The fallacy is referring to "Wikipedia" as if it was some single entity. The problem is between the editors - and when you edit, that includes you. There's no you-and-them, as the them may well be other people who are complaining about "Wikipedia", when by "Wikipedia" they actually mean their experience with you.
The problem is not between two individuals... The problem is a system which has an extremely cumbersome bureaucratic process for (eventually) addressing conflicts between editors.
Wikipedia is not meant to be a "he who pushes hardest, wins" anarchy, but in reality, that's what you're left with these days.
Wikipedia's rules work against patent vandalism, but NOTHING ELSE. One person steadfastly insisting that the Earth is flat can bend Wikipedia to his will, and it will take months of your time to get official refutation for ONE of those edits. After a few dozen of those, he might get temporarily restricted for a few days before he can push his agenda once more. Meanwhile, you've lost a year of your life.
No. That's not an exaggeration.
Meanwhile, I, and many other Wikipedia refugees, have headed over to Citizendium for something better. It's policies make sense, and were designed to overcome just about every problem we see with WP. In fact, several of the foundation documents are really thinly veiled recitations of everything that is wrong with Wikipedia.
The summary is utterly wrong. It wasn't lack of rules that made Wikipedia popular. It was simply that the rules rarely had to be utilized when there were fewer people, and therefore, fewer conflicts.
The rules are a total and utter mess. All the politicians in the world coming together in committee couldn't come up with something so wasteful, frustrating and time consuming.
Wikipedia's rules work against patent vandalism, but NOTHING ELSE. One person steadfastly insisting that the Earth is flat can bend Wikipedia to his will, and it will take months of your time to get official refutation for ONE of those edits. After a few dozen of those, he might get temporarily restricted for a few days before he can push his agenda once more. Meanwhile, you've lost a year of your life.
No. That's not an exaggeration.
Meanwhile, I, and many other Wikipedia refugees, have headed over to Citizendium for something better. It's policies make sense, and were designed to overcome just about every problem we see with WP. In fact, several of the foundation documents are really thinly veiled recitations of everything that is wrong with Wikipedia.
And don't forget electric cars... It was extremely strict CARB (California Air Resource Board) regulations that essentially mandated car companies had to sell a small percentage of all-electric vehicles in order to be allowed to sell normal gas guzzlers.
This led to GM's EV1, the Ford Th1nk, as well as the Toyota Prius...
Unfortunately, CARB backed off under intense industry pressure, and these same manufacturers that were developing extremely efficient vehicles went back to sell more SUVs, just in time for fuel prices to skyrocket, surrender the entire market to Toyota, and then go backrupt...
The regulations didn't entirely go away, that's why anyone has ever heard of "Neighborhood Electric Vehicles", and why you can get something like a heavy-duty golf cart (GEM) at a car dealership for just a couple grand (put some larger tires on the front, and it might actually get up to a decent speed, too).
Gimp's user interface is way, way too confusing for anyone but those who REALLY want to learn it. I've been using Adobe and Corel paint/photoediting programs for 15 years now and, let me tell you, that knowledge does not necessarily translate to Gimp. It's like starting from scratch
Yes... It is exactly like starting from scratch.
If you had learned on some other graphics tools (not just GIMP) the Adobe interface would be the terribly strange and limiting one, and for good reason.
Imitating proprietary software is far too popular in the Linux world today, and I'm immensely thankful for the few who do things their own way...
What's the point, otherwise? Why use a different operating system, and different applications, if they're just poor copies of what was already out there? The magic comes when those stupid interfaces are discarded, and something new and novel is allowed to spring up in its place. That's where great interfaces come from.
If you can't be bothered to learn something new and better, what are you doing here?
I see a guy in a rubber suit/mask and I *my* brain says nope and starts to laugh. They're *both* fake. Who cares, really
The guy in the rubber mask moves only in physically-possible ways. CGI floats around awkwardly, interacts with the surroundings poorly, is not in the same level of focus as other objects on-screen, and is shinier and smoother than could actually exist in the real world.
Rubber suits often look a bit clunky, but they, at least, fit in with the world. CGI comes in a turns a movie into some fucked-up Escher painting, putting you at odds with your own senses. That might be reasonably alright with unreal creatures, as in "Abyss", but the more real it's supposed to look, the more it stands out.
I have less distaste for CGI backgrounds than I do for fake objects interacting with the foreground, but even there, it doesn't seem to provide anything more than what we had in movies in the 1920's... Certainly, I'd say the matte paintings in something like Star Trek:ToS looked amazing, and put to shame any CGI backgrounds I've yet seen.
Of course you missed some little things [...] means absolutely nothing without context.
Except I gave more context and information than you could want... "Perceptual Entropy" and "ITU-R BS.1116-1" mean something very specific, and say volumes to anyone who knows ANYTHING about audio.
(for ex. speech codecs will reproduce speech without perceptible loss at bitrate X, but fail at music).
No, they won't. It's utterly impossible. Imperceptible has a real meaning, and "sounds okay to me" isn't it.
New and better ways of masking content are discovered all the time,
This is only true if you're talking about non-transparent sound (ie. perceptible loss). If you're not...
Name one.
Just one.
A peer-reviewed paper in any accepted journal will be fine. Anything in the past 15 years.
PE is about being able to faithfully represent the actual original wave form.
This is complete nonsense. PE is specifically about how heavily the audio wave form can be quantized without being perceived by the human auditory system. It doesn't come close to resembling the original wave form. Only then is the result analyzed to determine the amount of entropy, for further compression. Johnston was one of the pioneers of lossy audio compression, and his work is sited far and wide by those who made the early audio codecs.
so, say, encoding only the difference at a lower bitrate wouldn't work
No, it won't. Or more accurately, there is a very small amount of improvement possible, unless the two channels are, in fact, EXACTLY identical. The higher the quality, the less well perceptual tricks can work. At low bitrates, where "close" is good enough, it helps reduce the bitrate. Once it needs to be indistinguishable, near-perfect is the only option, and suddenly storing the difference between channels is just as large as storing both channels.
I can hear the difference between 256 Kpbs AAC+ and uncompressed, so don't tell me all the time that humans can't tell the difference.
I said exactly the opposite, actually... AAC can never provide transparent compression. MP2, Musepack, and AC-3 are the only remotely common ones with the potential to do so.
The myth of the welfare abuser is just that. You won't find 1% of welfare recipients on the program for more than a year. Of course it's possible you happened across the exceptions (and didn't bother to report them, so they can go on their merry way), but it's equally possible you're making bad assumptions from too little information, or just greatly exaggerating what little you've seen.
Most religions don't copyright their message and charge large sums to move up the hierarchy.
The Mormon Church also requires large sums of money from it's members (a large percentage of your earnings) as well as mandated service.
I think you'll have trouble enshrining any law which will target one and not the other. I'm sure the CoS will open up their texts if substantial money is on the line.
The currently proposed FairTax taxes necessities, as defined based on the poverty line, at 0% via a rebate. It is the most poor-friendly tax ever. Bleeding hearts should be eating it up.
"With the rebate taken into consideration, the FairTax would be [.. ] be regressive on income at higher income levels (as consumption falls as a percentage of income) [...] this would accordingly decrease the tax burden on high income earners and increase it on the middle class"
After necessities, why should the poor pay a lower percentage of tax on the items they buy than anyone else?
1) If you're poor, EVERYTHING you spend is on necessities. 2) The poor can least afford it.
Taxing those who earn 10K as much as we tax those who earn millions, puts the burden to pay for services (many of which they aren't benefiting from) on the poor. If you're rich, you have a workforce, and you're benefiting from all social programs, and disproportionately from many of them.
If you record a 22kHz square wave, you certainly don't need 176kbps to describe that as perfectly as uncompressed audio
Yes, but music is not a square wave. While there is some variation in "compressibility" (Kolmogorov complexity) the differences between various types and genres are not terribly significant. 88kbps/channel is the value established by Johnston while at AT&T, and it has held-up to all scrutiny quite well.
it depends how good your compression algorithm is.
No. If you model the human auditory system, you can figure out every possible masking technique that can be used, to determine which parts of complex sounds can be discarded without being perceived. After you've done that, it's a (relatively) straight-forward question of mathematically establishing the amount of entropy (randomness) in what's left of that hacked-up but otherwise uncompressed audio data.
Try any compression algorithms you like on the output of/dev/urandom and note that you get NO compression at all. I'm afraid the issue with audio compression is the same (boring) solved problem. The work has been done to determine the maximum theoretical compression you can get, by experts, and the only way to exceed that compression ratio is to discard audible information.
The road to future global irrelevance will be paved with companies that don't think doing business in China is important.
Why? India is on-track to have more people, has a superior political structure, and has a much higher-tech economy... they just don't assemble all our cheap crap at slave wages for us like China does, so they aren't as high profile.
corporate taxes are nothing more than a hidden tax on individuals. The business will just raise prices to compensate for the taxes that are imposed on it
If a company could get more money for a product by raising the price, they would be doing that already. Taxes or no.
If they raise their prices, they simply sell fewer products. They've determined that the increased profit from each sale doesn't make up for the lower volume, end of story.
If a company has more fees to pay, whether taxes or other, it comes out of profits, with only a fraction of it represented in the product's sale price.
The money that consumers use to purchase goods was already taxed, twice.
...unless it wasn't...
Ever gone out of state? Out of the country? Lots of people do. Eliminating sales tax completely would give a considerable disadvantage to areas with few locals, and lots of travelers.
I did a study myself... One at a time, I took people off the street, and told them to make a rocket that could go into space. None of them could. The result is clear: space travel is impossible.
Lossy audio coding is an area of intensive scientific study. All the comments here amount to a bunch of 6 year-old kids debating where babies come from...
The answer to the question is quite simple, and has been known since the 1980's. The rule of Perceptual Entropy is that you need a minimum bitrate of 176kbps for 44.1kHz stereo. If you're encoding below that, it can't possibly be indistinguishable from the original. ITU-R BS.1116-1 testing has proven that simple fact out over and over again.
And don't bother claiming your 192kbps MP3s sound perfect, either. MP3 is certainly not the ideal audio format, so it doesn't come that close. But much more importantly, it (like all low-bitrate audio codecs) is a frequency domain codec, making it impossible to avoid pre-echo and the like AT ANY BITRATE. MP3, AAC, Vorbis, et al. just can't possibly do it.
The only possible competitors for indistinguishable (transparent) lossy audio coding are time domain codecs, primarily: MPEG-1 Layer II, and Musepack. Some hybrids like AC-3 exist as well.
Amateur testing is pretty pointless... You're no longer judging which sounds more like the original, you're picking the one whose distortions you like more. Low bitrate codecs often throw in a relatively small amount of noise, which masks artifacts, and simply sounds sufficiently different that it's no longer the same audio. Compare a song (from a CD), to the same after normalizing the volume, and you'll have the same problem... You'll probably pick the modified version as sounding better, even though both are lossy, and at first glance, the same audio.
I can certainly imagine the next generation of lossy audio codecs will pitch-shift music to an octave people generally prefer, to get a higher rating on such "tests". Cheap igital cameras often do the same thing... over-correcting gamma to make every picture more white (bluish, really) and turning up the contrast to make it more vivid, so much so that it looks "better than the real thing".
Funny. It's like I know about this legal tort called "False Light" that you don't know about...
No. False Light law still requires inaccurate information.
LEGALLY, there is no creator who came down and put pen to paper and wrote the Bill of Rights... that was the US government.
It's not a question of who wrote what. It is a question of the scope of government power. The people have any rights not explicitly taken away from them.
From there, we go to jury nullification... Then straight to the "Consent of the Governed".
People without a government don't lack all rights, therefore, it is not government that grants them.
It's not a question of pro-life / pro-choice... I'm not pro-homicide either, but I don't begrudge the ACLU when they defend murders. It's a question of inordinate amounts of effort going to ever little trivial corner case of abortion (every states' variation on late-term abortion bans, for example), while very, very little effort is going into the really important issues. Additionally, their clear attempt to minimize it on their websites, while it is their primary task today, leaves a further bad taste.
I have a recurring alert in my calendar to donate $100 every July 1 to the ACLU
In 2003, as I saw rights being taken away left and right, I decided it was time to support the ACLU and fight back for our rights. Over the year, the ACLU sent me lots of e-mail to let me know what they were doing...
In short, tons and tons and tons of lawsuits defending every tiny grey area of abortion, several about someone getting offended at seeing a cross in a public space, and next to nothing else... and sadly, I REALLY mean that. Over that same time period, I saw that the EFF was doing more and more fighting of cases against the government spying via the internet, and later even taking a major role in the warrantless phone wiretapping case. It was a no-brainer that, while the EFF appears to be a substantially smaller organization, my money would be infinitely better spent with them, than the ACLU.
Really, what bothered me most about the ACLU was the two-faced nature of it. If you visit their website, they trumpet their fights against imposing government restrictions, and only briefly mention some involvement in defending abortion rights. But as soon as you donate, and start getting the newsletter, it becomes clear the overwhelming focus has become every last little abortion case they can possibly get their hands on. It's really not the ACLU we thought we all knew.
Most countries in the world do not hold to the barbaric idea of execution.
Actually, 102 countries have Capitol Punishment, while 95 do not. So at least a simple majority certainly do hold to "the barbaric idea".
I can see your point... People should be punished when they commit one murder, but the rest should be considered "freebies". Life + 500 year sentences really discourages murder.
We are supposed to be more moral than animals.
We are... that's why murders are punished. Animals don't do that. In fact murders in the animal kingdom are most often rewarded for killing.
but people need not actively tell you that they committed a crime, or necessarily any other sort of information.
That's a bit different than claiming they should be able to actively censor public information about themselves they don't want others to learn...
Sometimes, even if information is true, if it is presented with actual malice, it is wrong, and the individual is entitled to damages.
Never true in the US legal system. Some European countries believe this, and some go even further and don't allow the spread of damaging even if presented without malice, and even if entirely true. Here, it's clear the barbaric USA has got it right, and most of the world has it wrong.
A government grants the rights of their citizens to their citizens. There is not some omnipotent higher-power that brings his hand down to personally interfere with human legal machinations.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
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The problem is not between two individuals... The problem is a system which has an extremely cumbersome bureaucratic process for (eventually) addressing conflicts between editors.
Wikipedia is not meant to be a "he who pushes hardest, wins" anarchy, but in reality, that's what you're left with these days.
Wikipedia's rules work against patent vandalism, but NOTHING ELSE. One person steadfastly insisting that the Earth is flat can bend Wikipedia to his will, and it will take months of your time to get official refutation for ONE of those edits. After a few dozen of those, he might get temporarily restricted for a few days before he can push his agenda once more. Meanwhile, you've lost a year of your life.
No. That's not an exaggeration.
Meanwhile, I, and many other Wikipedia refugees, have headed over to Citizendium for something better. It's policies make sense, and were designed to overcome just about every problem we see with WP. In fact, several of the foundation documents are really thinly veiled recitations of everything that is wrong with Wikipedia.
Specifically "We think humanity can do better":
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Why_Citizendium%3F#We_can_do_better
As well as:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:We_aren't_Wikipedia
I'm hopeful mankind will get it right the second time around.
The summary is utterly wrong. It wasn't lack of rules that made Wikipedia popular. It was simply that the rules rarely had to be utilized when there were fewer people, and therefore, fewer conflicts.
The rules are a total and utter mess. All the politicians in the world coming together in committee couldn't come up with something so wasteful, frustrating and time consuming.
Wikipedia's rules work against patent vandalism, but NOTHING ELSE. One person steadfastly insisting that the Earth is flat can bend Wikipedia to his will, and it will take months of your time to get official refutation for ONE of those edits. After a few dozen of those, he might get temporarily restricted for a few days before he can push his agenda once more. Meanwhile, you've lost a year of your life.
No. That's not an exaggeration.
Meanwhile, I, and many other Wikipedia refugees, have headed over to Citizendium for something better. It's policies make sense, and were designed to overcome just about every problem we see with WP. In fact, several of the foundation documents are really thinly veiled recitations of everything that is wrong with Wikipedia.
Specifically "We think humanity can do better":
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Why_Citizendium%3F#We_can_do_better
As well as:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:We_aren't_Wikipedia
I'm hopeful mankind will get it right the second time around.
And don't forget electric cars... It was extremely strict CARB (California Air Resource Board) regulations that essentially mandated car companies had to sell a small percentage of all-electric vehicles in order to be allowed to sell normal gas guzzlers.
This led to GM's EV1, the Ford Th1nk, as well as the Toyota Prius...
Unfortunately, CARB backed off under intense industry pressure, and these same manufacturers that were developing extremely efficient vehicles went back to sell more SUVs, just in time for fuel prices to skyrocket, surrender the entire market to Toyota, and then go backrupt...
The regulations didn't entirely go away, that's why anyone has ever heard of "Neighborhood Electric Vehicles", and why you can get something like a heavy-duty golf cart (GEM) at a car dealership for just a couple grand (put some larger tires on the front, and it might actually get up to a decent speed, too).
Famous last worlds, that brought ruin to and endless string of "Web OS" kiosk-like devices.
NOBODY WANTS THEM DAMMIT!
I think you need an "IOpener", or maybe a Web TV, iPaq, Audrey, Personal Internet Communicator, etc.
Yes it does, because it's one of the few free services usable via POP3.
The web interface is awkward and slow. It's better than most other webmail interfaces, but it's still a pale imitation of a local MUA.
None of the other google apps is better than a local counterpart either.
Ever asked yourself why Google Earth is still a program you have to run on your local machine, when Google is so hot on web-apps?
Yes... It is exactly like starting from scratch.
If you had learned on some other graphics tools (not just GIMP) the Adobe interface would be the terribly strange and limiting one, and for good reason.
Imitating proprietary software is far too popular in the Linux world today, and I'm immensely thankful for the few who do things their own way...
What's the point, otherwise? Why use a different operating system, and different applications, if they're just poor copies of what was already out there? The magic comes when those stupid interfaces are discarded, and something new and novel is allowed to spring up in its place. That's where great interfaces come from.
If you can't be bothered to learn something new and better, what are you doing here?
The guy in the rubber mask moves only in physically-possible ways. CGI floats around awkwardly, interacts with the surroundings poorly, is not in the same level of focus as other objects on-screen, and is shinier and smoother than could actually exist in the real world.
Rubber suits often look a bit clunky, but they, at least, fit in with the world. CGI comes in a turns a movie into some fucked-up Escher painting, putting you at odds with your own senses. That might be reasonably alright with unreal creatures, as in "Abyss", but the more real it's supposed to look, the more it stands out.
I have less distaste for CGI backgrounds than I do for fake objects interacting with the foreground, but even there, it doesn't seem to provide anything more than what we had in movies in the 1920's... Certainly, I'd say the matte paintings in something like Star Trek:ToS looked amazing, and put to shame any CGI backgrounds I've yet seen.
Asked and answered a good 12 hours before you came along...
Except I gave more context and information than you could want... "Perceptual Entropy" and "ITU-R BS.1116-1" mean something very specific, and say volumes to anyone who knows ANYTHING about audio.
No, they won't. It's utterly impossible. Imperceptible has a real meaning, and "sounds okay to me" isn't it.
This is only true if you're talking about non-transparent sound (ie. perceptible loss). If you're not...
Name one.
Just one.
A peer-reviewed paper in any accepted journal will be fine. Anything in the past 15 years.
This is complete nonsense. PE is specifically about how heavily the audio wave form can be quantized without being perceived by the human auditory system. It doesn't come close to resembling the original wave form. Only then is the result analyzed to determine the amount of entropy, for further compression. Johnston was one of the pioneers of lossy audio compression, and his work is sited far and wide by those who made the early audio codecs.
No, it won't. Or more accurately, there is a very small amount of improvement possible, unless the two channels are, in fact, EXACTLY identical. The higher the quality, the less well perceptual tricks can work. At low bitrates, where "close" is good enough, it helps reduce the bitrate. Once it needs to be indistinguishable, near-perfect is the only option, and suddenly storing the difference between channels is just as large as storing both channels.
I said exactly the opposite, actually... AAC can never provide transparent compression. MP2, Musepack, and AC-3 are the only remotely common ones with the potential to do so.
The myth of the welfare abuser is just that. You won't find 1% of welfare recipients on the program for more than a year. Of course it's possible you happened across the exceptions (and didn't bother to report them, so they can go on their merry way), but it's equally possible you're making bad assumptions from too little information, or just greatly exaggerating what little you've seen.
The Mormon Church also requires large sums of money from it's members (a large percentage of your earnings) as well as mandated service.
I think you'll have trouble enshrining any law which will target one and not the other. I'm sure the CoS will open up their texts if substantial money is on the line.
"With the rebate taken into consideration, the FairTax would be [.. ] be regressive on income at higher income levels (as consumption falls as a percentage of income) [...] this would accordingly decrease the tax burden on high income earners and increase it on the middle class"
1) If you're poor, EVERYTHING you spend is on necessities.
2) The poor can least afford it.
Taxing those who earn 10K as much as we tax those who earn millions, puts the burden to pay for services (many of which they aren't benefiting from) on the poor. If you're rich, you have a workforce, and you're benefiting from all social programs, and disproportionately from many of them.
Yes, but music is not a square wave. While there is some variation in "compressibility" (Kolmogorov complexity) the differences between various types and genres are not terribly significant. 88kbps/channel is the value established by Johnston while at AT&T, and it has held-up to all scrutiny quite well.
No. If you model the human auditory system, you can figure out every possible masking technique that can be used, to determine which parts of complex sounds can be discarded without being perceived. After you've done that, it's a (relatively) straight-forward question of mathematically establishing the amount of entropy (randomness) in what's left of that hacked-up but otherwise uncompressed audio data.
Try any compression algorithms you like on the output of /dev/urandom and note that you get NO compression at all. I'm afraid the issue with audio compression is the same (boring) solved problem. The work has been done to determine the maximum theoretical compression you can get, by experts, and the only way to exceed that compression ratio is to discard audible information.
Why? India is on-track to have more people, has a superior political structure, and has a much higher-tech economy... they just don't assemble all our cheap crap at slave wages for us like China does, so they aren't as high profile.
If a company could get more money for a product by raising the price, they would be doing that already. Taxes or no.
If they raise their prices, they simply sell fewer products. They've determined that the increased profit from each sale doesn't make up for the lower volume, end of story.
If a company has more fees to pay, whether taxes or other, it comes out of profits, with only a fraction of it represented in the product's sale price.
Ever gone out of state? Out of the country? Lots of people do. Eliminating sales tax completely would give a considerable disadvantage to areas with few locals, and lots of travelers.
I did a study myself... One at a time, I took people off the street, and told them to make a rocket that could go into space. None of them could. The result is clear: space travel is impossible.
Lossy audio coding is an area of intensive scientific study. All the comments here amount to a bunch of 6 year-old kids debating where babies come from...
The answer to the question is quite simple, and has been known since the 1980's. The rule of Perceptual Entropy is that you need a minimum bitrate of 176kbps for 44.1kHz stereo. If you're encoding below that, it can't possibly be indistinguishable from the original. ITU-R BS.1116-1 testing has proven that simple fact out over and over again.
And don't bother claiming your 192kbps MP3s sound perfect, either. MP3 is certainly not the ideal audio format, so it doesn't come that close. But much more importantly, it (like all low-bitrate audio codecs) is a frequency domain codec, making it impossible to avoid pre-echo and the like AT ANY BITRATE. MP3, AAC, Vorbis, et al. just can't possibly do it.
The only possible competitors for indistinguishable (transparent) lossy audio coding are time domain codecs, primarily: MPEG-1 Layer II, and Musepack. Some hybrids like AC-3 exist as well.
Amateur testing is pretty pointless... You're no longer judging which sounds more like the original, you're picking the one whose distortions you like more. Low bitrate codecs often throw in a relatively small amount of noise, which masks artifacts, and simply sounds sufficiently different that it's no longer the same audio. Compare a song (from a CD), to the same after normalizing the volume, and you'll have the same problem... You'll probably pick the modified version as sounding better, even though both are lossy, and at first glance, the same audio.
I can certainly imagine the next generation of lossy audio codecs will pitch-shift music to an octave people generally prefer, to get a higher rating on such "tests". Cheap igital cameras often do the same thing... over-correcting gamma to make every picture more white (bluish, really) and turning up the contrast to make it more vivid, so much so that it looks "better than the real thing".
No. False Light law still requires inaccurate information.
It's not a question of who wrote what. It is a question of the scope of government power. The people have any rights not explicitly taken away from them.
From there, we go to jury nullification... Then straight to the "Consent of the Governed".
People without a government don't lack all rights, therefore, it is not government that grants them.
It's not a question of pro-life / pro-choice... I'm not pro-homicide either, but I don't begrudge the ACLU when they defend murders. It's a question of inordinate amounts of effort going to ever little trivial corner case of abortion (every states' variation on late-term abortion bans, for example), while very, very little effort is going into the really important issues. Additionally, their clear attempt to minimize it on their websites, while it is their primary task today, leaves a further bad taste.
In 2003, as I saw rights being taken away left and right, I decided it was time to support the ACLU and fight back for our rights. Over the year, the ACLU sent me lots of e-mail to let me know what they were doing...
In short, tons and tons and tons of lawsuits defending every tiny grey area of abortion, several about someone getting offended at seeing a cross in a public space, and next to nothing else... and sadly, I REALLY mean that. Over that same time period, I saw that the EFF was doing more and more fighting of cases against the government spying via the internet, and later even taking a major role in the warrantless phone wiretapping case. It was a no-brainer that, while the EFF appears to be a substantially smaller organization, my money would be infinitely better spent with them, than the ACLU.
Really, what bothered me most about the ACLU was the two-faced nature of it. If you visit their website, they trumpet their fights against imposing government restrictions, and only briefly mention some involvement in defending abortion rights. But as soon as you donate, and start getting the newsletter, it becomes clear the overwhelming focus has become every last little abortion case they can possibly get their hands on. It's really not the ACLU we thought we all knew.
Yes, the system generally works for anyone who has hundreds of thousands of dollars to throw away on legal fees...
Actually, 102 countries have Capitol Punishment, while 95 do not. So at least a simple majority certainly do hold to "the barbaric idea".
I can see your point... People should be punished when they commit one murder, but the rest should be considered "freebies". Life + 500 year sentences really discourages murder.
We are... that's why murders are punished. Animals don't do that. In fact murders in the animal kingdom are most often rewarded for killing.
That's a bit different than claiming they should be able to actively censor public information about themselves they don't want others to learn...
Never true in the US legal system. Some European countries believe this, and some go even further and don't allow the spread of damaging even if presented without malice, and even if entirely true. Here, it's clear the barbaric USA has got it right, and most of the world has it wrong.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.