Invention did not suddenly come into existence with the introduction of patents. How did people get paid for their work before then? There clearly must have been some profit to them, or they wouldn't have bothered.
Yeah, they kept the details of how their invention worked secret so that they had a monopoly on the manufacture and use of their design. Then either they died and their work went with them, or people figured it out for themselves after awhile and the inventor lost his monopoly. Keep in mind that the days before patent law were pre-industrial: inventors manufactured their devices themselves.
Patent law is for the public benefit (less so copyright law), it's just been seriously abused over the last 75 years or so.
20 years is too long for patents. I'm in favor of the original 7 years, with a stipulation that the invention needs to be brought to the public immediately (within 90 days) through either direct manufacture or licensing, or the patent is revoked.
To safeguard against corporations that would simply choose not to license and try to steal the patent after 90 days, an invention so revoked could be declared unpatentable, either for a limited time (another 7 years), or indefinitely, thereby opening up the invention to the public domain.
It's my view that if an invention isn't ready for public use when it's brought to the patent office, then it isn't ready for a patent.
If content creators are creating content with only profit in mind, then we don't need their crappy content.
Less new content is not necessarily a bad thing - the end result is more time to contemplate that which has already been made, and a lot less profit for artistic industry (art is never something one should endeavor to industrialize).
I know we live in a "Ooh! Shiny! New!" culture, but have you ever considered that maybe that isn't entirely a good thing?
I don't know. Why do you work to acquire money (assuming you do)? After all, it's just an artificial creation of society, with no intrinsic value. Therefore, I assume you have no objection if society caps your wealth at a level which will make you reasonably comfortable, and takes the rest? Come on, fair's fair, those pieces of paper had no value until the government declared that they did.
Sure, go ahead. I don't even need a government that sets caps and takes the rest. Whenever I have anything in excess of what I need, the first thing I do is look for people to give it to. I call it called leading by example.
The counter argument is that the wealthy will not work as hard to produce during their lifetimes if they are not able to leave their estates to their children upon death.
Wealthy people produce things? I thought they just created capitalist empires designed to milk common laborers (the people actually producing goods and services) as much as possible, and transfer the proceeds to themselves and their families.
You mean, they'd do less of that with restricted inheritance laws? Sounds more like an ironclad argument for capped inheritance to me.
The only question here that I have is, if inheritance is capped, where does that extra capital go? To the government? No way - I'd rather have it go to a bunch of lazy rotten brats than a bunch of lazy rotten imbeciles. Now, if it were redistributed to everyone they directly or indirectly employed, I could get behind that. Or even to non-denominational charity, or a charity or non-profit organization stipulated in the person's will.
The U.S. seems to be going the right way on this one for a change. There's a strong push for net neutrality legislation, and our current administration has made it a platform issue.
Granted we have media lobbyists and their pet politicians, but you can be reasonably sure that no anti-net neutrality legislature is going to pass in the next four years.
It's kind of a moot point over here in any case. This country is gearing up for total economic collapse (something I find both frightening and welcome at the same time), and I don't think anyone's going to care much about controlling the internet when the power's out and 90% of us are jobless.
Eh. I think war will continue as long as there are too many people. If there were few enough humans on the planet that everyone was swimming in more resources than they knew what to do with, I think war would stop. Getting to that point is problem.
we've seen how well communism and socialism work...
Well, we've seen how well socialism and central planned economies work (socialism seems to work pretty well, as long as you don't mind gigantic government, and so long as the government doesn't descend into fascism). We've never seen a true communist economy, at least not on the national scale.
Communism is an economic system where the workers cooperate on an equal level with expectation of equal pay in a given industry, each owning part of the company themselves and independent from government controls. The best example of a communist structure is a worker co-op (cooperative organization).
We have a few of these in the U.S., mostly in agriculture - this business more than any other lends itself to communal work - and they get by OK. The make it mostly on the quality of their products, as their prices can most definitely be beat by cut-throat capitalist enterprises. On the flip side, almost all of the companies that are listed as the best places to work in the U.S. are worker-owned co-ops.
To those of you living in the Northeastern U.S., Land o' Lakes is one such co-op that you may have noticed.
I'm guessing that they're trying to reform patent law by coming up with such ridiculous patents that the patent office can no longer take itself seriously, if indeed it still does.
Either that, or they have some seriously messed-up people in charge over there - c'mon, patenting non-use of software? Am I the only person who laughed at this article? Never even mind the patent summary itself, which keeps referring to the act of not using Lotus Notes as an "invention".
I think I'm going to go out and patent not using my personal computer between the hours of 6 pm and 10 pm EST. That way everyone else has to pay me for not using my PC during that timeframe.
Now that would be something to talk about. Until this piece of software can tell me what my original face looked like before my parents were born, I'm pretty sure I can get by just fine with my own searching capabilities.
I can guarantee you that if the theater clerk asked me for my ID so she could record my name and address and hand me assigned seating, I'd turn around and walk out, never to return. I don't think everyone would, but definitely more than a few people.
Even if no personally identifying information was requested (just using a camera in the ticket booth instead, I guess), I still wouldn't accept assigned seating in a theater. The whole point to getting there early is to pick your optimal seating.
So since infants are unable to process logic and reason, use their opposite thumbs, walk errect, communicate with a complex speech system then they aren't worthy of the protection afforeded to humans? All of these are characteristics of humans that set us apart from the rest of the beasts, but dont actually develop until several years after birth.
Indeed, this has been my argument that infants have no rights as people. Thank you for stating it so clearly.
The whole fact that life begins at conception is biological/scientific...The fact is, science shows that the child is a distinct lifeform from its mother from the moment of conception...
You are almost completely correct in those statements - if you revise your definition of life to that life which reproduces sexually, you are 100% correct.
Let me restrict the scope of this argument to only animal life (which most definitely includes humans), and let me once again concur wholeheartedly that in this case, life most certainly begins at conception.
The right to life is not a purely human right; it is inherent in all living organisms, even cockroaches. To claim otherwise is to claim that human life is somehow more important than that of other animals - more holy, if you will - and this is the epitome of hubris.
We humans simply find this concept inconvenient, and so we tend to restrict our concept of rights to "persons", rather than lifeforms as a whole. This does not mean those other lifeforms do not have rights; it simply means we ignore them.
If a person were truly arguing a right to life at conception from a scientific point of view, then s/he would condemn all killing of all animals regardless of the possible good that may come of it. They'd definitely be vegans.
The problem is that even folks who claim no religious mindset fail to realize that they have been raised in a culture that began with a fundamentalist mentality, and that they have absorbed some of those concepts without realizing it. If you believe that human life is more important than other life, you have absorbed fundamentalist doctrine.
Due to the inconvenience of supporting a lifeform's rights, most people have instead chosen to ignore these and support a person's rights.
Now, for the second issue in your argument:
Granting of "personhood" is a legal distinction that has no basis in science...
...
...the child is a distinct lifeform from its mother from the moment of conception, the law has chosen to ignore that until the child is completely removed from the womb.
Not technically correct, here. Personhood is a social concept, not a legal one. It is a social concept that has been held by humans across the globe and across time, most likely beginning before the first laws were ever devised.
When to grant an individual personhood in a society depends on that society - usually the law follows after, not before.
In the case of the U.S., most people agree that personhood begins at birth (I follow that personhood begins when an individual becomes useful to society, but I'm in a very outspoken minority here). The law here is even stricter: the Supreme Court in Roe v Wade effectively declared personhood to begin at the point a fetus becomes viable (i.e., able to exist outside the mother). This seems fair, and I'm willing to live with it, even if I don't agree.
As long as we get our terminology right ("life" vs "personhood"), there is no dispute.
While I certainly won't argue that any of the "big 3" have made horrible decisions in the past, they really are too important to let them fail. You'll never see me make that statement about any other industry: it's just that too many U.S. jobs are directly or indirectly supported by these folks.
Asking for money to retool in order to make better vehicles? Give it to them. We've paid for the retooling of the auto industries before (usually to make war machines), and 7.7 billion is chump change compared to some of the handouts that are being passed around right now.
On the other hand, I can't support a company that doesn't make (or at least plan to make) biodiesel hybrids or compressed-air vehicles. If I knew who to talk to to get those kinds of vehicles mandated to our auto manufacturers, well, I wouldn't be wasting my time here.
The goal shouldn't be to increase the mileage you can get on a gallon of gasoline; the goal should be to get gasoline out of the equation entirely. Even if all car companies everywhere stopped making vehicles that ran on fossil fuels right now, it'd still be ten years or more before the gas hogs we drive now are off the road. This country passed it's peak oil point nearly 40 years ago; the world passed it's peak oil point just 3 years ago. It's not about the environment, it's about dwindling supply & increasing demand.
The problem that this is designed to solve, though, is "how do we collect facial-recognition data on as many people as we can while they're still to young to do anything about it?"
Most facial recognition systems can determine the difference between identical twins - there are small differences, y'know.
Actually, if you pay attention, you should be able to tell one twin from another yourself, assuming you know a pair. I've known a few, and I've always been able to tell the difference. One dead giveaway is when one twin has a slightly slimmer face than the other.
In a nation such as the US, whose society I regard as civilized, where people are not coerced into prostitution against their will, what exactly is wrong about prostitution; and in turn, why is it illegal?
Well, on the face of things, there are two calls against prostitution in the U.S.:
The religious right, while being just an extremely vocal minority, commands about 20% of the vote nationwide, and is far more powerful in the southeast and midwest. They have declared sex outside of marriage immoral, and if they could would ban consensual sex between unmarried couples, nevermind prostitution.
The spread of venereal disease. On this case, there's a real issue - heavy prostitution in an area has historically always directly correlated to widespread disease.
The real reason that there's such an outcry over prostitution, I postulate, is because women can get far better deals if they barter for sex rather than sell the service for cash. It's a direct competition to women who want to enter into relationships where the man takes care of everything and the woman just has to put out now and again. Also, there are plenty of men made uneasy over the idea that women can market sexual services; it makes them inherently self-sufficient.
I'm not claiming the above argument is true: I'm just speculating based on the idea that humans have never been interested in what amounts to academic issues enough to act on them, but have forever directly attacked anything they could regard as competitive practices ruthlessly and rapidly.
Cutting out an advertising source just pushes that element that you want to arrest into other fringe areas that you probably don't know about yet.
What makes you think this isn't the desired result? Crime doesn't exist unless arrests are made - didn't anyone ever tell you that?
Moreover, maybe the sheriff is actually sympathetic to prostitutes. Prostitution in most states is just a misdemeanor, but Illinois has the harshest sentences (1-3 years and/or $25,000 fine). Maybe he's trying to help them not get caught (OK, I really doubt this too).
It would work! Think about it: the general reaction of the government whenever there has been social misuse of a commodity has been to ban the commodity and criminalize possession of it.
So, we just need to round up all children everywhere and lock them away in evidence lockers. Then when they reach the age of majority, we can release them for the 3-6 months it would take for the socially maladjusted adults to commit a crime, then lock them back up, this time in for-profit prisons.
Actually, I think this would be a great solution to all social problems, plus provide the government with a productive population that is completely under control
(To those of you who can't recognize a joke in poor taste when you see it, yes, I'm being facetious)
There's no such thing as unfair competition. There are anti-competitive laws that shore-up monopolies, and anti-competitive practices that lock out competitors, but in an open and legal (and sane) market, healthy competition is the definition of fairness.
If a competitor has a better product and is able to overspend on advertising keywords to get a higher spot, then both customers and the competitor will win. If the competitor is just trying to block the competition and has no real marketable substitute, then they're just overspending on useless advertisement - those keyword bids aren't cheap, y'know - especially on Google, where the price-per-click is outrageous due to the high demand.
The most useful trademarks will run you $1 or more a click to just get within the top 5 - with an average click-to-sale rate of 8% (which is actually pretty good) - you're looking at $12.50 in advertising per sale using Google. Nobody is going to pay that kind of advertising cost if they don't have the advertised product (at least, not unless they're actively trying to bankrupt themselves).
Now, I suppose you could outbid purely for defamation purposes, but you'd need deep pockets if you want to be effective, and you still run into libel laws
In this situation, the Utah legislature is attempting to ban unauthorized use of trademarks. Isn't this already illegal? (or at least an open invitation to lawsuit?) This is just another case of how the internet makes people stupid.
Actually, as a Demonoid member (once upon a time - I lost my password and have undergone an email change, so no luck getting back in), I'm very impressed with the site.
If you're looking for the latest media, then no, it's not much better than most other torrent search engines. But if you want the latest proprietary software, reference ebooks (or scanned books), or select indie stuff, it's excellent. Furthermore, there's a strong peer-review aspect to the site that makes me feel a lot more secure that what I'm downloading is actually what it's claimed to be.
Yes, I realize your point - and you are quite correct in referring back to it. My point was that the comment you based your prior argument in response to was not referring to a right to a jury, which most of us realize is a structure of our legal system, not an inherit right.
What "inherant rights in all human beings" are these? What relevance does this have to the TPB case? The right to... Life?
The issue is clearly the same as in any trial; being discussed is if and how the TPB operators' inherit right to do any damn thing they please should be bounded by the potential harm they inflict on society.
Are you Americans so totally absorbed in the notion that YOUR system is THE system?
Unfortunately yes, in many cases this is exactly what Americans think. While I completely support any nation's right to structure the legal system any way it chooses, I also believe in the inalienable rights present in all human beings across the globe, regardless of their nationality.
I see them. I'm one of those obsessive people who read every post in a topic, and then refresh to read the ones that popped up while I was reading the first set.
I see plenty of these die-hard right-wing libertarian posts get modded down here on Slashdot. And really, for good reason. The "free market is always right" and "look towards profit to find the right path" types scare me a little. How can they be that naive? Moreover, these posts offend me: I'm a moderate libertarian (inasmuch as I support any political party), and it's crazies like these guys make me look a little crazy in the eyes of others whenever I describe myself as one.
I'd really like to see these guys censored - but that's just my opinion, and in my heart I know that censorship is wrong. Modding them "Troll" and "Flamebait" is really the best balance in lieu of a "-1, Loony" tag.
I suppose there's always hope that these folks actually think they're Republicans (and who knows, maybe they're also fundamentalist nutjobs, making them real extremist Republicans after all). That would be slightly comforting. But not much.
I want Verizon back. Their customer service department was much easier to deal with, and their billing department seemed to understand me (like the fact that I pay for 4-5 months at a time every 4-5 months, regardless of what their billing due date is).
Slashdot Mirror
Invention did not suddenly come into existence with the introduction of patents. How did people get paid for their work before then? There clearly must have been some profit to them, or they wouldn't have bothered.
Yeah, they kept the details of how their invention worked secret so that they had a monopoly on the manufacture and use of their design. Then either they died and their work went with them, or people figured it out for themselves after awhile and the inventor lost his monopoly. Keep in mind that the days before patent law were pre-industrial: inventors manufactured their devices themselves.
Patent law is for the public benefit (less so copyright law), it's just been seriously abused over the last 75 years or so.
20 years is too long for patents. I'm in favor of the original 7 years, with a stipulation that the invention needs to be brought to the public immediately (within 90 days) through either direct manufacture or licensing, or the patent is revoked.
To safeguard against corporations that would simply choose not to license and try to steal the patent after 90 days, an invention so revoked could be declared unpatentable, either for a limited time (another 7 years), or indefinitely, thereby opening up the invention to the public domain.
It's my view that if an invention isn't ready for public use when it's brought to the patent office, then it isn't ready for a patent.
If content creators are creating content with only profit in mind, then we don't need their crappy content.
Less new content is not necessarily a bad thing - the end result is more time to contemplate that which has already been made, and a lot less profit for artistic industry (art is never something one should endeavor to industrialize).
I know we live in a "Ooh! Shiny! New!" culture, but have you ever considered that maybe that isn't entirely a good thing?
I don't know. Why do you work to acquire money (assuming you do)? After all, it's just an artificial creation of society, with no intrinsic value. Therefore, I assume you have no objection if society caps your wealth at a level which will make you reasonably comfortable, and takes the rest? Come on, fair's fair, those pieces of paper had no value until the government declared that they did.
Sure, go ahead. I don't even need a government that sets caps and takes the rest. Whenever I have anything in excess of what I need, the first thing I do is look for people to give it to. I call it called leading by example.
The counter argument is that the wealthy will not work as hard to produce during their lifetimes if they are not able to leave their estates to their children upon death.
Wealthy people produce things? I thought they just created capitalist empires designed to milk common laborers (the people actually producing goods and services) as much as possible, and transfer the proceeds to themselves and their families.
You mean, they'd do less of that with restricted inheritance laws? Sounds more like an ironclad argument for capped inheritance to me.
The only question here that I have is, if inheritance is capped, where does that extra capital go? To the government? No way - I'd rather have it go to a bunch of lazy rotten brats than a bunch of lazy rotten imbeciles. Now, if it were redistributed to everyone they directly or indirectly employed, I could get behind that. Or even to non-denominational charity, or a charity or non-profit organization stipulated in the person's will.
The U.S. seems to be going the right way on this one for a change. There's a strong push for net neutrality legislation, and our current administration has made it a platform issue.
Granted we have media lobbyists and their pet politicians, but you can be reasonably sure that no anti-net neutrality legislature is going to pass in the next four years.
It's kind of a moot point over here in any case. This country is gearing up for total economic collapse (something I find both frightening and welcome at the same time), and I don't think anyone's going to care much about controlling the internet when the power's out and 90% of us are jobless.
Eh. I think war will continue as long as there are too many people. If there were few enough humans on the planet that everyone was swimming in more resources than they knew what to do with, I think war would stop. Getting to that point is problem.
we've seen how well communism and socialism work...
Well, we've seen how well socialism and central planned economies work (socialism seems to work pretty well, as long as you don't mind gigantic government, and so long as the government doesn't descend into fascism). We've never seen a true communist economy, at least not on the national scale.
Communism is an economic system where the workers cooperate on an equal level with expectation of equal pay in a given industry, each owning part of the company themselves and independent from government controls. The best example of a communist structure is a worker co-op (cooperative organization).
We have a few of these in the U.S., mostly in agriculture - this business more than any other lends itself to communal work - and they get by OK. The make it mostly on the quality of their products, as their prices can most definitely be beat by cut-throat capitalist enterprises. On the flip side, almost all of the companies that are listed as the best places to work in the U.S. are worker-owned co-ops.
To those of you living in the Northeastern U.S., Land o' Lakes is one such co-op that you may have noticed.
I'm guessing that they're trying to reform patent law by coming up with such ridiculous patents that the patent office can no longer take itself seriously, if indeed it still does.
Either that, or they have some seriously messed-up people in charge over there - c'mon, patenting non-use of software? Am I the only person who laughed at this article? Never even mind the patent summary itself, which keeps referring to the act of not using Lotus Notes as an "invention".
I think I'm going to go out and patent not using my personal computer between the hours of 6 pm and 10 pm EST. That way everyone else has to pay me for not using my PC during that timeframe.
Now that would be something to talk about. Until this piece of software can tell me what my original face looked like before my parents were born, I'm pretty sure I can get by just fine with my own searching capabilities.
I can guarantee you that if the theater clerk asked me for my ID so she could record my name and address and hand me assigned seating, I'd turn around and walk out, never to return. I don't think everyone would, but definitely more than a few people.
Even if no personally identifying information was requested (just using a camera in the ticket booth instead, I guess), I still wouldn't accept assigned seating in a theater. The whole point to getting there early is to pick your optimal seating.
So since infants are unable to process logic and reason, use their opposite thumbs, walk errect, communicate with a complex speech system then they aren't worthy of the protection afforeded to humans? All of these are characteristics of humans that set us apart from the rest of the beasts, but dont actually develop until several years after birth.
Indeed, this has been my argument that infants have no rights as people. Thank you for stating it so clearly.
The whole fact that life begins at conception is biological/scientific...The fact is, science shows that the child is a distinct lifeform from its mother from the moment of conception...
You are almost completely correct in those statements - if you revise your definition of life to that life which reproduces sexually, you are 100% correct.
Let me restrict the scope of this argument to only animal life (which most definitely includes humans), and let me once again concur wholeheartedly that in this case, life most certainly begins at conception.
The right to life is not a purely human right; it is inherent in all living organisms, even cockroaches. To claim otherwise is to claim that human life is somehow more important than that of other animals - more holy, if you will - and this is the epitome of hubris.
We humans simply find this concept inconvenient, and so we tend to restrict our concept of rights to "persons", rather than lifeforms as a whole. This does not mean those other lifeforms do not have rights; it simply means we ignore them.
If a person were truly arguing a right to life at conception from a scientific point of view, then s/he would condemn all killing of all animals regardless of the possible good that may come of it. They'd definitely be vegans.
The problem is that even folks who claim no religious mindset fail to realize that they have been raised in a culture that began with a fundamentalist mentality, and that they have absorbed some of those concepts without realizing it. If you believe that human life is more important than other life, you have absorbed fundamentalist doctrine.
Due to the inconvenience of supporting a lifeform's rights, most people have instead chosen to ignore these and support a person's rights.
Now, for the second issue in your argument:
Granting of "personhood" is a legal distinction that has no basis in science...
...
...the child is a distinct lifeform from its mother from the moment of conception, the law has chosen to ignore that until the child is completely removed from the womb.
Not technically correct, here. Personhood is a social concept, not a legal one. It is a social concept that has been held by humans across the globe and across time, most likely beginning before the first laws were ever devised.
When to grant an individual personhood in a society depends on that society - usually the law follows after, not before.
In the case of the U.S., most people agree that personhood begins at birth (I follow that personhood begins when an individual becomes useful to society, but I'm in a very outspoken minority here). The law here is even stricter: the Supreme Court in Roe v Wade effectively declared personhood to begin at the point a fetus becomes viable (i.e., able to exist outside the mother). This seems fair, and I'm willing to live with it, even if I don't agree.
As long as we get our terminology right ("life" vs "personhood"), there is no dispute.
Couldn't agree more.
While I certainly won't argue that any of the "big 3" have made horrible decisions in the past, they really are too important to let them fail. You'll never see me make that statement about any other industry: it's just that too many U.S. jobs are directly or indirectly supported by these folks.
Asking for money to retool in order to make better vehicles? Give it to them. We've paid for the retooling of the auto industries before (usually to make war machines), and 7.7 billion is chump change compared to some of the handouts that are being passed around right now.
On the other hand, I can't support a company that doesn't make (or at least plan to make) biodiesel hybrids or compressed-air vehicles. If I knew who to talk to to get those kinds of vehicles mandated to our auto manufacturers, well, I wouldn't be wasting my time here.
The goal shouldn't be to increase the mileage you can get on a gallon of gasoline; the goal should be to get gasoline out of the equation entirely. Even if all car companies everywhere stopped making vehicles that ran on fossil fuels right now, it'd still be ten years or more before the gas hogs we drive now are off the road. This country passed it's peak oil point nearly 40 years ago; the world passed it's peak oil point just 3 years ago. It's not about the environment, it's about dwindling supply & increasing demand.
The problem that this is designed to solve, though, is "how do we collect facial-recognition data on as many people as we can while they're still to young to do anything about it?"
Bingo.
Most facial recognition systems can determine the difference between identical twins - there are small differences, y'know.
Actually, if you pay attention, you should be able to tell one twin from another yourself, assuming you know a pair. I've known a few, and I've always been able to tell the difference. One dead giveaway is when one twin has a slightly slimmer face than the other.
In a nation such as the US, whose society I regard as civilized, where people are not coerced into prostitution against their will, what exactly is wrong about prostitution; and in turn, why is it illegal?
Well, on the face of things, there are two calls against prostitution in the U.S.:
The real reason that there's such an outcry over prostitution, I postulate, is because women can get far better deals if they barter for sex rather than sell the service for cash. It's a direct competition to women who want to enter into relationships where the man takes care of everything and the woman just has to put out now and again. Also, there are plenty of men made uneasy over the idea that women can market sexual services; it makes them inherently self-sufficient.
I'm not claiming the above argument is true: I'm just speculating based on the idea that humans have never been interested in what amounts to academic issues enough to act on them, but have forever directly attacked anything they could regard as competitive practices ruthlessly and rapidly.
Cutting out an advertising source just pushes that element that you want to arrest into other fringe areas that you probably don't know about yet.
What makes you think this isn't the desired result? Crime doesn't exist unless arrests are made - didn't anyone ever tell you that?
Moreover, maybe the sheriff is actually sympathetic to prostitutes. Prostitution in most states is just a misdemeanor, but Illinois has the harshest sentences (1-3 years and/or $25,000 fine). Maybe he's trying to help them not get caught (OK, I really doubt this too).
Ban the children
It would work! Think about it: the general reaction of the government whenever there has been social misuse of a commodity has been to ban the commodity and criminalize possession of it.
So, we just need to round up all children everywhere and lock them away in evidence lockers. Then when they reach the age of majority, we can release them for the 3-6 months it would take for the socially maladjusted adults to commit a crime, then lock them back up, this time in for-profit prisons.
Actually, I think this would be a great solution to all social problems, plus provide the government with a productive population that is completely under control
(To those of you who can't recognize a joke in poor taste when you see it, yes, I'm being facetious)
The AC probably jumped to the conclusion that the sheriff was on a crusade based on religious temperament.
All in all, it was pretty easy to follow to me, if not necessarily well founded.
It's not really an improper conclusion. Show me one non-theist that believes prostitution is improper, and I'll show you a closet theist.
Only those who believe in some imaginary divine morality have an issue with folks selling sexual services.
It's unfair competition and should be illegal.
There's no such thing as unfair competition. There are anti-competitive laws that shore-up monopolies, and anti-competitive practices that lock out competitors, but in an open and legal (and sane) market, healthy competition is the definition of fairness.
If a competitor has a better product and is able to overspend on advertising keywords to get a higher spot, then both customers and the competitor will win. If the competitor is just trying to block the competition and has no real marketable substitute, then they're just overspending on useless advertisement - those keyword bids aren't cheap, y'know - especially on Google, where the price-per-click is outrageous due to the high demand.
The most useful trademarks will run you $1 or more a click to just get within the top 5 - with an average click-to-sale rate of 8% (which is actually pretty good) - you're looking at $12.50 in advertising per sale using Google. Nobody is going to pay that kind of advertising cost if they don't have the advertised product (at least, not unless they're actively trying to bankrupt themselves).
Now, I suppose you could outbid purely for defamation purposes, but you'd need deep pockets if you want to be effective, and you still run into libel laws
In this situation, the Utah legislature is attempting to ban unauthorized use of trademarks. Isn't this already illegal? (or at least an open invitation to lawsuit?) This is just another case of how the internet makes people stupid.
Actually, as a Demonoid member (once upon a time - I lost my password and have undergone an email change, so no luck getting back in), I'm very impressed with the site.
If you're looking for the latest media, then no, it's not much better than most other torrent search engines. But if you want the latest proprietary software, reference ebooks (or scanned books), or select indie stuff, it's excellent. Furthermore, there's a strong peer-review aspect to the site that makes me feel a lot more secure that what I'm downloading is actually what it's claimed to be.
Yes, I realize your point - and you are quite correct in referring back to it. My point was that the comment you based your prior argument in response to was not referring to a right to a jury, which most of us realize is a structure of our legal system, not an inherit right.
What "inherant rights in all human beings" are these? What relevance does this have to the TPB case? The right to... Life?
The issue is clearly the same as in any trial; being discussed is if and how the TPB operators' inherit right to do any damn thing they please should be bounded by the potential harm they inflict on society.
Are you Americans so totally absorbed in the notion that YOUR system is THE system?
Unfortunately yes, in many cases this is exactly what Americans think. While I completely support any nation's right to structure the legal system any way it chooses, I also believe in the inalienable rights present in all human beings across the globe, regardless of their nationality.
I see them. I'm one of those obsessive people who read every post in a topic, and then refresh to read the ones that popped up while I was reading the first set.
I see plenty of these die-hard right-wing libertarian posts get modded down here on Slashdot. And really, for good reason. The "free market is always right" and "look towards profit to find the right path" types scare me a little. How can they be that naive? Moreover, these posts offend me: I'm a moderate libertarian (inasmuch as I support any political party), and it's crazies like these guys make me look a little crazy in the eyes of others whenever I describe myself as one.
I'd really like to see these guys censored - but that's just my opinion, and in my heart I know that censorship is wrong. Modding them "Troll" and "Flamebait" is really the best balance in lieu of a "-1, Loony" tag.
I suppose there's always hope that these folks actually think they're Republicans (and who knows, maybe they're also fundamentalist nutjobs, making them real extremist Republicans after all). That would be slightly comforting. But not much.
I get my DSL from Fairpoint now.
I want Verizon back. Their customer service department was much easier to deal with, and their billing department seemed to understand me (like the fact that I pay for 4-5 months at a time every 4-5 months, regardless of what their billing due date is).