So let me see if I understand it - this is merely a more nakedly obvious example of the government which we empower to tax us, showing that its only concern is revenue.
(rolls eyes) Or just trying to get taxes from people who should be paying taxes. More to the point, each tax dollar that a company is exempt from is one that comes from your pocket as a local taxpayer.
I have a serious issue with a government that directly PROFITS by the death of its citizens
And I have a serious problem with rich estates not being taxed, so the decendants of the rich are exempt from work. They can work for a living, just like the rest of us.
...can a city complain about a corporation being exempt from taxes, and it's the city that's greedy. Seriously, if the rest of us have to suck it up an pay taxes, there's no reason whatsoever that a multi-billion dollar corporation can't do the same.
Nonsense. So if you decided to tear down some of the ads in the subway, sticking up your own in their place, is that just a public use of public property? Of course it isn't.
Your analogy is stupid. You are talking about making physical changes to existing property. This guy is making maps available for free that have absolutly zero impact on physical property or the operation of it.
For instance in this case it's pretty clear that the subway company licenses the map to users who add a value ad (e.g. tourism guides, etc), and in return those republishers return some of their take to the subway.
And the subway wouldn't be getting a take from people using the guys map to travel on said subway? And besides, a map is a drawing of facts, and you can't copyright facts. They guy should make his own map from scratch and tell those authorities to go to hell.
How so? What would be illegal about not licensing their music to Apple? I'm not trying to be argumentative. I really don't know.
Because they were just found guilty of price fixing. This is pretty risky on their part, imo. If more than one label is pressuring Apple to raise prices, and if I were Steve Jobs, my conference call would go something like this: *cough*price fixing*cough feds*cough states attorney generals*cough*
Remember, the other razor makers tried to make replacement blades that would fit in Apple's razor, but Apple shut them down with legal threats.
Since when did Apple send out legal threats to anyone who released mp3's, wavs, or even unprotected aac's? Those all fit in Apple's "razor" just fine, thank you.
It's probably just a bluff, but if the Music Industry does go through with this it would be incredibly stupid of them.
Even more so because they just got busted for price fixing. If two labels make good on their threat, I don't know why Apple couldn't just sue them for price fixing again. Dunno why this hasn't been mentioned more.
Why not? Right, it's because you're just like all the other stupid partisan windbags on both sides. Ignore your own issues, and yell louder than the other guy.
Nice try but no cigar, as they say.
And so have Medicare, and Social Security, (FAR FAR more than the war, by the way) but you don't trot out those examples every time this subject comes up, do you?
Maybe because both those programs go directly to the American people? Specifically to the middle and lower classes who payed for them already? Whereas the Iraq war hasn't done a damn thing to benefit the public here at home. In fact, it's done much to hurt us as it's convinced millions more Arabs that we are the bad guy, and turned Iraq into a breeding ground for jihadist terrorists, which it wasn't before.
It's time to wake up and realize that the U.S. is not a land of opportunity for the vast majority of people and the poor are constantly getting poorer. The middle class is steadily disappearing. The people running the corporations and who own most of the shares in them are wealthy and were born that way.
I have a theory: the Great Depression forced a reboot of wealth in this country. The wealthy had most of their money tied up in banks or investments, the same as today. So when banks went bust and stock holdings became worthless, everyone started off on a much more equal foot when the economy got going again. This is why the average CEO made 40 times more than the average worker, for a while.
But now money has had several decades to accumulate up to the top again, and now the average CEO makes 500 times what the average worker makes. A couple of things have changed though: during the Depression, much of the population in this country lived on family farms. You might not have any money but at least you were able to feed yourself. Now small family farms are almost extinct. The other thing to change is that much of our manufacturing base has moved overseas. So if we have another reboot - a stock market collapse or a meltdown in the national debt - the middle and lower classes might not come out as well as they did the last time.
The 30% of people who control 50% of the wealth or whatever are the people who, after 40 years of working, have paid off their homes, their cars, have a nice little IRA, etc.
Um, no. Those people would be what is known as the middle class. The middle class does not control 50% of the wealth. Check out the nice L graph to see how wealth and income are really distributed.
Next time you want to rail against "the rich," just take a drive through the nice part of town. Those are the people who used our capitalist economy to achieve upward mobility. Want to know what evil thing they did to achieve it? Take a ride down main street. They're the people who took out a loan to open up shop, provide jobs to the people in your community, and provide you with goods and services.
Okay, now drive in the rich part of town. The vast majority of these people never had to work for their money, they inherited it from their parents. Go look at the graph.
Your entire argument revolves around the idea that because other people have it worse and want to move here, nothing is wrong here. That is what is "nonsense".
It's the regulation that protects those who are already rich from competition, and guarantees that they continue to grow richer - not the lack of it.
In some cases yes - like your local utilities - but in other cases that's nonsense. Was there more or less competition in the telecom industry before the AT&T monopoly was broken up? How about the FCC's limits on media ownership?
The only thing worse than overregulation is no regulation.
A company that gets more money (generally) hires more workers.
A Republican fantasy. Companies hire more workers only if they figure to make more money by doing so. Anything else will screw with their efficiency and profit margins.
The more time goes on, the less I think the answer to this question is "yes".
Not if histroy is any guide. I don't know of any countries we were able to help in such a fashion when the populace really, really doesn't want us there. Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Vietnam...doesn't give one much hope that it's going to work this time.
So is thinking that continuing the effort to stabalize Iraq means agreeing with current leaders. The United States broke Iraq, and we have a responsibility to fix it. But those responsible (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield) should be fired and more competent people put in charge of the operation.
Or would he have declared war earlier, preventing Pearl Harbor
Except that wouldn't have happened, because we wouldn't have invaded the country responsible. We'd have just gone before the League of Nations with "convincing evidence" that Spain really did bomb the U.S.S. Maine, and invade them instead. Thus prolonging the war and tying up our resources in the event of an attack by a real enemy such as Japan.
It seems like you right wingers quit thinking when bush took office.
Not exactly, they just redefined "Republican" and "conservative" to mean "one who supports George W. Bush without question". No GOP action can't be rationalized, and no Democratic action can't be nitpicked.
Just look at one of the Slashdot editors for a perfect example of this: Pudge. In his top journal entry, he's calling Mary Mapes a liar because she claimed to have had the first interview with Ben Barnes, who claimed to have helped Bush get into the Air Gaurd. This is what Pudge had to say:
Except, no, Barnes did not say he helped Bush get into the TANG. This is simply a lie. What Barnes said is that he spoke to someone on Bush's behalf, but that he does not know whether it actually helped. CBS reported this, she and Rather keep saying it, but it is a lie. Excuse me, but how the hell is "talking on someones behalf" not "helping some one get the job"?
In the following entry, he sniffs that the Tom Delay inditement is no big deal, and then he calls the anti-war rally in DC a communist rally. Previously, he has said that Boxer was lying when she said the vote for war in Iraq was "about WMD, period", because part of the reason for the invasion was Saddams violations of U.N. resolutions. Except what were over 90% of those U.N. resolutions about? Weapons of mass distruction! And in the breath before that, he was saying that Social Security solvency really was a crisis after all, despite the fact that those problems wouldn't hit for almost another 40 years, and even then, people would still get 75% of their benefits.
Republicans like Pudge are fat fucking hypocrites who's entire spinal columns would explode if they were suddenly forced to stay consistent for more than a second at a time. And they called Kerry a flip-flopper.
Why don't you go there and tell those Iraqi families that those figures are inflated. Take up a collection, you might raise enough money to buy you a ticket.
90% of it was about Saddam not complying with U.N. resolutions.
And wtf do you think most of those resolutions were about? Over 90% of the resolutions that were still relevant dealt with weapons of mass distruction.
Spank spank, neocon beyach.
But at no point did the President jump up and down and scream "He's got millions of ICBMs! Let's go get 'em!" This is what everybody seems to think he said, however.
No, he jumped up and down and talked about mushroom clouds and how we had to invade right now to stop Saddam from obtaining nuclear weapons.
Do you have any idea the sort of field-testing that remote imaging, remote control, combo intertial/gps/multi-sensor guidance, distributed networking/comms technology is getting in a place like that?
BFD. Of the many problems we have in Iraq, technical superiority is not one of them. Are there advancements being made? Of course. Are they insignifigant next to advances made when you are facing equal opponents? Of course. Look at all the leaps that were made in either of the World Wars or the Cold War. The Iraq war is small potatos.
How about the huge portion of the Pentagon's budget that's going into building Iraq a this-century telecommunications system, real water treatment, decentralized power distribution/management, and so on?
Huh, I wonder how much of that wouldn't have been neccesary if the U.S. hadn't spent 12 years bombing that stuff in the first place. In any case, the Iraqis are vastly less impressed by this than you are.
The only people "mindlessly killing" anyone over there are the hardcore Islamo-fascists that want to reinstate a Sunni-esque pan-Arab caliphate, just like the good old days several hundred years ago.
A gross oversimplification, but yes the Sunnis are considerably more pissed off than the Kurds or the Shiites. That could all change if the country dissolves into civil war, or Turkey decides to invade an independant Kurdistan.
Citizens of Iraq are being murdered by insurgents, mostly made up of, and certainly funded/armed/trained by non-Iraqis
A Republican fantasy. Foriengers are comming, yes, but it's to help out the home grown insurgency by Sunnis, they did not create it in the first place nor are they the primary force behind it.
that don't want to see a forward-looking democracy take hold there
Bullshit. You really drink the Fox Kool-Aid, don't you? They hear all this talk of democracy and they just look next door at Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Pakistan to see just how seriously we really push democracy. They just want the U.S. to get the hell out of threre.
We lost because we couldn't hit strategic targets, which hamstrung the effort.
We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped by all sides during WWII. Fireboming every last supply trail would be like fireboming every last cocaine field in Columbia - it's not going to make any difference because in the end because they'll just make new ones. No, once again, the reason we lost is because they maintained moral and motivation no matter how many casualties they suffered. The Vientnamese beat us in a war of attrition, the same as they did to the French before us.
to avoid having their society -- which still needed electricity, sanitation, clean water, and usable transportation facilities and lines -- completely crushed into the ground.
Their society was pretty much crushed. And considering that much of the population lived in self-sufficient agrarian villages, the carrot of electricity and running lines was a bit underwhelming.
Iraq and Vietnam are two completely different kinds of war.
There are obvious differences and there are obvious similiarities. One obvious similarity is that the same people we are supposed to protect are the same ones trying to kill us. That tends to be a bit of a downer on the old morale.
No, you don't get it. As long as the administration keeps paying no price whatsoever for its fuckups, it will keep having Iraqi wars, My Pet Goats, and a day late & a dollar short responces to national disasters.
Could we PLEASE try to stay on the subject?
Oh, but the Iraq war and Katrina debacles, along with Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, have already cost fantastic sums of money. This makes them directly related to anything else that needs money, like oh say, NASA.
Slashdot Mirror
So let me see if I understand it - this is merely a more nakedly obvious example of the government which we empower to tax us, showing that its only concern is revenue.
(rolls eyes) Or just trying to get taxes from people who should be paying taxes. More to the point, each tax dollar that a company is exempt from is one that comes from your pocket as a local taxpayer.
I have a serious issue with a government that directly PROFITS by the death of its citizens
And I have a serious problem with rich estates not being taxed, so the decendants of the rich are exempt from work. They can work for a living, just like the rest of us.
And more importantly, corporations have a god-given right not to pay taxes. It's the American Way!
...can a city complain about a corporation being exempt from taxes, and it's the city that's greedy. Seriously, if the rest of us have to suck it up an pay taxes, there's no reason whatsoever that a multi-billion dollar corporation can't do the same.
Nonsense. So if you decided to tear down some of the ads in the subway, sticking up your own in their place, is that just a public use of public property? Of course it isn't.
Your analogy is stupid. You are talking about making physical changes to existing property. This guy is making maps available for free that have absolutly zero impact on physical property or the operation of it.
For instance in this case it's pretty clear that the subway company licenses the map to users who add a value ad (e.g. tourism guides, etc), and in return those republishers return some of their take to the subway.
And the subway wouldn't be getting a take from people using the guys map to travel on said subway? And besides, a map is a drawing of facts, and you can't copyright facts. They guy should make his own map from scratch and tell those authorities to go to hell.
Yes and my taxes pay for Number 10 Downing Street (the UK prime minister's residence) so I should be able to live there for free, right? right?
But do you pay those taxes to live there? No. Do you pay taxes for public transport so you can use it? Of course.
Your logic is flawed.
And your logic is fucking stupid.
And that makes it different from most Linux apps how?
And what happens with crappy linux apps? They don't get used. There's a mountain of unused crap on Freshmeat.
And let's see how many clueless mods mod this as flamebait or a a troll when it isn't....
Because there's no -1, Irrelevant Nitwit mod.
How so? What would be illegal about not licensing their music to Apple? I'm not trying to be argumentative. I really don't know.
Because they were just found guilty of price fixing. This is pretty risky on their part, imo. If more than one label is pressuring Apple to raise prices, and if I were Steve Jobs, my conference call would go something like this: *cough*price fixing*cough feds*cough states attorney generals*cough*
Remember, the other razor makers tried to make replacement blades that would fit in Apple's razor, but Apple shut them down with legal threats.
Since when did Apple send out legal threats to anyone who released mp3's, wavs, or even unprotected aac's? Those all fit in Apple's "razor" just fine, thank you.
It's probably just a bluff, but if the Music Industry does go through with this it would be incredibly stupid of them.
Even more so because they just got busted for price fixing. If two labels make good on their threat, I don't know why Apple couldn't just sue them for price fixing again. Dunno why this hasn't been mentioned more.
Why not? Right, it's because you're just like all the other stupid partisan windbags on both sides. Ignore your own issues, and yell louder than the other guy.
Nice try but no cigar, as they say.
And so have Medicare, and Social Security, (FAR FAR more than the war, by the way) but you don't trot out those examples every time this subject comes up, do you?
Maybe because both those programs go directly to the American people? Specifically to the middle and lower classes who payed for them already? Whereas the Iraq war hasn't done a damn thing to benefit the public here at home. In fact, it's done much to hurt us as it's convinced millions more Arabs that we are the bad guy, and turned Iraq into a breeding ground for jihadist terrorists, which it wasn't before.
It's time to wake up and realize that the U.S. is not a land of opportunity for the vast majority of people and the poor are constantly getting poorer. The middle class is steadily disappearing. The people running the corporations and who own most of the shares in them are wealthy and were born that way.
I have a theory: the Great Depression forced a reboot of wealth in this country. The wealthy had most of their money tied up in banks or investments, the same as today. So when banks went bust and stock holdings became worthless, everyone started off on a much more equal foot when the economy got going again. This is why the average CEO made 40 times more than the average worker, for a while.
But now money has had several decades to accumulate up to the top again, and now the average CEO makes 500 times what the average worker makes. A couple of things have changed though: during the Depression, much of the population in this country lived on family farms. You might not have any money but at least you were able to feed yourself. Now small family farms are almost extinct. The other thing to change is that much of our manufacturing base has moved overseas. So if we have another reboot - a stock market collapse or a meltdown in the national debt - the middle and lower classes might not come out as well as they did the last time.
The 30% of people who control 50% of the wealth or whatever are the people who, after 40 years of working, have paid off their homes, their cars, have a nice little IRA, etc.
Um, no. Those people would be what is known as the middle class. The middle class does not control 50% of the wealth. Check out the nice L graph to see how wealth and income are really distributed.
Next time you want to rail against "the rich," just take a drive through the nice part of town. Those are the people who used our capitalist economy to achieve upward mobility. Want to know what evil thing they did to achieve it? Take a ride down main street. They're the people who took out a loan to open up shop, provide jobs to the people in your community, and provide you with goods and services.
Okay, now drive in the rich part of town. The vast majority of these people never had to work for their money, they inherited it from their parents. Go look at the graph.
Your entire argument revolves around the idea that because other people have it worse and want to move here, nothing is wrong here. That is what is "nonsense".
It's the regulation that protects those who are already rich from competition, and guarantees that they continue to grow richer - not the lack of it.
In some cases yes - like your local utilities - but in other cases that's nonsense. Was there more or less competition in the telecom industry before the AT&T monopoly was broken up? How about the FCC's limits on media ownership?
The only thing worse than overregulation is no regulation.
A company that gets more money (generally) hires more workers.
A Republican fantasy. Companies hire more workers only if they figure to make more money by doing so. Anything else will screw with their efficiency and profit margins.
Commies have been saying this for over 100 years now.
You forgetting they actually did that? Along with a whole lot of other countries?
The more time goes on, the less I think the answer to this question is "yes".
Not if histroy is any guide. I don't know of any countries we were able to help in such a fashion when the populace really, really doesn't want us there. Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Vietnam...doesn't give one much hope that it's going to work this time.
But to bail out immediately is childish thinking.
So is thinking that continuing the effort to stabalize Iraq means agreeing with current leaders. The United States broke Iraq, and we have a responsibility to fix it. But those responsible (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield) should be fired and more competent people put in charge of the operation.
Or would he have declared war earlier, preventing Pearl Harbor
Except that wouldn't have happened, because we wouldn't have invaded the country responsible. We'd have just gone before the League of Nations with "convincing evidence" that Spain really did bomb the U.S.S. Maine, and invade them instead. Thus prolonging the war and tying up our resources in the event of an attack by a real enemy such as Japan.
It seems like you right wingers quit thinking when bush took office.
Not exactly, they just redefined "Republican" and "conservative" to mean "one who supports George W. Bush without question". No GOP action can't be rationalized, and no Democratic action can't be nitpicked.
Just look at one of the Slashdot editors for a perfect example of this: Pudge. In his top journal entry, he's calling Mary Mapes a liar because she claimed to have had the first interview with Ben Barnes, who claimed to have helped Bush get into the Air Gaurd. This is what Pudge had to say:
Except, no, Barnes did not say he helped Bush get into the TANG. This is simply a lie. What Barnes said is that he spoke to someone on Bush's behalf, but that he does not know whether it actually helped. CBS reported this, she and Rather keep saying it, but it is a lie.
Excuse me, but how the hell is "talking on someones behalf" not "helping some one get the job"?
In the following entry, he sniffs that the Tom Delay inditement is no big deal, and then he calls the anti-war rally in DC a communist rally. Previously, he has said that Boxer was lying when she said the vote for war in Iraq was "about WMD, period", because part of the reason for the invasion was Saddams violations of U.N. resolutions. Except what were over 90% of those U.N. resolutions about? Weapons of mass distruction! And in the breath before that, he was saying that Social Security solvency really was a crisis after all, despite the fact that those problems wouldn't hit for almost another 40 years, and even then, people would still get 75% of their benefits.
Republicans like Pudge are fat fucking hypocrites who's entire spinal columns would explode if they were suddenly forced to stay consistent for more than a second at a time. And they called Kerry a flip-flopper.
Why don't you go there and tell those Iraqi families that those figures are inflated. Take up a collection, you might raise enough money to buy you a ticket.
90% of it was about Saddam not complying with U.N. resolutions.
And wtf do you think most of those resolutions were about? Over 90% of the resolutions that were still relevant dealt with weapons of mass distruction.
Spank spank, neocon beyach.
But at no point did the President jump up and down and scream "He's got millions of ICBMs! Let's go get 'em!" This is what everybody seems to think he said, however.
No, he jumped up and down and talked about mushroom clouds and how we had to invade right now to stop Saddam from obtaining nuclear weapons.
Bush was wrong and so are you. Deal with it.
Do you have any idea the sort of field-testing that remote imaging, remote control, combo intertial/gps/multi-sensor guidance, distributed networking/comms technology is getting in a place like that?
BFD. Of the many problems we have in Iraq, technical superiority is not one of them. Are there advancements being made? Of course. Are they insignifigant next to advances made when you are facing equal opponents? Of course. Look at all the leaps that were made in either of the World Wars or the Cold War. The Iraq war is small potatos.
How about the huge portion of the Pentagon's budget that's going into building Iraq a this-century telecommunications system, real water treatment, decentralized power distribution/management, and so on?
Huh, I wonder how much of that wouldn't have been neccesary if the U.S. hadn't spent 12 years bombing that stuff in the first place. In any case, the Iraqis are vastly less impressed by this than you are.
The only people "mindlessly killing" anyone over there are the hardcore Islamo-fascists that want to reinstate a Sunni-esque pan-Arab caliphate, just like the good old days several hundred years ago.
A gross oversimplification, but yes the Sunnis are considerably more pissed off than the Kurds or the Shiites. That could all change if the country dissolves into civil war, or Turkey decides to invade an independant Kurdistan.
Citizens of Iraq are being murdered by insurgents, mostly made up of, and certainly funded/armed/trained by non-Iraqis
A Republican fantasy. Foriengers are comming, yes, but it's to help out the home grown insurgency by Sunnis, they did not create it in the first place nor are they the primary force behind it.
that don't want to see a forward-looking democracy take hold there
Bullshit. You really drink the Fox Kool-Aid, don't you? They hear all this talk of democracy and they just look next door at Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Pakistan to see just how seriously we really push democracy. They just want the U.S. to get the hell out of threre.
I covered this all already.
We lost because we couldn't hit strategic targets, which hamstrung the effort.
We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped by all sides during WWII. Fireboming every last supply trail would be like fireboming every last cocaine field in Columbia - it's not going to make any difference because in the end because they'll just make new ones. No, once again, the reason we lost is because they maintained moral and motivation no matter how many casualties they suffered. The Vientnamese beat us in a war of attrition, the same as they did to the French before us.
to avoid having their society -- which still needed electricity, sanitation, clean water, and usable transportation facilities and lines -- completely crushed into the ground.
Their society was pretty much crushed. And considering that much of the population lived in self-sufficient agrarian villages, the carrot of electricity and running lines was a bit underwhelming.
Iraq and Vietnam are two completely different kinds of war.
There are obvious differences and there are obvious similiarities. One obvious similarity is that the same people we are supposed to protect are the same ones trying to kill us. That tends to be a bit of a downer on the old morale.
WE GET IT.
No, you don't get it. As long as the administration keeps paying no price whatsoever for its fuckups, it will keep having Iraqi wars, My Pet Goats, and a day late & a dollar short responces to national disasters.
Could we PLEASE try to stay on the subject?
Oh, but the Iraq war and Katrina debacles, along with Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, have already cost fantastic sums of money. This makes them directly related to anything else that needs money, like oh say, NASA.