What if an employee leaves the company and takes the code to the magic secret program with him? It uses GNU GPL licensed code, which grants _him_ a license to redistribute it, because he has a copy of the program already.
The GPL grants him a licence to redistribute the GPL licensed code, not the magic secret program. Just because you include something licensed to you under the GPL in something you've written doesn't mean that anyone you give that something to is automatically licensed by you to redistribute the whole thing to others. You might be breaking the GPL granted to you by the original author when you do that, but that doesn't mean that the person you've given it to is not breaking YOUR copyright when he redistributes it.
And if you're a corporation and the redistributor is an employee then you can easily ruin his life by arguing over it in court, even if you lose or drop your case. Besides, do you REALLY want a dispute with your employer or manager over it, even if it's much lower level than that? Or even if you're technically right? (Or it might be that your employer doesn't really care, and that the manager concerned just doesn't want to take any risks himself by authorizing something he doesn't have to and doesn't help him get his job done).
It also makes it very important that you read your contracts of employment carefully. Some claim copyright over everything you produce, in the course of your employment or otherwise. I doubt that this is some secret plot to take over your life and I can't imagine that employers really want to own every love-letter and slashdot post you write, rather that it's just safer and easier from the drafter's point of view (one less thing to argue over in court, one less potential loophole, one less thing you might get wrong).
To make British politics work for its citizens a system of proportional representation is needed.
The current system forces you to vote for the party you think can defeat the party you really detest.
STV might help more there, but I can see PR makes it less necessary (because your vote still influences the outcome when it wouldn't have done if your party gets few votes in your area);
In a system of proportional representation you finally get the chance to have a representative that more closely aligns with your views. Labour would probably lose my vote unless I had faith in the particular candidate and that realistically means he/she will have experience in local politics in the city or county councils.
Dumping a candidate on an area by the national party will become more difficult again a plus point.
I don't see that one. How would you have a particular candidate for your area with PR? Are you thinking of a system basically like the current one, but with a national list which tops-up the number of the various parties' MPs to match their national share of the vote? That gives more power to national parties, doesn't it? Or maybe one like the European voting system, with a list for each region, which means your MEP isn't really local at all?
Plus, if all of the characters in the TLD are unambiguously not in my own alphabet, my browser can throw up a nice little "foreign site - Russian" icon next to it.
Except, of course, it'd have to say 'Cyrillic'. Is it actually possible to distinguish alphabets based on a few Unicode characters?
More awkwardly....what about a Russian accessing an existing site with a Latin TLD, possibly with other Cyrillic elements?
Disallowing TLDs that look similar to existing ones is probably a good start, though. Why should there be a Cyrillic.com?
Does it mean anything?
Like any technology, the problem is not the technology but that the technology allows unskilled persons to do work previously done by skilled persons. It is not surprising that the results tend to be of low quality.
I'm not convinced. Unskilled presenters have given presentations for a long time. Powerpoint has allowed people to do them badly in a different way. How much is due to the technology guiding people to do things in a particular way and how much is down to the generally accepted way a Powerpoint presentation is done I'm not sure. What I HAVE noticed is that many Powerpoint presenters don't seem to draw a distinction between material intended for the audience and for the presenter. People used to speak from notes (or memory), with images intended for the audience on posters, or projected or handed out. Nowadays, speakers tend to use the slides for both. They're effectively displaying their notes to their audience and then standing in front of them and reading them out.
Maybe Powerpoint should (or does it? I don't really use it) allow/encourage presenters to split the material in two - one display for the speaker, another for the audience. You should talk FROM your notes ABOUT what's displayed, and if you're not talking about something visual your projector should be blank.
But encryption of live servers and databases is a farce.
It's certainly pretty difficult, even in simple cases like encrypted card numbers. You pretty much either need a hardware security module, or you have to enter a key on every startup (not really OK for live servers that really should boot on their own accord), or you have to have some horrible off-site key management and decryption system.
I'm not so sure that this law mandates it though. This only mentions portable devices, so far as I can see:
http://www.mass.gov/Eoca/docs/idtheft/201CMR1700reg.pdf
(Though I haven't read the whole thing and it's not my jurisdiction, and IANAL anyway, so I may have got the wrong end of the stick). It would have been more helpful if the article, or at least the article the article links to as its source, had actually linked to the bits of the law they were talking about. Or at all, for that matter.
Why would a film studio seek an injunction against a cinema to stop it showing a film when the studio has just agreed to accept money from the cinema in exchange for being allowed to show it? Why would a court be so stupid as to issue an injunction if they did?
How do you sue someone for "potential infringement"?
You can't, but in the UK you can already ask for an injunction concerning infringement which hasn't happened yet (including ongoing infringement). I'd be surprised if you couldn't elsewhere, too.
This says they can be enjoined before they actually infringe anything. This is stomping over someone to make sure they don't do something that violates a copyright.
It's a court declaring that a person should not do something because the court says it would infringe copyright. That's not (inherently) stomping, it's saying 'don't do the specific thing we have good reason to believe you're likely to do, because we think it's illegal'. Think of, say, a software publisher being told not to start selling the software they're about to release because it contains unlicenced stolen code.
Why not take away every teenagers computer, to prevent them from pirating in the first place?
Because that would be a stupid idea? How is it related to injunctions?
The same law that dictates whether the customer should receive a refund from the retailer determines whether that retailer has recourse against Sony for their costs incurred.
Not necessarily...there are laws like the UK's Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations which apply to consumers and not businesses. Besides, the update came from Sony, not the retailer...so who knows?
As I understand it, the Sale of Goods Act 1979 (as amended) is national law granting statutory rights, which overrides even outright contracts, let alone questionably-signed copyright licences attached to end-user licence agreements. That's also what they mean when they give a guarantee that says it does not affect your statutory rights.
The Sale of Goods Act (and now the Sale and Supply of Goods Act) doesn't cover licences. Licences are not goods. It'll cover PS3s, though, because PS3s obviously ARE goods...but it's not immediately obvious that the PS3 itself is defective/not durable enough, given that people applying the patch are agreeing to it and that the patch isn't coming from the person from whom they bought the PS3 (and who would be liable). I don't know nearly enough law to know whether it's legal or not, but it's a bit more complex than you suggest.
(At the risk of answering my own, previous question) what protection do 'unpublished' works have?
Ideally? None.
So if you commission some software to run on your server then it attracts no copyright? Unless someone pinches it and publishes it rather than just using it for themselves, I suppose. What about, for example, stolen private diaries or e-mails? They seem worthy of legal protection of some sort. Why not copyright?
The purpose of copyright and patents is:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Why accept the US constitution as the document which establishes what copyrights should exclusively be used for? It's a perfectly sensible goal, but why limit it to that just because it doesn't say we shouldn't? The authors didn't really have any special perspective compared to modern economists, politicians, lawyers and scientists...and even if they did, that doesn't mean we should accept what they said without questioning it. There are lots constitutions and laws which you could have quoted, and none of them will make your argument for limiting copyright for you because they're about what the law IS, not what it SHOULD be or why. Why not argue for copyright wherever it's useful, has the legal effect you're looking for and appears to do the right thing?
So if JRR Tolkien had set up and sold the copyright to JRR Tolkien Associates Ltd then bequeathed the shares to his family they could control the copyright even after he'd died, whereas if he owned it personally and bequeathed it to them they couldn't? Or would you have a special rule for that? What if it was a publishing company instead of a company intended only for this purpose? Would the publishing company have to have commissioned him to write the work, or employed him as an employee, for them to get the 'that's a completely different situation' posthumous copyright extension, or would it be enough for him to have sold it to them after he'd written it? How much would it cost in lawyers to establish these differences?
You say this, and then you follow it up with an example of two authors who died, and are thus bereft of all control over their works. Why should people who did NOT write the works (okay, Christopher Tolkien might be given latitude here) ever be given control over the copyrights, especially in an age where that copyright is becoming ever more perpetual?
Think of software you've written for an employer. Presumably you accept that the employer should get the copyright (or at least an exclusive licence that lasts as long as the copyright). I don't think it'd be reasonable for employers to find work they'd commissioned to be out of copyright the day their programmer is run over by a bus.
Articles like this will make people think the opponents of the bill are against it because it will stop them infringing copyright. You won't find many people here who will agree that it should be legal to just take music and films without paying for them. Richard Stallman is essentially smearing his own side and compromising the bill's opponents' ability to convince the public that there are other good reasons for rejecting it.
Stop thinking about money, think about economic output. All output is consumed by people. Corporations cannot consume because they aren't sentient. If control over a chunk of economic output is taken away from the private sector by the government (which is what a transfer of money through taxation to the government represents) then the burden of that falls on people. And so do the benefits of the government spending it allows.
The important questions are: how does corporate taxation change which individuals bear which burden? And how does it affect economic decision-making through changes in incentives? Or, most important of all, how does this change the economic welfare of the population? It's irrelevant whether the taxes are 'fair' to the corporations (and whether they pay their 'fair share', as some people put it in the UK) or not...you might as well ask whether or not a tax on screwdrivers is fair to the screwdrivers.
The answers to those questions aren't easy to find exactly, but some things stand out. Taxing US corporate profits isn't taxing the same people as taxing US citizens personal income because some shares are owned by foreigners. (But reducing the rate may trigger reductions in other countries and reduce the burden of foreign corporate taxes on US citizens). It will fall more on older people than younger people, because older people own more shares. It will reduce the size of pensions. It will fall more on those who take risks with their savings than those who stick to government or corporate bonds. It will give corporate managers an incentive to borrow rather than raise equity (which increases the risk of corporate bankruptcies). The taxes will affect the investment decisions of shareholders and the corporation's managers in terms of both amounts and countries, because it reduces the return on investment and saving. It will probably do many other things.
An economy isn't just a big loop of money flows, it's a system for making decisions on what is produced, how, and who gets to consume it. (This can happen in a barter economy, too). What's important is not money, it's those decisions and how law and taxation change therm.
Personally, I'd rather see corporate taxes eliminated worldwide and replaced with personal taxes (and taxes on environmentally damaging activity, but that's a whole different issue). That way a whole load of pointless activity and distortions can be eliminated - there's no longer any need for complex tax avoidance schemes or for corporate tax collectors and lawyers. Of course distortions in other areas would increase (that's one reason I'd like environment taxes, because the tax can then actually correct a distortion), but I still suspect there'd be a net benefit.
Except that 200 years ago the British English spelling was -ize. Organization with an 's' is quite recent in UK English, probably because most people here associate 'z' with Americans and don't want to risk dirtying their English with your weird American ways. The OED will still tell you that 'organize' is preferred. (And so will I, which obviously clinches it).
Oil revenues have declined as output has slowed, in part because much of Venezuela's oil is heavy and difficult to extract, and the expertise to do so was largely provided by foreign companies. When he nationalized the oil industry there, many of those experts told him to go pound sand when he asked for assistance.
He's also sucked so much money out of the oil industry for 'social programmes' (ie, to hand to the poor in exchange for political support) that it can't invest in infrastructure. He's also raided central bank reserves and destroyed a lot of private enterprise. He might have handed a lot of money to the poor, but he's done it by running down Venezuela's capital and productive capacity.
He will run out of money. The Venezuelan poor will end up poorer than they were before. The economy will be left in a state where it's difficult to do anything about it. Maybe he knows he has to be so thoroughly entrenched by then that he can't be easily removed even when the poor find out?
You often don't get all your costs back. 80%-ish is more normal, I believe, and I'm not sure you can claim for everything anyway. If you run out of money before the end then you lose, so rich opponents can make you go through all the hoops in the hope of making that happen. IIRC, it's also possible to ask a court to refuse to let you continue a case on the grounds that you won't be able to pay the defendant's costs if you lose.
Erm....horse carriage and typewriter makers have mostly disappeared because people don't want them any more. People still want recordings. Besides, recordings are non-rival whereas your other examples are not. They really are totally different cases.
Not everyone in China is subject to the one-child policy. It's a little over a third, IIRC. It depends where you live, for example.
It's also important to remember that international trade is about exchange - you can't just compare prices. When you say 'cheap' what you mean is 'The Chinese economy will give us lots of their stuff in exchange for relatively little of our stuff'. Then you need to add 'The Chinese economy is also giving us lots of their stuff in exchange for a promise of some of our stuff in the future, a promise which the Chinese have so far been refusing to call in'. ie, they are lending to us.
If you want to think in terms of pricing you have to consider exchange rates too. There's no need for general deflation in the US for 'lots of stuff in exchange for a little stuff' to become 'quite a bit of stuff in exchange for less stuff', all that must happen is for the (real) exchange rate to change. Most especially, they need to stop lending so much and we need to stop borrowing so much.
Remember: long term, we can't import stuff from China if we don't export stuff in return. No-one can borrow (or sell assets) for ever (and it'd be immoral to live off the unrewarded labour of a relatively poor country anyway). There will be no means to pay for the imports if we don't export. The more we import, the more must be exported. The presence of trade like that can devastate particular industries in the relatively disadvantaged country, but in the end all that demand sooner or later has to pop up as demand for your country's exports. China must stop manipulating its exchange rate and let that happen.
China's economy won't be able to produce as much output per person as western economies for as long as, for example, there is state control over banking. Want to start a business? Joining the party and knowing the right people is as important as having a sane business idea. China will still reduce western living standards, though. They won't do it by undercutting labour and throwing western workers our of work. They'll do it by being able to compete with us on international raw materials markets. Suddenly, the west are not the only people able to hand cars, electronics, or whatever to oil or mineral producing countries....we'll have to start handing over more of our stuff in exchange for the same oil or minerals, and more of those materials will go to China for their own consumption. The most important thing for the west (and the whole world) to do is to use those resources more efficiently, and to search for alternative energy sources.
The UK votes against appear to be mainly from UKIP, a party with no noticeable presence in UK politics except for their main (only?) policy of UK withdrawal from the EU. And Nick Griffin abstained, presumably because international treaties will become irrelevant once 'abroad' has been abolished, or at least banned.
The government statistics show the number of "KSI" (people killed or seriously injured) is reduced.
From your link:
after allowing for the long-term trend, but without allowing for selection effects (such as regression-to-mean) there was a 22% reduction in personal injury collisions (PICs) at sites after cameras were introduced.
(my emphasis) ie, they don't show any such thing. They don't show anything at all regarding collisions. Speed cameras are frequently installed in places where there have recently been many serious accidents, quite possibly including places where the accident rate has been above its long term average. You need to find some better statistics (or, better, someone needs to carry out a properly designed and randomized trial). By drawing the conclusion that they do from this the government is simply lying about what it knows.
'Anyone' is singular. Any one. Besides, 'their penis' would imply he was talking about those individuals unfortunate enough to have to share a penis. Unusual Siamese twins, perhaps.
There could easily be 300 stabbings a day without you ever encountering one.
He didn't say 'stabbings'. Here, carrying a knife with a locking blade or with a blade over 3" without a reasonable excuse is illegal. I'd imagine that every time a policeman finds someone with a 3.2" pocket knife - or perhaps even someone with a reasonable excuse - it'll count towards the 300 'knife incidents'. BTW, anything pointy comes under the same law.
If a man forced you in to an apartment, tied you down, tore off your clothes and shoved his penis up your arse whilst his friend took pictures, you probably wouldn't be too keen on millions of Internet users getting excited over them later. It needs to be kept in proportion, but at the very least knowingly distributing it should not be allowed.
Where you do have a point is that the law's and popular culture's way of dealing with it has lost sight of the victims. The response is too much about public distaste, inflexible rules and reflex reactions to hearing the label 'paedophile', which is why in some places teenaged lovers end up in prison. The experience of the victim should be central to the response. If the 15 year old sleeping with the 20 year old doesn't feel like and wasn't treated like a victim, then there should be no punishment. A significantly injured ten year old? The opposite. People need to look beyond the label.
Slashdot Mirror
What if an employee leaves the company and takes the code to the magic secret program with him? It uses GNU GPL licensed code, which grants _him_ a license to redistribute it, because he has a copy of the program already.
The GPL grants him a licence to redistribute the GPL licensed code, not the magic secret program. Just because you include something licensed to you under the GPL in something you've written doesn't mean that anyone you give that something to is automatically licensed by you to redistribute the whole thing to others. You might be breaking the GPL granted to you by the original author when you do that, but that doesn't mean that the person you've given it to is not breaking YOUR copyright when he redistributes it.
And if you're a corporation and the redistributor is an employee then you can easily ruin his life by arguing over it in court, even if you lose or drop your case. Besides, do you REALLY want a dispute with your employer or manager over it, even if it's much lower level than that? Or even if you're technically right? (Or it might be that your employer doesn't really care, and that the manager concerned just doesn't want to take any risks himself by authorizing something he doesn't have to and doesn't help him get his job done).
It also makes it very important that you read your contracts of employment carefully. Some claim copyright over everything you produce, in the course of your employment or otherwise. I doubt that this is some secret plot to take over your life and I can't imagine that employers really want to own every love-letter and slashdot post you write, rather that it's just safer and easier from the drafter's point of view (one less thing to argue over in court, one less potential loophole, one less thing you might get wrong).
To make British politics work for its citizens a system of proportional representation is needed. The current system forces you to vote for the party you think can defeat the party you really detest.
STV might help more there, but I can see PR makes it less necessary (because your vote still influences the outcome when it wouldn't have done if your party gets few votes in your area);
In a system of proportional representation you finally get the chance to have a representative that more closely aligns with your views. Labour would probably lose my vote unless I had faith in the particular candidate and that realistically means he/she will have experience in local politics in the city or county councils. Dumping a candidate on an area by the national party will become more difficult again a plus point.
I don't see that one. How would you have a particular candidate for your area with PR? Are you thinking of a system basically like the current one, but with a national list which tops-up the number of the various parties' MPs to match their national share of the vote? That gives more power to national parties, doesn't it? Or maybe one like the European voting system, with a list for each region, which means your MEP isn't really local at all?
Plus, if all of the characters in the TLD are unambiguously not in my own alphabet, my browser can throw up a nice little "foreign site - Russian" icon next to it.
Except, of course, it'd have to say 'Cyrillic'. Is it actually possible to distinguish alphabets based on a few Unicode characters?
More awkwardly....what about a Russian accessing an existing site with a Latin TLD, possibly with other Cyrillic elements?
Disallowing TLDs that look similar to existing ones is probably a good start, though. Why should there be a Cyrillic .com?
Does it mean anything?
Like any technology, the problem is not the technology but that the technology allows unskilled persons to do work previously done by skilled persons. It is not surprising that the results tend to be of low quality.
I'm not convinced. Unskilled presenters have given presentations for a long time. Powerpoint has allowed people to do them badly in a different way. How much is due to the technology guiding people to do things in a particular way and how much is down to the generally accepted way a Powerpoint presentation is done I'm not sure. What I HAVE noticed is that many Powerpoint presenters don't seem to draw a distinction between material intended for the audience and for the presenter. People used to speak from notes (or memory), with images intended for the audience on posters, or projected or handed out. Nowadays, speakers tend to use the slides for both. They're effectively displaying their notes to their audience and then standing in front of them and reading them out.
Maybe Powerpoint should (or does it? I don't really use it) allow/encourage presenters to split the material in two - one display for the speaker, another for the audience. You should talk FROM your notes ABOUT what's displayed, and if you're not talking about something visual your projector should be blank.
But encryption of live servers and databases is a farce.
It's certainly pretty difficult, even in simple cases like encrypted card numbers. You pretty much either need a hardware security module, or you have to enter a key on every startup (not really OK for live servers that really should boot on their own accord), or you have to have some horrible off-site key management and decryption system.
I'm not so sure that this law mandates it though. This only mentions portable devices, so far as I can see: http://www.mass.gov/Eoca/docs/idtheft/201CMR1700reg.pdf (Though I haven't read the whole thing and it's not my jurisdiction, and IANAL anyway, so I may have got the wrong end of the stick). It would have been more helpful if the article, or at least the article the article links to as its source, had actually linked to the bits of the law they were talking about. Or at all, for that matter.
It's required in the UK: here, I think. IIRC magistrates only ever handed out absolute discharges so nobody is prosecuted for it any more.
Why would a film studio seek an injunction against a cinema to stop it showing a film when the studio has just agreed to accept money from the cinema in exchange for being allowed to show it? Why would a court be so stupid as to issue an injunction if they did?
How do you sue someone for "potential infringement"?
You can't, but in the UK you can already ask for an injunction concerning infringement which hasn't happened yet (including ongoing infringement). I'd be surprised if you couldn't elsewhere, too.
This says they can be enjoined before they actually infringe anything. This is stomping over someone to make sure they don't do something that violates a copyright.
It's a court declaring that a person should not do something because the court says it would infringe copyright. That's not (inherently) stomping, it's saying 'don't do the specific thing we have good reason to believe you're likely to do, because we think it's illegal'. Think of, say, a software publisher being told not to start selling the software they're about to release because it contains unlicenced stolen code.
Why not take away every teenagers computer, to prevent them from pirating in the first place?
Because that would be a stupid idea? How is it related to injunctions?
The same law that dictates whether the customer should receive a refund from the retailer determines whether that retailer has recourse against Sony for their costs incurred.
Not necessarily...there are laws like the UK's Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations which apply to consumers and not businesses. Besides, the update came from Sony, not the retailer...so who knows?
As I understand it, the Sale of Goods Act 1979 (as amended) is national law granting statutory rights, which overrides even outright contracts, let alone questionably-signed copyright licences attached to end-user licence agreements. That's also what they mean when they give a guarantee that says it does not affect your statutory rights.
The Sale of Goods Act (and now the Sale and Supply of Goods Act) doesn't cover licences. Licences are not goods. It'll cover PS3s, though, because PS3s obviously ARE goods...but it's not immediately obvious that the PS3 itself is defective/not durable enough, given that people applying the patch are agreeing to it and that the patch isn't coming from the person from whom they bought the PS3 (and who would be liable). I don't know nearly enough law to know whether it's legal or not, but it's a bit more complex than you suggest.
(At the risk of answering my own, previous question) what protection do 'unpublished' works have?
Ideally? None.
So if you commission some software to run on your server then it attracts no copyright? Unless someone pinches it and publishes it rather than just using it for themselves, I suppose. What about, for example, stolen private diaries or e-mails? They seem worthy of legal protection of some sort. Why not copyright?
The purpose of copyright and patents is:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Why accept the US constitution as the document which establishes what copyrights should exclusively be used for? It's a perfectly sensible goal, but why limit it to that just because it doesn't say we shouldn't? The authors didn't really have any special perspective compared to modern economists, politicians, lawyers and scientists...and even if they did, that doesn't mean we should accept what they said without questioning it. There are lots constitutions and laws which you could have quoted, and none of them will make your argument for limiting copyright for you because they're about what the law IS, not what it SHOULD be or why. Why not argue for copyright wherever it's useful, has the legal effect you're looking for and appears to do the right thing?
So if JRR Tolkien had set up and sold the copyright to JRR Tolkien Associates Ltd then bequeathed the shares to his family they could control the copyright even after he'd died, whereas if he owned it personally and bequeathed it to them they couldn't? Or would you have a special rule for that? What if it was a publishing company instead of a company intended only for this purpose? Would the publishing company have to have commissioned him to write the work, or employed him as an employee, for them to get the 'that's a completely different situation' posthumous copyright extension, or would it be enough for him to have sold it to them after he'd written it? How much would it cost in lawyers to establish these differences?
You say this, and then you follow it up with an example of two authors who died, and are thus bereft of all control over their works. Why should people who did NOT write the works (okay, Christopher Tolkien might be given latitude here) ever be given control over the copyrights, especially in an age where that copyright is becoming ever more perpetual?
Think of software you've written for an employer. Presumably you accept that the employer should get the copyright (or at least an exclusive licence that lasts as long as the copyright). I don't think it'd be reasonable for employers to find work they'd commissioned to be out of copyright the day their programmer is run over by a bus.
Articles like this will make people think the opponents of the bill are against it because it will stop them infringing copyright. You won't find many people here who will agree that it should be legal to just take music and films without paying for them. Richard Stallman is essentially smearing his own side and compromising the bill's opponents' ability to convince the public that there are other good reasons for rejecting it.
Stop thinking about money, think about economic output. All output is consumed by people. Corporations cannot consume because they aren't sentient. If control over a chunk of economic output is taken away from the private sector by the government (which is what a transfer of money through taxation to the government represents) then the burden of that falls on people. And so do the benefits of the government spending it allows.
The important questions are: how does corporate taxation change which individuals bear which burden? And how does it affect economic decision-making through changes in incentives? Or, most important of all, how does this change the economic welfare of the population? It's irrelevant whether the taxes are 'fair' to the corporations (and whether they pay their 'fair share', as some people put it in the UK) or not...you might as well ask whether or not a tax on screwdrivers is fair to the screwdrivers.
The answers to those questions aren't easy to find exactly, but some things stand out. Taxing US corporate profits isn't taxing the same people as taxing US citizens personal income because some shares are owned by foreigners. (But reducing the rate may trigger reductions in other countries and reduce the burden of foreign corporate taxes on US citizens). It will fall more on older people than younger people, because older people own more shares. It will reduce the size of pensions. It will fall more on those who take risks with their savings than those who stick to government or corporate bonds. It will give corporate managers an incentive to borrow rather than raise equity (which increases the risk of corporate bankruptcies). The taxes will affect the investment decisions of shareholders and the corporation's managers in terms of both amounts and countries, because it reduces the return on investment and saving. It will probably do many other things.
An economy isn't just a big loop of money flows, it's a system for making decisions on what is produced, how, and who gets to consume it. (This can happen in a barter economy, too). What's important is not money, it's those decisions and how law and taxation change therm.
Personally, I'd rather see corporate taxes eliminated worldwide and replaced with personal taxes (and taxes on environmentally damaging activity, but that's a whole different issue). That way a whole load of pointless activity and distortions can be eliminated - there's no longer any need for complex tax avoidance schemes or for corporate tax collectors and lawyers. Of course distortions in other areas would increase (that's one reason I'd like environment taxes, because the tax can then actually correct a distortion), but I still suspect there'd be a net benefit.
Except that 200 years ago the British English spelling was -ize. Organization with an 's' is quite recent in UK English, probably because most people here associate 'z' with Americans and don't want to risk dirtying their English with your weird American ways. The OED will still tell you that 'organize' is preferred. (And so will I, which obviously clinches it).
Oil revenues have declined as output has slowed, in part because much of Venezuela's oil is heavy and difficult to extract, and the expertise to do so was largely provided by foreign companies. When he nationalized the oil industry there, many of those experts told him to go pound sand when he asked for assistance.
He's also sucked so much money out of the oil industry for 'social programmes' (ie, to hand to the poor in exchange for political support) that it can't invest in infrastructure. He's also raided central bank reserves and destroyed a lot of private enterprise. He might have handed a lot of money to the poor, but he's done it by running down Venezuela's capital and productive capacity.
He will run out of money. The Venezuelan poor will end up poorer than they were before. The economy will be left in a state where it's difficult to do anything about it. Maybe he knows he has to be so thoroughly entrenched by then that he can't be easily removed even when the poor find out?
You often don't get all your costs back. 80%-ish is more normal, I believe, and I'm not sure you can claim for everything anyway. If you run out of money before the end then you lose, so rich opponents can make you go through all the hoops in the hope of making that happen. IIRC, it's also possible to ask a court to refuse to let you continue a case on the grounds that you won't be able to pay the defendant's costs if you lose.
Erm....horse carriage and typewriter makers have mostly disappeared because people don't want them any more. People still want recordings. Besides, recordings are non-rival whereas your other examples are not. They really are totally different cases.
Not everyone in China is subject to the one-child policy. It's a little over a third, IIRC. It depends where you live, for example.
It's also important to remember that international trade is about exchange - you can't just compare prices. When you say 'cheap' what you mean is 'The Chinese economy will give us lots of their stuff in exchange for relatively little of our stuff'. Then you need to add 'The Chinese economy is also giving us lots of their stuff in exchange for a promise of some of our stuff in the future, a promise which the Chinese have so far been refusing to call in'. ie, they are lending to us.
If you want to think in terms of pricing you have to consider exchange rates too. There's no need for general deflation in the US for 'lots of stuff in exchange for a little stuff' to become 'quite a bit of stuff in exchange for less stuff', all that must happen is for the (real) exchange rate to change. Most especially, they need to stop lending so much and we need to stop borrowing so much.
Remember: long term, we can't import stuff from China if we don't export stuff in return. No-one can borrow (or sell assets) for ever (and it'd be immoral to live off the unrewarded labour of a relatively poor country anyway). There will be no means to pay for the imports if we don't export. The more we import, the more must be exported. The presence of trade like that can devastate particular industries in the relatively disadvantaged country, but in the end all that demand sooner or later has to pop up as demand for your country's exports. China must stop manipulating its exchange rate and let that happen.
China's economy won't be able to produce as much output per person as western economies for as long as, for example, there is state control over banking. Want to start a business? Joining the party and knowing the right people is as important as having a sane business idea. China will still reduce western living standards, though. They won't do it by undercutting labour and throwing western workers our of work. They'll do it by being able to compete with us on international raw materials markets. Suddenly, the west are not the only people able to hand cars, electronics, or whatever to oil or mineral producing countries....we'll have to start handing over more of our stuff in exchange for the same oil or minerals, and more of those materials will go to China for their own consumption. The most important thing for the west (and the whole world) to do is to use those resources more efficiently, and to search for alternative energy sources.
The UK votes against appear to be mainly from UKIP, a party with no noticeable presence in UK politics except for their main (only?) policy of UK withdrawal from the EU. And Nick Griffin abstained, presumably because international treaties will become irrelevant once 'abroad' has been abolished, or at least banned.
The government statistics show the number of "KSI" (people killed or seriously injured) is reduced.
From your link:
after allowing for the long-term trend, but without allowing for selection effects (such as regression-to-mean) there was a 22% reduction in personal injury collisions (PICs) at sites after cameras were introduced.
(my emphasis) ie, they don't show any such thing. They don't show anything at all regarding collisions. Speed cameras are frequently installed in places where there have recently been many serious accidents, quite possibly including places where the accident rate has been above its long term average. You need to find some better statistics (or, better, someone needs to carry out a properly designed and randomized trial). By drawing the conclusion that they do from this the government is simply lying about what it knows.
'Anyone' is singular. Any one. Besides, 'their penis' would imply he was talking about those individuals unfortunate enough to have to share a penis. Unusual Siamese twins, perhaps.
There could easily be 300 stabbings a day without you ever encountering one.
He didn't say 'stabbings'. Here, carrying a knife with a locking blade or with a blade over 3" without a reasonable excuse is illegal. I'd imagine that every time a policeman finds someone with a 3.2" pocket knife - or perhaps even someone with a reasonable excuse - it'll count towards the 300 'knife incidents'. BTW, anything pointy comes under the same law.
If a man forced you in to an apartment, tied you down, tore off your clothes and shoved his penis up your arse whilst his friend took pictures, you probably wouldn't be too keen on millions of Internet users getting excited over them later. It needs to be kept in proportion, but at the very least knowingly distributing it should not be allowed.
Where you do have a point is that the law's and popular culture's way of dealing with it has lost sight of the victims. The response is too much about public distaste, inflexible rules and reflex reactions to hearing the label 'paedophile', which is why in some places teenaged lovers end up in prison. The experience of the victim should be central to the response. If the 15 year old sleeping with the 20 year old doesn't feel like and wasn't treated like a victim, then there should be no punishment. A significantly injured ten year old? The opposite. People need to look beyond the label.