Patents, in the final analysis, give the corporation power over the people.
That is simply absurd. The whole point of patents is to give people power over corporations. How do you think it's possible for an inventor to invent something without a big company just stealing it and "cutting out the middleman"?
This FUD about patents really needs to be brought under control. Patents are the friend of the little guy. Just because big entities have the same rights as little entities doesn't mean the rights are bad.
Based on their first CD that they tested, I think they allow you to download protected digital copies off their server, provided you have the CD. The article also mentions that you can make six copies of the music.
While I don't necessarily like this technique, I have to admit that it at least tries to recognize fair use rights.
Also, one of things the lawsuit was over was requiring registration to download the music.
And where did you get the information that Soviet Union wanted to invade Saudi Arabia?
I was reading an article recently, but unfortunately I can't find it. It had quite a bit of recent middle east history. It might have been Time or Newsweek, but I don't seem to be able to find it.
The gist of it was that the bases that we used in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War had been built after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. It went on to say that they were built because it was believed that Saudi Arabia was a target of the Soviet Union.
Unfortunately, I can't find a direct reference, so I can't back up the statement.
Yeah, I guess the Soviet Union was just a misunderstood "alternative" system. The fact that they slaughtered 30 million of their own citizens is just a vicious rumor. All those stories of people being put into psychiatric hospitals when they "mental illness" caused them to doubt communism are just fantasies. I guess all those countries they invaded just welcomed them in.
How foolish that the ENTIRE WORLD was to believe that they were oppressing their citizens. Too many spy novels, apparently. I mean, who needs free press, free speech and other silly liberties when the government is giving you free bread?
And Hitler was just a misunderstood Libertarian who wanted to "free" the Jews.
Funny how the Afghanistan citizens are so proud of the fact that they drove out the Soviets. If they were so "popular" as you state, one would think they would be pissed that they weren't allowed to join such a great totalitarian state.
You think they'd have done anything at all if the CIA, through Pakistan's ISI, hadn't trained [globalresearch.ca] them [public-i.org] to be extremists [msnbc.com]? Like you said, this isn't a game.
It never has been a game. Why don't you look at why we did what we did, rather than use 20/20 hindsite? The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan for the purpose of eventually invading Saudi Arabia.
It's easy to criticize now, but it's hard to argue with the result that Saudi Arabia did NOT fall into Soviet hands, which would have been a disaster for the free world. How soon we forget the threat of Soviet expansionism.
It is clearly stated in the documentation for cd players dvd players, cd-rom drives etc. that they are compatible with any disc bearing the cd digital audio logo.
And these discs still are compatible with CD-ROM players -- as long as you play audio. You only run into trouble when you try and pull digital data from them. There is no guarantee that CDs are free from digital defects. In fact, the standard specifically allows digital defects.
That claims compliance with the compact disc standard as developed by Phillips long ago.
That standard also allows for interpolation of bad data by the CD player, I believe.
That standard includes specifications which allow the disc to be read in a cd-rom drive.
Does it? As far as I know, the CD standard was not originally intended for data, although it ended up as a useful carrier of data. I would be surprised if the standard doesn't have the words "music playback" all over it, rather than "data storage that can be used for music playback".
This only works as long as computer CD-ROM drives don't allow interpolation of digital data. Are there any drives out there that allow that as an option? If not, I wouldn't be surprised to see them spring up soon.
Their defense would probably be that the intention of the CDs they are selling is to be used to play music in a standard CD music player. No where is it stated that they have to allow non-musical-playback purposes.
If the argument is then that they are degrading audio quality, you have to prove that audio quality is degraded. It's not that hard to design the intentional errors so that the interpolation produces the value that would normally be in the music (or very close to it).
I highly doubt that an A/B test would be able to find the difference to any ears.
...to rationalizing that it's OK to broaden the powers of an already Constitutionally dubious law?
The key phrases in the law that you cite are "warrants shall issue", "probable cause". No one -- ever -- has talked about giving the government unlimited authority to wiretap everyone.
Bugs surreptitiously planted on all of your friends and families' phones because you might use them?
If I have criminals (or terrorists) using my phones, and the FBI can convince a judge of the need in order to get a warrant, then more power to them. Go FBI!
Come back when you have actual, factual, abuse and we will deal with the abuse. Just because a tool can be abused doesn't mean a tool should be banned.
It *sounds* reasonable, until you try to impliment it - and realise there is no way to wiretap a person, you have to wiretap any device he might *possibly* use.
Which was actually similar to Ashcroft's point that the law has fallen behind technology. We have so much communication technology now that people can switch phones at will, making wiretaps much less effective.
At some level, we have to assume that government powers won't be abused. The FBI can already tap any phone they want, if they're determined to bypass getting a warrant. I think the key to all this is to make sure we have protections against abuses.
Not assuming tools can be used for illegal purposes cuts both ways, not just on private citizens.
Too many people seem to be automatically against anything that Ashcroft might call for, without actually knowing what the specific proposals are. For example, one of the new powers that Ashcroft has called for is that when a surveillance warrant is granted, it be tied to the individual rather than a specific phone, which seems totally reasonable to me.
In future discussions, how about if we discuss specific proposals and make specific criticisms rather than general statements about how the government is just looking for the chance to turn the country is a police state?
Let's see how your logic works... It is utter bullcrap to suggest that we couldn't get to Sadman, then you say later in the post that we tried a couple of times. So it is your reasoning that we tried to get him and couldn't.
No, I said the purpose of the mission was not getting rid of Saddam Hussein. That doesn't mean we didn't lob a few missiles in his direction.
That being said, I hope you get to retain your status as a Prole, because you are in for a very rude awakening if you ever have to wake up one day and have some idea what you are talking about.
I notice that you can't refute one thing I said, other than to attack semantics. But you "just know" that your world view is correct, regardless of the facts, right? After all, the most cynical position must be the most "realistic" position.
Of course, even though it was well within our power to oust him, we never did. Instead the US government explained to us 'proles' that they couldn't quite get to him.
What utter bullcrap. Link me to a statement by the government that said we "couldn't quite get to him". Apparently, you weren't paying attention when we fought the gulf war. The purpose of the gulf war to prevent Saddam Hussein from seizing a great majority of the world's oil by seizing Kuwait, and then moving into Saudi Arabia (you'll notice that Saudi Arabia asked us to come in and defend them).
The goal of the gulf war was ejecting Iraq from Kuwait, and if you read the UN resolution authorizing force, that's exactly what it said. I find it extremely ironic that the US is criticized for actually following the UN authorization, rather than going hog-wild and taking over the country.
The Gulf War was never about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. No one would cry if we did get rid of him, and we tried a couple of times, but that's not what the mission was about. And lest you fill yourself with oh-so-righteous indignation and say, "SO!! You admit that it was all about oil???" Of course it was all about oil. Without economic freedom, all other freedoms are just an intellectual exercise.
To steal a quote: "at this point, you either get it, or you never will."
Maybe you should consider that many other of your cynical and paranoid "facts" are also untrue.
Is it because life is sacred? If so, who says? God? Darwin? But what makes it wrong?
Your path of logic is fine. Keep going. Our survival instinct is built into our genes. If we didn't have an instinct for survival, we wouldn't be here now talking about it.
What is civilization? At its very basic level, it's a contract among human beings for self-protection. Originally human beings grouped together to fight off animals and pool resources for hunting and gathering. Of course, when you have human beings together, you inevitably get conflicts. To resolve those conflicts, we developed customs and laws. Inevitably, our customs and laws became more sophisticated as we had more and more people and higher and higher societal complexity.
You only have to look at tribal feuds that last multiple generations to see where the ban against murder came from. But what about something like slavery? It's telling that banning slavery is a relatively new wrinkle in civilization. From an "absolute" perspective, slavery has always been wrong, but it required civilization developing the concept of "human rights", which is much more abstract than the wholly practical bans on murder.
Banning slavery also required the recognition that all human races are actually human, which wasn't completely accepted until about 150 years ago (or even 100...). The rise of science has contributed to that as well. Before that, many people believed that black people were not really human, and closer to animals. I don't think the people of the time were blind, they just believed what they had always been told, and that is what "scientists" of the time told them.
So to answer your original question, I think the absolute "rights and wrongs" are built into our species in order to maximum survival through the mechanism of civilization.
Reality Master seems to be using the term "absolute" to refer to right and wrong within the current set of western morals.
No! No! No! When I talk about "absolute right and wrong", I am talking about specific rights and wrongs that are independent of cultural specifics. Slavery is wrong, no matter what culture it is. Slavery was wrong at every point in history, but society had not evolved to fix it.
I also don't think anyone will disagree that different systems of morality often have different and incompatable "absolute" rights and wrongs.
I agree that different cultures can have "cultural absolutes" that are different and incompatible, but I am talking about human absolutes. Cheating on your spouse is absolutely wrong if you are breaking the understanding of the relationship. This is independent of culture, because a culture either doesn't recognize cheating (in which case there is no breaking of commitment), or it does recognize "cheating", where by definition of cheating it is morally wrong.
I have to admit, I get a little bit of a guilty pleasure whenever this subject comes up. Nothing makes people squirm like having to think about whether there are "absolute right and wrongs". So many people have been brought up with the idea that there are only two ideas: 1) Religious moral absolutism, and 2) Moral relativism, where everything is relative (which is supposedly more "open minded"). For whatever reason, no one stops to really examine if there are moral absolutes that have nothing to do with religion.
And I would further add that your definition is incomplete - what society determines as right and wrong is made up of the consensus morals of all the citizens you actually hear, which all too often are those with power - be that money, guns or celebrity.
I should point out that I don't think that there are very many "absolute wrongs". Slavery is one that is pretty to identify. I think they usually have to be on the order of clearly violating a public trust (police corruption), a private trust (cheating on your spouse, as I alluded to in another post), or human rights (slavery). I'm sure there are others, but again, not that many. Breaking the law is not always an "absolute wrong".
So if one KKK member decides that we should go back to enslaving black people, then we should immedately make slavery a cultural choice rather than a generally recognized wrong?
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Patents, in the final analysis, give the corporation power over the people.
That is simply absurd. The whole point of patents is to give people power over corporations. How do you think it's possible for an inventor to invent something without a big company just stealing it and "cutting out the middleman"?
This FUD about patents really needs to be brought under control. Patents are the friend of the little guy. Just because big entities have the same rights as little entities doesn't mean the rights are bad.
Based on their first CD that they tested, I think they allow you to download protected digital copies off their server, provided you have the CD. The article also mentions that you can make six copies of the music.
While I don't necessarily like this technique, I have to admit that it at least tries to recognize fair use rights.
Also, one of things the lawsuit was over was requiring registration to download the music.
And where did you get the information that Soviet Union wanted to invade Saudi Arabia?
I was reading an article recently, but unfortunately I can't find it. It had quite a bit of recent middle east history. It might have been Time or Newsweek, but I don't seem to be able to find it.
The gist of it was that the bases that we used in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War had been built after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. It went on to say that they were built because it was believed that Saudi Arabia was a target of the Soviet Union.
Unfortunately, I can't find a direct reference, so I can't back up the statement.
I took the poster's comment to mean that pop-ups weren't effective advertising, although, looking at it again, the message is little confused.
I don't think X10 is losing money...
Yeah, I guess the Soviet Union was just a misunderstood "alternative" system. The fact that they slaughtered 30 million of their own citizens is just a vicious rumor. All those stories of people being put into psychiatric hospitals when they "mental illness" caused them to doubt communism are just fantasies. I guess all those countries they invaded just welcomed them in.
How foolish that the ENTIRE WORLD was to believe that they were oppressing their citizens. Too many spy novels, apparently. I mean, who needs free press, free speech and other silly liberties when the government is giving you free bread?
And Hitler was just a misunderstood Libertarian who wanted to "free" the Jews.
Funny how the Afghanistan citizens are so proud of the fact that they drove out the Soviets. If they were so "popular" as you state, one would think they would be pissed that they weren't allowed to join such a great totalitarian state.
You think they'd have done anything at all if the CIA, through Pakistan's ISI, hadn't trained [globalresearch.ca] them [public-i.org] to be extremists [msnbc.com]? Like you said, this isn't a game.
It never has been a game. Why don't you look at why we did what we did, rather than use 20/20 hindsite? The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan for the purpose of eventually invading Saudi Arabia.
It's easy to criticize now, but it's hard to argue with the result that Saudi Arabia did NOT fall into Soviet hands, which would have been a disaster for the free world. How soon we forget the threat of Soviet expansionism.
It is clearly stated in the documentation for cd players dvd players, cd-rom drives etc. that they are compatible with any disc bearing the cd digital audio logo.
And these discs still are compatible with CD-ROM players -- as long as you play audio. You only run into trouble when you try and pull digital data from them. There is no guarantee that CDs are free from digital defects. In fact, the standard specifically allows digital defects.
That claims compliance with the compact disc standard as developed by Phillips long ago.
That standard also allows for interpolation of bad data by the CD player, I believe.
That standard includes specifications which allow the disc to be read in a cd-rom drive.
Does it? As far as I know, the CD standard was not originally intended for data, although it ended up as a useful carrier of data. I would be surprised if the standard doesn't have the words "music playback" all over it, rather than "data storage that can be used for music playback".
This only works as long as computer CD-ROM drives don't allow interpolation of digital data. Are there any drives out there that allow that as an option? If not, I wouldn't be surprised to see them spring up soon.
Their defense would probably be that the intention of the CDs they are selling is to be used to play music in a standard CD music player. No where is it stated that they have to allow non-musical-playback purposes.
If the argument is then that they are degrading audio quality, you have to prove that audio quality is degraded. It's not that hard to design the intentional errors so that the interpolation produces the value that would normally be in the music (or very close to it).
I highly doubt that an A/B test would be able to find the difference to any ears.
The key phrases in the law that you cite are "warrants shall issue", "probable cause". No one -- ever -- has talked about giving the government unlimited authority to wiretap everyone.
Bugs surreptitiously planted on all of your friends and families' phones because you might use them?
If I have criminals (or terrorists) using my phones, and the FBI can convince a judge of the need in order to get a warrant, then more power to them. Go FBI!
Come back when you have actual, factual, abuse and we will deal with the abuse. Just because a tool can be abused doesn't mean a tool should be banned.
It *sounds* reasonable, until you try to impliment it - and realise there is no way to wiretap a person, you have to wiretap any device he might *possibly* use.
Which was actually similar to Ashcroft's point that the law has fallen behind technology. We have so much communication technology now that people can switch phones at will, making wiretaps much less effective.
At some level, we have to assume that government powers won't be abused. The FBI can already tap any phone they want, if they're determined to bypass getting a warrant. I think the key to all this is to make sure we have protections against abuses.
Not assuming tools can be used for illegal purposes cuts both ways, not just on private citizens.
Too many people seem to be automatically against anything that Ashcroft might call for, without actually knowing what the specific proposals are. For example, one of the new powers that Ashcroft has called for is that when a surveillance warrant is granted, it be tied to the individual rather than a specific phone, which seems totally reasonable to me.
In future discussions, how about if we discuss specific proposals and make specific criticisms rather than general statements about how the government is just looking for the chance to turn the country is a police state?
Just a thought.
Let's see how your logic works ... It is utter bullcrap to suggest that we couldn't get to Sadman, then you say later in the post that we tried a couple of times. So it is your reasoning that we tried to get him and couldn't.
No, I said the purpose of the mission was not getting rid of Saddam Hussein. That doesn't mean we didn't lob a few missiles in his direction.
That being said, I hope you get to retain your status as a Prole, because you are in for a very rude awakening if you ever have to wake up one day and have some idea what you are talking about.
I notice that you can't refute one thing I said, other than to attack semantics. But you "just know" that your world view is correct, regardless of the facts, right? After all, the most cynical position must be the most "realistic" position.
Cynicism/Paranoia != Logic/Facts.
Of course, even though it was well within our power to oust him, we never did. Instead the US government explained to us 'proles' that they couldn't quite get to him.
What utter bullcrap. Link me to a statement by the government that said we "couldn't quite get to him". Apparently, you weren't paying attention when we fought the gulf war. The purpose of the gulf war to prevent Saddam Hussein from seizing a great majority of the world's oil by seizing Kuwait, and then moving into Saudi Arabia (you'll notice that Saudi Arabia asked us to come in and defend them).
The goal of the gulf war was ejecting Iraq from Kuwait, and if you read the UN resolution authorizing force, that's exactly what it said. I find it extremely ironic that the US is criticized for actually following the UN authorization, rather than going hog-wild and taking over the country.
The Gulf War was never about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. No one would cry if we did get rid of him, and we tried a couple of times, but that's not what the mission was about. And lest you fill yourself with oh-so-righteous indignation and say, "SO!! You admit that it was all about oil???" Of course it was all about oil. Without economic freedom, all other freedoms are just an intellectual exercise.
To steal a quote: "at this point, you either get it, or you never will."
Maybe you should consider that many other of your cynical and paranoid "facts" are also untrue.
I find these two excerpts from your post terribly amusing:
Anti-Terrorism (Implement Fascism) bills by Adolph Ashcroft. [...] Remember, stay moderate. Don't jump to conclusions about things,
Maybe you should take your own advice. Cynicism and paranoia is NOT logic and facts.
Actually, the theme is totally and completely different. And profound. Learn the difference, and Be Enlightened.
That's why the abortion issue is such a big deal, because people equate morality with legality.
Not to get into the abortion issue, but many of us believe that human rights mean all humans, not just ones older than an arbitrary value.
Is it because life is sacred? If so, who says? God? Darwin? But what makes it wrong?
Your path of logic is fine. Keep going. Our survival instinct is built into our genes. If we didn't have an instinct for survival, we wouldn't be here now talking about it.
What is civilization? At its very basic level, it's a contract among human beings for self-protection. Originally human beings grouped together to fight off animals and pool resources for hunting and gathering. Of course, when you have human beings together, you inevitably get conflicts. To resolve those conflicts, we developed customs and laws. Inevitably, our customs and laws became more sophisticated as we had more and more people and higher and higher societal complexity.
You only have to look at tribal feuds that last multiple generations to see where the ban against murder came from. But what about something like slavery? It's telling that banning slavery is a relatively new wrinkle in civilization. From an "absolute" perspective, slavery has always been wrong, but it required civilization developing the concept of "human rights", which is much more abstract than the wholly practical bans on murder.
Banning slavery also required the recognition that all human races are actually human, which wasn't completely accepted until about 150 years ago (or even 100...). The rise of science has contributed to that as well. Before that, many people believed that black people were not really human, and closer to animals. I don't think the people of the time were blind, they just believed what they had always been told, and that is what "scientists" of the time told them.
So to answer your original question, I think the absolute "rights and wrongs" are built into our species in order to maximum survival through the mechanism of civilization.
Reality Master seems to be using the term "absolute" to refer to right and wrong within the current set of western morals.
No! No! No! When I talk about "absolute right and wrong", I am talking about specific rights and wrongs that are independent of cultural specifics. Slavery is wrong, no matter what culture it is. Slavery was wrong at every point in history, but society had not evolved to fix it.
I also don't think anyone will disagree that different systems of morality often have different and incompatable "absolute" rights and wrongs.
I agree that different cultures can have "cultural absolutes" that are different and incompatible, but I am talking about human absolutes. Cheating on your spouse is absolutely wrong if you are breaking the understanding of the relationship. This is independent of culture, because a culture either doesn't recognize cheating (in which case there is no breaking of commitment), or it does recognize "cheating", where by definition of cheating it is morally wrong.
I have to admit, I get a little bit of a guilty pleasure whenever this subject comes up. Nothing makes people squirm like having to think about whether there are "absolute right and wrongs". So many people have been brought up with the idea that there are only two ideas: 1) Religious moral absolutism, and 2) Moral relativism, where everything is relative (which is supposedly more "open minded"). For whatever reason, no one stops to really examine if there are moral absolutes that have nothing to do with religion.
And I would further add that your definition is incomplete - what society determines as right and wrong is made up of the consensus morals of all the citizens you actually hear, which all too often are those with power - be that money, guns or celebrity.
I should point out that I don't think that there are very many "absolute wrongs". Slavery is one that is pretty to identify. I think they usually have to be on the order of clearly violating a public trust (police corruption), a private trust (cheating on your spouse, as I alluded to in another post), or human rights (slavery). I'm sure there are others, but again, not that many. Breaking the law is not always an "absolute wrong".
So if one KKK member decides that we should go back to enslaving black people, then we should immedately make slavery a cultural choice rather than a generally recognized wrong?