I am a religious man but I wouldn't defend religion by saying that religious systems make useful predictions. Nowadays you don't see many burning bushes or calls to build arks. If you do start hearing voices, it's more likely some form of mental illness than the Voice Of God. Similarly, I wouldn't say that Intelligent Design has a place anywhere near a science class unless the Philosophy or Religion classroom happens to be right down the hall.
Yes, religions that say "no one can ever have sex and if you do you must kill any resulting babies" are bound to die off, but that the surviving religions have the "correct social framework." I'm Jewish and adherents of the Jewish faith are far from dominant (conspiracy theories aside). Does that mean that we have the wrong social framework compared to Protestants/Catholics? What about Buddhists, Wiccans or even (*gasp*) Atheists?
The real reason that Christianity is the dominant religion today is that, millennia ago, a Roman emperor converted to Christianity. The might of the Roman empire was then put to task converting "heathens." Christianity itself was even altered at times to better position itself to convert non-Christian groups. For example, Germanic tribes values virginity so suddenly Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived and husband Joseph was tossed to the curb. Christianity didn't become the dominant religion because it was the "right" religion, but because it had the backing of a powerful empire and was willing to change itself to grow. I guess, in a way, you can say that Christianity evolved to better survive.
As others have said, yes many people watch Fox News and buy right in to the "accurateness" of their "reporting."
While getting my car fixed recently, I had the opportunity to see a small segment of a Fox News broadcast. They were reporting on Italy accepting some of the Guantanamo Bay detainees. They phrased it as (from memory): "Are you going on vacation? Well, Obama might be sending terrorists to your favorite vacation spot." Another, related, segment showed three bearded guys on a beach as they claimed that Obama was sending terrorists to an island paradise. The truth of the matters was that Italy won't be putting the detainees up in vacation resorts, but prisons. (Don't think many people go to Italy to vacation in the prisons there.) As for the bearded guys on the beach, those were detainees that were released and the only nation willing to take them happened to be an island nation. I had heard before (on Slashdot and elsewhere) about how biased Fox News was, but I was unprepared for the spin levels involved. They're the political/news equivalent of the Scrambler ride: They spin the truth around and around until you can't tell which way is which and you feel like you're going to hurl.
That bottle of water is dangerous, I tell you! Have you not heard of the dangers of Dihydrogen monoxide? Besides, you could splash it in the pilot's eyes. Then, while he's temporarily blinded, he could push forward on the controls sending the plane into a death spiral. We must ban all water bottles on airplanes! Won't someone think of the pilots' eyes?!!!
How is being known as a company that issues gag orders when their products are dangerously defective "in the best interests of the stockholders"?
Because, as the rest of your post points out, stockholders only care about the short-term. They're only invested until the share price rises a few percentage points and then they plan on dumping the stock and moving on to another company. So they don't care if the company goes down in flames so long as they have a few good quarters first so the investors can make their money. Yes, "being known as the company that issues gag orders when their products are dangerously defective" is bad, but it would be worse (for the short-term investors) if the "iPods explode" story circulated all about and iPod sales plummeted. Of course, these same short-term investors won't see the fact that the story got out and is spreading as an inevitability. They'll just claim that Apple didn't do a good enough job of suppressing it.
I agree. This is why I think that the record labels will turn into advertising agencies. A band will sign with a label (without turning over copyright control) to promote a new album. The label will handle advertising on TV, radio, newspapers, the Internet, etc. In return, the label will get a (small) cut of the profits from the album sales. If the band doesn't like how the label handled the advertising, they can leave for another label without worrying about having their back-catalog of songs under the old label's control. If the band does like how the label handled the advertising, they'll resign for their next album. Sure, the money won't be as good as the take-control-of-everything-and-bleed-the-artists-dry money that they're getting now, but it'll be that or go out of business.
There's a general misunderstanding I see here anytime record companies are discussed. Time after time, people say that the label pays for all sorts of things to help artists. The truth is that all of that stuff isn't given to the artists, it's an advance on future royalties.
The artist has to repay the label for the cost of recording an album. The labels charge artists for promotion, too. It's a universal practice to include a "breakage" fee, which means the artist only receives royalties on 90% of sales. Concert touring expenses are also recoupable, paid for by the artist. Royalties are calculated on wholesale prices, not retail prices, so deals with record clubs can be based on deeply discounted wholesale prices and lower royalties
I'd also add that the labels structure the "royalty advance" and subsequent charges to that advancement such that they band winds up in debt to the record label. After all is said and done, they OWE the record label money and need to release another CD to pay it back. Record labels (at least the major ones - don't mean to include indie labels in this) are a form of indentured servitude. See Steve Albini's The Problem With Music for more information as well as a chart breaking down how a $250,000 advance plus a quarter million CDs sold winds up being a $14,000 debt! http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
This would make for a good test. Take a series of recordings, some in various languages and some plain gibberish, compress them into a little known format (no MP3 or Ogg here), perhaps compress them again (zip file?), and remove any file type identifiers (e.g. extension). Now, give these files to some SETI folks and have them tell you which ones are the "noise" and which ones contain the "signals." If they can't guess more than half correct, then perhaps the entire SETI project is doomed to failure.
... but if it is, I'm about to violate their copyright: "a temporary and transient act of reproduction is intended to enable".
Seriously, this is just ridiculous. After all... hold on, I feel another copyright violation coming... "a text extract of 11 words, the evidence submitted to the" Sorry. Now, as I was saying this is just ridiculous. How can snippets that small be still covered by copyright? Does this mean that snippets of 10 words are allowable? If not, what about 9? At what point does the copyright status end?
Oh, and one more: "the last act in the data capture process at issue in". There, now the ECJ can come after me for three acts of copyright infringement.
Or perhaps by the time a civilization progresses far enough, it becomes invisible to less advanced civilizations. For example, one of our big "alien hunts" involves SETI scanning the skies for transmissions. But what if, in 200 years, we discover how to use "subspace radio" (or some other futuristic sounding tech) to communicate long distances. If people on the Mars base want to communicate with their relatives orbiting Saturn, we will definitely need something better than radio waves. Going by this assumption, there would be a less than 300 year window when our civilization would be detectable via radio waves. If an alien civilization emerged a mere 500 years behind us, they would never be able to detect us while they were in the "radio phase" of their development.
This would still be illegal. "But I was just retrieving someone that I accidentally sold to him when I didn't have the right to. I left his money on the dresser when I took the book." is not a valid defense for breaking and entering.
So we went from "buying some music" to "buying a license to listen to some music" to "buying the opportunity to listen to some music until the RIAA decides you can't anymore." Where do we go next? "Paying for the possibility that one day the RIAA might let you listen to some music one time?"
Years ago, when I signed up for my Slashdot account (and others), I disagreed with that stance. I was very open in who I was, where I lived, etc. Over time, though, I got married and had kids. (Yes, a Slashdotter with a wife & kids - we do exist!) A few years back, my wife started blogging but kept her identity secret. She didn't use our real names, didn't name where we lived, etc. Then I decided to blog and open a Twitter account. I thought it over and decided that I preferred a degree of anonymity that using my real name wouldn't allow. So I adopted a pseudonym as well. I have no illusions that my identity is 100% secret, but it is secret enough for me. The casual observer wouldn't be able to link my real name identity to my pseudonym one. It would take a determined individual - almost stalker-level determined - to do that.
I still have those "legacy" accounts on Slashdot, BroadbandReports, etc where I have been posting for years. I wouldn't want to simply junk those accounts, start up new ones using my pseudonym, and try to pretend I was a new person. I also couldn't jump to using the pseudonym name and say "Hey everyone, I used to post as 'Jason Levine', but now I'm Pseudonym." That would defeat the whole purpose of the pseudonym. So I still use my real name moniker on the sites that I had signed up for years back, but every new site I post to, I use my pseudonym.
Awhile back, we got a new head of our department. He decided that he needed to see how everyone used their day so he required everyone to fill out a form to track our time. I joked that my time tracker would look like this:
8:00am - 8:15am - Checked/Answered E-mail 8:15am - 8:30am - Entered time tracking for 8:00am - 8:15am 8:30am - 8:45am - Entered time tracking for 8:15am - 8:30am 8:45am - 9:00am - Entered time tracking for 8:30am - 8:45am 9:00am - 9:15am - Entered time tracking for 8:45am - 9:00am etc.
I've always found the "every sperm/egg is a potential child and attempts to keep them from forming one is a sin" arguments quite funny. If you take them to their logical conclusion, then my sperm and some random woman's eggs are a potential child so (to keep from sinning), I need to have sex with every woman I come across. Of course, if I did that, I'd need to answer to a higher power: my wife.
Do you mean staged as in Sibrel tried to get Buzz to react violently or staged as in Buzz was in on it too. If the former, I wouldn't put it past Sibrel. From what I know of him, he's willing to do anything to get anything he can spin as "proof" that the Moon landings never happened. If you mean the latter, then I would disagree. Buzz has never shown any inkling that he would be associated with someone like Sibrel.
In either case, Buzz was ambushed, cornered, called a liar and a coward and didn't have his verbal assailant back down when told to. Buzz couldn't have known at the time whether Sibrel was out for some sort of "it was staged" confession (true or not) or for a video of a violent reaction. Given all of that, I still say Buzz was justified in his actions.
No, what Buzz proved is that he won't tolerate someone getting in his face and calling him a coward and a liar.
From Wikipedia:
According to Aldrin, he was lured to a Beverly Hills hotel under the pretext of an interview on space for a Japanese children's television show. When he arrived, Aldrin claims Sibrel was there demanding that he swear on a Bible that he had walked on the moon. When Aldrin refused, Sibrel called him a "coward and a liar and a thief." [1] Aldrin punched Sibrel in the jaw and the incident was captured on video. Sibrel later attempted to use the tape to convince police and prosecutors that he was the victim of an assault. However, it was decided that Aldrin had been provoked, and did not actually injure Sibrel, and so no charges were filed but the incident was covered in the media.
So Buzz is ambushed, cornered, and called a coward and a liar. He tells Sibrel to get away from him. Sibrel continues to press on repeating his claims that Buzz is a coward and a liar and a thief. At this point, it's obvious that there's going to be no reasoning with Sibrel, Sibrel won't simply back down, and will instead continue harassing Buzz until he (Sibrel) gets something he can consider proof of the "faked" moon landing. Add in Buzz being was understandably upset over being lured there under false pretenses and the punch is fully justified in my book. His punch wasn't even a full on roundhouse swing, but a quick jab. That was enough for Sibrel to go down. As far as I'm concerned, Sibrel is the one who's a coward and a liar and he should have been brought up on stalking and defamation of character charges.
Public education is costly, if a kid isn't learning and behaving by second grade should society perform a retroactive abortion?
Wow, I'm so glad we don't do this. I was a second grade dropout for awhile and would have been targeted. Seriously. My teacher (Mrs. Demperio) hated kids, especially hated boys, and plain despised me. She'd make fun of me in front of the class, give me extra work just to keep me busy, etc. I decided I wanted to drop out and my parents didn't force me back into school for a bit. (They went to the principal but he kept insisting that she was his best teacher and wouldn't listen to the stories of what she was doing.) Mrs. Demperio also told me that I'd never be a success in life. A few years later, I returned to the school to rub it into her face that I was doing well in school (honors classes and the like). Wouldn't you know it, she had retired and moved to Florida the previous year!
So, assuming I was in Ireland, If I said that Jesus isn't the messiah, I would offend Christians and would fall victim to this law. If I said he is the messiah, I offend Jews and fall victim to this law. Since everyone's religious views pretty much contradict someone else's views - even within the same religion - how will they sort this out? Furthermore, it wouldn't just be limited to religious statements. If I said that the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, would I be arrested for offending a Young Earth Creationist's religious views? People shouldn't have a Right To Be Free From Offense. In fact, quite the opposite. People should have the right to offend other people whenever they so choose. Fining the person $35,500+ US for offending a person's religious views is just idiotic.
I run a small Internet forum supported solely from member donations. We allow image attachments. The forum software we use is old, but the community is used to it and frankly it works fine for our purposes. If we were required to filter images for possible torrents hidden inside it would likely require that we: 1) Change forum software - a big time sink and something that would possibly cost us money or 2) Require us to invest in some sort of torrent filtering software (again time to set up and money to purchase). If we didn't buy this, we would risk being sued over people posting torrent-loaded images to our forum. If we did buy it, we would risk having to shut down due to overwhelming expense. (Of course, this is ignoring Safe Harbor laws which Big Content Owners would like to see vanish.)
I pretend not to notice when someone points out that the GPL relies on copyright law, and if I want to get rid of copyright, my beloved open source code will no longer be protected by the GPL.
I think most people here would agree that copyright does have a valid place in society. The problem is that copyright terms have been overextended and copyright powers overemphasized. It used to be that your copyright on a work only lasted 14 years. Then you could apply for a one-time extension of 14 years. After that, your work landed in the Public Domain. Now the terms are 70 years after the author's death or, if owned by a company, 95 years after publication. Under the 14+14 rule, works created in 1981 should be hitting the Public Domain now. Instead, they'll hit in 2076 (assuming corporate ownership and no more copyright extensions - big assumptions, I know). This means that I likely won't live to see works hit the Public Domain which were created when I was 6 years old. Heck, a work created in 1974 (a year before I was born) and owned by a company is currently due to hit Public Domain in 2069 - when I'm 95 years old! It's even worse if the ownership isn't corporate. Take Michael Jackson, for example. Since he just died (and assuming he owns the copyrights to his songs), his copyright will end in the year 2079. His youngest child is currently 7 years old. When the Jackson copyrights end, his youngest child will be 77 years old!
In addition to this, copyright owners are making more and more ridiculous assertions about their copyright ownership. The RIAA, for example, has tried to claim that ripping a CD to MP3 (purely for personal use) is a copyright violation. Of course, they aren't going around suing people for ripping their CDs, but they would love to get CD ripping banned.
Copyright was supposed to give a balance between the author's right to seek a profit from his work and the public advancement of the arts. Authors would have an incentive to create works thanks to the temporary monopoly that copyright granted. In exchange, the public would get to do what they wanted with the work when that monopoly ended. In addition, since the copyright would end soon, the author had an incentive to make more works. What we have now, however, is the author being granted a monopoly that persists for generations after they pass away and little to no incentive (from copyright expiration) to create additional works. The public, meanwhile, is robbed of songs entering the Public Domain and fueling new works.
That's close, but not quite broad enough: For a lot of voters the word "child" is enough to shut down the rational part of their brain.
It's not just that it shuts down the rational part of their brain, but they wind up expecting someone *else* to do the protecting. Because, you know, being a parent yourself is too tough.
I happen to be a father to two little boys (age 5 and 2) and I'll agree that being a parent is tough work. It's not all hugs and smiles with kids. There are temper tantrums. They *WILL* test boundaries to see how far they can go. Repeatedly. They *will* try to get away with things they shouldn't be doing. Keeping up with what is happening and keeping your kids in line (e.g. "No yelling in the store") and safe (e.g. "No running away from Mommy and Daddy in the parking lot") isn't always easy. Too many parents just let their kids run rampant because they don't want to exert the effort to set and enforce boundaries. Many people seem to want someone else to do the work for them. So they whine for the government to step in and "child proof" life. The problem is, you can't child proof life. Life has a lot of sharp edges to it. The trick is to teach your child to avoid the sharp edges *and* what to do if they accidentally hit upon one of them. That takes work and effort that too many parents just seem to not want to invest.
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I am a religious man but I wouldn't defend religion by saying that religious systems make useful predictions. Nowadays you don't see many burning bushes or calls to build arks. If you do start hearing voices, it's more likely some form of mental illness than the Voice Of God. Similarly, I wouldn't say that Intelligent Design has a place anywhere near a science class unless the Philosophy or Religion classroom happens to be right down the hall.
Yes, religions that say "no one can ever have sex and if you do you must kill any resulting babies" are bound to die off, but that the surviving religions have the "correct social framework." I'm Jewish and adherents of the Jewish faith are far from dominant (conspiracy theories aside). Does that mean that we have the wrong social framework compared to Protestants/Catholics? What about Buddhists, Wiccans or even (*gasp*) Atheists?
The real reason that Christianity is the dominant religion today is that, millennia ago, a Roman emperor converted to Christianity. The might of the Roman empire was then put to task converting "heathens." Christianity itself was even altered at times to better position itself to convert non-Christian groups. For example, Germanic tribes values virginity so suddenly Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived and husband Joseph was tossed to the curb. Christianity didn't become the dominant religion because it was the "right" religion, but because it had the backing of a powerful empire and was willing to change itself to grow. I guess, in a way, you can say that Christianity evolved to better survive.
As others have said, yes many people watch Fox News and buy right in to the "accurateness" of their "reporting."
While getting my car fixed recently, I had the opportunity to see a small segment of a Fox News broadcast. They were reporting on Italy accepting some of the Guantanamo Bay detainees. They phrased it as (from memory): "Are you going on vacation? Well, Obama might be sending terrorists to your favorite vacation spot." Another, related, segment showed three bearded guys on a beach as they claimed that Obama was sending terrorists to an island paradise. The truth of the matters was that Italy won't be putting the detainees up in vacation resorts, but prisons. (Don't think many people go to Italy to vacation in the prisons there.) As for the bearded guys on the beach, those were detainees that were released and the only nation willing to take them happened to be an island nation. I had heard before (on Slashdot and elsewhere) about how biased Fox News was, but I was unprepared for the spin levels involved. They're the political/news equivalent of the Scrambler ride: They spin the truth around and around until you can't tell which way is which and you feel like you're going to hurl.
Yes, nothing in this world is free.
So how much do I need to pay you for reading the post you just made? Hopefully, it's about the same amount as my charge for reading this post.
That bottle of water is dangerous, I tell you! Have you not heard of the dangers of Dihydrogen monoxide? Besides, you could splash it in the pilot's eyes. Then, while he's temporarily blinded, he could push forward on the controls sending the plane into a death spiral. We must ban all water bottles on airplanes! Won't someone think of the pilots' eyes?!!!
Because, as the rest of your post points out, stockholders only care about the short-term. They're only invested until the share price rises a few percentage points and then they plan on dumping the stock and moving on to another company. So they don't care if the company goes down in flames so long as they have a few good quarters first so the investors can make their money. Yes, "being known as the company that issues gag orders when their products are dangerously defective" is bad, but it would be worse (for the short-term investors) if the "iPods explode" story circulated all about and iPod sales plummeted. Of course, these same short-term investors won't see the fact that the story got out and is spreading as an inevitability. They'll just claim that Apple didn't do a good enough job of suppressing it.
Good news: your female request has been approved. She's 20 years old and 139 pounds.
Bad news: The weight is in hex.
I agree. This is why I think that the record labels will turn into advertising agencies. A band will sign with a label (without turning over copyright control) to promote a new album. The label will handle advertising on TV, radio, newspapers, the Internet, etc. In return, the label will get a (small) cut of the profits from the album sales. If the band doesn't like how the label handled the advertising, they can leave for another label without worrying about having their back-catalog of songs under the old label's control. If the band does like how the label handled the advertising, they'll resign for their next album. Sure, the money won't be as good as the take-control-of-everything-and-bleed-the-artists-dry money that they're getting now, but it'll be that or go out of business.
I'd also add that the labels structure the "royalty advance" and subsequent charges to that advancement such that they band winds up in debt to the record label. After all is said and done, they OWE the record label money and need to release another CD to pay it back. Record labels (at least the major ones - don't mean to include indie labels in this) are a form of indentured servitude. See Steve Albini's The Problem With Music for more information as well as a chart breaking down how a $250,000 advance plus a quarter million CDs sold winds up being a $14,000 debt! http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
This would make for a good test. Take a series of recordings, some in various languages and some plain gibberish, compress them into a little known format (no MP3 or Ogg here), perhaps compress them again (zip file?), and remove any file type identifiers (e.g. extension). Now, give these files to some SETI folks and have them tell you which ones are the "noise" and which ones contain the "signals." If they can't guess more than half correct, then perhaps the entire SETI project is doomed to failure.
... but if it is, I'm about to violate their copyright: "a temporary and transient act of reproduction is intended to enable".
Seriously, this is just ridiculous. After all... hold on, I feel another copyright violation coming... "a text extract of 11 words, the evidence submitted to the" Sorry. Now, as I was saying this is just ridiculous. How can snippets that small be still covered by copyright? Does this mean that snippets of 10 words are allowable? If not, what about 9? At what point does the copyright status end?
Oh, and one more: "the last act in the data capture process at issue in". There, now the ECJ can come after me for three acts of copyright infringement.
Or perhaps by the time a civilization progresses far enough, it becomes invisible to less advanced civilizations. For example, one of our big "alien hunts" involves SETI scanning the skies for transmissions. But what if, in 200 years, we discover how to use "subspace radio" (or some other futuristic sounding tech) to communicate long distances. If people on the Mars base want to communicate with their relatives orbiting Saturn, we will definitely need something better than radio waves. Going by this assumption, there would be a less than 300 year window when our civilization would be detectable via radio waves. If an alien civilization emerged a mere 500 years behind us, they would never be able to detect us while they were in the "radio phase" of their development.
Or perhaps there really isn't intelligent life out there after all and the aliens prefer Survivor, Big Brother, and *shudder* The Bachelorette.
Something, not someone! Me and my too-quick-to-hit-Submit fingers!
This would still be illegal. "But I was just retrieving someone that I accidentally sold to him when I didn't have the right to. I left his money on the dresser when I took the book." is not a valid defense for breaking and entering.
So we went from "buying some music" to "buying a license to listen to some music" to "buying the opportunity to listen to some music until the RIAA decides you can't anymore." Where do we go next? "Paying for the possibility that one day the RIAA might let you listen to some music one time?"
Years ago, when I signed up for my Slashdot account (and others), I disagreed with that stance. I was very open in who I was, where I lived, etc. Over time, though, I got married and had kids. (Yes, a Slashdotter with a wife & kids - we do exist!) A few years back, my wife started blogging but kept her identity secret. She didn't use our real names, didn't name where we lived, etc. Then I decided to blog and open a Twitter account. I thought it over and decided that I preferred a degree of anonymity that using my real name wouldn't allow. So I adopted a pseudonym as well. I have no illusions that my identity is 100% secret, but it is secret enough for me. The casual observer wouldn't be able to link my real name identity to my pseudonym one. It would take a determined individual - almost stalker-level determined - to do that.
I still have those "legacy" accounts on Slashdot, BroadbandReports, etc where I have been posting for years. I wouldn't want to simply junk those accounts, start up new ones using my pseudonym, and try to pretend I was a new person. I also couldn't jump to using the pseudonym name and say "Hey everyone, I used to post as 'Jason Levine', but now I'm Pseudonym." That would defeat the whole purpose of the pseudonym. So I still use my real name moniker on the sites that I had signed up for years back, but every new site I post to, I use my pseudonym.
Awhile back, we got a new head of our department. He decided that he needed to see how everyone used their day so he required everyone to fill out a form to track our time. I joked that my time tracker would look like this:
8:00am - 8:15am - Checked/Answered E-mail
8:15am - 8:30am - Entered time tracking for 8:00am - 8:15am
8:30am - 8:45am - Entered time tracking for 8:15am - 8:30am
8:45am - 9:00am - Entered time tracking for 8:30am - 8:45am
9:00am - 9:15am - Entered time tracking for 8:45am - 9:00am
etc.
I've always found the "every sperm/egg is a potential child and attempts to keep them from forming one is a sin" arguments quite funny. If you take them to their logical conclusion, then my sperm and some random woman's eggs are a potential child so (to keep from sinning), I need to have sex with every woman I come across. Of course, if I did that, I'd need to answer to a higher power: my wife.
Do you mean staged as in Sibrel tried to get Buzz to react violently or staged as in Buzz was in on it too. If the former, I wouldn't put it past Sibrel. From what I know of him, he's willing to do anything to get anything he can spin as "proof" that the Moon landings never happened. If you mean the latter, then I would disagree. Buzz has never shown any inkling that he would be associated with someone like Sibrel.
In either case, Buzz was ambushed, cornered, called a liar and a coward and didn't have his verbal assailant back down when told to. Buzz couldn't have known at the time whether Sibrel was out for some sort of "it was staged" confession (true or not) or for a video of a violent reaction. Given all of that, I still say Buzz was justified in his actions.
No, what Buzz proved is that he won't tolerate someone getting in his face and calling him a coward and a liar.
From Wikipedia:
So Buzz is ambushed, cornered, and called a coward and a liar. He tells Sibrel to get away from him. Sibrel continues to press on repeating his claims that Buzz is a coward and a liar and a thief. At this point, it's obvious that there's going to be no reasoning with Sibrel, Sibrel won't simply back down, and will instead continue harassing Buzz until he (Sibrel) gets something he can consider proof of the "faked" moon landing. Add in Buzz being was understandably upset over being lured there under false pretenses and the punch is fully justified in my book. His punch wasn't even a full on roundhouse swing, but a quick jab. That was enough for Sibrel to go down. As far as I'm concerned, Sibrel is the one who's a coward and a liar and he should have been brought up on stalking and defamation of character charges.
Wow, I'm so glad we don't do this. I was a second grade dropout for awhile and would have been targeted. Seriously. My teacher (Mrs. Demperio) hated kids, especially hated boys, and plain despised me. She'd make fun of me in front of the class, give me extra work just to keep me busy, etc. I decided I wanted to drop out and my parents didn't force me back into school for a bit. (They went to the principal but he kept insisting that she was his best teacher and wouldn't listen to the stories of what she was doing.) Mrs. Demperio also told me that I'd never be a success in life. A few years later, I returned to the school to rub it into her face that I was doing well in school (honors classes and the like). Wouldn't you know it, she had retired and moved to Florida the previous year!
So, assuming I was in Ireland, If I said that Jesus isn't the messiah, I would offend Christians and would fall victim to this law. If I said he is the messiah, I offend Jews and fall victim to this law. Since everyone's religious views pretty much contradict someone else's views - even within the same religion - how will they sort this out? Furthermore, it wouldn't just be limited to religious statements. If I said that the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, would I be arrested for offending a Young Earth Creationist's religious views? People shouldn't have a Right To Be Free From Offense. In fact, quite the opposite. People should have the right to offend other people whenever they so choose. Fining the person $35,500+ US for offending a person's religious views is just idiotic.
I run a small Internet forum supported solely from member donations. We allow image attachments. The forum software we use is old, but the community is used to it and frankly it works fine for our purposes. If we were required to filter images for possible torrents hidden inside it would likely require that we: 1) Change forum software - a big time sink and something that would possibly cost us money or 2) Require us to invest in some sort of torrent filtering software (again time to set up and money to purchase). If we didn't buy this, we would risk being sued over people posting torrent-loaded images to our forum. If we did buy it, we would risk having to shut down due to overwhelming expense. (Of course, this is ignoring Safe Harbor laws which Big Content Owners would like to see vanish.)
I think most people here would agree that copyright does have a valid place in society. The problem is that copyright terms have been overextended and copyright powers overemphasized. It used to be that your copyright on a work only lasted 14 years. Then you could apply for a one-time extension of 14 years. After that, your work landed in the Public Domain. Now the terms are 70 years after the author's death or, if owned by a company, 95 years after publication. Under the 14+14 rule, works created in 1981 should be hitting the Public Domain now. Instead, they'll hit in 2076 (assuming corporate ownership and no more copyright extensions - big assumptions, I know). This means that I likely won't live to see works hit the Public Domain which were created when I was 6 years old. Heck, a work created in 1974 (a year before I was born) and owned by a company is currently due to hit Public Domain in 2069 - when I'm 95 years old! It's even worse if the ownership isn't corporate. Take Michael Jackson, for example. Since he just died (and assuming he owns the copyrights to his songs), his copyright will end in the year 2079. His youngest child is currently 7 years old. When the Jackson copyrights end, his youngest child will be 77 years old!
In addition to this, copyright owners are making more and more ridiculous assertions about their copyright ownership. The RIAA, for example, has tried to claim that ripping a CD to MP3 (purely for personal use) is a copyright violation. Of course, they aren't going around suing people for ripping their CDs, but they would love to get CD ripping banned.
Copyright was supposed to give a balance between the author's right to seek a profit from his work and the public advancement of the arts. Authors would have an incentive to create works thanks to the temporary monopoly that copyright granted. In exchange, the public would get to do what they wanted with the work when that monopoly ended. In addition, since the copyright would end soon, the author had an incentive to make more works. What we have now, however, is the author being granted a monopoly that persists for generations after they pass away and little to no incentive (from copyright expiration) to create additional works. The public, meanwhile, is robbed of songs entering the Public Domain and fueling new works.
It's not just that it shuts down the rational part of their brain, but they wind up expecting someone *else* to do the protecting. Because, you know, being a parent yourself is too tough.
I happen to be a father to two little boys (age 5 and 2) and I'll agree that being a parent is tough work. It's not all hugs and smiles with kids. There are temper tantrums. They *WILL* test boundaries to see how far they can go. Repeatedly. They *will* try to get away with things they shouldn't be doing. Keeping up with what is happening and keeping your kids in line (e.g. "No yelling in the store") and safe (e.g. "No running away from Mommy and Daddy in the parking lot") isn't always easy. Too many parents just let their kids run rampant because they don't want to exert the effort to set and enforce boundaries. Many people seem to want someone else to do the work for them. So they whine for the government to step in and "child proof" life. The problem is, you can't child proof life. Life has a lot of sharp edges to it. The trick is to teach your child to avoid the sharp edges *and* what to do if they accidentally hit upon one of them. That takes work and effort that too many parents just seem to not want to invest.