if 95% of the citizens of a country ignore one of its laws, should the law continue to exist?
No. But until the legislature repeals said law, it does exist and "should" be followed.
And, of course, there's the fact that some laws are there to move against people's base nature. (Speed limits, nondiscrimination laws, outlawing dueling, anyone?)
When everyone's doing it, should we punish everyone, or rethink the law instead?
Until it is shown that most people pirate content that they either already own, have owned, or purchase legally in the future, there's not much one can say to that.
Those are still illegal actions. What's ethical and what's legal are not always the same thing.
All of this belies this simple fact, a fact that many others here have echoed: were it not for Napster, the RIAA would have *less* money in its pockets thanks to the music I discovered that I wanted to buy. It's as simple as that.
I wish it was as simple as that. But the courts can't say "RIAA, you're making more money, so shut up." Control of who gets to copy what songs is important--especially when unfinished works of art are being distributed through the world's most efficient method of mass distribution.
2: FedEx and other true "Common Carriers" have no way to tell that the contents of one wrapped package are illegal--and if they do (i.e., it's got a "do not export" label on the outside and is being shipped to Iraq), they've probably allready been sued to stop & check.
VCR recorders were declared legal because a significant legal use was declared--and then followed through on. What's the significant legal use of KaZaa, again?
For the record, I own a Palm (505) and love it dearly.
My wife and I owned two Palm IIIce's, then an m105 and a Sony Clique s360. All have been wonderful machines, and aside from the screen shrink they're great.
Now now, now. Despite being lazy, greedy, opportunistic bastards colluding to monopolize the airwaves of america, RIAA, in the sole case of acting legally against Napster et al, really is protecting the artists.
After all, it was the artists who raised such a ruckus, when they found unreleased (and unfinished) copies of their songs as MP3s on Napster which started the whole legal shebang. Left to their own devices, RIAA would never have lifted a finger against P2P.
Now, if only we had enough data for a marketing queen (must be smarter than a drone) to explain to Madonna and Lars why controlled and proactive P2P actually increases their record sales...
there's probably a good chance that some idiot will use some real big weapon that he shouldn't use, kill a lot of people, most likely over religous reasons. then others will retaliate. point is, i think that humans will have trouble learning to stanking use the resources given to them, and get along with others, therefore, i think that we will kill each other off long before 10 billion years.
Now, now. Most of the historical genocides have been culturally motivated, not religiously motivated.
The Nazis killed people who were of hebrew descent, not just people who practiced as jews. Hussein and Milsoevick caused genocided against ethnic minorities, not just members of a particular religion.
Sure, you can point to Ireland or the Crusades and say "but those are religious!", but they're really cultural; the Irish Catholics and the Irish Protestants are visibly differnet cultures, and the Crusaders sacked Constantinople in the 4th crusade, which was a Christian city.
(side note: The Crusades were a great example of a good idea [go to war to get pilgrimage rights back] that went horribly wrong. The fact that some Muslims are sore about the war shouldn't preclude the use of a fine english word; after all, the Muslims tried to conquer Europe first.)
faced with competition from [windows] and [windows], Palm OS is considered "old" and "outdated" and "lacking in functionality".
Care to back that up? Sounds like marketing-speak to me.
Sure, I have to pay nearly $50 for the software to do some of it (or more for hardware), but all the functionality I can imagine for a PDA, Palm allready has.
In any case, IIRC the biggest OS5 change will be a high-res screen--thus making it easier to read and an almost usable temporarly photo album.
Now, don't get me wrong. I bought Quake 3, Alpha Centauri, and Jagged Alliance II for Linux. But those *run* reasonably on computers not built for gaming. UT2003? Riiight...
I have a Duron 700 with 128 MB of RAM and a Geforce 2MX. By all accounts, I'm actually below the required stats for the game. But the demo runs just as well as the original Unreal...
If you're running Q3 at an average rate, you can probably run UT2003.
Thanks to the fine folks at ClearChannel, you can already do this!
Hardly.
I drive on a semi-regular basis from Albany, NY to State College, PA--which is only about 300 miles one-way. For this trip, we have at least four different "radio zones." The Albany stations cut out significantly before Binghampton, there's the crap around Binghampton, then there's a good station out of Sracnton, which doesn't reach to State College.
The Albany and Sranton stations, AFAIK, are Clear Channel.
No. Always, always, ALWAYS critizie that which you can't understand. Those that do understand it will defend it, or the overly cumbersome lie will come to rule us all.
So you thought the excessive following (call it harrassment) towards Einsten, Luther King and many, many obviously peacefull folk were justified?
Yes and no.
It makes sense to keep tabs on a german national who has conceptualized the deadliest weapon ever known, or the leader of a revolutionarly movement.
It crosses the line when obsevance goes over to harassment, which the FBI did all too often under Hoover.
But just because sex is sometime rape doesn't mean that all sex is bad; the FBI is supposed to keep a thousand eyes open, and if they can watch invisiblity, harassment can't happen in the regular course of investigation.
Considering that there are terrorist cells operating in the US, and just over a year ago they killed 3,000 american citizens + (and sparked a war), I'm willing to lean towards the Big Brother side for a few years. If the FBI abuses the power again, we can take it away again.
Exactly. As a matter of faith, nothing I do is private. It helps to keep me from straying when I know that, eventually, someone will ask me what I was doing on that website at 3:12 a.m....
Plus it lets me play devil's advocate on an apparantly undebatable issue like this one.
You say you were in the USAF. I thought you took an oath to protect our freedoms. Weren't you paying attention??
Actually, my father was in the USAF. I was just born and raised under their care.
And, in any rate, who died for the freedom to hide from your actions?
I would rather it be the norm of everyone knowning everything about everyone than the current state, where no one can be questioned about their actions because of "privacy."
As far as I care, the federal government is welcome to look into me and my life. They already have my spending history (credit report), job history (taxes), (lack_of_a) criminal record (DUH!), medical records (USAF), and a slew of other details I really don't need to know about.
If (and only if) the Patriot Act data given to the FBI is used soley by the investigative arms of the government, and not a business or private citizen unassociated with the feds, I have no problem with this. A friend of mine can be suboeneaed as to the two kittie cats and mass of CDRs in my apartment, and if they pick the right friend I won't ever know about it. So what if the federal government can know that I read fantasy novels and sci fi; it's their job to be snoopse, and they're welcome to it.
i always found it incredibly funny that my pastor would blame everything on "pre-flood" times where the earth was surrounded by water
Stop right there. Your pastor's a Jack Chick level moron.
Even if we presume that God intended to flood the world from the get-go, He didn't need to make a "second sphere" of water; he could just point to a cloud and say "make it rain", and alter creation to keep the water pouring.
The simple fact is that the universe looks like it's 14 billion years old. Either it really is this old, we've misinterpreted the data and it's a different age, or God created it looking 14 billion less 6,000.
But FOLLOWING the Constitution is more important than 1 life, or 3000 lives, or 100,000,000 lives. Yes, I really mean that.
Come again?
It's not the firggin Bible--and I wouldn't even kill to follow that. Why do you think that the Constitution--not the principles and liberties it aspires to, but the damn hacked-up document itself--is worth half the population of the United States?
I am really, really interested in your answer. Please answer off/. if you won't reply.
Child pornography should not be illegal; molesting children, harming minors, having sex with minors, that should be illega. Anything you can print, or is published, or is off the press, ought to be protected.
Two part rebuttal to this point.
1: Banning the medium strikes at the vile act even when the law cannot, for whatever reason, touch the criminal. People have proven time and time again that simply banning a necessary step (making child porn / importing illegal substances) does not hinder the flow of said vice, while making the common act illegal (posessing porn / drugs) does.
2: Why should we have absolute freedom of speech? Not why you think we do, but why should we?
Why? Because the Supreme Court is WRONG. There are no exceptions permitted by the Constitution, therefore, none exisit. Its pretty simple really. Again, dont want to get into deep legal arguments though.
Hmm... so, I guess we can't have social security, welfare, interstates that don't go between states, or military assistance to domesitc matters.
The people who wrote the constitution & the bill of rights did not think, lawyer-like, of every possible exception. This is why we have a Supreme Court--to interpret the constitution. It doesn't matter what you or I (or the Congress or the President) think the constitution or the federal code means; all that really matters is what the SC and the lower judges think it means.
I really believe that no words, utterances, guttural noises, sound waves, speach patterns, vocal emissions or other speach can ever be illegal under the 1st amendment.
Legal arguments about interpretation aside, banning speach of any type is stupid.
I, literally, agree with you. But when we deal with things that are not "speech", such as images, actions, printing, or the consequences of speech, it gets fuzzy.
Photographs of child pornography are, AFAIK, illegal primarily because they cause children to be put into pornographic positions, and secondly because they offend a basic sensability held by nearly all of the country.
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, or slander: Go ahead and speak what you want. When you harm someone through it, and it's not a simple difference of opinion, you've committed a tort and they (not the gov't) can sue you.
(IIRC, Slander needs to be both believable to a third party and known to be false by the offensee. If I really think that Geroge W. Bush is a flaming homosexual, I can't commit slander by saying that--just as I can't commit slander by saying it if no one would believe me. IANAL.)
Words themselves never hurt, are never dangerous. Associate actions - they are what is dangerous. Instead of restricting patterns of waves moving through the air, we should work on restricting and forming actions.
See, you agree with me, and the current law.
Also, I believe the Constitution is a literal document
It's a legal document, which has been interpreted to the way that best benefits society by the SC at different times in the country's history.
The SC has ruled that the 1st amendement is not an aboslute guarantee, and that laws and precedents that cause some speech to leave the speaker liable in certain situations that harm others are not unconstitutional.
The bottom line is this: yes, I believe all speech is protected, no matter its content.
My bottom line: You have absolute freedom in your speech, and no common citizen or government can take that from you--but you must live with the consequences of your speech.
My question is, does intending to make me spend money defending myself constitute intending to cause damage?
Yes and no. (IANAL)
If they don't have even the barest inklings of a case, and file a suit anyway that they know they're going to lose, then probably yes.
If they do have even the slightest inkling that there's something untoward about you, and believe that you have probably committeed a tort against them (or a crime), then defending yourself is just part and parcel of how life works.
In the episode Balance of Terror the Romulans only had vessels with impulse power and it was established that the war with the Romulans that took place was conducted before warp drive was discovered.
So they fought an interstellar war at 1/4 c? I really, really doubut that. Maybe they had poor engines, but they definitly had warp.
So in the original series human's met the Romulans before the Klingons, but in Enterprise we met the Klingon's apparently before the Romulans. And not to nit pick but as I watched last season there were at least half a dozen other major continuity issues.
"Temporal Cold War."
Enterprise is 4th dimensionally prior to all other version of 'trek... but becuase of the TCW, it's 5th dimensionally later. What I'm going to watch tonight is the "now" in the trekiverse.
I doubt that Paramonunt's going to try and explain this to anyone (too much pain for too little benefit), and they might not even realize it, but they will follow through on it. Aside from the actual facts of the episodes, anything and everything in the "continuity" is up for grabs if it will make a good story.
Or have you allready written a letter complaining about the odd look of the klingons?
In nature there is a balance. However messy it might be. In human society we work to continually tip this balance in our favor often to the detriment of nature itself. Additionally this tipping of the scales can have serious repercussions on our future.
The so-called "balance" of nature exists only if you group all of nature together. Look at any species individually, and they work to do the same thing you just accused humans of.
Striving to the best of our ability to subjugate all other forms of life is how most life forms work. The fact that we can see that there is benefit in other species beyond what we can immediately use them for means that we're better than nature; our mindless quenching and re-quenching of hunger and lust is just being an overly effective natural species, not an evil intelligent one.
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if 95% of the citizens of a country ignore one of its laws, should the law continue to exist?
No. But until the legislature repeals said law, it does exist and "should" be followed.
And, of course, there's the fact that some laws are there to move against people's base nature. (Speed limits, nondiscrimination laws, outlawing dueling, anyone?)
When everyone's doing it, should we punish everyone, or rethink the law instead?
Both.
Until it is shown that most people pirate content that they either already own, have owned, or purchase legally in the future, there's not much one can say to that.
Those are still illegal actions. What's ethical and what's legal are not always the same thing.
All of this belies this simple fact, a fact that many others here have echoed: were it not for Napster, the RIAA would have *less* money in its pockets thanks to the music I discovered that I wanted to buy. It's as simple as that.
I wish it was as simple as that. But the courts can't say "RIAA, you're making more money, so shut up." Control of who gets to copy what songs is important--especially when unfinished works of art are being distributed through the world's most efficient method of mass distribution.
1: It's "wanton", not "wonton."
2: FedEx and other true "Common Carriers" have no way to tell that the contents of one wrapped package are illegal--and if they do (i.e., it's got a "do not export" label on the outside and is being shipped to Iraq), they've probably allready been sued to stop & check.
VCR recorders were declared legal because a significant legal use was declared--and then followed through on. What's the significant legal use of KaZaa, again?
Discoveries like these reconfirms my beliefthat there really is nothing new under the sun
Care to point out the ancient nuclear weapon? Or the ancient use of velcro? Radar? Full plate armor before the fall or Rome?
There's plenty new things under the sun. Thinking that there aren't is as arrogant as thinking that there's nothing new to discover.
If you want hires, just buy a Sony Clié.
High-res on Palm is a non-native hack. OS5 will include native (and standard) functionality.
I think that Sony's & Palm's specs will be compatible... but I really have no idea.
For the record, I own a Palm (505) and love it dearly.
;)
My wife and I owned two Palm IIIce's, then an m105 and a Sony Clique s360. All have been wonderful machines, and aside from the screen shrink they're great.
Just for the record.
Now now, now. Despite being lazy, greedy, opportunistic bastards colluding to monopolize the airwaves of america, RIAA, in the sole case of acting legally against Napster et al, really is protecting the artists.
After all, it was the artists who raised such a ruckus, when they found unreleased (and unfinished) copies of their songs as MP3s on Napster which started the whole legal shebang. Left to their own devices, RIAA would never have lifted a finger against P2P.
Now, if only we had enough data for a marketing queen (must be smarter than a drone) to explain to Madonna and Lars why controlled and proactive P2P actually increases their record sales...
there's probably a good chance that some idiot will use some real big weapon that he shouldn't use, kill a lot of people, most likely over religous reasons. then others will retaliate. point is, i think that humans will have trouble learning to stanking use the resources given to them, and get along with others, therefore, i think that we will kill each other off long before 10 billion years.
Now, now. Most of the historical genocides have been culturally motivated, not religiously motivated.
The Nazis killed people who were of hebrew descent, not just people who practiced as jews. Hussein and Milsoevick caused genocided against ethnic minorities, not just members of a particular religion.
Sure, you can point to Ireland or the Crusades and say "but those are religious!", but they're really cultural; the Irish Catholics and the Irish Protestants are visibly differnet cultures, and the Crusaders sacked Constantinople in the 4th crusade, which was a Christian city.
(side note: The Crusades were a great example of a good idea [go to war to get pilgrimage rights back] that went horribly wrong. The fact that some Muslims are sore about the war shouldn't preclude the use of a fine english word; after all, the Muslims tried to conquer Europe first.)
faced with competition from [windows] and [windows], Palm OS is considered "old" and "outdated" and "lacking in functionality".
Care to back that up? Sounds like marketing-speak to me.
Sure, I have to pay nearly $50 for the software to do some of it (or more for hardware), but all the functionality I can imagine for a PDA, Palm allready has.
In any case, IIRC the biggest OS5 change will be a high-res screen--thus making it easier to read and an almost usable temporarly photo album.
Now, don't get me wrong. I bought Quake 3, Alpha Centauri, and Jagged Alliance II for Linux. But those *run* reasonably on computers not built for gaming. UT2003? Riiight...
I have a Duron 700 with 128 MB of RAM and a Geforce 2MX. By all accounts, I'm actually below the required stats for the game. But the demo runs just as well as the original Unreal...
If you're running Q3 at an average rate, you can probably run UT2003.
Thanks to the fine folks at ClearChannel, you can already do this!
Hardly.
I drive on a semi-regular basis from Albany, NY to State College, PA--which is only about 300 miles one-way. For this trip, we have at least four different "radio zones." The Albany stations cut out significantly before Binghampton, there's the crap around Binghampton, then there's a good station out of Sracnton, which doesn't reach to State College.
The Albany and Sranton stations, AFAIK, are Clear Channel.
Don't criticize something you can't understand.
No. Always, always, ALWAYS critizie that which you can't understand. Those that do understand it will defend it, or the overly cumbersome lie will come to rule us all.
see: Communism. The Inquisition. Thong underwear.
So you thought the excessive following (call it harrassment) towards Einsten, Luther King and many, many obviously peacefull folk were justified?
Yes and no.
It makes sense to keep tabs on a german national who has conceptualized the deadliest weapon ever known, or the leader of a revolutionarly movement.
It crosses the line when obsevance goes over to harassment, which the FBI did all too often under Hoover.
But just because sex is sometime rape doesn't mean that all sex is bad; the FBI is supposed to keep a thousand eyes open, and if they can watch invisiblity, harassment can't happen in the regular course of investigation.
Considering that there are terrorist cells operating in the US, and just over a year ago they killed 3,000 american citizens + (and sparked a war), I'm willing to lean towards the Big Brother side for a few years. If the FBI abuses the power again, we can take it away again.
Who needs big brother, you got big daddy.
Exactly. As a matter of faith, nothing I do is private. It helps to keep me from straying when I know that, eventually, someone will ask me what I was doing on that website at 3:12 a.m....
Plus it lets me play devil's advocate on an apparantly undebatable issue like this one.
You say you were in the USAF. I thought you took an oath to protect our freedoms. Weren't you paying attention??
Actually, my father was in the USAF. I was just born and raised under their care.
And, in any rate, who died for the freedom to hide from your actions?
I would rather it be the norm of everyone knowning everything about everyone than the current state, where no one can be questioned about their actions because of "privacy."
"You have no privacy; get over it."
As far as I care, the federal government is welcome to look into me and my life. They already have my spending history (credit report), job history (taxes), (lack_of_a) criminal record (DUH!), medical records (USAF), and a slew of other details I really don't need to know about.
If (and only if) the Patriot Act data given to the FBI is used soley by the investigative arms of the government, and not a business or private citizen unassociated with the feds, I have no problem with this. A friend of mine can be suboeneaed as to the two kittie cats and mass of CDRs in my apartment, and if they pick the right friend I won't ever know about it. So what if the federal government can know that I read fantasy novels and sci fi; it's their job to be snoopse, and they're welcome to it.
i always found it incredibly funny that my pastor would blame everything on "pre-flood" times where the earth was surrounded by water
Stop right there. Your pastor's a Jack Chick level moron.
Even if we presume that God intended to flood the world from the get-go, He didn't need to make a "second sphere" of water; he could just point to a cloud and say "make it rain", and alter creation to keep the water pouring.
The simple fact is that the universe looks like it's 14 billion years old. Either it really is this old, we've misinterpreted the data and it's a different age, or God created it looking 14 billion less 6,000.
*sigh*
But FOLLOWING the Constitution is more important than 1 life, or 3000 lives, or 100,000,000 lives. Yes, I really mean that.
/. if you won't reply.
Come again?
It's not the firggin Bible--and I wouldn't even kill to follow that. Why do you think that the Constitution--not the principles and liberties it aspires to, but the damn hacked-up document itself--is worth half the population of the United States?
I am really, really interested in your answer. Please answer off
Child pornography should not be illegal; molesting children, harming minors, having sex with minors, that should be illega. Anything you can print, or is published, or is off the press, ought to be protected.
Two part rebuttal to this point.
1: Banning the medium strikes at the vile act even when the law cannot, for whatever reason, touch the criminal. People have proven time and time again that simply banning a necessary step (making child porn / importing illegal substances) does not hinder the flow of said vice, while making the common act illegal (posessing porn / drugs) does.
2: Why should we have absolute freedom of speech? Not why you think we do, but why should we?
Why? Because the Supreme Court is WRONG. There are no exceptions permitted by the Constitution, therefore, none exisit. Its pretty simple really. Again, dont want to get into deep legal arguments though.
Hmm... so, I guess we can't have social security, welfare, interstates that don't go between states, or military assistance to domesitc matters.
The people who wrote the constitution & the bill of rights did not think, lawyer-like, of every possible exception. This is why we have a Supreme Court--to interpret the constitution. It doesn't matter what you or I (or the Congress or the President) think the constitution or the federal code means; all that really matters is what the SC and the lower judges think it means.
I really believe that no words, utterances, guttural noises, sound waves, speach patterns, vocal emissions or other speach can ever be illegal under the 1st amendment.
Legal arguments about interpretation aside, banning speach of any type is stupid.
I, literally, agree with you. But when we deal with things that are not "speech", such as images, actions, printing, or the consequences of speech, it gets fuzzy.
Photographs of child pornography are, AFAIK, illegal primarily because they cause children to be put into pornographic positions, and secondly because they offend a basic sensability held by nearly all of the country.
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, or slander: Go ahead and speak what you want. When you harm someone through it, and it's not a simple difference of opinion, you've committed a tort and they (not the gov't) can sue you.
(IIRC, Slander needs to be both believable to a third party and known to be false by the offensee. If I really think that Geroge W. Bush is a flaming homosexual, I can't commit slander by saying that--just as I can't commit slander by saying it if no one would believe me. IANAL.)
Words themselves never hurt, are never dangerous. Associate actions - they are what is dangerous. Instead of restricting patterns of waves moving through the air, we should work on restricting and forming actions.
See, you agree with me, and the current law.
Also, I believe the Constitution is a literal document
It's a legal document, which has been interpreted to the way that best benefits society by the SC at different times in the country's history.
The SC has ruled that the 1st amendement is not an aboslute guarantee, and that laws and precedents that cause some speech to leave the speaker liable in certain situations that harm others are not unconstitutional.
The bottom line is this: yes, I believe all speech is protected, no matter its content.
My bottom line: You have absolute freedom in your speech, and no common citizen or government can take that from you--but you must live with the consequences of your speech.
My question is, does intending to make me spend money defending myself constitute intending to cause damage?
Yes and no. (IANAL)
If they don't have even the barest inklings of a case, and file a suit anyway that they know they're going to lose, then probably yes.
If they do have even the slightest inkling that there's something untoward about you, and believe that you have probably committeed a tort against them (or a crime), then defending yourself is just part and parcel of how life works.
In the episode Balance of Terror the Romulans only had vessels with impulse power and it was established that the war with the Romulans that took place was conducted before warp drive was discovered.
So they fought an interstellar war at 1/4 c? I really, really doubut that. Maybe they had poor engines, but they definitly had warp.
So in the original series human's met the Romulans before the Klingons, but in Enterprise we met the Klingon's apparently before the Romulans. And not to nit pick but as I watched last season there were at least half a dozen other major continuity issues.
"Temporal Cold War."
Enterprise is 4th dimensionally prior to all other version of 'trek... but becuase of the TCW, it's 5th dimensionally later. What I'm going to watch tonight is the "now" in the trekiverse.
I doubt that Paramonunt's going to try and explain this to anyone (too much pain for too little benefit), and they might not even realize it, but they will follow through on it. Aside from the actual facts of the episodes, anything and everything in the "continuity" is up for grabs if it will make a good story.
Or have you allready written a letter complaining about the odd look of the klingons?
In nature there is a balance. However messy it might be. In human society we work to continually tip this balance in our favor often to the detriment of nature itself. Additionally this tipping of the scales can have serious repercussions on our future.
The so-called "balance" of nature exists only if you group all of nature together. Look at any species individually, and they work to do the same thing you just accused humans of.
Striving to the best of our ability to subjugate all other forms of life is how most life forms work. The fact that we can see that there is benefit in other species beyond what we can immediately use them for means that we're better than nature; our mindless quenching and re-quenching of hunger and lust is just being an overly effective natural species, not an evil intelligent one.
Then why doors?
I can see one plug, but not the three (at least) that this shaft has.
Anyone who doesn't think it was wrong must not be intelligent?
Think "legally wrong." Moral or not, Ethical or not, it is something that will get you busted and tossed in jail if you do it often enough.