This is true in a global sense, I think. The secular countries will always outpace those who impede themselves with legislated religious truth.
I think many people are simply worried that the United States may be turning away from science and progress and getting ready to stagnate for a few centuries as an unimportant and ignorant backwater.
There are people in the United States who want to see that happen, because they believe it is to their advantage to have everyone else ignorant and easily manipulated.
Evolution has already been proven true. It's proven true every single day by thousands of scientists who use it daily in their work. But I'm sure, the 10 billionth time someone relies on it to make a prediction and it works, God will show up and tell us how everything really works.
Let's hear it for irrational, useless beliefs! I can make up beliefs with no basis in fact that can't be proven false all day.
The problem with evolution is that it isn't that it's controversial, it's that there's no real consequences to the people who deny it. You can ask the guy who denies gravity to prove it by jumping off a cliff and one way or another the problem is solved. There's no such easy solutions for evolution.
Copyrights are both good and bad, and which it is depends on what you value more.
Copyrights are bad for freedom because they place limits on freedom. Copyrights are bad for society because they limit who can enjoy a work. Copyrights are bad for society because people have to pay more for artistic work. Copyrights are bad for society because they limit the generation of new (derivative) works.
Copyrights are good for authors and other creators, because the limits force other people to pay for their work. Copyrights are good for corporations who hoard copyrights and use them to generate long term revenue.
Copyrights are potentially good for society because they may increase the number of artistic works generated.
If you value freedom above all others, then copyright is a travesty. If you value author renumeration above all others, then copyright is a no-brainer. It's all about priorities and conflicting interests.
Personally, I think the money generated for corporations by copyright has led them to ceaseless work to erode the freedoms of society in the name of increasing the flow of that easy money. And that, by itself, is reason enough for me to consider copyright as an evil that should never have existed.
So far, I have yet to hear any argument for copyright other than "But then I wouldn't get paid for additional copies of my work".
You may not like your options, but they are still options. You can choose to live as a citizen of your country, or you can attempt to emigrate to a different country, or go stateless. The fact that you don't like any of the alternatives presented to you, doesn't mean you were forced into the one you did pick.
That's the thing I really dislike about libertarians, they insist that taxes are robbing them at gun point, but the reality is they are merely being forced to hold up their end a contract. However, once the contract is between themselves and a government somehow libertarians shouldn't be held to their responsibilities.
I, obviously, don't agree. Then again, I don't consider to be much morality in voting. It's politics. The first rule is that you're not going to agree with anyone on everything or everyone on anything. You have to pick and choose what's important to you and choose the person who's most like you on the important issues.
If you absolutely can't find anyone like you on the issues that important to you, you should probably be running for office.
Actually, I think that merely talking about change is one of the least effective ways to bring it about. It's even less effective when you admit you don't vote. It makes you seem like a blow hard who likes to talk about change but can't even be bothered to make a token effort to bring about those changes.
I doubt I'm the only one who gets that impression of you, and that makes your campaign of talking about change a big joke.
I think those are called primaries. Actually, if you don't like a candidate who can be elected, you should vote for one who can't.
There are 2 reasons this is good advice for everyone:
1) Gerrymandering is based on predictable 2 party politics, if the 50% of the population who don't vote, instead voted randomly for the parties that didn't "have a chance", suddenly they would and all the statistical models predicting the results of gerrymandering would be broken. Optimizing for 1 of 2 parties is easy, optimizing for 1 of 5 parties is much more difficult.
2) Giving your vote to neither the Democrats nor the Republicans but to some other party increases the credibility of all other parties. If one party or the other is winning with 30% of the popular vote rather than 50.1% then maybe, just maybe, you'll start to see other voices in the political process. This is not limited to the presidency.
Not voting is the easy way out. If you want change make sure you get counted. If everyone who didn't vote, did, American elections would be a vastly different thing.
Actually, that would have given a much more accurate picture of the situation. For having the full support of an entrenched monopoly with restrictive and anti-competitive deals with major computer distributions, Vista is doing remarkably poorly.
However, the poor showing isn't benefiting their competitors all that much.
You always have the right to refuse citizenship in the country in which you were born. In most countries Citizenship is given at birth, however, it is not free. It carries duties as well as privileges. That is life, there is no free ride.
Unfortunately, as the previous poster indicated, McCain's views on what is and is not torture and what is and is not America have proven to be flexible when his party put pressure on him.
The main difference between private charity and government welfare funded by taxes isn't that one is voluntary and one is not. You have, in practice, agreed to pay taxes by accepting citizenship in your home country.
The main difference is that one is inadequate and the other is inefficient.
Also you should be aware that Obama's campaign was not financed in the same way that most other campaigns are. He drew the majority of his money from small donations much like the Dean campaign did. He's so far avoided huge donations from political lobby groups, and thus owes relatively few favors to the typical moochers in Washington.
Actually, that's also why leftism is good in moderation. It gives to those who haven't earned it yet, and likely would never have a chance to earn it.
Sometimes you've got to go beyond who earned what and look at what might be best for everyone. Condemning someone to poverty and slave wage labour because that's what their parents were condemned to is not good for the country.
There is a good balance between the extremes where the wealthy keep most of the wealth they earned, and some of that wealth is used to guarantee that new wealth can be produced by as many of the next generation as possible. Some of that money will be wasted on people who won't succeed but the rewards generated by the few who do always seem to outweigh the costs after the fact.
A very cynical part of me thinks McCain is being set up for failure. It seems like the social conservatives and born again Christians should not rally around McCain unless he's clearly going to win. Instead they're should hang back and let him get crushed by the Democrats. Then they'll use his defeat as proof that the party should have selected a socially conservative born-again candidate. In the end they'll gather more power to themselves and wait for the Democrats to screw up something to feed the attack machine to get back in power.
In short, if the republicans lose either the religious zealots, warmongers and lobbyist puppets will get purged, or if they have already gathered enough power unto themselves, it will they who are doing the purging. Either way, the republican party is headed for serious trouble if they don't win the next presidential election, which there is every indication that they will not.
Personally, I think the "moral copyrights" are the single most important part of copyright law. In today's world, as long as you're willing to work, fame is easily translated into money.
For example in the music industry, it is common for artists to be poorly paid. Popular bands are often barely living above the poverty line based on the revenues earned from their CDs sales (the piracy issue that receives the most attention). In reality, most performers earn the majority of their money either through long term ownership of the rights to their music (which they are often forced or tricked into signing away with their first recording deal), or through revenues generated by concerts and collateral merchandising.
The important lesson to learn is that piracy has little direct impact on recording artists. The majority (90-95%) of the money goes to the music labels and middlemen.
Similarly, it's long been known that movie studios somehow manage to never make any money on any movie. In large part this explains why movie actors get such huge upfront fees. If they agree to a lesser fee with a percentage of the residuals, there just never seem to be any. Thus by the very nature of the business piracy mostly affects the producers who are the only people still making money after the movie has been released. The only time an actor or director is actually hurt by piracy is when they are also a producer for the film.
The people who argue for expanded copyright laws, almost always use the excuse that the laws are not to benefit themselves but to benefit people you actually like. However, in all truthfulness, any benefits will be hijacked by the labels and the studios long before it gets to anyone else.
Much of the real argument over copyright is about control and manipulation rather than making things better for the creators of artist content. Stronger copyright laws benefit the centralization of artist production into the hands of a few groups. When they band together they can afford high paid lobbyists and lawyers. The lobbyists work to further tip the field in favour of the labels and the lawyers harass anyone who has success outside of their oligopoly with the simple intent of ruining them through frivolous lawsuits and thus protection the oligopoly.
Weaker copyright laws (up to a point) actually benefit the artists by weakening the label's hold and thus making it less desirable to deal with them unless they're offering a reasonable deal. Legal protections against circumvention disproportionately benefit the people who deal with masses of content and thus the cost of the security mechanism can be amortized across all the handled content. Thus it is a centralizing factor, and when combined with another seemingly innocent centralizer that requires video or music players to only play "authorized" content, you can easily see how the copyright protection mechanism has been turned into a competitive advantage that favors the established parties, and thus has raised the barrier to entry to the artistic industries and simultaneously have limited competition. Weaker copyright laws can also make it less desirable for the labels to pressure the artists into giving the rights to their work to the labels as a condition of working with the label. If the rights are worth less financially, then there is simply less incentive for the labels to wrestle control away from the actual creators.
I think you're both wrong. The fan owns the copyright to his recording regardless of the presence of a recording crew. If 2 people take 2 different pictures of the same building, there are 2 different copyrights and neither infringes on the other. This principle applies in exactly the same way to 2 separate recordings of a performance.
The only way that Prince could be entitled to the copyright on the fan's video is if it were not held in a public place and there was a contract included in the entry requirements that designed the copyright of any resulting recordings to the performer. Since it was a music festival with many performers it is unlikely that the festival would give Prince so much control over the event.
Assuming Radiohead actually does own the copyright on the song, they do not have any legal entitlement to the fan video, either. If Prince was not entitled to perform the song because he had no paid for the right to perform it (highly doubtful because his label likely already made the necessary arrangement with Radiohead's label) he (or his label) would be the only one who liable for the infringement and damages thus incurred.
In other words, Prince is just being the obsessive control freak that he is. Don't mistake audacity and obsession for legality.
I think you have missed a crucially important part of the law:
A performance can not be copyrighted.
Regardless of the amount of original or creative elements contained within it, a performance is simply not eligible for copyright protection. That is because it is a performance and is not fixed as required by the law. A written account of the performance can be copyrighted, a picture of the performance can be copyrighted, a recording (video or audio) of the performance can be copyrighted. The performance itself, can not be copyrighted.
Only the recording of the performance can be covered by copyright law, and that copyright goes to the recorder, not the performer. Now, if you're a smart performer, you have your own recorders who are working for you and are contractually obliged to transfer ownership of the copyright to you.
Third party recordings are covered by contractual laws, not copyright. You create a condition of entrance to the venue where the performance is to occur and you make one of the conditions that they agree to not make a recording of the performance, and furthermore establish a penalty that should they make a recording they forfeit all rights to it to the performer. If you perform in a public place, then you can not enforce any contractual requirements on those in attendance excepting that the local government specifically gives you such rights.
I have ot point this out. I think it might just be because American laws allow partisan hacks to be appointed to run your elections.
In other countries we punish the mere appearance of impartiality in our electoral officers. Americans allow their officials to run the election and the campaign for one of the two front runners in that same election without any type of oversight.
It's really is no wonder that the elections officials act like partisan hacks. They are partisan hacks, and they were hired because they are partisan hacks and the people who hired them want them to act like partisan hacks. They're just doing the job they were paid to perform, that is making sure that elections are not run fairly and impartially but that their side wins at any cost.
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This is true in a global sense, I think. The secular countries will always outpace those who impede themselves with legislated religious truth.
I think many people are simply worried that the United States may be turning away from science and progress and getting ready to stagnate for a few centuries as an unimportant and ignorant backwater.
There are people in the United States who want to see that happen, because they believe it is to their advantage to have everyone else ignorant and easily manipulated.
Woosh.
That's the sound of a joke flying over your head.
Evolution has already been proven true. It's proven true every single day by thousands of scientists who use it daily in their work. But I'm sure, the 10 billionth time someone relies on it to make a prediction and it works, God will show up and tell us how everything really works.
Let's hear it for irrational, useless beliefs! I can make up beliefs with no basis in fact that can't be proven false all day.
The problem with evolution is that it isn't that it's controversial, it's that there's no real consequences to the people who deny it. You can ask the guy who denies gravity to prove it by jumping off a cliff and one way or another the problem is solved. There's no such easy solutions for evolution.
So correction:
Microsoft software doesn't help you live longer.
Copyrights are both good and bad, and which it is depends on what you value more.
Copyrights are bad for freedom because they place limits on freedom.
Copyrights are bad for society because they limit who can enjoy a work.
Copyrights are bad for society because people have to pay more for artistic work.
Copyrights are bad for society because they limit the generation of new (derivative) works.
Copyrights are good for authors and other creators, because the limits force other people to pay for their work.
Copyrights are good for corporations who hoard copyrights and use them to generate long term revenue.
Copyrights are potentially good for society because they may increase the number of artistic works generated.
If you value freedom above all others, then copyright is a travesty. If you value author renumeration above all others, then copyright is a no-brainer. It's all about priorities and conflicting interests.
Personally, I think the money generated for corporations by copyright has led them to ceaseless work to erode the freedoms of society in the name of increasing the flow of that easy money. And that, by itself, is reason enough for me to consider copyright as an evil that should never have existed.
So far, I have yet to hear any argument for copyright other than "But then I wouldn't get paid for additional copies of my work".
You may not like your options, but they are still options. You can choose to live as a citizen of your country, or you can attempt to emigrate to a different country, or go stateless. The fact that you don't like any of the alternatives presented to you, doesn't mean you were forced into the one you did pick.
That's the thing I really dislike about libertarians, they insist that taxes are robbing them at gun point, but the reality is they are merely being forced to hold up their end a contract. However, once the contract is between themselves and a government somehow libertarians shouldn't be held to their responsibilities.
I, obviously, don't agree. Then again, I don't consider to be much morality in voting. It's politics. The first rule is that you're not going to agree with anyone on everything or everyone on anything. You have to pick and choose what's important to you and choose the person who's most like you on the important issues.
If you absolutely can't find anyone like you on the issues that important to you, you should probably be running for office.
Actually, I think that merely talking about change is one of the least effective ways to bring it about. It's even less effective when you admit you don't vote. It makes you seem like a blow hard who likes to talk about change but can't even be bothered to make a token effort to bring about those changes.
I doubt I'm the only one who gets that impression of you, and that makes your campaign of talking about change a big joke.
I think those are called primaries. Actually, if you don't like a candidate who can be elected, you should vote for one who can't.
There are 2 reasons this is good advice for everyone:
1) Gerrymandering is based on predictable 2 party politics, if the 50% of the population who don't vote, instead voted randomly for the parties that didn't "have a chance", suddenly they would and all the statistical models predicting the results of gerrymandering would be broken. Optimizing for 1 of 2 parties is easy, optimizing for 1 of 5 parties is much more difficult.
2) Giving your vote to neither the Democrats nor the Republicans but to some other party increases the credibility of all other parties. If one party or the other is winning with 30% of the popular vote rather than 50.1% then maybe, just maybe, you'll start to see other voices in the political process. This is not limited to the presidency.
Not voting is the easy way out. If you want change make sure you get counted. If everyone who didn't vote, did, American elections would be a vastly different thing.
Actually, that would have given a much more accurate picture of the situation. For having the full support of an entrenched monopoly with restrictive and anti-competitive deals with major computer distributions, Vista is doing remarkably poorly.
However, the poor showing isn't benefiting their competitors all that much.
You always have the right to refuse citizenship in the country in which you were born. In most countries Citizenship is given at birth, however, it is not free. It carries duties as well as privileges. That is life, there is no free ride.
He had the moral ground, then he gave it away by backing down on waterboarding.
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/13/mccain-waterboarding-fail/
He voted against the ban on waterboarding.
Unfortunately, as the previous poster indicated, McCain's views on what is and is not torture and what is and is not America have proven to be flexible when his party put pressure on him.
Probably both.
The main difference between private charity and government welfare funded by taxes isn't that one is voluntary and one is not. You have, in practice, agreed to pay taxes by accepting citizenship in your home country.
The main difference is that one is inadequate and the other is inefficient.
Also you should be aware that Obama's campaign was not financed in the same way that most other campaigns are. He drew the majority of his money from small donations much like the Dean campaign did. He's so far avoided huge donations from political lobby groups, and thus owes relatively few favors to the typical moochers in Washington.
Actually, that's also why leftism is good in moderation. It gives to those who haven't earned it yet, and likely would never have a chance to earn it.
Sometimes you've got to go beyond who earned what and look at what might be best for everyone. Condemning someone to poverty and slave wage labour because that's what their parents were condemned to is not good for the country.
There is a good balance between the extremes where the wealthy keep most of the wealth they earned, and some of that wealth is used to guarantee that new wealth can be produced by as many of the next generation as possible. Some of that money will be wasted on people who won't succeed but the rewards generated by the few who do always seem to outweigh the costs after the fact.
A very cynical part of me thinks McCain is being set up for failure. It seems like the social conservatives and born again Christians should not rally around McCain unless he's clearly going to win. Instead they're should hang back and let him get crushed by the Democrats. Then they'll use his defeat as proof that the party should have selected a socially conservative born-again candidate. In the end they'll gather more power to themselves and wait for the Democrats to screw up something to feed the attack machine to get back in power.
In short, if the republicans lose either the religious zealots, warmongers and lobbyist puppets will get purged, or if they have already gathered enough power unto themselves, it will they who are doing the purging. Either way, the republican party is headed for serious trouble if they don't win the next presidential election, which there is every indication that they will not.
Personally, I think the "moral copyrights" are the single most important part of copyright law. In today's world, as long as you're willing to work, fame is easily translated into money.
For example in the music industry, it is common for artists to be poorly paid. Popular bands are often barely living above the poverty line based on the revenues earned from their CDs sales (the piracy issue that receives the most attention). In reality, most performers earn the majority of their money either through long term ownership of the rights to their music (which they are often forced or tricked into signing away with their first recording deal), or through revenues generated by concerts and collateral merchandising.
The important lesson to learn is that piracy has little direct impact on recording artists. The majority (90-95%) of the money goes to the music labels and middlemen.
Similarly, it's long been known that movie studios somehow manage to never make any money on any movie. In large part this explains why movie actors get such huge upfront fees. If they agree to a lesser fee with a percentage of the residuals, there just never seem to be any. Thus by the very nature of the business piracy mostly affects the producers who are the only people still making money after the movie has been released. The only time an actor or director is actually hurt by piracy is when they are also a producer for the film.
The people who argue for expanded copyright laws, almost always use the excuse that the laws are not to benefit themselves but to benefit people you actually like. However, in all truthfulness, any benefits will be hijacked by the labels and the studios long before it gets to anyone else.
Much of the real argument over copyright is about control and manipulation rather than making things better for the creators of artist content. Stronger copyright laws benefit the centralization of artist production into the hands of a few groups. When they band together they can afford high paid lobbyists and lawyers. The lobbyists work to further tip the field in favour of the labels and the lawyers harass anyone who has success outside of their oligopoly with the simple intent of ruining them through frivolous lawsuits and thus protection the oligopoly.
Weaker copyright laws (up to a point) actually benefit the artists by weakening the label's hold and thus making it less desirable to deal with them unless they're offering a reasonable deal. Legal protections against circumvention disproportionately benefit the people who deal with masses of content and thus the cost of the security mechanism can be amortized across all the handled content. Thus it is a centralizing factor, and when combined with another seemingly innocent centralizer that requires video or music players to only play "authorized" content, you can easily see how the copyright protection mechanism has been turned into a competitive advantage that favors the established parties, and thus has raised the barrier to entry to the artistic industries and simultaneously have limited competition. Weaker copyright laws can also make it less desirable for the labels to pressure the artists into giving the rights to their work to the labels as a condition of working with the label. If the rights are worth less financially, then there is simply less incentive for the labels to wrestle control away from the actual creators.
I think you're both wrong. The fan owns the copyright to his recording regardless of the presence of a recording crew. If 2 people take 2 different pictures of the same building, there are 2 different copyrights and neither infringes on the other. This principle applies in exactly the same way to 2 separate recordings of a performance.
The only way that Prince could be entitled to the copyright on the fan's video is if it were not held in a public place and there was a contract included in the entry requirements that designed the copyright of any resulting recordings to the performer. Since it was a music festival with many performers it is unlikely that the festival would give Prince so much control over the event.
Assuming Radiohead actually does own the copyright on the song, they do not have any legal entitlement to the fan video, either. If Prince was not entitled to perform the song because he had no paid for the right to perform it (highly doubtful because his label likely already made the necessary arrangement with Radiohead's label) he (or his label) would be the only one who liable for the infringement and damages thus incurred.
In other words, Prince is just being the obsessive control freak that he is. Don't mistake audacity and obsession for legality.
I think you have missed a crucially important part of the law:
A performance can not be copyrighted.
Regardless of the amount of original or creative elements contained within it, a performance is simply not eligible for copyright protection. That is because it is a performance and is not fixed as required by the law. A written account of the performance can be copyrighted, a picture of the performance can be copyrighted, a recording (video or audio) of the performance can be copyrighted. The performance itself, can not be copyrighted.
Only the recording of the performance can be covered by copyright law, and that copyright goes to the recorder, not the performer. Now, if you're a smart performer, you have your own recorders who are working for you and are contractually obliged to transfer ownership of the copyright to you.
Third party recordings are covered by contractual laws, not copyright. You create a condition of entrance to the venue where the performance is to occur and you make one of the conditions that they agree to not make a recording of the performance, and furthermore establish a penalty that should they make a recording they forfeit all rights to it to the performer. If you perform in a public place, then you can not enforce any contractual requirements on those in attendance excepting that the local government specifically gives you such rights.
Simple answer: Neither.
Don't forget the holy wars over whether the universe is "covered with sprinkles" or "filled with jelly".
Coincidentally, Wii Eating Disorders is slated for release in late September/early October just in time for the holiday binging season.
Actually, I think he's judging the message sender by the choice of messenger or to use an aphorism "birds of a feather flock together".
I have ot point this out. I think it might just be because American laws allow partisan hacks to be appointed to run your elections.
In other countries we punish the mere appearance of impartiality in our electoral officers. Americans allow their officials to run the election and the campaign for one of the two front runners in that same election without any type of oversight.
It's really is no wonder that the elections officials act like partisan hacks. They are partisan hacks, and they were hired because they are partisan hacks and the people who hired them want them to act like partisan hacks. They're just doing the job they were paid to perform, that is making sure that elections are not run fairly and impartially but that their side wins at any cost.