> I would say it was your wife's fault, so do not waste time on lawsuit.
If his wife dropped her checkbook, and a thief then wrote a check against the account to steal money, you're saying that her carelessness is to blame and the thief shouldn't be prosecuted? Her carelessness does not excuse illegal behavior on anyone else's part. She should proceed with seeking legal recourse.
You're aware that writing post-dated checks is a criminal offense, right? It is literally illegal, although almost nobody gets charged with the offense. If you're post-dating checks under the assumption that the bank won't honor it until the date, don't. At best, they'll just process it anyway, and at worst, the company that you sent the check to can charge you with fraud. The fraud charge won't stick, but it's a stepping stone to charging you with writing post-dated checks.
> Sure now go lookup precedence this is free money.
No, it's not free money, it's fraud on her part. They issued her a card under false pretenses. That makes the card invalid. If she takes the card that she knows is invalid, and presents it to a merchant for goods or services (and I'll assume she won't bother to inform the merchant that she knows the card is invalid), she's committed fraud for personal financial gain against that merchant. Whether she has to pay the credit card company back is irrelevant, and the card company will respond to her comment about not signing the agreement by reversing the charges to the merchant. Then, she'll be criminally liable for fraud, and legally liable (to the merchant directly) for repayment.
> She should spend a lot of money on the credit card and not pay it back. If anyone asks she should tell them she never signed the credit agreement and is not responsible for repaying it.
This is fraud, and it's very illegal. Everyone is saying that she's not legally responsible for charges run up on the card, and there's a legal case that she doesn't have to repay the card issuer, since she didn't agree to receive the card. How does that excuse (for example) the debt to the store for the purchase of the TV, though? If she presented the card for payment, and knew when she did it that the card isn't valid, she defrauded the store, and will be held legally liable, no matter what happens with the credit card company. That will land her in prison, and she'll still owe the store for the TV.
This is criminal advice. Please ignore any comments saying you can run up the balance of the card with impunity.
> As soon as your wife threw the application in the trash, she made it public knowledge.
Irrelevant point. By your logic, I could Google someone's particulars and file a credit card application on their behalf, without their knowledge or permission. The information does not become public knowledge in the legal sense when she throws it away, only that it's no longer protected by her Fourth Amendment rights. This does not give any private entity any right to distribute that information, and it most certainly does not give them the right to enter her into legal contracts using it.
> RUN UP THE BILL!!! You have no contractual obligation to pay them anything.
This is patently false, and following this advice could easily land you in jail for fraud. Because you didn't sign the form, you don't owe them anything for sending you the card, but if you use it, you are promising to conform to the cardholder agreement. If you claim after the fact that it's not valid because you never signed the form, you won't be held legally liable for the debt by the credit card company. The catch is that you presented the card to whoever you bought stuff from as a valid account, which it wasn't (and they can prove you did it on purpose because you know the cardholder contract isn't valid), thereby committing fraud for personal financial gain. Go directly to jail, and end up paying the merchant for the stuff directly anyway.
> There's hypocrisy in berating Microsoft for its monopoly based on closed source and yet a supporting state-mandated monopoly of Linux.
Incorrect, and irrelevant. Firstly, Massachusetts didn't mandate "open source", they mandated "open standards", which is only functionally the same because Microsoft chooses to maintain complete control over their own data formats. If they wished to produce MS Word-Open, which supported open standards of data storage, they'd be free to join in the bids for Massachusetts government agencies. Secondly, your description of a "monopoly of Linux" is nonsensical, just as declaring a "monopoly of English". Anyone, including Microsoft and Apple, can publish a Linux distro, and no one company or body can control what happens in all Linux distros. Therefore, there is no restriction to entry, and no centralized control, so using the term "monopoly" is meaningless.
Since the two situations (single vendor, control of a proprietary data format set versus multivendor, no control of data format sets) are not comparable, disparaging one while advocating the other is not hypocritical.
> Now, lets propose an experiment. Find a small isolated island and drop off a few hundred dogs of all different breeds. Every day we'll drop off food to make sure they get fed. Question is.... how many breeds will exist on the island after a hundred years? What you will find is that differences in species tend to get bred out unless the breeding is controlled. The number of breeds of dogs on the island will converge not diverge. This is one example of observations not supporting evolution. And yet in many places, discussion of these same facts could lead to a teacher getting fired.
Here's the curious part: your experiment actually goes a long way toward proving natural selection as a force for evolution, despite your presenting it as a refutation. It seems logical that the dogs would breed out until they were all the same, but that's only because your experiment removes the very mechanism by which evolution is purported to occur. If you provide the dogs with plentiful food (and presumably put them on an island that is neither so cold that they'd die of exposure if they slept outside nor so hot they'd die of heatstroke or thirst), there's no reason for the dogs to adapt to the environment at all, so any member can breed with any other member and the puppies will have about the same chance of surviving. Now, what if we did what you said, but put the food in ten foot long tubes that were only eight inches in diameter, to replicate an environment where the only food is burrowing small animals? Now how would your dogs fare, especially the ones that didn't fit in the tubes? Soon, you'd have an island full of dachshund-looking dogs, possibly with a second breed of dogs on the surface well adapted to hunting dachshunds. So you see, this does not constitute disproof of the mechanism of natural selection, but in reality it goes to prove it by showing that if there are no environmental pressures for different breeds, they disappear.
> For example, the fruit fly experiments have shown that aberations can occur to produce an extra set of wings. This seems to support evolution on the surface. However, if you look a little closer, you will find that there are no muscles behind those wings and that these mutations die off quickly when placed outside the
controlled environment (laboratory). This results in a net gain of "0" on the evolutionary scale.
Again, you're misconsidering. The appearance of the second set of wings is not considered proof of evolution, it's proof of mutation. Second, the fact that two-wing mayflies die off while one-wing mayflies surivive indicates that one-wing mayflies are better adapted to their environment, so they survive while their two-wing brothers die off. That is specifically the mechanism of natural selection, which goes toward proving the theory of evolving life, not against it. After all, if natural selection didn't work, why wouldn't both the one- and two-wing models survive together?
> What ever happened to the scientific method being used in scientific experiments? Why aren't we allowed to question of the Theory of Evolution? What makes it different from every other area of science?
Um, an awful lot of people have questioned the theory of evolution, but as you can see from the problems presented above, there are many situations where something has been presented as disproof in a very unscientific manner, as your dogs-on-island theory, in which you propose only one experimental situation and no controls (like putting the dogs on another island without outside food) or changes (like the food in pipes that I suggest) and then concluding from the very unscientific experiment that the theory is invalidated. We are allowed to question the theory of evolution, just not by using limited or biased experiments, since that's not following the scientific method.
> If observations don't support the theory, you don't throw out the observations, you throw out the theory. And yet this is what we have in the sci
> Since the theory of evolution states that everything evolved by pure chance without any intelligent design...
BZZZT. This is not what the theory of evolution says. Reread it and try again, being careful not to confuse the terms "intelligent design" with "environmental constants".
>...I see nothing wrong with presenting both ideas in the proper light...
And there, in one simple phrase, is the reason why Creationism does not belong in a school. Why is it that you present the idea of evolution, and the idea of creation, and don't cover the literal thousands of other "beginning of time" theories that exist all over the world? You don't want to teach any theory of creation other than your own personal version, and by not presenting your particular creation theory among a hundred other creation theories, you seek to give it a level of validity above any of those "other" theories. Isn't this what you accuse evolutionists of doing?
When you're willing to present any religious theory other than your own as a valid "theory", then you can readdress the issue. For now, you're just forcing your religion into the classroom as "scientific".
You cite as your proof of why Prohibition ended a site that contains in the very first paragraph the following:
Everyone, men, women, and even children were drinking huge amounts of alcohol without any feeling of doing something bad. Alcohol was part of daily life. Nearly everyone was addicted to it.
You can't seriously expect me to consider this a reliable source of information about Prohibition, can you? It's possible that the analyses presented here are sound, but it seems biased, leading me to distrust anything that isn't a date. Do you have other sources? All of the sources I found concerning Prohibition stated or implied that the unenforceability was the main reason for repeal, but tax monies were simply applied as a method for suppression by governments that wanted to remain dry but couldn't muster the necessary support, or wanted to repeal but needed to do something to assuage the Prohibitonists.
> If we don't like a law, we shouldn't break it and hope that a massive rebellion causes the law
to stop functioning.
Well, there have been a few examples of civil disobedience that demonstrate that this is sometimes an effective way to approach this problem, especially when used by those who do not have the political or monetary resources necessary to fight the legal battles you hold in such high regard. Do you really think that the American public defeated Prohibition by fighting it in court, or with fliers handed out on street corners?
> Heck, I believe that I presented good, valid arguments.
You did, actually.
> Out of curiousity, are you telling me that it
should be legal to hand out copies of copyrighted work?
But this isn't necessarily one of them. Your implication relies on an assumption, and that's where we part company. See, I feel that it's wrong to violate copyright wholesale, since it's designed to protect creators' value streams for the protected content. Where we part company, however, is in how far that protection should go. There is no valid reason, based on the reasons for copyright to exist in the first place, why Mickey Mouse should not be in the public domain. His creator has been dead for decades, and benefitted vastly from copyright during his life. The sole and complete reason he's not is that the Disney Corporation has poured a bunch of money into hyperextending what copyright means, so that they can continue to draw revenue exclusively from Mickey Mouse. So, in answer to your question, I think it should not be legal to hand out copies of copyrighted work, but we disagree greatly on what "copyrighted work" should mean. When you can offer a valid reason why it should be considered illegal to go into a music library, pull a book of classical piano pieces that's been out of print for thirty years by a company defunct for twenty, and scan a copy of one of the pieces for me and my friends to use, then I might agree entirely with your assessment.
> That case is only when every single CD sells. If half the CDs sell, or a quarter, or maybe none of them do, then that significantly changes the equation.
Not for the artist. Read what I wrote again. It's not the advance that does them in, it's the expenses. Since the record company determines the expenses, and does not consult (or need the approval of) the artist(s), the expense list can be as big as the record company wants it to be. Because the expenses are recaptured after the advance, that means that the record company basically determines the point at which the artist starts making any money. Yes, it's true that the risk is more strongly on the record company, but since they stand to gain much more than the artist that stands to reason. The problem becomes when the record sells well enough to make the record company a big pile of money, but the artist doesn't see any of that money because the contract is designed to divorce them from any kind of financial control over the album. Even more importantly, because the contract is written to describe the band as doing "work for hire", the copyrights for the result are held by the company, so even when the band decides to go out on the road to make up the losses they incurred making the album, the record company determines how much money they make (and indeed, whether they can even perform at all). These companies can and have forbidden artists from performing their own work in the past, and even went so far as to forbid Prince from using his own stage name in "unapproved" concerts (I bet you thought he changed his name to a symbol and wrote "slave" on his forehead just to be pretentious, didn't you?).
One other thing you need to consider is that the advance is given to the band for making an album, but it's not "pay" for the band's time. The band needs to spend the vast majority of that money to make the album itself, from paying studio and post-production, to cover art costs and such. Since they own nothing of the result (remember, the company owns all the copyrights), it's synonymous to your boss handing you a $2,000 bonus and telling you to go buy a new PC to work on, which you can only use for the year in which you bought it, only for work use, and it's not yours when you're done. Oh, and the first $2,000 of your paycheck will be recaptured to pay for the PC, but if the company doesn't make any money, it's okay, you won't have to pay back the two grand.
So, no, I don't see any situation where any artist has gotten a decent deal out of a recording contract, and since the industry has become very difficult to penetrate without an established record company to back you up, I don't see that there's enough difference to make the distinction.
> Given the amounts the artists have to pay out of their advance on basic expenses, there'd be a hell of a lot of bankrupt artists around if most of them had to pay their advances back! It doesn't work like that, few if any artists would even sign up if it did.
Um, there are a hell of a lot of bankrupt artists out there, and they do have to pay the advance back. See, the contract is written to work royalty recoup before expenses. In the example, the band gets fronted $1M for the record, and they hit the studio. Expenses end up on top of that (say $200K). Now, when the record starts to sell, the record company pays the band 20 percent of the proceeds, but then takes it back to recoup the original $1M. If the record grosses $5M, they recoup the entirety of the advance. Now why that doesn't count as having to pay it back is only academic. It's true that the band doesn't have to pay it back if royalties don't cover the advance, but they still have to pay it back before they make any money.
Oh, and did you forget the $200K in additional expenses? If the record makes $4M, not a dime of the $200K is paid off, and that money is indeed recoverable, which means that the record company makes $2.8M (that's the $4M in sales minus the $1M advance minus the $200K) and can sue the band for the $200K expenses (but not the leftover $200K in unrecouped advance), which forces the band to declare bankruptcy and break up, never to perform under the now-defunct name again. Since they got advanced $200K that they never repaid, assuming five members in the band, they each made $40K for one year, and had to drop the band at the end of that one year. The national average for a manager at a convenience store in the U.S. is $38K a year, and you get to keep the job from year to year, and you get a benefits package.
...for the rest of the musicians in the business. J.Lo represents the top.01 percent of musicians in the industry (that's one hundreth of one hundreth of all people playing music for a living). For the vast majority of musicians, a record contract is a fast route to bankruptcy, which is what the "one-hit wonder" phenomenon is all about. More than a two thirds of professional musicians can't make a living wage doing an album, because the contracts are so draconian that they have to be a huge success before they can pull in a dime. It's telling that Glenn Campbell, a fellow who has had hundreds of songs on the radio and twenty successful albums, has said that he has consistently lost money on making records because of the contracts.
Oh, and by the way, less than one percent of albums sold sell more than one million copies. So next time you pick up a million-seller and have trouble shedding a tear for the artist, consider the 99 other artists who didn't get a thing for all the work (while the record company did) or the 54 who had to declare bankruptcy because they owed so much money to the record company that they couldn't pay it back, while the company actually turned a net profit on the whole thing.
Oh, and one last thing. Musical tastes aside, any artist you've heard of on the national circuit is far, far above "mediocre" in terms of commercial success. Puff Daddy may not be to your liking, but saying his success is mediocre is pure insult to the venue bands that play the clubs all around your house, who can only dream of being as well recognized.
> Talking of game quality... isn't that why Atari went bust?
Not really. The reason Atari went under is that they were not so heavily into home systems as they were into arcade games (the big kind you see in the photos), and the money from that market dried up when people started getting home consoles and computer games. They were heavily invested in a market that died out from under them.
I'm not sure if you're serious about this or not, so I'll take the serious tack in addressing it:
1.) Control: Driving an ultralight aircraft is not for the timid, or the unpracticed. It's a very dangerous vehicle, and failure in control is very often fatal. Not so with a ground vehicle. I can't imagine what it'd be like trying to fly an ultralight near a city, but let's just say I wouldn't want to be piloting it. The wind currents alone would be a complete nightmare. It's also virtually impossible to fly an ultralight in inclement weather, so you'd need some other way to get to work in rain or snow.
2.) Safety: Not only is an ultralight hard to handle, in the case of mechanical failure, you've got a rough ride to the ground in the best of circumstances. If your car stalls, you roll to a stop. Any mechanical failure other than engine trouble is likely to cause an ultralight to fall (think broken wing strut or a thrown propeller, or a landing wheel gone flat that'll cause a wreck when you touch down).
3.) Economy: In the best conditions (always flying with the wind, being able to fly straight to your destination instead of routing around flight lanes and airports), ultralights are not very fuel-economical. Most times, that's not the issue, since people fly these things for recreation, but it wouldn't save you much in operating costs to fly to work every day. This is not to mention that the insurance bill would be astronomical.
4.) Immobility: You can only take it from airstrip to airstrip. Your comment about powered wheels is only feasible if you invent some mechanism for removing and stowing the wings, since they'd be too wide for most motorways, and if you drove at the speed of traffic you'd lift off the road. At that point, you'd essentially be commuting on a busy roadway in a go-cart, which goes back to the safety issue, since it's got to be light to fly, and light craft fare very badly in fender-benders.
> Right... 'Cause all normal power boats have enclosed tops...
This is insightful? Most normal power boats sit the pilot six feet above the waterline. Is the same true of this craft? To be insightful, you'd need to compare this craft to a johnboat going at 30 MPH.
> OK, here are my alternatives to fossil fuels: Renewable, non-polluting resources. We have wind turbines on our power grid here, and a surprising number of people have voluntarily been paying a premium on their monthly power bills to support it.
I agree that wind power is a good source of energy, but it's not feasible for good portions of the U.S.. We're getting to the point where windscrews are efficient enough for widespread power generation, but it's not yet a reasonable alternative for many people.
> Solar power is equally viable, especially with the current high-efficiency cells.
Oops. Not with you on this one. You're forgetting one of the hidden costs of solar power, and that is the hideously toxic slime that's generated by manufacturing them. Until the manufacturing process is cleaner, it's not a non-polluting energy source by any means. Also, the panels themselves lose efficiency over time, so as they wear out they need to be replaced, and the old ones disposed of, and a solar panel isn't the most environmentally friendly piece of junk I can imagine.
> And as far as reduced energy consumption, I am DEFINITELY suggesting that!
Hey, I'm with you all the way here. I merely pointed out that it's not a very popular stance, so your discussions need to address better how reducing energy consumption can benefit the average person, or you will indeed be pissing in the ocean.
> Well, there's actually a power source where I live which is better than burning wood or hitching animals to something that rotates. It's called "falling water".
Damming has been used to great effect in many places, but it's not the panacea that some would make it out to be. Like any other source of energy, it isn't "free" for the taking. Water wheels are not a reliable source of electric power, since if the water level by the wheel falls it stops turning (and both the Charles and the Merrimack rivers in your area suffer from large depth fluctuations), so you need to dam the river and build a reservoir behind the dam to compensate. This profoundly affects the nature of the river, from ecology to navigability. In some cases, the changes can be so severe that it's not worth the damage to do it. It seems in your area that the power companies are tending more toward nuclear plants than other alternatives to oil-fired generation plants, but assuming that simply harnessing the waterways would necessarily be better than that is too simplistic.
> It's ENTIRELY rational to plan for long term stability and viability. It's irrational (but entirely expected) that we continually fail to move away from a rapidly dwindling resource that our entire society is based on.
It is, but you don't offer any reason why switching from fossil fuels to something else right now constitutes long term stability. And there are long-running arguments about just how rapidly the resource is dwindling. I'm in the camp that thinks they're falling faster than most, but even the most conservative estimates place the beginnings of shortages more than 20 years out.
> A statement like this implies that the purpose of resources is to be consumed--by us.
Um, switching to a different source of energy is still consuming resources. It's just different resources. If your intention is to suggest reduced energy consumption on the whole, I respectfully point out that your opinion is rather unpopular.
> Your arguments will fail if the "economic incentive" and time available to create new sources of energy as oil runs out is not sufficient to create the amount of energy and the entire technology infrastructure that we will
actually need or desire for our purposes.
And they won't fail if the time available is sufficient, or there's a watershed change in energy. Can you accurately predict which will happen?
> It takes time and energy to create alternate-source power-stations, cars, distribution systems. What happens if the "natural demand curve" that you are describing causes oil to become scarce so fast that there isn't enough of it left to build all the "alternative fuel sources" to replace oil itself? Answer: our available energy levels go way way down and mostly gets diverted to trying to create more alternative fuel sources, which means for 5 or 10 years you don't get power to run your washing machine and only important people get cars. Not an ideal solution, eh? Don't you wish you had consciously chosen to pay an extra 10% for fuel in the prior 10 years to develop the alternative-power-sources *before* they were needed, instead of "letting the
market decide"?
See, here's the fun in playing "what if" games: they work both ways. What if we discover a way to harness gravitation for energy in a new way, such that we don't need to use fossil fuels much at all? Won't you be pissed at spending that extra 10 percent for ten years only to find out we're not going to run out of oil after all?
It seems that an awful lot of the replies to my post assume that I think that (A) the "market" is the only way to solve the energy problem, or (B) there is no energy problem, or (C) I think we should burn fossil fuels as fast as we can manage. None of these assumptions is correct in the least. However, I'm not going to join in with the crowd saying we need to move to something other than fossil fuels, wholesale, in the next decade or so, because that's not at all realistic, nor necessary. Sure, it's possible that the energy infrastructure will crash so quickly that we'll be left with major shortages, I just haven't seen any evidence that it's likely. It's more likely that prices will indeed drive the move to lower fossil fuel consumption. The same oil industry that's in power today couldn't prevent the American public from buying very fuel-efficient cars in the '70s, when prices at the pump pushed people to react with their wallets, and nobody has presented a reasonable argument why this isn't what'll happen with the next oil crunch as well.
Slashdot Mirror
> I would say it was your wife's fault, so do not waste time on lawsuit.
If his wife dropped her checkbook, and a thief then wrote a check against the account to steal money, you're saying that her carelessness is to blame and the thief shouldn't be prosecuted? Her carelessness does not excuse illegal behavior on anyone else's part. She should proceed with seeking legal recourse.
Virg
You're aware that writing post-dated checks is a criminal offense, right? It is literally illegal, although almost nobody gets charged with the offense. If you're post-dating checks under the assumption that the bank won't honor it until the date, don't. At best, they'll just process it anyway, and at worst, the company that you sent the check to can charge you with fraud. The fraud charge won't stick, but it's a stepping stone to charging you with writing post-dated checks.
Virg
> Sure now go lookup precedence this is free money.
No, it's not free money, it's fraud on her part. They issued her a card under false pretenses. That makes the card invalid. If she takes the card that she knows is invalid, and presents it to a merchant for goods or services (and I'll assume she won't bother to inform the merchant that she knows the card is invalid), she's committed fraud for personal financial gain against that merchant. Whether she has to pay the credit card company back is irrelevant, and the card company will respond to her comment about not signing the agreement by reversing the charges to the merchant. Then, she'll be criminally liable for fraud, and legally liable (to the merchant directly) for repayment.
Dipshit.
Virg
> She should spend a lot of money on the credit card and not pay it back. If anyone asks she should tell them she never signed the credit agreement and is not responsible for repaying it.
This is fraud, and it's very illegal. Everyone is saying that she's not legally responsible for charges run up on the card, and there's a legal case that she doesn't have to repay the card issuer, since she didn't agree to receive the card. How does that excuse (for example) the debt to the store for the purchase of the TV, though? If she presented the card for payment, and knew when she did it that the card isn't valid, she defrauded the store, and will be held legally liable, no matter what happens with the credit card company. That will land her in prison, and she'll still owe the store for the TV.
This is criminal advice. Please ignore any comments saying you can run up the balance of the card with impunity.
Virg
> As soon as your wife threw the application in the trash, she made it public knowledge.
Irrelevant point. By your logic, I could Google someone's particulars and file a credit card application on their behalf, without their knowledge or permission. The information does not become public knowledge in the legal sense when she throws it away, only that it's no longer protected by her Fourth Amendment rights. This does not give any private entity any right to distribute that information, and it most certainly does not give them the right to enter her into legal contracts using it.
Virg
> RUN UP THE BILL!!! You have no contractual obligation to pay them anything.
This is patently false, and following this advice could easily land you in jail for fraud. Because you didn't sign the form, you don't owe them anything for sending you the card, but if you use it, you are promising to conform to the cardholder agreement. If you claim after the fact that it's not valid because you never signed the form, you won't be held legally liable for the debt by the credit card company. The catch is that you presented the card to whoever you bought stuff from as a valid account, which it wasn't (and they can prove you did it on purpose because you know the cardholder contract isn't valid), thereby committing fraud for personal financial gain. Go directly to jail, and end up paying the merchant for the stuff directly anyway.
I say again, ignore this advice. It's criminal.
Virg
> There's hypocrisy in berating Microsoft for its monopoly based on closed source and yet a supporting state-mandated monopoly of Linux.
Incorrect, and irrelevant. Firstly, Massachusetts didn't mandate "open source", they mandated "open standards", which is only functionally the same because Microsoft chooses to maintain complete control over their own data formats. If they wished to produce MS Word-Open, which supported open standards of data storage, they'd be free to join in the bids for Massachusetts government agencies. Secondly, your description of a "monopoly of Linux" is nonsensical, just as declaring a "monopoly of English". Anyone, including Microsoft and Apple, can publish a Linux distro, and no one company or body can control what happens in all Linux distros. Therefore, there is no restriction to entry, and no centralized control, so using the term "monopoly" is meaningless.
Since the two situations (single vendor, control of a proprietary data format set versus multivendor, no control of data format sets) are not comparable, disparaging one while advocating the other is not hypocritical.
Virg
> Now, lets propose an experiment. Find a small isolated island and drop off a few hundred dogs of all different breeds. Every day we'll drop off food to make sure they get fed. Question is.... how many breeds will exist on the island after a hundred years? What you will find is that differences in species tend to get bred out unless the breeding is controlled. The number of breeds of dogs on the island will converge not diverge. This is one example of observations not supporting evolution. And yet in many places, discussion of these same facts could lead to a teacher getting fired.
Here's the curious part: your experiment actually goes a long way toward proving natural selection as a force for evolution, despite your presenting it as a refutation. It seems logical that the dogs would breed out until they were all the same, but that's only because your experiment removes the very mechanism by which evolution is purported to occur. If you provide the dogs with plentiful food (and presumably put them on an island that is neither so cold that they'd die of exposure if they slept outside nor so hot they'd die of heatstroke or thirst), there's no reason for the dogs to adapt to the environment at all, so any member can breed with any other member and the puppies will have about the same chance of surviving. Now, what if we did what you said, but put the food in ten foot long tubes that were only eight inches in diameter, to replicate an environment where the only food is burrowing small animals? Now how would your dogs fare, especially the ones that didn't fit in the tubes? Soon, you'd have an island full of dachshund-looking dogs, possibly with a second breed of dogs on the surface well adapted to hunting dachshunds. So you see, this does not constitute disproof of the mechanism of natural selection, but in reality it goes to prove it by showing that if there are no environmental pressures for different breeds, they disappear.
> For example, the fruit fly experiments have shown that aberations can occur to produce an extra set of wings. This seems to support evolution on the surface. However, if you look a little closer, you will find that there are no muscles behind those wings and that these mutations die off quickly when placed outside the controlled environment (laboratory). This results in a net gain of "0" on the evolutionary scale.
Again, you're misconsidering. The appearance of the second set of wings is not considered proof of evolution, it's proof of mutation. Second, the fact that two-wing mayflies die off while one-wing mayflies surivive indicates that one-wing mayflies are better adapted to their environment, so they survive while their two-wing brothers die off. That is specifically the mechanism of natural selection, which goes toward proving the theory of evolving life, not against it. After all, if natural selection didn't work, why wouldn't both the one- and two-wing models survive together?
> What ever happened to the scientific method being used in scientific experiments? Why aren't we allowed to question of the Theory of Evolution? What makes it different from every other area of science?
Um, an awful lot of people have questioned the theory of evolution, but as you can see from the problems presented above, there are many situations where something has been presented as disproof in a very unscientific manner, as your dogs-on-island theory, in which you propose only one experimental situation and no controls (like putting the dogs on another island without outside food) or changes (like the food in pipes that I suggest) and then concluding from the very unscientific experiment that the theory is invalidated. We are allowed to question the theory of evolution, just not by using limited or biased experiments, since that's not following the scientific method.
> If observations don't support the theory, you don't throw out the observations, you throw out the theory. And yet this is what we have in the sci
> Since the theory of evolution states that everything evolved by pure chance without any intelligent design...
BZZZT. This is not what the theory of evolution says. Reread it and try again, being careful not to confuse the terms "intelligent design" with "environmental constants".
Virg
> ...I see nothing wrong with presenting both ideas in the proper light...
And there, in one simple phrase, is the reason why Creationism does not belong in a school. Why is it that you present the idea of evolution, and the idea of creation, and don't cover the literal thousands of other "beginning of time" theories that exist all over the world? You don't want to teach any theory of creation other than your own personal version, and by not presenting your particular creation theory among a hundred other creation theories, you seek to give it a level of validity above any of those "other" theories. Isn't this what you accuse evolutionists of doing?
When you're willing to present any religious theory other than your own as a valid "theory", then you can readdress the issue. For now, you're just forcing your religion into the classroom as "scientific".
Virg
Virg
> If we don't like a law, we shouldn't break it and hope that a massive rebellion causes the law to stop functioning.
Well, there have been a few examples of civil disobedience that demonstrate that this is sometimes an effective way to approach this problem, especially when used by those who do not have the political or monetary resources necessary to fight the legal battles you hold in such high regard. Do you really think that the American public defeated Prohibition by fighting it in court, or with fliers handed out on street corners?
Virg
> Heck, I believe that I presented good, valid arguments.
You did, actually.
> Out of curiousity, are you telling me that it should be legal to hand out copies of copyrighted work?
But this isn't necessarily one of them. Your implication relies on an assumption, and that's where we part company. See, I feel that it's wrong to violate copyright wholesale, since it's designed to protect creators' value streams for the protected content. Where we part company, however, is in how far that protection should go. There is no valid reason, based on the reasons for copyright to exist in the first place, why Mickey Mouse should not be in the public domain. His creator has been dead for decades, and benefitted vastly from copyright during his life. The sole and complete reason he's not is that the Disney Corporation has poured a bunch of money into hyperextending what copyright means, so that they can continue to draw revenue exclusively from Mickey Mouse. So, in answer to your question, I think it should not be legal to hand out copies of copyrighted work, but we disagree greatly on what "copyrighted work" should mean. When you can offer a valid reason why it should be considered illegal to go into a music library, pull a book of classical piano pieces that's been out of print for thirty years by a company defunct for twenty, and scan a copy of one of the pieces for me and my friends to use, then I might agree entirely with your assessment.
Virg
> That case is only when every single CD sells. If half the CDs sell, or a quarter, or maybe none of them do, then that significantly changes the equation.
Not for the artist. Read what I wrote again. It's not the advance that does them in, it's the expenses. Since the record company determines the expenses, and does not consult (or need the approval of) the artist(s), the expense list can be as big as the record company wants it to be. Because the expenses are recaptured after the advance, that means that the record company basically determines the point at which the artist starts making any money. Yes, it's true that the risk is more strongly on the record company, but since they stand to gain much more than the artist that stands to reason. The problem becomes when the record sells well enough to make the record company a big pile of money, but the artist doesn't see any of that money because the contract is designed to divorce them from any kind of financial control over the album. Even more importantly, because the contract is written to describe the band as doing "work for hire", the copyrights for the result are held by the company, so even when the band decides to go out on the road to make up the losses they incurred making the album, the record company determines how much money they make (and indeed, whether they can even perform at all). These companies can and have forbidden artists from performing their own work in the past, and even went so far as to forbid Prince from using his own stage name in "unapproved" concerts (I bet you thought he changed his name to a symbol and wrote "slave" on his forehead just to be pretentious, didn't you?).
One other thing you need to consider is that the advance is given to the band for making an album, but it's not "pay" for the band's time. The band needs to spend the vast majority of that money to make the album itself, from paying studio and post-production, to cover art costs and such. Since they own nothing of the result (remember, the company owns all the copyrights), it's synonymous to your boss handing you a $2,000 bonus and telling you to go buy a new PC to work on, which you can only use for the year in which you bought it, only for work use, and it's not yours when you're done. Oh, and the first $2,000 of your paycheck will be recaptured to pay for the PC, but if the company doesn't make any money, it's okay, you won't have to pay back the two grand.
So, no, I don't see any situation where any artist has gotten a decent deal out of a recording contract, and since the industry has become very difficult to penetrate without an established record company to back you up, I don't see that there's enough difference to make the distinction.
Virg
"Aggressivity"?!?
Virg
> Given the amounts the artists have to pay out of their advance on basic expenses, there'd be a hell of a lot of bankrupt artists around if most of them had to pay their advances back! It doesn't work like that, few if any artists would even sign up if it did.
Um, there are a hell of a lot of bankrupt artists out there, and they do have to pay the advance back. See, the contract is written to work royalty recoup before expenses. In the example, the band gets fronted $1M for the record, and they hit the studio. Expenses end up on top of that (say $200K). Now, when the record starts to sell, the record company pays the band 20 percent of the proceeds, but then takes it back to recoup the original $1M. If the record grosses $5M, they recoup the entirety of the advance. Now why that doesn't count as having to pay it back is only academic. It's true that the band doesn't have to pay it back if royalties don't cover the advance, but they still have to pay it back before they make any money.
Oh, and did you forget the $200K in additional expenses? If the record makes $4M, not a dime of the $200K is paid off, and that money is indeed recoverable, which means that the record company makes $2.8M (that's the $4M in sales minus the $1M advance minus the $200K) and can sue the band for the $200K expenses (but not the leftover $200K in unrecouped advance), which forces the band to declare bankruptcy and break up, never to perform under the now-defunct name again. Since they got advanced $200K that they never repaid, assuming five members in the band, they each made $40K for one year, and had to drop the band at the end of that one year. The national average for a manager at a convenience store in the U.S. is $38K a year, and you get to keep the job from year to year, and you get a benefits package.
Not pretty, is it?
Virg
...for the rest of the musicians in the business. J.Lo represents the top .01 percent of musicians in the industry (that's one hundreth of one hundreth of all people playing music for a living). For the vast majority of musicians, a record contract is a fast route to bankruptcy, which is what the "one-hit wonder" phenomenon is all about. More than a two thirds of professional musicians can't make a living wage doing an album, because the contracts are so draconian that they have to be a huge success before they can pull in a dime. It's telling that Glenn Campbell, a fellow who has had hundreds of songs on the radio and twenty successful albums, has said that he has consistently lost money on making records because of the contracts.
Oh, and by the way, less than one percent of albums sold sell more than one million copies. So next time you pick up a million-seller and have trouble shedding a tear for the artist, consider the 99 other artists who didn't get a thing for all the work (while the record company did) or the 54 who had to declare bankruptcy because they owed so much money to the record company that they couldn't pay it back, while the company actually turned a net profit on the whole thing.
Oh, and one last thing. Musical tastes aside, any artist you've heard of on the national circuit is far, far above "mediocre" in terms of commercial success. Puff Daddy may not be to your liking, but saying his success is mediocre is pure insult to the venue bands that play the clubs all around your house, who can only dream of being as well recognized.
Virg
I imagine he'd say, "Crikey! My last name starts with an I, not an E!"
Then he'd problably add, "Crocs rule!"
Virg
> Talking of game quality... isn't that why Atari went bust?
Not really. The reason Atari went under is that they were not so heavily into home systems as they were into arcade games (the big kind you see in the photos), and the money from that market dried up when people started getting home consoles and computer games. They were heavily invested in a market that died out from under them.
Virg
I'm not sure if you're serious about this or not, so I'll take the serious tack in addressing it:
1.) Control: Driving an ultralight aircraft is not for the timid, or the unpracticed. It's a very dangerous vehicle, and failure in control is very often fatal. Not so with a ground vehicle. I can't imagine what it'd be like trying to fly an ultralight near a city, but let's just say I wouldn't want to be piloting it. The wind currents alone would be a complete nightmare. It's also virtually impossible to fly an ultralight in inclement weather, so you'd need some other way to get to work in rain or snow.
2.) Safety: Not only is an ultralight hard to handle, in the case of mechanical failure, you've got a rough ride to the ground in the best of circumstances. If your car stalls, you roll to a stop. Any mechanical failure other than engine trouble is likely to cause an ultralight to fall (think broken wing strut or a thrown propeller, or a landing wheel gone flat that'll cause a wreck when you touch down).
3.) Economy: In the best conditions (always flying with the wind, being able to fly straight to your destination instead of routing around flight lanes and airports), ultralights are not very fuel-economical. Most times, that's not the issue, since people fly these things for recreation, but it wouldn't save you much in operating costs to fly to work every day. This is not to mention that the insurance bill would be astronomical.
4.) Immobility: You can only take it from airstrip to airstrip. Your comment about powered wheels is only feasible if you invent some mechanism for removing and stowing the wings, since they'd be too wide for most motorways, and if you drove at the speed of traffic you'd lift off the road. At that point, you'd essentially be commuting on a busy roadway in a go-cart, which goes back to the safety issue, since it's got to be light to fly, and light craft fare very badly in fender-benders.
So, at this point, ground vehicles are it.
Virg
> Right... 'Cause all normal power boats have enclosed tops...
This is insightful? Most normal power boats sit the pilot six feet above the waterline. Is the same true of this craft? To be insightful, you'd need to compare this craft to a johnboat going at 30 MPH.
Insightful, indeed.
Virg
> OK, here are my alternatives to fossil fuels: Renewable, non-polluting resources. We have wind turbines on our power grid here, and a surprising number of people have voluntarily been paying a premium on their monthly power bills to support it.
I agree that wind power is a good source of energy, but it's not feasible for good portions of the U.S.. We're getting to the point where windscrews are efficient enough for widespread power generation, but it's not yet a reasonable alternative for many people.
> Solar power is equally viable, especially with the current high-efficiency cells.
Oops. Not with you on this one. You're forgetting one of the hidden costs of solar power, and that is the hideously toxic slime that's generated by manufacturing them. Until the manufacturing process is cleaner, it's not a non-polluting energy source by any means. Also, the panels themselves lose efficiency over time, so as they wear out they need to be replaced, and the old ones disposed of, and a solar panel isn't the most environmentally friendly piece of junk I can imagine.
> And as far as reduced energy consumption, I am DEFINITELY suggesting that!
Hey, I'm with you all the way here. I merely pointed out that it's not a very popular stance, so your discussions need to address better how reducing energy consumption can benefit the average person, or you will indeed be pissing in the ocean.
Virg
> Well, there's actually a power source where I live which is better than burning wood or hitching animals to something that rotates. It's called "falling water".
Damming has been used to great effect in many places, but it's not the panacea that some would make it out to be. Like any other source of energy, it isn't "free" for the taking. Water wheels are not a reliable source of electric power, since if the water level by the wheel falls it stops turning (and both the Charles and the Merrimack rivers in your area suffer from large depth fluctuations), so you need to dam the river and build a reservoir behind the dam to compensate. This profoundly affects the nature of the river, from ecology to navigability. In some cases, the changes can be so severe that it's not worth the damage to do it. It seems in your area that the power companies are tending more toward nuclear plants than other alternatives to oil-fired generation plants, but assuming that simply harnessing the waterways would necessarily be better than that is too simplistic.
Virg
> It's ENTIRELY rational to plan for long term stability and viability. It's irrational (but entirely expected) that we continually fail to move away from a rapidly dwindling resource that our entire society is based on.
It is, but you don't offer any reason why switching from fossil fuels to something else right now constitutes long term stability. And there are long-running arguments about just how rapidly the resource is dwindling. I'm in the camp that thinks they're falling faster than most, but even the most conservative estimates place the beginnings of shortages more than 20 years out.
> A statement like this implies that the purpose of resources is to be consumed--by us.
Um, switching to a different source of energy is still consuming resources. It's just different resources. If your intention is to suggest reduced energy consumption on the whole, I respectfully point out that your opinion is rather unpopular.
Virg
> Your arguments will fail if the "economic incentive" and time available to create new sources of energy as oil runs out is not sufficient to create the amount of energy and the entire technology infrastructure that we will actually need or desire for our purposes.
And they won't fail if the time available is sufficient, or there's a watershed change in energy. Can you accurately predict which will happen?
> It takes time and energy to create alternate-source power-stations, cars, distribution systems. What happens if the "natural demand curve" that you are describing causes oil to become scarce so fast that there isn't enough of it left to build all the "alternative fuel sources" to replace oil itself? Answer: our available energy levels go way way down and mostly gets diverted to trying to create more alternative fuel sources, which means for 5 or 10 years you don't get power to run your washing machine and only important people get cars. Not an ideal solution, eh? Don't you wish you had consciously chosen to pay an extra 10% for fuel in the prior 10 years to develop the alternative-power-sources *before* they were needed, instead of "letting the market decide"?
See, here's the fun in playing "what if" games: they work both ways. What if we discover a way to harness gravitation for energy in a new way, such that we don't need to use fossil fuels much at all? Won't you be pissed at spending that extra 10 percent for ten years only to find out we're not going to run out of oil after all?
It seems that an awful lot of the replies to my post assume that I think that (A) the "market" is the only way to solve the energy problem, or (B) there is no energy problem, or (C) I think we should burn fossil fuels as fast as we can manage. None of these assumptions is correct in the least. However, I'm not going to join in with the crowd saying we need to move to something other than fossil fuels, wholesale, in the next decade or so, because that's not at all realistic, nor necessary. Sure, it's possible that the energy infrastructure will crash so quickly that we'll be left with major shortages, I just haven't seen any evidence that it's likely. It's more likely that prices will indeed drive the move to lower fossil fuel consumption. The same oil industry that's in power today couldn't prevent the American public from buying very fuel-efficient cars in the '70s, when prices at the pump pushed people to react with their wallets, and nobody has presented a reasonable argument why this isn't what'll happen with the next oil crunch as well.
Virg