It's a waste because your party won't get more votes than everyone else and if they don't, they have zero influence. As not enough people are willing to vote for a party they like (and let the Republicrats go to either side) third party votes have no effect on the process.
It's a fact, in a first-past-the-post system votes are wasted, they don't serve to elect anyone or set policy. In countries with Approval Voting your third-party vote might actually combine with other third-party votes and get someone a seat, somewhere in the country. As is, nothing. Nada. Zero.
Spoil your ballot. It'll at least show voter dissatisfaction, instead of apathy like not voting.
At times your vote could be the one that tips the balance between republicrat A and B, if there are differences between the republicrats and those differences are worth voting for (as I feel they are now) you might make a difference.
Your argument seems to be that you'll waste your vote by not voting, or waste it by voting for someone else.
My point is that your vote will never change anything. There's a miniscule chance that your vote might change something if cast for a republicrat, though the ammount of change it would make in the long-run is small, but multiply the two and it's still non-zero. More than if you don't vote.
Myself, were I in your position, I'd spoil my ballot. It has the same effect on the current election (zilch) but it's at least clear.
I find F9/11 to be insulting and counter-productive. Anyone with half a critical mind will dismiss it (like Fox news) for what it is: distorted partisan crap.
Yeah! I completely agree. Many of my leftist friends don't understand how I can dislike F9/11 even though I dislike Bush. Like you, I simply want to point out the true problems with Bush (and Kerry, etc) instead of listening to Rush Limbaugh or Michael Moore.
I feel that you are mostly right, but you miss the point that individualist types, those not conditioned to sit quietly in a desk and do what they're told, can be just as productive. There are many job opportunities for an independent contractor, in jobs ranging from construction to computer programming, to surgeon.
We need to make children do things they might not want to do, in order to assure that they have the tools to make something of themselves, but it's not our place to pick that niche for them.
But that's all true. Bush handled the 9/11 aftermath badly, look at Afghanistan and Iraq for many examples of when a clearer purpose, international support (not as hard to get as he said) and less lies would have helped.
And at least Kerry showed up for his military service.
I'm not a Kerry supporter, but I find it amusing that the Bush campaign is making a big deal of Kerry's political record.
Of course, to the extreme right, Kerry's questioning of the reasons for the Vietnam war are tantamount to treason.
Look at BC, they voted the NDP in to get rid of the old guys, then kicked out the NDP and got the Liberals. Fat lot of good any of that did.
The basic problem is that our first-past-the-post electoral system, it produces flip-flop results because it emphasizes the emotion on voting day. It doesn't take much of a scandal to boost one party 10% in the polls but that 10% can end up making a much larger difference with in seats.
Approval voting would go a long way towards fixing this country.
How do you work for change when nobody you vote for will ever get into power? The only people to lobby are those who have the most to lose if the system changes.
Well, there are ways. Massive public outcry is one. I really wish Bush had gotten 10% less of the popular vote and still taken the election, nothing like an in-you-face example to illustrate why change is needed. Certainly though, nothing you do in a ballot box will ever change the situation.
Your philosophy sounds nice and cudly, but honestly it's a lie. If you vote for someone who isn't one of the big parties your vote won't influence the outcome, except perhaps to let the greater of the evils in. The problem is that your vote is wasted before you even go to vote. You can waste it one way, or waste it another, but it doesn't change the outcome much.
Now, with Dubya, I think there's more benefit in voting Not-Bush, but for the most part I don't see any real difference between the parties.
Maybe if the bill was simply split if the riders don't seem related to the main text of the bill. Unfortunately most pork appears just legitimate enough that it's hard to have a rule for dealing with it.
The decency thing would be good, but we select our officials based on how indecent they'll be in getting election funds so it's not that amazing that they keep on acting that way.
Actually, you can (meaningfully) refute a blanket statement with a single piece of proof. The existance of a single white raven shows the statement that all ravens are black to be incorrect.
The question about whether unspecified anecdotes count as proof is left as an exercise to the reader.
Bush doesn't seem like Hitler personality wise, but think of Hitler without the hatred of Jews and "subhumans". Just the Reichstag fire, the invasive laws, the cult of paranoia, the insane public patriotism, the at-all-costs approach to his goals.
Bush and Stalin doesn't seem right, Stalin was nuts. Not just a little silly, he was a full-on monomanical freak with a vendetta. Secret trials, guilt by association, overanalysis of political leanings. Rampant paranoia.
I wasn't aware that libertarians had these distinctions. It's neat to see because I fall somewhere between the Libertarian socialists and the FDR Libertarians. I can't see condemning a child because their parents didn't feed them or school them, and I see a need for a system to protect those children and give them a fair chance to enter society and live happily. I'm willing to be taxed to provide this safety net to those who can't afford it.
Really, my biggest problem with government is the lack of representation. I'd be choked to pay %.5 income tax if I didn't like where it went or couldn't see the balance sheet to make sure it actually was spent doing what it was supposed to do.
In discussions with libertarians I find that they tend to believe that anything that doesn't cause direct harm (like, you know, [hushed voice]initiating force[/hush]) isn't a problem. As in, I could buy all the property surrounding your house, late one night, and then shoot you for walking on my property on the way to the store. (Or, at least, trap you in your house.)
Part of it comes, I think, from fuzzy thinking when the word "own" comes up. Libertarians seem to believe that ownership rights trump everything else, regardless of how you come to own something or what it is.
I feel that true libertarianism is to believe that if what you do doesn't hurt others, you should be able to do it, and that the fewer the number of laws and government required to enforce these basic rules, the better.
I'm the really odd-duck politically. A Big-Government, tax-and-spend, Libertarian. I think that society, for the good of the society, should help people reach a certain level of education, even if that level requires providing welfare for the student while they're in school. I feel that it's enlightened self-interest. Educated people contribute much more to society and it reduces the problems with crime. I don't think you can expect someone to be a productive member of society if their parents didn't provide for them growing up and didn't school them or teach them the community's laws - if the community wants children to have a chance it may need to say that the rights of the child outweigh those of the parent, and to some degree, those around them (taxes). (Though, spaying and neutering irresponsible parents seems only fair - no reason to make the community foot a large bill.)
Exactly. If you can't read that 1000-page document you're trying to make into a law maybe you should take a month and do so, or have then trim it to a more reasonable 10-20 pages, and I don't mean summarize and pass the long form.
The more I read this thread the more I'm drawn to the the system someone described earlier of the Icelandic law-talker who had to boil the whole thing down until he could memorize it, word for word, and recite it in one sitting. That might be excessive, but I can't imagine that we need thousands of pages either.
I haven't seen the (serious) claim that teachers are willing accomplices in dumbing down children, merely that schools have this effect and it might be a result of "training for the work force" that was pushed for by those who had a lot to gain for consistently trained, if unimaginative, workers who were used to rote work.
All the truly effective higher education I've been in, either in accredited schools or otherwise, has had open book tests for all "final" exams. None of the public K-12 schools had open book tests, except for HomeEc, which let you have a recipe while cooking.
The goal should be to teach the student to be able to do real work, but no professional is far from their reference books. I've never worked anywhere where I've had to program without reference manuals or man pages, except in school.
By design or not, modern schools teach 90% of the children 90% of basic work skills quite well, but they fall down on teaching the children at either end of the curve (and likely could do better on many more). They also don't teach problem solving, merely the application of specific tools.
I doubt that the education system exists for the purpose of destroying students, but I don't doubt that it does.
The problem is that the naysayers are right, if you do vote anything other than the big two you waste your vote. Sure, if *everyone* got together and agreed to actually vote their conscience you might win, but it's a game where the defectors rack up easy wins and there's no gain unless everyone plays straight.
The problem is the voting system. It's broken. Until the first-past-the-post system is retired there will be a huge flaw, and to ignore the flaw, sadly, is to throw your vote away.
Don't bitch at people who refuse to throw their vote away - they've simply realized that the system is flawed and they're trying their best to have some (any!) representation. Instead, work to implement Approval voting. (My favorite - it's not quite as accurate as some, but it's safe from most simple problems and very easy to understand.)
Gore/Nader vs Bush was a textbook example of duplicate candidates and splitting the vote. Almost all of the alternate methods would avoid this problem.
There's a lot of press over Kerry flip-flopping, even though I've seen a debunking of many of the issues and they point out that the bill is "Military Spending - Forced Grandmother Rape" or vice versa. Riders are one of the worst features of the USA's democracy. That and the first-past-the-post voting system.
You fundies are getting dumber than a box of rocks.
First, the fact that Bush is subnormal doesn't mean anything about Kerry. Many Republicans think Bush is a dough-head and they wish for someone else.
Second, your retarded little video completely leaves out the fact that with government (Republican) complicity, the CIA lied about Saddam Hussein and WMDs. If someone (Kerry for example) trusted this, they'd appear to change their mind as the information they'd based their statements on was shown to be false.
Third, because of the USA's political system, riders are often attached to bills - even riders that have *nothing* to do with the original bill. Even a pro-military person is going to vote against a "Military Spending and Softwood Lumber Tarrif" bill if they think the lumber tarrif rider is a bad idea.
Four, just show a little fucking human decency and lay off the propoganda. Your ditto-head arguments are off-topic and show only how stupid you are, that you think they're indicative of something. A similar piece could be put together for *any* long-serving politician in the USA.
If anything, you're driving more people to vote for Kerry with your drivel. Slander campaigning only works with the already convinced.
The law is the original slippery slope. If you pass a law against mismatched socks because it lets you arrest Osama (Who, for some reason, managed to duck all other charges) you'll immediately see prosecutors using it in everything from international terrorism and drug laundering, to jaywalking. When you pass a law, or consider extending one through precedent, you need to make sure it's valid at the extremes (don't extradite S. Rushdie or a jaywalker, don't let Osama or Pablo Escobar go) and that it specifically states the areas in which it does and does not apply.
Otherwise, how do you draw the line? Is it terrorism when a kid makes pipebombs? Are there really a billion dollars in damages if you put a movie on an FTP site in China?
Many C&D letters are not threatening, and simply serve to notify the receiving party that they are using a mark in a manner which infringes the rights of our client. [...]
These letters are rarely posted on the web, because they are boring. You hear about the agressive letters because they get a reaction, and that is generally why they are phrased as they are: they are intended to generate a reaction
Glad to hear that many lawyers aren't jerks when doing this. And yeah, we would see just the worst.
My natural reaction, if I ever received an overly threatening C&D (or other lawyerly threat), would be to drag the company's name through the mud until the end of time. I assume other people feel the same so it seems like a dangerous game these companies play.
I could see it from someone like SCO (A company consisting of a lawsuit and some empty suits) but from a company like Disney (or many others) for whom customer relations is seemingly important...
Privately, we may tell the client one thing, but there is no obligation to tell the other side any of our misgivings about our case. So, that is a long way of saying, "almost never."
Darn. There are some really scum suckers out there who need to be taken down a peg and they ruin what little good name the profession has left.
I am not familiar with this case, but perhaps Disney did make such an offer. Maybe Disney's terms weren't acceptable to the other side. Maybe a Disney lawyer was having a bad day. Who knows? Licensing of the sort you describe happens every day. [...] Under the circumstances you describe, I agree that Disney seemed to drop the ball.
http://www.snopes.com/disney/wdco/daycare.htm
They certainly did drop the ball, though in this case mainly because someone big enough was there to take advantage of it. Glad to hear that this sort of licensing does happen - it seems like an obvious win for both parties, as well as a good public face.
Perhaps you can answer a question or two, re: Cease and Desist letters.
1) Why are they all written by someone with a chip on their shoulder, in such a threatening manner? I'd imagine "Hello, I'm with and we noticed your use of our trademark in an unauthorized context at . Trademark law requires us to take measures to stop unauthorized usage of our trademark. Please stop using our mark and reply to this email with confirmation that you have stopped, or questions."
If companies sent that out as their first contact they'd get a lot less hateful responses from the community. As is, most C&D letters I see are a terse page of legalese with a very blatant threat of lawsuit - not exactly the best foot to put forward. I'd think a nicer tone would be helpful, especially as many of these companies seem to have gotten their legal advice from a fortune cookie - their demands are often unreasonable and unsupported by law. (Demanding someone take down embarassing photos of someone wearing branded merchandise, for example.)
Can lawyers be disbarred for telling you (on behalf of their clients) that something you're doing that is legal, isn't?
2) With the case of the daycare using Disney's characters in a non-advertising context, why didn't Disney simply offer to license the appropriate rights to make the mural acceptable? Instead they threatened, pissed a bunch of people off, and got more bad press when WB not only offered free use of their characters, but hired a mural painter to replace the Disney characters. Seems like a huge loss for Disney.
Not really. Society is paying to maintain your copyright, if you don't keep providing the work for us we're going to assume you no longer need us to enforce copyright... Seems like it'd be perfectly fair to me.
It's news for nerds. Microsoft's action, usually the type of things I listed above, are news because they impact nerds. Any everyone else, for that matter, even if they're unable to see it.
Quite right, but hundreds of thousands of words don't suddenly create clarity either.
Laws need to be complex enough to deal with all the variables, yet simple enough to understand.
Perhaps what we could do is have a policy of removing as many laws as possible, or consolidating them. Everyone has seen to silly examples of laws from the early 1900s, like it being illegal to put ice-cream in your pockets, or put a donkey in a bathtub. I'm sure there was a purpose for these at one time or another, but surely they could have either been dropped by now, or rolled into larger laws.
If donkeys break their legs in bathtubs it's probably worth rolling into an animal cruelty law. We don't need to list every possibility for harm, just as theft laws don't have to list every type of car that you can't steal.
If you've got six laws banning various automatic rifles, perhaps you could consolidate that into one law which bans a wider range?
It's also possible to start with "Don't kill anyone (see section 1 for exceptions)". That way people know that by default, killing someone is against the law. They then look in section 1 and it says "Exceptions fall into two areas, 1) the person is threatening you or your property (see section 1.1 for details) or 2) they are a fugitive (see section 3.2) and you're a legally appointed police officer (4.1), prison guard (4.2), or bounty hunter (4.3)."
That way you partition off the legal mumbo jumbo. It's there if needed, but organized that you can probably go a minimum number of levels and have an absolute answer. Laws these days seem to be written backwards, with the basic rules hidden in paragraphs of exceptions and definitions.
If the law wasn't written by lawyers it wouldn't be that hard to understand.
Perhaps it should be the duty of a government to write laws that its citizens can understand. If the law can't be understood by a majority (90% maybe?) of free-school graduates (at whatever level the government stops paying the whole bill) then it should be simplified or the schools should improve and potentially the age of consent should be changed to reflect that we don't think people are capable of understanding the laws which govern them without twenty years of schooling.
It takes a truly stupid person to say "ignorance is the law is no excuse" with a straight face, when the law is written in such a way that arguably *nobody* understands it fully.
Why is your issue so important that despite the fact it only got three votes, it must be fixed now?
Quite honestly, anit-aliasing is less important than spell checking, or crashing, or really most everything else. If you listened to every jerk who insisted his little features was the most important you'd have a very pretty technology demo that didn't actually do anything.
Assuming you can't or won't write code, or help out in any way, then at least try to raise awareness of the issue and write a good argument for fixing it ahead of other bugs.
Part of being an adult is not whining like a spoiled brat when you don't get your own way. Sorry, but there was a choice and the people in charge didn't pick your way. You can either pout about it, declare that it's a terrible injustice and "the" fundamental problem with a whole philosophy, or you can accept that other people thought their bugs were also important and work to help.
Perhaps nobody without an LCD understands why sub-pixel rendering is so nice. Maybe you could get off your lazy ass and take a fucking picture of the screen with the feature turned on and turned off and show them! If you just say "Oh, I'm not a coder" and expect that the justify the bitching and lack of help, expect also to get ignored.
Would you expect any different in anything else? Would you start bitching to the volunteers who were organizing a Blues festival in the park that your favorite rapper wasn't invited?
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It's a waste because your party won't get more votes than everyone else and if they don't, they have zero influence. As not enough people are willing to vote for a party they like (and let the Republicrats go to either side) third party votes have no effect on the process.
It's a fact, in a first-past-the-post system votes are wasted, they don't serve to elect anyone or set policy. In countries with Approval Voting your third-party vote might actually combine with other third-party votes and get someone a seat, somewhere in the country. As is, nothing. Nada. Zero.
Spoil your ballot. It'll at least show voter dissatisfaction, instead of apathy like not voting.
At times your vote could be the one that tips the balance between republicrat A and B, if there are differences between the republicrats and those differences are worth voting for (as I feel they are now) you might make a difference.
Your argument seems to be that you'll waste your vote by not voting, or waste it by voting for someone else.
My point is that your vote will never change anything. There's a miniscule chance that your vote might change something if cast for a republicrat, though the ammount of change it would make in the long-run is small, but multiply the two and it's still non-zero. More than if you don't vote.
Myself, were I in your position, I'd spoil my ballot. It has the same effect on the current election (zilch) but it's at least clear.
Yeah! I completely agree. Many of my leftist friends don't understand how I can dislike F9/11 even though I dislike Bush. Like you, I simply want to point out the true problems with Bush (and Kerry, etc) instead of listening to Rush Limbaugh or Michael Moore.
What if society needs more McDonalds workers?
I feel that you are mostly right, but you miss the point that individualist types, those not conditioned to sit quietly in a desk and do what they're told, can be just as productive. There are many job opportunities for an independent contractor, in jobs ranging from construction to computer programming, to surgeon.
We need to make children do things they might not want to do, in order to assure that they have the tools to make something of themselves, but it's not our place to pick that niche for them.
But that's all true. Bush handled the 9/11 aftermath badly, look at Afghanistan and Iraq for many examples of when a clearer purpose, international support (not as hard to get as he said) and less lies would have helped.
And at least Kerry showed up for his military service.
I'm not a Kerry supporter, but I find it amusing that the Bush campaign is making a big deal of Kerry's political record.
Of course, to the extreme right, Kerry's questioning of the reasons for the Vietnam war are tantamount to treason.
Look at BC, they voted the NDP in to get rid of the old guys, then kicked out the NDP and got the Liberals. Fat lot of good any of that did.
The basic problem is that our first-past-the-post electoral system, it produces flip-flop results because it emphasizes the emotion on voting day. It doesn't take much of a scandal to boost one party 10% in the polls but that 10% can end up making a much larger difference with in seats.
Approval voting would go a long way towards fixing this country.
How do you work for change when nobody you vote for will ever get into power? The only people to lobby are those who have the most to lose if the system changes.
Well, there are ways. Massive public outcry is one. I really wish Bush had gotten 10% less of the popular vote and still taken the election, nothing like an in-you-face example to illustrate why change is needed. Certainly though, nothing you do in a ballot box will ever change the situation.
Your philosophy sounds nice and cudly, but honestly it's a lie. If you vote for someone who isn't one of the big parties your vote won't influence the outcome, except perhaps to let the greater of the evils in. The problem is that your vote is wasted before you even go to vote. You can waste it one way, or waste it another, but it doesn't change the outcome much.
Now, with Dubya, I think there's more benefit in voting Not-Bush, but for the most part I don't see any real difference between the parties.
Maybe if the bill was simply split if the riders don't seem related to the main text of the bill. Unfortunately most pork appears just legitimate enough that it's hard to have a rule for dealing with it.
The decency thing would be good, but we select our officials based on how indecent they'll be in getting election funds so it's not that amazing that they keep on acting that way.
Actually, you can (meaningfully) refute a blanket statement with a single piece of proof. The existance of a single white raven shows the statement that all ravens are black to be incorrect.
The question about whether unspecified anecdotes count as proof is left as an exercise to the reader.
Bush doesn't seem like Hitler personality wise, but think of Hitler without the hatred of Jews and "subhumans". Just the Reichstag fire, the invasive laws, the cult of paranoia, the insane public patriotism, the at-all-costs approach to his goals.
Bush and Stalin doesn't seem right, Stalin was nuts. Not just a little silly, he was a full-on monomanical freak with a vendetta. Secret trials, guilt by association, overanalysis of political leanings. Rampant paranoia.
Stalin is closest to McCarthy. Oh, the irony.
I wasn't aware that libertarians had these distinctions. It's neat to see because I fall somewhere between the Libertarian socialists and the FDR Libertarians. I can't see condemning a child because their parents didn't feed them or school them, and I see a need for a system to protect those children and give them a fair chance to enter society and live happily. I'm willing to be taxed to provide this safety net to those who can't afford it.
Really, my biggest problem with government is the lack of representation. I'd be choked to pay %.5 income tax if I didn't like where it went or couldn't see the balance sheet to make sure it actually was spent doing what it was supposed to do.
In discussions with libertarians I find that they tend to believe that anything that doesn't cause direct harm (like, you know, [hushed voice]initiating force[/hush]) isn't a problem. As in, I could buy all the property surrounding your house, late one night, and then shoot you for walking on my property on the way to the store. (Or, at least, trap you in your house.)
Part of it comes, I think, from fuzzy thinking when the word "own" comes up. Libertarians seem to believe that ownership rights trump everything else, regardless of how you come to own something or what it is.
I feel that true libertarianism is to believe that if what you do doesn't hurt others, you should be able to do it, and that the fewer the number of laws and government required to enforce these basic rules, the better.
I'm the really odd-duck politically. A Big-Government, tax-and-spend, Libertarian. I think that society, for the good of the society, should help people reach a certain level of education, even if that level requires providing welfare for the student while they're in school. I feel that it's enlightened self-interest. Educated people contribute much more to society and it reduces the problems with crime. I don't think you can expect someone to be a productive member of society if their parents didn't provide for them growing up and didn't school them or teach them the community's laws - if the community wants children to have a chance it may need to say that the rights of the child outweigh those of the parent, and to some degree, those around them (taxes). (Though, spaying and neutering irresponsible parents seems only fair - no reason to make the community foot a large bill.)
Exactly. If you can't read that 1000-page document you're trying to make into a law maybe you should take a month and do so, or have then trim it to a more reasonable 10-20 pages, and I don't mean summarize and pass the long form.
The more I read this thread the more I'm drawn to the the system someone described earlier of the Icelandic law-talker who had to boil the whole thing down until he could memorize it, word for word, and recite it in one sitting. That might be excessive, but I can't imagine that we need thousands of pages either.
I haven't seen the (serious) claim that teachers are willing accomplices in dumbing down children, merely that schools have this effect and it might be a result of "training for the work force" that was pushed for by those who had a lot to gain for consistently trained, if unimaginative, workers who were used to rote work.
All the truly effective higher education I've been in, either in accredited schools or otherwise, has had open book tests for all "final" exams. None of the public K-12 schools had open book tests, except for HomeEc, which let you have a recipe while cooking.
The goal should be to teach the student to be able to do real work, but no professional is far from their reference books. I've never worked anywhere where I've had to program without reference manuals or man pages, except in school.
By design or not, modern schools teach 90% of the children 90% of basic work skills quite well, but they fall down on teaching the children at either end of the curve (and likely could do better on many more). They also don't teach problem solving, merely the application of specific tools.
I doubt that the education system exists for the purpose of destroying students, but I don't doubt that it does.
The problem is that the naysayers are right, if you do vote anything other than the big two you waste your vote. Sure, if *everyone* got together and agreed to actually vote their conscience you might win, but it's a game where the defectors rack up easy wins and there's no gain unless everyone plays straight.
The problem is the voting system. It's broken. Until the first-past-the-post system is retired there will be a huge flaw, and to ignore the flaw, sadly, is to throw your vote away.
Don't bitch at people who refuse to throw their vote away - they've simply realized that the system is flawed and they're trying their best to have some (any!) representation. Instead, work to implement Approval voting. (My favorite - it's not quite as accurate as some, but it's safe from most simple problems and very easy to understand.)
Gore/Nader vs Bush was a textbook example of duplicate candidates and splitting the vote. Almost all of the alternate methods would avoid this problem.
There's a lot of press over Kerry flip-flopping, even though I've seen a debunking of many of the issues and they point out that the bill is "Military Spending - Forced Grandmother Rape" or vice versa. Riders are one of the worst features of the USA's democracy. That and the first-past-the-post voting system.
You fundies are getting dumber than a box of rocks.
First, the fact that Bush is subnormal doesn't mean anything about Kerry. Many Republicans think Bush is a dough-head and they wish for someone else.
Second, your retarded little video completely leaves out the fact that with government (Republican) complicity, the CIA lied about Saddam Hussein and WMDs. If someone (Kerry for example) trusted this, they'd appear to change their mind as the information they'd based their statements on was shown to be false.
Third, because of the USA's political system, riders are often attached to bills - even riders that have *nothing* to do with the original bill. Even a pro-military person is going to vote against a "Military Spending and Softwood Lumber Tarrif" bill if they think the lumber tarrif rider is a bad idea.
Four, just show a little fucking human decency and lay off the propoganda. Your ditto-head arguments are off-topic and show only how stupid you are, that you think they're indicative of something. A similar piece could be put together for *any* long-serving politician in the USA.
If anything, you're driving more people to vote for Kerry with your drivel. Slander campaigning only works with the already convinced.
The law is the original slippery slope. If you pass a law against mismatched socks because it lets you arrest Osama (Who, for some reason, managed to duck all other charges) you'll immediately see prosecutors using it in everything from international terrorism and drug laundering, to jaywalking. When you pass a law, or consider extending one through precedent, you need to make sure it's valid at the extremes (don't extradite S. Rushdie or a jaywalker, don't let Osama or Pablo Escobar go) and that it specifically states the areas in which it does and does not apply.
Otherwise, how do you draw the line? Is it terrorism when a kid makes pipebombs? Are there really a billion dollars in damages if you put a movie on an FTP site in China?
So yes, Pablo Escobar is on-topic.
Glad to hear that many lawyers aren't jerks when doing this. And yeah, we would see just the worst.
My natural reaction, if I ever received an overly threatening C&D (or other lawyerly threat), would be to drag the company's name through the mud until the end of time. I assume other people feel the same so it seems like a dangerous game these companies play.
I could see it from someone like SCO (A company consisting of a lawsuit and some empty suits) but from a company like Disney (or many others) for whom customer relations is seemingly important...
Darn. There are some really scum suckers out there who need to be taken down a peg and they ruin what little good name the profession has left.
http://www.snopes.com/disney/wdco/daycare.htm
They certainly did drop the ball, though in this case mainly because someone big enough was there to take advantage of it. Glad to hear that this sort of licensing does happen - it seems like an obvious win for both parties, as well as a good public face.
Perhaps you can answer a question or two, re: Cease and Desist letters.
1) Why are they all written by someone with a chip on their shoulder, in such a threatening manner? I'd imagine "Hello, I'm with and we noticed your use of our trademark in an unauthorized context at . Trademark law requires us to take measures to stop unauthorized usage of our trademark. Please stop using our mark and reply to this email with confirmation that you have stopped, or questions."
If companies sent that out as their first contact they'd get a lot less hateful responses from the community. As is, most C&D letters I see are a terse page of legalese with a very blatant threat of lawsuit - not exactly the best foot to put forward. I'd think a nicer tone would be helpful, especially as many of these companies seem to have gotten their legal advice from a fortune cookie - their demands are often unreasonable and unsupported by law. (Demanding someone take down embarassing photos of someone wearing branded merchandise, for example.)
Can lawyers be disbarred for telling you (on behalf of their clients) that something you're doing that is legal, isn't?
2) With the case of the daycare using Disney's characters in a non-advertising context, why didn't Disney simply offer to license the appropriate rights to make the mural acceptable? Instead they threatened, pissed a bunch of people off, and got more bad press when WB not only offered free use of their characters, but hired a mural painter to replace the Disney characters. Seems like a huge loss for Disney.
Not really. Society is paying to maintain your copyright, if you don't keep providing the work for us we're going to assume you no longer need us to enforce copyright... Seems like it'd be perfectly fair to me.
It's news for nerds. Microsoft's action, usually the type of things I listed above, are news because they impact nerds. Any everyone else, for that matter, even if they're unable to see it.
Quite right, but hundreds of thousands of words don't suddenly create clarity either.
Laws need to be complex enough to deal with all the variables, yet simple enough to understand.
Perhaps what we could do is have a policy of removing as many laws as possible, or consolidating them. Everyone has seen to silly examples of laws from the early 1900s, like it being illegal to put ice-cream in your pockets, or put a donkey in a bathtub. I'm sure there was a purpose for these at one time or another, but surely they could have either been dropped by now, or rolled into larger laws.
If donkeys break their legs in bathtubs it's probably worth rolling into an animal cruelty law. We don't need to list every possibility for harm, just as theft laws don't have to list every type of car that you can't steal.
If you've got six laws banning various automatic rifles, perhaps you could consolidate that into one law which bans a wider range?
It's also possible to start with "Don't kill anyone (see section 1 for exceptions)". That way people know that by default, killing someone is against the law. They then look in section 1 and it says "Exceptions fall into two areas, 1) the person is threatening you or your property (see section 1.1 for details) or 2) they are a fugitive (see section 3.2) and you're a legally appointed police officer (4.1), prison guard (4.2), or bounty hunter (4.3)."
That way you partition off the legal mumbo jumbo. It's there if needed, but organized that you can probably go a minimum number of levels and have an absolute answer. Laws these days seem to be written backwards, with the basic rules hidden in paragraphs of exceptions and definitions.
If the law wasn't written by lawyers it wouldn't be that hard to understand.
Perhaps it should be the duty of a government to write laws that its citizens can understand. If the law can't be understood by a majority (90% maybe?) of free-school graduates (at whatever level the government stops paying the whole bill) then it should be simplified or the schools should improve and potentially the age of consent should be changed to reflect that we don't think people are capable of understanding the laws which govern them without twenty years of schooling.
It takes a truly stupid person to say "ignorance is the law is no excuse" with a straight face, when the law is written in such a way that arguably *nobody* understands it fully.
And that, folks, is what's wrong with people.
Why is your issue so important that despite the fact it only got three votes, it must be fixed now?
Quite honestly, anit-aliasing is less important than spell checking, or crashing, or really most everything else. If you listened to every jerk who insisted his little features was the most important you'd have a very pretty technology demo that didn't actually do anything.
Assuming you can't or won't write code, or help out in any way, then at least try to raise awareness of the issue and write a good argument for fixing it ahead of other bugs.
Part of being an adult is not whining like a spoiled brat when you don't get your own way. Sorry, but there was a choice and the people in charge didn't pick your way. You can either pout about it, declare that it's a terrible injustice and "the" fundamental problem with a whole philosophy, or you can accept that other people thought their bugs were also important and work to help.
Perhaps nobody without an LCD understands why sub-pixel rendering is so nice. Maybe you could get off your lazy ass and take a fucking picture of the screen with the feature turned on and turned off and show them! If you just say "Oh, I'm not a coder" and expect that the justify the bitching and lack of help, expect also to get ignored.
Would you expect any different in anything else? Would you start bitching to the volunteers who were organizing a Blues festival in the park that your favorite rapper wasn't invited?