If anyone ever says you're a jerk, think back to this and maybe you'll understand why.
You're taking a rare occurrence (a battery malfunctioning), assuming the worst circumstances (a full house fire), going beyond that to assume that there are absolutely no remaining useful records, and that the customer would automatically win in this lawsuit. Also that they don't exploit the total lack of records to blame their space-heater, dishwasher, TV, etc.
And on that stupid pretense of an argument you're jumping up and down waving for attention as if you have something useful to add.
You don't see any of the holes in your argument. For example, wouldn't the fact that Panasonic cameras were known to not run on 3rd-party batteries actually imply greater responsibility if their camera was found to have caused a fire. This isn't to imply that you should continue in this discussion, but that you should examine your ideas to see if they are ultimately weak and drop them. You don't appear to be doing any of this basic critical thinking.
Yes, we understand that in some circumstances this could be useful to the camera company, but we also understand that all the reasons are contrived to support battery $ales, not based on actual concern for customer property or stray lawsuits. If they were just honestly greedy it would be one thing, but the way they spin it as a pro-customer move is rude.
How, though, are the CC companies supposed to judge who is a legitimate business and who is committing fraud?
Basic understanding of the law. Listening to customer complaints. There are other things for later, but that'd be a huge step forward.
I dealt with Visa's complaint dept and they took the side of the merchant without *any* investigation. They quoted part of the site's terms and conditions to me, without realizing that what I'd said invalidated that. In other words, just template crap for a merchant they'd obviously gotten complaints about before.
Even if there was no crime (unlikely) there certainly was evidence that customers found this merchant's site misleading and were being billed far more than they intended and this is something they should investigate.
What procedures would you have them put in place? What is their burden to examine their customers' business practices?
Oh my god, what would they do? A company, expected to do something correctly? And how unreasonable to expect them to have, gasp, procedures.
Then they'd have sort of a "mandated reporter" status
Or all the employees would have a duty to watch for and take reports of illegal activity and report it. You know, like everyone else.
What rights do they have to terminate a merchant account based on what kind of business they conduct?
All CC contracts I've seen give them all the power... Like large ISPs, they're monopolies and their contracts represent this.
Expecting them to actually put the amount of effort into avoiding criminal affiliations that a pawn-shop owner puts into avoiding buying a stolen TV would be a good start.
We would often see people come in with a damaged camera, pop out the 3rd-party battery and replace it with the Genuine one, and try to claim the Warranty.
Yammer, yammer, lie. Sure you did. And these customers, their cameras were all damaged by leaking batteries?
Because of course you'd ship the camera back for warranty with the default battery, who'd expect otherwise? But unless the battery caused the problem (leaked) this isn't deceptive.
[...] right before the warranty expires, load in a very cheap off-brand battery that you have intentionally over-stressed [...]
Uh huh, intentionally over-stressed. And how do you do this, Mr Scientist?
[...] and use it until it pops and ruins the camera. Voila
You're an idiot. They'll want to see the battery because if it's theirs, they'll owe you a new camera - if it's not, they won't.
Besides, if you could over-stress batteries why wouldn't you just do this to the real battery?
At least (apparently) the 5Dm2 doesn't lock out other batteries, just not offer the new features that the new batteries support.
It'd be cool if devices warned you "This isn't our battery", just in case you bought a fake, but if I knowingly buy a legitimate 3rd-party product I want to to work.
I bought an LX2 on the strength of the reviews and returned it almost instantly. It stunk. I bought a Canon SD800 and it outperformed it in every real-world way. Faster, cheaper, better.
The LX2 had all the features, and the LX3 looks better (selectable 1st or 2nd curtain flash) but the real-world performance just wasn't there.
Perhaps the Leica lens could do well, but unless it was at noon the LX2 wouldn't. Once past ISO200 the pictures dropped to perhaps 2MP equivalent from all the noise, and horrible spray-painted with a blocked can noise, not just some soft speckling.
The white-balance was horrible. I know the Canon line is considered bad for this compared to Nikon's DSLRs, but the LX2 was a joke. I was walking in and out of a forest, but the other camera (a 20d) (and the lx2's replacement the sd800 later) all handled it properly.
It was SLOW. How long is it between RAWs?
Then compare battery life, size/form-factor, menus, etc....
For a studio-camera, when used by someone who wants to tweak it and love it despite its flaws, it would have been... acceptable.
But yeah, totally replaced and outperformed by a "lesser" camera. So unless you already own the LX2/etc and are that person willing to love it, take the reviews with a grain of salt.
Now add "for your protection" 3rd-party lockout and it's pretty open and shut.
And yet you'd have to be blind to think there are as many Cobol programmers to read that source as Java programmers. So it couldn't not apply, even if they didn't spell it out.
Besides, you can sort of tell by the type of processes used. People doing these transitions (automated rewrite, emulation, etc) are usually doing it because they've lost the ability to work with the system.
Yes, they might be saving a ton of money on the hardware, but that's not the whole story. If they were comfortable with the system they'd have rewritten it piecemeal by now and it wouldn't be here to be transitioned in one big piece.
Yes, yawn, there are some things Java is slow for and that need speed. You shouldn't do those few things in Java. So what if it starts slow? Don't spawn new processes to handle incoming connections. For any given issue there are workarounds. If there are too many issues to justify it, use another tool.
But, please, SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT IT!
Seriously, just don't fucking use it. Just because you're too retarded to evaluate tools for the job at hand doesn't mean everyone else is.
Java's not my choice either, but I don't feel the need to find every Java coder I know and rub it in. They're too busy redundantly declaring types to stop to chat anyways...
People who don't care don't call the GPL a viral license. They're out not-caring far more than that.
It's only losers who care too much but have an axe to grind who call the GPL viral.
thesis length articles about why everyone should use certain words
If "That word doesn't mean what you think" is thesis-length, you went to a really poor school.
There's a big difference between trying to force people to use a word that doesn't fit - or demanding that it does fit as you are doing - and simply pointing out that such usage is wrong.
When we switched from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence, heights dropped two inches on average, lifespans shortened by a couple decades, and really interestingly, war broke out.
so if we can provide for all our basic needs plus a lot of luxuries with everyone working, say, 30 hours per week, maybe we should consider it.
The flaw with these statements is that there's a lot more everyone that there was. You say it as if we, personally, switched modes and watched life become harder. While people changed modes far more of their children lived. That the average life expectancy went down only ignores the concept that people who otherwise would not have lived at all, got a chance.
Leeching off the landscape works with small numbers, but falls apart (ie, requires vastly more work) when more people attempt it.
Not that life now requires 40h/w, but it's a different world and comparisons between the two situations aren't useful.
There are two problems around this, one is people who feel they need more stuff. Sick, but whatever. The other, and serious one, is companies who act as if not wanting full-time employment is crazy. They only give 3w/y of vacation (or other sad amount) and look at you as if you're crazy if you offer to take two or three months off unpaid.
You want her to run the car companies better, even though they're private businesses? [...] please enlighten us about how this should have been handled.
Simple. Staying the fuck out of the private businesses. Dunno if the particular politico in question could have made any appreciable difference, but I can't imagine they could help by doing anything but ending government involvement.
Ideal scenario? Sometime in the 70s, amidst other problems, one or more of the Big-3 simply fail. By now it wouldn't even be interesting history, they'd simply have gone bankrupt years ago and we wouldn't think anything of it.
At worst, if you think you can save it, take tax money and buy it outright in the name of the people and run it. But to just give huge cash payouts to the people who've already destroyed it... Insanity.
Yes, we tolerate them. They're clearly sub-adult intellectually but we don't deny them housing, simple work, freedom, etc.
But yeah, they are suspect - as is anyone unable to think clearly and logically. Who cares what any given one thinks (young/old earth) when it's just what they were told to think? It's a culture of ignorance and that's more important than any specific answer.
Of course, there are disciples of FOX and Michael Moore who are pretty bad at critical thinking too...
Dude, just read the UN quarterly reports to the security counsel.
Yeah, and it was happening since the end of the first war. We hardly cared, including Bush pre-wtc, because he was mostly happy to kill his own people.
Fox news has nothing to do with that
When FOX starts trumpeting the evils of Saddam, ignoring the tons of actual atrocities and starts quoting UN documents you know they're up to something. If they really cared they had years to notice, but they only care when Bush is trying to make his Iraq-war case.
The original plan was to use small amounts of troops with large reserves in order to keep the footprint small and entice battles out of Iraq.
Sounds like a dandy plan.
The length of the war was pretty much caused by all the stalling we did which allowed protest in turkey to force us out of entering from there.
This is when Bush was trying vainly to connect Saddam to wtc?
Perhaps the Turkish people merely didn't want to be parties to war crimes?
It was literally two different wars with two different outcomes because of the two different tactics.
You know, history is full of master strategists - at least in their own heads, who think that having one really good plan makes up for it inevitably falling apart and them having nothing.
This is part of what people point to when they say Bush was Saddam focused. While certain military incursions into parts of Iraq might have helped us and the Iraqis, Bush let his quest for Saddam lead him into a badly planned war.
More oil available... processed... sold in dollars.
Here is where your argument breaks down. First, the EU had already implemented Kyoto which meant their oil use was going to drop.
"Chololate rationing will be implemented"
Second, there was never any oil shortages and therfore never any need for oil.
"There never was chocolate rationing"
The price hikes we saw was from hedge investors taking stock in oil futures in attempts to place the valuation of the dollar.
You mean, investing in commodities? Or alternatively, ditching the dollar?
They could literally sell the futures for spot price at a loss and profit because of changes in the value of the dollar.
Of course, the dollar is increasingly just worthless paper and oil is useful around the world.
The problem with that is when normal companies who use oil attempt to secure long term runs, it drives the price up because even though there is more then enough physical oil,
No, this is the market disagreeing with you. There wasn't enough physical oil to satisfy everyone who wanted their own hedge, that's why the price went up as the cost of your own buffer was worked out.
the amount of buyers doubled with people who could never take possession of the oil.
And you're under the assumption that most buyers of commodities take them home with them?
And of course this also drove the spot prices up.
Demand, it'll do that.
There was never any shortage of oil
And yet people wanted more and were willing to pay for it.
and Iraq'a production wouldn't have made a difference.
Oh, of course not. Because the specific issue you focus on was a bubble you can't see that oil is actually tremendously valuable (hello, the Bush's are rich from it...) and that the Iraqi oil doesn't have to go one-to-one to fill some shortfall in Kentucky, but simply by being pumped and refined in a USA-friendly country helps our g
Yes, actually, it is. The point of copyright is...
You seem to have mistaken government fiat with reality - it's okay, they usually make the same mistake, witness GM, etc. You've confused a law saying I should not with a physical law meaning I can not. For instance, despite my willingness to question and ignore useless laws, I have been unable to fall up. Damn gravity.
However, despite the US Supreme Court's ruling that Steamboat Willie is still under copyright I have been able to reproduce it.
Do you see the difference?
It's provable that I can reproduce a file almost infinitely, without any incremental costs. That's the very definition of non-scarce. The bits being used are already there, so to speak.
You can copy information without depriving the original owner. I can't take your car, or house without depriving you of them, but if I copy a song that you have or wrote you likely wouldn't even know.
So what has been done? Certainly a government monopoly has been ignored. Pissed on. Flagrantly mocked even. But nothing has been stolen. Everyone has everything they started with, and now some people have more.
While there are some applications for limited government monopolies you do nobody any favors by pretending that they are some sort of natural right.
Words have meanings. The ones you are using are wrong. The term you're looking for is copyright violation. Use it.
It's because we have names for different areas in math at a school level.
Once you're done with a whole year of trig, forcing you to memorize a bunch of formulas you never want to touch math again, especially calculus which is rumored to be far harder.
Or, you know, actually explains some of the crap you've been needlessly memorizing over the years.
ARGH!
I know they can't exactly start with calculus, but if they didn't keep them so separate and you could see that the trig formulas and such are actually simply derived you could think of them as simply an advanced move, not some magical formula that someone must have discovered by pure luck.
You don't have to show the derivation of Pi (at least and make the students follow along), just explain a bit of how it works and why - merely give them a glimpse of real math behind the scenes of the plugging numbers into formulas.
I'd love to see what Feynman and Cliff Stoll would come up with to replace k-12.
Between not having the balls to tell students that shit like god and santa are make-believe and making the simplest things in the world (math) into some horrible memorizing game schools are almost totally worthless. Add in ignoring bullies and they really are little prisons...
Sure, then let's make sure all the laws are considered here to make it fair.
Let's really consider fair use. Not just yammer over some old words but think of what kinds of use are fair (anything that doesn't obviously hurt anyone) and then allow them.
Let's also consider that copyright is a trade of a limited government monopoly for the ability to enrich the public domain with more works. This is only reasonable if the public domain is actually ever enriched. So strip all DRMed works of copyright - they can't ever really be used by the people so they aren't going to enrich the public domain and as such don't deserve protection.
Now let's extend copyrights retroactively where it matters. If Disney wants their copyrights to last forever, why don't we go back just a few years more and find whoever owns something similar enough to Steamboat Willy and make their copyright the one that gets grandfathered in... After all, why choose to start at the specific place that enriches Disney over all others?
If we're going to extend the copyright we should consider the phrase "a limited time" in the context of the life of a member of the public. After all, why should someone pay for someone's monopoly now that won't enrich anyone until centuries after his death?
Oh, you wanted to just paint the people as thieves. How original.
plenty of evidence to suggest strong military actions dating from 1995 forward
Yes. In fact, having admitted in the first war that Iraq under Saddam was criminal we never should have stopped until he was removed.
There were legitimate reasons for the Iraq war without bringing oil into the mix.
Yeah, but we didn't use any of them. If we had we'd have invaded before 9/11 and had an obvious humanitarian mandate.
a legitimate reason can be illegitimate after the fact when we find out more
No, it's an illegitimate reason that appeared legitimate. It happens, but there's no need to sugarcoat it.
Hans Blix... no WMDs,... misleading... reports... UN security council... previously declare destroyed munitions... banned chemical weapons machinery... agriculture chemical processing facility... weapons production... leading... war... proof of illegal... and so on.
Yeah, it's like FOX news all over again.
If we needed a reason to get rid of Saddam it was his continual gassing of the Kurds, or any of umpteen other well-documented murder sprees in his capacity as leader of Iraq.
The shit you're repeating, while technically true that most of those incidents happened, was happening all along and nobody cared until they decided to invade, then they took the usual diplomatic push-back by a tyrant against supervision and declared it to be plans for... exactly the same low-level genocide we'd been fine with for years, but now we care!
At the time the US wanted to goto war with Iraq, [...] It wasn't until after the war that we found our understanding to be so far off base.
Convenient - you want to go to war with someone and all the evidence your special hand-picked teams can find point to reasons for war. It's not until you realize the war isn't over in a month or two that you start to question the rest of their advice...
It was all an obvious lie, imho. We'd always had enough reasons to justify war with Saddam for moral and security reasons. But these weren't used because it would set bad precedents to be used against us. Instead we're given more of Bush's "Trust me" speeches about how he had all this evidence, and it was great, but we just couldn't see it yet... If we'd have had real secret info even his hinting at it would risk compromising it. If we'd been worried about Saddam, for real, Saddam would've have figured it out during the months that CNN showed us to be running around like idiots talking about this supposed proof and attacked us then.
But so far all I've done is piss on the "reasons" we were given.
The war was never about oil unless...
No, unless by oil you mean money and power, largely through control of oil.
I think Bush had this image of a quick little war and being welcomed in Iraq as a liberator as the international coalition was seen to be during the first war (until they packed up and left, people unsaved). So I don't think it takes a lot to explain his calls for war. If you think we'll win handily and quickly you don't need to gain as much.
But what does the USA gain from Iraq?
More oil available/less hoarded by our 'enemies', more oil processed by western companies, and more oil sold in dollars.
Even right there it probably enough to make it worth while. Then consider that Bush and his advisors have connections to the companies doing much of the work, getting oil contracts, etc and it's pretty easy to see how they could all be a bit biased.
Then there's the value of Iraq for military bases in the area, and a million little imperialistic benefits.
I guess it comes off as moralizing because you talk about delusional gamblers (no argument there) and how they'll stop if they can't collect their winnings. Well yeah, most people will stop doing something if everything they hoped to gain would be confiscated - however delusional the basic activity. But, if you didn't mean it that way you didn't. But yeah, it will be effective.
I've never been accused of staying on-topic, so what's baseless about the comment on the Iraqi war? It was presented as a quick little war, and the non-oil reasons (terrorists, Saddam, etc) all fall apart when poked at.
Or was it the connection between the unjust war and taxation?
It's recursive, simply call for a flash-mob of vigilantes to take care of the troublesome vigilantes.
There's probably already an XKCD about it.
Honestly though, in a more transparent society (ie, fed-up with being taped by everyone else, citizens start recording everything too and sharing it in a giant p2p net) this is less of a problem because not only are more angles of any given event available but the people making the accusations become public themselves as well as the vigilantes who actually take any actions. This, applied recursively as mentioned, eventually produces methodical and well-documented vigilantes.
Slashdot Mirror
If anyone ever says you're a jerk, think back to this and maybe you'll understand why.
You're taking a rare occurrence (a battery malfunctioning), assuming the worst circumstances (a full house fire), going beyond that to assume that there are absolutely no remaining useful records, and that the customer would automatically win in this lawsuit. Also that they don't exploit the total lack of records to blame their space-heater, dishwasher, TV, etc.
And on that stupid pretense of an argument you're jumping up and down waving for attention as if you have something useful to add.
You don't see any of the holes in your argument. For example, wouldn't the fact that Panasonic cameras were known to not run on 3rd-party batteries actually imply greater responsibility if their camera was found to have caused a fire. This isn't to imply that you should continue in this discussion, but that you should examine your ideas to see if they are ultimately weak and drop them. You don't appear to be doing any of this basic critical thinking.
Yes, we understand that in some circumstances this could be useful to the camera company, but we also understand that all the reasons are contrived to support battery $ales, not based on actual concern for customer property or stray lawsuits. If they were just honestly greedy it would be one thing, but the way they spin it as a pro-customer move is rude.
How, though, are the CC companies supposed to judge who is a legitimate business and who is committing fraud?
Basic understanding of the law. Listening to customer complaints. There are other things for later, but that'd be a huge step forward.
I dealt with Visa's complaint dept and they took the side of the merchant without *any* investigation. They quoted part of the site's terms and conditions to me, without realizing that what I'd said invalidated that. In other words, just template crap for a merchant they'd obviously gotten complaints about before.
Even if there was no crime (unlikely) there certainly was evidence that customers found this merchant's site misleading and were being billed far more than they intended and this is something they should investigate.
What procedures would you have them put in place? What is their burden to examine their customers' business practices?
Oh my god, what would they do? A company, expected to do something correctly? And how unreasonable to expect them to have, gasp, procedures.
Then they'd have sort of a "mandated reporter" status
Or all the employees would have a duty to watch for and take reports of illegal activity and report it. You know, like everyone else.
What rights do they have to terminate a merchant account based on what kind of business they conduct?
All CC contracts I've seen give them all the power... Like large ISPs, they're monopolies and their contracts represent this.
Expecting them to actually put the amount of effort into avoiding criminal affiliations that a pawn-shop owner puts into avoiding buying a stolen TV would be a good start.
It's good there's no other source of evidence, such as forensic, financial, etc that could be used to tell if that was the truth.
Yes, you can arrive at a bad answer with logic.
A possibility of failure versus a certainty...
So?
We would often see people come in with a damaged camera, pop out the 3rd-party battery and replace it with the Genuine one, and try to claim the Warranty.
Yammer, yammer, lie. Sure you did. And these customers, their cameras were all damaged by leaking batteries?
Because of course you'd ship the camera back for warranty with the default battery, who'd expect otherwise? But unless the battery caused the problem (leaked) this isn't deceptive.
[...] right before the warranty expires, load in a very cheap off-brand battery that you have intentionally over-stressed [...]
Uh huh, intentionally over-stressed. And how do you do this, Mr Scientist?
[...] and use it until it pops and ruins the camera. Voila
You're an idiot. They'll want to see the battery because if it's theirs, they'll owe you a new camera - if it's not, they won't.
Besides, if you could over-stress batteries why wouldn't you just do this to the real battery?
They couldn't not honor the warranty just because of that provision. They'd actually have to point to a problem caused by the 3rd-party batteries.
If the batteries leak, that's one thing. But try proving the defect in the lens was due to batteries.
At least (apparently) the 5Dm2 doesn't lock out other batteries, just not offer the new features that the new batteries support.
It'd be cool if devices warned you "This isn't our battery", just in case you bought a fake, but if I knowingly buy a legitimate 3rd-party product I want to to work.
Do you actually own a Panasonic LX camera?
I bought an LX2 on the strength of the reviews and returned it almost instantly. It stunk. I bought a Canon SD800 and it outperformed it in every real-world way. Faster, cheaper, better.
The LX2 had all the features, and the LX3 looks better (selectable 1st or 2nd curtain flash) but the real-world performance just wasn't there.
Perhaps the Leica lens could do well, but unless it was at noon the LX2 wouldn't. Once past ISO200 the pictures dropped to perhaps 2MP equivalent from all the noise, and horrible spray-painted with a blocked can noise, not just some soft speckling.
The white-balance was horrible. I know the Canon line is considered bad for this compared to Nikon's DSLRs, but the LX2 was a joke. I was walking in and out of a forest, but the other camera (a 20d) (and the lx2's replacement the sd800 later) all handled it properly.
It was SLOW. How long is it between RAWs?
Then compare battery life, size/form-factor, menus, etc....
For a studio-camera, when used by someone who wants to tweak it and love it despite its flaws, it would have been... acceptable.
But yeah, totally replaced and outperformed by a "lesser" camera. So unless you already own the LX2/etc and are that person willing to love it, take the reviews with a grain of salt.
Now add "for your protection" 3rd-party lockout and it's pretty open and shut.
And yet you'd have to be blind to think there are as many Cobol programmers to read that source as Java programmers. So it couldn't not apply, even if they didn't spell it out.
Besides, you can sort of tell by the type of processes used. People doing these transitions (automated rewrite, emulation, etc) are usually doing it because they've lost the ability to work with the system.
Yes, they might be saving a ton of money on the hardware, but that's not the whole story. If they were comfortable with the system they'd have rewritten it piecemeal by now and it wouldn't be here to be transitioned in one big piece.
When "everything" is, "It's slow!", yeah.
Yes, yawn, there are some things Java is slow for and that need speed. You shouldn't do those few things in Java. So what if it starts slow? Don't spawn new processes to handle incoming connections. For any given issue there are workarounds. If there are too many issues to justify it, use another tool.
But, please, SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT IT!
Seriously, just don't fucking use it. Just because you're too retarded to evaluate tools for the job at hand doesn't mean everyone else is.
Java's not my choice either, but I don't feel the need to find every Java coder I know and rub it in. They're too busy redundantly declaring types to stop to chat anyways...
people who don't care
People who don't care don't call the GPL a viral license. They're out not-caring far more than that.
It's only losers who care too much but have an axe to grind who call the GPL viral.
thesis length articles about why everyone should use certain words
If "That word doesn't mean what you think" is thesis-length, you went to a really poor school.
There's a big difference between trying to force people to use a word that doesn't fit - or demanding that it does fit as you are doing - and simply pointing out that such usage is wrong.
When we switched from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence, heights dropped two inches on average, lifespans shortened by a couple decades, and really interestingly, war broke out.
so if we can provide for all our basic needs plus a lot of luxuries with everyone working, say, 30 hours per week, maybe we should consider it.
The flaw with these statements is that there's a lot more everyone that there was. You say it as if we, personally, switched modes and watched life become harder. While people changed modes far more of their children lived. That the average life expectancy went down only ignores the concept that people who otherwise would not have lived at all, got a chance.
Leeching off the landscape works with small numbers, but falls apart (ie, requires vastly more work) when more people attempt it.
Not that life now requires 40h/w, but it's a different world and comparisons between the two situations aren't useful.
There are two problems around this, one is people who feel they need more stuff. Sick, but whatever. The other, and serious one, is companies who act as if not wanting full-time employment is crazy. They only give 3w/y of vacation (or other sad amount) and look at you as if you're crazy if you offer to take two or three months off unpaid.
You want her to run the car companies better, even though they're private businesses? [...] please enlighten us about how this should have been handled.
Simple. Staying the fuck out of the private businesses. Dunno if the particular politico in question could have made any appreciable difference, but I can't imagine they could help by doing anything but ending government involvement.
Ideal scenario? Sometime in the 70s, amidst other problems, one or more of the Big-3 simply fail. By now it wouldn't even be interesting history, they'd simply have gone bankrupt years ago and we wouldn't think anything of it.
At worst, if you think you can save it, take tax money and buy it outright in the name of the people and run it. But to just give huge cash payouts to the people who've already destroyed it... Insanity.
You shouldn't have held the release in the model's face, but you should have refused to even discuss the issue with her mother.
Yes, we tolerate them. They're clearly sub-adult intellectually but we don't deny them housing, simple work, freedom, etc.
But yeah, they are suspect - as is anyone unable to think clearly and logically. Who cares what any given one thinks (young/old earth) when it's just what they were told to think? It's a culture of ignorance and that's more important than any specific answer.
Of course, there are disciples of FOX and Michael Moore who are pretty bad at critical thinking too...
Yeah, it's like FOX news all over again.
Dude, just read the UN quarterly reports to the security counsel.
Yeah, and it was happening since the end of the first war. We hardly cared, including Bush pre-wtc, because he was mostly happy to kill his own people.
Fox news has nothing to do with that
When FOX starts trumpeting the evils of Saddam, ignoring the tons of actual atrocities and starts quoting UN documents you know they're up to something. If they really cared they had years to notice, but they only care when Bush is trying to make his Iraq-war case.
The original plan was to use small amounts of troops with large reserves in order to keep the footprint small and entice battles out of Iraq.
Sounds like a dandy plan.
The length of the war was pretty much caused by all the stalling we did which allowed protest in turkey to force us out of entering from there.
This is when Bush was trying vainly to connect Saddam to wtc?
Perhaps the Turkish people merely didn't want to be parties to war crimes?
It was literally two different wars with two different outcomes because of the two different tactics.
You know, history is full of master strategists - at least in their own heads, who think that having one really good plan makes up for it inevitably falling apart and them having nothing.
This is part of what people point to when they say Bush was Saddam focused. While certain military incursions into parts of Iraq might have helped us and the Iraqis, Bush let his quest for Saddam lead him into a badly planned war.
More oil available ... processed ... sold in dollars.
Here is where your argument breaks down.
First, the EU had already implemented Kyoto which meant their oil use was going to drop.
"Chololate rationing will be implemented"
Second, there was never any oil shortages and therfore never any need for oil.
"There never was chocolate rationing"
The price hikes we saw was from hedge investors taking stock in oil futures in attempts to place the valuation of the dollar.
You mean, investing in commodities? Or alternatively, ditching the dollar?
They could literally sell the futures for spot price at a loss and profit because of changes in the value of the dollar.
Of course, the dollar is increasingly just worthless paper and oil is useful around the world.
The problem with that is when normal companies who use oil attempt to secure long term runs, it drives the price up because even though there is more then enough physical oil,
No, this is the market disagreeing with you. There wasn't enough physical oil to satisfy everyone who wanted their own hedge, that's why the price went up as the cost of your own buffer was worked out.
the amount of buyers doubled with people who could never take possession of the oil.
And you're under the assumption that most buyers of commodities take them home with them?
And of course this also drove the spot prices up.
Demand, it'll do that.
There was never any shortage of oil
And yet people wanted more and were willing to pay for it.
and Iraq'a production wouldn't have made a difference.
Oh, of course not. Because the specific issue you focus on was a bubble you can't see that oil is actually tremendously valuable (hello, the Bush's are rich from it...) and that the Iraqi oil doesn't have to go one-to-one to fill some shortfall in Kentucky, but simply by being pumped and refined in a USA-friendly country helps our g
Yes, actually, it is. The point of copyright is ...
You seem to have mistaken government fiat with reality - it's okay, they usually make the same mistake, witness GM, etc. You've confused a law saying I should not with a physical law meaning I can not. For instance, despite my willingness to question and ignore useless laws, I have been unable to fall up. Damn gravity.
However, despite the US Supreme Court's ruling that Steamboat Willie is still under copyright I have been able to reproduce it.
Do you see the difference?
It's provable that I can reproduce a file almost infinitely, without any incremental costs. That's the very definition of non-scarce. The bits being used are already there, so to speak.
You can copy information without depriving the original owner. I can't take your car, or house without depriving you of them, but if I copy a song that you have or wrote you likely wouldn't even know.
So what has been done? Certainly a government monopoly has been ignored. Pissed on. Flagrantly mocked even. But nothing has been stolen. Everyone has everything they started with, and now some people have more.
While there are some applications for limited government monopolies you do nobody any favors by pretending that they are some sort of natural right.
Words have meanings. The ones you are using are wrong. The term you're looking for is copyright violation. Use it.
It's because we have names for different areas in math at a school level.
Once you're done with a whole year of trig, forcing you to memorize a bunch of formulas you never want to touch math again, especially calculus which is rumored to be far harder.
Or, you know, actually explains some of the crap you've been needlessly memorizing over the years.
ARGH!
I know they can't exactly start with calculus, but if they didn't keep them so separate and you could see that the trig formulas and such are actually simply derived you could think of them as simply an advanced move, not some magical formula that someone must have discovered by pure luck.
You don't have to show the derivation of Pi (at least and make the students follow along), just explain a bit of how it works and why - merely give them a glimpse of real math behind the scenes of the plugging numbers into formulas.
I'd love to see what Feynman and Cliff Stoll would come up with to replace k-12.
Between not having the balls to tell students that shit like god and santa are make-believe and making the simplest things in the world (math) into some horrible memorizing game schools are almost totally worthless. Add in ignoring bullies and they really are little prisons...
Sure, then let's make sure all the laws are considered here to make it fair.
Let's really consider fair use. Not just yammer over some old words but think of what kinds of use are fair (anything that doesn't obviously hurt anyone) and then allow them.
Let's also consider that copyright is a trade of a limited government monopoly for the ability to enrich the public domain with more works. This is only reasonable if the public domain is actually ever enriched. So strip all DRMed works of copyright - they can't ever really be used by the people so they aren't going to enrich the public domain and as such don't deserve protection.
Now let's extend copyrights retroactively where it matters. If Disney wants their copyrights to last forever, why don't we go back just a few years more and find whoever owns something similar enough to Steamboat Willy and make their copyright the one that gets grandfathered in... After all, why choose to start at the specific place that enriches Disney over all others?
If we're going to extend the copyright we should consider the phrase "a limited time" in the context of the life of a member of the public. After all, why should someone pay for someone's monopoly now that won't enrich anyone until centuries after his death?
Oh, you wanted to just paint the people as thieves. How original.
Ummm, one's a forced reallocation of scare goods, the other isn't.
Copyrights, like patents, are just a way of stamping "first post" on something and collecting rent.
The only winners would be the lawyers.
You know they're in the wrong, but the rules were written by them and their ilk and you'll never win if you play their game.
Especially when they wear the trappings of authority.
Child abuse by a stranger is a terrible shame, but by a parent... treason.
plenty of evidence to suggest strong military actions dating from 1995 forward
Yes. In fact, having admitted in the first war that Iraq under Saddam was criminal we never should have stopped until he was removed.
There were legitimate reasons for the Iraq war without bringing oil into the mix.
Yeah, but we didn't use any of them. If we had we'd have invaded before 9/11 and had an obvious humanitarian mandate.
a legitimate reason can be illegitimate after the fact when we find out more
No, it's an illegitimate reason that appeared legitimate. It happens, but there's no need to sugarcoat it.
Hans Blix ... no WMDs, ... misleading ... reports ... UN security council ... previously declare destroyed munitions ... banned chemical weapons machinery ... agriculture chemical processing facility ... weapons production ... leading ... war ... proof of illegal ... and so on.
Yeah, it's like FOX news all over again.
If we needed a reason to get rid of Saddam it was his continual gassing of the Kurds, or any of umpteen other well-documented murder sprees in his capacity as leader of Iraq.
The shit you're repeating, while technically true that most of those incidents happened, was happening all along and nobody cared until they decided to invade, then they took the usual diplomatic push-back by a tyrant against supervision and declared it to be plans for ... exactly the same low-level genocide we'd been fine with for years, but now we care!
At the time the US wanted to goto war with Iraq, [...] It wasn't until after the war that we found our understanding to be so far off base.
Convenient - you want to go to war with someone and all the evidence your special hand-picked teams can find point to reasons for war. It's not until you realize the war isn't over in a month or two that you start to question the rest of their advice...
It was all an obvious lie, imho. We'd always had enough reasons to justify war with Saddam for moral and security reasons. But these weren't used because it would set bad precedents to be used against us. Instead we're given more of Bush's "Trust me" speeches about how he had all this evidence, and it was great, but we just couldn't see it yet... If we'd have had real secret info even his hinting at it would risk compromising it. If we'd been worried about Saddam, for real, Saddam would've have figured it out during the months that CNN showed us to be running around like idiots talking about this supposed proof and attacked us then.
But so far all I've done is piss on the "reasons" we were given.
The war was never about oil unless ...
No, unless by oil you mean money and power, largely through control of oil.
I think Bush had this image of a quick little war and being welcomed in Iraq as a liberator as the international coalition was seen to be during the first war (until they packed up and left, people unsaved). So I don't think it takes a lot to explain his calls for war. If you think we'll win handily and quickly you don't need to gain as much.
But what does the USA gain from Iraq?
More oil available/less hoarded by our 'enemies', more oil processed by western companies, and more oil sold in dollars.
Even right there it probably enough to make it worth while. Then consider that Bush and his advisors have connections to the companies doing much of the work, getting oil contracts, etc and it's pretty easy to see how they could all be a bit biased.
Then there's the value of Iraq for military bases in the area, and a million little imperialistic benefits.
Oh, and they thought
I guess it comes off as moralizing because you talk about delusional gamblers (no argument there) and how they'll stop if they can't collect their winnings. Well yeah, most people will stop doing something if everything they hoped to gain would be confiscated - however delusional the basic activity. But, if you didn't mean it that way you didn't. But yeah, it will be effective.
I've never been accused of staying on-topic, so what's baseless about the comment on the Iraqi war? It was presented as a quick little war, and the non-oil reasons (terrorists, Saddam, etc) all fall apart when poked at.
Or was it the connection between the unjust war and taxation?
It's recursive, simply call for a flash-mob of vigilantes to take care of the troublesome vigilantes.
There's probably already an XKCD about it.
Honestly though, in a more transparent society (ie, fed-up with being taped by everyone else, citizens start recording everything too and sharing it in a giant p2p net) this is less of a problem because not only are more angles of any given event available but the people making the accusations become public themselves as well as the vigilantes who actually take any actions. This, applied recursively as mentioned, eventually produces methodical and well-documented vigilantes.
Or, um, chaos reigns.