And this is EXACTLY why the government should have little to no regulatory authority in the free market.
When the government is far-reaching, then the legislators are influenced by whoever writes their campaign checks. Big business gives lots of money in order to get legislation passed IN FAVOR of big business. Ever wonder why a small business man these days really MUST have an attorney AND a tax accountant on retainer?
Independent and small business is a thread to big business. Therefore the big businesses attempt to skew the market in their favor by buying legislation.
The simple solution is to shrink the government and have a hands off approach to the market (thus the term "free" market) that way big business cannot pay off legislators to legislate in their favor and crush competition through regulation.
#1 - Copyright only exists when the idea is expressed in to/on to a tangible medium.
#3 - Actually there are various levels of similarity. Besides substanstial similarity, there is striking similarity. Also there is something called access. Did the defendent have access to the copyrighted work? Access can be hard to prove, but if there was wide dissemination of the copyrighted work (it was a top record 10 on the charts), then access can be infered.
But other than those two points, you nailed it pretty much.
But those are non-professional musicians. More than likely they are kids in a basement or something.
Professional musicans (or anyone serious) can make a $25k investment in some decent quality studio equipment and make radio quality recordings in their house if they know what they are doing.
The tools, the recording technology, is stupid cheap these days.
My parents bought me a Commodore 64/128 around 1987. I used it to play games mostly and learned a little bit of very simplistic BASIC programming then. To give you perspective I'm 24 now.
My school system (Seminole County, FL) was actually quite advanced and wealthy at the time and had an Apple Lab. I learned how to program on the Apple IIe, and IIGS in a public school. I also learned how to use a Mac in elementary school before age 11.
My parents bought a series of PCs in the 90s the first one of which contained PC-GEOS a well developed DOS-based 16bit GUI. Eventually we got on Prodigy and I did the BBS thing too.
When I was a teenage at age 14 I paid for broadband cable in my house. I then began to create websites for various small businesses and that kept me from ever having to have a "job" in high school. In fact I did so well with that I didn't have to have a "job" until my 3rd year in college because school kept me too busy to work on my other income-producing products.
So yes I am very greatful for the computers I was given access to as a kid, they have helped paved the way for me later on in life.
Maybe we disagree on what we think is "best" for the country.
However if the rule of law was applied, and the Constitution was followed the way it was written, then the federal government would be much smaller. Any powers not specifically granted to the federal gov in the Constitution are reserved to the states. Period, end of story.
The courts and congress expanding the "interstate commerce" clause and the "general welfare" clause beyond their original intents are the greatest bane of this country's existence.
We all know congress is wrong often, but I think we should also admit that sometimes the courts are wrong too. Expanding federal powers on these types of issues is a prime example.
The Founding Fathers wanted a minimalist federal government because they didn't want us to turn into imperial England. A weak government with non-centralized power was a way to help prevent that.
The Constitution does NOT grant the federal government the right to micro-legislate isses such as education and schools within states' boreders.
And about your statement: "...forcing different races, religions, etc. to cohabit..." is NONE of the business of the government at ANY LEVEL, local, state, federal! The government should have no say about who lives with who much less FORCING anyone to cohabit with anyone elese.
Islam and democracy are currently incompatiable. The head of the state, is the head of the church. THEY HAVE NO SEPERATION OF CHURCH AND STATE!
That is the problem they have.
I too am a Christian and it kills me when my fellow believers attempt to spread their faith via legislation. They don't realize that is what the Roman Catholic church did with the Pope during the mideval times and it was a disaster.
Seperation of the church and state protects the church just as much as it protects the state. Also just because the Christians hold the majority of the government today, doesn't mean that they will tomorrow. Therefore the best scenario is to have a neutral and secular government that doesn't promote or pander to any religion.
I think the first thing that needs to be changed is that the Senate needs to be changed back to a more dignified "upperhouse" with a serious distinction between that and the HoR.
Thigns changed early last century when they decided to put Senate seats on the ballots. Previous to that the Senate was comprised of delegates from each state's legislature, selected by the legislatures themselves - NOT by the populace.
Most of the time these Senators selected by the state legislatures were ex-governers and statesmen with no political ambition because their political careers were largely on the decline. These were the true professional politicians who were not apt to have knee-jerk reactions to public opinion. They were our republic/proxy part of our democratic-republic and helped prevent mob-populist rule.
I think that having this system revert to the way the Framers intended it would be a good thing for the country.
When a government can have far-reaching regulations it tends to have those regulations written in favor of whoever foots the campaign bill. This means that it hinders small business and independent establishments.
This is why the US government needs to be shrunk and severely limited in its powers and ability to regulate.
Who said Saddam actually built them? Who says they were not bought and shipped there? There is no written evidence that Stalin killed millions of people, but he did. Hitler wrote down the people he killed. Stalin and Saddam didn't. That doesn't mean they didn't do it just because they failed to scribe it.
Just because WMDs are not there now doesn't mean they never were. We know for a fact he had them at one point because we gave them to him. As we were moving in from the south, trucks were leaving the country to the east. Also Saddam was known to bury entire aircraft in the desert, and even send them to Iran while inspectors. He was the master of deception and smoke and mirrors.
In my opinion I think he was about to trade oil for uranium with North Korea and the US decided to stop it. If you remember just before we invaded N Korea unplugged their cameras in their reactors. Also they are under heavy sanctions and need crude oil badly.
We didn't invade for oil and anyone who thinks we did lacks serious critical thinking skills.
Did it ever occour to you that since this is an unpopular war that ex-Bush admin types are getting OFF the bandwagon in order to save their career later? Or not to be held in public contempt?
That's because the religion says one should give to the church. When people do this they are considering it something that will either benefit others directly, or themselves in the afterlife (or whatever).
But space exlploration still has a cost. And that cost has to be paid. People don't spend money or do things without a precieved benefit. If you can think of a situation where people will do something with zero benefit, please list it here.
Iraq was a benefit to some people, the Iraqis, the military, the Bush Admin, the Isralies. We didn't just go for the hell of it.
The space race was the same situation. We had to beat the Russians, that was the goal.
Obviously you haven't seen the amounts of profit made on these events. They are absolutely profit motivated.
But if you want to be less practical than that, the point is competition. To BEAT the other guy.
Why did the US even go into space? To BEAT Russia. We had a goal and a purpose. Athletes have a goal and a purpose. They want to win over the next guy. Or they want to make a million dollars a game. Spectators want to be entertained and are willing to pay to do so. Team owners are wanting to profit from owning the team, OR, satisfy their ego by saying "I own a team".
One of the very first things they teach in marketing is that people only spend money when there is a precieved benefit.
The first thing we should do is to abolish the FDA.
Everyone is concerned about the high cost of prescription drugs.
Before we are regulators, drug company employees, or cost-conscious consumers, we are human beings who will one day need a life-saving pharmaceutical or medical intervention. Thus, we all have a vested interest in innovative treatments at affordable prices.
Even at today's high drug prices, every dollar spent on new pharmaceuticals -- or "new chemical entities," as we call them in the trade -- saves us an additional $2 or $3 by lowering health care costs and cutting lost time.
For example, when the first anti-ulcer drug, Tagamet, was introduced, patients no longer needed to leave work for a $28,000 surgery. Instead, they could take one to three courses of drug therapy, each costing about $1,000 -- with virtually no loss of work.
Many of the proposed "solutions" to high drug costs, such as price and profit controls, would cause manufacturers to cut back on the innovation which creates such saving.
In the long run, these "solutions" only address the symptoms, not the underlying problem -- excess regulation.
Although many researchers knew that excess regulation -- regulation that takes lives instead of saving them -- played a role in soaring pharmaceutical prices, it's only in the past few years that enough data has been available to actually quantify some of these costs. Even though I had witnessed "regulatory creep" first-hand in my 19 years as a research scientist in the pharmaceutical industry, I was astounded at how large a role regulation plays in the rising price of drugs.
* Drug development time In 1962, the Kefauver-Harris amendments to the Food and Drug Act were passed in the wake of the European thalidomide tragedy. Thalidomide, a sleeping aid less likely than barbiturates to cause death by accidental overdose, prevented morning sickness as well. But, women who took thalidomide in the first month or two of pregnancy often had babies with half-formed limbs. The U.S. was largely unaffected by this tragedy because the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had withheld approval due to concern about kidney toxicity.
The new amendments required manufacturers to test drugs for efficacy, even though a 1907 Supreme Court ruling had declared such laws unconstitutional. No drug works for everyone, so what percentage of people had to be helped for it to be lawful? Clearly, as the court pointed out, it was a "matter of opinion."
Nevertheless, the 1962 amendments became law. The FDA set the bar for efficacy so high that drug development times soared from about 4.4 years in the decades prior to the amendments to 14.2 years in the 1990s. Without the 1992 Prescription Drug User Fee Act, the average drug would have spent 15.2 years in development in the 1990s. The 1992 legislation allowed manufacturers to pay for the hiring of more FDA staff -- who would then process their specific applications more rapidly.
The dramatic increase in drug development times meant that some drug patents ran out before the manufacturer could get it through the regulatory process! Consequently, Congress passed the Waxman-Hatch Act of 1984, which gave patent extensions to drug makers based on the regulatory component of the development time. By the Act's definition of the "regulatory review time," about 84 percent of the average new drug's development time was consumed by regulations, most of which (about 70 percent) was directly attributable to the 1962 amendments.
Adding a decade or so to development times meant that people died waiting for life-saving drugs. Since we know how many lives the average drug saves, we can calculate that about 4.7 million people died prematurely since 1962 due to the amendments. In contrast, had the amendments prevented all serious drug toxicity in the United States at the same rate seen from 1950 to 1962, only about 7,000 lives would have been saved.
Even if we assume that the U.S. would have experienced a
Well although you were trying to be funny there is some truth from a certain perspective on what you were saying.
HIV/AIDS is mostly contracted due to one's behavior. Now I take exception for those poor kids born with it due to their parents' irresponsible actions, and of course those that contract it from legit transfusions (exceptionally rare).
But other than that, if you keep yourself within specific behaviors, then YOU WILL NOT CONTRACT HIV/AIDS!
A lot of religious "laws/rules" have a reason behind them: no sex before marriage, no drugs, etc etc. These "laws/rules" were set in place to protect the people of that specific religion.
I am a Christian and I am not a hardliner fundamentalist, in fact I consider myself a classical liberal, very open minded, logical, rational, etc. So I am not saying that everyone needs to follow all of the laws in the Bible, or the Koran, or whatever.
But I AM saying that people should take responsibility for their actions. And unless you are in one of those two RARE cases mentioned above (transfusion/birth), contracting HIV/AIDS is a result of your own irresponsible actions.
Slashdot Mirror
And this is EXACTLY why the government should have little to no regulatory authority in the free market.
When the government is far-reaching, then the legislators are influenced by whoever writes their campaign checks. Big business gives lots of money in order to get legislation passed IN FAVOR of big business. Ever wonder why a small business man these days really MUST have an attorney AND a tax accountant on retainer?
Independent and small business is a thread to big business. Therefore the big businesses attempt to skew the market in their favor by buying legislation.
The simple solution is to shrink the government and have a hands off approach to the market (thus the term "free" market) that way big business cannot pay off legislators to legislate in their favor and crush competition through regulation.
Keep this in mind:
Patents are for processes, formulas, protocols, new ways of doing things.
Copyrights are for the expression of ideas in a creative context.
The threshold for copyright is a "minimal degree of creativity"
Whereas the threshold for a patent is quite high of a "novel inventiveness"
#1 - Copyright only exists when the idea is expressed in to/on to a tangible medium.
#3 - Actually there are various levels of similarity. Besides substanstial similarity, there is striking similarity. Also there is something called access. Did the defendent have access to the copyrighted work? Access can be hard to prove, but if there was wide dissemination of the copyrighted work (it was a top record 10 on the charts), then access can be infered.
But other than those two points, you nailed it pretty much.
There is an EXCELLENT book everyone should read called:
Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity
by Jerome R., Ph.D. Corsi, Craig R. Smith
They detail the abiogenic theory of oil in which it states that oil is not as "limited" in its supply as people like to think.
It's available on Amazon and other places.
Damn good read.
But those are non-professional musicians. More than likely they are kids in a basement or something.
Professional musicans (or anyone serious) can make a $25k investment in some decent quality studio equipment and make radio quality recordings in their house if they know what they are doing.
The tools, the recording technology, is stupid cheap these days.
And yes I am an audio engineer.
Sorry about your loss... The important thing is that yall were happy!
My parents bought me a Commodore 64/128 around 1987. I used it to play games mostly and learned a little bit of very simplistic BASIC programming then. To give you perspective I'm 24 now.
My school system (Seminole County, FL) was actually quite advanced and wealthy at the time and had an Apple Lab. I learned how to program on the Apple IIe, and IIGS in a public school. I also learned how to use a Mac in elementary school before age 11.
My parents bought a series of PCs in the 90s the first one of which contained PC-GEOS a well developed DOS-based 16bit GUI. Eventually we got on Prodigy and I did the BBS thing too.
When I was a teenage at age 14 I paid for broadband cable in my house. I then began to create websites for various small businesses and that kept me from ever having to have a "job" in high school. In fact I did so well with that I didn't have to have a "job" until my 3rd year in college because school kept me too busy to work on my other income-producing products.
So yes I am very greatful for the computers I was given access to as a kid, they have helped paved the way for me later on in life.
..TV watches YOU!
(alt version: In Soviet Russia, TV taxes YOU!)
Maybe we disagree on what we think is "best" for the country.
However if the rule of law was applied, and the Constitution was followed the way it was written, then the federal government would be much smaller. Any powers not specifically granted to the federal gov in the Constitution are reserved to the states. Period, end of story.
The courts and congress expanding the "interstate commerce" clause and the "general welfare" clause beyond their original intents are the greatest bane of this country's existence.
We all know congress is wrong often, but I think we should also admit that sometimes the courts are wrong too. Expanding federal powers on these types of issues is a prime example.
The Founding Fathers wanted a minimalist federal government because they didn't want us to turn into imperial England. A weak government with non-centralized power was a way to help prevent that.
So this is how physicists spend their Valentine's Day?
I am a white Southern libertarian and if you were running for office, I would vote for you! ;-)
Not quite.
The Constitution does NOT grant the federal government the right to micro-legislate isses such as education and schools within states' boreders.
And about your statement: "...forcing different races, religions, etc. to cohabit..." is NONE of the business of the government at ANY LEVEL, local, state, federal! The government should have no say about who lives with who much less FORCING anyone to cohabit with anyone elese.
You are correct.
And to expound on your statement the government doesn't belong in our houses. Not the state, local, and DEFINATELY not the federal government!
"There are two types of people I can't stand.... those intolorent of other people's culture, and the damn Dutch!"
Well that's just it.
Islam and democracy are currently incompatiable. The head of the state, is the head of the church. THEY HAVE NO SEPERATION OF CHURCH AND STATE!
That is the problem they have.
I too am a Christian and it kills me when my fellow believers attempt to spread their faith via legislation. They don't realize that is what the Roman Catholic church did with the Pope during the mideval times and it was a disaster.
Seperation of the church and state protects the church just as much as it protects the state. Also just because the Christians hold the majority of the government today, doesn't mean that they will tomorrow. Therefore the best scenario is to have a neutral and secular government that doesn't promote or pander to any religion.
"There are two types of people I can't stand.... those intoloernt of other people's culture, and the damn Dutch!"
I think the first thing that needs to be changed is that the Senate needs to be changed back to a more dignified "upperhouse" with a serious distinction between that and the HoR.
Thigns changed early last century when they decided to put Senate seats on the ballots. Previous to that the Senate was comprised of delegates from each state's legislature, selected by the legislatures themselves - NOT by the populace.
Most of the time these Senators selected by the state legislatures were ex-governers and statesmen with no political ambition because their political careers were largely on the decline. These were the true professional politicians who were not apt to have knee-jerk reactions to public opinion. They were our republic/proxy part of our democratic-republic and helped prevent mob-populist rule.
I think that having this system revert to the way the Framers intended it would be a good thing for the country.
Why hasn't a company put a bird into orbit and given free satellite radio with commercials just like terrestrial radio?
The equipment/transmission protocol could be "open source" so the recievers would
be widely spread thus swift adoption by the masses.
Does anyone think this is a viable business model?
You hit the nail on the head.
BIG BUSINESS LIKES BIG GOVERNMENT!
When a government can have far-reaching regulations it tends to have those regulations written in favor of whoever foots the campaign bill. This means that it hinders small business and independent establishments.
This is why the US government needs to be shrunk and severely limited in its powers and ability to regulate.
Who said Saddam actually built them? Who says they were not bought and shipped there? There is no written evidence that Stalin killed millions of people, but he did. Hitler wrote down the people he killed. Stalin and Saddam didn't. That doesn't mean they didn't do it just because they failed to scribe it.
Just because WMDs are not there now doesn't mean they never were. We know for a fact he had them at one point because we gave them to him. As we were moving in from the south, trucks were leaving the country to the east. Also Saddam was known to bury entire aircraft in the desert, and even send them to Iran while inspectors. He was the master of deception and smoke and mirrors.
In my opinion I think he was about to trade oil for uranium with North Korea and the US decided to stop it. If you remember just before we invaded N Korea unplugged their cameras in their reactors. Also they are under heavy sanctions and need crude oil badly.
We didn't invade for oil and anyone who thinks we did lacks serious critical thinking skills.
Did it ever occour to you that since this is an unpopular war that ex-Bush admin types are getting OFF the bandwagon in order to save their career later? Or not to be held in public contempt?
That's because the religion says one should give to the church. When people do this they are considering it something that will either benefit others directly, or themselves in the afterlife (or whatever).
But space exlploration still has a cost. And that cost has to be paid. People don't spend money or do things without a precieved benefit. If you can think of a situation where people will do something with zero benefit, please list it here.
Iraq was a benefit to some people, the Iraqis, the military, the Bush Admin, the Isralies. We didn't just go for the hell of it.
The space race was the same situation. We had to beat the Russians, that was the goal.
HA!
Obviously you haven't seen the amounts of profit made on these events. They are absolutely profit motivated.
But if you want to be less practical than that, the point is competition. To BEAT the other guy.
Why did the US even go into space? To BEAT Russia. We had a goal and a purpose. Athletes have a goal and a purpose. They want to win over the next guy. Or they want to make a million dollars a game. Spectators want to be entertained and are willing to pay to do so. Team owners are wanting to profit from owning the team, OR, satisfy their ego by saying "I own a team".
One of the very first things they teach in marketing is that people only spend money when there is a precieved benefit.
The first thing we should do is to abolish the FDA.
Everyone is concerned about the high cost of prescription drugs.
Before we are regulators, drug company employees, or cost-conscious consumers, we are human beings who will one day need a life-saving pharmaceutical or medical intervention. Thus, we all have a vested interest in innovative treatments at affordable prices.
Even at today's high drug prices, every dollar spent on new pharmaceuticals -- or "new chemical entities," as we call them in the trade -- saves us an additional $2 or $3 by lowering health care costs and cutting lost time.
For example, when the first anti-ulcer drug, Tagamet, was introduced, patients no longer needed to leave work for a $28,000 surgery. Instead, they could take one to three courses of drug therapy, each costing about $1,000 -- with virtually no loss of work.
Many of the proposed "solutions" to high drug costs, such as price and profit controls, would cause manufacturers to cut back on the innovation which creates such saving.
In the long run, these "solutions" only address the symptoms, not the underlying problem -- excess regulation.
Although many researchers knew that excess regulation -- regulation that takes lives instead of saving them -- played a role in soaring pharmaceutical prices, it's only in the past few years that enough data has been available to actually quantify some of these costs. Even though I had witnessed "regulatory creep" first-hand in my 19 years as a research scientist in the pharmaceutical industry, I was astounded at how large a role regulation plays in the rising price of drugs.
* Drug development time
In 1962, the Kefauver-Harris amendments to the Food and Drug Act were passed in the wake of the European thalidomide tragedy. Thalidomide, a sleeping aid less likely than barbiturates to cause death by accidental overdose, prevented morning sickness as well. But, women who took thalidomide in the first month or two of pregnancy often had babies with half-formed limbs.
The U.S. was largely unaffected by this tragedy because the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had withheld approval due to concern about kidney toxicity.
The new amendments required manufacturers to test drugs for efficacy, even though a 1907 Supreme Court ruling had declared such laws unconstitutional. No drug works for everyone, so what percentage of people had to be helped for it to be lawful? Clearly, as the court pointed out, it was a "matter of opinion."
Nevertheless, the 1962 amendments became law. The FDA set the bar for efficacy so high that drug development times soared from about 4.4 years in the decades prior to the amendments to 14.2 years in the 1990s. Without the 1992 Prescription Drug User Fee Act, the average drug would have spent 15.2 years in development in the 1990s. The 1992 legislation allowed manufacturers to pay for the hiring of more FDA staff -- who would then process their specific applications more rapidly.
The dramatic increase in drug development times meant that some drug patents ran out before the manufacturer could get it through the regulatory process! Consequently, Congress passed the Waxman-Hatch Act of 1984, which gave patent extensions to drug makers based on the regulatory component of the development time. By the Act's definition of the "regulatory review time," about 84 percent of the average new drug's development time was consumed by regulations, most of which (about 70 percent) was directly attributable to the 1962 amendments.
Adding a decade or so to development times meant that people died waiting for life-saving drugs. Since we know how many lives the average drug saves, we can calculate that about 4.7 million people died prematurely since 1962 due to the amendments. In contrast, had the amendments prevented all serious drug toxicity in the United States at the same rate seen from 1950 to 1962, only about 7,000 lives would have been saved.
Even if we assume that the U.S. would have experienced a
Well although you were trying to be funny there is some truth from a certain perspective on what you were saying.
HIV/AIDS is mostly contracted due to one's behavior. Now I take exception for those poor kids born with it due to their parents' irresponsible actions, and of course those that contract it from legit transfusions (exceptionally rare).
But other than that, if you keep yourself within specific behaviors, then YOU WILL NOT CONTRACT HIV/AIDS!
A lot of religious "laws/rules" have a reason behind them: no sex before marriage, no drugs, etc etc. These "laws/rules" were set in place to protect the people of that specific religion.
I am a Christian and I am not a hardliner fundamentalist, in fact I consider myself a classical liberal, very open minded, logical, rational, etc. So I am not saying that everyone needs to follow all of the laws in the Bible, or the Koran, or whatever.
But I AM saying that people should take responsibility for their actions. And unless you are in one of those two RARE cases mentioned above (transfusion/birth), contracting HIV/AIDS is a result of your own irresponsible actions.