All this ignores the basis of copyright law. That is, creators are given an exclusive right to profit off of their works in exchange for it's eventual inclusion in the public domain. Society only enforces an exclusive license to distribute because culture benefits over the long term.
However the compact has been corrupted because creators have colluded with government to prevent any transfer of material to the public domain. Even now industry is attempting to extend the embargo on the transfer of material to the public domain yet again.
People can see that not only is industry preventing materials from going into the public domain they are also making those materials unavailable at any price. Try to find a legal source for a great amount of content produced in the past. Classic and not so classic movies, out of print books and so forth. Illegal to distribute and unavailable at any price legally.
Dream on. You mean the Democrats will not appoint a corporate shill like they did all the other times they picked an FCC Chairman?
Look every FCC chairman since Roosevelt has been a corporate lobbyist. It's just the industry that's changed. First it was the radio broadcast industry. Then The Television industry. One of them was the guy who made the blackball list for McCarthy. Telecom shills, AOL shills. This guy is a Verizon shll. Bill Clinton appointed a guy who worked for the Quello Center for Telecommunication Management and Law, a telcom industry shill. Bush a guy who worked for the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and Obama appointed a guy whop had worked for Fox Broadcasting and USA network and then another NTCA guy. Then Trump appointed this bozo from Verizon.
So yeah. Tell me that Trump screwed up when he appointed this industry hack. I'll agree with you. But don't pretend that then next person will be any better. Every one of them has been a corrupt industry hack and as long as the Ds & Rs think they can get away with it they will both continue to appoint industry shills to this position.
I'm a Republican. I'm happy about many of the things this administration is doing.
However I don't agree 100% with all of the opinions of my wife. What's the chance I'll ever agree 100% with all of the opinions of some random politician?
This is not a partisan issue, or shouldn't be. What it comes down to is a battle between two corporate interests. One the one side are the telecoms, who want to make money on both sides of the data stream. Charging users on own side and content developers/aggregators on the other. On the other side are the dotcoms, who are primarily content aggregators/creators. They want to make money off their users and have the ISPs, who are the telecoms carry their data for free.
There are no heroes in this fight. Not the ISPs. Not the dotcoms. and certainly not the FCC.
No matter who in in power the FCC has been the poster child fro regulatory capture from it's inception. Every FCC head, with the possible exception of one has been an industry hack. it's just the industry that changes. First it was the television networks, then the phone companies, then the cable companies, the ISPs, and on and on it goes.
What none of these people are is an advocate for the U.S. citizen. It isn't a Democratic thing or a Republican thing. Neither party has shone any interest in taking the FCC away from the entrenched industry interests and putting in people who are more interested in advancing user privacy, securing broadband in all areas of the country (including rural areas), opening up broadband, wireless and ISPs to free market competition, or doing anything else that would actually make the communication industry in the United States better. If anything the FCC is proof that crony capitalism is alive and well in the United States and that both parties are committed to keeping it so.
But is this a case of conflicting legislation, or it it a case of more stringent state laws?
For example in cases of safety the federal government can require that an item like electrical cable meet a set of minimum specs. A state can require a tighter set of specs be used in structures in their state. The state law does not contradict the federal. It just requires more stringent specs. This is entirely legal and happens all the time.
What the state cannot do is mandate that less stringent specs be used for electrical cable. Is that what the state is doing here? Requiring businesses follow less stringent requirements than the federal government? I don't think so.
I have no doubt the FCC will sue. The question then becomes is the state contradicting Federal law or are they merely setting more stringent requirements for businesses operating in their state? If it is the latter they are well within their rights.
I ride a bicycle to work. The only statement I'm making is that It's an easy way to get exercise. If you want to assume I'm making a statement about AGW you'd be wrong. That's what happens when you make assumptions about what someone's actions mean.
Like the devil the the biased mainstream media managed to convince people for years in the aftermath of WWII that it did not exists. The likes of Edward R Murrow and Walter Cronkite managed to convince the American public that they were unbiased reporters of the facts rather than the biased socialist-globalists that they really were.
And it is certainly true that Internet has undercut their ability to single source news to the masses. That can only be good thing.
I think part of the point is that most people in the U.S. have realized that all politicians are scum. Trump is not more scum than any of the rest.
But people tend to take the attitude, "Yeh he's scum, but he's our scum." I saw that for years in Chicago. Everyone knew the city government was corrupt, but Under Daily the corruption didn't much matter to the actual voter. Crime was relegated to criminals. That is when a body was found it wasn't a kid or innocent citizen. It belong to some thug. The streets were plowed when it snowed. The lights stayed on. That's what people care about.
The day after Trump was elected the stock market started to recover. Right now unemployment is really low, among many groups lower than it has ever been. People have more money in their pocket, now, due to tax reform. At lot of businesses were smart and passed their tax savings on to their employees in raises and bonuses, and got headlines for doing it.
This is what most non-ideological voters will remember come the next election.
The only people I see using the court system and democratic suppression are liberals. Conservatives aren't calling for people to mob political appointees of the other party in their homes and in public. Conservatives aren't calling for the overturn of a presidential election based on fabricated evidence and wishful thinking. That would be Democrat liberals.
Politics can be important, but at least in the U.S. the political opinions of my boss are relatively unimportant to me, as long as their political opinions don't try to force me to break the law.
My religious beliefs are the moral compass which directs my life and I have the right to quit a job which would require me to act against them.
Likewise I neither expect to be able to impel my boss to violate his or her religious beliefs, nor feel it's my right to do so.
You know instead of made up stuff created out of whole cloth by the left.
Does Trump lie? No doubt. I also remember a previous occupant of the White House who promised me I could keep my doctor, among other lies. But then he wasn't even the first occupant of that office to be a lying bastard. So in that respect Trump is about average.
Of course the promises Trump is keeping are the ones he made while campaigning, which scares not just liberals, but mainstream Republican politicians as well. They're terrified that voters might actually expect them to keep their promises.
As is typical your "very fine people on each side" discounts the fact that there might actually be non racists who believe that tearing down statues of historical figures might not be a good thing. For one thing it means people might forget that those statues of treasonous racist Confederate soldiers were erected by members of the Democratic party. The party that created and enforced Jim Crow laws, held up the civil rights law for years so a Republican wouldn't get credit for it, and was the party that fought desegregation so ardently. How that party would like all those statues to disappear so that they can pretend they never erected them.
So, the real problem here is some liberal arts major who was covering Wall Street, without understanding what was going on there is now covering Silicone Valley without really understanding what is going on there.
Isn't the the major problem with journalism in the U.S.? A bunch of people who don't have any real knowledge of what they are reporting on spouting nonsense? The reason the parallels are so bad is the writer doesn't know the difference between a tech company which supports vital technology infrastructure and a social media company that literally no one but the Ad agencies would even miss.
Users would think they miss it, but it would have literally no real effect on their life if Facebook or Google folded. Well at least not Google's ad business. As a supplier of Google Maps or Android there might be a problem. Facebook or Twitter? No effect on anybody's life. Even Trump would quickly move on to another platform, or no platform.
Not much more, if anything. Labor cost isn't the problem, and Apple could take a hit on the 46% profit they make off each iPhone without too much worry.
The real issues are supplies, supply chains and international sales. First, some raw materials are currently only available in China and are export-controlled in their unprocessed forms;
And you don't see how export control, by China, to make manufacturing in other locations impossible, as anti-competitive and worthy of tariffs?
Labor is not the issue. The issue is that the means of production sufficient for global consumption exist already and only in China; there is no compelling reason for Apple to burn a ton of cash to build surplus production facilities in America.
Great. Then let them and their customers pay the tariffs. The situation did not develop naturally. It developed as the result of collusion between the Chinese government and Apple (and the benign neglect of the Globalization cabal (R and D) in Washington.) I have no sympathy for them and their customers.
Perhaps because American workers aren't available in company dormitories to work on last minute changes to the iphone?
That is at least what Apple claimed when Obama asked Apple why they couldn't bring jobs back to the U.S. At least according to that bastion of conservative values the New York Times.
So the truth is that Apple likes being able to use slave labor to construct it's phones, because it's easy.
“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”(NYTimes 2016)
Except it's not generosity is it? It's not generosity for a company to obey health and safety laws and pay people a decent wage. It's not ungenerous for people to stop buying crap made by corporations in slave labor factories in places without effective health and safety and environmental laws.
Let Apple eat the cost of the tariffs or raise their prices to compensate. maybe that will actually get customers to look at the conditions under which their phones are made or at least make them stop pretending that Apple is a virtuous company.
The reason that bankruptcy was disallowed in the first place was because if the student defaults the government (U.S. taxpayer) paid. That's what "government backed loan" means.
If you change the law to allow bankruptcy again the government is still on the hook. If you change the law so that the loans are no longer guaranteed what you've basically done is made the word of the U.S. government worthless. (Yes know, it's probably worthless already, just ask all the Native American tribes who hold worthless treaties.) Since U.S. currency is also only backed by the word of the U.S. government the government defaulting on their promise might just cause some problems.
Besides if students can declare bankruptcy it's not the schools that will suffer. They've already got their money. It's the banks that will have to eat it. Just and fair, but that is never going to happen.
For anyone who believes the U.S. government is capable of doing healthcare I just recommend they look at the VA. The VA is what everyone's healthcare would look like if there was one payer in the U.S.
I think the untrustworthiness of the congress that would be crafting the laws is my biggest concern. As for leaving it to regulators we already know that just means it will be controlled by whatever industry hack the latest administration puts into the FCC, either on the telecom or media side depending who's in power.
The best way to fix this is probably to prevent ISPs from being media companies, just like we don't let film studios own theaters. Free market principles don't necessarily mean allowing for the existence of megacorporations. The market was much freer when corporations were only allowed to exist as entities limited to operating in specific businesses. Prevent ISPs from engaging in media businesses and the incentives for them to differentiate content goes away.
Actually the public information is pretty much good enough. State secrets is all about yield and making a bomb small and light enough to put on a missile.
Just making a bomb that is operational is no problem at all. The biggest hurdle is access to fissionable material.
This is exactly it. The Soviet Union fell because the the Soviet class, i.e. those who were real members of the Party realized that government and it's leaders were holding things back.
They started protesting and the leaders ordered the military to put them down. Problem was that the people protesting were the families of the members of the military. They weren't going to put down their own families. So the government crumbled.
In the U.S. a cross section of the populous is armed. Don't let the coastal Progressives fool you, get to the flyover states and you'll find as many registered Democrats who are hunters as Republicans. Same goes for gun owners who are armed for self defense.
Like the man said you have it backwards. Rights exist in the absence of laws which restrict them. No government grants rights, they are not theirs to grant. At most they can restrict rights, provided they have a compelling need.
In the United States the Constitution, particularly in it's first ten amendments further restricts the federal governments ability to impose restrictions on rights. The courts have extended the restrictions in most cases to the individual states. In no case is government given the authority to grant rights, because rights exist naturally and are not created by government.
As for individuals building their own firearms this has already been discussed at length on/.
As for your quote, most officers can try to do anything they want. When the charge gets to court it will be thrown out and if deliberate malfeasance can be shown by the arresting officer they may find themselves in a civil or federal court for their breach of civil rights.
I use lots of applications that work on Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and whatever Mac is using now. Why would anyone be using something that is limited to Windows in the area of file backup and transfer?
If you're talking about CAD or even Point of Sale, sure, sticking to a single OS might make sense. But file storage? This is a loser strategy.
A quick search online seems to indicate that in the majority of U.S. jurisdictions it is not legal to change lanes in an intersection. California is often cited as a place where it is not illegal. I can tell you that in my state (Virginia) it is definitely illegal.
Two people arriving at the same time is easy, and there is a rule to account for it.
The driver on the right has right of way. So it's only a problem when 4 cars show up at once, which almost never actually happens. If traffic is heavy enough on both roads for it to happen regularly the intersection should have traffic signals rather than stop signs.
You have a vastly over inflated opinion on the competency of the average human. A large percentage of them could be outperformed by the processing power of a Raspberry Pi.
Slashdot Mirror
All this ignores the basis of copyright law. That is, creators are given an exclusive right to profit off of their works in exchange for it's eventual inclusion in the public domain. Society only enforces an exclusive license to distribute because culture benefits over the long term.
However the compact has been corrupted because creators have colluded with government to prevent any transfer of material to the public domain. Even now industry is attempting to extend the embargo on the transfer of material to the public domain yet again.
People can see that not only is industry preventing materials from going into the public domain they are also making those materials unavailable at any price. Try to find a legal source for a great amount of content produced in the past. Classic and not so classic movies, out of print books and so forth. Illegal to distribute and unavailable at any price legally.
Dream on. You mean the Democrats will not appoint a corporate shill like they did all the other times they picked an FCC Chairman?
Look every FCC chairman since Roosevelt has been a corporate lobbyist. It's just the industry that's changed. First it was the radio broadcast industry. Then The Television industry. One of them was the guy who made the blackball list for McCarthy. Telecom shills, AOL shills. This guy is a Verizon shll. Bill Clinton appointed a guy who worked for the Quello Center for Telecommunication Management and Law, a telcom industry shill. Bush a guy who worked for the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and Obama appointed a guy whop had worked for Fox Broadcasting and USA network and then another NTCA guy. Then Trump appointed this bozo from Verizon.
So yeah. Tell me that Trump screwed up when he appointed this industry hack. I'll agree with you. But don't pretend that then next person will be any better. Every one of them has been a corrupt industry hack and as long as the Ds & Rs think they can get away with it they will both continue to appoint industry shills to this position.
I'm a Republican. I'm happy about many of the things this administration is doing.
However I don't agree 100% with all of the opinions of my wife. What's the chance I'll ever agree 100% with all of the opinions of some random politician?
This is not a partisan issue, or shouldn't be. What it comes down to is a battle between two corporate interests. One the one side are the telecoms, who want to make money on both sides of the data stream. Charging users on own side and content developers/aggregators on the other. On the other side are the dotcoms, who are primarily content aggregators/creators. They want to make money off their users and have the ISPs, who are the telecoms carry their data for free.
There are no heroes in this fight. Not the ISPs. Not the dotcoms. and certainly not the FCC.
No matter who in in power the FCC has been the poster child fro regulatory capture from it's inception. Every FCC head, with the possible exception of one has been an industry hack. it's just the industry that changes. First it was the television networks, then the phone companies, then the cable companies, the ISPs, and on and on it goes.
What none of these people are is an advocate for the U.S. citizen. It isn't a Democratic thing or a Republican thing. Neither party has shone any interest in taking the FCC away from the entrenched industry interests and putting in people who are more interested in advancing user privacy, securing broadband in all areas of the country (including rural areas), opening up broadband, wireless and ISPs to free market competition, or doing anything else that would actually make the communication industry in the United States better. If anything the FCC is proof that crony capitalism is alive and well in the United States and that both parties are committed to keeping it so.
But is this a case of conflicting legislation, or it it a case of more stringent state laws?
For example in cases of safety the federal government can require that an item like electrical cable meet a set of minimum specs. A state can require a tighter set of specs be used in structures in their state. The state law does not contradict the federal. It just requires more stringent specs. This is entirely legal and happens all the time.
What the state cannot do is mandate that less stringent specs be used for electrical cable. Is that what the state is doing here? Requiring businesses follow less stringent requirements than the federal government? I don't think so.
I have no doubt the FCC will sue. The question then becomes is the state contradicting Federal law or are they merely setting more stringent requirements for businesses operating in their state? If it is the latter they are well within their rights.
Maybe so.
I ride a bicycle to work. The only statement I'm making is that It's an easy way to get exercise. If you want to assume I'm making a statement about AGW you'd be wrong. That's what happens when you make assumptions about what someone's actions mean.
Media has never been non-biased.
Like the devil the the biased mainstream media managed to convince people for years in the aftermath of WWII that it did not exists. The likes of Edward R Murrow and Walter Cronkite managed to convince the American public that they were unbiased reporters of the facts rather than the biased socialist-globalists that they really were.
And it is certainly true that Internet has undercut their ability to single source news to the masses. That can only be good thing.
I think part of the point is that most people in the U.S. have realized that all politicians are scum. Trump is not more scum than any of the rest.
But people tend to take the attitude, "Yeh he's scum, but he's our scum." I saw that for years in Chicago. Everyone knew the city government was corrupt, but Under Daily the corruption didn't much matter to the actual voter. Crime was relegated to criminals. That is when a body was found it wasn't a kid or innocent citizen. It belong to some thug. The streets were plowed when it snowed. The lights stayed on. That's what people care about.
The day after Trump was elected the stock market started to recover. Right now unemployment is really low, among many groups lower than it has ever been. People have more money in their pocket, now, due to tax reform. At lot of businesses were smart and passed their tax savings on to their employees in raises and bonuses, and got headlines for doing it.
This is what most non-ideological voters will remember come the next election.
The only people I see using the court system and democratic suppression are liberals. Conservatives aren't calling for people to mob political appointees of the other party in their homes and in public. Conservatives aren't calling for the overturn of a presidential election based on fabricated evidence and wishful thinking. That would be Democrat liberals .
Just keep telling yourself that.
The nearly half of voting public that voted for Trump were likely pretty happy he did.
No doubt you'll be telling yourself the same thing in 2020.
A job is just where you work.
Politics can be important, but at least in the U.S. the political opinions of my boss are relatively unimportant to me, as long as their political opinions don't try to force me to break the law.
My religious beliefs are the moral compass which directs my life and I have the right to quit a job which would require me to act against them.
Likewise I neither expect to be able to impel my boss to violate his or her religious beliefs, nor feel it's my right to do so.
I guess he has to actually be racist.
You know instead of made up stuff created out of whole cloth by the left.
Does Trump lie? No doubt. I also remember a previous occupant of the White House who promised me I could keep my doctor, among other lies. But then he wasn't even the first occupant of that office to be a lying bastard. So in that respect Trump is about average.
Of course the promises Trump is keeping are the ones he made while campaigning, which scares not just liberals, but mainstream Republican politicians as well. They're terrified that voters might actually expect them to keep their promises.
As is typical your "very fine people on each side" discounts the fact that there might actually be non racists who believe that tearing down statues of historical figures might not be a good thing. For one thing it means people might forget that those statues of treasonous racist Confederate soldiers were erected by members of the Democratic party. The party that created and enforced Jim Crow laws, held up the civil rights law for years so a Republican wouldn't get credit for it, and was the party that fought desegregation so ardently. How that party would like all those statues to disappear so that they can pretend they never erected them.
So, the real problem here is some liberal arts major who was covering Wall Street, without understanding what was going on there is now covering Silicone Valley without really understanding what is going on there.
Isn't the the major problem with journalism in the U.S.? A bunch of people who don't have any real knowledge of what they are reporting on spouting nonsense? The reason the parallels are so bad is the writer doesn't know the difference between a tech company which supports vital technology infrastructure and a social media company that literally no one but the Ad agencies would even miss.
Users would think they miss it, but it would have literally no real effect on their life if Facebook or Google folded. Well at least not Google's ad business. As a supplier of Google Maps or Android there might be a problem. Facebook or Twitter? No effect on anybody's life. Even Trump would quickly move on to another platform, or no platform.
Not much more, if anything. Labor cost isn't the problem, and Apple could take a hit on the 46% profit they make off each iPhone without too much worry.
The real issues are supplies, supply chains and international sales. First, some raw materials are currently only available in China and are export-controlled in their unprocessed forms;
And you don't see how export control, by China, to make manufacturing in other locations impossible, as anti-competitive and worthy of tariffs?
Labor is not the issue. The issue is that the means of production sufficient for global consumption exist already and only in China; there is no compelling reason for Apple to burn a ton of cash to build surplus production facilities in America.
Great. Then let them and their customers pay the tariffs. The situation did not develop naturally. It developed as the result of collusion between the Chinese government and Apple (and the benign neglect of the Globalization cabal (R and D) in Washington.) I have no sympathy for them and their customers.
Perhaps because American workers aren't available in company dormitories to work on last minute changes to the iphone?
That is at least what Apple claimed when Obama asked Apple why they couldn't bring jobs back to the U.S. At least according to that bastion of conservative values the New York Times.
So the truth is that Apple likes being able to use slave labor to construct it's phones, because it's easy.
“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”(NYTimes 2016)
Except it's not generosity is it? It's not generosity for a company to obey health and safety laws and pay people a decent wage. It's not ungenerous for people to stop buying crap made by corporations in slave labor factories in places without effective health and safety and environmental laws.
Let Apple eat the cost of the tariffs or raise their prices to compensate. maybe that will actually get customers to look at the conditions under which their phones are made or at least make them stop pretending that Apple is a virtuous company.
The reason that bankruptcy was disallowed in the first place was because if the student defaults the government (U.S. taxpayer) paid. That's what "government backed loan" means.
If you change the law to allow bankruptcy again the government is still on the hook. If you change the law so that the loans are no longer guaranteed what you've basically done is made the word of the U.S. government worthless. (Yes know, it's probably worthless already, just ask all the Native American tribes who hold worthless treaties.) Since U.S. currency is also only backed by the word of the U.S. government the government defaulting on their promise might just cause some problems.
Besides if students can declare bankruptcy it's not the schools that will suffer. They've already got their money. It's the banks that will have to eat it. Just and fair, but that is never going to happen.
For anyone who believes the U.S. government is capable of doing healthcare I just recommend they look at the VA. The VA is what everyone's healthcare would look like if there was one payer in the U.S.
I think the untrustworthiness of the congress that would be crafting the laws is my biggest concern. As for leaving it to regulators we already know that just means it will be controlled by whatever industry hack the latest administration puts into the FCC, either on the telecom or media side depending who's in power.
The best way to fix this is probably to prevent ISPs from being media companies, just like we don't let film studios own theaters. Free market principles don't necessarily mean allowing for the existence of megacorporations. The market was much freer when corporations were only allowed to exist as entities limited to operating in specific businesses. Prevent ISPs from engaging in media businesses and the incentives for them to differentiate content goes away.
Actually the public information is pretty much good enough. State secrets is all about yield and making a bomb small and light enough to put on a missile.
Just making a bomb that is operational is no problem at all. The biggest hurdle is access to fissionable material.
This is exactly it. The Soviet Union fell because the the Soviet class, i.e. those who were real members of the Party realized that government and it's leaders were holding things back.
They started protesting and the leaders ordered the military to put them down. Problem was that the people protesting were the families of the members of the military. They weren't going to put down their own families. So the government crumbled.
In the U.S. a cross section of the populous is armed. Don't let the coastal Progressives fool you, get to the flyover states and you'll find as many registered Democrats who are hunters as Republicans. Same goes for gun owners who are armed for self defense.
This judge will indeed find out, when he is overturned. Still he's a ninth circuit judge. He's probably use to being overturned by now.
Like the man said you have it backwards. Rights exist in the absence of laws which restrict them. No government grants rights, they are not theirs to grant. At most they can restrict rights, provided they have a compelling need.
In the United States the Constitution, particularly in it's first ten amendments further restricts the federal governments ability to impose restrictions on rights. The courts have extended the restrictions in most cases to the individual states. In no case is government given the authority to grant rights, because rights exist naturally and are not created by government.
As for individuals building their own firearms this has already been discussed at length on /.
As for your quote, most officers can try to do anything they want. When the charge gets to court it will be thrown out and if deliberate malfeasance can be shown by the arresting officer they may find themselves in a civil or federal court for their breach of civil rights.
I use lots of applications that work on Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and whatever Mac is using now. Why would anyone be using something that is limited to Windows in the area of file backup and transfer? If you're talking about CAD or even Point of Sale, sure, sticking to a single OS might make sense. But file storage? This is a loser strategy.
A quick search online seems to indicate that in the majority of U.S. jurisdictions it is not legal to change lanes in an intersection. California is often cited as a place where it is not illegal. I can tell you that in my state (Virginia) it is definitely illegal.
Two people arriving at the same time is easy, and there is a rule to account for it.
The driver on the right has right of way. So it's only a problem when 4 cars show up at once, which almost never actually happens. If traffic is heavy enough on both roads for it to happen regularly the intersection should have traffic signals rather than stop signs.
You have a vastly over inflated opinion on the competency of the average human. A large percentage of them could be outperformed by the processing power of a Raspberry Pi.