First a lawyer of RAF terrorists, now an advocate of torture...
OK, I can see how being an advocate of torture might reflect poorly on a person, but since when is the character of a lawyer to be determined by the character of that lawyer's clients? Does the driver of the prison van which takes the acused to the court room also share in the moral culpability of the accused?
Would you trust a judge who's never ridden in a car to rule on traffic law?
Sure, why ever not? I would also trust a judge who had never killed someone (or even been killed) to rule on a murder case, but that's probably just me.
Popular legend holds that the first legislators to set traffic law had never driven, and often came up with some hilarious laws...for example, that cars must be preceded by a flag man.
Sorry that was a bit above my head. How is a legend about legislators of any possible relevance to the actions (or knowledge requirements) of judges?! And plase keep the explanation simple enough for me to understand.
Not required, no.
Yes, required... this is law silly.
There are very few hard-and-fast rules that require a judge to recuse himself.
Maybe not where you practise. But at English law, judges are required to recuse themselves when they could be perceived to have a conflict of interest. You will recall the ruling in the Pinochet case, where a Law Lord was required to recuse himself because of his membership of Amnesty International. On the other hand, I am unaware of any (British) case which would indicate that asking for clarification from counsel is grounds to demand the judge be replaced. So if you know of one please further my legal education.
Maybe because there isn't any bloody reason for him to do so? I dunno, that's just my guess.
I'm seeing two kinds of ignorance at work here. Firstly a judge who is aware that his understanding of what a website is, is lacking, and who consequently asks for an explanation. Secondly posters here, who are apparently unaware of the extent of their ignorance as to when the law requires judges to recuse themselves, yet rather than asking "is this the kind of situation where judges should recuse themselves?" simply demand that the judge do so. I know which kind of ignorance is more dangerous.
he needs to know more then just the law, he has to understand the case he is ruling on
But not a priori. He can ask for the facts to be explained as the case proceeds (in fact he can also ask for the law to be explained, which is a duty counsel owe to the court, at least in the UK). Look the guy could have saved face by pretending to understand what was going on and asking his tipstaff later what the hell a web-site is. Instead he did the proper thing and asked counsel to explain in open court. What's your problem with that?
Jurors are frequently disqualified for knowing too much, but it should be the opposite for a judge, I think.
The Judge should know about the law. Other matters such as the changes in confirmation of the co-enzymes in the Krebs cycle, or indeed the technical aspects of communications technology, are best brought into evidence via expert witnesses. It is better judges get an expert explanation that proceed upon some fuzzy (mis)understanding. Remeber about 90% of people out there think that internet == WWW.
Maybe he should recuse himself.
Huh?! Can you cite some legal authority stating that judges are required to recuse themselves on the basis that they have no personal knowledge of some technical aspect of deliberations?
So, how much is that in real temperature? Like, 35 degrees C or something?
You know I thought the same thing (I mean this is supposed to be science reporting), but then I figured that by the time you got to 1200, it just had to be above body temperature!
... and your preferences aren't directed by the elderly campaigners handing out their flyers:)
Arghhhh!
Your preferences are directed by whatever you put on your ballot paper, unless you vote 1 only above the line on the table cloth (upper house) ballots (in which case you vote is directed along the preferences registered by the party you gave 1 to). The flyers are merely suggestions to voters, they do not direct the preferences of actual ballots.
When (If) the party you voted 1 for is eliminated your vote goes to the party you voted 2 for, and so on until only two candidates remain. The relevance of the flyers (and so-called "exchanging of preferences") is that most people get confused by the idea of preferential voting so they simply follow 'their' party's suggestions.
I think they pick alternative candidates in the land down under. That said, you aren't throwing away your vote if you vote for a third party... Your candidate might not win but at least you will be able to walk with your head held high.
We have exhaustive preferential voting, which means that quite literatlly you aren't "throwing away your vote" by giving a minor party your first preference. At the end of the voting process, your vote rests either with the winning candidate or with the canditate who came second.
As a poster pointed out above, the important considerations is who to put LAST.
But the administration has explicitly refused to accept that as their status.
Now, the way they're being held violates rules for holding a POW, but that's a different matter. Many have also been accused of being unlawful combatants, which alters the situation somewhat.
The way they are being held violated the rules of holding POWs, because their status as such is not accepted. All of them have been labelled "unlawful combatants." This is status, dreamed up by Gonzales, which is not recognised at law. It's the excuse provided not to treat them as POWs (which they probably aren't), but also not to treat them as criminals (which a percentage may be).
So OP is quite correct in eir observations, even if a bit off-topic.
That is not entirely true. It is true that there is no explicit protection in the Constitution, the High Court, in a series of cases beginning with the Capital TV case, discovered an implied right to "political communication" within its structure. It would seem to me that statements which are merely in support of terrorist organisations are properly thought of as political communication. On the other hand statements which go further and advocate violence or indulge in unlawful racial vilification will clearly not attract the protection of this implied right.
... government-owned television and radio
Owned yes, but not run. As you point out the government owned media is consistently attacked for having an anti-government bias, which when you think about it, should be the source of a great deal of comfort for Australians. However, the government still holds the purse strings, makes appointments to the boards etc and they are actively working to stiffle criticism. Just because convention has in the past restrained the government from interference, does not mean it will continue to do so indefinitely. In fact the signs are not good. And I disagree the the People (at least those who change their vote) will give a rat's arse about what happens to the ABC or SBS.
no separation of church and state
Again not entirely true. You are correct in terms of state powers, but freedom of religion (and the restriction from imposing religious qualification on Commonwealth employ) is one of the few rights the Constitution does explicitly grant (see Section 116) and using language which will seem familiar to American readers.
you have to remember that in Australia there are still checks and balances in place
Such as... ?
Australians being extra-skeptical about people in charge.
Well you have to be, after all, they're all politicians!
... expensive HD televisions which should last at least 10 years like my Sony SD Tube did. I'd hate to drop that cash in an immature market and be stuck with a TV I don't like for 10 years.
With the recent advances in redundancy engineering you need have no worries at all about a TV lasting 10 years.
I agree that if your speech is good enough, you don't need Powerpoint... But you only debate "how to use powerpoint" when you're not capable of doing that -- hence the dilemma I brought up.
I take your point... imagine Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech with powerpoint, ouch! And we cannot all be great orators.
Nonetheless, what the UNSW study, and lets bear in mind this is an empirical study, not merely opinion and conjecture, purports to show (so far as I can make out from the SMH article) is that coming at people with the same information through two separate sense systems doesn't work. Your speaking distracts them from their reading and their reading of your presentation slides distract them from your speaking. Incidentally I found that my marks at uni took a great leap upwards once I decideded to stop taking notes (except for the occasional reference cited) and simply to listen to what the lecturer had to say. Perhaps the same mechanism is at work.
Many people deal with incoming linguistic data by visualising what is being said. By getting them to read as we speak, we might be blocking such processing from occuring. If that were so, the best way to go would be to show the audience only that which they may not be able to imagine themselves. That is to say we use slides to aid in visualisation, not to distract from it. The technique used by Steve Jobs referred to above would seem to be an application of this idea.
What I mean is, regardless of how good a speaker you are, your body on stage is (except for performace art) visually boring, and the point of the slides is for there to be something more interesting to look at, to supplement your words, even if the words are exciting.
I gave a speech the other day, handwritten notes (largely ignored), not screen no props nothing. Looking directly into the eyes of audience members, especially at certain points which were meant to be directed at them. And guess what, I held the audience in rapt attention, something I have never been able to do in years of conference presentations using PP, (or HTML slides or whatever). And the feedback I was receiving from the audience (who were looking at me and responding to me rather than a screen) caused me to speak better and better.
This was a revelation to me, and I think perhaps you are 100% wrong. Perhaps being a good speaker is all about using your body, your hands and especially your face. It makes sense that people respond better to facial and other physical cues from another human being, than they do to bullet points on a projector? As the original article says, it's all right to speak to an illustration, but not to let an illustration speak for you, which is what bullet points (or rambling PP presentations) do.
Ethanol fuel production is not the ONLY reason that slash and burn exists and is on the rise, but it greatly increases the rate at which it occurs.
I seriously doubt that... and how could you demonstrate it?
If the demand for coffee were rising instead of the demand for biofuels would we be saying that drinking coffee greatly increases the rate at which slash and burn occurs? Ie. there is nothing inherent in biofuels that leads to this kind of deforestation. Nor would non-use of biofuels allievate deforestation. Instead this kind of deforestation is a function of population, poverty, inadequate government controls and outright corruption.
Biofuels can also be, and are, grown in countries with stringently enforced environmental protection laws, (relatively) wealthy farmers etc. etc.
In the article under discussion Malaysia was mentioned. Deforestation there occurs even in the absence of any demand for land on which to grow any kind of crops. It is fueled by rampant corruption, organised crime and the insatiable demand of Japan, Australia and other developed countries for paper.
A ban on using slash and burn farming for ethanol production would therefore just shift food crop growth to freshly slashed and burned areas.
Excepting the fact that you conveniently didn't RTFA. Biofuels are encroaching on native habitats, which often includes slash and burn farming.
But is that actually true?
Slash and burn farming has been encroaching on native habitats long before we decided to make biofuels. The fact is that population pressures in these areas will cause farmers to slash and burn in order to grow any crop which is at that time economically viable. Now that we are concentrating on biofuels the demand for sugar cane grows and that is the particular crop that is chosen.
I would actually have used Apple as a better example here. MS software on sale = not common, but not rare.
I was talking prosepectively, if SCOTUS change the law. An better example of MS's exploitation of its market power would be the refusal to supply to any retailer that sells new boxes which are not bundled with MSWindows. Apple's power in this regard has more to do with branding (why buy another mp3 player when you can get an IPod for 4x the price?) than market power and network effects.
The problem with your scenario is that it relys on a market that has a "high barrier to entry", or a market whose barrier to entry is so high that no other players can enter, no matter what. The reality is though, in a true free market this is never the case.
You don't need to achieve a pure monopoly to dictate to retailers or charge near monopoly rents. Look at the example I cited, ie. the PC OS market Sure you can point to MacOS, and Linux, but these don't seriously dent Microsoft's power, especially in regard to small business computer retailers (maybe someone as big as Dell can get away with shiping PCs without that OS installed...). Note the barrier to entry here isn't capital expenditure, as it is in chip manufacturing for instance, but primarily network effects.
The most important equalizer to high barriers to entry though is innovation.... The only way that there can be a market with an infinitely high barrier to entry is when the government is involved, through patents, copyrights, subsidies, and other protectionist laws.
While I'm against the overweening IP regime we are currently subjected to, we should not loose sight of the necessity of IP regulation. IP addresses another market failure, namely the 'free rider effect,' (again demonstrating the necessity of some limited state intervention for a functioning capitalist economy). For innovation to be an effective equaliser to barriers to entry, it requires that very IP protection you decry! Otherwise the innovator will simply have their innovation taken from them by the established players in the market. The innovator bears the research costs, while big guys use their market power to cut that innovator out from the profits of their own innovation. Not a good look.
The market may be unbalanced for a short while, but it will even itself out, quicker and fairer than slow moving anti-trust laws can.
That is a very romantic notion... unfortunately history demonstrates the exact opposite.
Ok, since they're such uber leet laptop design gurus, why don't they make a non-P.Diddy version with everything but the bling, and sell it for oh, 4-5 grand or so ?
And the free-market answer to that is that no manufacturer will be able to sell the price-fixed product because no retailers will do business with them.
As a player in the market I play not just for profit, but for market share. My aim is to put all competitors out of business, and since I'm in a market with very high barriers to entry I can keep them out of business. Now that I have achieved a monopoly (and monopoly rents), the retailers have no choice but to do business with me and I will certainly dictate the exact conditions under which my products can be sold. If I'm unable to achive a monopoly, I will instead collude with the other surviving players to our mutual advantage, and again to the disadvantage of retailers and consumers.
This scenario is historically why Anti-trust law was necessary in the first place.
Are you seriously suggesting that retailers are refusing to stock Microsoft products because these products come with strings attached? Reality check: Should their sales agreements specify minium resale prices, the mum & dad computer shops will be in no position to refuse MS. And they won't.
This is but one of the reasons that the intervention of the state is necessary to a healthily functioning capitalist economy.
It's a shame that they don't fight this. The courts in Australia are generally reasonably sympathetic to the victims of unmeritorious litigation, and wouldn't hesitate to give summary judgment and a significant costs order if it came down to it. The mining industry's lawyers would be well aware of this and would probably settle the thing out of court.
From the SMH article it appears that they are fighting back. They have issued a counter-notice under the regs and are basically telling the industry group to bring it on. Or is your advice that they proceed more agressively under section 202?
OK, this is my last on this topic. You are, of course, free to use words to mean anything you want them to. You need on conform to accepted definitions if you want to communicate with someone else. If you want to communicate with educated people, it helps to know what the words you are using actually mean (in the more technical sense which educated people tend to prefer over the colloquial).
I wasn't talking about the sociological aspects ("stateless society") but rather from a business angle.
If you want to understand the distinction between Socialism and Communism (do you want to understand?), you need to consider the role of the state (ie. that Communism is only achieved once the State disappears - fat chance!). Furthermore the statement that communism means government enforced equality is ridiculous once you appreciate this.
And in that context your data exactly supports my case.
My data? Did you actually read the definition of socialism, you think it supports your case.
In SOCIALISM there can be private business under strict Gov't control (see Venezula for instance) so that everyone profits equally. So limited private enterprise is OK.
Clearly not according to the pure definition of socialism (for which see my previous post). But since there is nothing pure in the world (as since socialism is conceived of as a transitional phase) you're statement that limited private enterprise can exist in a (real-world) socialism, is correct. It would, however, be incorrect to describe Germany as having only limited private enterprise and describe it as a socialist economy/society. It's bizarre to describe the government regulating a corporation which it has recently privatised (or is still in the process of selling off) as "socialism."
Apropos Venezuela, if Chavez really were a socialist he would be busy nationalising industry. Oh wait, just last month he nationalised the telephone service, and the electricity utilities. And he's about to nationalise the oil industry. Now if you were to cry socialism, you would in fact be correct. Also I don't share you optimism that this will bring about a situation where "everyone profits equally";)
In Communism there can be no private enterprise.
Correct, since theoretically communism cannot be achieved until a pure form of socialism has absorbed all private property.
Slashdot Mirror
First a lawyer of RAF terrorists, now an advocate of torture...
OK, I can see how being an advocate of torture might reflect poorly on a person, but since when is the character of a lawyer to be determined by the character of that lawyer's clients? Does the driver of the prison van which takes the acused to the court room also share in the moral culpability of the accused?
Would you trust a judge who's never ridden in a car to rule on traffic law?
Sure, why ever not? I would also trust a judge who had never killed someone (or even been killed) to rule on a murder case, but that's probably just me.
Popular legend holds that the first legislators to set traffic law had never driven, and often came up with some hilarious laws...for example, that cars must be preceded by a flag man.
Sorry that was a bit above my head. How is a legend about legislators of any possible relevance to the actions (or knowledge requirements) of judges?! And plase keep the explanation simple enough for me to understand.
Not required, no.
Yes, required ... this is law silly.
There are very few hard-and-fast rules that require a judge to recuse himself.
Maybe not where you practise. But at English law, judges are required to recuse themselves when they could be perceived to have a conflict of interest. You will recall the ruling in the Pinochet case, where a Law Lord was required to recuse himself because of his membership of Amnesty International. On the other hand, I am unaware of any (British) case which would indicate that asking for clarification from counsel is grounds to demand the judge be replaced. So if you know of one please further my legal education.
then why hasn't he done so?
Maybe because there isn't any bloody reason for him to do so? I dunno, that's just my guess.
I'm seeing two kinds of ignorance at work here. Firstly a judge who is aware that his understanding of what a website is, is lacking, and who consequently asks for an explanation. Secondly posters here, who are apparently unaware of the extent of their ignorance as to when the law requires judges to recuse themselves, yet rather than asking "is this the kind of situation where judges should recuse themselves?" simply demand that the judge do so. I know which kind of ignorance is more dangerous.
he needs to know more then just the law, he has to understand the case he is ruling on
But not a priori. He can ask for the facts to be explained as the case proceeds (in fact he can also ask for the law to be explained, which is a duty counsel owe to the court, at least in the UK). Look the guy could have saved face by pretending to understand what was going on and asking his tipstaff later what the hell a web-site is. Instead he did the proper thing and asked counsel to explain in open court. What's your problem with that?
Jurors are frequently disqualified for knowing too much, but it should be the opposite for a judge, I think.
The Judge should know about the law. Other matters such as the changes in confirmation of the co-enzymes in the Krebs cycle, or indeed the technical aspects of communications technology, are best brought into evidence via expert witnesses. It is better judges get an expert explanation that proceed upon some fuzzy (mis)understanding. Remeber about 90% of people out there think that internet == WWW.
Maybe he should recuse himself.
Huh?! Can you cite some legal authority stating that judges are required to recuse themselves on the basis that they have no personal knowledge of some technical aspect of deliberations?
So, how much is that in real temperature? Like, 35 degrees C or something?
You know I thought the same thing (I mean this is supposed to be science reporting), but then I figured that by the time you got to 1200, it just had to be above body temperature!
Arghhhh!
Your preferences are directed by whatever you put on your ballot paper, unless you vote 1 only above the line on the table cloth (upper house) ballots (in which case you vote is directed along the preferences registered by the party you gave 1 to). The flyers are merely suggestions to voters, they do not direct the preferences of actual ballots.
When (If) the party you voted 1 for is eliminated your vote goes to the party you voted 2 for, and so on until only two candidates remain. The relevance of the flyers (and so-called "exchanging of preferences") is that most people get confused by the idea of preferential voting so they simply follow 'their' party's suggestions.
Just be thankful we don't have Condorcet voting!
I think they pick alternative candidates in the land down under. That said, you aren't throwing away your vote if you vote for a third party ... Your candidate might not win but at least you will be able to walk with your head held high.
We have exhaustive preferential voting, which means that quite literatlly you aren't "throwing away your vote" by giving a minor party your first preference. At the end of the voting process, your vote rests either with the winning candidate or with the canditate who came second.
As a poster pointed out above, the important considerations is who to put LAST.
le travail rend libre
My French is not all it should be, but that translates into the German Arbeit macht frei, no?
There's no such thing as free energy, right?
Indeed! There is, however, such a thing as wasted energy.
They do have a status ... Prisoner of War.
But the administration has explicitly refused to accept that as their status.
Now, the way they're being held violates rules for holding a POW, but that's a different matter. Many have also been accused of being unlawful combatants, which alters the situation somewhat.
The way they are being held violated the rules of holding POWs, because their status as such is not accepted. All of them have been labelled "unlawful combatants." This is status, dreamed up by Gonzales, which is not recognised at law. It's the excuse provided not to treat them as POWs (which they probably aren't), but also not to treat them as criminals (which a percentage may be).
So OP is quite correct in eir observations, even if a bit off-topic.
In Australia, there's no enshrined free speech
That is not entirely true. It is true that there is no explicit protection in the Constitution, the High Court, in a series of cases beginning with the Capital TV case, discovered an implied right to "political communication" within its structure. It would seem to me that statements which are merely in support of terrorist organisations are properly thought of as political communication. On the other hand statements which go further and advocate violence or indulge in unlawful racial vilification will clearly not attract the protection of this implied right.
Owned yes, but not run. As you point out the government owned media is consistently attacked for having an anti-government bias, which when you think about it, should be the source of a great deal of comfort for Australians. However, the government still holds the purse strings, makes appointments to the boards etc and they are actively working to stiffle criticism. Just because convention has in the past restrained the government from interference, does not mean it will continue to do so indefinitely. In fact the signs are not good. And I disagree the the People (at least those who change their vote) will give a rat's arse about what happens to the ABC or SBS.
no separation of church and state
Again not entirely true. You are correct in terms of state powers, but freedom of religion (and the restriction from imposing religious qualification on Commonwealth employ) is one of the few rights the Constitution does explicitly grant (see Section 116) and using language which will seem familiar to American readers.
you have to remember that in Australia there are still checks and balances in place
Such as ... ?
Australians being extra-skeptical about people in charge.
Well you have to be, after all, they're all politicians!
They'll probably just switch to distribution channels that have no government oversight.
They will certainly switch distribution channels. This will just make it possible to convict those caught distributing them.
But the odds are, if you're in the US, you're a bitch.
Yeah, but on the internet everyone can tell if you are a bitch.
With the recent advances in redundancy engineering you need have no worries at all about a TV lasting 10 years.
I agree that if your speech is good enough, you don't need Powerpoint ... But you only debate "how to use powerpoint" when you're not capable of doing that -- hence the dilemma I brought up.
I take your point ... imagine Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech with powerpoint, ouch! And we cannot all be great orators.
Nonetheless, what the UNSW study, and lets bear in mind this is an empirical study, not merely opinion and conjecture, purports to show (so far as I can make out from the SMH article) is that coming at people with the same information through two separate sense systems doesn't work. Your speaking distracts them from their reading and their reading of your presentation slides distract them from your speaking. Incidentally I found that my marks at uni took a great leap upwards once I decideded to stop taking notes (except for the occasional reference cited) and simply to listen to what the lecturer had to say. Perhaps the same mechanism is at work.
Many people deal with incoming linguistic data by visualising what is being said. By getting them to read as we speak, we might be blocking such processing from occuring. If that were so, the best way to go would be to show the audience only that which they may not be able to imagine themselves. That is to say we use slides to aid in visualisation, not to distract from it. The technique used by Steve Jobs referred to above would seem to be an application of this idea.
What I mean is, regardless of how good a speaker you are, your body on stage is (except for performace art) visually boring, and the point of the slides is for there to be something more interesting to look at, to supplement your words, even if the words are exciting.
I gave a speech the other day, handwritten notes (largely ignored), not screen no props nothing. Looking directly into the eyes of audience members, especially at certain points which were meant to be directed at them. And guess what, I held the audience in rapt attention, something I have never been able to do in years of conference presentations using PP, (or HTML slides or whatever). And the feedback I was receiving from the audience (who were looking at me and responding to me rather than a screen) caused me to speak better and better.
This was a revelation to me, and I think perhaps you are 100% wrong. Perhaps being a good speaker is all about using your body, your hands and especially your face. It makes sense that people respond better to facial and other physical cues from another human being, than they do to bullet points on a projector? As the original article says, it's all right to speak to an illustration, but not to let an illustration speak for you, which is what bullet points (or rambling PP presentations) do.
Ethanol fuel production is not the ONLY reason that slash and burn exists and is on the rise, but it greatly increases the rate at which it occurs.
I seriously doubt that ... and how could you demonstrate it?
If the demand for coffee were rising instead of the demand for biofuels would we be saying that drinking coffee greatly increases the rate at which slash and burn occurs? Ie. there is nothing inherent in biofuels that leads to this kind of deforestation. Nor would non-use of biofuels allievate deforestation. Instead this kind of deforestation is a function of population, poverty, inadequate government controls and outright corruption.
Biofuels can also be, and are, grown in countries with stringently enforced environmental protection laws, (relatively) wealthy farmers etc. etc.
In the article under discussion Malaysia was mentioned. Deforestation there occurs even in the absence of any demand for land on which to grow any kind of crops. It is fueled by rampant corruption, organised crime and the insatiable demand of Japan, Australia and other developed countries for paper.
A ban on using slash and burn farming for ethanol production would therefore just shift food crop growth to freshly slashed and burned areas.
You said it!
Excepting the fact that you conveniently didn't RTFA. Biofuels are encroaching on native habitats, which often includes slash and burn farming.
But is that actually true?
Slash and burn farming has been encroaching on native habitats long before we decided to make biofuels. The fact is that population pressures in these areas will cause farmers to slash and burn in order to grow any crop which is at that time economically viable. Now that we are concentrating on biofuels the demand for sugar cane grows and that is the particular crop that is chosen.
I would actually have used Apple as a better example here. MS software on sale = not common, but not rare.
I was talking prosepectively, if SCOTUS change the law. An better example of MS's exploitation of its market power would be the refusal to supply to any retailer that sells new boxes which are not bundled with MSWindows. Apple's power in this regard has more to do with branding (why buy another mp3 player when you can get an IPod for 4x the price?) than market power and network effects.
The problem with your scenario is that it relys on a market that has a "high barrier to entry", or a market whose barrier to entry is so high that no other players can enter, no matter what. The reality is though, in a true free market this is never the case.
You don't need to achieve a pure monopoly to dictate to retailers or charge near monopoly rents. Look at the example I cited, ie. the PC OS market Sure you can point to MacOS, and Linux, but these don't seriously dent Microsoft's power, especially in regard to small business computer retailers (maybe someone as big as Dell can get away with shiping PCs without that OS installed ...). Note the barrier to entry here isn't capital expenditure, as it is in chip manufacturing for instance, but primarily network effects.
The most important equalizer to high barriers to entry though is innovation. ... The only way that there can be a market with an infinitely high barrier to entry is when the government is involved, through patents, copyrights, subsidies, and other protectionist laws.
While I'm against the overweening IP regime we are currently subjected to, we should not loose sight of the necessity of IP regulation. IP addresses another market failure, namely the 'free rider effect,' (again demonstrating the necessity of some limited state intervention for a functioning capitalist economy). For innovation to be an effective equaliser to barriers to entry, it requires that very IP protection you decry! Otherwise the innovator will simply have their innovation taken from them by the established players in the market. The innovator bears the research costs, while big guys use their market power to cut that innovator out from the profits of their own innovation. Not a good look.
The market may be unbalanced for a short while, but it will even itself out, quicker and fairer than slow moving anti-trust laws can.
That is a very romantic notion ... unfortunately history demonstrates the exact opposite.
Ok, since they're such uber leet laptop design gurus, why don't they make a non-P.Diddy version with everything but the bling, and sell it for oh, 4-5 grand or so ?
Dude, 5 grand won't even pay for the brand name!
And the free-market answer to that is that no manufacturer will be able to sell the price-fixed product because no retailers will do business with them.
As a player in the market I play not just for profit, but for market share. My aim is to put all competitors out of business, and since I'm in a market with very high barriers to entry I can keep them out of business. Now that I have achieved a monopoly (and monopoly rents), the retailers have no choice but to do business with me and I will certainly dictate the exact conditions under which my products can be sold. If I'm unable to achive a monopoly, I will instead collude with the other surviving players to our mutual advantage, and again to the disadvantage of retailers and consumers.
This scenario is historically why Anti-trust law was necessary in the first place.
Are you seriously suggesting that retailers are refusing to stock Microsoft products because these products come with strings attached? Reality check: Should their sales agreements specify minium resale prices, the mum & dad computer shops will be in no position to refuse MS. And they won't.
This is but one of the reasons that the intervention of the state is necessary to a healthily functioning capitalist economy.
what's more IAAAL
Yes, but are you AAIPL? ;)
It's a shame that they don't fight this. The courts in Australia are generally reasonably sympathetic to the victims of unmeritorious litigation, and wouldn't hesitate to give summary judgment and a significant costs order if it came down to it. The mining industry's lawyers would be well aware of this and would probably settle the thing out of court.
From the SMH article it appears that they are fighting back. They have issued a counter-notice under the regs and are basically telling the industry group to bring it on. Or is your advice that they proceed more agressively under section 202?
You know I only took this link to reassure myself that that would indeed be the first post for this story ... anything else would have been a travesty!
OK, this is my last on this topic. You are, of course, free to use words to mean anything you want them to. You need on conform to accepted definitions if you want to communicate with someone else. If you want to communicate with educated people, it helps to know what the words you are using actually mean (in the more technical sense which educated people tend to prefer over the colloquial).
I wasn't talking about the sociological aspects ("stateless society") but rather from a business angle.
If you want to understand the distinction between Socialism and Communism (do you want to understand?), you need to consider the role of the state (ie. that Communism is only achieved once the State disappears - fat chance!). Furthermore the statement that communism means government enforced equality is ridiculous once you appreciate this.
And in that context your data exactly supports my case.
My data? Did you actually read the definition of socialism, you think it supports your case.
In SOCIALISM there can be private business under strict Gov't control (see Venezula for instance) so that everyone profits equally. So limited private enterprise is OK.
Clearly not according to the pure definition of socialism (for which see my previous post). But since there is nothing pure in the world (as since socialism is conceived of as a transitional phase) you're statement that limited private enterprise can exist in a (real-world) socialism, is correct. It would, however, be incorrect to describe Germany as having only limited private enterprise and describe it as a socialist economy/society. It's bizarre to describe the government regulating a corporation which it has recently privatised (or is still in the process of selling off) as "socialism."
Apropos Venezuela, if Chavez really were a socialist he would be busy nationalising industry. Oh wait, just last month he nationalised the telephone service, and the electricity utilities. And he's about to nationalise the oil industry. Now if you were to cry socialism, you would in fact be correct. Also I don't share you optimism that this will bring about a situation where "everyone profits equally" ;)
In Communism there can be no private enterprise.
Correct, since theoretically communism cannot be achieved until a pure form of socialism has absorbed all private property.