No, in no case is copyright infringement stealing. They are two completely different things. (If you broke into my house, took the masters of the songs I'm working, and copied the stolen data, that would be both copyright infringement and stealing, but still two seperate acts.)
as the author deserves some proceeds from their work.
Perhaps. That doesn't means that a state-created artifical monopoly on the act of making copies is, or ever was, a good way to see that authors and creators get paid; any more than making people sing royalties for singing in the shower would be pratical, moral, or just.
I spend most of my day reading NON-FICTION (Read:The only thing to truly increase your mind).
Nonsense. Fiction is a legitimate way to present and explore ideas; reading, say, The Illuminatus! Trilogy will do quite a bit to "increase your mind".
It's also very simply written and plotted - compare it to its rough 1960's equivalent, A Wizard of Earthsea, for example
Nah. The Earthsea trilogy is "young adult" fiction (speaking of the first three books; the "second trilogy, if you will, written many years later, is I think aimed squarely at adult readers); the Harry Potter books are more "juvenile" fiction, though gaining depth as the series goes along.
A Wizard of Earthsea is one of my all time favorite books, but I greatly enjoyed the later Harry Potter books also; I wouldn't speak ill of either.
For those, I recommend Bugs Bunny or the Three Stooges, or maybe Treasure Isle.
Actually, a engaged viewing of Loony Toons will find many lessons about the dangers of revenge, hatred, and anger, and also loyalty, honor and friendship.
but I am doing better (money wise) as a recent graduate (about 2 yrs) engineer then some of them who have been out of school much, much longer. So reading != success by any measure.
The part that amazes me is that even with everyone consuming the same mass media (watching the same movies, TV) over many years, those variations are so vast.
Not many years at all. It takes generations for speech patterns to change.
My grandparents grew up without mass media, and it showed in their significant Baltimore accents. My parents grew up with radio and occasional movies and, in their later childhood, TV, and have less pronounced accents. I grew up with TV (though much more of it was local TV than today's kids get - watchin' Captain Chesapeake on channel 45), and have more standardized speech than my ancestors, but you'll still catch an extra long "o" when I'm talking about the Orioles, or hear me ask for a glass of "wuhter".
By the time of the American Revolution, it was around 90 percent.
Excluding the slaves, I presume. (Yes, there were slaves in colonial New England, not just in the southern colonies.) And who else was excluded in that figure, I wonder? Indentured servants? Sharecroppers?
And how was literacy defined? Being able to read a few Bible verses, the same verses they heard over and over in church every Sunday?
If the figure is "90% of land owning white people were literate enough to recognize on the page a verse they had heard several times before", that's a bit less impressive, and not comperable to a functional literacy test applied to a broad swath of socioeconomic status.
It's also not just about wether someone can read, but how well they comprehend complex arguments.
Indeed. And part of that comprehension is recognizing bad statistical comparisons.:-)
We limit free speech all the time in this country. For instance, you can't: * Yell "fire" in a crowded theater. * Commit libel or slander
* Say something that creates a "hostile work environment" for others
* Criticize a political candidate on television 60 days before an elections.
Libel and slander suits are civil, not criminal, actions. The others you mention are regulations on time and manner, not content - I can say "There's a fire at the Westview Cinema!" right now, or "That guy in the next cubicle at work is a fat ugly greasy transgendered racial epithet" when I'm outside the office. Only for-profit corporations and unions are banned from saying "Senator Smith is a fat ugly greasy transgendered racial epithet" on TV for a limited time before elections, in an attempt to control bribery in the form of campaign contributions.
(And in fact, you certainly can yell "fire" in a crowded theater
if there happens to be a fire.)
Show me one study that wasn't widely criticized for having basic flaws.
The flawed studies I've seen have been those finding no effect - the points used were not selected on the basis of a proper CM assessment, or they used acupressure as a control for acupuncture, or "inactive" points were used, without understanding that the points of "Traditional" Chinese Medicine represent only a recently-standardized subset of points.
The only effect those quacks seem to have is a complete lack of understanding how to do a proper double blinded test.
The double-blind model works well for drugs but less so for manual therapies. How many double-blind tests of surgical techniques do you know of? (In fact the only blinded tests of surgical techniques I've come across have had negative findings, and surgery is orders of magnitude more dangerous than acupuncture, so if you're going to go after therapists without double-blind tests to support them, you should be criticizing surgeons...)
The best blinded tests of acupuncture I'm aware of is the work of Allen, Schnyer, et. al., where participants receive genuine acupuncture therapy that is targeted at either the condition under investigation or for an unrelated complaint, with the assessing and treating handled by different therapists to create a blind condition. However, this eliminates patient feedback - the sensitivity of points and the sensation of "de qi" is diagnostic - so therapy under these conditions would certainly be less effective. Nonetheless, positive results have been found.
they will just refer you to the next quack's accupuncture needles. They might calll themselves 'alternative' but the correct term is 'unproven' or for most of those treatments it is just 'proven to be total bullshit'.
The consensus of Congress to convict and punish a specific citizen (or group of citizens) who is not a Congressional office holder is a Bill of Atainder.
Except that they are neither convicting nor punishing.
Censure proclaims someone guilty of a crime (real or imaginary) and prescribes a formal punishment (public denouncement of said person).
It does no such thing. Only the courts, or the Senate in the case of a presidental impeachment, can convict, and public denouncement is not a punishment so long as you can still walk away from it and denounce the denouncers right back. A resolution stating that "the sense of the congress is that George W. Bush is a jerk" is neither a conviction nor a punishment. (Neither would one that "Thomas M. Swiss and Ken Witherow are a pair of jerks.")
[from the report] As the Congressional Research Service has noted, any argument that censure provisions were not intended to be punitive would `face the task of overcoming express statements by individual Members concerning the appropriate `punishment' in this particular case.'
So, any application of this argument is limited by the part I've bolded, i.e. to the particular case of the proposed censure of Clinton, and therefore not to the general case. (I've been considering the general case here.)
[from the report, quoting Representative Pease] If it is a resolution that does not punish the President, it is meaningless.
A censure resolution is, legally, meaningless. Politically and morally it may have some meaning, just as an individual Congresscritters' bold speech/degranged rantings on the floor might, or the mayor of Springfield proclaiming today Snow Day, the funnest day ever.
Public shaming, such as scarlet letters, stockades, and perp walks, is most definitely a long standing traditional punishment
No. Having a bunch of people say "he's a jerk" is completely unrelated to using force or the threat of force to make someone wear certain clothing, or stand restrained in a certain place. If a censure resolution is "punishment" because it brings shame to the President (or would, if the sort of men capable of being elected POTUS hadn't had their sense of shame surgically removed), then so is any speech made against the President on the House or Senate floor, or any Congressional override of a Presidental veto.
Also please note, for those who have discussed it after Russ Feingold wanted to censure Bush, that the sole punishment by Congress is removal and banning from office.
Censure isn't a "punishment", it's a scolding. Congress passes all sorts of resolutions expressing the "sense of the House" or the "sense of the Senate"; a censure resolution is just one of these, that the sense of the House and the Senate is that the President is being a jerk.
Humans have some really unique aspects about us as a species. We have advanced language. We have art. We have complex emotions and psychology.
Other animals have language (not as advanced, obviously), have been known to engage in artistic activity, and appear to experience emotion. (Of course we can't say for sure - but then I can't say for sure whether you experience emotion either.) They also show culture, in the form of complex learned behaviors that differ from group to group.
When I asked a professor point blank why the need for art and culture would develop through the course of evolution
Evolution produces all sorts of things that are not "needed" for survival, like peacock tails.
Re:It should be a lot cheaper than in the 60s.
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Clearly, the economy is poorer by one house - the fallacy is in ignoring what else the money would have been spent on
It's clear to you and me. To many others, it's not - the article you cite points out that Paul Krugman suggested that the 9/11 attacks would end up providing a net benefit to the United States economy.
Which also relates back to the idea of getting research out of NASA - it ignores the possibility of spending money on research directly
Yes, the "spinoff technology" argument is lame. (That's not to say there aren't good arguments for space exploration!)
This genetically modified rice is destined for the developing world
From TFA, it's unclear whether they plan to grow their GM rice here and extract the relevant proteins as a suppliment, or use it directly as a food crop which would be grown locally (they've sought FDA appproval as a lightly-regulated "medical food" rather than a drug).
Allowing them to just grow rice that can save lives (children die of dehydration there) is pretty worthwhile.
Yeah, right...instead of providing them with conventionally produced mediciation (which would be long off-patent), or infrastrcture for clean water to prevent diarrhea-causing diseases (ditto), let's create a something new, of unproven safety (both to immediately to human beings and long-term to the ecosystem on which we depend) and that brings the developing world under corporate control.
This is just as stupid as "golden rice", the idea of which was to replace local crops rich in vitamin A with patented rice.
(BTW, if GM crops are so substantially identical to the originals tha no labeling is needed when they sneak them into my food, how is it that they are at the same time unique enough to be deserving of patents?)
Just because you have a hammer doesn't mean every problem becomes a nail. A biogeneticist should do the same thing a truck driver, a software developer, or a chef does - work on solving problems that can be ameliorated with your skills, and if you make decent money at doing so contribute it to groups that have other skill sets and work on solving other problems.
None of these professions should use their hammer to drive a screw, creating both a poor fix and additional problems.
And let's not pretend that Ventria is doing this out of any sense of charity. According to TFA they predict a $600 million market.
But what's the harm of having rice whose side-effect happens to limit the effects of deadly diarrhea?
Unintended side effects of GM crops have included allergic reactions to the relevant proteins, and toxicity to beneficial insects.
Dangerous side effects of drugs can take years to show up, but it's easy to pull them from the market. If a GM'ed pharmacrop spreads, pulling it out of the ecosystem would be difficult to impossible.
Re:It should be a lot cheaper than in the 60s.
on
Back to the Moon
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· Score: 1
The only time you have economic loss is when some resource is consumed without benefit. AKA: A house burning down, someone getting sick, or an auto accident.
Nah. Under currently mainstream economic theories, those things add to the economy. Rebuilding a house, needing medical care, repairing a car - that's consumption, which means production, which means a higher GDP!
so it's difficult to imagine what kind of privacy concerns the kid could have.
It's the privacy concerns of the adult the child will become that are worthy of consideration. If someone now were to find and publish a picture of my one-year-old self with my diaper down around my ankles, I beleive that would be an invasion of my privacy; if the publication occured before I was 18, it would be no less invasive.
Yes, parents can make decisions for their kids, but for the child's protection that power is subject to constraint by law. This may (note "may", not "should") be a case where such constraint is warranted.
The article you cite says "De Vries [the CIA-abuse denier] came under sharp criticism from the EU parliamentarians for refusing to consider earlier testimonies from a German and a Canadian who described to the committee how they were kidnapped and imprisoned by foreign agents, and from a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who alleged that British intelligence services used information obtained under torture".
That they might actually be trying to use these records to rapidly roll up terrorist groups after a initial attack instead of having to arrest 5000+ in the aftermath of 9/11?
A vigilante may be trying to save lives when he sets out to stop a murderer. That doesn't make him any less of a criminal when he ends up accidently or negilently harming, even killing, innocents.
Legal procedures have been carefully set up to control the power of the state and protect the innocent. They provide a means for the government to conduct surveillance on criminal suspects - they can GET AN FSCKING WARRANT.
Failing to follow these procedures makes them criminals and enemies of the United States. Can we just impeach this treasonous motherfucker already?
In a case like this, there would be a legitimate reason for the government to want to put a stop to the lawsuit.
Just because the government has a legitimate reason (from its POV) to want something, doesn't mean it can legitimately have it.
There's no power under the Constitution to quash lawsuits based on vague claims of "national security". Yes, there is a longstanding tradition of allowing it; that doesn't make it right or legal (understanding the Constitution as "law of the land" to have priority over misbegotten case law).
The communist party of the 1950's in the US was in part supported by the Soviet Union.
There was funding, yes; on the other hand, the U.S. funds groups in many countries today. (And, speaking of things glossed over in the teaching of history, as an intervention into the affairs of a foreign nation the USSR funding an American political party pales in comparision with the military intervention into the Russian Civil War in which the U.S. participated; knowing that America troops once invaded Russia to oppose the Bolsheveks puts the USSR's Cold War "paranoia" into a whole new light.)
It's membership was secret, and membership involved swearing allegiance to a foreign government.
It's not illegal for group to keep its membership confidential, and given the results of the first "Red Scare" it's not improbable that some people would prefer membership in the CP to be secret. But it's an interesting assertation that membership in the CP involved swearing allegiance to the USSR. Can you provide a reference for that?
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No, in no case is copyright infringement stealing. They are two completely different things. (If you broke into my house, took the masters of the songs I'm working, and copied the stolen data, that would be both copyright infringement and stealing, but still two seperate acts.)
Perhaps. That doesn't means that a state-created artifical monopoly on the act of making copies is, or ever was, a good way to see that authors and creators get paid; any more than making people sing royalties for singing in the shower would be pratical, moral, or just.
Doing it now. Really, really glad not to have a 60-mile round trip commute anymore.
Nonsense. Fiction is a legitimate way to present and explore ideas; reading, say, The Illuminatus! Trilogy will do quite a bit to "increase your mind".
Nah. The Earthsea trilogy is "young adult" fiction (speaking of the first three books; the "second trilogy, if you will, written many years later, is I think aimed squarely at adult readers); the Harry Potter books are more "juvenile" fiction, though gaining depth as the series goes along.
A Wizard of Earthsea is one of my all time favorite books, but I greatly enjoyed the later Harry Potter books also; I wouldn't speak ill of either.
Actually, a engaged viewing of Loony Toons will find many lessons about the dangers of revenge, hatred, and anger, and also loyalty, honor and friendship.
Your argument presumes that money == success.
Not many years at all. It takes generations for speech patterns to change.
My grandparents grew up without mass media, and it showed in their significant Baltimore accents. My parents grew up with radio and occasional movies and, in their later childhood, TV, and have less pronounced accents. I grew up with TV (though much more of it was local TV than today's kids get - watchin' Captain Chesapeake on channel 45), and have more standardized speech than my ancestors, but you'll still catch an extra long "o" when I'm talking about the Orioles, or hear me ask for a glass of "wuhter".
Excluding the slaves, I presume. (Yes, there were slaves in colonial New England, not just in the southern colonies.) And who else was excluded in that figure, I wonder? Indentured servants? Sharecroppers?
And how was literacy defined? Being able to read a few Bible verses, the same verses they heard over and over in church every Sunday?
If the figure is "90% of land owning white people were literate enough to recognize on the page a verse they had heard several times before", that's a bit less impressive, and not comperable to a functional literacy test applied to a broad swath of socioeconomic status.
Indeed. And part of that comprehension is recognizing bad statistical comparisons. :-)
Libel and slander suits are civil, not criminal, actions. The others you mention are regulations on time and manner, not content - I can say "There's a fire at the Westview Cinema!" right now, or "That guy in the next cubicle at work is a fat ugly greasy transgendered racial epithet" when I'm outside the office. Only for-profit corporations and unions are banned from saying "Senator Smith is a fat ugly greasy transgendered racial epithet" on TV for a limited time before elections, in an attempt to control bribery in the form of campaign contributions.
(And in fact, you certainly can yell "fire" in a crowded theater if there happens to be a fire.)
The flawed studies I've seen have been those finding no effect - the points used were not selected on the basis of a proper CM assessment, or they used acupressure as a control for acupuncture, or "inactive" points were used, without understanding that the points of "Traditional" Chinese Medicine represent only a recently-standardized subset of points.
The double-blind model works well for drugs but less so for manual therapies. How many double-blind tests of surgical techniques do you know of? (In fact the only blinded tests of surgical techniques I've come across have had negative findings, and surgery is orders of magnitude more dangerous than acupuncture, so if you're going to go after therapists without double-blind tests to support them, you should be criticizing surgeons...)
The best blinded tests of acupuncture I'm aware of is the work of Allen, Schnyer, et. al., where participants receive genuine acupuncture therapy that is targeted at either the condition under investigation or for an unrelated complaint, with the assessing and treating handled by different therapists to create a blind condition. However, this eliminates patient feedback - the sensitivity of points and the sensation of "de qi" is diagnostic - so therapy under these conditions would certainly be less effective. Nonetheless, positive results have been found.
There is in fact significant evidence for the efficacy of acupuncture and acupressure in a wide variety of conditions.
Except that they are neither convicting nor punishing.
It does no such thing. Only the courts, or the Senate in the case of a presidental impeachment, can convict, and public denouncement is not a punishment so long as you can still walk away from it and denounce the denouncers right back. A resolution stating that "the sense of the congress is that George W. Bush is a jerk" is neither a conviction nor a punishment. (Neither would one that "Thomas M. Swiss and Ken Witherow are a pair of jerks.")
So, any application of this argument is limited by the part I've bolded, i.e. to the particular case of the proposed censure of Clinton, and therefore not to the general case. (I've been considering the general case here.)
A censure resolution is, legally, meaningless. Politically and morally it may have some meaning, just as an individual Congresscritters' bold speech/degranged rantings on the floor might, or the mayor of Springfield proclaiming today Snow Day, the funnest day ever.
No. Having a bunch of people say "he's a jerk" is completely unrelated to using force or the threat of force to make someone wear certain clothing, or stand restrained in a certain place. If a censure resolution is "punishment" because it brings shame to the President (or would, if the sort of men capable of being elected POTUS hadn't had their sense of shame surgically removed), then so is any speech made against the President on the House or Senate floor, or any Congressional override of a Presidental veto.
Censure isn't a "punishment", it's a scolding. Congress passes all sorts of resolutions expressing the "sense of the House" or the "sense of the Senate"; a censure resolution is just one of these, that the sense of the House and the Senate is that the President is being a jerk.
Other animals have language (not as advanced, obviously), have been known to engage in artistic activity, and appear to experience emotion. (Of course we can't say for sure - but then I can't say for sure whether you experience emotion either.) They also show culture, in the form of complex learned behaviors that differ from group to group.
Evolution produces all sorts of things that are not "needed" for survival, like peacock tails.
It's clear to you and me. To many others, it's not - the article you cite points out that Paul Krugman suggested that the 9/11 attacks would end up providing a net benefit to the United States economy.
Yes, the "spinoff technology" argument is lame. (That's not to say there aren't good arguments for space exploration!)
From TFA, it's unclear whether they plan to grow their GM rice here and extract the relevant proteins as a suppliment, or use it directly as a food crop which would be grown locally (they've sought FDA appproval as a lightly-regulated "medical food" rather than a drug).
Yeah, right...instead of providing them with conventionally produced mediciation (which would be long off-patent), or infrastrcture for clean water to prevent diarrhea-causing diseases (ditto), let's create a something new, of unproven safety (both to immediately to human beings and long-term to the ecosystem on which we depend) and that brings the developing world under corporate control.
This is just as stupid as "golden rice", the idea of which was to replace local crops rich in vitamin A with patented rice.
(BTW, if GM crops are so substantially identical to the originals tha no labeling is needed when they sneak them into my food, how is it that they are at the same time unique enough to be deserving of patents?)
Just because you have a hammer doesn't mean every problem becomes a nail. A biogeneticist should do the same thing a truck driver, a software developer, or a chef does - work on solving problems that can be ameliorated with your skills, and if you make decent money at doing so contribute it to groups that have other skill sets and work on solving other problems.
None of these professions should use their hammer to drive a screw, creating both a poor fix and additional problems.
And let's not pretend that Ventria is doing this out of any sense of charity. According to TFA they predict a $600 million market.
Unintended side effects of GM crops have included allergic reactions to the relevant proteins, and toxicity to beneficial insects.
Dangerous side effects of drugs can take years to show up, but it's easy to pull them from the market. If a GM'ed pharmacrop spreads, pulling it out of the ecosystem would be difficult to impossible.
Nah. Under currently mainstream economic theories, those things add to the economy. Rebuilding a house, needing medical care, repairing a car - that's consumption, which means production, which means a higher GDP!
It's the privacy concerns of the adult the child will become that are worthy of consideration. If someone now were to find and publish a picture of my one-year-old self with my diaper down around my ankles, I beleive that would be an invasion of my privacy; if the publication occured before I was 18, it would be no less invasive.
Yes, parents can make decisions for their kids, but for the child's protection that power is subject to constraint by law. This may (note "may", not "should") be a case where such constraint is warranted.
Ahem.
The article you cite says "De Vries [the CIA-abuse denier] came under sharp criticism from the EU parliamentarians for refusing to consider earlier testimonies from a German and a Canadian who described to the committee how they were kidnapped and imprisoned by foreign agents, and from a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who alleged that British intelligence services used information obtained under torture".
Asserting that the EU investigated and found no proof of CIA kidnapping may have a comforting feel of "truthiness" for you, but I'm afraid that reality once again is showing a liberal bias.
A vigilante may be trying to save lives when he sets out to stop a murderer. That doesn't make him any less of a criminal when he ends up accidently or negilently harming, even killing, innocents.
Legal procedures have been carefully set up to control the power of the state and protect the innocent. They provide a means for the government to conduct surveillance on criminal suspects - they can GET AN FSCKING WARRANT.
Failing to follow these procedures makes them criminals and enemies of the United States. Can we just impeach this treasonous motherfucker already?
Just because the government has a legitimate reason (from its POV) to want something, doesn't mean it can legitimately have it.
There's no power under the Constitution to quash lawsuits based on vague claims of "national security". Yes, there is a longstanding tradition of allowing it; that doesn't make it right or legal (understanding the Constitution as "law of the land" to have priority over misbegotten case law).
There was funding, yes; on the other hand, the U.S. funds groups in many countries today. (And, speaking of things glossed over in the teaching of history, as an intervention into the affairs of a foreign nation the USSR funding an American political party pales in comparision with the military intervention into the Russian Civil War in which the U.S. participated; knowing that America troops once invaded Russia to oppose the Bolsheveks puts the USSR's Cold War "paranoia" into a whole new light.)
It's not illegal for group to keep its membership confidential, and given the results of the first "Red Scare" it's not improbable that some people would prefer membership in the CP to be secret. But it's an interesting assertation that membership in the CP involved swearing allegiance to the USSR. Can you provide a reference for that?