The only reason tobbacco, alchohol, coffee, and chocolate aren't controlled substances and illegal is that they were already too large in the economy and backed by people big enough to push the government around.
Actually, alcohol was totally banned in the U.S. only decades ago, and tobacco was banned in many states.
Further back, in some nations, tobacco possession was once punishable by death. There were some attempts to ban coffee in Europe.
The only drug you mention that, so far as I know, has been free from prohibtion is chocolate.
It's not because of economic power. It's because Prohibition Doesn't Work.
This is great -- I would probably be 15 pounds lighter if Mtn Dew were low-cal.
Or if, you know, you, like, didn't drink so much Mountain Dew.
If your intake of soda is high enough that artificially sweetened ones would make a large difference in your caloric intake, you're drinking too much fscking soda.
Hell, why bother with artifical sweetners and fats? Just make like the Romans and vomit it back up again! (Though not in a "vomitorium".)
I'm in Maryland and I get my voice and DSL from Cavalier Telephone. 384k DSL, static IP (you can get more than one for an additional fee, I just run my server on the static one and NAT my other boxen), total cost for voice and data about $65/month including all the taxes and fees. I'm quite happy with it.
Better is Wayne's World 2, at the end where Garth meets the geek girl: "Is that a Unix book?" "Yeah." "Cool." (The book is the classic Steven's "Unix Network Programming".)
Environmentalists are seen as luddites, because the top dog environmentalists often dismiss technological solutions to environmental problems out of hand.
Specifics, please? What environmentalits are dismissing what solutions "out of hand"? (And please note that coming to different conclusions that you is not dismissing "out of hand".)
The more rabiat environmentalists do not want cleaner cars, they want us to drive less. They don't want cheap energy, they want us using less of it.
You have a strange defintion of "rabid". (Assuming that's what you meant to type.)
A system that requires overuse of transportation or energy is inefficient. That's like saying programmers who don't just want faster and cheaper processors, but want efficient code, are "rabid".
the Earth's static magnetic field is on the order of.2-.6 G, depending on where you live.
First, comparing a static or slowly-changing field (even with transients) with a constantly varying 60 Hz field isn't reasonable.
Second, arguing from theory is not a good scientific approach. "X can't cause cancer because of equation Y" - denying observations that don't match theory - is not the scientific method. Using the scientific method would be analyzing the epidemiological evidence. Problem is that the "signal" of disease is so weak to start with (leukemia, fortunately, being rare) that looking for changes in it is extremely difficult, and firm conclusions can't yet be reached. Nor are they likely to be soon.
IRC, the strength of an electrical field is 1/(distance^2)...if power lines can cause cancer, it should be rather easy to detect - cancer rates would be high under the power lines, and fall off sharply.
You assume a simple proportional relationship between field strength and risk. That's not necessarily the case; the exposure/risk relationship could be much more complicated. (Consider for example the "fatal current" in cases of electricution, where in some instances you're more likely to survive a higher current.)
Which is not to say any such effect does or does not exist; just that we can't assume such a simple relationship between exposure and risk.
Now prove beyond a doubt that power lines are a risk.
Imagine yourself in 1950. Seems like everyone smokes. Manuy doctors are still advising some of their patients to smoke cigarettes. Someone tells you that smoking may be unhealthy. "Prove it beyond a doubt", you say, puffing away. And they go to work on the problem, and thirty years later it's pretty well established that smoking causes a high cancer risk. Unfortunately, by the time it's proved, there's a large tumor in your lung. Oops.
In the real world, we have to act on incomplete information. When a gun is pointed at us, we do not have the luxury of waiting until is is provem to be real, functional, and loaded before we decide to hit the dirt, even if ducking means paying a price by ruining our nice clothes in the mud.
People smoked tobacco for thousands of years, but it's only been for the past few decades than the health consequences have been understood. Meanwhile there are factors in our environment that have only been around for decades - EM fields, new chemicals, GM crops, et cetera. It will take a long time before the health effects, if any, of these factors are fully understood. In the meanwhile, avoiding excess exposure to them seems a prudent course.
I should be able to call an acquaintance using their name or ideally some truly identifying tag like a URL.
Hmm. So rather than typing 410-455-xxxx to speak to me, you could type "Tom Swiss, Baltimore, Maryland, USA" on your terminal. Then wait for a lookup. Then have to select "Which Tom Swiss? Thomas M. Swiss in Catonsville, or Thomas C. Swiss in Towson?" Doesn't sound all that better than having a unique numeric ID.
Re:It?s a matter of semantics
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Pirate Hunter
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That argument would work if taxes were payed in proportion to the government services that are rendered, but they're not.
Arguable. The rich benefit immensely from having a government around to keep the poor from
barbecuing them ("eat the rich, the poor are tough and stringy").
The state creates and defends many artificial "property rights" - patents and trademarks, mineral rights, water rights - that obviously benefit those it designates as owners. Its reserve banking systems, chartering of corporations, and issuing of bonds, certainly benefit the well-off more than the poor.
National defense benefits only those with at least some means. If you're living in a cardboard box, it doesn't much matter if the Canadians invade and put us all under the rule of the Queen of England, or whatever wacky system those Canucks use. (And you'll notice the demographics of those who actually end up getting killed when the fighting starts.)
On the other hand, I would like to see more of a shift away from payroll taxes to usage taxes. It is less intrusive, and it makes economic sense to make people pay the true cost of their activities. Maybe raise the capital gains tax, make it progressive, issue use-tax vouchers to low-income families (sort of like how ).
Re:It?s a matter of semantics
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It doesn't matter what a thief does with the money, if he takes it without permission it's theft.
If you eat dinner at a restaurant, and try to leave without paying the bill, and the restaurant uses force (say, by getting a cop to hold you until you pay) to make you pay, is that theft? Nope. You owed a debt, the money was no longer yours. Defining what's "yours" and what's "mine" and what's "his" is far from trivial.
If you - directly or indirectly - enjoy the benefit of various public goods, you incur a debt.
We'll elimiate taxes when we can eliminate government. As a Zenarchist, I look forward to that day, but I know it's a long long long way off. Meanwhile, might as well render onto Caesar what is Caesar's.
Re:Why pirates are bad
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Pirates have always been considered bad in the strictest sense. They are those that take property of others.
Ah, but what if those "others" claim to the property is questionable, if those others are thieves or aristocrats? If pirates are robbing a slave-trading boat that just sold a bunch of humand for a hold full of gold, for example, I know who I'm rooting for.
A corporation is a legal fictionWhat does this mean?
A legal fiction is a definition or assumption make by the law that is not congruent with reality.
My corporation owns my store. If a person slips on the pavement outside my store, they may sue.
They can sue the corporation. They can't sue the stockholders. You, as an individual, are absolved of responsibility by the state; all you can lose is your investment in the company, even if you were woefully negligent.
(And yes, we do live in an overly litigous society, that's certainly not debatable! But it's irrelevant to the point at hand.)
Corporations do a lot of good for individuals that you probably overlook.
Some do. Some commit horrible crimes. Corporate crime kills more people than street crime, but you can't arrest a fiction. Of course incorporation doen't create evil; but it creates a means and an environment that is condusive to it.
The stock options provided by my former employer (The Home Depot, a huge satanic babykilling corporation, right?) paid for our store and the adoption of our son.
You got paid by your former employer. Great. I'm supposed to be impressed that part of that payment was in the form of lottery tickets that happened to pay off for you??? (As stock prices have become more and more divorced from the actual value of a company, stocks have ceased having much to do with investing.)
It's very nice and all - I make a nice win for myself when a former employer went public, then got bought out. Doesn't mean that Trusted Information Systems or Network Associates is an ethically commendible organization, or that the legal concept of a corporation isn't badly flawed, just because stock went up and we got paid. There's no more altruism in a stock option than in a regular paycheck - oftentimes less. ("Rather than pay you $10 an hour, I'll pay you $8, and you can buy a $1 lottery tickey from me for 50 cents.")
so they're trying to tell me that this frog has been pretty much the same for all these millions of years, and meanwhile the earth has undergone all sorts of climate changes and most other species have radically evolved. is it just me or do things like this make old-earth, macro-evolution theories harder to swallow?
It's just you, because you don't seem to understand evolution.
First: species don't evolve much. If a group of organisms belong to a species changes a great deal, they're not the same species anymore.
Second: there are many extant species that have changed very little over millions of years, that are either the same species, or a very closely related species, to organisms that lived millions of years ago. Roaches, horseshoe crabs, ginkgo trees, the famous coelacanth, wacky microorganisms like the Archaea...they found very workable solutions to the problem of staying alive in their environments. Not much need to change.
Third: while there have been large climate changes, they affect where different types of climates are found - not what types of climate exist. There have been swamps, deserts, oceans, polar regions, and jungles for millions of years - a critter that found a way to live in a swamp a million years ago has a pretty good shot a being able to live in a swap today.
With sufficient financial motivation, laws will change it.
Laws can't change technology. Effective encryption is already out of the bag, and given that it will always be possible to create communication channels safe from Big Brother.
Hell, if things got bad we could bust out the modems, bring back UUCP with encryption on top. Old-school peer-to-peer networking. Communication doesn' have to be realtime, there was a Net before IP came to the masses. Mail and news would still get through.
Yes, John Q. Luser wouldn't be seeing it, he'd still be getting the pap fed to him from CNN.com/foxnews.com (pick your puppet), but guess what? That's going to be the case regardless of law. Anything not mainstream is underground, the only question is how far under.
Those who care about freedom cannot just sit back and assume that because the net is fairly free now, it always will be. Eternal vigiliance is the price.
Agreed. But so long as general-purpose computers (as opposed to DRM-crippled "media players") are in the hands of the masses, liberty is a little safer. And they can take my general-purpose computer from me when they pry the keyboard from my cold dead hands. (One of these days I'm going to print up a bunch of stickers with Woody Guthrie's old "This Machine Kills Fascists" slogan and give them to people to stick on their PCs.)
But the problem is that the burden needs to be on the individual.
Absolutely not. There's no call at all to throw such an obstacle into someone's exercise of the basic right to be left alone.
As much as you dislike telemarketing you must admit that some people buy products and services over the phone.
Then they can choose to not put their name on the list, if they want to buy products and services over the phone.
I can only conclude that the reason that you are opposed to making it easier for people to exercise their right to be left alone is that you work in the industry, or for a company that obtains business via telemarketing, or that you somehow profit from the practice. (Your use of the oxymoronic phrase "legitimate telemarketers" makes a strong case against you.)
The solution is to enforce our current laws rather than to enact a heavy-handed policy which restricts legitimate commerce.
The current rules are just about impossible to enforce effectively. Oh, and how can you call for enforcement of the current rules yet claim Constitutional concerns about Federal authority to regulate the telemarketing industry?
You come off not as interested in anyone's rights, but rather in ensuring that telemarketers have a means to badger the weak-willed. Too bad, tough luck, being connected with a scumbag industry was sure to take its karmic toll eventually.
It is enforced federally (which is unprecedented).
Since the majority of the phone spam I get is from companies based outside of Maryland (I get a whole bunch of free vacation offers from Virginia, for some reason, plus just about every credit card company seems to put up a front in Delaware), Federal legislation and enforcement seems sensible to me.
And there's certainly precedent - existing (though ineffective) Federal regulation of telemarketing scum[*]; this is really just a simplification. Federal law has long been setting acceptable hours, requiring each company to maintain DNC lists, enforcing anti-fraud provisions, and so on.
I agree that there is an issue of the overextension of the interstate commerce clause when this law is used to stop Little Timmy's Lawn Mowing Service down the street from calling, but that overextension shows up all over the place in federal law; it's a more general issue that we're unlikely to get sorted out in this case.
If you could individually contact each and every telemarketer and express your desire to not be called, and then the telemarketer were to call you in defiance of your will, then a city could punish them provided that they had such punitive power on the books.
There's no need to individually contact each and every person, when a sign or a list can do the job adequately. That's putting a pointless burden on my exercise of my right to be left alone. ("I told your church I didn't want any more evanglists to visit!" "Well, you didn't tell *me*, specifically. So let me tell you about the Great God Pan...")
And if a city can do it with stomping on free speech, then so can the Feds. The only question would be whether the Feds have Constitutional authority, and the interstate commerce clause is sufficient (modulo the concerns I mention above).
The reality is that many people think that they do not want to be contacted, but, in reality they do buy products over the phone.
You seem to be asserting that telemarketing scumbags know what I want better than I do. That's ridiculous.
I don't buy stuff over the phone. Ever. I tell them to put me on their don't call list. Always. Still, I get calls. Calls that are at the least annoying - and, when I get hangups from predictive dialers, emotionally stressful.
I mentioned earlier in the thread how a former housemate was being stalked and harassed - hangup calls were a prime method. I helped send the loon to prison; now every time I get a hangup call, my stress level goes up a notch. I know intellectually it's probably some harmless scumbag telemarketer with a dialer, but in my gut I wonder if it's a more dangerous scumbag out of jail and starting a new harassment campaign. (Paranoid? Perhaps a little, just justifiably so I think.) The hangup tactics of telemarketers can be rather stressful to people who've been victims of telephone harassment.
the DNC list makes it very easy for individuals who respond to sales pitches to be cut off from those who want to sell them things.
Not "to be cut from" - to cut themselves off from. That is their right, their right to be left alone.
This is an unfair restriction of the rights of businesses to speak to their customers.
Incorrect. The DNC law specifically allows businesses to call their customers, people with whom a business relationship exists.
Other provisions of the ordinance, which are not challenged here, such as the provision permitting homeowners to bar solicitors from their property by posting signs reading "No Solicitors or Peddlers Invited," 22-24, suggest the availability of less intrusive and more effective measures to protect privacy.
(The case in question struck down (correctly) provisions of the ordinance that restricted who could engage in such solicitation.)
Also noteworthy is the Court's 1943 opinion in Martin v. Struthers, 319 U.S. 141: "A city can punish those who call at a home in defiance of the previously expressed will of the occupant..." (With Google and FindLaw, anyone can look like a legal scholar...:-) )
The Do Not Call is currently in limbo precisely because it violates the freedom of speech.
As the above citations make clear, your freedom of speech does not include a right to disturb me after I've said sod off. And I certainly don't have to listen to you first. The DNC list does not violate free speech, and will stand.
Telemarketers have just as much right to call you as everyone else does.
Nonsense. Only people to whom I have distributed my number have any right to call me, and only for the purposes for which I have given them that number.
Other uses border on harassment. (Telephone misuse is a serious crime; in Maryland making "repeated calls with the intent to annoy, abuse, torment, harass, or embarrass another" or a call with "a comment, request, suggestion, or proposal that is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent" can lead to a three year jail term.)
And with a "Do Not Call" registry, telemarketers have no more right to call me than a door-to-door salesman has to trespass on my property if I put up a "No Solicitors" sign. (Which I am going to do; last straw was some asshole knocking on my door trying to tell me I was an AT&T preferred customer...when I've never had any service from AT&T.)
but if I have a closed source software, and use some open source "bits" that have been distributed under GPL, can't I just encapsulated the GPL stuff in a library and give the source to the library, and not the complete source to the software.
The legal question is, is your program a derived work? This is a tricky question in any copyright consideration.
The FSF's opinion is that "because the program as it is actually run includes the library", linking with a GPLed library makes your work a derivative, and requires that your program be GPLed.
(Note however that the GPL does not affect your "fair use" rights.)
I find it difficult to understand how a person can earn money by releasing the source to the software.
There are companies that are doing it...your difficulty doesn't seem to affect them. There are other ways to get paid besides a "pay-per-copy" scheme - like custom development and support contracts. Indeed, given the ease of making unauthorized copies of proprietary software, most people who actually purchase it do so in order to get support. (If you think they do so to comply with the law, you obviously haven't checked out the popularity of file sharing. (Although many if not most of the RIAA's copyright claims are constitutionally bogus, since copyright can only be legitimately held by creators...but that's a digression so far off course it's nested in two levels of parenthesis.))
(Now if it is ok by the GPL to pay for the exe and the code, then that would a different story)
It is quite legitimate to sell binaries under the GPL, and only make source available to those who bought binaries. However, you have to give those purchasers the same right - they can modify and redistribute the software, but have to provide source to anyone to whom them give binaries.
In fact, I've made my living writing software for over a decade, and most of it could have been GPLed without much affect on my employer's bottom line.
In what way does the author not understand the GPL?
The article states, "These disputes might scare companies away from using open source software." Clearly either the author, or the companies he spoke with, do not understand the GPL, which puts no obligation on the user of GPLed software; only on a distributor of GPLed software. You can put GNU/Linux on all your companies' computers and not incur any obligation under the GPL.
The article also states, "the Free Software Foundation doesn't want royalties--it wants you to burn down your house". No. A closer "house" metaphor would be that the FSF wants you to make available the blueprints to your house - as you agreeed to do in order to get access to someone else's blueprints.
I think that realistically the having computers in classrooms will help kids in only one important way. Yet it is indeed important. It will help them not be technophobic.
Kids today grow up with cell phones, MP3 players, and GameBoys in their pockets. Technophobia is not a significant threat to this generation. Really, how many kids do you know who are afraid of computers?
I'm much more worried about kids who can't do arithmetic without a calculator; who think that it's too hot to be outside when the temperature hits 80 F, because they spend all their summer inside air-conditioned houses watching TV or playing GTA on their X-Boxen; kids who never ride bikes, or climb trees.
They are trying to steal away educational tools from their children!
Outside of programming, engineering, and clerical skills classes, computers are not educational tools - educational tools must actually be useful for education.
Computers in the classroom are a wonderful distraction, and they give politicians something to point at and say "See my commitment to education!" But they do fsck-all to enhance learning.
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Farms have to be somewhere, yes. Highly polluting factory farms (which are also incredibly cruel to animals) can and should be eliminated.
Actually, alcohol was totally banned in the U.S. only decades ago, and tobacco was banned in many states.
Further back, in some nations, tobacco possession was once punishable by death. There were some attempts to ban coffee in Europe.
The only drug you mention that, so far as I know, has been free from prohibtion is chocolate.
It's not because of economic power. It's because Prohibition Doesn't Work.
Or if, you know, you, like, didn't drink so much Mountain Dew.
If your intake of soda is high enough that artificially sweetened ones would make a large difference in your caloric intake, you're drinking too much fscking soda.
Hell, why bother with artifical sweetners and fats? Just make like the Romans and vomit it back up again! (Though not in a "vomitorium".)
I'm in Maryland and I get my voice and DSL from Cavalier Telephone. 384k DSL, static IP (you can get more than one for an additional fee, I just run my server on the static one and NAT my other boxen), total cost for voice and data about $65/month including all the taxes and fees. I'm quite happy with it.
Better is Wayne's World 2, at the end where Garth meets the geek girl: "Is that a Unix book?" "Yeah." "Cool." (The book is the classic Steven's "Unix Network Programming".)
Specifics, please? What environmentalits are dismissing what solutions "out of hand"? (And please note that coming to different conclusions that you is not dismissing "out of hand".)
You have a strange defintion of "rabid". (Assuming that's what you meant to type.)
A system that requires overuse of transportation or energy is inefficient. That's like saying programmers who don't just want faster and cheaper processors, but want efficient code, are "rabid".
First, comparing a static or slowly-changing field (even with transients) with a constantly varying 60 Hz field isn't reasonable.
Second, arguing from theory is not a good scientific approach. "X can't cause cancer because of equation Y" - denying observations that don't match theory - is not the scientific method. Using the scientific method would be analyzing the epidemiological evidence. Problem is that the "signal" of disease is so weak to start with (leukemia, fortunately, being rare) that looking for changes in it is extremely difficult, and firm conclusions can't yet be reached. Nor are they likely to be soon.
You assume a simple proportional relationship between field strength and risk. That's not necessarily the case; the exposure/risk relationship could be much more complicated. (Consider for example the "fatal current" in cases of electricution, where in some instances you're more likely to survive a higher current.)
Which is not to say any such effect does or does not exist; just that we can't assume such a simple relationship between exposure and risk.
Imagine yourself in 1950. Seems like everyone smokes. Manuy doctors are still advising some of their patients to smoke cigarettes. Someone tells you that smoking may be unhealthy. "Prove it beyond a doubt", you say, puffing away. And they go to work on the problem, and thirty years later it's pretty well established that smoking causes a high cancer risk. Unfortunately, by the time it's proved, there's a large tumor in your lung. Oops.
In the real world, we have to act on incomplete information. When a gun is pointed at us, we do not have the luxury of waiting until is is provem to be real, functional, and loaded before we decide to hit the dirt, even if ducking means paying a price by ruining our nice clothes in the mud.
People smoked tobacco for thousands of years, but it's only been for the past few decades than the health consequences have been understood. Meanwhile there are factors in our environment that have only been around for decades - EM fields, new chemicals, GM crops, et cetera. It will take a long time before the health effects, if any, of these factors are fully understood. In the meanwhile, avoiding excess exposure to them seems a prudent course.
Hmm. So rather than typing 410-455-xxxx to speak to me, you could type "Tom Swiss, Baltimore, Maryland, USA" on your terminal. Then wait for a lookup. Then have to select "Which Tom Swiss? Thomas M. Swiss in Catonsville, or Thomas C. Swiss in Towson?" Doesn't sound all that better than having a unique numeric ID.
Arguable. The rich benefit immensely from having a government around to keep the poor from barbecuing them ("eat the rich, the poor are tough and stringy").
The state creates and defends many artificial "property rights" - patents and trademarks, mineral rights, water rights - that obviously benefit those it designates as owners. Its reserve banking systems, chartering of corporations, and issuing of bonds, certainly benefit the well-off more than the poor.
National defense benefits only those with at least some means. If you're living in a cardboard box, it doesn't much matter if the Canadians invade and put us all under the rule of the Queen of England, or whatever wacky system those Canucks use. (And you'll notice the demographics of those who actually end up getting killed when the fighting starts.)
On the other hand, I would like to see more of a shift away from payroll taxes to usage taxes. It is less intrusive, and it makes economic sense to make people pay the true cost of their activities. Maybe raise the capital gains tax, make it progressive, issue use-tax vouchers to low-income families (sort of like how ).
If you eat dinner at a restaurant, and try to leave without paying the bill, and the restaurant uses force (say, by getting a cop to hold you until you pay) to make you pay, is that theft? Nope. You owed a debt, the money was no longer yours. Defining what's "yours" and what's "mine" and what's "his" is far from trivial.
If you - directly or indirectly - enjoy the benefit of various public goods, you incur a debt.
We'll elimiate taxes when we can eliminate government. As a Zenarchist, I look forward to that day, but I know it's a long long long way off. Meanwhile, might as well render onto Caesar what is Caesar's.
Ah, but what if those "others" claim to the property is questionable, if those others are thieves or aristocrats? If pirates are robbing a slave-trading boat that just sold a bunch of humand for a hold full of gold, for example, I know who I'm rooting for.
They can sue the corporation. They can't sue the stockholders. You, as an individual, are absolved of responsibility by the state; all you can lose is your investment in the company, even if you were woefully negligent.
(And yes, we do live in an overly litigous society, that's certainly not debatable! But it's irrelevant to the point at hand.)
Some do. Some commit horrible crimes. Corporate crime kills more people than street crime, but you can't arrest a fiction. Of course incorporation doen't create evil; but it creates a means and an environment that is condusive to it.
You got paid by your former employer. Great. I'm supposed to be impressed that part of that payment was in the form of lottery tickets that happened to pay off for you??? (As stock prices have become more and more divorced from the actual value of a company, stocks have ceased having much to do with investing.)
It's very nice and all - I make a nice win for myself when a former employer went public, then got bought out. Doesn't mean that Trusted Information Systems or Network Associates is an ethically commendible organization, or that the legal concept of a corporation isn't badly flawed, just because stock went up and we got paid. There's no more altruism in a stock option than in a regular paycheck - oftentimes less. ("Rather than pay you $10 an hour, I'll pay you $8, and you can buy a $1 lottery tickey from me for 50 cents.")
It's just you, because you don't seem to understand evolution.
First: species don't evolve much. If a group of organisms belong to a species changes a great deal, they're not the same species anymore.
Second: there are many extant species that have changed very little over millions of years, that are either the same species, or a very closely related species, to organisms that lived millions of years ago. Roaches, horseshoe crabs, ginkgo trees, the famous coelacanth, wacky microorganisms like the Archaea...they found very workable solutions to the problem of staying alive in their environments. Not much need to change.
Third: while there have been large climate changes, they affect where different types of climates are found - not what types of climate exist. There have been swamps, deserts, oceans, polar regions, and jungles for millions of years - a critter that found a way to live in a swamp a million years ago has a pretty good shot a being able to live in a swap today.
No. A corporation is a legal fiction in which individuals deny any responsibility for the actions of the fiction. No responsibility, no rights.
Always remember that a corporation is a creation of the state.
Laws can't change technology. Effective encryption is already out of the bag, and given that it will always be possible to create communication channels safe from Big Brother.
Hell, if things got bad we could bust out the modems, bring back UUCP with encryption on top. Old-school peer-to-peer networking. Communication doesn' have to be realtime, there was a Net before IP came to the masses. Mail and news would still get through.
Yes, John Q. Luser wouldn't be seeing it, he'd still be getting the pap fed to him from CNN.com/foxnews.com (pick your puppet), but guess what? That's going to be the case regardless of law. Anything not mainstream is underground, the only question is how far under.
Agreed. But so long as general-purpose computers (as opposed to DRM-crippled "media players") are in the hands of the masses, liberty is a little safer. And they can take my general-purpose computer from me when they pry the keyboard from my cold dead hands. (One of these days I'm going to print up a bunch of stickers with Woody Guthrie's old "This Machine Kills Fascists" slogan and give them to people to stick on their PCs.)
Absolutely not. There's no call at all to throw such an obstacle into someone's exercise of the basic right to be left alone.
Then they can choose to not put their name on the list, if they want to buy products and services over the phone.
I can only conclude that the reason that you are opposed to making it easier for people to exercise their right to be left alone is that you work in the industry, or for a company that obtains business via telemarketing, or that you somehow profit from the practice. (Your use of the oxymoronic phrase "legitimate telemarketers" makes a strong case against you.)
The current rules are just about impossible to enforce effectively. Oh, and how can you call for enforcement of the current rules yet claim Constitutional concerns about Federal authority to regulate the telemarketing industry?
You come off not as interested in anyone's rights, but rather in ensuring that telemarketers have a means to badger the weak-willed. Too bad, tough luck, being connected with a scumbag industry was sure to take its karmic toll eventually.
Since the majority of the phone spam I get is from companies based outside of Maryland (I get a whole bunch of free vacation offers from Virginia, for some reason, plus just about every credit card company seems to put up a front in Delaware), Federal legislation and enforcement seems sensible to me.
And there's certainly precedent - existing (though ineffective) Federal regulation of telemarketing scum[*]; this is really just a simplification. Federal law has long been setting acceptable hours, requiring each company to maintain DNC lists, enforcing anti-fraud provisions, and so on.
([*]Do I perhaps betray my bias here? Is it clear that I agree with Bill Hicks' advice to people who work in advertising? Ah well.)
I agree that there is an issue of the overextension of the interstate commerce clause when this law is used to stop Little Timmy's Lawn Mowing Service down the street from calling, but that overextension shows up all over the place in federal law; it's a more general issue that we're unlikely to get sorted out in this case.
There's no need to individually contact each and every person, when a sign or a list can do the job adequately. That's putting a pointless burden on my exercise of my right to be left alone. ("I told your church I didn't want any more evanglists to visit!" "Well, you didn't tell *me*, specifically. So let me tell you about the Great God Pan...")
And if a city can do it with stomping on free speech, then so can the Feds. The only question would be whether the Feds have Constitutional authority, and the interstate commerce clause is sufficient (modulo the concerns I mention above).
You seem to be asserting that telemarketing scumbags know what I want better than I do. That's ridiculous.
I don't buy stuff over the phone. Ever. I tell them to put me on their don't call list. Always. Still, I get calls. Calls that are at the least annoying - and, when I get hangups from predictive dialers, emotionally stressful.
I mentioned earlier in the thread how a former housemate was being stalked and harassed - hangup calls were a prime method. I helped send the loon to prison; now every time I get a hangup call, my stress level goes up a notch. I know intellectually it's probably some harmless scumbag telemarketer with a dialer, but in my gut I wonder if it's a more dangerous scumbag out of jail and starting a new harassment campaign. (Paranoid? Perhaps a little, just justifiably so I think.) The hangup tactics of telemarketers can be rather stressful to people who've been victims of telephone harassment.
Not "to be cut from" - to cut themselves off from. That is their right, their right to be left alone.
Incorrect. The DNC law specifically allows businesses to call their customers, people with whom a business relationship exists.
By what possible argument do you arrive at the existence of such a right?
Incorrect. I can tell 'em all go to to hell, I don't have to listen to each one first. (See citations below.)
Incorrect. In fact, many localities expressly prohibit solicitation at a home where such a sign is displayed. (A quick Googling will confirm this.) And such provisions have been looked on favorably by the Supreme Court ( Schaumberg v. Citizens for Better Environ., 444 U.S. 620 (1980)):
(The case in question struck down (correctly) provisions of the ordinance that restricted who could engage in such solicitation.)
Also noteworthy is the Court's 1943 opinion in Martin v. Struthers, 319 U.S. 141: "A city can punish those who call at a home in defiance of the previously expressed will of the occupant..." (With Google and FindLaw, anyone can look like a legal scholar... :-) )
As the above citations make clear, your freedom of speech does not include a right to disturb me after I've said sod off. And I certainly don't have to listen to you first. The DNC list does not violate free speech, and will stand.
Nonsense. Only people to whom I have distributed my number have any right to call me, and only for the purposes for which I have given them that number.
Other uses border on harassment. (Telephone misuse is a serious crime; in Maryland making "repeated calls with the intent to annoy, abuse, torment, harass, or embarrass another" or a call with "a comment, request, suggestion, or proposal that is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent" can lead to a three year jail term.)
And with a "Do Not Call" registry, telemarketers have no more right to call me than a door-to-door salesman has to trespass on my property if I put up a "No Solicitors" sign. (Which I am going to do; last straw was some asshole knocking on my door trying to tell me I was an AT&T preferred customer...when I've never had any service from AT&T.)
Well, why remain ignorant? Read it, dammit.
The legal question is, is your program a derived work? This is a tricky question in any copyright consideration.
The FSF's opinion is that "because the program as it is actually run includes the library", linking with a GPLed library makes your work a derivative, and requires that your program be GPLed.
(Note however that the GPL does not affect your "fair use" rights.)
There are companies that are doing it...your difficulty doesn't seem to affect them. There are other ways to get paid besides a "pay-per-copy" scheme - like custom development and support contracts. Indeed, given the ease of making unauthorized copies of proprietary software, most people who actually purchase it do so in order to get support. (If you think they do so to comply with the law, you obviously haven't checked out the popularity of file sharing. (Although many if not most of the RIAA's copyright claims are constitutionally bogus, since copyright can only be legitimately held by creators...but that's a digression so far off course it's nested in two levels of parenthesis.))
It is quite legitimate to sell binaries under the GPL, and only make source available to those who bought binaries. However, you have to give those purchasers the same right - they can modify and redistribute the software, but have to provide source to anyone to whom them give binaries.
In fact, I've made my living writing software for over a decade, and most of it could have been GPLed without much affect on my employer's bottom line.
The article states, "These disputes might scare companies away from using open source software." Clearly either the author, or the companies he spoke with, do not understand the GPL, which puts no obligation on the user of GPLed software; only on a distributor of GPLed software. You can put GNU/Linux on all your companies' computers and not incur any obligation under the GPL.
The article also states, "the Free Software Foundation doesn't want royalties--it wants you to burn down your house". No. A closer "house" metaphor would be that the FSF wants you to make available the blueprints to your house - as you agreeed to do in order to get access to someone else's blueprints.
Kids today grow up with cell phones, MP3 players, and GameBoys in their pockets. Technophobia is not a significant threat to this generation. Really, how many kids do you know who are afraid of computers?
I'm much more worried about kids who can't do arithmetic without a calculator; who think that it's too hot to be outside when the temperature hits 80 F, because they spend all their summer inside air-conditioned houses watching TV or playing GTA on their X-Boxen; kids who never ride bikes, or climb trees.
Outside of programming, engineering, and clerical skills classes, computers are not educational tools - educational tools must actually be useful for education.
Computers in the classroom are a wonderful distraction, and they give politicians something to point at and say "See my commitment to education!" But they do fsck-all to enhance learning.
Clifford Stoll's book High Tech Heretic" is a good look at the subject.