Gozer the ACTA representative: Are you a country? Circletimessquare: No. Gozer ACTA representative: Then Go To Hell! Alsee: Circle, when someone asks you if you're a country, you say "YES"!
The only way at this point to prevent the government from taking what's left of individual freedom is a Ghandi-like non-violent movement to take back our government through peaceful means. This will be extremely difficult, as the government and its' non-government proxies such as unions and community organizations are already actively seeking to provoke violence at town hall meetings and Tea Party events as an excuse to use extreme measures to prevent/suppress dissent.
Ah yes..... we need to peacefully speak up for our rights, so go grab your guns and get ready to start shooting because THEY actually have a secret plan to provoke a violent revolution!
Yeah yeah, I've seen Glen Beck's show too. Once or twice.
I have a suggestion... how about you put down your gun and turn off the Glen Beck show for a while and go outside to play with your kids while you're oh-so-peacefully waiting for the anti-war-pacifists and the hippies and tree-huggers and egghead-professors to fire the first bullet in the civil war that they are secretly plotting.
How are all those Obama promises of change working out for you folks that supported him and voted for him?
For the most part, pretty damn well.
Unless I'm mistaken ACTA and the bureaucrats handling it significantly predate Obama's election. And while the buck does stop with him for everything that happens under his administration, and while he does deserve criticism on this issue, there is a huge moral difference between a bad president with bad ideas deliberately doing crap things, and a good president with good ideas doing his best to do good things under incredibly bad circumstances and failing to notice or fix some typical government bureaucratic crap going on under him.
Yes, I would very much like it if Obama would take a moment away from the multiple wars and handling the economy and all the other business of running the nation to give the ACTA people a swift kick in the ass. And yes, Obama deserves some criticism on this issue telling to do exactly that.
However most of "us folks" are rather happy with how things are going overall. If you are expecting people to regret his election over this, well then you're granting him grand praise with your faint damnation.
A bad president can wreak havoc in countless ways, from starting bad wars to fucking up wars, to causing a terrorist resurgence, to disastrous domestic mismanagement costing many lives, to committing torture, to trashing the Nation's global power and influence and the country's international respect, and on and on and on and on. Not to mention an almost complete collapse of the economy.
An excellent president for the most part simply manages not fuck things up in any of the million ways you can fuck up or abuse government power. An excellent president mostly manages to keep anything from going boom. An excellent president takes the bureaucratic hell-hole that is government and he ensures tomorrow's bureaucratic crap is slightly less craptastic than yesterday's bureaucratic crap.
The only people who ever bought into the Obama-as-Messiah-making-the-world-perfect thing are the idiots who think he's the antichrist. The people who supported Obama are thrilled that things are a million times better than Bush, and generally happy that he's running things pretty dang well under the circumstances even aside from any comparison with Bush. No magic fairies and pixie dust, just a pretty good guy doing a pretty good job of trying to do pretty much the right things. And nothing going boom.
If tomorrow is better than yesterday, then today was a pretty good day.
McCain almost could have been a good president, had he not slowly and steadily sold off all of his integrity trying to buy off the far right of his party.
We will start this sad sad story in the year 2000 when McCain referred to the confederate flag as symbol of racism and slavery, and the next day turned around and called it a symbol of heritage. And it doesn't matter what position you have on that matter, because it's all about what he had to say about the incident afterwards:
McCAIN: As I admitted, I should have done this earlier, when an honest answer could have affected me personally. I did not do so for one reason alone. I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary. So, I chose to compromise my principles. I broke my promise to always tell the truth.
A trivial harmless incident, but one that well marks the slow motion train wreck of McCain painfully selling off every last shred of integrity and self respect. Each time he starts out honest and trying to do what he thinks is right, and then turns around and sells off a piece of himself when the far right doesn't like it.
And there was McCain stating "Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell on the right", and then McCain trying to roll back the rightwing half of that comment and scheduling an appearance with Falwell exactly to pander for forgiveness from the right.
There was McCain opposing the Bush tax cuts for being fiscally irresponsible when not paired with spending cuts, and for being a giveaway to the rich. And then McCain sacrificed fiscal responsibility and integrity to support them, because tax cuts are sacrosanct to the far right no matter how fiscally irresponsible they are or how grotesquely imbalanced they are as welfare-for-the-rich.
And McCain had an immigration reform bill with his name right on the top of it, and turned around and declared he would VOTE AGAINST HIS OWN BILL when the right wing cried it wasn't strict enough. Apparently they wanted minefields and machine gun turrets along the border or some such.
And then it starts to get really ugly and painful. McCain is literally a TORTURE SURVIVOR and was a leading voice saying water boarding was torture and that it the US should absolutely never engage in such practices. I can't imagine what happened to McCain's self-respect when he flipped on that one to mollify the right.
All of that I could pass off as minor, but in those and other incidents he was selling out increasing pieces of his integrity to buy off people he considered to be racists and religious fundamentalists and "agents of intolerance" from "the outer reaches of American politics" in his own party and the fiscal irresponsible and advocates of torture. And in the presidential race he completely sold out his integrity selecting Sarah Palin for VP. He did it in a blatantly dishonest ploy trying to buy off the far right. A man who once valued honesty and integrity and serving the good of his country even in the face of torture and any personal cost, reduced to an empty shell of a man trying to buy off people he detests by appointing a Vice Presidential candidate whom he obviously considers unqualified and dangerous to be a heart-beat away from the presidential chair, selling out himself and the fate of the nation in a grossly pandering grab to be president.
And amazingly, that isn't even the biggest and worst and saddest scene in this train wreck. McCain then faced a challenger for his senate seat. A challenge from the right, who was attacking McCain of not being conservative enough. And McCain, integrity gone and self respect gone, still desperately trying to pander to a far right he detests, actually uttered the jaw-dropping words "I have never considered myself a maverick" in an attempt to defend his conservative credentials.
No, I'd say his comment "the US has set conditions that effectively seek to trade its willingness to release the text for gains on the substance of the text" is completely accurate. The call is for transparency and a release of the existing draft and the process of negotiating the terms of the treaty. The response was "Progress is necessary so that we can prepare to release a text", which is in effect a refusal to release the existing draft until other countries agree to desired changes to the existing draft.
The US delegation response is phrased in beneficial terms of clarifying what will or will not be in the treaty, but what-will-or-will-not be in the treaty is EXACTLY what is being negotiated right now, and the negotiation over what-will-or-will-not be in the treaty is exactly where transparency is being demanded and refused. The current draft lays out the various proposals from the various parties. Points of disagreement are placed in square brackets to show that they are currently under dispute or negotiation. It is a refusal to release the current existing until certain "fundamental issues" of the treaty are resolved.
to release a text that will provide meaningful information to the public and be a basis for productive dialogue."
It is a refusal to permit "public dialog" over the CURRENT STANDING POINTS OF NEGOTIATION between the countries. The US delegation considers "public dialog" over those issues to be "unproductive". The US Delegation wants to CONCLUDE certain points of negotiation so that "public dialog" can be "productively" constrained to minor detail disputes on how to carry out the treaty issues. Treaty issues that have already been resolved to the US trade delegation's satisfaction.
The current treaty has square brackets around areas that are still in dispute between the countries. The entire point of negotiations-before-release is to get those points "set in stone" before the public interest gets involved.
And God-forbid the public should object to some of the stuff that's not currently in square brackets. Any public comment over non-squarebracket text will simply be ignored as non-productive. That would be text that has already been discussed and resolved and agreed upon by the various countries - or more specifically agreed upon by the delegations from the various countries. Any complains or discussion over already agreed points would be completely redundant and unproductive.
The entire point of the secret treaty process to get things set in stone before pesky public dialog can productively influence it.
However without its equalizing power, the 5 most populous states would have over 1/3 of the voting power in a "popular" vote.
Whites outnumber blacks, asians, latinos, native americans, and any other ethnic group you care to name. So you're right, we need some new voting mechanism to provide equalizing power by giving multiple votes to anyone who is a minority.
You're right, in a democracy there needs to be some check against the ability of the majority to steamroll the votes of the minority.
Christians outnumber Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Atheists, Native Americans, Scientologists, any any other religion you care to name. So obviously in a democracy we need to give non-Christian voters multiple votes each so that they don't get steamrolled by the majority.
Right now each person in Montana effectively gets nearly four votes for president in relative to a single vote for president for each person in California.
If you propose giving asians and atheists four votes each, then sure, I'm all aboard with your plan to prevent a democratic majority of voters from "steamrolling" (aka actually winning the vote) over the losing minority vote.
Or, on the other hand, we can stick with the electoral college and take any one state - just for the sake of argument let's make it MY state - and carve it up into 178 states with a small population each. By just redrawing state lines the population of MY state magically gets 534 electoral votes and all the "equalizing power" to elect the president all by itself, regardless of whether my state was California or Montana. Just by drawing arbitrary state lines.
If you want to look at states and assume people in each state voted unanimously, then yes, the ten biggest states do in fact hold a majority of the population and do in fact represent a majority democratic vote. However if the population of #1 California and #2 Texas are unanimously voting the same way, not to mention the HUNDRED MILLION population how happen to live in states #3 through #8 are unanimously voting the same way then maybe.... just maybe... it might be a good idea going with the candidate elected by the democratic majority. Especially if Californians and Texans were for some reason to agree with each other unanimously.
Actually I was referring to Amazon's referal program where I was released back into the Amazon jungle and accepted by a pack of developers. In time I relearned their ways and mated with their women.
Lie.
As fate would have it, Amazon had only deferred their deferal program and as soon as it went back into effect I took advantage of it and here I am clean
There are some people who will flamebait-mod anything they politically dislike, but as you can see that bad mod was rapidly and overwhelmingly counter-modded. The moderation system is specifically designed to work on a public swarm model. If you constantly find yourself in conflict with the overwhelming majority you should at least consider the possibility that the problem is on your end before just assuming it is some vast evil conspiracy to persecute you.
The same criticism of George W. Bush using the same language regarding the same topic would have warranted a +5 insightful. Didn't you read that part of the moderation faq?
Which is exactly how the comment about Obama is currently modded.
Obama doesn't have some magic wand to make the world perfect. Obama is anything but perfect. But the reason Obama gets support and approval is because, within the reasonable expectations and limitations of what a president can do, most of us consider him to be doing an overall damn good job under incredibly hard circumstances. Because, for a politician, most of us think he's pretty damn good.
Yes, I think ACTA is crap and yes I think the lack of transparency on ACTA is crap, and yes I agree Obama deserves criticism on it. However as far as I'm aware this whole ACTA thing started long before Obama took office, and as far as I'm aware Obama has not gotten involved in the ACTA process. It is happening on his watch and it is being done by bureaucrats under his authority, and yes he could use a verbal butt-kicking telling him to do something about it. However is is a tad unreasonable to crucify him for the fact that government is still government, that he doesn't have a magic wand to be everywhere at once and fix all of the crap in government at once.
Most of us see a huge moral difference between a president who does bad things, and a war&economy busy president who hasn't noticed or hasn't fixed bureaucratic crap under him. Yes the responsibility still lands in his lap, the buck still does stop with him. But there's a moral difference between an incredibly bad president doing incredibly bad things and a good president doing his best to do good things and failing to notice or fix every bureaucratic crap problem going on under him.
Barack H. Obama was bought and paid for by Big Media <-- -1, troll George W. Bush was bought and paid for by Big Oil <-- +5, insightful
It's rather comical the way some people obsess over Mr. Barack Hussein Obama's middle initial as if it were some sort of dark evil stain revealing his dark evil soul or something.
It's not like we wouldn't know which President Barack Obama you were referring to. LOL.
Obama drew huge media attention for a number of very legitimate reasons, most particularly because he drew absolutely overwhelming public attention. Even if we set aside the historic fact that he was the first black candidate for president, the undeniable fact is that the man inspired huge numbers of people to stand up and try to make the country better. When he gave a speech as a candidate he literally filled stadiums. And yes, of course the media covered cheering stadiums filled with people enthusiastic about a candidate. Maybe YOU didn't like him, maybe YOU disagreed with him, maybe YOU weren't impressed by him, but the fact is that a large percentage of the population DID see him as an impressive and positive and very newsworthy figure, and yes of course the media did cover and reflect that public reaction to him. And yes, the media does inherently amplify whatever news they turn their spotlight on, but they didn't create it in the first place. And the media didn't "buy" him.
I'm sure some of that wide and powerful public enthusiasm for Obama was a counter reaction to the massive public despair at the Bush years. And that doesn't change the fact that it was real and public and widespread, and that the media was reflecting that fact. Not creating or buying it.
There's a relevant game people may be interested in. It is a fairly realistic digital transistor circuit simulator. Each level assigns you a real-world microchip to implement. You draw wires and silicon transistors creating a circuit, then the game runs a simulation to test it. The low levels start with a simple inverter circuit and then AND and OR logic gates, then works up through logic latches and oscillators and memory units and multi-function math units. If the game board were large enough you could literally implement a slow but fully working CPU.
Be sure to click the help tab and view the introductory video. One point that is not clear when starting is that you need to hold the SHIFT key in order to draw yellow silicon. To remove metal hold the shift key while deleting.
Oh, and by the way..... I currently happen to have the high score for every level:)
As far as I'm aware, I don't think anyone in this discussion has disputed imprisoning people who have committed actual acts of abuse against actual children.
by allowing lolicon and similar images to become acceptable I feel as if an important social barrier may have been breeched. I honestly can't make a truly informed decision because I don't have a degree or education in psychology, but based on what I have seen and heard, I have a very hard time accepting that child porn or lolicon (victemless or otherwise) should be allowed in any manifestation.
I don't have any data on child porn or lolicon, but I would like to point out that the exact same reasoning is often used to assert ALL porn should be criminal in order to reduce rape and other sex crimes, and we do in fact have plenty of hard data on that. Over the last several decades quite a few countries have either criminalized or decriminalized porn, and we do have solid data on what happens to the rate of rape and other sex crimes in such countries. The consistent fact is that the rate of rape and other sex crimes is LOWER when porn is decriminalized, and HIGHER when porn is criminalized.
The problem is that most people crusading against "dirty offensive immoral pictures" generally have a dogmatic position that the images are evil in themselves and anyone who looks at them needs to be imprisoned and burn in hell, and they just don't care about facts or evidence or logic. They routinely persist in asserting that they are fighting their crusade to protect people from crime and harm, when in fact the available evidence indicates the exact opposite. All evidence is that societies where porn is socially tolerated and available have lower rates of sex crimes. All evidence shows that the most serious sex offenders were produced in repressive intolerant homes, particularly when it is strict religious moral repression. At some point the child becomes arouse by some image or idea and he is attacked with the message the image or idea is evil, that sexuality is evil, that arousal is evil, and that it makes him evil. An obsessive compulsive cycle of intensifying focus is created. Arousal triggers repression and intensified focus on the arousal and self loathing. The thoughts and feelings are defined as evil in themselves, and he is defined as evil for having them. Ultimately the cycle of obsession and repression reaches the breaking point, and they just plain decide that they are evil. They just plain give in to the idea of themselves being evil as the only available resolution to the conflict. The cycle is broken, the psychological tension and pain are relieved, and the most monstrous form of serial sexual criminal is created. Statistics show that the worst category of serial criminal is almost without exception created by a repressive environment.
I see no reason that lolicon and similar materials would be the opposite case compared to porn in general.
There are people who get off on watching fires. You don't tell them that getting aroused by fire is evil. You don't tell them the tight is evil. You don't tell them the feeling is evil. You simply stick to committing the act of arson obviously hurts people and is criminal. If he collects images and videos of fire and gets off on it, you can tell him it's a rather bizarre kink but you don't demonize him for it. You make it very simple, thoughts and feeling and strange harmless hobbies are not evil in themselves and do not define you as evil. You make it very simple, arson or sexually abusing children or other acts harming people are "evil" and are crimes. No thought crime, no feelings-crime, no strange-harmless-hobby crime, no crime for merely "disgusting" , no crime for merely "offensive", actual acts harming actual people are actual crimes.
Most of us have had the feeling that we would like to kill some particular infuriating person. Whether it is a boss, or an obnoxious driver on the road, or some ha
I always find it hysterical when people toss around that ass backwards supply-and-demand argument.
Seriously. If someone genuinely wanted to prevent actual children from being actual victims of actual crimes to produce such images, the supply-and-demand argument mandates you must do the exact opposite. The supply-and-demand argument dictates that you would revoke any possible copyright in such images and that you would have law enforcement dump their vast collection of images free on the internet. You would keep the act of abuse itself a crime, but you would FLOOD the existing supply in order to obliterate demand for production.
I'm always mystified when people bring up that argument. Arson is criminal, images of arson are not in themselves criminal, and this bizarre ass backwards supply-demand argument is somehow tossed around as a reason these sorts of images should be legally treated differently than images of arson.
Throw arsonists in prison, throw child abusers in prison, but just drop the ridiculous supply demand argument to justify criminalizing non-arsonists or non-abusers over images themselves. Drop the bullshit argument that it's being done to protect children and prevent abuse, when in fact it wildly INCREASES the profit and INCREASES the abuse of children for production. Again, it increases the abuse of children for production. The reason the images are criminalized has nothing to do with supply and demand, it has nothing to do with protecting the children, the images are criminalized because that are offensive and disturbing.
On Wikimedia there are some hundred-year-old fictional line drawings that might be considered offensive and disturbing. Oh. My. God. The sky is going to fall if we don't put somebody in prison over it.
ISPs generally don't like threatening or losing customers over copyright stuff, but for the most part they are far more concerned with getting legally threatened by copyright holders. A single legal fight, even if they win in court, can cost them thousands times more than the yearly profit from a customer. Even under the best of circumstances they are constantly threatened and constantly fighting a lobbying war over new legislation to avoid copyright liability and new legislative copyright policing mandates. Most of them are terrified that if they decline to assist copyright holders that some court will view them as being complicit in infringement, and/or that it will make them look bad to legislators considering laws on the subject.
It's far cheaper and far safer to just throw customers under the bus to avoid even the threat that they might get dragged into the middle of a court case.
The defining characteristic of science is that it needs to be able to make testable predictions.
And to test whether or not evolution is valid science, I suggest the following evolutionist-worldview based prediction: Half of creationists will categorize this fossil as fully human, the other half will classify it as fully ape.
He said: a copyright holder can accuse you of pirating anything without evidence
You said: My understanding of it was that they would have to catch you actually doing it
Note that those two statements are, in practical effect, equivalent. And not in a good way.
A while ago an antipiracy-for-hire company mailed legal accusations against three networked lasers printers for supposedly infringing the copyright on an Indiana Jones movie. Needless to say there was in fact no copyright infringement being committed by these networked printers, nor by anyone connected to these printers. The anti-piracy outfit was engaging in wildly careless internet scanning for "apparently" infringing IP addresses, and they weren't spending any time or effort to check whether any infringement was actually being committed.
As I said, his statement and your statement are effectively equivalent, and not in a good way. They DID make accusations of infringement without any reliable evidence. And they kinda-sorta HAD "caught the printers actually doing it".... where "actually" is based upon the most reckless level of carelessness and the superficial level of appearances... where "actually" is often completely false.
The entire issue here is that these allegations does not involve police, they do not involve courts, they does not involve any standard of evidence. It works just as he had described. Private individuals or private outfits accuse you of infringement, presumably because they have some belief you infringed. There is zero standard of evidence, zero standard for care, zero standard for judgment, zero standard for credibility. Any idiot can carelessly or recklessly or even maliciously file file thousands of allegations of infringement based on unreliable or worthless "evidence" to "catch" thousands of people, both innocent and guilty. And after one or more allegations the ISP is legally required to cut your connection. YOU are generally given the option to drag THEM into court, and the burden is placed you to prove yourself innocent in order prevent or reverse the penalty.
And yes, just to use proper care I did double check your link before replying. The exact text of law at your link is "if it appears to a copyright owner ". Which is in short, amounts to exctly what I said above.
Anyone one can file allegations based upon their personal wildly unreasonable and wildly careless wildly aggressive search for an "appearance" of infringement. This sort of law turns the entire legal system on it's head. This is a guilt upon accusation law. Some private individual or private enterprise makes an allegation and the presumption in law is that you are guilty, and the law mandates a penalty be applied. And if I may use a touch of sarcasm, the law oh-so-generously has a clause permitting you to initiate a court case and permitting you to present evidence and permitting you to attempt to prove yourself innocent.
If out of the blue your ISP notifies you that someone has filed one or more an infringement allegations against you, and you're innocent, what possible evidence-of-innocence are you supposed to present!? How the hell are you supposed to prove yourself innocent?
Dear Iran, This is a test of the Emergency Tsunami Warning System. Had this been an actual emergency these EMP pulses would have been followed by a tsunami. This concludes this test of the Emergency Tsunami Warning System.
This is exactly the problem with liberals. They have no distinction between voluntarily giving something and having something taken by force.
I can't wait until conservatives get into power, and the large percentage of taxes going to pay the military become a "voluntary giving" rather than being taken by force. Not to mention all the money to run the courts and to pay the police and fire departments and roads and about ten thousand other things.
Or perhaps your argument about "taken by force" is total bull, and you are just quibbling over how you would like to spend it.
Science can tell you that putting lead oxide in paint will make it a very bright white, and science can tell you that putting lead paint on toys will give children brain damage, but science cannot tell you whether or not you should put lead paint on children's toys.
Science provides understanding, science can give you options, science helps you make predictions, and sometimes those predictions make it obvious what you should do, but science itself never tells you what to do. Lead gives children brain damage, that is a simple, neutral, objective, scientific fact. The choice not to give children brain damage is an obvious, but non-science, preference. Science informs, but it cannot chose. Science does not have preferences.
The application of the scientific method would show if there was harm done by adultery. Also if there was harm done by faithfulness. Science could tell you what is greater. Another example is smoking around babies. Is second-hand smoking bad for baby's health? Does it convey benefits?
Science can help you measure things and predict things, but science itself does not define things as harm or benefit. We define what we dislike as a harm, and we define what we like as a benefit. And it's almost always the case that every alternative combines a mixture of harms and benefits, and only we place relative weights on what we consider more important.
Science is extremely useful, including in relation to moral considerations. Ill informed moral reasoning is generally poor moral reasoning. However it always seems to lead to all sorts of problems when people assert science makes moral judgments. And interestingly, it seems to me that error rarely comes from people on the "science side". It seems to me that it usually comes from people who dislike certain scientific facts, people who come to obvious moral conclusions based on that science, and because they dislike those obvious implications they resist the science and they think they hear science making a moral assertion they disagree with.
To take a concrete example, there are people with a strong moral opposition to pornography. They want to eliminate or criminalize pornography because they believe it to be harmful. They want to eliminate pornography in order to reduce the incidence of rape and other sex crimes. And then they hear about scientific studies of countries that have criminalized or decriminalized pornography that show that rape and other sex crime rates consistently DECREASE when pornography is legalized and available, and that rape and other sex crimes consistently INCREASE when pornography is criminalized and generally unavailable in a society. They then often make the mistake of claiming science is pushing a moral position on the subject. It is pretty universally obvious to consider rape to be harm, and to the extent that is used as a sole basis for moral good and moral bad it leads to an obvious implication that the availability of pornography would be a moral good. Of course nothing in life has a single effect, and nothing in life can validly be morally judged on the basis of a solitary factor. If one accepts that reducing rape is a good thing, then the evidence shows that pornography is at a minimum a mixed issue, and that pronography would only be morally bad if there are one or more harms that outweigh that benefit. However some people don't reason that far - they have a dogmatic position that pornography is evil, so they simply deny the problematical evidence. They are dogmatically right, pornography is a dogmatically pure evil, and anything that conflicts with that is automatically false. The information must be false, and it must be coming from evil people. They then make the technically correct statement that science has no business making moral assertions, but they are incorrect in believing science is making a moral judgment. They "hear" science making moral assertions, but morality is actually only coming in to it when people draw obvious-but-non-scientific implications based on that neutral
judging by what you said the use of the internet itself falls under the same category like P2P. So using the internet is a felony or something?
The law makes certain copyright infringement into a criminal offense. Where there is no infringement there obviously is no crime under this law. So mere use of the internet is not a crime.
However it is virtually impossible to use the internet without technically violating copyright countless times a day. For example lets say Slashdot got one of their story icons from somewhere without permission. In that case you would technically be infringing the copyright on that image when you load the Slashdot home page, creating a copy of that image in the browser cache on your harddrive. However this law only criminalizes "willful" infringement, where "willful" means anything other than a genuine accident or being misled by someone else. Since you had no idea that Slashdot had an infringing image on their webpage you would not have willfully infringed that copyright, and therefore it would not be willful infringement.
I assume a court would also require some more relevant connection between the infringement and the "financial gain". I seriously doubt mere general internet use would qualify:), but anything like P2P or BitTorrent would be a pretty obvious link.
>"Part of a copyrighted work is "something of value" if the entire work is something of value"
That is an interesting opinion.
If it is really necessary, I can and will dig up one or more copyright court cases where damages were awarded due to the value of a copied portion of a full work.
I have no doubt that 0010 appears as a piece of many copyrighted works.
True, but value is also dependent upon context. Any DVD movie is made up of a series of numbers between 0 and 255, however a court would laugh in your face if you were to claim the value of the infringed movie was zero because you already possessed the numbers 0 through 255.
As I said, judicial reasoning and rulings on copyright place particular focus on intent and end result. They work to preserve the function of copyright protection. Activities that do not impair the value and function of copyright protection are generally accepted as fair use, an activities that directly violate the value and function of copyright protection are deemed infringement. If you copy one byte from each of a huge number of people to construct an entire new copy of a movie, then you have done precisely what copyright law is intended to prohibit. You have created a new copy.
For better or worse, the fact is that courts use a lot of flexibility and creativity in determining what qualifies as fair use or not, and what qualifies as infringement or not. For better or worse, the fact is that they look at the purpose and ultimate result, and they reason backwards from there. The central function of copyright is to restrict the creation of new copies. If you collect a single byte from countless people to create a copy of a movie then you have infringed the copyright on that movie. And if a court has to determine the "value" of each byte then they will most likely use the simple assumption that, in the context of compiling a full copy of the movie, that each byte carries an equal share of the value of the full movie. You could certainly argue some portions of the work carry more of the value than other portions of the work, and many rulings in fact do exactly that, but it really wouldn't have any bearing on the situation here.
I'm sorry but I can no longer continue examining the rest of your assertions because we have established that you are a criminal under this law and criminals have no credibility.
No, I don't recall making any such admission here.
I certainly admit I have copied portions of your copyrighted post within this thread, however I would assert a Fair Use defense:)
As far as any copying I may-or-may-not have engaged in outside of this thread, I invoke my 5th amendment right against self incrimination:)
Slashdot Mirror
If we all just ignored political ads entirely, they stop working
I agree completely.
By the way, pass me the Coors Light and Cheetos.
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Gozer the ACTA representative: Are you a country?
Circletimessquare: No.
Gozer ACTA representative: Then Go To Hell!
Alsee: Circle, when someone asks you if you're a country, you say "YES"!
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The only way at this point to prevent the government from taking what's left of individual freedom is a Ghandi-like non-violent movement to take back our government through peaceful means. This will be extremely difficult, as the government and its' non-government proxies such as unions and community organizations are already actively seeking to provoke violence at town hall meetings and Tea Party events as an excuse to use extreme measures to prevent/suppress dissent.
Ah yes..... we need to peacefully speak up for our rights, so go grab your guns and get ready to start shooting because THEY actually have a secret plan to provoke a violent revolution!
Yeah yeah, I've seen Glen Beck's show too.
Once or twice.
I have a suggestion... how about you put down your gun and turn off the Glen Beck show for a while and go outside to play with your kids while you're oh-so-peacefully waiting for the anti-war-pacifists and the hippies and tree-huggers and egghead-professors to fire the first bullet in the civil war that they are secretly plotting.
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How are all those Obama promises of change working out for you folks that supported him and voted for him?
For the most part, pretty damn well.
Unless I'm mistaken ACTA and the bureaucrats handling it significantly predate Obama's election. And while the buck does stop with him for everything that happens under his administration, and while he does deserve criticism on this issue, there is a huge moral difference between a bad president with bad ideas deliberately doing crap things, and a good president with good ideas doing his best to do good things under incredibly bad circumstances and failing to notice or fix some typical government bureaucratic crap going on under him.
Yes, I would very much like it if Obama would take a moment away from the multiple wars and handling the economy and all the other business of running the nation to give the ACTA people a swift kick in the ass. And yes, Obama deserves some criticism on this issue telling to do exactly that.
However most of "us folks" are rather happy with how things are going overall. If you are expecting people to regret his election over this, well then you're granting him grand praise with your faint damnation.
A bad president can wreak havoc in countless ways, from starting bad wars to fucking up wars, to causing a terrorist resurgence, to disastrous domestic mismanagement costing many lives, to committing torture, to trashing the Nation's global power and influence and the country's international respect, and on and on and on and on. Not to mention an almost complete collapse of the economy.
An excellent president for the most part simply manages not fuck things up in any of the million ways you can fuck up or abuse government power. An excellent president mostly manages to keep anything from going boom. An excellent president takes the bureaucratic hell-hole that is government and he ensures tomorrow's bureaucratic crap is slightly less craptastic than yesterday's bureaucratic crap.
The only people who ever bought into the Obama-as-Messiah-making-the-world-perfect thing are the idiots who think he's the antichrist. The people who supported Obama are thrilled that things are a million times better than Bush, and generally happy that he's running things pretty dang well under the circumstances even aside from any comparison with Bush. No magic fairies and pixie dust, just a pretty good guy doing a pretty good job of trying to do pretty much the right things. And nothing going boom.
If tomorrow is better than yesterday, then today was a pretty good day.
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McCain almost could have been a good president, had he not slowly and steadily sold off all of his integrity trying to buy off the far right of his party.
We will start this sad sad story in the year 2000 when McCain referred to the confederate flag as symbol of racism and slavery, and the next day turned around and called it a symbol of heritage. And it doesn't matter what position you have on that matter, because it's all about what he had to say about the incident afterwards:
McCAIN: As I admitted, I should have done this earlier, when an honest answer could have affected me personally. I did not do so for one reason alone. I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary. So, I chose to compromise my principles. I broke my promise to always tell the truth.
A trivial harmless incident, but one that well marks the slow motion train wreck of McCain painfully selling off every last shred of integrity and self respect. Each time he starts out honest and trying to do what he thinks is right, and then turns around and sells off a piece of himself when the far right doesn't like it.
And there was McCain stating "Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell on the right", and then McCain trying to roll back the rightwing half of that comment and scheduling an appearance with Falwell exactly to pander for forgiveness from the right.
There was McCain opposing the Bush tax cuts for being fiscally irresponsible when not paired with spending cuts, and for being a giveaway to the rich. And then McCain sacrificed fiscal responsibility and integrity to support them, because tax cuts are sacrosanct to the far right no matter how fiscally irresponsible they are or how grotesquely imbalanced they are as welfare-for-the-rich.
And McCain had an immigration reform bill with his name right on the top of it, and turned around and declared he would VOTE AGAINST HIS OWN BILL when the right wing cried it wasn't strict enough. Apparently they wanted minefields and machine gun turrets along the border or some such.
And then it starts to get really ugly and painful. McCain is literally a TORTURE SURVIVOR and was a leading voice saying water boarding was torture and that it the US should absolutely never engage in such practices. I can't imagine what happened to McCain's self-respect when he flipped on that one to mollify the right.
All of that I could pass off as minor, but in those and other incidents he was selling out increasing pieces of his integrity to buy off people he considered to be racists and religious fundamentalists and "agents of intolerance" from "the outer reaches of American politics" in his own party and the fiscal irresponsible and advocates of torture. And in the presidential race he completely sold out his integrity selecting Sarah Palin for VP. He did it in a blatantly dishonest ploy trying to buy off the far right. A man who once valued honesty and integrity and serving the good of his country even in the face of torture and any personal cost, reduced to an empty shell of a man trying to buy off people he detests by appointing a Vice Presidential candidate whom he obviously considers unqualified and dangerous to be a heart-beat away from the presidential chair, selling out himself and the fate of the nation in a grossly pandering grab to be president.
And amazingly, that isn't even the biggest and worst and saddest scene in this train wreck. McCain then faced a challenger for his senate seat. A challenge from the right, who was attacking McCain of not being conservative enough. And McCain, integrity gone and self respect gone, still desperately trying to pander to a far right he detests, actually uttered the jaw-dropping words "I have never considered myself a maverick" in an attempt to defend his conservative credentials.
No, I'd say his comment "the US has set conditions that effectively seek to trade its willingness to release the text for gains on the substance of the text" is completely accurate. The call is for transparency and a release of the existing draft and the process of negotiating the terms of the treaty. The response was "Progress is necessary so that we can prepare to release a text", which is in effect a refusal to release the existing draft until other countries agree to desired changes to the existing draft.
The US delegation response is phrased in beneficial terms of clarifying what will or will not be in the treaty, but what-will-or-will-not be in the treaty is EXACTLY what is being negotiated right now, and the negotiation over what-will-or-will-not be in the treaty is exactly where transparency is being demanded and refused. The current draft lays out the various proposals from the various parties. Points of disagreement are placed in square brackets to show that they are currently under dispute or negotiation. It is a refusal to release the current existing until certain "fundamental issues" of the treaty are resolved.
to release a text that will provide meaningful information to the public and be a basis for productive dialogue."
It is a refusal to permit "public dialog" over the CURRENT STANDING POINTS OF NEGOTIATION between the countries. The US delegation considers "public dialog" over those issues to be "unproductive". The US Delegation wants to CONCLUDE certain points of negotiation so that "public dialog" can be "productively" constrained to minor detail disputes on how to carry out the treaty issues. Treaty issues that have already been resolved to the US trade delegation's satisfaction.
The current treaty has square brackets around areas that are still in dispute between the countries. The entire point of negotiations-before-release is to get those points "set in stone" before the public interest gets involved.
And God-forbid the public should object to some of the stuff that's not currently in square brackets. Any public comment over non-squarebracket text will simply be ignored as non-productive. That would be text that has already been discussed and resolved and agreed upon by the various countries - or more specifically agreed upon by the delegations from the various countries. Any complains or discussion over already agreed points would be completely redundant and unproductive.
The entire point of the secret treaty process to get things set in stone before pesky public dialog can productively influence it.
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However without its equalizing power, the 5 most populous states would have over 1/3 of the voting power in a "popular" vote.
Whites outnumber blacks, asians, latinos, native americans, and any other ethnic group you care to name. So you're right, we need some new voting mechanism to provide equalizing power by giving multiple votes to anyone who is a minority.
You're right, in a democracy there needs to be some check against the ability of the majority to steamroll the votes of the minority.
Christians outnumber Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Atheists, Native Americans, Scientologists, any any other religion you care to name. So obviously in a democracy we need to give non-Christian voters multiple votes each so that they don't get steamrolled by the majority.
Right now each person in Montana effectively gets nearly four votes for president in relative to a single vote for president for each person in California.
If you propose giving asians and atheists four votes each, then sure, I'm all aboard with your plan to prevent a democratic majority of voters from "steamrolling" (aka actually winning the vote) over the losing minority vote.
Or, on the other hand, we can stick with the electoral college and take any one state - just for the sake of argument let's make it MY state - and carve it up into 178 states with a small population each. By just redrawing state lines the population of MY state magically gets 534 electoral votes and all the "equalizing power" to elect the president all by itself, regardless of whether my state was California or Montana. Just by drawing arbitrary state lines.
If you want to look at states and assume people in each state voted unanimously, then yes, the ten biggest states do in fact hold a majority of the population and do in fact represent a majority democratic vote. However if the population of #1 California and #2 Texas are unanimously voting the same way, not to mention the HUNDRED MILLION population how happen to live in states #3 through #8 are unanimously voting the same way then maybe.... just maybe... it might be a good idea going with the candidate elected by the democratic majority. Especially if Californians and Texans were for some reason to agree with each other unanimously.
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Actually I was referring to Amazon's referal program where I was released back into the Amazon jungle and accepted by a pack of developers. In time I relearned their ways and mated with their women.
Lie.
As fate would have it, Amazon had only deferred their deferal program and as soon as it went back into effect I took advantage of it and here I am clean
Lie lie.
and shaven
Lie lie lie.
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There are some people who will flamebait-mod anything they politically dislike, but as you can see that bad mod was rapidly and overwhelmingly counter-modded. The moderation system is specifically designed to work on a public swarm model. If you constantly find yourself in conflict with the overwhelming majority you should at least consider the possibility that the problem is on your end before just assuming it is some vast evil conspiracy to persecute you.
The same criticism of George W. Bush using the same language regarding the same topic would have warranted a +5 insightful. Didn't you read that part of the moderation faq?
Which is exactly how the comment about Obama is currently modded.
Obama doesn't have some magic wand to make the world perfect. Obama is anything but perfect. But the reason Obama gets support and approval is because, within the reasonable expectations and limitations of what a president can do, most of us consider him to be doing an overall damn good job under incredibly hard circumstances. Because, for a politician, most of us think he's pretty damn good.
Yes, I think ACTA is crap and yes I think the lack of transparency on ACTA is crap, and yes I agree Obama deserves criticism on it. However as far as I'm aware this whole ACTA thing started long before Obama took office, and as far as I'm aware Obama has not gotten involved in the ACTA process. It is happening on his watch and it is being done by bureaucrats under his authority, and yes he could use a verbal butt-kicking telling him to do something about it. However is is a tad unreasonable to crucify him for the fact that government is still government, that he doesn't have a magic wand to be everywhere at once and fix all of the crap in government at once.
Most of us see a huge moral difference between a president who does bad things, and a war&economy busy president who hasn't noticed or hasn't fixed bureaucratic crap under him. Yes the responsibility still lands in his lap, the buck still does stop with him. But there's a moral difference between an incredibly bad president doing incredibly bad things and a good president doing his best to do good things and failing to notice or fix every bureaucratic crap problem going on under him.
Barack H. Obama was bought and paid for by Big Media <-- -1, troll
George W. Bush was bought and paid for by Big Oil <-- +5, insightful
It's rather comical the way some people obsess over Mr. Barack Hussein Obama's middle initial as if it were some sort of dark evil stain revealing his dark evil soul or something.
It's not like we wouldn't know which President Barack Obama you were referring to. LOL.
Obama drew huge media attention for a number of very legitimate reasons, most particularly because he drew absolutely overwhelming public attention. Even if we set aside the historic fact that he was the first black candidate for president, the undeniable fact is that the man inspired huge numbers of people to stand up and try to make the country better. When he gave a speech as a candidate he literally filled stadiums. And yes, of course the media covered cheering stadiums filled with people enthusiastic about a candidate. Maybe YOU didn't like him, maybe YOU disagreed with him, maybe YOU weren't impressed by him, but the fact is that a large percentage of the population DID see him as an impressive and positive and very newsworthy figure, and yes of course the media did cover and reflect that public reaction to him. And yes, the media does inherently amplify whatever news they turn their spotlight on, but they didn't create it in the first place. And the media didn't "buy" him.
I'm sure some of that wide and powerful public enthusiasm for Obama was a counter reaction to the massive public despair at the Bush years. And that doesn't change the fact that it was real and public and widespread, and that the media was reflecting that fact. Not creating or buying it.
On the other hand there's Ge
There's a relevant game people may be interested in. It is a fairly realistic digital transistor circuit simulator. Each level assigns you a real-world microchip to implement. You draw wires and silicon transistors creating a circuit, then the game runs a simulation to test it. The low levels start with a simple inverter circuit and then AND and OR logic gates, then works up through logic latches and oscillators and memory units and multi-function math units. If the game board were large enough you could literally implement a slow but fully working CPU.
It is called kohctpyktop-engineer-of-the-people
Be sure to click the help tab and view the introductory video. One point that is not clear when starting is that you need to hold the SHIFT key in order to draw yellow silicon. To remove metal hold the shift key while deleting.
Oh, and by the way..... I currently happen to have the high score for every level :)
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I know what man is capable of when left unchecked
As far as I'm aware, I don't think anyone in this discussion has disputed imprisoning people who have committed actual acts of abuse against actual children.
by allowing lolicon and similar images to become acceptable I feel as if an important social barrier may have been breeched. I honestly can't make a truly informed decision because I don't have a degree or education in psychology, but based on what I have seen and heard, I have a very hard time accepting that child porn or lolicon (victemless or otherwise) should be allowed in any manifestation.
I don't have any data on child porn or lolicon, but I would like to point out that the exact same reasoning is often used to assert ALL porn should be criminal in order to reduce rape and other sex crimes, and we do in fact have plenty of hard data on that. Over the last several decades quite a few countries have either criminalized or decriminalized porn, and we do have solid data on what happens to the rate of rape and other sex crimes in such countries. The consistent fact is that the rate of rape and other sex crimes is LOWER when porn is decriminalized, and HIGHER when porn is criminalized.
The problem is that most people crusading against "dirty offensive immoral pictures" generally have a dogmatic position that the images are evil in themselves and anyone who looks at them needs to be imprisoned and burn in hell, and they just don't care about facts or evidence or logic. They routinely persist in asserting that they are fighting their crusade to protect people from crime and harm, when in fact the available evidence indicates the exact opposite. All evidence is that societies where porn is socially tolerated and available have lower rates of sex crimes. All evidence shows that the most serious sex offenders were produced in repressive intolerant homes, particularly when it is strict religious moral repression. At some point the child becomes arouse by some image or idea and he is attacked with the message the image or idea is evil, that sexuality is evil, that arousal is evil, and that it makes him evil. An obsessive compulsive cycle of intensifying focus is created. Arousal triggers repression and intensified focus on the arousal and self loathing. The thoughts and feelings are defined as evil in themselves, and he is defined as evil for having them. Ultimately the cycle of obsession and repression reaches the breaking point, and they just plain decide that they are evil. They just plain give in to the idea of themselves being evil as the only available resolution to the conflict. The cycle is broken, the psychological tension and pain are relieved, and the most monstrous form of serial sexual criminal is created. Statistics show that the worst category of serial criminal is almost without exception created by a repressive environment.
I see no reason that lolicon and similar materials would be the opposite case compared to porn in general.
There are people who get off on watching fires. You don't tell them that getting aroused by fire is evil. You don't tell them the tight is evil. You don't tell them the feeling is evil. You simply stick to committing the act of arson obviously hurts people and is criminal. If he collects images and videos of fire and gets off on it, you can tell him it's a rather bizarre kink but you don't demonize him for it. You make it very simple, thoughts and feeling and strange harmless hobbies are not evil in themselves and do not define you as evil. You make it very simple, arson or sexually abusing children or other acts harming people are "evil" and are crimes. No thought crime, no feelings-crime, no strange-harmless-hobby crime, no crime for merely "disgusting" , no crime for merely "offensive", actual acts harming actual people are actual crimes.
Most of us have had the feeling that we would like to kill some particular infuriating person. Whether it is a boss, or an obnoxious driver on the road, or some ha
Let's say you take a picture of your 5 yo daughter, in your backyard pool. She's wearing a swimsuit...
which the suspect has jerked off to...
Let's try something harder.
Oh, I'm sure it's hard enough already for a number of readers.
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I always find it hysterical when people toss around that ass backwards supply-and-demand argument.
Seriously. If someone genuinely wanted to prevent actual children from being actual victims of actual crimes to produce such images, the supply-and-demand argument mandates you must do the exact opposite. The supply-and-demand argument dictates that you would revoke any possible copyright in such images and that you would have law enforcement dump their vast collection of images free on the internet. You would keep the act of abuse itself a crime, but you would FLOOD the existing supply in order to obliterate demand for production.
I'm always mystified when people bring up that argument. Arson is criminal, images of arson are not in themselves criminal, and this bizarre ass backwards supply-demand argument is somehow tossed around as a reason these sorts of images should be legally treated differently than images of arson.
Throw arsonists in prison, throw child abusers in prison, but just drop the ridiculous supply demand argument to justify criminalizing non-arsonists or non-abusers over images themselves. Drop the bullshit argument that it's being done to protect children and prevent abuse, when in fact it wildly INCREASES the profit and INCREASES the abuse of children for production. Again, it increases the abuse of children for production. The reason the images are criminalized has nothing to do with supply and demand, it has nothing to do with protecting the children, the images are criminalized because that are offensive and disturbing.
On Wikimedia there are some hundred-year-old fictional line drawings that might be considered offensive and disturbing. Oh. My. God. The sky is going to fall if we don't put somebody in prison over it.
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Dwarf Planets Accumulate??
What, is our solar system some sort of drive-by dumping ground for other stars' litter?
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ISPs generally don't like threatening or losing customers over copyright stuff, but for the most part they are far more concerned with getting legally threatened by copyright holders. A single legal fight, even if they win in court, can cost them thousands times more than the yearly profit from a customer. Even under the best of circumstances they are constantly threatened and constantly fighting a lobbying war over new legislation to avoid copyright liability and new legislative copyright policing mandates. Most of them are terrified that if they decline to assist copyright holders that some court will view them as being complicit in infringement, and/or that it will make them look bad to legislators considering laws on the subject.
It's far cheaper and far safer to just throw customers under the bus to avoid even the threat that they might get dragged into the middle of a court case.
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The defining characteristic of science is that it needs to be able to make testable predictions.
And to test whether or not evolution is valid science, I suggest the following evolutionist-worldview based prediction: Half of creationists will categorize this fossil as fully human, the other half will classify it as fully ape.
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He said:
a copyright holder can accuse you of pirating anything without evidence
You said:
My understanding of it was that they would have to catch you actually doing it
Note that those two statements are, in practical effect, equivalent. And not in a good way.
A while ago an antipiracy-for-hire company mailed legal accusations against three networked lasers printers for supposedly infringing the copyright on an Indiana Jones movie. Needless to say there was in fact no copyright infringement being committed by these networked printers, nor by anyone connected to these printers. The anti-piracy outfit was engaging in wildly careless internet scanning for "apparently" infringing IP addresses, and they weren't spending any time or effort to check whether any infringement was actually being committed.
As I said, his statement and your statement are effectively equivalent, and not in a good way. They DID make accusations of infringement without any reliable evidence. And they kinda-sorta HAD "caught the printers actually doing it".... where "actually" is based upon the most reckless level of carelessness and the superficial level of appearances... where "actually" is often completely false.
The entire issue here is that these allegations does not involve police, they do not involve courts, they does not involve any standard of evidence. It works just as he had described. Private individuals or private outfits accuse you of infringement, presumably because they have some belief you infringed. There is zero standard of evidence, zero standard for care, zero standard for judgment, zero standard for credibility. Any idiot can carelessly or recklessly or even maliciously file file thousands of allegations of infringement based on unreliable or worthless "evidence" to "catch" thousands of people, both innocent and guilty. And after one or more allegations the ISP is legally required to cut your connection. YOU are generally given the option to drag THEM into court, and the burden is placed you to prove yourself innocent in order prevent or reverse the penalty.
And yes, just to use proper care I did double check your link before replying. The exact text of law at your link is " if it appears to a copyright owner ". Which is in short, amounts to exctly what I said above.
Anyone one can file allegations based upon their personal wildly unreasonable and wildly careless wildly aggressive search for an "appearance" of infringement. This sort of law turns the entire legal system on it's head. This is a guilt upon accusation law. Some private individual or private enterprise makes an allegation and the presumption in law is that you are guilty, and the law mandates a penalty be applied. And if I may use a touch of sarcasm, the law oh-so-generously has a clause permitting you to initiate a court case and permitting you to present evidence and permitting you to attempt to prove yourself innocent.
If out of the blue your ISP notifies you that someone has filed one or more an infringement allegations against you, and you're innocent, what possible evidence-of-innocence are you supposed to present!? How the hell are you supposed to prove yourself innocent?
It's insane. It's guilty until proven innocent.
It is guilt upon accusation.
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Name one food that the US manages to do better than the UK in. Just one.
High fructose corn syrup.
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Do they think SI prefixes grow on trees or something?
Well, someone did suggest fignewtons.
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Dear Iran,
This is a test of the Emergency Tsunami Warning System. Had this been an actual emergency these EMP pulses would have been followed by a tsunami. This concludes this test of the Emergency Tsunami Warning System.
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This is exactly the problem with liberals. They have no distinction between voluntarily giving something and having something taken by force.
I can't wait until conservatives get into power, and the large percentage of taxes going to pay the military become a "voluntary giving" rather than being taken by force. Not to mention all the money to run the courts and to pay the police and fire departments and roads and about ten thousand other things.
Or perhaps your argument about "taken by force" is total bull, and you are just quibbling over how you would like to spend it.
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I thin you need to recalibrate your sarcasm detector :) Notice how the word 'proof' was put in scare quotes? He was casting derision on this story.
The author of the post was himself an "extremest religionist" engaging a bad parody of the evils of atheism.
And considering it was written by a religionist, I find it a bit ironic that you found it ironic :D
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Science can tell you that putting lead oxide in paint will make it a very bright white, and science can tell you that putting lead paint on toys will give children brain damage, but science cannot tell you whether or not you should put lead paint on children's toys.
Science provides understanding, science can give you options, science helps you make predictions, and sometimes those predictions make it obvious what you should do, but science itself never tells you what to do. Lead gives children brain damage, that is a simple, neutral, objective, scientific fact. The choice not to give children brain damage is an obvious, but non-science, preference. Science informs, but it cannot chose. Science does not have preferences.
The application of the scientific method would show if there was harm done by adultery. Also if there was harm done by faithfulness. Science could tell you what is greater. Another example is smoking around babies. Is second-hand smoking bad for baby's health? Does it convey benefits?
Science can help you measure things and predict things, but science itself does not define things as harm or benefit. We define what we dislike as a harm, and we define what we like as a benefit. And it's almost always the case that every alternative combines a mixture of harms and benefits, and only we place relative weights on what we consider more important.
Science is extremely useful, including in relation to moral considerations. Ill informed moral reasoning is generally poor moral reasoning. However it always seems to lead to all sorts of problems when people assert science makes moral judgments. And interestingly, it seems to me that error rarely comes from people on the "science side". It seems to me that it usually comes from people who dislike certain scientific facts, people who come to obvious moral conclusions based on that science, and because they dislike those obvious implications they resist the science and they think they hear science making a moral assertion they disagree with.
To take a concrete example, there are people with a strong moral opposition to pornography. They want to eliminate or criminalize pornography because they believe it to be harmful. They want to eliminate pornography in order to reduce the incidence of rape and other sex crimes. And then they hear about scientific studies of countries that have criminalized or decriminalized pornography that show that rape and other sex crime rates consistently DECREASE when pornography is legalized and available, and that rape and other sex crimes consistently INCREASE when pornography is criminalized and generally unavailable in a society. They then often make the mistake of claiming science is pushing a moral position on the subject. It is pretty universally obvious to consider rape to be harm, and to the extent that is used as a sole basis for moral good and moral bad it leads to an obvious implication that the availability of pornography would be a moral good. Of course nothing in life has a single effect, and nothing in life can validly be morally judged on the basis of a solitary factor. If one accepts that reducing rape is a good thing, then the evidence shows that pornography is at a minimum a mixed issue, and that pronography would only be morally bad if there are one or more harms that outweigh that benefit. However some people don't reason that far - they have a dogmatic position that pornography is evil, so they simply deny the problematical evidence. They are dogmatically right, pornography is a dogmatically pure evil, and anything that conflicts with that is automatically false. The information must be false, and it must be coming from evil people. They then make the technically correct statement that science has no business making moral assertions, but they are incorrect in believing science is making a moral judgment. They "hear" science making moral assertions, but morality is actually only coming in to it when people draw obvious-but-non-scientific implications based on that neutral
judging by what you said the use of the internet itself falls under the same category like P2P. So using the internet is a felony or something?
The law makes certain copyright infringement into a criminal offense. Where there is no infringement there obviously is no crime under this law. So mere use of the internet is not a crime.
However it is virtually impossible to use the internet without technically violating copyright countless times a day. For example lets say Slashdot got one of their story icons from somewhere without permission. In that case you would technically be infringing the copyright on that image when you load the Slashdot home page, creating a copy of that image in the browser cache on your harddrive. However this law only criminalizes "willful" infringement, where "willful" means anything other than a genuine accident or being misled by someone else. Since you had no idea that Slashdot had an infringing image on their webpage you would not have willfully infringed that copyright, and therefore it would not be willful infringement.
I assume a court would also require some more relevant connection between the infringement and the "financial gain". I seriously doubt mere general internet use would qualify :), but anything like P2P or BitTorrent would be a pretty obvious link.
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>"Part of a copyrighted work is "something of value" if the entire work is something of value"
That is an interesting opinion.
If it is really necessary, I can and will dig up one or more copyright court cases where damages were awarded due to the value of a copied portion of a full work.
I have no doubt that 0010 appears as a piece of many copyrighted works.
True, but value is also dependent upon context. Any DVD movie is made up of a series of numbers between 0 and 255, however a court would laugh in your face if you were to claim the value of the infringed movie was zero because you already possessed the numbers 0 through 255.
As I said, judicial reasoning and rulings on copyright place particular focus on intent and end result. They work to preserve the function of copyright protection. Activities that do not impair the value and function of copyright protection are generally accepted as fair use, an activities that directly violate the value and function of copyright protection are deemed infringement. If you copy one byte from each of a huge number of people to construct an entire new copy of a movie, then you have done precisely what copyright law is intended to prohibit. You have created a new copy.
For better or worse, the fact is that courts use a lot of flexibility and creativity in determining what qualifies as fair use or not, and what qualifies as infringement or not. For better or worse, the fact is that they look at the purpose and ultimate result, and they reason backwards from there. The central function of copyright is to restrict the creation of new copies. If you collect a single byte from countless people to create a copy of a movie then you have infringed the copyright on that movie. And if a court has to determine the "value" of each byte then they will most likely use the simple assumption that, in the context of compiling a full copy of the movie, that each byte carries an equal share of the value of the full movie. You could certainly argue some portions of the work carry more of the value than other portions of the work, and many rulings in fact do exactly that, but it really wouldn't have any bearing on the situation here.
I'm sorry but I can no longer continue examining the rest of your assertions because we have established that you are a criminal under this law and criminals have no credibility.
No, I don't recall making any such admission here.
I certainly admit I have copied portions of your copyrighted post within this thread, however I would assert a Fair Use defense :)
As far as any copying I may-or-may-not have engaged in outside of this thread, I invoke my 5th amendment right against self incrimination :)
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