Actually, no one outside the US cares about your constitution.
This deserves emphasis.
Political debates with a certain kind of American are like science debates with creationists. They say "but it's in the Constitution!" just like "but the Bible says...!"
Stop fetishizing a document so much. It doesn't matter what it says. What matters is what your army and your spies and your politicians do. If they actually ever acted in accordance with your Consitution, you might have some kind of a point, but even then, all you'd have managed to prove is that your Constition is encouraging people to act immorally and therefore should be changed.
Why does this hard work mean that I should pay medical expenses for the lazy and deadbeats?
Because there's jack shit moral difference, in the end. You're not a "better class" of person, you're just a person. One of billions. In the aggregate, health care works out better if all people pay according to their ability to pay, and all people receive according to their need for treatment. Worrying about who "deserves" what leads to the creation of a massive layer of bureaucracy--ie, the crap in the FPP--that exists contrary to anyone's interests, be they freeloader or pay-and-never-use-er (whatever a good name for that is). Diseases don't check your wallet before they decide to infect you, you fool.
If health care is "free", what motivation is there for people to DO SOMETHING with themselves.
Gee, I dunno, how about... the desire to live a better life? Desire to have stuff? This is the same argument that idiots whining "if you tax the rich more, they'll pout and refuse to work, because if the taxman takes $500,000 of $1,000,000, there's absolutely no fucking point whatsoever in earning $1,000,000! None! No-one wants only $500,000!" raise. People earn money because they want the benefits of it. Extending one given benefit to everyone without regard for their individual pots of money will not suddenly cause them all to down tools and decide there's no point any more in working. They'll just find something else to spend money on. Because the same health care would be provided at, say, $100pp/month rather than $500pp/month, because so much of the costs of competition, and investigating competing providers, and fucking around with suing them to make them pay up, and actually living and getting healthy and going back to work instead of dying or ending up on the street, would be gone, $400pp/month more would be available to go into the economy.
One of the things that skeeves me out most about you fucking selfish dickwads is the amount of time and energy you put into barracking for the interests of the people who have things already, whose lives are going fine. You do not have to whine and plead on behalf of the rich. The rich will be just fine, thank you for your concern. In any commercial environment, even Stalinistic klepto-communism, some people will do just fine. The object is to make sure that on the average, as many people do as well as possible, and that as few people as possible do so badly that they no longer have any interest in the betterment of society.
"Wow, I just shit out another baby. Where's my money!?"
Yeesh, this explains a whole lot about your attitudes, you chump.
People like this raise healthcare costs for us all, and I guarantee that you Aussies pay more per capita for health care than we yanks do.
No we don't, shit for brains. Google "Measuring the Health of Nations". Health care, just like everything else, can be bought cheaper if bought in bulk, and the more bulk, the cheaper. It works for Tom's Discount Liquor Store buying beer to sell, it works for IBM buying processor parts, it works for an entire nation. Since everyone needs health care, it makes sense to buy health care for everyone.
And another point that escapes you dickheads: health care improves people's ability to contribute to the economy. It's investment. Guy X with health care $H can earn $E. Increasing H, up to a point, increases E. Obviously this isn't the case for all individuals everywhere, but we don't care about individuals, we care about the aggregate outcome. Individuals themselves and their friends and families care about individual outcomes - but the State must care about the overall picture. In the USA, that picture is pretty fucking dim and awful, whereas in socialized health care nations, the picture is somewhere between looking OK, and bright and rosy.
And the government is in it for your best interest?
The government, nominally, does whatever it does in the "best interest" of all citizens. At least, it says so, and there is, at least, some truth in that. Also, people who get involved in government do so for reasons other than to enrich themselves as much as possible; there are, in government, other currencies of power besides money. Corporations haven't even got a withered little figleaf of concern for anything other than profit. In other words, the government, if it thinks there are enough votes in it, might screw you. A corporation, if it thinks there is any money in it, will screw you.
So when I got to the U.S.A. I was looking forward to an amazing education in the world's richest, most technologically advanced country.
Why would you think that?
Seriously, if a potential emigree to the USA doesn't realise that American public education--and pretty much all other tax-funded public services--basically suck because the dominant American ideology says that money is the only thing that really matters, then there's something seriously deficient in your education.
They're a corporation. They don't have an "overdeveloped sense of entitlement", they have no sense of anything having to do with human decency at all. This is the core problem with corporations generally: pursuit of profit drives out morality. See the film "The Corporation".
# Police won't be carrying guns at all times, so they will provide absolutely no protection.
I realize you're being sarcastic, but this does need to be emphasised. Police in civilized nations do not need to pull guns and scream "DOWN ON THE FLOOR MOTHAFUCKA!" in high-pitched fearful voices to establish authority. Yanks do not generally quite seem to get this idea, but abusing an arrestee for personal amusement or sadistic gratification is police corruption
, just as much, if not more, than if the cops stole money from the arrestee's wallet. Same goes for prison guards.
Well, as with all problems, there is an engineering solution.
Stage One:
1. Devise a means of obtaining TV schedules.
2. Set up a website (hosted offshore) to which people may contribute list of offensive activities, and wording for letters into which these activities can be inserted, eg: "indecently exposed bare flesh", "displayed inappropriate sexual conduct", "disregarded the holy bonds of matrimony"; "I wish to report", "Please consider viewing", "the conduct displayed therein". Initially populate this with public record examples from PTC complaints.
3. Establish a voting system for wordings, so that people who visit the website can vote up or down particular wordings, the idea being to generate letters that will at least meet the writing skills of PTC members.
4. Randomly generate complaint letters: "Dear Sirs, I wish to draw your attention to the fact that on July 12, 2007 at 4:30am, actors on the program Better Gardening with Uncle Ralphie on the channel WTFTV based out of Bunghole, Texas, indecently exposed bare flesh. My 13 year old daughter Szanett was watching the program and I feel entitled to ask you to view the footage and, if you agree with me and the words of Our Lord that the conduct displayed therein is not suitable for a 13 year old to see, kindly prosecute these foul-minded sinners to the fullest extent American law allows and then some." Show the program description so that the user can decide if the complaint meets at least minimal standards of plausibility.
5. Produce these letters in an easily-printed form, with somewhat randomized font and layout. Ask visitors to the website to print and mail the letters.
That is, randomly generate spurious complaints. For names and addresses, scrape the phone directory (or better yet, a directory of the Parent's Television Council and members of the Republican Party - although there'd be a lot of overlap there) for addresses and names, and randomly generate variations such that the addresses are real, the surname is real, the combination of address and surname does not match an entry in the database, and the initials and title are randomly generated.
Stage Two:
The FCC responds. Obviously they declare pranking them illegal, but it's going to be awfully difficult for them to distinguish genuine (although insane) complaints from PTC members from pranks. They could start checking on the veracity of complaint letters, which costs them money and slows the process down and inevitably will lead to PTC-member-generated vexatious complaints being lost and unverified; and/or they start ignoring small numbers of complaints about programs, which is a good partial victory, but the website process can be modified to produce sets of letters to get them to repeatedly raise their minimum number to the point where it actually might be reasonable to act; and/or they come to some formal arrangement with the PTC, which citizens can protest.
"Anarchist" is to "left-wing" (or socialist) as "libertarian" is to "right-wing" (or capitalist). You can argue with either flavor of these fuckwits--who hate each other more than they hate you, despite the near-identical effect of their philosophies--until you're ultraviolet in the face. You can demonstrate their errors with rigorous logic, by pointing to real-world examples, by computer modeling, hell even with all three dozen fallacies... and they can not and will not comprehend their errors. They'll look at you like stunned sheep. They'll even shut up about it. But come the next discussion: oh look, here comes a fuckwit, singing "all we need is freeeeeeeeeeeeedom" all over again.
Freedoms have no inherent meaning without an authority (even the physical capacity of other people to force you to do their will counts as authority) to exercise them against, and no freedom can exist without an authority to enforce that freedom. These can be one and the same authority (the State itself enforces most of your freedoms against the State), but other people are, basically by definition, not one and the same, they are many and varied. Without an authority over all of you to keep you honest and decent to each other, you have no redress for the wrongs other people might do to you. Any system of redress capable of enforcing its decrees would amount to a State.
No, he's not. What they'll do is re-write the underlying program, and the user will have to load the graphic files from a StarCraft CD, theoretically a genuine one. Thus nothing copyright to Blizzard is actually distributed by these guys.
Capitalism is largely irrelevant here, since corporations are no more concerned for the general welfare than corrupt governments.
No, they have opposite goals. Companies by default are concerned solely for their own benefit, and any deviation from that to benefit other people is remarkable charity. Governments by default are concerned for the benefit of their citizens, and any deviation to that to benefit private individuals is corruption.
You're not Australian, are you? If you were, you'd realise that "acting as any company with some sense of business-strategy" is just not what Telstra does. Telstra's business strategy is this: (1) Be the biggest dog; (2) Stay firmly seated in the manger, growling.
You say "unelected" as if "elected" were a good thing. I for one prefer my civil servants unelected, constrained by law and custom from privately benefiting in any way from their position, and well paid but not highly so. (Frankly, the people who want to run governments as if they were businesses really should fuck off to run businesses instead.) "Elected" to me means, "loudest-hooting monkey in the crowd of hooting monkeys". He who tells the most lies, promises the most outrageously stupid things, and greases the most palms gets elected. To be in a position of power and *unelected*, one must show at least some competence for some length of time. Unless of course appointed by an elected person, in which case, the same problems as with election apply.
The last four decades have shown up the 'bug' in democracy, and it is this: there is nothing constraining a politician to tell the truth, the whole truth, while in office or campaigning for office. Given that bug, the whole system is compromised.
This quickly leads to no-one saying anything, because the cost to the speaker exceeds the benefits to the speaker of speaking out, even though the benefit to everyone involved may be great.
There's a fine line between "be held accountable" and "have vengeance taken upon you", and which is which generally depends on which side of the story you are on.
In fact, do better - print not only the negative review, but the story of the bribe attempt, the correspondence back from the advertiser, and records of the advertising, under the heading "Local Restaurant Attempts To Bribe And Threaten Us To Hide Shoddy Food, Poor Service".
And the idiot who made this decision will jump out, sail down in his golden parachute, and fuck off elsewhere to fuck up some other company. Do I hear two cheers for capitalism? How about one and a half?
I agree with the sentiment, but what happens in Europe when the losing side was the side that was correct?
In theory, this isn't supposed to happen in the law. Which side "was correct" is the side the highest court declared the winner. At each level of courts, below the highest, the loser has the right to ask for appeal to a higher court, and if it reaches the highest court, what they say, goes. However, the higher court may decide that the decision of the lower court was correct and refuse the appeal, in which case, what the highest court that declared a decision says, goes.
Does it actually cut down on bad law suits
Yes, in that lawsuits which will obviously fail can only be engaged in as a time delay tactic at the expense of the delaying party, rather than as a tactic to bankrupt and therefore silence opposition as in the USA.
or does it encourage a larger spending in the hopes of winning the case anyway?
Yes, and no. Parties are well aware that, even though the loser is forced to pay the costs of the winner, the limit to this is the loser's financial capabilities. Therefore money spent beyond the other party's ability to pay may well be expected to be lost. The commonest reason to engage in such a tactic is sheer bloodymindedness; the rational reason is to prevent the establishment of a more costly precedent. If A did X to B, and B sued A for it and won, then everyone else A has done X to will be lining up to file suit. This is the case under the US system too of course, and is very much in the forefront of the RIAA's minds. This is a major reason why, despite their apparent litigousness, they are actually very reluctant to set foot in a courtroom and have a case heard to a conclusion.
On that point, this is a problem with all adversarial legal systems. A party desperate to avoid an adverse precedent can and will attempt to coerce the other party to take the case out of the system with very tempting settlements and offers of costs and cookies and ponies and whores and threats (and bullets, in a few instances). The court under adversarial systems is a neutral referee, so if the parties 'choose' to withdraw the case, the court will not (except under very rare conditions) prevent them from doing so. This leads to another interesting fact about European courts and the RIAA's sock puppets in those jurisdictions: many European nations use the "Civil Law" or inquisitorial court system, derived from Roman rather than English law, in which the court is an active participant, and the case is not ended until the court is satisfied that justice has been done. Under such a system the court is free to declare settlement offers etc invalid, force parties to continue their case until the court has sufficient information to make a decision, and can declare both sides "winners" and "losers" to the extent that the court considers just. This of course can include reimbursement of costs, professional censure of egregiously misbehaving lawyers, declarations, fines and punishments, etc etc. Don't get too excited though, while European courts are not strictly bound by precedent, they are very strictly bound by legislation (look up "separation of powers" for more on this issue). As such, the copyright lobby's tactics in Europe are based more heavily around lobbying for legislation, attempting to bribe legislators, etc, almost refraining from suing individuals.
Slashdot Mirror
This deserves emphasis.
Political debates with a certain kind of American are like science debates with creationists. They say "but it's in the Constitution!" just like "but the Bible says ...!"
Stop fetishizing a document so much. It doesn't matter what it says. What matters is what your army and your spies and your politicians do. If they actually ever acted in accordance with your Consitution, you might have some kind of a point, but even then, all you'd have managed to prove is that your Constition is encouraging people to act immorally and therefore should be changed.
Because there's jack shit moral difference, in the end. You're not a "better class" of person, you're just a person. One of billions. In the aggregate, health care works out better if all people pay according to their ability to pay, and all people receive according to their need for treatment. Worrying about who "deserves" what leads to the creation of a massive layer of bureaucracy--ie, the crap in the FPP--that exists contrary to anyone's interests, be they freeloader or pay-and-never-use-er (whatever a good name for that is). Diseases don't check your wallet before they decide to infect you, you fool.
If health care is "free", what motivation is there for people to DO SOMETHING with themselves.
Gee, I dunno, how about ... the desire to live a better life? Desire to have stuff? This is the same argument that idiots whining "if you tax the rich more, they'll pout and refuse to work, because if the taxman takes $500,000 of $1,000,000, there's absolutely no fucking point whatsoever in earning $1,000,000! None! No-one wants only $500,000!" raise. People earn money because they want the benefits of it. Extending one given benefit to everyone without regard for their individual pots of money will not suddenly cause them all to down tools and decide there's no point any more in working. They'll just find something else to spend money on. Because the same health care would be provided at, say, $100pp/month rather than $500pp/month, because so much of the costs of competition, and investigating competing providers, and fucking around with suing them to make them pay up, and actually living and getting healthy and going back to work instead of dying or ending up on the street, would be gone, $400pp/month more would be available to go into the economy.
One of the things that skeeves me out most about you fucking selfish dickwads is the amount of time and energy you put into barracking for the interests of the people who have things already, whose lives are going fine. You do not have to whine and plead on behalf of the rich. The rich will be just fine, thank you for your concern. In any commercial environment, even Stalinistic klepto-communism, some people will do just fine. The object is to make sure that on the average, as many people do as well as possible, and that as few people as possible do so badly that they no longer have any interest in the betterment of society.
"Wow, I just shit out another baby. Where's my money!?"
Yeesh, this explains a whole lot about your attitudes, you chump.
People like this raise healthcare costs for us all, and I guarantee that you Aussies pay more per capita for health care than we yanks do.
No we don't, shit for brains. Google "Measuring the Health of Nations". Health care, just like everything else, can be bought cheaper if bought in bulk, and the more bulk, the cheaper. It works for Tom's Discount Liquor Store buying beer to sell, it works for IBM buying processor parts, it works for an entire nation. Since everyone needs health care, it makes sense to buy health care for everyone.
And another point that escapes you dickheads: health care improves people's ability to contribute to the economy. It's investment. Guy X with health care $H can earn $E. Increasing H, up to a point, increases E. Obviously this isn't the case for all individuals everywhere, but we don't care about individuals, we care about the aggregate outcome. Individuals themselves and their friends and families care about individual outcomes - but the State must care about the overall picture. In the USA, that picture is pretty fucking dim and awful, whereas in socialized health care nations, the picture is somewhere between looking OK, and bright and rosy.
The government, nominally, does whatever it does in the "best interest" of all citizens. At least, it says so, and there is, at least, some truth in that. Also, people who get involved in government do so for reasons other than to enrich themselves as much as possible; there are, in government, other currencies of power besides money. Corporations haven't even got a withered little figleaf of concern for anything other than profit. In other words, the government, if it thinks there are enough votes in it, might screw you. A corporation, if it thinks there is any money in it, will screw you.
That's for damn sure.
and un-American.
Don't be ridiculous.
Why would you think that?
Seriously, if a potential emigree to the USA doesn't realise that American public education--and pretty much all other tax-funded public services--basically suck because the dominant American ideology says that money is the only thing that really matters, then there's something seriously deficient in your education.
They're a corporation. They don't have an "overdeveloped sense of entitlement", they have no sense of anything having to do with human decency at all. This is the core problem with corporations generally: pursuit of profit drives out morality. See the film "The Corporation".
I realize you're being sarcastic, but this does need to be emphasised. Police in civilized nations do not need to pull guns and scream "DOWN ON THE FLOOR MOTHAFUCKA!" in high-pitched fearful voices to establish authority. Yanks do not generally quite seem to get this idea, but abusing an arrestee for personal amusement or sadistic gratification is police corruption
, just as much, if not more, than if the cops stole money from the arrestee's wallet. Same goes for prison guards.(Citation is not copyright. One can be both pro-citation and anti-copyright.)
Stage One:
1. Devise a means of obtaining TV schedules.
2. Set up a website (hosted offshore) to which people may contribute list of offensive activities, and wording for letters into which these activities can be inserted, eg: "indecently exposed bare flesh", "displayed inappropriate sexual conduct", "disregarded the holy bonds of matrimony"; "I wish to report", "Please consider viewing", "the conduct displayed therein". Initially populate this with public record examples from PTC complaints.
3. Establish a voting system for wordings, so that people who visit the website can vote up or down particular wordings, the idea being to generate letters that will at least meet the writing skills of PTC members.
4. Randomly generate complaint letters: "Dear Sirs, I wish to draw your attention to the fact that on July 12, 2007 at 4:30am, actors on the program Better Gardening with Uncle Ralphie on the channel WTFTV based out of Bunghole, Texas, indecently exposed bare flesh. My 13 year old daughter Szanett was watching the program and I feel entitled to ask you to view the footage and, if you agree with me and the words of Our Lord that the conduct displayed therein is not suitable for a 13 year old to see, kindly prosecute these foul-minded sinners to the fullest extent American law allows and then some." Show the program description so that the user can decide if the complaint meets at least minimal standards of plausibility.
5. Produce these letters in an easily-printed form, with somewhat randomized font and layout. Ask visitors to the website to print and mail the letters.
That is, randomly generate spurious complaints. For names and addresses, scrape the phone directory (or better yet, a directory of the Parent's Television Council and members of the Republican Party - although there'd be a lot of overlap there) for addresses and names, and randomly generate variations such that the addresses are real, the surname is real, the combination of address and surname does not match an entry in the database, and the initials and title are randomly generated.
Stage Two:
The FCC responds. Obviously they declare pranking them illegal, but it's going to be awfully difficult for them to distinguish genuine (although insane) complaints from PTC members from pranks. They could start checking on the veracity of complaint letters, which costs them money and slows the process down and inevitably will lead to PTC-member-generated vexatious complaints being lost and unverified; and/or they start ignoring small numbers of complaints about programs, which is a good partial victory, but the website process can be modified to produce sets of letters to get them to repeatedly raise their minimum number to the point where it actually might be reasonable to act; and/or they come to some formal arrangement with the PTC, which citizens can protest.
Freedoms have no inherent meaning without an authority (even the physical capacity of other people to force you to do their will counts as authority) to exercise them against, and no freedom can exist without an authority to enforce that freedom. These can be one and the same authority (the State itself enforces most of your freedoms against the State), but other people are, basically by definition, not one and the same, they are many and varied. Without an authority over all of you to keep you honest and decent to each other, you have no redress for the wrongs other people might do to you. Any system of redress capable of enforcing its decrees would amount to a State.
Maybe rabbits, not birds. Birds would just fly right out.
Only if you play at the faster speeds. If you play on Normal, micro is less of an issue. Still important, but not the only important thing.
No, he's not. What they'll do is re-write the underlying program, and the user will have to load the graphic files from a StarCraft CD, theoretically a genuine one. Thus nothing copyright to Blizzard is actually distributed by these guys.
That's because the terrorists were done messing with airports as of September 12, 2001. Once a battle is won, why keep fighting it?
No, they have opposite goals. Companies by default are concerned solely for their own benefit, and any deviation from that to benefit other people is remarkable charity. Governments by default are concerned for the benefit of their citizens, and any deviation to that to benefit private individuals is corruption.
You're not Australian, are you? If you were, you'd realise that "acting as any company with some sense of business-strategy" is just not what Telstra does. Telstra's business strategy is this: (1) Be the biggest dog; (2) Stay firmly seated in the manger, growling.
The last four decades have shown up the 'bug' in democracy, and it is this: there is nothing constraining a politician to tell the truth, the whole truth, while in office or campaigning for office. Given that bug, the whole system is compromised.
Maybe the plan is to deal with the isotope shortage by putting isotopes EVERYWHERE ...
This quickly leads to no-one saying anything, because the cost to the speaker exceeds the benefits to the speaker of speaking out, even though the benefit to everyone involved may be great.
There's a fine line between "be held accountable" and "have vengeance taken upon you", and which is which generally depends on which side of the story you are on.
In fact, do better - print not only the negative review, but the story of the bribe attempt, the correspondence back from the advertiser, and records of the advertising, under the heading "Local Restaurant Attempts To Bribe And Threaten Us To Hide Shoddy Food, Poor Service".
And the idiot who made this decision will jump out, sail down in his golden parachute, and fuck off elsewhere to fuck up some other company. Do I hear two cheers for capitalism? How about one and a half?
In theory, this isn't supposed to happen in the law. Which side "was correct" is the side the highest court declared the winner. At each level of courts, below the highest, the loser has the right to ask for appeal to a higher court, and if it reaches the highest court, what they say, goes. However, the higher court may decide that the decision of the lower court was correct and refuse the appeal, in which case, what the highest court that declared a decision says, goes.
Does it actually cut down on bad law suits
Yes, in that lawsuits which will obviously fail can only be engaged in as a time delay tactic at the expense of the delaying party, rather than as a tactic to bankrupt and therefore silence opposition as in the USA.
or does it encourage a larger spending in the hopes of winning the case anyway?
Yes, and no. Parties are well aware that, even though the loser is forced to pay the costs of the winner, the limit to this is the loser's financial capabilities. Therefore money spent beyond the other party's ability to pay may well be expected to be lost. The commonest reason to engage in such a tactic is sheer bloodymindedness; the rational reason is to prevent the establishment of a more costly precedent. If A did X to B, and B sued A for it and won, then everyone else A has done X to will be lining up to file suit. This is the case under the US system too of course, and is very much in the forefront of the RIAA's minds. This is a major reason why, despite their apparent litigousness, they are actually very reluctant to set foot in a courtroom and have a case heard to a conclusion.
On that point, this is a problem with all adversarial legal systems. A party desperate to avoid an adverse precedent can and will attempt to coerce the other party to take the case out of the system with very tempting settlements and offers of costs and cookies and ponies and whores and threats (and bullets, in a few instances). The court under adversarial systems is a neutral referee, so if the parties 'choose' to withdraw the case, the court will not (except under very rare conditions) prevent them from doing so. This leads to another interesting fact about European courts and the RIAA's sock puppets in those jurisdictions: many European nations use the "Civil Law" or inquisitorial court system, derived from Roman rather than English law, in which the court is an active participant, and the case is not ended until the court is satisfied that justice has been done. Under such a system the court is free to declare settlement offers etc invalid, force parties to continue their case until the court has sufficient information to make a decision, and can declare both sides "winners" and "losers" to the extent that the court considers just. This of course can include reimbursement of costs, professional censure of egregiously misbehaving lawyers, declarations, fines and punishments, etc etc. Don't get too excited though, while European courts are not strictly bound by precedent, they are very strictly bound by legislation (look up "separation of powers" for more on this issue). As such, the copyright lobby's tactics in Europe are based more heavily around lobbying for legislation, attempting to bribe legislators, etc, almost refraining from suing individuals.
"Natively"? I think the T is a typo. WoW works just fine under Wine.
Most people won't get worked up over what government might be doing even with it being proven true. That's been shown many times already.