Not sure what you're trying to say. Are you saying that the hunters were justified in shooting the drone, or are you just saying that both parties were idiots?
The issue here is that they were denied permission to fly the chopper and did it anyhow. That's the first breach of law. The other issue is that somebody fired a single shot from a small-caliber firearm which seems to have damaged the chopper.
Which article did you read? TFA doesn't say anything about applying for permission; it only says the hunters' lawyer tried to stop them, but failed. TFA also says several shots were fired as soon as the drone was launched.
On my property, I expect a right to privacy. If my property and privacy is invaded after I deny permission, then your flying camera is merely a "peeping tom tool" at this point.
So you think they were justified in taking the law in their own hands?
Equating any mainstream American Christianity with middle eastern Sharia Law Islam makes you look positively stupid. Compare your "encroaching" on "civil rights" to the Saudi practice of capital punishment for being raped. Or even this article of writing a program to upload photos...
The Saudis may be far worse, but they mostly affect people in Saudi Arabia. The Christians take away YOUR rights in YOUR OWN country.
If you read Slashdot enough, you would swear that the US is JUST as bad as Iran. No, I'm not kidding. There are people on here who will claim that the United States is just as bad as Iran when it comes to human rights issues and even try to argue this point.
Depends on how you measure.
The USA clearly has more respect for human rights than Iran.
But in sheer number of countries invaded, people killed, and war crimes committed, the USA comes out much worse, mostly because of its relative size and power.
So if I get a grant from the church, do ten years of research on the motion of planetary bodies, and submit a paper postulating that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and submit it to a journal run by people receiving money from the same Church, that's science?
If you do it right, yes, that's science. It may be factually wrong, but it's still science.
Well you're just completely wrong. Buddhism is simply a method for reliving pain by erasing desire. That's it. If I was grading a paper and that was your definition I would give you a F and ask you if you had bothered to do any reading at all and advise you that even religious studies requires something other than self involved navel gazing. I would also try to impress on you that just because some "followers" of a "religion" do something hat activity doesn't magically progress back upstream and change inviolate rules set down by the founder, as much as that may piss off the Pashtuns.
Assuming you're trying to find out the "right" version of a religion. For someone who studies religion as a social phenomenon, it's usually more interesting what people believe and do in practice.
What you are describing (with the choice thing) is somewhat closer to the Tao (but you're still not right) and so you may be confusing Buddhism with Zen which is a combination of the two.
The "choice thing" (Dharma) was inherited from Hinduism by both Buddhism and Taoism, although it works differently. In all three religions, it's a universal law of cause and effect that drives people's destinies. In Buddhism, it's called Karma, and is more about intention or desire than choice; bad intentions lead to suffering, and good intentions lead to freedom from suffering. The ultimate goal is, as you write, to be free of karma by being free of all desires. Buddha (Siddharta Gautama) mentions Karma on many occasions.
As to the nature worship you are just confusing the religion that was native to India before Buddhism which is called Hinduism or what you are talking about his more Tantra. Or you watch a lot Japanese movies and are thinking about Shino, so still totally wrong.
For an outsider, the respect for life seen in many Buddhists may be confused with nature worship. For example, Buddhist monks in India tend to be vegetarians, and carry with them a sieve so they don't accidentally swallow an insect with their drinking water.
This is, of course, different from nature worship, since monks don't pray to the insects; they simply avoid hurting them in order to improve their own karma.
It's even less harmful than testing the grapes at your super market, since the downloader doesn't prevent the song's owner from seling their song to someone else.
At most, the downloader deprives the song's owner of a potential sale. But not even that seems to hold true in practice - independent studies show that people spend their money on concerts or on other artists when they download songs, and that the availability of a song on filesharing networks has a roughly zero net effect on total sales.
It's not about having or not having IP laws. Clearly IP laws are needed and useful. It's about the corporations abusing those laws and going as far as screwing basic liberties that we should all enjoy. And nobody can deny that probably the biggest entertainment industry is in U.S.
It's not so obvious... copyright, for example, was made into law long before economics had developed far enough to quantify the costs and benefits. (The benefit being more works being produced, and the cost being those works becoming available to fewer people.) Now that we know more, more and more evidence accumulate for the harmfulness of copyright, but almost nothing for its benefits. For example, all independent studies on music sales suggest that online piracy have a roughly zero net effect on sales.
This is absolutely silly, this notion that the US is on the only country that has concerns about piracy and copyright violation. Europe has IP laws too. This central argument... that if mean ole' America went away, everyone would happily download pirated content all day with support from governments... is ludicrous.
While it's true that Europe has its fair share of greedy corporations that push for harsher IP laws, the USA has been the main driving force for at least two decades. The diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks ("Cablegate") revealed that the USA is consistently working to get other countries to adopt more restrictive IP laws through diplomatic channels and trade agreements. There's no other country besides the USA who has both the clout and motivation to do this. (China has the clout, but not yet the motivation.)
In general, the USA tends to be a few years or a decade ahead in societal developments, and European countries tend to follow.
That doesn't mean European countries are innocent victims, of course - it's our own responsibility to vote our spineless and ignorant politicians out of office.
All courts look at previous rulings when interpreting a law (if they can find relevant cases), since it's important that laws are applied consistently.
It's true, though, that the EU court doesn't have a Common Law system, like the UK and the USA, where the courts have a lot of leeway in establishing new practices which are practically laws in themselves.
I could write a sequel to the Harry Potter books. If I had been really quick about it, I could even have rushed out a sequel right after she had written the first book, but before she was done writing her second book. I could call it Harry Potter 2: Forbidden Lust and use her cover art from the original publication without paying for it!
You couldn't use the name "Harry Potter" in the title, since it's a trademark. Trademarks are separate from copyrights. Similarly, you might run into trouble if you used the original cover art without changing it substantially, since it could cause confusion with J.K. Rowling's original product. But you could use the characters and situations from the original "Harry Potter" book in your own book, as long as you made clear that it was an unauthorised version not written by J.K. Rowling, and didn't mislead people in your marketing.
Or maybe I could just take the text of Harry Potter and resell it under a new name, maybe Harvey Bowler and the Wizard's Rock!
That you could do.
For the cover art for Harvey Bowler, I'll just go online and find the coolest pictures I can find and use those. I won't have to pay the original artist for them at all! What a deal!
I could turn Harvey Bowler into a big budget movie. Fortunately, I won't have to pay any musicians to write music for it, since I can just take whatever music I want from anything else. There's this great artist who did a song I love that would be perfect for the end credits. I can use his music for free!
Now ask yourself the question: "Would this sell"?
If the answer is "No", then remixing old works is clearly not enough to create a marketable product, and you'd still need to pay an artist to make a custom cover for your book, to write a custom song for your credits, etc.
If the answer is "Yes", then clearly the art that already exists in the world is sufficient, and there's no need to pay people to create new art. Those people can do something more productive, like building cars or writing software.
The real answer probably lies somewhere in between: There will always be some need for new or custom-made art, and there will always be some products that sell well despite merely being remixes.
We could also abolish commercial copyright but keep the artist's right to attribution. That way, an artist whose work was used in a successful remix would get free advertising out of it.
If you repeal the DMCA, you're also repealing the 'safe harbor' provisions that many site currently enjoy.
A "safe harbour" means the site has to do something to earn it (in the case of the DMCA, honour take-down requests). If you mean that the site should plainly not be responsible for what their users upload, a better term is "status as a neutral carrier" or somesuch.
It's a fact that Microsoft funded SCO's lawsuits against Linux under the table.
In October 2003, BayStar Capital and Royal Bank of Canada invested US$50 million in The SCO Group to support the legal cost of SCO's Linux campaign. Later it was shown that BayStar was referred to SCO by Microsoft, whose proprietary Windows operating system competes with Linux. In 2003, BayStar looked at SCO on the recommendation of Microsoft, according to Lawrence R. Goldfarb, managing partner of BayStar Capital: "It was evident that Microsoft had an agenda".
On March 4, 2004, a leaked SCO internal e-mail detailed how Microsoft had raised up to $106 million via the BayStar referral and other means. Blake Stowell of SCO confirmed the memo was real. BayStar claimed the deal was suggested by Microsoft, but that no money for it came directly from them. In addition to the Baystar involvement, Microsoft paid SCO $6M (USD) in May 2003 for a license to "Unix and Unix-related patents", despite the lack of Unix-related patents owned by SCO.
I'm not sure copyright is needed - all independent studies so far have concluded that file sharing has a roughly zero net effect on sales. Most studies have been carried out on music sales, so we can't say for sure if it applies to, for example, ebooks, but it should make us pause.
There's also the problem that once we have a limited-term copyright - say, the original 14 years - the media industry builds up an infrastructure around copyright, and becomes dependent on the money from their most popular franchises. When a lucrative franchise is about to slip out of copyright - say, Elvis Presley's music - the industry gets a very strong incentive to lobby for an extension, are prepared to throw a lot of money at it, and can point to the lost job opportunities when they can no longer sell the franchise at a hefty price margin. That seems to be very difficult for the politicians to resist, which is how we ended up with the current life of the author + 70 years.
Any meaningful definition of "price dumping" includes "selling at a loss", not just "selling too low". Since a company can't sell at a loss in the long run, price dumping is often used to "starve" a competitor and then raise the prices again when the competition is gone.
It's only "price fixing" if different companies agree on a certain price. There's only reason to suspect price fixing if everyone charges the same price AND it's substantially above the manufacturing cost. If competition works well in the market,
It doesn't make much difference to the price if the singer is alive and producing new songs, since the supply of their old songs is practically infinite anyway. People are not prepared to pay less for one of the old songs just because the singer is producing new ones.
With music, the price is mostly determined by what the consumer is prepared to pay, (i.e, "demand"), and supply is mostly irrelevant to the price.
If you want to live in a "free market" with a copyright monopoly, this is one example of how that plays out when a non-person is maximizing shareholder value.
The idea that corporations are mandated by capitalism to behave unethically in the pursuit of profits, even if behaving unethically is ultimately bad for profits, comes up all the time here on Slashdot and never makes any sense.
Corporations tend to think fairly short-term, at most a few years into the future. If the badwill accumulates slowly over time, but the profit from unethical behaviour comes immediately, it'd explain why corporations would keep doing unethical things that are ultimately unprofitable.
I don't know why people keep talking about suicides at Foxconn factories, since the population of China has a higher suicide rate than the population of Foxconn workers in China.
True, but misleading, since the numbers for Foxconn only includes suicides in the workplace, while the national average includes all suicides.
In China, it only counts as a work-related death if it occurs in the workplace. I.e, for your family to get compensation, you need to take your life at work.
Even if people take their life at work for financial reasons, though, it still shows how desperate they are.
First of all, tax the rich at 75%+? Are you stupid? What do you think is going to happen when you tax the people earning the most money so much that 3/4 of it is gone before they ever even see it. In some cases that will be taxing the rich until they are below the poverty line.
75% income tax for the rich, doesn't mean the rich will pay 75% of their income in tax. There are so many ways for the rich to avoid tax, like stock options, job benefits, tax exemptions, and so on, which are not available to the poor or middle-class. I'm not sure a drastic increase in the tax rate for the highest income brackets would make that much difference to the actual incomes of the rich.
You also need to remember, that when we include sales tax, alcohol tax, and so on, in the equation, the middle class pays as large a percentage of their income in tax as the rich do. The US-American tax system is nearly flat in that range.
That being said, I'm not sure it would bring in that much money anyway if we could tax the rich, because they're so few compared to the middle class.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure what you're trying to say. Are you saying that the hunters were justified in shooting the drone, or are you just saying that both parties were idiots?
The issue here is that they were denied permission to fly the chopper and did it anyhow. That's the first breach of law. The other issue is that somebody fired a single shot from a small-caliber firearm which seems to have damaged the chopper.
Which article did you read? TFA doesn't say anything about applying for permission; it only says the hunters' lawyer tried to stop them, but failed. TFA also says several shots were fired as soon as the drone was launched.
On my property, I expect a right to privacy. If my property and privacy is invaded after I deny permission, then your flying camera is merely a "peeping tom tool" at this point.
So you think they were justified in taking the law in their own hands?
Equating any mainstream American Christianity with middle eastern Sharia Law Islam makes you look positively stupid. Compare your "encroaching" on "civil rights" to the Saudi practice of capital punishment for being raped. Or even this article of writing a program to upload photos...
The Saudis may be far worse, but they mostly affect people in Saudi Arabia. The Christians take away YOUR rights in YOUR OWN country.
If you read Slashdot enough, you would swear that the US is JUST as bad as Iran. No, I'm not kidding. There are people on here who will claim that the United States is just as bad as Iran when it comes to human rights issues and even try to argue this point.
Depends on how you measure.
The USA clearly has more respect for human rights than Iran.
But in sheer number of countries invaded, people killed, and war crimes committed, the USA comes out much worse, mostly because of its relative size and power.
So if I get a grant from the church, do ten years of research on the motion of planetary bodies, and submit a paper postulating that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and submit it to a journal run by people receiving money from the same Church, that's science?
If you do it right, yes, that's science. It may be factually wrong, but it's still science.
Well you're just completely wrong. Buddhism is simply a method for reliving pain by erasing desire. That's it. If I was grading a paper and that was your definition I would give you a F and ask you if you had bothered to do any reading at all and advise you that even religious studies requires something other than self involved navel gazing. I would also try to impress on you that just because some "followers" of a "religion" do something hat activity doesn't magically progress back upstream and change inviolate rules set down by the founder, as much as that may piss off the Pashtuns.
Assuming you're trying to find out the "right" version of a religion. For someone who studies religion as a social phenomenon, it's usually more interesting what people believe and do in practice.
What you are describing (with the choice thing) is somewhat closer to the Tao (but you're still not right) and so you may be confusing Buddhism with Zen which is a combination of the two.
The "choice thing" (Dharma) was inherited from Hinduism by both Buddhism and Taoism, although it works differently. In all three religions, it's a universal law of cause and effect that drives people's destinies. In Buddhism, it's called Karma, and is more about intention or desire than choice; bad intentions lead to suffering, and good intentions lead to freedom from suffering. The ultimate goal is, as you write, to be free of karma by being free of all desires. Buddha (Siddharta Gautama) mentions Karma on many occasions.
As to the nature worship you are just confusing the religion that was native to India before Buddhism which is called Hinduism or what you are talking about his more Tantra. Or you watch a lot Japanese movies and are thinking about Shino, so still totally wrong.
For an outsider, the respect for life seen in many Buddhists may be confused with nature worship. For example, Buddhist monks in India tend to be vegetarians, and carry with them a sieve so they don't accidentally swallow an insect with their drinking water.
This is, of course, different from nature worship, since monks don't pray to the insects; they simply avoid hurting them in order to improve their own karma.
It's even less harmful than testing the grapes at your super market, since the downloader doesn't prevent the song's owner from seling their song to someone else.
At most, the downloader deprives the song's owner of a potential sale. But not even that seems to hold true in practice - independent studies show that people spend their money on concerts or on other artists when they download songs, and that the availability of a song on filesharing networks has a roughly zero net effect on total sales.
It's not about having or not having IP laws. Clearly IP laws are needed and useful. It's about the corporations abusing those laws and going as far as screwing basic liberties that we should all enjoy. And nobody can deny that probably the biggest entertainment industry is in U.S.
It's not so obvious... copyright, for example, was made into law long before economics had developed far enough to quantify the costs and benefits. (The benefit being more works being produced, and the cost being those works becoming available to fewer people.) Now that we know more, more and more evidence accumulate for the harmfulness of copyright, but almost nothing for its benefits. For example, all independent studies on music sales suggest that online piracy have a roughly zero net effect on sales.
This is absolutely silly, this notion that the US is on the only country that has concerns about piracy and copyright violation. Europe has IP laws too. This central argument... that if mean ole' America went away, everyone would happily download pirated content all day with support from governments... is ludicrous.
While it's true that Europe has its fair share of greedy corporations that push for harsher IP laws, the USA has been the main driving force for at least two decades. The diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks ("Cablegate") revealed that the USA is consistently working to get other countries to adopt more restrictive IP laws through diplomatic channels and trade agreements. There's no other country besides the USA who has both the clout and motivation to do this. (China has the clout, but not yet the motivation.)
In general, the USA tends to be a few years or a decade ahead in societal developments, and European countries tend to follow.
That doesn't mean European countries are innocent victims, of course - it's our own responsibility to vote our spineless and ignorant politicians out of office.
What do you mean by "not precedent-based"?
All courts look at previous rulings when interpreting a law (if they can find relevant cases), since it's important that laws are applied consistently.
It's true, though, that the EU court doesn't have a Common Law system, like the UK and the USA, where the courts have a lot of leeway in establishing new practices which are practically laws in themselves.
I could write a sequel to the Harry Potter books. If I had been really quick about it, I could even have rushed out a sequel right after she had written the first book, but before she was done writing her second book. I could call it Harry Potter 2: Forbidden Lust and use her cover art from the original publication without paying for it!
You couldn't use the name "Harry Potter" in the title, since it's a trademark. Trademarks are separate from copyrights. Similarly, you might run into trouble if you used the original cover art without changing it substantially, since it could cause confusion with J.K. Rowling's original product. But you could use the characters and situations from the original "Harry Potter" book in your own book, as long as you made clear that it was an unauthorised version not written by J.K. Rowling, and didn't mislead people in your marketing.
Or maybe I could just take the text of Harry Potter and resell it under a new name, maybe Harvey Bowler and the Wizard's Rock!
That you could do.
For the cover art for Harvey Bowler, I'll just go online and find the coolest pictures I can find and use those. I won't have to pay the original artist for them at all! What a deal!
I could turn Harvey Bowler into a big budget movie. Fortunately, I won't have to pay any musicians to write music for it, since I can just take whatever music I want from anything else. There's this great artist who did a song I love that would be perfect for the end credits. I can use his music for free!
Now ask yourself the question: "Would this sell"?
If the answer is "No", then remixing old works is clearly not enough to create a marketable product, and you'd still need to pay an artist to make a custom cover for your book, to write a custom song for your credits, etc.
If the answer is "Yes", then clearly the art that already exists in the world is sufficient, and there's no need to pay people to create new art. Those people can do something more productive, like building cars or writing software.
The real answer probably lies somewhere in between: There will always be some need for new or custom-made art, and there will always be some products that sell well despite merely being remixes.
We could also abolish commercial copyright but keep the artist's right to attribution. That way, an artist whose work was used in a successful remix would get free advertising out of it.
If you repeal the DMCA, you're also repealing the 'safe harbor' provisions that many site currently enjoy.
A "safe harbour" means the site has to do something to earn it (in the case of the DMCA, honour take-down requests). If you mean that the site should plainly not be responsible for what their users upload, a better term is "status as a neutral carrier" or somesuch.
It's a fact that Microsoft funded SCO's lawsuits against Linux under the table.
In October 2003, BayStar Capital and Royal Bank of Canada invested US$50 million in The SCO Group to support the legal cost of SCO's Linux campaign. Later it was shown that BayStar was referred to SCO by Microsoft, whose proprietary Windows operating system competes with Linux. In 2003, BayStar looked at SCO on the recommendation of Microsoft, according to Lawrence R. Goldfarb, managing partner of BayStar Capital: "It was evident that Microsoft had an agenda".
On March 4, 2004, a leaked SCO internal e-mail detailed how Microsoft had raised up to $106 million via the BayStar referral and other means. Blake Stowell of SCO confirmed the memo was real. BayStar claimed the deal was suggested by Microsoft, but that no money for it came directly from them. In addition to the Baystar involvement, Microsoft paid SCO $6M (USD) in May 2003 for a license to "Unix and Unix-related patents", despite the lack of Unix-related patents owned by SCO.
(Wikipedia)
I'm not sure copyright is needed - all independent studies so far have concluded that file sharing has a roughly zero net effect on sales. Most studies have been carried out on music sales, so we can't say for sure if it applies to, for example, ebooks, but it should make us pause.
There's also the problem that once we have a limited-term copyright - say, the original 14 years - the media industry builds up an infrastructure around copyright, and becomes dependent on the money from their most popular franchises. When a lucrative franchise is about to slip out of copyright - say, Elvis Presley's music - the industry gets a very strong incentive to lobby for an extension, are prepared to throw a lot of money at it, and can point to the lost job opportunities when they can no longer sell the franchise at a hefty price margin. That seems to be very difficult for the politicians to resist, which is how we ended up with the current life of the author + 70 years.
Didn't say it was wrong, just explaining the facts so you can decide for yourself.
Any meaningful definition of "price dumping" includes "selling at a loss", not just "selling too low". Since a company can't sell at a loss in the long run, price dumping is often used to "starve" a competitor and then raise the prices again when the competition is gone.
It's only "price fixing" if different companies agree on a certain price. There's only reason to suspect price fixing if everyone charges the same price AND it's substantially above the manufacturing cost. If competition works well in the market,
It doesn't make much difference to the price if the singer is alive and producing new songs, since the supply of their old songs is practically infinite anyway. People are not prepared to pay less for one of the old songs just because the singer is producing new ones.
With music, the price is mostly determined by what the consumer is prepared to pay, (i.e, "demand"), and supply is mostly irrelevant to the price.
If you want to live in a "free market" with a copyright monopoly, this is one example of how that plays out when a non-person is maximizing shareholder value.
Fixed that for you.
The idea that corporations are mandated by capitalism to behave unethically in the pursuit of profits, even if behaving unethically is ultimately bad for profits, comes up all the time here on Slashdot and never makes any sense.
Corporations tend to think fairly short-term, at most a few years into the future. If the badwill accumulates slowly over time, but the profit from unethical behaviour comes immediately, it'd explain why corporations would keep doing unethical things that are ultimately unprofitable.
Good point.
That's a fair point.
I don't know why people keep talking about suicides at Foxconn factories, since the population of China has a higher suicide rate than the population of Foxconn workers in China.
True, but misleading, since the numbers for Foxconn only includes suicides in the workplace, while the national average includes all suicides.
In China, it only counts as a work-related death if it occurs in the workplace. I.e, for your family to get compensation, you need to take your life at work.
Even if people take their life at work for financial reasons, though, it still shows how desperate they are.
There was no need to combine those technologies in that manner until WANs were common and fast enough.to facilitate videoconferencing.
First of all, tax the rich at 75%+? Are you stupid? What do you think is going to happen when you tax the people earning the most money so much that 3/4 of it is gone before they ever even see it. In some cases that will be taxing the rich until they are below the poverty line.
75% income tax for the rich, doesn't mean the rich will pay 75% of their income in tax. There are so many ways for the rich to avoid tax, like stock options, job benefits, tax exemptions, and so on, which are not available to the poor or middle-class. I'm not sure a drastic increase in the tax rate for the highest income brackets would make that much difference to the actual incomes of the rich.
You also need to remember, that when we include sales tax, alcohol tax, and so on, in the equation, the middle class pays as large a percentage of their income in tax as the rich do. The US-American tax system is nearly flat in that range.
That being said, I'm not sure it would bring in that much money anyway if we could tax the rich, because they're so few compared to the middle class.