*Does* the constitution protect the minority, though?
For example, the American constitution prohibits harsh and unusual punishment, but what the court considers "harsh and unusual", is determined by what people in general think, so punishments in the USA end up being harsher than in Western Europe (longer sentences, worse prison conditions, and the death penalty in some states). The clause about "harsh and unusual" punishments is actually a way for the federal governement to impose its rule on the local state, i.e, a way for the majority to impose their will on the minority.
During WW2, US citizens of Japanese descent were detained without suspicion of crime. That's a pretty blatant violation of the constitution, but it slipped through because it had the support of the majority.
I'm not saying a constitution is meaningless, just that it doesn't seem to be very effective at protecting the minorities against majority rule.
Well, the Magna Carta was about protecting the landowners from abuse of the king's power, not about protecting the lowly peasants from abuse by the landowners. Just replace "landowners" with "shareholders", "king" with "state", and "peasants" with "consumers", and the Magna Carta is working as designed.
It's still rather weird that you can get a longer sentence for helping someone with copyright infringement, than you can get for the infringment itself, no matter how large, though.
Sooner or later pirate parties and other opponents of intellectual property rights (or at least these rights getting more and more strict) will come to power in Europe, and actions of this criminal industry will come back at them like a boomerang.
They'll regret sentences like these when copyrights will be abolished. Looking forward to that day.
I think the CEOs and lawyers will laugh as they enjoy the money they've already earned and stashed away, and not care one bit about how wrong they were. The rich or powerful almost always find a way to get away.
I think those issues have already been addressed. You can't stake a claim to another person because there is already an owner—that person. And as implied by the GP's brief definition, ownership is not fundamentally the right to exclude others from using or benefiting from something, though that often comes with it to some degree as a side-effect of scarcity, but rather the right to freedom from interference in your own use of the property. "Ownership" of an idea is thus meaningless—as an abstract concept, there is no way for others to interfere with your use, at least not without directly interfering with you, so there is no point in staking a claim.
I think quite a few people would object to that. For example, it would allow people to trespass anywhere as long as they didn't disturb anyone or anything. It would allow people to sell themselves as slaves. And there are ultra-libertarians who believe ownership is about protecting the fruits of their labour, so making use of someone's idea is like stealing from them (for example, if you sell copies of someone else's invention, and they sell fewer copies as a result).
The dream of a purely libertarian society is very far away from becoming reality, because people can't agree on what the fundamental libertarian principles are.
The pro-life people could easily argue for their position from an ultra-libertarian standpoint. They could claim women are free to do as they wish with their bodies, as long as they don't hurt another human being, in this case, the fetus.
The pertinent question is whether the fetus counts as a full human being, and, to a lesser degree, if abortion should count as actively killing the fetus, or just as passively refusing it protection and nutrition so it dies by itself.
The body needs stronger legal protection than property. For example, if you damage someone's property, the damage can be repaired with monetary compensation. Not so if you damage someone's body. Instead, we need punishments as deterrents for causing bodily harm and death.
Gross inequities arise out of government regulation to begin with, and mechanics like regulatory capture effectively ensure that the more power the government has to 'regulate' the more that the government effectively re-enforces and entrenches those inequities. The stories you have been taught of the 'gilded age' will have many half truths and deceptions, probably the largest being the lack of mention that each and every 'robber baron' owed his success to lobbyists and friendly congressmen, not some mythical free market which didnt actually exist.
That's probably true in many cases, but there are also cases where corporations have become so large by themselves that they can manipulate the market and get rid of competition. For example, Microsoft.
This dude is absolutely right. It's absolutely worth it to muster up all the will power and motivation you have to seeing a doctor and working with them to find medication that works for you without giving you more problems than you started off with.
Assuming the doctor is able to do that, and willing to expend the time and effort. You could also get a medication that makes you worse. You could end up with a diagnosis which is a social stigma, and makes it harder for you to find work or deal with the authorities. You may get a diagnosis or treatment without knowing it, because the doctor either forgets or doesn't think it's important to tell you when he changes either of them. Once you seek mental health care, people around you tend to treat you as less reliable and dismiss everything you say, which makes it even harder to get the right treatment.
Seeking treatment for mental health issues constitutes a risk, both in terms of medical side effects, and in terms of the social stigma, and you have to weigh that risk against the possible benefits.
I've taken antidepressants, with limited success. They made me drowsy, which helped me sleep better, but apart from that, they only changed my mood in a superficial way. They didn't help me handle daily life any better. When my sleep was better, taking them was not worth the side effects.
Modern anti-depressants (SSRI) only help some people. The're widely used because the side effects are relatively mild, not because the success rate is very high.
The problem is that those suffering from depression may do a lot, even subconsciously, to cover some of the obvious signs of depression from those closest to them. Add on to the fact that most people don't know enough about the signs of depression and it can be hard at times to easily recognize them.
So the Internet usage statistics might not work if the subject is aware they're being watched. They'd either fake their usage patterns, or go somewhere where they're not being watched, like the school or a public library.
And even if it worked, I think it's a spectacularly bad idea, because the invasion of privacy hurts the trust between parent and child.
I wonder if this could be a new Firefox plug-in, designed to help parents detect depression in their adolescents by tracking the mechanics (not the sites) and automatically emailing them if their ward is showing increasing signs of depression."
It'd be really sad if a parent needed to do this to know something was wrong with their kid.
Not to mention, it'd give the kid the (correct) impression that the parent is snooping ON them instead of talking TO them.
A lot of hardcore gamers buy a game, finish it within a week or two, and then get rid of it while it still sells for a high price. That's the type of used-game sales the game companies believe they lose money from.
And in case you were just trying to make an ad hominem argument, I mainly play MMORPGs and doesn't sell my games, so it doesn't affect me personally.
Is anyone ACTUALLY under the delusion that these people didn't actually download the material in question? I'd wager that 99.9%+ of these cases are valid.
I'd guess that most are guilty, but I doubt the figure is as high as 99.9%. Sometimes, the copyright lawyers are very sloppy with their claims. They work with volumes; send out the same extortion letter to 1000 people whose IP addresses they've got, and see how many pay up without a fight. Then they either take the few remaining cases to court, or drop them immediately since they're not worth the risk and cost. Being judicious in each individual case is not worth the time and cost to them.
Plus, some bittorrent trackers salt with fake IP addresses to give their users plausible deniability. I.e, a small percentage of the addresses the tracker claims are part of the torrent swarm, have nothing to do with it, so someone who gets caught can claim they were one of the "salted" IPs. Of course, you need to be an avid BitTorrent user to know to use that defence...
The majority of English speakers are not North Americans, if you count all those who use English as a second language. Many of them refer to English Wikipedia since it's the biggest and most well-maintained version, and English is the de facto "international" language in most of the world.
Remember that English is taught in schools throughout most of Europe, is an official language in India and Malaysia, and so on.
Too complicated and prone to misunderstandings. For example, say you're posting a link to a Wikipedia article here on Slashdot, and when someone else clicks it, they get to an article which uses a different name, and thinks the previus poster is talking out of their ass.
This was further exposed when through trickery an entry was made that did not yet have other published but upon wikipedia publishing the other made a reference to wikipedia and then the wikipedia article was edited to point to that article as a reference.... And it was found out and the article removed. I don't recall what article that was.
Slashdot Mirror
*Does* the constitution protect the minority, though?
For example, the American constitution prohibits harsh and unusual punishment, but what the court considers "harsh and unusual", is determined by what people in general think, so punishments in the USA end up being harsher than in Western Europe (longer sentences, worse prison conditions, and the death penalty in some states). The clause about "harsh and unusual" punishments is actually a way for the federal governement to impose its rule on the local state, i.e, a way for the majority to impose their will on the minority.
During WW2, US citizens of Japanese descent were detained without suspicion of crime. That's a pretty blatant violation of the constitution, but it slipped through because it had the support of the majority.
I'm not saying a constitution is meaningless, just that it doesn't seem to be very effective at protecting the minorities against majority rule.
Do you reason the same way when the Supreme Court rules contrary to your political opinion? E.g, gun control, the death penalty, abortion...
Can the individual states mandate their citizens to buy broccoli (without violating the constitution)?
Well, the Magna Carta was about protecting the landowners from abuse of the king's power, not about protecting the lowly peasants from abuse by the landowners. Just replace "landowners" with "shareholders", "king" with "state", and "peasants" with "consumers", and the Magna Carta is working as designed.
It's still rather weird that you can get a longer sentence for helping someone with copyright infringement, than you can get for the infringment itself, no matter how large, though.
Sooner or later pirate parties and other opponents of intellectual property rights (or at least these rights getting more and more strict) will come to power in Europe, and actions of this criminal industry will come back at them like a boomerang.
They'll regret sentences like these when copyrights will be abolished. Looking forward to that day.
I think the CEOs and lawyers will laugh as they enjoy the money they've already earned and stashed away, and not care one bit about how wrong they were. The rich or powerful almost always find a way to get away.
I think those issues have already been addressed. You can't stake a claim to another person because there is already an owner—that person. And as implied by the GP's brief definition, ownership is not fundamentally the right to exclude others from using or benefiting from something, though that often comes with it to some degree as a side-effect of scarcity, but rather the right to freedom from interference in your own use of the property. "Ownership" of an idea is thus meaningless—as an abstract concept, there is no way for others to interfere with your use, at least not without directly interfering with you, so there is no point in staking a claim.
I think quite a few people would object to that. For example, it would allow people to trespass anywhere as long as they didn't disturb anyone or anything. It would allow people to sell themselves as slaves. And there are ultra-libertarians who believe ownership is about protecting the fruits of their labour, so making use of someone's idea is like stealing from them (for example, if you sell copies of someone else's invention, and they sell fewer copies as a result).
The dream of a purely libertarian society is very far away from becoming reality, because people can't agree on what the fundamental libertarian principles are.
The pro-life people could easily argue for their position from an ultra-libertarian standpoint. They could claim women are free to do as they wish with their bodies, as long as they don't hurt another human being, in this case, the fetus.
The pertinent question is whether the fetus counts as a full human being, and, to a lesser degree, if abortion should count as actively killing the fetus, or just as passively refusing it protection and nutrition so it dies by itself.
The body needs stronger legal protection than property. For example, if you damage someone's property, the damage can be repaired with monetary compensation. Not so if you damage someone's body. Instead, we need punishments as deterrents for causing bodily harm and death.
Gross inequities arise out of government regulation to begin with, and mechanics like regulatory capture effectively ensure that the more power the government has to 'regulate' the more that the government effectively re-enforces and entrenches those inequities. The stories you have been taught of the 'gilded age' will have many half truths and deceptions, probably the largest being the lack of mention that each and every 'robber baron' owed his success to lobbyists and friendly congressmen, not some mythical free market which didnt actually exist.
That's probably true in many cases, but there are also cases where corporations have become so large by themselves that they can manipulate the market and get rid of competition. For example, Microsoft.
The US is bossing a lot of countries around, not just the UK, so I'm pretty sure the US is the master.
This dude is absolutely right. It's absolutely worth it to muster up all the will power and motivation you have to seeing a doctor and working with them to find medication that works for you without giving you more problems than you started off with.
Assuming the doctor is able to do that, and willing to expend the time and effort. You could also get a medication that makes you worse. You could end up with a diagnosis which is a social stigma, and makes it harder for you to find work or deal with the authorities. You may get a diagnosis or treatment without knowing it, because the doctor either forgets or doesn't think it's important to tell you when he changes either of them. Once you seek mental health care, people around you tend to treat you as less reliable and dismiss everything you say, which makes it even harder to get the right treatment.
Seeking treatment for mental health issues constitutes a risk, both in terms of medical side effects, and in terms of the social stigma, and you have to weigh that risk against the possible benefits.
I've taken antidepressants, with limited success. They made me drowsy, which helped me sleep better, but apart from that, they only changed my mood in a superficial way. They didn't help me handle daily life any better. When my sleep was better, taking them was not worth the side effects.
Modern anti-depressants (SSRI) only help some people. The're widely used because the side effects are relatively mild, not because the success rate is very high.
The problem is that those suffering from depression may do a lot, even subconsciously, to cover some of the obvious signs of depression from those closest to them. Add on to the fact that most people don't know enough about the signs of depression and it can be hard at times to easily recognize them.
So the Internet usage statistics might not work if the subject is aware they're being watched. They'd either fake their usage patterns, or go somewhere where they're not being watched, like the school or a public library.
And even if it worked, I think it's a spectacularly bad idea, because the invasion of privacy hurts the trust between parent and child.
From the summary:
I wonder if this could be a new Firefox plug-in, designed to help parents detect depression in their adolescents by tracking the mechanics (not the sites) and automatically emailing them if their ward is showing increasing signs of depression."
It'd be really sad if a parent needed to do this to know something was wrong with their kid.
Not to mention, it'd give the kid the (correct) impression that the parent is snooping ON them instead of talking TO them.
A lot of hardcore gamers buy a game, finish it within a week or two, and then get rid of it while it still sells for a high price. That's the type of used-game sales the game companies believe they lose money from.
And in case you were just trying to make an ad hominem argument, I mainly play MMORPGs and doesn't sell my games, so it doesn't affect me personally.
But is it really fail if they can scare people into paying?
Is anyone ACTUALLY under the delusion that these people didn't actually download the material in question? I'd wager that 99.9%+ of these cases are valid.
I'd guess that most are guilty, but I doubt the figure is as high as 99.9%. Sometimes, the copyright lawyers are very sloppy with their claims. They work with volumes; send out the same extortion letter to 1000 people whose IP addresses they've got, and see how many pay up without a fight. Then they either take the few remaining cases to court, or drop them immediately since they're not worth the risk and cost. Being judicious in each individual case is not worth the time and cost to them.
Plus, some bittorrent trackers salt with fake IP addresses to give their users plausible deniability. I.e, a small percentage of the addresses the tracker claims are part of the torrent swarm, have nothing to do with it, so someone who gets caught can claim they were one of the "salted" IPs. Of course, you need to be an avid BitTorrent user to know to use that defence...
Nice to see some literary taste on Slashdot :)
I'm ok with it, but I'm Swedish, so it doesn't count.
It's a chronicle, i.e, an article which summarises various recent news. The topics aren't supposed to be related to each other.
Which makes it rather silly to post the article on Slashdot. Why not dig up the source article instead?
The majority of English speakers are not North Americans, if you count all those who use English as a second language. Many of them refer to English Wikipedia since it's the biggest and most well-maintained version, and English is the de facto "international" language in most of the world.
Remember that English is taught in schools throughout most of Europe, is an official language in India and Malaysia, and so on.
The OP is correct. "Sega Megadrive" is the correct name, regardless of what the majority thinks.
I don't think it's a huge issue, though.
Too complicated and prone to misunderstandings. For example, say you're posting a link to a Wikipedia article here on Slashdot, and when someone else clicks it, they get to an article which uses a different name, and thinks the previus poster is talking out of their ass.
This was further exposed when through trickery an entry was made that did not yet have other published but upon wikipedia publishing the other made a reference to wikipedia and then the wikipedia article was edited to point to that article as a reference.... And it was found out and the article removed. I don't recall what article that was.
I found the reference for you: http://xkcd.com/978/