(Paraphrasing...) Being in the majority we have all the power, and so we feel perfectly justified to order you around. Furthermore, to add insult to injury we're going to insist that you're "free" too (free to do what we tell you!) even while treating you as a slave.
No one is arguing that you shouldn't be permitted to elect someone to govern you if that's what you want. Just leave the rest of us out of it.
Of course they aren't: after all, they're the ones who enforce the law.
The two are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to enforce the law without violating it yourself, provided one is actually working exclusively to hold people accountable for the consequences of their actions rather than attempting to enforce arbitrary edicts. When people finally get it through their heads that the path to correcting injustice does not involve perpetrating yet more injustice we will, perhaps, have matured a bit as a society.
Now, most people don't to get robbed or killed, so people living close to one another will usually start looking out for each other, and making and enforcing rules like "don't steal" and "don't kill" by force - in other words, they form a (primitive) government.
That isn't a government, even a primitive one: it isn't trying to govern. The moment they move beyond self-defense and proportional retribution -- e.g. by collecting taxes, or enforcing their own rules rather than protecting from aggression -- then they've become a government. Responding to someone else's aggression (initiation of force, e.g. theft, murder, trespass, fraud) in kind is not unlawful behavior, or an property exclusive to governments.
The total sum of all power is always equal to controlling every human beings every action....
Fine. The difference is purely a matter of definition; so far as I know no one objects to people having power over themselves per se, so I was interpreting "power" as "power over others", which is indeed eliminated when people are free, i.e. have exclusive control over their own actions.
Anyway, the rest of your response ignores the question of numbers. You don't have to be personally stronger than the criminals so long as there are more people in your side than there are on theirs; in other words, so long as the majority of individuals are lawful in nature. On the other hand, if the majority aren't lawful then you can't trust any form of democracy, since the criminals would always have the upper hand. If people are lawful, on average, then government is superfluous; if they aren't lawful no form of government can improve the matter. Your choices are anarchy (not chaos; the literal version), despair, or self-delusion. In practice people already live in a state of anarchy in almost every relationship except taxation; that this situation is stable demonstrates, to me at least, that most individuals are lawful.
Second: So-called "democratic" governments are only "accountable" to the majority vote, which is merely a form of "might makes right", this time in the form of numbers. The GP was clearly referring to accountability to justice, e.g. under common law, where anyone who causes another person harm is liable for the damage. No government, of any sort, considers itself accountable in this fashion; in fact, the definition of "government" can essentially be summed up as: the one group which is somehow not considered liable for the damage it causes.
Third: Power is not a zero-sum game. Among other factors, power is limited by the willingness of those not in power to be governed by others. Eliminate the false sense of legitimacy they feel for the government and the total amount of power will decrease.
Hosting trackers is the primary function of TPB; they're one of the most common and reliable tracker hosts. I'm also fairly certain their search feature only includes torrents for which TPB is the tracker. They don't host any of the actual contents, though; you won't see a TPB server acting as a seed. They merely act as coordinators, collecting and redistributing lists of the IP addresses and stats of the various clients participating in the torrent.
What kind of heartless [individual] thinks only people who have money should get treated at a hospital? Money is far from the best measure of the worth of a person.
I agree 100%. In fact, I would argue that there is no way at all to objectively measure "the worth of a person"; ergo, no person can be objectively argued to be more worthy of treatment than any other, on any grounds.
Nonetheless, treatment requires expensive resources and many highly-trained specialists, and you can't expect anyone to produce those resources or spend decades training and practicing in those specialized fields without compensation. There are really only two major options for providing that funding: voluntary exchange (including donations); or stealing from the "rich" to treat the poor. The latter is merely theft in the service of your own preferred ends; the supposed nobility of your goal is subjective, and ultimately irrelevant.
If I don't have the fortitude to take the loss of income to go do the right thing, at least I can work towards a society that supports those who do.
This is a most excellent goal, but the means by which you carry it out are of paramount importance. One cannot achieve a peaceful purpose through violent methods, at least not without side effects worse than the original problem. Employ persuasion rather than force and you'll get no opposition from me.
In fact the current system isn't all that bad. A hospital will rarely reject someone for inability to pay; and rather than a direct handout, if the treatment is not covered by donations the recipient(s) will generally be extended a loan, which they are expected to repay over time. There are some rough spots, such as the bundling of employment and health insurance, and the way this (combined with various government health insurance programs) drives up the cost of health care, but overall the system does work.
Hunter-gatherers... spend approximately 1/3 of their day looking for food--just surviving.
Modern office workers... spend approximately 1/3 of their day working so they can pay for their food--just surviving.
Sources? I'm a "modern office worker", and I know I only spend a few (2 to 2.5) hours a week earning money for food. That's 6.25% of my working hours (assuming a 40-hour week), and just 2.23% of my waking hours (taking a "day" as 16 hours, with eight hours for sleep). Even at minimum wage -- less than a typical office worker can expect to get -- the cost of essential food should only be about 20% (1/5) of waking hours. Also, a lot more emphasis is placed on attributes -- preservation, individual taste preferences, variety -- which are mostly unavailable in those hunter-gatherer societies at any price.
One thing we're missing in today's society that we seem to admire most is integrity and courage to do what is right and lawful even [especially] under threat of retaliation!
And, even more so, the courage to do what is right under threat of legal retaliation, because the right thing has been made illegal; or to exercise those natural rights which are not enshrined in law and/or upheld by the courts in the face of legal and social intimidation.
I know exactly what you mean. I don't have (or ever plan to have) kids, so why the hell should I have to pay taxes to pay for schools?
You can make that argument for a variety of different issues. Doesn't make it valid, or even a good idea.
The mere fact that you don't like the conclusions of the argument when applied to schools doesn't make the argument invalid. One shouldn't have to pay to subsidize other peoples' music downloads, and one shouldn't have to pay to subsidize other peoples' kids' educations, either.
You're absolutely right. But I see this as a first step in that direction. By 'decriminalizing' private, non-commercial copying in exchange for $5/month, then we take the first step to breaking the Record labels' stranglehold on distribution.
You could break their distribution monopoly (i.e. copyright) a whole lot faster by simple revoking it.
Perhaps you should examine the text more closely. The entire part I quoted is a single section, without any internal semicolons. The tax and general welfare clauses are separated only by a comma, and thus describe a single power, whereas the taxation and money-borrowing clauses are separated by a semicolon, making them separate powers as you stated.
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;...
The "general welfare" clause gives the reason why Congress is permitted under the Constitution to "collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises." In other words, the paragraph as a whole merely says Congress can collect taxes; it doesn't grant Congress the power to spend those taxes on anything in particular. Rather, the following paragraphs state exactly what Congress can do, and none of them mention research for its own sake.
If someone in the company files a lawsuit in bad faith, or deceives another into doing so, he or she is already liable and no additional punishment is required beyond that already imposed. If others knowingly participate they form a conspiracy, for which they are also already liable. Limited liability basically only applies to one's creditors; it doesn't protect anyone from liability for their own actions, including the filing of groundless lawsuits. To the extent any of your proposed consequences can be justly imposed, they are already in place.
Further, having the company's assets auctioned off implies that the shareholders will be reimbursed, and probably at a profit.
Most of a company's value has nothing to do with its salable assets, and an auction is hardly the way to get the best price even for those. If the company is auctioned off the shareholders will definitely take a major loss. (If they could've made a profit by auctioning off the company's assets they would already have done so.)
"my corporate officers, who are members of my corporation's board at time of filing, shall be individually levied personal fines of 3x their individual annual personal income"
Reading comprehension "FTW". The CEO is the one making the statement; the fines are on the corporate officers, not the CEO.
Seriously - I'd love to see a clause put into any patent (and copyright) based lawsuit filing, signed by the CEO himself, that says:
"... if my lawsuit is found to be without merit, and is dismissed with prejudice, then my corporate charter shall be dissolved, and my corporation's holdings shall be split and sold to the highest bidder at public auction. Furthermore, my corporate officers, who are members of my corporation's board at time of filing, shall be individually levied personal fines of 3x their individual annual personal income..."
Sorry, but the CEO doesn't own the company (the shareholders do) and doesn't have the authority to unilaterally give it way or dissolve its charter. Neither can the CEO levy fines on anyone, any more than you could. He/she could reduce or eliminate their future salary or wages, but then they'd just quit and go somewhere else.
Anyway, your proposal would be truly unfair to those who didn't have anything to do with supporting the decision to file the lawsuit, or who did support it, but in good faith. For the rest the existing penalties are, IMHO, more than sufficient.
The originator may not have actually compressed the file, perhaps he did it just to have an archive?
In case you're new at this: a torrent file can contain more than one file, organized unto subdirectories. There's no need for any encapsulation.
What makes even less sense, though, is where a single large (compressed) file is split into a bunch of.RAR files and then all the.RAR files are repackaged into a single torrent. The resulting torrent is no smaller or resistant to corruption, and requires external tools that most people don't have to reassemble.)
Since you're referring to the fetus as a child with equivalent legal standing as the mother, I think I'll take a wild guess and say you're not fond Roe v. Wade. Which is cool, but let's go easy on the implicit assumptions.
I was merely trying to say that both sides have plenty of support at this time. If you want my personal opinion, I would say that life and humanity begin at conception, and that abortion is murder, but that the only ones with the right to avenge a murder is the murdered person and/or its appointed representative or guardian, in this case the mother. Since abortion is performed at the request of the one who would otherwise be the child's representative I consider abortion to be legally similar to suicide (particularly assisted suicide) and devoid of any justified coercive response from outsiders.
Roe vs. Wade cast abortion as a matter of privacy, not a question of whether the unborn fetus has the same rights as a child, which to me makes no sense at all. I don't uphold any right to privacy, just the right not to tell people things if you don't wish to, which completely undermines the foundation the decision was built upon.
The parent is an obvious troll, but since the moderators are apparently taking a vacation...
Yeah, minorities love the individual freedom of their kids being forced to play Joseph of Arimathea in Christmas plays in public schools.
Public schools are clearly a state issue, not a matter for the federal government. Personally, I'm against compulsory attendance, much less compulsory participation in activities with religious overtones such as you describe, but this is not something a U.S. President has any actual authority over. Talk to your state government if you're so upset.
Women love the right to be told whether they can abort their unborn foetuses.
You are drastically over-simplifying the issue. There are two issues here: (a) there are at least two people involved in an abortion, the mother and the child, and there remains significant debate over whether the mother's right to control her body should trump the child's right to live. I'm not going to state my position one way or the other, but Ron Paul is hardly the only pro-life/anti-abortion candidate.
The terminally ill support and respect leaders whose religious morals prevent them from supporting potentially lifesaving stem cell research.
To the best of my knowledge Ron Paul does not support a ban on stem-cell research, only on government funding of such research, which he (correctly) points out is not something the federal government is permitted to do under the Constitution. This applies to many research areas, not just stem cells, but since that's a hot topic it's all you hear about.
Individual Slashdotters will certainly support Ron Paul's staunch blackballing of net neutrality - we can spend more time reading the first article while we wait and wait for the second to load.
Here you're grasping at straws. Point out a real-world case of provider-specific throttling sufficient to justify effectively nationalizing the Internet infrastructure and someone might just care, although it probably won't be me.
You are (intentionally?) misinterpreting the point of my comment.
An unfettered, unregulated, coercion-free market represents the best possible use of all information available. Each individual is the one and only expert with regards to his or her own situation; no one else is ever in a position to make an informed decision within that domain. No individual or group of individuals can objectively argue that their proposed use of someone else's person or property is more rational than the use chosen by the owner, because the question of rationality itself depends on the subjective goals of the owner.
And as parent mentioned, it takes informed and rational people to make a good decision. Free market can't handle this on its own.
On the contrary, the free market is the only system capable of dealing with imperfectly informed and occasionally irrational people in an optimal manner. Other economic systems can more perfectly reflect the desires of an individual or a small, cohesive group, but only the free market properly reflects the manifold desires of all of society in proportion to their individual contributions.
Pure capitalism is without heart or consideration for humanity.
That sounds nice and all, with lots of emotional impact, but what does it really mean? No economic system has "heart" or "consideration for humanity," so why single out capitalism? Only people have those attributes, expressed through their actions, and a capitalistic system provides people with extravagant opportunities to express those aspects of humanity out of their own savings. The alternative you propose is selfishness under the guise of charity: to insist that others' goals are contemptible compared to your own; to wrest from them what they have produced of their own efforts and direct it toward your pet ends. This is the attitude of a thief, not a philanthropist. It's easy to be "charitable" when others bear the costs.
Captialism is like mutt (the mail user agent) -- all economies suck, capitalism just sucks less.
More precisely, all economic systems have to deal with scarcity, which is a property of the physical universe and not something you can correct with a different kind of economy. Capitalism -- or more precisely, and unfettered free market -- provides an optimum allocation of scarce resources based on all available information. This is not to say that the allocation is perfect (since no real-world system could achieve that) but rather that it takes into account all known information; any other system is based on less accurate and/or less complete information and thus results in a less optimum allocation.
The only way to make a free market more efficient is to get people to make more rational economic decisions; irrational decisions waste resources on less urgently desired goods when more urgently desired goods could be produced instead. Unfortunately, the Third World is a major source of anti-capitalistic thinking, and as a consequence their economic decisions have an unusually large measure of irrationality.
There are loons in any campaign, but Ron Paul had a special knack for getting them to come out of the woodwork,...
Which is to be expected. Anyone who actually supports individual freedom is sure to be popular among the unpopular and oppressed minority groups; they have the most interest at stake in protecting basic rights like free speech. Those who only hold and/or express popular opinions don't require such protection.
You're assuming the systems are symmetric. It's more likely that the official licensees will have a far stronger transmitters than the ones in wireless microphones. The microphones won't interfere significantly with the licensees, but any licensee operating in that part of the spectrum will probably drown out wireless microphones over a fairly large area. Moreover, transmitters based on the "white space" detection that's been discussed recently would probably fail to detect such low-power signals and transmit right over them.
What I'd like to see is straight up metered usage, like power. Pay $10/month for the connection, then $0.50/GB or something.
That's a good start, but personally I'd make it slightly more complicated in the interest of avoiding surprise service outages and/or overage charges.
First, your flat fee includes a low guaranteed minimum bandwidth, plus some burst capability. E.g. you always have at least 48kbps (no contention), and if you don't use it more than e.g. 20% of the time you can get 5x burst rates, suitable for responsive basic web browsing and e-mail. This way each subscriber can choose the contention ratio they want for their own link, and everyone gets the same average baseline rate.
If you want to temporarily increase the speed of the link you pre-pay into a holding account. Through some standard, open protocol you discover the available speeds and current prices ($/GB) and choose a transfer speed. When your prepayment runs out, or you cancel the higher speed, the link returns to the baseline.
The basic parameters would be fairly easy to describe and compare:
A low-bandwidth user -- e-mail, IM, basic web browsing -- would be interested mainly in the base price and baseline burst rate, which is no different than the current system. A higher-bandwidth user, who is in any event more likely to understand the implications of the transfer rates and pricing, would also consider the bulk data rates and peak times.
it could be integrated into the music itself (undetectable to the ear, of course)
If it's undetectable to the ear it ought to be removed during compression. Acoustic compression codecs like MP3 or Vorbis are designed to remove anything that can't be heard; an ideal compression pass would strip out such watermarks without even trying, just to save space.
Because [corporations] have a legal obligation to put profit ahead of everything else,... they'll do anything that'll increase the perception of profitability unless it's illegal. There's power without anything but financial responsibility, and unfortunately, lots of evil things don't have financial consequences.
Whether or not what they do is "evil" (a purely subjective term), if they aren't violating the rights of others -- i.e. doing something that is rightfully illegal -- then there's no justification for violating their rights in turn. Actions taken on behalf of hundreds or thousands of shareholders are in this way no different from actions taken by any individual.
If a person on the street can't help but bite everyone who he sees, he's insane, and we put him in a mental health facility. It's not his fault, but we need to remove some of his rights in order to protect society. The same principle applies to corporations: they can't help but be vicious profit-hungry monsters, so we must restrain them.
I would not agree that locking someone up in a mental institution is a reasonable or justifiable response to a physical assault such as biting. A "mental health facility" can be a wonderful tool, but only when the patient chooses to employ it. To arbitrarily label someone "insane" and force them to enter such an institution for the purpose of remaking them into someone more suitable to yourself is to treat a human being as if it were merely a misbehaving performing animal, incapable of self-determination. A far more humane response would be to allow the offender to choose whether the assault is to be considered an accident or a deliberate action, the former being represented by checking himself into such a facility and the latter carrying all the normal penalties of an intentional assault.
Anyway, the whole argument is irrelevant here because the owners of the corporation, while often irresponsible, are clearly not insane. If in the course of seeking profits they cause harm to someone else, then they must make good the damage caused just as any individual would in the same circumstances; in no event does the mere fear of future harm justify the removal of present rights.
To permit someone the freedom to do what they want only so long as it coincides with what you want is no less totalitarian than micro-managing their life all the time. It's merely less obvious.
Anyway, when the market refuses to solve a perceived problem it's usually because the "solution" is even worse. Any problem that can be solved without making the situation worse will be solved without any need for outside regulation.
The rights of people ought to trump the rights of corporations. Society exists to benefit people. Corporations are merely a means to make society more efficient and don't have any natural rights.
You're correct in that only real people have rights. The question is whether a potential employee has the right to force the owners of the corporation -- other real people, not a mere legal abstraction -- to hire it, which is in no relevant way any different than questioning whether it's right for a retailer to force you to buy from it against your will. The "rights of corporations" are merely a proxy, a convenient shorthand, for the collective rights of the corporation's owners. To say that "[t]he rights of people ought to trump the rights of corporations" is to say, equivalently, that the rights of one group of people (the employees) ought to trump the rights of a different group of people (the owners). You thus undermine a most fundamental principle of any free society: equality under the law.
Slashdot Mirror
No one is arguing that you shouldn't be permitted to elect someone to govern you if that's what you want. Just leave the rest of us out of it.
The two are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to enforce the law without violating it yourself, provided one is actually working exclusively to hold people accountable for the consequences of their actions rather than attempting to enforce arbitrary edicts. When people finally get it through their heads that the path to correcting injustice does not involve perpetrating yet more injustice we will, perhaps, have matured a bit as a society.
That isn't a government, even a primitive one: it isn't trying to govern. The moment they move beyond self-defense and proportional retribution -- e.g. by collecting taxes, or enforcing their own rules rather than protecting from aggression -- then they've become a government. Responding to someone else's aggression (initiation of force, e.g. theft, murder, trespass, fraud) in kind is not unlawful behavior, or an property exclusive to governments.
Fine. The difference is purely a matter of definition; so far as I know no one objects to people having power over themselves per se, so I was interpreting "power" as "power over others", which is indeed eliminated when people are free, i.e. have exclusive control over their own actions.
Anyway, the rest of your response ignores the question of numbers. You don't have to be personally stronger than the criminals so long as there are more people in your side than there are on theirs; in other words, so long as the majority of individuals are lawful in nature. On the other hand, if the majority aren't lawful then you can't trust any form of democracy, since the criminals would always have the upper hand. If people are lawful, on average, then government is superfluous; if they aren't lawful no form of government can improve the matter. Your choices are anarchy (not chaos; the literal version), despair, or self-delusion. In practice people already live in a state of anarchy in almost every relationship except taxation; that this situation is stable demonstrates, to me at least, that most individuals are lawful.
First: Paragraphs. Please.
Second: So-called "democratic" governments are only "accountable" to the majority vote, which is merely a form of "might makes right", this time in the form of numbers. The GP was clearly referring to accountability to justice, e.g. under common law, where anyone who causes another person harm is liable for the damage. No government, of any sort, considers itself accountable in this fashion; in fact, the definition of "government" can essentially be summed up as: the one group which is somehow not considered liable for the damage it causes.
Third: Power is not a zero-sum game. Among other factors, power is limited by the willingness of those not in power to be governed by others. Eliminate the false sense of legitimacy they feel for the government and the total amount of power will decrease.
Hosting trackers is the primary function of TPB; they're one of the most common and reliable tracker hosts. I'm also fairly certain their search feature only includes torrents for which TPB is the tracker. They don't host any of the actual contents, though; you won't see a TPB server acting as a seed. They merely act as coordinators, collecting and redistributing lists of the IP addresses and stats of the various clients participating in the torrent.
I agree 100%. In fact, I would argue that there is no way at all to objectively measure "the worth of a person"; ergo, no person can be objectively argued to be more worthy of treatment than any other, on any grounds.
Nonetheless, treatment requires expensive resources and many highly-trained specialists, and you can't expect anyone to produce those resources or spend decades training and practicing in those specialized fields without compensation. There are really only two major options for providing that funding: voluntary exchange (including donations); or stealing from the "rich" to treat the poor. The latter is merely theft in the service of your own preferred ends; the supposed nobility of your goal is subjective, and ultimately irrelevant.
This is a most excellent goal, but the means by which you carry it out are of paramount importance. One cannot achieve a peaceful purpose through violent methods, at least not without side effects worse than the original problem. Employ persuasion rather than force and you'll get no opposition from me.
In fact the current system isn't all that bad. A hospital will rarely reject someone for inability to pay; and rather than a direct handout, if the treatment is not covered by donations the recipient(s) will generally be extended a loan, which they are expected to repay over time. There are some rough spots, such as the bundling of employment and health insurance, and the way this (combined with various government health insurance programs) drives up the cost of health care, but overall the system does work.
Sources? I'm a "modern office worker", and I know I only spend a few (2 to 2.5) hours a week earning money for food. That's 6.25% of my working hours (assuming a 40-hour week), and just 2.23% of my waking hours (taking a "day" as 16 hours, with eight hours for sleep). Even at minimum wage -- less than a typical office worker can expect to get -- the cost of essential food should only be about 20% (1/5) of waking hours. Also, a lot more emphasis is placed on attributes -- preservation, individual taste preferences, variety -- which are mostly unavailable in those hunter-gatherer societies at any price.
And, even more so, the courage to do what is right under threat of legal retaliation, because the right thing has been made illegal; or to exercise those natural rights which are not enshrined in law and/or upheld by the courts in the face of legal and social intimidation.
The mere fact that you don't like the conclusions of the argument when applied to schools doesn't make the argument invalid. One shouldn't have to pay to subsidize other peoples' music downloads, and one shouldn't have to pay to subsidize other peoples' kids' educations, either.
You could break their distribution monopoly (i.e. copyright) a whole lot faster by simple revoking it.
Perhaps you should examine the text more closely. The entire part I quoted is a single section, without any internal semicolons. The tax and general welfare clauses are separated only by a comma, and thus describe a single power, whereas the taxation and money-borrowing clauses are separated by a semicolon, making them separate powers as you stated.
The "general welfare" clause gives the reason why Congress is permitted under the Constitution to "collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises." In other words, the paragraph as a whole merely says Congress can collect taxes; it doesn't grant Congress the power to spend those taxes on anything in particular. Rather, the following paragraphs state exactly what Congress can do, and none of them mention research for its own sake.
If someone in the company files a lawsuit in bad faith, or deceives another into doing so, he or she is already liable and no additional punishment is required beyond that already imposed. If others knowingly participate they form a conspiracy, for which they are also already liable. Limited liability basically only applies to one's creditors; it doesn't protect anyone from liability for their own actions, including the filing of groundless lawsuits. To the extent any of your proposed consequences can be justly imposed, they are already in place.
Most of a company's value has nothing to do with its salable assets, and an auction is hardly the way to get the best price even for those. If the company is auctioned off the shareholders will definitely take a major loss. (If they could've made a profit by auctioning off the company's assets they would already have done so.)
Reading comprehension "FTW". The CEO is the one making the statement; the fines are on the corporate officers, not the CEO.
Sorry, but the CEO doesn't own the company (the shareholders do) and doesn't have the authority to unilaterally give it way or dissolve its charter. Neither can the CEO levy fines on anyone, any more than you could. He/she could reduce or eliminate their future salary or wages, but then they'd just quit and go somewhere else.
Anyway, your proposal would be truly unfair to those who didn't have anything to do with supporting the decision to file the lawsuit, or who did support it, but in good faith. For the rest the existing penalties are, IMHO, more than sufficient.
In case you're new at this: a torrent file can contain more than one file, organized unto subdirectories. There's no need for any encapsulation.
What makes even less sense, though, is where a single large (compressed) file is split into a bunch of .RAR files and then all the .RAR files are repackaged into a single torrent. The resulting torrent is no smaller or resistant to corruption, and requires external tools that most people don't have to reassemble.)
I was merely trying to say that both sides have plenty of support at this time. If you want my personal opinion, I would say that life and humanity begin at conception, and that abortion is murder, but that the only ones with the right to avenge a murder is the murdered person and/or its appointed representative or guardian, in this case the mother. Since abortion is performed at the request of the one who would otherwise be the child's representative I consider abortion to be legally similar to suicide (particularly assisted suicide) and devoid of any justified coercive response from outsiders.
Roe vs. Wade cast abortion as a matter of privacy, not a question of whether the unborn fetus has the same rights as a child, which to me makes no sense at all. I don't uphold any right to privacy, just the right not to tell people things if you don't wish to, which completely undermines the foundation the decision was built upon.
The parent is an obvious troll, but since the moderators are apparently taking a vacation...
Public schools are clearly a state issue, not a matter for the federal government. Personally, I'm against compulsory attendance, much less compulsory participation in activities with religious overtones such as you describe, but this is not something a U.S. President has any actual authority over. Talk to your state government if you're so upset.
You are drastically over-simplifying the issue. There are two issues here: (a) there are at least two people involved in an abortion, the mother and the child, and there remains significant debate over whether the mother's right to control her body should trump the child's right to live. I'm not going to state my position one way or the other, but Ron Paul is hardly the only pro-life/anti-abortion candidate.
To the best of my knowledge Ron Paul does not support a ban on stem-cell research, only on government funding of such research, which he (correctly) points out is not something the federal government is permitted to do under the Constitution. This applies to many research areas, not just stem cells, but since that's a hot topic it's all you hear about.
Here you're grasping at straws. Point out a real-world case of provider-specific throttling sufficient to justify effectively nationalizing the Internet infrastructure and someone might just care, although it probably won't be me.
You are (intentionally?) misinterpreting the point of my comment.
An unfettered, unregulated, coercion-free market represents the best possible use of all information available. Each individual is the one and only expert with regards to his or her own situation; no one else is ever in a position to make an informed decision within that domain. No individual or group of individuals can objectively argue that their proposed use of someone else's person or property is more rational than the use chosen by the owner, because the question of rationality itself depends on the subjective goals of the owner.
On the contrary, the free market is the only system capable of dealing with imperfectly informed and occasionally irrational people in an optimal manner. Other economic systems can more perfectly reflect the desires of an individual or a small, cohesive group, but only the free market properly reflects the manifold desires of all of society in proportion to their individual contributions.
That sounds nice and all, with lots of emotional impact, but what does it really mean? No economic system has "heart" or "consideration for humanity," so why single out capitalism? Only people have those attributes, expressed through their actions, and a capitalistic system provides people with extravagant opportunities to express those aspects of humanity out of their own savings. The alternative you propose is selfishness under the guise of charity: to insist that others' goals are contemptible compared to your own; to wrest from them what they have produced of their own efforts and direct it toward your pet ends. This is the attitude of a thief, not a philanthropist. It's easy to be "charitable" when others bear the costs.
More precisely, all economic systems have to deal with scarcity, which is a property of the physical universe and not something you can correct with a different kind of economy. Capitalism -- or more precisely, and unfettered free market -- provides an optimum allocation of scarce resources based on all available information. This is not to say that the allocation is perfect (since no real-world system could achieve that) but rather that it takes into account all known information; any other system is based on less accurate and/or less complete information and thus results in a less optimum allocation.
The only way to make a free market more efficient is to get people to make more rational economic decisions; irrational decisions waste resources on less urgently desired goods when more urgently desired goods could be produced instead. Unfortunately, the Third World is a major source of anti-capitalistic thinking, and as a consequence their economic decisions have an unusually large measure of irrationality.
Which is to be expected. Anyone who actually supports individual freedom is sure to be popular among the unpopular and oppressed minority groups; they have the most interest at stake in protecting basic rights like free speech. Those who only hold and/or express popular opinions don't require such protection.
You're assuming the systems are symmetric. It's more likely that the official licensees will have a far stronger transmitters than the ones in wireless microphones. The microphones won't interfere significantly with the licensees, but any licensee operating in that part of the spectrum will probably drown out wireless microphones over a fairly large area. Moreover, transmitters based on the "white space" detection that's been discussed recently would probably fail to detect such low-power signals and transmit right over them.
That's a good start, but personally I'd make it slightly more complicated in the interest of avoiding surprise service outages and/or overage charges.
First, your flat fee includes a low guaranteed minimum bandwidth, plus some burst capability. E.g. you always have at least 48kbps (no contention), and if you don't use it more than e.g. 20% of the time you can get 5x burst rates, suitable for responsive basic web browsing and e-mail. This way each subscriber can choose the contention ratio they want for their own link, and everyone gets the same average baseline rate.
If you want to temporarily increase the speed of the link you pre-pay into a holding account. Through some standard, open protocol you discover the available speeds and current prices ($/GB) and choose a transfer speed. When your prepayment runs out, or you cancel the higher speed, the link returns to the baseline.
The basic parameters would be fairly easy to describe and compare:
A low-bandwidth user -- e-mail, IM, basic web browsing -- would be interested mainly in the base price and baseline burst rate, which is no different than the current system. A higher-bandwidth user, who is in any event more likely to understand the implications of the transfer rates and pricing, would also consider the bulk data rates and peak times.
If it's undetectable to the ear it ought to be removed during compression. Acoustic compression codecs like MP3 or Vorbis are designed to remove anything that can't be heard; an ideal compression pass would strip out such watermarks without even trying, just to save space.
Whether or not what they do is "evil" (a purely subjective term), if they aren't violating the rights of others -- i.e. doing something that is rightfully illegal -- then there's no justification for violating their rights in turn. Actions taken on behalf of hundreds or thousands of shareholders are in this way no different from actions taken by any individual.
I would not agree that locking someone up in a mental institution is a reasonable or justifiable response to a physical assault such as biting. A "mental health facility" can be a wonderful tool, but only when the patient chooses to employ it. To arbitrarily label someone "insane" and force them to enter such an institution for the purpose of remaking them into someone more suitable to yourself is to treat a human being as if it were merely a misbehaving performing animal, incapable of self-determination. A far more humane response would be to allow the offender to choose whether the assault is to be considered an accident or a deliberate action, the former being represented by checking himself into such a facility and the latter carrying all the normal penalties of an intentional assault.
Anyway, the whole argument is irrelevant here because the owners of the corporation, while often irresponsible, are clearly not insane. If in the course of seeking profits they cause harm to someone else, then they must make good the damage caused just as any individual would in the same circumstances; in no event does the mere fear of future harm justify the removal of present rights.
To permit someone the freedom to do what they want only so long as it coincides with what you want is no less totalitarian than micro-managing their life all the time. It's merely less obvious.
Anyway, when the market refuses to solve a perceived problem it's usually because the "solution" is even worse. Any problem that can be solved without making the situation worse will be solved without any need for outside regulation.
You're correct in that only real people have rights. The question is whether a potential employee has the right to force the owners of the corporation -- other real people, not a mere legal abstraction -- to hire it, which is in no relevant way any different than questioning whether it's right for a retailer to force you to buy from it against your will. The "rights of corporations" are merely a proxy, a convenient shorthand, for the collective rights of the corporation's owners. To say that "[t]he rights of people ought to trump the rights of corporations" is to say, equivalently, that the rights of one group of people (the employees) ought to trump the rights of a different group of people (the owners). You thus undermine a most fundamental principle of any free society: equality under the law.