What made the Liberty coins illegal was that they had too close a resemblance to actual US currency...
Have you ever actually seen a Liberty Dollar? Among other things, they're (a) made of silver, unlike any current US coin; (b) much larger than any current US coin; (c) printed with a different design; (d) labeled with a different motto; (e) have "libertydollar.org" on the back; etc. In short, they are nothing like any current US currency. Here's a picture, in case you don't believe me: Liberty Dollar.
...and were being advertised in ways that might lead people to believe they were legal tender.
There was some trouble with individual Liberty Dollars users not specifically stating that they were paying with real money, as opposed to legal tender, but to the best of my knowledge the organization itself never advertised Liberty Dollars as legal tender, and in fact went out of its way to point out the difference and advise its customers not to label it as such. What would be the point, after all, of taking valuable silver coins and passing them off as worthless legal tender?
For long-running, non-interactive applications, sure. As you say, in terms of raw performance Java is only 2-3 times slower than C++, which still makes it faster than CLR or most scripting languages. However, in the areas of start-up time and GUI performance Java's reputation for poor performance is well-deserved. This may not impact its usefulness for servers, but it makes all the difference in the world when it comes to desktop applications.
Then how do you determine what application needs real time and what application doesn't to provide higher quality packets?
Simple: you don't. The ISP shouldn't care about the applications, just the data. Instead, you allocate each customer N bytes of real-time data per day (or per peak/off-peak period) at a maximum rate of X KB/s. Any application can request real-time priority, subject to overrides configured in the router, but once either the short-term rate or the long-term cap is used up the overflow gets bumped down to normal priority.
Since real-time bandwidth is strictly limited it wouldn't benefit bulk-data applications, which don't care about latency or jitter. For example, if a P2P client application were to request real-time priority it would only get a bit less jitter and latency for, say, the first 10 KB/s worth of packets; the remaining 100 KB/s would be over the limit and thus left at normal priority. The practice would be self-limiting as users would not choose clients which exhaust their real-time allocation and interfere with VoIP calls for—at best—marginally higher throughput.
I realize people *should* be paid in proportion to their ability and work ethic, but that's not how the real world works.
Whatever gave you that idea? People "should" be paid according to their productivity. Ability and work-ethic are irrelevant unless others want what you're producing and are willing to pay for it.
It's better than the alternative. The process of voting legitimizes the outcome; you're never going to change anything by fighting over which of the pre-selected candidates—neither of which really represents you—should be in charge for the next four years. It doesn't matter who wins the election; you still lose.
The only way out is to de-legitimize the system itself, and the only way to do that is to ignore the ballot entirely. Stop caring about who wins; one politician is just as criminal as the next. Ignore their farcical debates and endless speeches. Stop following their orders. Put an end to the influence which politics holds over your life.
If IT workers do tend more toward libertarian/anarcho-capitalist viewpoints (which I'd like to believe) then the lack of barriers to entry, and correspondingly lower salaries, result from their dedicated adherence to their principles, not incompetence or inability to organize.
You could, but the closer you get to paying "benefits" based on how much the individual has payed in the less point there is in having the system in the first place. Better to just let each individual manage their own resources.
Besides, one of the more controversial aspects of mass immigration is the possibility of sudden shifts in political preferences among the newly-eligible voters. One way to minimize the impact of such shifts is to the scope of government, thus guaranteeing a greater level of self-determination. If a particular group wants to work together to provide "socialized" services they are free to do so; they just can't force anyone to support them.
The government is hardly "shipping in the foreigners". Their normal involvement consists of forcibly keeping said foreigners out, which works directly against the market economy by maintaining artificially high prices for labor. On occasion, when they deign to notice a shortage of certain skills, they reduce their interference in the market economy and graciously permit a few more well-qualified foreigners to immigrate.
I'd be the first to admit that their policy as a whole favors certain influential individuals—e.g. shareholders of large corporations—over others, but the solution to that inequality consistent with our market economy is not to further block immigration by refusing H1-Bs, but rather to remove the requirement for H1-Bs entirely, permitting free and open immigration. Naturally this would require that the current welfare system to be significantly reduced in scope, if not eliminated entirely; otherwise the existing citizens would be forced to subsidize the new immigrants' "benefits", a most unjust circumstance. Any nation with open borders, as ours was intended to be, must insist that individuals pay their own way (not counting private, voluntary support, e.g. charity).
Quite a bit, actually. Gold has industrial and medical uses, both as a raw component and as a catalyst, not to mention its suitability for artistic endeavors, e.g. jewelry. It has a unique combination of useful material properties: extremely malleable, highly conductive, non-reactive, plus a low melting-point (for a metal). Gold wasn't chosen arbitrarily; it's value as a currency is a consequence of its enduring value as a commodity trade-good, along with its easy divisibility and resistance to rust/decay. As with any currency, of course, its present value owes both to its direct uses and the demand resulting from marketability.
Can i get energy out of gold?
Yes, actually. As with any metal you can combine it with an electrolytic solution and any other metal to construct a battery. Gold-based batteries should produce a decent voltage, although they're not very efficient economically due to the cost of the gold.
What can you grow on gold? How do you eat gold?
What can you grow on iron, coal, oil, or most other valuable (and inedible) commodities? Food, though necessary, is not the only good worth having.
Sure "we" can. There are lots of different individuals here, with plenty of room for differing opinions.
You're committing the fallacy of assuming that the existence of an apparent consensus at one point in time (among those being modded up) implies that everyone participating in this forum must share that consensus. In practice the consensus can and does change radically over time without any individual poster trying to "have it both ways".
Why would that be? You can block a/64 just as easily as a single IP address. Sure, each end-user may have 2**64 separate addresses, but they'll all be within the same subnet. If a particular host is misbehaving you can just block their entire/64.
In fact, the lack of ubiquitous NAT should make it easier to block individual hosts without affecting non-offending customers of the same ISP.
If he was paying the full cost to install the lines, why didn't he arrange to own them afterward, and thus have control over who could use them? Simple lack of foresight? Regulations prohibiting private ownership? Lack of bargaining power?
Or was he perhaps not paying the full cost for the use of the land the lines were run over, in which case the electric company was partially subsidizing the cost of his power lines?
The problem with positive rights is that they cannot be guaranteed except at the expense of other rights. Commodities and services are not superabundant abstract goods in the manner of negative rights; someone has to provide them. More specifically, to the extent that you rely on their status as "rights", someone must be forced to provide them, thus violating their right to self-determination—which includes both self-ownership and ownership of property. For this reason the positive-rights aspects of the so-called Universal Declaration of Human Rights carry very little weight within the United States, where the right to self-determination is considered far more fundamental.
From another point-of-view, in a relatively wealthy society it's easy enough (though thoroughly immoral, IMHO) to wave your hands and declare "let everyone have broadband", and dismiss the consequences as only impacting those richer than yourself. However, even if you're willing to violate equality under the law in this manner, your "rights" can only exist so long as the wealth holds out. What will you do when everyone has been brought down to the same level, and there are no more "rich" for you to leach from?
The right doesn't mean you will get it, it means you will be able to get it.
Not quite. It doesn't mean you will be able to get it—the government isn't required to sell you a gun even if no one else will. Rather, it means that the government can't interfere with your right to make/acquire, possess, and use weapons per se. They are permitted to interfere with attempts to harm other citizens, of course, but that is entirely independent of the weapon(s) used (if any). Similarly, the right to free speech doesn't mean they are obligated to provide you with a forum, but rather that they can't prevent you from speaking (again, per se), or punish you for it after the fact.
An analogous "right to broadband" would change little, as there are currently no laws prohibiting the provision of broadband. It would invalidate actual monopolies granted by law, if there are any, but would not automatically provide new would-be ISPs with permission to run lines through others' property (right-of-way), which is where most state- and local-level exclusivity agreements originate.
There is no more "right to free infrastructure" than there is a "right to free service". If you want some company to run power, water, sewer, or communication lines to you, be prepared to make it worth their while.
Why should I have to pay for your disability welfare?
That's a very good question. Why should you have to pay for others' disability welfare, particularly when that disability is the result of voluntary action on their part? I certainly can't think of any good reason. Why don't you take that up with those who are actually forcing you to pay—the politicians and the voters who empower them. The GP hasn't imposed any burden on you as of yet, and quite possibly never will.
That's true, though the "ran off with all its assets" part would be unlikely to endear him to the other shareholders. Either way, the new board has a right to investigate such things before making their decision. By prohibiting such investigation, as the GGP advocated, one would essentially be externalizing the risk which accompanies the goal of making society less sensitive to past misdeeds.
IMHO just as thre's a 7-year stature of limitations on law, so too should employers have a limitation on how far back they can dig. Anything that predates this decade should be irrelevant.
So when a board of directors is reviewing the candidates for their new CEO, they should just ignore the fact that eight years ago one candidate drove his company into the ground and ran off with all its assets, while another has a spotless record? Face it, history matters. Actual reform and rehabilitation should be considered, but you don't get a free pass just because it's been a few years since your last incident. If you want to take a chance on a candidate with questionable history that's your prerogative, but others retain the right to take that history into account.
Moreover, all else being equal, a candidate with a known history of embarrassing (or criminal) behavior should expect to lose to a candidate with a clean record. I agree that society should be less sensitive to such things, but it is not unreasonable for employers to prefer candidates who have shown themselves to be conscious of their public image, and thus less likely to harm the company's reputation. If you want to be hired despite your history you must be prepared to justify the heightened risk they are taking by hiring you. (If society were less sensitive then this justification would be easier to make.)
I believe the most serious challenge proposed to free-software licenses is that since the software is distributed to the public for free there can be no damages resulting from infringement. If accepted, that line of reasoning would lead to a judgment of willful copyright infringement, as you say, but without any compensation required of the infringer. This would effectively render the software public-domain (which doesn't seem like a bad thing to me, but then I have a fundamental disagreement with copyright to begin with).
If the Pythagorean Theorem required an increase in taxes people would start to doubt it. There was an interesting research paper in which conservatives were given a news article which outlined a study with evidence for humans being responsible for global warming. At the end of the article they either appended a paragraph explaining possible regulation and taxation solutions or a paragraph suggesting that we needed increased Nuclear Power to solve the problem.... Those who read that the solution was taxes were more likely to doubt the validity of the science than those conservatives who read the article with no mention of increased taxes but instead read about Nuclear power.
This is a perfectly reasonable response. Trust in the validity of the article's conclusions is not a binary, true/false solution set. When you ask people whether they doubt the validity of the science their answer must be taken in the context in which it was asked, in this case whether they trust the conclusions strongly enough to justify regulations/taxes, on the one hand, or an increase focus on nuclear power—presumably self-funded, and enabled by loosening the current anti-nuclear regulations—on the other. Naturally different proposals will require different standards of evidence, and each individual will weight the consequences of implementing the proposals differently, as is not only their right but also their responsibility.
For an abstract formula with no immediate consequences (e.g. the Pythagorean Theorem in your example) a simple balance-of-evidence standard is sufficient. The question of nuclear power, on the other hand, comes down to balancing risk; you have to show that the risk of climate change is worse than the risk of nuclear proliferation or meltdowns or whatever else keeps them from authorizing new plants. For that you need to meet a higher standard of evidence; 50.001% likelihood just won't do. Finally, to even begin to justify an aggressive response in the form of regulations and/or taxes, you need to show that your projected harm due to climate change is accurate beyond reasonable doubt. If you present your article on climate change and follow it up with a proposal for an aggressive response, of course your readers will be more likely to doubt your conclusions, as they're holding them to a higher standard of evidence than they would if they were merely being asked to evaluate the claims in the abstract.
BTW, is the quote in the.sig yours? I need to know who to quote.:)
No, I just copied it from another comment's.sig. A quick search on Google suggests that the original version was:
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I’ll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems — Jamie Zawinski
I usually try to include a citation, but in many cases (like here) there isn't enough room in the.sig area.
P.S. To the anonymous coward who posted "No, it was written by the man who singlehandedly fought off invading armies and built all the roads in the country": lack of government does not imply a lack of cooperation, but merely the absence of legitimized aggression. It's not like the government—being nothing more than a group of individuals itself—is more capable of these things than any other group of individuals cooperating voluntarily. Government's only advantage is that it gets an irrational free pass on actions which would otherwise be considered crimes.
Why not try this Firefox extension: RefControl. You can set it to block the referer (equivalent to copying & pasting the URL) or, even better, set it to the URL you're visiting, which gets around attempts to block direct links. This is, as one of the commenters put it, "One of the essential addons for Firefox. "
People who are paying close attention to the economic crisis must realize by now that the market is based on the mood of the traders...more specifically, that selling is better than buying at the moment.
This is a very common view, but the fact is that if you actually knew that the current state of the market is driven by nothing more than traders' emotions—as opposed to a reasonable projection of future price changes to the best of everyone's current combined knowledge—you would stand to make a fortune. If the traders are selling then that means they think prices are going to fall; if you think they're wrong, buy up the shares they're selling and retire early on the money you'll make when the prices go up instead.
Or perhaps you just have cause and effect reversed, and traders are in the mood to sell because prices really are likely to fall.
Certainly they can ask, and nothing prevents the theater owners from calling the police and requesting that they arrest someone with or without just cause, but only some hypothetical jurisdiction with the most messed-up and immoral laws imaginable would allow someone to actually be arrested, or have their property confiscated, over a matter of possible copyright infringement without so much as a court order.
P.S. That a request is "simple" is no reason for it to have the force of law.
3) ask people who are recording to delete the recording
That's going a bit too far. You can bar them from the facilities, but you have no legal basis to confiscate their recording equipment or to demand that they delete the recording. (You can ask, but they don't have to comply.) If the recording really was copyright infringement, which is highly unlikely, then the copyright owner—not the theater manager—can sue after the fact to recover any "damages" (unfortunately).
Slashdot Mirror
What made the Liberty coins illegal was that they had too close a resemblance to actual US currency...
Have you ever actually seen a Liberty Dollar? Among other things, they're (a) made of silver, unlike any current US coin; (b) much larger than any current US coin; (c) printed with a different design; (d) labeled with a different motto; (e) have "libertydollar.org" on the back; etc. In short, they are nothing like any current US currency. Here's a picture, in case you don't believe me: Liberty Dollar.
...and were being advertised in ways that might lead people to believe they were legal tender.
There was some trouble with individual Liberty Dollars users not specifically stating that they were paying with real money, as opposed to legal tender, but to the best of my knowledge the organization itself never advertised Liberty Dollars as legal tender, and in fact went out of its way to point out the difference and advise its customers not to label it as such. What would be the point, after all, of taking valuable silver coins and passing them off as worthless legal tender?
For long-running, non-interactive applications, sure. As you say, in terms of raw performance Java is only 2-3 times slower than C++, which still makes it faster than CLR or most scripting languages. However, in the areas of start-up time and GUI performance Java's reputation for poor performance is well-deserved. This may not impact its usefulness for servers, but it makes all the difference in the world when it comes to desktop applications.
Then how do you determine what application needs real time and what application doesn't to provide higher quality packets?
Simple: you don't. The ISP shouldn't care about the applications, just the data. Instead, you allocate each customer N bytes of real-time data per day (or per peak/off-peak period) at a maximum rate of X KB/s. Any application can request real-time priority, subject to overrides configured in the router, but once either the short-term rate or the long-term cap is used up the overflow gets bumped down to normal priority.
Since real-time bandwidth is strictly limited it wouldn't benefit bulk-data applications, which don't care about latency or jitter. For example, if a P2P client application were to request real-time priority it would only get a bit less jitter and latency for, say, the first 10 KB/s worth of packets; the remaining 100 KB/s would be over the limit and thus left at normal priority. The practice would be self-limiting as users would not choose clients which exhaust their real-time allocation and interfere with VoIP calls for—at best—marginally higher throughput.
I realize people *should* be paid in proportion to their ability and work ethic, but that's not how the real world works.
Whatever gave you that idea? People "should" be paid according to their productivity. Ability and work-ethic are irrelevant unless others want what you're producing and are willing to pay for it.
It's better than the alternative. The process of voting legitimizes the outcome; you're never going to change anything by fighting over which of the pre-selected candidates—neither of which really represents you—should be in charge for the next four years. It doesn't matter who wins the election; you still lose.
The only way out is to de-legitimize the system itself, and the only way to do that is to ignore the ballot entirely. Stop caring about who wins; one politician is just as criminal as the next. Ignore their farcical debates and endless speeches. Stop following their orders. Put an end to the influence which politics holds over your life.
If IT workers do tend more toward libertarian/anarcho-capitalist viewpoints (which I'd like to believe) then the lack of barriers to entry, and correspondingly lower salaries, result from their dedicated adherence to their principles, not incompetence or inability to organize.
You could, but the closer you get to paying "benefits" based on how much the individual has payed in the less point there is in having the system in the first place. Better to just let each individual manage their own resources.
Besides, one of the more controversial aspects of mass immigration is the possibility of sudden shifts in political preferences among the newly-eligible voters. One way to minimize the impact of such shifts is to the scope of government, thus guaranteeing a greater level of self-determination. If a particular group wants to work together to provide "socialized" services they are free to do so; they just can't force anyone to support them.
The government is hardly "shipping in the foreigners". Their normal involvement consists of forcibly keeping said foreigners out, which works directly against the market economy by maintaining artificially high prices for labor. On occasion, when they deign to notice a shortage of certain skills, they reduce their interference in the market economy and graciously permit a few more well-qualified foreigners to immigrate.
I'd be the first to admit that their policy as a whole favors certain influential individuals—e.g. shareholders of large corporations—over others, but the solution to that inequality consistent with our market economy is not to further block immigration by refusing H1-Bs, but rather to remove the requirement for H1-Bs entirely, permitting free and open immigration. Naturally this would require that the current welfare system to be significantly reduced in scope, if not eliminated entirely; otherwise the existing citizens would be forced to subsidize the new immigrants' "benefits", a most unjust circumstance. Any nation with open borders, as ours was intended to be, must insist that individuals pay their own way (not counting private, voluntary support, e.g. charity).
But what can you make out of gold?
Quite a bit, actually. Gold has industrial and medical uses, both as a raw component and as a catalyst, not to mention its suitability for artistic endeavors, e.g. jewelry. It has a unique combination of useful material properties: extremely malleable, highly conductive, non-reactive, plus a low melting-point (for a metal). Gold wasn't chosen arbitrarily; it's value as a currency is a consequence of its enduring value as a commodity trade-good, along with its easy divisibility and resistance to rust/decay. As with any currency, of course, its present value owes both to its direct uses and the demand resulting from marketability.
Can i get energy out of gold?
Yes, actually. As with any metal you can combine it with an electrolytic solution and any other metal to construct a battery. Gold-based batteries should produce a decent voltage, although they're not very efficient economically due to the cost of the gold.
What can you grow on gold? How do you eat gold?
What can you grow on iron, coal, oil, or most other valuable (and inedible) commodities? Food, though necessary, is not the only good worth having.
We can't have it both ways.
Sure "we" can. There are lots of different individuals here, with plenty of room for differing opinions.
You're committing the fallacy of assuming that the existence of an apparent consensus at one point in time (among those being modded up) implies that everyone participating in this forum must share that consensus. In practice the consensus can and does change radically over time without any individual poster trying to "have it both ways".
Why would that be? You can block a /64 just as easily as a single IP address. Sure, each end-user may have 2**64 separate addresses, but they'll all be within the same subnet. If a particular host is misbehaving you can just block their entire /64.
In fact, the lack of ubiquitous NAT should make it easier to block individual hosts without affecting non-offending customers of the same ISP.
If he was paying the full cost to install the lines, why didn't he arrange to own them afterward, and thus have control over who could use them? Simple lack of foresight? Regulations prohibiting private ownership? Lack of bargaining power?
Or was he perhaps not paying the full cost for the use of the land the lines were run over, in which case the electric company was partially subsidizing the cost of his power lines?
The problem with positive rights is that they cannot be guaranteed except at the expense of other rights. Commodities and services are not superabundant abstract goods in the manner of negative rights; someone has to provide them. More specifically, to the extent that you rely on their status as "rights", someone must be forced to provide them, thus violating their right to self-determination—which includes both self-ownership and ownership of property. For this reason the positive-rights aspects of the so-called Universal Declaration of Human Rights carry very little weight within the United States, where the right to self-determination is considered far more fundamental.
From another point-of-view, in a relatively wealthy society it's easy enough (though thoroughly immoral, IMHO) to wave your hands and declare "let everyone have broadband", and dismiss the consequences as only impacting those richer than yourself. However, even if you're willing to violate equality under the law in this manner, your "rights" can only exist so long as the wealth holds out. What will you do when everyone has been brought down to the same level, and there are no more "rich" for you to leach from?
The right doesn't mean you will get it, it means you will be able to get it.
Not quite. It doesn't mean you will be able to get it—the government isn't required to sell you a gun even if no one else will. Rather, it means that the government can't interfere with your right to make/acquire, possess, and use weapons per se. They are permitted to interfere with attempts to harm other citizens, of course, but that is entirely independent of the weapon(s) used (if any). Similarly, the right to free speech doesn't mean they are obligated to provide you with a forum, but rather that they can't prevent you from speaking (again, per se), or punish you for it after the fact.
An analogous "right to broadband" would change little, as there are currently no laws prohibiting the provision of broadband. It would invalidate actual monopolies granted by law, if there are any, but would not automatically provide new would-be ISPs with permission to run lines through others' property (right-of-way), which is where most state- and local-level exclusivity agreements originate.
There is no more "right to free infrastructure" than there is a "right to free service". If you want some company to run power, water, sewer, or communication lines to you, be prepared to make it worth their while.
Why should I have to pay for your disability welfare?
That's a very good question. Why should you have to pay for others' disability welfare, particularly when that disability is the result of voluntary action on their part? I certainly can't think of any good reason. Why don't you take that up with those who are actually forcing you to pay—the politicians and the voters who empower them. The GP hasn't imposed any burden on you as of yet, and quite possibly never will.
That's true, though the "ran off with all its assets" part would be unlikely to endear him to the other shareholders. Either way, the new board has a right to investigate such things before making their decision. By prohibiting such investigation, as the GGP advocated, one would essentially be externalizing the risk which accompanies the goal of making society less sensitive to past misdeeds.
IMHO just as thre's a 7-year stature of limitations on law, so too should employers have a limitation on how far back they can dig. Anything that predates this decade should be irrelevant.
So when a board of directors is reviewing the candidates for their new CEO, they should just ignore the fact that eight years ago one candidate drove his company into the ground and ran off with all its assets, while another has a spotless record? Face it, history matters. Actual reform and rehabilitation should be considered, but you don't get a free pass just because it's been a few years since your last incident. If you want to take a chance on a candidate with questionable history that's your prerogative, but others retain the right to take that history into account.
Moreover, all else being equal, a candidate with a known history of embarrassing (or criminal) behavior should expect to lose to a candidate with a clean record. I agree that society should be less sensitive to such things, but it is not unreasonable for employers to prefer candidates who have shown themselves to be conscious of their public image, and thus less likely to harm the company's reputation. If you want to be hired despite your history you must be prepared to justify the heightened risk they are taking by hiring you. (If society were less sensitive then this justification would be easier to make.)
I believe the most serious challenge proposed to free-software licenses is that since the software is distributed to the public for free there can be no damages resulting from infringement. If accepted, that line of reasoning would lead to a judgment of willful copyright infringement, as you say, but without any compensation required of the infringer. This would effectively render the software public-domain (which doesn't seem like a bad thing to me, but then I have a fundamental disagreement with copyright to begin with).
If the Pythagorean Theorem required an increase in taxes people would start to doubt it. There was an interesting research paper in which conservatives were given a news article which outlined a study with evidence for humans being responsible for global warming. At the end of the article they either appended a paragraph explaining possible regulation and taxation solutions or a paragraph suggesting that we needed increased Nuclear Power to solve the problem.... Those who read that the solution was taxes were more likely to doubt the validity of the science than those conservatives who read the article with no mention of increased taxes but instead read about Nuclear power.
This is a perfectly reasonable response. Trust in the validity of the article's conclusions is not a binary, true/false solution set. When you ask people whether they doubt the validity of the science their answer must be taken in the context in which it was asked, in this case whether they trust the conclusions strongly enough to justify regulations/taxes, on the one hand, or an increase focus on nuclear power—presumably self-funded, and enabled by loosening the current anti-nuclear regulations—on the other. Naturally different proposals will require different standards of evidence, and each individual will weight the consequences of implementing the proposals differently, as is not only their right but also their responsibility.
For an abstract formula with no immediate consequences (e.g. the Pythagorean Theorem in your example) a simple balance-of-evidence standard is sufficient. The question of nuclear power, on the other hand, comes down to balancing risk; you have to show that the risk of climate change is worse than the risk of nuclear proliferation or meltdowns or whatever else keeps them from authorizing new plants. For that you need to meet a higher standard of evidence; 50.001% likelihood just won't do. Finally, to even begin to justify an aggressive response in the form of regulations and/or taxes, you need to show that your projected harm due to climate change is accurate beyond reasonable doubt. If you present your article on climate change and follow it up with a proposal for an aggressive response, of course your readers will be more likely to doubt your conclusions, as they're holding them to a higher standard of evidence than they would if they were merely being asked to evaluate the claims in the abstract.
BTW, is the quote in the .sig yours? I need to know who to quote. :)
No, I just copied it from another comment's .sig. A quick search on Google suggests that the original version was:
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I’ll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems — Jamie Zawinski
I usually try to include a citation, but in many cases (like here) there isn't enough room in the .sig area.
P.S. To the anonymous coward who posted "No, it was written by the man who singlehandedly fought off invading armies and built all the roads in the country": lack of government does not imply a lack of cooperation, but merely the absence of legitimized aggression. It's not like the government—being nothing more than a group of individuals itself—is more capable of these things than any other group of individuals cooperating voluntarily. Government's only advantage is that it gets an irrational free pass on actions which would otherwise be considered crimes.
Why not try this Firefox extension: RefControl. You can set it to block the referer (equivalent to copying & pasting the URL) or, even better, set it to the URL you're visiting, which gets around attempts to block direct links. This is, as one of the commenters put it, "One of the essential addons for Firefox. "
People who are paying close attention to the economic crisis must realize by now that the market is based on the mood of the traders...more specifically, that selling is better than buying at the moment.
This is a very common view, but the fact is that if you actually knew that the current state of the market is driven by nothing more than traders' emotions—as opposed to a reasonable projection of future price changes to the best of everyone's current combined knowledge—you would stand to make a fortune. If the traders are selling then that means they think prices are going to fall; if you think they're wrong, buy up the shares they're selling and retire early on the money you'll make when the prices go up instead.
Or perhaps you just have cause and effect reversed, and traders are in the mood to sell because prices really are likely to fall.
[Citation needed]
Certainly they can ask, and nothing prevents the theater owners from calling the police and requesting that they arrest someone with or without just cause, but only some hypothetical jurisdiction with the most messed-up and immoral laws imaginable would allow someone to actually be arrested, or have their property confiscated, over a matter of possible copyright infringement without so much as a court order.
P.S. That a request is "simple" is no reason for it to have the force of law.
3) ask people who are recording to delete the recording
That's going a bit too far. You can bar them from the facilities, but you have no legal basis to confiscate their recording equipment or to demand that they delete the recording. (You can ask, but they don't have to comply.) If the recording really was copyright infringement, which is highly unlikely, then the copyright owner—not the theater manager—can sue after the fact to recover any "damages" (unfortunately).