Actually, all Rights belong to the people, except for those Powers we have delegated to the government.
That is true--though it seems to mean very little these days--but we have granted powers over copyright to Congress as you show later on in your post by quoting the relevant power grant. This is Congress' authority and the only ability we the people have to take it away now is to elect a Congress who will amend the Constitution to remove it from themselves. A slightly less optimal but probably easier solution would be to elect a Congress that treats copyright in the manner we wish. Unfortunately neither are likely to happen.
That can only be done by the consent of the People.
Again, this may be true in a strict sense but has little practical application. I think what you're getting at is power being derived from the consent of the governed, which the Founders saw fit to write down, I believe for the first time in history, when they penned, "We the People."
That said, to state that --
If we decide that the government does not represent us [. ..] then truly Congress has overstepped its Power [. . . and] the law is not legal under the Powers granted by the Constitution, and therefore is not a law at all.
-- seems to be a bit of idealistic overreaching.
This is not, as you no doubt know, a democracy; the people do not determine laws. The Founders went to considerable lengths to keep the people as far away from deciding things as they felt they could without coming too close to dictatorship. It was a careful balancing act between redressing some of the wrongs they were experiencing and avoiding tyranny of the majority, whether in direct terms or through an uneducated populace making bad decisions.
A law is a law. In fact, if we're reading the Constitution strictly that's really all there is to it. If we're folding in case law and accepting the constitutionality of judicial review, the power to determine whether a law is in violation of the Constitution belongs to the judiciary. Technically speaking you are not forced to obey unconstitutional laws, so you're free to make your own judgment in that respect. It won't, however, stop you from going to jail or facing whatever the particular penalty may be unless and until the judiciary steps in.
I think consent of the people is a very important concept, but I also think it is pretty much implied. Every two years we elect some portion of the people who make the laws for us; they are given their powers with our consent. The assumption is that for the next two years, they pass our laws with our consent. If not, in each of those two year periods we are granted the right to a mini-revolution. We're free to throw the bums out and get people who will do what we want. Those people are also governing with our consent. (The fact that we don't throw the bums out is a sore spot with me, but not particularly relevant.)
If things get entirely out of hand, many (most?) of the Founders believed it perfectly okay for you to grab your gun and take the government back forcibly. I wouldn't recommend it, particularly in this day and age, but there it is.
So again, yes, you're right in a strict sense: Congress must have the consent of the people to govern. That doesn't mean that the consistently 20%-range approval ratings for Congress dissolve it or strip it of its powers, though; they are assumed to have our consent by virtue of being elected. More to the point, until struck down or repealed, a law is a law.
I thought you were being serious at first, right up until you suggested that people should be made to suffer to compensate you for being irrationally afraid. Now I'm honestly not sure. I hope there aren't people that stupid and panicky in the world, but history has shown otherwise so I'm going to operate on the assumption you were serious.
If I were a sex offender, do you know what these laws would make me do? Offend again. And to reduce the potential evidence against me, I would ensure I killed the person afterward and utterly destroyed the body. Sorry, victims' families; you don't even get a body.
If I am permitted to re-enter society and attempt to lead a normal life after serving my prison sentence, I have something to help me keep honest. If I'm not allowed to live anywhere, be anywhere, or even use the Internet in the Internet age, what the hell do I have to lose? Why shouldn't I do it again? I'm going to be put back in jail? Big deal, you're making the world a jail. I'm going to be executed? Big deal, I'm not being permitted to live as it is.
Yes, some people will commit the crime again; it's called recidivism and the recidivism rate among sex offenders is comparatively low. Why are we trying to push these people to not only repeat-offend, but become more violent when they do so?
You're afraid of sex offenders? I'm afraid of you and your ilk. I'm afraid of what you're doing to this country and the harm you're going to cause. I'm deathly afraid that you're doing it with an air of righteousness that all but guarantees you won't stop.
They are privileges. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that when Congress determines how copyright works, that they are under any obligation whatsoever to provide exceptions for things we now call "fair use." These were created by Congress in the copyright laws and can be changed by Congress just as easily. And if you're trying to claim that your ability to rip a CD to MP3 is somehow a moral or god-given right, well... eesh. God must have been pretty bored that day.
It IS the government's decision. Your decision is who you send to be part of the government.
Getting sensationalism out of the newsroom and into advertising where it belongs. (and eliminating any sense of personal or editorial responsibility when smearing someone's reputation).
No responsibility? You think the FBI is just going to randomly pick somebody, get a picture and biographical details about them and flash it up on a billboard? If you're on this thing it's because you're a material witness to a crime or a suspect likely with enough evidence that they're going to arrest you when they find you. They're not going to use this for petty things if for no other reason than to avoid making the public stop caring what the billboards say. In fact I would be willing to bet substantial sums of money that the people they featured will be fugitives believed to be in the area--people who were either already convicted or who have warrants out for their arrest to begin with.
Helping the government to use private billboard companies to irresponsibly violate the privacy of private citizens. Shifting the power once and for all away from non-profit-generating people.
That would be your inalienable right to not have somebody say where they saw you when you were in public?
And believe it or not, the government is not a profit-generating "person." They are, at best, a consumer. In this case, the billboards are being provided as a public service. No money involved. The people who will be featured on those billboards is decided by the FBI. How, again, are the advertising companies usurping power?
Hyping crimes out of proportion to their real risk to society and keeping the people quaking in their boots (and consuming).
Hyping crimes out of proportion? Exactly how hyped do you think these crimes are going to look mashed between advertisements for radio stations and shoes?
Keep them consuming? What the hell? How does putting a billboard up keep people consuming, even in the paranoid "ZOMG GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY OUT TO GET J00!!" crowd? Or is it that you believe they're going to be putting up pictures of people who don't have a government-approved balance on their credit cards?
I think you should take your tinfoil hat off from time to time. Something appears to be seeping into your brain--and it ain't the evil gub'mint brain control waves.
Finally getting rid of that pesky "innocent until proven guilty clause"
Oh. I didn't see in the article where you were going to be instantly shot on the spot if anybody spots your picture on the billboard. Let me read it again.
...Nope. You're just making shit up.
Punishing people who didn't give enough in campaign contributions to the party in power
Damn fugitives. Never sending their politicians any money. Sent 'em all off to Gitmo for some waterboarding, I say.
Allowing us to effectively bundle advertising, racism, and fear (maybe even in one billboard!). Imagine how many security systems, bank accounts, insurance policies, guns and KKK memberships we could sell in bundled ad campaigns!
"Turn in this fugitive, receive his identity as our free gift to you?" I kind of like it, actually.
Making us look really modern. ..pushing us from the 21st centry to 1984
Oh! Oh my god! There it is. The super-clever pun that made reading the rest of your nonsense drivel worth reading. 'Cause, you know, we don't get enough 1984 references on Slashdot. We can always use one more--bonus points for getting it out with bullet points!
I was worried that we might drop our murder rates and/or school shootings to the levels of other countries
Wow. I thought it was the evil video games corrupting our children into murderers. To think it was billboards this whole time! Jack
why load a dishwasher and then wait to get to work/a friend's to go online to tell it to turn on
My mom often loads up the dishwasher before she leaves for work. When she leaves, I am usually still in bed so she usually doesn't turn it on. The current solution is to leave a note on the fridge that says "turn on the dishwasher when you get up!" and it works pretty well, but obviously it would be more handy and reliable for her to be able to either start it remotely or, even better, set a timer that tells it to start up at some specific time.
Depending on exactly how smart we're talking, "wash when energy prices are lowest" would be handy as well.
And I just want to point out that if Congress has to subsidize receivers to force this change along, it's probably not a good idea in the first place.
That's because you think it is for the benefit of television viewers, or even broadcasters. It is not. They simply want the spectrum that these broadcasts are currently going out on back, with their relatively long wavelengths, for things like cellular service or long-range (municipal?) wireless networks.
With the way both of these services are growing, I happen to think it's a good idea for a relatively small cost.
Yes, that is pretty much what they're claiming. Or more specifically, their argument would be that the fact that you have a shared folder indicates you are meaning to share the files, and that choosing to put your songs there indicates a desire to share them. Since the RIAA doesn't break into peoples' houses and search their computers (yet!), you can be pretty sure they found this shared folder via the Internet. They (or rather MediaSentry) actually downloaded the songs too, so regardless of his intentions he DID commit copyright infringement at least at that moment, as the law would define it.
I don't think it is a step beyond claiming making available to be piracy; it seems to be the same argument. In this case they even hedged their bets by downloading the song and ensuring a case of copyright infringement if "making available is enough" didn't fly.
This just in folks! Companies want you to buy the newest version of the software, and will try to convince you it's better than your current version! WOW! Clearly this means Microsoft is in a tailspin. Cash out your stock; this one's swirling the drain.
Bah. Speaking as an avid linux user, this submission is nothing but pure, unadulterated anti-MS crap. It's certainly not newsworthy, and it's certainly not anything that matters.
Apple touting 300 new features in Leopard? Holy smokes! That's an implicit declaration that their previous OS X versions were worse! 11 of those features involve security??? Clearly that means they were getting hacked to bits, I'd better go out and buy the new version right now!
Please, people.
I remember years ago when I was 16 or so, I thought this site was so cool. The comments always seemed to have some super intelligent guy who was able to state my opinions with better facts and better presentation than I could ever hope to. I ask this seriously: Has Slashdot fallen this far, or was I just that much more naive and that much less educated back then?
I suppose it depends on how one defines "violent person."
"X makes you more violent" implies that you have some level of violence to begin with, and more after X. "X reduces your inhibition toward violence" implies you have some level of violence to begin with and an identical level after X, but may be less likely to resist.
In other words, if you want to hit somebody, are you already violent regardless of whether or not you do? Is it the act or the desire?
There's obviously some tipping point; if you're "more violent enough*," you're going to act violently in the same way as if you're "less likely to resist violence enough."
Sidetrack... as I wrote that I began to wonder if there is a difference in triggers. It seems like somebody who has more violence (however defined) would be more likely to become actually violent over things that did not deserve it, kind of like how we think of bullies and punks, where any perceived slight is grounds for inflicting pain. Is that true with a reduced inhibition to violence as well, or would it still require something we consider to be a justifiable trigger? Does it shift the goalposts of what constitutes a justifiable trigger or just make it more likely that if we see one we act violently?
* These are obviously useless terms, because they're undefinable and would likely vary person to person anyway.
Hey, cool. It must be pretty hard to spend seven paragraphs calling somebody a racist without actually saying the word.
Unfortunately you're just wrong, and the "ZOMG RACIST!!" thing is nothing but an ad hominem attack that distracts from the real issues at work.
Yeah dvorak... what a freaking odd and naive notion that is. That they may be able to achieve everything we can, only with the same tools. Yeap, "They" can't do it...
It has nothing to do with that at all. His argument is really simple: Poor here and poor in many other places in the world are vastly different groups. Yes, people starve to death in America too, but not nearly as many--numerically or proportionally--as do in Africa. For the most part, the poor have clothing here. The poor children have access to an education and a handful of government programs to provide them with at least one decent meal per day, even if that education isn't nearly the quality somebody in an affluent neighborhood in the US would get. In short, being a poor child here is a struggle against poverty while being a poor child in Africa is a struggle against dying.
Agree or disagree with the premise, but it has nothing to do with racism or any "us" versus "them" argument. He's simply arguing that the situations are different and thus the needs are different.
Personally, I think Dvorak is an ass--in this and just about everything else he writes. I think that his "you're not giving what I think they need the most, therefore your gesture is worthless!" attitude--even if he is right that food is what they need most (an issue I'm not interested in taking up right now)--is plain bullshit. I think he completely ignores the recurring problems that food aide cause with the same zealotry he accuses supporters of the OLPC of possessing, and glosses over the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps hope this project is striving for.
Maybe he's right and maybe he's wrong. Argue that all day if you wish, since that debate actually has a use. Pretending it's racism or nationalism or elitism or whatever you're eluding to with the "us against them" nonsense is counter-productive. At best.
You are the one who started the ball rolling. You are the one who made it possible.
So what?
If I have a gun in the house and somebody uses it to kill somebody, am I charged with murder? If I borrow my brother's car and accidentally leave the keys inside and somebody steals it, am I a car thief?
Or more applicable to the situation, if I sell you drugs and you sell them to 10 other people, do I get charged with 11 counts or 1?
If I make files available, I should be liable for the people who download it from me. I should absolutely NOT be liable for what anybody who got it from me does with it; that responsibility falls on them the same as it fell on me.
I imagine this sort of thing would be most useful in a situation where you weren't in 100% control of the PC but could install applications. Most notably would probably be corporate machines, where they probably wouldn't look forward to you formatting the sucker to get OSx86 working and may even prohibit you from using your own Mac for business purposes while you're there.
They're overselling by magnitudes, and of course that doesn't work out in the long run when people actually (gasp!) use what they're being sold.
So what you want is a worldwide circuit-switched network? No problem with 300 million lines (for only the people in the US, mind you) coming into your house to ensure that everybody is permitted to use what they pay for? No problemo. We're just going to need an initial investment of, eh, I don't know, let's be cheap and call it two million dollars from you and your tens of millions of neighbors. After that this service can be yours for the low, low price of $50,000 a month. This is the only way to guarantee that everybody can use their full bandwidth to any end point at any time.
Not attractive? Welcome to packet-switched networks, we're happy to have you. The entire point of them is that multiple people can use the same lines at basically the same time. Whether you like it or not, Internet traffic WAS exactly what you describe; short bursts of information. I suspect that in terms of time usage, it probably still is today--though that dynamic is certainly changing and will continue to change.
As another poster said, you're perfectly free to pay $300 a month right now for your very own dedicated bandwidth; it's called a T1 line, and they will be ecstatic to sell it to you. You'll note that a T1 is only 1.544 Mbps, though; somewhere in the vicinity of five times slower than your Comcast service is now for around five times the price. Or go for the best of both worlds and get a Frame Relay connection with a CIR. You'll probably get an even lower amount of guaranteed bandwidth, but the price will be less and they'll let you burst up to the full line speed depending on usage.
If your ability to use your full, dedicated bandwidth is so important to you, why aren't you paying for some T1s for yourself?
Yeah, it's rhetorical. It's because they're too damn expensive. There is a reason for that: The infrastructure can simply not handle everybody using their full line capacities at the same time. And it shouldn't. All that does is end up with an economically unsound and probably unsustainable system that is a cheaper version of circuit-switching everything; you've just cut out the infrastructure expense of laying more endpoints.
If that's what you want, well, okay... just be prepared to pay for it. More likely, though, you're the person who thinks $50 a month should buy you a dedicated 6Mbps line and ISPs are teh suxx0rs if they can't provide that.
Incidentally, I've been glossing over the fact that your statement was, itself, based on a fallacy: You are not paying for a dedicated connection if you're using Cable or DSL or similar services, as most people are. The fact that the advertisements say "6 megabit connections, faster than DSL!" doesn't mean that's what you're being sold. You want to know what you're being sold? Read your contract. I guarantee they will specifically disclaim any idea that 6mbps is your committed information rate, and probably even the idea that you have a CIR at all. There will be some language about terminations for high usage (though they probably won't do a good job defining what that is). Etc etc.
They are providing what they sold you. If you think you've been sold more than you have been, that's your fault. Caveat emptor.
I watched the original three movies for the first time a few weeks ago, and I had a somewhat opposite reaction.
I didn't understand what the big fuss was. The specific story was meh to me; I dislike when movies spend in this case the entirety of THREE movies setting something up ("once you go to the dark side, you can never come back") that just so happens to be untrue at the end. It's sappy and predictable and I always feel like they wasted a lot of my time. Yes, it happens in a lot of movies and yes, I dislike it. Believe it or not, I didn't know the ending of the series before I watched it. I did see it coming several miles away though. The overarching story (Empire trying to take over the universe, resistance, good versus evil) was fine.
The acting was just okay. I actually thought it was better on average in movies 1-3 than the originals. Also, the constant fucking wipes in the original three movies drove me batty. Were they just invented at that time or what? Wipes have their place, but not after every scene.
I think the allure of Star Wars must have been in what was accomplished for the time it was accomplished. I'm sure the effects were great for the time period, for example. It just seems like a lot of "everything was better in my day" to me.
That said, Episode 1 just absolutely sucked balls. When the major event in the movie is a freakin' race, there's something wrong, and I wasn't much of a fan of following around an eight year old boy for two hours. I think they could have easily condensed that period in his life without losing anything important. Jar-Jar was also ungodly annoying.
Episodes two and three weren't bad for the most part, though.
What a blatent, idiotic anti-American troll. No wonder you posted it AC.
For starters, one damn story from a group dedicated to causing precisely this kind of stir ("Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places") does not suddenly make it common.
Secondly, the response was appropriate. If you bring 80 people into a store dressed like employees, you're absolutely up to no good. In this case "no good" was trying to agitate people so they could document it and try to make fun of them on their website. It could range from that all the way up to their fear: some sort of elaborate robbery attempt.
Either way, they should be removed from the store. Whether it's 80 random douchebags confusing customers, taking up space and staff time and having no intention of buying anything or a full-on robbery, they have no reason to be there. They should be removed and the reliable way to do that is to ask the police to do it. (Why? Because all security can do is ask you to leave; if you refuse, the only recourse is to call the police anyway.) While they're there they may as well make sure it WASN'T a robbery, because otherwise snide-ass anti-American, anti-police Anonymous Cowards on Slashdot would be railing against the incompetence of the police force to let 80 people "obviously" there to rob the joint get away with merchandise.
Blarghhh. I truly am beginning to hate this site and the cesspool of idiots that has infected it.
The record labels finally give in and provide it online, and they're told that people will still keep illegally distributing music because they don't like DRM and 99 cents a song is somehow too high.
You say it like it is some sort of "sliding excuse." I can't speak for anybody else, but I am an example of the truth of that reality.
I have never purchased a song from iTunes, and DRM is exactly the reason. I don't like the idea that somebody can tell me what I can do with music after I have purchased it. It doesn't matter if there are easy workarounds; I choose to vote with my dollars and not give them to companies who are supporting that sort of thing.
At the same time, I have bought a few songs from the new Walmart service because of a lack of DRM. Only a few, though, because I still believe $0.89/$0.99 is still too much for a song unless I really, really love it and really, really have to have it.
Compare to AllofMP3, which had the best of both worlds. My purchases there were probably between two- and three hundred. No DRM and prices I thought were more than reasonable, and they got my money. Speaking of...
The only business model a lot of people here seemed to support was AllofMP3, but honestly 10 cent non-DRMed songs really isn't a viable business model, as much as everyone wants it to be.
Unless AllofMP3 is rolling in debt--and they sure don't seem to be--the business model does work. At 10 cents or so per song they are obviously paying for their acquisitions and their bandwidth and infrastructure. And they're setting aside a royalty for the artist too.
What you mean to say is that it is not a business model that promotes record labels making gobs and gobs of money. This is true; the profit margins on a 10 cent item is going to be fairly low.
That said, there is a medium somewhere between $0.10/song on the one end and $0.99 (or $1.29) and DRM on the other. I would pay up to $0.50 a song for a non-DRM'd track at a quality bitrate (I prefer 320 most of the time, but 192 would be an absolute minimum for me) without hesitating. Beyond that point I'd have to seriously start thinking about it. Knowing that demand increases as price decreases, I can safely say there are many other people who feel the same way.
What it probably won't support is the current level of spending on artists. Luckily it doesn't need as much. The same Internet mechanisms that are promoting the pirating of music today can be used as free or near-free promotion of artists.
You're either missing his point, or you're completely ignorant of what the ESRB ratings mean. In which case, to borrow your own egotistical ranting, "it makes your opinion worthless."
Playing this game when you're 17 will warp your fragile mind, but playing it when you're 18 is A-OK?
No one ever said that.
They did say that. Manhunt received a rating of "M" for mature. That means that its content is not recommended for anybody under the age of 17. So, a minimum age of 17. In some states this guideline is actually law, in some not. But that's not quite the point.
Politicians come along now and are bitching. "Manhunt should have received a rating of 'AO' for 'Adult Only'" they say. What is an adult? According to both legal standards and the AO rating guideline itself, it means 18 years old.
They are saying that it's too intense for a 17 year old but fine for an 18 year old.
The OP is completely right. It is a ridiculously stupid argument fueled entirely by politics and not any real concern for US citizens. What's more is that it's actually an attempt at censorship in the guise of protecting children. The fact that I wouldn't pitch a one year old down the stairs doesn't make "'M' or 'AO?'" any less stupid.
Companies tend to be dishonest as well, so I don't have major qualms with something like this.
Basically, my point is this: There is some amount of work that I am hired to do. If I am not doing it, whether they think I'm working 60 hours or 40 or 20, they need to either replace me or ensure that I do that work in the future. If I really DID work 60 hours a week and still couldn't muster 40 hours worth of progress, you can be fairly sure I would be let go.
Now imagine the converse. I'm able to make those 40 hours of progress in only 15 hours. Are they going to let me go home early or take extra vacation time? Unlikely. More likely, they'll laugh their asses off as they delight in the fact that they have found somebody 2.5+ times more efficient than average. In other words they expect me to do significantly more work than an average-efficiency employee for the same pay.
Maybe I get a bonus at the end of the year; in good companies, I probably would. It's pretty damn unlikely to be a bonus that is 150% of my base salary though, so I'm still getting shafted there. Maybe I get a promotion that I may or may not want (it happens a lot with technical positions where a tech guy doesn't want to become a manager). The cycle just starts over again.
I don't support lying if you're an hourly employee; I'm not going to say I worked 20 hours if I actually worked 10. But if I'm salaried, and something I'm doing--intentionally or otherwise--is convincing people that I am working harder than I actually am, I have no trouble with it and I'm certainly not going to be in any hurry to correct it. If I am not doing enough work to be worth the money they're paying me, they're perfectly free to fire me. If I am, I fail to see how it matters how much time it takes me to get it done--except in that they might want to exploit my being fast.
Not really. If Congress doesn't like how courts are interpreting the law, it has every right and the power to change that law.
You're right in that SCOTUS can overrule anything that the Ninth Circuit may decide, but the interesting question--and perhaps what the OP is getting at--is, if the Ninth issues findings and/or judgments, does Congress have any recourse?
We know that you can not be charged under a law if the act you are accused of was not illegal at the time that you did it (ex post facto laws). Can you, then, be absolved of guilt for a crime or tort you were found guilty/liable of, by virtue of Congress declaring it legal afterward? I doubt that. I'm not a legal expert, but it seems to me that if Congress granted immunity after a judgment is entered that it would not have an effect on said judgment (except, maybe, if SCOTUS used it on an appeal). If they get it in before there are any findings about it, though, they might be able to stop it in its tracks.
They can certainly make it legal going forward (constitutionality aside), which would be bad at least from my perspective, but I think the timing matters quite a lot as far as what effect they have on this current litigation.
Large corps have great political influence even though they have no right to vote. What they do have is money.
As a bit of an aside, why do we permit this? Corporations should not be permitted to make campaign contributions.
For starters, we should stop treating them like individuals. They are not. Even if we considered campaign contributions to be speech--and I'm not sure I do--they should not have the ability to purchase our republic even if that does amount to curtailing their free speech.
There's also something that strikes me as wrong that a corporation, with many employees who undoubtedly believe separate things, should be taking money made from the efforts of those disparate people and supporting a candidate. If each person within a corporation wants to make a donation, great! They should be able to do so.
As far as corporations needing a way to protect their interests, I think it can be achieved without permitting them to make campaign contributions. The ones that are big and rich enough to make these contributions and hire lobbyists have a tremendous economic power by virtue of the number of people they employ and the amount they contribute to the economy. People will listen to important pieces of our economy without needing their palms greased.
If we really feel a need allow corporations to support a candidate, can we require they do it themselves? "Vote for Bill. This ad paid for by Ford Motor Company." At least that is actual speech instead of some money==speech thing.
If we can't get any of that done, can we at least agree that giving money to both sides of an election is not free speech and put an end to that? It is a simple attempt at bribery; they are not trying to say anything nor are they trying to support anything other than making sure they gave money to the eventual winner.
I don't see what the problem is with the CEO's pay, but everybody on Slashdot seems to have a problem with it.
To borrow a quote from West Wing, "presumably these people have skills that the market values at [$500,000]." It doesn't matter if Average Joe approves of what they make, and I suspect that a lot of it is simple jealousy that somebody is making so much more than they are when they're probably working harder, at least from their perspective.
If they had brought in $501,000 and were paying their CEO $500,000, then yeah, that would be an issue. But the developers don't seem to be starving. The CEO's salary isn't disproportionate to the income, and it's probably either at the level or less than he could make as CEO of other companies with comparable income streams. According to a post up the thread, they spent roughly $12,000,000 on software development in 2006.
Somebody else replied that the $300,000 R&D figure you mention was only pay to outside companies, but even if it were not I would question how much R&D a company making a web browser needs to be doing considering that their major job is to write code that adheres to already-made standards. Some UI stuff maybe, a bit of usability testing... even looking through the preferences area I can't see a lot that needed significant research.
*shrugs* They make what they make because that's what the market says, in the same way that you make whatever you make because that's what the market says. We just seem to get uppity whenever that number gets above $200,000 or so.
Seriously, what kind of kid eats non-edible beads when they are 10 years old?
Many of them.
I'm glad that your child is acting safely in this particular example--though I'm perfectly sure he's doing any number of unsafe things in other areas; he is three after all--but here's the fact: The risk-management and decision-making centers of the brain are not fully developed until into the 20s. If you need sources, here is one from 10 seconds of Googling: http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071014/NEWS/710140303/1001/DWEK01. You can find any number of others if you keep looking.
Obviously, some people will mature at faster rates than others, "not fully developed" does not necessarily mean they will do every dangerous thing known to man, and good parenting is strongly in play. Still, it's important to realize that a child doing stupid things is not necessarily a function of them being stupid.
On an semi-related note, I find it abhorrent that an adult would be judging a 10-year-old child he knows nothing about other than he got sick because of a toxic bead. Part of me is tempted to wish some harm befalls your own child to see if you still think of it as Darwinian evolution at work, but then I realize: I'm not that sort of a bastard monster.
These are children. I'm not one of those "somebody think of the children!" types, but you really are despicable. Personally I don't think it's the child who ate the bead who needs to grow up.
The local empire-building "Board of Education" is perfectly happy to build any number of new schools to handle these people, no matter what the cost to the local taxpayers.
To be fair, they are Constitutionally required to educate all children, even illegal immigrants, at least according to current US Supreme Court precedent.
I suppose that does not necessarily mean they have to build new schools, but you can only cram so many students into schools before it simply doesn't work anymore--including for the children of citizens.
The thing is, this debate is not particularly relevant. It's latched onto by Slashdotters in part, I think, to assuage their guilt for pirating music and prove how the RIAA is composed of nothing but greedy, self-serving bastards.
They aren't wrong. The problem is that the people who are opposed to illegal P2P file sharing of copyrighted music don't care what happens in bulk. They care whether or not an artist is getting paid when you receive that artist's music. The fact that you download, three CDs worth of music and purchase five CDs, for example, doesn't matter to them unless three of those five purchased CDs are the ones you've downloaded.
I'm sure anybody who has pirated music can point to a situation where they did indeed buy the CD (or specific tracks in the days of iTunes and the like) after pirating some or all of the tracks from it. I'm sure, if they are being honest, that they can also admit times when they downloaded songs that they never ended up buying. I think that in most cases, the latter situation would be the more common one.
I'm not meaning to imply that the RIAA is the champion of artists; they're not. They are the champion of record labels who historically have done whatever they can to screw the artists. I'm saying that if somebody opposes illegal downloading, they care whether each artist is compensated for their music and not whether artists as a whole are compensated.
And thus why the debate is really useless. Those people are not going to be swayed by any of these reports, whether they are truly concerned about the artists or using them as distractions for their own financial gain.
The debate worth having, as always, is how "we" get the people who download music and don't pay for it to become paying customers. You'll never get everybody, of course--at least not without giving it away free--but various approaches have their own benefits. The lower the price point, the higher the demand is a fairly obvious one. That site that just popped up with prices that fluctuate based on demand is an interesting experiment, though I think it goes the wrong way (prices increase as demand increases). I think the best experiment was the group that allowed you to name your own price for the CD.
All of these ideas likely need to be refined, but that is the direction we should be focusing our intellectual efforts in. As a nice side effect for the Slashdot crowd, the likelihood is that as systems such as those become more and more successful, the RIAA dies a little more and more. Artists and consumers both stand to win.
For every candidate they let on the ballot, they have to pay $20,000 to the state election commission.
Colbert is just fucking around. At least the others, regardless of how little their chances of winning might be, are actually making an effort to be the nominee.
Slashdot Mirror
That is true--though it seems to mean very little these days--but we have granted powers over copyright to Congress as you show later on in your post by quoting the relevant power grant. This is Congress' authority and the only ability we the people have to take it away now is to elect a Congress who will amend the Constitution to remove it from themselves. A slightly less optimal but probably easier solution would be to elect a Congress that treats copyright in the manner we wish. Unfortunately neither are likely to happen.
Again, this may be true in a strict sense but has little practical application. I think what you're getting at is power being derived from the consent of the governed, which the Founders saw fit to write down, I believe for the first time in history, when they penned, "We the People."
That said, to state that --
-- seems to be a bit of idealistic overreaching.
This is not, as you no doubt know, a democracy; the people do not determine laws. The Founders went to considerable lengths to keep the people as far away from deciding things as they felt they could without coming too close to dictatorship. It was a careful balancing act between redressing some of the wrongs they were experiencing and avoiding tyranny of the majority, whether in direct terms or through an uneducated populace making bad decisions.
A law is a law. In fact, if we're reading the Constitution strictly that's really all there is to it. If we're folding in case law and accepting the constitutionality of judicial review, the power to determine whether a law is in violation of the Constitution belongs to the judiciary. Technically speaking you are not forced to obey unconstitutional laws, so you're free to make your own judgment in that respect. It won't, however, stop you from going to jail or facing whatever the particular penalty may be unless and until the judiciary steps in.
I think consent of the people is a very important concept, but I also think it is pretty much implied. Every two years we elect some portion of the people who make the laws for us; they are given their powers with our consent. The assumption is that for the next two years, they pass our laws with our consent. If not, in each of those two year periods we are granted the right to a mini-revolution. We're free to throw the bums out and get people who will do what we want. Those people are also governing with our consent. (The fact that we don't throw the bums out is a sore spot with me, but not particularly relevant.)
If things get entirely out of hand, many (most?) of the Founders believed it perfectly okay for you to grab your gun and take the government back forcibly. I wouldn't recommend it, particularly in this day and age, but there it is.
So again, yes, you're right in a strict sense: Congress must have the consent of the people to govern. That doesn't mean that the consistently 20%-range approval ratings for Congress dissolve it or strip it of its powers, though; they are assumed to have our consent by virtue of being elected. More to the point, until struck down or repealed, a law is a law.
I thought you were being serious at first, right up until you suggested that people should be made to suffer to compensate you for being irrationally afraid. Now I'm honestly not sure. I hope there aren't people that stupid and panicky in the world, but history has shown otherwise so I'm going to operate on the assumption you were serious.
If I were a sex offender, do you know what these laws would make me do? Offend again. And to reduce the potential evidence against me, I would ensure I killed the person afterward and utterly destroyed the body. Sorry, victims' families; you don't even get a body.
If I am permitted to re-enter society and attempt to lead a normal life after serving my prison sentence, I have something to help me keep honest. If I'm not allowed to live anywhere, be anywhere, or even use the Internet in the Internet age, what the hell do I have to lose? Why shouldn't I do it again? I'm going to be put back in jail? Big deal, you're making the world a jail. I'm going to be executed? Big deal, I'm not being permitted to live as it is.
Yes, some people will commit the crime again; it's called recidivism and the recidivism rate among sex offenders is comparatively low. Why are we trying to push these people to not only repeat-offend, but become more violent when they do so?
You're afraid of sex offenders? I'm afraid of you and your ilk. I'm afraid of what you're doing to this country and the harm you're going to cause. I'm deathly afraid that you're doing it with an air of righteousness that all but guarantees you won't stop.
They are privileges. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that when Congress determines how copyright works, that they are under any obligation whatsoever to provide exceptions for things we now call "fair use." These were created by Congress in the copyright laws and can be changed by Congress just as easily. And if you're trying to claim that your ability to rip a CD to MP3 is somehow a moral or god-given right, well... eesh. God must have been pretty bored that day.
It IS the government's decision. Your decision is who you send to be part of the government.
No responsibility? You think the FBI is just going to randomly pick somebody, get a picture and biographical details about them and flash it up on a billboard? If you're on this thing it's because you're a material witness to a crime or a suspect likely with enough evidence that they're going to arrest you when they find you. They're not going to use this for petty things if for no other reason than to avoid making the public stop caring what the billboards say. In fact I would be willing to bet substantial sums of money that the people they featured will be fugitives believed to be in the area--people who were either already convicted or who have warrants out for their arrest to begin with.
That would be your inalienable right to not have somebody say where they saw you when you were in public?
And believe it or not, the government is not a profit-generating "person." They are, at best, a consumer. In this case, the billboards are being provided as a public service. No money involved. The people who will be featured on those billboards is decided by the FBI. How, again, are the advertising companies usurping power?
Hyping crimes out of proportion? Exactly how hyped do you think these crimes are going to look mashed between advertisements for radio stations and shoes?
Keep them consuming? What the hell? How does putting a billboard up keep people consuming, even in the paranoid "ZOMG GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY OUT TO GET J00!!" crowd? Or is it that you believe they're going to be putting up pictures of people who don't have a government-approved balance on their credit cards?
I think you should take your tinfoil hat off from time to time. Something appears to be seeping into your brain--and it ain't the evil gub'mint brain control waves.
Oh. I didn't see in the article where you were going to be instantly shot on the spot if anybody spots your picture on the billboard. Let me read it again.
...Nope. You're just making shit up.
Damn fugitives. Never sending their politicians any money. Sent 'em all off to Gitmo for some waterboarding, I say.
"Turn in this fugitive, receive his identity as our free gift to you?" I kind of like it, actually.
Oh! Oh my god! There it is. The super-clever pun that made reading the rest of your nonsense drivel worth reading. 'Cause, you know, we don't get enough 1984 references on Slashdot. We can always use one more--bonus points for getting it out with bullet points!
Wow. I thought it was the evil video games corrupting our children into murderers. To think it was billboards this whole time! Jack
My mom often loads up the dishwasher before she leaves for work. When she leaves, I am usually still in bed so she usually doesn't turn it on. The current solution is to leave a note on the fridge that says "turn on the dishwasher when you get up!" and it works pretty well, but obviously it would be more handy and reliable for her to be able to either start it remotely or, even better, set a timer that tells it to start up at some specific time.
Depending on exactly how smart we're talking, "wash when energy prices are lowest" would be handy as well.
That's because you think it is for the benefit of television viewers, or even broadcasters. It is not. They simply want the spectrum that these broadcasts are currently going out on back, with their relatively long wavelengths, for things like cellular service or long-range (municipal?) wireless networks.
With the way both of these services are growing, I happen to think it's a good idea for a relatively small cost.
Yes, that is pretty much what they're claiming. Or more specifically, their argument would be that the fact that you have a shared folder indicates you are meaning to share the files, and that choosing to put your songs there indicates a desire to share them. Since the RIAA doesn't break into peoples' houses and search their computers (yet!), you can be pretty sure they found this shared folder via the Internet. They (or rather MediaSentry) actually downloaded the songs too, so regardless of his intentions he DID commit copyright infringement at least at that moment, as the law would define it.
I don't think it is a step beyond claiming making available to be piracy; it seems to be the same argument. In this case they even hedged their bets by downloading the song and ensuring a case of copyright infringement if "making available is enough" didn't fly.
I agree completely.
This just in folks! Companies want you to buy the newest version of the software, and will try to convince you it's better than your current version! WOW! Clearly this means Microsoft is in a tailspin. Cash out your stock; this one's swirling the drain.
Bah. Speaking as an avid linux user, this submission is nothing but pure, unadulterated anti-MS crap. It's certainly not newsworthy, and it's certainly not anything that matters.
Apple touting 300 new features in Leopard? Holy smokes! That's an implicit declaration that their previous OS X versions were worse! 11 of those features involve security??? Clearly that means they were getting hacked to bits, I'd better go out and buy the new version right now!
Please, people.
I remember years ago when I was 16 or so, I thought this site was so cool. The comments always seemed to have some super intelligent guy who was able to state my opinions with better facts and better presentation than I could ever hope to. I ask this seriously: Has Slashdot fallen this far, or was I just that much more naive and that much less educated back then?
Let the troll mods commence.
I suppose it depends on how one defines "violent person."
"X makes you more violent" implies that you have some level of violence to begin with, and more after X. "X reduces your inhibition toward violence" implies you have some level of violence to begin with and an identical level after X, but may be less likely to resist.
In other words, if you want to hit somebody, are you already violent regardless of whether or not you do? Is it the act or the desire?
There's obviously some tipping point; if you're "more violent enough*," you're going to act violently in the same way as if you're "less likely to resist violence enough."
Sidetrack... as I wrote that I began to wonder if there is a difference in triggers. It seems like somebody who has more violence (however defined) would be more likely to become actually violent over things that did not deserve it, kind of like how we think of bullies and punks, where any perceived slight is grounds for inflicting pain. Is that true with a reduced inhibition to violence as well, or would it still require something we consider to be a justifiable trigger? Does it shift the goalposts of what constitutes a justifiable trigger or just make it more likely that if we see one we act violently?
* These are obviously useless terms, because they're undefinable and would likely vary person to person anyway.
Hey, cool. It must be pretty hard to spend seven paragraphs calling somebody a racist without actually saying the word.
Unfortunately you're just wrong, and the "ZOMG RACIST!!" thing is nothing but an ad hominem attack that distracts from the real issues at work.
It has nothing to do with that at all. His argument is really simple: Poor here and poor in many other places in the world are vastly different groups. Yes, people starve to death in America too, but not nearly as many--numerically or proportionally--as do in Africa. For the most part, the poor have clothing here. The poor children have access to an education and a handful of government programs to provide them with at least one decent meal per day, even if that education isn't nearly the quality somebody in an affluent neighborhood in the US would get. In short, being a poor child here is a struggle against poverty while being a poor child in Africa is a struggle against dying.
Agree or disagree with the premise, but it has nothing to do with racism or any "us" versus "them" argument. He's simply arguing that the situations are different and thus the needs are different.
Personally, I think Dvorak is an ass--in this and just about everything else he writes. I think that his "you're not giving what I think they need the most, therefore your gesture is worthless!" attitude--even if he is right that food is what they need most (an issue I'm not interested in taking up right now)--is plain bullshit. I think he completely ignores the recurring problems that food aide cause with the same zealotry he accuses supporters of the OLPC of possessing, and glosses over the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps hope this project is striving for.
Maybe he's right and maybe he's wrong. Argue that all day if you wish, since that debate actually has a use. Pretending it's racism or nationalism or elitism or whatever you're eluding to with the "us against them" nonsense is counter-productive. At best.
So what?
If I have a gun in the house and somebody uses it to kill somebody, am I charged with murder? If I borrow my brother's car and accidentally leave the keys inside and somebody steals it, am I a car thief?
Or more applicable to the situation, if I sell you drugs and you sell them to 10 other people, do I get charged with 11 counts or 1?
If I make files available, I should be liable for the people who download it from me. I should absolutely NOT be liable for what anybody who got it from me does with it; that responsibility falls on them the same as it fell on me.
I imagine this sort of thing would be most useful in a situation where you weren't in 100% control of the PC but could install applications. Most notably would probably be corporate machines, where they probably wouldn't look forward to you formatting the sucker to get OSx86 working and may even prohibit you from using your own Mac for business purposes while you're there.
So what you want is a worldwide circuit-switched network? No problem with 300 million lines (for only the people in the US, mind you) coming into your house to ensure that everybody is permitted to use what they pay for? No problemo. We're just going to need an initial investment of, eh, I don't know, let's be cheap and call it two million dollars from you and your tens of millions of neighbors. After that this service can be yours for the low, low price of $50,000 a month. This is the only way to guarantee that everybody can use their full bandwidth to any end point at any time.
Not attractive? Welcome to packet-switched networks, we're happy to have you. The entire point of them is that multiple people can use the same lines at basically the same time. Whether you like it or not, Internet traffic WAS exactly what you describe; short bursts of information. I suspect that in terms of time usage, it probably still is today--though that dynamic is certainly changing and will continue to change.
As another poster said, you're perfectly free to pay $300 a month right now for your very own dedicated bandwidth; it's called a T1 line, and they will be ecstatic to sell it to you. You'll note that a T1 is only 1.544 Mbps, though; somewhere in the vicinity of five times slower than your Comcast service is now for around five times the price. Or go for the best of both worlds and get a Frame Relay connection with a CIR. You'll probably get an even lower amount of guaranteed bandwidth, but the price will be less and they'll let you burst up to the full line speed depending on usage.
If your ability to use your full, dedicated bandwidth is so important to you, why aren't you paying for some T1s for yourself?
Yeah, it's rhetorical. It's because they're too damn expensive. There is a reason for that: The infrastructure can simply not handle everybody using their full line capacities at the same time. And it shouldn't. All that does is end up with an economically unsound and probably unsustainable system that is a cheaper version of circuit-switching everything; you've just cut out the infrastructure expense of laying more endpoints.
If that's what you want, well, okay... just be prepared to pay for it. More likely, though, you're the person who thinks $50 a month should buy you a dedicated 6Mbps line and ISPs are teh suxx0rs if they can't provide that.
Incidentally, I've been glossing over the fact that your statement was, itself, based on a fallacy: You are not paying for a dedicated connection if you're using Cable or DSL or similar services, as most people are. The fact that the advertisements say "6 megabit connections, faster than DSL!" doesn't mean that's what you're being sold. You want to know what you're being sold? Read your contract. I guarantee they will specifically disclaim any idea that 6mbps is your committed information rate, and probably even the idea that you have a CIR at all. There will be some language about terminations for high usage (though they probably won't do a good job defining what that is). Etc etc.
They are providing what they sold you. If you think you've been sold more than you have been, that's your fault. Caveat emptor.
I watched the original three movies for the first time a few weeks ago, and I had a somewhat opposite reaction.
I didn't understand what the big fuss was. The specific story was meh to me; I dislike when movies spend in this case the entirety of THREE movies setting something up ("once you go to the dark side, you can never come back") that just so happens to be untrue at the end. It's sappy and predictable and I always feel like they wasted a lot of my time. Yes, it happens in a lot of movies and yes, I dislike it. Believe it or not, I didn't know the ending of the series before I watched it. I did see it coming several miles away though. The overarching story (Empire trying to take over the universe, resistance, good versus evil) was fine.
The acting was just okay. I actually thought it was better on average in movies 1-3 than the originals. Also, the constant fucking wipes in the original three movies drove me batty. Were they just invented at that time or what? Wipes have their place, but not after every scene.
I think the allure of Star Wars must have been in what was accomplished for the time it was accomplished. I'm sure the effects were great for the time period, for example. It just seems like a lot of "everything was better in my day" to me.
That said, Episode 1 just absolutely sucked balls. When the major event in the movie is a freakin' race, there's something wrong, and I wasn't much of a fan of following around an eight year old boy for two hours. I think they could have easily condensed that period in his life without losing anything important. Jar-Jar was also ungodly annoying.
Episodes two and three weren't bad for the most part, though.
What a blatent, idiotic anti-American troll. No wonder you posted it AC.
For starters, one damn story from a group dedicated to causing precisely this kind of stir ("Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places") does not suddenly make it common.
Secondly, the response was appropriate. If you bring 80 people into a store dressed like employees, you're absolutely up to no good. In this case "no good" was trying to agitate people so they could document it and try to make fun of them on their website. It could range from that all the way up to their fear: some sort of elaborate robbery attempt.
Either way, they should be removed from the store. Whether it's 80 random douchebags confusing customers, taking up space and staff time and having no intention of buying anything or a full-on robbery, they have no reason to be there. They should be removed and the reliable way to do that is to ask the police to do it. (Why? Because all security can do is ask you to leave; if you refuse, the only recourse is to call the police anyway.) While they're there they may as well make sure it WASN'T a robbery, because otherwise snide-ass anti-American, anti-police Anonymous Cowards on Slashdot would be railing against the incompetence of the police force to let 80 people "obviously" there to rob the joint get away with merchandise.
Blarghhh. I truly am beginning to hate this site and the cesspool of idiots that has infected it.
You say it like it is some sort of "sliding excuse." I can't speak for anybody else, but I am an example of the truth of that reality.
I have never purchased a song from iTunes, and DRM is exactly the reason. I don't like the idea that somebody can tell me what I can do with music after I have purchased it. It doesn't matter if there are easy workarounds; I choose to vote with my dollars and not give them to companies who are supporting that sort of thing.
At the same time, I have bought a few songs from the new Walmart service because of a lack of DRM. Only a few, though, because I still believe $0.89/$0.99 is still too much for a song unless I really, really love it and really, really have to have it.
Compare to AllofMP3, which had the best of both worlds. My purchases there were probably between two- and three hundred. No DRM and prices I thought were more than reasonable, and they got my money. Speaking of...
Unless AllofMP3 is rolling in debt--and they sure don't seem to be--the business model does work. At 10 cents or so per song they are obviously paying for their acquisitions and their bandwidth and infrastructure. And they're setting aside a royalty for the artist too.
What you mean to say is that it is not a business model that promotes record labels making gobs and gobs of money. This is true; the profit margins on a 10 cent item is going to be fairly low.
That said, there is a medium somewhere between $0.10/song on the one end and $0.99 (or $1.29) and DRM on the other. I would pay up to $0.50 a song for a non-DRM'd track at a quality bitrate (I prefer 320 most of the time, but 192 would be an absolute minimum for me) without hesitating. Beyond that point I'd have to seriously start thinking about it. Knowing that demand increases as price decreases, I can safely say there are many other people who feel the same way.
What it probably won't support is the current level of spending on artists. Luckily it doesn't need as much. The same Internet mechanisms that are promoting the pirating of music today can be used as free or near-free promotion of artists.
You're either missing his point, or you're completely ignorant of what the ESRB ratings mean. In which case, to borrow your own egotistical ranting, "it makes your opinion worthless."
They did say that. Manhunt received a rating of "M" for mature. That means that its content is not recommended for anybody under the age of 17. So, a minimum age of 17. In some states this guideline is actually law, in some not. But that's not quite the point.
Politicians come along now and are bitching. "Manhunt should have received a rating of 'AO' for 'Adult Only'" they say. What is an adult? According to both legal standards and the AO rating guideline itself, it means 18 years old.
They are saying that it's too intense for a 17 year old but fine for an 18 year old.
The OP is completely right. It is a ridiculously stupid argument fueled entirely by politics and not any real concern for US citizens. What's more is that it's actually an attempt at censorship in the guise of protecting children. The fact that I wouldn't pitch a one year old down the stairs doesn't make "'M' or 'AO?'" any less stupid.
Companies tend to be dishonest as well, so I don't have major qualms with something like this.
Basically, my point is this: There is some amount of work that I am hired to do. If I am not doing it, whether they think I'm working 60 hours or 40 or 20, they need to either replace me or ensure that I do that work in the future. If I really DID work 60 hours a week and still couldn't muster 40 hours worth of progress, you can be fairly sure I would be let go.
Now imagine the converse. I'm able to make those 40 hours of progress in only 15 hours. Are they going to let me go home early or take extra vacation time? Unlikely. More likely, they'll laugh their asses off as they delight in the fact that they have found somebody 2.5+ times more efficient than average. In other words they expect me to do significantly more work than an average-efficiency employee for the same pay.
Maybe I get a bonus at the end of the year; in good companies, I probably would. It's pretty damn unlikely to be a bonus that is 150% of my base salary though, so I'm still getting shafted there. Maybe I get a promotion that I may or may not want (it happens a lot with technical positions where a tech guy doesn't want to become a manager). The cycle just starts over again.
I don't support lying if you're an hourly employee; I'm not going to say I worked 20 hours if I actually worked 10. But if I'm salaried, and something I'm doing--intentionally or otherwise--is convincing people that I am working harder than I actually am, I have no trouble with it and I'm certainly not going to be in any hurry to correct it. If I am not doing enough work to be worth the money they're paying me, they're perfectly free to fire me. If I am, I fail to see how it matters how much time it takes me to get it done--except in that they might want to exploit my being fast.
You're right in that SCOTUS can overrule anything that the Ninth Circuit may decide, but the interesting question--and perhaps what the OP is getting at--is, if the Ninth issues findings and/or judgments, does Congress have any recourse?
We know that you can not be charged under a law if the act you are accused of was not illegal at the time that you did it (ex post facto laws). Can you, then, be absolved of guilt for a crime or tort you were found guilty/liable of, by virtue of Congress declaring it legal afterward? I doubt that. I'm not a legal expert, but it seems to me that if Congress granted immunity after a judgment is entered that it would not have an effect on said judgment (except, maybe, if SCOTUS used it on an appeal). If they get it in before there are any findings about it, though, they might be able to stop it in its tracks.
They can certainly make it legal going forward (constitutionality aside), which would be bad at least from my perspective, but I think the timing matters quite a lot as far as what effect they have on this current litigation.
As a bit of an aside, why do we permit this? Corporations should not be permitted to make campaign contributions.
For starters, we should stop treating them like individuals. They are not. Even if we considered campaign contributions to be speech--and I'm not sure I do--they should not have the ability to purchase our republic even if that does amount to curtailing their free speech.
There's also something that strikes me as wrong that a corporation, with many employees who undoubtedly believe separate things, should be taking money made from the efforts of those disparate people and supporting a candidate. If each person within a corporation wants to make a donation, great! They should be able to do so.
As far as corporations needing a way to protect their interests, I think it can be achieved without permitting them to make campaign contributions. The ones that are big and rich enough to make these contributions and hire lobbyists have a tremendous economic power by virtue of the number of people they employ and the amount they contribute to the economy. People will listen to important pieces of our economy without needing their palms greased.
If we really feel a need allow corporations to support a candidate, can we require they do it themselves? "Vote for Bill. This ad paid for by Ford Motor Company." At least that is actual speech instead of some money==speech thing.
If we can't get any of that done, can we at least agree that giving money to both sides of an election is not free speech and put an end to that? It is a simple attempt at bribery; they are not trying to say anything nor are they trying to support anything other than making sure they gave money to the eventual winner.
I don't see what the problem is with the CEO's pay, but everybody on Slashdot seems to have a problem with it.
To borrow a quote from West Wing, "presumably these people have skills that the market values at [$500,000]." It doesn't matter if Average Joe approves of what they make, and I suspect that a lot of it is simple jealousy that somebody is making so much more than they are when they're probably working harder, at least from their perspective.
If they had brought in $501,000 and were paying their CEO $500,000, then yeah, that would be an issue. But the developers don't seem to be starving. The CEO's salary isn't disproportionate to the income, and it's probably either at the level or less than he could make as CEO of other companies with comparable income streams. According to a post up the thread, they spent roughly $12,000,000 on software development in 2006.
Somebody else replied that the $300,000 R&D figure you mention was only pay to outside companies, but even if it were not I would question how much R&D a company making a web browser needs to be doing considering that their major job is to write code that adheres to already-made standards. Some UI stuff maybe, a bit of usability testing... even looking through the preferences area I can't see a lot that needed significant research.
*shrugs* They make what they make because that's what the market says, in the same way that you make whatever you make because that's what the market says. We just seem to get uppity whenever that number gets above $200,000 or so.
Many of them.
I'm glad that your child is acting safely in this particular example--though I'm perfectly sure he's doing any number of unsafe things in other areas; he is three after all--but here's the fact: The risk-management and decision-making centers of the brain are not fully developed until into the 20s. If you need sources, here is one from 10 seconds of Googling: http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071014/NEWS/710140303/1001/DWEK01. You can find any number of others if you keep looking.
Obviously, some people will mature at faster rates than others, "not fully developed" does not necessarily mean they will do every dangerous thing known to man, and good parenting is strongly in play. Still, it's important to realize that a child doing stupid things is not necessarily a function of them being stupid.
On an semi-related note, I find it abhorrent that an adult would be judging a 10-year-old child he knows nothing about other than he got sick because of a toxic bead. Part of me is tempted to wish some harm befalls your own child to see if you still think of it as Darwinian evolution at work, but then I realize: I'm not that sort of a bastard monster.
These are children. I'm not one of those "somebody think of the children!" types, but you really are despicable. Personally I don't think it's the child who ate the bead who needs to grow up.
To be fair, they are Constitutionally required to educate all children, even illegal immigrants, at least according to current US Supreme Court precedent.
I suppose that does not necessarily mean they have to build new schools, but you can only cram so many students into schools before it simply doesn't work anymore--including for the children of citizens.
The thing is, this debate is not particularly relevant. It's latched onto by Slashdotters in part, I think, to assuage their guilt for pirating music and prove how the RIAA is composed of nothing but greedy, self-serving bastards.
They aren't wrong. The problem is that the people who are opposed to illegal P2P file sharing of copyrighted music don't care what happens in bulk. They care whether or not an artist is getting paid when you receive that artist's music. The fact that you download, three CDs worth of music and purchase five CDs, for example, doesn't matter to them unless three of those five purchased CDs are the ones you've downloaded.
I'm sure anybody who has pirated music can point to a situation where they did indeed buy the CD (or specific tracks in the days of iTunes and the like) after pirating some or all of the tracks from it. I'm sure, if they are being honest, that they can also admit times when they downloaded songs that they never ended up buying. I think that in most cases, the latter situation would be the more common one.
I'm not meaning to imply that the RIAA is the champion of artists; they're not. They are the champion of record labels who historically have done whatever they can to screw the artists. I'm saying that if somebody opposes illegal downloading, they care whether each artist is compensated for their music and not whether artists as a whole are compensated.
And thus why the debate is really useless. Those people are not going to be swayed by any of these reports, whether they are truly concerned about the artists or using them as distractions for their own financial gain.
The debate worth having, as always, is how "we" get the people who download music and don't pay for it to become paying customers. You'll never get everybody, of course--at least not without giving it away free--but various approaches have their own benefits. The lower the price point, the higher the demand is a fairly obvious one. That site that just popped up with prices that fluctuate based on demand is an interesting experiment, though I think it goes the wrong way (prices increase as demand increases). I think the best experiment was the group that allowed you to name your own price for the CD.
All of these ideas likely need to be refined, but that is the direction we should be focusing our intellectual efforts in. As a nice side effect for the Slashdot crowd, the likelihood is that as systems such as those become more and more successful, the RIAA dies a little more and more. Artists and consumers both stand to win.
I don't think it will be long now.
For every candidate they let on the ballot, they have to pay $20,000 to the state election commission.
Colbert is just fucking around. At least the others, regardless of how little their chances of winning might be, are actually making an effort to be the nominee.