Gold is not money. If you're in the US, go to your local grocery store and try to buy a loaf of bread with gold. In the meantime, I'll be using dollars, and I bet I have less hassle than you.
I also don't necessarily have to use any paper. I usually put my groceries on a credit card. At the end of the month, I pay for it with a document telling the bank to transfer a certain amount of dollars and cents (a check), and the check is good because my employer has had the amount of dollars in my checking account incremented. FWIW, I don't want my employer to give me a certain weight of gold of a certain purity instead of dollars.
The reason dollars work as money is that people expect them to work as money. The reason gold doesn't around here is that people don't want payment in gold, and insist on dollars.
I'm moderately familiar with the history of money, and, yes, there was a time when you were more or less correct. That time is past.
An individual may be liable if the infringement was committed: (B) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; or (C) by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution. 17 U.S.C. 506(a)(1).
On rereading, it isn't obvious that (C) applies to torrenting, but many torrenters will fall in the $1K category.
This isn't the law as I think it should be, but as it is.
Would you like to troll some more and be like creationists and ignore the facts?
Let me sum up the facts as you have stated them. Psychology Today said there was one new 50-year longitudinal study that claims that long-term use of marijuana causes violent behavior. PT said that the reason this study was important because of the long-term follow-up, enabling them to determine what happened in what order.
In my experience, Psychology Today is a somewhat sensationalist magazine popularizing psychology at a simple level, so I don't trust them to get things right. They say things about one study, without giving me enough information to judge the study for myself. It is on line in advance of publication, and you don't say how far in advance. Is it possible, for example, that it's not getting through peer review intact?
If you're going to gloat about knowing the facts, make sure there's enough of them on your side.
How, exactly, is that different from the the last century? Come to think of it, when exactly did scientists make more than non-scientist celebrities?
Movie stars and football players can entertain millions of people at a time, while teachers reach comparatively few at a time. Only the top few make a lot of money. If you're in professional baseball, and you're not one of the top thousand or so players on the continent, you're doing a lot worse than the ten thousandth-best professor.
Celebrities are by definition truly exceptional people in some way, and are going to make far more than others in their profession. They're not a good salary comparison for pretty much anything.
In the novel, the justification given is "because it works", which it did in the book. The only other justification I remember is that it co-opts potential revolutionaries that would be willing to take some action by giving them a way to get the vote, which doesn't pass the smell test either. Heinlein did not make any fictional claim that veterans would be better in any other way; such as not being fools or paranoiacs. (Anyone was allowed to enter and complete public service and get the vote, and it was up to the government to find something to do with any given person.)
Since I don't know of real-world examples of government by veterans that actually worked well overall, I see no reason why we'd want to try it.
The cloud's great. If all my computer equipment were destroyed, everything I really care about is in the cloud. Of course, if my cloud provider goes away for whatever reason, everything I really care about is on my own equipment also. Since the files on my computers would be destroyed by completely different things than my files in the cloud (barring a thermonuclear war or really big asteroid hit), I think they complement each other nicely as backups.
FWIW, my family has a few Nooks from B&N, and buying books from B&N is dead easy. Getting them from elsewhere (legal or not) is a little more cumbersome, since I have to hook the Nook to my computer and copy them over.
The DRM doesn't bother me, for reasons I think I'll not mention on a public forum.
Do you have an actual example of a free country by your definition? Pretty much every country has copyright laws, although not necessarily as restrictive as those of the US.
Wrong. There's a lot of law on civil matters, and "illegal" doesn't mean just "criminal". In the case of copyright infringement, last I looked torrenting copyrighted material without permission was a criminal matter in the US.
Something over three hundred million people have to abide by USA laws, and they're overrepresented on the Internet. Saying that torrenting copyrighted material without permission is not a crime, without allowing for jurisdictions where it is, is either ignorance or falsehood.
Not that I approve of the US definition of criminal copyright infringement here, but it is the law for a large number of people on/.
The government never actually told me to accept dollars, except for some transactions with governments where I have to use dollars. For everything else, I accept, offer, and save dollars because they're very useful. The government never told me I had to accept a paycheck in dollars, and I'd accept dollars as money a lot more easily than gold.
I disagree. While some things have changed for the worse, we're slowly insinuating accountability into the law enforcement system. We're generally improved in our ability to detect and publicize government abuses. We have fewer people in classes that can be abused freely.
When things get more open, we find more abuses, and it looks like things are getting worse. That doesn't mean that the abuses didn't exist previously.
The fallacy is the claim that an argument "becomes worthless" because of a characteristic of the person making that argument. That's "ad hominem". Now, "ad hominem" isn't necessarily a fallacy, and I would not have considered it so if GGP had said the opinion was suspect because of conflict of interest, but rejecting opinions of people who have an interest in the outcome is, in my opinion, over the line into fallacy.
Said environmentalists do not seem to be to be thinking quite straight. I don't consider AGW to be an existential threat to humanity, although it's probably going to do a great deal of damage, but I favor nuclear plants. Hydro requires dams and those have some unpleasant effects, but I wouldn't want to see a hydro dam shut down. I like wind and solar and other renewables, also. Basically, if it produces power without burning fossil carbon, I'm interested.
I'd say said environmentalists are being more confident in renewable energy sources than I am, to take a charitable view of it.
Chernobyl was a fluke that can't happen again. Fukushima was far less harmful than Chernobyl. It would be nice to say that Fukushima was a fluke hat couldn't happen again, but I'm not at all sure of that. Another Fukushima-scale incident is unlikely, of course, and we can make it less likely, but it's going to be quite some time before we can be sure of not getting another Fukushima. Eventually, we should be able to rule out another Fukushima-scale incident by building newer and much safer reactors, but they'll probably have a failure mode we didn't anticipate, and we'll get some sort of incident not up to Fukushima scale.
The short version then is that FlyHelicopters wants to drastically lower the average standard of living over the long term, by allowing the planet to be trashed by the costs of fossil fuel borne by the public.
Also as a "lefty", I'm going to suggest that the externalized costs of fossil fuels, meaning the costs that are borne by the general public, are far bigger than the protection money.
then only have taxes based on the known effect on the environment, based on current scientific understanding.
Current scientific understanding is that carbon-based fossil fuels have massive effects on the environment that aren't known very well. To be fair, we're going to have to go on our best guesses rather than what can be solidly proven.
You're misinterpreting what is meant by "subsidies". What fossil fuel companies are benefiting from is the ability to generate large costs and dump them on somebody else so they're externalities. They don't really get significant subsidies in the sense of tax breaks or government grants. The proposal is to account for at least some of the externalities so the market finds a solution that's overall more efficient.
As someone is saying right now on Slashdot: carbon taxes are the most market-friendly way of getting the right balance of power generation methods. The fossil fuel subsidies we're talking about are the amount of cost of fossil fuels the companies get to dump onto other people in general, and carbon taxes are precisely the right method to remove those subsidies.
Carbon taxes can be implemented in a revenue-neutral way by reducing other taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
Gold is not money. If you're in the US, go to your local grocery store and try to buy a loaf of bread with gold. In the meantime, I'll be using dollars, and I bet I have less hassle than you.
I also don't necessarily have to use any paper. I usually put my groceries on a credit card. At the end of the month, I pay for it with a document telling the bank to transfer a certain amount of dollars and cents (a check), and the check is good because my employer has had the amount of dollars in my checking account incremented. FWIW, I don't want my employer to give me a certain weight of gold of a certain purity instead of dollars.
The reason dollars work as money is that people expect them to work as money. The reason gold doesn't around here is that people don't want payment in gold, and insist on dollars.
I'm moderately familiar with the history of money, and, yes, there was a time when you were more or less correct. That time is past.
The easiest to find is the Wikipedia article. This says:
On rereading, it isn't obvious that (C) applies to torrenting, but many torrenters will fall in the $1K category.
This isn't the law as I think it should be, but as it is.
Let me sum up the facts as you have stated them. Psychology Today said there was one new 50-year longitudinal study that claims that long-term use of marijuana causes violent behavior. PT said that the reason this study was important because of the long-term follow-up, enabling them to determine what happened in what order.
In my experience, Psychology Today is a somewhat sensationalist magazine popularizing psychology at a simple level, so I don't trust them to get things right. They say things about one study, without giving me enough information to judge the study for myself. It is on line in advance of publication, and you don't say how far in advance. Is it possible, for example, that it's not getting through peer review intact?
If you're going to gloat about knowing the facts, make sure there's enough of them on your side.
Movie stars and football players can entertain millions of people at a time, while teachers reach comparatively few at a time. Only the top few make a lot of money. If you're in professional baseball, and you're not one of the top thousand or so players on the continent, you're doing a lot worse than the ten thousandth-best professor.
Celebrities are by definition truly exceptional people in some way, and are going to make far more than others in their profession. They're not a good salary comparison for pretty much anything.
In the novel, the justification given is "because it works", which it did in the book. The only other justification I remember is that it co-opts potential revolutionaries that would be willing to take some action by giving them a way to get the vote, which doesn't pass the smell test either. Heinlein did not make any fictional claim that veterans would be better in any other way; such as not being fools or paranoiacs. (Anyone was allowed to enter and complete public service and get the vote, and it was up to the government to find something to do with any given person.)
Since I don't know of real-world examples of government by veterans that actually worked well overall, I see no reason why we'd want to try it.
That's one advantage of using a credit card for such purchases. You keep some leverage.
The cloud's great. If all my computer equipment were destroyed, everything I really care about is in the cloud. Of course, if my cloud provider goes away for whatever reason, everything I really care about is on my own equipment also. Since the files on my computers would be destroyed by completely different things than my files in the cloud (barring a thermonuclear war or really big asteroid hit), I think they complement each other nicely as backups.
FWIW, my family has a few Nooks from B&N, and buying books from B&N is dead easy. Getting them from elsewhere (legal or not) is a little more cumbersome, since I have to hook the Nook to my computer and copy them over.
The DRM doesn't bother me, for reasons I think I'll not mention on a public forum.
Do you have an actual example of a free country by your definition? Pretty much every country has copyright laws, although not necessarily as restrictive as those of the US.
Wrong. There's a lot of law on civil matters, and "illegal" doesn't mean just "criminal". In the case of copyright infringement, last I looked torrenting copyrighted material without permission was a criminal matter in the US.
Something over three hundred million people have to abide by USA laws, and they're overrepresented on the Internet. Saying that torrenting copyrighted material without permission is not a crime, without allowing for jurisdictions where it is, is either ignorance or falsehood.
Not that I approve of the US definition of criminal copyright infringement here, but it is the law for a large number of people on /.
The government never actually told me to accept dollars, except for some transactions with governments where I have to use dollars. For everything else, I accept, offer, and save dollars because they're very useful. The government never told me I had to accept a paycheck in dollars, and I'd accept dollars as money a lot more easily than gold.
It's impressive how many things are flat wrong in this post.
I disagree. While some things have changed for the worse, we're slowly insinuating accountability into the law enforcement system. We're generally improved in our ability to detect and publicize government abuses. We have fewer people in classes that can be abused freely.
When things get more open, we find more abuses, and it looks like things are getting worse. That doesn't mean that the abuses didn't exist previously.
The fallacy is the claim that an argument "becomes worthless" because of a characteristic of the person making that argument. That's "ad hominem". Now, "ad hominem" isn't necessarily a fallacy, and I would not have considered it so if GGP had said the opinion was suspect because of conflict of interest, but rejecting opinions of people who have an interest in the outcome is, in my opinion, over the line into fallacy.
It produces more usable energy by burning coal than is consumed by building the plant and extracting the coal. What did you expect?
Said environmentalists do not seem to be to be thinking quite straight. I don't consider AGW to be an existential threat to humanity, although it's probably going to do a great deal of damage, but I favor nuclear plants. Hydro requires dams and those have some unpleasant effects, but I wouldn't want to see a hydro dam shut down. I like wind and solar and other renewables, also. Basically, if it produces power without burning fossil carbon, I'm interested.
I'd say said environmentalists are being more confident in renewable energy sources than I am, to take a charitable view of it.
Chernobyl was a fluke that can't happen again. Fukushima was far less harmful than Chernobyl. It would be nice to say that Fukushima was a fluke hat couldn't happen again, but I'm not at all sure of that. Another Fukushima-scale incident is unlikely, of course, and we can make it less likely, but it's going to be quite some time before we can be sure of not getting another Fukushima. Eventually, we should be able to rule out another Fukushima-scale incident by building newer and much safer reactors, but they'll probably have a failure mode we didn't anticipate, and we'll get some sort of incident not up to Fukushima scale.
The short version then is that FlyHelicopters wants to drastically lower the average standard of living over the long term, by allowing the planet to be trashed by the costs of fossil fuel borne by the public.
Ad hominem, ten yard penalty, still second down.
Also as a "lefty", I'm going to suggest that the externalized costs of fossil fuels, meaning the costs that are borne by the general public, are far bigger than the protection money.
Current scientific understanding is that carbon-based fossil fuels have massive effects on the environment that aren't known very well. To be fair, we're going to have to go on our best guesses rather than what can be solidly proven.
You're misinterpreting what is meant by "subsidies". What fossil fuel companies are benefiting from is the ability to generate large costs and dump them on somebody else so they're externalities. They don't really get significant subsidies in the sense of tax breaks or government grants. The proposal is to account for at least some of the externalities so the market finds a solution that's overall more efficient.
As someone is saying right now on Slashdot: carbon taxes are the most market-friendly way of getting the right balance of power generation methods. The fossil fuel subsidies we're talking about are the amount of cost of fossil fuels the companies get to dump onto other people in general, and carbon taxes are precisely the right method to remove those subsidies.
Carbon taxes can be implemented in a revenue-neutral way by reducing other taxes.
If you're right, you'll be controlled by special interests any way you slice it, so you may as well give up.