"I can't see how a monarchy can be democratic. The monarch has ultimate power and so the people do not."
Honestly, did you even do basic research on various types of monarchies in the world?
I'm not interested in what places that used to be monarchies that retain that label. If the king/queen doesn't have ruling power then they're no longer monarchs and some other form of government (or anarchy) is present. A constitutional democracy with a person called "king" who is required to do some ceremonial duties and wields no power isn't a monarchy.
Sweden is a constitutional democracy.
Saudi-Arabia is a theocracy isn't it - whilst King Abdullah (sp?) has ruling power under normal circumstances he's bound by Shari'a and ultimately by the religious leaders. I'd let this one slide as a Theocratic Monarchy.
I don't know much about the Netherlands but it seems the Queen still retains the power to rule in theory and to overrule the populace and so I'd have to say Netherlands is not a democracy./Prima facie/ quite similar to the UK.
Your suggestion I was "bashing" didn't really help forward your argument that monarchy (ruling power of a nation by an individual) is consistent with democracy (ruling power of a nation wielded by the people of that nation).
I still don't see it, I'm not even sure who you thought I was bashing?
If you truly have a constitution then you don't have a monarchy, unless the first line says "the Monarch is always right".
Much of Europe still have royal families, I don't think they have monarchies though. A monarchy necessarily requires a monarch to have ruling power; if they don't then they're not the monarch, they might be head of state.
Your Belgian example is interesting. If Belgium can at the peoples will become a republic for the day then ultimately the king does not have ruling power, the people do - hence it must be some form of democracy (or other government, depending on which people can decide to overthrow the king when they wish). If a king can no longer can refuse assent then they're no longer monarch.
In the UK we have a monarchy dressed up as [a vaguely] representational democracy. The Queen can refuse assent to the suggestions of her parliament. She doesn't, but that stops us from having a democracy - when one person gets a vote greater in power to all other parties that's not democracy.
OK, it's a genuine question, who are the special interests and how do they make enough money to have an "incredibly lucrative business" when someone is arrested?
We went out for three years and contraception was only used for a total of about 6 months of that with no pregnancy.
Sperm come out before ejaculation. So I was thinking you're probably impotent or at least have poor sperm motility. Turns out that studies suggest ( eg http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/reprints/Contraception79-407-410.pdf from this month, June 2009; see http://menstrualpoetry.com/withdrawal-viable-method-contraception for a summary) that couples practising withdrawal have a 4% chance of pregnancy in a year vs. a 2% chance with a condom... provided you do it perfectly! If you slip up the chances rise to 18% (vs. 17% with a condom). So you're only twice as likely to get pregnant using withdrawal perfectly as opposed to a condom. Ignoring your risks for STD/STIs of course.
This could mean that the general population have potency problems too. Other studies show a general decline in sperm quality.
My instinct is to blame oestrogen like compounds in personally grooming products (shampoos, etc.).
you little girly men that think getting snipped makes you less of a man, good god take off your fucking skirt and get your Vas snipped and stapled.
Being impotent does make you less of a man. Males are in many ways (but crucially not all) defined by their ability to impregnate.
If your a darwinist then you should be embracing your potential to propagate your genes and like Genghis Khan/Chingis Khaan going out and screwing all the females you can find and destroying all your competition (ie killing all men who aren't loyal to you).
... and a point is made. The United States is NOT a Democracy. We are a Republic.
You say that as if they're mutually explusive. They're not. Dictatorship and democracy are mutually explusive. Monarchy and republic are mutually exclusive. But all democracies are either a republic or a monarchy, and the US is not a monarchy.
I can't see how a monarchy can be democratic. The monarch has ultimate power and so the people do not. A monarchy can be superficially democratic in order to avoid the monarchs subjects from getting pissed-off and establishing an alternate government but it's never truly a democracy if, when you've voted for something, the monarch can just say "nah, don't like that" and refuse to instigate it.
I'm in the UK, you may have guessed, and I'm actually growing to like HM The Queen being there because she's apparently benevolent and not out to get rich like most members of her government appear to be. I think she'd find a lot of support amongst her subjects for dissolving the current parliament too.
Damn straight it's an important issue. And, unlike many issues, it is a purely government issue, that the government could solve in a week, if the government was interested in actually listening to what the people were saying.
It's no doubt important to pot-heads and dealers/growers (and I imagine the tobacco industry would be pretty pleased to get their claws [further?] into this industry).
However someone else noted that 6% of people over 12 (they said adults, their link says 12+) have used marijuana in the last month. I'd guess that goes to about 3% of voting age population - a lot of those people are probably too disengaged/stoned/paranoid to be engaged in the political process. So lets say at most a couple of percent of voters want marijuana legalised because of personal use - perhaps there are non-users too. But it's going to be < 10% for sure.
Now how many of the population of potential voters do you think don't want more of the youth population wandering around skipping class and dropping out cause they're too busy getting stoned?
Arresting pot smokers is an incredibly lucrative business! That's why it's still banned.
How? How do you make a profit arresting someone? Costs of police and court time, costs of incarceration, etc., I can't see how you think the state makes a profit from it - unless you think they take all the pot and sell it to caf/es in Amsterdam?
So if somebody sings along, THEN you have a problem.
Lol, hadn't thought of that one... they have censorship on Big Brother (a "reality" TV show) where is a housemate sings they have to blank it out or pay a licensing fee.
When you speak to me sounds are sent from your vocal apparatus (a biological device suitable for copyright infringement;0) via the process of compression and rarefaction of the air to my receiving means (ears) potentially transferring (ie communicating) information.
The law is a wonderful thing. I'll accept your reading of 17 USC, but the UK situation is contrary.
I think the UK code mentions something about being commercial. For example if staff listen to a walkman at work then they're allowed by The PRS, however if they share a walkman ("hey listen to this") then The PRS (majority collection company) demand a license fee. This is certainly how rights holders in the UK act out the law here.
To beg for something is to insistently ask for something to be. This is the way that it is [mis]used in "beg the question" - to demand that a further question follows from the original statement or question. This is accurate and logically consistent use of modern language.
"Beg the question" is a mistranslation of a precise Latin phrase. If it's accuracy you want then call/petitio principii/ (sp?) "presumption".
-- undoubtedly I'll have made a grammatical or spelling error here, I'm sure someone will be happy to correct it for me
(ii) the transmission thus received is further transmitted to the public;
In the hypothetical boom-box situation then the music is being further transmitted (as sounds waves in the air) to the public. Ergo, you've contradicted yourself here and the GP is correct that use of a radio with speakers in public is infringing activity.
Aside: Under UK law if you watch a movie (that you've a license to watch) in a school and the movie contains songs in the soundtrack then you're infringing the songwriters copyright (according to The PRS Limited). I think Copyright Law is my favourite type of idiocy.
[...], if I found a way to get free songs from the iTunes or Amazon store and managed to download 24 tracks before caught but did not distribute them, then it would fit the framework you've described. But that's not what she did -- she was making them available.
Did she distribute them? Making narcotics available (intent to distribute) is rightly a lesser offence than actual distribution, the same should be true here. Was there proof that she distributed the tracks, that anyone got the tracks from her _alone_ (not just contributory copyright infringement). Did she intend to distribute them?
From what I can tell she thoroughly intended to download them but not to distribute them. Nor does there appear to be any evidence of actual distribution. In which case the punishment is absurd.
I've not followed this too closely, please correct me if necessary.
So you acknowledge that all three possibilities offered by the English language are flawed, but you still criticise the author for picking one you evidently have a problem with?
For heaven's sake - get over it.
1. Masculine pronoun, standard English language - problem: some people think it's some sort of mark of misogyny 2. Feminine pronoun, against the convention of English - problem: if you're changing a convention you should have a reason other than thinking everyone [sic] is a misogynist bastard out to get you 3. Neutral pronoun, there isn't an appropriate one to use - problem: it's alright to use "they" but the grammar nazi's will eat you for breakfast
If you imagine that the gender of words is somehow carefully crafted against females then #3. Otherwise please stick with the conventions (that's how language works) #1.
A side note, my French teacher always taught me that the gender of French words generally follows the rule that things that are pretty and nice are feminine and thinks that are utilitarian or ugly are masculine. Do French men take affront and change the gender of everything to be masculine? I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess not.
This scheme is stimulating. People won't invest in multimillion pound movies without getting something back. With no copyright law these movies wouldn't be made. Smaller creative activities would continue, I made and gave away a tutorial on Inkscape the other day licensed BY-NC-SA 3.0,uk. Without any copyright I don't have the moral right to be named as the author of that work (the BY part) nor to specify that it can't be used commercially without recompensing me; nor indeed to stop someone maliciously editing it and leaving me attributed.
You're adding to the situation to get those results, though; we don't need copyright law to say it's wrong to impersonate another person with malicious intent -- that's wrong for a different set of reasons.
The intent may not be malicious but the results may still be damaging to my reputation. I don't think there is any other international treaty that protects these things to such an extent other than the international copyright treaties of Berne, TRIPS, etc..
Opera has always been good for standards compliance (and for implementing things early). I do testing on it with website designs and have rarely found I needed to debug something because Opera was doing something wrong, indeed (like FF) it's more an indicator that I've dropped an error into the code than anything else.
Chrome is only in my test regime as a "looks fine" check as my clients don't have large chrome userbases.
It doesn't have ABP afaik. It does have in-built adblocking that can be used with wildcards. Presumably those rules are held in a file somewhere that you could just wget from someone else. The blocking mechanism is quite nice too, right-click and choose "block" the page changes with a menu bar (for fine tuning) and with blocked items crossed out, just click on bits you want to block and it adds a wildcard for that item.
[...] It's a toy to attract users and to maintain those who may consider leaving the browser, and it's doing just that. Anyone who wants to share content with friends/family can easily do it, and it's incredibly handy for people who use multiple computers.
I don't think Unite is a toy, it's already affecting how I do business and I think it will make a lot of difference for some of my clients eg sharing files is absolutely simple, easy enough for my Mum to do! Now if they can just get it to hook up a VNC session...
[...] he claimed that it would "decentralize the web" and I pointed out in the very article that was on Slashodt yesterday, and I again quote "Although Opera Unite claims to "directly link people's personal computers together," to use it you need an account on Opera's servers, and all of your exchanges pass through Opera's servers first.That's an effective way to get around technical difficulties like NAT firewalls, but more important, it makes Opera the intermediary in your social interactions [...] But don't lie and say the sky is pink when it is blue. The simple fact is you CAN'T use this new feature without an Opera account. Sorry, but it just don't work, because it was designed to go through Opera's servers. So all you are doing with Opera Unite is moving the central server from Facebook to Opera. Sorry, but that doesn't sound very revolutionary to me.
You're mixing a lot of half-truths in there.Opera Unite does directly link peoples computers together. Period. It _also_ acts as an intermediary where they can't use UPnP or in other situations. Opera also creates the links that direct people to the service you're hosting from your browser.
You _can_ use the features of Unite without an account, any browser can access my Unite fileshare with the write password and URL; same goes for accessing photos, media, chat. Oh, right, you want to host a service (with 3 clicks of your mouse!) on the internet without signing up for anything, good luck with that. Even backbone connections have peering contracts - every internet service has to sign up for something.
Remembering that this is a first alpha I think Opera has started a mass decentralisation of the internet, the peerweb as it were. I give it a few months before Opera Unite will connect to other intermediaries and perhaps a year before you can host that same intermediary on a box inside your firewall.
Slashdot Mirror
"I can't see how a monarchy can be democratic. The monarch has ultimate power and so the people do not."
Honestly, did you even do basic research on various types of monarchies in the world?
I'm not interested in what places that used to be monarchies that retain that label. If the king/queen doesn't have ruling power then they're no longer monarchs and some other form of government (or anarchy) is present. A constitutional democracy with a person called "king" who is required to do some ceremonial duties and wields no power isn't a monarchy.
Sweden is a constitutional democracy.
Saudi-Arabia is a theocracy isn't it - whilst King Abdullah (sp?) has ruling power under normal circumstances he's bound by Shari'a and ultimately by the religious leaders. I'd let this one slide as a Theocratic Monarchy.
I don't know much about the Netherlands but it seems the Queen still retains the power to rule in theory and to overrule the populace and so I'd have to say Netherlands is not a democracy. /Prima facie/ quite similar to the UK.
Your suggestion I was "bashing" didn't really help forward your argument that monarchy (ruling power of a nation by an individual) is consistent with democracy (ruling power of a nation wielded by the people of that nation).
I still don't see it, I'm not even sure who you thought I was bashing?
If you truly have a constitution then you don't have a monarchy, unless the first line says "the Monarch is always right".
Much of Europe still have royal families, I don't think they have monarchies though. A monarchy necessarily requires a monarch to have ruling power; if they don't then they're not the monarch, they might be head of state.
Your Belgian example is interesting. If Belgium can at the peoples will become a republic for the day then ultimately the king does not have ruling power, the people do - hence it must be some form of democracy (or other government, depending on which people can decide to overthrow the king when they wish). If a king can no longer can refuse assent then they're no longer monarch.
In the UK we have a monarchy dressed up as [a vaguely] representational democracy. The Queen can refuse assent to the suggestions of her parliament. She doesn't, but that stops us from having a democracy - when one person gets a vote greater in power to all other parties that's not democracy.
OK, it's a genuine question, who are the special interests and how do they make enough money to have an "incredibly lucrative business" when someone is arrested?
We went out for three years and contraception was only used for a total of about 6 months of that with no pregnancy.
Sperm come out before ejaculation. So I was thinking you're probably impotent or at least have poor sperm motility. Turns out that studies suggest ( eg http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/reprints/Contraception79-407-410.pdf from this month, June 2009; see http://menstrualpoetry.com/withdrawal-viable-method-contraception for a summary) that couples practising withdrawal have a 4% chance of pregnancy in a year vs. a 2% chance with a condom ... provided you do it perfectly! If you slip up the chances rise to 18% (vs. 17% with a condom). So you're only twice as likely to get pregnant using withdrawal perfectly as opposed to a condom. Ignoring your risks for STD/STIs of course.
This could mean that the general population have potency problems too. Other studies show a general decline in sperm quality.
My instinct is to blame oestrogen like compounds in personally grooming products (shampoos, etc.).
you little girly men that think getting snipped makes you less of a man, good god take off your fucking skirt and get your Vas snipped and stapled.
Being impotent does make you less of a man. Males are in many ways (but crucially not all) defined by their ability to impregnate.
If your a darwinist then you should be embracing your potential to propagate your genes and like Genghis Khan/Chingis Khaan going out and screwing all the females you can find and destroying all your competition (ie killing all men who aren't loyal to you).
That's being a man.
... and a point is made. The United States is NOT a Democracy. We are a Republic.
You say that as if they're mutually explusive. They're not. Dictatorship and democracy are mutually explusive. Monarchy and republic are mutually exclusive. But all democracies are either a republic or a monarchy, and the US is not a monarchy.
I can't see how a monarchy can be democratic. The monarch has ultimate power and so the people do not. A monarchy can be superficially democratic in order to avoid the monarchs subjects from getting pissed-off and establishing an alternate government but it's never truly a democracy if, when you've voted for something, the monarch can just say "nah, don't like that" and refuse to instigate it.
I'm in the UK, you may have guessed, and I'm actually growing to like HM The Queen being there because she's apparently benevolent and not out to get rich like most members of her government appear to be. I think she'd find a lot of support amongst her subjects for dissolving the current parliament too.
Damn straight it's an important issue. And, unlike many issues, it is a purely government issue, that the government could solve in a week, if the government was interested in actually listening to what the people were saying.
It's no doubt important to pot-heads and dealers/growers (and I imagine the tobacco industry would be pretty pleased to get their claws [further?] into this industry).
However someone else noted that 6% of people over 12 (they said adults, their link says 12+) have used marijuana in the last month. I'd guess that goes to about 3% of voting age population - a lot of those people are probably too disengaged/stoned/paranoid to be engaged in the political process. So lets say at most a couple of percent of voters want marijuana legalised because of personal use - perhaps there are non-users too. But it's going to be < 10% for sure.
Now how many of the population of potential voters do you think don't want more of the youth population wandering around skipping class and dropping out cause they're too busy getting stoned?
* meant
Perhaps he might psychiatry and rehabilitation clinics?
Arresting pot smokers is an incredibly lucrative business! That's why it's still banned.
How? How do you make a profit arresting someone? Costs of police and court time, costs of incarceration, etc., I can't see how you think the state makes a profit from it - unless you think they take all the pot and sell it to caf/es in Amsterdam?
Hang him from the nearest lamp post and then burn him.
Yeah, we should only allow company executives and rich investors to take vast amounts of money through share price manipulation.
So if somebody sings along, THEN you have a problem.
Lol, hadn't thought of that one ... they have censorship on Big Brother (a "reality" TV show) where is a housemate sings they have to blank it out or pay a licensing fee.
When you speak to me sounds are sent from your vocal apparatus (a biological device suitable for copyright infringement ;0) via the process of compression and rarefaction of the air to my receiving means (ears) potentially transferring (ie communicating) information.
The law is a wonderful thing. I'll accept your reading of 17 USC, but the UK situation is contrary.
I think the UK code mentions something about being commercial. For example if staff listen to a walkman at work then they're allowed by The PRS, however if they share a walkman ("hey listen to this") then The PRS (majority collection company) demand a license fee. This is certainly how rights holders in the UK act out the law here.
To beg for something is to insistently ask for something to be. This is the way that it is [mis]used in "beg the question" - to demand that a further question follows from the original statement or question. This is accurate and logically consistent use of modern language.
"Beg the question" is a mistranslation of a precise Latin phrase. If it's accuracy you want then call /petitio principii/ (sp?) "presumption".
--
undoubtedly I'll have made a grammatical or spelling error here, I'm sure someone will be happy to correct it for me
(ii) the transmission thus received is further transmitted to the public;
In the hypothetical boom-box situation then the music is being further transmitted (as sounds waves in the air) to the public. Ergo, you've contradicted yourself here and the GP is correct that use of a radio with speakers in public is infringing activity.
Aside: Under UK law if you watch a movie (that you've a license to watch) in a school and the movie contains songs in the soundtrack then you're infringing the songwriters copyright (according to The PRS Limited). I think Copyright Law is my favourite type of idiocy.
You probably mean, "raises an interesting question".
http://begthequestion.info/
Nope, he's probably using it in the common usage of everyday language and not as a term of logical discourse. We all know what he means ...
[...], if I found a way to get free songs from the iTunes or Amazon store and managed to download 24 tracks before caught but did not distribute them, then it would fit the framework you've described. But that's not what she did -- she was making them available.
Did she distribute them? Making narcotics available (intent to distribute) is rightly a lesser offence than actual distribution, the same should be true here. Was there proof that she distributed the tracks, that anyone got the tracks from her _alone_ (not just contributory copyright infringement). Did she intend to distribute them?
From what I can tell she thoroughly intended to download them but not to distribute them. Nor does there appear to be any evidence of actual distribution. In which case the punishment is absurd.
I've not followed this too closely, please correct me if necessary.
So you acknowledge that all three possibilities offered by the English language are flawed, but you still criticise the author for picking one you evidently have a problem with?
For heaven's sake - get over it.
1. Masculine pronoun, standard English language - problem: some people think it's some sort of mark of misogyny
2. Feminine pronoun, against the convention of English - problem: if you're changing a convention you should have a reason other than thinking everyone [sic] is a misogynist bastard out to get you
3. Neutral pronoun, there isn't an appropriate one to use - problem: it's alright to use "they" but the grammar nazi's will eat you for breakfast
If you imagine that the gender of words is somehow carefully crafted against females then #3. Otherwise please stick with the conventions (that's how language works) #1.
A side note, my French teacher always taught me that the gender of French words generally follows the rule that things that are pretty and nice are feminine and thinks that are utilitarian or ugly are masculine. Do French men take affront and change the gender of everything to be masculine? I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess not.
"One" isn't always correct either though. Imagine a conversation between you and someone else:
You: Hey, my friend Chris just called.
Someone else: What did he say?
You: _She_ said 'people always think I'm a boy, do you think it's because of my beard?'
!
Gendered language sure is horrible, isn't it? I mean, when it's not gendered like you.
Breaking with language conventions is horrible.
The convention is that plural pronouns use the masculine.
Do neo-feminists make all nouns feminine in gendered languages like French? It's just being immature.
This scheme is stimulating. People won't invest in multimillion pound movies without getting something back. With no copyright law these movies wouldn't be made. Smaller creative activities would continue, I made and gave away a tutorial on Inkscape the other day licensed BY-NC-SA 3.0,uk. Without any copyright I don't have the moral right to be named as the author of that work (the BY part) nor to specify that it can't be used commercially without recompensing me; nor indeed to stop someone maliciously editing it and leaving me attributed.
You're adding to the situation to get those results, though; we don't need copyright law to say it's wrong to impersonate another person with malicious intent -- that's wrong for a different set of reasons.
The intent may not be malicious but the results may still be damaging to my reputation. I don't think there is any other international treaty that protects these things to such an extent other than the international copyright treaties of Berne, TRIPS, etc..
Opera has always been good for standards compliance (and for implementing things early). I do testing on it with website designs and have rarely found I needed to debug something because Opera was doing something wrong, indeed (like FF) it's more an indicator that I've dropped an error into the code than anything else.
Chrome is only in my test regime as a "looks fine" check as my clients don't have large chrome userbases.
It doesn't have ABP afaik. It does have in-built adblocking that can be used with wildcards. Presumably those rules are held in a file somewhere that you could just wget from someone else. The blocking mechanism is quite nice too, right-click and choose "block" the page changes with a menu bar (for fine tuning) and with blocked items crossed out, just click on bits you want to block and it adds a wildcard for that item.
[...]
It's a toy to attract users and to maintain those who may consider leaving the browser, and it's doing just that. Anyone who wants to share content with friends/family can easily do it, and it's incredibly handy for people who use multiple computers.
I don't think Unite is a toy, it's already affecting how I do business and I think it will make a lot of difference for some of my clients eg sharing files is absolutely simple, easy enough for my Mum to do! Now if they can just get it to hook up a VNC session ...
[...] he claimed that it would "decentralize the web" and I pointed out in the very article that was on Slashodt yesterday, and I again quote "Although Opera Unite claims to "directly link people's personal computers together," to use it you need an account on Opera's servers, and all of your exchanges pass through Opera's servers first.That's an effective way to get around technical difficulties like NAT firewalls, but more important, it makes Opera the intermediary in your social interactions [...] But don't lie and say the sky is pink when it is blue. The simple fact is you CAN'T use this new feature without an Opera account. Sorry, but it just don't work, because it was designed to go through Opera's servers. So all you are doing with Opera Unite is moving the central server from Facebook to Opera. Sorry, but that doesn't sound very revolutionary to me.
You're mixing a lot of half-truths in there.Opera Unite does directly link peoples computers together. Period. It _also_ acts as an intermediary where they can't use UPnP or in other situations. Opera also creates the links that direct people to the service you're hosting from your browser.
You _can_ use the features of Unite without an account, any browser can access my Unite fileshare with the write password and URL; same goes for accessing photos, media, chat. Oh, right, you want to host a service (with 3 clicks of your mouse!) on the internet without signing up for anything, good luck with that. Even backbone connections have peering contracts - every internet service has to sign up for something.
Remembering that this is a first alpha I think Opera has started a mass decentralisation of the internet, the peerweb as it were. I give it a few months before Opera Unite will connect to other intermediaries and perhaps a year before you can host that same intermediary on a box inside your firewall.