Those gold farmers are breaching the agreement they made with Blizzard; their profit comes entirely from ill-gotten gains. As I said before, [b]until I cash out by breaching my agreement[/b], it makes as much sense as taxing me for things that my neighbors acquire, on the grounds that I might steal them and thus be enriched.
A quote, apparently from IRS publication 525: "If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless in the same year, you return it to its rightful owner"
Let's pay attention to what we're actually talking about.
It's not a question of selling virtual goods for real-world currency. Of course that income is taxable. The concern is that this sale is itself a breach of contract.
I'm not a lawyer yet, but I'll argue like one anyway (by analogy). The IRS taxes income from theft, even though that income is illegitimate (just like income earned from selling virtual goods in breach of contract). However, it doesn't tax you for possessions that others acquire, which you could hypothetically steal and sell for profit. Similarly, the IRS shouldn't tax you for virtual goods that have no value unless you breach of Terms of Service you agreed to in order to attain them. It is only once you have breached the ToS and sold the goods that they have any real-world value, so it's at this point that taxes should be levied.
He has little to be ashamed about, so please cease your attacks on him.
I'd hope he wouldn't take a jocular second-hand insult personally.
If they want to sue their parents for infringing these "rights" they will only win the judge's amusement and maybe a little notoriety in the local newspaper
That's true, but not because those rights don't exist, it's because parents, being responsible for the well-being of the child, are not bound to recognize those rights, on the belief that children are not prepared for the reponsibilities that come with those rights. My point is quite simply that with that power comes the responsibility to use it wisely, and that using that power to teach children that they have no personal autonomy likely isn't such a good idea. Perhaps I was too strident in making that point, as I was operating under the belief that you were making the argument I mentioned above. My apologies to you and your esteemed professor.
There's a reason spellcheck was invented. I have bad habits with certain words, and I'm replying to these while doing a few other things, so I'm not bothering to copy the text into Word, run it, then copy back. Not that it should matter - logic is logic. While poor presentation does tarnish one's credibility, it doesn't change the facts of the matter.
Moving past my atrocious spelling, let's compare. Now: [i]I never once said children have no rights.[/i] Then: [i]Children are born into their families with no inherent rights except that to food, shelter, education and a decent upbringing to the best of their parents' ability. They do not have "rights" to privacy, speech, freedom of association or any of the basic civil rights adults enjoy.[/i]
You may not have meant to say that children don't have inherent (I caught myself that time) rights, but you did. Fine - from here on out, I'll assume that you meant to say that their rights do not protect them from parental action. Like I just said: Whether or not those rights are respected by private actors, such as parents, is up to those actors, but that doesn't change the fact that the rights in question exist.
You also seem to have a strange definition of inherent rights, in which the rights one has are defined to be whatever rights are protected by the authority in question. This model can be coherent, but it doesn't really make sense in a democratic society. When I speak of inherent rights, I'm not discussing rights which authority does protect, I'm discussing rights that a just authority would protect. It's possible that our disagreement stems from this semantic issue.
What Hazelwood shows is that they are not fully vested citizens outside the home, either.
No, that's not what Hazelwood shows you at all, and your graduate-level law professor should be ashamed. Citizenship is immutable, permanent, and from birth (or naturalization). However, as in most cases, the protection of children's rights is subject to balancing with the rights and obligations of others involved. If that excludes a child from being considered a "fully vested citizen," then no one can qualify.
You're misinterpreting the precedent of Hazelwood. Hazelwood actually confirms my analysis of the rule: people under the age of 18 have the same rights as people over the age of 18, but, as in all situations, can be treated differently where there are relevant differences. Something that you should have gotten from your graduate-level law classes is that rights are very rarely / never absolute, and are generally subjected to a balancing process against other rights and obligations. This is generally because there are conflicting rights in most situations. In Hazelwood, the conflict was between the student's expressive rights in a school-run newspaper and the pedalogical interests and obligations of the government. Additionally, as always, you need to keep in mind the facts of the case. Hazelwood dealt with a newspaper paid for and run by the school, which significantly changes the questions involved.
None of this, of course, is really relevant, since your initial argument (which lead to me bringing up Tinker in the first place) was that people under the age of 18 have no rights, which is flat out rejected in every case I'm aware of. Tinker was cited because it contains the best articulation of the rule that children do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse door (thereby demonstrating that they in fact possess such rights). Even New Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. 325 (1985), which held that a school official conducting a warrantless search of a student's purse was constitutional, rejected the argument that children have no rights. Interestingly, in doing so, the Court endorsed an argument very similar to the one I am making now, first articulated some sixty years ago.
In determining whether the search at issue in this case violated the Fourth Amendment, we are faced initially with the question whether that Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures applies to searches conducted by public school officials. We hold that it does.
It is now beyond dispute that "the Federal Constitution, by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment, prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures by state officers."... Equally indisputable is the proposition that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the rights of students against encroachment by public school officials: "The Fourteenth Amendment, as now applied to the States, protects the citizen against the State itself and all of its creatures--Boards of Education not excepted. These have, of course, important, delicate, and highly discretionary functions, but none that they may not perform within the limits of the Bill of Rights. That they are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes." West Virginia State Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 637 (1943). (333-34).
Face it. You were wrong. Children have inherant rights. Whether or not those rights are respected by private actors, such as parents, is up to those actors, but that doesn't change the fact that the rights in question exist.
Children are not property, true. But they are not fully-vested citizens either. The concept is just silly. I hope you're not a parent.
There's something that tells me that's not quite right. What was it again? Oh yeah...
Amendment XIV
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
People under the age of 18 have the same inherant rights as people over the age of 18. If the rights are only acquired upon reaching a magic age, they're hardly "inherant." The application of those rights is different, because there are relevant differences between the classes in many cases, but that doesn't change the fact that those rights are still inherant, which means that children still have them.
Your general attitude is one fundamentally inconsistent with raising children to live in a democratic society. Yes, parents do have the legal authority to set arbitrary rules to control children. That doesn't mean they should. If you raise your children under the fundamental rule that "My word is law, and needs no justification," they're not going to be healthy. They're going to see their government saying to them "My word is law, and needs no justification" and think that there's nothing wrong with it, because that's how they were socialized. Furthermore, they're going to be far more likely to abuse their own power over others, because they were socialized that when you have power over someone else, you may exercise it as you wish absent any sort of justification, irrespective of the rights of others. "Might makes right" is a principle that should never be endorsed in a democratic society.
Except that, far too frequently in K-12 education , homework is seen as an end to itself, rather than a means to something worthwhile. It's not used as a way of getting students to learn material; if it were, students wouldn't regularly be able to excel on finals in classes while doing none of the homework.
Interesting opinion. Too bad it's horribly, horribly misinformed. People under the age of 18 share the same rights as people over the age of 18 in at least two of the categories you mention (speech and association). Privacy is on squishier ground, since the right to privacy itself isn't as firm as it could be, constitutionally speaking. You may want to read Tinker v. Des Moines School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969), wherein the Supreme Court ruled that minor's free speech rights don't stop at the schoolhouse door. It'd be awfully hard to support that kind of a ruling if those minors didn't have those free speech rights to begin with, wouldn't it?
It comes down to a simple concept that you don't seem to understand - children are people, not property.
Interestingly, because fashion designs in Second Life fall within the bounds of copyright, they are more protected than fashion designs in real life. Because real life designs are considered a "useful article," they fall under patent law rather than copyright law. Since patent law moves so slowly, designs wouldn't be protected under patents until after they're no longer worth protecting.
Because computer code is not held to be a "useful article" (I have no idea why clothes are and software isn't... *shrug*) fashion designers who design virtual clothes can copyright their designs and sue infringers. I'd be kind of curious to find out what would happen if a real life designer started creating copies of their own work in Second Life and then attacking other real life copiers for making derivative works from their virtual copyright. The outcome would likely be the court deciding that the Second Life designs were similar to paper designs, making no difference to the current regulatory scheme. It's an interesting question nonetheless.
(If you're interested in the topic, there's a paper on the topic here: http://www.law.virginia.edu/pdf/faculty/sprigman_p iracy.pdf)
But you've paid for more than just a physical object, you've paid for a license to listen to the music contained on the physical object. The physical object may be gone, but what happened to the license?
This is really more of an issue of language than science - they're trying to decide on a common definition for a term. Language is defined by consensus.
Agreed that the rants are often knee-jerk (especially the ones that only blame Republicans), but there is a fair amount of evidence to be wary of corporations.
I think the reason most people in those circumstances choose to pick on the Republican party is because, as Bill Maher said, "The Democrats are bought out by less scary special interest groups." If I had to choose between teacher's unions and Big Oil, I think I'll choose the teachers any day.
I do disagree with the age limit requirements and with disenfranchising felons, those are two areas I might be willing to support limited knowledge tests to grant a right to vote. Say any citizen under 18 who wants to be able to vote can go take a test at the DMV, or anyone with felony conviction can regain the right to vote immediately upon release from prison if they pass a test, or automatically after a short period of time (say 1 year or so). I'm not opposed to letting resident aliens vote if they have lived here a long time either, I don't see what is wrong with that at all.
As an aside - up until Lawrence vs. Texas, it was a felony in Virginia to have sex in any position other than missionary. Let me reiterate: In Virginia, you would permanently lose your right to vote for having sex.
I like your idea of letting minors vote so long as they can pass a basic test - it makes things more free. As for felons, I'd like to see felons allowed to vote just like everyone else, if only because if my understanding of recidivism is correct, the feeling of powerlessness is very bad for keeping one's nose clean.
As for resident aliens, I'm really not concerned (maybe that's a chink in my argument). I just don't see it as making a whole lot of sense for non-citizens to vote. Perhaps you can explain your motivation?
Similarly, car salesman never try to push rust-coating, interior protection, or any sort of warranty, because the consumer will then believe that the car is flawed.
Give it a couple days before the networks catch a whiff. A month from now you may regret this wish... it's going to be all over the news and is going to swamp coverage of candidates.
Assuming we're talking the national election - It's not for another year + 2 months! Realistically, there shouldn't even *be* a campaign yet. The primary in NH isn't even until January!
Obviously you haven't looked at VT recently. Tuition and fees is only $7,500, out of state. I can only wish that my tuition were that low. Hell, for in-state students, the room and board is the same price as tuition (around $2,000).
But of course, you're modded up insightful, because you pulled a random idea out of your ass and presented it as fact.
Actually, the parent poster was claiming that copyright has no place because (s)he believes that creativity itself outweights profit. I respectfully disagree, since without copyright law, I could spend years creating a novel only to have someone copy it near-verbatim and profit from my efforts. This may not be an issue if I were writing as a hobby, but this obviously does not apply to all writers.
Maybe I don't understand, but if you write a novel and give it away for free, why would someone pay money for an inferior knock-off?
There are still bands that have feeling to their music - I went to see Pearl Jam for the first time this summer, and it was amazing. Saw Audioslave too - I have a feeling they're going to be around for awhile (if only because Tom Morello kicks ass).
By the way, Aerosmith is far superior to the Stones. =D
To be fair, the OP did say "identical"... the girls you described seem anything but. In your case, the differences were more than enough to outway the monetary discrepancy. In the case of some people, it might not have been.
Slashdot Mirror
Those gold farmers are breaching the agreement they made with Blizzard; their profit comes entirely from ill-gotten gains. As I said before, [b]until I cash out by breaching my agreement[/b], it makes as much sense as taxing me for things that my neighbors acquire, on the grounds that I might steal them and thus be enriched.
A quote, apparently from IRS publication 525:
r y-2006/feature_dibbell_janfeb06.msp
"If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless in the same year, you return it to its rightful owner"
Pulled from http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/January-Februa
You gained nothing of monetary value, just like if you steal all my monopoly money.
Let's pay attention to what we're actually talking about.
It's not a question of selling virtual goods for real-world currency. Of course that income is taxable. The concern is that this sale is itself a breach of contract.
I'm not a lawyer yet, but I'll argue like one anyway (by analogy). The IRS taxes income from theft, even though that income is illegitimate (just like income earned from selling virtual goods in breach of contract). However, it doesn't tax you for possessions that others acquire, which you could hypothetically steal and sell for profit. Similarly, the IRS shouldn't tax you for virtual goods that have no value unless you breach of Terms of Service you agreed to in order to attain them. It is only once you have breached the ToS and sold the goods that they have any real-world value, so it's at this point that taxes should be levied.
He has little to be ashamed about, so please cease your attacks on him.
I'd hope he wouldn't take a jocular second-hand insult personally.
If they want to sue their parents for infringing these "rights" they will only win the judge's amusement and maybe a little notoriety in the local newspaper
That's true, but not because those rights don't exist, it's because parents, being responsible for the well-being of the child, are not bound to recognize those rights, on the belief that children are not prepared for the reponsibilities that come with those rights. My point is quite simply that with that power comes the responsibility to use it wisely, and that using that power to teach children that they have no personal autonomy likely isn't such a good idea. Perhaps I was too strident in making that point, as I was operating under the belief that you were making the argument I mentioned above. My apologies to you and your esteemed professor.
There's a reason spellcheck was invented. I have bad habits with certain words, and I'm replying to these while doing a few other things, so I'm not bothering to copy the text into Word, run it, then copy back. Not that it should matter - logic is logic. While poor presentation does tarnish one's credibility, it doesn't change the facts of the matter.
Moving past my atrocious spelling, let's compare. Now:
[i]I never once said children have no rights.[/i]
Then:
[i]Children are born into their families with no inherent rights except that to food, shelter, education and a decent upbringing to the best of their parents' ability. They do not have "rights" to privacy, speech, freedom of association or any of the basic civil rights adults enjoy.[/i]
You may not have meant to say that children don't have inherent (I caught myself that time) rights, but you did. Fine - from here on out, I'll assume that you meant to say that their rights do not protect them from parental action. Like I just said: Whether or not those rights are respected by private actors, such as parents, is up to those actors, but that doesn't change the fact that the rights in question exist.
You also seem to have a strange definition of inherent rights, in which the rights one has are defined to be whatever rights are protected by the authority in question. This model can be coherent, but it doesn't really make sense in a democratic society. When I speak of inherent rights, I'm not discussing rights which authority does protect, I'm discussing rights that a just authority would protect. It's possible that our disagreement stems from this semantic issue.
What Hazelwood shows is that they are not fully vested citizens outside the home, either.
No, that's not what Hazelwood shows you at all, and your graduate-level law professor should be ashamed. Citizenship is immutable, permanent, and from birth (or naturalization). However, as in most cases, the protection of children's rights is subject to balancing with the rights and obligations of others involved. If that excludes a child from being considered a "fully vested citizen," then no one can qualify.
You're misinterpreting the precedent of Hazelwood. Hazelwood actually confirms my analysis of the rule: people under the age of 18 have the same rights as people over the age of 18, but, as in all situations, can be treated differently where there are relevant differences. Something that you should have gotten from your graduate-level law classes is that rights are very rarely / never absolute, and are generally subjected to a balancing process against other rights and obligations. This is generally because there are conflicting rights in most situations. In Hazelwood, the conflict was between the student's expressive rights in a school-run newspaper and the pedalogical interests and obligations of the government. Additionally, as always, you need to keep in mind the facts of the case. Hazelwood dealt with a newspaper paid for and run by the school, which significantly changes the questions involved.
... Equally indisputable is the proposition that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the rights of students against encroachment by public school officials:
None of this, of course, is really relevant, since your initial argument (which lead to me bringing up Tinker in the first place) was that people under the age of 18 have no rights, which is flat out rejected in every case I'm aware of. Tinker was cited because it contains the best articulation of the rule that children do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse door (thereby demonstrating that they in fact possess such rights). Even New Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. 325 (1985), which held that a school official conducting a warrantless search of a student's purse was constitutional, rejected the argument that children have no rights. Interestingly, in doing so, the Court endorsed an argument very similar to the one I am making now, first articulated some sixty years ago.
In determining whether the search at issue in this case violated the Fourth Amendment, we are faced initially with the question whether that Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures applies to searches conducted by public school officials. We hold that it does.
It is now beyond dispute that "the Federal Constitution, by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment, prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures by state officers."
"The Fourteenth Amendment, as now applied to the States, protects the citizen against the State itself and all of its creatures--Boards of Education not excepted. These have, of course, important, delicate, and highly discretionary functions, but none that they may not perform within the limits of the Bill of Rights. That they are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes." West Virginia State Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 637 (1943). (333-34).
Face it. You were wrong. Children have inherant rights. Whether or not those rights are respected by private actors, such as parents, is up to those actors, but that doesn't change the fact that the rights in question exist.
Somebody failed their civics classes.
Children are not property, true. But they are not fully-vested citizens either. The concept is just silly. I hope you're not a parent.
There's something that tells me that's not quite right. What was it again? Oh yeah...
Amendment XIV
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
People under the age of 18 have the same inherant rights as people over the age of 18. If the rights are only acquired upon reaching a magic age, they're hardly "inherant." The application of those rights is different, because there are relevant differences between the classes in many cases, but that doesn't change the fact that those rights are still inherant, which means that children still have them.
Your general attitude is one fundamentally inconsistent with raising children to live in a democratic society. Yes, parents do have the legal authority to set arbitrary rules to control children. That doesn't mean they should. If you raise your children under the fundamental rule that "My word is law, and needs no justification," they're not going to be healthy. They're going to see their government saying to them "My word is law, and needs no justification" and think that there's nothing wrong with it, because that's how they were socialized. Furthermore, they're going to be far more likely to abuse their own power over others, because they were socialized that when you have power over someone else, you may exercise it as you wish absent any sort of justification, irrespective of the rights of others. "Might makes right" is a principle that should never be endorsed in a democratic society.
Except that, far too frequently in K-12 education , homework is seen as an end to itself, rather than a means to something worthwhile. It's not used as a way of getting students to learn material; if it were, students wouldn't regularly be able to excel on finals in classes while doing none of the homework.
Interesting opinion. Too bad it's horribly, horribly misinformed. People under the age of 18 share the same rights as people over the age of 18 in at least two of the categories you mention (speech and association). Privacy is on squishier ground, since the right to privacy itself isn't as firm as it could be, constitutionally speaking. You may want to read Tinker v. Des Moines School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969), wherein the Supreme Court ruled that minor's free speech rights don't stop at the schoolhouse door. It'd be awfully hard to support that kind of a ruling if those minors didn't have those free speech rights to begin with, wouldn't it?
It comes down to a simple concept that you don't seem to understand - children are people, not property.
Interestingly, because fashion designs in Second Life fall within the bounds of copyright, they are more protected than fashion designs in real life. Because real life designs are considered a "useful article," they fall under patent law rather than copyright law. Since patent law moves so slowly, designs wouldn't be protected under patents until after they're no longer worth protecting. Because computer code is not held to be a "useful article" (I have no idea why clothes are and software isn't... *shrug*) fashion designers who design virtual clothes can copyright their designs and sue infringers. I'd be kind of curious to find out what would happen if a real life designer started creating copies of their own work in Second Life and then attacking other real life copiers for making derivative works from their virtual copyright. The outcome would likely be the court deciding that the Second Life designs were similar to paper designs, making no difference to the current regulatory scheme. It's an interesting question nonetheless. (If you're interested in the topic, there's a paper on the topic here: http://www.law.virginia.edu/pdf/faculty/sprigman_p iracy.pdf)
But you've paid for more than just a physical object, you've paid for a license to listen to the music contained on the physical object. The physical object may be gone, but what happened to the license?
Clearly, it's not representative now, since 100% of the members of the legislature are, by definition, legislators. What the hell?
This is really more of an issue of language than science - they're trying to decide on a common definition for a term. Language is defined by consensus.
Agreed that the rants are often knee-jerk (especially the ones that only blame Republicans), but there is a fair amount of evidence to be wary of corporations.
I think the reason most people in those circumstances choose to pick on the Republican party is because, as Bill Maher said, "The Democrats are bought out by less scary special interest groups." If I had to choose between teacher's unions and Big Oil, I think I'll choose the teachers any day.
You forgot to mention: she tried to settle for just the medical costs, but McDonalds said no.
I do disagree with the age limit requirements and with disenfranchising felons, those are two areas I might be willing to support limited knowledge tests to grant a right to vote. Say any citizen under 18 who wants to be able to vote can go take a test at the DMV, or anyone with felony conviction can regain the right to vote immediately upon release from prison if they pass a test, or automatically after a short period of time (say 1 year or so). I'm not opposed to letting resident aliens vote if they have lived here a long time either, I don't see what is wrong with that at all.
As an aside - up until Lawrence vs. Texas, it was a felony in Virginia to have sex in any position other than missionary. Let me reiterate: In Virginia, you would permanently lose your right to vote for having sex.
I like your idea of letting minors vote so long as they can pass a basic test - it makes things more free. As for felons, I'd like to see felons allowed to vote just like everyone else, if only because if my understanding of recidivism is correct, the feeling of powerlessness is very bad for keeping one's nose clean.
As for resident aliens, I'm really not concerned (maybe that's a chink in my argument). I just don't see it as making a whole lot of sense for non-citizens to vote. Perhaps you can explain your motivation?
Similarly, car salesman never try to push rust-coating, interior protection, or any sort of warranty, because the consumer will then believe that the car is flawed.
Actually, he didn't. If you counted all the legitimate votes in FL, Gore would have won. Odd, that.
Give it a couple days before the networks catch a whiff. A month from now you may regret this wish... it's going to be all over the news and is going to swamp coverage of candidates.
Assuming we're talking the national election - It's not for another year + 2 months! Realistically, there shouldn't even *be* a campaign yet. The primary in NH isn't even until January!
Obviously you haven't looked at VT recently. Tuition and fees is only $7,500, out of state. I can only wish that my tuition were that low. Hell, for in-state students, the room and board is the same price as tuition (around $2,000). But of course, you're modded up insightful, because you pulled a random idea out of your ass and presented it as fact.
Actually, the parent poster was claiming that copyright has no place because (s)he believes that creativity itself outweights profit. I respectfully disagree, since without copyright law, I could spend years creating a novel only to have someone copy it near-verbatim and profit from my efforts. This may not be an issue if I were writing as a hobby, but this obviously does not apply to all writers.
Maybe I don't understand, but if you write a novel and give it away for free, why would someone pay money for an inferior knock-off?
It's Condorcet ranking with circular ambiguity, as far as I can tell.
Election Methods
Sure, you're not talking voting, but the ranking at the end of the vote is, if I read you correctly, the same thing as what you're talking about.
There are still bands that have feeling to their music - I went to see Pearl Jam for the first time this summer, and it was amazing. Saw Audioslave too - I have a feeling they're going to be around for awhile (if only because Tom Morello kicks ass).
By the way, Aerosmith is far superior to the Stones. =D
To be fair, the OP did say "identical"... the girls you described seem anything but. In your case, the differences were more than enough to outway the monetary discrepancy. In the case of some people, it might not have been.