His comment about blowing up the UN was not a "flippant remark" that I've seized upon, as the grandparent suggests. It was, in fact, a prominent proposal on his website prior to his winning the Libertarian Party nomination; its removal since then (and subsequent denials of it ever having been a serious position) likely being because even he realizes the idea is too insane for the general populace. His excuse for it previous to that was that it was a necessary action for showing the World that US policies had significantly changed.
In fact, minus the "and blow up the building" bit, the "Withdraw from the UN and evict them" proposal still appears on his official website. This is still enough to raise serious questions about Mr. Badnarik's apparently tenuous grasp on the scope of Presidential authority, because the US government does not own the UN land, which was donated by John D Rockefeler and which is considered to be international territory under the law. I don't know what magical powers Badnarik believes the President posesses, but a self-professed constitutional scholar should really know better than to believe that he can unilaterally seize extra-national territory.
But even if it was just some silly comment of his, I notice that you haven't bothered to attempt to refute any of the other serious concerns people have raised about Badnarik here: The "atrophy prisoner's muscles" plan in contravention of the 8th ammendment, the ludicruous notion of returning to a gold standard, the fact he does not seem to understand the powers granted by the 16th ammendment, the fact that he doesn't seem to understand the powers granted to the courts by Article III of the constitution, etc, etc. Badnarik, for all his claims to being a constitutional scholar, appears to understand very, very little of what powers the President does and does not have. How does he plan to "announce a special one-week session of congress in which all members of Congress would be forced to sit through him teaching a constitution class, followed by them swearing an oath stating that they will only exercise their powers as he sees them granted by the constitution??" The President lacks the ability to force the entirety of Congress to sit through a week-long anything, and his opinions on powers granted by the constitution are certainly not binding under law.
If I, as you assert, haven't a clue what I'm talking about, then it should be fairly easy for you to refute these troubling claims about Mr. Badnarik's beliefs and show us all how they are both sane and constitutional proposals.
The Constitution Party is far too pro-Christian, pro-extremely narrow first ammendmant interpretation for me to consider voting for them. The Ten Commandments (or any other religious gobbeldy-gook) do not belong in any government building, motto, creed, et al.
The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office. Section 2: The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution,...
Courts have previously upheld the legality (and, ergo, constitutionality) of the Federal Income tax, citing the authority granted by the 16th ammendment. Hence, Badnarik's stated belief in the illegality of the Federal Income Tax is inconsistent with the constitution and the court's interpretation of it (whose authority to do so is granted by the 3rd article, cited in part above).
I wouldn't say the tax itself is illegal, but some of the methods the IRS has used in its collection definitely are.
That's nice, but we're not here to discuss you're beliefs on the Federal Income Tax. It is Badnarik's position that the constitution does not provide sufficient basis for a Federal Income Tax, which stands in stark defiance of the constitution as written and the intended ability of the Supreme Court as ultimate interpreter of it. It's one thing to run on a platform of repealing the 16th ammendmant as a means of scrapping the income tax, but I don't see how running on a platform of "The parts of the constitution I don't agree with I will ignore" is any better than the crap we're getting right now from the major parties.
Would you prefer the current policy of strapping them to electrical wires?
I'd prefer a President who was capable of respecting the constitution.
Are you kidding me? That's one of the primary themes of his campaign, the fact that politicians today (the President in particular) wield far more power than they should.
I fail to see why that justifies Badnarik's (apparent) belief that the executive should weild even more power than it does now, let alone why libertarians everywhere should flock to vote for a man whose platform contradicts not only basic libertarian ideals, but also the constitution itself.
To be honest, his promise to blow up the UN was what won me over to him.
Waste of time and precious NYC space. Turn it into a landfill or a new stadium for the Yankees, but I repeat myself.
So when did "If we don't like it, we'll seize it from its owners and turn it in to what we the all-powerful government think it should be" become a Libertarian ideal rather than a Communist one?
I agree with *some* of the Libertarian ideas...
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Pre-Election Discussion
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· Score: 4, Interesting
But Badnarik is a bloody nutcase.
Blowing up the UN within a week of taking office? How does that work with the strong property rights stance of the Libertarian party? "We're all for the government respecting your property, unless we don't like you, then we'll confiscate it and blow it up?" His plan isn't legal, let alone practical or within his authority as President
The Federal Income Tax is illegal? Strapping prisoners to their beds for a month so that their muscles atrophy? Has he read the constitution? Does he understand that the President doesn't wield this kind of power?
Based on his tendancy to advocate this kind of crap, my only conclusion is that Badnarik has even less respect for the whole of the constitution than the two major party's candidates.
The last time I checked, my prefered distro (gentoo) had ancient and nearly broken support for GNUstep. Does anyone know of a distro with really good support for runiing it?
It made no sense. They essentially call Stewart a failed journalist because his questions weren't 'tough' enough, and then when he makes solid points about how much they fucking suck at being responsible journalists, they ignore it because he's suddenly not a journalist, just some dumb comedian who isn't being funny enough and whose opinion isn't important.
There was a port of Windows NT to the PPC platform, as well of the Alpha. It was such a miserable failure that WinNT Alpha looked like a roaring success by comparisson.
So, no, no one did care when Windows came to the PPC last time, so I doubt they'd give a flying fuck now, either.
Re:Not much confidence, but still a good player.
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Rio Karma User Review
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· Score: 1
It's because of dirty contacts not because the design is a piece of shit. The design is amazing. I still have my original NES from 1987, it still works. Yes, I have to screw with a few cartridges sometimes but the thing still works
The SNES never had that problem. The fact is the NES' contacts get bent over after enough use, and the thing becomes useless. It's a huge design flaw. The revamped top-loading NES, on the other hand, never had that problem.
I looked in to buying a Karma when they first came out, and the lock ups were a problem them, so I decided to wait until Rio had come up with a solution. Rio, to this day, has never acknowledged the problem; the only difference is that now, over a year later, the forum goers have hit on hte 'solution' of smacking the crap out of a several hundred dollar piece of electronics. Over a year. Either Rio produced one damn huge production run at the beginning, or they've never bothered to try to correct the problem.
Re:From the next-article-please dept.
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Rio Karma User Review
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If only there were some way you could convert your oggs in to some other format, or if only a person was allowed to rip their music collection more than once in their lifetime...
Let's face it, if you have to buy a hideously flawed player because of the format your music is in, you need to put your music in to a new format.
out of an iPod just to make it work, though, which is a bit more of a deal breaker than Ogg compatibility in my book.
The iPod, by the way, support more than the two formats you list: mp3 (cbr and vbr), AAC, Apple Lossless, WAV, AIFF, and Audible.com
Re:From the next-article-please dept.
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Rio Karma User Review
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· Score: 3, Informative
Well, he comes right out and EXPLAINS why you'd buy this over an iPod - he only runs Linux. Last I checked, iPods weren't doing much of anything under Linux.
"It plays Oggs" doesn't exactly make up for the "It suffers from a well known and widespread flaw that forces the user to beat the crap out of it in hopes that it will correct itself and not die under the pummeling" angle.
you must mean that whole 70 years after the author's death.
You must mean currently. But we all know that as soon as anything major (like Steamboat Willy) comes close to coming out of copyright, we'll see Congress extend the term of copyright yet again, thanks to 'encouragement' from Disney.
Copyright terms are nigh on infinite in fact, if not in law.
Indeed, and yours a well stated reminder that not all christians have succumbed to such nonsense. I seem to recall reading a persuasive argument, somewhere, that biblical literalism is in fact a heretical notion co-opted by religious fundamental groups as a response to religions like Islam, which claimed to have the literal words of god in the quran.
While incompatiblity would appear to be a defining characteristic of western religions, a number of eastern religions (Buddhism, Shinto, Taoism, among others) are perfectly compatibile with other religions (from a Buddhist perspective, one could be a buddhist christian, though from a christian perspective that possibility is rejected outright).
I agree with what you're saying on the whole, I'm just reminding you that there are religions out there that aren't as insanely intolerant as the ones you see here in daily life.
>How do you rectify the Earth revolving around the Sun, something the bible obliquely states it does not do?
Well that's not in bible!
Yes, it is. See Psalms 93:1, Psalms 19:1-6, and Joshua 10:12-14. It explicitly states that:
The earth is immovable, the sun is set in rotation about it, and the your god can supposedly halt it's (explicitly not the earth's, but the sun's) rotation. The bible is Heliocentric, pure and simple, and the problem that you Christians get into when you try to argue from the supposed authority of some old goddamn book is that you end up trying to handwave away all the other looney shit it says and only pick out the parts you feel should really count.
That's all a very interesting world view you've constructed for yourself, but the fact remains that the Liberal Party of Australia (note the capital L, its important) is, in fact, a right wing party.
I'm waiting for Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars...
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Star Wars TV Show
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· Score: 5, Funny
"Do you see a sign on my lawn that says 'Dead Wookie Storage'??"
No, it isn't. In both issues the ACLU has a consistant (both with itself, and with the constitution of the United States) stance:
The State can not and should not in any way enact or enforce a law so as to promote the concerns of one religious group over another. Tax Dollars, in other words, should neither be given nor withheld in such a way as to promote the irrelevant concerns of some particular religion.
It is you, on the other hand, who is dogmatically holding to an inconsistent position. Withholding tax dollars to address religious concerns about abortion while providing tax dollars to religious schools is wholely inconsistent with the constitution.
Didn't say it was right, didn't say it made sense, didn't say I agree with it, but believe it or not, that's the way it works.
I'm so insistent on the point not because I agree with it, but because if people understand that our laws actually are that retarded, there's more of a chance they'll agree with the need for copyright reform.
HUH? What is illegal in the US?
Assuming allofmp3 has a legal right to distribute the music (if they don't then I agree with you 100% that the whole thing is a time bomb),
Therein lies the heart of your confusion. Repeat after me:
There is no such thing as a right to distribute music. There is only the right to distribute a copyrighted work within the country that the copyrightholder holds the rights for. Allofmp3 doesn't have the right to distribute the music worldwide, because no such right exists. The rights holder for the music is different in every country . Allofmp3 probably secured permission from the Russian copyright holder to distribute the works, but NOTE THAT that only gives them the right to distribute the work within Russia. The Russian copyright holder is not the US copy right holder, and they lack the right to grant US distribution. Unless allofmp3 has secured the rights from the US rightsholder, the RIAA, it is illegal for them to distribute the work here. And the lack of the RIAA's beloved 'rights-management' crippling is a clear indication that the RIAA never granted them distribution.
the only issue at hand is the legality of that music leaving Russia and entering into the US. Plain and simple.
No such issue exists here. The work never leaves Russia, only a copy of it is made by you in downloading it. It is thus governed by copyright law, and since the US rights holder has not authorized the copy, it is illegal. End of story.
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His comment about blowing up the UN was not a "flippant remark" that I've seized upon, as the grandparent suggests. It was, in fact, a prominent proposal on his website prior to his winning the Libertarian Party nomination; its removal since then (and subsequent denials of it ever having been a serious position) likely being because even he realizes the idea is too insane for the general populace. His excuse for it previous to that was that it was a necessary action for showing the World that US policies had significantly changed.
In fact, minus the "and blow up the building" bit, the "Withdraw from the UN and evict them" proposal still appears on his official website. This is still enough to raise serious questions about Mr. Badnarik's apparently tenuous grasp on the scope of Presidential authority, because the US government does not own the UN land, which was donated by John D Rockefeler and which is considered to be international territory under the law. I don't know what magical powers Badnarik believes the President posesses, but a self-professed constitutional scholar should really know better than to believe that he can unilaterally seize extra-national territory.
But even if it was just some silly comment of his, I notice that you haven't bothered to attempt to refute any of the other serious concerns people have raised about Badnarik here: The "atrophy prisoner's muscles" plan in contravention of the 8th ammendment, the ludicruous notion of returning to a gold standard, the fact he does not seem to understand the powers granted by the 16th ammendment, the fact that he doesn't seem to understand the powers granted to the courts by Article III of the constitution, etc, etc. Badnarik, for all his claims to being a constitutional scholar, appears to understand very, very little of what powers the President does and does not have. How does he plan to "announce a special one-week session of congress in which all members of Congress would be forced to sit through him teaching a constitution class, followed by them swearing an oath stating that they will only exercise their powers as he sees them granted by the constitution??" The President lacks the ability to force the entirety of Congress to sit through a week-long anything, and his opinions on powers granted by the constitution are certainly not binding under law.
If I, as you assert, haven't a clue what I'm talking about, then it should be fairly easy for you to refute these troubling claims about Mr. Badnarik's beliefs and show us all how they are both sane and constitutional proposals.
The Constitution Party is far too pro-Christian, pro-extremely narrow first ammendmant interpretation for me to consider voting for them. The Ten Commandments (or any other religious gobbeldy-gook) do not belong in any government building, motto, creed, et al.
US Constitution, Article III, Section 1:
The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office. Section 2: The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution,...
Courts have previously upheld the legality (and, ergo, constitutionality) of the Federal Income tax, citing the authority granted by the 16th ammendment. Hence, Badnarik's stated belief in the illegality of the Federal Income Tax is inconsistent with the constitution and the court's interpretation of it (whose authority to do so is granted by the 3rd article, cited in part above).
I wouldn't say the tax itself is illegal, but some of the methods the IRS has used in its collection definitely are.
That's nice, but we're not here to discuss you're beliefs on the Federal Income Tax. It is Badnarik's position that the constitution does not provide sufficient basis for a Federal Income Tax, which stands in stark defiance of the constitution as written and the intended ability of the Supreme Court as ultimate interpreter of it. It's one thing to run on a platform of repealing the 16th ammendmant as a means of scrapping the income tax, but I don't see how running on a platform of "The parts of the constitution I don't agree with I will ignore" is any better than the crap we're getting right now from the major parties.
Would you prefer the current policy of strapping them to electrical wires?
I'd prefer a President who was capable of respecting the constitution.
Are you kidding me? That's one of the primary themes of his campaign, the fact that politicians today (the President in particular) wield far more power than they should.
I fail to see why that justifies Badnarik's (apparent) belief that the executive should weild even more power than it does now, let alone why libertarians everywhere should flock to vote for a man whose platform contradicts not only basic libertarian ideals, but also the constitution itself.
To be honest, his promise to blow up the UN was what won me over to him.
Waste of time and precious NYC space. Turn it into a landfill or a new stadium for the Yankees, but I repeat myself.
So when did "If we don't like it, we'll seize it from its owners and turn it in to what we the all-powerful government think it should be" become a Libertarian ideal rather than a Communist one?
But Badnarik is a bloody nutcase.
Blowing up the UN within a week of taking office? How does that work with the strong property rights stance of the Libertarian party? "We're all for the government respecting your property, unless we don't like you, then we'll confiscate it and blow it up?" His plan isn't legal, let alone practical or within his authority as President
The Federal Income Tax is illegal? Strapping prisoners to their beds for a month so that their muscles atrophy? Has he read the constitution? Does he understand that the President doesn't wield this kind of power?
Based on his tendancy to advocate this kind of crap, my only conclusion is that Badnarik has even less respect for the whole of the constitution than the two major party's candidates.
The last time I checked, my prefered distro (gentoo) had ancient and nearly broken support for GNUstep. Does anyone know of a distro with really good support for runiing it?
It made no sense. They essentially call Stewart a failed journalist because his questions weren't 'tough' enough, and then when he makes solid points about how much they fucking suck at being responsible journalists, they ignore it because he's suddenly not a journalist, just some dumb comedian who isn't being funny enough and whose opinion isn't important.
There was a port of Windows NT to the PPC platform, as well of the Alpha. It was such a miserable failure that WinNT Alpha looked like a roaring success by comparisson.
So, no, no one did care when Windows came to the PPC last time, so I doubt they'd give a flying fuck now, either.
It's because of dirty contacts not because the design is a piece of shit. The design is amazing. I still have my original NES from 1987, it still works. Yes, I have to screw with a few cartridges sometimes but the thing still works
The SNES never had that problem. The fact is the NES' contacts get bent over after enough use, and the thing becomes useless. It's a huge design flaw. The revamped top-loading NES, on the other hand, never had that problem.
I looked in to buying a Karma when they first came out, and the lock ups were a problem them, so I decided to wait until Rio had come up with a solution. Rio, to this day, has never acknowledged the problem; the only difference is that now, over a year later, the forum goers have hit on hte 'solution' of smacking the crap out of a several hundred dollar piece of electronics. Over a year. Either Rio produced one damn huge production run at the beginning, or they've never bothered to try to correct the problem.
If only there were some way you could convert your oggs in to some other format, or if only a person was allowed to rip their music collection more than once in their lifetime...
Let's face it, if you have to buy a hideously flawed player because of the format your music is in, you need to put your music in to a new format.
out of an iPod just to make it work, though, which is a bit more of a deal breaker than Ogg compatibility in my book.
The iPod, by the way, support more than the two formats you list: mp3 (cbr and vbr), AAC, Apple Lossless, WAV, AIFF, and Audible.com
Well, he comes right out and EXPLAINS why you'd buy this over an iPod - he only runs Linux. Last I checked, iPods weren't doing much of anything under Linux.
When was the last time you checked?
"It plays Oggs" doesn't exactly make up for the "It suffers from a well known and widespread flaw that forces the user to beat the crap out of it in hopes that it will correct itself and not die under the pummeling" angle.
you must mean that whole 70 years after the author's death.
You must mean currently. But we all know that as soon as anything major (like Steamboat Willy) comes close to coming out of copyright, we'll see Congress extend the term of copyright yet again, thanks to 'encouragement' from Disney.
Copyright terms are nigh on infinite in fact, if not in law.
Indeed, and yours a well stated reminder that not all christians have succumbed to such nonsense. I seem to recall reading a persuasive argument, somewhere, that biblical literalism is in fact a heretical notion co-opted by religious fundamental groups as a response to religions like Islam, which claimed to have the literal words of god in the quran.
While incompatiblity would appear to be a defining characteristic of western religions, a number of eastern religions (Buddhism, Shinto, Taoism, among others) are perfectly compatibile with other religions (from a Buddhist perspective, one could be a buddhist christian, though from a christian perspective that possibility is rejected outright).
I agree with what you're saying on the whole, I'm just reminding you that there are religions out there that aren't as insanely intolerant as the ones you see here in daily life.
>How do you rectify the Earth revolving around the Sun, something the bible obliquely states it does not do?
Well that's not in bible!
Yes, it is. See Psalms 93:1, Psalms 19:1-6, and Joshua 10:12-14. It explicitly states that:
The earth is immovable, the sun is set in rotation about it, and the your god can supposedly halt it's (explicitly not the earth's, but the sun's) rotation. The bible is Heliocentric, pure and simple, and the problem that you Christians get into when you try to argue from the supposed authority of some old goddamn book is that you end up trying to handwave away all the other looney shit it says and only pick out the parts you feel should really count.
That's all a very interesting world view you've constructed for yourself, but the fact remains that the Liberal Party of Australia (note the capital L, its important) is, in fact, a right wing party.
"Do you see a sign on my lawn that says 'Dead Wookie Storage'??"
Religions don't use roads, people do.
The mere fact that tax dollars (in the form of vouchers) can be used for a religious institution is unconstitutional in the ACLU's (and my) view.
That isn't consistant, is it?
No, it isn't. In both issues the ACLU has a consistant (both with itself, and with the constitution of the United States) stance:
The State can not and should not in any way enact or enforce a law so as to promote the concerns of one religious group over another. Tax Dollars, in other words, should neither be given nor withheld in such a way as to promote the irrelevant concerns of some particular religion.
It is you, on the other hand, who is dogmatically holding to an inconsistent position. Withholding tax dollars to address religious concerns about abortion while providing tax dollars to religious schools is wholely inconsistent with the constitution.
Didn't say it was right, didn't say it made sense, didn't say I agree with it, but believe it or not, that's the way it works.
I'm so insistent on the point not because I agree with it, but because if people understand that our laws actually are that retarded, there's more of a chance they'll agree with the need for copyright reform.
No difference at all, a copy is being made on US soil.
HUH? What is illegal in the US? Assuming allofmp3 has a legal right to distribute the music (if they don't then I agree with you 100% that the whole thing is a time bomb),
Therein lies the heart of your confusion. Repeat after me:
There is no such thing as a right to distribute music. There is only the right to distribute a copyrighted work within the country that the copyrightholder holds the rights for. Allofmp3 doesn't have the right to distribute the music worldwide, because no such right exists. The rights holder for the music is different in every country . Allofmp3 probably secured permission from the Russian copyright holder to distribute the works, but NOTE THAT that only gives them the right to distribute the work within Russia. The Russian copyright holder is not the US copy right holder, and they lack the right to grant US distribution. Unless allofmp3 has secured the rights from the US rightsholder, the RIAA, it is illegal for them to distribute the work here. And the lack of the RIAA's beloved 'rights-management' crippling is a clear indication that the RIAA never granted them distribution.
the only issue at hand is the legality of that music leaving Russia and entering into the US. Plain and simple.
No such issue exists here. The work never leaves Russia, only a copy of it is made by you in downloading it. It is thus governed by copyright law, and since the US rights holder has not authorized the copy, it is illegal. End of story.