Jesus came to set us free from the law. By His death and resurection, He succeded in that. Christians are not under old testament law, though the Jews have chosen to remain under it. Read Matthew 5:17
Government rarely removes monopolies. Look at the Microsoft Antitrust case. Government creates monopolies in many cases, however. Those monopolies not created by either government, FUD or vaporware, such as DeBeers, can only be eliminated through technological innovation. DeBeers' control of most of the worlds diamond mines won't keep them a monopoly much longer, now that synthetic diamonds are becoming feasible. The monopolies created by FUD, such as MS, are undermined when a much better competitor becomes well known enough, such as linux. Those created by government, such as the RIAA and the MPAA, can be eliminated by breaking the law(The company with patents on Motion Pictures around the turn of the century no longer exists, and the who moved to hollywood to escape the patents).
Removing the rights of women, for example. Or executing gays and lesbians. Any takers? Not me. A third source of the conflict is religion. Saudi Arabia and other countries have espoused fundamentalist strains of their religion.
Europe is also primarily dominated by Christians, while India is dominated by Hindus, yet their intolerance didn't lead to any terrorist attacks against either region as far as I am aware. All developed nations support the rights of women, more than the Taliban does at least, yet we have been the target of all of Al Qaeda's attacks.
So instead of the history of tolerance we saw at the Islamic world's height, we see massive intolerance, and violence against every country on the Muslim world's borders.
The only country on their borders they are violent against is Israel. I know India and Pakistan don't have particularly friendly relations but they aren't fighting, and I've never heard anything about bad relations between Turkey and Greece or Russia.
Virtually none of this is our (America's) fault.
We supported the Taliban(when they were fighting the USSR) and Saddam Hussein(during the Iran-Iraq war).
Not every evil that happens in the world is our fault.
True, but we are partly to blame for some of it.
One of the biggest problems in America right now is that we're viewing the other party as an enemy rather than a rival.
That's why we are in the middle of a civil war right now.
If you had lost a close friend or family member on 9/11, I don't think you would see even the most odious right- or left-wing zealot as worse than Osama bin Laden.
Osama planned the terrorist attack because he was a right-wing zealot.
Terms of use for a website probably will be ruled invalid unless you have to click a button or link saying that you accept. Not only have you not accepted but you may not have even known those terms exist. Unless you know or can reasonably be expected to know that you aren't granted permission to do something it is essentially an implied right(for example you dont have to ask permission every time you visit someones web page; they put it on the net, presumably for you to read).
Actually, taking the fascistic bent (hey, when has Microsoft ever been a stickler on the terms?) you can't write a program based on the information presented there, since it'd be a derivative work of the information presented there (again, third paragraph).
As stated earlier terms of use are probalbly invalid, but even if the court deems it valid there are two things you can use. One thing is that anti-trust laws do not allow anti-competitive clauses in contracts; This clause if interpreted that way will not allow anyone to write competing programs for windows. Another thing is that in the case of an ambiguity in a contract of adhesion(a take it or leave it offer), the courts almost always side with the defendant
If you have an opputunity to read it but agree without reading it, a contract is still valid. The thing you might be able to get it found invalid is consideration. If a contract does not give you anything but just takes stuff away its invalid. The right to use your property is part of the right to property, so you already have it. The typical arguement against that is that its part of the purchase contract. If you were not given an oppurtunity to know the full terms of the contract at the time you make it it is invalid. That way I can't add more terms to the contract afterwards.
Despite popular belief even 10% voter turnout is sufficient. This is why surveys are accurate, the probability of the sample deviating from the entire population significantly is quite small at that low rate as well as higher ones.
First a copyright license is not a contract. Copyright restricts what you can do without the copyright holders approval. A license is simply a statement saying what the copyright holder allows you to do. The GPL is simply permission from the copyeright holders to do whatever you want with the code except giving copies of it out that dont allow others the same priveledges.
Second it doesn't need to be federal law. You can give someone permission without passing a federal law saying they have permission. Even contracts don't need to be law, because the law says they must be followed. Transfer of property is handled by contract law. Yet you don't need to go to the legislature and ask for a law every time you want to buy something.
If only 10%, as long as that 10% is random, of the population voted we would still have better precision as to what the public wants than most surveys.
Use a tripwire system with the tripwire wrapped around the inside of the case and the screws, so that it cant be opened without breaking the wire; the tripwire should be attached to a NOT gate attached in turn to a detonator with a strong enough explosive charge to destroy the device. Another method however is X-Rays so you should use a metal case(which will stop most EM radiation at every frequency except extremely high frequencies, ie beyond gamma rays) just inside the tripwire. This also prevents waves from inside the device escaping, and giving away the location of the source, and the functional form of the voltage. There are other waves to worry about, in particular sound waves. Anything with a sufficiently high acoustic impedance surrounding the hardware its self will reflect most of the sound wave. Most other waves are not significant in this case. The biggest remaining problem is that someone conceivably could reconstruct the temperature and the thermal conductivity at each point from thermal images at 2 different points in time separated by a small time interval, using the heat equation,
C*pho*partial T/partial t = k *laplacian T + grad T dot grad k (I know this notation sucks but ascii doesn't have those symbols so im just putting it in bold; C is specific heat). the innermost casing should be filled with an inhomogenous mixture of a wide array of molten plastics(which solidify afterwards; an air pocket must be maintained around the explosive charge however), some of which preferably have specific heats and/or thermal conductivities that change significantly with relatively small changes in temperature(making the equation nonlinear; the specific plastics and their locations in the material are not known, so there does not exist a unique solution now that these constants vary with temperature, and thus have more degrees of freedom; this can however be circumvented if an approximate functional form is known for the constants), so that k is not susceptible to any special approximation techniques, and thus requiring a large amount of detail in the imaging, and a computationally intensive approximation. However the thermodynamic constants can be found by using thermal imaging when the device is off and the external heat sources are known, so there must also be heat sources with unpredictable power inside, which like the tripwire system stay on when the device is switched off. The techniques described can still be used to reverse engineer it given sufficiently accurate measurements.
If I owned 90%+ of all the fertile ground in the USA able to bear wheat, how then would you compete?
If you owned 90% of all the fertile ground able to grow wheat in the USA you couldn't charge whatever you want. You would still face foreign competition, so your profit will be just over the tariff rate(If there are tariffs). Also there would be competition from other foods.
could also just lower my prices for a time until you were no longer able to compete and swoop in and take your remaining 10% and now have full control of all wheat production, which is very similar to the postioin MS is in and where they are trying to go.
To undercut any competition you would have to sell it at a loss. If you lower your prices for a while whats to stop people from buying a lot of wheat and selling it for a profit after you raised the prices back up? The only things you can do are to wait for them to sell off there whole stock, depriving you of profits, or lower the price so you can undercut them, restarting the cycle and draining even more profit. They will be run into bankruptcy if they undercut competitors long enough. BTW The remaining 10% of the land most likely won't belong to a single competitor.
That actually accomplishes the same purpose as dissolving in sulfuric acid, because its dissolved in hydrochloric acid in your stomach. It's actually better though because it mixes in dissolved bits of whatever else you ate and bacteria,hiding which pieces are actually from the shredded document, causing it to decompose faster, and making people want to leave it alone.
Larger corporations have something far more powerfull then police/military, it is called money
My point is the government can punish those who don't comply with its wishes, whereas a corporation can only reward those who do. The corporations money, as opposed to the force behind the government, can only influence you as much as your greed will allow.
Also, with monopolies, people never have the chance to vote with thier money. As the grandparent post pointed out, we need to eat, so when one company controls too much of a food supply market, it is detrimental to the people.
There is nothing preventing other people from growing their own food, so the only tactics to maintain a monopoly are use of force(through the government), and FUD. FUD wouldnt be effective, how would you FUD the competitions wheat when yours is the same (Microsoft's FUD against linux is somewhat successful only because linux is different from windows, otherwise they'd be FUDing their product too). Thus only the government could impose such a monopoly, so it doesn't serve your argument that monopolies are more powerful than the government.
The same goes for technology, some may argue that you don't need technology or a computer, however I think it has become engrained into our society and is needed. This is another reason why MS controlling so much of the IT industry is a bad thing.
You can 'pirate' M$ software instead, and without the use of force, which is the defining property of government, noone can stop you. Their FUD wouldn't help against competition from pirated copies, beause they'd be FUDing legit copies as well, and driving people to the competition.
However, with all their money comes power to buy votes, so it is we the people that suffer.
Buying votes is simply bribing the government(actually the officials in the government) to do what they want. It still has no point without the force of government to enforce their wishes. Without law enforcment Congress can pass all the laws they want, but they won't make any more difference than if I decided to make up a new law.
The problem with stealing is that you deprive someone of their property. That problem doesn't apply to copying; I see no reason copyright violations are immoral.
No, due to the Berne convention, copyright protection is automatic, the only reason to file it is to allow you to get punative damages as well as actual damages from infringers.
A state can be totalitarian and capitalist (fascism):
Not exactly; Fascism tends more towards each of those however. Capitalism is based on the idea of laissez faire; Totalitarianism is based on total control of everything. Obviously those two are contradictory.
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
A private Power cannot easily become as powerful as the government through the free market. They will need an army that rivals that of the government, and even if they do try to spend the money on an army it probably wont sit too well with the stock holders(less profit for a while, and huge risk when the company goes up against the government; besides the shareholders are people too, and I dont think they want the corporation to rule every aspect of their lives).
Then we don't have to worry about the deregulation. The only reason this is an issue is because the FCC licences only a limited portion of the spectrum for the media(Im thinking primarily Radio here). Without government regulations there is nothing stopping anyone else from brodcasting at any given frequency.
You are assuming every American votes. I wish that was the case
It doesn't matter. On surveys they often use a 2-3% sampling size and get fairly accurate results. If only 20% of the population votes, assuming its random which vote and which dont, than the margin of error due to the sample size will be significantly smaller than the margin of victory in any presidential election, or even the margin of error due to ballot fraud.
And if Libertarians had their way, we'd be driving on toll roads
What's so bbad about that? If you save tax money and pay for the toll road instead it wouldn't hurt you.
Plus we'd all be out of jobs, because the major corporations would move everything overseas due to the lack of gov't interference in business.
In a free market economy with floating exchange rates there isn't much benifit in moving everything overseas; besides right now there are no regulations that I'm aware of preventing businesses from moving everything overseas anyway.
Give me a party that believes in protecting the environment, promotes competition amongst businesses by not allowing them to buy each other up, stays out of my personal life, and puts the rights and liberties of citizens ahead of big business.
First of all the Libertarian Party has a plan to protect the environment, by eliminating sovereign immunity and allowing the privatization of land and beast. Businesses buying each other up is not a threat to competition. If they wont pay more than the cost of starting the business then nobody will sell a business. If they do pay more, then people will start creating businesses to get bought out for a quick profit, and will drain the monopoly of funds.
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Jesus came to set us free from the law. By His death and resurection, He succeded in that. Christians are not under old testament law, though the Jews have chosen to remain under it. Read Matthew 5:17
Which ones? Searching the archives wont help me much as they have a billion.
Government rarely removes monopolies. Look at the Microsoft Antitrust case. Government creates monopolies in many cases, however. Those monopolies not created by either government, FUD or vaporware, such as DeBeers, can only be eliminated through technological innovation. DeBeers' control of most of the worlds diamond mines won't keep them a monopoly much longer, now that synthetic diamonds are becoming feasible. The monopolies created by FUD, such as MS, are undermined when a much better competitor becomes well known enough, such as linux. Those created by government, such as the RIAA and the MPAA, can be eliminated by breaking the law(The company with patents on Motion Pictures around the turn of the century no longer exists, and the who moved to hollywood to escape the patents).
Europe is also primarily dominated by Christians, while India is dominated by Hindus, yet their intolerance didn't lead to any terrorist attacks against either region as far as I am aware. All developed nations support the rights of women, more than the Taliban does at least, yet we have been the target of all of Al Qaeda's attacks.
So instead of the history of tolerance we saw at the Islamic world's height, we see massive intolerance, and violence against every country on the Muslim world's borders.
The only country on their borders they are violent against is Israel. I know India and Pakistan don't have particularly friendly relations but they aren't fighting, and I've never heard anything about bad relations between Turkey and Greece or Russia.
Virtually none of this is our (America's) fault.
We supported the Taliban(when they were fighting the USSR) and Saddam Hussein(during the Iran-Iraq war).
Not every evil that happens in the world is our fault.
True, but we are partly to blame for some of it.
One of the biggest problems in America right now is that we're viewing the other party as an enemy rather than a rival.
That's why we are in the middle of a civil war right now.
If you had lost a close friend or family member on 9/11, I don't think you would see even the most odious right- or left-wing zealot as worse than Osama bin Laden.
Osama planned the terrorist attack because he was a right-wing zealot.
I thought perl was interpreted, not compiled.
Actually, taking the fascistic bent (hey, when has Microsoft ever been a stickler on the terms?) you can't write a program based on the information presented there, since it'd be a derivative work of the information presented there (again, third paragraph).
As stated earlier terms of use are probalbly invalid, but even if the court deems it valid there are two things you can use. One thing is that anti-trust laws do not allow anti-competitive clauses in contracts; This clause if interpreted that way will not allow anyone to write competing programs for windows. Another thing is that in the case of an ambiguity in a contract of adhesion(a take it or leave it offer), the courts almost always side with the defendant
If you have an opputunity to read it but agree without reading it, a contract is still valid. The thing you might be able to get it found invalid is consideration. If a contract does not give you anything but just takes stuff away its invalid. The right to use your property is part of the right to property, so you already have it. The typical arguement against that is that its part of the purchase contract. If you were not given an oppurtunity to know the full terms of the contract at the time you make it it is invalid. That way I can't add more terms to the contract afterwards.
Despite popular belief even 10% voter turnout is sufficient. This is why surveys are accurate, the probability of the sample deviating from the entire population significantly is quite small at that low rate as well as higher ones.
Second it doesn't need to be federal law. You can give someone permission without passing a federal law saying they have permission. Even contracts don't need to be law, because the law says they must be followed. Transfer of property is handled by contract law. Yet you don't need to go to the legislature and ask for a law every time you want to buy something.
I don't know what case you're talking about but I'd assume you would have to invest in the stock to be held liable for securities fraud
If only 10%, as long as that 10% is random, of the population voted we would still have better precision as to what the public wants than most surveys.
Use a tripwire system with the tripwire wrapped around the inside of the case and the screws, so that it cant be opened without breaking the wire; the tripwire should be attached to a NOT gate attached in turn to a detonator with a strong enough explosive charge to destroy the device. Another method however is X-Rays so you should use a metal case(which will stop most EM radiation at every frequency except extremely high frequencies, ie beyond gamma rays) just inside the tripwire. This also prevents waves from inside the device escaping, and giving away the location of the source, and the functional form of the voltage. There are other waves to worry about, in particular sound waves. Anything with a sufficiently high acoustic impedance surrounding the hardware its self will reflect most of the sound wave. Most other waves are not significant in this case. The biggest remaining problem is that someone conceivably could reconstruct the temperature and the thermal conductivity at each point from thermal images at 2 different points in time separated by a small time interval, using the heat equation, C*pho*partial T/partial t = k *laplacian T + grad T dot grad k (I know this notation sucks but ascii doesn't have those symbols so im just putting it in bold; C is specific heat). the innermost casing should be filled with an inhomogenous mixture of a wide array of molten plastics(which solidify afterwards; an air pocket must be maintained around the explosive charge however), some of which preferably have specific heats and/or thermal conductivities that change significantly with relatively small changes in temperature(making the equation nonlinear; the specific plastics and their locations in the material are not known, so there does not exist a unique solution now that these constants vary with temperature, and thus have more degrees of freedom; this can however be circumvented if an approximate functional form is known for the constants), so that k is not susceptible to any special approximation techniques, and thus requiring a large amount of detail in the imaging, and a computationally intensive approximation. However the thermodynamic constants can be found by using thermal imaging when the device is off and the external heat sources are known, so there must also be heat sources with unpredictable power inside, which like the tripwire system stay on when the device is switched off. The techniques described can still be used to reverse engineer it given sufficiently accurate measurements.
They aren't after increased taxes, they can raise taxes without us saying we want them too. What they want is campaign contributions.
If you owned 90% of all the fertile ground able to grow wheat in the USA you couldn't charge whatever you want. You would still face foreign competition, so your profit will be just over the tariff rate(If there are tariffs). Also there would be competition from other foods.
could also just lower my prices for a time until you were no longer able to compete and swoop in and take your remaining 10% and now have full control of all wheat production, which is very similar to the postioin MS is in and where they are trying to go.
To undercut any competition you would have to sell it at a loss. If you lower your prices for a while whats to stop people from buying a lot of wheat and selling it for a profit after you raised the prices back up? The only things you can do are to wait for them to sell off there whole stock, depriving you of profits, or lower the price so you can undercut them, restarting the cycle and draining even more profit. They will be run into bankruptcy if they undercut competitors long enough.
BTW The remaining 10% of the land most likely won't belong to a single competitor.
That actually accomplishes the same purpose as dissolving in sulfuric acid, because its dissolved in hydrochloric acid in your stomach. It's actually better though because it mixes in dissolved bits of whatever else you ate and bacteria,hiding which pieces are actually from the shredded document, causing it to decompose faster, and making people want to leave it alone.
If you burn paper you usually can still see the writing on the ashes if you look closely; the ink isn't the same shade of black as the ashes are.
My point is the government can punish those who don't comply with its wishes, whereas a corporation can only reward those who do. The corporations money, as opposed to the force behind the government, can only influence you as much as your greed will allow.
Also, with monopolies, people never have the chance to vote with thier money. As the grandparent post pointed out, we need to eat, so when one company controls too much of a food supply market, it is detrimental to the people.
There is nothing preventing other people from growing their own food, so the only tactics to maintain a monopoly are use of force(through the government), and FUD. FUD wouldnt be effective, how would you FUD the competitions wheat when yours is the same (Microsoft's FUD against linux is somewhat successful only because linux is different from windows, otherwise they'd be FUDing their product too). Thus only the government could impose such a monopoly, so it doesn't serve your argument that monopolies are more powerful than the government.
The same goes for technology, some may argue that you don't need technology or a computer, however I think it has become engrained into our society and is needed. This is another reason why MS controlling so much of the IT industry is a bad thing.
You can 'pirate' M$ software instead, and without the use of force, which is the defining property of government, noone can stop you. Their FUD wouldn't help against competition from pirated copies, beause they'd be FUDing legit copies as well, and driving people to the competition.
However, with all their money comes power to buy votes, so it is we the people that suffer.
Buying votes is simply bribing the government(actually the officials in the government) to do what they want. It still has no point without the force of government to enforce their wishes. Without law enforcment Congress can pass all the laws they want, but they won't make any more difference than if I decided to make up a new law.
The problem with stealing is that you deprive someone of their property. That problem doesn't apply to copying; I see no reason copyright violations are immoral.
No, due to the Berne convention, copyright protection is automatic, the only reason to file it is to allow you to get punative damages as well as actual damages from infringers.
Not exactly; Fascism tends more towards each of those however. Capitalism is based on the idea of laissez faire; Totalitarianism is based on total control of everything. Obviously those two are contradictory.
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
A private Power cannot easily become as powerful as the government through the free market. They will need an army that rivals that of the government, and even if they do try to spend the money on an army it probably wont sit too well with the stock holders(less profit for a while, and huge risk when the company goes up against the government; besides the shareholders are people too, and I dont think they want the corporation to rule every aspect of their lives).
A state can be socalist and capitalist.
You just contradicted what you said earlier.
Then we don't have to worry about the deregulation. The only reason this is an issue is because the FCC licences only a limited portion of the spectrum for the media(Im thinking primarily Radio here). Without government regulations there is nothing stopping anyone else from brodcasting at any given frequency.
And corporations theoretically don't have the same kind of force(police/military) backing their wishes that the government does.
It doesn't matter. On surveys they often use a 2-3% sampling size and get fairly accurate results. If only 20% of the population votes, assuming its random which vote and which dont, than the margin of error due to the sample size will be significantly smaller than the margin of victory in any presidential election, or even the margin of error due to ballot fraud.
What's so bbad about that? If you save tax money and pay for the toll road instead it wouldn't hurt you.
Plus we'd all be out of jobs, because the major corporations would move everything overseas due to the lack of gov't interference in business.
In a free market economy with floating exchange rates there isn't much benifit in moving everything overseas; besides right now there are no regulations that I'm aware of preventing businesses from moving everything overseas anyway.
Give me a party that believes in protecting the environment, promotes competition amongst businesses by not allowing them to buy each other up, stays out of my personal life, and puts the rights and liberties of citizens ahead of big business.
First of all the Libertarian Party has a plan to protect the environment, by eliminating sovereign immunity and allowing the privatization of land and beast. Businesses buying each other up is not a threat to competition. If they wont pay more than the cost of starting the business then nobody will sell a business. If they do pay more, then people will start creating businesses to get bought out for a quick profit, and will drain the monopoly of funds.
Arrow's Theorem states that systems such as you described can't be made perfect however.