You nonsense. If you speed, you might be putting others at risk. If you smoke pot in your living room, the only thing you're putting at risk are the contents of your fridge.
However, just because everyone has done it at some point does not mean it is "not sufficiently damaging to be a crime." Most people have stolen. Many people owned slaves while we were trying to illegalize it.
Apples to irrelevant oranges. You're comparing victimless crimes (smoking pot or eating shrooms in your living room) to crimes where their is a definite victim (theft/slavery).
It's called the reality based community, try and visit it some time. Or just visit some European nations where drugs are legal and addiction is treated as a medical problem instead of a criminal one. Their societies haven't fallen apart, yet they do save billions on not locking up non violent offenders for victimless crimes.
No one has held up banks or killed people for sugar before. No sir, the major difference is that drugs are extremely addictive. Far more than sugar or fat ever will be.
An important distinction you are ignoring: people don't rob to get drugs, they rob to get money to buy drugs. If sugar had high black market prices, you'd see people fighting over that too...as has happened, as another poster pointed out.
Then FDR came along. FDR didn't give a damn about the Constitution
Horseshit.
FDR threatened to pack the court
If you gave a damn about the Constitution, you might know that it doesn't limit the Supreme Court to 9 justices. There's been as few as six and as many as ten sitting justices, and FDR's plan was not only perfectly Constitutional, it had precedent. Ah, consistency: the enemy of all wingnut arguments.
Otherwise all this New Deal stuff (wage controls, price controls, etc.) would (and did) fail the Constitutionality test.
Wrong again. Promote the General Welfare. It's in the Constitution. Twice. If you're response to that is the canned "promote, not provide", Article I, Section 8 uses the word "provide." And if your response to that is that General Welfare is limited to the specific list in Section 8, then Common Defense is also similarly listed, since it's not only in the same section, but the same sentence as General Welfare.
In other words, if Social Security is unconstitutional because it's not specifically spelled out as a Congressional power, then so is the Air Force, as Congress only has the power to fund an army or a navy. As well as the CIA, the NSA, and any other intelligence agency not attached to the Army or the Navy. Ditto for our spy satellites, border patrol, and large parts of the FBI.
But I've bet you've never heard a wingnut bitch about the unconstitutionality of the New Deal and the Air Force. It's almost like their standards and ethics depend entirely on the situation, like they were partisan hacks or something. Huh, interesting.
So, I would assume the issue is what Democrats like to call the "Living Constitution" meaning that the Constitution doesn't mean what it meant when it was written/ratified, but what 5 Justices think it means today (president be damned). Like Lewis Carroll's Humpty-Dumpty, words mean only what he says they mean. Conservatives refer to these people as "Activist Judges", and in stead believe that the way to change the Constitution is via Amendments (last one passed during Clinton). In short, the Constitution is a social contract and means what it meant when written/ratified.
The idea that liberal judges are advocates and partisans while judges like Justice Scalia are not is being touted everywhere these days, and it is pure myth. Justice Scalia has been more than willing to ignore the Constitution's plain language, and he has a knack for coming out on the conservative side in cases with an ideological bent. The conservative partisans leading the war on activist judges are just as inconsistent: they like judicial activism just fine when it advances their own agendas.
Justice Scalia's views on federalism - which now generally command a majority on the Supreme Court - are perhaps the clearest example of the problem with the conservative attack on judicial activism. When conservatives complain about activist judges, they talk about gay marriage and defendants' rights. But they do not mention the 11th Amendment, which has been twisted beyond its own plain words into a states' rights weapon to throw minorities, women and the disabled out of federal court.
The 11th Amendment says federal courts cannot hear lawsuits against a state brought by "Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State." But it's been interpreted to block suits by a state's own citizens - something it clearly does not say. How to get around the Constitution's express words? In a 1991 decision, Justice Scalia wrote that "despite the narrowness of its terms," the 11th Amendment h
it's not that the black market is better, but that the system of (potential_for_black_market+illegality) is potentially better than the legal alternative
That's the point: it's not better. We learned that lesson just fine with Prohibition, for for some reason it hasn't sunk in yet for Prohibition 2.0: the War on Drugs.
Because imposing draconian punishments for victimless crimes is stupid and inhumane. Oh, and we've been doing that, and it hasn't worked out any better than cracking down on the dealers.
Yes, because the plural of anecdote is data, and taking prescribed doses is the same as taking an overdose to get high. I'm sure we could also find no shortage of people that snort coke twice a month without any problems.
...that's flame retardant? That would do infinitely more to protect your personal safety than bending over for the government, but somehow I doubt that you do more than buckle your seat belt.
Most artists who create a song (under the current terms) will be dead before their works enter the public domain.
That's a given. It's life of the author + 75 years, IIRC. The irony is that Disney, one of the prime backers of each new extension, wouldn't have been able to make a lot of their classic movies if current copyright terms had been in effect at the time, like Jungle Book. And the neat factoid that every content industry, with the exception of software, was itself founded on piracy. For example, Hollywood didn't just settle in California for the nice weather - studios set up shop on the west coast to avoid having to make patent payments on cameras to Thomas Edison.
Content industries don't have a problem with violations of the law - they have a problem when the violations of the law don't make them money.
Ever hear of a game called Summoner? It was a simultaenous PC/PS2 release. The PC version sold 50000 copies, not bad for an actiony RPG type game. The PS2 version sold 500000.
You sound like an vinyl audiophile, saying CD's are crap because album XYZ sounds so much better on vinyl than on compact disc. Never mind that the label did a crappy job on remastering the CD and distorted the audio by cranking up the volume (a new Celine Dion CD plays louder than a Van Halen album from the 90's).
In other words, there are plenty of things that can prevent this from being an apples to apples comparison. Was the game designed with a gamepad in mind, making it more difficult to play with a keyboard/mouse? Did the PC version require vastly more powerful hardware than the console to play as well? Were there major bugs left in the PC version of the game because the publisher had the "ship first, fix later" mentality with QA? Was the gameplay for the PC limited by console restrictions (limited save points)? How about the game itself - were the maps heavily segmented into load zones for console hardware?
Deus Ex II and Thief III: Deadly Shadows are good examples of what I'm talking about. While you could save anywhere you wanted, both games had bad bugs in the PC versions, and had tiny levels compared to their PC-only predecessors, especially Thief III. The entire game could have fit in two or three of the larger levels from Thief II: The Metal Age.
Not just yet, but it's only a matter of time. The PC game market is slowly but surely turning into the Amiga game market of the early 90's: ports from other platforms, games from European dev houses too poor to do console games, and lots of piracy.
Console fanboys foretell the death of PC gaming, just as they've been doing for the last 30 years. Next up, fundamentalist Christians move up the expected date of the Rapture for the 534th time. News at 11.
Although mods have their appeal, they also reduce the # of games people buy, thus reducing developer income, we've all read of folks who have been playing CounterStrike+Mods to the exclusion of all else (and not buying games) for the past 8 years or so.
But those long lasting mods keep sales up for that original game...a game where the development and advertising costs were paid off a long time ago, and new sales are nearly straight cash. Counter-Strike has kept sales of Half-Life up long after other games of the same age would be in a collection pack in the bargin bin.
Mods are a good thing for publishers, not a bad thing.
Visa/Mastercard doesn't give a shit about a store's return policy. Buy with a credit card, and tell them you'll do a chargeback if they don't refund your money. You'll get your money back and the store will have to eat an additional chargeback fee.
It has to do with copyright law. I think it's national, but may be state (Pennsylvania)... though I can't see a reason why a copyright law would pertain only to state. It's a broken system.
And when the clerk tells you that, either they are lying or they are passing down the lie that was taught to them in training. There is nothing whatsoever about copyright law that prevents the store from taking returns on opened items.
This is why you always want to buy software with a credit card, so you can do a charge back if necessary.
Accounts which have been bought, sold or traded will be permanently disabled. This includes any other accounts in your possession at the time of the sale or trade, regardless of whether those accounts were also sold or not. #
Takes care of any guilt I had over downloading the new Half-Life Episodes. Fuckers.
I hate to beat the dead horse of debate, but this really is just one more nail in the coffin of PC gaming.
I hate to beat a dead horse, but self-important console fanboys have been talking about the death of PC gaming as long as there have been consoles. I have news for you buddy: a bad PC game is just a bad PC game, just as a bad console game is a bad console game.
The difference is you can drag and drop files from ANY file manager (Windows, Linux, OSX) with those other MP3 players.
Because that's a stupid way to do it. When adding tracks to your player, you either have to sit on your ass while your file transfer completes, or keep dragging and dropping files whilst going through your library and watch your system slow to a crawl.
Because, unlike the Zune, there are reasonable arguments that the iPod constitutes monopoly influence in the portable music player market.
What "reasonable arguments". Common, lets see them.
The reality is that nothing prevents you from listening to the same music on comparable devices with comparable prices to Apple's products - about as far from a monopoly as you can get.
True, but it is still a concern and Apple doesn't seem to be trying to get rid of DRM for video, which is just as significant of a concern to most.
You're barking up the wrong tree. It's not Apple that demands DRM, it's the content industries - and good luck getting TV and television studios to release digital formats without DRM.
Slashdot Mirror
Not since September 18, 1947, it's not. :)
Unlike pot, LSD, mushrooms, etc. those schedule 1 drugs can kill an experimenter on first use.
So can water and table salt. Anything is toxic if taken in large enough amounts.
But murder, rape, and fraud all have victims, while drug use does not. Hopefully your red herring will go away.
There is no way that anyone is making money from the war on drugs except maybe sellers
Don't forget local governments. A single pot bust can result in thousands of dollars in fines, "treatment", and attorney's fees.
You nonsense. If you speed, you might be putting others at risk. If you smoke pot in your living room, the only thing you're putting at risk are the contents of your fridge.
However, just because everyone has done it at some point does not mean it is "not sufficiently damaging to be a crime." Most people have stolen. Many people owned slaves while we were trying to illegalize it.
Apples to irrelevant oranges. You're comparing victimless crimes (smoking pot or eating shrooms in your living room) to crimes where their is a definite victim (theft/slavery).
It's called the reality based community, try and visit it some time. Or just visit some European nations where drugs are legal and addiction is treated as a medical problem instead of a criminal one. Their societies haven't fallen apart, yet they do save billions on not locking up non violent offenders for victimless crimes.
No one has held up banks or killed people for sugar before. No sir, the major difference is that drugs are extremely addictive. Far more than sugar or fat ever will be.
An important distinction you are ignoring: people don't rob to get drugs, they rob to get money to buy drugs. If sugar had high black market prices, you'd see people fighting over that too...as has happened, as another poster pointed out.
Then FDR came along. FDR didn't give a damn about the Constitution
Horseshit.
FDR threatened to pack the court
If you gave a damn about the Constitution, you might know that it doesn't limit the Supreme Court to 9 justices. There's been as few as six and as many as ten sitting justices, and FDR's plan was not only perfectly Constitutional, it had precedent. Ah, consistency: the enemy of all wingnut arguments.
Otherwise all this New Deal stuff (wage controls, price controls, etc.) would (and did) fail the Constitutionality test.
Wrong again. Promote the General Welfare. It's in the Constitution. Twice. If you're response to that is the canned "promote, not provide", Article I, Section 8 uses the word "provide." And if your response to that is that General Welfare is limited to the specific list in Section 8, then Common Defense is also similarly listed, since it's not only in the same section, but the same sentence as General Welfare.
In other words, if Social Security is unconstitutional because it's not specifically spelled out as a Congressional power, then so is the Air Force, as Congress only has the power to fund an army or a navy. As well as the CIA, the NSA, and any other intelligence agency not attached to the Army or the Navy. Ditto for our spy satellites, border patrol, and large parts of the FBI.
But I've bet you've never heard a wingnut bitch about the unconstitutionality of the New Deal and the Air Force. It's almost like their standards and ethics depend entirely on the situation, like they were partisan hacks or something. Huh, interesting.
So, I would assume the issue is what Democrats like to call the "Living Constitution" meaning that the Constitution doesn't mean what it meant when it was written/ratified, but what 5 Justices think it means today (president be damned). Like Lewis Carroll's Humpty-Dumpty, words mean only what he says they mean. Conservatives refer to these people as "Activist Judges", and in stead believe that the way to change the Constitution is via Amendments (last one passed during Clinton). In short, the Constitution is a social contract and means what it meant when written/ratified.
You mean liberal activist judges like Antonin Scalia?
it's not that the black market is better, but that the system of (potential_for_black_market+illegality) is potentially better than the legal alternative
That's the point: it's not better. We learned that lesson just fine with Prohibition, for for some reason it hasn't sunk in yet for Prohibition 2.0: the War on Drugs.
So attack the demand instead of supply.
Because imposing draconian punishments for victimless crimes is stupid and inhumane. Oh, and we've been doing that, and it hasn't worked out any better than cracking down on the dealers.
Yes, because the plural of anecdote is data, and taking prescribed doses is the same as taking an overdose to get high. I'm sure we could also find no shortage of people that snort coke twice a month without any problems.
...that's flame retardant? That would do infinitely more to protect your personal safety than bending over for the government, but somehow I doubt that you do more than buckle your seat belt.
Most artists who create a song (under the current terms) will be dead before their works enter the public domain.
That's a given. It's life of the author + 75 years, IIRC. The irony is that Disney, one of the prime backers of each new extension, wouldn't have been able to make a lot of their classic movies if current copyright terms had been in effect at the time, like Jungle Book. And the neat factoid that every content industry, with the exception of software, was itself founded on piracy. For example, Hollywood didn't just settle in California for the nice weather - studios set up shop on the west coast to avoid having to make patent payments on cameras to Thomas Edison.
Content industries don't have a problem with violations of the law - they have a problem when the violations of the law don't make them money.
Ever hear of a game called Summoner? It was a simultaenous PC/PS2 release. The PC version sold 50000 copies, not bad for an actiony RPG type game. The PS2 version sold 500000.
You sound like an vinyl audiophile, saying CD's are crap because album XYZ sounds so much better on vinyl than on compact disc. Never mind that the label did a crappy job on remastering the CD and distorted the audio by cranking up the volume (a new Celine Dion CD plays louder than a Van Halen album from the 90's).
In other words, there are plenty of things that can prevent this from being an apples to apples comparison. Was the game designed with a gamepad in mind, making it more difficult to play with a keyboard/mouse? Did the PC version require vastly more powerful hardware than the console to play as well? Were there major bugs left in the PC version of the game because the publisher had the "ship first, fix later" mentality with QA? Was the gameplay for the PC limited by console restrictions (limited save points)? How about the game itself - were the maps heavily segmented into load zones for console hardware?
Deus Ex II and Thief III: Deadly Shadows are good examples of what I'm talking about. While you could save anywhere you wanted, both games had bad bugs in the PC versions, and had tiny levels compared to their PC-only predecessors, especially Thief III. The entire game could have fit in two or three of the larger levels from Thief II: The Metal Age.
Not just yet, but it's only a matter of time. The PC game market is slowly but surely turning into the Amiga game market of the early 90's: ports from other platforms, games from European dev houses too poor to do console games, and lots of piracy.
Console fanboys foretell the death of PC gaming, just as they've been doing for the last 30 years. Next up, fundamentalist Christians move up the expected date of the Rapture for the 534th time. News at 11.
Although mods have their appeal, they also reduce the # of games people buy, thus reducing developer income, we've all read of folks who have been playing CounterStrike+Mods to the exclusion of all else (and not buying games) for the past 8 years or so.
But those long lasting mods keep sales up for that original game...a game where the development and advertising costs were paid off a long time ago, and new sales are nearly straight cash. Counter-Strike has kept sales of Half-Life up long after other games of the same age would be in a collection pack in the bargin bin.
Mods are a good thing for publishers, not a bad thing.
Visa/Mastercard doesn't give a shit about a store's return policy. Buy with a credit card, and tell them you'll do a chargeback if they don't refund your money. You'll get your money back and the store will have to eat an additional chargeback fee.
Just skip the hassle and buy software/games with a credit card. If the store gives you any shit, tell them you'll do a chargeback.
It has to do with copyright law. I think it's national, but may be state (Pennsylvania)... though I can't see a reason why a copyright law would pertain only to state. It's a broken system.
And when the clerk tells you that, either they are lying or they are passing down the lie that was taught to them in training. There is nothing whatsoever about copyright law that prevents the store from taking returns on opened items.
This is why you always want to buy software with a credit card, so you can do a charge back if necessary.
This is just as bad:
#
Buying, Selling, or Trading Accounts
Accounts which have been bought, sold or traded will be permanently disabled. This includes any other accounts in your possession at the time of the sale or trade, regardless of whether those accounts were also sold or not.
#
Takes care of any guilt I had over downloading the new Half-Life Episodes. Fuckers.
I hate to beat the dead horse of debate, but this really is just one more nail in the coffin of PC gaming.
I hate to beat a dead horse, but self-important console fanboys have been talking about the death of PC gaming as long as there have been consoles. I have news for you buddy: a bad PC game is just a bad PC game, just as a bad console game is a bad console game.
The difference is you can drag and drop files from ANY file manager (Windows, Linux, OSX) with those other MP3 players.
Because that's a stupid way to do it. When adding tracks to your player, you either have to sit on your ass while your file transfer completes, or keep dragging and dropping files whilst going through your library and watch your system slow to a crawl.
Because your paid for content suddenly becomes useful if you decide you want to use another brand of player.
But the same applies to other manufacturers. Or if Microsoft decides to orphan one of their formats again.
Because, unlike the Zune, there are reasonable arguments that the iPod constitutes monopoly influence in the portable music player market.
What "reasonable arguments". Common, lets see them.
The reality is that nothing prevents you from listening to the same music on comparable devices with comparable prices to Apple's products - about as far from a monopoly as you can get.
True, but it is still a concern and Apple doesn't seem to be trying to get rid of DRM for video, which is just as significant of a concern to most.
You're barking up the wrong tree. It's not Apple that demands DRM, it's the content industries - and good luck getting TV and television studios to release digital formats without DRM.
No one does. So your point is...?