I see your total inability to provide any evidence to support your "adult" and "grown up" claims. You are back with more innuendo and rationalizations.
As to "reluctance" to testify, there are also a host of other crimes where people are reluctant to testify and yet they are not turned into outright obsessions and sick fetishes for sex-fixated "social sciences" types, religious wackos and general authoritarians.
And to add to your further utter mendacity on display, you've even managed to try to expand the definition of "rape" to cover murder ("women in morgues"). Nice try.
Then there are the strawmen where you try to insinuate that I claimed that somehow there are no unreported crimes, while of course I merely pointed out that there are no reliable statistics for them, that "rape" accusation can be abused by self-serving accusers and their "medical practitioners" (for example in acrimonious divorce cases) and is extremely difficult to prove conclusively and is a stoking horse for all sorts of unsavory power-hungry "feminist" maniacs and authoritarians and that claiming that "depressingly small number" is prosecuted out of "very large number of cases" followed by repeated refusal to even weakly substantiate these assertions is utter propagandist shit.
Also, murders, unlike rapes have much more precise statistics simply due to much higher ease of their determination. If you want to make analogies, try crimes like assault (with no third-party witnesses present) which quickly devolve into "he-said-she-said" even if there are bruises and broken bones and every boy in the hospital will claim he was assaulted by a gang of brutes rather then admit he fell down while trying a stupid skate-boarding stunt on someone else's property...
So you and your admiring moderators can take your PC bullshit and shove it.
It's reported all right by pathologists and other medical practitioners - those large number of rapes I'm talking about are most definitely happening. The only thing that isn't proven in those cases is exactly who the perpetrators are.
Right, and the supposedly abundant DNA evidence is of no use because? Next you will claim that all these rapes are committed by a globe-spanning gang of hooded, masked men dwelling in really dark alleys, no doubt.
A depressingly small number of reported cases with medical evidence make it to court
Oh quit with the bullshit. A "depressingly small number", as in "we are depressed by our inability to fabricate credible statistics". I can't help but notice that you keep failing to point to any sort of independent analysis of these supposedly staggering waves of rapist activity but that does not stop you from using phrases like "depressingly small" and "very large number" in an effort to give an impression of some indefinable looming vastness being squeezed via an ear of a needle...
If you had actually bothered to read more than a few words of the post above instead of some deranged attack on who you think I may be you would have noticed I was talking about REPORTED EVIDENCE.
Nonsense. You were talking, at best, of self-interested parties claiming to witness some astounding numbers of supposed crimes which somehow fail to make it to court but which, naturally, demand increased funding for these poor overworked "therapists", "pathologists" and other "medical practitioners".
For your information: a "rape" with no actual police claim and associated investigation "crime" does not make for the simple reason that anyone can claim anything without credible verification by an unbiased third party and in case of "rape" one can do so even with semen present in the uterus, since it is quite possible for a female to use intercourse as a tactical weapon. Even reported and investigated "rapes" that go to trial turn out bogus (although it is a miracle that a male manages to defend himself given current conditions).
I can only suggest improving your reading skills and stop pulling crap like the "And so in effect you insist" bullshit that bears no relation whatsoever with what I wrote. You should have grown out of that sort of kindergarden sandpit style of argument by now.
You can "suggest" whatever you want but your clear insistence on using nebulous and unquantifiable phrases while trying to assign some great value to unverifiable and one-sided "reports" can only lead to the conclusion I already made in the previous post.
Right. You remind me of the former Canadian Public Safety Minister who while trying to justify a massive expansion of prisons in Canada (and their completely coincidental privatization) when faced with inconvenient statistics about crime rates went on whining about a "dramatic rise in unreported crime"...
Likewise, you (and a chorus of deranged femi-nazis) bray about a "very large number of cases" ("some people say!") where damning DNA samples are supposedly summarily ejected out the windows of the police stations to the accompaniment of giggles, whistles, cat-calls and exclamations of "whore!", a claim which you make based entirely on your anecdotal, unverifiable "evidence". And so in effect you insist that we should keep reducing the safeguards and the levels of proof required for prosecuting rape until a mere off-hand remark and a dismissive flick of a finger by any annoyed female will lock any male up for 20 years, transfer of all his assets to her and put him on an sex-offender list for life.
Right now the balance is shifting definitely towards women being able to accuse anyone without recourse, particularly in the "enlightened liberal democracies", of which Sweden is a prime example... and which is why "rape" was the weapon of choice in this case.
Right, otherwise it would be a win for authoritarian douchebags who seek to squash anyone who defies their "betters" and "feminists" who try to expand the definition of "rape" into "suspecting of being sexually abused" - us silly traditionalists tend to think that when you've been raped you are likely to experience a feeling wee bit stronger then "suspicion", given bruises and massive pain of the reproductive organs or the anus...
So all things considered a win for the warped "moral police" lynch-mob who you represent would be far, far, far worse for everyone.
As for this particular case, I'll have to see what, if anything, comes out. It could be a deliberate smear campaign against him, though I'm a bit doubtful of that as the risk of backfire would be pretty large.
It is a classic "character assassination" campaign. After the charges have been trumpeted all over the world, the widely-publicized arrest warrant has been withdrawn and a few hours later the Swedish Public Prosecutor announced that "he is no longer even under suspicion"... and yet from now on every time his name is mentioned, the easily impressed by the authority types with limited attention span will go "isn't that the rapist/traitor/terrorist/child-molester guy?"
It also served its job as a final "warning" from the power elite to this guy: "See what we can do? We can destroy you and make you a villain and no one will help you! You are defenseless against our power!"
So congratulations are in order. Now you can proudly consider yourself a honorary member of the dirty-tricks arm of the Pax Americana, unlike the rest of us, "tin foil hat" "conspiracy nuts" who smelled a rat from the get-go...
This is in NO way "against" the idea that rape is performed to wield power over someone else.
Err, activity performed for the purpose of reproduction and "power" have no mutual causation links whatsoever.
This isn't a "feminist/social sciences dogma", this is a widely accepted fact supported by most everyone in the field.
In a "field" that is nearly entirely composed of "feminists" and "social studies" types...
The result of which is constant goal-post shifting of definitions such as "rape" which 100 years ago meant a forceful, violent sexual assault and these days "I, kinda, felt like yes, but in the back of my mind I was like no, but it was like I let him, but then, like, I changed my mind, I am a victim, you see, I always am!" followed by the "social worker" going "You pooooor thing! You deserve millions from that asshole rapist!!!"... which is what the litmus test is now in Sweden (and getting weaker every day with the predictable result of Swedish "rape" statistics skyrocketing - surpassing most of Africa now, which prompts the screeching "feminists" do demand more broad definitions - lather, rinse, repeat).
Because its "rape", you know... all about power!
Come to think about it, it does seem that it is all about "power" but of the "feminist" kind...
In short there is no coincidence that "rape" is the weapon of choice here. Smart tactics calls for using the most appropriate tool for the job and in modern day Sweden "rape" is most definitely the most likely to succeed.
I notice that your reply is somewhat short on alternative explanations of why "sex crimes" are treated in all the supposedly science-based and "rational" Western democracies as far more serious offenses than killing or armed robbery, and why the same is true for Islamic theocracies....
You have to remember that in an insane society ruled by religious wackos whose mental disease revolves around fighting "sin" killing is a far, far, far, lesser crime than all things sex-related.
You see killing is a forgivable sin (after all you can't have religious wars without killing and the "holy book" of the month is full of mass murder in the name of spreading the lunacy) but controlling sex resides deeply at the very core of the warped, hateful, controlling, jealous egos of the zealots.
It is no coincidence that the ravings on the subject of "morality" coming from the Taliban officials and US "born again" politicos are so similar.
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Well even if it is 17, it is still lower then the drinking or "statutory rape" age. Btw, I said "16" because that is the age here in Canada and I thought that NATO members were harmonizing this stuff.
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Err, minimum enlistment age is 16. Many of the states on that list have age of consent at 18. My point stands.
If the games are "utterly crap," why are they getting pirated?
Actually "utterly crap" games (and music and movies) are getting "pirated" because a lot of people do not know better or do not believe reviews. Pirating is a no-cost activity and so boredom and the "who knows, maybe" factors combine into people downloading the said crap, watching/playing/listening for 10 minutes and then deleting it. That's how you get movies rated 1 out of 10 stars still going strong on torrent sites. But the hysterical "intellectual property" crusaders would still consider it "theft" (but then again they consider "theft" you looking at some famous building without permission).
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Except this has nothing whatsoever to do with "protecting" children but with fucked up Christo-Islamist (that is why they hate each other so much - too alike for comfort) religious bigotry where children are seen as "innocent" victims ready to be corrupted by the evils of "sin", sex being chief amongst them. If they had their way, the religious retards (and all those politicos and "law enforcement" opportunists who see power and money in it) would have the legal age of consent at 50, legal age for alcohol consumption at 60 but would gladly see the legal age to enlist in the armed forces lowered to 10, for fighting religious wars in foreign lands for fun and profit is a sure way to heaven...
That is the insane mentality that is driving the draconian and inflexible laws (in the US the legal age for having sex with a girl is already higher than that for tossing grenades into houses and then perusing the naked dismembered bodies of the said foreign girls).
This insane mentality can be further exposed by looking at what happens when children themselves violate the laws meant to ostensibly "protect" them: they are punished, in most draconian ways, for life. That is because instead of "protection" the real, thinly veiled, point of these laws is, and always was, fighting "sin".
Choosing the lesser of two evils sometimes means you're left with a really evil choice.
At which point you would have to explain how a murderous band of rabid medievalists and religious nihilist nut-cases was somehow "less evil" then an authoritarian, secular state-capitalist empire in decline....
In fact when one takes the whole spectrum of possible historical repercussions into the equation, the Soviets were, by far, the "lesser" of the evils.
But then again, their victory offered far less "profit opportunities" for some of the ruling elites within the US, not to mention the unforgivable loss it would have presented in their dick-size comparison contests - by now everyone should be painfully aware that swagger and massive egos (not to mention greed) are the main factor behind most of the US military interventions globally.
Copyright existed, and should exist, to allow an individual to profit from their creation. It has not a damned thing to do with producing useful art
In reality of course the whole point of copyright was to promote works of art and scientific discoveries. In the US this purpose is even spelled outright in the Constitution where it reads: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.".
The Founding Fathers (Jefferson particularly ) were very uneasy about granting effective monopoly to authors at the expense of the general public and so they sought to allow it only if the general public benefited from such an arrangement more then it had to invest (in terms of enforcing such a law).
I will make an (only one) exception in replying to an AC, further AC comments will be ignored as odds are that you are down-moderating me with your real account.
Your confusion stems from conflating "aesthetics" with corporate activities. While it is true that people might find one thing or another "attractive" those perceptions have long since became subject to manipulation by the "fashion" industry, with the aim of "creating market" for disposable crap. Jewelery is in the same category, and has been worked by the con-men so thoroughly that you end up with nonsensical psychosis like "engagement rings" and "anniversary rings" etc. If only aesthetics was involved, the jewelery (and clothing) markets would not reach even 1% of their present size.
Hence "parasitic" activities, since a tiny conceivable gain is visible for the "consumers" at a massive expense.
It can also be put another way: a good indicator of "value" of something is the resale price of the said thing as measured immediately after purchase. For jewelery in the US the drop is frequently in 80% range.
You clearly no nothing about law. The rules are not whimsy but well defined, and attempts to step outside narrow bands of the law are met with failure.
Total bullshit. If one work of art or invention is "derivative" (term used in case law) of another is purely subjective determination and yet it is the basis of copyright claims and patent lawsuits, results of which are random, with bias towards the party outspending the other by a factor of 10.
If you contest this, you will have to present a scientific formula for determination of what information is and what is not "derivative" of some other bit of information. I will not hold my breath.
And with that, I leave you to your fantastic visions of unreality - you may have the last response since I think at this point all can see what little reality you might once have clung to has slipped away utterly.
This moronic comment of yours is devoid of any sense whatsoever.
But have you seen the rotary power saw with two blades, one rotating in each direction, that is infinitely safer for firefighters to use on a crashed car because it doesn't emit sparks?
Except, of course, the counter-rotating blades do nothing whatsoever for sparks as they are the result of friction that does not disappear magically because you got two, three or twenty blades (advanced saws use fluid coolants and lubricants for that) and fire-fighters use hydraulic-operated cutting jaws because they allow for precision cutting without exposing victims to flying bits of metal and rotating blades. Also, fire-departaments do not buy anything from infomercials. Ever. The target audience is the gullible public.
Late-night infomercials were the traditional domain of con-men and scammers since the first day they were broadcast. In fact the only serious product I could imagine being sold there would be a stamp with which you could stamp your forehead so it could proclaim to the world "I am a homo-idiotus, a specimen of a TV-stupefied 'consumer' whose wits were stillborn and whose gullibility is infinite. I buy stuff from infomercials! No brain within." That way we could easily tell at a glance whose "opinions" to disregard before he opens his mouth.
Come to think of it, the infomercial victim crowd is very likely composed of the same people who make all that email spam profitable. More of your kind of "innovation".
Come on. New ideas, new worlds (especially in gaming) are made all the time! Where are the scary boogity boo gatekeepers that blocked Doodle Jump? Or Braid?
The fact that the "intellectual property" crowd has not yet achieved their desired goals completely does not mean that they are not in the process of doing so. With every 100+ year copyright the field of possible gaming ideas that are not covered narrows since there is a finite number of fundamental variations on the interaction with a game and claims of "significant similarities" become more and more viable to pursue the "derivative works" tithe collection strategy.
But the long term grasp the huge companies have on said ideas simply strangles what they have; it simply does not preclude a vast world of new ideas from being born and seeming all the more fresh to a world that craves uniqueness and the unusual.
You clearly do not grasp the scope of the copyright. Any work even remotely similar can be attempted to be acquired by a mega-corp via claims of it being somehow "derivative" (subject to wholly subjective and utterly whimsical since no scientific formulae exist for this - and highly bribe sensitive - opinion of a judge) and no indy studio is going to withstand a multi-million legal assault by a Sony, a Viacom or an Electronic Arts. The only reason these two-bit gaming productions are not molested is precisely because they are precisely that, beneath the contempt of these mega-corporations. Little cockroaches feeding on the crumbs that fell unnoticed from the feast table.
So I say, let Disney have the mouse for a billion trillion years. They can dance with that hoary skeleton until the end of time while the rest of the world moves past them, and they wonder why they in turn cannot come up with new ideas that work like Pixar can (yes I know technically Disney owns Pixar). And in time of course Disney gets it's own comeuppance, since it can no longer borrow liberally and freely from old treasured children's stories as they, too, are protected forever...
You defeat your own arguments. Disneys of the world are doing quite fine, thank you, by ever expanding their control over the popular culture and by acquiring rights in perpetuity to anything that can be a base for further creations, in fact these very children stories are also being acquired by the likes of Disney for their "portfolios" of "intellectual property" and so they are the only ones to gain from it, to the detriment of the humanity at large.
It also has to do with some motivation other than "less beatings" when you come up with something novel.
Which, according to the True Believers in the "free market" religion, can only be an all-encompassing, boundless, unstoppable and never satiated greed that burns within one's belly like a fire...
Of course most scientific discoveries were made out of a desire to discover and understand, not even a single penny entering the equation at any time, other then to fund the research with. Most inventions were made because some difficulty or need annoyed the inventor, not because he wanted his thing featured at late night infomercials. In fact greed is a very poor motivator because it tends to lead to "inventions" whose only purpose is to somehow make money, irrespective if they actually work or have hidden side effects.
Look at the successes of a company like Stuller (jewelry business). Their operation is based around the premise that any employee who comes up with a way of saving the company money directly gets half of what the company saves for the first year. With that policy, they've become the single biggest wholesale supplier of findings and mountings, and one of the biggest for stones and finished jewelry. They were founded in 1970; 40 years to be the best in an industry from the founding date, largely because the concept that you, and only you, can be rewarded for your ideas is really novel the the last couple centuries.
Yes, lets consider this company which supplies utterly useless crap, "demand" for which is manufactured wholesale by attempting to brainwash the unsuspecting dupes that "jewelery" will somehow improve their self-esteem or if they do not get it, they will be seen as "lesser" by their peers. The term "parasites" comes to mind.
If I have no motivation to come up with an idea, I'm not going to, plain and simple. That's a simple fact, and is a significant portion of the reason people think about how to make their lives easier, then sell their goods via infomercial rather than keep it to themselves. The total elimination of patents would bring the economy to a standstill- just the same as the current nonsense is slowing down progress.
Given that you equate "motivation" with greed and the crap peddled on the late-night infomercials with "inventions" and "progress", further discussion is likely to be a waste of time.
Without patents, we wouldn't have a large portion of the innovation of today;
That is merely an assertion of the "intellectual property" would-be landlords, in fact it is easily disproved: progress existed long before patents, in fact patents were present for something like the last 1% of recorded human history. And before you start talking about how fast that last bit developed, that has nothing whatsoever to do with patents but with easy access to and free exchange of information between scientists and inventors, the very thing that is now being restricted, combined with a critical mass of population density and transportation capabilities. Patents were simply inconsequential, having accounted for only a tiny part of the industrial output of that period, not to mention the fact that some industrial powers (I am looking at you USA) developed precisely because they ignored patents claimed by their former bosses (Britain in this case).
It's really true that part of an education is in fact realizing that some people have IP that they will vigorously defend, and that you need to perhaps think more about creating something truly original in order to avoid this issue.
Except of course that the true purpose of all the "intellectual property", as the mega-corps and their paid-for politicos envision it, is to prevent exactly that and to ensure that no innovation is possible without it "belonging" to one of the "gate keepers" of all future progress who are busily jockeying for the position in this aristocracy.
And it is already nearly so since every thing ever invented or created always builds on the cumulative knowledge of all the discoveries and developments of the past and the recent past is nearly completely patented, copyrighted and locked down. Locked down forever - for all practical purposes from the point of view of a person living less then 100 years.
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I see your total inability to provide any evidence to support your "adult" and "grown up" claims. You are back with more innuendo and rationalizations.
As to "reluctance" to testify, there are also a host of other crimes where people are reluctant to testify and yet they are not turned into outright obsessions and sick fetishes for sex-fixated "social sciences" types, religious wackos and general authoritarians.
And to add to your further utter mendacity on display, you've even managed to try to expand the definition of "rape" to cover murder ("women in morgues"). Nice try.
Then there are the strawmen where you try to insinuate that I claimed that somehow there are no unreported crimes, while of course I merely pointed out that there are no reliable statistics for them, that "rape" accusation can be abused by self-serving accusers and their "medical practitioners" (for example in acrimonious divorce cases) and is extremely difficult to prove conclusively and is a stoking horse for all sorts of unsavory power-hungry "feminist" maniacs and authoritarians and that claiming that "depressingly small number" is prosecuted out of "very large number of cases" followed by repeated refusal to even weakly substantiate these assertions is utter propagandist shit.
Also, murders, unlike rapes have much more precise statistics simply due to much higher ease of their determination. If you want to make analogies, try crimes like assault (with no third-party witnesses present) which quickly devolve into "he-said-she-said" even if there are bruises and broken bones and every boy in the hospital will claim he was assaulted by a gang of brutes rather then admit he fell down while trying a stupid skate-boarding stunt on someone else's property...
So you and your admiring moderators can take your PC bullshit and shove it.
Right, and the supposedly abundant DNA evidence is of no use because? Next you will claim that all these rapes are committed by a globe-spanning gang of hooded, masked men dwelling in really dark alleys, no doubt.
Oh quit with the bullshit. A "depressingly small number", as in "we are depressed by our inability to fabricate credible statistics". I can't help but notice that you keep failing to point to any sort of independent analysis of these supposedly staggering waves of rapist activity but that does not stop you from using phrases like "depressingly small" and "very large number" in an effort to give an impression of some indefinable looming vastness being squeezed via an ear of a needle...
Nonsense. You were talking, at best, of self-interested parties claiming to witness some astounding numbers of supposed crimes which somehow fail to make it to court but which, naturally, demand increased funding for these poor overworked "therapists", "pathologists" and other "medical practitioners".
For your information: a "rape" with no actual police claim and associated investigation "crime" does not make for the simple reason that anyone can claim anything without credible verification by an unbiased third party and in case of "rape" one can do so even with semen present in the uterus, since it is quite possible for a female to use intercourse as a tactical weapon. Even reported and investigated "rapes" that go to trial turn out bogus (although it is a miracle that a male manages to defend himself given current conditions).
You can "suggest" whatever you want but your clear insistence on using nebulous and unquantifiable phrases while trying to assign some great value to unverifiable and one-sided "reports" can only lead to the conclusion I already made in the previous post.
Right. You remind me of the former Canadian Public Safety Minister who while trying to justify a massive expansion of prisons in Canada (and their completely coincidental privatization) when faced with inconvenient statistics about crime rates went on whining about a "dramatic rise in unreported crime"...
Likewise, you (and a chorus of deranged femi-nazis) bray about a "very large number of cases" ("some people say!") where damning DNA samples are supposedly summarily ejected out the windows of the police stations to the accompaniment of giggles, whistles, cat-calls and exclamations of "whore!", a claim which you make based entirely on your anecdotal, unverifiable "evidence". And so in effect you insist that we should keep reducing the safeguards and the levels of proof required for prosecuting rape until a mere off-hand remark and a dismissive flick of a finger by any annoyed female will lock any male up for 20 years, transfer of all his assets to her and put him on an sex-offender list for life.
Right now the balance is shifting definitely towards women being able to accuse anyone without recourse, particularly in the "enlightened liberal democracies", of which Sweden is a prime example ... and which is why "rape" was the weapon of choice in this case.
Right, otherwise it would be a win for authoritarian douchebags who seek to squash anyone who defies their "betters" and "feminists" who try to expand the definition of "rape" into "suspecting of being sexually abused" - us silly traditionalists tend to think that when you've been raped you are likely to experience a feeling wee bit stronger then "suspicion", given bruises and massive pain of the reproductive organs or the anus ...
So all things considered a win for the warped "moral police" lynch-mob who you represent would be far, far, far worse for everyone.
Actually, the Swedish Public Prosecutor just announced that "he is no longer under any suspicion".
They way this is developing, it might soon be the girls who face charges in Sweden and then mysteriously relocate to the US or Israel to avoid them.
It is a classic "character assassination" campaign. After the charges have been trumpeted all over the world, the widely-publicized arrest warrant has been withdrawn and a few hours later the Swedish Public Prosecutor announced that "he is no longer even under suspicion"... and yet from now on every time his name is mentioned, the easily impressed by the authority types with limited attention span will go "isn't that the rapist/traitor/terrorist/child-molester guy?"
It also served its job as a final "warning" from the power elite to this guy: "See what we can do? We can destroy you and make you a villain and no one will help you! You are defenseless against our power!"
So congratulations are in order. Now you can proudly consider yourself a honorary member of the dirty-tricks arm of the Pax Americana, unlike the rest of us, "tin foil hat" "conspiracy nuts" who smelled a rat from the get-go ...
Err, activity performed for the purpose of reproduction and "power" have no mutual causation links whatsoever.
In a "field" that is nearly entirely composed of "feminists" and "social studies" types...
The result of which is constant goal-post shifting of definitions such as "rape" which 100 years ago meant a forceful, violent sexual assault and these days "I, kinda, felt like yes, but in the back of my mind I was like no, but it was like I let him, but then, like, I changed my mind, I am a victim, you see, I always am!" followed by the "social worker" going "You pooooor thing! You deserve millions from that asshole rapist!!!" ... which is what the litmus test is now in Sweden (and getting weaker every day with the predictable result of Swedish "rape" statistics skyrocketing - surpassing most of Africa now, which prompts the screeching "feminists" do demand more broad definitions - lather, rinse, repeat).
Because its "rape", you know... all about power!
Come to think about it, it does seem that it is all about "power" but of the "feminist" kind...
In short there is no coincidence that "rape" is the weapon of choice here. Smart tactics calls for using the most appropriate tool for the job and in modern day Sweden "rape" is most definitely the most likely to succeed.
I notice that your reply is somewhat short on alternative explanations of why "sex crimes" are treated in all the supposedly science-based and "rational" Western democracies as far more serious offenses than killing or armed robbery, and why the same is true for Islamic theocracies....
You have to remember that in an insane society ruled by religious wackos whose mental disease revolves around fighting "sin" killing is a far, far, far, lesser crime than all things sex-related.
You see killing is a forgivable sin (after all you can't have religious wars without killing and the "holy book" of the month is full of mass murder in the name of spreading the lunacy) but controlling sex resides deeply at the very core of the warped, hateful, controlling, jealous egos of the zealots.
It is no coincidence that the ravings on the subject of "morality" coming from the Taliban officials and US "born again" politicos are so similar.
Well even if it is 17, it is still lower then the drinking or "statutory rape" age. Btw, I said "16" because that is the age here in Canada and I thought that NATO members were harmonizing this stuff.
Err, minimum enlistment age is 16. Many of the states on that list have age of consent at 18. My point stands.
Actually "utterly crap" games (and music and movies) are getting "pirated" because a lot of people do not know better or do not believe reviews. Pirating is a no-cost activity and so boredom and the "who knows, maybe" factors combine into people downloading the said crap, watching/playing/listening for 10 minutes and then deleting it. That's how you get movies rated 1 out of 10 stars still going strong on torrent sites. But the hysterical "intellectual property" crusaders would still consider it "theft" (but then again they consider "theft" you looking at some famous building without permission).
Except this has nothing whatsoever to do with "protecting" children but with fucked up Christo-Islamist (that is why they hate each other so much - too alike for comfort) religious bigotry where children are seen as "innocent" victims ready to be corrupted by the evils of "sin", sex being chief amongst them. If they had their way, the religious retards (and all those politicos and "law enforcement" opportunists who see power and money in it) would have the legal age of consent at 50, legal age for alcohol consumption at 60 but would gladly see the legal age to enlist in the armed forces lowered to 10, for fighting religious wars in foreign lands for fun and profit is a sure way to heaven...
That is the insane mentality that is driving the draconian and inflexible laws (in the US the legal age for having sex with a girl is already higher than that for tossing grenades into houses and then perusing the naked dismembered bodies of the said foreign girls).
This insane mentality can be further exposed by looking at what happens when children themselves violate the laws meant to ostensibly "protect" them: they are punished, in most draconian ways, for life. That is because instead of "protection" the real, thinly veiled, point of these laws is, and always was, fighting "sin".
At which point you would have to explain how a murderous band of rabid medievalists and religious nihilist nut-cases was somehow "less evil" then an authoritarian, secular state-capitalist empire in decline ....
In fact when one takes the whole spectrum of possible historical repercussions into the equation, the Soviets were, by far, the "lesser" of the evils.
But then again, their victory offered far less "profit opportunities" for some of the ruling elites within the US, not to mention the unforgivable loss it would have presented in their dick-size comparison contests - by now everyone should be painfully aware that swagger and massive egos (not to mention greed) are the main factor behind most of the US military interventions globally.
I think there is a step involving renaming your backups to pornographic descriptions missing in there somewhere....
In reality of course the whole point of copyright was to promote works of art and scientific discoveries. In the US this purpose is even spelled outright in the Constitution where it reads: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.".
The Founding Fathers (Jefferson particularly ) were very uneasy about granting effective monopoly to authors at the expense of the general public and so they sought to allow it only if the general public benefited from such an arrangement more then it had to invest (in terms of enforcing such a law).
I will make an (only one) exception in replying to an AC, further AC comments will be ignored as odds are that you are down-moderating me with your real account.
Your confusion stems from conflating "aesthetics" with corporate activities. While it is true that people might find one thing or another "attractive" those perceptions have long since became subject to manipulation by the "fashion" industry, with the aim of "creating market" for disposable crap. Jewelery is in the same category, and has been worked by the con-men so thoroughly that you end up with nonsensical psychosis like "engagement rings" and "anniversary rings" etc. If only aesthetics was involved, the jewelery (and clothing) markets would not reach even 1% of their present size.
Hence "parasitic" activities, since a tiny conceivable gain is visible for the "consumers" at a massive expense.
It can also be put another way: a good indicator of "value" of something is the resale price of the said thing as measured immediately after purchase. For jewelery in the US the drop is frequently in 80% range.
Total bullshit. If one work of art or invention is "derivative" (term used in case law) of another is purely subjective determination and yet it is the basis of copyright claims and patent lawsuits, results of which are random, with bias towards the party outspending the other by a factor of 10.
If you contest this, you will have to present a scientific formula for determination of what information is and what is not "derivative" of some other bit of information. I will not hold my breath.
This moronic comment of yours is devoid of any sense whatsoever.
Except, of course, the counter-rotating blades do nothing whatsoever for sparks as they are the result of friction that does not disappear magically because you got two, three or twenty blades (advanced saws use fluid coolants and lubricants for that) and fire-fighters use hydraulic-operated cutting jaws because they allow for precision cutting without exposing victims to flying bits of metal and rotating blades. Also, fire-departaments do not buy anything from infomercials. Ever. The target audience is the gullible public.
Late-night infomercials were the traditional domain of con-men and scammers since the first day they were broadcast. In fact the only serious product I could imagine being sold there would be a stamp with which you could stamp your forehead so it could proclaim to the world "I am a homo-idiotus, a specimen of a TV-stupefied 'consumer' whose wits were stillborn and whose gullibility is infinite. I buy stuff from infomercials! No brain within." That way we could easily tell at a glance whose "opinions" to disregard before he opens his mouth.
Come to think of it, the infomercial victim crowd is very likely composed of the same people who make all that email spam profitable. More of your kind of "innovation".
The fact that the "intellectual property" crowd has not yet achieved their desired goals completely does not mean that they are not in the process of doing so. With every 100+ year copyright the field of possible gaming ideas that are not covered narrows since there is a finite number of fundamental variations on the interaction with a game and claims of "significant similarities" become more and more viable to pursue the "derivative works" tithe collection strategy.
You clearly do not grasp the scope of the copyright. Any work even remotely similar can be attempted to be acquired by a mega-corp via claims of it being somehow "derivative" (subject to wholly subjective and utterly whimsical since no scientific formulae exist for this - and highly bribe sensitive - opinion of a judge) and no indy studio is going to withstand a multi-million legal assault by a Sony, a Viacom or an Electronic Arts. The only reason these two-bit gaming productions are not molested is precisely because they are precisely that, beneath the contempt of these mega-corporations. Little cockroaches feeding on the crumbs that fell unnoticed from the feast table.
You defeat your own arguments. Disneys of the world are doing quite fine, thank you, by ever expanding their control over the popular culture and by acquiring rights in perpetuity to anything that can be a base for further creations, in fact these very children stories are also being acquired by the likes of Disney for their "portfolios" of "intellectual property" and so they are the only ones to gain from it, to the detriment of the humanity at large.
Which, according to the True Believers in the "free market" religion, can only be an all-encompassing, boundless, unstoppable and never satiated greed that burns within one's belly like a fire ...
Of course most scientific discoveries were made out of a desire to discover and understand, not even a single penny entering the equation at any time, other then to fund the research with. Most inventions were made because some difficulty or need annoyed the inventor, not because he wanted his thing featured at late night infomercials. In fact greed is a very poor motivator because it tends to lead to "inventions" whose only purpose is to somehow make money, irrespective if they actually work or have hidden side effects.
Yes, lets consider this company which supplies utterly useless crap, "demand" for which is manufactured wholesale by attempting to brainwash the unsuspecting dupes that "jewelery" will somehow improve their self-esteem or if they do not get it, they will be seen as "lesser" by their peers. The term "parasites" comes to mind.
Given that you equate "motivation" with greed and the crap peddled on the late-night infomercials with "inventions" and "progress", further discussion is likely to be a waste of time.
That is merely an assertion of the "intellectual property" would-be landlords, in fact it is easily disproved: progress existed long before patents, in fact patents were present for something like the last 1% of recorded human history. And before you start talking about how fast that last bit developed, that has nothing whatsoever to do with patents but with easy access to and free exchange of information between scientists and inventors, the very thing that is now being restricted, combined with a critical mass of population density and transportation capabilities. Patents were simply inconsequential, having accounted for only a tiny part of the industrial output of that period, not to mention the fact that some industrial powers (I am looking at you USA) developed precisely because they ignored patents claimed by their former bosses (Britain in this case).
Except of course that the true purpose of all the "intellectual property", as the mega-corps and their paid-for politicos envision it, is to prevent exactly that and to ensure that no innovation is possible without it "belonging" to one of the "gate keepers" of all future progress who are busily jockeying for the position in this aristocracy.
And it is already nearly so since every thing ever invented or created always builds on the cumulative knowledge of all the discoveries and developments of the past and the recent past is nearly completely patented, copyrighted and locked down. Locked down forever - for all practical purposes from the point of view of a person living less then 100 years.
Also, Google fails to locate the site "bitchtara" and so the pursuit of the truth, strictly for the sake of scientific discovery, is so far thwarted.