Personally, I'm happy as hell we don't get a tenth of the government we pay for.
And saying that, I'm all in favor of a smaller government. Put it on a diet, liposuction the shit outta it, and let's see how those poor bureaucrats do when they have to work for a living.
As for the bill itself, I dont know what it is supposed to do. Force companies to make sure their shit is secure?
The big problem was the ammendments. They had a little bit of everything in there cause it was the last bit of law they were gonna look at before their summer break. So they loaded it up with every pet project of 70 braindead idiots^F^Ffavored son Senators and were surprised when they only got 62 votes to pass this abortion.
An amendment making the proposal of amendments to a bill - which are not directly related to said bill's specific subject - matter a crime punishable by being forced to watch at least 72 continuous hours of Barney the Friendly Dinosaur.
For a second offense, maybe. First offense? 48 hours of The Brady Bunch. Course, they'd probably throw it out as cruel and unusual punishment, but hey, if it's not cruel and unusual, how can it be punishment?
I based that 'pays for itself in a week' on the fact that my apartment complex doesn't let me have my own washer & dryer, I gotta use the laundromat style gear they have in the laundry room. It's 1.35 a load to wash, 1.45 to dry.
When I get back out to
Arizona hopefully next year, my clothes are goin back on the clothesline.
Thing is, that $5 clothesline pays for itself within a week or so. Our clothesline lasted 10 years. Your PV panels pay for themselves in about 30 years, and in the meantime need maintanance, replacement batteries (not cheap) for storage at least once during the cycle, and become less efficient as time goes on.
I did a quick calculation. Using 100W = 3 square feet.
That is roughly 3.2 square miles/gigawatt of solar cells.
200,000Gigawats would be 640,000 square miles, or roughly 16.8% of the US land mass.
I'm just saying - the numbers they are throwing around are a bit amazing. Further - what happens at night? Do they have a decent storage system for this juice?
Do what the engineers do. Triple the area used and use the excess for feeding the storage system. That'll take up about 50% of the area of the US. So much for our national parks system...
Inefficient at this point in its development, resource and energy dependent at this stage of its development, way expensive at present, and with storage capabilities in dire need of further development that make it practically uneconomic without even more massive subsidies, definitely. If they could get the system cost down to something on the order of 15 cents a generated kilowatt hour including overnight storage they might have something. Til then, the only real solar power that's worth it would be a solar power satellite built in space from offworld materials.
One of the very few things I miss about living in Toledo was the cable tv service out of Detroit. About half the 'local' channels back in the late 90's were Canadian. Loved it. I've been a Canadian TV junkie since.
Even if we accept the utter bs argument that piracy is stealing(it's not), this would mean the "stealing" is from companies who themselves steal from the artists.
Interesting.
What did you expect? Thieves hate competition. That's why there's no viable alternatives to government, they keep knocking out the competition. Same thing with the MAFIAA, only, being thieves themselves, they think everybody else is a thief too.
The court explicitly declared that the money should go to the artists. If the artists decide it should be used for that, fine, but it should be going to the artists first. If they decide to give it to someone else for some other purpose, whatever, but not giving it to the artists is violating a direct court decision.
Great idea, but it just ain't gonna happen. Every time the MAFIAA got awarded money and managed to collect it, they used it to finance the next round of litigation and lobbying Congress for even more draconian laws allowing them to more easily litigate potential victims. Yeah, it's a court order, but who's gonna call them on the carpet and demand an accounting? The courts aren't. When the judge drops the hammer to close the court, he's done. The MAFIAA sure as hell won't, that'd give their little game away. Me and thee can't, we don't have 'standing' in these cases unless we get named in an action. The 'artists' won't, because it would put them in serious violation of their contracts and they might (gasp) actually have to go out and work for a living.
It's the musicians who sign up to these labels. They're the ones doing work for them. They're the ones who could cause the labels to shrivel and die simply by choosing or building alternative distribution methods.
Worst of all are the half a dozen successes who pretend that these scrounging middlemen act on musicians' behalf, with superstar whores acting no better than the celebrity representatives of Scientology from Bee Gees to Metallica to Lily Allen (only joking, Lily - you're no superstar, you're shit).
That's because, back in the Bad Old Days before the Internet, a record deal was 1 act in a thousand or so were hyped into stardom to show that 'it could be done' if you 'worked hard and did what your label told you to do', baiting more thousands into willingly selling their souls for a chance to do the same. Nowadays, anybody can post a music video of themselves on Youtube and have the chance to do the same. Bieber originally did that, and got co-opted by the labels because somebody thought they could make money off him if they kept up the hype, NOT because they thought he had talent.
Hell, in this day and age, talent is a hinderance in pop culture. Prime example: Snookie.
Every unsold album, in their eyes, was an album that was downloaded and shared with 1,000 other people, and is thus used by them as further justification for their heavy-handed tactics.
FTFY. Of course the '1000 other people' number is pulled straight out of their asses, just like every other statistic they use.
Not really. the MAFIAA also collects royalties from radio stations and performances. They'd probably use that cash to buy up some more politicians to legislate them a bailout just like GM and the banks did, siphoning off taxpayer money to guarantee their profits and bonus structures.
A retainer just means they're obligated to answer your phone calls if it looks like it's gonna hit the fan. For anything else, they bill you at the going hourly rate. You didn't think lawyers would put their hearts and souls (what souls they have, anyways) into a case for just the retainer, do you? If two lawyers talk for 10 minutes at the water cooler and mention your case, the firm bills you for 20 minutes time.
Because even though our founding documents says that all men are endowed with inalienable rights, the our government only recognizes those rights to US citizens. This means to our government can treat you by lower standards then it is require to treat us. Even though it would love to lower the bar for our citizens to your level.
Two words. 'Enemy combatant'. You can live anywhere in the world, including the US and get tagged as an enemy combatant. All they have to do is say you've 'given aid and/or comfort to the enemy' and they have the excuse to lock you away. Say something negative against the US government, you too can get an all expenses paid trip to Gitmo with subsequent loss of all rights.
Fiat money is only money if somebody says it is. Otherwise, it's just smoke and mirrors. Gold certificates and such have something backing them. Turn one in and you get the equivilent value of gold. Turn a Federal Reserve note in and get laughed at. Lose confidence in fiat money, you're stuck with paper that doesn't even make good asswipe.
Sure, there are other parties than the party split between the 'Democrat' and 'Repubican' wings (And to me, they're all the same, just a bunch of rich boys spending millions to grab a 200,000$ a year job for up to 8 years and chump change for the rest of their lives compared to their trust funds). They don't get any traction because the media tells everybody the '3rd parties' don't have a chance and when you vote for their candidate 'you just threw away your vote'. Then they further propagandise that your vote is unimportant. And they follow it with even more propaganda of 'but if you're gonna vote, vote for OUR guy cause the other guy is EVIL and he can't/won't help you'. That's how you stifle the competition and win elections in American politics. 3rd party candidates can't get the funding to get their own propaganda on the air.
If I recall correctly, Robert A Heinlein once wrote he was to keep up levels of training and supply aboard USS Roper (I think that was the ship) on about a dollar and a half a day. Roper was a destroyer, and that was in the 1930's, before he was invalided out. So, yeah, I can believe the US's total military was about 39th in the world before WW2.
Actually, there is a system in place to pull that off. It's called impeachment. Problem is, every time they've tried it, the Senate broke down into serious partisan politics to try to pull it off and failed miserably both times.
It doesn't stop the fringe nutjobs from demanding impeachment of a president-elect the day after winning an election, though...
Oh I certainly agree with all that. I was criticizing one of his core arguments about income tax, which essentially boils down to the idea that income in currencies that aren't backed by gold doesn't pass constitutional muster as income that can be taxed. The problem with that argument is that, if he were right (which I don't think he is), then modern currency is worthless and therefore not even worth keeping. The fact that he wants to keep his income puts the lie to his theory.
Actually, he has a point. Look down to the 5th clause of that article. Let me quote it for you:
To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
When you expand the expression 'coin Money' to include printing money, then paper money is covered. The problem with 'Federal Reserve notes' is that they are not issued by the government, they're printed by the Federal Reserve, which, despite its name, is not part of the government, but is a private bank that only serves other banks. Constitutionally, Federal Reserve notes are as legal as Monopoly money as far as being 'true money'. And it gets better. Federal Reserve notes are what is called fiat money. And no, that's not the money you use to buy an Italian subcompact car. It's when somebody gets up in front of you and says, "This is money" and hands you a bunch of paper with fancy printing on it. It's 'money by decree', the very definition of fiat money.
So, if Congress alone has the authority to create money, howcome the government has to borrow money from the Federal Reserve at interest to pay for anything? And what gives the Federal Reserve (or any bank) the right to 'create' money by declaring 'We earned x million dollars in interest and created it out of thin air as our profit', making yet more fiat money? With current banking laws allowing reserves less than loans, every loan creats new fiat money.
The fix is obvious, of course, and left to the student to figure out. Be sure to show your work.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I'm happy as hell we don't get a tenth of the government we pay for.
And saying that, I'm all in favor of a smaller government. Put it on a diet, liposuction the shit outta it, and let's see how those poor bureaucrats do when they have to work for a living.
As for the bill itself, I dont know what it is supposed to do. Force companies to make sure their shit is secure?
The big problem was the ammendments. They had a little bit of everything in there cause it was the last bit of law they were gonna look at before their summer break. So they loaded it up with every pet project of 70 braindead idiots^F^Ffavored son Senators and were surprised when they only got 62 votes to pass this abortion.
An amendment making the proposal of amendments to a bill - which are not directly related to said bill's specific subject - matter a crime punishable by being forced to watch at least 72 continuous hours of Barney the Friendly Dinosaur.
For a second offense, maybe. First offense? 48 hours of The Brady Bunch. Course, they'd probably throw it out as cruel and unusual punishment, but hey, if it's not cruel and unusual, how can it be punishment?
I based that 'pays for itself in a week' on the fact that my apartment complex doesn't let me have my own washer & dryer, I gotta use the laundromat style gear they have in the laundry room. It's 1.35 a load to wash, 1.45 to dry.
When I get back out to Arizona hopefully next year, my clothes are goin back on the clothesline.
Thing is, that $5 clothesline pays for itself within a week or so. Our clothesline lasted 10 years. Your PV panels pay for themselves in about 30 years, and in the meantime need maintanance, replacement batteries (not cheap) for storage at least once during the cycle, and become less efficient as time goes on.
I did a quick calculation. Using 100W = 3 square feet.
That is roughly 3.2 square miles/gigawatt of solar cells.
200,000Gigawats would be 640,000 square miles, or roughly 16.8% of the US land mass.
I'm just saying - the numbers they are throwing around are a bit amazing. Further - what happens at night? Do they have a decent storage system for this juice?
Do what the engineers do. Triple the area used and use the excess for feeding the storage system. That'll take up about 50% of the area of the US. So much for our national parks system...
It's not baloney.
Inefficient at this point in its development, resource and energy dependent at this stage of its development, way expensive at present, and with storage capabilities in dire need of further development that make it practically uneconomic without even more massive subsidies, definitely. If they could get the system cost down to something on the order of 15 cents a generated kilowatt hour including overnight storage they might have something. Til then, the only real solar power that's worth it would be a solar power satellite built in space from offworld materials.
Might want to look into methane digester if you have a few animals (cattle, sheep, chickens, etc) around on your off grid place.
Sounds to me like an OS that can interface with the XP API and run native XP binaries might have a chance in the marketplace now that XP is 'retired'.
Windows 8 has gotten more idiot proof than usual, and that's what draws in people that don't already somehow have a PC.
Thing is, make something idiot proof, the universe evolves a better class of idiots.
That's an interesting observation. That makes more sense than paid MS astroturfers.
Paid MS shills? Wouldn't that count as job creation in this economy?
I can see it now. If the 'paid shills' are Americans, $POLITICAL_PARTY says 'See? We created American jobs!!! See? See? SEE???
Course if the jobs were outsourced to $THE_THIRD_WORLD, $POLITICAL_PARTY would scream 'Hey, $THE_OTHER_PARTY is outsourcing jobs!! See? See? SEE???
So how much does a paid shill make?
One of the very few things I miss about living in Toledo was the cable tv service out of Detroit. About half the 'local' channels back in the late 90's were Canadian. Loved it. I've been a Canadian TV junkie since.
Even if we accept the utter bs argument that piracy is stealing(it's not), this would mean the "stealing" is from companies who themselves steal from the artists.
Interesting.
What did you expect? Thieves hate competition. That's why there's no viable alternatives to government, they keep knocking out the competition. Same thing with the MAFIAA, only, being thieves themselves, they think everybody else is a thief too.
The court explicitly declared that the money should go to the artists. If the artists decide it should be used for that, fine, but it should be going to the artists first. If they decide to give it to someone else for some other purpose, whatever, but not giving it to the artists is violating a direct court decision.
Great idea, but it just ain't gonna happen. Every time the MAFIAA got awarded money and managed to collect it, they used it to finance the next round of litigation and lobbying Congress for even more draconian laws allowing them to more easily litigate potential victims. Yeah, it's a court order, but who's gonna call them on the carpet and demand an accounting? The courts aren't. When the judge drops the hammer to close the court, he's done. The MAFIAA sure as hell won't, that'd give their little game away. Me and thee can't, we don't have 'standing' in these cases unless we get named in an action. The 'artists' won't, because it would put them in serious violation of their contracts and they might (gasp) actually have to go out and work for a living.
It's the musicians who sign up to these labels. They're the ones doing work for them. They're the ones who could cause the labels to shrivel and die simply by choosing or building alternative distribution methods.
Worst of all are the half a dozen successes who pretend that these scrounging middlemen act on musicians' behalf, with superstar whores acting no better than the celebrity representatives of Scientology from Bee Gees to Metallica to Lily Allen (only joking, Lily - you're no superstar, you're shit).
That's because, back in the Bad Old Days before the Internet, a record deal was 1 act in a thousand or so were hyped into stardom to show that 'it could be done' if you 'worked hard and did what your label told you to do', baiting more thousands into willingly selling their souls for a chance to do the same. Nowadays, anybody can post a music video of themselves on Youtube and have the chance to do the same. Bieber originally did that, and got co-opted by the labels because somebody thought they could make money off him if they kept up the hype, NOT because they thought he had talent.
Hell, in this day and age, talent is a hinderance in pop culture. Prime example: Snookie.
FTFY. Of course the '1000 other people' number is pulled straight out of their asses, just like every other statistic they use.
Not really. the MAFIAA also collects royalties from radio stations and performances. They'd probably use that cash to buy up some more politicians to legislate them a bailout just like GM and the banks did, siphoning off taxpayer money to guarantee their profits and bonus structures.
A retainer just means they're obligated to answer your phone calls if it looks like it's gonna hit the fan. For anything else, they bill you at the going hourly rate. You didn't think lawyers would put their hearts and souls (what souls they have, anyways) into a case for just the retainer, do you? If two lawyers talk for 10 minutes at the water cooler and mention your case, the firm bills you for 20 minutes time.
Because even though our founding documents says that all men are endowed with inalienable rights, the our government only recognizes those rights to US citizens. This means to our government can treat you by lower standards then it is require to treat us. Even though it would love to lower the bar for our citizens to your level.
Two words. 'Enemy combatant'. You can live anywhere in the world, including the US and get tagged as an enemy combatant. All they have to do is say you've 'given aid and/or comfort to the enemy' and they have the excuse to lock you away. Say something negative against the US government, you too can get an all expenses paid trip to Gitmo with subsequent loss of all rights.
Fiat money is only money if somebody says it is. Otherwise, it's just smoke and mirrors. Gold certificates and such have something backing them. Turn one in and you get the equivilent value of gold. Turn a Federal Reserve note in and get laughed at. Lose confidence in fiat money, you're stuck with paper that doesn't even make good asswipe.
Sure, there are other parties than the party split between the 'Democrat' and 'Repubican' wings (And to me, they're all the same, just a bunch of rich boys spending millions to grab a 200,000$ a year job for up to 8 years and chump change for the rest of their lives compared to their trust funds). They don't get any traction because the media tells everybody the '3rd parties' don't have a chance and when you vote for their candidate 'you just threw away your vote'. Then they further propagandise that your vote is unimportant. And they follow it with even more propaganda of 'but if you're gonna vote, vote for OUR guy cause the other guy is EVIL and he can't/won't help you'. That's how you stifle the competition and win elections in American politics. 3rd party candidates can't get the funding to get their own propaganda on the air.
If I recall correctly, Robert A Heinlein once wrote he was to keep up levels of training and supply aboard USS Roper (I think that was the ship) on about a dollar and a half a day. Roper was a destroyer, and that was in the 1930's, before he was invalided out. So, yeah, I can believe the US's total military was about 39th in the world before WW2.
It doesn't stop the fringe nutjobs from demanding impeachment of a president-elect the day after winning an election, though...
Oh I certainly agree with all that. I was criticizing one of his core arguments about income tax, which essentially boils down to the idea that income in currencies that aren't backed by gold doesn't pass constitutional muster as income that can be taxed. The problem with that argument is that, if he were right (which I don't think he is), then modern currency is worthless and therefore not even worth keeping. The fact that he wants to keep his income puts the lie to his theory.
Actually, he has a point. Look down to the 5th clause of that article. Let me quote it for you:
To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
When you expand the expression 'coin Money' to include printing money, then paper money is covered. The problem with 'Federal Reserve notes' is that they are not issued by the government, they're printed by the Federal Reserve, which, despite its name, is not part of the government, but is a private bank that only serves other banks. Constitutionally, Federal Reserve notes are as legal as Monopoly money as far as being 'true money'. And it gets better. Federal Reserve notes are what is called fiat money. And no, that's not the money you use to buy an Italian subcompact car. It's when somebody gets up in front of you and says, "This is money" and hands you a bunch of paper with fancy printing on it. It's 'money by decree', the very definition of fiat money.
So, if Congress alone has the authority to create money, howcome the government has to borrow money from the Federal Reserve at interest to pay for anything? And what gives the Federal Reserve (or any bank) the right to 'create' money by declaring 'We earned x million dollars in interest and created it out of thin air as our profit', making yet more fiat money? With current banking laws allowing reserves less than loans, every loan creats new fiat money.
The fix is obvious, of course, and left to the student to figure out. Be sure to show your work.
And I agree. I was just 'passing you some ammo.'