Genium? Senation? O.K., Now we've got the names, Captain Genium of the Starship Senation. That's half a pilot right there, right? We can still pull Star Trek out of its slump, can't we? I mean 18 years and... Ahw Nutz!
You're saying you don't see how this advice ties into "Copyright culture", or don't see a cause and effect pattern there. OK, you don't. But you don't think it's a bad thing either - so if you don't think a problem exists, is it any surprise you haven't inquired into the possible sources of that problem?
You like to engage in various logical fallacies as a hobby don't you? Does the fact I do not see a problem (actually not true, I just don't see the particular problem ascribed), nor the application of cause and effect in this case, automatically imply that I have not inquired into the situation? I think not. I think to suggest so is to engage in fallacious argument.
It's hardly a logical fallacy. It's more like you had a fixed opinion, and you were simultaneously claiming to have simultaneously started from that opinion as an axiom, and reasoned your way to it as a conclusion. I'm that supercillious bastard who is holding your feet to the fire and saying "one or the other man, one or the other!". I hope that doesn't up your stress levels, as you don't sound like you particularly deserve the ones you already have, but it's hard to tell just what will bug some person or not.
Its like you (just for example, I'm not saying you actually hold this opinion) believe that alcoholism is a moral failing, and reject the idea it is a disease. Someone posts regarding genetic influences on alcoholism, and you disagree (that's like the first poster whose cause and effect claim you reject here). But, you're not necessarily rejecting his arguement for a causal link between alcoholism and genetics because his initial facts are flawed, nor because his reasoning about those facts is illogical, but because you've already classified alchoholism as one kind of effect, and your definition precludes his very kind of cause.
In this case, I'm pretty sure you've thought about what you refer to as the situation. It doesn't follow that you've persued those lines of thought that might lead you to reclassify the situation as a problem. My point is, you will consider different things if you treat the situation as something that might be a problem, or if you decide it definitely isn't a problem, or definitely is. You're "just doesn't fly" and other such remarks imply that you made an effort to follow the first poster's arguement, and found either a mistaken axiom, or a logical gap in his proof, but you haven't been willing to point out where that gap is. That claim leaves out that pesky third alternative, which is you've rejected his premise automatically, a priori, as not being in the class of explanations that could even possibly be true, and so haven't bothered to try and verify or disprove some particualr axiom or follow the subsequent steps and check his methodology.
In the case of this thread, you're not rejecting the idea that this culture particularly deserves to be called a copy-control culture (you ARE argueing that that term is not all that well defined, but that implys that you would accept or reject the axiom later, based on further definition, and so haven't already rejected it as yet). At the same time, your pespective still seems to be the situation definitely isn't a problem, but surely that depends in part on that axiom that's still to be considered open. You also haven't pointed to a specific logical mistake the original poster made, but normally, yes you could be reasoning from having actually identified one or more such flaws, and just not specified what the flaw(s) was/were as yet.
Now, is it fair of me to insist you actually were holding to the pre-determined third alternative and not yourself doing logical reasoning based on one of the other two? Your very first remark in the thread, about people who go to movies expecting to be touched or uplifted needing to get a life, ruled out the option that there really was that much of a middle ground in your mind. Your earlier post was full of statements that only made sense if you had already made up your mind on one of the
Back when registration was required for enforcement , creators frequently filed for a single registration for a whole group of photographs, short articles, stories, or poems. Corporations frequently registered all the contents of a monthly magazine or anthology under a single application.
This still made it difficult for some people, i.e. publishers of daily newspapers and some low circulation weekly magazines and non-profit monthlies, to afford to register everything needed, but there were practical methods to protect work, i.e. registering some selected writings by a popular columnist was usually enough to protect the rest of their work from being misused.
In an era when copying someone else's work generally meant having unsold copies in warehouses for some time, the risk from having the work registered after another person had violated its copyright was much more significant. Registration could make all those not-yet-sold copies unsellable.
The Thor Power Tools decision made warehousing itself less attractive to publishers, and so destabilized the copyright situation by removing some of the teeth from registration. Registration by itself didn't impose much financial burden on the creator, until it became more risky for the creator to wait and register after some damages were already done.
If you would support a registration required copyright system, you might want to add in a law limiting the effects of the Thor Power Tools decision on publishers.
So, although I agree we are a copy control culture and I think *AAs are doing bad things with lawyer/legislative backing, your arguments don't exactly bring out these problems in a cause and effect fashion. I think most of us put 'hype' as you call it (arguable) over 'substance' (again your word, again arguable) because we have enough 'substance' from other sources. Life nowadays has a stress level that I don't think people from prior times would really have experienced incessantly (as a result of pace), so I think we just want a break more often.
Your ancestors, who had an average age at death of about 30 by the time you go back three geneerations, probably would debate whether your stress level is any higher than theirs. If you've got some who faced little stressors like World War 2, the black plague, or Atilla the Hun, they certainly would. Why do you believe otherwise? Could it be because the media have been telling you stress is up, up, up? Could it be you feel flattered, deep inside, by the thought that you are a special breed of person who can cope with all that extra, special stress?
Part of selling more newer stuff that's still protected by copyright is giving you a false sense of what the past is like, so you won't think older books, films, and such are relevant to your faster paced, newer than new style life. This may even help difuse your own better instincts. Even if you end up picking, not just Star Wars over Sophie's Choice, but Jerry Springer uncensored over both, you can fall back on the excuse that it's because your special life came with special stress levels, and not ever have to ask yourself "What if I'm just being mentally lazy?", or even "What if I'm not really enjoying Spiderman 14 the way I did the first three or four?" I'm not saying you should be constantly asking yourself why you chose X over Shakespeare, but this stress arguement keeps you from ever asking why you chose a sequel over something new.
Sure, people want a break more often. They are constantly being told they deserve a break, and that a real break consists of not having to think at all. The truth is, often the best break works your mind, but in a different way than your regular life, and a break that shuts your mind down completely ends up not refreshing you at all.
If you're sedentary, eating nothing but junk food, 60 pounds overweight, and at risk of dieing at 45 of heart disease, you will feel over-stressed and constantly exausted. At this point, some people will tell you that too's because of your faster paced lifestyle, and you need to eat a choco-coated-sugar bar any time you feel tired. Those bars will even work, short term. You probably don't listen to the Choco-coated-sugar bar people too much, maybe not at all. Personally, I think the people who are telling you the best break for your mind and heart is a diet of nothing but Arnie, Adam, and Yoda, are giving similarly bad advice. You're saying you don't see how this advice ties into "Copyright culture", or don't see a cause and effect pattern there. OK, you don't. But you don't think it's a bad thing either - so if you don't think a problem exists, is it any surprise you haven't inquired into the possible sources of that problem?
With enough people with this attitude, the stuff you consider high brow will vanish, and then what? Will the whole public stick to Arnie, Adam, and Yoda? Will you enjoy a golden age of endless X-Man and Van Helsing sequels? I don't think that's what will happen. If the public continues to believe they need a steady, invariable diet of stuff that doesn't touch them, educate them, or illuminate their lives, then everything that has any trace of novelty of character, plot or setting left will become the new high-brow stuff, and the most popular stuff will drift down, down, down, until you hear reviewers saying Carmen Miranda is too Cerebral and the hot film of the week is either Chainsaw Lesbian Dwarf Flagelation part 37, or Gummi Bears part 93.
There are probably things you liked going to be lost
That will give you a bright cyan text on dark cyan background screen of death. Feel free to substitute other colors 0-F as desired. This works in 95, 98, and Me, at least. Red's in there somewhere - don't remember exactly where - just try a pair of values, wait the usual 15 minutes for a SOD, and see if you like the combination. I can honestly say I haven't seen a BSOD on my screen in months.
There is plenty of Christian symbolism in Tolkien. There's also lots of other stuff that is really historical or literary reference, but the history involved is chiefly that of England, so of course it's got its own share of Christian roots.
For an example of a historical reference, the Rohirrim are definitely more Saxon-like, and Gondor more like the Normans. Their joining together to fight in the end is a fictional recapitulation of the same synthesis as modern England's.
For an example of a literary reference, the death of Boromir is essentially one big reference to the Death of Roland, (although there's also some reference to the Death of Robin Hood, and lots of other tid-bits mixed in - Tolkien was a genuine genius, and his work is argueably more complex and densely interwoven with all of western literature than is, say Joyce's "Ulysses").
However, there's plenty of specifically Christian symbolism: i.e. Aragorn = Christ, with Isildur = Adam, and all the kings since Isildur as the post-Adamic generations. Aragorn resists the temptation to claim the ring, and so redeems the human race, where Isildur fell for the same temptation. Aragorn enjoys the long life of his distant ancestors, whereas, by Isildur's fall, the lives of the Numenorians began to dwindle to the shortness of normal men. "For as by Adam, all came to death, even so in Christ will all be made alive" (modern translation of a 12th century Hymn). Then of course, Aragorn walks the paths of the dead, although I don't recall it specifically taking him three days underground.
The beauty of Tolkien's symbolism is that no one character always behaves like Christ, or goes through all the same stages, and there's plenty of "other stuff" there too.
I hope it doesn't spoil Tolkien for anyone if Frodo's carrying the Ring up Mount Doom is like Christ's carrying the Cross up Golgotha, or that Sam, like Adam, was a gardener. There really are lots of Norse and Pagan references in there too if you want them (Bombadil! - which none of you that have just seen the movies will get, sorry!).
Lewis was a devoutly Christian author. That doesn't have to equate to manipulation, even if he sometimes descended from symbolism into allegory. Propaganda lies somewhere along that spectrum, but it's almost at the far end, exceeded only by flat out indoctrination by sheer repetition. Allegory is a caution sign, a warning to the experienced reader that there's a risk of propaganda, but not by any means a guarentee. (And there's plenty of propaganda without allegory - i.e. "Hansi: The Girl Who Loved The Swastika"., plus there are some works with lots of allegory that are anti-propaganda i.e. Spinrad's "The Iron Dream".)
Instead, what C.S. was doing tends to come from a view that all people's lives, very much including non-Christians, will have aspects where the same underlieing truths are bound to break through. Lewis saw most of the other religions and many non-religious philosophys as gaining their value from those same truths. He chose Christianity as his preferred, best expression out of those, but he was mostly writing about those truths as directly as possible.
Now, the Narnia books were written mostly for kids. Kids in general are not going to much catch underlieing symbolism or metaphor. That goes for Aslan as a Christ symbol, but it also goes for Huck Finn as a symbol of Freedom, or Ahab as an Obsession symbol, or Atticus Finch as a symbol of Natural Nobility enhanced rather than degraded by social education. Sure the average kid won't get it, but that's not because it's hidden by the author, it's hidden by the child's own lack of experience.
If you want to see Lewis at his best, try the last two of the Silent Planet Trilogy (The first book was written early, and it suffers from some of the same flaws as the Narnia books, but by about half way through "Perelandra", Lewis was hitting his stride). Better yet, read his best adult novel "Till We Have Faces".
Almost certainly, the legal system will come up with a similar rationale for tracking. It's not puishment, it's just "locating" or something along those lines, and that'll put the foot in the door.
I keep thinking of what C. S. Lewis said in That Hideous Strength, writing about a group of very bad people who were claiming to be uninterested in punishment and only trying to help rehabilitate the criminal.
"In eliminating the name Punishment, they sought to make the fact of it infinite."
Some paedophiles do seem to respond to rehabilitiation. This percentage varies with the exact type, like most crimes, but it's actually pretty good odds, upwards of 50% for familial incest and about 1 in 3 for outside the family hetero-oriented child molestation, and 1 in 5 for outside the family homosexual molesters. That's looking at fairly short programs to change behavior, followed up over nearly 20 years so far after release from prison. Going from an average of a single week or two weeks of 1 hour/day group therapy style sessions to something more intensive would probably get those numbers up.
Because it seems to work fairly often, I don't mean to argue against trying to rehabilitate in itself (although I wonder how we justify spending money on rehabilitation if we really can't afford to spend money on counseling and other help for the victims first), but somehow, to the government, it makes a dandy justification for the more expensive option of life-time technological control instead of a justification for the much lower cost options of either better in-prison programs, or additional counseling after release (or both).
Add to that these other ideas, like lifetime monitoring not counting as a punishment, and factor in that many of these advocates for lifetime monitoring also see mental illness (or lack thereof) as not being a factor one way or another in deciding what to do with these people, and we will end up with a nightmare. This methodology will spread to other areas of punishment, and will further distort such principles as the cruel and unusual test.
Or to really save paper, print it out by arranging individual atoms in the shape of ones and zeros.
This Just in - IBM announces a method of storing data that is 10 bajillion times more compact than the best existing method - Moore's law surrenders! - IBM to use this technique to write their answers to SCO's interogatives on the entire planet (using the Moon as a read/write head) - IBM exec says "yeah, it cost a bit to develop, but on the balance shipping costs are zero.".
All the tools they need indeed....
The Law now gives a possible 5x multiple to fines for "willful' copyright infringement (US $30,000 max/incident becomes $150,000 by a willfulness test.)
Most people who have been wronged are lucky if they qualify for a 3x multiple in a lawsuit, and have to prove something much tougher, like criminal and not just simple negligence to get it.
So let's assume I agree completely the RIAA is being wronged by file sharers. Even so, why should I go out of my way to help them more, when I'm already paying for selective law enforcement that gives them extra breaks like this, and I could be helping some other victim of some other wrong who isn't already being offered such a good deal to help set things right?
I used to occasionally have to search property (during my time as a comissioned officer). Even under miltiary law, there were plenty of conditions, i.e. if I was doing a health and welfare inspection, what was found was not relevant to criminal charges. (Normally when you do a health and welfare inspection of the actual bunkrooms in an enlisted barracks, you're looking for things like boxes of cookies and other junk food, and usually, only siezing it if it's stored in a manner so as to attract roaches and help spread diseases. Private "Smart enough to use Tupperware" normally gets cut some slack. If a searcher found drugs, the drugs were siezed, tagged with only the barracks name and no other details, and taken to be incinerated, but no charges were filed). In the same way, even in an army barracks, if you're searching for a stolen radio, you can't look inside a drawer too small to possibly hold it. What's being searched for gets publicly announced to the whole unit, and so on.
We had frequent 'brainstorms' usually from some new lieutenant, about ways to get it on some person's record or otherwise not let the drug posessors off with just the loss of their drugs in such cases. Overall, I found most senior officers and just about all the senior NCOs didn't want to 'stretch' the rules to get convictions. There's a genuine lot of respect for the constitution in most senior Army personnel.
One thing it pointed out though, is that drugs are a great excuse to search all sorts of tiny niches and crannies. Because drugs are sometimes in such tiny packages, absolutely everywhere became a legitimate search target. Another trick some people tried in the military was ammo searches. Take the unit to the range for training, count the rounds assigned and the number of people who actually fired, and if there's a little ammunition unaccounted for, it was theoretically legal to search for it like lots of different soldiers had each smuggled off a bullet or two. People suggested making sure there were always some pistol range activites included, as pistol bullets are much smaller, decreasing the minimum possible size places to search even more. You could sometimes spot when someone was trying to set up for a search later, because they would print up the range agenda with clauses like "Time permitting, soldiers will be offered the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the 9 mm pistol even if it is not their primary weapon".
Drug's tiny sizes also justify those invasive body cavity searches that aren't permitted for a lot of other cases.
In your car example, the police man could have sought a warrent claiming that he had reason to believe the car was either still all there, or had been already dismantled there in a quick chop-shop style operation. That would have let him search even very small locations for possible pieces of that car, even without adding drugs.
Kiddy porn (or other "obsenity") is a very possible red-herring item when the law starts breaking the rules. If it's suspected to be there as actual photos, the policeman can search every location big enough to hold a polaroid print, and since it might be stored in electronic form instead, it often justifies siezing the suspect's PC as well, which our pervious examples don't.
I like high prices. I like buying hardware at a local store that competes with Walmart. I like the local hardware store being closed after 5:30, even though the sink may have started leaking at 9 PM. I like getting up at 2 in the morning to empty a bucket, on a weekend, waiting for that other store to open, so I can pay 50% extra for the part I will need.
Why? Because that store carries other parts Walmart just won't carry. That little store has a guy who will do some free fixing and adjustment on my chain-saw just to sell me a new chain now and then, and when I needed a file to sharpen it, that store had one in stock that was 'right', not 'halfway close'. That store will sell me one washer or Woodroffe key from a bin, and for the washer, Walmart wants to sell me a pack of a dozen with a dozen-minus-one sizes I don't need, while for the Woodroffe key, Walmart wants to sell me a blank stare. Go compare a section of Walmart with a specialty store that sells just that section, and that 'low selection' is 'on the other foot'.
I can save money at Walmart now. When that drives the little hardware store out of business, I will spend all that money I saved, and a whole lot more, doing things like hiring a professional to completely replace that window with the busted crank, instead of replacing a simple assembly myself, because only a few full-time pros can now afford to keep the parts for thousands of different windows in stock, and the only way they can make money is to charge for more repairs than are strictly needed.
I'm one of those jack of all trades guys. I build my own PCs, do my own carpentry, plumbing and wiring, rebuild my transmission, and even have liscences and paperwork for some of these skills. The only time I turn a car, a plumbing job, or electrical work over to a pro is when it would take me more than my time's worth, and they are actually cheaper. Walmart is pushing out the supplyers I need to keep this up, and even the original poster's claim to detest Walmart and all it stands for doesn't seem too strong. Frankly speaking any more politely than that about Walmart feels about like saying "This pesky Multiple Sclerosis is getting in the way of my laying a new tile floor in the bathroom and I find that a trifle inconvenient.".
Most corporations don't think they can afford the publicity costs of having sued and lost. Having a judge dismiss over some "technical point" in process can be spun to the public as a neutral settlement. "A pays all B's costs" makes a loss look like a loss - the public reads that as "A did something crooked".
The people inside corporations who decide whether a given lawsuit is worth persueing also can't afford the hit to their career that comes from repeatedly paying out to plantiffs.
When a corporation gets big enough to afford its own internal legal department, they basically pay so many thousand a year for services, regardless of the number of cases (yes, that's a simplification - most companies have to pay some costs for outside consutation and of course filing fees and such, but, the total cost is pretty close to flat).
The person running a legal department needs to win most of the time, to look good to his boss. BUT, legal isn't like an R&D department (there to make the company more profitable, and if it doesn't, get rid of it), it's often there to keep someone else from taking all the marbles, or just because it's something you have to have.
The person making decisions to sue/not sue can often show the company a set of fixed, yearly costs for legal, that would be the same whether they sue anyone or not, and a much smaller set of variable costs that come from deciding to actually sue. Paying out, even if for only the most unjustifiable lawsuits, would all show up in that second category, which would actually help companies judge the worth of their legal dept. better.
Now as you've shown, the consequences work both ways, and the same people who are intimidated by a company's deep pockets now are going to have problems with increased risks. Personally, I'd say changing the law would help, not if it became a blanket policy that any loser pays, but if it became something invoked when the case is genuinely frivolous. The one reason I doubt this, you haven't stated, but it's a big arguement for your position: Investors are flat-out idiots when it comes to corporate lawyers, and already lose huge sums of money to them all the time without it buying them a clue, so more legal penalties won't make it any better.
You show a good understanding of why Steve Jobs counts as a public figure, and why there's not likely to be a lawsuit here.
The public figure principle definitely applies to Jobs, as he's been a charismatic representitive of Apple who has gladly placed himself in the public eye when he could have made statements through spokespersons and intermediaries. You could argue that Jobs is more of a public figure than say the current Wallmart heirs in this sense.
The limitations on right of privacy still are something determined by the courts on a case by case basis. They can be very broad limits - let a movie star's press agent deliberately release an article gossiping about the star's romantic fling with a leading man or lady, and the star's whole love life becomes pretty much fair game.
There are still often parts of a public person's life where they enjoy privacy. The law has usually respected some of these formally - there's no diminishing of the rights of other family members just by association, or most public figures still have substantial rights concerning medical information, for two examples. (To match this with your post, It may not seem fair, but it's not as unfair as some may fear - the courts do generally try to make sure the potential penalties for becoming a public figure don't outpace the original reasons driving a person into the spotlight).
Other areas are not as rigorously defined, and often depend on legal fine points. I doubt that this book includes major violations, particularly in a clear cut way that would make a lawsuit anything remotely approaching a good idea, but it is quite possible the book has portions that should have been dropped out of respect for Mr. Jobs remaining privacy.
Your safe assumption isn't, and isn't true either. Your second "safe assumption" that you didn't bother to label an assumption is also false.
Why on earth do you think it is safe to assume that all the advocates for and against a position honestly hold those views for the same reasons they are stating, rather than other reasons? History shows that is a tremendously unsafe assumption to make.
The hidden assumption is shown in your remark about the discussion staying rational. There has never yet been a point in time whan a large group of people got together over a political issue and the discussion achieved total rationality, let alone had a chance of staying that way for the duration without at least occasional slips.
Let's see: Is not affected by the law in question, and can hide that fact? Wont have to pay for the law in question, and can hide that fact? Is in a special interest group that has a special exemption from the law, and can hide that fact?
And you think of this as an unadulterated positive? You really don't think anonymity can be used for any bad purposes? It's time to put the politically aware curse on you: May you go through 20 years of trying to implement your position in the real world, only to realize that the people who are lining you up against the wall are just applying a minor extension of what you advocated.
1. A body that is granted a charter recognizing it as a separate legal entity having its own rights, privileges, and liabilities distinct from those of its members.
Corporations have a separate right. In particular The ones that are incorporated for profit can persue maximizing their profits by any means that is within the letter of the law, and it is not later held against them in court if they (or one of their agencies) break(s) a law.
You as an individual don't have that right. If you break the law, your past conduct with regard to social involvement is relevant to your sentencing. A history of charitable actions can mitigate your sentence, and demonstrating that you were historically focused only on profit can aggrievate your sentence, as well as taking away some of your legal defenses during your trial (i.e. greed can itself be offered as a motive to explain why you might have done the dirty deed).
Corporations are supposed to have liabilities that offset their extra rights. Not being able to support any legislation irrelevant to their bottom line is one of those balancing liabilities for a for profit corporation.
With that said, your definition is really irrelevant (although in this case, that first clause is a pretty accurate summation of much of the law). The court's definition of what corporation means, as actually written in lawbook and precident, is the only one that really matters, and in particular, the court's definition including the modifying term 'for profit' and not just of one word taken out of that context.
The poster you were responding to was correct - for Microsoft, based on the articles of incorporation they chose to use, they are a for profit corporation, with both an actual duty to persue a profit and special liabilities if they go outside of that persuit.
That makes your last two sentences utterly false. If the shareholders want to support any legislation they are free to sell some Microsoft stock and set up a non-profit corporation to lobby for their cause, but no, they are not free to turn Microsoft towards a non-profit cause and still expect it to enjoy its normal legal protections as a for profit.
As per my response to the originating poster, how is making corporations legally superior as fictitious persons to real living persons a good thing? If I have the choice of the present trend or of declaring corporations to make up their own, superior tier of society, socially accountable only to other superior entities, but not to individuals, I'll take the present mess, thank you. Your arguement seems to sum up to "A little poisoning the environment is bad, so we should breed the poisoners into giant radioactive fire breathing lizards and turn them loose on Tokyo with an army of shield lawyers"
Here's one of the actual legal arguements for your assertion, as near as this non-lawyer can make out.
Corporations are fictitious persons under law. They are legally protected for always putting profits first, so long as they stay within the letter of the law. Real persons don't have that same legal protection (If they did, Martha Stwewart's past charitable acts wouldn't have been relevant testimony in court at her sentencing hearing - individual persons would have the right to always put profit first within the law without it possibly adversely affecting legal penalties down the road).
Ergo, if corporations have a human level right to address social issues, they lose the right to be regarded as upstanding entities while still placing profit first or the law has now made corporations a superior class of person to real persons.
The internet's anonymity totally destroys its use as a social forum when it comes to town hall style meetings. That marvelous same anonymity that keeps anyone else from knowing you're black, or a woman, or whatever, and disenfranchising you for it.
It also keeps you from knowing if the other person is a minor (and so not subject to the law you may be debating), or doesn't pay any taxes in the area (and so won't have to pay the costs for the 'solution' they are advocating), or alternately is a lifelong resident (and will be protected from the new law by a grandfather clause) or any of a thousand other factors that might be relevant to empowering an informed public.
I wish I had mod points right now. Right in one. Federal laws and the laws of all 50 states use the term "Obscenity". "Pornography" means nothing to a proper court (neither does "Erotica", for better or worse). Sadly, "Pornography" sometimes creeps into judicial records as a term for work that meets just one of the tests of "Obscenity", that is, it is intended to appeal to purient interests, or it depicts sexual conduct. It's also become yoked to the word Kiddy. "Kiddy Porn" is actually illegal because it is obscene, not because it is porn.
The Supremes definition involves a series of "and" tests. It's OK by that definition to depict sexual conduct,if the work doesn't fail the other tests in the definition, for example, lacking serious moral, scientific or artistic value. Porn is as legal as Time or Newsweek.
This is like antitrust law. Just being a monopoly is perfectly legal. Abusing the power that monopoly gives is what's illegal. Another one more people in the general public get wrong than right.
Isn't this begging the question? Assume there is at least one truck stop at which they provide no wifi service at all (for technical or financial reasons). That is a 100% filter on the service provided to people who stop at that stop. I doubt any court would decide that was a first amendment issue.
Assume there is at least one truck stop at which they provide no wifi service at all (and it just happens to be in the only county in the region that voted heavily the other way, last election) I don't doubt but what a court might decide that was a first amendment issue.
See, saying there are technical or financial reasons behind a decision is a defense against any claim that the reason is instead censorship. The court won't even consider where censorship is or isn't legal on constitutional grounds if the accused successfully proves the decision wasn't censorship at all, just financial or technical limitations. The courts just have to decide if its a good defense or a poor one in a given case, but the way the law works, they have to consider that defense first, and the censorship issue second. If the defense is held good, the court never addresses the second issue at all.
You're right in your interpretation of what the first amendment means (where "you're right" = "I agree with you"). Your out of service example just doesn't support your point.
Evolution didn't really make average 12 year olds able to concieve. Before modern dietary and medical improvements, typical age of menses was about 14-15. Sure some females started at 12, or even earlier, but it was far from average, and it didn't used to be very easy at all for a (typical) 12 year old to become "pregnate'.
Up until the 19th century, the average age for settling down and getting hitched or makeing some kind of arrangments to assure the kids would be taken care of seems to have run consistently only about 18 months past onset of fertility.
Now, average age of first menses is actually under 12 in most of the industrialized world. Kids are expected to wait until at least age 18, often 22-24 to start having kids of their own. That 18 month gap has become 10 years or more! Plus, the kids are younger, and therefore less experienced, when they have to face the decision! No wonder it's a bigger problem - but it has little or nothing to do with people rallying against nature (and did you mean "railing"?). This is an impact of something artificial.
Some reasonably well educated and credentialed people even think there are other, less benign technologies than just better medical care and neutrition involved, and cite trace hormones found in beef and poultry from modern industry farm techniques as pushing the average age down still further.
Slashdot Mirror
Genium? ... Ahw Nutz!
Senation?
O.K., Now we've got the names, Captain Genium of the Starship Senation. That's half a pilot right there, right? We can still pull Star Trek out of its slump, can't we? I mean 18 years and
You're saying you don't see how this advice ties into "Copyright culture", or don't see a cause and effect pattern there. OK, you don't. But you don't think it's a bad thing either - so if you don't think a problem exists, is it any surprise you haven't inquired into the possible sources of that problem?
You like to engage in various logical fallacies as a hobby don't you? Does the fact I do not see a problem (actually not true, I just don't see the particular problem ascribed), nor the application of cause and effect in this case, automatically imply that I have not inquired into the situation? I think not. I think to suggest so is to engage in fallacious argument.
It's hardly a logical fallacy. It's more like you had a fixed opinion, and you were simultaneously claiming to have simultaneously started from that opinion as an axiom, and reasoned your way to it as a conclusion. I'm that supercillious bastard who is holding your feet to the fire and saying "one or the other man, one or the other!". I hope that doesn't up your stress levels, as you don't sound like you particularly deserve the ones you already have, but it's hard to tell just what will bug some person or not.
Its like you (just for example, I'm not saying you actually hold this opinion) believe that alcoholism is a moral failing, and reject the idea it is a disease. Someone posts regarding genetic influences on alcoholism, and you disagree (that's like the first poster whose cause and effect claim you reject here). But, you're not necessarily rejecting his arguement for a causal link between alcoholism and genetics because his initial facts are flawed, nor because his reasoning about those facts is illogical, but because you've already classified alchoholism as one kind of effect, and your definition precludes his very kind of cause.
In this case, I'm pretty sure you've thought about what you refer to as the situation. It doesn't follow that you've persued those lines of thought that might lead you to reclassify the situation as a problem. My point is, you will consider different things if you treat the situation as something that might be a problem, or if you decide it definitely isn't a problem, or definitely is.
You're "just doesn't fly" and other such remarks imply that you made an effort to follow the first poster's arguement, and found either a mistaken axiom, or a logical gap in his proof, but you haven't been willing to point out where that gap is. That claim leaves out that pesky third alternative, which is you've rejected his premise automatically, a priori, as not being in the class of explanations that could even possibly be true, and so haven't bothered to try and verify or disprove some particualr axiom or follow the subsequent steps and check his methodology.
In the case of this thread, you're not rejecting the idea that this culture particularly deserves to be called a copy-control culture (you ARE argueing that that term is not all that well defined, but that implys that you would accept or reject the axiom later, based on further definition, and so haven't already rejected it as yet). At the same time, your pespective still seems to be the situation definitely isn't a problem, but surely that depends in part on that axiom that's still to be considered open. You also haven't pointed to a specific logical mistake the original poster made, but normally, yes you could be reasoning from having actually identified one or more such flaws, and just not specified what the flaw(s) was/were as yet.
Now, is it fair of me to insist you actually were holding to the pre-determined third alternative and not yourself doing logical reasoning based on one of the other two? Your very first remark in the thread, about people who go to movies expecting to be touched or uplifted needing to get a life, ruled out the option that there really was that much of a middle ground in your mind. Your earlier post was full of statements that only made sense if you had already made up your mind on one of the
Back when registration was required for enforcement , creators frequently filed for a single registration for a whole group of photographs, short articles, stories, or poems. Corporations frequently registered all the contents of a monthly magazine or anthology under a single application.
This still made it difficult for some people, i.e. publishers of daily newspapers and some low circulation weekly magazines and non-profit monthlies, to afford to register everything needed, but there were practical methods to protect work, i.e. registering some selected writings by a popular columnist was usually enough to protect the rest of their work from being misused.
In an era when copying someone else's work generally meant having unsold copies in warehouses for some time, the risk from having the work registered after another person had violated its copyright was much more significant. Registration could make all those not-yet-sold copies unsellable.
The Thor Power Tools decision made warehousing itself less attractive to publishers, and so destabilized the copyright situation by removing some of the teeth from registration. Registration by itself didn't impose much financial burden on the creator, until it became more risky for the creator to wait and register after some damages were already done.
If you would support a registration required copyright system, you might want to add in a law limiting the effects of the Thor Power Tools decision on publishers.
So, although I agree we are a copy control culture and I think *AAs are doing bad things with lawyer/legislative backing, your arguments don't exactly bring out these problems in a cause and effect fashion. I think most of us put 'hype' as you call it (arguable) over 'substance' (again your word, again arguable) because we have enough 'substance' from other sources. Life nowadays has a stress level that I don't think people from prior times would really have experienced incessantly (as a result of pace), so I think we just want a break more often.
Your ancestors, who had an average age at death of about 30 by the time you go back three geneerations, probably would debate whether your stress level is any higher than theirs. If you've got some who faced little stressors like World War 2, the black plague, or Atilla the Hun, they certainly would. Why do you believe otherwise? Could it be because the media have been telling you stress is up, up, up? Could it be you feel flattered, deep inside, by the thought that you are a special breed of person who can cope with all that extra, special stress?
Part of selling more newer stuff that's still protected by copyright is giving you a false sense of what the past is like, so you won't think older books, films, and such are relevant to your faster paced, newer than new style life. This may even help difuse your own better instincts. Even if you end up picking, not just Star Wars over Sophie's Choice, but Jerry Springer uncensored over both, you can fall back on the excuse that it's because your special life came with special stress levels, and not ever have to ask yourself "What if I'm just being mentally lazy?", or even "What if I'm not really enjoying Spiderman 14 the way I did the first three or four?" I'm not saying you should be constantly asking yourself why you chose X over Shakespeare, but this stress arguement keeps you from ever asking why you chose a sequel over something new.
Sure, people want a break more often. They are constantly being told they deserve a break, and that a real break consists of not having to think at all. The truth is, often the best break works your mind, but in a different way than your regular life, and a break that shuts your mind down completely ends up not refreshing you at all.
If you're sedentary, eating nothing but junk food, 60 pounds overweight, and at risk of dieing at 45 of heart disease, you will feel over-stressed and constantly exausted. At this point, some people will tell you that too's because of your faster paced lifestyle, and you need to eat a choco-coated-sugar bar any time you feel tired. Those bars will even work, short term. You probably don't listen to the Choco-coated-sugar bar people too much, maybe not at all. Personally, I think the people who are telling you the best break for your mind and heart is a diet of nothing but Arnie, Adam, and Yoda, are giving similarly bad advice. You're saying you don't see how this advice ties into "Copyright culture", or don't see a cause and effect pattern there. OK, you don't. But you don't think it's a bad thing either - so if you don't think a problem exists, is it any surprise you haven't inquired into the possible sources of that problem?
With enough people with this attitude, the stuff you consider high brow will vanish, and then what? Will the whole public stick to Arnie, Adam, and Yoda? Will you enjoy a golden age of endless X-Man and Van Helsing sequels? I don't think that's what will happen. If the public continues to believe they need a steady, invariable diet of stuff that doesn't touch them, educate them, or illuminate their lives, then everything that has any trace of novelty of character, plot or setting left will become the new high-brow stuff, and the most popular stuff will drift down, down, down, until you hear reviewers saying Carmen Miranda is too Cerebral and the hot film of the week is either Chainsaw Lesbian Dwarf Flagelation part 37, or Gummi Bears part 93.
There are probably things you liked going to be lost
Edit your system.ini file as follows:
Under the [386Enh] header, add these two lines:
MessageTextColor=B
MessageBackColor=3
That will give you a bright cyan text on dark cyan background screen of death. Feel free to substitute other colors 0-F as desired. This works in 95, 98, and Me, at least. Red's in there somewhere - don't remember exactly where - just try a pair of values, wait the usual 15 minutes for a SOD, and see if you like the combination. I can honestly say I haven't seen a BSOD on my screen in months.
There is plenty of Christian symbolism in Tolkien. There's also lots of other stuff that is really historical or literary reference, but the history involved is chiefly that of England, so of course it's got its own share of Christian roots.
For an example of a historical reference, the Rohirrim are definitely more Saxon-like, and Gondor more like the Normans. Their joining together to fight in the end is a fictional recapitulation of the same synthesis as modern England's.
For an example of a literary reference, the death of Boromir is essentially one big reference to the Death of Roland, (although there's also some reference to the Death of Robin Hood, and lots of other tid-bits mixed in - Tolkien was a genuine genius, and his work is argueably more complex and densely interwoven with all of western literature than is, say Joyce's "Ulysses").
However, there's plenty of specifically Christian symbolism: i.e. Aragorn = Christ, with Isildur = Adam, and all the kings since Isildur as the post-Adamic generations. Aragorn resists the temptation to claim the ring, and so redeems the human race, where Isildur fell for the same temptation. Aragorn enjoys the long life of his distant ancestors, whereas, by Isildur's fall, the lives of the Numenorians began to dwindle to the shortness of normal men. "For as by Adam, all came to death, even so in Christ will all be made alive" (modern translation of a 12th century Hymn). Then of course, Aragorn walks the paths of the dead, although I don't recall it specifically taking him three days underground.
The beauty of Tolkien's symbolism is that no one character always behaves like Christ, or goes through all the same stages, and there's plenty of "other stuff" there too.
I hope it doesn't spoil Tolkien for anyone if Frodo's carrying the Ring up Mount Doom is like Christ's carrying the Cross up Golgotha, or that Sam, like Adam, was a gardener. There really are lots of Norse and Pagan references in there too if you want them (Bombadil! - which none of you that have just seen the movies will get, sorry!).
Lewis was a devoutly Christian author. That doesn't have to equate to manipulation, even if he sometimes descended from symbolism into allegory. Propaganda lies somewhere along that spectrum, but it's almost at the far end, exceeded only by flat out indoctrination by sheer repetition. Allegory is a caution sign, a warning to the experienced reader that there's a risk of propaganda, but not by any means a guarentee. (And there's plenty of propaganda without allegory - i.e. "Hansi: The Girl Who Loved The Swastika"., plus there are some works with lots of allegory that are anti-propaganda i.e. Spinrad's "The Iron Dream".)
Instead, what C.S. was doing tends to come from a view that all people's lives, very much including non-Christians, will have aspects where the same underlieing truths are bound to break through. Lewis saw most of the other religions and many non-religious philosophys as gaining their value from those same truths. He chose Christianity as his preferred, best expression out of those, but he was mostly writing about those truths as directly as possible.
Now, the Narnia books were written mostly for kids. Kids in general are not going to much catch underlieing symbolism or metaphor. That goes for Aslan as a Christ symbol, but it also goes for Huck Finn as a symbol of Freedom, or Ahab as an Obsession symbol, or Atticus Finch as a symbol of Natural Nobility enhanced rather than degraded by social education. Sure the average kid won't get it, but that's not because it's hidden by the author, it's hidden by the child's own lack of experience.
If you want to see Lewis at his best, try the last two of the Silent Planet Trilogy (The first book was written early, and it suffers from some of the same flaws as the Narnia books, but by about half way through "Perelandra", Lewis was hitting his stride). Better yet, read his best adult novel "Till We Have Faces".
Almost certainly, the legal system will come up with a similar rationale for tracking. It's not puishment, it's just "locating" or something along those lines, and that'll put the foot in the door.
I keep thinking of what C. S. Lewis said in That Hideous Strength, writing about a group of very bad people who were claiming to be uninterested in punishment and only trying to help rehabilitate the criminal.
"In eliminating the name Punishment, they sought to make the fact of it infinite."
Some paedophiles do seem to respond to rehabilitiation. This percentage varies with the exact type, like most crimes, but it's actually pretty good odds, upwards of 50% for familial incest and about 1 in 3 for outside the family hetero-oriented child molestation, and 1 in 5 for outside the family homosexual molesters. That's looking at fairly short programs to change behavior, followed up over nearly 20 years so far after release from prison. Going from an average of a single week or two weeks of 1 hour/day group therapy style sessions to something more intensive would probably get those numbers up.
Because it seems to work fairly often, I don't mean to argue against trying to rehabilitate in itself (although I wonder how we justify spending money on rehabilitation if we really can't afford to spend money on counseling and other help for the victims first), but somehow, to the government, it makes a dandy justification for the more expensive option of life-time technological control instead of a justification for the much lower cost options of either better in-prison programs, or additional counseling after release (or both).
Add to that these other ideas, like lifetime monitoring not counting as a punishment, and factor in that many of these advocates for lifetime monitoring also see mental illness (or lack thereof) as not being a factor one way or another in deciding what to do with these people, and we will end up with a nightmare. This methodology will spread to other areas of punishment, and will further distort such principles as the cruel and unusual test.
Or to really save paper, print it out by arranging individual atoms in the shape of ones and zeros.
This Just in - IBM announces a method of storing data that is 10 bajillion times more compact than the best existing method - Moore's law surrenders! - IBM to use this technique to write their answers to SCO's interogatives on the entire planet (using the Moon as a read/write head) - IBM exec says "yeah, it cost a bit to develop, but on the balance shipping costs are zero.".
All the tools they need indeed....
The Law now gives a possible 5x multiple to fines for "willful' copyright infringement (US $30,000 max/incident becomes $150,000 by a willfulness test.)
Most people who have been wronged are lucky if they qualify for a 3x multiple in a lawsuit, and have to prove something much tougher, like criminal and not just simple negligence to get it.
So let's assume I agree completely the RIAA is being wronged by file sharers. Even so, why should I go out of my way to help them more, when I'm already paying for selective law enforcement that gives them extra breaks like this, and I could be helping some other victim of some other wrong who isn't already being offered such a good deal to help set things right?
Does the original troll modder get mod points less often?
Yes
I used to occasionally have to search property (during my time as a comissioned officer). Even under miltiary law, there were plenty of conditions, i.e. if I was doing a health and welfare inspection, what was found was not relevant to criminal charges. (Normally when you do a health and welfare inspection of the actual bunkrooms in an enlisted barracks, you're looking for things like boxes of cookies and other junk food, and usually, only siezing it if it's stored in a manner so as to attract roaches and help spread diseases. Private "Smart enough to use Tupperware" normally gets cut some slack. If a searcher found drugs, the drugs were siezed, tagged with only the barracks name and no other details, and taken to be incinerated, but no charges were filed). In the same way, even in an army barracks, if you're searching for a stolen radio, you can't look inside a drawer too small to possibly hold it. What's being searched for gets publicly announced to the whole unit, and so on.
We had frequent 'brainstorms' usually from some new lieutenant, about ways to get it on some person's record or otherwise not let the drug posessors off with just the loss of their drugs in such cases. Overall, I found most senior officers and just about all the senior NCOs didn't want to 'stretch' the rules to get convictions. There's a genuine lot of respect for the constitution in most senior Army personnel.
One thing it pointed out though, is that drugs are a great excuse to search all sorts of tiny niches and crannies. Because drugs are sometimes in such tiny packages, absolutely everywhere became a legitimate search target. Another trick some people tried in the military was ammo searches. Take the unit to the range for training, count the rounds assigned and the number of people who actually fired, and if there's a little ammunition unaccounted for, it was theoretically legal to search for it like lots of different soldiers had each smuggled off a bullet or two. People suggested making sure there were always some pistol range activites included, as pistol bullets are much smaller, decreasing the minimum possible size places to search even more. You could sometimes spot when someone was trying to set up for a search later, because they would print up the range agenda with clauses like "Time permitting, soldiers will be offered the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the 9 mm pistol even if it is not their primary weapon".
Drug's tiny sizes also justify those invasive body cavity searches that aren't permitted for a lot of other cases.
In your car example, the police man could have sought a warrent claiming that he had reason to believe the car was either still all there, or had been already dismantled there in a quick chop-shop style operation. That would have let him search even very small locations for possible pieces of that car, even without adding drugs.
Kiddy porn (or other "obsenity") is a very possible red-herring item when the law starts breaking the rules. If it's suspected to be there as actual photos, the policeman can search every location big enough to hold a polaroid print, and since it might be stored in electronic form instead, it often justifies siezing the suspect's PC as well, which our pervious examples don't.
I like high prices. I like buying hardware at a local store that competes with Walmart. I like the local hardware store being closed after 5:30, even though the sink may have started leaking at 9 PM. I like getting up at 2 in the morning to empty a bucket, on a weekend, waiting for that other store to open, so I can pay 50% extra for the part I will need.
Why? Because that store carries other parts Walmart just won't carry. That little store has a guy who will do some free fixing and adjustment on my chain-saw just to sell me a new chain now and then, and when I needed a file to sharpen it, that store had one in stock that was 'right', not 'halfway close'. That store will sell me one washer or Woodroffe key from a bin, and for the washer, Walmart wants to sell me a pack of a dozen with a dozen-minus-one sizes I don't need, while for the Woodroffe key, Walmart wants to sell me a blank stare. Go compare a section of Walmart with a specialty store that sells just that section, and that 'low selection' is 'on the other foot'.
I can save money at Walmart now. When that drives the little hardware store out of business, I will spend all that money I saved, and a whole lot more, doing things like hiring a professional to completely replace that window with the busted crank, instead of replacing a simple assembly myself, because only a few full-time pros can now afford to keep the parts for thousands of different windows in stock, and the only way they can make money is to charge for more repairs than are strictly needed.
I'm one of those jack of all trades guys. I build my own PCs, do my own carpentry, plumbing and wiring, rebuild my transmission, and even have liscences and paperwork for some of these skills. The only time I turn a car, a plumbing job, or electrical work over to a pro is when it would take me more than my time's worth, and they are actually cheaper. Walmart is pushing out the supplyers I need to keep this up, and even the original poster's claim to detest Walmart and all it stands for doesn't seem too strong. Frankly speaking any more politely than that about Walmart feels about like saying "This pesky Multiple Sclerosis is getting in the way of my laying a new tile floor in the bathroom and I find that a trifle inconvenient.".
Most corporations don't think they can afford the publicity costs of having sued and lost. Having a judge dismiss over some "technical point" in process can be spun to the public as a neutral settlement. "A pays all B's costs" makes a loss look like a loss - the public reads that as "A did something crooked".
The people inside corporations who decide whether a given lawsuit is worth persueing also can't afford the hit to their career that comes from repeatedly paying out to plantiffs.
When a corporation gets big enough to afford its own internal legal department, they basically pay so many thousand a year for services, regardless of the number of cases (yes, that's a simplification - most companies have to pay some costs for outside consutation and of course filing fees and such, but, the total cost is pretty close to flat).
The person running a legal department needs to win most of the time, to look good to his boss. BUT, legal isn't like an R&D department (there to make the company more profitable, and if it doesn't, get rid of it), it's often there to keep someone else from taking all the marbles, or just because it's something you have to have.
The person making decisions to sue/not sue can often show the company a set of fixed, yearly costs for legal, that would be the same whether they sue anyone or not, and a much smaller set of variable costs that come from deciding to actually sue. Paying out, even if for only the most unjustifiable lawsuits, would all show up in that second category, which would actually help companies judge the worth of their legal dept. better.
Now as you've shown, the consequences work both ways, and the same people who are intimidated by a company's deep pockets now are going to have problems with increased risks. Personally, I'd say changing the law would help, not if it became a blanket policy that any loser pays, but if it became something invoked when the case is genuinely frivolous. The one reason I doubt this, you haven't stated, but it's a big arguement for your position: Investors are flat-out idiots when it comes to corporate lawyers, and already lose huge sums of money to them all the time without it buying them a clue, so more legal penalties won't make it any better.
You show a good understanding of why Steve Jobs counts as a public figure, and why there's not likely to be a lawsuit here.
The public figure principle definitely applies to Jobs, as he's been a charismatic representitive of Apple who has gladly placed himself in the public eye when he could have made statements through spokespersons and intermediaries. You could argue that Jobs is more of a public figure than say the current Wallmart heirs in this sense.
The limitations on right of privacy still are something determined by the courts on a case by case basis. They can be very broad limits - let a movie star's press agent deliberately release an article gossiping about the star's romantic fling with a leading man or lady, and the star's whole love life becomes pretty much fair game.
There are still often parts of a public person's life where they enjoy privacy. The law has usually respected some of these formally - there's no diminishing of the rights of other family members just by association, or most public figures still have substantial rights concerning medical information, for two examples. (To match this with your post, It may not seem fair, but it's not as unfair as some may fear - the courts do generally try to make sure the potential penalties for becoming a public figure don't outpace the original reasons driving a person into the spotlight).
Other areas are not as rigorously defined, and often depend on legal fine points. I doubt that this book includes major violations, particularly in a clear cut way that would make a lawsuit anything remotely approaching a good idea, but it is quite possible the book has portions that should have been dropped out of respect for Mr. Jobs remaining privacy.
Your safe assumption isn't, and isn't true either. Your second "safe assumption" that you didn't bother to label an assumption is also false.
Why on earth do you think it is safe to assume that all the advocates for and against a position honestly hold those views for the same reasons they are stating, rather than other reasons? History shows that is a tremendously unsafe assumption to make.
The hidden assumption is shown in your remark about the discussion staying rational. There has never yet been a point in time whan a large group of people got together over a political issue and the discussion achieved total rationality, let alone had a chance of staying that way for the duration without at least occasional slips.
If you can run Linux on a 286, you can run it on a mutant Kaled, I always say. It's probably easier to run it on a live mutant than a dead badger.
Let's see: Is not affected by the law in question, and can hide that fact?
Wont have to pay for the law in question, and can hide that fact?
Is in a special interest group that has a special exemption from the law, and can hide that fact?
And you think of this as an unadulterated positive? You really don't think anonymity can be used for any bad purposes?
It's time to put the politically aware curse on you: May you go through 20 years of trying to implement your position in the real world, only to realize that the people who are lining you up against the wall are just applying a minor extension of what you advocated.
You posted the link, so I'll work with it:
1. A body that is granted a charter recognizing it as a separate legal entity having its own rights, privileges, and liabilities distinct from those of its members.
Corporations have a separate right. In particular The ones that are incorporated for profit can persue maximizing their profits by any means that is within the letter of the law, and it is not later held against them in court if they (or one of their agencies) break(s) a law.
You as an individual don't have that right. If you break the law, your past conduct with regard to social involvement is relevant to your sentencing. A history of charitable actions can mitigate your sentence, and demonstrating that you were historically focused only on profit can aggrievate your sentence, as well as taking away some of your legal defenses during your trial (i.e. greed can itself be offered as a motive to explain why you might have done the dirty deed).
Corporations are supposed to have liabilities that offset their extra rights. Not being able to support any legislation irrelevant to their bottom line is one of those balancing liabilities for a for profit corporation.
With that said, your definition is really irrelevant (although in this case, that first clause is a pretty accurate summation of much of the law). The court's definition of what corporation means, as actually written in lawbook and precident, is the only one that really matters, and in particular, the court's definition including the modifying term 'for profit' and not just of one word taken out of that context.
The poster you were responding to was correct - for Microsoft, based on the articles of incorporation they chose to use, they are a for profit corporation, with both an actual duty to persue a profit and special liabilities if they go outside of that persuit.
That makes your last two sentences utterly false. If the shareholders want to support any legislation they are free to sell some Microsoft stock and set up a non-profit corporation to lobby for their cause, but no, they are not free to turn Microsoft towards a non-profit cause and still expect it to enjoy its normal legal protections as a for profit.
As per my response to the originating poster, how is making corporations legally superior as fictitious persons to real living persons a good thing? If I have the choice of the present trend or of declaring corporations to make up their own, superior tier of society, socially accountable only to other superior entities, but not to individuals, I'll take the present mess, thank you. Your arguement seems to sum up to "A little poisoning the environment is bad, so we should breed the poisoners into giant radioactive fire breathing lizards and turn them loose on Tokyo with an army of shield lawyers"
Here's one of the actual legal arguements for your assertion, as near as this non-lawyer can make out.
Corporations are fictitious persons under law. They are legally protected for always putting profits first, so long as they stay within the letter of the law. Real persons don't have that same legal protection (If they did, Martha Stwewart's past charitable acts wouldn't have been relevant testimony in court at her sentencing hearing - individual persons would have the right to always put profit first within the law without it possibly adversely affecting legal penalties down the road).
Ergo, if corporations have a human level right to address social issues, they lose the right to be regarded as upstanding entities while still placing profit first or the law has now made corporations a superior class of person to real persons.
The internet's anonymity totally destroys its use as a social forum when it comes to town hall style meetings. That marvelous same anonymity that keeps anyone else from knowing you're black, or a woman, or whatever, and disenfranchising you for it.
It also keeps you from knowing if the other person is a minor (and so not subject to the law you may be debating), or doesn't pay any taxes in the area (and so won't have to pay the costs for the 'solution' they are advocating), or alternately is a lifelong resident (and will be protected from the new law by a grandfather clause) or any of a thousand other factors that might be relevant to empowering an informed public.
I wish I had mod points right now. Right in one. Federal laws and the laws of all 50 states use the term "Obscenity". "Pornography" means nothing to a proper court (neither does "Erotica", for better or worse). Sadly, "Pornography" sometimes creeps into judicial records as a term for work that meets just one of the tests of "Obscenity", that is, it is intended to appeal to purient interests, or it depicts sexual conduct. It's also become yoked to the word Kiddy. "Kiddy Porn" is actually illegal because it is obscene, not because it is porn.
The Supremes definition involves a series of "and" tests. It's OK by that definition to depict sexual conduct,if the work doesn't fail the other tests in the definition, for example, lacking serious moral, scientific or artistic value. Porn is as legal as Time or Newsweek.
This is like antitrust law. Just being a monopoly is perfectly legal. Abusing the power that monopoly gives is what's illegal. Another one more people in the general public get wrong than right.
Isn't this begging the question?
Assume there is at least one truck stop at which they provide no wifi service at all (for technical or financial reasons). That is a 100% filter on the service provided to people who stop at that stop. I doubt any court would decide that was a first amendment issue.
Assume there is at least one truck stop at which they provide no wifi service at all (and it just happens to be in the only county in the region that voted heavily the other way, last election) I don't doubt but what a court might decide that was a first amendment issue.
See, saying there are technical or financial reasons behind a decision is a defense against any claim that the reason is instead censorship. The court won't even consider where censorship is or isn't legal on constitutional grounds if the accused successfully proves the decision wasn't censorship at all, just financial or technical limitations. The courts just have to decide if its a good defense or a poor one in a given case, but the way the law works, they have to consider that defense first, and the censorship issue second. If the defense is held good, the court never addresses the second issue at all.
You're right in your interpretation of what the first amendment means (where "you're right" = "I agree with you"). Your out of service example just doesn't support your point.
Evolution didn't really make average 12 year olds able to concieve. Before modern dietary and medical improvements, typical age of menses was about 14-15. Sure some females started at 12, or even earlier, but it was far from average, and it didn't used to be very easy at all for a (typical) 12 year old to become "pregnate'.
Up until the 19th century, the average age for settling down and getting hitched or makeing some kind of arrangments to assure the kids would be taken care of seems to have run consistently only about 18 months past onset of fertility.
Now, average age of first menses is actually under 12 in most of the industrialized world. Kids are expected to wait until at least age 18, often 22-24 to start having kids of their own. That 18 month gap has become 10 years or more! Plus, the kids are younger, and therefore less experienced, when they have to face the decision! No wonder it's a bigger problem - but it has little or nothing to do with people rallying against nature (and did you mean "railing"?). This is an impact of something artificial.
Some reasonably well educated and credentialed people even think there are other, less benign technologies than just better medical care and neutrition involved, and cite trace hormones found in beef and poultry from modern industry farm techniques as pushing the average age down still further.