Signing the petition is never doing nothing. it's seldom enough unless you are prepared to do other things too, but "not enough in itself" does not mean 'futile" in any sane dictionary. Signing a petition may interest a few people who hadn't paid attention. Noticing how reluctant the press is to mention that petition when it gets 100,000 signatures may awaken a few more. After a while, people start telling the cops why they have lost all respect. The jokes about politicians start provoking shaken fists and not just laughs. People in the crowd start shouting angry insults and your own goons start looking more and more embarrassed to escort them out of the "public" meetings. The crowds get too big for the designated free speech areas. One of the goons overeacts and makes an arrest for lynching when some Occupy member gets in the way of an arrest for picketing without a permit, then more people start wanting to know why, if the Occupy people aren't saying anything, someone is willing to falsly accuse one of attempted murder just to shut him up. Nothing is wasted. All the little grains of sand that can't gain any actual movement exert the pressure that becomes the avalanche.
Who would want to live in a broken-down, aged body forever, kept alive only by a steady stream of stem cells?
The same type of rich person who has no problem taking taxpayer funds to move jobs out of the country, indulge their endless appetite for vulture capitalism, believes their money is proof of their absolute moral virtue and personal eternal chumship with the Almighty, and thinks they should regulate everybody else's having any fun, is the one who will want this and think the others are weak for not wanting it as bad. The same person who thinks he is a superior species to the common human and that it is that man's duty to die as need be for the life, the convienience or even the whim of that superior species. The same person that doesn't really love life in the slightest, but has an overwhelming fear of death, far beyond that of any rational entity. The same person who will make life on Earth a living hell for himself and everybody else and think, right up to that last system failure, that he is winning.
I'm going to give you a couple of references: Jonathan Swift's (and to some extent Larry Niven's) Struldbrugs. Niel Gaiman's Teknophage. The people who are mentioning Dracula are understating the sheer evil possible here.
The concern is that they will go from swabs to more and more intrusive searches. In practice, what they could do within their mandate now includes asking you to turn a laptop on to verify it's not a dummy shell filled with Semtex or something. In theory, though, all these port cities fall within the aegis of laws that could allow border control agents to search that laptop for porn and confiscate it even for legal images or video found on it. There's no sharp perceptual line between local police assisting the TSA do something that is relatively non-restrictive and might (or might not) even achieve a rational goal, and a more restrictive search, one that takes a lot more than 90 seconds, one where the goals are not specified, nor is there any obvious divide between them assisting the TSA and assisting immigration, DEA, BATF, CIA, etc. You know, the topic is about local police ASSISTING SOMEBODY ELSE, and you cite two examples about what local police do ENTIRELY BY THEMSELVES as counterexamples. Let's try that: "It's alright for the CIA to waterboard, because an MD assists them, and my doctor only needed a few minutes to recognize my condition and give me a shot for it, and I have once or twice seen doctors rendering assistance at automobile accidents. Doctors mean that whatever the CIA does is alright".
Some of what Ron Paul says seems to ignore the idea that the Constitution is not a Suicide Pact. For example, Paul may be right about the constitutionality of the Dept. of Energy, but he hasn't proposed a solution that can be rationally accepted. Just shutting the DOE down means there would be no federal oversight of nuclear weapons when they enter the repair and maintenance process, or of spent nuclear fuel. I too once took that oath to defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and I'm damned pretty sure I meant it, than and now, but until Ron Paul can say at least say whether the DOE plants at Yucca Flats, Oak Ridge, and others should be under control of the Fed through some agency (DOE, DOE, or other), or of various state governments, or what his shut down plan is, he hasn't really said anything. I remember classes on how Posse Comitatus itself is a Constitution derived principle which limits the military itself controlling the nuclear arsenal when it's on US soil, off military posts, and I can only wish Dr. Paul would address whether, and just how, he intends to abide by that interpretation as well, because that seems to imply the possibility the guy really plans to abandon control of operational multi-megaton devices. Now, as a loyal Tennessean, if Ron Paul wants the governor to have full control over the disposition of all nuclear weapons currently in state (including any Russian ones Oak Ridge is probably dismantling right now), I guess that's all right, but I'd think come football season Alabama and Georgia might be a trifle nervous about just what the "Vol Defense" now encompasses.
Please understand, Hellbombs get dirtier and dirtier inside just sitting on the shelf. There is not unlimited time to take "Shut down the DOE" from an idea to an actual plan, unless you don't mind putting human workers lives at a vastly increased and essentially unnecessary risk.Even the likely delay from a mere couple of years spent actually debating a plan in congress poses a very real health risk to hundreds of DOE contractor employees. And if your interpretation of the Constitution is that it puts some form of nuclear release authority in the hands of Bill Haslam, well, I'm not sure he even wants it. In fact, I kinda hope he doesn't. By the way, for those of you in states with Democratic governors, Bill's a staunch Republican, and no, most of your states don't have nukes in them. Lest you think I'm exaggerating, well, yes I am, a bit, but I'd point out that ambiguities in the control of the Ex-Soviet nuclear arsenal did occur on just this basis, and the result, according to the CIA for one source, was supposedly that some devices came close to falling into the hands, not just of oddly behaving leaders of some break-away republics, but of actual known terrorist organizations. One of the reasons the US has spent over a decade cleaning up really hot, nastily contaminated Soviet era devices is a period of less than a single year's delay in the ongoing process of maintenance in the collapsing USSR. Do you think we'd do better, with the sort of congress we have now?
Actually, I didn't agree with your claims. My point is, it is not valid to call copyright violation stealing in the legal sense. By your own logic, If I agree that Shakspeare was using English properly, I have stipulated for the historical record that the Earl of Glamis has committed a real life murder ("Glamis hath murdered sleep."). Well, I'm not trying to get Shakespeare tried in absentia for libel, and I'm not demanding that all the history books be changes to claim that the 8th Earl of Glamis killed some guy named Mr. Sleep. Now, what power do you have to make me embrace either alternative? Go ahead, force me to accept one of your false extremes as correct. Yeah, twist my arm over the Internet until I let you put words into my mouth, but here's the last words I have for you: STFU, Troll.
In terms of a dictionary defintion, it is obvious that copyright infringement is stealing.
And in terms of a legal definition, it's obvious it isn't - now was this person accused of breaking a law of etymology as dictated by Ben Johnson, Noah Webster or maybe all those nice Britannica 3 people, or current US law? You do know what they call people who go into courts and argue that the common use of words has legal power over the actual courts rulings and precedents, don't you?
If copyright violation is legally theft:
1. States have a right to enforce laws regarding theft which happens in their jurisdictions, so the SCOTUS decision that copyright law cannot be delegated to the states is invalid and we have a constitutional crisis on our hands.
2. ALL copyright violation is criminal - As there's no such thing as non-criminal theft. We need to get ALL copyright law moved from Title 17 (copyright law) to Title 18 (US federal criminal law).
3. Copyright cannot expire, and the part of the constitution that says 'limited time' is again part of a constitutional crisis. After all, theft can't become non-theft just because of the age of the item. Can you imagine if someone could legally take something physical just because it had gotten too old to be protected? "Let's go loot an antique shop - that stuff is too old to be protected by law anymore.".
4. Everything Madison, John Jay, Learned Hand, Franklin, Jefferson and many others wrote on copyright proves they were morally bankrupt, because they didn't agree that copyright violation was theft at all, and we need to tear down a lot of statues. These people are bad examples to our children. Hell, every single person elected to high federal office failed to agree with you until 1976 when the first actual criminal penalties for some select forms of CV were passed, let's get their names off all those monuments, bridges, and high schools.
You go tell the government to smash the Jefferson Memorial and demand that every single congresscritter that won't move all of Title 17 into Title 18 be immediately impeached for coddling thieves. You encourage your state to secede if the federal government won't let them exercise their old state level copyright laws. I will wait here.
3x is what everyone else gets, why not say 3x at least and at most. I once had a van full of electronics installation gear, which, while parked, was plowed into by a drunk driver in a rainstorm (water damaged most of the tools and contents before the mess could be cleaned up). I had to take the matter to court and prove he was over the legal alcohol limit to drive, before I could get punitive damages. Just to qualify for that 3x multiple, I had to prove extra circumstances applied, and those extra circumstances amounted to a criminal level of guilt, as it would be in a criminal case, not just simple responsibility as in a civil case. (Note, technically I still didn't have to meet the reasonable doubt test for the drunk driver to be considered responsible in a civil case, but I did have to show somebody, whether a full court actually prosecuting him or just a cop making out an accident report and bothering to do a breathalizer test and subsequent arrest, had determined his responsibility exceeded simple responsibility before I could qualify for punitive damages).
So why does a special privilege exist, letting the software creator seek damages many times higher than 3x? Why does somebody like me have to prove criminal negligence, or other fully criminal level of responsibility, while various copyright holders have a special private law that means they only have to prove a lesser standard such as'willfulness', and why does 'willfulness' sometimes multiply the already ultra-high damages by 5x, not just 3x?
I want a special law like these guys get - one that lets me really discourage people who through illegal acts, damage my property. Of course, all I was trying to discourage was a drunk who blew 0.31 on a breathalizer and was estimated to have been driving 60 MPH in a quiet residential neighborhood, at the time school was just letting out, and who had 9 priors, and who somehow still had enough money to buy another car after the last accident and seemed to think he could just pay for simple damages and keep it up forever. But the courts in their infinite wisdom have decided that needs less discouragement than that hideous and abominable crime of pirating software.
I have to agree with you, particularly right now when domestic problem solving has to be our first priority if the system itself is to survive, but if we can get the economy back on a stable course, here's why I'd argue investing in other places can be worth it.
The sane argument for spending money on other people's nations is never that they deserve it more than your own citizens. It's that it saves larger costs elsewhere. We make that sort of argument all the time even in domestic politics, because where someone such as you tries to draw the line as citizen/non-citizen, many other people try to draw the lines other places. If you're going to frame things as American citizen/Foreign national, please note a huge part of making what you want happen for America is to get hundreds of millions of people not to redraw that us vrs. them line somewhere else, like "producers vs. consumers", or "The state that elected me" vs. "The other 49, the district, and Puerto Rico, too".
Why spend on educating your own poor, when education for just those who can afford it themselves may be fairer (by some people)? The answer is fairer or less fair, sometimes you can spend X on education or 6X on prisons. Why spend money finding a cure for AIDS, when we could spend it on diseases where the person's 'immoral lifestyle' didn't contribute? One answer might be, those other diseases don't have the same potential to become epidemics and don't tend to kill otherwise healthy young productive people in great numbers. For the international theatre, the argument is that wars cost a lot, and foreign aid actually saves money.
Can it, really? There's been cases that make good arguments for it, but often, foreign aid seems to get us nothing. Contrary to the people on the right who think foreign aid is a Liberal scheme, a lot of foreign aid gets earmarked for buying weapons, in which case, we aren't buying peace, we're simply buying delaying a war while giving both sides more nastiness for when that war can't be delayed any more (Counting the Israeli side of US foreign aid certainly includes a large portion that goes for military resources, well over 50% of total aid to the region.). What would happen if we specifically made all foreign aid targeted at actual peace, at building hospitals and clinics and paving roads and building bridges and feeding people? Less than 50% of foreign aid actually stays targeted at making things kinder and gentler, so how would we determine if taking that percentage up would actually win peace, or if various regional madmen would just use what we were saving their governments to prepare for more war?
But, if we were aggressively waging peace, I suspect there are ways to make sure the US got full credit from the populations we helped. There was a consulting firm during the Vietnam war, that said to the US government, in effect "It's cheaper just to buy their hearts and minds. We can make boxes full of seed grain, more boxes full of basic medical supplies, more boxes full of basic tools, and print manuals in Vietnamese for everything. Mark all the types so everyone knows what's in each kind. Then airdrop those boxes with parachutes all over both parts of Vietnam... with little red, white and blue pop-up flags, just to make them easier to find. Six months after you start, tell Hanoi they get a Pepsi plant and Saigon gets a Coca-Cola plant. By the projections, building those boxes to actually play the star spangled banner and filling those manuals with color pictures of smiling Americans saying (in Vietnamese): "We don't care if you're flirting with communism, we just want you to stop fighting, fix up your infrastructure, and feed all your people", and it was still expected to cost a lot less than making the same number of bombs as we actually dropped (raw estimates only, but the price per box was less than 10% of the price per unit bomb).
A lot of what made the PC a general purpose computer wasn't innate geek-dom. There were many people in the 60's, 70's, and beyond who were not particularly into learning to code or grok hardware, but wanted to make music, draw pictures, or publish something. They learned about hardware and software because they had those goals, rather than the geek goal of learning tech for its own sake. Computers such as the C-64, with its SID chip were aimed at the lay-person who had a new idea about using the machine for a general task, a task neither tech focused nor business oriented users cared that much about. Apple developed font management and a wide selection of fonts themselves because of what were thought of as hobbyist or non-business users in the same way. At that point, Microsoft was assuring businesses eight fonts would be plenty, counting italic versions. A lot of powerful people though we would go to huge, monolithic computers that did what businesses and governments wanted and that would be it. Breaking out of that model wasn't done the first time all by geeks, unless a bunch of rock musicians who wanted smaller synthesizers and funkier sounds were geeks, or a bunch of psychedelic poster designing hippies were geeks, or a bunch of political minority publishers were geeks. If it has to happen again, it will need the same sort of mix. It will need non-geeks who don't want to be forced into buying Photoshop at some exorbitant markup and running it on their Microsoft only box with regular BSA audits while they are just trying to make pretty pictures. Non-geeks who only want to write something the government doesn't like, but are drawn in to learning about open source by their worrying about distinctive digital watermarking in the Industrial Complex Approved software they are told is the only alternative.
1. Steven Moffat has officially declared that, when they get to the end of the 12th doctor, they will use a special esoteric procedure only professional writers know, called 'making something up'. 2. Did you never see Dr Who and the Curse of Fatal Death? That's four or five more doctors right there, so we're on #15 or so now. (My favorites among them are Rowan Atkenson and Joanna Lumley, both of which would have made great Doctors back then, but probably can't run nearly enough now.).
Re:Ken Murray's blog
on
How Doctors Die
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· Score: 5, Interesting
10 years ago, at the age of only 43, my Ex-wife was diagnosed with an advanced Stage IV Melanoma. The normal size for the primary tumor to be classed as stage IV at that time was 8 mm to 12 mm, and hers was about 20mm on discovery. The assumption is that a Melanoma that large has to have metastasized unless absolutely proven otherwise. The location was on top of her scalp, making it very likely by the standard model to have drained tumor cells into her lymph nodes just because of that location. The original physician diagnosing her gave her 3 to 6 WEEKS to live and was incredibly blunt about it. She is, however still alive, thank God. (And no, I didn't pull a Gingrich, she divorced me about 4 years later, then we found out the relationship could be saved, put it back together, and just never bothered to do another ceremony. We have great fun making my staid, conservative daughter roll her eyes at us.).
I don't like to tell people who are terminal about this. She beat odds that were quoted in the standard books on cancer as 10 Billion to 1 or worse, repeatedly. I'm not by any means totally convinced that it was a miracle, but her surgeon swears something guided him, literally forcing him to cut a small extra flap extending for about 2 inches along a scalp vein before it would let him put the scalpel down.
An experimental treatment program at Duke University got mixed results on a bunch of other people, triggered the weirdest side effects anyone ever saw in her (She was speaking with a foreign accent a few days after some sessions, spoke some fragments in recognizable languages and some that may have been a really exotic tongue or just some noises (and all she speaks normally is English and 1 year of Spanish, but there were times her German was excellent, and one where I recognized some Italian, but then, my own Italian is not that good), she had occasional weeks with feeling fantastic, not sleeping at all, and working like a fresh, new meth addict, while running a 103 fever and losing 10-15 lbs. a week, then other weeks with no other physical symptoms except where she slept for 33 to 48 hours at a time, and the program may or may not have been a factor in her survival - it's been dropped as inconclusive). She had other symptoms that would fit schizophrenia, things such as putting the car keys in the refrigerator's butter dish 'so they wouldn't melt'. None of those periods lasted more than a week or so before it was something else.
I've got no explanation for why any conceivable God would do such a thing as a miracle just for her, or wouldn't for so many other people, or why a miracle would be so strange. Worshiping some form of God for doing this almost seems irrelevant.
I know I prayed. I mean waking up at 2 am next to her with sweat pouring off of me and telling God how sure I was that there were things she was still needed for. I don't remember doing a lot of praying about how I would make this or that bargain with God if he would only change things, but as I understand it, a lot of people do pass through a stage where they offer bargain after bargain if God or reality or whatever will just fix the bad thing. I also felt a lot of anger at times, as did she. Whether you feel it and whether you express any of it to the dieing person, please understand, you are not there to vent. If admitting to your own fear or anger helps the patient tell you about theirs, then you do it - if it seems to make them even a bit uncomfortable, you don't.
Right now, I'm wondering what to say to her all over. Her older brother was just killed by a criminal on Christmas eve, Shot right after he opened a safe. The murderer had been out of prison for about 24 hours. She's basically in the shock stage right now, but she's seizing on some things in the news and starting to ask some very angry questions about how the authorities let this guy loose. So now I'm wondering what to do, not just for now, but every time the holiday season rolls around.
Many of the founding fathers of the US were deists, including two I greatly admire, Jefferson and Paine. But, the reason they claimed to be deists is demonstrably wrong by modern Science, so I'm not sure why people still invoke this claim as support for their position. Just about all the 18th century deists were driven by a Newtonian model of the universe, as Scientifically proven fact. The actions of reality could ALL be reduced to collisions of particles under mathematical laws, in a way much like a gigantic pool table. The typical Deist of that time argued that it was possible, in principle, to 'run the film' infinitely forwards or backwards with sufficient mathematical ability, and so to calculate the inevitable future. 18th century Deism is not more scientific than any of the more Theistic religions, rather it would vigorously oppose such modern Science as radioactive decay or Relativity or Chaos theory, as that Deism was ultimately deterministic. It supported an absolute materialism, as the outcome of a God who merely started the universe and then needed to take no part in the constant running of the clockwork or collision of the particles. Endorsing Deism as closer to real science than Christianity or other mystic religions is basically claiming that Newton was right, and Einstein, Godel, and Darwin were all heretics against real science. I doubt there is a single modern scientist who believes in the basic philosophical principles of Deism as they would apply to his or her field, or that people such as Jefferson would have clung to Deism very long if exposed to the scientific advances that were soon to come.
I'd agree with this, but you also said 'infallible' proof, and that's a different standard.
Does an objective, verifiable external reality exist? There's no reasonable claim to infallible proof of even that. You may think one does, and that you really exist as some sort of object in the awareness of people such as myself. I certainly think that one does and that I exist as some sort of objectively extant fact in your external environment. But, either of us would be a fool to claim that 100% of our sensory experiences prove reality exists. After all, we've both had dreams, and hopefully, neither of us would claim that a dream we had proved anything about the nature of reality. We've both had emotions, but again, I hope neither of us would say that the fact we disliked someone proved they were guilty of a crime, or that we liked someone proved they were worthy of voting into high office. Less than 100% of our experiences, probably much less, seem to offer any reliable support for the various materialist or objective philosophies. When it comes to accepting the existence of the real, as real, we all do that based on a limited subset of our experiences, or else we make claims we can't support. And if our proof of reality itself is limited in this way, how can our proof of anything else exceed that limit?
And religion is the same way - I'm aware of a few religious arguments that are quite logical, reasonable or rational (being careful to point out those three things are not exactly the same) Every single one of them can be shot down by saying "But why doesn't that happen in 100% of all cases?" or "Why doesn't that argument convince 100% of all the people who hear it, if it's true?", if people listen to that.
Then there's the claims from many materialists and rationalists. Some people have claimed, with a certain amount of reason backing it up, that Free Will is an illusion. That strikes me as an extraordinary claim, one that needs a very great lot of proving. After all, most of us feel like we are directly experiencing Free Will. A claim it doesn't exist is a claim that we are all collectively very deluded about the nature of what we think we are experiencing on a near continual basis. That's an extraordinary claim indeed, in the same sense as if I claimed more of what you saw was optical illusions than actual data about the visual aspects of reality. I've read enough Daniel Dennett to respect some of his arguments on the subject, but his evidence is no where near the standard of an extraordinary proof.
For once, your hopes are somewhat rewarded, and if you're OK on Hydro too, you should be thrilled. See my post above.There's still some Coal generation in the area, but Wind is catching on fast, plus for the last few years rainfall remains up pretty consistently over historic levels, and TVA would rather run that water through a turbine or three than just let it spill over the tops of the dams. Ash spill problems at TVA's Kingston plant 3 years ago have made Coal less popular with a lot of people, so hopefully the push for Wind will be sustained. Round heah' though, Solar is seem as mostly for residential use.
It's in Eastern Tennessee, so it could get some Nuclear generated electricity from Watt's Bar, but it's probably mostly Hydroelectric, from TVA's Melton Hill and Norris dams, and lately some Wind Turbine based - I can stand on a modest hill and see the ORNL front gate to one side and half a dozen turbines to the other, say 12 miles apart total.
I'm starting to favor a +1 Pedantic twit option, myself. Everyone has their pet peeves about grammar or spelling. A given example is usually trivial - for example I still read the post with "could of" to see what the poster had to say, and didn't bother to criticize the misuse or even give it any attention. But, where does that stop? When someone makes enough of those mistakes, an increasing number of people start skipping the posts. At some level, we all read a little way into the missive and simply give up, and if it looks bad enough, we find ourselves giving the time to do even that much only grudgingly. Every well written thought says you cared enough about a reader that you at least tried to avoid turning him away before he got to your points. Every poorly written thought says you didn't care that you would lose some potential readers. So, just how many readers do you have to not bother with before you are moving into the arrogant jerk category? If I decide not to bother correcting the mistakes that turn away 60%, 80% or 95% of the people who might potentially listen to what I have to say, at some point, I've been abusive of both a lot of people, and of the very idea I'm supposedly supporting. Can you, as a person who correctly used such words as pedantic and derisive, honestly say there are no levels of mistakes in spelling or grammar large enough to make you disregard the very possibility that there was any value in what that person had to say worth the time it would take you to read further?
Try this. If someone breaks into your house and all you had was a basic combination lock, they would still be the criminal. If, over a few years, the "somebodys" doing the breaking in evolve into Depleted Uranium Armored Fiendish Hybred Godzilla Clones with Field Mobile Howitzer Penises, and you are getting 'broken into" three times a day, and you still are using just that combination lock, they are still the criminals. So frelling what - you're innocent, but you don't sound too bright. Why should I brave city streets full of a hundred thousand DUAFHGCwFMHP's, just to sit on a jury and help get a conviction on one of the many who ripped you off? Yeah, if I'm incredibly noble, couragious and dedicated to justice, I'll pay the price to keep the social mechanisms of justice going, so you can be a fool but an honest fool.
See, there's your problem. You're demanding that 300 million Americans pay any price, bear any burden, and show a level of moral virtue that would make Sir Lancelot feel inadequate, so as to provide a level of protection from all the torrenters and file sprinters that is sufficient with all the extra power the bad guys have gained. Those people all owe it to big content to do that without even hinting that big content should get better security, so that big content doesn't feel like they are being labeled as criminals instead of victims. That's because people such as you keep turning every accusation of stupidity into an accusation of moral failing.
It's an interesting proposal. We'll get to it right after the Lion and lamb lie down together in peace and everyone gets their pony.
Your basic premise is simply wrong. If corporations (C corps) were nothing more than associations of people, then they would not be subject to separate taxation. Since any corporation can do away with that taxation just by dissolving itself, and the people who formed it can them reconstitute as one or more sole proprietorships, "S-corps', partnerships, variant LLCs (as allowed by some states) and other such pass through entities, and still do business, we either have to believe that all those smart people pay extra taxes as part of their association for absolutely no advantages (maybe they just want to give the government an extra 36% and this is their way of being anonymous charitable donors, right?), or they get advantages for their association (such as higher overall profits than they themselves think they could make as Partnerships, S-Corps, or other pass-throughs). Every for profit C-corp has judged, and continues to judge every quarter, that they DO GET EXTRA RIGHTS from association. You're arguing for William Jefferson Gates, Warren Buffett, and a host of others going back beyond Howard Hughes, Edison, Westinghouse and Ford being the biggest idiots on the planet, constantly conned into giving the rest of us free money and too blind to ever figure it out. Guess what, they weren't and aren't, but I'm not so sure about you.
As a hint of where you have gone off the beam, the standard C-Corp is also often called a limited liability corporation. Why is that do you suppose? It's not like there's anything special about limited liability, is there. Can't anyone, as an individual person, simply declare their liability in the event of an auto accident is limited to the value of their vehicle, and then drive a battered old beater and not have to insure it? No? They cannot? Then you might want to learn just what limited liability means, because you, as a living entity with rights, sure as hell don't enjoy that one.
People point out that there are some very good bands that have never made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Rush and Yes for two). Then they mention that Kiss hasn't either, and all the Rush and Yes fans realize the process isn't completely broken and chill.
That's the real point - if you can't target something accurately, you resort to methods that are considered cowardly, or to area affect weapons - not just suicide vests, but grenades or rockets, or shooting the friend of the guy with the laser gadget, or shooting the guy himself after he has gone to bed for the evening. There's some sort of weird stupidity from the people buying these items for governments, so they believe all the hype about new gadgets, and don't ask what happens when the problem tries to route around it.
Look into getting a 'joke' passport from the Conch Republic. These sell in Key West, FL* for a few bucks, but a lot of people seem to take them seriously when you travel, and the US government apparently turns a blind eye to them. You can basically tell most overly inquisitive people in exotic locales that you are from a small, innocuous Caribbean nation that no one is at war with.
*Full name: The People's Republic of the Florida Keys.
How is this hyperbole? The videos in question are of government origin, produced using your and my tax dollars, paid for by us (if you are also a US Citizen and taxpayer). Google is allowing people to fraudulently claim stuff you and me paid for and have paid for a legal right to see. Yeah, it's not their entire user base, it's only the entire taxpaying population of the US and of any foreign power who also signed the Berne convention. It doesn't include North Korea or Burkina Faso or wherever , but it sure as hell includes literally billions of people, so again, how is this hyperbole? And while you're at it, you can give away your rights all you want, but please stop being so eager to give away mine.
how would they know if some sort of stenography was being implemented
You are correct. There is no known way to detect which files were transcribed in shorthand by a person taking dictation before being entered by keyboard... Oh, wait, you meant "steganography", didn't you?
Like the parent poster said, individual handling. Anything that can't simply be dealt with once, but requires a human to enter the loop, drives up the cost of implementing your algorithms, AND creates a potential for the snoopers to betray themselves. Why do we put locks on houses? A professional can get through the typical lock quickly. There are a few lock systems thought to be generally uncrackable (within certain limits, like no fair bringing along a wrecking ball and crane), but not everyone buys such an 'uncrackable' lock. Why bother with any of the others at all?
Here, it's a case of inflicting costs on the snooper. It's very cheap to harvest lots of unencrypted e-mail. It's equally cheap to throw out all the items that have standard, reliable encryptions and let those people keep their privacy. For some nefarious purposes, reading just the rest is enough. But it gets very expensive in human resource terms to determine what's hard encryption and what's a simple but unique code that could be worth breaking if the effort was put forth, but only if a human spends some time on the task.
Try this example (Warning, non car example follows): The US government has machines that can recognize an individual voice in a phone call by voice-print analysis. They can record all calls featuring one of those voices and it's very cheap. They could probably catch absolutely every call by a particular suspect once they were in the system. But what happens when they want to figure out what region of what country someone on a voice call was raised in? Could they possibly afford to filter for all calls made featuring a voice with some particular geographic or ethnic traits?
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Signing the petition is never doing nothing. it's seldom enough unless you are prepared to do other things too, but "not enough in itself" does not mean 'futile" in any sane dictionary. Signing a petition may interest a few people who hadn't paid attention. Noticing how reluctant the press is to mention that petition when it gets 100,000 signatures may awaken a few more. After a while, people start telling the cops why they have lost all respect. The jokes about politicians start provoking shaken fists and not just laughs. People in the crowd start shouting angry insults and your own goons start looking more and more embarrassed to escort them out of the "public" meetings. The crowds get too big for the designated free speech areas. One of the goons overeacts and makes an arrest for lynching when some Occupy member gets in the way of an arrest for picketing without a permit, then more people start wanting to know why, if the Occupy people aren't saying anything, someone is willing to falsly accuse one of attempted murder just to shut him up. Nothing is wasted. All the little grains of sand that can't gain any actual movement exert the pressure that becomes the avalanche.
Who would want to live in a broken-down, aged body forever, kept alive only by a steady stream of stem cells?
The same type of rich person who has no problem taking taxpayer funds to move jobs out of the country, indulge their endless appetite for vulture capitalism, believes their money is proof of their absolute moral virtue and personal eternal chumship with the Almighty, and thinks they should regulate everybody else's having any fun, is the one who will want this and think the others are weak for not wanting it as bad. The same person who thinks he is a superior species to the common human and that it is that man's duty to die as need be for the life, the convienience or even the whim of that superior species. The same person that doesn't really love life in the slightest, but has an overwhelming fear of death, far beyond that of any rational entity. The same person who will make life on Earth a living hell for himself and everybody else and think, right up to that last system failure, that he is winning.
I'm going to give you a couple of references: Jonathan Swift's (and to some extent Larry Niven's) Struldbrugs. Niel Gaiman's Teknophage. The people who are mentioning Dracula are understating the sheer evil possible here.
The concern is that they will go from swabs to more and more intrusive searches. In practice, what they could do within their mandate now includes asking you to turn a laptop on to verify it's not a dummy shell filled with Semtex or something. In theory, though, all these port cities fall within the aegis of laws that could allow border control agents to search that laptop for porn and confiscate it even for legal images or video found on it. There's no sharp perceptual line between local police assisting the TSA do something that is relatively non-restrictive and might (or might not) even achieve a rational goal, and a more restrictive search, one that takes a lot more than 90 seconds, one where the goals are not specified, nor is there any obvious divide between them assisting the TSA and assisting immigration, DEA, BATF, CIA, etc.
You know, the topic is about local police ASSISTING SOMEBODY ELSE, and you cite two examples about what local police do ENTIRELY BY THEMSELVES as counterexamples. Let's try that: "It's alright for the CIA to waterboard, because an MD assists them, and my doctor only needed a few minutes to recognize my condition and give me a shot for it, and I have once or twice seen doctors rendering assistance at automobile accidents. Doctors mean that whatever the CIA does is alright".
Jeremy doesn't have that much (political) experience, but he seems like a natural shoe-in for vice president.
Some of what Ron Paul says seems to ignore the idea that the Constitution is not a Suicide Pact. For example, Paul may be right about the constitutionality of the Dept. of Energy, but he hasn't proposed a solution that can be rationally accepted. Just shutting the DOE down means there would be no federal oversight of nuclear weapons when they enter the repair and maintenance process, or of spent nuclear fuel. I too once took that oath to defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and I'm damned pretty sure I meant it, than and now, but until Ron Paul can say at least say whether the DOE plants at Yucca Flats, Oak Ridge, and others should be under control of the Fed through some agency (DOE, DOE, or other), or of various state governments, or what his shut down plan is, he hasn't really said anything. I remember classes on how Posse Comitatus itself is a Constitution derived principle which limits the military itself controlling the nuclear arsenal when it's on US soil, off military posts, and I can only wish Dr. Paul would address whether, and just how, he intends to abide by that interpretation as well, because that seems to imply the possibility the guy really plans to abandon control of operational multi-megaton devices. Now, as a loyal Tennessean, if Ron Paul wants the governor to have full control over the disposition of all nuclear weapons currently in state (including any Russian ones Oak Ridge is probably dismantling right now), I guess that's all right, but I'd think come football season Alabama and Georgia might be a trifle nervous about just what the "Vol Defense" now encompasses.
Please understand, Hellbombs get dirtier and dirtier inside just sitting on the shelf. There is not unlimited time to take "Shut down the DOE" from an idea to an actual plan, unless you don't mind putting human workers lives at a vastly increased and essentially unnecessary risk.Even the likely delay from a mere couple of years spent actually debating a plan in congress poses a very real health risk to hundreds of DOE contractor employees. And if your interpretation of the Constitution is that it puts some form of nuclear release authority in the hands of Bill Haslam, well, I'm not sure he even wants it. In fact, I kinda hope he doesn't. By the way, for those of you in states with Democratic governors, Bill's a staunch Republican, and no, most of your states don't have nukes in them. Lest you think I'm exaggerating, well, yes I am, a bit, but I'd point out that ambiguities in the control of the Ex-Soviet nuclear arsenal did occur on just this basis, and the result, according to the CIA for one source, was supposedly that some devices came close to falling into the hands, not just of oddly behaving leaders of some break-away republics, but of actual known terrorist organizations. One of the reasons the US has spent over a decade cleaning up really hot, nastily contaminated Soviet era devices is a period of less than a single year's delay in the ongoing process of maintenance in the collapsing USSR. Do you think we'd do better, with the sort of congress we have now?
Actually, I didn't agree with your claims. My point is, it is not valid to call copyright violation stealing in the legal sense. By your own logic, If I agree that Shakspeare was using English properly, I have stipulated for the historical record that the Earl of Glamis has committed a real life murder ("Glamis hath murdered sleep."). Well, I'm not trying to get Shakespeare tried in absentia for libel, and I'm not demanding that all the history books be changes to claim that the 8th Earl of Glamis killed some guy named Mr. Sleep. Now, what power do you have to make me embrace either alternative? Go ahead, force me to accept one of your false extremes as correct. Yeah, twist my arm over the Internet until I let you put words into my mouth, but here's the last words I have for you: STFU, Troll.
In terms of a dictionary defintion, it is obvious that copyright infringement is stealing.
And in terms of a legal definition, it's obvious it isn't - now was this person accused of breaking a law of etymology as dictated by Ben Johnson, Noah Webster or maybe all those nice Britannica 3 people, or current US law? You do know what they call people who go into courts and argue that the common use of words has legal power over the actual courts rulings and precedents, don't you?
If copyright violation is legally theft:
1. States have a right to enforce laws regarding theft which happens in their jurisdictions, so the SCOTUS decision that copyright law cannot be delegated to the states is invalid and we have a constitutional crisis on our hands.
2. ALL copyright violation is criminal - As there's no such thing as non-criminal theft. We need to get ALL copyright law moved from Title 17 (copyright law) to Title 18 (US federal criminal law).
3. Copyright cannot expire, and the part of the constitution that says 'limited time' is again part of a constitutional crisis. After all, theft can't become non-theft just because of the age of the item. Can you imagine if someone could legally take something physical just because it had gotten too old to be protected? "Let's go loot an antique shop - that stuff is too old to be protected by law anymore.".
4. Everything Madison, John Jay, Learned Hand, Franklin, Jefferson and many others wrote on copyright proves they were morally bankrupt, because they didn't agree that copyright violation was theft at all, and we need to tear down a lot of statues. These people are bad examples to our children. Hell, every single person elected to high federal office failed to agree with you until 1976 when the first actual criminal penalties for some select forms of CV were passed, let's get their names off all those monuments, bridges, and high schools.
You go tell the government to smash the Jefferson Memorial and demand that every single congresscritter that won't move all of Title 17 into Title 18 be immediately impeached for coddling thieves. You encourage your state to secede if the federal government won't let them exercise their old state level copyright laws. I will wait here.
3x is what everyone else gets, why not say 3x at least and at most.
I once had a van full of electronics installation gear, which, while parked, was plowed into by a drunk driver in a rainstorm (water damaged most of the tools and contents before the mess could be cleaned up). I had to take the matter to court and prove he was over the legal alcohol limit to drive, before I could get punitive damages. Just to qualify for that 3x multiple, I had to prove extra circumstances applied, and those extra circumstances amounted to a criminal level of guilt, as it would be in a criminal case, not just simple responsibility as in a civil case. (Note, technically I still didn't have to meet the reasonable doubt test for the drunk driver to be considered responsible in a civil case, but I did have to show somebody, whether a full court actually prosecuting him or just a cop making out an accident report and bothering to do a breathalizer test and subsequent arrest, had determined his responsibility exceeded simple responsibility before I could qualify for punitive damages).
So why does a special privilege exist, letting the software creator seek damages many times higher than 3x? Why does somebody like me have to prove criminal negligence, or other fully criminal level of responsibility, while various copyright holders have a special private law that means they only have to prove a lesser standard such as'willfulness', and why does 'willfulness' sometimes multiply the already ultra-high damages by 5x, not just 3x?
I want a special law like these guys get - one that lets me really discourage people who through illegal acts, damage my property. Of course, all I was trying to discourage was a drunk who blew 0.31 on a breathalizer and was estimated to have been driving 60 MPH in a quiet residential neighborhood, at the time school was just letting out, and who had 9 priors, and who somehow still had enough money to buy another car after the last accident and seemed to think he could just pay for simple damages and keep it up forever. But the courts in their infinite wisdom have decided that needs less discouragement than that hideous and abominable crime of pirating software.
I have to agree with you, particularly right now when domestic problem solving has to be our first priority if the system itself is to survive, but if we can get the economy back on a stable course, here's why I'd argue investing in other places can be worth it. ... with little red, white and blue pop-up flags, just to make them easier to find. Six months after you start, tell Hanoi they get a Pepsi plant and Saigon gets a Coca-Cola plant. By the projections, building those boxes to actually play the star spangled banner and filling those manuals with color pictures of smiling Americans saying (in Vietnamese): "We don't care if you're flirting with communism, we just want you to stop fighting, fix up your infrastructure, and feed all your people", and it was still expected to cost a lot less than making the same number of bombs as we actually dropped (raw estimates only, but the price per box was less than 10% of the price per unit bomb).
The sane argument for spending money on other people's nations is never that they deserve it more than your own citizens. It's that it saves larger costs elsewhere. We make that sort of argument all the time even in domestic politics, because where someone such as you tries to draw the line as citizen/non-citizen, many other people try to draw the lines other places. If you're going to frame things as American citizen/Foreign national, please note a huge part of making what you want happen for America is to get hundreds of millions of people not to redraw that us vrs. them line somewhere else, like "producers vs. consumers", or "The state that elected me" vs. "The other 49, the district, and Puerto Rico, too".
Why spend on educating your own poor, when education for just those who can afford it themselves may be fairer (by some people)? The answer is fairer or less fair, sometimes you can spend X on education or 6X on prisons. Why spend money finding a cure for AIDS, when we could spend it on diseases where the person's 'immoral lifestyle' didn't contribute? One answer might be, those other diseases don't have the same potential to become epidemics and don't tend to kill otherwise healthy young productive people in great numbers. For the international theatre, the argument is that wars cost a lot, and foreign aid actually saves money.
Can it, really? There's been cases that make good arguments for it, but often, foreign aid seems to get us nothing. Contrary to the people on the right who think foreign aid is a Liberal scheme, a lot of foreign aid gets earmarked for buying weapons, in which case, we aren't buying peace, we're simply buying delaying a war while giving both sides more nastiness for when that war can't be delayed any more (Counting the Israeli side of US foreign aid certainly includes a large portion that goes for military resources, well over 50% of total aid to the region.). What would happen if we specifically made all foreign aid targeted at actual peace, at building hospitals and clinics and paving roads and building bridges and feeding people? Less than 50% of foreign aid actually stays targeted at making things kinder and gentler, so how would we determine if taking that percentage up would actually win peace, or if various regional madmen would just use what we were saving their governments to prepare for more war?
But, if we were aggressively waging peace, I suspect there are ways to make sure the US got full credit from the populations we helped. There was a consulting firm during the Vietnam war, that said to the US government, in effect "It's cheaper just to buy their hearts and minds. We can make boxes full of seed grain, more boxes full of basic medical supplies, more boxes full of basic tools, and print manuals in Vietnamese for everything. Mark all the types so everyone knows what's in each kind. Then airdrop those boxes with parachutes all over both parts of Vietnam
A lot of what made the PC a general purpose computer wasn't innate geek-dom. There were many people in the 60's, 70's, and beyond who were not particularly into learning to code or grok hardware, but wanted to make music, draw pictures, or publish something. They learned about hardware and software because they had those goals, rather than the geek goal of learning tech for its own sake. Computers such as the C-64, with its SID chip were aimed at the lay-person who had a new idea about using the machine for a general task, a task neither tech focused nor business oriented users cared that much about. Apple developed font management and a wide selection of fonts themselves because of what were thought of as hobbyist or non-business users in the same way. At that point, Microsoft was assuring businesses eight fonts would be plenty, counting italic versions. A lot of powerful people though we would go to huge, monolithic computers that did what businesses and governments wanted and that would be it. Breaking out of that model wasn't done the first time all by geeks, unless a bunch of rock musicians who wanted smaller synthesizers and funkier sounds were geeks, or a bunch of psychedelic poster designing hippies were geeks, or a bunch of political minority publishers were geeks. If it has to happen again, it will need the same sort of mix. It will need non-geeks who don't want to be forced into buying Photoshop at some exorbitant markup and running it on their Microsoft only box with regular BSA audits while they are just trying to make pretty pictures. Non-geeks who only want to write something the government doesn't like, but are drawn in to learning about open source by their worrying about distinctive digital watermarking in the Industrial Complex Approved software they are told is the only alternative.
1. Steven Moffat has officially declared that, when they get to the end of the 12th doctor, they will use a special esoteric procedure only professional writers know, called 'making something up'.
2. Did you never see Dr Who and the Curse of Fatal Death? That's four or five more doctors right there, so we're on #15 or so now. (My favorites among them are Rowan Atkenson and Joanna Lumley, both of which would have made great Doctors back then, but probably can't run nearly enough now.).
10 years ago, at the age of only 43, my Ex-wife was diagnosed with an advanced Stage IV Melanoma. The normal size for the primary tumor to be classed as stage IV at that time was 8 mm to 12 mm, and hers was about 20mm on discovery. The assumption is that a Melanoma that large has to have metastasized unless absolutely proven otherwise. The location was on top of her scalp, making it very likely by the standard model to have drained tumor cells into her lymph nodes just because of that location. The original physician diagnosing her gave her 3 to 6 WEEKS to live and was incredibly blunt about it. She is, however still alive, thank God. (And no, I didn't pull a Gingrich, she divorced me about 4 years later, then we found out the relationship could be saved, put it back together, and just never bothered to do another ceremony. We have great fun making my staid, conservative daughter roll her eyes at us.).
I don't like to tell people who are terminal about this. She beat odds that were quoted in the standard books on cancer as 10 Billion to 1 or worse, repeatedly. I'm not by any means totally convinced that it was a miracle, but her surgeon swears something guided him, literally forcing him to cut a small extra flap extending for about 2 inches along a scalp vein before it would let him put the scalpel down.
An experimental treatment program at Duke University got mixed results on a bunch of other people, triggered the weirdest side effects anyone ever saw in her (She was speaking with a foreign accent a few days after some sessions, spoke some fragments in recognizable languages and some that may have been a really exotic tongue or just some noises (and all she speaks normally is English and 1 year of Spanish, but there were times her German was excellent, and one where I recognized some Italian, but then, my own Italian is not that good), she had occasional weeks with feeling fantastic, not sleeping at all, and working like a fresh, new meth addict, while running a 103 fever and losing 10-15 lbs. a week, then other weeks with no other physical symptoms except where she slept for 33 to 48 hours at a time, and the program may or may not have been a factor in her survival - it's been dropped as inconclusive). She had other symptoms that would fit schizophrenia, things such as putting the car keys in the refrigerator's butter dish 'so they wouldn't melt'. None of those periods lasted more than a week or so before it was something else.
I've got no explanation for why any conceivable God would do such a thing as a miracle just for her, or wouldn't for so many other people, or why a miracle would be so strange. Worshiping some form of God for doing this almost seems irrelevant.
I know I prayed. I mean waking up at 2 am next to her with sweat pouring off of me and telling God how sure I was that there were things she was still needed for. I don't remember doing a lot of praying about how I would make this or that bargain with God if he would only change things, but as I understand it, a lot of people do pass through a stage where they offer bargain after bargain if God or reality or whatever will just fix the bad thing. I also felt a lot of anger at times, as did she. Whether you feel it and whether you express any of it to the dieing person, please understand, you are not there to vent. If admitting to your own fear or anger helps the patient tell you about theirs, then you do it - if it seems to make them even a bit uncomfortable, you don't.
Right now, I'm wondering what to say to her all over. Her older brother was just killed by a criminal on Christmas eve, Shot right after he opened a safe. The murderer had been out of prison for about 24 hours. She's basically in the shock stage right now, but she's seizing on some things in the news and starting to ask some very angry questions about how the authorities let this guy loose. So now I'm wondering what to do, not just for now, but every time the holiday season rolls around.
Many of the founding fathers of the US were deists, including two I greatly admire, Jefferson and Paine. But, the reason they claimed to be deists is demonstrably wrong by modern Science, so I'm not sure why people still invoke this claim as support for their position. Just about all the 18th century deists were driven by a Newtonian model of the universe, as Scientifically proven fact. The actions of reality could ALL be reduced to collisions of particles under mathematical laws, in a way much like a gigantic pool table. The typical Deist of that time argued that it was possible, in principle, to 'run the film' infinitely forwards or backwards with sufficient mathematical ability, and so to calculate the inevitable future. 18th century Deism is not more scientific than any of the more Theistic religions, rather it would vigorously oppose such modern Science as radioactive decay or Relativity or Chaos theory, as that Deism was ultimately deterministic. It supported an absolute materialism, as the outcome of a God who merely started the universe and then needed to take no part in the constant running of the clockwork or collision of the particles. Endorsing Deism as closer to real science than Christianity or other mystic religions is basically claiming that Newton was right, and Einstein, Godel, and Darwin were all heretics against real science. I doubt there is a single modern scientist who believes in the basic philosophical principles of Deism as they would apply to his or her field, or that people such as Jefferson would have clung to Deism very long if exposed to the scientific advances that were soon to come.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I'd agree with this, but you also said 'infallible' proof, and that's a different standard.
Does an objective, verifiable external reality exist? There's no reasonable claim to infallible proof of even that. You may think one does, and that you really exist as some sort of object in the awareness of people such as myself. I certainly think that one does and that I exist as some sort of objectively extant fact in your external environment. But, either of us would be a fool to claim that 100% of our sensory experiences prove reality exists. After all, we've both had dreams, and hopefully, neither of us would claim that a dream we had proved anything about the nature of reality. We've both had emotions, but again, I hope neither of us would say that the fact we disliked someone proved they were guilty of a crime, or that we liked someone proved they were worthy of voting into high office. Less than 100% of our experiences, probably much less, seem to offer any reliable support for the various materialist or objective philosophies. When it comes to accepting the existence of the real, as real, we all do that based on a limited subset of our experiences, or else we make claims we can't support. And if our proof of reality itself is limited in this way, how can our proof of anything else exceed that limit?
And religion is the same way - I'm aware of a few religious arguments that are quite logical, reasonable or rational (being careful to point out those three things are not exactly the same) Every single one of them can be shot down by saying "But why doesn't that happen in 100% of all cases?" or "Why doesn't that argument convince 100% of all the people who hear it, if it's true?", if people listen to that.
Then there's the claims from many materialists and rationalists. Some people have claimed, with a certain amount of reason backing it up, that Free Will is an illusion. That strikes me as an extraordinary claim, one that needs a very great lot of proving. After all, most of us feel like we are directly experiencing Free Will. A claim it doesn't exist is a claim that we are all collectively very deluded about the nature of what we think we are experiencing on a near continual basis. That's an extraordinary claim indeed, in the same sense as if I claimed more of what you saw was optical illusions than actual data about the visual aspects of reality. I've read enough Daniel Dennett to respect some of his arguments on the subject, but his evidence is no where near the standard of an extraordinary proof.
For once, your hopes are somewhat rewarded, and if you're OK on Hydro too, you should be thrilled. See my post above.There's still some Coal generation in the area, but Wind is catching on fast, plus for the last few years rainfall remains up pretty consistently over historic levels, and TVA would rather run that water through a turbine or three than just let it spill over the tops of the dams. Ash spill problems at TVA's Kingston plant 3 years ago have made Coal less popular with a lot of people, so hopefully the push for Wind will be sustained. Round heah' though, Solar is seem as mostly for residential use.
It's in Eastern Tennessee, so it could get some Nuclear generated electricity from Watt's Bar, but it's probably mostly Hydroelectric, from TVA's Melton Hill and Norris dams, and lately some Wind Turbine based - I can stand on a modest hill and see the ORNL front gate to one side and half a dozen turbines to the other, say 12 miles apart total.
I'm starting to favor a +1 Pedantic twit option, myself. Everyone has their pet peeves about grammar or spelling. A given example is usually trivial - for example I still read the post with "could of" to see what the poster had to say, and didn't bother to criticize the misuse or even give it any attention. But, where does that stop? When someone makes enough of those mistakes, an increasing number of people start skipping the posts. At some level, we all read a little way into the missive and simply give up, and if it looks bad enough, we find ourselves giving the time to do even that much only grudgingly. Every well written thought says you cared enough about a reader that you at least tried to avoid turning him away before he got to your points. Every poorly written thought says you didn't care that you would lose some potential readers. So, just how many readers do you have to not bother with before you are moving into the arrogant jerk category? If I decide not to bother correcting the mistakes that turn away 60%, 80% or 95% of the people who might potentially listen to what I have to say, at some point, I've been abusive of both a lot of people, and of the very idea I'm supposedly supporting. Can you, as a person who correctly used such words as pedantic and derisive, honestly say there are no levels of mistakes in spelling or grammar large enough to make you disregard the very possibility that there was any value in what that person had to say worth the time it would take you to read further?
Try this. If someone breaks into your house and all you had was a basic combination lock, they would still be the criminal. If, over a few years, the "somebodys" doing the breaking in evolve into Depleted Uranium Armored Fiendish Hybred Godzilla Clones with Field Mobile Howitzer Penises, and you are getting 'broken into" three times a day, and you still are using just that combination lock, they are still the criminals. So frelling what - you're innocent, but you don't sound too bright. Why should I brave city streets full of a hundred thousand DUAFHGCwFMHP's, just to sit on a jury and help get a conviction on one of the many who ripped you off? Yeah, if I'm incredibly noble, couragious and dedicated to justice, I'll pay the price to keep the social mechanisms of justice going, so you can be a fool but an honest fool.
See, there's your problem. You're demanding that 300 million Americans pay any price, bear any burden, and show a level of moral virtue that would make Sir Lancelot feel inadequate, so as to provide a level of protection from all the torrenters and file sprinters that is sufficient with all the extra power the bad guys have gained. Those people all owe it to big content to do that without even hinting that big content should get better security, so that big content doesn't feel like they are being labeled as criminals instead of victims. That's because people such as you keep turning every accusation of stupidity into an accusation of moral failing.
It's an interesting proposal. We'll get to it right after the Lion and lamb lie down together in peace and everyone gets their pony.
Your basic premise is simply wrong. If corporations (C corps) were nothing more than associations of people, then they would not be subject to separate taxation. Since any corporation can do away with that taxation just by dissolving itself, and the people who formed it can them reconstitute as one or more sole proprietorships, "S-corps', partnerships, variant LLCs (as allowed by some states) and other such pass through entities, and still do business, we either have to believe that all those smart people pay extra taxes as part of their association for absolutely no advantages (maybe they just want to give the government an extra 36% and this is their way of being anonymous charitable donors, right?), or they get advantages for their association (such as higher overall profits than they themselves think they could make as Partnerships, S-Corps, or other pass-throughs). Every for profit C-corp has judged, and continues to judge every quarter, that they DO GET EXTRA RIGHTS from association. You're arguing for William Jefferson Gates, Warren Buffett, and a host of others going back beyond Howard Hughes, Edison, Westinghouse and Ford being the biggest idiots on the planet, constantly conned into giving the rest of us free money and too blind to ever figure it out. Guess what, they weren't and aren't, but I'm not so sure about you.
As a hint of where you have gone off the beam, the standard C-Corp is also often called a limited liability corporation. Why is that do you suppose? It's not like there's anything special about limited liability, is there. Can't anyone, as an individual person, simply declare their liability in the event of an auto accident is limited to the value of their vehicle, and then drive a battered old beater and not have to insure it? No? They cannot? Then you might want to learn just what limited liability means, because you, as a living entity with rights, sure as hell don't enjoy that one.
People point out that there are some very good bands that have never made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Rush and Yes for two). Then they mention that Kiss hasn't either, and all the Rush and Yes fans realize the process isn't completely broken and chill.
That's the real point - if you can't target something accurately, you resort to methods that are considered cowardly, or to area affect weapons - not just suicide vests, but grenades or rockets, or shooting the friend of the guy with the laser gadget, or shooting the guy himself after he has gone to bed for the evening. There's some sort of weird stupidity from the people buying these items for governments, so they believe all the hype about new gadgets, and don't ask what happens when the problem tries to route around it.
Look into getting a 'joke' passport from the Conch Republic. These sell in Key West, FL* for a few bucks, but a lot of people seem to take them seriously when you travel, and the US government apparently turns a blind eye to them. You can basically tell most overly inquisitive people in exotic locales that you are from a small, innocuous Caribbean nation that no one is at war with.
*Full name: The People's Republic of the Florida Keys.
How is this hyperbole? The videos in question are of government origin, produced using your and my tax dollars, paid for by us (if you are also a US Citizen and taxpayer). Google is allowing people to fraudulently claim stuff you and me paid for and have paid for a legal right to see. Yeah, it's not their entire user base, it's only the entire taxpaying population of the US and of any foreign power who also signed the Berne convention. It doesn't include North Korea or Burkina Faso or wherever , but it sure as hell includes literally billions of people, so again, how is this hyperbole? And while you're at it, you can give away your rights all you want, but please stop being so eager to give away mine.
how would they know if some sort of stenography was being implemented
You are correct. There is no known way to detect which files were transcribed in shorthand by a person taking dictation before being entered by keyboard...
Oh, wait, you meant "steganography", didn't you?
Like the parent poster said, individual handling. Anything that can't simply be dealt with once, but requires a human to enter the loop, drives up the cost of implementing your algorithms, AND creates a potential for the snoopers to betray themselves. Why do we put locks on houses? A professional can get through the typical lock quickly. There are a few lock systems thought to be generally uncrackable (within certain limits, like no fair bringing along a wrecking ball and crane), but not everyone buys such an 'uncrackable' lock. Why bother with any of the others at all?
Here, it's a case of inflicting costs on the snooper. It's very cheap to harvest lots of unencrypted e-mail. It's equally cheap to throw out all the items that have standard, reliable encryptions and let those people keep their privacy. For some nefarious purposes, reading just the rest is enough. But it gets very expensive in human resource terms to determine what's hard encryption and what's a simple but unique code that could be worth breaking if the effort was put forth, but only if a human spends some time on the task.
Try this example (Warning, non car example follows): The US government has machines that can recognize an individual voice in a phone call by voice-print analysis. They can record all calls featuring one of those voices and it's very cheap. They could probably catch absolutely every call by a particular suspect once they were in the system. But what happens when they want to figure out what region of what country someone on a voice call was raised in? Could they possibly afford to filter for all calls made featuring a voice with some particular geographic or ethnic traits?