So if I assign a team of skilled operatives to follow you at 500 yards using telephoto lenses and parabolic microphones from the moment you leave your door to the moment you reenter, that's cool, right? And you would trust me not to get a little extra data through your windows if you ever leave a curtain undrawn, because by buying into your definition, I've said I'd stop at the edge of inside? But I'm not going to use millimeter wave GSR, because that technology crosses outside/inside lines as if they didn't exist. (Or does inside mean a stone house but not a wood frame? Maybe only people rich enough to afford re-bar and concrete construction should be allowed a right to privacy).
The bigger question is "Why would you NOT realize that what you did outside can still be private?". Do you really think all the people who have an eight foot fence around their backyard pool have no right to swim naked? I mean, they are being publicly indecent if you just prop a ladder up against the fence, or fly over in a hang-glider with a good pair of binoculars. If privacy doesn't extend at all to the outside, I can open your mail if you haven't yet brought it in. If you've lived long enough to be an adult, you should have run across thousands of examples such as these that prove at least some types of privacy do apply to the outside.
The real value of "Red Tape" is if a request has to pass through five or six people, they all know about it, so there's at least some chance a particularly stupid or unethical request will become public knowledge. Would the general public have ever heard about how ridiculously big the FBI file on Martin Luther King was if fewer people had been involved in maintaining it?
The second value is in where records are kept. Without any 'red tape' there may still be one copy of a request for a particular photo mission kept in in the spooks offices at Langley, and one in the West Wing. Start an impeachment proceeding against the President, and just maybe those could disappear before anyone knows the white house ran multiple satellite ops on the Dixie Chicks. A third copy in the hands of a federal judge makes that harder.
It's never perfect. We are trying to put some checks in place against abuse of power, but not so many nothing gets done or nothing that should be secret stays secret. It leads to real complicated forms of 'red tape', such as briefing select groups of Senators but giving each of them slightly differently phrased papers so that if one of them leaks a copy, the Executive and Judicial branches can tell which one. Still, sometimes what we need is more 'red tape', not less.
US law does assume some restrictions - like prohibiting gun dealers from selling to people who are known to be mentally ill or have prior felony convictions. Blaming Nokia or Seimens could be reasonable in principle, IF there was a general consensus that the government of Iran was the equivalent of a mentally ill person or a criminal. I don't see how we could claim to know, in advance of this election, that Iran would try to cook the books this way, so criminal could be a stretch. The US has also had a tendency to label a whole bunch of leaders we don't like as mental (Pre-war Iraq, North Korea, Cuba, etc.). We've probably thrown that term around too much to make it stick here either. The waters are just muddied enough that I wouldn't feel comfortable blaming the companies here. It does seem at least possible that there's things said between the companies and the government of Iran that could change this though.
This is why I'd like to see the US government take the ethical high ground. If it doesn't continue to label every dictator it disagrees with a nutjob, maybe its power of moral suasion might become great enough to get more companies to "not be evil", in the sense Google claims to mean those words.
Over a thousand years after the Sermon on the Mount, there were the crusades. Clearly Jesus should be held personally responsible. Less than 40 years after Darwin, many people had perverted what he wrote into a horribly destructive eugenics movement. Clearly Darwin should NOT be held responsible. That's only fair (by certain AC's standards).
For all the genuinely rational Atheists I suspect are out there, I urge you not to let these ACs claim to speak for you - I'm sure you're not all the equivalent of nutcase fundies. If there's no one like that coming forward on Slashdot, it's probably because they are embarrassed to be seen near these ACs. I have friends who can make a great, closely reasoned argument for not believing in God and have obviously put some real thought into their position. I was an agnostic for twenty years and I hope at least to boast that my opinions of that time had some rational underpinnings. I know it's possible.
Oh, and Einstein (more a Deist than anything - God as an abstract ground of being model, rather than a believer in a more personal God), Von Neumann (deathbed conversion to Catholicism), Dirac (No deathbedder he, a near lifelong member), Godel (Read his third great proof, which attempts to prove the existence of God using the same modal logics that created his great incompleteness theorem), Pascal, Chandrasekar, Jefferson (Deist who was uncomfortable with the miracle tales of the Bible, Scientist (contributions to Paleontology, although it was still just called Natural History then)), I could go on and on (Newton!), but that should be enough (Herschel!)
How about this: The US doubtless has intelligence agents inside Iran, both US citizens and Iranians that report to our CIA. Their orders are what most agents get most of the time - to gather information, and to try to make it as accurate as possible and not to get played by one side or another. The first is a safe assumption. The second could be the case if the current administration thinks there is a fair chance things will work out well that way.
Why would the administration believe that? The Iranian spiritual leaders have become divided. They are (with some notable exceptions), people who have endorsed suicide bombing and similar methods, at least against what they consider entrenched opposition. They have a strong tendency to consider the other side in any division to be diabolically evil and not just holders of a differing opinion. These are people who have trained ultra-violent animalistic killers and are just now realizing those human weapons could end up pointed at them. (And by and large, they are still thinking 'could' and imagining some vague future time-frame, when they should be assuming some already have been, and a lot of the action will happen over the next three months or less). Why would the US need to interfere, when it's already reap what you sow time? I doubt 'CIA assassins' could raise the body count if they tried.
Cowboy frequently means a rugged individualist in the US. How negative that is depends on whether you take it to mean "not a team player", or "relies on his own internal value system". There's even a phrase "Sticks to his guns", which I doubt you have run across much, if at all, in the UK. That tends to sound negative too to most non US'ians, but it frequently means he lets his actions speak for him, not just his words, and his actions are consistant.
Overall, "Cowboy" isn't a negative term, but some uses definitely are. For example, it can often mean a person who is self reliant, used to managing on his own when he has to work many miles from civilization and outside help. A good example of a negative use is seen in the aviation, where calling a pilot a cowboy could mean he is reckless, or at least he's a down to earth sort who trusts his own instincts, but he's in a profession where book learning and intellectual discipline are vital to temper that viewpoint or it will likely get people killed. Calling someone in a profession such as politics or finance a cowboy (or a maverick, a related term), could be negative or not.
When KDE went to version 4, there was this weird yellow squiggly thing that fit in a quarter circle in the top right corner of the desktop. (It's actually the basic control for locking and unlocking all the Plasma widgets, so offhand, Ill give the designers their basic claim that they can't make it 'just go away' even if it clashes with somebody's wallpaper).
I notice though, that as of Kubuntu 9.04, when it's unlocked you can drag it around, at least to other points on the top edge of the desktop, and it changes outline so it's not in a quarter circle if it's not in the TR corner, but in a normal tab shape. That last little attention to detail is what I consider polished and professional. I suspect the KDE creative team got messages similar to the ones you faced, and saw some wisdom in at least some of them. I greatly appreciate that little change myself, as the top right corner of the screen is a good place to put some of the common rectangular widgits such as RAM meters or weather displays. If you use some big honking painting or something as wallpaper, that corner also has a good chance of not being all that fundamental to the image, etc. Maybe next week I'll have a small tiled wallpaper where it doesn't matter so much, and decide I only want to see a weather report when I actually have a full strength browser open, but somebody decided that coding for the desires of some people was worth doing, and that should be appreciated.
In this case, it was also respectful of the fellow coders who were developing various widgets, and not just end users. It was also pragmatic, like the coders realized that the more popular their system was, the more widgets would be coded, and the more users would need to be able to fine tune the system so they could use all the widgets they wanted without being overloaded.
There's also a big difference, even for an unpaid coder, between saying they don't want to implement a particular feature, or they think it would be difficult and might break existing functionality, and saying the user's opinion is ill thought out, trivial, or just doesn't matter (especially for interfaces). What sounds like just a nit-picking opinion can be a major utility issue to a disabled user. I wouldn't have particularly groused if there was some reason I couldn't put a bunch of time, weather, and e-mail notifier type widgets in various corners, but If my eyesight was bad enough, I might take it every bit as seriously as people take healthy people parking in handicapped spaces or blocking wheelchair ramps. Some interface developers need to look at what they just wrote and ask "Would I still say this if I knew this user had Retinitus Pigmentosa and everything he sees looks like he's looking at it down a paper towel tube?"
At least as far as the Win-9X series running over DOS, MS automounting still also allowed for occasional auto-unmounting before all the write processes had finished, without making this at all clear to the typical user. It's kind of like saying that Mr. Some Guy built an automobile assembly line before Ford, but not mentioning the line sometimes made five wheeled cars with no engines and Some Guy didn't notice that little detail. If memory serves, MS has fixed a lot of this, but is it fair to say they beat any competition?
You're the one who declared a result "Garbage" in your initial header. That's your choice of inflammatory and demeaning verbiage from the very beginning, not anyone else's. To say that that choice was just (part of) the mathematics is more flamebait and you have been modded correctly. I also simply don't care if you actually are in a PHD program or not, you are way-out-of-line wrong to act this way. Since the net result is that you are giving moral support to one of the most repressive regimes since at least the death of Pol Pot or so, on an issue much more gravely serious than most Slashdot news, and you aren't actually presenting objective facts as you pretend, but stooping from the very beginning to Ad Hom's, you actually need to be at -1 for both posts.
While we're at it, you could check out the Project for the Old American Century site, (http://www.oldamericancentury.org/) Which is currently devoting itself covering to the Iran mess to the extent that they have renamed themselves the "Project for the Old Persian Century" on their masthead. Half the Reddit politics links they pass on seem to be devoted to Iran today.
Normally, I do Slashdot instead of Fark or Reddit because the mod system here actually seems to reduce the turkey level - in particular, Reddit has a bunch of 'Atheists' (who may just be posturing as part of a mass trolling) who have vowed to make all the other sections 'officially Atheists Only', and 'ruthlessly suppress all religious speech' (that's their phrases, not mine). there are probably at least 50 accounts involved, something I've never seen anything close to here. In fact, finding something like that on Slashdot would probably mean a GNAA post and 10 "me too"s, all remorselessly modded up to +5 and kept there for days, by literally dozens of throw away accounts. If someone wants to try that hard here, they'll just be setting a new mark for pathetic losers everywhere. In that sense, Slashdot's mod system works well.
But what I'm seeing there today is that on an important news issue, there are enough thousands of people responding that trolls like that are completely drowned out, or have enough sense to stay out of the way. The information level has gone high, there's a lot of thoughtful, reasoned posting, and it's obvious that some people will be taking what they are learning in the discussion into account when it comes time to vote or contribute to political causes. On this issue, both Fark and Reddit are having real impact. maybe some of that's happening here too, but it's less obvious.
There's some areas where it definitely helps you. Vaccination, for example may protect you if you're exposed to some disease, but getting a high enough portion of people vaccinated means you may never encounter a carrier, even if your own vaccination fails to boost your immunity enough. The best way to protect yourself is to pay for a small share of the whole program.
Also, your moral position is irrelevant from a medical problem's (admittedly limited) perspective. If a plague of some sort gets loose in your area it's going to do whatever damage it does. If that leaves a whole bunch of unburied corpses around, someone is going to have to clean it up, and you should hope they do it before you are placed at further risk. You can argue all you want that you are not responsible for paying to prevent the problem, but I am not responsible for going into that damaged area and cleaning it up free of charge to protect you, either. If I have to do it, I'm not going to give you my risk, time and dedication free because you have some sort of morally superior status to the people I've never met and 'don't care about', quite possibly including you. There are plenty of situations where somebody is going to have to pay, one way or another to fix an existing mess, and however it comes out, that cost is imposed by the nature of the catastrophe, not by anyone's "moral right not to be their 'brother's' keeper".
So in the real world and not Ayn Rand-ville, the question is, when might you be being short sighted enough about the risks you are hoping not to pay for that I can genuinely claim you have a moral obligation to pay a share? Maybe I don't have any moral right to make you carry insurance against your own possible injury, but even if that's so, I could still have a right to make you carry insurance against you injuring someone else.
For a fairly extreme example, if not getting drug addicts treatment is not helping the society at large much, and you could probably pick much better uses for your money, then my taxing you for drug treatment support is arrogant, an unwarranted assertion that I (hypothetically a politician in a cases such as this) know better than you how to spend your money. But what if I can show in the longer run it ends up costing five or six times what it temporarily saves not to fund it, in the form of extra police costs. Is that enough that I can compel some part of your taxes to go to treatment programs? Unless you're claiming that you have no obligation to pay a share for police and prisons either, what's the point of acknowledging your moral claim not to owe it to strangers in the abstract, when pragmatically, you're statistically likely to be better off if we all kick in to a collective pot and do it the way that evidence shows is most likely to improve things for most of the people who pay for it? At what point are you being irrational, to insist that the whole society take a gamble that not funding X now won't lead to situation Y later that will cost a lot more for everyone to clean up?
Some conditions have very high correlations with selected behavior. Drink a fifth a day and get a totaled liver, ride a motorcycle without a helmet and get a concussion, smoke two packs a day and get lung cancer.
But, what about lower correlation? Ride a motorcycle at all, and some risks go up, even if you are a safe, responsible driver who always uses safety gear. Live in Tornado Alley? How about right on the Florida coast? How many times in your life have you had a sunburn?
Then there are even lower correlation factors that the society often overrates. Rock Climb? Skydive much? Do you do specifically cardiovascular exercises, and is it a physician evaluated program? Does your place of employment give some people a few free hours on the clock to train as first responders? Was the forklift operator nearest to your current location drug tested in the last 3 months? Did you hit the sweet spot on booze and have exactly 3.38 oz./70 kg. bodyweight of red wine with your evening meal, at least three times a week but not more than five? Oops, that was last week, now we're thinking beer is better...
What do we do if somebody drank too much, but it was thirty years ago? They quit, but it was probably at least a small factor in accelerating the timetable for their liver failure. What about the person who caught HIV, but from a heterosexual contact, back when it was still thought to be a Gay plague? What happens, in other words, when a person acted in accordance with medical opinion, and then the opinion changed?
Yes, we probably could tailor limits to medical support based on obvious bad lifestyle choices, but just how obvious do they need to be? We've had warning labels on Booze and Cigarettes for many years now. There's not as much clear evidence on Pot causing permanent memory loss, but it's illegal, surely that justifies refusing to cover early onset Alzheimer's in former dopers? Now what do we do if somebody, whether it's a government or a private carrier, decides there's enough evidence to decline to treat somebody with heart disease because they ate too much red meat and drank too much coffee?
Trouble is, it's the Internet. Someone compares a whole group of humans to sub human creatures, and specifies a situation where those creatures lose any endearing qualities, count as vermin, and have to be shot or poisoned if they are to be controlled, and they've said nothing wrong by Internet standards, but if you called that someone what they honestly are, without any exaggeration, you've Godwined the argument. (As I've just done, I think, if you didn't beat me to it).
I think your first two sentences are totally incorrect, so the rest of your derivations from them become at least slightly suspect. That's sad, because I agree with several points you go on to make, some of them strongly. I still don't like building them even in part on that first basis. That's what you get when you claim unanimous agreement and then say it's existence is obvious, when being able to honestly use words such as ALL or EVERY is actually very rare. There's a sizable group right here on Slashdot who want to privatize functions like fire and even police service, and if you've followed some of their debates, they certainly don't find the reasons for them staying government functions obvious.
There's two major sides in this debate, and all the rest are trivial. On side is generally in favor of bigger government, and while they may not like increasing taxes, they think it's necessary to make some favored programs possible. That increase could be manageable, but might well be huge and totally non-functional. The other side is in favor of bigger government, so they can piss more money down that black hole they call the Defense budget, and the smaller holes such as the War on Drugs. Side A tends to lie somewhat about how they feel about taxes, at least to the extent of sounding more reluctant about them than they really are. Side B has swung pretty far out of line with reality lately. Where they used to be about like Side A on not really admitting they support bigger government on some programs (different ones than Side A to be sure), lately they've been in power during the two biggest deficit spending ventures so far, and a good chunk of them have never met a civil rights restriction they didn't like unless it involved amendment 2, but Side B always tells what has become an increasingly huge whopper about how they really favor much smaller government. We have the choice of the usual fibbers and petty crooks, or the bunch who's fibbing has become evidence of a pathological problem.
I'm sure they don't all mean it this way, but some people have this whole idea that poorer people are more often messed up, stupid, or crooked. Somehow, getting to the point where you have a little more disposable income makes you a better person. It's a really silly version of a Marxist class struggle argument - especially when we are not talking rich vs. poor but 'lower middle class' vs. 'upper lower class', or something like that. For games, we're talking abut the difference between people who can afford a high speed connection but little more and people who have just a bit more disposable income each month.
Money is a modest barrier to entry. It's like an age limit, say having to be at least 16 to drive. Money is only a very indirect check of reliability, much less reliable than actually having proof of prior trustworthyness, knowledge or skill. The point seems to be that a person wouldn't invest monthly fees and then commit acts that would risk losing that investment.
1. If their income is low enough the monthly fees make a real difference to them, maybe, but what about people who see 19 more bucks a month as trivial?
2. If the prior investment argument is true, then persons wouldn't invest a lot of time leveling a character and then commit acts that would risk losing that investment in time either.
There's no penalty to the character inside the game. There's a penalty to the person controlling that character in the real world (You've made them waste time waiting to respawn if nothing else, haven't you? You've made them devote time to a fight they consider pointless, rather than getting on with a mission that they don't feel is a waste of time. You've made them play your game, instead of the one they came to play. Often they lose any progress developing their character for the session, which I for one would find frustrating, especially if someone I didn't know seemed to have just singled me out personally for repeat treatments). So you're the one talking like the little pixel guy in the box is more important than the real person, and saying somebody else needs a reality check. That's a trifle scary all right. Some people take that attitude really far, and it's called being a sociopath. I'm NOT saying you're clinical just because you seem to be having a little trouble seeing beyond the WoW character to the person controlling it. You may really feel the game is a special situation. But, it looks to me like you are having some trouble imagining what the persons on the other ends of those characters may be feeling.
Look, it's absolutely within the 'game mechanics' of Slashdot for me to really give you a hard time. I could have played amateur shrink and simply claimed you were seriously mental, and if I put that claim somewhere after the first few sentences I wrote, some people would have bought the logic. I could probably blow your remarks up into a huge deal, imply that you are one of those 'terrible' people Dr. Phil goes after for low empathy and maybe end up getting modded up by enough people to call it a win. But, the truth would suffer. You sound like a bit of a jerk, but that doesn't make you mentally ill, and the fact that local 'game mechanics' might let me get away with picking on you doesn't justify me doing it. Sometimes the right thing to do is to live up to a personal standard, whether the external rules enforce that standard or not.
The language you use is part of the problem - you can call it 'griefing', and claim that it's the 'bad players' who complain about it, and use a term such as 'carebear' to describe the people who don't do it your way, but having a bunch of special slang to justify your position is common when putting it into normal English makes you look bad. It looks to me like you are deliberately trying to avoid thinking about your behavior in ways that might make you maybe regret it and maybe change.
Think of Gauss's formula: e to the i x pi power +1 = 0. This usually gets taught as part of second semester calculus or so. It gives some students headaches, because it emphasizes so strongly how raising a number to a power isn't really best understood as self multiplication once we get beyond the integers (It's fairly simple to see e to the 4th as e x e x e x e, but harder to imagine what e to the i or pi power involves). Just doing one of the simplest possible operations to the equation, making it read: e to the i x pi = -1, shouldn't do anything bad, should it? Some students rush to do this, after all, it makes the equation 1 term smaller.
But the 'point' of the equation, the thing the student needs to understand so he or she sees why knowledge of e lets that student integrate and derive for a whole bunch of functions that the student couldn't deal with at all the prior semester, is that e is that number which is the base of a function that maps sums onto products, and whose rate of change is identical to itself. The actual value of e can be determined by a limit:
Lim (as delta x goes to 0) of (e to the power delta x)-1 / delta x = 1.
What's the derivitive of a constant (such as 1)? Zero! And just doing an operation most of us learned in first grade obscures the relationship and makes it harder for the student to understand.
Some of the inflationary models also suggest the universe is very, very much bigger than the part we could theoretically see, a factor of about 10e30 times or more. (We could theoretically look back close to the total age of the universe, and because of expansion, the total distance would actually be at least a bit more than 2x larger than that roughly 12 Billion years would seem to allow, say 26-30 Billion LY radius.).
For those models where the total size of the universe is so much bigger than the observable part, theory predicts there could be many zones, each with differing Hubble constants as well as other variant properties. So even if it turns out the local expansion isn't really accelerating, 'The' Hubble constant may still be just one of many.
Surely this difference is far too big to be explained purely as a reporting bias.
That's precisely the point - If this attitude is as prevalent in Japan as it appears from sales records for such games and for comics and print, you can't make that assumption. There's already an enormous counter-example. Several Middle Eastern and African countries have very low reported cases of rape, and a strong blame the victim cultural bias, including actually trying and punishing the victim in some cases. Independent observers have shown repeatedly that the real incidence of rape is savagely higher than reported. Read up on Somalia, Ethiopia, and Yemen, and how incredibly low their official rape reporting is compared to the literal millions of counts that are happening each year in each of those nations. Reporting biases that big and much, much larger do exist in the area of rape. It's tragic to even have to consider that a nation such as Japan might have cultural blinders as large as the ones that contribute to the African rape culture (i.e. belief that sex with virgins cures AIDS), but, especially with their historical record (Nanking), there's every reason not to rule it out.
It's pretty clear that giving potential rapists the ability to do so in a fictional environment where they do not hurt any real people is a good way of making them less likely to do it for real.
No, no it isn't. It's not all that clear whether fictional depictions defuse some of the real world potential, enhance it, or have little effect one way or the other. It's hard to show causation, and there's much argument over it. There's legitimate grounds to say even the sickest fictional stuff should be allowed unless somebody can show clear causation, or at least a high correlation. But not passing laws without clear reason is not the same as having proved there's a clear reason the law would be in defiance of facts.
The original person, Chauvin, from which we derive the word 'chauvinist', had an extreme and unreasoning partisanship for France, including French persons of either gender, French ways of doing things, and essentially everything related to France, and so female chauvinist is a separate derived construction based on substituting gender for nation, and not an inversion of male chauvinist at all. If one is a good phrase, both are.
I won't pretend to be able to guide the whole of media into a better model, but i will (arroganty) claim I've thought about it enough to have some alternatives for the music part of that industry. First, pricing, especially on older content, needs to come down a lot more than they are willing to accept. Just the fact that we got to a date where most people who were going to replace older media with CDs had already done it, should have caused a price drop. Just the fact that when CDs first came in, the industry promised that prices would come down to where tape and vinyl were, should have caused a price drop (and redoing the standard contracts, as CDs soon stopped counting as an experimental medium). Competition from just legal online downloading should have caused a third price drop. That's all before we even debate if it is ethical to expect them to drop prices to offset free downloading or not. The pressure for those first three price drops exists whether there is a single illegal torrent or not. One reason I agree that the flaws are obvious is that there is nothing the industry can do that is actually aimed at 'pirates' (and not screwing their legitimate consumers and then raping them as taxpayers) which will do anything at all to address those first three problems.
So when you say we "can certainly criticize some of the current pricing", that's a bit like calling Tyson's ear biting 'unsportsmanlike' - true but a vast understatement. There are very good arguments for much larger price decreases than the industry is willing to even consider, and I, for one, suspect they haven't even looked at projected total profits for prices down in that range in at least the last twenty years or so, and don't actually know whether it would be a possible business model or not. Notice that if there's a legitimate lower price point that would preserve at least a fair margin of profit, it probably would decrease piracy as well - most pirate have some costs, if only for blank CDs or higher bandwidth caps on service, so it becomes a matter of how much is your time worth, etc. and for at least some pirates, that would translate to it being cheaper to buy some things.
There's probably much more reason now to decrease prices on digital downloads than on CDs, and I suspect there's people here who can make a better argument for it than I would. I'll just say that keeping CD prices high doesn't justify the high price of direct digital to most consumers, and lowering CDs wouldn't make any sense from that perspective either, so the industry is in a damned if they do, damned if the don't gridlock unless per track prices also come down on legal downloading.
However, there's irrationality involved now - the industry may be crazy enough to spend far more trying to stop piracy than it is worth, trying to rub out every last remaining case, and the pirates may be slow to do what's in their own best interests, having come to literally hate and despise the industry.
Now film is a somewhat different issue. Cheap sale DVDs of films that either did poorly at the box office or are just a tad older movies are much more common than the audio side of big media. There's probably a bit more honesty in advertising them too, as when a film comes on TV and there's a statement about how it has been modified from the original release. Those seem to be more straightforward than anything the RIAA members use. I could mention old examples of irrational behavior (the financial miss-handling of the original Planet of the Apes series, for one), but let's see if someone who knows the movie industry better will address this point.
Since you can't find anything to disagree with in the facts "abigsmurf" presented, you decide to attack the messenger - guess you just proved everything "abigsmurf" said is true.
There's a basic economic fallacy often called the broken window myth: The idea is that some crook who breaks out a window does economic good, because the store owner will spend money to replace it, the glazier will take that money and buy something else with it, and so on. That money will be taxed all along the way, supporting roads and education, and our fine boys in the Navy - So the window breaker is keeping America strong!
This sounds like a variant of that - here, it's the anti-pirates not the pirates that you are starting with, but still, the police that fight piracy could have been used to fight something else instead, so the system as a whole hasn't gained from changing where they are focused. The pirates may give up and buy where they can't free ride, but they may not, so the taxation part of the system may have not gained anything either, or the pirates may end up paying taxes, which shifts money from the privater sector to government, but doesn't actually create or destroy wealth.
I want the right to be able to recover all damages I incur as a result of corporate malice or gross incompetence. I suspect that a majority agrees with me on that too.
Even a company as large as Microsoft could function as a set of S corps. Because of limitations on how many shareholders and whether they can be corporations instead of natural entities, It would probably take some fractionation, but we are not talking about hundreds of thousands of sole traders as individual biological entities. If we amended the law on S corps so that there could be more than 200 stockholders per, even a company the size of Microsoft could become a single pass-through entity to its shareholders. Other changes, such as unlimited allowing foreign corporations to be shareholders in an S, can be argued for or against, but a lot of that rests on other grounds.
Recently, I assisted a woman who has two lines of work to form two S corps. One is for her real estate activities, the other for her royalties as an author. The chief point of it is, she can only be sued for her royalties if she were sued for libel, not for her profits in renting or selling real estate. (And vice versa, her absolute maximum liability for a real estate related case is her profit in that area). If she had done this as C style corps, she could probably protect herself from being sued for her full profit in either case, but there would be other costs, such as corporate taxes. In her case, there were other advantages to 's'es, such as being able to match into her own retirement account and so contribute more than the personal limit each year. From there, there are pass-throughs with over 5,000 employees, and corporate revenues in the Large Cap range. I can think of no reason why one of these couldn't scale a little more and become the next MS, even if they can't have foreign corporations investing in them.
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So if I assign a team of skilled operatives to follow you at 500 yards using telephoto lenses and parabolic microphones from the moment you leave your door to the moment you reenter, that's cool, right? And you would trust me not to get a little extra data through your windows if you ever leave a curtain undrawn, because by buying into your definition, I've said I'd stop at the edge of inside? But I'm not going to use millimeter wave GSR, because that technology crosses outside/inside lines as if they didn't exist. (Or does inside mean a stone house but not a wood frame? Maybe only people rich enough to afford re-bar and concrete construction should be allowed a right to privacy).
The bigger question is "Why would you NOT realize that what you did outside can still be private?". Do you really think all the people who have an eight foot fence around their backyard pool have no right to swim naked? I mean, they are being publicly indecent if you just prop a ladder up against the fence, or fly over in a hang-glider with a good pair of binoculars. If privacy doesn't extend at all to the outside, I can open your mail if you haven't yet brought it in. If you've lived long enough to be an adult, you should have run across thousands of examples such as these that prove at least some types of privacy do apply to the outside.
The real value of "Red Tape" is if a request has to pass through five or six people, they all know about it, so there's at least some chance a particularly stupid or unethical request will become public knowledge. Would the general public have ever heard about how ridiculously big the FBI file on Martin Luther King was if fewer people had been involved in maintaining it?
The second value is in where records are kept. Without any 'red tape' there may still be one copy of a request for a particular photo mission kept in in the spooks offices at Langley, and one in the West Wing. Start an impeachment proceeding against the President, and just maybe those could disappear before anyone knows the white house ran multiple satellite ops on the Dixie Chicks. A third copy in the hands of a federal judge makes that harder.
It's never perfect. We are trying to put some checks in place against abuse of power, but not so many nothing gets done or nothing that should be secret stays secret. It leads to real complicated forms of 'red tape', such as briefing select groups of Senators but giving each of them slightly differently phrased papers so that if one of them leaks a copy, the Executive and Judicial branches can tell which one. Still, sometimes what we need is more 'red tape', not less.
US law does assume some restrictions - like prohibiting gun dealers from selling to people who are known to be mentally ill or have prior felony convictions. Blaming Nokia or Seimens could be reasonable in principle, IF there was a general consensus that the government of Iran was the equivalent of a mentally ill person or a criminal. I don't see how we could claim to know, in advance of this election, that Iran would try to cook the books this way, so criminal could be a stretch. The US has also had a tendency to label a whole bunch of leaders we don't like as mental (Pre-war Iraq, North Korea, Cuba, etc.). We've probably thrown that term around too much to make it stick here either. The waters are just muddied enough that I wouldn't feel comfortable blaming the companies here. It does seem at least possible that there's things said between the companies and the government of Iran that could change this though.
This is why I'd like to see the US government take the ethical high ground. If it doesn't continue to label every dictator it disagrees with a nutjob, maybe its power of moral suasion might become great enough to get more companies to "not be evil", in the sense Google claims to mean those words.
Over a thousand years after the Sermon on the Mount, there were the crusades. Clearly Jesus should be held personally responsible. Less than 40 years after Darwin, many people had perverted what he wrote into a horribly destructive eugenics movement. Clearly Darwin should NOT be held responsible. That's only fair (by certain AC's standards).
For all the genuinely rational Atheists I suspect are out there, I urge you not to let these ACs claim to speak for you - I'm sure you're not all the equivalent of nutcase fundies. If there's no one like that coming forward on Slashdot, it's probably because they are embarrassed to be seen near these ACs. I have friends who can make a great, closely reasoned argument for not believing in God and have obviously put some real thought into their position. I was an agnostic for twenty years and I hope at least to boast that my opinions of that time had some rational underpinnings. I know it's possible.
Oh, and Einstein (more a Deist than anything - God as an abstract ground of being model, rather than a believer in a more personal God), Von Neumann (deathbed conversion to Catholicism), Dirac (No deathbedder he, a near lifelong member), Godel (Read his third great proof, which attempts to prove the existence of God using the same modal logics that created his great incompleteness theorem), Pascal, Chandrasekar, Jefferson (Deist who was uncomfortable with the miracle tales of the Bible, Scientist (contributions to Paleontology, although it was still just called Natural History then)), I could go on and on (Newton!), but that should be enough (Herschel!)
How about this: The US doubtless has intelligence agents inside Iran, both US citizens and Iranians that report to our CIA. Their orders are what most agents get most of the time - to gather information, and to try to make it as accurate as possible and not to get played by one side or another. The first is a safe assumption. The second could be the case if the current administration thinks there is a fair chance things will work out well that way.
Why would the administration believe that? The Iranian spiritual leaders have become divided. They are (with some notable exceptions), people who have endorsed suicide bombing and similar methods, at least against what they consider entrenched opposition. They have a strong tendency to consider the other side in any division to be diabolically evil and not just holders of a differing opinion. These are people who have trained ultra-violent animalistic killers and are just now realizing those human weapons could end up pointed at them. (And by and large, they are still thinking 'could' and imagining some vague future time-frame, when they should be assuming some already have been, and a lot of the action will happen over the next three months or less). Why would the US need to interfere, when it's already reap what you sow time? I doubt 'CIA assassins' could raise the body count if they tried.
Cowboy frequently means a rugged individualist in the US. How negative that is depends on whether you take it to mean "not a team player", or "relies on his own internal value system". There's even a phrase "Sticks to his guns", which I doubt you have run across much, if at all, in the UK. That tends to sound negative too to most non US'ians, but it frequently means he lets his actions speak for him, not just his words, and his actions are consistant.
Overall, "Cowboy" isn't a negative term, but some uses definitely are. For example, it can often mean a person who is self reliant, used to managing on his own when he has to work many miles from civilization and outside help. A good example of a negative use is seen in the aviation, where calling a pilot a cowboy could mean he is reckless, or at least he's a down to earth sort who trusts his own instincts, but he's in a profession where book learning and intellectual discipline are vital to temper that viewpoint or it will likely get people killed. Calling someone in a profession such as politics or finance a cowboy (or a maverick, a related term), could be negative or not.
When KDE went to version 4, there was this weird yellow squiggly thing that fit in a quarter circle in the top right corner of the desktop. (It's actually the basic control for locking and unlocking all the Plasma widgets, so offhand, Ill give the designers their basic claim that they can't make it 'just go away' even if it clashes with somebody's wallpaper).
I notice though, that as of Kubuntu 9.04, when it's unlocked you can drag it around, at least to other points on the top edge of the desktop, and it changes outline so it's not in a quarter circle if it's not in the TR corner, but in a normal tab shape. That last little attention to detail is what I consider polished and professional. I suspect the KDE creative team got messages similar to the ones you faced, and saw some wisdom in at least some of them. I greatly appreciate that little change myself, as the top right corner of the screen is a good place to put some of the common rectangular widgits such as RAM meters or weather displays. If you use some big honking painting or something as wallpaper, that corner also has a good chance of not being all that fundamental to the image, etc. Maybe next week I'll have a small tiled wallpaper where it doesn't matter so much, and decide I only want to see a weather report when I actually have a full strength browser open, but somebody decided that coding for the desires of some people was worth doing, and that should be appreciated.
In this case, it was also respectful of the fellow coders who were developing various widgets, and not just end users. It was also pragmatic, like the coders realized that the more popular their system was, the more widgets would be coded, and the more users would need to be able to fine tune the system so they could use all the widgets they wanted without being overloaded.
There's also a big difference, even for an unpaid coder, between saying they don't want to implement a particular feature, or they think it would be difficult and might break existing functionality, and saying the user's opinion is ill thought out, trivial, or just doesn't matter (especially for interfaces). What sounds like just a nit-picking opinion can be a major utility issue to a disabled user. I wouldn't have particularly groused if there was some reason I couldn't put a bunch of time, weather, and e-mail notifier type widgets in various corners, but If my eyesight was bad enough, I might take it every bit as seriously as people take healthy people parking in handicapped spaces or blocking wheelchair ramps. Some interface developers need to look at what they just wrote and ask "Would I still say this if I knew this user had Retinitus Pigmentosa and everything he sees looks like he's looking at it down a paper towel tube?"
At least as far as the Win-9X series running over DOS, MS automounting still also allowed for occasional auto-unmounting before all the write processes had finished, without making this at all clear to the typical user. It's kind of like saying that Mr. Some Guy built an automobile assembly line before Ford, but not mentioning the line sometimes made five wheeled cars with no engines and Some Guy didn't notice that little detail. If memory serves, MS has fixed a lot of this, but is it fair to say they beat any competition?
You're the one who declared a result "Garbage" in your initial header. That's your choice of inflammatory and demeaning verbiage from the very beginning, not anyone else's. To say that that choice was just (part of) the mathematics is more flamebait and you have been modded correctly. I also simply don't care if you actually are in a PHD program or not, you are way-out-of-line wrong to act this way. Since the net result is that you are giving moral support to one of the most repressive regimes since at least the death of Pol Pot or so, on an issue much more gravely serious than most Slashdot news, and you aren't actually presenting objective facts as you pretend, but stooping from the very beginning to Ad Hom's, you actually need to be at -1 for both posts.
While we're at it, you could check out the Project for the Old American Century site, (http://www.oldamericancentury.org/)
Which is currently devoting itself covering to the Iran mess to the extent that they have renamed themselves the "Project for the Old Persian Century" on their masthead. Half the Reddit politics links they pass on seem to be devoted to Iran today.
Normally, I do Slashdot instead of Fark or Reddit because the mod system here actually seems to reduce the turkey level - in particular, Reddit has a bunch of 'Atheists' (who may just be posturing as part of a mass trolling) who have vowed to make all the other sections 'officially Atheists Only', and 'ruthlessly suppress all religious speech' (that's their phrases, not mine). there are probably at least 50 accounts involved, something I've never seen anything close to here. In fact, finding something like that on Slashdot would probably mean a GNAA post and 10 "me too"s, all remorselessly modded up to +5 and kept there for days, by literally dozens of throw away accounts. If someone wants to try that hard here, they'll just be setting a new mark for pathetic losers everywhere. In that sense, Slashdot's mod system works well.
But what I'm seeing there today is that on an important news issue, there are enough thousands of people responding that trolls like that are completely drowned out, or have enough sense to stay out of the way. The information level has gone high, there's a lot of thoughtful, reasoned posting, and it's obvious that some people will be taking what they are learning in the discussion into account when it comes time to vote or contribute to political causes. On this issue, both Fark and Reddit are having real impact. maybe some of that's happening here too, but it's less obvious.
There's some areas where it definitely helps you. Vaccination, for example may protect you if you're exposed to some disease, but getting a high enough portion of people vaccinated means you may never encounter a carrier, even if your own vaccination fails to boost your immunity enough. The best way to protect yourself is to pay for a small share of the whole program.
Also, your moral position is irrelevant from a medical problem's (admittedly limited) perspective. If a plague of some sort gets loose in your area it's going to do whatever damage it does. If that leaves a whole bunch of unburied corpses around, someone is going to have to clean it up, and you should hope they do it before you are placed at further risk. You can argue all you want that you are not responsible for paying to prevent the problem, but I am not responsible for going into that damaged area and cleaning it up free of charge to protect you, either. If I have to do it, I'm not going to give you my risk, time and dedication free because you have some sort of morally superior status to the people I've never met and 'don't care about', quite possibly including you. There are plenty of situations where somebody is going to have to pay, one way or another to fix an existing mess, and however it comes out, that cost is imposed by the nature of the catastrophe, not by anyone's "moral right not to be their 'brother's' keeper".
So in the real world and not Ayn Rand-ville, the question is, when might you be being short sighted enough about the risks you are hoping not to pay for that I can genuinely claim you have a moral obligation to pay a share? Maybe I don't have any moral right to make you carry insurance against your own possible injury, but even if that's so, I could still have a right to make you carry insurance against you injuring someone else.
For a fairly extreme example, if not getting drug addicts treatment is not helping the society at large much, and you could probably pick much better uses for your money, then my taxing you for drug treatment support is arrogant, an unwarranted assertion that I (hypothetically a politician in a cases such as this) know better than you how to spend your money. But what if I can show in the longer run it ends up costing five or six times what it temporarily saves not to fund it, in the form of extra police costs. Is that enough that I can compel some part of your taxes to go to treatment programs? Unless you're claiming that you have no obligation to pay a share for police and prisons either, what's the point of acknowledging your moral claim not to owe it to strangers in the abstract, when pragmatically, you're statistically likely to be better off if we all kick in to a collective pot and do it the way that evidence shows is most likely to improve things for most of the people who pay for it? At what point are you being irrational, to insist that the whole society take a gamble that not funding X now won't lead to situation Y later that will cost a lot more for everyone to clean up?
Some conditions have very high correlations with selected behavior. Drink a fifth a day and get a totaled liver, ride a motorcycle without a helmet and get a concussion, smoke two packs a day and get lung cancer.
But, what about lower correlation? Ride a motorcycle at all, and some risks go up, even if you are a safe, responsible driver who always uses safety gear. Live in Tornado Alley? How about right on the Florida coast? How many times in your life have you had a sunburn?
Then there are even lower correlation factors that the society often overrates. Rock Climb? Skydive much? Do you do specifically cardiovascular exercises, and is it a physician evaluated program? Does your place of employment give some people a few free hours on the clock to train as first responders? Was the forklift operator nearest to your current location drug tested in the last 3 months? Did you hit the sweet spot on booze and have exactly 3.38 oz./70 kg. bodyweight of red wine with your evening meal, at least three times a week but not more than five? Oops, that was last week, now we're thinking beer is better...
What do we do if somebody drank too much, but it was thirty years ago? They quit, but it was probably at least a small factor in accelerating the timetable for their liver failure. What about the person who caught HIV, but from a heterosexual contact, back when it was still thought to be a Gay plague? What happens, in other words, when a person acted in accordance with medical opinion, and then the opinion changed?
Yes, we probably could tailor limits to medical support based on obvious bad lifestyle choices, but just how obvious do they need to be? We've had warning labels on Booze and Cigarettes for many years now. There's not as much clear evidence on Pot causing permanent memory loss, but it's illegal, surely that justifies refusing to cover early onset Alzheimer's in former dopers? Now what do we do if somebody, whether it's a government or a private carrier, decides there's enough evidence to decline to treat somebody with heart disease because they ate too much red meat and drank too much coffee?
Trouble is, it's the Internet. Someone compares a whole group of humans to sub human creatures, and specifies a situation where those creatures lose any endearing qualities, count as vermin, and have to be shot or poisoned if they are to be controlled, and they've said nothing wrong by Internet standards, but if you called that someone what they honestly are, without any exaggeration, you've Godwined the argument. (As I've just done, I think, if you didn't beat me to it).
I think your first two sentences are totally incorrect, so the rest of your derivations from them become at least slightly suspect. That's sad, because I agree with several points you go on to make, some of them strongly. I still don't like building them even in part on that first basis. That's what you get when you claim unanimous agreement and then say it's existence is obvious, when being able to honestly use words such as ALL or EVERY is actually very rare. There's a sizable group right here on Slashdot who want to privatize functions like fire and even police service, and if you've followed some of their debates, they certainly don't find the reasons for them staying government functions obvious.
There's two major sides in this debate, and all the rest are trivial.
On side is generally in favor of bigger government, and while they may not like increasing taxes, they think it's necessary to make some favored programs possible. That increase could be manageable, but might well be huge and totally non-functional. The other side is in favor of bigger government, so they can piss more money down that black hole they call the Defense budget, and the smaller holes such as the War on Drugs. Side A tends to lie somewhat about how they feel about taxes, at least to the extent of sounding more reluctant about them than they really are. Side B has swung pretty far out of line with reality lately. Where they used to be about like Side A on not really admitting they support bigger government on some programs (different ones than Side A to be sure), lately they've been in power during the two biggest deficit spending ventures so far, and a good chunk of them have never met a civil rights restriction they didn't like unless it involved amendment 2, but Side B always tells what has become an increasingly huge whopper about how they really favor much smaller government. We have the choice of the usual fibbers and petty crooks, or the bunch who's fibbing has become evidence of a pathological problem.
I'm sure they don't all mean it this way, but some people have this whole idea that poorer people are more often messed up, stupid, or crooked. Somehow, getting to the point where you have a little more disposable income makes you a better person. It's a really silly version of a Marxist class struggle argument - especially when we are not talking rich vs. poor but 'lower middle class' vs. 'upper lower class', or something like that. For games, we're talking abut the difference between people who can afford a high speed connection but little more and people who have just a bit more disposable income each month.
Money is a modest barrier to entry. It's like an age limit, say having to be at least 16 to drive. Money is only a very indirect check of reliability, much less reliable than actually having proof of prior trustworthyness, knowledge or skill. The point seems to be that a person wouldn't invest monthly fees and then commit acts that would risk losing that investment.
1. If their income is low enough the monthly fees make a real difference to them, maybe, but what about people who see 19 more bucks a month as trivial?
2. If the prior investment argument is true, then persons wouldn't invest a lot of time leveling a character and then commit acts that would risk losing that investment in time either.
There's no penalty to the character inside the game. There's a penalty to the person controlling that character in the real world (You've made them waste time waiting to respawn if nothing else, haven't you? You've made them devote time to a fight they consider pointless, rather than getting on with a mission that they don't feel is a waste of time. You've made them play your game, instead of the one they came to play. Often they lose any progress developing their character for the session, which I for one would find frustrating, especially if someone I didn't know seemed to have just singled me out personally for repeat treatments). So you're the one talking like the little pixel guy in the box is more important than the real person, and saying somebody else needs a reality check. That's a trifle scary all right. Some people take that attitude really far, and it's called being a sociopath. I'm NOT saying you're clinical just because you seem to be having a little trouble seeing beyond the WoW character to the person controlling it. You may really feel the game is a special situation. But, it looks to me like you are having some trouble imagining what the persons on the other ends of those characters may be feeling.
Look, it's absolutely within the 'game mechanics' of Slashdot for me to really give you a hard time. I could have played amateur shrink and simply claimed you were seriously mental, and if I put that claim somewhere after the first few sentences I wrote, some people would have bought the logic. I could probably blow your remarks up into a huge deal, imply that you are one of those 'terrible' people Dr. Phil goes after for low empathy and maybe end up getting modded up by enough people to call it a win. But, the truth would suffer. You sound like a bit of a jerk, but that doesn't make you mentally ill, and the fact that local 'game mechanics' might let me get away with picking on you doesn't justify me doing it. Sometimes the right thing to do is to live up to a personal standard, whether the external rules enforce that standard or not.
The language you use is part of the problem - you can call it 'griefing', and claim that it's the 'bad players' who complain about it, and use a term such as 'carebear' to describe the people who don't do it your way, but having a bunch of special slang to justify your position is common when putting it into normal English makes you look bad. It looks to me like you are deliberately trying to avoid thinking about your behavior in ways that might make you maybe regret it and maybe change.
Think of Gauss's formula: e to the i x pi power +1 = 0.
This usually gets taught as part of second semester calculus or so. It gives some students headaches, because it emphasizes so strongly how raising a number to a power isn't really best understood as self multiplication once we get beyond the integers (It's fairly simple to see e to the 4th as e x e x e x e, but harder to imagine what e to the i or pi power involves). Just doing one of the simplest possible operations to the equation, making it read: e to the i x pi = -1, shouldn't do anything bad, should it? Some students rush to do this, after all, it makes the equation 1 term smaller.
But the 'point' of the equation, the thing the student needs to understand so he or she sees why knowledge of e lets that student integrate and derive for a whole bunch of functions that the student couldn't deal with at all the prior semester, is that e is that number which is the base of a function that maps sums onto products, and whose rate of change is identical to itself. The actual value of e can be determined by a limit:
Lim (as delta x goes to 0) of (e to the power delta x)-1 / delta x = 1.
What's the derivitive of a constant (such as 1)? Zero! And just doing an operation most of us learned in first grade obscures the relationship and makes it harder for the student to understand.
Some of the inflationary models also suggest the universe is very, very much bigger than the part we could theoretically see, a factor of about 10e30 times or more. (We could theoretically look back close to the total age of the universe, and because of expansion, the total distance would actually be at least a bit more than 2x larger than that roughly 12 Billion years would seem to allow, say 26-30 Billion LY radius.).
For those models where the total size of the universe is so much bigger than the observable part, theory predicts there could be many zones, each with differing Hubble constants as well as other variant properties. So even if it turns out the local expansion isn't really accelerating, 'The' Hubble constant may still be just one of many.
Surely this difference is far too big to be explained purely as a reporting bias.
That's precisely the point - If this attitude is as prevalent in Japan as it appears from sales records for such games and for comics and print, you can't make that assumption. There's already an enormous counter-example. Several Middle Eastern and African countries have very low reported cases of rape, and a strong blame the victim cultural bias, including actually trying and punishing the victim in some cases. Independent observers have shown repeatedly that the real incidence of rape is savagely higher than reported. Read up on Somalia, Ethiopia, and Yemen, and how incredibly low their official rape reporting is compared to the literal millions of counts that are happening each year in each of those nations. Reporting biases that big and much, much larger do exist in the area of rape. It's tragic to even have to consider that a nation such as Japan might have cultural blinders as large as the ones that contribute to the African rape culture (i.e. belief that sex with virgins cures AIDS), but, especially with their historical record (Nanking), there's every reason not to rule it out.
It's pretty clear that giving potential rapists the ability to do so in a fictional environment where they do not hurt any real people is a good way of making them less likely to do it for real.
No, no it isn't. It's not all that clear whether fictional depictions defuse some of the real world potential, enhance it, or have little effect one way or the other. It's hard to show causation, and there's much argument over it. There's legitimate grounds to say even the sickest fictional stuff should be allowed unless somebody can show clear causation, or at least a high correlation. But not passing laws without clear reason is not the same as having proved there's a clear reason the law would be in defiance of facts.
The original person, Chauvin, from which we derive the word 'chauvinist', had an extreme and unreasoning partisanship for France, including French persons of either gender, French ways of doing things, and essentially everything related to France, and so female chauvinist is a separate derived construction based on substituting gender for nation, and not an inversion of male chauvinist at all. If one is a good phrase, both are.
Yes, now get back to work pushing and pulling.
I won't pretend to be able to guide the whole of media into a better model, but i will (arroganty) claim I've thought about it enough to have some alternatives for the music part of that industry. First, pricing, especially on older content, needs to come down a lot more than they are willing to accept. Just the fact that we got to a date where most people who were going to replace older media with CDs had already done it, should have caused a price drop. Just the fact that when CDs first came in, the industry promised that prices would come down to where tape and vinyl were, should have caused a price drop (and redoing the standard contracts, as CDs soon stopped counting as an experimental medium). Competition from just legal online downloading should have caused a third price drop. That's all before we even debate if it is ethical to expect them to drop prices to offset free downloading or not. The pressure for those first three price drops exists whether there is a single illegal torrent or not. One reason I agree that the flaws are obvious is that there is nothing the industry can do that is actually aimed at 'pirates' (and not screwing their legitimate consumers and then raping them as taxpayers) which will do anything at all to address those first three problems.
So when you say we "can certainly criticize some of the current pricing", that's a bit like calling Tyson's ear biting 'unsportsmanlike' - true but a vast understatement. There are very good arguments for much larger price decreases than the industry is willing to even consider, and I, for one, suspect they haven't even looked at projected total profits for prices down in that range in at least the last twenty years or so, and don't actually know whether it would be a possible business model or not. Notice that if there's a legitimate lower price point that would preserve at least a fair margin of profit, it probably would decrease piracy as well - most pirate have some costs, if only for blank CDs or higher bandwidth caps on service, so it becomes a matter of how much is your time worth, etc. and for at least some pirates, that would translate to it being cheaper to buy some things.
There's probably much more reason now to decrease prices on digital downloads than on CDs, and I suspect there's people here who can make a better argument for it than I would. I'll just say that keeping CD prices high doesn't justify the high price of direct digital to most consumers, and lowering CDs wouldn't make any sense from that perspective either, so the industry is in a damned if they do, damned if the don't gridlock unless per track prices also come down on legal downloading.
However, there's irrationality involved now - the industry may be crazy enough to spend far more trying to stop piracy than it is worth, trying to rub out every last remaining case, and the pirates may be slow to do what's in their own best interests, having come to literally hate and despise the industry.
Now film is a somewhat different issue. Cheap sale DVDs of films that either did poorly at the box office or are just a tad older movies are much more common than the audio side of big media. There's probably a bit more honesty in advertising them too, as when a film comes on TV and there's a statement about how it has been modified from the original release. Those seem to be more straightforward than anything the RIAA members use. I could mention old examples of irrational behavior (the financial miss-handling of the original Planet of the Apes series, for one), but let's see if someone who knows the movie industry better will address this point.
Since you can't find anything to disagree with in the facts "abigsmurf" presented, you decide to attack the messenger - guess you just proved everything "abigsmurf" said is true.
There's a basic economic fallacy often called the broken window myth: The idea is that some crook who breaks out a window does economic good, because the store owner will spend money to replace it, the glazier will take that money and buy something else with it, and so on. That money will be taxed all along the way, supporting roads and education, and our fine boys in the Navy - So the window breaker is keeping America strong!
This sounds like a variant of that - here, it's the anti-pirates not the pirates that you are starting with, but still, the police that fight piracy could have been used to fight something else instead, so the system as a whole hasn't gained from changing where they are focused. The pirates may give up and buy where they can't free ride, but they may not, so the taxation part of the system may have not gained anything either, or the pirates may end up paying taxes, which shifts money from the privater sector to government, but doesn't actually create or destroy wealth.
I want the right to be able to recover all damages I incur as a result of corporate malice or gross incompetence. I suspect that a majority agrees with me on that too.
Even a company as large as Microsoft could function as a set of S corps. Because of limitations on how many shareholders and whether they can be corporations instead of natural entities, It would probably take some fractionation, but we are not talking about hundreds of thousands of sole traders as individual biological entities. If we amended the law on S corps so that there could be more than 200 stockholders per, even a company the size of Microsoft could become a single pass-through entity to its shareholders. Other changes, such as unlimited allowing foreign corporations to be shareholders in an S, can be argued for or against, but a lot of that rests on other grounds.
Recently, I assisted a woman who has two lines of work to form two S corps. One is for her real estate activities, the other for her royalties as an author. The chief point of it is, she can only be sued for her royalties if she were sued for libel, not for her profits in renting or selling real estate. (And vice versa, her absolute maximum liability for a real estate related case is her profit in that area). If she had done this as C style corps, she could probably protect herself from being sued for her full profit in either case, but there would be other costs, such as corporate taxes. In her case, there were other advantages to 's'es, such as being able to match into her own retirement account and so contribute more than the personal limit each year. From there, there are pass-throughs with over 5,000 employees, and corporate revenues in the Large Cap range. I can think of no reason why one of these couldn't scale a little more and become the next MS, even if they can't have foreign corporations investing in them.