The IRS puts that quote on some of their pamphlets. Then they remind the taxpayer that it damned well is their public duty to pay what the law demands.
I posted a comment on this thread, above, and I seriously considered saying the four people who modded the OP insightful were idiots, but decided to be polite. Now that i think about it more, I'm not doing them a favor. They need to confront that they modded something insightful that was totally the opposite. For the record again, shareholders have sued for failure to maximize value many times, but very few of the suits are successful.
There has never been a successful claim that a US corp has an obligation to break any non-US law to maximize shareholder value (five cases have been filed claiming in various ways that 'bribes are a way of life in some foreign country', and the CEO was failing to maximize by not using them - not one has won, and the SCOTUS has declined to hear all of them after the first.).
There has never been a successful claim that a company is required to break a private contract if the immediate penalties are small enough compared to honoring it, not one.
Claims that a company was required to break a US law have all failed, and some lead to the court record being passed on to the DA for consideration of criminal charges (If you go to civil court to force a criminal act forward, your own testimony is usually abundant evidence to convict you of conspiracy to commit that criminal act. - gee, who would have thought of that?).
The court cases that established you simply can't sue in a US court to force the government to release a firm from its existing articles of incorporation when the firm itself doesn't want to be so released are very old law, settled under names such as John Hay. Again, they are rock solid law if any single point of law is.
So you're saying a US court (which would be the only court that could legally hear the case unless Balmer voluntarily gave the shareholder who sued what they wanted) would unilaterally break the contract between the state of incorporation and Microsoft by accepting such an argument? You're saying they would do so, breaking with over a dozen precedents including a rare unanimous decision by the US supreme court? This is settled law, if anything is. You can't successfully sue over this. The last time anyone has tried anything even related to what you advocate was nearly a hundred years ago, and the suit was dismissed in minutes with prejudice. You would have more chance of successfully suing Steve Balmer for a billion dollars because you didn't get a pony for your fourth birthday.
I'm sorta on Linux... No wait, it's just Kubuntu (a Swahili word that means "Kant grok Debian"). Guess I shouldn't say this... It's childish and petty to spell MS with a $, but most fonts don't have a swastica.
Let's see, if Balmer leaves the USA, he could go to Ireland, which is still fighting against fully joining the EU. If Ireland's economy rallies faster than most and stays good, that could actually work, but if it doesn't, then MS's current EU problems are but a small foretaste of what's to come.
He could go to the orient, with their history of scrupulous respect for IP rights. MS could make nice-nice with some government that has previously winked at its citizens mass duplication of various MS products...
There's the middle east. MS could operate out of Iran...
Uhm, Sealand...
Err, a Lunar colony under control of a self aware computer...
Overall, it looks like some MPAA members are aware that there's a negative impact on sales from fear of losing access if the provider goes out of business. The RIAA, as usual, has no clue and blames it all on piracy. If the US economy totally tanked, with 78% unemployment and nine states declaring themselves People's Republics, and we faced 30,000% hyperinflation, the RIAA would declare all their projected lost sales were due to piracy. When the RIAA finds themselves in the dark, their first step is to insist all the Grues have peg-legs and parrots.
One of Darwin's own predictions was that for Evolution to work, the mechanisms of heredity could not allow unlimited blending. When Crick and Watson got their Nobel, it was in part for showing that the genetic code was a descrete (as in non-blending) system, and it's fair to claim that Darwin himself predicted some aspects of DNA. With that said, there are areas where I suspect the theory is showing cracks - for example, sexual selection is often used to explain changes happening over short timeframes where regular natural selection seems a stretch, and there's been some big flaws in the whole sex selection model (See Bighorn Sheep, a creature usually considered an obvious case of sexual selection pressure.).
I figured a Capone reference would show up in this thread. There's one difference though, Capone was sentenced to a mere 11 years and actually served only 7, even though the jury 'admitted' they were really trying to put him away for everything he had done. My bet is, before long, some file sharer will be serving more than that. America is becoming a nation of inspector Javerts.
Technically, Rush is 100% correct, for once. It still feels like he's lying by omission though, because he didn't mention the other eight in the Bill of Rights. For that matter, what if the government fails to follow the 14th amendment, or some part of the original constitution? can we rebel then as well? Rush is a speaker, of course he wants his free speech rights protected. When he supports protecting somebody else's right against a warrantless search, or argues that some other right might be one of those not specifically enumerated but still real, I'll start believing Rush can count above two.
Weather prediction is hard because of extreme variability in initial conditions, and the math which covers such states is called Chaos Theory. Those conditions are not down on the quantum level, and there is no particular reason to make a concession to Quantum Mechanics for weather besides the fact that QM underlies all sorts of macroworld processes.* The scale of a single initial condition for weather could be, for example, a rising moisture laden hot air zone filling a many cubic meter volume over a large asphalt parking lot, and not just the metaphorical butterfly in Brazil. Essentially, if we based a weather prediction on sensors scattered a mile apart in a 3-D grid covering the whole planet, there are still macro-scale conditions less than a mile across that will significantly affect the outcome within a fey days. Even if we got down to where that hypothetical sensor grid was on the scale of 10 meters, there are smaller conditions which could have such consequences, and we would gain only a few days accuracy.
* If you would include minor QM effects in Shipbuilding or Dentistry, then by all means include them in Weather.
Economics is harder, for the reason you've given. To restate it, there are many more positive AND negative feedback loops in economics, and, for your fundamental particle, the same entities can act in a bewildering variety of modes.
Though I don't know if I would characterize the 'fundamental particle' as people in all cases. For some economic math, the fundamental particle is better described as each individual value transaction. That model is attractive because it lets economists see a given sale as multiple transactions (for example, when a person buys a pack of gum, and the clerk also collects sales tax, that's at least two transactions. A given payment to an employee can include state and federal income taxes, health insurance premiums, a retirement contribution, and Social Security and Medicare withholding - that's six transactions, and I'm sure some cases involve more).
To my mind there's another way to do three categories: copying that's not infringing period (e. g. if it's old enough to be public domain), copying that's clearly going to do real damage to the rights holder (anything that's big, hot and current, where benefits such as word of mouth or reawakening public interest won't help sales nearly as much as free or for sale bootlegs will hurt them), and an intermediate range where the copying is technically infringing but so inoffensive that we view it as unreasonable for the owner to complain about it absent some additional problems (i.e. it's still under copyright but nobody has made any money off of it in decades, or the region encoding keeps it from being played legally in the area where it is being distributed).
I'm going to take a devil's advocate position I really don't actually agree with at all, and pretend the whole idea of tremendous damages to deter copying shouldn't be found unconstitutional just because of sheer amounts. That seems to be the position most judges hold, so what if we assume they are right on that point?
That said, the law set caps at $30,000 and $150,000 in one area of copyright infringement, and made the test to go from one to the other include the word 'willful'. Work it out, the law specified the value for willful infringement was 5x unwillful for its favored friend class, not 3x for punitive damages as it is for the rest of us, and not with so rigorous a test as normally warrants punitive damages. The law just never said that that was what it was doing by actually using the same format to express the underlying idea as the older laws do. By that logic, if I threaten to deprive somebody of the air getting to their lungs, I haven't made a death threat since i didn't actually say any words such as "kill", "murder" or "slay". In fact, the court has technically let lawyers get away with disguising their playing the 'Some are more equal than others" game by also letting them give a math answer without showing all their work.
"Nunnnnh-Nuuh!, I didn't explicitly say 5x, I just defined it so it is implicitly 5x. Can't touch me.".
So if the total amounts don't violate the 'cruel' part of cruel and unusual punishment, doesn't the higher multiplier still violate the 'unusual' part?
The court has specifically recognized cases where somebody made a new process to manufacture something that was already manufacturable by an older process. For example, Aspirin was recognized as a pre-existing synthetic under U. S. law, but the court ruled that the newer process for making it was novel, because it produced a medically pure compound at a cost that made it of widespread utility, while the older process produced a compound that required costly steps to eliminate contaminants. The court recognized it therefore as a new invention.
I don't think you can claim fairly that the Bush administration got a free ride the whole ten years - the first few after Sept 11th, maybe, but not nearly so much by Katrina.
However, when the Governor of Illinois recently got into trouble, CNN and NBC (both part of what Fox calls the liberal media), ran pieces on it. They both printed a quote from a phone conversation involving the perp, where he essentially said 'Obama's whole staff were Boy-scouts. When he tried to hit Obama up for a kickback through them, they wouldn't offer anything that wasn't totally legal.' Both networks then ran headlines saying Obama had some serious explaining to do. News-flash - when the crook is on tape saying your whole organization is too squeaky clean for his taste, you have no obligation to 'explain' that. Saying to the guy who didn't offer or accept a crooked deal that he has an obligation to explain why the criminal even thought their might be a chance for one is attacking the known victim of an attempted criminal act, just like blaming the victim of an attempted rape for dressing provocatively. So I'll give you your 'viciously hostile'.
As a person who once held a Military Intelligence slot, I want to point out some things. Properly done, MI is all about capabilities, not intentions. That is, MI when it's working right will tell you if a possible enemy has artillery with a 55 mile range or not. Mi done right won't speculate whether the enemy has the intention of aiming it at an adjacent capital city unless the owner announces it, or at least positions it so there are no other targets that would make any sense.
It's supposed to be up to something called Civilian Oversight to ask the right questions and pick the targets for evaluation. If the civilian government asks if a drone plane Saddam was building could hit New York if launched from the Canadian border, MI will tell them whatever they know of the drone's range, but they won't ask how their supervisor thinks Saddam will get the drone to Ontario. If the civilian oversight asks if there is any known nuke small enough to fit in that drone's cargo compartment, MI will say yes, because the US, the former USSR, and several NATO allies all have such devices.
If the Secretary of State doesn't ask if Saddam has a third generation pony nuke (or any chance of making one in the next 10 years) before he talks to the UN about them, and jumps to a conclusion (or if he doesn't ask because he already knows the answer is a flat no), then the Civilian Oversight can deliver a report, and MI has no way of knowing if he got some parts of the report from somebody else (NSA maybe) or if he's lying. Then the MI operatives usually take the blame if any of the BS part becomes public.
If Civilian Oversight decides it's more important to investigate Mexico's submarine warfare progress than to keep an eye on the Chinese, then MI operatives will say "Yes sir, watching the Mexican Navy sir!", even if they think it's a stupid waste of resources. Civilians define who's the foe, not the military.
I'm a former signal corps officer who once held the electronic security officer position in a S-2 shop (that's military intelligence), and I personally know of three cases where a military computer intrusion resulted in serving a warrant at some person's home. One of them was on post and was served by MPs - the other two at civilian addresses. In ALL cases, persons bearing M-16s were present (MPs, FBI or SWAT). In ALL cases, all computer and related equipment in the home was impounded and held at least until trial.
In one of the three cases, a firearm was actually pointed by police in my presence, and the civilian policeman informed the suspect (a 16 year old kid), "Step away from the computer NOW! Or I will splatter your dumbass fucking head all over the fucking wall". fortunately he complied at that point, although later, one of the police told me it was probably because a non-cop was present that his buddy didn't bang the kid against said wall 'just a little' before handcuffing him. Even though I was only along as a witness to identify presence of the suspected software on his machine, since this was a civilian related case, I ended up having to testify at the trial that the kid appeared to be trying to destroy evidence, because he argued at first that the language and being cuffed constituted excessive force.
So yes, if that something is intrusion in a military system, someone may very well point a gun at you. I think the police were reasonably professional in the cases I was connected to, and I recommend that people don't rely on that. I got to where I really feared having a case come up in some areas where I would expect the police to get overexcited about it. We always had to assume a cases such as this might be espionage by foreign agent, but the police typically reacted like they never heard the word 'might' in that - to them it simply was spying and sabotage, and I also heard the word 'treason' thrown around a lot when we briefed the local DAs that the suspects were believed to be U.S. citizens. Many cops damned well may go a lot farther than pointing, and you are giving out very, very bad advice.
The only reason this isn't happening is we are afraid the process will continue to expand. We will end up with a Jobs Law, an Ayn Rand Law, a Limbaugh Law, etc. There will be too many for even the most nerdcore to be sure they know them all, so we are not going to let the expansion from Godwin even start. So there.
It really can't all be deterministic. It's a bit of a stretch to say quantum mechanics is what it would take to make it non-deterministic. Roger Penrose made a fair argument that QM played a part, but there are some pretty good arguments why he was wrong. Anyway, Chaos theory is enough to prove mental activity isn't deterministic by itself, for we can be confident that the brain itself follows Chaos theory models before we even worry about whether the mind does. When you already have proven non-determinism rules at the purely physical layer, arguing about the existence or nature of the possible non-physical layer(s) and whether non-determinism is possible there as well seems like overkill.
Here's the real problem with telling sick people to just "Deal with it like an adult".
I'm a Diabetic. Right now, I take only small amounts of oral meds, even though I occasionally have some processed sugar in my diet. That's because over about three years, I lost 20 pounds and built 25 back into muscle, starting at age 50 to get off insulin and lead a more normal life. I'm currently healthy as a horse (2 mile runs at least 3 times a week, LONG runs on weekends, bench 255, takes about 45 minutes continuously on a stairmaster just to get my heart up to what is technically it's calculated training rate, and five minutes later it will be back down to 68 BPM).
When I was typical slashdot poster age, I was in the Army. I went from being a sedentary oscilloscope jockey on entry to scoring over 400 on the Army Physical Fitness Test extended scale in, again, about 3 years. In training, I ran against and frequently matched a soldier who had been awarded the Silver in Barcelona the year before. So, I can actually claim to have been in near Olympic condition. (please note the near). At some points I did long range recon, with 55 pound standard load, plus because I was the biggest guy in my squad I also carried an M-60, spare barrel assembly and four or so belts of ammo on what sometimes turned into 70-80 mile hikes in rough country (average altitude was over 11 thousand feet for some of these little expeditions).
'Beating' Diabetes fifteen years after that was harder. Until I got to the point where I could come off the insulin itself, the pain from exercise was constant, at a level that would have broken me back in my twenties. The zone between not enough exercise to improve and too much to heal up from becomes incredibly narrow when your sugar is that high. it's a target you just can't hit consistently. It took weeks to heal from some little training slips that would typically be ignored the next day in a young healthy person, and there were stages where the inflammation effects from exercising under the medications triggered (fortunately temporary) symptoms resembling advanced MS. After six months, I came off the insulin, and soon after it got to be just as rough as it is for any 50 year old man to build 25 pounds of muscle.
I had a lot of people tell me it was just a matter of willpower, of manning up and being an adult. Yes it is. Any average person, who has merely approximately the will normally needed to become an Olympic level athlete, can do it.
That's why it comes off as condescending. If you're a highly decorated combat infantryman, or an Olympian... If you made it through the original Mercury program... If you are one of the ten greatest living concert pianists or even just an Iron Chef, or merely use your Pulitzers to hold up the shelf for your Nobel, by all means, tell me it just took a little willpower or doing what a typical adult would and should do. From that exalted viewpoint, you may mean it well. If you don't have credentials such as those, anything you say about maturity, willpower, or dedication is hypocritical at best.
Now maybe some of these people with the mental disorders really do have no real idea how much they just have to reach down into themselves and find the energy to continue, over and over, but maybe they've fought a battle every single damned day that makes my whole life look like a lazy river ride.
There are lots of decent lawyers - as Will Rogers pointed out - Most of the time, when a lawyer is hurting innocent people, he's just doing what the Banker he works for ordered. Factor such cases out, and the rest are about as good and bad as real humans.
A lot of the nasty side effects happen in people who are messed up, and who take the drug to self medicate. When it doesn't overcome the mental illness, or other factors push the person into unsocial behavior and worse, the drug gets all the blame. (Note that I'm not making this claim about Meth or some of the other drugs that will typically mes anyone on them up. From what I've seen Cocaine and Methamphetamine simply don't allow controlled use in the sufficiently long term.).
For other cases though, look at LSD. Risky? Definitely. Some people are more prone to not being able to tell the difference between external reality and their internal imagery than others - for them, there's no distinction between the drug's 'visions' and the world outside. Then there's the Manson case, which proved pretty conclusively that young people could be brainwashed better under its influence by a charismatic cult leader. At the same time, regular psychiatrists and therapists were getting wonderful results. There were so many studies in the 60's where LSD based therapy seems to have contributed to long term reform of alcoholics, pedophiles, or other criminal or behavior problem types that it's simply amazing that the drug was made schedule 1 in the USA. A drug with an LD50 over a hundred thousand times its effective dose, with the counter-addictive property that after the first use, that effective does simply rises and rises until the subject literally can't get high on it unless they wait a week or two to use it again, and that was getting glowing praise in some psychiatric circles, and it wasn't restricted or controlled, it was simply totally banned. That's politics indeed.
Superfluous data starts having negative value when it becomes common enough to make it hard to find the more essential data.
To use your 'pyramids'. It could be pretty useful to disprove theories that UFO aliens built the pyramids. I'm not sure believing in alien pyramid builders undermines anyone's life, but realizing that regular people figured out how to do it instead gives us increasing respect for our roots and inspires us to believe we can solve new problems on our own without waiting for the aliens to come back.
There was probably some preserved data from Egypt that was trivial by just about any standard, and certainly there was a lot of redundant data (papyri with seemingly endless inventory records for a rope maker's warehouse, such as turned up on one dig (in 1968, if memory serves), comes to mind). Maybe some of this has negative value. But I trust the archaeologists to make that decision. They will probably continue to err on the side of caution, but it doesn't cost all that much to store more than you can study.
For our contemporary data, we probably need more data deleting itself sooner. I work with financial information that has to include SSNs, and we use systems that deliberately purge routing numbers and bank account numbers after a few months, and never print them or full SSNs to paper copies, so they literally aren't in our possession to be stolen by the time the records get transferred to long term storage. There's still some risk of abuses even with what we have to retain, but its a lot less when the thief still doesn't get all the pieces they would need to commit some financial shenanigans. Even if somebody gets a lot of other personal info and attempts to impersonate a client with all the sort of skills and resources you see in Hollywood caper films, there's no way to steal what's simply not there.
I suppose it could be very useful if Juvenile records or Driving Violation records were self deleting after a few years, and there are probably lots of other cases where some kind of automatic deletion would be better than what we tend to now.
One of the signs that some of these "Creative Rights" types are missing the point is claims such as "I make it, I get to decide". Copyright law for the first 200 years or so of the US was totally about financial profit. You sued somebody who made money from your work over your loss of that money, not emotional damages or insults to your reputation. All you ever got for having made something was the right to decide (for a genuinely limited time) whether somebody else could make a profit from your work. All this "I get to decide, period" talk is European moral copyright, and often goes far beyond the limits of that. It's largely a far left position to try to extend moral copyright to cover everything these people want to decide.
So essentially, we now have people demanding that they should have a Free Market, Capitalist, Downright John Galtian system, JUST LIKE THE LEFT WING SOCIAL DEMOCRAT PARTYS ARE PUSHING FOR IN EUROPE!
Id rather the summary told me about a source, even if it's pay, than not mention it. Still, news is true information (the not-so-true info is called propaganda, advertising puffery, and so on). I want the Slashdot summary to be as accurate as possible, and the article it links to to be so as well. Ideally, if somebody wants to inform me of something, they will do their best to get accurate links to me for as little as possible (not necessarily free). Paying for detailed info on an interesting chemical process to compensate the preparer is one thing, but paying because the commercial article is full of mistakes, deliberate distortions or advertiser's bias, is another.
Slashdot Mirror
The IRS puts that quote on some of their pamphlets. Then they remind the taxpayer that it damned well is their public duty to pay what the law demands.
I posted a comment on this thread, above, and I seriously considered saying the four people who modded the OP insightful were idiots, but decided to be polite. Now that i think about it more, I'm not doing them a favor. They need to confront that they modded something insightful that was totally the opposite. For the record again, shareholders have sued for failure to maximize value many times, but very few of the suits are successful.
There has never been a successful claim that a US corp has an obligation to break any non-US law to maximize shareholder value (five cases have been filed claiming in various ways that 'bribes are a way of life in some foreign country', and the CEO was failing to maximize by not using them - not one has won, and the SCOTUS has declined to hear all of them after the first.).
There has never been a successful claim that a company is required to break a private contract if the immediate penalties are small enough compared to honoring it, not one.
Claims that a company was required to break a US law have all failed, and some lead to the court record being passed on to the DA for consideration of criminal charges (If you go to civil court to force a criminal act forward, your own testimony is usually abundant evidence to convict you of conspiracy to commit that criminal act. - gee, who would have thought of that?).
The court cases that established you simply can't sue in a US court to force the government to release a firm from its existing articles of incorporation when the firm itself doesn't want to be so released are very old law, settled under names such as John Hay. Again, they are rock solid law if any single point of law is.
So you're saying a US court (which would be the only court that could legally hear the case unless Balmer voluntarily gave the shareholder who sued what they wanted) would unilaterally break the contract between the state of incorporation and Microsoft by accepting such an argument? You're saying they would do so, breaking with over a dozen precedents including a rare unanimous decision by the US supreme court? This is settled law, if anything is. You can't successfully sue over this. The last time anyone has tried anything even related to what you advocate was nearly a hundred years ago, and the suit was dismissed in minutes with prejudice. You would have more chance of successfully suing Steve Balmer for a billion dollars because you didn't get a pony for your fourth birthday.
I'm sorta on Linux...
No wait, it's just Kubuntu (a Swahili word that means "Kant grok Debian").
Guess I shouldn't say this...
It's childish and petty to spell MS with a $, but most fonts don't have a swastica.
Let's see, if Balmer leaves the USA, he could go to Ireland, which is still fighting against fully joining the EU. If Ireland's economy rallies faster than most and stays good, that could actually work, but if it doesn't, then MS's current EU problems are but a small foretaste of what's to come.
He could go to the orient, with their history of scrupulous respect for IP rights. MS could make nice-nice with some government that has previously winked at its citizens mass duplication of various MS products...
There's the middle east. MS could operate out of Iran...
Uhm, Sealand...
Err, a Lunar colony under control of a self aware computer...
Overall, it looks like some MPAA members are aware that there's a negative impact on sales from fear of losing access if the provider goes out of business. The RIAA, as usual, has no clue and blames it all on piracy. If the US economy totally tanked, with 78% unemployment and nine states declaring themselves People's Republics, and we faced 30,000% hyperinflation, the RIAA would declare all their projected lost sales were due to piracy. When the RIAA finds themselves in the dark, their first step is to insist all the Grues have peg-legs and parrots.
One of Darwin's own predictions was that for Evolution to work, the mechanisms of heredity could not allow unlimited blending. When Crick and Watson got their Nobel, it was in part for showing that the genetic code was a descrete (as in non-blending) system, and it's fair to claim that Darwin himself predicted some aspects of DNA. With that said, there are areas where I suspect the theory is showing cracks - for example, sexual selection is often used to explain changes happening over short timeframes where regular natural selection seems a stretch, and there's been some big flaws in the whole sex selection model (See Bighorn Sheep, a creature usually considered an obvious case of sexual selection pressure.).
I figured a Capone reference would show up in this thread. There's one difference though, Capone was sentenced to a mere 11 years and actually served only 7, even though the jury 'admitted' they were really trying to put him away for everything he had done. My bet is, before long, some file sharer will be serving more than that. America is becoming a nation of inspector Javerts.
Technically, Rush is 100% correct, for once. It still feels like he's lying by omission though, because he didn't mention the other eight in the Bill of Rights. For that matter, what if the government fails to follow the 14th amendment, or some part of the original constitution? can we rebel then as well? Rush is a speaker, of course he wants his free speech rights protected. When he supports protecting somebody else's right against a warrantless search, or argues that some other right might be one of those not specifically enumerated but still real, I'll start believing Rush can count above two.
Weather prediction is hard because of extreme variability in initial conditions, and the math which covers such states is called Chaos Theory. Those conditions are not down on the quantum level, and there is no particular reason to make a concession to Quantum Mechanics for weather besides the fact that QM underlies all sorts of macroworld processes.* The scale of a single initial condition for weather could be, for example, a rising moisture laden hot air zone filling a many cubic meter volume over a large asphalt parking lot, and not just the metaphorical butterfly in Brazil. Essentially, if we based a weather prediction on sensors scattered a mile apart in a 3-D grid covering the whole planet, there are still macro-scale conditions less than a mile across that will significantly affect the outcome within a fey days. Even if we got down to where that hypothetical sensor grid was on the scale of 10 meters, there are smaller conditions which could have such consequences, and we would gain only a few days accuracy.
* If you would include minor QM effects in Shipbuilding or Dentistry, then by all means include them in Weather.
Economics is harder, for the reason you've given. To restate it, there are many more positive AND negative feedback loops in economics, and, for your fundamental particle, the same entities can act in a bewildering variety of modes.
Though I don't know if I would characterize the 'fundamental particle' as people in all cases. For some economic math, the fundamental particle is better described as each individual value transaction. That model is attractive because it lets economists see a given sale as multiple transactions (for example, when a person buys a pack of gum, and the clerk also collects sales tax, that's at least two transactions. A given payment to an employee can include state and federal income taxes, health insurance premiums, a retirement contribution, and Social Security and Medicare withholding - that's six transactions, and I'm sure some cases involve more).
To my mind there's another way to do three categories: copying that's not infringing period (e. g. if it's old enough to be public domain), copying that's clearly going to do real damage to the rights holder (anything that's big, hot and current, where benefits such as word of mouth or reawakening public interest won't help sales nearly as much as free or for sale bootlegs will hurt them), and an intermediate range where the copying is technically infringing but so inoffensive that we view it as unreasonable for the owner to complain about it absent some additional problems (i.e. it's still under copyright but nobody has made any money off of it in decades, or the region encoding keeps it from being played legally in the area where it is being distributed).
I'm going to take a devil's advocate position I really don't actually agree with at all, and pretend the whole idea of tremendous damages to deter copying shouldn't be found unconstitutional just because of sheer amounts. That seems to be the position most judges hold, so what if we assume they are right on that point?
That said, the law set caps at $30,000 and $150,000 in one area of copyright infringement, and made the test to go from one to the other include the word 'willful'. Work it out, the law specified the value for willful infringement was 5x unwillful for its favored friend class, not 3x for punitive damages as it is for the rest of us, and not with so rigorous a test as normally warrants punitive damages. The law just never said that that was what it was doing by actually using the same format to express the underlying idea as the older laws do. By that logic, if I threaten to deprive somebody of the air getting to their lungs, I haven't made a death threat since i didn't actually say any words such as "kill", "murder" or "slay". In fact, the court has technically let lawyers get away with disguising their playing the 'Some are more equal than others" game by also letting them give a math answer without showing all their work.
"Nunnnnh-Nuuh!, I didn't explicitly say 5x, I just defined it so it is implicitly 5x. Can't touch me.".
So if the total amounts don't violate the 'cruel' part of cruel and unusual punishment, doesn't the higher multiplier still violate the 'unusual' part?
The court has specifically recognized cases where somebody made a new process to manufacture something that was already manufacturable by an older process. For example, Aspirin was recognized as a pre-existing synthetic under U. S. law, but the court ruled that the newer process for making it was novel, because it produced a medically pure compound at a cost that made it of widespread utility, while the older process produced a compound that required costly steps to eliminate contaminants. The court recognized it therefore as a new invention.
I don't think you can claim fairly that the Bush administration got a free ride the whole ten years - the first few after Sept 11th, maybe, but not nearly so much by Katrina.
However, when the Governor of Illinois recently got into trouble, CNN and NBC (both part of what Fox calls the liberal media), ran pieces on it. They both printed a quote from a phone conversation involving the perp, where he essentially said 'Obama's whole staff were Boy-scouts. When he tried to hit Obama up for a kickback through them, they wouldn't offer anything that wasn't totally legal.' Both networks then ran headlines saying Obama had some serious explaining to do. News-flash - when the crook is on tape saying your whole organization is too squeaky clean for his taste, you have no obligation to 'explain' that. Saying to the guy who didn't offer or accept a crooked deal that he has an obligation to explain why the criminal even thought their might be a chance for one is attacking the known victim of an attempted criminal act, just like blaming the victim of an attempted rape for dressing provocatively. So I'll give you your 'viciously hostile'.
As a person who once held a Military Intelligence slot, I want to point out some things. Properly done, MI is all about capabilities, not intentions. That is, MI when it's working right will tell you if a possible enemy has artillery with a 55 mile range or not. Mi done right won't speculate whether the enemy has the intention of aiming it at an adjacent capital city unless the owner announces it, or at least positions it so there are no other targets that would make any sense.
It's supposed to be up to something called Civilian Oversight to ask the right questions and pick the targets for evaluation. If the civilian government asks if a drone plane Saddam was building could hit New York if launched from the Canadian border, MI will tell them whatever they know of the drone's range, but they won't ask how their supervisor thinks Saddam will get the drone to Ontario. If the civilian oversight asks if there is any known nuke small enough to fit in that drone's cargo compartment, MI will say yes, because the US, the former USSR, and several NATO allies all have such devices.
If the Secretary of State doesn't ask if Saddam has a third generation pony nuke (or any chance of making one in the next 10 years) before he talks to the UN about them, and jumps to a conclusion (or if he doesn't ask because he already knows the answer is a flat no), then the Civilian Oversight can deliver a report, and MI has no way of knowing if he got some parts of the report from somebody else (NSA maybe) or if he's lying. Then the MI operatives usually take the blame if any of the BS part becomes public.
If Civilian Oversight decides it's more important to investigate Mexico's submarine warfare progress than to keep an eye on the Chinese, then MI operatives will say "Yes sir, watching the Mexican Navy sir!", even if they think it's a stupid waste of resources. Civilians define who's the foe, not the military.
I'm a former signal corps officer who once held the electronic security officer position in a S-2 shop (that's military intelligence), and I personally know of three cases where a military computer intrusion resulted in serving a warrant at some person's home. One of them was on post and was served by MPs - the other two at civilian addresses. In ALL cases, persons bearing M-16s were present (MPs, FBI or SWAT). In ALL cases, all computer and related equipment in the home was impounded and held at least until trial.
In one of the three cases, a firearm was actually pointed by police in my presence, and the civilian policeman informed the suspect (a 16 year old kid), "Step away from the computer NOW! Or I will splatter your dumbass fucking head all over the fucking wall". fortunately he complied at that point, although later, one of the police told me it was probably because a non-cop was present that his buddy didn't bang the kid against said wall 'just a little' before handcuffing him. Even though I was only along as a witness to identify presence of the suspected software on his machine, since this was a civilian related case, I ended up having to testify at the trial that the kid appeared to be trying to destroy evidence, because he argued at first that the language and being cuffed constituted excessive force.
So yes, if that something is intrusion in a military system, someone may very well point a gun at you. I think the police were reasonably professional in the cases I was connected to, and I recommend that people don't rely on that. I got to where I really feared having a case come up in some areas where I would expect the police to get overexcited about it. We always had to assume a cases such as this might be espionage by foreign agent, but the police typically reacted like they never heard the word 'might' in that - to them it simply was spying and sabotage, and I also heard the word 'treason' thrown around a lot when we briefed the local DAs that the suspects were believed to be U.S. citizens. Many cops damned well may go a lot farther than pointing, and you are giving out very, very bad advice.
The only reason this isn't happening is we are afraid the process will continue to expand. We will end up with a Jobs Law, an Ayn Rand Law, a Limbaugh Law, etc. There will be too many for even the most nerdcore to be sure they know them all, so we are not going to let the expansion from Godwin even start. So there.
Nice strawman. Go ahead and mod me.
It really can't all be deterministic. It's a bit of a stretch to say quantum mechanics is what it would take to make it non-deterministic. Roger Penrose made a fair argument that QM played a part, but there are some pretty good arguments why he was wrong. Anyway, Chaos theory is enough to prove mental activity isn't deterministic by itself, for we can be confident that the brain itself follows Chaos theory models before we even worry about whether the mind does. When you already have proven non-determinism rules at the purely physical layer, arguing about the existence or nature of the possible non-physical layer(s) and whether non-determinism is possible there as well seems like overkill.
Here's the real problem with telling sick people to just "Deal with it like an adult".
I'm a Diabetic. Right now, I take only small amounts of oral meds, even though I occasionally have some processed sugar in my diet. That's because over about three years, I lost 20 pounds and built 25 back into muscle, starting at age 50 to get off insulin and lead a more normal life. I'm currently healthy as a horse (2 mile runs at least 3 times a week, LONG runs on weekends, bench 255, takes about 45 minutes continuously on a stairmaster just to get my heart up to what is technically it's calculated training rate, and five minutes later it will be back down to 68 BPM).
When I was typical slashdot poster age, I was in the Army. I went from being a sedentary oscilloscope jockey on entry to scoring over 400 on the Army Physical Fitness Test extended scale in, again, about 3 years. In training, I ran against and frequently matched a soldier who had been awarded the Silver in Barcelona the year before. So, I can actually claim to have been in near Olympic condition. (please note the near). At some points I did long range recon, with 55 pound standard load, plus because I was the biggest guy in my squad I also carried an M-60, spare barrel assembly and four or so belts of ammo on what sometimes turned into 70-80 mile hikes in rough country (average altitude was over 11 thousand feet for some of these little expeditions).
'Beating' Diabetes fifteen years after that was harder. Until I got to the point where I could come off the insulin itself, the pain from exercise was constant, at a level that would have broken me back in my twenties. The zone between not enough exercise to improve and too much to heal up from becomes incredibly narrow when your sugar is that high. it's a target you just can't hit consistently. It took weeks to heal from some little training slips that would typically be ignored the next day in a young healthy person, and there were stages where the inflammation effects from exercising under the medications triggered (fortunately temporary) symptoms resembling advanced MS. After six months, I came off the insulin, and soon after it got to be just as rough as it is for any 50 year old man to build 25 pounds of muscle.
I had a lot of people tell me it was just a matter of willpower, of manning up and being an adult. Yes it is. Any average person, who has merely approximately the will normally needed to become an Olympic level athlete, can do it.
That's why it comes off as condescending. If you're a highly decorated combat infantryman, or an Olympian... If you made it through the original Mercury program... If you are one of the ten greatest living concert pianists or even just an Iron Chef, or merely use your Pulitzers to hold up the shelf for your Nobel, by all means, tell me it just took a little willpower or doing what a typical adult would and should do. From that exalted viewpoint, you may mean it well. If you don't have credentials such as those, anything you say about maturity, willpower, or dedication is hypocritical at best.
Now maybe some of these people with the mental disorders really do have no real idea how much they just have to reach down into themselves and find the energy to continue, over and over, but maybe they've fought a battle every single damned day that makes my whole life look like a lazy river ride.
There are lots of decent lawyers - as Will Rogers pointed out - Most of the time, when a lawyer is hurting innocent people, he's just doing what the Banker he works for ordered. Factor such cases out, and the rest are about as good and bad as real humans.
A lot of the nasty side effects happen in people who are messed up, and who take the drug to self medicate. When it doesn't overcome the mental illness, or other factors push the person into unsocial behavior and worse, the drug gets all the blame. (Note that I'm not making this claim about Meth or some of the other drugs that will typically mes anyone on them up. From what I've seen Cocaine and Methamphetamine simply don't allow controlled use in the sufficiently long term.).
For other cases though, look at LSD. Risky? Definitely. Some people are more prone to not being able to tell the difference between external reality and their internal imagery than others - for them, there's no distinction between the drug's 'visions' and the world outside. Then there's the Manson case, which proved pretty conclusively that young people could be brainwashed better under its influence by a charismatic cult leader. At the same time, regular psychiatrists and therapists were getting wonderful results. There were so many studies in the 60's where LSD based therapy seems to have contributed to long term reform of alcoholics, pedophiles, or other criminal or behavior problem types that it's simply amazing that the drug was made schedule 1 in the USA. A drug with an LD50 over a hundred thousand times its effective dose, with the counter-addictive property that after the first use, that effective does simply rises and rises until the subject literally can't get high on it unless they wait a week or two to use it again, and that was getting glowing praise in some psychiatric circles, and it wasn't restricted or controlled, it was simply totally banned. That's politics indeed.
To paraphrase Krishnamurti - Not fitting in well to a sick society is not a sign of mental illness.
Superfluous data starts having negative value when it becomes common enough to make it hard to find the more essential data.
To use your 'pyramids'. It could be pretty useful to disprove theories that UFO aliens built the pyramids. I'm not sure believing in alien pyramid builders undermines anyone's life, but realizing that regular people figured out how to do it instead gives us increasing respect for our roots and inspires us to believe we can solve new problems on our own without waiting for the aliens to come back.
There was probably some preserved data from Egypt that was trivial by just about any standard, and certainly there was a lot of redundant data (papyri with seemingly endless inventory records for a rope maker's warehouse, such as turned up on one dig (in 1968, if memory serves), comes to mind). Maybe some of this has negative value. But I trust the archaeologists to make that decision. They will probably continue to err on the side of caution, but it doesn't cost all that much to store more than you can study.
For our contemporary data, we probably need more data deleting itself sooner. I work with financial information that has to include SSNs, and we use systems that deliberately purge routing numbers and bank account numbers after a few months, and never print them or full SSNs to paper copies, so they literally aren't in our possession to be stolen by the time the records get transferred to long term storage. There's still some risk of abuses even with what we have to retain, but its a lot less when the thief still doesn't get all the pieces they would need to commit some financial shenanigans. Even if somebody gets a lot of other personal info and attempts to impersonate a client with all the sort of skills and resources you see in Hollywood caper films, there's no way to steal what's simply not there.
I suppose it could be very useful if Juvenile records or Driving Violation records were self deleting after a few years, and there are probably lots of other cases where some kind of automatic deletion would be better than what we tend to now.
One of the signs that some of these "Creative Rights" types are missing the point is claims such as "I make it, I get to decide". Copyright law for the first 200 years or so of the US was totally about financial profit. You sued somebody who made money from your work over your loss of that money, not emotional damages or insults to your reputation. All you ever got for having made something was the right to decide (for a genuinely limited time) whether somebody else could make a profit from your work. All this "I get to decide, period" talk is European moral copyright, and often goes far beyond the limits of that. It's largely a far left position to try to extend moral copyright to cover everything these people want to decide.
So essentially, we now have people demanding that they should have a Free Market, Capitalist, Downright John Galtian system, JUST LIKE THE LEFT WING SOCIAL DEMOCRAT PARTYS ARE PUSHING FOR IN EUROPE!
Id rather the summary told me about a source, even if it's pay, than not mention it. Still, news is true information (the not-so-true info is called propaganda, advertising puffery, and so on). I want the Slashdot summary to be as accurate as possible, and the article it links to to be so as well. Ideally, if somebody wants to inform me of something, they will do their best to get accurate links to me for as little as possible (not necessarily free). Paying for detailed info on an interesting chemical process to compensate the preparer is one thing, but paying because the commercial article is full of mistakes, deliberate distortions or advertiser's bias, is another.