This sounds like shorting, and particularly 'naked shorting', relates to a broader problem that's been much in the news lately.
It's pretty fundamental to abstract capitalism, that people who invest have capital, and they put up that capital, and that capital does a number of things, such as paying for materials and salaries/wages. If you don't have enough capital for a given investment system, you stick to what you can afford, and if you have no capital, you work for someone else. I've been puzzled by the number of businesses that have said "Without this rescue plan, we may not be able to pay our employees.". If they didn't themselves have the money to be in at the capital end of things, why are they the employers and not the employees? Why are some people evidently able to get credit so that they can play at being capitalists, without actually having capital of their own? Naked shorting looks like playing with somebody else putting up the money, but so does a lot of the rest of the system.
I'd have to lean towards even normal shorting being an abuse. As you put it, collateral can be just your reputation. Why? It looks like whole businesses were founded on just reputation, or at least massively under-collateralized. That appears to be pretty common. Some people were 'in the capitalist class', whether they actually had capital or not. Old school ties or something. They could get capital loans and credit regardless of whether they had their own money at risk. If that situation entailed a fundamental error, then the honesty of normal shorting mechanisms isn't enough to make it more ethical than naked shorting, because there's still a fundamental fraudulence at the time of picking who gets to play the game. The in-game rules may be fairer than for naked shorting, but the playing field itself is un-level.
One example doesn't make a broad pattern. You however appear to be under the really, really odd impression that conventional right and left matters, but the whole idea of classifying fascism as the conventional far, far right doesn't. As Ren put it, "Which is it, Man!!".
At the same time, I agree that your 'not going to limit free speech, only dangerous hateful speech' is an excellent example of just what I'm talking about.
Again, I'm not the one who said they didn't start scapegoating Jews, you are the one putting those words in my mouth. I said large numbers, and I defined what I meant by large , and by that definition, it's accurate. It agrees with what at least the vast majority of established historians teach on the subject. It's not some Nazi apologist's rantings, it's as accurate history as we have, the numbers interred entered six digit ranges in late 41, period. The main point I drew from it, that there was no wide spread opposition on moral grounds to putting smaller groups or groups that couldn't be defined as simply as by race or ethnicity into those same camps, is also, simply true, or are you saying it isn't.
You're the second person who immediately questioned my education in response. The other person insists the appropriate date is Nov 38, not Oct 39, so you two don't agree with each other. So how about you insult each other, instead of me? I can't get an education that agrees with both of you, and whichever one I please, the other will still be playing the "Ha, you said something I can take out of context and twist to prove my own moral superiority" game.
So your own article mentions approximately 25,000 in 1938, and refers to Krystallnacht as a prelude to the holocaust and not part of the actual event. It was, granted, an element of an ongoing process. I mentioned total numbers in the hundred thousands as late as 41, with 10's of thousands for the gypsies (Romany) in the same period. That's accurate. My mentioning specific numbers at specific times makes it pretty clear what I meant by 'really starting' and 'large numbers', and the figures I gave are all accurate, main-stream history. But even if that wasn't clear, you presumably know that the estimated total casualties of the Holocaust were around 12 Million, with 6 Million of them Jewish, so 'large numbers' should be pretty damned self explanatory.
I mentioned reclassification of arrested people, i.e. people who were arrested as radical dissidents and politically motivated opposition, and then reclassified later as being a problem primarily because they were Jews. Your pop article doesn't go into that, but should, because it happened quite a bit, and in particular, many of the laws that allowed blanket arrests and interment of Jews, simply as Jews, still had to be passed after Krystallnacht. One of its major roles in history was as a pretext to pass more laws, which obviously had to be passed later than Nov. of 38.
Here's a link, which mentions how the actual attacks of Kristallnacht were set up in a covert fashion, using Nazi groups who were willing to act outside the law. As this site puts it, ""Krystallnacht" was so called because of a deliberate but veiled edict which went out from the Reich to thoroughly destroy, ransack and loot all Jewish Business." and "The Jews who were rounded up and incarcerated became known as the "November Jews"and were among the first of mass deportations and imprisonments which were to take place over the next few years.":http://www.shoaheducation.com/krystallnacht.html
Past it yourself, I've forgotten how to use slashcode.
In the mean time, most of those people actually arrested over the next few months were arrested for being Bolsheviks or Anarchists, or having violated some control law such as a curfew. At that time, the Reich was still keeping up a legal pretense of merely desiring to control the Jewish population and not force it all into exile, let alone extermination (which they never really admitted to for the general public) But go right ahead with your "That's wrong. Please read some history books."
I wish all the people who keep yelling that copyright violation = theft, would start yelling that "it's a bonus when we say it is, it's core content when we say it is" = lying. How about "you've bought a physical product - no you've just bought a liscence" = lying? Fraud? Crooked as a dog's hind leg?
Also, game developers don't diserve shit from used game dealers.
Not forgetting that a lot of used game dealers are primarily in some other line of work, like used book or video sellers. There's nothing at all, under free market rules, copyright law, or whatever, to stop a used game store from deciding to pay less for games with dropped special features, or even all games from that company. They can put up a big sign that says "We pay 5$ less for ALL Foo games, because they inactivate some features for the used trade.". This is entirely justifiable, as the business does not know and can't be expected to take the time to figure out, just which Foo games are actually to blame, and the business can also assume many customers will just take the lazy approach and assume ALL Foo games have this defect. Now if games aren't even the business's primary line, and they make more money on books or comics or music, why on earth will they bother with anything fancy? A blanket discount on all used Foo games, or a simple refusal to buy them at all, starts making sense from their business model.
I actually liked some of the activation codewheels that came with some of the old D&D silver-box system, Bard's Tale, or various SSI products of yore. You could fiddle with those before the game, and when they made the ones with various place names, characters, and such, and not just random words, you got clues to the game - (Who is Vala? In which of these places will I encounter him/her? Will I have to go to all these locations to complete the game? Why is an Emerald Orb mentioned on this codewheel?) There were optional side quests in some games that were pretty hard to find, and it was often only the codewheel that gave you a clue you had missed something. Done right (which it often wasn't), the codewheel became more a part of the game and less just an anti-copying trick.
I don't think we are really to zero just yet. I'm even a little piqued at all the people who are arguing that most people will pirate because the goods are effectively free, and free always beats any other price. What I'm seeing is people buying 500 Gb. hard drives to hold that 'free' content, plus commercial disk burning and processing software, tons of blank DVDs, monthly paid Usenet access, and other costs for this 'free' stuff. I'm also seeing people spend a lot of time learning esoteric software just to handle obstacles such as RAR'ed and PAR'ed files or y-enc encoding, and sometimes buying commercial software for such tasks. Even if there was no risk from the RIAA to getting caught torrenting, the user has to provide drivespace and bandwidth to maintain a good ratio. Even once users have paid the one-time costs to own and learn software, there seems to be a lot of checking copies to make sure they are good enough, hand editing and even repairing going on.
I'm not saying that pirating can't save money, or that people are necessarily being illogical if that's their sole motivation. I'm also not saying that there aren't people who value their spare time at a pretty low rate, or people who don't care about the difference between a commercial CD quality track and a 128 K MP3. But the more I look at it, the more it looks like most pirates just about have to have other motives drawing them in than just to get stuff free. A lot of them have to be going after stuff they can't get legitimately at any normal price, like porn in some jurisdictions (i.e. Saudi Arabia), or their favorite old TV series that's never made it to DVD.
Once those people get the things they want most, they've bought the extra-sized drives, DVD-burners, and such, and they've paid the time costs to learn to do some non-mainstream-windows XP stuff on their PCs, so at that point pirating just because it's 'free' (really meaning comparatively very cheap, but not quite free), probably makes economic sense.
If the __AA's and such are just trying to deter piracy based on the idea all pirates are cheapskates, they aren't addressing the causes that get neo-pirates over the initial hump. I for one, wouldn't expect much success at getting the consumers back into line after they have already rebelled for other reasons, instead of before they stray. But if the industries don't know those other reason exist, or can't acknowledge it publicly, their chance of success must be miniscule.
You probably meant a specific right "Right of First Sale" if you're talking US law. Right of first sale is a pretty well defined area of law, and better, one of the pivotal early cases actually involved resale of used books so the distinction between purchasing the abstract speech and the physical medium was addressed by the court. I've seen right of first sale included in discussions of fair use by real copyright lawyers, so maybe you were actually technically right the first time, but it isn't what most people think of as an example of fair use, so I hope this helps. You're making some interesting arguments.
One of the real concerns is, how successful would a Fascist state be if it carefully avoided scapegoating whole races or ethnicities? What happens if the government bends over backwards to avoid specifically profiling Muslems as terrorists, but still keeps people constantly worried about those unspecified but presumably swarthy terrorists still lurking out there in some not too carefully specified cells. Does Fascism have to simplify everything into racial or ethnic lines, or can it survive by creating more nuanced pools of enemies.
At this late date, most people have lost sight of the fact that the Nazis didn't really start putting Jews in the camps, in large numbers, until late 1941 or early 42. Before that, the camps programs had focused on minor criminals and mental defectives with the claim that they would be rehabilitated and not simply destroyed.
Smaller religious groups had already been classed as enemies of the state, i.e. most of the estimated 45,000 Seventh Day Adventists in Germany were rounded up or forced to leave for refusing to swear loyalty oaths before 41, but people didn't react to such numbers. A lot of Romany and Jews entered the programs at this time (with a lot being tens or hundreds of thousands respectively by 1941, not the millions later), but most of the Romany were the ones classed as petty criminals, and most of the Jews as Bolsheviks, Wobblies, or other political problems, not for their race, per se. It was after that time that they were reclassified as just part of the larger Jewish problem.
If something similar happened in America, it would probably involve (as just one example) a transition where the black population currently in prison for mostly drug offenses became just part of a larger 'Black problem', and was used to justify mass interments there. So long as the government can argue that they aren't targeting blacks, just treating crack cocaine as a special crisis that's worse than the other kind of cocaine sold to white neighborhoods, and similar claims, they can get the effect without appearing, to many, overtly racist at all.
Another possibility is to fictionalize and fractionalize problem groups in a way any opposition party would tolerate, and allow some opposition - i.e. a government saying "we have nothing against gays, just those bad, promiscuous gays who are spreading HIV by refusing to give up their promiscuity. We have to inter them, for public safety, but it's not like we are targeting all those other gays." Then the government doesn't accuse the political thorns in its side of being homosexuals, but of being secret members of the bad subtype of homosexual, when it rounds them up.
Or create a new term. Everyone's tired of the red scare era, and won't believe a government who sees commies under every bed, So call them "Unmutualists", like in The Prisoner TV show. Want to lock up those commies, or union organizers, or anyone who gets in the way of profits? Just insist that the way they sound, they are obviously secret unmutualists, using special code words that reveal their conspiracy, and not just typical protestors or unionizers or whatever. Change the new out group every few months, before a real oposition can get organized under that name, and you have a Fascism that can target problem individuals without ever having to pick on a natural group.
As another example of this, let's assume I go on geekoid's land, and set fire to his or her barn. He or she loses his or her barn, so I've stolen it, right? Of course not. I'd have committed trespassing just for attempting it, and arson if I was successful, but as geekoid put it, lost does not equal stolen. There really are crimes (and torts) besides theft, people.
If I point a gun at you, and force you to get into my car, I've deprived you of your right to freedom of movement. Ergo, by your definition, I've committed theft. If I then shoot you, I've deprived you of the life you once possessed - yep more theft. Why is it so hard for some people to see that there are other crimes besides theft?
For that matter, why do you think there are other types of copyright violation besides criminal ones? Why is there civil copyright tort at all? Why aren't all copyright violations criminal, in other words? If it's all theft, aren't you claiming there's somehow such a thing as non-criminal theft?
Now if this case involved actually taking the right to the work itself away directly, as part of the same acts of making and distributing the copies, there might be a way to justify calling it theft of the copyright itself, so I see how you might want to see the guilty party punished like it was a theft. But as I understand this case, instead there's actually two separate acts, committed at different times, that the law says have to be investigated by separate entities and probably prosecuted in different court systems, if they are to be prosecuted at all. The only way to get theft out of that would be to shuffle the two acts together, ignore venues, take only selected parts of both situations, and string just those parts together into a single crime.
To the people who want to turn this into theft because colloquial or non-legalistic uses of the word allow it: When somebody drives down a residential street with their radio blaring at 2 AM, should we charge them with murder? After all, as Shakespeare had it "Glamis hath murdered sleep." Common uses of a word can veer pretty damned far from the strict legal uses.
Judges don't let somebody whip out an OED in court and make all the definitions in it count for legal matters. If they rely on dictionaries, these are specialized for the law.
These actions aren't theft. Theft is a single crime, in and of itself. Here we have either a tort or criminal violation of copyright, followed by what's likely to count as criminal patent fraud except the patent office doesn't seem to bother to prosecute anybody anymore. The two acts together seem to have accomplished much the same result as a theft, but:
a. you can't automatically convert and consolidate a set of different torts or crimes into a single crime just because the results are (in some ways) similar.
(If you could, lying to somebody to get them to accompany you somewhere else would be kidnapping, since you have the 'transport to a different locale' part of the definition of kidnapping, and lying for such a goal could well constitute fraud in most jurisdictions. In practice, kidnapping involves force or threat of force, and you can't get around that by substituting some other crime.) (If you live in a jurisdiction that has some law re. non-forcible kidnapping, that's different, but those are unusual.)
b. you don't need to consolidate elements anyway. You can properly charge or sue the person over the two actions actually committed. If there are failures of the legal system in this case, it's that the patent fraud issue wasn't explored, or that the trial judge used a very narrow definition of economic harm that doesn't match well established common law. Both those problems should be fixed, but the fix is to deal with each of them in their own sector, not stretch the law to get something that results in a punishment WE think is reasonable despite them. Note that one of these two problems seems fixed now.
1. British 'pants' is usually underpants, not trousers. 2. Now imagine MST3K, where it's a special occasion, and Joel has just given out presents, and Gypsy got a Barbie make up set, and Tom Servo got a neat toy racecar big enough for him to drive off in, and Crow ends up getting a pair of J. C. Pennys medium brown straight leg slacks. 3. Now to really Anglicise it, imagine if Crow gets underwear instead.
Nah, he's just an old fart like me. Now that we're in our 50's, me and partner both have whole days where other things look less boring than sex. The good news is, she used to have weeks like that. As I've dropped, she's risen, and now we seem to be pretty well synced.
I'm not sure if this should be called a result of curvature or a result of Guth style expansion, but yes, it's at least quite possible that the observable radius is much, much larger than it would be for a more Newtonian model, and highly probable it's at least a little larger. If I'd known that it was even possible to get over 3 times a more linear extrapolation while sticking to pretty well established physics, I would have adjusted what I wrote, but I still thought it was more like, say, 20 or 30% at most (damned pesky back of the envelope calculations), and the post was getting pretty complex already, so I simplified.
The Wiki article is very interesting, and thanks for bringing it to my attention, but I thought there was still a lot more debate over whether the CMBR reflected only post inflationary era expansion or included enough primal photons from non-Einsteinian stretching of the metric frame (photons already in existence in the inflationary era) to skew the overall numbers. Anyway. I think I'll go with at least that lower bound figure of 78 billion in the future.
We don't necessarily have to be at or near the center of such a bubble, here's the conditions we might require:
1. We would have to somewhere be in a bubble that is much less dense than the actual average for the universe, 2. that bubble would have to be pretty uniformly less dense for the 12 Billion light year radius around us. It doesn't have to be exactly uniform, in fact one reason we might be able to detect it is if it isn't. The bubble doesn't have to be spherical, overall, or uniformly dense, overall, and the nature of the edge, where it becomes more like the rest of the universe is, is allowed some variation as well.
(In fact, from what the original paper says so far, the center of the bubble could still be even less dense than our part, just so those lower density regions were more than the observable length away.)
(If this hypothesis develops into a full fledged theory, we would probably be able at a minimum to confirm or reject the existence of even lower density regions, predict how thick the edges of the bubble are, and write an equation that describes how the density would go up, as hypothetically measured at different points in the edge.). 3. The bubble would have to be pretty big, bigger than the time it takes light to cross the entire part of the universe we can see. Since we estimate the universe is about 12 Billion years old, the edges of the bubble must be more than that number of light years away from our POV. But, we don't have to be equally near all edges.
(We could still possibly see some effects from what is now farther away, because we can observe things such as the cosmic microwave background, that preserve data from the very early times when things were much closer together. We could also see the indirect effects of gravity on things we can see directly in the visible, Gamma or UV ranges). 4. We would have to be near enough to an edge in at least one direction that we could see the effects of those hypothetical average density regions that lie farther than 12 Billion light years away. That way, we may never be able to see them directly, but we can infer them from the parts we can see, so this becomes testable. So if the bubble is much bigger than 24 billion light years across, we must not be too near the center. The bigger the bubble is, the farther out from the center we would have to be to detect something, but that's still a pretty general requirement that we be somewhere in a pretty big volume, not really something improbable or requiring a particularly privledged viewpoint. Our view would be unusual, but not unique. 5. Near enough in point 4 depends on how swiftly the edge of the bubble changes to a more average density, and just what the average is, among other factors. Again, actually coming up with some more specific numbers is what will happen if this hypothesis gets developed into a more established theory. The researchers will calculate some combinations of overall size, rate of change at the edges, and density for the larger universe, and see if there are combinations that predict something we can observe to test them, while throwing out combinations that lead to conclusions contrary to what we can observe. Better yet, a lot of our existing observations can be used to swiftly develop this hypothesis - this is much more testable right now than, say, string theory.
Right. At the Niagara Falls powerplant, there are still plaques on some generators and such, that list the relevant patent holders. It's amazing to see some with twenty or so names, mostly 1 or 2 patents per name, and then Tesla's name with a string of numbers after it that stretches for paragraphs, (and probably ends with 'continued on next machine...'). But, most people don't know who he was, and a lot who could vaguely identify him as an inventor still think of him more as Rotwang in Fritz lang's Metropolis than as THE person who made things such as the New York power grid possible.
I think the phrase you are focusing on is better rendered as 'natural rights'. Saying "I don't believe there can be a natural law..." sounds more like you have a problem with Newton or something than with the Bible, or any other set of social rules.
But there are places where natural rights, natural law, and such make great sense. For example, where does the US Constitution's copyright law come from? If it starts as a restriction on a natural right to copy, then the original 'for a limited time' clause makes sense. People only have a limited time to exercise a natural right to copy - that is while they are actually alive. No one can naturally copy anything even a second after they die. If instituted copyright is an abridgment and reassignment of a natural right, then when man made copyright ends, the remaining right automatically reverts to the individual person. So, people who frequently used phrases such as "Nature and Nature's God", wrote a rule where the result was originally a limited time, much less than a typical lifespan, and didn't spell out what needed to happen afterwards, suggesting they thought it was pretty obvious. (And it is pretty damned obvious if the Right in question starts with a 'Natural Right', less so if it doesn't).
Look what getting rid of the concept of someting originating in natural rights does there. First, 'a limited time' becomes 'possibly just one second short of forever', not 'less than an average human lifetime', so a period such as 'life+70' years, looks just as limited under the modern interpretation as the original 14 or 28 years once did, at least to the Supreme Court we have now. Second, copyright becomes a right created by government fiat, rather than one transferred, so retroactively extending copyright on an already existing body of work stops counting as even possibly 'taking without compensation'.
I'm sure that plenty of people could pick this or some other area of law and show how Natural Rights either help explain it or make no sense at all there. I picked copyright because it's been a popular topic on Slashdot. I'm not a lawyer, and the explanation I've suggested here most assuredly isn't one the high court accepts, so please don't anyone expect this argument to work if they are involved in a legal case regarding copyright. On the other hand, there was a time I could have written the last few sentences about the Dred Scott decision with only minor changes.
Eisenhower was the one who coined the phrase "military-industrial complex". Richard Nixon was for at least some price controls, and a guarenteed minimum income. Ronald Reagan once said that persuit of higher profits was much more likely to really screw up the economy than persuit of higher wages. The pendulum has swung very far to the right already, that all of those individuals now seem positioned to the left of it.
This is part of a broader spectrum of ignorance. There are easily 20 times as many people who know who Paris Hilton is than who Buckminster Fuller was. Ask somebody what else the Lear who built Learjets invented first. What did Tesla do that actually got built and worked? What branch of the US government did Learned Hand work for? Who was Armand Hammer? Milton Canniff? Leon Trotsky? Ludwig Mies van der Rohe? George Adamski? Alvin York? All of these died less than a century ago, which should make it a bit easier.
Ask people to name 3 famous physicists, without starting with Einstein. Name 3 famous architects, without including Frank Lloyd Wright. Name 3 famous individuals from the Renaissance, without Michaelangelo and DaVinci (I have to exclude two there, but only because of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). If Henry Ford founded Ford motors, who founded General Motors?
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This sounds like shorting, and particularly 'naked shorting', relates to a broader problem that's been much in the news lately.
It's pretty fundamental to abstract capitalism, that people who invest have capital, and they put up that capital, and that capital does a number of things, such as paying for materials and salaries/wages. If you don't have enough capital for a given investment system, you stick to what you can afford, and if you have no capital, you work for someone else. I've been puzzled by the number of businesses that have said "Without this rescue plan, we may not be able to pay our employees.". If they didn't themselves have the money to be in at the capital end of things, why are they the employers and not the employees? Why are some people evidently able to get credit so that they can play at being capitalists, without actually having capital of their own? Naked shorting looks like playing with somebody else putting up the money, but so does a lot of the rest of the system.
I'd have to lean towards even normal shorting being an abuse. As you put it, collateral can be just your reputation. Why? It looks like whole businesses were founded on just reputation, or at least massively under-collateralized. That appears to be pretty common. Some people were 'in the capitalist class', whether they actually had capital or not. Old school ties or something. They could get capital loans and credit regardless of whether they had their own money at risk. If that situation entailed a fundamental error, then the honesty of normal shorting mechanisms isn't enough to make it more ethical than naked shorting, because there's still a fundamental fraudulence at the time of picking who gets to play the game. The in-game rules may be fairer than for naked shorting, but the playing field itself is un-level.
One example doesn't make a broad pattern. You however appear to be under the really, really odd impression that conventional right and left matters, but the whole idea of classifying fascism as the conventional far, far right doesn't. As Ren put it, "Which is it, Man!!".
At the same time, I agree that your 'not going to limit free speech, only dangerous hateful speech' is an excellent example of just what I'm talking about.
Again, I'm not the one who said they didn't start scapegoating Jews, you are the one putting those words in my mouth. I said large numbers, and I defined what I meant by large , and by that definition, it's accurate. It agrees with what at least the vast majority of established historians teach on the subject. It's not some Nazi apologist's rantings, it's as accurate history as we have, the numbers interred entered six digit ranges in late 41, period. The main point I drew from it, that there was no wide spread opposition on moral grounds to putting smaller groups or groups that couldn't be defined as simply as by race or ethnicity into those same camps, is also, simply true, or are you saying it isn't.
You're the second person who immediately questioned my education in response. The other person insists the appropriate date is Nov 38, not Oct 39, so you two don't agree with each other. So how about you insult each other, instead of me? I can't get an education that agrees with both of you, and whichever one I please, the other will still be playing the "Ha, you said something I can take out of context and twist to prove my own moral superiority" game.
So your own article mentions approximately 25,000 in 1938, and refers to Krystallnacht as a prelude to the holocaust and not part of the actual event. It was, granted, an element of an ongoing process. I mentioned total numbers in the hundred thousands as late as 41, with 10's of thousands for the gypsies (Romany) in the same period. That's accurate. My mentioning specific numbers at specific times makes it pretty clear what I meant by 'really starting' and 'large numbers', and the figures I gave are all accurate, main-stream history. But even if that wasn't clear, you presumably know that the estimated total casualties of the Holocaust were around 12 Million, with 6 Million of them Jewish, so 'large numbers' should be pretty damned self explanatory.
I mentioned reclassification of arrested people, i.e. people who were arrested as radical dissidents and politically motivated opposition, and then reclassified later as being a problem primarily because they were Jews. Your pop article doesn't go into that, but should, because it happened quite a bit, and in particular, many of the laws that allowed blanket arrests and interment of Jews, simply as Jews, still had to be passed after Krystallnacht. One of its major roles in history was as a pretext to pass more laws, which obviously had to be passed later than Nov. of 38.
Here's a link, which mentions how the actual attacks of Kristallnacht were set up in a covert fashion, using Nazi groups who were willing to act outside the law. As this site puts it, ""Krystallnacht" was so called because of a deliberate but veiled edict which went out from the Reich to thoroughly destroy, ransack and loot all Jewish Business." and "The Jews who were rounded up and incarcerated became known as the "November Jews"and were among the first of mass deportations and imprisonments which were to take place over the next few years." :http://www.shoaheducation.com/krystallnacht.html
Past it yourself, I've forgotten how to use slashcode.
In the mean time, most of those people actually arrested over the next few months were arrested for being Bolsheviks or Anarchists, or having violated some control law such as a curfew. At that time, the Reich was still keeping up a legal pretense of merely desiring to control the Jewish population and not force it all into exile, let alone extermination (which they never really admitted to for the general public) But go right ahead with your "That's wrong. Please read some history books."
I wish all the people who keep yelling that copyright violation = theft, would start yelling that "it's a bonus when we say it is, it's core content when we say it is" = lying. How about "you've bought a physical product - no you've just bought a liscence" = lying? Fraud? Crooked as a dog's hind leg?
Also, game developers don't diserve shit from used game dealers.
Not forgetting that a lot of used game dealers are primarily in some other line of work, like used book or video sellers. There's nothing at all, under free market rules, copyright law, or whatever, to stop a used game store from deciding to pay less for games with dropped special features, or even all games from that company. They can put up a big sign that says "We pay 5$ less for ALL Foo games, because they inactivate some features for the used trade.". This is entirely justifiable, as the business does not know and can't be expected to take the time to figure out, just which Foo games are actually to blame, and the business can also assume many customers will just take the lazy approach and assume ALL Foo games have this defect. Now if games aren't even the business's primary line, and they make more money on books or comics or music, why on earth will they bother with anything fancy? A blanket discount on all used Foo games, or a simple refusal to buy them at all, starts making sense from their business model.
I actually liked some of the activation codewheels that came with some of the old D&D silver-box system, Bard's Tale, or various SSI products of yore. You could fiddle with those before the game, and when they made the ones with various place names, characters, and such, and not just random words, you got clues to the game - (Who is Vala? In which of these places will I encounter him/her? Will I have to go to all these locations to complete the game? Why is an Emerald Orb mentioned on this codewheel?) There were optional side quests in some games that were pretty hard to find, and it was often only the codewheel that gave you a clue you had missed something. Done right (which it often wasn't), the codewheel became more a part of the game and less just an anti-copying trick.
Oh, and the FNORDs work for me....
I don't think we are really to zero just yet. I'm even a little piqued at all the people who are arguing that most people will pirate because the goods are effectively free, and free always beats any other price. What I'm seeing is people buying 500 Gb. hard drives to hold that 'free' content, plus commercial disk burning and processing software, tons of blank DVDs, monthly paid Usenet access, and other costs for this 'free' stuff. I'm also seeing people spend a lot of time learning esoteric software just to handle obstacles such as RAR'ed and PAR'ed files or y-enc encoding, and sometimes buying commercial software for such tasks. Even if there was no risk from the RIAA to getting caught torrenting, the user has to provide drivespace and bandwidth to maintain a good ratio. Even once users have paid the one-time costs to own and learn software, there seems to be a lot of checking copies to make sure they are good enough, hand editing and even repairing going on.
I'm not saying that pirating can't save money, or that people are necessarily being illogical if that's their sole motivation. I'm also not saying that there aren't people who value their spare time at a pretty low rate, or people who don't care about the difference between a commercial CD quality track and a 128 K MP3. But the more I look at it, the more it looks like most pirates just about have to have other motives drawing them in than just to get stuff free. A lot of them have to be going after stuff they can't get legitimately at any normal price, like porn in some jurisdictions (i.e. Saudi Arabia), or their favorite old TV series that's never made it to DVD.
Once those people get the things they want most, they've bought the extra-sized drives, DVD-burners, and such, and they've paid the time costs to learn to do some non-mainstream-windows XP stuff on their PCs, so at that point pirating just because it's 'free' (really meaning comparatively very cheap, but not quite free), probably makes economic sense.
If the __AA's and such are just trying to deter piracy based on the idea all pirates are cheapskates, they aren't addressing the causes that get neo-pirates over the initial hump. I for one, wouldn't expect much success at getting the consumers back into line after they have already rebelled for other reasons, instead of before they stray. But if the industries don't know those other reason exist, or can't acknowledge it publicly, their chance of success must be miniscule.
You probably meant a specific right "Right of First Sale" if you're talking US law. Right of first sale is a pretty well defined area of law, and better, one of the pivotal early cases actually involved resale of used books so the distinction between purchasing the abstract speech and the physical medium was addressed by the court.
I've seen right of first sale included in discussions of fair use by real copyright lawyers, so maybe you were actually technically right the first time, but it isn't what most people think of as an example of fair use, so I hope this helps. You're making some interesting arguments.
One of the real concerns is, how successful would a Fascist state be if it carefully avoided scapegoating whole races or ethnicities? What happens if the government bends over backwards to avoid specifically profiling Muslems as terrorists, but still keeps people constantly worried about those unspecified but presumably swarthy terrorists still lurking out there in some not too carefully specified cells. Does Fascism have to simplify everything into racial or ethnic lines, or can it survive by creating more nuanced pools of enemies.
At this late date, most people have lost sight of the fact that the Nazis didn't really start putting Jews in the camps, in large numbers, until late 1941 or early 42. Before that, the camps programs had focused on minor criminals and mental defectives with the claim that they would be rehabilitated and not simply destroyed.
Smaller religious groups had already been classed as enemies of the state, i.e. most of the estimated 45,000 Seventh Day Adventists in Germany were rounded up or forced to leave for refusing to swear loyalty oaths before 41, but people didn't react to such numbers. A lot of Romany and Jews entered the programs at this time (with a lot being tens or hundreds of thousands respectively by 1941, not the millions later), but most of the Romany were the ones classed as petty criminals, and most of the Jews as Bolsheviks, Wobblies, or other political problems, not for their race, per se. It was after that time that they were reclassified as just part of the larger Jewish problem.
If something similar happened in America, it would probably involve (as just one example) a transition where the black population currently in prison for mostly drug offenses became just part of a larger 'Black problem', and was used to justify mass interments there. So long as the government can argue that they aren't targeting blacks, just treating crack cocaine as a special crisis that's worse than the other kind of cocaine sold to white neighborhoods, and similar claims, they can get the effect without appearing, to many, overtly racist at all.
Another possibility is to fictionalize and fractionalize problem groups in a way any opposition party would tolerate, and allow some opposition - i.e. a government saying "we have nothing against gays, just those bad, promiscuous gays who are spreading HIV by refusing to give up their promiscuity. We have to inter them, for public safety, but it's not like we are targeting all those other gays." Then the government doesn't accuse the political thorns in its side of being homosexuals, but of being secret members of the bad subtype of homosexual, when it rounds them up.
Or create a new term. Everyone's tired of the red scare era, and won't believe a government who sees commies under every bed, So call them "Unmutualists", like in The Prisoner TV show. Want to lock up those commies, or union organizers, or anyone who gets in the way of profits? Just insist that the way they sound, they are obviously secret unmutualists, using special code words that reveal their conspiracy, and not just typical protestors or unionizers or whatever. Change the new out group every few months, before a real oposition can get organized under that name, and you have a Fascism that can target problem individuals without ever having to pick on a natural group.
As another example of this, let's assume I go on geekoid's land, and set fire to his or her barn. He or she loses his or her barn, so I've stolen it, right? Of course not. I'd have committed trespassing just for attempting it, and arson if I was successful, but as geekoid put it, lost does not equal stolen. There really are crimes (and torts) besides theft, people.
If I point a gun at you, and force you to get into my car, I've deprived you of your right to freedom of movement. Ergo, by your definition, I've committed theft. If I then shoot you, I've deprived you of the life you once possessed - yep more theft. Why is it so hard for some people to see that there are other crimes besides theft?
For that matter, why do you think there are other types of copyright violation besides criminal ones? Why is there civil copyright tort at all? Why aren't all copyright violations criminal, in other words? If it's all theft, aren't you claiming there's somehow such a thing as non-criminal theft?
Now if this case involved actually taking the right to the work itself away directly, as part of the same acts of making and distributing the copies, there might be a way to justify calling it theft of the copyright itself, so I see how you might want to see the guilty party punished like it was a theft. But as I understand this case, instead there's actually two separate acts, committed at different times, that the law says have to be investigated by separate entities and probably prosecuted in different court systems, if they are to be prosecuted at all. The only way to get theft out of that would be to shuffle the two acts together, ignore venues, take only selected parts of both situations, and string just those parts together into a single crime.
To the people who want to turn this into theft because colloquial or non-legalistic uses of the word allow it: When somebody drives down a residential street with their radio blaring at 2 AM, should we charge them with murder? After all, as Shakespeare had it "Glamis hath murdered sleep." Common uses of a word can veer pretty damned far from the strict legal uses.
Judges don't let somebody whip out an OED in court and make all the definitions in it count for legal matters. If they rely on dictionaries, these are specialized for the law.
These actions aren't theft. Theft is a single crime, in and of itself. Here we have either a tort or criminal violation of copyright, followed by what's likely to count as criminal patent fraud except the patent office doesn't seem to bother to prosecute anybody anymore. The two acts together seem to have accomplished much the same result as a theft, but:
a. you can't automatically convert and consolidate a set of different torts or crimes into a single crime just because the results are (in some ways) similar.
(If you could, lying to somebody to get them to accompany you somewhere else would be kidnapping, since you have the 'transport to a different locale' part of the definition of kidnapping, and lying for such a goal could well constitute fraud in most jurisdictions. In practice, kidnapping involves force or threat of force, and you can't get around that by substituting some other crime.) (If you live in a jurisdiction that has some law re. non-forcible kidnapping, that's different, but those are unusual.)
b. you don't need to consolidate elements anyway. You can properly charge or sue the person over the two actions actually committed. If there are failures of the legal system in this case, it's that the patent fraud issue wasn't explored, or that the trial judge used a very narrow definition of economic harm that doesn't match well established common law. Both those problems should be fixed, but the fix is to deal with each of them in their own sector, not stretch the law to get something that results in a punishment WE think is reasonable despite them. Note that one of these two problems seems fixed now.
Yeah, I'm not getting on one of those after Penn's been there!
Can anyone prove The Hedgehog isn't already experienced in zero-gee sex, say on the voyage here from his native planet?
1. British 'pants' is usually underpants, not trousers.
2. Now imagine MST3K, where it's a special occasion, and Joel has just given out presents, and Gypsy got a Barbie make up set, and Tom Servo got a neat toy racecar big enough for him to drive off in, and Crow ends up getting a pair of J. C. Pennys medium brown straight leg slacks.
3. Now to really Anglicise it, imagine if Crow gets underwear instead.
Nah, he's just an old fart like me. Now that we're in our 50's, me and partner both have whole days where other things look less boring than sex. The good news is, she used to have weeks like that. As I've dropped, she's risen, and now we seem to be pretty well synced.
I'm not sure if this should be called a result of curvature or a result of Guth style expansion, but yes, it's at least quite possible that the observable radius is much, much larger than it would be for a more Newtonian model, and highly probable it's at least a little larger. If I'd known that it was even possible to get over 3 times a more linear extrapolation while sticking to pretty well established physics, I would have adjusted what I wrote, but I still thought it was more like, say, 20 or 30% at most (damned pesky back of the envelope calculations), and the post was getting pretty complex already, so I simplified.
The Wiki article is very interesting, and thanks for bringing it to my attention, but I thought there was still a lot more debate over whether the CMBR reflected only post inflationary era expansion or included enough primal photons from non-Einsteinian stretching of the metric frame (photons already in existence in the inflationary era) to skew the overall numbers. Anyway. I think I'll go with at least that lower bound figure of 78 billion in the future.
We don't necessarily have to be at or near the center of such a bubble, here's the conditions we might require:
1. We would have to somewhere be in a bubble that is much less dense than the actual average for the universe,
2. that bubble would have to be pretty uniformly less dense for the 12 Billion light year radius around us. It doesn't have to be exactly uniform, in fact one reason we might be able to detect it is if it isn't. The bubble doesn't have to be spherical, overall, or uniformly dense, overall, and the nature of the edge, where it becomes more like the rest of the universe is, is allowed some variation as well.
(In fact, from what the original paper says so far, the center of the bubble could still be even less dense than our part, just so those lower density regions were more than the observable length away.)
(If this hypothesis develops into a full fledged theory, we would probably be able at a minimum to confirm or reject the existence of even lower density regions, predict how thick the edges of the bubble are, and write an equation that describes how the density would go up, as hypothetically measured at different points in the edge.).
3. The bubble would have to be pretty big, bigger than the time it takes light to cross the entire part of the universe we can see. Since we estimate the universe is about 12 Billion years old, the edges of the bubble must be more than that number of light years away from our POV. But, we don't have to be equally near all edges.
(We could still possibly see some effects from what is now farther away, because we can observe things such as the cosmic microwave background, that preserve data from the very early times when things were much closer together. We could also see the indirect effects of gravity on things we can see directly in the visible, Gamma or UV ranges).
4. We would have to be near enough to an edge in at least one direction that we could see the effects of those hypothetical average density regions that lie farther than 12 Billion light years away. That way, we may never be able to see them directly, but we can infer them from the parts we can see, so this becomes testable. So if the bubble is much bigger than 24 billion light years across, we must not be too near the center. The bigger the bubble is, the farther out from the center we would have to be to detect something, but that's still a pretty general requirement that we be somewhere in a pretty big volume, not really something improbable or requiring a particularly privledged viewpoint. Our view would be unusual, but not unique.
5. Near enough in point 4 depends on how swiftly the edge of the bubble changes to a more average density, and just what the average is, among other factors. Again, actually coming up with some more specific numbers is what will happen if this hypothesis gets developed into a more established theory. The researchers will calculate some combinations of overall size, rate of change at the edges, and density for the larger universe, and see if there are combinations that predict something we can observe to test them, while throwing out combinations that lead to conclusions contrary to what we can observe. Better yet, a lot of our existing observations can be used to swiftly develop this hypothesis - this is much more testable right now than, say, string theory.
Right. At the Niagara Falls powerplant, there are still plaques on some generators and such, that list the relevant patent holders. It's amazing to see some with twenty or so names, mostly 1 or 2 patents per name, and then Tesla's name with a string of numbers after it that stretches for paragraphs, (and probably ends with 'continued on next machine...'). But, most people don't know who he was, and a lot who could vaguely identify him as an inventor still think of him more as Rotwang in Fritz lang's Metropolis than as THE person who made things such as the New York power grid possible.
I think the phrase you are focusing on is better rendered as 'natural rights'. Saying "I don't believe there can be a natural law..." sounds more like you have a problem with Newton or something than with the Bible, or any other set of social rules.
But there are places where natural rights, natural law, and such make great sense. For example, where does the US Constitution's copyright law come from? If it starts as a restriction on a natural right to copy, then the original 'for a limited time' clause makes sense. People only have a limited time to exercise a natural right to copy - that is while they are actually alive. No one can naturally copy anything even a second after they die. If instituted copyright is an abridgment and reassignment of a natural right, then when man made copyright ends, the remaining right automatically reverts to the individual person. So, people who frequently used phrases such as "Nature and Nature's God", wrote a rule where the result was originally a limited time, much less than a typical lifespan, and didn't spell out what needed to happen afterwards, suggesting they thought it was pretty obvious. (And it is pretty damned obvious if the Right in question starts with a 'Natural Right', less so if it doesn't).
Look what getting rid of the concept of someting originating in natural rights does there. First, 'a limited time' becomes 'possibly just one second short of forever', not 'less than an average human lifetime', so a period such as 'life+70' years, looks just as limited under the modern interpretation as the original 14 or 28 years once did, at least to the Supreme Court we have now. Second, copyright becomes a right created by government fiat, rather than one transferred, so retroactively extending copyright on an already existing body of work stops counting as even possibly 'taking without compensation'.
I'm sure that plenty of people could pick this or some other area of law and show how Natural Rights either help explain it or make no sense at all there. I picked copyright because it's been a popular topic on Slashdot. I'm not a lawyer, and the explanation I've suggested here most assuredly isn't one the high court accepts, so please don't anyone expect this argument to work if they are involved in a legal case regarding copyright. On the other hand, there was a time I could have written the last few sentences about the Dred Scott decision with only minor changes.
Eisenhower was the one who coined the phrase "military-industrial complex".
Richard Nixon was for at least some price controls, and a guarenteed minimum income.
Ronald Reagan once said that persuit of higher profits was much more likely to really screw up the economy than persuit of higher wages.
The pendulum has swung very far to the right already, that all of those individuals now seem positioned to the left of it.
This is part of a broader spectrum of ignorance. There are easily 20 times as many people who know who Paris Hilton is than who Buckminster Fuller was. Ask somebody what else the Lear who built Learjets invented first. What did Tesla do that actually got built and worked? What branch of the US government did Learned Hand work for? Who was Armand Hammer? Milton Canniff? Leon Trotsky? Ludwig Mies van der Rohe? George Adamski? Alvin York? All of these died less than a century ago, which should make it a bit easier.
Ask people to name 3 famous physicists, without starting with Einstein. Name 3 famous architects, without including Frank Lloyd Wright. Name 3 famous individuals from the Renaissance, without Michaelangelo and DaVinci (I have to exclude two there, but only because of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). If Henry Ford founded Ford motors, who founded General Motors?
We haven't needed to keep that secret for seven years now.