This points up one of the basic problems with public marches, one we saw in the 60's civil rights movement, the Vietnam war protests, and ever since.
When you get 10,000 people or more together, some small percentage of them will invariably be people who have criminal records, mental illness issues, or who have said something that sounds really stupid, especially if quoted out of context. That percentage could be 25% or 2%, but it's there.
This is one area where computer technology makes a huge difference. Photograph the crowd, and now-a-days you can match many faces up with names and records, so you can find that percentage, and if it fits your agenda, make it look like the whole crowd was made up of these sorts of people. You can describe the known nutbars as ringleaders and organizers even if they were fringe members and otherwise start a smear campaign against your opposition. With face recognition tech, you can also do this very quickly, while the protest is still newsworthy and fresh in people's minds. Modern tech makes a smear campaign both more useful and more generally successful.
This is one of those Faux-News talking points. The militant right has pundits, spokespeople, and press agents who have been told to hammer away at the idea that the anti-war movement is the traditional left, that this makes them the same as the pro-union 'left', the pro-NEA 'left', the pro-ACLU 'left', and that all of these are really the HIPPIE DRUGGY COMMIE LEFT.
I disagree with many of this current administration's actions - that doesn't mean I would stoop to claim they are all strung out on Oxycontin.
The whole way savings and capital gains taxes have been changed under this administration is a huge con game:
There's a saver's credit, which is now tiered at 50%, 20%, and 10%, before being phased out entirely. The very poorest group of people, typically making less than 15,000 for a single filer, or 22,500 for a single parent head of household, gets the 50% credit if they save for their own retirement with something like an IRA or 401-K. Most of them are too poor to save anything at all. If they are making less than $15K, what's the chance they have an employer who matches 401K contributions? If they are making less than $15K, how likely is it they can put a typical minimum balance in an IRA, when that can take from 1,000 to 2,000 dollars to start? So the 50% bracket group can't afford even such a 'generous' setup, and if, through serious determination and exceptional fiscal prudence, they manage, the credit mostly just balances the lack of employer matching before it actually improves the employee's bottom line. If they are making a little more, and might actually be able to save, the credit drops at $15,001 to 20%. A plan that really wanted to encourage the working poor to save for their own retirements would have many small steps or a smooth curve instead of this huge differential.
Then there's capital gains. Long term (where you hold the stock or whatever more than a year) capital gains has a 5% bottom rate, then jumps right to 15%. Again, almost nobody eligible for the 5% rate actually has long term investments (less than 1 in 100 people eligible). They get a "50% discount" if they are in the bottom 10% tax rate, but it drops off by half in shelf like fashion for anyone a trifle above that. With little access to mutual funds, particularly conservative, balanced funds that often have base investment amounts in the thousands, taking advantage of capital gains for the very poor can often be limited to the riskiest way, buying a few shares of this and that penny stock without professional advice.
The laws sound very generous, as phrased, but in practice, almost no one qualifies. They are feel-good laws, where the government says in effect, "See, we do care about the poor.", but very little actual money transferring occurs compared to something like raising the poverty limit, extending the EIC to cover more than 2 children, or even enforcing the existing law for people who are being wrongly carried as self employed but should count as employees. The government loses almost no tax revenues from these laws (at least as they affect the poorest bracket - there may be some benefits to the upper middle class that actually reduce the government's revenues a bit).
Company says "CDs will cost $5 more than LPs or Cassettes, but that's just until they stop being experimental - then the price will come down". CDs become the default medium, price doesn't drop.
(And company still gives artists lower royalties per unit for CDs using the same argument).
Company says "We will continue to market CDs, but we need to get the CD standard and definition changed."
I'm not saying you're wrong to characterize what some listeners are doing as moving the goalposts, but that's some listeners, while others do come back to the market and buy music if their particular complaint is addressed. Meanwhile, the RIAA has been moving the goalposts on its own in various ways, and until recently, it hasn't been some members, it's been a totally unified 100% action.
Mmmmh well, about the lying, isn't it some kind of nasty crime to in court?
Perjury? Normally, when a judge thinks someone is lying in a civil trial (as opposed to a criminal one) they don't invoke perjury law. Instead, they just direct the jury. This can mean the judge flat out tells the jury to disregard that testimony entirely, or just that the jury gets frequent reminders that they are to decide on the preponderance, and that some point which counts as a possible doubt doesn't really matter in a civil case unless the odds are better it is true than the alternative. Assuring the jury that it can ignore testimony it thinks is false, and can and should judge other testimony from the same person in that light is usually enough.
if she did all that trickery, wouldn't it be plausible that she did shared *knowing* that it was illegal?
The law in this case uses a willfulness test, and yes, members of the jury could easily decide that trickery after the actual deed was enough to make it more plausible than not that she had willful intent to violate the law all along. In fact, that's probably what most of them did.
I'm going to assume you are at least a little serious. The strict, young earth creationism model assumes the Bible is totally correct if taken totally literally. Thus, God used six literal 24 hour days to create the world, and all the accounts in Genesis after that add up to allegedly accurate totals.
Genesis is actually very full of numbers, i.e.:
Adam died at 930 years old. The oldest man was Methuselah, living to 969.
or
Noah, at 600 years old, boarded the boat, and it rained for forty days and forty nights. After 150 days, the boat rested upon the mountains of Ararat.
There is actually a whole book of the old testament that is named Numbers!
In the new testament, there are some similar references, for example, there are several monarchs described as simultaneously ruling different locations: Augustus, Cyrenius * as Roman governor of Persia, a particular one of the Herods as king of Judea. Dates can be generated, either from the Bible or from other sources such as Roman official records. Anyone can calibrate these to see if other sources show a possible overlap of reigns and check this against other dates, and lots of people have.
* Publius Sulpicius Quirinus, to use the actual Roman name and not the Greek variant.
Anyone can take these numbers and do basic math with them. The could also start with some independently confirmed date such as the Assyrian conquest of the region and add and subtract to see if the resulting dates match with other non-biblical sources, etc. Some of these sorts of calculations come out accurate or pretty close, some don't, but you can definitely do real math with them. Whether the conclusions this process points to are right or wrong, the math itself is valid.
I actually find questions like yours rather eerie. I mean, you or anyone else is certainly free to decide you don't think the old testament accounts correspond to real history, or that the whole Bible is not a valid guide to the origin and nature of the universe, or many other things, but it sounds rather like you are claiming that, if the Bible says 16+17=33, then it must be wrong about that too.
Of course, you may not mean it that way, but many people are so anti-religion that one reads really strange claims from some critics - for example claims that since Augustus is mentioned in the Bible, there was no real Roman emperor with that name. There was a prominent French philosopher who claimed that ALL religions with the idea of an afterlife got the idea from Egyptian sources, and when it was pointed out to him that Neanderthals had burial practices that seemed to indicate they believed in an afterlife, said the Neanderthals must have gotten the idea from the Egyptians. If this is the sort of point you are trying to make, you really should seek help.
A legal notice, prepared so as to be admissible in a court proceeding, becomes a document of the court. As such, its broader publication is from then on to be determined by a judge, who could, for example seal the record, theoretically including the document. Unless a judge actually did this, the document is part of the public record, subject to various 'sunshine laws' and basic rules for federal proceedings, that override any assertion of copyright.
The proper method to deal with publication is to go ahead and press the case, and ask the judge to issue an order prohibiting both sides from discussing the case in public forums as a pre-trial motion. There is no real venue to stop publication of the legal notice short of actually taking the case to court, and there are some powerful SCOTUS decisions on the first amendment issues involved that say any such method would be prior restraint.
(please note my Sig. Any actual lawyers please feel free to correct me if I have got anything wrong here.)
Focoma said: "Fact A: Religious practices sometimes produce certain psychological effects." You misquoted: "Psychological effects produce religious practices"
You're not just inverting what he said (which is bad enough), you're omitting that word "sometimes" which claims the situation simply doesn't simplify as much as you'd like it to, and the word "certain" which implies a subset of a larger class exists in his arguement.
Psychology, Religion, and Epistemology (which is the real subject of this thread), are complex subjects, worthy of real thought. The person who oversimplifies is almost invariably the wrongest. Your argument then goes on to throw in words such as all and nothing, quotation marks used for ironic distance, and an extended Ad Hom attack. You don't say which 'facts' you consider dubious, you don't say why, and you base the argument on one fact I consider more dubious than any of his, the claim that ALL religious effects have psychological causes. That's simply a restatement of your first claim, with no new facts being presented. It's the very point people are still expecting you to prove, just rephrased.
You can call me a blind, raging nerd if you want, but your question has a terribly flawed assumption. Plenty of people have been wrong, and still defended their actions rhetorically in one way or another. People have more or less respect for that claim, depending on the case.
But, there are cases where the claim is obviously delusional, or worse. There are criminals right now, even ones on various death rows, for crimes such as raping and murdering five year olds, who claim that their victims really deserved it, and the society is persecuting them, and they actually "did the right thing". Some of them probably actually believe it.
Enron's execs sounded a lot like Darl after their trials (as far as Ken Lay got). They too made the statements about how they still believed what they did was right, and that their opposition was motivated by venial concerns. What they don't understand, what Darl doesn't, and what you evidently don't either is one simple word: JUSTICE.
Now if you know of one thing RMS has done that puts him in the category of meriting the swift and determined application of justice, by all means mention it - but as of now, I am pretty damned confident that Darl will eventually be found guilty of at least a couple of serious crimes. Certain statements he has made to the public will eventually result in an SEC action, and probably perjury, tax fraud, and plain old fraud charges. Other actions such as his seeking to find and publish personal information on P. J. at Groklaw will likely move these actions into RICO act territory, and at that time, Darl will become a convicted racketeer. Even if this doesn't happen, there is no ethical innocence in his actions. He made statements that he either knew were untrue, or that he thought were true only because he didn't do the elementary fact checking any professional should know. If he didn't actively lie to the court, to his investors, and to others, it's because he was criminally negligent, terrifyingly so, in his duties, and not just any simple negligence. There is no rational way of looking at his actions that excuses them. If he truly holds the opinion that there is then he is simply unable to look at his own actions without desperate evasion. I can't think of anything even proportionately similar in RMS's activities - perhaps he rationalizes as much as the average person, or more, but for all I actually have evidence for there, RMS may well be better than typical. To conflate these two examples, criminal and non-criminal - "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
Let's go to a movie. We'll sit in a comfy chair, and watch Indiana Jones dodge boulders. What happens?
1. Usually, a person enters a state that can be described as focused monomania (just as Hypnosis can be described). For an hour and a half, they focus on the film so that they are unaware of anything beyond the edges of the screen. They believe the events shown are every bit as real as real life until the film is over. They jump when Ripley opens a hatch and the ship's cat pops out. They cringe when Michael Myers swings an axe. They get aroused when... Ahem, I'll keep this within the realm of Slashdot. I don't want to think about what arouses many of you. In fact, it's very hard to enjoy a film at all without getting that deeply into it. People don't just forget their external environment, often they forget their bladders unless the need becomes really critical, or sit so still that a foot 'goes to sleep' or similar effects. It takes a real annoyance to snap many of them out of it, a cell phone ringing, loud talking, or worse (and it's perceived as a distinct annoyance to be 'snapped out of it').
2. A conscious person, typically of normal mental health, has had an out of the body experience lasting typically 90 minutes or so. The other things in life that can allegedly normally cause such an effect aren't present. There's no chemical disturbance of the brain (as from a hallucinogen). There's no physical disturbance (as from a blow to the head). There's no build up of fatigue toxins (as is sometimes used to explain sleep related mental effects). There's nothing but images, images which in the hands of a skilled artist can be so compelling that we choose to become entangled, enthralled, enraptured.
3. Now describe it in evolutionary terms: We observe some members of a species that has just developed many of its unique brain functions over the last million years. They have lived for 99.999% of that time in small groups typically numbering less than 30. The single most common predator for that entire time was members of other small groups of humans, who typically were just as virulently cannibalistic as we observe today in chimpanzees. Without any of the causes we normally consider to cause a brain dis-function, these members of that species have become totally oblivious to large numbers of strangers, not of their tribe, they have made a deliberate, determined effort to become so, and to stay in that state for an extended time.
4. The mystery is, why, after doing that once, do humans not realize what they have done, run out of movie theaters screaming, and never return?
Not realizing how bad it's getting is common - Mary Tyler Moore found out she was Type 2 when her initial test came back 775. Her doctor said "Don't take this wrong, but how come you're not dead?". You have it tougher with Type 1, as levels can change so fast. Plus, at 5 shots a day, you're probably putting some real wear and tear on your abdomen - I never had to do more than 2 at a time.
I test every morning before eating anything, and do a second sample 2 hours after a meal, every other day. If I feel off for any other reason (like the flu), there's extra testing to make sure it's not diabetes related. There is one study from last year that says people in my particular category can probably cut back to maybe 3x a week, but I'm not going to consider it unless some more studies confirm it. If you're testing 5 times a day, I'll bet there are tiny black dots all over the sides of most of your fingers - you can never really catch up at that level - you're constantly looking for a fresh spot, etc.
I'm a 50 year old type 2 diabetic. I weigh 210 lbs, have a 34 inch waist, and stand 6'1", can bench press more than my body weight, and run an average of 12-14 Miles/week. Even in this condition, I have to use an oral medication (Glucophage) to fully control my blood sugar.
When I was first diagnosed, I had let myself get out of shape, and weighed about 225. I had to use insulin for about six months until I built enough muscle and lost enough fat to go to just oral meds, and for the first year after that, I had to take several.
I was in the army for 13 years when I was younger, and among other posts held the position of physical fitness instructor. I routinely scored on the extended scale in the APFT (Army Physical Fitness Test) every 6 Months for 8 to 10 years. (Basically, a Soldier had to score above 150 to finish basic training, extended scale starts with scoring over 100 in all three events - if you fall short in one, the high scores in the other two don't count). Getting back in shape with Diabetes was harder for me than getting to the top 2% of the Army. (And I had rank by then, so it wasn't drill sergeants pushing me, either).
I was never an Airborne Ranger, but I know a type 2 Diabetic who was, and he says getting back in shape felt about like Hell Week in ranger training (but lasted several months in his case).
There are several studies that show type 2 diabetes actually resets the satiation levels of the brain so that people with it get hungrier and have longer before they register fullness when their blood sugar levels are off (The disease thus impairs your judgment of one of means to fight it). There are others that show how a normal person will have extreme soreness the first few exercise sessions but if they push through it will stop feeling nearly that sore and how the average Type 2 Diabetic can expect that to continue for months or even more.
(It was about 6 months in my case - six months of near constant fatigue and extreme muscle soreness - six months when I did 8 reps with a weight, then 2 days later did the same 8 reps, then 2 days later did the same 8 reps, only to gain a rep every 2-3 weeks, before the process started getting up to normal sorts of gains - six months of worrying I would injure a foot with all the running and they would do what frequently happens to diabetics - amputation!).
Comments like yours are every bit as untrue and abusive as telling a rape victim they deserved it because they were dressed wrong. You should be heartily ashamed. It's not the researchers who 'just don't get it' here, it's people like you.
Yes, but Noise isn't Noise - that is, there are different kinds of noise. Several common types are named by analogy with the visual spectrum - White Noise, Brown Noise*, and Pink Noise**. White Noise has a roughly evenly distributed spectrum of audio frequencies at at least approximately similar amplitudes. (Theoretically perfect White Noise is completely flat across all frequencies, but in practice, there are limits to what can be generated, and noise that is approximately flat across a defined range is considered white).
Brown Noise is technically noise where the spectral density is proportional to 1/f^2, which means it has more energy at lower frequencies (decreasing by around 6dB per octave). Examples in nature include waves on a beach and some types of wind noise. Brown Noise of the same overall 'loudness' is usually much better tolerated by people than White Noise.
Pink Noise has spectral density proportional to 1/f. There is equal energy in all octaves. In terms of power at a constant bandwidth, 1/f noise falls off at 3 dB per octave. Pink Noise again sounds less unpleasant to the human listener than White, and is the form of noise usually used to test acoustics for concert halls and such.
* before someone else points it out, by some accounts Brown Noise is named either because the formula relates to that for Brownian motion or for a researcher named Brown.
** Pink Noise is also a rock band out of Brooklyn, New York.
Speakers are a good item to focus on at first. Find a place that will let you test a bunch of different speakers at a time, bring along a disc or tape of music you already like and know well, and that has a good range of frequencies and dynamic attributes. Look at various surround sound layouts and not just stereo. Try to test speakers in a room about the same size as where you want to put them.
Find several speaker arrays you like, and only then check the technical specs. Don't worry about the graphs showing how the manufacturer calculated THD (Total Harmonic Distortion) using some variant on RMS (Root-Mean Square) modeling, etc. The biggest thing to look at in specs is what sort of amplifier you will need to drive those speakers.
After that, room prep really matters. Avoid really square rooms if you have a choice of where to set up. Look for obvious sources of imbalance, like if the left hand wall is all windows. You will probably end up with a room that is longer one way than the other, and you will generally want to put the speakers on one of the narrower walls, because the good listening spot will be at the tip of a long triangle. IF that point is very close to the opposite wall of the room, echoes off that will blur the sound in a way most people don't like. With a room that's at least 25% longer than it is wide, you can adjust where you put speakers, how you point them, and such so the sweet spot for listening fills most of the center of the room, and you and several guests can all be in a place where the music sounds good at the same time.
People get pretty intense about room prep, sometimes deadening the whole end where the speakers are located with fancy corrugated foam panels to create what's called a live end-dead end configuration, but the same sort of effect can be gotten with some curtains or a fabric panel or two. I use some actual foam but I got it cheap when some people tore down a small recording studio, and things like fabric really do work.
I've wondered if business execs and such could afford to deal with such problems piecemeal or not. Take a slight variation on your example. Suppose a CIO thinks a subordinate, such as the former head of the advertising department, may have allowed some pirated graphics software onto that department's machines. If the CIO directs an internal audit of just the graphics programs and for just that department, what happens if the BSA later audits the whole business for general software non-compliance? It seems like the CIO could make the decision to only audit a particularly suspect area for normally good reasons such as cost effectiveness, but to the BSA, wouldn't it look like that CIO was suspicious there were other problems and deliberately limited the scope of the internal audit, hoping to bury them?
And, since an audit of just one department might trigger some slighted feeling employee there forwarding a tip about some other department...
There is still a distinction between the credit we should give individual genius and the social environment that may either help or hinder it, but can never substitute for it, and I gather that was a big part of your position. All the help a society gives a genius can only do a limited amount of good, but since genius doesn't protect the physical body from the forces intolerance can bring to bear, the reverse isn't true.
Isaac Newton became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1669, and did most of his work in that position. At that time, any fellow of Cambridge or Oxford normally had to be an ordained Anglican priest. However, Newton was exempted from this ordination requirement by no less than Charles II, acting as temporal head of the Anglican church. So, he was given a position normally an actual part of the (Anglican branch of the) Christan church, he was selected in appreciation for his genius and in a truly ecumenical fashion treated the same despite any differences in his beliefs (Newton was probably an Arian - meaning he denied the validity of the trinity and opposed treating Jesus as an actual deity. By a few accounts, he was actually closer to Eastern Orthodoxy than to the Arianists).
Just about everybody Newton bounced any ideas off of before publication was an Anglican clergyman. The administrative people who encouraged him to work in the areas of Physics, Optics, and Math more, and eschew alchemical and abstract philosophical work that didn't seem to lead anywhere, were all Anglican clergy. The people who defended his name in the argument over whether Newton or Leibniz invented the Calculus were again overwhelmingly made up of Anglican clergy.
So should the church, which administered and controlled the entire school where Newton worked, and provided him with research funding, assistance in publication, assistants, and blanket support for him to research what he chose and write about it as he willed be given any credit? I suppose that depends on just what sort of credit we mean. Certainly they deserve the same sort as we would give the Nobel prize committee or a modern college today.
Is Good Will really the only source for used CDs in your area? I live in a town of only about 25,000 population, and there are two used CD stores in it, selling them at an average price of about 8.00$. There's a city of over 500,000 half an hour away, and it has over a dozen such stores. Some of these stores belong to nationwide franchises. Some of them also deal in used books, and regularly forward market data to print publishers. Some of them sell via net, through Amazon.com, as associated distributors whose stock can be purchased via the Amazon web site.
Since they all use pretty much the same formula on pricing, I really don't see the scrap metal comment either. They price CDs at about half new, and pay about 20% for inventory, or 25% or even 30% if the customer takes trade credit. How can you claim that 50% pricing amounts to scrap value? Ah, I see, you have never traded a CD, so no one else has either. And of course, you post about trading, even though you claim to only know of Good Will and they don't trade. Troll much?
There is a third possibility there, and a fourth, a fifth, and more. 1. We could at least try for a consensus with at least some other countries about what to do before we meddle. (We helped build NATO once, we used to be able to achieve a consensus there pretty regularly even when other nations knew that NATO didn't get them out of playing point man if any war had eventuated.) 2. We could refuse to meddle for now even in cases like Darfur, but start redeveloping the competencies we once had as a nation, so that if we start meddling again, we get it right. (We helped post WW2 Japan, Italy, and Germany rebuild and modernize, not a lot of lambasting for that). 3. We could support the same standard of justice we once supported, at home first and then abroad (Again Post various wars, the US led the way by example - we were heavy supporters of the Geneva convention and its now accepted amendments, we pushed our allies post WW2 to use objective standards to try the Nazis (and agreed that we would use the same standards in dealing with Japanese war crimes claims, where our European allies didn't really have a right to demand that, except if they had a right to demand common decency trump political expedience). We got some lambasting for that, true, as the Russians and the French (and to some smaller extent even the English), wanted to execute a lot of captured Nazis without real trials, and to execute a lot who ended up serving time instead, but it only took a few years for the consensus to develop that this was right.
We mostly got 'lambasted' for being political babes in the woods in all those cases, for not being cynical and not knowing Realpolitik. Within a few years, the critics mostly came around to our way of thinking. Where we've joined the cynics and flat out bastards since then, we still get lambasted for it twenty years later, as the whole eye for an eye approach never resolves.
Besides this, the Darfur issue is a red herring - because we can't! We have so many resources committed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and a potential involvement in Iran, we couldn't possibly afford to 'meddle' in a conflict such as Darfur, Burma, or any other. Why debate over whether it would be politically or ethically right or wrong, when we have made it logistically impossible? Plus if we did somehow meddle, there's a dozen nations who would use this as an excuse not to take up the job themselves, claiming there was the same sort of tainted intelligence and such behind it. This way, at least the inactivity of the various European powers is on their own heads.
But, people who are not very skilled in English will have even more trouble communicating with someone else who has different deficiencies. So even though he or she isn't making the point very well, that inadvertently makes the point.
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but the cause of so much mayhem and misery in this world has been mostly religion/cult on religion/cult."
OK, since you asked. The cause of so much (organized) mayhem and misery in the world has been mostly philosophical differences that claim to affect real world outcomes. Some of these are specifically religious philosophies vs other religious philosophies (causing, for example, the Spanish inquisition or the crusades). Some have religion as a possibly significant factor, but appear to have other, more major aspects, or religion matters significantly to one side but not the other (The American revolution, The Trail of Tears, the various persecutions of non-Arab Muslims by Arab Muslims). Some are best characterized as not particularly religious disputes (the French revolution. the Holocaust (where the Nazis may have mostly claimed to be Christians, but put people in camps for being 'Genetically Jewish', not for practicing as Jews). Some of the worst start from entirely secular philosophies on at least the initiating side (The actual organized, international warfare part of WW 2, Stalin's purges, Mao's, Pol-Pot's).
Tale the 'Holy land' for a model - religious warfare abounds (The Old testament accounts of slaughtering the Hebrew's neighbors, The Crusades, the initial Muslim conquest). Of course the area also saw wars from the Hittite Conquest, the Egyptian conquest, Alexander the Great, Tamurlane, the Mongol Horde, the secondary Muslim conquests (The Califate, the Ottoman Empire and others), WW 2, etc., none of which were particularly religious events. The best estimates historians can come up with for the region is secular differences of opinion resulted in roughly 10.5 times as many organized deaths as religious ones.
When you buy any good used, it helps keep up the price on new items. Would you pay as much for a car if its resale value was zero as you would if you knew you could eventually sell it used? For CDs in particular, you can take more of a chance on a group you haven't heard much of, if you can get at least a bit of your money back if it turns out you don't like them after all.
Also, any producer of new music could work out a deal to get information from used CD stores, and get useful marketing studies comparatively cheaply in this way. If they don't, and complain about the used trade as though it was all one-sidedly working against them, why should the law fix a problem the complainant has in part created?
I hate to keep making this point on RIAA threads but...
I ran an electronics service business out of a white ford van for a while. One night a drunk driver totaled it, and was actually caught. I was legally able to sue him for 3x damages, because he committed DUI and Hit and Run, both criminal acts, and so punitive damages were allowed on the civil side. (I ended up getting almost exactly what it cost me to actually replace everything, but that was more than what I could really prove in court he had destroyed, and replacement costs on all the ruined equipment were higher than the original costs, so 'punitive' damage rules helped get actual justice).
The RIAA is using a law that gives them a 5x damages rule (it multiplies a 30,000$ damage cap to 150,000$ if a test is met - that's 5x). The only have to prove the violation was 'willful' to get that multiple. The standard to prove willfullness is much, much easier than the standard I needed to justify 3x damages.
This is a matter of fundamental equality. Even if I was sure the people running torrents and such are doing severe damage to the RIAA members, even if it is every bit as costly as the RIAA claims, getting special laws passed that make everyone else effectively second tier in court is a damage to the whole legal system. I can't support the RIAA's actions unless they are subject to the same rules as the rest of us. I'm not sure how anyone else can.
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This points up one of the basic problems with public marches, one we saw in the 60's civil rights movement, the Vietnam war protests, and ever since.
When you get 10,000 people or more together, some small percentage of them will invariably be people who have criminal records, mental illness issues, or who have said something that sounds really stupid, especially if quoted out of context. That percentage could be 25% or 2%, but it's there.
This is one area where computer technology makes a huge difference. Photograph the crowd, and now-a-days you can match many faces up with names and records, so you can find that percentage, and if it fits your agenda, make it look like the whole crowd was made up of these sorts of people. You can describe the known nutbars as ringleaders and organizers even if they were fringe members and otherwise start a smear campaign against your opposition. With face recognition tech, you can also do this very quickly, while the protest is still newsworthy and fresh in people's minds. Modern tech makes a smear campaign both more useful and more generally successful.
This is one of those Faux-News talking points. The militant right has pundits, spokespeople, and press agents who have been told to hammer away at the idea that the anti-war movement is the traditional left, that this makes them the same as the pro-union 'left', the pro-NEA 'left', the pro-ACLU 'left', and that all of these are really the HIPPIE DRUGGY COMMIE LEFT.
I disagree with many of this current administration's actions - that doesn't mean I would stoop to claim they are all strung out on Oxycontin.
The whole way savings and capital gains taxes have been changed under this administration is a huge con game:
There's a saver's credit, which is now tiered at 50%, 20%, and 10%, before being phased out entirely. The very poorest group of people, typically making less than 15,000 for a single filer, or 22,500 for a single parent head of household, gets the 50% credit if they save for their own retirement with something like an IRA or 401-K. Most of them are too poor to save anything at all. If they are making less than $15K, what's the chance they have an employer who matches 401K contributions? If they are making less than $15K, how likely is it they can put a typical minimum balance in an IRA, when that can take from 1,000 to 2,000 dollars to start? So the 50% bracket group can't afford even such a 'generous' setup, and if, through serious determination and exceptional fiscal prudence, they manage, the credit mostly just balances the lack of employer matching before it actually improves the employee's bottom line. If they are making a little more, and might actually be able to save, the credit drops at $15,001 to 20%. A plan that really wanted to encourage the working poor to save for their own retirements would have many small steps or a smooth curve instead of this huge differential.
Then there's capital gains. Long term (where you hold the stock or whatever more than a year) capital gains has a 5% bottom rate, then jumps right to 15%. Again, almost nobody eligible for the 5% rate actually has long term investments (less than 1 in 100 people eligible). They get a "50% discount" if they are in the bottom 10% tax rate, but it drops off by half in shelf like fashion for anyone a trifle above that. With little access to mutual funds, particularly conservative, balanced funds that often have base investment amounts in the thousands, taking advantage of capital gains for the very poor can often be limited to the riskiest way, buying a few shares of this and that penny stock without professional advice.
The laws sound very generous, as phrased, but in practice, almost no one qualifies. They are feel-good laws, where the government says in effect, "See, we do care about the poor.", but very little actual money transferring occurs compared to something like raising the poverty limit, extending the EIC to cover more than 2 children, or even enforcing the existing law for people who are being wrongly carried as self employed but should count as employees. The government loses almost no tax revenues from these laws (at least as they affect the poorest bracket - there may be some benefits to the upper middle class that actually reduce the government's revenues a bit).
Company says "CDs will cost $5 more than LPs or Cassettes, but that's just until they stop being experimental - then the price will come down". CDs become the default medium, price doesn't drop.
(And company still gives artists lower royalties per unit for CDs using the same argument).
Company says "We will continue to market CDs, but we need to get the CD standard and definition changed."
I'm not saying you're wrong to characterize what some listeners are doing as moving the goalposts, but that's some listeners, while others do come back to the market and buy music if their particular complaint is addressed. Meanwhile, the RIAA has been moving the goalposts on its own in various ways, and until recently, it hasn't been some members, it's been a totally unified 100% action.
Mmmmh well, about the lying, isn't it some kind of nasty crime to in court?
Perjury? Normally, when a judge thinks someone is lying in a civil trial (as opposed to a criminal one) they don't invoke perjury law. Instead, they just direct the jury. This can mean the judge flat out tells the jury to disregard that testimony entirely, or just that the jury gets frequent reminders that they are to decide on the preponderance, and that some point which counts as a possible doubt doesn't really matter in a civil case unless the odds are better it is true than the alternative. Assuring the jury that it can ignore testimony it thinks is false, and can and should judge other testimony from the same person in that light is usually enough.
if she did all that trickery, wouldn't it be plausible that she did shared *knowing* that it was illegal?
The law in this case uses a willfulness test, and yes, members of the jury could easily decide that trickery after the actual deed was enough to make it more plausible than not that she had willful intent to violate the law all along. In fact, that's probably what most of them did.
I'm going to assume you are at least a little serious. The strict, young earth creationism model assumes the Bible is totally correct if taken totally literally. Thus, God used six literal 24 hour days to create the world, and all the accounts in Genesis after that add up to allegedly accurate totals.
Genesis is actually very full of numbers, i.e.:
Adam died at 930 years old. The oldest man was Methuselah, living to 969.
or
Noah, at 600 years old, boarded the boat, and it rained for forty days and forty nights. After 150 days, the boat rested upon the mountains of Ararat.
There is actually a whole book of the old testament that is named Numbers!
In the new testament, there are some similar references, for example, there are several monarchs described as simultaneously ruling different locations: Augustus, Cyrenius * as Roman governor of Persia, a particular one of the Herods as king of Judea. Dates can be generated, either from the Bible or from other sources such as Roman official records. Anyone can calibrate these to see if other sources show a possible overlap of reigns and check this against other dates, and lots of people have.
* Publius Sulpicius Quirinus, to use the actual Roman name and not the Greek variant.
Anyone can take these numbers and do basic math with them. The could also start with some independently confirmed date such as the Assyrian conquest of the region and add and subtract to see if the resulting dates match with other non-biblical sources, etc. Some of these sorts of calculations come out accurate or pretty close, some don't, but you can definitely do real math with them. Whether the conclusions this process points to are right or wrong, the math itself is valid.
I actually find questions like yours rather eerie. I mean, you or anyone else is certainly free to decide you don't think the old testament accounts correspond to real history, or that the whole Bible is not a valid guide to the origin and nature of the universe, or many other things, but it sounds rather like you are claiming that, if the Bible says 16+17=33, then it must be wrong about that too.
Of course, you may not mean it that way, but many people are so anti-religion that one reads really strange claims from some critics - for example claims that since Augustus is mentioned in the Bible, there was no real Roman emperor with that name. There was a prominent French philosopher who claimed that ALL religions with the idea of an afterlife got the idea from Egyptian sources, and when it was pointed out to him that Neanderthals had burial practices that seemed to indicate they believed in an afterlife, said the Neanderthals must have gotten the idea from the Egyptians. If this is the sort of point you are trying to make, you really should seek help.
A legal notice, prepared so as to be admissible in a court proceeding, becomes a document of the court. As such, its broader publication is from then on to be determined by a judge, who could, for example seal the record, theoretically including the document. Unless a judge actually did this, the document is part of the public record, subject to various 'sunshine laws' and basic rules for federal proceedings, that override any assertion of copyright.
The proper method to deal with publication is to go ahead and press the case, and ask the judge to issue an order prohibiting both sides from discussing the case in public forums as a pre-trial motion. There is no real venue to stop publication of the legal notice short of actually taking the case to court, and there are some powerful SCOTUS decisions on the first amendment issues involved that say any such method would be prior restraint.
(please note my Sig. Any actual lawyers please feel free to correct me if I have got anything wrong here.)
Focoma said:
"Fact A: Religious practices sometimes produce certain psychological effects."
You misquoted:
"Psychological effects produce religious practices"
You're not just inverting what he said (which is bad enough), you're omitting that word "sometimes" which claims the situation simply doesn't simplify as much as you'd like it to, and the word "certain" which implies a subset of a larger class exists in his arguement.
Psychology, Religion, and Epistemology (which is the real subject of this thread), are complex subjects, worthy of real thought. The person who oversimplifies is almost invariably the wrongest. Your argument then goes on to throw in words such as all and nothing, quotation marks used for ironic distance, and an extended Ad Hom attack. You don't say which 'facts' you consider dubious, you don't say why, and you base the argument on one fact I consider more dubious than any of his, the claim that ALL religious effects have psychological causes. That's simply a restatement of your first claim, with no new facts being presented. It's the very point people are still expecting you to prove, just rephrased.
You can call me a blind, raging nerd if you want, but your question has a terribly flawed assumption.
Plenty of people have been wrong, and still defended their actions rhetorically in one way or another. People have more or less respect for that claim, depending on the case.
But, there are cases where the claim is obviously delusional, or worse. There are criminals right now, even ones on various death rows, for crimes such as raping and murdering five year olds, who claim that their victims really deserved it, and the society is persecuting them, and they actually "did the right thing". Some of them probably actually believe it.
Enron's execs sounded a lot like Darl after their trials (as far as Ken Lay got). They too made the statements about how they still believed what they did was right, and that their opposition was motivated by venial concerns. What they don't understand, what Darl doesn't, and what you evidently don't either is one simple word: JUSTICE.
Now if you know of one thing RMS has done that puts him in the category of meriting the swift and determined application of justice, by all means mention it - but as of now, I am pretty damned confident that Darl will eventually be found guilty of at least a couple of serious crimes. Certain statements he has made to the public will eventually result in an SEC action, and probably perjury, tax fraud, and plain old fraud charges. Other actions such as his seeking to find and publish personal information on P. J. at Groklaw will likely move these actions into RICO act territory, and at that time, Darl will become a convicted racketeer. Even if this doesn't happen, there is no ethical innocence in his actions. He made statements that he either knew were untrue, or that he thought were true only because he didn't do the elementary fact checking any professional should know. If he didn't actively lie to the court, to his investors, and to others, it's because he was criminally negligent, terrifyingly so, in his duties, and not just any simple negligence. There is no rational way of looking at his actions that excuses them. If he truly holds the opinion that there is then he is simply unable to look at his own actions without desperate evasion. I can't think of anything even proportionately similar in RMS's activities - perhaps he rationalizes as much as the average person, or more, but for all I actually have evidence for there, RMS may well be better than typical. To conflate these two examples, criminal and non-criminal - "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
Ok, but there's got to be a downside.
I'll give you one of the simplest real mysteries:
... Ahem, I'll keep this within the realm of Slashdot. I don't want to think about what arouses many of you. In fact, it's very hard to enjoy a film at all without getting that deeply into it. People don't just forget their external environment, often they forget their bladders unless the need becomes really critical, or sit so still that a foot 'goes to sleep' or similar effects. It takes a real annoyance to snap many of them out of it, a cell phone ringing, loud talking, or worse (and it's perceived as a distinct annoyance to be 'snapped out of it').
Let's go to a movie. We'll sit in a comfy chair, and watch Indiana Jones dodge boulders. What happens?
1. Usually, a person enters a state that can be described as focused monomania (just as Hypnosis can be described). For an hour and a half, they focus on the film so that they are unaware of anything beyond the edges of the screen. They believe the events shown are every bit as real as real life until the film is over. They jump when Ripley opens a hatch and the ship's cat pops out. They cringe when Michael Myers swings an axe. They get aroused when
2. A conscious person, typically of normal mental health, has had an out of the body experience lasting typically 90 minutes or so. The other things in life that can allegedly normally cause such an effect aren't present. There's no chemical disturbance of the brain (as from a hallucinogen). There's no physical disturbance (as from a blow to the head). There's no build up of fatigue toxins (as is sometimes used to explain sleep related mental effects). There's nothing but images, images which in the hands of a skilled artist can be so compelling that we choose to become entangled, enthralled, enraptured.
3. Now describe it in evolutionary terms: We observe some members of a species that has just developed many of its unique brain functions over the last million years. They have lived for 99.999% of that time in small groups typically numbering less than 30. The single most common predator for that entire time was members of other small groups of humans, who typically were just as virulently cannibalistic as we observe today in chimpanzees. Without any of the causes we normally consider to cause a brain dis-function, these members of that species have become totally oblivious to large numbers of strangers, not of their tribe, they have made a deliberate, determined effort to become so, and to stay in that state for an extended time.
4. The mystery is, why, after doing that once, do humans not realize what they have done, run out of movie theaters screaming, and never return?
Not realizing how bad it's getting is common - Mary Tyler Moore found out she was Type 2 when her initial test came back 775. Her doctor said "Don't take this wrong, but how come you're not dead?". You have it tougher with Type 1, as levels can change so fast. Plus, at 5 shots a day, you're probably putting some real wear and tear on your abdomen - I never had to do more than 2 at a time.
I test every morning before eating anything, and do a second sample 2 hours after a meal, every other day. If I feel off for any other reason (like the flu), there's extra testing to make sure it's not diabetes related. There is one study from last year that says people in my particular category can probably cut back to maybe 3x a week, but I'm not going to consider it unless some more studies confirm it. If you're testing 5 times a day, I'll bet there are tiny black dots all over the sides of most of your fingers - you can never really catch up at that level - you're constantly looking for a fresh spot, etc.
I'm a 50 year old type 2 diabetic. I weigh 210 lbs, have a 34 inch waist, and stand 6'1", can bench press more than my body weight, and run an average of 12-14 Miles/week. Even in this condition, I have to use an oral medication (Glucophage) to fully control my blood sugar.
When I was first diagnosed, I had let myself get out of shape, and weighed about 225. I had to use insulin for about six months until I built enough muscle and lost enough fat to go to just oral meds, and for the first year after that, I had to take several.
I was in the army for 13 years when I was younger, and among other posts held the position of physical fitness instructor. I routinely scored on the extended scale in the APFT (Army Physical Fitness Test) every 6 Months for 8 to 10 years. (Basically, a Soldier had to score above 150 to finish basic training, extended scale starts with scoring over 100 in all three events - if you fall short in one, the high scores in the other two don't count). Getting back in shape with Diabetes was harder for me than getting to the top 2% of the Army. (And I had rank by then, so it wasn't drill sergeants pushing me, either).
I was never an Airborne Ranger, but I know a type 2 Diabetic who was, and he says getting back in shape felt about like Hell Week in ranger training (but lasted several months in his case).
There are several studies that show type 2 diabetes actually resets the satiation levels of the brain so that people with it get hungrier and have longer before they register fullness when their blood sugar levels are off (The disease thus impairs your judgment of one of means to fight it). There are others that show how a normal person will have extreme soreness the first few exercise sessions but if they push through it will stop feeling nearly that sore and how the average Type 2 Diabetic can expect that to continue for months or even more.
(It was about 6 months in my case - six months of near constant fatigue and extreme muscle soreness - six months when I did 8 reps with a weight, then 2 days later did the same 8 reps, then 2 days later did the same 8 reps, only to gain a rep every 2-3 weeks, before the process started getting up to normal sorts of gains - six months of worrying I would injure a foot with all the running and they would do what frequently happens to diabetics - amputation!).
Comments like yours are every bit as untrue and abusive as telling a rape victim they deserved it because they were dressed wrong. You should be heartily ashamed. It's not the researchers who 'just don't get it' here, it's people like you.
Yes, but Noise isn't Noise - that is, there are different kinds of noise. Several common types are named by analogy with the visual spectrum - White Noise, Brown Noise*, and Pink Noise**. White Noise has a roughly evenly distributed spectrum of audio frequencies at at least approximately similar amplitudes. (Theoretically perfect White Noise is completely flat across all frequencies, but in practice, there are limits to what can be generated, and noise that is approximately flat across a defined range is considered white).
Brown Noise is technically noise where the spectral density is proportional to 1/f^2, which means it has more energy at lower frequencies (decreasing by around 6dB per octave). Examples in nature include waves on a beach and some types of wind noise. Brown Noise of the same overall 'loudness' is usually much better tolerated by people than White Noise.
Pink Noise has spectral density proportional to 1/f. There is equal energy in all octaves. In terms of power at a constant bandwidth, 1/f noise falls off at 3 dB per octave. Pink Noise again sounds less unpleasant to the human listener than White, and is the form of noise usually used to test acoustics for concert halls and such.
* before someone else points it out, by some accounts Brown Noise is named either because the formula relates to that for Brownian motion or for a researcher named Brown.
** Pink Noise is also a rock band out of Brooklyn, New York.
Speakers are a good item to focus on at first. Find a place that will let you test a bunch of different speakers at a time, bring along a disc or tape of music you already like and know well, and that has a good range of frequencies and dynamic attributes. Look at various surround sound layouts and not just stereo. Try to test speakers in a room about the same size as where you want to put them.
Find several speaker arrays you like, and only then check the technical specs. Don't worry about the graphs showing how the manufacturer calculated THD (Total Harmonic Distortion) using some variant on RMS (Root-Mean Square) modeling, etc. The biggest thing to look at in specs is what sort of amplifier you will need to drive those speakers.
After that, room prep really matters. Avoid really square rooms if you have a choice of where to set up. Look for obvious sources of imbalance, like if the left hand wall is all windows. You will probably end up with a room that is longer one way than the other, and you will generally want to put the speakers on one of the narrower walls, because the good listening spot will be at the tip of a long triangle. IF that point is very close to the opposite wall of the room, echoes off that will blur the sound in a way most people don't like. With a room that's at least 25% longer than it is wide, you can adjust where you put speakers, how you point them, and such so the sweet spot for listening fills most of the center of the room, and you and several guests can all be in a place where the music sounds good at the same time.
People get pretty intense about room prep, sometimes deadening the whole end where the speakers are located with fancy corrugated foam panels to create what's called a live end-dead end configuration, but the same sort of effect can be gotten with some curtains or a fabric panel or two. I use some actual foam but I got it cheap when some people tore down a small recording studio, and things like fabric really do work.
I've wondered if business execs and such could afford to deal with such problems piecemeal or not. Take a slight variation on your example. Suppose a CIO thinks a subordinate, such as the former head of the advertising department, may have allowed some pirated graphics software onto that department's machines. If the CIO directs an internal audit of just the graphics programs and for just that department, what happens if the BSA later audits the whole business for general software non-compliance? It seems like the CIO could make the decision to only audit a particularly suspect area for normally good reasons such as cost effectiveness, but to the BSA, wouldn't it look like that CIO was suspicious there were other problems and deliberately limited the scope of the internal audit, hoping to bury them?
And, since an audit of just one department might trigger some slighted feeling employee there forwarding a tip about some other department...
There is still a distinction between the credit we should give individual genius and the social environment that may either help or hinder it, but can never substitute for it, and I gather that was a big part of your position. All the help a society gives a genius can only do a limited amount of good, but since genius doesn't protect the physical body from the forces intolerance can bring to bear, the reverse isn't true.
Isaac Newton became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1669, and did most of his work in that position. At that time, any fellow of Cambridge or Oxford normally had to be an ordained Anglican priest. However, Newton was exempted from this ordination requirement by no less than Charles II, acting as temporal head of the Anglican church. So, he was given a position normally an actual part of the (Anglican branch of the) Christan church, he was selected in appreciation for his genius and in a truly ecumenical fashion treated the same despite any differences in his beliefs (Newton was probably an Arian - meaning he denied the validity of the trinity and opposed treating Jesus as an actual deity. By a few accounts, he was actually closer to Eastern Orthodoxy than to the Arianists).
Just about everybody Newton bounced any ideas off of before publication was an Anglican clergyman. The administrative people who encouraged him to work in the areas of Physics, Optics, and Math more, and eschew alchemical and abstract philosophical work that didn't seem to lead anywhere, were all Anglican clergy. The people who defended his name in the argument over whether Newton or Leibniz invented the Calculus were again overwhelmingly made up of Anglican clergy.
So should the church, which administered and controlled the entire school where Newton worked, and provided him with research funding, assistance in publication, assistants, and blanket support for him to research what he chose and write about it as he willed be given any credit? I suppose that depends on just what sort of credit we mean. Certainly they deserve the same sort as we would give the Nobel prize committee or a modern college today.
Is Good Will really the only source for used CDs in your area? I live in a town of only about 25,000 population, and there are two used CD stores in it, selling them at an average price of about 8.00$. There's a city of over 500,000 half an hour away, and it has over a dozen such stores. Some of these stores belong to nationwide franchises. Some of them also deal in used books, and regularly forward market data to print publishers. Some of them sell via net, through Amazon.com, as associated distributors whose stock can be purchased via the Amazon web site.
Since they all use pretty much the same formula on pricing, I really don't see the scrap metal comment either. They price CDs at about half new, and pay about 20% for inventory, or 25% or even 30% if the customer takes trade credit. How can you claim that 50% pricing amounts to scrap value? Ah, I see, you have never traded a CD, so no one else has either. And of course, you post about trading, even though you claim to only know of Good Will and they don't trade. Troll much?
There is a third possibility there, and a fourth, a fifth, and more.
1. We could at least try for a consensus with at least some other countries about what to do before we meddle. (We helped build NATO once, we used to be able to achieve a consensus there pretty regularly even when other nations knew that NATO didn't get them out of playing point man if any war had eventuated.)
2. We could refuse to meddle for now even in cases like Darfur, but start redeveloping the competencies we once had as a nation, so that if we start meddling again, we get it right. (We helped post WW2 Japan, Italy, and Germany rebuild and modernize, not a lot of lambasting for that).
3. We could support the same standard of justice we once supported, at home first and then abroad (Again Post various wars, the US led the way by example - we were heavy supporters of the Geneva convention and its now accepted amendments, we pushed our allies post WW2 to use objective standards to try the Nazis (and agreed that we would use the same standards in dealing with Japanese war crimes claims, where our European allies didn't really have a right to demand that, except if they had a right to demand common decency trump political expedience). We got some lambasting for that, true, as the Russians and the French (and to some smaller extent even the English), wanted to execute a lot of captured Nazis without real trials, and to execute a lot who ended up serving time instead, but it only took a few years for the consensus to develop that this was right.
We mostly got 'lambasted' for being political babes in the woods in all those cases, for not being cynical and not knowing Realpolitik. Within a few years, the critics mostly came around to our way of thinking. Where we've joined the cynics and flat out bastards since then, we still get lambasted for it twenty years later, as the whole eye for an eye approach never resolves.
Besides this, the Darfur issue is a red herring - because we can't! We have so many resources committed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and a potential involvement in Iran, we couldn't possibly afford to 'meddle' in a conflict such as Darfur, Burma, or any other. Why debate over whether it would be politically or ethically right or wrong, when we have made it logistically impossible? Plus if we did somehow meddle, there's a dozen nations who would use this as an excuse not to take up the job themselves, claiming there was the same sort of tainted intelligence and such behind it. This way, at least the inactivity of the various European powers is on their own heads.
Then please don't litigate.
But, people who are not very skilled in English will have even more trouble communicating with someone else who has different deficiencies. So even though he or she isn't making the point very well, that inadvertently makes the point.
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but the cause of so much mayhem and misery in this world has been mostly religion/cult on religion/cult."
OK, since you asked. The cause of so much (organized) mayhem and misery in the world has been mostly philosophical differences that claim to affect real world outcomes. Some of these are specifically religious philosophies vs other religious philosophies (causing, for example, the Spanish inquisition or the crusades). Some have religion as a possibly significant factor, but appear to have other, more major aspects, or religion matters significantly to one side but not the other (The American revolution, The Trail of Tears, the various persecutions of non-Arab Muslims by Arab Muslims). Some are best characterized as not particularly religious disputes (the French revolution. the Holocaust (where the Nazis may have mostly claimed to be Christians, but put people in camps for being 'Genetically Jewish', not for practicing as Jews). Some of the worst start from entirely secular philosophies on at least the initiating side (The actual organized, international warfare part of WW 2, Stalin's purges, Mao's, Pol-Pot's).
Tale the 'Holy land' for a model - religious warfare abounds (The Old testament accounts of slaughtering the Hebrew's neighbors, The Crusades, the initial Muslim conquest). Of course the area also saw wars from the Hittite Conquest, the Egyptian conquest, Alexander the Great, Tamurlane, the Mongol Horde, the secondary Muslim conquests (The Califate, the Ottoman Empire and others), WW 2, etc., none of which were particularly religious events. The best estimates historians can come up with for the region is secular differences of opinion resulted in roughly 10.5 times as many organized deaths as religious ones.
When you buy any good used, it helps keep up the price on new items. Would you pay as much for a car if its resale value was zero as you would if you knew you could eventually sell it used? For CDs in particular, you can take more of a chance on a group you haven't heard much of, if you can get at least a bit of your money back if it turns out you don't like them after all.
Also, any producer of new music could work out a deal to get information from used CD stores, and get useful marketing studies comparatively cheaply in this way. If they don't, and complain about the used trade as though it was all one-sidedly working against them, why should the law fix a problem the complainant has in part created?
I hate to keep making this point on RIAA threads but...
I ran an electronics service business out of a white ford van for a while. One night a drunk driver totaled it, and was actually caught. I was legally able to sue him for 3x damages, because he committed DUI and Hit and Run, both criminal acts, and so punitive damages were allowed on the civil side. (I ended up getting almost exactly what it cost me to actually replace everything, but that was more than what I could really prove in court he had destroyed, and replacement costs on all the ruined equipment were higher than the original costs, so 'punitive' damage rules helped get actual justice).
The RIAA is using a law that gives them a 5x damages rule (it multiplies a 30,000$ damage cap to 150,000$ if a test is met - that's 5x). The only have to prove the violation was 'willful' to get that multiple. The standard to prove willfullness is much, much easier than the standard I needed to justify 3x damages.
This is a matter of fundamental equality. Even if I was sure the people running torrents and such are doing severe damage to the RIAA members, even if it is every bit as costly as the RIAA claims, getting special laws passed that make everyone else effectively second tier in court is a damage to the whole legal system. I can't support the RIAA's actions unless they are subject to the same rules as the rest of us. I'm not sure how anyone else can.