"Today, anyone can just claim he's just exercising his right to be armed right up to the point when he does something criminal with it. With a weapon ban in place, whenever a police officers finds someone with a weapon, they can take him off the streets on that charge. They don't have to wait for him to do his evil deed."
Even in the US, this is simply not true. Even here where most people can obtain a firearm of some kind legally, almost every gun crime is committed with an illegal weapon or by someone (e.g. a felon) who is not allowed to carry them. They could be arrested for this at any time already. What this means is that a weapon ban would make just about zero positive effectâ" police would have no more tools for preventing crime than they do now. Simply enforcing the law against felons with weapons would do much more good than any ban or registration requirement for honest citizens.
The majority of violent assailants are already criminals, not average citizens with a temper. Perhaps surprisingly, most victims of firearm crimes are also criminals and often have a "business" relationship with their assailant.
On the other side, (legally) armed citizens stop approaching 1,000,000 crimes each year and have a much better success rate than the police at correctly identifying the person to shoot since the armed citizen often directly witnesses (or experiences) the crime whereas the police show up after the fact and are not certain what is going on or how to intervene.
What people don't understand is close to half the adults in the US own guns. We are not an aberrant minority but often just about demographically dead center by most measures. The criminals are an aberrant minority and they will get weapons however they need toâ" they are criminals after all. They will use whatever is easiest. Right now handguns fit the bill for a lot of their crimes. However, they would be just as happy with long arms and, since they are an order of magnitude deadlier shot for shot, you really don't want to push criminals to make that choice. I would much rather have a criminal with a handgun trespass on my farm when I meet them with a shotgun.
When in a similar situation administering multiple domains, I found that grey-listing gave the most bang-for-the-buck by eliminating roughly 90% of the SPAM before it got to the heuristic-based filters. It also reduced the CPU/IO load on the mail server since it requires very little on the server end to just tempfail a message and stick it in a hash. There were no false positives reported from the grey-listing.
For those who do not know, I am referring to temp-failing messages from senders who are not already white-listed. If the user's client or upstream mail server does not bother to retry, it is almost certainly a mass-mailing program. For the small number of mass-mailers that handle grey-listing, it still naturally throttles their traffic and the SPAMmer still has to get through the rest of the SPAM filters. By letting grey-listing have a crack first, by the time you sit down to examine the quarantined mail by hand, there isn't anywhere near as much. It requires no interaction by the sender and, if you do hit a false positive, they get a normal bounce report and know to try again or give you a call.
What if I don't want health insurance, and am willing to run the risk of getting cancer and dieing because I can't get it treated? Why should I be FORCED to pay for it?
This is among the stupidest arguments that anti-universal-care people trot out. Forcing you to pay into a State (or, as the case may be, national) treasury is a part of living in a well-functioning society. You cannot "opt out" of paying taxes for things you don't personally benefit from.
No, the argument is spot on and should be the first hurdle any potential government program must pass. Taking from one person by force to provide for another person is inherently immoral and it therefore should only be done with very very good reason and the control over how it is done should remain as close to the individual as possible, otherwise people will just vote themselves handouts for everything: food, clothing, housing, cable television, etc. One could argue that this is already happening in the US. Just because one can argue that this is justified in one specific instance, national defense, does not invalidate the argument across the board, especially as national "defense" itself is getting out of hand.
By forcing someone to pay into a particular health care system, you are robbing them of fundamental choices of how they run their life and derive meaning. To take the GP's situation, why might someone want to not invest in their future possibility of cancer? Well, one example is they would rather put that money toward their child's education than their personal health. The child then gets a number of opportunities that they lack and may in some sense become their health insurance if they succeed. Are you going to take that choice from them?
Other big pitfalls include restricting choice on *how* to accomplish the task. If I give my money to a private charity to provide medical care to the needy, I can take that money away from them if they are ineffective by donating to a more effective charity. I cannot choose to withhold taxes and give them to someone else; I am stuck with a broken system. With existing agencies, such as the FDA, USDA, the Department of Education, Family Services, and many others I have no meaningful control over what they do. In fact, my whole town added together has no meaningful control. If we move toward socialized medicine, I will have no meaningful control over my own doctor.
Right now, with my longterm condition I have a lot of choices I can make and am trying to make those decisions. I can take one medication, for instance, that costs, let's say $30 per month. I can take another medication which is somewhat more effective but costs $300 per month. When I am paying for my own care, I have to decide whether that fancier pill makes enough difference to my level of pain and discomfort to justify $270 per month for that medication alone. Can I make changes to my life and environment for that $270 per that will make as much or more difference? Can I put that money into my daughter's college fund and just deal with it? Will the more expensive pill increase my capacity to work and end up worthwhile?
If the government is paying for it all, how is that choice made? The more expensive pill does improve my life, but, even if I accept that I am "entitled" to health care (I don't), am I "entitled" to the more or most expensive care? If the socialized medicine says that I am not, can I still privately buy the more expensive option if I do think it is worth it?
I am about to become eligible for Medicare and am one of the people who would be on the receiving end of many "entitlements," but I still do not like the system socialized to the point that it is, want to see it dismantled, and am looking for ways personally to avoid using it. We should be looking for ways to get private action back into the picture rather than all of the rules which make it next to impossible for the market and for private charity to operate.
Health care needs to be a right, and the risk or cost spread over everyone, with no one excluded.
What if I don't want health insurance, and am willing to run the risk of getting cancer and dieing because I can't get it treated? Why should I be FORCED to pay for it?
What if I don't want public schools, and am willing to let my children grow up untutored unless I pay privately? Why should I be FORCED to pay for it?
If you were trying to be sarcastic, you missed. Plenty of people home school their children and would be perfectly happy with less government control over education. I know a number of people who pulled their children out of school (to home school) because of the horrible mismanagement of our schools, but they still have to pay for it (and the school still gets their money and does not change). Making something mandatory is not just taking away someone's choice whether to do something, but also how and preventing them from choosing a more efficient or effective option.
You see, this is what's commonly called a "straw man" argument. You take things I never said (or even implied) and proceed to demolish them.
You were defending the act of profiling on the basis that Muslims were more commonly at fault. In order to sustain that argument, then 1) Muslims would have to be most commonly at fault, and 2) a significant danger of non-Muslims at fault (and being missed by your profiling) would have to be not-present. Neither of these are true and my response was at point.
To put it succinctly, I never stated all terrorists are (or were) Muslim. However, the vast majority of those in the last forty years have been. When was the last time you heard of a Hindu blowing himself up in a crowded market? A Buddhist? A Sikh? A Jew? A Christian?
You seem to be ignoring the Tamil Tigers, who are Marxist suicide terrorists of Hindu extraction and just happen to be the most active suicide terror group in modern history. I also pointed out Christians among known Hezbollah suicide terrorists. The PKK are also primarily Marxist, culturally Kurdish terrorists with religion being at best an afterthought. Timothy McVeigh was a Christian. The folks who tried to attack a US military base up north were Christian. The various domestic suicide rampages have not been perpetrated by Muslims, including the guy who slaughtered people in a town hall near here recently. I am not looking hard to find these examples, either.
Historically, the Zealots were Jewish suicide terrorists fighting Roman occupation, the infamous Assassins were Muslims fighting another Muslim invader, and, of course, the Kamikazes were Japanese, so there is no basis for a historical trend based on religion vs. religion either.
Some of my other examples pointed to the fact that our own government (which we are trusting with profiling) has also been a threat to us and others in the past. Given that examples can be found readily for either side, the only solution is to look at actual statistics to see if one is actually more likely than another. But actual counts of terrorists and events where we know the religion of the terrorist do not bear out the conclusion either, not in modern times and not historically.
You might find isolated cases of this here and there if you go back four decades...
You need only go back to 1980 to see that statistically, Hindus are more likely to be suicide terrorists than Muslims. Is this because Hindus are violent? No, it is just historical circumstance. They are largely active in parts of the world we do not care about and therefore we pay less attention to those numbers.
If you count non-suicide terrorism, then you suddenly have to include all of the groups in South America who are often Christian (and who are largely anti-US now, by the way), as well as terrorists in the former Russian Republics, so you can't get to your conclusion that way, either.
Are all Muslims terrorists? Nope. But most terrorists are Muslims.
If actual statistics are examined, this is nowhere near the case, not even a little bit around the edges. If you read Newsweek, etc., it appears to be true due to selective reporting. Pape's Dying to Win is a very good treatment of the statistics, though it is becoming dated.
Just make everyone eat a piece of ham, bacon or pork to get through security.
Stops 100% of the terrorists and is a nice treat for hungry travelers! Under the British Empire, beef fat was allegedly used to grease the rifle cartridges, which soldiers needed to put in their mouths in order to bite open the end. In India, there was a very brief rebellion over this: brief because the rebels refused to use the rifle cartridges.
If you actually look at statistics of actual suicide terrorists, you would get a very different picture. Statistically:
1) Suicide bombers are not poor, nor do they tend to be uneducated. 2) Suicide bombers are often not Muslim (e.g. Tamil Tigers, the Christian suicide bombers who operated under Hezbollah) 3) They are not more likely to be from areas known to foster Muslim extremists. In fact the presence of US troops in their home country is a better indicator by a factor of ten. 4) Suicide terrorists are not an extension of 'normal' terrorism, they develop from guerrilla campaigns. 5) The religion of a population is not a significant indicator, but the *difference* in religion between a people and a foreign occupier is.
Pape's _Dying to Win_ has a very good analysis of these statistics. Once you look at actual facts, you realize the question is a lot more complicated.
That applies to agents and agencies of the government, not airlines, or bars. Don't like their policies? Don't support them with your money! Since when is the Transportation Security Administration private? Even before the TSA took over the job, airline security was highly regulated. You could not choose to use (or run) an airline with different policies, short of chartering.
"Let's see: Pan Am 103 blown up by...hmmm...Muslims? 9/11 orchestrated by...Muslims? Achille Lauro, the Israeli Olympic athletes, the Beslan school massacres, ethnic cleansing, and many more too numerous to list, all done by...Muslims?"
Sure, Timothy McVeigh... Muslim. The Tamil Tigers... Muslim. The VA Tech shootings? Muslim. The Holocaust? Plotted by Muslims. Watergate? Richard Hassan Nixon was a closet Muslim. The slaughter of the Native Americans and internment of Japanese Americans? All a Muslim plot. Guatanamo only exists because the Muslims forced us to. The Crusades? They started it. It really is a wonder people object to profiling.
As I note in a previous post, http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=472974&cid=22621278 , Genuity was doing dynamic cost-based routing and smart mirroring in 1997 and the technology had already been in development for several years. The company I was working with was also working on similar technology, which is how I got introduced to the founders of Genuity (about the time they were bought by GTE). I know of at least one other effort to do the same thing during the same period, although it was not as far along as either ours or Genuity's "Hopscotch" protocol, and another company I worked with was doing the same thing with distributed database systems in 1998 (project was over five years old when I worked with it).
We also had a Internet gambling site at the time which used at least elements of the patent in that it was an off-shore (for legal reasons) site with static content served domestically for performance through multiple NAP connections with some routing magic. No where near as advanced as either Genuity or the design we were working on, but obviously pointing toward that goal.
A guy, possibly by the name of Alex Yuriev, was talking about distributed sites and dynamic routing in Philadelphia in 1996-1997. He may have worked for NetAccess at that point and was a bit genius with BGP and routing in general. My business partner at the time talked back and forth with him about some of the similar things we were working on.
The base concept is just not that hard, and the most difficult part of the implementation is physical and logistical, not technical. The hard technical part is doing dynamic updates to the distributed systems and synchronizing transactions, but even that can be fudged decently if you are willing to go with the 90% solution that gives you most of the benefit.
So basically, there was a lot of activity on this sort of thing in the 90's, the technology was clearly driving in that direction, and it becomes easy once the underlying tools are in place.
Genuity, a web hosting company, was doing this via their "hopscotch" routing protocol in 1997. They were bought by GTE at that point but the technology had already been in development for several years. I met the founders at a conference and we exchanged some ideas on improvements based on some work I was doing for another company. Basically, though, they had connections into all of the major NAPs in the US and a dynamic cost-based routing protocol that chose which server to use for which customer. Dynamic updates to the site data (e.g. actually buying stuff) was more complex, obviously, because they had to wait for the transaction to synchronize, but at least they benefited by processing the request through the fastest pipe to the browser. Those updates and associated content came from a different server, matching the patent requirements.
A company I contracted to was building an Internet gambling site (football spreads). Since the site was technically not legal in the US, the site was run off-shore (Hati and DR). The problem was that bandwidth (and latency) was not good to either country. So, we served the images for the site (perfectly legal) off a domestic server. Fast response time, but the actual site logic was safely out of jurisdiction.
The site was called "Wager Web", but I don't think it exists anymore. After the off-shore clients stopped paying, we repossessed the product and modified it to use fake money and prizes from vendors (for making the most "money" during a season). I don't know what happened after that as I started my own company around that time.
A life insurance policy where the beneficiary is the insured person? How... useful. List yourself as the primary beneficiary and someone else as the secondary. That way, if you are alive, you can get the benefits, but if you are dead... oh, wait.
This is the most effective way to live "off the grid!" No more taxes, etc.
Think of the legal implications.
Its against the law to "mistreat" a dead body. So, no death penalty for someone declared dead. Also, since you're dead, they can't stick you in a jail cell (the state won't to pay to jail a dead person, and other detainees would have a good complaint, cruel and unusual punishment and all that). Heck, they can't even put the cuffs on you without running afoul of the requirement to treat a dead body with all due respect and dignity.... someone should take this and really run with it.
Of course, there's the downside. No more sex, since necrophilia is also against the law...
Actually, the NY Department of Motor Vehicles constantly threatened to fine my dead grandfather for a year or two. He had the gall to not return the plates from his van before dying (we never found where he put them). They sent nasty letters to my father and grandmother threatening him with fines, demanding to know where he was, wanting him to appear for hearings, and finally threatening to imprison him for contempt.
We wrote back or responded over the phone that he was dead. We sent them copies of the death certificate and other paperwork. We went in person with the paperwork. We sent them a forwarding address, just as requested, complete with plot number. We also tried an address care of St. Peter. We finally told them to go ahead and arrest him. At long last, on the phone with a DMV clerk, my mother finally got through to them: "The man is dead, D-E-D, 'dead', deceased, as in 'no longer living'. He cannot respond because he is in the ground, rotting." or something to that effect, while I sat in the kitchen practically wiping tears from my eyes and trying not to laugh too loudly. "Oh, he's dead! We need to update our records." The clerk eventually started a process to correct their records and clear up the situation.
The idiocy of government employees knows no bounds. I feel sorry for the intelligent people in government weighed down by the system. I have met a few, so I know they do actually exist. Poor sots.
After all this, my grandmother needed to get new ID to deal with certain government agencies. She had never had a driver's license, her birth certificate had been destroyed in a fire at the hall of records, and her proof of age was a census when she was a teen (where it turns out she lied about her age anyway because she was truant). The DMV refused to accept the documents she had to prove her identity. Finally we asked them what they would accept, and they mentioned a "Sheriff's ID". We went across the street, obtained a Sheriff's ID with the exact same documents, and got her ID card from the DMV. Somehow, I imagine the same mess or worse with "Real ID".
Strongly disagree. People payed for scarcity, not the music.
Let me try to understand you correctly. Intellectual property[1] is not scarce - it is 100% copyable, for free, by anyone with access to a single instance of the IP. If people are only paying for scarcity, and IP is not scarce, you have just claimed that the IP is worthless. I couldn't disagree with that more. I believe IP is still valuable, in spite of its complete and utter non-scarcity. IOW, I pay for the music because the music itself has value. Maybe I'm also paying for big media to find the "next big thing", the studio equipment, the production, the marketing, etc., but I'm paying for the music too.
That's patronage. You are responding to the idea that the talent or ability to produce the things you like is rare. You would be willing to do this whether there was a copyright goon standing there or not. So would I. But there is no inherent value to the copy. You are intending to pay the artist. This has been a functional system for millennia.
People payed for personal, live performances and still do because they are scarce. People buy original canvas paintings (as opposed to reproductions) for the same reason.
These things aren't IP precisely because they are not perfectly reproducible. Instead of a canvas painting, we should talk about photographs, especially digital photographs. They certainly aren't scarce - anyone can buy a camera and take them, and photographs are really easy to copy, especially if they are digital. But the good ones have value despite their lack of scarcity - maybe they capture a cool-looking scene, a mood, a rare event, etc. Are those worthless? Maybe it's just a matter of personal opinion at this point.
I mentioned these things specifically because they demonstrated the borderline. The things which are hard to reproduce with fidelity are the ones that maintain value. People will pay for them regardless of copying (at least, those who care and can afford it will). The cool digital photo is not "worthless" per se, it just has no monetary value, no cost. The artist has to find some connection to scarcity in order to pay for that work, such as special signed prints, patronage, exhibitions, produce on contract. As a technology becomes commonplace and the rarity of things like that drops, only the people who are really unusual will be able to make money doing that. No one is going to go to a gallery and buy a signed print of one of my botanical photos (and I give the digital images away anyway); my level of talent is not rare. Cheap digital copies can actually drive the market for the real, scarce originals. Painting might also increase in popularity again, just because it is harder to reproduce. Hard to say.
Making money as an artist is great if you can do it, but there is no necessary relation.
100% agreed. But I think the good artists are worth paying for, and that's why I support the notion that some people can and should make careers out of their art - and be able to be compensated for it. If people find that they cannot make careers out of art because the general public finds their creations worthless, we might lose out on good art.
Perhaps some, but many artists would find other ways to sell their work, many would work even if they were starving and had their fingertips gnawed on by fat brown mice with little bell collars that said "Sweetie" on them in thin black, gold embellished lettering. We would also lose a good bit of bad art, though, which might be a good thing. I would like to see a point where people value local, original, live music again. I have been around enough of those groups to know that copyright does not help them. If music became more rare, they would become more valuable and would therefore actually be able to produce more.
Or am I supposed to declare a value that no person in their right mind would pay, and suck it up and pay the taxes? Even then, anyone wealthy enough (or not in their right mind) could simply seize my home if they fancied it.
And what's the problem with that? So you buy a house for $300,000, declare it's value to be $3,000,000, and have someone wealthy enough "seize it" at that price. And you're complaining? Hah! We should all be so lucky!
There is a difference between a house and a home. If I had put thirty years into a farm, built the house and raised my kids on it, I wouldn't want $3,000,000, I'd want to live on my farm in peace. If someone tried to take it, I'd hand them a shovel and tell them where they can dig. Just because some [elided] wants to level a place and turn it into condos doesn't mean that I should have to move.
The people in Kelo v New London were not arguing that the price offered was insufficient, they were arguing that it was manifestly unjust to steal their home, a unique value to only themselves, and hand it to a private developer for their own profit. I have to agree with them.
[snip] I'm not so sure this would be possible. I admit I haven't examined the issue in great detail, but it would seem to violate the terms of the proposed 'system'. More specifically, it allows for the existence of IP that is not itself taxed. However, it might be possible in a static form.
[snip]
Flip it around. You are not taxing the idea, but the monopoly on the idea. A future buyer could not renege on previous grants. They could use their new rights to do new things, like put the GPL code into their own closed source product, but they could not void the old license for people who are already bound to it. As well, if someone created a derivative of that code and distributed it, the new owner would have to comply with the GPL to us it, even though they owned the underlying copyright. Just like, if a copyright is put into the public domain, it does not mean that your license to use it is gone, but rather unnecessary.
What you want to tax is the government enforcement of the copyright. The taxpayers supply a goonsquad to enforce that IP. That is what you are paying for, not the idea itself.
The only reason there is an industry for non-tangible goods like recorded music and art is because someone is willing to exchange money/goods/services for them! The instant that happened - the instant the music or art was found to be as valuable as some amount of money or some good or some service - an industry developed. Why wasn't there an industry for caveman paintings? I don't really know, maybe there was. But if there wasn't, it's probably because those paintings were not found to be valuable enough to warrant an exchange of other goods or services. Said caveman painter needed a "day job" to support himself and did his paintings in his spare time.
[snip] Strongly disagree. People payed for scarcity, not the music. People bought records because recordings were hard to make once and are not now. People payed for big media because they were talent scouts, paying for the service of finding and producing previously unknown artists (the rare "next big thing"). People payed for personal, live performances and still do because they are scarce. People buy original canvas paintings (as opposed to reproductions) for the same reason. Cavemen painters might have received some value from the community if the skill and medium was considered rare and special enough, but they probably did not have a registry or prevent people from copying motifs from one cave to another. Throughout history, artists have traveled from gig to gig working for room and board or maybe some extra and some have worked under great patrons. Art existed.
Today, people learn to play instruments and participate in church choirs or other functions with no expectation of payment because they think it makes their life better. In many cases, that is enough. Many artists, and most of the good ones I think, perform because they need to, because they would not imagine life without art. That has nothing to do with "property". Making money as an artist is great if you can do it, but there is no necessary relation.
No no, this is simple. Instead of forcing them to offer it for sale at that price, they are required to use the same value they are taxed on for court cases.
So if $megaCorp sues someone for patent or copyright infringement, they will be taxed on the same value that they use for calculating damages.
This is sounding better all the time! So what you are really talking about is buying "IP theft coverage" from the government. They can elect to pay less, but they get less coverage. That actually starts to make sense. The whole point of Copyright is that the government grants limited monopoly protection as an incentive to create/produce. Once that incentive is no longer meaningful, the transaction ends and the nominal value of the IP goes to zero.
The thing to figure out would be what the starting "coverage" would be and how long until they have to pay for it. If I have just written a book, I might not be able to afford enough coverage at the exact point "theft" is most damaging. I think it makes sense to give someone a certain coverage minimum for a *very short* amount of time (e.g. in the neighborhood of or less than the original copyright term of seven years).
[snip] Finally, these are in no way analogous to property tax because property tax is just on land, not on the various other things you own. Also the federal government doesn't even collect property tax. It's a stupid idea that would hurt everyone. As other posters point out, many types of property are taxed in different places. The bigger thing to me, though, is that it is the government granting you the limited monopoly protection. Having to rent that protection does not seem unreasonable, *if* not paying the rent does not deprive you of the property. In other words, as long as the worst that could happen is that your "property" would become public domain (where it would actually start out if not for Copyright law). You could keep using the creation/idea, but so could everyone else.
As for it hurting OpenSource developers, it would cut both ways, but if there is a grace period of even a few years, it would be enough to enforce the GPL. Who wants to fork a version of Linux from 2004 to start their closed-source project? If they want to redo four years of effort, let them, otherwise they will have to comply with the terms of the most current release, on which there will be active copyright. On the other hand, something like the SCO debacle would be completely moot.
As for paintings, the original would still have special value. If someone took a picture of the painting above my desk and published it (because the painting is out of copyright), the actual, physical piece of art still has value (not much in this particular case, but you get my point).
Performing the steps in a system is not prior art to defining that system.
That said, if the "waiter" was following written instructional guidelines on exactly when to start handing out free meals, that's a whole other issue entirely. Those instructions would have a chance at qualifying as prior art. No, you are right. If the procedure is so utterly commonplace that it is not even written down as a procedure, then it fails by way of obviousness, not prior art. The idea of rewarding (bribing) customers for bad service of all kinds likely goes back to the first occupation. Bad word of mouth advertising and lost business hurts. Duh. Adding "with an egg timer" to the process does not make it less obvious.
Ah, yes. Waterboarding. Do you realize that we've spent less than five minutes total waterboarding since 9-11. We've waterboarded five terrorists... and yes, these were true 100% terrorists, for about an average of 45 seconds each. The Japanese nailed bamboo splints underneath fingernails. The Germans performed "experiments" on its prisoners. Both had forced labor camps. Tell me again how we are the same as the Axis powers of WWII? Tell me how waterboarding the guy that planned 9-11 for less than two minutes puts us in the same leagues as the Germans when they were committing the Holocaust? And you know exactly how many "real terrorists" were tortured, how, and how long how exactly? Because this administration has been extremely forthcoming in allowing unrestricted civilian oversight, answering subpoenas from Congress without destroying tapes, requests from the Red Cross, law suits from other countries related to extraordinary rendition (at least one related to the CIA grabbing *the wrong person* and subjecting them to torture), and interrogating their duly arrested prisoners in easily inspected prisons within the United States? Somehow I don't think that's the case. Unless you are Mr. Bush logged in to SlashDot, you don't have the foggiest clue what we have done or not done and *that* as much as anything, is the problem. Under the type of regime he has established, I doubt Bush himself knows everything that is going on at this point: his kind of leadership does not inspire honesty in underlings.
It is the same problem with domestic wiretaps. We don't know who they have wiretapped and under what circumstances. We only know what has been reluctantly dragged out of them a piece at a time as they backpedal and try to hide potential evidence. That does not make me confident *at all* that what they have done and what they say they have done match up in any way. I certainly think it justifies further investigation and stricter limits, not less restrictive.
Do we have a responsibility to protect the rights of "everybody in the world"? No, but we certainly have a responsibility not to violate them ourselves, and letting our own government violate us is just stupid. But, in all fairness, it is not just Bush. Congress has not exactly lined up to correct the situation, and a lot of ordinary Americans seem to have been duped as well.
I'm a member of the Green Party, so apparently I'm on Bush's side. I'm not (either), but how do you figure? According to: http://www.gp.org/platform/2004/democracy.html#320735 the Green Party is against the PATRIOT act and related evisceration of Constitutional protections. I believe that Mr. Nadar has spoken out against these measures as well. Or was there a joke there I missed?
I am in favor of wiretaps when necessary and under oversight. That is what FISA is for. Procedures are already in place to deal with emergencies where warrants cannot be obtained in time. I think that the limits which were put in place to curb *actual past abuses* are fine.
[snip] So their solution is to hinder or completely block a technology or protocol because they aren't up with the times? So let me use another car analogy, since Comcast is fond of that one. They are saying that since everyone just got sportscars, we shouldn't pave the dirt roads but force most people to keep riding horses and allow only 30% of people to share these sportscars on the available paved roads at peak traffic hours. [snip] Keep your fancy sports cars offo'my dirt roads, Bud. They upset the cattle.
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"Today, anyone can just claim he's just exercising his right to be armed right up to the point when he does something criminal with it. With a weapon ban in place, whenever a police officers finds someone with a weapon, they can take him off the streets on that charge. They don't have to wait for him to do his evil deed."
Even in the US, this is simply not true. Even here where most people can obtain a firearm of some kind legally, almost every gun crime is committed with an illegal weapon or by someone (e.g. a felon) who is not allowed to carry them. They could be arrested for this at any time already. What this means is that a weapon ban would make just about zero positive effectâ" police would have no more tools for preventing crime than they do now. Simply enforcing the law against felons with weapons would do much more good than any ban or registration requirement for honest citizens.
The majority of violent assailants are already criminals, not average citizens with a temper. Perhaps surprisingly, most victims of firearm crimes are also criminals and often have a "business" relationship with their assailant.
On the other side, (legally) armed citizens stop approaching 1,000,000 crimes each year and have a much better success rate than the police at correctly identifying the person to shoot since the armed citizen often directly witnesses (or experiences) the crime whereas the police show up after the fact and are not certain what is going on or how to intervene.
What people don't understand is close to half the adults in the US own guns. We are not an aberrant minority but often just about demographically dead center by most measures. The criminals are an aberrant minority and they will get weapons however they need toâ" they are criminals after all. They will use whatever is easiest. Right now handguns fit the bill for a lot of their crimes. However, they would be just as happy with long arms and, since they are an order of magnitude deadlier shot for shot, you really don't want to push criminals to make that choice. I would much rather have a criminal with a handgun trespass on my farm when I meet them with a shotgun.
When in a similar situation administering multiple domains, I found that grey-listing gave the most bang-for-the-buck by eliminating roughly 90% of the SPAM before it got to the heuristic-based filters. It also reduced the CPU/IO load on the mail server since it requires very little on the server end to just tempfail a message and stick it in a hash. There were no false positives reported from the grey-listing.
For those who do not know, I am referring to temp-failing messages from senders who are not already white-listed. If the user's client or upstream mail server does not bother to retry, it is almost certainly a mass-mailing program. For the small number of mass-mailers that handle grey-listing, it still naturally throttles their traffic and the SPAMmer still has to get through the rest of the SPAM filters. By letting grey-listing have a crack first, by the time you sit down to examine the quarantined mail by hand, there isn't anywhere near as much. It requires no interaction by the sender and, if you do hit a false positive, they get a normal bounce report and know to try again or give you a call.
This is among the stupidest arguments that anti-universal-care people trot out. Forcing you to pay into a State (or, as the case may be, national) treasury is a part of living in a well-functioning society. You cannot "opt out" of paying taxes for things you don't personally benefit from.
No, the argument is spot on and should be the first hurdle any potential government program must pass. Taking from one person by force to provide for another person is inherently immoral and it therefore should only be done with very very good reason and the control over how it is done should remain as close to the individual as possible, otherwise people will just vote themselves handouts for everything: food, clothing, housing, cable television, etc. One could argue that this is already happening in the US. Just because one can argue that this is justified in one specific instance, national defense, does not invalidate the argument across the board, especially as national "defense" itself is getting out of hand.
By forcing someone to pay into a particular health care system, you are robbing them of fundamental choices of how they run their life and derive meaning. To take the GP's situation, why might someone want to not invest in their future possibility of cancer? Well, one example is they would rather put that money toward their child's education than their personal health. The child then gets a number of opportunities that they lack and may in some sense become their health insurance if they succeed. Are you going to take that choice from them?
Other big pitfalls include restricting choice on *how* to accomplish the task. If I give my money to a private charity to provide medical care to the needy, I can take that money away from them if they are ineffective by donating to a more effective charity. I cannot choose to withhold taxes and give them to someone else; I am stuck with a broken system. With existing agencies, such as the FDA, USDA, the Department of Education, Family Services, and many others I have no meaningful control over what they do. In fact, my whole town added together has no meaningful control. If we move toward socialized medicine, I will have no meaningful control over my own doctor.
Right now, with my longterm condition I have a lot of choices I can make and am trying to make those decisions. I can take one medication, for instance, that costs, let's say $30 per month. I can take another medication which is somewhat more effective but costs $300 per month. When I am paying for my own care, I have to decide whether that fancier pill makes enough difference to my level of pain and discomfort to justify $270 per month for that medication alone. Can I make changes to my life and environment for that $270 per that will make as much or more difference? Can I put that money into my daughter's college fund and just deal with it? Will the more expensive pill increase my capacity to work and end up worthwhile?
If the government is paying for it all, how is that choice made? The more expensive pill does improve my life, but, even if I accept that I am "entitled" to health care (I don't), am I "entitled" to the more or most expensive care? If the socialized medicine says that I am not, can I still privately buy the more expensive option if I do think it is worth it?
I am about to become eligible for Medicare and am one of the people who would be on the receiving end of many "entitlements," but I still do not like the system socialized to the point that it is, want to see it dismantled, and am looking for ways personally to avoid using it. We should be looking for ways to get private action back into the picture rather than all of the rules which make it next to impossible for the market and for private charity to operate.
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What if I don't want health insurance, and am willing to run the risk of getting cancer and dieing because I can't get it treated? Why should I be FORCED to pay for it?
What if I don't want public schools, and am willing to let my children grow up untutored unless I pay privately? Why should I be FORCED to pay for it?If you were trying to be sarcastic, you missed. Plenty of people home school their children and would be perfectly happy with less government control over education. I know a number of people who pulled their children out of school (to home school) because of the horrible mismanagement of our schools, but they still have to pay for it (and the school still gets their money and does not change). Making something mandatory is not just taking away someone's choice whether to do something, but also how and preventing them from choosing a more efficient or effective option.
Sorry, trying to get used to the new interface, I posted my response in the wrong place. It is here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=528940&cid=23162044
You were defending the act of profiling on the basis that Muslims were more commonly at fault. In order to sustain that argument, then 1) Muslims would have to be most commonly at fault, and 2) a significant danger of non-Muslims at fault (and being missed by your profiling) would have to be not-present. Neither of these are true and my response was at point.
To put it succinctly, I never stated all terrorists are (or were) Muslim. However, the vast majority of those in the last forty years have been. When was the last time you heard of a Hindu blowing himself up in a crowded market? A Buddhist? A Sikh? A Jew? A Christian?You seem to be ignoring the Tamil Tigers, who are Marxist suicide terrorists of Hindu extraction and just happen to be the most active suicide terror group in modern history. I also pointed out Christians among known Hezbollah suicide terrorists. The PKK are also primarily Marxist, culturally Kurdish terrorists with religion being at best an afterthought. Timothy McVeigh was a Christian. The folks who tried to attack a US military base up north were Christian. The various domestic suicide rampages have not been perpetrated by Muslims, including the guy who slaughtered people in a town hall near here recently. I am not looking hard to find these examples, either.
Historically, the Zealots were Jewish suicide terrorists fighting Roman occupation, the infamous Assassins were Muslims fighting another Muslim invader, and, of course, the Kamikazes were Japanese, so there is no basis for a historical trend based on religion vs. religion either.
Some of my other examples pointed to the fact that our own government (which we are trusting with profiling) has also been a threat to us and others in the past. Given that examples can be found readily for either side, the only solution is to look at actual statistics to see if one is actually more likely than another. But actual counts of terrorists and events where we know the religion of the terrorist do not bear out the conclusion either, not in modern times and not historically.
You might find isolated cases of this here and there if you go back four decades...You need only go back to 1980 to see that statistically, Hindus are more likely to be suicide terrorists than Muslims. Is this because Hindus are violent? No, it is just historical circumstance. They are largely active in parts of the world we do not care about and therefore we pay less attention to those numbers.
If you count non-suicide terrorism, then you suddenly have to include all of the groups in South America who are often Christian (and who are largely anti-US now, by the way), as well as terrorists in the former Russian Republics, so you can't get to your conclusion that way, either.
Are all Muslims terrorists? Nope. But most terrorists are Muslims.If actual statistics are examined, this is nowhere near the case, not even a little bit around the edges. If you read Newsweek, etc., it appears to be true due to selective reporting. Pape's Dying to Win is a very good treatment of the statistics, though it is becoming dated.
Stops 100% of the terrorists and is a nice treat for hungry travelers! Under the British Empire, beef fat was allegedly used to grease the rifle cartridges, which soldiers needed to put in their mouths in order to bite open the end. In India, there was a very brief rebellion over this: brief because the rebels refused to use the rifle cartridges.
If you actually look at statistics of actual suicide terrorists, you would get a very different picture. Statistically:
1) Suicide bombers are not poor, nor do they tend to be uneducated.
2) Suicide bombers are often not Muslim (e.g. Tamil Tigers, the Christian suicide bombers who operated under Hezbollah)
3) They are not more likely to be from areas known to foster Muslim extremists. In fact the presence of US troops in their home country is a better indicator by a factor of ten.
4) Suicide terrorists are not an extension of 'normal' terrorism, they develop from guerrilla campaigns.
5) The religion of a population is not a significant indicator, but the *difference* in religion between a people and a foreign occupier is.
Pape's _Dying to Win_ has a very good analysis of these statistics. Once you look at actual facts, you realize the question is a lot more complicated.
"Let's see: Pan Am 103 blown up by...hmmm...Muslims? 9/11 orchestrated by...Muslims? Achille Lauro, the Israeli Olympic athletes, the Beslan school massacres, ethnic cleansing, and many more too numerous to list, all done by...Muslims?"
Sure, Timothy McVeigh... Muslim. The Tamil Tigers... Muslim. The VA Tech shootings? Muslim. The Holocaust? Plotted by Muslims. Watergate? Richard Hassan Nixon was a closet Muslim. The slaughter of the Native Americans and internment of Japanese Americans? All a Muslim plot. Guatanamo only exists because the Muslims forced us to. The Crusades? They started it. It really is a wonder people object to profiling.
As I note in a previous post, http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=472974&cid=22621278 , Genuity was doing dynamic cost-based routing and smart mirroring in 1997 and the technology had already been in development for several years. The company I was working with was also working on similar technology, which is how I got introduced to the founders of Genuity (about the time they were bought by GTE). I know of at least one other effort to do the same thing during the same period, although it was not as far along as either ours or Genuity's "Hopscotch" protocol, and another company I worked with was doing the same thing with distributed database systems in 1998 (project was over five years old when I worked with it).
We also had a Internet gambling site at the time which used at least elements of the patent in that it was an off-shore (for legal reasons) site with static content served domestically for performance through multiple NAP connections with some routing magic. No where near as advanced as either Genuity or the design we were working on, but obviously pointing toward that goal.
A guy, possibly by the name of Alex Yuriev, was talking about distributed sites and dynamic routing in Philadelphia in 1996-1997. He may have worked for NetAccess at that point and was a bit genius with BGP and routing in general. My business partner at the time talked back and forth with him about some of the similar things we were working on.
The base concept is just not that hard, and the most difficult part of the implementation is physical and logistical, not technical. The hard technical part is doing dynamic updates to the distributed systems and synchronizing transactions, but even that can be fudged decently if you are willing to go with the 90% solution that gives you most of the benefit.
So basically, there was a lot of activity on this sort of thing in the 90's, the technology was clearly driving in that direction, and it becomes easy once the underlying tools are in place.
Genuity, a web hosting company, was doing this via their "hopscotch" routing protocol in 1997. They were bought by GTE at that point but the technology had already been in development for several years. I met the founders at a conference and we exchanged some ideas on improvements based on some work I was doing for another company. Basically, though, they had connections into all of the major NAPs in the US and a dynamic cost-based routing protocol that chose which server to use for which customer. Dynamic updates to the site data (e.g. actually buying stuff) was more complex, obviously, because they had to wait for the transaction to synchronize, but at least they benefited by processing the request through the fastest pipe to the browser. Those updates and associated content came from a different server, matching the patent requirements.
I found this article ( http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1997_Dec_10/ai_20053332 ) rather easily, going back to 1997.
A company I contracted to was building an Internet gambling site (football spreads). Since the site was technically not legal in the US, the site was run off-shore (Hati and DR). The problem was that bandwidth (and latency) was not good to either country. So, we served the images for the site (perfectly legal) off a domestic server. Fast response time, but the actual site logic was safely out of jurisdiction.
The site was called "Wager Web", but I don't think it exists anymore. After the off-shore clients stopped paying, we repossessed the product and modified it to use fake money and prizes from vendors (for making the most "money" during a season). I don't know what happened after that as I started my own company around that time.
This is the most effective way to live "off the grid!" No more taxes, etc.
Think of the legal implications.
Its against the law to "mistreat" a dead body. So, no death penalty for someone declared dead. Also, since you're dead, they can't stick you in a jail cell (the state won't to pay to jail a dead person, and other detainees would have a good complaint, cruel and unusual punishment and all that). Heck, they can't even put the cuffs on you without running afoul of the requirement to treat a dead body with all due respect and dignity .... someone should take this and really run with it.
Of course, there's the downside. No more sex, since necrophilia is also against the law ...
Actually, the NY Department of Motor Vehicles constantly threatened to fine my dead grandfather for a year or two. He had the gall to not return the plates from his van before dying (we never found where he put them). They sent nasty letters to my father and grandmother threatening him with fines, demanding to know where he was, wanting him to appear for hearings, and finally threatening to imprison him for contempt.
We wrote back or responded over the phone that he was dead. We sent them copies of the death certificate and other paperwork. We went in person with the paperwork. We sent them a forwarding address, just as requested, complete with plot number. We also tried an address care of St. Peter. We finally told them to go ahead and arrest him. At long last, on the phone with a DMV clerk, my mother finally got through to them: "The man is dead, D-E-D, 'dead', deceased, as in 'no longer living'. He cannot respond because he is in the ground, rotting." or something to that effect, while I sat in the kitchen practically wiping tears from my eyes and trying not to laugh too loudly. "Oh, he's dead! We need to update our records." The clerk eventually started a process to correct their records and clear up the situation.
The idiocy of government employees knows no bounds. I feel sorry for the intelligent people in government weighed down by the system. I have met a few, so I know they do actually exist. Poor sots.
After all this, my grandmother needed to get new ID to deal with certain government agencies. She had never had a driver's license, her birth certificate had been destroyed in a fire at the hall of records, and her proof of age was a census when she was a teen (where it turns out she lied about her age anyway because she was truant). The DMV refused to accept the documents she had to prove her identity. Finally we asked them what they would accept, and they mentioned a "Sheriff's ID". We went across the street, obtained a Sheriff's ID with the exact same documents, and got her ID card from the DMV. Somehow, I imagine the same mess or worse with "Real ID".
Let me try to understand you correctly. Intellectual property[1] is not scarce - it is 100% copyable, for free, by anyone with access to a single instance of the IP. If people are only paying for scarcity, and IP is not scarce, you have just claimed that the IP is worthless. I couldn't disagree with that more. I believe IP is still valuable, in spite of its complete and utter non-scarcity. IOW, I pay for the music because the music itself has value. Maybe I'm also paying for big media to find the "next big thing", the studio equipment, the production, the marketing, etc., but I'm paying for the music too.
That's patronage. You are responding to the idea that the talent or ability to produce the things you like is rare. You would be willing to do this whether there was a copyright goon standing there or not. So would I. But there is no inherent value to the copy. You are intending to pay the artist. This has been a functional system for millennia.
People payed for personal, live performances and still do because they are scarce. People buy original canvas paintings (as opposed to reproductions) for the same reason.These things aren't IP precisely because they are not perfectly reproducible. Instead of a canvas painting, we should talk about photographs, especially digital photographs. They certainly aren't scarce - anyone can buy a camera and take them, and photographs are really easy to copy, especially if they are digital. But the good ones have value despite their lack of scarcity - maybe they capture a cool-looking scene, a mood, a rare event, etc. Are those worthless? Maybe it's just a matter of personal opinion at this point.
I mentioned these things specifically because they demonstrated the borderline. The things which are hard to reproduce with fidelity are the ones that maintain value. People will pay for them regardless of copying (at least, those who care and can afford it will). The cool digital photo is not "worthless" per se, it just has no monetary value, no cost. The artist has to find some connection to scarcity in order to pay for that work, such as special signed prints, patronage, exhibitions, produce on contract. As a technology becomes commonplace and the rarity of things like that drops, only the people who are really unusual will be able to make money doing that. No one is going to go to a gallery and buy a signed print of one of my botanical photos (and I give the digital images away anyway); my level of talent is not rare. Cheap digital copies can actually drive the market for the real, scarce originals. Painting might also increase in popularity again, just because it is harder to reproduce. Hard to say.
Making money as an artist is great if you can do it, but there is no necessary relation.100% agreed. But I think the good artists are worth paying for, and that's why I support the notion that some people can and should make careers out of their art - and be able to be compensated for it. If people find that they cannot make careers out of art because the general public finds their creations worthless, we might lose out on good art.
Perhaps some, but many artists would find other ways to sell their work, many would work even if they were starving and had their fingertips gnawed on by fat brown mice with little bell collars that said "Sweetie" on them in thin black, gold embellished lettering. We would also lose a good bit of bad art, though, which might be a good thing. I would like to see a point where people value local, original, live music again. I have been around enough of those groups to know that copyright does not help them. If music became more rare, they would become more valuable and would therefore actually be able to produce more.
There is a difference between a house and a home. If I had put thirty years into a farm, built the house and raised my kids on it, I wouldn't want $3,000,000, I'd want to live on my farm in peace. If someone tried to take it, I'd hand them a shovel and tell them where they can dig. Just because some [elided] wants to level a place and turn it into condos doesn't mean that I should have to move.
The people in Kelo v New London were not arguing that the price offered was insufficient, they were arguing that it was manifestly unjust to steal their home, a unique value to only themselves, and hand it to a private developer for their own profit. I have to agree with them.
I'm not so sure this would be possible. I admit I haven't examined the issue in great detail, but it would seem to violate the terms of the proposed 'system'. More specifically, it allows for the existence of IP that is not itself taxed. However, it might be possible in a static form.
Flip it around. You are not taxing the idea, but the monopoly on the idea. A future buyer could not renege on previous grants. They could use their new rights to do new things, like put the GPL code into their own closed source product, but they could not void the old license for people who are already bound to it. As well, if someone created a derivative of that code and distributed it, the new owner would have to comply with the GPL to us it, even though they owned the underlying copyright. Just like, if a copyright is put into the public domain, it does not mean that your license to use it is gone, but rather unnecessary.[snip]
What you want to tax is the government enforcement of the copyright. The taxpayers supply a goonsquad to enforce that IP. That is what you are paying for, not the idea itself.
The only reason there is an industry for non-tangible goods like recorded music and art is because someone is willing to exchange money/goods/services for them! The instant that happened - the instant the music or art was found to be as valuable as some amount of money or some good or some service - an industry developed. Why wasn't there an industry for caveman paintings? I don't really know, maybe there was. But if there wasn't, it's probably because those paintings were not found to be valuable enough to warrant an exchange of other goods or services. Said caveman painter needed a "day job" to support himself and did his paintings in his spare time.
[snip] Strongly disagree. People payed for scarcity, not the music. People bought records because recordings were hard to make once and are not now. People payed for big media because they were talent scouts, paying for the service of finding and producing previously unknown artists (the rare "next big thing"). People payed for personal, live performances and still do because they are scarce. People buy original canvas paintings (as opposed to reproductions) for the same reason. Cavemen painters might have received some value from the community if the skill and medium was considered rare and special enough, but they probably did not have a registry or prevent people from copying motifs from one cave to another. Throughout history, artists have traveled from gig to gig working for room and board or maybe some extra and some have worked under great patrons. Art existed.Today, people learn to play instruments and participate in church choirs or other functions with no expectation of payment because they think it makes their life better. In many cases, that is enough. Many artists, and most of the good ones I think, perform because they need to, because they would not imagine life without art. That has nothing to do with "property". Making money as an artist is great if you can do it, but there is no necessary relation.
So if $megaCorp sues someone for patent or copyright infringement, they will be taxed on the same value that they use for calculating damages.
This is sounding better all the time! So what you are really talking about is buying "IP theft coverage" from the government. They can elect to pay less, but they get less coverage. That actually starts to make sense. The whole point of Copyright is that the government grants limited monopoly protection as an incentive to create/produce. Once that incentive is no longer meaningful, the transaction ends and the nominal value of the IP goes to zero.
The thing to figure out would be what the starting "coverage" would be and how long until they have to pay for it. If I have just written a book, I might not be able to afford enough coverage at the exact point "theft" is most damaging. I think it makes sense to give someone a certain coverage minimum for a *very short* amount of time (e.g. in the neighborhood of or less than the original copyright term of seven years).
Finally, these are in no way analogous to property tax because property tax is just on land, not on the various other things you own. Also the federal government doesn't even collect property tax. It's a stupid idea that would hurt everyone. As other posters point out, many types of property are taxed in different places. The bigger thing to me, though, is that it is the government granting you the limited monopoly protection. Having to rent that protection does not seem unreasonable, *if* not paying the rent does not deprive you of the property. In other words, as long as the worst that could happen is that your "property" would become public domain (where it would actually start out if not for Copyright law). You could keep using the creation/idea, but so could everyone else.
As for it hurting OpenSource developers, it would cut both ways, but if there is a grace period of even a few years, it would be enough to enforce the GPL. Who wants to fork a version of Linux from 2004 to start their closed-source project? If they want to redo four years of effort, let them, otherwise they will have to comply with the terms of the most current release, on which there will be active copyright. On the other hand, something like the SCO debacle would be completely moot.
As for paintings, the original would still have special value. If someone took a picture of the painting above my desk and published it (because the painting is out of copyright), the actual, physical piece of art still has value (not much in this particular case, but you get my point).
That said, if the "waiter" was following written instructional guidelines on exactly when to start handing out free meals, that's a whole other issue entirely. Those instructions would have a chance at qualifying as prior art. No, you are right. If the procedure is so utterly commonplace that it is not even written down as a procedure, then it fails by way of obviousness, not prior art. The idea of rewarding (bribing) customers for bad service of all kinds likely goes back to the first occupation. Bad word of mouth advertising and lost business hurts. Duh. Adding "with an egg timer" to the process does not make it less obvious.
It is the same problem with domestic wiretaps. We don't know who they have wiretapped and under what circumstances. We only know what has been reluctantly dragged out of them a piece at a time as they backpedal and try to hide potential evidence. That does not make me confident *at all* that what they have done and what they say they have done match up in any way. I certainly think it justifies further investigation and stricter limits, not less restrictive.
Do we have a responsibility to protect the rights of "everybody in the world"? No, but we certainly have a responsibility not to violate them ourselves, and letting our own government violate us is just stupid. But, in all fairness, it is not just Bush. Congress has not exactly lined up to correct the situation, and a lot of ordinary Americans seem to have been duped as well.
I am in favor of wiretaps when necessary and under oversight. That is what FISA is for. Procedures are already in place to deal with emergencies where warrants cannot be obtained in time. I think that the limits which were put in place to curb *actual past abuses* are fine.
So their solution is to hinder or completely block a technology or protocol because they aren't up with the times? So let me use another car analogy, since Comcast is fond of that one. They are saying that since everyone just got sportscars, we shouldn't pave the dirt roads but force most people to keep riding horses and allow only 30% of people to share these sportscars on the available paved roads at peak traffic hours.
[snip] Keep your fancy sports cars offo'my dirt roads, Bud. They upset the cattle.