If time travel were a reality, I would go back & work my arse off to become a "founding father" just so I could enshrine a right to tax-evasion in the constitution. Any tax-paying entity, whether person or (shriek) corporation, would have a constitutional right to 75% of their earned income, period.
All this would accomplish would be for the Congress to split hairs over the word "earn": sure, someone might have paid you some sum, but did you actually deserve to get it ? Oh, and your personal finances - including taxation and how much you have left afterwards - affect your ability to buy things from outside of your home state, therefore affect the interstate commerce, therefore are within the power of the Congress to decide.
No matter what you wrote to the Constitution, in the end it is just a piece of paper, and can be worked around. Constitutional clauses are about as effective in the political realm as disabling right click with Javascript is on the Web.
Why would aliens want to breed with dumb animals? That's the part of the whole 'Chariots of the Gods' bit I never did get.
I don't get it either, but considering the amount of bestiality videos floating on Gnutella, it seems to nonetheless be a possibility. Maybe the aliens were from a morally oppressive society, and consequently didn't have a mixed-gender crew ?
There is a BIG difference between... PACK animals (which are hunter killers) and HERD animals, which are prey. Society teaches us to be HERD animals. Humans are the apex predator on this planet. We are indeed PACK animals, but packs associate voluntarily (even the weak), while herds associate because someone wants to eat them all, or someone has already put them inside a pen.
Most herbivores associate in packs, herds or whatever because this gives protection in numbers, and with more intelligent beings allows more effective searching for food, not for the convenience of predators.
Most of "society" and its tendencies remind me of HERDS, not PACKS. In a pack, the vast majority fight together and can do so. The weak are exterminated or left behind or don't make it past childhood. In HERDS, those who breed and care for the herds make sure the weak grow up (by denying the predators their prey, i.e. the weak, sick or old) through the use of fences (literal or figurative/laws).
Assuming that's true, why on Earth would anyone want to live in a pack and not a herd ? After all, every human being who isn't killed young will grow old and weak eventually, so rooting for packs seems to be a form of delayed suicide.
Randian's at least talk a good show about becoming voluntary members in whatever PACK they so desire.
Yes... and you better desire to belong to one, because with the government neutered, the pack is the only safety you have against the predations of other packs or stronger individuals. Since membership in a pack is voluntarily, and you may be thrown out at anytime, you better conform to anything the pack leader says; to do otherwise means risking becoming defenseless against the predators set loose on society. That's ultimate collectivism for you, and much worse than any western nation has right now.
Randians - and other forms of libertarians, but Randians tend to stick out - come in two varieties:
The wolves. These people are trying to bring down the fences because they are ruthless bastards with delusions of grandieur (justified or not), and wish to prey upon the weak unhindered.
The sheep. These people are morons who think that taking down the fences which protect them from the wolves will make them free, as opposed to wolffood.
Call it "government by consent", rather than "servitude by pre-natal consent" (which is what social care governments really are, they force you to accept their kindness and extract it back at gun point even if you manage to avoid being a target of their "services" while young.)
And what happens if Bubba down the street chooses not to consent ? Then you will indeed have your property taken away at gunpoint, and that is if you're lucky.
Why should anyone receive a government benefit for having children?
Because the birth rate is below replacement rate in most western countries.
Why, yes, I am a Randian Libertarian.
That's okay, nobody's perfect. You'll grow out of it eventually, as time and experience do their job of teaching you just how vulnerable you are on your own. Humans are pack animals for a reason.
When only a minority of people is responsible for traffic accidents, the majority is indeed better than average.
Actually, from what I've seen, most dangerous situations are not caused by bad - unskilled - drivers, but by good drivers who at some point began thinking that accidents can't happen to them due to their l33t sk1lls. The problem is that the laws of physics don't care how skilled you are; if you drive a foot behind another car at 80 mph and that guy has to make a sudden stop, you simply won't have time to react, no matter your skill level.
It's not lack of skill which kills in traffick, but lack of humility.
There are two people, Tina Farrel and a sales assistant that need to be darwinised.
Personally, I think the people who judge other people fit to be "darwinised" - especially based on a page-long Web article - are the ones we could do without, rather than the people who's worst known flaw is that they can't count below zero.
Eventually the material would break-down, stop being a meta-material, and release the captured light. As I alluded to before, if this were carefully designed it could have some interesting effects (e.g. a "light capacitor" that builds up a big pulse and then releases it all at once).
Some mail server administrator who thinks he's God decided that he should get to choose which mail gets delivered and which doesn't.
Holy exaggeration, Batman ! Well, I guess animistic faiths could incorporate gods of e-mail servers for various domains. Sure would make an impressive title for your CV, too;).
But seriously, in what way does deciding not to receive (not deliver; receive) an e-mail mean you've got delusions of grandieur ? And do I have such delusions if I put "no junk mail" sticker on my real-life mailbox, or my phone number in the "Do-not-call" list ?
"We're going to block these mails -- if you don't like it, switch providers." Sounds like blackmail to me.
Sounds like bad service to me. To make it blackmail, the alternative should be "pay us", not "switch providers".
Leveraging the very VICTIMS of spam, taking advantage of their ire, frustration, and helplessness to further your own political goals.
What do you mean ? Skynet functioned exactly within its design parameters: it detected America's enemies and executed them with the most efficient method at its disposal. It goes like this:
US is waging a War on Terror -> you're either with us or you're with the terrorists -> giving money or training to terrorists makes you an enemy of the US -> US gave money and training to many terrorist organizations during the Cold War -> US is an ally of the terrorists -> US is an enemy of US -> kaboom.
Maybe, but what the summary describes is an autoimmune syndrome and has nothing to do with AIDS. This, of course, raises the question of why AIDS was even mentioned in the subject.
Could someone go and see the article ? I'd rather not do so myself, because of the Firefox CPU/memory consumption bug would make restarting the browser a neccessity afterwards, and I have a lot of tabs already open.
Under your system, it would be effectively free for anyone to bring a case against anyone else, no matter how baseless the accusations or how flimsy the evidence.
Defending yourself would also be free. Besdies, the current system doesn't prevent this; just watch the RIAA's little terror campaign.
I don't know about you, but I do know several people who (mostly because of social maladjustment) would happily spend every waking moment suing the ass of anyone who irritated them in any way, shape or form.
So make bringing completely baseless cases to the court a crime in itself.
How would one of those being sued in this case come up with the money if they lost? Being innocent of the charges isn't always enough to ensure that one wins the case. All that would do in these cases would be to encourage the RIAA to pay more and represent a larger incentive to settle out of court.
Have the state pay for everything - every last penny spent on the case. Anything else means that the citizens are not equal before law, which only serves to bring all law into contempt.
Not that that'll ever happen, because no one wants to pay for common good until it's their own head on the execution block and then it's too late.
I never really got it what the draw of anime is, can someone please enlighten me ?
Well, I'm personally more into manga (comics) than anime. The reason is simple: the only other comics available as widely are Marvel/DC superhero ones, which, frankly, are a never-ending soap opera long past its best date. The ingenious plot writers who apparently don't see any problem when a character wearing a swimsuit in a snowstorm on Antarctis doesn't suffer any ill effects don't help either.
That, and my current favorite, Negima, has lots of cute teen girls who lose their clothes all the time:). Sex sells, and the combination of sex, comedy, and big-explosion action even more so.
And if said car happened to be packed with a quarter ton of high explosives, it definitely wasn't me.
And I know nothing about the tentacled sex fiends from beyond doing to Comcast execs what they've been doing to their customers. This isn't a spell to call such things: "Mato nousevi maan alta, lonkero lonkalta, perseenreikä niiden alla, kirkuna kuuluu kuutamolla."
Am I supposed to just accept that this violation-by-proxy is legal?
When I was in the Finnish Army, one of our instructors said (bad translation): "Group punishment (that is, punishing the whole group when you can't figure out who's the real culprit) is forbidden, but there are ways around that."
That was a moment of epiphany for me, the moment when I stopped respecting the law and the authority behind it. It was an insignificant incident in itself, but it certainly drove home that the authority is not my friend, but rather a mass of corruption, and should be avoided whenever possible in any of its forms. It was also the moment when whatever lingering remains of nationalism still existed in my heart died out for good. For all that I owe a debt of gratitude I can never repay to that instructor.
So, don't hate your overlords, but learn from them. They want to get your fingerprints ? Forge them.
Now, if you look back at the posts, you'll see that I never agreed to the methods of the RIAA, I simply stated that stealing isn't the right route, and is in fact, the least effective: going without is the right route.
No one has stolen anything from the RIAA or their member organizations. A lot of people have infringed on their copyrights, but that is not the same thing, in either the legal or moral sense.
The Pirate Bay and Pirate party may be brave, but they are also stupid. They hurt the cause as much as help it. If you want to fight someone because they are wrong, you cannot bring yourself down to their level - you are forcing people into a 'lesser of two evils' situation.
Neither the Pirate Bay nor Pirate Party have sunken anywhere near the level of RIAA. To do that they'd have to engage in extortion against innocent people, as well as financially ruining people with absurdly large fines, as well as bribing the politicial machine to pervert laws to their favor.
The Pirate Party has argued against current copyright law, while the Pirate Bay has acted as a specialized search engine. Neither is wrong, neither legally (in the jurisdictions the organizations operate) nor morally.
Yes, the rampant shotgun lawsuits without merit ar wrong - but so is the theft that these groups promote.
Neither group is promoting theft. The Pirate Bay is promoting copyright infringement, while the Pirate Party is promoting the downscaling of copyright law.
Copyright law isn't preventing communication - it's preventing spoiled from getting their passive entertainment for free, or making a profit off of someone elses labors without giving them a return for it.
The copyright law specifically forbids party A from communicating information to any other party, if the information is copyrighted and party A does not hold the copyright or license. The current perversion of copyright law also forbids party A from communicating any technical information concerning technology party B uses to prevent access to any information it has copyright to, even if this technical information is not in itself copyrighted. Given this, it is untrue that copyright law wouldn't prevent communication; the whole point of copyright law is to prevent free communication.
Society is not obliged to give money to the people to make these works, though the creators do have a right to ask for it (as anyone has a right to ask for compensation for their works).
Anyone has a right to ask for anything, but that doesn't mean that anyone else has any obligation to give it to them.
Likewise, the creators aren't obligated to share their works with society, but they may.
True.
If they choose to set conditions, society, if it is civilized, should accept those conditions, or refuse the sharing.
The way it is nowadays, the deal is constantly being altered worse and worse for the society. Copyright terms are de facto infinite and using copyrighted works as basis for new works is illegal. Circumventing copy prevention, to for example view DVD's on Linux, is illegal. People's lives are ruined with absurd fines over trivial "crime" of copyright violation.
Even a civilized society must at some point defend itself against Vaderian practices. This is what the Pirate Bay and Pirate Party are doing.
Example: I like some of the songs on Metallica's Black CD. The CD, even used goes for nearly $20 around here. There's no way in hell it's worth that. Now, I could download it for free, and steal the music, not compensating the artist for the work done, but that does not hurt them any more than simply not buying it, in fact, it hurts them *less*, because now, not only did they not
In the US couldn't she plead the 5th? I'm betting its arguable that she would be testifying against themselves... I mean, it's their job to produce evidence, I don't think they have a right to force her to help...
$ENEMY have no rights. Only an $ENEMY would try to keep the law enforcement from doing its job. Therefore, if you try to plead the 5th, you do not have such a right.
If you read on and visit Rowling's site you will notice something. The story is quite different from what the grandfather-post suggests.
So basically, the lexicon site claims they're in the right, and Rowling's site claims she is in the right. Word against word. Impossible to say who, if anyone, is telling the truth.
So the correct form is: "Rowling claims that the story is quite different from what the grandfather-post suggest."
She's happy helping fans, but selling books based on her work is a bridge to far.
Isn't it nice how Rowling may tap folklore and popular culture for free, but heaven forbid anyone tap her work ? That's copyright law for you: hindering the growth of culture since whenever Disney first began perverting it with their legalized bribery in the form of campaign contributions.
If people don't openly resist then things will only get worse.
And if people will openly resist, things will still only get worse. Quoth Emperor Palpatine, the role model of British, US and many other governments: "Your feeble skills are no match for the power of the Dark Side."
Never give up the key and be totally open that there is a key and that you're not going to give it up. Involve the press and make a big stink about the issue.
The press, being owned by Big Business who also own the government, will report it as a notorious criminal withholding evidence, if at all. Assuming, of course, that you'll be allowed to contact the press in the first place, rather than simply disappear.
Scary how art imitates life: "Now witness the full power of the Dark Side."
And of course, you are overlooking the obvious, that, the United States and the EU could merge into a single trading block... sorta make NATO into a trading and foreign policy alliance along with the military alliance.
Why would anyone want to tie their foreign policy to the US ? I, for one, do not want to pay or die for one of its pointless wars.
I can hear it now: "I told you we were lost! I can plainly hear we're in Techno Town, and we are supposed to be in Bluegrass-Ville! Pull over and get directions!"
Actually, this is a good use, if you can make intelligible speech with this thing: "There is an intersection after one mile. This lane continues to X. If you want to go to Y, switch to the left lane. The right lane is deserved for mass transit."
So do you want a dusty, overheating logic board controlling your fuel injection? An anecdotal case doesn't justify a design where one of 100K units failing is too high of a risk.
You know, if the fuel injection in your car engine fails, the engine stops. It won't blow into a giant fireball and send the flaming wreckage of the car to crash uncontrollably to the nearest innocent buystander. It simply loses power, or in the absolute worst case, jams; but even that will only happen if the injection is designed badly enough to go full-out rather than all-stop in the case of failure. In short, it's an inconvenience, not a catastrophe, except perhaps for your wallet.
I guess you don't drive a Prius. Regenerative breaking can by definition only by controlled by wire, there is no mechanical way to put the car in neutral or park and there is only an electrical power switch instead of the key that could be used to physically turn off the ignition.
I find it hard to believe that Prius doesn't have mechanical fail-safe brakes, since most jurisdictions demand them for this exact reason. I also fail to see how this, even if true, would take away your ability to steer the car. Finally, I find it very hard to believe that you truly don't have any way of killing the engine if it goes berserk.
I hope I will never be a bystander caught up in this particular police technology.
Yep, getting microwaved is not likely to be a pleasant experience, except perhaps if it is a really cold and windy day:).
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All this would accomplish would be for the Congress to split hairs over the word "earn": sure, someone might have paid you some sum, but did you actually deserve to get it ? Oh, and your personal finances - including taxation and how much you have left afterwards - affect your ability to buy things from outside of your home state, therefore affect the interstate commerce, therefore are within the power of the Congress to decide.
No matter what you wrote to the Constitution, in the end it is just a piece of paper, and can be worked around. Constitutional clauses are about as effective in the political realm as disabling right click with Javascript is on the Web.
So basically, the lack of pre-existing evidence for a phenomenom is grounds for rejecting evidence for said phenomenom ?
See above. Now, if there is evidence that it can't survive long outside human body, that's another matter entirely.
I don't get it either, but considering the amount of bestiality videos floating on Gnutella, it seems to nonetheless be a possibility. Maybe the aliens were from a morally oppressive society, and consequently didn't have a mixed-gender crew ?
Most herbivores associate in packs, herds or whatever because this gives protection in numbers, and with more intelligent beings allows more effective searching for food, not for the convenience of predators.
Assuming that's true, why on Earth would anyone want to live in a pack and not a herd ? After all, every human being who isn't killed young will grow old and weak eventually, so rooting for packs seems to be a form of delayed suicide.
Yes... and you better desire to belong to one, because with the government neutered, the pack is the only safety you have against the predations of other packs or stronger individuals. Since membership in a pack is voluntarily, and you may be thrown out at anytime, you better conform to anything the pack leader says; to do otherwise means risking becoming defenseless against the predators set loose on society. That's ultimate collectivism for you, and much worse than any western nation has right now.
Randians - and other forms of libertarians, but Randians tend to stick out - come in two varieties:
And what happens if Bubba down the street chooses not to consent ? Then you will indeed have your property taken away at gunpoint, and that is if you're lucky.
Because the birth rate is below replacement rate in most western countries.
That's okay, nobody's perfect. You'll grow out of it eventually, as time and experience do their job of teaching you just how vulnerable you are on your own. Humans are pack animals for a reason.
Actually, from what I've seen, most dangerous situations are not caused by bad - unskilled - drivers, but by good drivers who at some point began thinking that accidents can't happen to them due to their l33t sk1lls. The problem is that the laws of physics don't care how skilled you are; if you drive a foot behind another car at 80 mph and that guy has to make a sudden stop, you simply won't have time to react, no matter your skill level.
It's not lack of skill which kills in traffick, but lack of humility.
Personally, I think the people who judge other people fit to be "darwinised" - especially based on a page-long Web article - are the ones we could do without, rather than the people who's worst known flaw is that they can't count below zero.
Take one hundred
Binary add thirty two
Fingers say fuck you
That sounds like a bomb to me. A laser bomb...
Holy exaggeration, Batman ! Well, I guess animistic faiths could incorporate gods of e-mail servers for various domains. Sure would make an impressive title for your CV, too ;).
But seriously, in what way does deciding not to receive (not deliver; receive) an e-mail mean you've got delusions of grandieur ? And do I have such delusions if I put "no junk mail" sticker on my real-life mailbox, or my phone number in the "Do-not-call" list ?
Sounds like bad service to me. To make it blackmail, the alternative should be "pay us", not "switch providers".
What political goals ?
Maybe, but what the summary describes is an autoimmune syndrome and has nothing to do with AIDS. This, of course, raises the question of why AIDS was even mentioned in the subject.
Could someone go and see the article ? I'd rather not do so myself, because of the Firefox CPU/memory consumption bug would make restarting the browser a neccessity afterwards, and I have a lot of tabs already open.
Defending yourself would also be free. Besdies, the current system doesn't prevent this; just watch the RIAA's little terror campaign.
So make bringing completely baseless cases to the court a crime in itself.
Have the state pay for everything - every last penny spent on the case. Anything else means that the citizens are not equal before law, which only serves to bring all law into contempt.
Not that that'll ever happen, because no one wants to pay for common good until it's their own head on the execution block and then it's too late.
Well, I'm personally more into manga (comics) than anime. The reason is simple: the only other comics available as widely are Marvel/DC superhero ones, which, frankly, are a never-ending soap opera long past its best date. The ingenious plot writers who apparently don't see any problem when a character wearing a swimsuit in a snowstorm on Antarctis doesn't suffer any ill effects don't help either.
That, and my current favorite, Negima, has lots of cute teen girls who lose their clothes all the time :). Sex sells, and the combination of sex, comedy, and big-explosion action even more so.
And I know nothing about the tentacled sex fiends from beyond doing to Comcast execs what they've been doing to their customers. This isn't a spell to call such things: "Mato nousevi maan alta, lonkero lonkalta, perseenreikä niiden alla, kirkuna kuuluu kuutamolla."
When I was in the Finnish Army, one of our instructors said (bad translation): "Group punishment (that is, punishing the whole group when you can't figure out who's the real culprit) is forbidden, but there are ways around that."
That was a moment of epiphany for me, the moment when I stopped respecting the law and the authority behind it. It was an insignificant incident in itself, but it certainly drove home that the authority is not my friend, but rather a mass of corruption, and should be avoided whenever possible in any of its forms. It was also the moment when whatever lingering remains of nationalism still existed in my heart died out for good. For all that I owe a debt of gratitude I can never repay to that instructor.
So, don't hate your overlords, but learn from them. They want to get your fingerprints ? Forge them.
So buy new monitors for everyone. They are expensive, unlikely to break anything, and will actually do something usefull by reducing eyestrain.
No one has stolen anything from the RIAA or their member organizations. A lot of people have infringed on their copyrights, but that is not the same thing, in either the legal or moral sense.
Neither the Pirate Bay nor Pirate Party have sunken anywhere near the level of RIAA. To do that they'd have to engage in extortion against innocent people, as well as financially ruining people with absurdly large fines, as well as bribing the politicial machine to pervert laws to their favor.
The Pirate Party has argued against current copyright law, while the Pirate Bay has acted as a specialized search engine. Neither is wrong, neither legally (in the jurisdictions the organizations operate) nor morally.
Neither group is promoting theft. The Pirate Bay is promoting copyright infringement, while the Pirate Party is promoting the downscaling of copyright law.
The copyright law specifically forbids party A from communicating information to any other party, if the information is copyrighted and party A does not hold the copyright or license. The current perversion of copyright law also forbids party A from communicating any technical information concerning technology party B uses to prevent access to any information it has copyright to, even if this technical information is not in itself copyrighted. Given this, it is untrue that copyright law wouldn't prevent communication; the whole point of copyright law is to prevent free communication.
Anyone has a right to ask for anything, but that doesn't mean that anyone else has any obligation to give it to them.
True.
The way it is nowadays, the deal is constantly being altered worse and worse for the society. Copyright terms are de facto infinite and using copyrighted works as basis for new works is illegal. Circumventing copy prevention, to for example view DVD's on Linux, is illegal. People's lives are ruined with absurd fines over trivial "crime" of copyright violation.
Even a civilized society must at some point defend itself against Vaderian practices. This is what the Pirate Bay and Pirate Party are doing.
$ENEMY have no rights. Only an $ENEMY would try to keep the law enforcement from doing its job. Therefore, if you try to plead the 5th, you do not have such a right.
So basically, the lexicon site claims they're in the right, and Rowling's site claims she is in the right. Word against word. Impossible to say who, if anyone, is telling the truth.
So the correct form is: "Rowling claims that the story is quite different from what the grandfather-post suggest."
Isn't it nice how Rowling may tap folklore and popular culture for free, but heaven forbid anyone tap her work ? That's copyright law for you: hindering the growth of culture since whenever Disney first began perverting it with their legalized bribery in the form of campaign contributions.
And if people will openly resist, things will still only get worse. Quoth Emperor Palpatine, the role model of British, US and many other governments: "Your feeble skills are no match for the power of the Dark Side."
The press, being owned by Big Business who also own the government, will report it as a notorious criminal withholding evidence, if at all. Assuming, of course, that you'll be allowed to contact the press in the first place, rather than simply disappear.
Scary how art imitates life: "Now witness the full power of the Dark Side."
Why would anyone want to tie their foreign policy to the US ? I, for one, do not want to pay or die for one of its pointless wars.
Actually, this is a good use, if you can make intelligible speech with this thing: "There is an intersection after one mile. This lane continues to X. If you want to go to Y, switch to the left lane. The right lane is deserved for mass transit."
You know, if the fuel injection in your car engine fails, the engine stops. It won't blow into a giant fireball and send the flaming wreckage of the car to crash uncontrollably to the nearest innocent buystander. It simply loses power, or in the absolute worst case, jams; but even that will only happen if the injection is designed badly enough to go full-out rather than all-stop in the case of failure. In short, it's an inconvenience, not a catastrophe, except perhaps for your wallet.
I find it hard to believe that Prius doesn't have mechanical fail-safe brakes, since most jurisdictions demand them for this exact reason. I also fail to see how this, even if true, would take away your ability to steer the car. Finally, I find it very hard to believe that you truly don't have any way of killing the engine if it goes berserk.
Yep, getting microwaved is not likely to be a pleasant experience, except perhaps if it is a really cold and windy day :).