If living in an urban area forced you to walk often, then obesity shouldn't be a problem at all in urban areas, and of course thats not true. Its all going to vary from person to person.
Living closer to commercial areas may make fitting walking into your daily life slightly more convenient, but that doesn't mean there is a lack of walking opportunities in suburbs, nor does it mean that where you live is the cause of your obesity. The cause there is simply your lifestyle, you can't push off the blame to what type of neighborhood you live in.
One of the big reasons things are so spread apart down here is that the area is full of parks and greenways. One of the big characteristics of 'sprawled' areas is houses with yards (meaning a place for kids to exercise). And despite the artificial barriers between residential and commercial sections of town, there is usually going to be something within walking distance. There are plenty of walking opportunities in 'sprawled' areas, if some people don't make use of them thats a result of their lifestyle, not where they live.
Again, correlation != causation. The correlation here is likely due to a common cause, working a desk job. Many suburbanites work in offices, and believe it or not, sitting in a cubicle all day isn't all that healthy. That and people who are fat and lazy are going to be more likely to pick a house without regard to where they can walk to.
That part of the contracts are put in by the networks, not the sports agencies. They are the beneficiaries, the sports providers would make more if they could sell contracts to both networks. And you see it in many forms of media, not just satellite radio.
"I think that the NFL prefers one service over another, and past that, I really don't know of anything else except maybe some talk personalities that I've probably never heard of."
Its not that the NFL 'prefers' one over the other, its that the NFL is only on one (Sirius), while other sports (baseball, hockey, college sports) are only on the other (XM). Thats where people get upset over having to choose between one or the other, if you are a big sports fan you have to choose between listening to football or baseball on your XM radio.
"But each service also has to be price-competitive and service-competitive to keep you from switching. They have to periodically roll out new features and improve the quality of existing features to keep up with the other. And they have to pay Joe Talkshow a decent salary to keep him from going to the other. Those things, again in my humble opinion, are preferable to having Oprah and Stern on just one service."
They would have to do all that even without a competing satellite radio service in order to get and keep customers. The fact of the matter is, XM's biggest competitor isn't Sirius, its traditional radio. As it is, you are not going to see many people flocking from one service to another. If you just spent $100 for an XM radio, you are not going to spend another $100 to get a Sirius radio just because they signed a personality you like.
Obviously Apple's legal department disagrees, otherwise they wouldn't have been working with Cisco to come to an agreement. And for the record, getting legal advice from/. generally isn't a very good idea.
Hey, thats nothing. I'm from DC and now I live in NC. Down here people start panicking when we get a tenth of an inch. And thats not an exaggeration, two years ago we got something like that during the day and the entire region ground to a halt, and it took me three hours to get home. Then last week we got half an inch which turned to rain within a few hours and again, everyone panicked. It wasn't as bad since this time it happened at night and people could just stay home, but those who tried to drive had no idea what to do. A reporter supposedly saw one guy getting out of his car to scrape his windshield in the middle of the highway.
Yeah, people in the capital region may not be the best with snow, but it gets worse and worse as you head south.
There is a big difference between the iPhone and the iPod. The iPod is basically just a toy, its not as bad if it doesn't have certain features as long as you can still have fun with it. Smart phones, however, are business devices. There if you spend a small fortune on the device just to find out you simply cannot do the things your coworker with the year old Blackberry can do, you may be a little more upset.
But they didn't have to make each and every detail public. Let the FCC leak out a few aspects of it, that will just grow the rumor mill more and more. Or at the very least don't give the name, which got them sued.
Its not a double negative (or triple, or quadruple) if the negatives are in different clauses. And it cannot be "today's" prize if the post you were referring to was posted yesterday.
Don't play grammar Nazi if you are not prepared to be hit back.
Email labels are nothing more than glorified folders which have been around for years. But Blogger labels (which this article also talks about) are easy to abuse, as is many other so-called "Web 2.0" tagging systems around nowadays.
That would be why he said it is difficult to get a cell phone without a camera, not impossible. I have yet to hear anyone argue there are no cell phones without cameras who was not obviously exaggerating. But they are few in number, they often have to be specially ordered (last time I went to Best Buy all their phones had cameras), and often lack features which people who actually work for a living (and cannot take a camera in to the office) might want. That is what people are complaining about.
Especially not tags. Have people already forgotten the meta tags that web pages used to use to describe themselves to search engines? They never worked because porn sites would just add a bunch of tags to their sites to get their sites to show up in the results for searches as diverse as "FDR Presidency" to "Birthday Cake recipes". People got so fed up with them that when a new search engine came along that didn't use meta tags in determining what a page is about, people instantly flocked to it. Now, in an ironic twist, the same company that launched that search engine is leading a movement back to tags. I'll give you about 8 months before people start abusing this technology as well. You can already start to see this abuse right here on/., as whenever a controversial story pops up it quickly picks up the tags "fud" or "notfud" (or often both).
"Coke has fewer calories per ounce than orange juice, apple juice, or milk. Granted, it has none of the health benefits of any of those, but it's probably not making you fatter."
A) Per serving sodas have more calories than any of those. There is a reason why nutritional information isn't recorded per ounce. People usually drink more soda in one serving than they drink orange juice.
B) As long as you drink 1% or less, milk has fewer calories per ounce than soda. And whole milk isn't exactly known as a health food.
C) The problem with coke isn't that it just has a lot of calories. In fact, calories themselves are good, your body needs them to function. Its how you get those calories when you drink soda that causes a problem. First, as you say, it has no nutritional value. It then goes without saying that soda cannot be used as a replacement for those foods, unless you want to suffer from serious health problems. Thus any calories you get from soda must be in addition to the calories you get from healthier foods, not as a replacement.
"Plus, the caffeine-induced twitching is good to burn off a few more."
Coke really doesn't have much caffeine, especially compared to drinks such as coffee and tea.
Please tell me you are all just drug addicts and you are talking about cocaine, not Coca-Cola. That stuff is disgusting in the morning. And yes, I have tried it.
And people wonder why Americans are so overweight. We have started drinking sugary soda in the mornings too now. Are you too lazy to brew a quick cup of coffee and get your caffeine rush there?
"From these accounts it is clear that the Bush administration's priorities on a Mars mission and a moon base are partly to blame for the de-emphasizing of earth science. Neither article quite says that some responsibility must fall to the administration's footdragging on global warming."
A quick glance reveals that one article never mentions Bush by name, the other only in that they are calling for more emphasis on global warming research and that real scientists (not/. scientist wannabes) are happy they really are funding the Mars missions.
What is this, really? The New York Times (not exactly known to have a major conservative slant) doesn't bash Bush so instead the/. article has to insert in a completely unsupported accusation?
"Most of the time, with no prompting, the girls will cuddle and mother the trucks that you give them, and the boys will throw the dolls."
Those kids are never fully removed from society. Unless you deny them friends, TV, stories, or anything else that tells them what their gender's place is, you do not have a controlled experiment at all.
"There are inherent differences between girls and boys."
As there are cultural differences between girls and boys. No one is arguing that boys and girls are biologically identical. It is which is more important in determining their interests later in life that is under discussion.
"Think of it this way. If the differences between male and female humans were arbitrarily decided by society, then how is it that every separate human culture on earth arrived at a similar result?"
Well, they didn't. Different cultures determined different roles for the genders. For instance in many societies cooking is considered the man's job. And I can even think of a time when mathematics was considered a woman's job. In the early part of the century long calculations were performed by human 'computers' sitting at desks. Most of those were women due to the fact that they worked for less money and, once WWII started, the men were needed elsewhere.
Sure, many roles end up being commonly filled by one gender or the other due to the obvious differences in reproductive or physical abilities, but that doesn't mean evolution hardwired our brains to prefer different careers based on our gender. Arguing that it does because you see common patterns is no more valid than a creationist arguing that there must be a creator because certain patterns are common in nature.
"Streaming radio" is so Web 1.0 man, get with the times. Now that we have moved to Web 2.0, its all about "podcasts" and "AJAX" and "mash-ups" and other meaningless buzzwords that describe old technologies.
On a more serious note, while we are complaining about the quality of the submission...
Why does it name Feinstein and Biden but not Lindsey Graham and Lamar Alexander, instead just calling them "two GOP senators"? Are they trying to belittle the Republicans by not even giving their names? Or are they trying to blame the Democrats by calling the focus to them? Its not like Graham or Alexander are exactly political unknowns.
I heard about a doctor like that on the news. He would mock his overweight patients to get them to lose weight and live healthier. It worked fine until he got sued by one of his patients...
Though I'm not sure if that is always going to be the best approach to getting people to get in shape. While for many people that might provide the motivation to exercise and eat better, others will just get defensive and resist more. I think its partially a consequence of our society's tendency to make fun of fat people that we now have these movements trying to advocate that people should be fine with their weight, even if they are extremely obese.
"
Uh, no. You need to go back about 100 years earlier. The first state child labor law came about in 1836 when Massachusetts required children under 15 working in factories to attend school at least 3 months/year."
A) Thats a state law, not a federal law.
B) Massachusetts in the 1800s had a vastly different economy than third world countries today.
C) That law has long since been replaced, and its no longer what we consider to be a high standard of labor.
"Well, they why did you bring this topic up?"
Uh, you did.
"If they already have laws similar to ours, then your previous point is irrelevant. "
No, it still stands. We still cannot expect other countries with vastly different economies (anywhere from India to Ecuador) to have the same labor laws we do.
"Further, while you may be just talking about India, I am not unless I specifically say so."
First, I clearly said I wasn't just talking about India (unless you need me to clarify the difference between 'mostly' and 'entirely'). Second, RTFA. We are talking about countries where offshoring American jobs is common. India is one of the biggest such countries. And unless this is your first time ever on/., you should know it plays a prominent role in these discussions.
"They can still sell competitively priced goods"
No, actually they often cannot. If someone has to choose a supplier of widgets from two factories, one based overseas and the other across the street and both with the same selling price, which is he going to choose?
"
World GDP is $60 trillion. US GDP is $12 trillion. Europe matches us at $12 trillion. That's a whole shitload of other economies they can trade with. We are not the only game in town."
Aside from the fact that the term "World Gross Domestic Product" doesn't make a whole lot of sense...
Our economy is 1/5 the world's economy, and over a hundred billion greater as the entire continent of Europe. Thats pretty big. That means we have a shitload of influence.
"Sorry, your logic still doesn't match reality."
Now you are claiming that reality isn't logical? I think its more your perception of reality thats wrong.
"A lot of fair trade proponents would be happy eliminating or reducing intellectual property, copyright, and patent laws. In that regard, they are the supporters of free trade, while big business is protectionist."
How many times do I have to explain the economic definition of 'protectionism' to you? If you don't like the term, feel free to not use it. But it is a commonly used term (probably invented by its supporters) to describe your foreign trade philosophy. Don't cry when other people use it.
"So, some restrictions are good, but others are bad and protectionist."
For the last time, almost everyone wants some restrictions (true anarchists are rare these days), and almost everyone disagrees with at least one form of restriction. At some point opponents of foreign trade decided to use the term 'protectionist' to describe their movement, and it stuck so well it made it into the fucking dictionary. Yes, the term could have been made up to describe other movements such as a movement backing IP (protecting inventors and artists) or a movement backing a stronger national defense (protecting our country). But it didn't.
"Specifically, restrictions that help big business are good and not protectionist, but restrictions on environmental and labor law which hurt big business are bad"
If that is the opinion you want to hold, you are free to do so. Mostly people (myself included) would argue thats a huge over-simplification.
"Our labor laws were enacted at a time when our economic status was radically different, much like a third world country of today."
Oh no. The oldest ones come from around the 1930s. Our economy was in a depression back then, but it was still radically different from that of an undeveloped third world nation.
Besides, the country we have been mostly talking about in these offshoring debates is India, and they do have extensive labor laws. The one thing people complain about is that workers make very little compared to US workers doing the same job, but the cost of living is much lower there. So you really cannot argue that you are trying to protect Indian workers by claiming their government needs to enact more laws.
"Duties and quotas are an option for importing their goods."
Thats still often enough to kill any chance they have at growing through trade.
"Further, developing nations can trade with any other nation they like and do not necessarily have to deal with us."
We have by far the largest economy in the world. If they cannot trade with us, that often means they are just screwed.
"Businesses are not labeled protectionist when they request protection in the form of intellectual property, copyright, and patent laws when dealing with countries that do not have similar laws to ours."
Lets look at a different issue, maybe that will make sense to you. Consider abortion. One position is that it is wrong to harm a potential child at any stage in development. That means abortions at any stage in development, the morning after pill, the birth control pill, and many other forms of contraception should not be allowed. Another position is that until they stick their head out into the real world, fetuses are completely worthless. That means abortion on demand is fine up to the moment of birth, and in fact abortion is a nice method of birth control. Now most people do not take one of these two views. Most people take something in between. That doesn't stop them from falling into two sides. A person isn't considered pro-life because they agree to restrictions to abortion in the final trimester. And a person isn't considered pro-choice because they consider something like the pill ok. The fact that they don't take the most radical views doesn't mean they do not take sides, nor does it mean they are hypocrites.
Similarly the free trade debate has radical positions, but most people take stands in between. The side arguing for more liberal trade policies (thats economic liberal, not political liberal) are often called supporters of free-trade. They may still argue for some restrictions, for instance they would not be against embargoes against North Korea because they are an evil communist country. The side arguing for more restrictions on trade are often called protectionists. They may still be fine with open trade to some degree and with some countries, they just want more restrictions than the free trade backers. If you don't like the label they have chosen for themselves, feel free to use a different one like "fair trade". But that doesn't mean people are wrong when they use the more common label, since they are effectively the same thing.
"It fosters or develops domestic industries by protecting them from foreign competition."
No, it protects them from any competition that attempts to compete by selling the copyrighted work. It is no more legal for a kid in America to sell a bootleg CD than a kid in China. In fact, most companies with businesses based on IP are more protective of it in the US and often are willing to turn a blind eye on it in other countries.
"If you go back and read what I wrote, I said that in discussions regarding free trade, people like you never mention that intellectual property law, copyright, and patent law are protectionist."
And again, you are wrong. Discussions regarding free trade often include discussions on IP law.
Slashdot Mirror
If living in an urban area forced you to walk often, then obesity shouldn't be a problem at all in urban areas, and of course thats not true. Its all going to vary from person to person.
Living closer to commercial areas may make fitting walking into your daily life slightly more convenient, but that doesn't mean there is a lack of walking opportunities in suburbs, nor does it mean that where you live is the cause of your obesity. The cause there is simply your lifestyle, you can't push off the blame to what type of neighborhood you live in.
One of the big reasons things are so spread apart down here is that the area is full of parks and greenways. One of the big characteristics of 'sprawled' areas is houses with yards (meaning a place for kids to exercise). And despite the artificial barriers between residential and commercial sections of town, there is usually going to be something within walking distance. There are plenty of walking opportunities in 'sprawled' areas, if some people don't make use of them thats a result of their lifestyle, not where they live.
Again, correlation != causation. The correlation here is likely due to a common cause, working a desk job. Many suburbanites work in offices, and believe it or not, sitting in a cubicle all day isn't all that healthy. That and people who are fat and lazy are going to be more likely to pick a house without regard to where they can walk to.
That part of the contracts are put in by the networks, not the sports agencies. They are the beneficiaries, the sports providers would make more if they could sell contracts to both networks. And you see it in many forms of media, not just satellite radio.
Its also possible to generate electricity with nothing more than a few lemons. Its just a lot easier with the volcano.
It must be nice to live right on top of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and a volcanic hotspot and get tons of free energy.
Well, except when one of the dozens of active volcanoes erupts, of course...
"I think that the NFL prefers one service over another, and past that, I really don't know of anything else except maybe some talk personalities that I've probably never heard of."
Its not that the NFL 'prefers' one over the other, its that the NFL is only on one (Sirius), while other sports (baseball, hockey, college sports) are only on the other (XM). Thats where people get upset over having to choose between one or the other, if you are a big sports fan you have to choose between listening to football or baseball on your XM radio.
"But each service also has to be price-competitive and service-competitive to keep you from switching. They have to periodically roll out new features and improve the quality of existing features to keep up with the other. And they have to pay Joe Talkshow a decent salary to keep him from going to the other. Those things, again in my humble opinion, are preferable to having Oprah and Stern on just one service."
They would have to do all that even without a competing satellite radio service in order to get and keep customers. The fact of the matter is, XM's biggest competitor isn't Sirius, its traditional radio. As it is, you are not going to see many people flocking from one service to another. If you just spent $100 for an XM radio, you are not going to spend another $100 to get a Sirius radio just because they signed a personality you like.
Right...
My suggestion, don't give up that day job in your hopes to go to law school and become a rich and powerful lawyer.
Obviously Apple's legal department disagrees, otherwise they wouldn't have been working with Cisco to come to an agreement. And for the record, getting legal advice from /. generally isn't a very good idea.
Hey, thats nothing. I'm from DC and now I live in NC. Down here people start panicking when we get a tenth of an inch. And thats not an exaggeration, two years ago we got something like that during the day and the entire region ground to a halt, and it took me three hours to get home. Then last week we got half an inch which turned to rain within a few hours and again, everyone panicked. It wasn't as bad since this time it happened at night and people could just stay home, but those who tried to drive had no idea what to do. A reporter supposedly saw one guy getting out of his car to scrape his windshield in the middle of the highway.
Yeah, people in the capital region may not be the best with snow, but it gets worse and worse as you head south.
There is a big difference between the iPhone and the iPod. The iPod is basically just a toy, its not as bad if it doesn't have certain features as long as you can still have fun with it. Smart phones, however, are business devices. There if you spend a small fortune on the device just to find out you simply cannot do the things your coworker with the year old Blackberry can do, you may be a little more upset.
But they didn't have to make each and every detail public. Let the FCC leak out a few aspects of it, that will just grow the rumor mill more and more. Or at the very least don't give the name, which got them sued.
Its not a double negative (or triple, or quadruple) if the negatives are in different clauses. And it cannot be "today's" prize if the post you were referring to was posted yesterday.
Don't play grammar Nazi if you are not prepared to be hit back.
Email labels are nothing more than glorified folders which have been around for years. But Blogger labels (which this article also talks about) are easy to abuse, as is many other so-called "Web 2.0" tagging systems around nowadays.
That would be why he said it is difficult to get a cell phone without a camera, not impossible. I have yet to hear anyone argue there are no cell phones without cameras who was not obviously exaggerating. But they are few in number, they often have to be specially ordered (last time I went to Best Buy all their phones had cameras), and often lack features which people who actually work for a living (and cannot take a camera in to the office) might want. That is what people are complaining about.
Especially not tags. Have people already forgotten the meta tags that web pages used to use to describe themselves to search engines? They never worked because porn sites would just add a bunch of tags to their sites to get their sites to show up in the results for searches as diverse as "FDR Presidency" to "Birthday Cake recipes". People got so fed up with them that when a new search engine came along that didn't use meta tags in determining what a page is about, people instantly flocked to it. Now, in an ironic twist, the same company that launched that search engine is leading a movement back to tags. I'll give you about 8 months before people start abusing this technology as well. You can already start to see this abuse right here on /., as whenever a controversial story pops up it quickly picks up the tags "fud" or "notfud" (or often both).
There are instant coffee mixes, frozen coffee drinks, even coffee machines that can be put on a timer to brew while you are sleeping.
"Coke has fewer calories per ounce than orange juice, apple juice, or milk. Granted, it has none of the health benefits of any of those, but it's probably not making you fatter."
A) Per serving sodas have more calories than any of those. There is a reason why nutritional information isn't recorded per ounce. People usually drink more soda in one serving than they drink orange juice.
B) As long as you drink 1% or less, milk has fewer calories per ounce than soda. And whole milk isn't exactly known as a health food.
C) The problem with coke isn't that it just has a lot of calories. In fact, calories themselves are good, your body needs them to function. Its how you get those calories when you drink soda that causes a problem. First, as you say, it has no nutritional value. It then goes without saying that soda cannot be used as a replacement for those foods, unless you want to suffer from serious health problems. Thus any calories you get from soda must be in addition to the calories you get from healthier foods, not as a replacement.
"Plus, the caffeine-induced twitching is good to burn off a few more."
Coke really doesn't have much caffeine, especially compared to drinks such as coffee and tea.
Please tell me you are all just drug addicts and you are talking about cocaine, not Coca-Cola. That stuff is disgusting in the morning. And yes, I have tried it.
And people wonder why Americans are so overweight. We have started drinking sugary soda in the mornings too now. Are you too lazy to brew a quick cup of coffee and get your caffeine rush there?
"From these accounts it is clear that the Bush administration's priorities on a Mars mission and a moon base are partly to blame for the de-emphasizing of earth science. Neither article quite says that some responsibility must fall to the administration's footdragging on global warming."
A quick glance reveals that one article never mentions Bush by name, the other only in that they are calling for more emphasis on global warming research and that real scientists (not /. scientist wannabes) are happy they really are funding the Mars missions.
What is this, really? The New York Times (not exactly known to have a major conservative slant) doesn't bash Bush so instead the /. article has to insert in a completely unsupported accusation?
"Most of the time, with no prompting, the girls will cuddle and mother the trucks that you give them, and the boys will throw the dolls."
Those kids are never fully removed from society. Unless you deny them friends, TV, stories, or anything else that tells them what their gender's place is, you do not have a controlled experiment at all.
"There are inherent differences between girls and boys."
As there are cultural differences between girls and boys. No one is arguing that boys and girls are biologically identical. It is which is more important in determining their interests later in life that is under discussion.
"Think of it this way. If the differences between male and female humans were arbitrarily decided by society, then how is it that every separate human culture on earth arrived at a similar result?"
Well, they didn't. Different cultures determined different roles for the genders. For instance in many societies cooking is considered the man's job. And I can even think of a time when mathematics was considered a woman's job. In the early part of the century long calculations were performed by human 'computers' sitting at desks. Most of those were women due to the fact that they worked for less money and, once WWII started, the men were needed elsewhere.
Sure, many roles end up being commonly filled by one gender or the other due to the obvious differences in reproductive or physical abilities, but that doesn't mean evolution hardwired our brains to prefer different careers based on our gender. Arguing that it does because you see common patterns is no more valid than a creationist arguing that there must be a creator because certain patterns are common in nature.
"Streaming radio" is so Web 1.0 man, get with the times. Now that we have moved to Web 2.0, its all about "podcasts" and "AJAX" and "mash-ups" and other meaningless buzzwords that describe old technologies.
On a more serious note, while we are complaining about the quality of the submission...
Why does it name Feinstein and Biden but not Lindsey Graham and Lamar Alexander, instead just calling them "two GOP senators"? Are they trying to belittle the Republicans by not even giving their names? Or are they trying to blame the Democrats by calling the focus to them? Its not like Graham or Alexander are exactly political unknowns.
I heard about a doctor like that on the news. He would mock his overweight patients to get them to lose weight and live healthier. It worked fine until he got sued by one of his patients...
Though I'm not sure if that is always going to be the best approach to getting people to get in shape. While for many people that might provide the motivation to exercise and eat better, others will just get defensive and resist more. I think its partially a consequence of our society's tendency to make fun of fat people that we now have these movements trying to advocate that people should be fine with their weight, even if they are extremely obese.
Wasn't there a man law passed against that?
" Uh, no. You need to go back about 100 years earlier. The first state child labor law came about in 1836 when Massachusetts required children under 15 working in factories to attend school at least 3 months/year."
A) Thats a state law, not a federal law.
B) Massachusetts in the 1800s had a vastly different economy than third world countries today.
C) That law has long since been replaced, and its no longer what we consider to be a high standard of labor.
"Well, they why did you bring this topic up?"
Uh, you did.
"If they already have laws similar to ours, then your previous point is irrelevant. "
No, it still stands. We still cannot expect other countries with vastly different economies (anywhere from India to Ecuador) to have the same labor laws we do.
"Further, while you may be just talking about India, I am not unless I specifically say so."
First, I clearly said I wasn't just talking about India (unless you need me to clarify the difference between 'mostly' and 'entirely'). Second, RTFA. We are talking about countries where offshoring American jobs is common. India is one of the biggest such countries. And unless this is your first time ever on /., you should know it plays a prominent role in these discussions.
"They can still sell competitively priced goods"
No, actually they often cannot. If someone has to choose a supplier of widgets from two factories, one based overseas and the other across the street and both with the same selling price, which is he going to choose?
" World GDP is $60 trillion. US GDP is $12 trillion. Europe matches us at $12 trillion. That's a whole shitload of other economies they can trade with. We are not the only game in town."
Aside from the fact that the term "World Gross Domestic Product" doesn't make a whole lot of sense...
Our economy is 1/5 the world's economy, and over a hundred billion greater as the entire continent of Europe. Thats pretty big. That means we have a shitload of influence.
"Sorry, your logic still doesn't match reality."
Now you are claiming that reality isn't logical? I think its more your perception of reality thats wrong.
"A lot of fair trade proponents would be happy eliminating or reducing intellectual property, copyright, and patent laws. In that regard, they are the supporters of free trade, while big business is protectionist."
How many times do I have to explain the economic definition of 'protectionism' to you? If you don't like the term, feel free to not use it. But it is a commonly used term (probably invented by its supporters) to describe your foreign trade philosophy. Don't cry when other people use it.
"So, some restrictions are good, but others are bad and protectionist."
For the last time, almost everyone wants some restrictions (true anarchists are rare these days), and almost everyone disagrees with at least one form of restriction. At some point opponents of foreign trade decided to use the term 'protectionist' to describe their movement, and it stuck so well it made it into the fucking dictionary. Yes, the term could have been made up to describe other movements such as a movement backing IP (protecting inventors and artists) or a movement backing a stronger national defense (protecting our country). But it didn't.
"Specifically, restrictions that help big business are good and not protectionist, but restrictions on environmental and labor law which hurt big business are bad"
If that is the opinion you want to hold, you are free to do so. Mostly people (myself included) would argue thats a huge over-simplification.
"Our labor laws were enacted at a time when our economic status was radically different, much like a third world country of today."
Oh no. The oldest ones come from around the 1930s. Our economy was in a depression back then, but it was still radically different from that of an undeveloped third world nation.
Besides, the country we have been mostly talking about in these offshoring debates is India, and they do have extensive labor laws. The one thing people complain about is that workers make very little compared to US workers doing the same job, but the cost of living is much lower there. So you really cannot argue that you are trying to protect Indian workers by claiming their government needs to enact more laws.
"Duties and quotas are an option for importing their goods."
Thats still often enough to kill any chance they have at growing through trade.
"Further, developing nations can trade with any other nation they like and do not necessarily have to deal with us."
We have by far the largest economy in the world. If they cannot trade with us, that often means they are just screwed.
"Businesses are not labeled protectionist when they request protection in the form of intellectual property, copyright, and patent laws when dealing with countries that do not have similar laws to ours."
Lets look at a different issue, maybe that will make sense to you. Consider abortion. One position is that it is wrong to harm a potential child at any stage in development. That means abortions at any stage in development, the morning after pill, the birth control pill, and many other forms of contraception should not be allowed. Another position is that until they stick their head out into the real world, fetuses are completely worthless. That means abortion on demand is fine up to the moment of birth, and in fact abortion is a nice method of birth control. Now most people do not take one of these two views. Most people take something in between. That doesn't stop them from falling into two sides. A person isn't considered pro-life because they agree to restrictions to abortion in the final trimester. And a person isn't considered pro-choice because they consider something like the pill ok. The fact that they don't take the most radical views doesn't mean they do not take sides, nor does it mean they are hypocrites.
Similarly the free trade debate has radical positions, but most people take stands in between. The side arguing for more liberal trade policies (thats economic liberal, not political liberal) are often called supporters of free-trade. They may still argue for some restrictions, for instance they would not be against embargoes against North Korea because they are an evil communist country. The side arguing for more restrictions on trade are often called protectionists. They may still be fine with open trade to some degree and with some countries, they just want more restrictions than the free trade backers. If you don't like the label they have chosen for themselves, feel free to use a different one like "fair trade". But that doesn't mean people are wrong when they use the more common label, since they are effectively the same thing.
"It fosters or develops domestic industries by protecting them from foreign competition."
No, it protects them from any competition that attempts to compete by selling the copyrighted work. It is no more legal for a kid in America to sell a bootleg CD than a kid in China. In fact, most companies with businesses based on IP are more protective of it in the US and often are willing to turn a blind eye on it in other countries.
"If you go back and read what I wrote, I said that in discussions regarding free trade, people like you never mention that intellectual property law, copyright, and patent law are protectionist."
And again, you are wrong. Discussions regarding free trade often include discussions on IP law.
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