All I can say is that I am permanently scarred by Legend of the Overfiend. Any culture that can come up with that stuff as a form of pop entertainment is seriously more laid back about sex than most of the world.
All these people who are complaining about violence being worse than sex, yikes.
First of all, you are all a bunch of facists! The government shouldn't regulate violence OR sex in media, and if you support that then you are a totalitarian scumbag, plain and simple. I don't care if Europe censors differently than the U.S... Europe still censors, and so they are still a bunch of authoritarian bastards, even if they censor with a different estetic than the U.S. Don't give me that "what about the children" crap - Ever heard of the V-chip? It is on every TV and it works, so your kids won't see violence if you take two seconds out of your life to set the parantal settings.
But besides that, any healthy person enjoys violence in TV shows more than sex. Why? Because I can have real sex. Why would I want to watch it on TV when it is perfectly legal and viable activity that I can engage in? I don't need to experience sex vicariously.
Where as violence, I can not engage in a socially acceptable way, nor would I want to. The point of violence in fiction is to create tension and fear, and to take character conflicts to an extreme level. Not only that, but there is very little danger that I am going to emulate what I see. I am not going to be robbing trains in the old west, or leading a CIA paramilitary force against evil terrorists, or shooting my way though zombie hordes, or fighting magical flying kung fu shaolin monks in ancient china. Any person who is incapable of grasping the huge gap between fictional violence and real violence is probably commiting acts of violence due to their mental disorder rather than television.
When Microsoft does buisness with the Chinese government, it is "corporation is evil for selling OS to repressive government. When OSS does does the same thing, "oh, this is great, more countries using OSS".
Now, don't get me wrong, I think any person in any country should be free to use whatever software they want, and any company or organization should be free to give or sell anything they want to whoever they want.
But it is funny, that software that will be cheaper (and therefore leave the government with more resources for repressive activities), and better (to help them carry out their repressive activities with greater effectivness), is hailed as being "good"... while expensive, crappy software that can only hinder the repressive activities of a government is considered "bad".
I say they are both a bunch of assholes. Japan allows extreme sex, extreme violence in its entertainment, and there is way less crime, teen pregnancy, etc, than either Europe or the U.S..
First of all, the statistics you are throwing around are FEDERAL TAX REVENUE!!!
It does not include state and local taxes, sales taxes, fines, fees, confiscated property, etc. It also does not include Social Security contributions, which aren't considered taxes even though SS surpluses go directly into the general budget.
It also does not tell anything about government SPENDING!!! The Federal government, as well as many state and local governments, run huge budget deficits. Government spends far more than its revenues!
I mean, do some simple math: The Federal Budget is approx 3 trillion, GDP is approx 12 trillion... 3/12 is 0.25... or about 25% of GDP being spent by the Federal government, not including Social Security, not including local government, not including state government, etc. And it also assumes that the U.S. government is properly reporting expenditures - The GAO thinks real government expenditures are significantly higher than reported.
And, of course, we aren't including expenses incured by private citizens in complying with government regulation - which is essentially money that the government decides how to spend for you. At that point you are probably talking closer to 80% or 90% of GDP being allocated, either directly (government spending), or indirectly (required spending enforced by the government on private entities), by the government.
I don't know how democracy can work with such ignorance.
Totally... when people get the stupid idea that somehow the government only consumes 17% of GDP, I don't think there is any way they could possibly make rational decisions about government.
A trade war would also effect the US negatively. Given that Ford and GM's operations stradle the border and given their current financial status, a trade war between the US and Canada would guarantee their bankruptcy. Now which American politician would want to be resposible for doing that over a few movies? Bush is stupid enough but its the Dems that are running congress and are on hollywoods payroll. And they definitely don't want to screw things up just after they've finally gotten a little power back.
Of course a trade war would effect the United States negatively, and the United States would never rationally decide to start a trade war about this kind of thing, because it would definitly not be in their own self interest. But the U.S. isn't always rational. The whole point I am trying to make, is that if the RIAA turns it into a Canada vs. U.S. issue, people in the U.S. might not act rationally (look at the Mexican imigration issue as an example: Stopping Mexican immigration will seriously hurt the U.S. economicly, yet politicians are still clamoring for restriction Mexican immigration, building a wall on the Mexican border, etc.). The RIAA will try to fire up both sides, so that the U.S. might engage in an unwise trade war just to save face.
The people in the Canadian government dealing with this have to manage U.S. public perception as much as deal with the U.S. government. It isn't as simply as "who cares".
Since about 50% of all economic activity in Canada involves the United States in some way, it is definitly in Canadas economic interest to care. That doesn't nessicarily mean that Canada should change its current copyright system for the U.S., but it does mean that if Canada tries a pissing match with the U.S. about this, the U.S. can put some serious pressure on Canada. It means that Canada has to deal with the problem diplomaticly and shrudely, and not play into the typical Canadian inferiority complex and go all Carolyn Parrish... If trade problems cause unemployment, less tax revenue and therefore diminishing social services, people are going to be a lot more pissed off at the government then they would be about any copyright changes which the average Canadian could care less about. The thing the RIAA would most love to do is turn this into a Canada vs. the U.S. issue (because Americans will rally on the issue if it is presented as an us vs. them issue instead of the RIAA vs. everyone issue), and I am sure there are enough blustering Canadians willing to indulge the RIAA.
The best thing Canada could do is offer some token (and meaningless) change... Just enough to look like they are trying to work with the RIAA. Then, if the RIAA (or whatever the pan-media equivalent is) doesn't accept, Canada can throw it back in their face and say "Look, we tried to work with you guys...". Defuse the situation and make the RIAA look like the unreasonable ones.
Once government started consuming more than 50% of the GDP, government has more money to spend than all other economic entities in the United States, and then some. The government spends more than every man, women, child, illegal alien, tourist, buisness, corporation, church, charity, etc, combined. For every dollar anyone spends for any reason, the government spends a dollar and some change.
Big government *IS* big buisness. Government is the only consumer worth a damn anymore. Call it socialism, or state capitalism, or whatever (they are all the same thing anyway), but the U.S. has crossed that threshold. The government is so big, so all encompassing, that free-markets or consumer capitalism are no longer relevant.
The only way to make money in the U.S. is to sell to the government... and so now big buisness supports big government, because those are the people with money to spend. Hence, Republicans have essentially adopted National Socialism as opposed to Laisse Faire Capitalism.
It's NOT the job of the government to give out free internet access as though it were an "inalienable right." If you want to go to those sites, and the library doesn't give you that permission, then go buy a computer and do it on your own.
It is not the job of the government to give out free internet access... but once it DOES give out free internet access, it needs to be uncensored. If you don't want the government giving out free internet access, that is fine - have the government STOP giving free internet access.
This aspect alone makes this bill virtually impossible to implement in any meaningful way.
Don't kid yourself... this bill WILL be aggressively enforced. People always say "well, the law is too vauge, it is impossible to enforce", but that is bullshit. The law being vauge just means that the government will be free to go after whoever it wants. Don't like the website of your political rivials? Have it declared a "Socal Networking Website". Is there some embarrasing information about the government? Have it declared a "Social Networking Website"! Power hungry politicians LOVE vauge laws. It gives them the power to do just about anything.
This is why many people are against government-run wireless internet access that everyone on Slashdot thinks is such a fine idea.
"Yeah, but dude, like the government would be giving us wireless access FOR FREE!! And like, we can trust them, because they are the government!"
If schools, libraries, government facilities are required to implement this type on censorship, then without a doubt the "free" wireless broadband offered by municipalities will also implement this type of censorship. The price you pay for your "free" internet access is being restricted to only those websites that your local paternalistic demagog politician approves of. People on Slashdot would much rather have free beer than free speech, so I don't think it will make a difference... but just saying.
Did you ever wonder why there are laws that say pharmacies can substitute a generic drug for a brand one?
What are you talking about? In lots of states it is illegal for a pharmacist to even offer a generic drug (let alone secretly replace the drug as you suggest)... the pharmacist is required to provide the brand name listed on the prescription unless the patient explicity asks about a generic.
Second, the insurance companies pay far far less for generic drugs than the brand names... which is a good thing, because those high drug costs are eventually passed on to the consumer in the cost of insurance. And the pharmacies are not getting rich either from generics - for the most part they make their money on over-the-counter medicines, toilet paper, dish detergent, cosmetics, and other crap they sell.
Third, generic drugs are the exact same substance as the brand name drug, and are just as effective. Quality control is so high with both generic and brand name drugs that it is not an issue. No one is getting sick or dying from using generic drugs instead of brand names, because those companies are just as liable for mistakes as the larger companies.
It would be fine for me to cache a current site on my site, so long as I make it clear that the information is not mine and where it came from... and so long as the owner of the site hasn't explicitly disallowed such a thing.
I am sure I might get sued, but in the modern day legal climate where people sue anyone for anything, that doesn't really mean anything.
What I want is something similar to slashcode's degrees of separation. I want to have a foes list, plus friends of friends and foes of friends. Football suffers massively from idiocy online. From what I've heard, seems like all of the games do.:( If I could maintain a foes list, and see whom my friends have tagged as foes, it would make filtering jerks out much easier.
Xbox Live for the 360 pretty much has this, although not quite as detailed as slashcode's system.
The CO2 emission problem has been solved. Nuclear power is safe, it is cheap (when political forces aren't intentionally making it expensive), it has been proven to work (see countries like France). Waste is not an issue when recycling is legal. Pebble Bed reactors and non-weapons-grade fuels can eliminate the threat of meltdown and weapons proliferation.
Global Warming? Problem solved!
The trouble is that enviornmentalists are not only concerned about eliminating CO2, they also have a political and social agenda. They want to see a government run economy, and an end to consumer capitalism. A solution to global warming that allows people to keep current "evil" consumption levels, and doesn't involve total economic control by the government, is politically undesirable. Leftists see global warming as the issue that will prove to all the "evil and destructiveness of capitalism", and will bring us into a totalitarian government run utopia, free of "greed and materialistic desires".
Now, in reality of course, social enlightenment tends to come from technological development and economic plenty. Slavery ends in each society at around the time of their industrial revolution. When industrial productivity gets to a certain level, the labor of children is no longer needed to produce vital goods and services, and child labor disapears. The conversion of the labor force from tasks that require brute strength to mental tasks, along with the availability of packaged goods and foods that don't require a family member to make bread or soap or clothing themselves, and the wide spread availability of birth control technology, leads to sexual equality. When mass-media and global communications come into place, provincialism and racism begins to break down as people are exposed to people of different races and cultures through television, movies, pop music, etc.. So in reality, the socialist utopia envisioned by the enviornmentalists will most likely regress into the level of social progress of the pre-industrial age (wide spread racism, sexism, lots of blatent exploitation and maybe even slavery).
For there to be any progress on Global Warming, the enviornmental movement is going to have to adopt nuclear power as a solution, and abandon their lunatic fringe that tells us that the solution to global warming is everyone living in pre-industrial centrally planned communes.
The government should represent its people, and politicians should be held to very high standards. Legal bribery, or any other means of subverting our government are simply unacceptable, and should be considered no less seriously than premeditated murder. In fact, as the current administration demonstrates, it is often much worse.
The trouble is, when you give the government trillions of dollars to divy out however it wants, and when you give the government almost total power over every single aspect of life in the United States... corruptions is the inevitable result. Government has become the ultimate source of money, power, respect and adoration... it is only natural that people will do anything to get the government to act in their favor.
The death penalty for "corrupt" politicians would simply mean that corrupt politicians would be able to have uncorrupted politicians executed (after all, the system itself would be legislated by corrupt politicians, and be enforced by judges selected by those corrupt politicians).
Liberals used to understand the corrupting nature of power... but eventually they abandoned their support for limited government, decentralization, and individual liberty, and instead adopted the socialist mythology of the benevolent all-powerful state. Power corrupts, and so an ultra-powerful state, no matter what laws or means you try to put in place to keep it from being corrupt, will become corrupt. Corruption is the inevitable result of big government. Being for big government, but being anti-corruption, is like being for smoking, but against lung cancer: It is a contradiction that ignores cause-and-effect.
Except that Corporations are collections of people. Saying you want to oppress corporations is like saying you want to oppress Spain. Since Spain is made up of people, opressing Spain means oppressing Spanish citizens.
Likewise, while a corporation does not have freedom of speech, its employees do. If I am not allowed to blog positive things about my employer, then you have taken away freedom of speech from an individual person. I, as an individual, should not lose my freedom of speech, simply because my opinions may benifit a corporation.
Of course, the whole point is moot. Since the Internet is global, corporations will simply run fake blogs in countries where it is legal, so this law will have zero effect on this kind of advertising. The goal is not to stop this kind of advertising, but to slowly expand censorship in such a way as to make you feel warm and fuzzy and protected by it... incrementally increase censorship in the name of "stopping the evil corporations", until the point where to be anti-censorship is considered pro-corporation without any human thought involved. It is about desensitizing people to censorship to make them more comfortable with it, for the inevitable day that it is expanded to include all forms of speech.
In the same way anti-terror hysteria is used to get people to agree to laws that steal their individual liberties, anti-corporate hysteria is used to steal people's individual liberties. It is all about marketing totalitarianism in a way that seems palatable to your own political beliefs. For you, corporations are the boogie man that makes you willing to give up your rights.
So that's a yes to the NAMBLA thing? Frankly, I'm rather glad we have a low age of consent. I had an incident with a young female who lied about her age that would have landed me in prison if I had been in the US
People tend to be most paranoid of the things that are closest to their selves. The guys I know who are super jealous about their girlfriends cheating on them are the guys who cheated on their girlfriends. The people I know that are super afraid of their stuff being stolen are the people who steal stuff themselves. The right wing Christian zealots in America are terrified of right wing Muslim zealots from overseas. Homophobes tend to be closet homosexuals. The actions that people are most likely to commit themselves are the ones they most go totally batshit about.
In your case, you are a self-admitted pedophile... you had an "incident", and despite your lame excuse (She lied about her age? Yeah, like all you weirdos don't say that!) you HAD SEX WITH A CHILD!!! You fucking admit it! Only someone truly sick and twisted yourself wouldn't get the irony of you accusing random people you don't know on the internet of being a member of NABMLA!
In any case, I wouldn't have sent you to prison, but I would have sent you to manditory counciling so you would take responsiblity for your actions and stop projecting your sexual desires onto other people.
Sure you did! You said 14 is too low for an age of consent, but you don't think that an adult having sex with a 14 year old should be locked up. Therefore you don't think someone having sex with a person who is below the age of consent should be locked up. But I see what your problem is:
What is so hard for you to understand? An 8 year old isn't a 14 year old. A 14 year old isn't a young child, they are a teenager. That is why movies have several different ratings: G, PG, PG-13, R, NC17, etc. A rational person can understand that while it is undesirable that a 14 year old have concentual sex with an adult, that it is not an clear and present danger to society at large.
Would you throw doctors who prescribe birth control to teenagers in prison, for aiding child molestation? Would you make it illegal for health facilities to distribute any contraceptives to teenagers, under the assumption that any underage sex is child molestation? So when do you plan to throw the Canadian Minister of Health in prison, for aiding and abetting?
That doesn't work. "Sliding scale" laws are notoriously bad because judges are all over the board when it comes to sentencing. If you leave it up to the judges discretion, you'll end up with all sorts of weird verdicts.
A sliding scale doesn't have to leave sentencing to a judges discretion. You can have a sliding scale based on objective criteria. For example, have sex with minors below 14 to be a serious felony along the lines of rape or murder, and having concentual sex with minors 14 or above to be more along the lines of drunken driving or theft: You probably won't go to prison on your first offense, provided you seek help.
And how exactly you managed to use the word "nuanced" while talking about the sentencing of child molesters is beyond me. Let me guess, you're a member of NAMBLA, right? And a university professor too?
It is good to see Canada doesn't have any shortage of facists. Just because I don't support your lynch mob mentality, doesn't mean I endorse the behavior. The fact that you would accuse someone of such vile thing as being a member of NAMBLA, in civil discourse with someone who supports *even stricter* laws than are currently in place, shows the kind of paranoid McCarthyist attitude at work.
Since you think that 14 is too young for consent, yet still think that an adult having sex with a 14 year old should not be "thrown in prison", do you feel the same way about an adult having sex with an 8 year old? Because that is the implication which you are making. You've basically stated that an adult who has sex with a minor should not be arrested.
I implied nothing of the sort. An 8 year old is not a 14 year old, and any reasonable person can make the distinction.
As for the 80 year old and the 14 year old, throwing a person in prison is not the only punishment possible. You could fine a person. You could give them a suspended sentence with manditory counseling. You could give them a restraining order to legally keep them from seeing the 14 year old. You could put them in jail for 30 days (as opposed to prison for 30 years). The situation can be dealt with in a reasonable, nuanced fashion... proportional to the individual circumstances of the crime. The Canadian system, while not perfect, is far more reasonable and sane than the U.S. 'zero-tolerance' system.
Arabs and Islam have been demonized for ages, and more so now in this "post 9/11 world" than ever, it would seem. Now, think about those political cartoons that Islam was so terribly intolerant of. They showed a religious figure as a terrorist, using his "towel" to hold a bomb. This wasn't just against the religion, this was against a whole group of people, painting a whole religion with one brush. Would a Christian be happy to see a cartoon of Jesus dressed as a klansman? Or maybe Jesus stabbing an Arab child through the heart with a cross? Perhaps some, but the majority would see this as an insult and a totally unfair generalization. Perhaps... but in most Western countries, drawing a picture of Jesus stabbing an arab child through the heart with a cross would get you a government grant for the arts... where as critizing Islam in the same way is likely to get you thrown in jail for "hate crimes".
If you were trying to scare us with some frightening scenario, you failed. While it does disturb me that a 14 year old girl would be hooking up with an 80 year old guy (I think 14 years old might be a little too young for the age of consent), it is still less disturbing than throwing both in prison.
This is clearly a case of not just prosecutorial misconduct, but malicious prosecution of the worst kind.
No, this is not clearly a case of prosecutorial misconduct, nor malicious prosecution. This is the logical, reasonable, and inevitable end result of "zero tolerance" policies on crime. Once you accept the logic of a police state (no matter if it is the War on Drugs, War on Terror, Gun Control, Hate Speech, Sex Crime Hysteria, or any of the other mainstraim "Law & Order" political movements), then reactions like this are totally reasonable within the logic of that belief system.
Only when you start looking at faith in government as being a religion, do laws like this make sense.
So:
Careless people are being killed because they are not paying attention because of ipods. The threat of death or extreme physical harm is not enough of a penalty to force them to not wear ipods while crossing the street. There are far more potentially dangerous automobiles on the roads than there are cops patrolling intersections looking for ipod wearers.
Therefore, the law must rely on one of the following beliefs:
Either a $100 fine is worse than death or serious injury. (I don't think anyone believes that).
Or government manipulates some sort of sympathetic magic ( http://skepdic.com/sympathetic.html ), where by what is made a law has some sort of physical manifestation beyond the simple penalty or enforcement, simple by decreeing something on paper. Much like God says "Let there be light", and there is light... the government says "do not wear ipods while crossing the street", and therefore no-one can wear ipods while crossing the street.
The vast majority of people nowadays, instead of looking at a law as say a 'medicine' (that might work, that might not work, that might have side effects, that might have a greater social cost to use than the problem itself), they look at it as ordination - People assume the will of the state simply manifests itself, and to solve problems all you need to do is make a law forbidding said problem.
Umm, have you not been paying any attention AT ALL to what the religious right has done and/or tried to do to the US governments direction and policies in the past 25 years?
And fortunatly for the Christian Right, the Progressive Left has been promoting the concept of Social Democracy, where by society is socially engineered by the state in order to better address social issues. Years ago, the Christian Right had to go through pretty extreme lengths to enforce their will (for example, in the 1920s the prohibition of alchohol needed to explicity constitutional amendment to be enacted), since the role of the federal government was so limited. Nowadays, most law is essentially dictated by the executive branch (in regulations created by the EPA, the DEA, the FDA, the Department of Energy, etc., etc.), and completly bypasses congress, state and local governments, etc.
The thinking of the Progressive Left was "We need to make a super powerful federal government, where the president and the executive branch have nearly total power over all affairs of our nation, because then the president will be able to do a lot of 'social good' with all that power. It isn't like a right wing christian nut will ever be elected president!".
The greatest allies the Christian Right has ever known in their struggle for power in America is the Progressive Left.
Slashdot Mirror
All I can say is that I am permanently scarred by Legend of the Overfiend. Any culture that can come up with that stuff as a form of pop entertainment is seriously more laid back about sex than most of the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urotsukidoji
All these people who are complaining about violence being worse than sex, yikes.
First of all, you are all a bunch of facists! The government shouldn't regulate violence OR sex in media, and if you support that then you are a totalitarian scumbag, plain and simple. I don't care if Europe censors differently than the U.S... Europe still censors, and so they are still a bunch of authoritarian bastards, even if they censor with a different estetic than the U.S. Don't give me that "what about the children" crap - Ever heard of the V-chip? It is on every TV and it works, so your kids won't see violence if you take two seconds out of your life to set the parantal settings.
But besides that, any healthy person enjoys violence in TV shows more than sex. Why? Because I can have real sex. Why would I want to watch it on TV when it is perfectly legal and viable activity that I can engage in? I don't need to experience sex vicariously.
Where as violence, I can not engage in a socially acceptable way, nor would I want to. The point of violence in fiction is to create tension and fear, and to take character conflicts to an extreme level. Not only that, but there is very little danger that I am going to emulate what I see. I am not going to be robbing trains in the old west, or leading a CIA paramilitary force against evil terrorists, or shooting my way though zombie hordes, or fighting magical flying kung fu shaolin monks in ancient china. Any person who is incapable of grasping the huge gap between fictional violence and real violence is probably commiting acts of violence due to their mental disorder rather than television.
When Microsoft does buisness with the Chinese government, it is "corporation is evil for selling OS to repressive government. When OSS does does the same thing, "oh, this is great, more countries using OSS".
Now, don't get me wrong, I think any person in any country should be free to use whatever software they want, and any company or organization should be free to give or sell anything they want to whoever they want.
But it is funny, that software that will be cheaper (and therefore leave the government with more resources for repressive activities), and better (to help them carry out their repressive activities with greater effectivness), is hailed as being "good"... while expensive, crappy software that can only hinder the repressive activities of a government is considered "bad".
I say they are both a bunch of assholes. Japan allows extreme sex, extreme violence in its entertainment, and there is way less crime, teen pregnancy, etc, than either Europe or the U.S..
First of all, the statistics you are throwing around are FEDERAL TAX REVENUE!!!
It does not include state and local taxes, sales taxes, fines, fees, confiscated property, etc. It also does not include Social Security contributions, which aren't considered taxes even though SS surpluses go directly into the general budget.
It also does not tell anything about government SPENDING!!! The Federal government, as well as many state and local governments, run huge budget deficits. Government spends far more than its revenues!
I mean, do some simple math: The Federal Budget is approx 3 trillion, GDP is approx 12 trillion... 3/12 is 0.25... or about 25% of GDP being spent by the Federal government, not including Social Security, not including local government, not including state government, etc. And it also assumes that the U.S. government is properly reporting expenditures - The GAO thinks real government expenditures are significantly higher than reported.
And, of course, we aren't including expenses incured by private citizens in complying with government regulation - which is essentially money that the government decides how to spend for you. At that point you are probably talking closer to 80% or 90% of GDP being allocated, either directly (government spending), or indirectly (required spending enforced by the government on private entities), by the government.
I don't know how democracy can work with such ignorance.
Totally... when people get the stupid idea that somehow the government only consumes 17% of GDP, I don't think there is any way they could possibly make rational decisions about government.
A trade war would also effect the US negatively. Given that Ford and GM's operations stradle the border and given their current financial status, a trade war between the US and Canada would guarantee their bankruptcy. Now which American politician would want to be resposible for doing that over a few movies? Bush is stupid enough but its the Dems that are running congress and are on hollywoods payroll. And they definitely don't want to screw things up just after they've finally gotten a little power back.
Of course a trade war would effect the United States negatively, and the United States would never rationally decide to start a trade war about this kind of thing, because it would definitly not be in their own self interest. But the U.S. isn't always rational. The whole point I am trying to make, is that if the RIAA turns it into a Canada vs. U.S. issue, people in the U.S. might not act rationally (look at the Mexican imigration issue as an example: Stopping Mexican immigration will seriously hurt the U.S. economicly, yet politicians are still clamoring for restriction Mexican immigration, building a wall on the Mexican border, etc.). The RIAA will try to fire up both sides, so that the U.S. might engage in an unwise trade war just to save face.
The people in the Canadian government dealing with this have to manage U.S. public perception as much as deal with the U.S. government. It isn't as simply as "who cares".
Since about 50% of all economic activity in Canada involves the United States in some way, it is definitly in Canadas economic interest to care. That doesn't nessicarily mean that Canada should change its current copyright system for the U.S., but it does mean that if Canada tries a pissing match with the U.S. about this, the U.S. can put some serious pressure on Canada. It means that Canada has to deal with the problem diplomaticly and shrudely, and not play into the typical Canadian inferiority complex and go all Carolyn Parrish... If trade problems cause unemployment, less tax revenue and therefore diminishing social services, people are going to be a lot more pissed off at the government then they would be about any copyright changes which the average Canadian could care less about. The thing the RIAA would most love to do is turn this into a Canada vs. the U.S. issue (because Americans will rally on the issue if it is presented as an us vs. them issue instead of the RIAA vs. everyone issue), and I am sure there are enough blustering Canadians willing to indulge the RIAA.
The best thing Canada could do is offer some token (and meaningless) change... Just enough to look like they are trying to work with the RIAA. Then, if the RIAA (or whatever the pan-media equivalent is) doesn't accept, Canada can throw it back in their face and say "Look, we tried to work with you guys...". Defuse the situation and make the RIAA look like the unreasonable ones.
Once government started consuming more than 50% of the GDP, government has more money to spend than all other economic entities in the United States, and then some. The government spends more than every man, women, child, illegal alien, tourist, buisness, corporation, church, charity, etc, combined. For every dollar anyone spends for any reason, the government spends a dollar and some change.
Big government *IS* big buisness. Government is the only consumer worth a damn anymore. Call it socialism, or state capitalism, or whatever (they are all the same thing anyway), but the U.S. has crossed that threshold. The government is so big, so all encompassing, that free-markets or consumer capitalism are no longer relevant.
The only way to make money in the U.S. is to sell to the government... and so now big buisness supports big government, because those are the people with money to spend. Hence, Republicans have essentially adopted National Socialism as opposed to Laisse Faire Capitalism.
It's NOT the job of the government to give out free internet access as though it were an "inalienable right." If you want to go to those sites, and the library doesn't give you that permission, then go buy a computer and do it on your own.
It is not the job of the government to give out free internet access... but once it DOES give out free internet access, it needs to be uncensored. If you don't want the government giving out free internet access, that is fine - have the government STOP giving free internet access.
This aspect alone makes this bill virtually impossible to implement in any meaningful way.
Don't kid yourself... this bill WILL be aggressively enforced. People always say "well, the law is too vauge, it is impossible to enforce", but that is bullshit. The law being vauge just means that the government will be free to go after whoever it wants. Don't like the website of your political rivials? Have it declared a "Socal Networking Website". Is there some embarrasing information about the government? Have it declared a "Social Networking Website"! Power hungry politicians LOVE vauge laws. It gives them the power to do just about anything.
This is why many people are against government-run wireless internet access that everyone on Slashdot thinks is such a fine idea.
"Yeah, but dude, like the government would be giving us wireless access FOR FREE!! And like, we can trust them, because they are the government!"
If schools, libraries, government facilities are required to implement this type on censorship, then without a doubt the "free" wireless broadband offered by municipalities will also implement this type of censorship. The price you pay for your "free" internet access is being restricted to only those websites that your local paternalistic demagog politician approves of. People on Slashdot would much rather have free beer than free speech, so I don't think it will make a difference... but just saying.
Did you ever wonder why there are laws that say pharmacies can substitute a generic drug for a brand one?
What are you talking about? In lots of states it is illegal for a pharmacist to even offer a generic drug (let alone secretly replace the drug as you suggest)... the pharmacist is required to provide the brand name listed on the prescription unless the patient explicity asks about a generic.
Second, the insurance companies pay far far less for generic drugs than the brand names... which is a good thing, because those high drug costs are eventually passed on to the consumer in the cost of insurance. And the pharmacies are not getting rich either from generics - for the most part they make their money on over-the-counter medicines, toilet paper, dish detergent, cosmetics, and other crap they sell.
Third, generic drugs are the exact same substance as the brand name drug, and are just as effective. Quality control is so high with both generic and brand name drugs that it is not an issue. No one is getting sick or dying from using generic drugs instead of brand names, because those companies are just as liable for mistakes as the larger companies.
It would be fine for me to cache a current site on my site, so long as I make it clear that the information is not mine and where it came from... and so long as the owner of the site hasn't explicitly disallowed such a thing.
I am sure I might get sued, but in the modern day legal climate where people sue anyone for anything, that doesn't really mean anything.
What I want is something similar to slashcode's degrees of separation. I want to have a foes list, plus friends of friends and foes of friends. Football suffers massively from idiocy online. From what I've heard, seems like all of the games do. :( If I could maintain a foes list, and see whom my friends have tagged as foes, it would make filtering jerks out much easier.
Xbox Live for the 360 pretty much has this, although not quite as detailed as slashcode's system.
The CO2 emission problem has been solved. Nuclear power is safe, it is cheap (when political forces aren't intentionally making it expensive), it has been proven to work (see countries like France). Waste is not an issue when recycling is legal. Pebble Bed reactors and non-weapons-grade fuels can eliminate the threat of meltdown and weapons proliferation.
Global Warming? Problem solved!
The trouble is that enviornmentalists are not only concerned about eliminating CO2, they also have a political and social agenda. They want to see a government run economy, and an end to consumer capitalism. A solution to global warming that allows people to keep current "evil" consumption levels, and doesn't involve total economic control by the government, is politically undesirable. Leftists see global warming as the issue that will prove to all the "evil and destructiveness of capitalism", and will bring us into a totalitarian government run utopia, free of "greed and materialistic desires".
Now, in reality of course, social enlightenment tends to come from technological development and economic plenty. Slavery ends in each society at around the time of their industrial revolution. When industrial productivity gets to a certain level, the labor of children is no longer needed to produce vital goods and services, and child labor disapears. The conversion of the labor force from tasks that require brute strength to mental tasks, along with the availability of packaged goods and foods that don't require a family member to make bread or soap or clothing themselves, and the wide spread availability of birth control technology, leads to sexual equality. When mass-media and global communications come into place, provincialism and racism begins to break down as people are exposed to people of different races and cultures through television, movies, pop music, etc.. So in reality, the socialist utopia envisioned by the enviornmentalists will most likely regress into the level of social progress of the pre-industrial age (wide spread racism, sexism, lots of blatent exploitation and maybe even slavery).
For there to be any progress on Global Warming, the enviornmental movement is going to have to adopt nuclear power as a solution, and abandon their lunatic fringe that tells us that the solution to global warming is everyone living in pre-industrial centrally planned communes.
The government should represent its people, and politicians should be held to very high standards. Legal bribery, or any other means of subverting our government are simply unacceptable, and should be considered no less seriously than premeditated murder. In fact, as the current administration demonstrates, it is often much worse.
The trouble is, when you give the government trillions of dollars to divy out however it wants, and when you give the government almost total power over every single aspect of life in the United States... corruptions is the inevitable result. Government has become the ultimate source of money, power, respect and adoration... it is only natural that people will do anything to get the government to act in their favor.
The death penalty for "corrupt" politicians would simply mean that corrupt politicians would be able to have uncorrupted politicians executed (after all, the system itself would be legislated by corrupt politicians, and be enforced by judges selected by those corrupt politicians).
Liberals used to understand the corrupting nature of power... but eventually they abandoned their support for limited government, decentralization, and individual liberty, and instead adopted the socialist mythology of the benevolent all-powerful state. Power corrupts, and so an ultra-powerful state, no matter what laws or means you try to put in place to keep it from being corrupt, will become corrupt. Corruption is the inevitable result of big government. Being for big government, but being anti-corruption, is like being for smoking, but against lung cancer: It is a contradiction that ignores cause-and-effect.
Except that Corporations are collections of people. Saying you want to oppress corporations is like saying you want to oppress Spain. Since Spain is made up of people, opressing Spain means oppressing Spanish citizens.
Likewise, while a corporation does not have freedom of speech, its employees do. If I am not allowed to blog positive things about my employer, then you have taken away freedom of speech from an individual person. I, as an individual, should not lose my freedom of speech, simply because my opinions may benifit a corporation.
Of course, the whole point is moot. Since the Internet is global, corporations will simply run fake blogs in countries where it is legal, so this law will have zero effect on this kind of advertising. The goal is not to stop this kind of advertising, but to slowly expand censorship in such a way as to make you feel warm and fuzzy and protected by it... incrementally increase censorship in the name of "stopping the evil corporations", until the point where to be anti-censorship is considered pro-corporation without any human thought involved. It is about desensitizing people to censorship to make them more comfortable with it, for the inevitable day that it is expanded to include all forms of speech.
In the same way anti-terror hysteria is used to get people to agree to laws that steal their individual liberties, anti-corporate hysteria is used to steal people's individual liberties. It is all about marketing totalitarianism in a way that seems palatable to your own political beliefs. For you, corporations are the boogie man that makes you willing to give up your rights.
So that's a yes to the NAMBLA thing? Frankly, I'm rather glad we have a low age of consent. I had an incident with a young female who lied about her age that would have landed me in prison if I had been in the US
People tend to be most paranoid of the things that are closest to their selves. The guys I know who are super jealous about their girlfriends cheating on them are the guys who cheated on their girlfriends. The people I know that are super afraid of their stuff being stolen are the people who steal stuff themselves. The right wing Christian zealots in America are terrified of right wing Muslim zealots from overseas. Homophobes tend to be closet homosexuals. The actions that people are most likely to commit themselves are the ones they most go totally batshit about.
In your case, you are a self-admitted pedophile... you had an "incident", and despite your lame excuse (She lied about her age? Yeah, like all you weirdos don't say that!) you HAD SEX WITH A CHILD!!! You fucking admit it! Only someone truly sick and twisted yourself wouldn't get the irony of you accusing random people you don't know on the internet of being a member of NABMLA!
In any case, I wouldn't have sent you to prison, but I would have sent you to manditory counciling so you would take responsiblity for your actions and stop projecting your sexual desires onto other people.
Sure you did! You said 14 is too low for an age of consent, but you don't think that an adult having sex with a 14 year old should be locked up. Therefore you don't think someone having sex with a person who is below the age of consent should be locked up. But I see what your problem is:
What is so hard for you to understand? An 8 year old isn't a 14 year old. A 14 year old isn't a young child, they are a teenager. That is why movies have several different ratings: G, PG, PG-13, R, NC17, etc. A rational person can understand that while it is undesirable that a 14 year old have concentual sex with an adult, that it is not an clear and present danger to society at large.
Would you throw doctors who prescribe birth control to teenagers in prison, for aiding child molestation? Would you make it illegal for health facilities to distribute any contraceptives to teenagers, under the assumption that any underage sex is child molestation? So when do you plan to throw the Canadian Minister of Health in prison, for aiding and abetting?
That doesn't work. "Sliding scale" laws are notoriously bad because judges are all over the board when it comes to sentencing. If you leave it up to the judges discretion, you'll end up with all sorts of weird verdicts.
A sliding scale doesn't have to leave sentencing to a judges discretion. You can have a sliding scale based on objective criteria. For example, have sex with minors below 14 to be a serious felony along the lines of rape or murder, and having concentual sex with minors 14 or above to be more along the lines of drunken driving or theft: You probably won't go to prison on your first offense, provided you seek help.
And how exactly you managed to use the word "nuanced" while talking about the sentencing of child molesters is beyond me. Let me guess, you're a member of NAMBLA, right? And a university professor too?
It is good to see Canada doesn't have any shortage of facists. Just because I don't support your lynch mob mentality, doesn't mean I endorse the behavior. The fact that you would accuse someone of such vile thing as being a member of NAMBLA, in civil discourse with someone who supports *even stricter* laws than are currently in place, shows the kind of paranoid McCarthyist attitude at work.
Since you think that 14 is too young for consent, yet still think that an adult having sex with a 14 year old should not be "thrown in prison", do you feel the same way about an adult having sex with an 8 year old? Because that is the implication which you are making. You've basically stated that an adult who has sex with a minor should not be arrested.
I implied nothing of the sort. An 8 year old is not a 14 year old, and any reasonable person can make the distinction.
As for the 80 year old and the 14 year old, throwing a person in prison is not the only punishment possible. You could fine a person. You could give them a suspended sentence with manditory counseling. You could give them a restraining order to legally keep them from seeing the 14 year old. You could put them in jail for 30 days (as opposed to prison for 30 years). The situation can be dealt with in a reasonable, nuanced fashion... proportional to the individual circumstances of the crime. The Canadian system, while not perfect, is far more reasonable and sane than the U.S. 'zero-tolerance' system.
If you were trying to scare us with some frightening scenario, you failed. While it does disturb me that a 14 year old girl would be hooking up with an 80 year old guy (I think 14 years old might be a little too young for the age of consent), it is still less disturbing than throwing both in prison.
This is clearly a case of not just prosecutorial misconduct, but malicious prosecution of the worst kind.
No, this is not clearly a case of prosecutorial misconduct, nor malicious prosecution. This is the logical, reasonable, and inevitable end result of "zero tolerance" policies on crime. Once you accept the logic of a police state (no matter if it is the War on Drugs, War on Terror, Gun Control, Hate Speech, Sex Crime Hysteria, or any of the other mainstraim "Law & Order" political movements), then reactions like this are totally reasonable within the logic of that belief system.
Only when you start looking at faith in government as being a religion, do laws like this make sense.
So:
Careless people are being killed because they are not paying attention because of ipods.
The threat of death or extreme physical harm is not enough of a penalty to force them to not wear ipods while crossing the street.
There are far more potentially dangerous automobiles on the roads than there are cops patrolling intersections looking for ipod wearers.
Therefore, the law must rely on one of the following beliefs:
Either a $100 fine is worse than death or serious injury. (I don't think anyone believes that).
Or government manipulates some sort of sympathetic magic ( http://skepdic.com/sympathetic.html ), where by what is made a law has some sort of physical manifestation beyond the simple penalty or enforcement, simple by decreeing something on paper. Much like God says "Let there be light", and there is light... the government says "do not wear ipods while crossing the street", and therefore no-one can wear ipods while crossing the street.
The vast majority of people nowadays, instead of looking at a law as say a 'medicine' (that might work, that might not work, that might have side effects, that might have a greater social cost to use than the problem itself), they look at it as ordination - People assume the will of the state simply manifests itself, and to solve problems all you need to do is make a law forbidding said problem.
Umm, have you not been paying any attention AT ALL to what the religious right has done and/or tried to do to the US governments direction and policies in the past 25 years?
And fortunatly for the Christian Right, the Progressive Left has been promoting the concept of Social Democracy, where by society is socially engineered by the state in order to better address social issues. Years ago, the Christian Right had to go through pretty extreme lengths to enforce their will (for example, in the 1920s the prohibition of alchohol needed to explicity constitutional amendment to be enacted), since the role of the federal government was so limited. Nowadays, most law is essentially dictated by the executive branch (in regulations created by the EPA, the DEA, the FDA, the Department of Energy, etc., etc.), and completly bypasses congress, state and local governments, etc.
The thinking of the Progressive Left was "We need to make a super powerful federal government, where the president and the executive branch have nearly total power over all affairs of our nation, because then the president will be able to do a lot of 'social good' with all that power. It isn't like a right wing christian nut will ever be elected president!".
The greatest allies the Christian Right has ever known in their struggle for power in America is the Progressive Left.