Hmmm. I didn't go out to see a movie yesterday. That means I didn't give the theater $20. I stole from them!
Sorry, but stealing does not work that way. Theft means one thing and one thing only: To remove physical property from someone so that they may no longer use it and to keep it in your possession. If you go into someone's house and use something, it's not theft. It's tresspassing. If you break something of someone else's, it's not theft. It's vandalism. If you take someone else's idea and claim it as your own, it's plagiarism. Not theft.
See, to steal is not the same thing as to infringe. They are two different words for a very good reason.
Besides, you're assuming that these people who download these movies would pay for them otherwise. Just because I wouldn't pay X dollars to see a movie doesn't mean I wouldn't pay X/2 to see it. Or, heck, some movies are so ridiculous these days, I'd only go to see them if someone paid ME. But I suppose others my settle for "free."
This reminds me. I work part time at a grocery store, where I've seen a set of stuffed animals whom allow you to name stars. When you buy it, you get a code to go to some international astronomy society (I can't remember its name off the top of my head) where you get to give a name to a star somewhere out there.
Now, this is kinda cute, and something I'm sure little kids might enjoy, and it's not like we are running out of stars. But someday, I can't help but picture a fateful day when we try to explain to our once-peaceful alien neighbors why the citizens of Earth have chosen to name the sun that their planet revolves around "Mr. Snugglekins III."
Thus beginning an inter-galactic war that will leave trillions dead.
My point is, having anyone other than scientists naming celestial bodies is a potential recipe for disaster. God forbid these kids decide to name it "Dick Face" and the asteroid decides it would rather be a meteorite...
This is why I hate the stock market with a passion. It's no longer about making money. Making money is the point of business and hey, that's just fine. But no, it's now about making MORE money. You can't be happy that you spent a million dollars and made a billion. Because you made 2 billion last year, so you should have made at least THREE billion. The stock market and its investors tend to, I've noticed, ignore the concept of averages. Sometimes, a store will do better than average. Sometimes, it will do worse. That's kinda the definition of average. But we want our stock prices to go up indefinitely. You can only raise stock prices by legal means so high. After that, well, that's when the less savory aspects of business kicks in, just to make sure we look "better" this quarter than we did last year. Nevermind the moral, legal, and long term financial ramifications.
My theory, and feel free to tear this apart as necessary, is that the explosion of science and change over the course of the 20th century lead to this. Think of it this way. For most of human history, change was a slow, gradual concept. Yes, new theories and inventions were always coming out, but they were events, things to be celebrated. Now, scientific achievements are brought up so often (though never for more than 30 seconds) that they're impossible to keep track of. We went from horse and carriages to combustion engines, airplanes, to tanks and airliners, sports cars, jets, and helicopters, all in less than a century. Heck, we went to the MOON! We went from newspapers and books to radio, television, and then the Internet. With the Internet alone, well, no more modem noises, and you can get all this information on your cell-phone, too (which is another big change).
The point is, people have been dominated by change. We have information and possibilities right at our fingertips. This is a huge change and, as you may recall, change scares people. People tend to resist it. How many elderly people still do things "their" way when they can do it more efficiently? A lot of human nature tells us to stick to our tried-and-true methods (even if they're no longer true).
Computers are for geeks!...Well, they were, anyway. There really weren't too many non-geeks online in the early to mid 1990's. This has changed a lot, with places like MySpace becoming buzzwords for even the most luddite-like politicians. However, the stigma has not changed. Computers are still for geeks, or so they say. And thus these values are passed on in the form of peer pressure. And people try as hard as they can to fit in with their peers. "Heh, computers are sooooooooo for nerds! I don't even know what computer I've got, I just use it to go to MySpace and YouTube!"
With time, hopefully, these sorts of things will die down. For example, just look at cultural revolutions in our own country. After the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and the signing of the Civil Rights Act, there were plenty of people who were still as adamantly anti-black as could be. Even though they had no proof, they rejected the change from a position of being "the dominant race" to "equality." Since then, things have improved quite a bit. Why? Well, it's been 30-40 years. A lot of the old people who were that racist are dead now, and we have a new generation of kids who have grown up alongside blacks and other races are taking over, and blatant public racism is shunned. (Well, at least towards blacks. We still have a long way to go, though things are still hardly perfect here, but it's a good improvement)
I suppose to summarize my idea, it would be this: Our scientific and cultural developments have outpaced our ability to adapt to changes as a society, which leads to many rejecting newer concepts out of confusion, fear, and stubbornness.
My question is, what kind of business would truly suffer from the off-the-clock activities of its employees? Would people boycott or something the products of a software developer because Bob from Accounting has admitted to smoking pot at his home? It seems unlikely to me. What DOES seem likely is that, say, a CEO caught SMUGGLING drugs, or at least financing it, would have far worse consequences. And that's already a serious crime and if caught, getting fired would be the LEAST of your concerns.
Let's face facts: We get a lot of our stuff from China. China makes little kids work in sweatshops so they can make this stuff cheap. The average American doesn't give a rat's ass about what employees do on or off the clock as long as they can get what they want for cheap.
SEX OFFENDERS ARE USING OUR AIR! Do you want some child molester, rapist, or, heaven forbid, someone who e-mailed naked pictures of herself to her boyfriend when she was still technically 17, using the same air as your children? I say it's time we vote so that our lungs may not be filled with their deadly, possibly contagious, sicknesses and force them to breath carbon dioxide, methane, and helium.
Also, why limit this awesome bill to sex offenders? Shoplifters, too. They might just reach through the screen and steal stuff from Amazon.com or eBay!
It met mine, too! All I was expecting was basically Windows XP plus a bunch of useless features I would never use that takes a lot more memory than XP.
In all seriousness, the only way I'd ever "upgrade" is when suddenly all my latest video games REQUIRE Vista to run. You know it'll happen eventually...
It's not theft. It's copyright violation. They are not the same thing. Theft involves the loss of an object wherein the user can no longer use it.
And just because something is illegal doesn't make it unethical. Martin Luther King Jr broke many laws in his civil rights protests, but I'd hardly call his actions "unethical." I would say that the RIAA arguing that it is illegal to use MP3s you obtain by burning CDs you HAVE paid for is far more unethical. Though I'm not really a pirate. I don't buy their CDs nor do I download them, but for one real reason: Most music today isn't worth the disc its written to.
Re:Couple Thoughts
on
Where are Wii?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
As someone who was "lucky" enough to be working at a Toys R Us during its launch last year (I say lucky because while I most certainly would not have been able to find one if I weren't there to make a reservation, it's hard to think of even the best game system being worth getting paid minimum wage to work in that festering shithole), and got one on day one, I hate these people with a passion. Are we really such greedy bastards? I don't even SELL my games. I don't sell books when I'm done with them, even if I'm not likely to read them again. I don't sell movies. These are experiences I've had, and I keep them as at the least a reminder of good times and fantasy worlds I can use for a little needed escapism.
Let's face it. Video games are GAMES. Their only real purpose, in my opinion, is to be fun. Yes, they can improve hand-eye coordination, make us better/worse readers (depending on what games you play. I have a hard time believing RPGs that are 3/4 text make us worse readers than people who guzzle down trashy romance novels), provide an outlet for stress, etc. but they're still just GAMES. Where's the love of playing the game? Where's the FUN? Have we, as a society, lost the ability to just DO something for the sake of doing it, without thinking of ways to make a buck off of it? (The correct answer is: Yes. Yes we have.) I mean, obviously Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft want to make a profit. But that's business. But getting a Wii. That's gaming.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. People want answers. We may not have them yet or maybe we will NEVER get them. But if humans had never been here, if some cosmic fluke wiped us out before we stood upright, then I'm quite sure 2+2 would still be 4. Just as I believe that when a tree falls in the woods, yes, it does make a sound (unless you argue semantics, at which point you need to differentiate between "sound waves" and "sound," the latter being only a interpretation of the former by a creature with proper sensory organs.). Things happen all the time without our knowledge and our consent. Saying "God must be the cause of this" because it's too complicated is just a sort of comforting thought to counter something we can't understand. Saying some omnipotent being made us because "evolution is complex" is like someone in the 2nd century saying "the world is flat because I can't understand how it could be round." Well, you can think that all you like, but the truth and reality cares little for what we think of it. We are not entitled to knowledge and wisdom. If we want them, we must find them, and there are no short-cuts.
Science does not work that way. Science begins with an observation, then the creation of a hypothesis, an experiment, and ends with an affirmation, denial, or refinement of the hypothesis.
Intelligent design begins with an affirmation: The universe is complex, therefore, it must have been designed by a sort of intelligent being. You just can't jump to assumptions like that. That is a debasement of all that science is. Just because we don't understand something doesn't mean it cannot be understood with more research. Just because we can't explain something through modern scientific theories does not mean that later theories cannot explain them. And most of all, just because we do not KNOW the answer to a question does not mean the answer defaults to "God."
We do not know for certain what created the universe. We theorize the Big Bang, but as to what lead to that, we don't know. This does NOT mean "God willed it to happen." It just means we don't know for now. We can explain many properties of gravity, but we do not know WHAT it is, exactly. This is not a sign that God, excuse me, "The Designer" simply said "let's have mass attract each other at a rate proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them." All it means is... we don't know.
This is why ID is not a science. You cannot, under any circumstances, simply declare something "too complex" to occur naturally (which in and of itself is a bit of a joke. Anything that occurs in nature is, by definition, natural, regardless of means.). The only "evidence" we have that suggests God--pardon me, "designer" (and certainly not a thinly-veiled cover for the Judeo-Christian God), created all life is that we don't know for certain what did.
Intelligent Design by its very fundamental nature is not, cannot, and will not ever be a science. It's a debasement of all that is science. It's the lazy man's way out. "Oh, it's too complex for me to understand. It's much easier to just say God did it." If you want to believe that, fine. But keep that thinking, or lack thereof, out of our science classes and don't you dare expect those who actually KNOW what the Scientific Method is to just sit back and ignore the attempts to get rid of it.
What the studios and labels don't want you to know is that they OWN the import shops. Then they just need to stamp out the FREE forms of piracy and they're free to sell the imports at thrice the price, and once more when it FINALLY comes overseas!
I don't know what scares me more, the idea that people would do this or the idea that somewhere someone already is.
This is the major problem with "non-lethal" weapons. When you have a pistol, the consequences of using it in any situation other than "he's charging at me with a knife and going to stab me" are rather dire. The penalties for misusing a taser are far less serious. If there are any penalties at all. A taser becomes a one-shot fix to any situation. Any "non-lethal" device can have serious side-effects or become lethal when done to the wrong individual, but I think tasers are being shown to be too dangerous. Rather than a last resort when you can't even wrestle someone to the ground, it's a first-resort.
Personally, I like to use an outside observer and general relativity to monitor my speed. I simply have someone watch me drive, and if it seems as if time in my car has slowed down, and the car and I have increased in mass, they tell me and I slow down.
This is going to set back witch hunts by generations. Witches burn because they're made of wood. So, some suggested we make bridges out of them. But you can make bridges out of stone. But stone can't float, either. So if we could see if she'd float, we'd know if she were or weren't made out of stone. BUT WATER floats! We could be killing innocent people because they're not really witches, they're just made of water!
So, using Ohm's Law, amd realizing that a taser sends a current through your body and that a current in your body produces heat...
Well, V=IR. The taser provides the current (I) as does your own nervous system. Your body provides a natural Resistance (R). Multiplying these two, we get voltage. And as anyone who has been shocked can say, it warms you up. Now, happiness is also known to cause a "warm" feeling in people. Therefore, our only conclusion is that IR = Happiness = Voltage, where happiness is also measured in volts.
I can presume, then, that a person who is "happy" is so because his central nervous system is using an unusually high current.
Wikipedia, if you'll allow me to use emotional buzzwords for a minute as if I were a politician in a debate, is a great example of democracy and freedom of speech. The truth is, we'd like all signal and no noise, but to try and rid yourself of all noise, you're going to lose some signal. By forbidding a certain action/author/etc. on Wikipedia, you may ban 100 vandals, but you also ban 1 extremely useful editor. To let the truly insightful speak, you need to let the truly braindead have their say, too.
The best way to deal with this is our old favorite saying, "citation needed." Like any information source, you need to ask "where did this information come from?" Using Wikipedia for serious work is a bad idea... directly... but it is a good place to find links to other places with more direct credibility.
Not to mention one should always check the "recent edits" pages for signs of vandals.
Wikipedia is imperfect, but so are the creatures that make it, so it's to be expected. It has a vast array of information that is hard to find anywhere else, and one of the best ways to look up "Amazon Wildlife" without running into horrible fetish porn sites along the way. So as long as people are willing to read and think and have a grain of salt ready, it will remain a valuable and interesting source of information.
Or, to sum up your post a little better, the RIAA only goes after people who can't fight back. The RIAA likes to take candy from babies, but avoids the ones with guard dogs.
Yes. Profit is the first, and only, goal of business.
And that is why I believe profit-above-all-else mentalities must be destroyed. See, I have no problems with a company that wants to make money. I'm a college student, but I also work part time at a grocery store as a janitor. Why do I work as a janitor? Because I make money doing it. I make exactly $8.50 an hour (and with about 20 hours per week and factoring out taxes) I make about $150 a week. I would not clean toilets and wipe up spills like that if I was not being paid.
However, suppose someone offered to pay me double my rate. I'd love it. Except... to earn it, I need to use a cleaning chemical that will make 1/100 of the customers in the store very sick (For the sake of argument, let's pretend its untraceable, so lawsuits don't get involved). Now I'm not too sure. I'm there to make money, but at the expense of the health of others?
Basically, I, as a human being, want more. This is natural and instinctual. However, I also feel that it is wrong to help myself at the expense of others. I want to further myself, but have qualms with dragging others behind.
Corporations lack this failsafe of greed. "Sir, if we paid each worker 25 cents a week, we'd make $12billion by the end of the fiscal year in pure profit." "What if we paid them minimum US wage?" "Well, we'd make $11billion." "...Screw the workers, I want that extra billion!"
As I said, there's nothing wrong with one wanting to be paid what they are worth. Profit is okey-dokey by me. But when you try to squeeze every last dollar you can out, the costs in damages you can cause to a workforce, an environment, or a country far exceed what little extra you gain. Thus "profit by any means necessary" is foolish and immoral.
I pretty much agree with everything you said. But I can't help but shudder at the thought of complaints from minority groups if there weren't any token blacks/Hispanics/etc. Personally, I find characters whose sole purpose is to stand up and scream "look at me, I'm not white!" to be rather annoying. But I digress.
Of course, I wouldn't expect feminist groups to speak up about a lack of women in the line: I mean, I'm sure most of them would rather keep OUT of the draft, should one ever return (I can't blame them, there, either. It's gone, and likely to never return, but if it did, I'd do all I could to avoid it, too.)
Of course, I doubt they didn't complain back then because we had "better things to do." I mostly lay the blame on: 1) Lack of national communication (With the Internet, we now have the capability of rounding up a group of irate people who hate just about everything that doesn't conform to their ideal for protests. Back then, you'd need to have essentially an entire town who was outraged by a toyline) 2) We were too busy accusing each other of being a communist. "So, when the Rooskies are gonna nuke us any minute, you want to discuss the RACE of a toyline? Sounds like you're just trying to divert attention, COMRADE." 3) Racists. Let's face it, in the 1940's through... well, to about 1970 I'd say, you could stand right out in the open and be as racist or sexist as you wanted. HOW long did it take the Civil Rights movement to get rights for blacks to use the same BATHROOM as whites? Not to mention how many people, not unlike the anti-gay rights movement of today, claimed that "interracial marriage will destroy the sanctity of marriage?" (Fortunately, many of those people are now dead.)
Blowing things out of proportion... while ignoring actual problems... is a tradition as old as man himself, though America has certainly done a lot of it in a disproportionate amount of time.
You know, Dr. Strangelove references aside... This does prove my hypothesis:
To err is human. To really fuck up, you need to work for the government.
Honestly, the Average Joe can get in trouble with the law for driving 47 miles per hour in a 45 mph zone.
But this? "Whoops. Looks like I accidentally put nuclear bombs in my plane." Did they ever figure out whose fault this was? I'm just trying to figure out if he'll be fired (low level employee) or given a Congressional medal (high ranking official).
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Hmmm. I didn't go out to see a movie yesterday. That means I didn't give the theater $20. I stole from them!
Sorry, but stealing does not work that way. Theft means one thing and one thing only: To remove physical property from someone so that they may no longer use it and to keep it in your possession.
If you go into someone's house and use something, it's not theft. It's tresspassing.
If you break something of someone else's, it's not theft. It's vandalism.
If you take someone else's idea and claim it as your own, it's plagiarism. Not theft.
See, to steal is not the same thing as to infringe. They are two different words for a very good reason.
Besides, you're assuming that these people who download these movies would pay for them otherwise. Just because I wouldn't pay X dollars to see a movie doesn't mean I wouldn't pay X/2 to see it. Or, heck, some movies are so ridiculous these days, I'd only go to see them if someone paid ME. But I suppose others my settle for "free."
This reminds me. I work part time at a grocery store, where I've seen a set of stuffed animals whom allow you to name stars. When you buy it, you get a code to go to some international astronomy society (I can't remember its name off the top of my head) where you get to give a name to a star somewhere out there.
Now, this is kinda cute, and something I'm sure little kids might enjoy, and it's not like we are running out of stars. But someday, I can't help but picture a fateful day when we try to explain to our once-peaceful alien neighbors why the citizens of Earth have chosen to name the sun that their planet revolves around "Mr. Snugglekins III."
Thus beginning an inter-galactic war that will leave trillions dead.
My point is, having anyone other than scientists naming celestial bodies is a potential recipe for disaster. God forbid these kids decide to name it "Dick Face" and the asteroid decides it would rather be a meteorite...
This is why I hate the stock market with a passion.
It's no longer about making money. Making money is the point of business and hey, that's just fine.
But no, it's now about making MORE money.
You can't be happy that you spent a million dollars and made a billion. Because you made 2 billion last year, so you should have made at least THREE billion.
The stock market and its investors tend to, I've noticed, ignore the concept of averages. Sometimes, a store will do better than average. Sometimes, it will do worse. That's kinda the definition of average. But we want our stock prices to go up indefinitely. You can only raise stock prices by legal means so high. After that, well, that's when the less savory aspects of business kicks in, just to make sure we look "better" this quarter than we did last year. Nevermind the moral, legal, and long term financial ramifications.
What's the difference between the two?
My theory, and feel free to tear this apart as necessary, is that the explosion of science and change over the course of the 20th century lead to this. Think of it this way. For most of human history, change was a slow, gradual concept. Yes, new theories and inventions were always coming out, but they were events, things to be celebrated. Now, scientific achievements are brought up so often (though never for more than 30 seconds) that they're impossible to keep track of. We went from horse and carriages to combustion engines, airplanes, to tanks and airliners, sports cars, jets, and helicopters, all in less than a century. Heck, we went to the MOON! We went from newspapers and books to radio, television, and then the Internet. With the Internet alone, well, no more modem noises, and you can get all this information on your cell-phone, too (which is another big change).
...Well, they were, anyway. There really weren't too many non-geeks online in the early to mid 1990's. This has changed a lot, with places like MySpace becoming buzzwords for even the most luddite-like politicians. However, the stigma has not changed. Computers are still for geeks, or so they say. And thus these values are passed on in the form of peer pressure. And people try as hard as they can to fit in with their peers. "Heh, computers are sooooooooo for nerds! I don't even know what computer I've got, I just use it to go to MySpace and YouTube!"
The point is, people have been dominated by change. We have information and possibilities right at our fingertips. This is a huge change and, as you may recall, change scares people. People tend to resist it. How many elderly people still do things "their" way when they can do it more efficiently? A lot of human nature tells us to stick to our tried-and-true methods (even if they're no longer true).
Computers are for geeks!
With time, hopefully, these sorts of things will die down. For example, just look at cultural revolutions in our own country. After the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and the signing of the Civil Rights Act, there were plenty of people who were still as adamantly anti-black as could be. Even though they had no proof, they rejected the change from a position of being "the dominant race" to "equality." Since then, things have improved quite a bit. Why? Well, it's been 30-40 years. A lot of the old people who were that racist are dead now, and we have a new generation of kids who have grown up alongside blacks and other races are taking over, and blatant public racism is shunned. (Well, at least towards blacks. We still have a long way to go, though things are still hardly perfect here, but it's a good improvement)
I suppose to summarize my idea, it would be this: Our scientific and cultural developments have outpaced our ability to adapt to changes as a society, which leads to many rejecting newer concepts out of confusion, fear, and stubbornness.
My question is, what kind of business would truly suffer from the off-the-clock activities of its employees? Would people boycott or something the products of a software developer because Bob from Accounting has admitted to smoking pot at his home? It seems unlikely to me. What DOES seem likely is that, say, a CEO caught SMUGGLING drugs, or at least financing it, would have far worse consequences. And that's already a serious crime and if caught, getting fired would be the LEAST of your concerns.
Let's face facts: We get a lot of our stuff from China. China makes little kids work in sweatshops so they can make this stuff cheap. The average American doesn't give a rat's ass about what employees do on or off the clock as long as they can get what they want for cheap.
Maybe he'll have another "police action" on RIAA headquarters.
"We need to fight the executives there, so we don't have to fight them in our courtrooms."
SEX OFFENDERS ARE USING OUR AIR! Do you want some child molester, rapist, or, heaven forbid, someone who e-mailed naked pictures of herself to her boyfriend when she was still technically 17, using the same air as your children? I say it's time we vote so that our lungs may not be filled with their deadly, possibly contagious, sicknesses and force them to breath carbon dioxide, methane, and helium.
Also, why limit this awesome bill to sex offenders? Shoplifters, too. They might just reach through the screen and steal stuff from Amazon.com or eBay!
It met mine, too! All I was expecting was basically Windows XP plus a bunch of useless features I would never use that takes a lot more memory than XP.
In all seriousness, the only way I'd ever "upgrade" is when suddenly all my latest video games REQUIRE Vista to run. You know it'll happen eventually...
It's not theft. It's copyright violation. They are not the same thing. Theft involves the loss of an object wherein the user can no longer use it.
And just because something is illegal doesn't make it unethical. Martin Luther King Jr broke many laws in his civil rights protests, but I'd hardly call his actions "unethical." I would say that the RIAA arguing that it is illegal to use MP3s you obtain by burning CDs you HAVE paid for is far more unethical. Though I'm not really a pirate. I don't buy their CDs nor do I download them, but for one real reason: Most music today isn't worth the disc its written to.
As someone who was "lucky" enough to be working at a Toys R Us during its launch last year (I say lucky because while I most certainly would not have been able to find one if I weren't there to make a reservation, it's hard to think of even the best game system being worth getting paid minimum wage to work in that festering shithole), and got one on day one, I hate these people with a passion. Are we really such greedy bastards? I don't even SELL my games. I don't sell books when I'm done with them, even if I'm not likely to read them again. I don't sell movies. These are experiences I've had, and I keep them as at the least a reminder of good times and fantasy worlds I can use for a little needed escapism.
Let's face it. Video games are GAMES. Their only real purpose, in my opinion, is to be fun. Yes, they can improve hand-eye coordination, make us better/worse readers (depending on what games you play. I have a hard time believing RPGs that are 3/4 text make us worse readers than people who guzzle down trashy romance novels), provide an outlet for stress, etc. but they're still just GAMES. Where's the love of playing the game? Where's the FUN? Have we, as a society, lost the ability to just DO something for the sake of doing it, without thinking of ways to make a buck off of it? (The correct answer is: Yes. Yes we have.) I mean, obviously Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft want to make a profit. But that's business. But getting a Wii. That's gaming.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. People want answers. We may not have them yet or maybe we will NEVER get them. But if humans had never been here, if some cosmic fluke wiped us out before we stood upright, then I'm quite sure 2+2 would still be 4. Just as I believe that when a tree falls in the woods, yes, it does make a sound (unless you argue semantics, at which point you need to differentiate between "sound waves" and "sound," the latter being only a interpretation of the former by a creature with proper sensory organs.). Things happen all the time without our knowledge and our consent. Saying "God must be the cause of this" because it's too complicated is just a sort of comforting thought to counter something we can't understand. Saying some omnipotent being made us because "evolution is complex" is like someone in the 2nd century saying "the world is flat because I can't understand how it could be round." Well, you can think that all you like, but the truth and reality cares little for what we think of it. We are not entitled to knowledge and wisdom. If we want them, we must find them, and there are no short-cuts.
Science does not work that way. Science begins with an observation, then the creation of a hypothesis, an experiment, and ends with an affirmation, denial, or refinement of the hypothesis.
Intelligent design begins with an affirmation: The universe is complex, therefore, it must have been designed by a sort of intelligent being. You just can't jump to assumptions like that. That is a debasement of all that science is. Just because we don't understand something doesn't mean it cannot be understood with more research. Just because we can't explain something through modern scientific theories does not mean that later theories cannot explain them. And most of all, just because we do not KNOW the answer to a question does not mean the answer defaults to "God."
We do not know for certain what created the universe. We theorize the Big Bang, but as to what lead to that, we don't know. This does NOT mean "God willed it to happen." It just means we don't know for now.
We can explain many properties of gravity, but we do not know WHAT it is, exactly. This is not a sign that God, excuse me, "The Designer" simply said "let's have mass attract each other at a rate proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them." All it means is... we don't know.
This is why ID is not a science. You cannot, under any circumstances, simply declare something "too complex" to occur naturally (which in and of itself is a bit of a joke. Anything that occurs in nature is, by definition, natural, regardless of means.). The only "evidence" we have that suggests God--pardon me, "designer" (and certainly not a thinly-veiled cover for the Judeo-Christian God), created all life is that we don't know for certain what did.
Intelligent Design by its very fundamental nature is not, cannot, and will not ever be a science. It's a debasement of all that is science. It's the lazy man's way out. "Oh, it's too complex for me to understand. It's much easier to just say God did it." If you want to believe that, fine. But keep that thinking, or lack thereof, out of our science classes and don't you dare expect those who actually KNOW what the Scientific Method is to just sit back and ignore the attempts to get rid of it.
What the studios and labels don't want you to know is that they OWN the import shops. Then they just need to stamp out the FREE forms of piracy and they're free to sell the imports at thrice the price, and once more when it FINALLY comes overseas!
I don't know what scares me more, the idea that people would do this or the idea that somewhere someone already is.
Can't we just take pre-established fictional deities? Especially from fantasy stories. Like D&D!
Ilmater's blessings upon you, Anonymous Coward.
This is the major problem with "non-lethal" weapons. When you have a pistol, the consequences of using it in any situation other than "he's charging at me with a knife and going to stab me" are rather dire. The penalties for misusing a taser are far less serious. If there are any penalties at all. A taser becomes a one-shot fix to any situation. Any "non-lethal" device can have serious side-effects or become lethal when done to the wrong individual, but I think tasers are being shown to be too dangerous. Rather than a last resort when you can't even wrestle someone to the ground, it's a first-resort.
Personally, I like to use an outside observer and general relativity to monitor my speed. I simply have someone watch me drive, and if it seems as if time in my car has slowed down, and the car and I have increased in mass, they tell me and I slow down.
This is going to set back witch hunts by generations.
Witches burn because they're made of wood.
So, some suggested we make bridges out of them.
But you can make bridges out of stone. But stone can't float, either.
So if we could see if she'd float, we'd know if she were or weren't made out of stone.
BUT WATER floats! We could be killing innocent people because they're not really witches, they're just made of water!
Only if resistance 1 Ohm.
Though theoretically, if you could keep your current constant AND be very resistant, you'd be EXTREMELY happy.
So, using Ohm's Law, amd realizing that a taser sends a current through your body and that a current in your body produces heat...
Well, V=IR. The taser provides the current (I) as does your own nervous system. Your body provides a natural Resistance (R). Multiplying these two, we get voltage. And as anyone who has been shocked can say, it warms you up. Now, happiness is also known to cause a "warm" feeling in people. Therefore, our only conclusion is that IR = Happiness = Voltage, where happiness is also measured in volts.
I can presume, then, that a person who is "happy" is so because his central nervous system is using an unusually high current.
Wikipedia, if you'll allow me to use emotional buzzwords for a minute as if I were a politician in a debate, is a great example of democracy and freedom of speech. The truth is, we'd like all signal and no noise, but to try and rid yourself of all noise, you're going to lose some signal. By forbidding a certain action/author/etc. on Wikipedia, you may ban 100 vandals, but you also ban 1 extremely useful editor. To let the truly insightful speak, you need to let the truly braindead have their say, too.
The best way to deal with this is our old favorite saying, "citation needed." Like any information source, you need to ask "where did this information come from?" Using Wikipedia for serious work is a bad idea... directly... but it is a good place to find links to other places with more direct credibility.
Not to mention one should always check the "recent edits" pages for signs of vandals.
Wikipedia is imperfect, but so are the creatures that make it, so it's to be expected. It has a vast array of information that is hard to find anywhere else, and one of the best ways to look up "Amazon Wildlife" without running into horrible fetish porn sites along the way. So as long as people are willing to read and think and have a grain of salt ready, it will remain a valuable and interesting source of information.
Or, to sum up your post a little better, the RIAA only goes after people who can't fight back.
The RIAA likes to take candy from babies, but avoids the ones with guard dogs.
Not the parent, but...
Yes. Profit is the first, and only, goal of business.
And that is why I believe profit-above-all-else mentalities must be destroyed. See, I have no problems with a company that wants to make money. I'm a college student, but I also work part time at a grocery store as a janitor. Why do I work as a janitor? Because I make money doing it. I make exactly $8.50 an hour (and with about 20 hours per week and factoring out taxes) I make about $150 a week. I would not clean toilets and wipe up spills like that if I was not being paid.
However, suppose someone offered to pay me double my rate. I'd love it. Except... to earn it, I need to use a cleaning chemical that will make 1/100 of the customers in the store very sick (For the sake of argument, let's pretend its untraceable, so lawsuits don't get involved). Now I'm not too sure. I'm there to make money, but at the expense of the health of others?
Basically, I, as a human being, want more. This is natural and instinctual. However, I also feel that it is wrong to help myself at the expense of others. I want to further myself, but have qualms with dragging others behind.
Corporations lack this failsafe of greed. "Sir, if we paid each worker 25 cents a week, we'd make $12billion by the end of the fiscal year in pure profit." "What if we paid them minimum US wage?" "Well, we'd make $11billion." "...Screw the workers, I want that extra billion!"
As I said, there's nothing wrong with one wanting to be paid what they are worth. Profit is okey-dokey by me. But when you try to squeeze every last dollar you can out, the costs in damages you can cause to a workforce, an environment, or a country far exceed what little extra you gain. Thus "profit by any means necessary" is foolish and immoral.
I pretty much agree with everything you said. But I can't help but shudder at the thought of complaints from minority groups if there weren't any token blacks/Hispanics/etc. Personally, I find characters whose sole purpose is to stand up and scream "look at me, I'm not white!" to be rather annoying. But I digress.
Of course, I wouldn't expect feminist groups to speak up about a lack of women in the line: I mean, I'm sure most of them would rather keep OUT of the draft, should one ever return (I can't blame them, there, either. It's gone, and likely to never return, but if it did, I'd do all I could to avoid it, too.)
Of course, I doubt they didn't complain back then because we had "better things to do." I mostly lay the blame on:
1) Lack of national communication (With the Internet, we now have the capability of rounding up a group of irate people who hate just about everything that doesn't conform to their ideal for protests. Back then, you'd need to have essentially an entire town who was outraged by a toyline)
2) We were too busy accusing each other of being a communist. "So, when the Rooskies are gonna nuke us any minute, you want to discuss the RACE of a toyline? Sounds like you're just trying to divert attention, COMRADE."
3) Racists. Let's face it, in the 1940's through... well, to about 1970 I'd say, you could stand right out in the open and be as racist or sexist as you wanted. HOW long did it take the Civil Rights movement to get rights for blacks to use the same BATHROOM as whites? Not to mention how many people, not unlike the anti-gay rights movement of today, claimed that "interracial marriage will destroy the sanctity of marriage?" (Fortunately, many of those people are now dead.)
Blowing things out of proportion... while ignoring actual problems... is a tradition as old as man himself, though America has certainly done a lot of it in a disproportionate amount of time.
You know, Dr. Strangelove references aside... This does prove my hypothesis:
To err is human. To really fuck up, you need to work for the government.
Honestly, the Average Joe can get in trouble with the law for driving 47 miles per hour in a 45 mph zone.
But this? "Whoops. Looks like I accidentally put nuclear bombs in my plane." Did they ever figure out whose fault this was? I'm just trying to figure out if he'll be fired (low level employee) or given a Congressional medal (high ranking official).