ROFL.
Obama's out to stop the drone entrepenaurs!
ITS ALL A CONSPIRACY!!
It's not a conspiracy, coward. It's published policy. Your decision to trot out ad hominem in place of addressing the basic facts of the matter shows you know I'm right. That you're posting as a coward makes it even more clear. But keep propping up your pet administration, man. The documents they publish - you know, the ones that have been amply covered in both aviation news and general media of all sorts - make this all very clear. The agency has just been sued by multiple parties over the 'interpretation' document and policy position in question. But please, don't trouble yourself to keep up with the news - that would take the fun out of your shrill, drooling Obama fanboyism.
This is that anti-job anti-business Obama's fault!
To which I respond: [citation needed].
You actually need a citation to believe that the director of the FAA is a political appointee? You are that unaware of how federal agencies are run by the executive branch of the government? You don't need a citation, you need a remedial course in basic civics. Please return to the conversation when you understand the basic structure of the government.
Yes, and congress passed a law requiring the FAA to produce such regulations in a timely fashion due in this coming year. The administration has said they will not obey that law, and will not have such a framework in anything like the timely fashion required.
In the meantime, the administration has published an "interpretation" of the 2012 law that says they take it to mean more or less the exact opposite of its plain intent, and they are busy getting ready to fine people for doing things like participating in RC competitions (you know, like we've been having for decades) that happen to involve things like $20 cash prizes... because that's commercial drone use! The employees of US-based companies that have for years stepped out back of their shops to test-fly a new RC airplane or multirotor will, according to the Obama administration's new interpretation, be breaking the law and subject to substantial fines for being paid to fly unmanned aerial systems. We can't have that! Quick! Shut down all of those businesses and jobs! Chase those retailers out of the country!
It's preposterous. We're not just dragging behind the rest of the world, we're actively taking steps backwards. The administration is deliberately, purposefully, putting the brakes on what would otherwise be a multi-billion dollar industry full of innovation and attractive to STEM-types in this country. The left's instinct to Nanny State their way down into every last aspect of what someone might do to conduct some business (hey, kid, quit flying your $250, 2-pound plastic quad-copter with a cheap camera over your neighbor's roof because he asked you to, and said he'd give you $25 to get pictures of his roof gutters for him - if you don't cease and desist such commercial UAV operations, that's going to be a $10,000 fine!) means they can't simply clone the sort of framework that the UK or Canada have long had in place... no, there's got to be a way to make it all MORE miserable, MORE expensive, MORE punitive, and nearly impossible for small entrepreneurs to get into - because otherwise we might miss out on some more federal fees, and intrusive paperwork.
And as usual, the very idiots that we'd most worry about anyway, who will be getting a drone from Amazon tomorrow and flying it over a park full of kids an hour later without any understanding of safe operations or good manners, will completely ignore the FAA's rules/guidance/regs anyway. The government, which is here to help you, will only be placing the painful burden and expense on the very people who are the most responsible anyway: those with a lot to lose because they're in business to use the technology.
More Hope and Change, hard at work for our economy. Yes, Obama's man Huerta at the FAA is a political appointee and that aspect of the food chain lays the FAA's entire posture on this squarely at the door of the White House.
In the future, when the world is more enlightened, freedom to trade will be as much a basic right as speech is today.
No. The same collectivist and PC-style urges that currently act to prevent free expression will continue to further intercede when you seek to trade with someone. Why? Because there will always be people who think it's unfair that you and someone else have found a mutually beneficial reason to interact, and they will use the force of government to take a piece of that benefit, pay career middlemen in the government to handle it, and hand some of that benefit over to other people who didn't manage to make that transaction happen for themselves. That trend has been increasing, not decreasing. Places like academia and mass media are now LESS free places, for expression, and the market is an increasingly less free place in which to transact business between any two given parties. The "in the future" you envision is a fantasy. That horse has left the barn, and the nanny staters have won.
So your constitution doesn't exactly spell out what dignity exactly is, or what "quality" actually means in constitutionally mandated "quality housing for all citizens" - but it's not an entitlement, it's actually a "right" defined in the constitution, right? You said it's a clause there. Which is it? Does the constitution get dirty in describing specific wealth transfer entitlement program details, or not?
The housing thing is an entitlement not a right. What I said was that if you qualify for the entitlement the dignity right prevents government from giving you a new cardboard box and calling it "housing assistance".
OK, so indeed, if you pass a certain test, you have the power to make the government take something from other people, and give it to you. And your constitution guarantees that only can that happen, but it has to happen with a certain amount of style. Not enough style, and it's undignified, right? So: who decides how many square feet of entitlement home is constitutionally dignified? How does the constitution lay out the definition of dignified where the rubber meets the road and you have to decide how much of someone else's work day should be spent building a kitchen for somebody else? Specifically.
Much of what you're saying seems based on a (all to common) fundamental misunderstanding of rights and the constitution. In the US, our rights are not defined there. The constitution exists to document the ways in which the government's power (to interfere with our rights) is limited. It does also lay out a limited range of things the government must do (defense, that sort of thing) and the structure of the branches of government... but the point of the charter isn't to set up a laundry list of our rights. It's to remind everyone that rights (say, to assemble or speak, etc) are "natural," and that given the tendency of people in power to abuse things, we have a chartering document that points out the limits on the government's power - and it expressly mentions some hot-button areas that the document's authors knew would come up. Like speech, assembly, self defense, and the like.
You don't have "more rights" because more of them are listed. Nobody has a "right" to housing in the same way they have a right to freedom of speech. You're confusing government-run entitlement programs, paid for with taxes taken from one person and given to another, with "rights." They are not the same thing. A "right to dignity" as it relates to the government should only be mentioned in the sense that such a clause would prevent the government from actively doing something that removes someone's "dignity" (an impossibly elastic word that is more or less chosen for its inability to be commonly understood or defined).
A rational, constitutional take on "dignity" (vis a vis homelessness, for example, since you mention it), would be that the government cannot stop you from being charitable and helping somebody else into a home if you see fit. The only way the government can be in the dignity-through-housing-paid-for-by-someone-else business is to reduce someone else's dignity by making them spend part of their day as a slave working to prop up the "dignity" (read as: having stuff) of another guy. When you can wave the magic "dignity" wand and use it to remove something from one person and give it to another, that cries out for a very precise definition of dignity.
How many square meters of kitchen space is required in order to be dignified? If I have to spend some of the 12+ hours I'll spend working today in order to make a deposit in someone else's dignity fund, I'm left less able to afford my own kitchen than I otherwise would be. What if I feel undignified in an 800 square foot apartment, but would feel like I would finally have my dignity in a 1000 square foot space? Should I have the right to make you, with the government ready to back me up by seizure and force and imprisonment of you if you're not cooperative, give me the difference in rent every month? Talking about such things in terms of "rights" is completely misguided.
OK, then. "You see, officer, I've been thinking of studying Gaelic, and after just a few minutes of trying to figure out how to conjugate in future imperfect, I got so frustrated that I punched a wall." [takes out pocket guide to Gaelic] "I'm guessing that dead guy over there must have gotten into a fight with someone else about pluperfect usage or perhaps gerunds, and it just went bad. That's a shame."
Even stupid criminals can learn to shoot with their off hand.
Regardless, this strikes me as a horse-has-left-the-barn issue. "No jury in the world" is going to convict Joe Felon on a murder because of detected acceleration that feels like a gun. What's a gun feel like, anyway? You're just as dead if Billy Thug puts a.22 short (essentially recoiless) into the back of your head as you are if he blasts away with a 9mm.
And here's my alibi, officer: I was at the gym and took a swing at a punching bag.
Something like this would have to be tuned to the anatomy of the wearer and the specifics of the weapon and shooting style used. And of course it doesn't even begin to address the thousands of people who are killed by recidivist gang members in beatings, stabbings, etc. Our local thugs prefer knives and machetes.
Why would you assume my question meant that there should be no CEO at all?
Because when someone trots out any eye-rolling reference to how many burgers, or airline seats, or theater tickets have to be sold to pay the chief executive a company's board of directors deliberately hired to do a specific job, it usually means that someone disapproves of the kind of money that changed hands to make that happen. That complaint is usually made in the context of a larger, rambling complaint about any or all of for-profit entities in the first place, or a company's liberty to hire who they want at whatever price they see fit to pay for executives, or the very existence of incorporated businesses, etc.
Complaining about how many widget sales are required to pay for a CEO or CTO or CFO has become shorthand for complaining that they exist at all, and how it would be better if the company was managed by somebody that's a peer of the entry-level employees, or maybe their immediate management. That fantasy and variations on it is pure nonsense.
The minute that someone cites the CEO's pay when complaining about the nature or price of a delivered retail product or service is the moment that you can be sure they don't know what's involved in keeping a gigantic company funded and running. That complaint needs its own equivalent of Godwin's law, because it's always apparent where the sentiment originates - and it's usually based on the premise that people who own companies (whether privately held or publicly traded and thus owned by investors) shouldn't be allowed to decide what they are willing to pay for the things they need to buy as they run their business. They pay vendors for products and supplies, they pay contractors to maintain facilities, they pay workers at every level to do a whole spectrum of things, and they seek out and hire officer-level people to deal with big-issue stuff. They choose those people from a limited range of choices, and stake enormous parts of the company's future on how those choices will turn out. And they throw money at the problem to open up more options and, with much of that pay being tied to performance, to make sure the executives have a vested interest in meeting the owners goals.
Dismissing what that costs as being too much misses the larger picture.
Why is an enterprise that is losing 440 million dollars every 3 months paying the top person 7 million dollars compensation? It appears to be unsustainable.
They pay that money to retain the services of someone that they judge will help make sure that those losses aren't ever bigger, and that they'll be reversed, at least in part due to that person's efforts - whether it's in overseeing M&A or more investment, or branding exercises, or housecleaning that can impact the long term viability of the business. It can take years to make that work. If the company's owners want to gamble the current $7m against a future they expect will turn around in the hundreds of millions, why isn't that their decision to make?
They don't perceive things like terrorist attacks against Saudi Arabia as attacks on themselves even when Saudi Arabia was the largest non-domestic source of US oil.
Sure they do. I do.
That's why dealing with people who use terrorist bombings and similar tactics against civilian and commercial targets in order to boost their global profile and recruit fellow idiots to their cause ARE considered a global problem, even if all they're doing is deliberately slaughtering innocent women and children at a vegetable market in Afghanistan. Because allowing people who embrace and spread that way of interacting with the world to continue unchecked just makes the problem grow. Legitimizes it, for some, as a way to communicate their twisted world view in a global media/economy era. That stuff is toxic to civilization, period. So those of us who appreciate civilization do feel assaulted when those who want to tear it down decide they can and should get away with it unmolested.
How many tickets must be sold to satisfy the CEO's paycheck alone? Much less the other executives...
You're right! There should be no CEO. The company doesn't need a chief executive. In fact, all airlines should be run by the government so that the company no longer needs to figure out how to attract investment, make marketing deals, strategize about how to pay for fuel a year from now, or negotiate over routes and hub services. There's no reason that any of that can't be done by a typical bureaucrat who has no personal vested interest in making such decisions as financially efficient as possible. Also, people who've spent money to buy shares in airlines should have to give that up, and taxpayers should be stuck with all of that as the decisions made by a randomly chosen mid-level federal employee begin to immediately lose billions more dollars. It's OK, we'll just borrow it from our grandchildren!
Why did they perceive it as an attack on themselves? Why do they view themselves as having a vested interest in the USA economy?
Because if you participate in the US economy (as someone who contributes to it, or someone who takes from it - either way), then a deliberate attack on it IS an attack on you. They "view" themselves as having a vested interest in the US economy because they actually do have such. There's really no room for confusion on that front.
But tribal behavior is pretty well baked into us, genetically, and certainly manifests itself in large groups whether they're fourth cousins twice removed or just plain people who were raised the same way or like the same things. Groupthink on Slashdot frequently looks that way, for example, where people reflexively root for or against some person, meme, or the like simply because that's what their tribe here does.
Tribal-style behavior can exist in groups much larger than kin without that group happening to be a nation-state.
What ISIS is doing is forming a Sunni nation state. I don't like their politics but I do believe that this formation of a nation state is a really important step forward for the middle east in achieving good government.
Except, lots of Sunnis consider those asshats to be unspeakably un-Sunni-like, and a scourge. You're confusing religious affiliation with the foundation of nation building. That's not "important," it's exactly what's wrong with the entire Middle East.
For example many of the Americans traumatized and angered 9/11 didn't have anyone related to them that died in 9/11 or close friends that died in 9/11. But they still saw it as an attack on themselves.
Because it WAS an attack on themselves. It was intended to be damaging to everyone in the country or who has a vested interest in the health and well being of the US economy. The people who did the attack did so because there are hundreds of millions of people who don't want to live under a cruel religious authority, and have build nations where that medieval BS is appropriately pushed to the sidelines. It's not important that ISIS take the steps it's taking, it's important that they are prevented from taking a single new step at all, ever again.
The rich can lay sprawled out in their lay-flat beds while the plebs snarl at one another while standing ankle-deep in their own feces. We're back to the good old days of the Titanic.
Which would be an interesting observation if it wasn't pure nonsense. Flying anywhere, no matter how briefly uncomfortable, is a huge luxury. If you want to fly first class, put the money aside and do it. If you don't want to spend that much money, quit bitching at people who do. If you can buy any sort of airline ticket, you're the wealthy one by any measure that matters.
No. Representative government, not tribalism, IS the common interest. The long-term thing you're describing isn't an embrace of democracy., It's the retrenchment of tribal rivalry by people who think that there is only so much prosperity available, and that the best way to get more is to kill the other guy. The "other guy" in this case, is someone who doesn't share your relatively recent family tree. Combine those gang-war family turf politics with medieval-minded murderous theo-thugocracy in the form of groups like Isis and the Wahabism that fuels it, and you've got quite a mess. None of which has anything to do with Democracy.
If we're talking body tolls, then George W Bush is responsible for the deaths of more Iraqis than Saddam.
No, not really. Saddam was responsible for the deaths of millions of Iraqis. Getting even more of his people killed while spending that last of force's energies to try to keep him in power was also his fault. Starving even more of them while stealing aid money to buy more weapons and prop up his regime by force was his fault.
I believe we would've been better containing Saddam than the current mess we have.
We do indeed have to put up with lots of bad people in power. But holding our noses while contending with him ceased to be an option. He invaded Kuwait, and we allowed to stay in power as long as he agreed to stand down and abide by many specific requirements. He chose not to, at every turn. He never stopped trying to kill ethnic minorities (like the Kurds), never stopped shooting at allied forces enforcing the no-fly zone, never stopped importing weapons (including long-range SCUDs), never came clean about where he put all of his VX gas, and more. The larger conflict that finally took him down was the climax of an uninterrupted fight that he started when he tried to forcibly take over a neighboring country. He'd probably still be there, along with his incomprehensibly cruel and murderous sons, if he'd not invaded Kuwait - and possibly he'd still be there if he'd actually done what he promised when he was kicked back out.
The FAA has granted modelers a loophole. Be careful or the courts might make them take it away.
No, Congress passed a law forbidding the FAA from messing with hobbyists. The FAA is even now trying to find a way around that statutory requirement, and has published an "interpretation" of that law (now being challenged in court) that shows the administration is actively trying to pretend the law means the exact opposite of what it plainly states.
And what exactly is the legal basis for the FAA's denying commercial operation of "drones"?
You've got it backwards. The FAA would be banning ALL such activity if it could. But congress passed a low telling them it was hands off for the hobby crowd. The FAA is currently being taken to court over their recently published "interpretation" of that law, implying that a whole bunch of hobby RC activity (like, flying while using video linked goggles) is reasonably banned. If congress hadn't explicitly carved out a niche for hobbyists, it would already be all over.
The Obama administration has already come right out and said that they won't be complying with the law requiring the FAA to have, by next year, rules in place to integrate commercial UAS into use. They will eventually, but all signs right now are that their idea of making it allowable for people like small aerial photography operations is going to be so onerous and expensive as to completely shut down huge new areas of economic activity. Thanks, all of you hope-and-changers who put such idiots in charge of the executive branch of the government, and in charge of political appointees like the FAA's Huerta, who is the driving force behind crushing this technology at every opportunity.
i thought copyrights had to be applied for like a patent?
No. You own the copyrights on content you create, by the very act of creating it. You take a photo, you are the copyright holder, right then and there.
so i can take some nude selfies and then leak them and then sue for millions?
No, not on the basis of your holding the copyright. Not unless you can show that you'd normally make millions off of the use of that image anyway. Because unless you REGISTER the copyright, federally, you can only sue to stop infringing use and claim - at most - the customary fee you'd normally have collected if the infringing person had agreed to license the image from you in the first place. There is no punitive damage $ possible unless you take the matter to federal court, and you can only do that if you've taken the additional step of registering the material with the copyright office. THEN you can hire a lawyer and go to town. Of course, you'd need to have the material registered BEFORE all of that happened. Otherwise, your main option is to simply use your copyright power to stop the infringing use.
Of course, that's all completely separate from suing someone for defaming you, or using your likeness commercially without your permission... those aren't copyright matters, that's separate. You might indeed be able, as a celebrity with a valuable public face, to sue for a pile of money based on someone else's mis-use of your image without your permission. But the average basement-dwelling slashdot user? No.
The slogan for the day? "If everyone is in trouble, nobody is."
You've obviously never dealt with the Maryland state government or any of its counties. The entire MO is to make interaction with the government absolutely as miserable as possible at every turn. Then, when you play the game right and donate to the right party (it's a political monoculture, really), you get relief from the imposed hell. "Everybody is always in trouble" should be the state motto. Sounds better in Latin...
Well, you did say, "Montana, Wyoming and parts of Idaho and Utah"... which is more than Wyoming. Lots of cattle throughout those four states. Lots of agriculture in Idaho, timber in Montana. Anyway, those states together produce just under 10% of the grain and ranch output we consume - many billions per year worth. Considering the just-in-time nature of the country's food supply, loss of it would be very non-trivial. We're also talking about herd destruction, which would have a lasting impact beyond the immediate absence of what would be going to market at any given time. That sort of destruction would quite suck, and we're not even talking about the industries that are present in places like Salt Lake City. Let's hope it just doesn't happen any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Out of hundreds of such discussions that pop up on easy Google searches ...
http://www.modelaircraft.org/a...
ROFL.
Obama's out to stop the drone entrepenaurs!
ITS ALL A CONSPIRACY!!
It's not a conspiracy, coward. It's published policy. Your decision to trot out ad hominem in place of addressing the basic facts of the matter shows you know I'm right. That you're posting as a coward makes it even more clear. But keep propping up your pet administration, man. The documents they publish - you know, the ones that have been amply covered in both aviation news and general media of all sorts - make this all very clear. The agency has just been sued by multiple parties over the 'interpretation' document and policy position in question. But please, don't trouble yourself to keep up with the news - that would take the fun out of your shrill, drooling Obama fanboyism.
This is that anti-job anti-business Obama's fault!
To which I respond: [citation needed].
You actually need a citation to believe that the director of the FAA is a political appointee? You are that unaware of how federal agencies are run by the executive branch of the government? You don't need a citation, you need a remedial course in basic civics. Please return to the conversation when you understand the basic structure of the government.
Yes, and congress passed a law requiring the FAA to produce such regulations in a timely fashion due in this coming year. The administration has said they will not obey that law, and will not have such a framework in anything like the timely fashion required.
... because that's commercial drone use! The employees of US-based companies that have for years stepped out back of their shops to test-fly a new RC airplane or multirotor will, according to the Obama administration's new interpretation, be breaking the law and subject to substantial fines for being paid to fly unmanned aerial systems. We can't have that! Quick! Shut down all of those businesses and jobs! Chase those retailers out of the country!
... no, there's got to be a way to make it all MORE miserable, MORE expensive, MORE punitive, and nearly impossible for small entrepreneurs to get into - because otherwise we might miss out on some more federal fees, and intrusive paperwork.
In the meantime, the administration has published an "interpretation" of the 2012 law that says they take it to mean more or less the exact opposite of its plain intent, and they are busy getting ready to fine people for doing things like participating in RC competitions (you know, like we've been having for decades) that happen to involve things like $20 cash prizes
It's preposterous. We're not just dragging behind the rest of the world, we're actively taking steps backwards. The administration is deliberately, purposefully, putting the brakes on what would otherwise be a multi-billion dollar industry full of innovation and attractive to STEM-types in this country. The left's instinct to Nanny State their way down into every last aspect of what someone might do to conduct some business (hey, kid, quit flying your $250, 2-pound plastic quad-copter with a cheap camera over your neighbor's roof because he asked you to, and said he'd give you $25 to get pictures of his roof gutters for him - if you don't cease and desist such commercial UAV operations, that's going to be a $10,000 fine!) means they can't simply clone the sort of framework that the UK or Canada have long had in place
And as usual, the very idiots that we'd most worry about anyway, who will be getting a drone from Amazon tomorrow and flying it over a park full of kids an hour later without any understanding of safe operations or good manners, will completely ignore the FAA's rules/guidance/regs anyway. The government, which is here to help you, will only be placing the painful burden and expense on the very people who are the most responsible anyway: those with a lot to lose because they're in business to use the technology.
More Hope and Change, hard at work for our economy. Yes, Obama's man Huerta at the FAA is a political appointee and that aspect of the food chain lays the FAA's entire posture on this squarely at the door of the White House.
In the future, when the world is more enlightened, freedom to trade will be as much a basic right as speech is today.
No. The same collectivist and PC-style urges that currently act to prevent free expression will continue to further intercede when you seek to trade with someone. Why? Because there will always be people who think it's unfair that you and someone else have found a mutually beneficial reason to interact, and they will use the force of government to take a piece of that benefit, pay career middlemen in the government to handle it, and hand some of that benefit over to other people who didn't manage to make that transaction happen for themselves. That trend has been increasing, not decreasing. Places like academia and mass media are now LESS free places, for expression, and the market is an increasingly less free place in which to transact business between any two given parties. The "in the future" you envision is a fantasy. That horse has left the barn, and the nanny staters have won.
So your constitution doesn't exactly spell out what dignity exactly is, or what "quality" actually means in constitutionally mandated "quality housing for all citizens" - but it's not an entitlement, it's actually a "right" defined in the constitution, right? You said it's a clause there. Which is it? Does the constitution get dirty in describing specific wealth transfer entitlement program details, or not?
The housing thing is an entitlement not a right. What I said was that if you qualify for the entitlement the dignity right prevents government from giving you a new cardboard box and calling it "housing assistance".
OK, so indeed, if you pass a certain test, you have the power to make the government take something from other people, and give it to you. And your constitution guarantees that only can that happen, but it has to happen with a certain amount of style. Not enough style, and it's undignified, right? So: who decides how many square feet of entitlement home is constitutionally dignified? How does the constitution lay out the definition of dignified where the rubber meets the road and you have to decide how much of someone else's work day should be spent building a kitchen for somebody else? Specifically.
So just to be clear, you're saying that some people in your country have the right to force other people in your country give them stuff.
Much of what you're saying seems based on a (all to common) fundamental misunderstanding of rights and the constitution. In the US, our rights are not defined there. The constitution exists to document the ways in which the government's power (to interfere with our rights) is limited. It does also lay out a limited range of things the government must do (defense, that sort of thing) and the structure of the branches of government ... but the point of the charter isn't to set up a laundry list of our rights. It's to remind everyone that rights (say, to assemble or speak, etc) are "natural," and that given the tendency of people in power to abuse things, we have a chartering document that points out the limits on the government's power - and it expressly mentions some hot-button areas that the document's authors knew would come up. Like speech, assembly, self defense, and the like.
You don't have "more rights" because more of them are listed. Nobody has a "right" to housing in the same way they have a right to freedom of speech. You're confusing government-run entitlement programs, paid for with taxes taken from one person and given to another, with "rights." They are not the same thing. A "right to dignity" as it relates to the government should only be mentioned in the sense that such a clause would prevent the government from actively doing something that removes someone's "dignity" (an impossibly elastic word that is more or less chosen for its inability to be commonly understood or defined).
A rational, constitutional take on "dignity" (vis a vis homelessness, for example, since you mention it), would be that the government cannot stop you from being charitable and helping somebody else into a home if you see fit. The only way the government can be in the dignity-through-housing-paid-for-by-someone-else business is to reduce someone else's dignity by making them spend part of their day as a slave working to prop up the "dignity" (read as: having stuff) of another guy. When you can wave the magic "dignity" wand and use it to remove something from one person and give it to another, that cries out for a very precise definition of dignity.
How many square meters of kitchen space is required in order to be dignified? If I have to spend some of the 12+ hours I'll spend working today in order to make a deposit in someone else's dignity fund, I'm left less able to afford my own kitchen than I otherwise would be. What if I feel undignified in an 800 square foot apartment, but would feel like I would finally have my dignity in a 1000 square foot space? Should I have the right to make you, with the government ready to back me up by seizure and force and imprisonment of you if you're not cooperative, give me the difference in rent every month? Talking about such things in terms of "rights" is completely misguided.
OK, then. "You see, officer, I've been thinking of studying Gaelic, and after just a few minutes of trying to figure out how to conjugate in future imperfect, I got so frustrated that I punched a wall." [takes out pocket guide to Gaelic] "I'm guessing that dead guy over there must have gotten into a fight with someone else about pluperfect usage or perhaps gerunds, and it just went bad. That's a shame."
Even stupid criminals can learn to shoot with their off hand.
.22 short (essentially recoiless) into the back of your head as you are if he blasts away with a 9mm.
Regardless, this strikes me as a horse-has-left-the-barn issue. "No jury in the world" is going to convict Joe Felon on a murder because of detected acceleration that feels like a gun. What's a gun feel like, anyway? You're just as dead if Billy Thug puts a
And here's my alibi, officer: I was at the gym and took a swing at a punching bag.
Something like this would have to be tuned to the anatomy of the wearer and the specifics of the weapon and shooting style used. And of course it doesn't even begin to address the thousands of people who are killed by recidivist gang members in beatings, stabbings, etc. Our local thugs prefer knives and machetes.
Why would you assume my question meant that there should be no CEO at all?
Because when someone trots out any eye-rolling reference to how many burgers, or airline seats, or theater tickets have to be sold to pay the chief executive a company's board of directors deliberately hired to do a specific job, it usually means that someone disapproves of the kind of money that changed hands to make that happen. That complaint is usually made in the context of a larger, rambling complaint about any or all of for-profit entities in the first place, or a company's liberty to hire who they want at whatever price they see fit to pay for executives, or the very existence of incorporated businesses, etc.
Complaining about how many widget sales are required to pay for a CEO or CTO or CFO has become shorthand for complaining that they exist at all, and how it would be better if the company was managed by somebody that's a peer of the entry-level employees, or maybe their immediate management. That fantasy and variations on it is pure nonsense.
The minute that someone cites the CEO's pay when complaining about the nature or price of a delivered retail product or service is the moment that you can be sure they don't know what's involved in keeping a gigantic company funded and running. That complaint needs its own equivalent of Godwin's law, because it's always apparent where the sentiment originates - and it's usually based on the premise that people who own companies (whether privately held or publicly traded and thus owned by investors) shouldn't be allowed to decide what they are willing to pay for the things they need to buy as they run their business. They pay vendors for products and supplies, they pay contractors to maintain facilities, they pay workers at every level to do a whole spectrum of things, and they seek out and hire officer-level people to deal with big-issue stuff. They choose those people from a limited range of choices, and stake enormous parts of the company's future on how those choices will turn out. And they throw money at the problem to open up more options and, with much of that pay being tied to performance, to make sure the executives have a vested interest in meeting the owners goals.
Dismissing what that costs as being too much misses the larger picture.
Why is an enterprise that is losing 440 million dollars every 3 months paying the top person 7 million dollars compensation? It appears to be unsustainable.
They pay that money to retain the services of someone that they judge will help make sure that those losses aren't ever bigger, and that they'll be reversed, at least in part due to that person's efforts - whether it's in overseeing M&A or more investment, or branding exercises, or housecleaning that can impact the long term viability of the business. It can take years to make that work. If the company's owners want to gamble the current $7m against a future they expect will turn around in the hundreds of millions, why isn't that their decision to make?
They don't perceive things like terrorist attacks against Saudi Arabia as attacks on themselves even when Saudi Arabia was the largest non-domestic source of US oil.
Sure they do. I do.
That's why dealing with people who use terrorist bombings and similar tactics against civilian and commercial targets in order to boost their global profile and recruit fellow idiots to their cause ARE considered a global problem, even if all they're doing is deliberately slaughtering innocent women and children at a vegetable market in Afghanistan. Because allowing people who embrace and spread that way of interacting with the world to continue unchecked just makes the problem grow. Legitimizes it, for some, as a way to communicate their twisted world view in a global media/economy era. That stuff is toxic to civilization, period. So those of us who appreciate civilization do feel assaulted when those who want to tear it down decide they can and should get away with it unmolested.
How many tickets must be sold to satisfy the CEO's paycheck alone? Much less the other executives...
You're right! There should be no CEO. The company doesn't need a chief executive. In fact, all airlines should be run by the government so that the company no longer needs to figure out how to attract investment, make marketing deals, strategize about how to pay for fuel a year from now, or negotiate over routes and hub services. There's no reason that any of that can't be done by a typical bureaucrat who has no personal vested interest in making such decisions as financially efficient as possible. Also, people who've spent money to buy shares in airlines should have to give that up, and taxpayers should be stuck with all of that as the decisions made by a randomly chosen mid-level federal employee begin to immediately lose billions more dollars. It's OK, we'll just borrow it from our grandchildren!
Why did they perceive it as an attack on themselves? Why do they view themselves as having a vested interest in the USA economy?
Because if you participate in the US economy (as someone who contributes to it, or someone who takes from it - either way), then a deliberate attack on it IS an attack on you. They "view" themselves as having a vested interest in the US economy because they actually do have such. There's really no room for confusion on that front.
A tribe is defined by blood.
But tribal behavior is pretty well baked into us, genetically, and certainly manifests itself in large groups whether they're fourth cousins twice removed or just plain people who were raised the same way or like the same things. Groupthink on Slashdot frequently looks that way, for example, where people reflexively root for or against some person, meme, or the like simply because that's what their tribe here does.
Tribal-style behavior can exist in groups much larger than kin without that group happening to be a nation-state.
What ISIS is doing is forming a Sunni nation state. I don't like their politics but I do believe that this formation of a nation state is a really important step forward for the middle east in achieving good government.
Except, lots of Sunnis consider those asshats to be unspeakably un-Sunni-like, and a scourge. You're confusing religious affiliation with the foundation of nation building. That's not "important," it's exactly what's wrong with the entire Middle East.
For example many of the Americans traumatized and angered 9/11 didn't have anyone related to them that died in 9/11 or close friends that died in 9/11. But they still saw it as an attack on themselves.
Because it WAS an attack on themselves. It was intended to be damaging to everyone in the country or who has a vested interest in the health and well being of the US economy. The people who did the attack did so because there are hundreds of millions of people who don't want to live under a cruel religious authority, and have build nations where that medieval BS is appropriately pushed to the sidelines. It's not important that ISIS take the steps it's taking, it's important that they are prevented from taking a single new step at all, ever again.
flying is as much a luxury as is having an auto
Right, exactly. Another thing that most people in the world don't have.
The rich can lay sprawled out in their lay-flat beds while the plebs snarl at one another while standing ankle-deep in their own feces. We're back to the good old days of the Titanic.
Which would be an interesting observation if it wasn't pure nonsense. Flying anywhere, no matter how briefly uncomfortable, is a huge luxury. If you want to fly first class, put the money aside and do it. If you don't want to spend that much money, quit bitching at people who do. If you can buy any sort of airline ticket, you're the wealthy one by any measure that matters.
No. Representative government, not tribalism, IS the common interest. The long-term thing you're describing isn't an embrace of democracy., It's the retrenchment of tribal rivalry by people who think that there is only so much prosperity available, and that the best way to get more is to kill the other guy. The "other guy" in this case, is someone who doesn't share your relatively recent family tree. Combine those gang-war family turf politics with medieval-minded murderous theo-thugocracy in the form of groups like Isis and the Wahabism that fuels it, and you've got quite a mess. None of which has anything to do with Democracy.
If we're talking body tolls, then George W Bush is responsible for the deaths of more Iraqis than Saddam.
No, not really. Saddam was responsible for the deaths of millions of Iraqis. Getting even more of his people killed while spending that last of force's energies to try to keep him in power was also his fault. Starving even more of them while stealing aid money to buy more weapons and prop up his regime by force was his fault.
I believe we would've been better containing Saddam than the current mess we have.
We do indeed have to put up with lots of bad people in power. But holding our noses while contending with him ceased to be an option. He invaded Kuwait, and we allowed to stay in power as long as he agreed to stand down and abide by many specific requirements. He chose not to, at every turn. He never stopped trying to kill ethnic minorities (like the Kurds), never stopped shooting at allied forces enforcing the no-fly zone, never stopped importing weapons (including long-range SCUDs), never came clean about where he put all of his VX gas, and more. The larger conflict that finally took him down was the climax of an uninterrupted fight that he started when he tried to forcibly take over a neighboring country. He'd probably still be there, along with his incomprehensibly cruel and murderous sons, if he'd not invaded Kuwait - and possibly he'd still be there if he'd actually done what he promised when he was kicked back out.
The FAA has granted modelers a loophole. Be careful or the courts might make them take it away.
No, Congress passed a law forbidding the FAA from messing with hobbyists. The FAA is even now trying to find a way around that statutory requirement, and has published an "interpretation" of that law (now being challenged in court) that shows the administration is actively trying to pretend the law means the exact opposite of what it plainly states.
And what exactly is the legal basis for the FAA's denying commercial operation of "drones"?
You've got it backwards. The FAA would be banning ALL such activity if it could. But congress passed a low telling them it was hands off for the hobby crowd. The FAA is currently being taken to court over their recently published "interpretation" of that law, implying that a whole bunch of hobby RC activity (like, flying while using video linked goggles) is reasonably banned. If congress hadn't explicitly carved out a niche for hobbyists, it would already be all over.
The Obama administration has already come right out and said that they won't be complying with the law requiring the FAA to have, by next year, rules in place to integrate commercial UAS into use. They will eventually, but all signs right now are that their idea of making it allowable for people like small aerial photography operations is going to be so onerous and expensive as to completely shut down huge new areas of economic activity. Thanks, all of you hope-and-changers who put such idiots in charge of the executive branch of the government, and in charge of political appointees like the FAA's Huerta, who is the driving force behind crushing this technology at every opportunity.
i thought copyrights had to be applied for like a patent?
No. You own the copyrights on content you create, by the very act of creating it. You take a photo, you are the copyright holder, right then and there.
so i can take some nude selfies and then leak them and then sue for millions?
No, not on the basis of your holding the copyright. Not unless you can show that you'd normally make millions off of the use of that image anyway. Because unless you REGISTER the copyright, federally, you can only sue to stop infringing use and claim - at most - the customary fee you'd normally have collected if the infringing person had agreed to license the image from you in the first place. There is no punitive damage $ possible unless you take the matter to federal court, and you can only do that if you've taken the additional step of registering the material with the copyright office. THEN you can hire a lawyer and go to town. Of course, you'd need to have the material registered BEFORE all of that happened. Otherwise, your main option is to simply use your copyright power to stop the infringing use.
... those aren't copyright matters, that's separate. You might indeed be able, as a celebrity with a valuable public face, to sue for a pile of money based on someone else's mis-use of your image without your permission. But the average basement-dwelling slashdot user? No.
Of course, that's all completely separate from suing someone for defaming you, or using your likeness commercially without your permission
The slogan for the day? "If everyone is in trouble, nobody is."
You've obviously never dealt with the Maryland state government or any of its counties. The entire MO is to make interaction with the government absolutely as miserable as possible at every turn. Then, when you play the game right and donate to the right party (it's a political monoculture, really), you get relief from the imposed hell. "Everybody is always in trouble" should be the state motto. Sounds better in Latin...
Quisque Semper Est Mala
Words to rule by.
From Wyoming? Seriously.
Well, you did say, "Montana, Wyoming and parts of Idaho and Utah" ... which is more than Wyoming. Lots of cattle throughout those four states. Lots of agriculture in Idaho, timber in Montana. Anyway, those states together produce just under 10% of the grain and ranch output we consume - many billions per year worth. Considering the just-in-time nature of the country's food supply, loss of it would be very non-trivial. We're also talking about herd destruction, which would have a lasting impact beyond the immediate absence of what would be going to market at any given time. That sort of destruction would quite suck, and we're not even talking about the industries that are present in places like Salt Lake City. Let's hope it just doesn't happen any time soon.