They are not your friend, they have no interest in following any laws themselves, they really are out to get all they can and to hell with any constitution or "laws", and will use every tactic they can come up with to protect their criminal guild, their gang,
In New England they routinely display gang colors on their official and unofficial cars. They will often replace their front license plate with one of those.
Right now, to help reform all of this we need two things badly: the federal government needs to really enforce the illegal immigration laws on the books, including the provisions of fining the employers.
Well, that sure was a random unsupported claim in the midst of an otherwise fairly consistent diatribe.
Revealing classified information is against the law.
No it is not. If you come across classified information in public then you can do whatever you want with it. There are recent anti-news-reporter laws that prevent one from convincing someone with clearance into revealing classified information to you, but otherwise if you find it in an open source (term of art, not to be confused with software) then you can do with it what you will. Sometimes two pieces of information will not be classified unless combined together but if you aren't cleared in the first place you can combine that information yourself and it still isn't classified.
So for an uncleared person to reveal undercover cops' identities by observing the police station and using public records can in no way be considered a security violation (another term of art) by that person. It might be a violation on one of the cops' part for exposing himself when he should not have.
The Plame affair was a whole different story, Armitage was cleared for access to know that she was an agent. He violated his clearance by telling that information to an uncleared person.
So, in summary, it is even more lopsided than you made it out to be. In no way can this blogger have revealed classified information since she never had access to any in the first place. But Armitage clearly did so in direct violation of his clearance.
The term "extremely authoritarian" is a bit of hyperbole.
Chill. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings only to point out that you advocate for something completely contrary to what you claim to represent. Not just minor degrees of difference, you write as if freedom of speech is a privilege and not a requirement for a functioning democracy.
Look into how colleges used "free speech zones" back during the Vietnam war and then let me know why that is any different.
Thanks for spelling out the slippery slope even more explicitly. Its gone from colleges - private institutions limited to control of just their campus with a stated interest in preventing disruption of classes - to the government applying it such that the protested never even see the protesters. During vietnam the on-campus protests were only rarely directed at anyone actually on campus - nobody there was responsible for the war. You keep digging your self further and further in.
Are you pretending to be dense? I know you are smarter than this. For about the fifth time, I live in New York. We don't have problems dealing with large gatherings here.
You have never once said "I live in new york" or anything like that. You have cited wherever you live as being a location which is routinely disrupted - oh wait you didn't, you only implied knowledge of such based on your theories that the only reason NYC isn't disrupted is because of regulation, as if parades are even vaguely like a protest and "chill" is the ultimate proof of one's claims despite gigantic holes lapses of logic.
Right, we disagree as to the limits of free speech and so you have to demonize me. Nice.
That's not demonization. That's saying you claim the cover of supporting free speech while actually advocating extremely authoritarian policies. I'd say the same thing about a person who claims to be fascist but really advocates for personal liberty.
That actually came first. Free speech zones, at least the modern more widespread use of them in the US, resulted from violent anti-free-trade protesters.... It's been in use since at least Vietnam,
Hhhhm. So either you admit that restrictions have become progressively worse over time since we clearly did not have "free speech zones" miles away from the people being protested back during the vietnam war, or you are seriously confused about what was being protested back then.
New York City is not frequently shut down, precisely because they are so good at handling large events.
Doesn't answer my question. Where do you live that protests frequently shutdown the entire city?
I second that. I know in my area Verizon's roll out of FIOS was delayed by two or three years because they wanted Washington state to subsidize something like 70% of the infrastructure upgrade cost.
I hope the state did not cave. Verizon has or is in the process of pulling out of the state, leaving the infrastructure in the hands of a local company. The cynic in me says that if they took state money for the build-out then this little manoeuvre has caused any stipulations to be shed.
Maybe you don't believe in that slippery slope but the fact is that your arguments are precisely what has already enabled it.
Which I contend is a good thing.
A good thing? Free speech zones? Yeah you are a wolf in sheep's clothing. You know what comes next? Violence. Press the people down and they only press back harder. Maybe you don't understand what a "free speech zone" is - maybe you need to educate yourself on just how they've been implemented.
I don't know if you live somewhere where protests are frequent, but I do.
Put up or shut up. Lets see what city is frequently "shut down"-- what like once a week? Or maybe I should "chill" before you start back-pedaling again.
You have tried to change your argument in mid-stream. You wrote "Copyright is the right to make copies. Simple as that."
So, I guessed right. You want to argue that copies that are not 1:1 are not copies. Well, never mind the law, even pop culture is against you -- people routinely rail against remakes of foreign movies as being "rip-offs" because the idea was copied. You are far too willing to alternate between literal and flexible interpretations when it suits your purposes, where copies must be 1:1 in order to qualify as copies but ideas need only be "in the realm" of theories in order to qualify as a theory.
I think you are just pissy because I shot down your weak rationalization you had before you even could bring it up.
I challenged you to give an example clear back then.
Yeah and your continuous challenges for an historical example of copyright-free, but money-based systems just go to show how completely lost you are. My point was that circumstances are different than they have ever been before and thus all previous cases aren't applicable. If you weren't so far out of your depth you wouldn't keep trying to make same irrelevant point over and over again. I ignored your previous challenges because my first post in the thread spelled out why examples from history are not applicable.
I freely admitted that I misunderstood how you were using the terms, but that was because you did not put them in any context. You just dumped them into the middle of the conversation.
Yeah, I "dumped" them in the middle of a conversation where they are probably the two terms most relevant to the discussion. The lack of context was only a lack of experience on your part. It totally cracks me up that you keep trying to deflect responsibility for being uneducated on the topic on which you make so many bald assertions. Its like you want to live up to the Dunning-Kruger.
And (2) this whole subject is about to drop off the bottom of my queue in Slashdot, and I have no real motivation to hunt it up again.
Haha. There you go again not understanding how a system works or chosing to deliberately misrepresent it. Should I conclude that you keep "hunting it up" so as to protect your ego or that it pops to the top of two of the three different stacks available to you whenever I post to it?
I completely agree, which is why I fully support closing off roads to traffic for things like parades, rallies, protests, etc. But it has to be organized and it has to be safe.
Implicit in "organized and safe" is out of the way of people being protested. Life's complicated and fraught with risks, trying to protect someone in the name of public safety is the tool by which "free speech zones" have been justified. Maybe you don't believe in that slippery slope but the fact is that your arguments are precisely what has already enabled it.
I'd take it a step further and sell her info or maybe just strategically post it on the net. She's dead, identity theft ain't going to hurt her. Teach those companies a lesson for being so willing to trust in the digital word.
Now that I think about it, I might make posting my information a requirement of my will for anyone inheriting anything from me. One last "fuck you" to the system after I'm gone.
That is demonstrably not true. I could shut down traffic into New York City by simply clogging the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels...
You are back-pedaling. First it was "shutdown a city" now it is the about 0.001% of that - simply shutting down traffic into a city. Its going to take a lot more that blocking incoming traffic for a day or two to "shutdown a city."
Again, your rights end when they infringe someone else's.
You completely miss the point. Your right to travel on public roads is not absolute, the right to protest on those roads is also part of their function. They are competing rights.
I don't think conspiracy to commit murder should be legal, even under the guise of free speech.
Conspiracy laws are thought-crime laws, one of the most totalitarian kinds of law ever dreamed up. You clearly are no free-speech advocate no matter how much you've convinced yourself otherwise.
There are a lot of ways to act like a douche. Shutting down a city is not acceptable.
Here's the thing - public streets don't exist solely for transportation, they exist for public use. Sometimes that use isn't compatible with transportation. If so many people care about an issue that their protesting in the streets causes a city to "shut down" then chances are they've got a legitimate issue that needs addressing. After all, it takes a lot of people to "shut down a city" - not just a handful of fringe lunatics. You get that many people out protesting, their protests are pretty much by definition representative of a significant portion of the mainstream population.
I agree with you regarding "distasteful" speech. Even hate speech should be protected, so long as it isn't a call to violence.
And who decides just what defines a call to violence? "Kill that fag!" is obvious - what about "those fags will burn in hell!" To the right audience the latter is clearly incitement to put those fags in hell so they can get started burning. No, the real answer is that even calls to violence should not be censored, it is the people who do the violence who are guilty. We used to believe in sticks and stones, now way too many people like you believe in mean words and have forgotten that personal responsibility is the cornerstone of civil society.
"In fact, a company may save money by hiring international students because the majority of them are exempt from Social Security (FICA) and Medicare tax requirements."
Big deal. This is about hiring students not graduates for part-time work and internships -- this is not serious job competition. And in fact the reverse is true for hiring graduates who do not become citizens - FICA and medicare must be collected, but when those people go back to their home countries they get get nothing in return for all of those "benefit" taxes- no medicare, no social-security, nada.
If you think that "copyright" is merely the right to make copies, you are deluded. That may be what it was originally named after, but it is a hell of a lot more than that.
Put your money where your mouth is. Give an example of where modern copyright law regulates some aspect that is not copying in one form or another. I think you are so deluded you would try to cite some variation on making derivative works. Clue - still copies, just because they are 1:1 doesn't mean they aren't a kind of copy. Great opportunity to make good on your promise not to respond though, lets you hide your ineptitude one more time.
And no... where do you see me stating that I deny that theories must be predictive?
My observations don't make predictions. You claim my observations are theories, ergo you deny that theories must be predictive. Or is it that being "in the realm of theory" is some special state where they are theories only when convenient for you?
I am simply walking away from your bullshit, because (1) you have made very little sense,
Ah, so the reason you've accepted the incorrectness of your claims about legal theories, piano rolls, electronic financial transactions and economic circumstances is because I made very little sense.
(2) you have consistently read things into my writing that I simply did not write (sometimes some pretty weird interpretations),
You haven't been able to show a single case of that yet. Yet I put together an entire post showing just how disconnected you are from reality and I didn't even have to exaggerate or misrepresent to do it.
(3) your arguments, in the rare cases that they did make sense, were inconsistent and contradictory.
The only reason what I wrote doesn't make sense to you is because you are completely out of your depth. You didn't even know the terms "rival" and "excludable" until you entered this conversation and even after looking them up still you tried to insist that physical objects like piano rolls were not rivalrous.
Look closely in to the mirror - you are the product of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Unfortunately, the hypocrisy wasn't what you think - the VA is only marginally better than what the rest of us get. They deliver roughly 65% of necessary care versus roughly 55% for the non-VA healthcare in the US and they do it at a cost of roughly $5500/yr per person versus $6500/yr per person (including those who do not have healthcare coverage). In addition the VA has means-testing for 'regular' veterans (those not wounded in combat) so their coverage isn't comprehensive. The real problem with that segment (yes, I saw it) isn't how great a job government-managed healthcare could do, it is how poorly vets are still treated.
Then there is question of whether or not the VA's marginal improvements over the current system would remain if it were scaled up the hundred-fold or so necessary for universal coverage. Maybe it would, maybe it would even get better, but I don't think we can assume either to be the case without a solid analysis of why and how, which I don't think anyone's done.
Ah... so now you are re-defining "copyright" to mean anything you want, too?
Lol. Coming from you that's rich. Copyright is the right to make copies. Simple as that. Ownership of a right does not define the right just as owning a house does not change it from a house into something else.
No, it's not an observation. It is (if it were really what you say it to be), a generalization about observations. That is commonly known as a "theory"
You deny that theories must be predictive? You must have flunked high school science.
It took me a while, but I see that this is not even a discussion. It's an exercise in fantasyland, and I refuse to participate further.
Finally. You should have given up the minute you thought legal arguments about piano rolls were at all meaningful.
Not at all. A counterexample is ridiculously simple: Government holding all the rights to original works would be one alternative. I am not saying that I recommend that, but there are acres and acres of "dry floor" here, friend.
And what rights would those be? The right to distribute? It is STILL copyright regardless of who holds it. Your floor ain't dry at all.
Put it in plain words. Before we had electronic networks, you paid by cash or check. If you paid by check, you were charged for the privilege... whether that charge was up-front, or "buried" in a slight difference in interest rates or margins, you still paid for it. Same with a credit card. With a credit card, the company doing the selling was charged both a percentage of the sale AND a per-transaction fee.
Wooosh. Seriously, are you so completely unable to discriminate between man-made barriers and barriers due to limits of technology? Here's a clue - if moving money around electronically is just as expensive as doing it physically, why is it that every business, every bank, even the US government, does as much of it as they possibly can that way? Do you think the Fed pays a 2% transaction fee on the billions in commercial paper loans that they open and close every week?
is still in the realm of economic theory, not just observations, because if it had really been based on observations, those observations would have had to be wrong.
That's the dumbest load of baloney I've seen today. Its not an observation because you think it is false? Even if it were false, that wouldn't make it anything other than a false observation. "In the realm of economic theory" -- WTF does that mean? Theories make predictions. What I wrote does not make predictions, ergo not a theory. Full stop.
You are so damn desperate - always responding with those long, meanderingly pointless screeds. Looking to hook some new red-herring to hang your hat on. You've already acquiesced on all your major claims, you ain't going to win anything by trawling for more red herrings.
You can't split hairs that finely. There's no bright line between "speech" and "committing a crime through use of speech". For example, sedition (where illegal) is a crime often committed through speech, but freedom of speech would be pretty meaningless if the government could punish seditious speech.
Sedition is purely speech whereas something like fraud is not. Thus criminalizing sedition is guaranteed to be a violation of the freedom of speech. You want to make over-throwing the government or attempting to over-throw the government a crime, then fine, that's not an act that requires speech although speech may aid in it. The difference is that sedition singles out speech while over-throwing the government does not.
I'd submit that speech is just one possible tool to commit certain crimes. (i.e. Reckless endangerment, in the case of the theater crowd).
Bingo. It isn't the speech that should be illegal. It is the crime itself, that in some cases may be aided by speech, that should be prosecuted. Freedom of speech needs to be absolute, but that does not mean committing a crime through the use of speech gets any exemption.
Your definition of "entrepreneurial spirit" is very, uhmmm, strange to say the least. It is as if "getting as filthy rich as possible" and "working in an industry they enjoy" were somehow mutually exclusive. They are not.
It is a wage-slave mentality. For may people, their entrepreneurial spirit is rooted in a desire to be master of their own domain. No arbitrary and capricious corporate structure telling them what to do, when they know better. The ability to "fire a client" if they feel like it. That sort of thing.
letting original works and inventions automatically be in the public domain from the beginning
That does not necessarily mean copyright...
Rrrrright. Give one example of excluding the public domain that is not copyright. You can't. The very definition of copyright is "not public domain." Your corner is all out of dry floor.
I understand "nearly" very well, but apparently you don't. The internet is NOT a "nearly frictionless" medium for distribution of... money". Anywhere. It costs about the same to perform a transaction over the internet as it does to perform that transaction via any other medium.
You seem to have forgotten what it used to be like before we had electronic networks. Just because a rising tide floats all boats doesn't mean the tide doesn't rise.
You are just plain wrong about that. What part of that don't you understand?
Woooosh. Don't try to use the phrase if you can't correctly connect any of the end points.
PS. Still not economic theories - just observations.
And DON'T plan on using a wireless mouse or keyboard - those things are so range-crippled now that unless you are within a couple of feet of the receiver (and I mean that literally: less than 4 feet!) they won't work (and that's not some no-name keyboard: that's a Logitech).
The trick is to buy a keyboard that is not designed as a desktop replacement - i.e. its meant to sit on your lap on the couch, not your desk 4 feet away from the PC. I use an Adesso WKB-3000UB and it works pretty well through walls and such for about 20 feet of range. A couple of different companies put their brand on the same keyboard, I've bought from adesso and another I can't remember the name of and they were identical except for the label on the back. You can find them in the $40-$60 range.
Expecting it to have Samba or NFS is actually quite a bit more ignorant than the grandparent.
Out of the woodwork!
Computers with only 4MB of ram were doing NFS just fine 20 years ago.
Nowadays, any network media player (like tvix, popcorn hour, etc) supports SMB, probably also NFS and is most likely running linux on 64MB or less. These TV's are essentially regular TV's with half-assed network media players built in. Expecting Samba and NFS isn't ignorant, its a baseline.
Slashdot Mirror
They are not your friend, they have no interest in following any laws themselves, they really are out to get all they can and to hell with any constitution or "laws", and will use every tactic they can come up with to protect their criminal guild, their gang,
In New England they routinely display gang colors on their official and unofficial cars. They will often replace their front license plate with one of those.
Right now, to help reform all of this we need two things badly: the federal government needs to really enforce the illegal immigration laws on the books, including the provisions of fining the employers.
Well, that sure was a random unsupported claim in the midst of an otherwise fairly consistent diatribe.
Revealing classified information is against the law.
No it is not. If you come across classified information in public then you can do whatever you want with it. There are recent anti-news-reporter laws that prevent one from convincing someone with clearance into revealing classified information to you, but otherwise if you find it in an open source (term of art, not to be confused with software) then you can do with it what you will. Sometimes two pieces of information will not be classified unless combined together but if you aren't cleared in the first place you can combine that information yourself and it still isn't classified.
So for an uncleared person to reveal undercover cops' identities by observing the police station and using public records can in no way be considered a security violation (another term of art) by that person. It might be a violation on one of the cops' part for exposing himself when he should not have.
The Plame affair was a whole different story, Armitage was cleared for access to know that she was an agent. He violated his clearance by telling that information to an uncleared person.
So, in summary, it is even more lopsided than you made it out to be. In no way can this blogger have revealed classified information since she never had access to any in the first place. But Armitage clearly did so in direct violation of his clearance.
The term "extremely authoritarian" is a bit of hyperbole.
Chill. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings only to point out that you advocate for something completely contrary to what you claim to represent. Not just minor degrees of difference, you write as if freedom of speech is a privilege and not a requirement for a functioning democracy.
Look into how colleges used "free speech zones" back during the Vietnam war and then let me know why that is any different.
Thanks for spelling out the slippery slope even more explicitly. Its gone from colleges - private institutions limited to control of just their campus with a stated interest in preventing disruption of classes - to the government applying it such that the protested never even see the protesters. During vietnam the on-campus protests were only rarely directed at anyone actually on campus - nobody there was responsible for the war. You keep digging your self further and further in.
Are you pretending to be dense? I know you are smarter than this. For about the fifth time, I live in New York. We don't have problems dealing with large gatherings here.
You have never once said "I live in new york" or anything like that. You have cited wherever you live as being a location which is routinely disrupted - oh wait you didn't, you only implied knowledge of such based on your theories that the only reason NYC isn't disrupted is because of regulation, as if parades are even vaguely like a protest and "chill" is the ultimate proof of one's claims despite gigantic holes lapses of logic.
Right, we disagree as to the limits of free speech and so you have to demonize me. Nice.
That's not demonization. That's saying you claim the cover of supporting free speech while actually advocating extremely authoritarian policies. I'd say the same thing about a person who claims to be fascist but really advocates for personal liberty.
That actually came first. Free speech zones, at least the modern more widespread use of them in the US, resulted from violent anti-free-trade protesters. ...
It's been in use since at least Vietnam,
Hhhhm. So either you admit that restrictions have become progressively worse over time since we clearly did not have "free speech zones" miles away from the people being protested back during the vietnam war, or you are seriously confused about what was being protested back then.
New York City is not frequently shut down, precisely because they are so good at handling large events.
Doesn't answer my question. Where do you live that protests frequently shutdown the entire city?
I second that. I know in my area Verizon's roll out of FIOS was delayed by two or three years because they wanted Washington state to subsidize something like 70% of the infrastructure upgrade cost.
I hope the state did not cave. Verizon has or is in the process of pulling out of the state, leaving the infrastructure in the hands of a local company. The cynic in me says that if they took state money for the build-out then this little manoeuvre has caused any stipulations to be shed.
Maybe you don't believe in that slippery slope but the fact is that your arguments are precisely what has already enabled it.
Which I contend is a good thing.
A good thing? Free speech zones? Yeah you are a wolf in sheep's clothing. You know what comes next? Violence. Press the people down and they only press back harder. Maybe you don't understand what a "free speech zone" is - maybe you need to educate yourself on just how they've been implemented.
I don't know if you live somewhere where protests are frequent, but I do.
Put up or shut up. Lets see what city is frequently "shut down"-- what like once a week? Or maybe I should "chill" before you start back-pedaling again.
You have tried to change your argument in mid-stream. You wrote "Copyright is the right to make copies. Simple as that."
So, I guessed right. You want to argue that copies that are not 1:1 are not copies. Well, never mind the law, even pop culture is against you -- people routinely rail against remakes of foreign movies as being "rip-offs" because the idea was copied. You are far too willing to alternate between literal and flexible interpretations when it suits your purposes, where copies must be 1:1 in order to qualify as copies but ideas need only be "in the realm" of theories in order to qualify as a theory.
I think you are just pissy because I shot down your weak rationalization you had before you even could bring it up.
I challenged you to give an example clear back then.
Yeah and your continuous challenges for an historical example of copyright-free, but money-based systems just go to show how completely lost you are. My point was that circumstances are different than they have ever been before and thus all previous cases aren't applicable. If you weren't so far out of your depth you wouldn't keep trying to make same irrelevant point over and over again. I ignored your previous challenges because my first post in the thread spelled out why examples from history are not applicable.
I freely admitted that I misunderstood how you were using the terms, but that was because you did not put them in any context. You just dumped them into the middle of the conversation.
Yeah, I "dumped" them in the middle of a conversation where they are probably the two terms most relevant to the discussion. The lack of context was only a lack of experience on your part. It totally cracks me up that you keep trying to deflect responsibility for being uneducated on the topic on which you make so many bald assertions. Its like you want to live up to the Dunning-Kruger.
And (2) this whole subject is about to drop off the bottom of my queue in Slashdot, and I have no real motivation to hunt it up again.
Haha. There you go again not understanding how a system works or chosing to deliberately misrepresent it. Should I conclude that you keep "hunting it up" so as to protect your ego or that it pops to the top of two of the three different stacks available to you whenever I post to it?
I completely agree, which is why I fully support closing off roads to traffic for things like parades, rallies, protests, etc. But it has to be organized and it has to be safe.
Implicit in "organized and safe" is out of the way of people being protested. Life's complicated and fraught with risks, trying to protect someone in the name of public safety is the tool by which "free speech zones" have been justified. Maybe you don't believe in that slippery slope but the fact is that your arguments are precisely what has already enabled it.
I'd take it a step further and sell her info or maybe just strategically post it on the net. She's dead, identity theft ain't going to hurt her. Teach those companies a lesson for being so willing to trust in the digital word.
Now that I think about it, I might make posting my information a requirement of my will for anyone inheriting anything from me. One last "fuck you" to the system after I'm gone.
That is demonstrably not true. I could shut down traffic into New York City by simply clogging the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels...
You are back-pedaling. First it was "shutdown a city" now it is the about 0.001% of that - simply shutting down traffic into a city. Its going to take a lot more that blocking incoming traffic for a day or two to "shutdown a city."
Again, your rights end when they infringe someone else's.
You completely miss the point. Your right to travel on public roads is not absolute, the right to protest on those roads is also part of their function. They are competing rights.
I don't think conspiracy to commit murder should be legal, even under the guise of free speech.
Conspiracy laws are thought-crime laws, one of the most totalitarian kinds of law ever dreamed up. You clearly are no free-speech advocate no matter how much you've convinced yourself otherwise.
There are a lot of ways to act like a douche. Shutting down a city is not acceptable.
Here's the thing - public streets don't exist solely for transportation, they exist for public use. Sometimes that use isn't compatible with transportation. If so many people care about an issue that their protesting in the streets causes a city to "shut down" then chances are they've got a legitimate issue that needs addressing. After all, it takes a lot of people to "shut down a city" - not just a handful of fringe lunatics. You get that many people out protesting, their protests are pretty much by definition representative of a significant portion of the mainstream population.
I agree with you regarding "distasteful" speech. Even hate speech should be protected, so long as it isn't a call to violence.
And who decides just what defines a call to violence? "Kill that fag!" is obvious - what about "those fags will burn in hell!" To the right audience the latter is clearly incitement to put those fags in hell so they can get started burning. No, the real answer is that even calls to violence should not be censored, it is the people who do the violence who are guilty. We used to believe in sticks and stones, now way too many people like you believe in mean words and have forgotten that personal responsibility is the cornerstone of civil society.
Congratulations on missing the forest for the trees.
"In fact, a company may save money by hiring international students because the majority of them are exempt from Social Security (FICA) and Medicare tax requirements."
Big deal. This is about hiring students not graduates for part-time work and internships -- this is not serious job competition. And in fact the reverse is true for hiring graduates who do not become citizens - FICA and medicare must be collected, but when those people go back to their home countries they get get nothing in return for all of those "benefit" taxes- no medicare, no social-security, nada.
If you think that "copyright" is merely the right to make copies, you are deluded. That may be what it was originally named after, but it is a hell of a lot more than that.
Put your money where your mouth is. Give an example of where modern copyright law regulates some aspect that is not copying in one form or another. I think you are so deluded you would try to cite some variation on making derivative works. Clue - still copies, just because they are 1:1 doesn't mean they aren't a kind of copy. Great opportunity to make good on your promise not to respond though, lets you hide your ineptitude one more time.
And no... where do you see me stating that I deny that theories must be predictive?
My observations don't make predictions. You claim my observations are theories, ergo you deny that theories must be predictive. Or is it that being "in the realm of theory" is some special state where they are theories only when convenient for you?
I am simply walking away from your bullshit, because (1) you have made very little sense,
Ah, so the reason you've accepted the incorrectness of your claims about legal theories, piano rolls, electronic financial transactions and economic circumstances is because I made very little sense.
(2) you have consistently read things into my writing that I simply did not write (sometimes some pretty weird interpretations),
You haven't been able to show a single case of that yet. Yet I put together an entire post showing just how disconnected you are from reality and I didn't even have to exaggerate or misrepresent to do it.
(3) your arguments, in the rare cases that they did make sense, were inconsistent and contradictory.
The only reason what I wrote doesn't make sense to you is because you are completely out of your depth. You didn't even know the terms "rival" and "excludable" until you entered this conversation and even after looking them up still you tried to insist that physical objects like piano rolls were not rivalrous.
Look closely in to the mirror - you are the product of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Unfortunately, the hypocrisy wasn't what you think - the VA is only marginally better than what the rest of us get. They deliver roughly 65% of necessary care versus roughly 55% for the non-VA healthcare in the US and they do it at a cost of roughly $5500/yr per person versus $6500/yr per person (including those who do not have healthcare coverage). In addition the VA has means-testing for 'regular' veterans (those not wounded in combat) so their coverage isn't comprehensive. The real problem with that segment (yes, I saw it) isn't how great a job government-managed healthcare could do, it is how poorly vets are still treated.
Then there is question of whether or not the VA's marginal improvements over the current system would remain if it were scaled up the hundred-fold or so necessary for universal coverage. Maybe it would, maybe it would even get better, but I don't think we can assume either to be the case without a solid analysis of why and how, which I don't think anyone's done.
Here's a related question: How many felons would you set free to save an innocent man from false incarceration?
It's called "Blackstone's Formulation" and, typical of the insular nature of the us legal system, is absurdly low and yet held in high regard.
Ah... so now you are re-defining "copyright" to mean anything you want, too?
Lol. Coming from you that's rich. Copyright is the right to make copies. Simple as that. Ownership of a right does not define the right just as owning a house does not change it from a house into something else.
No, it's not an observation. It is (if it were really what you say it to be), a generalization about observations. That is commonly known as a "theory"
You deny that theories must be predictive? You must have flunked high school science.
It took me a while, but I see that this is not even a discussion. It's an exercise in fantasyland, and I refuse to participate further.
Finally. You should have given up the minute you thought legal arguments about piano rolls were at all meaningful.
Not at all. A counterexample is ridiculously simple: Government holding all the rights to original works would be one alternative. I am not saying that I recommend that, but there are acres and acres of "dry floor" here, friend.
And what rights would those be? The right to distribute? It is STILL copyright regardless of who holds it. Your floor ain't dry at all.
Put it in plain words. Before we had electronic networks, you paid by cash or check. If you paid by check, you were charged for the privilege... whether that charge was up-front, or "buried" in a slight difference in interest rates or margins, you still paid for it. Same with a credit card. With a credit card, the company doing the selling was charged both a percentage of the sale AND a per-transaction fee.
Wooosh. Seriously, are you so completely unable to discriminate between man-made barriers and barriers due to limits of technology? Here's a clue - if moving money around electronically is just as expensive as doing it physically, why is it that every business, every bank, even the US government, does as much of it as they possibly can that way? Do you think the Fed pays a 2% transaction fee on the billions in commercial paper loans that they open and close every week?
is still in the realm of economic theory, not just observations, because if it had really been based on observations, those observations would have had to be wrong.
That's the dumbest load of baloney I've seen today. Its not an observation because you think it is false? Even if it were false, that wouldn't make it anything other than a false observation. "In the realm of economic theory" -- WTF does that mean? Theories make predictions. What I wrote does not make predictions, ergo not a theory. Full stop.
You are so damn desperate - always responding with those long, meanderingly pointless screeds. Looking to hook some new red-herring to hang your hat on. You've already acquiesced on all your major claims, you ain't going to win anything by trawling for more red herrings.
You can't split hairs that finely. There's no bright line between "speech" and "committing a crime through use of speech". For example, sedition (where illegal) is a crime often committed through speech, but freedom of speech would be pretty meaningless if the government could punish seditious speech.
Sedition is purely speech whereas something like fraud is not. Thus criminalizing sedition is guaranteed to be a violation of the freedom of speech. You want to make over-throwing the government or attempting to over-throw the government a crime, then fine, that's not an act that requires speech although speech may aid in it. The difference is that sedition singles out speech while over-throwing the government does not.
What company do you work for so my clients can avoid it?
If that's your reasoned response to his points, I think you had better answer your own question first.
I'd submit that speech is just one possible tool to commit certain crimes. (i.e. Reckless endangerment, in the case of the theater crowd).
Bingo. It isn't the speech that should be illegal. It is the crime itself, that in some cases may be aided by speech, that should be prosecuted. Freedom of speech needs to be absolute, but that does not mean committing a crime through the use of speech gets any exemption.
Your definition of "entrepreneurial spirit" is very, uhmmm, strange to say the least. It is as if "getting as filthy rich as possible" and "working in an industry they enjoy" were somehow mutually exclusive. They are not.
It is a wage-slave mentality. For may people, their entrepreneurial spirit is rooted in a desire to be master of their own domain. No arbitrary and capricious corporate structure telling them what to do, when they know better. The ability to "fire a client" if they feel like it. That sort of thing.
letting original works and inventions automatically be in the public domain from the beginning
That does not necessarily mean copyright...
Rrrrright. Give one example of excluding the public domain that is not copyright. You can't. The very definition of copyright is "not public domain." Your corner is all out of dry floor.
I understand "nearly" very well, but apparently you don't. The internet is NOT a "nearly frictionless" medium for distribution of... money". Anywhere. It costs about the same to perform a transaction over the internet as it does to perform that transaction via any other medium.
You seem to have forgotten what it used to be like before we had electronic networks. Just because a rising tide floats all boats doesn't mean the tide doesn't rise.
You are just plain wrong about that. What part of that don't you understand?
Woooosh. Don't try to use the phrase if you can't correctly connect any of the end points.
PS. Still not economic theories - just observations.
And DON'T plan on using a wireless mouse or keyboard - those things are so range-crippled now that unless you are within a couple of feet of the receiver (and I mean that literally: less than 4 feet!) they won't work (and that's not some no-name keyboard: that's a Logitech).
The trick is to buy a keyboard that is not designed as a desktop replacement - i.e. its meant to sit on your lap on the couch, not your desk 4 feet away from the PC.
I use an Adesso WKB-3000UB and it works pretty well through walls and such for about 20 feet of range. A couple of different companies put their brand on the same keyboard, I've bought from adesso and another I can't remember the name of and they were identical except for the label on the back. You can find them in the $40-$60 range.
Expecting it to have Samba or NFS is actually quite a bit more ignorant than the grandparent.
Out of the woodwork!
Computers with only 4MB of ram were doing NFS just fine 20 years ago.
Nowadays, any network media player (like tvix, popcorn hour, etc) supports SMB, probably also NFS and is most likely running linux on 64MB or less. These TV's are essentially regular TV's with half-assed network media players built in. Expecting Samba and NFS isn't ignorant, its a baseline.