Government collapse and "government collapse into a dictatorship" are not the same thing.
And as for "some hypothetical point in the future," every empire in the history of man has fallen, and that is something that will not change. Rome even fell, in part, at the hands of expatriate legionnaires who were hired to defend it (a mercenary army, like the one the US is building up now). Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The thought that "It cannot happen here" is the one always made by people against it, and they are always the ones who regret it afterward. I'd rather prepare for the worst than scream when it happens.
And as the other poster below you said, gun ownership does not correlate to murder as many believe it does.
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the Atmosphere."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Abigail Adams, 1787
Why is he being modded down? He's absolutely right!
The American Revolution would never have happened if the populace was not armed to the teeth. I hate to say it, but if our government ever collapses into a blatant dictatorship, I sure as hell wouldn't want to be unarmed.
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government"
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1 Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334
Ummm, way to insult sysadmins. I work in IT at the world's 10th largest company, and we've gone so far as to install firefox with IEView for the intranet web portal just so we can get that garbage off our machines.
What they need to do is release IE8 with a "surf as IE7" and "surf as IE6" option. So the USER can control it, and the web will be the same. Eventually those pages still coded for IE6 will move on to standards compliance and that button will simply be ignored.
Agreed. I use Time Warner in the NYC area and have never had a problem with bandwidth speeds, and am near positive that I'm in that supposed 5%. But as long as I don't hit speed limits, so to speak, I fail to see their problem.
The crux though, seems to be that broadband providers like Comcast and Time Warner are worried that more and more will move into that higher traffic usage population, and fear their infrastructure won't handle it. But instead of acknowledging the fact that the US, though catching up in broadband penetration (impressive, given our size relative to other industrialized nations), is falling behind in access speed and actual bandwidth, we try to limit its growth, even though demand for bandwidth is only going to go up.
As the nation which, for all intents and purposes, built the original backbone and was the major leader in the internet's formation, design, and construction, this should not be unexpected. We have older lines than many of the nations on that list, and upgrading existing tech can be very costly.
The bigger issue now though, is that because of our hand in the net's formation, we have a lot of sway in its politics. Moves like these set a dangerous precedent for other nations to do the same, much in the way that China's censorship helped pave the way for other nations to undertake such draconian measures. We should be a leader and grow in the right directions instead of trying to find an easy way to fix our problem and ignore it until it blows up in our faces.
Ummm, first of all, I wasn't exactly showing off, and second, the only reason I'd mentioned it was because I'd read in the original press release that the Final Cut was only being screened in NYC and LA and hadn't heard of it playing anywhere else at all. Care to enlighten me on where else it's playing?
Yep, I've got to agree on that. The original line felt too out of place, though that may just be because it's pretty much the only curse in the whole movie. On the one hand it's a bit jarring, but not entirely in a good way.
The new line flows much better and works better in context imo. And no, I have no aversion to cursing, and I honestly don't think that should be a criteria for rating a film, and it works in some films just fine, but I felt that this was an improvement.
Hmmm, I don't remember to be honest. I wasn't looking for minor detail changes like that. I was just watching it to see if they improved the flow, as I found the other cuts very hard to follow at times, due to inconsistencies (that 6th replicant that went unaccounted for always bothered me, for instance:P)
I was gonna say that! oh well lol. But also don't forget how much energy it takes to find, ship, and refine uranium. I think Hydrogen (tritium) is way easier to get and there's way more of it. Too bad we're apparently not so good at fusion. All I can say though is I hope we can easily convert fission nuke plants to fusion when we perfect it cuz fission isn't going to last much longer.
Great job at knowing nothing about a subject and acting cocky about it anyway.
Tritium has a half-life of only about 12 and a half years, and natural production in nature requires cosmic ray interaction with atmospheric nitrogen. Thus, it's rare on Earth because our magnetic field shields us from most cosmic rays, and the tritium that DOES get produced decays so quickly that for all intents and purposes it's negligible.
Thankfully, it can be produced industrially... BY A FISSION REACTOR.
All that proves is that Deckard is a god damned idiot. The reason he saved him was so that he'd REMEMBER HIM. So that he'd remember that there was a man named Roy Baty, who was as much a man as he was, regardless of his origins. By saving him, he guaranteed that he will never be forgotten in Deckard's eyes, and that, in and of itself is as close to immortality as anyone can truly get: to be remembered. Also, Roy's line before his death was far better imo.
And yeah, as was mentioned, Scott and Ford hated the voiceover and intentionally bombed it in the hopes that the studio would leave it out. They didn't.
That being said, I've seen the Final Cut. I live in NYC and had the wonderful opportunity to see it in theaters, and I'll be honest, it's the best, by far. The storyline flows much better than any of the other versions, it's visually spectacular (though a bit overdone with the flare effect on the Spinners), and overall it's so much more watchable and doesn't feel as if it's dragging on as much as the other versions.
I took my girlfriend to see it for the first time, and she freaked out and loved it from the word go. To be honest, I was happy she saw that version first, as she didn't have aspects of it ruined by poor production, or bad editing. So if you've never seen Blade Runner, go see the Final Cut and pretend the others never existed.
Ah, but that is in effect an entirely different scenario. I'm not arguing that provenance should not mean anything, I'm arguing that it should not apply in the specific situation I gave. The example you give, however, is wholly different, and has every reason for provenance to be applicable.
Also, you are correct in pointing out my mistake in bringing up common sense. But then again, wasn't law originally supposed to be based on the decision of what is considered a reasonable person?
At some point though, common sense must enter into the equation.
When I mention common sense, I am primarily referring to the fact that, whether I recorded it on TiVo, a VCR, or onto my computer on my own, what difference does it actually make, so long as I had access to the material in the first place? I can understand arguing that if a person does not have HBO they should not be allowed to download HBO content, but if someone does, and they have no other way to timeshift, then fundamentally I see no difference. Provenance, in this scenario, is simply an excuse for holding the consumer liable for actions that the average person would deem perfectly reasonable.
First of all, you once again failed to miss my point, but I'll get to that in just a second.
I wanted to point out the fact that we had cable in our dorms, something which I felt extremely lucky to have. That being said, we got Comedy Central, and, if I sat down at the proper time, I could watch it. The issue is that you can't plan your life around television. If I had to work on a project late, and miss an episode, and couldn't catch the encore, should I just say "oh well" and walk away? Why? If they had, at the time, a way for me to watch it whenever I wanted to, I wouldn't care about the commercials or other things. I just couldn't always sit down to watch it on "their time" so to speak. I don't feel "entitled" to watch it, as you imply, but the cable cost is coming out of my tuition, so I'm kind of paying for it one way or another aren't I?
In the same vein, broadcasters understand this, and agree as shown by more and more cable providers offering "On Demand" TV shows and movies for certain channels. Nowadays, if I want to watch Dexter, or an HBO special, or anything like that, I have a legal option, that I am paying for, and I gladly use it.
Getting back on the topic though, my point was that localizing P2P is the most efficient method of conserving global bandwidth and indeed, saving money for everyone involved (well, except the content producers, assuming you believe that the people downloading it would also buy it). Additionally, ending such an infrastructure can often have unforeseen ramifications. For instance, all our papers and projects were submitted online, and since the entire network crumbled when they shut down the hub, a lot of papers and projects were pushed back because we couldn't actually submit them for about 3 days. To say that blocking local filesharing is unimportant is simply being naive, because it has a ripple effect on the actions of the users.
PS- Caps are not the answer. While at my Uni, I was working on development for a Sourse Engine mod, and would often have to download and upload several hundred megabytes in the process. This is all content that my friends and I had legally made. Would you argue that we had no right to use the campus network for this? Especially since it was actually directly related to my field of academic study? I'll give you one better: The Computer Science House (a section of the dorms) on campus had their own dedicated T1 line because of similar reasons.
The fact is that the system worked when we had a local filesharing source. Not only that, but it worked well, and no one complained for about 5 years until 1 person said the wrong thing, and the end result was a network shutdown for 3 days, and countless other side-effects. And after all that the local hub was reinstated anyway.
Not everything comes out on DVD you know. This was, for instance, before the Daily Show archives were online, and a lot of students enjoy watching that. I like how you presume I felt we were entitled to illegal content though, purely by my saying "were forced to use torrents", because I couldn't have meant "were forced to use torrents if they wanted to keep using P2P" right? Of course not!
Get off your high horse. My post had nothing to do with the content itself and everything to do with the result of blocking local DC++ use on a university campus. If you want to take issue with what I was actually talking about, go ahead. Otherwise, shut up.
The University where I went to had, at one point, what was believed to be one of the top 10 largest internal P2P hubs in the world. A student accidentally mentioned it off-hand to one of the professors, who then logged a complaint with IT Services on campus, who had looked the other way up till then. Now that someone had complained though, they were begrudgingly forced to take action and shut down the hub and its operators. The end result was that within a week, when everyone realized it wasn't coming back anytime soon, the external pipe went down as it was flooded with P2P traffic from students who had, until then, simply been using the internal hub, but were now forced to use torrents and other methods. There was no internet on campus for several days, and they were forced to upgrade their equipment and lease more bandwidth from the fiber loop going through the city.
The moral of the story is that sometimes, keeping things internal and quiet is an easier solution... In the long run though, we setup Tor servers all over campus and used that to connect to the new hub:)
Errr, have you ever worked with robotics? A robot and an operating system are not the same thing. Robotics usually use microcontrollers which are preprogrammed in BASIC, or C, or some other language. Microsoft has nothing to do with anything, and neither does Linux for that matter, so stop trying to drag that argument into every conversation.
You've clearly never looked at real estate prices in NYC, lived/worked in NYC, and might very well be delusional.
I'm an IT intern just starting, and looking for an apartment in NYC that I can afford on my reasonably decent intern salary. It's pretty much suicide, but I'd do anything at this point to skip the 2 hour+ commute to and from Staten Island (one of the other boroughs, except we have virtually no mass transit. 2 hours for 20 fucking miles...) I mostly look at the lower income housing, but 5 million dollars for an apartment, to BUY it no less, is about average, in a place where some rooms can cost $10,000+ per night. And the people who buy those DO live in them, because the usually get them because they work in the area.
I work with stock traders all the time at work and you're right, a lot have multiple homes, but it's mostly like, a weekend house in Connecticut, and their apartment here. They don't have Bentleys, or islands, or even chauffeurs. That kinda thing is WAY above them. Shit, even most CEOs (I work for the 10th largest company in the world, and I refer to the CEO of the American ventures in this case, because I know the guy) don't have those things.
So please, spare me your delusions of what you think the wealthy live like, based off of what seems to be a VHS library of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" reruns and Cribs marathons. the fact that you got modded so high for such a vapid comment amazes me.
You have a bunch of nerds (self included) with high speed Inet access, stacking up their harddrives with all the MP3/Divx/Porn/Animes/Warez they can find...
Those are, incidentally, the names of the 5 hard drives I have in my desktop:)
Genesis is mostly comprised of a collection of Hebrew myths. Eve wasn't Adam's first wife, Lilith was. There are a great many books left out of the Bible, and especially Genesis, which explain a lot of contradictions, and many more contradictions are poor translations. For instance, many people don't know that Cain, Abel, Sodom, Gomorrah, and other biblical names, aren't names, they're words. In Hebrew, if I recall, they are something like Gained, Nothing, Burnt, Buried respectively. And due to this, many of the stories have double meanings and multiple morals which are lost in translation.
That being said, when reading it in Hebrew, it's very obvious that many of the books, Genesis especially, are folk tales and not historical accounts. Frankly, I don't even believe the original authors intended it literally.
Thank you for clarifying, but they're still not *quite* comparable analogies, and let my explain why.
There's an old quote from Thomas Jefferson that I think sums it up well:
"[An idea's] peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
This is more true now than it ever was. Once an application, piece of art, or anything electronic is generated, it can be duplicated an infinite number of times at no cost whatsoever. None. That's the key problem that exists. It costs nothing to duplicate, the only actual harm is that whoever created the work originally is not compensated for its use. That is actually a notion Jefferson addressed in the end of that statement, which I had left off, where he says that the "exclusive right" to an invention or idea exists SOLELY to encourage the inventor to continue creating ideas, such that they may make a living off of it if they are good at it.
This is the fallacy of comparing theft and copyright violation. It is NOT theft, but by simply not being theft, that does NOT make it legal. It simply makes it a different situation, one which MUST be considered separately from theft if a fair copyright law is to be established. As it stands now, copyright law is perhaps one of the largest blemishes in the US legal record. It is unfair to the creator of content, it is unfair to the user of content, and only benefits the intermediary corporations that distribute it. These intermediaries are dinosaurs, are ceased to be necessary at the dawn of the internet, and more importantly, broadband. This is a fact that they are acutely aware of, and this, the DMCA, and the RIAA's actions are all the death rattle of a colossal machine that we have created for a purpose that is no longer necessary. They refuse to move on, they refuse to adapt, and in spite of the dark times in intellectual property history that we are experiencing currently, they cannot grasp at straws forever.
It's certainly telling. I mean, this case seemed like deja vu when I first read about it. I could've swore it was some old article from 2003, and that Microsoft was a typo and that they meant SCO.
Yet lo and behold, Microsoft imitates that failed strategy. It was shot down in courts then, and it'll be shot down again.
Slashdot Mirror
And as for "some hypothetical point in the future," every empire in the history of man has fallen, and that is something that will not change. Rome even fell, in part, at the hands of expatriate legionnaires who were hired to defend it (a mercenary army, like the one the US is building up now). Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The thought that "It cannot happen here" is the one always made by people against it, and they are always the ones who regret it afterward. I'd rather prepare for the worst than scream when it happens.
And as the other poster below you said, gun ownership does not correlate to murder as many believe it does.
Why is he being modded down? He's absolutely right!
The American Revolution would never have happened if the populace was not armed to the teeth. I hate to say it, but if our government ever collapses into a blatant dictatorship, I sure as hell wouldn't want to be unarmed.
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government"
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1 Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334
No I'm Troll Tracker!
Wikipedia is your friend...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Millennium_episodes
Ummm, way to insult sysadmins. I work in IT at the world's 10th largest company, and we've gone so far as to install firefox with IEView for the intranet web portal just so we can get that garbage off our machines.
What they need to do is release IE8 with a "surf as IE7" and "surf as IE6" option. So the USER can control it, and the web will be the same. Eventually those pages still coded for IE6 will move on to standards compliance and that button will simply be ignored.
Agreed. I use Time Warner in the NYC area and have never had a problem with bandwidth speeds, and am near positive that I'm in that supposed 5%. But as long as I don't hit speed limits, so to speak, I fail to see their problem.
The crux though, seems to be that broadband providers like Comcast and Time Warner are worried that more and more will move into that higher traffic usage population, and fear their infrastructure won't handle it. But instead of acknowledging the fact that the US, though catching up in broadband penetration (impressive, given our size relative to other industrialized nations), is falling behind in access speed and actual bandwidth, we try to limit its growth, even though demand for bandwidth is only going to go up.
As the nation which, for all intents and purposes, built the original backbone and was the major leader in the internet's formation, design, and construction, this should not be unexpected. We have older lines than many of the nations on that list, and upgrading existing tech can be very costly.
The bigger issue now though, is that because of our hand in the net's formation, we have a lot of sway in its politics. Moves like these set a dangerous precedent for other nations to do the same, much in the way that China's censorship helped pave the way for other nations to undertake such draconian measures. We should be a leader and grow in the right directions instead of trying to find an easy way to fix our problem and ignore it until it blows up in our faces.
Random Sources:
Breoadband penetration-
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0704/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_Internet_access#Broadband_worldwide
Broadband Speeds - http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2007-06-25-net-speeds_N.htm
Then clearly they didn't want to sell to TPB because they needed to construct additional pylons...
I recommend: http://www.psp-hacks.com/ and http://pspupdates.qj.net/ for the most part, as well as their respective forums at: http://www.psp-hacks.com/forums/ and http://forums.qj.net/f-psp-development-hacks-and-homebrew-13.html/ Lots of cool stuff there and you can always ask for help or advice. Personally, I have Bookr, PSPSSH, PSPIRC, and IRSHELL on mine. All very useful tools imo
Ummm, first of all, I wasn't exactly showing off, and second, the only reason I'd mentioned it was because I'd read in the original press release that the Final Cut was only being screened in NYC and LA and hadn't heard of it playing anywhere else at all. Care to enlighten me on where else it's playing?
Yep, I've got to agree on that. The original line felt too out of place, though that may just be because it's pretty much the only curse in the whole movie. On the one hand it's a bit jarring, but not entirely in a good way.
The new line flows much better and works better in context imo. And no, I have no aversion to cursing, and I honestly don't think that should be a criteria for rating a film, and it works in some films just fine, but I felt that this was an improvement.
Hmmm, I don't remember to be honest. I wasn't looking for minor detail changes like that. I was just watching it to see if they improved the flow, as I found the other cuts very hard to follow at times, due to inconsistencies (that 6th replicant that went unaccounted for always bothered me, for instance :P)
Great job at knowing nothing about a subject and acting cocky about it anyway.
Tritium has a half-life of only about 12 and a half years, and natural production in nature requires cosmic ray interaction with atmospheric nitrogen. Thus, it's rare on Earth because our magnetic field shields us from most cosmic rays, and the tritium that DOES get produced decays so quickly that for all intents and purposes it's negligible.
Thankfully, it can be produced industrially... BY A FISSION REACTOR.
All that proves is that Deckard is a god damned idiot. The reason he saved him was so that he'd REMEMBER HIM. So that he'd remember that there was a man named Roy Baty, who was as much a man as he was, regardless of his origins. By saving him, he guaranteed that he will never be forgotten in Deckard's eyes, and that, in and of itself is as close to immortality as anyone can truly get: to be remembered. Also, Roy's line before his death was far better imo.
And yeah, as was mentioned, Scott and Ford hated the voiceover and intentionally bombed it in the hopes that the studio would leave it out. They didn't.
That being said, I've seen the Final Cut. I live in NYC and had the wonderful opportunity to see it in theaters, and I'll be honest, it's the best, by far. The storyline flows much better than any of the other versions, it's visually spectacular (though a bit overdone with the flare effect on the Spinners), and overall it's so much more watchable and doesn't feel as if it's dragging on as much as the other versions.
I took my girlfriend to see it for the first time, and she freaked out and loved it from the word go. To be honest, I was happy she saw that version first, as she didn't have aspects of it ruined by poor production, or bad editing. So if you've never seen Blade Runner, go see the Final Cut and pretend the others never existed.
Ah, but that is in effect an entirely different scenario. I'm not arguing that provenance should not mean anything, I'm arguing that it should not apply in the specific situation I gave. The example you give, however, is wholly different, and has every reason for provenance to be applicable.
Also, you are correct in pointing out my mistake in bringing up common sense. But then again, wasn't law originally supposed to be based on the decision of what is considered a reasonable person?
At some point though, common sense must enter into the equation.
When I mention common sense, I am primarily referring to the fact that, whether I recorded it on TiVo, a VCR, or onto my computer on my own, what difference does it actually make, so long as I had access to the material in the first place? I can understand arguing that if a person does not have HBO they should not be allowed to download HBO content, but if someone does, and they have no other way to timeshift, then fundamentally I see no difference. Provenance, in this scenario, is simply an excuse for holding the consumer liable for actions that the average person would deem perfectly reasonable.
And that's different from downloading it how? Especially since the latter is MUCH better quality and 1/10th of the hassle?
First of all, you once again failed to miss my point, but I'll get to that in just a second.
I wanted to point out the fact that we had cable in our dorms, something which I felt extremely lucky to have. That being said, we got Comedy Central, and, if I sat down at the proper time, I could watch it. The issue is that you can't plan your life around television. If I had to work on a project late, and miss an episode, and couldn't catch the encore, should I just say "oh well" and walk away? Why? If they had, at the time, a way for me to watch it whenever I wanted to, I wouldn't care about the commercials or other things. I just couldn't always sit down to watch it on "their time" so to speak. I don't feel "entitled" to watch it, as you imply, but the cable cost is coming out of my tuition, so I'm kind of paying for it one way or another aren't I?
In the same vein, broadcasters understand this, and agree as shown by more and more cable providers offering "On Demand" TV shows and movies for certain channels. Nowadays, if I want to watch Dexter, or an HBO special, or anything like that, I have a legal option, that I am paying for, and I gladly use it.
Getting back on the topic though, my point was that localizing P2P is the most efficient method of conserving global bandwidth and indeed, saving money for everyone involved (well, except the content producers, assuming you believe that the people downloading it would also buy it). Additionally, ending such an infrastructure can often have unforeseen ramifications. For instance, all our papers and projects were submitted online, and since the entire network crumbled when they shut down the hub, a lot of papers and projects were pushed back because we couldn't actually submit them for about 3 days. To say that blocking local filesharing is unimportant is simply being naive, because it has a ripple effect on the actions of the users.
PS- Caps are not the answer. While at my Uni, I was working on development for a Sourse Engine mod, and would often have to download and upload several hundred megabytes in the process. This is all content that my friends and I had legally made. Would you argue that we had no right to use the campus network for this? Especially since it was actually directly related to my field of academic study? I'll give you one better: The Computer Science House (a section of the dorms) on campus had their own dedicated T1 line because of similar reasons.
The fact is that the system worked when we had a local filesharing source. Not only that, but it worked well, and no one complained for about 5 years until 1 person said the wrong thing, and the end result was a network shutdown for 3 days, and countless other side-effects. And after all that the local hub was reinstated anyway.
Not everything comes out on DVD you know. This was, for instance, before the Daily Show archives were online, and a lot of students enjoy watching that. I like how you presume I felt we were entitled to illegal content though, purely by my saying "were forced to use torrents", because I couldn't have meant "were forced to use torrents if they wanted to keep using P2P" right? Of course not!
Get off your high horse. My post had nothing to do with the content itself and everything to do with the result of blocking local DC++ use on a university campus. If you want to take issue with what I was actually talking about, go ahead. Otherwise, shut up.
The University where I went to had, at one point, what was believed to be one of the top 10 largest internal P2P hubs in the world. A student accidentally mentioned it off-hand to one of the professors, who then logged a complaint with IT Services on campus, who had looked the other way up till then. Now that someone had complained though, they were begrudgingly forced to take action and shut down the hub and its operators. The end result was that within a week, when everyone realized it wasn't coming back anytime soon, the external pipe went down as it was flooded with P2P traffic from students who had, until then, simply been using the internal hub, but were now forced to use torrents and other methods. There was no internet on campus for several days, and they were forced to upgrade their equipment and lease more bandwidth from the fiber loop going through the city.
:)
The moral of the story is that sometimes, keeping things internal and quiet is an easier solution... In the long run though, we setup Tor servers all over campus and used that to connect to the new hub
Errr, have you ever worked with robotics? A robot and an operating system are not the same thing. Robotics usually use microcontrollers which are preprogrammed in BASIC, or C, or some other language. Microsoft has nothing to do with anything, and neither does Linux for that matter, so stop trying to drag that argument into every conversation.
You've clearly never looked at real estate prices in NYC, lived/worked in NYC, and might very well be delusional.
I'm an IT intern just starting, and looking for an apartment in NYC that I can afford on my reasonably decent intern salary. It's pretty much suicide, but I'd do anything at this point to skip the 2 hour+ commute to and from Staten Island (one of the other boroughs, except we have virtually no mass transit. 2 hours for 20 fucking miles...) I mostly look at the lower income housing, but 5 million dollars for an apartment, to BUY it no less, is about average, in a place where some rooms can cost $10,000+ per night. And the people who buy those DO live in them, because the usually get them because they work in the area.
I work with stock traders all the time at work and you're right, a lot have multiple homes, but it's mostly like, a weekend house in Connecticut, and their apartment here. They don't have Bentleys, or islands, or even chauffeurs. That kinda thing is WAY above them. Shit, even most CEOs (I work for the 10th largest company in the world, and I refer to the CEO of the American ventures in this case, because I know the guy) don't have those things.
So please, spare me your delusions of what you think the wealthy live like, based off of what seems to be a VHS library of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" reruns and Cribs marathons. the fact that you got modded so high for such a vapid comment amazes me.
Genesis is mostly comprised of a collection of Hebrew myths. Eve wasn't Adam's first wife, Lilith was. There are a great many books left out of the Bible, and especially Genesis, which explain a lot of contradictions, and many more contradictions are poor translations. For instance, many people don't know that Cain, Abel, Sodom, Gomorrah, and other biblical names, aren't names, they're words. In Hebrew, if I recall, they are something like Gained, Nothing, Burnt, Buried respectively. And due to this, many of the stories have double meanings and multiple morals which are lost in translation.
That being said, when reading it in Hebrew, it's very obvious that many of the books, Genesis especially, are folk tales and not historical accounts. Frankly, I don't even believe the original authors intended it literally.
There's an old quote from Thomas Jefferson that I think sums it up well:
This is more true now than it ever was. Once an application, piece of art, or anything electronic is generated, it can be duplicated an infinite number of times at no cost whatsoever. None. That's the key problem that exists. It costs nothing to duplicate, the only actual harm is that whoever created the work originally is not compensated for its use. That is actually a notion Jefferson addressed in the end of that statement, which I had left off, where he says that the "exclusive right" to an invention or idea exists SOLELY to encourage the inventor to continue creating ideas, such that they may make a living off of it if they are good at it.
This is the fallacy of comparing theft and copyright violation. It is NOT theft, but by simply not being theft, that does NOT make it legal. It simply makes it a different situation, one which MUST be considered separately from theft if a fair copyright law is to be established. As it stands now, copyright law is perhaps one of the largest blemishes in the US legal record. It is unfair to the creator of content, it is unfair to the user of content, and only benefits the intermediary corporations that distribute it. These intermediaries are dinosaurs, are ceased to be necessary at the dawn of the internet, and more importantly, broadband. This is a fact that they are acutely aware of, and this, the DMCA, and the RIAA's actions are all the death rattle of a colossal machine that we have created for a purpose that is no longer necessary. They refuse to move on, they refuse to adapt, and in spite of the dark times in intellectual property history that we are experiencing currently, they cannot grasp at straws forever.
It's certainly telling. I mean, this case seemed like deja vu when I first read about it. I could've swore it was some old article from 2003, and that Microsoft was a typo and that they meant SCO.
Yet lo and behold, Microsoft imitates that failed strategy. It was shot down in courts then, and it'll be shot down again.