See, thing is... If you get your ass beat, you can take the entire damn department to court and you stand one hell of a good chance of winning.
If you antagonize the cops you stand a good chance of being framed for a crime and have a very poor chance of winning a court case. If you're beaten while resisting arrest, you stand a very poor chance of getting any compensation for it unless it is hugely publicized for some reason. You stand a much better chance winning a civil case to get reparations for your camera if you have it smashed or taken than you do if you're arrested for possession of crack that you claim was planted on you and your camera was broken while you were resisting arrest.
Also, King wasn't killed by the cops, unless you're some kind of whack-job conspiracy theorist.
So if I am some whack job conspiracy theorist he was killed by the cops? King's murder was certainly not clear cut and never even went to trial despite years of attempts by the convicted to make that happen. The first people on the scene were FBI agents who had been "monitoring" him.
Oh, and tell your "Most people who resist end up with a bullet in their heads" to the millions of protesters a year who end up, guess where? In a jail cell, not in a morgue.
We're talking about resisting arrest in an individual incident, not in a protest. There have been enough instances caught on tape of abuse during these situations for the reasonable person to conclude that it happens a lot more that is not caught on tape.
In this age where shooting even an armed criminal who is firing on you in the middle of a shootout gets you several months off-duty as you get investigated the hell out of, I very much doubt any cop wants to pull the trigger for any reason other than self-defense.
It happens in my neck o the woods regularly. The cops who shot the guy dispatch had told them was deaf in the back for failing to comply and put down the rake he was holding walked without even being fired let alone put in jail. A lot of random bodies show up in Detroit, who is to say who killed them?
So, please, take your all-cops-are-evil, stupid sociopathic, triggerhappy control freaks nonesense and stick it somewhere unpleasant.
I said nothing about cops being evil, I only described the psychology of the cops I know.
All of the cops I know personally are good men who just want to make a positive difference.
Most of the cops I know think they are doing the right thing too. Of course they think it is right to abuse blacks and homosexuals. They think anyone who resists arrest deserves what is coming to them.
At least if you get your ass beat excessively, somebody at the department is gonna get put on review.
If you don't resist they will probably take your camera. If you do, they will probably taser you and take your camera and they may frame you for a crime. After all, isn't that what the gritty, heroic cops in the TV shows would do?
they could get in trouble for and they can get in a lot more trouble for smacking around some random civilian than for taking said civilian's tape out of his video camera.
They get in even less trouble if they take the tape and send you to jail with evidence that you are a criminal so you have motivation to lie about the tape in the first place.
The advice to resist arrest is foolish and can get people killed or their lives ruined. It is a very poor suggestion.
I'd expect that if they're hiring cops who couldn't get into the military you've got a HR problem.
In most places the police department has much lesser requirements for the physical than the military. My brother, for example, had open heart surgery as an infant which means the military would never take him, but since he could easily pass the physical to get his law enforcement degree and pass the physical to get onto the force, he was hired on by the local sheriff's department. Another cop I know failed his drug tests for entrance into the military, and they would not take him at any point afterwards. He cleaned up enough to pass for the police, and then went back to doing drugs just like many cops do. I know/knew some fairly senior people in a medium sized county, state post, and the city cops where I live. Usually they have mellowed and become a bit less violent and abusive by the time they move up in the ranks, but there is a reason most state concealed weapons laws have an exemption for cops. No one convicted of domestic assault, battery, or spousal abuse can get a concealed firearms permit, unless they are a cop. Why do you suppose they need to make such an exception?
Movies have ratings and kids cannot enter the theatre to see them, but nobody complains about censorship in that regard, the kid can just wait until he is old enough.
There is no law that says a movie must be rated (there are many unrated) and no law that says theaters cannot let minors see R or X-rated films. Certain states and localities have passed laws that say that, but they have always been overturned when challenged.
How about fairgrounds, are they censoring the rides because they have a height chart and restrict kids from their freedom to ride on them?
Again, this is voluntary on the part of the fairground operators, not mandated by law in most cases. There are certain restrictions on heavy equipment and safety, but that is for a clear danger to the safety of the operators and mostly covers providing machinery known to be dangerous and not informing the user.
Its not censorship, its common sense.
The government restricting what citizens can see and hear is censorship. If you think in this case they should do so, well great for you. That doesn't make it legal and it does not demonstrate a danger to children.
I'm sorry to tell you, but the US is a democracy, not a meritocracy. Thus, what the people want goes, not what is "right" scientifically.
You do know this isn't true, right? In a straight up democracy if 51% of the people vote to restrict free speech with censorship, the law restricts free speech. In the US, 66% of Congress (super-majority) have to agree to pass a constitutional amendment to override any of the existing amendments in the constitution. Further, the constitution trumps state law if they conflict. The US is an indirect democracy, but with the will of the people needing extra force in the case of certain rights and restrictions. This is meant to prevent a "tyranny of the majority" where (for example) women can vote that men are no longer allowed to vote.
What is the point of having ratings if they aren't enforced? If the game says M, only those only over 17 should be able to buy it.
Rating games strictly provides information on the content. If retailers want to voluntarily restrict sale of certain kinds of games to minors, well and good. It is a free country. If the government, however, wants to pass a law forcing retailers to restrict sale, well that is a different story. It is called "censorship" and their needs to be a real and compelling public interest. Until the reason for the restriction is a fairly well documented scientific event with clear causality the government has no business trying to enforce censorship.
It was a drug bust. It's likely undercover cops were present to confirm/asssist arrest. Taking pictures of said drug busts could cost lives. Your 'precious rights to an afternoon sitting on the couch' stop the moment you put somebody's life in danger. Period.
Have you ever heard of the concept of a "nation of laws." It is not up to an arbitrary police officer to take it upon themselves to make up a new law and then try to enforce it. In a drug bust the cops usually arrest the undercover cops as well as the crooks, so taking pictures does not jeopardize their cover. If you want to argue that it should be illegal to take pictures of the cops, fine, but until there is a law that says that, the police have no business trying to pretend their is.
Just a snippet of advice: Stand up for yourself if some officer of the "Law" is harassing you. Do it in a respectful manner and respectfully tell them that they cannot legally arrest you for whatever it is they are trying to arrest you for illegally.
This is lousy advice. Telling a cop you know the law better than they do (whether you do or not) will not earn their respect. It will challenge their ego and most of them have some serious issues with control which is one of the reasons they become cops. Second, many are very juvenile in their view of right and wrong (based on action movies). They are good guy so in their mind they are always right. Standing up to them means you're one of the bad guys and as TV has shown us, it is ethically okay for the cops to do whatever it takes including breaking the law to take down the bad guys.
If you need to, resist arrest. They pretty much can't shoot you, they mostly won't taser you, and, if there are witnesses around, certainly won't beat your ass for refusing to allow them to clap you in irons and drag you off to some dungeon.
This is much, much worse advice than the previous. They certainly will beat your ass and taser you if you resist arrest and they are legally allowed to do so. They are also likely to "find" a bag of weed or crack on you as well.
What's a night in jail for standing up for your Rights? Martin Luther King, Jr. and Henry David Thoreau seemed to think that was a fine trade.
It is unlikely to be a night in jail. Most people who stand up to the cops end up with a bullet in their head, just like Dr. King. If you want to resist the police and stop this sort of behavior you damned well better be a lot smarter about it that this. The police have the authority and power. If you want to change things, use your brain, which is what most of them are lacking to some degree.
I honestly think some cops are bad, but most (like most people) just want to do a good job, make the world better or at least not any worse and go home to their happy and safe little home.
If you really were a sadistic bastard who just wanted to mess with the world, there are easier and more lucrative ways to do it than going into law enforcement.
Do you know any cops? I do. My brother used to be a cop and I got to know quite a few of them both through him and by just talking to them. Almost every cop and even security guard I've ever talked to has had issues with anger and control. When within ten minutes of meeting someone they express to you how they wish they had a good excuse to shoot someone or how they became a cop because they could not get into the military and really just wanted to learn to be a better killer you start to have a very different view of cops. Most of them are people who grew up too slowly and did not realize that all the action shows on TV were just revenge fantasies and not life goals. A whole lot of them have sadistic tendencies and/or a strong desire to assert dominance over everyone they can. Every cop I've ever asked has a "funny" story about how they broke the law and did things normal people can't because they can get away with it. Most cops abuse their power.
You say that most cops just want to do a good job, but in the opinions of many of the cops I've talked to "doing a good job" might mean driving those "niggers" out of town or making sure those weird guys are properly frightened so they know it is not alright to be different from the NASCAR watching majority.
I get along just fine with cops for the most part. I never get tickets and know enough about martial arts and guns and have enough good stories about the military and crimes so that they generally consider me one of the "good guys." I'm also something of a social chameleon and am almost universally accepted in any clique. I don't, however, have an illusions about the fact that for the most part cops are bigger criminals than the average person, they abuse their authority, and they are violent and prone to use violence unnecessarily. They also always want to be in control and are more likely to respond with violence or by arresting someone with no legal justification than they are willing to cede that control. For example, from stories I've heard from cops, most are likely to arrest anyone who points out that they are wrong and that the act they are claiming is illegal (like photographing them) is legal. It is a challenge to them and the fact that what they are doing is illegal is only a technicality to them. Most cops feel anyone doing anything that is not what they direct is in the wrong, because most don't ever admit that they could be wrong.
I think you are a bit confused. WalMart only carries a very very very VERY small fraction of albums released each year.
So? Walmart is the single largest retailer of music worldwide. They sell more music than any other company in the world.
As far as distribution methods, do you really think that someone can stop MySpace, BitTorrent, LimeWire, P2P etc?
Why does anyone need to? Those sites still account for a tiny fraction of music distribution and an even tinier amount of sales. And sales is what we're talking about; the ability to reach an audience and survive on the profits.
I'd say that the labels are on the downside of their death grip on distribution.
Maybe, we shall see what they do to lock it up online as time progresses. Claims, however, that they are losing their grip are more than a little premature.
Some parents use Libraries as something of an afterschool daycare.
It isn't a daycare, it's a library. It has books full of naked women. It has creeps researching how to build bombs. It is a public place, just like a park or any other.
...is to suggest that private school parents who tell their kid "go hang out at the library till I can pick you up" are irresponsible.
Yes it is. If your children are not trained and responsible enough to be left on their own in public, then they should not be left alone in public. If parents want a government run daycare, let them vote a millage an build one. The library is not a daycare.
No link is provided to the system you claim exists. Thus, I'm not bothering to read any more of your evasions. I'm not wasting my time rereading the same crap again.
Not wanting the government to take responsibility for child rearing is not anarchy. You sir, are jumping to some major and completely unwarranted conclusions.
I reject your entire political philosophy on practical grounds and therefore refuse to accept your argument.
Wow, it is hard to fit so many logical fallacies into one statement. Good job. First, you've made the fallacy of association, you believe this therefor I'll assign to you the following additional set of beliefs I attribute to everyone who holds this one belief and which I disagree with. Second, you've made the fallacy of generalization; your other arguments are wrong for unspecified reasons therefore this argument must also be wrong. Third, you've made the fallacy Non sequitur, in claiming that because of my previous argument I'm an anarchist.
Our discussion is now over because, based on the differing fundamental beliefs, we can never come to a compromise.
Since you have no idea what my beliefs are, you have decided that you need a way to ignore my arguments so you don't have to evaluate and/or logically rebuke them. In effect you are running away rather than facing your own irrationality. I hope some day you recognize that you are responding emotively to a threat to your ego rather than logically in a way that allows you to assimilate new information and refine your opinions. I know people do grow and become more sophisticated as they learn. Might I suggest some reading in logical discourse, rhetorical method, and critical thinking as a direction to improve your ability to reason?
But now ANYONE can record, duplicate, and distribute their music very easily.
Bzzzzzzt! Sorry, thanks for playing. The online market is a tiny portion of the market as a whole. The retail chains are still locked up. Can the average person sell at Walmart? I didn't think so. There is great potential with new distribution methods, but also a lot of pressure to control those new distribution methods. Time will tell if the cartel loses its grip.
I think the convictions you are talking about are more about price-fixing and the co-op advertsing deals.
The advertising deals, the Clearchannel crap, and a dozen things they probably will never be convicted of. It all adds up to a grim situation for the average musician who wants to be heard by a large, national audience. It is all well and good to look hopefully to the future, but that does not mitigate the poor choices musicians have to make right now.
You have no idea what you're talking about. There is NO statute that hasn't been overturned that allows the government to block "harmful" material from children in private settings.
Pornography laws and alcohol laws come to mind. A private business cannot sell or even give pornography to a minor.
This is a ridiculous argument and no competent judge would sit and listen to it.
I see, because our legal system is broken we should just allow unethical laws to be passed? Okay then.
Standing interpretation of the law says that you being forced to ask for a filter to be removed on a public system is not a violation that outweighs the benefit of preventing children from accessing illicit materials.
And that interpretation is unethical and illogical, but appeals to the same "please think of the children" crowd as this one. This uninformed, hysterical, tyranny of the majority is why the constitution is supposed to trump this crap.
In other words: the law isn't written with you personally in mind, go cry to someone else about it.
This law shouldn't be written at all and was created with hysterical soccer moms with no sense of parental responsibility in mind. If you don't have a problem with it, enjoy I'm sure more and more of this crap will be rammed down our throats. As a well-to-do adult, this law is meaningless to me except in its potential harmful effect upon the children and poor. Isn't it amusing that I actually am thinking of the children in my opposition to this censorship bullshit you're so happy to suck down.
The issue here is a difference in what we think we're telling the OS to do.
True enough, but I think move and replace are both fairly intuitive procedures. The difference is that in replacing the behavior from the mouse action is consistent whereas if you merge folders with that mouse action, shouldn't you also merge the contents of files? Doing two different operations using the same method is what I am objecting to.
I suspect you're in the minority here.
So are you. Most people expect that if they replace a folder with another, the old folder and what was in it will be gone. Most people would not understand merging at all.
Most people don't even know what a versioning system is.
True, although that will change as filesystems and versioning systems merge.
The workaround to get the behavior you want on systems that do the opposite is to delete the destination folder first. There is no easy workaround the other way.
Then I propose the correct solution is to provide a workaround for the other way or to change both behaviors, not to un-intuitively perform different operations depending upon the contents of a folder.
That is, of course, a strawman. There is already standing precedent for the legality of preventing minors from accessing materials deemed, by law, to be potentially harmful.
This is not doing that however, This is preventing minors from using public resources to access material that may be harmful, while not banning them from accessing those same materials in other locations. It is a fairly important distinction.
So, in effect, the entire whiny, misunderstood complaint here is "it's unfair that children are being barred from accessing, via public systems, non-educational sites which could potentially cause them harm".
I think that is a valid complaint. Every Web page contains information, whether you deem it educational or not. Maybe it is educating me about the colors preferred by teenagers or about the psychology of groupies. Similarly, every Web page is potentially harmful. Maybe commas look a lot like sperm which will permanently scar a child and destroy their future relationships. We don't have any proof to the contrary so lets think of the children and ban them unless they can come up with an "educational" reason they need to see pages with commas.
Both the harmfulness and the educational benefits of any given sight are very subjective and this type of legislation is harmful or useless except for one thing. It convinces people politicians care and is a way to get votes from emotionally driven, infantile voters.
I don't question that the educational value of MySpace is pretty much the same as hitting yourself in the face with a brick.
I see, well why don't we make you the gatekeeper for all media to decide what is and is not appropriate for Americans to see. Or maybe we shouldn't.
This is not a violation of rights by even the most ridiculous stretch of the imagination.
Yes it is. It is making it harder for me to view certain Websites in the library and not others. It is intentionally restricting my and everyone else's access to certain information.
I believe me when it comes to 2006, which shows that, contrary to your assertion, Dell is not at the bottom of the PC market for tech support.
The ratings, especially for laptops, show it well behind Sony and Lenovo and even further behind Apple. They do nothing to support your position that Apple machines and Dell machines are of comparable quality.
Is Dell exceptional in its low customer satisfaction? No, it's just right in line with everyone else.
Except Apple and Sony and Lenovo and other manufacturers of mostly higher quality gear.
Your claim, and I quote, was: "Dell ranks near the bottom for customer satisfaction, support surveys, and hardware reliability almost every year, significantly worse than even HP or Gateway." My counter-claim is that no
Dell does rank near the bottom every year. Who is lower than they are?
You know, I'm not going to waste my time even reading the rest of your post. You're going to believe whatever you want, no matter what evidence is presented. You can't find any store where you can buy a machine with the same specs as the MacBook Pro, for significantly less or you would have done so. No one has been able to do so when challenged on this for several years now, and many people have tried. No, configuring a cheap ass system and then claiming you can add on a bunch of extra third party gear in USB ports and whatnot does not count. If you'd like to prove me wrong, just find me the machine, otherwise, you're just blowing smoke up your own ass.
I want this feature to work like it does in Windows and Linux.
I don't. I hate it when the OS decides it know what I want to do for me and does something I did not tell it. If I deleted a file two folders down and then copy the parent folder over another folder somewhere, I expect that file to still be gone. If I want to merge trees I'll use a versioning system.
The ONLY way someone else can exploit it is with the original author's permission (via a recording/publishing contract etc).
If a person has you beaten up by thugs every day until you sign over the rights to your music, what's the problem? I mean, you gave them permission to use the music, right?
The RIAA does not have people beaten (as far as I know) but they do break the law by illegally and artificially restricting the market with their cartel. They have been convicted numerous times. They are preventing artists from reaching their audiences by illegally restricting access to the distribution chains. They use this illegal action to coerce artists into handing over the rights to their works. Get it?
Yet Nintendo holds a nice monopoly on producing Gamecube discs. The same with Sony and PS2 discs.
The term, "monopoly" does not really apply here. Nintendo competes with Sony in the console and game markets. They've become gatekeepers for ntheir own little market segment, but not monopolies.
PC realm is much more open, especially with the invention of shareware effectively giving anyone the ability to be a distributor, but there are very few examples of authors manging success even in this market, let alone having much of a foothold.
I think most PC software is created by companies not controlled by someone controlling the distribution channels.
... IMHO, because people are becoming more wise to the fact that they're paying multiple times for the same thing without any real added benefit and without any legitimate reason to have to pay again...
I hope this is true, although I have my doubts.
Perhaps their plans to limit supply are backfiring.
They certainly lose money by not selling certain works and old works are rarely "discovered" by a modern audience and catapulted into the mainstream the way they used to be. Still, I think they are making more money with this abuse than they are losing.
I should not have to hover over an object to find out what it does.
True, the icons should always be visible and probably a bit bigger.
Objects should not be distinguished only by colour (hel-LO, heard of colour blindness?)...
I think you mean, "objects should not be distinguished only by color." They should certainly be distinguished by color. Anyone who has ever instructed remedial users using both windows and OS X knows how much more quickly people understand "click the red one" as compared to "click the X." Also, to be fair, Apple does have a screen mode for the visually impaired that lets you use icons better suited to the color blind.
That even Apple is consistently failing to meet basic usability standards is a damning indictment of how far their standards have fallen since the days, long ago, when Apple's operating systems were prized for their ease of use, not merely their fluff and eye-candy.
Apple still does a better job than pretty much every other player, but they have had more UI issues than they used to. They have also made some UI advances as well. This is probably some culture clash from the old Apple folks and the newer UNIX guys they've brought on board. It has made OS X a hybrid, neither as well designed of a UI as it used to have, nor a secure as some of the other UNIX's, but somewhere in between. (Note, this is not, in my opinion, a dichotomy. It can be both more secure and more usable.)
Now, the Constitutional clause that allows copyright law to exist may have been with the intent to benefit artists and encourage them to make more works (really the latter, but the former was an accepted side-effect), but copyright law itself has never been designed to benefit artists. This may seem contradictory, but it is the case that publishing houses have existed since even before the US existed.
It does seem contradictory. The constitutional clause is a law. I think I see where you're coming from though. Yes copyright predated the US and was a mess in Europe which is why it was so specifically limited in the US.
In reality, copyright gives only the most marginal of benefits to the artist while giving publishers enormous benefit.
This depends upon the industry and the application. For example, you can still make an independent video game and gain great monetary benefit distributing it yourself. The problem is when the distribution channels are all owned by the same company or group and who then use that as a bottleneck to be gatekeepers.
There's only two real motivation publishing houses have to keeping copyright around: preventing their competitors from printing their works and keeping the average person from distributing copies.
There is actually a third, artificially restricting the available works. The average large publishing company or film company owns more works that it does not make available than it sells. By making sure these works are unavailable it channels all the buying to a smaller set of works, which has fewer infrastructure and distribution costs. Were copyright abolished a significant number of people would find a number of currently unavailable works to consume.
Authors weren't equipped, at least until very modern times, to distribute their works around the world.
I'd argue the dissemination of demand was more a restriction than of the works themselves. The main thing current distributors bring to the table is advertising.
Single button mice encourage app designers to hide functionality behind CMD-ALT-SHIFT-CONTROL-DOUBLE-CLICK.
I know of one, that is just one application for the mac that uses the native UI that requires the use of any chording to use all the features of that program. Many provide shortcuts to common features for a second or third button or using cntrl-click or the like, but they don't require you to either use a second button or a mouse button and a key in combination. The same is certainly not true for windows as anyone who has ever used an alternate navigation like a stylus, assistive device, or spoken interface can tell you. This is largely because Apple ships one button mice and trackpads by default.
If you'd like to present a few examples of mac programs that require multiple buttons or a mouse button and keyboard key in combination to use them, please do.
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See, thing is... If you get your ass beat, you can take the entire damn department to court and you stand one hell of a good chance of winning.
If you antagonize the cops you stand a good chance of being framed for a crime and have a very poor chance of winning a court case. If you're beaten while resisting arrest, you stand a very poor chance of getting any compensation for it unless it is hugely publicized for some reason. You stand a much better chance winning a civil case to get reparations for your camera if you have it smashed or taken than you do if you're arrested for possession of crack that you claim was planted on you and your camera was broken while you were resisting arrest.
Also, King wasn't killed by the cops, unless you're some kind of whack-job conspiracy theorist.
So if I am some whack job conspiracy theorist he was killed by the cops? King's murder was certainly not clear cut and never even went to trial despite years of attempts by the convicted to make that happen. The first people on the scene were FBI agents who had been "monitoring" him.
Oh, and tell your "Most people who resist end up with a bullet in their heads" to the millions of protesters a year who end up, guess where? In a jail cell, not in a morgue.
We're talking about resisting arrest in an individual incident, not in a protest. There have been enough instances caught on tape of abuse during these situations for the reasonable person to conclude that it happens a lot more that is not caught on tape.
In this age where shooting even an armed criminal who is firing on you in the middle of a shootout gets you several months off-duty as you get investigated the hell out of, I very much doubt any cop wants to pull the trigger for any reason other than self-defense.
It happens in my neck o the woods regularly. The cops who shot the guy dispatch had told them was deaf in the back for failing to comply and put down the rake he was holding walked without even being fired let alone put in jail. A lot of random bodies show up in Detroit, who is to say who killed them?
So, please, take your all-cops-are-evil, stupid sociopathic, triggerhappy control freaks nonesense and stick it somewhere unpleasant.
I said nothing about cops being evil, I only described the psychology of the cops I know.
All of the cops I know personally are good men who just want to make a positive difference.
Most of the cops I know think they are doing the right thing too. Of course they think it is right to abuse blacks and homosexuals. They think anyone who resists arrest deserves what is coming to them.
At least if you get your ass beat excessively, somebody at the department is gonna get put on review.
If you don't resist they will probably take your camera. If you do, they will probably taser you and take your camera and they may frame you for a crime. After all, isn't that what the gritty, heroic cops in the TV shows would do?
they could get in trouble for and they can get in a lot more trouble for smacking around some random civilian than for taking said civilian's tape out of his video camera.
They get in even less trouble if they take the tape and send you to jail with evidence that you are a criminal so you have motivation to lie about the tape in the first place.
The advice to resist arrest is foolish and can get people killed or their lives ruined. It is a very poor suggestion.
I'd expect that if they're hiring cops who couldn't get into the military you've got a HR problem.
In most places the police department has much lesser requirements for the physical than the military. My brother, for example, had open heart surgery as an infant which means the military would never take him, but since he could easily pass the physical to get his law enforcement degree and pass the physical to get onto the force, he was hired on by the local sheriff's department. Another cop I know failed his drug tests for entrance into the military, and they would not take him at any point afterwards. He cleaned up enough to pass for the police, and then went back to doing drugs just like many cops do. I know/knew some fairly senior people in a medium sized county, state post, and the city cops where I live. Usually they have mellowed and become a bit less violent and abusive by the time they move up in the ranks, but there is a reason most state concealed weapons laws have an exemption for cops. No one convicted of domestic assault, battery, or spousal abuse can get a concealed firearms permit, unless they are a cop. Why do you suppose they need to make such an exception?
Movies have ratings and kids cannot enter the theatre to see them, but nobody complains about censorship in that regard, the kid can just wait until he is old enough.
There is no law that says a movie must be rated (there are many unrated) and no law that says theaters cannot let minors see R or X-rated films. Certain states and localities have passed laws that say that, but they have always been overturned when challenged.
How about fairgrounds, are they censoring the rides because they have a height chart and restrict kids from their freedom to ride on them?
Again, this is voluntary on the part of the fairground operators, not mandated by law in most cases. There are certain restrictions on heavy equipment and safety, but that is for a clear danger to the safety of the operators and mostly covers providing machinery known to be dangerous and not informing the user.
Its not censorship, its common sense.
The government restricting what citizens can see and hear is censorship. If you think in this case they should do so, well great for you. That doesn't make it legal and it does not demonstrate a danger to children.
I'm sorry to tell you, but the US is a democracy, not a meritocracy. Thus, what the people want goes, not what is "right" scientifically.
You do know this isn't true, right? In a straight up democracy if 51% of the people vote to restrict free speech with censorship, the law restricts free speech. In the US, 66% of Congress (super-majority) have to agree to pass a constitutional amendment to override any of the existing amendments in the constitution. Further, the constitution trumps state law if they conflict. The US is an indirect democracy, but with the will of the people needing extra force in the case of certain rights and restrictions. This is meant to prevent a "tyranny of the majority" where (for example) women can vote that men are no longer allowed to vote.
What is the point of having ratings if they aren't enforced? If the game says M, only those only over 17 should be able to buy it.
Rating games strictly provides information on the content. If retailers want to voluntarily restrict sale of certain kinds of games to minors, well and good. It is a free country. If the government, however, wants to pass a law forcing retailers to restrict sale, well that is a different story. It is called "censorship" and their needs to be a real and compelling public interest. Until the reason for the restriction is a fairly well documented scientific event with clear causality the government has no business trying to enforce censorship.
It was a drug bust. It's likely undercover cops were present to confirm/asssist arrest. Taking pictures of said drug busts could cost lives. Your 'precious rights to an afternoon sitting on the couch' stop the moment you put somebody's life in danger. Period.
Have you ever heard of the concept of a "nation of laws." It is not up to an arbitrary police officer to take it upon themselves to make up a new law and then try to enforce it. In a drug bust the cops usually arrest the undercover cops as well as the crooks, so taking pictures does not jeopardize their cover. If you want to argue that it should be illegal to take pictures of the cops, fine, but until there is a law that says that, the police have no business trying to pretend their is.
Just a snippet of advice: Stand up for yourself if some officer of the "Law" is harassing you. Do it in a respectful manner and respectfully tell them that they cannot legally arrest you for whatever it is they are trying to arrest you for illegally.
This is lousy advice. Telling a cop you know the law better than they do (whether you do or not) will not earn their respect. It will challenge their ego and most of them have some serious issues with control which is one of the reasons they become cops. Second, many are very juvenile in their view of right and wrong (based on action movies). They are good guy so in their mind they are always right. Standing up to them means you're one of the bad guys and as TV has shown us, it is ethically okay for the cops to do whatever it takes including breaking the law to take down the bad guys.
If you need to, resist arrest. They pretty much can't shoot you, they mostly won't taser you, and, if there are witnesses around, certainly won't beat your ass for refusing to allow them to clap you in irons and drag you off to some dungeon.
This is much, much worse advice than the previous. They certainly will beat your ass and taser you if you resist arrest and they are legally allowed to do so. They are also likely to "find" a bag of weed or crack on you as well.
What's a night in jail for standing up for your Rights? Martin Luther King, Jr. and Henry David Thoreau seemed to think that was a fine trade.
It is unlikely to be a night in jail. Most people who stand up to the cops end up with a bullet in their head, just like Dr. King. If you want to resist the police and stop this sort of behavior you damned well better be a lot smarter about it that this. The police have the authority and power. If you want to change things, use your brain, which is what most of them are lacking to some degree.
I honestly think some cops are bad, but most (like most people) just want to do a good job, make the world better or at least not any worse and go home to their happy and safe little home. If you really were a sadistic bastard who just wanted to mess with the world, there are easier and more lucrative ways to do it than going into law enforcement.
Do you know any cops? I do. My brother used to be a cop and I got to know quite a few of them both through him and by just talking to them. Almost every cop and even security guard I've ever talked to has had issues with anger and control. When within ten minutes of meeting someone they express to you how they wish they had a good excuse to shoot someone or how they became a cop because they could not get into the military and really just wanted to learn to be a better killer you start to have a very different view of cops. Most of them are people who grew up too slowly and did not realize that all the action shows on TV were just revenge fantasies and not life goals. A whole lot of them have sadistic tendencies and/or a strong desire to assert dominance over everyone they can. Every cop I've ever asked has a "funny" story about how they broke the law and did things normal people can't because they can get away with it. Most cops abuse their power.
You say that most cops just want to do a good job, but in the opinions of many of the cops I've talked to "doing a good job" might mean driving those "niggers" out of town or making sure those weird guys are properly frightened so they know it is not alright to be different from the NASCAR watching majority.
I get along just fine with cops for the most part. I never get tickets and know enough about martial arts and guns and have enough good stories about the military and crimes so that they generally consider me one of the "good guys." I'm also something of a social chameleon and am almost universally accepted in any clique. I don't, however, have an illusions about the fact that for the most part cops are bigger criminals than the average person, they abuse their authority, and they are violent and prone to use violence unnecessarily. They also always want to be in control and are more likely to respond with violence or by arresting someone with no legal justification than they are willing to cede that control. For example, from stories I've heard from cops, most are likely to arrest anyone who points out that they are wrong and that the act they are claiming is illegal (like photographing them) is legal. It is a challenge to them and the fact that what they are doing is illegal is only a technicality to them. Most cops feel anyone doing anything that is not what they direct is in the wrong, because most don't ever admit that they could be wrong.
I find your view of the police to be very naive.
I think you are a bit confused. WalMart only carries a very very very VERY small fraction of albums released each year.
So? Walmart is the single largest retailer of music worldwide. They sell more music than any other company in the world.
As far as distribution methods, do you really think that someone can stop MySpace, BitTorrent, LimeWire, P2P etc?
Why does anyone need to? Those sites still account for a tiny fraction of music distribution and an even tinier amount of sales. And sales is what we're talking about; the ability to reach an audience and survive on the profits.
I'd say that the labels are on the downside of their death grip on distribution.
Maybe, we shall see what they do to lock it up online as time progresses. Claims, however, that they are losing their grip are more than a little premature.
Some parents use Libraries as something of an afterschool daycare.
It isn't a daycare, it's a library. It has books full of naked women. It has creeps researching how to build bombs. It is a public place, just like a park or any other.
Yes it is. If your children are not trained and responsible enough to be left on their own in public, then they should not be left alone in public. If parents want a government run daycare, let them vote a millage an build one. The library is not a daycare.
Let me guess the term "monopolistic competition" was coined by a marketing guy or a mathematician? Orwell would be in titters.
No link is provided to the system you claim exists. Thus, I'm not bothering to read any more of your evasions. I'm not wasting my time rereading the same crap again.
In effect you're an anarchist.
Not wanting the government to take responsibility for child rearing is not anarchy. You sir, are jumping to some major and completely unwarranted conclusions.
I reject your entire political philosophy on practical grounds and therefore refuse to accept your argument.
Wow, it is hard to fit so many logical fallacies into one statement. Good job. First, you've made the fallacy of association, you believe this therefor I'll assign to you the following additional set of beliefs I attribute to everyone who holds this one belief and which I disagree with. Second, you've made the fallacy of generalization; your other arguments are wrong for unspecified reasons therefore this argument must also be wrong. Third, you've made the fallacy Non sequitur, in claiming that because of my previous argument I'm an anarchist.
Our discussion is now over because, based on the differing fundamental beliefs, we can never come to a compromise.
Since you have no idea what my beliefs are, you have decided that you need a way to ignore my arguments so you don't have to evaluate and/or logically rebuke them. In effect you are running away rather than facing your own irrationality. I hope some day you recognize that you are responding emotively to a threat to your ego rather than logically in a way that allows you to assimilate new information and refine your opinions. I know people do grow and become more sophisticated as they learn. Might I suggest some reading in logical discourse, rhetorical method, and critical thinking as a direction to improve your ability to reason?
But now ANYONE can record, duplicate, and distribute their music very easily.
Bzzzzzzt! Sorry, thanks for playing. The online market is a tiny portion of the market as a whole. The retail chains are still locked up. Can the average person sell at Walmart? I didn't think so. There is great potential with new distribution methods, but also a lot of pressure to control those new distribution methods. Time will tell if the cartel loses its grip.
I think the convictions you are talking about are more about price-fixing and the co-op advertsing deals.
The advertising deals, the Clearchannel crap, and a dozen things they probably will never be convicted of. It all adds up to a grim situation for the average musician who wants to be heard by a large, national audience. It is all well and good to look hopefully to the future, but that does not mitigate the poor choices musicians have to make right now.
You have no idea what you're talking about. There is NO statute that hasn't been overturned that allows the government to block "harmful" material from children in private settings.
Pornography laws and alcohol laws come to mind. A private business cannot sell or even give pornography to a minor.
This is a ridiculous argument and no competent judge would sit and listen to it.
I see, because our legal system is broken we should just allow unethical laws to be passed? Okay then.
Standing interpretation of the law says that you being forced to ask for a filter to be removed on a public system is not a violation that outweighs the benefit of preventing children from accessing illicit materials.
And that interpretation is unethical and illogical, but appeals to the same "please think of the children" crowd as this one. This uninformed, hysterical, tyranny of the majority is why the constitution is supposed to trump this crap.
In other words: the law isn't written with you personally in mind, go cry to someone else about it.
This law shouldn't be written at all and was created with hysterical soccer moms with no sense of parental responsibility in mind. If you don't have a problem with it, enjoy I'm sure more and more of this crap will be rammed down our throats. As a well-to-do adult, this law is meaningless to me except in its potential harmful effect upon the children and poor. Isn't it amusing that I actually am thinking of the children in my opposition to this censorship bullshit you're so happy to suck down.
The issue here is a difference in what we think we're telling the OS to do.
True enough, but I think move and replace are both fairly intuitive procedures. The difference is that in replacing the behavior from the mouse action is consistent whereas if you merge folders with that mouse action, shouldn't you also merge the contents of files? Doing two different operations using the same method is what I am objecting to.
I suspect you're in the minority here.
So are you. Most people expect that if they replace a folder with another, the old folder and what was in it will be gone. Most people would not understand merging at all.
Most people don't even know what a versioning system is.
True, although that will change as filesystems and versioning systems merge.
The workaround to get the behavior you want on systems that do the opposite is to delete the destination folder first. There is no easy workaround the other way.
Then I propose the correct solution is to provide a workaround for the other way or to change both behaviors, not to un-intuitively perform different operations depending upon the contents of a folder.
That is, of course, a strawman. There is already standing precedent for the legality of preventing minors from accessing materials deemed, by law, to be potentially harmful.
This is not doing that however, This is preventing minors from using public resources to access material that may be harmful, while not banning them from accessing those same materials in other locations. It is a fairly important distinction.
So, in effect, the entire whiny, misunderstood complaint here is "it's unfair that children are being barred from accessing, via public systems, non-educational sites which could potentially cause them harm".
I think that is a valid complaint. Every Web page contains information, whether you deem it educational or not. Maybe it is educating me about the colors preferred by teenagers or about the psychology of groupies. Similarly, every Web page is potentially harmful. Maybe commas look a lot like sperm which will permanently scar a child and destroy their future relationships. We don't have any proof to the contrary so lets think of the children and ban them unless they can come up with an "educational" reason they need to see pages with commas.
Both the harmfulness and the educational benefits of any given sight are very subjective and this type of legislation is harmful or useless except for one thing. It convinces people politicians care and is a way to get votes from emotionally driven, infantile voters.
I don't question that the educational value of MySpace is pretty much the same as hitting yourself in the face with a brick.
I see, well why don't we make you the gatekeeper for all media to decide what is and is not appropriate for Americans to see. Or maybe we shouldn't.
This is not a violation of rights by even the most ridiculous stretch of the imagination.
Yes it is. It is making it harder for me to view certain Websites in the library and not others. It is intentionally restricting my and everyone else's access to certain information.
I believe me when it comes to 2006, which shows that, contrary to your assertion, Dell is not at the bottom of the PC market for tech support.
The ratings, especially for laptops, show it well behind Sony and Lenovo and even further behind Apple. They do nothing to support your position that Apple machines and Dell machines are of comparable quality.
Is Dell exceptional in its low customer satisfaction? No, it's just right in line with everyone else.
Except Apple and Sony and Lenovo and other manufacturers of mostly higher quality gear.
Your claim, and I quote, was: "Dell ranks near the bottom for customer satisfaction, support surveys, and hardware reliability almost every year, significantly worse than even HP or Gateway." My counter-claim is that no
Dell does rank near the bottom every year. Who is lower than they are?
You know, I'm not going to waste my time even reading the rest of your post. You're going to believe whatever you want, no matter what evidence is presented. You can't find any store where you can buy a machine with the same specs as the MacBook Pro, for significantly less or you would have done so. No one has been able to do so when challenged on this for several years now, and many people have tried. No, configuring a cheap ass system and then claiming you can add on a bunch of extra third party gear in USB ports and whatnot does not count. If you'd like to prove me wrong, just find me the machine, otherwise, you're just blowing smoke up your own ass.
I want this feature to work like it does in Windows and Linux.
I don't. I hate it when the OS decides it know what I want to do for me and does something I did not tell it. If I deleted a file two folders down and then copy the parent folder over another folder somewhere, I expect that file to still be gone. If I want to merge trees I'll use a versioning system.
The ONLY way someone else can exploit it is with the original author's permission (via a recording/publishing contract etc).
If a person has you beaten up by thugs every day until you sign over the rights to your music, what's the problem? I mean, you gave them permission to use the music, right?
The RIAA does not have people beaten (as far as I know) but they do break the law by illegally and artificially restricting the market with their cartel. They have been convicted numerous times. They are preventing artists from reaching their audiences by illegally restricting access to the distribution chains. They use this illegal action to coerce artists into handing over the rights to their works. Get it?
Yet Nintendo holds a nice monopoly on producing Gamecube discs. The same with Sony and PS2 discs.
The term, "monopoly" does not really apply here. Nintendo competes with Sony in the console and game markets. They've become gatekeepers for ntheir own little market segment, but not monopolies.
PC realm is much more open, especially with the invention of shareware effectively giving anyone the ability to be a distributor, but there are very few examples of authors manging success even in this market, let alone having much of a foothold.
I think most PC software is created by companies not controlled by someone controlling the distribution channels.
I hope this is true, although I have my doubts.
Perhaps their plans to limit supply are backfiring.
They certainly lose money by not selling certain works and old works are rarely "discovered" by a modern audience and catapulted into the mainstream the way they used to be. Still, I think they are making more money with this abuse than they are losing.
Troll?
I should not have to hover over an object to find out what it does.
True, the icons should always be visible and probably a bit bigger.
Objects should not be distinguished only by colour (hel-LO, heard of colour blindness?)...
I think you mean, "objects should not be distinguished only by color." They should certainly be distinguished by color. Anyone who has ever instructed remedial users using both windows and OS X knows how much more quickly people understand "click the red one" as compared to "click the X." Also, to be fair, Apple does have a screen mode for the visually impaired that lets you use icons better suited to the color blind.
That even Apple is consistently failing to meet basic usability standards is a damning indictment of how far their standards have fallen since the days, long ago, when Apple's operating systems were prized for their ease of use, not merely their fluff and eye-candy.
Apple still does a better job than pretty much every other player, but they have had more UI issues than they used to. They have also made some UI advances as well. This is probably some culture clash from the old Apple folks and the newer UNIX guys they've brought on board. It has made OS X a hybrid, neither as well designed of a UI as it used to have, nor a secure as some of the other UNIX's, but somewhere in between. (Note, this is not, in my opinion, a dichotomy. It can be both more secure and more usable.)
Now, the Constitutional clause that allows copyright law to exist may have been with the intent to benefit artists and encourage them to make more works (really the latter, but the former was an accepted side-effect), but copyright law itself has never been designed to benefit artists. This may seem contradictory, but it is the case that publishing houses have existed since even before the US existed.
It does seem contradictory. The constitutional clause is a law. I think I see where you're coming from though. Yes copyright predated the US and was a mess in Europe which is why it was so specifically limited in the US.
In reality, copyright gives only the most marginal of benefits to the artist while giving publishers enormous benefit.
This depends upon the industry and the application. For example, you can still make an independent video game and gain great monetary benefit distributing it yourself. The problem is when the distribution channels are all owned by the same company or group and who then use that as a bottleneck to be gatekeepers.
There's only two real motivation publishing houses have to keeping copyright around: preventing their competitors from printing their works and keeping the average person from distributing copies.
There is actually a third, artificially restricting the available works. The average large publishing company or film company owns more works that it does not make available than it sells. By making sure these works are unavailable it channels all the buying to a smaller set of works, which has fewer infrastructure and distribution costs. Were copyright abolished a significant number of people would find a number of currently unavailable works to consume.
Authors weren't equipped, at least until very modern times, to distribute their works around the world.
I'd argue the dissemination of demand was more a restriction than of the works themselves. The main thing current distributors bring to the table is advertising.
Single button mice encourage app designers to hide functionality behind CMD-ALT-SHIFT-CONTROL-DOUBLE-CLICK.
I know of one, that is just one application for the mac that uses the native UI that requires the use of any chording to use all the features of that program. Many provide shortcuts to common features for a second or third button or using cntrl-click or the like, but they don't require you to either use a second button or a mouse button and a key in combination. The same is certainly not true for windows as anyone who has ever used an alternate navigation like a stylus, assistive device, or spoken interface can tell you. This is largely because Apple ships one button mice and trackpads by default.
If you'd like to present a few examples of mac programs that require multiple buttons or a mouse button and keyboard key in combination to use them, please do.