There are and always have been countless ways to confirm the quality of music, videos, movies, etc before you buy them, all of which are perfectly legal.
We are talking about the Chinese scientist, not anyone else. For him, the fourth option is unemployment, which isn't going to happen as long as he produces more science for less bucks. Someone is going to hire him - it may as well be us.
You are also wrong about the benefits. Having him (or her) here means he or she pays US taxes, as well as produces profits for an American corporation (resulting in more taxes and fat 401ks). Having him work overseas for us only provides the latter. Having the scientist work overseas for someone else means we get squat.
As many people have said, the world is flattening. Information sector jobs are the first to do so - and science is nothing but information. American scientists cannot nor should not be protected from foreign competition.
Money isn't everything, but isn't nothing either. As long as we have huge pay differentials between various jobs that require similar intellects, we are going to find people choosing the high paying field until competition evens out the wages. At the moment, we are losing scientists for this reason.
Perhaps in the future, when enough would-be scientists have switched to medicine, law, and MBAs, the wages will be equal and the flow will stop.
#4 is irrelevant. We are talking about what happens to the Chinese scientist. Someone is going to hire him or her, if this person produces more bang for the buck. It is only a question of who.
#5 is rare, though I happen to be an example of an American scientist working overseas. Trust me, working overseas is not a cure for low pay or competition.
As I have noted on slashdot before, as of right now, there is no reason for an American to pursue a PhD in science or engineering. The same person will make much more money as a doctor or lawyer, for example.
Why the difference?
Simple - your doctor or lawyer, almost by the definition of their job, must be local. They are relatively immune to competition from foreigners. This is not true for scientists, who right now are most definitely competing with very able Chinese, Indians, etc.
That being said, the usual panic cry of "keep out the foreigners" is also wrong. Each and every American scientist is competing with each and every foreign scientist in his or her field. This is true regardless of who hires them or where they work. Which do you think is best for America?
1: An American company hires the Chinese scientist, sponsers his visa and brings him to the US.
2: An American company hires the Chinese scientist, but the scientist works in the company's Chinese division.
3: A foreign company hires the Chinese scientist, and employs him overseas.
I hope you realize the first option is the best. There is nothing the government can do to stop the competition created by these new scientists, and nothing it can do to prevent wage deflation because of it. It should give up trying.
If, for national security reasons or some other random excuse, the government feels it important to have lots of native-born scientists, it will have to tackle the problem at the graduate level. Asking talented 22-30 year olds to slog through 6+ years of 70h weeks for a wage topped by the guy cleaning the toilets, while a lawyer is making $75k at age 25, is pure silliness. Making graduate school less financially miserable would be a start. Of course, it is too late for me.
You can sample the music on such places as iTunes, the store, or the band's website. Your laziness is not an excuse to break the law.
Your latter point is irrelevant. The question is do these people buy more or less than they would without file sharing. The answer is almost assuredly less. All your point boils down to is "people who like music are both more likely to buy music and download music".
Logically, you have C causing A and B, and are trying to infer a causation between A and B, due to their correlation via C.
The RIAA is not even within a country mile of "bad faith".
Nor are they likely to lose most of these cases, as the people are guilty of breaking the law. This should be obvious, regardless of whether you like the law or not.
Any article that starts out by whining about someone's physical handicaps, when they clearly have nothing to do with the matter at hand is a priori full of "#$". How on earth are physical health problems related to one's guilt or innocence with respect to copyright law? The answer? Not at all. Hence, the author starts his argument with a laughably idiotic argument, and that sets the tone for the rest of the article.
In any case, finding a half-dozen sap stories of possible mistaken identity out of 14,000 is not surprising at all. Even in these cases, many of them just look like the parents were not paying due diligence to the children's habits.
The analysis I have seen did not make such an assumption, though "hours worked" is never easy to measure for salaried workers. Ironically, it is usually the teacher's union that makes such an assumption about everyone else. Most non-teaching professionals put in much more than 40h, but the unions almost always assume it is 40 when making their comparisons. The studies I remember estimated that a teacher works about 80-85% of the total hours per year as compared to other professionals. They work somewhat more than the average hours per week, but work far fewer weeks per year.
Ultimately, though, I think that the pay scales need to be changed. Just about every organization in the country (public and private) except K-12 schools have figured out how to fairly pay their best workers more than their worst. We shouldn't be surprised that when our K-12 schools fail to do this, they can't attract many good workers!
Some possible ideas:
1: Pay teachers more in difficult to teach subjects and schools. Science, math, and special ed are facing severe shortages. Elementary ed, English, and history are facing huge surpluses. This is the result of ignoring economics. Likewise, good, experienced teachers flee the toughest schools where the children have the most need, precisely because the transition is either pay-neutral (in district) or pay-positive (out of district). We need to be attracting good teachers to bad schools with higher pay.
2: Even out the pay scales. The biggest barrier to entry into the profession is the low beginning salary. Evidence indicates that quality of teaching rises rapidly for the first few years and then levels off pretty quickly. There is no reason for huge, back-loaded pay raises, where the people with 25 years are making more than double than those with 5 years, if the results are nearly the same. Instead of ranging from 30k-80k, maybe 40k-60k is more justified (keeping the same average, of course).
3: Reward relevant job experience. This interacts strongly with the previous point. You cannot expect mid-career professionals to switch to the bottom of the pay scale. Their experience is relevant and should not be ignored.
4: Incorporate more measures of quality - student performance, peer review, quality of the teacher's education, etc. Northeastern Kansas State - Southfield ain't Harvard.
Studies have found that average teacher pay is very competitive on an hourly basis with other, similar professions. Average teacher pay is just fine.
The problems are that it is too heavily back-loaded (starting teachers make squat, old teachers make a mint), that teachers in completely different field earn the same pay (physics is not communications!), and that no regard is given to real-world job experience.
These factors combine to make it almost impossible that someone with a math or science background and years of real job experience would switch to being a teacher. Both their experience and quality degree would be ignored when determining pay, and they would start at the very bottom of a very steep payscale. How many people are going to give up $60k at IMB for $30k as a teacher? Not many.
until school districts start counting years of relevant job experience as part of the determinant of your pay.
Right now, if that engineer from DuPont switches to teaching, she starts at the same point in the pay scale as the 23-year-old with no experience at all. This makes the switch almost impossible, as most people in mid-career cannot/will not give up ten or twenty years worth of raises!
In the economic analyses that I have seen, per hour compensation for teachers is very competitive for similar professions. Average teacher pay is not a problem.
What is a problem is the distribution of that money. Essentially, these are the only two factors that matter in determining your pay in almost every district:
1: Highest degree earned
2: Number of years as a teacher
That it is. Nothing else matters. So some fresh new fool with a BA in communications from Directional State University and a 2.5 GPA is going to get the same pay as a 55-year old manager from IBM, who had had (long ago) a 3.8 GPA from Princeton in Applied Mathematics.
I am sure you can see what the problem is. This is compounded by the fact that teacher pay in almost every district is extremely backloaded. While that average you cited looks nice, you have to slog through a decade of $30-5k/year to get it.
Retirement benefits are also heavily backloaded.
It is the unions who are creating this problem. The absurd pay-scales they have created effectively make it impossible to recruit large numbers of math and science majors. Until the pay system is changed, all the blathering in the world will not change this.
When I was a kid, I was a hardcore video game fanatic. In the last few years, though I have pretty much quit playing games entirely. When my friends ask why, I point out one major reason - there are no new games! In my opinion, there has been nothing almost new since Wolfenstein, Warcraft, 3D-platformers, and the old text-based MMORPGs. Everything since has just been prettier pictures plastered atop the same old crap.
Sony and Microsoft are banking on doing the boring - even prettier pictures, the same old games.
Nintendo is bringing us - NEW GAMES.
Sony and Microsoft are going to be scrambling to catch up. I wonder what sort of patents Nintendo is holding...
In constrast to most/. types, I have pretty much given up on "privacy" in this sense. We live in a world that is becoming more and more connected and wired every day. Within that context, it becomes more and more possible for people to obtain information about one another. Perhaps we should be thinking more about how to embrace this reality rather than fruitlessly attempting to resist it. Just a thought...
but I am sure it ain't right. Check the historical budget tables at www.omb.gov. NIH and NSF are doing just fine, thank you very much. Unfortunately, most of the data is not adjusted for inflation but the increases are so large that it is obvious that it is greater than inflation (around 2-3% year, or 25% over ten).
Also, how precisely are you measuring "provision to society"? If you are making claims about it, you should have a good answer.
However, you may get rich in the science business, as you apparently have done. Congratulations.
The reality is that if you work in the lab, your salary will be good, but smaller that it would have been if you had become a doctor, lawyer, MBA, etc, especially when you consider the long time it takes to get your PhD (and post-doc, and second post-doc....)
Not many Americans are entering scientific fields for a darned good reason, I think. I wouldn't repeat my choice, knowing what I know now.
But I don't think anything based on simple word correlations can do a good job, Google or otherwise.
Right now, I understand about 50% of a typical native Japanese conversation. However, this number is strongly dependant on context. If I am present for the beginning of a conversation, and know who/what/where/when is being talked about, I usually can follow the conversation. However, if I enter in the middle of the conversation, I usually cannot enter it, precisely because I am missing all of this context. That, combined with the words or expressions I do not yet understand, leaves me in a muddle.
It is my opinion that a key to understanding and translation is precisely this context - who is speaking, who the audience is (both within and outside of the text), where these people are, what relationships they have, etc. Therefore, any system which wants to translate must have a method for codifying such things, or its translations will always be garbage.
Natural language is built upon context - who is speaking to whom, where they are located, tone and body language, and the meanings they are trying to convey. Simply mapping correlations between words in one language and another will get you nowhere. Better versions of Babelfish will still be babble.
I am currently living in Japan and learning the language. Here is a simple phrase that I was thinking about the other night...pretty much first-year college level Japanese.
Japanese version:
Itta koto ga aru
English version:
I/he/she/they have been (t)here before
or
Have you been there before?
The latter translation is correct if said with a rising tone of voice.
Note that I have just listed nine completely correct translations of a very simple Japanese sentence, all of which differ based on context - who is speaking to whom, their current location relative to the one in question, and tone of voice. A human reading a passage containing "itta goto ga aru" would know all of this information and correctly translate with ease. We are a long way from having a computer that can do such.
Even ignoring these problems, just to illustrate the difficulties of translation from vastly differing languages, I will explain the Japanese phrase.
"itta" means "went"
"koto" turns a verb into a noun. In this case, "experience" is probably the best single-word translation. It can also mean "idea", "process", or "concept".
"ga" has no translation into English whatsoever. It marks the topic of the sentence - in this case, "itta koto", the experience of having went.
"aru" implies existence.
Note that the natural Japanese sentence does not contain the subject of the sentence (I/you/he/she/etc) nor the implied location (here or there). The English version would use pronouns in these places. The translator needs to know this when translating, inserting them into the English from nothing in the Japanese, while dropping them in the reverse case. The translator needs to understand not only that Japanese rarely use pronouns, but it also needs to know when they do need to be used. If it turned every English pronoun into the corresponding Japanese, it would be wrong. If it threw them all out, it would be wrong. Instead, it must decide based on context whether they are necessary - and trust me, this is not easy at all.
Language processing is still a million miles off, and analyzing a mountain of text is only a fraction of the solution.
and don't own expensive speakers. Nor do I care. I was simply making a point that audiophiles' hatred of Bose is predictable.
To the extent that I know anything about speakers, I thought Denon and Onkyo were in the same price range as Bose (typically, the upper end of what you would find at Best Buy or Curcuit City, which is what I mean by "mainstream"). Marantz is rather far up the chain for the label of mainstream, though they do dabble in some mid/high priced models.
Both of these responses are exactly the things that XYZ-philes always say.
Bose occupies a niche at the upper end of the mainstream. They are a little more expensive and defnitely better than the cheap crap that most people buy. Every market has such a company or two. The XYZ-philes always attack such companies with the line "but here is some obscure product that is both cheaper and infinitely better".
by their inevitable disdain of mid-high quality but mainstream XYZ products.
Whether we are talking about speakers, wine, chocolate, cars, or golf clubs, there is nothing the aficionado hates more than anything in his or her realm of expertise that is pretty good and reasonably priced, as it undermines the value of their hard-earned knowledge.
2: Cite some specific examples of whom you are referring to.
3: Cite some specific quotes by these people backing up your childish, absurd claims about them.
4: Demonstrate that these particular fools have both the power and will to execute their idiotic claims.
5: Demonstrate that the public support for such people is great enough that their words are likely to result in actions by others.
Until you can do this, your absurd cries of "moral equivalence" are meaningless. Note that all of these unquestionably apply for Osama, if you substitute "neocon" with "Muslim Terrorist".
Slashdot Mirror
100 million dead would be a good starter.
I'll start listening to silly leftist lectures when they acknowledge the brutality of their ideology.
are not an excuse to break the law.
There are and always have been countless ways to confirm the quality of music, videos, movies, etc before you buy them, all of which are perfectly legal.
We are talking about the Chinese scientist, not anyone else. For him, the fourth option is unemployment, which isn't going to happen as long as he produces more science for less bucks. Someone is going to hire him - it may as well be us.
You are also wrong about the benefits. Having him (or her) here means he or she pays US taxes, as well as produces profits for an American corporation (resulting in more taxes and fat 401ks). Having him work overseas for us only provides the latter. Having the scientist work overseas for someone else means we get squat.
As many people have said, the world is flattening. Information sector jobs are the first to do so - and science is nothing but information. American scientists cannot nor should not be protected from foreign competition.
Money isn't everything, but isn't nothing either. As long as we have huge pay differentials between various jobs that require similar intellects, we are going to find people choosing the high paying field until competition evens out the wages. At the moment, we are losing scientists for this reason.
Perhaps in the future, when enough would-be scientists have switched to medicine, law, and MBAs, the wages will be equal and the flow will stop.
#4 is irrelevant. We are talking about what happens to the Chinese scientist. Someone is going to hire him or her, if this person produces more bang for the buck. It is only a question of who.
#5 is rare, though I happen to be an example of an American scientist working overseas. Trust me, working overseas is not a cure for low pay or competition.
As I have noted on slashdot before, as of right now, there is no reason for an American to pursue a PhD in science or engineering. The same person will make much more money as a doctor or lawyer, for example.
Why the difference?
Simple - your doctor or lawyer, almost by the definition of their job, must be local. They are relatively immune to competition from foreigners. This is not true for scientists, who right now are most definitely competing with very able Chinese, Indians, etc.
That being said, the usual panic cry of "keep out the foreigners" is also wrong. Each and every American scientist is competing with each and every foreign scientist in his or her field. This is true regardless of who hires them or where they work. Which do you think is best for America?
1: An American company hires the Chinese scientist, sponsers his visa and brings him to the US.
2: An American company hires the Chinese scientist, but the scientist works in the company's Chinese division.
3: A foreign company hires the Chinese scientist, and employs him overseas.
I hope you realize the first option is the best. There is nothing the government can do to stop the competition created by these new scientists, and nothing it can do to prevent wage deflation because of it. It should give up trying.
If, for national security reasons or some other random excuse, the government feels it important to have lots of native-born scientists, it will have to tackle the problem at the graduate level. Asking talented 22-30 year olds to slog through 6+ years of 70h weeks for a wage topped by the guy cleaning the toilets, while a lawyer is making $75k at age 25, is pure silliness. Making graduate school less financially miserable would be a start. Of course, it is too late for me.
You can sample the music on such places as iTunes, the store, or the band's website. Your laziness is not an excuse to break the law.
Your latter point is irrelevant. The question is do these people buy more or less than they would without file sharing. The answer is almost assuredly less. All your point boils down to is "people who like music are both more likely to buy music and download music".
Logically, you have C causing A and B, and are trying to infer a causation between A and B, due to their correlation via C.
The RIAA is not even within a country mile of "bad faith".
Nor are they likely to lose most of these cases, as the people are guilty of breaking the law. This should be obvious, regardless of whether you like the law or not.
Any article that starts out by whining about someone's physical handicaps, when they clearly have nothing to do with the matter at hand is a priori full of "#$". How on earth are physical health problems related to one's guilt or innocence with respect to copyright law? The answer? Not at all. Hence, the author starts his argument with a laughably idiotic argument, and that sets the tone for the rest of the article.
In any case, finding a half-dozen sap stories of possible mistaken identity out of 14,000 is not surprising at all. Even in these cases, many of them just look like the parents were not paying due diligence to the children's habits.
The analysis I have seen did not make such an assumption, though "hours worked" is never easy to measure for salaried workers. Ironically, it is usually the teacher's union that makes such an assumption about everyone else. Most non-teaching professionals put in much more than 40h, but the unions almost always assume it is 40 when making their comparisons. The studies I remember estimated that a teacher works about 80-85% of the total hours per year as compared to other professionals. They work somewhat more than the average hours per week, but work far fewer weeks per year.
Ultimately, though, I think that the pay scales need to be changed. Just about every organization in the country (public and private) except K-12 schools have figured out how to fairly pay their best workers more than their worst. We shouldn't be surprised that when our K-12 schools fail to do this, they can't attract many good workers!
Some possible ideas:
1: Pay teachers more in difficult to teach subjects and schools. Science, math, and special ed are facing severe shortages. Elementary ed, English, and history are facing huge surpluses. This is the result of ignoring economics. Likewise, good, experienced teachers flee the toughest schools where the children have the most need, precisely because the transition is either pay-neutral (in district) or pay-positive (out of district). We need to be attracting good teachers to bad schools with higher pay.
2: Even out the pay scales. The biggest barrier to entry into the profession is the low beginning salary. Evidence indicates that quality of teaching rises rapidly for the first few years and then levels off pretty quickly. There is no reason for huge, back-loaded pay raises, where the people with 25 years are making more than double than those with 5 years, if the results are nearly the same. Instead of ranging from 30k-80k, maybe 40k-60k is more justified (keeping the same average, of course).
3: Reward relevant job experience. This interacts strongly with the previous point. You cannot expect mid-career professionals to switch to the bottom of the pay scale. Their experience is relevant and should not be ignored.
4: Incorporate more measures of quality - student performance, peer review, quality of the teacher's education, etc. Northeastern Kansas State - Southfield ain't Harvard.
Studies have found that average teacher pay is very competitive on an hourly basis with other, similar professions. Average teacher pay is just fine.
The problems are that it is too heavily back-loaded (starting teachers make squat, old teachers make a mint), that teachers in completely different field earn the same pay (physics is not communications!), and that no regard is given to real-world job experience.
These factors combine to make it almost impossible that someone with a math or science background and years of real job experience would switch to being a teacher. Both their experience and quality degree would be ignored when determining pay, and they would start at the very bottom of a very steep payscale. How many people are going to give up $60k at IMB for $30k as a teacher? Not many.
until school districts start counting years of relevant job experience as part of the determinant of your pay.
Right now, if that engineer from DuPont switches to teaching, she starts at the same point in the pay scale as the 23-year-old with no experience at all. This makes the switch almost impossible, as most people in mid-career cannot/will not give up ten or twenty years worth of raises!
In the economic analyses that I have seen, per hour compensation for teachers is very competitive for similar professions. Average teacher pay is not a problem.
What is a problem is the distribution of that money. Essentially, these are the only two factors that matter in determining your pay in almost every district:
1: Highest degree earned
2: Number of years as a teacher
That it is. Nothing else matters. So some fresh new fool with a BA in communications from Directional State University and a 2.5 GPA is going to get the same pay as a 55-year old manager from IBM, who had had (long ago) a 3.8 GPA from Princeton in Applied Mathematics.
I am sure you can see what the problem is. This is compounded by the fact that teacher pay in almost every district is extremely backloaded. While that average you cited looks nice, you have to slog through a decade of $30-5k/year to get it. Retirement benefits are also heavily backloaded.
It is the unions who are creating this problem. The absurd pay-scales they have created effectively make it impossible to recruit large numbers of math and science majors. Until the pay system is changed, all the blathering in the world will not change this.
Which is to whom I was refering!
When I was a kid, I was a hardcore video game fanatic. In the last few years, though I have pretty much quit playing games entirely. When my friends ask why, I point out one major reason - there are no new games! In my opinion, there has been nothing almost new since Wolfenstein, Warcraft, 3D-platformers, and the old text-based MMORPGs. Everything since has just been prettier pictures plastered atop the same old crap.
Sony and Microsoft are banking on doing the boring - even prettier pictures, the same old games.
Nintendo is bringing us - NEW GAMES.
Sony and Microsoft are going to be scrambling to catch up. I wonder what sort of patents Nintendo is holding...
Maybe rather than trying to conceal this sort of information, we should be working to make it useless.
In constrast to most /. types, I have pretty much given up on "privacy" in this sense. We live in a world that is becoming more and more connected and wired every day. Within that context, it becomes more and more possible for people to obtain information about one another. Perhaps we should be thinking more about how to embrace this reality rather than fruitlessly attempting to resist it. Just a thought...
but I am sure it ain't right. Check the historical budget tables at www.omb.gov. NIH and NSF are doing just fine, thank you very much. Unfortunately, most of the data is not adjusted for inflation but the increases are so large that it is obvious that it is greater than inflation (around 2-3% year, or 25% over ten).
Also, how precisely are you measuring "provision to society"? If you are making claims about it, you should have a good answer.
However, you may get rich in the science business, as you apparently have done. Congratulations.
The reality is that if you work in the lab, your salary will be good, but smaller that it would have been if you had become a doctor, lawyer, MBA, etc, especially when you consider the long time it takes to get your PhD (and post-doc, and second post-doc....)
Not many Americans are entering scientific fields for a darned good reason, I think. I wouldn't repeat my choice, knowing what I know now.
But I don't think anything based on simple word correlations can do a good job, Google or otherwise.
Right now, I understand about 50% of a typical native Japanese conversation. However, this number is strongly dependant on context. If I am present for the beginning of a conversation, and know who/what/where/when is being talked about, I usually can follow the conversation. However, if I enter in the middle of the conversation, I usually cannot enter it, precisely because I am missing all of this context. That, combined with the words or expressions I do not yet understand, leaves me in a muddle.
It is my opinion that a key to understanding and translation is precisely this context - who is speaking, who the audience is (both within and outside of the text), where these people are, what relationships they have, etc. Therefore, any system which wants to translate must have a method for codifying such things, or its translations will always be garbage.
Natural language is built upon context - who is speaking to whom, where they are located, tone and body language, and the meanings they are trying to convey. Simply mapping correlations between words in one language and another will get you nowhere. Better versions of Babelfish will still be babble.
I am currently living in Japan and learning the language. Here is a simple phrase that I was thinking about the other night...pretty much first-year college level Japanese.
Japanese version:
Itta koto ga aru
English version:
I/he/she/they have been (t)here before
or
Have you been there before?
The latter translation is correct if said with a rising tone of voice.
Note that I have just listed nine completely correct translations of a very simple Japanese sentence, all of which differ based on context - who is speaking to whom, their current location relative to the one in question, and tone of voice. A human reading a passage containing "itta goto ga aru" would know all of this information and correctly translate with ease. We are a long way from having a computer that can do such.
Even ignoring these problems, just to illustrate the difficulties of translation from vastly differing languages, I will explain the Japanese phrase.
"itta" means "went"
"koto" turns a verb into a noun. In this case, "experience" is probably the best single-word translation. It can also mean "idea", "process", or "concept".
"ga" has no translation into English whatsoever. It marks the topic of the sentence - in this case, "itta koto", the experience of having went.
"aru" implies existence.
Note that the natural Japanese sentence does not contain the subject of the sentence (I/you/he/she/etc) nor the implied location (here or there). The English version would use pronouns in these places. The translator needs to know this when translating, inserting them into the English from nothing in the Japanese, while dropping them in the reverse case. The translator needs to understand not only that Japanese rarely use pronouns, but it also needs to know when they do need to be used. If it turned every English pronoun into the corresponding Japanese, it would be wrong. If it threw them all out, it would be wrong. Instead, it must decide based on context whether they are necessary - and trust me, this is not easy at all.
Language processing is still a million miles off, and analyzing a mountain of text is only a fraction of the solution.
and don't own expensive speakers. Nor do I care. I was simply making a point that audiophiles' hatred of Bose is predictable.
To the extent that I know anything about speakers, I thought Denon and Onkyo were in the same price range as Bose (typically, the upper end of what you would find at Best Buy or Curcuit City, which is what I mean by "mainstream"). Marantz is rather far up the chain for the label of mainstream, though they do dabble in some mid/high priced models.
Both of these responses are exactly the things that XYZ-philes always say.
Bose occupies a niche at the upper end of the mainstream. They are a little more expensive and defnitely better than the cheap crap that most people buy. Every market has such a company or two. The XYZ-philes always attack such companies with the line "but here is some obscure product that is both cheaper and infinitely better".
Thanks for making my point, guys.
by their inevitable disdain of mid-high quality but mainstream XYZ products.
Whether we are talking about speakers, wine, chocolate, cars, or golf clubs, there is nothing the aficionado hates more than anything in his or her realm of expertise that is pretty good and reasonably priced, as it undermines the value of their hard-earned knowledge.
1: Define "neocon".
2: Cite some specific examples of whom you are referring to.
3: Cite some specific quotes by these people backing up your childish, absurd claims about them.
4: Demonstrate that these particular fools have both the power and will to execute their idiotic claims.
5: Demonstrate that the public support for such people is great enough that their words are likely to result in actions by others.
Until you can do this, your absurd cries of "moral equivalence" are meaningless. Note that all of these unquestionably apply for Osama, if you substitute "neocon" with "Muslim Terrorist".