You know, your argument would have a little more "oomph" behind it if allofmp3.com was actually breaking the law - in Russia, where they are located. Since they're satisfying their home country's laws & being good entrepreneurs by providing a _legal_ service that people are willing to pay for, then you're happy with them, right? Or are you just a hypocrite willing to use any means to rationalise sacrificing private property rights in the name of IP?
"Intellectual Property" is _socialism_, not free market. It's an artificial restriction placed on private property rights to support a social experiment (supposedly encouraging creativity and innovation), although many people seem to have accepted it as dogma & a "right" rather than actually verifying that it is doing what it was supposed to do.
Considering that one of the constants that they are talking about include the speed of light, what these guys are saying has a great deal of effect on the validity of Einstein's observations, since a lot of them started specifically with the assumption that the speed of light is constant in all frames of reference.
Employer: That's not what I fucking hired them for, they're here to work for me.
Employee: "Employer is an asshole. I hate this job. I wonder how much I can slack off without getting fired - hell, even if I get fired I'd be just as happy. I wonder if Employer knows about Joe embezzling company funds? Hell, it's not my money...who gives a damn about that asshole Employer, serve'm right to go bankrupt..."
Any employer with the attitude you have described is basically incompetent, and will receive the quality of services from their employees that the employer deserves.
Well, we could compile a list of desirable characteristics of a patent system & see if there's any model that fits those characteristics.
For one thing, any good patent system should severely limit the total number of valid patents (perhaps with some constant limit). Not only would this make the patent database a helluva lot easier to search, but if there were some kind of competitive process for ideas to get one of those rare patent "slots", then the resultant due diligence would greatly reduce the number of bad patents which are currently granted willy-nilly.
Nah, people understand the functioning of lie detectors pretty well - they just don't like to say that the typical lie detector isn't very good at detecting whether somebody is lying or not.
IMO, the _real_ value behind a lie detector is provided more by the intimidation factor & how talented the guy behind the detector is at watching the reactions of the interrogatee, rather than any real information derived from the detector itself.
That said there is a significant transmission loss, both resistive and capacitive, to running power through underground conduit versus overhead lines.
Huh? Unless they're using a completely different kind of wire for each, what would cause a change in transmission capability between being underground or overhead?
I'm the same way, not a fan at all, but, I do wonder at what point, what would prevent MS from basically thumbing their nose at EU, and saying fine, we'll just withdraw all new products from you market...and if things got worse, just plain stop supporting the products currently out there in EU.
That doesn't work with "intellectual property" products, since there's no practical way for Microsoft to stop the distribution of the product into the EU if the government(s) don't cooperate.
If they (MS) tried to do something like removing all their product from the EU, the EU could simply declare anything produced by Microsoft to be in the "public domain", and a whole service industry would grow up over importing, supporting & customizing Microsoft products, without having to bother with any restrictions by Microsoft.
Of course, this would be an utterly extreme course of action for both Microsoft & the EU government(s) (it would probably spark a trade war of some kind at the very least), but there is no way that companies whose business models depend on "intellectual property" can win if the host government(s) refuse to support their IP rights.
It _does_ sounds like you have a fundamental misunderstanding about (or are deliberately rejecting) the difference between real property, and intellectual "property".
Some of that misunderstanding seems to be supported by your desire to maintain a business model that you are benefiting from, where you have rationalised that since that business model helps you, it is somehow magically a net benefit to society for such business models to exist.
1. It requires the use of an arbitrary legal definition (not related to the free market ideal of providing desired goods or services for acceptable compensation) to create a form of artificial scarcity.
2. It requires the use of government power to enforce adherence to that arbitrary legal definition (since in a free market most people wouldn't see the point of giving up their rights over their own personal property without being compensated for it in some manner).
3. The original motivation behind the mechanism was (supposedly) to encourage societal creativity.
All of these characteristics scream socialism (e.g., trying to encourage certain kinds of social & economic behavior using govermental influence) no matter how you cut it.
If you think that anybody fighting for their rights -- whether they're a big media conglomerate, or a poet making $50 a year -- is out of line, or if you believe that any organization made up of initials and which fights for copyright protection is evil (the "the artists are greedy" camp), then this news may upset you.
Nice false choices there - how 'bout people who simply believe that free market economics should be allowed to have a chance, and that "IP" laws are socialistic and create false value which wouldn't otherwise exist?
No, I understand the reference, but you're just being unnecessarily inflammatory.
I was asking whether or not someone would be happier about the estate tax if they had control over which charities or public services that the money went to (although still not being allowed to pass it all as an inheritance), rather than just giving the money to the government.
Lining the pockets of the rich wouldn't hurt the economy if the rich also spent all that money pretty quickly rather than tying up large amounts of money in their bank accounts.
That's a big IF, and not necessarily true. You also have to depend on rich people having the desire, and being able to determine where the best place to spend that money is, in order to stimulate the economy. That's coming dangerously close to the type of reasoning that says that a central command-and-control economic bureaucracy will do better at allocating resources than a free market.
It's _much_ more effective for a government to stimulate the economy by paying for low-level infrastructure labor. As I stated previously, not only are such people much more likely to spend every extra dollar they get, but the extra infrastructure will help _everyone_ (and make people happier about paying taxes since they'll see more evidence that the taxes are being spent on them), make lots of business opportunities (because of the lots of people with more money to spend), and will help reduce the economic-class-stratification-effect that a completely free-market has a tendency to encourage.
I have a great deal of skepticism about any government policy that caters to the rich. In my mind, the rich don't need any help - as long as the government isn't actively trying to crush them, they have plenty of resources to help themselves. Anybody who actually seriously cares about the health of the society should be concentrating on policies which help the lower & middle economic classes.
It's actually a useful principle when trying to decide which politicians I can stand to vote for - if their rhetoric AND their actions indicate they are primarily trying to help the lower & middle economic classes, but they're not really being demagogues trying to incite a class war against the rich, then I figure they're probably reasonable people who are trying to think about what's best for society. Unfortunately, such figures seem to be pretty few & far between.
in the other the govt buys stuff they don't really need in order to increase demand and indirectly having money go from the govt to the economy
I suspect that the more likely reason is to be able to "redistribute wealth" from the taxpayers to cronies & big campaign contributors. The "it's good for the economy" reason is just a rationalisation to divert peoples' attention from who is benefiting the most from those handouts.
If the people in the government _really_ wanted to help the economy, they'd just train & hire more infrastructure grunts (teachers, police officers, fireman, health care workers, etc).
This be a more effective way of injecting cash into the economy (since folks like these are much more likely to spend the extra cash immediately) without supporting welfare. It would encourage upward economic mobility and provide a much better educated & productive labor force.
The stronger infrastructure would also make it easier to do business, and having more people with money to spend would provide more business opportunities.
Of course, given past history, most people are going to rightfully suspect that allocating funds to hire more low-level employees will probably end up expanding the bureaucracy than it would actually hiring actual workers, but instead of making proposals to try and restrict the growth of the bureacracy, the kneejerk reaction is to reduce spending by _cutting_ low-level employees, which has _no_ benefits to the economy and often makes the infrastructure look bad (since it's under increased strain to provide services with less people).
There's nothing you can really do about stupid people who think they aren't, except try to arrange things so that their poor judgement won't affect anyone except themselves.
It's even funnier watching people who are completely clueless about climate science trying to shoot down the studies of people who have spent their whole lives studying it.
The GP sounds like a moron, but I disagree with you slightly: like any professional, the police don't like people getting in the way of them doing what they perceive to be their job, and the more effective you are at getting in their way, the more annoyed that are going to be at you.
If you decide that you're going to be a hero for civil liberties, and happen to run into a cop who's been having a bad day, there are plenty of legal ways (not available to ordinary having-a-bad-day-citizens) that cop can make your life a living hell (if he/she feels like putting forth the effort).
she made the huge mistake of not following policy and notifying the borough's attorney that the subpoena had been served.
Right, like the borough's attorney is going to tell her anything but "do what the police tell you". You don't become a government lawyer because you want to buck the power structure, even if you are technically upholding the law.
And there should be a law that any time a new bill is passed, 2 old bills / laws have to be removed.
I think I mentioned this idea in another thread, but _my_ daydream proposal is to limit the total # of words in all valid laws to some maximum number N (where hopefully N is something reasonably small). When a legislator proposes a change to the laws (either by adding new ones or amending existing ones), the change would have to result in the total # of words fitting under the limit, otherwise the change will be rejected.
You'll also have to fit all of the agency regulations under the limit (otherwise the legislators would just shift all the verbiage into the various agency regulations.)
There's nothing wrong with my imagination - it's just that I have thought through the practicalities/implications of what you are proposing, and you (as you have amply demonstrated), have not.
No, you've pretty much demonstrated your lack of imagination (and as is usual with such an attitude, you are completely oblivious to your own deficiency). You seem to be stuck thinking that any successful space-going colony is going to be just like an ISS-on-steroids.
What part of "city" are you having trouble understanding the scale of? A successful long-term space-colony is going to have upwards of _millions_ of people, not just thousands.
It's not for you to dictate to us what is in our best interests and what is not.
Whoa, I seem to have gotten an implicit upgrade in social status to "Dictator of the World". Since when does expressing a strong opinion suddenly mean I am capable of dictating anything to anyone?
Particularly in comparison with a system that gives early detection of objects on a collision course and diverts the object away. Entirely possible, and with the advantage of being ethical and not monstrous in cynically condemning billions of people/species to death.
Yeah, I think we should be doing that too as a first step into space (more achievable, and would help us work out the kinks in the technology & build the infrastructure).
However, just implementing that kind of system wouldn't help with any other potential global catastrophes like a worldwide plague, or complete environmental collapse, or nuclear war. But hey, it's not like we're cynically condemning all the life on Earth by not trying to establish off-planet "backups".
To sum up your entire response(s): "It's too tough, so we shouldn't do it." I'd guess that you're at no risk of ever been accused of having too much "vision".
Slashdot Mirror
You know, your argument would have a little more "oomph" behind it if allofmp3.com was actually breaking the law - in Russia, where they are located. Since they're satisfying their home country's laws & being good entrepreneurs by providing a _legal_ service that people are willing to pay for, then you're happy with them, right? Or are you just a hypocrite willing to use any means to rationalise sacrificing private property rights in the name of IP?
"Intellectual Property" is _socialism_, not free market. It's an artificial restriction placed on private property rights to support a social experiment (supposedly encouraging creativity and innovation), although many people seem to have accepted it as dogma & a "right" rather than actually verifying that it is doing what it was supposed to do.
allofmp3.com is at least providing a service that people are willing to pay for.
The RIAA & its ilk have to use the power of the government to _force_ people to pay them.
Any true capitalist would know that this is not a viable free-market business model.
Considering that one of the constants that they are talking about include the speed of light, what these guys are saying has a great deal of effect on the validity of Einstein's observations, since a lot of them started specifically with the assumption that the speed of light is constant in all frames of reference.
Lemme guess - the next stage is something even _weirder_ than quantum mechanics...
Employee: "Employer is an asshole. I hate this job. I wonder how much I can slack off without getting fired - hell, even if I get fired I'd be just as happy. I wonder if Employer knows about Joe embezzling company funds? Hell, it's not my money...who gives a damn about that asshole Employer, serve'm right to go bankrupt..."
Any employer with the attitude you have described is basically incompetent, and will receive the quality of services from their employees that the employer deserves.
You have to win a Sudoku game to dial?
Well, we could compile a list of desirable characteristics of a patent system & see if there's any model that fits those characteristics.
For one thing, any good patent system should severely limit the total number of valid patents (perhaps with some constant limit). Not only would this make the patent database a helluva lot easier to search, but if there were some kind of competitive process for ideas to get one of those rare patent "slots", then the resultant due diligence would greatly reduce the number of bad patents which are currently granted willy-nilly.
Since Bush took the White House.
Nah, people understand the functioning of lie detectors pretty well - they just don't like to say that the typical lie detector isn't very good at detecting whether somebody is lying or not.
IMO, the _real_ value behind a lie detector is provided more by the intimidation factor & how talented the guy behind the detector is at watching the reactions of the interrogatee, rather than any real information derived from the detector itself.
Huh? Unless they're using a completely different kind of wire for each, what would cause a change in transmission capability between being underground or overhead?
That doesn't work with "intellectual property" products, since there's no practical way for Microsoft to stop the distribution of the product into the EU if the government(s) don't cooperate.
If they (MS) tried to do something like removing all their product from the EU, the EU could simply declare anything produced by Microsoft to be in the "public domain", and a whole service industry would grow up over importing, supporting & customizing Microsoft products, without having to bother with any restrictions by Microsoft.
Of course, this would be an utterly extreme course of action for both Microsoft & the EU government(s) (it would probably spark a trade war of some kind at the very least), but there is no way that companies whose business models depend on "intellectual property" can win if the host government(s) refuse to support their IP rights.
It _does_ sounds like you have a fundamental misunderstanding about (or are deliberately rejecting) the difference between real property, and intellectual "property".
Some of that misunderstanding seems to be supported by your desire to maintain a business model that you are benefiting from, where you have rationalised that since that business model helps you, it is somehow magically a net benefit to society for such business models to exist.
What part of IP is the epitomy of capitalism?
1. It requires the use of an arbitrary legal definition (not related to the free market ideal of providing desired goods or services for acceptable compensation) to create a form of artificial scarcity.
2. It requires the use of government power to enforce adherence to that arbitrary legal definition (since in a free market most people wouldn't see the point of giving up their rights over their own personal property without being compensated for it in some manner).
3. The original motivation behind the mechanism was (supposedly) to encourage societal creativity.
All of these characteristics scream socialism (e.g., trying to encourage certain kinds of social & economic behavior using govermental influence) no matter how you cut it.
Nice false choices there - how 'bout people who simply believe that free market economics should be allowed to have a chance, and that "IP" laws are socialistic and create false value which wouldn't otherwise exist?
No, I understand the reference, but you're just being unnecessarily inflammatory.
I was asking whether or not someone would be happier about the estate tax if they had control over which charities or public services that the money went to (although still not being allowed to pass it all as an inheritance), rather than just giving the money to the government.
Would you be so against the estate tax if, instead of a tax, the estate tax was implemented as a mandate to donate to charity?
That's a big IF, and not necessarily true. You also have to depend on rich people having the desire, and being able to determine where the best place to spend that money is, in order to stimulate the economy. That's coming dangerously close to the type of reasoning that says that a central command-and-control economic bureaucracy will do better at allocating resources than a free market.
It's _much_ more effective for a government to stimulate the economy by paying for low-level infrastructure labor. As I stated previously, not only are such people much more likely to spend every extra dollar they get, but the extra infrastructure will help _everyone_ (and make people happier about paying taxes since they'll see more evidence that the taxes are being spent on them), make lots of business opportunities (because of the lots of people with more money to spend), and will help reduce the economic-class-stratification-effect that a completely free-market has a tendency to encourage.
I have a great deal of skepticism about any government policy that caters to the rich. In my mind, the rich don't need any help - as long as the government isn't actively trying to crush them, they have plenty of resources to help themselves. Anybody who actually seriously cares about the health of the society should be concentrating on policies which help the lower & middle economic classes.
It's actually a useful principle when trying to decide which politicians I can stand to vote for - if their rhetoric AND their actions indicate they are primarily trying to help the lower & middle economic classes, but they're not really being demagogues trying to incite a class war against the rich, then I figure they're probably reasonable people who are trying to think about what's best for society. Unfortunately, such figures seem to be pretty few & far between.
I suspect that the more likely reason is to be able to "redistribute wealth" from the taxpayers to cronies & big campaign contributors. The "it's good for the economy" reason is just a rationalisation to divert peoples' attention from who is benefiting the most from those handouts.
If the people in the government _really_ wanted to help the economy, they'd just train & hire more infrastructure grunts (teachers, police officers, fireman, health care workers, etc).
This be a more effective way of injecting cash into the economy (since folks like these are much more likely to spend the extra cash immediately) without supporting welfare. It would encourage upward economic mobility and provide a much better educated & productive labor force.
The stronger infrastructure would also make it easier to do business, and having more people with money to spend would provide more business opportunities.
Of course, given past history, most people are going to rightfully suspect that allocating funds to hire more low-level employees will probably end up expanding the bureaucracy than it would actually hiring actual workers, but instead of making proposals to try and restrict the growth of the bureacracy, the kneejerk reaction is to reduce spending by _cutting_ low-level employees, which has _no_ benefits to the economy and often makes the infrastructure look bad (since it's under increased strain to provide services with less people).
There's nothing you can really do about stupid people who think they aren't, except try to arrange things so that their poor judgement won't affect anyone except themselves.
It's even funnier watching people who are completely clueless about climate science trying to shoot down the studies of people who have spent their whole lives studying it.
The GP sounds like a moron, but I disagree with you slightly: like any professional, the police don't like people getting in the way of them doing what they perceive to be their job, and the more effective you are at getting in their way, the more annoyed that are going to be at you.
If you decide that you're going to be a hero for civil liberties, and happen to run into a cop who's been having a bad day, there are plenty of legal ways (not available to ordinary having-a-bad-day-citizens) that cop can make your life a living hell (if he/she feels like putting forth the effort).
Fox "news" is an entertainment company, not a serious news source.
Right, like the borough's attorney is going to tell her anything but "do what the police tell you". You don't become a government lawyer because you want to buck the power structure, even if you are technically upholding the law.
I think I mentioned this idea in another thread, but _my_ daydream proposal is to limit the total # of words in all valid laws to some maximum number N (where hopefully N is something reasonably small). When a legislator proposes a change to the laws (either by adding new ones or amending existing ones), the change would have to result in the total # of words fitting under the limit, otherwise the change will be rejected.
You'll also have to fit all of the agency regulations under the limit (otherwise the legislators would just shift all the verbiage into the various agency regulations.)
No, you've pretty much demonstrated your lack of imagination (and as is usual with such an attitude, you are completely oblivious to your own deficiency). You seem to be stuck thinking that any successful space-going colony is going to be just like an ISS-on-steroids.
What part of "city" are you having trouble understanding the scale of? A successful long-term space-colony is going to have upwards of _millions_ of people, not just thousands.
Whoa, I seem to have gotten an implicit upgrade in social status to "Dictator of the World". Since when does expressing a strong opinion suddenly mean I am capable of dictating anything to anyone?
Yeah, I think we should be doing that too as a first step into space (more achievable, and would help us work out the kinks in the technology & build the infrastructure).
However, just implementing that kind of system wouldn't help with any other potential global catastrophes like a worldwide plague, or complete environmental collapse, or nuclear war. But hey, it's not like we're cynically condemning all the life on Earth by not trying to establish off-planet "backups".
To sum up your entire response(s): "It's too tough, so we shouldn't do it." I'd guess that you're at no risk of ever been accused of having too much "vision".