Not being a US citizen: I would love to immigrate to the US. Here in Australia, people cheer at the destruction of their own liberty and demand more. All for safety and security of course. In the US you have the same, but you also seem to have fairly large amounts of people who are prepared to stand up for liberty. Here I have difficulty even finding people who understand the concept of liberty and how far we have departed from it, let alone agreeing that we ought to do something about it.
The US isn't perfect, but my appraisal of the situation is that in the US you have a chance, elsewhere, not so much.
the human brain has about 100 billion neurons. Each neuron doesn't have a single on/off state either, but a collection of chemical and hormonal states. And each neuron is connected to hundreds of neighboring neurons instead of just a couple in the case of a CPU. The complexity is unfathomable.
Except when we claim to have a good enough understanding of it to rule out free will?
Should a supreme being decide to throw the rule book out the window, do all kinds of crazy shit, but then (being omnipotent), change everything around so we didnt see any of it then we'd be none the wiser.
If said creator presumably wrote the rule book, could also have done the alleged "all kinds of crazy shit" before the rules were in place, therefore not violating any rules.
They [religions] should make clear that they prefer a book
I take it you are referring to the bible here. You've got it all wrong. Most (christian) religions don't want you to have anything more than a very superficial knowledge of the bible. You wouldn't believe the preacher then. I've also heard from Christian missionaries in two countries who claim that the easiest way to convert muslims away is to read the Quran to them. When they find out what is in it, many leave the religion.
Do the numbers on those killed in wars due to communism and I think you'll find contention for the #1 spot. Admittedly partly because of the higher population as those wars happened and the current religious wars are not a full scale world war yet, but still, absence of religion doesn't seem to solve the problem of war.
The use of the word natural often makes a distinction between human and not human. An ant mount is natural, a house is artificial. In the context of the post I was replying to, wild populations available to be hunted are natural and therefore good, animals available for food due to animal husbandry are artificial and therefore bad.
There's no "supposed to" that says we should have six-billion people. This isn't a number we reached because it was a good idea, but the consequence of sex being so much fun.
The AC's position is pure foolishness, who has the time to do detailed rebutals. There is no indication that human population will suffer a Malthusian catastrophe as a result of living above the constraints of hunter/gatherer food production.
If there isn't enough natural-born prey to hunt (ie: without resorting to breeding) and/or fauna to pick, then a larger population is _not supposed to exist_!
Supposed by whom? God? You? Who is this supposer that requires human populations to not exist except by hunter/gatherer subsistence, and why should we follow his dictates? We don't live by natural means. Artificial means made by human skill or produced by humans. By definition pretty much everything we do is not natural. Get used to it.
If someone busts his ass producing something, he has the right to determine what to do with it. If he wants to give it away, fine. If he wants to restrict it a million different ways, fine. It's his work, so it's his choice.
But if I buy something, I am paying for it with the product of my work (the money). I don't get to determine what the copyright owner can do with the money I gave them, why should they get to determine what I can do with the product I bought? Now really I know why but the reason comes down to that it is a social contract. Arguing copyright as a natural right rather than a social contract is destroying the copyright system.
To the extent that content producers could be said to have any natural right to control their work after releasing it, their natural right to control their work is in conflict with my natural right to use my computer and the internet (copying machine and distribution network). It is very common in humans that when parties rights are in conflict, they all give precedence to their own rights. So arguing for copyright as a natural right is doomed to fail. Arguing for copyright as a social contract has good prospects for success but the copyright holders need to be offering terms a lot more reasonable for people to be willing to voluntarily cooperate with the system. Lets get at it.
Enforcement is another issue. You need widespread agreement to cooperate with the copyright system or you need to implement it by force. If you don't have cooperation, the measures needed to enforce it (trusted computing etc) will be a large step towards the end of a free society. So in essence we have three choices:
1) Reduce the copyright terms to the point that people will largely voluntarily follow them.
2) Have no effective copyright.
3) Help bring about the end of free societies to have copyright.
Granted, trusted computing, DRM are only some of the steps that will end freedom as we know it, but they do go along that path, and other steps are already being taken (various laws I shouldn't need to point out as they are widely discussed). Option 3 should be unacceptable to everyone, option 2 is unacceptable to many who wish to copyright their work. Only option 1 seems viable to me.
Little, I gather. Look on all of the major torrent sites and you'll see stuff on them day and date with release. This is not people protesting against unfair copyright laws but people who see it as them getting what they want for free.
That's not necessarily a reliable indicator though. If people consider the "copyright social contract" to be broken by the copyright holders, they will not necessarily continue to abide by the original terms of that contract, but may also treat the "exclusive rights" terms as void just as the "limited time" term is being treated as void.
Right now, as far as I am aware, there is no difference in penalty for downloading a new movie or a 20 year old one. If you've decided to treat current copyright law as invalid, for what reason would you only download older movies? I think that if all movies over 14 years old were public domain that plenty of people would choose a 14 year old legal download in preference to a new illegal one. Really, even if movies that old were available as paid ($1-$2) downloads, DRM free, I'm sure that would get significant "market share" away from illegal downloads.
Ron Paul's strategy is interesting (even if you don't find his policies and ideology so), infiltrate, influence and take over one of the popular two. I'll be interested to see how it works out over then next 10-15 years, as it was obvious from quite early on that he didn't really mean to win the presidency but to pack the republican party with libertarians.
Troll? The parent poster claimed that Jews are colonists and the Palestinians are the indigenous population. This is a blatant lie, the Jews have been there also for thousands of years. Whatever you think of Israeli politics, characterizing the (re)establishment of the state of Israel as an foreign colonisation is such inflammatory bullshit that it has to be called out. If that's trolling, expect more of it from me.
If I have to tolerate such blatant lying to keep my karma, then karma be damned.
The one who holds the gun is the one making the decisions.
I take it you are opposed to gun bans then, and believe that the citizens of a country should be armed.
No sane person is going to say "No" to a man with a gun, a badge, and government backed authority to shoot.
The SEOL Act hasn't passed yet (Summary Execution Of Librarians) it's still being debated in Congress, so the FBI doesn't yet have authority to shoot librarians for requiring a warrant to search etc.
Dude, it's not the Israeli Jews who will suffer here. It's the indigenous population. The Palestinians.
WTF? Go get a date on that wailing wall, then come back with who are the colonists and who are indigenous. You'd need to have no knowledge of history at all to claim that Israel is a colonist state of Jews invading someone else's homeland, unless you're going to claim that everyone in the world who is not living where there ancestors where 3000+ years ago is not in their homeland.
Yes, I'm aware that Palestinians have been there for some time, it's a difficult situation.
I'm not at all anti-semitic, but I don't believe for one minute that powerful Jews won't oppress less powerful Jews. The Nazi state was overall an oppressive state, not only to the Jews. The methods they used ought to be well noted by all people who desire to live in political freedom, regardless of whether or not genocide is likely to be an aspect of the threatened oppression. The lessons we can learn from what happened are not only about Jews and not only about genocide. And no, I'm not a leftist.
Ownership is not the test. Let's say you bring a utility bill to work with the intention of purchasing a stamp for the letter. Your boss sees the envelope and demands to see it. Until it has a stamp on it, the boss could insist on opening and examining the envelope to insure it doesn't contain any trade secrets. Once a stamp is on it, it gains Federal protection, in most cases.
And yet if that envelope is a company branded envelope, the boss can still open it, being company mail. Ownership is still a test, perhaps not the test, as you say. Probably until it has a stamp it doesn't qualify as mail and therefore comes under different laws, I don't know, it hasn't been a problem for me.
Best bet is to leave the personal stuff at home or find a more open-minded employer.
The difference is in who owns the mail. Send a personal letter, your company can't open it. Send a letter on company letterhead and they can. I think you'd find a different response in court to the company accessing your personal email account than when they access your company email account.
When I log on to the company network, there's a pop-up which states [paraphrased] "We watch everything you do and can read every file and email, this is for work, not personal use." There is some tolerance for personal use in practise, but if you use it for something you'd be upset about them seeing it would have to be your own fault in my opinion.
Try explaining this to most people, though, and see how far you get. Instead of saying "the power to change things for the better is in my hands" they say "so you're trying to blame this all on me?!" and they completely miss the point.
I've found this too. It only really seems to work if you have a very solid relationship with that person so they are confident of your goodwill. Possibly talking about it in relation to events that are long gone would evoke a less emotional response, or in relation to something that happened to someone else, so they can understand the principle without getting upset before applying it to their own situation.
It's disheartening because the way most people respond to anyone who says this leads me to believe that most of them want to be victims.
I think it's to do with people's focus, past or future. For someone focussed on the past, since it can't be changed the only thing left is to apportion blame. Their self respect demands that they are not to blame. For someone focussed on the future, they want to influence that future for their benefit so they seek responsibility (the ability to respond). Their self respect demands that they do all they can. How to change this focus in someone else? I don't know.
Hey, I want car thieves caught too, however I also recognise that freedom for citizens requires restraint on government power. The trick is finding an acceptable balance so that you have a government that can be effective but not oppressive. If you look at the bill of rights, they all make things more difficult for the government.
Any government will be imperfect, that being the nature of people, and will have some degree of ineffectiveness and oppressiveness. In my opinion, the balance is leaning to far to the oppressiveness side at the moment. Correcting that will unfortunately have some undesirable side-effects by decreasing the effectiveness in catching criminals. Like side effects of medications, that's a price worth paying in a lot of cases.
No, he stated that the ones he knew had "a chemical or alcohol abuse problem" which is not a statement that "each unlawful motorist [in existence] is also a drug or alcohol addict".
wouldn't uploading one's own copyrighted music imply the conveyance of legal right to have that music?
Nope, you need explicit approval.
If the RIAA tried that argument in court, I imagine it could be used as a defence against infringement suits also. "I didn't give them explicit approval to download that song from my computer, I just posted a torrent, same as copyright holders do when they don't want you to download". In the end, they won't be able to have it both ways.
What if my business isn't sustainable with a 5% profit margin?
Why exactly wouldn't it be?
Companies compete for investors (the ones who provide the capital your proposed 5% is made from). Low profitability compared to other companies means low capital means shrinking business. Like, not sustainable.
So in the case of big-oil, record profits are just that: an opportunity for them to grow and to further line the pockets of shareholders and investors.
Yes, shareholders and investors. Like the company that manages your retirement fund, for example.
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Not being a US citizen: I would love to immigrate to the US. Here in Australia, people cheer at the destruction of their own liberty and demand more. All for safety and security of course. In the US you have the same, but you also seem to have fairly large amounts of people who are prepared to stand up for liberty. Here I have difficulty even finding people who understand the concept of liberty and how far we have departed from it, let alone agreeing that we ought to do something about it.
The US isn't perfect, but my appraisal of the situation is that in the US you have a chance, elsewhere, not so much.
the human brain has about 100 billion neurons. Each neuron doesn't have a single on/off state either, but a collection of chemical and hormonal states. And each neuron is connected to hundreds of neighboring neurons instead of just a couple in the case of a CPU. The complexity is unfathomable.
Except when we claim to have a good enough understanding of it to rule out free will?
Should a supreme being decide to throw the rule book out the window, do all kinds of crazy shit, but then (being omnipotent), change everything around so we didnt see any of it then we'd be none the wiser.
If said creator presumably wrote the rule book, could also have done the alleged "all kinds of crazy shit" before the rules were in place, therefore not violating any rules.
They [religions] should make clear that they prefer a book
I take it you are referring to the bible here. You've got it all wrong. Most (christian) religions don't want you to have anything more than a very superficial knowledge of the bible. You wouldn't believe the preacher then. I've also heard from Christian missionaries in two countries who claim that the easiest way to convert muslims away is to read the Quran to them. When they find out what is in it, many leave the religion.
Do the numbers on those killed in wars due to communism and I think you'll find contention for the #1 spot. Admittedly partly because of the higher population as those wars happened and the current religious wars are not a full scale world war yet, but still, absence of religion doesn't seem to solve the problem of war.
That would make them wrong about the characteristics, not the existence, of a supreme being.
Or rather, everything we do is natural.
The use of the word natural often makes a distinction between human and not human. An ant mount is natural, a house is artificial. In the context of the post I was replying to, wild populations available to be hunted are natural and therefore good, animals available for food due to animal husbandry are artificial and therefore bad.
There's no "supposed to" that says we should have six-billion people. This isn't a number we reached because it was a good idea, but the consequence of sex being so much fun.
Sex was fun for a long time without reaching these population levels. I suspect the invention of the Haber-Bosch process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber-Bosch_process had a bit to do with it as well. You know, the whole artificial thing.
The AC's position is pure foolishness, who has the time to do detailed rebutals. There is no indication that human population will suffer a Malthusian catastrophe as a result of living above the constraints of hunter/gatherer food production.
If there isn't enough natural-born prey to hunt (ie: without resorting to breeding) and/or fauna to pick, then a larger population is _not supposed to exist_!
Supposed by whom? God? You? Who is this supposer that requires human populations to not exist except by hunter/gatherer subsistence, and why should we follow his dictates? We don't live by natural means. Artificial means made by human skill or produced by humans. By definition pretty much everything we do is not natural. Get used to it.
If they are starving, it's because they don't have sufficient resources to sustain their current population.
Actually, it can be that their resources are sufficient to sustain their lives, but at the same time they are paying usury to foreign banks.
If someone busts his ass producing something, he has the right to determine what to do with it. If he wants to give it away, fine. If he wants to restrict it a million different ways, fine. It's his work, so it's his choice.
But if I buy something, I am paying for it with the product of my work (the money). I don't get to determine what the copyright owner can do with the money I gave them, why should they get to determine what I can do with the product I bought? Now really I know why but the reason comes down to that it is a social contract. Arguing copyright as a natural right rather than a social contract is destroying the copyright system.
To the extent that content producers could be said to have any natural right to control their work after releasing it, their natural right to control their work is in conflict with my natural right to use my computer and the internet (copying machine and distribution network). It is very common in humans that when parties rights are in conflict, they all give precedence to their own rights. So arguing for copyright as a natural right is doomed to fail. Arguing for copyright as a social contract has good prospects for success but the copyright holders need to be offering terms a lot more reasonable for people to be willing to voluntarily cooperate with the system. Lets get at it.
Enforcement is another issue. You need widespread agreement to cooperate with the copyright system or you need to implement it by force. If you don't have cooperation, the measures needed to enforce it (trusted computing etc) will be a large step towards the end of a free society. So in essence we have three choices:
1) Reduce the copyright terms to the point that people will largely voluntarily follow them.
2) Have no effective copyright.
3) Help bring about the end of free societies to have copyright.
Granted, trusted computing, DRM are only some of the steps that will end freedom as we know it, but they do go along that path, and other steps are already being taken (various laws I shouldn't need to point out as they are widely discussed). Option 3 should be unacceptable to everyone, option 2 is unacceptable to many who wish to copyright their work. Only option 1 seems viable to me.
Little, I gather. Look on all of the major torrent sites and you'll see stuff on them day and date with release. This is not people protesting against unfair copyright laws but people who see it as them getting what they want for free.
That's not necessarily a reliable indicator though. If people consider the "copyright social contract" to be broken by the copyright holders, they will not necessarily continue to abide by the original terms of that contract, but may also treat the "exclusive rights" terms as void just as the "limited time" term is being treated as void.
Right now, as far as I am aware, there is no difference in penalty for downloading a new movie or a 20 year old one. If you've decided to treat current copyright law as invalid, for what reason would you only download older movies? I think that if all movies over 14 years old were public domain that plenty of people would choose a 14 year old legal download in preference to a new illegal one. Really, even if movies that old were available as paid ($1-$2) downloads, DRM free, I'm sure that would get significant "market share" away from illegal downloads.
Ron Paul's strategy is interesting (even if you don't find his policies and ideology so), infiltrate, influence and take over one of the popular two. I'll be interested to see how it works out over then next 10-15 years, as it was obvious from quite early on that he didn't really mean to win the presidency but to pack the republican party with libertarians.
Probably not, as the stamp doesn't identify the sender as the company, the letterhead etc does. It would just mean it was a stolen stamp.
Troll? The parent poster claimed that Jews are colonists and the Palestinians are the indigenous population. This is a blatant lie, the Jews have been there also for thousands of years. Whatever you think of Israeli politics, characterizing the (re)establishment of the state of Israel as an foreign colonisation is such inflammatory bullshit that it has to be called out. If that's trolling, expect more of it from me.
If I have to tolerate such blatant lying to keep my karma, then karma be damned.
The one who holds the gun is the one making the decisions.
I take it you are opposed to gun bans then, and believe that the citizens of a country should be armed.
No sane person is going to say "No" to a man with a gun, a badge, and government backed authority to shoot.
The SEOL Act hasn't passed yet (Summary Execution Of Librarians) it's still being debated in Congress, so the FBI doesn't yet have authority to shoot librarians for requiring a warrant to search etc.
Dude, it's not the Israeli Jews who will suffer here. It's the indigenous population. The Palestinians.
WTF? Go get a date on that wailing wall, then come back with who are the colonists and who are indigenous. You'd need to have no knowledge of history at all to claim that Israel is a colonist state of Jews invading someone else's homeland, unless you're going to claim that everyone in the world who is not living where there ancestors where 3000+ years ago is not in their homeland.
Yes, I'm aware that Palestinians have been there for some time, it's a difficult situation.
I'm not at all anti-semitic, but I don't believe for one minute that powerful Jews won't oppress less powerful Jews. The Nazi state was overall an oppressive state, not only to the Jews. The methods they used ought to be well noted by all people who desire to live in political freedom, regardless of whether or not genocide is likely to be an aspect of the threatened oppression. The lessons we can learn from what happened are not only about Jews and not only about genocide. And no, I'm not a leftist.
Ownership is not the test. Let's say you bring a utility bill to work with the intention of purchasing a stamp for the letter. Your boss sees the envelope and demands to see it. Until it has a stamp on it, the boss could insist on opening and examining the envelope to insure it doesn't contain any trade secrets. Once a stamp is on it, it gains Federal protection, in most cases.
And yet if that envelope is a company branded envelope, the boss can still open it, being company mail. Ownership is still a test, perhaps not the test, as you say. Probably until it has a stamp it doesn't qualify as mail and therefore comes under different laws, I don't know, it hasn't been a problem for me.
Best bet is to leave the personal stuff at home or find a more open-minded employer.
Spot on.
The difference is in who owns the mail. Send a personal letter, your company can't open it. Send a letter on company letterhead and they can. I think you'd find a different response in court to the company accessing your personal email account than when they access your company email account.
When I log on to the company network, there's a pop-up which states [paraphrased] "We watch everything you do and can read every file and email, this is for work, not personal use." There is some tolerance for personal use in practise, but if you use it for something you'd be upset about them seeing it would have to be your own fault in my opinion.
Try explaining this to most people, though, and see how far you get. Instead of saying "the power to change things for the better is in my hands" they say "so you're trying to blame this all on me?!" and they completely miss the point.
I've found this too. It only really seems to work if you have a very solid relationship with that person so they are confident of your goodwill. Possibly talking about it in relation to events that are long gone would evoke a less emotional response, or in relation to something that happened to someone else, so they can understand the principle without getting upset before applying it to their own situation.
It's disheartening because the way most people respond to anyone who says this leads me to believe that most of them want to be victims.
I think it's to do with people's focus, past or future. For someone focussed on the past, since it can't be changed the only thing left is to apportion blame. Their self respect demands that they are not to blame. For someone focussed on the future, they want to influence that future for their benefit so they seek responsibility (the ability to respond). Their self respect demands that they do all they can. How to change this focus in someone else? I don't know.
Hey, I want car thieves caught too, however I also recognise that freedom for citizens requires restraint on government power. The trick is finding an acceptable balance so that you have a government that can be effective but not oppressive. If you look at the bill of rights, they all make things more difficult for the government.
Any government will be imperfect, that being the nature of people, and will have some degree of ineffectiveness and oppressiveness. In my opinion, the balance is leaning to far to the oppressiveness side at the moment. Correcting that will unfortunately have some undesirable side-effects by decreasing the effectiveness in catching criminals. Like side effects of medications, that's a price worth paying in a lot of cases.
In the end, freedom only works if free people act in a responsible manner.
So all I need, if I wish to take away freedom on the basis of it "not working", is to induce some people to act irresponsibly.
No, he stated that the ones he knew had "a chemical or alcohol abuse problem" which is not a statement that "each unlawful motorist [in existence] is also a drug or alcohol addict".
If the RIAA tried that argument in court, I imagine it could be used as a defence against infringement suits also. "I didn't give them explicit approval to download that song from my computer, I just posted a torrent, same as copyright holders do when they don't want you to download". In the end, they won't be able to have it both ways.
Companies compete for investors (the ones who provide the capital your proposed 5% is made from). Low profitability compared to other companies means low capital means shrinking business. Like, not sustainable.
Yes, shareholders and investors. Like the company that manages your retirement fund, for example.