Well for starters, try this. Hopefully that link stays live - anyway, it's not too hard to Google for HR2929 and look it up. Yes, there are some vagueries in this law (for example, the specifics of what are "deceptive practices" are not fully defined, but quite a few specific practices are enumerated, including some of the most egregious spyware 'features'), but that's a basic necessity since the range of practices is fairly broad. Let a judge decide - frankly, if it's questionable enough that somebody brings a court case about it, I'd say it's pretty certain that it's spyware/malware, given how prevalent this crap is these days.
You can find the enforcement section there too, it's section 4. Multimillion dollar fines are provided for, to be enforced by the FTC.
* Property should be owned by people, not government.
* All voluntary associations should be permissible -- economic and social.
* The government's monetary role is to maintain the integrity of the monetary unit, not participate in fraud.
* Government exists to protect liberty, not to redistribute wealth or to grant special privileges.
* The lives and actions of people are their own responsibility, not the government's.
Gee, almost sounds like a libertarian, right? Then you read stuff like this rant. So in other words, he supports people's rights to all voluntary social and economic associations for certain values of voluntary, namely "socially conservative".
He may be consistent over time, but his statements are mutually and internally inconsistent. If he really believed in social liberty and freedom, he would not describe himself as a cultural or social conservative, which is also translated as "authoritarian". If the lives and actions of people are their own business, why does he care who has sex with whom or how marriage is defined?
Nothing pisses me off as much as Republicans who steal the verbiage of socially liberal positions, and then turn around and disparage the word liberal like it means something dirty by attacking the straw man position that all liberals favor massive redistribution of wealth. I'm also not a libertarian, but if I were I would probably be offended by this guy borrowing my platform and abusing it.
Personally, I have no problem with calling you a musician and artist as the producer, if you are the one primarily responsible for the work. My only issue is with considering a singer to be musically responsible for a piece's goodness or crappiness if they were basically just used as an instrument by a producer. To me, the authenticity is about the attribution of the musicality, not really the nature of the instruments.
In order for this to take off beyond the geek community to average users it needs to be somehow streamed to a easy to use media player or embeded in a webpage.
You mean like Suprnova.org? Lots of bittorrent links embedded in a webpage. I don't understand, how is that harder to use than Kazaa? You just have to know where to go - it's less accessible than Kazaa, yes, but that's a GOOD thing. As soon as things become too centralized and accessible (i.e. widely known) they become a large, easy target. Remember what happened when everybody started using Kazaa? It started sucking with lots of fake music, fake porn, fake warez. And those in the know ditched it ASAP.
The only reason eDonkey has been around so long is that for a long time it was so cryptic to use and configure properly that only the truly |33+ could grok it. These days eMule makes it pretty easy, but still a bit more complex than Kazaa, just enough to put it over the threshold from Joe Average to Joe Modest Poweruser, which is why it's still holding on.
It would be trivial to make something very easy-to-use, slickly marketed, and ubiquitous, but you'd be making yourself a blatant target for litigation and countermeasures.
I thought Nirvana Unplugged was excellent too. It was raw, yes, but very intense. More Nirvana than Nirvana.
Re:More Democratic Market
on
The Long Tail
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· Score: 4, Insightful
While that is true, Sinatra may not have been a great musician to be studied by posterity, but at least he was a singer. He entertained with his voice, by singing good tunes in an aesthetically pleasing manner. The reason Britney Spears and the like get derided is that the talent of singing has taken a backseat to glittery semi-nude outfits and titellation of adult men with teenage booty. Don't get me wrong, I am all for some teenage booty now and then (I think I'm getting too old to say that, so don't arrest me please), but I don't want to turn on my radio and hear these chick singer voices that have to be processed to hell and back again to make them sound aesthetically pleasing.
My metric for this is "would this person be entertaining if you gave them a microphone and a couple of acoustic instruments to back them and sat them down on a stage?" And in the case of nonvocal music, it's a question of whether the music itself is sufficiently enjoyable to stand on its own merit. If neither of these metrics are met, then it may be entertainment but it's not really music. And some pop songs are decently catchy and enjoyable, in *spite of* the singer behind them - you can have a great songwriter or producer behind an otherwise mediocre talent and still come up with something that sounds pretty good. And I can appreciate those songs for what they are, but still dismiss the singer as worthless.
Heh, I've never seen the CIMM before, I like it though. I was involved in a contract project at a CIMM level -1 or -2 organization once, it was the most hellish 4 month experience in my life. Give me a nice disorganized, chaotic but well meaning software development shop any day over that environment. Personally, I am not sure how much love I have for the CMM - it implies that the most rigid software development organizations are the most efficient and most predictable. While the predictability part is true, the efficiency part I question. And the excessive process involved in the model, carried to extremes, I find annoying. If you are able to control the hiring process and hire a decent team, you should never need such an outrageous amount of process. Furthermore, in an actual software company, you need to give people a long enough leash to innovate and experiment a bit. A good manager just needs to know who needs the strict code reviews and the most rigid adherence to process and who doesn't.
I agree that it makes slightly more sense than using them for weapons. Weapon applications of anti-matter exist, they just are far from practical right now, and the downsides seem to outweight the benefits. For example, you could make very small tactical field weapons that don't suffer from the extremely negative public associations made with nuclear weapons (to replace weapons like the Davy Crockett man portable nuclear warhead). The problem is that to be useful as an artillery-style weapon, it would need to be fail safe, and extremely reliable. Also, such weapons would be so effective as small ad hoc man-portable terrorist weapons, it would seem that the risks associated with building them would outweigh the benefits to a military arsenal.
And as for large strategic launch weapons, why bother? 1kg is a LOT of anti-matter to manufacture, and regardless of improvements in technology to create or confine the stuff, you are basically going to have to get all the energy to make them out of something like a dedicated nuclear reactor facility anyway. More sensible and safer to just make a 40 megaton nuke if that's really what you want, yeah it'll be quite a bit bigger and heavier in terms of nuclear reaction mass, but that the reaction mass is not really relevant with respect to an ICBM or nuclear bomb, since it's far less than the mass of the housing, electronics, etc. That's why I mentioned the artillery concept (and because making 1/10th of a gram of antimatter stably confined seems more likely than doing so with 1kg, though still very difficult).
In any case, all these weapons applications don't really seem to make any sense - even if the production technologies were improved greatly, anti-matter's reaction mass efficiency compared to nuclear seems far more beneficial as a propulsion technology than as a weapons technology, especially given the aversion to using nuclear propulsion as an orbital lift technology due to the risks of explosion in midair (I guess an antimatter drive would blow up quite colossally if it failed, so you'd probably have to do it out over the ocean somewhere, but at least it wouldn't spread nuclear waste over a large part of the planet).
Rough breakdown of foreign troops deployed in Iraq: American = 170,000, British = 8,000, S. Korea = 2,800, Italy = 2,700, Poland = 2,400, Ukraine 1,500, Netherlands 1,400. Then about 20 other countries have contributed between 10 and 700 troops, neglible amounts in mostly supporting or specialized functional roles (this list includes Australia, with about 250 troops actually in Iraq, and Japan with 550).
Of these others, South Korea depends heavily on the US for their own national defense, Berlusconi and Bush are actually buddies, Poland has already stated they were duped by the US on the WMD issue, and were offered financial incentives, and I'm betting Ukraine and Netherlands have similar stories.
In the total breakdown, the US represents about 85% of the troops currently deployed, the British about 7%, and a bunch of other countries have contributed a token amount of troops to show their 'support' for the country that their economies depend on. As you can see, it's not just about the breadth of the coalition as it is about its depth, and the types of countries that are 'members' and their reasons for being there.
Wait a second, I just read that link and it's about an expansion of the AmeriCorps program, a community service initiative that Clinton put in place. It says nothing at all about reinstating the draft - the only mention at all on the page of the military is where it talks about increasing funding for the ROTC program. It does mention mandatory community service for high school students (this is already the case in many areas - my high school had a mandatory community service requirement) and a program that offers 4 years of college tuition in exchange for 2 years of public service - this doesn't sound like the draft to me.
If you are going to troll with false claims, don't post a link that makes perfectly clear you are full of it.
I think it's more like saying that because 80% of software developers oppose globalization, the software industry must be anti-globalization. The developers don't set policy in software companies, and reporters don't set policy in news organizations.
Well, I am not sure, but there's no fundamental reason I can think of that they can offer you a contract of adhesion with onerous terms to escape from it after the fact, whereas you can't do the same to them. Contracts are by definition bilateral agreements, and contracts of adhesion are unilateral offers, and there's no reason only a seller can impose such a contract. So your tactic seems to show some promise as a way to effectively protest EULAs and force jurisprudence or industry action to reconsider this strategy for infringing on fair use rights.
Another thing I just thought of - I don't understand how making archival copies for backup purposes is a protected right that can't be infringed by an EULA but reverse engineering for compatibility is a fair use right that CAN be infringed by an EULA (actually, I just looked it up and apparently the government now suggests that parts of Title 17, including the right to archival backup, can be thrown away by EULA).
Fair use and archival backup are both sections under Title 17 of the Copyright Act. In order to accept that any of exemptions can be made not to apply, you have to accept that the software you are buying at a store isn't 'bought' at all, it is solely licensed after the fact by the EULA. So as to the question of what happened in that store when you handed them cash or your credit card and carried that box home, I basically give up trying to make sense of it.
This ruling is wrong on many fronts, and it is devastating to the software world as a whole if these interpretations were to be considered precedent. Here's a summary of the relevant parts of the decision itself:
The decision acknowledges that an EULA is a contract of adhesion, but rejects that prohibitions against investigation or reverse engineering of a product are unconscionable terms and thus the fact that it's a contract of adhesion is irrelevant (they partially base this on the fact that the party to this dispute was smart enough to reverse engineer the product, and thus should have known well enough to read and understand the terms of the EULA, unlike a normal user - no, I'm not kidding on this).
They then go on in the next section to state that fair use rights don't apply here since the EULA waives them - again, they've already asserted that there is nothing unconscionable in the EULA, and they fail to consider whether waiver of fair use should be considered unconscionable in a contract of adhesion, they just assert it indirectly (basically their argument states by implication that Joe Average doesn't care about his fair use rights, and thus their prohibition in a contract of adhesion is not a radically unexpected or unconscionable term and is thus PERMITTED).
As for EULA terms constituting copyright misuse, they don't really make any assessment to speak of other than to say that this may be an affirmative defense to copyright violation, but that portion of the case has been dismissed already, and this doesn't have much to do with the fact that there was a contract formed by the EULA.
With respect to the DMCA, the court rejects completely the notion that 1201(f) (the reverse engineering exception in the DMCA) is applicable unless the relevant party has permission to circumvent it. This makes no sense, since even the DMCA doesn't state that, they infer it from another case. In essence, they interpret the word 'use' in the DMCA to mean 'use as permitted by the EULA', and thus breaking the EULA contract now AUTOMATICALLY means you are no longer permitted to take advantage of the reverse engineering exception of the DMCA under any circumstances, regardless of your intention to circumvent copyright.
The next part - where they find that they state that bnetd was not an 'independent program' according to the DMCA is completely wrong. They say it fails to be independent because it replicates features from the existing server program created by Blizzard. This is a definition of 'independent program' that only the most twisted logic could accept.
As to their overall conclusion that the defendents were trafficking in a circumvention device as defined by the DMCA, they come back to their rejection of the reverse engineering defense - since they reject that, and have already stated that the action of creating bnetd constitutes 'copyright infringement' (meaning presumably violation of the DMCA), there can be no doubt that it is a cirumvention device (though they don't seem to address section E(2)(A) directly - what was the primary purpose of the device).
I understand that it's hard to argue that the primary purpose of Bnetd wasn't to allow circumvention of copyright, and on that point I can understand where the court's hands are tied by the poor legislation. The rest of this decision is filled with misunderstanding, misinterpretation and half-truths.
Anyway, this was a quicky analysis and I'm sure I missed stuff in here, so feel free to correct or add to this where I made mistakes.
So having a branch in Nevada would mean Microsoft had to pay Nevada taxes AND Washington taxes.
You effectively do. You have to pay corporation registration and filing fees in the jurisdiction your corporation is registered in, in exchange for taking advantage of their general corporate organizational laws and chancery courts. You pay corporate excise or income taxes in the state where you actually conduct business, and if you conduct business in multiple states, you essentially are supposed to divide up that income and attribute it appropriately to each state. At least, this is the way the states that I'm familiar with deal with the issue. Delaware doesn't want to charge you full excise taxes for doing business there, they make good money out of having the best, most flexible, and well tested corporate structure statutes.
In any case, a state can't really tax a corporation or individual on income that is already getting taxed at a state level elsewhere, at least not without chasing everybody out. For a national corporation, anyway, this is all particularly confusing. If you employ all your people in state A and develop your software there, then you should probably pay taxes there. But it's possible to transfer ownership of that software to a corporation in another state, for example, and have it's income attributable to a totally separate entity in that other state, making it look like operations in state A are not that profitable while the corporation as a whole is raking in lots of profits (this may be what Microsoft is doing, but it's not clear from the article at all).
Anyway, the only way to make the kind of uniform changes you describe would be to do so at the federal level and impose them on the states (not likely). What if you have a branch in Nevada, Washington and Florida? How about in every state? Well, you already have to pay taxes in all these states, but you can't expect a company to pay taxes on all their income in ALL the states they do business in, they'd owe more taxes than they have income! So you come back to the problem of attributing and assigning income - it's a sticky problem, and ultimately you have to rely on a certain degree of honesty and tools like Sarbannes-Oxley to force that honesty. Beyond that, states need to deal with corporations that are abusing tax laws when they occur - if all your employees are in Washington and the company is making 10 billion dollars a year, but only attributing a billion dollars of it to work done in Washington, they are probably abusing the definitions provided for by law and they need to be cracked down on.
Well, in general, there are lots of reasons to incorporate in different states other than just saving money on taxes. I don't know what the specifics in Washington state vs. Nevada are, so I won't comment on that. But in Massachusetts, a corporation doing business in the state and registered as a business entity in the state has "nexus" in the state and thus is subject to the corporate excise tax on all income apportioned to or attributable to the state. It doesn't matter where you are incorporated - I run a Delaware Corporation, and still have to pay a minimum 456 dollar excise tax to Massachusetts every year.
You generally incorporate in a different state to take advantage of their chancery courts, anonymity laws and corporate stucture statutes (allowing more flexible or customized corporate structures, like the Delaware Series LLC for example). And you want to have your corporate entities in a state that doesn't add a substantial amount of tax on top of what you'll already owe to the states where you do business and generate income (Delaware, for instance, charges only a nominal amount of tax every year based on the number of shares outstanding - but like I said, this doesn't mean I don't pay excise or corporate taxes, I still pay them in MA since that's where I do business!). Additionally Massachusetts has a foreign corporation registration fee which makes up for any money you save by registering your corporation in another state - so you literally save nothing (and we're talking about differences here of a few hundred dollars a year, not something Microsoft cares about).
If Microsoft is doing business in Nevada and attributing income to that state, then that's not really a loophole at all. If they are mis-attributing income, that's just fraud. There are tax loopholes out there, but this article doesn't really make clear what loopholes Microsoft is actually using, or if Microsoft just uses Nevada corporations for business entities and groups subsumed within Microsoft Inc. because of their flexible corporate law. Maybe Washington just isn't as anal as Massachusetts about collecting their taxes from all businesses, or just are failing to enforce the appropriate attribution of income to Washington state? This stuff is always confusing in the software world, since it's not always so clear cut to say where the work was performed and where the income came from.
Well, it looks like I've boxed myself into being a moral relativist by defending Jefferson - that's not a position I like to be in. I don't think slavery was right in the early American era, nor do I think it was right in the Roman context (the Romans practiced a rather different form of slavery of course, but slavery nonetheless). If the moral ills of the past negated the benefits of studying history in a broad sense, than we could just throw everything historical away since none of the societies of the past presented a perfect moral model for us.
In any case, I don't mean to suggest that there is a fundamentally different moral metric for the era, though every era has its limits in terms of knowledge. For example, was it "evil" of the Mayans to sacrifice virgins to their gods if they genuinely believed it was for a greater utilitarian good of their society? They may have been mistaken on a massive scale in their perceptions about causation in nature, but that doesn't mean the decisions they made were immoral or amoral. Undoubtedly, moral decisions are limited by the knowledge that people at any point in time possess - you don't have to believe that the absolute moral standards progress with time to believe that humanity acquires new knowledge with time that gives context and basis for reinterpreting past moral decisions. In any case, you are refuting my claim that early Americans didn't appreciate the full humanity of the Native Americans or Black slaves - mind you, I've read sources that seem to indicate that people overlooked that humanity even if they were aware of it at some level. I don't think I have enough knowledge of primary historical material to make a proper argument on this subject though.
If 100 years from now, scientists discover irrefutable proof that dogs are sentient, in the same way as humans, will our descendents look back on us and judge as for having kept dogs as pets? Would it be a change in moral system if they did, or just a modification to what they knew about their moral system? I generally believe in the principle of utility, but one of the big problems with utilitarianism is that moral decisions are generally made in a fog of mediocre and incomplete knowledge and understanding.
As for your question of human rights, I don't know how absolute rights really are, since they are always butting up against each other, and traded off against one another in various ways. Does an absolute morality, even if it is fundamentally unknowable and subject to human fallibility, imply that human rights are also absolute and unchanging? I guess so, but it's not really something I've thought much about. I mean, there are contextual rights within a society, legal system, etc. The right to a fair trial, the right to work, the right to enter contracts. Are these absolute and unchanging rights? I prefer not to muck around with things called "rights", because they always seem too contextual and tied to a legal and governmental fabric for a discussion of morality (again, I'm not an expert, so feel free to correct me, I was a physics major in college, not a philosophy or political science major).
This has gotten way off topic in any case. Regardless of whether I find all aspects of Roman society moral, or all aspects of my own society moral, I think the concept of citizenship and civic duty, and the tension between democracy and authoritarianism is similar enough between our own society and that of the Romans (on whom many aspects of our society are modelled) to make their perspectives and experiences very useful to study.
Okay, you say Jefferson should have known slavery was wrong because he was versed in the classics and then you blame the classics for his failure to recognize this flaw in his own society enough to challenge it. I may think there are many things wrong with our current society, but I still have to live within it and try to effect change where I can, when I can. I can't just try to legislate huge social change that is completely disruptive to society one day because I feel like it - even the President can't do that. I may struggle with some of the moral challenges of our day too, and I may have a reasonable idea of how they will turn out some day, but I hope I'm not judged by my descendants as a bad man because I lived within the society of my day and was subject to its rules, not theirs in the future.
As for the Romans - citizenship and voting rights were used earlier as a reward, and later as a tool of socializing conquered or allied peoples into the Roman system. The Romans had a system of laws that applied to their citizens, but their system certainly didn't guarantee equality to non-citizens, of any race. The Greeks were quite elitist with respect to their own race as well - they saw their northern neighbors, the Macedonians (i.e. Alexander the Great), as bordering on barbarians. The concept of egalitarianism set out in the Declaration of Independence, for example, owes much to John Locke and other political philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries. That's why I said many of these ideas are modern in origin - the Greeks and Romans had a great set of concepts about citizenship, morality, and law, but never really made the leap to general realities about the human condition, equality of the races etc.
I agree that it did take some time to reconcile the realities of a slavery system and the conquering of native peoples with these principles - it semes clear that these peoples weren't considered quite as human as European-descended folks, and thus less deserving of the equalities guaranteed to everybody else.
Most importantly - I never suggested that we should follow precisely the model of the Romans! Quite to the contrary, I think we should be wary of making many of the same mistakes the Romans did. I also don't mean to dismiss other traditions, and I think they are certainly worthy of study, though their forms of government and cultural assumptions are sometimes so different as to make them less relevant to the issues we were discussing here of dealing with citizenship, pariticipatory government, etc.
I hardly suggested that studying classics and ancient history is a cureall for the ills of the world - I just said it gives a better perspective on citizenship and the meaning of democracy, the republic, and what is good and not good about our system. In fact, I would argue that much of the success of our nation has come from the fact that our founders and many key politicians generally were generally fairly well educated on the historical roots of our system and set up what was, at the time, the best system of its sort in the world.
I never claimed that reading about the Roman or Greek empire-building experiences would prevent similar attempts, nor that they should. I don't see the size of American territory as an inherently bad thing. Sure, my 20th century perspective finds the way Native Americans and Blacks were treated in the past centuries in this country disgusting, but modern concepts of racial equality are just that - modern, they took time to develop, and much of them developed here in the US as we had more of a 'melting pot' than had ever occurred anywhere in history. I suggested learning from the past, not judging people in the past as if they had the benefit of growing up in our society today.
As for corruption, I don't claim that being more learned inherently changes the nature of human beings, which is to sometimes do that which is in their self interest at the expense of their fellow citizens. But I do think it is less likely in a society built around the concept of civic virtue and responsibility that also values openness and transparency in government.
It did make the rumor circuit here in the US, since I've read about it, but it didn't seem to make the mass media. Likewise, I've never read a serious refutation of it (other than denials from the Iraqi government).
It's OK to be lazy (the truly lazy will always be in a minority), stupid, sick, handicapped and politically conscious and to be supported by tax money. It's the primary function of a society to guarantee the welfare of the weak - not to guarantee free trade or maximum profit for you "winners".
No it's not OK to be lazy. Being stupid (genetically) is something beyond our control, but being uneducated is not excusable either. If you are sick or handicapped, I agree, it is fair for society to guarantee your welfare and help support you. I do agree that you can be socially liberal, focused on the concept of individual liberty, and fiscally moderate, without being a Randian bastard. This is why I don't call myself a libertarian, though I agree with libertarians on many issues.
In any case, pure laziness or lack of education are definitely not excuses to be on the dole for life. The primary function of society is to balance everybody's interests and end up with a net utilitarian benefit without screwing anybody over too much. Protecting the weak is definitely one important function of society, but the interests of the slothful and stupid shouldn't be given more consideration than the interests of those who contribute more to society.
Unfortunately, if you want to get in bed with these people, you have to realize who your bunkmates are. They aren't well-thought out, rational environmental thinkers. They are the same people who protest everything with the word 'nuclear' or 'genetically modified' in it. This guy is just playing to his base.
So no, the Green Party isn't trying to change thinking on nuclear power or other environmental issues to be logically sound, they are just trying to represent the positions of their left wing (usually slightly nutty) party members. These are the same people who buy organic this and organic that, and shell out lots of money for holistic health care and strange nutritional supplements despite the complete lack of scientific evidence to back up their 'lifestyle'. And you expect them to suddenly become rational scientific thinkers?
I still don't understand what you mean. If the outcome is a 'foregone conclusion', why should the candidate have to campaign there? The point of campaigning is to make it so that the outcome is in your favour... so... if it already is in your favour (or if there's absolutely no chance of it being in your favour)... why campaign there? Or am i still not getting it?.-.
Umm, the outcome is only a foregone conclusion _because_ of the winner-takes-all system. If you abolished that system, then even if 60% of people in the area were planning on voting for your opponent, if there were a large number of undecided or wavering voters there, it would be worth campaigning there. That is not currently the case. Under any system but our current one, you would not have entire states written off whole hog.
I don't see the things you reference. I have seen fairly little street crime in Manhattan in the years I lived there - as soon as Dinkins was gone, things got cleaned up rapidly and have stayed that way. It was different back in the 80s, yes, and if you go to the ghetto and hang around in the projects it's different because those people are poor and uneducated. Boston has the occasional incident when the trash come up from Southie to mug a nice Harvard student, but mostly it's quite safe on the streets and there are almost no signs of gang activity in any normal neighborhoods (Boston is a lot more lily white than NYC of course). As for drug culture, I see drug use, but it doesn't really bother me, most of it is among people who are perfectly functional members of society, not derelict bums smoking crack.
Mind you, I live about 10 yards from Harvard Law School, and a couple hundred from Harvard Yard, so yes, the people I meet really are that smart. As for the suggestion that all the smart people choose to live in the rural country side, my experiences have generally indicated otherwise.
That is bizarre. Usually I find if you try to transpose the arguments and people onto modern day political leaders, it makes things click a bit better. Not that it's really fair to judge Romans by modern standards, but it's helpful to at least make the associations.
I would also chalk this up to a lack of perspective - I don't think any one writer's presentation is sufficient, you need enough context of the era to understand what happened. There's a really excellent book, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus by Paul Zanker that does a great job of analyzing the culture campaign Augustus used to manipulate the hearts and minds of his subjects... err... fellow citizens.:)
So.... I'm not sure what you mean when you suggest that the candidates ignore the population centres. The states with population centres get more electoral votes anyway, so why would they ignore them? Am i not understanding what you mean?:/
Because of winner takes all - a 51% vote of the state secures all the states electoral votes. The only reason candidates come to Boston or New York is for fundraising, like I said, because there's money in the urban centers. If the election outcome (51% or greater to one of the candidates) in a populous state like New York is a foregone conclusion, then that candidate is guaranteed all the states electoral votes. Yes, New York gets 10 times as many electoral votes as Wyoming, but ALL of New York's electoral votes are allocated to the winner of the New York majority. So it's not that New York gets less attention than it should on a per capita basis, it's that it gets no attention other than as a source for funds.
I think there are 1 or 2 states that have somehow done away with the winner-takes-all system for assigning their electoral college votes. If every state did away with this, it would certainly reduce the odd disparities - Wyoming would still have 3 times as much say per capita as New York because of the way delegate numbers are counted, but so many resources wouldn't be wasted on states that are irrelevant other than their 'swing' status.
I understand all the arguments in your excerpt, and I acknowledged them, but A) they don't address the problem with a winner takes all system, that causes all the attention and resources to flow into a couple of swing states and B) that issue aside, the assumption that people in rural areas are more deserving of per capita attention because of the larger land area of their state relative to its population is ridiculous. If LA is 5 times as populous as Colorado, why should the candidates spend all their time worrying about issues that a few million people and no time worrying about issues that affect 15 million people? Hell, we dump nasty things in places all the time because those places are relatively unpopulated and thus there are fewer people to bitch about it. But you seem to suggest we should dump it in LA because rural people have more rights than urbanites. This just makes no sense, and seems like a good argument for going beyond just doing away with winner-takes-all and abolishing the college entirely. In any case, I've never heard a good argument FOR the winner-takes-all system except that it tends to take very close elections and make them look less close.
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You can find the enforcement section there too, it's section 4. Multimillion dollar fines are provided for, to be enforced by the FTC.
* Rights belong to individuals, not groups.
* Property should be owned by people, not government.
* All voluntary associations should be permissible -- economic and social.
* The government's monetary role is to maintain the integrity of the monetary unit, not participate in fraud.
* Government exists to protect liberty, not to redistribute wealth or to grant special privileges.
* The lives and actions of people are their own responsibility, not the government's.
Gee, almost sounds like a libertarian, right? Then you read stuff like this rant. So in other words, he supports people's rights to all voluntary social and economic associations for certain values of voluntary, namely "socially conservative".
He may be consistent over time, but his statements are mutually and internally inconsistent. If he really believed in social liberty and freedom, he would not describe himself as a cultural or social conservative, which is also translated as "authoritarian". If the lives and actions of people are their own business, why does he care who has sex with whom or how marriage is defined?
Nothing pisses me off as much as Republicans who steal the verbiage of socially liberal positions, and then turn around and disparage the word liberal like it means something dirty by attacking the straw man position that all liberals favor massive redistribution of wealth. I'm also not a libertarian, but if I were I would probably be offended by this guy borrowing my platform and abusing it.
Personally, I have no problem with calling you a musician and artist as the producer, if you are the one primarily responsible for the work. My only issue is with considering a singer to be musically responsible for a piece's goodness or crappiness if they were basically just used as an instrument by a producer. To me, the authenticity is about the attribution of the musicality, not really the nature of the instruments.
You mean like Suprnova.org? Lots of bittorrent links embedded in a webpage. I don't understand, how is that harder to use than Kazaa? You just have to know where to go - it's less accessible than Kazaa, yes, but that's a GOOD thing. As soon as things become too centralized and accessible (i.e. widely known) they become a large, easy target. Remember what happened when everybody started using Kazaa? It started sucking with lots of fake music, fake porn, fake warez. And those in the know ditched it ASAP.
The only reason eDonkey has been around so long is that for a long time it was so cryptic to use and configure properly that only the truly |33+ could grok it. These days eMule makes it pretty easy, but still a bit more complex than Kazaa, just enough to put it over the threshold from Joe Average to Joe Modest Poweruser, which is why it's still holding on.
It would be trivial to make something very easy-to-use, slickly marketed, and ubiquitous, but you'd be making yourself a blatant target for litigation and countermeasures.
I thought Nirvana Unplugged was excellent too. It was raw, yes, but very intense. More Nirvana than Nirvana.
My metric for this is "would this person be entertaining if you gave them a microphone and a couple of acoustic instruments to back them and sat them down on a stage?" And in the case of nonvocal music, it's a question of whether the music itself is sufficiently enjoyable to stand on its own merit. If neither of these metrics are met, then it may be entertainment but it's not really music. And some pop songs are decently catchy and enjoyable, in *spite of* the singer behind them - you can have a great songwriter or producer behind an otherwise mediocre talent and still come up with something that sounds pretty good. And I can appreciate those songs for what they are, but still dismiss the singer as worthless.
Heh, I've never seen the CIMM before, I like it though. I was involved in a contract project at a CIMM level -1 or -2 organization once, it was the most hellish 4 month experience in my life. Give me a nice disorganized, chaotic but well meaning software development shop any day over that environment. Personally, I am not sure how much love I have for the CMM - it implies that the most rigid software development organizations are the most efficient and most predictable. While the predictability part is true, the efficiency part I question. And the excessive process involved in the model, carried to extremes, I find annoying. If you are able to control the hiring process and hire a decent team, you should never need such an outrageous amount of process. Furthermore, in an actual software company, you need to give people a long enough leash to innovate and experiment a bit. A good manager just needs to know who needs the strict code reviews and the most rigid adherence to process and who doesn't.
And as for large strategic launch weapons, why bother? 1kg is a LOT of anti-matter to manufacture, and regardless of improvements in technology to create or confine the stuff, you are basically going to have to get all the energy to make them out of something like a dedicated nuclear reactor facility anyway. More sensible and safer to just make a 40 megaton nuke if that's really what you want, yeah it'll be quite a bit bigger and heavier in terms of nuclear reaction mass, but that the reaction mass is not really relevant with respect to an ICBM or nuclear bomb, since it's far less than the mass of the housing, electronics, etc. That's why I mentioned the artillery concept (and because making 1/10th of a gram of antimatter stably confined seems more likely than doing so with 1kg, though still very difficult).
In any case, all these weapons applications don't really seem to make any sense - even if the production technologies were improved greatly, anti-matter's reaction mass efficiency compared to nuclear seems far more beneficial as a propulsion technology than as a weapons technology, especially given the aversion to using nuclear propulsion as an orbital lift technology due to the risks of explosion in midair (I guess an antimatter drive would blow up quite colossally if it failed, so you'd probably have to do it out over the ocean somewhere, but at least it wouldn't spread nuclear waste over a large part of the planet).
Of these others, South Korea depends heavily on the US for their own national defense, Berlusconi and Bush are actually buddies, Poland has already stated they were duped by the US on the WMD issue, and were offered financial incentives, and I'm betting Ukraine and Netherlands have similar stories.
In the total breakdown, the US represents about 85% of the troops currently deployed, the British about 7%, and a bunch of other countries have contributed a token amount of troops to show their 'support' for the country that their economies depend on. As you can see, it's not just about the breadth of the coalition as it is about its depth, and the types of countries that are 'members' and their reasons for being there.
If you are going to troll with false claims, don't post a link that makes perfectly clear you are full of it.
I think it's more like saying that because 80% of software developers oppose globalization, the software industry must be anti-globalization. The developers don't set policy in software companies, and reporters don't set policy in news organizations.
Another thing I just thought of - I don't understand how making archival copies for backup purposes is a protected right that can't be infringed by an EULA but reverse engineering for compatibility is a fair use right that CAN be infringed by an EULA (actually, I just looked it up and apparently the government now suggests that parts of Title 17, including the right to archival backup, can be thrown away by EULA).
Fair use and archival backup are both sections under Title 17 of the Copyright Act. In order to accept that any of exemptions can be made not to apply, you have to accept that the software you are buying at a store isn't 'bought' at all, it is solely licensed after the fact by the EULA. So as to the question of what happened in that store when you handed them cash or your credit card and carried that box home, I basically give up trying to make sense of it.
The decision acknowledges that an EULA is a contract of adhesion, but rejects that prohibitions against investigation or reverse engineering of a product are unconscionable terms and thus the fact that it's a contract of adhesion is irrelevant (they partially base this on the fact that the party to this dispute was smart enough to reverse engineer the product, and thus should have known well enough to read and understand the terms of the EULA, unlike a normal user - no, I'm not kidding on this).
They then go on in the next section to state that fair use rights don't apply here since the EULA waives them - again, they've already asserted that there is nothing unconscionable in the EULA, and they fail to consider whether waiver of fair use should be considered unconscionable in a contract of adhesion, they just assert it indirectly (basically their argument states by implication that Joe Average doesn't care about his fair use rights, and thus their prohibition in a contract of adhesion is not a radically unexpected or unconscionable term and is thus PERMITTED).
As for EULA terms constituting copyright misuse, they don't really make any assessment to speak of other than to say that this may be an affirmative defense to copyright violation, but that portion of the case has been dismissed already, and this doesn't have much to do with the fact that there was a contract formed by the EULA.
With respect to the DMCA, the court rejects completely the notion that 1201(f) (the reverse engineering exception in the DMCA) is applicable unless the relevant party has permission to circumvent it. This makes no sense, since even the DMCA doesn't state that, they infer it from another case. In essence, they interpret the word 'use' in the DMCA to mean 'use as permitted by the EULA', and thus breaking the EULA contract now AUTOMATICALLY means you are no longer permitted to take advantage of the reverse engineering exception of the DMCA under any circumstances, regardless of your intention to circumvent copyright.
The next part - where they find that they state that bnetd was not an 'independent program' according to the DMCA is completely wrong. They say it fails to be independent because it replicates features from the existing server program created by Blizzard. This is a definition of 'independent program' that only the most twisted logic could accept.
As to their overall conclusion that the defendents were trafficking in a circumvention device as defined by the DMCA, they come back to their rejection of the reverse engineering defense - since they reject that, and have already stated that the action of creating bnetd constitutes 'copyright infringement' (meaning presumably violation of the DMCA), there can be no doubt that it is a cirumvention device (though they don't seem to address section E(2)(A) directly - what was the primary purpose of the device).
I understand that it's hard to argue that the primary purpose of Bnetd wasn't to allow circumvention of copyright, and on that point I can understand where the court's hands are tied by the poor legislation. The rest of this decision is filled with misunderstanding, misinterpretation and half-truths.
Anyway, this was a quicky analysis and I'm sure I missed stuff in here, so feel free to correct or add to this where I made mistakes.
So having a branch in Nevada would mean Microsoft had to pay Nevada taxes AND Washington taxes.
You effectively do. You have to pay corporation registration and filing fees in the jurisdiction your corporation is registered in, in exchange for taking advantage of their general corporate organizational laws and chancery courts. You pay corporate excise or income taxes in the state where you actually conduct business, and if you conduct business in multiple states, you essentially are supposed to divide up that income and attribute it appropriately to each state. At least, this is the way the states that I'm familiar with deal with the issue. Delaware doesn't want to charge you full excise taxes for doing business there, they make good money out of having the best, most flexible, and well tested corporate structure statutes.
In any case, a state can't really tax a corporation or individual on income that is already getting taxed at a state level elsewhere, at least not without chasing everybody out. For a national corporation, anyway, this is all particularly confusing. If you employ all your people in state A and develop your software there, then you should probably pay taxes there. But it's possible to transfer ownership of that software to a corporation in another state, for example, and have it's income attributable to a totally separate entity in that other state, making it look like operations in state A are not that profitable while the corporation as a whole is raking in lots of profits (this may be what Microsoft is doing, but it's not clear from the article at all).
Anyway, the only way to make the kind of uniform changes you describe would be to do so at the federal level and impose them on the states (not likely). What if you have a branch in Nevada, Washington and Florida? How about in every state? Well, you already have to pay taxes in all these states, but you can't expect a company to pay taxes on all their income in ALL the states they do business in, they'd owe more taxes than they have income! So you come back to the problem of attributing and assigning income - it's a sticky problem, and ultimately you have to rely on a certain degree of honesty and tools like Sarbannes-Oxley to force that honesty. Beyond that, states need to deal with corporations that are abusing tax laws when they occur - if all your employees are in Washington and the company is making 10 billion dollars a year, but only attributing a billion dollars of it to work done in Washington, they are probably abusing the definitions provided for by law and they need to be cracked down on.
You generally incorporate in a different state to take advantage of their chancery courts, anonymity laws and corporate stucture statutes (allowing more flexible or customized corporate structures, like the Delaware Series LLC for example). And you want to have your corporate entities in a state that doesn't add a substantial amount of tax on top of what you'll already owe to the states where you do business and generate income (Delaware, for instance, charges only a nominal amount of tax every year based on the number of shares outstanding - but like I said, this doesn't mean I don't pay excise or corporate taxes, I still pay them in MA since that's where I do business!). Additionally Massachusetts has a foreign corporation registration fee which makes up for any money you save by registering your corporation in another state - so you literally save nothing (and we're talking about differences here of a few hundred dollars a year, not something Microsoft cares about).
If Microsoft is doing business in Nevada and attributing income to that state, then that's not really a loophole at all. If they are mis-attributing income, that's just fraud. There are tax loopholes out there, but this article doesn't really make clear what loopholes Microsoft is actually using, or if Microsoft just uses Nevada corporations for business entities and groups subsumed within Microsoft Inc. because of their flexible corporate law. Maybe Washington just isn't as anal as Massachusetts about collecting their taxes from all businesses, or just are failing to enforce the appropriate attribution of income to Washington state? This stuff is always confusing in the software world, since it's not always so clear cut to say where the work was performed and where the income came from.
In any case, I don't mean to suggest that there is a fundamentally different moral metric for the era, though every era has its limits in terms of knowledge. For example, was it "evil" of the Mayans to sacrifice virgins to their gods if they genuinely believed it was for a greater utilitarian good of their society? They may have been mistaken on a massive scale in their perceptions about causation in nature, but that doesn't mean the decisions they made were immoral or amoral. Undoubtedly, moral decisions are limited by the knowledge that people at any point in time possess - you don't have to believe that the absolute moral standards progress with time to believe that humanity acquires new knowledge with time that gives context and basis for reinterpreting past moral decisions. In any case, you are refuting my claim that early Americans didn't appreciate the full humanity of the Native Americans or Black slaves - mind you, I've read sources that seem to indicate that people overlooked that humanity even if they were aware of it at some level. I don't think I have enough knowledge of primary historical material to make a proper argument on this subject though.
If 100 years from now, scientists discover irrefutable proof that dogs are sentient, in the same way as humans, will our descendents look back on us and judge as for having kept dogs as pets? Would it be a change in moral system if they did, or just a modification to what they knew about their moral system? I generally believe in the principle of utility, but one of the big problems with utilitarianism is that moral decisions are generally made in a fog of mediocre and incomplete knowledge and understanding.
As for your question of human rights, I don't know how absolute rights really are, since they are always butting up against each other, and traded off against one another in various ways. Does an absolute morality, even if it is fundamentally unknowable and subject to human fallibility, imply that human rights are also absolute and unchanging? I guess so, but it's not really something I've thought much about. I mean, there are contextual rights within a society, legal system, etc. The right to a fair trial, the right to work, the right to enter contracts. Are these absolute and unchanging rights? I prefer not to muck around with things called "rights", because they always seem too contextual and tied to a legal and governmental fabric for a discussion of morality (again, I'm not an expert, so feel free to correct me, I was a physics major in college, not a philosophy or political science major).
This has gotten way off topic in any case. Regardless of whether I find all aspects of Roman society moral, or all aspects of my own society moral, I think the concept of citizenship and civic duty, and the tension between democracy and authoritarianism is similar enough between our own society and that of the Romans (on whom many aspects of our society are modelled) to make their perspectives and experiences very useful to study.
As for the Romans - citizenship and voting rights were used earlier as a reward, and later as a tool of socializing conquered or allied peoples into the Roman system. The Romans had a system of laws that applied to their citizens, but their system certainly didn't guarantee equality to non-citizens, of any race. The Greeks were quite elitist with respect to their own race as well - they saw their northern neighbors, the Macedonians (i.e. Alexander the Great), as bordering on barbarians. The concept of egalitarianism set out in the Declaration of Independence, for example, owes much to John Locke and other political philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries. That's why I said many of these ideas are modern in origin - the Greeks and Romans had a great set of concepts about citizenship, morality, and law, but never really made the leap to general realities about the human condition, equality of the races etc.
I agree that it did take some time to reconcile the realities of a slavery system and the conquering of native peoples with these principles - it semes clear that these peoples weren't considered quite as human as European-descended folks, and thus less deserving of the equalities guaranteed to everybody else.
Most importantly - I never suggested that we should follow precisely the model of the Romans! Quite to the contrary, I think we should be wary of making many of the same mistakes the Romans did. I also don't mean to dismiss other traditions, and I think they are certainly worthy of study, though their forms of government and cultural assumptions are sometimes so different as to make them less relevant to the issues we were discussing here of dealing with citizenship, pariticipatory government, etc.
I never claimed that reading about the Roman or Greek empire-building experiences would prevent similar attempts, nor that they should. I don't see the size of American territory as an inherently bad thing. Sure, my 20th century perspective finds the way Native Americans and Blacks were treated in the past centuries in this country disgusting, but modern concepts of racial equality are just that - modern, they took time to develop, and much of them developed here in the US as we had more of a 'melting pot' than had ever occurred anywhere in history. I suggested learning from the past, not judging people in the past as if they had the benefit of growing up in our society today.
As for corruption, I don't claim that being more learned inherently changes the nature of human beings, which is to sometimes do that which is in their self interest at the expense of their fellow citizens. But I do think it is less likely in a society built around the concept of civic virtue and responsibility that also values openness and transparency in government.
It did make the rumor circuit here in the US, since I've read about it, but it didn't seem to make the mass media. Likewise, I've never read a serious refutation of it (other than denials from the Iraqi government).
No it's not OK to be lazy. Being stupid (genetically) is something beyond our control, but being uneducated is not excusable either. If you are sick or handicapped, I agree, it is fair for society to guarantee your welfare and help support you. I do agree that you can be socially liberal, focused on the concept of individual liberty, and fiscally moderate, without being a Randian bastard. This is why I don't call myself a libertarian, though I agree with libertarians on many issues.
In any case, pure laziness or lack of education are definitely not excuses to be on the dole for life. The primary function of society is to balance everybody's interests and end up with a net utilitarian benefit without screwing anybody over too much. Protecting the weak is definitely one important function of society, but the interests of the slothful and stupid shouldn't be given more consideration than the interests of those who contribute more to society.
So no, the Green Party isn't trying to change thinking on nuclear power or other environmental issues to be logically sound, they are just trying to represent the positions of their left wing (usually slightly nutty) party members. These are the same people who buy organic this and organic that, and shell out lots of money for holistic health care and strange nutritional supplements despite the complete lack of scientific evidence to back up their 'lifestyle'. And you expect them to suddenly become rational scientific thinkers?
Umm, the outcome is only a foregone conclusion _because_ of the winner-takes-all system. If you abolished that system, then even if 60% of people in the area were planning on voting for your opponent, if there were a large number of undecided or wavering voters there, it would be worth campaigning there. That is not currently the case. Under any system but our current one, you would not have entire states written off whole hog.
Mind you, I live about 10 yards from Harvard Law School, and a couple hundred from Harvard Yard, so yes, the people I meet really are that smart. As for the suggestion that all the smart people choose to live in the rural country side, my experiences have generally indicated otherwise.
I would also chalk this up to a lack of perspective - I don't think any one writer's presentation is sufficient, you need enough context of the era to understand what happened. There's a really excellent book, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus by Paul Zanker that does a great job of analyzing the culture campaign Augustus used to manipulate the hearts and minds of his subjects... err... fellow citizens.
So.... I'm not sure what you mean when you suggest that the candidates ignore the population centres. The states with population centres get more electoral votes anyway, so why would they ignore them? Am i not understanding what you mean?
Because of winner takes all - a 51% vote of the state secures all the states electoral votes. The only reason candidates come to Boston or New York is for fundraising, like I said, because there's money in the urban centers. If the election outcome (51% or greater to one of the candidates) in a populous state like New York is a foregone conclusion, then that candidate is guaranteed all the states electoral votes. Yes, New York gets 10 times as many electoral votes as Wyoming, but ALL of New York's electoral votes are allocated to the winner of the New York majority. So it's not that New York gets less attention than it should on a per capita basis, it's that it gets no attention other than as a source for funds.
I think there are 1 or 2 states that have somehow done away with the winner-takes-all system for assigning their electoral college votes. If every state did away with this, it would certainly reduce the odd disparities - Wyoming would still have 3 times as much say per capita as New York because of the way delegate numbers are counted, but so many resources wouldn't be wasted on states that are irrelevant other than their 'swing' status.
I understand all the arguments in your excerpt, and I acknowledged them, but A) they don't address the problem with a winner takes all system, that causes all the attention and resources to flow into a couple of swing states and B) that issue aside, the assumption that people in rural areas are more deserving of per capita attention because of the larger land area of their state relative to its population is ridiculous. If LA is 5 times as populous as Colorado, why should the candidates spend all their time worrying about issues that a few million people and no time worrying about issues that affect 15 million people? Hell, we dump nasty things in places all the time because those places are relatively unpopulated and thus there are fewer people to bitch about it. But you seem to suggest we should dump it in LA because rural people have more rights than urbanites. This just makes no sense, and seems like a good argument for going beyond just doing away with winner-takes-all and abolishing the college entirely. In any case, I've never heard a good argument FOR the winner-takes-all system except that it tends to take very close elections and make them look less close.