Yes, quoting a single line like that is cute and earns a few chuckles on the partisan blogs, but http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW3NHNk4oc4 has the full context (question starts at 4:24). When you hear the preceding sentences, it becomes apparent that "the situation on the ground" doesn't mean the level of violence, but the fact that the underlying problem is political, not military.
If you honestly think there has been no political progress please explain Malaki's actions lately
What, you mean demanding that we set a timetable for leaving? Doesn't sound like our presence is helping very much.
You are NOT buying the software. The software is provided BY the licence, not the other way around.
That's not generally true, even across the U.S. Software is considered to be "licensed" in the 7th and 8th circuits, but it's "sold" in the others.
undoing the EULA would castrate the power of multiple government agencies, and wreak havock on the software and services sections of business. The ramifications of undoing licence use and trade restrictions by simply stating that software becomes an individual piece of property on purchase will cost the US BILLIONS in trade.
Nonsense. The situation you're afraid of already exists, and the software industry is still doing fine. So are all the other industries where products are sold, not licensed or leased.
It may be legal, but it still stinks (and I think there may be others who agree). If I lease you a station wagon, do I get to decide where you can drive it?
It's worse than that, because software is bought, not leased.
If you lease a car, it still belongs to someone else and they can demand it back at any time; you don't expect to be able to keep it forever. On the other hand, if you buy the car, then it's yours and they can't tell you what to do with it.
When you go to the store and exchange money for software, it doesn't belong to the store anymore - no one can demand it back from you. It's yours. That's a sale, not a lease. Some courts just fail to see the obvious.
This was probably inevitable, but it's a shame to see Psystar brought down. Without any competition in the computers-that-run-OS-X market, Apple just keeps getting more obnoxious.
(If this kind of thing bothers you and you want to take a swipe back at Apple, I recommend passing up that shiny new iPhone 3G and looking at the equally shiny LG Dare instead. The screen is smaller but it's actually easier to type on.)
Also it's not just that he's changing position, it's that he's rewriting history to sound like he never argued the surge would have the opposite effect it actually has.
Did he argue that? Cite, please.
I think you're failing to distinguish between what the surge was intended to accomplish (political reconciliation) and what it has accomplished (reduced violence but no political progress: i.e. we're no closer to being able to leave, according to the Bush/McCain view, than we were before).
Another big impediment to changing the voting system is getting people to understand it. They are used to simple voting procedures.
This is where approval voting comes in handy: it's exactly the same as what we do now, same ballots and everything, except you can vote for more than one candidate. Instead of voting for your single favorite, you vote for everyone you "approve" of, and the winner is whoever gets the approval of the most voters.
No, it really isn't. This is an infuriating bit of misinformation that needs to stop. The only thing that is throwing away your vote is not voting. Any vote, any vote at all, is not throwing your vote away.
Yes, it really is. In a plurality voting system, your vote is only worth something if it pushes a candidate from second place to first place (or prevents the first place candidate from being overtaken). There's no prize for coming in second or third.
That means if you vote for someone who you know doesn't have a viable chance to win the election, your vote has no effect on the outcome. It's been thrown away.
The only way for third party voting to be sensible is if you can convince everyone overnight to vote for your third party.
If you only convince some of the people, your plan backfires: every vote for a third party is a vote that isn't being cast for a viable party, so all the would-be Democrats who vote for, say, the Green Party are taking votes away from the Democratic candidate they would've supported, and the result is that the Republican candidate wins -- the least desirable of all three, from those voters' perspective.
After having been burned like that once or twice, do you think those voters going to go along with you next time you ask them to gamble their vote on a third party candidate? Not likely.
If you want third parties to have a chance -- I sure do -- then you should stick to fighting for voting reform, not convincing people to squander their vote in a counterproductive symbolic gesture.
Obama and McCain have clearly shown us that you're just voting for the same guy, with a different name.
You realize how silly that claim is, right? If Gore or Kerry had been elected, this country would be in a very different place right now. Elections matter.
Anyone can see that Obama and McCain have opposing positions on dozens of important issues. If you care at all about the Iraq war, or health care, or the economy, or reliance on oil, or reproductive rights, or who gets appointed to the Supreme Court, you have a very clear choice in November.
What we do, is we pair these tests on a page. We'll include a known test, like the one above. And we'll also show an unclassified image and we might ask "how many people are in this picture?"
This is basically what reCAPTCHA does, although they only use words. They take images of words that off-the-shelf OCR software failed to read, apply more distortions, and serve them up two at a time. One of the words is known; the other is unknown but becomes known after enough people have submitted the same answer.
And as a bonus, the answers aren't just used to grant access to a web site - they're used to digitize the old books that the images came from in the first place.
Perhaps you'll get around to it someday, or perhaps you'll keep buying that 'any non 2-party vote is a wasted vote' propaganda
It's only considered propaganda by people who don't understand how plurality voting works.
The unfortunate reality of our voting system is that a vote for a candidate who doesn't have a near majority is wasted. If the choices are A (who you hate), B (who you can tolerate), and C (who you love), but C has no significant support, it's counterproductive and irrational to vote for C: that would mean throwing away your chance to influence the contest between A and B, which is the only one that matters since you know one of them is going to win.
This is the fundamental problem with plurality voting, and it's why voting reform is the only way to make third parties viable. Plurality voting punishes you for voting for a third party: the more people who vote for the third party instead of the "lesser evil", the more likely it is that they'll end up throwing the election to the "greater evil" (right up until they become a majority, when the situation suddenly reverses, but you can't form that majority overnight). That's not opinion or propaganda, it's a mathematical consequence of the way we count votes.
and continue to ACTUALLY waste your vote on one of two completely dysfunctional choices.
Dysfunctional? Heh.
Just because you don't care about the issues where the two viable candidates differ doesn't mean no one else does. For someone who cares about the issues I care about (and indeed, the ones most voters care about), one candidate is clearly more "functional" than the other. If my vote helps elect the guy who shares 80% of my positions instead of the guy who only shares 20%, you'd have to be blind to call that a waste.
Yes, in fact, it is, as far as the government is concerned. Go read the constitution. Pay particular attention to the words "shall not infringe."
Sounds like you need to read it yourself. The ultimate authority on what those words mean is the Supreme Court, according to that very document, and the court disagrees with you.
As I said, courts have repeatedly held that these rights can be regulated without being "infringed". That means there are limits on gun ownership that don't violate the Second Amendment, just like there are limits on speech that don't violate the First Amendment.
You and I may not like it, but that's the way it is. If you want to do something about it, maybe you should try to get yourself appointed to the Supreme Court. Pouting on Slashdot sure isn't going to help.
What part of "SHALL NOT" do you and Obama not understand?
Well, since you seem to think those words mean something other than what the highest body in charge of interpreting them has ruled that they mean, it sounds like you're the one who doesn't understand.
Sad that you're too brainwashed to do what's good for you on your own.
No, not brainwashed. Rational.
I have one vote. I could choose not to vote at all, and have no effect on the election's outcome, leaving my interests totally unrepresented. Or I could vote for a third party, which also has no effect on the outcome, so it also leaves my interests unrepresented.
Or I could do what I always do, and vote for the viable candidate who's closer to my interests. That one vote might not be much, but it's all I've got, and I'm not about to throw it away.
If you'd like to throw yours away, then by all means go ahead. The rest of us won't mind; you're just making our votes more valuable.
I suppose it'll take a few more administrations chewing up your rights and selling the law to those behind the PACs before you figure it out.
Heh. What do you think throwing your vote away is going to do to stop that?
If you're sick of the major parties, here are some suggestions:
Mount a massive campaign to try to bring a majority of voters over to some third party between elections -- but if you only get a large minority, this plan will backfire.
Pray that some scandal will utterly destroy one of the major parties and leave an opening for a third party to take its place.
Work from inside one of the major parties to change it into something you like better.
Push for approval voting, ranked choice voting, or some other voting method that's friendlier to third parties, so your third-party vote will actually matter.
If you don't think that Obama and McCain are exactly the same then you apparently don't understand how the two party system works.
What an odd thing to say. The two-party system results in a choice of candidates who have so many differences that, on almost any given issue, it's obvious which candidate's position is closer to your own.
If you hold a set of positions that don't fall neatly into a party category (like most of us do), you might find that you agree with one candidate on some issues, and the other on some other issues. That doesn't mean they're "exactly the same", though: it just means you'll have a harder time choosing between them. The failure of the two-party system in that case is that it makes you compromise, instead of giving you the option to vote for a third candidate who offers a little of both.
I'm one of that pitiful group who will vote for a third part candidate because it's actually the right thing to do.
Please do. Considering what a hard time you have seeing the obvious and concrete differences between the two viable candidates, I think it's best for all of us if you cast your vote in a way that's guaranteed not to affect the outcome of the election.
If neither candidate is willing to stand up for what's right and provide a little leadership and preserve American liberty for the next generation they why bother with either of them?
Because of little things like, oh, who they might appoint to the Supreme Court or put in charge of various agencies, or which laws they might choose to sign or veto, or what programs and policies they're going to promote once they get into office.
It's silly to pretend that Barack Obama and John McCain would do exactly the same things if they were elected. The only way to make that argument with a straight face is to talk in vague abstractions, like "they'd both disregard the constitution!!!" or "they'd both bow to their corporate overlords!!!". But when you get down to concrete issues, the differences are too obvious to ignore.
Also keep in mind that since taxation is always coupled with government expenditure, the combination can only have the effect of diverting resources from where consumers wanted them used to some other use chosen by political official. So, 40% of people's income is forcibly taken from them and put to some other use than they would have otherwise chosen.
Not necessarily. Keep in mind that political officials are elected by those same people, precisely to do things like divert resources to various projects. And often, when people want the government to do something, it's because private industry can't (or won't) do it: the government isn't constrained by having to turn a profit. It may not be the most efficient way to get things done, but sometimes it's the only way.
For a US example, look at electrical and phone service in rural areas. It wasn't profitable for companies to offer service in those areas at a price consumers were willing to pay, but We The People decided electricity and telecommunications were important enough that people in those areas should have them anyway, so out came the subsidies.
Would the people who ended up subsidizing it have preferred to spend their money on something else instead? Possibly. But that's what happens in a democracy: sometimes you're outnumbered.
Obama was smart to vote for this, even though he opposed it!
Not necessarily. Obama's fundraising involves getting a lot of small donations from people who are excited about him as a candidate, because they think he represents a new kind of politics and/or they're sick of the Bush administration's abuses (like warrantless wiretapping).
If he tarnishes his brand by doing stuff like this, he pisses those people off, and the money dries up.
Unfortunately somoeone thinking of voting for obama can't bring themselves to vote for mccain and vise versa, so what we need is in fact voting for third parties.
And that means we need voting reform.
What you mentioned here is, IMO, the biggest problem with American politics. Our method of running elections (plurality voting) naturally leads to a two-party system, and for many voters, that means their options on election day are "vote for the candidate I like" or "stay home", because the other candidate will be diametrically opposed on dozens of key issues.
It's not just that they can't bring themselves to vote for the other candidate; it's that voting for the other guy would be counterproductive, like reacting to high prices at the supermarket by going to a different one that's even more expensive.
Voting for a third party has the same problem, since in a plurality system, your vote is only important if it pushes someone from second place to first place. Pushing someone from third to second is a waste, but that's all a third-party vote can do unless you manage to convince a majority to switch to him overnight: if you can only convince a minority, you'll be working against their interests, which makes it hard to count on their support next time.
What we need is something like ranked-choice voting or approval voting, where you can show your support for a minor candidate, but still be confident that if he doesn't get much support, your vote will still count in the matchup between the major candidates.
For the 2nd amendment, where it says "shall not be infringed", he interprets that as "we can infringe if we want to", as witness his saying that the Washington law was a good law.
Er... here's Barack Obama on the Supreme Court decision that overturned that law: "Today's decision reinforces that if we act responsibly, we can both protect the constitutional right to bear arms and keep our communities and our children safe."
Sounds like he supports the 2nd amendment to me. The right to bear arms isn't absolute, but then neither is the right to free speech (which is restricted by libel/slander laws, copyright, etc.) -- courts have always held that these rights can be regulated without being "infringed".
So while we may mutter about Obama or McCain, the fact is that it isn't going to make any difference.
Actually, it'll make a hell of a difference to those of us who aren't libertarian fundamentalists. Claiming both candidates are the same because they favor "big government" is like claiming they're the same because they're both men: it says more about your ideology than it does about theirs.
Doesn't matter what Obama can remember. They're exactly the same. They'd both burn the constitution to roast a marshmallow. Don't kid yourself.
What a short-sighted view. There's more to the candidates than their positions on this particular bill, you know.
If you care at all about health care, war, the economy, etc. then there are plenty of important differences left between Obama and McCain. On the other hand, if you really think they're "exactly the same", then either you aren't paying attention, or you're such a one-issue fringe voter that no one is going to court your vote anyway.
Another reason is that we have forgotten the tyranny and oppression that in inevitable when the government controls close to 40% of the nation's income,
Ah, that must be why Denmark is such an oppressive, tyrannical hellhole.
Oh wait... it isn't. They have much higher taxes than we do in the US, but because they hold their government accountable, they actually get something in return, rather than having that money pissed away.
Claiming it's not stealing as a way of absolving immorality is imprecise and entirely unsuccessful.
I agree. If anyone here had claimed that copyright infringement is not immoral simply because it isn't "stealing", that would've been a poor argument (whether or not they were wrong about the meaning of that word). Morality comes from the act's consequences, not from what it's called.
If they didn't believe it was wrong to steal, they wouldn't make such an effort to make weak and unsupportable arguments that it's not.
Do you believe it's wrong to steal?
If so, then why aren't you out there complaining about stolen bases, stolen kisses, and stealing away into the night?
Could it be because you realize that some actions which can be described by some senses of the word "stealing" are wrong, but others aren't?
You don't go to jail for "stealing", because stealing is not against the law.
Similarly, most of us don't condemn each other for "stealing", because not all acts which can be described as "stealing" are objectionable. The objectionable acts are those which can more specifically be described as theft, because the fact that the victim is deprived of his property is precisely what's objectionable about them.
It seems you do, as indicated by your very next sentence:
It's clear by the acrobatics performed by people in your position that they're aware it's stealing and that they shouldn't do it
"It's stealing" and therefore "they shouldn't do it". This argument relies on the belief that stealing is a bad thing that people shouldn't do.
But, of course, as soon as you convince someone that an act he considers perfectly acceptable is "stealing" in some sense of the word that doesn't mean theft, you create a category of "stealing" that it's OK to do. Semantic wrangling doesn't change morality: you can refer to the act by a different name if you want, but the name you choose has no effect on the merits of the act itself.
Similarly, a group of crows is called a "murder", but that doesn't mean anyone will react to a group of crows the same way they react to homicide. You can go around all day, pointing at groups of crows and shouting to bystanders, "Look, it's a murder! Why isn't anyone stopping it?", but no one will join you in your outrage -- because the thing that bothers them about homicide is that it involves killing people, not just that it's called "murder". Harping on the alternate meanings of that word would only serve to remind people that some kinds of "murder" are harmless.
And if you kept arguing that those bystanders who didn't do anything about the crows were supporting "murder", they'd quickly conclude you were an asshole more interested in semantic games than honest discussion.
If people really stood on principle, they'd freely admit to stealing.
Perhaps they'd be willing to do that if "stealing" didn't also mean theft and weren't likely to be confused with it. A baseball player might "steal" bases, but obviously there are situations where he wouldn't "freely admit to stealing" for fear of being misunderstood.
That would be an asinine exchange, since all of those instances are perfectly consistent with the word and its definition, and have been used in that manner by society for centuries.
And yet when people are trying to communicate with each other, they tend to avoid such ambiguities. If you use "murder" to mean a group of crows because you don't realize your audience will interpret it as homicide, you're failing to communicate.
If you do realize it and you continue using that word anyway, instead of choosing a less ambiguous one, and then you go on to insist that your use was correct because the word had been "used in that manner by society for centuries" (regardless of how it was likely to be interpreted in its current context), then you're just trolling.
No. The verb's agency is the perpetrator, not the victim. It is the acquisition that is critical, not the result on the victim.
That isn't a widespread belief. You're welcome to it, but don't expect to find much agreement here (or elsewhere).
I think you'll find that most people aren't concerned about supposed instances of "stealing" where the "stolen" item isn't taken away from its owner, because the reason they're opposed to stealing in the first place is the effect it has on its victim (not the unearned acquisition/enjoyment, which is the sort of thing only Puritans worry about). Without that result, the word is shooting blanks.
It's possible that with enough semantic wrangling, you might manage to convince someone that copyright infringement could, in some sense of the word, be considered a form of stealing. But that won't get you anywhere: it'll only draw a distinction in their mind between "bad" stealing that takes property away from someone, and "good" stealing that doesn't. Stripping the word "steal" of its emotional connotation doesn't seem like something you'd want to do if you're a fan of property rights.
So you're going to pretend you've never used the word "steal" to describe the taking of an idea, an opportunity, or the taking of a password?
I don't need to pretend. I haven't used the word that way except as an exaggeration, the same way I might say "I'm starving" when I'm merely hungry. If someone pointed out that an opportunity, a password, a base, or a kiss hadn't really been stolen -- particularly in a conversation about morals or laws or property, where someone might reasonably think I'd been referring to theft -- I'd happily concede that it hadn't.
You're saying that you post in GPL violation threads on Slashdot to remind editors and posters that GPL violation isn't stealing, it's just copying and the developers didn't actually lose anything? You're opposed to the FSF and other open source organizations being able to enforce in court noncompliance with the requirements of open source licenses? Rrrrright.
I don't really bother with GPL violation threads, but yes, that's rrrrright: I'm opposed to copyright whether it's being wielded by the FSF or by the RIAA, for profit or for open source.
(However, I'm not in favor of unilateral disarmament. As long as some people are able to use copyright to prevent sharing, it's only fair that others should be able to use it to promote sharing.)
"In this particular context", theft isn't involved or relevant.
That shows you have no idea what the context was, because apparently you didn't bother to read the comment I was responding to, or even the part of it that I originally quoted. If you had, you would've seen that it used the word "theft".
I even gave you a link, but you couldn't manage to put forth the meager effort necessary to click on it. Maybe you're really that lazy, but I suspect you're just willfully ignorant.
The basic truth is that you're okay with the term "he stole my GPL code" but not "she stole my album", which is hypocrisy at its finest.
No, I wouldn't describe either of those as stealing. The only hypocrisy there is that you're arguing against a position you made up yourself. If you want to be a successful troll, try picking a less obvious strawman next time.
When someone goes from a state of not having something to having it, by their own deeds and without authorization, they've stolen it, regardless of whether the owner even knows or cares that it's gone.
The question isn't whether the owner knows or cares that it's gone, but whether it really is gone at all. The fact is, it isn't gone: the owner still has it. Only a moron would complain that his stuff had been "stolen" when it was still right there in his hands.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4vlBgh7KLg
Yes, quoting a single line like that is cute and earns a few chuckles on the partisan blogs, but http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW3NHNk4oc4 has the full context (question starts at 4:24). When you hear the preceding sentences, it becomes apparent that "the situation on the ground" doesn't mean the level of violence, but the fact that the underlying problem is political, not military.
If you honestly think there has been no political progress please explain Malaki's actions lately
What, you mean demanding that we set a timetable for leaving? Doesn't sound like our presence is helping very much.
You are NOT buying the software. The software is provided BY the licence, not the other way around.
That's not generally true, even across the U.S. Software is considered to be "licensed" in the 7th and 8th circuits, but it's "sold" in the others.
undoing the EULA would castrate the power of multiple government agencies, and wreak havock on the software and services sections of business. The ramifications of undoing licence use and trade restrictions by simply stating that software becomes an individual piece of property on purchase will cost the US BILLIONS in trade.
Nonsense. The situation you're afraid of already exists, and the software industry is still doing fine. So are all the other industries where products are sold, not licensed or leased.
It may be legal, but it still stinks (and I think there may be others who agree). If I lease you a station wagon, do I get to decide where you can drive it?
It's worse than that, because software is bought, not leased.
If you lease a car, it still belongs to someone else and they can demand it back at any time; you don't expect to be able to keep it forever. On the other hand, if you buy the car, then it's yours and they can't tell you what to do with it.
When you go to the store and exchange money for software, it doesn't belong to the store anymore - no one can demand it back from you. It's yours. That's a sale, not a lease. Some courts just fail to see the obvious.
This was probably inevitable, but it's a shame to see Psystar brought down. Without any competition in the computers-that-run-OS-X market, Apple just keeps getting more obnoxious.
(If this kind of thing bothers you and you want to take a swipe back at Apple, I recommend passing up that shiny new iPhone 3G and looking at the equally shiny LG Dare instead. The screen is smaller but it's actually easier to type on.)
Also it's not just that he's changing position, it's that he's rewriting history to sound like he never argued the surge would have the opposite effect it actually has.
Did he argue that? Cite, please.
I think you're failing to distinguish between what the surge was intended to accomplish (political reconciliation) and what it has accomplished (reduced violence but no political progress: i.e. we're no closer to being able to leave, according to the Bush/McCain view, than we were before).
Another big impediment to changing the voting system is getting people to understand it. They are used to simple voting procedures.
This is where approval voting comes in handy: it's exactly the same as what we do now, same ballots and everything, except you can vote for more than one candidate. Instead of voting for your single favorite, you vote for everyone you "approve" of, and the winner is whoever gets the approval of the most voters.
No, it really isn't. This is an infuriating bit of misinformation that needs to stop. The only thing that is throwing away your vote is not voting. Any vote, any vote at all, is not throwing your vote away.
Yes, it really is. In a plurality voting system, your vote is only worth something if it pushes a candidate from second place to first place (or prevents the first place candidate from being overtaken). There's no prize for coming in second or third.
That means if you vote for someone who you know doesn't have a viable chance to win the election, your vote has no effect on the outcome. It's been thrown away.
The only way for third party voting to be sensible is if you can convince everyone overnight to vote for your third party.
If you only convince some of the people, your plan backfires: every vote for a third party is a vote that isn't being cast for a viable party, so all the would-be Democrats who vote for, say, the Green Party are taking votes away from the Democratic candidate they would've supported, and the result is that the Republican candidate wins -- the least desirable of all three, from those voters' perspective.
After having been burned like that once or twice, do you think those voters going to go along with you next time you ask them to gamble their vote on a third party candidate? Not likely.
If you want third parties to have a chance -- I sure do -- then you should stick to fighting for voting reform, not convincing people to squander their vote in a counterproductive symbolic gesture.
Obama and McCain have clearly shown us that you're just voting for the same guy, with a different name.
You realize how silly that claim is, right? If Gore or Kerry had been elected, this country would be in a very different place right now. Elections matter.
Anyone can see that Obama and McCain have opposing positions on dozens of important issues. If you care at all about the Iraq war, or health care, or the economy, or reliance on oil, or reproductive rights, or who gets appointed to the Supreme Court, you have a very clear choice in November.
What we do, is we pair these tests on a page. We'll include a known test, like the one above. And we'll also show an unclassified image and we might ask "how many people are in this picture?"
This is basically what reCAPTCHA does, although they only use words. They take images of words that off-the-shelf OCR software failed to read, apply more distortions, and serve them up two at a time. One of the words is known; the other is unknown but becomes known after enough people have submitted the same answer.
And as a bonus, the answers aren't just used to grant access to a web site - they're used to digitize the old books that the images came from in the first place.
Perhaps you'll get around to it someday, or perhaps you'll keep buying that 'any non 2-party vote is a wasted vote' propaganda
It's only considered propaganda by people who don't understand how plurality voting works.
The unfortunate reality of our voting system is that a vote for a candidate who doesn't have a near majority is wasted. If the choices are A (who you hate), B (who you can tolerate), and C (who you love), but C has no significant support, it's counterproductive and irrational to vote for C: that would mean throwing away your chance to influence the contest between A and B, which is the only one that matters since you know one of them is going to win.
This is the fundamental problem with plurality voting, and it's why voting reform is the only way to make third parties viable. Plurality voting punishes you for voting for a third party: the more people who vote for the third party instead of the "lesser evil", the more likely it is that they'll end up throwing the election to the "greater evil" (right up until they become a majority, when the situation suddenly reverses, but you can't form that majority overnight). That's not opinion or propaganda, it's a mathematical consequence of the way we count votes.
and continue to ACTUALLY waste your vote on one of two completely dysfunctional choices.
Dysfunctional? Heh.
Just because you don't care about the issues where the two viable candidates differ doesn't mean no one else does. For someone who cares about the issues I care about (and indeed, the ones most voters care about), one candidate is clearly more "functional" than the other. If my vote helps elect the guy who shares 80% of my positions instead of the guy who only shares 20%, you'd have to be blind to call that a waste.
Yes, in fact, it is, as far as the government is concerned. Go read the constitution. Pay particular attention to the words "shall not infringe."
Sounds like you need to read it yourself. The ultimate authority on what those words mean is the Supreme Court, according to that very document, and the court disagrees with you.
As I said, courts have repeatedly held that these rights can be regulated without being "infringed". That means there are limits on gun ownership that don't violate the Second Amendment, just like there are limits on speech that don't violate the First Amendment.
You and I may not like it, but that's the way it is. If you want to do something about it, maybe you should try to get yourself appointed to the Supreme Court. Pouting on Slashdot sure isn't going to help.
What part of "SHALL NOT" do you and Obama not understand?
Well, since you seem to think those words mean something other than what the highest body in charge of interpreting them has ruled that they mean, it sounds like you're the one who doesn't understand.
Sad that you're too brainwashed to do what's good for you on your own.
No, not brainwashed. Rational.
I have one vote. I could choose not to vote at all, and have no effect on the election's outcome, leaving my interests totally unrepresented. Or I could vote for a third party, which also has no effect on the outcome, so it also leaves my interests unrepresented.
Or I could do what I always do, and vote for the viable candidate who's closer to my interests. That one vote might not be much, but it's all I've got, and I'm not about to throw it away.
If you'd like to throw yours away, then by all means go ahead. The rest of us won't mind; you're just making our votes more valuable.
I suppose it'll take a few more administrations chewing up your rights and selling the law to those behind the PACs before you figure it out.
Heh. What do you think throwing your vote away is going to do to stop that?
If you're sick of the major parties, here are some suggestions:
If you don't think that Obama and McCain are exactly the same then you apparently don't understand how the two party system works.
What an odd thing to say. The two-party system results in a choice of candidates who have so many differences that, on almost any given issue, it's obvious which candidate's position is closer to your own.
If you hold a set of positions that don't fall neatly into a party category (like most of us do), you might find that you agree with one candidate on some issues, and the other on some other issues. That doesn't mean they're "exactly the same", though: it just means you'll have a harder time choosing between them. The failure of the two-party system in that case is that it makes you compromise, instead of giving you the option to vote for a third candidate who offers a little of both.
I'm one of that pitiful group who will vote for a third part candidate because it's actually the right thing to do.
Please do. Considering what a hard time you have seeing the obvious and concrete differences between the two viable candidates, I think it's best for all of us if you cast your vote in a way that's guaranteed not to affect the outcome of the election.
If neither candidate is willing to stand up for what's right and provide a little leadership and preserve American liberty for the next generation they why bother with either of them?
Because of little things like, oh, who they might appoint to the Supreme Court or put in charge of various agencies, or which laws they might choose to sign or veto, or what programs and policies they're going to promote once they get into office.
It's silly to pretend that Barack Obama and John McCain would do exactly the same things if they were elected. The only way to make that argument with a straight face is to talk in vague abstractions, like "they'd both disregard the constitution!!!" or "they'd both bow to their corporate overlords!!!". But when you get down to concrete issues, the differences are too obvious to ignore.
Also keep in mind that since taxation is always coupled with government expenditure, the combination can only have the effect of diverting resources from where consumers wanted them used to some other use chosen by political official. So, 40% of people's income is forcibly taken from them and put to some other use than they would have otherwise chosen.
Not necessarily. Keep in mind that political officials are elected by those same people, precisely to do things like divert resources to various projects. And often, when people want the government to do something, it's because private industry can't (or won't) do it: the government isn't constrained by having to turn a profit. It may not be the most efficient way to get things done, but sometimes it's the only way.
For a US example, look at electrical and phone service in rural areas. It wasn't profitable for companies to offer service in those areas at a price consumers were willing to pay, but We The People decided electricity and telecommunications were important enough that people in those areas should have them anyway, so out came the subsidies.
Would the people who ended up subsidizing it have preferred to spend their money on something else instead? Possibly. But that's what happens in a democracy: sometimes you're outnumbered.
Obama was smart to vote for this, even though he opposed it!
Not necessarily. Obama's fundraising involves getting a lot of small donations from people who are excited about him as a candidate, because they think he represents a new kind of politics and/or they're sick of the Bush administration's abuses (like warrantless wiretapping).
If he tarnishes his brand by doing stuff like this, he pisses those people off, and the money dries up.
Unfortunately somoeone thinking of voting for obama can't bring themselves to vote for mccain and vise versa, so what we need is in fact voting for third parties.
And that means we need voting reform.
What you mentioned here is, IMO, the biggest problem with American politics. Our method of running elections (plurality voting) naturally leads to a two-party system, and for many voters, that means their options on election day are "vote for the candidate I like" or "stay home", because the other candidate will be diametrically opposed on dozens of key issues.
It's not just that they can't bring themselves to vote for the other candidate; it's that voting for the other guy would be counterproductive, like reacting to high prices at the supermarket by going to a different one that's even more expensive.
Voting for a third party has the same problem, since in a plurality system, your vote is only important if it pushes someone from second place to first place. Pushing someone from third to second is a waste, but that's all a third-party vote can do unless you manage to convince a majority to switch to him overnight: if you can only convince a minority, you'll be working against their interests, which makes it hard to count on their support next time.
What we need is something like ranked-choice voting or approval voting, where you can show your support for a minor candidate, but still be confident that if he doesn't get much support, your vote will still count in the matchup between the major candidates.
For the 2nd amendment, where it says "shall not be infringed", he interprets that as "we can infringe if we want to", as witness his saying that the Washington law was a good law.
Er... here's Barack Obama on the Supreme Court decision that overturned that law: "Today's decision reinforces that if we act responsibly, we can both protect the constitutional right to bear arms and keep our communities and our children safe."
Sounds like he supports the 2nd amendment to me. The right to bear arms isn't absolute, but then neither is the right to free speech (which is restricted by libel/slander laws, copyright, etc.) -- courts have always held that these rights can be regulated without being "infringed".
So while we may mutter about Obama or McCain, the fact is that it isn't going to make any difference.
Actually, it'll make a hell of a difference to those of us who aren't libertarian fundamentalists. Claiming both candidates are the same because they favor "big government" is like claiming they're the same because they're both men: it says more about your ideology than it does about theirs.
Doesn't matter what Obama can remember. They're exactly the same. They'd both burn the constitution to roast a marshmallow. Don't kid yourself.
What a short-sighted view. There's more to the candidates than their positions on this particular bill, you know.
If you care at all about health care, war, the economy, etc. then there are plenty of important differences left between Obama and McCain. On the other hand, if you really think they're "exactly the same", then either you aren't paying attention, or you're such a one-issue fringe voter that no one is going to court your vote anyway.
Another reason is that we have forgotten the tyranny and oppression that in inevitable when the government controls close to 40% of the nation's income,
Ah, that must be why Denmark is such an oppressive, tyrannical hellhole.
Oh wait... it isn't. They have much higher taxes than we do in the US, but because they hold their government accountable, they actually get something in return, rather than having that money pissed away.
Claiming it's not stealing as a way of absolving immorality is imprecise and entirely unsuccessful.
I agree. If anyone here had claimed that copyright infringement is not immoral simply because it isn't "stealing", that would've been a poor argument (whether or not they were wrong about the meaning of that word). Morality comes from the act's consequences, not from what it's called.
If they didn't believe it was wrong to steal, they wouldn't make such an effort to make weak and unsupportable arguments that it's not.
Do you believe it's wrong to steal?
If so, then why aren't you out there complaining about stolen bases, stolen kisses, and stealing away into the night?
Could it be because you realize that some actions which can be described by some senses of the word "stealing" are wrong, but others aren't?
You don't go to jail for "stealing", because stealing is not against the law.
Similarly, most of us don't condemn each other for "stealing", because not all acts which can be described as "stealing" are objectionable. The objectionable acts are those which can more specifically be described as theft, because the fact that the victim is deprived of his property is precisely what's objectionable about them.
I don't care how people feel about stealing.
It seems you do, as indicated by your very next sentence:
It's clear by the acrobatics performed by people in your position that they're aware it's stealing and that they shouldn't do it
"It's stealing" and therefore "they shouldn't do it". This argument relies on the belief that stealing is a bad thing that people shouldn't do.
But, of course, as soon as you convince someone that an act he considers perfectly acceptable is "stealing" in some sense of the word that doesn't mean theft, you create a category of "stealing" that it's OK to do. Semantic wrangling doesn't change morality: you can refer to the act by a different name if you want, but the name you choose has no effect on the merits of the act itself.
Similarly, a group of crows is called a "murder", but that doesn't mean anyone will react to a group of crows the same way they react to homicide. You can go around all day, pointing at groups of crows and shouting to bystanders, "Look, it's a murder! Why isn't anyone stopping it?", but no one will join you in your outrage -- because the thing that bothers them about homicide is that it involves killing people, not just that it's called "murder". Harping on the alternate meanings of that word would only serve to remind people that some kinds of "murder" are harmless.
And if you kept arguing that those bystanders who didn't do anything about the crows were supporting "murder", they'd quickly conclude you were an asshole more interested in semantic games than honest discussion.
If people really stood on principle, they'd freely admit to stealing.
Perhaps they'd be willing to do that if "stealing" didn't also mean theft and weren't likely to be confused with it. A baseball player might "steal" bases, but obviously there are situations where he wouldn't "freely admit to stealing" for fear of being misunderstood.
That would be an asinine exchange, since all of those instances are perfectly consistent with the word and its definition, and have been used in that manner by society for centuries.
And yet when people are trying to communicate with each other, they tend to avoid such ambiguities. If you use "murder" to mean a group of crows because you don't realize your audience will interpret it as homicide, you're failing to communicate.
If you do realize it and you continue using that word anyway, instead of choosing a less ambiguous one, and then you go on to insist that your use was correct because the word had been "used in that manner by society for centuries" (regardless of how it was likely to be interpreted in its current context), then you're just trolling.
No. The verb's agency is the perpetrator, not the victim. It is the acquisition that is critical, not the result on the victim.
That isn't a widespread belief. You're welcome to it, but don't expect to find much agreement here (or elsewhere).
I think you'll find that most people aren't concerned about supposed instances of "stealing" where the "stolen" item isn't taken away from its owner, because the reason they're opposed to stealing in the first place is the effect it has on its victim (not the unearned acquisition/enjoyment, which is the sort of thing only Puritans worry about). Without that result, the word is shooting blanks.
It's possible that with enough semantic wrangling, you might manage to convince someone that copyright infringement could, in some sense of the word, be considered a form of stealing. But that won't get you anywhere: it'll only draw a distinction in their mind between "bad" stealing that takes property away from someone, and "good" stealing that doesn't. Stripping the word "steal" of its emotional connotation doesn't seem like something you'd want to do if you're a fan of property rights.
So you're going to pretend you've never used the word "steal" to describe the taking of an idea, an opportunity, or the taking of a password?
I don't need to pretend. I haven't used the word that way except as an exaggeration, the same way I might say "I'm starving" when I'm merely hungry. If someone pointed out that an opportunity, a password, a base, or a kiss hadn't really been stolen -- particularly in a conversation about morals or laws or property, where someone might reasonably think I'd been referring to theft -- I'd happily concede that it hadn't.
You're saying that you post in GPL violation threads on Slashdot to remind editors and posters that GPL violation isn't stealing, it's just copying and the developers didn't actually lose anything? You're opposed to the FSF and other open source organizations being able to enforce in court noncompliance with the requirements of open source licenses? Rrrrright.
I don't really bother with GPL violation threads, but yes, that's rrrrright: I'm opposed to copyright whether it's being wielded by the FSF or by the RIAA, for profit or for open source.
(However, I'm not in favor of unilateral disarmament. As long as some people are able to use copyright to prevent sharing, it's only fair that others should be able to use it to promote sharing.)
"In this particular context", theft isn't involved or relevant.
That shows you have no idea what the context was, because apparently you didn't bother to read the comment I was responding to, or even the part of it that I originally quoted. If you had, you would've seen that it used the word "theft".
I even gave you a link, but you couldn't manage to put forth the meager effort necessary to click on it. Maybe you're really that lazy, but I suspect you're just willfully ignorant.
The basic truth is that you're okay with the term "he stole my GPL code" but not "she stole my album", which is hypocrisy at its finest.
No, I wouldn't describe either of those as stealing. The only hypocrisy there is that you're arguing against a position you made up yourself. If you want to be a successful troll, try picking a less obvious strawman next time.
When someone goes from a state of not having something to having it, by their own deeds and without authorization, they've stolen it, regardless of whether the owner even knows or cares that it's gone.
The question isn't whether the owner knows or cares that it's gone, but whether it really is gone at all. The fact is, it isn't gone: the owner still has it. Only a moron would complain that his stuff had been "stolen" when it was still right there in his hands.