You had me until that one. Simply because your "constitution" once held the South does not entitle you to do so indefinitely, particularly considering in the year 1861, said occupation was completely against the wishes of the people who actually lived there.
Using your logic, we can build about 5 cases for who should legally own Palestine, and we see where that logic gets us.
Your history is also largely incorrect. nation we now call the United States was originally formed as union of independent states under a military alliance (as was also referred to in the plural). The Treaty of Paris (1783) (look it up on Wikipedia) recognized the 13 colonies as independent states. The understanding at the time was that each state had the right to unilaterally leave. The writings of the framers establish that. In fact, the first secessionists were northern states, in the War of 1812.
So to sum up, the nation called the "United States" has not "owned" the South any time in the last 225 years, and has had absolutely no control that was granted by the people of the South except by coerced Reconstruction arrangements. That makes the United States an occupying, illegitimate, oppressive power in the South.
Every argument you're going to use that the the North's victory over the South was justified because the South held slaves and the North didn't applies equally to justifying England's victory over the colonies in the Revolutionary War.
Funny what happens when you take this self-determination deal to its logical conclusions. Just a thought.
When you go to a music store, they show you this thing...It's called a price list. At any respectable store, that list will show how much money you must give the store to get an album. Once you have paid for the album, you can do anything you want with the album as long as it doesn't damage anyone else's property, or violate any other laws (like copyright). The album is yours. If you want to listen to it in public that is okay. If you want to take it home and produce your own musical style based on it, that is ok too.
What contract? Show me, or even quote a line from it. Compare your signature on the contract to the one on your driver's license, just to make sure it was you, who really signed it. If you've ever eaten at a restaurant, then surely you have one sitting around somewhere. Or if you didn't keep it, then surely the restauranteur kept a copy, right? But you can't, because it doesn't exist.
If the transaction of ordering food at a restaurant has hidden elements (e.g. that you must pay for the food they bring out after you eat it) that the buyer is not aware of (which ought to set off your fraud alarm, BTW), then how do you know that any other sort of transaction also doesn't?
A person walks into a restaurant, orders some food, eats it, and walks out after thanking the host. It wasn't any different than eating at a friend's house. It doen't look any different to an observer, the law doesn't say it's any different, and nobody is able to come up with any evidence that it's any different. All you have is an assertion that it's different, but it's funny how nobody ever backs up that assertion. But if you just keep saying it, maybe it'll become true.
****
Look: the law specifies what copyright means. Everyone knows what copyright means. They label the content they sell you as copyrighted. The copyright label is understood by everyone as meaning that you only bought certain usage rights. It's no different that pointing to the lack of a contract whent you eat at a restaurant. Actually, the obligations there are even less-defined, yet most people would not claim you have a right to eat without paying. Or for another example, it's like you bought a peace of property on the condition that you not obstruct the rainwater drainage through the land, and then after the title was transfered to you, you say, "But I own this land, it's MINE, how dare you say what I may and may not use it!" Sure, the obligations there have to be more explicit, but it's the same principle: everyone, including law enforcement, knows what the obligations are, and you do not own the right to disregard them.
I hate to be bad guy here, and I especially hate how I'll unjustifiably lose my positive karma for saying thus, but when people say things like:
it appears that 'mandatory managed copy' will still allow content producers to limit what consumers can do with the content and equipment they own well beyond the limitations imposed by copyright law.
I cringe. You do not own the content. You bought specific use rights. They sold you the content contingent on certain usage standards you agreed to. Ergo, you only own the right to use it in very specific ways. You do not own the content simpliciter, as much as you would like to. DRM simply enforces the contract you agreed to and which the law recognizes.
That's the beauty of true science, it's a quest for truth regardless of what was previously "known". If you discover something that conflicts with earlier thinking, not only are you recognized, but you're celebrated.
This just confirms what all the anti-antitrust law people have been saying all along. If a company (like Microsoft) really has a monopoly and is exploiting to make lucrative returns, someone will enter and compete with them. And yes, that was a bold claim. 10 years ago, no one would have believed that anyone could go head to head with Microsoft on their office suite. In other words, no one predicted Google.
Um, the article (I'm sorry, TFA) doesn't say anything about the, er, REVENUE MODEL that these "businesses" use (in fact, it specifically says that's big barrier, and only hints about the models in one line), and, uh, that's kind of important to consider when invensting venture capital. Remember the dot-com boom/bust, anyone? Enron? Didn't that teach ANYONE the merits of, you know, understanding how the businesses intends to make money before pouring putting your own funds into it?
I had a great idea for a open source project that could use a lot of funding (it relates to machine translation and is something people would pay a lot of money for), and I read the article (TFA) hoping to find ideas for revenue models for open source that I could then use to promote when seeking VC. No, I was unfortunately not successful. Maybe next time Business Week can remember to include the single most important part of the story?
Why do people keep making this idiotic argument? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to call your argument idiotic. Let me put it another way. Why do you keep making this argument that assumes a static model? The market is large because piracy is so hard!!!! That difficulty is due to a combination of copy protection AND law enforcement. No IP enforcement -> no market -> no selling in that market. Simple enough?
Did you read my point at all? It was two lines. Let's again go over the point, to which I cannot find a single relevant response in your post:
Distributing DVD on P2P = easy
Distributing physical DVD = hard, because you either only give it or your friends, or you advertise and attract the FBI
DVD can be read by computer: both options are possible
DVD can't be read by computer: only hard option is possible
Let's go over the points I made elsewhere that you tried to address:
Number of people who buy a given official DVD, now that copyright is enforced: a lot
Number of people who would buy a given official DVD if piracy were infinitely easy and unenforceable: 3
Cost to market a DVD: more than the revenues from three people
Decision to release DVD = no
Revenues from movie production: cut by half
Money invested in making movies: cut by half
Please, stop assuming a static model, and start thinking on the margin. You're like the pacifist who says "Gee, I've never had to use violence, so I guess there's no point in being willing to use it."
Now, to your final point:
Your claim: region codes don't prevent piracy.
Your claim: region codes allow studios to milk more profit
Conclusion: region codes prevent interregion piracy.
Fact: one form of piracy is interregion arbitrage.
Conclusion: region codes prevent one form of piracy effectively.
There, did I make my points easy enough to understand this time? Maybe now people will stop emotionally modding me down.
And just to clarify (again): I'm not saying IP laws are even a good idea! I wish there were another way! In fact, I'm working on a paper right now showing there's an alternate way, which I've NEVER seen a Slashdotter propose! So quit acting like I'm the "enemy". I'm not.
Huh? I wasn't claiming that if DVD's had poor copy protection, studios would sell VHS instead. I'm claiming they would abandon the market altogether. If that meant only being able to profit from the box office run, they would make fewer movies and the resources would be devoted elsewhere. Let's not forget the ostensible justification for IP laws in the first place: encourage people to produce intellectual works. Don't ignore that lower returns from producing intellectual works will drive capital to other endeavors and leave us, most likely, worse off.
Of course, there could be a way to profitably make a movie without IP laws. But NO ONE (and that includes the myriad Slashdotters who are heavy on complaints about copy protection, light on complaints about piracy) has come up with one! Until that happens, this is the best we've got.
+1 Insightful? More like -1 Ridiculous! They're in the freakin movie business. The way they make money is by selling movies. They wouldn't release DVDs if pirating were easy? Like they did with VHS? Yeah, not a single movie was released on VHS.
They heyday of VHS was before the mass availability of Napster and P2P filesharing, so piracy had huge difficulties built right in. You had to distribute them in person (and thereby only spread the movies very, very slowly) or get a good reputation and advertise publicly, in which case the FBI would arrest you. So yes, it was relatively hard to pirate VHS.
urthermore, it's not like region coding does diddley squat to prevent piracy. It's not even intended to stop piracy. It's sole purpose is to facilitate market segmentation, whereby the movie industry can squeeze the maximum possible profit out of every market in the world without the low income regions undercutting the high income ones by selling out of the country.
You contradict yourself. If region coding does diddley squat, it would not be possible to "squeeze the maximum possible profit out of every market in the world without the low income regions undercutting the high income ones by selling out of the country." because people would just buy in the cheaper region and sell to the more expensive region. (Arbitrage: gotta love it! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage) You can complain that region coding accomlishes nothing, or you can complain that the movie industry squeezes the maximum profit out according to ability to pay, but you can't do both.
Right, but let's think on the margin. Obviously, someone will still release DVD's, irrespective of ease of piracy. But for some class of movies, ease of piracy is a huge factor, and given the risk involved in promoting a movie, some studios will conclude that a DVD will lose them money and just not release it. The important question is, do the benefits of ease of use in the DVD's that do get released outweight the loss of the DVD's that don't ever get released? And the answer is far from clear.
Good point about the technological use restrictions, but they may not even release DVD's if they had to release them in a format that allowed for easy pirating. So it's not all bad.
Yeah, good point! What government is going to punish, tax, or ban the practice of providing free or cheap goods to consumers? That would be stupid! Cheap and free stuff is... good. I can't imagine any government trying to get in the way of that. You would have to be monumentally stupid to do that! I mean, you might as well just ban sunlight for competing with light bulb manufacturers! LOL!...
You know, if you really believe your product is going to increase another company's sales, and they're not going to give you a cut, here's a crazy way to get that cut anyway: it's called "buying their stock". New concept, they should look into it.
I think you're forgetting the most outrageous error of FEMA. What happened is, thousands of firefighters and other emergency responders arrived, ready and able to do important stuff, like, you know, save lives, that kind of thing. So what did they do? Did they put em to work? No, they first made them endure days of sensitivity training. SENSITIVITY TRAINING!!!!!! People are dying, and they're worried about the prospect that a rescue worker who came on his own dime to serve his fellow man might think negative thoughts about members of other races?
Want proof? We got proof.
Search for the word "harassment" in these articles:
Just google Katrina "sexual harassment" in their news section.
And note: this wasn't some errant agency violating its mandate. This is the liberal, socialist mindset at work, which values "diversity" over, you know, what real people actually want. Want a good doctor? Fuck that. You get a diverse doctor. Want good teachers, police, firefighters, lifeguards, etc.? Fuck no. You get the shitty ones, 'cause we got quotas to meet.
Anyone who has ever asked for sensitivity training can easily find the person responsible for this murderous loss of common sense. It's called a mirror.
First of all, I'm proposing a change to the system of laws, and, as such, for purposes of advocating my idea I can assume any change in other laws necessary to make my proposed change legal. So the charge of it being insider trading is orthogonal to whether it would be a good idea. Re: your next point, I share your concern that company officers, but:
1) That can be prevented without insider trading laws. As long as other people also own shares, they can contract to prohibit profiting from intentional destruction of the company, like companies already do today. Contrary to what you seem to be saying, most investors do not try to kill the value of their stock so they can sell it and say "haha! dodged that one! Suckers!"
2) You overstate the difference it would make. Today, employees can tank their companies and they don't lose much because they have *no* shares. Yet no one worries about "wageers" (the wage-earning versions of profiteers).
What was offensive about my post? I used the exact same tone you did, and in fact, was rather mild compared to you. If I was "trolling", you were definitely trolling. And the explanation you gave there would warrant a "flamebait" moderation, not a trolling moderation.
Oh, and thanks for the lecture about taking time to consider that I'm not perfect, and I'm not always right. Perhaps you forgot that I used that exact tone and attitude in my original post on this topic.
And where do you get off lecturing me on fallacies? I didn't make a single one. You, on the other hand, made the fallacy of equating "opposition to method X of achieving Y" with "opposition to Y". Then you made two strawmen by 1) claiming I supported stupid federal programs (I don't, and that should have been clear from my post), and 2) claiming I thought stem cell federal funding proponents were short-sighted (I said nothing like that). And you also used circular logic by assuming your conclusion (that some tasks must be provided by the government). And just now you made the appeal to popularity (about how I'm getting modded down and you aren't). I will concede you've got some guts referring me to a fallacy list.
LOL!!!!! Someone lectures me about "standing up for your ideas" then anonymously gets his friend to mod me down after I tear him a new one! This is rich!
On the other hand, if you're not related at all to the person I was replying to, could you please get someone to explain what the HELL I said in that post that counts as "trolling"? All I did was refute his arguments. I'm sorry if they "offend" you, but there's no way that was trolling. It's just malicious modding, pure and simple.
Slashdot Mirror
You had me until that one. Simply because your "constitution" once held the South does not entitle you to do so indefinitely, particularly considering in the year 1861, said occupation was completely against the wishes of the people who actually lived there.
Using your logic, we can build about 5 cases for who should legally own Palestine, and we see where that logic gets us.
Your history is also largely incorrect. nation we now call the United States was originally formed as union of independent states under a military alliance (as was also referred to in the plural). The Treaty of Paris (1783) (look it up on Wikipedia) recognized the 13 colonies as independent states. The understanding at the time was that each state had the right to unilaterally leave. The writings of the framers establish that. In fact, the first secessionists were northern states, in the War of 1812.
So to sum up, the nation called the "United States" has not "owned" the South any time in the last 225 years, and has had absolutely no control that was granted by the people of the South except by coerced Reconstruction arrangements. That makes the United States an occupying, illegitimate, oppressive power in the South.
Every argument you're going to use that the the North's victory over the South was justified because the South held slaves and the North didn't applies equally to justifying England's victory over the colonies in the Revolutionary War.
Funny what happens when you take this self-determination deal to its logical conclusions. Just a thought.
When you go to a music store, they show you this thing...It's called a price list. At any respectable store, that list will show how much money you must give the store to get an album. Once you have paid for the album, you can do anything you want with the album as long as it doesn't damage anyone else's property, or violate any other laws (like copyright). The album is yours. If you want to listen to it in public that is okay. If you want to take it home and produce your own musical style based on it, that is ok too.
Note: read the full post. This is a parody. -LG
What contract? Show me, or even quote a line from it. Compare your signature on the contract to the one on your driver's license, just to make sure it was you, who really signed it. If you've ever eaten at a restaurant, then surely you have one sitting around somewhere. Or if you didn't keep it, then surely the restauranteur kept a copy, right?
But you can't, because it doesn't exist.
If the transaction of ordering food at a restaurant has hidden elements (e.g. that you must pay for the food they bring out after you eat it) that the buyer is not aware of (which ought to set off your fraud alarm, BTW), then how do you know that any other sort of transaction also doesn't?
A person walks into a restaurant, orders some food, eats it, and walks out after thanking the host. It wasn't any different than eating at a friend's house. It doen't look any different to an observer, the law doesn't say it's any different, and nobody is able to come up with any evidence that it's any different. All you have is an assertion that it's different, but it's funny how nobody ever backs up that assertion. But if you just keep saying it, maybe it'll become true.
****
Look: the law specifies what copyright means. Everyone knows what copyright means. They label the content they sell you as copyrighted. The copyright label is understood by everyone as meaning that you only bought certain usage rights. It's no different that pointing to the lack of a contract whent you eat at a restaurant. Actually, the obligations there are even less-defined, yet most people would not claim you have a right to eat without paying. Or for another example, it's like you bought a peace of property on the condition that you not obstruct the rainwater drainage through the land, and then after the title was transfered to you, you say, "But I own this land, it's MINE, how dare you say what I may and may not use it!" Sure, the obligations there have to be more explicit, but it's the same principle: everyone, including law enforcement, knows what the obligations are, and you do not own the right to disregard them.
I hate to be bad guy here, and I especially hate how I'll unjustifiably lose my positive karma for saying thus, but when people say things like:
it appears that 'mandatory managed copy' will still allow content producers to limit what consumers can do with the content and equipment they own well beyond the limitations imposed by copyright law.
I cringe. You do not own the content. You bought specific use rights. They sold you the content contingent on certain usage standards you agreed to. Ergo, you only own the right to use it in very specific ways. You do not own the content simpliciter, as much as you would like to. DRM simply enforces the contract you agreed to and which the law recognizes.
That's the beauty of true science, it's a quest for truth regardless of what was previously "known". If you discover something that conflicts with earlier thinking, not only are you recognized, but you're celebrated.
Unless the previously known belief is evolution.
Can someone please explain how that's flamebait? It's a joke, people. Sheesh...
Bork the bitch!
This just confirms what all the anti-antitrust law people have been saying all along. If a company (like Microsoft) really has a monopoly and is exploiting to make lucrative returns, someone will enter and compete with them. And yes, that was a bold claim. 10 years ago, no one would have believed that anyone could go head to head with Microsoft on their office suite. In other words, no one predicted Google.
Um, the article (I'm sorry, TFA) doesn't say anything about the, er, REVENUE MODEL that these "businesses" use (in fact, it specifically says that's big barrier, and only hints about the models in one line), and, uh, that's kind of important to consider when invensting venture capital. Remember the dot-com boom/bust, anyone? Enron? Didn't that teach ANYONE the merits of, you know, understanding how the businesses intends to make money before pouring putting your own funds into it?
I had a great idea for a open source project that could use a lot of funding (it relates to machine translation and is something people would pay a lot of money for), and I read the article (TFA) hoping to find ideas for revenue models for open source that I could then use to promote when seeking VC. No, I was unfortunately not successful. Maybe next time Business Week can remember to include the single most important part of the story?
Why do people keep making this idiotic argument? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to call your argument idiotic. Let me put it another way. Why do you keep making this argument that assumes a static model? The market is large because piracy is so hard!!!! That difficulty is due to a combination of copy protection AND law enforcement. No IP enforcement -> no market -> no selling in that market. Simple enough?
Please read my post here, where I show the errors of your logic: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=163994&thresho ld=1&commentsort=0&tid=97&mode=thread&pid=13698545 #13698622
Did you read my point at all? It was two lines. Let's again go over the point, to which I cannot find a single relevant response in your post:
Distributing DVD on P2P = easy
Distributing physical DVD = hard, because you either only give it or your friends, or you advertise and attract the FBI
DVD can be read by computer: both options are possible
DVD can't be read by computer: only hard option is possible
Let's go over the points I made elsewhere that you tried to address:
Number of people who buy a given official DVD, now that copyright is enforced: a lot
Number of people who would buy a given official DVD if piracy were infinitely easy and unenforceable: 3
Cost to market a DVD: more than the revenues from three people
Decision to release DVD = no
Revenues from movie production: cut by half
Money invested in making movies: cut by half
Please, stop assuming a static model, and start thinking on the margin. You're like the pacifist who says "Gee, I've never had to use violence, so I guess there's no point in being willing to use it."
Now, to your final point:
Your claim: region codes don't prevent piracy.
Your claim: region codes allow studios to milk more profit
Conclusion: region codes prevent interregion piracy.
Fact: one form of piracy is interregion arbitrage.
Conclusion: region codes prevent one form of piracy effectively.
There, did I make my points easy enough to understand this time? Maybe now people will stop emotionally modding me down.
And just to clarify (again): I'm not saying IP laws are even a good idea! I wish there were another way! In fact, I'm working on a paper right now showing there's an alternate way, which I've NEVER seen a Slashdotter propose! So quit acting like I'm the "enemy". I'm not.
Oh, cool, so now you've got a physical DVD you can distribute and give to all your small circle of friends. WOOT!
Oh, wait, you were gonna give it to strangers? So... you're going to advertise without risking alerting the authorities...how?
Huh? I wasn't claiming that if DVD's had poor copy protection, studios would sell VHS instead. I'm claiming they would abandon the market altogether. If that meant only being able to profit from the box office run, they would make fewer movies and the resources would be devoted elsewhere. Let's not forget the ostensible justification for IP laws in the first place: encourage people to produce intellectual works. Don't ignore that lower returns from producing intellectual works will drive capital to other endeavors and leave us, most likely, worse off.
Of course, there could be a way to profitably make a movie without IP laws. But NO ONE (and that includes the myriad Slashdotters who are heavy on complaints about copy protection, light on complaints about piracy) has come up with one! Until that happens, this is the best we've got.
You're claiming that making DVD's not playable on computers doesn't make it harder to distribute illegally?
+1 Insightful? More like -1 Ridiculous! They're in the freakin movie business. The way they make money is by selling movies. They wouldn't release DVDs if pirating were easy? Like they did with VHS? Yeah, not a single movie was released on VHS.
They heyday of VHS was before the mass availability of Napster and P2P filesharing, so piracy had huge difficulties built right in. You had to distribute them in person (and thereby only spread the movies very, very slowly) or get a good reputation and advertise publicly, in which case the FBI would arrest you. So yes, it was relatively hard to pirate VHS.
urthermore, it's not like region coding does diddley squat to prevent piracy. It's not even intended to stop piracy. It's sole purpose is to facilitate market segmentation, whereby the movie industry can squeeze the maximum possible profit out of every market in the world without the low income regions undercutting the high income ones by selling out of the country.
You contradict yourself. If region coding does diddley squat, it would not be possible to "squeeze the maximum possible profit out of every market in the world without the low income regions undercutting the high income ones by selling out of the country." because people would just buy in the cheaper region and sell to the more expensive region. (Arbitrage: gotta love it! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage) You can complain that region coding accomlishes nothing, or you can complain that the movie industry squeezes the maximum profit out according to ability to pay, but you can't do both.
Right, but let's think on the margin. Obviously, someone will still release DVD's, irrespective of ease of piracy. But for some class of movies, ease of piracy is a huge factor, and given the risk involved in promoting a movie, some studios will conclude that a DVD will lose them money and just not release it. The important question is, do the benefits of ease of use in the DVD's that do get released outweight the loss of the DVD's that don't ever get released? And the answer is far from clear.
Good point about the technological use restrictions, but they may not even release DVD's if they had to release them in a format that allowed for easy pirating. So it's not all bad.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/25/143921 4&tid=97
Yeah, good point! What government is going to punish, tax, or ban the practice of providing free or cheap goods to consumers? That would be stupid! Cheap and free stuff is ... good. I can't imagine any government trying to get in the way of that. You would have to be monumentally stupid to do that! I mean, you might as well just ban sunlight for competing with light bulb manufacturers! LOL! ...
& q=tariff&btnG=Search+News
Oh, fuck:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2062852/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protective_tariff
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8
*burying face in hands*
You know, if you really believe your product is going to increase another company's sales, and they're not going to give you a cut, here's a crazy way to get that cut anyway: it's called "buying their stock". New concept, they should look into it.
I think you're forgetting the most outrageous error of FEMA. What happened is, thousands of firefighters and other emergency responders arrived, ready and able to do important stuff, like, you know, save lives, that kind of thing. So what did they do? Did they put em to work? No, they first made them endure days of sensitivity training. SENSITIVITY TRAINING!!!!!! People are dying, and they're worried about the prospect that a rescue worker who came on his own dime to serve his fellow man might think negative thoughts about members of other races?
a sp_ ID=46179
Want proof? We got proof.
Search for the word "harassment" in these articles:
http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_3004197
http://www.gazetteextra.com/katrina_rundle092905.
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE
Just google Katrina "sexual harassment" in their news section.
And note: this wasn't some errant agency violating its mandate. This is the liberal, socialist mindset at work, which values "diversity" over, you know, what real people actually want. Want a good doctor? Fuck that. You get a diverse doctor. Want good teachers, police, firefighters, lifeguards, etc.? Fuck no. You get the shitty ones, 'cause we got quotas to meet.
Anyone who has ever asked for sensitivity training can easily find the person responsible for this murderous loss of common sense. It's called a mirror.
First of all, I'm proposing a change to the system of laws, and, as such, for purposes of advocating my idea I can assume any change in other laws necessary to make my proposed change legal. So the charge of it being insider trading is orthogonal to whether it would be a good idea. Re: your next point, I share your concern that company officers, but:
1) That can be prevented without insider trading laws. As long as other people also own shares, they can contract to prohibit profiting from intentional destruction of the company, like companies already do today. Contrary to what you seem to be saying, most investors do not try to kill the value of their stock so they can sell it and say "haha! dodged that one! Suckers!"
2) You overstate the difference it would make. Today, employees can tank their companies and they don't lose much because they have *no* shares. Yet no one worries about "wageers" (the wage-earning versions of profiteers).
What was offensive about my post? I used the exact same tone you did, and in fact, was rather mild compared to you. If I was "trolling", you were definitely trolling. And the explanation you gave there would warrant a "flamebait" moderation, not a trolling moderation.
Oh, and thanks for the lecture about taking time to consider that I'm not perfect, and I'm not always right. Perhaps you forgot that I used that exact tone and attitude in my original post on this topic.
And where do you get off lecturing me on fallacies? I didn't make a single one. You, on the other hand, made the fallacy of equating "opposition to method X of achieving Y" with "opposition to Y". Then you made two strawmen by 1) claiming I supported stupid federal programs (I don't, and that should have been clear from my post), and 2) claiming I thought stem cell federal funding proponents were short-sighted (I said nothing like that). And you also used circular logic by assuming your conclusion (that some tasks must be provided by the government). And just now you made the appeal to popularity (about how I'm getting modded down and you aren't). I will concede you've got some guts referring me to a fallacy list.
LOL!!!!! Someone lectures me about "standing up for your ideas" then anonymously gets his friend to mod me down after I tear him a new one! This is rich!
On the other hand, if you're not related at all to the person I was replying to, could you please get someone to explain what the HELL I said in that post that counts as "trolling"? All I did was refute his arguments. I'm sorry if they "offend" you, but there's no way that was trolling. It's just malicious modding, pure and simple.