As we have seen time and again with the Universal Service Fund, big health care (Pfizer being let off the hook for defrauding Medicare because punishing them would mean delisting all of their products from Medicare) and big finance (if you cannot immediately think of five major scandals, you've not been paying attention) the big guys get government money and aren't held accountable at all. At all. So, no. Not a single red cent to them. I don't give a damn how high and noble their stated goals are. Until we have an independent prosecutor who can hang one of these companies from the nearest lamp post for taking the money and not doing precisely what the money is for, the answer is "no."
And if you let your idealism get in the way and say "yes," you're an idiot who deserves to have your face rubbed into this when you get betrayed.
I really hate the extent to which the US is exerting its thought crime laws in other sovereign nations. I guess not so sovereign any more.
Thought crime? Have you even read 1984? A thought crime is a "crime" in which the mere desiring something contrary to the law is itself a punishable criminal act. No proposed copyright law has come even close to being a "thought crime." You do genuine civilian libertarians absolutely no good with this extremist hyperbole and only make the rest of us copyright minimalists look like idiots.
Heck, while I'm at it, I have news for you. We have these modern law enforcement mechanisms called "extraditions" and "international partnerships." This means that if people from your country screw over the US Government in the US, you help us stop them. Believe it or not, the US Government has actually done this in reverse on behalf of foreign countries such as when it puts Americans in prison for going to places like Uganda and Thailand to rape children or when it arrests Americans who raise funds for guerrilla groups abroad.
The FBI actually needs this more than anyone else. It's a little known fact that the FBI is the only federal agency that has no charter-defined enforcement authority; all enforcement authority comes from the Attorney General. That means that they live and die in their latitude to investigate federal crimes by politics.
What we need is the FBI to receive a well defined grant of authority from Congress and to make them an independent agency unaccountable to the President. There is precedent for this; the US Marshals Service, until a few decades ago, didn't report to the President. It reported to the federal judiciary.
They've finally alienated the entire political spectrum. I don't know a single conservative writer, thinker or activist that supports strong IP rights anymore. They've over-played their hand to the point that mainstream opinion on the political right is that they're the quintessential corporate Fascists over things like SOPA (conservative and libertarian publications were even more strident than the left over SOPA). If anything, the fact that so many people in Hollywood support big government policies and politicians while demanding the destruction of property rights and the Internet's infrastructure in the name of IP protection has made many of them think that our country needs to bankrupt all of them.
But in 2004-2005, a friend of mine and I discovered that you could mount the iPod Classic as a hard drive and bring the files over from Terminal.app or a Linux equivalent despite Apple's attempts to make it hard to access. Since the files all had ID3 tags, their attempts to obfuscate the file names were pointless if we wanted to share our collections.
Their handling of the retina display was a major screw up that sacrificed the very reason to call the MacBook Pro a professional device so that normal users (home and manager types, for example) could have an expensive and sexy fashion statement-laptop (instead of giving them a 17 inch retina display Air). Their unwillingness to maintain the Mac Pro is another reason why people get the impression that the iPhoneification of OS X is underway.
I think it's much simpler: Steve Jobs was the last executive who understood the need to keep Apple's feet in both the home market and the outskirts of the enterprise. Their current management may know the design approaches he liked and a host of other things that can let them keep going in the same pattern. Unfortunately, I don't think they "get" the different segments of Apple's products. Macs aren't supposed to just be toys for upper-middle class snobs (I say this as an owner of a 2008 MBP). They're supposed to be able to actually do work as well.
This is why I really think Apple's fans need to realize that this may be the start of Apple's decline (not into irrelevant, just to some place of North of Sony's current position in 10 years). A company Apple's size can afford to maintain both appliance-like devices and real workhorse computers. Apple is not even saying they won't keep going. They're just stumbling around.
1. We pull back all of our military forces except at a few major naval bases, end the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and tell Europe, Japan and Korea to pick up 100% of their defense budget from now on. Then cut the defense budget by 25%-30%. 2. We reduce unemployment benefits to six months instead of two years. Sorry, if you haven't worked in your field for about two years you don't have a career in it anymore. Unemployment benefits I believe are right now about $500B-$600B of the current federal budget. 3. We means test the hell out of Social Security and Medicare. 4. Release all non-violent drug offenders (including dealers) from prison, end the War on Drugs and send the enforcement personnel DEA and ATF to work for another federal law enforcement agency. 5. Privatize TSA, repeal 90% of the legislation behind Homeland Security and just admit that the only sensible reform we really needed post 9/11 was letting the FBI and CIA coordinate on terrorism cases.
But nope, we can't stop bombing foreign backwaters where some jihadi is rattling his sabre and AK47 impotently at the Great Satan(tm) or tell someone they need to back away from the federal trough.
In 1960 a college graduate could own a home and support a family on one full time salary. In 2012, positions like that are vanishingly rare.
A few things have happened since 1960:
1. The number of citizens with college degrees has gone up something like 300%. 2. The average B.S./B.A. today is watered down considerably compared to 1960. 3. There are a few tens of millions more women in the workplace now than compared to then (or at least pre-2008 crash there were) 4. There are conservatively 12 million illegal immigrants doing low-skilled and unskilled jobs and their illegal status makes it impossible for them to demand a decent wage.
What the left doesn't want to face up to is the fact that they got their egalitarian college experiment and increased presence of women in the workplace. Then, the law of supply and demand kicked in and started crushing the wages of college degree holders and workers generally due to the comparative glut of new workers in the economy.
Meanwhile, all we hear about is just outsourcing as though outsourcing all by itself killed everything. It's a big factor, but it's not big enough to do all of that damage by itself.
1. Give them 2 years to hire or retain by contract people who can repair or do maintenance on site. 2. Make it a class six felony to knowingly connect an industrial system to the public internet for any reason other than an exigent circumstance for which a reasonable practitioner would not regard the on-site staff as capable of handling or for which there is insufficient time to fly out a practitioner capable of performing the work. 3. In the event of loss to limb or property, make trebble damages built-in to the civil site. 4. In the even of loss of life, make elevation to felony murder mandatory with execution mandatory for all parties involved in the event that the death toll goes beyond a few people.
That's how you wake them up and institute change post haste.
I can think of many things which would improve the quality of public schools without raising taxes:
1. Tort reform. Serious, hardcore tort reform at the state level which takes an axe to all of the areas where frivolous lawsuits can be brought would eliminate the argument for any policy that is grounded in the fear of what some idiot might sue over. 2. End zero tolerance under pain of imprisonment for anyone who punishes a student for acting in self-defense. 3. Remove any student who is constantly disrupting class. If they become a problem (and don't have a documented mental handicap), simply expel them and kick them out onto the street. 4. Establish a general policy of erring on the side of pacing the class to the speed of the top 50% of the class, not the bottom 50%. If the bottom cannot keep up, offer them tutoring; if they fail objectively, fail them for the year.
If ASIS and CIA have enough boots on the ground overseas, they'll eliminate the need for a large ASIO/FBI which can do domestic monitoring.
If the politicians castrate ASIS and CIA's ability to operate overseas in terms of manpower and/or rules of engagement, the foreign threat is not hampered abroad and can translate into a domestic threat by virtue of immigration and tourism. That makes a job for the ASIO and FBI, which means more power at home, which means the politicians have a real power infrastructure to use for their benefit.
This is also why the Romans kept the legions abroad and required them to disarm in Italy...
18-36 months for user activity logs? Really? If they do that voluntarily, they have no credible argument from a cost perspective to ever say "no" to the government. None. Period. The amount of data they're freely taking on there is so high that the government can easily justify telling them that they must warehouse all activity, all users (past and present) indefinitely at their cost.
I simply cannot believe the bean counters are ok with this.
What we need is a more controlled version of the ballot initiative. I would rather see the following changes:
1) All felony criminal statutes are etched into stone in the state constitution. The legislature is powerless to draft new criminal charges worse than a misdemeanor without submitting them to the electorate for a ballot initiative. A 2) All tax increases must be submitted for ballot initiative and must apply to all potential voters. That is, whatever behavior would trigger it for your neighbor must trigger it for you. For income tax purposes, that would mean that even if it's just $1, every voter must pay additional income tax or vice tax if they work or use vice. 3) Recall elections for elected representatives. For appointed judges, how about a ballot initiative that would force the legislature to consider impeachment charges immediately upon the opening of the first session of the legislature.
It'll just make a bigger mockery of our court precedents. If hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for what would no more than grand theft in most states is not "cruel and unusual" WRT fines, then how can the Supreme Court possibly justify things like saying that it is cruel and unusual to use the death penalty on someone who is a serial child molester (they struck down Louisiana's law which provided for execution of repeat offenders say it was "uncivilized").
Oh wait, this is the same federal judiciary that only recently discovered that the 2nd amendment was part of the Bill of Rights and was being excluded from incorporation under the 14th. In another 150 years, they might discover that the DMCA's statutory damages are unconscionable and hypocritical as well.
Newegg is a retailer, not an OEM. You cannot do any sort of substantial alteration to it and expect them to take it back. This isn't like she bought it straight from Lenovo and they're saying they won't do warranty work on it. She's expecting a full refund after she removed the original OS which is a major selling point to most Thinkpad buyers.
Instead of advertising, how about creating cheap, useful APIs for developers to enable things like mobile gaming against friends, tightly integrated with Facebook? They have an opportunity to build out a service layer that is connected to all of the popular games and ecommerce sites and that provides value independent of advertising. How hard would it be for Amazon to get an inexpensive service to discretely figure out social graphs so they can show you products your friends and family are buying?
Socialization is the process of creating the social patterns that society hopes to create to integrate a child into productive adulthood. That is, it's the human equivalent of training a puppy to be the sort of dog the family wants around the house. People like you don't seem to understand that socialization and socializing are only related insofar as the latter sometimes provides opportunities for the former. Socializing qua socializing is not socialization. Indeed, it can undermine proper socialization if not controlled among kids. You don't give children the socialization they need by making their primary experiences be with other children, but rather with adults who can show them the proper social behaviors of adulthood.
The homeschoolers I've known (almost all religious homeschoolers) are far better socialized than many of my peers were. More mature, more responsible and capable of functioning in adult society than the average public schooler. That's one reason I am wholeheartedly in favor of home schooling. Most of the "social lessons" I learned in the public schools would more likely kill my career by virtue of getting me sued or arrested than help me function as an adult.
I've never heard of children taunted for being slower than their peers at reading.
So you've never heard of kids being made fun of for being "stupid" or "retarded?" Man, you must have lived in the Twilight Zone. Kids tend to go after people they perceive to be on both sides of the bell curve.
The very reason they went to explore was to find an efficient trade route to India. Once they realized it wasn't India, they returned to gain new land and gold. It was imperialism, plain and simple.
The Spanish hardly conquered the Aztecs on their own strength. Do you really think 500 white guys with 15th and early 16th century muskets defeated the over 100,000 strong Aztech imperial army on their own strength and with the aid of Smallpox? Bullshit. When they marched into Tenochtitlan, they did so at the head of a multi-ethnic army composed of tens of thousands of soldiers recruited from the ethnic groups that were sick of being victims of Aztec sacrificial state terrorism.
The irony is that the treatment the Christian Spaniards gave them was far more humane than what the Muslims or some of the advanced pagan civilizations of antiquity would have given a people who practiced a religion as barbaric as the Aztec religion.
People like you are quick to point to a non-existent double standard that allegedly benefits Christianity, ignoring the fact that Christian violence toward Islam has almost always been either in self-defense or irredentist in nature. You ignore the fact that most of the land in the Middle East that is Muslim used to be Christian, Jewish or Zoroastrian; Syria, Lebanon and North Africa were predominantly Christian when conquered and forcefully converted by the Muslim Caliphate. Two hundred some years prior to the first Crusade, Muslims had marched up the Iberian Peninsula and were stopped in France by Charles Martel at the battle of Tours.
This has been the norm for Islam. Muslim armies were marching on Europe to annex and conquer-by-the-sword even into the Enlightenment period. That's how recent this unrelenting pattern of expansion-by-the-sword by Islam has been since the very beginning of Islam's power. But heaven forbid Christians fight back harshly or invade some minor provinces of the Islamic world to regain some of the ground taken by the sword.
"Christian jihad" is exempt from mainstream scrutiny because it is something that has never really existed. The closest moral equivocation that can be made is to compare a handful of anti-abortion extremists who use violence against what they believe to be cold-blooded murder of babies to a mass movement in the Islamic world that attacks people because of their religious beliefs and/or what their governments are doing.
I say screw the big government-loving liberals that control Hollywood. They've spent the last 50 years pushing an anti-property rights, pro-tax, government-worshiping (ever notice how most non-comedic TV dramas are about cops or lawyers?) agenda. Boo freaking hoo that they're IP rights are being violated. That creaking sound they're hearing is the roof about to cave in under the weight of all of the chickens roosting on it.
You'll see that the main reason they went after him was because he took the source code in order to use it for his personal profit, and it hadn't gone through the proper channels to make it public-ready. In other words, what he did with the accounting software was roughly equivalent to taking classified missile control software home in order to either start a competing business or use it to help his current one. Technically, the software is "public domain," but the Federal Reserve had not actually gone through the process of making it ready to be released to the public.
I have no problem with him doing a few years for that because what he did is no different than taking a work-for-hire work home to use for a customer who didn't pay for it nor was authorized by the paying customer to have it. That's for-profit copyright violation in the private sector, and since he intended to derive private benefits from it, I don't see much of a difference. It's not like he took it home, modified it to be attractive to the Department of the Treasury and tried to demo it to another part of the government (since the Federal Reserve is a quasi-federal agency, taking their code to show to the Treasury would have been less legally problematic)
The Federal Reserve is actually a public-private corporation that happens to do some important Treasury-related functions. They're not an actual federal agency like the US Mint.
$37B is also, IIRC, about equal to the annual income of both the recording and movie industries combined in the US...
I suppose this number has value for making a point, but in terms of practicality it is barely more meaningful than the "studies" which assume that 1 download = 1 lost, guaranteed sale. Why? Because if the legal regime were even remotely positioned to impose this sort of cost on free services, they'd fold overnight. Larry Page would be booking 100mph from his office to their nearest data center in his Tesla to personally shut down Youtube post-haste.
I get and sympathize with the propaganda value of this "study," but let's be realistic:
1. Probably only about 25% of all pirates have both the means to buy a good and would buy it if piracy weren't an option (contrary to the views of both sides). 2. In the real world, Google would either fold its operations at YouTube or would simply ratchet up the automated scanning algorithm to "guilty until proven innocent via human review."
(and 2b, Google would buy out half of Congress to make filing a false DMCA complaint be strict liability, that is absolutely no criminal intent required in order to do hard prison time for "getting it wrong.")
The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration, commits more heinous violations of life, liberty and property every 6 months than Google has in its entire lifetime so far. Cry me a fucking river over the open wifi connections. Turn your attention to the President who claims the power to assassinate Americans abroad, who continues most of the War on Terror policies and whose Attorney General is such a contemptible scumbag that he sacrificed hundreds of Mexican civilians' lives to influence domestic gun policy (a move so cynical, you almost can't even see the average neocon supporting something like it).
Slashdot Mirror
As we have seen time and again with the Universal Service Fund, big health care (Pfizer being let off the hook for defrauding Medicare because punishing them would mean delisting all of their products from Medicare) and big finance (if you cannot immediately think of five major scandals, you've not been paying attention) the big guys get government money and aren't held accountable at all. At all. So, no. Not a single red cent to them. I don't give a damn how high and noble their stated goals are. Until we have an independent prosecutor who can hang one of these companies from the nearest lamp post for taking the money and not doing precisely what the money is for, the answer is "no."
And if you let your idealism get in the way and say "yes," you're an idiot who deserves to have your face rubbed into this when you get betrayed.
Thought crime? Have you even read 1984? A thought crime is a "crime" in which the mere desiring something contrary to the law is itself a punishable criminal act. No proposed copyright law has come even close to being a "thought crime." You do genuine civilian libertarians absolutely no good with this extremist hyperbole and only make the rest of us copyright minimalists look like idiots.
Heck, while I'm at it, I have news for you. We have these modern law enforcement mechanisms called "extraditions" and "international partnerships." This means that if people from your country screw over the US Government in the US, you help us stop them. Believe it or not, the US Government has actually done this in reverse on behalf of foreign countries such as when it puts Americans in prison for going to places like Uganda and Thailand to rape children or when it arrests Americans who raise funds for guerrilla groups abroad.
The FBI actually needs this more than anyone else. It's a little known fact that the FBI is the only federal agency that has no charter-defined enforcement authority; all enforcement authority comes from the Attorney General. That means that they live and die in their latitude to investigate federal crimes by politics.
What we need is the FBI to receive a well defined grant of authority from Congress and to make them an independent agency unaccountable to the President. There is precedent for this; the US Marshals Service, until a few decades ago, didn't report to the President. It reported to the federal judiciary.
They've finally alienated the entire political spectrum. I don't know a single conservative writer, thinker or activist that supports strong IP rights anymore. They've over-played their hand to the point that mainstream opinion on the political right is that they're the quintessential corporate Fascists over things like SOPA (conservative and libertarian publications were even more strident than the left over SOPA). If anything, the fact that so many people in Hollywood support big government policies and politicians while demanding the destruction of property rights and the Internet's infrastructure in the name of IP protection has made many of them think that our country needs to bankrupt all of them.
But in 2004-2005, a friend of mine and I discovered that you could mount the iPod Classic as a hard drive and bring the files over from Terminal.app or a Linux equivalent despite Apple's attempts to make it hard to access. Since the files all had ID3 tags, their attempts to obfuscate the file names were pointless if we wanted to share our collections.
Their handling of the retina display was a major screw up that sacrificed the very reason to call the MacBook Pro a professional device so that normal users (home and manager types, for example) could have an expensive and sexy fashion statement-laptop (instead of giving them a 17 inch retina display Air). Their unwillingness to maintain the Mac Pro is another reason why people get the impression that the iPhoneification of OS X is underway.
I think it's much simpler: Steve Jobs was the last executive who understood the need to keep Apple's feet in both the home market and the outskirts of the enterprise. Their current management may know the design approaches he liked and a host of other things that can let them keep going in the same pattern. Unfortunately, I don't think they "get" the different segments of Apple's products. Macs aren't supposed to just be toys for upper-middle class snobs (I say this as an owner of a 2008 MBP). They're supposed to be able to actually do work as well.
This is why I really think Apple's fans need to realize that this may be the start of Apple's decline (not into irrelevant, just to some place of North of Sony's current position in 10 years). A company Apple's size can afford to maintain both appliance-like devices and real workhorse computers. Apple is not even saying they won't keep going. They're just stumbling around.
How about...
1. We pull back all of our military forces except at a few major naval bases, end the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and tell Europe, Japan and Korea to pick up 100% of their defense budget from now on. Then cut the defense budget by 25%-30%.
2. We reduce unemployment benefits to six months instead of two years. Sorry, if you haven't worked in your field for about two years you don't have a career in it anymore. Unemployment benefits I believe are right now about $500B-$600B of the current federal budget.
3. We means test the hell out of Social Security and Medicare.
4. Release all non-violent drug offenders (including dealers) from prison, end the War on Drugs and send the enforcement personnel DEA and ATF to work for another federal law enforcement agency.
5. Privatize TSA, repeal 90% of the legislation behind Homeland Security and just admit that the only sensible reform we really needed post 9/11 was letting the FBI and CIA coordinate on terrorism cases.
But nope, we can't stop bombing foreign backwaters where some jihadi is rattling his sabre and AK47 impotently at the Great Satan(tm) or tell someone they need to back away from the federal trough.
A few things have happened since 1960:
1. The number of citizens with college degrees has gone up something like 300%.
2. The average B.S./B.A. today is watered down considerably compared to 1960.
3. There are a few tens of millions more women in the workplace now than compared to then (or at least pre-2008 crash there were)
4. There are conservatively 12 million illegal immigrants doing low-skilled and unskilled jobs and their illegal status makes it impossible for them to demand a decent wage.
What the left doesn't want to face up to is the fact that they got their egalitarian college experiment and increased presence of women in the workplace. Then, the law of supply and demand kicked in and started crushing the wages of college degree holders and workers generally due to the comparative glut of new workers in the economy.
Meanwhile, all we hear about is just outsourcing as though outsourcing all by itself killed everything. It's a big factor, but it's not big enough to do all of that damage by itself.
1. Give them 2 years to hire or retain by contract people who can repair or do maintenance on site.
2. Make it a class six felony to knowingly connect an industrial system to the public internet for any reason other than an exigent circumstance for which a reasonable practitioner would not regard the on-site staff as capable of handling or for which there is insufficient time to fly out a practitioner capable of performing the work.
3. In the event of loss to limb or property, make trebble damages built-in to the civil site.
4. In the even of loss of life, make elevation to felony murder mandatory with execution mandatory for all parties involved in the event that the death toll goes beyond a few people.
That's how you wake them up and institute change post haste.
I can think of many things which would improve the quality of public schools without raising taxes:
1. Tort reform. Serious, hardcore tort reform at the state level which takes an axe to all of the areas where frivolous lawsuits can be brought would eliminate the argument for any policy that is grounded in the fear of what some idiot might sue over.
2. End zero tolerance under pain of imprisonment for anyone who punishes a student for acting in self-defense.
3. Remove any student who is constantly disrupting class. If they become a problem (and don't have a documented mental handicap), simply expel them and kick them out onto the street.
4. Establish a general policy of erring on the side of pacing the class to the speed of the top 50% of the class, not the bottom 50%. If the bottom cannot keep up, offer them tutoring; if they fail objectively, fail them for the year.
and not ASIS and CIA in the first place...
If ASIS and CIA have enough boots on the ground overseas, they'll eliminate the need for a large ASIO/FBI which can do domestic monitoring.
If the politicians castrate ASIS and CIA's ability to operate overseas in terms of manpower and/or rules of engagement, the foreign threat is not hampered abroad and can translate into a domestic threat by virtue of immigration and tourism. That makes a job for the ASIO and FBI, which means more power at home, which means the politicians have a real power infrastructure to use for their benefit.
This is also why the Romans kept the legions abroad and required them to disarm in Italy...
18-36 months for user activity logs? Really? If they do that voluntarily, they have no credible argument from a cost perspective to ever say "no" to the government. None. Period. The amount of data they're freely taking on there is so high that the government can easily justify telling them that they must warehouse all activity, all users (past and present) indefinitely at their cost.
I simply cannot believe the bean counters are ok with this.
What we need is a more controlled version of the ballot initiative. I would rather see the following changes:
1) All felony criminal statutes are etched into stone in the state constitution. The legislature is powerless to draft new criminal charges worse than a misdemeanor without submitting them to the electorate for a ballot initiative. A
2) All tax increases must be submitted for ballot initiative and must apply to all potential voters. That is, whatever behavior would trigger it for your neighbor must trigger it for you. For income tax purposes, that would mean that even if it's just $1, every voter must pay additional income tax or vice tax if they work or use vice.
3) Recall elections for elected representatives. For appointed judges, how about a ballot initiative that would force the legislature to consider impeachment charges immediately upon the opening of the first session of the legislature.
It'll just make a bigger mockery of our court precedents. If hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for what would no more than grand theft in most states is not "cruel and unusual" WRT fines, then how can the Supreme Court possibly justify things like saying that it is cruel and unusual to use the death penalty on someone who is a serial child molester (they struck down Louisiana's law which provided for execution of repeat offenders say it was "uncivilized").
Oh wait, this is the same federal judiciary that only recently discovered that the 2nd amendment was part of the Bill of Rights and was being excluded from incorporation under the 14th. In another 150 years, they might discover that the DMCA's statutory damages are unconscionable and hypocritical as well.
Newegg is a retailer, not an OEM. You cannot do any sort of substantial alteration to it and expect them to take it back. This isn't like she bought it straight from Lenovo and they're saying they won't do warranty work on it. She's expecting a full refund after she removed the original OS which is a major selling point to most Thinkpad buyers.
Instead of advertising, how about creating cheap, useful APIs for developers to enable things like mobile gaming against friends, tightly integrated with Facebook? They have an opportunity to build out a service layer that is connected to all of the popular games and ecommerce sites and that provides value independent of advertising. How hard would it be for Amazon to get an inexpensive service to discretely figure out social graphs so they can show you products your friends and family are buying?
Socialization is the process of creating the social patterns that society hopes to create to integrate a child into productive adulthood. That is, it's the human equivalent of training a puppy to be the sort of dog the family wants around the house. People like you don't seem to understand that socialization and socializing are only related insofar as the latter sometimes provides opportunities for the former. Socializing qua socializing is not socialization. Indeed, it can undermine proper socialization if not controlled among kids. You don't give children the socialization they need by making their primary experiences be with other children, but rather with adults who can show them the proper social behaviors of adulthood.
The homeschoolers I've known (almost all religious homeschoolers) are far better socialized than many of my peers were. More mature, more responsible and capable of functioning in adult society than the average public schooler. That's one reason I am wholeheartedly in favor of home schooling. Most of the "social lessons" I learned in the public schools would more likely kill my career by virtue of getting me sued or arrested than help me function as an adult.
So you've never heard of kids being made fun of for being "stupid" or "retarded?" Man, you must have lived in the Twilight Zone. Kids tend to go after people they perceive to be on both sides of the bell curve.
The very reason they went to explore was to find an efficient trade route to India. Once they realized it wasn't India, they returned to gain new land and gold. It was imperialism, plain and simple.
The Spanish hardly conquered the Aztecs on their own strength. Do you really think 500 white guys with 15th and early 16th century muskets defeated the over 100,000 strong Aztech imperial army on their own strength and with the aid of Smallpox? Bullshit. When they marched into Tenochtitlan, they did so at the head of a multi-ethnic army composed of tens of thousands of soldiers recruited from the ethnic groups that were sick of being victims of Aztec sacrificial state terrorism.
The irony is that the treatment the Christian Spaniards gave them was far more humane than what the Muslims or some of the advanced pagan civilizations of antiquity would have given a people who practiced a religion as barbaric as the Aztec religion.
People like you are quick to point to a non-existent double standard that allegedly benefits Christianity, ignoring the fact that Christian violence toward Islam has almost always been either in self-defense or irredentist in nature. You ignore the fact that most of the land in the Middle East that is Muslim used to be Christian, Jewish or Zoroastrian; Syria, Lebanon and North Africa were predominantly Christian when conquered and forcefully converted by the Muslim Caliphate. Two hundred some years prior to the first Crusade, Muslims had marched up the Iberian Peninsula and were stopped in France by Charles Martel at the battle of Tours.
This has been the norm for Islam. Muslim armies were marching on Europe to annex and conquer-by-the-sword even into the Enlightenment period. That's how recent this unrelenting pattern of expansion-by-the-sword by Islam has been since the very beginning of Islam's power. But heaven forbid Christians fight back harshly or invade some minor provinces of the Islamic world to regain some of the ground taken by the sword.
"Christian jihad" is exempt from mainstream scrutiny because it is something that has never really existed. The closest moral equivocation that can be made is to compare a handful of anti-abortion extremists who use violence against what they believe to be cold-blooded murder of babies to a mass movement in the Islamic world that attacks people because of their religious beliefs and/or what their governments are doing.
I say screw the big government-loving liberals that control Hollywood. They've spent the last 50 years pushing an anti-property rights, pro-tax, government-worshiping (ever notice how most non-comedic TV dramas are about cops or lawyers?) agenda. Boo freaking hoo that they're IP rights are being violated. That creaking sound they're hearing is the roof about to cave in under the weight of all of the chickens roosting on it.
You'll see that the main reason they went after him was because he took the source code in order to use it for his personal profit, and it hadn't gone through the proper channels to make it public-ready. In other words, what he did with the accounting software was roughly equivalent to taking classified missile control software home in order to either start a competing business or use it to help his current one. Technically, the software is "public domain," but the Federal Reserve had not actually gone through the process of making it ready to be released to the public.
I have no problem with him doing a few years for that because what he did is no different than taking a work-for-hire work home to use for a customer who didn't pay for it nor was authorized by the paying customer to have it. That's for-profit copyright violation in the private sector, and since he intended to derive private benefits from it, I don't see much of a difference. It's not like he took it home, modified it to be attractive to the Department of the Treasury and tried to demo it to another part of the government (since the Federal Reserve is a quasi-federal agency, taking their code to show to the Treasury would have been less legally problematic)
The Federal Reserve is actually a public-private corporation that happens to do some important Treasury-related functions. They're not an actual federal agency like the US Mint.
$37B is also, IIRC, about equal to the annual income of both the recording and movie industries combined in the US...
I suppose this number has value for making a point, but in terms of practicality it is barely more meaningful than the "studies" which assume that 1 download = 1 lost, guaranteed sale. Why? Because if the legal regime were even remotely positioned to impose this sort of cost on free services, they'd fold overnight. Larry Page would be booking 100mph from his office to their nearest data center in his Tesla to personally shut down Youtube post-haste.
I get and sympathize with the propaganda value of this "study," but let's be realistic:
1. Probably only about 25% of all pirates have both the means to buy a good and would buy it if piracy weren't an option (contrary to the views of both sides).
2. In the real world, Google would either fold its operations at YouTube or would simply ratchet up the automated scanning algorithm to "guilty until proven innocent via human review."
(and 2b, Google would buy out half of Congress to make filing a false DMCA complaint be strict liability, that is absolutely no criminal intent required in order to do hard prison time for "getting it wrong.")
The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration, commits more heinous violations of life, liberty and property every 6 months than Google has in its entire lifetime so far. Cry me a fucking river over the open wifi connections. Turn your attention to the President who claims the power to assassinate Americans abroad, who continues most of the War on Terror policies and whose Attorney General is such a contemptible scumbag that he sacrificed hundreds of Mexican civilians' lives to influence domestic gun policy (a move so cynical, you almost can't even see the average neocon supporting something like it).