Unless you're familiar with history.:) "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not." What I'm saying is that your argument sounds reasonable, but does not stand up to what has actually happened in such situations.
Well, I'm not American, so it's true that I'm not all that familiar with the history of racial relations in the US. But I remember that, from what I read on the subject, many of the problems were more related to the racism of political authorities than to the silliness of businessmen.
It's one thing for an idiot to open a "whites only" shop in a town and compete with a "no-restrictions" shop down the street when both can work unhindered and equally protected by the authorities, in a pure free market set up. It's another one completely different when the "no-restrictions" shop is raided and destroyed by white supremacists all the while the racist sheriff doesn't give a damn (and is friends with the supremacists), racist politicians approve laws forcing segregation even upon those who aren't racists, and racist judges condemn blacks who do 'x' to 20 years in prison while a white who did the same gets just a $100 fine and a slap in the wrist.
In the first case, anti-discrimination laws don't make much sense, since all thing being equal, the market itself ends up correcting the situation. In the second case, though, I guess that anti-discrimination laws are a necessity, as the lack of equanimity in the distribution of the law makes it impossible for the free market to solve anything.
The question thus is: in which of the two cases does the US fit nowadays?
So, presumably, if the market were more free, it would be even more wonderful, right? E.g., repealing the law that prevents people from discriminating on the basis of race would make the market more free, so it must be a wonderful idea, right?
Well, on the one hand, the businessman who refused to sell to persons of a given "race" (why do we still use this word?) would lose a sale. On the other hand, the businessman down the street who did not refuse to sell to those same persons would earn a lot more. So, why exactly isn't it a good thing to let racist businessmen punish themselves by following stupid business decisions, all the while allowing the sensible, non-racist ones to profit from the racists' mistakes?
If I were a shop owner I would be sure to make it very clear in my advertising that I sell to anyone from any "race" who's being discriminated in other shops. And at a discount! Let the racists lose sales. I don't mind getting the money.;-)
I guess I didn't realize that gmail was past 1.0 yet. I thought it was still a beta.
I'd call the new version even more beta-ish than the older.
On the plus side:
a) Clicking a message opens it almost instantly. This is a HUGE improvement.
On the bad side, two very annoying problems:
b) Scrolling up or down in the message list is much slower than the older version, either with the scroll bar or with the mouse wheel.
c) The label-applying drop-down being now an HTML element makes scrolling it with the mouse wheel painful. The moment the I hit the end of the list, it start scrolling the whole page down. Previously, it'd hit the end of the labels list stop there.
For me, 'a' isn't worth dealing with 'b' and 'c', so now I have a bookmark that opens https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1 directly. UI 2 isn't polished enough yet. But things are probably going to improve. It's just a matter of time.
Thanks to Microsoft, I think most already do. Isn't it common nowadays for users in general, and those in TI in particular, to expect any new OS developed by them to only work correctly after its first service pack? I know I do. 2000 wasn't good. 2000 SP-1 (or more, I don't remember) made it good. XP wasn't good. XP SP-1 was. Vista isn't good. Vista SP-1 probably will be. And so on and so forth.
Actually, even back in the days Microsoft used numbers to differentiate product versions, it was common sense that "x.0" versions weren't worth it. Those who knew advised users to prefer a previous version with a higher number after the dot, as by then it would be stable and actually working as expected...
In short: whenever Google decides to remove the "beta" tag from Gmail, I doubt they're going to call it "Gmail 1.0". It wouldn't be good for business.
Right, blame America for the Saudi Royal family. Why? because Americans buy their oil? Like no other countries do that?
If USA only did this it would be perfectly okay. The problem is that it goes out of its way to make sure the House of Saud stay in power. The reasoning is that this brings stability to Saudi Arabia, so it's worth it, no matter what. I'd love for USA to stop such supporting and switch to just buying oil from them in a strict business fashion.
Moderate Muslims believe that lands taken for Islam are theirs to run as they see fit, just as Wahhabi do.
Just as all religions do. There's no exception. The notion that religion and politics shouldn't go together is a modern view. For 1500 years no one inside Christianity even thought of this idea. When the concept appeared amidst the religious wars of Modern Europe, it was unanimously fought against for other 300 to 400 years. Only on the transition from the 19th to the 20th century it finally became a common idea among Christians, and even so, nowadays there are still a lot who just "don't accept it, period".
Besides, "to run as they see fit" doesn't mean "destroying other's religious sites and artifacts". It means "as they see fit". If they "see fit" to preserve these things, as most Muslims did for more than 1500 years on most places they ruled, that's exactly what they'll do. Otherwise, no. Both options are just that: options. There's no strict rule determining for one or the other to be selected.
None of your links in any way support the notion that the Temple Mount Waqf is Wahhabi. Do you have some basis for claiming that or did you just make it up?
Neither. I know nothing specific about the Waqf organization, but I do know Saudi Arabia's long monetary arm. Anywhere where a mosque or anything resembling a Sunni Islamic organization appears, it's either done by House of Saud's financed activists, or if done by someone else it in short time starts attracting these guys for a takeover. It requires a strong willpower from the management to not be dragged in that direction.
Write down the name of the Waqf members, start searching, and it's almost certain you'll find links, from the monetary to the ideological. It's almost unavoidable.
After the Ottoman seizure of Constantinople, and during the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans, plenty of Jewish and Christian holy sites were destroyed. Similarly, after the Muslim conquest of parts of the Indian subcontinent, plenty of Hindu sites were defaced. These events happened well before the rise of your 18-century heresy. Thinking that it is just Wahhabi followers who are that extreme is foolish, for a great deal more streams in Islam do the same.
True, because monotheisms have a tendency (not a commandment, just a tendency) towards iconoclasm.
Among Jews this used to happen some millennia back, at the time they had power to actually go around destroying idols and temples from other religions, as the Bible records extensively.
Among Christians, this trend appeared in the first centuries, first against Greek and Roman imagery, then among Constantinopolitan Christians themselves, then some centuries later it reappeared among Protestants towards Catholic imagery, a sentiment that resurfaces now and then among Evangelicals. But no matter what, it always ends up being condemned by the majority of Christians.
And Muslims are no exception to the rule. They had their fair share of iconoclasm too, for sure. But as with Christians, in the end this ends up condemned by the majority of Muslims. Currently, the only actively Muslims iconoclasts are the Wahhabi. And the majority of common-sensical Muslims condemn them, as expected.
And of course they completely ignore the destruction of Jewish archaeological relics by Palestinian "scientists"; undeniably proven when temple-era artifacts were unearthed from THE GARBAGE DUMP that the Muslims had shipped the items they were breaking to.
I think you should take care to distinguish between different Muslim sects. The fundamentalist nuts who destroy ancient Jewish relics are the same who are actively destroy Islamic relics on Muslim countries. Who come and destroy places and artifacts from Jewish, Christian, Buddhist and Hinduist origins which actual Muslims were preserving for more than 1500 years are the most radical members of a 18th-century heresy. These guys, and no one else, are the culprits.
You want to find sensible, rational, no-nonsense Muslims? Go search for the majority of non-Wahhabi ones. This is all there is to it.
You want a way to stop the spread of Wahhabism? Well, that's trickier, since USA's (previously the British Empire's) financial and political support for the House of Saud is the most direct cause (other than the House itself) for its prosperity. Think of ways to break this relationship and you're set.
"'Some of these users have subsequently purchased a legal copy after realizing the issue and were having difficulty removing the illegitimate keys from their Steam accounts,' added Lombardi. 'Anyone having this problem should contact Steam Support to have the Thai key removed from their Steam account.'"
I wonder how much time it'll take for all the people accused by Mr. Lombardi of being criminals to sue him for, well, calling them criminals. After all, if, according to Mr. Lombardi, they "subsequently purchased a legal copy", it's clear that's because they "previously hadn't purchased a legal copy", aka, they "previously purchased an illegal copy", aka, "why are all these lawyers looking funny at me?".
That, in addition to the class action suit for not being able to use the software they lawfully purchased, of course.
Only console companies have been doing this same game region lock-out for YEARS. I don't see you complaining about that.
What do you think mod-chip are for? Sure, most of them allow you to also play pirated games, but there are mod-chips out there that remove only the region lock-out while keeping the anti-piracy "features" intact. And yes, people pay for that. The complaining is right there. Exactly one complaint for each dollar spent on mod-chips and their installation.
Americans may love the Internet, but most are not prepared to implant it into their brain, even if it was safe. Only 11% of respondents said they be willing to safely implant a device that enabled them to use their mind to access the Internet.
Hmm... this made me think. Let's make some suppositions, shall we? So, suppose:
a) You have one of these implants. b) You are able to install anything you want on it, such as a torrent client; c) These devices are so advanced that they preemptively start downloading anything you'd think in terms of "it would be could if I had this"; d) What you just wished happens to be a MAFIAA-copyrighted work; e) MAFIAA happened to track your IP address (or more specifically, your brain's IP address) and now you're f*cked.
Brings a whole new meaning to the "thought crime" concept, doesn't it? Worse: would someone equipped with such a device be allowed to go to the movies? Who'd be able to guarantee he isn't recording it through... *gasp*... his eyeballs!!!
For some time now I've been saying that copyright is dead. Internet implants, when they arrive, will be the nail in the coffin. Nothing more, nothing less.
By the way: this also lead into the end of privacy, and many other interesting unintended consequences. See more on this essay I found the other day while browsing: Shaping the future.
If you think your taxes are too high, CHANGE THE LAW, but pay what the law dictates until the law changes.
The problem with this is that you're assuming it's in the realm of possibility for laws to be changed by citizens in Brazil. It isn't.
The whole Brazilian party system is built in such a way that it's almost impossible for a group of concerned citizens to just assemble, decide to make a party and presto, enter the political game. In Brazil, contrary to the USA, any party must have a national presence before being allowed to enter even small elections. You cannot create a small local party to dispute elections just in your city, grow, then go dispute in two cities, grow, then over time reach state level, and with luck and effort then reach federal level, trying to win the presidency.
An party I like, the Partido Federalista, whose members have good ideas on this tax issue, is struggling with this problem for over a decade. They must manage to get hundreds of thousands of signatures from electors in nine or ten states (I don't remember now) saying they approve of the party entering elections. But just the signatures aren't enough. These must come accompanied by the signers' electoral title numbers, a document most people don't carry around and usually don't even know where they stored it. Thus, to get a signature you must ask the person to first find the document, what most won't do, meaning from 100 or so potential signers only one comes back to sign.
After the party surpass this entry barrier, it's allowed to enter elections. But then, it's only allowed to take a chair in any branch of government, at any level, if they get at least 5% of the votes. So, yes, in theory you can change the law, but it takes an outrageous amount of effort for decades for you to be able to start trying.
How about the concerned citizens entering an existing party instead of trying to make their own then? Well, the problem with that is that in Brazil we have no small-government, conservative or generic right-wing party. None at all. The above mentioned Federalist Party would be the first. What we have actually that most distantly resembles a "right", in the American or European meanings of the word, are parties that aren't left-wing but at the same time have no ideology at all, being more what you could call populist parties, all of them entirely focused on getting tax money for their pet projects (and their pockets, in what they don't differ from their left-wing counter-parts). As examples of what I mean:
a) One of the most important of these "pseudo-right" parties, previously known as Liberal Front Party ("liberal" in the American meaning of the word, not the European) has just changed its name to Democrats Party, inspired, believe it or not, by the example of USA's Democratic Party;
b) Another, the Progressist Party (yes, that's the name), heavily criticized for more than 20 years by the (currently governing) Worker's Party, is now one of its main allies.
c) The main adversary of the Worker's Party, called "neoliberal" by it, is the Brazilian Social-Democratic Party. Yes, social-democratic...
d) And the most radical "right-wing" party, the small but very vocal Rebuilding of the National Order Party, is actually a follower of the ideas of former (American) Labor Party, then USA Democratic Party member Lyndon LaRouche.
What means, roughly speaking, that entering any of these parties equal to being ostracized and not being able to do anything at all, because it goes counter to everything they preach, want, need and do.
As a result, Brazilians see no escape. Anywhere they look, there are obstacles and more obstacles. So much, in fact, that disobeying the law (not all, but surely a lot among the more than 1.5 million laws we have) seems to be the only act able to ease a little our situation. That being the case, it's exactly what we (me included) do.
Were you to live here, you'd do the same. Don't think you wouldn't. It's either this, or not living.
That's acutally a very good solution. Record yourself reading out loud a 10 minute piece of any public-domain/open-content book, save it as a 10MB MP3 called "000.mp3", use a script to replicate it 999 times ("001.mp3", "002.mp3"... "999.mp3"), and presto, there you have 10 GB of shared "content" to make any dumb P2P server happy.
think you were a strong propponent before you changed your views.
Well, I wrote I was an "opponent of copyright infringement" (without italics), but I can see someone not noticing the "infringement" word. My bad, I should write more carefully. In any case, yes, a former copyright proponent.:-)
To enforce that fee I would need (C).
True, and this is precisely one of the ways the "right to copy" twisted the way people naturally see work. The common sense approach is simple: monetary investment and retirement notwithstanding, if I work, I earn, and if I don't work, I don't earn. This was valid for intellectual producers as much as for everyone else. A writer would write either because he liked to do so, without expecting to earn money with it, or by being sponsored by a 3rd party during his writing, as a service. In this case, what was paid was the service itself, not the contents.
For goods, for services, as a gift, as taxes, or from robbery: these five are pretty intuitive (maybe the intuitive, although I'm not so sure of that) ways, four of which legitimate, that a person receives or loses money from/to another person. Copyright and patents add a sixth kind of money transfer that is very difficult to understand: a service-tax mix that is neither exactly a tax, nor exactly a service, and that exists neither in the market nor in the state spheres, but somewhere in between. Such a thing is, for most people, akin to a phantasmagoria. No wonder then that they reject it: it really makes no sense.
One should not need to agree, that such copying amounts to theft, to understand, that it is wrong regardless.
Not really. I myself was a VERY strong opponent of copyright infringement until ten years ago. I only changed my mind after I got hold of economics studies, more specifically in the classic liberal (not the US-kind of social liberalism) and libertarian traditions, then advanced into the realm of political theory.
There are A LOT of arguments out there against copyright and patents, ranging from the economic to the historical, from the social to the political, and dismissing all of this on the basis that "copying is obviously wrong" amounts to nothing more than a very crude oversimplification.
If you want a simple example, here's the historical one. Since the beginning of recorded history up until the first half of the Modern Age, the copying was considered by EVERYONE, from writers to actors, from musicians to singers, from inventors to manufacturers, as an obvious right. Libraries, for instance, existed for thousands of years, and beyond allowing you to take a book and read it, they all had full teams of scribes who would copy any work a customer wanted, or, if he so wished, would allow him to do the copy himself. Everyone interested in any intellectual production did this, and everyone felt it was the natural way of things.
It was only half-way through the Modern Age, and at first only in certain regions on Europe, that thing started to change. It took centuries, literally, for our system of "copying rights" to develop and turn in 180 degrees how we handled the subject. And while many industries organized and flourished around and from this system, it never, ever, ceased feeling unnatural to those taking contact with it for the first time.
What the Internet, and the "pirates" in it, are doing, thus, isn't so much contrary to the way things ought to be, but quite the opposite, a return to way things always were. A way that was artificially twisted 400 or so years ago, but is now being slowly and painfully put straight again. In this matter, they're surely a bunch of very conservative old-timers as one rarely sees.;-)
If this is the case, how can they be "wrong"? They're "wrong" only from the very limited perspective of a limited subset of modernity and most of the contemporaneity. From the perspective of the (25 times longer) Ancient and Medieval worlds, their actions are pure common sense.
If they win, and they will, the Copyright Age will be seen as nothing more than a very small period of time sandwiched between the two huge Copyrightless Ages: the one that existed before, and the one that is starting right now.
The faster the "progressive" copyright-defenders accept this, the better. For everyone.
I've read on Scientific American around one or two years ago that nowadays there's technology to build nuclear plants that use much more of the radioactive material than older designs, including lots that would be considered waste before, all the while leaving fewer and less radioactive hazardous wastes behind. If I remember correctly, current day buried radioactive waste are in fact fuel for these new technologies, so much that we would probably start digging and using them both for the sake of the energy they still carry, as well as a way to lower or even nullify the risk they pose.
Unfortunately this was on the Brazilian edition of SA, so I have absolutely no idea when the original article was published. Maybe it's online somewhere.
The insurance companies alone would have a field day. You think it is hard now to get private insurance, if you have a pre-existing condition or something like high triglycerides? (I know about the latter one well), well, wait till they can pre-screen your DNA to find out what you might be afflicted with in the future.
Hmm... while this is a likely possibility, it's solvable by way of public policies all the while retaining DNA databases. A government can simply determine that insurance companies cannot charge differently or refuse applications based on health conditions, past or future. For the insurance companies themselves this wouldn't mean diminished profits, as they'd simply charge a flat value from everyone that would include their profit in it as usual. For those who might be paying less due to having good health/genetics, yes, such a thing would be a sad state of affairs. But other than that, it works almost the same.
An example: I'm not sure whether what you call "insurance" is the same thing that here in Brazil we call "health accord". In any case, our health accords work like this: the health company cannot refuse someone with previous health problems; any new contract requires a 18 month entry period with less health services available to you, but afterwards you have full treatment, including for your previous health issues; prices are based solely on the level of service you want and your age, and adjusted based on a fixed table (which is part of the contract) plus inflation.
When this system was made into law many health companies couldn't adapt and went bankrupt. The remaining ones made their accountability fit, and nowadays I myself have a health accord with a pretty solid package of services, valid in my whole state, for as low as $60.00 US dollars per month. What changes from one package to the other is mostly geography and the amount of bureaucracy you have to surpass to get access to the most expensive treatments. Entry-level "teenagers, local-only, limited selection of hospital/doctors, have to get approval by fax for almost everything, new contract, standard 18-month wait" plans go for as low as $10.00/month, while "International, no questions asked, you chose any medic and hospital you wish anywhere in the world, helicopter and flight included, 60-years old age group, new contract, no 18-month wait" can go for as much as $1,000.00/month (if I remember correctly).
In all cases, your own health story, genetics, future treatment requirements etc. play no part in the price you pay. These variable are, by law, completely flatted, and what counts is their average for your age group.
Now, mind you: I'm a free market activist and in principle I should be against this kind of government interference in the business of private companies. But this is a case where I'm not so sure. Go figure.:-)
Sorry to ask, but why simply looking at images of children porn is usually seen as a problem? I'm all for sending to jail those who make such images, those who distribute them for profit, and those who pay for them, since all of these persons are directly or indirectly harming children. But just for looking? This is silly.
What I've found is that, in general, it turns out that mostly people are trying to apply stereotypes, and they apply the stereotypes that fit their expectations.
Oh, but you don't avoid it yourself. When you say "my spouse", and not "this spouse of mine" (with can mean one or more), you're implying a very specific social construct: monogamy. You're making very clear you have only, and only one, spouse. Sure, that doesn't mean you don't have additional "lovers", but even so, only one person ends up being the socially acceptable, officially recognized, spouse.
In short: if you want really odd reactions, you must not only abstract the sex, but also the number, all the while keeping the official determinant. It'll be determined on one hand, but doubly undetermined on the other. Way to have fun!:)
By the way: I'm not a native speaker of English. In my language, Portuguese, the friend of the English "spouse", and its usual translation, is "esposo", which is a male word, the female one being "esposa", and both being formal version of the most informal "marido" ("husband") and "mulher" ("wife", but also our generic word for "woman": "a mulher de" means "the wife of", while "uma mulher" means "a woman"). Thus, oddly enough, when I read your first post I just understood you to be a very formal woman. It was only by reading the comments by others that I realized you were doing word tricks. In any case, though, in my case it worked reversed. Instead of producing an abstraction, your selection of words had the effect of crystallizing a concept in my mind.
Here in Brazil our previous government decided to diminish the amount of bureaucracy by creating a full-blown "Deburocratization Department". Talk about shooting your foot.
I don't think ATI and nVidia, the two big graphic chipset manufacturers, will keep their drivers closed for much more time. GPUs are more and more being seen as advanced mathematical co-processors rather than "mere" gamers' hardware. Keeping them closed is akin to keeping most if not all of a CPU's opcodes closed under NDA's. What good would that do to a CPU manufacturer? There'll come a point where software companies will simply start demanding open low level access to GPUs for performance improvement purposes (think advanced video editing, strong cryptography, grid computing etc.), and it'll be hard for GPU manufacturer to offer any reasonable explanation for not providing it.
Maybe they should deal with REALITY, which is that 'ethnic minorities' ARE more likely to be criminal, parasitic wastrels, than the indigenous populations, whose countries they have come into to STEAL from.
You mean, just like that ethnic minority composed of criminal, parasitic, white British sailors, who came stole the Native-American's lands from their rightful owners all the while destroying their culture?
After all, they all clearly know they aren't wanted here by the MAJORITY of whites, and non-whites can't seem to produce their own functioning societies.
Yes, because the Vikings and the pre-medieval Germanic tribes had highly functional societies before being acculturated by southern Europeans, who in turn were acculturated by Greeks and Semites.
Do you know why studying History is cool? Because most often than not it breaks our prejudices.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean, something like this or this?
It's one thing for an idiot to open a "whites only" shop in a town and compete with a "no-restrictions" shop down the street when both can work unhindered and equally protected by the authorities, in a pure free market set up. It's another one completely different when the "no-restrictions" shop is raided and destroyed by white supremacists all the while the racist sheriff doesn't give a damn (and is friends with the supremacists), racist politicians approve laws forcing segregation even upon those who aren't racists, and racist judges condemn blacks who do 'x' to 20 years in prison while a white who did the same gets just a $100 fine and a slap in the wrist.
In the first case, anti-discrimination laws don't make much sense, since all thing being equal, the market itself ends up correcting the situation. In the second case, though, I guess that anti-discrimination laws are a necessity, as the lack of equanimity in the distribution of the law makes it impossible for the free market to solve anything.
The question thus is: in which of the two cases does the US fit nowadays?
If I were a shop owner I would be sure to make it very clear in my advertising that I sell to anyone from any "race" who's being discriminated in other shops. And at a discount! Let the racists lose sales. I don't mind getting the money.
On the plus side:
a) Clicking a message opens it almost instantly. This is a HUGE improvement.
On the bad side, two very annoying problems:
b) Scrolling up or down in the message list is much slower than the older version, either with the scroll bar or with the mouse wheel.
c) The label-applying drop-down being now an HTML element makes scrolling it with the mouse wheel painful. The moment the I hit the end of the list, it start scrolling the whole page down. Previously, it'd hit the end of the labels list stop there.
For me, 'a' isn't worth dealing with 'b' and 'c', so now I have a bookmark that opens https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1 directly. UI 2 isn't polished enough yet. But things are probably going to improve. It's just a matter of time.
Actually, even back in the days Microsoft used numbers to differentiate product versions, it was common sense that "x.0" versions weren't worth it. Those who knew advised users to prefer a previous version with a higher number after the dot, as by then it would be stable and actually working as expected...
In short: whenever Google decides to remove the "beta" tag from Gmail, I doubt they're going to call it "Gmail 1.0". It wouldn't be good for business.
Besides, "to run as they see fit" doesn't mean "destroying other's religious sites and artifacts". It means "as they see fit". If they "see fit" to preserve these things, as most Muslims did for more than 1500 years on most places they ruled, that's exactly what they'll do. Otherwise, no. Both options are just that: options. There's no strict rule determining for one or the other to be selected.
Write down the name of the Waqf members, start searching, and it's almost certain you'll find links, from the monetary to the ideological. It's almost unavoidable.
Among Jews this used to happen some millennia back, at the time they had power to actually go around destroying idols and temples from other religions, as the Bible records extensively.
Among Christians, this trend appeared in the first centuries, first against Greek and Roman imagery, then among Constantinopolitan Christians themselves, then some centuries later it reappeared among Protestants towards Catholic imagery, a sentiment that resurfaces now and then among Evangelicals. But no matter what, it always ends up being condemned by the majority of Christians.
And Muslims are no exception to the rule. They had their fair share of iconoclasm too, for sure. But as with Christians, in the end this ends up condemned by the majority of Muslims. Currently, the only actively Muslims iconoclasts are the Wahhabi. And the majority of common-sensical Muslims condemn them, as expected.
Wahhabism is the enemy. Not Islam in general.
You want to find sensible, rational, no-nonsense Muslims? Go search for the majority of non-Wahhabi ones. This is all there is to it.
You want a way to stop the spread of Wahhabism? Well, that's trickier, since USA's (previously the British Empire's) financial and political support for the House of Saud is the most direct cause (other than the House itself) for its prosperity. Think of ways to break this relationship and you're set.
That, in addition to the class action suit for not being able to use the software they lawfully purchased, of course.
a) You have one of these implants.
b) You are able to install anything you want on it, such as a torrent client;
c) These devices are so advanced that they preemptively start downloading anything you'd think in terms of "it would be could if I had this";
d) What you just wished happens to be a MAFIAA-copyrighted work;
e) MAFIAA happened to track your IP address (or more specifically, your brain's IP address) and now you're f*cked.
Brings a whole new meaning to the "thought crime" concept, doesn't it? Worse: would someone equipped with such a device be allowed to go to the movies? Who'd be able to guarantee he isn't recording it through... *gasp*... his eyeballs!!!
For some time now I've been saying that copyright is dead. Internet implants, when they arrive, will be the nail in the coffin. Nothing more, nothing less.
By the way: this also lead into the end of privacy, and many other interesting unintended consequences. See more on this essay I found the other day while browsing: Shaping the future.
The whole Brazilian party system is built in such a way that it's almost impossible for a group of concerned citizens to just assemble, decide to make a party and presto, enter the political game. In Brazil, contrary to the USA, any party must have a national presence before being allowed to enter even small elections. You cannot create a small local party to dispute elections just in your city, grow, then go dispute in two cities, grow, then over time reach state level, and with luck and effort then reach federal level, trying to win the presidency.
An party I like, the Partido Federalista, whose members have good ideas on this tax issue, is struggling with this problem for over a decade. They must manage to get hundreds of thousands of signatures from electors in nine or ten states (I don't remember now) saying they approve of the party entering elections. But just the signatures aren't enough. These must come accompanied by the signers' electoral title numbers, a document most people don't carry around and usually don't even know where they stored it. Thus, to get a signature you must ask the person to first find the document, what most won't do, meaning from 100 or so potential signers only one comes back to sign.
After the party surpass this entry barrier, it's allowed to enter elections. But then, it's only allowed to take a chair in any branch of government, at any level, if they get at least 5% of the votes. So, yes, in theory you can change the law, but it takes an outrageous amount of effort for decades for you to be able to start trying.
How about the concerned citizens entering an existing party instead of trying to make their own then? Well, the problem with that is that in Brazil we have no small-government, conservative or generic right-wing party. None at all. The above mentioned Federalist Party would be the first. What we have actually that most distantly resembles a "right", in the American or European meanings of the word, are parties that aren't left-wing but at the same time have no ideology at all, being more what you could call populist parties, all of them entirely focused on getting tax money for their pet projects (and their pockets, in what they don't differ from their left-wing counter-parts). As examples of what I mean:
a) One of the most important of these "pseudo-right" parties, previously known as Liberal Front Party ("liberal" in the American meaning of the word, not the European) has just changed its name to Democrats Party, inspired, believe it or not, by the example of USA's Democratic Party;
b) Another, the Progressist Party (yes, that's the name), heavily criticized for more than 20 years by the (currently governing) Worker's Party, is now one of its main allies.
c) The main adversary of the Worker's Party, called "neoliberal" by it, is the Brazilian Social-Democratic Party. Yes, social-democratic...
d) And the most radical "right-wing" party, the small but very vocal Rebuilding of the National Order Party, is actually a follower of the ideas of former (American) Labor Party, then USA Democratic Party member Lyndon LaRouche.
What means, roughly speaking, that entering any of these parties equal to being ostracized and not being able to do anything at all, because it goes counter to everything they preach, want, need and do.
As a result, Brazilians see no escape. Anywhere they look, there are obstacles and more obstacles. So much, in fact, that disobeying the law (not all, but surely a lot among the more than 1.5 million laws we have) seems to be the only act able to ease a little our situation. That being the case, it's exactly what we (me included) do.
Were you to live here, you'd do the same. Don't think you wouldn't. It's either this, or not living.
For goods, for services, as a gift, as taxes, or from robbery: these five are pretty intuitive (maybe the intuitive, although I'm not so sure of that) ways, four of which legitimate, that a person receives or loses money from/to another person. Copyright and patents add a sixth kind of money transfer that is very difficult to understand: a service-tax mix that is neither exactly a tax, nor exactly a service, and that exists neither in the market nor in the state spheres, but somewhere in between. Such a thing is, for most people, akin to a phantasmagoria. No wonder then that they reject it: it really makes no sense.
There are A LOT of arguments out there against copyright and patents, ranging from the economic to the historical, from the social to the political, and dismissing all of this on the basis that "copying is obviously wrong" amounts to nothing more than a very crude oversimplification.
If you want a simple example, here's the historical one. Since the beginning of recorded history up until the first half of the Modern Age, the copying was considered by EVERYONE, from writers to actors, from musicians to singers, from inventors to manufacturers, as an obvious right. Libraries, for instance, existed for thousands of years, and beyond allowing you to take a book and read it, they all had full teams of scribes who would copy any work a customer wanted, or, if he so wished, would allow him to do the copy himself. Everyone interested in any intellectual production did this, and everyone felt it was the natural way of things.
It was only half-way through the Modern Age, and at first only in certain regions on Europe, that thing started to change. It took centuries, literally, for our system of "copying rights" to develop and turn in 180 degrees how we handled the subject. And while many industries organized and flourished around and from this system, it never, ever, ceased feeling unnatural to those taking contact with it for the first time.
What the Internet, and the "pirates" in it, are doing, thus, isn't so much contrary to the way things ought to be, but quite the opposite, a return to way things always were. A way that was artificially twisted 400 or so years ago, but is now being slowly and painfully put straight again. In this matter, they're surely a bunch of very conservative old-timers as one rarely sees.
If this is the case, how can they be "wrong"? They're "wrong" only from the very limited perspective of a limited subset of modernity and most of the contemporaneity. From the perspective of the (25 times longer) Ancient and Medieval worlds, their actions are pure common sense.
If they win, and they will, the Copyright Age will be seen as nothing more than a very small period of time sandwiched between the two huge Copyrightless Ages: the one that existed before, and the one that is starting right now.
The faster the "progressive" copyright-defenders accept this, the better. For everyone.
I've read on Scientific American around one or two years ago that nowadays there's technology to build nuclear plants that use much more of the radioactive material than older designs, including lots that would be considered waste before, all the while leaving fewer and less radioactive hazardous wastes behind. If I remember correctly, current day buried radioactive waste are in fact fuel for these new technologies, so much that we would probably start digging and using them both for the sake of the energy they still carry, as well as a way to lower or even nullify the risk they pose.
Unfortunately this was on the Brazilian edition of SA, so I have absolutely no idea when the original article was published. Maybe it's online somewhere.
An example: I'm not sure whether what you call "insurance" is the same thing that here in Brazil we call "health accord". In any case, our health accords work like this: the health company cannot refuse someone with previous health problems; any new contract requires a 18 month entry period with less health services available to you, but afterwards you have full treatment, including for your previous health issues; prices are based solely on the level of service you want and your age, and adjusted based on a fixed table (which is part of the contract) plus inflation.
When this system was made into law many health companies couldn't adapt and went bankrupt. The remaining ones made their accountability fit, and nowadays I myself have a health accord with a pretty solid package of services, valid in my whole state, for as low as $60.00 US dollars per month. What changes from one package to the other is mostly geography and the amount of bureaucracy you have to surpass to get access to the most expensive treatments. Entry-level "teenagers, local-only, limited selection of hospital/doctors, have to get approval by fax for almost everything, new contract, standard 18-month wait" plans go for as low as $10.00/month, while "International, no questions asked, you chose any medic and hospital you wish anywhere in the world, helicopter and flight included, 60-years old age group, new contract, no 18-month wait" can go for as much as $1,000.00/month (if I remember correctly).
In all cases, your own health story, genetics, future treatment requirements etc. play no part in the price you pay. These variable are, by law, completely flatted, and what counts is their average for your age group.
Now, mind you: I'm a free market activist and in principle I should be against this kind of government interference in the business of private companies. But this is a case where I'm not so sure. Go figure.
Sorry to ask, but why simply looking at images of children porn is usually seen as a problem? I'm all for sending to jail those who make such images, those who distribute them for profit, and those who pay for them, since all of these persons are directly or indirectly harming children. But just for looking? This is silly.
In short: if you want really odd reactions, you must not only abstract the sex, but also the number, all the while keeping the official determinant. It'll be determined on one hand, but doubly undetermined on the other. Way to have fun!
By the way: I'm not a native speaker of English. In my language, Portuguese, the friend of the English "spouse", and its usual translation, is "esposo", which is a male word, the female one being "esposa", and both being formal version of the most informal "marido" ("husband") and "mulher" ("wife", but also our generic word for "woman": "a mulher de" means "the wife of", while "uma mulher" means "a woman"). Thus, oddly enough, when I read your first post I just understood you to be a very formal woman. It was only by reading the comments by others that I realized you were doing word tricks. In any case, though, in my case it worked reversed. Instead of producing an abstraction, your selection of words had the effect of crystallizing a concept in my mind.
And right or wrong, it's still crystallized.
Here in Brazil our previous government decided to diminish the amount of bureaucracy by creating a full-blown "Deburocratization Department". Talk about shooting your foot.
I don't think ATI and nVidia, the two big graphic chipset manufacturers, will keep their drivers closed for much more time. GPUs are more and more being seen as advanced mathematical co-processors rather than "mere" gamers' hardware. Keeping them closed is akin to keeping most if not all of a CPU's opcodes closed under NDA's. What good would that do to a CPU manufacturer? There'll come a point where software companies will simply start demanding open low level access to GPUs for performance improvement purposes (think advanced video editing, strong cryptography, grid computing etc.), and it'll be hard for GPU manufacturer to offer any reasonable explanation for not providing it.
Do you know why studying History is cool? Because most often than not it breaks our prejudices.