Porn is ensnaring and addicting as hell, which is why it is so effective in advertisements, by making a powerful physiological association between product and something which cannot be simply ignored and removed from the mind once seen. And yon dipshit and many like him cry "OMFG censorship like as done by tze evilz dictatorz/autocratz/religioz tyrantz!!!" without paying attention to why they actually ban it: they simply observe it is bad for their populations, which is therefore bad for their national strength (and own power), and given they have the power to impose and enforce bans...they use it.
Among ancient "conservative" (without having to be Statist, as the Europeans have always confused Statism with "conservatism" because State-imposed atomism (Tocqueville) they have always confused with "liberalism") realizations, throughout every society, is that a little social imposition of difficulty to access certain things (like sex) go a long way toward making a happier society (like women who get men interested, civil, chivalrous, etc.; women who can't be entitled hear-me-roar bitch-princes who are only worth a quick bang followed by walking-away: which I am not saying is right). The truly "liberal" realization is that to avoid massive problems you should let people contract their relations, and the State's role is to enforce the contract: in a place like the U.S., where feminist lawyers in judges robes presiding over family "court" spent decades excising the controls of contract law from marital disputes, and even now the fight is over a "marriage" which is not about a serious relationship with definite ends (like building an enterprise, having children, and commitment for life except emotively as an idea that is kinda-liked) but a "dignified" status and thing done because it's "romantic" and "feels good" and all the "witnesses" are a mob of idiots who won't be going to court with you to uphold the contract (that's what the vows are) or to testify against either party that breaks them (who should, as in other areas of contract law, get nothing: and be removed from all claims upon anything that resulted), there is neither conservatism nor liberalism--anymore, only Statism and atomism.
violence against men, one form of which is the forced circumcision and genital mutilation of boys which remains legal in many countries that protect girls from similar.
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact they aren't equivocal; in one case, with several thousand years' development, a small bit of extra skin is excised making a male lose a little bit of sensitivity with an increase in cleanliness and also a greater resistance in disease (circumcision is being implemented in the AIDs-infested parts of Africa for precisely this reason) by cause of the fact that the skin traps bodily fluids of a partner against one's own skin and near the entrance of the urethra: in the other, all ability to feel any sexual pleasure--at all--is usually removed, and because this required excision of the equivalent of the male glans, or cutting off a massive conglomeration of nerve ends, often means that the recipient will also continue to have searing pain in their crotch for as long as they don't kill themselves.
Let me repeat and simplify: in one case, useless (and somewhat disadvantaging) skin is removed, and if done correctly has no permanent consequences, while female "circumcision" is not "circumcision" at all, it's genital mutilation: cutting off the lady part which happens to be the analog of the big, bulbous and sensitive end of the male penis. The equivocation of them came from a bunch of leftist idjuts, the kind of people who think "equal protections" means the State can forcibly make both sexes equal by imposing consequences on one sex to hinder it in order to advantage the other, and other such rights-killing liberty-murdering shit, and it's long past the point that people who don't want to be ruled by such intellectual retarded ideologues start opposing them in every possible way, as well as calling out bullshit that originates with them, like the brown that AC posted. Put another way: the liberals aren't liberals, and haven't ever been with few exceptions, and fuck tolerance: they're the most intolerant bunch of self-designated "enlightened" tyrants ever to crawl on the face of the earth, whose ideologies have led to over 100,000,000 murders in the last century alone, and as "small" as the equivocation of male circumcision with female genitalia "excision" or "mutilation" may seem, it is the same sort of categorical and metaphysical error that leads to assertions that male=female, and therefore we have the perogative to forcibly make female=male, when we all know it's bullshit.
Good points. I'm preferential (wherever possible) to capture and public trial (with competent, lawful handlers of the affairs and processes involved) such that we can show the world our legal system (er...as it is defined and codified and stipulated in the law) is up to the task, but where that's not an option...bombs away I guess...for now... Hopefully knowledge and wisdom will come to make a better conclusion than one of "I guess".
I'm betting they're using deep packet inspection, perhaps looking for signatures if content going across is encrypted, such that perhaps (probably unencrypted to facilitate this) someone should start "sharing" with himself from one location, pulling from home, and doing so through his own web interface, and wait to get these notices; then when they finally terminate service he'll have grounds to bring suit: (1) for illegal derivation from a copyrighted work without permission of the rights holder (for which that person will have, as the rights holder, the right to sue); (2) for unlawful eavesdropping; (3) for false claims of copyright infringement, and assistance in the claim; (4) for unlawful termination of services (I believe under TPA that cutting-off utilities is defined as an act of terrorism...); (5) for installation of software or code (these pop-ups) upon a computer without permission of the owner... Essentially they need to screw off, or nerds really need to lawyer-up and start fighting, building their own networks, and working to make possible avoidance of unethical companies.
Speaking of all this: let's all put banners at the top of web pages with the words "if you get a copyright infringement notice from your ISP on any of these pages, please take a screenshot and contact me, so I can sue them for unlawfully making a derivative of my copyrighted work."
Also, comments from here, http://yro.slashdot.org/story/07/06/23/1233212/isps-inserting-ads-into-your-pages likely apply to this too. On many levels this appears to be very illegal. At the least eavesdropping--and "monitoring" is only acceptable insofar as the justification was to automatically adjust the network traffic flows to keep the whole stable and flowing--and making derivative works. The law has already established that just because communications take place across even PUBLIC utility lines, that doesn't make it not eavedropping to listen-in: the police were hammered pretty hard after trying to make that argument (and it's logic consistent with the Constitution which needs to rightfully be returned and applied to roads and your persons and effects in a vehicle as you travel on them, your vehicle, and any number of areas that Statists have successfully convinced sometimes all-too-willingly collusive Courts to make fishing/spying free-for-alls), and merely being "private" doesn't mean eavesdropping becomes legal.
p.s. We were never a full subscriber to Geneva, actually stating upon ratification that it was only ratified in certain sections; not "fair" maybe, but the rest of the world has accepted it, so it's legit. Very often cries of "violating Geneva" ignore partial ratification (conveniently), which is not a practice that only the U.S. practises. Also, "international law" is only what a power big enough is willing to enforce: countries ruled by immoral politicians have no honor or lawfulness abroad.
Laws have intended purposes; these just don't typically get written-into the laws because those writing them put out documentation at the time of writing, and because frankly they write them also as convenient pretexts to say "so sorry about the egregious outcome in this particular case of the application of this law, but the law, damn it, rules, not us--no, ignore that we wrote it in the first place and are able to revise it at a whim but have failed to do so after thousands of inquiries and urgently be contacted over years to do so because these things keep happening." I'm pretty damn sure that the likes of the whistleblower act would cover Manning if they would let it, and frankly "UCMJ governs" my ass: the military may be "special" but it's still a department under the executive branch, i.e. should be covered by things like that.
Stop putting dickless sociopaths in office, and maybe things like this won't happen.
even analysts who support the government's case against Manning have said there was little practical fallout from the leak.
Citations needed...so we can show asshats who can do something about it that there is reason to concern themselves with how all this has been handled, and to start intervening/doing something about it: note the president, as Commander in Chief, likely has the power to, but as presidents often do, pretends otherwise.
If you go knock on your neighbors' doors and say "I support [candidate] and you should too!" you'll go to jail for unregistered political activity and electioneering. The Democrats have (so far) passed such laws and pulled-off finangling court approval on the basis of specious justifications for this (despite how this evidently kills all legitimate, effective grassroots movements: if you're grassroots* and become effective someone from either of the parties will send the enforcers to imprison and fine you), and daily work toward further infringement, abolishion, notification of fundamental rights and liberties in the name of supposed "good" causes, so what makes you expect in the name of "un/Constitutional" [whatever] that long-term something like this won't be argue just-right so the Courts will let it pass?
* As a guy who worked within those "grassroots" efforts recently, I can tell you they're well-oiled, heavily-infrastructured, pro- illegal-mafia/cartel called by one party or another, at least most of the time, or else they're the product of "open conspiracy" that happens to play into the "narratives" of one power-hungry bunch of criminals or another, whose other supporters and supporting organizations just happen to contribute lots of funds, expertise, money, personnel, etc. to the "grassroots" cause.
And I noticed you didn't actually respond to my points about it not being a prevenative measure, but at any rate: your signature is "Safety is a tyrant's tool; no one can oppose safety", which makes your comments funnier: rambling on about predispositions to alcohol and whatnot. ; )
And "well-known" often means "popular knowledge only half-assedly acquired, partially, inaccurately, and without serious consideration". You don't seem to understand genetic predispositions (as you comments stand): my own studies were actually in biology and genetics. You know that "predisposition" that had test-positive women signing-up to have major mastectomies? Geneticists knew that because of epigenetics, the actual probability of getting breast cancer just because of a present gene was actually very unknown, and merely modifying life behaviors could [very] significantly reduce the likelihood of it developing--because the actual regulation of genes was changed by inputs beyond the genes.
This is "classically" a "heresy" in genetics thought, but epigenetics fundamentally alters all the old thinking (largely making it irrelevant in all but research on rats in a lab). My family happens to be filled with alcoholics too, but I seem to be the one in it that can drink as much or as little (at will) as he wants...and just enjoy it without getting drunk. In fact, I can down a bottle of higher-proof wine and feel just a little dizzy (at first, it goes away pretty quickly), and ponder to myself "why is this?"
Removing the ability of someone to enjoy what is a FOOD is not moral: alcohol isn't a "mind altering drug" in the same way as the schedule 1's tend to be. One sip doesn't *tend* (which is key) to be a problem, nor one beer (for a man; ~1/3 for a woman), or even two or three, when someone has a normal BMI. Making that decision for them means they can't go to France or Italy and not insult a host, or to perhaps 3/5ths of the globe without having a serious problem with regards how to get fluids without being infected with water-born illness (the ancient trick of mixing a slight amount of boos or wine with water remains a useful one).
Perhaps rather than putting fear over actual knowns, a parent should wait to see if their spawn have problems with it, and if these are found later, suggest to them to get such a vaccine? Just sayin'. And to be less contentious...nice Homepage and photowork. : ) No really!
Nope to both the assertions and your question, or perhaps I should say there are different significances at play here.
She has a slight allergy to something naturally, meaning she avoids it because of the slight allergy: and it is slight (important for below): rather than having a vaccine that caused an allergy, it is natural.
On the other hand, inducing an unnatural allergy to a substance that some people abuse, for which some people therefore disapprove, is criminal: it is deciding for someone whether they should ever enjoy something which, besides abuse, should not be considered anything but good, and moreover, is something that is even still necessary in some parts of the world (unless you want water-based poisoning).
But as to the "you're saying it works", it works for someone who has never been able, and doesn't become too depressed (or similar), because even this gal I know can and will drink alcohol if she gets very down. Merely going "it'll work by making people feel bad" is idiocy: plenty of people keep drinking "long and hard" despite how terrible they feel the next day, for reasons like being miserable, or else because they're simply addicted. Want an example? My father. His processing ability has definitely diminished over decades of drinking, and the effects can take days, but he...still goes at it very frequently. I also know people who start drinking-through the damn drugs: with horrible, horrible, horrible, awful, horrible consequences that last and last...yet they try...
Let's stop trying to impose very simplistic, invasive, immuno-altering (in a very unnatural way) non-solutions to very difficult problems. As a guy with an extreme immune system (disabled me for 8 months at one point), I know first-hand the consequences of it getting messed-up, and by extension how precarious actions that attempt to "train" it can be. There is also the potentially unintended side-effect nobody's mentioning: if this would make you feel sick for days after, it would probably be much like the current drugs that work to do this same thing by disabling the enzymes in your system for breaking-down alcohol: this means that air fresheners, cleaning supplies, polishes of all kinds, certain oils, hand sanitizer, lotions, and more could all make you very sick: I once sprayed air freshener very slightly in a bathroom to cover-up the smell of using the toilet for #2 and made an uncle on a light dose of the meds start violently heaving; this was across a big apartment with a bunch of walls in-between and the doors closed, and simply leaving the residence wasn't enough: he had to exit the building! That would be a monstrous thing to induce in people.
Let's leave normal health and physiology alone: the ability to break-down alcohol is both natural, and even at a certain level necessary: if this "vaccination" (immuno-mis-training) goes wrong, ever, it will kill someone: you HAVE to be able to process alcohols at some level, and even the supposedly allergic/intolerant/incapable actually do, just in diminished amounts.
A real boon, and mercy/grace, to people with this problem, might be one similar to injections that can decouple certain drugs from receptors in the brain, or block their attachment, such that they can within a few treatments actually break dependence: those exist and are in development...but their mechanisms are actually more complex than that, and different from alcohol. This particular proposed "solution" is a sham, it is wishful thinking: I wish it weren't.
It is pretty obvious that these days they would imprison them under the pretext of "necessity to 'national security'", though the higher courts *might* intervene.
When the conflict gets to litigation, everyone except the lawyers lose.
In a rare moment of defending lawyers, I have known lawyers that seek to settle disputes outside of court. One a family law lawyer who I would speak to, and who said, "I focus on the other side's attorneys, because most drag-out these disputes to rake-in fees at their client's expense, but all that does is impoverish both sides, work more animosity, and harm any children involved."
Another is an insurance lawyer I know, who always seeks to avoid court, because people just get boned there. Otherwise though...yes, lawyers tend to equal self-serving, cynical scum.
I think this "ideology" has something to do with the very realistic observation that the government isn't trustworthy, that they think the historical position of "we should not be murdering babies in the name of 'fulfilling one's potential'" is perhaps a rational one while those now in power are mandating even to those who are lawful and backed by the law and history on this position to pool resources into the hands of people who facilitate and pay for such child-murder (and bioethicists at major academic and ethical institutions no longer mince words that it is anything but) on the justification of "your conscience is not recognized and gets in the way of our utopian vision", and in the name of "universal" "health care"; there is also the fact of the matter that recent monies have all gone to cronies and pet projects (usually of the president and his party's members) rather than to strategic initiatives. I do some sleuthing and know people with connections, including to Senators, and that's just the game now: as someone else I know puts it, however, better not say or you may wind-up dead.
I would like to point-out that as China's citizens are now openly revolting with open criticism and knocking-down corrupt citizens one-by-one, with the party there becoming stricter and stricter about keeping high moral standards among its members, our country is going the other way because the legal system has self-referencedly argued that not only cannot you not legislate morality, but that a thousand years of doing just that--including the founders themselves saying otherwise--is illegitimate as a guide, also that it isn't consequential to who we elect, and also the politicians have argued (effectively convincing society) that it has no bearing on how trustworthy the leadership will be, but rather all that matters is "how effective" they are at "getting things done". Think about that next time some popular comedy show mocks Congress "for failing to do anything", when until recently the standard of wisdom about government was that the legislature is the least important branch, and that technically it isn't even needed to keep the government running in a healthy society.
Until our government backs off (or is forced to), gets spending AND debt under control (something without which the world will start backing-off and investors will stop buying bonds for, except liberals, unless we change the Constitution to remove the stipulation that all debts be paid), and society generally is made of not-so-selfish pukes, we're screwed, and I don't want an explosion of innovation by which our government will have yet more levers and technologies to order, control, and enslave us with soft tyranny.
p.s. as far as women and unwanted babies are concerned, I have participated with and know people who actually put their money where their mouth is and care for such women and children--even when they are strangers, though I myself took care of a relative for a year and essentially put myself in the poor house doing it. I was also raised by a struggling single parent, so empathize sympathize with the fears women have about it.
Thanks for saying this. It is a bad idea, stupid at every level, but ultimately for the reason you give here. I also know someone with this intolerance, who still drinks: she's actually pretty good about it though, only having tiny little sips with company of some good wine, and nothing more.
That said, someone who is a dependent alcoholic isn't drinking because they have the ability to break-down the alcohol, but because they're biochemically rewired to require the alcohol, which is among the few things that will actually hard-wire into your system and kill you if you don't get it as needed: I have alcoholics in the family who are extremely dependent and it's a bet you can make, no matter how long they go to try and fix their lives, they'll eventually fall, fall hard, and be excessively hard to deal with.
What is rather needed is not some metaphorical stick to disincentivize the behavior, but to decouple that wiring: to reverse the process someone has undergone by drinking long and hard: it doesn't seem to ever start as someone boozing too hard, but rather one day someone who drinks moderately to heavily, but perhaps has never even gotten drunk, suddenly hits it hard all the time, even when they don't want to. People separated from this drug for years in forced rehab come out zealous to build a new and better life and...get found a few months later back in the gutter. It is hard, heartbreaking, and as of now they is not only no easy solution, but there is no known natural and always-applicable solution. : (
Continuing on a theme here, http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3464567&cid=42917771, this is also why the "conservatives" so often oppose government intervention in social issues (though I'm glad for the segregation intervention given there were violent syndicates between government and private mobs in the South). When there are guaranteed funds for care, etc., the prices jump: I took care of a relative with Alzheimer's for about a year with a cost of about three hundred per month for food, gas, entertainment... (cooking from scratch, cleaning the house ourselves, etc.), but professional care runs in the $4000/mo. range (which is somewhat reasonable due to the price of living in many areas, for homes, and especially as people get more difficult, but still...): if the payments/subsidies went away, and we required families to care for their own again, the less economically competitive in the families would have to start taking care of their weaker and needy members again, and despite the cult of individuals-pursuing-themselves-at-all-costs (including the cost to society around them), I'm all for this.
So remember the "party of no" and uncompromising intransigence of the Republicans on giving more revenue to the government without effective cuts? Well this is a good way to illustrate that thinking: letting any organization give-in on this issues gives pretext to the unprincipled people on the other side who have twisted (in collusion with courts below the Supreme Court) the legal system to bless patents on fudamental tools of the sciences and on mathematics it/them- selves.
No matter how you spin it, speaking about its very nature, software is never an invention: it is always a logical application of algorithmic solutions to do something, and so it is never legitimately eligible for the grant of monopoly by what we call a "patent": the case used to legitimate them never did say software was patentable, only that an invention wasn't automatically disqualified from patent protection just because, in some part, it included software to function. Yet magically (because the damn sharks we call lawyers knew the potential for rent seeking), this transformed into permitting software patents: much like Justice J. Marshall's words that the Supreme Court's job is to "say what law is" turned into "what the Supreme Court says is law" in the hands of his successors and the legal system, which our founders would probably have revolted again for.
We should NEVER compromise on permitting or supporting a position that results in unconscionable conditions: software patents are just another form of ideal policing/control, of which we already have too many examples--some in the guise of golden calves that nobody shall dare touch in politics, making truth radical these days. It must stop or else we'll turn into the stuff of Orwell's and Huxley's nightmares, at least, it will be so for those who want to innovate, do, build, support a stable society, their families, and not be slaves pacified by the next bauble and entertainment craze.
"For example," Prenda wrote in one court filing, "if the subscriber is 75 years old, or the subscriber is female, it is statistically quite unlikely that the subscriber was the infringer."
I would submit that even considering how bloated the codebase to office is, it is better than the Open/Libre/[other derivative prefixes/first names] -Office in that it gets things done in a reliable and expected way, while the FOSS suite has very basic annoyances and errors that, for many people expected some better plumbing and polish, are unacceptable. Take errors like OpenOffice saving back-ups to temp files that are overwritten when the program starts: this is "boring" stuff that MUST be fixed, but forever wasn't (isn't? I stopped caring or following and just got MS Office to get shit done) because it is boring, they have other features to implement, there's work to make it run on new Java interpreters besides the official one...
Stuff that should just work, e.g. creating headers and footers, endnotes, changing styles throughout a document...don't work well at all; controls over these things are lacking horrendously...basically, it's junk with too many hack/work-arounds to be immediately useful for all but the most basic of tasks.
But then again, plenty of people just need uber-simple abilities, and they are being saved significant sums. I use Calc period because I find Excel unstable (after some MS Windows update screwed something), and for basic input of data into rows and columns for human consumption and orderly display, it's great: this means I don't have to shell-out for an upgrade on the next version of Excel that I wouldn't use for much more. Yet there is an opportunity cost: learning to use and gaining then sustaining familiarity with a de facto standard that everybody and their mother (including major Open Source promoters like Google) requires to hire anybody.
What is really needed is disciplined organizations--for profit or otherwise--to carefully and strategically develop these softwares, and not in the interest of a given or specific company to the exclusion of others.
Anyway, I write this stuff because...it's what gets at the issue of making this FOSS suite (and versions thereof) truly and widely beneficial with few opportunity costs to its use. There are other considerations that are needed; like increasing consistency, not removing "redundancy" when that means "exposing access to features from various directions that customers may expect so they don't have to learn one specific way of doing things that isn't necessarily intuitive to them",and "making it more intuitive for people in general, with behaviors that can be trusted/expected", and in general increasing actual reliability of supposed abilities that don't really work, they're just there so the makers can say they are there. This would also mean departures from some things that Word does.
I think anyone even semi-familiar with software development and different capabilities of different suites can see ways to start making up for deficiencies, correcting unwelcome behavior, increasing reliability, exposing more ways to control existing and means of control for features that should be there but aren't. Yet...it doesn't seem to happen. A really simple step can be elucidated with this question: why, with the bloat that WYSIWIG often puts into documents, and strange mark-up they make resulting from the fact they have to guess at what a user intends based on algorithms making assumptions, which often causes the editor to see in-line elements as broken into different paragraphs, evinced by things like styling them differently, doesn't every such editor have a "view mark-up" feature (which also lets you edit it by hand) in the way Corel WordPerfect does? This applies to MS Office just as well: ever get that annoying frickin' issue that it drops a line from one page to the next "just because", when the line wouldn't be in a margin if staid on the previous page, and you're desperate to cut your number of words to two pages and x number of words for college?
And why is this insightful? The url in question is used for a site unpretensiously all about the same Ron Paul who is now going after it. ICANN has rules against grabbing and holding urls merely for trying to extort funds out of someone else. With all the chatter about Rand et. al. people seem to willfully forget that Paul is a libertarian, but not an individualist one: he was a doctor and spent campaign capital on countering "collectivist" arguments in favor of so-called "universal health care" on the premise that government insuring payments to doctors and hospitals means that the prices (as happened with Universities once student loans came easy) would skyrocket because people are greedy (which was implied, its signification being "this is not good", unlike the Randians) and favoring "community" approaches as existed in his day, that doctors and practitioners in the medical fields worked with patients on payments and ensured one way or another that they would be treated.
You might be able to as long as you're paying more than you use and they are not; or the outlays to some are more than actual inlays from others; and that doesn't even get into defining "society", what few necessities government is required to furnish thereto, and what benefits vs. drains on it (I would argue those have more to do with traditional moral items, which makes it quite comical to watch the progressive "liberals" fight with the Randian "liberals" who happen to have coalitioned with the "moral" Republicans).
Why is this modded "insightful"?
I am not opposed, by the way, to help of the needy by government where private society hasn't stepped-in. I am opposed to the trainwreck which is current discernment, thought, and standards of supposedly sound judgment.
The rhetorical question: in the current political environment it seemed like just another shot about the "corporations as people" thing, but re-reading it, I get that I could have misconstrued you point: I think it quite easy in this environment. I find it funnier that "three fifths of all other Persons" is so vague as to include clearly include the personhood of non-citizens, and the fourteenth amendment is even clearer that they are. When you say
250 years of common law has changed our country's constitution to the point where foreign citizens are no longer even considered persons, and are considered outside of U.S. court jurisdiction
I need to point-out, that 250 years hasn't "changed out country's constitution", it has simply built-up a morass-ive range of mounts of caselaw and willful misinterpretations, instances and principles on how to willfully ignore/disregard it, and proposed under thin guise of supposed "constitutionality" things that are "legal" but not "the law". They haven't changed out Constitution on this point one bit: just pretended that they are not violating it or going against it while they are. Quite clearly, the Constitution classes these people (then and now and between) as "people". If you want to really agitate and start throwing a wrench into the lawyers', judges', and politicians' BS, stop talking like them, and when they say some ruling has made/declared/determined something "Constitutional" that isn't, reply "rhetoric: the judiciary can 'say what law is', not 'make shit up'" ( Another post intended to be forthcoming...
I would like to attack this popular myth right here: the answer is obvious, for two reasons. One is based on the fact that this argument is fallacious and is brainwashing, side-stepping providing a relevant consideration that nullifies the assertion "slaves weren't full people as per the original document". The other is very simple, and would apply even if that assertion ("slaves weren't full people") were true.
(1) The Constitution does neither say nor imply that slaves are not people, but that for the purposes of the census they would be enumerated as 3/5ths a person per...person ("...three fifths of all other Persons.").
I would just like to point-out how IDIOTIC the left in this country is on this issue, for ignoring this, and also self-serving: they do this to tarnish that document and...try to argue they should not be bound by it (while out of the other side of their mouths claiming they have legitimate authority to govern because of it, though usually twisting it in the process).
(2) If only slaves "were not people", then would it not mean that those who are foreign nationals and not salves, be covered as people? This is moot because the Constitution actually declares them persons! (see (1)), it just enumerates them for counting purposes different for purposes of determining other governing functions because...wait for it...they didn't want the slave States to have more influence (numbers which would lead to more representation/control by them) just because of the slaves: THEY WANTED TO DIMINISH THAT ELEMENT, which also SHOWS either HOW FRICKIN' DISHONEST OR ELSE IGNORANT "THE LEFT" (probably both in terms of their "leaders"/philosophers-behind-the-scenes-pulling-the-strings vs. the followers) IS.
Please also note: I don't consider the Republicans, on the whole, desirable, honest, worthwhile, supportable, or any good either. I just hate gangrenous myths that pretend to point-out injustices and undermine some "evil bad traditional pre-60's thing" that supposedly is responsible for injustices, and twisted and warped and used to empower conscience-less pathological megalomaniacs who pretend to give a damn about what's right rather than their tribe (as long as they're leading it), which allowed to continue in popular imagination spread and continue to serve the function of those powerful dicks rather than put them in their place, limit their power, and say "**** off" effectively.
During the period in which the U.S. debated becoming a European style empire, the Supreme Court fabricated (I think in the insular cases) doctrines that said outside of U.S. States and certain other classes of territory, the Constitution does not apply, or at least that's the version taught to schoolchildren (and probably the one politicians promote).
It would have been better logic to say "in times of war in places thereof the Constitution is suspended" or something like that, i.e. "when you're fighting in some warzone outside the States, the Constitution doesn't apply in full", but they didn't: they gave the greenlight ("we won't judge against you") to the Federal government to act however it wants outside of U.S. jurisdictions of certain kinds, meaning those outside of any are just screwed (those within the special territories are "privileged" to be governed by the UCMJ, though for many places of the world that would still be quite an improvement).
Besides that, corporations have always been "personae", which you'll find in any basic law text (book, historical doc...): the reason? Simple. Without the status of "persona" (not plural), a corporation can't be taken to court. The left here has been increasingly showing a combination of willful ignorance as well as arrogance: just "making shit up" as a roommate (and gov employee, and lawyer-in-training, and social liberal...) likes to put it. Obama et. al. know that "corporations are [personae]", because "persona/personae" is actually a technical, legal fiction in the first place (actually second, it's a technical term that goes back into ancient history, and it is also a theological category): the "tricky" part is that it is a category that in colloquial as well as legal usage can't be separated from "human being", which Roe v. Wade pretended could be done--also why libs are gnashing teeth and so nervous about the status and security of the right promulgated in that decision, because it is on shaky, no, unsustainable grounds: that is why legal circles are trying to re-found it on the grounds that the Constitution now forbids "involuntary servitude", except that statue can't be construed to have ever intended, nor the words' scope to include, such a matter (but it would not be surprising if a large group of intelligentsia/intellectuals/elites/D.C.ites started to do so anyway).
Aside from that technical information (which matters in law), the foreign citizens haven't been denied "personhood", they've simply, arbitrarily, been declared to be suspect, or put another way, the Constitution as written has been denied: it's a frequent recurring (and often long-lasting) feature of American politics, government, especially juris"prudence". I would say "get used to it", but that assumes cynism or encourages apathy, and frankly assumes that you give a damn about the actual law vs. your own pet peeves of "rights" that may or may not be so, that you "wanna": not meant to be an insult, but it's tiring to hear of rights and so-called rights bandied about by people while they try to deny rights to others: "rights for me, not for you". What's often missing is that things claimed as rights but are not, become fictious rights created and upheld by given coalition hegemony that lasts for quite some time, which by nature (as rights) create duties in others (which infringe upon or abolish fundamental rights), but mention that, and they start attacking you as a lunatic: "one of those natural rights idiots, hahahaha", because if they can succeed in re-grounding our law on everything British, rather than keeping the foundations on the principles promulgated by the founders (which included natural rights theory), we really do become subjects of the government rather than its masters.
For all interested, Robert NIsbet wrote about the cult of economics in "Prejudices", published by Harvard University Press and worth a good read. It is a really engaging book that seems to fit just as well today as it did yesterday, and will piss off liberals as much now as then, though probably conservatives as well. Just don't use it as an authority without some fact checking here and there, as it wasn't written quite as history or as philosophy, but as a piece of freethinking a la Voltaire's Dictionnairre Philosophique.
With an expiration like that, they need to (1) get the attorney (2) talk to an organization specializing in things like this (e.g. EFF), (3) keep mum about activities: you can't be sued (legitimately) for merely doing research that uses something described in a patent, but have to actually commercialize it, (4) wait until the patent has expired if they even think about doing anything commercial (this date makes this so easy a choice it's crazy), and (5) incorporate as others have said: it's usually not that hard if you have competent professional help, and depending on the state I might be able to recommend some people.
Then again, they might not be just a "troll": lawyers specializing in patents tend to do so not because they want to benefit others or help with patents, but to serve themselves: particularly by extorting protection money from people who are actually inventive, with software and various maths (like "business methods", which is simply algorithmic activities that are logically arrived at being claimed as "invention") being a favorite because as fundamental tools of arts and sciences (and reasoning at all, and thinking, and doing anything) they know they can achieve near-universal monopoly enforced by government---and the courts--impressed and enamored with form over substance (because it increases the scope of their power by offering and escape from limits imposed on them by Constitutions, people, etc.); the courts because they're obsessed with process, increasingly deny truth as defense in the name of efficiency and proper timing even when there's no evidence of mal-intent or misbehavior, and because if you go in front of a judge claiming "your duty is to uphold the law and rights not mere process and side with government just 'cause" their response is something like "you're tell me what I ought do, and questioning my authoritah!!!" (Think Cartman in robes with a self-supposed veneer of respectability, and the punctuation is not a mistake: it's not a question but a veiled and indirect threat.) And of course, they too "benefit" by getting free of "restrictions", in particular more abstract or theoretical than the others: it's no accident that lawyers' writings celebrate things like "developments relieving us of care for metaphysics" (because if you can just make shit up and ignore care for nature and substance of things, in a legal system that dictates to the rest of us, you can be quite powerful).
I mention all this because I may know (directly or indirectly -but-not-far-removed) such kind of people, and I wouldn't be surprised of seeing a quick set-up of an organization directed by them (but perhaps veiling the connections) and intended to extract some kind of deal from persons or company that they see as possessing potential to be successful and make a lot of money. But then, they may just want to set a precedent with an easy target in order to go after others who violated (they say) their legitimately granted (they say) patent all that time and extract money from already-proven ventures: they might be after Dish for all we know, for instance.
Or some large company could be seeking to put you under. So as said, flying low, keeping mum, contacting competent organizations specializing in these sort of matters, etc., are all good ideas. Also, having a lawyer who isn't too enamored with formalities: it could be disastrous if the guy just decided to contact them to be polite, or rushed to your defense by sending a C&D or set of questions. Neither the law degree nor bar appointment are indicative of how savvy a lawyer is: I know some pretty good ones who also happen to be the sort-of-folks mentioned above who would try tactics as-mentioned.
Good luck and remember that this is not legal advice or counsel, but opinion, and I am not a lawyer.
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Porn is ensnaring and addicting as hell, which is why it is so effective in advertisements, by making a powerful physiological association between product and something which cannot be simply ignored and removed from the mind once seen. And yon dipshit and many like him cry "OMFG censorship like as done by tze evilz dictatorz/autocratz/religioz tyrantz!!!" without paying attention to why they actually ban it: they simply observe it is bad for their populations, which is therefore bad for their national strength (and own power), and given they have the power to impose and enforce bans...they use it.
Among ancient "conservative" (without having to be Statist, as the Europeans have always confused Statism with "conservatism" because State-imposed atomism (Tocqueville) they have always confused with "liberalism") realizations, throughout every society, is that a little social imposition of difficulty to access certain things (like sex) go a long way toward making a happier society (like women who get men interested, civil, chivalrous, etc.; women who can't be entitled hear-me-roar bitch-princes who are only worth a quick bang followed by walking-away: which I am not saying is right). The truly "liberal" realization is that to avoid massive problems you should let people contract their relations, and the State's role is to enforce the contract: in a place like the U.S., where feminist lawyers in judges robes presiding over family "court" spent decades excising the controls of contract law from marital disputes, and even now the fight is over a "marriage" which is not about a serious relationship with definite ends (like building an enterprise, having children, and commitment for life except emotively as an idea that is kinda-liked) but a "dignified" status and thing done because it's "romantic" and "feels good" and all the "witnesses" are a mob of idiots who won't be going to court with you to uphold the contract (that's what the vows are) or to testify against either party that breaks them (who should, as in other areas of contract law, get nothing: and be removed from all claims upon anything that resulted), there is neither conservatism nor liberalism--anymore, only Statism and atomism.
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact they aren't equivocal; in one case, with several thousand years' development, a small bit of extra skin is excised making a male lose a little bit of sensitivity with an increase in cleanliness and also a greater resistance in disease (circumcision is being implemented in the AIDs-infested parts of Africa for precisely this reason) by cause of the fact that the skin traps bodily fluids of a partner against one's own skin and near the entrance of the urethra: in the other, all ability to feel any sexual pleasure--at all--is usually removed, and because this required excision of the equivalent of the male glans, or cutting off a massive conglomeration of nerve ends, often means that the recipient will also continue to have searing pain in their crotch for as long as they don't kill themselves.
Let me repeat and simplify: in one case, useless (and somewhat disadvantaging) skin is removed, and if done correctly has no permanent consequences, while female "circumcision" is not "circumcision" at all, it's genital mutilation: cutting off the lady part which happens to be the analog of the big, bulbous and sensitive end of the male penis. The equivocation of them came from a bunch of leftist idjuts, the kind of people who think "equal protections" means the State can forcibly make both sexes equal by imposing consequences on one sex to hinder it in order to advantage the other, and other such rights-killing liberty-murdering shit, and it's long past the point that people who don't want to be ruled by such intellectual retarded ideologues start opposing them in every possible way, as well as calling out bullshit that originates with them, like the brown that AC posted. Put another way: the liberals aren't liberals, and haven't ever been with few exceptions, and fuck tolerance: they're the most intolerant bunch of self-designated "enlightened" tyrants ever to crawl on the face of the earth, whose ideologies have led to over 100,000,000 murders in the last century alone, and as "small" as the equivocation of male circumcision with female genitalia "excision" or "mutilation" may seem, it is the same sort of categorical and metaphysical error that leads to assertions that male=female, and therefore we have the perogative to forcibly make female=male, when we all know it's bullshit.
Good points. I'm preferential (wherever possible) to capture and public trial (with competent, lawful handlers of the affairs and processes involved) such that we can show the world our legal system (er...as it is defined and codified and stipulated in the law) is up to the task, but where that's not an option...bombs away I guess...for now... Hopefully knowledge and wisdom will come to make a better conclusion than one of "I guess".
This is all theoretically based, but:
I'm betting they're using deep packet inspection, perhaps looking for signatures if content going across is encrypted, such that perhaps (probably unencrypted to facilitate this) someone should start "sharing" with himself from one location, pulling from home, and doing so through his own web interface, and wait to get these notices; then when they finally terminate service he'll have grounds to bring suit: (1) for illegal derivation from a copyrighted work without permission of the rights holder (for which that person will have, as the rights holder, the right to sue); (2) for unlawful eavesdropping; (3) for false claims of copyright infringement, and assistance in the claim; (4) for unlawful termination of services (I believe under TPA that cutting-off utilities is defined as an act of terrorism...); (5) for installation of software or code (these pop-ups) upon a computer without permission of the owner... Essentially they need to screw off, or nerds really need to lawyer-up and start fighting, building their own networks, and working to make possible avoidance of unethical companies.
Speaking of all this: let's all put banners at the top of web pages with the words "if you get a copyright infringement notice from your ISP on any of these pages, please take a screenshot and contact me, so I can sue them for unlawfully making a derivative of my copyrighted work."
Also, comments from here, http://yro.slashdot.org/story/07/06/23/1233212/isps-inserting-ads-into-your-pages likely apply to this too. On many levels this appears to be very illegal. At the least eavesdropping--and "monitoring" is only acceptable insofar as the justification was to automatically adjust the network traffic flows to keep the whole stable and flowing--and making derivative works. The law has already established that just because communications take place across even PUBLIC utility lines, that doesn't make it not eavedropping to listen-in: the police were hammered pretty hard after trying to make that argument (and it's logic consistent with the Constitution which needs to rightfully be returned and applied to roads and your persons and effects in a vehicle as you travel on them, your vehicle, and any number of areas that Statists have successfully convinced sometimes all-too-willingly collusive Courts to make fishing/spying free-for-alls), and merely being "private" doesn't mean eavesdropping becomes legal.
p.s. We were never a full subscriber to Geneva, actually stating upon ratification that it was only ratified in certain sections; not "fair" maybe, but the rest of the world has accepted it, so it's legit. Very often cries of "violating Geneva" ignore partial ratification (conveniently), which is not a practice that only the U.S. practises. Also, "international law" is only what a power big enough is willing to enforce: countries ruled by immoral politicians have no honor or lawfulness abroad.
Laws have intended purposes; these just don't typically get written-into the laws because those writing them put out documentation at the time of writing, and because frankly they write them also as convenient pretexts to say "so sorry about the egregious outcome in this particular case of the application of this law, but the law, damn it, rules, not us--no, ignore that we wrote it in the first place and are able to revise it at a whim but have failed to do so after thousands of inquiries and urgently be contacted over years to do so because these things keep happening." I'm pretty damn sure that the likes of the whistleblower act would cover Manning if they would let it, and frankly "UCMJ governs" my ass: the military may be "special" but it's still a department under the executive branch, i.e. should be covered by things like that.
Stop putting dickless sociopaths in office, and maybe things like this won't happen.
Citations needed...so we can show asshats who can do something about it that there is reason to concern themselves with how all this has been handled, and to start intervening/doing something about it: note the president, as Commander in Chief, likely has the power to, but as presidents often do, pretends otherwise.
If you go knock on your neighbors' doors and say "I support [candidate] and you should too!" you'll go to jail for unregistered political activity and electioneering. The Democrats have (so far) passed such laws and pulled-off finangling court approval on the basis of specious justifications for this (despite how this evidently kills all legitimate, effective grassroots movements: if you're grassroots* and become effective someone from either of the parties will send the enforcers to imprison and fine you), and daily work toward further infringement, abolishion, notification of fundamental rights and liberties in the name of supposed "good" causes, so what makes you expect in the name of "un/Constitutional" [whatever] that long-term something like this won't be argue just-right so the Courts will let it pass? * As a guy who worked within those "grassroots" efforts recently, I can tell you they're well-oiled, heavily-infrastructured, pro- illegal-mafia/cartel called by one party or another, at least most of the time, or else they're the product of "open conspiracy" that happens to play into the "narratives" of one power-hungry bunch of criminals or another, whose other supporters and supporting organizations just happen to contribute lots of funds, expertise, money, personnel, etc. to the "grassroots" cause.
And I noticed you didn't actually respond to my points about it not being a prevenative measure, but at any rate: your signature is "Safety is a tyrant's tool; no one can oppose safety", which makes your comments funnier: rambling on about predispositions to alcohol and whatnot. ; )
And "well-known" often means "popular knowledge only half-assedly acquired, partially, inaccurately, and without serious consideration". You don't seem to understand genetic predispositions (as you comments stand): my own studies were actually in biology and genetics. You know that "predisposition" that had test-positive women signing-up to have major mastectomies? Geneticists knew that because of epigenetics, the actual probability of getting breast cancer just because of a present gene was actually very unknown, and merely modifying life behaviors could [very] significantly reduce the likelihood of it developing--because the actual regulation of genes was changed by inputs beyond the genes.
This is "classically" a "heresy" in genetics thought, but epigenetics fundamentally alters all the old thinking (largely making it irrelevant in all but research on rats in a lab). My family happens to be filled with alcoholics too, but I seem to be the one in it that can drink as much or as little (at will) as he wants...and just enjoy it without getting drunk. In fact, I can down a bottle of higher-proof wine and feel just a little dizzy (at first, it goes away pretty quickly), and ponder to myself "why is this?"
Removing the ability of someone to enjoy what is a FOOD is not moral: alcohol isn't a "mind altering drug" in the same way as the schedule 1's tend to be. One sip doesn't *tend* (which is key) to be a problem, nor one beer (for a man; ~1/3 for a woman), or even two or three, when someone has a normal BMI. Making that decision for them means they can't go to France or Italy and not insult a host, or to perhaps 3/5ths of the globe without having a serious problem with regards how to get fluids without being infected with water-born illness (the ancient trick of mixing a slight amount of boos or wine with water remains a useful one).
Perhaps rather than putting fear over actual knowns, a parent should wait to see if their spawn have problems with it, and if these are found later, suggest to them to get such a vaccine? Just sayin'. And to be less contentious...nice Homepage and photowork. : ) No really!
Nope to both the assertions and your question, or perhaps I should say there are different significances at play here.
She has a slight allergy to something naturally, meaning she avoids it because of the slight allergy: and it is slight (important for below): rather than having a vaccine that caused an allergy, it is natural.
On the other hand, inducing an unnatural allergy to a substance that some people abuse, for which some people therefore disapprove, is criminal: it is deciding for someone whether they should ever enjoy something which, besides abuse, should not be considered anything but good, and moreover, is something that is even still necessary in some parts of the world (unless you want water-based poisoning).
But as to the "you're saying it works", it works for someone who has never been able, and doesn't become too depressed (or similar), because even this gal I know can and will drink alcohol if she gets very down. Merely going "it'll work by making people feel bad" is idiocy: plenty of people keep drinking "long and hard" despite how terrible they feel the next day, for reasons like being miserable, or else because they're simply addicted. Want an example? My father. His processing ability has definitely diminished over decades of drinking, and the effects can take days, but he...still goes at it very frequently. I also know people who start drinking-through the damn drugs: with horrible, horrible, horrible, awful, horrible consequences that last and last...yet they try...
Let's stop trying to impose very simplistic, invasive, immuno-altering (in a very unnatural way) non-solutions to very difficult problems. As a guy with an extreme immune system (disabled me for 8 months at one point), I know first-hand the consequences of it getting messed-up, and by extension how precarious actions that attempt to "train" it can be. There is also the potentially unintended side-effect nobody's mentioning: if this would make you feel sick for days after, it would probably be much like the current drugs that work to do this same thing by disabling the enzymes in your system for breaking-down alcohol: this means that air fresheners, cleaning supplies, polishes of all kinds, certain oils, hand sanitizer, lotions, and more could all make you very sick: I once sprayed air freshener very slightly in a bathroom to cover-up the smell of using the toilet for #2 and made an uncle on a light dose of the meds start violently heaving; this was across a big apartment with a bunch of walls in-between and the doors closed, and simply leaving the residence wasn't enough: he had to exit the building! That would be a monstrous thing to induce in people.
Let's leave normal health and physiology alone: the ability to break-down alcohol is both natural, and even at a certain level necessary: if this "vaccination" (immuno-mis-training) goes wrong, ever, it will kill someone: you HAVE to be able to process alcohols at some level, and even the supposedly allergic/intolerant/incapable actually do, just in diminished amounts.
A real boon, and mercy/grace, to people with this problem, might be one similar to injections that can decouple certain drugs from receptors in the brain, or block their attachment, such that they can within a few treatments actually break dependence: those exist and are in development...but their mechanisms are actually more complex than that, and different from alcohol. This particular proposed "solution" is a sham, it is wishful thinking: I wish it weren't.
Regards man.
It is pretty obvious that these days they would imprison them under the pretext of "necessity to 'national security'", though the higher courts *might* intervene.
In a rare moment of defending lawyers, I have known lawyers that seek to settle disputes outside of court. One a family law lawyer who I would speak to, and who said, "I focus on the other side's attorneys, because most drag-out these disputes to rake-in fees at their client's expense, but all that does is impoverish both sides, work more animosity, and harm any children involved."
Another is an insurance lawyer I know, who always seeks to avoid court, because people just get boned there. Otherwise though...yes, lawyers tend to equal self-serving, cynical scum.
I think this "ideology" has something to do with the very realistic observation that the government isn't trustworthy, that they think the historical position of "we should not be murdering babies in the name of 'fulfilling one's potential'" is perhaps a rational one while those now in power are mandating even to those who are lawful and backed by the law and history on this position to pool resources into the hands of people who facilitate and pay for such child-murder (and bioethicists at major academic and ethical institutions no longer mince words that it is anything but) on the justification of "your conscience is not recognized and gets in the way of our utopian vision", and in the name of "universal" "health care"; there is also the fact of the matter that recent monies have all gone to cronies and pet projects (usually of the president and his party's members) rather than to strategic initiatives. I do some sleuthing and know people with connections, including to Senators, and that's just the game now: as someone else I know puts it, however, better not say or you may wind-up dead.
I would like to point-out that as China's citizens are now openly revolting with open criticism and knocking-down corrupt citizens one-by-one, with the party there becoming stricter and stricter about keeping high moral standards among its members, our country is going the other way because the legal system has self-referencedly argued that not only cannot you not legislate morality, but that a thousand years of doing just that--including the founders themselves saying otherwise--is illegitimate as a guide, also that it isn't consequential to who we elect, and also the politicians have argued (effectively convincing society) that it has no bearing on how trustworthy the leadership will be, but rather all that matters is "how effective" they are at "getting things done". Think about that next time some popular comedy show mocks Congress "for failing to do anything", when until recently the standard of wisdom about government was that the legislature is the least important branch, and that technically it isn't even needed to keep the government running in a healthy society.
Until our government backs off (or is forced to), gets spending AND debt under control (something without which the world will start backing-off and investors will stop buying bonds for, except liberals, unless we change the Constitution to remove the stipulation that all debts be paid), and society generally is made of not-so-selfish pukes, we're screwed, and I don't want an explosion of innovation by which our government will have yet more levers and technologies to order, control, and enslave us with soft tyranny.
p.s. as far as women and unwanted babies are concerned, I have participated with and know people who actually put their money where their mouth is and care for such women and children--even when they are strangers, though I myself took care of a relative for a year and essentially put myself in the poor house doing it. I was also raised by a struggling single parent, so empathize sympathize with the fears women have about it.
Thanks for saying this. It is a bad idea, stupid at every level, but ultimately for the reason you give here. I also know someone with this intolerance, who still drinks: she's actually pretty good about it though, only having tiny little sips with company of some good wine, and nothing more.
That said, someone who is a dependent alcoholic isn't drinking because they have the ability to break-down the alcohol, but because they're biochemically rewired to require the alcohol, which is among the few things that will actually hard-wire into your system and kill you if you don't get it as needed: I have alcoholics in the family who are extremely dependent and it's a bet you can make, no matter how long they go to try and fix their lives, they'll eventually fall, fall hard, and be excessively hard to deal with.
What is rather needed is not some metaphorical stick to disincentivize the behavior, but to decouple that wiring: to reverse the process someone has undergone by drinking long and hard: it doesn't seem to ever start as someone boozing too hard, but rather one day someone who drinks moderately to heavily, but perhaps has never even gotten drunk, suddenly hits it hard all the time, even when they don't want to. People separated from this drug for years in forced rehab come out zealous to build a new and better life and...get found a few months later back in the gutter. It is hard, heartbreaking, and as of now they is not only no easy solution, but there is no known natural and always-applicable solution. : (
Continuing on a theme here, http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3464567&cid=42917771, this is also why the "conservatives" so often oppose government intervention in social issues (though I'm glad for the segregation intervention given there were violent syndicates between government and private mobs in the South). When there are guaranteed funds for care, etc., the prices jump: I took care of a relative with Alzheimer's for about a year with a cost of about three hundred per month for food, gas, entertainment... (cooking from scratch, cleaning the house ourselves, etc.), but professional care runs in the $4000/mo. range (which is somewhat reasonable due to the price of living in many areas, for homes, and especially as people get more difficult, but still...): if the payments/subsidies went away, and we required families to care for their own again, the less economically competitive in the families would have to start taking care of their weaker and needy members again, and despite the cult of individuals-pursuing-themselves-at-all-costs (including the cost to society around them), I'm all for this.
So remember the "party of no" and uncompromising intransigence of the Republicans on giving more revenue to the government without effective cuts? Well this is a good way to illustrate that thinking: letting any organization give-in on this issues gives pretext to the unprincipled people on the other side who have twisted (in collusion with courts below the Supreme Court) the legal system to bless patents on fudamental tools of the sciences and on mathematics it/them- selves.
No matter how you spin it, speaking about its very nature, software is never an invention: it is always a logical application of algorithmic solutions to do something, and so it is never legitimately eligible for the grant of monopoly by what we call a "patent": the case used to legitimate them never did say software was patentable, only that an invention wasn't automatically disqualified from patent protection just because, in some part, it included software to function. Yet magically (because the damn sharks we call lawyers knew the potential for rent seeking), this transformed into permitting software patents: much like Justice J. Marshall's words that the Supreme Court's job is to "say what law is" turned into "what the Supreme Court says is law" in the hands of his successors and the legal system, which our founders would probably have revolted again for.
We should NEVER compromise on permitting or supporting a position that results in unconscionable conditions: software patents are just another form of ideal policing/control, of which we already have too many examples--some in the guise of golden calves that nobody shall dare touch in politics, making truth radical these days. It must stop or else we'll turn into the stuff of Orwell's and Huxley's nightmares, at least, it will be so for those who want to innovate, do, build, support a stable society, their families, and not be slaves pacified by the next bauble and entertainment craze.
Lies. Damn Lies. Statistics.
I would submit that even considering how bloated the codebase to office is, it is better than the Open/Libre/[other derivative prefixes/first names] -Office in that it gets things done in a reliable and expected way, while the FOSS suite has very basic annoyances and errors that, for many people expected some better plumbing and polish, are unacceptable. Take errors like OpenOffice saving back-ups to temp files that are overwritten when the program starts: this is "boring" stuff that MUST be fixed, but forever wasn't (isn't? I stopped caring or following and just got MS Office to get shit done) because it is boring, they have other features to implement, there's work to make it run on new Java interpreters besides the official one...
Stuff that should just work, e.g. creating headers and footers, endnotes, changing styles throughout a document...don't work well at all; controls over these things are lacking horrendously...basically, it's junk with too many hack/work-arounds to be immediately useful for all but the most basic of tasks.
But then again, plenty of people just need uber-simple abilities, and they are being saved significant sums. I use Calc period because I find Excel unstable (after some MS Windows update screwed something), and for basic input of data into rows and columns for human consumption and orderly display, it's great: this means I don't have to shell-out for an upgrade on the next version of Excel that I wouldn't use for much more. Yet there is an opportunity cost: learning to use and gaining then sustaining familiarity with a de facto standard that everybody and their mother (including major Open Source promoters like Google) requires to hire anybody.
What is really needed is disciplined organizations--for profit or otherwise--to carefully and strategically develop these softwares, and not in the interest of a given or specific company to the exclusion of others.
Anyway, I write this stuff because...it's what gets at the issue of making this FOSS suite (and versions thereof) truly and widely beneficial with few opportunity costs to its use. There are other considerations that are needed; like increasing consistency, not removing "redundancy" when that means "exposing access to features from various directions that customers may expect so they don't have to learn one specific way of doing things that isn't necessarily intuitive to them",and "making it more intuitive for people in general, with behaviors that can be trusted/expected", and in general increasing actual reliability of supposed abilities that don't really work, they're just there so the makers can say they are there. This would also mean departures from some things that Word does.
I think anyone even semi-familiar with software development and different capabilities of different suites can see ways to start making up for deficiencies, correcting unwelcome behavior, increasing reliability, exposing more ways to control existing and means of control for features that should be there but aren't. Yet...it doesn't seem to happen. A really simple step can be elucidated with this question: why, with the bloat that WYSIWIG often puts into documents, and strange mark-up they make resulting from the fact they have to guess at what a user intends based on algorithms making assumptions, which often causes the editor to see in-line elements as broken into different paragraphs, evinced by things like styling them differently, doesn't every such editor have a "view mark-up" feature (which also lets you edit it by hand) in the way Corel WordPerfect does? This applies to MS Office just as well: ever get that annoying frickin' issue that it drops a line from one page to the next "just because", when the line wouldn't be in a margin if staid on the previous page, and you're desperate to cut your number of words to two pages and x number of words for college?
Anyway, enough rambling...
And why is this insightful? The url in question is used for a site unpretensiously all about the same Ron Paul who is now going after it. ICANN has rules against grabbing and holding urls merely for trying to extort funds out of someone else. With all the chatter about Rand et. al. people seem to willfully forget that Paul is a libertarian, but not an individualist one: he was a doctor and spent campaign capital on countering "collectivist" arguments in favor of so-called "universal health care" on the premise that government insuring payments to doctors and hospitals means that the prices (as happened with Universities once student loans came easy) would skyrocket because people are greedy (which was implied, its signification being "this is not good", unlike the Randians) and favoring "community" approaches as existed in his day, that doctors and practitioners in the medical fields worked with patients on payments and ensured one way or another that they would be treated.
You might be able to as long as you're paying more than you use and they are not; or the outlays to some are more than actual inlays from others; and that doesn't even get into defining "society", what few necessities government is required to furnish thereto, and what benefits vs. drains on it (I would argue those have more to do with traditional moral items, which makes it quite comical to watch the progressive "liberals" fight with the Randian "liberals" who happen to have coalitioned with the "moral" Republicans).
Why is this modded "insightful"?
I am not opposed, by the way, to help of the needy by government where private society hasn't stepped-in. I am opposed to the trainwreck which is current discernment, thought, and standards of supposedly sound judgment.
I need to point-out, that 250 years hasn't "changed out country's constitution", it has simply built-up a morass-ive range of mounts of caselaw and willful misinterpretations, instances and principles on how to willfully ignore/disregard it, and proposed under thin guise of supposed "constitutionality" things that are "legal" but not "the law". They haven't changed out Constitution on this point one bit: just pretended that they are not violating it or going against it while they are. Quite clearly, the Constitution classes these people (then and now and between) as "people". If you want to really agitate and start throwing a wrench into the lawyers', judges', and politicians' BS, stop talking like them, and when they say some ruling has made/declared/determined something "Constitutional" that isn't, reply "rhetoric: the judiciary can 'say what law is', not 'make shit up'" (
Another post intended to be forthcoming...
I would like to attack this popular myth right here: the answer is obvious, for two reasons. One is based on the fact that this argument is fallacious and is brainwashing, side-stepping providing a relevant consideration that nullifies the assertion "slaves weren't full people as per the original document". The other is very simple, and would apply even if that assertion ("slaves weren't full people") were true.
(1) The Constitution does neither say nor imply that slaves are not people, but that for the purposes of the census they would be enumerated as 3/5ths a person per...person ("...three fifths of all other Persons.").
I would just like to point-out how IDIOTIC the left in this country is on this issue, for ignoring this, and also self-serving: they do this to tarnish that document and...try to argue they should not be bound by it (while out of the other side of their mouths claiming they have legitimate authority to govern because of it, though usually twisting it in the process).
(2) If only slaves "were not people", then would it not mean that those who are foreign nationals and not salves, be covered as people? This is moot because the Constitution actually declares them persons! (see (1)), it just enumerates them for counting purposes different for purposes of determining other governing functions because...wait for it...they didn't want the slave States to have more influence (numbers which would lead to more representation/control by them) just because of the slaves: THEY WANTED TO DIMINISH THAT ELEMENT, which also SHOWS either HOW FRICKIN' DISHONEST OR ELSE IGNORANT "THE LEFT" (probably both in terms of their "leaders"/philosophers-behind-the-scenes-pulling-the-strings vs. the followers) IS.
Please also note: I don't consider the Republicans, on the whole, desirable, honest, worthwhile, supportable, or any good either. I just hate gangrenous myths that pretend to point-out injustices and undermine some "evil bad traditional pre-60's thing" that supposedly is responsible for injustices, and twisted and warped and used to empower conscience-less pathological megalomaniacs who pretend to give a damn about what's right rather than their tribe (as long as they're leading it), which allowed to continue in popular imagination spread and continue to serve the function of those powerful dicks rather than put them in their place, limit their power, and say "**** off" effectively.
Your question is bad, but I can answer it.
During the period in which the U.S. debated becoming a European style empire, the Supreme Court fabricated (I think in the insular cases) doctrines that said outside of U.S. States and certain other classes of territory, the Constitution does not apply, or at least that's the version taught to schoolchildren (and probably the one politicians promote).
It would have been better logic to say "in times of war in places thereof the Constitution is suspended" or something like that, i.e. "when you're fighting in some warzone outside the States, the Constitution doesn't apply in full", but they didn't: they gave the greenlight ("we won't judge against you") to the Federal government to act however it wants outside of U.S. jurisdictions of certain kinds, meaning those outside of any are just screwed (those within the special territories are "privileged" to be governed by the UCMJ, though for many places of the world that would still be quite an improvement).
Besides that, corporations have always been "personae", which you'll find in any basic law text (book, historical doc...): the reason? Simple. Without the status of "persona" (not plural), a corporation can't be taken to court. The left here has been increasingly showing a combination of willful ignorance as well as arrogance: just "making shit up" as a roommate (and gov employee, and lawyer-in-training, and social liberal...) likes to put it. Obama et. al. know that "corporations are [personae]", because "persona/personae" is actually a technical, legal fiction in the first place (actually second, it's a technical term that goes back into ancient history, and it is also a theological category): the "tricky" part is that it is a category that in colloquial as well as legal usage can't be separated from "human being", which Roe v. Wade pretended could be done--also why libs are gnashing teeth and so nervous about the status and security of the right promulgated in that decision, because it is on shaky, no, unsustainable grounds: that is why legal circles are trying to re-found it on the grounds that the Constitution now forbids "involuntary servitude", except that statue can't be construed to have ever intended, nor the words' scope to include, such a matter (but it would not be surprising if a large group of intelligentsia/intellectuals/elites/D.C.ites started to do so anyway).
Aside from that technical information (which matters in law), the foreign citizens haven't been denied "personhood", they've simply, arbitrarily, been declared to be suspect, or put another way, the Constitution as written has been denied: it's a frequent recurring (and often long-lasting) feature of American politics, government, especially juris"prudence". I would say "get used to it", but that assumes cynism or encourages apathy, and frankly assumes that you give a damn about the actual law vs. your own pet peeves of "rights" that may or may not be so, that you "wanna": not meant to be an insult, but it's tiring to hear of rights and so-called rights bandied about by people while they try to deny rights to others: "rights for me, not for you". What's often missing is that things claimed as rights but are not, become fictious rights created and upheld by given coalition hegemony that lasts for quite some time, which by nature (as rights) create duties in others (which infringe upon or abolish fundamental rights), but mention that, and they start attacking you as a lunatic: "one of those natural rights idiots, hahahaha", because if they can succeed in re-grounding our law on everything British, rather than keeping the foundations on the principles promulgated by the founders (which included natural rights theory), we really do become subjects of the government rather than its masters.
For all interested, Robert NIsbet wrote about the cult of economics in "Prejudices", published by Harvard University Press and worth a good read. It is a really engaging book that seems to fit just as well today as it did yesterday, and will piss off liberals as much now as then, though probably conservatives as well. Just don't use it as an authority without some fact checking here and there, as it wasn't written quite as history or as philosophy, but as a piece of freethinking a la Voltaire's Dictionnairre Philosophique.
With an expiration like that, they need to (1) get the attorney (2) talk to an organization specializing in things like this (e.g. EFF), (3) keep mum about activities: you can't be sued (legitimately) for merely doing research that uses something described in a patent, but have to actually commercialize it, (4) wait until the patent has expired if they even think about doing anything commercial (this date makes this so easy a choice it's crazy), and (5) incorporate as others have said: it's usually not that hard if you have competent professional help, and depending on the state I might be able to recommend some people.
Then again, they might not be just a "troll": lawyers specializing in patents tend to do so not because they want to benefit others or help with patents, but to serve themselves: particularly by extorting protection money from people who are actually inventive, with software and various maths (like "business methods", which is simply algorithmic activities that are logically arrived at being claimed as "invention") being a favorite because as fundamental tools of arts and sciences (and reasoning at all, and thinking, and doing anything) they know they can achieve near-universal monopoly enforced by government---and the courts--impressed and enamored with form over substance (because it increases the scope of their power by offering and escape from limits imposed on them by Constitutions, people, etc.); the courts because they're obsessed with process, increasingly deny truth as defense in the name of efficiency and proper timing even when there's no evidence of mal-intent or misbehavior, and because if you go in front of a judge claiming "your duty is to uphold the law and rights not mere process and side with government just 'cause" their response is something like "you're tell me what I ought do, and questioning my authoritah!!!" (Think Cartman in robes with a self-supposed veneer of respectability, and the punctuation is not a mistake: it's not a question but a veiled and indirect threat.) And of course, they too "benefit" by getting free of "restrictions", in particular more abstract or theoretical than the others: it's no accident that lawyers' writings celebrate things like "developments relieving us of care for metaphysics" (because if you can just make shit up and ignore care for nature and substance of things, in a legal system that dictates to the rest of us, you can be quite powerful).
I mention all this because I may know (directly or indirectly -but-not-far-removed) such kind of people, and I wouldn't be surprised of seeing a quick set-up of an organization directed by them (but perhaps veiling the connections) and intended to extract some kind of deal from persons or company that they see as possessing potential to be successful and make a lot of money. But then, they may just want to set a precedent with an easy target in order to go after others who violated (they say) their legitimately granted (they say) patent all that time and extract money from already-proven ventures: they might be after Dish for all we know, for instance.
Or some large company could be seeking to put you under. So as said, flying low, keeping mum, contacting competent organizations specializing in these sort of matters, etc., are all good ideas. Also, having a lawyer who isn't too enamored with formalities: it could be disastrous if the guy just decided to contact them to be polite, or rushed to your defense by sending a C&D or set of questions. Neither the law degree nor bar appointment are indicative of how savvy a lawyer is: I know some pretty good ones who also happen to be the sort-of-folks mentioned above who would try tactics as-mentioned.
Good luck and remember that this is not legal advice or counsel, but opinion, and I am not a lawyer.