The problem with a "copyright tax" is very simple: According to current international copyright laws, you don't have to register, anything you create is (C) you.
A solution that is readily adaptable to a surrender-value based property tax scheme already exists in US copyright law. You aren't required to register to be protected by copyright, but you are required to register in order to pursue most legal enforcement actions. So you do the same with the property tax declared value, and, indeed, you can link it to registration. If you haven't registered (which includes declaring a value for surrender and tax-basis) purposes, you can't go to court for most copyright-related claims. When you do register, you have to pay tax back to the creation date based on the declared value, which provides a surrender value and may limit recovery for certain classes of damages in an infringement action.
You can also create a limited window (say, 7 years from creation) after which the copyright expires if you haven't registered it (and thereby provided a surrender alue.) If you do register it, it can continue for a longer period, subject to the prospect of involuntary transfer to the public domain by someone paying the surrender price, and the requirement to pay an ad valorem tax annually as long as the copyright is maintained.
You can make this work for patents and trademarks, because they are registered.
Not all trademarks are registered, either. And since the main purpose of trademarks isn't to encourage creation of works of utility to the public (which is the purpose of copyright and patent), but to promote clarity in trade, I don't think creating a property tax system on trademarks is really desirable, anyway.
But a surrender-value based system for copyrights (using the above system to deal with the lack of a registration requirement) and patents might be a good idea.
Then we're right back where we started, that "tax free" term might start out as 7 years and then will get extended to 14, then to 35, then 99 years, then 200 years past the life of the owner.
Yes, any policy that can be proposed might changed into a completely different policy that would not have the same benefits as the proposed policy.
You don't get a "tax free" period on owning your home.
You don't get a tax free period after buying an existing piece of real property, in most jurisdictions, but, in most jurisdictions, you get a "tax free" period on any increase in the value of a property during the time you own it (the period between tax assessments). And in many jurisdictions, you aren't taxed on the actual value of real property anyway, you are taxed on the value at the time of the most recent transfer, plus the lesser of any increase in assessed value since then or a fixed percentage increase per year.
But, at any rate, real property is not subject to a surrender-price based property tax scheme (while real property is subject to eminent domain, condemnation valuation is often completely different than property tax assessment), so the concerns that motivate a tax-free period in a surrender-price-based property tax scheme don't apply.
You don't get a "tax free" period on owning a car.
Maybe, I'm not familiar with every jurisdictions vehicle taxes. California's VLF certainly gives permanent "tax free" status for certain private vehicles whose use is for publicly-beneficial purposes (like schoolbusses) or by certain owners (most vehicles owned by disabled veterans, former POWs, or Medal of Honor recipients or their surviving spouses).
You don't get a "tax free" period on any other real property.
"Your home", "a car", "any other real property"? A car isn't real property, its tangible personal property. If by "real property" you meant some unusual class of property that includes real property and tangible personal property, then, yeah, for lots of kinds of property in that class, you have an unlimited period free of property taxation.
Why should someone get that benefit for IP?
The reason in a surrender-price based taxation scheme is that the initial period (1) encourages creation, and (2) enables the creator to get a reasonable idea of the commercial value of the IP before setting a surrender price.
Property taxes (in the usual cases) are ad valorem taxes, but ad valorem taxes levied on personal property generally are not property taxes (which are periodically levied on the value of things owned) but transfer taxes (levied at the time of transfer on the value of things transferred.) All an "ad valorem tax" is is any tax based on the value of the thing taxes. But that doesn't make all ad valorem taxes equivalent, or even generally analogous.
GP remains correct that personal property, as a general rule (at least in the US) is not subject to property taxes, or anything structured similarly, notwithstanding that various ad valorem transfer taxes (sales taxes, etc.) are levied on personal property.
I think Heinlein had the solution to that (he used it for real property). You declare a value, you pay taxes based on that, and anybody can force you to sell it to them at that price.
There are lots of reasons that is a really bad idea for most kinds of property, and especially for real property, but it might actually be a fairly good idea for intellectual property with the slight alteration that instead of forcing you to sell it, any person (or group of persons) tendering the declared value can compel you to surrender to the IP right involved -- patent or copyright: you probably don't want to do this with trademarks -- to the public domain.
Combined with a short "tax free" term (say, 7 years) where you didn't need to declare a value and the work was immune to such moves, this would be a good way to guarantee that the public was benefiting from works one way or another, while still rewarding creators and providing an incentive to create works.
In a response to the LA Times editorial on copyright which we discussed a week ago, the paper published a response arguing: 'If Intellectual Property is actually property, why isn't it covered by a property tax?'
Which is kind of a dumb place to start, considering that in the US, property taxes don't apply to most non-intellectual property. The main tax on property you find is on real property, and you occasionally find property taxes or the effective equivalent on some special items of tangible personal property (i.e., California's valuation-based "Vehicle License Fee" which is very similar to a property tax on automobiles, though not quite the same.)
There might be good arguments for property taxes on intellectual property, but the idea that "if it it is called property, it must have property tax" is not one of the better ones.
I've worked in many industries and without fail they all have a requirement for automated generation of reports based on database information. reporting sevrices provides a really good tool for this, and OSS has no answer to it.
There are quite a lot of OSS database reporting tools (or generic reporting tools that can be used with databases and other information sources). What specific features do you think business needs that are not provided by any of the existing open source reporting tools?
But there is a side of caution. Note that I was talking about parents, not about government.
I was talking about both.
Stating that children may be at risk while online, and that sexual solicitation of minors is common in chat-rooms and other online forums does not have to lead to attacks on freedom of speech.
Spreading misleading statistics about the degree of risk makes it more difficult for people (whether parents acting to care for their own children, or citizens deciding among people selling government policies) to effectively weigh the risks being addressed vs. the costs of any option for addressing, mitigating, or controlling those risks.
The first amendment has to do with political speech (and religious speech) not with just form of speech.
The first amendment "has to do with" all speech. It also has to do with religious liberty aside from speech. But, anyway, I wasn't discussing Constitutional limits on government power even where I mentioned government policy, I was referring to the ability of citizens to properly weigh what policies were justified based on the facts.
Again, the main problem here is what should government do vs what should parents do.
No, the main problem here is that people are lying about what the problem is to scare people (parents in their role with regard to their own children and citizens with regard to their role in government, as well), and that those lies get in the way of dealing with this and other problems appropriately.
The idea that because you disagree with the way the question was phrased, and thus you question the validity of the data, the entire topic of discussion should be muted, and that the use of such broad definitions lead, always, to infringements on personal freedoms is a slippery slope fallacy.
Whether or not that's true, the idea you present here is not what I argued, so I really don't care.
If you changed that to the real percentage, parents would worry less about it, and feel like their child was safe enough without implementing even the most obvious common-sense measures to combat a rare, but very real threat.
The thing is, the reason they would feel that way is that it is pretty much true. The real level of the danger of this particular problem is such that special precautions against it are almost certainly unwarranted and a waste of time and effort that could be directed at dealing with other issues. Certainly, the general education parents need to provide their children about dealing with strangers that are applicable in any medium, and advice about controlling personal information online that are important principally for reasons other than avoiding sexual assault remain important, but the attention focussed on online sexual assault due to hyped misleading statistics which focusses people on a illusory narrow problem is a distraction from, not an attention-getter for, the broader and more significant real issues that children need to be prepared for.
Reminds me of the myth that "1 in 4" women are victims of sexual assault.
Not all "1 in X" statistics are misleading. One reason the "1 in 5" NCMEC misleading statistic is dangerous because when people realize it is misleading, they assume that other similar statistics must necessarily be similarly misleading. The "1 in 4 women are victims of sexual assault" statistic usually comes from one of two CALCASA studies (one in 2000 the other in 2003), both asked if the respondent had been a victim of rape or attempted rape (The 2000 study was of college undergraduate women and asked if they had been victims of rape or attempted rape; I'm not sure what the universe of the 2003 study was, and the question supporting "1 in 4" asked if women had been a victim of rape or attempted rape by a present or former spouse, partner, or date.)
I think the idea here - by most of those organizations - is to err on the side of caution.
But, the thing is, there is no side of caution. There is merely a side that appears to be the side of caution, when you consider only one problem, and consider it in isolation, ignoring the actions that people will feel motivated to take out of "caution" when misled by the deliberately deceptive that organization present out of "caution".
When statistics that are sold as true to create a specter of a massive threat that is almost completely illusory, it is not legitimate caution, because when people are misled about the nature of the threat, they are motivated to take actions with costs disproportionate to the real threat, whether in terms of forgoing useful learning opportunities for their children, or supporting legislation that destroys freedom for everyone for no real gain in safety as a precaution against the illusory threat.
If he dismisses the case before it goes to the jury he can be certain that it will be appealed. If he lets the jury come back with a verdict in favor of the plaintiff it likely ends there. When this goes wrong and the jury returns an obviously stupid verdict the judge overrules it knowing that there will be an appeal but the defendant is no worse off than if the case had been dismissed before the jury verdict.
IIRC, the important difference that this glosses over is that if the judge enters a decision prior to the verdict (a judgement as a matter of law), rather than overturning the jury verdict, if there is an appeal and the judge's decision is thrown out on appeal, it can require a empaneling a new jury and trying the case again. Whereas, if the jury returns a verdict and the judge enters a JNOV and that is appealed, the original jury verdict still exists and can be entered (or modified less radically.)
The reason that narrow groups, special interests if you will, are able to do this is because of the government NOT the free market.
Well, yes, without government, most of organized society would be impossible. "Government" and the "free market" are not opposing forces; a "free market" is an abstract, unrealizable ideal that can only be approached the appropriate government policy.
If there was limited government there would be no government to take over and use for purposes of coercion.
Well, no, this is clearly wrong. If there was no government, there would be no government to take over and use to benefit narrow interests. As long as there is a government, one has to be concerned not merely with how large it is, but with the manner in which the power vested in it is applied.
I often find that when people are complaining about the free market they are in fact complaining about something which is the indirect or even the direct result of government incursion into the free market.
If you read my post, you will note that I wasn't complaining about the "free market", which doesn't (and cannot) exist, I was talking about the actually policies that are proposed by people claiming to be advancing "the free market", which mostly are about redistributing power from government bodies that are accountable to the public to government-created entities imbued with special privileges and immunities that are less accountable to the public (corporations), and making those corporations even less accountable than they already are (to the public, of course, but also often to their own stockholders, making corporate management a new self-perpetuating, unaccountable aristocracy.)
They falsely attribute perceived wrongs to the free market or market failure because they cannot or will not believe that the root of the problem lies in poor government policy and not the marketplace.
That's a nice canned generality, but perhaps you'd like to respond to what I actually wrote.
Again, it the existence of extensive and powerful government agencies which allows this regulatory capture and rent seeking to occur.
Heck, its the exercise of government power that allows corporations to exist in the first place. You aren't paying attention at all: I'm not arguing about some nonsense comparison of what can happen with government vs. what can happen without government.
If the market place were REALLY de-regulated and private property rights actually ENFORCED by the courts then you would not have these problems.
That's a nice fantasy that is only tenable because what "really de-regulated" and "property rights" and "actually enforced" mean in concrete terms are kept vague; for any concrete definition of those you care to advance, it either won't look much like anything "free market" advocates actually concretely embrace in the real world, or it won't acheive those goals, or both.
Which is why government should be strictly limited in size and scope. If there is no power or right of government to step in and arbitrarily meddle in the marketplace whenever it feels like it then there will be no need to be constantly "on guard" against people taking over the apparatus of government for their own economic ends because even if they took it over it would have very limited ability to interfere in the marketplace and any takeover attempt would be easily spotted by the people due to the small size of that government.
A government restricted in size so as to be effectively limited in that regard would not retain the power to effectively enforce property rights against violations by powerful private institutions. So I think your argument is ill-considered. Sure, you want government restricted in how it acts so that it acts onl
Streaming would kill BluRay just as quickly IFF the infrastructure to do so could be setup because, while people enjoy owning a physical item, the convenience of streaming might be enough to override it.
Streaming would only be clearly more convenient if it was one-time purchase: not having to pay for each viewing is, itself, a form of convenience. Pay-per-view streaming may threaten rentals, but only download-to-own (ala iPod) with players with suitable capacity and reliability is a going to be a clear convenience winner over buying discs.
and your ok with sony taking away your choice like that?
Well, aside from the fact that all parties involved have denied that there was a bidding war, and the only indication that there was one is the article's unnamed "analysts", even if one believes the article as absolutely accurate, you are left with Toshiba trying just as hard to take away the choice, the only difference is that Sony was able to pony up a better deal (whether that was more money, or a better combination of money and Blu-ray's existing market suceess, or whatever.)
It's not like Warner or Sony would be able to keep the payment off their books.
Well, if they wanted to conceal the exact figure, it would have been, on paper, a complicated nest of deals on various subjects, etc., that all tied into the Blu-ray exclusivity, and from which the exact value of the Blu-ray exclusivity apart from the other components would be hard to infer (or even impossible for any concrete figure to ever be defined for), rather than a simple deal to give $400 million in cash in exchange for Blu-ray exclusivity. That being said, though, the next bit...
These are completely unsubstantiated sour-grapes rumors.
If you were an early buyer of blu-ray your player won't have all the features needed to perform even the most basic functions that all hd-dvd units had.
Unless, of course, like most early buyers of Blu-ray, your Blu-ray player happens to be a PS3.
Any sufficiently powerful corporation becomes every bit as degenerated as a government.
This should be unsurprising, since corporations have no natural existence but are, instad, creatures of government and extensions and applications of the power of government.
Last I checked there's a difference between economic policy and political philosophy
There really isn't; economic structure and political structure are intrinsically inseparable. There are uses, at times, for analytically pretending that there is a wall between them and that they can be examined in isolation, just as there are uses for all sorts of fundamentally inaccurate assumptions in simplifying analysis of various problems, but in reality they both fundamentally concern the same thing and they are intertwined at the most fundamental level. Economics is about the distribution of goods and services. Politics is about the distribution of power. But power is fundamentally the ability to get people to provide you the goods and services you desire: it is, precisely, the same thing as "wealth".
Now, in many systems (particularly, the kind of democratic capitalism the West aspires to), there is an effort to try to have, at the same time, virtually unlimited and unregulated concentration of "economic wealth" while maintaining an equal distribution of "political power". Inevitably, also, this effort fails because the two quantities are inseperable. Each is simply a different way of referring the capacity to get other people to do what you want.
We got to see at least three major (and differing) implementations of Marx' setup.
Well, no. What are usually characterized as implementations of Marx's setup are solely the various major derivatives of Lenin's setup, which replaced Marx's requirement for an advanced capitalist society with an active, politically mobilized, proletariat aware of and leading the restructuring of society with a narrow activist elite vanguard leading in the name of the proletariat as a shortcut, because there was no prospect of the place Lenin wanted to implement revolution meeting the prerequisites in Marx's theory anytime in Lenin's lifetime. (The major implementations here include, of course, Stalinism and Maoism and their derivatives.)
There are lots of other adaptations of the ideas that Marx laid down, incorporating elements both of Marx's critique of capitalism and his prescriptions for alternatives to address those critiques, that are usually ignored. But these other adaptations (including many of the forms of democratic socialism in place in Western Europe, and some movements that replace the state as the principal locus of worker control of the means of production so which are not principally models of government) are usually not held up by those who want to criticize the supposed essential and universal failure of "Marx's setup" even though, while they are radically different than Marx's setup, they are often no more radically different from that setup than Leninism and its descendants are. Ironically (or perhaps deliberately), the opponents of "Communism" buy into the propaganda of Leninism (that starts with the name "Marxism-Leninism") as thoroughly as do those who have claimed to adhere to Lenin's views.
Free-market is not without its troubles, but its still a far better solution then letting the 'state' run things.
That's a nice bit of ideology; in practice, the policies sold as "free market" amount to letting a narrow group, backed by the coercive power of public institutions acting to protect their narrow interests under the flag of "property rights", etc. This is especially true of "deregulation" efforts, which usually are, in fact, efforts which recast regulations into the form preferred by the leading firms in the regulated industry, and serve largely to protect them from competition and protect and reinforce their dominant position.
There is a reason that the biggest advocates of so-called "free market" policies are exactly the people that the theorist to whom "free market" advocates like to pay lip service, Adam Smith, warned must always be particularly distrusted when advocating policies because they can be counted on to do so out of narrow interests that will almost invariably be opposed to the public interest, organizations of merchants and manufacturers in particular industries.
Yes, they supported blu-ray over hddvd incidentally. Ie if the PS3 had been hddvd they would have bought it all the same.
"Incidentally" is not "unwittingly", though. I tend to agree that most probably did so "incidentally" (it may have been important to buyers that it was an HD player, but which format probably wasn't important), but "unwittingly" suggests that not merely unconcerned with the fact that buy buying the PS3 and media to play on it they were supporting Blu-ray, but unaware that they were doing so.
Everyone picking a stand alone player had to agonize over whether to go bluray or hddvd.
And anyone buying a PS3 that was motivated to do so based, in whole or in part, by its HD playback capacity had to consider the prospect of Blu-ray being a dead-end format and how to discount the value of the HD playback capacity based on that--and whether to go with a different gaming console, particularly an Xbox 360 with optional HD-DVD playback, instead. How many posts on Slashdot or anti-PS3 articles various media were there over the last several years (right up until last Christmas) talking about how likely it was that Sony was going to lose the format war as it did with Betamax, and that the PS3 would consequently be a long-term flop for which gaming content would never match its competitors, either?
Sure, PS3 purchasers may have also weighed the current and expected future gaming content of the PS3 in its favor, or the Linux capacity, or other non-Blu-ray features, but to say that PS3 purchasers, particularly those who were likely to be significantly interested in using it as a movie player, were totally insulated from concern over the format war whereas purchasers of standalone players were not is simply wrong.
Certainly so, just not pardonable due to any military connection. (Or any other functional excuse, either, I would guess; at least the H2 and H3 don't seem particularly practical for anything but showing off.)
The article does not say that Sony paid Warner $400 million. It merely states that there was a bidding war between Sony and Toshiba and that unnamed "analysts" have suggested that payout may have been "as much as $400 million", though no one who knows anything is saying anything. Actually, the summary could have been good with a small change:
Is $400 million too much? Sony didn't think so and this article speculates that's how they won the Hi-Def format war.
Should read:
Is $400 million too much? This article speculates that Sony may not have thought so and goes on to speculate that's how they won the Hi-Def format war.
Really, other than the really obvious things we all know (Sony won the format war), there aren't any facts in the article, just speculation and some rather weird ideas from a variety of sources. Like Professor Xavier Dreze and his suggestion that "PlayStation buyers... unwittingly embraced Blu-ray and undermined HD DVD." As if PS3 buyers were shelling out the high price of the console without realizing that it was a Blu-ray player, and just started purchasing Blu-ray discs without any consciousness of their actions. To the extent that PS3 owners embraced Blu-ray at all, they didn't do it "unwittingly".
...Microsoft's implementation of healthvault is actually somewhat questionable. It's as if the company paid no attention to existing standards, and decided to implement a PHR system however they damn well pleased.
So, essentially, exactly like everything how Microsoft does everything else?
Slashdot Mirror
A solution that is readily adaptable to a surrender-value based property tax scheme already exists in US copyright law. You aren't required to register to be protected by copyright, but you are required to register in order to pursue most legal enforcement actions. So you do the same with the property tax declared value, and, indeed, you can link it to registration. If you haven't registered (which includes declaring a value for surrender and tax-basis) purposes, you can't go to court for most copyright-related claims. When you do register, you have to pay tax back to the creation date based on the declared value, which provides a surrender value and may limit recovery for certain classes of damages in an infringement action.
You can also create a limited window (say, 7 years from creation) after which the copyright expires if you haven't registered it (and thereby provided a surrender alue.) If you do register it, it can continue for a longer period, subject to the prospect of involuntary transfer to the public domain by someone paying the surrender price, and the requirement to pay an ad valorem tax annually as long as the copyright is maintained.
Not all trademarks are registered, either. And since the main purpose of trademarks isn't to encourage creation of works of utility to the public (which is the purpose of copyright and patent), but to promote clarity in trade, I don't think creating a property tax system on trademarks is really desirable, anyway.
But a surrender-value based system for copyrights (using the above system to deal with the lack of a registration requirement) and patents might be a good idea.
Yes, any policy that can be proposed might changed into a completely different policy that would not have the same benefits as the proposed policy.
You don't get a tax free period after buying an existing piece of real property, in most jurisdictions, but, in most jurisdictions, you get a "tax free" period on any increase in the value of a property during the time you own it (the period between tax assessments). And in many jurisdictions, you aren't taxed on the actual value of real property anyway, you are taxed on the value at the time of the most recent transfer, plus the lesser of any increase in assessed value since then or a fixed percentage increase per year.
But, at any rate, real property is not subject to a surrender-price based property tax scheme (while real property is subject to eminent domain, condemnation valuation is often completely different than property tax assessment), so the concerns that motivate a tax-free period in a surrender-price-based property tax scheme don't apply.
Maybe, I'm not familiar with every jurisdictions vehicle taxes. California's VLF certainly gives permanent "tax free" status for certain private vehicles whose use is for publicly-beneficial purposes (like schoolbusses) or by certain owners (most vehicles owned by disabled veterans, former POWs, or Medal of Honor recipients or their surviving spouses).
"Your home", "a car", "any other real property"? A car isn't real property, its tangible personal property. If by "real property" you meant some unusual class of property that includes real property and tangible personal property, then, yeah, for lots of kinds of property in that class, you have an unlimited period free of property taxation.
The reason in a surrender-price based taxation scheme is that the initial period (1) encourages creation, and (2) enables the creator to get a reasonable idea of the commercial value of the IP before setting a surrender price.
Property taxes (in the usual cases) are ad valorem taxes, but ad valorem taxes levied on personal property generally are not property taxes (which are periodically levied on the value of things owned) but transfer taxes (levied at the time of transfer on the value of things transferred.) All an "ad valorem tax" is is any tax based on the value of the thing taxes. But that doesn't make all ad valorem taxes equivalent, or even generally analogous.
GP remains correct that personal property, as a general rule (at least in the US) is not subject to property taxes, or anything structured similarly, notwithstanding that various ad valorem transfer taxes (sales taxes, etc.) are levied on personal property.
There are lots of reasons that is a really bad idea for most kinds of property, and especially for real property, but it might actually be a fairly good idea for intellectual property with the slight alteration that instead of forcing you to sell it, any person (or group of persons) tendering the declared value can compel you to surrender to the IP right involved -- patent or copyright: you probably don't want to do this with trademarks -- to the public domain.
Combined with a short "tax free" term (say, 7 years) where you didn't need to declare a value and the work was immune to such moves, this would be a good way to guarantee that the public was benefiting from works one way or another, while still rewarding creators and providing an incentive to create works.
Which is kind of a dumb place to start, considering that in the US, property taxes don't apply to most non-intellectual property. The main tax on property you find is on real property, and you occasionally find property taxes or the effective equivalent on some special items of tangible personal property (i.e., California's valuation-based "Vehicle License Fee" which is very similar to a property tax on automobiles, though not quite the same.)
There might be good arguments for property taxes on intellectual property, but the idea that "if it it is called property, it must have property tax" is not one of the better ones.
There are quite a lot of OSS database reporting tools (or generic reporting tools that can be used with databases and other information sources). What specific features do you think business needs that are not provided by any of the existing open source reporting tools?
I was talking about both.
Spreading misleading statistics about the degree of risk makes it more difficult for people (whether parents acting to care for their own children, or citizens deciding among people selling government policies) to effectively weigh the risks being addressed vs. the costs of any option for addressing, mitigating, or controlling those risks.
The first amendment "has to do with" all speech. It also has to do with religious liberty aside from speech. But, anyway, I wasn't discussing Constitutional limits on government power even where I mentioned government policy, I was referring to the ability of citizens to properly weigh what policies were justified based on the facts.
No, the main problem here is that people are lying about what the problem is to scare people (parents in their role with regard to their own children and citizens with regard to their role in government, as well), and that those lies get in the way of dealing with this and other problems appropriately.
Whether or not that's true, the idea you present here is not what I argued, so I really don't care.
The thing is, the reason they would feel that way is that it is pretty much true. The real level of the danger of this particular problem is such that special precautions against it are almost certainly unwarranted and a waste of time and effort that could be directed at dealing with other issues. Certainly, the general education parents need to provide their children about dealing with strangers that are applicable in any medium, and advice about controlling personal information online that are important principally for reasons other than avoiding sexual assault remain important, but the attention focussed on online sexual assault due to hyped misleading statistics which focusses people on a illusory narrow problem is a distraction from, not an attention-getter for, the broader and more significant real issues that children need to be prepared for.
Not all "1 in X" statistics are misleading. One reason the "1 in 5" NCMEC misleading statistic is dangerous because when people realize it is misleading, they assume that other similar statistics must necessarily be similarly misleading. The "1 in 4 women are victims of sexual assault" statistic usually comes from one of two CALCASA studies (one in 2000 the other in 2003), both asked if the respondent had been a victim of rape or attempted rape (The 2000 study was of college undergraduate women and asked if they had been victims of rape or attempted rape; I'm not sure what the universe of the 2003 study was, and the question supporting "1 in 4" asked if women had been a victim of rape or attempted rape by a present or former spouse, partner, or date.)
But, the thing is, there is no side of caution. There is merely a side that appears to be the side of caution, when you consider only one problem, and consider it in isolation, ignoring the actions that people will feel motivated to take out of "caution" when misled by the deliberately deceptive that organization present out of "caution".
When statistics that are sold as true to create a specter of a massive threat that is almost completely illusory, it is not legitimate caution, because when people are misled about the nature of the threat, they are motivated to take actions with costs disproportionate to the real threat, whether in terms of forgoing useful learning opportunities for their children, or supporting legislation that destroys freedom for everyone for no real gain in safety as a precaution against the illusory threat.
IIRC, the important difference that this glosses over is that if the judge enters a decision prior to the verdict (a judgement as a matter of law), rather than overturning the jury verdict, if there is an appeal and the judge's decision is thrown out on appeal, it can require a empaneling a new jury and trying the case again. Whereas, if the jury returns a verdict and the judge enters a JNOV and that is appealed, the original jury verdict still exists and can be entered (or modified less radically.)
Well, yes, without government, most of organized society would be impossible. "Government" and the "free market" are not opposing forces; a "free market" is an abstract, unrealizable ideal that can only be approached the appropriate government policy.
Well, no, this is clearly wrong. If there was no government, there would be no government to take over and use to benefit narrow interests. As long as there is a government, one has to be concerned not merely with how large it is, but with the manner in which the power vested in it is applied.
If you read my post, you will note that I wasn't complaining about the "free market", which doesn't (and cannot) exist, I was talking about the actually policies that are proposed by people claiming to be advancing "the free market", which mostly are about redistributing power from government bodies that are accountable to the public to government-created entities imbued with special privileges and immunities that are less accountable to the public (corporations), and making those corporations even less accountable than they already are (to the public, of course, but also often to their own stockholders, making corporate management a new self-perpetuating, unaccountable aristocracy.)
That's a nice canned generality, but perhaps you'd like to respond to what I actually wrote.
Heck, its the exercise of government power that allows corporations to exist in the first place. You aren't paying attention at all: I'm not arguing about some nonsense comparison of what can happen with government vs. what can happen without government.
That's a nice fantasy that is only tenable because what "really de-regulated" and "property rights" and "actually enforced" mean in concrete terms are kept vague; for any concrete definition of those you care to advance, it either won't look much like anything "free market" advocates actually concretely embrace in the real world, or it won't acheive those goals, or both.
A government restricted in size so as to be effectively limited in that regard would not retain the power to effectively enforce property rights against violations by powerful private institutions. So I think your argument is ill-considered. Sure, you want government restricted in how it acts so that it acts onl
Streaming would only be clearly more convenient if it was one-time purchase: not having to pay for each viewing is, itself, a form of convenience. Pay-per-view streaming may threaten rentals, but only download-to-own (ala iPod) with players with suitable capacity and reliability is a going to be a clear convenience winner over buying discs.
Well, aside from the fact that all parties involved have denied that there was a bidding war, and the only indication that there was one is the article's unnamed "analysts", even if one believes the article as absolutely accurate, you are left with Toshiba trying just as hard to take away the choice, the only difference is that Sony was able to pony up a better deal (whether that was more money, or a better combination of money and Blu-ray's existing market suceess, or whatever.)
Well, if they wanted to conceal the exact figure, it would have been, on paper, a complicated nest of deals on various subjects, etc., that all tied into the Blu-ray exclusivity, and from which the exact value of the Blu-ray exclusivity apart from the other components would be hard to infer (or even impossible for any concrete figure to ever be defined for), rather than a simple deal to give $400 million in cash in exchange for Blu-ray exclusivity. That being said, though, the next bit...
Unless, of course, like most early buyers of Blu-ray, your Blu-ray player happens to be a PS3.
This should be unsurprising, since corporations have no natural existence but are, instad, creatures of government and extensions and applications of the power of government.
There really isn't; economic structure and political structure are intrinsically inseparable. There are uses, at times, for analytically pretending that there is a wall between them and that they can be examined in isolation, just as there are uses for all sorts of fundamentally inaccurate assumptions in simplifying analysis of various problems, but in reality they both fundamentally concern the same thing and they are intertwined at the most fundamental level. Economics is about the distribution of goods and services. Politics is about the distribution of power. But power is fundamentally the ability to get people to provide you the goods and services you desire: it is, precisely, the same thing as "wealth".
Now, in many systems (particularly, the kind of democratic capitalism the West aspires to), there is an effort to try to have, at the same time, virtually unlimited and unregulated concentration of "economic wealth" while maintaining an equal distribution of "political power". Inevitably, also, this effort fails because the two quantities are inseperable. Each is simply a different way of referring the capacity to get other people to do what you want.
Well, no. What are usually characterized as implementations of Marx's setup are solely the various major derivatives of Lenin's setup, which replaced Marx's requirement for an advanced capitalist society with an active, politically mobilized, proletariat aware of and leading the restructuring of society with a narrow activist elite vanguard leading in the name of the proletariat as a shortcut, because there was no prospect of the place Lenin wanted to implement revolution meeting the prerequisites in Marx's theory anytime in Lenin's lifetime. (The major implementations here include, of course, Stalinism and Maoism and their derivatives.)
There are lots of other adaptations of the ideas that Marx laid down, incorporating elements both of Marx's critique of capitalism and his prescriptions for alternatives to address those critiques, that are usually ignored. But these other adaptations (including many of the forms of democratic socialism in place in Western Europe, and some movements that replace the state as the principal locus of worker control of the means of production so which are not principally models of government) are usually not held up by those who want to criticize the supposed essential and universal failure of "Marx's setup" even though, while they are radically different than Marx's setup, they are often no more radically different from that setup than Leninism and its descendants are. Ironically (or perhaps deliberately), the opponents of "Communism" buy into the propaganda of Leninism (that starts with the name "Marxism-Leninism") as thoroughly as do those who have claimed to adhere to Lenin's views.
That's a nice bit of ideology; in practice, the policies sold as "free market" amount to letting a narrow group, backed by the coercive power of public institutions acting to protect their narrow interests under the flag of "property rights", etc. This is especially true of "deregulation" efforts, which usually are, in fact, efforts which recast regulations into the form preferred by the leading firms in the regulated industry, and serve largely to protect them from competition and protect and reinforce their dominant position.
There is a reason that the biggest advocates of so-called "free market" policies are exactly the people that the theorist to whom "free market" advocates like to pay lip service, Adam Smith, warned must always be particularly distrusted when advocating policies because they can be counted on to do so out of narrow interests that will almost invariably be opposed to the public interest, organizations of merchants and manufacturers in particular industries.
"Incidentally" is not "unwittingly", though. I tend to agree that most probably did so "incidentally" (it may have been important to buyers that it was an HD player, but which format probably wasn't important), but "unwittingly" suggests that not merely unconcerned with the fact that buy buying the PS3 and media to play on it they were supporting Blu-ray, but unaware that they were doing so.
And anyone buying a PS3 that was motivated to do so based, in whole or in part, by its HD playback capacity had to consider the prospect of Blu-ray being a dead-end format and how to discount the value of the HD playback capacity based on that--and whether to go with a different gaming console, particularly an Xbox 360 with optional HD-DVD playback, instead. How many posts on Slashdot or anti-PS3 articles various media were there over the last several years (right up until last Christmas) talking about how likely it was that Sony was going to lose the format war as it did with Betamax, and that the PS3 would consequently be a long-term flop for which gaming content would never match its competitors, either?
Sure, PS3 purchasers may have also weighed the current and expected future gaming content of the PS3 in its favor, or the Linux capacity, or other non-Blu-ray features, but to say that PS3 purchasers, particularly those who were likely to be significantly interested in using it as a movie player, were totally insulated from concern over the format war whereas purchasers of standalone players were not is simply wrong.
Certainly so, just not pardonable due to any military connection. (Or any other functional excuse, either, I would guess; at least the H2 and H3 don't seem particularly practical for anything but showing off.)
Should read:
Really, other than the really obvious things we all know (Sony won the format war), there aren't any facts in the article, just speculation and some rather weird ideas from a variety of sources. Like Professor Xavier Dreze and his suggestion that "PlayStation buyers
So, essentially, exactly like everything how Microsoft does everything else?
Of the civilian "Hummers", only the H1 has any substantial connection beyond branding to anything designed for military use.