I was asking a rhetorical question which pointed out that it's an arbitrary monopoly created by regulation (apparently you're too dense to pick up on that satire). Additionally, if the medium is publicly "owned" by the FCC (by de facto decree as of 1927 apparently), shouldn't they be subject to the rule of the constitution since they are a government agency? Shouldn't all forms of speech be given "equal broadcast opportunity?" Or does the FCC get to decide what the dictatorship of the proletariat considers "acceptable" broadcast speech?
Broadcast licenses are simply a contract between the People and those who wish to broadcast. If you choose not to follow the rules imposed by the FCC, that contract can and should be revoked.
Since when does the FCC represent "the People?" This is not even a direct democracy and the FCC is not an elected body -- our representatives created them.
Also, I fail to see how a broadcast is not free speech. If the FCC can police broadcasts, can they police online blogs or print newspapers for obscenity? Where does it end?
If your definition of "free speech" is so narrow that it only applies to people talking out loud to only each other in a private setting, then free speech is already dead.
Your spelling aside, what exactly are you putting your ass on the line for? You said it best yourself:
"Hell, someday, maybe there will be an administration that will stop thinking of military troops as a well equipped police force, I doubt it but one can hope."
Why enlist if you disagree? We should boycott the army and stock up on privately owned weapons to defend ourselves if our representatives won't withdraw the troops. The war is totally wasteful and we're just going to prompt more criminal attacks. We should be investing in defense and alternative fuels and research instead of bullets and gasoline and the paychecks of reluctant troops. It's diplomatically and economically more sound.
You are not inborn with rights in the sense that God or the Universe granted them to you; the social contracts that uphold your entire society (the ones you defend so venomously) granted them to you. "My moral code" (the code in question here regarding "inborn rights") is a philosophical code word for "the system of social contracts that I prefer to live under," and nothing more. In short, people uphold the contracts they choose to merely because they themselves want the protection that those contracts afford (or perhaps feel they are capable of survival in a lawless land, if they uphold few or none). Laws against murder and "honor" killings and rape and slave trade and female genital mutilation are common because, well, people don't like to be killed, raped, sold, or forcibly mutilated. Personally, I think that these practices are wasteful and I don't support them. Frankly, you are missing the point in saying that I was even trying to say that you "cannot know the moral implications of an act." The point is that the universe is inherently amoral. You are just a collection of molecules and you happen to arbitrarily value your own life and the lives of other molecule collections like you more than anything else in the universe. You support the notion of inborn rights because you enjoy having rights. You are probably naturally empathetic to other members of your species because empathy fosters cooperation and cooperation is a more effective survival strategy than squabbling constantly.
Frankly, I would not mind living in a society with more weapons and more freedom to use those weapons on undeclared trespassers. Why? Because I am not in the business of trespassing and I want to be able to defend myself. Comparing the desire to live under a social contract of self-defense to the desire to break the social contracts against murder and rape and slave trade is an illogical and poorly considered comparison, made in your vain and red-faced attempt to show how "uncivilized" I am for calling you a moralist. Even a "relativist" is capable of realizing that certain social contracts are worth upholding, even if he himself is amoral (I'd describe myself personally as an agnostic nihilist).
In the universe that you and I live in, we are like tiny bugs flying around on a rock in the middle of a giant vacuum that we know nothing about. Compared to earth's history and the cosmos our lives are very short. We don't know how we got here, we don't know where we're going, we don't even know what happens when we die, and for all we know we are the only people in the whole wide universe who actually care about the future of the "human race" at all. That is the "objective" reality; the notion of inborn rights exists solely within the brains of some humans (a minority of them, I would imagine, considering how many eat chicken and beef). It is not the creed of the universe and I will not adopt your "morals" word-for-word as though they were spewed from the mouth of an infallible deity without critically evaluating them first. I, unlike most, am honest with myself about how little I really know about "objective" reality.
You won't sway a nihilist to believe that a philosophy is "ineffective" by demonstrating that it causes suffering. He would reply that your statements themselves belied a selfish set of presupposed, invented human principles about the importance of the human race, it's survival, the elimination of all suffering from the world, and "inborn rights". He would reply that he doesn't really care what effects it has on every being in the entire universe, but rather what effects it would have on him, or perhaps to the future of the race as a whole (regardless of whether or not some "eggs are cracked" in the execution of the philosophy). He would reply that we are the children of nature and in nature the coyote does not believe that the rabbit has "inborn rights." He does what he can to survive without remorse.
In short -- I just don't give a fuck! But that doesn't mean I'll cut off my daughter
*Ahem* FTFA, you stupid simpleton: "Some companies have demanded that eBay forbid sales of even their legitimate products on the site because of alleged trademark infringement"
This almost doesn't even justify a response. For christ's sake just read the wikipedia articles and some game review writeups for both titles and answer your own fucking question.
I would be surprised, though, if someone used that sort of convention in a press release instead of just internally. "4th quarter 2008," generally speaking, really does mean the 4th quarter of 2008. I'd be surprised if a public relations officer didn't realize that; if he didn't he would be grossly incompetent.
If the current businesses in the marketplace are too greedy and stupid to provide the product that the market place demands perhaps it is time for some regulation.
The telecommunications sector is already regulated. Companies are granted regional monopolies by the government so that they don't have to build separate networks that are in competition with each other.
If anything what we need is less regulation.
It's scary that people will jump to the conclusion that regulation is a "silver bullet" and push to apply it indiscriminately, in all situations, without researching the specific markets at all. The problems are probably from regulation.
From your link: For example, implementing proprietary features on top of open source utilities to provide a low-cost computer-controlled product ("smart box"), and distributing a program on hardware that blocks execution of modified software, have proven to be contentious issues. Running commercial Web services using open source software without releasing source code has also caused consternation in some quarters.
You're totally correct; it isn't things designed using the utilities that are violations, it's when you modify the utilities THEMSELVES and then sell your changes or try to copyright them. But I don't know if the commentator here is quite that clueless, based on this paragraph.
This is true if we continue to control drugs, but if we just lifted the prohibition entirely and let people pop whatever pills they wanted to, there could be no "illegal sites dispensing crap." There would simply be quality companies and poor companies, and the poor companies would get boycotted into bankruptcy.
I'm 20. I know exactly what the current generation is doing. "Social networking" is still not as much of a time-consumer as games (or in some people's cases, television).
Also, yes, all they would have to do is raise the price to compensate. Have you considered that raising the price would lower the demand in the U.S.? As the dollar continues to depreciate, we'll see spending on luxury goods dry up as real incomes fall.
Also, even if you just raise the price, you're still collecting and holding U.S. dollars for at least as long as it would take you to convert them into a different currency -- they will depreciate more in that time period.
The CFO of Porsche recently made the company a boatload of money through currency exchanges -- one of the things he did was to centralize the corporation's accounting, so that the company's reserves could be held in Euros instead of the various currencies of their local branches.
To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.
That does not put the performance of the machine in perspective at all. Technical details would be much more accurate and effective.
P.P.S. You are so fucking ignorant that when I said "so there could be a greed incentive (increased sales/revenue/stock prices) for the company owners," you didn't acknowledge that "company owners" is synonymous with "stockholders," regardless of the size of their stake. Hiring hackers, of course, wouldn't be profitable for smaller shareholders in the company, but it could be profitable for a large shareholder, or maybe a small oligopoly of shareholders.
P.S. Your point about the US being the largest industrial producer in the world is irrelevant to my suggestion that hackers could perform a targeted attack on the power infrastructure in a specific municipality. If it were within their power to do that, then they could just figure out what "zones" their competitor's factories were in and cut the power there while maintaining power in zones that their factories operate in. Any company from any country could do it -- after all, if someone were to attack the electricity supply, they would do it in a targeted fashion, they wouldn't just randomly try to cut off power to the entire U.S.A.
Also, I don't have to "check my statistics" because I didn't actually cite any statistics in my post. And neither did you. So fuck you, you snarky asshole.
You're just being pessimistic here. You listed tons of obstacles without even bothering to try seeing around them.
The simplest solution is a wikipedia-style website that allows anyone to post, but requires them to establish their credentials, and only allows them to edit the articles they publish, while maintaining a list of revisions with unique ID codes so that people who write papers based on the articles can refer to specific revisions of the topic or paper (allowing revisions is not even a necessary component of this model, it would just be "neat").
Professors and such could post scholarly articles, and write articles citing other articles on the website, and their reputations and the experimental integrity of their work would have to mostly stand on it's own. However, to assist in that process, you could then add a rating system in which salaried (or simply approved) editors with doctorate's and research backgrounds in their fields gave thumbs-ups or thumbs-downs to different articles, each with explanations of why they felt that way about the article.
The fact of the matter is that in producing a print article, there are several steps that consume time: writing the material, reviewing the material, printing the material, and shipping the material. Putting it on a website doesn't mean you have to forfeit the entire model -- hell, you can still even charge subscription fees for access to the website in order to support the cost of hiring the editors and maintaining the servers. Putting it on a website just shortens the time required to get the product to the end user, by changing the steps to: writing the material, reviewing the material, and uploading the material to a web server.
P.S. It's "fundamental" -- try using Mozilla Firefox, it has a built-in spell checker that would have caught that instantly.
Slashdot Mirror
I was asking a rhetorical question which pointed out that it's an arbitrary monopoly created by regulation (apparently you're too dense to pick up on that satire). Additionally, if the medium is publicly "owned" by the FCC (by de facto decree as of 1927 apparently), shouldn't they be subject to the rule of the constitution since they are a government agency? Shouldn't all forms of speech be given "equal broadcast opportunity?" Or does the FCC get to decide what the dictatorship of the proletariat considers "acceptable" broadcast speech?
The medium is publicly owned? Who did they buy it from?
Broadcast licenses are simply a contract between the People and those who wish to broadcast. If you choose not to follow the rules imposed by the FCC, that contract can and should be revoked.
Since when does the FCC represent "the People?" This is not even a direct democracy and the FCC is not an elected body -- our representatives created them.
Also, I fail to see how a broadcast is not free speech. If the FCC can police broadcasts, can they police online blogs or print newspapers for obscenity? Where does it end?
If your definition of "free speech" is so narrow that it only applies to people talking out loud to only each other in a private setting, then free speech is already dead.
Your spelling aside, what exactly are you putting your ass on the line for? You said it best yourself:
"Hell, someday, maybe there will be an administration that will stop thinking of military troops as a well equipped police force, I doubt it but one can hope."
Why enlist if you disagree? We should boycott the army and stock up on privately owned weapons to defend ourselves if our representatives won't withdraw the troops. The war is totally wasteful and we're just going to prompt more criminal attacks. We should be investing in defense and alternative fuels and research instead of bullets and gasoline and the paychecks of reluctant troops. It's diplomatically and economically more sound.
You are not inborn with rights in the sense that God or the Universe granted them to you; the social contracts that uphold your entire society (the ones you defend so venomously) granted them to you. "My moral code" (the code in question here regarding "inborn rights") is a philosophical code word for "the system of social contracts that I prefer to live under," and nothing more. In short, people uphold the contracts they choose to merely because they themselves want the protection that those contracts afford (or perhaps feel they are capable of survival in a lawless land, if they uphold few or none). Laws against murder and "honor" killings and rape and slave trade and female genital mutilation are common because, well, people don't like to be killed, raped, sold, or forcibly mutilated. Personally, I think that these practices are wasteful and I don't support them. Frankly, you are missing the point in saying that I was even trying to say that you "cannot know the moral implications of an act." The point is that the universe is inherently amoral. You are just a collection of molecules and you happen to arbitrarily value your own life and the lives of other molecule collections like you more than anything else in the universe. You support the notion of inborn rights because you enjoy having rights. You are probably naturally empathetic to other members of your species because empathy fosters cooperation and cooperation is a more effective survival strategy than squabbling constantly.
Frankly, I would not mind living in a society with more weapons and more freedom to use those weapons on undeclared trespassers. Why? Because I am not in the business of trespassing and I want to be able to defend myself. Comparing the desire to live under a social contract of self-defense to the desire to break the social contracts against murder and rape and slave trade is an illogical and poorly considered comparison, made in your vain and red-faced attempt to show how "uncivilized" I am for calling you a moralist. Even a "relativist" is capable of realizing that certain social contracts are worth upholding, even if he himself is amoral (I'd describe myself personally as an agnostic nihilist).
In the universe that you and I live in, we are like tiny bugs flying around on a rock in the middle of a giant vacuum that we know nothing about. Compared to earth's history and the cosmos our lives are very short. We don't know how we got here, we don't know where we're going, we don't even know what happens when we die, and for all we know we are the only people in the whole wide universe who actually care about the future of the "human race" at all. That is the "objective" reality; the notion of inborn rights exists solely within the brains of some humans (a minority of them, I would imagine, considering how many eat chicken and beef). It is not the creed of the universe and I will not adopt your "morals" word-for-word as though they were spewed from the mouth of an infallible deity without critically evaluating them first. I, unlike most, am honest with myself about how little I really know about "objective" reality.
You won't sway a nihilist to believe that a philosophy is "ineffective" by demonstrating that it causes suffering. He would reply that your statements themselves belied a selfish set of presupposed, invented human principles about the importance of the human race, it's survival, the elimination of all suffering from the world, and "inborn rights". He would reply that he doesn't really care what effects it has on every being in the entire universe, but rather what effects it would have on him, or perhaps to the future of the race as a whole (regardless of whether or not some "eggs are cracked" in the execution of the philosophy). He would reply that we are the children of nature and in nature the coyote does not believe that the rabbit has "inborn rights." He does what he can to survive without remorse.
In short -- I just don't give a fuck! But that doesn't mean I'll cut off my daughter
I think he meant that it was antiquated in the sense that it had been around since the earliest life, not that it wasn't still useful.
Thinking you are a good man because you resort to violence when confronted with property theft is anachronistic in most of the civilized world
So, we should agree with you because everyone else in the "civilized" world does. Please. How ethnocentric and quaintly moralist.
No shit. The point is that it isn't just about counterfeit goods, it's also about the "first sale" doctrine.
*Ahem* FTFA, you stupid simpleton: "Some companies have demanded that eBay forbid sales of even their legitimate products on the site because of alleged trademark infringement"
Too bad English is not your first language.
This almost doesn't even justify a response. For christ's sake just read the wikipedia articles and some game review writeups for both titles and answer your own fucking question.
I would be surprised, though, if someone used that sort of convention in a press release instead of just internally. "4th quarter 2008," generally speaking, really does mean the 4th quarter of 2008. I'd be surprised if a public relations officer didn't realize that; if he didn't he would be grossly incompetent.
If the current businesses in the marketplace are too greedy and stupid to provide the product that the market place demands perhaps it is time for some regulation.
The telecommunications sector is already regulated. Companies are granted regional monopolies by the government so that they don't have to build separate networks that are in competition with each other.
If anything what we need is less regulation.
It's scary that people will jump to the conclusion that regulation is a "silver bullet" and push to apply it indiscriminately, in all situations, without researching the specific markets at all. The problems are probably from regulation.
Stop over-regulating!
From your link: For example, implementing proprietary features on top of open source utilities to provide a low-cost computer-controlled product ("smart box"), and distributing a program on hardware that blocks execution of modified software, have proven to be contentious issues. Running commercial Web services using open source software without releasing source code has also caused consternation in some quarters.
You're totally correct; it isn't things designed using the utilities that are violations, it's when you modify the utilities THEMSELVES and then sell your changes or try to copyright them. But I don't know if the commentator here is quite that clueless, based on this paragraph.
Overestimating the intelligence of your opponent has never lost a game of Chess.
The fact that it's permanent makes it kinda risky to do. But adspace on the moon is genius.
This is true if we continue to control drugs, but if we just lifted the prohibition entirely and let people pop whatever pills they wanted to, there could be no "illegal sites dispensing crap." There would simply be quality companies and poor companies, and the poor companies would get boycotted into bankruptcy.
Yeah, we should buy one copy of the key and put it on a torrent for everyone else. Just like we do with music!
I'm 20. I know exactly what the current generation is doing. "Social networking" is still not as much of a time-consumer as games (or in some people's cases, television).
Also, yes, all they would have to do is raise the price to compensate. Have you considered that raising the price would lower the demand in the U.S.? As the dollar continues to depreciate, we'll see spending on luxury goods dry up as real incomes fall.
Also, even if you just raise the price, you're still collecting and holding U.S. dollars for at least as long as it would take you to convert them into a different currency -- they will depreciate more in that time period.
The CFO of Porsche recently made the company a boatload of money through currency exchanges -- one of the things he did was to centralize the corporation's accounting, so that the company's reserves could be held in Euros instead of the various currencies of their local branches.
Please. It makes more economic sense in the current environment to collect payment in Euros, hands-down.
To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.
That does not put the performance of the machine in perspective at all. Technical details would be much more accurate and effective.
The dust would be a problem, but that does not sound infeasible (IANARS). If the electricity could somehow be beamed to the space elevator ...
P.P.S. You are so fucking ignorant that when I said "so there could be a greed incentive (increased sales/revenue/stock prices) for the company owners," you didn't acknowledge that "company owners" is synonymous with "stockholders," regardless of the size of their stake. Hiring hackers, of course, wouldn't be profitable for smaller shareholders in the company, but it could be profitable for a large shareholder, or maybe a small oligopoly of shareholders.
P.S. Your point about the US being the largest industrial producer in the world is irrelevant to my suggestion that hackers could perform a targeted attack on the power infrastructure in a specific municipality. If it were within their power to do that, then they could just figure out what "zones" their competitor's factories were in and cut the power there while maintaining power in zones that their factories operate in. Any company from any country could do it -- after all, if someone were to attack the electricity supply, they would do it in a targeted fashion, they wouldn't just randomly try to cut off power to the entire U.S.A.
Also, I don't have to "check my statistics" because I didn't actually cite any statistics in my post. And neither did you. So fuck you, you snarky asshole.
You're just being pessimistic here. You listed tons of obstacles without even bothering to try seeing around them.
The simplest solution is a wikipedia-style website that allows anyone to post, but requires them to establish their credentials, and only allows them to edit the articles they publish, while maintaining a list of revisions with unique ID codes so that people who write papers based on the articles can refer to specific revisions of the topic or paper (allowing revisions is not even a necessary component of this model, it would just be "neat").
Professors and such could post scholarly articles, and write articles citing other articles on the website, and their reputations and the experimental integrity of their work would have to mostly stand on it's own. However, to assist in that process, you could then add a rating system in which salaried (or simply approved) editors with doctorate's and research backgrounds in their fields gave thumbs-ups or thumbs-downs to different articles, each with explanations of why they felt that way about the article.
The fact of the matter is that in producing a print article, there are several steps that consume time: writing the material, reviewing the material, printing the material, and shipping the material. Putting it on a website doesn't mean you have to forfeit the entire model -- hell, you can still even charge subscription fees for access to the website in order to support the cost of hiring the editors and maintaining the servers. Putting it on a website just shortens the time required to get the product to the end user, by changing the steps to: writing the material, reviewing the material, and uploading the material to a web server.
P.S. It's "fundamental" -- try using Mozilla Firefox, it has a built-in spell checker that would have caught that instantly.