Lol.. a scenario that exists largely only in your head and you paint every person who thinks the constitution matters with your brush of ignorance.

Some people will never stop amazing me.

Is your google finger broken? No Dianne Feinstein does not have a CCW. She may still have the pistol but has publicly claimed she got rid of it too. She wasn't a big gun control champion when she had her CCW either. The only reason we know about it is that she admitted having previously had one when trying to institute an assault weapons ban.

But hey, as long as you can say someone else is wrong- amiright? Oh, and you may have failed the reading comprehension, I certainly did not. Try reading the rest of my post. Perhaps it is above your level and you should ask you mom to come into the basement and help you understand it or something?

There use to be software or a process with a human that would listen in on tech support calls while the person was on hold. It would try to detect key words like cussing and so on to determine the level of upset the user was. It would then transfer the calls a little sooner than if they stayed in original queue.

I used to just start spouting random swear words in hopes of going to the front of the line. Had an employer catch me doing it once and was about ready to fire me until he found out why. Sometimes it appears to work, most of the time it just relieves some stress.

Well, technically he has. There used to be an ice cream shop right on base. It sold burgers and shakes and stuff too. It was named Guantanamo. He shut it down and now the servicemen have to go into Cuba proper in order to get ice cream. That is why normalizing relations with Cuba was so damn important.

hmm.. the spiral stair case problem... I guess that is what we can call it.

I think you are ignoring reality in order to press whatever ideology you want to be true.

With the exception of the democrat in California who was running guns and creating his own little market niche by championing and passing gun control laws, almost all prominent gun control advocates do in fact have armed security around them the majority of time they are in public. They do no arm themselves unless you consider hiring armed thugs or having armed police provided by the state to be arming yourself.

BTW, intelligence does enter into it. How else do you compensate for or explain the "I won't arm myself but pay others to arm themselves for me while actively trying to stop others from protecting their families" mentality and pretending it somehow makes them better than everyone else.

You might be on to something. Now if you just add that the smart people end up hiring the stupid people to be armed and around them to protect them while decrying the evils of guns, you might have a solid theory on your hands.

Oh and no, I wasn't being sarcastic. I think it's stupid for people to arm themselves and put their life in danger in order to protect some rich asshat or politician or whatever that seems to have pissed enough people off that they fear for their lives for the pittance of salary a lot of these people make. It seems like all the largest mouth pieces against guns sure have a lot of them around in the hands of hired help to protect them.

If diversity is rated as a qualification higher than training, abilities and skills, it not only can be, but likely would be the problem.

Diversity is great when it happens naturally due to qualifications for the job itself. It likely becomes one of the strongest positions to administer from. It is a liability when it is done irrespective of qualifications and to some political motivation. It also breeds contempt and disrespect for those under qualified which tend to be associated with thier overriding qualification be it sex, sexual orientation, race or religion or whatever. When John cannot competently do his job and it appears he was hired because he is really a handicapped black girl pretending to be a man so he fills a couple diversity quotas, it eventually gets associated with people like that. It's completely counterproductive to the point being made.

Now i do not know if this is happening anywhere but the concern is legitimate. I have worked with and under unqualified people before. Usually it is because of some family relationships with the owner and not because of quotas. I grew to resent all "family run" businesses i even consider working for.

You were the one who claimed that most would-be pirates were discouraged from doing it prior to the invention of the printing press. Guess what? The high cost of making copies (and the relative lack of literate people to share them with, assuming that the author himself was even literate) discouraged authors from writing things down too.

Wrong. You're conflating authors with their works. The only sure way an author could prevent Alexandrians from copying their works was to not create works in the first place.

If they created works, even if they were not written down, nothing stopped someone else from writing it down. (For example, Socrates never wrote anything; what we know of him comes primarily from the writings of his student, Plato; Another example is from the days of Elizabethan theater, when printers would have people dictate the scripts to plays, sometimes actors who had memorized the lines, sometimes just people with good memories who had been in the audience)

If works were created, written down, and shared with anyone, there was absolutely nothing that could keep the scrolls from getting copied or moved. Consider Virgil, who wrote fanfic (The Aneid) based on the epic poems of Homer (The Illiad and The Odyssey), but wanted all the copies burned; this was ignored, and the world is better off for it.

Fundamentally, it's the same issue with secrets, or any other information. The only way to control the spread of it is to either convince other people to respect your wishes (which they may or may not do according to their own self interest, and other factors), or to never tell anyone.

I don't think we can credit copyright with the increase in the number of works in existence in recent history, as compared with ages past. The real credit is probably owed to increases in literacy, improved artificial lighting, the development of printing (as well as improved paper and ink to support it), greater leisure time available due to a variety of technological and social advances, increases in the internal stability of much of the world (hard to sell books when bandits rob every wagon, or war ravages the country), etc. Copyright can be nice, but it gets way more credit than it deserves.

Authors really just don't engage in self-censorship as a means of control. Copyright, from an author's point of view, is a way to recoup their investment. If they can't do that, they have to have other jobs that take time away from creating. Potentially, those jobs take away all their time from creating, so they don't create. It's rare as hell to find someone who is interested in creating works, has the financial means to do so without having to worry about the cost (and opportunity cost), yet refuses because they're a control freak. I'm confident that the sorts of authors you've identified are so rare as to not be worth concerning ourselves with.

As for the purpose of modern, authorial copyright (as opposed to the old stationers' copyright), you're almost entirely right: I'd only say that mere access is not enough. Rather, copyright is intended to provide an overall benefit to society by increasing the number of works which are created and published, while imposing the fewest and shortest restrictions on the public. It operates by providing some temporary benefits (whose actual value is determined by the market) to authors, but this is merely a means to an end, not an end in itself. If copyright were actually meant to benefit authors, it's clear that it has never done a good job of it at all. The stereotype of the starving author exists for a reason.

Personally, I would drop terms to a year, with numerous opportunities for renewal, but with overall maximum lengths that were still quite short (probably no more than 20 years or so, and less in the case of some types of works, such as computer software). The reason is that when we had renewal terms, many rights holders failed to renew, evidencing a lack of desire for longer copyright on their part, and getting works into the public domain faster through their inaction. Since everyone winds up as happy as they wanted to be in that scenario, I see no reason not to return to it.

Regarding maximum lengths, you may be interested to read the following paper on the subject: http://rufuspollock.org/papers...

You kind of butchered it with the reboot is near being after the fact but otherwise excellent job.

BTW, I think that is one of the best movies ever. Lots of people don't realize what it was making fun of though.

What the hell are you talking about?

Unauthorized copying was absolutely standard practice everywhere in the world until the 18th century, and most places until well into the 19th and 20th centuries. Hell, some places, like Alexandria during the days of the famous library, made it government policy; any books that entered the city had to be turned over for the library to make copies of, if the librarians wanted.

And it's a good thing too, since every written work we have from antiquity which wasn't carved into stone or clay survived only thanks to unauthorized copying -- often many generations of copying, by many different copyists. Even then, we've lost a tremendous amount of material.

As for the difficulty of copying books by hand, that was equally difficult for everyone, whether authorized or not, so it didn't deter piracy.

Copyright originated because publishers printed books (often without authorization; the authors had no rights) but didn't like to compete amongst themselves. So the publishers set up a cartel whereby they would agree which of them had the right to print a particular book. The author had no real say. And the government cooperated so long as they could censor anything they didn't like. It wasn't until substantially later that this system fell apart -- because people didn't like the monopoly -- and a replacement based on authors getting the rights was suggested. (And then the publishers fought that when they were unable to fully control it in the way that they had before, and even now publishers are the real powers behind and beneficiaries of copyright; authors need publishers far more than publishers need authors)

That's true. The problem you face, however, is that the social norm concerning creative works appears to be that it's perfectly okay for ordinary people to do things that constitute copyright infringement, at least if they aren't doing so for direct financial gain (i.e. if they aren't selling the copies). If the law were to reflect this social norm, copyright would not be as interesting an issue as it has become in the past 30-40 years. Instead we see copyright holders suing individuals, and trying to control the Internet so as to indirectly control individuals by limiting their options, so as to preserve the laws that enable a particular market, regardless of whether or not they conform to social norms.

And it looks as though even for a sort of infringement that most people would agree should be illegal, the copyright maximalist faction is still going overboard. I certainly would agree that professional, profit-oriented copyright infringement ought to be prevented, but I would not go so far as to say that it would ever be appropriate to put someone in jail for as much as ten years over it; it's just not that important. Punishments should not be so draconian, especially given that it seems unlikely that it will accomplish a damn thing. A better solution would be to reform copyright so that there's less of a point in engaging in professional, profit-oriented infringement, rather than the current strategy which is to simply make it high risk, high reward. For example, just as repealing Prohibition undercut the mafia, and just as drug legalization and decriminalization undercuts criminals in the drug trade, legalizing some copyright infringement by people acting not for profit, and thus able to act openly, could undercut professional infringers.

Well, I'd point out two things here. First, there are pre-existing incentives that act independently of copyright; in many cases, copyright is not the primary incentive, and in many cases copyright is not even a necessary incentive.

Second, I agree that copyright is useful, but we ought to regulate how much copyright we have, and for how long it lasts, with an eye toward its utility. I'd bet good money that adding a ten year sentence for certain copyright infringements, and even enforcing it, will have zero meaningful effects on how well copyright serves society. Therefore, such punishments are inappropriate. Indeed, we ought to pare copyright down to the point where it has both the fewest restrictions on the public with the greatest incentivizing effects. Given the economics of the various copyright-related fields, I think you'll find that this would involve no criminal punishments, minimal civil penalties, minimal restrictions on individuals, and copyright terms of far shorter length than we see now.

I don't think that's true. Sure, I know about the lifestyle of someone like Kim Dotcom, but he's something of an outlier. Benny Glover made some money, but I don't think you'd say it was a lot.

Making counterfeit anything, and selling it to someone who knows it's counterfeit, only makes sense if you sell it for a very substantial discount below the legitimate price. The negative effect on the legitimate supplier, if there's any at all, is going to be far greater than the positive effect for the counterfeiter.

lol.. and what's it to you. Outside of being wrong, I doubt you even have a fucking clue. Some crap that doesn't scale with the page on the article's site blocks the text when I try to enlarge the text enough to even read it on my phone. That is why I haven't read it but with defenders like you, I'm positive it is just drivel not worth reading anyways.

Just wanted to add, don't stop at the recommendations the software suggest.

I had a client who decided to go with the hardware recommendations provided by the software vendor against my objections. Six months after we were up and running, the software which was the entire point of the ordeal released an update that slowed everything down enormously. Turns out, their "recommended" hardware specs were slightly better than their minimum specs on the new version of the software and the server had also been purposed to do a few other minor things that ran in conjunction with the software. You might as well say it was the minimum.

So by stopping at the recommendations of the software vendor, they were presented with a setback no one was really thinking about. They could either roll back the software version negating the support and upgrade purchase plan, suffer the slow speeds and hope the vendor doesn't slow it any more, or replace good hardware that they really didn't have a use for outside of the specific software. They eventually let me completely overkill a server to replace it.

So unless the software vendor says there is a limit, reasonably increase the power and memory of their recommendations for future proofing. Just keep in mind you will want to eventually replace the hardware anyways else risk suffering down time from the inevitable failures.

I was thinking much the same thing. I didn't read the article but am wondering how much of this increase coincided with the PACA and the expansion of medicaid.

But if we are looking at poor areas with an infusion of money, of course people will be more active then they used to be and this alone should cause an uptick in hospital or doctors visits.