I have done my homework. For example: the American Journal of Public Health reports that even moderate consumption of alcohol will take 17-19 years off your life and leads to much higher incidences of various mouth and throat cancers, as well as breast cancer. And the benefits you cite come from other things found in wine, because they're found in ordinary grape juice.
OK, I'm kind of confused here. What are you doing with your smartphone that you spend so much time "staring at the screen" or finding ways to reduce doing so?
My smartphone is a tool, not a TV. I use it to make calls, send text messages, write up posts, etc, and a watch is useless for such tasks.
The wine thing's been debunked. The line of reasoning originally went something like this:
People in France tend to live longer. France is famous for its wine. Therefore, drinking wine helps you live longer.
Then, armed with this certainty, people started searching for reasons to explain it, and eventually found a chemical in the skin of red grapes that serves as a natural antioxidant. Therefore, drinking red wine must be good for you.
Then recently a few actual scientists went back and looked at the original premise, and they found something interesting: people in France don't actually drink very much wine at all; they export most of it. (Parallels to the Big Tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s immediately come to mind. Remember when it was revealed that not a single tobacco company CEO smoked?)
It turns out that wine (or alcoholic beverages of any variety) have zero beneficial impact on your health, and plenty of negative impacts... which anyone with a shred of common sense could have told you before a bunch of nonsense masquerading as science got involved.
Soon, just about everything we touch will capture data about us. Our cars. Our watches. Our clothing.
What's with all these people talking about watches lately? Especially in an article about smartphones. Has everyone missed the memo? The smartphone has made watches just as obsolete as cameras, Rolodexes, and alarm clocks. There's still a market for very high-end models as status symbols (Rolex watches) or exceptional quality (fancy cameras targeted at professional photographers,) but Joe Average Citizen today is never ever going to need to buy another one in his life, and his kids will probably not even know what they are, in much the same way as today's children don't know what a floppy disc is.
The cost of distribution has come way down. The cost of creation, not so much.
There are several authors and webcomic artists I follow who make their living by their creative work. Some of them publish via the Internet, with negligible distribution costs; others sell actual books, which costs a bit more to produce and distribute. But either way, what they're selling is their creativity.
If anyone - including the author - could redistribute the work freely, however they wanted to, they would not be able to support themselves via their creative work, and would have to seek traditional employment, which would severely limit the amount of time they can put into their creative work, with predictable consequences on their contribution to our culture. So no, eliminating copyright is not a good idea. It was created for a good reason: to stop publishers from doing exactly that. And it still serves a valid purpose, when it's not being abused by the very publishers it's supposed to be keeping in line.
Copyright needs to be reformed, restored to its original purpose, not abolished. We tried not having any copyright once, in the 18th century. It created an anarchic state that made the need for copyright obvious, and that was when printing presses were rare and expensive. Today, when everyone has a personal computer, it would only be that much worse.
Remember, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
I would hope it does expose them to legal liability. As I've pointed out before on here, that's fraud, and fraud is supposed to expose you to legal liability.
It seems like everyone these days is in the fraud business, from airlines (selling more seats on a flight than they have available) to ISPs (promising speed and connectivity and not delivering as promised) to insurance companies (selling contracts requiring them to pay out under certain circumstances, and then doing everything possible to avoid paying out when a claim is filed.) It's about time We The People start pushing back and saying "no, you don't get to weasel out of things. Keep your word or go out of business and let someone who can actually do the job right take over."
The Court only upheld the power of Congress to set the term and extend the term retroactively.
As if we needed any further reason to deride the Supreme Court as illegitimate. Before Citizens United and other messes they've made, there was this.
Let's be nice and clear here, kids. That ruling was completely wrong, completely unjustifiable, and completely beyond the authority of the Supreme Court. The Constitution is crystal-clear on the relevant point: nether Congress nor the States may pass any ex post facto (retroactive) law. Period. End of discussion. Retroactive copyright term extension is illegal, and if anyone should have known it, it's the Supreme Court..
Almost. The L in SLAPP is "Lawsuit," but DMCA takedowns are an extrajudicial abomination designed to allow people to make trouble for alleged pirates without having to go through the hassle of actually coming up with proof that they were doing anything wrong and convincing a court.
Yet another reason why the DMCA needs to be repealed in its entirety.
You know how we could essentially solve every single corporate tax-cheating problem we have, all at once? Make one simple change of definitions:
Taxable profits under the US tax code are defined as all revenue received from sources within the US, minus all business expenses spent within the US.
Make that one simple change, and transferring funds overseas would now have zero effect on one's tax status. Shipping jobs overseas would be severely impacted, since there's now a definite tax advantage for keeping the workforce local. All the foreign tax haven shell games would be brought to a screeching halt, and the job of calculating a company's tax burden would be massively simplified.
So of course we'll never do it. It would make too much sense.
If nothing else, the lower bound could be "non-zero," and with a long and documented history of service not only being poor but frequently failing altogether, and the company doing nothing about it...
Why is it a stretch. If you take my money in return for a commitment to deliver a specified service, and then do not deliver the service as specified, you have defrauded me. Seems to me it really is that simple.
What bandwidth we have coming into the entire community has been severely over-subscribed (sold to too many users for the small signal strength available) and thus the poor quality of connectivity in our community.
When someone sells you something and does not provide it, there's a name for that: fraud. Especially if they've been talking with CenturyLink (and Qwest before them) for years and it hasn't gotten any better, it sounds to me like it's time for the town to stop negotiating and start pressing charges.
As much as certain parties like to try and pretend that copyright arose as an extension of the Stationers' censorship regime, the truth is the exact opposite: copyright arouse out of its fall, because everyone (even Parliament) was sick of it. Every time the Stationers tried to get it replaced, they were roundly rejected, and what ended up getting put in place was completely different.
As for copyright assignment, a friend once told me he'd seen an interview with Orson Scott Card where he discussed the topic. I really wish I could find that now so I could quote it directly, but basically what Card said (according to the guy I heard this from) is that a lot of publishers attempt to get you to sign over your copyright under "work made for hire" doctrine, and that an author should never sign such a thing because he did not write that book under contract to the publisher, and therefore signing a legal document stating that he did is perjury, and it's suborning perjury for the publisher to ask you to. (Even though they'll never get prosecuted for it, of course.)
But that's beside the point. You're talking about the modern system, which as I pointed out in my original comment, has been urgently in need of reform since the 1970s.
On the post: Privacy Oversight Board Turns Its Sights On The Real Problem: Executive Order 12333
Re: I wish the PCLOB had teeth
On the post: DailyDirt: Correlations With Living Longer
Re: Re:
On the post: Supreme Court Ruling Over Mobile Phone Searches May Really Be The First 'Internet Of Things' Ruling
Re: Re:
My smartphone is a tool, not a TV. I use it to make calls, send text messages, write up posts, etc, and a watch is useless for such tasks.
On the post: DailyDirt: Correlations With Living Longer
People in France tend to live longer.
France is famous for its wine.
Therefore, drinking wine helps you live longer.
Then, armed with this certainty, people started searching for reasons to explain it, and eventually found a chemical in the skin of red grapes that serves as a natural antioxidant. Therefore, drinking red wine must be good for you.
Then recently a few actual scientists went back and looked at the original premise, and they found something interesting: people in France don't actually drink very much wine at all; they export most of it. (Parallels to the Big Tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s immediately come to mind. Remember when it was revealed that not a single tobacco company CEO smoked?)
It turns out that wine (or alcoholic beverages of any variety) have zero beneficial impact on your health, and plenty of negative impacts... which anyone with a shred of common sense could have told you before a bunch of nonsense masquerading as science got involved.
On the post: Supreme Court Ruling Over Mobile Phone Searches May Really Be The First 'Internet Of Things' Ruling
What's with all these people talking about watches lately? Especially in an article about smartphones. Has everyone missed the memo? The smartphone has made watches just as obsolete as cameras, Rolodexes, and alarm clocks. There's still a market for very high-end models as status symbols (Rolex watches) or exceptional quality (fancy cameras targeted at professional photographers,) but Joe Average Citizen today is never ever going to need to buy another one in his life, and his kids will probably not even know what they are, in much the same way as today's children don't know what a floppy disc is.
On the post: Defending The Indefensible: Hilarious Talking Points On Ridiculous Copyright Terms
Re: Re: Why not elimiate copyright
There are several authors and webcomic artists I follow who make their living by their creative work. Some of them publish via the Internet, with negligible distribution costs; others sell actual books, which costs a bit more to produce and distribute. But either way, what they're selling is their creativity.
If anyone - including the author - could redistribute the work freely, however they wanted to, they would not be able to support themselves via their creative work, and would have to seek traditional employment, which would severely limit the amount of time they can put into their creative work, with predictable consequences on their contribution to our culture. So no, eliminating copyright is not a good idea. It was created for a good reason: to stop publishers from doing exactly that. And it still serves a valid purpose, when it's not being abused by the very publishers it's supposed to be keeping in line.
Copyright needs to be reformed, restored to its original purpose, not abolished. We tried not having any copyright once, in the 18th century. It created an anarchic state that made the need for copyright obvious, and that was when printing presses were rare and expensive. Today, when everyone has a personal computer, it would only be that much worse.
Remember, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
On the post: Did Comcast's Infamous Customer Service Call Open The Company Up To Legal Troubles For Lying About Speeds?
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Did Comcast's Infamous Customer Service Call Open The Company Up To Legal Troubles For Lying About Speeds?
Re: Since when...
On the post: Did Comcast's Infamous Customer Service Call Open The Company Up To Legal Troubles For Lying About Speeds?
It seems like everyone these days is in the fraud business, from airlines (selling more seats on a flight than they have available) to ISPs (promising speed and connectivity and not delivering as promised) to insurance companies (selling contracts requiring them to pay out under certain circumstances, and then doing everything possible to avoid paying out when a claim is filed.) It's about time We The People start pushing back and saying "no, you don't get to weasel out of things. Keep your word or go out of business and let someone who can actually do the job right take over."
On the post: German Government Tries To Censor Publication Of Its List Of Censored Websites
Re: Re:
On the post: Defending The Indefensible: Hilarious Talking Points On Ridiculous Copyright Terms
As if we needed any further reason to deride the Supreme Court as illegitimate. Before Citizens United and other messes they've made, there was this.
Let's be nice and clear here, kids. That ruling was completely wrong, completely unjustifiable, and completely beyond the authority of the Supreme Court. The Constitution is crystal-clear on the relevant point: nether Congress nor the States may pass any ex post facto (retroactive) law. Period. End of discussion. Retroactive copyright term extension is illegal, and if anyone should have known it, it's the Supreme Court..
On the post: Copyright As Censorship: San Francisco Eviction Lawyer Uses DMCA Takedown To Censor Protest Video
Re: Re:
Yet another reason why the DMCA needs to be repealed in its entirety.
On the post: Internet Industry Hate Taken To Insane Levels: Ridiculous Proposals To 'Nationalize' Successful Internet Companies
Re:
Taxable profits under the US tax code are defined as all revenue received from sources within the US, minus all business expenses spent within the US.
Make that one simple change, and transferring funds overseas would now have zero effect on one's tax status. Shipping jobs overseas would be severely impacted, since there's now a definite tax advantage for keeping the workforce local. All the foreign tax haven shell games would be brought to a screeching halt, and the job of calculating a company's tax burden would be massively simplified.
So of course we'll never do it. It would make too much sense.
On the post: Airlines, Travel Sites Hand Over Your Full Booking Credit Card, IP Info To Feds, Who Keep It Stored With No Encryption
How many US citizens have traveled by plane since March of 2005? I bet it's a lot more than 6.5 million!
On the post: FedEx Indicted For Failing To Look Into Its Packages To See If Any Online Pharmacies Were Sending Drugs
Re: Boston Tea Party
On the post: Mayor Of Arizona Town Publicly Shames Lousy Broadband Service Provider With Apology Letter To Hotel Guests
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Mayor Of Arizona Town Publicly Shames Lousy Broadband Service Provider With Apology Letter To Hotel Guests
Re: Re:
On the post: Mayor Of Arizona Town Publicly Shames Lousy Broadband Service Provider With Apology Letter To Hotel Guests
When someone sells you something and does not provide it, there's a name for that: fraud. Especially if they've been talking with CenturyLink (and Qwest before them) for years and it hasn't gotten any better, it sounds to me like it's time for the town to stop negotiating and start pressing charges.
On the post: Conan Doyle Estate Asks Supreme Court To Step In And Block Sherlock Holmes From Being Public Domain'd
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Conan Doyle Estate Asks Supreme Court To Step In And Block Sherlock Holmes From Being Public Domain'd
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Have a look at a scholar who actually did some real research into the matter: http://copy.law.cam.ac.uk/cam/tools/request/showRecord?id=commentary_uk_1710
As much as certain parties like to try and pretend that copyright arose as an extension of the Stationers' censorship regime, the truth is the exact opposite: copyright arouse out of its fall, because everyone (even Parliament) was sick of it. Every time the Stationers tried to get it replaced, they were roundly rejected, and what ended up getting put in place was completely different.
As for copyright assignment, a friend once told me he'd seen an interview with Orson Scott Card where he discussed the topic. I really wish I could find that now so I could quote it directly, but basically what Card said (according to the guy I heard this from) is that a lot of publishers attempt to get you to sign over your copyright under "work made for hire" doctrine, and that an author should never sign such a thing because he did not write that book under contract to the publisher, and therefore signing a legal document stating that he did is perjury, and it's suborning perjury for the publisher to ask you to. (Even though they'll never get prosecuted for it, of course.)
But that's beside the point. You're talking about the modern system, which as I pointed out in my original comment, has been urgently in need of reform since the 1970s.
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