Would a "reasonably decent POTUS" really: - Not end the war on drugs - Not close gitmo as promised - Not be transparent as promised - Fullfill the wishes of the MAFIAA - Wage a war on whistleblowers - Have people assassinated - Have people tortured - Have the whole world put under surveillance - Allow everyone and his neighbor to frack below other peoples land
The list goes on and on.
The only "decent" things I can find is that he really seemed to be trying the get Americans a decent healthcare system, and the he killed off some weird pipeline. But being a bit social and a bit eco-friendly doesn't really cut it against being a fascist.
a large-scale downloader and redistributor Of pictures.
What exactly is the crime? Is this about copyright? or privacy violations?
I refuse to adhere to the position that "possession" of anything should be a crime (however, it can of course be evidence; you don't want to "possess" a stolen painting...).
Actually, I think it would very much make sense to NOT criminalize the possession of child pornography because then ordinary people wouldn't just "say nothing" because they're afraid they could be persecuted. Instead, they would inform the police, and the chances of finding real criminals, the child molesters, would go up..
Besides, right now there are people convicted of possession of child pornography for possession of comics, drawings and pictures of themselves, which is frankly absurd.
The Free Market is not "existing by itself". It's made by societies. It's made by laws.
"Free Market" as an idea implies that everyone can participate in it; and it actually works best if everyone is supplier and consumer at the same time, because, obviously, innovation will be at its peak, and also consumer choice. That's the macro-economic perspective of it.
On the purely micro-economic perspective, for a lone actor, the most interesting system is the one where everything belongs to him, and he's the only supplier of everything. But quite clearly, this cannot be called "free market" by any stretch.
So the idea is to build a level playing field for all actors. Laws that regulate employment, destruction of environment, declaration duty, monopolies and so on are all geared towards that. And net neutrality as well.
Of course, for individual actors, it can be beneficial to game the system, getting laws that allow dumping of toxic waste, allow government-granted monopolies etc., thus gearing that playing field. TTIP and suchlike are obvious attempts at doing this, and inherently anti-free-market.
Led by the Germanic "hamlet"-culture, which did not see big cities or big technology as useful.
And it aligned naturally with Christianity, which saw the whole earth as only a temporary place of toil, therefore it was unimportant to build a civilization.
Of course, Christianity changed its mind later on..
> Why even accept a DMCA takedown from a foreign company?
You've instituted a process, where everyone can demand to have taken down everyone elses content with impunity. So why would you want to discern whether the request came from a foreign company?
Oh yes, it is. - It changes your behavior - It allows anyone retroactively to do data-analysis (Like for when the USA enacts Sharia-Law and looks for people who cheated on their husbands the last 20 years...). - It's wholly, completely, incompatible with the state of law. And the state of law happens to be the basis for democracy. So it actually destroys democracy. - It provides a database as a target for abuse (by the collectors themselves, AND by third-party hackers).
Actually, about 80% of all windows games run out of the box with wine on linux. You can get this up to 90% with some config-fu, cracks and an implementation of gfwl: https://github.com/Seegras/wine/tree/work/dlls/xlive
Still broken: - All games requiring Rockstar Social Club (stupid DRM). - A lot of games requiring DirectX 6 to 8, or glide. - Lots of troubles with .NET (which is expected, the .NET runtime is a piece of crap. For instance it blows up your registry from 300kb to 8MB). - Codec Hell. A lot of older games want to play movies in specific versions of codecs, which of course break newer games and vice versa. This isn't actually a wine-problem. The same happens on Windows.
Eliminate all vulnerabilities, making everyone more secure
and not
Hoard or produce vulnerabilities to attack adversaries, making EVERYONE less secure
Nobody is going to trust these agencies. They won't even trust each other, because this second case means agencies like the NSA is deliberately putting others like the DOA or the DEA or even the DOD at risk. Since the more people know (and need to know) details of these issues, they will inevitably leak, making them useless to attack anyone.
So it's pretty much a given the NSA won't tell the companies managing the power grid, since then the information would basically be public. And of course with not telling them, they put the power grid at risk.
Unless there's a paradigm shift within these agencies, NOBODY can trust them.
1) the person has committed copyright infringement;
Yes, and there it fails.
Because at most they "facilitated" infringement, but in that case, they would need to go against a user of MegaUpload who uploaded works for commercial gain.
Finally, as for his own personal downloads, those, too, would be civil infringements, not criminal.
Sorry, that's wrong. DOWNLOADS can't be infringing copyright. Because copyright is about PUBLISHING. Unless he uploaded works to which he has no rights of publishing, he did not infringe copyright.
Sadly, most countries in the world have no way to ensure
* That regulations don't contradict the law * That laws don't contradict the constitution
It's usually left to the legislative bodies to ensure this. But they realized thy don't have to, hence some jerk can override laws with "National Security Letters", and hence some congress can override the constitution with some "PATRIOT act".
And this is not US-specific, we have this problem in Switzerland as well (although we have some remedy, in the form that if we can gather enough signatures, we can force a public vote on a law. Not on regulations, though...).
What's really needed is a court of law, where everyone can submit laws or regulations and say "I think this contradicts another law or the constitution", and logically everyone has "standing", because it obviously effects everyone. And the court must be able to enforce its judgements.
This is somewhat implemented in Germany with the constitutional court ("Verfassungsgericht"), but I think that one only covers laws, and neither treaties nor regulations, and furthermore, it lacks any means to really enforce its decisions. So what they've got is a judgement against pre-emptive data retention, but hundreds of politicians still trying to write it into law.
On the post: Late Friday, White House Announces That FISA Court Has Rubberstamped NSA Phone Record Collection, While Insisting It Wants Reform
Re: Just what I thought...
- Not end the war on drugs
- Not close gitmo as promised
- Not be transparent as promised
- Fullfill the wishes of the MAFIAA
- Wage a war on whistleblowers
- Have people assassinated
- Have people tortured
- Have the whole world put under surveillance
- Allow everyone and his neighbor to frack below other peoples land
The list goes on and on.
The only "decent" things I can find is that he really seemed to be trying the get Americans a decent healthcare system, and the he killed off some weird pipeline. But being a bit social and a bit eco-friendly doesn't really cut it against being a fascist.
On the post: Mandatory Sentencing Guidelines Have Nothing To Do With 'Justice'
Re: Only 14 months?
Of pictures.
What exactly is the crime? Is this about copyright? or privacy violations?
I refuse to adhere to the position that "possession" of anything should be a crime (however, it can of course be evidence; you don't want to "possess" a stolen painting...).
Actually, I think it would very much make sense to NOT criminalize the possession of child pornography because then ordinary people wouldn't just "say nothing" because they're afraid they could be persecuted. Instead, they would inform the police, and the chances of finding real criminals, the child molesters, would go up..
Besides, right now there are people convicted of possession of child pornography for possession of comics, drawings and pictures of themselves, which is frankly absurd.
On the post: Verizon At Least Shows It Has A Sense Of Humor About Net Neutrality, Even If It's Incapable Of Respecting It
Re:
"Free Market" as an idea implies that everyone can participate in it; and it actually works best if everyone is supplier and consumer at the same time, because, obviously, innovation will be at its peak, and also consumer choice. That's the macro-economic perspective of it.
On the purely micro-economic perspective, for a lone actor, the most interesting system is the one where everything belongs to him, and he's the only supplier of everything. But quite clearly, this cannot be called "free market" by any stretch.
So the idea is to build a level playing field for all actors. Laws that regulate employment, destruction of environment, declaration duty, monopolies and so on are all geared towards that. And net neutrality as well.
Of course, for individual actors, it can be beneficial to game the system, getting laws that allow dumping of toxic waste, allow government-granted monopolies etc., thus gearing that playing field. TTIP and suchlike are obvious attempts at doing this, and inherently anti-free-market.
On the post: We Now Know The NSA And GCHQ Have Subverted Most (All?) Of The Digital World: So Why Can't We See Any Benefits?
Re: Re: Re: Finally
Led by the Germanic "hamlet"-culture, which did not see big cities or big technology as useful.
And it aligned naturally with Christianity, which saw the whole earth as only a temporary place of toil, therefore it was unimportant to build a civilization.
Of course, Christianity changed its mind later on..
On the post: We Now Know The NSA And GCHQ Have Subverted Most (All?) Of The Digital World: So Why Can't We See Any Benefits?
Re: It's not that difficult...
On the post: US Court Rules That Kim Dotcom Is A 'Fugitive' And Thus DOJ Can Take His Money
I'm a fugitive
It's not that I did something illegal in the USA, but apparently that doesn't stop the DOJ from persecuting.
On a related note, the DOJ now presumably rounds up Jews for failure to turn themselves in by themselves.
On the post: Total Wipes Blames Trying To Take Down Every Page With The Word 'Download' On 'A Bug'
Re: Total AssWipes
You've instituted a process, where everyone can demand to have taken down everyone elses content with impunity. So why would you want to discern whether the request came from a foreign company?
On the post: Total Wipes Blames Trying To Take Down Every Page With The Word 'Download' On 'A Bug'
Re: Re:
On the post: Lawmaker Who Said Snowden Committed Treason, Now On The Other Side Of Metadata Surveillance
Re:
- It changes your behavior
- It allows anyone retroactively to do data-analysis (Like for when the USA enacts Sharia-Law and looks for people who cheated on their husbands the last 20 years...).
- It's wholly, completely, incompatible with the state of law. And the state of law happens to be the basis for democracy. So it actually destroys democracy.
- It provides a database as a target for abuse (by the collectors themselves, AND by third-party hackers).
On the post: No, 'App Neutrality' Is Not A Thing
Re: Re: Year of the Linux Desktop
Still broken:
- All games requiring Rockstar Social Club (stupid DRM).
- A lot of games requiring DirectX 6 to 8, or glide.
- Lots of troubles with .NET (which is expected, the .NET runtime is a piece of crap. For instance it blows up your registry from 300kb to 8MB).
- Codec Hell. A lot of older games want to play movies in specific versions of codecs, which of course break newer games and vice versa. This isn't actually a wine-problem. The same happens on Windows.
On the post: Apparently The Best Way To Decrease Movie Piracy Is To Get Rid Of The Oscars
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Apparently The Best Way To Decrease Movie Piracy Is To Get Rid Of The Oscars
Re: Re: Re:
Actually, downloading IS legal. It's the uploading that isn't (which of course, you do automatically when downloading torrents).
On the post: President Obama To Encourage Cybersecurity Information Sharing, Highlighting Why We Don't Need CISPA
paradigm shift
Eliminate all vulnerabilities, making everyone more secure
and not
Hoard or produce vulnerabilities to attack adversaries, making EVERYONE less secure
Nobody is going to trust these agencies. They won't even trust each other, because this second case means agencies like the NSA is deliberately putting others like the DOA or the DEA or even the DOD at risk. Since the more people know (and need to know) details of these issues, they will inevitably leak, making them useless to attack anyone.
So it's pretty much a given the NSA won't tell the companies managing the power grid, since then the information would basically be public. And of course with not telling them, they put the power grid at risk.
Unless there's a paradigm shift within these agencies, NOBODY can trust them.
On the post: Megaupload Programmer Takes Plea Deal, Though It's Still Unclear What Criminal Law He Violated
Re:
Yes, and there it fails.
Because at most they "facilitated" infringement, but in that case, they would need to go against a user of MegaUpload who uploaded works for commercial gain.
On the post: Megaupload Programmer Takes Plea Deal, Though It's Still Unclear What Criminal Law He Violated
Re: Re: Re:
No. If any, there was a conspiracy to profit from the breaking of copyright law by others.
On the post: Megaupload Programmer Takes Plea Deal, Though It's Still Unclear What Criminal Law He Violated
Civil infringement
Sorry, that's wrong. DOWNLOADS can't be infringing copyright. Because copyright is about PUBLISHING. Unless he uploaded works to which he has no rights of publishing, he did not infringe copyright.
On the post: State Attorney General Won't Fight Court's Block Of Law Curtailing Sex Offenders' First Amendment Rights
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
* That regulations don't contradict the law
* That laws don't contradict the constitution
It's usually left to the legislative bodies to ensure this. But they realized thy don't have to, hence some jerk can override laws with "National Security Letters", and hence some congress can override the constitution with some "PATRIOT act".
And this is not US-specific, we have this problem in Switzerland as well (although we have some remedy, in the form that if we can gather enough signatures, we can force a public vote on a law. Not on regulations, though...).
What's really needed is a court of law, where everyone can submit laws or regulations and say "I think this contradicts another law or the constitution", and logically everyone has "standing", because it obviously effects everyone. And the court must be able to enforce its judgements.
This is somewhat implemented in Germany with the constitutional court ("Verfassungsgericht"), but I think that one only covers laws, and neither treaties nor regulations, and furthermore, it lacks any means to really enforce its decisions. So what they've got is a judgement against pre-emptive data retention, but hundreds of politicians still trying to write it into law.
On the post: Once More With Feeling: Patent Reform Introduced, And This Time The Trial Lawyers May Not Be Able To Kill It
Re: Re: Patent Abolition
They're monopolies given by the state that allow the holder to tell you what you can't do with your property.
There's just no way you can support any patent-system and claim you're a libertarian.
On the post: CIA Wanted To Throw The CFAA At Senate Staffers For Unauthorized Googling
Re: Re: reality is a scam
Surveillance is the spiritual successor of slavery. They should feel guilty about it.
On the post: Court Rejects EFF's Arguments Over NSA Internet Surveillance
Isn't there something like a motion to discovery?
So any customer of AT&T should be able to demand this.
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