champu

You don't have any posts in the thread to which I was referring, so I guess there's been a misunderstanding. Any similarity between my snide remark and posts you may have made elsewhere is a coincidence.

No no no, it's because the very concept of money exploits people via interest which is the ammunition of servitude. ...wait, wrong thread.

I'm really not sure how different an angle this case was from the Thomas-Rasset trial. That said... Forgetting peer-to-peer for a moment, have there been any cases of the RIAA going after violations of synchronization licenses (specifically, lack thereof) in no-profit situations? Youtube and the other major players will generally pull videos if they get a complaint from the copyright owner of the audio track, but what about other websites? Is the volume not high enough to trigger a response? I assume there have been cases of the RIAA defending sync-rights in for-profit situations somewhere along the line. yes? (my guess is the term "sync-rights" wouldn't exist if that were not the case.) And here's a hypothetical... suppose you allowed a student to bring a CD with the music they wanted to go along with their skydive. If you shot the video and dubbed the music (for which, let's assume, the student has a legitimate private use license) to it, didn't retain a copy of the music, and the student never published the video/music anywhere publicly, do you think you would have a case that this falls under fair use? Presumably I can make a skydiving video synced to copyrighted music if I don't release it publicly / publicly exhibit it. What if a friend comes over and uses my music and my video to make a video for me that, again, I don't release publicly. What if I buy him a beer for his efforts? What if I give him a dollar?

Again, simply not true. Besides, how does one plan for the future if their savings don't maintain value? Condescension meets conspiracy theory meets irony. You plan for the future and maintain the value of your savings by understanding the reality of the situation that money was never meant to store value.

And then someone comes along and starts offering malspanery insurance to engineers... ... ...you see "span" works for both the bridges and the airpl- ah, forget it.

Talk about a fantasy. I hate to break it to you, but we can't all be Presidents and Astronauts. It's just not possible and is one of the "great lies" we as a nation tell ourselves and the next generation. There's a difference between telling ourselves, "we can all become wildly successful (whether it involves obtaining political power or orbiting the Earth)" and saying, "wildly successful people can come from all walks of life." The latter would be true and could be motivational and the former would be, as you point out, a lie. Again, however, I don't think that's the point here. Raising minimum wage isn't to help more people on their way to being astronauts. I think a greater lie than the aforementioned is telling ourselves, "we can all own a house wherever we want, have 2.5 kids, a dog, and afford it all on one 9-5 salary." /edited to add "wherever we want" clause

I think going back and forth between an over-loaded sabre-2 and a comfortably loaded xfire-2 is a bad idea. Either will fly, but everyone picks up and sloughs off bad habits as they learn and a successful correction on one of those canopies after a minor mistake might stall the other and ruin your weekend. I think those two canopies/wingloadings will fly similarly enough in just the wrong ways to make a mistake likely.

Thinking that rich people need to be thankful for the hoi polloi that buy (with what ever degree of necessity or gratitude you want to attach to the purchase) whatever it is the rich person is peddling has absolutely nothing to do with raising the minimum wage of the guy that said good morning to them as they walked in the store. People pay for things in a store because that's one of the "rules" of the "game" that we're all playing. Getting busted for shop lifting is also a possibility in the "game." Getting a minimum wage job at a company where someone, perhaps far away, is getting rich is yet another. I've already said that I'm completely fine with rich people paying more in taxes (which keep the "game" going) because they benefit more from it... I've even said I'm okay with the idea of minimum wages... All I'm asking is that if you want to raise the minimum wage you re-examine the whole picture of unskilled labor.

People who make more (presumably by playing "the game" better) pay more in taxes to keep the game going. That's in their best interest, because they're good at the game. I'm completely fine with that. Beyond that, though, successful people don't owe anyone anything. The employee does work, the employee gets paid, end of transaction. The successful person gets ahead and, in the case of unskilled labor, the employee doesn't have to think too hard. If the employer chooses to do bonuses or perks or something to keep people working happily, that may be in everyone's best interests. Now... having no labor laws is a bad idea. I think we've learned that. I think we can definitely find common ground in things like workplace health and safety. I don't even have too much heartburn over the idea of a minimum wage to keep employers from banding together to deflate the cost of labor. What worries me is when rules to protect the worker (some written, some de facto as a result of a litigious society) stack up to create ridiculous situations. Like a person you have to pay more than they're worth and can't fire unless they commit a felony on the job. There's no end to the havoc you can wreak by tweaking nuts and bolts of a system in ways that seem rewording if you don't re-examine the big picture now and again.

No, that is not what I meant to say. I also don't mean to hold a lecture on stochastic processes here.

As do radio transmissions... ...eventually. But rather than argue about this any further, let's replace free space communications with a long distance coaxial cable run. Same stochastic processes and probabilistic behavior, only now we have a comforting ground*. *This situation is less dissimilar to free space transmissions than you may think... but if it makes you feel better...

Radio transmission involves displacement current as opposed to free current, but an electrical circuit it is nonetheless.

Deep space communication links are electrical circuits that function probabilistically because they are subject to stochastic processes. You can't really claim they "follow logic" without abstracting the problem to a trivial one.

I agree. And it would appear the evolution occurs on a societal level. Internally altruistic and externally aggressive societies will tend to prevail. Religious texts can be thought of as attempts by man to capture a snapshot of that particular society's morality and altruism (and occasionally external aggression) at a moment in time. Ascribing the details of this snapshot to a higher power is simply an example of taking Dennett's intentional stance.

I'm turning my pockets out with this, but I've scrounged up another two cents to throw in... As I said before, I'm all for doing what it takes to keep drunk drivers off the road and to prosecute the ones that are on the road up to, but not including, where you stick a needle in them. And I don't care if it's a LEO on the side of the road or Ardis Dee Hoven doing the sticking. I'd probably get on a bandwagon to make refusal of a breathalyzer test as bad as "failing" a breathalyzer test which will, of course, carry different levels of "badness" depending on the situation (i.e. rolling up on a checkpoint vs. running a bus full of nuns of a cliff.)

I'm not a huge wine drinker, but it's funny that I'm not a big fan of Syrahs given I like IPAs as much as I do... Give me a Cabernet Franc any day...

Blind Pig IPA http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/863/22790 Russian River is fantastic. Pliny the Younger is one of my favorite IPAs.

Because Escondido is too far away, I bring the stone to me. Decisions, decisions...

In the case of legal manners, deferring to people who are emotionally involved is actually the opposite of the best thing to do. I will always be more than willing to walk a line, blow in a tube, or pee in a cup (oh... and not drive drunk in the first place) and I'm willing to support laws and DMV fine print to make other people on the road do the same. Blood draws are medical procedures. People fuck up medical procedures... yes even trivial ones. Increase the volume of procedures and you increase the volume of fuck ups. I'm not claiming you're going to instantly kill blind orphans en mass, I'm just saying that you will end up with some number of people who were not over the limit getting Hep-C and HIV infections.

Interestingly enough... studying the act of getting wrapped around the axle in the persuit of deep and meaningful secrets of the universe may actually yield deep and meaningful secrets of the universe. ...in contrast to having a conversation with yourself on an online forum.

Convenience.

math is sounding more and more like a religion to me. The answer depends on who you ask and many say it is semantic game, while others insist they are right and the others are wrong. Forgot to add .. some will insult you when you don't understand their version. btw, religion and mathematics (particularly set theory of cardinalities greater than aleph0) do have something in common. Studying either in great detail can lead you to believe you've unlocked deep and meaningful secrets of the universe when all you've really done is wrapped yourself around the axle of a construct created by man as a means to communicate ideas. Physics on the other hand...

So a man walks into the "Infinite Inn" which is a hotel with an infinite number of rooms. He walks up to the clerk and asks if he's got any rooms available and the clerk says, "Nope, we're all full up." Then the clerk thinks for a minute and says, "Wait, I've got an idea!" He picks up the PA and says, "Attention everyone in the hotel. Sorry for the inconvienience, but I have to ask everyone to please step out of your room, note your room number, and please go to one room number higher than yours." All of the hotel guests comply and once the terrible racket of doors opening and closing settles down the clerk turns back to the man and says, "We've got one room available. Room number 1, first door on the left." The man says, "well actually I need more than one room. I need a room for myself and for each of my children, and their children, and so on extending back infinitely up my family tree." To which the clerk replies, "well I'm afraid I can't help you, you'll have to try Aleph Suites next door."

math is sounding more and more like a religion to me. The answer depends on who you ask and many say it is semantic game, while others insist they are right and the others are wrong. The difference is in math, some are actually right in a way that can be proven. That's correct... and the rest are wrong in a way that can be proven. The crux of this problem is not one of "College Calculus 3" nor of Algebra. A course on Discrete Mathematics / Logic / Set Theory would cover it in much better detail. Rosen wrote a pretty good text on the subject... ...which is apparently now in its sixth edition... ...see this is the kind of crap that's going to make me start feeling old really fast.

SORRY... ...sorry... I took the keys out of my brain this morning but I tend to diesel into the weekend.