Charles Anthony

I do not trust the editorial from the National Post either but Izzy Asper died a few years ago.

Here is my opinion: you did not read the article. The article does not address anything with regards to whether it needs to be fixed or whether it can be fixed. Here is some of more of my opinion: it is not wise to draw conclusions from this article. Depending on who you are in Ontario (or any other province, for that matter) one may benefit financially from being part of Canada which can not appear in these numbers. Here are some very simplistic examples to get you thinking. If I operate a retail business in a Ontario border town, my financial success may benefit from federal expenditures in Manitoba or Quebec or even in the U.S.A. because of my proximity and people passing through. If I operate a repair center for airplanes in Toronto and the federal government subsidizes 99% of my customers, the location of my customer does not matter. Looking at money spent in Ontario and collected in Ontario by the federal government is too simplistic. I belongs in the field of crockonomics.

They do NOT put up all of the resources themselves. The copyrights and the patents and the intellectual property rights are enforced -- and funded through taxation -- by government. You are failing to understand that. A copyright or a patent or an intellectual property right is a government enforced privilege. You are failing to understand that. Oddly, you insist that people would not create things without our government enforced copyrights and patents and intellectual property rights. Yes, they are. I pay for the government enforced privilege of intellectual property through my taxes. You are failing to understand that. No. I am saying that your argument that government enforced intellectual property rights has no merit. You were appealing to how much better people are with the new drugs. You think I do not know that??? No, actually I am more of a free-loading hypocrite than a Luddite. I have no choice in deciding who gets protection and neither do you. Nevertheless, both of us are forced to pay for it through our taxes. Just because people with a problem lobby government to solve their problem does not make it right. I am not denying that government actions can do wonderfully amazing things. I am denying their authority. No. My vision of the future is a world that has environmental degradation and socialists still running around chasing their tails trying to find a government to solve their problems. When the whole environment goes to Hell, people who support the coercive powers of government privilege will be to blame. FortN. , the reason your quotations did not display properly is because you accidentally deleted the following first opening quote code: [quote name='Charles Anthony' date='Mar 10 2007, 06:24 PM' post='194549'] ahead of each of your two paragraphs. You can edit your previous post by putting that code back twice before each of your [quote name='Wilber'] codes and it should work.

So, now we bring up hockey?

What the hell do the candidates want in this campaign?? The GazetteWhen asked by a reporter what he thought of Pierre Paradis, Jean Charest is reported to have just smiled. In his shoes, I would have said "The show must go on!" and laughed it off. I want to see their lips move when they speak. This is entertainment. [incidentally, Boisclair says that Quebeckers are electing a leader and not an actor. He is wrong.] I want to see their faces.

-- since he lives in Canada, it speaks volumes about many other things too. Your presumptuous conclusion is not fair.

I agree. Then again, not everybody is so fortunate as to own a house.

Nor will they have them if the people who develop them can't make a reasonable return on their investment.I do not see that as a problem. Of course. I am not denying government privilege or cronyism -- paid by taxes -- can create something beneficial. I am denying the right to government privilege and cronyism. I am not saying we should do without cars. I am denying the auto industry the right to government enforced privilege. It would not make a difference to my freedom. Being free does not mean you have an infinite abundance of choice and opportunity. The Swiss Family Robinson was free on their island. I do not think I phrased it clearly. Most of our technological and transportation culture is fake. Up above in post #71, RWind said that most Open Source advances were cheap knock offs that were nowhere near as good as the originals. Aside from the fact that it is a debatable view, we could also say that most technological advances are more than we really need. Most personal computers today can not operate Microsoft's new Vista which is in fact, a knock off itself of open source Xen technology. Just like the National Arts Center and the Canada Council For The Arts, without government cronyism, barely any of our glorious benefits of copyright would exist. Would that decrease my freedom?? Of course not! I would buy my fruits and vegetables from the local farmers market. Would I be able to get berries all year around? Probably not -- however, that is too bad. On the plus side, I would probably know who my neighbors were a bit better than I do now.

What exactly were those terms? Can you provide a specific link or a reference?

I am considering renewing my television cable service. Unlike hockey games, I doubt I will be able to find a bar in town that will be broadcasting the debate! At least it will be on the radio but that will not be the same thing.

even if you are not making money off of your copies, the copyright owner's ability to make his own profit is negatively affected by your distribution. Try to imagine if you, the pirate, made a copy for every person in the world. The copyright owner would have a much smaller consumer base -- only the people who want the authorized copy would buy. Ridiculous indeed. Guttenburg never invents the printing press, J.S.Bach stops playing the organ, Shakespeare stops writing plays. Oh, where oh, where would we be without copyright?!? Two things. 1) if you are examining our current State of affairs and the laws of Canada, of course you are right. I agree completely that DVD copycats will lose a court battle today. I will not dispute that. 2) if you are arguing the validity of the contracts in a free market, your assumption is unacceptable. The cost of enforcing copyright without government help may be prohibitive in a particular market. The Canadian DVD industry may choose to market their products differently or not at all. Canadians may find it more worth their while to do as the Asians do: wait and pirate. Granted, Pfizer or GSC might not invest at all. On a personal note, I care not. Missing out on the magic creations of Pfizer and GSC or any other drug company is the price one must pay for the virtue of freedom. [There are other prices that come with freedom too, mind you.] On a practical not, I do not think of it as an objectively bad thing. Missing out on the tragic creations of Pfizer and GSC or any other drug company might not be so bad after all. Washington Post I do not believe anybody is owed newer and better technology or drugs or scientific discovery. I challenge all of the government-privilege-enforced-funded apologists to answer this question: In about 500 years, somebody may invent a way to teleport through space. However, it might come at the cost of some people being incinerated or our natural environment being decimated. Should we be forced to pay for the advancement of technology?? BlueBlood made the argument that he should be allowed to copy a logo or a brand name. Doing that is fraud or misrepresentation and he would probably have a hard time defending himself in a free market. However, in a truly free market, who is to say that people would rely on a logo for identifying their product? CAVEAT: This might be thread drift. In a truly free market, international commerce and transportation and telecommunications would not be propped up by government statesmen nor any funding from taxation. As a result, industries would not market the way they do now. People would tend to buy locally compared to importing from abroad. Our abuse of the environment might not go rampant either. I would go to my local soda shop and ask for a cola. The bar tender would pour it from the fountain, the way they did in the good old days. The big cola companies would not likely inflate themselves to the point they are now if it were not for government privilege. You are misunderstanding what a truly free market is. If government participates or influences the market in any way, it is not a free market.

On top of what RWind noted, you can not associate the MLW server configuration to how Google indexes pages. There are two other things. 1) The way that a forum software operates is by calling entries (posts) from a database and a recompiling them on the fly for display on your browser. This display is influenced in part by your display preferences set in your user profile. The page you see is never stored on the forum server. The forum software or server can not absolutely control how Google chooses to index the forum. Thus, when Google indexes a forum, it could conceivably index each thread with 5 posts per page or 25 posts per page or whatever it wants. It could also consider each thread as one continuous page if it wanted -- which it most likely does but nobody knows for sure. 2) Search engines deliberately do not report what they index. If they did, it would be easier for people to figure out how the results are generated. Discrepancies and inconsistencies between numbers of results reported by Google for a particular search and the amount of results displayed have been noted in the past throughout the internet. Try this: look up your site search results site:mapleleafweb.com/forums and click on the numbered page links -- below where it says << Goooooooooogle >> at the bottom. Eventually, you will get the following anti-robot page to stop you. Why? Search engines want to make it very difficult for anybody to deduct (or reverse-engineer so to speak) their algorithm. Google takes a risk by indexing any forum or any database-driven site because it is possible to create a robot that may run repeated searches in the attempts to crack the Google code. Google likely changes its algorithm periodically solely for the sake of preventing this. One of the side effects may be what we observe as inconsistencies in search results.

Do not say my statement is wrong when it is right. In a free market a seller assumes the costs HIMSELF of enforcing his contract of sale. Point final. Once a market is influenced by coercion -- in this case, by the state -- it is NOT a free market. There is no discussion on that point. It matters not one single bit if any other aspect of an economy is influenced by coercive actions either. The single fact, as you admit, "that the state assists copyright owners in enforcing this contract" is sufficient to violate a free market situation. Actually, it is highly unreasonable, at best and dishonest, at worst to make the assertion that our Glorious Almighty State enforces contracts and property rights uniformally for all citizens of the land. If my car gets stolen, I have equal chances asking YOU to come to my aid as I do calling the police. There is different levels of justice for different levels of people in this country and your "free-market" argument is a lame apology for the state. Furthermore, even if there was perfect respect and enforce by the State of property rights, it would still NOT be a free market. Irrelevent. Nobody in the world is owed advances in commercial technology. In fact, most of our environmental problems (conveniently, we expect the State to fix) are caused by government favoring crony-commercialism and assigning political privilege. In a few thousand years from now, is it more important that humans have State-enforced advances in technology or a sustainable environment?? Irrelevant. You speak like both government protection and funding are necessary for them to happen. [incidentally, I can not think of one automobile that drove across Canada that did not avail itself of the exclusively wonderful privilege of the TransCanada Highway. Does that mean it could not be possible to drive across Canada today if the TransCanada Highway was not built years ago?] I can not think of one single person who ever saw the Mona Lisa in person but I can not think of a single person who can not identify her. Shakespeare did not make a living with copyright protection. In fact, the scripts we have today are a result of people (modern-day equivalents of copyright pirates) in the audience who furiously tried to scribble down the verses. States, statesmen, state-privilege and state-warfare will always exist but there will only be one single Beethoven. Guess what the most famously recognizable melody happens to be throughout the world? In a hundred years from now, do you think the latest blockbuster movies and today's latest chart-topping pop hits will be still available on DVD? Maybe. However, they will likely lie in delete bins and lie in landfill sites on the Moon long before the works of any of the masters are forgotten. Appealing to such incentives for innovation or creation is culturally very poor. Excellent point. Excellent point! It violates the contract you agreed to when you purchased the product therefore is it wrong - end of story.False contract. False justification. Without government sanctioned privilege -- once again, I remind, paid by taxes -- those contracts would not exist. If the public opinion in Canada gradually changes so that the vast majority of Canadians want to completely repeal copyright protection laws, those laws might change. Following such a hypothetical turn of events, would you defend the concept of copyright?

No. I do not believe the rest of Canadians are obligated to do so. Whether it is to their advantage to do so is a different question but it is superceded by the question of obligation.If Atlantica was force to survive financially as an independent sovereign nation, how would its economy look?

The state makes you believe that "intellectual" whatever is property but it is not. Property rights are only morally attributable when dealing with physical substances.

-- because they need tech support. Why else would somebody use Windows? Various agents (directly from Windows or from third-parties or mom-and-pop local computer shops) throughout the computer industry charge for that too but such a service does NOT require copyright protection in a free market. BlueBlood, very early on in this thread you said something very significant. You condemned the copyright laws as being a distortion of the free market. You are still absolutely 100% correct and nobody in this thread has been able to dispute this. All they have been doing is providing excuses and apologies for the benefactors of copyright/patent/intellectual (whatever, they are all the same principle) government special privilege and protection -- funded by your taxes, I might add.

Welcome, MB, to the forum.

Part of me thinks the cause is simpler. It is too easy for people to participate in society without being fully responsible for themselves or their family or their friends or their neighbors. Part of our culture involves delegating responsibility to things or people with whom we have no contact -- if they exist at all. In an absolute sense, I do not think we can resolve it in a fair manner. The mentally ill genuinely need compassion but at the risk of being callously partisan, I must object to compelling people to be compassionate. I think the best we can do is make the plight of the mentally ill better in the future. We have to encourage people to assign themselves a power of attorney. It should become part of our culture. We should say: - learn to walk - toilet training - brush and floss your teeth - look both ways before you cross the road - wear a seat belt - stop smoking - exercise regularly - go to school (if you believe that sort of thing) - buy a house - get life insurance - write a will - assign yourself a power of attorney Understandably, not everybody has responsible family or friends, but we can at least start somewhere. Imagine a world where all minor children are de facto assigned their parents to be their power of attorney. When they reach the age of majority, it is a cultural habit to write a will and re-new their assignment of power of attorney. If ever mental illness strikes, there might at least be a little more hope.

Not if you signed a contract promising not to do so.Wrong. In an absolute sense, our copyright laws are still a distortion of the free market by virtue of the fact that the enforcement of the contract comes through taxation and the state. Mr. BlueBlood can not opt out of the money he is forced to pay to enforce the copyright laws. If the HollywoodDVDcopyright holders paid to enforce their contracts themselves, you might have a free market argument. State enforcement and special privilege have insidious ways of choosing winners and losers.

Proponents of the death penalty may not be concerned about deterence. Some of them want to retaliate. No, you did not make an argument. You just stated it as fact. Yes, I was confusing you with somebody who had an argument. Nice try. What connection were you trying to make in your last sentence in your very first post of this thread: Sorry, Ghandi nailed this one very well. An eye for an eye just makes the whole world blind. P.S. Violent offenders do not act rationally. Expecting them to do so is a fallacy. You exclusively quoted that one line of the Opening Post and responded to it by stating your opinion on the rationality of violent offenders to which you linked the choice of justice. Now you are saying you did not. I know you said that. To which I questioned the application of this "criminals tend to act irrationally" theory on how some criminals escape detection. Your belief does not jive with what occurs in real life. I have no trouble reading them and I enjoy how you play with them. You say: which is false and I pointed out that some advocates of capital punishment want vengeance. Even though you quoted from the same post #40 where my statement appears, you conveniently skipped over that. This is irrelevant and wrong since your premise (all theories are based on crime deterrence) is false. I asked about criminals going undetected to which you seem to have no answer. For you, according to your "do not act rationally" belief, criminals who go undetected can not possibly have planned their escape. So, if criminals can not be expected to act rationally (your assertion), is it pure accident that some go undetected?? they happen to irrationally slip through the fine rational detective work and police work??

Maybe the highly constructive "Conservative party membership" comment tainted my attention but I wish I had caught this earlier. Mental illness is particularly different from other aspects of health because it confounds the concept of responsibility and informed consent for treatment. For example, a mentally ill person is told that he has cancer and needs treatment. Following this, he agrees to accepting a proposed treatment but forgets the conversation one minute later. Effectively, the oncologist has said nothing. How should the oncologist spend his time?

Hmm... maybe I will get up off my ass and vote. I must say that if we went back in time 30 years ago, who would have thunk that the leaders of the federal parties would be haggling over which taxes to cut?

Yes. However, given that the effects of each of those crimes can be infinitesimally variable, what does it matter? It makes no sense to generalize. Would you rather have a sexual predator sneak a peek up your kilt or a car thief jack your Porshe? None of that really matters to the victim, does it? I think it is also worthy to note that the general public views and responds to criminals differently. Look at what happens when child molesters are released from prison. Often, they have no place to go and maybe rightly so. Their crime continues to get punished for the rest of their lives -- if it was not punished in prison by fellow inmates enough. You do not understand my explanation for why I say Ghandi is wrong? Suit yourself. I do not care for all theories about capital punishment. I honestly believe that the majority of capital punishment advocates simply want barbaric vengeance -- regardless of their arguments. Personally, I abhor capital punishment. First, I just do not think the rationality of the criminal should matter when it comes to meting out justice. Second, your categorical assertion that crime is irrational does not make sense. If a person can secure their escape from justice, it does not follow that crime is irrational. Do you have trouble believing that not all crime is detected?

Unless you can link his leadership competency to a book written by a fellow party candidate, I think it is just you.

You are assuming that the government should discriminate on the basis or marital status. I would say that the solution to this dilemma is like nail-biting: just stop doing it.