Does anyone understand what this part of the original privacy article meant?

quote:

The Minister of Industry, together with Liza Frulla, his Canadian Heritage counterpart, are also reportedly about to finalize new rules that may reshape the availability of Internet content to educational institutions. Acting on the recommendation of a parliamentary committee that was chaired by Toronto MP Sarmite Bulte, the government may soon unveil a new "extended license" that would require schools to pay millions of dollars for content that is currently freely available on the Internet.

While the committee recommendation excluded payment for content that is publicly available, it adopted the narrowest possible definition of publicly available, limiting it to only those works that are not technologically or password protected and which contain an explicit notice that the material can be used without prior payment or permission.

It sounds like this proposal has its advantages and disadvantages... advantages is that from the American side, this sounds like a great way to cut down on foreign competition for tech jobs! disadvantages is that proposals like this might help pave the way for the new dark ages, and new dark ages might offer humanity some possibility of survival.

P.S. Charma: if Joe hires a cop and Jim hires a dope dealer, don't they both have jobs?

Call me crazy, but maybe if the guy wasn't breaking the law the mounties wouldn't have raided him.

Who knows? Maybe one of them even support the legalisation of marijuana. But they executed their duty, because someone was breaking the laws of their country.

And maybe, just maaaybe, some of those people in jail might actually have commited crimes.

Just a hypothesis. You need to grow up if you feel you can break the law and simply be allowed to get away with it - that ain't how society works.

Or even better, drop the bong and get out and work on getting the laws changed.

banshee, you are one unbelieveably stunned cunt.

quote:

Originally posed by banshee:
Every time a person spends money, especially in America, he's guilty of some kind of a crime... You're picking out one rare special case from a background of endless violence and mayhem.

If I'm following you correctly, we're all guilty, damned no matter what we do. If that's the case, we can draw one of two conclusions:
1) All wrongs are morally equal, so we can do whatever we want, because nobody is better than anyone else, regardless of their actions. The jaywalker is in no position to judge the rapist. After all, the jaywalker was diverting valuable police resources that could be used to stop murderers. As such, any infraction of the law should be punishable by death, (or not punished at all,) since all wrongs are equal.
2) There are different degrees of wrong. It is more wrong to, for example, shoot four cops, than it is to ignore a homeless man asking for money.
Most people have accepted number two. Most people also accept the necessity of a state and laws, and the need for people employed by the state to enforce those laws.

quote:

"Just doing their jobs", maybe. But then again, the guy who did the shooting was also just doing his job, no?

By that logic (dealing dope is just as legitimate a way to make money as keeping the peace) a child slaver is no better and no worse than a doctor working to cure AIDS. After all, you have to make a living somehow, and children are so dumb, you can't help but catch them.

P.S: You still haven't explained why shooting Mounties is more tragic than shooting DEA.

quote:

Originally posted by charmakarmacat:
banshee, you are one unbelieveably stunned cunt.

HA HA HA HA HA!!!

I'm with the cat.

A brilliant summation, CKC.

quote:

Originally posted by BlueShift:
2) There are different degrees of wrong. It is more wrong to, for example, shoot four cops, than it is to ignore a homeless man asking for money.

No, Blueshift, all I ever said here was that it's more wrong to ignore someone who is genuinely starving than to worry about whether your hypothetical dope money might conceivably encourage a police shooting.

You people seem to want it every which way. When the police round up somebody, or half a million somebodies, for possessing some plant, this word you use, "should", is absolutely meaningless. People can run around and say that they "shouldn't" enforce the laws or they "should" make treatment as easy to get into as a prison, or they "should" let all the harmless people go, and it's all blather - it adds up to nothing, not now, not ever.

Then you people turn around and crap all this meaningless "should" at me - this nut "should" have preferred to go to jail than to shoot the people who just ruined his life, I "should" try to change the law because we all know what a great democracy the USA is, I "should" refrain from some genuinely hypothetical habit because it might conceivably create such incidents, and above all, that I "should" sympathize more with these professional housebreakers than with a guy who is so sincere about his feelings that he even added his own death to the list. What is this nonsense? "Should" doesn't mean anything, remember? I prefer to admire Loki - when Princess Diana died, the animals wept, the trees wept, the stones wept, but Loki didn't care. 9/11 was like that too, but it lasted twice as long.

There are no guarantees. Maybe they'll lock you up for growing a plant. Maybe someday they'll come after me and shoot me because I said I couldn't give a damn about their dead narcotics agents. Not giving a damn seems to be an offense to you people, after all - you seem to require that a person feel thus and so, at the right times, for the right things, and never mind anything else. But threats and attacks are the sum total of their moral persuasive power, and it is often effective. There is nothing else beyond that.

banshee, if you are going to practice moral relativism, then you should be aware that cultures and states are like giant planetary masses, and unless you live in a hut in the woods, you'll be sucked into them and have to deal with their own special type of gravity, on their own grounds. even though I do not share your opinion, I understand your point of view, and quite simply, you are wasting your time trying to defend your position. more importantly, you are wasting your effort since most of the people are simply going to take charma's tact and make a mockery of anything else you post about the subject. if you have any sense of public decency, then it would really be better for all involved to stop giving them fuel for their sport: unless you possess some nasty exhibitionistic streak of masochism, in which case, by all means, flame on.

quote:

Originally posted by banshee:
I "should" try to change the law because we all know what a great democracy the USA is

Dude, we're not in USA any more. Things different up here.

(insert "Insensitive Clod" joke)

not guilty.

i'm afraid i know next to fuck-all, but from what i can make out this looks like a real all-around-bed-shitting-kerfuckery. a goddamned shame. one hundred and thirty million fucking dollars. wasted.

No kidding. After all that hoopla, a case built on unreliable testimony??!!

quote:

Originally posted by Pauline:
No kidding. After all that hoopla, a case built on unreliable testimony??!!

Aren't they all?

quote:

The acquaintance is an American citizen paid $460,000 by the RCMP to testify. The man has a long history as an FBI (news - web sites) informant and used that position to gain U.S. citizenship.

On the eve of his testimony he tried to get more money out of Canadian police.

"His entreaties for immigration assistance at the same time he was demanding this additional payment firmly belie any notion that he was motivated other than by self-interest," Josephson said.

It sounds like the Mounties have learned a lot from the Americans, but Canadian judges are woefully behind. Canadians need a big dose of advertisements about how this limp-wristed terrorist-hugging technicality-spouting judge let a craven killer loose on the street as an activist statement of his distrust of police and police informants! Jesus, can you believe a judge would let a little thing like $460,000 stand in the way of a conviction??! An American judge would uphold that testimoney on appeal!

I'm sure you're right, fuckwit. Except that acquittals can't be appealed.

It's good that you've formed your brilliant opinion of our system after studying it carefully and learning it well.

Yes, at the moment appeals do follow convictions. Which was my point.

The U.S. juries have traditionally had few qualms about paid jailhouse informants claiming an otherwise innocent person decided to blab gory details of his crime during the night in the cell, and finding someone guilty based on that "evidence" alone.

Hey, if you dudes wanna argue about American jurisprudence, whyn't y'all take it to the American thread?

Oh, wait, the American thread's about Iraq. My mistake.

_{Hehhehhehhehheh.}

Dear Mary Mother of Christ in a Brothel, how did I miss this thread?

One aspect of this discussion troubles me: the assumption it's possible to know and control the affects your actions have on society at large.

Yeah, I know, who could argue against that? I wouldn't argue against it, so much, except to point out that the as the systems in which we seek to observe the affects of our individual actions grow in scope and complexity it becomes increasingly difficult to say with any degree of certainty what our actions' affects on others will be. Sure, you throw a cup of hot coffee at the boss, you're going to get your ass fired. You cut down on the amount of energy you use, and you cut down on your contribution to green house emissions which in turn decrease the chances that you or your progeny are going to fry in a hot and unstable climate.

But, in the latter case, you're basing your actions on a very complicated set of assumptions that one would need Ph D's in chemistry, atmospherics, geology, complexity theory, economics and a host of others to truly understand, if such an understanding is indeed possible (and, for the record, my opinion is: when in doubt, err on the side of caution, so let's just try and cut that nasty CO2 down a bit, shall we?. Clearly - to me at least - the more moral action is to do what you can regardless of any assurance of outcome so long as it doesn't negatively affect those around you.)

However, when one reaches such a complex problem as the effects of drug use on society, almost any position is morally or historically defensible because we lack unambiguous data about drug production and use in general (not in particular, however, which I'll get to later). We have examples of cultures that used what would now be considered highly dangerous drugs for thousands of years with no ill effect and examples of countries and communities torn apart by drug production and use in just a decade. We have examples of productive members of society remembered by history fondly who were lifelong users of what are now illegal drugs and examples of kids committing suicide after using LSD once.

So, it's difficult to understand what affect drugs use will have on an individual, much more so to predict what affect it will have on a society (for example, consider the different outcomes of policy in Colombia and Holland). Trying to predict what affect law and enforcement will have on the situation is, in my opinion, a little easier, but only because it's such a large factor determining how drugs are produced and sold, not because of any privileged epistemic or moral position laws and their production hold, as Banshee has pointed out.

My point is: when the "facts" of situation point to no clear overall pattern, it's perhaps naive to assume that you can understand how your individual behavior might or might not affect this theoretical pattern. The only things you can understand about drug use are those close to home; how does it affect you? If your community has a problem with crystal meth wrecking families and causing violence, than you should do something about it (like not buy pot from someone you know deals in meth or to quit smoking it if he's the only game in town). But, by the same token, if your community has a problem with crime and poverty because more than a quarter of the young men are locked up due to unfairly enforced and draconian drug laws, you should deal with that as well (like lobby to legalize drugs, or make prisons more useful and humane or to, at least, make sentencing guidelines more fair.)

Unfortunately, in the first case, your actions will clearly have an affect, albeit a small one. In the latter case, one presupposes a faith in the democratic process that has not, at least in the USA in recent memory, been born out by experiential data.

In that light, I think it makes sense to redefine the morality of drug use in a much more personal frame of reference: how does it affect me, my family, and the community in which I live? In other words, Smoking pot in Berkeley is not the same as pushing crack in South Central. Having two martinis may be just a good time to "social" drinker but can spell ruin for an alcoholic. Likewise, drug laws in Holland may not work in America. All that said, clearly, in the US (and in other places) our drug policies are not working. We seem unable to change demand (it does in fact appear to be an historical constant in many cultures), so perhaps we should revisit drug policy afresh bearing in mind that just as not all individuals are alike in their desire for or response to drugs, likewise, not all communities suffer the same ill effects of drug use or drug laws.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that drug use and production is a complex problem that on some level affects many people. I don't think, however, that we're looking at the problem the right way, and until we stop thinking in absolutes (my "right" to get high on the substance of choice be it chocolate or alcohol or smack vs. the community's right to protect itself from perceived immorality or actual violence and predation), and until we stop basing our decision on specious assumptions, we're not going to get anywhere.

quote:

Originally posted by banshee:
Yes, at the moment appeals do follow convictions. Which was my point.

Oh, that's right, I forgot that you're posting from Bizarro-World and that everything you say comes out as the opposite of what you mean.

quote:

The U.S. juries have traditionally had few qualms about paid jailhouse informants claiming an otherwise innocent person decided to blab gory details of his crime during the night in the cell, and finding someone guilty based on that "evidence" alone.

Really? Da-a-a-a-a-a-ayum it must be easy to work in law enforcement in this country. Maybe I should consider that as a career choice. It sounds like a job that requires almost no effort at all.

Naturally, if what you say is true, then no one must ever be acquitted in American courts, as your average crackhead would sell his own soul for $1.95 (Hell, even $1.95 Canadian, to bring this back on-topic), so I imagine he'd be willing to sell someone else's soul for even less. Why bother even investigating crimes anymore? Just compile a list of non-credible jailhouse informers, pile up a stack of $1 bills, and pay them off one by one to convict everybody and their sister.

In that world, you only get out of a jail sentence if the cops really like you for some reason and decide not to get you put in jail.

Assuming, banshee, that you're not posting from jail, that must mean the cops love you, man! And I don't know about the rest of the folks here, but that makes me very very suspicious of you.