"At stake, say supporters, are American jobs. Every free piece of content scraped to be sold, or given away, online takes money out of the pockets of record companies, movie producers and other content creators and their millions of employees.
Pharmaceutical companies, sports leagues and video-game makers have also voiced support.
"Especially in this time of economic recovery, we cannot stand by and watch while American companies and the jobs they support are being bled by foreign criminals who are taking advantage of a massive loophole in our law enforcement capabilities," wrote Steve Tepp, who works on counterfeiting and piracy issues for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "These illicit enterprises are not tolerated in the brick and mortar marketplace, so why would we allow them to flourish unchecked online?""
Rhetoric of SOPA supporters > Rhetoric of SOPA detractors, when it comes to winning public support. The message needs to be streamlined...
This started as an idea to save money on laundry. We've visited the offices of Dropbox, Twilio, PB Works; even new startup Piazza, and we always accepted free t-shirts because it means more to wear and less to wash. Our ambitious goal: Sell 25 startup tee shirts for $25 each from 25 of our favorite startups. "
"The denial of an objective moral law, based on the compulsion to deny the existence of God, results ultimately in the denial of evil itself...
The one who raises the question against God in effect plays God while denying He exists. Now one may wonder: why do you actually need a moral law giver if you have a moral law? The answer is because the questioner and the issue he or she questions always involve the essential value of a person. You can never talk of morality in abstraction. Persons are implicit to the question and the object of the question. In a nutshell, positing a moral law without a moral law giver would be equivalent to raising the question of evil without a questioner. So you cannot have a moral law unless the moral law itself is intrinsically woven into personhood, which means it demands an intrinsically worthy person if the moral law itself is valued. And that person can only be God.
Our inability to alter what is actual frustrates our grandiose delusions of being sovereign over everything. Yet t he truth is we cannot escape the existential rub by running from a moral law. Objective moral values exist only if God exists. Is it all right, for example, to mutilate babies for entertainment? Every reasonable person will say “no.” We know that objective moral values do exist. Therefore, God must exist. Examining those premises and their validity presents a very strong argument. "
short summary: America, for its fear and litigious society, is neutering herself.
This does not nail it though on why the country is failing at Math & Science. Parental influence is the top correlation between children and success in school. It's not a surprise that 50% of STEM degrees are going to International students (who make up less than 10% of the general US student populous) -- their parents push them towards the most difficult degrees -- Sciences, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
This from 28 February 08 (and blog posts dating back about 9 to 10 months as well):
We have been working on our Social Marketplace “Onista” for quite sometime and every week (and every month) we think we are almost ready for launch “only if we fix these remaining little issues”. To be honest, there is no such thing called “little issues”. There are bugs in product (tons of bugs) and we must fix those before launching.
"5. They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives, and the mainstream culture) and their access to information is severely controlled."
Yet on Hacker News, the recruiting grounds of said cult, this post (information contrary to the teaching of said cult) has ascended to the top?
Rhetoric of SOPA supporters > Rhetoric of SOPA detractors, when it comes to winning public support. The message needs to be streamlined...