They aren't referencing the 1951 movie, but instead the 1920s shorts series called Alice Comedies, the first of which is literally called Alice's Wonderland.
These weren't really retellings of the original stories, but it would nevertheless not be hard to imagine they would count as a derivative work under modern law and would thus have been illegal to produce without a licensing deal.
> So, I guess it wasn’t till after World War Two that their feature films became profitable. They survived, so chances are the shorts brought in money.
According to Wikipedia [0], "The U.S. and Canadian governments commissioned the studio to produce training and propaganda films. By 1942, 90 percent of its 550 employees were working on war-related films." So, it seems they primarily survived by taking government contracts, not producing shorts. In fact, the next paragraph goes on to say, "With limited staff and little operating capital during and after the war, Disney's feature films during much of the 1940s were 'package films', or collections of shorts, [...] which performed poorly at the box office." So I wouldn't say their shorts were particular moneymakers during that time. After the war, they started releasing feature films again (Song of the South, etc).
Although it does seem that in the 20s and early 30s, prior to Snow White, animated shorts and comics (and potentially related merchandising?) were most of the company's revenue.
So, I think it's probably fair to say shorts financed the company through the release of Snow White, but not really any further.
Actually, it uses port 8448 for federation [0], which is unlikely to conflict with other services. But, even if it does, there are ways to specify a different port or subdomain [1].
> As to your second point, we often hire underage people to do work such as restocking shelves. If sex work is truly the same as retail work would you also argue that hiring an underage prostitute is no different than when Walmart hires a 15 year old to push carts? If not, what's the difference?
I don't find this argument compelling. Are you saying that the only professions that are morally permissible are those that we would allow fifteen-year-olds to do? We don't allow them to bartend, drive trucks, nor be members of the US Senate, but I find it silly to think that fact makes those professions particularly immoral. 15 year olds aren't even allowed to work 40 hour weeks in most countries.
And, to answer your question, I think the answer is that the fifteen-year-old is not sexually nor emotionally mature enough to engage in prostitution. (Just like they are not mature enough to serve alcohol or drive, whereas they are likely emotionally mature enough to push carts.) They're below the legal age of consent by three years, for goodness' sake! Advocating for legalized and regulated prostitution is not equivalent to advocating for pedophilia, and I find the equivalence you've drawn troubling.
Well, the burden of proof is on you for saying that there are small trucks on the market. But, it turns out that the complaint about the Tacoma is spot on.
The Tacoma's weight has increased from the 3155 lbs. - 3877 lbs range when it was first released [0], to now being in the 4,425 lbs. – 4,480 lbs range [1]. In comparison, the 2020 Ford F-150 weighs in the range of 4,069 lbs – 4,653 lbs [2]. For fairness, a Ford F-150 from 1995, the first year that the Tacoma came out, weighed around 4,316 lbs [3]. So, they are in fact the same weight.
Similarly, the length of the Tacoma was 30-40 inches shorter when it was released [0][1]. Now, it is within the range of a modern F-150 [2].
In conclusion, the Tacoma has increased substantially in size since its introduction (the Wikipedia page mentions it was reclassified from a compact pickup to a midsize pickup), and is now on par with a Ford F-150 (both modern and the 1995 version) in terms of weight and length.
> Can you give examples of model years and decisions to back up your claim?
Actually, I think the burden of proof is on the GP who made the original claim that there are plenty of small trucks for those who want them. Additionally, it's easier for them —or you— to provide a single example of a common small truck than for the parent to provide a comprehensive breakdown of the sizes of all trucks over decades of model years. Plus, they have already pointed out the Tacoma, at least, as having grown.
> Last I checked this (common) misconception is patently false.
This is merely an assertion with no more evidence than the parent. To flip your question: Can you provide examples of small truck models to back up your claim?
I mean, probably, but the article is explicitly only looking at states with the death penalty:
> In the analyses below, we include only states allowing the death penalty in the year of analysis. Because we focus on the geographical variability in the use of the death penalty, we exclude the US military (which has sentenced 15 individuals to death since reestablishment in 1984, but carried out no executions) and the federal government (which has issued 79 death sentences since reinstatement in 1988, and carried out three executions).
And with this in mind, they still found that death sentences didn't correlate well with the homicide rate:
> The table also lists the rate of death sentences per 100 homicides and the rate of homicides per 100,000 population. If there was a direct link among these variables, we would expect some consistency here. But we see very little. In fact, the correlations are surprisingly low; in fact, the rate of death sentences per 100 homicides and the rate of homicides per 100,000 population correlate at -0.12. The counties with the highest raw numbers of death sentences listed in the table include not a single county that ranks in the top 100 with regards to death sentences per 100 homicides.
First, even the death penalty rate isn't approximately equal across the sample, so it's not just population. And second, they are saying that the death penalty rate doesn't even correlate well with the crime rate. And yet there are still a few outlier counties that have an abnormally high death penalty rate! That is what is unintuitive. I mean, sure, it makes some sense that some counties are more likely to issue the death penalty than others, even where it's legal, but it's a huge skew, and it's very different from saying "Texas has a lot of people."
I assume you mean to imply that population alone explains the title of the post? My guess is the argument goes:
(1) Crime scales with population.
(2) Death sentences scale with crime.
(3) Therefore, death sentences should scale with population.
(4) The U.S.'s geographic distribution results in very dense clustering such that only a handful of counties have a lot of population.
(5) Therefore, we would expect to see only a handful of counties account for the majority of death sentences.
However, this line from the abstract seems to make (2) unlikely:
> The number of death sentences in a given county in a given year is better predicted by that county’s previous experience in imposing death than by the number of homicides.
Thus, their argument is that something much deeper is going on than just population-level trends.
Actually, I recommend you check out Freenet [0], a project that's 20 years old. In fact, the Wikipedia page explicitly states:
> Information flow in Freenet is different from networks like eMule or BitTorrent; in Freenet:
> 1. A user wishing to share a file or update a freesite "inserts" the file "to the network"
> 2. After "insertion" is finished, the publishing node is free to shut down, because the file is stored in the network. It will remain available for other users whether or not the original publishing node is online. No single node is responsible for the content; instead, it is replicated to many different nodes.
> Realtime mass surveillance of every party who receives money is isomorphic to realtime mass surveillance of everyone.
I don't believe it is.
For instance, imagine a closed system of three people: Alice, Bob, and Carol. Initially we start off with seeding both Alice and Bob $100 via Taler. We can see that because it is public. Then, we see that Carol receives $5. That is also public. Who gave Carol the $5?
If surveillance of money received is isometric to full surveillance, you should be able to answer this question, but clearly there is insufficient information, so clearly they are not isometric. There may be special cases where sufficiently large transactions can only have come from a small pool of wealthy transactors, but I bet this would be essentially meaningless in practice, and is absolutely not the same as equating the system to full surveillance of every participant.
Sure, the bridge operator could do that, but why? Bridges don't operate as efficient markets with heavy competition, instead they tend to act as regional monopolies. If you don't cross this bridge, you usually have to drive an hour or more out of your way. This market position of the bridge operator gives them outsize leverage over their customers, and so there is no incentive for them to compete on things like price or low traffic congestion, because who are they competing with?
So, I'm not sure a "profit motive" is really the solution here. Yes, the bridge operator could make that contractual offer and add towing infrastructure out of the goodness of their heart, but there's no incentive to doing so. A decent local government does have that incentive (as they are responsible to the commuters as voters), so they offer that service. You could have regulation that forces the bridge operator to provide this service instead of the government, but is that really less government intervention?
> This isn't a crazy outcome and it matches up well with traditional property laws.
Yeah, but copyright is not a form of traditional property right. Intellectual "property" rights are better thought of as intellectual monopolies granted for a limited time, and this is important because intellectual works have some very different properties that separate them from physical property.
For instance, in your examples, the lawn mower cannot easily "un-mow" the lawn nor the painters "un-paint" the house. Any attempt to do so would be labor intensive. However, in the OLGA copyright case, the publishers can trivially force the infringers to no longer publish the tabs, undoing any further damage. In the lawn mower and house painting case, the labor is fundamentally tied to the physical property being infringed. However, with intellectual property, this is explicitly not the case. The tabs do not alter the original song in any way, they are merely a derivative work.
To be explicit, while the transferal of rights over the tabs to the copyright holders may be granted by a judge as part of reparation of harm done, I see no reason that the music publishers should presume to own the rights outright without the intervention of a court.
For one final example as to why we should not conflate intellectual works and physical property, if I were to trespass onto your land and paint a beautiful painting of your landscape (with supplies I own) and then leave without causing damage, do you... own the painting? Just own the copyright? Own none of it? It is definitely not clear to me that you should automatically own my painting, even if I infringed your property rights by trespassing.
Well, despite what anarcho-capitalists may say, in an anarchist society you would find it very hard to maintain capitalism as is familair to us today. This is because the State, and by extension its threat of violence, enforces private property rights. In a truly anarchist system where no other protection force evolves to reinstitute the government's role in protecting private property, you would have a very hard time building large amounts of capital. You may be able to control some small amounts of relatively private property (in addition to some personal property), but you absolutely could not maintain the current breadth of our global supply chain without the credible threat of violence from a large organization bent on maintaining private property rights.[0]
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[0]: Merely the threat of violence from a large organization, but not one with a goal of maintaining private property rights, is insufficient to maintain capitalist supply chains, because such an organization would naturally try to increase its own power through force. It would look more like a warlord, cartel, or small-time dictatorship with all of the corruption that implies than a smoothly working system of trade.
I'm sorry, but I don't think that's what they were saying at all. To me, it sounded like they were saying that when a developer works alone at nights or on the weekend, they cannot ask other members of the team, or the person who originally filed the ticket, any questions. Thus, if the ticket is vague, or if they have a question about a part of the codebase they are less familiar with, they have to spend a lot of time trying to divine the answers themselves when they could just walk over or message their colleague for the answer on a normal work day. Spending three hours rederiving trivial knowledge that other members of your team already know (such as which package something is in, or the exact set of inputs that reliably reproduce a bug), IS spending time on the wrong things.
I agree that a manager shouldn't micromanage to the point that they believe developers cannot be productive without their manager physically present, but that is not what they were talking about. The comment isn't about the developer needing their manager's insight or guidance, but about the developer needing the expertise of the rest of the team, which they will not have access to at nights or on the weekend.
My understanding is that while yes, in some sense a flat tax is neither progressive nor regressive, that's not really what people are talking about when they say a flat tax is regressive. Instead, the issue is that the poorer you are, the larger percent of your income is spent on essentials.
If I go from spending $200/month on groceries and then I get an enormous 300% raise at work, I'm not going to start spending $800/month on groceries, maybe $300. The rest goes into the discretionary part of my budget. So, to someone making $40,000/year, paying 20% of that in rent, 10% for food, 20% for healthcare, and 15% for other stuff, adding a 15% tax is a decent chunk of the rest of their budget. But, for someone making $400,000/year, paying 15% for rent, 2% for food, 10% for healthcare, and 15% for everything else, then 15% of their income towards taxes is comparatively much less of their total budget!
This is true, even though everyone is paying a proportional amount of their income. Another way of thinking about this is as follows: if there is a homeless woman on the side of the street who makes $30 one day begging for change, should she be taxed at 15% and have to give the government $4.50 because it's "fair", or, should she be receiving more value in benefits than the average citizen because there is a floor on how much you can spend on food and survive?
Thus, even a flat tax can in practice be regressive, because essential spending does not scale with income.
An addendum: While it is not relevant to this argument, I also agree with the other commenters that whether a tax system is flat or has marginal brackets is not the main source of complexity, and is relatively super simple. The main complexity comes from determining which sources count as income. Presumably, birthday presents don't, but whoops, now there's an exception. And this is suddenly how tax laws get super complicated.
For your first question, this is mostly about legal interpretability. The GPL has a long text that describes explicitly what it allows and doesn't. Yes, that is based on an ethical framework, but that ethical framework is all baked into the text of the license. There is no ambiguity. The GP contrasts this with the JSON license which only uses the term 'good' to describe what it allows. This is incredibly ambiguous from a court's perspective, likely past the point of just being thrown out as a clause in a legal contract.
For your second question, you are right that you don't have 'complete freedom,' which another commenter pointed out cannot even theoretically exist. The closest you really get is public domain, in which you're not even restricted like the MIT; you don't even have to list the author! (IANAL, so this is not legal advice, but just my understanding.) However, the GPL is not interested in guaranteeing complete freedom, in the style of very permissive licenses. Instead, it's interested in maximizing end-user freedom. An MIT library can immediately be placed in a proprietary program, and now the end-user has none of the Four Freedoms, though the author of the program still has all of them. So, the GPL puts restrictions on developers and how they can use the software ('limiting freedom', if you want, though it's the freedom to limit others' Four Freedoms that is being limited), to guarantee that the Four Freedoms reach the end-user. This does lead to incompatibility as you've outlined, and so goreportcard would have to adopt the GPL to use the library and remain compliant (again, IANAL), but from the perspective of the GNU foundation, this maximizes the total number of freedoms retained because it continues to protect end-users. I hope this helps, I wanted to expand on what the goals of the GPL actually are, since you seemed to earnestly be asking.
WebAuthn is only secure because it entrusts to browser to pass verified domains to your USB key. Why can't SQRL just do that with no other protocol modifications? Then we don't trust the user with anything, protocol-wise. Cause sure, if the site can pass a QR code or URL directly everytime, that's an issue because you're still trusting the user to manually verify the domain, but if the interaction is mitigated by a trusted party (i.e. the browser), then I don't see the problem.
I'm not so sure that's a false dichotomy. There are plenty of elements of Christian myths that are considered 'scientific reality', such as people and fruits and the fact that the Romans crucified people. There are also elements that are not. However, there are also influences on our culture that originate neither in science nor in Christian theology.
I think you interpret that passage to mean: "All influences must be from science OR religion, but not both. It is from religion. Therefore, it is from science." However, I interpret it more along the lines of: "Science has not backed up this idea of free will. So, how did we get this idea in our culture, you might ask, if it's not real? Well, it is inherited from Christian myth." This second reading is not an argument (he's not proving why free will is not a scientific reality), but an explanation of why the idea of free will exists.
You may still not be convinced by his assertion, but I don't think it's a false dichotomy. Additionally, he may make such assertions in his work Homo Dues (which I have not read), but I don't think this is necessarily an example of fallacious reasoning.
I disagree. If the community wants to make that illegal, they should make it explicitly illegal, and go through the formal processes of review and enactment that allow for checks on the power of the government. Incredibly broad, rarely enforced laws only allow for corruption by the powerful. If communities should be allowed to use the full force of law (which, of course, can legitimately steal from you, lock you up, or kill you) to maintain social norms without them being explicitly defined, then what is the point of law in the first place? (Which is arguably a system of explicitly defining norms and the consequences of breaking them, with the implication that these norms are universal.)
Those laws should never have been used, and if the community wanted to dissuade future productions, they should have passed laws at the city, county, or state level that allows for the proper checks and balances.
These weren't really retellings of the original stories, but it would nevertheless not be hard to imagine they would count as a derivative work under modern law and would thus have been illegal to produce without a licensing deal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Comedies