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happyskeptic

Listed below are comments made by happyskeptic between Friday, 31st October 2008 and Monday, 9th November 2009.

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The hard fact of healthcare costs 1:34pm on 09 Nov 2009 "A potential point that some seem to miss is that, with American dollars spent for health care, the world's health care is improved. America funds medical innovation and new perscription drugs. America's defence of Europe and Japan mean more funds for those countries to fund social programs. Because the world gets a discount, America pays more."

America is not a charity - the American-researched drugs that Europe, Japan etc. use are bought at market rates from drug companies whose prices more than cover their R&D spending plus a very healthy profit margin. Drugs don't exclusively come from America and shine down upon the rest of the world like a gift from a benevolent god - Europe for example has its own pharmaceutical industry comparable in size to the US's and those we do get from the US we pay for, fair and sqaure.
Pirate Bay beached but not sunk 09:43am on 18 Apr 2009 After my post (#14) asking for a legal downloads site that matched the features of 'illegal' ones several people suggested Amazon's MP3 service. I've tried it and although it's a huge step in the right direction it doesn't match the criteria I set out in my earlier post.

In particular it's got a limited selection (there is no file-sharing aspect that leads to the almost unlimited selection on P2P networks) plus it's restricted 3 countries - only in the country I live in (Germany) since barely 2 weeks ago!

And the prices are, in my opinion, excessive, especially in this day-and-age where people typically have MP3 collections of thousands or 10's of thousands of songs. That might be subjective but it's still a fact that the prices are set by a cartel of a few record companies through restrictive licence agreements, totally against any kind of capitalist free-market.

I'd encourage anyone who disagrees with the Pirate Bay judgement to take a look at voting for the Pirate Party in the EU elections. You might not agree with everything on their website (I don't) but they can at least provide some balance in government against some of the crazier laws.
The 'Great Firewall of Australia' 5:44pm on 26 Mar 2009 Yet more proof this is a terrible idea from today's Herald:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/03/26/1237657050527.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

So there you have it. Despite the claims by many (including in these comments) that it was only about blocking child porn the government's secret list includes not only normal porn and controversial (although legal) art works but various political and religious ideas that a few beaurocrats and pollies in Canberra happen to personally dislike. Not to mention the innocent small businesses who get caught up in the drag-net and then have no idea why no one can reach them, since it's a secret list, arbitrarily added to by some wowser in Canberra.
The great human rights debate... 8:32pm on 23 Mar 2009 @BrisbaneBen
Thanks and good on ya' for being straight-up enough to say what you think.
The great human rights debate... 8:19pm on 18 Mar 2009 "1) Do not engage in ad hominem arguments. It makes you look like a prat, regardless of what type of person you are. If you want your arguments to be taken seriously by all readers, stick to the topic and attack the persons ideas, not the person."

Hang on a minute, I was responding to someone who instead of replying to my posts spent 2 whole posts attacking me personally. I told her bluntly that if she couldn't string a proper argument together she shouldn't post here, which is a perfectly justified comment.

"(who is the same as HappySkeptic3, if you go through their previous posts)"

The similar usernames deliberately make it obvious I'm the same person, I'm not trying to sock-puppet. (it's due to me not having the happyskeptic password saved on the work computer yet)

"2) My point I'm arguing is that the current laws respect our human rights. You have yet to provide an example dis-proving that. "

http://www.aph.gov.au/LIBRARY/Pubs/RN/2001-02/02rn42.htm
'The Australian Constitution does not have any express provision relating to freedom of speech....There is no list of personal rights or freedoms which may be enforced in the courts. There are however some provisions relating to personal rights such as the right to trial by jury (section 80), and the right to freedom of religion (section 116)'

http://www.humanrightsact.com.au/2008/about-a-hr-act/#15

That's a pretty threadbare set of rights that get legal protection.
Compare it to the UN Universal Declaration of rights, the European Convention on Human Rights or the US Constitution + Bill of Rights.

"3) Your counter-argument jumps over the step of having your rights infringed, appealing to the courts, having that appeal rejected. That then leaves a change of government and a subsequent change in the laws as your next redress of the infringement on your rights."

Not really, the point I was making is that human rights are inadequately or incompletely protected in the law thus leaving no means for appeal to the courts if your rights had been infringed.

"Basically, to disprove my argument, what you need to do is provide an example, based on the current laws of Australia (which I am by no means an expert on), how human rights can be infringed on, with no way through the legal system for any appeal. That would leave a change of government as the only alternative."

And to prove your argument you need to show that the current laws we have protect all basic human rights, especially since Australia is a signatory to most international human rights treaties, and moreso because the general public believes their rights are protected when they really are only de facto at best.

Some examples showing things aren't ok can be found in Amnesty internationals annual reports (about page 65 in the 2008 one) detailing arbitrary detention of Australian terror suspects for example
Or Reporters without borders' various reports:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24544868-26103,00.html
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=25611

"Providing examples where it may be possible one day for them to be infringed, isn't what is needed here."

I disagree, the parliamentry research note lists some of the types of infringements of free speach rights which have happened to date, and which could happen in future too. The main purpose of any human rights act would be to stop human rights infringements that are currently legally possible even if there's no specific case where it's occured.

"The second part of the debate, is how to protect those rights."
I agree this is something that'd have to be worked out.
The great human rights debate... 5:21pm on 16 Mar 2009 "Given that the majority of people (as indicated by the survey) believe their rights are adequately protected under commonwealth law, the answer is no. It's up to those people who believe we do need it, to convince the majority of Australians that it is needed."

But that's the whole problem - the majority of Australian's believe something that's completely untrue. These rights people think we have either don't exist or are not protected, only there by whim of politicians or judges.

By definition Human Rights are a given, they apply to everyone regardless of who they are, where they live or whether they've 'earned' them according to some arbitrary criteria or not. It's therefore up to the opponents of this to prove why human rights in Australia *do not* need protection and guarantees.
YouTube row reflects online minefield 10:05pm on 10 Mar 2009 #27 Gurubear wrote : "So when you all complain that we get upset because you all want to STEAL our property, remember that."

This 'steal[ing] our property' nonsense is exactly the attitude that's leading to the demise of the current music industry and people like you missing out on revenues. Music is not a piece of physical property like a CD or LP anymore that can only be bought from (or stolen from) a shop. It's a bit of data that can be copied and distributed in almost limitless amounts for effectively no cost.

Copyright may give you the right to stop that distribution but in practice this is now impossible to do. The only way you can make money off it is to make licencing deals simple, flat-rate, once-off, no-DRM-strings-attached and world-wide so that anyone can setup a legal online music store with ease and sell music at reasonable prices, and you get your rightful revenue.

However the current philosophy of the music industry which seems to be to try to kill of anything digital and return to the 60's just won't work. The first time I see a 'blocked due to licencing issues' notice I would feel right in simply shruging my shoulders and download it over P2P - after all if you've blocked me from paying you for it why should I feel any guilt about not doing so?
Health care heartbreak 9:48pm on 07 Jan 2009 "Re #96, in answer to my own comment #34, I am self-employed in Germany and was never given the choice to go into the state system but was private from day 1. Health insurance and health care taken together cost me more than anything else, including my house and 2 cars. OK, I earn very good money and can afford it, but a couple of families could live on what my health costs me in a year."

Ok, I've looked into this more (I may become self-employed soon in Germany) and it seems you can only go into the public system as self-employed if you can prove you were part of the public system in another EU country in the past 12 months or something. Germans love their insanely complex laws! I'm not sure about the high costs though - my current (private) insurance costs me 13.8% of my income if I go self-employed (half that currently with employer contributions).

Post 165: "perhaps one possible solution could be having government subsidize several non profit hospitals through out the US, without restricting current health care.
if enough non profit hospitals were established, this could give people in need more options, this could allow those in favor of government intervention a solution,"

Why do Americans never look beyond their own borders when trying to solve these problems? Just about all other Western nations that have public healthcare also have healthy private insurance sectors - supported by the large percentage of middle-class and wealthier people who're prepared to pay extra for that extra care (mainly skipping the queue on non-urgent procedures and so on). There's no need to step tentatively into this - a handful of govt. run non-profit hospitals is not going to make a huge difference - why don't you just catch up with Europe, Canada and Australia here in the 21st century?
Health care heartbreak 11:11pm on 05 Jan 2009 "As regards paying for health care, that is the case in Germany for those with higher incomes. People with low incomes are insured by the State and contribute if they earn above the threshold, but higher earners have no choice but to go private."

This is simply not true. Even if you're over the income threshold (currently pre-tax income of ~47000 euros) you have to explicitly opt to transfer to private. Even then they make it extremely difficult - you in fact need to prove that you've been over this threshold for 2 or 3 years before they'll let you leave the public system.

However...

"In my case the insurer does not pay the first EUR 2500 in a year and then can apply a scale to items so you do not get everything back.."

For us expats (assuming that's what you are) it seems a bit different. On starting a first job in Germany you can seemingly opt straight into the private system (if the income from that job is over the threshold), this is what I did. If you count as having just been 'seconded' to Germany working for an international company, or are self-employed you can even opt out of the German system altogether and instead get international private insurance, although there's a lot of argument over whether this fulfils German legal requirements that everyone have health insurance to a certain standard.

It's the international private insurance or German private insurance that would give you the option of high (eg. 2500 eur) excesses in exchange for lower premiums.
Research on BBC content for GNU/Linux 8:24pm on 31 Oct 2008 "Hatta0, you might read a little bit more a bit GNU/Linux distros and it's multimedia-history. Ignoring the aspects of user experience and content rights, the main technical trouble is about patents on audio and video codecs on the client side."

This is hardly a problem in the real world. Software patents are a grey area legally, especially this side of the Atlantic, but whether these codecs are actually patented people just use them anyway. The process of adding a 3rd party repository and getting the right packages is trivially easy and there are plenty of good instructions on the web (just google "distroname" multimedia codecs). Anyway the whole discussion is moot as there are already good, unpatented audio and video codecs such as the Ogg and Theora ones that anyone can use.

But to the more general point - why are you making it so difficult to get access to your content BBC? As others have pointed out setting up audio and video streaming using open technologies is relatively simple, and will work on all OSes on the client side without special configuration. And you guys really need to drop this DRM nonsense - I can go to any torrent website and download a video file of any Dr Who or Dragons Den episode quickly, with and in a format that will play on virutally any OS or device with no hassles - from my Linux computer to my DVD player.

I'd be happy to get these shows from the legitimate source but that just isn't an option. The reasoning that you need DRM to stop it being pirated is laughable when the only practical way to access the DRM'd content for a lot of people is to use one of the easily available pirated copies.

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