Shinokamen

I'm sorry. What I meant was this: Many people say that his recordings are too fast, and many say that other versions are too slow. I don't really understand what is meant by that because I have not listened to very many renditions of these songs. Are these midis more like Rachmaninoff''s own recordings ("too fast") or like those which are "too slow?"

Not having listened to much Rach before, I went trying to find some samples. Among others, I found these midi files. How close are they to his original recordings? Also, which of the albums available on itunes would be best to purchase? I was looking for Rachmaninoff playing his own stuff, but I couldn't find any of them on itunes.

Who do you think should be put on the president's cabinet in the different Departments? Give a list with the department paired with the person who you think would best promote liberty in that office.

How about something along the line of "What was the reason for concentration camps for Japanese during WWII? Does genetics predispose an individual to a given loyalty?" I have run into this problem often myself, though.

I would love to participate in this! I'll try just about any book you want to read.

Lincoln expanded the government unrelentingly. Everyone seems to like him because he ended slavery, but that was never his attention in the beginning. His only goal initially was to "preserve the union." Lincoln enslaved the entire country by imposing the draft and an income tax. He also threw those who disagreed with him in prison, rather than listen to their argument. FDR is by far the worst president, I think, for his blatant disregard of individual rights and unrelenting expansion of government. Also, he loses points for his (successful) attempt to become a life-long ruler. Cal is often listed as one of the worse presidents that we have had, isn't he? Is that because he did not try to expand government into all aspects of a person's life?

I have been assigned to come up with a list of the greatest presidents in my opinion. I have not been given a standard by which I must rate them, and I am planning to go against the common conception that Lincoln, FDR, Jackson, and the like are among the best for their blatant disregard for individual rights. What I want are suggestions for the best presidents. Should I go with the ones who are usually given low rankings because of their relative inaction (and thus did not do as much to destroy liberty)? Or have there been any truly "great" presidents? Something I just thought of: perhaps I will go with the common idea that FDR (and the others) is "great," but great for his great disregard for mankind and his great need to sacrifice everyone in the country to the common good. Any constructive input would be appreciated.

I voted for Ron Paul for president, rather than abstain. (There is no line to write on in colorado, so I just wrote it up the side between the other names and the line.) I voted all republican for the rest of the offices. Oh, and NO on amendment 48!

Why can't domain names be claimed in the same way that land originally could be? If no one is already using it, and you claim it and use it, shouldn't it become yours? Maybe I am missing something, but I don't understand why you have to pay for a domain name that has not been claimed yet. For example something like www.ministersofsacrilege.com. I don't know why you would want it, but that is not the point. With literally billions of possible names to choose from, why is it that you have to pay for any name you may come up with? If this is in the wrong section, please move it to a more appropriate one.

Alright. I was on Ballotpedia, trying to figure out whether I should vote for or against Colorado's amendments. I am simply requesting some guidance on this. Specifically amendments 47 and 49. I am rather in the dark as far as current laws go, but I fail to see why we should prevent a business from allowing a union if they would want to (for whatever stupid reason). Don't businesses have to agree to allow the unions to control their businesses? Thanks in advance for any help.

Thank you for bringing this up. I had heard about this in passing, but I did not know that it was in Colorado. In my experience (living in a farming/ranching community) the law is that you have to put up fences to keep animals off of your property. Legacy of open range, I guess. Cities have their own laws, but I think this happened outside of a city. Check out this article on open range & fencing. "Any person maintaining in good repair a lawful fence may recover damages for trespass from the owner of any livestock that break through such fence." And according to this article, he did have a "lawful fence." I don't know whether his won his first case or not, but I think he should have. If he did not wait for it to go through, he should have. Ignorance of a law is not an excuse not to follow it.

Although it needs some other features (like themes), I like how it doesn't have stuff on the sides and bottom, making it much more open-feeling for me. I also enjoy the how the downloads go to the bottom of the screen and you can click on them to open them from there. It also runs faster than my firefox ever did. I found a portable version of Chrome. You can download it here. It is small enough to run well off of a Flash drive. P.S. Have you heard that Google is threatening to become a monopoly now?

I apologize for making a huge over generalization of DragonForce's music. The songs of theirs that I enjoy are Through the Fire and Flames, Revolution Deathsquad, and Lost Souls in Endless Time from Inhuman Rampage; Soldiers of the Wasteland and Once in a Lifetime from Sonic Firestorm; Valley of the Damned, Starfire, Heart of a Dragon, and Where Dragons Rule from Valley of the Damned. I had said that nearly all of their music was great, but I should have specified which songs I enjoy, as I now realize that I like about half of their songs. May I ask which album you listened to? As you can see, I myself do not like most of their music. Listen to Starfire if you think that all of their music is the same (although you probably didn't mean that literally). Listen to some tracks off of Ultra Beatdown. You can find them on youtube and some other sites. I will suggest The Warrior Inside, A Flame for Freedom, and The Last Journey Home. The band toned down the guitar solos some in this album to focus more on lyrics and melody (in my opinion). Also, I realize that DragonForce makes a large number of mistakes in their very, very complicated music while playing live, but as I have not seen them live and listen to their recordings, it does not affect the spirit of the songs any for me.

I realize that this is a very old thread, but after reading it through and also finding almost no mention of DragonForce on this site, I feel compelled to put my two cents worth in. Here goes: Anyone who claims that metal is not music has not listened to Blue Oyster Cult, The Unforgiven, The Unforgiven II, Fade to Black, One, The Call of Ktulu, or To Live is to Die by Metallica; Through the Fire and Flames, The Warrior Inside, Reasons to Live or pretty much anything else by DragonForce; or Iron Maiden. Hearing Metal insulted like that made me want to engage in some catharsis of my own, but then I read that it doesn't help and just listened to some music. There's my thoughts on the subject; hopefully my digging this up will get some more constructive discussion instead of the ignorant hatred of metal which was expressed earlier. Ultra Beatdown comes out on August 26th!

This is for those of us who listen to music on their computers. Make yourself an account and download the client. Then when you play a track, the program will "scrobble" it, telling last.fm that you played it. Then we can add each other and see what Objectivists listen to. I'm Shinokamen there, too. There's an Objectivist group. Numbers are pretty low right now, but maybe we can bring it up. What do you guys think? There is an "Objectivist" group and an "Ayn Rand" group

I have often wondered if the apparently arbitrary ages set by law for sex, drinking, voting, driving, etc. are not too high for some and too low for others. Is it at all possible to come up with a better method for deciding the appropriate age for someone?

You got me there. Actually, I did not qualify for that particular hand-out, but I still would have taken it had it been offered to me. I would justify that as money that should have been left to me in the first place, although I know that it would have been better if that money had gone to pay off the debt. However, I know that the money would not have been used to pay off the debt, it would have been used to buy more things that the government should not be concerned with; like the housing market or banks.

I don't claim to have a lot of experience in this kind of thing, but I would agree that accepting money gained from taxes would sanction the increase of taxes. What I mean is that if you were to stop accepting tax dollars or non-existent dollars (i.e. those printed by the federal reserve without any value) the government would probably stop using them. To recap, I think that you should not accept money from the government, at least not in the many of the forms which it is currently handed out in.

I have a WYSIWYG creator, and you can get a free site at aokhost.com, among others.

I am not sure of the punishment exactly, but as I said one of the requirements to check out at the end of the year (along with turning in class books, having lunch account paid off, having all school library books in, having locker clean) is to have your class dues paid.

I live in Colorado. Class dues work are put to a vote by all the members of the class, with a win by a simple majority. Each member of the class usually has until the end of the school year to pay the fee or he is not allowed to check out. I have never known anyone to try this, though. The fee is only $10-30, but I feel that the principal is that which is important. The proceeds from this go to pay for dances and the like, which I believe would be more justly paid for by an admission fee.

After searching this site, I was unable to find anything discussing class dues. By "class dues" I mean fees which are charged in many high schools for unknown reasons (to me). Often there is a vote by the class, but that doesn't seem right to me. I would like some thoughts on this subject. I feel that they exist, in part, to 'prepare' children for taxes. They are put in place by the majority, they pay for things which the students may not want, and there are unknown punishments for disobeying. I thought we were supposed to have "free and public schooling."

Thanks for clearing up my confusion! Where do you guys stand on games (in the form of roms) or albums which are no longer in print? If the copyright owner does not wish to make any money on the games, would they seek reparations for the copying of the games? It seems to me that programs should be patented not copyrighted, as they are tools; you wouldn't copyright a shovel or a drill bit or a computer, would you? After a quick search on google, I found that you can download limewire pro with a torrent and steal the program that allows you to steal music. Ironic, huh?

So, downloading the adobe trial software through a torrent would not be copyright infringement? And do copyright laws prevent you from downloading something that is copyrighted, or just making copies of it (Seeding)?

Thanks for the input! The pre-game stuff is the tail-gating outside of the stadium which I thought would fall under "related-events." Following part of Greebo's response, how does the government track torrent downloads and the like? And how does the copying of a program which a person would not buy if they could not get it for free hurt the creator of the program? Just a few more quick questions I thought of: If the author of a work is dead, but the work is copyrighted by a company, the copyright can't be argued to be protecting the author, can it? And finally, if a company offers a program as a trial, is it an infringement of copyright for another person to download the trial and offer it on a torrent site so that it is easier and faster to download the trial?