This WHOLE THREAD started with MY OPINION on what the law should be. YOU decided to argue with me. Now you're hiding behind the law that was passed... which was what I was talking about in the first place.
You argue in circles. I have nothing further to say here.
"It doesn't matter what I think... what matters is what a judge thinks. If a person has doubts about the matter, they shouldn't do it.... Arguing otherwise only defends the sick people who do this shit."
No, what matters is what reasonable people think. The U.S. is a Common Law country, and as such, laws are designed around the "Reasonable Man" principle (increasingly called "reasonable person"). That means a reasonable citizen, not a judge.
Judges DO have to decide what a reasonable person in public might think; but they are required to do so from the point of view of that reasonable person, not from their position up on that bench.
"Something can be covered and there can still be a picture of it... either by utilizing specifically crafted shooting angles, which would be evidenced by looking at the photograph itself, or utilizing sophisticated surveillance systems which *can* image directly through clothing. Intent to not be seen naked, as I said, would be implied by virtue of wearing clothes in the first place, and any other alleged intent would require consent. "
Now you're really reaching. I was discussing reasonable everyday circumstances. Now you're way off talking about something very different. I have no particular desire to go there.
But your idea of a "reasonable person" may not be somebody else's idea of a "reasonable person".
Nudists are not uncommon, for example. I even know a few.
"That would also mean that even somehow photographing a middle-eastern woman's face, when she ordinarily wears a sari, would be violation, unless the photographer has received explicit consent. "
Exactly. Which most people in the United States do not consider "reasonable". You're making my point for me.
You're trying to regulate "public" in a ridiculous manner. It would never work. Not in a free society, anyway.
"Even at that, both Uberoid and cyanogen both have some extra apps I'll never use that I'd like to get rid of.."
It is my understanding that as long as it's not an essential system app, Cyanogen will let you delete it.
My current phone has had some hardware compatibility issues. The radio did not work when I tried Cyanogen on it so I had to switch back. I'm going to keep an eye out for a newer version.
"The dirty little secret of the CPU industry is that chips went from "good enough" to insanely overpowered several years so unless you are doing a job that needs every last drop of power you can squeeze (wave simulation, heavy number crunching) you'd be hard pressed in a blind trial to tell an AMD from an Intel....except when you got the bill and saw how much money you can save."
Tell that to my $3000 laptop which is now 6 years old and on which I do development work... slamming both cores pretty hard, because I have 7 applications running at once, all of them necessary to what I do.
Granted, that isn't your everyday home user, and that is on my laptop, but it's not THAT unusual either. And don't forget games!
As for AMD... there is still the chance of a comeback but slipped behind Intel in the desktop market and are struggling to keep up.
"Then I think they really have a shot here in the states too as I don't know how many folks I've talked to that are seriously pissed at their Android phones because the carriers are so piss poor when it comes to pushing updates."
I won't argue with you there. Presumably, they will be able to update the OS as long as the hardware will support it.
"You've never seen someone do something and had a strong conviction one way or the other whether they did it by accident or on purpose? I know I have."
Of course I have. But that's not the point. This is a law, for which someone can be convicted and thrown in jail. So the point isn't what you think, at all. The POINT is what you can prove in court.
"I have a reasonable expectation of privacy."
Not in public you don't. If you're in public, and you hang it out, I'll take a picture of it. Maybe even accidentally! So don't hang it out.
"If you simply acknowledge that taking photographs where a person or persons are the primary subject requires disclosure and consent solves the problem no less neatly."
I already did. Did you read the whole thread you are replying to, or just that one comment above? Give me a break.
But even then, there are exceptions. BIG exceptions. News? You can't go by that, because who decides what is a news service, and what is not? The government CAN'T decide that... the Constitution says so. And a judge just recently ruled about that very thing: if you're blogging or writing about things on the Internet, for example, you have the same legal protections as the New York Times.
"Most photography would not be affected by what I suggested, only photography that reveals parts of the subject's body which were actually covered by the subjects clothing, in which case informed consent would be required.."
You're making a distinction that isn't real. It is contradictory. If it's part of the body that's covered, then by definition there will be no picture of it. It if is in a picture, then by definition it was not covered.
And if you are saying a part of the body that is intended to be covered, then you are opening yourself up to gross abuse of the law, because anybody can lie about their intent, any time they want.
So why stop there? Why not just throw people in jail for any crime on somebody's say-so?
What's that you say? Because you should need actual evidence to convict someone of a crime?
"Not impossible, just illegal. It would be up to a judge to determine if any particular photo did more public good than it harmed the people being photographed."
Okay, technically not impossible. But unreasonably impractical to the point that people would simply stop taking public photography. If any public photograph could be taken to court on anybody's say-so, you have an impractical law that would be nearly impossible to enforce.
Laws are not intended to be so vague that anybody can take someone else to court whenever they disagree. In common-law countries like the U.S., laws are required to be reasonable.
"Reading this and the first post, I think this is still a slightly different version of "she was asking for it". I'm sure you could see it if you tried to separate the two sets of crimes."
Just no.
The problem is that you are ASSUMING, in the first place, that the person taking photographs of something that happens in public is committing a crime. On what basis do you make this judgment? Where would you draw the line? (And this is the whole problem.) You want to take pictures of a public building? Why not? That's not a crime, is it? Well, what if there are people on the front steps of the building? Is it suddenly a crime to take a picture?
There are all kinds of ways you can go to extremes here. But at some point those extremes become reality.
So, now: let's just say that we agree you can still take pictures of that public building, if a few people just happen to be standing near it that will be in your picture. That seems reasonable.
Then some woman standing on those steps lifts up her dress. (Maybe you didn't notice, maybe you did.) Should it now be illegal to take that same picture? Why? What gives that person the right to control where you take your pictures?
That may sound ridiculous to you but it's actually quite important. If you say no, it is still your right to take that public picture, when does tht change? Does it change when the woman lifting up her dress is standing in a crowd and facing you? Does it change when you are in a smaller public place, like a food court in a mall? Maybe in a bus?
See, it isn't a matter of "her asking for it", like some people would say if she walked down the wrong alley at night in a skimpy dress. (You and I would probably agree that she was NOT "asking for it", but just as an example of what we're talking about.) Because a rape or something of that nature is already a crime anyway. You'd be saying (wrongly, probably, but still saying) she was asking you to commit the crime.
But the reason THIS situation is not the same, is that she's not "asking for" someone to commit a crime... she's CONTROLLING WHETHER or not it is a crime. Do you see the difference?
If she were not there, it would not be a crime for you to take a picture of the bus. If she is there, and the laws are made that way, SHE could decide whether a crime was committed on her merest whim, by simply saying what her "intentions" were. She can control your behavior by forcing you do not do something you would otherwise be able to legally do... and decide whether or not you are a criminal, any time she wants.
And that's not what laws are supposed to be about. Laws say what is illegal, people on the street don't. That's why there has to be a line, and it can't be left up to vague "intentions". You can't leave it up to somebody's say-so whether something was a crime or not. (Again, that's a different situation from saying somebody is guilty of theft or something which is a crime anyway, they're just giving witness.)
But if you make the simple rule: "If you don't want it seen, don't show it" then everybody knows what the line is, and nobody has to try to read anybody else's mind to know whether their behavior is criminal or not. AND... you don't have anybody bullying anybody else over threats of saying they committed a crime when they didn't.
And that's actually the way the law is in most places. In one state nearby, for instance, they tried to pass a law against "upskirt" photographs, but they couldn't because they could not find a way to define the law. It is legal to go naked in public if you want, but if you do -- because it's public -- you can be photographed. How can you square that with a law against taking photos up a skirt? Answer: you can't. Not without saying somebody is guilty of a crime based on nothing but someone else's word.
"at some point every product category sees a slowing of new features in new releases
look at desktop OS's, smartphones, etc"
Yes, but it tends to slow more when a relative monopoly gets control of the market.
When Intel pretty much owned the desktop CPU market, innovation was slow and CPUs were very expensive. When others like AMD started to compete in the x86 market, things started moving much faster and getting lots cheaper.
It's called competition in a free market, man. It works.
You may have noticed that now AMD has started dragging ass in the desktop CPU market, Intel hasn't been improving as fast as well.
Sure, there are technological obstacles to overcome today, but that has always been the case. Competition helps the market. We need a competitor for Intel desktop chips, because desktops are not going away any time soon.
Pretty much. In programmer-speak, "legacy code" is anything that was already there when you started working on the project.
So if somebody else was writing the program last month, but they left and your team started working on it this week, anything already in the project is "legacy code". That's basically what the word "legacy" means: something you "inherited" from someone else. (Or in this case, some other project, coder, or team.)
Some people have started using "legacy" to mean "old", but that's really not where it came from. It doesn't have to be old in order to be legacy. It just has to come from someone else.
"You know, I've been hearing this from Creationists about evolution for years, and it's as big a lie coming from the AGW pseudoskeptics as it is coming from their intellectual brethren in the Creationist camp."
The true mark of an ideologue... don't argue with anybody's actual points, just insult them and compare them to Creationists.
Do you honestly not see the irony in your comment?
I wrote about 6 months ago that I'm going to start calling this Jane's Law. Imply that today's mainstream climate science is not the Gospel from Above, get compared to Nazis or Creationists.
I love how some people just jump right in to stereotypes. No work on my part necessary.
Maybe in the UK, the topics of abortion and politics can be separated, but in the US it definitely can't be. Moreover, the charity itself says it was an anti-abortion activist, and that the ruling rewards the criminal. So it's already political from the summary.
What I was referring to was GP inferring that the charity got a "heavy-handed" judgment because of the abortion issue, rather than it simply being a judgment they deserved for being irresponsible with personal information.
It should not matter what the politics of either the charity or the criminal are; judgments are supposed to be apolitical. Saying the judgment was political is trying to inject politics into a legal matter. Do you somehow disagree with that? Or do you just assume that the court's decision was politically motivated?
"This coming from one of the most politically-instigating people on the site."
Example?
Please show me where I have tried to "politicize" abortion or other social subject. I certainly do have opinions about them, but I don't think a court should be making decisions based on politics. I would be interested in seeing an example of where you think I might have stated otherwise.
"Make a stupid comment, get downmodded, is more like it. The "politically correct dogma" Slashdot is working on is that highly intelligent people who have studied something all their professional lives are likely to be closer to being correct than people who just don't get thermodynamics."
Please explain to me where my argument was "stupid" or counterfactual. If you would like to discuss the thermodynamics of AGW, I have some excellent sources I can give you for reference.
Further, why do you imply that climate scientists are experts on thermodynamics? That's an area of physics, not climatology, and I know some physicists who very much disagree with today's mainstream "climate science".
"The law has endless cases where the difference between 2 crimes, or a crime and not-a-crime boil down to "intent", and what a judge/jury feel the intentions were."
Yes, but those are generally about very different situations than the one under discussion. Please don't muddy the waters.
"If she did it 'intentionally to get him in trouble' and there is any evidence of that then it will count heavily against her case."
And you illustrate the exact problem I was talking about: in most situations like the one under discussion, there is simply no way to show intent, one way or another.
Since intent in these kinds of situations is usually not possible to prove, a reasonable law must be based on something else.
If you simply acknowledge that public photography is legal, all these problems and ambiguities go away. Then, if you don't want it seen, simply don't show it. Don't try to regulate other peoples' behavior -- much less try to make it criminal -- based on your personal preferences at any given moment.
And it should be blatantly obvious that intent, insomuch as the law concerns itself with it, is determined by objectively measurable criteria... and in this case, as I had repeatedly stated, that criteria would be giving informed consent.
I know what you stated. But if the law were literally as you spelled out, public photography of just about anything would be taboo. Obviously that is not in the public interest.
As I just mentioned to someone else, if the law everywhere were as you say, pictures such as THESE would be impossible.
Nah. I'll just take a picture of it. If you don't like that, I suggest not doing whatever it is you object to having photographs of.
"Of course people lie... which is why any serious photographer who is wanting to take nude pictures would get consent for such in writing first, so it cannot later be controverted. A photographer can, however just as easily lie that he or she was allegedly given permission when they were not as a subject can later deny that they ever gave permission even after they did."
You are again just reinforcing my point. Intent is generally hard to establish. Things in public are generally okay to photograph. The whole point here is where the line is to be drawn.
Because the recommended policy I suggested of assuming that there is no consent to photograph what is underneath a person's clothes being the default condition in the first place, the photographer gains absolutely nothing by not explicitly gaining such consent in writing when he or she does not know the subject *EXTREMELY* well.
I disagree. What about, for example, Picture #3 on this page? It would have been impossible.
If it's in public, I'm going to take a picture of it. If you don't like it, tough luck.
"Is this statement in error? The statement is not true in any modern law system (1700s' to present). The primary concern in Western / US Law is 'mens rea'. This means if the guy was 3' tall and had no choice but to see people's private parts they would get leeway that a person of normal height does not. Establishing "intent" is what the person was thinking at the time they committed a crime. You may have possibly written something you did not intend."
In this case, though, intent is also what the other person intended. Did they show you their genitals on purpose? Is she hanging out of her dress in order to give you a peek? Or are you snooping? (Both do happen.
Perhaps a better way to put it is: "Laws that are based on intent are largely (1) hard to prove, or often (2) bad laws because they are prone to abuse."
I can think of examples of both. And in fact, some situations are examples of both. For example, if you're sitting across from someone on the bus, how can they prove they didn't intend to uncross their legs while wearing no panties; they simply slipped or forgot. (Actually, forgot shouldn't be an exception anyway because that's negligence. But it's still a lack of intent.)
As for (2), let's say they flash you deliberately, you take a picture (because after all, it's public), and then later they lie about their "intent". What about the woman who has sex at a party and then when she sobers up lies because she regrets her actions? Hell, things like that have happened throughout history, and of course it's not just women, or sex.
That's what I meant by this. Certainly, sometimes intent is important. But even then, it can be hard to show. Example: "No, I didn't intend to walk out of the store with that merchandise. My mind was just elsewhere." Etc. There are more sinister situations where it comes up too, of course.
But when it comes to social situations, how do you prove what was "intended"? It's one person's word against another.
Slashdot Mirror
This WHOLE THREAD started with MY OPINION on what the law should be. YOU decided to argue with me. Now you're hiding behind the law that was passed... which was what I was talking about in the first place.
You argue in circles. I have nothing further to say here.
"It doesn't matter what I think... what matters is what a judge thinks. If a person has doubts about the matter, they shouldn't do it.... Arguing otherwise only defends the sick people who do this shit."
No, what matters is what reasonable people think. The U.S. is a Common Law country, and as such, laws are designed around the "Reasonable Man" principle (increasingly called "reasonable person"). That means a reasonable citizen, not a judge.
Judges DO have to decide what a reasonable person in public might think; but they are required to do so from the point of view of that reasonable person, not from their position up on that bench.
"Something can be covered and there can still be a picture of it... either by utilizing specifically crafted shooting angles, which would be evidenced by looking at the photograph itself, or utilizing sophisticated surveillance systems which *can* image directly through clothing. Intent to not be seen naked, as I said, would be implied by virtue of wearing clothes in the first place, and any other alleged intent would require consent. "
Now you're really reaching. I was discussing reasonable everyday circumstances. Now you're way off talking about something very different. I have no particular desire to go there.
s/May/Maya
Nudists are not uncommon, for example. I even know a few.
"That would also mean that even somehow photographing a middle-eastern woman's face, when she ordinarily wears a sari, would be violation, unless the photographer has received explicit consent. "
Exactly. Which most people in the United States do not consider "reasonable". You're making my point for me.
You're trying to regulate "public" in a ridiculous manner. It would never work. Not in a free society, anyway.
Blender IS doing just fine. It isn't "competing" in the normal sense with May or those others.
I should qualify this.
Autodesk does not have a monopoly on 3D rendering or animation by any means, but it now owns a lot more of the market than it once did.
Blender and others are still doing just fine.
"Even at that, both Uberoid and cyanogen both have some extra apps I'll never use that I'd like to get rid of.."
It is my understanding that as long as it's not an essential system app, Cyanogen will let you delete it.
My current phone has had some hardware compatibility issues. The radio did not work when I tried Cyanogen on it so I had to switch back. I'm going to keep an eye out for a newer version.
"The dirty little secret of the CPU industry is that chips went from "good enough" to insanely overpowered several years so unless you are doing a job that needs every last drop of power you can squeeze (wave simulation, heavy number crunching) you'd be hard pressed in a blind trial to tell an AMD from an Intel....except when you got the bill and saw how much money you can save."
Tell that to my $3000 laptop which is now 6 years old and on which I do development work... slamming both cores pretty hard, because I have 7 applications running at once, all of them necessary to what I do.
Granted, that isn't your everyday home user, and that is on my laptop, but it's not THAT unusual either. And don't forget games!
As for AMD... there is still the chance of a comeback but slipped behind Intel in the desktop market and are struggling to keep up.
"Then I think they really have a shot here in the states too as I don't know how many folks I've talked to that are seriously pissed at their Android phones because the carriers are so piss poor when it comes to pushing updates."
I won't argue with you there. Presumably, they will be able to update the OS as long as the hardware will support it.
"You've never seen someone do something and had a strong conviction one way or the other whether they did it by accident or on purpose? I know I have."
Of course I have. But that's not the point. This is a law, for which someone can be convicted and thrown in jail. So the point isn't what you think, at all. The POINT is what you can prove in court.
"I have a reasonable expectation of privacy."
Not in public you don't. If you're in public, and you hang it out, I'll take a picture of it. Maybe even accidentally! So don't hang it out.
"If you simply acknowledge that taking photographs where a person or persons are the primary subject requires disclosure and consent solves the problem no less neatly."
I already did. Did you read the whole thread you are replying to, or just that one comment above? Give me a break.
But even then, there are exceptions. BIG exceptions. News? You can't go by that, because who decides what is a news service, and what is not? The government CAN'T decide that... the Constitution says so. And a judge just recently ruled about that very thing: if you're blogging or writing about things on the Internet, for example, you have the same legal protections as the New York Times.
"Most photography would not be affected by what I suggested, only photography that reveals parts of the subject's body which were actually covered by the subjects clothing, in which case informed consent would be required.."
You're making a distinction that isn't real. It is contradictory. If it's part of the body that's covered, then by definition there will be no picture of it. It if is in a picture, then by definition it was not covered.
And if you are saying a part of the body that is intended to be covered, then you are opening yourself up to gross abuse of the law, because anybody can lie about their intent, any time they want.
So why stop there? Why not just throw people in jail for any crime on somebody's say-so?
What's that you say? Because you should need actual evidence to convict someone of a crime?
Yep. There ya go. That's my point.
"Not impossible, just illegal. It would be up to a judge to determine if any particular photo did more public good than it harmed the people being photographed."
Okay, technically not impossible. But unreasonably impractical to the point that people would simply stop taking public photography. If any public photograph could be taken to court on anybody's say-so, you have an impractical law that would be nearly impossible to enforce.
Laws are not intended to be so vague that anybody can take someone else to court whenever they disagree. In common-law countries like the U.S., laws are required to be reasonable.
"Reading this and the first post, I think this is still a slightly different version of "she was asking for it". I'm sure you could see it if you tried to separate the two sets of crimes."
Just no.
The problem is that you are ASSUMING, in the first place, that the person taking photographs of something that happens in public is committing a crime. On what basis do you make this judgment? Where would you draw the line? (And this is the whole problem.) You want to take pictures of a public building? Why not? That's not a crime, is it? Well, what if there are people on the front steps of the building? Is it suddenly a crime to take a picture?
There are all kinds of ways you can go to extremes here. But at some point those extremes become reality.
So, now: let's just say that we agree you can still take pictures of that public building, if a few people just happen to be standing near it that will be in your picture. That seems reasonable.
Then some woman standing on those steps lifts up her dress. (Maybe you didn't notice, maybe you did.) Should it now be illegal to take that same picture? Why? What gives that person the right to control where you take your pictures?
That may sound ridiculous to you but it's actually quite important. If you say no, it is still your right to take that public picture, when does tht change? Does it change when the woman lifting up her dress is standing in a crowd and facing you? Does it change when you are in a smaller public place, like a food court in a mall? Maybe in a bus?
See, it isn't a matter of "her asking for it", like some people would say if she walked down the wrong alley at night in a skimpy dress. (You and I would probably agree that she was NOT "asking for it", but just as an example of what we're talking about.) Because a rape or something of that nature is already a crime anyway. You'd be saying (wrongly, probably, but still saying) she was asking you to commit the crime.
But the reason THIS situation is not the same, is that she's not "asking for" someone to commit a crime... she's CONTROLLING WHETHER or not it is a crime. Do you see the difference?
If she were not there, it would not be a crime for you to take a picture of the bus. If she is there, and the laws are made that way, SHE could decide whether a crime was committed on her merest whim, by simply saying what her "intentions" were. She can control your behavior by forcing you do not do something you would otherwise be able to legally do... and decide whether or not you are a criminal, any time she wants.
And that's not what laws are supposed to be about. Laws say what is illegal, people on the street don't. That's why there has to be a line, and it can't be left up to vague "intentions". You can't leave it up to somebody's say-so whether something was a crime or not. (Again, that's a different situation from saying somebody is guilty of theft or something which is a crime anyway, they're just giving witness.)
But if you make the simple rule: "If you don't want it seen, don't show it" then everybody knows what the line is, and nobody has to try to read anybody else's mind to know whether their behavior is criminal or not. AND... you don't have anybody bullying anybody else over threats of saying they committed a crime when they didn't.
And that's actually the way the law is in most places. In one state nearby, for instance, they tried to pass a law against "upskirt" photographs, but they couldn't because they could not find a way to define the law. It is legal to go naked in public if you want, but if you do -- because it's public -- you can be photographed. How can you square that with a law against taking photos up a skirt? Answer: you can't. Not without saying somebody is guilty of a crime based on nothing but someone else's word.
"at some point every product category sees a slowing of new features in new releases look at desktop OS's, smartphones, etc"
Yes, but it tends to slow more when a relative monopoly gets control of the market.
When Intel pretty much owned the desktop CPU market, innovation was slow and CPUs were very expensive. When others like AMD started to compete in the x86 market, things started moving much faster and getting lots cheaper.
It's called competition in a free market, man. It works.
You may have noticed that now AMD has started dragging ass in the desktop CPU market, Intel hasn't been improving as fast as well.
Sure, there are technological obstacles to overcome today, but that has always been the case. Competition helps the market. We need a competitor for Intel desktop chips, because desktops are not going away any time soon.
"Legacy" is a buzzword for "old."
Pretty much. In programmer-speak, "legacy code" is anything that was already there when you started working on the project.
So if somebody else was writing the program last month, but they left and your team started working on it this week, anything already in the project is "legacy code". That's basically what the word "legacy" means: something you "inherited" from someone else. (Or in this case, some other project, coder, or team.)
Some people have started using "legacy" to mean "old", but that's really not where it came from. It doesn't have to be old in order to be legacy. It just has to come from someone else.
"You know, I've been hearing this from Creationists about evolution for years, and it's as big a lie coming from the AGW pseudoskeptics as it is coming from their intellectual brethren in the Creationist camp."
The true mark of an ideologue... don't argue with anybody's actual points, just insult them and compare them to Creationists.
Do you honestly not see the irony in your comment?
I wrote about 6 months ago that I'm going to start calling this Jane's Law. Imply that today's mainstream climate science is not the Gospel from Above, get compared to Nazis or Creationists.
I love how some people just jump right in to stereotypes. No work on my part necessary.
"Android runs very well on low spec hardware. Plus the low end phones of today were yesterday"s high-end!"
But Android runs better on low spec hardware the more you take Google out of it. (See CyanogenMod and Carbon.)
I think that's part of it. The more corporate lock-in and advertising stuff you have to put up with, the less well your hardware performs.
The next big issue is security. While Google gives lip-service to taking it seriously, Android is wanting in several areas.
"We don't need another browser dominating the market just like IE did: it gives them too much power."
I certainly agree with THAT.
But who's going to take on Intel today? We need competition there, too. The entire world is not yet mobile, nor should it be.
Maybe in the UK, the topics of abortion and politics can be separated, but in the US it definitely can't be. Moreover, the charity itself says it was an anti-abortion activist, and that the ruling rewards the criminal. So it's already political from the summary.
What I was referring to was GP inferring that the charity got a "heavy-handed" judgment because of the abortion issue, rather than it simply being a judgment they deserved for being irresponsible with personal information.
It should not matter what the politics of either the charity or the criminal are; judgments are supposed to be apolitical. Saying the judgment was political is trying to inject politics into a legal matter. Do you somehow disagree with that? Or do you just assume that the court's decision was politically motivated?
"This coming from one of the most politically-instigating people on the site."
Example?
Please show me where I have tried to "politicize" abortion or other social subject. I certainly do have opinions about them, but I don't think a court should be making decisions based on politics. I would be interested in seeing an example of where you think I might have stated otherwise.
"Make a stupid comment, get downmodded, is more like it. The "politically correct dogma" Slashdot is working on is that highly intelligent people who have studied something all their professional lives are likely to be closer to being correct than people who just don't get thermodynamics."
Please explain to me where my argument was "stupid" or counterfactual. If you would like to discuss the thermodynamics of AGW, I have some excellent sources I can give you for reference.
Further, why do you imply that climate scientists are experts on thermodynamics? That's an area of physics, not climatology, and I know some physicists who very much disagree with today's mainstream "climate science".
"The law has endless cases where the difference between 2 crimes, or a crime and not-a-crime boil down to "intent", and what a judge/jury feel the intentions were."
Yes, but those are generally about very different situations than the one under discussion. Please don't muddy the waters.
"If she did it 'intentionally to get him in trouble' and there is any evidence of that then it will count heavily against her case."
And you illustrate the exact problem I was talking about: in most situations like the one under discussion, there is simply no way to show intent, one way or another.
Since intent in these kinds of situations is usually not possible to prove, a reasonable law must be based on something else.
If you simply acknowledge that public photography is legal, all these problems and ambiguities go away. Then, if you don't want it seen, simply don't show it. Don't try to regulate other peoples' behavior -- much less try to make it criminal -- based on your personal preferences at any given moment.
And it should be blatantly obvious that intent, insomuch as the law concerns itself with it, is determined by objectively measurable criteria... and in this case, as I had repeatedly stated, that criteria would be giving informed consent.
I know what you stated. But if the law were literally as you spelled out, public photography of just about anything would be taboo. Obviously that is not in the public interest.
As I just mentioned to someone else, if the law everywhere were as you say, pictures such as THESE would be impossible.
Nah. I'll just take a picture of it. If you don't like that, I suggest not doing whatever it is you object to having photographs of.
"Of course people lie... which is why any serious photographer who is wanting to take nude pictures would get consent for such in writing first, so it cannot later be controverted. A photographer can, however just as easily lie that he or she was allegedly given permission when they were not as a subject can later deny that they ever gave permission even after they did."
You are again just reinforcing my point. Intent is generally hard to establish. Things in public are generally okay to photograph. The whole point here is where the line is to be drawn.
Because the recommended policy I suggested of assuming that there is no consent to photograph what is underneath a person's clothes being the default condition in the first place, the photographer gains absolutely nothing by not explicitly gaining such consent in writing when he or she does not know the subject *EXTREMELY* well.
I disagree. What about, for example, Picture #3 on this page? It would have been impossible.
If it's in public, I'm going to take a picture of it. If you don't like it, tough luck.
"Is this statement in error? The statement is not true in any modern law system (1700s' to present). The primary concern in Western / US Law is 'mens rea'. This means if the guy was 3' tall and had no choice but to see people's private parts they would get leeway that a person of normal height does not. Establishing "intent" is what the person was thinking at the time they committed a crime. You may have possibly written something you did not intend."
In this case, though, intent is also what the other person intended. Did they show you their genitals on purpose? Is she hanging out of her dress in order to give you a peek? Or are you snooping? (Both do happen.
Perhaps a better way to put it is: "Laws that are based on intent are largely (1) hard to prove, or often (2) bad laws because they are prone to abuse."
I can think of examples of both. And in fact, some situations are examples of both. For example, if you're sitting across from someone on the bus, how can they prove they didn't intend to uncross their legs while wearing no panties; they simply slipped or forgot. (Actually, forgot shouldn't be an exception anyway because that's negligence. But it's still a lack of intent.)
As for (2), let's say they flash you deliberately, you take a picture (because after all, it's public), and then later they lie about their "intent". What about the woman who has sex at a party and then when she sobers up lies because she regrets her actions? Hell, things like that have happened throughout history, and of course it's not just women, or sex.
That's what I meant by this. Certainly, sometimes intent is important. But even then, it can be hard to show. Example: "No, I didn't intend to walk out of the store with that merchandise. My mind was just elsewhere." Etc. There are more sinister situations where it comes up too, of course.
But when it comes to social situations, how do you prove what was "intended"? It's one person's word against another.