But, anyway, it's just amazing how morons think 'hide the decline' is evidence of anything except 'tree rings started screwing up recently'. The damn email explained that, it's a known thing that scientists have been doing for decades, it's mentioned in all the footnotes, but this requires AGW-deniers to have some actual grasp of the research instead of just parroting talking point.
If people don't understand what's going on: It's like to tracking someone miles through the woods. You've got their footprints (tree rings), and broken branches (ice cores), and other stuff(There's a lot of ways to guess a temperature in the past), and you've followed them a very long way. In the last hundred feet, for some reason, they've apparently had a squaredance or something, you don't know what, but their footprints are a mess. Of course, for the past half mile, you've had a damn GPS tracker(Those devices we possess to actually measure temperature called 'thermometers'.) on them, and you know they didn't have a square dance, so you just start ignoring their footprints and following their actual measured position. (Possibly some other animal mated on their footprints, which might be a concern to the 'footprint scientists', but you couldn't care less about. You're just keeping track of the location of the person you're tracking.)
As I said, the only scientific debate you can have about this (As we factually know the temperature recently, we don't need to guess.) is to assert that maybe tree rings were wrong in the past, too.
It's a valid argument to make. But, as I said, a somewhat pointless argument to make, too, as the older tree rings pretty well match the other data we have, and removing them doesn't shift temps one way or another.
The whole 'haywire' thing is very noticeable, with temps jumping up and down randomly, so it really doesn't look like they were doing this in the past, but as the temps matches anyway, no one cares if AGW deniers want to argue the data without tree rings. It doesn't actually change anything.
Of course, AGW deniers weren't arguing this, because, as I said, they have almost no idea how any of these scientists actually make claims or what the claims says or what research has been done, and they think it's just some scientists literally just measuring a trend and extrapolating from there, and the way to disprove it is to point to how the trend isn't perfect.
Don't get me fucking started on SWAT teams and no-knock warrants.
You're the police. You're paid to risk your life. You don't get to push that risk to innocent civilians because you're fucking scared of getting shot.
If they shoot at you when you walk up and knock on the door, by all means, wear armor, have other people with guns in position, and, after they shoot at you, feel free to shoot back. But you don't get to assault a building because you have hallucinated they might be armed and willing to shoot you. You are the police, not some random civilian, and you are paid to risk your life, you pussy. You don't want to do that, find some other damn job.
And if you can't collect the goddamn evidence without breaking in guns shooting, perhaps you should collect it some other way?
What? You say that makes it impossible to enforce drug laws because users will flush it down the toilet? Well, the impossibility of enforcing a specific law is not my concern. The fact that you assert the right to break into people's houses waving guns and shouting 'police' is my concern.
The police should never be the first to escalate violence, not even preemptively. They do not get to make people get on the ground, they do not get to tase people who talk back.
It's amazing how much 'resisting arrest', which justifies more force, is simply because of people being extremely uncomfortable while being arrested, because they got forced to the ground or on a car. No. You get arrested, you get handed a pair of handcuffs, you put them on yourself. You don't get fucking thrown around where any movement can justify more force. They only get to use more force if you actually attempt to escape, and that should be defined as 'attempting to move more than five feet without permission', or if you actually attempt to harm them, because cops abuse their fucking power to call things like attempting to move into a more comfortable position when forced onto the ground 'escape'
Perhaps, under exceptional circumstances such as searching for a known violent criminal, police officers might have permission to walk around with guns drawn.
If the police toss someone a pair of handcuffs, and they pull out a gun and shot the police, the police get shot! You do not want to get shot, do not join the police!
I don't know about the other thing, but anyone should have standing to challenge whether or not a law is constitutional, both at the state and federal level. Or, at least, any citizen.
Why? The Federal government is a tool of citizens joined by the constitution. Anything they do is automatically relevant to us from that direction, because they are doing it 'for' us.
So we should not only have standing because they're doing things to us, we should have standing if they're doing things 'from' us, although that standing should be restricted to arguing we can not legally have that law in the first place.
Non-citizens, of course, would be restricted to arguing when they have traditional standing, like everyone is now.
The problem, of course, is that a lot of idiots would challenge really dumb things, because a lot of people are very misinformed about the constitution, and very misinformed about actual facts.
But that's why you have to go through lower courts first, which I think you should still have to do, if only to prove your facts, and weed out delusional people who think there are FEMA detention camps being built everywhere.
The only thing I said wrong was the US government requires you to mark your patents, which, as you pointed out, they don't, that's just required to collect more damages.
I fail to see how that makes me 'very misinformed'. I should have said that they require you to do that 'to actually collect any damages from infringement'. Otherwise they will just assert they didn't know, and as long as they stop when you notify them, they are fine. Without it, copycats can flood the market until you write each one a letter.
So, yes, in theory, you don't have to put patents on a product. In practice, however, you do, if you ever intend on suing people for cloning your product. Or they will say 'Oh, that's patented? Now that I know, I'll stop.' and you get nothing.
I think you also decided I was wrong about how hard pending patents are to find, but I was giving a history lesson...pending patents used to be very hard to find. Patents themselves used to be almost as hard.
Hence it's illegal to mark something as having patents pending when it does not. And it's illegal to mark something as applicable to a patent when it is not.
Indeed. This entire discussion is a rather blatant example of the failure of moderation. Half the people here seem to think we're actually discussing whether a patent is valid or not.
Actually discussing whether or not the large fine makes sense in this day and age, when it's fairly easy to look up patents, is another thing, as is whether or not it should apply if you do it accidentally, and a real discussion we could actually be interesting.
Likewise, an argument could be made that you should have to lists patents required to use a device on said device even if the device itself doesn't use the patent.
(You can replace 'device' with 'software'.)
If you really truly need a patent to do something with what you buy, like if you need to use a patented device to put fuel in your car, I would argue that it would actually make sense to require the car, as well as the fuel device, to state that. This isn't how the law works, and thus that argument won't really help Activision, but it would make sense.
Or, for perhaps a more relevant example, some companies have taken to patenting hardware interfaces. But they can patent just the cable, and hence stop people from making compatible cables, while not patenting the plug itself, and hence not having to notify people on their device.
Hence I might build and sell my own cable and be in violation of patent law, even after I've looked up the patents on the device itself. Yes, in theory, I could be in violation of patents for all sorts of things, but the point is that companies should be required to inform me, a purchaser of their stuff, all the patents that are relevant, even if, strictly speaking, they don't apply to the stuff itself. Perhaps some sort of 'See also' patent list.
But almost all the people here seem to think this is some actual patent dispute, so heaven forbid we have an actual relevant discussion. Ugh.
I don't know where you're getting that, but they aren't allowed to make claims for effects that aren't any better than a placebo.
When they talk about placebos in disclaimers, they're usually talking about side effects that are not, or are not, much worse than placebos.
I'm not sure why they have to do that...surely if 5% of the people using my new drug in the trial got a headache, and 5% of the people taking the placebo also got a headache, we should assume that 5% of people just get headaches, and we shouldn't have to mention it. Likewise, if only 4% got one from the placebo, we should assume the drug I'm testing has a 1% chance of causing a headache, so have to mention 'In rare cases, drug x might cause headaches...' or whatever the phrasing is.
But, anyway, the only time I've heard them talk about placebos is in regard to side effects, not actual deliberate effects. If you can't demonstrate that your drug beats a placebo for a specific effect, you can't market it as treating that effect at all, not even with a disclaimer.
Which is, as others point out, causing some weird issues as some of the older antidepression drugs are currently no better than a placebo, although they were much better when first tested. There's not actually a process to pull drugs off the market for magically becoming 'less efficient' like that, and no one knows how that's happening. You can really only pull them off if the testing was fraudulent, or if there are later side effects discovered, or something like that, not 'placebos inexplicably got better'.
Indeed. Although you know what they call 'herbal medicine, and other alternative medicine, that works'?
They call it medicine.;)
All naturopathy either a) doesn't actually treat what it's supposed to treat, or, at least, is unproven to do so, b) treats it with near random amounts and can cause dangerous drug interactions, aka St John's wort.
WRT the first option, well, it really doesn't harm anything if people run around taking ginseng supplements. It's pretty bad when people get conned into herbs instead of actual functioning medications, but I can understand people trying them if they don't have a lot of options left.
(a) is essentially what we developed most medication from, and I assure we've checked exactly what you're using for exactly the thing you want to treat with it, and found it didn't really help. If it did, we already made a medication from it.
And as for actual medically active naturopathy treatments makes sense, where an overdose is not likely and it's fairly safe in general...if you want to make willow bark tree instead of aspirin, I certainly won't stand in your way. Especially with some drug prices nowadays, although the high ones are usually entirely artificial. Just be careful.
Despite my moderate dislike of herbal medication, I will, at least, admit that some of it is medicine. It's not really the safest way in the world to take it, and quite a lot of it has little to no effect, and the side effects are unknown, but there are circumstances where it makes sense, as long as you realize you are actually taking 'a drug' of some sort, and need to watch out.
I knew someone was going to mention 'hide the decline'.
Here is the story:
For the past thousand years or so, we can guess global temperature based on tree rings. They match very well to know global temperature until 1980 or so.
After that, they go insane.
Please note this isn't some argument over facts...we know what the temperature was in 1994. It isn't some debatable thing. We know tree rings from 1994 don't match. We know the tree rings vary widely since 1980, not matching anything at all. We don't know why, but we know they do not match.
And hence, when graphing average temps, you have to do stop using tree rings around 1980.
You're standing there like an idiot arguing that not using data we know is factually wrong is a bad thing. We had damn thermometers in the 1980s! We don't need to guess the temperature with tree rings!
And everyone except apparently you morons have known scientists were doing this for decades. There are specific papers written as to why they have to stop doing this. All estimates as to average temp mention this.
Now, you could, if you were intellectually honest, remind people that tree rings are a bit iffy to use in the first place, considering they've gone haywire and no one can come up with a reason why, so we shouldn't be using them to tell use the average temperature 600 years ago, either...for all we know, they were haywire then, also. If you want to poke holes in this theory based on this new stuff you just discovered (Which all serious people knew the entire time and wasn't secret at all.), that would be a valid claim to make: Tree rings have weird problems in the present, hence might also have had weird problems in the past, so estimates using them are invalid.
Of course, that doesn't really get you very far, considering that tree rings match other temperature indicators we have, like ice cores, so throwing them out results in basically the same estimates. Also, it would require you being 'honest' and 'intellectual', so I guess that's out.
The pending patents are for hardware, not software. They cannot apply to a box of software people purchase.
Okay, everyone seems to be very ignorant here, and the article isn't explaining this, so I guess I have to give a damn history lesson:
The US government requires that you put notification of patent use on things you sell. (Either your own patent, or something you've licensed from someone else.)
That is fine for issued patents, but what about pending patents? Remember, you can use something for up to a year before filing a patent on it, and you do have some amount of protection when patents are pending.
Ergo, you should have to put pending patent notifications, so people can look those up, too, and not waste their time building something that's going to be in violation of a patent in two months.
Well, the problem then arose. You see, actual patents are easy to look up. Patent lawyers could have copies of the entire set, you could go to a law courthouse in state capital, etc.
Pending patents, OTOH, are real bitch to find. Only the patent office has those. So some enterprising people who couldn't, or didn't bother, to get patents, just went around putting 'patent pending' on everything, resulting in other people unable to figure out what, exactly, was patented. Or they could keep resubmitted a rejected patent, and it remain 'pending'.
Hence, at some point, falsely claiming to have patents pending, or actually having one pending, but unrelated to what you put it on, was made criminal and you can be fined for it.
Those laws don't really make any sense anymore, but are still there.
Okay, to recap what is actually happening for insane people who have no reading comprehension: No one is going after any patents whatsoever.
Some extraneous 'patent pending' numbers were printed on software boxes. No one has even slightly indicated that anyone would attempt to 'enforce' said patent-printing mistakes, or that other people wish to use said patents on their software, because the patents do not even relate to software.
Again: There are no actual patents involved at all. The 'offense' was a box that asserted that various pending patents applied to it, when they clearly do not, and no one is even slightly asserting they do. No one is attempting to enforce any patents, no one is attempting to strike down any patents. The patents mentioned will remain valid (For the things they actually apply to) even if this suit succeeds.
Apparently, falsely claiming you have a patent pending is a civil liability, as is claiming a pending patent applies to something it doesn't, and groups have arisen to run around suing people for this. This is the story of one of those groups.
Um, no, patent pending is the opposite of stifling creativity.
Patents stifle creativity. Patent pending lets you know what patents to look up.
Society needs to be warned about pending patents, so that people won't waste their time developing something identical, and then learn it is patented. That is much most stifling of creativity than 'Here is a list of things you should look up before developing a product like this'.
You can argue that patents are bad, but you cannot possibly argue that 'knowing patents exist before spending time and money developing a product' is bad.
I'm actually amazed it's any sort of crime, and it certainly shouldn't be per instances. It's the equivalent of printing 'may contain peanuts' on food that does not, in fact, contain peanuts.
I mean, an argument can be made that an overkill 'patent pending' use can result in the person being unable to find the actual relevant patent by throwing too much chaff in there, but these patents are relevant...if you're using the software you purchased, you're using the patents. You're just using them on the hardware you bought separately. The government should just order them to correct the error.
0: Redundant information that any objective observer would conclude is blatantly obviously, and normally get a Redundant mod just for stating something akin to 'A is A', yet the post was a response to a total fucking moron who apparently didn't understand that rather basic information.
But that's clearly too long to fit in the dropbox. Ah well.
'to make Windows appear faster.' Jesus H. Christ.
Windows is using my system resources to make my computer appear to be faster! Those bastards at Microsoft have struck again! How dare they make things happen faster on my computer as some sort of optical illusion of speed! (Because it's not like the speed of a computer is actually defined by 'how fast things happen'. That's crazy talk.)
You know, it's an interesting thought experiment: What if no work had ever gone into making computers 'appear' faster? If through computer history, we'd actually made them faster like normal, but put absolutely no effort into caching or optimizing or offloading processing or DMA or anything, just making processors faster and faster?
I suspect, right now, we'd be trying to figure out how to play our fancy new 'MP3s' on our eight-core-processor RAID-array setups, and hoping, one day, we'll get processors fast enough to handle postage-stamp-size video, or possibly even redraw our entire video screen at once.
The question isn't when you're at work. Work is not far enough away. For all they know, you got sick, and will be pulling up any second. Or you just didn't work today, and you're at the mall. Or someone lives in the house who doesn't work and doesn't have a car. Or the maid or your boyfriend are about to show up and let themselves in.
It is simply not safe to target random, unobserved houses with no cars in the driveway. Especially during the day. At night, you have slightly better luck, if there's no car at 4 in the morning it's entirely possible that everyone there is sleeping somewhere else...OTOH, that's exactly when people expect robbers to show up, so are extra paranoid if happen to be away and see a strange car pull into a neighbor's house.
Meanwhile, observing a house isn't safe either. That's the entire point of Neighborhood Watches. Good luck in surveilling a house long enough to figure out exactly what's going on and the schedule of the people inside it. There's a reason cops don't do it that much, and aren't really trying to figure out a 'schedule', just where people go and who visits them.
Criminals do both those things, breaking in without checking, and just watching the house...and often get caught at it.
It is much, much safer to do it when someone is out of town, and other people know they are out of town so won't be coming over. Hence the old 'Look for papers piling up' trick. That still required crooks to drive around semi-randomly, though.
Now, as the article points out, they can get a computer program that can look at tons of tweets, find people who are are normally nearby, and what location they seem to live at, and then notice when they are fairly far away, which in and of itself is a major advantage. Knowing some one is physically 200 miles away means they can't possibly show up in the next hour. The fact the criminal can then look at the tweets and figure out if other people live in the house, how long they'll be away, wait for another tweet to pin down the fact they're still there, etc, is just icing on the cake.
Except Facebook doesn't have location stats, and you need permission to see their info.
With twitter, it's entirely possible to design a tool that a) follows people automatically, b) sees if they are posting location-giving tweets, c) determines where their house is from said tweets (Pretty easy, statistically), and then d) notices when they are 250+ miles away from that house. (I actually think you can see people's tweets without following them, so I think (a) is not needed.)
At that point, it can involve a human, perhaps even showing them the tweets before they relocated to actually see what's going on, how long they will be on vacation, and if their house is empty. Perhaps it could even search for references to 'wife' or 'roommate', alerting the criminal that said victim has one and they need to discover if this person is out of town also.
You really could automate 95% of all this, finding locations that are about 50% likely to be someone on vacation. And sometimes will be a coffee shop and sometimes there will be someone else there, but it's much easier than trying to find the people on vacation randomly.
You know, I want to a see a coal plant + coal mine designed to release only as much radiation as a nuclear plant + uranium mine.
I wonder how much that will cost.
It's always amazing how much crap we're willing to put up from old stuff, while having new regulations on new stuff that's a bajillion times as harsh.
Like how companies are supposed to treat broken CFL lights because of the mercury. Dude, I can promise that 1/2 of people at least 30 have been around 1000 times that much mercury. Do not eat mercury, but it's not going to kill you to touch it, or we'd all be dead. Let's worry about the high levels of mercury in fish, which adds up to toxic amounts over years of eating, instead of calling a hazmat team for a broken CFL, which isn't any danger to anyone at all unless they like licking the floor!
I'm all for getting toxins out of our environment, but it often seems that the ones we choose to worry, and where we worry about them, are very skewed, often inexplicably. It seems like we're willing to tolerate any level of horrible things from old things, whereas new stuff, oh no, that has almost 1/1000th the toxic level, or 20 times less than the old thing people use all the time! Pull it from the market!
With coal plants, however, it's not so inexplicable. The coal lobby is powerful, as evidenced by the fact that people here even mention clean coal like that's some actual thing. Actual clean coal ends up looking a lot like half my thought experiment at the front of this post. It would be massively expensive to actually filter all the CO2 and whatnot out of air, and that's not including the radioactive crap. CO2 scrubbers, right now, get maybe 5% of the CO2.
Hell, with all that scrubbing, it quite possibly wouldn't generate net energy. Having a discussion where 'clean coal' makes an appearance is like having a discussion about nuclear waste where we propose sending it up the space elevator into space.
Solar is rapidly uneconomic as soon as you have any overcast days at all. It works fine for the desert, and few other places, but generally, no. (OTOH, solar water heaters would work well for almost everyone and take demand off the grid.) Vegas, however, should certainly be running off it.
Wind is the same way. Very few places actually have some sort of steady wind that could work. Mainly ocean areas.
Tidal is an interesting tech, but it doesn't really generate as much power as people think. Tidal is essentially hydroelectric power..on the equivalent of a small stream gently sloping downhill. You can add more water moving, but then you have to block off more and more ocean to do it, and at some point that starts causing environmental concerns of its own.
Geothermal never really going to be that good an idea, as it requires you to build in a place where there might be earthquakes. OTOH, as geothermal plants don't actually have any containment issues, as long as you're willing to suffer a power outage, it's fine, I guess.
Essentially alternative power is sorta like alternative medicine.
You know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine.
Same thing with 'green power'. If it works, and has worked for a decade, they've probably already built it. There might be a fine edge where there's some form of green power that would work, but is more expensive than coal, or some new innovate which makes it work in a specific situation, and by all means we should push to switch when that is true, and likewise we should push to decrease energy consumption, but in reality it turns out that we really only have a few options to actually create the power we need in general: Natural gas, oil, coal, or nuclear. Only one of those doesn't spew pollutants in the air, which kill people, and also get a lot of people killed while mining.(1)
1) Coal mines kill people in accidents. And release radon, which kills people. And causes black lung, which kills people. Whereas drilling for oil isn't as dangerous, but fighting over oil certainly seems to kill a lot people.
With coal power, talking about 'radiation' is like asserting that you're not going to ride inside a car, as cars are dangerous...you're going to ride standing on the hood of the car.
Seriously, people. Solar and wind cannot supply our needs. Do the math. We can work on that, sure, but we need power now.
Oil and gas are just bad ideas all around. Gas prices are already high enough.
And as for coal...good grief, people. Do you know why coal's so cheap? Well, a) safety regulations are lax, so people die mining it, b) They mine it by blowing the tops of mountains, c) it reduces more radioactivity materials in a year than all radiation ever released in the US due to the nuclear power industry.
And what are you doing about the radon released by coal mining and burning? You know, released straight into the atmosphere instead of as a lump of metal?
Or do you only care about radioactivity if it's from uranium?
Fixing standby mode devices is fixing a problem that's almost an order of magnitude smaller than the real one.
Fixing standby mode is fixing a problem that's at least two orders of magnitude smaller than the real one.
Most power usage in this country is not from things that can even have a standby mode. Most home use, for example, is from heating and cooling. Most than half of power usage is commercial, and they probably aren't watching TV. (And while they are using computers, the problem is that they aren't turning them off or having them standby at all.)
That said, of course companies shouldn't be allowed to sell us something that wasted $4 a year in energy to save $0.20 in materials. We do need reasonable assurances that things that are 'off' are off, or close to it. Of course, a lot of this has been done already, this isn't 1998.
Suddenly I'm imagining one of those 'facial recognizance' system that only exist in Hollywood, where you see a computer overlay an outline over someone else's face, creates a wireframe, rotates it, colors it in, and magically starts sorting through faces on the side trying to find the right one.
Except this one does it just for boobs, and prints the size of them, perhaps with some comment like 'perky'. Perhaps, on the side, it attempts to find a lowcut outfit said boobs would look good in, or the right push-up bra.
Occasionally, it accidentally locates some manboobs and then shows an error message and crashes.
How about this for a radical solution - we let the people who want it have it, and the people who don't, don't have it?
Oh, oh, and I know. The government could provide software to do that that people could install on their computer...for free!
Like the Australian government has been doing for a while now. No one used it.
You know, it's always amazing when governments say 'The people want this', and they try to make it mandatory, but end up compromising politically and making it optional...and no one uses it...so a push happens to make it mandatory.
Hey, dumbasses, I think we just figured out how many people actually want it. People might claim to want it, but they either are a stupidly vocal minority, or they are factually incorrect about their own desires.
We're about to do the same thing with health insurance in the US. Granted, at the same time, we're demanding that insurance companies allow people to purchase health insurance that they outright excluded until now, but there's a reason healthy people aren't buying health insurance...it's an insanely horrible scam that no one wants any part of unless they are already very sick.(1)
Sometimes ideas are just stupid. Sometimes the citizens, despite people saying 'This is what citizens want', are smart enough to say 'Thanks, but no thanks'.
1) I just know that someone is going to take that the wrong way, so I will say a) I am a Democrat, b) I am someone whose preexisting condition means he can't buy insurance currently, c) am for health care reform, and d) know that requiring people to buy health insurance from the same monstrous companies that kill every year approximately 1/10 the amount of people that cigarette do is going to be so incredibly unpopular that the Democrats will be lucky if they're not fucking lynched. Democrats: Always willing to shoot themselves in the head as long as both they and the Republicans bipartisanly pull the trigger.
People do not actually have the right to have unfiltered water. Well, they do, but they don't have the right to have it provided by the government. There is only one water system, and the government will filter it to reasonable levels. You don't like the level they go to, you can either put crap back in, or you can filter it some more.
Perhaps your analogy works if everyone is drinking well water, and the government is running around putting filters on their wells, and outlawing purchasing soft drinks in stores, calling them 'impure water'.
This is after the government walked around offering to install filters for free, and put big warning on soft drinks, but people just kept getting soft drinks, and no one installed filters. People simply didn't care, their water was fine to them.
Even that's not a very good analogy. We recognize the government has the general right to stop dangerous things from being sold, but not stop 'dangerous' speech from being passed from person to person. It would be entirely reasonable for the government to require stores to stop selling soft drinks made with cocaine, for example.
This assumes that an attraction for male children is, in any way, similar to an attraction to male adults.
It's entirely possible, actually likely, that there are three attractions: Male adults, female adults, and children of any gender.
As a pedophile is explicitly defined as someone who is attracted by the lack of secondary sexual characteristics, (1) it seems entirely likely that gender-based attraction (Which, after all, works off secondary sexual characteristics...we cannot see people's genitalia) does not operate the same way for them.
So, actually, the three things people are attracted to are: Male secondary sexual characteristics, female secondary sexual characteristics (Let's not forget transsexuals there, producing more than a few mental gymnastics as us straight men attempt to move them to the 'male' category from where they were before we figure it out.) and no secondary sexual characteristics.
Ah, but now I've caused a problem the other way. If the attraction is identical, than logically it should be roughly 50%.
Well, no, there's a reason for that. Most pedophiles are men, and, to put it bluntly, it's physically easier for a man to have sex with a female than a male, even a child.
Also, there may be less of a taboo in their mind(2), and they can imagine the female child in a more traditional role such as their 'wife'. It's entirely possible as the taboo against homosexuality goes away, the abuse will skew back to more gender neutral.
The question really is: How many people who are 'actually gay', as in, attracted to adults of the same gender, are also pedophiles? Or, assuming that almost all pedophiles are men, how many are attracted to male secondary sexual characteristics and no secondary sexual characteristics, vs replacing 'male' with 'female'?
I honestly have no idea of the answer, but that's the real question, not which gender of children they're abusing.
1) As opposed to just people attracted to underaged, but sexually mature people...and if you claim you've never been attracted to a mature 17 year old, or a mature person just under whatever the age of consent for your area is, when you were 20, you're lying. Adults do not act on such attractions, but, nevertheless, have them, and that is not pedophilia, which is attraction to non-sexually mature people.
2) Statistically, bisexuals end up in heterosexual relationships more often than homosexual ones, partially because it's easier to find heterosexual partners, but, just as importantly, they get less resistance from society so the whole thing is easier. While I doubt that a pedophile would find any meaningful difference of societal acceptance from abusing children of the opposite gender, (Although, frankly, I wouldn't be too surprised.), it's entirely possible they think that they would.
P.S. The commonly accepted figure is that 10% of the population is gay or bi. I don't know where you got 2%-5%,but 2% is way too low. Statistically, 4% of men, and 10% of women, admit to being occasionally attracted to people of the same gender, and another 4% of claimed to be mostly attracted to the same gender. (And that's just how many admit it on a poll.)
It sounds like you're doing the 'identity politics' trick, whether or not people consider themselves 'homosexual'. Only about 2.8% of men, and 1.5% of women claim to be 'homosexual', whatever that mean by that. This was, of course, the same survey where 4% of both admitted being attracted mostly to the same gender.
But that's not particularly relevant to this discussion.
To recap, if I want to ride rail from Georgia to DC, here is what should happen:
1) I drive to a moderately sized town, such as Gainesville.
2) I walk on a train. If the train actually comes through town, I should get on it when it comes through, otherwise, I should get on a car that goes to where the train is, and either get hooked on, or possibly I have to walk across a platform.
4) I ride the train. During this ride I have to produce a ticket, or just buy one there.
5) I arrive at a mass transit hub in DC. Taxies, subway, etc, just like an airport
All this should be almost as good as an airplane, with the trip itself being admittedly maybe a fourth the speed, but half both the hassle and the cost, and a train ride is much more enjoyable than an airplane one, as they don't attempt to cram you in a tiny space. Families should be taking them to go on vacation, cheap companies should be sending people on trips with them, etc.
Here is how it actually goes:
1) I drive all the way into Atlanta, dealing with Atlanta traffic. There might be parking, or not. (Alternately, I take the subway, which still requires me to drive almost the way into Atlanta, and the slightly shorter driving distance is more than removed by the fact that subways have incredibly expensive long term parking.)
2) I stand in line to buy a ticket.
3) I go through security.
4) I wait until my train is ready to leave.(Heaven forbid they actually have more than one 'terminal' at a train station.)
5) I go through something almost as intrusive as airport screening.
6) I ride the train. Sometimes I sit for an hour to weight for freight to get out of the way.
7) I get off god-knows-where in DC. Possibly there will be a phone.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, whatever, I was working off memory. :)
But, anyway, it's just amazing how morons think 'hide the decline' is evidence of anything except 'tree rings started screwing up recently'. The damn email explained that, it's a known thing that scientists have been doing for decades, it's mentioned in all the footnotes, but this requires AGW-deniers to have some actual grasp of the research instead of just parroting talking point.
If people don't understand what's going on: It's like to tracking someone miles through the woods. You've got their footprints (tree rings), and broken branches (ice cores), and other stuff(There's a lot of ways to guess a temperature in the past), and you've followed them a very long way. In the last hundred feet, for some reason, they've apparently had a squaredance or something, you don't know what, but their footprints are a mess. Of course, for the past half mile, you've had a damn GPS tracker(Those devices we possess to actually measure temperature called 'thermometers'.) on them, and you know they didn't have a square dance, so you just start ignoring their footprints and following their actual measured position. (Possibly some other animal mated on their footprints, which might be a concern to the 'footprint scientists', but you couldn't care less about. You're just keeping track of the location of the person you're tracking.)
As I said, the only scientific debate you can have about this (As we factually know the temperature recently, we don't need to guess.) is to assert that maybe tree rings were wrong in the past, too.
It's a valid argument to make. But, as I said, a somewhat pointless argument to make, too, as the older tree rings pretty well match the other data we have, and removing them doesn't shift temps one way or another.
The whole 'haywire' thing is very noticeable, with temps jumping up and down randomly, so it really doesn't look like they were doing this in the past, but as the temps matches anyway, no one cares if AGW deniers want to argue the data without tree rings. It doesn't actually change anything.
Of course, AGW deniers weren't arguing this, because, as I said, they have almost no idea how any of these scientists actually make claims or what the claims says or what research has been done, and they think it's just some scientists literally just measuring a trend and extrapolating from there, and the way to disprove it is to point to how the trend isn't perfect.
Don't get me fucking started on SWAT teams and no-knock warrants.
You're the police. You're paid to risk your life. You don't get to push that risk to innocent civilians because you're fucking scared of getting shot.
If they shoot at you when you walk up and knock on the door, by all means, wear armor, have other people with guns in position, and, after they shoot at you, feel free to shoot back. But you don't get to assault a building because you have hallucinated they might be armed and willing to shoot you. You are the police, not some random civilian, and you are paid to risk your life, you pussy. You don't want to do that, find some other damn job.
And if you can't collect the goddamn evidence without breaking in guns shooting, perhaps you should collect it some other way?
What? You say that makes it impossible to enforce drug laws because users will flush it down the toilet? Well, the impossibility of enforcing a specific law is not my concern. The fact that you assert the right to break into people's houses waving guns and shouting 'police' is my concern.
The police should never be the first to escalate violence, not even preemptively. They do not get to make people get on the ground, they do not get to tase people who talk back.
It's amazing how much 'resisting arrest', which justifies more force, is simply because of people being extremely uncomfortable while being arrested, because they got forced to the ground or on a car. No. You get arrested, you get handed a pair of handcuffs, you put them on yourself. You don't get fucking thrown around where any movement can justify more force. They only get to use more force if you actually attempt to escape, and that should be defined as 'attempting to move more than five feet without permission', or if you actually attempt to harm them, because cops abuse their fucking power to call things like attempting to move into a more comfortable position when forced onto the ground 'escape'
Perhaps, under exceptional circumstances such as searching for a known violent criminal, police officers might have permission to walk around with guns drawn.
If the police toss someone a pair of handcuffs, and they pull out a gun and shot the police, the police get shot! You do not want to get shot, do not join the police!
I don't know about the other thing, but anyone should have standing to challenge whether or not a law is constitutional, both at the state and federal level. Or, at least, any citizen.
Why? The Federal government is a tool of citizens joined by the constitution. Anything they do is automatically relevant to us from that direction, because they are doing it 'for' us.
So we should not only have standing because they're doing things to us, we should have standing if they're doing things 'from' us, although that standing should be restricted to arguing we can not legally have that law in the first place.
Non-citizens, of course, would be restricted to arguing when they have traditional standing, like everyone is now.
The problem, of course, is that a lot of idiots would challenge really dumb things, because a lot of people are very misinformed about the constitution, and very misinformed about actual facts.
But that's why you have to go through lower courts first, which I think you should still have to do, if only to prove your facts, and weed out delusional people who think there are FEMA detention camps being built everywhere.
Erm, in what manner am I very misinformed?
The only thing I said wrong was the US government requires you to mark your patents, which, as you pointed out, they don't, that's just required to collect more damages.
I fail to see how that makes me 'very misinformed'. I should have said that they require you to do that 'to actually collect any damages from infringement'. Otherwise they will just assert they didn't know, and as long as they stop when you notify them, they are fine. Without it, copycats can flood the market until you write each one a letter.
So, yes, in theory, you don't have to put patents on a product. In practice, however, you do, if you ever intend on suing people for cloning your product. Or they will say 'Oh, that's patented? Now that I know, I'll stop.' and you get nothing.
I think you also decided I was wrong about how hard pending patents are to find, but I was giving a history lesson...pending patents used to be very hard to find. Patents themselves used to be almost as hard.
Hence it's illegal to mark something as having patents pending when it does not. And it's illegal to mark something as applicable to a patent when it is not.
Man, your reading comprehension is terrible.
Indeed. This entire discussion is a rather blatant example of the failure of moderation. Half the people here seem to think we're actually discussing whether a patent is valid or not.
Actually discussing whether or not the large fine makes sense in this day and age, when it's fairly easy to look up patents, is another thing, as is whether or not it should apply if you do it accidentally, and a real discussion we could actually be interesting.
Likewise, an argument could be made that you should have to lists patents required to use a device on said device even if the device itself doesn't use the patent. (You can replace 'device' with 'software'.)
If you really truly need a patent to do something with what you buy, like if you need to use a patented device to put fuel in your car, I would argue that it would actually make sense to require the car, as well as the fuel device, to state that. This isn't how the law works, and thus that argument won't really help Activision, but it would make sense.
Or, for perhaps a more relevant example, some companies have taken to patenting hardware interfaces. But they can patent just the cable, and hence stop people from making compatible cables, while not patenting the plug itself, and hence not having to notify people on their device.
Hence I might build and sell my own cable and be in violation of patent law, even after I've looked up the patents on the device itself. Yes, in theory, I could be in violation of patents for all sorts of things, but the point is that companies should be required to inform me, a purchaser of their stuff, all the patents that are relevant, even if, strictly speaking, they don't apply to the stuff itself. Perhaps some sort of 'See also' patent list.
But almost all the people here seem to think this is some actual patent dispute, so heaven forbid we have an actual relevant discussion. Ugh.
Or, and here's a crazy idea, we could actually have, you know, nurses who are trained to notice actual medical problems doing it.
I don't know where you're getting that, but they aren't allowed to make claims for effects that aren't any better than a placebo.
When they talk about placebos in disclaimers, they're usually talking about side effects that are not, or are not, much worse than placebos.
I'm not sure why they have to do that...surely if 5% of the people using my new drug in the trial got a headache, and 5% of the people taking the placebo also got a headache, we should assume that 5% of people just get headaches, and we shouldn't have to mention it. Likewise, if only 4% got one from the placebo, we should assume the drug I'm testing has a 1% chance of causing a headache, so have to mention 'In rare cases, drug x might cause headaches...' or whatever the phrasing is.
But, anyway, the only time I've heard them talk about placebos is in regard to side effects, not actual deliberate effects. If you can't demonstrate that your drug beats a placebo for a specific effect, you can't market it as treating that effect at all, not even with a disclaimer.
Which is, as others point out, causing some weird issues as some of the older antidepression drugs are currently no better than a placebo, although they were much better when first tested. There's not actually a process to pull drugs off the market for magically becoming 'less efficient' like that, and no one knows how that's happening. You can really only pull them off if the testing was fraudulent, or if there are later side effects discovered, or something like that, not 'placebos inexplicably got better'.
Indeed. Although you know what they call 'herbal medicine, and other alternative medicine, that works'?
They call it medicine. ;)
All naturopathy either a) doesn't actually treat what it's supposed to treat, or, at least, is unproven to do so, b) treats it with near random amounts and can cause dangerous drug interactions, aka St John's wort.
WRT the first option, well, it really doesn't harm anything if people run around taking ginseng supplements. It's pretty bad when people get conned into herbs instead of actual functioning medications, but I can understand people trying them if they don't have a lot of options left.
(a) is essentially what we developed most medication from, and I assure we've checked exactly what you're using for exactly the thing you want to treat with it, and found it didn't really help. If it did, we already made a medication from it.
And as for actual medically active naturopathy treatments makes sense, where an overdose is not likely and it's fairly safe in general...if you want to make willow bark tree instead of aspirin, I certainly won't stand in your way. Especially with some drug prices nowadays, although the high ones are usually entirely artificial. Just be careful.
Despite my moderate dislike of herbal medication, I will, at least, admit that some of it is medicine. It's not really the safest way in the world to take it, and quite a lot of it has little to no effect, and the side effects are unknown, but there are circumstances where it makes sense, as long as you realize you are actually taking 'a drug' of some sort, and need to watch out.
Homeopathy, OTOH...ugh. Horribly stupid scam.
Sigh.
I knew someone was going to mention 'hide the decline'.
Here is the story:
For the past thousand years or so, we can guess global temperature based on tree rings. They match very well to know global temperature until 1980 or so.
After that, they go insane.
Please note this isn't some argument over facts...we know what the temperature was in 1994. It isn't some debatable thing. We know tree rings from 1994 don't match. We know the tree rings vary widely since 1980, not matching anything at all. We don't know why, but we know they do not match.
And hence, when graphing average temps, you have to do stop using tree rings around 1980.
You're standing there like an idiot arguing that not using data we know is factually wrong is a bad thing. We had damn thermometers in the 1980s! We don't need to guess the temperature with tree rings!
And everyone except apparently you morons have known scientists were doing this for decades. There are specific papers written as to why they have to stop doing this. All estimates as to average temp mention this.
Now, you could, if you were intellectually honest, remind people that tree rings are a bit iffy to use in the first place, considering they've gone haywire and no one can come up with a reason why, so we shouldn't be using them to tell use the average temperature 600 years ago, either...for all we know, they were haywire then, also. If you want to poke holes in this theory based on this new stuff you just discovered (Which all serious people knew the entire time and wasn't secret at all.), that would be a valid claim to make: Tree rings have weird problems in the present, hence might also have had weird problems in the past, so estimates using them are invalid.
Of course, that doesn't really get you very far, considering that tree rings match other temperature indicators we have, like ice cores, so throwing them out results in basically the same estimates. Also, it would require you being 'honest' and 'intellectual', so I guess that's out.
The pending patents are for hardware, not software. They cannot apply to a box of software people purchase.
Okay, everyone seems to be very ignorant here, and the article isn't explaining this, so I guess I have to give a damn history lesson:
The US government requires that you put notification of patent use on things you sell. (Either your own patent, or something you've licensed from someone else.)
That is fine for issued patents, but what about pending patents? Remember, you can use something for up to a year before filing a patent on it, and you do have some amount of protection when patents are pending.
Ergo, you should have to put pending patent notifications, so people can look those up, too, and not waste their time building something that's going to be in violation of a patent in two months.
Well, the problem then arose. You see, actual patents are easy to look up. Patent lawyers could have copies of the entire set, you could go to a law courthouse in state capital, etc.
Pending patents, OTOH, are real bitch to find. Only the patent office has those. So some enterprising people who couldn't, or didn't bother, to get patents, just went around putting 'patent pending' on everything, resulting in other people unable to figure out what, exactly, was patented. Or they could keep resubmitted a rejected patent, and it remain 'pending'.
Hence, at some point, falsely claiming to have patents pending, or actually having one pending, but unrelated to what you put it on, was made criminal and you can be fined for it.
Those laws don't really make any sense anymore, but are still there.
Okay, to recap what is actually happening for insane people who have no reading comprehension: No one is going after any patents whatsoever.
Some extraneous 'patent pending' numbers were printed on software boxes. No one has even slightly indicated that anyone would attempt to 'enforce' said patent-printing mistakes, or that other people wish to use said patents on their software, because the patents do not even relate to software.
Again: There are no actual patents involved at all. The 'offense' was a box that asserted that various pending patents applied to it, when they clearly do not, and no one is even slightly asserting they do. No one is attempting to enforce any patents, no one is attempting to strike down any patents. The patents mentioned will remain valid (For the things they actually apply to) even if this suit succeeds.
Apparently, falsely claiming you have a patent pending is a civil liability, as is claiming a pending patent applies to something it doesn't, and groups have arisen to run around suing people for this. This is the story of one of those groups.
Um, no, patent pending is the opposite of stifling creativity.
Patents stifle creativity. Patent pending lets you know what patents to look up.
Society needs to be warned about pending patents, so that people won't waste their time developing something identical, and then learn it is patented. That is much most stifling of creativity than 'Here is a list of things you should look up before developing a product like this'.
You can argue that patents are bad, but you cannot possibly argue that 'knowing patents exist before spending time and money developing a product' is bad.
I'm actually amazed it's any sort of crime, and it certainly shouldn't be per instances. It's the equivalent of printing 'may contain peanuts' on food that does not, in fact, contain peanuts.
I mean, an argument can be made that an overkill 'patent pending' use can result in the person being unable to find the actual relevant patent by throwing too much chaff in there, but these patents are relevant...if you're using the software you purchased, you're using the patents. You're just using them on the hardware you bought separately. The government should just order them to correct the error.
I think we need a 0 mod.
0: Redundant information that any objective observer would conclude is blatantly obviously, and normally get a Redundant mod just for stating something akin to 'A is A', yet the post was a response to a total fucking moron who apparently didn't understand that rather basic information.
But that's clearly too long to fit in the dropbox. Ah well.
'to make Windows appear faster.' Jesus H. Christ.
Windows is using my system resources to make my computer appear to be faster! Those bastards at Microsoft have struck again! How dare they make things happen faster on my computer as some sort of optical illusion of speed! (Because it's not like the speed of a computer is actually defined by 'how fast things happen'. That's crazy talk.)
You know, it's an interesting thought experiment: What if no work had ever gone into making computers 'appear' faster? If through computer history, we'd actually made them faster like normal, but put absolutely no effort into caching or optimizing or offloading processing or DMA or anything, just making processors faster and faster?
I suspect, right now, we'd be trying to figure out how to play our fancy new 'MP3s' on our eight-core-processor RAID-array setups, and hoping, one day, we'll get processors fast enough to handle postage-stamp-size video, or possibly even redraw our entire video screen at once.
I think you, and others, are fairly confused.
The question isn't when you're at work. Work is not far enough away. For all they know, you got sick, and will be pulling up any second. Or you just didn't work today, and you're at the mall. Or someone lives in the house who doesn't work and doesn't have a car. Or the maid or your boyfriend are about to show up and let themselves in.
It is simply not safe to target random, unobserved houses with no cars in the driveway. Especially during the day. At night, you have slightly better luck, if there's no car at 4 in the morning it's entirely possible that everyone there is sleeping somewhere else...OTOH, that's exactly when people expect robbers to show up, so are extra paranoid if happen to be away and see a strange car pull into a neighbor's house.
Meanwhile, observing a house isn't safe either. That's the entire point of Neighborhood Watches. Good luck in surveilling a house long enough to figure out exactly what's going on and the schedule of the people inside it. There's a reason cops don't do it that much, and aren't really trying to figure out a 'schedule', just where people go and who visits them.
Criminals do both those things, breaking in without checking, and just watching the house...and often get caught at it.
It is much, much safer to do it when someone is out of town, and other people know they are out of town so won't be coming over. Hence the old 'Look for papers piling up' trick. That still required crooks to drive around semi-randomly, though.
Now, as the article points out, they can get a computer program that can look at tons of tweets, find people who are are normally nearby, and what location they seem to live at, and then notice when they are fairly far away, which in and of itself is a major advantage. Knowing some one is physically 200 miles away means they can't possibly show up in the next hour. The fact the criminal can then look at the tweets and figure out if other people live in the house, how long they'll be away, wait for another tweet to pin down the fact they're still there, etc, is just icing on the cake.
Except Facebook doesn't have location stats, and you need permission to see their info.
With twitter, it's entirely possible to design a tool that a) follows people automatically, b) sees if they are posting location-giving tweets, c) determines where their house is from said tweets (Pretty easy, statistically), and then d) notices when they are 250+ miles away from that house. (I actually think you can see people's tweets without following them, so I think (a) is not needed.)
At that point, it can involve a human, perhaps even showing them the tweets before they relocated to actually see what's going on, how long they will be on vacation, and if their house is empty. Perhaps it could even search for references to 'wife' or 'roommate', alerting the criminal that said victim has one and they need to discover if this person is out of town also.
You really could automate 95% of all this, finding locations that are about 50% likely to be someone on vacation. And sometimes will be a coffee shop and sometimes there will be someone else there, but it's much easier than trying to find the people on vacation randomly.
Yeah, I was posting that as I ate, sorry.
You know, I want to a see a coal plant + coal mine designed to release only as much radiation as a nuclear plant + uranium mine.
I wonder how much that will cost.
It's always amazing how much crap we're willing to put up from old stuff, while having new regulations on new stuff that's a bajillion times as harsh.
Like how companies are supposed to treat broken CFL lights because of the mercury. Dude, I can promise that 1/2 of people at least 30 have been around 1000 times that much mercury. Do not eat mercury, but it's not going to kill you to touch it, or we'd all be dead. Let's worry about the high levels of mercury in fish, which adds up to toxic amounts over years of eating, instead of calling a hazmat team for a broken CFL, which isn't any danger to anyone at all unless they like licking the floor!
I'm all for getting toxins out of our environment, but it often seems that the ones we choose to worry, and where we worry about them, are very skewed, often inexplicably. It seems like we're willing to tolerate any level of horrible things from old things, whereas new stuff, oh no, that has almost 1/1000th the toxic level, or 20 times less than the old thing people use all the time! Pull it from the market!
With coal plants, however, it's not so inexplicable. The coal lobby is powerful, as evidenced by the fact that people here even mention clean coal like that's some actual thing. Actual clean coal ends up looking a lot like half my thought experiment at the front of this post. It would be massively expensive to actually filter all the CO2 and whatnot out of air, and that's not including the radioactive crap. CO2 scrubbers, right now, get maybe 5% of the CO2.
Hell, with all that scrubbing, it quite possibly wouldn't generate net energy. Having a discussion where 'clean coal' makes an appearance is like having a discussion about nuclear waste where we propose sending it up the space elevator into space.
Solar is rapidly uneconomic as soon as you have any overcast days at all. It works fine for the desert, and few other places, but generally, no. (OTOH, solar water heaters would work well for almost everyone and take demand off the grid.) Vegas, however, should certainly be running off it.
Wind is the same way. Very few places actually have some sort of steady wind that could work. Mainly ocean areas.
Tidal is an interesting tech, but it doesn't really generate as much power as people think. Tidal is essentially hydroelectric power..on the equivalent of a small stream gently sloping downhill. You can add more water moving, but then you have to block off more and more ocean to do it, and at some point that starts causing environmental concerns of its own.
Geothermal never really going to be that good an idea, as it requires you to build in a place where there might be earthquakes. OTOH, as geothermal plants don't actually have any containment issues, as long as you're willing to suffer a power outage, it's fine, I guess.
Essentially alternative power is sorta like alternative medicine.
You know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine.
Same thing with 'green power'. If it works, and has worked for a decade, they've probably already built it. There might be a fine edge where there's some form of green power that would work, but is more expensive than coal, or some new innovate which makes it work in a specific situation, and by all means we should push to switch when that is true, and likewise we should push to decrease energy consumption, but in reality it turns out that we really only have a few options to actually create the power we need in general: Natural gas, oil, coal, or nuclear. Only one of those doesn't spew pollutants in the air, which kill people, and also get a lot of people killed while mining.(1)
1) Coal mines kill people in accidents. And release radon, which kills people. And causes black lung, which kills people. Whereas drilling for oil isn't as dangerous, but fighting over oil certainly seems to kill a lot people.
With coal power, talking about 'radiation' is like asserting that you're not going to ride inside a car, as cars are dangerous...you're going to ride standing on the hood of the car.
Seriously, people. Solar and wind cannot supply our needs. Do the math. We can work on that, sure, but we need power now.
Oil and gas are just bad ideas all around. Gas prices are already high enough.
And as for coal...good grief, people. Do you know why coal's so cheap? Well, a) safety regulations are lax, so people die mining it, b) They mine it by blowing the tops of mountains, c) it reduces more radioactivity materials in a year than all radiation ever released in the US due to the nuclear power industry.
And what are you doing about the radon released by coal mining and burning? You know, released straight into the atmosphere instead of as a lump of metal?
Or do you only care about radioactivity if it's from uranium?
Fixing standby mode devices is fixing a problem that's almost an order of magnitude smaller than the real one.
Fixing standby mode is fixing a problem that's at least two orders of magnitude smaller than the real one.
Most power usage in this country is not from things that can even have a standby mode. Most home use, for example, is from heating and cooling. Most than half of power usage is commercial, and they probably aren't watching TV. (And while they are using computers, the problem is that they aren't turning them off or having them standby at all.)
That said, of course companies shouldn't be allowed to sell us something that wasted $4 a year in energy to save $0.20 in materials. We do need reasonable assurances that things that are 'off' are off, or close to it. Of course, a lot of this has been done already, this isn't 1998.
Suddenly I'm imagining one of those 'facial recognizance' system that only exist in Hollywood, where you see a computer overlay an outline over someone else's face, creates a wireframe, rotates it, colors it in, and magically starts sorting through faces on the side trying to find the right one.
Except this one does it just for boobs, and prints the size of them, perhaps with some comment like 'perky'. Perhaps, on the side, it attempts to find a lowcut outfit said boobs would look good in, or the right push-up bra.
Occasionally, it accidentally locates some manboobs and then shows an error message and crashes.
How about this for a radical solution - we let the people who want it have it, and the people who don't, don't have it?
Oh, oh, and I know. The government could provide software to do that that people could install on their computer...for free!
Like the Australian government has been doing for a while now. No one used it.
You know, it's always amazing when governments say 'The people want this', and they try to make it mandatory, but end up compromising politically and making it optional...and no one uses it...so a push happens to make it mandatory.
Hey, dumbasses, I think we just figured out how many people actually want it. People might claim to want it, but they either are a stupidly vocal minority, or they are factually incorrect about their own desires.
We're about to do the same thing with health insurance in the US. Granted, at the same time, we're demanding that insurance companies allow people to purchase health insurance that they outright excluded until now, but there's a reason healthy people aren't buying health insurance...it's an insanely horrible scam that no one wants any part of unless they are already very sick.(1)
Sometimes ideas are just stupid. Sometimes the citizens, despite people saying 'This is what citizens want', are smart enough to say 'Thanks, but no thanks'.
1) I just know that someone is going to take that the wrong way, so I will say a) I am a Democrat, b) I am someone whose preexisting condition means he can't buy insurance currently, c) am for health care reform, and d) know that requiring people to buy health insurance from the same monstrous companies that kill every year approximately 1/10 the amount of people that cigarette do is going to be so incredibly unpopular that the Democrats will be lucky if they're not fucking lynched. Democrats: Always willing to shoot themselves in the head as long as both they and the Republicans bipartisanly pull the trigger.
Erm, your water filtering analogy is stupid.
People do not actually have the right to have unfiltered water. Well, they do, but they don't have the right to have it provided by the government. There is only one water system, and the government will filter it to reasonable levels. You don't like the level they go to, you can either put crap back in, or you can filter it some more.
Perhaps your analogy works if everyone is drinking well water, and the government is running around putting filters on their wells, and outlawing purchasing soft drinks in stores, calling them 'impure water'.
This is after the government walked around offering to install filters for free, and put big warning on soft drinks, but people just kept getting soft drinks, and no one installed filters. People simply didn't care, their water was fine to them.
Even that's not a very good analogy. We recognize the government has the general right to stop dangerous things from being sold, but not stop 'dangerous' speech from being passed from person to person. It would be entirely reasonable for the government to require stores to stop selling soft drinks made with cocaine, for example.
This assumes that an attraction for male children is, in any way, similar to an attraction to male adults.
It's entirely possible, actually likely, that there are three attractions: Male adults, female adults, and children of any gender.
As a pedophile is explicitly defined as someone who is attracted by the lack of secondary sexual characteristics, (1) it seems entirely likely that gender-based attraction (Which, after all, works off secondary sexual characteristics...we cannot see people's genitalia) does not operate the same way for them.
So, actually, the three things people are attracted to are: Male secondary sexual characteristics, female secondary sexual characteristics (Let's not forget transsexuals there, producing more than a few mental gymnastics as us straight men attempt to move them to the 'male' category from where they were before we figure it out.) and no secondary sexual characteristics.
Ah, but now I've caused a problem the other way. If the attraction is identical, than logically it should be roughly 50%.
Well, no, there's a reason for that. Most pedophiles are men, and, to put it bluntly, it's physically easier for a man to have sex with a female than a male, even a child.
Also, there may be less of a taboo in their mind(2), and they can imagine the female child in a more traditional role such as their 'wife'. It's entirely possible as the taboo against homosexuality goes away, the abuse will skew back to more gender neutral.
The question really is: How many people who are 'actually gay', as in, attracted to adults of the same gender, are also pedophiles? Or, assuming that almost all pedophiles are men, how many are attracted to male secondary sexual characteristics and no secondary sexual characteristics, vs replacing 'male' with 'female'?
I honestly have no idea of the answer, but that's the real question, not which gender of children they're abusing.
1) As opposed to just people attracted to underaged, but sexually mature people...and if you claim you've never been attracted to a mature 17 year old, or a mature person just under whatever the age of consent for your area is, when you were 20, you're lying. Adults do not act on such attractions, but, nevertheless, have them, and that is not pedophilia, which is attraction to non-sexually mature people.
2) Statistically, bisexuals end up in heterosexual relationships more often than homosexual ones, partially because it's easier to find heterosexual partners, but, just as importantly, they get less resistance from society so the whole thing is easier. While I doubt that a pedophile would find any meaningful difference of societal acceptance from abusing children of the opposite gender, (Although, frankly, I wouldn't be too surprised.), it's entirely possible they think that they would.
P.S. The commonly accepted figure is that 10% of the population is gay or bi. I don't know where you got 2%-5%,but 2% is way too low. Statistically, 4% of men, and 10% of women, admit to being occasionally attracted to people of the same gender, and another 4% of claimed to be mostly attracted to the same gender. (And that's just how many admit it on a poll.)
It sounds like you're doing the 'identity politics' trick, whether or not people consider themselves 'homosexual'. Only about 2.8% of men, and 1.5% of women claim to be 'homosexual', whatever that mean by that. This was, of course, the same survey where 4% of both admitted being attracted mostly to the same gender.
But that's not particularly relevant to this discussion.
To recap, if I want to ride rail from Georgia to DC, here is what should happen:
1) I drive to a moderately sized town, such as Gainesville.
2) I walk on a train. If the train actually comes through town, I should get on it when it comes through, otherwise, I should get on a car that goes to where the train is, and either get hooked on, or possibly I have to walk across a platform.
4) I ride the train. During this ride I have to produce a ticket, or just buy one there.
5) I arrive at a mass transit hub in DC. Taxies, subway, etc, just like an airport
All this should be almost as good as an airplane, with the trip itself being admittedly maybe a fourth the speed, but half both the hassle and the cost, and a train ride is much more enjoyable than an airplane one, as they don't attempt to cram you in a tiny space. Families should be taking them to go on vacation, cheap companies should be sending people on trips with them, etc.
Here is how it actually goes:
1) I drive all the way into Atlanta, dealing with Atlanta traffic. There might be parking, or not. (Alternately, I take the subway, which still requires me to drive almost the way into Atlanta, and the slightly shorter driving distance is more than removed by the fact that subways have incredibly expensive long term parking.)
2) I stand in line to buy a ticket.
3) I go through security.
4) I wait until my train is ready to leave.(Heaven forbid they actually have more than one 'terminal' at a train station.)
5) I go through something almost as intrusive as airport screening.
6) I ride the train. Sometimes I sit for an hour to weight for freight to get out of the way.
7) I get off god-knows-where in DC. Possibly there will be a phone.