You are assuming that all discussions can and do last forever. On many forums, this place included, discussion must cease after a certain amount of time.
Even in places like Usenet, where discussions and theoretically last 'forever' (Or at least long as there is intelligent life), in practice software stops carrying and display threads that are past a certain age.
It's not so much as '90% of the users', it's '90% of the applications'.
I am astonished by all the people here talking about stored procedures and views and whatnot. I always assumed, and I suspect I'm correct, that something like 70% of MySQL use was by people running Joomla and Drupal and Gallery2 and Serendipity and all the other different pre-packaged software build for LAMP.
All of those would work fine on Drizzle. None of them use any of the features that will be removed. Maybe a few of them have an option to use prepared statements, but that's going to be in a module so can be enabled.
Another 20% of MySQL use is by people who've set it up to hold a mail database or written small custom web pages or various misc uses that don't require any of those features either.
Only about 10% seems to be actual heavy-duty custom applications that use those features. Most people, when actually faced with a real development project like that, go with some other database.
If there's an easy upgrade path provided from MySQL 5, if it can work with existing mysql applications and existing php code, the webservers I admin will be switching over.
There doesn't appear to be any logical way to 'lock in' utilities when your car can plug into standard outlets and run off gas.
The second that charging your Volt on the road becomes more expensive than just buying a few gallons of gas and running it through the Volt's generator, no one will do it. People will just treat it as a normal car that gets the first 40 miles a day free, and then uses gas.
That's not to say that GM might not want a cut of the profits. But people would only say that if they didn't understand what GM is doing.
GM is literally betting their entire company on the Volt. The whole thing. They see other American car makers struggling, and they decided to roll double-or-nothing.
I seriously doubt they would endanger this by putting any obstacle in the way of making it cheaper for drivers. They're probably just going to add a 'supercharge' plug on the Volt, which can charge in five minutes, in addition to the standard 115V 15A plug, and hand out the specs to the gas stations, and let them build and operate pay version of them however they see fit.
And possibly sell a version that doesn't charge, for home installation, or even one that works like a vending machine for parking lots, taking cash.
Incidentally, for those two, I'm imagining systems that don't need special wiring. Essentially, they themselves have batteries in them, and slowly charge off the wiring. When a car hooks up, they dump all their power at once into it, and start charging again. It means they can only charge four cars a day, but that should be enough to start with, and is more than enough for a single house. This is assuming the same amount of batteries as a Volt...they could obviously have more, or run off 220, or 30 amps, or all sorts of stuff to charge faster and hold more.
I'm basically seeing fast-chargers as a step between the cheapest 'charge overnight' and the most expensive 'using gasoline to charge'. So if you drive, for example, 60 miles and back, the first 40 are from your car's overnight charge, the next 20 are from the gas generator, you fast-charge once you get there, the next 40 are off that, and the last 20 are from gasoline again.
That's rather goofy math. First of all, it's not going to draw 15 amps. People do not produce things that draw 15 amps and tell people to plug them into 15 amp sockets. That's a good way to blow a breaker. It's going to draw 12 amps at most.
Secondly, the Volt is a 'hybrid'. Or, rather, it has an gasoline-powered electrical generator on board that can charge the battery. It will get approximately 50 mpg, so if electricity is absurdly high in your area, feel free to just run it on gas.
And, frankly, if the Volt itself can generate its own power using a tiny inefficient gasoline generator at less cost than you apparently believe the power company can running cheap coal plants, I must suspect something in your math is really off.
The Great Smog of 1952 killed more people than Chernobyl will, and that's not even due to the radioactivity of coal, just coal smoke. If you're comparing 'disaster situations' instead of normal operations, that is.
Of course, if we're talking about situations that safety regulations could not allow at this point in time, it's worth pointing out that over 20,000 people lost their life in coal mines from 1900 to 1910, which means in a single decade coal killed more people than nuclear power ever has. Granted, coal mines are nowhere near as dangerous now, but, then again, neither are nuclear power plants.
Coal plants do not have disaster modes that result in radiation being spewed everywhere. Neither do modern nuclear power plants. Both of them release radioactivity in general, the coal plants a lot more than the nuclear ones. (That nuclear waste? That stuff people care so much we dispose of properly? That flies out the top of coal plants.)
You said that much better than I did. If the population likes the guerrillas better than you, You. Have. Lost.
You may not know it, it might take fifty years and 100,000 men, but you've lost. The only possible way to win is to get the population to like you better than the guerrillas.(1)
And, as the guerrillas are hiding in the population (With the population's permission.), that means you have to attack the general population, which is unlikely to make them like you.
Alternately, you can choose not to attack the general population. Which means you will constantly be shot and killed. That would be an interesting way to 'fight' a guerrilla war. Maybe you can win the population's love out of pity.:)
All cases in which a guerrilla war has stopped are cases in which the general population became happy enough with their situation to want the fighting to stop. This is because the occupying force has done what the guerrillas wanted them to do in the first place.
That is only 'defeating' the guerrillas if you're crazy. Most sane people consider it the guerrillas' winning.
1) Which, admittedly, is technically possibly through the simple means of killing the entire population, and then introducing a new one that likes you better.
You are using a different definition of guerrilla than I am. A guerrilla force is one that operates, with the support of a civilian population, attacks an opposing or occupying army, and then blends back into the population.
Key words being 'support of a civilian population'. Everyone who doesn't wear a uniform, and makes short targeted attacks, and blends back into the population, is not a guerrilla. They're only guerrillas if the population is supporting them. Otherwise they're spies (If attacking military), or terrorists (If attacking civilians.).
The MRTA were terrorists, which is basically the exact opposite of guerrillas. They attacked civilians, and were the remnants of a military in the first place! They never had any local support.
Shining Path, OTOH, did operate as a guerrilla organization for a while, but then went rather loony and is more notable for killing allies than enemies, in addition to random civilians. It wasn't 'defeated', it collapsed when they captured its cult-of-personality leader.
Like I said, that's actually terrorism, not guerrilla warfare. Shooting at an occupying army or an unpopular government, with the support of the general population, is guerrilla warfare. Blowing up the general population in an attempt to dismantle an elected and popularly supported government is terrorism. (Before someone starts yammering about 'points of view', there is a very very very clear defining line, and it has to do with support of the general population.)
As for Malayan Races Liberation Army...dude...they won. I know the history books say they lost...but they won. Ethnic Chinese were granted the right to vote, and then Malaya became independent. Which is almost entirely what they wanted. They, being backed by China, wanted a Communist independent Malaya.
However, the general population was happy with a Capitalist independent Malaya. So the population, which had supported them until that point, stopped supporting them, so they 'lost' at their ultimate goal.
But I didn't say that guerrillas couldn't lose anyway. I said they couldn't be defeated by the opposing force.
They can easily lose if they lose the support of population, like all your examples did, either by pushing for changes no one wanted, or attacking civilians and harming their reputation.
Well, yes, if they actually did the second filter.
In reality, though, they don't, so I'm going to object to them doing the first.
What is actually needed is a supreme court decision that if they are going to use any sort of DNA matching as evidence, they have to do the full tests. They can use them however they want to filter whatever they want, but to present them in court, they should be required to do the full test.
Incidentally, there was a well publicized issue with that problem happening with fingerprints recently, by the name of Brandon Mayfield. While people realize that fingerprint match, via computers, is done by only looking at a few points, many people don't realize that often time such 'matches' are just accepted at face value and no one actually looks at the results.
I am not one of those morons who whines constantly about taxes, don't worry.
Incidentally, it costs about the same, in many places, to imprison a person for a month than to do a full DNA test.(And, like I said, the price of such testing would seriously drop if they'd start doing it in large amounts.)
Even ignoring any moral or ethical concerns, it would be cheaper to test DNA. Some portion of people in jail would no longer be in jail, with no replacement, as the police never solved the case.
Even the 'replacement' people, of the crimes that were eventually solved, and the 'correct in the first place' people, who were 'needlessly' DNS tested, would be cheaper, as it would reduce the likelihood of them being granted an appeal and new trial, which is much more expensive.
So even in the imaginary world where cost is more important than imprisoning the wrong people, it would still be cheaper to DNA test, as some percentage of the prison population wouldn't be there, and the rest would have harder evidence against them so less chance of appeal.
Remember this, every time the Innocence Project uses DNA testing to free someone: If the court had ordered that DNA test, and paid for it (Instead of it being paid for by the project.), the system would have made that money up within, at most, two or three months of not having to imprison that person. And that's not including the cost of lawyers fighting the test, and judges, and court-assigned defense lawyers, etc. And the first trial which would have never even started if it had been paid for at the start.
Oh, and the crimes the actual criminal committed while he should have been in prision.
Literally the only 'cost' of fully DNA testing is that the conviction rate goes down. And that fact, the fact we don't do full testing, entirely speaks for itself. We don't do it because we want convictions instead of justice.
That happens because the fucking legal system only test 13 points of the DNA, instead of the entire thing.
Testing the entire thing would cost thousands of dollars. Which is, apparently, not worth it to determine if we're sending an innocent to jail. (Although obviously the price would go down if the government would set up its own labs to do that test.)
The people who are released are released because volunteers go around investigating cases, finding ones that looks like miscarriages of justice, and paying for the DNA test out of their own pocket.
Yeah, and that's why people should object to the police collecting large and storing amounts of DNA. The police do not need to be running searches to find suspects, they need to be running the DNA of their suspects past DNA at the crime scene.
Of course, all this could be remedied if they'd run actual DNA tests instead of the pretend tests they run now. If they actually compared the full genome of someone to the DNA found at a crime scene, none of this would be an issue...the only false matches would be identical twins.
But heaven forbid they actually have to spend money to get a conviction.
'paying your boyfriend for the priviledge of raping you'?
Well, yes, that's what happens when prostitution is illegal.
Now go ask the sex workers in the Netherlands if that's what happening with them.
We don't actually have to imagine what the world would be like with legalized prostitution. See, it actually is legal in plenty of places, and the quickest glance at those places would reveal that the 'whole mesh of other crimes and abuses' are a result of the activity being illegal in the first place.
There is no such thing as a 'victimless crime'. All crimes, even completely consensual ones, result in a culture of lawlessness, with strong preying on the weak, simply because they exist outside the law. People selling $500 worth of cocaine shoot each other, while people selling $50,000 worth of diamonds in a jewelry store do not, because one of them is operating under the rule of law.
Any crime whatsoever, or at least any crime that a significant number of people do and makes any sort of profit, will quickly produce a whole class of people acting in a criminal manner around that crime. Be that crime burglary or prostitution or selling alcohol. Even murder, something which as a rule is not a 'repeat for money' crime, has produced hitmen.
Pointing to that culture of lawlessness as a reason to outlaw a behavior is extremely stupid, however. If, to pick a crazy example, murder was legal but murder for hire was not, hitmen would entirely disappear. (Of course, that wouldn't actually help anything.) If there was no such crime as burglary, we'd have no fences to resell their goods. Substances that are legal do not have sales that result in murder.
And, more to the point, if prostitution was legal, prostitutes would not put up with people raping them. (Unless you're talking about actual enslaved people, and at that point we're so far outside the law with kidnapping, slavery, and whatnot, that it seems moot to talk about what 'the law' is.)
I can see people who want to outlaw prostitution because it's 'wrong'. I think they're fools, but I can understand where they are coming from. Prostitution does cause societal problems in how it impacts others' relationships.
But once you remove the moral argument from the question, once you base it on the idea that prostitutes are 'victim', you're a complete moron if you want it illegal. It being illegal allows thousands of prostitutes to be beaten and raped and drugged every day, whereas if it was legal, they would call the police. All the victimization they are forced to endure is due to the illegality. (Unless you think them choosing to have sex itself is victimization, and at that point you're actually in the first class of people who want it outlawed because immoral, you're just not being honest.)
Young girls - by my definition, anything under 16 - do not have tits, do not have curves,
Dude, you're a moron if you think girls get breasts and hips at 16. Maybe 10% get them that late.
Normal girls start growing breasts around 10 or 11, although it takes about two years for them to fill in. There are plenty of 13 and 14 years old girls walking around whose breasts are as big as they will ever be, however big that is. (And some will keep growing.)(1)
Seriously, next time you're near a high school (Grades 8-12, ages 14-18) see if you can see a single one who hasn't already developed secondary sexual characteristics.
1) Just in case you guys think I'm hanging out with young girls a little too much, I volunteer at a local community theatre. I know at least two girls under 16 who are often cast as parents to people older then them, simply because they are fully developed (So much so that the very first thing we tell new male volunteers is 'She's 15, don't touch her'.), and I know at least three 22-30 year-old women who get cast as adolescents because they are small of stature and breast.
Pretending you can make blanket statements about the shape of women's bodies is wrong, but you've managed to do that is a way that isn't even knowledgeable...if women do not grow at least some breasts before 16, something is delayed in their development.
What I've always wondered is why the FBI doesn't pull the schools into this. The FBI should download this crap (Which is easier if it's not illegal.) and fax half a dozen head captures to each and every elementary school every week, saying 'Do you know this child?', which gets posted above the teacher's sign-in sheet.
Finding the children and their abuser is literally a million times more important than catching some random guy who's got pictures of some 16-year-old Russian girl mixed in with his other porn, which is what all their time is actually spent on.
I'm not sure that outlawing child porn has actually protected any children at all. Sure, selling it should be illegal, but I fail to see what good thing outlawing possession has done.
It's a) created a black market, hence more abuse from places outside this country we can't do anything about, and b) stops many people from distributing evidence of their, or others, abuse of children.
Outlawing evidence of a crime sounds, if you're very very stupid, a way to stop that crime from being committed, but in actuality just makes the actual crime harder to solve.
Yes, because abusing children to pass out child porn for free is a logical behavior of businessmen.
The people producing the child porn are not the people posting it to Usenet. The people buying it are then posting it, against the producers' wishes.
Trying to stop the production of child porn by shutting places where it is traded for free is akin to trying to stop the commercial production of music by shutting places that trade it for free.
Neither prostitution or smoking pot is against biblical law.
Visiting temple prostitutes is, but we don't actually have any religions that have prostitutes as part of their worship, and even under Jewish law those were never 'outlawed'...simply visiting them was outlaws. (As, of course, wherever they existed, it was Jews living inside another culture.)
I'm glad someone has come to the same conclusion as me.
Look, folks, yammering about copyright is stupid. At least music/TV/movie copyright.
Because copyright is, at this point, nonfunctional. It functioned when it required a lot of time and effort to make each copy, thus required someone to make a profit on each copy, or not do it. And if people made profits, if they are selling it as a business, the creator could easily track them down and sue them. That is how copyright used to function.
It does not function when there is no barrier to copying, and people do it for free. It does not even function when there is a slight barrier to the original copy (I.e., DRM or scanned copies of books) and then no barrier to additional copies, because 'hobbyists' are perfectly willing to spend the time on the first copy, just like they're willing to spend time on painting a model train or climbing a mountain.
Music copyright barely made it past CD-Rs, and the music industry rightly panicked at them. No copyrights except when the copies must be physical, like sculptures and paintings, are going make it past the internet. The second normal people could make a copy of a copyrighted work without any cost, copyright was doomed. Period.
It's not actually worth debating. There are people out there still arguing what we 'should' do about copyright, and what 'should' happen. There is no should. There are three options: a) have no internet, b) have no digital media, or c) have no copyright. Pick one, those are all the choices you get.
This legislation isn't rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, it's changing the order of disembarkation when the Titanic reaches New York. The music industry is going to remove the cargo before the people so they still make a profit. Yeah, good luck with that plan. The MPAA can just keep waiting at those docks for the ship to come in.
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You are assuming that all discussions can and do last forever. On many forums, this place included, discussion must cease after a certain amount of time.
Even in places like Usenet, where discussions and theoretically last 'forever' (Or at least long as there is intelligent life), in practice software stops carrying and display threads that are past a certain age.
It's not so much as '90% of the users', it's '90% of the applications'.
I am astonished by all the people here talking about stored procedures and views and whatnot. I always assumed, and I suspect I'm correct, that something like 70% of MySQL use was by people running Joomla and Drupal and Gallery2 and Serendipity and all the other different pre-packaged software build for LAMP.
All of those would work fine on Drizzle. None of them use any of the features that will be removed. Maybe a few of them have an option to use prepared statements, but that's going to be in a module so can be enabled.
Another 20% of MySQL use is by people who've set it up to hold a mail database or written small custom web pages or various misc uses that don't require any of those features either.
Only about 10% seems to be actual heavy-duty custom applications that use those features. Most people, when actually faced with a real development project like that, go with some other database.
If there's an easy upgrade path provided from MySQL 5, if it can work with existing mysql applications and existing php code, the webservers I admin will be switching over.
There doesn't appear to be any logical way to 'lock in' utilities when your car can plug into standard outlets and run off gas.
The second that charging your Volt on the road becomes more expensive than just buying a few gallons of gas and running it through the Volt's generator, no one will do it. People will just treat it as a normal car that gets the first 40 miles a day free, and then uses gas.
That's not to say that GM might not want a cut of the profits. But people would only say that if they didn't understand what GM is doing.
GM is literally betting their entire company on the Volt. The whole thing. They see other American car makers struggling, and they decided to roll double-or-nothing.
I seriously doubt they would endanger this by putting any obstacle in the way of making it cheaper for drivers. They're probably just going to add a 'supercharge' plug on the Volt, which can charge in five minutes, in addition to the standard 115V 15A plug, and hand out the specs to the gas stations, and let them build and operate pay version of them however they see fit.
And possibly sell a version that doesn't charge, for home installation, or even one that works like a vending machine for parking lots, taking cash.
Incidentally, for those two, I'm imagining systems that don't need special wiring. Essentially, they themselves have batteries in them, and slowly charge off the wiring. When a car hooks up, they dump all their power at once into it, and start charging again. It means they can only charge four cars a day, but that should be enough to start with, and is more than enough for a single house. This is assuming the same amount of batteries as a Volt...they could obviously have more, or run off 220, or 30 amps, or all sorts of stuff to charge faster and hold more.
I'm basically seeing fast-chargers as a step between the cheapest 'charge overnight' and the most expensive 'using gasoline to charge'. So if you drive, for example, 60 miles and back, the first 40 are from your car's overnight charge, the next 20 are from the gas generator, you fast-charge once you get there, the next 40 are off that, and the last 20 are from gasoline again.
That's rather goofy math. First of all, it's not going to draw 15 amps. People do not produce things that draw 15 amps and tell people to plug them into 15 amp sockets. That's a good way to blow a breaker. It's going to draw 12 amps at most.
Secondly, the Volt is a 'hybrid'. Or, rather, it has an gasoline-powered electrical generator on board that can charge the battery. It will get approximately 50 mpg, so if electricity is absurdly high in your area, feel free to just run it on gas.
And, frankly, if the Volt itself can generate its own power using a tiny inefficient gasoline generator at less cost than you apparently believe the power company can running cheap coal plants, I must suspect something in your math is really off.
The Great Smog of 1952 killed more people than Chernobyl will, and that's not even due to the radioactivity of coal, just coal smoke. If you're comparing 'disaster situations' instead of normal operations, that is.
Of course, if we're talking about situations that safety regulations could not allow at this point in time, it's worth pointing out that over 20,000 people lost their life in coal mines from 1900 to 1910, which means in a single decade coal killed more people than nuclear power ever has. Granted, coal mines are nowhere near as dangerous now, but, then again, neither are nuclear power plants.
Coal plants do not have disaster modes that result in radiation being spewed everywhere. Neither do modern nuclear power plants. Both of them release radioactivity in general, the coal plants a lot more than the nuclear ones. (That nuclear waste? That stuff people care so much we dispose of properly? That flies out the top of coal plants.)
You said that much better than I did. If the population likes the guerrillas better than you, You. Have. Lost.
You may not know it, it might take fifty years and 100,000 men, but you've lost. The only possible way to win is to get the population to like you better than the guerrillas.(1)
And, as the guerrillas are hiding in the population (With the population's permission.), that means you have to attack the general population, which is unlikely to make them like you.
Alternately, you can choose not to attack the general population. Which means you will constantly be shot and killed. That would be an interesting way to 'fight' a guerrilla war. Maybe you can win the population's love out of pity. :)
All cases in which a guerrilla war has stopped are cases in which the general population became happy enough with their situation to want the fighting to stop. This is because the occupying force has done what the guerrillas wanted them to do in the first place.
That is only 'defeating' the guerrillas if you're crazy. Most sane people consider it the guerrillas' winning.
1) Which, admittedly, is technically possibly through the simple means of killing the entire population, and then introducing a new one that likes you better.
You are using a different definition of guerrilla than I am. A guerrilla force is one that operates, with the support of a civilian population, attacks an opposing or occupying army, and then blends back into the population.
Key words being 'support of a civilian population'. Everyone who doesn't wear a uniform, and makes short targeted attacks, and blends back into the population, is not a guerrilla. They're only guerrillas if the population is supporting them. Otherwise they're spies (If attacking military), or terrorists (If attacking civilians.).
The MRTA were terrorists, which is basically the exact opposite of guerrillas. They attacked civilians, and were the remnants of a military in the first place! They never had any local support.
Shining Path, OTOH, did operate as a guerrilla organization for a while, but then went rather loony and is more notable for killing allies than enemies, in addition to random civilians. It wasn't 'defeated', it collapsed when they captured its cult-of-personality leader.
Like I said, that's actually terrorism, not guerrilla warfare. Shooting at an occupying army or an unpopular government, with the support of the general population, is guerrilla warfare. Blowing up the general population in an attempt to dismantle an elected and popularly supported government is terrorism. (Before someone starts yammering about 'points of view', there is a very very very clear defining line, and it has to do with support of the general population.)
As for Malayan Races Liberation Army...dude...they won. I know the history books say they lost...but they won. Ethnic Chinese were granted the right to vote, and then Malaya became independent. Which is almost entirely what they wanted. They, being backed by China, wanted a Communist independent Malaya.
However, the general population was happy with a Capitalist independent Malaya. So the population, which had supported them until that point, stopped supporting them, so they 'lost' at their ultimate goal.
But I didn't say that guerrillas couldn't lose anyway. I said they couldn't be defeated by the opposing force.
They can easily lose if they lose the support of population, like all your examples did, either by pushing for changes no one wanted, or attacking civilians and harming their reputation.
Well, yes, if they actually did the second filter.
In reality, though, they don't, so I'm going to object to them doing the first.
What is actually needed is a supreme court decision that if they are going to use any sort of DNA matching as evidence, they have to do the full tests. They can use them however they want to filter whatever they want, but to present them in court, they should be required to do the full test.
Incidentally, there was a well publicized issue with that problem happening with fingerprints recently, by the name of Brandon Mayfield. While people realize that fingerprint match, via computers, is done by only looking at a few points, many people don't realize that often time such 'matches' are just accepted at face value and no one actually looks at the results.
I am not one of those morons who whines constantly about taxes, don't worry.
Incidentally, it costs about the same, in many places, to imprison a person for a month than to do a full DNA test.(And, like I said, the price of such testing would seriously drop if they'd start doing it in large amounts.)
Even ignoring any moral or ethical concerns, it would be cheaper to test DNA. Some portion of people in jail would no longer be in jail, with no replacement, as the police never solved the case.
Even the 'replacement' people, of the crimes that were eventually solved, and the 'correct in the first place' people, who were 'needlessly' DNS tested, would be cheaper, as it would reduce the likelihood of them being granted an appeal and new trial, which is much more expensive.
So even in the imaginary world where cost is more important than imprisoning the wrong people, it would still be cheaper to DNA test, as some percentage of the prison population wouldn't be there, and the rest would have harder evidence against them so less chance of appeal.
Remember this, every time the Innocence Project uses DNA testing to free someone: If the court had ordered that DNA test, and paid for it (Instead of it being paid for by the project.), the system would have made that money up within, at most, two or three months of not having to imprison that person. And that's not including the cost of lawyers fighting the test, and judges, and court-assigned defense lawyers, etc. And the first trial which would have never even started if it had been paid for at the start.
Oh, and the crimes the actual criminal committed while he should have been in prision.
Literally the only 'cost' of fully DNA testing is that the conviction rate goes down. And that fact, the fact we don't do full testing, entirely speaks for itself. We don't do it because we want convictions instead of justice.
Guerrilla wars last until the guerrillas win, period. No opposing force has ever defeated guerrillas.
That happens because the fucking legal system only test 13 points of the DNA, instead of the entire thing.
Testing the entire thing would cost thousands of dollars. Which is, apparently, not worth it to determine if we're sending an innocent to jail. (Although obviously the price would go down if the government would set up its own labs to do that test.)
The people who are released are released because volunteers go around investigating cases, finding ones that looks like miscarriages of justice, and paying for the DNA test out of their own pocket.
You're asserting that biologists assert that some people have 'collectivist psychology'?
I'm fairly certain it is you who have no idea what you're talking about.
The problem isn't really people with matching DNA samples. Criminals would be very lucky to have that happen to them.
The problem is people who are in the database, and match a sample, but did not do it, while the person who did do it is not in there.
The No Fly list is not intended to catch no one, it is intended to make terrorists fly under different assumed names.
Or, um, something like that. No one's really sure.
Yeah, and that's why people should object to the police collecting large and storing amounts of DNA. The police do not need to be running searches to find suspects, they need to be running the DNA of their suspects past DNA at the crime scene.
Of course, all this could be remedied if they'd run actual DNA tests instead of the pretend tests they run now. If they actually compared the full genome of someone to the DNA found at a crime scene, none of this would be an issue...the only false matches would be identical twins.
But heaven forbid they actually have to spend money to get a conviction.
'paying your boyfriend for the priviledge of raping you'?
Well, yes, that's what happens when prostitution is illegal.
Now go ask the sex workers in the Netherlands if that's what happening with them.
We don't actually have to imagine what the world would be like with legalized prostitution. See, it actually is legal in plenty of places, and the quickest glance at those places would reveal that the 'whole mesh of other crimes and abuses' are a result of the activity being illegal in the first place.
There is no such thing as a 'victimless crime'. All crimes, even completely consensual ones, result in a culture of lawlessness, with strong preying on the weak, simply because they exist outside the law. People selling $500 worth of cocaine shoot each other, while people selling $50,000 worth of diamonds in a jewelry store do not, because one of them is operating under the rule of law.
Any crime whatsoever, or at least any crime that a significant number of people do and makes any sort of profit, will quickly produce a whole class of people acting in a criminal manner around that crime. Be that crime burglary or prostitution or selling alcohol. Even murder, something which as a rule is not a 'repeat for money' crime, has produced hitmen.
Pointing to that culture of lawlessness as a reason to outlaw a behavior is extremely stupid, however. If, to pick a crazy example, murder was legal but murder for hire was not, hitmen would entirely disappear. (Of course, that wouldn't actually help anything.) If there was no such crime as burglary, we'd have no fences to resell their goods. Substances that are legal do not have sales that result in murder.
And, more to the point, if prostitution was legal, prostitutes would not put up with people raping them. (Unless you're talking about actual enslaved people, and at that point we're so far outside the law with kidnapping, slavery, and whatnot, that it seems moot to talk about what 'the law' is.)
I can see people who want to outlaw prostitution because it's 'wrong'. I think they're fools, but I can understand where they are coming from. Prostitution does cause societal problems in how it impacts others' relationships.
But once you remove the moral argument from the question, once you base it on the idea that prostitutes are 'victim', you're a complete moron if you want it illegal. It being illegal allows thousands of prostitutes to be beaten and raped and drugged every day, whereas if it was legal, they would call the police. All the victimization they are forced to endure is due to the illegality. (Unless you think them choosing to have sex itself is victimization, and at that point you're actually in the first class of people who want it outlawed because immoral, you're just not being honest.)
Do you really trust the updater to not install a backdoor somewhere in your system while you aren't watching?
Um, yes?
If we cannot trust Red Hat not to install a backdoor in our system, we'd hardly be able to use Red Hat, would we?
Young girls - by my definition, anything under 16 - do not have tits, do not have curves,
Dude, you're a moron if you think girls get breasts and hips at 16. Maybe 10% get them that late.
Normal girls start growing breasts around 10 or 11, although it takes about two years for them to fill in. There are plenty of 13 and 14 years old girls walking around whose breasts are as big as they will ever be, however big that is. (And some will keep growing.)(1)
Seriously, next time you're near a high school (Grades 8-12, ages 14-18) see if you can see a single one who hasn't already developed secondary sexual characteristics.
1) Just in case you guys think I'm hanging out with young girls a little too much, I volunteer at a local community theatre. I know at least two girls under 16 who are often cast as parents to people older then them, simply because they are fully developed (So much so that the very first thing we tell new male volunteers is 'She's 15, don't touch her'.), and I know at least three 22-30 year-old women who get cast as adolescents because they are small of stature and breast.
Pretending you can make blanket statements about the shape of women's bodies is wrong, but you've managed to do that is a way that isn't even knowledgeable...if women do not grow at least some breasts before 16, something is delayed in their development.
What I've always wondered is why the FBI doesn't pull the schools into this. The FBI should download this crap (Which is easier if it's not illegal.) and fax half a dozen head captures to each and every elementary school every week, saying 'Do you know this child?', which gets posted above the teacher's sign-in sheet.
Finding the children and their abuser is literally a million times more important than catching some random guy who's got pictures of some 16-year-old Russian girl mixed in with his other porn, which is what all their time is actually spent on.
That's what I've always said.
I'm not sure that outlawing child porn has actually protected any children at all. Sure, selling it should be illegal, but I fail to see what good thing outlawing possession has done.
It's a) created a black market, hence more abuse from places outside this country we can't do anything about, and b) stops many people from distributing evidence of their, or others, abuse of children.
Outlawing evidence of a crime sounds, if you're very very stupid, a way to stop that crime from being committed, but in actuality just makes the actual crime harder to solve.
More to the point, what is the point for high demand anyway?
Yes, because abusing children to pass out child porn for free is a logical behavior of businessmen.
The people producing the child porn are not the people posting it to Usenet. The people buying it are then posting it, against the producers' wishes.
Trying to stop the production of child porn by shutting places where it is traded for free is akin to trying to stop the commercial production of music by shutting places that trade it for free.
All employment is 'trading your body for money'.
Neither prostitution or smoking pot is against biblical law.
Visiting temple prostitutes is, but we don't actually have any religions that have prostitutes as part of their worship, and even under Jewish law those were never 'outlawed'...simply visiting them was outlaws. (As, of course, wherever they existed, it was Jews living inside another culture.)
I'm glad someone has come to the same conclusion as me.
Look, folks, yammering about copyright is stupid. At least music/TV/movie copyright.
Because copyright is, at this point, nonfunctional. It functioned when it required a lot of time and effort to make each copy, thus required someone to make a profit on each copy, or not do it. And if people made profits, if they are selling it as a business, the creator could easily track them down and sue them. That is how copyright used to function.
It does not function when there is no barrier to copying, and people do it for free. It does not even function when there is a slight barrier to the original copy (I.e., DRM or scanned copies of books) and then no barrier to additional copies, because 'hobbyists' are perfectly willing to spend the time on the first copy, just like they're willing to spend time on painting a model train or climbing a mountain.
Music copyright barely made it past CD-Rs, and the music industry rightly panicked at them. No copyrights except when the copies must be physical, like sculptures and paintings, are going make it past the internet. The second normal people could make a copy of a copyrighted work without any cost, copyright was doomed. Period.
It's not actually worth debating. There are people out there still arguing what we 'should' do about copyright, and what 'should' happen. There is no should. There are three options: a) have no internet, b) have no digital media, or c) have no copyright. Pick one, those are all the choices you get.
This legislation isn't rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, it's changing the order of disembarkation when the Titanic reaches New York. The music industry is going to remove the cargo before the people so they still make a profit. Yeah, good luck with that plan. The MPAA can just keep waiting at those docks for the ship to come in.