What if you're going to break the law that says you have to call it in? Those people will probably fail to call in. Thus breaking another law, etc, etc., retroactively breaking laws backwards to the beginning of time.
And I don't know what court system you're in, but that actually won't fly. Post ex facto and all that.
No, what we need to do is to require them to call in, each day, if they aren't going to break the law.
I've always figured out the way to end the drug laws in this country is for the estimated 25 million people who've smoked pot to turn themselves in on the same day, with full confessions, and demand a jury for their sentencing.
What you say is exactly true, if for 'criminals', you say 'bad people'. Cops don't want to put normal people away.
However, it's who they think are 'bad people'. Chinamen. Hippies. The Irish. Unionists. Blacks. Mormons. Homosexuals.
I've deliberately listed people that the cops used to go after, instead of modern people. But rest assured they still do the same thing.
Luckily, given enough laws, everyone is breaking the law, and cops can choose to go after 'bad people', secure in the knowledge those people are criminals. This is what is called a 'police state'.
The 'good' people will get ignored, maybe get a warning every so often, and of course the laws will be rigged so the laws they like to break are not that bad (1), or can be twisted into not being that bad by the police, as long as they don't interfere with the ability of the police to come down on 'bad people'.
I'm not saying this POV is actually a bad thing. There are plenty of cops where 'bad people'=='people who hurt other people', and those people make good cops. There also, however, plenty whose idea of 'bad people' is a bit more...iffy.
1) This works really well when there is a cultural gap between 'good people' and 'bad people'. For example, using different kinds of drugs, or in different ways. Or, as Anatole France put it, the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Although I'm not so sure they're on firm moral ground with the first 'baby' that died. Is it morally acceptable to create a 'person' you know has a 50% chance of dying in the next few days?
Let's frame this with full-size people.
Let's say someone invents a matter duplicator. And it can duplicate people as well as anything else.
Let's assume there's a job so dangerous that it has, say, a 50% death rate each day.
So people merely make a copy of themselves and trade off each day with the copy. When one of them dies, they duplicate themselves again and keep going.
Is this even vaguely acceptable in society? Is it even vaguely moral for a company to operate like this?
If we, as society, actually think life starts at conception, we must not only stop the waste in IVF, we must also look at the risks to the 'babies'. In fact, we need to take a long and hard look at the morality of pregnancy at all.
And if someone truely cares about '100 cells that could be a life', I have to point out that, at that stage of life, it is still even odds for a pregnancy to 'not take'. So half those people wouldn't exist anyway.
Wait, I forgot. It's okay if God kills them. We shouldn't work to save the hundreds of millions of 'babies' that die that way each year. Just the few hundred thousand who die in fertility clinics.
Wait, no, the pro-lifers apparently don't even care about them. Maybe they don't think life starts at conception after all.
Wait, unless we're talking about the morning-after pill. Which is so evil it still hasn't managed to get FDA approval after a damn decade, despite being as safe as birth control pills.
I wish pro-lifers would pick a damn story and stick with it. If life starts at conception, surely a family who spends time and money to make six 'babies'. have one die after two days in the womb, give birth to another, and kill four is much worse than a woman who gets an abortion.
If you pro-lifers think that's not comparable, it's because you realize that 100 cells is not a 'person'.
But right now dead 'babies' appears to be okay if 'God' or rich people do it, but not okay if poor or unmarried people do it.
Embryonic stem cells aren't taken from aborted fetuses. Otherwise they'd be fetal stem cells. That wouldn't even work, as the point of stem cells is that they have failed to differentiate.
Embryonic stem cells are taken from embryos. You know, those things that sit on the shelf at a fertility clinic, and get thrown away when one of them works?
And if they're so damn precious, why aren't you lunatics doing something to stop that practice?
You idiots are claiming that murder is immoral, so we shouldn't be able to donate our body to science. Instead of, I dunno, actually doing something about all the murdering. Um, whatever.
There isn't even a good contitutional challenge to fertility clinics. You could probably completely outlaw them, and you could certainly outlaw the practice of making multiple embryos at once.
I've actually thought about that some. It would be trivial to provide any organization that has 'runners' (I'm thinking organized crime here.) with unbreakable one-time pad encryption.
Assume a 20k/s VoiP stream. A CD could be used as a OTP for about 9 hours,.
Set up a secure generation site somewhere, make a dozen CD-RWs, run them to computers all over a city.
Each diskless computer boots off the CD using a custom Linux distro that takes up maybe 50 megs, and the rest is encrypted data. It boots up, sucks in the CD, and erases it. (And you then shred it.)
Yes, if the power fails, you're in trouble, but a lack of communications for five minutes is better than prison. You can always just do the 'talk using vague references on the phone' trick. Or the boss can carry an emergency wallet-sized CD. (You could have a UPS, but the best security would be to power off the computer for anything.)
You could either do a shared system, where all the CDs are the same, or you could just have each computer be able to talk to a central site, and that site reencode and send it out elsewhere. (The later is not only more secure, but let's you send out the disks less often, and on a more random schedule, as each individually run out. Might be overkill, though.)
For even more security, you could send more than two CD via multiple means, and XOR them together. Thus requiring feds to intercept two CDs and duplicate them without you noticing. Or three or four.
And the nice thing about a OTP is that it's fast.
I suspect that organized crime is perfectly happy with purchasing throw-away cell phones, however.
It's a guild of independent contractors, there isn't anyone in 'charge' at all. Anyone can get in if they pass the tests and training. Presumably there are some Companion-elected people setting standards and whatnot, but we've never seen the slightest indication that the guild has the authority to tell Companions what to do, or is leaded by anyone besides the Companions themselves.
Presumably there are ethical standards that failing to follow can get you decertified, but those are heavily tilted towards Companions. And there are systems and database only Companions have access to, but that's obvious.
As for the reason they have respect everywhere? Because the mistresses of some of the most powerful people in the verse are members of the guild, and protect the other members, and, I suspect, a lot of PR on their part. Other prostitutes aren't treated anywhere near as well.
I don't know ttrafford is talking about. There's no indication at all the Companions have any sort of hidden motive.
Only a 'few' out of the nine. That translates to three or so. Simon, Wash, and River.
Simon's having to deal with the complete and total change in his social situtation, which he finally accepts when he hires the crew for his own job.
River become a good deal less insane and a good deal more scary.
Wash is trying to work out his and his wife's relationship to Mal. I.e. the funniest torture scene ever.
And Mal and Zoe technically have forward movement, if you treat the battle at the start of the first episode as part of the series instead of a flashback. That's 'learn how our characters got where they are' instead of actual development, but linearly, we are introduced to them as soldiers and then get them as criminals, although we don't really figure out why until later.
So that's actually more than half the cast.
But you're an idiot if you think people in a series should all show character development in fourteen episodes. You have to explain who the characters really are before you can let them change:
We learn more about Mal and Inara's insane relationship over time. And a little of why she's where she is.
We know nothing at all about Book, except he has some upper-level Allience pull somehow.
With Jayne we, sadly, apparently know all we need to know about him. He is extremely shallow, and isn't secretly a good guy or anything.
Kaylee, uniquely, actually has an incredibly boring past, which we do know about.
But, as you apparently watch show with insane levels of character development, here's a challenge: Name one.
So, you watched two minutes of the show, and you felt like it was a rip-off of something?
Hey, at least the two minutes you watched were on the ship, so you didn't come away ranting and raving about the cowboy feel.
For reference, in the scene you watched, Saffron (The greatest reoccuring character ever) was pretending to be some young, innocent, backwater girl who thinks she married the captain in one of those local misunderstanding, when in reality she's trying to hijack the ship and give it to pirates. Her manner of speech is entirely something she invented.
After attempting to seduce the captain (which works) and Wash (doesn't work, he's married), she tries to seduce Inara, who is, of course, a trained prostitute, and it doesn't work. I don't know exactly where you got 'Dune' from that.
And if you don't think there was enough spent on character development you really didn't watch the show. There were nine characters, and fifteen 'hours' of show (Where hour=45 minutes of show and 15 of commercials) and they each got better explained and retroactively developed (Here's how they used to be.) than most other shows pull off on five characters in a whole season.
Granted, only a few of them made any forward movement. But moving forward before you've explained where the characters are and how they got there is not a useful thing.
And considering the big complaint is the show aired out of order, didn't it even vaguely occur to you that a good idea would be to start at the beginning?
No, they don't have to go out looking for infringements. (Trademarks do, however.)
However, if someone sets up a pirate movie distribution kiosk in their lobby, and they wait a decade and then sue him, they're not going to get very far.
If they want that CD to be worth 200 dollars they can stop claiming they have 'licensed' me Windows.
If I have paid for a license to use something, there are certain obligations the licensor is under, and one of them is to supply and replace the material I have licensed for a nominal fee, or to cancel my license and refund my money.
If I license a song to use in a movie, and they send me a CD with the song on it that breaks, they don't (and don't get to) keep my $14,000 license fee and laugh all the way to the bank.
They just send me another damn CD for free, because that's what's in the contract. If it wasn't in the contract, they'd have the option of canceling my license, or even charging a small fee to replace the media.
Under no circumstances do they have the right to just keep my money while I sit there unable to use my purchased license.
MS wants the best of both worlds. If they want to pull this 'license' crap, well, fine. Let's license it, bitches.
Oh, BTW, if it's licensed, I want my damn sales tax back.
Actually, revolutions tend to start with a bunch of people not breaking the law, but doing something those in power do not like, so they then make it illegal, but people keep doing it, and it spirals out of control from there.
Slashdot Mirror
What if you're going to break the law that says you have to call it in? Those people will probably fail to call in. Thus breaking another law, etc, etc., retroactively breaking laws backwards to the beginning of time.
And I don't know what court system you're in, but that actually won't fly. Post ex facto and all that.
No, what we need to do is to require them to call in, each day, if they aren't going to break the law.
Have fun sorting that mess out.
What you say is exactly true, if for 'criminals', you say 'bad people'. Cops don't want to put normal people away.
However, it's who they think are 'bad people'. Chinamen. Hippies. The Irish. Unionists. Blacks. Mormons. Homosexuals.
I've deliberately listed people that the cops used to go after, instead of modern people. But rest assured they still do the same thing.
Luckily, given enough laws, everyone is breaking the law, and cops can choose to go after 'bad people', secure in the knowledge those people are criminals. This is what is called a 'police state'.
The 'good' people will get ignored, maybe get a warning every so often, and of course the laws will be rigged so the laws they like to break are not that bad (1), or can be twisted into not being that bad by the police, as long as they don't interfere with the ability of the police to come down on 'bad people'.
I'm not saying this POV is actually a bad thing. There are plenty of cops where 'bad people'=='people who hurt other people', and those people make good cops. There also, however, plenty whose idea of 'bad people' is a bit more...iffy.
1) This works really well when there is a cultural gap between 'good people' and 'bad people'. For example, using different kinds of drugs, or in different ways. Or, as Anatole France put it, the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
How about 'United'? I think that definately goes on the list as meaning the opposite of what it normally does.
Although I'm not so sure they're on firm moral ground with the first 'baby' that died. Is it morally acceptable to create a 'person' you know has a 50% chance of dying in the next few days?
Let's frame this with full-size people.
Let's say someone invents a matter duplicator. And it can duplicate people as well as anything else.
Let's assume there's a job so dangerous that it has, say, a 50% death rate each day.
So people merely make a copy of themselves and trade off each day with the copy. When one of them dies, they duplicate themselves again and keep going.
Is this even vaguely acceptable in society? Is it even vaguely moral for a company to operate like this?
If we, as society, actually think life starts at conception, we must not only stop the waste in IVF, we must also look at the risks to the 'babies'. In fact, we need to take a long and hard look at the morality of pregnancy at all.
One day, however, you'll have to upgrade to the advanced capablities of lynx, and you will have to stop browsing the web from the command line. ;)
A somewhat specialized moderation, and everyone laughed when they added it, but look how useful it is!
Third, abortions don't have a damn thing to do with any sort of stem cell research.
Wait, I forgot. It's okay if God kills them. We shouldn't work to save the hundreds of millions of 'babies' that die that way each year. Just the few hundred thousand who die in fertility clinics.
Wait, no, the pro-lifers apparently don't even care about them. Maybe they don't think life starts at conception after all.
Wait, unless we're talking about the morning-after pill. Which is so evil it still hasn't managed to get FDA approval after a damn decade, despite being as safe as birth control pills.
I wish pro-lifers would pick a damn story and stick with it. If life starts at conception, surely a family who spends time and money to make six 'babies'. have one die after two days in the womb, give birth to another, and kill four is much worse than a woman who gets an abortion.
If you pro-lifers think that's not comparable, it's because you realize that 100 cells is not a 'person'.
But right now dead 'babies' appears to be okay if 'God' or rich people do it, but not okay if poor or unmarried people do it.
Embryonic stem cells aren't taken from aborted fetuses. Otherwise they'd be fetal stem cells. That wouldn't even work, as the point of stem cells is that they have failed to differentiate.
Embryonic stem cells are taken from embryos. You know, those things that sit on the shelf at a fertility clinic, and get thrown away when one of them works?
And if they're so damn precious, why aren't you lunatics doing something to stop that practice?
You idiots are claiming that murder is immoral, so we shouldn't be able to donate our body to science. Instead of, I dunno, actually doing something about all the murdering. Um, whatever.
There isn't even a good contitutional challenge to fertility clinics. You could probably completely outlaw them, and you could certainly outlaw the practice of making multiple embryos at once.
He's against using any of the destroyed embryos. He hasn't once addressed the issue of their destruction.
Why the hell are people having so much problem with grasping this issue?
I don't recall Christ having any moral objections to using the tissue of dead people to help living people.
If he had, you'd have thought someone would have brought it up WRT organ donation at some point.
Assume a 20k/s VoiP stream. A CD could be used as a OTP for about 9 hours,.
Set up a secure generation site somewhere, make a dozen CD-RWs, run them to computers all over a city.
Each diskless computer boots off the CD using a custom Linux distro that takes up maybe 50 megs, and the rest is encrypted data. It boots up, sucks in the CD, and erases it. (And you then shred it.)
Yes, if the power fails, you're in trouble, but a lack of communications for five minutes is better than prison. You can always just do the 'talk using vague references on the phone' trick. Or the boss can carry an emergency wallet-sized CD. (You could have a UPS, but the best security would be to power off the computer for anything.)
You could either do a shared system, where all the CDs are the same, or you could just have each computer be able to talk to a central site, and that site reencode and send it out elsewhere. (The later is not only more secure, but let's you send out the disks less often, and on a more random schedule, as each individually run out. Might be overkill, though.)
For even more security, you could send more than two CD via multiple means, and XOR them together. Thus requiring feds to intercept two CDs and duplicate them without you noticing. Or three or four.
And the nice thing about a OTP is that it's fast.
I suspect that organized crime is perfectly happy with purchasing throw-away cell phones, however.
Hilight, right-click, Decoders, ROT-13.
As easy as pie. Vg pna rira qb grkgobkrf.
However, I think he just used to work for the Allience. Didn't he get on the ship before Simon found it?
Presumably there are ethical standards that failing to follow can get you decertified, but those are heavily tilted towards Companions. And there are systems and database only Companions have access to, but that's obvious.
As for the reason they have respect everywhere? Because the mistresses of some of the most powerful people in the verse are members of the guild, and protect the other members, and, I suspect, a lot of PR on their part. Other prostitutes aren't treated anywhere near as well.
I don't know ttrafford is talking about. There's no indication at all the Companions have any sort of hidden motive.
Simon's having to deal with the complete and total change in his social situtation, which he finally accepts when he hires the crew for his own job.
River become a good deal less insane and a good deal more scary.
Wash is trying to work out his and his wife's relationship to Mal. I.e. the funniest torture scene ever.
And Mal and Zoe technically have forward movement, if you treat the battle at the start of the first episode as part of the series instead of a flashback. That's 'learn how our characters got where they are' instead of actual development, but linearly, we are introduced to them as soldiers and then get them as criminals, although we don't really figure out why until later.
So that's actually more than half the cast.
But you're an idiot if you think people in a series should all show character development in fourteen episodes. You have to explain who the characters really are before you can let them change:
We learn more about Mal and Inara's insane relationship over time. And a little of why she's where she is.
We know nothing at all about Book, except he has some upper-level Allience pull somehow.
With Jayne we, sadly, apparently know all we need to know about him. He is extremely shallow, and isn't secretly a good guy or anything.
Kaylee, uniquely, actually has an incredibly boring past, which we do know about.
But, as you apparently watch show with insane levels of character development, here's a challenge: Name one.
Well, there's your problem. Buffy ain't about vampires. ;)
Hey, at least the two minutes you watched were on the ship, so you didn't come away ranting and raving about the cowboy feel.
For reference, in the scene you watched, Saffron (The greatest reoccuring character ever) was pretending to be some young, innocent, backwater girl who thinks she married the captain in one of those local misunderstanding, when in reality she's trying to hijack the ship and give it to pirates. Her manner of speech is entirely something she invented.
After attempting to seduce the captain (which works) and Wash (doesn't work, he's married), she tries to seduce Inara, who is, of course, a trained prostitute, and it doesn't work. I don't know exactly where you got 'Dune' from that.
And if you don't think there was enough spent on character development you really didn't watch the show. There were nine characters, and fifteen 'hours' of show (Where hour=45 minutes of show and 15 of commercials) and they each got better explained and retroactively developed (Here's how they used to be.) than most other shows pull off on five characters in a whole season.
Granted, only a few of them made any forward movement. But moving forward before you've explained where the characters are and how they got there is not a useful thing.
And considering the big complaint is the show aired out of order, didn't it even vaguely occur to you that a good idea would be to start at the beginning?
Which was all well and good for gmail, but would look rather unprofessional for a business thing, so I rather doubt that's what MS is doing.
However, if someone sets up a pirate movie distribution kiosk in their lobby, and they wait a decade and then sue him, they're not going to get very far.
If I have paid for a license to use something, there are certain obligations the licensor is under, and one of them is to supply and replace the material I have licensed for a nominal fee, or to cancel my license and refund my money.
If I license a song to use in a movie, and they send me a CD with the song on it that breaks, they don't (and don't get to) keep my $14,000 license fee and laugh all the way to the bank.
They just send me another damn CD for free, because that's what's in the contract. If it wasn't in the contract, they'd have the option of canceling my license, or even charging a small fee to replace the media.
Under no circumstances do they have the right to just keep my money while I sit there unable to use my purchased license.
MS wants the best of both worlds. If they want to pull this 'license' crap, well, fine. Let's license it, bitches.
Oh, BTW, if it's licensed, I want my damn sales tax back.
How do we know this isn't a poisoned copy of the article? ;)
Just because something is allowed at a company doesn't mean the company is willing to spend any time or money on it if you can't do it.
Actually, revolutions tend to start with a bunch of people not breaking the law, but doing something those in power do not like, so they then make it illegal, but people keep doing it, and it spirals out of control from there.