The SCOTUS upheld the constitutionality of the law, but the reason it was upheld was not because the law allowed prosecution of a distributor who was not aware of the underage nature of the performers. Rather, the conviction was upheld because the 9th circuit had already ruled that the prosecutor had sufficiently proven that the distributor had knowledge of the underage nature of the performer (and, IIRC, actually knew the performer), and SCOTUS did not disagree with that assessment.
The reason for the SCOTUS granting certiorari was that the distributor was attempting a constitutional challenge, claiming that the law made it illegal to distribute child porn without knowing it was child porn, and that it was therefore unconstitutional. That rather bizarre interpretation of the law was supported by the 9th circuit in finding the law unconstitutional, but that interpretation was overturned by the SCOTUS. Because the law did actually require knowledge of the underage nature of the performers, they ruled that it was not unconstitutional, and thus the distributor could not get the conviction overturned on a technicality.
Some choice bits from the opinion:
Held: Because the term "knowingly" in sections 2252(1) and (2) modifies the phrase "the use of a minor" in sections (1)(A) and (2)(A), the Act is properly read to include a scienter requirement for age of minority. This Court rejects the most natural grammatical reading, adopted by the Ninth Circuit, under which "knowingly" modifies only the relevant verbs in sections (1) and (2), and does not extend to the elements of the minority of the performers, or the sexually explicit nature of the material, because they are set forth in independent clauses separated by interruptive punctuation. Some applications of that reading would sweep within the statute's ambit actors who had no idea that they were even dealing with sexually explicit material, an anomalous result that the Court will not assume Congress to have intended.
...
The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed the conviction of respondents for violation of this Act. It held that the Act did not require that the defendant know that one of the performers was a minor, and that it was therefore facially unconstitutional. We conclude that the Act is properly read to include such a requirement.
...
If the term "knowingly" applies only to the relevant verbs in section 2252-transporting, shipping, receiving, distributing, and reproducing-we would have to conclude that Congress wished to distinguish between someone who knowingly transported a particular package of film whose contents were unknown to him, and someone who unknowingly transported that package. It would seem odd, to say the least, that Congress distinguished between someone who inadvertently dropped an item into the mail without realizing it, and someone who consciously placed the same item in the mail, but was nonetheless unconcerned about whether the person had any knowledge of the prohibited contents of the package.
Some applications of respondents' position would produce results that were not merely odd, but positively absurd. If we were to conclude that "knowingly" only modifies the relevant verbs in section 2252, we would sweep within the ambit of the statute actors who had no idea that they were even dealing with sexually explicit material. For instance, a retail druggist who returns an uninspected roll of developed film to a customer "knowingly distributes" a visual depiction and would be criminally liable if it were later discovered that the visual depiction contained images of children engaged in sexually explicit conduct. Or, a new resident of an apartment might receive mail for the prior resident and store the mail unopened. If the prior tenant had requested delivery of materials covered by section 2252, his residential successor could be prosecuted for "knowing receipt" of such materials. Similarly, a Federal Express courier who delivers a box in which the shipper has declared the contents to be "film" "knowingly transports" such film. We do not assume that Congress, in passing laws, intended such results.
You missed a third reason - content I want to see is not legally available my region. Netflix and iTunes limit what I can watch and barring vpns just makes it harder to access content that arguably I have paid for.
I would argue that if you've paid for it, that isn't piracy. It might be a contractual violation, but it isn't piracy. If you haven't paid for it, that's a bit more problematic, and you're right that the content providers need to fix this. The notion of the world as a bunch of independent markets pretty much stopped working after the Internet revolution, and anybody still treating it that way is just begging to fail.
From a legal perspective, you are correct. Piracy is different from theft of a physical item because:
Not all sales lost due to piracy would have otherwise resulted in a purchase in a theoretical world where piracy is impossible.
People who pirate content tend to buy more content, too, either because of broader exposure or because they're digital hoarders (or both).
The victim of piracy loses only the profit on the sale, not the cost of the physical good itself.
In all but the most extreme circumstances, penalties for infringement under Title 17 are civil, rather than criminal.
However, those differences do not in any way negate my point, which is that psychologically, the motivation is essentially the same, whether you're stealing something from a store or pirating movies over the Internet, and that those motivations are primarily the ones listed in my original post.
But like, AC said, if the content is so bad, why are they pirating it in the first place?
Because it isn't all bad. The reason I stopped bothering with watching movies in theaters is because over the course of about five years, I went from enjoying about 80% of the movies I watched to enjoying about one in every six while the price crept up from about four bucks to about seven bucks per movie. So the effective price per good movie went up from $3.20 to about $42. And the median quality has only decreased since then.
After that, I switched to watching TV for a while, then as the median quality there decreased, I started watching movies on DVD (and later Blu-Ray), before eventually getting a subscription to Amazon Prime, followed by Netflix. Each of those inflection points was caused by me running out of new, good-quality content through a particular channel. At each of those inflection points, I made the decision to continue getting content legally, but some percentage of people go the other way.
If the content is good, but too expensive, why does that entitle them to the content on their own terms (free)?
It doesn't give them the right to do so, but it does make people feel much more justified in doing so, which means they're much more likely to do so.
But in the short term, it would bankrupt the industry, resulting in long-term equal availability of nothing. Yes, that's a bad thing. You don't get to free trade overnight; attempting to go down that path too quickly will result in complete economic collapse.
Because getting it free and reimporting it to the US encourages less of a grey market than getting it cheap. Logic fail.
Getting it free (pirated copies) and reimporting it is illegal, and various agencies actively go after people who do that. No legitimate business would do that, and the ones that try it tend to get into a lot of trouble and don't remain in business for very long.
By contrast, if those copies overseas are legal copies, then reimporting them is legal, and those agencies can't do a thing to people who do that. More to the point, there's nothing preventing, oh, say Amazon from mass-reimporting those overseas copies and selling them legally, completely devastating the movie company's U.S. income.
No, my logic is sound. You just missed the point. Ensuring that cheap overseas copies are all unlicensed is critical to limiting the damage that those copies can do in the U.S.
The problem is, if you sell a legally licensed copy for a fraction of the price in countries that don't have money, it suddenly becomes very profitable to do grey-market imports back into the U.S. and undercut your sales there.
It is typically more reasonable to sell them at a high price everywhere, knowing that poorer countries will exhibit rampant piracy, and then just write off the rampant piracy as a cost of doing business.
Like you'd stop pirating content if that happened... lol
Statistically, people steal for one of two reasons: For the thrill or because they feel the price is more than they can afford to spend on the product.
The latter of those two groups would pirate a lot less if the quality were better, because they wouldn't have to go through so much crap to find something worth watching.
But even if they didn't, there's no evidence that the industry's spending on DRM has done anything to reduce their piracy, so even in the worst case, eliminating the DRM and using the money to improve content quality will still make people who don't pirate more likely to spend money on the content.
The former group is going to pirate no matter what, but more to the point, won't be significantly hampered by DRM anyway, making DRM nothing more than a giant broken window fallacy—a task that wastes the time of a lot of programmers on both sides of the DRM war, with neither side having any meaningful effect on piracy, while wasting a tremendous amount of resources in the process.
Interesting point. Eventually the surface of any object will reach the temperature of the substance that it is in, but how long that takes does depend in part on the density. It would be pretty fascinating to see a probe that does ablative cooling, leaving a tail like a comet. But I can't even begin to imagine how much ice would be needed.:-)
No. Smallpox, flu, chicken pox... all the viruses we vaccinate against don't kill genetically "weaker" people, they kill off the elderly, infants, and a few immunocompromised individuals, and make anyone else mildly to seriously sick.
We also vaccinate against influenza, and some forms of that disproportionately kill certain groups of people based on how their immune system responds; people whose immune systems exhibit a sufficiently severe cytokine storm die, whereas people with a less aggressive immune system don't, and genetic factors are believed to play a significant role in that difference. And those deaths are among people of roughly breeding age, which means that virus will have a very real effect on the genetic makeup of the population in future generations, which means they will be less susceptible to similar viruses in the future.
But again as I said, it would be incorrect to assume that such a susceptibility qualifies as "weaker", because those precise immune mechanisms that cause death in that case are also likely responsible for conferring extra protection against any number of other illnesses. Part of what makes a species robust is its genetic diversity.
Unfortunately, we can't absolutely rule out the possibility that some random genetic fluke could become disproportionately common in the gene pool because we protected those people against hard-to-spread viruses that killed a few people at a time, nor the possibility that some future virus could take advantage of that to wipe out an unusually large percentage of the population. It is unlikely, but not impossible.
The summary is very wrong. The sun's surface is ~5800K. The corona (above the surface) is ~500,000 K, or 100x hotter than that (or more; the temperature of the corona varies). This means if the probe is designed to burn up at ~1700K, it won't get to 5 km above the surface; in fact, it will burn up more than 2000 km above the surface.
Unless you define "surface" as the top of the corona... in which case maybe, but the temperature number is wrong at that point.
The problem is, AFAIK, like most legacy airlines, all of those critical systems tie into a central mainframe. Redundancy is supposed to be built into the mainframe hardware itself, and replication is infeasible because the mainframe-based databases don't really provide that capability. And like many companies, rather than spend the extra money to increase IT staffing so that they can properly transition to redundant clusters that are actually long-term-maintainable, they took the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach, assuming that as long as the system was working, nothing more than minimal maintenance would be required, and outsourced their IT.
I'd like to believe that this will force them to rethink that strategy and invest in systems that go between the front-end systems and the mainframe to let them slowly replicate it onto more standard hardware, along with people trained to handle such a large-scale IT task, but I'm not holding my breath. Give it another ten years, and it will happen again, but next time, the damage will be too severe and they'll be down for a year while they rebuild all their systems from scratch.
Ticketing and scheduling systems are not life-safety critical...
Tell that to the cancer patient who misses his/her chemo appointment at some regional cancer center because of a flight cancellation. When you have enough people depending on a service, if an outage lasts long enough, every service becomes life-safety critical, though perhaps somewhat less so in a country like England that is geographically small enough to not depend on air travel to get from one part of the country to another (and even less so post-Brexit).
And yet, ask any American, and you'll hear that his or her congresspeople are all good. As long as that continues to be true—as long as people believe that Congress is awful except for their Senators and Reps—we'll continue to get the same results. Instead of starting from the assumption that our individual congresspeople are good, we need to each start from the assumption that they are incompetent and try to find proof to the contrary, and if we can't, vote them out and hope that the next person is better; repeat until competent.
The problem with MAGA is that it implies that America stopped being great -- which isn't something most Americans believe.
Once again, most Americans claim they are exceptional, and live on the greatest nation in the world, yet most have never travelled outside the US, so their uneducated opinion counts for nothing. But that's a common flaw among the American people, they believe that if they say it, is it true. They don't ever let facts get in the way of a good opinion.
[Long list of areas in which America is not the best redacted]
That's a composition fallacy. To use a car analogy, a Ferrari's gas mileage is much worse than a Prius, but that doesn't make the Ferrari a not-great car.
America doesn't have to be best at everything to be a great country. It just has to not be below a certain badness threshold in any area.
Which is equivalent to UBI. What do we do if someone can't find a job they can do? Guaranteed full employment means we create a make-work job for them. How is this significantly different than just handing them money for doing nothing? The costs of the employee will outweigh the money they earn; it will be cheaper to just hand them money.
Nonsense. That's simply not possible. The costs of the employee can never be more than the money they earn, in practice. Even if you have to create a make-work job for them, you're still gaining something for the effort. You can't just discount that benefit as though it didn't exist merely because it wasn't something you originally planned to do, or because it wasn't a high enough priority to get funding in a non-guaranteed-employment situation. Society still benefits; they merely benefit at a level less than what they paid for the service, which is significantly better than just handing them money.
Besides, there's always plenty of useful work to be done. Take a look at the WPA for a historical example. It created what you would probably call make-work for lots of people, but society benefitted. For that matter, society still benefits today from some of that work, so long-term, it was probably a win even if it didn't look like it in the short term. Right now, we have a lot of minor road construction work to do. I know that the need for purchasing expensive equipment limits the extent to which that effort can be divided, but at least in principle, there's plenty of useful work to be done.
2) divide up the work so nobody is working more than is pleasant
I find any work unpleasant. Just hand me money. Bingo, UBI again.
The GP didn't say that nobody would work more than he or she found pleasant. I would assume a "reasonable person" test here, e.g. reducing everyone to 30-hour weeks instead of 40+. Fun fact: If you give everyone a nine-hour day for 3.5 days, you can have two full sets of workers in the same facilities and get approximately twice as much work done as if you hire one group of workers and pay them for 40 hours but expect them to work 60, because you have the same number of employee hours, but people aren't exhausted all the time.:-)
Good thing that that's not the reason. The owner is taking the risks.
Except that the same gross imbalance occurs even when the person at the top isn't taking the risks. Take CEOs, for example. Their only risk is that the giant piles of stock options they were granted might not be worth anything. That's not a risk; it's a potential benefit. The people taking the risk are the shareholders. What reason, then, is there for paying them many millions of dollars per year while the people under them make less than 1% of that? (Yes, I agree that 1000x is hyperbole. A more typical number for big companies is 100-300x.)
We don't know the chain of custody for the hard drive, so there's reasonable doubt that the content found on the drive is content that the doctor did not know about during the time he used his computer.
Worse, even if you knew the chain of custody from the manufacturer, and even if you could prove that the material wasn't planted by Best Buy employees, if the drive was refurbished (as is often the case for computers that have been repaired previously), you would also need to know the chain of custody for the platters in the drive, which almost certainly does not even exist.
Searching the unallocated space on a hard drive for kiddie porn is simply not a legitimate investigative technique, and anybody in law enforcement who works with cybercrime should know that already. So why the heck are we even having this discussion? This evidence must be suppressed as fruit of the poisonous tree, along with any evidence obtained as a direct result of any warranty wrongfully obtained based on that evidence, which likely means that the case will get dismissed for lack of evidence.
Not to mention that deleted kiddie porn files are not prima facie evidence of a crime, because it is only a crime if possession was willful and with the offender's knowledge (United States v. X-Citement Video, Inc.). If the offender had a reasonable belief that the performers were of legal age, or that the material was not pornographic, or if the offender did not intentionally obtain that material, then it isn't a crime. That's what makes prosecution really problematic.
Of course, it is quite possible that the Best Buy "finders" are actually parallel construction. For example, the owner of the computer might have knowingly downloaded one of those state-sponsored trojans that we've read about from a kiddie porn site, which in turn caused him to take the computer to Best Buy to remove the infection, and they detected that during the cleanup. If so, it's possible that they aren't allowed to talk about it in court because the trojan would then become part of the public record, which would create a whole new fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree discussion that makes this one look like child's play. But that's pure speculation.
No. The third-party doctrine only covers information voluntarily given to a third party. The key word in the doctrine is "revelation". Giving a computer to a third party to repair does not constitute revealing all of the data on that computer to that third party, and thus it is not covered by the third-party doctrine. And even with an agreement that gives them the right to inspect files on the system to the extent necessary to effect repairs, that still does not grant them the right to inspect arbitrary, non-software files, which means at no point can it reasonably be considered to be a revelation of the existence of those files, much less of the contents of those files.
It seems prima facie obvious that giving hardware to a third party for repair purposes absolutely does not remove the expectation of privacy for data contained on that hardware. No Best Buy customer goes in for a computer repair thinking, "I'm giving all of my files to Best Buy for their employees' entertainment." You're giving them a computer to repair, with the expectation that your data will remain securely on that computer and will not leave that computer. In much the same way that storing a hard drive in a safety deposit box does not grant the bank the right to open the box without a warranty and give the files to law enforcement, neither can a computer repair grant Best Buy that right.
Additionally, as others have mentioned, there are fundamental chain of custody problems involved when non-law-enforcement personnel inspect a computer, to such an extent that any "evidence" obtained should be considered highly suspect to the point of being circumstantial, and arguably shouldn't even be sufficient to qualify as probable cause for a warranted search of the owner's home/office/email/*. But that issue is only relevant if the person opens up the computer and finds kiddie porn on the desktop, such that seeing it was an inevitable and normal part of the repair process. If the person had to even double-click on a folder called XXX to find the kiddie porn, we're back to fruit of the poisonous tree, and the evidence should be considered inadmissable—doubly so if law enforcement enticed those employees to break the law as part of gathering that evidence.
Possible exception being vaccines. I don't really see a downside there.
One possible downside is that the human species could gradually become weaker by not allowing the most susceptible to die off, and one day a superbug could kill us all. This is, of course, purely hypothetical (and will likely continue to be hypothetical unless and until it isn't), but antibiotic resistance could very easily just be the first salvo in the rise of the contagions.
That said, this isn't a valid reason to stop vaccinate people, of course. The risk is likely low relative to the reward, and if you don't vaccinate people, there's a very real possibility that one of the people who dies unnecessarily as a result of one nasty bug would be one of the people (or the ancestor of one of the people) who otherwise would later discover the vaccine that prevents the superbug or whose natural immunity would allow the vaccine to be derived. So it would be a pretty silly thing to stop vaccinating people based on that fear. But it's still technically a possible downside.:-)
The problem with that logic is that a large battery is either a battery or an explosive. It takes ten seconds to open the thing and see if it turns on. If we required that ten second hand inspection for every laptop, it would have the same effect without the huge negative impact on travelers. No, this isn't about safety. This is about a combination of fascists throwing their weight around to prove that they have the power and spooks giving themselves access to every laptop carried overseas by business travelers to make it easier to steal corporate secrets. There is nothing good about this. It is 100%
dystopian nightmare to the core.
What will you name the function? What will you name your variables?
Proper cheating detection has to ignore function and variable names, because changing them is the most obvious way to cheat.
Will you use an iterative method, and thus will you use a for loop, or a do...while loop. Will you count up or count down? Or will you use a recursive function? Or perhaps you do some research and discover Binet's formula which calculates a Fibonacci number without iteration.
In college programming classes, the Fibonacci sequence is invariably being taught as an example of how to write a recursive function, which eliminates all the iterative implementations right off the bat. It also eliminates Binet's formula (and also, because you said no math libraries, computing a square root isn't really possible, at least in C, making that solution unavailable anyway).
In an introductory programming class, catching cheaters is useless, because their code should always be pretty much the same; if it isn't, they're probably doing it wrong and will fail at the end of the term anyway. And if they're just copying and aren't learning from what they're copying in the process, they'll fail at the end of the term anyway. This is why it is so important to require students to actually write code in class for the final exam. You immediately know with certainty who learned the material and who didn't.
I guarantee you if you ask 20 first-year CS students to write that function, given the usual criteria for a first-year college test question, even without cheating, the differences will be whitespace, variable names, function names, comments, and function order (whether function A is before function B or vice versa), none of which tell you anything about whether the student understands how to write code. And that's one problem with CS; by the time you get to the point where students either truly get it or don't, they've spent a lot of time in classes—at least a semester/quarter, and arguably more.
What we really need to do is come up with some sort of aptitude test for computer science, in which we somehow magically determine whether a person is going to be able to wrap his or her head around writing software. I don't have any idea what that might be yet, though, or else I'd have written it already, and I'd be rich, so there you go.
And yet various shrink-wrap licenses have been upheld repeatedly by the courts. AutoDesk should have been an open-and-shut case of the first-sale doctrine, yet it wasn't, and SCOTUS refused certiorari—a reasonably strong indication that they believe the decision was correct. And the comments in this decision alluding to licensing being okay support my belief that AutoDesk would be upheld by the SCOTUS if granted certiorari today.
IMO, the decision in AutoDesk is prima facie ludicrous, as it draws an entirely arbitrary line between two classes of copyrighted material solely because one exists "on a computer". And yet six years later, it is still binding precedent. I'm not holding my breath on this getting fixed any time soon.
It is not "loitering", if the offender follows the victim there. And that "intent" can not be proven until after the assault — there is no reliable mind-reading.
Nope. Intent can be proven just as easily by a foiled attempt at assault.
With the law on the books, police can book the pervert. Without it, he can not be touched until an assault takes place.
If the pervert actually did anything, or even attempted to do so, or even started to do so, the police can book him or her anyway. And if the pervert didn't, then no harm occurred. The only situation where the outcome would be different with a law like the one proposed would be in the ridiculously unlikely hypothetical situation in which all of the following are true:
The parent is not with the child
Someone else just happens to be in the right place to see someone following that child suspiciously
That someone else is so late for dinner that he or she can't be bothered to wait in the non-stall part of the restroom until the person said or started to do something inappropriate before busting the would-be attacker.
The person is not freaked out at all by getting arrested, tried, and found not guilty by reason of insufficient evidence, and proceeds to then go after some other child.
The overwhelming majority of the time, a presumption of guilt is an appalling miscarriage of justice. Unfortunately, that's what the law you're advocating effectively does—creates a presumpton of guilt. That simply can't pass constitutional muster, period, no matter the reason.
Slashdot Mirror
The SCOTUS upheld the constitutionality of the law, but the reason it was upheld was not because the law allowed prosecution of a distributor who was not aware of the underage nature of the performers. Rather, the conviction was upheld because the 9th circuit had already ruled that the prosecutor had sufficiently proven that the distributor had knowledge of the underage nature of the performer (and, IIRC, actually knew the performer), and SCOTUS did not disagree with that assessment.
The reason for the SCOTUS granting certiorari was that the distributor was attempting a constitutional challenge, claiming that the law made it illegal to distribute child porn without knowing it was child porn, and that it was therefore unconstitutional. That rather bizarre interpretation of the law was supported by the 9th circuit in finding the law unconstitutional, but that interpretation was overturned by the SCOTUS. Because the law did actually require knowledge of the underage nature of the performers, they ruled that it was not unconstitutional, and thus the distributor could not get the conviction overturned on a technicality.
Some choice bits from the opinion:
...
...
I would argue that if you've paid for it, that isn't piracy. It might be a contractual violation, but it isn't piracy. If you haven't paid for it, that's a bit more problematic, and you're right that the content providers need to fix this. The notion of the world as a bunch of independent markets pretty much stopped working after the Internet revolution, and anybody still treating it that way is just begging to fail.
From a legal perspective, you are correct. Piracy is different from theft of a physical item because:
However, those differences do not in any way negate my point, which is that psychologically, the motivation is essentially the same, whether you're stealing something from a store or pirating movies over the Internet, and that those motivations are primarily the ones listed in my original post.
Because it isn't all bad. The reason I stopped bothering with watching movies in theaters is because over the course of about five years, I went from enjoying about 80% of the movies I watched to enjoying about one in every six while the price crept up from about four bucks to about seven bucks per movie. So the effective price per good movie went up from $3.20 to about $42. And the median quality has only decreased since then.
After that, I switched to watching TV for a while, then as the median quality there decreased, I started watching movies on DVD (and later Blu-Ray), before eventually getting a subscription to Amazon Prime, followed by Netflix. Each of those inflection points was caused by me running out of new, good-quality content through a particular channel. At each of those inflection points, I made the decision to continue getting content legally, but some percentage of people go the other way.
It doesn't give them the right to do so, but it does make people feel much more justified in doing so, which means they're much more likely to do so.
But in the short term, it would bankrupt the industry, resulting in long-term equal availability of nothing. Yes, that's a bad thing. You don't get to free trade overnight; attempting to go down that path too quickly will result in complete economic collapse.
Getting it free (pirated copies) and reimporting it is illegal, and various agencies actively go after people who do that. No legitimate business would do that, and the ones that try it tend to get into a lot of trouble and don't remain in business for very long.
By contrast, if those copies overseas are legal copies, then reimporting them is legal, and those agencies can't do a thing to people who do that. More to the point, there's nothing preventing, oh, say Amazon from mass-reimporting those overseas copies and selling them legally, completely devastating the movie company's U.S. income.
No, my logic is sound. You just missed the point. Ensuring that cheap overseas copies are all unlicensed is critical to limiting the damage that those copies can do in the U.S.
The problem is, if you sell a legally licensed copy for a fraction of the price in countries that don't have money, it suddenly becomes very profitable to do grey-market imports back into the U.S. and undercut your sales there.
It is typically more reasonable to sell them at a high price everywhere, knowing that poorer countries will exhibit rampant piracy, and then just write off the rampant piracy as a cost of doing business.
Statistically, people steal for one of two reasons: For the thrill or because they feel the price is more than they can afford to spend on the product.
The latter of those two groups would pirate a lot less if the quality were better, because they wouldn't have to go through so much crap to find something worth watching. But even if they didn't, there's no evidence that the industry's spending on DRM has done anything to reduce their piracy, so even in the worst case, eliminating the DRM and using the money to improve content quality will still make people who don't pirate more likely to spend money on the content.
The former group is going to pirate no matter what, but more to the point, won't be significantly hampered by DRM anyway, making DRM nothing more than a giant broken window fallacy—a task that wastes the time of a lot of programmers on both sides of the DRM war, with neither side having any meaningful effect on piracy, while wasting a tremendous amount of resources in the process.
Interesting point. Eventually the surface of any object will reach the temperature of the substance that it is in, but how long that takes does depend in part on the density. It would be pretty fascinating to see a probe that does ablative cooling, leaving a tail like a comet. But I can't even begin to imagine how much ice would be needed. :-)
We also vaccinate against influenza, and some forms of that disproportionately kill certain groups of people based on how their immune system responds; people whose immune systems exhibit a sufficiently severe cytokine storm die, whereas people with a less aggressive immune system don't, and genetic factors are believed to play a significant role in that difference. And those deaths are among people of roughly breeding age, which means that virus will have a very real effect on the genetic makeup of the population in future generations, which means they will be less susceptible to similar viruses in the future.
But again as I said, it would be incorrect to assume that such a susceptibility qualifies as "weaker", because those precise immune mechanisms that cause death in that case are also likely responsible for conferring extra protection against any number of other illnesses. Part of what makes a species robust is its genetic diversity.
Unfortunately, we can't absolutely rule out the possibility that some random genetic fluke could become disproportionately common in the gene pool because we protected those people against hard-to-spread viruses that killed a few people at a time, nor the possibility that some future virus could take advantage of that to wipe out an unusually large percentage of the population. It is unlikely, but not impossible.
The summary is very wrong. The sun's surface is ~5800K. The corona (above the surface) is ~500,000 K, or 100x hotter than that (or more; the temperature of the corona varies). This means if the probe is designed to burn up at ~1700K, it won't get to 5 km above the surface; in fact, it will burn up more than 2000 km above the surface.
Unless you define "surface" as the top of the corona... in which case maybe, but the temperature number is wrong at that point.
Okay, fine, but statistically, you're an outlier. :-)
The problem is, AFAIK, like most legacy airlines, all of those critical systems tie into a central mainframe. Redundancy is supposed to be built into the mainframe hardware itself, and replication is infeasible because the mainframe-based databases don't really provide that capability. And like many companies, rather than spend the extra money to increase IT staffing so that they can properly transition to redundant clusters that are actually long-term-maintainable, they took the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach, assuming that as long as the system was working, nothing more than minimal maintenance would be required, and outsourced their IT.
I'd like to believe that this will force them to rethink that strategy and invest in systems that go between the front-end systems and the mainframe to let them slowly replicate it onto more standard hardware, along with people trained to handle such a large-scale IT task, but I'm not holding my breath. Give it another ten years, and it will happen again, but next time, the damage will be too severe and they'll be down for a year while they rebuild all their systems from scratch.
Tell that to the cancer patient who misses his/her chemo appointment at some regional cancer center because of a flight cancellation. When you have enough people depending on a service, if an outage lasts long enough, every service becomes life-safety critical, though perhaps somewhat less so in a country like England that is geographically small enough to not depend on air travel to get from one part of the country to another (and even less so post-Brexit).
And yet, ask any American, and you'll hear that his or her congresspeople are all good. As long as that continues to be true—as long as people believe that Congress is awful except for their Senators and Reps—we'll continue to get the same results. Instead of starting from the assumption that our individual congresspeople are good, we need to each start from the assumption that they are incompetent and try to find proof to the contrary, and if we can't, vote them out and hope that the next person is better; repeat until competent.
That's a composition fallacy. To use a car analogy, a Ferrari's gas mileage is much worse than a Prius, but that doesn't make the Ferrari a not-great car.
America doesn't have to be best at everything to be a great country. It just has to not be below a certain badness threshold in any area.
Nonsense. That's simply not possible. The costs of the employee can never be more than the money they earn, in practice. Even if you have to create a make-work job for them, you're still gaining something for the effort. You can't just discount that benefit as though it didn't exist merely because it wasn't something you originally planned to do, or because it wasn't a high enough priority to get funding in a non-guaranteed-employment situation. Society still benefits; they merely benefit at a level less than what they paid for the service, which is significantly better than just handing them money.
Besides, there's always plenty of useful work to be done. Take a look at the WPA for a historical example. It created what you would probably call make-work for lots of people, but society benefitted. For that matter, society still benefits today from some of that work, so long-term, it was probably a win even if it didn't look like it in the short term. Right now, we have a lot of minor road construction work to do. I know that the need for purchasing expensive equipment limits the extent to which that effort can be divided, but at least in principle, there's plenty of useful work to be done.
The GP didn't say that nobody would work more than he or she found pleasant. I would assume a "reasonable person" test here, e.g. reducing everyone to 30-hour weeks instead of 40+. Fun fact: If you give everyone a nine-hour day for 3.5 days, you can have two full sets of workers in the same facilities and get approximately twice as much work done as if you hire one group of workers and pay them for 40 hours but expect them to work 60, because you have the same number of employee hours, but people aren't exhausted all the time. :-)
Except that the same gross imbalance occurs even when the person at the top isn't taking the risks. Take CEOs, for example. Their only risk is that the giant piles of stock options they were granted might not be worth anything. That's not a risk; it's a potential benefit. The people taking the risk are the shareholders. What reason, then, is there for paying them many millions of dollars per year while the people under them make less than 1% of that? (Yes, I agree that 1000x is hyperbole. A more typical number for big companies is 100-300x.)
Worse, even if you knew the chain of custody from the manufacturer, and even if you could prove that the material wasn't planted by Best Buy employees, if the drive was refurbished (as is often the case for computers that have been repaired previously), you would also need to know the chain of custody for the platters in the drive, which almost certainly does not even exist.
Searching the unallocated space on a hard drive for kiddie porn is simply not a legitimate investigative technique, and anybody in law enforcement who works with cybercrime should know that already. So why the heck are we even having this discussion? This evidence must be suppressed as fruit of the poisonous tree, along with any evidence obtained as a direct result of any warranty wrongfully obtained based on that evidence, which likely means that the case will get dismissed for lack of evidence.
Not to mention that deleted kiddie porn files are not prima facie evidence of a crime, because it is only a crime if possession was willful and with the offender's knowledge (United States v. X-Citement Video, Inc.). If the offender had a reasonable belief that the performers were of legal age, or that the material was not pornographic, or if the offender did not intentionally obtain that material, then it isn't a crime. That's what makes prosecution really problematic.
Of course, it is quite possible that the Best Buy "finders" are actually parallel construction. For example, the owner of the computer might have knowingly downloaded one of those state-sponsored trojans that we've read about from a kiddie porn site, which in turn caused him to take the computer to Best Buy to remove the infection, and they detected that during the cleanup. If so, it's possible that they aren't allowed to talk about it in court because the trojan would then become part of the public record, which would create a whole new fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree discussion that makes this one look like child's play. But that's pure speculation.
No. The third-party doctrine only covers information voluntarily given to a third party. The key word in the doctrine is "revelation". Giving a computer to a third party to repair does not constitute revealing all of the data on that computer to that third party, and thus it is not covered by the third-party doctrine. And even with an agreement that gives them the right to inspect files on the system to the extent necessary to effect repairs, that still does not grant them the right to inspect arbitrary, non-software files, which means at no point can it reasonably be considered to be a revelation of the existence of those files, much less of the contents of those files.
It seems prima facie obvious that giving hardware to a third party for repair purposes absolutely does not remove the expectation of privacy for data contained on that hardware. No Best Buy customer goes in for a computer repair thinking, "I'm giving all of my files to Best Buy for their employees' entertainment." You're giving them a computer to repair, with the expectation that your data will remain securely on that computer and will not leave that computer. In much the same way that storing a hard drive in a safety deposit box does not grant the bank the right to open the box without a warranty and give the files to law enforcement, neither can a computer repair grant Best Buy that right.
Additionally, as others have mentioned, there are fundamental chain of custody problems involved when non-law-enforcement personnel inspect a computer, to such an extent that any "evidence" obtained should be considered highly suspect to the point of being circumstantial, and arguably shouldn't even be sufficient to qualify as probable cause for a warranted search of the owner's home/office/email/*. But that issue is only relevant if the person opens up the computer and finds kiddie porn on the desktop, such that seeing it was an inevitable and normal part of the repair process. If the person had to even double-click on a folder called XXX to find the kiddie porn, we're back to fruit of the poisonous tree, and the evidence should be considered inadmissable—doubly so if law enforcement enticed those employees to break the law as part of gathering that evidence.
One possible downside is that the human species could gradually become weaker by not allowing the most susceptible to die off, and one day a superbug could kill us all. This is, of course, purely hypothetical (and will likely continue to be hypothetical unless and until it isn't), but antibiotic resistance could very easily just be the first salvo in the rise of the contagions.
That said, this isn't a valid reason to stop vaccinate people, of course. The risk is likely low relative to the reward, and if you don't vaccinate people, there's a very real possibility that one of the people who dies unnecessarily as a result of one nasty bug would be one of the people (or the ancestor of one of the people) who otherwise would later discover the vaccine that prevents the superbug or whose natural immunity would allow the vaccine to be derived. So it would be a pretty silly thing to stop vaccinating people based on that fear. But it's still technically a possible downside. :-)
That's why you interview during the last week of your vacation, then come back from vacation and turn in your two weeks' notice.
The problem with that logic is that a large battery is either a battery or an explosive. It takes ten seconds to open the thing and see if it turns on. If we required that ten second hand inspection for every laptop, it would have the same effect without the huge negative impact on travelers. No, this isn't about safety. This is about a combination of fascists throwing their weight around to prove that they have the power and spooks giving themselves access to every laptop carried overseas by business travelers to make it easier to steal corporate secrets. There is nothing good about this. It is 100% dystopian nightmare to the core.
Proper cheating detection has to ignore function and variable names, because changing them is the most obvious way to cheat.
In college programming classes, the Fibonacci sequence is invariably being taught as an example of how to write a recursive function, which eliminates all the iterative implementations right off the bat. It also eliminates Binet's formula (and also, because you said no math libraries, computing a square root isn't really possible, at least in C, making that solution unavailable anyway).
In an introductory programming class, catching cheaters is useless, because their code should always be pretty much the same; if it isn't, they're probably doing it wrong and will fail at the end of the term anyway. And if they're just copying and aren't learning from what they're copying in the process, they'll fail at the end of the term anyway. This is why it is so important to require students to actually write code in class for the final exam. You immediately know with certainty who learned the material and who didn't.
I guarantee you if you ask 20 first-year CS students to write that function, given the usual criteria for a first-year college test question, even without cheating, the differences will be whitespace, variable names, function names, comments, and function order (whether function A is before function B or vice versa), none of which tell you anything about whether the student understands how to write code. And that's one problem with CS; by the time you get to the point where students either truly get it or don't, they've spent a lot of time in classes—at least a semester/quarter, and arguably more.
What we really need to do is come up with some sort of aptitude test for computer science, in which we somehow magically determine whether a person is going to be able to wrap his or her head around writing software. I don't have any idea what that might be yet, though, or else I'd have written it already, and I'd be rich, so there you go.
And yet various shrink-wrap licenses have been upheld repeatedly by the courts. AutoDesk should have been an open-and-shut case of the first-sale doctrine, yet it wasn't, and SCOTUS refused certiorari—a reasonably strong indication that they believe the decision was correct. And the comments in this decision alluding to licensing being okay support my belief that AutoDesk would be upheld by the SCOTUS if granted certiorari today.
IMO, the decision in AutoDesk is prima facie ludicrous, as it draws an entirely arbitrary line between two classes of copyrighted material solely because one exists "on a computer". And yet six years later, it is still binding precedent. I'm not holding my breath on this getting fixed any time soon.
Nope. Intent can be proven just as easily by a foiled attempt at assault.
If the pervert actually did anything, or even attempted to do so, or even started to do so, the police can book him or her anyway. And if the pervert didn't, then no harm occurred. The only situation where the outcome would be different with a law like the one proposed would be in the ridiculously unlikely hypothetical situation in which all of the following are true:
The overwhelming majority of the time, a presumption of guilt is an appalling miscarriage of justice. Unfortunately, that's what the law you're advocating effectively does—creates a presumpton of guilt. That simply can't pass constitutional muster, period, no matter the reason.