Also, how does one charge a child with possession and/or manufacturing of child porn? As individuals with no (legal) ability to consent, shouldn't they be considered victims of the crime?
This is the crazy thing about the cases (I've heard of much the same thing happening before) where minors get accused of making/distributing child porn in the form of pictures of themselves naked.
Either they're old enough to be legally responsible for themselves, and hence it isn't child pornography, or they aren't old enough, in which case they can't be considered to be the perpetrator.
They can't cut it both ways and say that these kids (children, young adults, whatever) were simultaneously old enough to be responsible and yet too young to give consent... well, maybe they can, they've brought this case after all, so clearly they can try... but they shouldn't be able to.
I'm not making any claim about the ethics of the thing, what the law ought to be or how people should go about the business of making music and being compensated for it, I'm only talking about the terminology of it
Copyright infringement means a different thing from theft. Simple as that. The reason it means a different thing is that theft involves taking something away from someone else illegally whereas copyright infringement is making a copy of a thing that you aren't allowed to. There may be superficial similarities in that both involve obtaining something that you shouldn't, but the effect on the original owner (losing their thing, or not getting payment from you) is a distinction to be made.
There is precisely no reason to conflate the two things, they are separate terms with different meanings and should be used accurately, even if that means the emotional impact of your statement is reduced. So once again, please stop using "theft" and "copyright infringement" interchangeably, because they are NOT interchangeable terms.
No. Stealing the product of their labour would involve nicking the master copy they made, or possibly shoplifting a CD (although then you're stealing from the shop rather than the artist). An infringing copy removes nothing from their possession except the money that you might or might not have spent on a legal copy.
Both are illegal, but they aren't the same thing, and really the only reason to persist in not splitting that hair is if you have some motive for "copyright infringement" to be considered exactly equal to "theft". The most obvious motive being that theft sounds more serious and so people are less likely to choose to do it if they think of it in those terms.
Thankfully we are not undergoing a transition to Newspeak, so there is no need to eliminate terms from our vocabulary. There is a distinction between the 2 things and no reason to lump them together under one word, so please stop trying to do so.
We all learn it from scratch, the difference is that you learn your native tongue by example and come out of the process knowing things by intuition that it's "just right" rather than knowing the formal terms for things.
Learning a foreign language you tend to get some kind of structured approach... which lends itself well to quoting the rules, but isn't so great for gaining full fluency of a language, since they pretty much all have an absolute morass of exceptions and contradictions for every rule.
Your immune system already does suppress cancers to some extent, killing off damaged cells before they turn cancerous, or before a tumour grows too large. I heard of a case a while back where someone had a kidney transplant, and because of the anti-rejection drugs suppressing their immune system a previously dormant cancer started to grow. When it was discovered they had to come off the suppressant drugs, which sent the cancer into remission but meant they lost the kidney.
When a person "gets cancer" it's more the case that the normal cancer-prevention mechanisms have failed to stop it for some reason. Which is encouraging - the mechanisms already being in place should mean this kind of treatment is easier than it would otherwise be, so long as we can find a reliable way to call cancer cells to the attention of the immune system and not other cells.
That movie was all well and good until the very end... suddenly in the last half hour it was like whoever was writing it said "fuck it, magic happens". Until then it was more or less your standard epidemic/apocalypse film (excepting the slightly supernatural visions some people had) and it was doing it well.
The religious overtones I was ok with. I could just about handle the none-too-subtle divide into the lawful society-rebuilding good guys led by God (speaking through a magic old black lady) and the anarchistic criminals led by the incarnation of Satan (dressed entirely in denim), but when the hand of God quite literally came down out of the sky to detonate a nuclear bomb, for no apparent reason other than "there's a nuke on set and no-one to press the button," that was a step too far for me.
Good guys inspired by God... fair enough. Good guys with God himself as air support... little too much deus ex machine there for my taste
Cancerous cells, being defective already, tend to be more susceptible to further damage. So it takes less radiation/chemical to be lethal to a cancer cell than to a normal cell.
The treatments are still pretty savage on the normal cells, but it at least gives you a decent shot at killing the tumour before you kill the patient.
Do I sense that you're perhaps not my biggest fan?
Strange... you're supporting brain donation, and doubting the plausibility of future re-animation just makes me more likely to do that. I may be irrationally protective of my brain while I'm still using it, but if I can't be brought back after death using it then I have no qualms about it being given over to better purposes.
Whatever. I guess Slashdot comments aren't the best place for thought or discussion of something a little philosophical (who knew?)
I'm never sure what to think about that particular possibility... my normal inclination is that a computer simulation can't be "me" in the fullest sense, because I inhabit a brain, not a computer, so a simulation would just be a copy of me, not the genuine article.
But then... what am "I" apart from the pattern of stuff happening between my ears, which would suggest that recreating that pattern in a computer program of sufficient complexity would mean "I" was alive again in every important sense of the word.
I think the sticking point is if I die as a part of the transferral process - then it seems like you've killed "me" and made a copy at the same time. Although leaving me alive would make it even more definitely a copy... seems the only way that avoids the issue would be a gradual replacement of brain tissue with computer components. But then what's so different about doing it all at once?
In short, no matter how objective or logical I try and be, there's still a clinging sense of there being something a little bit "magic" about the 3 pounds of grey jelly between my ears. Crazy really, but I reserve the right to be irrationally protective when it comes to my brain.
Price vs Performance. For the same clock speed, a quad will be significantly more expensive, but the extra cores may not help performance for gaming all that much.
Since it was the "budget" build in question here, if you can get almost-as-good for a lot less money, that would be the more sensible option.
Certain instincts are very deeply rooted in us, like yanking your hand away if you accidentally touch something extremely hot.
You try adapting that response and doing something different... doesn't make it stupid. If policy is there for good reason and hasn't become out-dated then it's not stupid. Yes, stupid policies exist and need to be removed, but that doesn't make every example stupid.
You could argue that really smart people could figure out what the policy ought to be in each case, removing the need for it to be formally defined... but that would take longer, and stupid people would get it wrong. So actually policy can be used as a tool to save smart people time, and make stupid people act smarter.
If subsets of a species no longer interbreed then surely that itself is the moment of speciation... no? They would still be very similar initially, but once they're in 2 distinct groups that don't interbreed variation between them would likely only increase.
I hadn't heard of ring species before... that one is a line blurrer, I'll grant you. I suppose you could denote all 3 as subspecies, but then the distinctness of A and C makes that inaccurate. Maybe classify B as a hybrid, but that wouldn't be true either... ok, yeah. That one's difficult.
You're right that it doesn't disprove god (that would be hard for the same reasons that it's hard to prove the non-existence of unicorns - there's always the chance that you'll discover a unicorn after all) But it does demonstrate that no god is required in the development of life and that the Christian account of things is wrong (sidenote: the *origin* of life is a different thing that we don't have a definite explanation for just yet... but it's getting there)
Really the strongest result science can produce is that there is no need for god, that everything we know about can happen in the absence of god and that if a god exists, he's either too busy with his own stuff to have any effect on us, or that (despite all those godly powers) he's totally irrelevant/inactive.
Once we're at that point, where there's no evidence for god, and nothing left in the "unexplained, might be god" category, it's a fairly small step to say that god probably doesn't exist. Evolution is one step towards that and explains what was previously considered a fairly definitely divine act (creating all the variety and complexity around us), so in that way it's part of the argument against the existence of god.
I think I'm right in saying that there actually is a fairly clear-cut way to differentiate one species from an other - the ability to breed and produce viable offspring.
If fish #1 and weird-version of fish #1 can still breed and produce offspring that can themselves breed with other fish #1's then that's just variation within a species and speciation hasn't happened yet (the weird version isn't quite weird enough yet). Otherwise, they're 2 separate species.
The viable offspring bit is important when looking at hybrids - a horse and a donkey can breed to make a mule, but mules are sterile, so horses and donkeys are separate species.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, how does one charge a child with possession and/or manufacturing of child porn? As individuals with no (legal) ability to consent, shouldn't they be considered victims of the crime?
This is the crazy thing about the cases (I've heard of much the same thing happening before) where minors get accused of making/distributing child porn in the form of pictures of themselves naked.
Either they're old enough to be legally responsible for themselves, and hence it isn't child pornography, or they aren't old enough, in which case they can't be considered to be the perpetrator.
They can't cut it both ways and say that these kids (children, young adults, whatever) were simultaneously old enough to be responsible and yet too young to give consent... well, maybe they can, they've brought this case after all, so clearly they can try... but they shouldn't be able to.
You misunderstand me, and misquote me.
I'm not making any claim about the ethics of the thing, what the law ought to be or how people should go about the business of making music and being compensated for it, I'm only talking about the terminology of it
Copyright infringement means a different thing from theft. Simple as that. The reason it means a different thing is that theft involves taking something away from someone else illegally whereas copyright infringement is making a copy of a thing that you aren't allowed to. There may be superficial similarities in that both involve obtaining something that you shouldn't, but the effect on the original owner (losing their thing, or not getting payment from you) is a distinction to be made.
There is precisely no reason to conflate the two things, they are separate terms with different meanings and should be used accurately, even if that means the emotional impact of your statement is reduced. So once again, please stop using "theft" and "copyright infringement" interchangeably, because they are NOT interchangeable terms.
Step 1: Attach EULA to the bottom of a website
Step 2: Send invoices to German visitors for the web-page they downloaded from you
Step 3: Profit!
No. Stealing the product of their labour would involve nicking the master copy they made, or possibly shoplifting a CD (although then you're stealing from the shop rather than the artist). An infringing copy removes nothing from their possession except the money that you might or might not have spent on a legal copy.
Both are illegal, but they aren't the same thing, and really the only reason to persist in not splitting that hair is if you have some motive for "copyright infringement" to be considered exactly equal to "theft". The most obvious motive being that theft sounds more serious and so people are less likely to choose to do it if they think of it in those terms.
Thankfully we are not undergoing a transition to Newspeak, so there is no need to eliminate terms from our vocabulary. There is a distinction between the 2 things and no reason to lump them together under one word, so please stop trying to do so.
We all learn it from scratch, the difference is that you learn your native tongue by example and come out of the process knowing things by intuition that it's "just right" rather than knowing the formal terms for things.
Learning a foreign language you tend to get some kind of structured approach... which lends itself well to quoting the rules, but isn't so great for gaining full fluency of a language, since they pretty much all have an absolute morass of exceptions and contradictions for every rule.
Alternatively, the South Park episode "Asspen" (which aired 2 years before Team America was released)
Your immune system already does suppress cancers to some extent, killing off damaged cells before they turn cancerous, or before a tumour grows too large. I heard of a case a while back where someone had a kidney transplant, and because of the anti-rejection drugs suppressing their immune system a previously dormant cancer started to grow. When it was discovered they had to come off the suppressant drugs, which sent the cancer into remission but meant they lost the kidney.
When a person "gets cancer" it's more the case that the normal cancer-prevention mechanisms have failed to stop it for some reason. Which is encouraging - the mechanisms already being in place should mean this kind of treatment is easier than it would otherwise be, so long as we can find a reliable way to call cancer cells to the attention of the immune system and not other cells.
side note: I am aware that it's supposed to be "deus ex machina", but that little item of information got lost on it's way from my brain to my fingers
That movie was all well and good until the very end... suddenly in the last half hour it was like whoever was writing it said "fuck it, magic happens". Until then it was more or less your standard epidemic/apocalypse film (excepting the slightly supernatural visions some people had) and it was doing it well.
The religious overtones I was ok with. I could just about handle the none-too-subtle divide into the lawful society-rebuilding good guys led by God (speaking through a magic old black lady) and the anarchistic criminals led by the incarnation of Satan (dressed entirely in denim), but when the hand of God quite literally came down out of the sky to detonate a nuclear bomb, for no apparent reason other than "there's a nuke on set and no-one to press the button," that was a step too far for me.
Good guys inspired by God... fair enough. Good guys with God himself as air support... little too much deus ex machine there for my taste
Cancerous cells, being defective already, tend to be more susceptible to further damage. So it takes less radiation/chemical to be lethal to a cancer cell than to a normal cell.
The treatments are still pretty savage on the normal cells, but it at least gives you a decent shot at killing the tumour before you kill the patient.
Ahh, it's all clear to me now.
There's just not enough hours in a day to keep up with every source of geek references...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomerase
Doing it in a controlled, non-cancer-like way might be more difficult.
The flamebait part was all the talk of "earthly bodies", going to "somewhere better" and escaping "evil people".
He should know that Slashdot is exclusively for godless heathens, and hence that any post with religious overtones is liable to induce flames.
Also questioning science's ability to do whatever it damn well pleases... that's pure flamebait.
(btw I'm a godless heathen too, I think the guy's ridiculous and more than a little offensive, but unfortunately there is no "-1 Stupid" moderation)
Yeah, that is a problem.
Do I sense that you're perhaps not my biggest fan?
Strange... you're supporting brain donation, and doubting the plausibility of future re-animation just makes me more likely to do that. I may be irrationally protective of my brain while I'm still using it, but if I can't be brought back after death using it then I have no qualms about it being given over to better purposes.
Whatever. I guess Slashdot comments aren't the best place for thought or discussion of something a little philosophical (who knew?)
I'm never sure what to think about that particular possibility... my normal inclination is that a computer simulation can't be "me" in the fullest sense, because I inhabit a brain, not a computer, so a simulation would just be a copy of me, not the genuine article.
But then... what am "I" apart from the pattern of stuff happening between my ears, which would suggest that recreating that pattern in a computer program of sufficient complexity would mean "I" was alive again in every important sense of the word.
I think the sticking point is if I die as a part of the transferral process - then it seems like you've killed "me" and made a copy at the same time. Although leaving me alive would make it even more definitely a copy... seems the only way that avoids the issue would be a gradual replacement of brain tissue with computer components. But then what's so different about doing it all at once?
In short, no matter how objective or logical I try and be, there's still a clinging sense of there being something a little bit "magic" about the 3 pounds of grey jelly between my ears. Crazy really, but I reserve the right to be irrationally protective when it comes to my brain.
Damn it, I've been out-pedanted.
Curse my sense of sentence flow... it wouldn't let me say "massive" again in such a small space of words.
Price vs Performance. For the same clock speed, a quad will be significantly more expensive, but the extra cores may not help performance for gaming all that much.
Since it was the "budget" build in question here, if you can get almost-as-good for a lot less money, that would be the more sensible option.
A massive object in near-zero gravity weighs less than a smaller object in very strong gravity... that's sort of what weight means.
I agree it's pedantry to insist that the headline be perfectly accurate, but you're still wrong.
Certain instincts are very deeply rooted in us, like yanking your hand away if you accidentally touch something extremely hot.
You try adapting that response and doing something different... doesn't make it stupid. If policy is there for good reason and hasn't become out-dated then it's not stupid. Yes, stupid policies exist and need to be removed, but that doesn't make every example stupid.
You could argue that really smart people could figure out what the policy ought to be in each case, removing the need for it to be formally defined... but that would take longer, and stupid people would get it wrong. So actually policy can be used as a tool to save smart people time, and make stupid people act smarter.
If subsets of a species no longer interbreed then surely that itself is the moment of speciation... no? They would still be very similar initially, but once they're in 2 distinct groups that don't interbreed variation between them would likely only increase. I hadn't heard of ring species before... that one is a line blurrer, I'll grant you. I suppose you could denote all 3 as subspecies, but then the distinctness of A and C makes that inaccurate. Maybe classify B as a hybrid, but that wouldn't be true either... ok, yeah. That one's difficult.
You're right that it doesn't disprove god (that would be hard for the same reasons that it's hard to prove the non-existence of unicorns - there's always the chance that you'll discover a unicorn after all) But it does demonstrate that no god is required in the development of life and that the Christian account of things is wrong (sidenote: the *origin* of life is a different thing that we don't have a definite explanation for just yet... but it's getting there)
Really the strongest result science can produce is that there is no need for god, that everything we know about can happen in the absence of god and that if a god exists, he's either too busy with his own stuff to have any effect on us, or that (despite all those godly powers) he's totally irrelevant/inactive.
Once we're at that point, where there's no evidence for god, and nothing left in the "unexplained, might be god" category, it's a fairly small step to say that god probably doesn't exist. Evolution is one step towards that and explains what was previously considered a fairly definitely divine act (creating all the variety and complexity around us), so in that way it's part of the argument against the existence of god.
I think I'm right in saying that there actually is a fairly clear-cut way to differentiate one species from an other - the ability to breed and produce viable offspring.
If fish #1 and weird-version of fish #1 can still breed and produce offspring that can themselves breed with other fish #1's then that's just variation within a species and speciation hasn't happened yet (the weird version isn't quite weird enough yet). Otherwise, they're 2 separate species.
The viable offspring bit is important when looking at hybrids - a horse and a donkey can breed to make a mule, but mules are sterile, so horses and donkeys are separate species.
Do what you like so long as your mutant super-plant doesn't run anyone over?
Given enough time, 10 out of 10 boards will fail, the trick is to upgrade them faster than they die.
So they saved themselves some work, that's not a sign of incompetence, actually that shows true competence.
Doing more than is necessary to achieve the same result, now that's incompetent.