Sounds pretty bizarre to me. Obviously the slapping is the crime, not the filming. I assume the French already have laws against slapping. But if the anti-slapping laws aren't effective, what makes them think the anti-filming laws will be effective?
Um, I already have several Hero-episode equivalents stored here at home. If all this data adds up to everybody gets a DVD, and some people get two, it doesn't seem like something anybody would really even notice, amongst all the DVDs they have already.
I, for one, would like to see students master Reading and Math before they spend very much time on Social Studies or Science. Considering that they don't even start teaching anything as basic as Algebra until 7th Grade at the earliest, why is your wife trying to spend any time at all on anything other than Math and Reading in the first place? It seems to me that presenting a half-hour of Science and a half-hour of Social Studies on alternating days is more than enough for Third-Graders already.
we're better off slowing CO2 output and being wrong about global warming than we are heating up the planet with CO2 and being wrong about not having a human global climate impact.
It depends how big a part of the problem manmade CO2 production actually is, and how much you want to slow it down, and how fast. Keep in mind that a lot of manmade CO2 production is a side effect of keeping millions of people fed, clothed, and warm in the winter.
Suppose for the sake of argument that it is natural. If it creates havoc for humans, such as bad weather, lost farmland, and lost coastlines, then perhaps we should still do something about it. Continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere is not helping the situation.
How much CO2 is human activity producing? What is that, as a percentage of total CO2 being produced from all natural and artificial sources? Of all the greenhouse gases being produced, what percentage is CO2?
What if our best bet is to continue producing CO2 at our current rate, on account of it being a very small part of the overall picture, while at the same time being a side effect of exactly the kind of technological advancement we will need to adapt to global climate changes that are actually beyond our control?
When the temperature hits 200 F in a couple of years, we will be glad to know we didn't cause it.
Even better: If we don't cripple our economy trying to fix a problem we didn't cause and have no control over, we will be glad not only that we didn't bring suffering to millions of people for no good reason, but we may also have the technolgical advancements necessary to adapt to the problem and prevent further suffering to millions of people.
What is more likely: That NASA, with 40+ years of experience, doesn't know how to handle this kind of thing? Or that a reporter for a business journal is neither well-informed on the topic, nor particularly interested in writing a boring article about how this isn't really news?
This is a big deal because "fair" and "prudent" are two totally different priorities, that rarely intersect.
If you're thinking Iran will emerge as a force for world peace and a sane, rational counter to U.S. hyperpotency, you may want to reconsider your basic assumptions.
"Petty nonsense" is a subjective term. It's obviously not "petty nonsense" to the plaintiff, who has gone to some trouble and expense in addressing it. With more and more people looking to Wikipedia and Google for information, anyone who makes a living in part by their reputation will have to treat the Internet as serious business. It's easy for you and I, whose primary Internet identities are recreational pseudonyms, to say his complaints are petty nonsense. Personally, I think it's nice that we do have a court system, and that people do have recourse to peaceful arbitration, on whatever grievances they choose to take seriously. In the end, the judge and jury, not you and I, are the ones chartered to decide if his grievance is petty nonsense.
Given the state of the mathematical art available to that culture at the time the pattern was created, what mathematical process(es) would they have used to arrive at the mathematical solution to the pattern they created?
Is it a feasible process? Is there any evidence that they used this process (other than the pattern itself)?
Precision engineering at its very best I'm sure you'll agree."
Actually, engineering a system to support a human operator allows for a much wider range of choices when it comes to solving problems. Engineering an automated system that accurately forsaw every possible failure mode would be prohibitively expensive to begin with, would proceed from there to introduce an increasing number of problem-solving subsystems that would bring their own vast array of possible failure modes in a cascading chain of prohibitive expenses, and end with the realization that predicting all possible failure modes is actually impossible anyway.
On the other hand, putting human ingenuity and adaptability right there at the scene is not only much cheaper in comparison, but it also provides capability for solving unexpected problems on the fly.
This spacewalk is actually in keeping with the finest traditions of aerospace engineering--the tradition of recognizing when "precision" engineering is a bad idea, and choosing an imprecise but adaptable engineering solution instead.
I don't think laws are about preventing crime, so much as they are about setting up a "payback" system for crime.
I think of it this way: You take something from society, you should give up something of your own in exchange. Ideally, you should give up something that pays society back in exchange for what you took, but in practice this is difficult to manage. (However, in America at least, we do have civil courts for people who want to try to get paid back in this way.) Instead, societies over the years have settled on conventions of what is "just" for a person to give up, in exchange for the privilege of taking something away from society.
In this case, the Swedish people, as represented by their government, have determined that two years of freedom is a just thing to give up, in exchange for attempting a denial of service attack.
Imprisonment might seem like a strange thing to exchange for many crimes (including DDOS attacks), but over thousands of years, imprisonment is what most societies have come up with, as the best (or least bad, if you prefer) exchange for most crimes. Other exchanges include fines, confiscation of property, exile, torture, maiming, and execution, as well as combinations of these things.
It's obvious that many people will continue to commit crimes regardless of the deterrents put in their way. The justice system isn't called the "deterrence system", after all. But it's called the "justice system" precisely because it codifies these tradeoffs: take something from society, give up something of your own in return.
The real villains turned out to be senior officers, one instigator especially, who chose to follow their own lead instead of faithfully supporting the chain of command and doing what they could to make the situation better instead of worse.
Indeed, watching that movie reversed my interpretation of A Few Good Men.
It's a black hole consisting of two subatomic particles. Whatever its properties, it's not going to have greater mass than two subatomic particles. Might as well worry about getting eaten by an oxygen molecule. Heck, an oxygen molecule is several orders of magnitude more dangerous, gravitationally speaking.
Hey, I've chosen a career path that gives me work I enjoy and a paycheck I really enjoy. It's a good business model, but I'm certainly not helping the state of affairs in infectious diseases.
I bet it's the same way with you, right?
So why should pharmaceutical companies be any different?
(Heck, since Novartis is actually working with infectious diseases, and is actually releasing some of their work product, they're already doing more to help the state of affairs in infectious diseases than the two of us put together.)
I won't start playing again until the gaming industry figures out some way to stop punishing me for not spending 20 hours a day in my mom's basement multifarming.
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Sounds pretty bizarre to me. Obviously the slapping is the crime, not the filming. I assume the French already have laws against slapping. But if the anti-slapping laws aren't effective, what makes them think the anti-filming laws will be effective?
Um, I already have several Hero-episode equivalents stored here at home. If all this data adds up to everybody gets a DVD, and some people get two, it doesn't seem like something anybody would really even notice, amongst all the DVDs they have already.
I, for one, would like to see students master Reading and Math before they spend very much time on Social Studies or Science. Considering that they don't even start teaching anything as basic as Algebra until 7th Grade at the earliest, why is your wife trying to spend any time at all on anything other than Math and Reading in the first place? It seems to me that presenting a half-hour of Science and a half-hour of Social Studies on alternating days is more than enough for Third-Graders already.
It depends how big a part of the problem manmade CO2 production actually is, and how much you want to slow it down, and how fast. Keep in mind that a lot of manmade CO2 production is a side effect of keeping millions of people fed, clothed, and warm in the winter.
Exactly.
What if human-produced CO2 is an insignificant contribution?
How much CO2 is human activity producing? What is that, as a percentage of total CO2 being produced from all natural and artificial sources? Of all the greenhouse gases being produced, what percentage is CO2?
What if our best bet is to continue producing CO2 at our current rate, on account of it being a very small part of the overall picture, while at the same time being a side effect of exactly the kind of technological advancement we will need to adapt to global climate changes that are actually beyond our control?
Even better: If we don't cripple our economy trying to fix a problem we didn't cause and have no control over, we will be glad not only that we didn't bring suffering to millions of people for no good reason, but we may also have the technolgical advancements necessary to adapt to the problem and prevent further suffering to millions of people.
What is more likely: That NASA, with 40+ years of experience, doesn't know how to handle this kind of thing? Or that a reporter for a business journal is neither well-informed on the topic, nor particularly interested in writing a boring article about how this isn't really news?
Either that, or the technology to build a practical, useful version of what the patent describes wasn't developed until recently.
What about the longevity issues associated with the readers?
Puerto Rico and Hawaii have significant logistical disadvantages.
This is a big deal because "fair" and "prudent" are two totally different priorities, that rarely intersect.
If you're thinking Iran will emerge as a force for world peace and a sane, rational counter to U.S. hyperpotency, you may want to reconsider your basic assumptions.
"Petty nonsense" is a subjective term. It's obviously not "petty nonsense" to the plaintiff, who has gone to some trouble and expense in addressing it. With more and more people looking to Wikipedia and Google for information, anyone who makes a living in part by their reputation will have to treat the Internet as serious business. It's easy for you and I, whose primary Internet identities are recreational pseudonyms, to say his complaints are petty nonsense. Personally, I think it's nice that we do have a court system, and that people do have recourse to peaceful arbitration, on whatever grievances they choose to take seriously. In the end, the judge and jury, not you and I, are the ones chartered to decide if his grievance is petty nonsense.
Given the state of the mathematical art available to that culture at the time the pattern was created, what mathematical process(es) would they have used to arrive at the mathematical solution to the pattern they created?
Is it a feasible process? Is there any evidence that they used this process (other than the pattern itself)?
Tell me: In your country, what's the preferred method for arbitrating grievances? Dueling? Vigilantism? Lynch mobs? Violent revolt? Outright warfare? Protest marches?
So... with OU students benefiting so much from all this Academic Freedom, they must lead U.S. Colleges in academic excellence too, right?
Actually, engineering a system to support a human operator allows for a much wider range of choices when it comes to solving problems. Engineering an automated system that accurately forsaw every possible failure mode would be prohibitively expensive to begin with, would proceed from there to introduce an increasing number of problem-solving subsystems that would bring their own vast array of possible failure modes in a cascading chain of prohibitive expenses, and end with the realization that predicting all possible failure modes is actually impossible anyway.
On the other hand, putting human ingenuity and adaptability right there at the scene is not only much cheaper in comparison, but it also provides capability for solving unexpected problems on the fly.
This spacewalk is actually in keeping with the finest traditions of aerospace engineering--the tradition of recognizing when "precision" engineering is a bad idea, and choosing an imprecise but adaptable engineering solution instead.
I don't think laws are about preventing crime, so much as they are about setting up a "payback" system for crime.
I think of it this way: You take something from society, you should give up something of your own in exchange. Ideally, you should give up something that pays society back in exchange for what you took, but in practice this is difficult to manage. (However, in America at least, we do have civil courts for people who want to try to get paid back in this way.) Instead, societies over the years have settled on conventions of what is "just" for a person to give up, in exchange for the privilege of taking something away from society.
In this case, the Swedish people, as represented by their government, have determined that two years of freedom is a just thing to give up, in exchange for attempting a denial of service attack.
Imprisonment might seem like a strange thing to exchange for many crimes (including DDOS attacks), but over thousands of years, imprisonment is what most societies have come up with, as the best (or least bad, if you prefer) exchange for most crimes. Other exchanges include fines, confiscation of property, exile, torture, maiming, and execution, as well as combinations of these things.
It's obvious that many people will continue to commit crimes regardless of the deterrents put in their way. The justice system isn't called the "deterrence system", after all. But it's called the "justice system" precisely because it codifies these tradeoffs: take something from society, give up something of your own in return.
How does rules-lawyering a natural language add anything at all to the debate?
We all understand what we're talking about. Why not take a moment to enjoy the flexibility and power of the English language?
Ah, but remember the moral of that story?
The real villains turned out to be senior officers, one instigator especially, who chose to follow their own lead instead of faithfully supporting the chain of command and doing what they could to make the situation better instead of worse.
Indeed, watching that movie reversed my interpretation of A Few Good Men.
Just how much destructive power do you think the gravity of two protons could possibly have?
It's a black hole consisting of two subatomic particles. Whatever its properties, it's not going to have greater mass than two subatomic particles. Might as well worry about getting eaten by an oxygen molecule. Heck, an oxygen molecule is several orders of magnitude more dangerous, gravitationally speaking.
I'm pretty sure the right to free speech means the great-grandparent post is entitled to denigrate anybody it damn well pleases.
Just like I'm entitled to denigrate your bizarre ideas about free speech.
Hey, I've chosen a career path that gives me work I enjoy and a paycheck I really enjoy. It's a good business model, but I'm certainly not helping the state of affairs in infectious diseases.
I bet it's the same way with you, right?
So why should pharmaceutical companies be any different?
(Heck, since Novartis is actually working with infectious diseases, and is actually releasing some of their work product, they're already doing more to help the state of affairs in infectious diseases than the two of us put together.)
I won't start playing again until the gaming industry figures out some way to stop punishing me for not spending 20 hours a day in my mom's basement multifarming.