Because keeping network logs specific enough to definitively determine cheating is totally not invasion of privacy.
...
Maybe if the document were shared via public Google Docs or so, and the university logged a mapping of university accounts (presumably students have to have one to access the university's network) -> URIs, then you're still on the violation side of privacy protection. Or maybe if the university somehow can read a student's university email without the student's consent or knowledge without it being considered a privacy violation, but even then you're only catching the kids dumb enough to use the university's mail service for cheating. Also consider that students have no selective power over which emails their account receives, so you'd have to check to see if the email was read, and even then you wouldn't know if the student "read" it just to delete it, or actually read it, and used the material to cheat.
Cultivated strains (e.g. E. coli K12) are well-adapted to the laboratory environment, and, unlike wild type strains, have lost their ability to thrive in the intestine. Many lab strains lose their ability to form biofilms.[70][71] These features protect wild type strains from antibodies and other chemical attacks, but require a large expenditure of energy and material resources.
Basically the E. coli K12 gets totally owned by our immune system, as in before it has a chance to cause much damage, as in it doesn't make us sick, as in it is not "associated with human disease". In an abstract sense, saying, "K12 is 'associated with human disease' because O157:H7 is (and probably others are) associated with human disease," is very much like saying, "garden snakes/<insert relatively harmless snake> are associated with human death because black mambos/king cobras/<insert other deadly snake> is associated with human death." More colloquially put, "OMG it's a snake! It's going to kill me!" and "OMG it's E. coli! It's going to make me sick!" have the same logical flaws.
Infinity isn't a number. If anything, the concept represents a "really really big positive number" in this context, in which case, yes, if you add something greater than 0 to that really really big number, then you will have an even bigger number.
What do you do when a portion of the bacterial population evolves to defend against A in a way that protects it against B, and part against C?
If I understand you right, you might encounter a situation in which, say, half the cows have a variant of an infection which is A-resistant (requiring B-treatment) and the other half have a B-resistant variant (requiring A-treatment). I would agree this would be difficult to handle in a way that gives every cow the same antibiotics. However, if the antibiotics are designed correctly, then there's really only one or two remotely probable ways to evolve from being susceptible to A, and those ways can be treated by B, C, D, etc. which in turn only have a few probable ways to evolve away from, and eventually you'll be able to loop those evolutions back in on themselves.
I think your point would still stand though, because the evolution of the diseases in different cows would happen at different rates (though I imagine those rates won't differ by very much relative to how often antibiotics are given, so perhaps this is a moot point). Some cow might have a slowly-evolving disease still close to A-state but another cow might have a quickly-evolving disease closer to B-state, at which point it's difficult to supply just one medication to the entire herd. This might be countered with a triangular "circle", so that the disease evolves from A->B->C->A. It's unlikely that a disease would still be barely past A-state in one cow, but another cow would be entirely past C-state and ready to move back into A-state.
Obviously doing this is extremely precarious, as it's pretty easy to muff up the timing of drug treatments and have cows with diseases in all sorts of evolutionary states, which would make it significantly easier for a superbug to evolve. Treating each cow on a case-by-case basis would work, but that's more expensive.
what about a bacteria that is specifically designed to...
The HIV would evolve to differentiate between the 'tar pit' bacteria and the cells it typically infects. If it were somehow impossible to make that differentiation, the body itself wouldn't be able to tell the difference, and wouldn't be able to effectively regulate white blood cell levels while the treatment is taking place, which would basically cause AIDS in the person you're trying to treat for HIV. After a while, the levels of HIV in the system would hopefully decline as the 'tar pit' bacteria clean them up, but I don't think the HIV levels would ever go lower than a certain equilibrium point with the white blood cells and 'tar pit' bacteria, so the person's white blood cell count would never be able to return to normal. I have no idea if the difference between not-quite-normal and normal is enough to care about though. I think inducing AIDS to treat HIV would completely defeat the purpose though, even if the AIDS was only temporary.
Some sort of hybrid between the 'tar pit' bacteria and the circular evolution technique might be able to force HIV levels to go low without nuking the body's white blood cell count though. Maybe then the body will have enough time to develop its own vaccination against HIV? That'd be pretty damn cool.
AFAIK, current HIV medications are given to counter the evolution of HIV. Instead of simply stopping evolution, they get HIV to "evolve" in a circle. eg. present antiviral A where HIV tends to evolve to adapt to A with some mechanism, then after a while, switch to antiviral B that kills HIV through that mechanism, causing the HIV to evolve back to its former state.
It's more complicated than that (eg, say the HIV evolves a mechanism that can counter A and B, to which you would respond with a C that causes the HIV to evolve back to something A works well against), but the general idea of making HIV evolve in circles is the important part.
If the antibiotics used in cows and such were designed to work this way, then this whole superbug issue would be significantly less important. It's probably a lot more expensive (in the short term), so you'd need the FDA to step in and start requiring drug treatments that function by the circular evolution method. obviously in the long term, using antibiotics against superbugs will be extremely difficult and probably even less cost-effective than the drugs that cause circular evolution (which might not work when the superbug is super-resistant to every super-awesome super-antibiotic we've thrown at it).
Unless this odor is a significant component of mating (to the point where birds with odor won't mate with birds without), removing it won't create a new species, at least by the (objective) biological definition of a species. It simply forces an adaptation onto an existing species. Preliminary testing on small populations should be done to ensure the adaptation actually benefits the species so that no unintended side-effects surprise us later. So unless this situation is more complex (eg reproductive rates are drastically lower in birds without the odor, or the predators have an alternative method to identify the birds), then the birds with this new adaptation would quickly grow back to near the population level they were at before the predators entered their environment.
If the odor is used in mating, there isn't much we can do without going really hardcore, and somehow remove the role the odor plays in the reproductive/mating process. Also, if odor is a requirement in mating, then preliminary testing should identify it and we'll realize the idea is a bust before we have any significant negative impact on the population.
If there are multiple methods for predators to identify the birds, then we'd have to research how to remove all of them, and hope all of them play no major role in the mating process. From there, it's just cost/benefit analysis to decide whether it's worth the time/money to research adaptations for all those methods, which should be in the hands of whoever is deciding whether to grant the funding for the research.
So we're going to remove any incentive for these birds to evolve by deodorizing them? It's highly unlikely we'll be able to deodorize every bird all the time, so there will be birds that we miss. Only the birds we miss, and miss often, will be under pressure to evolve. This is a significantly smaller population. Evolution only works well on large populations. So this species will be significantly less likely to evolve, which means the most likely scenario is humans deodorizing these birds for the rest of time, or until we come up with some other solution.
I say we spend the money researching which genes create the odors, find a way to disable them, steal some eggs, modify the genetics of those eggs to disable the odor-creating genes, and then let natural selection work its magic.
That's all assuming investing all that money is even worth keeping this bird species around.
From what I read in the article, it looks like Toshiba's reduced the number of magnetic grains per bit from a few hundred down to just a few. Otherwise it appears everything is the same.
I think if the guys with the power to make decisions at MS could chose between making $100M and killing the global economy, or not, they'd take the $100M, quickly get it put into their Swiss bank account, and retire in Switzerland while the rest of the world goes to hell. Maybe I'm being cynical, but if MS (or any other overly-huge corporation, like say AIG pre-recession) were to just disappear from the global economy, it'd be like ripping a kidney out of your body. You just might survive, but it sure is not going to be pleasant. If we handle the situation differently, and slowly kill MS off (by essentially shutting down everything but say support and whatever people are necessary to keep the systems relatively secure), the rest of the world will be much more able to adequately adjust.
They would need some other way of proving you were at the scene to say you were. You can't argue that just because the one bit of fake DNA they found was trying to be yours, you couldn't have been at the crime scene. At least that sounds like the logical solution. Best I can do is hope that's how the legal system actually sees it.
It might just be that the defense mechanisms take less energy than otherwise. I'm not an expert on eucalyptus trees though, to know.
It's only been 500 years since moas went extinct, not 1500. Your point only gets stronger from that though. 500 years is nothing to the time it took for just about every other evolutionary change.
Right, so... Whether the terms content creators / publishers impose on your "ownership" of a product are fair or not, you still want to be able to use the product they sell? Yet you want all of this at the terms you?
There is nothing wrong with "wanting" to use a product some creator/publisher creates, or "wanting" to set the terms of the transfer. It's called demand, something I am very sure you are aware of, seeing as how you are so insistent on maintaining a Free Market.
If you don't want to abide by a specific term or condition, you don't get to use the product.
This certainly would be a great rule to use, in the case where each party in an agreement offers fair terms. However, in the cases where one party imposes terms and conditions that a significant portion of the public perceives as unjust, then the public pirates/steals/recreates their benefits of the agreement. In each of those cases, the victim of the piracy/theft/recreation does not gain a thing. This is the public's revenge for creating unjust terms in the first place, and unfortunately the piracy/theft/recreation victim does suffer an actual loss in the case of theft (I like to think that if the public could just as easily create an actual copy of the desired device as steal it, they would make the copy, so this loss in the case of theft is mostly a secondary effect caused by physical constraints rather than a primary effect of obtaining the technology of the device). And the public gains technology.
I have absolutely no issue with any of what's going on except for two things:... Corporate Lobbying (and) Government Bailouts
I agree that corporations shouldn't be allowed to buy legislation. That's just stupid for any government remotely close to democracy. I don't know if corporations are 'buying' legislation so much as just spending an outrageously disproportionate amount of money on legislation compared to money from person-oriented PACs, which is still stupid, in my opinion, though the blame in this case isn't so much on the system, as it is on the players.
As far as Government Bailouts, and letting businesses fail when they fail go, I would agree with you, in a world where a business goes down because it was out-competed by some other company, who is there to pick up new customers marooned by the failed business. In some cases, however, like the case of AIG, etc., I don't think there were other businesses capable of providing the same services AIG/etc provided on the level AIG/etc provided them. The unfortunate thing is that there isn't much in the way of alternatives for dealing with AIG-like situations, so our congressmen came up with the great idea of copying the big-bank business strategy of giving/loaning out large quantities of money it never had. The only way to 'solve' this crisis completely is to go back in time and keep it from happening to the scale it did; basically to force AIG/etc to be a significantly smaller business, so that when it failed, it didn't take half the world (exaggeration) with it. For now though, we just deal with the fact that we screwed up, and try to regain normalcy as quickly as we comfortably can (hence the strategy of loaning/giving out money).
Sorry if this isn't entirely understandable. I'm not the most eloquent writer. And for the record, I would mod your post up, so that at the very least it gets refuted by more adept writers, or confirmed by more advanced thinkers. I just figured nobody would ever actually come back to this story and reply to you.
A Nintendo DS with a cart to allow homebrew, or a PSP with functionally the same thing.
Fits 1 perfectly (unless your cousin has small pockets) Fits 2, as long as your cousin doesn't care about doing what Nintendo and Sony don't want him to. Fits 3 partly. You can buy the DS or PSP and the storage medium (Usually microSD) in the US, with cash. The interface to let you play homebrew is another story though.
Hopefully your cousin can compromise on part 2 and part 3.
(Please note that any addresses of 'you' refer to the person that commits suicide because they were solicited male enhancement, who you addressed as 'I')
As far as I know, Lori Drew committed this crime fully aware that the girl had psychological problems. That's like spammers sending you messages because they are fully aware your penis is small. They obviously aren't (unless you advertise it online, or happened to have slept with one of them). So if you decide to off yourself because some random person is sending 'enhancement' spam to thousands or millions of people, including yourself, and you interpret their spam as demeaning, then you are clearly at more fault than the spammer is. Interpreting impersonal e-mails offering assistance for your insecurity as demeaning requires some sort of psychological problem on your part, probably depression caused by insecurity (which in and of itself would be a psychological problem).
In the case of this girl, Drew intentionally bullied her. The messages Drew sent the girl could easily be interpreted as bullying by just about anyone of sane mind. Drew also intentionally addressed the messages specifically to this girl--it was not some 'you suck' e-mail send to every person on a million-person address book.
As far as I know, nobody's privacy was questionably respected/disrespected in this case (I don't see anybody ranting about it on slashdot), so your concerns for burning people for their diary entries are ill-founded.
Blogs are essentially anonymously-addressed e-mails for anyone who cares to read them. This case sets no precedence for what is (as far as my above argument is concerned) essentially equivalent to spam that people may choose to read. Your concerns for the public's right to blog are also ill-founded.
Here is my case for you simply (in case you misinterpreted anything I said above, which tends to happen when two people disagree): Before you get concerned over nanny-states consider whether the analogies you base your conclusions on are actually relevant and correct. In this case they are not.
I don't really see much of an argument against considering video games as art. The longer ones, with stories and what-not are very similar to written books. Both have different methods of engaging the player or reader, but both do provide a fully-fledged story, complete with morals, themes, and a message that can change a player's or reader's opinion on a matter. The shorter games, like in the mentioned Space Invaders controversy, are very similar to paintings. There isn't much of a story to them, but they still are fully capable of affecting a player or viewer.
In general, I'd say that something is art if it's capable of affecting its 'experiencer' in some sort of opinion- or emotially-related way. The fact that 2+2 is 4 isn't art (written on paper, it might be, but not the simple fact itself), while little aliens blowing up the WTC is.
I don't think that'd be too difficult, but when you consider that Mars' atmosphere is 95.72% Carbon Dioxide already (Mars Wiki page), I doubt sending additional carbon dioxide is going to do much to increase the temperature.
Assuming each stage of my life was increased proportionally, I would probably end up spending something like 50 years in a wheelchair, with poor eyesight and Alzheimer's disease.
If this is the case, would it possible for me to revert to 'normal' aging and only have to suffer through something like 5 years of limited functionality as an alternative to suicide? Or would the 'treatment' for aging be a permanent choice and its cure death itself? I really don't want to spend 50 years in a wheelchair with poor eyesight and memory too poor to remember how to turn on a computer only to die at the end of it. I doubt many other people would either.
If you're not sure because the technique itself is too undeveloped (which is more than likely true), then will there at least be a standard that requires (or at least promotes/prefers) a killswitch in the technique?
Slashdot Mirror
We all know Linux is great... it does infinite loops in 5 seconds.
- Linus Torvalds about the superiority of Linux on the Amterdam Linux Symposium
Because keeping network logs specific enough to definitively determine cheating is totally not invasion of privacy.
...
Maybe if the document were shared via public Google Docs or so, and the university logged a mapping of university accounts (presumably students have to have one to access the university's network) -> URIs, then you're still on the violation side of privacy protection. Or maybe if the university somehow can read a student's university email without the student's consent or knowledge without it being considered a privacy violation, but even then you're only catching the kids dumb enough to use the university's mail service for cheating. Also consider that students have no selective power over which emails their account receives, so you'd have to check to see if the email was read, and even then you wouldn't know if the student "read" it just to delete it, or actually read it, and used the material to cheat.
Cultivated strains (e.g. E. coli K12) are well-adapted to the laboratory environment, and, unlike wild type strains, have lost their ability to thrive in the intestine. Many lab strains lose their ability to form biofilms.[70][71] These features protect wild type strains from antibodies and other chemical attacks, but require a large expenditure of energy and material resources.
Basically the E. coli K12 gets totally owned by our immune system, as in before it has a chance to cause much damage, as in it doesn't make us sick, as in it is not "associated with human disease". In an abstract sense, saying, "K12 is 'associated with human disease' because O157:H7 is (and probably others are) associated with human disease," is very much like saying, "garden snakes/<insert relatively harmless snake> are associated with human death because black mambos/king cobras/<insert other deadly snake> is associated with human death." More colloquially put, "OMG it's a snake! It's going to kill me!" and "OMG it's E. coli! It's going to make me sick!" have the same logical flaws.
Mars' atmosphere is already 95% carbon dioxide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars
Infinity isn't a number. If anything, the concept represents a "really really big positive number" in this context, in which case, yes, if you add something greater than 0 to that really really big number, then you will have an even bigger number.
Actually, there's an error with your argument.
sqrt(x^2) = abs(x)
so
Women = abs(Evil)
and since Evil is typically a negative thing, ie Evil 0, and since |x| = -x for x 0,
abs(Evil) = -Evil
so
Women = -Evil
which may be read as "Women are the opposite of evil."
Of course this also means money is imaginary.
What do you do when a portion of the bacterial population evolves to defend against A in a way that protects it against B, and part against C?
If I understand you right, you might encounter a situation in which, say, half the cows have a variant of an infection which is A-resistant (requiring B-treatment) and the other half have a B-resistant variant (requiring A-treatment). I would agree this would be difficult to handle in a way that gives every cow the same antibiotics. However, if the antibiotics are designed correctly, then there's really only one or two remotely probable ways to evolve from being susceptible to A, and those ways can be treated by B, C, D, etc. which in turn only have a few probable ways to evolve away from, and eventually you'll be able to loop those evolutions back in on themselves.
I think your point would still stand though, because the evolution of the diseases in different cows would happen at different rates (though I imagine those rates won't differ by very much relative to how often antibiotics are given, so perhaps this is a moot point). Some cow might have a slowly-evolving disease still close to A-state but another cow might have a quickly-evolving disease closer to B-state, at which point it's difficult to supply just one medication to the entire herd. This might be countered with a triangular "circle", so that the disease evolves from A->B->C->A. It's unlikely that a disease would still be barely past A-state in one cow, but another cow would be entirely past C-state and ready to move back into A-state.
Obviously doing this is extremely precarious, as it's pretty easy to muff up the timing of drug treatments and have cows with diseases in all sorts of evolutionary states, which would make it significantly easier for a superbug to evolve. Treating each cow on a case-by-case basis would work, but that's more expensive.
what about a bacteria that is specifically designed to...
The HIV would evolve to differentiate between the 'tar pit' bacteria and the cells it typically infects. If it were somehow impossible to make that differentiation, the body itself wouldn't be able to tell the difference, and wouldn't be able to effectively regulate white blood cell levels while the treatment is taking place, which would basically cause AIDS in the person you're trying to treat for HIV. After a while, the levels of HIV in the system would hopefully decline as the 'tar pit' bacteria clean them up, but I don't think the HIV levels would ever go lower than a certain equilibrium point with the white blood cells and 'tar pit' bacteria, so the person's white blood cell count would never be able to return to normal. I have no idea if the difference between not-quite-normal and normal is enough to care about though. I think inducing AIDS to treat HIV would completely defeat the purpose though, even if the AIDS was only temporary.
Some sort of hybrid between the 'tar pit' bacteria and the circular evolution technique might be able to force HIV levels to go low without nuking the body's white blood cell count though. Maybe then the body will have enough time to develop its own vaccination against HIV? That'd be pretty damn cool.
AFAIK, current HIV medications are given to counter the evolution of HIV. Instead of simply stopping evolution, they get HIV to "evolve" in a circle. eg. present antiviral A where HIV tends to evolve to adapt to A with some mechanism, then after a while, switch to antiviral B that kills HIV through that mechanism, causing the HIV to evolve back to its former state.
It's more complicated than that (eg, say the HIV evolves a mechanism that can counter A and B, to which you would respond with a C that causes the HIV to evolve back to something A works well against), but the general idea of making HIV evolve in circles is the important part.
If the antibiotics used in cows and such were designed to work this way, then this whole superbug issue would be significantly less important. It's probably a lot more expensive (in the short term), so you'd need the FDA to step in and start requiring drug treatments that function by the circular evolution method. obviously in the long term, using antibiotics against superbugs will be extremely difficult and probably even less cost-effective than the drugs that cause circular evolution (which might not work when the superbug is super-resistant to every super-awesome super-antibiotic we've thrown at it).
Unless this odor is a significant component of mating (to the point where birds with odor won't mate with birds without), removing it won't create a new species, at least by the (objective) biological definition of a species. It simply forces an adaptation onto an existing species. Preliminary testing on small populations should be done to ensure the adaptation actually benefits the species so that no unintended side-effects surprise us later. So unless this situation is more complex (eg reproductive rates are drastically lower in birds without the odor, or the predators have an alternative method to identify the birds), then the birds with this new adaptation would quickly grow back to near the population level they were at before the predators entered their environment.
If the odor is used in mating, there isn't much we can do without going really hardcore, and somehow remove the role the odor plays in the reproductive/mating process. Also, if odor is a requirement in mating, then preliminary testing should identify it and we'll realize the idea is a bust before we have any significant negative impact on the population.
If there are multiple methods for predators to identify the birds, then we'd have to research how to remove all of them, and hope all of them play no major role in the mating process. From there, it's just cost/benefit analysis to decide whether it's worth the time/money to research adaptations for all those methods, which should be in the hands of whoever is deciding whether to grant the funding for the research.
So we're going to remove any incentive for these birds to evolve by deodorizing them? It's highly unlikely we'll be able to deodorize every bird all the time, so there will be birds that we miss. Only the birds we miss, and miss often, will be under pressure to evolve. This is a significantly smaller population. Evolution only works well on large populations. So this species will be significantly less likely to evolve, which means the most likely scenario is humans deodorizing these birds for the rest of time, or until we come up with some other solution.
I say we spend the money researching which genes create the odors, find a way to disable them, steal some eggs, modify the genetics of those eggs to disable the odor-creating genes, and then let natural selection work its magic.
That's all assuming investing all that money is even worth keeping this bird species around.
From what I read in the article, it looks like Toshiba's reduced the number of magnetic grains per bit from a few hundred down to just a few. Otherwise it appears everything is the same.
http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html
and computers and keyboard and mice and printers and paper and pencils and markers and charcoal and papyrus and ...
Then maybe they shouldn't break the law.
I think if the guys with the power to make decisions at MS could chose between making $100M and killing the global economy, or not, they'd take the $100M, quickly get it put into their Swiss bank account, and retire in Switzerland while the rest of the world goes to hell. Maybe I'm being cynical, but if MS (or any other overly-huge corporation, like say AIG pre-recession) were to just disappear from the global economy, it'd be like ripping a kidney out of your body. You just might survive, but it sure is not going to be pleasant. If we handle the situation differently, and slowly kill MS off (by essentially shutting down everything but say support and whatever people are necessary to keep the systems relatively secure), the rest of the world will be much more able to adequately adjust.
They would need some other way of proving you were at the scene to say you were. You can't argue that just because the one bit of fake DNA they found was trying to be yours, you couldn't have been at the crime scene. At least that sounds like the logical solution. Best I can do is hope that's how the legal system actually sees it.
Give each station a unique id for its name, and store all the other information in a spreadsheet.
It might just be that the defense mechanisms take less energy than otherwise. I'm not an expert on eucalyptus trees though, to know.
It's only been 500 years since moas went extinct, not 1500. Your point only gets stronger from that though. 500 years is nothing to the time it took for just about every other evolutionary change.
Right, so... Whether the terms content creators / publishers impose on your "ownership" of a product are fair or not, you still want to be able to use the product they sell? Yet you want all of this at the terms you?
There is nothing wrong with "wanting" to use a product some creator/publisher creates, or "wanting" to set the terms of the transfer. It's called demand, something I am very sure you are aware of, seeing as how you are so insistent on maintaining a Free Market.
If you don't want to abide by a specific term or condition, you don't get to use the product.
This certainly would be a great rule to use, in the case where each party in an agreement offers fair terms. However, in the cases where one party imposes terms and conditions that a significant portion of the public perceives as unjust, then the public pirates/steals/recreates their benefits of the agreement. In each of those cases, the victim of the piracy/theft/recreation does not gain a thing. This is the public's revenge for creating unjust terms in the first place, and unfortunately the piracy/theft/recreation victim does suffer an actual loss in the case of theft (I like to think that if the public could just as easily create an actual copy of the desired device as steal it, they would make the copy, so this loss in the case of theft is mostly a secondary effect caused by physical constraints rather than a primary effect of obtaining the technology of the device). And the public gains technology.
I have absolutely no issue with any of what's going on except for two things: ... Corporate Lobbying (and) Government Bailouts
I agree that corporations shouldn't be allowed to buy legislation. That's just stupid for any government remotely close to democracy. I don't know if corporations are 'buying' legislation so much as just spending an outrageously disproportionate amount of money on legislation compared to money from person-oriented PACs, which is still stupid, in my opinion, though the blame in this case isn't so much on the system, as it is on the players.
As far as Government Bailouts, and letting businesses fail when they fail go, I would agree with you, in a world where a business goes down because it was out-competed by some other company, who is there to pick up new customers marooned by the failed business. In some cases, however, like the case of AIG, etc., I don't think there were other businesses capable of providing the same services AIG/etc provided on the level AIG/etc provided them. The unfortunate thing is that there isn't much in the way of alternatives for dealing with AIG-like situations, so our congressmen came up with the great idea of copying the big-bank business strategy of giving/loaning out large quantities of money it never had. The only way to 'solve' this crisis completely is to go back in time and keep it from happening to the scale it did; basically to force AIG/etc to be a significantly smaller business, so that when it failed, it didn't take half the world (exaggeration) with it. For now though, we just deal with the fact that we screwed up, and try to regain normalcy as quickly as we comfortably can (hence the strategy of loaning/giving out money).
Sorry if this isn't entirely understandable. I'm not the most eloquent writer. And for the record, I would mod your post up, so that at the very least it gets refuted by more adept writers, or confirmed by more advanced thinkers. I just figured nobody would ever actually come back to this story and reply to you.
A Nintendo DS with a cart to allow homebrew, or a PSP with functionally the same thing.
Fits 1 perfectly (unless your cousin has small pockets)
Fits 2, as long as your cousin doesn't care about doing what Nintendo and Sony don't want him to.
Fits 3 partly. You can buy the DS or PSP and the storage medium (Usually microSD) in the US, with cash. The interface to let you play homebrew is another story though.
Hopefully your cousin can compromise on part 2 and part 3.
Why you got modded insightful is beyond me.
(Please note that any addresses of 'you' refer to the person that commits suicide because they were solicited male enhancement, who you addressed as 'I')
As far as I know, Lori Drew committed this crime fully aware that the girl had psychological problems. That's like spammers sending you messages because they are fully aware your penis is small. They obviously aren't (unless you advertise it online, or happened to have slept with one of them). So if you decide to off yourself because some random person is sending 'enhancement' spam to thousands or millions of people, including yourself, and you interpret their spam as demeaning, then you are clearly at more fault than the spammer is. Interpreting impersonal e-mails offering assistance for your insecurity as demeaning requires some sort of psychological problem on your part, probably depression caused by insecurity (which in and of itself would be a psychological problem).
In the case of this girl, Drew intentionally bullied her. The messages Drew sent the girl could easily be interpreted as bullying by just about anyone of sane mind. Drew also intentionally addressed the messages specifically to this girl--it was not some 'you suck' e-mail send to every person on a million-person address book.
As far as I know, nobody's privacy was questionably respected/disrespected in this case (I don't see anybody ranting about it on slashdot), so your concerns for burning people for their diary entries are ill-founded.
Blogs are essentially anonymously-addressed e-mails for anyone who cares to read them. This case sets no precedence for what is (as far as my above argument is concerned) essentially equivalent to spam that people may choose to read. Your concerns for the public's right to blog are also ill-founded.
Here is my case for you simply (in case you misinterpreted anything I said above, which tends to happen when two people disagree):
Before you get concerned over nanny-states consider whether the analogies you base your conclusions on are actually relevant and correct. In this case they are not.
I don't really see much of an argument against considering video games as art. The longer ones, with stories and what-not are very similar to written books. Both have different methods of engaging the player or reader, but both do provide a fully-fledged story, complete with morals, themes, and a message that can change a player's or reader's opinion on a matter. The shorter games, like in the mentioned Space Invaders controversy, are very similar to paintings. There isn't much of a story to them, but they still are fully capable of affecting a player or viewer.
In general, I'd say that something is art if it's capable of affecting its 'experiencer' in some sort of opinion- or emotially-related way. The fact that 2+2 is 4 isn't art (written on paper, it might be, but not the simple fact itself), while little aliens blowing up the WTC is.
I don't think that'd be too difficult, but when you consider that Mars' atmosphere is 95.72% Carbon Dioxide already (Mars Wiki page), I doubt sending additional carbon dioxide is going to do much to increase the temperature.
Assuming each stage of my life was increased proportionally, I would probably end up spending something like 50 years in a wheelchair, with poor eyesight and Alzheimer's disease.
If this is the case, would it possible for me to revert to 'normal' aging and only have to suffer through something like 5 years of limited functionality as an alternative to suicide? Or would the 'treatment' for aging be a permanent choice and its cure death itself? I really don't want to spend 50 years in a wheelchair with poor eyesight and memory too poor to remember how to turn on a computer only to die at the end of it. I doubt many other people would either.
If you're not sure because the technique itself is too undeveloped (which is more than likely true), then will there at least be a standard that requires (or at least promotes/prefers) a killswitch in the technique?