Depends on who's depicting them. The more sober depictions of Gotham City frequently have the criminals infighting with one another. Bane and Catwoman, for example, are fairly consistent in their opposition to a large part of Gotham's underground on matters of principle, and Fries, Ras, Scarecrow, and Ivy have all been known to turn against other supervillians, mobs, and cartels for mostly selfish reasons.
Organized crime syndicates also start turf wars from time to time and street gangs fighting one another is a major element in, at least, Miller's vision.
Then you have people like Joker or Ventriloquist who are just tragically and viciously insane and will turn their rage on anybody who happens to be nearby no matter where the victim stands in relation to Batman's ideas of justice and order.
There's so much range in how Gotham City has been depicted over the years that it's difficult to come up with any consistent vision for it unless you group it into eras, and those eras that show a grittier, meaner Batman and Gotham have very complex characters that range from hero to anti-hero and the traditional crime noir villian seeking wealth or power to chilling psychopaths bent on unleashing hell for no other reason than that they can.
A large portion of the Batman storyline revolves around the question of whether or not that's really true.
One of the more poignant observations made in the comics was by Commissioner Gordon when he pointed out that there were always regular criminals in Gotham before Batman arrived, but there weren't any supervillians until after Batman made room for them.
A state could pass a law that prohibits you from having child pornography on your computer, but I don't think it could pass a law prohibiting that traffic from entering the state.
Pennsylvania is the most recent state I recall hearing about, but I know there have been others as well. So far, the attempts to initiate these blocks have been shut down in court battles, but if one should eventually stick, it could present some interesting challenges.
As a hypothetical, the mere existence of 4chan is not illegal, nor is it inherently illegal to access it, but it has been blocked before by ISPs - notably in Europe, but it's a potential here as well - on the grounds that the content on 4chan is not acceptable to the communities those ISPs serve.
A community or state may pass a law to block 4chan, deeming it inappropriate by the standards of the community, and this FCC ruling may wind up in contention with that blocking as the ISPs would need to notify their customers and ensure that complying with the community law wouldn't clash with the FCC's regulatory ruling.
I can see the ruling going different ways. Existing demands to block content have already been ruled on, and the ruling has been that ISPs cannot be held responsible for not delivering illicit content into a community when a member of that community is actively requesting it, but legislators are a tricky bunch and continue to try and press laws that circumvent the court's findings. This FCC ruling would seem to throw yet another wrench in the gears.
Martin said Comcast has "arbitrarily" blocked Internet access, regardless of the level of traffic, and failed to disclose to consumers that it was doing so.
So, what sort of precedent might this set for other attempts to block access? Numerous states have attempted to block access, by law, to what they deem to be illegal content. Would a ruling like this tie the hands of companies like Comcast so that they're in a "damned if you do damned if you don't" position, or would one ruling likely supercede the other?
Martin's order would require Comcast to stop its practice of blocking; provide details to the commission on the extent and manner in which the practice has been used; and to disclose to consumers details on future plans for managing its network going forward.
I also find this amusing. Comcast is whining about it, but they're effectively been told off and punished for not disclosing to their customers what they were doing to paid services. It really says a lot about the company that they're complaining that they have to inform their customers before they make significant service changes.
Hell if customers should be informed and able to make competent purchasing decisions... informed and self-interested customers would utterly destroy Comcast's entire business model.
Now, that's not to say it should be completely excluded from schools.
I'd be interested in hearing what relevance it has outside of, perhaps, current events, that would justify any mention in sound educational policy?
The common argument is that it may fit into a philosophy class - as you've mentioned - but there's little reason to even do that since it doesn't appear to be a well-defined argument of any import. Furthermore, there are far more established philosophies that oppose Evolution which can provide for a much more thorough discussion on the contending ideas.
There seems to be little value in the idea as a whole as far as its educational uses are concerned. It's clearly a seat-of-the-pants response to evolutionary biology and offers nothing of relevance to the study of science and is poorly defined as a matter of philosophical interest. Really, it's more like an advertising campaign than anything, so if it fits anywhere, it would seem to fit primarily in discussions about propaganda, but that would just cause outrage among its "proponents" and would hardly be worth the hassle.
You would not expect that Viacom could stand outside that phone booth, listening in to see if you quoted too many lines from their latest movie or song or whatever it is they do.
That's not a good analogy. In the Youtube case, Viacom would see what videos you're requesting from a public website, so it's more like they're watching what stores you enter from a public street. That's not illegal, nor should it be. If you're not comfortable with the social ramifications of going into Fat Al's World of Pecan Porn, you shouldn't go in.
The decision should be about whether your private transaction with a company is reasonably expected to be shared or overseen by third parties.
Frankly, I agree. I think that if a company wants to see logs like that, and the business the request is made to refuses that request, the requesting company should be forced to make very specific requests about very specific transactions and be prepared to prove that their is a reasonable level of suspicion that the activity they are requesting information on caused them some level of measurable harm, or may be used to prove some level of measurable harm.
Unfortunately, that's not how it is, so, for practical purposes, one must assume that one's activity online is subject to search and seizure by practically any business or governmental entity, and one should take appropriate steps to protect oneself from such invasions of privacy.
I'd take that a step further and say it's symptomatic of generations of desensitization to private sector and government snooping in general.
When the government mandated schooling for children, people sent to enforce the new laws were actually occsaionally shot at. Now, people can't even get riled up enough to write their representative and senators if Congress wants to pass a law allowing the government to tap our private conversations.
It's sad, but people have, through a process of laziness and even active denial, effectively ceded most authority over their own decisions to various private interests and governments.
It is, in fact, our own faults, but how could we be expected to act much different when, for generations, people have failed to educate their progeny on the importance of balancing the good of self and society?
I'll have to admit that I've just become ignorant on the matter, then. I've never thought particularly well of Youtube users, based primarily on their exchanges in most Youtube videos, so I've never bothered to create an account and wasn't aware of that feature.
If you can create private videos, I would personally agree that allowing Viacom to access information on them and how they are used should require that Viacom prove there is a reasonable suspicion that the private videos are either illegal content or, more appropriately to Viacom's litigation, an infringement of Viacom "property".
Unfortunately, these last fifteen years or so, courts and government entities haven't generally seen these sorts of the things the same way I do...
In the end, my opinion is that business and government should not be allowed to passively obtain information on the activities of the general public in any setting without proving a strong case for necessity, but that if a member of the public broadcasts, in some way, their behavior, then it becomes fair game for everyone, including the government and private business.
While I disagree with the judge's decision for various reasons, I feel no sympathy for your friends, and the plight induced here is not among the reasons I object to the decision.
Youtube is a publicly available website and, as such, videos on it are public displays. If they didn't want to broadcast their shenanigans, they shouldn't have made a public display of those shenanigans.
Government obtaining damaging information by thwarting the privacy of citizens is one thing, but this would be government obtaining damaging information by simply accessing content that it - and everyone else - was given implicit permission to view.
Your friends would do well to spend a little more time thinking through the repercussions of their actions. Even if this had never crept up, there are still countless other ways such reckless displays can fall into 'the wrong hands'.
There's a causal link between decreased motor and mental faculties and alcohol, and between cigarette smoke and various diseases. Hence the prohibition on selling them to people who, in theory, are unable to make an appropriate decision regarding the use of those products because they haven't reached the ages of 18 and 21 where magical fairy-thinking kicks in and you suddenly gain 50 IQ points so that...
OK, wait... tangent there...
Anyway, the whole argument here is that the state couldn't prove a causal link between violent video games and violent behavior, which was the argument they used to justify the law.
I have been deputized by the analogy police so you're under arrest. No slashdot for you for three days!
What's more interesting is the ruling that video games are protected speech, effectively making it impossible for the state to restrict them at all.
I wonder why gouging eyes out and decapitation is "protected speech" but crude language isn't... in theory, you could publicly display a game of Manhunt.... but you'd have to censor the swearing.
The immunity offered by this bill is retroactive only; it does not extend into the future.
But it is immunity nonetheless, and immunity for something that many people not only believe to be illegal, but an outright assault on the rights of the citizenry.
What's worse, in my opinion, is his wishy-washy press release on the matter. If he'd focused more on the "look, if it wasn't this, the republicans and telco-owned democrats would've killed the whole thing and we'd have no progress at all", it wouldn't have been so bad.
Instead, he hid behind the "look! bogeymen!" scare-tactics and provided a waffly excuse of "legitimate threats" this and "terrorists" that without ever actually specifying what these vague apparitions lurking in the dark are. THAT, to me, is where his political colors really showed.
I think this may, very well, be the first thing that has come out to really tarnish his image. I'm not going to stop supporting his bid over it, but I certainly am viewing him with a bit more suspicion than in the past.
You don't need consensus for a healthy democracy, you just need a factually valid and composed discourse that allows people to vent frustration, air grievances, discuss differences, and share information in a safe and reliable way.
We'll never agree on everything, and that's not necessary. But this country has gotten to the point where no matter how important an issue is (as gaged by prior opinions of importance) that there isn't even a factual discussion occurring. Not only are people disagreeing, they're bickering over the tiniest differences, starting discussions by insulting each other, and concentrating their opinions into feedback loops through both major media outlets and specialized websites/periodicals.
People don't need to know everything, but there should be a way for them to learn about things they want to become involved in. We don't have that. Maybe we never did. Maybe the serf-like ignorance we see now has always been the standard and we just see that we have the OPPORTUNITY to put an end to it, but not the will.
At any rate, the point is that people must be responsible for maturely engaging in dialogs on important issues, and we don't have that in this country right now.
I don't know if there's a specific definition of the phrase "earth-like atmosphere", but what I mean when I say it is one in which the exact constituents of the atmosphere are very, very similar to Earth's such that you could transplant practically any living thing from Earth to the new location safely.
The point I'm driving at is that you can have an atmosphere that is safe for humans, but not close enough to the atmosphere on Earth that it would allow for all the same organisms that we see on Earth. You don't really need to re-create the entire Earth's atmosphere, or even a portion of it, you just need one in which humans can survive and can have an agriculture that sustains a local population, even if it doesn't support the same types of agriculture or the diversity we have on Earth.
You could even have a non-breathable atmosphere that provides an appropriate pressure and is, at least, not poisonous, caustic, etc. so long as you used a breathing apparatus outside.
And just where do you propose the (Human breathable) gases will come from?
I'm not proposing anything, I'm just observing that much of the conversation on terra-forming here is revolving around re-creating a stable, Earth-like atmosphere, but that's not necessary. There are many, many different options for terra-forming a world so that humans could live on it. It doesn't have to be Earth for us to be able to develop it.
It is available, but it is obtuse. A nice place to find such information is OpenSecrets.org
And the accountability? It's with you. With me. With our neighbors and fellow slashdotters. We are a Democratic Republic, we are supposed to keep our elected officials in check by removing them or not re-electing them when they become corrupt or simply stop representing our interests, which means one of two things is in play here:
1) The American people, generally, support wiretapping without oversight and don't want to see telecoms punished even if their support of the program was illegal
or, more likely:
2) The American people do not fully educate themselves on these sorts of matters and don't have a full grasp of the implications involved in allowing it. They have abdicated their responsibility of oversight of the government.
We are a lazy and selfish people, my friend. It's going to take some serious suffering on our parts to change that.
If a safe atmosphere can be generated at a rate faster than the upper atmosphere is escaping, yes, it can be "thick" enough.
Just getting it to the point we want and then letting it sit around will inevitably result in what we have now, but if we are active participants in an endless terraforming process, it's feasible to maintain a human-friendly atmosphere.
An earth-like atmosphere? Probably not, but human beings don't necessarily need an earth-like atmosphere to survive, they just need one that's breathable and that won't actively kill them.
Mars will probably never be earth-like, but it may well eventually be habitable. Even if that means environmental suits (or, at least breathers) to go outside and work the fields while structures pump and filter the external atmosphere into something safe for us inside, that's still habitation.
There are many, many options beyond making Mars into a new Earth.
An interesting point. Any brief distractions (such as a firecracker or single broken pane of glass) would, in theory, fail, as the camera would just abandon them and turn toward the real crime the instant it noticed what was happening off-camera.
However, how would it handle a prolonged mock crime and a real crime that occur simultaneously...
Regardless, I point you to this gentleman's timely journal on the matter of surveillance:
There's a Z platform, but Mitsubishi had more to do with it than Chrysler did. I'm not sure Chrysler even still uses it anymore. I don't know that they ever used it in the states.
I'm also a Chrysler hater (horrible, horrible experience with a 1996 Sebring of my wife's), and even I don't know anything specifically bad about the Z platform, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on who's depicting them. The more sober depictions of Gotham City frequently have the criminals infighting with one another. Bane and Catwoman, for example, are fairly consistent in their opposition to a large part of Gotham's underground on matters of principle, and Fries, Ras, Scarecrow, and Ivy have all been known to turn against other supervillians, mobs, and cartels for mostly selfish reasons.
Organized crime syndicates also start turf wars from time to time and street gangs fighting one another is a major element in, at least, Miller's vision.
Then you have people like Joker or Ventriloquist who are just tragically and viciously insane and will turn their rage on anybody who happens to be nearby no matter where the victim stands in relation to Batman's ideas of justice and order.
There's so much range in how Gotham City has been depicted over the years that it's difficult to come up with any consistent vision for it unless you group it into eras, and those eras that show a grittier, meaner Batman and Gotham have very complex characters that range from hero to anti-hero and the traditional crime noir villian seeking wealth or power to chilling psychopaths bent on unleashing hell for no other reason than that they can.
A large portion of the Batman storyline revolves around the question of whether or not that's really true.
One of the more poignant observations made in the comics was by Commissioner Gordon when he pointed out that there were always regular criminals in Gotham before Batman arrived, but there weren't any supervillians until after Batman made room for them.
Pennsylvania is the most recent state I recall hearing about, but I know there have been others as well. So far, the attempts to initiate these blocks have been shut down in court battles, but if one should eventually stick, it could present some interesting challenges.
As a hypothetical, the mere existence of 4chan is not illegal, nor is it inherently illegal to access it, but it has been blocked before by ISPs - notably in Europe, but it's a potential here as well - on the grounds that the content on 4chan is not acceptable to the communities those ISPs serve.
A community or state may pass a law to block 4chan, deeming it inappropriate by the standards of the community, and this FCC ruling may wind up in contention with that blocking as the ISPs would need to notify their customers and ensure that complying with the community law wouldn't clash with the FCC's regulatory ruling.
I can see the ruling going different ways. Existing demands to block content have already been ruled on, and the ruling has been that ISPs cannot be held responsible for not delivering illicit content into a community when a member of that community is actively requesting it, but legislators are a tricky bunch and continue to try and press laws that circumvent the court's findings. This FCC ruling would seem to throw yet another wrench in the gears.
So, what sort of precedent might this set for other attempts to block access? Numerous states have attempted to block access, by law, to what they deem to be illegal content. Would a ruling like this tie the hands of companies like Comcast so that they're in a "damned if you do damned if you don't" position, or would one ruling likely supercede the other?
I also find this amusing. Comcast is whining about it, but they're effectively been told off and punished for not disclosing to their customers what they were doing to paid services. It really says a lot about the company that they're complaining that they have to inform their customers before they make significant service changes.
Hell if customers should be informed and able to make competent purchasing decisions... informed and self-interested customers would utterly destroy Comcast's entire business model.
I'd be interested in hearing what relevance it has outside of, perhaps, current events, that would justify any mention in sound educational policy?
The common argument is that it may fit into a philosophy class - as you've mentioned - but there's little reason to even do that since it doesn't appear to be a well-defined argument of any import. Furthermore, there are far more established philosophies that oppose Evolution which can provide for a much more thorough discussion on the contending ideas.
There seems to be little value in the idea as a whole as far as its educational uses are concerned. It's clearly a seat-of-the-pants response to evolutionary biology and offers nothing of relevance to the study of science and is poorly defined as a matter of philosophical interest. Really, it's more like an advertising campaign than anything, so if it fits anywhere, it would seem to fit primarily in discussions about propaganda, but that would just cause outrage among its "proponents" and would hardly be worth the hassle.
That's not a good analogy. In the Youtube case, Viacom would see what videos you're requesting from a public website, so it's more like they're watching what stores you enter from a public street. That's not illegal, nor should it be. If you're not comfortable with the social ramifications of going into Fat Al's World of Pecan Porn, you shouldn't go in.
Frankly, I agree. I think that if a company wants to see logs like that, and the business the request is made to refuses that request, the requesting company should be forced to make very specific requests about very specific transactions and be prepared to prove that their is a reasonable level of suspicion that the activity they are requesting information on caused them some level of measurable harm, or may be used to prove some level of measurable harm.
Unfortunately, that's not how it is, so, for practical purposes, one must assume that one's activity online is subject to search and seizure by practically any business or governmental entity, and one should take appropriate steps to protect oneself from such invasions of privacy.
I'd take that a step further and say it's symptomatic of generations of desensitization to private sector and government snooping in general.
When the government mandated schooling for children, people sent to enforce the new laws were actually occsaionally shot at. Now, people can't even get riled up enough to write their representative and senators if Congress wants to pass a law allowing the government to tap our private conversations.
It's sad, but people have, through a process of laziness and even active denial, effectively ceded most authority over their own decisions to various private interests and governments.
It is, in fact, our own faults, but how could we be expected to act much different when, for generations, people have failed to educate their progeny on the importance of balancing the good of self and society?
I'll have to admit that I've just become ignorant on the matter, then. I've never thought particularly well of Youtube users, based primarily on their exchanges in most Youtube videos, so I've never bothered to create an account and wasn't aware of that feature.
If you can create private videos, I would personally agree that allowing Viacom to access information on them and how they are used should require that Viacom prove there is a reasonable suspicion that the private videos are either illegal content or, more appropriately to Viacom's litigation, an infringement of Viacom "property".
Unfortunately, these last fifteen years or so, courts and government entities haven't generally seen these sorts of the things the same way I do...
In the end, my opinion is that business and government should not be allowed to passively obtain information on the activities of the general public in any setting without proving a strong case for necessity, but that if a member of the public broadcasts, in some way, their behavior, then it becomes fair game for everyone, including the government and private business.
While I disagree with the judge's decision for various reasons, I feel no sympathy for your friends, and the plight induced here is not among the reasons I object to the decision.
Youtube is a publicly available website and, as such, videos on it are public displays. If they didn't want to broadcast their shenanigans, they shouldn't have made a public display of those shenanigans.
Government obtaining damaging information by thwarting the privacy of citizens is one thing, but this would be government obtaining damaging information by simply accessing content that it - and everyone else - was given implicit permission to view.
Your friends would do well to spend a little more time thinking through the repercussions of their actions. Even if this had never crept up, there are still countless other ways such reckless displays can fall into 'the wrong hands'.
There's a causal link between decreased motor and mental faculties and alcohol, and between cigarette smoke and various diseases. Hence the prohibition on selling them to people who, in theory, are unable to make an appropriate decision regarding the use of those products because they haven't reached the ages of 18 and 21 where magical fairy-thinking kicks in and you suddenly gain 50 IQ points so that...
OK, wait... tangent there...
Anyway, the whole argument here is that the state couldn't prove a causal link between violent video games and violent behavior, which was the argument they used to justify the law.
I have been deputized by the analogy police so you're under arrest. No slashdot for you for three days!
What's more interesting is the ruling that video games are protected speech, effectively making it impossible for the state to restrict them at all.
I wonder why gouging eyes out and decapitation is "protected speech" but crude language isn't... in theory, you could publicly display a game of Manhunt.... but you'd have to censor the swearing.
But it is immunity nonetheless, and immunity for something that many people not only believe to be illegal, but an outright assault on the rights of the citizenry.
What's worse, in my opinion, is his wishy-washy press release on the matter. If he'd focused more on the "look, if it wasn't this, the republicans and telco-owned democrats would've killed the whole thing and we'd have no progress at all", it wouldn't have been so bad.
Instead, he hid behind the "look! bogeymen!" scare-tactics and provided a waffly excuse of "legitimate threats" this and "terrorists" that without ever actually specifying what these vague apparitions lurking in the dark are. THAT, to me, is where his political colors really showed.
I think this may, very well, be the first thing that has come out to really tarnish his image. I'm not going to stop supporting his bid over it, but I certainly am viewing him with a bit more suspicion than in the past.
You don't need consensus for a healthy democracy, you just need a factually valid and composed discourse that allows people to vent frustration, air grievances, discuss differences, and share information in a safe and reliable way.
We'll never agree on everything, and that's not necessary. But this country has gotten to the point where no matter how important an issue is (as gaged by prior opinions of importance) that there isn't even a factual discussion occurring. Not only are people disagreeing, they're bickering over the tiniest differences, starting discussions by insulting each other, and concentrating their opinions into feedback loops through both major media outlets and specialized websites/periodicals.
People don't need to know everything, but there should be a way for them to learn about things they want to become involved in. We don't have that. Maybe we never did. Maybe the serf-like ignorance we see now has always been the standard and we just see that we have the OPPORTUNITY to put an end to it, but not the will.
At any rate, the point is that people must be responsible for maturely engaging in dialogs on important issues, and we don't have that in this country right now.
I don't know if there's a specific definition of the phrase "earth-like atmosphere", but what I mean when I say it is one in which the exact constituents of the atmosphere are very, very similar to Earth's such that you could transplant practically any living thing from Earth to the new location safely.
The point I'm driving at is that you can have an atmosphere that is safe for humans, but not close enough to the atmosphere on Earth that it would allow for all the same organisms that we see on Earth. You don't really need to re-create the entire Earth's atmosphere, or even a portion of it, you just need one in which humans can survive and can have an agriculture that sustains a local population, even if it doesn't support the same types of agriculture or the diversity we have on Earth.
You could even have a non-breathable atmosphere that provides an appropriate pressure and is, at least, not poisonous, caustic, etc. so long as you used a breathing apparatus outside.
I'm not proposing anything, I'm just observing that much of the conversation on terra-forming here is revolving around re-creating a stable, Earth-like atmosphere, but that's not necessary. There are many, many different options for terra-forming a world so that humans could live on it. It doesn't have to be Earth for us to be able to develop it.
It is available, but it is obtuse. A nice place to find such information is OpenSecrets.org
And the accountability? It's with you. With me. With our neighbors and fellow slashdotters. We are a Democratic Republic, we are supposed to keep our elected officials in check by removing them or not re-electing them when they become corrupt or simply stop representing our interests, which means one of two things is in play here:
1) The American people, generally, support wiretapping without oversight and don't want to see telecoms punished even if their support of the program was illegal
or, more likely:
2) The American people do not fully educate themselves on these sorts of matters and don't have a full grasp of the implications involved in allowing it. They have abdicated their responsibility of oversight of the government.
We are a lazy and selfish people, my friend. It's going to take some serious suffering on our parts to change that.
If a safe atmosphere can be generated at a rate faster than the upper atmosphere is escaping, yes, it can be "thick" enough.
Just getting it to the point we want and then letting it sit around will inevitably result in what we have now, but if we are active participants in an endless terraforming process, it's feasible to maintain a human-friendly atmosphere.
An earth-like atmosphere? Probably not, but human beings don't necessarily need an earth-like atmosphere to survive, they just need one that's breathable and that won't actively kill them.
Mars will probably never be earth-like, but it may well eventually be habitable. Even if that means environmental suits (or, at least breathers) to go outside and work the fields while structures pump and filter the external atmosphere into something safe for us inside, that's still habitation.
There are many, many options beyond making Mars into a new Earth.
An interesting point. Any brief distractions (such as a firecracker or single broken pane of glass) would, in theory, fail, as the camera would just abandon them and turn toward the real crime the instant it noticed what was happening off-camera.
However, how would it handle a prolonged mock crime and a real crime that occur simultaneously...
Regardless, I point you to this gentleman's timely journal on the matter of surveillance:
"Official Voyeurism"
There's a Z platform, but Mitsubishi had more to do with it than Chrysler did. I'm not sure Chrysler even still uses it anymore. I don't know that they ever used it in the states.
I'm also a Chrysler hater (horrible, horrible experience with a 1996 Sebring of my wife's), and even I don't know anything specifically bad about the Z platform, though.
That doesn't mean they can't try and make a big fuss about it. It's not like they're doing anything useful with their time otherwise.
In fact, Christopher Dodd (D-CT) is busy trying to shift Countrywide's bad loans through the FHA to the taxpayers so that when BoA buys them for $7 a share they only get the good parts and we get all the subprime slime we can eat.
Oh, and we might also get to foot the bill for BoA's acquisition of the good parts!
Yea, color me an unimpressed democratic voter too.