If you take that view then vaccines are useless too since they only have something like a (picks number out of ass) 90% chance of actually confering immunity to a disease to any particular individual which is all well and good for that 90% but for the other 10% who can still catch the crippling/deadly disease it does no good.
Of course with vaccines there's also the aspect of herd immunity where once you get over a certain point diseases just don't spread. Similarly once you get over a certain threshold with contraceptives then the whole society starts seeing benefits.
Poor Bozo, who's family will starve if he has one more child then has some sisters, brothers and friends etc who because they're part of that other 99% who didn't have children are not under the same strain. They are generating more wealth and consuming less and are generally more able to help old Bozo out.
We could hand out condoms to actually help.
But no. We should throw blindingly obvious common sense out the window and expect people to act like perfectly rational robots who don't have sex unless it's sensible to do so. While we're at it lets provide electricity for people in the third world with generators powered by water flowing uphill and provide food products made from airborne organisms of the porcine persuasion.
well by definition as soon as you take the necessary actions to have children you stop practicing abstinence and start having sex with someone. (assuming no puddles or turkey basters)
Anyone who consistently practices abstinence hasn't much chance to pass on the old genes.
*People are irrational* We are not rational actors. We like to think we are but rarely do people make anything close to rational choices.
People can want to have sex without wanting to have a child. People extremely often *do* have sex without wanting to have a child no matter how much bibles are waved at them. People *do* have sex whatever you do.
Better yet, thanks to the wonders of technology there are these wonderful inventions made out of latex which can dramatically lower the chances of you having a child as a result of sex.
So any rational actor who wanted to minimize the number of unwanted children born into these situations rather than fuck around moralizing ineffectively would accept that people have sex and hand out many examples of those wonderous inventions to anyone they could find.
But of course humans are not rational actors.
It's charming that you consider poor people living in the third world to be animals by the way.
Well for that situation why would they even try to remain anonymous? They can hire a thousand people to post under their own names to make those comments who just don't mention their being employed to do it.
Unless you also want to not just force people to reveal their identities but also their employer with every post they make on the internet. (The more info you require the more problems we hit)
This one would be fantastic if I was an employer of course because then I could just do a search for all posts from people who have been obliged by law to reveal that they work for me online and then fire anyone who expresses political opinions I don't like. Think abortion is wrong? you're fired. Think tax rates on the wealthy are too low? you're fired. etc etc
Unless you also mandate that people reveal their employers then the scenario you outlined is in no way mitigated. Never mind FUD is rarely spread anonymously. It tends to get spread quite openly by ad agencies openly working for said big companies.
Anonymity protects the little guys from the big guys far more than it protects the big guys who have little or no need for anonymity.
Even ignoring the sitting in a puddle thing better make that consensually *and unintentionally* given how trivial artificial insemination is now days.
In any case it doesn't make for much of a practical solution for real world situations given that for the last billion years any of our potential ancestors with a talent for or natural tendency towards abstinence have gradually been selected out of the gene pool.
Better to accept that people are going to act like people and have sex and go with the approach which takes that into account.
Actually I'd say it's an almost perfect example of why anonymous speech is almost harmless and is perfectly fine. Hell on slashdot I can't even see it without changing my settings. As an anonymous post it holds pretty much zero weight because it cites no sources and doesn't back up it's claims.
If I say "Bill gates has 6 toes" under the name "John Smith" on the other hand people would be less inclined to pay attention to the fact that I have nothing to back up what I'm saying because hey, it's not anonymous.
Now of course a lot of other forms of birth control don't do much about that situation but it's misleading to claim that your approach would be 100% effective.
you seem to be missing the extremely easy to understand point. *any* reduction is good. Abstinence only tends to be a spectacular failure everywhere it's tried as is handing out bibles. So lets go with a method which actually works almost all of the time under real life conditions.
there are lots of approaches, that one just happens to be very promising. Now as for the time it's taken it's not like they haven't been getting anywhere it's just that there's the little problem that what they're trying to do is really really hard.
What I don't get is why. In this day and age why they don't use a decently secure system with some crypto built in.
I'm sure this isn't perfect but this is off the top of my head so I'm sure there's plenty of people who could offer ideas for improvement:
My ideal:
Card with decent bit length private key stored on it in such a way that it cannot be retrieved without shaving the plastic off the card. Allow card to be hooked up to a computer using some standard connection like micro-usb or some such. [suggestions for best/cheapest method for connecting card?] Use protocol which requires pin from user (hashed+salted on card) before the card will sign the challenge and authorise the transaction.
That way it at least requires the card to be present(can't just rip it when someone uses it to pay for gas). If your card is stolen you have a chance to know about it and can cancel the card. If it just gets lifted when you pay for gas then it's more of a problem.
Less complex cheaper but still better than current system: have the card given to the user be similar to those cards used for 2 factor auth which display a different number every few minutes. build it such that the whole contents of the card cannot be ripped without mutilating the card.
I know perfect security is impossible given the physical access aspect but we can at least make it so that your card has to physically no longer be in your possession for your CC details to be stolen.
Personally I don't use a CC because I don't like how awful and insecure the current system is. Thoughts, suggestions?
You'd swear that every man with a bit of his dick chopped off thinks that those of us who aren't circumcised have to constantly worry about it rotting off. Hygiene has never been an issue for me. Ever.
Not in normal society and not even even when spending weeks hiking cross country without access to easy ways to wash.
It's a retarded myth. A foreskin does not make for hygiene problems.
Could your ISP block websites which it considers to be involved in copyright infringement? Might it even only allow you communicate with a whitelist of IP's?
Personally I don't like any law that creates a situation where you can become a criminal while in a locked room with nothing more than a pen and some blank sheets of paper.
Want to draw up your plans for bringing down the government? no problem, it's not conspiracy until another person is involved.
Want to write about raping and maiming everyone around you? Again, you don't break the law until other people are involved.
But god help you if you draw 2 stick figures and put an arrow pointing to one with a little side note reading "Age 15" For that you are a criminal at least as bad as people who gang rape children.
Ok, how inconspicuous from the air+easily dismantled and turned back into innocent components can I make a HERF gun with the range to fry one of these things.
this is horrible but I knew at least one guy who did very well out of making sure there was always something very visible to management broken. I was always borken in such a way that it didn't cause an immediate impact and could be fixed before it caused an impact on the bottom line. And he would make sure he could swoop in and fix it on time.
Now I'm not sure if he arranged for things to break or if he just had a knack for making sure convenient things broke at the right time for him.
Compare that to some other people I've know who simple did their jobs very well to the extent that very rarely did anyone ever notice anything go wrong.
Guess who got paid more. Guess who got shitcanned because "sure why are we paying those guys, it's not like things go wrong much"
You get that attitude even amongst programmers... hell especially from some programmers.
I'm no web developers, I know enough web design and development to be sure I'm no web developer and I've seen some fantastical cockups from programmers who've decided they are web developers.
I'm a final year comp sci student and I have to agree. This course has been watered down like the drinks at a carnival.
I expected that by the end of my degree I'd feel competent in the subject. The best way to describe my current state? I now more fully appreciate the true breadth of my ignorance. I do not however feel that I am any kind of expert on the subject....
Some of the modules seem ok but then I look at the modules related to areas which I have an interest in outside of college and many of the modules I've done over the last few years could probably have been covered more thoroughly in a few days by an enthusiastic person with a textbook, google and some brains.
They're cutting out most of the math from first year because the dropout rate was the highest in the university and the standards in second year seem shocking since they also dropped a lot of the other basic stuff. (I've been tutoring people from the lower years)
If you genuinely do have something wrong with your brain how accountable can you be held for your actions. It makes sense to restrain someone who is dangerous to stop them from hurting themselves or others but actually setting out to punish someone for acting erratically and hurting people due to malfunctions in their brain seems about a sensible as beating my laptop for floating point errors.
It's not going to fix it and it's not going to prevent the problem from happening in future but it does vent your frustration.
Slashdot Mirror
that's a fairly insane standard to go by.
If you take that view then vaccines are useless too since they only have something like a (picks number out of ass) 90% chance of actually confering immunity to a disease to any particular individual which is all well and good for that 90% but for the other 10% who can still catch the crippling/deadly disease it does no good.
Of course with vaccines there's also the aspect of herd immunity where once you get over a certain point diseases just don't spread.
Similarly once you get over a certain threshold with contraceptives then the whole society starts seeing benefits.
Poor Bozo, who's family will starve if he has one more child then has some sisters, brothers and friends etc who because they're part of that other 99% who didn't have children are not under the same strain.
They are generating more wealth and consuming less and are generally more able to help old Bozo out.
We could hand out condoms to actually help.
But no.
We should throw blindingly obvious common sense out the window and expect people to act like perfectly rational robots who don't have sex unless it's sensible to do so.
While we're at it lets provide electricity for people in the third world with generators powered by water flowing uphill and provide food products made from airborne organisms of the porcine persuasion.
well by definition as soon as you take the necessary actions to have children you stop practicing abstinence and start having sex with someone.
(assuming no puddles or turkey basters)
Anyone who consistently practices abstinence hasn't much chance to pass on the old genes.
*People are irrational*
We are not rational actors.
We like to think we are but rarely do people make anything close to rational choices.
People can want to have sex without wanting to have a child.
People extremely often *do* have sex without wanting to have a child no matter how much bibles are waved at them.
People *do* have sex whatever you do.
Better yet, thanks to the wonders of technology there are these wonderful inventions made out of latex which can dramatically lower the chances of you having a child as a result of sex.
So any rational actor who wanted to minimize the number of unwanted children born into these situations rather than fuck around moralizing ineffectively would accept that people have sex and hand out many examples of those wonderous inventions to anyone they could find.
But of course humans are not rational actors.
It's charming that you consider poor people living in the third world to be animals by the way.
Gah
*they're
Well for that situation why would they even try to remain anonymous?
They can hire a thousand people to post under their own names to make those comments who just don't mention their being employed to do it.
Unless you also want to not just force people to reveal their identities but also their employer with every post they make on the internet.
(The more info you require the more problems we hit)
This one would be fantastic if I was an employer of course because then I could just do a search for all posts from people who have been obliged by law to reveal that they work for me online and then fire anyone who expresses political opinions I don't like.
Think abortion is wrong? you're fired.
Think tax rates on the wealthy are too low? you're fired.
etc etc
Unless you also mandate that people reveal their employers then the scenario you outlined is in no way mitigated.
Never mind FUD is rarely spread anonymously. It tends to get spread quite openly by ad agencies openly working for said big companies.
Anonymity protects the little guys from the big guys far more than it protects the big guys who have little or no need for anonymity.
Even ignoring the sitting in a puddle thing better make that consensually *and unintentionally* given how trivial artificial insemination is now days.
In any case it doesn't make for much of a practical solution for real world situations given that for the last billion years any of our potential ancestors with a talent for or natural tendency towards abstinence have gradually been selected out of the gene pool.
Better to accept that people are going to act like people and have sex and go with the approach which takes that into account.
Actually I'd say it's an almost perfect example of why anonymous speech is almost harmless and is perfectly fine.
Hell on slashdot I can't even see it without changing my settings.
As an anonymous post it holds pretty much zero weight because it cites no sources and doesn't back up it's claims.
If I say "Bill gates has 6 toes" under the name "John Smith" on the other hand people would be less inclined to pay attention to the fact that I have nothing to back up what I'm saying because hey, it's not anonymous.
well given that a woman who avoids all sex like a robot factors can still be outside her control ie: she can still get raped and become pregnant so even abstinence fails to achieve that.
Unless you think that people who take abstinence pledges and then get raped have *broken* their pledges.
http://s539.photobucket.com/albums/ff359/blades420baby/christian%20sarcasm/?action=view¤t=9.png
Now of course a lot of other forms of birth control don't do much about that situation but it's misleading to claim that your approach would be 100% effective.
you seem to be missing the extremely easy to understand point.
*any* reduction is good.
Abstinence only tends to be a spectacular failure everywhere it's tried as is handing out bibles.
So lets go with a method which actually works almost all of the time under real life conditions.
To be fair it used to be 15 years away (admitedly more than 10 years ago) so in 50 years it'll only be 2 or 3 years away.
there are lots of approaches, that one just happens to be very promising.
Now as for the time it's taken it's not like they haven't been getting anywhere it's just that there's the little problem that what they're trying to do is really really hard.
What I don't get is why.
In this day and age why they don't use a decently secure system with some crypto built in.
I'm sure this isn't perfect but this is off the top of my head so I'm sure there's plenty of people who could offer ideas for improvement:
My ideal:
Card with decent bit length private key stored on it in such a way that it cannot be retrieved without shaving the plastic off the card.
Allow card to be hooked up to a computer using some standard connection like micro-usb or some such. [suggestions for best/cheapest method for connecting card?]
Use protocol which requires pin from user (hashed+salted on card) before the card will sign the challenge and authorise the transaction.
That way it at least requires the card to be present(can't just rip it when someone uses it to pay for gas). If your card is stolen you have a chance to know about it and can cancel the card. If it just gets lifted when you pay for gas then it's more of a problem.
Less complex cheaper but still better than current system:
have the card given to the user be similar to those cards used for 2 factor auth which display a different number every few minutes.
build it such that the whole contents of the card cannot be ripped without mutilating the card.
I know perfect security is impossible given the physical access aspect but we can at least make it so that your card has to physically no longer be in your possession for your CC details to be stolen.
Personally I don't use a CC because I don't like how awful and insecure the current system is.
Thoughts, suggestions?
Where did this piece of retardation come from????
You'd swear that every man with a bit of his dick chopped off thinks that those of us who aren't circumcised have to constantly worry about it rotting off.
Hygiene has never been an issue for me.
Ever.
Not in normal society and not even even when spending weeks hiking cross country without access to easy ways to wash.
It's a retarded myth.
A foreskin does not make for hygiene problems.
*starts a slow clap*
Is this just protocols or also destinations?
Could your ISP block websites which it considers to be involved in copyright infringement?
Might it even only allow you communicate with a whitelist of IP's?
That requires other people or at least communication beyond the room.
Try again.
You can become a criminal without ever sending any of those sheets beyond that room.
Personally I don't like any law that creates a situation where you can become a criminal while in a locked room with nothing more than a pen and some blank sheets of paper.
Want to draw up your plans for bringing down the government?
no problem, it's not conspiracy until another person is involved.
Want to write about raping and maiming everyone around you?
Again, you don't break the law until other people are involved.
But god help you if you draw 2 stick figures and put an arrow pointing to one with a little side note reading "Age 15"
For that you are a criminal at least as bad as people who gang rape children.
Again....wooosh
wooosh!
Ok, how inconspicuous from the air+easily dismantled and turned back into innocent components can I make a HERF gun with the range to fry one of these things.
this is horrible but I knew at least one guy who did very well out of making sure there was always something very visible to management broken.
I was always borken in such a way that it didn't cause an immediate impact and could be fixed before it caused an impact on the bottom line.
And he would make sure he could swoop in and fix it on time.
Now I'm not sure if he arranged for things to break or if he just had a knack for making sure convenient things broke at the right time for him.
Compare that to some other people I've know who simple did their jobs very well to the extent that very rarely did anyone ever notice anything go wrong.
Guess who got paid more.
Guess who got shitcanned because "sure why are we paying those guys, it's not like things go wrong much"
Assholes win in life.
You get that attitude even amongst programmers... hell especially from some programmers.
I'm no web developers, I know enough web design and development to be sure I'm no web developer and I've seen some fantastical cockups from programmers who've decided they are web developers.
That's just a product of restraining them, it's the line between that and punishment that's where it gets messed up.
I'm a final year comp sci student and I have to agree.
This course has been watered down like the drinks at a carnival.
I expected that by the end of my degree I'd feel competent in the subject.
The best way to describe my current state? I now more fully appreciate the true breadth of my ignorance.
I do not however feel that I am any kind of expert on the subject....
Some of the modules seem ok but then I look at the modules related to areas which I have an interest in outside of college and many of the modules I've done over the last few years could probably have been covered more thoroughly in a few days by an enthusiastic person with a textbook, google and some brains.
They're cutting out most of the math from first year because the dropout rate was the highest in the university and the standards in second year seem shocking since they also dropped a lot of the other basic stuff. (I've been tutoring people from the lower years)
If you genuinely do have something wrong with your brain how accountable can you be held for your actions.
It makes sense to restrain someone who is dangerous to stop them from hurting themselves or others but actually setting out to punish someone for acting erratically and hurting people due to malfunctions in their brain seems about a sensible as beating my laptop for floating point errors.
It's not going to fix it and it's not going to prevent the problem from happening in future but it does vent your frustration.