If the hole has been recovering since then why are scientists blaming mankind for the current increase in temperatures.
Because the ozone hole and global warming are two totally separate phenomena. They are both caused by pollution, but different kinds of pollution-- in simple terms, the ozone hole is caused by CFCs, global warming is caused by greenhouse gases. In the 80s, we stopped using CFCs, and since CFCs take a few decades to fall out of the atmosphere, now that a few decades have passed the ozone hole is starting to get better. In the 80s we did not stop our emission of greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide), so global climate change / global warming is still getting worse.
Of course, carbon dioxide takes longer to fall out of the atmosphere than CFCs, so even if we entirely ceased carbon dioxide emissions tomorrow (which we probably couldn't even if we really wanted to without bringing civilization to its knees) we shouldn't expect to see things returning to normal for maybe a couple hundreds of years. But at least we could stop making things worse.
Repairing the ozone hole is not helping global warming for the same reason that if your computer's power supply is on fire, you cannot fix this by reinstalling Windows. If you thought that repairing the ozone hole would stop global warming, it is because you are confused.
Slashdot rails against Palladium nonstop for a matter of years when Microsoft is pushing Palladium as something they want to do. (And in what may just be a coincidence, as long as public pressure is on, Microsoft never actually manages to get Palladium adopted.) Then all of a sudden, Palladium crops up in all these new Macintoshes, but now that it's in fancy white plastic nobody minds, nobody cares, nobody even talks about it. Anyone left who's upset about the idea of the operating system vendor requiring you to use a chip which takes ultimate control of the machine out of the hands of the computer owner, and into the hands of the people who sold it to you? Anyone left who's not willing to support the future abuses of power that the mere presence of TPM in existing machines makes possible? One or two people? Oh, well you weren't going to buy it anyway you pirate.
Now that white plastic is involved, now all of a sudden the implicit spirit of "capitalism is a two-way negotiation, and the consumer is obligated to protect their interests by rejecting actions by producers which go to far" gives way to a new spirit of "TPM? What's that? Well, whatever. I'm sure software companies wouldn't do anything irresponsible. If you don't like it, then you don't have to use.. y'know.. a computer".
(Amusingly, through all of this the pirates aren't complaining about the TPM or the kernel source closing or anything, they're just going ahead and running the unrestricted pirated versions. What do they even have to complain about? They alone get the freedom to use their computers in the way they wish. There's this idea that you don't own your possessions, the people who sold them to you own them and they're just letting you use them as long as you live your life by the rules they demand, and this idea is one that only legal paying customers have to put up with.)
My dual g4 mac I'm posting on here is getting really, really old. I can probably stretch another couple of years of life out of it if I beef up the RAM some. After that I guess my next computer, for the first time since I got my first computer in 1986 or so, will be something other than an Apple. I don't really know or care what it is as long as it isn't running Windows, and doesn't have a TPM in it (or other chip in it that allows software to encrypt part of the computers internals to keep me from looking at it). Linux doesn't have any of the audio programs I need, doesn't have any of the image editing programs I need, can't run any of the Cocoa software I've written for private use, and doesn't have any developer platforms which even approach the elegance, speed of development, and usability of Cocoa in the first place. But the only choices the "free" market gives here are between being a criminal, being a slave, and being a miserable, freezing luddite eating bark in the woods. Option #3 is looking best right now.
Why would they? I suggest you read Smith v. Maryland (1979).
Hi. Please see my comments in response to someone who brought up Smith v. Maryland in a different thread. In short Smith v. Maryland applied in 1979 but I do not think it applies in 2006, becuase the Smith v. Maryland suit is founded on the subjective question of what constitutes a "reasonable expectation of privacy"; however, privacy laws (and laws concerning exactly when the government must ask for a warrant before obtaining certain information) have changed significantly since 1979, meaning that what may be considered a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in 1979 is different from what may be considered a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in 2006. Thanks for the link though.
That post you link contains an amendment to 47 U.S.C. 222.
My post which you are responding to primarily concerns a completely different law, 18 U.S.C. 2701-2712.
Please note the difference between a "bill" and the "code". A bill, Such as the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which you apparently link, amends the United States Code, which is what "the law" is. A copy of "the code", such as can be found at http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode, has already taken all amendments, additions, etc to the law into account.
So while I'm not entirely sure what in that big block of text you link you're trying to draw attention to-- you don't give any hints what you're trying to say, so I actually can't even tell if you're trying to agree or disagree with my post-- I just want to make it clear that the post you link there has no bearing on whether the communications carriers have broken the Stored Communications Act, because it concerns a different law.
Did you read the slashdot summary or are you just hurrying to spam that to every single article that has something to do with phone numbers being tracked, regardless of whether the situation is conceptually or materially similar to the circumstances of the Smith v Maryland case? Actually, never mind circumstances. Let's put aside, for just a moment, all the differences between Smith v Maryland-- in which one single man had his phone pen-registered as a direct part of the investigation of one specific crime-- and the modern situation, of an unnumbered group of people having their records tracked "just in case" over a period of years. I say let's put these differences aside because I am not a lawyer, and thus have no way of knowing exactly whether and in what way Smith V. Maryland qualifies as precident under what seem to be different circumstances (though, of course, neither are you a lawyer, and you have not shown this precedent applies; you're just pasting something you found which is politically convenient).
Aside from this, a court decision in 1979 about the fourth amendment has little to do with a lawsuit in 2006 about telecom companies breaking the Stored Communications Act, passed in 1986-- as the article discusses. Here. Look. I can cut and paste too.
(a) Prohibitions.-- Except as provided in subsection (b)-- (1) a person or entity providing an electronic communication service to the public shall not knowingly divulge to any person or entity the contents of a communication while in electronic storage by that service; and (2) a person or entity providing remote computing service to the public shall not knowingly divulge to any person or entity the contents of any communication which is carried or maintained on that service-- (A) on behalf of, and received by means of electronic transmission from (or created by means of computer processing of communications received by means of electronic transmission from), a subscriber or customer of such service; (B) solely for the purpose of providing storage or computer processing services to such subscriber or customer, if the provider is not authorized to access the contents of any such communications for purposes of providing any services other than storage or computer processing; and (3) a provider of remote computing service or electronic communication service to the public shall not knowingly divulge a record or other information pertaining to a subscriber to or customer of such service (not including the contents of communications covered by paragraph (1) or (2)) to any governmental entity.
It then sets out various exceptions, listing separate exceptions for "records" and "contents of communications". If the information is obtained accidentally, if people are in immediate danger of death or physical injury and this information is needed to prevent that, that's an excpetion. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children gets an exception, as do persons investigating specific cases of telemarketing fraud. Other "governmental entities", this act outlines in several places, don't. None of the exceptions are protections here.
The section after this one concerns the circumstances under which providers are required to supply information to the government and thus freed from any charges that they shouldn't have supplied the information; and it begins:
A governmental entity may require the disclosure by a provider of electronic communication service of the contents of a wire or electronic communication, that is in electronic storage in an electronic communications system for one hundred and eighty days or less, only pursuant to a warrant issued using the procedures described in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure by a court with jurisdiction over the offense under investigation or equivalent State warrant.
I have heard this 'above the law' bit a lot. However, it seems rather shrill.... the Supreme Court seized that power... Congress... its power has expanded through seizure... What the President is doing is promoting a view of Presidential authority that has waxed and waned throughout our history.
It really sounds to me here like you're using a whole lot of words in this post to say "the people complaining about the Executive rising above the law are totally right, but I don't see why it's a problem, so I'm going to call them 'shrill'".
Bush will be out of office. He won't become a dictator calling for a referendum on whether "Bush should be president" until 2031.
Who cares about Bush? Seriously, who gives a shit? Bush will leave office in 2009, but we will still have a president. Bush isn't a threat at all, the threat is the intitutions and movements that put and are holding Bush in place. Bush is just the public face of those institutions. He is a mascot that both allies and enemies alike can latch onto and concentrate on until they forget that the U.S. government is a large number of people and processes working in concert, and not just one single man. He does his job very, very well.
Even if the problem here were the men running the executive and not the runaway executive itself, it isn't like Bush being out of office will change a goddamn thing-- because Bush hasn't been running the country in the first place. He's been in office in the sense of sitting in the office, not running the office. Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld each have better claims to the title "head of the executive branch" over the aggregate of the last four years, and none of these three men have term limits.
The President will over-reach, Congress will express holy indignation, the President will retreat to a lesser, but still greater than before, position, and the Supremes will eventually mediate it all
The President is overreaching now; Congress is doing absolutely zip nada nothing about it; and the normally-sacrosanct assumption that no matter how badly our elected leaders fuck up the Supreme Court (the great American playground monitor) will someday step in and clean the whole thing up, has been serverely compromised by the unfortunate incident that the exact people who are currently overreaching have just been allowed to replace 2 of the 9 justices of the Supreme Court.
Its the way our system works.
No, no no. This is the way our system breaks. The way our system works is when people "get their panties in a bunch", complain, and convince everyone to vote for something as different as possible. Or perhaps you actually think the way political progress happens is that good citizens sit polititely and remain attentive to the news while Congress "negotiates" for us which of our basic conceptions of what constitutes American government get to survive?
That's a cute little story. You forgot to mention that in 2009, Bush leaves office
And of course we can be sure that whichever entirely random, currently totally unknown person takes office (when Bush leaves office) will use these new, poorly-defined and kinglike presidential powers that he has inherited from Bush in a solely responsible manner. Crisis averted!
Let us post some more articles about how stupid the name 'Wii' is.
Why not? It's a stupid name.
Think about that, the one group of people that are truly going to determine how this console does is jointly standing up and bashing it before the API is even in their hands.
Surely this demonstrates how big of a mistake Nintendo made here by giving their console a stupid name then, if the name is to some degree alienating the exact people Nintendo needs to reach out to most to make this console work.
Let us ignore the fact that we all like gaming consoles and instead resort to childish puns to evaluate something before it's even released.
But the name has already been released. We are in a perfectly good position to evaluate the name at this time.
How does anybody in our relativism wracked society decide what what "morals" are and that artists or anybody else for that matter has such a thing as "moral" rights? Exactly WHO decides what is moral?
No, it isn't. More children are harmed every year by ASPIRIN than are moslested by strangers. You can count the children molested and killed by strangers in the past few years on the fingers of one hand (there were 4)...
I'm not entirely sure the ones that survive are the ones that got the better deal.
Virtually all children who are molested are molested by their parents and step-parents, not by strangers on the internet.
Okay. If you're right, let's concentrate on that then.
If the real problem in protecting children from predators or child pornographers is family or acquaintences and not random scary internet people, how can we take steps to combat that problem without resorting to passing globally-invasive internet legislation just to make it look like we're doing something?
Where might one find voices or proposals which attempt to combat child pornography without encroaching on reasonable civil liberties or turning the internet into a police state? After all, I have no idea whether child pornography and predatory pedophilia is a problem which is getting better or worse with time-- but it surely is a real-world problem.
Perhaps it would be easier to protect civil liberties from false choice fallacies if we could say something like "I am opposed to the Bush Administration child pornography plan, because I support this other, superior strategy for fighting child pornography instead".
People seem to be really, really interested in thinking of the children so long as the children are still, y'know, children. But almost nobody seems to be thinking about making sure that we are leaving behind an America such that by the time the children grow up, it will still be a place worth living...
Not one that relies on draconian hardware chips that prevent you from having control over your computer.
I'm sorry, what? According to wide report, as of the new Intel macs, Apple is in fact using draconian hardware chips that prevent you from having control over your computer, and is reportedly using these specifically to keep you from running OS X on unauthorized hardware. (Though, hilariously enough, that's according to wide report. There is no hard evidence I've seen one way or the other that these chips are or aren't even in the new macs to begin with! All reports of TPM in the Intel macs are based on sort of circumstantial evidence from reports of the developer betas of the Intel macs. Since the actual release of the Intel macs, everyone has gone silent on the subject, and Google doesn't turn up any attempts I can find to take apart the Intel macs and the kernel to see whether TPM is in there. Apparently though the slashdot and tech blogger crowd were angry and opposed to Palladium/TPM for three or five years nonstop since it was announced, they just fell silent once they saw how shiny the new iMacs are.)
You are of course correct that they aren't, of course, using these chips for iTunes or the iPod. Yet. But if the chips are in the machines, they could start using them for such purposes at any time. The iTunes DRM already subtly changes with each iTunes version (the jHymn backup utility still doesn't work with the iTunes 6.0 DRM).
Though all of my computers since I was six years old have been Apples, if it's true that Apple is using TPM in their machines now, it would seem I'm going to be using Linux from now on. I was rather annoyed at the prospect of having to suffer a hardware platform transition (again) to begin with, but I can at least understand the reasoning behind that. But I'm absolutely not willing to pay for a computer if there's this ticking TPM time bomb buried in it that means, if someday the OS vendor changes their mind, a single OS update could sweep through and my computer would no longer be mine.
The only real problem with using this chip in a PDA is it isn't very fast, the article says the chip is comparable to a 77Mhz ARM9 which is several times slower than anything you'd find in a PDA today.
I think what you mean is that it's not suspicious, or it doesn't indicate wrongdoing, or perhaps that it's not relevant to Mr. Perens' point and thus possibly constitutes the creation of unfair innuendo by Mr. Perens.
But it's certainly still interesting, at least to me. If nothing else because it demonstrates once again exactly how small the pool of actually empowered people in America is.
The reason the NYT is giving this the "doubters of evolution" spin is that there's this guy, Michael Behe, who wrote a book around 1995 somewhere called "Darwin's Black Box". The central idea of that book was the allegation that evolutionary science treats the cell like a "black box" that nobody attempts to look inside or explain. Evolutionary science, said Behe, only concerns itself with larger structures, and only assumes the stuff inside the cell "just works". Because evolution can't explain, subcellular structures, evolution lacks a foundation, is built on nothing, and is wrong.
This is, of course, silly if you're actually familiar with the science, because to whatever extent scienists ever treated the cell like a "black box", it was because we didn't know how to look inside yet. Viewing machinery the size of a molecule is really hard. Scientists could analyze things, but have only relatively recently gained the ability to view the full picture of things, much as they might have wanted to.
Once the technology for understanding the molecular structures that make up cells really started to take off (say, at the beginning of the 80s-ish), a revolution of sorts started in microbiology and genetics. And as this happened, Behe managed to exploit a neat trick of timing; he wrote his book just as a lot of fascinating questions were appearing through this revolution in microbiology, but before (since the questions had only just been asked) we really knew what the answers were. Behe was able to craft the illusion, since we didn't know the answers to some of those questions yet, that the questions didn't have answers or would never be answered and thus evolution was flawed-- not mentioning that work was underway or even partially completed to find answers to all of these questions. In the time since Behe wrote his book, cell microbiology has progressed by leaps and bounds, but the book itself is able to do a neat little job of making it seem like the cell really is just an inexplicable black box, because he wrote it just as science totally finished picking the lock.
Which brings us to this story: The one scientific "big idea" in Darwin's Black Box was what Behe calls "Irreducible Complexity", and the publication of Darwin's Black Box was the main way this idea was popularized. The idea behind irreducible complexity is that there exist structures that contain one or more parts, and that if you remove one of the parts, the entire thing stops working. But one would expect that evolutionary mutation can only change "one thing" at a time; the idea that a single new allele that could simultaneously create two separable and interlocking structures seems wholly unbelievable. So how did irreducibly complex structures evolve?
This is an extremely reasonable question, and one evolutionary science is obligated to answer. The problem is that Behe, and the rest of the ID crowd:
Instead of asking the question, "how did irreducibly complex structures evolve?", skipped the question and immediately jumped to the conclusion "it is impossible for irreducibly complex structures to evolve".
Even after answers to the question saying "this is an explanation of how irreducibly complex structures can evolve" were provided again, and again, and again, kept doggedly insisting "it is impossible for irreducibly complex structures to evolve".
The answer to how irreducibly complex structures could evolve is pretty simple: all that would have to happen is for a structure to change its purpose over time. That is to say, it doesn't matter that irreducibly complex structures can only evolve one part at a time, because it is simple to imagine each of the small structures in an irreducibly complex system independently evolving for some other purpose than the big IC system performs, then being adapted into a bigger IC system with rube goldberg style ingenuity, then gradually losing the ability to function for their original purpose indepen
Slashdot Mirror
If the hole has been recovering since then why are scientists blaming mankind for the current increase in temperatures.
Because the ozone hole and global warming are two totally separate phenomena. They are both caused by pollution, but different kinds of pollution-- in simple terms, the ozone hole is caused by CFCs, global warming is caused by greenhouse gases. In the 80s, we stopped using CFCs, and since CFCs take a few decades to fall out of the atmosphere, now that a few decades have passed the ozone hole is starting to get better. In the 80s we did not stop our emission of greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide), so global climate change / global warming is still getting worse.
Of course, carbon dioxide takes longer to fall out of the atmosphere than CFCs, so even if we entirely ceased carbon dioxide emissions tomorrow (which we probably couldn't even if we really wanted to without bringing civilization to its knees) we shouldn't expect to see things returning to normal for maybe a couple hundreds of years. But at least we could stop making things worse.
Repairing the ozone hole is not helping global warming for the same reason that if your computer's power supply is on fire, you cannot fix this by reinstalling Windows. If you thought that repairing the ozone hole would stop global warming, it is because you are confused.
The rumor they are denying here was never reported as concerning any portion of Sony except SCEE UK in the first place.
Slashdot rails against Palladium nonstop for a matter of years when Microsoft is pushing Palladium as something they want to do. (And in what may just be a coincidence, as long as public pressure is on, Microsoft never actually manages to get Palladium adopted.) Then all of a sudden, Palladium crops up in all these new Macintoshes, but now that it's in fancy white plastic nobody minds, nobody cares, nobody even talks about it. Anyone left who's upset about the idea of the operating system vendor requiring you to use a chip which takes ultimate control of the machine out of the hands of the computer owner, and into the hands of the people who sold it to you? Anyone left who's not willing to support the future abuses of power that the mere presence of TPM in existing machines makes possible? One or two people? Oh, well you weren't going to buy it anyway you pirate.
Now that white plastic is involved, now all of a sudden the implicit spirit of "capitalism is a two-way negotiation, and the consumer is obligated to protect their interests by rejecting actions by producers which go to far" gives way to a new spirit of "TPM? What's that? Well, whatever. I'm sure software companies wouldn't do anything irresponsible. If you don't like it, then you don't have to use.. y'know.. a computer".
(Amusingly, through all of this the pirates aren't complaining about the TPM or the kernel source closing or anything, they're just going ahead and running the unrestricted pirated versions. What do they even have to complain about? They alone get the freedom to use their computers in the way they wish. There's this idea that you don't own your possessions, the people who sold them to you own them and they're just letting you use them as long as you live your life by the rules they demand, and this idea is one that only legal paying customers have to put up with.)
My dual g4 mac I'm posting on here is getting really, really old. I can probably stretch another couple of years of life out of it if I beef up the RAM some. After that I guess my next computer, for the first time since I got my first computer in 1986 or so, will be something other than an Apple. I don't really know or care what it is as long as it isn't running Windows, and doesn't have a TPM in it (or other chip in it that allows software to encrypt part of the computers internals to keep me from looking at it). Linux doesn't have any of the audio programs I need, doesn't have any of the image editing programs I need, can't run any of the Cocoa software I've written for private use, and doesn't have any developer platforms which even approach the elegance, speed of development, and usability of Cocoa in the first place. But the only choices the "free" market gives here are between being a criminal, being a slave, and being a miserable, freezing luddite eating bark in the woods. Option #3 is looking best right now.
Why would they? I suggest you read Smith v. Maryland (1979).
Hi. Please see my comments in response to someone who brought up Smith v. Maryland in a different thread. In short Smith v. Maryland applied in 1979 but I do not think it applies in 2006, becuase the Smith v. Maryland suit is founded on the subjective question of what constitutes a "reasonable expectation of privacy"; however, privacy laws (and laws concerning exactly when the government must ask for a warrant before obtaining certain information) have changed significantly since 1979, meaning that what may be considered a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in 1979 is different from what may be considered a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in 2006. Thanks for the link though.
Please note:
That post you link contains an amendment to 47 U.S.C. 222.
My post which you are responding to primarily concerns a completely different law, 18 U.S.C. 2701-2712.
Please note the difference between a "bill" and the "code". A bill, Such as the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which you apparently link, amends the United States Code, which is what "the law" is. A copy of "the code", such as can be found at http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode, has already taken all amendments, additions, etc to the law into account.
So while I'm not entirely sure what in that big block of text you link you're trying to draw attention to-- you don't give any hints what you're trying to say, so I actually can't even tell if you're trying to agree or disagree with my post-- I just want to make it clear that the post you link there has no bearing on whether the communications carriers have broken the Stored Communications Act, because it concerns a different law.
Aside from this, a court decision in 1979 about the fourth amendment has little to do with a lawsuit in 2006 about telecom companies breaking the Stored Communications Act, passed in 1986-- as the article discusses. Here. Look. I can cut and paste too.
It then sets out various exceptions, listing separate exceptions for "records" and "contents of communications". If the information is obtained accidentally, if people are in immediate danger of death or physical injury and this information is needed to prevent that, that's an excpetion. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children gets an exception, as do persons investigating specific cases of telemarketing fraud. Other "governmental entities", this act outlines in several places, don't. None of the exceptions are protections here.
The section after this one concerns the circumstances under which providers are required to supply information to the government and thus freed from any charges that they shouldn't have supplied the information; and it begins:
and co
Anyone think that maybe there might be good and legitimate reasons for this system?
No. If there were good and legitimate reasons, they would have simply obtained warrants.
I have heard this 'above the law' bit a lot. However, it seems rather shrill. ... the Supreme Court seized that power ... Congress ... its power has expanded through seizure ... What the President is doing is promoting a view of Presidential authority that has waxed and waned throughout our history.
It really sounds to me here like you're using a whole lot of words in this post to say "the people complaining about the Executive rising above the law are totally right, but I don't see why it's a problem, so I'm going to call them 'shrill'".
Bush will be out of office. He won't become a dictator calling for a referendum on whether "Bush should be president" until 2031.
Who cares about Bush? Seriously, who gives a shit? Bush will leave office in 2009, but we will still have a president. Bush isn't a threat at all, the threat is the intitutions and movements that put and are holding Bush in place. Bush is just the public face of those institutions. He is a mascot that both allies and enemies alike can latch onto and concentrate on until they forget that the U.S. government is a large number of people and processes working in concert, and not just one single man. He does his job very, very well.
Even if the problem here were the men running the executive and not the runaway executive itself, it isn't like Bush being out of office will change a goddamn thing-- because Bush hasn't been running the country in the first place. He's been in office in the sense of sitting in the office, not running the office. Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld each have better claims to the title "head of the executive branch" over the aggregate of the last four years, and none of these three men have term limits.
The President will over-reach, Congress will express holy indignation, the President will retreat to a lesser, but still greater than before, position, and the Supremes will eventually mediate it all
The President is overreaching now; Congress is doing absolutely zip nada nothing about it; and the normally-sacrosanct assumption that no matter how badly our elected leaders fuck up the Supreme Court (the great American playground monitor) will someday step in and clean the whole thing up, has been serverely compromised by the unfortunate incident that the exact people who are currently overreaching have just been allowed to replace 2 of the 9 justices of the Supreme Court.
Its the way our system works.
No, no no. This is the way our system breaks. The way our system works is when people "get their panties in a bunch", complain, and convince everyone to vote for something as different as possible. Or perhaps you actually think the way political progress happens is that good citizens sit polititely and remain attentive to the news while Congress "negotiates" for us which of our basic conceptions of what constitutes American government get to survive?
That's a cute little story. You forgot to mention that in 2009, Bush leaves office
And of course we can be sure that whichever entirely random, currently totally unknown person takes office (when Bush leaves office) will use these new, poorly-defined and kinglike presidential powers that he has inherited from Bush in a solely responsible manner. Crisis averted!
As of right now (late tuesday night), IGN is claiming that Duck Hunt will be playable on the E3 show floor wednesday morning.
The difference being that China is a Communist state, while the United States is a Republic.
They're working on that.
It is a stupid name.
How does anybody in our relativism wracked society decide what what "morals" are and that artists or anybody else for that matter has such a thing as "moral" rights? Exactly WHO decides what is moral?
The person who has more money, silly.
No, it isn't. More children are harmed every year by ASPIRIN than are moslested by strangers. You can count the children molested and killed by strangers in the past few years on the fingers of one hand (there were 4)...
I'm not entirely sure the ones that survive are the ones that got the better deal.
Virtually all children who are molested are molested by their parents and step-parents, not by strangers on the internet.
Okay. If you're right, let's concentrate on that then.
If the real problem in protecting children from predators or child pornographers is family or acquaintences and not random scary internet people, how can we take steps to combat that problem without resorting to passing globally-invasive internet legislation just to make it look like we're doing something?
Where might one find voices or proposals which attempt to combat child pornography without encroaching on reasonable civil liberties or turning the internet into a police state? After all, I have no idea whether child pornography and predatory pedophilia is a problem which is getting better or worse with time-- but it surely is a real-world problem.
Perhaps it would be easier to protect civil liberties from false choice fallacies if we could say something like "I am opposed to the Bush Administration child pornography plan, because I support this other, superior strategy for fighting child pornography instead".
People seem to be really, really interested in thinking of the children so long as the children are still, y'know, children. But almost nobody seems to be thinking about making sure that we are leaving behind an America such that by the time the children grow up, it will still be a place worth living...
Not one that relies on draconian hardware chips that prevent you from having control over your computer.
I'm sorry, what? According to wide report, as of the new Intel macs, Apple is in fact using draconian hardware chips that prevent you from having control over your computer, and is reportedly using these specifically to keep you from running OS X on unauthorized hardware. (Though, hilariously enough, that's according to wide report. There is no hard evidence I've seen one way or the other that these chips are or aren't even in the new macs to begin with! All reports of TPM in the Intel macs are based on sort of circumstantial evidence from reports of the developer betas of the Intel macs. Since the actual release of the Intel macs, everyone has gone silent on the subject, and Google doesn't turn up any attempts I can find to take apart the Intel macs and the kernel to see whether TPM is in there. Apparently though the slashdot and tech blogger crowd were angry and opposed to Palladium/TPM for three or five years nonstop since it was announced, they just fell silent once they saw how shiny the new iMacs are.)
You are of course correct that they aren't, of course, using these chips for iTunes or the iPod. Yet. But if the chips are in the machines, they could start using them for such purposes at any time. The iTunes DRM already subtly changes with each iTunes version (the jHymn backup utility still doesn't work with the iTunes 6.0 DRM).
Though all of my computers since I was six years old have been Apples, if it's true that Apple is using TPM in their machines now, it would seem I'm going to be using Linux from now on. I was rather annoyed at the prospect of having to suffer a hardware platform transition (again) to begin with, but I can at least understand the reasoning behind that. But I'm absolutely not willing to pay for a computer if there's this ticking TPM time bomb buried in it that means, if someday the OS vendor changes their mind, a single OS update could sweep through and my computer would no longer be mine.
The DS isn't a PDA
It runs Opera.
Nevertheless, the nature of MHz is that it is safe to say a 66 MHz ARM9 is slower than a 77 MHz ARM9.
The only real problem with using this chip in a PDA is it isn't very fast, the article says the chip is comparable to a 77Mhz ARM9 which is several times slower than anything you'd find in a PDA today.
Unless you have a Nintendo DS...
Fair enough.
I think what you mean is that it's not suspicious, or it doesn't indicate wrongdoing, or perhaps that it's not relevant to Mr. Perens' point and thus possibly constitutes the creation of unfair innuendo by Mr. Perens.
But it's certainly still interesting, at least to me. If nothing else because it demonstrates once again exactly how small the pool of actually empowered people in America is.
The reason the NYT is giving this the "doubters of evolution" spin is that there's this guy, Michael Behe, who wrote a book around 1995 somewhere called "Darwin's Black Box". The central idea of that book was the allegation that evolutionary science treats the cell like a "black box" that nobody attempts to look inside or explain. Evolutionary science, said Behe, only concerns itself with larger structures, and only assumes the stuff inside the cell "just works". Because evolution can't explain, subcellular structures, evolution lacks a foundation, is built on nothing, and is wrong.
This is, of course, silly if you're actually familiar with the science, because to whatever extent scienists ever treated the cell like a "black box", it was because we didn't know how to look inside yet. Viewing machinery the size of a molecule is really hard. Scientists could analyze things, but have only relatively recently gained the ability to view the full picture of things, much as they might have wanted to.
Once the technology for understanding the molecular structures that make up cells really started to take off (say, at the beginning of the 80s-ish), a revolution of sorts started in microbiology and genetics. And as this happened, Behe managed to exploit a neat trick of timing; he wrote his book just as a lot of fascinating questions were appearing through this revolution in microbiology, but before (since the questions had only just been asked) we really knew what the answers were. Behe was able to craft the illusion, since we didn't know the answers to some of those questions yet, that the questions didn't have answers or would never be answered and thus evolution was flawed-- not mentioning that work was underway or even partially completed to find answers to all of these questions. In the time since Behe wrote his book, cell microbiology has progressed by leaps and bounds, but the book itself is able to do a neat little job of making it seem like the cell really is just an inexplicable black box, because he wrote it just as science totally finished picking the lock.
Which brings us to this story: The one scientific "big idea" in Darwin's Black Box was what Behe calls "Irreducible Complexity", and the publication of Darwin's Black Box was the main way this idea was popularized. The idea behind irreducible complexity is that there exist structures that contain one or more parts, and that if you remove one of the parts, the entire thing stops working. But one would expect that evolutionary mutation can only change "one thing" at a time; the idea that a single new allele that could simultaneously create two separable and interlocking structures seems wholly unbelievable. So how did irreducibly complex structures evolve?
This is an extremely reasonable question, and one evolutionary science is obligated to answer. The problem is that Behe, and the rest of the ID crowd:
The answer to how irreducibly complex structures could evolve is pretty simple: all that would have to happen is for a structure to change its purpose over time. That is to say, it doesn't matter that irreducibly complex structures can only evolve one part at a time, because it is simple to imagine each of the small structures in an irreducibly complex system independently evolving for some other purpose than the big IC system performs, then being adapted into a bigger IC system with rube goldberg style ingenuity, then gradually losing the ability to function for their original purpose indepen
Combine
this
with
this
and if everything goes right, maybe we'll at least be moving in that direction?