The verbose isn't -automatically- clear, and the concise isn't automatically unclear. Indeed, like most things in life, the middle way is often the best one, being horribly verbose makes it a lot of work to even readd what the code says, much less understand it, whereas being -overly- compact has a tendency to make things unreadable.
It looks stable only short-term. If you look at the graph for the last 3 years, then you see that the 30% drop is equivalent to putting bandwith-usage back where it was 9 months ago.
Nobody downloaded any illegal movies or music 9 months ago, right ?
This editorial is well and good, but it's barking up the wrong tree.
Okay, so it's a problem to define what exactly "pornography" is, and it may be worthwhile to look into that, though I seriously question the practicality of the suggested approaches here.
But the much more OBVIOUS injustice, that is also easier to fix is the NONSENSE that a person can be convicted of producing and posessing child-porn for the crime of taking nudie-pics (explicit or not!) of THEMSELVES.
There can be no doubt whatsoever that the laws regarding production, posession and distribution of child-porn should be changed in such a manner that you could never break them with pictures of *yourself*. It just makes zero sense. Putting a 15-year old girl on the "sex offenders" list for life, because she used her mobile-phone to take photos of HERSELF ? That's just braindead.
Also; a 13 year old boy who is interested in 13 year-old girls is not a pedophile -- he is "normal".
It's not a new idea. The age of consent works like that already in many countries (including Norway and Germany), the age of consent in general is 16. But there is no punishment for breaking it if the participants are similar in age or development. So none of this "two 15-year-olds sleep with eachother, let's label both sex-offenders!" bullshit.
I think the same should be true for photos. A 25 year old has no business taking, posessing or distributing explicit images of a 14-year-old, and it's fair to label that "child-porn". If the same 14-year old takes photos of herself and send to her 15-year-old boyfriend, then the same label is obvious NONSENSE.
Yeah, South Park, whatever. (makes no difference to this particular argument which precise show was used as an example)
Sure, if the images, given the context they're in, MUST reasonably be assumed to be created principally for the purpose of arousal, then they're pornographic, even if that assumption is wrong. It's fairly convoluted thinking. I can't imagine all too many realistic examples where that would be true though.
I have no problem with the idea that a *part* of a certain work may on it's own be pornographic even if the work in total is not. If you made a 3-minute short-movie consisting solely of the raciest parts from random hollywood-movies, the result would be very different from the movies themselves.
The law is stupid for a completely different reason; the south-park characters are fictious. Furthermore, the sketch is a *drawing*, there's no sensible reason for outlawing *fiction* on the basis that we would dislike it if it was *real*.
The law is very bad, but not quite as bad as the summary would have you believe. Simpsons would *not* be covered by the law, because allthough there are episodes in it where children are present when someone has sex, that's not sufficient for the imagery to be deemed illegal.
The images also need to be pornographic, which is defined thusly: must reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal.
(and a later section says, in the case of images that are part of a larger narrative, the entire narrative should be considered.)
So the simpsons would only be covered by the law if you claimed that the episode in question would reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal.
And that, frankly, doesn't pass the laugh-test. The simpsons is a lot of things, but it's not principally produced for the purpose of sexual arousal.
IT's still bad law mind you, just not quite *THAT* bad.
To get the CO2 out of the atmosphere for a significant period of time, you would want the carbon-containing dead planton to sink into deep layers of the ocean where circulation is modest and it'll take hundreds or thousands of years for it to re-enter the atmosphere.
When the plankton is eaten by animals living in the top part of the ocean, much of the CO2 stays in the top part of the ocean, which is already at gas-equilibrium with the bottom-part of the atmosphere, put differently, much of the CO2 ends up back in the atmosphere in a short time. (weeks to years)
You're kidding yourself if you honestly believe that most people in IT are within the top 1% of mental and cognitive ability.
Sure, if you're talking the best programmers in the world, then that's likely to be true, but most people aren't among the best in the world.
Age ain't so much of an issue. But experience is. I'd go with a 35 year old with 10 years of varied experience over a 35 year old with -zero- experience any time, as would most people I guess.
It depends, obviously. On speech, for example, FLAC often manages 75% or sometimes even better. And on some kinds of music 50% or even slightly better is achievable.
That wasn't my point. My point was that, generally, reducing a music-file by much more than half generally isn't possible by the best lossless encoders, and it's kinda naive to think that one would manage to do better with a simplistic technique like lossy-compression plus nudging. (the developers of FLAC and similar encoders are not stupid, is my main point, I guess.)
No, that doesn't work. If it did, the lossless-encoders would do it this way already.
The best lossless encoders for CD-quality audio can manage to reduce filesize by 30-50% for most kinds of music. You can get reasonable quality lossy encodings at a reduction in filesize of 80-90%.
If you could get lossless compression by storing this lossy encoding plus a few bits, then obviously you'd do that and get very good lossless compression.
But no. CD-quality music has 16-bit samples. lossy encoding, such as mp3, use around 2 bits to store that with reasonable quality. Good lossless compression use 8-12 bits to store those 16 bits.
So, it turns out that "It probably wouldn't take all that many bits per sample to nudge the waveform back to the original value." is wrong.
It would take atleast the difference between 2 bits and 8-12 bits, so in other words 6-10 additional bits for every 16-bit sample.
I do care about the *environment* the fate of individual creatures (or plants) isn't relevant to this though, unless perhaps if they're crucial members of a vulnerable population.
Too often people don't see the distinction, and get confused. Hunting around 500 minke-whales out of a population in the north-atlantic of around 110.000 (global population-estimate something around 3/4th of a million) is not a problem for the *environment*. (It's a problem for the individual whales hunted offcourse, but I don't think that's much of an argument, unless you're a vegan and against the eating of *all* animals on principle)
I actually think railable cars is a much better solution than *flyable* cars. There's multiple concepts for regular cars that have a "slit" under the middle that make it possible for them to drive on a monorail.
The advantages are many, compared to normal car:
For longer commutes, you can spend the time on the rail sensibly (catching up on news or email, for example)
Higher capacity, on the rail the cars can form a "train" with zero inter-vehicle distance, which means a single rail can have the capacity of 4-5 lanes. Also, doing this reduces wind-drag a "train" of 10 cars does *not* use the same energy as 10 individual cars.
Potentially higher speeds.
Electric vehicles can get power from the rail, solving one of electric cars achilles-heels, namely the short battery-range and long recharge-times.
Making the car capable of self-driving when on the rail should be MUCH easier than self-driving on a road. A self-driving car can get you somewhere while you relax.
At the same time, the fact that these vehicles are *also* normal cars mean you can get one even if there isn't a rail going to *everywhere*. When a rail is available, you use that, when not, you drive the normal way.
True. But still not terribly interesting. I mean, compensating for these disadvantages would perhaps have moved the date when a computer first beat a chess grandmaster by a few years.
But the basic idea has still been proven; chess is a problem where a combination of todays programming-techniques and a lot of brute-force, can beat the best human players. And once that basic point has been proven, it's not terribly interesting to me if the year where "enough" brute-force became available was 2000, 2005 or 2010.
In any case, Moores law comes close to guaranteeing that what Deep Blue could do a decade ago, any poweful computer can do today, and any pocket-calculator can do in a decade or so. (If we assume a doubling-time of 18 months, then a decade gives you 100 times the computing-power for the same price)
So, if we're not there already, it's only a matter of time before the computers in the chess-championship for computers can all easily beat the best human players.
Batteries aren't good enough, is the main problem. (or power-drain is too high, take your pick).
A Nintendo-DS can be played continously for around 20 hours before the battery is dead. At which point it just doesn't matter very much, because it's "atleast a complete day" no matter what you do. (let's assume that the sum of sleeping, eating and such is atleast 4 hours a day!)
2 - 5 hours or something, which is what many laptops get, is just too sucky. It basically means you *cannot* reasonably expect to extensively use the laptop on a travel or whatever, without needing power.
I wouldn't care so much if 30 hours turned out to be 20 -- recharge the thing at night, and I'd never run out of juice anyway.
Or put differently, if your wiring is good enough that they can safely take 20A in a 120V country (2400W), then in a 240V country, you get the choice between either installing the same wiring, and getting 4800W, or installing cheaper, thinner wiring and still get 2400W.
I'm not sure what you're arguing, but you do so poorly. You start with a claim: lack of morals is responsible for the majority of criminal and economic woe. You don't even attempt to support this claim in any manner.
Then you give another, unrelated claim. You claim that too many people use free speech foolishly, in manners which may be *allowed* but which nevertheless harm society, such as needlessly insulting people. Again, that's just a naked claim, no support for the claim is offered.
You then go on to claim that fractional reserve banking is, in general, fraud. It's unclear what this (naturally unsupported) claim has to do with any of the former two claims, but there you go.
You should tidy up your act. It's quite possible you've got an actual point, inside all the ranting. But if so, it's not entirely obvious what that point is even supposed to be.
There's a difference between healthcare and car-ownership.
If someone, trough bad-luck, bad-planning, silly-choices or other circumstances end up not owning a car, we as a society are generally willing to say: "So walk then, or take the bus."
Not so if someone trough bad luck, bad planning, silly choices or other circumstances end up broke, uninsured and with cancer. We -don't- typically say; "so do without treatment, then."
If the work is changed by someone else, then obviously, the original author is not responsible for the changes. So I don't quite see how that's relevant.
There's perfect logic behind it, and nothing sad about it whatsoever.
If I wrote a text, then I'm the author of that text. I can't really "waive" that. No statement from my side can change the FACT that I'm the author.
Oh, I can allow anyone to do anything they want with the text whatsoever. I can permit them to do this without mentioning my name at all, and with zero restrictions.
But I'm still the author. So if they published the text, and for example put *THEIR* name as author, this would be a fraud. If they really did not write the text, claiming that they did, is a lie. (completely regardless of copyright-status of the text, it would be a lie even in a world where copyright does not exist)
The law is like that in Norway: I can give you any and all rights to my works, no problem whatsoever. The only thing I cannot sign-away, is the right to be considered the author of the work.
Reasonable enough to me, and I don't see what's "sad" about it at all.
Re:Parents choose their baby's name
on
Designer Babies
·
· Score: 1
"people", maybe, but not me. My example was not randomly choosen; the gene is real, and testable today. There's a debate going on currently in some countries in Europe, if we should offer the test for all women who get breast-cancer. If we did, and they turned out to have the gene, their daughters could be warned of the increased risk. This would lead to less deaths among the daugthers as you could, for example, have more rigorous screening. (the test also has influence on the correct treatment, but to even treat something at all, you have to first DISCOVER it, and early discovery greatly increases cancer survivability.)
People are generally quite good at dividing people into "us" versus "them" on a rather flimsy basis. Do -you- feel certain that, for example, the way we treat sufferers of Downs syndrome would not deteriorate if gene-screening meant that "that's something only poor peoples kids get!" ?
Besides, it's reasonable to extrapolate slightly. We're able to screen for a handful of common single-gene-error diseases today. We will almost certainly be able to screen for much more in a few years, it's not as if genetics has been standing still for the last decade, and quite unlikely (imho) that it'll stay still for the NEXT.
Agreed. Get some sort of proof of the blackmail-attempt, then leave as quickly as possible. Demand a fair evaluation, and if you don't get one, hand the evidence to a lawyer and tell him to deal with it.
Re:Parents choose their baby's name
on
Designer Babies
·
· Score: 1
There's atleast two large differences.
First, ALL parents are (reasonably) free to choose the name of their children. Designer babies are only for the rich. There's more than enough of a class-separation already, and it's definitely going to grow if being born by rich parents also means you've got hand-picked desirable genes, in addition to the advantages of wealth that are already there. This contributes to a stronger separation, and even larger difference between the haves and the have-nots, and that's not a good thing.
Second, your genetics are not changeable. So this essentially means that if you're born in a "bad" body, you're doomed to stay that way. Yes, sure you can keep your body in good repair by healthy eating, exercise and so on. Still, if you've got a gene that gives you a 40% chance of breast-cancer, while all rich are free of this, there's not much you can DO about it. (It's possible to -change- your name, you know)
Or do what everyone does; use one of the many good javascript-libraries out there, and *do* defer javascript-stuff. It's not hard. In jQuery, for example, it's just a question of instead of writing: dostuff(), you write $(function(){dostuff()}) works *precisely* the same way, but doesn't slow down the page-load.
The *real* problem though, is with lack of real competition on international roaming.
There's no -sane- reason why calling someone from Canada needs to cost 100 times what it costs to call them from 3 miles away, on the other side of the border.
While I don't at the top of my head remember any cases of convictions for *fucking* an equal-aged partner, there's this little gem from January 15th; http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28679588/
Summary: six Pennsylvania high school students are facing child pornography charges after three teenage girls allegedly took nude or semi-nude photos of themselves and shared them with male classmates via their cell phones. The female students at Greensburg Salem High School in Greensburg, Pa., all 14- or 15-years-old, face charges of manufacturing, disseminating or possessing child pornography while the boys, who are 16 and 17, face charges of possession,
So yeah, it's not just theorethical; there's *actual* teenage girls being criminally charged with production of child-porn, for the crime of taking explicit snapshots of THEMSELVES. And actual similar-age boys ("classmates") being charged with posessing child-porn after having received the pictures from the girls (as MMS-messages)
It's so stupid it's almost hard to believe, but there you go.
Slashdot Mirror
The verbose isn't -automatically- clear, and the concise isn't automatically unclear. Indeed, like most things in life, the middle way is often the best one, being horribly verbose makes it a lot of work to even readd what the code says, much less understand it, whereas being -overly- compact has a tendency to make things unreadable.
It looks stable only short-term. If you look at the graph for the last 3 years, then you see that the 30% drop is equivalent to putting bandwith-usage back where it was 9 months ago.
Nobody downloaded any illegal movies or music 9 months ago, right ?
...Or when she agrees to run Time's Scar (from Chrono Cross) at your wedding-ceremony. I'm not kidding.
I agree. Geek girls are awesome !
This editorial is well and good, but it's barking up the wrong tree.
Okay, so it's a problem to define what exactly "pornography" is, and it may be worthwhile to look into that, though I seriously question the practicality of the suggested approaches here.
But the much more OBVIOUS injustice, that is also easier to fix is the NONSENSE that a person can be convicted of producing and posessing child-porn for the crime of taking nudie-pics (explicit or not!) of THEMSELVES.
There can be no doubt whatsoever that the laws regarding production, posession and distribution of child-porn should be changed in such a manner that you could never break them with pictures of *yourself*. It just makes zero sense. Putting a 15-year old girl on the "sex offenders" list for life, because she used her mobile-phone to take photos of HERSELF ? That's just braindead.
Also; a 13 year old boy who is interested in 13 year-old girls is not a pedophile -- he is "normal".
It's not a new idea. The age of consent works like that already in many countries (including Norway and Germany), the age of consent in general is 16. But there is no punishment for breaking it if the participants are similar in age or development. So none of this "two 15-year-olds sleep with eachother, let's label both sex-offenders!" bullshit.
I think the same should be true for photos. A 25 year old has no business taking, posessing or distributing explicit images of a 14-year-old, and it's fair to label that "child-porn". If the same 14-year old takes photos of herself and send to her 15-year-old boyfriend, then the same label is obvious NONSENSE.
Yeah, South Park, whatever. (makes no difference to this particular argument which precise show was used as an example)
Sure, if the images, given the context they're in, MUST reasonably be assumed to be created principally for the purpose of arousal, then they're pornographic, even if that assumption is wrong. It's fairly convoluted thinking. I can't imagine all too many realistic examples where that would be true though.
I have no problem with the idea that a *part* of a certain work may on it's own be pornographic even if the work in total is not. If you made a 3-minute short-movie consisting solely of the raciest parts from random hollywood-movies, the result would be very different from the movies themselves.
The law is stupid for a completely different reason; the south-park characters are fictious. Furthermore, the sketch is a *drawing*, there's no sensible reason for outlawing *fiction* on the basis that we would dislike it if it was *real*.
The law is very bad, but not quite as bad as the summary would have you believe. Simpsons would *not* be covered by the law, because allthough there are episodes in it where children are present when someone has sex, that's not sufficient for the imagery to be deemed illegal.
The images also need to be pornographic, which is defined thusly: must reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal.
(and a later section says, in the case of images that are part of a larger narrative, the entire narrative should be considered.)
So the simpsons would only be covered by the law if you claimed that the episode in question would reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal.
And that, frankly, doesn't pass the laugh-test. The simpsons is a lot of things, but it's not principally produced for the purpose of sexual arousal.
IT's still bad law mind you, just not quite *THAT* bad.
To get the CO2 out of the atmosphere for a significant period of time, you would want the carbon-containing dead planton to sink into deep layers of the ocean where circulation is modest and it'll take hundreds or thousands of years for it to re-enter the atmosphere.
When the plankton is eaten by animals living in the top part of the ocean, much of the CO2 stays in the top part of the ocean, which is already at gas-equilibrium with the bottom-part of the atmosphere, put differently, much of the CO2 ends up back in the atmosphere in a short time. (weeks to years)
You're kidding yourself if you honestly believe that most people in IT are within the top 1% of mental and cognitive ability.
Sure, if you're talking the best programmers in the world, then that's likely to be true, but most people aren't among the best in the world.
Age ain't so much of an issue. But experience is. I'd go with a 35 year old with 10 years of varied experience over a 35 year old with -zero- experience any time, as would most people I guess.
It depends, obviously. On speech, for example, FLAC often manages 75% or sometimes even better. And on some kinds of music 50% or even slightly better is achievable.
That wasn't my point. My point was that, generally, reducing a music-file by much more than half generally isn't possible by the best lossless encoders, and it's kinda naive to think that one would manage to do better with a simplistic technique like lossy-compression plus nudging. (the developers of FLAC and similar encoders are not stupid, is my main point, I guess.)
No, that doesn't work. If it did, the lossless-encoders would do it this way already.
The best lossless encoders for CD-quality audio can manage to reduce filesize by 30-50% for most kinds of music. You can get reasonable quality lossy encodings at a reduction in filesize of 80-90%.
If you could get lossless compression by storing this lossy encoding plus a few bits, then obviously you'd do that and get very good lossless compression.
But no. CD-quality music has 16-bit samples. lossy encoding, such as mp3, use around 2 bits to store that with reasonable quality. Good lossless compression use 8-12 bits to store those 16 bits.
So, it turns out that "It probably wouldn't take all that many bits per sample to nudge the waveform back to the original value." is wrong.
It would take atleast the difference between 2 bits and 8-12 bits, so in other words 6-10 additional bits for every 16-bit sample.
Very true ! And an excellent point.
I do care about the *environment* the fate of individual creatures (or plants) isn't relevant to this though, unless perhaps if they're crucial members of a vulnerable population.
Too often people don't see the distinction, and get confused. Hunting around 500 minke-whales out of a population in the north-atlantic of around 110.000 (global population-estimate something around 3/4th of a million) is not a problem for the *environment*. (It's a problem for the individual whales hunted offcourse, but I don't think that's much of an argument, unless you're a vegan and against the eating of *all* animals on principle)
I actually think railable cars is a much better solution than *flyable* cars. There's multiple concepts for regular cars that have a "slit" under the middle that make it possible for them to drive on a monorail.
The advantages are many, compared to normal car:
For longer commutes, you can spend the time on the rail sensibly (catching up on news or email, for example)
Higher capacity, on the rail the cars can form a "train" with zero inter-vehicle distance, which means a single rail can have the capacity of 4-5 lanes. Also, doing this reduces wind-drag a "train" of 10 cars does *not* use the same energy as 10 individual cars.
Potentially higher speeds.
Electric vehicles can get power from the rail, solving one of electric cars achilles-heels, namely the short battery-range and long recharge-times.
Making the car capable of self-driving when on the rail should be MUCH easier than self-driving on a road. A self-driving car can get you somewhere while you relax.
At the same time, the fact that these vehicles are *also* normal cars mean you can get one even if there isn't a rail going to *everywhere*. When a rail is available, you use that, when not, you drive the normal way.
Have a look at http://www.ruf.dk/ for one such example.
Yes, there's engineering-challenges in this too, but they're MUCH simpler than those assosiated with flying cars. And the advantages are many.
True. But still not terribly interesting. I mean, compensating for these disadvantages would perhaps have moved the date when a computer first beat a chess grandmaster by a few years.
But the basic idea has still been proven; chess is a problem where a combination of todays programming-techniques and a lot of brute-force, can beat the best human players. And once that basic point has been proven, it's not terribly interesting to me if the year where "enough" brute-force became available was 2000, 2005 or 2010.
In any case, Moores law comes close to guaranteeing that what Deep Blue could do a decade ago, any poweful computer can do today, and any pocket-calculator can do in a decade or so. (If we assume a doubling-time of 18 months, then a decade gives you 100 times the computing-power for the same price)
So, if we're not there already, it's only a matter of time before the computers in the chess-championship for computers can all easily beat the best human players.
Batteries aren't good enough, is the main problem. (or power-drain is too high, take your pick).
A Nintendo-DS can be played continously for around 20 hours before the battery is dead. At which point it just doesn't matter very much, because it's "atleast a complete day" no matter what you do. (let's assume that the sum of sleeping, eating and such is atleast 4 hours a day!)
2 - 5 hours or something, which is what many laptops get, is just too sucky. It basically means you *cannot* reasonably expect to extensively use the laptop on a travel or whatever, without needing power.
I wouldn't care so much if 30 hours turned out to be 20 -- recharge the thing at night, and I'd never run out of juice anyway.
Or put differently, if your wiring is good enough that they can safely take 20A in a 120V country (2400W), then in a 240V country, you get the choice between either installing the same wiring, and getting 4800W, or installing cheaper, thinner wiring and still get 2400W.
I'm not sure what you're arguing, but you do so poorly. You start with a claim: lack of morals is responsible for the majority of criminal and economic woe. You don't even attempt to support this claim in any manner.
Then you give another, unrelated claim. You claim that too many people use free speech foolishly, in manners which may be *allowed* but which nevertheless harm society, such as needlessly insulting people. Again, that's just a naked claim, no support for the claim is offered.
You then go on to claim that fractional reserve banking is, in general, fraud. It's unclear what this (naturally unsupported) claim has to do with any of the former two claims, but there you go.
You should tidy up your act. It's quite possible you've got an actual point, inside all the ranting. But if so, it's not entirely obvious what that point is even supposed to be.
There's a difference between healthcare and car-ownership.
If someone, trough bad-luck, bad-planning, silly-choices or other circumstances end up not owning a car, we as a society are generally willing to say: "So walk then, or take the bus."
Not so if someone trough bad luck, bad planning, silly choices or other circumstances end up broke, uninsured and with cancer. We -don't- typically say; "so do without treatment, then."
If the work is changed by someone else, then obviously, the original author is not responsible for the changes. So I don't quite see how that's relevant.
There's perfect logic behind it, and nothing sad about it whatsoever.
If I wrote a text, then I'm the author of that text. I can't really "waive" that. No statement from my side can change the FACT that I'm the author.
Oh, I can allow anyone to do anything they want with the text whatsoever. I can permit them to do this without mentioning my name at all, and with zero restrictions.
But I'm still the author. So if they published the text, and for example put *THEIR* name as author, this would be a fraud. If they really did not write the text, claiming that they did, is a lie. (completely regardless of copyright-status of the text, it would be a lie even in a world where copyright does not exist)
The law is like that in Norway: I can give you any and all rights to my works, no problem whatsoever. The only thing I cannot sign-away, is the right to be considered the author of the work.
Reasonable enough to me, and I don't see what's "sad" about it at all.
"people", maybe, but not me. My example was not randomly choosen; the gene is real, and testable today. There's a debate going on currently in some countries in Europe, if we should offer the test for all women who get breast-cancer. If we did, and they turned out to have the gene, their daughters could be warned of the increased risk. This would lead to less deaths among the daugthers as you could, for example, have more rigorous screening. (the test also has influence on the correct treatment, but to even treat something at all, you have to first DISCOVER it, and early discovery greatly increases cancer survivability.)
People are generally quite good at dividing people into "us" versus "them" on a rather flimsy basis. Do -you- feel certain that, for example, the way we treat sufferers of Downs syndrome would not deteriorate if gene-screening meant that "that's something only poor peoples kids get!" ?
Besides, it's reasonable to extrapolate slightly. We're able to screen for a handful of common single-gene-error diseases today. We will almost certainly be able to screen for much more in a few years, it's not as if genetics has been standing still for the last decade, and quite unlikely (imho) that it'll stay still for the NEXT.
Agreed. Get some sort of proof of the blackmail-attempt, then leave as quickly as possible. Demand a fair evaluation, and if you don't get one, hand the evidence to a lawyer and tell him to deal with it.
There's atleast two large differences.
First, ALL parents are (reasonably) free to choose the name of their children. Designer babies are only for the rich. There's more than enough of a class-separation already, and it's definitely going to grow if being born by rich parents also means you've got hand-picked desirable genes, in addition to the advantages of wealth that are already there. This contributes to a stronger separation, and even larger difference between the haves and the have-nots, and that's not a good thing.
Second, your genetics are not changeable. So this essentially means that if you're born in a "bad" body, you're doomed to stay that way. Yes, sure you can keep your body in good repair by healthy eating, exercise and so on. Still, if you've got a gene that gives you a 40% chance of breast-cancer, while all rich are free of this, there's not much you can DO about it. (It's possible to -change- your name, you know)
Or do what everyone does; use one of the many good javascript-libraries out there, and *do* defer javascript-stuff. It's not hard. In jQuery, for example, it's just a question of instead of writing: dostuff(), you write $(function(){dostuff()}) works *precisely* the same way, but doesn't slow down the page-load.
The *real* problem though, is with lack of real competition on international roaming.
There's no -sane- reason why calling someone from Canada needs to cost 100 times what it costs to call them from 3 miles away, on the other side of the border.
While I don't at the top of my head remember any cases of convictions for *fucking* an equal-aged partner, there's this little gem from January 15th; http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28679588/
Summary: six Pennsylvania high school students are facing child pornography charges after three teenage girls allegedly took nude or semi-nude photos of themselves and shared them with male classmates via their cell phones. The female students at Greensburg Salem High School in Greensburg, Pa., all 14- or 15-years-old, face charges of manufacturing, disseminating or possessing child pornography while the boys, who are 16 and 17, face charges of possession,
So yeah, it's not just theorethical; there's *actual* teenage girls being criminally charged with production of child-porn, for the crime of taking explicit snapshots of THEMSELVES. And actual similar-age boys ("classmates") being charged with posessing child-porn after having received the pictures from the girls (as MMS-messages)
It's so stupid it's almost hard to believe, but there you go.