I absolutely agree there is predation of the young and that this cannot be tolerated.
I've wracked my brains on this for so many years, because the question keeps coming up. I've reached the conclusion that there's two types of maturity - intellectual and emotional. Autistic people will mature far more quickly intellectually, but be emotionally far behind, as just one example. I've wondered if the age of consent should be the average of intellectual age, emotional age and biological age, but that could lead to some weird results. And how would these be measured?
Ideally, you'd have the brain checked with the yearly medical, but that's not really practical at the moment.
Hence the desire for a conference of the people who are far wiser on the different nuances than I, and more intelligent, who can tell us how to balance the risks at a finer level than global.
Agreed that the safety of youth is very important. But we must be wary of unintended consequences. Just as antibacterial soap created deadlier bacteria and reduced our own defenses to them, we can make things too safe, too sterile. On the flip side, we can underestimate certain risks and certain forms of damage. PTSD turns out to form with almost any level of trauma, so mild constant trauma is actually just as destructive as a major calamity. Under certain circumstances. Recovery is not guaranteed because the brain doesn't work off video tape and you can't delete. Not thinking about it doesn't help, because the brain is one gigantic neural net. Every experience weighs in to everything, whether you think about it or not.
It's an absolute nightmare. I share your concerns and aims, absolutely, but it's a tough problem. Fortunately, we aren't the ones being asked to solve it. I'm just hoping that those who ARE asked to solve it, at least for Facebook, have looked at this level of complexity.
It's not a crime in all parts of the US. Until last year, it would have been perfectly legal in Virginia, provided the perp married the girl some time afterwards. Child brides, for the purpose of avoiding lawsuits, are still common in the Bible Belt, according to The Guardian.
Obviously, that's insane. But if it's not actually illegal, then it's not a crime.
In Britain, you can pose topless for the newspapers and magazines at age 16. Perfectly legal. You can walk nude in public at any age, anywhere you like, provided it doesn't cause actual offence. There are no other restrictions. And, no, I don't think a few shocked ultra-conservatives from Saudi Arabia or Alabama would count towards it being actually offensive. On that basis, a British teen who is a professional model might well argue that she should be able to distribute what she damn well pleases. In Britain. That you don't get to call that a crime.
This is that murky water where cultural values matter and cultural impacts matter. I don't think there's ever been a serious study of whether that causes the girls harm or not. If it does cause them harm, then you still don't get to call that a crime but you have justification for asking the British to make it one. If it doesn't cause them harm, then where does this justification come from? If we don't know which way it goes, any guess we make is just a guess and will either harm them through abuse or harm them by trampling on their rights. You still end up with harm. That's not ok. We need to know.
Facebook has terms of service that are independent of the law. They're universal. Not keen on that but it'll do for now. Breach of the TOS is not a crime, it is at worst a violation of contract law, a civil law matter. Facebook hasn't the resources to run a global psycho-ethic conference on the morality of teen sexuality. That's something they can maybe campaign for, since they obviously don't want the burden of making some of these decisions on their own. Fine. I'd love to see such a global conference. Get a single unified model that allows you to plug in details of culture, diet and anything else that alters rate of maturity to get a series of numbers out that tells you when things become ok.
Could turn out such a model never produces any number below 21. Could be that the numbers you get out are always similar to the Nordic model. Could be that it turns out to be so complex that no model is possible, that everything has to be case by case on an individual level. But I'd rather hear from them as to what should be a crime rather than a specific individual in a specific culture calling everything worldwide that would be a crime where they live a crime. That just doesn't help.
That rather takes European values and sets them on fire, supplanting them with values of a culture not exactly known for a lack of child abuse.
No, different cultures, different needs. Most cultures have got those needs hopelessly wrong and need to understand them better, but Europeans kicked the Puritans out and should not tolerate letting them back in. We need proper decisions, made to address each of the different proper needs, not some blanket standard that suits nobody.
If Facebook cannot cope with the fact that Europe left the Middle Ages, then Facebook shouldn't be there.
It may well be that for some cultures, the standards will be stricter than 18. There may be places where 21 plus a license would be suitable.
Britain has never had a problem with 16, Samantha Fox has repeatedly said in interviews that she was only hassled once (I think by an American) and she kneed him in the nuts before throwing him to the ground. Good. It would be good if every girl, by age 16 or even 12, had basic self-defense, a strong kicking foot and a reinforced toe cap on their shoes. Solve a lot of problems. If Britain feels that's entirely appropriate, then provided psychologists and ethicists from multiple countries actually back that up and say that it's ok in that culture, that it does no harm in that context, I don't think the Moral Majority in America should have a say. They should have a say as to whether it can reach America, sure, but they should not have rights over other cultures. Of course, if those psychologists and ethicists say Britain is out of line, that 17 is correct, then Britain should raise the age to 17 and not argue.
This is about getting it right. In each context and each subcontext. That's tough. The only thing that's certain is that it's not standard.
In Scandinavia, the rules seem to be 12-14 year olds can do what they like, consensually, with each other, that 15 is the age of consent. France has similar rules, I think. Britain, the age of consent is 16. So she was legal when her first softcore pics came out. Far as I know, the rules haven't changed there.
In America, child brides are reportedly a major problem. Virginia only changed its rules last year so that marrying the victim of an assault doesn't mean the assault didn't happen. (There was nothing in the rules about consent.) Apparently, according to The Grauniad, there are states with similar laws on the book.
America is ultra-puritanical when it comes to women's rights, but not so much when it comes to predator's rights.
I tend to think Europe has a much better grasp of rights than America. They tend to be universal rather than selective, although that's not always the case, and tend to be slightly more modern and slightly less religious. But this does not mean that they should be adopted globally for social media.
This is where child psychologists, psychologists specializing in social media, psychologists specializing in trauma and ethicists from around the globe should be getting together and debating the issue as experts in a relatively calm, relatively neutral atmosphere. They should then, as experts, jointly produce recommendations on different types of consent and the ages they are appropriate at under varying cultural environments if you want optimal mental health for all concerned and least harm.
Right now, people are throwing numbers around as though it's a circus act. These are people's lives, not mass entertainment. A wrong decision in either direction can cause incalculable damage. And the number isn't guaranteed to be fixed. France has a lot of problems, but it doesn't have significantly more than the Bible Belt. Norway isn't perfect, but it's a damn sight better off than Virginia! But if Virginia followed Norway, would it be better? If the Bible Belt copied French laws, would that solve anything? Chances are, no. Different cultures produce different rates of emotional maturity.
We need a model that can tell us, for any given culture, what would be sensible for any given situation. With that, there's still practically no chance anyone (least of all Facebook) would make sensible decisions, but at least we'd have an idea of the impact of a decision and the harm likely done by it.
Obviously no number, however sophisticated, is going to replace consent, but as politicians have no grasp of consent, they can't really do anything useful about it.
The US Supreme Court can take into consideration whatever it likes, including a Tarot reading if it so wishes.
However, US laws only apply to US soil and as Microsoft is not an embassy under the Vienna Convention (yet), their servers in Ireland are not on US soil.
If it is sufficient to say that Microsoft is American, then Americans abroad are under US law as well as the law of the nation they are in. That means US government officials are bound by the US Constitution when operating abroad. Personally, I'd argue they are, since it's a law specifically restricting government and not a law about how to govern the United States. That would make violations by US government officials of, say, the right to a fair trial by mere suspects living abroad a serious criminal offence. Many argue that it is. But this is the sort of thing that will worry SCOTUS. They interpret. They actually are activist judges, by design and by nature. They get to decide what any law actually means and who it applies to. That is their job.
SCOTUS aren't stupid, they'll be aware of the ramifications of a decision either way. My concern is that they may be careless. Whatever their ruling, it will have loopholes that could be catastrophic. SCOTUS doesn't have to care, but they will. How they look matters. Image matters. But ramifications also matter. These court rulings are lengthy and detailed, not for amusement but to minimize the collateral damage. Because of political pressures, they may skimp on that and produce a devastating international incident as a result.
Congress? Psychologists and neurologists are in broad agreement that they're all psychopaths. The President? The boy does nothing.
Already done. in the LIBOR scandal, it was revealed banks were actively assisting customers in hiding money overseas in Switzerland. For a donation.
And therein lies the problem. Whichever way SCOTUS swings, everyone is fully aware of the loopholes criminals can exploit. Every path they can go down has unintended consequences that threaten the stability and integrity of enough of the nation to pose a serious problem.
There is no solution to this within the existing framework. The framework has to be changed. You need some form of ever-closer union, at some level, if you're going to eliminate the paradoxes within the framework. Merely suggesting that would send half of America ballistic and has already sent just over half of Britain into apoplectic fury. Keeping the peace by keeping laws national is going to mean more Paradise Papers and more Panama Papers. Sooner or later, that'll have the same result.
As long as the companies are considered on EU turf, you are absolutely correct. Ergo, the only way the US can impose its laws on Microsoft in Europe is to get a treaty with the EU declaring that companies on someone else's turf are embassies covered by the Vienna Convention. Microsoft would then be on US soil anywhere in Europe and so subject to US laws.
Aaaaand it will take you all of five seconds to figure out why that would be such an incredibly bad idea.
Nonetheless, it would work, and if the Supreme Court ruled that way then it is instructing Congress to put forward such a treaty. Otherwise, it's like ruling the moon is made of green cheese.
Ultimately, there will be unintended consequences, and essentially every law ever passed will have them, because very few people stop to think past a single talking point. Particularly politicians. Judges might, but the rules on activist judges prevent them.
If you impose that rule, then EU companies in America are embassies protected by the Vienna Convention because they have to be in Europe to be under EU laws and you're saying that they are.
Can you begin to imagine the unintended consequences of that?
For a start, forget immigration controls. They're embassies, they can house whoever they damn well like, under EU laws. The US has no jurisdiction because this is EU turf not US turf by your own rules.
In the example you gave, usually extra-territorial is off-limits, except for crimes on the high seas, which can be prosecuted by the owning state, the state of arrival or the states of the individuals concerned.
The LIBOR scandal was partly uncovered by somewhat forceful access to Swiss bank accounts by the British, albeit with begrudging Swiss approval. Eventually. The Panama Papers and Paradise Papers revealed further abuses that really should have been uncovered a lot sooner and which can't be effectively dealt with. International Banking has laws and an exchange system which lie outside any territorial boundaries by definition, yet must be enforced.
So we have a system that is (a) not very well designed, not particularly honest and exceedingly fragile (fake transfers are known to get through on the exchange system), and (b) requires an international approach even if it was well-designed and honest. Treaties are only effective if nations can be forced to obey or overridden if they dishonestly refuse.
But this covers only a tiny fraction of the activity of the banking system and most of the time the jurisdiction is clear-cut.
Then there's the unintended consequence of enforcing such a system. It means US recognition of ALL national laws regarding prohibited speech and ALL national/EU laws governing data privacy and the right to be forgotten. Even when it's a US company operating in that nation or political domain.
Is the US prepared to renounce its exceptionalism stance with regards EU data protection? If not, it has a problem. You can't say it's their jurisdiction but only for the laws of theirs you like. It means deliberately transferring data outside the EU without imposing equal protection measures is a crime, that the US will neither protect nor defend any US company operating in the EU that commits that crime and that the US will approach EU nations and offer absolute guarantees that it will respect EU law and will support nations wishing to prosecute such an offence.
I don't think the US government has the guts, to be honest. Which means it's trying to play both sides of the fence, according to what plays better with the home crowd. That's a good way to get burned.
If they say that nationality of the corporation overrides all, then we have the inverse consequence. Any EU corporation in America is automatically covered by EU law, not American law. I don't imagine THAT would go down terribly well. In other words, the reverse ruling makes all corporations de-facto embassies. Which would wreck havoc if corporations actually enforced that.
(Note: This could solve some Brexit issues. If companies are embassies, then EU companies in the UK are not subject to any UK laws, only EU ones. It would also cause widespread rioting.)
If the Supreme Court rules that data follows the laws of the nation that it is in, then the EU's data protection laws and right to forget automatically apply to all data in the EU even if held by a US company. I doubt the court will consider that, but that is simply a matter of fact.
If the Supreme Court rules that data follows the laws of the nation of the holding company, then European-based companies in the US automatically follow those aforementioned EU laws. The fact that they're in the US would be incidental. The Supreme Court decision would override all State and Federal rights as they are the supreme arbiters.
There can be only one law on the subject, one rule, one criterion for whose laws matter.
I don't believe for a second that the majority of fans of either side have considered the ramifications. It is human nature to look at things in isolation, even though nothing exists in such a state. So, here's a chance. I'l like people to reply to me with a consequence they hate yet know must be faced if the decision went the way they wanted it to. The inevitable consequence of the dichotomies of an us-v-them political situation. From a systems standpoint rather than in isolation, is it a useful dichotomy? Is it a useful consequence, even if you hate it? There will always be one, but it useful?
If the consequences serve no useful purpose or are even harmful, then maybe the problem is not in who holds jurisdiction but why we're asking that particular question and not something else.
Creating one that's secure is the hard part. Creating one that has secure exchanges is even harder. Creating one that actually works AND anyone wants is impossible, as most investors are there solely to defraud.
The ACs have always had free reign. Sometimes that's good, such as the one time they nearly caused an all-out religious civil war in the States. Most of the time, they're batshit crazy nutters who got thrown off Murdoch's writing team for lack of believability.
The OP has yet to figure out how news aggregators and op-eds work. I doubt they've discovered anything as high tech as "flat" or "the sky". Based on the complete absence of spelling and reality, it was probably written by one of Trump's friends.
You get twice as much done, for more than twice the efficiency, and thus you spend maybe 1.5x as much and get 3x the profit.
Profit is good. Companies should try it some time.
You are assuming that (a) AIs would be no better than humans, (b) be no cheaper than humans, and (c) that redeployed human resources couldn't diversify and enrich product lines thus boosting corporate stability and profitability.
All three assumptions are trivially shown to be false.
We can also say that most companies have ideas they lack resources for. Reducing resources makes no sense, how are you supposed to try these new ideas out? Telepathy? Wishing on a star?
Finally, it was tried in the Industrial Revolution by some of the most successful companies of the era. Those who went for instant profit rarely succeeded. Of the two types, there are more examples of the former today still around than the latter, despite the latter being more common. Ergo, it works. We have experimental data that your concerns don't hold up and that my suggestions work.
That businesses are repeating mistakes we've already learned from is intensely irritating.
Which is why companies should look at the number of lines of work displaced and create an equal number that AI can't do that those displaced are nonetheless able and qualified to do AND which pays at least as well. Then AI doesn't eliminate jobs, it simply changes which line of business you're in.
The problem with companies, and governments, is that they're very good on destroying things, but not so hot on replacing them. Where I come from, you break it, you buy it. This should apply to jobs. You break their careers, you buy the time you broke. If that's 30 years at $11 an hour, you pay the person for 30 years work at $11 an hour. You might find governments a little less... eager to ruin lives.
But if you have a new career path that they can switch to and which is viable for them to switch to, then I think they should be allowed to claim no foul, no penalty. This would require a massive increase in R&D funding, blue sky research, education, and the like, but that's their problem. Don't pay the fine? Don't do the crime. And chucking thousands or millions onto the streets is a crime by any standard.
Make the premise of the current EU Data Protection Act a component of the US Constitution and the subject of a UN treaty that applies to all nations whether they sign it or not. The US is the only important nation in this, because it's the only nation where information and infrastructure only exist for the very rich. In other countries, either nobody has either or everybody has both.
The US then needs a law that provides strong privacy to everybody, under all circumstances, where the individual has strong controls over who knows what. If Texas was made the penal colony for violators, would that be too harsh? It's not as if it's being used for anything else, right at the moment.
Option 2:
Design and build student cities where that is the primary function of the city - education. Eliminate all religious teaching, except as pertains to history and cultural awareness. Teach maximally - you want kids to leave school with the best possible combination of breadth and depth given their personal abilities and interests. Feed optimally - nobody in these cities should have access to junk food, fast food, ultra-processed meat or anything from those disease-ridden abatoirs we've been hearing about in the news. They should have easy access to medically age-appropriate amounts of red wine and damn the law. Also, access to free health care. Education at such places should be free from age 3 to age 24.
The idea here is simple. If technology has outpaced culture, accelerate culture. If your ability to manage the technology is in question, improve your management. If you do not understand what you do, improve your understanding. This technology won't appear overnight and will take time to be abused. If in the same time, you've developed a cultural immune system to the abuses, by churning out millions of high-end polymaths, then the technology can only be used positively and beneficially. It's a multi-use technology, so you don't give it to naked apes who are too primitive to understand the benefits and who are too violent and self-centred to use it for anything other than harm.
Hmmm. Let's see. I'll look at what he said on the subject and let's see what this indicates.
At bidding of a Will, to which we bend (and must), but only dimly apprehend, great processes march on, as Time unrolls from dark beginnings to uncertain goals; and as on page o'er-written without clue, with script and limning packed of various hue, an endless multitude of forms appear, some grim, some frail, some beautiful, some queer, each alien, except as kin from one remote Origo, gnat, man, stone, and sun.
(Extract from Mythopoeia)
The heart of Man is not compound of lies, but draws some wisdom from the only Wise, and still recalls him. Though now long estranged, Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed. Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned, and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned
(Extract from Mythopoeia)
Though all the crannies of the world we filled with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build Gods and their houses out of dark and light, and sowed the seed of dragons, 'twas our right (used or misused). The right has not decayed. We make still by the law in which we're made.
(Extract from Mythopoeia)
Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.
(On Fairy Stories)
History often resembles myth, because they are both ultimately of the same stuff.
(On Fairy Stories)
Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural; whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom.
(On Fairy Stories)
Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion.
(On Fairy Stories)
No, I think it quite safe to say that Tolkien was not an atheist, but a theologian-philologist-mythographer of a type so exotic that there are almost no specimens left of such minds. He was an astonishingly astute observer of stories and it's a brave soul to say that he's wrong simply because he's different from a lot of contemporary views... held by people who will be forgotten long before he is and who will never have the same impact on the genre.
I disagree with him on the theology (I actually am an atheist) but his views on stories are self-consistent and founded a rational analysis of stories and poems across a wide range of cultures and times.
There are easily enough company employees and astroturfers out there to exceed the 50%+1 needed to falsify a blockchain. You'd end up with "hard evidence" which proved that the moon landings were fake, McDonald's provided food, and that the defendants were in league with Satan.
Tell it to the Hobbits. Cos the hand stopped listening. Got bored with this constant whinging and whining about how you have to have movies your way and screw the rest of us who want to go see one.
Tolkien argued that if you had to suspend disbelief, the writer had failed.
Yes, that's the sort of thing that SHOULD bother you. If you create a world where women can fly, then (as Terry Nation would have said), on that world a woman can fly. Under the Isaac Asimov Doctrine, you have to justify violations of known physics for it to qualify as sci-fi. And? Does that mean he couldn't write a bloody good story? No, it meant he wrote bloody good stories that were self-consistent and where deviations were acknowledged.
And fantasy? Science fantasy is required to be internally consistent. So, again, if Amazonian women can fly then Amazonian women can fly and that is NOT a problem. Those are the rules that the creators and top writers of the genres developed. And violations of history are not given a green pass under them. Flying women (and flying cars) are. Edible food from McDonald's is borderline fantasy.
This is how it has always been. And this is why pulp is regarded with such disgust by True Fans and True Authors alike. It is not sci-fi, it is Playboy in space, Westerns in space or Eastenders in Africa, but it is not sci-fi or fantasy.
So if someone doesn't like 0.001% of all sci-fi and fantasy literature, they can't enjoy things.
Right. Let's start with some basic arithmetic. I would like to suggest that those who only enjoy 0.001% of all the sci-fi and fantasy literature are completely incapable of knowing why enjoying the other 99.999% might, just might, constitute enjoying a damn sight more. Get out of the closet, Narnia is in the one down the hall. You do not believe it, and that - as Yoda would say - is why you fail.
Debian is a pessimized distribution. It's compiled for the worst possible case. It has a filesystem layout guaranteed to cause conflicts between packages and they've not bothered to resolve those except where it's "noticeable". The default disk layout is sub-optimal. It puts ideology over getting anything done.
I'm not impressed by the others, either.
Frankly, I'm horrified by the state of Linux distributions. That people voted Debian up is not a surprise, however, because nobody expects the best from their computers any more. I used to run three MUDs on a 16 MHz 386SX, in addition to a mail server, DNS server, modem pool and an instance of X. I could compile GateD or Perl in the background without interfering with anyone's work. Did it do less? Well, it had just as many fonts in LaTeX, so I could still do all the DTP that Libre Office can do. Admittedly, I couldn't WYSIWYG it but nobody does that with LaTeX anyway and anyone who does it for regular documents is paying far too much attention to presentation and not enough to content.
(I forget where I saw the article on PowerPoint, but it argued that this emphasis on presentation was endangering R&D, promoting really bad ideas over much better ones, and was responsible for endangering the modern economy and several western democracies. Ok, maybe they overstated the threat to the economy, since you have to have one to endanger.)
Modern Linux is not as fast because of poor design choices by distros. We have no Linux Desktop because of even worse design choices by distros.
These problems are THEIR fault (and the fault of OSDL's closed-door meetings with vendors). Yes, in almost every respect, Windows is worse. But Windows has mindshare and enough money to afford to be worse. Microsoft should have been broken up in 1998 when it was ordered to do so by the courts, but the appeals court reversed that - probably under government pressure - and we have to live with the fact that we're competing against Sauron.
Slashdot Mirror
I absolutely agree there is predation of the young and that this cannot be tolerated.
I've wracked my brains on this for so many years, because the question keeps coming up. I've reached the conclusion that there's two types of maturity - intellectual and emotional. Autistic people will mature far more quickly intellectually, but be emotionally far behind, as just one example. I've wondered if the age of consent should be the average of intellectual age, emotional age and biological age, but that could lead to some weird results. And how would these be measured?
Ideally, you'd have the brain checked with the yearly medical, but that's not really practical at the moment.
Hence the desire for a conference of the people who are far wiser on the different nuances than I, and more intelligent, who can tell us how to balance the risks at a finer level than global.
Agreed that the safety of youth is very important. But we must be wary of unintended consequences. Just as antibacterial soap created deadlier bacteria and reduced our own defenses to them, we can make things too safe, too sterile. On the flip side, we can underestimate certain risks and certain forms of damage. PTSD turns out to form with almost any level of trauma, so mild constant trauma is actually just as destructive as a major calamity. Under certain circumstances. Recovery is not guaranteed because the brain doesn't work off video tape and you can't delete. Not thinking about it doesn't help, because the brain is one gigantic neural net. Every experience weighs in to everything, whether you think about it or not.
It's an absolute nightmare. I share your concerns and aims, absolutely, but it's a tough problem. Fortunately, we aren't the ones being asked to solve it. I'm just hoping that those who ARE asked to solve it, at least for Facebook, have looked at this level of complexity.
It's not a crime in all parts of the US. Until last year, it would have been perfectly legal in Virginia, provided the perp married the girl some time afterwards. Child brides, for the purpose of avoiding lawsuits, are still common in the Bible Belt, according to The Guardian.
Obviously, that's insane. But if it's not actually illegal, then it's not a crime.
In Britain, you can pose topless for the newspapers and magazines at age 16. Perfectly legal. You can walk nude in public at any age, anywhere you like, provided it doesn't cause actual offence. There are no other restrictions. And, no, I don't think a few shocked ultra-conservatives from Saudi Arabia or Alabama would count towards it being actually offensive. On that basis, a British teen who is a professional model might well argue that she should be able to distribute what she damn well pleases. In Britain. That you don't get to call that a crime.
This is that murky water where cultural values matter and cultural impacts matter. I don't think there's ever been a serious study of whether that causes the girls harm or not. If it does cause them harm, then you still don't get to call that a crime but you have justification for asking the British to make it one. If it doesn't cause them harm, then where does this justification come from? If we don't know which way it goes, any guess we make is just a guess and will either harm them through abuse or harm them by trampling on their rights. You still end up with harm. That's not ok. We need to know.
Facebook has terms of service that are independent of the law. They're universal. Not keen on that but it'll do for now. Breach of the TOS is not a crime, it is at worst a violation of contract law, a civil law matter. Facebook hasn't the resources to run a global psycho-ethic conference on the morality of teen sexuality. That's something they can maybe campaign for, since they obviously don't want the burden of making some of these decisions on their own. Fine. I'd love to see such a global conference. Get a single unified model that allows you to plug in details of culture, diet and anything else that alters rate of maturity to get a series of numbers out that tells you when things become ok.
Could turn out such a model never produces any number below 21. Could be that the numbers you get out are always similar to the Nordic model. Could be that it turns out to be so complex that no model is possible, that everything has to be case by case on an individual level. But I'd rather hear from them as to what should be a crime rather than a specific individual in a specific culture calling everything worldwide that would be a crime where they live a crime. That just doesn't help.
That rather takes European values and sets them on fire, supplanting them with values of a culture not exactly known for a lack of child abuse.
No, different cultures, different needs. Most cultures have got those needs hopelessly wrong and need to understand them better, but Europeans kicked the Puritans out and should not tolerate letting them back in. We need proper decisions, made to address each of the different proper needs, not some blanket standard that suits nobody.
If Facebook cannot cope with the fact that Europe left the Middle Ages, then Facebook shouldn't be there.
It may well be that for some cultures, the standards will be stricter than 18. There may be places where 21 plus a license would be suitable.
Britain has never had a problem with 16, Samantha Fox has repeatedly said in interviews that she was only hassled once (I think by an American) and she kneed him in the nuts before throwing him to the ground. Good. It would be good if every girl, by age 16 or even 12, had basic self-defense, a strong kicking foot and a reinforced toe cap on their shoes. Solve a lot of problems. If Britain feels that's entirely appropriate, then provided psychologists and ethicists from multiple countries actually back that up and say that it's ok in that culture, that it does no harm in that context, I don't think the Moral Majority in America should have a say. They should have a say as to whether it can reach America, sure, but they should not have rights over other cultures. Of course, if those psychologists and ethicists say Britain is out of line, that 17 is correct, then Britain should raise the age to 17 and not argue.
This is about getting it right. In each context and each subcontext. That's tough. The only thing that's certain is that it's not standard.
In Scandinavia, the rules seem to be 12-14 year olds can do what they like, consensually, with each other, that 15 is the age of consent. France has similar rules, I think. Britain, the age of consent is 16. So she was legal when her first softcore pics came out. Far as I know, the rules haven't changed there.
In America, child brides are reportedly a major problem. Virginia only changed its rules last year so that marrying the victim of an assault doesn't mean the assault didn't happen. (There was nothing in the rules about consent.) Apparently, according to The Grauniad, there are states with similar laws on the book.
America is ultra-puritanical when it comes to women's rights, but not so much when it comes to predator's rights.
I tend to think Europe has a much better grasp of rights than America. They tend to be universal rather than selective, although that's not always the case, and tend to be slightly more modern and slightly less religious. But this does not mean that they should be adopted globally for social media.
This is where child psychologists, psychologists specializing in social media, psychologists specializing in trauma and ethicists from around the globe should be getting together and debating the issue as experts in a relatively calm, relatively neutral atmosphere. They should then, as experts, jointly produce recommendations on different types of consent and the ages they are appropriate at under varying cultural environments if you want optimal mental health for all concerned and least harm.
Right now, people are throwing numbers around as though it's a circus act. These are people's lives, not mass entertainment. A wrong decision in either direction can cause incalculable damage. And the number isn't guaranteed to be fixed. France has a lot of problems, but it doesn't have significantly more than the Bible Belt. Norway isn't perfect, but it's a damn sight better off than Virginia! But if Virginia followed Norway, would it be better? If the Bible Belt copied French laws, would that solve anything? Chances are, no. Different cultures produce different rates of emotional maturity.
We need a model that can tell us, for any given culture, what would be sensible for any given situation. With that, there's still practically no chance anyone (least of all Facebook) would make sensible decisions, but at least we'd have an idea of the impact of a decision and the harm likely done by it.
Obviously no number, however sophisticated, is going to replace consent, but as politicians have no grasp of consent, they can't really do anything useful about it.
The US Supreme Court can take into consideration whatever it likes, including a Tarot reading if it so wishes.
However, US laws only apply to US soil and as Microsoft is not an embassy under the Vienna Convention (yet), their servers in Ireland are not on US soil.
If it is sufficient to say that Microsoft is American, then Americans abroad are under US law as well as the law of the nation they are in. That means US government officials are bound by the US Constitution when operating abroad. Personally, I'd argue they are, since it's a law specifically restricting government and not a law about how to govern the United States. That would make violations by US government officials of, say, the right to a fair trial by mere suspects living abroad a serious criminal offence. Many argue that it is. But this is the sort of thing that will worry SCOTUS. They interpret. They actually are activist judges, by design and by nature. They get to decide what any law actually means and who it applies to. That is their job.
SCOTUS aren't stupid, they'll be aware of the ramifications of a decision either way. My concern is that they may be careless. Whatever their ruling, it will have loopholes that could be catastrophic. SCOTUS doesn't have to care, but they will. How they look matters. Image matters. But ramifications also matter. These court rulings are lengthy and detailed, not for amusement but to minimize the collateral damage. Because of political pressures, they may skimp on that and produce a devastating international incident as a result.
Congress? Psychologists and neurologists are in broad agreement that they're all psychopaths. The President? The boy does nothing.
Already done. in the LIBOR scandal, it was revealed banks were actively assisting customers in hiding money overseas in Switzerland. For a donation.
And therein lies the problem. Whichever way SCOTUS swings, everyone is fully aware of the loopholes criminals can exploit. Every path they can go down has unintended consequences that threaten the stability and integrity of enough of the nation to pose a serious problem.
There is no solution to this within the existing framework. The framework has to be changed. You need some form of ever-closer union, at some level, if you're going to eliminate the paradoxes within the framework. Merely suggesting that would send half of America ballistic and has already sent just over half of Britain into apoplectic fury. Keeping the peace by keeping laws national is going to mean more Paradise Papers and more Panama Papers. Sooner or later, that'll have the same result.
Precisely. The question is whether SCOTUS will think of that.
As long as the companies are considered on EU turf, you are absolutely correct. Ergo, the only way the US can impose its laws on Microsoft in Europe is to get a treaty with the EU declaring that companies on someone else's turf are embassies covered by the Vienna Convention. Microsoft would then be on US soil anywhere in Europe and so subject to US laws.
Aaaaand it will take you all of five seconds to figure out why that would be such an incredibly bad idea.
Nonetheless, it would work, and if the Supreme Court ruled that way then it is instructing Congress to put forward such a treaty. Otherwise, it's like ruling the moon is made of green cheese.
Ultimately, there will be unintended consequences, and essentially every law ever passed will have them, because very few people stop to think past a single talking point. Particularly politicians. Judges might, but the rules on activist judges prevent them.
If you impose that rule, then EU companies in America are embassies protected by the Vienna Convention because they have to be in Europe to be under EU laws and you're saying that they are.
Can you begin to imagine the unintended consequences of that?
For a start, forget immigration controls. They're embassies, they can house whoever they damn well like, under EU laws. The US has no jurisdiction because this is EU turf not US turf by your own rules.
You can't have it both ways.
In the example you gave, usually extra-territorial is off-limits, except for crimes on the high seas, which can be prosecuted by the owning state, the state of arrival or the states of the individuals concerned.
The LIBOR scandal was partly uncovered by somewhat forceful access to Swiss bank accounts by the British, albeit with begrudging Swiss approval. Eventually. The Panama Papers and Paradise Papers revealed further abuses that really should have been uncovered a lot sooner and which can't be effectively dealt with. International Banking has laws and an exchange system which lie outside any territorial boundaries by definition, yet must be enforced.
So we have a system that is (a) not very well designed, not particularly honest and exceedingly fragile (fake transfers are known to get through on the exchange system), and (b) requires an international approach even if it was well-designed and honest. Treaties are only effective if nations can be forced to obey or overridden if they dishonestly refuse.
But this covers only a tiny fraction of the activity of the banking system and most of the time the jurisdiction is clear-cut.
Then there's the unintended consequence of enforcing such a system. It means US recognition of ALL national laws regarding prohibited speech and ALL national/EU laws governing data privacy and the right to be forgotten. Even when it's a US company operating in that nation or political domain.
Is the US prepared to renounce its exceptionalism stance with regards EU data protection? If not, it has a problem. You can't say it's their jurisdiction but only for the laws of theirs you like. It means deliberately transferring data outside the EU without imposing equal protection measures is a crime, that the US will neither protect nor defend any US company operating in the EU that commits that crime and that the US will approach EU nations and offer absolute guarantees that it will respect EU law and will support nations wishing to prosecute such an offence.
I don't think the US government has the guts, to be honest. Which means it's trying to play both sides of the fence, according to what plays better with the home crowd. That's a good way to get burned.
If they say that nationality of the corporation overrides all, then we have the inverse consequence. Any EU corporation in America is automatically covered by EU law, not American law. I don't imagine THAT would go down terribly well. In other words, the reverse ruling makes all corporations de-facto embassies. Which would wreck havoc if corporations actually enforced that.
(Note: This could solve some Brexit issues. If companies are embassies, then EU companies in the UK are not subject to any UK laws, only EU ones. It would also cause widespread rioting.)
If the Supreme Court rules that data follows the laws of the nation that it is in, then the EU's data protection laws and right to forget automatically apply to all data in the EU even if held by a US company. I doubt the court will consider that, but that is simply a matter of fact.
If the Supreme Court rules that data follows the laws of the nation of the holding company, then European-based companies in the US automatically follow those aforementioned EU laws. The fact that they're in the US would be incidental. The Supreme Court decision would override all State and Federal rights as they are the supreme arbiters.
There can be only one law on the subject, one rule, one criterion for whose laws matter.
I don't believe for a second that the majority of fans of either side have considered the ramifications. It is human nature to look at things in isolation, even though nothing exists in such a state. So, here's a chance. I'l like people to reply to me with a consequence they hate yet know must be faced if the decision went the way they wanted it to. The inevitable consequence of the dichotomies of an us-v-them political situation. From a systems standpoint rather than in isolation, is it a useful dichotomy? Is it a useful consequence, even if you hate it? There will always be one, but it useful?
If the consequences serve no useful purpose or are even harmful, then maybe the problem is not in who holds jurisdiction but why we're asking that particular question and not something else.
Creating one that's secure is the hard part. Creating one that has secure exchanges is even harder. Creating one that actually works AND anyone wants is impossible, as most investors are there solely to defraud.
How much would my UID sell for?
(Ok, ok, given that I absolutely infuriate the bigots, about $2.50. As in, that's what I'd have to pay them.)
The ACs have always had free reign. Sometimes that's good, such as the one time they nearly caused an all-out religious civil war in the States. Most of the time, they're batshit crazy nutters who got thrown off Murdoch's writing team for lack of believability.
The OP has yet to figure out how news aggregators and op-eds work. I doubt they've discovered anything as high tech as "flat" or "the sky". Based on the complete absence of spelling and reality, it was probably written by one of Trump's friends.
You get twice as much done, for more than twice the efficiency, and thus you spend maybe 1.5x as much and get 3x the profit.
Profit is good. Companies should try it some time.
You are assuming that (a) AIs would be no better than humans, (b) be no cheaper than humans, and (c) that redeployed human resources couldn't diversify and enrich product lines thus boosting corporate stability and profitability.
All three assumptions are trivially shown to be false.
We can also say that most companies have ideas they lack resources for. Reducing resources makes no sense, how are you supposed to try these new ideas out? Telepathy? Wishing on a star?
Finally, it was tried in the Industrial Revolution by some of the most successful companies of the era. Those who went for instant profit rarely succeeded. Of the two types, there are more examples of the former today still around than the latter, despite the latter being more common. Ergo, it works. We have experimental data that your concerns don't hold up and that my suggestions work.
That businesses are repeating mistakes we've already learned from is intensely irritating.
Which is why companies should look at the number of lines of work displaced and create an equal number that AI can't do that those displaced are nonetheless able and qualified to do AND which pays at least as well. Then AI doesn't eliminate jobs, it simply changes which line of business you're in.
The problem with companies, and governments, is that they're very good on destroying things, but not so hot on replacing them. Where I come from, you break it, you buy it. This should apply to jobs. You break their careers, you buy the time you broke. If that's 30 years at $11 an hour, you pay the person for 30 years work at $11 an hour. You might find governments a little less... eager to ruin lives.
But if you have a new career path that they can switch to and which is viable for them to switch to, then I think they should be allowed to claim no foul, no penalty. This would require a massive increase in R&D funding, blue sky research, education, and the like, but that's their problem. Don't pay the fine? Don't do the crime. And chucking thousands or millions onto the streets is a crime by any standard.
Option 1:
Make the premise of the current EU Data Protection Act a component of the US Constitution and the subject of a UN treaty that applies to all nations whether they sign it or not. The US is the only important nation in this, because it's the only nation where information and infrastructure only exist for the very rich. In other countries, either nobody has either or everybody has both.
The US then needs a law that provides strong privacy to everybody, under all circumstances, where the individual has strong controls over who knows what. If Texas was made the penal colony for violators, would that be too harsh? It's not as if it's being used for anything else, right at the moment.
Option 2:
Design and build student cities where that is the primary function of the city - education. Eliminate all religious teaching, except as pertains to history and cultural awareness. Teach maximally - you want kids to leave school with the best possible combination of breadth and depth given their personal abilities and interests. Feed optimally - nobody in these cities should have access to junk food, fast food, ultra-processed meat or anything from those disease-ridden abatoirs we've been hearing about in the news. They should have easy access to medically age-appropriate amounts of red wine and damn the law. Also, access to free health care. Education at such places should be free from age 3 to age 24.
The idea here is simple. If technology has outpaced culture, accelerate culture. If your ability to manage the technology is in question, improve your management. If you do not understand what you do, improve your understanding. This technology won't appear overnight and will take time to be abused. If in the same time, you've developed a cultural immune system to the abuses, by churning out millions of high-end polymaths, then the technology can only be used positively and beneficially. It's a multi-use technology, so you don't give it to naked apes who are too primitive to understand the benefits and who are too violent and self-centred to use it for anything other than harm.
Hmmm. Let's see. I'll look at what he said on the subject and let's see what this indicates.
At bidding of a Will, to which we bend
(and must), but only dimly apprehend,
great processes march on, as Time unrolls
from dark beginnings to uncertain goals;
and as on page o'er-written without clue,
with script and limning packed of various hue,
an endless multitude of forms appear,
some grim, some frail, some beautiful, some queer,
each alien, except as kin from one
remote Origo, gnat, man, stone, and sun.
(Extract from Mythopoeia)
The heart of Man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned
(Extract from Mythopoeia)
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, 'twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we're made.
(Extract from Mythopoeia)
Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.
(On Fairy Stories)
History often resembles myth, because they are both ultimately of the same stuff.
(On Fairy Stories)
Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural; whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom.
(On Fairy Stories)
Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion.
(On Fairy Stories)
No, I think it quite safe to say that Tolkien was not an atheist, but a theologian-philologist-mythographer of a type so exotic that there are almost no specimens left of such minds. He was an astonishingly astute observer of stories and it's a brave soul to say that he's wrong simply because he's different from a lot of contemporary views... held by people who will be forgotten long before he is and who will never have the same impact on the genre.
I disagree with him on the theology (I actually am an atheist) but his views on stories are self-consistent and founded a rational analysis of stories and poems across a wide range of cultures and times.
There are easily enough company employees and astroturfers out there to exceed the 50%+1 needed to falsify a blockchain. You'd end up with "hard evidence" which proved that the moon landings were fake, McDonald's provided food, and that the defendants were in league with Satan.
Tell it to the Hobbits. Cos the hand stopped listening. Got bored with this constant whinging and whining about how you have to have movies your way and screw the rest of us who want to go see one.
Tolkien argued that if you had to suspend disbelief, the writer had failed.
Yes, that's the sort of thing that SHOULD bother you. If you create a world where women can fly, then (as Terry Nation would have said), on that world a woman can fly. Under the Isaac Asimov Doctrine, you have to justify violations of known physics for it to qualify as sci-fi. And? Does that mean he couldn't write a bloody good story? No, it meant he wrote bloody good stories that were self-consistent and where deviations were acknowledged.
And fantasy? Science fantasy is required to be internally consistent. So, again, if Amazonian women can fly then Amazonian women can fly and that is NOT a problem. Those are the rules that the creators and top writers of the genres developed. And violations of history are not given a green pass under them. Flying women (and flying cars) are. Edible food from McDonald's is borderline fantasy.
This is how it has always been. And this is why pulp is regarded with such disgust by True Fans and True Authors alike. It is not sci-fi, it is Playboy in space, Westerns in space or Eastenders in Africa, but it is not sci-fi or fantasy.
Now get off my lawn.
So if someone doesn't like 0.001% of all sci-fi and fantasy literature, they can't enjoy things.
Right. Let's start with some basic arithmetic. I would like to suggest that those who only enjoy 0.001% of all the sci-fi and fantasy literature are completely incapable of knowing why enjoying the other 99.999% might, just might, constitute enjoying a damn sight more. Get out of the closet, Narnia is in the one down the hall. You do not believe it, and that - as Yoda would say - is why you fail.
The Hex Girls are hot.
Debian is a pessimized distribution. It's compiled for the worst possible case. It has a filesystem layout guaranteed to cause conflicts between packages and they've not bothered to resolve those except where it's "noticeable". The default disk layout is sub-optimal. It puts ideology over getting anything done.
I'm not impressed by the others, either.
Frankly, I'm horrified by the state of Linux distributions. That people voted Debian up is not a surprise, however, because nobody expects the best from their computers any more. I used to run three MUDs on a 16 MHz 386SX, in addition to a mail server, DNS server, modem pool and an instance of X. I could compile GateD or Perl in the background without interfering with anyone's work. Did it do less? Well, it had just as many fonts in LaTeX, so I could still do all the DTP that Libre Office can do. Admittedly, I couldn't WYSIWYG it but nobody does that with LaTeX anyway and anyone who does it for regular documents is paying far too much attention to presentation and not enough to content.
(I forget where I saw the article on PowerPoint, but it argued that this emphasis on presentation was endangering R&D, promoting really bad ideas over much better ones, and was responsible for endangering the modern economy and several western democracies. Ok, maybe they overstated the threat to the economy, since you have to have one to endanger.)
Modern Linux is not as fast because of poor design choices by distros. We have no Linux Desktop because of even worse design choices by distros.
https://itvision.altervista.or...
These problems are THEIR fault (and the fault of OSDL's closed-door meetings with vendors). Yes, in almost every respect, Windows is worse. But Windows has mindshare and enough money to afford to be worse. Microsoft should have been broken up in 1998 when it was ordered to do so by the courts, but the appeals court reversed that - probably under government pressure - and we have to live with the fact that we're competing against Sauron.
And, yes, GET OFF MY LAWN!