It isn't clear to me what fraction of kids get solicited by adult predators (rather than fellow teens near their own ages), nor is it clear what fraction actually have any real trouble with it beyond just blocking the person. But do note that 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 10 boys will be "sexually exploited" overall.
"the only other Sci-Fi on Tv was Star Trek: The Next Generation"
Well, if you ignore DS9, Voyager, Stargate: SG-1, Earth 2, Space: Above and Beyond, and a bunch of others that most of us have forgotten by now. In fact, TNG only overlapped B5 by what, one year?
We'll see in about ten years or so how much the bar has really been raised, apart from things like FX. (Which I feel are sort of superficial.)
I did a planetarium show here six months ago on the science of science fiction. As I put it together, I ended up reflecting a lot about how much sci-fi television has changed in the past decade. Look at most any new show: BSG, Firefly, Farscape, later seasons of Stargate, etc. You'll see that they're all doing longer arcs with much better character developpment. They've all gone to CGI, allowing more flexible FX. And many of them are exploring making aliens that are a lot more alien-looking and with more alien behavior.
Why do I mention all of thise? Because as I looked back, it became apparent to me that B5 was the catalyst in all of this. It absolutely had its weaknesses: the acting was eratic (some actors were fantastics, others were acceptable, a few were weak), the effects look kind of weak now, and the sets are often kind of minimal. But JMS and B5 brought a lot of new things to the table that have changed SciFi TV. You can even see the changes setting in as you watch DS9 start to finish. It's clear that they learned some of the lessons of B5, although not all. (The one thing that has impressed me most about B5 above all other shows is JMS's committment to story-telling. He avoided writing his scripts to please his fan base and focused on what he needed to do to tell the story he wanted to tell. If that meant killing off a beloved character, he pulled the trigger.)
I think what you'll find will happen is that ten years from now, BSG will look good, but not great. It will have aged, just like B5 and other shows. In retrospect, while B5's weakness will still be apparent, I think that you'll find that it's strengths will show up relative to BSG a lot better since they'll both show their ages and the FX factor will be a lot less significant.
No, I'm with you. It's a good show and I enjoy it, but it has a lot of flaws. I find the story-telling to be inconsistent and full of holes that really irk me. The characters suddenly develop issues out of nowhere about one episode before it'll come into play, only to resolve the issue at the end of that episode never to hear about it again. It's clear that Ron Moore has some idea where he's heading with the show, but he doesn't really have the details ironed out very clearly and he doesn't know his characters all that well.
Still, it's a fun show and I'll happily watch it. I'm certainly not on board with the "best show EVER". And I suspect a lot of fans are confusing good special effects with a good show. (Just so you understand where I come from in all of this, my top few sci-fi shows ever include the original Twilight Zone and the original Trek. Production values are great, but there's a lot more to a show than cool FX and sets. Even mediocre acting can take a back seat to story-telling.)
Agreed. Check out the SciFi actors with the most makeup who made the big splashes. It takes tremendous acting talent to work through all of that and still emote. To get past the makeup and make the character really sympathetic (if not always loveable) is the mark of an exceptional actor. Andreas was brilliant and he really made G'Kar what he was. JMS has said so a number of times in his commentaries to the scripts. That's why JMS won't re-cast G'Kar: you won't get the same character by a long shot. Even if you get another fantastic actor, you won't get *G'Kar*.
The question there isn't "Did we need all of our weapons?" so much as "Did we have a viable surrender on the table before the atomic bombings?"
Now, we *could* have beaten them at that point without nuclear weapons. That's no disrespect, that's just how things were. (Early in the war it was certainly touch-and-go. Once our war machine got rolling, once we got experience fighting, and especially once the European front was won, the Japanese were simply facing overwelming odds. To say that we needed every means at are disposal at that point is just silly. It's not a matter of respect, it's a matter of recognizing when two sides aren't fairly matched anymore.) For one thing, we were literally starving them to death by submarine warfare. (Remember the U-boats? We were succeeding with a similar tact against Japan.) I've heard estimates that they could have survived maybe six months to a year before they would have been forced to capitulate from pure starvation.
In as much as Einstein didn't build or drop the bomb, I'm not quite clear about why you'd blame him. He didn't even write the leter to President Roosevelt, Leo Szilard did. (Arguably nitpicky, sure.) Einstein *signed* it because there was a very real concern that Germany would get the bomb first. I don't think it speaks negatively about Einstein that he didn't want to see the Third Reich the sole owners of that kind of power. Do you?
Whether the bomb should have been dropped or not depends a lot on how much you feel it was a ploy to scare the Soviets. (Dropping the bomb was certainly a less costly (for us and for them) route to forcing the Japanese surrender than an invasion, however. That's undisputed. But, again, the question is: did we need to even do that? Historians are still arguing about what happened, so I'm hesitant to pass a very firm judgement there.)
"Solis contacted the girl through her MySpace Web site in April, telling her that he was a high school senior who played on the football team, according to the lawsuit."
If he lied about his age at all, it seems as if it would have been at most by about a year.
I do most of my grocery shopping at CostCo, as well as the shopping for a variety of other products. It's definitely true that some things are more expensive there, but I suspect that that has to do with negotiating power of other large chains. You definitely are *always* going to be happiest if you know the normal price for products at a few stores before you go shopping. (Safeway, for example, tends to almost always be more expensive and have worse-quality store brands than King Soopers in my area.) That said, as a rule CostCo is a lot cheaper than most other stores, provided you can store and use the item before it goes nasty. But that's also always something you should be thinking about before going shopping anywhere.
That's not entirely true. Yes, the legistlation should be considered on its merits. But you're a fool if you think that the source is irrelevent. Would you not scrutinize smoking legislation that came from the tabacco lobby with extra care? Given Amazon.com's history, I'd be very wary of the advice that they give and look very closely to see how it affects them. If it is fair and even-handed to them as well as everyone else, that's great. But it definitely bears looking at.
Oddly, this doesn't stop them from giving us all manner of advise on the topic.
(Doesn't it seem a bit weird to have Catholic priests lecturing people on how to have a successful marriage or the Vatican laying down rules about what is OK where sex is concerned?)
Why do you need ISS to provide data on humans in space? There are many years' worth of data from Russian and American space stations already. ISS isn't going to add a lot to that, actually.
Knowing who the publisher is doesn't equate to having heard of the journal. It's the journal's proported prestige (I didn't use that word to describe it, the original article did) that I question, not that it's a legitimate publication.
You are clear. You clearly sound racist when you say that.
You want to hinder Mexicans from legally entering the country as a way of making it "fair" that Asia is across the Pacific? You're comparing apples and oranges, here with legal and illegal immigration and you apparently seek to punish would-be legal immigrants from Mexico for the fact that their country shares a border with ours.
Pay attention, here: illegal immigration is illegal. It has nothing to do with legal immigration. Punishing one entire group because they're from a neighboring country all in the name of "being more fair" is nothing short of inane at best. Worse, it sounds (and may well be) poorly disguised racism. It smacks very much of wanting to allow in the "right" people and keep out the "wrong" ones.
Actually, I can't think of one in my field that's abbreviated that way. But the word "Analysis" doesn't really appear in any astronomy journals that I've seen. "Annals", yes. "Analysis", no. It's probably a culture thing. Even if it did, my guess is we're go for the shortest possible abbreviation. (Thus, "The Astrophysical Joural" is "ApJ" -- pronounced "ap-jay" -- for example.)
First of all, someone from China does *not* have to go through legal channels to immigrate to the US. It may be harder for them to sneak in than Mexicans, but if you can't imagine someone doing so (or that many of the same motivations for doing so apply), then you sorely lack imagination.
Second, you still haven't explain how you're going to undo this unfairness of Mexico being next door. That was your beef, but I see no solution to this injustice.
The article claims that the study was published in the "presigious" journal, Astrophysics and Space Science. I'm an astronomer and I've never heard of it. And yes, this does matter: a major find like ET life will have journals like Science and Nature tripping over themselves to publish it. Every step down from there is an indiciation that someone didn't think that the research was reasonable. Of course, the fact that this is a solid-state physicist who published this and not, say, a biologist is disturbing, too.
Also, I'm going to be a bit junior-high here and point out that "Astrophysics and Space Science" has a very unfortunate acronym and must be difficult to cite with its abbreviation.
Which is why it makes sense to fence off the entire border. The more effort you have to expend to get over, under, or around it, the fewer the number of people who will try.
Sure. But how much time, money, and committment is it worth to the American people? If you're only stopping, say, 50% of all attempted crossings and it costs $50 billion initially and $5 billion a year to maintain, is that worth it? (The figures are made up, but the way. They're just there to illustrate a point.) What about if/when people start dying due to the blocks in place? Is the public still going to be on board with that?
And I disagree that the national interest in this is grassroots. There are a few groups out there and several (in some cases rather racist) congresscritters pushing this. But a small grassroots movement does get national attention unless someone gives it that attention and when you get right down to it, we're ALWAYS being told that these cause-of-the-minutes are "grassroots". (So is a lot of the anti-gay stuff that goes on, after all.) I wouldn't put it past any politician, let alone Rove, to be stoke this one for his or her own ends. I'll believe that this is an issue that Americans really care about when I see them persist with their interest in it and when they're willing to pay up to deal with it. Until then, I'm going with the time-tested default position of "passing fad".
That proves little, though. They've moved because there's an unfenced area availible and that's easier to cross there, not because they can't cross the fence. In a sense, you've validated my point: building a wall just makes people be a bit smarter about how they cross.
As for the political will, we'll see how long Karl Rove can keep this going. Remember how hot and bothered he had people about those gays wanting to get married? No? It was only two years ago that it was *the* hot political issue.
A fair point, but I think that the irony remains. A border wall is still an insult to other countries (and our own competence, I might add) and rather ominous. Remember the stink raised when Isreal proposed a similar wall to try to stop would-be terrorists from getting in.
The expression was metaphorical. A ladder was not literally being suggested. The point is, build a better wall and if people want to get passed it, they will. People got out of East Berlin, didn't they? We have a much larger border to secure and much less will to go to extremes to defend it.
So you're saying that we should pay for their tickets over here? I conclude this because the reason it's easier to immigrate from Mexico has everything to do with that pesky ocean. I'll be surprised if you have a solution for getting rid of that obstacle, so that leaves assissting them to cross.
Presumably, they flash the "help us Batman!" signal and they give him the coordinates of the crosser. Then he zooms off in his Bat-copter or Bat-jet (sold separately) to the site to arrest the heinous criminal. Either that, or they send out US troops/border guards in choppers to try to get to the guy before he disappears again. Either way, it seems like it would take a lot of effort and not just a little fuel to nab each person, doesn't it?
What I find really funny is the fact that they don't realize that as soon as the webcams start working (if they ever do), the people crossing the border will just pick NEW spots at which to cross. But I assume that Gov. Perry will be re-elected by then and no one will care.
Because then people will just find 21-foot ladders. If you can't patrol the wall properly, it's nearly useless and a terrible waste of money. As long as there's an incentive to cross the border and people can find a way across that's worth the cost, they'll come. Which points to the smart solution, I think.
On the other hand, we could build the wall. And then a future Mexican president can stand by the wall and demand that the US bring down that wall. The circle will be complete, although the irony will probably be unappreciated.
Slashdot Mirror
This provides some stats, although the methods are a bit dodgy, I think.
Also, this
It isn't clear to me what fraction of kids get solicited by adult predators (rather than fellow teens near their own ages), nor is it clear what fraction actually have any real trouble with it beyond just blocking the person. But do note that 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 10 boys will be "sexually exploited" overall.
"the only other Sci-Fi on Tv was Star Trek: The Next Generation"
Well, if you ignore DS9, Voyager, Stargate: SG-1, Earth 2, Space: Above and Beyond, and a bunch of others that most of us have forgotten by now. In fact, TNG only overlapped B5 by what, one year?
We'll see in about ten years or so how much the bar has really been raised, apart from things like FX. (Which I feel are sort of superficial.)
I did a planetarium show here six months ago on the science of science fiction. As I put it together, I ended up reflecting a lot about how much sci-fi television has changed in the past decade. Look at most any new show: BSG, Firefly, Farscape, later seasons of Stargate, etc. You'll see that they're all doing longer arcs with much better character developpment. They've all gone to CGI, allowing more flexible FX. And many of them are exploring making aliens that are a lot more alien-looking and with more alien behavior.
Why do I mention all of thise? Because as I looked back, it became apparent to me that B5 was the catalyst in all of this. It absolutely had its weaknesses: the acting was eratic (some actors were fantastics, others were acceptable, a few were weak), the effects look kind of weak now, and the sets are often kind of minimal. But JMS and B5 brought a lot of new things to the table that have changed SciFi TV. You can even see the changes setting in as you watch DS9 start to finish. It's clear that they learned some of the lessons of B5, although not all. (The one thing that has impressed me most about B5 above all other shows is JMS's committment to story-telling. He avoided writing his scripts to please his fan base and focused on what he needed to do to tell the story he wanted to tell. If that meant killing off a beloved character, he pulled the trigger.)
I think what you'll find will happen is that ten years from now, BSG will look good, but not great. It will have aged, just like B5 and other shows. In retrospect, while B5's weakness will still be apparent, I think that you'll find that it's strengths will show up relative to BSG a lot better since they'll both show their ages and the FX factor will be a lot less significant.
No, I'm with you. It's a good show and I enjoy it, but it has a lot of flaws. I find the story-telling to be inconsistent and full of holes that really irk me. The characters suddenly develop issues out of nowhere about one episode before it'll come into play, only to resolve the issue at the end of that episode never to hear about it again. It's clear that Ron Moore has some idea where he's heading with the show, but he doesn't really have the details ironed out very clearly and he doesn't know his characters all that well.
Still, it's a fun show and I'll happily watch it. I'm certainly not on board with the "best show EVER". And I suspect a lot of fans are confusing good special effects with a good show. (Just so you understand where I come from in all of this, my top few sci-fi shows ever include the original Twilight Zone and the original Trek. Production values are great, but there's a lot more to a show than cool FX and sets. Even mediocre acting can take a back seat to story-telling.)
Agreed. Check out the SciFi actors with the most makeup who made the big splashes. It takes tremendous acting talent to work through all of that and still emote. To get past the makeup and make the character really sympathetic (if not always loveable) is the mark of an exceptional actor. Andreas was brilliant and he really made G'Kar what he was. JMS has said so a number of times in his commentaries to the scripts. That's why JMS won't re-cast G'Kar: you won't get the same character by a long shot. Even if you get another fantastic actor, you won't get *G'Kar*.
The question there isn't "Did we need all of our weapons?" so much as "Did we have a viable surrender on the table before the atomic bombings?"
Now, we *could* have beaten them at that point without nuclear weapons. That's no disrespect, that's just how things were. (Early in the war it was certainly touch-and-go. Once our war machine got rolling, once we got experience fighting, and especially once the European front was won, the Japanese were simply facing overwelming odds. To say that we needed every means at are disposal at that point is just silly. It's not a matter of respect, it's a matter of recognizing when two sides aren't fairly matched anymore.) For one thing, we were literally starving them to death by submarine warfare. (Remember the U-boats? We were succeeding with a similar tact against Japan.) I've heard estimates that they could have survived maybe six months to a year before they would have been forced to capitulate from pure starvation.
In as much as Einstein didn't build or drop the bomb, I'm not quite clear about why you'd blame him. He didn't even write the leter to President Roosevelt, Leo Szilard did. (Arguably nitpicky, sure.) Einstein *signed* it because there was a very real concern that Germany would get the bomb first. I don't think it speaks negatively about Einstein that he didn't want to see the Third Reich the sole owners of that kind of power. Do you?
Whether the bomb should have been dropped or not depends a lot on how much you feel it was a ploy to scare the Soviets. (Dropping the bomb was certainly a less costly (for us and for them) route to forcing the Japanese surrender than an invasion, however. That's undisputed. But, again, the question is: did we need to even do that? Historians are still arguing about what happened, so I'm hesitant to pass a very firm judgement there.)
From the article:
"Solis contacted the girl through her MySpace Web site in April, telling her that he was a high school senior who played on the football team, according to the lawsuit."
If he lied about his age at all, it seems as if it would have been at most by about a year.
I do most of my grocery shopping at CostCo, as well as the shopping for a variety of other products. It's definitely true that some things are more expensive there, but I suspect that that has to do with negotiating power of other large chains. You definitely are *always* going to be happiest if you know the normal price for products at a few stores before you go shopping. (Safeway, for example, tends to almost always be more expensive and have worse-quality store brands than King Soopers in my area.) That said, as a rule CostCo is a lot cheaper than most other stores, provided you can store and use the item before it goes nasty. But that's also always something you should be thinking about before going shopping anywhere.
That's not entirely true. Yes, the legistlation should be considered on its merits. But you're a fool if you think that the source is irrelevent. Would you not scrutinize smoking legislation that came from the tabacco lobby with extra care? Given Amazon.com's history, I'd be very wary of the advice that they give and look very closely to see how it affects them. If it is fair and even-handed to them as well as everyone else, that's great. But it definitely bears looking at.
Oddly, this doesn't stop them from giving us all manner of advise on the topic.
(Doesn't it seem a bit weird to have Catholic priests lecturing people on how to have a successful marriage or the Vatican laying down rules about what is OK where sex is concerned?)
Why do you need ISS to provide data on humans in space? There are many years' worth of data from Russian and American space stations already. ISS isn't going to add a lot to that, actually.
Knowing who the publisher is doesn't equate to having heard of the journal. It's the journal's proported prestige (I didn't use that word to describe it, the original article did) that I question, not that it's a legitimate publication.
You are clear. You clearly sound racist when you say that.
You want to hinder Mexicans from legally entering the country as a way of making it "fair" that Asia is across the Pacific? You're comparing apples and oranges, here with legal and illegal immigration and you apparently seek to punish would-be legal immigrants from Mexico for the fact that their country shares a border with ours.
Pay attention, here: illegal immigration is illegal. It has nothing to do with legal immigration. Punishing one entire group because they're from a neighboring country all in the name of "being more fair" is nothing short of inane at best. Worse, it sounds (and may well be) poorly disguised racism. It smacks very much of wanting to allow in the "right" people and keep out the "wrong" ones.
Thanks!
Actually, I can't think of one in my field that's abbreviated that way. But the word "Analysis" doesn't really appear in any astronomy journals that I've seen. "Annals", yes. "Analysis", no. It's probably a culture thing. Even if it did, my guess is we're go for the shortest possible abbreviation. (Thus, "The Astrophysical Joural" is "ApJ" -- pronounced "ap-jay" -- for example.)
First of all, someone from China does *not* have to go through legal channels to immigrate to the US. It may be harder for them to sneak in than Mexicans, but if you can't imagine someone doing so (or that many of the same motivations for doing so apply), then you sorely lack imagination.
Second, you still haven't explain how you're going to undo this unfairness of Mexico being next door. That was your beef, but I see no solution to this injustice.
The article claims that the study was published in the "presigious" journal, Astrophysics and Space Science. I'm an astronomer and I've never heard of it. And yes, this does matter: a major find like ET life will have journals like Science and Nature tripping over themselves to publish it. Every step down from there is an indiciation that someone didn't think that the research was reasonable. Of course, the fact that this is a solid-state physicist who published this and not, say, a biologist is disturbing, too.
Also, I'm going to be a bit junior-high here and point out that "Astrophysics and Space Science" has a very unfortunate acronym and must be difficult to cite with its abbreviation.
Which is why it makes sense to fence off the entire border. The more effort you have to expend to get over, under, or around it, the fewer the number of people who will try.
Sure. But how much time, money, and committment is it worth to the American people? If you're only stopping, say, 50% of all attempted crossings and it costs $50 billion initially and $5 billion a year to maintain, is that worth it? (The figures are made up, but the way. They're just there to illustrate a point.) What about if/when people start dying due to the blocks in place? Is the public still going to be on board with that?
And I disagree that the national interest in this is grassroots. There are a few groups out there and several (in some cases rather racist) congresscritters pushing this. But a small grassroots movement does get national attention unless someone gives it that attention and when you get right down to it, we're ALWAYS being told that these cause-of-the-minutes are "grassroots". (So is a lot of the anti-gay stuff that goes on, after all.) I wouldn't put it past any politician, let alone Rove, to be stoke this one for his or her own ends. I'll believe that this is an issue that Americans really care about when I see them persist with their interest in it and when they're willing to pay up to deal with it. Until then, I'm going with the time-tested default position of "passing fad".
That proves little, though. They've moved because there's an unfenced area availible and that's easier to cross there, not because they can't cross the fence. In a sense, you've validated my point: building a wall just makes people be a bit smarter about how they cross.
As for the political will, we'll see how long Karl Rove can keep this going. Remember how hot and bothered he had people about those gays wanting to get married? No? It was only two years ago that it was *the* hot political issue.
A fair point, but I think that the irony remains. A border wall is still an insult to other countries (and our own competence, I might add) and rather ominous. Remember the stink raised when Isreal proposed a similar wall to try to stop would-be terrorists from getting in.
The expression was metaphorical. A ladder was not literally being suggested. The point is, build a better wall and if people want to get passed it, they will. People got out of East Berlin, didn't they? We have a much larger border to secure and much less will to go to extremes to defend it.
So you're saying that we should pay for their tickets over here? I conclude this because the reason it's easier to immigrate from Mexico has everything to do with that pesky ocean. I'll be surprised if you have a solution for getting rid of that obstacle, so that leaves assissting them to cross.
Presumably, they flash the "help us Batman!" signal and they give him the coordinates of the crosser. Then he zooms off in his Bat-copter or Bat-jet (sold separately) to the site to arrest the heinous criminal. Either that, or they send out US troops/border guards in choppers to try to get to the guy before he disappears again. Either way, it seems like it would take a lot of effort and not just a little fuel to nab each person, doesn't it?
What I find really funny is the fact that they don't realize that as soon as the webcams start working (if they ever do), the people crossing the border will just pick NEW spots at which to cross. But I assume that Gov. Perry will be re-elected by then and no one will care.
Because then people will just find 21-foot ladders. If you can't patrol the wall properly, it's nearly useless and a terrible waste of money. As long as there's an incentive to cross the border and people can find a way across that's worth the cost, they'll come. Which points to the smart solution, I think.
On the other hand, we could build the wall. And then a future Mexican president can stand by the wall and demand that the US bring down that wall. The circle will be complete, although the irony will probably be unappreciated.