That was basically Satan's argument in Paradise Lost.
"Ye will not, if I trust
To know ye right, or if ye know yourselves
Natives and Sons of Heaven possessed before
By none, and, if not equal all yet free,
Equally free; for orders and degrees
Are not with liberty, but well consist.
Who can in reason, then, or right, assume
Monarchy over such as live by right
His equals; if in power and splendour less,
In freedom equal? or can introduce
Law and edict on us, who without law
Err not? much less for this to be our Lord,
And look for adoration to the abuse
Of those imperial titles which assert
Our being ordained to govern, not to serve!'"
In essence and in more modern terms: "God is immensely powerful, but just because he is physically capable of beating us all to a bloody pulp if we disobey him doesn't mean he has the right to do so. We deserve to run our own lives, not just to do as God decrees because he is big enough to enforce his will by violence."
Satan goes on to run the first uprising, and is promptly schooled on just what 'omnipotence' means in the form of the divine smackdown.
It is true that even the Catholic church admits that the vast majority of apparent posessions are just plain mental illness - but they do still claim that a small but non-zero percentage of them are genuine demonic effects. I gather the church regards the whole thing as a bit embarassing - they can't be seen to change their doctrine if they can possibly avoid it, so they have to continue to claim that demonic posession is a real thing, but at same time they know this view is outdated.
I can't imagine they would invite complete nonbelievers to a conference like this, though. Why invite someone to a conference who believes the issue being discussed is nothing but an ancient superstition? What they want really are professionals who believe that demonic posession is real, and does happen... and yet every single case of it they ever heard of is actually just mental illness. They just have to be willing to entertain the possibility that maybe the next one will be the real thing.
Confusingly, there are several very different religions that bear the label of 'satanism.' There are some that go back centuries, often new forms of what were once nature-worship pagan cults. Some are mishmashes of imagery, often taking the symbols of Satan but not believing in the character as an actual being - rather as a representation of human nature. And then there are the ones the others look down upon, the ones born more recently of cultural rebellion and the appeal of the forbidden, which get their religion more from horror movies than ancient texts.
More of a re-invention. Satan as a character is Jewish in origin, but their view of him is different. Satan to them isn't evil, or opposed to God - he is an agent of God who works to prove the faith of believers, as seen in the case of Job. He doesn't commit evil acts for their own sake, but commits evil so that the faithful may overcome it and thus grow stronger and closes to God in the struggle. Christianity started with that character, but reworked it entirely - turning Satan from the good-natured adversary into the antithesis of God, the Evil to God's Good, a character filled with spite and hate who revels in suffering and is driven to oppose all that is Godly. That is the Satan we have come to know today, perhaps because he is just far more interesting. Various sects and writers fine-tuned the details - transposing elements of pagan gods to give the goatlegs-and-wings image we would all recognise today.
Milton did some very nice work on Satan - he turned the rather vague and open-to-interpretation mentions in the bible into a coherent narrative of Satan's origin as the fallen angel who thought himself God's equal and was struck down in his pride, thus becoming dedicated to corrupting God's greatest work: Mankind. Milton actually thought he did a bit too well on that, as he was most displeased when people actually started seeing the prince of darkness as a sympathetic character.
This isn't a conference for outsiders. Those doctors-etc are still going to be Catholics, and devout ones too if they are getting an invite. They arn't inviting the enemy into their midst, they are inviting in members of the small intersection of the set of medical professionals and the set of demon-believing Catholics. Probably most of them work at Catholic-run or at least Christian-run schools and hospitals, as those employed anywhere else would be risking their jobs by openly admitting they believe some cases of mental illness are caused by demonic posession.
"Our priests didn't really rape children! It was Satan that made them do it! He put his sin-tentacles into the priests' brains and manipulated them, so you can't hold the priests responsible for their actions."
Pre-internet, there was a strong biased in favor of the popular in just about all things. Be they religion, hobbies, political views, etc. If something was popular, it was easy to find others who shared the interest - and they would be local and easy to communicate with. I think every village has a church, usually more than one - I've got three that I know of within five minute's walk of my home, and more than I can count right now within twenty minutes walk. But if I wanted to find satanists to talk to, before the internet... no. Not going to happen. I'd have to know one already who could introduce me. Today, it's a few seconds on google to find out anything I want, including the details of all the local sects.
You can see the same thing in hobbies, political groups... even unusually kinky pornography. It's easier for groups to form from a shared but niche interest than it used to be.
Depends how you define 'bad.' There are a lot of people who would be one-issue voters, if not for both the parties not caring about it. Take, for example, copyright reform - this being Slashdot, a lot of people here believe that some form of weakening of copyright laws would be in order to preserve freedom of innovation and because the cost of enforcement is unacceptable. But what can they do? The Republican party is in favor of even stronger copyright law, and the Democratic party is in favor of... exactly the same. They are both beholden to corporate interests, because that is where the money is - and it doesn't matter how good your policies are, you arn't going to get far in politics without the money to run a campaign. In the last presidential election, the candidates between them spent nearly three billion dollars. They differ only in exactly which corporations they serve.
The problem isn't that the parties are the same - they do differ substantially, as you describe. The problem is that they are both essentially corrupt, just in different manners, because that is the only way to compete in the political arena. Winning elections takes money, and you get money by courting the rich donors and implying that you'll do something to help them if they give you enough to get in power.
Using the device is indeed illegal. It's a law that just about everyone breaks, and it goes completly unenforced. Basically it's a relic from the past. They have long been sold openly, in the knowledge of everyone involved that it's illegal but no-one cares. All that's happened here is the ASA saying that, yes, everyone breaks the law - but you can't admit that in the advertising.
Potentially a point there, if the car is advertised in a way that could encourage speeding - eg, highlighting in the ad that the car can do a hundred and fifty miles an hour, when it's not marketed for racing purposes. We don't have any non-speed-limited public roads, so the only way you can legally do that speed is on private land such as a racetrack.
Would it be illegal if you tried to transfer to a music player *other* than the iPod? I'd find out, but I recall that licence agreement is exactly 99 pages long.... and it's in small font.
Disney confined some of it's classics to vault for a long time. Song of the South for some casual racism - completly unremarkable at the time of production, but an embarassment just the same. Fantasia for the same reason. Even Streamboat Willie, for Micky Mouse performing some cartoon violence not in fitting with the image Disney wants for the character today. They do still show these things, for they are valuable brands and have historical significence, but not in the original form. They are edited to some extent to hide whatever it is that Disney doesn't want to show. They excised a whole character from Fantasia by zooming-and-cropping any frames they appear in.
There's also one of the deliberatly vaulted in there. The Happiness Patrol features a minion of the villain that, apparently by pure coincidence, resembles very closely Bertie Basset the mascot of the liquorish allsorts brand. The BBC promised that they would never allow the episode to air again, in return for an agreement from Bassets and Co not to take any legal action.
From the show website: "The stories of the twelve Kids of Zodiac Island share family values of loving, respect, and ethical behavior while learning to enjoy Nature. The loving, joyful Zodiac Kids are role models for children across the globe, and help everyone realize we are all peaceful, loving, happy beings."
So... nothing of value was lost? Sounds anvilicious to me.
A good point though. Businesses go out of business. Some television of the past has even been deliberatly destroyed for legal reasons, or because it is embarassing to the company today. Still more can no longer be shown for the same reason, and remains locked up in a vault somewhere. VHS tapes degrade quickly, but now the pirates have digital technology, they do serve to preserve - thousands of people with their own stores, independant, backups for each other. They can't be legally compelled to destroy anything, because they just don't care. Companies come and go, but so long as someone is willing to replace the occasional failed hard drive, a pirate collection is forever.
"What does increased browser market share really accomplish?"
Cross-promotion. Internet explorer had MSN set as it's default homepage. It had bookmarks set by default to Microsoft's sites and it's partners. Just open IE (I'm going to assume you never deleted them) and look at the ones included - MSN Autos, MSN Money, MSN Money, MSN sport, MSN news, Microsoft at Home, Microsoft at Work, Microsoft Store. I can't remember what the old IE6 did searchwise, but later on they would use IE to heavily promote Bing by making it the default search provider - perhaps the only reason anyone uses Bing at all, as there was no other reason to switch from the firmly established Google. Microsoft makes no money from IE directly, but it serves to drive customers to their commercial services.
Don't forget their use of bundling to enter the media technology sector. The inclusion of Windows Media Player with windows killed off Winamp and just about every other small media player there was, and then they made sure their WMA format became established by including a WMA-only CD ripping capability with the OS. The WMA format is so horrible it failed to displace MP3 even with that advantage (It's the only audio file format I know capable of carrying a virus), but without that bundling it would probably be completly unknown. The same thing for Windows Movie Maker and it's WMV-only export capability. The intention to me seems obvious - get people to use the conveniently supplied tools and thus amass collections of WMA and WMV files, effectively tying them to the Windows platform and to Media Player - as it's legally difficult to have any other player read them. Microsoft patented the container, thus why Virtualdub had to drop support.
WMV can at least be defended for having one of the best video codecs available for low-bitrate at the time. Maybe Realplayer could compete for cramming video through dialup, but the player was a piece of bloated, painful adware.
Depends on your aim. Freenet is one of the more prominant projects in this area, and it's designed for anonymous publication - that is, you don't mind the government seeing it so long as everyone else can, and it can't be traced to the source. Great for spreading videos of government abuse of power, leaked documents, counterpropaganda, surpressed books, etc. Anything you want everyone to see, but can't risk being identified as a distributor for. There is no invite needed, and yet finding the source of a document is very close to impossible baring some form of user error.
Not that user error is hard to induce. It's quite possible to say, send someone a link to a non-existant news article on a government-controlled server. They get the link, follow the link, find nothing there... and then all the attacker need do is grep the logs, because the one person who accessed that particular fake address must be the one it was sent to.
I've been urging that someone more capable than myself look into that. Unfortunatly routing would be a nightmare and latency just as bad - I imagine that it would be unuseable for real-time communcations, certainly so in sparsely populated areas. But it could still function using some sort of shared caching system, similar to Freenet - or even just using Freenet, with adaptations to run on portable devices and with ad-hoc connections between nodes.
If accused, you can probably prove you were not responsible. After the police have siezed every computer and mobile phone you own, the press has dragged your name through the mud, and half the town are at your door with the traditional pitchforks to expell the suspected pedophile. If you're lucky, the police might even give your computers back after a year or so, once they have finished searching it for any other crimes you may have committed they can charge you with to save face.
Though unfamiliar with the exact details of how it's implimented here in Europe (I imagine each country has a slightly different approach), the US law includes an exception for specialised bulbs or applications where high-efficiency replacements are no available. Oven lights, fridges, floodlights, navigational boat lights, that sort of thing. I imagine your shaving mirror would be included in that. You might have to buy online though, as fewer local retailers will be carrying incandescents.
Slashdot Mirror
That was basically Satan's argument in Paradise Lost.
"Ye will not, if I trust
To know ye right, or if ye know yourselves
Natives and Sons of Heaven possessed before
By none, and, if not equal all yet free,
Equally free; for orders and degrees
Are not with liberty, but well consist.
Who can in reason, then, or right, assume
Monarchy over such as live by right
His equals; if in power and splendour less,
In freedom equal? or can introduce
Law and edict on us, who without law
Err not? much less for this to be our Lord,
And look for adoration to the abuse
Of those imperial titles which assert
Our being ordained to govern, not to serve!'"
In essence and in more modern terms: "God is immensely powerful, but just because he is physically capable of beating us all to a bloody pulp if we disobey him doesn't mean he has the right to do so. We deserve to run our own lives, not just to do as God decrees because he is big enough to enforce his will by violence."
Satan goes on to run the first uprising, and is promptly schooled on just what 'omnipotence' means in the form of the divine smackdown.
It is true that even the Catholic church admits that the vast majority of apparent posessions are just plain mental illness - but they do still claim that a small but non-zero percentage of them are genuine demonic effects. I gather the church regards the whole thing as a bit embarassing - they can't be seen to change their doctrine if they can possibly avoid it, so they have to continue to claim that demonic posession is a real thing, but at same time they know this view is outdated.
I can't imagine they would invite complete nonbelievers to a conference like this, though. Why invite someone to a conference who believes the issue being discussed is nothing but an ancient superstition? What they want really are professionals who believe that demonic posession is real, and does happen... and yet every single case of it they ever heard of is actually just mental illness. They just have to be willing to entertain the possibility that maybe the next one will be the real thing.
Confusingly, there are several very different religions that bear the label of 'satanism.' There are some that go back centuries, often new forms of what were once nature-worship pagan cults. Some are mishmashes of imagery, often taking the symbols of Satan but not believing in the character as an actual being - rather as a representation of human nature. And then there are the ones the others look down upon, the ones born more recently of cultural rebellion and the appeal of the forbidden, which get their religion more from horror movies than ancient texts.
More of a re-invention. Satan as a character is Jewish in origin, but their view of him is different. Satan to them isn't evil, or opposed to God - he is an agent of God who works to prove the faith of believers, as seen in the case of Job. He doesn't commit evil acts for their own sake, but commits evil so that the faithful may overcome it and thus grow stronger and closes to God in the struggle. Christianity started with that character, but reworked it entirely - turning Satan from the good-natured adversary into the antithesis of God, the Evil to God's Good, a character filled with spite and hate who revels in suffering and is driven to oppose all that is Godly. That is the Satan we have come to know today, perhaps because he is just far more interesting. Various sects and writers fine-tuned the details - transposing elements of pagan gods to give the goatlegs-and-wings image we would all recognise today.
Milton did some very nice work on Satan - he turned the rather vague and open-to-interpretation mentions in the bible into a coherent narrative of Satan's origin as the fallen angel who thought himself God's equal and was struck down in his pride, thus becoming dedicated to corrupting God's greatest work: Mankind. Milton actually thought he did a bit too well on that, as he was most displeased when people actually started seeing the prince of darkness as a sympathetic character.
This isn't a conference for outsiders. Those doctors-etc are still going to be Catholics, and devout ones too if they are getting an invite. They arn't inviting the enemy into their midst, they are inviting in members of the small intersection of the set of medical professionals and the set of demon-believing Catholics. Probably most of them work at Catholic-run or at least Christian-run schools and hospitals, as those employed anywhere else would be risking their jobs by openly admitting they believe some cases of mental illness are caused by demonic posession.
"Our priests didn't really rape children! It was Satan that made them do it! He put his sin-tentacles into the priests' brains and manipulated them, so you can't hold the priests responsible for their actions."
Pre-internet, there was a strong biased in favor of the popular in just about all things. Be they religion, hobbies, political views, etc. If something was popular, it was easy to find others who shared the interest - and they would be local and easy to communicate with. I think every village has a church, usually more than one - I've got three that I know of within five minute's walk of my home, and more than I can count right now within twenty minutes walk. But if I wanted to find satanists to talk to, before the internet... no. Not going to happen. I'd have to know one already who could introduce me. Today, it's a few seconds on google to find out anything I want, including the details of all the local sects.
You can see the same thing in hobbies, political groups... even unusually kinky pornography. It's easier for groups to form from a shared but niche interest than it used to be.
Depends how you define 'bad.' There are a lot of people who would be one-issue voters, if not for both the parties not caring about it. Take, for example, copyright reform - this being Slashdot, a lot of people here believe that some form of weakening of copyright laws would be in order to preserve freedom of innovation and because the cost of enforcement is unacceptable. But what can they do? The Republican party is in favor of even stronger copyright law, and the Democratic party is in favor of... exactly the same. They are both beholden to corporate interests, because that is where the money is - and it doesn't matter how good your policies are, you arn't going to get far in politics without the money to run a campaign. In the last presidential election, the candidates between them spent nearly three billion dollars. They differ only in exactly which corporations they serve.
The problem isn't that the parties are the same - they do differ substantially, as you describe. The problem is that they are both essentially corrupt, just in different manners, because that is the only way to compete in the political arena. Winning elections takes money, and you get money by courting the rich donors and implying that you'll do something to help them if they give you enough to get in power.
Using the device is indeed illegal. It's a law that just about everyone breaks, and it goes completly unenforced. Basically it's a relic from the past. They have long been sold openly, in the knowledge of everyone involved that it's illegal but no-one cares. All that's happened here is the ASA saying that, yes, everyone breaks the law - but you can't admit that in the advertising.
Potentially a point there, if the car is advertised in a way that could encourage speeding - eg, highlighting in the ad that the car can do a hundred and fifty miles an hour, when it's not marketed for racing purposes. We don't have any non-speed-limited public roads, so the only way you can legally do that speed is on private land such as a racetrack.
Would it be illegal if you tried to transfer to a music player *other* than the iPod? I'd find out, but I recall that licence agreement is exactly 99 pages long.... and it's in small font.
How many bananna-equivilents?
Disney confined some of it's classics to vault for a long time. Song of the South for some casual racism - completly unremarkable at the time of production, but an embarassment just the same. Fantasia for the same reason. Even Streamboat Willie, for Micky Mouse performing some cartoon violence not in fitting with the image Disney wants for the character today. They do still show these things, for they are valuable brands and have historical significence, but not in the original form. They are edited to some extent to hide whatever it is that Disney doesn't want to show. They excised a whole character from Fantasia by zooming-and-cropping any frames they appear in.
There's also one of the deliberatly vaulted in there. The Happiness Patrol features a minion of the villain that, apparently by pure coincidence, resembles very closely Bertie Basset the mascot of the liquorish allsorts brand. The BBC promised that they would never allow the episode to air again, in return for an agreement from Bassets and Co not to take any legal action.
From the show website: "The stories of the twelve Kids of Zodiac Island share family values of loving, respect, and ethical behavior while learning to enjoy Nature. The loving, joyful Zodiac Kids are role models for children across the globe, and help everyone realize we are all peaceful, loving, happy beings."
So... nothing of value was lost? Sounds anvilicious to me.
http://www.zodiacisland.com/characters/index.html -- IT BURNSES ME! Really, children deserve better than that.
A good point though. Businesses go out of business. Some television of the past has even been deliberatly destroyed for legal reasons, or because it is embarassing to the company today. Still more can no longer be shown for the same reason, and remains locked up in a vault somewhere. VHS tapes degrade quickly, but now the pirates have digital technology, they do serve to preserve - thousands of people with their own stores, independant, backups for each other. They can't be legally compelled to destroy anything, because they just don't care. Companies come and go, but so long as someone is willing to replace the occasional failed hard drive, a pirate collection is forever.
"What does increased browser market share really accomplish?"
Cross-promotion. Internet explorer had MSN set as it's default homepage. It had bookmarks set by default to Microsoft's sites and it's partners. Just open IE (I'm going to assume you never deleted them) and look at the ones included - MSN Autos, MSN Money, MSN Money, MSN sport, MSN news, Microsoft at Home, Microsoft at Work, Microsoft Store. I can't remember what the old IE6 did searchwise, but later on they would use IE to heavily promote Bing by making it the default search provider - perhaps the only reason anyone uses Bing at all, as there was no other reason to switch from the firmly established Google. Microsoft makes no money from IE directly, but it serves to drive customers to their commercial services.
Don't forget their use of bundling to enter the media technology sector. The inclusion of Windows Media Player with windows killed off Winamp and just about every other small media player there was, and then they made sure their WMA format became established by including a WMA-only CD ripping capability with the OS. The WMA format is so horrible it failed to displace MP3 even with that advantage (It's the only audio file format I know capable of carrying a virus), but without that bundling it would probably be completly unknown. The same thing for Windows Movie Maker and it's WMV-only export capability. The intention to me seems obvious - get people to use the conveniently supplied tools and thus amass collections of WMA and WMV files, effectively tying them to the Windows platform and to Media Player - as it's legally difficult to have any other player read them. Microsoft patented the container, thus why Virtualdub had to drop support.
WMV can at least be defended for having one of the best video codecs available for low-bitrate at the time. Maybe Realplayer could compete for cramming video through dialup, but the player was a piece of bloated, painful adware.
Odd fittings. Some appliances take unusual sizes that arn't easy to get hold of, and may even be discontinued or manufacturer-specific.
Depends on your aim. Freenet is one of the more prominant projects in this area, and it's designed for anonymous publication - that is, you don't mind the government seeing it so long as everyone else can, and it can't be traced to the source. Great for spreading videos of government abuse of power, leaked documents, counterpropaganda, surpressed books, etc. Anything you want everyone to see, but can't risk being identified as a distributor for. There is no invite needed, and yet finding the source of a document is very close to impossible baring some form of user error.
Not that user error is hard to induce. It's quite possible to say, send someone a link to a non-existant news article on a government-controlled server. They get the link, follow the link, find nothing there... and then all the attacker need do is grep the logs, because the one person who accessed that particular fake address must be the one it was sent to.
I've been urging that someone more capable than myself look into that. Unfortunatly routing would be a nightmare and latency just as bad - I imagine that it would be unuseable for real-time communcations, certainly so in sparsely populated areas. But it could still function using some sort of shared caching system, similar to Freenet - or even just using Freenet, with adaptations to run on portable devices and with ad-hoc connections between nodes.
Massive, massive overhead. Also, only any use for private communications where both parties have already exchanged some form of key.
If accused, you can probably prove you were not responsible. After the police have siezed every computer and mobile phone you own, the press has dragged your name through the mud, and half the town are at your door with the traditional pitchforks to expell the suspected pedophile. If you're lucky, the police might even give your computers back after a year or so, once they have finished searching it for any other crimes you may have committed they can charge you with to save face.
CFLs do indeed contain a potentially dangerous amout of mercury.
If you eat them.
In bulk.
Though unfamiliar with the exact details of how it's implimented here in Europe (I imagine each country has a slightly different approach), the US law includes an exception for specialised bulbs or applications where high-efficiency replacements are no available. Oven lights, fridges, floodlights, navigational boat lights, that sort of thing. I imagine your shaving mirror would be included in that. You might have to buy online though, as fewer local retailers will be carrying incandescents.