Either that, or they'll use the "feed the dog a pill" approach. First, they'll chop SOPA up into component parts. Next, they'll hide pieces of it into must-pass legislation. "We need to pass this emergency bill to help those poor flood victims. [mumbled tone]and require ISPs to block whatever websites we tell them to[/mumble]. You don't hate flood victims, do you?" This will keep us from noticing it until much or all of it is already law. Or, at least, that's what the SOPA proponents would hope to achieve. Hopefully, enough eyes will be on those non-related riders to sniff out these hidden pills.
Health records can contain personally identifying information (like SSN/DOB/address) which can be used for ID theft. (As an ID theft victim, trust me when I say this is *NOT* fun to clean up after.) Also, potentially embarrassing information could be revealed that was trusted to remain between doctor and patient. Working in IT in a medical organization, I can attest to the power HIPAA has over our actions. We need to keep it in mind with everything we do. People get fired for violations like looking up someone's records that they didn't have a job-related need to do. It's not a warning not to do it again with repeat offenders getting the boot. It's strike one and you're out. There will be an investigation and people will be fired.
These browser release schedules are getting out of control. First, FireFox considered updating as often as once every 5 weeks. Now, Opera is going to top them by developing faster than light technology so they can post updates before their predecessors were released! (Side note: I'm now running Opera version 10,573 and it's great. I expect to be able to update to 10,574 yesterday.)
I think using "job creation" is a perfectly acceptable buzzword to toss in. The MPAA/RIAA keep insisting that not passing their latest crazy copyright bill will mean lost revenue and job losses. We need to remind the politicians that the tech companies that these bills hurt also hire people. If you hurt the tech companies, you cause job loss. That's why we need to take a balanced approach and not just grab text from the MPAA/RIAA and copy-paste it into bills.
But think of all of those cat-bag makers that will be put out of work! I say we need to pass a law requiring all cats to be in not one, but two bags!!!! Any bag-less cat is a lost sale and lost sales are unamerican!
Can we also drape huge banners outside of their houses so they refuse to leave their rooms or look out of any window? Do this to enough congressfolk and we just might solve the problem!
Even if you accepted the "copyright infringement is theft" analogy, SOPA is not about the Internet equivalent of "stealing goods off a truck." Copyright infringement is already illegal and there are already provisions to handle it. You notice your copyright is being infringed, you send a DMCA notice to the website, they take down the infringing material (or open themselves to a lawsuit), and then the uploader gets to respond (to get the stuff put back up). If you want to take down an entire site for copyright infringement, however, you need to first prove your case to a judge.
SOPA takes that pesky judge out of the equation. Suppose that there are 10,000 sellers on SomeAuctionSite.com. Of these, 9,999 are legit. They sell items that nobody would have any problem with. One seller, however, is selling copyright infringing material. (For example, copies of DVDs.) Instead of the DMCA notices, the MPAA could contact the payment processors and ad sites that SomeAuctionSite.com uses to get their operating money. With their access to money cut off, SomeAuctionSite.com closes down. 9,999 legit sellers are taken down to get rid of 1 pirated DVD seller. It's using a bazooka to kill a fly, but the RIAA/MPAA doesn't care because they just want the fly dead and don't care about the collateral damage.
In fact, it's even worse than that example. Suppose that the 1 seller on SomeAuctionSite.com didn't sell pirated DVDs but instead sold photos he took. Now let's say someone looked at one and thought it looked like a photo they had taken. They start to believe that this seller is selling other people's copyrighted photos and send SOPA notices to the payment/ad companies SomeAuctionSite.com uses. Nothing is proven in court, but still funding is cut off and SomeAuctionSite.com closes. Even if that seller is innocent of any infringement. SomeAuctionSite.com isn't even given any notice until their funds are cut off. By that point, their business will be bleeding money until they can clear things up. (Imagine if your business couldn't take any money in for some reason. How long would it last before it closed shop?)
SOPA is a MPAA/RIAA wet dream and a Freddy Krueger for the rest of us.
And, in at least one version (Super Mario World), he stomps on the turtles causing them to go hurtling out of their shells. The then-defenseless turtles are hit with their own shells to kill them. Such cruelty to fictional digital animals cannot be allowed!
In Capital vs. Thomas, the verdict was for $2,250 per song. So your 30,000 MP3 player/phone would be worth $30,000 if the songs were legitimate and $67.5 million if they were pirated. That makes the $500 sale price even better. It'd be 99.999% off!
The RIAA hates used CDs also and would stop them from being sold if they could. Unfortunately (for them in some ways, for us in others), selling a piece of plastic that you bought is a lot clearer ownership transfer than copying a few files and saying "you own these now."
Sadly, I think we are headed more towards a "100 years from now" future where copyrights have been extended to 250 years (after all, that's "limited", right?) than a future where copyrights were kept at 95 years and content was allowed to fall into the public domain.
Then again, a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago, movies were vastly different than they are today. They didn't even have sound. It's possible that 100 years from now, watching a 2011 movie would be as interesting to the average American as watching a silent movie is to the average American of today.
You can't "move" followers on Twitter. People follow a Twitter account on their own. Let's say he made a "@PhoneDog2" account (since PhoneDog seems to already have @PhoneDog). He could post a message asking people to follow PhoneDog2, but it would be up to each individual follower whether or not they followed. He could change that account's name to PhoneDog2 and register a new personal account, asking people to asking people to follow that one also, but they would (again) have to opt-in to following his new account.
In the first scenario, I'm sure PhoneDog would ask for both accounts (the latter since it used PhoneDog's name and the former because he built his followers partially using PhoneDog's name). In the second scenario, he'd be able to turn over the former PhoneDog_Noah account, but his personal account might wind up with many fewer followers.
I'd wager that it wouldn't be considered at the same level as synthetic material candy. At least not all kosher certifying organizations would consider it that. Gelatin is often made from meat (calf stomach lining), but processed until it is unrecognizable as meat. Still, most kosher agencies don't like the mixing of meat-based gelatin and milk. I'm thinking that this fake-meat would be considered to be meat. Whether it was kosher or not, would probably depend on what animal the cells were originally from and how it was obtained. Alternatively, it might be considered that since this "animal" (really, vat of cells) doesn't chew its cud or have cloven hooves that it cannot be kosher at all.
I think we have to start with the facts as we know them now. Right now, we know of no alien civilizations. This could be because there are none out there. However, considering how large the Universe is, I'd put the odds of that as very low. So why haven't we found any? It could be because we lack the tools to locate them. Either because we can only see (and even then sort of indirectly) super-Earth sized planets while perhaps the largest alien construction project was smaller than that. No, maybe we're looking in the wrong direction (or have our view blocked). However, there's a third option. When a civilization becomes big enough, perhaps their large construction projects don't look like giant metal balls, but like naturally occurring solar systems. Perhaps they travel to a star and manipulate it to generate the kind of radiation they need and then create (or move) a planet into the correct orbit, engineer it's habitat, etc. When they're done, perhaps it'd look like this solar system developed naturally. We might stumble upon it, think nothing of it (maybe the planet was a super-Jupiter and the moon is where they live) and move on.
There are a lot of possibilities that involve aliens existing but us not knowing of them. All we can do is keep examining the Universe both for life and just to see how it works. All we really know right now is that we don't know enough to have a definitive answer to: Are we alone?
Or on the outside edge of it. Perhaps we live in "real physics land" and a few galaxies over the laws of physics have been modified to allow for certain alien projects to be possible.
Let's assume for a second that an alien race existed that got advanced enough to build something big. First of all, how big would it need to be to be detected by us? Currently, we are on the verge of detecting Earth-sized planets. Even when we detect these, it isn't some telescope taking ultra-HD photos of the planet. It's a detection of gravitational effects or seeing the star's light dim as the planet passes between us and the star. So I'd wager we'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between an alien built Ultra-Planet-Sized-Death-Orb and Naturally Occurring Planet #52. Anything smaller than star-sized would either be mistaken as a naturally occurring object or would go completely unnoticed.
So now our alien race has advanced to the point that they can build space-constructs the size of a star. Now, we'd need to actually detect it. For that, we need to ask where are they? Are they in the Milky Way? If not, chances are we see their galaxy and not them. Even if they are in the Milky Way, if they are on the far side we might not notice their object because it is blocked by the rest of the galaxy.
Then there's the problem of distance. Remember, looking into the sky is like looking into the past. Suppose this alien civilization is 100,000 years ahead of us. If they are 10 light years away, no problem. We'll just see things the way they were 10 years ago. If they are 100,000 light years away, though, we'll see things the way they were when they were at our technological level. A million light years away and we'll be seeing them when they were cave-aliens. (And I use the term "seeing them" loosely. See the first point.)
So even if an alien built a giant object in space, they would need to position it just right and have it be positioned at the right time for us to spot it. At this point, the fact that we haven't seen any aliens has more to do with the size of the universe and our detection abilities than whether or not aliens exist. This doesn't mean that they do exist. Just that lack of proof of existence doesn't equal proof of non-existence.
I actually did more math to figure out the size of the asteroid. At that scale, the asteroid would be the size of a bacterium. I doubt you'd notice someone shooting a bacteria 17 feet from your head (no matter what speed it was travelling at).
Scott Adams is proposing a "Fact Checking" 4th branch, but this already exists. Groups like Politifact are already evaluating politicians statements and rating them according to their veracity. For example, here is their check of Rick Perry claiming that everyone would get a tax cut under his plan: http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2011/nov/07/rick-perry/rick-perry-says-under-his-tax-plan-everyone-will-b/
They also equally hit both sides of the aisle. Here they are disproving Obama saying that he's completed 60% of his campaign promises: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/nov/01/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-60-percent-his-promises-are-done/
The two problems with groups like Politifact are that 1) their response isn't immediate and 2) relatively few people will read their responses. In the case of the former, A politician will say something at a rally or on TV and they will check into it and get their response up a day later. It's the nature of fact-checking, but by then the soundbite has sunk in. It doesn't matter if "Everyone gets a tax cut" is true or not because thousands heard it. Likely, if at a rally, thousands heard it over and over said in a sincere sounding voice. The "that's just not true" delayed response is weaker. (If it was just as strong, then Snopes would have made urban legend e-mails a thing of the past.)
As for the latter, I don't know the readership of Politifact offhand, but I'm sure it is under the amount of people who hear the candidates speak. Thus, even if you *do* get the real story later, you are in the minority. Most folks have continued on their way thinking "Everyone gets a tax cut" must be true because their candidate said so. (Blindly accepting a candidate's word because they are in "your party" is a completely different problem, of course. No amount of fact-checking will cure this.)
That said, making them part of the government would only open the door for their fact checked reports to be manipulated by special interests or political bosses. "We can't release that report saying that everyone doesn't get tax cuts. The party chairman said it was true and we can't embarrass him like that. Politifact might not make a big impact, but at least it is outside of the control* of the political parties.
* Ok, everything can be controlled if you try hard enough, but it would be harder to control Politifact now than it would be if it was a government agency.
Probably, but this wouldn't be within arm's length.
The Earth has a diameter of about 12,756 km. A human face (from tip of nose to back of head) is about 8 inches. (Yes, I actually measured mine.) The asteroid will pass no closer than 324,600km from the Earth. This gives us the equivalent "bullet distance to face" distance of 203.5 inches, or nearly 17 feet. If that's "arm's length", you have some very long arms! Remember, space is big. Mindbogglingly big. (Insert Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quote here.)
He may not be fired, but he many end up doing traffic court for the rest of his career. . If it's boring enough and at night, that might be a nice start.
I'm thinking his new career should be referee during wrestling matches. With one stipulation, however: The wrestlers will constantly forget that they just *pretend* to smack him in the back with a steel chair. "*WHAM!* Oops. We're supposed to fake that? I don't know why we have so much trouble remembering!"
Feeding your child is a natural behavior so it isn't as shocking, relatively speaking, to see a parent overfeeding their child. You disagree with what the parent is putting in their child's mouth, but not with the basic act.
This is beating your child. Whipping them. This is *not* a basic act of parenting. Even if you believe in spanking, spanking is different than beating. Therefore, you aren't questioning the father's methods (e.g. "he should only whip his daughter with the belt for three minutes; seven is excessive"), you are questioning the act itself. No part of what happened on this video should happen in any home.
Also, just to make things much better, this is a family court judge. So he might be ruling on matters of abuse in families. I wonder how many abuse cases were tossed out by him because he thinks beating a disabled girl for 7 minutes with a belt is normal.
I haven't watched the entire video. I've tried, but I just can't make it all the way through. As a father, I just can't see whipping my child like that for any reason. When I see a dad think that the proper response to downloading music illegally was to beat her like that, I try to understand why he would do this and my brain just can't wrap itself around it. I understand in theory why he might (anger issues, feeling beating his daughter is his "god given right", etc), but seeing it in practice is just too painful.
I think one of the parts (that I saw) that gets me the most is when he walks out. He's gone for about 30 seconds and then comes back in saying "I never got my whoopin'!" Then, he begins to whip her more while screaming at her to turn over and let him whip her "properly." (Thus setting up a rationalization in his mind that she "caused" the beating, I'm sure.) I would have thought that his time away from the situation would have led him to calm down. Instead, he seems to come back in angrier than ever. Silly me, thinking rationally when irrational thought processes were being used.
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Either that, or they'll use the "feed the dog a pill" approach. First, they'll chop SOPA up into component parts. Next, they'll hide pieces of it into must-pass legislation. "We need to pass this emergency bill to help those poor flood victims. [mumbled tone]and require ISPs to block whatever websites we tell them to[/mumble]. You don't hate flood victims, do you?" This will keep us from noticing it until much or all of it is already law. Or, at least, that's what the SOPA proponents would hope to achieve. Hopefully, enough eyes will be on those non-related riders to sniff out these hidden pills.
Health records can contain personally identifying information (like SSN/DOB/address) which can be used for ID theft. (As an ID theft victim, trust me when I say this is *NOT* fun to clean up after.) Also, potentially embarrassing information could be revealed that was trusted to remain between doctor and patient. Working in IT in a medical organization, I can attest to the power HIPAA has over our actions. We need to keep it in mind with everything we do. People get fired for violations like looking up someone's records that they didn't have a job-related need to do. It's not a warning not to do it again with repeat offenders getting the boot. It's strike one and you're out. There will be an investigation and people will be fired.
These browser release schedules are getting out of control. First, FireFox considered updating as often as once every 5 weeks. Now, Opera is going to top them by developing faster than light technology so they can post updates before their predecessors were released! (Side note: I'm now running Opera version 10,573 and it's great. I expect to be able to update to 10,574 yesterday.)
I think using "job creation" is a perfectly acceptable buzzword to toss in. The MPAA/RIAA keep insisting that not passing their latest crazy copyright bill will mean lost revenue and job losses. We need to remind the politicians that the tech companies that these bills hurt also hire people. If you hurt the tech companies, you cause job loss. That's why we need to take a balanced approach and not just grab text from the MPAA/RIAA and copy-paste it into bills.
But think of all of those cat-bag makers that will be put out of work! I say we need to pass a law requiring all cats to be in not one, but two bags!!!! Any bag-less cat is a lost sale and lost sales are unamerican!
Can we also drape huge banners outside of their houses so they refuse to leave their rooms or look out of any window? Do this to enough congressfolk and we just might solve the problem!
Even if you accepted the "copyright infringement is theft" analogy, SOPA is not about the Internet equivalent of "stealing goods off a truck." Copyright infringement is already illegal and there are already provisions to handle it. You notice your copyright is being infringed, you send a DMCA notice to the website, they take down the infringing material (or open themselves to a lawsuit), and then the uploader gets to respond (to get the stuff put back up). If you want to take down an entire site for copyright infringement, however, you need to first prove your case to a judge.
SOPA takes that pesky judge out of the equation. Suppose that there are 10,000 sellers on SomeAuctionSite.com. Of these, 9,999 are legit. They sell items that nobody would have any problem with. One seller, however, is selling copyright infringing material. (For example, copies of DVDs.) Instead of the DMCA notices, the MPAA could contact the payment processors and ad sites that SomeAuctionSite.com uses to get their operating money. With their access to money cut off, SomeAuctionSite.com closes down. 9,999 legit sellers are taken down to get rid of 1 pirated DVD seller. It's using a bazooka to kill a fly, but the RIAA/MPAA doesn't care because they just want the fly dead and don't care about the collateral damage.
In fact, it's even worse than that example. Suppose that the 1 seller on SomeAuctionSite.com didn't sell pirated DVDs but instead sold photos he took. Now let's say someone looked at one and thought it looked like a photo they had taken. They start to believe that this seller is selling other people's copyrighted photos and send SOPA notices to the payment/ad companies SomeAuctionSite.com uses. Nothing is proven in court, but still funding is cut off and SomeAuctionSite.com closes. Even if that seller is innocent of any infringement. SomeAuctionSite.com isn't even given any notice until their funds are cut off. By that point, their business will be bleeding money until they can clear things up. (Imagine if your business couldn't take any money in for some reason. How long would it last before it closed shop?)
SOPA is a MPAA/RIAA wet dream and a Freddy Krueger for the rest of us.
And, in at least one version (Super Mario World), he stomps on the turtles causing them to go hurtling out of their shells. The then-defenseless turtles are hit with their own shells to kill them. Such cruelty to fictional digital animals cannot be allowed!
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought of the physical/license duality being related to quantum mechanics.
Now, I'm trying to think up an RIAA standard artist contract-Schrödinger's cat analogy. Except the cat has better survival odds.
In Capital vs. Thomas, the verdict was for $2,250 per song. So your 30,000 MP3 player/phone would be worth $30,000 if the songs were legitimate and $67.5 million if they were pirated. That makes the $500 sale price even better. It'd be 99.999% off!
The RIAA hates used CDs also and would stop them from being sold if they could. Unfortunately (for them in some ways, for us in others), selling a piece of plastic that you bought is a lot clearer ownership transfer than copying a few files and saying "you own these now."
Sadly, I think we are headed more towards a "100 years from now" future where copyrights have been extended to 250 years (after all, that's "limited", right?) than a future where copyrights were kept at 95 years and content was allowed to fall into the public domain.
Then again, a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago, movies were vastly different than they are today. They didn't even have sound. It's possible that 100 years from now, watching a 2011 movie would be as interesting to the average American as watching a silent movie is to the average American of today.
You can't "move" followers on Twitter. People follow a Twitter account on their own. Let's say he made a "@PhoneDog2" account (since PhoneDog seems to already have @PhoneDog). He could post a message asking people to follow PhoneDog2, but it would be up to each individual follower whether or not they followed. He could change that account's name to PhoneDog2 and register a new personal account, asking people to asking people to follow that one also, but they would (again) have to opt-in to following his new account.
In the first scenario, I'm sure PhoneDog would ask for both accounts (the latter since it used PhoneDog's name and the former because he built his followers partially using PhoneDog's name). In the second scenario, he'd be able to turn over the former PhoneDog_Noah account, but his personal account might wind up with many fewer followers.
I'd wager that it wouldn't be considered at the same level as synthetic material candy. At least not all kosher certifying organizations would consider it that. Gelatin is often made from meat (calf stomach lining), but processed until it is unrecognizable as meat. Still, most kosher agencies don't like the mixing of meat-based gelatin and milk. I'm thinking that this fake-meat would be considered to be meat. Whether it was kosher or not, would probably depend on what animal the cells were originally from and how it was obtained. Alternatively, it might be considered that since this "animal" (really, vat of cells) doesn't chew its cud or have cloven hooves that it cannot be kosher at all.
I think we have to start with the facts as we know them now. Right now, we know of no alien civilizations. This could be because there are none out there. However, considering how large the Universe is, I'd put the odds of that as very low. So why haven't we found any? It could be because we lack the tools to locate them. Either because we can only see (and even then sort of indirectly) super-Earth sized planets while perhaps the largest alien construction project was smaller than that. No, maybe we're looking in the wrong direction (or have our view blocked). However, there's a third option. When a civilization becomes big enough, perhaps their large construction projects don't look like giant metal balls, but like naturally occurring solar systems. Perhaps they travel to a star and manipulate it to generate the kind of radiation they need and then create (or move) a planet into the correct orbit, engineer it's habitat, etc. When they're done, perhaps it'd look like this solar system developed naturally. We might stumble upon it, think nothing of it (maybe the planet was a super-Jupiter and the moon is where they live) and move on.
There are a lot of possibilities that involve aliens existing but us not knowing of them. All we can do is keep examining the Universe both for life and just to see how it works. All we really know right now is that we don't know enough to have a definitive answer to: Are we alone?
Or on the outside edge of it. Perhaps we live in "real physics land" and a few galaxies over the laws of physics have been modified to allow for certain alien projects to be possible.
Let's assume for a second that an alien race existed that got advanced enough to build something big. First of all, how big would it need to be to be detected by us? Currently, we are on the verge of detecting Earth-sized planets. Even when we detect these, it isn't some telescope taking ultra-HD photos of the planet. It's a detection of gravitational effects or seeing the star's light dim as the planet passes between us and the star. So I'd wager we'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between an alien built Ultra-Planet-Sized-Death-Orb and Naturally Occurring Planet #52. Anything smaller than star-sized would either be mistaken as a naturally occurring object or would go completely unnoticed.
So now our alien race has advanced to the point that they can build space-constructs the size of a star. Now, we'd need to actually detect it. For that, we need to ask where are they? Are they in the Milky Way? If not, chances are we see their galaxy and not them. Even if they are in the Milky Way, if they are on the far side we might not notice their object because it is blocked by the rest of the galaxy.
Then there's the problem of distance. Remember, looking into the sky is like looking into the past. Suppose this alien civilization is 100,000 years ahead of us. If they are 10 light years away, no problem. We'll just see things the way they were 10 years ago. If they are 100,000 light years away, though, we'll see things the way they were when they were at our technological level. A million light years away and we'll be seeing them when they were cave-aliens. (And I use the term "seeing them" loosely. See the first point.)
So even if an alien built a giant object in space, they would need to position it just right and have it be positioned at the right time for us to spot it. At this point, the fact that we haven't seen any aliens has more to do with the size of the universe and our detection abilities than whether or not aliens exist. This doesn't mean that they do exist. Just that lack of proof of existence doesn't equal proof of non-existence.
I actually did more math to figure out the size of the asteroid. At that scale, the asteroid would be the size of a bacterium. I doubt you'd notice someone shooting a bacteria 17 feet from your head (no matter what speed it was travelling at).
If we feed this honey to dogs will they be dogs with bees in their mouths and when they bark they shoot bees at you?
Scott Adams is proposing a "Fact Checking" 4th branch, but this already exists. Groups like Politifact are already evaluating politicians statements and rating them according to their veracity. For example, here is their check of Rick Perry claiming that everyone would get a tax cut under his plan: http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2011/nov/07/rick-perry/rick-perry-says-under-his-tax-plan-everyone-will-b/
They also equally hit both sides of the aisle. Here they are disproving Obama saying that he's completed 60% of his campaign promises: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/nov/01/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-60-percent-his-promises-are-done/
The two problems with groups like Politifact are that 1) their response isn't immediate and 2) relatively few people will read their responses. In the case of the former, A politician will say something at a rally or on TV and they will check into it and get their response up a day later. It's the nature of fact-checking, but by then the soundbite has sunk in. It doesn't matter if "Everyone gets a tax cut" is true or not because thousands heard it. Likely, if at a rally, thousands heard it over and over said in a sincere sounding voice. The "that's just not true" delayed response is weaker. (If it was just as strong, then Snopes would have made urban legend e-mails a thing of the past.)
As for the latter, I don't know the readership of Politifact offhand, but I'm sure it is under the amount of people who hear the candidates speak. Thus, even if you *do* get the real story later, you are in the minority. Most folks have continued on their way thinking "Everyone gets a tax cut" must be true because their candidate said so. (Blindly accepting a candidate's word because they are in "your party" is a completely different problem, of course. No amount of fact-checking will cure this.)
That said, making them part of the government would only open the door for their fact checked reports to be manipulated by special interests or political bosses. "We can't release that report saying that everyone doesn't get tax cuts. The party chairman said it was true and we can't embarrass him like that. Politifact might not make a big impact, but at least it is outside of the control* of the political parties.
* Ok, everything can be controlled if you try hard enough, but it would be harder to control Politifact now than it would be if it was a government agency.
Probably, but this wouldn't be within arm's length.
The Earth has a diameter of about 12,756 km. A human face (from tip of nose to back of head) is about 8 inches. (Yes, I actually measured mine.) The asteroid will pass no closer than 324,600km from the Earth. This gives us the equivalent "bullet distance to face" distance of 203.5 inches, or nearly 17 feet. If that's "arm's length", you have some very long arms! Remember, space is big. Mindbogglingly big. (Insert Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quote here.)
I'm thinking his new career should be referee during wrestling matches. With one stipulation, however: The wrestlers will constantly forget that they just *pretend* to smack him in the back with a steel chair. "*WHAM!* Oops. We're supposed to fake that? I don't know why we have so much trouble remembering!"
Feeding your child is a natural behavior so it isn't as shocking, relatively speaking, to see a parent overfeeding their child. You disagree with what the parent is putting in their child's mouth, but not with the basic act.
This is beating your child. Whipping them. This is *not* a basic act of parenting. Even if you believe in spanking, spanking is different than beating. Therefore, you aren't questioning the father's methods (e.g. "he should only whip his daughter with the belt for three minutes; seven is excessive"), you are questioning the act itself. No part of what happened on this video should happen in any home.
Also, just to make things much better, this is a family court judge. So he might be ruling on matters of abuse in families. I wonder how many abuse cases were tossed out by him because he thinks beating a disabled girl for 7 minutes with a belt is normal.
I haven't watched the entire video. I've tried, but I just can't make it all the way through. As a father, I just can't see whipping my child like that for any reason. When I see a dad think that the proper response to downloading music illegally was to beat her like that, I try to understand why he would do this and my brain just can't wrap itself around it. I understand in theory why he might (anger issues, feeling beating his daughter is his "god given right", etc), but seeing it in practice is just too painful.
I think one of the parts (that I saw) that gets me the most is when he walks out. He's gone for about 30 seconds and then comes back in saying "I never got my whoopin'!" Then, he begins to whip her more while screaming at her to turn over and let him whip her "properly." (Thus setting up a rationalization in his mind that she "caused" the beating, I'm sure.) I would have thought that his time away from the situation would have led him to calm down. Instead, he seems to come back in angrier than ever. Silly me, thinking rationally when irrational thought processes were being used.