There are three big problems with saying "presumption of innocence" and "bring him in alive":
1) Bin Laden had already claimed credit multiple times for 9-11 and we had plenty of other evidence that he (and Al Qaeda in general) were behind it. We really didn't need any more proof.
2) "Presumption of innocence" is fine in a local, state or federal criminal matter, but when it comes to acts of war there isn't any "innocent until proven guilty." Should US soldiers capture alive everyone they face so we can have separate trials for each person? It's war. People are killed. It's not pretty. (Side note: This is precisely why we shouldn't get into a war unless there's a very good reason).
3) By all accounts, the special forces that went in to capture/kill Bin Laden encountered a firefight. Bin Laden himself was firing on them. They quickly made a determination that he wouldn't be captured alive and so they killed him. It's very easy to say "Well, they could have just done X, Y and Z instead and captured him alive. Simple!" The fact of the matter is, though, that none of us were in that situation and I doubt many of us have ever been in anything close to that sort of situation. The soldiers did the best they could under fire and I, for one, think they did an exceptional job. No American lives lost and Bin Laden not only killed but his body recovered to provide proof of death? I'd call that a successful mission!
If it's not in the store, then you can get it from Netflix with a paid subscription or possibly for free at your local library. If you want to own the disc, you can check eBay for an older vault release. If the "Locked In The Vault" strategy ever worked, it is extremely easy to get around nowadays (without even resorting to piracy). The only reason for it now is to keep releasing Diamond Ultra Platinum Special Edition DVD-Blu-Ray Combo Packs, Now With Extra Bonus Features to desparately try to lure buyers to get one more copy.
There was an unofficial YouTube channel made for Roku. It worked great, but it seems that YouTube is demanding it be taken down. http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2011/04/25/youtube-asks-settop-maker-roku-remove-access-videos
There's a difference between telling your neighbors "We'll be out of town over the weekend, could you keep an eye on our house for us" and telling the entire Internet "We're leaving our house vacant this weekend and, by the way, here's a geotagged photo of our kids playing in the backyard." Just because Security Through Obscurity doesn't work in some instances doesn't mean it is a bad idea in all instances. Similarly, just because openness is a good idea in some instances, doesn't mean it is a good idea in all instances.
Wait. It all makes sense now. Skynet wasn't really a military computer network but was actually developed by the combined efforts of the RIAA and MPAA to take down Internet piracy (and anything that threatened their business model). Skynet was programmed with a rigid interpretation of copyright law, became self-aware and soon reasoned that humans would commit copyright violations every time they thought of or hummed a song. It reasoned that the only way to prevent all copyright violations from occurring would be to destroy humanity. It took over a military computer system and the rest is future-history. Insidious!
I was under the impression that the whole point of the DMCA was to force the ISP to pull content first and ask questions later - essentially forcing the legal threat onto the person who's least equipped to deal with them.
My understanding of the DMCA is that it charts a course of action for ISPs to take when they're accused of hosting copyrighted material without proper consent. First, the ISP takes down the content. Next, they send a note to the account holder who uploaded the content informing them of the DMCA action.
At this point, the account holder (in this case IMSLP) can A) accept the takedown and move on or B) formally tell the ISP that the DMCA claim is without merit. Once the latter is done, the ISP has to restore the content and is relieved of any legal liability. The person/company that sent the DMCA notice then has to file suit with the person/company who uploaded the content and prove (in a court of law) that the DMCA notice *was* valid. If they don't (either losing the suit or not filing one), the content stays online. If they do (proving that a copyright violation occurred), the content is taken down again.
Yes, this often leads to big companies suing individuals, but the alternative is big companies threatening ISPs with lawsuits if content they don't like isn't removed. Without the DMCA's removal of ISP legal liability, any person/company with enough power could claim copyright over any uploaded content and force its removal.
On the flip side, without the DMCA, being an ISP (or a message board operator or running any service where users post content) would be extremely risky legally as any individual could post a copyrighted item leading to a fine against your company. The larger a service got, the greater the risk that one rogue (or copyright-lax) user would post something that earned the company a fine. And, of course, the larger a service got and the more money it made, the more likely big companies would try to find that copyrighted content to either A) stop the service from growing or B) tap into the service's revenue stream. In the face of a legal landscape like this, many online services would fold rather than risk legal action and fines.
There are services like TwitLonger to allow for longer-than-140 character tweets. The problem for Twitter is that they want to continue to support the SMS-crowd who are limited to 160 character messages. (Leave some room for the @Username and you get the reason for the 140 character tweet limit.) Of course, I count myself among the SMS crowd. I just haven't found justification yet for spending $30 per month per phone for cell phone web access.
Perhaps Twitter could set up a system where long tweets would get sent with as much text as possible and then a link, like so:
TwitterUser: This is my detailed reasoning why long tweets are so great. First of all, they let you full express... http://t.co/ABC12345
Then, if you were an SMS user and wanted to read more, you could tweet "bookmark" and the link to Twitter (i.e. texting "bookmark http://t.co/ABC12345" to 40404). Twitter would keep the link bookmarked for you to read when you signed on via a web browser or client that supported long tweets. They already support some SMS commands like "follow" to allow people to manage their twitter-stream via SMS. It wouldn't be a stretch to do this.
Like you I started at 255 pounds and went down a ton. (173 at my lowest when I was actually called "too skinny" for the first time in my life!) I found many things that helped me, but there were three important points:
1) Drink lots of water. It's amazing how often you mistake your body's "I'm thirsty" signals for "I'm hungry." Plus, water fills you up so you injest less calories.
2) Keep a food journal. Be annoyingly anal about it. Write down every little thing you put in your mouth. (Use your geekliness to motivate you. If you're a math geek, figure out how many calories you're injesting. If you're a gaming geek, think of yourself as a character and your caloric intake as a "stat" to be tracked.) And make sure you weigh/measure your snacks so you can accurately record them. Get a digital food scale and/or use your measuring cups. Taking an open container of peanuts to the couch is a recipe for disaster. "I only ate a few" really means "I ate ten servings."
3) A real serving is much less than an American serving. That plate of pasta you get at a restaurant? Three real servings (if not more). Don't even assume that a "single size" bag of chips is one serving. Check the nutrition label. It might just be 2.5 servings. (Like anyone is going to eat 40% of one of those bags and then say "I'll save the rest for later.") In fact, checking nutrition labels is so important I'll repeat it: CHECK THE NUTRITION LABEL! You'll soon find those "not *that* bad for me" snacks you've been eating actually are bad for you or aren't bad so long as you eat a very small amount of them.
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
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· Score: 1
I can't speak for bars (I don't to them because I rarely drink), but non-smokers never go to restaurants? And attic fans don't do anything about the smoke situation except maybe blow it around a bit. You can still smell the horrid stench, especially if you're right on the Smoking Section-Non Smoking Section line. Fortunately, I don't have to worry about my children ever experiencing this as smoking has been banned in restaurants for quite some time.
I could see allowing smoking if smokers were using electronic cigarettes (which apparently don't produce clouds of foul-smelling, carcinogen laden smoke), but not for normal cigarettes.
I can't speak for Europe, but in the US owning music (where "own" means you have the CD or purchased the MP3 online) does not give you permission to make copies for your friends. Fair use/Private copy allows you to make a copy for your own use. Once that copy leaves your possession, it ceases to be fair use and becomes copyright infringement. Of course, this kind of infringement is rarely, if ever, prosecuted because of the difficulty in tracking down who is making mix CDs for whom. If you burn your ten favorite songs to a CD and give it to your friend, he's probably not going to rat you out to the RIAA. And even if he does, they're probably not going to go through all the trouble of suing you for an infringement of 10 songs. Just because something isn't prosecuted often/at all doesn't mean that it's legal.
So the Chinese government wants to ban time travel stories to stop historical revisionism when they engage in massive historical revisionism themselves? (Tiananmen Square? Nothing ever happened there!)
I don't think that the Internet is a "human right" in and of itself. However, I think it is an important enabler of human rights such as freedom of speech. Suppose you live in a dictatorship and you want to express opposition to your cruel leader. You can stand on the street corner and say how awful he is, but that is likely to result in you being tortured/killed and possibly your family being put in harm's way too. You definitely won't be given the chance to gather with like-minded individuals to share stories of repression and discuss ways to improve your lives.
Now suppose you have Internet access. Suddenly, you are semi-anonymous, can state your views more freely and can meet/talk with others who share your views. Yes, the dictator can still track you down but depending on which technologies you use to conceal your identity and how far the dictator is willing go to find you, this can be difficult. At the very least, it is harder than saying "there's that guy on the street corner shouting 'Down With The Dictator!'"
So Internet access isn't a human right, but it makes some human rights much easier to obtain.
For my home backups, I have two external hard drives (both 1TB in size). I back up our computers onto the first hard drive. Then I back up this hard drive to the second hard drive. Finally, I move the second hard drive to an "offsite" location. In case of fire/theft/etc, my first hard drive may not be recoverable, but the second hard drive should be safe. Yes, a giant, area-wide disaster could wreck both backups, but those are rarities where I live and I think, in the event of one of these, I would be more worried about my family being safe than whether our digital photos were safe.
Cloud backups can have their place, especially if you don't have much to backup, but I think if a home user had to pick between the two, a set of external hard drives would be a lot better backup tool than the cloud.
That's my reasoning (except for the iPod... don't have one of those). You can buy a 2TB external hard drive from Amazon for $100. You can also buy a 2TB home NAS drive for under $200. That $200, meanwhile, will buy you a year of 200GB backups or 2.4 months of 1TB backups. The external hard drive is portable and data will transfer back and forth a lot faster than to Amazon's cloud. Add a second hard drive (up to 4.8 months of 1TB backups now) and you can get offsite backups going. Personally, I'd rather go with the "pay for it once" NAS or USB drive than with some annual-fee cloud.
Yes, but you see without these cameras terrorists would be running wild around our streets stealing our children during the night and brainwashing our pets. They operate on the same principle as my tiger repelling rock.
Exactly. Even if Director #1's intentions are completely honorable, he won't be in charge forever. Director #2 might abuse it or Director #3 might or Director #4. Or they all might just slightly alter the project's aim bit by bit so that you don't notice at all when it has been changed completely.
Years ago, when the Bush administration was claiming massive Executive Branch power, I'd always ask how people would feel about a Democrat using that power. At the time, I used Hillary Clinton since she seemed like the "Big Scary Democrat" back then. Even if you trusted Bush's administration with the power, could you trust a hypothetical Hillary Clinton White House with it? If so, what about the person that came after that? Maybe *they* can't be trusted. Oddly enough*, the party in power tends to want big, powerful government for their purposes but suddenly cares about small, "get out of our way" government when out of power. This is true for both Democrats and Republicans and only tends to differ in the areas the government grows.
* And by "oddly enough", I mean "not oddly at all."
Given that, in a continuous-survilance society, it doesn't matter if your behavior is improper. If you didn't commit something that they can lock you up for today, you did yesterday. Everyone does.
Or fine you as heavily as they can. Even if a politician doesn't want to lock you up for your crimes, they can levy fine after fine on you. This can be used to: 1) create financial hardships on individuals who oppose them and 2) raise money for the government (because anyone who opposes these fines is "soft on crime"). Of course, anyone with any wealth can find ways around the petty fines. Contribute $10,000 to Candidates X and Y and suddenly Very Rich Person won't be marked for speeding or anything else for a month. Meanwhile Middle Class Person will keep getting fines that they need to pay up, sapping time, money and energy from such troublesome activities as political activism.
What other engineer can take a cardboard box, turn it into a transmorgifier, then make it into a time travel machine and then make it into a duplicator? Not to mention that, when he added an ethicator to his duplicator, he built in a moral compromise spectral release phantasmatron. Sheer genius!
Science doesn't require faith. What it does require is Trust. Suppose Scientist A postulates a Theory X which attempts to explain Phenomenon Q. Theory X's math goes way over my head, but Scientists B, C and D are his peers. They understand this math. They look over his math/experiments/methodology/etc. If they poke holes in the theory, the theory is modified or discarded. Let's say Theory X survives relatively unscathed. This is now accepted as the most likely explanation (at the moment) for some Phenomenon Q. At this point, I can say that science has shown that Phenomenon Q is explained by Theory X.
I'm not having faith that the scientists did their job right. Instead, I trust that they did their job right. How is faith different from trust? Trust is earned. If I were to say that I proved what dark matter really is, I would have an uphill battle. This isn't my field of expertise (dark matter's pretty far from web development) and, as such, my skills in this area are unproven. If my friends said this paper was true, it wouldn't help at all. They aren't anywhere close to experts on dark matter. Is there an outside chance I could be right? Perhaps, but I haven't earned the trust of the scientific community that would lend weight to my theories.
Similarly, people can lose trust. If Scientist A follows up Theory X with Theory Y that states that the Universe is a giant burrito about to be eaten by God... well, he won't be getting many follow up papers approved in scientific journals. He'll be regarded as a bit of a loon and his future theories will have to overcome quite a bit to be looked at. He'll have lost the trust of the scientific community.
Faith is something that is either there or isn't there. You don't earn faith. Trust, however, is obtained by hard work and can be lost if you don't keep working hard. Science is built on trust, not faith.
When government shuts down, Congress and the President should have to work sans pay until a budget is hammered out. (Not their aides, mind you, but the actual Senators/Representatives/President.) After the budget is passed, they can resume collecting pay but lose out on any back pay. This would ensure that any shut downs are as shortlived as possible.
Not that it'll ever happen though, apart from one or two Congressfolk publicly rejecting their salary as a "show of support"/upcoming election ploy.
"Piracy is a market failure - not a legal one" Who is the author trying to rebut? Are people on the "other side" really saying "Piracy is a legal failure, not a market one."? I've never heard anyone make the claim that piracy exists because the laws are inadequate.
Have you been sleeping for the past few decades? The RIAA/MPAA is constantly lobbying for new laws to help them fight "the evil pirates." The DMCA is the obvious example, but there were other attempts. Recall that Senator Orrin Hatch (who constantly sided with the RIAA/MPAA) once said that he was in favor of giving the entertainment industry the ability to remotely destroy user's PCs if they suspected them of pirating. They are constantly pushing for "three strikes" laws where you're kicked offline after your third accusation (not conviction, accusation). They're constantly trying to bend the law to allow their lawsuits against pirates to go in their direction (and calling foul when it doesn't work in their favor).
In short, they view piracy as a legal problem. Throw enough lawyers and lobbyists at the problem and it will go away. Then they can go back to the good old days when they decided what people listened to (as well as when, where and how).
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There are three big problems with saying "presumption of innocence" and "bring him in alive":
1) Bin Laden had already claimed credit multiple times for 9-11 and we had plenty of other evidence that he (and Al Qaeda in general) were behind it. We really didn't need any more proof.
2) "Presumption of innocence" is fine in a local, state or federal criminal matter, but when it comes to acts of war there isn't any "innocent until proven guilty." Should US soldiers capture alive everyone they face so we can have separate trials for each person? It's war. People are killed. It's not pretty. (Side note: This is precisely why we shouldn't get into a war unless there's a very good reason).
3) By all accounts, the special forces that went in to capture/kill Bin Laden encountered a firefight. Bin Laden himself was firing on them. They quickly made a determination that he wouldn't be captured alive and so they killed him. It's very easy to say "Well, they could have just done X, Y and Z instead and captured him alive. Simple!" The fact of the matter is, though, that none of us were in that situation and I doubt many of us have ever been in anything close to that sort of situation. The soldiers did the best they could under fire and I, for one, think they did an exceptional job. No American lives lost and Bin Laden not only killed but his body recovered to provide proof of death? I'd call that a successful mission!
Try telling that to Weight Watchers who patented Points = (Calories/50) + (Fat/12) - (Min(Fiber, 4)/5)
They've sued "points calculator" programmers for infringing on their patent.
Of course, now they've moved on to their new Points formula which is much more complex, but still is a patented mathematical formula.
If it's not in the store, then you can get it from Netflix with a paid subscription or possibly for free at your local library. If you want to own the disc, you can check eBay for an older vault release. If the "Locked In The Vault" strategy ever worked, it is extremely easy to get around nowadays (without even resorting to piracy). The only reason for it now is to keep releasing Diamond Ultra Platinum Special Edition DVD-Blu-Ray Combo Packs, Now With Extra Bonus Features to desparately try to lure buyers to get one more copy.
There was an unofficial YouTube channel made for Roku. It worked great, but it seems that YouTube is demanding it be taken down. http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2011/04/25/youtube-asks-settop-maker-roku-remove-access-videos
There's a difference between telling your neighbors "We'll be out of town over the weekend, could you keep an eye on our house for us" and telling the entire Internet "We're leaving our house vacant this weekend and, by the way, here's a geotagged photo of our kids playing in the backyard." Just because Security Through Obscurity doesn't work in some instances doesn't mean it is a bad idea in all instances. Similarly, just because openness is a good idea in some instances, doesn't mean it is a good idea in all instances.
Wait. It all makes sense now. Skynet wasn't really a military computer network but was actually developed by the combined efforts of the RIAA and MPAA to take down Internet piracy (and anything that threatened their business model). Skynet was programmed with a rigid interpretation of copyright law, became self-aware and soon reasoned that humans would commit copyright violations every time they thought of or hummed a song. It reasoned that the only way to prevent all copyright violations from occurring would be to destroy humanity. It took over a military computer system and the rest is future-history. Insidious!
My understanding of the DMCA is that it charts a course of action for ISPs to take when they're accused of hosting copyrighted material without proper consent. First, the ISP takes down the content. Next, they send a note to the account holder who uploaded the content informing them of the DMCA action.
At this point, the account holder (in this case IMSLP) can A) accept the takedown and move on or B) formally tell the ISP that the DMCA claim is without merit. Once the latter is done, the ISP has to restore the content and is relieved of any legal liability. The person/company that sent the DMCA notice then has to file suit with the person/company who uploaded the content and prove (in a court of law) that the DMCA notice *was* valid. If they don't (either losing the suit or not filing one), the content stays online. If they do (proving that a copyright violation occurred), the content is taken down again.
Yes, this often leads to big companies suing individuals, but the alternative is big companies threatening ISPs with lawsuits if content they don't like isn't removed. Without the DMCA's removal of ISP legal liability, any person/company with enough power could claim copyright over any uploaded content and force its removal.
On the flip side, without the DMCA, being an ISP (or a message board operator or running any service where users post content) would be extremely risky legally as any individual could post a copyrighted item leading to a fine against your company. The larger a service got, the greater the risk that one rogue (or copyright-lax) user would post something that earned the company a fine. And, of course, the larger a service got and the more money it made, the more likely big companies would try to find that copyrighted content to either A) stop the service from growing or B) tap into the service's revenue stream. In the face of a legal landscape like this, many online services would fold rather than risk legal action and fines.
There are services like TwitLonger to allow for longer-than-140 character tweets. The problem for Twitter is that they want to continue to support the SMS-crowd who are limited to 160 character messages. (Leave some room for the @Username and you get the reason for the 140 character tweet limit.) Of course, I count myself among the SMS crowd. I just haven't found justification yet for spending $30 per month per phone for cell phone web access.
Perhaps Twitter could set up a system where long tweets would get sent with as much text as possible and then a link, like so:
TwitterUser: This is my detailed reasoning why long tweets are so great. First of all, they let you full express... http://t.co/ABC12345
Then, if you were an SMS user and wanted to read more, you could tweet "bookmark" and the link to Twitter (i.e. texting "bookmark http://t.co/ABC12345" to 40404). Twitter would keep the link bookmarked for you to read when you signed on via a web browser or client that supported long tweets. They already support some SMS commands like "follow" to allow people to manage their twitter-stream via SMS. It wouldn't be a stretch to do this.
Like you I started at 255 pounds and went down a ton. (173 at my lowest when I was actually called "too skinny" for the first time in my life!) I found many things that helped me, but there were three important points:
1) Drink lots of water. It's amazing how often you mistake your body's "I'm thirsty" signals for "I'm hungry." Plus, water fills you up so you injest less calories.
2) Keep a food journal. Be annoyingly anal about it. Write down every little thing you put in your mouth. (Use your geekliness to motivate you. If you're a math geek, figure out how many calories you're injesting. If you're a gaming geek, think of yourself as a character and your caloric intake as a "stat" to be tracked.) And make sure you weigh/measure your snacks so you can accurately record them. Get a digital food scale and/or use your measuring cups. Taking an open container of peanuts to the couch is a recipe for disaster. "I only ate a few" really means "I ate ten servings."
3) A real serving is much less than an American serving. That plate of pasta you get at a restaurant? Three real servings (if not more). Don't even assume that a "single size" bag of chips is one serving. Check the nutrition label. It might just be 2.5 servings. (Like anyone is going to eat 40% of one of those bags and then say "I'll save the rest for later.") In fact, checking nutrition labels is so important I'll repeat it: CHECK THE NUTRITION LABEL! You'll soon find those "not *that* bad for me" snacks you've been eating actually are bad for you or aren't bad so long as you eat a very small amount of them.
I can't speak for bars (I don't to them because I rarely drink), but non-smokers never go to restaurants? And attic fans don't do anything about the smoke situation except maybe blow it around a bit. You can still smell the horrid stench, especially if you're right on the Smoking Section-Non Smoking Section line. Fortunately, I don't have to worry about my children ever experiencing this as smoking has been banned in restaurants for quite some time.
I could see allowing smoking if smokers were using electronic cigarettes (which apparently don't produce clouds of foul-smelling, carcinogen laden smoke), but not for normal cigarettes.
I can't speak for Europe, but in the US owning music (where "own" means you have the CD or purchased the MP3 online) does not give you permission to make copies for your friends. Fair use/Private copy allows you to make a copy for your own use. Once that copy leaves your possession, it ceases to be fair use and becomes copyright infringement. Of course, this kind of infringement is rarely, if ever, prosecuted because of the difficulty in tracking down who is making mix CDs for whom. If you burn your ten favorite songs to a CD and give it to your friend, he's probably not going to rat you out to the RIAA. And even if he does, they're probably not going to go through all the trouble of suing you for an infringement of 10 songs. Just because something isn't prosecuted often/at all doesn't mean that it's legal.
Does this mean that in Soviet Russia, Time Travel bans you?
So the Chinese government wants to ban time travel stories to stop historical revisionism when they engage in massive historical revisionism themselves? (Tiananmen Square? Nothing ever happened there!)
I don't think that the Internet is a "human right" in and of itself. However, I think it is an important enabler of human rights such as freedom of speech. Suppose you live in a dictatorship and you want to express opposition to your cruel leader. You can stand on the street corner and say how awful he is, but that is likely to result in you being tortured/killed and possibly your family being put in harm's way too. You definitely won't be given the chance to gather with like-minded individuals to share stories of repression and discuss ways to improve your lives.
Now suppose you have Internet access. Suddenly, you are semi-anonymous, can state your views more freely and can meet/talk with others who share your views. Yes, the dictator can still track you down but depending on which technologies you use to conceal your identity and how far the dictator is willing go to find you, this can be difficult. At the very least, it is harder than saying "there's that guy on the street corner shouting 'Down With The Dictator!'"
So Internet access isn't a human right, but it makes some human rights much easier to obtain.
I can see this finding its way into some restaurant's food challenge. The Phaal challenge of Man vs. Food comes to mind:
http://www.eatmedaily.com/2009/01/the-phaal-challenge-at-brick-lane-curry-house-on-man-v-food-video/
Any time a gas mask is required for cooking, you can tell the food will be spicy!
For my home backups, I have two external hard drives (both 1TB in size). I back up our computers onto the first hard drive. Then I back up this hard drive to the second hard drive. Finally, I move the second hard drive to an "offsite" location. In case of fire/theft/etc, my first hard drive may not be recoverable, but the second hard drive should be safe. Yes, a giant, area-wide disaster could wreck both backups, but those are rarities where I live and I think, in the event of one of these, I would be more worried about my family being safe than whether our digital photos were safe.
Cloud backups can have their place, especially if you don't have much to backup, but I think if a home user had to pick between the two, a set of external hard drives would be a lot better backup tool than the cloud.
That's my reasoning (except for the iPod... don't have one of those). You can buy a 2TB external hard drive from Amazon for $100. You can also buy a 2TB home NAS drive for under $200. That $200, meanwhile, will buy you a year of 200GB backups or 2.4 months of 1TB backups. The external hard drive is portable and data will transfer back and forth a lot faster than to Amazon's cloud. Add a second hard drive (up to 4.8 months of 1TB backups now) and you can get offsite backups going. Personally, I'd rather go with the "pay for it once" NAS or USB drive than with some annual-fee cloud.
Yes, but you see without these cameras terrorists would be running wild around our streets stealing our children during the night and brainwashing our pets. They operate on the same principle as my tiger repelling rock.
Exactly. Even if Director #1's intentions are completely honorable, he won't be in charge forever. Director #2 might abuse it or Director #3 might or Director #4. Or they all might just slightly alter the project's aim bit by bit so that you don't notice at all when it has been changed completely.
Years ago, when the Bush administration was claiming massive Executive Branch power, I'd always ask how people would feel about a Democrat using that power. At the time, I used Hillary Clinton since she seemed like the "Big Scary Democrat" back then. Even if you trusted Bush's administration with the power, could you trust a hypothetical Hillary Clinton White House with it? If so, what about the person that came after that? Maybe *they* can't be trusted. Oddly enough*, the party in power tends to want big, powerful government for their purposes but suddenly cares about small, "get out of our way" government when out of power. This is true for both Democrats and Republicans and only tends to differ in the areas the government grows.
* And by "oddly enough", I mean "not oddly at all."
Or fine you as heavily as they can. Even if a politician doesn't want to lock you up for your crimes, they can levy fine after fine on you. This can be used to: 1) create financial hardships on individuals who oppose them and 2) raise money for the government (because anyone who opposes these fines is "soft on crime"). Of course, anyone with any wealth can find ways around the petty fines. Contribute $10,000 to Candidates X and Y and suddenly Very Rich Person won't be marked for speeding or anything else for a month. Meanwhile Middle Class Person will keep getting fines that they need to pay up, sapping time, money and energy from such troublesome activities as political activism.
What other engineer can take a cardboard box, turn it into a transmorgifier, then make it into a time travel machine and then make it into a duplicator? Not to mention that, when he added an ethicator to his duplicator, he built in a moral compromise spectral release phantasmatron. Sheer genius!
http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2011/04/05/
Science doesn't require faith. What it does require is Trust. Suppose Scientist A postulates a Theory X which attempts to explain Phenomenon Q. Theory X's math goes way over my head, but Scientists B, C and D are his peers. They understand this math. They look over his math/experiments/methodology/etc. If they poke holes in the theory, the theory is modified or discarded. Let's say Theory X survives relatively unscathed. This is now accepted as the most likely explanation (at the moment) for some Phenomenon Q. At this point, I can say that science has shown that Phenomenon Q is explained by Theory X.
I'm not having faith that the scientists did their job right. Instead, I trust that they did their job right. How is faith different from trust? Trust is earned. If I were to say that I proved what dark matter really is, I would have an uphill battle. This isn't my field of expertise (dark matter's pretty far from web development) and, as such, my skills in this area are unproven. If my friends said this paper was true, it wouldn't help at all. They aren't anywhere close to experts on dark matter. Is there an outside chance I could be right? Perhaps, but I haven't earned the trust of the scientific community that would lend weight to my theories.
Similarly, people can lose trust. If Scientist A follows up Theory X with Theory Y that states that the Universe is a giant burrito about to be eaten by God... well, he won't be getting many follow up papers approved in scientific journals. He'll be regarded as a bit of a loon and his future theories will have to overcome quite a bit to be looked at. He'll have lost the trust of the scientific community.
Faith is something that is either there or isn't there. You don't earn faith. Trust, however, is obtained by hard work and can be lost if you don't keep working hard. Science is built on trust, not faith.
When government shuts down, Congress and the President should have to work sans pay until a budget is hammered out. (Not their aides, mind you, but the actual Senators/Representatives/President.) After the budget is passed, they can resume collecting pay but lose out on any back pay. This would ensure that any shut downs are as shortlived as possible.
Not that it'll ever happen though, apart from one or two Congressfolk publicly rejecting their salary as a "show of support"/upcoming election ploy.
"including a great flood that wiped out humanity"
Wait. We were wiped out? Why am I always the last one to be told about these things?!!!
"Piracy is a market failure - not a legal one" Who is the author trying to rebut? Are people on the "other side" really saying "Piracy is a legal failure, not a market one."? I've never heard anyone make the claim that piracy exists because the laws are inadequate.
Have you been sleeping for the past few decades? The RIAA/MPAA is constantly lobbying for new laws to help them fight "the evil pirates." The DMCA is the obvious example, but there were other attempts. Recall that Senator Orrin Hatch (who constantly sided with the RIAA/MPAA) once said that he was in favor of giving the entertainment industry the ability to remotely destroy user's PCs if they suspected them of pirating. They are constantly pushing for "three strikes" laws where you're kicked offline after your third accusation (not conviction, accusation). They're constantly trying to bend the law to allow their lawsuits against pirates to go in their direction (and calling foul when it doesn't work in their favor).
In short, they view piracy as a legal problem. Throw enough lawyers and lobbyists at the problem and it will go away. Then they can go back to the good old days when they decided what people listened to (as well as when, where and how).