Under Stanley v. Georgia (1969) (you can look it up, since you obviously know how) Americans cannot be forbidden from owning and perusing obscenity in the privacy of their own homes. Child porn is still a different issue.
I don't think that Brown vs. Board of Education belongs in this argument
Brown v. Board held in dicta that the primary role of the states in a modern era of a more powerful Federal government is in providing education to their citizens.
most teenagers are not ready for the real world as much as they think they are
No child is ready for the reality of raising her own children.
Under one version of the Gaia hypothesis, the earth ceases to exist once there is no one left to cherish her. Unmeasured events cannot be said to happen.
There were several major federal income taxes enacted during the Civil War years and the years thereafter. War-time income taxes were upheld by the supreme court in Springer v. US(1876 or so, IIRC). But when the first peace-time income tax in 1894, enough was enough, and the Supreme Court struck it down in Polluck v. Farmer's Loan and Trust 1895 as a violation of the direct-taxes provisions of the constitution (that income taxes as a direct tax must be apportioned among the states according to the census). The spectre of income taxes was not again raised until after the passage of the 16th amendment (proposed in 1908 or so, ratified in 1913) in the income tax act of 1913, itself challenged and upheld that same year. It's a terribly interesting chronicle of the illegitimate accumulation of power in a central government made constitutional only after the fact by a poorly thought-out constitutional amendment.
Premarital sex (fornication?) wasn't as much as a problem then; kids could get married much younger. Teenage pregnancy was expected of married teenage women.
Thank you for putting it right out in the open: the purpose of women is to make babies, and we should be grateful for that opportunity?
Could it be that we as a society think that children aren't yet able to properly conduct themselves in an increasingly complex and demanding world
But children already have the power to make babies themselves, especially with under duress by predatory behavior by adults. You would deny them their only way out?
Used to be that girls could get married before the age of fifteen. That's right, even the Virgin Mary was probably no older than 14. It was societal convention.
Indeed, it's still the same in some states like Utah, and it was and is a sick, sick time. In Victorian England, the age of consent for girls was 12 years old. TWELVE YEARS OLD. And you know what they also thought back then? Just as in other societies and parts of our own today, it was thought that the cure for sexually transmitted diseases was to have sex with a virgin. And do you know who those virgins were? Twelve-year-old girls. Fathers would coerce their daughters into contributing to the household income by prostituting themselves (not to mention the plight of orphans).
It is now the role of the state to provide education to minors (read Brown v. Board of Education), so there is no longer any need to hold them in thrall of their parents. And it is precisely that state education (in the form of library access) that is the subject of this article on slashdot. Your words have meaning, so think carefully about what sort of world you'd have us live in. One of habitual rape and unanswered pleas for help? Or one for emancipation. Our country has had many great moments of emancipation (13th amendment, 19th amendment, etc.) It is now time for another.
If you've been to a convenience store lately, then you already know this: Sony is now selling its own brand of disposable batteries. They're making a wholescale entrance into the battery market. But this then raises the question as to why they're focused on selling laptops that consume less battery life than their counterparts'? It'd be like HP deciding to sell printers that consume fewer ink-cartridges. HP is an ink company, and Sony is positioning itself as a battery company. We all know HP is a toothless enterprise if ever there was one, but Sony is a real competitive force.
We as slashdotters should petition the FTC to break them up now before they start leveraging their dominance in the record-label industry and come out with a line of Barbara Streisand batteries and seal our fate for us. They are still small enough to be broken up now. If we squander our opportunity, then we will have to answer to our children and grand children. We shall rue the day if it comes to pass.
Libraries aren't being called bastions of evil -- that's just a red herring of political forces rallying against filters (who have plenty of rational reasons for opposing them, without resorting to fear-mongering -- I should know, since I'm one of them). The real matter is much more sinister:
What is at stake here is parenting. Do the libraries have the power and right to educate children (or allow children to educate themselves) without first being sifted through parental control? Or must parents be afforded the constitutional power and right to determine what their children know and experience, because they are their children.
There is an interesting argument to be made on this point: the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution prohibits slavery within the borders of the US. But can't this sort of rigorous parental control be understood as a form of slavery? Girls who have the biological power to get pregnant are denied the right to an abortion without their parents' approval in many states; they are so much chattel to be disposed of by their fathers. It harkens back to hundreds of years of legal systems of marriage where the wife was legally indistinguishable from her husband and so couldn't initiate suits in her own name, much less seek divorce or protection from battery.
Libraries are just a convenient middleman. They don't want controversy -- they just want to pursue knowledge without consequences, consistent with ideals of science and enlightened thought. When politics starts to enter into this quest; when ethics boards get formed and regulations get heaped onto these disinterested parties, all of humankind suffers. All of us: woman, daughter, and child.
It may not be news, but it's a little patch of calm on slashdot, situated between the two flamefests that are US-politics articles. Just look around you: there's practically no one here. It's like reading the stories in the special-topics forums on the left column of the front page that don't make it to the front page itself, which I encourage all sincere and intelligent readers to do.
And don't forget, and it's still news that the courts have reached these rulings. This may be a lame article in itself, but it's a vehicle for intelligent discussion on an important subject.
Rather than serving the people, our government has tried it's damdest to become our ruler instead, starting with the imposition of the 16th Amendment
Actually, this isn't entirely far from the truth when you go back and look at which states actually ratified the 16th amendment and which states were counted as having done so even though they didn't. Kentucky's senate voted against ratification, yet they were counted. Oklahoma voted to ratify a substantially different version of the 16th amendment (making provision for appropriation according to census, not the absence thereof as in the official version of the 16th amendment). There's even an argument to be made that while Texas did vote to ratify, it could not have done so according to law, because it would have violated certain provisions of Texas's own constitution to do so. (The interesting part of the argument is whether state's own constitutions can restrict their ability to ratify federal constitutional amendments -- the language of the Constitution is ambiguous and perhaps even approving on this point).
So, then the result is a corrupt central government aggrandizing this power onto itself without respect for the contitutional processes that bear legitimacy. A similar argument can be made concerning the 14th amendment (which was ratified by southern "states" which hadn't been fully let back into the union since seceding) and even the original constitution (which required a smaller number of states ratifying it than even the 3/4 majority needed for amendment under Article V, much less the unanimity required under the Articles of Confederation). But it's sad, none the less.
From the article: If you don't have any way to put the program into a PIC 16C84 or 16F84 chip, you can build your own programmer.
So if you don't already have a programmer, you'll have to build a programmer yourself. None of this weak "find a programmer in a box" crap -- do it yourself.
As with other areas of the economy, especially energy management as it affects the environment, the focus is misguided on production rather than more efficient use. There's plenty of bandwidth to go around already, but it's being improperly allocated. Just think for a second about the sheer vollume of Pokemon and porn that's saturating the existing pipes, and you'll know what I'm talking about. Originally, the internet served a specific purpose of allowing academics to communicate and further the development of social and scientific knowledge. Today, it just lets people get their prurient fix or their yahoo quotes. Laying more fiber will perhaps further the science of fiber-laying, but the same can be said of all sorts of other make-work endeavors.
What I'm trying to get at is a call for a national moratorium on porn and other wasteful bandwidth. It'd do wonders for internet congestion and it'd help us as a society in the process.
The reason is to avoid classification as a medical device and have to undergo rigorous safety and efficacy trials. It's a matter of civil law, not criminal law.
Haven't you read Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886)? Corporations are considered full persons under American law, and yet you belittle their humanity. The whole person/corporation dichotomy is a false one, both under law and in principle: corporations are composed of human flesh just as you and I are. As such, they have full rights under the 1st, 5th, and 14th amendments to make political contributions and seek redress within the normal political processes as everyone else.
In the mid 1980s, Louisiana passed a law prohibiting the manufacture and sale of all devices resembling sexual organs or "designed or marketed... for the stimulation of human genital organs." Louisiana's supreme court recently struck down that ban 6-1, but before then, an entire category of technology was denied to Louisianans (and Alabamans by a similar law) simply because of prudish morality.
Law is people. Asking how law will continue to affect technology is like asking how people will continue to affect technology. It's an important but not terribly interesting question.
Slander is by definition oral. Once it's written down (as publications do by publishing it), it becomes libel. It's an incredibly important distinction, and it further undermines the consortium's credibility for failing to make it.
One of the great moral questions of our time (and equally true for all time) is whether truth will out. Thank heavens for slashdot, A New Hope. Thank heavens for the diligence of slashdot's readership and the glorious pursuit of truth. We should all get together in one big group hug and pat ourselves on our collective back. Good job. Keep up the good work.
It's libel, specifically group libel, an outmoded and obsolete legal classification in all but the most ignorant and backwater of jurisdictions, like Texas (re: Oprah's battle with the cattle industry a few years ago).
[Y]ou know, our testing managing committee started working on this Wednesday morning, and it's simply impossible to say whether this is true or this is false. Nobody knows! And when I say nobody, I mean nobody, because it's 450 music files that have yet to be tested.
So, then, whom are you going to believe? A historically ethical and prudent news magazine or the RIAA who "doesn't know what the fuck is going on; I repeat, we don't know our asses from our elbows, and we've only started trying to determine the difference since this past Wednesday"?
When you pledge money to public television or a thousand other "charities", you get a small gift in return, like an umbrella or a video. Does the perl community plan to continue in this tradition? I.e., for $100 I get Damien's half-eaten french toast; for $1,000 I get to play conceal&carry with ESR, and for $10,000 I get to have Larry Wall lecture me on the scriptures (especially the parts about uncovering people's nakedness)?
You BUY politicians, and politicians are people like you and me who share in humanity's common hopes and dreams. At least until they fuck it over royally through legislation or executive edict.
A national DNA database would be a good thing for the reasons you cited, but I'm still wary of the privacy implications for Americans like me. So, couldn't we go and make a database of some other nation instead? Like, maybe our neighbors to the north? There's no reason why it has to be our nation, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
Under Stanley v. Georgia (1969) (you can look it up, since you obviously know how) Americans cannot be forbidden from owning and perusing obscenity in the privacy of their own homes. Child porn is still a different issue.
I don't think that Brown vs. Board of Education belongs in this argument
Brown v. Board held in dicta that the primary role of the states in a modern era of a more powerful Federal government is in providing education to their citizens.
most teenagers are not ready for the real world as much as they think they are
No child is ready for the reality of raising her own children.
Under one version of the Gaia hypothesis, the earth ceases to exist once there is no one left to cherish her. Unmeasured events cannot be said to happen.
There were several major federal income taxes enacted during the Civil War years and the years thereafter. War-time income taxes were upheld by the supreme court in Springer v. US(1876 or so, IIRC). But when the first peace-time income tax in 1894, enough was enough, and the Supreme Court struck it down in Polluck v. Farmer's Loan and Trust 1895 as a violation of the direct-taxes provisions of the constitution (that income taxes as a direct tax must be apportioned among the states according to the census). The spectre of income taxes was not again raised until after the passage of the 16th amendment (proposed in 1908 or so, ratified in 1913) in the income tax act of 1913, itself challenged and upheld that same year. It's a terribly interesting chronicle of the illegitimate accumulation of power in a central government made constitutional only after the fact by a poorly thought-out constitutional amendment.
Premarital sex (fornication?) wasn't as much as a problem then; kids could get married much younger. Teenage pregnancy was expected of married teenage women.
Thank you for putting it right out in the open: the purpose of women is to make babies, and we should be grateful for that opportunity?
Could it be that we as a society think that children aren't yet able to properly conduct themselves in an increasingly complex and demanding world
But children already have the power to make babies themselves, especially with under duress by predatory behavior by adults. You would deny them their only way out?
Used to be that girls could get married before the age of fifteen. That's right, even the Virgin Mary was probably no older than 14. It was societal convention.
Indeed, it's still the same in some states like Utah, and it was and is a sick, sick time. In Victorian England, the age of consent for girls was 12 years old. TWELVE YEARS OLD. And you know what they also thought back then? Just as in other societies and parts of our own today, it was thought that the cure for sexually transmitted diseases was to have sex with a virgin. And do you know who those virgins were? Twelve-year-old girls. Fathers would coerce their daughters into contributing to the household income by prostituting themselves (not to mention the plight of orphans).
It is now the role of the state to provide education to minors (read Brown v. Board of Education), so there is no longer any need to hold them in thrall of their parents. And it is precisely that state education (in the form of library access) that is the subject of this article on slashdot. Your words have meaning, so think carefully about what sort of world you'd have us live in. One of habitual rape and unanswered pleas for help? Or one for emancipation. Our country has had many great moments of emancipation (13th amendment, 19th amendment, etc.) It is now time for another.
If you've been to a convenience store lately, then you already know this: Sony is now selling its own brand of disposable batteries. They're making a wholescale entrance into the battery market. But this then raises the question as to why they're focused on selling laptops that consume less battery life than their counterparts'? It'd be like HP deciding to sell printers that consume fewer ink-cartridges. HP is an ink company, and Sony is positioning itself as a battery company. We all know HP is a toothless enterprise if ever there was one, but Sony is a real competitive force.
We as slashdotters should petition the FTC to break them up now before they start leveraging their dominance in the record-label industry and come out with a line of Barbara Streisand batteries and seal our fate for us. They are still small enough to be broken up now. If we squander our opportunity, then we will have to answer to our children and grand children. We shall rue the day if it comes to pass.
Libraries aren't being called bastions of evil -- that's just a red herring of political forces rallying against filters (who have plenty of rational reasons for opposing them, without resorting to fear-mongering -- I should know, since I'm one of them). The real matter is much more sinister:
What is at stake here is parenting. Do the libraries have the power and right to educate children (or allow children to educate themselves) without first being sifted through parental control? Or must parents be afforded the constitutional power and right to determine what their children know and experience, because they are their children.
There is an interesting argument to be made on this point: the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution prohibits slavery within the borders of the US. But can't this sort of rigorous parental control be understood as a form of slavery? Girls who have the biological power to get pregnant are denied the right to an abortion without their parents' approval in many states; they are so much chattel to be disposed of by their fathers. It harkens back to hundreds of years of legal systems of marriage where the wife was legally indistinguishable from her husband and so couldn't initiate suits in her own name, much less seek divorce or protection from battery.
Libraries are just a convenient middleman. They don't want controversy -- they just want to pursue knowledge without consequences, consistent with ideals of science and enlightened thought. When politics starts to enter into this quest; when ethics boards get formed and regulations get heaped onto these disinterested parties, all of humankind suffers. All of us: woman, daughter, and child.
It may not be news, but it's a little patch of calm on slashdot, situated between the two flamefests that are US-politics articles. Just look around you: there's practically no one here. It's like reading the stories in the special-topics forums on the left column of the front page that don't make it to the front page itself, which I encourage all sincere and intelligent readers to do.
And don't forget, and it's still news that the courts have reached these rulings. This may be a lame article in itself, but it's a vehicle for intelligent discussion on an important subject.
Rather than serving the people, our government has tried it's damdest to become our ruler instead, starting with the imposition of the 16th Amendment
Actually, this isn't entirely far from the truth when you go back and look at which states actually ratified the 16th amendment and which states were counted as having done so even though they didn't. Kentucky's senate voted against ratification, yet they were counted. Oklahoma voted to ratify a substantially different version of the 16th amendment (making provision for appropriation according to census, not the absence thereof as in the official version of the 16th amendment). There's even an argument to be made that while Texas did vote to ratify, it could not have done so according to law, because it would have violated certain provisions of Texas's own constitution to do so. (The interesting part of the argument is whether state's own constitutions can restrict their ability to ratify federal constitutional amendments -- the language of the Constitution is ambiguous and perhaps even approving on this point).
So, then the result is a corrupt central government aggrandizing this power onto itself without respect for the contitutional processes that bear legitimacy. A similar argument can be made concerning the 14th amendment (which was ratified by southern "states" which hadn't been fully let back into the union since seceding) and even the original constitution (which required a smaller number of states ratifying it than even the 3/4 majority needed for amendment under Article V, much less the unanimity required under the Articles of Confederation). But it's sad, none the less.
Since the site is slashdotted, here's another propeller-clock sites to look at in the meantime:
http://home.wxs.nl/~luberth/propklok.htm
From the article: If you don't have any way to put the program into a PIC 16C84 or 16F84 chip, you can build your own programmer.
So if you don't already have a programmer, you'll have to build a programmer yourself. None of this weak "find a programmer in a box" crap -- do it yourself.
As with other areas of the economy, especially energy management as it affects the environment, the focus is misguided on production rather than more efficient use. There's plenty of bandwidth to go around already, but it's being improperly allocated. Just think for a second about the sheer vollume of Pokemon and porn that's saturating the existing pipes, and you'll know what I'm talking about. Originally, the internet served a specific purpose of allowing academics to communicate and further the development of social and scientific knowledge. Today, it just lets people get their prurient fix or their yahoo quotes. Laying more fiber will perhaps further the science of fiber-laying, but the same can be said of all sorts of other make-work endeavors.
What I'm trying to get at is a call for a national moratorium on porn and other wasteful bandwidth. It'd do wonders for internet congestion and it'd help us as a society in the process.
The reason is to avoid classification as a medical device and have to undergo rigorous safety and efficacy trials. It's a matter of civil law, not criminal law.
Haven't you read Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886)? Corporations are considered full persons under American law, and yet you belittle their humanity. The whole person/corporation dichotomy is a false one, both under law and in principle: corporations are composed of human flesh just as you and I are. As such, they have full rights under the 1st, 5th, and 14th amendments to make political contributions and seek redress within the normal political processes as everyone else.
In the mid 1980s, Louisiana passed a law prohibiting the manufacture and sale of all devices resembling sexual organs or "designed or marketed ... for the stimulation of human genital organs." Louisiana's supreme court recently struck down that ban 6-1, but before then, an entire category of technology was denied to Louisianans (and Alabamans by a similar law) simply because of prudish morality.
Once I perfect my perpetual-motion machine, I'm getting the heck out of this dump.
Law is people. Asking how law will continue to affect technology is like asking how people will continue to affect technology. It's an important but not terribly interesting question.
Slander is by definition oral. Once it's written down (as publications do by publishing it), it becomes libel. It's an incredibly important distinction, and it further undermines the consortium's credibility for failing to make it.
One of the great moral questions of our time (and equally true for all time) is whether truth will out. Thank heavens for slashdot, A New Hope. Thank heavens for the diligence of slashdot's readership and the glorious pursuit of truth. We should all get together in one big group hug and pat ourselves on our collective back. Good job. Keep up the good work.
It's libel, specifically group libel, an outmoded and obsolete legal classification in all but the most ignorant and backwater of jurisdictions, like Texas (re: Oprah's battle with the cattle industry a few years ago).
To quote the article:
[Y]ou know, our testing managing committee started working on this Wednesday morning, and it's simply impossible to say whether this is true or this is false. Nobody knows! And when I say nobody, I mean nobody, because it's 450 music files that have yet to be tested.
So, then, whom are you going to believe? A historically ethical and prudent news magazine or the RIAA who "doesn't know what the fuck is going on; I repeat, we don't know our asses from our elbows, and we've only started trying to determine the difference since this past Wednesday"?
Or slashdot jumped the gun when reporting that Salon reported that SDMI was cracked? It's a moot point, though, since it's bound to fall eventually.
When you pledge money to public television or a thousand other "charities", you get a small gift in return, like an umbrella or a video. Does the perl community plan to continue in this tradition? I.e., for $100 I get Damien's half-eaten french toast; for $1,000 I get to play conceal&carry with ESR, and for $10,000 I get to have Larry Wall lecture me on the scriptures (especially the parts about uncovering people's nakedness)?
You BUY politicians, and politicians are people like you and me who share in humanity's common hopes and dreams. At least until they fuck it over royally through legislation or executive edict.
A national DNA database would be a good thing for the reasons you cited, but I'm still wary of the privacy implications for Americans like me. So, couldn't we go and make a database of some other nation instead? Like, maybe our neighbors to the north? There's no reason why it has to be our nation, after all.