Yes, it's hard to think rationally about this because it inevitably turns into a question of whether the art that comes out of the system is "worthy" or similar.
It certainly does seem silly to say that a 54" screen is ok but a 55" is not, but you do have to remember that in some cases it can be preferable to have a concrete rule than a completely sensible one. Not that this is necessarily one of those cases, especially when advances in technology have made 55" a fairly unremarkable size for a home TV screen. My guess is that the idea was to separate between cases where there is a game being shown at a bar and where there are drinks being served at a public "performance" of the work: once upon a time, a huge screen bore more strongly on that distinction.
Honestly, I don't entirely understand the logic from the NFL to restrict these, but I can sort of see the logic that gives them the power. I'm sure they do make money by licensing some big shows with big screens. I don't think I agree with it, though; it seems to me that once you've broadcast something to the world, what they do with it is their business.
You ask some good questions. But on your last point, I think you can argue that we want to live in a world where resources on that level are available to produce artwork. Whether Avatar in particular is a worthy investment is surely a fair question, but remember that it was a huge investment in an art form that has (in recent history) been very financially successful, with a director and production team that has a history of performing very well. Thus it's not like this was a throwaway of half a billion dollars on a whim. Regardless of your personal opinions of the worthiness of the movie, it was a pretty major technical achievement, and it has provided entertainment to a huge number of people... is there a reason not to class that as a major success of the system in collecting and investing the resources to produce what the people want?
(I'm sure I'll regret asking that rhetorically....... for the record, yes, there are reasons not to, and no, I don't know how I'd answer it. Specifically, I'm neither a Cameron or Avatar fanboy nor hater. I haven't even seen it.)
You know, you made a mostly nice post. Why did you feel the need to throw in a childish stab at what you assume to be my understanding of economics, especially when you're about to throw yourself into the same group? I never even suggested I'm an authority, but it doesn't take an authority to point out that you need more than "copyrights are bad so let's get rid of them" to seriously claim that "the whole problem" is that there's a law preventing public display of DVDs. That merely takes a little critical thinking.
Where do you get your number for the cost in a competitive market? If you mean that since a DVD copy costs $1, the price should be there, then you're completely ignoring the initial costs of content production. How do you propose that be recovered? It only costs me something of order of pennies for the bandwidth to download a copy without a physical medium, so why is $1 even a reasonable price? Aren't you an order of magnitude or two too high in your own estimate?
Second, I don't think my logic relies on the relative sizes of the markets for public viewings and DVDs, and even so, I dispute your claim. IIRC for a typical movie that does reasonably well, box offices and DVD sales are in the same ballpark as far as revenue, and the revenue from box offices gets a fee for every viewer, not for every showing. If those movies could all be shown using a $15 DVD (or a $1 DVD if you like), that goes from reaping ~$10 per viewer per showing to being $15 (or $1) for EVERY showing from that DVD.
You're taking my comments too personally. I don't mean to suggest that you are engaging in it, although I'd argue that basically everything that happens on slashdot amounts to that or less. This is not a criticism of you, but of the medium that we're discussing in. So don't bother with the dick-measuring about how much time you or I have spent researching this.
Look, I'm not interested in debating the merits of art and entertainment here, and that was not something necessary to my original statement. I'll just say that it's clear that as a society, "we" place a lot of value on it, and claiming that this value is somehow misplaced requires a lot more justification than my passing use of it as an example. Furthermore, if you're going to pick away at my use of "need" and then "we" rather than focusing on what I'm actually saying, I don't think I'm going to bother reading further replies. If you really believe in making arguments based on justice in ignorance of the practical consequences of your ideas, then I'll thank you to stay out of policy-making please.
Justice is a fine concept, but you can't abstract practical concerns from its pursuit in any practical political or economic system. I'm not even talking about fine-tuning issues, you simply need to understand the system in order to make intelligent statements about it. How can you possibly consider whether restrictions on copying are just without some sense of what impact those restrictions have on other rights?
I thought this was fairly obvious, but "need" meaning that if we want these art forms to survive in the modern high-quality, high-production values state, somehow the expensive equipment, labor, and training need to be paid for.
Yes, I think it's a bad thing if this goes away. I think we benefit not only from having art and entertainment, available, but from having high quality art and entertainment available. Independent of whether this means we need homogenous, national or world-scale products, it's in everyone's interest if it's feasible to support oneself through the production of art in its various forms. Further, in the case of TV and movies, this can go beyond art, to include news, philosophy, educational materials, etc. There is a real problem that revenue sources that have traditionally supported, e.g., news-gatherers and aggregators are drying up, and it's not at all obvious who is going to replace those and how they'll be funded.
It's completely fair, and I encourage everyone, to question whether copyright (and patent) laws are sensible and lead to sensible outcomes. However, you need to do a real educated analysis, and go beyond knee-jerk handwaving and really understand the economy that is built on the current laws and how our society depends on the products. Revolutions can be good and necessary, but a lot of them leave things worse off than they found them, so it behooves us all to be careful, thoughtful, and well-informed as we try to change the world.
It's not nearly so simple. The legal landscape and market are very complicated. For example, if you changed the law to allow public showings of consumer-aimed DVDs, that will cut into the separately-marketed and priced versions currently legal for such use. Thus, the $15 DVD you can currently buy will go up in price to offset the lost revenue. So in some sense, the reason you can buy a "reasonably" priced copy of the movie is that its production is subsidized by the other market.
I'm not saying it's right, but you really shouldn't be so knee-jerk about this. The content producers and providers do need channels to make money, and while I generally agree that copyright laws are a mess right now, taking away every method they have to be profitable is not a solution for anything. All the slashdot wankery aside, this is a big problem: how do you maintain a viable production industry when their product becomes free to copy. For music or live theater, you can wave your hands about performance revenues, etc, but there's not an equivalent for movies or television programs. Most of the simplistic stuff thrown around here is a joke in this regard. A whole self-consistent system needs to be constructed. That's hard.
Have a look at SpeedCalc then. It was my favorite when I was using Linux and since it looks like it may be available for Mac I'm going to check it out again. It had a clicky calculator interface, but could also be interacted with using typed keywords. Assigning variables was intuitive (just type x=... or whatever) and I thought really bridged the gap between a desk calculator and a full programming environment quite well.
I also recommend just using Python (for me usually via ipython). The data entry is not as obvious as a spreadsheet (though if you go via a text file and use loadtxt (either matplotlib or numpy function, I don't recall which) it's more repeatable. The tradeoff is it's easier to see the manipulations in code than it is in the spreadsheet (to me) versus easier to see/modify the data in the spreadsheet.
It's ridiculous, and just one of many serious problems in California. Nothing like legislating everything that seems like a good idea and then walking out without paying the tab. They've been making (or claim they've been making) progress on clearing up the backlog, but it's slow going and many of the kits have been sitting so long that the statute of limitations will prevent prosecution even if they bother with them.
To be completely accurate, it's not that there's a 10-year queue before any kits get processed, just that some get set aside and forgotten for some reason. It's not even a rational prioritization, just half-assed, understaffed work.
If you Google around a bit you can find various stories documenting it. Two years ago there were 7,500 sitting around. They claim it's now under 3,500, and that they'll be done by 2011, but we'll see.... You just have to figure out what other important programs are being overlooked to make way on this!
I agree. I pretty strongly suspect that most pedophiles would more than gladly give up their urges if it were as simple as that. It's exactly thought crime --- these laws aim to punish the urge rather than acting upon the urge. It's ridiculous. But like other taboo-related crimes, there's enormous political gain to be had from being unjustly "tough" on the crime. People idealistic enough (and with enough foresight to see the endgame of the proliferation of thought crime laws) to stand up for the rights of these defendants are far too rare to keep things in balance.
I'll wager that it's the under-resourced that was the limiting factor, since it doesn't sound like it took major effort. Given that California has something like a decade of unprocessed DNA rape kits due to lack of resources, it wouldn't be the least bit surprising if data forensics had a year long wait before they even got around to touching a new case.
That's a common mischaracterization of "quantum leap." Quantum only means that it is a discrete leap, not that it's a microscopic quantum. It's a quantum leap versus continuous drift. Not to say I don't think it's a hackneyed phrase, but that's not to do with its being inherently incorrect.
I dunno, if they're honest about the specs, I don't see that it's shady. I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for people who throw multiple $100s on a cable without taking the time to understand the technology a bit. If you have the disposable income to do that and don't care about wisely investing in your equipment, that's your own problem. A market of morons with more dollars than sense exists, and I don't blame Denon or Monster Cable or whatever for catering to it. Anyone with limited funding will take the time to decide whether they need magic in their cables or not anyway.
I'm not saying "don't do the research," just that opening up the database to every Tom, Dick, and Jane with a PhD would be a gross violation of the public trust, whether or not privacy issues can be "worked around".
Why? I don't understand the logic if the data cannot be tied to individuals. The FBI and law enforcement is one of the groups I personally worry MOST about having access and they've already got it. I'd feel relatively more comfortable if the data were public so we don't have to take their word for its quality, statistics, etc.
In a typical criminal case, investigators look for matches to a specific profile. But the Arizona search looked for any matches among all the thousands of profiles in the database, greatly increasing the odds of finding them.
[emphasis added] What you say is how it usually works, and how it stands any chance of being statistically valid. In some cases I've read about (not sure if it's in the story I linked to or not), the raw "1 in 100 billion" type odds were presented, which is plainly and patently false when used in this manner, and I believe the defense was not allowed to correct this. Some states do not allow this sort of search, per the article, but some do.
However, this is not relevant to independent checking of statistics. I'm sure the FBI has done at least some good faith testing of their methods, but they are also far too interested in the outcomes of those tests to be trusted with that without some verification.
If the purpose is to independently evaluate the rate of false matches in a DNA database to be used in criminal investigations, what better database is there than the one that will be used for that purpose?
Privacy issues can easily be worked around here---there's no need for personally identifiable information (i.e., name or location, not the dna data itself:-P ) to accompany the database for this purpose. You might also worry about statistical independence between the sample to be used for the analysis and that used for testing the results, but there are very well established methods for using subsamples of a data set in just this way.
The claim is that the allergies are so severe that dust in the atmosphere inside the aircraft may reach them and trigger a reaction. As I understand it there are no recorded confirmed instances of this mechanism and it's probably an overblown risk (but I haven't bothered to actually look this up so don't take my word for it).
Many schools, especially daycares/preschools, have enacted no-nut policies for similar reasons. I think these are generally reasonable, particularly for young children, not because of toxic tree nut dust wafting across the lunch table, but because sharing or cross-contamination is likely and it can be hard to get young children to understand they can't swap sandwiches or crackers.
The air dilemma here is stupid, as is the idea of the buffer zone. Either the dust is truly dangerous (unlikely but possible) in which case just outright ban the nuts and hand out snacks that do not contain peanuts, or it's not in which case do nothing.
Sure, I don't actually dispute that some dirt (i.e., nature) is beneficial. In fact, I don't take issue with the suggestion that it may have some bearing on allergies, but the OP's implications that it was open and shut with respect to cause and effect is a serious overstatement of the evidence.
Many people, especially children, are allergic to wheat and many more suffer from severe gluten intolerance (celiac disease/celiac sprue). But I prefer pretzels to peanuts on a flight, personally.
I'm glad you've got it all figured out for us. I assume you'll be writing up your evidence of this mechanism and the clinical proof of your solution to the allergy increases in a suitable medical journal soon.
I don't agree. Trademark protection is not intended to, nor should it, entitle an owner to reap the benefits of creativity in the way that copyright and patents do. The purpose is to protect the consumer from being misled.
In the case of "Droid," that's an abbreviation of an actual word that AFAIK was not used prior to Star Wars. Furthermore, the Star Wars folks certainly marketed many products (toys, mostly) using that term or reasonably associated with it. The word is pretty strongly (in my mind, anyway) tied with the movie series. Getting permission to use it seems reasonable; even if it's not required, it was probably prudent.
In this case, I don't think anyone would associate the word "Nexus" with PKDick's creation. It's an obscure reference and one that has virtually no chance of creating confusion. Without that, there's no reason to need a license. It's possible that this is just my own bias showing, but as a card-carrying nerd, I think I'm probably far more likely to be familiar with "common" terms in sci fi than the average consumer, so I think it's fairly safe to say that most people will draw zero connection between "Android" and Blade Runner, and even less with Nexus.
That's not true. Look up "trademark dilution" for exceptions. The trademark rules are somewhat different for especially unique and/or especially famous marks. Apple could well qualify for protection from this, probably depending on how careful you are not to use similar logos/typefaces/etc. Certainly they'd be able to force a real (and expensive) lawsuit on the matter---it would almost certainly not be a simple open and shut case.
Ok. Glad I took the time to reply to your comment the second time around. If you don't actually want a more detailed response, don't pretend you do.
Against better judgement, I will carry it just a bit further. It's senseless to try to abstract an idea like that away from its reasonable implementations, at least without qualification. If your position is "Lethal force would be a valid response if [condition]" then don't present it as "Lethal force is a valid response" without the qualification.
You're criticizing my reading comprehension because I didn't try to refute your fundamentally inconsistent logic? Funny. You say that you are in favor of applying lethal force to stop an escape, but you would not trust the police enough to authorize them to use it. Sorry, I didn't feel that was worth bothering with.
Your auto examples here, first of all, have no bearing on whether lethal force is appropriate to stop someone who is simply evading arrest. You're now trying to use "evading arrest while posing a threat of serious harm or death" (assuming we accept your suggestion that leaving the scene in an automobile is such a threat) plus evasion as justification. That is a different situation---in fact, it's just the situation I said might warrant lethal force above. Bravo.
Second of all, I question your "statistics" about crash rates, and I find the last sentence (your attempt at logically deriving your conclusion) to be laughably fallacious. I think the police should catch criminals. I also recognize that there are levels of force consistent with doing this that fall somewhere between "doing nothing" and "fire at will." If you want to debate precisely how great a threat warrants firing on a suspect, go for it, but that is irrelevant to this discussion.
The police yell "freeze" and you do. That's due process. If the man with the gun identifies himself as a police officer, yells "freeze" and you run, then they fire shots at you,
Here we go again. You don't think the untrustworthy police should be authorized to use lethal force in cases like the one in the article, yet you clearly think they should in some cases. So are they supposed to call home and give a quick deposition to get authorization or what?
My "police state" comment was particularly inspired by your wonderful example of killing a suspect because they attempt to escape a traffic stop. Sorry, but that's just not a proportional response. You don't have to be very creative to come up with reasons that a misunderstanding or emergency might yield a disastrous result here. Lethal force can't be undone, yet you seem quite happy to have it thrown around at the drop of a hat.
Anyway, I completely stand by my original statements, and I don't find any of your logic even remotely convincing. In the absence of a specific, well-justified belief that a suspect is about to inflict grievous harm or death unless stopped immediately, lethal force is not justified.
Lethal force is reasonable to stop someone who you have no other way to catch (i.e. someone fleeing a traffic stop or who hasn't been identified).
No it is not.
Lethal force is acceptable to stop someone who is about to inflict serious harm or death on someone. Resisting arrest and refusing to comply with a lawful order from a police officer are already crimes (in the US anyway, and I presume in most other places as well) and neither is punishable by death. Allowing police to decide in the field whether to fire on someone who is not presenting a violent threat is absolutely ridiculous.
Good luck with your police state. I prefer to live in one where due process is at least given an occasional nod, even if that means an occasional criminal can escape capture.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's hard to think rationally about this because it inevitably turns into a question of whether the art that comes out of the system is "worthy" or similar.
It certainly does seem silly to say that a 54" screen is ok but a 55" is not, but you do have to remember that in some cases it can be preferable to have a concrete rule than a completely sensible one. Not that this is necessarily one of those cases, especially when advances in technology have made 55" a fairly unremarkable size for a home TV screen. My guess is that the idea was to separate between cases where there is a game being shown at a bar and where there are drinks being served at a public "performance" of the work: once upon a time, a huge screen bore more strongly on that distinction.
Honestly, I don't entirely understand the logic from the NFL to restrict these, but I can sort of see the logic that gives them the power. I'm sure they do make money by licensing some big shows with big screens. I don't think I agree with it, though; it seems to me that once you've broadcast something to the world, what they do with it is their business.
You ask some good questions. But on your last point, I think you can argue that we want to live in a world where resources on that level are available to produce artwork. Whether Avatar in particular is a worthy investment is surely a fair question, but remember that it was a huge investment in an art form that has (in recent history) been very financially successful, with a director and production team that has a history of performing very well. Thus it's not like this was a throwaway of half a billion dollars on a whim. Regardless of your personal opinions of the worthiness of the movie, it was a pretty major technical achievement, and it has provided entertainment to a huge number of people... is there a reason not to class that as a major success of the system in collecting and investing the resources to produce what the people want?
(I'm sure I'll regret asking that rhetorically....... for the record, yes, there are reasons not to, and no, I don't know how I'd answer it. Specifically, I'm neither a Cameron or Avatar fanboy nor hater. I haven't even seen it.)
You know, you made a mostly nice post. Why did you feel the need to throw in a childish stab at what you assume to be my understanding of economics, especially when you're about to throw yourself into the same group? I never even suggested I'm an authority, but it doesn't take an authority to point out that you need more than "copyrights are bad so let's get rid of them" to seriously claim that "the whole problem" is that there's a law preventing public display of DVDs. That merely takes a little critical thinking.
Where do you get your number for the cost in a competitive market? If you mean that since a DVD copy costs $1, the price should be there, then you're completely ignoring the initial costs of content production. How do you propose that be recovered? It only costs me something of order of pennies for the bandwidth to download a copy without a physical medium, so why is $1 even a reasonable price? Aren't you an order of magnitude or two too high in your own estimate?
Second, I don't think my logic relies on the relative sizes of the markets for public viewings and DVDs, and even so, I dispute your claim. IIRC for a typical movie that does reasonably well, box offices and DVD sales are in the same ballpark as far as revenue, and the revenue from box offices gets a fee for every viewer, not for every showing. If those movies could all be shown using a $15 DVD (or a $1 DVD if you like), that goes from reaping ~$10 per viewer per showing to being $15 (or $1) for EVERY showing from that DVD.
You're taking my comments too personally. I don't mean to suggest that you are engaging in it, although I'd argue that basically everything that happens on slashdot amounts to that or less. This is not a criticism of you, but of the medium that we're discussing in. So don't bother with the dick-measuring about how much time you or I have spent researching this.
Look, I'm not interested in debating the merits of art and entertainment here, and that was not something necessary to my original statement. I'll just say that it's clear that as a society, "we" place a lot of value on it, and claiming that this value is somehow misplaced requires a lot more justification than my passing use of it as an example. Furthermore, if you're going to pick away at my use of "need" and then "we" rather than focusing on what I'm actually saying, I don't think I'm going to bother reading further replies. If you really believe in making arguments based on justice in ignorance of the practical consequences of your ideas, then I'll thank you to stay out of policy-making please.
Justice is a fine concept, but you can't abstract practical concerns from its pursuit in any practical political or economic system. I'm not even talking about fine-tuning issues, you simply need to understand the system in order to make intelligent statements about it. How can you possibly consider whether restrictions on copying are just without some sense of what impact those restrictions have on other rights?
I thought this was fairly obvious, but "need" meaning that if we want these art forms to survive in the modern high-quality, high-production values state, somehow the expensive equipment, labor, and training need to be paid for.
Yes, I think it's a bad thing if this goes away. I think we benefit not only from having art and entertainment, available, but from having high quality art and entertainment available. Independent of whether this means we need homogenous, national or world-scale products, it's in everyone's interest if it's feasible to support oneself through the production of art in its various forms. Further, in the case of TV and movies, this can go beyond art, to include news, philosophy, educational materials, etc. There is a real problem that revenue sources that have traditionally supported, e.g., news-gatherers and aggregators are drying up, and it's not at all obvious who is going to replace those and how they'll be funded.
It's completely fair, and I encourage everyone, to question whether copyright (and patent) laws are sensible and lead to sensible outcomes. However, you need to do a real educated analysis, and go beyond knee-jerk handwaving and really understand the economy that is built on the current laws and how our society depends on the products. Revolutions can be good and necessary, but a lot of them leave things worse off than they found them, so it behooves us all to be careful, thoughtful, and well-informed as we try to change the world.
It's not nearly so simple. The legal landscape and market are very complicated. For example, if you changed the law to allow public showings of consumer-aimed DVDs, that will cut into the separately-marketed and priced versions currently legal for such use. Thus, the $15 DVD you can currently buy will go up in price to offset the lost revenue. So in some sense, the reason you can buy a "reasonably" priced copy of the movie is that its production is subsidized by the other market.
I'm not saying it's right, but you really shouldn't be so knee-jerk about this. The content producers and providers do need channels to make money, and while I generally agree that copyright laws are a mess right now, taking away every method they have to be profitable is not a solution for anything. All the slashdot wankery aside, this is a big problem: how do you maintain a viable production industry when their product becomes free to copy. For music or live theater, you can wave your hands about performance revenues, etc, but there's not an equivalent for movies or television programs. Most of the simplistic stuff thrown around here is a joke in this regard. A whole self-consistent system needs to be constructed. That's hard.
er, I meant SpeedCrunch. Serve me right for posting after 2am.
Have a look at SpeedCalc then. It was my favorite when I was using Linux and since it looks like it may be available for Mac I'm going to check it out again. It had a clicky calculator interface, but could also be interacted with using typed keywords. Assigning variables was intuitive (just type x=... or whatever) and I thought really bridged the gap between a desk calculator and a full programming environment quite well.
I also recommend just using Python (for me usually via ipython). The data entry is not as obvious as a spreadsheet (though if you go via a text file and use loadtxt (either matplotlib or numpy function, I don't recall which) it's more repeatable. The tradeoff is it's easier to see the manipulations in code than it is in the spreadsheet (to me) versus easier to see/modify the data in the spreadsheet.
It's ridiculous, and just one of many serious problems in California. Nothing like legislating everything that seems like a good idea and then walking out without paying the tab. They've been making (or claim they've been making) progress on clearing up the backlog, but it's slow going and many of the kits have been sitting so long that the statute of limitations will prevent prosecution even if they bother with them.
To be completely accurate, it's not that there's a 10-year queue before any kits get processed, just that some get set aside and forgotten for some reason. It's not even a rational prioritization, just half-assed, understaffed work.
If you Google around a bit you can find various stories documenting it. Two years ago there were 7,500 sitting around. They claim it's now under 3,500, and that they'll be done by 2011, but we'll see.... You just have to figure out what other important programs are being overlooked to make way on this!
I agree. I pretty strongly suspect that most pedophiles would more than gladly give up their urges if it were as simple as that. It's exactly thought crime --- these laws aim to punish the urge rather than acting upon the urge. It's ridiculous. But like other taboo-related crimes, there's enormous political gain to be had from being unjustly "tough" on the crime. People idealistic enough (and with enough foresight to see the endgame of the proliferation of thought crime laws) to stand up for the rights of these defendants are far too rare to keep things in balance.
I'll wager that it's the under-resourced that was the limiting factor, since it doesn't sound like it took major effort. Given that California has something like a decade of unprocessed DNA rape kits due to lack of resources, it wouldn't be the least bit surprising if data forensics had a year long wait before they even got around to touching a new case.
That's a common mischaracterization of "quantum leap." Quantum only means that it is a discrete leap, not that it's a microscopic quantum. It's a quantum leap versus continuous drift. Not to say I don't think it's a hackneyed phrase, but that's not to do with its being inherently incorrect.
I dunno, if they're honest about the specs, I don't see that it's shady. I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for people who throw multiple $100s on a cable without taking the time to understand the technology a bit. If you have the disposable income to do that and don't care about wisely investing in your equipment, that's your own problem. A market of morons with more dollars than sense exists, and I don't blame Denon or Monster Cable or whatever for catering to it. Anyone with limited funding will take the time to decide whether they need magic in their cables or not anyway.
I'm not saying "don't do the research," just that opening up the database to every Tom, Dick, and Jane with a PhD would be a gross violation of the public trust, whether or not privacy issues can be "worked around".
Why? I don't understand the logic if the data cannot be tied to individuals. The FBI and law enforcement is one of the groups I personally worry MOST about having access and they've already got it. I'd feel relatively more comfortable if the data were public so we don't have to take their word for its quality, statistics, etc.
If only that were the case. For example, from page 2 of http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/20/local/me-dna20:
In a typical criminal case, investigators look for matches to a specific profile. But the Arizona search looked for any matches among all the thousands of profiles in the database, greatly increasing the odds of finding them.
[emphasis added] What you say is how it usually works, and how it stands any chance of being statistically valid. In some cases I've read about (not sure if it's in the story I linked to or not), the raw "1 in 100 billion" type odds were presented, which is plainly and patently false when used in this manner, and I believe the defense was not allowed to correct this. Some states do not allow this sort of search, per the article, but some do.
However, this is not relevant to independent checking of statistics. I'm sure the FBI has done at least some good faith testing of their methods, but they are also far too interested in the outcomes of those tests to be trusted with that without some verification.
If the purpose is to independently evaluate the rate of false matches in a DNA database to be used in criminal investigations, what better database is there than the one that will be used for that purpose?
Privacy issues can easily be worked around here---there's no need for personally identifiable information (i.e., name or location, not the dna data itself :-P ) to accompany the database for this purpose. You might also worry about statistical independence between the sample to be used for the analysis and that used for testing the results, but there are very well established methods for using subsamples of a data set in just this way.
The claim is that the allergies are so severe that dust in the atmosphere inside the aircraft may reach them and trigger a reaction. As I understand it there are no recorded confirmed instances of this mechanism and it's probably an overblown risk (but I haven't bothered to actually look this up so don't take my word for it).
Many schools, especially daycares/preschools, have enacted no-nut policies for similar reasons. I think these are generally reasonable, particularly for young children, not because of toxic tree nut dust wafting across the lunch table, but because sharing or cross-contamination is likely and it can be hard to get young children to understand they can't swap sandwiches or crackers.
The air dilemma here is stupid, as is the idea of the buffer zone. Either the dust is truly dangerous (unlikely but possible) in which case just outright ban the nuts and hand out snacks that do not contain peanuts, or it's not in which case do nothing.
Sure, I don't actually dispute that some dirt (i.e., nature) is beneficial. In fact, I don't take issue with the suggestion that it may have some bearing on allergies, but the OP's implications that it was open and shut with respect to cause and effect is a serious overstatement of the evidence.
Many people, especially children, are allergic to wheat and many more suffer from severe gluten intolerance (celiac disease/celiac sprue). But I prefer pretzels to peanuts on a flight, personally.
I'm glad you've got it all figured out for us. I assume you'll be writing up your evidence of this mechanism and the clinical proof of your solution to the allergy increases in a suitable medical journal soon.
I don't agree. Trademark protection is not intended to, nor should it, entitle an owner to reap the benefits of creativity in the way that copyright and patents do. The purpose is to protect the consumer from being misled.
In the case of "Droid," that's an abbreviation of an actual word that AFAIK was not used prior to Star Wars. Furthermore, the Star Wars folks certainly marketed many products (toys, mostly) using that term or reasonably associated with it. The word is pretty strongly (in my mind, anyway) tied with the movie series. Getting permission to use it seems reasonable; even if it's not required, it was probably prudent.
In this case, I don't think anyone would associate the word "Nexus" with PKDick's creation. It's an obscure reference and one that has virtually no chance of creating confusion. Without that, there's no reason to need a license. It's possible that this is just my own bias showing, but as a card-carrying nerd, I think I'm probably far more likely to be familiar with "common" terms in sci fi than the average consumer, so I think it's fairly safe to say that most people will draw zero connection between "Android" and Blade Runner, and even less with Nexus.
That's not true. Look up "trademark dilution" for exceptions. The trademark rules are somewhat different for especially unique and/or especially famous marks. Apple could well qualify for protection from this, probably depending on how careful you are not to use similar logos/typefaces/etc. Certainly they'd be able to force a real (and expensive) lawsuit on the matter---it would almost certainly not be a simple open and shut case.
Ok. Glad I took the time to reply to your comment the second time around. If you don't actually want a more detailed response, don't pretend you do.
Against better judgement, I will carry it just a bit further. It's senseless to try to abstract an idea like that away from its reasonable implementations, at least without qualification. If your position is "Lethal force would be a valid response if [condition]" then don't present it as "Lethal force is a valid response" without the qualification.
Dipshit.
You're criticizing my reading comprehension because I didn't try to refute your fundamentally inconsistent logic? Funny. You say that you are in favor of applying lethal force to stop an escape, but you would not trust the police enough to authorize them to use it. Sorry, I didn't feel that was worth bothering with.
Your auto examples here, first of all, have no bearing on whether lethal force is appropriate to stop someone who is simply evading arrest. You're now trying to use "evading arrest while posing a threat of serious harm or death" (assuming we accept your suggestion that leaving the scene in an automobile is such a threat) plus evasion as justification. That is a different situation---in fact, it's just the situation I said might warrant lethal force above. Bravo.
Second of all, I question your "statistics" about crash rates, and I find the last sentence (your attempt at logically deriving your conclusion) to be laughably fallacious. I think the police should catch criminals. I also recognize that there are levels of force consistent with doing this that fall somewhere between "doing nothing" and "fire at will." If you want to debate precisely how great a threat warrants firing on a suspect, go for it, but that is irrelevant to this discussion.
The police yell "freeze" and you do. That's due process. If the man with the gun identifies himself as a police officer, yells "freeze" and you run, then they fire shots at you,
Here we go again. You don't think the untrustworthy police should be authorized to use lethal force in cases like the one in the article, yet you clearly think they should in some cases. So are they supposed to call home and give a quick deposition to get authorization or what?
My "police state" comment was particularly inspired by your wonderful example of killing a suspect because they attempt to escape a traffic stop. Sorry, but that's just not a proportional response. You don't have to be very creative to come up with reasons that a misunderstanding or emergency might yield a disastrous result here. Lethal force can't be undone, yet you seem quite happy to have it thrown around at the drop of a hat.
Anyway, I completely stand by my original statements, and I don't find any of your logic even remotely convincing. In the absence of a specific, well-justified belief that a suspect is about to inflict grievous harm or death unless stopped immediately, lethal force is not justified.
Lethal force is reasonable to stop someone who you have no other way to catch (i.e. someone fleeing a traffic stop or who hasn't been identified).
No it is not.
Lethal force is acceptable to stop someone who is about to inflict serious harm or death on someone. Resisting arrest and refusing to comply with a lawful order from a police officer are already crimes (in the US anyway, and I presume in most other places as well) and neither is punishable by death. Allowing police to decide in the field whether to fire on someone who is not presenting a violent threat is absolutely ridiculous.
Good luck with your police state. I prefer to live in one where due process is at least given an occasional nod, even if that means an occasional criminal can escape capture.