Newsflash for you: There are servers that are part of the internet outside the US, and have been for more than 30 years. If the US government wants to control the US part of the internet that's there perogative, but don't expect the rest of the world to forever let the US keep control of services vital to the entire non-US part of the internet as well.
To turn your question on it's head: Why should we (as in the rest of the world) have to let someone else control that which is ours? The non-US parts of the internet is no more the property of the US than non-US electricity networks or phone networks even though both originated with the US.
Or do you advocate US control over electricity grids worldwide as well?
So much for any concept of freedom and democracy...
Because the IEEE is US dominated and consists of engineers, the IETF is a volunteer organisation with no fixed membership structured and consists of engineers, ISO is a standards organisation and not set up for running anything, and the W3C consists of whoever forks over the considerable membership fees which means mostly corporate interests and main engineering types.
Why should anyone except engineers who happen to have access to these organisations be satisfied with having a bunch of engineers set public policy?
The only of the organisations you suggested that would be remotely acceptable for most governments would be ISO, and only because ISO is a government sponsored organisations which would have very much the same governing issues as the UN if it got handed something political.
You miss the crucial difference between fiction and non-fiction. Of course we can imagine what it would be like after the singularity - it is our ability to give meaningful predictions of the future that is reduced. That doesn't mean we can't try. We just have to accept that the odds of being correct will be tremendously low, but in this case being right isn't the point. Being interesting and thought provoking is.
You're late. There's already several print on demand publishers that happily take almost any book you throw at them. Search for "print on demand" and you'll find quite a few with warying degrees of optional extras. Some of them will get your book into the main catalogues and will make the book available to for instance Amazon.
In addition, there's at least one company working on a small cheap print on demand / binding machine intended to be cheap enough for bookstores to offer print on demand in store.
That is a fairly small circulation... Even the Evening Standard (which is a regional newspaper for the London area, for those of you not in the UK) sells more than that (somewhere above 400k, I think).
The Sun has a circulation of about 3.4 million for comparison, News of the World around 3.8 million and the Sunday Times around 1.3 million. In fact, of the well known national newspapers, only the Independent are clearly smaller than the Guardian, unless you add in complete outsiders like the Morning Star.
Actually, the BBC charter explicitly requires the BBC to provide some level of service abroad. This is fairly typical for public broadcasters in that many of them are intended to provide some level of service to expats as well, and to help promote their country's culture and values abroad.
You don't even have to encumber it by advertising if they'd do it as part of a larger campain.
In the UK, Levi's used Haendel's Sarabande from his Suite in D minor for an ad back in 2002/2003. The piece was relatively unknown by the general public, but as a result of the ad the largest classical radio station kept getting huge number of requests for it for months, many of them just for "that song from the Levi's ad", and whenever they'd play it, they'd refer to Levi's as well.
To this day I'd expect most people in the UK who recognise it to think of the Levi's ad and most of them likely won't know where the music is from.
All Levi's would have had to do to capitalise of that was to - in at least some of the advertising slots - include a URL that hinted that you could get the music there, and they'd have a great opportunity to both spread it and to get people to watch more of their promotional material.
Add to that tagging the music with the URL and a mention of Levi's and the ad, and put the ad itself for download on the same site and they'd get a significant boost over the ad by itself - in cases like this, where the ad was actually very good by itself, you might even find a significant number of people would like to see the ad again.
When it comes to the TV programmes, it is important to realise what the BBC's mission is. It is NOT to be in a ratings war with the commercial broadcasters. In fact, the BBC was recently told to reduce it's programming in several niches it had been one of the pioneers in because the commercial broadcasters now fill that niche (property shows, for instance). As a result, outside of a core of programs with mass appeal, a lot of what you will find on the BBC falls in categories that are intended for relatively small market segments.
That said, I find myself watching more and more BBC - partly because as their number of channels have gone up I've found more shows fit.
The upside is of course that since most shows on BBC are relatively free to experiment and not have to be commercial successes, there are often real gems to be found that doesn't get ruined by trying to target the lowest common denominator of a very diverse population.
Have to agree with that. My hand positions are usually very different from what's considered "right" for qwerty, and it's all down to placement to make access to special characters easier. Since I've been typing like that for close to 25 years (since I was 5), I've ended up using that hand placement for most other writing as well.
I don't type extremely fast, but more than fast enough that the typing doesn't slow down my work, and hence I've never had an incentive to improve my speed much beyond where it currently is as it would just lead to my hands waiting idle lots of the time anyway.
(For anyone who's interested, I usually hold my left hand in approximately the same position as you'd do for qwerty touch typing, but with my thumb resting on space, and my little finger near shift. My right hand is usually further to the right, with my three rightmost fingers often resting on enter and the bracket keys respectively, though I tend to move the right hand around quite a bit.
Interestingly, I often find myself supporting it so I can suspend it over the keyboard without resting the fingers on any keys, and still usually have no problems finding the right keys without looking at the keyboard.
For some reason I rarely, if ever, use my right hand thumb when typing, and my left hand thumb hardly ever leaves the space bar.
Note that I'm left handed, and my left hand is significantly stronger than my right, so that might have something to do with my preference for a hand placement that places most strain on the left and gives the right a more relaxed and varied workload)
Treating this as a war is a guaranteed way of getting millions of people that currently are against these terrorists to change sides once they see their friends and relatives murdered or imprisoned or treated as animals.
Someone else has already pointed out that this tactic was exactly what the UK government followed in Northern Ireland, and one of the key reasons that allowed the IRA to grow so powerful - the more brutal the government got, the more people decided IRA were right after all.
In fact, from what you are writing, you are no better than these terrorists yourself. You are advocating the same kind of ideology of hate and religious/race based war. If you seriously believe radical imams are legitimate targets, then you are no less a legitimate target based on the hate mongering you are attempting here.
Scum like you is exactly one of the reasons why terrorism is escalating, because you help turn it into a "war" instead of letting society focus on solving the root causes. Again, look at Northern Ireland to see the difference a few years of treating people with relative respect will do over the kind of fascist methods you are proposing.
Not in London, perhaps, but more likely because they didn't have the capabilities than of any concern for human life. Bombings like the one in Omagh, or the Brighton bomb aimed are clear indications that they had the will, but not the means (The Brighton bomb "only" killed 5 and hurt 34, but was a complete failure as the goal had been to take out all of the cabinet)
In any case, they are hyping the fear, yes. It would take 30-40 attacks like this to even get to the level of deaths on British roads each year. About as many people as died in these attacks die in accidents and suicides in the London underground network alone each year.
It's simply getting far more attention than it deserves, and giving it that attention only serves the terrorists.
Not really. But it is interesting that he's actually said he won't this time around, and have actually talked about the need to resolve root causes etc. instead of going on a Bush inspired war path. When I saw that, I almost fell of my chair - even if it turns out to be only empty promises, it's still a big change.
The real issue is that terrorism is a minor killer. Every time you step into a street you have greater odds of getting run down and killed than what you have from dying on the tube network, counting both accidents and terrorism combined.
You're more likely to die of almost anything else than terrorism in the UK, even if we from now and onwards see an attack like this every year. We could have 30-40 attacks of the current size every year before it'd rival traffic deaths alone.
That kind of money would save far more lives if it was invested on any number of other things. There are 274 stations on the underground. If the average cost is around the million mark, the cost would easily finance another major hospital, for instance.
If terrorism was a significant killer, then yes, a little loss of privacy might be acceptable. But it isn't a significant killer, and blowing it out of proportion only serves the terrorists scare mongering and draw attention away from issues that affect far more people.
The problem with that is that open DRM is an oxymoron. If it's open it can be bypassed. DRM works only if there is a secret component that can't be bypassed to get at the raw data, and that inevitably means that access to the implementations of it has to be covered by restrictive NDA's.
You completely fail to understand terorism. Why do you think the terrorists want the UK to yield? They gain much more if the UK does NOT yield, but reacts in yet another knee-jerk "lets go to war and kill some more terrorists" reaction Bush-style, or enacts yet more limitations on civil rights. THAT is the kind of reactions that they feed on to help recruit more people.
Their ultimate goal may be to get their opponents to yield, however the very fact that these are terrorist organisations, and not well established armies, mean that they are weak. You resort to terrorism when you're too few to lead guerilla warfare, and guerilla warfare when you are too weak for open conflict. You do it to spread fear and get your enemy to do stupid things, not to "win".
I'm not British, but I live in London and was on the train to Victoria this morning when I heard about the explosions. I did write both about my trip (which was fairly uneventful) and some thoughts on terrorism on my blog.
Hopefully one day politicians will get a clue, and maybe the terorrist dorks will get a harder time recruiting more people.
You are asking him to prove something different than what he claimed.... Nice try, but not a very honest way to debate.
Democracy is not about votes, but about influence. It doesn't matter if everyone can vote if the vote doesn't mean anything, or if how people vote is largely influenced by the funding available to the various candidates, or if the election system is biased towards certain candidates.
The election system is the first flaw - by penalising votes for outsiders it creates an entrenched situation where only very rich people (i.e. Ross Perot) or the two major parties have a fighting chance of winning. That in itself means that even if the majority of Americans in advance of the next election wanted a major change, and a candidate matched what they wanted, that candidate would be unlikely to stand a chance because most voters would see it as too risky.
The funding available has a similar level of importance - remember the level of support Perot was able to get? It was a direct result of having access to funding that enabled him to reach a large audience. Try picking a random candidate from the last two elections and asking people on the street if they know who he/she was, and most of them won't know. That means that effectively, the office of President is closed to anyone not palatable to a majority in one of the major parties, or wealthy enough for a major PR blitz.
It's tragic that so many people believe blindly in a system just because they are a allowed a vote. People were allowed to vote under Saddam Hussein as well, and we all know - regardless of whether or not we support the war - that those votes were worthless. No other comparisons intended - just an example of how being allowed to vote says nothing about whether or not a country is democratic.
That said, at the moment I live in the UK, which has an election system about as shitty as the US one (i.e. Labour holds an absolute majority in parliament despite not getting anywhere near the majority of votes, thanks to one man circuits), as does France and a number of other European countries, most of the above apply in varying degress to many other countries as well.
For a small business it would be quite reasonable to have a service like that if you don't have enough legal work for it to be worth hiring a full time legal counsel.
If you can't be bothered to go and read his (long) entry on the subject where he clearly states his reasoning, why should he be bothered answering you?
First of all, it's not "outrageous sums of money" when you factor in that the time they spend doing the actual voiceover is just a small percentage of the time they spend on the work (promoting themselves, auditioning, getting contracts sorted, preparing for the role).
You're making the same ridiculous assumption as people that complain about contractor salaries without taking into account that most of them spend less than half their time booked to a job. That doesn't mean SOME actors and SOME contractors don't make tons of money because they happen to be people that can work most of the time and that can dictate fairly high salaries, but the average actor makes less than the average working person:
Around $30,000 for actors and above $40,000 for the whole working population in the US. Only about 10% of actors in the US pull in $100k or more a year, and the majority make little enough that they can't live on acting alone. In fact Screen Actor Guild members apparently pull in only around $5000 a year on average from acting - it's only a minority that get enough acting jobs to make it their full time job.
Wil has no reason to defend himself to the programmers, artists, designers and writers in the industry - if those people can't be bothered to unionize or to negotiate deals individually (if they seriously think they'd have any bargaining power individually), they have NOTHING to complain about. Neither Wil, nor anyone else, have a duty to stand back and let themselves get shafted just because other people aren't willing to take responsibility.
There's few things that pisses me off as much as people that complain because other people have the balls to stand up for themselves.
This is jointly funded by a consortium that includes United States, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea and the European Union, so it's hardly a matter of France spending 12 billion and taking a risk, but France winning a bid to get substantial benefits (as presumably having the site of the reactor means a larger amount of the investment will be spent in France).
Re:What users would really need for desktop linux.
on
Xorg and Desktop Eyecandy
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Actually I'd be satisfied with a Firefox that doesn't leak all over the place... I've got plenty of memory, but that doesn't help much when Firefox keeps growing until everything grinds to a halt swapping, so I have to restart it every day or so.
How do you manage to spend 3000 a year to commute within London considering the most expensive travelcard, covering zone 1-D costs 2.360 GBP a year? Heck, it's even cost effective to pay the annual season ticket with a credit card if don't want to pay it upfront...
You're making the (wrongful) assumption that there are no other alternatives in between getting a transplant of this device and getting a transplant of a new human heart. There are plenty of other devices, including other mechanical hearts and devices to assist your current heart, on the market. The main benefit of this device is that it's fully implanted, and so gives more freedom of movement - it's not the only alternative available.
The arguments against allowing viewing of child porn are several:
Allowing child porn is a further burden on the victims. Imagine being abused and have to go through life knowing that people like your abusers are still looking at pictures of you being abused. This part I agree with. We require regular porn to be consentual and for the producer to have signed model releases to get rights to distribute the images. A child can't legally give such consent, and I doubt a court would consider accepting consent given by parents colluding with abusers or participating in the abuse.
Second comes the "incitement" argument - the idea that viewing child porn makes people more likely to commit sexual abuse themselves. I don't know if this has ever been proven. Generally this argument tends to be based on flawed media reports that go the wrong way. I.e. an abuser has been found to have child porn.
The problem with that, is that if child porn has the opposite effect (helping people refrain from actual abuse) in the "normal case", then you'd expect a molester to have tried restraining himself that way, or if it has no effect then you'd expect someone ready to take the risk of molesting a child to also be ready to take the risk of having child porn.
I'm not saying it's not possible for it to have a negative effect, merely that I don't think any link has been scientifically proven.
Third comes the argument that creating a "market" for child porn increases abuse. The question here is whether or not merely viewing (as opposed to purchasing) child porn has an effect. Does the people producing it get an added kick out of knowing people will see it even if they don't make money off it directly? Is the stuff people have viewed for free used as "teasers" to make them pay? I don't know.
All in all I think a ban on viewing it intentionally is acceptable - the first reason in itself is enough for me. The problem finding a balance in terms of proof for deciding whether or not someone has viewed something (as opposed to have it on their computer because of a trojan or because someone included a hidden image in a seemingly innocent webpage.
That is why most laws focus on possession or distribution instead of viewing. But even possession is hard for the same reasons mentioned above. Imagine if someone added a hidden image on the front page of one of the major web portals. Obviously the courts wouldn't be stupid enough to let the government throw tens of millions of people in jail despite not having the faintest idea what was downloaded to their computers, regardless what the law says. But what if it's only done to a few people? Been fired at work, and want to stitch up the boss, perhaps?
Yes, spending less than $2 million a year over the next three years on research split between them is "flushing billions of taxpayer money down the toilet".
The supersonic jetliner is 1960s space-age dream bullshit. Yes, we CAN build supersonic passenger jet planes. But we don't have the technology to make it economical.
Duh. That's why people spend money on research. To get the technology to make them economical.
I do agree with you that there are other things to fix as well, but I think you severely underestimate the cost.
Slashdot Mirror
To turn your question on it's head: Why should we (as in the rest of the world) have to let someone else control that which is ours? The non-US parts of the internet is no more the property of the US than non-US electricity networks or phone networks even though both originated with the US.
Or do you advocate US control over electricity grids worldwide as well?
So much for any concept of freedom and democracy...
Why should anyone except engineers who happen to have access to these organisations be satisfied with having a bunch of engineers set public policy?
The only of the organisations you suggested that would be remotely acceptable for most governments would be ISO, and only because ISO is a government sponsored organisations which would have very much the same governing issues as the UN if it got handed something political.
You miss the crucial difference between fiction and non-fiction. Of course we can imagine what it would be like after the singularity - it is our ability to give meaningful predictions of the future that is reduced. That doesn't mean we can't try. We just have to accept that the odds of being correct will be tremendously low, but in this case being right isn't the point. Being interesting and thought provoking is.
In addition, there's at least one company working on a small cheap print on demand / binding machine intended to be cheap enough for bookstores to offer print on demand in store.
The Sun has a circulation of about 3.4 million for comparison, News of the World around 3.8 million and the Sunday Times around 1.3 million. In fact, of the well known national newspapers, only the Independent are clearly smaller than the Guardian, unless you add in complete outsiders like the Morning Star.
Actually, the BBC charter explicitly requires the BBC to provide some level of service abroad. This is fairly typical for public broadcasters in that many of them are intended to provide some level of service to expats as well, and to help promote their country's culture and values abroad.
In the UK, Levi's used Haendel's Sarabande from his Suite in D minor for an ad back in 2002/2003. The piece was relatively unknown by the general public, but as a result of the ad the largest classical radio station kept getting huge number of requests for it for months, many of them just for "that song from the Levi's ad", and whenever they'd play it, they'd refer to Levi's as well.
To this day I'd expect most people in the UK who recognise it to think of the Levi's ad and most of them likely won't know where the music is from.
All Levi's would have had to do to capitalise of that was to - in at least some of the advertising slots - include a URL that hinted that you could get the music there, and they'd have a great opportunity to both spread it and to get people to watch more of their promotional material.
Add to that tagging the music with the URL and a mention of Levi's and the ad, and put the ad itself for download on the same site and they'd get a significant boost over the ad by itself - in cases like this, where the ad was actually very good by itself, you might even find a significant number of people would like to see the ad again.
(For an interesting take on this particular ad before it started running, see this article in the Telegraph)
That said, I find myself watching more and more BBC - partly because as their number of channels have gone up I've found more shows fit.
The upside is of course that since most shows on BBC are relatively free to experiment and not have to be commercial successes, there are often real gems to be found that doesn't get ruined by trying to target the lowest common denominator of a very diverse population.
I don't type extremely fast, but more than fast enough that the typing doesn't slow down my work, and hence I've never had an incentive to improve my speed much beyond where it currently is as it would just lead to my hands waiting idle lots of the time anyway.
(For anyone who's interested, I usually hold my left hand in approximately the same position as you'd do for qwerty touch typing, but with my thumb resting on space, and my little finger near shift. My right hand is usually further to the right, with my three rightmost fingers often resting on enter and the bracket keys respectively, though I tend to move the right hand around quite a bit.
Interestingly, I often find myself supporting it so I can suspend it over the keyboard without resting the fingers on any keys, and still usually have no problems finding the right keys without looking at the keyboard.
For some reason I rarely, if ever, use my right hand thumb when typing, and my left hand thumb hardly ever leaves the space bar.
Note that I'm left handed, and my left hand is significantly stronger than my right, so that might have something to do with my preference for a hand placement that places most strain on the left and gives the right a more relaxed and varied workload)
Treating this as a war is a guaranteed way of getting millions of people that currently are against these terrorists to change sides once they see their friends and relatives murdered or imprisoned or treated as animals.
Someone else has already pointed out that this tactic was exactly what the UK government followed in Northern Ireland, and one of the key reasons that allowed the IRA to grow so powerful - the more brutal the government got, the more people decided IRA were right after all.
In fact, from what you are writing, you are no better than these terrorists yourself. You are advocating the same kind of ideology of hate and religious/race based war. If you seriously believe radical imams are legitimate targets, then you are no less a legitimate target based on the hate mongering you are attempting here.
Scum like you is exactly one of the reasons why terrorism is escalating, because you help turn it into a "war" instead of letting society focus on solving the root causes. Again, look at Northern Ireland to see the difference a few years of treating people with relative respect will do over the kind of fascist methods you are proposing.
Not in London, perhaps, but more likely because they didn't have the capabilities than of any concern for human life. Bombings like the one in Omagh, or the Brighton bomb aimed are clear indications that they had the will, but not the means (The Brighton bomb "only" killed 5 and hurt 34, but was a complete failure as the goal had been to take out all of the cabinet) In any case, they are hyping the fear, yes. It would take 30-40 attacks like this to even get to the level of deaths on British roads each year. About as many people as died in these attacks die in accidents and suicides in the London underground network alone each year. It's simply getting far more attention than it deserves, and giving it that attention only serves the terrorists.
Not really. But it is interesting that he's actually said he won't this time around, and have actually talked about the need to resolve root causes etc. instead of going on a Bush inspired war path. When I saw that, I almost fell of my chair - even if it turns out to be only empty promises, it's still a big change.
You're more likely to die of almost anything else than terrorism in the UK, even if we from now and onwards see an attack like this every year. We could have 30-40 attacks of the current size every year before it'd rival traffic deaths alone.
That kind of money would save far more lives if it was invested on any number of other things. There are 274 stations on the underground. If the average cost is around the million mark, the cost would easily finance another major hospital, for instance.
If terrorism was a significant killer, then yes, a little loss of privacy might be acceptable. But it isn't a significant killer, and blowing it out of proportion only serves the terrorists scare mongering and draw attention away from issues that affect far more people.
The problem with that is that open DRM is an oxymoron. If it's open it can be bypassed. DRM works only if there is a secret component that can't be bypassed to get at the raw data, and that inevitably means that access to the implementations of it has to be covered by restrictive NDA's.
Their ultimate goal may be to get their opponents to yield, however the very fact that these are terrorist organisations, and not well established armies, mean that they are weak. You resort to terrorism when you're too few to lead guerilla warfare, and guerilla warfare when you are too weak for open conflict. You do it to spread fear and get your enemy to do stupid things, not to "win".
I'm not British, but I live in London and was on the train to Victoria this morning when I heard about the explosions. I did write both about my trip (which was fairly uneventful) and some thoughts on terrorism on my blog. Hopefully one day politicians will get a clue, and maybe the terorrist dorks will get a harder time recruiting more people.
Democracy is not about votes, but about influence. It doesn't matter if everyone can vote if the vote doesn't mean anything, or if how people vote is largely influenced by the funding available to the various candidates, or if the election system is biased towards certain candidates.
The election system is the first flaw - by penalising votes for outsiders it creates an entrenched situation where only very rich people (i.e. Ross Perot) or the two major parties have a fighting chance of winning. That in itself means that even if the majority of Americans in advance of the next election wanted a major change, and a candidate matched what they wanted, that candidate would be unlikely to stand a chance because most voters would see it as too risky.
The funding available has a similar level of importance - remember the level of support Perot was able to get? It was a direct result of having access to funding that enabled him to reach a large audience. Try picking a random candidate from the last two elections and asking people on the street if they know who he/she was, and most of them won't know. That means that effectively, the office of President is closed to anyone not palatable to a majority in one of the major parties, or wealthy enough for a major PR blitz.
It's tragic that so many people believe blindly in a system just because they are a allowed a vote. People were allowed to vote under Saddam Hussein as well, and we all know - regardless of whether or not we support the war - that those votes were worthless. No other comparisons intended - just an example of how being allowed to vote says nothing about whether or not a country is democratic.
That said, at the moment I live in the UK, which has an election system about as shitty as the US one (i.e. Labour holds an absolute majority in parliament despite not getting anywhere near the majority of votes, thanks to one man circuits), as does France and a number of other European countries, most of the above apply in varying degress to many other countries as well.
For a small business it would be quite reasonable to have a service like that if you don't have enough legal work for it to be worth hiring a full time legal counsel.
The article did mention that Redhat and IBM were both part of the cutover team, so I guess they were the vendors.
First of all, it's not "outrageous sums of money" when you factor in that the time they spend doing the actual voiceover is just a small percentage of the time they spend on the work (promoting themselves, auditioning, getting contracts sorted, preparing for the role).
You're making the same ridiculous assumption as people that complain about contractor salaries without taking into account that most of them spend less than half their time booked to a job. That doesn't mean SOME actors and SOME contractors don't make tons of money because they happen to be people that can work most of the time and that can dictate fairly high salaries, but the average actor makes less than the average working person:
Around $30,000 for actors and above $40,000 for the whole working population in the US. Only about 10% of actors in the US pull in $100k or more a year, and the majority make little enough that they can't live on acting alone. In fact Screen Actor Guild members apparently pull in only around $5000 a year on average from acting - it's only a minority that get enough acting jobs to make it their full time job.
Wil has no reason to defend himself to the programmers, artists, designers and writers in the industry - if those people can't be bothered to unionize or to negotiate deals individually (if they seriously think they'd have any bargaining power individually), they have NOTHING to complain about. Neither Wil, nor anyone else, have a duty to stand back and let themselves get shafted just because other people aren't willing to take responsibility.
There's few things that pisses me off as much as people that complain because other people have the balls to stand up for themselves.
This is jointly funded by a consortium that includes United States, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea and the European Union, so it's hardly a matter of France spending 12 billion and taking a risk, but France winning a bid to get substantial benefits (as presumably having the site of the reactor means a larger amount of the investment will be spent in France).
Actually I'd be satisfied with a Firefox that doesn't leak all over the place... I've got plenty of memory, but that doesn't help much when Firefox keeps growing until everything grinds to a halt swapping, so I have to restart it every day or so.
How do you manage to spend 3000 a year to commute within London considering the most expensive travelcard, covering zone 1-D costs 2.360 GBP a year? Heck, it's even cost effective to pay the annual season ticket with a credit card if don't want to pay it upfront...
You're making the (wrongful) assumption that there are no other alternatives in between getting a transplant of this device and getting a transplant of a new human heart. There are plenty of other devices, including other mechanical hearts and devices to assist your current heart, on the market. The main benefit of this device is that it's fully implanted, and so gives more freedom of movement - it's not the only alternative available.
Allowing child porn is a further burden on the victims. Imagine being abused and have to go through life knowing that people like your abusers are still looking at pictures of you being abused. This part I agree with. We require regular porn to be consentual and for the producer to have signed model releases to get rights to distribute the images. A child can't legally give such consent, and I doubt a court would consider accepting consent given by parents colluding with abusers or participating in the abuse.
Second comes the "incitement" argument - the idea that viewing child porn makes people more likely to commit sexual abuse themselves. I don't know if this has ever been proven. Generally this argument tends to be based on flawed media reports that go the wrong way. I.e. an abuser has been found to have child porn.
The problem with that, is that if child porn has the opposite effect (helping people refrain from actual abuse) in the "normal case", then you'd expect a molester to have tried restraining himself that way, or if it has no effect then you'd expect someone ready to take the risk of molesting a child to also be ready to take the risk of having child porn.
I'm not saying it's not possible for it to have a negative effect, merely that I don't think any link has been scientifically proven.
Third comes the argument that creating a "market" for child porn increases abuse. The question here is whether or not merely viewing (as opposed to purchasing) child porn has an effect. Does the people producing it get an added kick out of knowing people will see it even if they don't make money off it directly? Is the stuff people have viewed for free used as "teasers" to make them pay? I don't know.
All in all I think a ban on viewing it intentionally is acceptable - the first reason in itself is enough for me. The problem finding a balance in terms of proof for deciding whether or not someone has viewed something (as opposed to have it on their computer because of a trojan or because someone included a hidden image in a seemingly innocent webpage.
That is why most laws focus on possession or distribution instead of viewing. But even possession is hard for the same reasons mentioned above. Imagine if someone added a hidden image on the front page of one of the major web portals. Obviously the courts wouldn't be stupid enough to let the government throw tens of millions of people in jail despite not having the faintest idea what was downloaded to their computers, regardless what the law says. But what if it's only done to a few people? Been fired at work, and want to stitch up the boss, perhaps?
The supersonic jetliner is 1960s space-age dream bullshit. Yes, we CAN build supersonic passenger jet planes. But we don't have the technology to make it economical.
Duh. That's why people spend money on research. To get the technology to make them economical.
I do agree with you that there are other things to fix as well, but I think you severely underestimate the cost.