I'm a Japanophile, too, but there's something about that culture that really attracts some creepy (or at least unsettling) gaijin.
I think it's the fact that nobody obsesses like the Japanese. Think about it. The culture prizes knowledge but excludes people outside the norm. Both forces push those with obsessive tendencies way further out over the edge than in many other countries. You don't get otaku and hikikomori in other countries to the level that whole industries cater to them.
Because of that our own obsessive and socially outcast people get the false impression that obsessing over their entertainment and so on is socially acceptable there. Therefore, it's not bad to be like that. Other people understand. Listen, covering your walls in anime posters and keeping figurines of female characters is even more of a turn-off for women there than it is here. It doesn't help that (much like tabletop gaming and first-person shooters in the states) anime fandom has been tarnished by a few murders by fans Where the media latched onto their hobbies as the cause of their mental degeneration.
(FYI, otaku is not a nice word. It inherently carries connotations of creepy, socially-stunted hermits. The term use for obsessed geeks comes from its use by such people who would use it to greet each other (as a polite form of "you") because they couldn't remember other people's names. Don't wear it like a badge of pride.)
I think if more people realized that the Japanese didn't like their creepy fanboys anymore than we do, it might lose a bit of its sheen. As for the other factors, I'd say that, yes, technology, kid-like spirit, obscurity, and sexual undertones in addition to action and escapist elements strongly influence anime fandom. For those of us that gain no joy from reality television, sit-coms sports, or other drivel, anime makes a nice escape. The problem is the people who don't know how to come back to reality afterwards.
I ask because that was the longest-winded, most self-indulgent review I've ever read of anything.
I'll sum it up:
"Blah, blah, I have rarified tastes in J-pop, blah, blah, I know the producer's name, blah, blah, the game is more of the same and it's good, blah, blah, the game succeeded because of Japanophiles with less knowledge of Japanese culture than me, blah, blah, the game is more of the same and it's bad, blah, blah, I suggest that the producer drop his name in connection with newer projects that have nothing to do with Katamari."
The review was incoherent and was 20-30% about the author of the review more than the game. I smell blog.
A Prius is a great alternative for a hybrid car, but what the manufacturer doesn't want to tell you when you're buying it is that the batteries only last about 6-8 years, and then they cost $10,000 to replace.
FYI, the Prius hybrid drivetrain (including electric motors and batteries) are warranteed for 8 years. I looked at buying one recently but couldn't afford it and had to go with a lesser car.
While Clark sentiments are noble, they're equivalent to saying that we shouldn't even be having these rivalries here on the ground. He is correct, but wishing does not make reality so.
Space colonization is going to be like any other form of colonization in history, only with less killing of the natives. It's going to be a chance for each country's "Way of Life" to be exported abroad and for each country to seize resources for themselves so that they can dominate their rivals close to home. The fact that it's in space instead of across the sea is irrelevant.
Seriously, this post is the best argument that I've ever heard for homeschooling. I think I'm going to remember that bathroom quip for the rest of my life.
The second paragraph, though, clinched it for me. The argument is pure gold.
School sports is a way to unite the student body. It promotes (this may sound corny) school spirit where you have a sense of belonging and pride. This is crucial to any school to mark its place!
Mindless, zealous worship of an institution for the mere reason that you belong to it is the root of all authoritarian rule. I think that tribal chest-thumping, irrational us vs. them feelings, and devotion to a name and a name alone are the LAST things we need to be encouraging in our kids.
Every private school in town knows that if they piss off one parent...
As the child of a teacher who has to handle crazy parent demands, this makes me shudder. Honestly, there are a lot of parents who are convinced that their child is "a perfect angel at home," so there's no way they could be causing the trouble at school that the teacher observes. These deluded parents will rankle at any punishment given to their child for bad behavior and some even try to get their child removed from the class or the teacher fired rather than accept that they have raised their child poorly.
The idea of every school licking the boots of every parent with an axe to grind against a teacher would be the death of the educational system.
Re:Reading, writing, & arithmetic through six
on
Improving Education?
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· Score: 1
I really do not think that the answer is to reward the slackers by giving up on them. All that will do is dissuade the general populace to learn about the world around them. Encouraging a populace to never try to educate themselves is essentially death to democracy.
Furthermore, what kid really understands what's best for them in the long term (i.e. the next 50 years of their life) while in high school? Make them learn. Life isn't all about what you feel like doing at the time. I get to hear enough about the end results of people who only learned what they paid attention to when I look at the inner city and the trailer parks back home. Vocational training is not the answer.
This is problem number one, and I firmly point the finger at pop culture in America. Success in school is not rewarded with prestige in our pop culture. In our TV programs, you don't ever see the stock character of "the popular kid that's good at everything." Popular kids in American pop culture are very rarely acadmeic success stories, while good students are always unpopular.
It didn't start with our entertainment though, and so it can't end there. Politics and religion in America has long had an anti-intellectual tendency dating back to the Dark Ages in Europe through the lineage of Puritanism and our down-to-business focused work ethic. An intellectual was seen as an idle person and often was a person who defied the Will of God by questioning dogma. While this attitude has weakened over the past few centuries, it has still left its stain on the philosophy of blue collar America.
Asian countries have been fortunate to have had Confuscian philosophy as an influence. A virtuous man is a studious man in Confuscian philosophy. Asian religions also have rarely held onto a dogmatic streak in their worship -- though they have been just as capable of putting believers of other religions to the sword. They have been more encouraging of questioning and seeking which has overall led to a culture that prized education more than the West.
Even so, many European nations have shaken off the past and gained a far better attitude towards education. The problem runs deep in our culture, and until the public attitude towards intellectuals and education changes, no amount of shuffling about the cirriculum will help. However, I think we've been sliding backwards on this since the 60s. I don't forsee any significant improvements in my lifetime unless a major political and philosophical land change occurs.
Re:I agree. The very idea of such a penalty is evi
on
Death Penalty For Hackers?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Unless the parent(s)are total crack-heads, do any kids in the US REALLY go hungry?
Yes, yes they do. Not many do, but some extreme cases do. There are a lot parents who you might call "total crack-heads." My sister works as a teacher at an inner city school, and she sees a lot of this sort of thing. Some kids only get a school lunch as a reasonable meal.
In the projects, there are two essentials -- a car and cable. Properly feeding and clothing your kids is secondary. It's not surprising given that most "parents" in the projects are stupid kids who got pregnant at an early age and never really learned how to fend for themselves. These are people who have no job skills and no initiative to improve themselves since they see every other pathetic loser around them as the status quo. They have no role models other than the flashy celebrities on the TV living hedonistically for little hard work (making music or playing games). As long as they're having fun and looking cool to their peers, everything's good.
The kids (most of whom weren't wanted when the mother got pregnant) are treated as an burdensome obligation in many cases. They're taken care of just as well as any other unwanted chore is -- that is, shoved off on a grandparent or even another child. My sister has seen a six year old left at home alone to take care of a two year old. (Poor girl got put in a foster home where the foster parents didn't care about her either and just wanted to spend the welfare check for taking her in. I digress.)
We are SO spoiled.
Exactly. This is why this sort of thing happens. If the parents honestly had to work to survive and didn't have their own parents to fall back on, I think these kids would be a little better cared for. For the most part, parents in the poor neighborhoods DO feed their kids, but the cheap crap they feed them isn't healthy for them. This is why obesity is on the rise fastest in the poorest areas of the nation. How much does a good healthy meal with vegetables cost vs. McDonald's. You do the math.
The article alleges that violent approaches are suggested by characters meant to be seen as "monsters" while pacifistic approaches are suggested by characters meant to be seen as "charismatic," but is this a case of character actions coloring your perception of the character?
Would the "monsters" be seen as monsters if they did not encourage violence, and would the "charismatic" ones be thought of so well if they did not work towards non-violence? If the characters switched goals, then wouldn't they also switch descriptions applied to them?
Explicit sex earns and Adult Only rating in the ESRB system which means that the game can't be sold in areas where minors can get it. This means Wal-mart amongst other places. The fact is that most M titles end up in the hands of kids much like R rated movies do, but NC-17 rated movies and AO games don't for good reason.
I can't believe they'd even code the feature. Did someone really think that they might be able to get that accepted in a retail game? Yeesh -- this isn't Japan.
What if they find it's the same DNA we have and it tuns out they just had some serious back problems?
It'd be shocking in light of all the other traits that they didn't have in common with us. Did you know that they have a larger cranium than us? Did you also know that they weren't all hunchbacked like the pop culture image or a caveman would suggest?
Because the person I responded to, Azeron, was attempting to justify the indefinite detention and torture of terrorist suspect by the atrocities of the past. By arguing purely from legal precedent, he was denying (and decrying) the view that the prisoners had any instrinsic human rights that merited treating them with the same principles of respect for one's fellow man that are enshrined in the Constitution -- the document that makes America more than just a bunch of people living on a spot of land.
The poster seems to relish being rid of O'Connor and the dawning of an era where we sink back into barbarism. Clearly, the concept of intrinsic human rights does not exist in his worldview.
Also note that the justices appointed don't always carry otu the 'wishes' of the appointer. President Ford, a fairly conservative leader, managed to get one of the more liberal judges appointed.
That will absolutely NOT happen. In case you haven't been following this administration, this President does not pick people purely on merit but picks people who are not friends or friends of friends. This is the most insular Presidency of my lifetime. You can rest assured that any judge nominated to the Supreme Court will be a staunch neoconservative.
Consider that Alberto Gonzalez is very high on the list of candidates.
i would further suggest that, if you are actually intetested in following greenpeace's position on this and similar matters...
I'm not really interested in the slightest. While I share Greenpeace's commitment to saving the environment and to achieving nuclear disarmament and world peace, I think their fear of nuclear fusion power is ludicrous and unfounded. To be honest, their opposition to it has made me write off their opinion on it almost completely.
They do have a really good point about what we could achieve if we put that money to other uses right now. However, if fusion is to be achieved, serious money must be committed to it. They just don't want the technology to even exist, and I do not respect them for it.
For that kind of dough, wouldn't it be easier just to move the Earth to a higher orbit (further from Sol)?
In a word: No. In two words: Hell, no!
Do you have any idea what kind of money that would take if such a thing were even possible with human effort? Do you have any idea how much energy would have to be expended and how much mass would have to tossed off planet (or smashed into it) to accomplish this? Furthermore, can you think of a way to move the enitre planet off orbit without killing most life on it thanks to disturbing the crust and the atmosphere?
How much seawater could you pump into the central Sahara for $1 trillion? [...] But how much cooler would that make the globe?
Um, none? For the purposes of global warming, shuffling water around is a closed system. Now, if you're talking about increasing cloud cover or saturating the air with water, you have something that could actually affect total global climate, but moving water from one part of the planet to another does nothing in and of itself to the picture. Also, do you think that pumping water happens for free (in terms of both energy and money)?
Or, maybe we could just accept the changes in climate as the natural order of things (even if they're our fault - we're natural, too). If the oceans rise, move to higher ground.
Yeah, and fixing it to save our collective necks would be "natural" too.
Seriously, what good does it do to move to higher ground if you're losing farmland in the process? You're going to run out of places that can provide food to support the world's populace long before the ice caps completely melt thanks to desertification. Furthermore, fresh water is going to be more and more in demand. A world deep in the throes of global warming is going to be a world dominated by war over scant resources with an even more brutal contrast between the have and the have-not countries.
Diesel hybrids are hard because diesel engines do not like to be shut off periodically. Diesel engines ignite fuel based purely on pressure and heat and operate best when hot. In fact, if all you do with a diesel engine is drive from home to work, you probably haven't even fully warmed the thing up to its most efficient operating temperature by the time you arrive at your destination. Diesel and hybrid design philosophy needs to be reconciled first.
So, let's dim the sunlight needed to grow crops (and other CO2-absorbing life) and needed by humanity for proper neurochemistry to avoid depression. Then, let's take that light and use it to microwave the Earth, dumping much of that blocked heat right back into the biosphere via industrial use. Also, let's ignore the potential health risks since from dumping more radio energy into environment at a time when studies are showing potential cellular damage from cell phones.
What could possibly go wrong? I mean, it's not like it would take a massive consumption of resources to implement such a quixotic idea!
Or, at least, Bram Cohen would've been safe until he created decentralized torrents and torrent search capabilities, which have no real use in the legitimate content distribution business. These are features almost explicitly designed for getting pirated goods.
I've seen quite a few gun magazines (mostly in the waiting rooms of auto shops, for some reason) that advertise ammunition or guns based on lethality or stopping power or penetration ability. To my mind, this isn't especially different than the claiming that "any movie or song" can be found on your P2P network.
You're missing the fact that there are many situations in which it is legal to kill another person. The self-defense and law enforcement markets have a legitimate interest in the stopping power of a firearm because the purpose of a gun is to kill. It's not to wound. It's not to scare. It's to kill a person who has become a threat to you or people who you must protect.
This is significantly different from advertising that you can get "any movie or song. " That implicitly includes ones that are illegal for you to obtain. In fact, it's extremely hard to claim without risking perjury that one didn't know that the vast majority of such data traded would be infringing.
Betamax was all about whether illegal misuse of a product sold for legal uses implied conspiracy to commit the crime by the manufacturer. Grokster was about whether or not potential legal uses of a product intended for illegal uses exempts one from conspiracy and collusion. The Supreme Court ruled the only way that they could have logically ruled which was to say that it wasn't a "get out of jail free" card. The question in this case is now one of Grokster's intended use.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a Japanophile, too, but there's something about that culture that really attracts some creepy (or at least unsettling) gaijin.
I think it's the fact that nobody obsesses like the Japanese. Think about it. The culture prizes knowledge but excludes people outside the norm. Both forces push those with obsessive tendencies way further out over the edge than in many other countries. You don't get otaku and hikikomori in other countries to the level that whole industries cater to them.
Because of that our own obsessive and socially outcast people get the false impression that obsessing over their entertainment and so on is socially acceptable there. Therefore, it's not bad to be like that. Other people understand. Listen, covering your walls in anime posters and keeping figurines of female characters is even more of a turn-off for women there than it is here. It doesn't help that (much like tabletop gaming and first-person shooters in the states) anime fandom has been tarnished by a few murders by fans Where the media latched onto their hobbies as the cause of their mental degeneration.
(FYI, otaku is not a nice word. It inherently carries connotations of creepy, socially-stunted hermits. The term use for obsessed geeks comes from its use by such people who would use it to greet each other (as a polite form of "you") because they couldn't remember other people's names. Don't wear it like a badge of pride.)
I think if more people realized that the Japanese didn't like their creepy fanboys anymore than we do, it might lose a bit of its sheen. As for the other factors, I'd say that, yes, technology, kid-like spirit, obscurity, and sexual undertones in addition to action and escapist elements strongly influence anime fandom. For those of us that gain no joy from reality television, sit-coms sports, or other drivel, anime makes a nice escape. The problem is the people who don't know how to come back to reality afterwards.
I ask because that was the longest-winded, most self-indulgent review I've ever read of anything.
I'll sum it up:
"Blah, blah, I have rarified tastes in J-pop, blah, blah, I know the producer's name, blah, blah, the game is more of the same and it's good, blah, blah, the game succeeded because of Japanophiles with less knowledge of Japanese culture than me, blah, blah, the game is more of the same and it's bad, blah, blah, I suggest that the producer drop his name in connection with newer projects that have nothing to do with Katamari."
The review was incoherent and was 20-30% about the author of the review more than the game. I smell blog.
A Prius is a great alternative for a hybrid car, but what the manufacturer doesn't want to tell you when you're buying it is that the batteries only last about 6-8 years, and then they cost $10,000 to replace.
FYI, the Prius hybrid drivetrain (including electric motors and batteries) are warranteed for 8 years. I looked at buying one recently but couldn't afford it and had to go with a lesser car.
While Clark sentiments are noble, they're equivalent to saying that we shouldn't even be having these rivalries here on the ground. He is correct, but wishing does not make reality so.
Space colonization is going to be like any other form of colonization in history, only with less killing of the natives. It's going to be a chance for each country's "Way of Life" to be exported abroad and for each country to seize resources for themselves so that they can dominate their rivals close to home. The fact that it's in space instead of across the sea is irrelevant.
This is history. Prepare to repeat it.
Seriously, this post is the best argument that I've ever heard for homeschooling. I think I'm going to remember that bathroom quip for the rest of my life.
The second paragraph, though, clinched it for me. The argument is pure gold.
School sports is a way to unite the student body. It promotes (this may sound corny) school spirit where you have a sense of belonging and pride. This is crucial to any school to mark its place!
Mindless, zealous worship of an institution for the mere reason that you belong to it is the root of all authoritarian rule. I think that tribal chest-thumping, irrational us vs. them feelings, and devotion to a name and a name alone are the LAST things we need to be encouraging in our kids.
Every private school in town knows that if they piss off one parent...
As the child of a teacher who has to handle crazy parent demands, this makes me shudder. Honestly, there are a lot of parents who are convinced that their child is "a perfect angel at home," so there's no way they could be causing the trouble at school that the teacher observes. These deluded parents will rankle at any punishment given to their child for bad behavior and some even try to get their child removed from the class or the teacher fired rather than accept that they have raised their child poorly.
The idea of every school licking the boots of every parent with an axe to grind against a teacher would be the death of the educational system.
I really do not think that the answer is to reward the slackers by giving up on them. All that will do is dissuade the general populace to learn about the world around them. Encouraging a populace to never try to educate themselves is essentially death to democracy.
Furthermore, what kid really understands what's best for them in the long term (i.e. the next 50 years of their life) while in high school? Make them learn. Life isn't all about what you feel like doing at the time. I get to hear enough about the end results of people who only learned what they paid attention to when I look at the inner city and the trailer parks back home. Vocational training is not the answer.
Eliminate American Anti-intellectualism.
This is problem number one, and I firmly point the finger at pop culture in America. Success in school is not rewarded with prestige in our pop culture. In our TV programs, you don't ever see the stock character of "the popular kid that's good at everything." Popular kids in American pop culture are very rarely acadmeic success stories, while good students are always unpopular.
It didn't start with our entertainment though, and so it can't end there. Politics and religion in America has long had an anti-intellectual tendency dating back to the Dark Ages in Europe through the lineage of Puritanism and our down-to-business focused work ethic. An intellectual was seen as an idle person and often was a person who defied the Will of God by questioning dogma. While this attitude has weakened over the past few centuries, it has still left its stain on the philosophy of blue collar America.
Asian countries have been fortunate to have had Confuscian philosophy as an influence. A virtuous man is a studious man in Confuscian philosophy. Asian religions also have rarely held onto a dogmatic streak in their worship -- though they have been just as capable of putting believers of other religions to the sword. They have been more encouraging of questioning and seeking which has overall led to a culture that prized education more than the West.
Even so, many European nations have shaken off the past and gained a far better attitude towards education. The problem runs deep in our culture, and until the public attitude towards intellectuals and education changes, no amount of shuffling about the cirriculum will help. However, I think we've been sliding backwards on this since the 60s. I don't forsee any significant improvements in my lifetime unless a major political and philosophical land change occurs.
Unless the parent(s)are total crack-heads, do any kids in the US REALLY go hungry?
Yes, yes they do. Not many do, but some extreme cases do. There are a lot parents who you might call "total crack-heads." My sister works as a teacher at an inner city school, and she sees a lot of this sort of thing. Some kids only get a school lunch as a reasonable meal.
In the projects, there are two essentials -- a car and cable. Properly feeding and clothing your kids is secondary. It's not surprising given that most "parents" in the projects are stupid kids who got pregnant at an early age and never really learned how to fend for themselves. These are people who have no job skills and no initiative to improve themselves since they see every other pathetic loser around them as the status quo. They have no role models other than the flashy celebrities on the TV living hedonistically for little hard work (making music or playing games). As long as they're having fun and looking cool to their peers, everything's good.
The kids (most of whom weren't wanted when the mother got pregnant) are treated as an burdensome obligation in many cases. They're taken care of just as well as any other unwanted chore is -- that is, shoved off on a grandparent or even another child. My sister has seen a six year old left at home alone to take care of a two year old. (Poor girl got put in a foster home where the foster parents didn't care about her either and just wanted to spend the welfare check for taking her in. I digress.)
We are SO spoiled.
Exactly. This is why this sort of thing happens. If the parents honestly had to work to survive and didn't have their own parents to fall back on, I think these kids would be a little better cared for. For the most part, parents in the poor neighborhoods DO feed their kids, but the cheap crap they feed them isn't healthy for them. This is why obesity is on the rise fastest in the poorest areas of the nation. How much does a good healthy meal with vegetables cost vs. McDonald's. You do the math.
The article alleges that violent approaches are suggested by characters meant to be seen as "monsters" while pacifistic approaches are suggested by characters meant to be seen as "charismatic," but is this a case of character actions coloring your perception of the character?
Would the "monsters" be seen as monsters if they did not encourage violence, and would the "charismatic" ones be thought of so well if they did not work towards non-violence? If the characters switched goals, then wouldn't they also switch descriptions applied to them?
Explicit sex earns and Adult Only rating in the ESRB system which means that the game can't be sold in areas where minors can get it. This means Wal-mart amongst other places. The fact is that most M titles end up in the hands of kids much like R rated movies do, but NC-17 rated movies and AO games don't for good reason.
I can't believe they'd even code the feature. Did someone really think that they might be able to get that accepted in a retail game? Yeesh -- this isn't Japan.
What if they find it's the same DNA we have and it tuns out they just had some serious back problems?
It'd be shocking in light of all the other traits that they didn't have in common with us. Did you know that they have a larger cranium than us? Did you also know that they weren't all hunchbacked like the pop culture image or a caveman would suggest?
Care to explain why you think that?
Because the person I responded to, Azeron, was attempting to justify the indefinite detention and torture of terrorist suspect by the atrocities of the past. By arguing purely from legal precedent, he was denying (and decrying) the view that the prisoners had any instrinsic human rights that merited treating them with the same principles of respect for one's fellow man that are enshrined in the Constitution -- the document that makes America more than just a bunch of people living on a spot of land.
The poster seems to relish being rid of O'Connor and the dawning of an era where we sink back into barbarism. Clearly, the concept of intrinsic human rights does not exist in his worldview.
I don't suppose the concept of intrinsic human rights has any meaning in your personal ethic system, does it?
Also note that the justices appointed don't always carry otu the 'wishes' of the appointer. President Ford, a fairly conservative leader, managed to get one of the more liberal judges appointed.
That will absolutely NOT happen. In case you haven't been following this administration, this President does not pick people purely on merit but picks people who are not friends or friends of friends. This is the most insular Presidency of my lifetime. You can rest assured that any judge nominated to the Supreme Court will be a staunch neoconservative.
Consider that Alberto Gonzalez is very high on the list of candidates.
Yeah, but at least our college is known for something.
The difference between greed, ambition, vanity, and lust is only in what it is you obsessed with taking.
All is entrapment in desire. The rest is merely flavor and color.
There is already no evidence for the religious concept of the 'soul'.
You seem to have confused "a lack of proof" and "a proof of the lack."
the greenpeace press release on the fusion plant in question is here. i didn't see your quote in it anywhere.
Maybe you should find a press release that is more recent than one from 2003.
i would further suggest that, if you are actually intetested in following greenpeace's position on this and similar matters...
I'm not really interested in the slightest. While I share Greenpeace's commitment to saving the environment and to achieving nuclear disarmament and world peace, I think their fear of nuclear fusion power is ludicrous and unfounded. To be honest, their opposition to it has made me write off their opinion on it almost completely.
They do have a really good point about what we could achieve if we put that money to other uses right now. However, if fusion is to be achieved, serious money must be committed to it. They just don't want the technology to even exist, and I do not respect them for it.
For that kind of dough, wouldn't it be easier just to move the Earth to a higher orbit (further from Sol)?
In a word: No.
In two words: Hell, no!
Do you have any idea what kind of money that would take if such a thing were even possible with human effort? Do you have any idea how much energy would have to be expended and how much mass would have to tossed off planet (or smashed into it) to accomplish this? Furthermore, can you think of a way to move the enitre planet off orbit without killing most life on it thanks to disturbing the crust and the atmosphere?
How much seawater could you pump into the central Sahara for $1 trillion? [...] But how much cooler would that make the globe?
Um, none? For the purposes of global warming, shuffling water around is a closed system. Now, if you're talking about increasing cloud cover or saturating the air with water, you have something that could actually affect total global climate, but moving water from one part of the planet to another does nothing in and of itself to the picture. Also, do you think that pumping water happens for free (in terms of both energy and money)?
Or, maybe we could just accept the changes in climate as the natural order of things (even if they're our fault - we're natural, too). If the oceans rise, move to higher ground.
Yeah, and fixing it to save our collective necks would be "natural" too.
Seriously, what good does it do to move to higher ground if you're losing farmland in the process? You're going to run out of places that can provide food to support the world's populace long before the ice caps completely melt thanks to desertification. Furthermore, fresh water is going to be more and more in demand. A world deep in the throes of global warming is going to be a world dominated by war over scant resources with an even more brutal contrast between the have and the have-not countries.
Diesel hybrids are hard because diesel engines do not like to be shut off periodically. Diesel engines ignite fuel based purely on pressure and heat and operate best when hot. In fact, if all you do with a diesel engine is drive from home to work, you probably haven't even fully warmed the thing up to its most efficient operating temperature by the time you arrive at your destination. Diesel and hybrid design philosophy needs to be reconciled first.
So, let's dim the sunlight needed to grow crops (and other CO2-absorbing life) and needed by humanity for proper neurochemistry to avoid depression. Then, let's take that light and use it to microwave the Earth, dumping much of that blocked heat right back into the biosphere via industrial use. Also, let's ignore the potential health risks since from dumping more radio energy into environment at a time when studies are showing potential cellular damage from cell phones.
What could possibly go wrong? I mean, it's not like it would take a massive consumption of resources to implement such a quixotic idea!
Or, at least, Bram Cohen would've been safe until he created decentralized torrents and torrent search capabilities, which have no real use in the legitimate content distribution business. These are features almost explicitly designed for getting pirated goods.
I've seen quite a few gun magazines (mostly in the waiting rooms of auto shops, for some reason) that advertise ammunition or guns based on lethality or stopping power or penetration ability. To my mind, this isn't especially different than the claiming that "any movie or song" can be found on your P2P network.
You're missing the fact that there are many situations in which it is legal to kill another person. The self-defense and law enforcement markets have a legitimate interest in the stopping power of a firearm because the purpose of a gun is to kill. It's not to wound. It's not to scare. It's to kill a person who has become a threat to you or people who you must protect.
This is significantly different from advertising that you can get "any movie or song. " That implicitly includes ones that are illegal for you to obtain. In fact, it's extremely hard to claim without risking perjury that one didn't know that the vast majority of such data traded would be infringing.
Betamax was all about whether illegal misuse of a product sold for legal uses implied conspiracy to commit the crime by the manufacturer. Grokster was about whether or not potential legal uses of a product intended for illegal uses exempts one from conspiracy and collusion. The Supreme Court ruled the only way that they could have logically ruled which was to say that it wasn't a "get out of jail free" card. The question in this case is now one of Grokster's intended use.
Guns are a Betamax issue, not a Grokster issue.