I never said "it just works". What I said amounts to "it works for a good reason."
The reason I'm concerned about tech deployments is that like anything else you have to have experienced people running them and you have to practice to be good at it. Experience matters.
You missed the important point. By eliminating unnecessary components, you eliminate sources of error. If there are no thumb drives, then you don't have to worry about the wrong ones being sent. If there are no touch screens, you don't have to worry about miscalibrated screens recording the wrong vote. If there are no computers, you don't have to worry about crashes, bad software, or power outages.
Other elements of the system show careful thought. For example, by asking for address, then name, you eliminate the problem where you're handed the wrong ballot because you have the same name as someone else. Since there are much more often more than one voter at an address than more than one voter with the same name in a precinct, election workers get into the proper rhythm of checking BOTH. That's an admirable piece of human factors engineering that reflect long experience.
If it's important, KEEP IT SIMPLE. You expect election boards to be able to handle massive technology deployments one day every two years like clockwork? It's nuts.
I have voted in over twenty elections using optical scan, and there have never been any problems. If there were problems they can be fixed by a manual recount.
As for the other problems you mention, they have nothing to do with paper vs. electronic. It's just bad organization.
Here's how we do it where I vote. You walk into the polling place, and you tell the nice old lady your address, She looks up your address on a paper printout, and when she finds it you tell her your name and she crosses it off with a red pencil and hands you your ballot. You go into the voting booth, which is nothing but a curtained aluminum frame with a table in it; the table contains a stack of markers. You mark off your ballot, go to the exit desk where the address and name procedure is duplicated with another nice old lady. Then you drop your ballot into a dropped box under the watchful gaze of a policeman. When the polls close the printouts go into another locked box and it's all driven over to the counting center under police guard.
There's literally nothing technological to screw up voting, counting or recounting, except that every polling place has to have a special machine for visually impaired voters. If that goes wrong the procedure is to bring a trusted person to fill out your ballot.
There's no question that for a reasonably prepared person a GPS and electronic map is the safest and most secure method to find his way. But there are other reasons to learn traditional means of navigation -- pleasure and challenge for example.
One of the advantages of GPS navigation is that it takes the human factor out of the equation. One of the advantages of traditional navigation is that it puts the human factor back *in* to the equation. With a map and compass, you have to keep track of your surroundings, matching the terrain to the map and dead reckoning between places where you can get bearings on definitive landmarks. It requires a high level of situational awareness, which is behind the pleasure and feeling of accomplishment you get by doing it well.
Pre-industrial humans accomplished amazing feats of navigation without maps (in our sense of the word) or compasses. They paddled canoes across the pacific, finding their way tiny islands far across the horizon using subtle changes in the swells caused by reefs and land masses. I once read an 19th C account of Comanche teenagers traveling over four hundred miles across trackless terrain to raid a village none of them had ever been to, using verbal descriptions of landmarks it took the elders days to relate.
Early aviators became adept at pathfinding too. They could tell one part of France from another that would look identical to a layman, using cues like how the prevailing winds shaped the trees.
Finding your way is a craft that can be practiced for its own satisfaction. There are still people who practice calligraphy even though laser printing is more practical. There are still people who like to fence even though guns are a lot more effective. There will, I hope, always people using maps and compasses, possibly even sextants.
Evidently gay is highly contagious. Scientists say it's not airborne, but some of them have got it, so there's obviously a lot they don't know about how gay is spread. It stands to reason we should do everything we an think of to reduce the public exposure to gay.
It's called vehicle tracking, and the devices I was working with ten years ago had arrays of discrete (on/off), continuous (analog) and data inputs you could wire up to anything and the state would be relayed back every few seconds over a cellular data link. For example some police departments equip cruisers with shotguns mounted in the trunk. Put a switch on the shotgun mount and as soon as an officer takes the shotgun out of the rack an alarm goes of back at HQ and the crusier's position is marked on a map.
You can use the inputs on those units for anything. Put the same unit in a snow plow and connect the discrete input to a switch that is activated whenever the plow is lowered. Collect the GPS fixes where the plow is down, put them on a map and bingo, you have a map of the streets you've plowed.
What you do with the inputs is limited only by your imagination. You could put a switch in all the seats and you'd know if the crusier was transporting anyone, or when an officer exited the vehicle. Mount accelerometers in the vehicle and wire them to the analog inputs and you know when the vehicle is maneuvering aggresively. It's not engineering, it's Arduino style inventing.
Sure, but driving is very safe statistically speaking. Your lifetime chance of dying as a car passenger is about 2/10 %; amortized over the tens of thousands of trips you take in the car it means its extremely unlikely that you will be killed in any particular trip. Still, it warrants things like checking your tires and wearing your seatbelts. Statistics is no protection from stupidity.
Space travel, by contrast, is much, much more dangerous than driving. Estimates I've seen come in at about a 4% fatality rate per trip. That's maybe not high enough to dissuade someone from fulfilling their life's dream. Fatality rates for Everest climbers is about 2%. But it's quite reasonable to look at the decision to get on a rocket differently than the decision to get in your car.
Oh, and don't forget to use a five year running average as in here. You can see the global five year running average temperature in 1990 was 0.3 C above the baseline; in 2000 it was about 0.8. You can also see the five year average oscillates above and below the underlying rising trend. If you use a piece of paper to cut off the graph at 1950, it looks like global temperatures are falling. In fact in the 50s global cooling was the scientific consensus, but that's coincidentally where the first contrarian papers proposing AGW were published.
did you ever hear the phrase, YMMV ? like, maybe not everyone is as dedicate or strong as you ? To assert that narrow, twisty, snow covered roads, at night, are not a problem is just mind boggling; you must be a conservative republican who believes in the gold standard, and doesn't know that the individual mandate was a heritage foundation idea
Or... I could just be a person who actually tried it and found out it wasn't such a big deal. I'm not saying everyone has to do it. I'm saying don't be dissuaded by the naysayers who've never tried it.
I bike commuted for many years in Boston, 6-10 miles each way depending on the job and where I was living. It is hardly the cycling hell-on-Earth the poster depicts. In my experience it's practical to bike commute 75% of the time, 95% if you have showers at work. You just need the right clothing, equipment and attitude.
The electric wheel might help some commuter choose routes that would otherwise be impractical, but it's not not going revolutionize bike commuting because it's not essential. What is essential is a can-do attitude. If you're the kind of person who throws his hands up in defeat because he imagines every single challenge as insurmountable, this is not for you.
I have encountered almost every obstacle listed by the poster above, and they were no big deal.
That sounds exactly like a fire marshal who wasn't sufficiently bribed.
Well, you're probably joking but we are talking about Rhode Island, the most notoriously corrupt state in the Northeast, after maybe Pennsylvania. Some say that on a per capita basis it's the most corrupt state in the country.
I had a colleague whose father was an electrician in Rhode Island. When he saw what the state was paying to maintain the lights on a bridge near his house he figured he could easily do it for less. The contract came up to bid and when he found out the amount he'd have to pay in bribes, he realized he couldn't afford to do it.
I personally like Providence quite a bit. I think Federal Hill is great,Waterfire is a blast, and many times we drove down to take our kids to the zoo or the Children's Museum. But I wouldn't do business in the state. It's not worth the hassle.
Yeah, because no shipping ever occurred before LORAN or GPS. What a joke! It's not like people found their way around the globe for centuries using the sun, moon and stars.
Sure, if a precision of 1 nautical mile (1852 meters) is good enough for you, with fixes only possible at certain times of the day. Celestial navigation is not going to keep your 200 foot beam supertanker in the middle of a 500 foot shipping channel in the middle of the day. That's like treading a needle, only you thread ways a half million tons and is traveling at 19 miles/hour.
It works if you select the right statistics. Since 75% of the criminal cases are cleared by the Maricopa sheriff's office without a proper investigation, we really have no idea whether his approach works, or he's just lousy at catching repeat offenders.
I went through a period of my career where I was taking two, sometimes three business trips per month. I was supposed to fly on one of the planes that flew in the WTC on 9/11, but my trip was cancelled a couple days earlier so I could attend a meeting up in Nashua with Oracle. I've never been hijacked or crashed, but I've been in more than one near-miss, which takes a lot of flying. I've also been stranded by missed connections multiple times. Take it from me, Chicago Midway is the worst airport hub to spend a night in.
One day I was stranded at Phoenix Sky Harbor by a missed conection. Standing in the customer service line, watching the passengers ahead of me yell at the woman behind the counter about things she couldn't fix, I had an epiphany: air travel sucks, *and nobody's going to fix it*.
So here's my strategy when it comes to flying: minimize my exposure to the system by taking an alternative whenever it is remotely practical. Rather than fly to Sacramento, which involves at least one flight change from where I live, I fly direct to San Francisco and drive for two hours each way. Rather than take the shuttle from Boston to New York, I take the bus which costs only $22. Spending four hours on the bus is not *safer*, and it's certainly not *faster*, but it sucks soooo much less. On a recent business trip to Blacksburg VA (in the middle of nowhere), I took Amtrak and drove the final two hours, anticipating that 12 hours in the rail system would be *much* preferable to four hours in the air travel system -- and it was.
When I *do* have to fly, I try to do it in cheerful acceptance that the experience will be uncomfortable, inconvenient and possibly personally degrading. It doesn't matter how mad you get, the system isn't going to respond *as long as you continue using it*. The only thing it *will* respond to is more people opting out whenever they have *any* feasible alternative.
A lot of arguments for open source are based on things which people outside the project could in principle accomplish, but in practice seldom do. So it's reassuring at least that an experienced developer can build the two most popular browsers from scratch. It means the arguments aren't hollow. I've seen closed source projects that were purchased by companies, only to find out that getting them to build on any computer but the one it was developed on is a serious engineering challenge.
That the process of building these browsers from scratch is somewhat arcane will come as no surprise to any experienced developer. But that it's not so arcane that it's impractical to figure out is good news.
Is it unreasonable for the average height of a population to grow by 7" in twenty generations? I should think so. But if you changed your initial conditions somewhat, maybe less unreasonable.
There are roughly 400 genes known to influence height. Imagine we have a small, isolated population that does not interbreed with other populations -- say on an isolated island. This population's average male height is, say 175 cm for men -- roughly the same as the average American. However the population contains all the alleles neede to generate individuals approacing 7' in height. We then take our population and put them under evolutionary pressure; let's say we shoot everyone who reaches the age of 16 and is below average height. It wouldn't many generations for that population's average height to become quite tall, as "tall genes" begin to predominate.
Let's change that initial condition by stipulating that there are no "tall genes" in the initial population. It's still average height, but maybe it lacks both "tall genes" and "short genes". It would be surprising if the genetic height potential for a newborn changed very quickly, because you've got to wait for a lot of "lucky" mutations and twenty generations is not that long.
Let's go back to our successful initial conditions and change something else. This time the population has all the necessary alleles to produce super-tall people, but it interbreeds extensively with a large external population which is not subject to our culling protocol. Under these conditions the population's height increase will be slow, or non-existent depending on the rate at which individuals interbreed with populations not under pressure.
What's wrong with our system is that corporate shills call anyone who suggests any restraint on corporate behavior a "socialist", and enough people are scared that only bloodless corporate tools can get elected.
We vote like a bunch of pussies, and we get the government we deserve.
That's because you use ridiculously vaguye language like "easy to transmit". You need to specify the conditions under which the potential transmission takes place. What peoiple don't realize is just how primitive conditions are in Africa, and what a difference it makes. These are countries where medical providers re-use latex gloves, sometimes even hypodermic needles. Granted, this guy was part a medical mission that probably had all the protective equipment, but you have to keep in mind that the primitive conditions that preceded them meant that there have been some TEN THOUSAND cases in the region.
It's immensely labor intensive to take care of an Ebola patient, especially with the precautions required by close contact., but the overwhelming numbers introduces yet another deadly risk factor: fatigue.
So yes, I suppose you could say the medical personnel who contracted Ebola are stupid because they made a mistake under pressure. But what about the rest of us? This epidemic should never have got big enough to pose a global concern. It was our choice to cut the CDC's emergency preparedness budget to a billion dollars below the FY 2002 mark.
Well, every generalization has its corner cases that require careful thought. So while I agree that trolling per se shouldn't be outlawed, there may be certain uses of trolling that should be criminalized.
Take the libelous component of cyberstalking. At the very least this could be an aggravating factor in impersonation. Also, the law already recognizes libel as wrong, but it requires the harmed person take civil action. The Internet exposes more people than ever to reputation harm, but not all those people have the money to hire a lawyer. Social media have created a whole new vista for defamation, much of which is *practically* immune from any consequences.
So I do not in principle object to a law that criminalizes *some* forms of defamation, particularly against people who are not protected by the current laws. But I'd have to look at the the specific proposed law carefully. Just because people *claim* a new law would do something doesn't mean it does, or that's all it does.
Well, there's a big difference between saying something won't ever happen because it's never happened yet, and saying that a claim that you've done something is presumptively not credible unless you can meet certain stadnards of proof.
Slashdot Mirror
I never said "it just works". What I said amounts to "it works for a good reason."
The reason I'm concerned about tech deployments is that like anything else you have to have experienced people running them and you have to practice to be good at it. Experience matters.
You missed the important point. By eliminating unnecessary components, you eliminate sources of error. If there are no thumb drives, then you don't have to worry about the wrong ones being sent. If there are no touch screens, you don't have to worry about miscalibrated screens recording the wrong vote. If there are no computers, you don't have to worry about crashes, bad software, or power outages.
Other elements of the system show careful thought. For example, by asking for address, then name, you eliminate the problem where you're handed the wrong ballot because you have the same name as someone else. Since there are much more often more than one voter at an address than more than one voter with the same name in a precinct, election workers get into the proper rhythm of checking BOTH. That's an admirable piece of human factors engineering that reflect long experience.
If it's important, KEEP IT SIMPLE. You expect election boards to be able to handle massive technology deployments one day every two years like clockwork? It's nuts.
I have voted in over twenty elections using optical scan, and there have never been any problems. If there were problems they can be fixed by a manual recount.
As for the other problems you mention, they have nothing to do with paper vs. electronic. It's just bad organization.
Here's how we do it where I vote. You walk into the polling place, and you tell the nice old lady your address, She looks up your address on a paper printout, and when she finds it you tell her your name and she crosses it off with a red pencil and hands you your ballot. You go into the voting booth, which is nothing but a curtained aluminum frame with a table in it; the table contains a stack of markers. You mark off your ballot, go to the exit desk where the address and name procedure is duplicated with another nice old lady. Then you drop your ballot into a dropped box under the watchful gaze of a policeman. When the polls close the printouts go into another locked box and it's all driven over to the counting center under police guard.
There's literally nothing technological to screw up voting, counting or recounting, except that every polling place has to have a special machine for visually impaired voters. If that goes wrong the procedure is to bring a trusted person to fill out your ballot.
What's wrong with that picture?
There's no question that for a reasonably prepared person a GPS and electronic map is the safest and most secure method to find his way. But there are other reasons to learn traditional means of navigation -- pleasure and challenge for example.
One of the advantages of GPS navigation is that it takes the human factor out of the equation. One of the advantages of traditional navigation is that it puts the human factor back *in* to the equation. With a map and compass, you have to keep track of your surroundings, matching the terrain to the map and dead reckoning between places where you can get bearings on definitive landmarks. It requires a high level of situational awareness, which is behind the pleasure and feeling of accomplishment you get by doing it well.
Pre-industrial humans accomplished amazing feats of navigation without maps (in our sense of the word) or compasses. They paddled canoes across the pacific, finding their way tiny islands far across the horizon using subtle changes in the swells caused by reefs and land masses. I once read an 19th C account of Comanche teenagers traveling over four hundred miles across trackless terrain to raid a village none of them had ever been to, using verbal descriptions of landmarks it took the elders days to relate.
Early aviators became adept at pathfinding too. They could tell one part of France from another that would look identical to a layman, using cues like how the prevailing winds shaped the trees.
Finding your way is a craft that can be practiced for its own satisfaction. There are still people who practice calligraphy even though laser printing is more practical. There are still people who like to fence even though guns are a lot more effective. There will, I hope, always people using maps and compasses, possibly even sextants.
Evidently gay is highly contagious. Scientists say it's not airborne, but some of them have got it, so there's obviously a lot they don't know about how gay is spread. It stands to reason we should do everything we an think of to reduce the public exposure to gay.
It's called vehicle tracking, and the devices I was working with ten years ago had arrays of discrete (on/off), continuous (analog) and data inputs you could wire up to anything and the state would be relayed back every few seconds over a cellular data link. For example some police departments equip cruisers with shotguns mounted in the trunk. Put a switch on the shotgun mount and as soon as an officer takes the shotgun out of the rack an alarm goes of back at HQ and the crusier's position is marked on a map.
You can use the inputs on those units for anything. Put the same unit in a snow plow and connect the discrete input to a switch that is activated whenever the plow is lowered. Collect the GPS fixes where the plow is down, put them on a map and bingo, you have a map of the streets you've plowed.
What you do with the inputs is limited only by your imagination. You could put a switch in all the seats and you'd know if the crusier was transporting anyone, or when an officer exited the vehicle. Mount accelerometers in the vehicle and wire them to the analog inputs and you know when the vehicle is maneuvering aggresively. It's not engineering, it's Arduino style inventing.
Sure, but driving is very safe statistically speaking. Your lifetime chance of dying as a car passenger is about 2/10 %; amortized over the tens of thousands of trips you take in the car it means its extremely unlikely that you will be killed in any particular trip. Still, it warrants things like checking your tires and wearing your seatbelts. Statistics is no protection from stupidity.
Space travel, by contrast, is much, much more dangerous than driving. Estimates I've seen come in at about a 4% fatality rate per trip. That's maybe not high enough to dissuade someone from fulfilling their life's dream. Fatality rates for Everest climbers is about 2%. But it's quite reasonable to look at the decision to get on a rocket differently than the decision to get in your car.
Oh, and don't forget to use a five year running average as in here. You can see the global five year running average temperature in 1990 was 0.3 C above the baseline; in 2000 it was about 0.8. You can also see the five year average oscillates above and below the underlying rising trend. If you use a piece of paper to cut off the graph at 1950, it looks like global temperatures are falling. In fact in the 50s global cooling was the scientific consensus, but that's coincidentally where the first contrarian papers proposing AGW were published.
And while you're at it, make sure you take into account the error bars.
did you ever hear the phrase, YMMV ?
like, maybe not everyone is as dedicate or strong as you ?
To assert that narrow, twisty, snow covered roads, at night, are not a problem is just mind boggling; you must be a conservative republican who believes in the gold standard, and doesn't know that the individual mandate was a heritage foundation idea
Or... I could just be a person who actually tried it and found out it wasn't such a big deal. I'm not saying everyone has to do it. I'm saying don't be dissuaded by the naysayers who've never tried it.
I bike commuted for many years in Boston, 6-10 miles each way depending on the job and where I was living. It is hardly the cycling hell-on-Earth the poster depicts. In my experience it's practical to bike commute 75% of the time, 95% if you have showers at work. You just need the right clothing, equipment and attitude.
The electric wheel might help some commuter choose routes that would otherwise be impractical, but it's not not going revolutionize bike commuting because it's not essential. What is essential is a can-do attitude. If you're the kind of person who throws his hands up in defeat because he imagines every single challenge as insurmountable, this is not for you.
I have encountered almost every obstacle listed by the poster above, and they were no big deal.
That sounds exactly like a fire marshal who wasn't sufficiently bribed.
Well, you're probably joking but we are talking about Rhode Island, the most notoriously corrupt state in the Northeast, after maybe Pennsylvania. Some say that on a per capita basis it's the most corrupt state in the country.
I had a colleague whose father was an electrician in Rhode Island. When he saw what the state was paying to maintain the lights on a bridge near his house he figured he could easily do it for less. The contract came up to bid and when he found out the amount he'd have to pay in bribes, he realized he couldn't afford to do it.
I personally like Providence quite a bit. I think Federal Hill is great,Waterfire is a blast, and many times we drove down to take our kids to the zoo or the Children's Museum. But I wouldn't do business in the state. It's not worth the hassle.
Yeah, because no shipping ever occurred before LORAN or GPS. What a joke! It's not like people found their way around the globe for centuries using the sun, moon and stars.
Sure, if a precision of 1 nautical mile (1852 meters) is good enough for you, with fixes only possible at certain times of the day. Celestial navigation is not going to keep your 200 foot beam supertanker in the middle of a 500 foot shipping channel in the middle of the day. That's like treading a needle, only you thread ways a half million tons and is traveling at 19 miles/hour.
It works if you select the right statistics. Since 75% of the criminal cases are cleared by the Maricopa sheriff's office without a proper investigation, we really have no idea whether his approach works, or he's just lousy at catching repeat offenders.
Well, I'm not sure we have enough data yet to make statistically valid characterizations of each company's relative reliability.
I went through a period of my career where I was taking two, sometimes three business trips per month. I was supposed to fly on one of the planes that flew in the WTC on 9/11, but my trip was cancelled a couple days earlier so I could attend a meeting up in Nashua with Oracle. I've never been hijacked or crashed, but I've been in more than one near-miss, which takes a lot of flying. I've also been stranded by missed connections multiple times. Take it from me, Chicago Midway is the worst airport hub to spend a night in.
One day I was stranded at Phoenix Sky Harbor by a missed conection. Standing in the customer service line, watching the passengers ahead of me yell at the woman behind the counter about things she couldn't fix, I had an epiphany: air travel sucks, *and nobody's going to fix it*.
So here's my strategy when it comes to flying: minimize my exposure to the system by taking an alternative whenever it is remotely practical. Rather than fly to Sacramento, which involves at least one flight change from where I live, I fly direct to San Francisco and drive for two hours each way. Rather than take the shuttle from Boston to New York, I take the bus which costs only $22. Spending four hours on the bus is not *safer*, and it's certainly not *faster*, but it sucks soooo much less. On a recent business trip to Blacksburg VA (in the middle of nowhere), I took Amtrak and drove the final two hours, anticipating that 12 hours in the rail system would be *much* preferable to four hours in the air travel system -- and it was.
When I *do* have to fly, I try to do it in cheerful acceptance that the experience will be uncomfortable, inconvenient and possibly personally degrading. It doesn't matter how mad you get, the system isn't going to respond *as long as you continue using it*. The only thing it *will* respond to is more people opting out whenever they have *any* feasible alternative.
Yes but we're Americans. If we pay attention to what works for you then the socialists have won.
Add IPX8 to the high specs.
File it under "stuff that matters".
A lot of arguments for open source are based on things which people outside the project could in principle accomplish, but in practice seldom do. So it's reassuring at least that an experienced developer can build the two most popular browsers from scratch. It means the arguments aren't hollow. I've seen closed source projects that were purchased by companies, only to find out that getting them to build on any computer but the one it was developed on is a serious engineering challenge.
That the process of building these browsers from scratch is somewhat arcane will come as no surprise to any experienced developer. But that it's not so arcane that it's impractical to figure out is good news.
Is it unreasonable for the average height of a population to grow by 7" in twenty generations? I should think so. But if you changed your initial conditions somewhat, maybe less unreasonable.
There are roughly 400 genes known to influence height. Imagine we have a small, isolated population that does not interbreed with other populations -- say on an isolated island. This population's average male height is, say 175 cm for men -- roughly the same as the average American. However the population contains all the alleles neede to generate individuals approacing 7' in height. We then take our population and put them under evolutionary pressure; let's say we shoot everyone who reaches the age of 16 and is below average height. It wouldn't many generations for that population's average height to become quite tall, as "tall genes" begin to predominate.
Let's change that initial condition by stipulating that there are no "tall genes" in the initial population. It's still average height, but maybe it lacks both "tall genes" and "short genes". It would be surprising if the genetic height potential for a newborn changed very quickly, because you've got to wait for a lot of "lucky" mutations and twenty generations is not that long.
Let's go back to our successful initial conditions and change something else. This time the population has all the necessary alleles to produce super-tall people, but it interbreeds extensively with a large external population which is not subject to our culling protocol. Under these conditions the population's height increase will be slow, or non-existent depending on the rate at which individuals interbreed with populations not under pressure.
The bottom line: it depends.
What's wrong with our system is that corporate shills call anyone who suggests any restraint on corporate behavior a "socialist", and enough people are scared that only bloodless corporate tools can get elected.
We vote like a bunch of pussies, and we get the government we deserve.
That's because you use ridiculously vaguye language like "easy to transmit". You need to specify the conditions under which the potential transmission takes place. What peoiple don't realize is just how primitive conditions are in Africa, and what a difference it makes. These are countries where medical providers re-use latex gloves, sometimes even hypodermic needles. Granted, this guy was part a medical mission that probably had all the protective equipment, but you have to keep in mind that the primitive conditions that preceded them meant that there have been some TEN THOUSAND cases in the region.
It's immensely labor intensive to take care of an Ebola patient, especially with the precautions required by close contact., but the overwhelming numbers introduces yet another deadly risk factor: fatigue.
So yes, I suppose you could say the medical personnel who contracted Ebola are stupid because they made a mistake under pressure. But what about the rest of us? This epidemic should never have got big enough to pose a global concern. It was our choice to cut the CDC's emergency preparedness budget to a billion dollars below the FY 2002 mark.
Well, every generalization has its corner cases that require careful thought. So while I agree that trolling per se shouldn't be outlawed, there may be certain uses of trolling that should be criminalized.
Take the libelous component of cyberstalking. At the very least this could be an aggravating factor in impersonation. Also, the law already recognizes libel as wrong, but it requires the harmed person take civil action. The Internet exposes more people than ever to reputation harm, but not all those people have the money to hire a lawyer. Social media have created a whole new vista for defamation, much of which is *practically* immune from any consequences.
So I do not in principle object to a law that criminalizes *some* forms of defamation, particularly against people who are not protected by the current laws. But I'd have to look at the the specific proposed law carefully. Just because people *claim* a new law would do something doesn't mean it does, or that's all it does.
Well, there's a big difference between saying something won't ever happen because it's never happened yet, and saying that a claim that you've done something is presumptively not credible unless you can meet certain stadnards of proof.