You haven't confirmed shit, other than you're a moron. Looking back in 20 years you'll feel stupid when it turns out that DNA actually does have a use after all.
Humanity and its arrogance. Jesus Fucking Christ.
Yes, we HAVE confirmed that most DNA is junk. See this talk by biologist PZ Myers. (Money quote starts at 35:20.) Cyberax's figures are an exaggeration, but... roughly 5% is functional (protein-coding, rRNA, tRNA, microRNA), 10% is structural (centromeres and telomeres), 45% of the human genome is known parasitic DNA (LINEs, SINEs, endogenous retroviruses, transposons), and only 40% is unexplained. As PZ Myers asks, if the remaining 40% is all functional... why do onions need ten times as much as humans need, and why can the fugu pufferfish thrive without any of it?
Bizarre, because the now dominiant language of Turkey, Turkish, isn't Indo-European. So it spread everywhere, but was pushed out of it's own back yard.
If I recall correctly from Jared Diamond's Collapse, the non-tonal Polynesian languages originated in South Asia but were pushed out by tonal ones, e.g. Vietnamese, who were themselves pushed out by Han expansion from China.
How can you be proud of something you didn't choose? It's like me saying that I'm proud of the color of my eyes. I understand that these people had a difficult time until very recently, and many still do in some countries, but proud of what exactly?
The word pride arose in response to what came before: back when it was illegal to serve alcohol to a homosexual, gay bars were regularly raided by the police for the purpose of listing the patrons in the newspaper the next day to shame them. "Pride" in this context means "I'm not afraid of telling everyone, even if it hurts me in the process", i.e. neutralizing the threat by making shame impossible.
Secret-key crypto isn't dependent on NPish-hard problems, just on complex messiness, and it'll work fine even if we've got magic quantum computers. We'd have to go relearn all of those annoying Key Distribution System methods that public-key replaced, figure out what if anything to do about signatures, and have to build a whole lot of new business models for dealing with trust, since we'd have to actually trust the people running the KDC, but we'd live.
This is not quite right. Secret key crypto will be fine if quantum computing becomes ubiquitous (or if we find out that P=BQP), but P=NP is a vastly more powerful result, to the extent that it would shatter secret key crypto as well. P=NP means that you can pluck answers to a question out of the aether with no more difficulty than checking if one random input answers the question. So if you know how to calculate "lambda key: ciphertext.decrypt(AES, key).matches(English)", then by P=NP magic you already know the list of all 256-bit AES keys that satisfy that calculation. (Substitute "English" for any human language or binary file format you prefer.) You would still have the problem of sorting through all the candidate plaintexts, but if the ciphertext is longer than 256 bits then the list of candidates will be very short. Only one time pads (key length equals plaintext length) would remain truly safe if P=NP, because an n-bit ciphertext could represent any possible n-bit plaintext, i.e. the P=NP magic doesn't teach you anything you didn't already know.
The only "security" NAT provides is *exactly* the same as a stateful firewall.
As much as I agree with the sentiment, I will play devil's advocate for a moment. In an ideal world they are 100% equivalent. However, I think security people may consider NAT to be more 'failsafe'. If a NAT fails to apply its capabilities correctly, you have an outage and a problem, but it failed in a way that more likely than not still doesn't let foreign traffic in. For a stateful firewall, a failure is more equally likely to cause unwanted traffic to flow. Or, if being more pessimistic, cheap home routers stop bothering to set up rules as they aren't needed and naive consumers don't care.
If anything it's the other way around: a firewall is designed for security, whereas NAT is designed for functionality. For instance, all but the cheapest NATs inspect packets and automatically open holes to the LAN for compatibility with FTP, IRC DCC, various IM protocols, etc.
White males have been, and continue to be, in a position of privilege.
Are we, now? I'm afraid someone didn't let me in on the secret handshake to get the privileges. Either that, or I'm just not white enough. Either way, I object to being attacked under the cover of "erosion of privilege".
Yes, we are. As a white US resident, I've never had to worry about selecting a wardrobe that carefully avoids any chance of being mistaken for a criminal (e.g. avoiding hoodies, no matter how convenient they are); and as a male, I've never had to make an on-the-spot calculation of whether or not the guy entering the elevator is going to use the confined space to sexually harass me or bully me into accepting a sexual proposition.
Only in rare cases does privilege come with a special handshake -- it's often the mere absence of bias. In the context of discrimination, "privilege" is a term of technical jargon; I strongly recommend you read Of Dogs and Lizards: A Parable of Privilege for a good explanation of what "privilege" means here.
I think it's incredibly naïve to believe that we can, in one atomic action, rip out and replace tcp/ip (or whatever other technology) with something that is "better" for whatever value of the word "better" you assign it to have. An incredible amount of work and research has gone into making things work the way that they do, and not only do they work pretty well, but upgrading them to fix issues like this buffer bloat thing is not some Manhattan Project-esque undertaking, like reengineering the internet would be.
TCP has already been replumbed numerous times since its creation. Take a look at the after-market congestion avoidance algorithms that have been bolted on, or new wire-level features like timestamps (now ~mandatory), window scaling (now ~mandatory), SACK, and ECN. If AQM takes off, it'll simply be the latest in a line of fixes that's kept TCP working across 37 years of Moore's Law.
"People of the book" specifically means Abrahamic religions: Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and arguably offshoots like Baha'i. The "book" is the Torah, a.k.a. the first 5 books of what Christians call the Old Testament. The Islam founding legend says Muhammed was visited by an angel who told him "yup, everything the Jews believe is true, but here's some more stuff God forgot to tell the Jewish prophets".
Today's hatred and mistrust between Jews and Muslims... well, Israel/Europe/US and Muslims... is fairly recent; Muslims and Mizrahi Jews living in modern-day Israel got along reasonably well until the 20th century kicked over the anthill. The modern insanity is almost entirely due to ham-handed mismanagement of the Palestinian Mandate after the Ottoman Empire fell in WWI: first by Britain, whose administration was rotten enough that it triggered an armed Arab revolt and made the WWII Allies locally quite unpopular, then after Britain handed off the festering mess in the aftermath of WWII, the UN made it worse as they promptly decided to forcibly segregate the Palestinian Mandate's population into "Jews" and "not Jews", i.e. the "Trail of Tears" approach (instead of e.g. setting up a one-state secular constitutional democracy with a liberal immigration policy for Jewish diaspora). The Middle East would probably not be a powder keg today if WWI had gone just a little differently and, say, the Ottoman Empire had lingered on until after the Holocaust.
... There *is* a paid version of Google Docs. You can disable advertisements in gmail in the paid version. However, I still don't feel good about Google having access to all that information. Leaves a bad taste in my mouth....
Google's privacy policy says they won't sell your information to third parties, and their stated business model is all about throwing algorithms at big piles of aggregated data and never having a human look at any of it. Do you really think humans at Google even have the desire to look at your data, nevermind the access to do it without getting fired on the spot? What is your threat model? What abuse are you defending against?
> It's just a step towards eventually becoming part of
> the css standard
Except when it's not. There are plenty of -webkit properties that have never been proposed for standardization, and some that Apple is refusing to propose even though people are asking them to. Presumably because Apple has patents covering the behavior of those properties and doesn't actually want to license them.
So don't use those. Unlike the old IE lockin, it's pretty obvious from the "-webkit-*" prefix that they're Webkit-specific. We aren't going to raise a new generation of web developers who think that "-webkit-*" properties are standard CSS and it's those other non-Webkit browsers who are being weird and icky for not implementing a "-webkit-*" property correctly. (Ditto "-moz-*" for that matter.)
Some adults do. I was bullied in elementary school, my parents' relationship seemed barely functional, and I'm pretty nerdy - I basically distrusted most humans until college (at which point my atrophied social skills had me believing I was autistic for a while) and I only started dating in grad school. I think I've made pretty rapid progress since, but needless to say I've made tons of rookie mistakes in the process.
This is a good point, one that I nearly brought up in my original post. I was in a similar boat, due to Asperger's as much as to the obvious reason.
... For example, they could better disambiguate between Santorum the tool and santorum the frothy mixture of blood, semen and feces....
I believe you mean lube and feces. Blood is not normally a product of anal sex if you're using lube right, and there shouldn't be any semen in the mix because the condom should catch it. (And you are using the condom because, monogamous or not, you don't want to catch an unpleasant E. coli UTI.)
... He was not comparing homosexuality to those things in his statement....
In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It [definition of marriage] [i]s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It [definition of marriage] is one thing. -- Rick Santorum
Santorum is essentially saying "Here are some things that are not marriage: homosexuality, man on child, man on dog". He is putting homosexuality in the same list as pedophilia and bestality so that the three may be compared with each other as fellow examples of the same category. His "That's not to pick on homosexuality" simply means "homosexuality is not the only thing in this category, it's just an easy example because homosexuality is more common than the other category members"; at best that phrasing only barely implies that Santorum thinks pedophilia and bestiality are as bad or worse than homosexuality.
(It probably doesn't hurt to mention that I was molested by my stepfather from ages 16 to 18, so I've got a fair bit of firsthand personal experience on the matter.
Actually it does hurt, since it completely destroys the argument you are trying to support. In your situation, how did the law (that your stepfather violated) help you? What do you think would have happened, had you reported this situation to the police? Do you think their involvement would have improved the situation?
The law keeps it rare by scaring people away from doing it, and also prevents the people who do it anyway from bragging about it and normalizing it. Do you really think that repealing the law would have zero effect on the rate of, say, stepfather/stepdaughter molestation?
Dude, walk away from the game theory articles and the Rand books. Thanks.
You can criticize me for drinking the Overcoming Bias / Less Wrong kool-aid, but I am NOT a Rand fan and never have been. (I'm a leftist for one.)
Besides, Rand's fiction was totally in favor of coercive relationships, right up to the edge of rape. How much was Rand's principles and how much was Rand getting her jollies and forgetting the rule "don't publish your Mary Sue wankfic", who knows...
... However, coercion is not always a factor and when it demonstrably isn't - again, as per my post - I so no reason for it to be forbidden....
In spherical cow land, sure, but my argument is that an adult/teenager relationship (with a sufficiently wide age difference) is always coercive because the adult has more experience than the teen. The very nature of expertise is to train our minds to automatically jump to the right answer without any conscious thought (cf. Daniel Kahneman), which means that the more-experienced adult will take advantage of the situation, bending it to his/her will even without intending to. The difference in dating experience creates a power imbalance, and power imbalances are inherently coercive (pretty much by definition of "power" in the social sense).
Pretty much the only situation I can see where it might work out OK is if the adult has never dated, not in high school and not since then. But in that case the adult is likely to have other issues, in which case the "don't date anyone who obviously needs more therapy than you do" rule might kick in for the teenager (though sadly odds are good no one told the teenager about that one).
... If they can consent to having sex with another child around their own age, then why not with an adult?...
Two words: mind games. The drama in high school is all prep for the adult mating dance: "how do I get his/her attention without coming off as clingy/desperate?", "is he/she really interested in me or just planning to use me as a status symbol?", "but he/she isn't mature/hot enough, if I settle for him/her it means I'm less of a person because Hollywood tells me so". Adolescence is the phase where we take all the crap society has crammed into our skulls about love/sex/romance and sort out fact from fiction.
Adults already know and play the mind games; whether we treat them as friendly Canasta or as winner-take-all Russian Roulette, we DO play them, constantly. For example, info-dumping your life's backstory on the first date is (a) narcissistic, (b) clingy/desperate, and (c) ammunition for a poorly chosen partner to shove a knife in your heart and manipulate you like a puppet in your future relationship. Therefore even the kindest, most genuine form of the adult mating dance involves concealing information and strategically revealing your cards at the right time, to protect yourself from awful people if nothing else. But teenagers don't have any practice with this; not knowing any better, they think it's romantic to trust someone fully and unconditionally, which lasts until they put that in practice precisely enough times to get burned. During this phase, it's important that the participants in the mating game be at roughly the same skill level (viz.xkcd.com/314), as it limits the potential for damage. A teenager is wide open to the manipulation of information that adults do 100% automatically and subconsciously.
Oh, and then there's the whole "adults are the authority, you must obey them" thing. Even rebellious teenagers still recognize adults as authority figures — if the adults were seen as equals, they wouldn't be seen as authority figures to rebel against.
(It probably doesn't hurt to mention that I was molested by my stepfather from ages 16 to 18, so I've got a fair bit of firsthand personal experience on the matter. It took me years to spot the web of manipulation that he laid in my mind and unwind past his lies. What were his lies? That I chose it of my own free will; that I should feel guilty for "making" him cheat on my mother; that he was doing me a favor by giving me "pity sex" because I was too shy to get laid in high school. Nevermind that he pinned me in a corner, bullied me into coming out gay to him when I didn't trust him with that information, brought up the idea of sex with him and wouldn't drop it, and made me feel too physically and emotionally threatened to defy his rage-laden authority. For the next two years, he had me wrapped around his little finger until I left for college, and I blamed myself the whole way.)
Right. The Greenland glaciers melting may be bad. Now, would you so kindly tell me how a fresh water plume will affect glaciers ON LAND?
Directly? Not at all. But it's worth keeping in mind that white ice has a higher albedo than dark blue seawater, which keeps arctic / antarctic summers cold by reflecting away summer sunlight.
There's no reason for saying that. IPv6 is just another cyber space, there's nothing fancy, new, with it, it should be commonly accepted as something we MUST have, right now.
Except that it's not. There are billions of addresses - entire A blocks - locked up in early-adopter organizations that could be made available. For example, the US Post Office doesn't really need it's own A block. Nor do most organizations who own them. And B blocks? Thousands are unneeded. My old university has a B block and it's ridiculous...it's all behind a firewall except for a few numbers anyway. For most orgs, it's just that the money that these big blocks could be sold for doesn't exceed the cost of renumbering to 10.x internally. It will someday soon.
We're years away from ipv4 exhaustion.
Great plan: spend man-years of effort forcing the handful of companies with class A blocks to re-architect their networks... only for each class A block to be consumed by the RIRs in 6 months or less. Did you even pay attention to how fast APNIC ate two of its last three/8's? Seriously, this idea can't extend IPv4 by more than 2 or 3 years, even if it works flawlessly and re-IPing is free.
"IP addresses are not identity."
Thank you. The hypocrisy around here is large, but not surprising.
Does Google offer guest Wi-Fi access at any of their locations? Does anyone in Google run a Tor exit node? Are there any live jacks in Google meeting rooms? Do they NAT multiple internal addresses?
It's one thing to confirm suspicions by setting up a honeypot phone number like Mocality did, and then receive calls from people identifying themselves as being from Google. It's quite another to only point to an IP addresses and place blame with no further evidence.
AppEngine apps can make HTTP requests from Google's IP blocks. Not sayin' that's what happened here, but just throwing that out there.
No, these are actually imaginary Canadian dollars, which are worth much, much less than real American dollars.
As of this writing, an American dollar will purchase 1.02 Canadian dollars. I admit that I was surprised. I stopped following it for a while, but I had thought the Canadian was worth more. What did Canada do to screw up their economy?
You have it backwards: the CAD per USD ratio hasn't gone much above 1.07 CAD per USD in the last 10 years, and used to swim in 0.75 territory for the longest time. Hence the well-known phenomenon of books and magazines with two list prices, a US price plus a Canadian price that's a good nudge higher. That suddenly became obsolete when the CAD achieved rough parity around 2007 or so, in part because of the USD inflating a bit faster than the CAD.
Slashdot Mirror
You haven't confirmed shit, other than you're a moron. Looking back in 20 years you'll feel stupid when it turns out that DNA actually does have a use after all.
Humanity and its arrogance. Jesus Fucking Christ.
Yes, we HAVE confirmed that most DNA is junk. See this talk by biologist PZ Myers. (Money quote starts at 35:20.) Cyberax's figures are an exaggeration, but... roughly 5% is functional (protein-coding, rRNA, tRNA, microRNA), 10% is structural (centromeres and telomeres), 45% of the human genome is known parasitic DNA (LINEs, SINEs, endogenous retroviruses, transposons), and only 40% is unexplained. As PZ Myers asks, if the remaining 40% is all functional... why do onions need ten times as much as humans need, and why can the fugu pufferfish thrive without any of it?
Bizarre, because the now dominiant language of Turkey, Turkish, isn't Indo-European. So it spread everywhere, but was pushed out of it's own back yard.
If I recall correctly from Jared Diamond's Collapse, the non-tonal Polynesian languages originated in South Asia but were pushed out by tonal ones, e.g. Vietnamese, who were themselves pushed out by Han expansion from China.
How can you be proud of something you didn't choose? It's like me saying that I'm proud of the color of my eyes. I understand that these people had a difficult time until very recently, and many still do in some countries, but proud of what exactly?
The word pride arose in response to what came before: back when it was illegal to serve alcohol to a homosexual, gay bars were regularly raided by the police for the purpose of listing the patrons in the newspaper the next day to shame them. "Pride" in this context means "I'm not afraid of telling everyone, even if it hurts me in the process", i.e. neutralizing the threat by making shame impossible.
Secret-key crypto isn't dependent on NPish-hard problems, just on complex messiness, and it'll work fine even if we've got magic quantum computers. We'd have to go relearn all of those annoying Key Distribution System methods that public-key replaced, figure out what if anything to do about signatures, and have to build a whole lot of new business models for dealing with trust, since we'd have to actually trust the people running the KDC, but we'd live.
This is not quite right. Secret key crypto will be fine if quantum computing becomes ubiquitous (or if we find out that P=BQP), but P=NP is a vastly more powerful result, to the extent that it would shatter secret key crypto as well. P=NP means that you can pluck answers to a question out of the aether with no more difficulty than checking if one random input answers the question. So if you know how to calculate "lambda key: ciphertext.decrypt(AES, key).matches(English)", then by P=NP magic you already know the list of all 256-bit AES keys that satisfy that calculation. (Substitute "English" for any human language or binary file format you prefer.) You would still have the problem of sorting through all the candidate plaintexts, but if the ciphertext is longer than 256 bits then the list of candidates will be very short. Only one time pads (key length equals plaintext length) would remain truly safe if P=NP, because an n-bit ciphertext could represent any possible n-bit plaintext, i.e. the P=NP magic doesn't teach you anything you didn't already know.
The only "security" NAT provides is *exactly* the same as a stateful firewall.
As much as I agree with the sentiment, I will play devil's advocate for a moment. In an ideal world they are 100% equivalent. However, I think security people may consider NAT to be more 'failsafe'. If a NAT fails to apply its capabilities correctly, you have an outage and a problem, but it failed in a way that more likely than not still doesn't let foreign traffic in. For a stateful firewall, a failure is more equally likely to cause unwanted traffic to flow. Or, if being more pessimistic, cheap home routers stop bothering to set up rules as they aren't needed and naive consumers don't care.
If anything it's the other way around: a firewall is designed for security, whereas NAT is designed for functionality. For instance, all but the cheapest NATs inspect packets and automatically open holes to the LAN for compatibility with FTP, IRC DCC, various IM protocols, etc.
Are we, now? I'm afraid someone didn't let me in on the secret handshake to get the privileges. Either that, or I'm just not white enough. Either way, I object to being attacked under the cover of "erosion of privilege".
Yes, we are. As a white US resident, I've never had to worry about selecting a wardrobe that carefully avoids any chance of being mistaken for a criminal (e.g. avoiding hoodies, no matter how convenient they are); and as a male, I've never had to make an on-the-spot calculation of whether or not the guy entering the elevator is going to use the confined space to sexually harass me or bully me into accepting a sexual proposition.
Only in rare cases does privilege come with a special handshake -- it's often the mere absence of bias. In the context of discrimination, "privilege" is a term of technical jargon; I strongly recommend you read Of Dogs and Lizards: A Parable of Privilege for a good explanation of what "privilege" means here.
I think it's incredibly naïve to believe that we can, in one atomic action, rip out and replace tcp/ip (or whatever other technology) with something that is "better" for whatever value of the word "better" you assign it to have. An incredible amount of work and research has gone into making things work the way that they do, and not only do they work pretty well, but upgrading them to fix issues like this buffer bloat thing is not some Manhattan Project-esque undertaking, like reengineering the internet would be.
TCP has already been replumbed numerous times since its creation. Take a look at the after-market congestion avoidance algorithms that have been bolted on, or new wire-level features like timestamps (now ~mandatory), window scaling (now ~mandatory), SACK, and ECN. If AQM takes off, it'll simply be the latest in a line of fixes that's kept TCP working across 37 years of Moore's Law.
The subway just gets you to another subway station, you probably forgot to add the walking and waiting times. The car gets you to your destination.
No, the car gets you to a parking spot. In a big city (e.g. I live in SF), that could still be a few blocks away from your destination.
"People of the book" specifically means Abrahamic religions: Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and arguably offshoots like Baha'i. The "book" is the Torah, a.k.a. the first 5 books of what Christians call the Old Testament. The Islam founding legend says Muhammed was visited by an angel who told him "yup, everything the Jews believe is true, but here's some more stuff God forgot to tell the Jewish prophets".
Today's hatred and mistrust between Jews and Muslims... well, Israel/Europe/US and Muslims... is fairly recent; Muslims and Mizrahi Jews living in modern-day Israel got along reasonably well until the 20th century kicked over the anthill. The modern insanity is almost entirely due to ham-handed mismanagement of the Palestinian Mandate after the Ottoman Empire fell in WWI: first by Britain, whose administration was rotten enough that it triggered an armed Arab revolt and made the WWII Allies locally quite unpopular, then after Britain handed off the festering mess in the aftermath of WWII, the UN made it worse as they promptly decided to forcibly segregate the Palestinian Mandate's population into "Jews" and "not Jews", i.e. the "Trail of Tears" approach (instead of e.g. setting up a one-state secular constitutional democracy with a liberal immigration policy for Jewish diaspora). The Middle East would probably not be a powder keg today if WWI had gone just a little differently and, say, the Ottoman Empire had lingered on until after the Holocaust.
... There *is* a paid version of Google Docs. You can disable advertisements in gmail in the paid version. However, I still don't feel good about Google having access to all that information. Leaves a bad taste in my mouth. ...
Google's privacy policy says they won't sell your information to third parties, and their stated business model is all about throwing algorithms at big piles of aggregated data and never having a human look at any of it. Do you really think humans at Google even have the desire to look at your data, nevermind the access to do it without getting fired on the spot? What is your threat model? What abuse are you defending against?
> It's just a step towards eventually becoming part of > the css standard
Except when it's not. There are plenty of -webkit properties that have never been proposed for standardization, and some that Apple is refusing to propose even though people are asking them to. Presumably because Apple has patents covering the behavior of those properties and doesn't actually want to license them.
So don't use those. Unlike the old IE lockin, it's pretty obvious from the "-webkit-*" prefix that they're Webkit-specific. We aren't going to raise a new generation of web developers who think that "-webkit-*" properties are standard CSS and it's those other non-Webkit browsers who are being weird and icky for not implementing a "-webkit-*" property correctly. (Ditto "-moz-*" for that matter.)
Adults already know and play the mind games
Some adults do. I was bullied in elementary school, my parents' relationship seemed barely functional, and I'm pretty nerdy - I basically distrusted most humans until college (at which point my atrophied social skills had me believing I was autistic for a while) and I only started dating in grad school. I think I've made pretty rapid progress since, but needless to say I've made tons of rookie mistakes in the process.
This is a good point, one that I nearly brought up in my original post. I was in a similar boat, due to Asperger's as much as to the obvious reason.
What if I'm opposed to Sodomy for Sanitary / Public Health Reasons?
Please note that "sodomy" means radically different things in different states. For example, in most states it includes oral sex.
Romney edges Santorum in conservatives' straw poll
Gingrich plunges, Santorum surges
... For example, they could better disambiguate between Santorum the tool and santorum the frothy mixture of blood, semen and feces. ...
I believe you mean lube and feces. Blood is not normally a product of anal sex if you're using lube right, and there shouldn't be any semen in the mix because the condom should catch it. (And you are using the condom because, monogamous or not, you don't want to catch an unpleasant E. coli UTI.)
... He was not comparing homosexuality to those things in his statement. ...
In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It [definition of marriage] [i]s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It [definition of marriage] is one thing. -- Rick Santorum
Santorum is essentially saying "Here are some things that are not marriage: homosexuality, man on child, man on dog". He is putting homosexuality in the same list as pedophilia and bestality so that the three may be compared with each other as fellow examples of the same category. His "That's not to pick on homosexuality" simply means "homosexuality is not the only thing in this category, it's just an easy example because homosexuality is more common than the other category members"; at best that phrasing only barely implies that Santorum thinks pedophilia and bestiality are as bad or worse than homosexuality.
(It probably doesn't hurt to mention that I was molested by my stepfather from ages 16 to 18, so I've got a fair bit of firsthand personal experience on the matter.
Actually it does hurt, since it completely destroys the argument you are trying to support. In your situation, how did the law (that your stepfather violated) help you? What do you think would have happened, had you reported this situation to the police? Do you think their involvement would have improved the situation?
The law keeps it rare by scaring people away from doing it, and also prevents the people who do it anyway from bragging about it and normalizing it. Do you really think that repealing the law would have zero effect on the rate of, say, stepfather/stepdaughter molestation?
Dude, walk away from the game theory articles and the Rand books. Thanks.
You can criticize me for drinking the Overcoming Bias / Less Wrong kool-aid, but I am NOT a Rand fan and never have been. (I'm a leftist for one.)
Besides, Rand's fiction was totally in favor of coercive relationships, right up to the edge of rape. How much was Rand's principles and how much was Rand getting her jollies and forgetting the rule "don't publish your Mary Sue wankfic", who knows...
... However, coercion is not always a factor and when it demonstrably isn't - again, as per my post - I so no reason for it to be forbidden. ...
In spherical cow land, sure, but my argument is that an adult/teenager relationship (with a sufficiently wide age difference) is always coercive because the adult has more experience than the teen. The very nature of expertise is to train our minds to automatically jump to the right answer without any conscious thought (cf. Daniel Kahneman), which means that the more-experienced adult will take advantage of the situation, bending it to his/her will even without intending to. The difference in dating experience creates a power imbalance, and power imbalances are inherently coercive (pretty much by definition of "power" in the social sense).
Pretty much the only situation I can see where it might work out OK is if the adult has never dated, not in high school and not since then. But in that case the adult is likely to have other issues, in which case the "don't date anyone who obviously needs more therapy than you do" rule might kick in for the teenager (though sadly odds are good no one told the teenager about that one).
... If they can consent to having sex with another child around their own age, then why not with an adult? ...
Two words: mind games. The drama in high school is all prep for the adult mating dance: "how do I get his/her attention without coming off as clingy/desperate?", "is he/she really interested in me or just planning to use me as a status symbol?", "but he/she isn't mature/hot enough, if I settle for him/her it means I'm less of a person because Hollywood tells me so". Adolescence is the phase where we take all the crap society has crammed into our skulls about love/sex/romance and sort out fact from fiction.
Adults already know and play the mind games; whether we treat them as friendly Canasta or as winner-take-all Russian Roulette, we DO play them, constantly. For example, info-dumping your life's backstory on the first date is (a) narcissistic, (b) clingy/desperate, and (c) ammunition for a poorly chosen partner to shove a knife in your heart and manipulate you like a puppet in your future relationship. Therefore even the kindest, most genuine form of the adult mating dance involves concealing information and strategically revealing your cards at the right time, to protect yourself from awful people if nothing else. But teenagers don't have any practice with this; not knowing any better, they think it's romantic to trust someone fully and unconditionally, which lasts until they put that in practice precisely enough times to get burned. During this phase, it's important that the participants in the mating game be at roughly the same skill level (viz. xkcd.com/314), as it limits the potential for damage. A teenager is wide open to the manipulation of information that adults do 100% automatically and subconsciously.
Oh, and then there's the whole "adults are the authority, you must obey them" thing. Even rebellious teenagers still recognize adults as authority figures — if the adults were seen as equals, they wouldn't be seen as authority figures to rebel against.
(It probably doesn't hurt to mention that I was molested by my stepfather from ages 16 to 18, so I've got a fair bit of firsthand personal experience on the matter. It took me years to spot the web of manipulation that he laid in my mind and unwind past his lies. What were his lies? That I chose it of my own free will; that I should feel guilty for "making" him cheat on my mother; that he was doing me a favor by giving me "pity sex" because I was too shy to get laid in high school. Nevermind that he pinned me in a corner, bullied me into coming out gay to him when I didn't trust him with that information, brought up the idea of sex with him and wouldn't drop it, and made me feel too physically and emotionally threatened to defy his rage-laden authority. For the next two years, he had me wrapped around his little finger until I left for college, and I blamed myself the whole way.)
I don't like the binary blobs for because they 1) break when I get automatic updates that include a kernel ...
What about a distro with DKMS? Wikipedia claims Fedora supports it these days...
Right. The Greenland glaciers melting may be bad. Now, would you so kindly tell me how a fresh water plume will affect glaciers ON LAND?
Directly? Not at all. But it's worth keeping in mind that white ice has a higher albedo than dark blue seawater, which keeps arctic / antarctic summers cold by reflecting away summer sunlight.
There's no reason for saying that. IPv6 is just another cyber space, there's nothing fancy, new, with it, it should be commonly accepted as something we MUST have, right now.
Except that it's not. There are billions of addresses - entire A blocks - locked up in early-adopter organizations that could be made available. For example, the US Post Office doesn't really need it's own A block. Nor do most organizations who own them. And B blocks? Thousands are unneeded. My old university has a B block and it's ridiculous...it's all behind a firewall except for a few numbers anyway. For most orgs, it's just that the money that these big blocks could be sold for doesn't exceed the cost of renumbering to 10.x internally. It will someday soon.
We're years away from ipv4 exhaustion.
Great plan: spend man-years of effort forcing the handful of companies with class A blocks to re-architect their networks... only for each class A block to be consumed by the RIRs in 6 months or less. Did you even pay attention to how fast APNIC ate two of its last three /8's? Seriously, this idea can't extend IPv4 by more than 2 or 3 years, even if it works flawlessly and re-IPing is free.
"IP addresses are not identity." Thank you. The hypocrisy around here is large, but not surprising. Does Google offer guest Wi-Fi access at any of their locations? Does anyone in Google run a Tor exit node? Are there any live jacks in Google meeting rooms? Do they NAT multiple internal addresses? It's one thing to confirm suspicions by setting up a honeypot phone number like Mocality did, and then receive calls from people identifying themselves as being from Google. It's quite another to only point to an IP addresses and place blame with no further evidence.
AppEngine apps can make HTTP requests from Google's IP blocks. Not sayin' that's what happened here, but just throwing that out there.
No, these are actually imaginary Canadian dollars, which are worth much, much less than real American dollars.
As of this writing, an American dollar will purchase 1.02 Canadian dollars. I admit that I was surprised. I stopped following it for a while, but I had thought the Canadian was worth more. What did Canada do to screw up their economy?
You have it backwards: the CAD per USD ratio hasn't gone much above 1.07 CAD per USD in the last 10 years, and used to swim in 0.75 territory for the longest time. Hence the well-known phenomenon of books and magazines with two list prices, a US price plus a Canadian price that's a good nudge higher. That suddenly became obsolete when the CAD achieved rough parity around 2007 or so, in part because of the USD inflating a bit faster than the CAD.