* You don't define "back then", so... * before 1900, it was fully expected that half the children born would die of something before the age of five, and that only 1 in 5 would make it to puberty. * before 1800, puberty was pretty much considered to be adulthood insofar as sex was concerned in most nations and cultures - and before 1900, marrying at sixteen was considered normal. Children were expected to work as soon as they could gain enough mental acuity and strength to do so, be it on the family farm or in the factory. The only exception involved kids of more well-off parents, who were expected to get an education that would scare today's kids. * before 1700, the prohibitions on fornication (notice that sex for procreation isn't considered that) were put in place by church authorities, but was widely ignored unless it became politically expedient to pay attention to.
Some other cultural bits...
* Back then, what would be considered as teen sex usually happened after the teens were married, or in a house of prostitution. Girls were kept from "fornicating" because potential suitors by and large demanded a virgin bride. OTOH, many teen boys of affluent parents were encouraged by their fathers to visit a brothel, if only to get some experience in the matter.
* For most guys, you either did it with your wife, did it in a brothel, or you hadn't hit puberty yet. Any outliers in that data set usually involved adultery, which was harshly dealt with. What you had left was not enough to be statistically significant., and if you had sex with a girl but didn't marry her, she'd be the first one to scream to the authorities demanding marriage (else you either faced charges of rape, or an outright lynching by her family).
* Speaking of brothels, they were not only popular, but legal damned near everywhere (or at most studiously ignored by the local constabulary).
* The whole idea of banning fornication and and adultery revolved around the idea of lineage and property rights (your kid inherits the herds, land, or whatever - not some other guy's kid). This stretches back to the very historic concept of inheritance, and why most religions have that prohibition in place - as a concept, it is that damned old. But, you yourself mention the pragmatism as well.:)
As for today, kids are treasured far more highly, even to the point of legal worship over ideals that earlier civilizations really couldn't give a damn about. It is certainly wrong to harm a kid, to exploit one, or to molest one. This is common sense to a civilized modern human being. OTOH, there comes a point where at least biologically, a person is no longer a child, and the law has to allow for the adolescent to start taking steps into the world of adulthood. As long as it doesn't involve an adult taking advantage of that period of growth, the law should just leave the teenager the hell alone in that regard.
Not that I know if he was correct or not, but asking a police officer for legal advice is akin to asking a blind man for a description of the Mona Lisa.
The sad part is, while you may be able to prove innocence of any crime once you're in front of a judge, you still have that part where you get locked up in jail, lose your job (if you're unable to bail out), have the press label you nasty evil things (if the charge involves kids, drugs, or some other item considered to be a moral outrage), suffer financial damage defending yourself against it, etc.
That said, most cops I know of have enough of a working knowledge of the law (mostly by dealing with it daily) to get it right about 80-90% of the time. It's that 10% you have to worry about running afoul of.
Given Microsoft's history of IP theft back then, I wonder how they would have fared if the established players back then demanded and got the same fees and licenses that Microsoft is demanding now?
The idea is, you create a fake FB profile you never directly use, on a throwaway email addy that you never monitor. Suddenly, those preferences won't mean squat.
While I don't know all the ins and outs of Spotify, I do know that my Pandora account is keyed to an email addy from a toss-off account at a former employer (when you're the Exchange guy, why not? the account was used to test spam filtering among other things anyway.)
If I lose it? BFD, my prefs can be quickly re-established with another account tied to yet another email addy.
As long as I'm not doing actual purchases through the thing, a fake FB profile works just as well as a real one.
Dunno how much good that will do... hordes of fake facebook accounts (or even real ones that are never seen by the users who created them) will only dilute its value to advertisers.
Re. the Dead Sea Scrolls, the answer is simple: They were thought to have been written by the Essene sect, a group of folks which largely kept themselves separate and isolated from the larger Jewish community. They didn't get out much, and by the time word of anything Jesus did would have gotten there, the Roman legions would've likely gotten there first, hot off of sacking Jerusalem.
Philo? May also want to ask about Josephus, a contemporary who also didn't mention Christ (there was a passage in his writing that says otherwise, but this was ascribed to a rather overzealous monk slipping that in sometime during all that hand-copying throughout the ages).
My best guess is that, like most Jews of the time, they simply accepted what the Sanhedrin was pushing; namely, that Jesus' particular sect of messianic Judaism were to be considered a fringe heretical sect, and thus would be studiously ignored. Boosting this was the Pauline acceptance of gentiles into the group, something strictly in opposition to what was considered sensible Judaism. Therefore, giving the christian movement credence, attention, or even notice would have in turn given the two gents massive headaches - both at the local synagogue, and from their peers. Keeping one's reputation isn't exactly a new concept, after all.
Therein lies the problem... most countries in the first world have data retention logs.
You might be able to get away with some of it in the US, but not much. Besides, unless you run a backbone node, it wouldn't be too hard for the authorities to get the logs from your upstream data providers, which can still (with effort, but still) allow them to reconstruct what they need anyway.
The "worst disaster" in our planetary history involved asteroids big enough to heat the entire Earth's surface to a nice, sterility-inducing 4000 degrees centigrade, to a depth of 4 kilometers.
I'm pretty sure that Mars or even the Moon would be far more hospitable by comparison...
The situations aren't parallel. I'm sure Columbus would have been happy to send a robot, if he could have.
Err, that "robot" wouldn't have gained the title, or made the money from trade that Columbus was looking to rake in from finding a shortcut to China. So no, that wasn't going to happen even if they had a Renaissance equivalent of R. Daneel Olivaw on the manifest.
Especially if he knew before he left that it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars just for him to be able to breathe.
...instead, he had to beg one of the wealthiest noble families in Europe to cough up the back-then equivalent to get three ships, crew, and supplies for a multi-month voyage.
Nobody wants to end exploration. We're all desperate for exploration. So desperate that we want to send ten times as many missions, missions which stay up for years rather than weeks. Which is the sort of thing we can do with machines.
Problem is, on the long timescale, machines won't provide a living DNA backup against ELE asteroid events, pandemics, or the like. They also don't do much to relieve population pressures. They also have a nasty habit of doing the absolute wrong things whenever something unexpected happens. Finally, they have the maddening habit of missing opportunities.
As sibling said - an NDA is a civil affair, not a criminal one. The only types of NDA that could possibly land you in jail or in fines over violation would be for a government security clearance.
The worst that can happen in this case? The guy could get sued by the company, and they would have a hard time getting much of anything out of him for the effort spent. That's it.
While there is no implied threat of violence, there is the implied threat of severe fiscal damage, which to a company is just as damaging as an arson job on one of their factories would be.
(...and it's shit like this where I would love to see a "loser pays" system apply to any corporation that sues *anybody* else.)
It's their money that will go offshore, not them. They'll just continue living here, while shell corporations and other dodges sit comfy and nearly tax-free in the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, etc.
Besides, if Warren Buffet wants to pay more taxes that badly, the IRS actually does accept donations. He's more than welcome to give as much as he wants.
...not quite understanding what you're getting at, since if taxes go up, I sincerely doubt that my wages will go up in order to compensate for that shift.
Here's a clue: Microsoft counted *every* workstation license sold as a Windows 7 license ever since Windows 7's release date. This includes XP, bulk EA/SA purchases, thin clients, etc... whether the license was used for Windows 7 or not.
I think it's a project by Microsoft to see if they can hype things out (like they did with Windows 7) and get massive results (like Windows 7)... sort of like emulating the Apple rumor mill, but instead of leaving the world to speculate, MSFT is trying to fuel the fire itself.
OTOH, I think it will backfire, mostly because I think they mis-read the reason Windows 7 was moderately successful: Windows 7 didn't become popular by the hype machine; it became moderately successful because the last decent version of Windows (XP) was released 8 years prior, and both XP and Vista using Windows enthusiasts were gagging for something that was up to date but not broken.
CNET (I know, I know) has been spewing out Windows 8 puff pieces every other day (sometimes every day), even for incredibly minor crap (e.g. Hyper-V, mounting.iso files, etc... minor bits that really don't mean much of anything to the end user individually.)
The worst of it is those who insist that just because yesterday and today were cold in Lower Pisshaven, that somehow disproves the notion of climate change, under the common oversimplification of "global warming".
You know? I find it funny that, while yes it is true that climate != weather, the same folk who (rightly) scream that during a cold snap tend to suddenly shift gears whenever a hurricane shows up, point to it, and begins to shout 'see! see! It's teh global warmingz!'
It's no surprise that people who congregate can be threats to an oppressive regime. In societies with particular fearful rulers weekly prayers (mass, temple, etc) would be the only public meetings not easily suppressed. Stalin got away with it, and it's said that Hitler bought out the ones he couldn't bully. The regimes that don't fully suppress religion (or other gatherings, even sports), can find those places as ignition to chaos, and even committed atheists might find the time to attend the only meeting they can.
Good point, but you yourself missed something overall: Certainly, atheists may congregate under the guise of prayer or such, but we were talking about monitoring news trends. If all you do is have your software eyeball prayer meetings (esp. just those phrased towards the Islamic Friday prayers, since Christians do it on Sunday and others do it whenever), you're going to miss it - which was my entire point.
Even if you're just eyeballing public meetings, you're going to miss it - most revolutionary meetings nowadays are going to be clandestine, and outside of Islam, aren't necessarily going to be centered around praying.
But sure, get all butt-hurt and lash out - there's a kernel of good idea in your first post, but you're still doing it all *wrong* by focusing on only one tiny aspect of a much larger picture.
Slashdot Mirror
Give it a couple days, then everyone can scream "dupe!"
That walled garden escalates the total cost of ownership for the thing. It increases what you would otherwise pay for the same content.
You're talking about a demographic that rents-to-own furniture, takes payday loans, and eats fast food.
Seriously.
Couple points of order:
* You don't define "back then", so...
* before 1900, it was fully expected that half the children born would die of something before the age of five, and that only 1 in 5 would make it to puberty.
* before 1800, puberty was pretty much considered to be adulthood insofar as sex was concerned in most nations and cultures - and before 1900, marrying at sixteen was considered normal. Children were expected to work as soon as they could gain enough mental acuity and strength to do so, be it on the family farm or in the factory. The only exception involved kids of more well-off parents, who were expected to get an education that would scare today's kids.
* before 1700, the prohibitions on fornication (notice that sex for procreation isn't considered that) were put in place by church authorities, but was widely ignored unless it became politically expedient to pay attention to.
Some other cultural bits...
* Back then, what would be considered as teen sex usually happened after the teens were married, or in a house of prostitution. Girls were kept from "fornicating" because potential suitors by and large demanded a virgin bride. OTOH, many teen boys of affluent parents were encouraged by their fathers to visit a brothel, if only to get some experience in the matter.
* For most guys, you either did it with your wife, did it in a brothel, or you hadn't hit puberty yet. Any outliers in that data set usually involved adultery, which was harshly dealt with. What you had left was not enough to be statistically significant., and if you had sex with a girl but didn't marry her, she'd be the first one to scream to the authorities demanding marriage (else you either faced charges of rape, or an outright lynching by her family).
* Speaking of brothels, they were not only popular, but legal damned near everywhere (or at most studiously ignored by the local constabulary).
* The whole idea of banning fornication and and adultery revolved around the idea of lineage and property rights (your kid inherits the herds, land, or whatever - not some other guy's kid). This stretches back to the very historic concept of inheritance, and why most religions have that prohibition in place - as a concept, it is that damned old. But, you yourself mention the pragmatism as well. :)
As for today, kids are treasured far more highly, even to the point of legal worship over ideals that earlier civilizations really couldn't give a damn about. It is certainly wrong to harm a kid, to exploit one, or to molest one. This is common sense to a civilized modern human being. OTOH, there comes a point where at least biologically, a person is no longer a child, and the law has to allow for the adolescent to start taking steps into the world of adulthood. As long as it doesn't involve an adult taking advantage of that period of growth, the law should just leave the teenager the hell alone in that regard.
Not that I know if he was correct or not, but asking a police officer for legal advice is akin to asking a blind man for a description of the Mona Lisa.
The sad part is, while you may be able to prove innocence of any crime once you're in front of a judge, you still have that part where you get locked up in jail, lose your job (if you're unable to bail out), have the press label you nasty evil things (if the charge involves kids, drugs, or some other item considered to be a moral outrage), suffer financial damage defending yourself against it, etc.
That said, most cops I know of have enough of a working knowledge of the law (mostly by dealing with it daily) to get it right about 80-90% of the time. It's that 10% you have to worry about running afoul of.
They are licensing patents that are currently valid under US law.
That has yet to be tested. Once said patents have been found invalid, then what?
Given Microsoft's history of IP theft back then, I wonder how they would have fared if the established players back then demanded and got the same fees and licenses that Microsoft is demanding now?
I think the funniest day to come will be when (hopefully not "if") Microsoft loses that one in court.
I wonder if the companies currently paying up could turn around and sue Microsoft if that happens?
That's not the idea.
The idea is, you create a fake FB profile you never directly use, on a throwaway email addy that you never monitor. Suddenly, those preferences won't mean squat.
While I don't know all the ins and outs of Spotify, I do know that my Pandora account is keyed to an email addy from a toss-off account at a former employer (when you're the Exchange guy, why not? the account was used to test spam filtering among other things anyway.)
If I lose it? BFD, my prefs can be quickly re-established with another account tied to yet another email addy.
As long as I'm not doing actual purchases through the thing, a fake FB profile works just as well as a real one.
Dunno how much good that will do... hordes of fake facebook accounts (or even real ones that are never seen by the users who created them) will only dilute its value to advertisers.
Re. the Dead Sea Scrolls, the answer is simple: They were thought to have been written by the Essene sect, a group of folks which largely kept themselves separate and isolated from the larger Jewish community. They didn't get out much, and by the time word of anything Jesus did would have gotten there, the Roman legions would've likely gotten there first, hot off of sacking Jerusalem.
Philo? May also want to ask about Josephus, a contemporary who also didn't mention Christ (there was a passage in his writing that says otherwise, but this was ascribed to a rather overzealous monk slipping that in sometime during all that hand-copying throughout the ages).
My best guess is that, like most Jews of the time, they simply accepted what the Sanhedrin was pushing; namely, that Jesus' particular sect of messianic Judaism were to be considered a fringe heretical sect, and thus would be studiously ignored. Boosting this was the Pauline acceptance of gentiles into the group, something strictly in opposition to what was considered sensible Judaism. Therefore, giving the christian movement credence, attention, or even notice would have in turn given the two gents massive headaches - both at the local synagogue, and from their peers. Keeping one's reputation isn't exactly a new concept, after all.
Therein lies the problem... most countries in the first world have data retention logs.
You might be able to get away with some of it in the US, but not much. Besides, unless you run a backbone node, it wouldn't be too hard for the authorities to get the logs from your upstream data providers, which can still (with effort, but still) allow them to reconstruct what they need anyway.
The "worst disaster" in our planetary history involved asteroids big enough to heat the entire Earth's surface to a nice, sterility-inducing 4000 degrees centigrade, to a depth of 4 kilometers.
I'm pretty sure that Mars or even the Moon would be far more hospitable by comparison...
The situations aren't parallel. I'm sure Columbus would have been happy to send a robot, if he could have.
Err, that "robot" wouldn't have gained the title, or made the money from trade that Columbus was looking to rake in from finding a shortcut to China. So no, that wasn't going to happen even if they had a Renaissance equivalent of R. Daneel Olivaw on the manifest.
Especially if he knew before he left that it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars just for him to be able to breathe.
...instead, he had to beg one of the wealthiest noble families in Europe to cough up the back-then equivalent to get three ships, crew, and supplies for a multi-month voyage.
Nobody wants to end exploration. We're all desperate for exploration. So desperate that we want to send ten times as many missions, missions which stay up for years rather than weeks. Which is the sort of thing we can do with machines.
Problem is, on the long timescale, machines won't provide a living DNA backup against ELE asteroid events, pandemics, or the like. They also don't do much to relieve population pressures. They also have a nasty habit of doing the absolute wrong things whenever something unexpected happens. Finally, they have the maddening habit of missing opportunities.
Now all you would need to do is to show any collaboration with the US, state or local government in this instance.
[...]
Well, unless those whitelisted exceptions are checked by source IP addy or MX record back-checks.
As sibling said - an NDA is a civil affair, not a criminal one. The only types of NDA that could possibly land you in jail or in fines over violation would be for a government security clearance.
The worst that can happen in this case? The guy could get sued by the company, and they would have a hard time getting much of anything out of him for the effort spent. That's it.
Start here.
While there is no implied threat of violence, there is the implied threat of severe fiscal damage, which to a company is just as damaging as an arson job on one of their factories would be.
(...and it's shit like this where I would love to see a "loser pays" system apply to any corporation that sues *anybody* else.)
You missed a small step.
It's their money that will go offshore, not them. They'll just continue living here, while shell corporations and other dodges sit comfy and nearly tax-free in the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, etc.
Besides, if Warren Buffet wants to pay more taxes that badly, the IRS actually does accept donations. He's more than welcome to give as much as he wants.
...not quite understanding what you're getting at, since if taxes go up, I sincerely doubt that my wages will go up in order to compensate for that shift.
See related reply - they counted blatant XP license installs as "Windows 7" licenses, so the figure is suspect at best, a blatant lie at worst.
Look it up for yourself: http://www.microsoft.com/oem/en/licensing/sblicensing/pages/downgrade_rights.aspx
Here's a clue: Microsoft counted *every* workstation license sold as a Windows 7 license ever since Windows 7's release date. This includes XP, bulk EA/SA purchases, thin clients, etc... whether the license was used for Windows 7 or not.
Nice try, though.
I think it's a project by Microsoft to see if they can hype things out (like they did with Windows 7) and get massive results (like Windows 7)... sort of like emulating the Apple rumor mill, but instead of leaving the world to speculate, MSFT is trying to fuel the fire itself.
OTOH, I think it will backfire, mostly because I think they mis-read the reason Windows 7 was moderately successful: Windows 7 didn't become popular by the hype machine; it became moderately successful because the last decent version of Windows (XP) was released 8 years prior, and both XP and Vista using Windows enthusiasts were gagging for something that was up to date but not broken.
CNET (I know, I know) has been spewing out Windows 8 puff pieces every other day (sometimes every day), even for incredibly minor crap (e.g. Hyper-V, mounting .iso files, etc... minor bits that really don't mean much of anything to the end user individually.)
No they would be asked is the increasing number of hurricanes and their severity consistent with global warming predictions and they would say yes.
Riiiiight...
I can safely direct you to the search function on this very site - specifically, every frickin' time a hurricane-related story comes up.
The worst of it is those who insist that just because yesterday and today were cold in Lower Pisshaven, that somehow disproves the notion of climate change, under the common oversimplification of "global warming".
You know? I find it funny that, while yes it is true that climate != weather, the same folk who (rightly) scream that during a cold snap tend to suddenly shift gears whenever a hurricane shows up, point to it, and begins to shout 'see! see! It's teh global warmingz!'
A pox on both of your houses.
It's no surprise that people who congregate can be threats to an oppressive regime. In societies with particular fearful rulers weekly prayers (mass, temple, etc) would be the only public meetings not easily suppressed. Stalin got away with it, and it's said that Hitler bought out the ones he couldn't bully. The regimes that don't fully suppress religion (or other gatherings, even sports), can find those places as ignition to chaos, and even committed atheists might find the time to attend the only meeting they can.
Good point, but you yourself missed something overall: Certainly, atheists may congregate under the guise of prayer or such, but we were talking about monitoring news trends. If all you do is have your software eyeball prayer meetings (esp. just those phrased towards the Islamic Friday prayers, since Christians do it on Sunday and others do it whenever), you're going to miss it - which was my entire point.
Even if you're just eyeballing public meetings, you're going to miss it - most revolutionary meetings nowadays are going to be clandestine, and outside of Islam, aren't necessarily going to be centered around praying.
But sure, get all butt-hurt and lash out - there's a kernel of good idea in your first post, but you're still doing it all *wrong* by focusing on only one tiny aspect of a much larger picture.