"Religion" does not necessarily imply belief in or worship of a deity. It can mean "[A] cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith". This is fully consistent with its Latin root, which means "to bind again". Any beleif or practice that binds or connects us to something -- in a positive or negative sense -- can rightfully be called religious. Religion does not require deities or supernaturalism.
Megan's laws (I like to call them "The Ultimate ThinkOfTheChildren Acts") pretty much make it illegal for a male of any age to get within 20 yards of a female below 18, or have to wear a virtual scarlet letter for the rest of his life.
Yes. If you don't like such socially-conservative laws, don't support the GOP.
When you have trillions of dollars being spent-- none for inarguably constitutional uses such as defense-- and a big tax hike across the board, that's redistribution of wealth by definition.
Our taxes are low, both by international standards and by the standards of American history. It's well past time to restore the aristocracy tax (a.k.a. the estate tax), and raise the top marginal rates back to the 50% that was there for most of the Reagan era -- or even the 90% that curbed the extremely rich during the Eisenhower administration.
The federal government inarguablely has the Constitutional power to "to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States". Congress can buy us all ponies if it thinks it's in the general welfare. Our check on that is to elect a new Congress.
Capitalism is redistribution of wealth by definition: it takes the wealth created by labor and redirects a large part of it to bankers, landlords, and absentee investors.
How is it that right-wingers only discovered this concern about debt after decades of it being rung up by Reagan and the Bushes, and how is it that they don't seen it connected with the massive tax breaks that the rich have enjoyed under these administrations? Is it massive ignorance, or willing blindness?
Yes, trillions in debt is bad. End the wars, dismantle the military-industrial complex, and restore the taxes on the richest Americans to the level they were during the Reagan -- or better, the Eisenhower -- administration, and we could start to bring it down. Also helpful would be ending the futile and expensive War on Drugs.
Folks on the left have been advocating this solution for the debt for years. If right-wingers were serious, they could get on board with it; or they could continue to whine about "entitlements", not understanding that the biggest part of that is Social Security -- a program that supports some of the "Tea Party" organizers.
The debt is a substantive issue. But the right wing's "OMG liberals want to bankrupt us!" song-and-dance, is not. A more substantive issue would be, why did the right only discover it recently? How are they so ignorant of its history? And what should we do about people like Beck, Palin, and the whole Fox News crew who are active sources of misinformation that poisons the political dialog?
people on the left clammoring for more entitlement spending?
If the government can provide a service more efficiently than massive for-profit corporations -- and in the case of health insurance, it can -- it is only rational to have the government provide it. Yes, this means raising government spending -- but decreasing spending to private interests. If my tax bill goes up by $150 a month, but I'm no longer paying $200 a month to Amalgamated Health Insurance Profits, Inc., that's a win. (Numbers pulled out of the air.)
Of course, if we ended the wars, dismantled the military-industrial complex, and restored taxes on the richest Americans to a sane level, we might not even have to raise the tax bills of most Americans to provide services that civilized nations take for granted.
but fortunately/unfortunately, X10 at least _used_ to have the only powerline remote control stuff regular people could afford.
X10 the protocol was not the same as X10.com. There were several manufacturers making X10 gizmos, all around the same price range, become X10.com came along.
Is there anyone tech-savvy out there who's not already filtering their mail into a bunch of folders or some other means of prioritization? I use Sylpheed, which easily filters my mail into various folders. And by using mh folders, messages are stored in flat files on which I can use the standard Unix-y tools like grep -- and which are easily migrated to a new machine. My e-mail archives go back over 14 years.
I'm pretty sure that the filters I set up manually will be much more useful to me than Google's guesses about what I find important.
The problem with this is that you are applying modern behavior to events that happened over 50 years ago.
Some things do not change over time.
Fallacious reasoning is fallacious reasoning, today or 50 years ago. Censorship is censorship, today or 50 years ago.
Or to put it another way, what you suggest is kind of like going back in time to the 1950s and getting angry because nobody has a cell phone.
No, it's not like that at all. It's more like going back in time to the 1950s and getting angry because so many people were ignorant enough to think that segregation was a good idea, and wishing that someone would do the Rosa Parks thing a few years earlier.
Which is why this is about an "annulment", which requires you to have -- or pretend to have -- some sort of reason why the marriage was never actually valid, such as "psychological incapacity".
Just speculating, but perhaps the prosecutor knows this is a bunch of BS, didn't really want to block the annulment, but still has to look busy?
Question: do 6 out of 10 American young adults need to find Iraq on a map, or Sudan? Do they need to know what religion the majority of the population of India practice?
Every American of voting age needs to have enough knowledge of the world to know that India -- the world's largest democracy -- is a majority Hindu nation, that the Sudan -- the nation containing the Darfur region, which you might have heard about in the news the past few years -- is in Africa, and at least be able to say "Iraq is in the middle East, somewhere around here, and borders Iran and Turkey."
If they point to Iran or some other near-by country when asked to find Iraq on an unlabeled map, ok, I'd say that's within tolerance. (If the map has the Tigris and Euphrates rivers clearly marked, though, and you can't identify Iraq, you fail it.) But you've got people pointing to Australia when asked to find Iran. (Yes, it's a satire show, but it's illustrative.)
Anyone who doesn't know these basic facts about the geopolitical situation, or doesn't know why it's important to know them, please refrain from voting in any national elections; such ignorance disqualifies you from being able to make an intelligent choice.
I'd say knowing our relationship with these countries, and their relationships with some other countries (most likely just who is in conflict) are much more important pieces of information than the actual location of said countries.
But political relationships between nations are highly influenced by geographical factors, indeed perhaps more by geography than anything else.
People don't expect you to understand how a nuclear bomb works. That's not nearly as useful as simply knowing that it's crazy destructive and that they shouldn't be used.
No, actually, if all someone knows about how a nuclear bomb works is that it's "crazy destructive", they are too ignorant to contribute to the democratic process. "What's all this fuss about nuclear reactors in Iran and North Korea? I don't care about that, so long as they don't get The Bomb! Because that'd be the end of the world!"
I have this silly idea that it's like any other business, where they state the prices of the products and I choose which ones I want to buy, then pay the money and get the products.
I have this silly idea that intelligent human beings are able to understand that different conventions apply in different situations -- even if they themselves would create other conventions if they were omnipotent -- and can adjust their behavior accordingly. (Provided, of course, that such conventions are not a violation of anyone's rights; social convention is no excuse for racism, sexism, homophobia, etcetera.)
Now, certainly choosing to avoid eating out is less offensive than eating out and pretending that the convention of tipping does not exist; so, kudos on that. But "they state the prices of the products and I choose which ones I want to buy, then pay the money and get the products," is no more or less a valid convention than haggling or tipping.
And there won't be any echo cancellation happening, which is really rather needed if headsets aren't used for audio. (Nothing quite like hearing "Hey Dad!" echo over and over again with a second or so of latency as bounces back and forth across the country...)
Or, you know, he could put the microphone where it won't pick up noise from the speakers. Bar musicians can figure out where to set up their PA speakers and monitors to avoid feedback, I'd hope any/. reader could do the same...
A waitress has every right to be mad when someone orders $300 worth of food and doesn't even leave her a single cent.
Why?
Because an important social convention has been violated. If you believe that non-institutionalized social conventions are unimportant, try cutting in front of someone in line at the supermarket, or walking down the street yelling "Fuck you!" at everyone you see. There's no law against these behaviors, but only someone from a completely different culture, or someone serverely brain-damaged, would not understand them to be highly offensive and likely to cause anger.
Why? If she feels that a hourly salary is unfair, she can negotiate one based on how many dollars of food she serves.
No, she can't, no effectively, because capitalism puts a government-force-backed inequity into the system. When it's Jane Smith versus the government-chartered Amalgamated Restaurant Profits, Inc., it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that some sort of free-market negotiation is going on.
Knowing what states border mine is significantly more important than knowing where a random state is, is significantly more important than knowing where a random country is -- none of which are terribly important at all.
The fact that more than 6 out of ten American young adults (18 to 24) can't find Iraq on a map of the middle East, that 20% of them think Sudan is in Asia, and that almost half think that the majority population in India is Muslim, doesn't have any deleterious foreign policy.
And I've got a bridge for sale. (Don't be bothered by the fact that it's no where near any river, valley, or other geographical feature that the requires bridging...)
Facebook needs to actively defend itself if they do not want the backwards derived generalized suffix of "-book" to be used for social networking sites (something they may feel leads to people associating other "-book" sites with Facebook).
The fact that Facebook may not want the suffix "-book" to be used for other social networking sites, does not imply that they have any right to use government force to enforce their desires.
No one is going to associate "Teachbook" with "Facebook" any more than they associate "Yellowbook (Facebook includes a phone directory), Bluebook (Facebook includes an on-line marketplace), Guestbook (Facebook pages often function like guest books for small businesses), or Photobook (Facebook includes photos).
The idea is more vague than your statement about AI writing AI;
The idea of the technological Singularity is exactly "super-human AI (artificial or amplified intelligence) writing even more super-human AI in a positive feedback loop,." It was Vernor Vinge who gave the term its current meaning. (As you can tell by my handle, I'm fan of some of Vinge's work.)
Kurzweil and others looking for techno-rapture might like it to mean other things; but if you're going to have a serious discussion about the technological Singularity, stick with the Vingean definition.
The interesting thing is, everyone's so held up on the artificial intelligence thing, most fail to recognize the other path to Singularity, the one that we're already soaking in: Intelligence Amplification. Any goofball with a smartphone now has access to a quantity of information that would have been shocking thirty years ago.
For example, last week I was Lowes looking at insecticides, trying to figure out what could get rid of the mosquitoes in my yard but not have a huge environmental impact or be highly dangerous to me and my dog. I pulled out the Centro (yes, outdated) and started Googling insecticides: more information at my fingertips at seconds, than I could have found thirty years ago in an hour at my local library. That makes me, in some ways, smarter than people were decades ago.
The first Singularity was the invention of speech: it allowed human beings to pool their knowledge and thinking power with others in the immediate vicinity. The second was the invention of writing, which allowed us to precisely share information with people distant in space (via messengers) and distant in time. This not only made possible the development of organizational hierarchies (can't have those without reports and paperwork); it was the invention of history.
The third -- or maybe the second-and-a-half -- was the development of a practical printing press. Without that one-to-many type of communication, no Enlightenment, no Industrial Revolution.
The invention of electronic and digital media, cheap many-to-many communication, is -- once we get copyright out the way and get indexing worked out -- going to let everyone have access to any bit of information humanity has ever put out. That's a game changer. It's already enough to make predictions based on models of the past useless.
However, we should fix that definition rather than neutering the "sex offender" laws in the subset of cases where they are appropriate.
That's just it: there is no "subset of cases where they are appropriate." The only actual crimes that involve sex are crimes of assault, and we do not need a whole new class of laws to address them.
I think in the West we had a strange unnatural period where for the first time in human history there was enough individuality and wealth across the general populace that we could actually keep our lives private. This is not a luxury that most peoples and cultures of the world either have now or have ever really had.
Not at all. Throughout almost all of human history, people enjoyed two very important forms of privacy: freedom from surveillance and freedom from records. Until recently, to remove yourself from surveillance and have a private conversation or meeting, all you had to do was go out into the woods where no one else was around; and until recently, the vast majority of humanity left almost no paper (or electronic) trail behind them. These have been the default condition throughout the existence of the human species, and only with the combination of technology and concentrated power (political or economic) have they come to be seriously threatened.
people will stop acting like trash because there will be more consequences and the world will be a better place to live in.
If people can't recover from one mistake, then there's no incentive to "clean up your act".
Case 1: Teen commits a minor act of shoplifting. He gets caught, makes restitution, does X hours community service, learns his lesson, record is expunged and he becomes a productive member of society.
Case 2: Teen commits a minor act of shoplifting. He gets caught, makes restitution, does X hours community service. But his record is plastered all over the interwebs forever, and he can't get a job. Well, might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb: if they're going to indelibly label him a criminal, he'll live up to it, so he takes to burglary, car theft, etcetera, and spends his life in and out of prison.
He's right, society doesn't understand and until people learn to look past minor indiscretions society never will. Until that time, the only way to have a fresh start is to give people a name that doesn't have all the past associated with it.
Or we can try to have a sane society, and pass laws requiring businesses to delete any information associated with a person at that person's request.
Subjectright: you don't get to make money off data about me, without my consent. I am the author of my life, and the data you collect is a derivative work.
The adverb most, a shortened form of almost, is far from being either a recent development or an Americanism. It goes back to the 16th century in England, where it is now principally a dialect form. In American English it occurs before such pronouns as all, anyone, anybody, everyone, and everybody; the adjectives all, any, and every; and adverbs like anywhere and everywhere: Most everyone around here is related to everyone else. You can find that plant most anywhere. This use of most is often objected to, but it is common in the informal speech of educated persons. It is less common in edited writing except in representations of speech.
Red: an electomagnetic wave with a wavelength of 700 nm, and electomagnetic waves that activate the color receptors in the typical human eye to a similar level of stimulation.
Nope. Red is a subjective experience -- one that is highly correlated with exposure to electromagnetic waves in a certain wavelength range, sure, but I can experience red with my eyes closed through memory and imagination, and the experience of red can (probably) be caused by direct stimulation of the brain.
Red happens in the mind. Electromagnetic waves happen in the "objective" universe.
The religious holiday is All Saints Day (Nov 1), not the evening before it.
The Christian holiday is All Saints Day. There are other religions, you know. Samhain, a religious holiday for many Neopagans based on ancient Celtic traditions, is October 31, or sunset on the 31st through sunset November 1.
We most certainly do, and have since we first took control over extra-national territory.
and free speech has always been something that can be curtailed for an ongoing criminal investigation.
No, free speech has always been something that governments interfered with in the name of ongoing criminal investigations, among other excuses.
When I was in the ISP business I learned that it's illegal in New York State to tell one of your customers that he's the subject of a electronic surveillance warrant. Are you going to claim that's an infringement on free speech?
Yes, I will tell you that when the state threatens you with violence if you discuss certain of its acts -- such as placing a person under surveillance -- that is a violation of free speech. There is no other way to describe it.
The real problem now is that instead of the press harping on every thing the Congress and Presidency did while under Republicans they have suddenly clammed up.
Really? I can't view any of the mainstream corporate media without hearing criticism of Obama. And the alternative press is all over him for failing to end the wars and for reneging on the progressive planks of his platform.
During the Bush years, on the other hand, the corporate media let the GOP get away with stealing at least one election, at least interfering with a second, and taking us into a war on false pretenses.
Hopefully most will make the choice to boot incumbents out.
Not if the challengers are teabagger loons, no. I'd rather have a garden-variety slightly-crooked politico than somebody Palin would endorse.
Dissent is only a threat if it comes from the right.
I haven't heard anyone call right-wing dissenters anti-patriotic or a threat. I've heard them called ignorant, which they often are, but other than the handful of idiots who were actually threatening violence, I've not heard them called a "threat". I haven't heard of any of them being herded into "Free Speech" zones. Hell, some of these guys have shown up waving rifles around, and have faced no sanction.
I went out last summer to counter-protest a bunch of teabaggers at a health-care town hall meeting. I didn't feel those people were a threat -- woefully ignorant, yes, untrained in critical thinking, certainly, and in some cases racist; but I would never want them to be silenced by force.
That's why people like William Ayers are iconic on the left
Citation needed. The leftists I know don't give a shit about the guy.
who, at the end of the day, isn't all that different than Timothy McVeigh.
Well, other than McVeigh was a mass murderer, while Ayers blew up a statue and damaged a few buildings, never killing anyone, and did so in an attempt to stop an American war of agression.
Ayers: "We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war."
McVeigh: "I have come to peace with myself, my God and my cause. Blood will flow in the streets, Steve. Good vs. Evil. Free Men vs. Socialist Wannabe Slaves. Pray it is not your blood, my friend."
Sure, not different at all -- sort of the same way that you, at the end of the day, aren't all that different from Hitler. Only difference is that he was a genocidal megalomaniac and you're (presumably) not. Hardly significant, right?
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"Religion" does not necessarily imply belief in or worship of a deity. It can mean "[A] cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith". This is fully consistent with its Latin root, which means "to bind again". Any beleif or practice that binds or connects us to something -- in a positive or negative sense -- can rightfully be called religious. Religion does not require deities or supernaturalism.
Yes. If you don't like such socially-conservative laws, don't support the GOP.
None for defense? WTF? Have you not been paying attention? Direct federal spending on "defense" makes up 20% of the budget, not counting veteran's benefits, interest on the debt rung up from war and the arms race. Add those in and the spending on "defense" roughly doubles.
Our taxes are low, both by international standards and by the standards of American history. It's well past time to restore the aristocracy tax (a.k.a. the estate tax), and raise the top marginal rates back to the 50% that was there for most of the Reagan era -- or even the 90% that curbed the extremely rich during the Eisenhower administration.
The federal government inarguablely has the Constitutional power to "to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States". Congress can buy us all ponies if it thinks it's in the general welfare. Our check on that is to elect a new Congress.
Capitalism is redistribution of wealth by definition: it takes the wealth created by labor and redirects a large part of it to bankers, landlords, and absentee investors.
How is it that right-wingers only discovered this concern about debt after decades of it being rung up by Reagan and the Bushes, and how is it that they don't seen it connected with the massive tax breaks that the rich have enjoyed under these administrations? Is it massive ignorance, or willing blindness?
Yes, trillions in debt is bad. End the wars, dismantle the military-industrial complex, and restore the taxes on the richest Americans to the level they were during the Reagan -- or better, the Eisenhower -- administration, and we could start to bring it down. Also helpful would be ending the futile and expensive War on Drugs.
Folks on the left have been advocating this solution for the debt for years. If right-wingers were serious, they could get on board with it; or they could continue to whine about "entitlements", not understanding that the biggest part of that is Social Security -- a program that supports some of the "Tea Party" organizers.
The debt is a substantive issue. But the right wing's "OMG liberals want to bankrupt us!" song-and-dance, is not. A more substantive issue would be, why did the right only discover it recently? How are they so ignorant of its history? And what should we do about people like Beck, Palin, and the whole Fox News crew who are active sources of misinformation that poisons the political dialog?
If the government can provide a service more efficiently than massive for-profit corporations -- and in the case of health insurance, it can -- it is only rational to have the government provide it. Yes, this means raising government spending -- but decreasing spending to private interests. If my tax bill goes up by $150 a month, but I'm no longer paying $200 a month to Amalgamated Health Insurance Profits, Inc., that's a win. (Numbers pulled out of the air.)
Of course, if we ended the wars, dismantled the military-industrial complex, and restored taxes on the richest Americans to a sane level, we might not even have to raise the tax bills of most Americans to provide services that civilized nations take for granted.
X10 the protocol was not the same as X10.com. There were several manufacturers making X10 gizmos, all around the same price range, become X10.com came along.
Is there anyone tech-savvy out there who's not already filtering their mail into a bunch of folders or some other means of prioritization? I use Sylpheed, which easily filters my mail into various folders. And by using mh folders, messages are stored in flat files on which I can use the standard Unix-y tools like grep -- and which are easily migrated to a new machine. My e-mail archives go back over 14 years.
I'm pretty sure that the filters I set up manually will be much more useful to me than Google's guesses about what I find important.
Another outstanding reason to avoid shiny geegaws from an evil company.
Seriously, WTF?
Some things do not change over time.
Fallacious reasoning is fallacious reasoning, today or 50 years ago. Censorship is censorship, today or 50 years ago.
No, it's not like that at all. It's more like going back in time to the 1950s and getting angry because so many people were ignorant enough to think that segregation was a good idea, and wishing that someone would do the Rosa Parks thing a few years earlier.
Philippines. 80% Catholic. Thanks to religious bullshit, you basically can't get a divorce there. (Well, according to the wik, so some irony here...)
Which is why this is about an "annulment", which requires you to have -- or pretend to have -- some sort of reason why the marriage was never actually valid, such as "psychological incapacity".
Just speculating, but perhaps the prosecutor knows this is a bunch of BS, didn't really want to block the annulment, but still has to look busy?
Every American of voting age needs to have enough knowledge of the world to know that India -- the world's largest democracy -- is a majority Hindu nation, that the Sudan -- the nation containing the Darfur region, which you might have heard about in the news the past few years -- is in Africa, and at least be able to say "Iraq is in the middle East, somewhere around here, and borders Iran and Turkey."
If they point to Iran or some other near-by country when asked to find Iraq on an unlabeled map, ok, I'd say that's within tolerance. (If the map has the Tigris and Euphrates rivers clearly marked, though, and you can't identify Iraq, you fail it.) But you've got people pointing to Australia when asked to find Iran. (Yes, it's a satire show, but it's illustrative.)
Anyone who doesn't know these basic facts about the geopolitical situation, or doesn't know why it's important to know them, please refrain from voting in any national elections; such ignorance disqualifies you from being able to make an intelligent choice.
But political relationships between nations are highly influenced by geographical factors, indeed perhaps more by geography than anything else.
No, actually, if all someone knows about how a nuclear bomb works is that it's "crazy destructive", they are too ignorant to contribute to the democratic process. "What's all this fuss about nuclear reactors in Iran and North Korea? I don't care about that, so long as they don't get The Bomb! Because that'd be the end of the world!"
I have this silly idea that intelligent human beings are able to understand that different conventions apply in different situations -- even if they themselves would create other conventions if they were omnipotent -- and can adjust their behavior accordingly. (Provided, of course, that such conventions are not a violation of anyone's rights; social convention is no excuse for racism, sexism, homophobia, etcetera.)
Now, certainly choosing to avoid eating out is less offensive than eating out and pretending that the convention of tipping does not exist; so, kudos on that. But "they state the prices of the products and I choose which ones I want to buy, then pay the money and get the products," is no more or less a valid convention than haggling or tipping.
Or, you know, he could put the microphone where it won't pick up noise from the speakers. Bar musicians can figure out where to set up their PA speakers and monitors to avoid feedback, I'd hope any /. reader could do the same...
Because an important social convention has been violated. If you believe that non-institutionalized social conventions are unimportant, try cutting in front of someone in line at the supermarket, or walking down the street yelling "Fuck you!" at everyone you see. There's no law against these behaviors, but only someone from a completely different culture, or someone serverely brain-damaged, would not understand them to be highly offensive and likely to cause anger.
No, she can't, no effectively, because capitalism puts a government-force-backed inequity into the system. When it's Jane Smith versus the government-chartered Amalgamated Restaurant Profits, Inc., it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that some sort of free-market negotiation is going on.
Right. Knowing what nations border Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran -- completely unimportant.
The fact that more than 6 out of ten American young adults (18 to 24) can't find Iraq on a map of the middle East, that 20% of them think Sudan is in Asia, and that almost half think that the majority population in India is Muslim, doesn't have any deleterious foreign policy.
And I've got a bridge for sale. (Don't be bothered by the fact that it's no where near any river, valley, or other geographical feature that the requires bridging...)
The fact that Facebook may not want the suffix "-book" to be used for other social networking sites, does not imply that they have any right to use government force to enforce their desires.
No one is going to associate "Teachbook" with "Facebook" any more than they associate "Yellowbook (Facebook includes a phone directory), Bluebook (Facebook includes an on-line marketplace), Guestbook (Facebook pages often function like guest books for small businesses), or Photobook (Facebook includes photos).
The idea of the technological Singularity is exactly "super-human AI (artificial or amplified intelligence) writing even more super-human AI in a positive feedback loop, ." It was Vernor Vinge who gave the term its current meaning. (As you can tell by my handle, I'm fan of some of Vinge's work.)
Kurzweil and others looking for techno-rapture might like it to mean other things; but if you're going to have a serious discussion about the technological Singularity, stick with the Vingean definition.
The interesting thing is, everyone's so held up on the artificial intelligence thing, most fail to recognize the other path to Singularity, the one that we're already soaking in: Intelligence Amplification. Any goofball with a smartphone now has access to a quantity of information that would have been shocking thirty years ago.
For example, last week I was Lowes looking at insecticides, trying to figure out what could get rid of the mosquitoes in my yard but not have a huge environmental impact or be highly dangerous to me and my dog. I pulled out the Centro (yes, outdated) and started Googling insecticides: more information at my fingertips at seconds, than I could have found thirty years ago in an hour at my local library. That makes me, in some ways, smarter than people were decades ago.
The first Singularity was the invention of speech: it allowed human beings to pool their knowledge and thinking power with others in the immediate vicinity. The second was the invention of writing, which allowed us to precisely share information with people distant in space (via messengers) and distant in time. This not only made possible the development of organizational hierarchies (can't have those without reports and paperwork); it was the invention of history.
The third -- or maybe the second-and-a-half -- was the development of a practical printing press. Without that one-to-many type of communication, no Enlightenment, no Industrial Revolution.
The invention of electronic and digital media, cheap many-to-many communication, is -- once we get copyright out the way and get indexing worked out -- going to let everyone have access to any bit of information humanity has ever put out. That's a game changer. It's already enough to make predictions based on models of the past useless.
That's a Singularity. You're living in it.
That's just it: there is no "subset of cases where they are appropriate." The only actual crimes that involve sex are crimes of assault, and we do not need a whole new class of laws to address them.
Not at all. Throughout almost all of human history, people enjoyed two very important forms of privacy: freedom from surveillance and freedom from records. Until recently, to remove yourself from surveillance and have a private conversation or meeting, all you had to do was go out into the woods where no one else was around; and until recently, the vast majority of humanity left almost no paper (or electronic) trail behind them. These have been the default condition throughout the existence of the human species, and only with the combination of technology and concentrated power (political or economic) have they come to be seriously threatened.
If people can't recover from one mistake, then there's no incentive to "clean up your act".
Case 1: Teen commits a minor act of shoplifting. He gets caught, makes restitution, does X hours community service, learns his lesson, record is expunged and he becomes a productive member of society.
Case 2: Teen commits a minor act of shoplifting. He gets caught, makes restitution, does X hours community service. But his record is plastered all over the interwebs forever, and he can't get a job. Well, might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb: if they're going to indelibly label him a criminal, he'll live up to it, so he takes to burglary, car theft, etcetera, and spends his life in and out of prison.
Or we can try to have a sane society, and pass laws requiring businesses to delete any information associated with a person at that person's request.
Subjectright: you don't get to make money off data about me, without my consent. I am the author of my life, and the data you collect is a derivative work.
"Most all" is an acceptable informal form of "almost all" in American English.
Nope. Red is a subjective experience -- one that is highly correlated with exposure to electromagnetic waves in a certain wavelength range, sure, but I can experience red with my eyes closed through memory and imagination, and the experience of red can (probably) be caused by direct stimulation of the brain.
Red happens in the mind. Electromagnetic waves happen in the "objective" universe.
The Christian holiday is All Saints Day. There are other religions, you know. Samhain, a religious holiday for many Neopagans based on ancient Celtic traditions, is October 31, or sunset on the 31st through sunset November 1.
We most certainly do, and have since we first took control over extra-national territory.
No, free speech has always been something that governments interfered with in the name of ongoing criminal investigations, among other excuses.
Yes, I will tell you that when the state threatens you with violence if you discuss certain of its acts -- such as placing a person under surveillance -- that is a violation of free speech. There is no other way to describe it.
Really? I can't view any of the mainstream corporate media without hearing criticism of Obama. And the alternative press is all over him for failing to end the wars and for reneging on the progressive planks of his platform.
During the Bush years, on the other hand, the corporate media let the GOP get away with stealing at least one election, at least interfering with a second, and taking us into a war on false pretenses.
Not if the challengers are teabagger loons, no. I'd rather have a garden-variety slightly-crooked politico than somebody Palin would endorse.
I haven't heard anyone call right-wing dissenters anti-patriotic or a threat. I've heard them called ignorant, which they often are, but other than the handful of idiots who were actually threatening violence, I've not heard them called a "threat". I haven't heard of any of them being herded into "Free Speech" zones. Hell, some of these guys have shown up waving rifles around, and have faced no sanction.
I went out last summer to counter-protest a bunch of teabaggers at a health-care town hall meeting. I didn't feel those people were a threat -- woefully ignorant, yes, untrained in critical thinking, certainly, and in some cases racist; but I would never want them to be silenced by force.
Citation needed. The leftists I know don't give a shit about the guy.
Well, other than McVeigh was a mass murderer, while Ayers blew up a statue and damaged a few buildings, never killing anyone, and did so in an attempt to stop an American war of agression.
Ayers: "We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war."
McVeigh: "I have come to peace with myself, my God and my cause. Blood will flow in the streets, Steve. Good vs. Evil. Free Men vs. Socialist Wannabe Slaves. Pray it is not your blood, my friend."
Sure, not different at all -- sort of the same way that you, at the end of the day, aren't all that different from Hitler. Only difference is that he was a genocidal megalomaniac and you're (presumably) not. Hardly significant, right?