The problem is that the US courts ruled that US law does apply in Ireland because Microsoft has a presence in both countries.
And you think that somehow the ruling of a US court absolves Microsoft from Irish law?
Not at all, but these statements are not contradictory: 1. US law requires MS to divulge data A, and MS will be punished if they don't divulge it. 2. Irish law requires MS to not divulge data A, and MS will be punished if they do divulge it.
I'm not arguing that you are "wrong" merely that your argument omits the crucial element of property ownership in play.
Property ownership of a legal corporate entity doesn't mean that the parent entity can compel the owned entity to break the law.
I don't want to quibble over wording, but strictly speaking that isn't true, depending on your definition of "compel." I can compel you to give me everything you own by pointing a gun at somebody you care about and telling you that if you don't send me your money I'll shoot them. It certainly isn't legal, but it IS compulsion. Or at least, I think most people would say that it is.
So, in a sense the US CAN compel MS to make its Irish subsidiary break Irish law, in the sense that practically speaking it has the power to do so. It sucks to be MS in such a case.
This court case is about getting the US government to restrain itself so that it isn't compelling people to break privacy laws.
Countries compel people to break laws all the time, simply because national interests are not always aligned. If country A is at war with country B and captures a spy, do you think country A really cares that country B's laws prevent the spy from divulging their plans? They're going to interrogate that spy and get them to spill their guts all the same, perhaps offering them amnesty if they are sufficiently cooperative.
" unless the owning party wishes it distributed or is under criminal investigation".. those are conditions, not absolutes. Therefore, it's not a real dichotomy.
You said either A or B when A and B are not the only possibilities. That is what a false dichotomy is.
For example, an option might be that privacy law doesn't apply to evidence that a crime was committed, even if no crime is formally under investigation, and that determination can be made by any private citizen (and presumably upheld in court if there is a dispute).
Whether you agree with it or not, that IS an option.
I decided long ago that I was having neither a funeral or any service. Roast me, toast me, and find some way to lose the ashes.
My wife and I had the same discussion. Have the body disposed of in the cheapest way possible, and maybe plant a memorial tree in the backyard or something. If she feels the need to blow $20k in the process she can take the family to disney world or something.
The reputation of the company is only harmed because most people aren't economists
Thank Christ for that. If you looked at the link you'd see the high prices did not become "market value" because everyone got a refund to defuse the poor reputation gained from this utterly stupid fuckup.
You're paying out the nose for the cab either way. You're just paying with your time instead of with your wallet.
Or I guess you can just pay somebody else to stand around and hail a cab for you, and then come pick you up once they have one.
I don't get why people are so opposed to auctions. If you auctioned off rush-hour driving permits for major highways you'd clear up traffic jams overnight. Carpooling would take off, public transit would take off, employers would allow for flexible hours, etc. It would take 15 minutes to drive what used to take 2 hours in some places.
I say all this and I don't really have a great deal of money to spend. I just don't like standing in line forever. If I could pay $1 and get a reserved seat in a movie theater I would.
Are you certain of that? Bear in mind, when interpreting the Constitution of the United States, judges do look at other influencing documents from the time, like The Federalist Papers, which are not themselves legal documents.
Sure, but a law is issued by Congress, and by nobody else.
If I license my software under the GPL and give it to you, then if you want to understand the intent of the license you need to talk to ME and not RMS. After all, _I_ was the one who licensed the software to you. I just used the GPL instead of retyping my own version of it.
Sure, you can ask what the intent was, but I think the text matters far more in a situation like this.
Pirate sites are illegal, so that OBVIOUSLY means anything uploaded to them are illegal.
Pirate sites aren't in themselves illegal. It's the content, such as movies and such, that is illegal.
Keep in mind that the movie studios are trying to get the sites declared illegal just based on what they do.
Of course that doesn't make them illegal on its own. However, if you're trying to make the case that even so much as downloading a Debian CD from TPB is illegal, you don't want opposing council pointing out that your own company uses the site for non-infringing uses.
A bunch of people who make their living off of dressing up dead bodies and charging people to view them is concerned about people not wanting to come see dead bodies in person. Of course, saying it that way would be crass, so we get a bunch of ramble about the grieving process and how important it is to see dead bodies in person as part of that.
"To have death and mourning transferred online takes away that tangible proof. What is there to show us that death is real?"
Maybe the fact that Aunt Tilly no longer calls/emails you once a week to check up? Do you really need to see a body to know somebody died.
The real fear is that if showing up to an online funeral becomes popular, then people will start to question why they are spending so much money on dressing up dead bodies and propping them up for viewing. If everybody is just looking at an image of them anyway, why not just show a slideshow of photos of the deceased? And if you do that then you can dispense with the funeral services almost entirely. There might still be a gathering, but it could be anywhere. There might still be a religious service, but it might not include tens of thousands of dollars worth of embalming and equipment.
There's a quote of up to $184 for a trip to the nearby airport. It's spiked far beyond the point where most people are going to decline the service and wait for something else. That's a flawed algorithm since if it's capped at all it's capped beyond the point where it harmed the reputation of the company.
Whether most people decline the service is actually completely irrelevant. The question is whether Uber's services are 100% utilized or not. If they are, then the algorithm is doing exactly what it is supposed to do - match supply and demand. Now, if all of Uber's cars are sitting idle while there are crowds of people who would otherwise be using their services then the algorithm would be broken.
The reputation of the company is only harmed because most people aren't economists.:) They prefer waiting in lines for rations to orderly markets. This is why we spend so much of our time waiting in lines, waiting in traffic, and so on.
Economists prefer economic efficiency, and standing in lines of any kind is basically the opposite of efficiency. Any economist would tell you that there would be no point in capping the max price Uber charges, since the value of a service is whatever the supplier and customers agree it is. If people were buying $184 Uber rides and drivers were willing to provide the rides at that price, then that was the market value of the service. People who didn't want to pay the price would just have to wait until the riders with deep pockets were done buying rides, and then the price would fall. If Uber didn't raise their prices everybody would be standing around waiting anyway, but many drivers might see that huge traffic jam downtown and decide to just take the afternoon off.
I agree that I will not assert or maintain against ___________________________, your successors, assigns and licensees, any claim, action, suit or demand of any kind or nature whatsoever, including but not limited to those grounded upon invasion of privacy, rights of publicity or other civil rights, or for any reason in connection with your authorized use of my physical likeness and sound in the Picture as herein provided.
Actors in effect sign over their rights as they pertain to the movie. One of those right is copyright. Without a valid release copyright to the actor's image is retained by the actor. The DMCA allows copyright holders to have they property taken down. She is not "going after" Google but Google is going after her. She filed a DMCA and the courts agreed with her position. Now Google is appealing the decision.
You do realize that the statement you quoted doesn't mention copyright at all, right? That would because people don't own copyright to their own image. There certainly are other laws that pertain to this, but not copyright, and not the DMCA. Of course, they're trying to claim copyright because copyright in the US is very strongly enforced, and privacy laws in the US generally are not.
Where in the copyright law is somebody granted rights to any photograph taken of them? If it isn't in the law, then failure to sign a release doesn't make it a law. You can't release a right you never had.
However, the inane aspect about it is that while Republicans blamed Obama for what happened in Benghazi, fact remains that their position on Libya/Qadaffi was no different from the Democrats.
Some think using force is the solution to every problem and some believe democracy is the solution to every problem.
The disaster of the Arab spring is what you get when you combine the two ideas.
You do realize that most of the older democracies became that way through the use of force, right? The ones that didn't were colonies of democratic nations for the most part already, and since the occupying nation was democratically controlled by people who generally didn't care for tyranny measures like civil disobedience were far more successful.
He wasn't suggesting that everybody has to live in a city, but rather that industry should be more dispersed. I think a big problem in Silicon Valley / etc is that everybody lives in suburbs and then commutes to a bunch of businesses that are all in one area. Nobody can afford to live near the employers and traffic is horrible.
If you spread the employers out and intermix it with residential areas then people move generally close to where they work, and everything ends up being moderately priced, with moderate traffic.
An urban model can work with real mass transit, but US cities tend to lack that, outside of maybe NYC.
I'm not sure.....it sounds like it kind of, but wouldn't the higher prices draw more people in to act as Taxis? (or should I say, to "give rides?")
Yup. For some reason people seem to prefer inefficient markets where the prices stay low but everybody stands around in lines waiting for rationed soap or whatever, to a market where the price gets set based on supply/demand and there are no lines and when the price of soap rises to $100/bar you find everybody with a pot and plastic containers making their own soap for sale, thus increasing the supply and satisfying demand.
Then whoever designed the algorithm is purposely ripping people off, which definitely sounds like slashdot story material if it's true.
Apparently you favor an algorithm where people with the time to stand on a street corner for 3 hours get lucky and get a cab. Uber apparently prefers an algorithm where anybody who requests a cab gets one in 5 minutes every time, albeit at a higher cost than normal.
Either way exactly the same number of people are being driven where they want to go per hour. It isn't like they're limiting the supply of cabs. Indeed, if fares are going up chances are that every Uber driver in the city is headed for that area even if it means working all night to do it. The algorithm probably means that more people are going to get where they want to go per hour.
An auction is actually the most straightforward way of ensuring that supply and demand are balanced. Virtually every stock exchange on the planet works in this manner as a result. If more people want Microsoft stock than are selling it at the moment, the price goes up.
It almost sounds like they are hiring drivers who are not only ok with ripping off people but are activly good at it. How is that not crimial behaviour?
Don't waste your time arguing with trolls. It is a bit like somebody spending all day arguing that there are lots of things that could make a pendulum behave the way it does besides the earth turning.
Since the whole point of dark matter is attempting to account for phenomena which have no other explanation, it is entirely possible that all of physics is off the mark. However, to just dismiss the entire matter because any ONE specific issue is somewhat circumstantial is to miss the overall picture. There is certainly a lot of evidence that established theories are wrong, and there are a lot of independent constraints on what is going on.
I just want to take a moment, at this sympathetic time of year, to say that I really feel for the poor souls who are (or should I say were) responsible for security at Sony. We've all got issues, but those folks must be in a dark place now. For what it's worth I blame the execs who skimped on the IT security budget.
People seem to claim that Sony is particularly lax at security, but most of the solutions I see are tinfoil-hat territory - disconnect from the internet and such.
If Sony took the kinds of measures people seem to propose, they'd go out of business since their competitors would be far more efficient. You can't just turn the dial back to the 90s and pretend the internet didn't happen.
I don't have a solution. What Sony did is what virtually every company around does. I'm sure we'll see more hacks like this happen. Companies that try to prevent these attacks will either still get hacked because they don't do enough, or will go bankrupt because they did do enough. Maybe at some point governments will start firewalling at the border, or will make it illegal to distribute an operating system that isn't NSA-certified. That won't be much of an improvement.
You do realize that the solution proposed in that article is to completely disconnect an entire corporation from the internet, right? It reads like something written in 1995. People don't use the internet at work just to check Facebook these days. Ever use Stack Overflow or Google at work? Every profession has sites like that, and you're not going to way to pay to replicate every one of them inside the firewall. If you tried either nobody would get anything done, or every manager in the company would just tell their employees to switch to google docs and gmail and to use their own PCs.
because they fear that making them illegal will affect conventional abortion
It has been the standard operating procedure ever since Roe v Wade: chip away at abortion without passing an Ireland-style ban. Because shit happens when medical decisions are made by religious fanatics rather than doctors.
That was the original point - "Both sides are afraid of incrimentalism by the other, which compels them to adopt the extremist position in order to prevent that strategy working."
Both sides are forced to take extreme positions. Thus we have wars over things where otherwise there might be compromise. The case you cited is an example that actually touches on both abortion and euthanasia, which are both incredibly controversial topics. In the US euthanasia is illegal even when consented to by a completely competent adult, let alone in the case of a child where the consent is provided by a parent. Any rational discussion on the matter is trumped by, "OMG, Death Panels!"
The government could but delaying a standard or making sure it is expensive is a way to prevent legal UAV use.
Not sure what the point of that is. Do you think that commercial outfits which likely have money and are interested in hanging onto it are going to be flying drones around airports or in the way of other aircraft (which will cost them drones likely carrying expensive gear which is traceable and lawsuits)? That sort of nonsense is strictly amateur hour, and if every Radio Shack $30 UAV came with anti-collision gear that would make a real dent in the risks there.
It isn't just IT. Management fads seem to be everywhere. People go where the incentives are. If doing something akin to internal marketing gets you a promotion, guess what you're going to do?
Consulting companies pay artists and designers to work on powerpoint presentations, or at least to teach their consultants how to design snazzy slides and arm them with a mountain of templates. That all happens off the official bills but obviously the cost gets baked in. They do it for the same reason that ads always look pretty - they know that it impresses internal management at the client and it makes the guy who decided to hire the consultants look good, so that he gets more power in the company and more discretion to bring in more consultants.
I learned a long time ago to read between the lines and work on the stuff that the managers "really" want. That project that has no business case that nobody has the guts to cancel - you put in the minimum effort so as to not outright be insubordinate and get yourself assigned to some hot project that is going to get rewarded and when they ask you to do things on the dead-end project you just say you're too busy and let the hotshot PM on your other project dump ice water on whoever asked you to do something unimportant. In the end the dead-end project fails and probably gets branded as a success and you haven't sidelined your career serving it.
While I echo the necessity of vaccines in the modern world as a necessary and effective tool for limiting infections and thereby human suffering, I am not a fan of abandoning basic freedoms just so we can all feel more secure. The law is very clear, the government shall not pass any law that infringes on the free exercise of religion. Thus, if vaccines are created that infringe on my freedom of religious expression, they have to pass a bar that is set pretty high before they can be enforced or have any hope of surviving a basic court challenge.
Vaccines don't make us "feel more secure." They have been proven effective in preventing disease and saving lives. This isn't security theater.
Free expression of religion doesn't include driving without auto insurance, or without passing a basic automotive safety inspection where required. It doesn't include being free to practice human sacrifice. It doesn't include being free to raise your kid in a tribal lifestyle without basic education. Your freedom to practice your religion ends where you begin to infringe on my own freedom to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If your choice to not be vaccinated increases my risk of getting a dangerous disease, then I'd say that your choice is not one automatically protected by the constitution.
Of course vaccines have risks as well as benefits, and those should be weighed, but this was already done when the government approved the use of the vaccine in the first place. If the risks weren't outweighed by the benefits as demonstrated by the scientific data, then you wouldn't even be allowed to buy the vaccine in the first place.
Since everybody else is AC I'll reply here, mostly to agree with you.
The obvious argument to your claim is that if a woman had a gene that caused her to pump out more males in these circumstances, then her progeny would probably become more dominant, favoring this gene and making it more prevalent.
However, this is only true if you look at the local community.
Suppose the group of humans in which this gene is taking over is in competition with another group of humans that does not breed with them, but does compete for resources - another tribe essentially. If both groups are under stress, the one group might have a high frequency of the selfish gene, but the other group which lacks it might have more progeny overall, and thus may become dominant.
Genes aren't unlike viruses in this regard. A virus that reproduces so successfully that it kills its host quickly might make lots of headlines, but ultimately it won't be nearly as re-productively successful as some quiet little virus that lives in peace in every human on the planet.
Slashdot Mirror
And you think that somehow the ruling of a US court absolves Microsoft from Irish law?
Not at all, but these statements are not contradictory:
1. US law requires MS to divulge data A, and MS will be punished if they don't divulge it.
2. Irish law requires MS to not divulge data A, and MS will be punished if they do divulge it.
Property ownership of a legal corporate entity doesn't mean that the parent entity can compel the owned entity to break the law.
I don't want to quibble over wording, but strictly speaking that isn't true, depending on your definition of "compel." I can compel you to give me everything you own by pointing a gun at somebody you care about and telling you that if you don't send me your money I'll shoot them. It certainly isn't legal, but it IS compulsion. Or at least, I think most people would say that it is.
So, in a sense the US CAN compel MS to make its Irish subsidiary break Irish law, in the sense that practically speaking it has the power to do so. It sucks to be MS in such a case.
This court case is about getting the US government to restrain itself so that it isn't compelling people to break privacy laws.
Countries compel people to break laws all the time, simply because national interests are not always aligned. If country A is at war with country B and captures a spy, do you think country A really cares that country B's laws prevent the spy from divulging their plans? They're going to interrogate that spy and get them to spill their guts all the same, perhaps offering them amnesty if they are sufficiently cooperative.
" unless the owning party wishes it distributed or is under criminal investigation" .. those are conditions, not absolutes. Therefore, it's not a real dichotomy.
You said either A or B when A and B are not the only possibilities. That is what a false dichotomy is.
For example, an option might be that privacy law doesn't apply to evidence that a crime was committed, even if no crime is formally under investigation, and that determination can be made by any private citizen (and presumably upheld in court if there is a dispute).
Whether you agree with it or not, that IS an option.
I decided long ago that I was having neither a funeral or any service. Roast me, toast me, and find some way to lose the ashes.
My wife and I had the same discussion. Have the body disposed of in the cheapest way possible, and maybe plant a memorial tree in the backyard or something. If she feels the need to blow $20k in the process she can take the family to disney world or something.
Thank Christ for that.
If you looked at the link you'd see the high prices did not become "market value" because everyone got a refund to defuse the poor reputation gained from this utterly stupid fuckup.
You're paying out the nose for the cab either way. You're just paying with your time instead of with your wallet.
Or I guess you can just pay somebody else to stand around and hail a cab for you, and then come pick you up once they have one.
I don't get why people are so opposed to auctions. If you auctioned off rush-hour driving permits for major highways you'd clear up traffic jams overnight. Carpooling would take off, public transit would take off, employers would allow for flexible hours, etc. It would take 15 minutes to drive what used to take 2 hours in some places.
I say all this and I don't really have a great deal of money to spend. I just don't like standing in line forever. If I could pay $1 and get a reserved seat in a movie theater I would.
"Once you have a working compiler, the code you write for it will be interpreted correctly and the same way everytime."
Rrrrright.
Well, it is one way to eliminate compiler bugs. By definition the compiler doesn't have any.
Are you certain of that? Bear in mind, when interpreting the Constitution of the United States, judges do look at other influencing documents from the time, like The Federalist Papers, which are not themselves legal documents.
Sure, but a law is issued by Congress, and by nobody else.
If I license my software under the GPL and give it to you, then if you want to understand the intent of the license you need to talk to ME and not RMS. After all, _I_ was the one who licensed the software to you. I just used the GPL instead of retyping my own version of it.
Sure, you can ask what the intent was, but I think the text matters far more in a situation like this.
Pirate sites are illegal, so that OBVIOUSLY means anything uploaded to them are illegal.
Pirate sites aren't in themselves illegal. It's the content, such as movies and such, that is illegal.
Keep in mind that the movie studios are trying to get the sites declared illegal just based on what they do.
Of course that doesn't make them illegal on its own. However, if you're trying to make the case that even so much as downloading a Debian CD from TPB is illegal, you don't want opposing council pointing out that your own company uses the site for non-infringing uses.
1) Either nothing is private, or
2) Everything is private unless the owning party wishes it distributed or is under criminal investigation.
or
3) You used a false dichotomy fallacy.
A bunch of people who make their living off of dressing up dead bodies and charging people to view them is concerned about people not wanting to come see dead bodies in person. Of course, saying it that way would be crass, so we get a bunch of ramble about the grieving process and how important it is to see dead bodies in person as part of that.
"To have death and mourning transferred online takes away that tangible proof. What is there to show us that death is real?"
Maybe the fact that Aunt Tilly no longer calls/emails you once a week to check up? Do you really need to see a body to know somebody died.
The real fear is that if showing up to an online funeral becomes popular, then people will start to question why they are spending so much money on dressing up dead bodies and propping them up for viewing. If everybody is just looking at an image of them anyway, why not just show a slideshow of photos of the deceased? And if you do that then you can dispense with the funeral services almost entirely. There might still be a gathering, but it could be anywhere. There might still be a religious service, but it might not include tens of thousands of dollars worth of embalming and equipment.
There's a quote of up to $184 for a trip to the nearby airport. It's spiked far beyond the point where most people are going to decline the service and wait for something else. That's a flawed algorithm since if it's capped at all it's capped beyond the point where it harmed the reputation of the company.
Whether most people decline the service is actually completely irrelevant. The question is whether Uber's services are 100% utilized or not. If they are, then the algorithm is doing exactly what it is supposed to do - match supply and demand. Now, if all of Uber's cars are sitting idle while there are crowds of people who would otherwise be using their services then the algorithm would be broken.
The reputation of the company is only harmed because most people aren't economists. :) They prefer waiting in lines for rations to orderly markets. This is why we spend so much of our time waiting in lines, waiting in traffic, and so on.
Economists prefer economic efficiency, and standing in lines of any kind is basically the opposite of efficiency. Any economist would tell you that there would be no point in capping the max price Uber charges, since the value of a service is whatever the supplier and customers agree it is. If people were buying $184 Uber rides and drivers were willing to provide the rides at that price, then that was the market value of the service. People who didn't want to pay the price would just have to wait until the riders with deep pockets were done buying rides, and then the price would fall. If Uber didn't raise their prices everybody would be standing around waiting anyway, but many drivers might see that huge traffic jam downtown and decide to just take the afternoon off.
Actors sign release forms such as these;
I agree that I will not assert or maintain against ___________________________, your
successors, assigns and licensees, any claim, action, suit or demand of any kind or nature whatsoever, including but not limited to those grounded upon invasion of privacy, rights of publicity or other civil rights, or for any reason in connection with your authorized use of my physical likeness and sound in the Picture as herein provided.
Actors in effect sign over their rights as they pertain to the movie. One of those right is copyright. Without a valid release copyright to the actor's image is retained by the actor. The DMCA allows copyright holders to have they property taken down. She is not "going after" Google but Google is going after her. She filed a DMCA and the courts agreed with her position. Now Google is appealing the decision.
You do realize that the statement you quoted doesn't mention copyright at all, right? That would because people don't own copyright to their own image. There certainly are other laws that pertain to this, but not copyright, and not the DMCA. Of course, they're trying to claim copyright because copyright in the US is very strongly enforced, and privacy laws in the US generally are not.
Where in the copyright law is somebody granted rights to any photograph taken of them? If it isn't in the law, then failure to sign a release doesn't make it a law. You can't release a right you never had.
Some think using force is the solution to every problem and some believe democracy is the solution to every problem.
The disaster of the Arab spring is what you get when you combine the two ideas.
You do realize that most of the older democracies became that way through the use of force, right? The ones that didn't were colonies of democratic nations for the most part already, and since the occupying nation was democratically controlled by people who generally didn't care for tyranny measures like civil disobedience were far more successful.
He wasn't suggesting that everybody has to live in a city, but rather that industry should be more dispersed. I think a big problem in Silicon Valley / etc is that everybody lives in suburbs and then commutes to a bunch of businesses that are all in one area. Nobody can afford to live near the employers and traffic is horrible.
If you spread the employers out and intermix it with residential areas then people move generally close to where they work, and everything ends up being moderately priced, with moderate traffic.
An urban model can work with real mass transit, but US cities tend to lack that, outside of maybe NYC.
I'm not sure.....it sounds like it kind of, but wouldn't the higher prices draw more people in to act as Taxis? (or should I say, to "give rides?")
Yup. For some reason people seem to prefer inefficient markets where the prices stay low but everybody stands around in lines waiting for rationed soap or whatever, to a market where the price gets set based on supply/demand and there are no lines and when the price of soap rises to $100/bar you find everybody with a pot and plastic containers making their own soap for sale, thus increasing the supply and satisfying demand.
Then whoever designed the algorithm is purposely ripping people off, which definitely sounds like slashdot story material if it's true.
Apparently you favor an algorithm where people with the time to stand on a street corner for 3 hours get lucky and get a cab. Uber apparently prefers an algorithm where anybody who requests a cab gets one in 5 minutes every time, albeit at a higher cost than normal.
Either way exactly the same number of people are being driven where they want to go per hour. It isn't like they're limiting the supply of cabs. Indeed, if fares are going up chances are that every Uber driver in the city is headed for that area even if it means working all night to do it. The algorithm probably means that more people are going to get where they want to go per hour.
An auction is actually the most straightforward way of ensuring that supply and demand are balanced. Virtually every stock exchange on the planet works in this manner as a result. If more people want Microsoft stock than are selling it at the moment, the price goes up.
It almost sounds like they are hiring drivers who are not only ok with ripping off people but are activly good at it. How is that not crimial behaviour?
Same way that Comcast gets away with hiring people like this.
Don't waste your time arguing with trolls. It is a bit like somebody spending all day arguing that there are lots of things that could make a pendulum behave the way it does besides the earth turning.
Since the whole point of dark matter is attempting to account for phenomena which have no other explanation, it is entirely possible that all of physics is off the mark. However, to just dismiss the entire matter because any ONE specific issue is somewhat circumstantial is to miss the overall picture. There is certainly a lot of evidence that established theories are wrong, and there are a lot of independent constraints on what is going on.
I just want to take a moment, at this sympathetic time of year, to say that I really feel for the poor souls who are (or should I say were) responsible for security at Sony. We've all got issues, but those folks must be in a dark place now. For what it's worth I blame the execs who skimped on the IT security budget.
People seem to claim that Sony is particularly lax at security, but most of the solutions I see are tinfoil-hat territory - disconnect from the internet and such.
If Sony took the kinds of measures people seem to propose, they'd go out of business since their competitors would be far more efficient. You can't just turn the dial back to the 90s and pretend the internet didn't happen.
I don't have a solution. What Sony did is what virtually every company around does. I'm sure we'll see more hacks like this happen. Companies that try to prevent these attacks will either still get hacked because they don't do enough, or will go bankrupt because they did do enough. Maybe at some point governments will start firewalling at the border, or will make it illegal to distribute an operating system that isn't NSA-certified. That won't be much of an improvement.
You do realize that the solution proposed in that article is to completely disconnect an entire corporation from the internet, right? It reads like something written in 1995. People don't use the internet at work just to check Facebook these days. Ever use Stack Overflow or Google at work? Every profession has sites like that, and you're not going to way to pay to replicate every one of them inside the firewall. If you tried either nobody would get anything done, or every manager in the company would just tell their employees to switch to google docs and gmail and to use their own PCs.
It has been the standard operating procedure ever since Roe v Wade: chip away at abortion without passing an Ireland-style ban. Because shit happens when medical decisions are made by religious fanatics rather than doctors.
That was the original point - "Both sides are afraid of incrimentalism by the other, which compels them to adopt the extremist position in order to prevent that strategy working."
Both sides are forced to take extreme positions. Thus we have wars over things where otherwise there might be compromise. The case you cited is an example that actually touches on both abortion and euthanasia, which are both incredibly controversial topics. In the US euthanasia is illegal even when consented to by a completely competent adult, let alone in the case of a child where the consent is provided by a parent. Any rational discussion on the matter is trumped by, "OMG, Death Panels!"
The government could but delaying a standard or making sure it is expensive is a way to prevent legal UAV use.
Not sure what the point of that is. Do you think that commercial outfits which likely have money and are interested in hanging onto it are going to be flying drones around airports or in the way of other aircraft (which will cost them drones likely carrying expensive gear which is traceable and lawsuits)? That sort of nonsense is strictly amateur hour, and if every Radio Shack $30 UAV came with anti-collision gear that would make a real dent in the risks there.
It isn't just IT. Management fads seem to be everywhere. People go where the incentives are. If doing something akin to internal marketing gets you a promotion, guess what you're going to do?
Consulting companies pay artists and designers to work on powerpoint presentations, or at least to teach their consultants how to design snazzy slides and arm them with a mountain of templates. That all happens off the official bills but obviously the cost gets baked in. They do it for the same reason that ads always look pretty - they know that it impresses internal management at the client and it makes the guy who decided to hire the consultants look good, so that he gets more power in the company and more discretion to bring in more consultants.
I learned a long time ago to read between the lines and work on the stuff that the managers "really" want. That project that has no business case that nobody has the guts to cancel - you put in the minimum effort so as to not outright be insubordinate and get yourself assigned to some hot project that is going to get rewarded and when they ask you to do things on the dead-end project you just say you're too busy and let the hotshot PM on your other project dump ice water on whoever asked you to do something unimportant. In the end the dead-end project fails and probably gets branded as a success and you haven't sidelined your career serving it.
While I echo the necessity of vaccines in the modern world as a necessary and effective tool for limiting infections and thereby human suffering, I am not a fan of abandoning basic freedoms just so we can all feel more secure. The law is very clear, the government shall not pass any law that infringes on the free exercise of religion. Thus, if vaccines are created that infringe on my freedom of religious expression, they have to pass a bar that is set pretty high before they can be enforced or have any hope of surviving a basic court challenge.
Vaccines don't make us "feel more secure." They have been proven effective in preventing disease and saving lives. This isn't security theater.
Free expression of religion doesn't include driving without auto insurance, or without passing a basic automotive safety inspection where required. It doesn't include being free to practice human sacrifice. It doesn't include being free to raise your kid in a tribal lifestyle without basic education. Your freedom to practice your religion ends where you begin to infringe on my own freedom to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If your choice to not be vaccinated increases my risk of getting a dangerous disease, then I'd say that your choice is not one automatically protected by the constitution.
Of course vaccines have risks as well as benefits, and those should be weighed, but this was already done when the government approved the use of the vaccine in the first place. If the risks weren't outweighed by the benefits as demonstrated by the scientific data, then you wouldn't even be allowed to buy the vaccine in the first place.
Since everybody else is AC I'll reply here, mostly to agree with you.
The obvious argument to your claim is that if a woman had a gene that caused her to pump out more males in these circumstances, then her progeny would probably become more dominant, favoring this gene and making it more prevalent.
However, this is only true if you look at the local community.
Suppose the group of humans in which this gene is taking over is in competition with another group of humans that does not breed with them, but does compete for resources - another tribe essentially. If both groups are under stress, the one group might have a high frequency of the selfish gene, but the other group which lacks it might have more progeny overall, and thus may become dominant.
Genes aren't unlike viruses in this regard. A virus that reproduces so successfully that it kills its host quickly might make lots of headlines, but ultimately it won't be nearly as re-productively successful as some quiet little virus that lives in peace in every human on the planet.