Your "counter examples" are completely ridiculous. [...] You are totally and completly wrong in your summary of the laws.
That's because they're *not* summaries of law, American or otherwise (*)
They are hypothetical examples of two situations where an imbalance in the law (specifically, where one side of the act would be illegal, the other would not) *might* be desirable (and hence rational).
So, bear in mind that I'm not attempting to discuss a particular legal system; I'm addressing the general point you make:-
However, having one side of something being legal, while the other side is illegial, IS NOT FUCKING RATIONAL. I thought I'd emphasize that, because you continue to quote me out of context, argue against some completely different subject, and generally just continue to miss the point...
Okay; I think you made your point clearly there.
Now; can you explain *why* having one side of something being legal, and the other side illegal is not rational? That is your point, right?
I'm repeating myself here, but the two (hypothetical) examples I gave were designed to illustrate two (hypothetical) situations where it *might* be rational to do this.
If you're saying that in all cases, "having one side of something being legal, while the other side is illegial, IS NOT FUCKING RATIONAL", then I would be interested in your criticism of them.
(*) I assume you are in the US; I'm not, and frankly, it wasn't my intention to discuss the specifics of the US legal system.
The point is, how can one side of something be illegial, while the other side be legal?
Because legality is defined by the law.
If the law says it is legal, it is legal.
If the law says it is illegal, it is illegal.
Legality is the end result, not the motivation.
For example; Killing people is not immoral because it is against the law. Killing people is against the law because it is immoral.
Morals and rationality *should* dictate law. Not the other way round.
I suspect that you may have intended your question to be; "Why should one side of something be illegal, while the other side is legal?"
Such a law is irrational.
We are back at the start. This is what you said previously. In my reply, I gave *two* counter-examples, which you haven't contradicted. In fact, you said...
Should we make prostitution legal, then make it illegial to pay for the service of a prostitute? It makes no sense.
Actually, politicians in Britain have argued towards prosecuting clients more heavily than the prostitutes. Whilst it would still be illegal to be a prostitute, the logic of uneven punishment is being used.
The law is a means to an end. If that end can be achieved by weighing the law unevenly, then so be it.
What is not reasonable, is when one side is doing something legal, while the other side is something illegial.
Since the law itself defines what is legal and illegal, you could end up with a circular argument. I'm not sure I understand what point you're making here.
I could watch 2001, 2010, 2061 and 3001 all at the same time.
They've never made a 2061 movie, and I doubt they ever will. 2061 is more of a novel that just happens to inhabit the same continuity as the previous two; it doesn't really move the story on in the same way.
I don't know what happens in 3001 (after reading 2061, and losing my interest in sci-fi novels, I'm not remotely inclined to read it); my guess is that if that was worth making a film of, they would just go straight to that, possibly combining key events from 2061 into the same film.
I love 2001, probably more then any other movie (maybe bladerunner...) But what bugs me is how many people blame HAL for what happened on the trip to Jupiter.
Note that you can pick any two from 2001 (the movie), 2001 (the novel), 2010 (the movie) and 2010 (the novel), and there will be inconsistencies between them.
For example, the 2010 movie opens with a quotation from the 2001 novel ("Oh my God! It's full of stars"), which *never* appeared in the 2001 movie. (OTOH, this doesn't contradict the events of 2001; especially since the first movie starts getting very opaque at that stage).
It's debatable *what* was meant in the 2001 movie. Personally, I suspect (and having watched a documentary, suspect even more) that the makers didn't know what was happening in 2001; 2010 (both movie and film) seem to extrapolate from the 2001 novel- but as mentioned above, 2001 the novel is *not* the same as the movie (there are significant plot differences).
Have I confused everyone yet?
Anyway; what I'm saying is- the "explanation" of Hal's behaviour given in 2010 might *not* apply to the movie 2001. Bear in mind that Kubrick would have had his own ideas too.
[It always seems] to be younger people who get arrested for these kind of acts [..] Is it because the the younger ones aren't as bright and therefor don't cover their tracks as well? Or is it because as you get older, the appeal of these kind of things drops?
You wouldn't believe how old some of the world's top hackers and crackers are. For example...
In fact, it is little known that she was an u83r1337 h4x0r whose skills reached terrifying levels during her "lifetime". However, wary of the risk of getting caught, and not exhibiting the carelessness or egotism of youth, she decided the only way to practice these skills to their full extent was to fake her own death.
It is rumored that, post-"death", she is working as a black-hat hacker on behalf of Microsoft, and that her alias is qqqqmutha ("four 'q' mother").
Oh yeah, that's what I meant. Sorry. I'm just bitter because all my friends are going to law school and I'm unemployed.
Please get some good blackmail material on them, so that when a Slashdot-friendly project gets hauled into court in an SCO-style move, it gets free legal support.
Not only free, but more effective, since, if you lose, you'll release the "sheep" picture anyway.
Something this made me think of happened a few years back. I was in the north-west Highlands of Scotland and telephoning someone on the other side of the country.
I assume at least part of the line was not digital, because there was still a lot of analog noise on it. If it had been clear and hiss-free, I doubt I would have thought about it. But hearing that noise made me aware of the infrastructure and the distance involved (just a few hundred miles, but still...), and brought back to me how impressive it was that I could talk to someone (of my choosing) at that distance.
And yet, when I talk to a friend in Japan for 5p/min (!), it's too easy to forget all this stuff, because the line is clean and digital.
It's the same with using the Internet. When I first realised *what* the Internet was, I was impressed at the possibilities. Sitting here typing this, it's easy to forget all the infrastructure being used, that the Slashdot servers are thousands of miles away, that I'm sharing my net connection with many other users, that my packets are going all over the world.
Could it be that digital technology sometimes hides too much?
Very good; but you still have to consider the inconvenience of counting change, sorting it out, putting it into the bank, etc... and that *does* assume you want to work for the US national minimum wage (BTW, not sure it would meet the UK min. wage)
i strongly suspect this all goes back to the comfort things that people are seeking in our post 9-11 world.
I'm fed up of the phrase "post 9/11" being used to explain changes in fashion and taste. Frankly, it would be easy to 'explain' most trends in this way, and I believe it's impact in this area has been grossly overstated.
Fact is, digital watches have not been "cool" since sometime in the 1980s, and they are now coming back into fashion, this time as *retro*.
I don't accept that *this* is down to 9-11; it is more likely to be another retro trend. The early 80s were a *long* time ago now; too long ago to be passe' any more, so let's revive it, goes the reasoning.
It might be legal to download music, but illegial to share it... Well if nobody shares it, nobody can download it.
This might be a stupid idea; or it might not.
Since they are two sides of the same coin, the act we wish to prevent is basically downloading/sharing. Making one illegal, but not the other shifts the emphasis of responsibility for the 'combined act' onto one party. This may be more practical in terms of law enforcement (better to prosecute one sharer than many downloaders).
In other cases with similar 'contradictions', such asymmetry may have the effect of protecting one party (e.g. if you simply made it a crime for an underage child to have sexual intercourse with an adult, you may be setting up the situation where a 14-year old is in danger of being blackmailed by a 40-year old, for fear of prosecution; and criminalising the 14-year old would almost certainly go against the spirit of the law).
don't pick up a penny if you see it on the street, that's theft, leave it there, the owner might come back for it.
You would bother picking up a 1 cent coin? Seriously?
I hate bronze coins; especially the UK 1p piece. The 1p is worthless (I'd guess it's worth less now than the old 0.5p piece was when that was phased out), and the 2p is ridiculously bulky for its present value.
I normally remove them from my pile of change, but taking the effort of that, *plus* sorting them into bags for the bank is barely worth it! I don't *want* the damn 1p change! Put it in a charity box, if it's worth their time dealing with them.
Anyway.... whilst I can't see Britain getting rid of the 1p/2p (next up, 5p is too large for a base coin, and to have a 2p without a 1p would be strange, even though the 1p is useless); the US situation is different, because 1 cent is worth about 0.55p.
In short.... why hasn't the US phased out 1 cent coins and settled on the 5 cent piece (nickel IIRC) as the lowest value coin?
And who on earth would seriously consider picking up American pennies?
I have a good friend who's a Taxi driver and he's very intelligent; just not motivated enough to do something else for a living.
"It's no surprise that things are so screwed up: everyone that knows how
to run a government is either driving taxicabs or cutting hair."
-- George Burns
A webcam pretty much does the same thing - except you don't have avatars, you ARE the avatar.
Bear in mind that it's hard *not* to look shit with a webcam. Think about it:-
Lighting; usually not optimal, too much or too little contrast. And you know how that looks on a webcam.
Auto colour balance; got a large red object in the background? Then the "correction" will give your face a horrible turquoise cast.
And worst of all... the same wide-angle lens that gives a decent field of view when you're sitting close also exaggerates your facial features in a similar manner to a Christmas-tree bauble. Note that professional photographers use longish (low-end telephoto) lenses for portrait photography, instead of a standard-angle 58mm job, as such narrow-angle lenses reduce this effect further.
I was told by the job centre that i MUST use comic sans for my CV
You mean the Job Centre place itself (or a Job Club?). If it was the Job Centre, how did they know which version of your CV you were sending out?
And even if they did, was there any reason you couldn't say no? If they tried to put something moronic like that in your agreement, you could appeal it, and have a good case for a number of reasons (e.g. I'm not going to start having a go at JobCentre staff or people in general, but your average guy/girl doesn't know *shit* about typography, and you should...)
Only if it was a SQL joke, it's clearly a shellscript/perl joke;->
The asterisk has two distinct meanings in Perl; as part of the globbing mechanism (where the joke would work) and *differently* (i.e. 0+ repetitions of the previous character/sequence) as part of a regular expression (in which case the joke *wouldn't* work).
Would you like to buy my car. You can pay me in Dollars. Its worth a few thousand pounds.
See... you kinda blew that opportunity. Even if what I said about the exchange rate was true, what would be in it for me to pay in dollars?
Now, if you'd said "I'll give you 75% off if you pay in Dollars", it might have worked.
Otherwise, why on earth would I want to buy an American car that has the steering wheel on the wrong side, and is on the other side of the planet? And I don't even know which model it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Your "counter examples" are completely ridiculous. [...] You are totally and completly wrong in your summary of the laws.
That's because they're *not* summaries of law, American or otherwise (*)
They are hypothetical examples of two situations where an imbalance in the law (specifically, where one side of the act would be illegal, the other would not) *might* be desirable (and hence rational).
So, bear in mind that I'm not attempting to discuss a particular legal system; I'm addressing the general point you make:-
However, having one side of something being legal, while the other side is illegial, IS NOT FUCKING RATIONAL. I thought I'd emphasize that, because you continue to quote me out of context, argue against some completely different subject, and generally just continue to miss the point...
Okay; I think you made your point clearly there.
Now; can you explain *why* having one side of something being legal, and the other side illegal is not rational? That is your point, right?
I'm repeating myself here, but the two (hypothetical) examples I gave were designed to illustrate two (hypothetical) situations where it *might* be rational to do this.
If you're saying that in all cases, "having one side of something being legal, while the other side is illegial, IS NOT FUCKING RATIONAL", then I would be interested in your criticism of them.
(*) I assume you are in the US; I'm not, and frankly, it wasn't my intention to discuss the specifics of the US legal system.
No, Clarke knew what was going on. See The Lost Worlds of 2001, which is essentially a "Making Of..." book.
Question is, is Clarke's explanation definitive? If Kubrick were alive, would he have something different to say? He made the film, after all.
The point is, how can one side of something be illegial, while the other side be legal?
Because legality is defined by the law.
If the law says it is legal, it is legal.
If the law says it is illegal, it is illegal.
Legality is the end result, not the motivation.
For example; Killing people is not immoral because it is against the law. Killing people is against the law because it is immoral.
Morals and rationality *should* dictate law. Not the other way round.
I suspect that you may have intended your question to be; "Why should one side of something be illegal, while the other side is legal?"
Such a law is irrational.
We are back at the start. This is what you said previously. In my reply, I gave *two* counter-examples, which you haven't contradicted. In fact, you said...
Should we make prostitution legal, then make it illegial to pay for the service of a prostitute? It makes no sense.
Actually, politicians in Britain have argued towards prosecuting clients more heavily than the prostitutes. Whilst it would still be illegal to be a prostitute, the logic of uneven punishment is being used.
The law is a means to an end. If that end can be achieved by weighing the law unevenly, then so be it.
What is not reasonable, is when one side is doing something legal, while the other side is something illegial.
Since the law itself defines what is legal and illegal, you could end up with a circular argument. I'm not sure I understand what point you're making here.
"Open the iPod and play The Doors, HAL"
Well, if the iPod supports DRM, you know what HAL might just say...
I could watch 2001, 2010, 2061 and 3001 all at the same time.
They've never made a 2061 movie, and I doubt they ever will. 2061 is more of a novel that just happens to inhabit the same continuity as the previous two; it doesn't really move the story on in the same way.
I don't know what happens in 3001 (after reading 2061, and losing my interest in sci-fi novels, I'm not remotely inclined to read it); my guess is that if that was worth making a film of, they would just go straight to that, possibly combining key events from 2061 into the same film.
I love 2001, probably more then any other movie (maybe bladerunner...) But what bugs me is how many people blame HAL for what happened on the trip to Jupiter.
Note that you can pick any two from 2001 (the movie), 2001 (the novel), 2010 (the movie) and 2010 (the novel), and there will be inconsistencies between them.
For example, the 2010 movie opens with a quotation from the 2001 novel ("Oh my God! It's full of stars"), which *never* appeared in the 2001 movie. (OTOH, this doesn't contradict the events of 2001; especially since the first movie starts getting very opaque at that stage).
It's debatable *what* was meant in the 2001 movie. Personally, I suspect (and having watched a documentary, suspect even more) that the makers didn't know what was happening in 2001; 2010 (both movie and film) seem to extrapolate from the 2001 novel- but as mentioned above, 2001 the novel is *not* the same as the movie (there are significant plot differences).
Have I confused everyone yet?
Anyway; what I'm saying is- the "explanation" of Hal's behaviour given in 2010 might *not* apply to the movie 2001. Bear in mind that Kubrick would have had his own ideas too.
[It always seems] to be younger people who get arrested for these kind of acts [..] Is it because the the younger ones aren't as bright and therefor don't cover their tracks as well? Or is it because as you get older, the appeal of these kind of things drops?
You wouldn't believe how old some of the world's top hackers and crackers are. For example...
The Queen Mother didn't die.
In fact, it is little known that she was an u83r1337 h4x0r whose skills reached terrifying levels during her "lifetime". However, wary of the risk of getting caught, and not exhibiting the carelessness or egotism of youth, she decided the only way to practice these skills to their full extent was to fake her own death.
It is rumored that, post-"death", she is working as a black-hat hacker on behalf of Microsoft, and that her alias is qqqqmutha ("four 'q' mother").
The Queen Mother is 104.
Is that British for "Source Code"? Like torch for flashlight?
Not that I've heard...
Oh yeah, that's what I meant. Sorry. I'm just bitter because all my friends are going to law school and I'm unemployed.
Please get some good blackmail material on them, so that when a Slashdot-friendly project gets hauled into court in an SCO-style move, it gets free legal support.
Not only free, but more effective, since, if you lose, you'll release the "sheep" picture anyway.
Or you could just get a law degree.
Law degree? WTF?!
If you're referring to the large amounts of money to be earned, then.... I don't see how this changes what we're discussing.
Something this made me think of happened a few years back. I was in the north-west Highlands of Scotland and telephoning someone on the other side of the country.
I assume at least part of the line was not digital, because there was still a lot of analog noise on it. If it had been clear and hiss-free, I doubt I would have thought about it. But hearing that noise made me aware of the infrastructure and the distance involved (just a few hundred miles, but still...), and brought back to me how impressive it was that I could talk to someone (of my choosing) at that distance.
And yet, when I talk to a friend in Japan for 5p/min (!), it's too easy to forget all this stuff, because the line is clean and digital.
It's the same with using the Internet. When I first realised *what* the Internet was, I was impressed at the possibilities. Sitting here typing this, it's easy to forget all the infrastructure being used, that the Slashdot servers are thousands of miles away, that I'm sharing my net connection with many other users, that my packets are going all over the world.
Could it be that digital technology sometimes hides too much?
Very good; but you still have to consider the inconvenience of counting change, sorting it out, putting it into the bank, etc... and that *does* assume you want to work for the US national minimum wage (BTW, not sure it would meet the UK min. wage)
Everyone knows that records sound better than CDs. Too bad they don't sell video content on records.
What about these?
i strongly suspect this all goes back to the comfort things that people are seeking in our post 9-11 world.
I'm fed up of the phrase "post 9/11" being used to explain changes in fashion and taste. Frankly, it would be easy to 'explain' most trends in this way, and I believe it's impact in this area has been grossly overstated.
Fact is, digital watches have not been "cool" since sometime in the 1980s, and they are now coming back into fashion, this time as *retro*.
I don't accept that *this* is down to 9-11; it is more likely to be another retro trend. The early 80s were a *long* time ago now; too long ago to be passe' any more, so let's revive it, goes the reasoning.
It might be legal to download music, but illegial to share it... Well if nobody shares it, nobody can download it.
This might be a stupid idea; or it might not.
Since they are two sides of the same coin, the act we wish to prevent is basically downloading/sharing. Making one illegal, but not the other shifts the emphasis of responsibility for the 'combined act' onto one party. This may be more practical in terms of law enforcement (better to prosecute one sharer than many downloaders).
In other cases with similar 'contradictions', such asymmetry may have the effect of protecting one party (e.g. if you simply made it a crime for an underage child to have sexual intercourse with an adult, you may be setting up the situation where a 14-year old is in danger of being blackmailed by a 40-year old, for fear of prosecution; and criminalising the 14-year old would almost certainly go against the spirit of the law).
don't pick up a penny if you see it on the street, that's theft, leave it there, the owner might come back for it.
You would bother picking up a 1 cent coin? Seriously?
I hate bronze coins; especially the UK 1p piece. The 1p is worthless (I'd guess it's worth less now than the old 0.5p piece was when that was phased out), and the 2p is ridiculously bulky for its present value.
I normally remove them from my pile of change, but taking the effort of that, *plus* sorting them into bags for the bank is barely worth it! I don't *want* the damn 1p change! Put it in a charity box, if it's worth their time dealing with them.
Anyway.... whilst I can't see Britain getting rid of the 1p/2p (next up, 5p is too large for a base coin, and to have a 2p without a 1p would be strange, even though the 1p is useless); the US situation is different, because 1 cent is worth about 0.55p.
In short.... why hasn't the US phased out 1 cent coins and settled on the 5 cent piece (nickel IIRC) as the lowest value coin?
And who on earth would seriously consider picking up American pennies?
What about those "drinkordie" guys who were distributing warez for free? They got sent up for several years.
I took their advice and drank ordie; it made me seriously ill.
Now I am going to sue them for inducing me to drink Ordie.
I have a good friend who's a Taxi driver and he's very intelligent; just not motivated enough to do something else for a living.
"It's no surprise that things are so screwed up: everyone that knows how to run a government is either driving taxicabs or cutting hair."
-- George Burns
This won't catch on, because people generally use IM while doing something else.
brtnee34: im taking off my bra
wellhung2953: my 10 inch cock is hard for you
brtnee34: now i am taking...... etc
'Doing something else'? I'll bet they are.
A webcam pretty much does the same thing - except you don't have avatars, you ARE the avatar.
Bear in mind that it's hard *not* to look shit with a webcam. Think about it:-
Lighting; usually not optimal, too much or too little contrast. And you know how that looks on a webcam.
Auto colour balance; got a large red object in the background? Then the "correction" will give your face a horrible turquoise cast.
And worst of all... the same wide-angle lens that gives a decent field of view when you're sitting close also exaggerates your facial features in a similar manner to a Christmas-tree bauble. Note that professional photographers use longish (low-end telephoto) lenses for portrait photography, instead of a standard-angle 58mm job, as such narrow-angle lenses reduce this effect further.
I talk to people in my underwear
My God!!! You have people in your underwear???!!!
But seriously.... from this we can deduce that you are not a cute 18-year old girl, otherwise people *would* want to see you in your underwear.
I was told by the job centre that i MUST use comic sans for my CV
You mean the Job Centre place itself (or a Job Club?). If it was the Job Centre, how did they know which version of your CV you were sending out?
And even if they did, was there any reason you couldn't say no? If they tried to put something moronic like that in your agreement, you could appeal it, and have a good case for a number of reasons (e.g. I'm not going to start having a go at JobCentre staff or people in general, but your average guy/girl doesn't know *shit* about typography, and you should...)
Only if it was a SQL joke, it's clearly a shellscript/perl joke ;->
The asterisk has two distinct meanings in Perl; as part of the globbing mechanism (where the joke would work) and *differently* (i.e. 0+ repetitions of the previous character/sequence) as part of a regular expression (in which case the joke *wouldn't* work).
Would you like to buy my car. You can pay me in Dollars. Its worth a few thousand pounds.
See... you kinda blew that opportunity. Even if what I said about the exchange rate was true, what would be in it for me to pay in dollars?
Now, if you'd said "I'll give you 75% off if you pay in Dollars", it might have worked.
Otherwise, why on earth would I want to buy an American car that has the steering wheel on the wrong side, and is on the other side of the planet? And I don't even know which model it is.