A tool maker can't be sued for how the tool is used. You'd have to sue the person who used the tool; namely, the IT manager who instituted the policy, or his/her pinhead boss. But I agree with you, this would seem to run afoul of wiretap laws.
Well, technically they probably wouldn't know what it was immediately simply because the Apple I shipped as basically a motherboard. People had to buy their own case, power supply, etc -- no different than the custom-built PCs of today. So unless the 'Genius' opened the case, they wouldn't necessarily even know it was an Apple product.
From the Apple I ad: "And since our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost, you won't be continually paying for access to this growing software library."
And there's a reason the UT bots were good: the original UT bots were created by Steve Polge, the creator of the Reaper bot. You could always pick out a UT bot, they were in a kind of behavioral uncanny valley, but they made for a good challenge. Moreso from their accuracy than their tactics. As a map designer, it was very hard to get them to use advanced features of the engine like multi-stop platforms, but in generic DM and CTF maps they could easily hold their own. Sadly, shipping FPS games with bots seemed to fall out of favor with game developers.
I'm not sure I'd say they are the "best" bot made -- the UT bots were short on group tactics, by comparison with the AIs in the Half-Life series. They assumed roles in team gametypes, but I don't remember them ever using flanking tactics or helping each other out. But in terms of being a one-bot fireworks show, yes they were quite proficient.
The thing is, now we're back to 1998 with sites being created for specific browsers. That's way more onerous than Flash ever was! It's becoming a moot point though; multimedia and interactive content will be primarily viewed through apps, not the web. HTML5 is sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Photoshop is Adobe's bread and butter; I think they've still got good people working on that team. And they probably have fairly free reign to do blue-sky feature development. They have good people still on Flash also, especially on the 3D side, but far fewer than they did. Effectively Adobe has stopped evolving the Actionscript language though, and it seems their gameplan is just to add more APIs as necessary to enable content creation on target platforms. The problem for Adobe is, Unity is already way beyond Flash at the task of multi-platform games -- where most people would want to use Flash in this context -- than the Flash IDE is. The new version of Flash does very little to overcome its shortcomings in this area, especially in the realm of 3D games.
Adobe's whole foray into Flex as an attempt to take on Java in the corporate world was basically a huge distraction, monetarily, talent-wise, and in vision. It was a huge failure. IMO, that's the Indian "Java is king" corporate philosophy taking hold of Adobe which parent-parent spoke of. Adobe was a company that used to be about enabling creativity, not enabling executive dashboards. Between that and Adobe's laziness to improve their codebase in lieu of new features (mostly determined by Adobe's hunger for quarterly profits), Flash was an easy target for Apple.
Having said all that, Flash is still a great platform for interactive multimedia. The SWF format is open-sourced, the Actionscript language is still leagues beyond Javascript in development efficiency and feature-set, and Flash's renderer still surpasses HTML5 in composited animations, 3D rendering, and audio processing. It's just a shame that such a shitty company controls it.
Do you have evidence for "people got tired of music videos", or is that just a guess? Because I would say Viacom buying MTV in '85 was its death knell, although it took Viacom a few years to really figure out what to put on MTV.
Not everyone non-music video show on MTV was bad though. Look at Liquid Television – they showed fairly avant garde shows like Aeon Flux.
And according to Wikipedia, MTV dropped the tagline "Music Television" in 2010. So that last lip service to music has finally been expunged.
Well, Facebook buying the Opera browser makes some sense. As Opera sends all page requests through their servers to speed up the user experience, Facebook would obviously love to data mine this browsing information when hooked up to a Facebook login. It would mean they can more effectively whore out your life to interested parties.
I would say "plenty of artists" is a stretch. Even pre-web days, most of the talented indie music artists sadly had full-time day jobs.
I don't think "well they did it before the phonograph" is a very strong argument. I don't think there's anything wrong with recorded music as a revenue stream. It should NOT be in perpetuity, I agree. But for instance, if Brian Wilson had not quit touring with the Beach Boys, he probably would've never written my namesake album. And you could go on down the line with similar examples. Touring is great if that's your thing, but musicians shouldn't be locked into that as the main way to support themselves. If they can't, either it is a fault of their distribution mechanism, or fans placing no value on the music. You seem to think the latter is a foregone conclusion, or perhaps you're one of those 'music should be free' people; I don't think it's a lost cause yet.
Wait, what? Why must a musician either be a millionaire musician or a bedroom noodler? Why can't indie artists make a decent living at their craft?
This idea that artists should simply suffer in obscurity for their art, that they should learn their place and not expect to earn a living doing what they love, is bullshit. That they should get a "real job", is bullshit. Of course, that's part of the American experience – as a culture, we don't value art – and artists – as much as the Europeans. We value invented royalty in the United States.
Getting the big money out of music is a lot easier than getting rid of that attitude. Digital music and streaming services have only enforced that attitude that music has very little value, and that the artists behind them don't need support and compensation for their work.
The MINI Cooper was great while designer Frank Stephenson was at the helm, but once he was lured away to Ferrari the Germans had no idea what to do with the model. They replaced its spunky engine with a boring, flat torque curve Bavarian engine, and made a mess of Stephenson's elegant lines. BMW may have helped revive the brand, but they proceeded to ruin everything good about it.
The reason that Facebook's users are not its customers, is because people don't have any money, so the only thing they have to offer to the marketplace is their personal information, their habits, their discussions, their personal communications.
While this sounds very delicious in its sensationalism, the reason Facebook is free is the same reason all social media services are free -- you won't attract a critical mass of users if your service sits behind a paywall. People don't want to use a 'social' service in which their social circle has to pay in order to interact with each other.
This has nothing to do with people's ability to pay or not pay -- some community-driven pay-to-play sites seem to be profitable, e.g. eHarmony.com, Ancestry.com, Second Life. They aren't Facebook-level profitable, but they stay in business. The difference is that those social services are driven by discovery of new social contacts, not bringing your current circle over. And they offer features which people are willing to pay for. Sending messages, sharing photos, writing comments... these features are so ubiquitous now that they essentially have no intrinsic value, except for profile mining in the hands of unethical capitalists like the Facebook team.
Facebook is just a digital mirror of brick-and-mortar corporate conglomerates who offer seemingly much better value than local, customer-focused businesses. And people eat it up, thinking there's no downsides.
While I'm quite ardently against Apple's walled garden increasingly becoming a SuperMAX prison, at least customers are actually buying a product, and Apple's business goal is not selling your information. Their goal is selling hardware, and getting a cut out of every app store purchase. Apple just wants to keep you locked in, but I do believe MOST of the people who work there really are trying to make good products that help people. Every feature rollout on Facebook by contrast is another transparent attempt to get more data about your life.
Yeah, the only time I've experienced Siri asking a question in the context of information I gave it is when setting an appointment. Generally it knows nothing (yet) about the API results it spits back.
Hmm, no, I don't believe so. Not specifically. I don't even think Siri was a response to Android. Apple has been toying with the idea of Intelligent Agents since the '90s. I think they have long-term goals with Siri, and they want to get to the stage of a conversational agent that has enough APIs and natural language abilities to abstract the internet. Need a flight to Seattle tomorrow? It'll buy you a ticket using your FF number, schedule travel times based on your calendar itinerary, and automatically find the best restaurants for you. A personal assistant is the long-term "point" of Siri.
Siri is the intelligent personal assistant that helps you get things done just by asking. It allows you to use your voice to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls, and more. But Siri isn’t like traditional voice recognition software that requires you to remember keywords and speak specific commands. Siri understands your natural speech, and it asks you questions if it needs more information to complete a task.
The old 3GS voice commands were perfectly usable for controlling the iPod app and making phone calls. The new SIRI-fied version is entirely useless because instead of working, you just get to wait some 5-10 seconds for the SIRI servers to process whatever it was you said. Assuming it works at all.
"Call mom." (15 seconds later) "I'm sorry, something went wrong."
First of all, what the hell are you talking about? The old Voice Command was terrible. I was driving in the car once when I asked it to "Play Led Zeppelin". Instead it told me, "Calling ". This quickly led to shouts of, "Oh shit! No no no no!" and almost having an accident trying to stop the call. After that incident, I never used it again. Both the language recognition and the UI were awful.
Yes, network-based voice recognition has its problems, but phones are not yet powerful enough to handle what Siri can do. And plus, half of Siri is the database and network APIs, so to get any functionality aside from local device functions you'll have to ping the network anyway. But I can count on one hand the amount of times I've had Siri timeout or take more than five seconds to respond. And I'd imagine most of the wait time is the transmission of audio data to the server.
I do think that Siri needs a lot more internet APIs to truly become an Intelligent Agent. The sad thing is that the original Siri app was more useful in this respect -- you could buy movie tickets and other things.
Well, unfortunately the Siri system doesn't seem to currently have any ability to discuss the content it returns, whether that content is from Wolfram or another API. Your wife should've just clicked on the name of the restaurant in that list, which would've brought up the restaurant on a Google map. But she's not my wife, so I can say she was wrong without fear of reprisal.;)
But then some things surprise you. The other day I asked it, "How many seconds are there in an average lifetime?" and it came back with an appropriate response: 2.192 x10^9. Of course that is mostly the magic of Wolfram, not Siri, but I expected Siri to say it didn't know what I was talking about.
It's difficult to glean from the articles, but it seems Kokabee is not an American citizen, but an Iranian citizen who was attending an American graduate school. The act of going to an American school was the first risky move, both to his own safety but that of his family. The Iranian government knew he was attending an American school and simply waited for the appropriate time to use him as a pawn. Did he really think he was going to be able to associate himself with America and not end up being used for propaganda purposes by the Iranian government? He's a young kid so maybe he didn't think about it, but his parents should have.
I do sympathize that he felt he had to risk everything in order to get a good education in the field of his choice, but he put himself in a very risky position.
I agree that SMS's are way over priced, but you can't say that they don't cost the carriers anything. And how would you set a "reasonable" SMS fee? McDonalds sells a few cents of sugar-syrup, water, and ice in a cup for $1.29 - is that price gouging? When I go to the ball park, the same Coke costs $3.50. is that price gouging? Should all companies be forced to charge their base cost plus a reasonable markup for profit for all goods and services?
The problem is the the U.S. telcos imagine themselves as one-stop shops, and do everything they can to monopolize services and content. They should really only be selling their connection. SMS is just another data service that should be handled by a third-party. Imagine if you local DSL or cable ISP charged you to use AIM or MSN! And I can only go so far with the infrastructure argument. The telcos built their empires on the backs of taxpayers via Federal handouts.
Unfortunately the service companies have proprietary messaging services (iMessage, Blackberry messaging), so SMS is still the only universal messaging system. Sometimes a free market system works against the common good, and this is one of those cases.
No, I'm pretty sure "long overdue" in the context of a horribly outdated language getting a feature it should've had ten years ago is an apt description.
Unfortunately there are a lot of Objective-C old-timers, both at Apple and abroad, who think that Objective-C is a great language and don't see how it needs much refinement (seriously, I've had this discussion with an Apple engineer). It's that kind of masochistic attitude about programming that went out of style in the 90s that runs in spades with old-timer Objective-C guys, but they stayed in a purely ObjC world for the last 15 years and have sort of been frozen in time like programming cavemen.
Then there's the whole other discussion about Apple's APIs; they're just as convoluted and inelegant as the language itself, but that's the mode of thinking they seem to be stuck in. I mean just look at the Core Graphics API. Holy shit, what a clusterfuck. Say what you will about Flash, but its Actionscript graphics API and the whole display architecture is very elegant.
Yup, exactly. It's amazing how many people continue to cling to their party, but politics in America is more like sports: people feel compelled to root for their home team no matter how much the team sucks.
I think an encompassing problem here is that Americans have become incredibly jaded about the political process. They vote for who they think has the best chance of winning, not who they want to win. That mental mode means that the person who runs the slickest campaign and gives lip service to the most interest groups will win, not the person with the best ideas or qualifications. And it means third-party candidates are continual non-starters.
Another fairly distressing problem is that the American public is by-and-large becoming more ignorant as time passes. Most people don't care about in-depth political news, and when they do they tend to get their news from a biased source like Fox (the consolidation of news sources under a few megacorps contributes heavily to this problem). And our educational systems are producing people with less critical-thinking skills. The only thing really keeping a democracy from descending into tyranny is an educated public. The public is the largest check and balance in the U.S. system, and we are failing to meet our obligations as citizens.
I've been reading about the creation process of the U.S. Constitution recently, and I believe if the framers of the Constitution foresaw how much corporate interests would corrupt the political system, they would have put much stronger protections in place against such abuse.
So yes, I find torturing and maiming animals, and stealing away their free will and often their lives to advance scientific knowledge both 'savagely cruel' and 'primitive'. I'm sure you were trying to be funny, but I find the subject void of humor.
Slashdot Mirror
A tool maker can't be sued for how the tool is used. You'd have to sue the person who used the tool; namely, the IT manager who instituted the policy, or his/her pinhead boss. But I agree with you, this would seem to run afoul of wiretap laws.
Well, technically they probably wouldn't know what it was immediately simply because the Apple I shipped as basically a motherboard. People had to buy their own case, power supply, etc -- no different than the custom-built PCs of today. So unless the 'Genius' opened the case, they wouldn't necessarily even know it was an Apple product.
It's interesting to note that even back then, Apple's philosophy was sell the hardware, give away the software [big jpg ahead].
From the Apple I ad: "And since our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost, you won't be continually paying for access to this growing software library."
Most people in positions of power at a national level are not 'sincere' about anything.
And there's a reason the UT bots were good: the original UT bots were created by Steve Polge, the creator of the Reaper bot. You could always pick out a UT bot, they were in a kind of behavioral uncanny valley, but they made for a good challenge. Moreso from their accuracy than their tactics. As a map designer, it was very hard to get them to use advanced features of the engine like multi-stop platforms, but in generic DM and CTF maps they could easily hold their own. Sadly, shipping FPS games with bots seemed to fall out of favor with game developers.
I'm not sure I'd say they are the "best" bot made -- the UT bots were short on group tactics, by comparison with the AIs in the Half-Life series. They assumed roles in team gametypes, but I don't remember them ever using flanking tactics or helping each other out. But in terms of being a one-bot fireworks show, yes they were quite proficient.
The thing is, now we're back to 1998 with sites being created for specific browsers. That's way more onerous than Flash ever was! It's becoming a moot point though; multimedia and interactive content will be primarily viewed through apps, not the web. HTML5 is sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Photoshop is Adobe's bread and butter; I think they've still got good people working on that team. And they probably have fairly free reign to do blue-sky feature development. They have good people still on Flash also, especially on the 3D side, but far fewer than they did. Effectively Adobe has stopped evolving the Actionscript language though, and it seems their gameplan is just to add more APIs as necessary to enable content creation on target platforms. The problem for Adobe is, Unity is already way beyond Flash at the task of multi-platform games -- where most people would want to use Flash in this context -- than the Flash IDE is. The new version of Flash does very little to overcome its shortcomings in this area, especially in the realm of 3D games.
Adobe's whole foray into Flex as an attempt to take on Java in the corporate world was basically a huge distraction, monetarily, talent-wise, and in vision. It was a huge failure. IMO, that's the Indian "Java is king" corporate philosophy taking hold of Adobe which parent-parent spoke of. Adobe was a company that used to be about enabling creativity, not enabling executive dashboards. Between that and Adobe's laziness to improve their codebase in lieu of new features (mostly determined by Adobe's hunger for quarterly profits), Flash was an easy target for Apple.
Having said all that, Flash is still a great platform for interactive multimedia. The SWF format is open-sourced, the Actionscript language is still leagues beyond Javascript in development efficiency and feature-set, and Flash's renderer still surpasses HTML5 in composited animations, 3D rendering, and audio processing. It's just a shame that such a shitty company controls it.
Do you have evidence for "people got tired of music videos", or is that just a guess? Because I would say Viacom buying MTV in '85 was its death knell, although it took Viacom a few years to really figure out what to put on MTV.
Not everyone non-music video show on MTV was bad though. Look at Liquid Television – they showed fairly avant garde shows like Aeon Flux.
And according to Wikipedia, MTV dropped the tagline "Music Television" in 2010. So that last lip service to music has finally been expunged.
Well, Facebook buying the Opera browser makes some sense. As Opera sends all page requests through their servers to speed up the user experience, Facebook would obviously love to data mine this browsing information when hooked up to a Facebook login. It would mean they can more effectively whore out your life to interested parties.
I guess someone just sees pathfinding algorithms wherever they go....
I would say "plenty of artists" is a stretch. Even pre-web days, most of the talented indie music artists sadly had full-time day jobs.
I don't think "well they did it before the phonograph" is a very strong argument. I don't think there's anything wrong with recorded music as a revenue stream. It should NOT be in perpetuity, I agree. But for instance, if Brian Wilson had not quit touring with the Beach Boys, he probably would've never written my namesake album. And you could go on down the line with similar examples. Touring is great if that's your thing, but musicians shouldn't be locked into that as the main way to support themselves. If they can't, either it is a fault of their distribution mechanism, or fans placing no value on the music. You seem to think the latter is a foregone conclusion, or perhaps you're one of those 'music should be free' people; I don't think it's a lost cause yet.
Wait, what? Why must a musician either be a millionaire musician or a bedroom noodler? Why can't indie artists make a decent living at their craft?
This idea that artists should simply suffer in obscurity for their art, that they should learn their place and not expect to earn a living doing what they love, is bullshit. That they should get a "real job", is bullshit. Of course, that's part of the American experience – as a culture, we don't value art – and artists – as much as the Europeans. We value invented royalty in the United States.
Getting the big money out of music is a lot easier than getting rid of that attitude. Digital music and streaming services have only enforced that attitude that music has very little value, and that the artists behind them don't need support and compensation for their work.
The MINI Cooper was great while designer Frank Stephenson was at the helm, but once he was lured away to Ferrari the Germans had no idea what to do with the model. They replaced its spunky engine with a boring, flat torque curve Bavarian engine, and made a mess of Stephenson's elegant lines. BMW may have helped revive the brand, but they proceeded to ruin everything good about it.
While this sounds very delicious in its sensationalism, the reason Facebook is free is the same reason all social media services are free -- you won't attract a critical mass of users if your service sits behind a paywall. People don't want to use a 'social' service in which their social circle has to pay in order to interact with each other.
This has nothing to do with people's ability to pay or not pay -- some community-driven pay-to-play sites seem to be profitable, e.g. eHarmony.com, Ancestry.com, Second Life. They aren't Facebook-level profitable, but they stay in business. The difference is that those social services are driven by discovery of new social contacts, not bringing your current circle over. And they offer features which people are willing to pay for. Sending messages, sharing photos, writing comments... these features are so ubiquitous now that they essentially have no intrinsic value, except for profile mining in the hands of unethical capitalists like the Facebook team.
Facebook is just a digital mirror of brick-and-mortar corporate conglomerates who offer seemingly much better value than local, customer-focused businesses. And people eat it up, thinking there's no downsides.
While I'm quite ardently against Apple's walled garden increasingly becoming a SuperMAX prison, at least customers are actually buying a product, and Apple's business goal is not selling your information. Their goal is selling hardware, and getting a cut out of every app store purchase. Apple just wants to keep you locked in, but I do believe MOST of the people who work there really are trying to make good products that help people. Every feature rollout on Facebook by contrast is another transparent attempt to get more data about your life.
Let's leave out the personal attacks, eh? Slashdot used to be relatively free of that stuff, but I'm seeing it more and more.
Yeah, the only time I've experienced Siri asking a question in the context of information I gave it is when setting an appointment. Generally it knows nothing (yet) about the API results it spits back.
Hmm, no, I don't believe so. Not specifically. I don't even think Siri was a response to Android. Apple has been toying with the idea of Intelligent Agents since the '90s. I think they have long-term goals with Siri, and they want to get to the stage of a conversational agent that has enough APIs and natural language abilities to abstract the internet. Need a flight to Seattle tomorrow? It'll buy you a ticket using your FF number, schedule travel times based on your calendar itinerary, and automatically find the best restaurants for you. A personal assistant is the long-term "point" of Siri.
From Apple's FAQ on Siri:
Hooray for no post editing. That's supposed to be "Calling [Crazy Ex-Girlfriend]", but slashdot ate my brackets.
First of all, what the hell are you talking about? The old Voice Command was terrible. I was driving in the car once when I asked it to "Play Led Zeppelin". Instead it told me, "Calling ". This quickly led to shouts of, "Oh shit! No no no no!" and almost having an accident trying to stop the call. After that incident, I never used it again. Both the language recognition and the UI were awful.
Yes, network-based voice recognition has its problems, but phones are not yet powerful enough to handle what Siri can do. And plus, half of Siri is the database and network APIs, so to get any functionality aside from local device functions you'll have to ping the network anyway. But I can count on one hand the amount of times I've had Siri timeout or take more than five seconds to respond. And I'd imagine most of the wait time is the transmission of audio data to the server.
I do think that Siri needs a lot more internet APIs to truly become an Intelligent Agent. The sad thing is that the original Siri app was more useful in this respect -- you could buy movie tickets and other things.
Well, unfortunately the Siri system doesn't seem to currently have any ability to discuss the content it returns, whether that content is from Wolfram or another API. Your wife should've just clicked on the name of the restaurant in that list, which would've brought up the restaurant on a Google map. But she's not my wife, so I can say she was wrong without fear of reprisal. ;)
But then some things surprise you. The other day I asked it, "How many seconds are there in an average lifetime?" and it came back with an appropriate response: 2.192 x10^9. Of course that is mostly the magic of Wolfram, not Siri, but I expected Siri to say it didn't know what I was talking about.
It's difficult to glean from the articles, but it seems Kokabee is not an American citizen, but an Iranian citizen who was attending an American graduate school. The act of going to an American school was the first risky move, both to his own safety but that of his family. The Iranian government knew he was attending an American school and simply waited for the appropriate time to use him as a pawn. Did he really think he was going to be able to associate himself with America and not end up being used for propaganda purposes by the Iranian government? He's a young kid so maybe he didn't think about it, but his parents should have.
I do sympathize that he felt he had to risk everything in order to get a good education in the field of his choice, but he put himself in a very risky position.
The problem is the the U.S. telcos imagine themselves as one-stop shops, and do everything they can to monopolize services and content. They should really only be selling their connection. SMS is just another data service that should be handled by a third-party. Imagine if you local DSL or cable ISP charged you to use AIM or MSN! And I can only go so far with the infrastructure argument. The telcos built their empires on the backs of taxpayers via Federal handouts.
Unfortunately the service companies have proprietary messaging services (iMessage, Blackberry messaging), so SMS is still the only universal messaging system. Sometimes a free market system works against the common good, and this is one of those cases.
And if a group of pro-Plutoans happen to make Neptune...disappear...does Pluto still get planetary status?
No, I'm pretty sure "long overdue" in the context of a horribly outdated language getting a feature it should've had ten years ago is an apt description.
Unfortunately there are a lot of Objective-C old-timers, both at Apple and abroad, who think that Objective-C is a great language and don't see how it needs much refinement (seriously, I've had this discussion with an Apple engineer). It's that kind of masochistic attitude about programming that went out of style in the 90s that runs in spades with old-timer Objective-C guys, but they stayed in a purely ObjC world for the last 15 years and have sort of been frozen in time like programming cavemen.
Then there's the whole other discussion about Apple's APIs; they're just as convoluted and inelegant as the language itself, but that's the mode of thinking they seem to be stuck in. I mean just look at the Core Graphics API. Holy shit, what a clusterfuck. Say what you will about Flash, but its Actionscript graphics API and the whole display architecture is very elegant.
"And what also floats in water?"
"Bread!"
"Apples!"
"...Very small rocks!"
I'm afraid the Scientists of the Knights of the Round Table have concluded that only *tiny* rocks may float as you suggest.
Yup, exactly. It's amazing how many people continue to cling to their party, but politics in America is more like sports: people feel compelled to root for their home team no matter how much the team sucks.
I think an encompassing problem here is that Americans have become incredibly jaded about the political process. They vote for who they think has the best chance of winning, not who they want to win. That mental mode means that the person who runs the slickest campaign and gives lip service to the most interest groups will win, not the person with the best ideas or qualifications. And it means third-party candidates are continual non-starters.
Another fairly distressing problem is that the American public is by-and-large becoming more ignorant as time passes. Most people don't care about in-depth political news, and when they do they tend to get their news from a biased source like Fox (the consolidation of news sources under a few megacorps contributes heavily to this problem). And our educational systems are producing people with less critical-thinking skills. The only thing really keeping a democracy from descending into tyranny is an educated public. The public is the largest check and balance in the U.S. system, and we are failing to meet our obligations as citizens.
I've been reading about the creation process of the U.S. Constitution recently, and I believe if the framers of the Constitution foresaw how much corporate interests would corrupt the political system, they would have put much stronger protections in place against such abuse.
From the Oxford American Dictionary:
So yes, I find torturing and maiming animals, and stealing away their free will and often their lives to advance scientific knowledge both 'savagely cruel' and 'primitive'. I'm sure you were trying to be funny, but I find the subject void of humor.