I would imagine that such a technology could be adapted to other fuel sources like hydrogen.
It may be pedantic, but straight hydrogen should be thought of more as an energy store than a fuel source, i.e., as a gas or liquid battery. The energy used to create any amount of hydrogen is going to be higher than the energy returned in use, similar to how a battery requires more energy to charge than it will give back as usable electricity.
The advantage fossil fuels have is that the initial energy storage took place epochs ago, and we need invest only a tiny bit of energy today to get many multiples of that investment back at this point in time. In that sense, fossil fuels are virtually free energy (not in the perpetual motion sense, but in the sense that they cost so little to get).
Hydrogen is the exact opposite, that is, we must invest more energy to get less energy. The luxurious lifestyle we all enjoy is rooted in the fact that we can get more energy than we invest. Once that reverses, there won't be surplus energy to spend on making life comfortable. Because H2 as a fuel source represents loss rather than profit, I'm pretty skeptical that it will prove to be some kind of magic bullet.
I think we get that. The question is what happens when the lens gets sooty? There has to be lens in the plug somewhere because the engine isn't going to work all that efficiently with a hole in it.
I haven't completely read the article, but this doesn't sound like MLM. In MLM, a person will get a cut of the revenue from the people who sign up under the people he signed up. This sounds like a discount for a referral, which can be perfectly legit. My webhost will give me a hosting credit if I refer someone who signs up. I've never even tried to get the credit, even with people I did suggest use my host, but that isn't MLN -- it's an incentive to make a referral.
Note: I am not a MLM junkie by any stretch of the imagination, and like every(logical)one else, view all MLM schemes as scams. I don't see single level discounting as multilevel though, and they can be quite legitimate as a way to get an occasional discount, but are obviously not a way to make a living.
There's no point in comparing what people can get in a technically advanced country to what we can get here. Between Comcast and the one or two other providers who cringe at the thought of offering any sort of actual competition, we should bless our lucky stars to have a tenth the bandwith at thrice the cost of what people can get elsewhere, even in spread out countries like Canada.
I've had some 'spiritual' experiences before so hopefully, I'll be able to avoid becoming a street corner preacher. I chalk those experiences up to the brain being super cool, but I can see how they can be very convincing. My most memorable was related to sleep deprivation, heat, and overwork. I fire a type of wood fired kiln that requires five or six days of constant stoking (armload of wood every 7-10 minutes at the peak temperature, which lasts three days round the clock). In my first firing, I didn't have enough help, so I got way to little sleep, plus I was physically exhausted from alternately sweating from exposure to the 2400F interior when stoking, freezing due the winter temperatures (the kiln is roofed but not enclosed), chopping wood, and running around doing this or that.
At dawn on the last day of firing, I heard singing through the fog gathering over the fields around the kiln. It was unearthly beautiful, like angels. I strained hard to hear the words, but couldn't make them out. Seriously, I was awestruck with sound and I felt compelled to leave the kiln, find the source, and just listen to it in its full glory. I had no choice in the matter, it was literally like a Siren song to me. I can't emphasize enough that the sound was beautiful beyond anything I've ever heard in my life, before or since.
As I was leaving the kiln pit, I walked by a propane campstove. There was a teapot on the burner and the water was making that sound it makes just before it starts to boil -- when the bubbles are small and just beginning to form, a sort of muffled tinging sound. At that instant, I realized I was not hearing singing -- I was hearing the tea kettle (I was so tired I had already forgotten that I'd set it on the burner). If I had been slightly more tired, I might not have figured it out and could easily have believed that I was visited by angels or muses or elves or whatever. How my brain turned that tea kettle noise into ethereal music, I don't know, but that convinced me of how powerful the brain is in its ability misperceive.
I still treasure those moments hearing the angels singing, because it was absolutely beautiful. I just accept the fact that it wasn't actually angels at all but rather something quite mundane. This knowledge doesn't make it any less wonderful or moving. I just don't interpret it as spiritual, it was an auditory hallucination. The cool part is, I could do this whenever I want -- I just have to get really tired and do hard physical labor. There must be an easier way....
Anyway, sorry for the serious answer to your lighthearted reply.;-)
I don't know what you mean by "no evidence either way". I think the many thousands of years that have passed without actual miracles (I don't equate the improbable with the miraculous) indicates something. Plus, there are thousands of years to demonstrate that hard labor, research, trial and error, or other human efforts are capable of producing some pretty amazing feats -- pyramids to particle accelerators.
At this point in time, it is completely reasonable to expect the religious people to demonstrate at least some proof that their god can do cool shit, and I don't mean some half-assed convoluted interpretation of natural processes or something like that. I mean something like water to wine in a controlled environment -- something that would win the James Randi prize. Raise the dead. Lift a mountain.
What I do see is that humans using their brains have done amazing stuff. Humans' gods however, never do squat, and while I realize proving a negative isn't possible, at some point you don't expect it can be proven. I'm not holding my breath to get a visit from Santa, and I'm not holding my breath any gods will ever do anything. I feel confident neither exist because of the complete lack of their influence on the world (I don't count the effects put in motion by people, which are mostly bad anyway). Obviously, if confronted with actual evidence to the contrary, I'd change my mind in a heartbeat.
What is silly though, is discounting the towering evidence against the existence of gods so that somehow, the evidence that they do exist is considered equally weighty. To put this in a car analogy, religionists are like a car manufacturer who claims their car is the fastest in the world, except that every expert who has test driven the car hasn't been able to get it to go faster than a Geo Metro in any kind of driving conditions no matter how skillfully it is driven. Most people are going to think the car manufacturer's claims are bunk at that point. With religion though, we get excuses. Maybe in a particular set of circumstances with the right number of believers exerting psychic powers on the car, it would be fast. Nobody is going to buy that as valid tech spec. They do with religion though. It's crazy.
It should be pointed out that the Corel decision is a District Court opinion. It is binding on the parties of course being the law of the case, but it is what is known as "persuasive authority". Decisions from the US Supreme Court are "mandatory authority", meaning all courts must follow them. Decisions from the US Courts of Appeals are mandatory authority for the district they represent. While the District Court's decisions are a decent guide to what that particular lower court will do, and may optionally be followed by other cours, they certainly aren't generally applicable precedent that applies on a nationwide or even district wide basis.
Water preference is interesting. I have a pottery studio in the middle of a field out in the country. Several years ago, some cats moved in and I started feeding them. Since then, we became good friends.
Inside my studio are buckets with clay scraps and water. The water that floats on top of the clay is the cats' absolute favorite drink. Certain kinds of bacteria grow in the clay giving it an earthy smell (and secreting compounds that make it more workable). The water that goes in these buckets is well water from a spigot.
The cats' second favorite water is the rain water that I collect under the rain spout (sometimes the well runs dry or the power is out -- nice to have some water about). Leaves and bugs fall into this, and when the water has the color of light tea, it becomes quite desirable for the cats. If I dump out the water thinking "that can't be good" -- they avoid the bucket until it has had enough time to get a sufficient amount of leaves in it to make tea -- this can take weeks and none of the cats will bother with the water.
A close second to the rain water tea, is commercial bottled water in a teacup on a table, but for only one particular cat. The others aren't that interested, but this guy clearly lived with someone before he found his way to my studio.
After this, puddles in the garden from either well water from watering the garden, or rain, seem to be acceptable drinking sources for all the cats, but definitely not like clay water. The cats drink the clay water often and for long periods -- like they are drinking for pleasure, not thirst.
As for plain water in a bowl on a floor (either well or bottled), nobody every drinks that. Cat food does find its way into the bowl, but it is always completely full of water. The only time it gets used is if the clay water, leaf tea, teacup water, or puddle water are completely absent.
Anyway, it seems completely reasonable that a cat might have a favored drink. To the GP poster, instead of tormenting your cat, why don't you spend sometime finding out what your cat likes and making that available.
I'm using Darwin Calendar Server in my office: http://trac.calendarserver.org/
You can install it on a linux box and it's even in the Lenny and recent Ubuntu repositories if you don't want to deal with dependency hell. The only real "gotcha" is that you _must_ enable extended attributes in fstab -- without that, you'll pull your hair out wondering why it doesn't work.
Sunbird will sync with it, although Sunbird always downloads all the data when it starts, so if your calendar is large (2-3 items per day spanning 2 years), it'll nail your calendar server's resources for about a full minute. After that, your server can get back to doing whatever else it does -- DCS uses very little resources while runnig. During this time when Sunbird is downloading everything in the calender, Sunbird is not responsive, so just let it sit for a minute or two after loading Sunbird. Sunbird will also completely fail to load the calendar beyond a certain size. This is BTW, the linux version of Sunbird. No idea if Windows version works better.
With those exceptions, Sunbird works fine and Apple's iCal (if you have any Macs) works flawlessly of course. For remote access, just VPN into your office and sync.
Actually, the case doesn't firmly establish that "photos are not creative works". First, it is a trial court decision -- it states the law for the area covered by that particular court (which is not all of the US -- either a particular district or NY). It is what is known as a "persuasive authority", meaning that another court can follow it if it wants to, or ignore it if it wants to. In contrast, "mandatory authority", e.g., a Supreme Court decision, must be followed. And finally, as an additional limitation, it states that painstakingly accurate reproductions of public domain images are not copyrightable. If there is a difference, like bad coloring, that IS copyrightable (according to a different case from a different district -- all this from the wikipedia article, I'm not doing actual case reading on a Sunday).
Anyway, be careful copying photos willy-nilly because that case does not have the wide application you think it has. It may well come to have wide application, but only after a higher court follows it. In other words, you could have the honor of being the test case the Supreme Court decides -- you CAN lose, one side always does, and in fact, you do ALWAYS lose, unless a boatload of cash in attorney fees is meaningless to you.
Totally brilliant! I don't have mod points, but I wish I did -- and just yesterday I was wasting them moding ACs as funny. That's about the most insightful comment I've ever read on slashdot.
Advanced education (or advanced knowledge) in a specific subject, tends to be accompanied by an accurate sense of just how much one does not know. People with a rudimentary understanding of something often have a much higher sense of certainty than people with deep knowledge. The more you know, the more you know you don't know.
With respect to the Republican/Democrat/Independent split, I find it interesting that a third identify as independents. I think that for at least the last couple decades, the Republicans have taken on so much of an "America Fuck Yeah" religiousity, that people who understand that the world is not simple because they have discovered in their own area, how much others misunderstand the topic and the findings and how much more there is to learn, are easily disillusioned by the Readers Digest platitudes that seem sufficient for the vast majority of people. As a result, those who actually know how little they know, can see how they are underinformed outside their area of expertise and are much more likely to accept that they may be wrong in any of their beliefs. Given the Republican party's penchant for unthinking dogmatism, it is easy to see why people who have become very expert in a specialized area would be hesitant to be associated with the Republican party. By the same token, Democrats can be just as bad, but there is some logic in going with the lesser evil (although I personally have decided against that path), and because the Democrats on average aren't such thundering bible-bangers, it seems natural enough to go that route.
The survey should figure out a way to focus more on boolean logic. The statute has a number of mandatory elements, all of which must be true for a crime to exist. Math skills are certainly related to boolean logic, but math skills are not a necessary requirement for applying boolean logic to situations involving non-numerical rules.
For example, Westlaw has an excellent boolean search feature. For example, if I wanted to search for cases like the one here, I could construct a query such as:
(child!/s porn!) and ((photo! or face)/s paste!/s nude)
The "!" acts like "*" -- so "child!" gets child, children, child's (and Childress or other uncommon names). "/s" means in the same sentence -- sometimes "/p", same paragraph, is useful. Elements inside parens are "calculated" first just as you'd expect from ordinary math.
I wish google would implement the same type of search methods -- would really cut down on the garbage results.
Do you consider the phrase "patently offensive" to be well defined?
"It is unlawful for any person to knowingly possess material that includes a minor engaged in simulated sexual activity that is patently offensive."
This statute can be broken into four parts (I'll just assume he is a person and let that go), all of which must be true:
knowingly possessing material,
which depicts a minor,
where the minor is engaged in simulated sexual activity, and
where that activity is patently offensive.
If any of the elements are not met, the law is not broken. We can tick off the first element as true, because he made the pics. The second one is questionable because the pics only partially depict a minor -- perhaps what they actually depict is an adult with a young face. I'll let this go for the prosecutor here though, because this argument is also a bit on the subjective side -- it could be worth revisiting however. We might as well table any discussion about the fourth element because as you mention, that is wholly subjective.
Focusing on the third element, however, it is pretty clear that certain types of pictures would not violate this law. For example, any picture that fails to show "simulated sexual activity". Now, nudity is not a requirement for sex. People often do have sex with clothes on. Secondly, nudity in and of itself, is not an example of sexual activity, it is nothing more than the absence of clothing. If nudity is the same as sex, then what are we to do with anatomically correct models of underage human body that professors of biology or doctors possess? While sexual activity is often accompanied by nudity, it is almost just as often accompanied by clothing.
Because the facts of this case (assuming the pics were just nudes) fail on at least one element of the law, and all elements must be met for a crime to exist, the defendant is not guilty of anything.
Fortunately, this can be decided without looking at whether the pictures are patently offensive.
ps: I'd consider my math skill to be slightly above the average, which of course on an objective scale, means rather poor.
The Aptera looks totally cool -- I'd love to have it as a second car, but the 100 mile range prevents it from being a good replacement for the common car. I only want one car -- I have no interest in owning two.
I wonder how much extra it will cost to have the blue LEDs stripped off the outside, the blue lights removed from the inside and replaced with dull red (because I like to be able to see at night), and the 17" touchscreen ripped out and replaced with knobs and dials you can operate by feel rather than sight (because looking at the road is good)?
Slashdot Mirror
I think Apple already covered that:
http://www.engadget.com/2005/01/12/the-ipod-shuffle-do-not-eat-in-the-us-or-chew-in-the-uk/
Forget that, I'm still waiting for a car analogy even after scrolling by 90% of the posts.
It may be pedantic, but straight hydrogen should be thought of more as an energy store than a fuel source, i.e., as a gas or liquid battery. The energy used to create any amount of hydrogen is going to be higher than the energy returned in use, similar to how a battery requires more energy to charge than it will give back as usable electricity.
The advantage fossil fuels have is that the initial energy storage took place epochs ago, and we need invest only a tiny bit of energy today to get many multiples of that investment back at this point in time. In that sense, fossil fuels are virtually free energy (not in the perpetual motion sense, but in the sense that they cost so little to get).
Hydrogen is the exact opposite, that is, we must invest more energy to get less energy. The luxurious lifestyle we all enjoy is rooted in the fact that we can get more energy than we invest. Once that reverses, there won't be surplus energy to spend on making life comfortable. Because H2 as a fuel source represents loss rather than profit, I'm pretty skeptical that it will prove to be some kind of magic bullet.
I think we get that. The question is what happens when the lens gets sooty? There has to be lens in the plug somewhere because the engine isn't going to work all that efficiently with a hole in it.
slightly dated, but apropos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AShdIoYX87c
Why would politicians want to hinder their own kind? I don't know much about cops ... I'll leave that assessment for others.
I haven't completely read the article, but this doesn't sound like MLM. In MLM, a person will get a cut of the revenue from the people who sign up under the people he signed up. This sounds like a discount for a referral, which can be perfectly legit. My webhost will give me a hosting credit if I refer someone who signs up. I've never even tried to get the credit, even with people I did suggest use my host, but that isn't MLN -- it's an incentive to make a referral.
Note: I am not a MLM junkie by any stretch of the imagination, and like every(logical)one else, view all MLM schemes as scams. I don't see single level discounting as multilevel though, and they can be quite legitimate as a way to get an occasional discount, but are obviously not a way to make a living.
There's no point in comparing what people can get in a technically advanced country to what we can get here. Between Comcast and the one or two other providers who cringe at the thought of offering any sort of actual competition, we should bless our lucky stars to have a tenth the bandwith at thrice the cost of what people can get elsewhere, even in spread out countries like Canada.
I've had some 'spiritual' experiences before so hopefully, I'll be able to avoid becoming a street corner preacher. I chalk those experiences up to the brain being super cool, but I can see how they can be very convincing. My most memorable was related to sleep deprivation, heat, and overwork. I fire a type of wood fired kiln that requires five or six days of constant stoking (armload of wood every 7-10 minutes at the peak temperature, which lasts three days round the clock). In my first firing, I didn't have enough help, so I got way to little sleep, plus I was physically exhausted from alternately sweating from exposure to the 2400F interior when stoking, freezing due the winter temperatures (the kiln is roofed but not enclosed), chopping wood, and running around doing this or that.
At dawn on the last day of firing, I heard singing through the fog gathering over the fields around the kiln. It was unearthly beautiful, like angels. I strained hard to hear the words, but couldn't make them out. Seriously, I was awestruck with sound and I felt compelled to leave the kiln, find the source, and just listen to it in its full glory. I had no choice in the matter, it was literally like a Siren song to me. I can't emphasize enough that the sound was beautiful beyond anything I've ever heard in my life, before or since.
As I was leaving the kiln pit, I walked by a propane campstove. There was a teapot on the burner and the water was making that sound it makes just before it starts to boil -- when the bubbles are small and just beginning to form, a sort of muffled tinging sound. At that instant, I realized I was not hearing singing -- I was hearing the tea kettle (I was so tired I had already forgotten that I'd set it on the burner). If I had been slightly more tired, I might not have figured it out and could easily have believed that I was visited by angels or muses or elves or whatever. How my brain turned that tea kettle noise into ethereal music, I don't know, but that convinced me of how powerful the brain is in its ability misperceive.
I still treasure those moments hearing the angels singing, because it was absolutely beautiful. I just accept the fact that it wasn't actually angels at all but rather something quite mundane. This knowledge doesn't make it any less wonderful or moving. I just don't interpret it as spiritual, it was an auditory hallucination. The cool part is, I could do this whenever I want -- I just have to get really tired and do hard physical labor. There must be an easier way ....
Anyway, sorry for the serious answer to your lighthearted reply. ;-)
I don't know what you mean by "no evidence either way". I think the many thousands of years that have passed without actual miracles (I don't equate the improbable with the miraculous) indicates something. Plus, there are thousands of years to demonstrate that hard labor, research, trial and error, or other human efforts are capable of producing some pretty amazing feats -- pyramids to particle accelerators.
At this point in time, it is completely reasonable to expect the religious people to demonstrate at least some proof that their god can do cool shit, and I don't mean some half-assed convoluted interpretation of natural processes or something like that. I mean something like water to wine in a controlled environment -- something that would win the James Randi prize. Raise the dead. Lift a mountain.
What I do see is that humans using their brains have done amazing stuff. Humans' gods however, never do squat, and while I realize proving a negative isn't possible, at some point you don't expect it can be proven. I'm not holding my breath to get a visit from Santa, and I'm not holding my breath any gods will ever do anything. I feel confident neither exist because of the complete lack of their influence on the world (I don't count the effects put in motion by people, which are mostly bad anyway). Obviously, if confronted with actual evidence to the contrary, I'd change my mind in a heartbeat.
What is silly though, is discounting the towering evidence against the existence of gods so that somehow, the evidence that they do exist is considered equally weighty. To put this in a car analogy, religionists are like a car manufacturer who claims their car is the fastest in the world, except that every expert who has test driven the car hasn't been able to get it to go faster than a Geo Metro in any kind of driving conditions no matter how skillfully it is driven. Most people are going to think the car manufacturer's claims are bunk at that point. With religion though, we get excuses. Maybe in a particular set of circumstances with the right number of believers exerting psychic powers on the car, it would be fast. Nobody is going to buy that as valid tech spec. They do with religion though. It's crazy.
It should be pointed out that the Corel decision is a District Court opinion. It is binding on the parties of course being the law of the case, but it is what is known as "persuasive authority". Decisions from the US Supreme Court are "mandatory authority", meaning all courts must follow them. Decisions from the US Courts of Appeals are mandatory authority for the district they represent. While the District Court's decisions are a decent guide to what that particular lower court will do, and may optionally be followed by other cours, they certainly aren't generally applicable precedent that applies on a nationwide or even district wide basis.
And who wants Meeses anymore either?
Water preference is interesting. I have a pottery studio in the middle of a field out in the country. Several years ago, some cats moved in and I started feeding them. Since then, we became good friends.
Inside my studio are buckets with clay scraps and water. The water that floats on top of the clay is the cats' absolute favorite drink. Certain kinds of bacteria grow in the clay giving it an earthy smell (and secreting compounds that make it more workable). The water that goes in these buckets is well water from a spigot.
The cats' second favorite water is the rain water that I collect under the rain spout (sometimes the well runs dry or the power is out -- nice to have some water about). Leaves and bugs fall into this, and when the water has the color of light tea, it becomes quite desirable for the cats. If I dump out the water thinking "that can't be good" -- they avoid the bucket until it has had enough time to get a sufficient amount of leaves in it to make tea -- this can take weeks and none of the cats will bother with the water.
A close second to the rain water tea, is commercial bottled water in a teacup on a table, but for only one particular cat. The others aren't that interested, but this guy clearly lived with someone before he found his way to my studio.
After this, puddles in the garden from either well water from watering the garden, or rain, seem to be acceptable drinking sources for all the cats, but definitely not like clay water. The cats drink the clay water often and for long periods -- like they are drinking for pleasure, not thirst.
As for plain water in a bowl on a floor (either well or bottled), nobody every drinks that. Cat food does find its way into the bowl, but it is always completely full of water. The only time it gets used is if the clay water, leaf tea, teacup water, or puddle water are completely absent.
Anyway, it seems completely reasonable that a cat might have a favored drink. To the GP poster, instead of tormenting your cat, why don't you spend sometime finding out what your cat likes and making that available.
I'm just glad my car isn't broken.
I'm using Darwin Calendar Server in my office: http://trac.calendarserver.org/ You can install it on a linux box and it's even in the Lenny and recent Ubuntu repositories if you don't want to deal with dependency hell. The only real "gotcha" is that you _must_ enable extended attributes in fstab -- without that, you'll pull your hair out wondering why it doesn't work. Sunbird will sync with it, although Sunbird always downloads all the data when it starts, so if your calendar is large (2-3 items per day spanning 2 years), it'll nail your calendar server's resources for about a full minute. After that, your server can get back to doing whatever else it does -- DCS uses very little resources while runnig. During this time when Sunbird is downloading everything in the calender, Sunbird is not responsive, so just let it sit for a minute or two after loading Sunbird. Sunbird will also completely fail to load the calendar beyond a certain size. This is BTW, the linux version of Sunbird. No idea if Windows version works better. With those exceptions, Sunbird works fine and Apple's iCal (if you have any Macs) works flawlessly of course. For remote access, just VPN into your office and sync.
Actually, the case doesn't firmly establish that "photos are not creative works". First, it is a trial court decision -- it states the law for the area covered by that particular court (which is not all of the US -- either a particular district or NY). It is what is known as a "persuasive authority", meaning that another court can follow it if it wants to, or ignore it if it wants to. In contrast, "mandatory authority", e.g., a Supreme Court decision, must be followed. And finally, as an additional limitation, it states that painstakingly accurate reproductions of public domain images are not copyrightable. If there is a difference, like bad coloring, that IS copyrightable (according to a different case from a different district -- all this from the wikipedia article, I'm not doing actual case reading on a Sunday).
Anyway, be careful copying photos willy-nilly because that case does not have the wide application you think it has. It may well come to have wide application, but only after a higher court follows it. In other words, you could have the honor of being the test case the Supreme Court decides -- you CAN lose, one side always does, and in fact, you do ALWAYS lose, unless a boatload of cash in attorney fees is meaningless to you.
I wish I had mod points to correct the erroneous offtopic mod you got for failing to toe the line.
Totally brilliant! I don't have mod points, but I wish I did -- and just yesterday I was wasting them moding ACs as funny. That's about the most insightful comment I've ever read on slashdot.
Advanced education (or advanced knowledge) in a specific subject, tends to be accompanied by an accurate sense of just how much one does not know. People with a rudimentary understanding of something often have a much higher sense of certainty than people with deep knowledge. The more you know, the more you know you don't know.
With respect to the Republican/Democrat/Independent split, I find it interesting that a third identify as independents. I think that for at least the last couple decades, the Republicans have taken on so much of an "America Fuck Yeah" religiousity, that people who understand that the world is not simple because they have discovered in their own area, how much others misunderstand the topic and the findings and how much more there is to learn, are easily disillusioned by the Readers Digest platitudes that seem sufficient for the vast majority of people. As a result, those who actually know how little they know, can see how they are underinformed outside their area of expertise and are much more likely to accept that they may be wrong in any of their beliefs. Given the Republican party's penchant for unthinking dogmatism, it is easy to see why people who have become very expert in a specialized area would be hesitant to be associated with the Republican party. By the same token, Democrats can be just as bad, but there is some logic in going with the lesser evil (although I personally have decided against that path), and because the Democrats on average aren't such thundering bible-bangers, it seems natural enough to go that route.
Hmmm ... you stole my allusion, at least the DP part. Prepare yourself for a life behind bars!
The survey should figure out a way to focus more on boolean logic. The statute has a number of mandatory elements, all of which must be true for a crime to exist. Math skills are certainly related to boolean logic, but math skills are not a necessary requirement for applying boolean logic to situations involving non-numerical rules.
For example, Westlaw has an excellent boolean search feature. For example, if I wanted to search for cases like the one here, I could construct a query such as:
(child! /s porn!) and ((photo! or face) /s paste! /s nude)
The "!" acts like "*" -- so "child!" gets child, children, child's (and Childress or other uncommon names). "/s" means in the same sentence -- sometimes "/p", same paragraph, is useful. Elements inside parens are "calculated" first just as you'd expect from ordinary math.
I wish google would implement the same type of search methods -- would really cut down on the garbage results.
From a while back, I loved the "Wife Swap" clip that made its way around the world. I think the concise quote you want is:
"undereducated and overopinionated"
They guy who said it may have been a pretentious prick, but he was also correct.
"It is unlawful for any person to knowingly possess material that includes a minor engaged in simulated sexual activity that is patently offensive."
This statute can be broken into four parts (I'll just assume he is a person and let that go), all of which must be true:
If any of the elements are not met, the law is not broken. We can tick off the first element as true, because he made the pics. The second one is questionable because the pics only partially depict a minor -- perhaps what they actually depict is an adult with a young face. I'll let this go for the prosecutor here though, because this argument is also a bit on the subjective side -- it could be worth revisiting however. We might as well table any discussion about the fourth element because as you mention, that is wholly subjective.
Focusing on the third element, however, it is pretty clear that certain types of pictures would not violate this law. For example, any picture that fails to show "simulated sexual activity". Now, nudity is not a requirement for sex. People often do have sex with clothes on. Secondly, nudity in and of itself, is not an example of sexual activity, it is nothing more than the absence of clothing. If nudity is the same as sex, then what are we to do with anatomically correct models of underage human body that professors of biology or doctors possess? While sexual activity is often accompanied by nudity, it is almost just as often accompanied by clothing.
Because the facts of this case (assuming the pics were just nudes) fail on at least one element of the law, and all elements must be met for a crime to exist, the defendant is not guilty of anything.
Fortunately, this can be decided without looking at whether the pictures are patently offensive.
ps: I'd consider my math skill to be slightly above the average, which of course on an objective scale, means rather poor.
The Aptera looks totally cool -- I'd love to have it as a second car, but the 100 mile range prevents it from being a good replacement for the common car. I only want one car -- I have no interest in owning two.
I wonder how much extra it will cost to have the blue LEDs stripped off the outside, the blue lights removed from the inside and replaced with dull red (because I like to be able to see at night), and the 17" touchscreen ripped out and replaced with knobs and dials you can operate by feel rather than sight (because looking at the road is good)?