The best software I found was the Olympus DSS Player 2002, which came bundled with the expensive Olympus digital recorder (but the cheap ones had a bare-bones software). It was like the old mechanical tape transcribing machines, except much better, with adjustable back pedal, 50% slow speed, 200% fast speed, fast forward, fast back, etc. Newest version is probably better.
Problem was it was optimized for the Olympus proprietary *.DSS format, although you could use *.WAV with some limitations on features.
Sony and the other digital recorders also had playback software; I haven't checked them out but they're probably equivalent.
NCH Scribe (free) could have been a clone of the Olympus player; NCH didn't work as well when I tried it, although later versions may work better.
These programs can be overkill, mplayer at 60% speed sounds like it would work well.
Each one has its best use. I don't use foreign language dictionaries much any more. But I still read Science magazine and New Scientist on paper, and I still buy biology books. Medical students have stopped carrying the bible-paper Merck Manual around in the pocket of their white coats.
Online newspapers have pretty much replaced paper -- my apartment building used to have stacks of bundled newspapers on the curb waiting for the garbage collector, but it's been replaced by packaging from Amazon shipments.
But there's something missing in online newspapers. A broadsheet page organizes information in a way that nothing can match. A friend of mine got two New York Times-sized LCDs, and reads it online in a two-page spread.
I'm sure there will be e-book readers that do everything that paper can do. I'd love to have a tablet with the color, size and resolution of the National Geographic, that I could write on. Not yet.
If they did not have a gun, then it would have been a knife. Dont even dare to try and make it sound like that the gun perpetuated the violence.. It was the unstable person that did it.
Unstable wackjobs will do what ever it takes... Ohh look, a wine bottle, that will kill someone nicely.
Doctors who try to fix these victims up, and cops who investigate murders to prosecute them in court, say that's not true.
It's a lot easier to kill somebody on impulse with a gun -- guns are designed to be easy to kill people. If you hit them with a wine bottle, you won't necessarily kill them, and they can defend themselves or run away. If you shoot them from close range, they're most likely to be dead.
Take a fight. Somebody might get hurt. Add a gun. Somebody gets killed.
I remember a cop describing a typical murder: because there was a gun handy, the guy shot his wife. If he didn't have a gun, he would have slugged her. The next day they would have made up, and gone on with their lives. Now he's lost his wife, going to prison for a long term, and two lives are ruined.
If you can kill somebody with a wine bottle if you really want to, then why do you need a gun? Why don't you carry a wine bottle around for protection?
CONAN: Well, Brendan Nyhan is a health policy researcher at the University of Michigan. He recently published "When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions." That was in the June issue of the Journal of Political Behavior, and he joins us now from the studios of WUOM, Michigan Radio, our member station in Ann Arbor. Nice to have you with us today.
Yes, the stories are out there. But, like yourself, most liberals, and even some moderates, discount all the accounts of self defense. "Oh, big deal, granny killed a rapist. Some moron killed his son last month!" Like - you're keeping score, and one accidental death negates 100 successful self defenses.
Yeah, we're keeping score. Actually, Journal of the American Medical Association and the American Journal of Public Health are keeping score.
There are about 75,000 gun deaths a year, or about 1/4,000 Americans. That outnumbers the cases of self-defense by about 10 to 1. For every granny that defended herself from rape with a gun, there are 10 grannies who were raped by an assailant with a gun.
If you want to reduce those deaths by a substantial amount, reduce the number of guns in circulation.
Of course we can't easily do that any more, after the Supreme Court illegally appointed George W. Bush President, and he packed the court with gun nuts. (Notice the Supreme Court didn't give you a right to carry a gun in their courtroom.)
So we'll just have to suffer 75,000 murders, suicides, and accidental deaths a year.
There are quite a few "Armed American" stories that involve children picking up legally owned firearms to defend themselves and/or their families against violent assaults.
And there are quite a few more stories that involve family members picking up legally owned firearms in a moment of anger to kill another family member, or in a moment of distress to commit suicide.
It takes more work to disassemble a PC than it did to assemble it from those parts in the first place. When you're done, there isn't much of a market for old 128MB RAM chips, 30GB hard drives, 500 MHz motherboards, etc.
Is there a viable technology that shreds computers with giant steel rollers and sorts the flakes according to material, and sells aluminum flakes, etc. and sells them? Is there a safe heat process? There must be something, since there are companies that claim to provide certified recycling to meet government regulations. But I can't find one. All I can find is stories of third-world dumping.
It may be safer and better for the environment to dump old PCs in U.S. landfills than to send them to parts unknown for "recycling." We should be able to make landfills that can take appliances with heavy metals and electronic plastics without passing it on to the water supply.
Trust a dumbass journalist to rewrite that to mean that suddenly our electric cars will be powered by Xenon Fluoride compressed by diamond anvils, even though the original research paper doesn't mention anything of the sort!
It wasn't the journalist who wrote the bit about "potential for creating a new class of energetic materials or fuels, an energy storage device, super-oxidizing materials for destroying chemical and biological agents, and high temperature superconductors," it was the university PR office. http://www.wsunews.wsu.edu/pages/Publications.asp?Action=Release&PublicationID=20580 The researcher reviews and approves the press release before the university sends it out.
So you can trust the dumbass scientist to hype his research in the hope of getting more funding.
Yes, but phdcomics missed one important step in the science news cycle: where the researcher himself wracks his brain to come up with some speculative practical application to justify his next grant.
Ideally, every grant should have a section, "How this discovery will help the war against terror (if we get more money)."
Back in the cold war, every grant had a section, "How this discovery will help the war against Communism (if we get more money)."
Then comes the section, "How this discovery will help the war against cancer (if we get more money)."
Since the investigator is supposed to review every press release for accuracy, phdcomics can't blame the university PR office too much.
Not that I have any objection. I'd rather see money spent on useless basic science than on war.
I don't understand. You want to make videos of lawnmowers killing kittens and puppies? Is that seriously your concern?
Please read posts more carefully before you respond. You asked
is there a legal expert who agrees with the articles premise?
I replied by giving you 2 quotes from the article that agree with the article's premise.
I don't want to make videos of lawnmowers killing kittens and puppies. I don't think such videos exist. U.S. vs. Stevens was about dog fight videos.
Keep in mind, congress acted in part because these animals were killed only to make the video. People were not killing puppies and kittens and recording it incidentally--they were killing kittens and puppies to make a video. The killing was tied to the video industry so unless you think animal cruelty is a speech right then I don't understand the concern about Stevens.
They weren't killing puppies and kittens with lawnmowers at at all, but if they were, there are animal cruelty laws to prosecute them. It's too bad if some puppies and kittens were tortured by some psychopath, but I'm more concerned about the harms suffered by humans. There are lots of problems in the world and the government can't solve every one of them.
You have gotten completely off field from the original problem with Kagan, which is that she believed in finding ways around the protection of the First Amendment to prosecute people for producing pornography. In this country, most of us believe in freedom of expression. Re-interpreting the Constitution to give us less freedom of expression is a bad idea. Kagan also thinks it would be good if the government could stop all pornography. A lot of legal scholars think that's none of the government's business (and I agree).
In addition, Kagan accepted the factual premise that pornography harms people. If you read that article in The Scientist by Milton Diamond that somebody cited, you'd see a good review that of the evidence which concluded that pornography does not harm people.
Wendy Kaminer said, "Judges who casually assume the alleged harms of unpopular speech can't be trusted with First Amendment freedoms." I agree. But Kagan is probably the best we can get. That bothers me more than the non-problem of people killing kittens and puppies with lawnmowers.
Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20–24 and 25–34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. . . .
In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined. . . .
In terms of the use of pornography by sex offenders, the police sometimes suggest that a high percentage of sex offenders are found to have used pornography. This is meaningless . . . .
Studies of men who had seen X-rated movies found that they were significantly more tolerant and accepting of women than those men who didn’t see those movies . . . .
you've never had the right to libel or slander people, nor have you had the right to commit fraud. Hate speech is similar in the fact that it's not something that advances any meaningful purpose.
Actually you do have a right to libel or slander people. That was the issue in New York Times vs. Sullivan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_vs._Sullivan. You do have a right to libel public figures as long as the public figures can't prove that you did it with "malice." In Sullivan, the Alabama police department was actually wrongly accused.
(Although you might redefine libel. You could say that what would otherwise be libel isn't libel if the subject is a public figure).
The problem is that we've gone too far in being accommodating of hate speech. And I say that as a legitimate civil libertarian.
I'm going to complain to the civil libertarian club and demand they revoke your membership. You're not a civil libertarian at all.
Perhaps I can inject some intelligent ideas into this discussion by recommending that everybody who is interested in understanding free speech read the classic, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. http://bartleby.com/130/2.html
Teachers used to assign Mill during the McCarthy days to show their students how the government was violating the First Amendment.
So, if FN says she is middle of the road, and a libertarian agrees that she is speech-protective, is there a legal expert who agrees with the articles premise?
I guess the computer screen just isn't a good way to read.
“I think the Stevens case is really a very recent smoking gun. Never in any administration would I expect to see a brief like that out of the Justice Department in terms of a frontal assault on the most basic First Amendment principles,” Crosson said. “Even the very conservative Supreme Court tore them a new one. I was just gobsmacked by the positions they took.”
“Judges who casually assume the alleged harms of unpopular speech can't be trusted with First Amendment freedoms,” said Wendy Kaminer, a Boston attorney and early leader in the anti-censorship camp.
The issue that bothered me was scientific literacy. I went to a lecture this week where some science educators complained that people (the people they're trying to teach) don't understand what a scientific fact is.
That's the problem with the guy who wrote TFA. He seems to think that a fact is true if somebody important says so.
He doesn't understand the fundamental scientific process of forming a hypothesis, testing it experimentally, and deciding on the basis of the facts whether your hypothesis was correct.
I never understood why the juries returned those big awards in breast implant cases. I will point out that at the time of the trial, they didn't have all the evidence, and the exhaustive review and authoritative conclusions of the Institutes of Medicine study. Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, wrote several articles and finally a book arguing against the breast implant court decisions, and she probably gave the best explanation.
I wonder if other developed countries, with better science education, have such poor scientific literacy as we do.
I'm interested in strabismus because my father and my sister had it. I've been tested for it myself by optometrists with fancy equipment that required me to orient my eyes in different directions, sort of what TFA describes.
I read that whole article and the links and I couldn't find a single thing to support their claim that 3D video causes strabismus.
It looks like the whole article is based on Mark Pesce telling Wayde Robson that he doesn't have time to be interviewed for 2 weeks.
The journalism that Robson practices is a bit too familiar and colloquial for my tastes. It's one thing to read an article that sounds like a guy giving you the straight dope after a few drinks in a bar. It's another thing to read an article that sounds like a "journalist" who doesn't know what "fact checking" means.
He quotes SRI as saying, “You Cannot Give This To Kids!” but that's fiction. SRI would never use words like that in a scientific report. I don't suppose it occurred to Robson to call SRI and find out if they actually did a report like that. Or to call an optometrist or ophthalmologist.
"Children under seven are at risk of strabismus – period." Another fiction.
Let's go back to basic scientific method. If you actually found children under seven who didn't have strabismus, then used 3D video, and developed strabismus, you could raise the reasonable hypothesis that 3D video caused strabismus. I've never heard of strabismus being acquired like that, but I'm open to new evidence.
Nothing in TFA indicates that anybody found a single child under seven who had strabismus from 3D video. So there's no justification for making that statement. It's all speculation.
Here's the way regulation works. Private business tries something, people hate it. Customers can't get the companies to change their ways because all of the companies are doing it - there's no competitor to jump to. So now the government has to put a stop to it.
Write the bill and send it to your Congress critter.
It's quaint and charming when my friends tell me how writing a thoughtful letter to their elected representatives will accomplish something. Even intelligent people believe that.
Lobbyists know the system better than you or I ever will, they have contacts, but most of all they have money. They can contribute tens of millions of dollars to the Dem and Republican parties, and to individual candidates. That money can make the difference in paying for enough attack TV ads to bring a candidate over the top in a close race.
You, on the other hand, can send no more than a few letters, and if you're really charismatic you may be able to organize a dozen or a hundred of your friends to do the same. Meanwhile, you can't pay the millions of dollars for campaign costs which your elected official really needs.
There was a book that one a political science prize called "The Congressman," written by a former congressman turned political science professor, who said that the first priority for an elected official has to do is get re-elected. Otherwise they won't be an elected official any longer.
No matter how well-meaning, your congressman will either do whatever it takes to get re-elected, or he won't be a congressman. And it takes tens of millions of dollars.
Getting between a congressman and his millionaire contributors is like getting between a grizzly bear and her cub.
The example I understand best is health care reform.
According to the polls, the American public supported a single payer system (like other countries with better health care systems have) by over 50%, in multiple polls. They like Medicare and (by majorities) they wanted Medicare extended to people under 65.
During the Democratic primary, I saw a rundown of campaign contributions from the health care industry. Recalling from memory, it was:
Hillary Clinton $8.8 million
Barak Obama $8.4 million
Dennis Kucinich $40,000 (from the California Nurses Association).
Kucinich supported single payer.
As soon as Obama got into office, he broke his promise to support a single payer system. He came up with a compromise (public option), then a compromise of that compromise, and finally threw government-funded health care under the bus. The current plan is the same private insurance system, with subsidies for the private insurance industry to prevent it from collapsing immediately.
The best explanation I've seen for this was at Bill Moyer's Journal. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12182009/watch.html Moyers said that Obama never *wanted* a meaningful reform. He never *wanted* single payer. He *wanted* to cut a deal with the insurance industry.
The FBI backlog is overwhelming, as it is for State labs in most cities. DNA evidence collected at a crime scene is likely not to be analyzed before the trial date.
Doesn't New York City have a lot of DNA forensic equipment left over from testing all the body parts in 9/11?
New York City doesn't have the money to do this, anyhow. The cost would be exorbitant, even with a balanced budget.
Do you mean that if I valued the lives of the victims, I'd want to execute an innocent person?
False dichotomy.
I said that my first objection to capital punishment is that innocent people are executed. You accused me of believing that the life of a murderer is worth more than the lives of his victims. How do you go from my statements to your conclusion?
First a guy loses his children in a fire (at least sometimes through no fault of his own). Then, on top of that tragedy (and losing your child is the worst tragedy in the world) the district attorney falsely accuses him of murder, prosecutes him, gets a stupid jury to convict him, and executes an innocent man for arson.
Appeal to fear, appeal to emotion, and hypothetical worst case scenario which is a form of cherry picking.
I'm afraid and outraged that innocent people have been executed. What's wrong with an appeal to fear and emotion? Prosecutors do it all the time to get convictions in those same cases. It's not hypothetical; many such cases have been documented with evidence stronger than the original conviction. The worst case happens frequently. If citing the cases with the strongest evidence is cherry picking, then there's nothing wrong with cherry picking.
You sound like someone who read a popular book on "How to Argue." I recommend that, after you graduate high school, you take a college freshman English course. If you've already taken a college freshman English course, I recommend that you demand your money back. If you're home schooled, there may be no hope.
Alternately, you could become a Tea Bagger and run for Congress. In that case, your inability to distinguish between fact an opinion, and your lack of understanding of logic and argument, will not be a problem and may even be an advantage.
The rest of your post is based on those false premises and outright lies.
You are unable to cite a false premise or lie, because there are none. As I say, you don't seem to understand what a fact is. When you disagree with someone, you just throw out a lot of inflammatory language.
And, even if he doesn't face the death penalty, he would still prosecuted.
How does that do his children any good?
How does that do the surviving members of the victim's family any good?
Or, do you suggest that we not prosecute anyone, ever, because they might be innocent?
I suggest that we not execute anyone, ever, because they might be innocent. They have been innocent, many times.
Yeah, I read about the UK failure in the New Scientist and elsewhere.
One thing missing in TFA: Data.
How many people were actually arrested in East Orange, NJ as a result of those cameras? If the cops had a good example, they would give it to the writer.
Another thing missing: Any meaningful scientific evaluation.
After $1.4 million, they should have some kind of evaluation to see whether they're improving the crime rate or wasting the money.
Slashdot Mirror
I've done loads of transcripts too.
The best software I found was the Olympus DSS Player 2002, which came bundled with the expensive Olympus digital recorder (but the cheap ones had a bare-bones software). It was like the old mechanical tape transcribing machines, except much better, with adjustable back pedal, 50% slow speed, 200% fast speed, fast forward, fast back, etc. Newest version is probably better.
Problem was it was optimized for the Olympus proprietary *.DSS format, although you could use *.WAV with some limitations on features.
Sony and the other digital recorders also had playback software; I haven't checked them out but they're probably equivalent.
NCH Scribe (free) could have been a clone of the Olympus player; NCH didn't work as well when I tried it, although later versions may work better.
These programs can be overkill, mplayer at 60% speed sounds like it would work well.
hard cover, soft cover, and ebooks.
Each one has its best use. I don't use foreign language dictionaries much any more. But I still read Science magazine and New Scientist on paper, and I still buy biology books. Medical students have stopped carrying the bible-paper Merck Manual around in the pocket of their white coats.
Online newspapers have pretty much replaced paper -- my apartment building used to have stacks of bundled newspapers on the curb waiting for the garbage collector, but it's been replaced by packaging from Amazon shipments.
But there's something missing in online newspapers. A broadsheet page organizes information in a way that nothing can match. A friend of mine got two New York Times-sized LCDs, and reads it online in a two-page spread.
I'm sure there will be e-book readers that do everything that paper can do. I'd love to have a tablet with the color, size and resolution of the National Geographic, that I could write on. Not yet.
So we'll just have to suffer 75,000 murders, suicides, and accidental deaths a year.
Correction. I read Wikipedia too quickly. That's 75,000 injuries a year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States#Homicides
The correct numbers (which vary somewhat every year) are 9,000 homicides, 17,000 suicides.
The estimate of 10 gun deaths for every life saved in defensive use (which can't be determined accurately) is from Am J Public Health. 1994 December; 84(12):1982–1984. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1615397/?tool=pmcentrez
At least the right wing wackos on Slashdot aren't as crazy as the right wing wackos on the Wall Street Journal comments pages.
If they did not have a gun, then it would have been a knife. Dont even dare to try and make it sound like that the gun perpetuated the violence.. It was the unstable person that did it.
Unstable wackjobs will do what ever it takes... Ohh look, a wine bottle, that will kill someone nicely.
Doctors who try to fix these victims up, and cops who investigate murders to prosecute them in court, say that's not true.
It's a lot easier to kill somebody on impulse with a gun -- guns are designed to be easy to kill people. If you hit them with a wine bottle, you won't necessarily kill them, and they can defend themselves or run away. If you shoot them from close range, they're most likely to be dead.
Take a fight. Somebody might get hurt. Add a gun. Somebody gets killed.
I remember a cop describing a typical murder: because there was a gun handy, the guy shot his wife. If he didn't have a gun, he would have slugged her. The next day they would have made up, and gone on with their lives. Now he's lost his wife, going to prison for a long term, and two lives are ruined.
If you can kill somebody with a wine bottle if you really want to, then why do you need a gun? Why don't you carry a wine bottle around for protection?
But don't let facts stop you now!
It never did.
In Politics, Sometimes The Facts Don't Matter
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128490874
CONAN: Well, Brendan Nyhan is a health policy researcher at the University of Michigan. He recently published "When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions." That was in the June issue of the Journal of Political Behavior, and he joins us now from the studios of WUOM, Michigan Radio, our member station in Ann Arbor. Nice to have you with us today.
Yes, the stories are out there. But, like yourself, most liberals, and even some moderates, discount all the accounts of self defense. "Oh, big deal, granny killed a rapist. Some moron killed his son last month!" Like - you're keeping score, and one accidental death negates 100 successful self defenses.
Yeah, we're keeping score. Actually, Journal of the American Medical Association and the American Journal of Public Health are keeping score.
There are about 75,000 gun deaths a year, or about 1/4,000 Americans. That outnumbers the cases of self-defense by about 10 to 1. For every granny that defended herself from rape with a gun, there are 10 grannies who were raped by an assailant with a gun.
If you want to reduce those deaths by a substantial amount, reduce the number of guns in circulation.
Of course we can't easily do that any more, after the Supreme Court illegally appointed George W. Bush President, and he packed the court with gun nuts. (Notice the Supreme Court didn't give you a right to carry a gun in their courtroom.)
So we'll just have to suffer 75,000 murders, suicides, and accidental deaths a year.
There are quite a few "Armed American" stories that involve children picking up legally owned firearms to defend themselves and/or their families against violent assaults.
And there are quite a few more stories that involve family members picking up legally owned firearms in a moment of anger to kill another family member, or in a moment of distress to commit suicide.
Their *other* project is a robot capable of cleaning up after a party. That could be even more practical.
They're like Daleks, right? They can't climb stairs.
I don't think PC recycling can be done.
It takes more work to disassemble a PC than it did to assemble it from those parts in the first place. When you're done, there isn't much of a market for old 128MB RAM chips, 30GB hard drives, 500 MHz motherboards, etc.
Is there a viable technology that shreds computers with giant steel rollers and sorts the flakes according to material, and sells aluminum flakes, etc. and sells them? Is there a safe heat process? There must be something, since there are companies that claim to provide certified recycling to meet government regulations. But I can't find one. All I can find is stories of third-world dumping.
It may be safer and better for the environment to dump old PCs in U.S. landfills than to send them to parts unknown for "recycling." We should be able to make landfills that can take appliances with heavy metals and electronic plastics without passing it on to the water supply.
Trust a dumbass journalist to rewrite that to mean that suddenly our electric cars will be powered by Xenon Fluoride compressed by diamond anvils, even though the original research paper doesn't mention anything of the sort!
It wasn't the journalist who wrote the bit about "potential for creating a new class of energetic materials or fuels, an energy storage device, super-oxidizing materials for destroying chemical and biological agents, and high temperature superconductors," it was the university PR office. http://www.wsunews.wsu.edu/pages/Publications.asp?Action=Release&PublicationID=20580 The researcher reviews and approves the press release before the university sends it out.
So you can trust the dumbass scientist to hype his research in the hope of getting more funding.
Yes, but phdcomics missed one important step in the science news cycle: where the researcher himself wracks his brain to come up with some speculative practical application to justify his next grant.
Ideally, every grant should have a section, "How this discovery will help the war against terror (if we get more money)."
Back in the cold war, every grant had a section, "How this discovery will help the war against Communism (if we get more money)."
Then comes the section, "How this discovery will help the war against cancer (if we get more money)."
Since the investigator is supposed to review every press release for accuracy, phdcomics can't blame the university PR office too much.
Not that I have any objection. I'd rather see money spent on useless basic science than on war.
This sounds like the plot to Spies like Us
Sounds like Sleepers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepers_(TV_series)
I don't understand. You want to make videos of lawnmowers killing kittens and puppies? Is that seriously your concern?
Please read posts more carefully before you respond. You asked
is there a legal expert who agrees with the articles premise?
I replied by giving you 2 quotes from the article that agree with the article's premise.
I don't want to make videos of lawnmowers killing kittens and puppies. I don't think such videos exist. U.S. vs. Stevens was about dog fight videos.
Keep in mind, congress acted in part because these animals were killed only to make the video. People were not killing puppies and kittens and recording it incidentally--they were killing kittens and puppies to make a video. The killing was tied to the video industry so unless you think animal cruelty is a speech right then I don't understand the concern about Stevens.
They weren't killing puppies and kittens with lawnmowers at at all, but if they were, there are animal cruelty laws to prosecute them. It's too bad if some puppies and kittens were tortured by some psychopath, but I'm more concerned about the harms suffered by humans. There are lots of problems in the world and the government can't solve every one of them.
You have gotten completely off field from the original problem with Kagan, which is that she believed in finding ways around the protection of the First Amendment to prosecute people for producing pornography. In this country, most of us believe in freedom of expression. Re-interpreting the Constitution to give us less freedom of expression is a bad idea. Kagan also thinks it would be good if the government could stop all pornography. A lot of legal scholars think that's none of the government's business (and I agree).
In addition, Kagan accepted the factual premise that pornography harms people. If you read that article in The Scientist by Milton Diamond that somebody cited, you'd see a good review that of the evidence which concluded that pornography does not harm people.
Wendy Kaminer said, "Judges who casually assume the alleged harms of unpopular speech can't be trusted with First Amendment freedoms." I agree. But Kagan is probably the best we can get. That bothers me more than the non-problem of people killing kittens and puppies with lawnmowers.
Milton Diamond, The Scientist magazine, March 2010. "Porn: Good for Us?"
This opinion piece takes a look at scientific research around pornography.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57169/
Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20–24 and 25–34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. . . .
In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined. . . .
In terms of the use of pornography by sex offenders, the police sometimes suggest that a high percentage of sex offenders are found to have used pornography. This is meaningless . . . .
Studies of men who had seen X-rated movies found that they were significantly more tolerant and accepting of women than those men who didn’t see those movies . . . .
Adapted from “Pornography, Public Acceptance and Sex Related Crime: A Review,” Int J Law Psychiatry, 32:304–14, 2009. http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/2005to2009/2009-pornography-acceptance-crime.html
you've never had the right to libel or slander people, nor have you had the right to commit fraud. Hate speech is similar in the fact that it's not something that advances any meaningful purpose.
Actually you do have a right to libel or slander people. That was the issue in New York Times vs. Sullivan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_vs._Sullivan. You do have a right to libel public figures as long as the public figures can't prove that you did it with "malice." In Sullivan, the Alabama police department was actually wrongly accused.
(Although you might redefine libel. You could say that what would otherwise be libel isn't libel if the subject is a public figure).
The problem is that we've gone too far in being accommodating of hate speech. And I say that as a legitimate civil libertarian.
I'm going to complain to the civil libertarian club and demand they revoke your membership. You're not a civil libertarian at all.
Perhaps I can inject some intelligent ideas into this discussion by recommending that everybody who is interested in understanding free speech read the classic, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. http://bartleby.com/130/2.html
Teachers used to assign Mill during the McCarthy days to show their students how the government was violating the First Amendment.
the document plainly states that Congress shall make no law (1st amendment) and that the right shall not be infringed (2nd amendment).
You'll notice that even the most pro-gun judges have not upheld the First Amendment right to bear arms in their own courtroom.
So, if FN says she is middle of the road, and a libertarian agrees that she is speech-protective, is there a legal expert who agrees with the articles premise?
I guess the computer screen just isn't a good way to read.
“I think the Stevens case is really a very recent smoking gun. Never in any administration would I expect to see a brief like that out of the Justice Department in terms of a frontal assault on the most basic First Amendment principles,” Crosson said. “Even the very conservative Supreme Court tore them a new one. I was just gobsmacked by the positions they took.”
“Judges who casually assume the alleged harms of unpopular speech can't be trusted with First Amendment freedoms,” said Wendy Kaminer, a Boston attorney and early leader in the anti-censorship camp.
The issue that bothered me was scientific literacy. I went to a lecture this week where some science educators complained that people (the people they're trying to teach) don't understand what a scientific fact is.
That's the problem with the guy who wrote TFA. He seems to think that a fact is true if somebody important says so.
He doesn't understand the fundamental scientific process of forming a hypothesis, testing it experimentally, and deciding on the basis of the facts whether your hypothesis was correct.
I never understood why the juries returned those big awards in breast implant cases. I will point out that at the time of the trial, they didn't have all the evidence, and the exhaustive review and authoritative conclusions of the Institutes of Medicine study. Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, wrote several articles and finally a book arguing against the breast implant court decisions, and she probably gave the best explanation.
I wonder if other developed countries, with better science education, have such poor scientific literacy as we do.
I'm interested in strabismus because my father and my sister had it. I've been tested for it myself by optometrists with fancy equipment that required me to orient my eyes in different directions, sort of what TFA describes.
I read that whole article and the links and I couldn't find a single thing to support their claim that 3D video causes strabismus.
It looks like the whole article is based on Mark Pesce telling Wayde Robson that he doesn't have time to be interviewed for 2 weeks.
The journalism that Robson practices is a bit too familiar and colloquial for my tastes. It's one thing to read an article that sounds like a guy giving you the straight dope after a few drinks in a bar. It's another thing to read an article that sounds like a "journalist" who doesn't know what "fact checking" means.
He quotes SRI as saying, “You Cannot Give This To Kids!” but that's fiction. SRI would never use words like that in a scientific report. I don't suppose it occurred to Robson to call SRI and find out if they actually did a report like that. Or to call an optometrist or ophthalmologist.
"Children under seven are at risk of strabismus – period." Another fiction.
Let's go back to basic scientific method. If you actually found children under seven who didn't have strabismus, then used 3D video, and developed strabismus, you could raise the reasonable hypothesis that 3D video caused strabismus. I've never heard of strabismus being acquired like that, but I'm open to new evidence.
Nothing in TFA indicates that anybody found a single child under seven who had strabismus from 3D video. So there's no justification for making that statement. It's all speculation.
Here's the way regulation works. Private business tries something, people hate it. Customers can't get the companies to change their ways because all of the companies are doing it - there's no competitor to jump to. So now the government has to put a stop to it.
Write the bill and send it to your Congress critter.
It's quaint and charming when my friends tell me how writing a thoughtful letter to their elected representatives will accomplish something. Even intelligent people believe that.
Lobbyists know the system better than you or I ever will, they have contacts, but most of all they have money. They can contribute tens of millions of dollars to the Dem and Republican parties, and to individual candidates. That money can make the difference in paying for enough attack TV ads to bring a candidate over the top in a close race.
You, on the other hand, can send no more than a few letters, and if you're really charismatic you may be able to organize a dozen or a hundred of your friends to do the same. Meanwhile, you can't pay the millions of dollars for campaign costs which your elected official really needs.
There was a book that one a political science prize called "The Congressman," written by a former congressman turned political science professor, who said that the first priority for an elected official has to do is get re-elected. Otherwise they won't be an elected official any longer.
No matter how well-meaning, your congressman will either do whatever it takes to get re-elected, or he won't be a congressman. And it takes tens of millions of dollars.
Getting between a congressman and his millionaire contributors is like getting between a grizzly bear and her cub.
The example I understand best is health care reform.
According to the polls, the American public supported a single payer system (like other countries with better health care systems have) by over 50%, in multiple polls. They like Medicare and (by majorities) they wanted Medicare extended to people under 65.
During the Democratic primary, I saw a rundown of campaign contributions from the health care industry. Recalling from memory, it was:
Hillary Clinton $8.8 million
Barak Obama $8.4 million
Dennis Kucinich $40,000 (from the California Nurses Association).
Kucinich supported single payer.
As soon as Obama got into office, he broke his promise to support a single payer system. He came up with a compromise (public option), then a compromise of that compromise, and finally threw government-funded health care under the bus. The current plan is the same private insurance system, with subsidies for the private insurance industry to prevent it from collapsing immediately.
All of the touching letters to Obama didn't make any difference. He followed the interests of his financial contributors rather than the interests of the people who elected him. Now we're paying twice as much for health care as the next most expensive country, for care that isn't even always as good. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/HealthCare/wireStory?id=10987822 http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Content/Publications/Fund-Reports/2010/Jun/Mirror-Mirror-Update.aspx
The best explanation I've seen for this was at Bill Moyer's Journal. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12182009/watch.html Moyers said that Obama never *wanted* a meaningful reform. He never *wanted* single payer. He *wanted* to cut a deal with the insurance industry.
The FBI backlog is overwhelming, as it is for State labs in most cities. DNA evidence collected at a crime scene is likely not to be analyzed before the trial date.
Doesn't New York City have a lot of DNA forensic equipment left over from testing all the body parts in 9/11?
New York City doesn't have the money to do this, anyhow. The cost would be exorbitant, even with a balanced budget.
Can't they get federal funds to help them?
As I said, there are many cases at http://deathpenaltyinfo.org/
As I said, there are some people who will never accept facts they don't agree with, no matter how strong the evidence.
As you may gather, I think you are one of them.
I've said everything I have to say to you on this subject.
If you would like to know more about what I believe, I invite you to re-read my earlier posts more carefully.
Oh, really? Yet, that is exactly what is implied by your posts.
The implication of my posts is in your mind. It wasn't in my posts. If you see that implication, that's your problem with reading comprehension.
Name them.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/executed-possibly-innocent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Todd_Willingham is the best-documented
False dichotomy.
I said that my first objection to capital punishment is that innocent people are executed. You accused me of believing that the life of a murderer is worth more than the lives of his victims. How do you go from my statements to your conclusion?
First a guy loses his children in a fire (at least sometimes through no fault of his own). Then, on top of that tragedy (and losing your child is the worst tragedy in the world) the district attorney falsely accuses him of murder, prosecutes him, gets a stupid jury to convict him, and executes an innocent man for arson.
Appeal to fear, appeal to emotion, and hypothetical worst case scenario which is a form of cherry picking.
I'm afraid and outraged that innocent people have been executed. What's wrong with an appeal to fear and emotion? Prosecutors do it all the time to get convictions in those same cases. It's not hypothetical; many such cases have been documented with evidence stronger than the original conviction. The worst case happens frequently. If citing the cases with the strongest evidence is cherry picking, then there's nothing wrong with cherry picking.
You sound like someone who read a popular book on "How to Argue." I recommend that, after you graduate high school, you take a college freshman English course. If you've already taken a college freshman English course, I recommend that you demand your money back. If you're home schooled, there may be no hope.
Alternately, you could become a Tea Bagger and run for Congress. In that case, your inability to distinguish between fact an opinion, and your lack of understanding of logic and argument, will not be a problem and may even be an advantage.
The rest of your post is based on those false premises and outright lies.
You are unable to cite a false premise or lie, because there are none. As I say, you don't seem to understand what a fact is. When you disagree with someone, you just throw out a lot of inflammatory language.
And, even if he doesn't face the death penalty, he would still prosecuted.
Or, do you suggest that we not prosecute anyone, ever, because they might be innocent?
I suggest that we not execute anyone, ever, because they might be innocent. They have been innocent, many times.
Yeah, I read about the UK failure in the New Scientist and elsewhere.
One thing missing in TFA: Data.
How many people were actually arrested in East Orange, NJ as a result of those cameras? If the cops had a good example, they would give it to the writer.
Another thing missing: Any meaningful scientific evaluation.
After $1.4 million, they should have some kind of evaluation to see whether they're improving the crime rate or wasting the money.