You're correct re: attribution- I was thinking of plagiarism. Copyright doesn't care about style or confusion, but they can definitely speak to the effect on the author's ability to exploit the original work. Rowling has an exclusive right to create derivative works- imitating the style used in the series and its associated works (Rowling has previously published in-world guidebook style works) undercuts Rowling's ability to profit from the work in a way that a guide book written using a different style would not.
Given that neither of us have read the lexicon (as it is not published) we are left to believe one side or the other.
The judge got to read it. His ruling mentioned specifically that there were lengthy verbatim excerpts. The combination of this with the practice of poor footnoting/attribution with the imitation of Rowling's style made the Lexicon appear to be a derivative work rather than a text incorporating passages in a way acceptable under fair use.
Fair use necessitates attribution- making it clear when text is being quoted or paraphrased, and when new material is being added by the author. One of the points cited by the judge was the sloppy attribution and long quotes. By imitating Rowling's style while including long, unattributed portions of her work the authors of the Lexicon are making it unclear where her text ends and theirs begins, making their work appear to be a new composite work derived from Rowlings text rather than a work that comments on, satirizes, etc. Rowlings material.
The gist of the decision seems to be that if the Lexicon did a better job of clearly identifying what is Rowling's work and what is their own. That makes it hard to argue that they are commenting on or sampling Rowling's test in a manner compatible with fair use. Imitating Rowling's style is part of what creates the confusion.
I would say that the villain in each movie reflects the type of character most likely to be demonized by the administration. Vampires are ancient, aristocratic white people who suck the life from the young and vivacious- in other words, the dessicated plutocrats that liberals blame for worldly ills. Zombies are poorly dressed unintelligent masses that want to eat the brains of the small number of intelligent protagonists who had the 'good sense' not to become zombies- in other words, the masses of the urban poor who are leeching off of a small number of productive citizens. Zombies are, to a conservative, just brain welfare queens.
Look at the financial crisis: was it the fault of a few Wall Street fat cats getting greedy (Dem view), or financially unfit masses dragging down the economy by not paying their bills (Republican view)?
Socialists I would think would be associated with 1980's teen films and episodes of Scooby Doo. The real villain is always a real estate developer interested in making a public good (teen center) into private property.
Libertarians would be bondage torture movies like Saw or Hostel. The enemy wants to tie you down and dismember you, just like the state wants to restrict your freedom and steal your property.
is that we begin right away with the baseless speculation about which of many conspiracies is responsible for this omission. God forbid someone email someone at Google, or wait until they make a blog post or something.
I don't think that schools are capable of substituting for good parenting, or should be in that position. I do think that schools are capable of providing additional structured experiences for students that are beneficial whether or not the kid is getting an informal version of the same at home- in other words, no one suffers because these lessons are being taught in school. Furthermore, society as a whole has a stake in seeing that these things are taught, just as they have a stake in seeing that young people are capable of making a living for themselves through work. Basic citizenship is simply too important to society for us to permit it to be left up to chance whether a student learns it. I guess the crux of it is that I can't particularly see a downside to this for students; the burden that is being added to them in terms of investment of time is very modest in comparison to the scope of their education. It can provide substantial benefit to certain students (my wife used to be a volunteer coordinator for a senior center; she encountered quite a few students who had significant positive changes in their life because of the experience of working with seniors, even if they did so unwillingly initially), and at worse it's a very modest investment of time that doesn't pay off.
The education system is not just a vocational training program. It should be preparing people for the fact that they will be citizens of a society- not workers, not taxpayers, not consumers, but citizens. Personal responsibility, cooperation, good judgment, discipline, and the skills of learning are realistically much more important in the long term to convey to students at the high school or junior high level than any particular job skill. The community service that kids at a high school level are going to be doing is not going to be digging ditches for the county highway commission so that the state gets some free labor. These kids are probably going to be running activities at senior centers, tutoring underprivileged elementary school kids, sorting cans at a food bank, that sort of thing. The same sort of volunteer work that high-performing private schools already require their students to do, as part of an attempt at giving kids a more complete education. This kind of work is not materially or economically particularly significant. But it creates opportunities for students to see parts of their community they might otherwise be shielded from, to make positive connections with adults, or to have some early experience of being responsible for what they do and how they do it.
Every kid takes some kind of civics or government course, right? This is the field trip. Go out into your community and see how other people live, and how lives are affected concretely by abstract policy decisions. See both the choices and the circumstances that leave people needing the help of their government or a non-profit agency. Help a kid in your own community read or solve a math problem, and see how tiny decisions have giant impacts in the life of children. Decide if you like working indoors in an office or outside in the weather. See who is in your own community trying to make things better, and the challenges that they have to tackle. Decide that government could help them better, or that government is a farce and we could do better without it. Whatever. It puts students out in the community. It helps them understand how the world around them works, and what their place in it might be. It helps them develop some personal skills that they will need in the world, whatever they do, and that they are much more likely to concretely use than any particular chapter of a history book or math skill.
I understand your point- it is a mistake to take a sanitized view of prostitution as it currently exists. People are tricked, manipulated and forced into prostitution, and the continuing abuse keeps them in place. That sucks, and it's unlikely that even the best legalization scheme could eliminate all of that. But I think that there's a harm management issue here: how do we minimize or reduce the harm that flows from the sex trade, even if we can't eliminate it entirely?
You mention that the sex trade should be monitored carefully, and I agree. However, I think that the way to ensure the maximum possible monitoring is to make the trade legal. There's a disincentive right now for sex trade workers to cooperate with police or other possible sources of monitoring because they are always at risk for arrest or other harassment. I think at the very least that legalizing prostitution would not result in more abuse of the type you are describing, could likely result in less, and would definitely have an improved outcome in terms of public health, the safety of at least a subset of people in the sex trade, the use of police resources, and tax revenue. That to me is a big enough gain that it has to be seriously considered, even if we're uncomfortable with the idea of being seen as condoning an activity that may hide abuses.
The range of motion of a tendon should be very small- the tendon's job is to keep the joint connected and stable, so it shouldn't ever be intentionally moved past its natural range of motion. Ankle and other joint sprains and joint dislocation are all the result of the tendon being moved past its normal range of motion (though not being torn or snapped)- the tendon is over extended, damaging it, and the joint moves in an unnatural way, causing pain and possibly damage to the joint. Once you have had one of these injuries, your risk for recurrence goes way up, because once the tendon is stretched past its initial range, it never goes back to the old tightness. That's why rehab for sprains and dislocations is to strengthen the muscles around the joint so that they can keep the joint stable. There really isn't such a thing as the tendon being 'tight' or 'loose' in the way a muscle is- warming up or stretching does little or nothing to change how the tendon performs, and pre-activity stretches are not aimed at affecting your tendons.
Think of it this way: tendons are short, thick, strong plastic bands. Muscles are long rubber bands. Tendons stretch a little, but get stuck at their stretched length if they are overstretched. Muscles being stretched past their natural length go back to their rest length, but is more likely to tear if they hasn't been warmed and gradually moved through its range of motion.
I'm sorry, but if you think that anyone running for president under the banner of one of the major parties in America is a socialist, you're an idiot. Republicans picked up on this bizarre canard that Obama was a "wealth redistributing socialist" based on an out of context, off hand remark that Obama made to Joe the Plant- I mean Joe the Plumber. The core of the accusation leveled against Obama has to do with his tax plan, which would leave taxes on the wealthiest Americans at less than half of what they were under that arch-Marxist, Dwight Eisenhower. Obama's plan would tax the wealthiest bracket less than Richard Nixon did. It would restore tax levels to the pre-Bush tax cut era- you know, the levels of taxation that John McCain endorsed when he voted against the Bush tax cuts the first time around.
Both candidates advocated building a tax-funded health care system that built on top of the existing insurance and health care industry instead of replacing it with a government-directed system.
Both candidates voted for the government's massive intervention in the economy- the biggest nationalization of an industry in American history, but in American we decline to call it a nationalization and call it a "bail out".
Both candidates advocated the government using public funds to invest in the development of alternative energy and job creation.
Both candidates were against the privatization of social security- or at least in McCain's, had adopted that position by the time the economic crisis was in full swing.
The fact of the matter is that there is no real left wing in American politics. The Democratic party is to the left of the Republicans, but they still are essentially operating within a framework that would be called center-right in any other democracy in the world. Both parties are planning on maintaining massive government spending on entitlement programs and economic stimulus. Both parties want to cut taxes for certain segments of society. They differ in where they want to target aide and tax breaks, and, at least in the case of these candidates, in their approach to issues of international relations. Every economic plan trotted out by either major party during the entire election was a slight variation on the same theme.
But yeah, Obama's a Marxist. Sarah Palin said so, and she should know- she can see the giant floating head of Vladimir Putin from her back yard.
If underage prostitution or sex slavery is increased under a legalized prostitution regime, I think that is primarily evidence of inadequate regulation and inspection. You designate licensed premises for prostitution; anything going on outside of these places is breaking the law. Anyone prostitute in a licensed facility is subject to random inspection to ensure that their paperwork (age verification, clean STD screen), in which they're talked to privately away from management to ensure that they aren't there against their will. Any violation results in the whole facility losing a license. You require criminal background checks to get a license to run a brothel. Inspections and enforcement are paid for out of the taxes and license fees paid by brothels and prostitutes. Legal prostitution in the Netherlands is missing several of these steps as mandatory features, and has a patchwork of local regulations that may make it easier to hide offenses.
The expectation isn't that the present-day crop of pimps will suddenly become saints; the expectation is that you put a lot of them out of the business because they can't meet the licensing requirements, and replace them with legitimate business people who realize that sex sells, and that with legal protections can be a profitable business in a lot of areas. Right now prostitutes have no choice in who they work for; given a choice, I doubt that most would work for the pimps that are currently in business if given a choice. The key is balancing licensing and fees in such a way that you don't create an incentive to go around the legal system. That's a balancing act, but it at least creates an opportunity to improve the current situation and manage the harm that can be created by the sex trade.
Keeping prostitution illegal makes it easier and more likely that prostitutes will be victimized. Currently, prostitutes must rely on pimps for a number of things. They ensure that clients pay (because prostitutes can't make use of the civil legal system to settle bills), they may protect prostitutes from violent clients (because prostitutes can't go to the cops), etc. Who is going to work for an abusive pimp who takes an arbitrary cut from their wages if there are legal, regulated options? The question is not whether legalizing prostitution would eliminate all of its ills, but whether it would improve the situation and reduce the harm done to society. Deregulating immorality may not work, but historically failed prohibition policies seem to create more harm than their alternative.
The elections that Thaksin's party and their successors won were crooked- just like every Thai election before them. However, international monitors claimed that the election was marked by much lower levels of overt corruption than was seen in other Thai elections. Now as a result of the repeated election of Thaksin and his allies by members of the aristocracy, PAD is trying to reduce the electoral representation of rural voters.
The right ring spent the entire 1970's and 80's apologizing for vicious regimes throughout the third world based on the claim that they were "keeping order" or "fighting communism". Extremists on both sides are guilty of being apologists for the cruel practices of regimes that embrace their pet causes. To attribute approval for this kind of censorship to the American left on the whole is ridiculous. Specific elements within the right and the left are both responsible for attempts at curtailing free expression (hate speech laws vs. obscenity laws, for instance), and in general the right ring has a much poorer reputation for resisting attempts at censorship by the powers that be.
On paper maybe. In practice, the Thai monarchy is able to exert much more significant influence over politics in Thailand than the British monarch. While his 'constitutional' powers are very limited, he has a lot of support in the military and the aristocracy. A lot of observers of Thai politics would tell you that Thaksin Shinawatra lost his job first and foremost because he was challenging certain prerogatives traditionally reserved to the king instead of the elected government. Whenever a democratically elected government becomes 'too radical'- that is to say, when it starts questioning some of the fundamental assumptions about the structure of the constitutional monarchy or the privileges of the aristocracy- it finds itself the victim of a military coup or a "popular" uprising, like the PAD protests that have been going on for the last several months. PAD is campaigning to reduce the elected representation of the rural population in Thailand, essentially on the grounds that they keep voting for the wrong party. The Queen recently made an appearance at the funeral of a PAD protester killed in clashes with police, which some people hold essentially amounts to the monarchy giving its blessing to street protests organized by some very wealthy Thais (they've threatened a run on the banking system if their demands aren't met) seeking to depose a government that has been popularly elected several times over now.
MMOs don't typically do that anymore because they've discovered that having serious consequences for death are very unpopular with the majority of players. It also creates additional support issues for the company: in WoW if you get disconnected and beaten to death as a result, it's a bummer but not a huge issue. If you have major consequences for death, every time a glitch results in death you have hundreds of players wining to a GM.
The headline this was posted with is weapons-grade stupid. Nowhere in the GENI plans (which have been being formulated by academics over the last several years) is there any indication that GENI should "replace" the current Internet. There are a few people involved in GENI who think that the Internet of the future might look a bit like GENI in some respects, but a much more likely outcome is that future Internet innovations will emerge from experiments carried out with GENI. GENI will be a very sophisticated research platform that allows researchers to carve up the research network into reasonably isolated slices via virtualization so that experiments into new protocols, switch architectures, etc. can be run on a full-speed network in parallel with one another without interfering. Access to GENI, much like Internet2, will essentially be restricted to researchers running experiments and essentially limited to interconnects between major research universities.
Nowhere is there any suggestion that GENI will or should: * replace the existing internet * develop protocols to remove anonymity from the internet * give control of the internet to any particular government
It's a research platform for academics who think that the field of networking could benefit from large-scale research projects that are more ambitious and forward-looking than the sort of thing that can be reasonably carried out by the R&D departments of large tech corporations. Full stop. There is a ton of information available about the project from their websites, and in papers that have been published over the last several years.
Your spine is probably a little over-sensitive. While this is just now being published online, serious scholars and armchair theologians alike have known about the contents of this book for a long, long time. And you're way off base about the Catholics; I would be very, very surprised if some of the scholars involved in this project weren't also Catholic clergy. While Catholics have some rather inflexible dogmas regarding belief and scripture, they also have a very active scholastic tradition that is interested in exactly these sorts of issues. Plus, the RCC is way too busy training Jesuit ninjas to assassinate Dan Brown to bother with censoring this sort of thing (not because he stumbled upon the secret truth of the Vatican, but because he writes unreadable drivel that results in people harassing the staff at Saint-Sulpice).
Biblical literalists have been ignoring and rationalizing away evidence like this since the early 20th Century; nothing new for them here. Muslims have always believed that Christianity was a valid revelation from Allah, but that the Christians mixed up and failed to preserve the true teachings and as such are superseded by Islam- publishing an early draft of the bible does nothing to change that.
The extremists among the Iraqi insurgency and other terrorist groups are devoted to the idea of pushing the broader Islamic world into open war with the West. They would probably prefer that the winner of the election prolong the occupation so that they can continue to claim to be fighting against Western aggression and collaborators, rather than just killing their own people. The last thing that the kookiest of the terror groups want is a president who is interested in multi-lateral diplomatic settlements to points of conflict between Muslim countries and the US. A diplomatic resolution to conflicts over Iran's nuclear program, for instance, amounts to a disappointing fizzle if you're interested in widening the rift. An invasion and war, on the other hand, would push moderates in Iran into the arms of Islamic radicals that promise to defend them.
It's certainly not used in NHL ice hockey. There used to be a "feature" in one of the network broadcasts of hockey games where they would add a "glow" around the puck to make it easier to follow on screen- this was done not using a tracker inside the puck, but was painted on digitally during the broadcast delay. Were a tracker to be put in the puck, the most significant use of it would be in deciding close goals where it isn't clear if the puck is over the line completely or not. No such technology is used in current NHL games. Making a resilient enough tracker to survive a slap shot would be a pretty significant challenge, though in hockey the consistency of the puck is not quite as significant as in cricket and other sports.
The comparison that you're making ignores a lot of other differences between the state of the world when Einstein was publishing and today. Yes, standards for review and inclusion in an academic journal are higher now. But a significant portion of that is because other mechanisms now exist for disseminating early results and new research that is being done. In Einstein's day, how did someone doing research in California find out about new research in Germany or England? He waited for the paper to be accepted by a journal, waited for the journal to be printed, waited for the edition to be shipped across the ocean, and then finally read it in a journal. By the time a paper is published in a journal these days, it has been available on the web as a pre-publication almost since the day it was written, has likely been presented at multiple conferences attended by international researchers (since travel is so much cheaper and faster these days), and the results have been flogged at talks and seminars that the author was invited to present at multiple institutions. The journal is simply serving a different role these days: dissemination is already occurring through new channels, so the journal instead acts primarily as a stamp of quality control and approval. Compared to Einstein's day, there are many more channels for early or controversial work to be disseminated, and the quality of results published in journals is likely higher because the journals no longer need to be as concerned with publishing immature results in order to give them exposure.
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You're correct re: attribution- I was thinking of plagiarism. Copyright doesn't care about style or confusion, but they can definitely speak to the effect on the author's ability to exploit the original work. Rowling has an exclusive right to create derivative works- imitating the style used in the series and its associated works (Rowling has previously published in-world guidebook style works) undercuts Rowling's ability to profit from the work in a way that a guide book written using a different style would not.
Given that neither of us have read the lexicon (as it is not published) we are left to believe one side or the other.
The judge got to read it. His ruling mentioned specifically that there were lengthy verbatim excerpts. The combination of this with the practice of poor footnoting/attribution with the imitation of Rowling's style made the Lexicon appear to be a derivative work rather than a text incorporating passages in a way acceptable under fair use.
Fair use necessitates attribution- making it clear when text is being quoted or paraphrased, and when new material is being added by the author. One of the points cited by the judge was the sloppy attribution and long quotes. By imitating Rowling's style while including long, unattributed portions of her work the authors of the Lexicon are making it unclear where her text ends and theirs begins, making their work appear to be a new composite work derived from Rowlings text rather than a work that comments on, satirizes, etc. Rowlings material.
The gist of the decision seems to be that if the Lexicon did a better job of clearly identifying what is Rowling's work and what is their own. That makes it hard to argue that they are commenting on or sampling Rowling's test in a manner compatible with fair use. Imitating Rowling's style is part of what creates the confusion.
I would say that the villain in each movie reflects the type of character most likely to be demonized by the administration. Vampires are ancient, aristocratic white people who suck the life from the young and vivacious- in other words, the dessicated plutocrats that liberals blame for worldly ills. Zombies are poorly dressed unintelligent masses that want to eat the brains of the small number of intelligent protagonists who had the 'good sense' not to become zombies- in other words, the masses of the urban poor who are leeching off of a small number of productive citizens. Zombies are, to a conservative, just brain welfare queens.
Look at the financial crisis: was it the fault of a few Wall Street fat cats getting greedy (Dem view), or financially unfit masses dragging down the economy by not paying their bills (Republican view)?
Socialists I would think would be associated with 1980's teen films and episodes of Scooby Doo. The real villain is always a real estate developer interested in making a public good (teen center) into private property.
Libertarians would be bondage torture movies like Saw or Hostel. The enemy wants to tie you down and dismember you, just like the state wants to restrict your freedom and steal your property.
is that we begin right away with the baseless speculation about which of many conspiracies is responsible for this omission. God forbid someone email someone at Google, or wait until they make a blog post or something.
I don't think that schools are capable of substituting for good parenting, or should be in that position. I do think that schools are capable of providing additional structured experiences for students that are beneficial whether or not the kid is getting an informal version of the same at home- in other words, no one suffers because these lessons are being taught in school. Furthermore, society as a whole has a stake in seeing that these things are taught, just as they have a stake in seeing that young people are capable of making a living for themselves through work. Basic citizenship is simply too important to society for us to permit it to be left up to chance whether a student learns it. I guess the crux of it is that I can't particularly see a downside to this for students; the burden that is being added to them in terms of investment of time is very modest in comparison to the scope of their education. It can provide substantial benefit to certain students (my wife used to be a volunteer coordinator for a senior center; she encountered quite a few students who had significant positive changes in their life because of the experience of working with seniors, even if they did so unwillingly initially), and at worse it's a very modest investment of time that doesn't pay off.
The education system is not just a vocational training program. It should be preparing people for the fact that they will be citizens of a society- not workers, not taxpayers, not consumers, but citizens. Personal responsibility, cooperation, good judgment, discipline, and the skills of learning are realistically much more important in the long term to convey to students at the high school or junior high level than any particular job skill. The community service that kids at a high school level are going to be doing is not going to be digging ditches for the county highway commission so that the state gets some free labor. These kids are probably going to be running activities at senior centers, tutoring underprivileged elementary school kids, sorting cans at a food bank, that sort of thing. The same sort of volunteer work that high-performing private schools already require their students to do, as part of an attempt at giving kids a more complete education. This kind of work is not materially or economically particularly significant. But it creates opportunities for students to see parts of their community they might otherwise be shielded from, to make positive connections with adults, or to have some early experience of being responsible for what they do and how they do it.
Every kid takes some kind of civics or government course, right? This is the field trip. Go out into your community and see how other people live, and how lives are affected concretely by abstract policy decisions. See both the choices and the circumstances that leave people needing the help of their government or a non-profit agency. Help a kid in your own community read or solve a math problem, and see how tiny decisions have giant impacts in the life of children. Decide if you like working indoors in an office or outside in the weather. See who is in your own community trying to make things better, and the challenges that they have to tackle. Decide that government could help them better, or that government is a farce and we could do better without it. Whatever. It puts students out in the community. It helps them understand how the world around them works, and what their place in it might be. It helps them develop some personal skills that they will need in the world, whatever they do, and that they are much more likely to concretely use than any particular chapter of a history book or math skill.
I understand your point- it is a mistake to take a sanitized view of prostitution as it currently exists. People are tricked, manipulated and forced into prostitution, and the continuing abuse keeps them in place. That sucks, and it's unlikely that even the best legalization scheme could eliminate all of that. But I think that there's a harm management issue here: how do we minimize or reduce the harm that flows from the sex trade, even if we can't eliminate it entirely?
You mention that the sex trade should be monitored carefully, and I agree. However, I think that the way to ensure the maximum possible monitoring is to make the trade legal. There's a disincentive right now for sex trade workers to cooperate with police or other possible sources of monitoring because they are always at risk for arrest or other harassment. I think at the very least that legalizing prostitution would not result in more abuse of the type you are describing, could likely result in less, and would definitely have an improved outcome in terms of public health, the safety of at least a subset of people in the sex trade, the use of police resources, and tax revenue. That to me is a big enough gain that it has to be seriously considered, even if we're uncomfortable with the idea of being seen as condoning an activity that may hide abuses.
The range of motion of a tendon should be very small- the tendon's job is to keep the joint connected and stable, so it shouldn't ever be intentionally moved past its natural range of motion. Ankle and other joint sprains and joint dislocation are all the result of the tendon being moved past its normal range of motion (though not being torn or snapped)- the tendon is over extended, damaging it, and the joint moves in an unnatural way, causing pain and possibly damage to the joint. Once you have had one of these injuries, your risk for recurrence goes way up, because once the tendon is stretched past its initial range, it never goes back to the old tightness. That's why rehab for sprains and dislocations is to strengthen the muscles around the joint so that they can keep the joint stable. There really isn't such a thing as the tendon being 'tight' or 'loose' in the way a muscle is- warming up or stretching does little or nothing to change how the tendon performs, and pre-activity stretches are not aimed at affecting your tendons.
Think of it this way: tendons are short, thick, strong plastic bands. Muscles are long rubber bands. Tendons stretch a little, but get stuck at their stretched length if they are overstretched. Muscles being stretched past their natural length go back to their rest length, but is more likely to tear if they hasn't been warmed and gradually moved through its range of motion.
I'm sorry, but if you think that anyone running for president under the banner of one of the major parties in America is a socialist, you're an idiot. Republicans picked up on this bizarre canard that Obama was a "wealth redistributing socialist" based on an out of context, off hand remark that Obama made to Joe the Plant- I mean Joe the Plumber. The core of the accusation leveled against Obama has to do with his tax plan, which would leave taxes on the wealthiest Americans at less than half of what they were under that arch-Marxist, Dwight Eisenhower. Obama's plan would tax the wealthiest bracket less than Richard Nixon did. It would restore tax levels to the pre-Bush tax cut era- you know, the levels of taxation that John McCain endorsed when he voted against the Bush tax cuts the first time around.
The fact of the matter is that there is no real left wing in American politics. The Democratic party is to the left of the Republicans, but they still are essentially operating within a framework that would be called center-right in any other democracy in the world. Both parties are planning on maintaining massive government spending on entitlement programs and economic stimulus. Both parties want to cut taxes for certain segments of society. They differ in where they want to target aide and tax breaks, and, at least in the case of these candidates, in their approach to issues of international relations. Every economic plan trotted out by either major party during the entire election was a slight variation on the same theme.
But yeah, Obama's a Marxist. Sarah Palin said so, and she should know- she can see the giant floating head of Vladimir Putin from her back yard.
If underage prostitution or sex slavery is increased under a legalized prostitution regime, I think that is primarily evidence of inadequate regulation and inspection. You designate licensed premises for prostitution; anything going on outside of these places is breaking the law. Anyone prostitute in a licensed facility is subject to random inspection to ensure that their paperwork (age verification, clean STD screen), in which they're talked to privately away from management to ensure that they aren't there against their will. Any violation results in the whole facility losing a license. You require criminal background checks to get a license to run a brothel. Inspections and enforcement are paid for out of the taxes and license fees paid by brothels and prostitutes. Legal prostitution in the Netherlands is missing several of these steps as mandatory features, and has a patchwork of local regulations that may make it easier to hide offenses.
The expectation isn't that the present-day crop of pimps will suddenly become saints; the expectation is that you put a lot of them out of the business because they can't meet the licensing requirements, and replace them with legitimate business people who realize that sex sells, and that with legal protections can be a profitable business in a lot of areas. Right now prostitutes have no choice in who they work for; given a choice, I doubt that most would work for the pimps that are currently in business if given a choice. The key is balancing licensing and fees in such a way that you don't create an incentive to go around the legal system. That's a balancing act, but it at least creates an opportunity to improve the current situation and manage the harm that can be created by the sex trade.
Keeping prostitution illegal makes it easier and more likely that prostitutes will be victimized. Currently, prostitutes must rely on pimps for a number of things. They ensure that clients pay (because prostitutes can't make use of the civil legal system to settle bills), they may protect prostitutes from violent clients (because prostitutes can't go to the cops), etc. Who is going to work for an abusive pimp who takes an arbitrary cut from their wages if there are legal, regulated options? The question is not whether legalizing prostitution would eliminate all of its ills, but whether it would improve the situation and reduce the harm done to society. Deregulating immorality may not work, but historically failed prohibition policies seem to create more harm than their alternative.
The elections that Thaksin's party and their successors won were crooked- just like every Thai election before them. However, international monitors claimed that the election was marked by much lower levels of overt corruption than was seen in other Thai elections. Now as a result of the repeated election of Thaksin and his allies by members of the aristocracy, PAD is trying to reduce the electoral representation of rural voters.
The right ring spent the entire 1970's and 80's apologizing for vicious regimes throughout the third world based on the claim that they were "keeping order" or "fighting communism". Extremists on both sides are guilty of being apologists for the cruel practices of regimes that embrace their pet causes. To attribute approval for this kind of censorship to the American left on the whole is ridiculous. Specific elements within the right and the left are both responsible for attempts at curtailing free expression (hate speech laws vs. obscenity laws, for instance), and in general the right ring has a much poorer reputation for resisting attempts at censorship by the powers that be.
On paper maybe. In practice, the Thai monarchy is able to exert much more significant influence over politics in Thailand than the British monarch. While his 'constitutional' powers are very limited, he has a lot of support in the military and the aristocracy. A lot of observers of Thai politics would tell you that Thaksin Shinawatra lost his job first and foremost because he was challenging certain prerogatives traditionally reserved to the king instead of the elected government. Whenever a democratically elected government becomes 'too radical'- that is to say, when it starts questioning some of the fundamental assumptions about the structure of the constitutional monarchy or the privileges of the aristocracy- it finds itself the victim of a military coup or a "popular" uprising, like the PAD protests that have been going on for the last several months. PAD is campaigning to reduce the elected representation of the rural population in Thailand, essentially on the grounds that they keep voting for the wrong party. The Queen recently made an appearance at the funeral of a PAD protester killed in clashes with police, which some people hold essentially amounts to the monarchy giving its blessing to street protests organized by some very wealthy Thais (they've threatened a run on the banking system if their demands aren't met) seeking to depose a government that has been popularly elected several times over now.
MMOs don't typically do that anymore because they've discovered that having serious consequences for death are very unpopular with the majority of players. It also creates additional support issues for the company: in WoW if you get disconnected and beaten to death as a result, it's a bummer but not a huge issue. If you have major consequences for death, every time a glitch results in death you have hundreds of players wining to a GM.
Since you get XP for PvP, I'm guessing you would eventually level out of the tier just by beating on similar or lower level players in your tier.
You think you were confused? I was picturing robotic 60 Minutes anchors duking it out in front of the Opera House...
The headline this was posted with is weapons-grade stupid. Nowhere in the GENI plans (which have been being formulated by academics over the last several years) is there any indication that GENI should "replace" the current Internet. There are a few people involved in GENI who think that the Internet of the future might look a bit like GENI in some respects, but a much more likely outcome is that future Internet innovations will emerge from experiments carried out with GENI. GENI will be a very sophisticated research platform that allows researchers to carve up the research network into reasonably isolated slices via virtualization so that experiments into new protocols, switch architectures, etc. can be run on a full-speed network in parallel with one another without interfering. Access to GENI, much like Internet2, will essentially be restricted to researchers running experiments and essentially limited to interconnects between major research universities.
Nowhere is there any suggestion that GENI will or should:
* replace the existing internet
* develop protocols to remove anonymity from the internet
* give control of the internet to any particular government
It's a research platform for academics who think that the field of networking could benefit from large-scale research projects that are more ambitious and forward-looking than the sort of thing that can be reasonably carried out by the R&D departments of large tech corporations. Full stop. There is a ton of information available about the project from their websites, and in papers that have been published over the last several years.
Your spine is probably a little over-sensitive. While this is just now being published online, serious scholars and armchair theologians alike have known about the contents of this book for a long, long time. And you're way off base about the Catholics; I would be very, very surprised if some of the scholars involved in this project weren't also Catholic clergy. While Catholics have some rather inflexible dogmas regarding belief and scripture, they also have a very active scholastic tradition that is interested in exactly these sorts of issues. Plus, the RCC is way too busy training Jesuit ninjas to assassinate Dan Brown to bother with censoring this sort of thing (not because he stumbled upon the secret truth of the Vatican, but because he writes unreadable drivel that results in people harassing the staff at Saint-Sulpice).
Biblical literalists have been ignoring and rationalizing away evidence like this since the early 20th Century; nothing new for them here. Muslims have always believed that Christianity was a valid revelation from Allah, but that the Christians mixed up and failed to preserve the true teachings and as such are superseded by Islam- publishing an early draft of the bible does nothing to change that.
The extremists among the Iraqi insurgency and other terrorist groups are devoted to the idea of pushing the broader Islamic world into open war with the West. They would probably prefer that the winner of the election prolong the occupation so that they can continue to claim to be fighting against Western aggression and collaborators, rather than just killing their own people. The last thing that the kookiest of the terror groups want is a president who is interested in multi-lateral diplomatic settlements to points of conflict between Muslim countries and the US. A diplomatic resolution to conflicts over Iran's nuclear program, for instance, amounts to a disappointing fizzle if you're interested in widening the rift. An invasion and war, on the other hand, would push moderates in Iran into the arms of Islamic radicals that promise to defend them.
It's certainly not used in NHL ice hockey. There used to be a "feature" in one of the network broadcasts of hockey games where they would add a "glow" around the puck to make it easier to follow on screen- this was done not using a tracker inside the puck, but was painted on digitally during the broadcast delay. Were a tracker to be put in the puck, the most significant use of it would be in deciding close goals where it isn't clear if the puck is over the line completely or not. No such technology is used in current NHL games. Making a resilient enough tracker to survive a slap shot would be a pretty significant challenge, though in hockey the consistency of the puck is not quite as significant as in cricket and other sports.
Nearly every piece of C code that I've ever seen has contained some hidden malicious (or at least willfully stupid) behavior.
The comparison that you're making ignores a lot of other differences between the state of the world when Einstein was publishing and today. Yes, standards for review and inclusion in an academic journal are higher now. But a significant portion of that is because other mechanisms now exist for disseminating early results and new research that is being done. In Einstein's day, how did someone doing research in California find out about new research in Germany or England? He waited for the paper to be accepted by a journal, waited for the journal to be printed, waited for the edition to be shipped across the ocean, and then finally read it in a journal. By the time a paper is published in a journal these days, it has been available on the web as a pre-publication almost since the day it was written, has likely been presented at multiple conferences attended by international researchers (since travel is so much cheaper and faster these days), and the results have been flogged at talks and seminars that the author was invited to present at multiple institutions. The journal is simply serving a different role these days: dissemination is already occurring through new channels, so the journal instead acts primarily as a stamp of quality control and approval. Compared to Einstein's day, there are many more channels for early or controversial work to be disseminated, and the quality of results published in journals is likely higher because the journals no longer need to be as concerned with publishing immature results in order to give them exposure.
Uninformed readers voting on something is to peer review what being beaten to death by apes is to getting a good massage.