True, but this information is not allowed to be used to keep an offender from using public facilities.
You mean like a playground? Betcha it is. Heck, there are playgrounds where it's illegal for ANY adult without a child to be. These guys generally are forbidden to have contact with minors anyway. And in any event, the sites in question, say MySpace, aren't public in the sense of being government-run and are quite free to decide that they'd prefer their site be free of pedophiles. That's why the sex offender registry exists, for communities to know who's an offender and decide they'd rather not have their company.
No, if you read my arguement, you will see that it is that this solution doesn't fix the problem any better than adding duct tape to a leaking dam will fix the dam. My arguement is that it will restrict the rights of too many people and do too little to actually solve the problem for a total net loss in effectiveness.
And I'm saying that it's so easy, if it allows law enforcement to make some more arrests of these assholes, go for it. It won't restrict the rights of anyone who doesn't have a conviction for child molestation, and frankly I'm rather unconcerned about their rights. Also, we're not talking about some big system for catching pedophiles, and nothing can catch them all anyway. We're talking about a charge we can throw at them that will stick in case they weasel out of everything else. It's just a tool in the toolbox.
You mean kid friendly sites like Yahoo? Or kid friendly messaging systems like AOL? And where do you draw the line of kid friendliness? Most of the sites pedophiles seem to be cruising are used by anyone (claiming to be) 13 to who knows how old.
I'd be more in favor of a voluntary program, allow the site to decide. If it were mandatory - and I don't think it should be - then it would have to be for sites whose content is substantially directed at children under 18. MySpace, Nickelodeon, etc. If it's a section of a major site that directs to kids - like, say, Yahoo! Kids - that would apply too.
It costs them nearly 4 million dollars a year to make sure it is up to date. And that is for one maybe two addresses per offender. Imagine if they also had to maintain an untold number of emails as well. A database does no good if it is not maintained. It will quickly become just a random bunch of data that is unreliable. At the very least you will have to pay for the servers to maintain it, technicians to keep it running, developers to create interfaces for it, and bandwidth so it is accessible. Not to mention security measures to keep the wrong people from accessing the data and all sorts of other things.
I'd say the incremental cost of adding another field isn't much given the program already exists. Besides, even if it comes down to $2 per taxpayer, that wouldn't even make the list of ridiculous pork projects. I also doubt it would be as expensive, because we're not talking about something that would have a public interface, or even public access. This is for law enforcement only. Set up the database with the emails, have a program send out an autorespond to each email once a year. Collect names of those who don't respond, and track them down at their physical address for confirmation. I can't imagine this couldn't be done for under $1M per year, about a quarter per taxpayer even for small states.
Since when do sex offender registries only hold lists of pedophiles, any sex offender gets added to it. This would include pedophiles, yes, but also statitory rape convicts (22 yo has sex with a consenting 17 yo without his knowledge, wrong but not pedophelia, at least not intentionally) and other rape convictions (guy gets a girl drunk and takes advantage of her, still wrong, but still not pedophelia). These people don't have the same rate of repeat that pedophiles do, but they lose all the same rights.
That's a whole other issue of who should be on the offender registry.
Please point out a statue where someone could be prosecuted for that. In new york, nearly all sex offenses require "sexual conduct." (distinct from the sex offender list, which you can be added to without having committed a crime)
I don't live in New York, but in most states, displaying intent is enough. Hell, some TV show lately was working with the cops to televise a sting operation. The cops found guys setting up a rendezvous with a kid, found the kid and set him/her straight, set up shop in the kid's house, and waited for the pervert. When he showed up, they busted him. In other words, setting up the rendezvous and then showing up was enough to prove intent, they didn't actually sit by while he screwed the kid before busting him.
I'd be shocked if New York didn't have a similar arrangement, but again, I don't live there.
I take your emphasis on "convicted" to mean it would be required for prosecution -- meaning he'd only be charged with parole violation. In other words, an act any other free person could commit.
Under the new law, disguising his identity (being an ex-con pedo) would be a crime in itself, and the otherwise legal but shady conversation he would be having with a kid would likely be used for sentencing. Previously, as you point out, ex-con pedos probably are prevented from contacting kids as a condition of parole. This law would allow two things: 1) kid friendly sites would be able to screen known pedos based on a database, and 2) pedos trying to circumvent that could be arrested for the circumvention alone even AFTER their parole is up.
This would just be a "scarlet letter" like program online for people convicted of sexual crimes (remember that these lists don't just include pedophiles, or even violent crimes). Removing a person's ability to live because they were formerly convicted of a crime and have served their sentence is unconstitutional.
No it's not. First, they wouldn't have to wear any "letter," just register. We're not talking about a signature on their email, *that* would be a Scarlet Letter. Second, there is substantial precedent fo removing the rights of convicted felons, including the right to vote in many states. Currently, sex offenders in many states have to disclose publically their actual physical address, including Virginia. So in light of that, I think your constitutionality argument is off the mark.
It would take a pedophile that intends to strike again less than an hour to find out enough information about someone through a myspace account to cause harm.
And for such lightning fast pedophiles who can lure a kid in half an hour, drive over, kidnap the kid, they will have success. Yet most probably don't act so quickly. Your argument seems to be that if we can't completely solve a problem, don't do anything about it at all! At that point, we shouldn't have any laws, as I've yet to see one that can 't be circumvented at all. Again, this is about a black and white, no arugment charge to bring against a known pedophile. It is one of many tools available to law enforecement. It is not expected to completely solve the problem.
On the other hand, all those people blacklisted in the previous section would be unable to do things most people normally can (send email, use IM, share information with their friends on social sites like myspace, etc.)
Not the case. They would probably be prevented from using sites that are extremely kid-friendly. They would probably be banned from emailing children. This would NOT include sending email to adults. It probably WOULD include not using MySpace, but tough shit, that's what you get for molesting children.
Yes, it is an extra conviction law enforcement can use, but the costs, both in liberties and actual money, are too great.
I'm not seeing much monetary costs, since we're not talking about a monitoring system, just a database. They're pretty cheap, and they already exist for residences. We're talking about adding another field to a mysql database. If they like, I'll do it for them for free. As for liberties, the right to live without big brother watching you evaporated when they molested a kid. Same for the ability to interact with kids in the future.
As long as using that registered email won't prevent them from entering said chat room,
I think it's also partially psychological - if they're willing to use a registered screen name, they're probably not up to no good. It also gives providers and hosts (like MySpace) the ability to potentially subscribe to a list (a la Do Not Call) and keep them out.
its the fact that it is easy enough to get around that it will only restrict the rights of the "minor" offenders who are reformed, or who were wrongly convicted, or that sort of thing, but does absolutely nothing to restrict the ability for those that are dangerous to strike again, or to strike in the first place.
1. You're right, it does nothing about non-felons. It's not supposed to. But given the recidivism rate of pedophilia, I think there's an assumption that you'll have a tool to catch offenses 2,3,4...etc. 2. It does keep pedos from striking again, in that it lowers the burden of evidence for law enforcement. If the cops are tracking a suspected perv, they can arrest him now just for using the bad email. They don't have to wait for him to abduct a kid. Or, if they monitor a chat room and catch an unknown email address having a somewhat too intimate conversation with a kid, they can trace the IP with his provider back to the account, and if it turns out he's a convicted pedophile, they can arrest him while they investigate further.
This is by no means intended to completely solve the problem of molestation, and if you see it through that lens, you're missing the point. This is intended to be a charge that you can prove without a doubt. There's no interpretation here - if you catch the perv using an unregistered email, he's busted. Period. It's one more thing to add to a case to put a guy away, as well. If a DA had a weaker case against someone before, now they have something that points at deception and intent.
If you see this from the point of view from how law enforecement works, it makes sense. There are a lot of cases where the cops get stuck without quite enough evidence to make charges stick. Now they have something that will stick for sure.
The reason this law will be useful is it can't be effectively enforced. Are you going to require that convicted sexual predators are monitored 24/7?
No, of course not.
If thats the case why have this silly rule? It would take me, as others have said, 30 seconds to create a new anonymous email account.
You're still missing it. There's nothing that will guarantee that you catch all pedophiles. It's a way of lowering the standard of evidence against a known pedophile. Let's say you get a transcript of a guy in a chat room talking to a kid, and he's careful enough not to say anything blatantly incriminating. But let's say it's a chat room the FBI does happen to be monitoring. If it's enough to raise their suspicion, but not enough to actually bring a case, they can trace the IP and see who the owner of the account is. If it's a pedophile using an unregistered email account, they can now press charges where they couldn't before.
This also does nothing to protect against those who have not yet been convicted of sexual abuse. If the illusion of security is all you want, enjoy your dream world, but that will just make you less safe.
Using that tired logic, we shouldn't have police either, because they won't catch every crime. Wouldn't want you to live in a dream world, right? This isn't meant to completely solve the problem. I'd say no law has completely solved any problem. It's really just another tool for law enforement to be able to more easily bring charges against recidivist but clever pedophiles. Just like tax evasion did with Capone.
I swear, once I find those CDs, I'm going to go through our entire collection and rip every one of them using some lossless codec and store them on a hard drive. Every time I purchase a song that employs digital restrictions management I get burned by it. Apple can take their iTMS and serve the sheeple.
because registering a new email address and IM account is so hard. Better still, get an.i2p email address.
But like Capone with tax evasion, catching a pedophile using an unregistered email address would then be a chargeable offense. Probably easier than proving intent of kidfuckery.
As of December 4,2006 there were 142 murders in Oakland, CA, this is the city where Han Reiser lives in and no one is getting a media frenzy over the 141 other murders.
Well, I wouldn't say the media is much concerned with this one either, unless you count slashdot. And that's only because he made a filesystem.
Though to consider your question more broadly - let's consider murders that get attention. First, eliminate all "mundane crime" related murders. All burglaries, gang crime, stuff like that. Happens all the time, there's no plot, no one cares about the next one. But when it comes to spousal murder, murder of kids, etc, I'd say the media in most areas will report on that, at least for a while. A friend of mine is a reporter for a TV station in a city of a few hundred thousand people, and she and her station cover murders fairly frequently.
The notion that things with similar structures having different smells - well, things with different structures often have different chemistries. Often a slight change in structure has significant effect on shape, size, polarity, electronegativity, etc, and these things can have enormous impacts on the ability of an odorant to fit correctly with a G-coupled protein receptor, which are the proteins responsible for olfaction.
The notion that things with different structures smelling the same is irrelevant - it's been shown that a similar *perception* can be caused by a very different combination of actual receptor activations. The conclusion there, not surprisingly, is that perception owes more to the backend processing done in the nasal epithelium and the brain *after* the signals are sent downstream from the receptors.
I'm not saying it plays no role at all, but it's danged questionable. The only evidence at all is the isotopic effect, but there may be other alternative effects going on, including something as mundane as the difference in vapor pressure. The olfactory sensors I worked on could distinguish H20 fromD20, and they most certainly did NOT work on a principle of electronic tunnelling. Sometimes when people hear hoofbeats, they assume camels and zebras.
Reiser's wife probrably wasn't as attractive as Laci Peterson. The media only showcases good looking victims.
Other factors:
Laci was pregnant. Laci went missing on Christmas Eve (I believe). Laci had a lot of friends and a large family, all of whom coordinated a media blitz.
No, seriously. Getting rid of lactose intolerance was is only relevant for pastoralists. So it mainly happend in Central Asia (and probably spreading from there to Europe) and parts of Africa.
Yeah, and we're talking about Africa here, so what's your point? It's not surprising that this gene arose in areas that could, you know, actually benefit from milk?
The Chinese and Japanese for example did and do rather well with a majority of the population being intolerant to lactose.
There's obviously more than one way to gain an advantage, and a lack of dairy cattle in Japan might have played a role there.
If something is an advantage or not is highly dependent on the context. There is no absolute better/worse. Evolution is not a way to perfection.
Who are you debating this with? This isn't philospohy class. Who ever mentioned absolutism or perfection?
It's really simple, drinking milk or not really had no influence on human evolution. Humans that couldnt drink milk found something else to eat.
Yeah, because 6000 years ago you could just go down to 7-11 and grab a burrito, right genius? Fact is that you have two populations - one that can eat the enormously nutritious, high-calorie food that comes out of this cow/goat/wildebeast over here, and one population that can't. Guess which one dies first when famine hits, or the grain crop spoils?
Most evolutionary advantages are slight and happen over time. In this case, you have people living in rather arid conditions, some of whom live a whole lot better because they can drink milk. Not hard to figure out, really.
I don't care what resources Redmond has. They simply cannot compete with a bunch of determined individuals. No one can. It's just a matter of time.
I'm sure I'll get modded down for raining on the parade, but MS has a *lot* of developers, and I'll bet that as a result more man-hours are spent on windows than on KDE. This is one of the issues facing the open source development community going forward: while the notion of having this community built thing is great, most big projects aren't. There is a rather small group of developers, and for many projects, their time is sponsored by a corporation (like, say, Sun) that has a stake in the project's success. So to say that KDE has to succeed because of the hordes of developer volunteers out there, probably not.
This of course ignores the more basic fallacy of the "mythical man month," as the amount of raw resources isn't always that important. Behemoth corporations are often killed by a more nimble opponent they can't catch. But to use the argument that KDE will win because there are more volunteers...it's a very unlikely proposition.
Personally I can't stand windows, and won't use it. But last I checked, KDE was still buggy and very cluttered. I use fluxbox, but I haven't tried the latest KDE so I'll eventually check it out.
You bring up some good points. But I still disagree because embracing High Tech does not mean we need to abandon manufacturing as a core part of our economy. Not everybody can be retrained to be in a directly High Tech job. We still need to provide working class jobs, because we will always have a working class
Well, the thing is, we need something to distinguish ourselves from other countries, unless we'd like wages as low as theirs. What we can offer is an environment in which great things are invented, and bring us all along for the ride.
That would also be great now. I'm not arguing against evolution or adaptation. I'm not saying we should be making buggy-whips. Nor am I against automation and efficiency (as these advances lead to greater productivity and higher real wages). What I am saying is that we should be manufacturing the high-tech goods that we design, instead of farming the work out to virtual slave-laborers in China.
I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that, but I don't think protectionism is the answer. To me as long as we're exporting tough, low-paying, mind-numbing work, great. Start worrying when the other countries start high-tech companies of their own. And that *is* starting to happen, so we need a competitive advantage now more than ever. We need to throw money at both basic and applied R&D, in industries and in universities, to steal the smartest people from all over the world.
Because Northern VA (where I also work) is driven by the Federal Gov't which dumps billions on the local economy.
This is true, but I could make a similar argument for most any other large city in this country. Heck, even the country as a whole has a very low unemployment rate.
But you can move forward in a progressive manner instead of a regressive manner.
If "progressive" means either handouts or protectionism, I'm not interested (note that applies to both people as well as companies who fail to keep up with the times). Incidentally, what do you mean by that?
This brings to mind the old joke: "The Government says they created 1 million new jobs, I should know, because I have three of them". The point is not so much the raw number of jobs, but the **type** of jobs. Instead of manufacturing TVs for $20 per hour plus benefits, we're retailing them for $5.15 with no benefits. That is a very bad thing.
I'd agree if it were generally true! Minimum wage jobs tend to be held by high schoolers. The economy has shifted from backbreaking factory work to white-collar work, with more and more people at all levels having jobs that aren't bad for their health. This is a great thing. Compared to 30 years ago, home ownership is higher and hunger - actual hunger, where people don't get enough to eat - has been all but eliminated. Using standards of what passed for poverty 30 years ago, a very small percentage of the population truly lives in poverty. This nation doesn't even know what poverty is anymore.
I think that guy lives in Flint, MI where he used to make $25/hour in a factory and is now making $7.00/hour stocking shelves.
He may, and he can thank the implosion of an uncompetitve American auto industry that was long past its due. There are certainly small areas that can be destroyed by the collapse of an industry, particularly small towns that owe their existences to single companies. This is certainly somewhere where the government can do good by getting involved.
The higher paying jobs are for people with education, and not everybody is going to get one (which was the point of my original post). We still have to provide for those who aren't going to get an education, because they will always be a significant part of the population.
True if you equate education with 4-year college. Personally, I think the best thing we can do is expand real vocational training in this country where people can learn actual useful skills they can use, 1-2 year programs. But again,
Re:We Still Need Blue Collar Jobs
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Apologists for exporting our standard-of-living have been repeating this mantra for years. I'm sorry to burst your education-is-the-answer bubble, but not everybody is going to get a PhD (or even Bachelor) in engineering. We will always have a large section of our society who, for whatever reason (aptitude or personal perference, poor choice, etc) will NOT go to college and will NOT become engineers.
That's what is so great about a tech economy: you don't have to! The salaries of all jobs are dragged up via supply and demand. Why else would a janitor here have such a high salary compared to the rest of the world? Put another way, if we do the same work as the rest of the world as a whole, and we're not smarter, or harder working, what is there to sustain the high salaries even non-tech Americans make? The answer is nothing. So unless you want to see the national standard of living deline for everyone, be very glad for the economy in which you find yourself.
They are often moderately-paying union jobs with health insurance, pensions, and fringe benefits. They are the kind of jobs that allowed the development of a broad-based lower-middle class that formed the backbone of American society in the 1900s. They are the kind of jobs that allow a guy to own a small house with a yard on an affordable mortgage with enough left over to have a decent standard of living.
You're right. That was great in the 1900s. But we're not living in the 1900s anymore, and you either evolve or die. We can't freeze the clock and hope that Asia, Europe, etc don't catch up with us. They will, and as a result we need to stay ahead of them.
They wouldn't be able to make a living in Virginia (where I live), because it is teeming with cheap illegal immigrant labor that has pushed out the native workforce in those types of jobs. I have no doubt that native born americans would do that work in Virginia, if they weren't undercut by an illegal workforce that does not get paid benefits, often gets paid "under the table", and is not subject to labor law.
In Virginia, where I also live, the unemployment is ridiculously low, and you can't find a legal American who's willing to do the work they do for the wages they earn. And why do jobs in America, even non-tech jobs, pay more here than in their homelands? See my previous analysis above. What force would you like to see artificially sustain the wages of menial labor jobs? Magic? Even then, the lowest paying jobs in Northern Virginia run $10/hr. That's higher than anywhere else in the world. Be grateful we live in such an economy.
I agree with Cluckshot's post that we are waging a trade war against our own citizens. We are exporting manufacturing blue collar jobs while importing cheap immigant labor to take the remaining blue collar jobs.
And all the while maintaining a healthy 4% unemployment rate. That's the problem that you don't get - we have no unemployment and *still* we have to outsurce jobs and bring immigrants in. So your best argument is that we're outsourcing manufacturing jobs because we're generating white collar jobs instead? That's a bad thing?
And please don't repeat the racist lie that these are "jobs American's won't do". That is a lie. They will do them for decent pay, but not for peanuts.
Well, duh! It's not racist - people in America who can work legally will choose higher paying more fulfilling jobs and leave the crappy low paying jobs for people who can't speak English. Please explain to me how this is bad. If there were a glut of experienced, responsible, hard-working, English-speaking people who were unemployed, you might have a case, but there aren't and you don't. Find me some guy who says "man, I wish I could work in a factory instead of what I'm doing now." Who is this guy? Where does he live?
I've digressed, so going back to the original point, we need manufacturing jobs in this country because not everybody is go
However, I ask you today, what is the new, great "Next Big Thing (TM)"?
If I knew, it would be the current big thing - or else I'd be doing it myself and making tons of cash and not telling you.;) There's a ton to be done with bio/nanotech, information sciences, etc.
I'm afraid that as a country we've missed the boat on that one already as South Korea and other not-so-infuenced-by-the-right countries have picked up the ball that we dropped.
The coastal states are doing that research as well (I assume you mean stem cell). I know all the California schools are (so there's Berkeley and Caltech), Maryland is funding it, and I think Harvard may be as well. Also, this will probably end in 2 years. So I agree, the present administration has hurt us, but we ain't dead yet.
That sounds well and good, but I don't think history supports it. Yes, VCRs started here and ended in Japan. Yes, computers started here and ended in Taiwan. But these days both manufacturing and research are rapidly moving. Taiwanese manufacturers are doing their own research and creating products with USA labels that have generated essentially no new USA expertise in the problem domain.
There's no question that other areas are starting to catch up. This is why it's even more critical now than ever before that we work to maintain the advantage we have. Asian countries are definitely doing good research, but by far most of the highest level research that will ultimately have the highest payoff is being done in the US. In many cases it's foreigners doing the work, but that's fine, as long as the companies they start are incorporated in America, hiring people in America, and paying American taxes. We need to keep it that way.
Japanese cars are far ahead of USA cars in innovation and quality.
Cars haven't been a growth industry for decades. Tying your economy to manufacturing things like cars is, in fact, the wrong way to go. We want innovative companies dreaming up the next big thing, not coming up with incremental modifications to the big thing from 50 years ago. So I don't care if every car is made in Japan as long as the next Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and whatever comes after starts in the US.
My major is transitioning to new fields, particularly bioengineering and nanotechnology design and fabrication, which may be supporting your point,
Yup.
but OTOH the new stuff is very bleeding edge and will not be ready for productizing for a decade or four.
That's why you need an established research and development community. Put another way, we're now reaping the rewards of having performed research in decades past - like, say, the internet, which started in the 60s. It's kind of like running a winery - you do your research on grapes and varietals and weather now, and realize your profit in 10 years when you have great aged wine. You don't just go ahead and make box wine because you can do it this year.
because all the other nations are starting at about the same place we are and unlike USA they have the manufacturing facilities to experiment with.
They're not starting at the same place we are. We have the best research universities. We have an established capital market for new innovators to get access to cash. And you don't experiment at manufacturing scale anyway because it's too expensive by far. If Intel needed a 50,000 square foot factory to do nanotube semiconductor research, they'd build one. But they don't, because experiments in that arena are done on 30cm scale.
I agree that we don't want Flint, MI, to be the entire USA. But we also shouldn't want USA to become uber-specialized Chiba City surrounded by a vast wasteland of poor serfs.
Well, the serfs aren't poor when the tech jobs drag up the overall labor market due to supply and demand. By participating in a tech economy, even non-tech laborers benefit. That's why a janitor in America has a far greater quality of living than one in, say, China.
As an overall sort of take, sometimes engineers start to get too focused on specific problems and aren't patient enough with things that do in fact take time. Research and development is a long time scale investment that will pay off for decades. If we quit now, we gradually lose our advantage over Asia and Europe over the coming decades.
Re:We have a bigger problem...
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As we export more and more jobs, especially manufacturing, it is only natural that we are going to lose our place in science.
Quite the opposite. It is our high tech labor force that has priced itself out of low-level, non-innovative markets like manufacturing. A study of history would easily prove that - this nation has continuously become more high-tech while constantly shedding physical-labor intensive work elsewhere. An attempt to maintain a dying labor model in manufacturing spawned the original Luddites. Your suggestion is no different - smashing looms has never been the answer; creating the next better product is. That's where science comes in.
If you have little or no manufacturing, you won't need much engineering to support the manufacturing.
Science doesn't "surrport" manufacturing. High-level science and engineering invent things that are high-tech for a while, and are manufactured in the US as long as those things require a high-tech work force. Later they become commoditized and are moved offshore. By then we've moved on to something else.
The net result is that it will be nearly impossible for us to regain over the next few hundred years what we lose over the next twenty years.
What, low-paying manufacturing jobs that we send overseas? Good, I don't want them. Wouldn't you rather get rid of crappy jobs, while using research to generate new good ones?
We've made short term monetary gain our ultimate god. Many generations of future Americans will pay for that.
Actually, we're talking about re-investment into science and engineering here, which is long-term monetary gain. Short-term gain would be trying to squeeze a little more blood from the stone of manufacturing jobs, which isn't a growth industry. And I don't want future generations of Americans to pay be slipping and losing our wage advantage. The only way to maintain that is through an environment of innovation.
Put another way - we aren't smarter, nor do we work harder, than people in nations such as India and China. The only thing unique about us is our entrepeneurial environment which combines research at the highest levels with available capital to turn that research into products that generate thousands of jobs.
Flint, MI should tell you all you need to know about the wisdom of tying your economy to manufacturing.
And even that is not that big a deal. They can always buy the start up company when it proves successful, saving google tons of R&D money.
Assuming it's an arena in which Google chooses to compete, and assuming the principals involved choose to merge back with Google. Which, if they leave in the first place, isn't all that likely. Bottom line, it doesn't work for Google if its best people leave. Best case scenario in your suggestion, Google ceases being an innovative engineering company and turns into a VC firm.
Doesn't matter. The harm here isn't that they'll form companies to compete with Google, the harm is the brain drain, whether they form software companies or write novels.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but this information is not allowed to be used to keep an offender from using public facilities.
You mean like a playground? Betcha it is. Heck, there are playgrounds where it's illegal for ANY adult without a child to be. These guys generally are forbidden to have contact with minors anyway. And in any event, the sites in question, say MySpace, aren't public in the sense of being government-run and are quite free to decide that they'd prefer their site be free of pedophiles. That's why the sex offender registry exists, for communities to know who's an offender and decide they'd rather not have their company.
No, if you read my arguement, you will see that it is that this solution doesn't fix the problem any better than adding duct tape to a leaking dam will fix the dam. My arguement is that it will restrict the rights of too many people and do too little to actually solve the problem for a total net loss in effectiveness.
And I'm saying that it's so easy, if it allows law enforcement to make some more arrests of these assholes, go for it. It won't restrict the rights of anyone who doesn't have a conviction for child molestation, and frankly I'm rather unconcerned about their rights. Also, we're not talking about some big system for catching pedophiles, and nothing can catch them all anyway. We're talking about a charge we can throw at them that will stick in case they weasel out of everything else. It's just a tool in the toolbox.
You mean kid friendly sites like Yahoo? Or kid friendly messaging systems like AOL? And where do you draw the line of kid friendliness? Most of the sites pedophiles seem to be cruising are used by anyone (claiming to be) 13 to who knows how old.
I'd be more in favor of a voluntary program, allow the site to decide. If it were mandatory - and I don't think it should be - then it would have to be for sites whose content is substantially directed at children under 18. MySpace, Nickelodeon, etc. If it's a section of a major site that directs to kids - like, say, Yahoo! Kids - that would apply too.
It costs them nearly 4 million dollars a year to make sure it is up to date. And that is for one maybe two addresses per offender. Imagine if they also had to maintain an untold number of emails as well. A database does no good if it is not maintained. It will quickly become just a random bunch of data that is unreliable. At the very least you will have to pay for the servers to maintain it, technicians to keep it running, developers to create interfaces for it, and bandwidth so it is accessible. Not to mention security measures to keep the wrong people from accessing the data and all sorts of other things.
I'd say the incremental cost of adding another field isn't much given the program already exists. Besides, even if it comes down to $2 per taxpayer, that wouldn't even make the list of ridiculous pork projects. I also doubt it would be as expensive, because we're not talking about something that would have a public interface, or even public access. This is for law enforcement only. Set up the database with the emails, have a program send out an autorespond to each email once a year. Collect names of those who don't respond, and track them down at their physical address for confirmation. I can't imagine this couldn't be done for under $1M per year, about a quarter per taxpayer even for small states.
Since when do sex offender registries only hold lists of pedophiles, any sex offender gets added to it. This would include pedophiles, yes, but also statitory rape convicts (22 yo has sex with a consenting 17 yo without his knowledge, wrong but not pedophelia, at least not intentionally) and other rape convictions (guy gets a girl drunk and takes advantage of her, still wrong, but still not pedophelia). These people don't have the same rate of repeat that pedophiles do, but they lose all the same rights.
That's a whole other issue of who should be on the offender registry.
Please point out a statue where someone could be prosecuted for that. In new york, nearly all sex offenses require "sexual conduct." (distinct from the sex offender list, which you can be added to without having committed a crime)
I don't live in New York, but in most states, displaying intent is enough. Hell, some TV show lately was working with the cops to televise a sting operation. The cops found guys setting up a rendezvous with a kid, found the kid and set him/her straight, set up shop in the kid's house, and waited for the pervert. When he showed up, they busted him. In other words, setting up the rendezvous and then showing up was enough to prove intent, they didn't actually sit by while he screwed the kid before busting him.
I'd be shocked if New York didn't have a similar arrangement, but again, I don't live there.
I take your emphasis on "convicted" to mean it would be required for prosecution -- meaning he'd only be charged with parole violation. In other words, an act any other free person could commit.
Under the new law, disguising his identity (being an ex-con pedo) would be a crime in itself, and the otherwise legal but shady conversation he would be having with a kid would likely be used for sentencing. Previously, as you point out, ex-con pedos probably are prevented from contacting kids as a condition of parole. This law would allow two things: 1) kid friendly sites would be able to screen known pedos based on a database, and 2) pedos trying to circumvent that could be arrested for the circumvention alone even AFTER their parole is up.
It is also incredibly easy to let someone create an email address and make it look as if it was the offender's. Good news for vigilantes I guess.
And when they check the IP of the sender and find out it comes from someone else's house, we have obstruction charges against the vigilante.
Wait, so in this carefully-constructed example of yours, what the guy actually do wrong?
You mean, as a convicted perophile masking his identity while conversing in a suggestive manner with a child? I'd hope that answers itself.
This would just be a "scarlet letter" like program online for people convicted of sexual crimes (remember that these lists don't just include pedophiles, or even violent crimes). Removing a person's ability to live because they were formerly convicted of a crime and have served their sentence is unconstitutional.
No it's not. First, they wouldn't have to wear any "letter," just register. We're not talking about a signature on their email, *that* would be a Scarlet Letter. Second, there is substantial precedent fo removing the rights of convicted felons, including the right to vote in many states. Currently, sex offenders in many states have to disclose publically their actual physical address, including Virginia. So in light of that, I think your constitutionality argument is off the mark.
It would take a pedophile that intends to strike again less than an hour to find out enough information about someone through a myspace account to cause harm.
And for such lightning fast pedophiles who can lure a kid in half an hour, drive over, kidnap the kid, they will have success. Yet most probably don't act so quickly. Your argument seems to be that if we can't completely solve a problem, don't do anything about it at all! At that point, we shouldn't have any laws, as I've yet to see one that can 't be circumvented at all. Again, this is about a black and white, no arugment charge to bring against a known pedophile. It is one of many tools available to law enforecement. It is not expected to completely solve the problem.
On the other hand, all those people blacklisted in the previous section would be unable to do things most people normally can (send email, use IM, share information with their friends on social sites like myspace, etc.)
Not the case. They would probably be prevented from using sites that are extremely kid-friendly. They would probably be banned from emailing children. This would NOT include sending email to adults. It probably WOULD include not using MySpace, but tough shit, that's what you get for molesting children.
Yes, it is an extra conviction law enforcement can use, but the costs, both in liberties and actual money, are too great.
I'm not seeing much monetary costs, since we're not talking about a monitoring system, just a database. They're pretty cheap, and they already exist for residences. We're talking about adding another field to a mysql database. If they like, I'll do it for them for free. As for liberties, the right to live without big brother watching you evaporated when they molested a kid. Same for the ability to interact with kids in the future.
As long as using that registered email won't prevent them from entering said chat room,
I think it's also partially psychological - if they're willing to use a registered screen name, they're probably not up to no good. It also gives providers and hosts (like MySpace) the ability to potentially subscribe to a list (a la Do Not Call) and keep them out.
its the fact that it is easy enough to get around that it will only restrict the rights of the "minor" offenders who are reformed, or who were wrongly convicted, or that sort of thing, but does absolutely nothing to restrict the ability for those that are dangerous to strike again, or to strike in the first place.
1. You're right, it does nothing about non-felons. It's not supposed to. But given the recidivism rate of pedophilia, I think there's an assumption that you'll have a tool to catch offenses 2,3,4...etc. 2. It does keep pedos from striking again, in that it lowers the burden of evidence for law enforcement. If the cops are tracking a suspected perv, they can arrest him now just for using the bad email. They don't have to wait for him to abduct a kid. Or, if they monitor a chat room and catch an unknown email address having a somewhat too intimate conversation with a kid, they can trace the IP with his provider back to the account, and if it turns out he's a convicted pedophile, they can arrest him while they investigate further.
This is by no means intended to completely solve the problem of molestation, and if you see it through that lens, you're missing the point. This is intended to be a charge that you can prove without a doubt. There's no interpretation here - if you catch the perv using an unregistered email, he's busted. Period. It's one more thing to add to a case to put a guy away, as well. If a DA had a weaker case against someone before, now they have something that points at deception and intent.
If you see this from the point of view from how law enforecement works, it makes sense. There are a lot of cases where the cops get stuck without quite enough evidence to make charges stick. Now they have something that will stick for sure.
The reason this law will be useful is it can't be effectively enforced. Are you going to require that convicted sexual predators are monitored 24/7?
No, of course not.
If thats the case why have this silly rule? It would take me, as others have said, 30 seconds to create a new anonymous email account.
You're still missing it. There's nothing that will guarantee that you catch all pedophiles. It's a way of lowering the standard of evidence against a known pedophile. Let's say you get a transcript of a guy in a chat room talking to a kid, and he's careful enough not to say anything blatantly incriminating. But let's say it's a chat room the FBI does happen to be monitoring. If it's enough to raise their suspicion, but not enough to actually bring a case, they can trace the IP and see who the owner of the account is. If it's a pedophile using an unregistered email account, they can now press charges where they couldn't before.
This also does nothing to protect against those who have not yet been convicted of sexual abuse. If the illusion of security is all you want, enjoy your dream world, but that will just make you less safe.
Using that tired logic, we shouldn't have police either, because they won't catch every crime. Wouldn't want you to live in a dream world, right? This isn't meant to completely solve the problem. I'd say no law has completely solved any problem. It's really just another tool for law enforement to be able to more easily bring charges against recidivist but clever pedophiles. Just like tax evasion did with Capone.
I swear, once I find those CDs, I'm going to go through our entire collection and rip every one of them using some lossless codec and store them on a hard drive. Every time I purchase a song that employs digital restrictions management I get burned by it. Apple can take their iTMS and serve the sheeple.
!Viva la revolucion!
because registering a new email address and IM account is so hard. Better still, get an .i2p email address.
But like Capone with tax evasion, catching a pedophile using an unregistered email address would then be a chargeable offense. Probably easier than proving intent of kidfuckery.
As of December 4,2006 there were 142 murders in Oakland, CA, this is the city where Han Reiser lives in and no one is getting a media frenzy over the 141 other murders.
Well, I wouldn't say the media is much concerned with this one either, unless you count slashdot. And that's only because he made a filesystem.
Though to consider your question more broadly - let's consider murders that get attention. First, eliminate all "mundane crime" related murders. All burglaries, gang crime, stuff like that. Happens all the time, there's no plot, no one cares about the next one. But when it comes to spousal murder, murder of kids, etc, I'd say the media in most areas will report on that, at least for a while. A friend of mine is a reporter for a TV station in a city of a few hundred thousand people, and she and her station cover murders fairly frequently.
The notion that things with similar structures having different smells - well, things with different structures often have different chemistries. Often a slight change in structure has significant effect on shape, size, polarity, electronegativity, etc, and these things can have enormous impacts on the ability of an odorant to fit correctly with a G-coupled protein receptor, which are the proteins responsible for olfaction.
The notion that things with different structures smelling the same is irrelevant - it's been shown that a similar *perception* can be caused by a very different combination of actual receptor activations. The conclusion there, not surprisingly, is that perception owes more to the backend processing done in the nasal epithelium and the brain *after* the signals are sent downstream from the receptors.
I'm not saying it plays no role at all, but it's danged questionable. The only evidence at all is the isotopic effect, but there may be other alternative effects going on, including something as mundane as the difference in vapor pressure. The olfactory sensors I worked on could distinguish H20 fromD20, and they most certainly did NOT work on a principle of electronic tunnelling. Sometimes when people hear hoofbeats, they assume camels and zebras.
Reiser's wife probrably wasn't as attractive as Laci Peterson. The media only showcases good looking victims.
Other factors:
Laci was pregnant. Laci went missing on Christmas Eve (I believe). Laci had a lot of friends and a large family, all of whom coordinated a media blitz.
No, seriously. Getting rid of lactose intolerance was is only relevant for pastoralists. So it mainly happend in Central Asia (and probably spreading from there to Europe) and parts of Africa.
Yeah, and we're talking about Africa here, so what's your point? It's not surprising that this gene arose in areas that could, you know, actually benefit from milk?
The Chinese and Japanese for example did and do rather well with a majority of the population being intolerant to lactose.
There's obviously more than one way to gain an advantage, and a lack of dairy cattle in Japan might have played a role there.
If something is an advantage or not is highly dependent on the context. There is no absolute better/worse. Evolution is not a way to perfection.
Who are you debating this with? This isn't philospohy class. Who ever mentioned absolutism or perfection?
It's really simple, drinking milk or not really had no influence on human evolution. Humans that couldnt drink milk found something else to eat.
Yeah, because 6000 years ago you could just go down to 7-11 and grab a burrito, right genius? Fact is that you have two populations - one that can eat the enormously nutritious, high-calorie food that comes out of this cow/goat/wildebeast over here, and one population that can't. Guess which one dies first when famine hits, or the grain crop spoils?
Most evolutionary advantages are slight and happen over time. In this case, you have people living in rather arid conditions, some of whom live a whole lot better because they can drink milk. Not hard to figure out, really.
I don't care what resources Redmond has. They simply cannot compete with a bunch of determined individuals. No one can. It's just a matter of time.
I'm sure I'll get modded down for raining on the parade, but MS has a *lot* of developers, and I'll bet that as a result more man-hours are spent on windows than on KDE. This is one of the issues facing the open source development community going forward: while the notion of having this community built thing is great, most big projects aren't. There is a rather small group of developers, and for many projects, their time is sponsored by a corporation (like, say, Sun) that has a stake in the project's success. So to say that KDE has to succeed because of the hordes of developer volunteers out there, probably not.
This of course ignores the more basic fallacy of the "mythical man month," as the amount of raw resources isn't always that important. Behemoth corporations are often killed by a more nimble opponent they can't catch. But to use the argument that KDE will win because there are more volunteers...it's a very unlikely proposition.
Personally I can't stand windows, and won't use it. But last I checked, KDE was still buggy and very cluttered. I use fluxbox, but I haven't tried the latest KDE so I'll eventually check it out.
I turn green up to 9 out of 10 times I take a shower
Can I watch?
You bring up some good points. But I still disagree because embracing High Tech does not mean we need to abandon manufacturing as a core part of our economy. Not everybody can be retrained to be in a directly High Tech job. We still need to provide working class jobs, because we will always have a working class
Well, the thing is, we need something to distinguish ourselves from other countries, unless we'd like wages as low as theirs. What we can offer is an environment in which great things are invented, and bring us all along for the ride.
That would also be great now. I'm not arguing against evolution or adaptation. I'm not saying we should be making buggy-whips. Nor am I against automation and efficiency (as these advances lead to greater productivity and higher real wages). What I am saying is that we should be manufacturing the high-tech goods that we design, instead of farming the work out to virtual slave-laborers in China.
I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that, but I don't think protectionism is the answer. To me as long as we're exporting tough, low-paying, mind-numbing work, great. Start worrying when the other countries start high-tech companies of their own. And that *is* starting to happen, so we need a competitive advantage now more than ever. We need to throw money at both basic and applied R&D, in industries and in universities, to steal the smartest people from all over the world.
Because Northern VA (where I also work) is driven by the Federal Gov't which dumps billions on the local economy.
This is true, but I could make a similar argument for most any other large city in this country. Heck, even the country as a whole has a very low unemployment rate.
But you can move forward in a progressive manner instead of a regressive manner.
If "progressive" means either handouts or protectionism, I'm not interested (note that applies to both people as well as companies who fail to keep up with the times). Incidentally, what do you mean by that?
This brings to mind the old joke: "The Government says they created 1 million new jobs, I should know, because I have three of them". The point is not so much the raw number of jobs, but the **type** of jobs. Instead of manufacturing TVs for $20 per hour plus benefits, we're retailing them for $5.15 with no benefits. That is a very bad thing.
I'd agree if it were generally true! Minimum wage jobs tend to be held by high schoolers. The economy has shifted from backbreaking factory work to white-collar work, with more and more people at all levels having jobs that aren't bad for their health. This is a great thing. Compared to 30 years ago, home ownership is higher and hunger - actual hunger, where people don't get enough to eat - has been all but eliminated. Using standards of what passed for poverty 30 years ago, a very small percentage of the population truly lives in poverty. This nation doesn't even know what poverty is anymore.
I think that guy lives in Flint, MI where he used to make $25/hour in a factory and is now making $7.00/hour stocking shelves.
He may, and he can thank the implosion of an uncompetitve American auto industry that was long past its due. There are certainly small areas that can be destroyed by the collapse of an industry, particularly small towns that owe their existences to single companies. This is certainly somewhere where the government can do good by getting involved.
The higher paying jobs are for people with education, and not everybody is going to get one (which was the point of my original post). We still have to provide for those who aren't going to get an education, because they will always be a significant part of the population.
True if you equate education with 4-year college. Personally, I think the best thing we can do is expand real vocational training in this country where people can learn actual useful skills they can use, 1-2 year programs. But again,
Apologists for exporting our standard-of-living have been repeating this mantra for years. I'm sorry to burst your education-is-the-answer bubble, but not everybody is going to get a PhD (or even Bachelor) in engineering. We will always have a large section of our society who, for whatever reason (aptitude or personal perference, poor choice, etc) will NOT go to college and will NOT become engineers.
That's what is so great about a tech economy: you don't have to! The salaries of all jobs are dragged up via supply and demand. Why else would a janitor here have such a high salary compared to the rest of the world? Put another way, if we do the same work as the rest of the world as a whole, and we're not smarter, or harder working, what is there to sustain the high salaries even non-tech Americans make? The answer is nothing. So unless you want to see the national standard of living deline for everyone, be very glad for the economy in which you find yourself.
They are often moderately-paying union jobs with health insurance, pensions, and fringe benefits. They are the kind of jobs that allowed the development of a broad-based lower-middle class that formed the backbone of American society in the 1900s. They are the kind of jobs that allow a guy to own a small house with a yard on an affordable mortgage with enough left over to have a decent standard of living.
You're right. That was great in the 1900s. But we're not living in the 1900s anymore, and you either evolve or die. We can't freeze the clock and hope that Asia, Europe, etc don't catch up with us. They will, and as a result we need to stay ahead of them.
They wouldn't be able to make a living in Virginia (where I live), because it is teeming with cheap illegal immigrant labor that has pushed out the native workforce in those types of jobs. I have no doubt that native born americans would do that work in Virginia, if they weren't undercut by an illegal workforce that does not get paid benefits, often gets paid "under the table", and is not subject to labor law.
In Virginia, where I also live, the unemployment is ridiculously low, and you can't find a legal American who's willing to do the work they do for the wages they earn. And why do jobs in America, even non-tech jobs, pay more here than in their homelands? See my previous analysis above. What force would you like to see artificially sustain the wages of menial labor jobs? Magic? Even then, the lowest paying jobs in Northern Virginia run $10/hr. That's higher than anywhere else in the world. Be grateful we live in such an economy.
I agree with Cluckshot's post that we are waging a trade war against our own citizens. We are exporting manufacturing blue collar jobs while importing cheap immigant labor to take the remaining blue collar jobs.
And all the while maintaining a healthy 4% unemployment rate. That's the problem that you don't get - we have no unemployment and *still* we have to outsurce jobs and bring immigrants in. So your best argument is that we're outsourcing manufacturing jobs because we're generating white collar jobs instead? That's a bad thing?
And please don't repeat the racist lie that these are "jobs American's won't do". That is a lie. They will do them for decent pay, but not for peanuts.
Well, duh! It's not racist - people in America who can work legally will choose higher paying more fulfilling jobs and leave the crappy low paying jobs for people who can't speak English. Please explain to me how this is bad. If there were a glut of experienced, responsible, hard-working, English-speaking people who were unemployed, you might have a case, but there aren't and you don't. Find me some guy who says "man, I wish I could work in a factory instead of what I'm doing now." Who is this guy? Where does he live?
I've digressed, so going back to the original point, we need manufacturing jobs in this country because not everybody is go
...for finally figuring out that controlling, say, 30% of a market with 50% piracy is better than controlling 2% of a market with 10% piracy.
However, I ask you today, what is the new, great "Next Big Thing (TM)"?
If I knew, it would be the current big thing - or else I'd be doing it myself and making tons of cash and not telling you. ;) There's a ton to be done with bio/nanotech, information sciences, etc.
I'm afraid that as a country we've missed the boat on that one already as South Korea and other not-so-infuenced-by-the-right countries have picked up the ball that we dropped.
The coastal states are doing that research as well (I assume you mean stem cell). I know all the California schools are (so there's Berkeley and Caltech), Maryland is funding it, and I think Harvard may be as well. Also, this will probably end in 2 years. So I agree, the present administration has hurt us, but we ain't dead yet.
offshoring anything is not a good thing.
So you want to work in a textiles factory?
That sounds well and good, but I don't think history supports it. Yes, VCRs started here and ended in Japan. Yes, computers started here and ended in Taiwan. But these days both manufacturing and research are rapidly moving. Taiwanese manufacturers are doing their own research and creating products with USA labels that have generated essentially no new USA expertise in the problem domain.
There's no question that other areas are starting to catch up. This is why it's even more critical now than ever before that we work to maintain the advantage we have. Asian countries are definitely doing good research, but by far most of the highest level research that will ultimately have the highest payoff is being done in the US. In many cases it's foreigners doing the work, but that's fine, as long as the companies they start are incorporated in America, hiring people in America, and paying American taxes. We need to keep it that way.
Japanese cars are far ahead of USA cars in innovation and quality.
Cars haven't been a growth industry for decades. Tying your economy to manufacturing things like cars is, in fact, the wrong way to go. We want innovative companies dreaming up the next big thing, not coming up with incremental modifications to the big thing from 50 years ago. So I don't care if every car is made in Japan as long as the next Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and whatever comes after starts in the US.
My major is transitioning to new fields, particularly bioengineering and nanotechnology design and fabrication, which may be supporting your point,
Yup.
but OTOH the new stuff is very bleeding edge and will not be ready for productizing for a decade or four.
That's why you need an established research and development community. Put another way, we're now reaping the rewards of having performed research in decades past - like, say, the internet, which started in the 60s. It's kind of like running a winery - you do your research on grapes and varietals and weather now, and realize your profit in 10 years when you have great aged wine. You don't just go ahead and make box wine because you can do it this year.
because all the other nations are starting at about the same place we are and unlike USA they have the manufacturing facilities to experiment with.
They're not starting at the same place we are. We have the best research universities. We have an established capital market for new innovators to get access to cash. And you don't experiment at manufacturing scale anyway because it's too expensive by far. If Intel needed a 50,000 square foot factory to do nanotube semiconductor research, they'd build one. But they don't, because experiments in that arena are done on 30cm scale.
I agree that we don't want Flint, MI, to be the entire USA. But we also shouldn't want USA to become uber-specialized Chiba City surrounded by a vast wasteland of poor serfs.
Well, the serfs aren't poor when the tech jobs drag up the overall labor market due to supply and demand. By participating in a tech economy, even non-tech laborers benefit. That's why a janitor in America has a far greater quality of living than one in, say, China.
As an overall sort of take, sometimes engineers start to get too focused on specific problems and aren't patient enough with things that do in fact take time. Research and development is a long time scale investment that will pay off for decades. If we quit now, we gradually lose our advantage over Asia and Europe over the coming decades.
As we export more and more jobs, especially manufacturing, it is only natural that we are going to lose our place in science.
Quite the opposite. It is our high tech labor force that has priced itself out of low-level, non-innovative markets like manufacturing. A study of history would easily prove that - this nation has continuously become more high-tech while constantly shedding physical-labor intensive work elsewhere. An attempt to maintain a dying labor model in manufacturing spawned the original Luddites. Your suggestion is no different - smashing looms has never been the answer; creating the next better product is. That's where science comes in.
If you have little or no manufacturing, you won't need much engineering to support the manufacturing.
Science doesn't "surrport" manufacturing. High-level science and engineering invent things that are high-tech for a while, and are manufactured in the US as long as those things require a high-tech work force. Later they become commoditized and are moved offshore. By then we've moved on to something else.
The net result is that it will be nearly impossible for us to regain over the next few hundred years what we lose over the next twenty years.
What, low-paying manufacturing jobs that we send overseas? Good, I don't want them. Wouldn't you rather get rid of crappy jobs, while using research to generate new good ones?
We've made short term monetary gain our ultimate god. Many generations of future Americans will pay for that.
Actually, we're talking about re-investment into science and engineering here, which is long-term monetary gain. Short-term gain would be trying to squeeze a little more blood from the stone of manufacturing jobs, which isn't a growth industry. And I don't want future generations of Americans to pay be slipping and losing our wage advantage. The only way to maintain that is through an environment of innovation.
Put another way - we aren't smarter, nor do we work harder, than people in nations such as India and China. The only thing unique about us is our entrepeneurial environment which combines research at the highest levels with available capital to turn that research into products that generate thousands of jobs.
Flint, MI should tell you all you need to know about the wisdom of tying your economy to manufacturing.
And even that is not that big a deal. They can always buy the start up company when it proves successful, saving google tons of R&D money.
Assuming it's an arena in which Google chooses to compete, and assuming the principals involved choose to merge back with Google. Which, if they leave in the first place, isn't all that likely. Bottom line, it doesn't work for Google if its best people leave. Best case scenario in your suggestion, Google ceases being an innovative engineering company and turns into a VC firm.
Doesn't matter. The harm here isn't that they'll form companies to compete with Google, the harm is the brain drain, whether they form software companies or write novels.
Cite your sources for this information, please.
1. Photoelectric effect, Einstein, Albert. Won the Nobel Prize. 2. Any physical chemistry or organic chemistry textbook.