Ok, so no one should be patenting "genes" period. It's a separate discussion the list of things that may be considered patentable that shouldn't be.
His point is valid, patents are intended to promote innovation. In many industries they're actually retarding it, particularly in many EE/CS/ME areas. Investment in these areas is pretty cheap, and the innovation alone is its own reward in most cases. The real issue is that these patents are often obvious enough and essential and trivial such that they really shouldn't have ever been granted. The right thing would be to toss them out a window...
In bio/pharm, I'm still not sure 17 years or whatever it is, is the right number, it seems awfully long for the way things are today... but it does cost a crapload of money to research and test and create the new ideas. Patents are still needed to keep companies interested in R&D.
The real issue here is that Bill Gates got credit. How many people like you describe, work tirelessly day after day, providing society with the fruits of their labor (at a far better cost)? I know quite a few, most will never be famous.
Maybe that's where the luck is...having been recognized from the see of intelligent, hardworking, ambitious people.
Nobody outside of the windows team even has access to the OS source code
False, several people in my company have access to the OS source code and they do not even work for Microsoft. If you believe that MS's own employees can't get access if they want, you're crazy.
MS is a monopoly, in its purest and evilest form, and it's provably hurting our ecosystem. In point of fact their OS is total crap, but no one can adopt the competitors because of the ball and chain.
I would allow them to live if they open up device drivers, file formats, etc. Until then, go Google, go EU.
As an aside, it is quite possible that no one above your manager (presuming it was he/she that threatened you) is aware of this stupid intimidation tactic.
This is very true. This happened in my company, also in a software group, also in an at-will state. The person affected fortunately liked his coworkers but just hated mgmt and wanted out. Fortunately he also had a GF in the same company (in my group), and she leaked out what was happening and our own manager said that's against company policy and grounds for dismissal, that he should go to HR. They aren't his friend, but they exist for this purpose.
Well it turns out this was just a desperate manager, at the end of her leash. She was not fired, but was removed and her bluff called.
My opinion is to discuss with HR, but give them the 3 weeks you promised them, and leave. It's unlikely they'll report any of this to people asking about your references (at least in the US), and you clearly need to leave that company anyway.
I think the idea is that if you're card counting in your head, you can make a mistake. You could not account for any of the variations and distractions they provide. In this sense you're playing "the game", and if you win money they won't mess with you until you're too good. Hence the truly excellent won't attempt to bankrupt the house...they'll just net positive. Having a small time winner telling stories can only help you as a casino owner. If what he was doing was easy, you'd have to stop running the game.
If you use a machine, you're not really playing the game at all, you're just the arms. It's not a game anymore, there's no skill...it's just a matter of being obedient. I think they're well within their rights to boot you out, or if they can no longer prevent cheating, stop running the game.
In theory gambling is supposed to be fun, not a profitable career. Casino's are often their own worst enemies in creating the atmosphere where you believe you can make a good living by playing the odds. Unless you're ill, you will quickly see it's a losing proposition without working the system.
Re:Wow! Who ever would have guessed that!?
on
You Are Not a Lawyer
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I read this as a warning that such and such ironclad defenses are not the complete picture of how a prosecution would go, and to listen to your lawyers legal advice.
True, smart people would have thought this through. There is no shortage of dumb criminals, the newspaper is full of them. Particularly so for teenagers, I can't count how many times I've heard "ironclad" loopholes for smoking pot, carrying drugs, getting away with shoplifting that any reasonable person would know has to be BS. Living in California for most of my teenager years, you can't imagine how many times I've heard the "minors cannot enter into contracts" law used as a defense in ways that couldn't ever work. Everyone was a lawyer...
I think it's healthy to point out that this isn't a game, that there is no magic pixie dust to escape you from criminal activity. The subtext might be, if you're going to commit a crime, assume big brother is watching and think through how he's go about proving you guilty. Assume he's competant.
I suspect that in most of the cases this guy is writing about, the people caught never expected they'd be investigated. The likely compounded their problem with lame defenses after the fact, because they're shocked/outraged/scared, and not listened to their lawyers advice, assuming he/she was too stupid to understand the technology. It comes across a bit weak that because one lawyer writes about the issue and clearly understands it, that should assume all lawyers would...but then I think he did a good job of explaining why it doesn't matter anyway.
[And no, I don't think "troll" is the right moderation for parent, although it could have been more civil]
It does seem that music and art, as with so many other things, the vision is what we're there for. Execution has to be good or we get distracted, but it's not what we turn the radio on for. Anything that conveys the full vision more completely, is a good thing.
Does anyone believe Britney has any actual talent outside of shaking her ass? Have you listened to her speak, do you think she's actually capable of stringing sentences together much less composing the lyrics to her songs? Come on. Someone writes her songs for her, composes and performs the music, modifies her voice... whatever. It doesn't change the fact that if you like her music, you actually like the team that creates it.
I think it's the right line of thinking, but putting on my evil corporate leadership that I'd say: contract work. No one in my company would be located outside of the US, but some people who aren't in my company will do all the work for me.
In essence corporate taxes are being paid through employee wages and benefits. But it doesn't quite cover all the cost advantages. In one company I worked, the employer considered my liability to be roughly 2.5x my salary. This included my benefits, the building I worked in, the equipment I used, etc. All of which are cheaper elsewhere.
If they wanted to avoid criminal charges for treason, they should be forced to do that. Unfortunately it's not defined that way in the US, although perhaps "aid and comfort to our enemies" might entail employing them and moving our industrial base to their countries.
This country is an expensive place to live and work because, as a democratic society, we've voted ourselves a lot of cruft. Some of it is good, some of it is excess. There is a price however, and the price is wages.
Corporations want to circumvent this cruft by simply moving away from the problem (while simultaneously leeching the benefits of it, by maintaining themselves in the US). They leech on our society, using it to protect them while they grow their businesses, taking full advantage of what the country has to offer...while simultaneously selling it out. If it isn't stopped, we'll bleed dry.
Hopefully people will look at this statement from IBM and say "I don't want to live in China, there's no bill of rights, their legal system doesn't work well [for us], there is no personal freedom, and it's barely a democracy." s/China/wherever/g
Then ask why it is that IBM, who is based in Armonk, NY, should be able to make a profit by undermining our democracy - bypassing laws our government created to benefit us, because they don't really want to pay for it.
I may agree with them that there's a lot of inefficiencies and excess in some of the things that drive our wages up. But the proper solution is to work within the system, not erode it.
Why is murder wrong? Because if we allow someone to go around killing people, the result is that everyone but that guy is going to be paranoid. To the point that booby-traps, weapons, and fear of leaving ones house will cripple society. A possible scenario might be more people dying from "defense" than from the homicidal maniac in question.
Unless you are a spooky religious person, you cannot believe in anything as irrational as "natural law" or some incredible belief that taking another's life is anything but a social concern. Without the confines of society, things, people included, kill each other. They do it for food, they do it over mates, they do it for any damned reason at all. It is a pretty wretched and unfortunate existance, and once which humans have attempted to get away from. More to the point, we enforce our own social order by force. If you do not comply, we'll kill you. Even for a parking ticket, if you are sufficiently belligerent. It's an unlikely scenario, but ultimately that is the power we wield over one another.
At various points in history, select people have been allowed to kill people arbitrarily. Monarchs, religious clerics, soldiers, executioners, etc. have all, at times, had the authority and socially accepted power to murder. A problem that has occurred is that monarchs and clerics, have been known to abuse their power, causing social ills. Today, we do not accept that from our leadership, at least in the western world. In the US we do still have executioners, who by a jury of peers, can be ordered to put major criminals to death. This may change, or it may not. We have varying degrees of discomfort with this subject (i.e. "it could be us, wrongly accused"). However soldiers still kill, this will never change, our last resort is always, now and forever, going to be doing things by force. It will always be socially accepted when it happens. At risk of bringing in a stupid abortion debate: we also permit the murder of human fetuses. It is murder, whether or not you consider that object to be human or not. It was alive, and then someone killed it. This is not about whether it is right or wrong to have done so, it's about the only part of the debate that is fact: something is killed. It's not used for food or housing. The only justifiable reason for having done so is the negative social ramification of an unwanted human child exceeds the negative social ramification of killing something we don't necessarily have empathy for (yet).
So having disabused the notion that murder is always socially unacceptable, and in all cases wrong, and further highlighting our present (mixed) acceptance of killing humanesque things, what about critters that are maybe a bit human, and maybe a bit something else?
Is there a question? If they don't exist, there's no real question about whether murder is wrong. Once they do exist, our opinions are likely going to change based on the behavior and situation of the creature in question. If it performs advanced math while looking as cuddly as a new born kitten, we're not going to tolerate murdering it. On the other hand if it has the personality of a pissed off cobra, but makes a nice steak... I think i can eat dinner with a cleaner conscience than when cute peaceful cows are slaughtered.
All this "ethical dilemma" nonsense is really just a lot of noise to satisfy some spooky belief in God. Rational thinkers cannot come to the conclusion that if we created it, we would necessarily murder it. And if we were in a situation where murdering it is necessary, that it would be considered a social ill to do so. Modern medicine was built on the back of uncounted dead lab critters. Perhaps if we had one that was bio-chemically human, but didn't look, act or think like one, we could get away with killing less often?
Unless and until we get to the point where there is significant social concern, we can't begin to legislate behavior based on a maybe. If we're going to do that, then I propose we start this way: It is hereby legal to kill grey aliens for food, sport or scientific pursuit, but it is illegal to kill the equally succulent green alien.
Maybe aliens are everywhere, aware of us, and simply choosing not to communicate.
Many people have speculated this about cats. Owners know it to be true. Perhaps aliens live among us, and late at night, turn into psyochotic axe-murderer chasing predators from the foots of our very own beds.
I'd rather spend that money on his college fund, bank on a very low probability of cancer/etc. incidence (both by national average and by genetics) and hope for a cure for cancer for him, just like I will hope for one for me. The college fund has a pretty predictable and high return on my investment.
At $1k/year (roughly what they asked), for something that has no payout today, and very uncertain payout tomorrow... I think it's designed to tug on your heartstrings (and pursestrings) not rationality.
I'm technically minded, but not a biologist. I don't think I want to throw good money into a technology I don't understand, sponsored by people I don't really trust but who are clearly trying to turn a profit.
I might have a more optimistic view if I could be sure the cord blood bank was a non-profit research organization, run by respectable scientists doing non-private research. But I didn't see that. I saw guys in nice suits selling me nuclear shelters made out of tinfoil.
Absolutely we should be recruiting them to the US. Plus, how much of our problem are H1Bs? I want to see the government twisting arms to fire offshore employees and doing harm to companies who have moved their engineering out of the US entirely.
H1Bs pay the same rent we do, they pay the same "cost of living", and are subject to the same workforce protects the US has. They may be a little cheaper, but they can't be that much cheaper or they couldn't afford to live here.
US labor is expensive not entirely because of shortages, but because all the laws designed to protect workers make it that way. Anyone short circuiting that, ad hoc, deserves to be punished.
The show isn't a series of morality plays, it's to make you think about what's right. It's more social commentary, "this is how it is", not "how it should be". Right and wrong is a complicated issue, made easier for us viewers because we have (somewhat) perfect knowledge.
I believe that in general though, you're right, characters display less backbone than we, the audience would like them to. And I believe that's the point. We are unpassionate observers, watching two warring factions go at it. The more we watch, the less we necessarily have empathy for either side. The more clearly we see where this is headed. After the last episode, would you accept a Disney ending?
More importantly, are the times when characters actually do the right thing. Some characters do the right thing more often than not, on both sides. Sometimes the right thing had dire consequences, involving deaths of many people. How many people, your people, would you kill for the right thing? Would you lie to your people to unify them, to ensure their (brief) survival? What is the quest for earth if not a metaphor for our new president?
Baltar is, mostly, our example of the true self-serving egotist. He's even making a religion out of it. He's not all bad, he sometimes does the right thing, he certainly tries to think the right thoughts. But he is impossibly weak. Yet I think at some level we all identify with him. We hate what he does, but we understand why he does it. We'd like to think we'd do differently. Baltar, IMO, is ultimately dominated by his cowardice, not his intellect. He knows where he stands on the jedi-sith scale, but he's too much of a coward to take control of himself. This internal battle was fought out earlier on, with his "head six".
The show is pretty bleak, I think precisely for the reasons you cite for not liking the characters. Unlike Star Trek, the moral quandaries and decisions made persist and are affecting the outcome. They're absolutely not blown by, they're resolved one way or another. All the what-if's that were decided on in past episodes have forced them down the path they're on now, a path that has caused a lot of pain and suffering, more than what could have been if characters had acted differently.
Yeah that'll work. Ask 10 people what they want for dinner and get 10 different answers.
Try to do ANYTHING with your local home owners association and see. You can't agree to abolish the HOA, you can't agree on the speed limits, you can't agree on whether the rule against pink plastic flamingo's should be stricken. All of them think they're adults and have "reasons" for what they believe, however idiotic they may at times be. As a group, people are sheep, and we need a shepherd.
I'm not sure if it's in this article, but the belief was that in that state, the charges would be purged when they are 18. That's good enough protection IMO.
And as I said above, for the intent of this law, you can't charge teens differently than adults, or it would be exploited. You'd have adults paying/pressuring/manipulating teens, essentially creating a market for getting kids involved in illegal activity.
I believe prosecutors have the latitude to decide who to charge, and what bargains to accept. If not, that's where things need to be bent. If the prosecutor believes this is a porn ring, by all means go for it. If not...slap them on the wrists and move on.
To the extent that the parents/schools can be held legally responsible for activities the students are involved in (or rather the blissful and perhaps willful ignorance therein), minors should have limited freedoms and expectations of privacy. They are usually legally treated with kid gloves because we don't expect minors to necessarily understand right/wrong, consequence and danger. The downside is that minors do have freedoms limited by parents and guardians (and I disagree and think schools should count as guardians, although the law seems to vary).
I think the only thing noteworthy in this story is whether the kids will actually get convicted. This has "plea out" all over it, with a side of "I'll teach you a lesson you won't forget".
The question of whether it's appropriate to charge teens with porn charges is probably irrelevant. Underage porn laws are written with the intent (whether you agree or not) of protecting minors from themselves. Thus you can't differentiate who took it, or you could have adults paying/pressuring teens to do this. You need to be able to charge the teens if only to let them plea and turn in any adult who may have been involved. The question of whether these laws are well conceived isn't being raised.
This is a case where kids are being kids and should be treated like kids... but the law isn't great with exceptions. I question what "lesson" the prosecutor thinks can be taught by chasing this particular crime, and why not just let the parents handle it with a firm warning that this is illegal. If anything is wrong here, it's the attorney trying to play the role of a parent.
Which is unfortunate but true. Most people do not care about their government.
A slight exaggeration. We care, but we cannot follow along with it all day long, down to detailed minutia and throwing Filibuster Parties, complete with chips and dip. This ignores what they do when not in session, where the real wheeling and dealing is done. Everyone has an important part to contribute to society, for us, it's our day jobs. We need to supervise the government and ensure that the right trade-offs are being made.
We do rely on media agencies to pay detailed attention to the government, and boil it down in small chunks in an unbiased way. Unfortunately that doesn't happen...what coverage exists always seems to be around hot button issues. It's very difficult to follow the breadcrumbs to figure out what actually is happening...although we generally can know with some precision who Britney Spears is having sex with at any given moment in time.
So insofar as your statement is true, it's because viewers may have more curiosity in Britney's love life than in our senators. That doesn't mean we don't care about our senators or what they're up to. Someone has boiled coverage down to an "either or" scenario.
And the bottom line is that is where Globalization breaks. If the only difference between two countries was the price of labor, I'd say have at it (and be prepared to move myself).
But it's not. How is this obvious? Well Dell is based in Austin, Texas. One common theme in Texas is complaining about the "illegal's"...the mexican's jumping the border and living illegally in the US. They want the opportunities, freedoms and protections our government gives us. Why then, does Mr. Dell not talk to his friend Mr. G. W. Bush and say "let them in, they can work in my factory"?
Easy answer, once you let them in legally, they become protected by our labor laws, and become part of our society. By becoming citizens (or resident aliens), their price went up. It has nothing to do with them being brown skinned, it has to do with the fact that in order to create a fair, unexploited labor market, we have to raise the price of our labor. Mr. Dell (and many others, not to single him out), do not wish to pay the cost of the country that created him. It seems treasonous, but we justify it in economic terms as "inevitable".
No, it hasn't escaped my attention. It's just not really necessary for the network I deal with, so I'm wondering why I want to go out of my way for it.
One of the reasons cited for leaving IPv4 is not needing to NAT. I'm not sure how many people would really benefit from that.
Individuals do it to present a single IP to their ISP, who are known to be draconian and oppressive and may think they're entitled to money per machine used. Sure you can NAT with IPv6 too, but all you've done is make me buy a new gateway/router and given me no advantage. The day will come, but I'm not sure why I want to bring it on.
Corporations often funnel us all through single proxies or NAT servers just to keep tabs on us, not routing anything they don't approve of. They also will prefer the privacy NAT offers. I'm not sure how IPv6 improves your average corporate network.
The only advantage I see is for schools and data centers who need a large number of global IPs. I'm not sure anyone else wants to get excited about it.
Given that NAT at least partially became popular due to a few ISPs trying to argue that you can have only 1 machine on your network connected or you're breaking "the law" (their idiotic TOS), I have some doubts that IPV6 would bring about any real advantages to end users.
I'm not sure that I even want all my machines to have globally routable IPs.
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Ok, so no one should be patenting "genes" period. It's a separate discussion the list of things that may be considered patentable that shouldn't be.
His point is valid, patents are intended to promote innovation. In many industries they're actually retarding it, particularly in many EE/CS/ME areas. Investment in these areas is pretty cheap, and the innovation alone is its own reward in most cases. The real issue is that these patents are often obvious enough and essential and trivial such that they really shouldn't have ever been granted. The right thing would be to toss them out a window...
In bio/pharm, I'm still not sure 17 years or whatever it is, is the right number, it seems awfully long for the way things are today... but it does cost a crapload of money to research and test and create the new ideas. Patents are still needed to keep companies interested in R&D.
Perhaps those are necessary but not sufficient.
The real issue here is that Bill Gates got credit. How many people like you describe, work tirelessly day after day, providing society with the fruits of their labor (at a far better cost)? I know quite a few, most will never be famous.
Maybe that's where the luck is...having been recognized from the see of intelligent, hardworking, ambitious people.
Nobody outside of the windows team even has access to the OS source code
False, several people in my company have access to the OS source code and they do not even work for Microsoft. If you believe that MS's own employees can't get access if they want, you're crazy.
MS is a monopoly, in its purest and evilest form, and it's provably hurting our ecosystem. In point of fact their OS is total crap, but no one can adopt the competitors because of the ball and chain.
I would allow them to live if they open up device drivers, file formats, etc. Until then, go Google, go EU.
Sure, but we could always install firefox through the many and varied security holes that IE users generously provide for us!
As an aside, it is quite possible that no one above your manager (presuming it was he/she that threatened you) is aware of this stupid intimidation tactic.
This is very true. This happened in my company, also in a software group, also in an at-will state. The person affected fortunately liked his coworkers but just hated mgmt and wanted out. Fortunately he also had a GF in the same company (in my group), and she leaked out what was happening and our own manager said that's against company policy and grounds for dismissal, that he should go to HR. They aren't his friend, but they exist for this purpose.
Well it turns out this was just a desperate manager, at the end of her leash. She was not fired, but was removed and her bluff called.
My opinion is to discuss with HR, but give them the 3 weeks you promised them, and leave. It's unlikely they'll report any of this to people asking about your references (at least in the US), and you clearly need to leave that company anyway.
What's really going on here is that in the future (after Core i7) "GPUs" are being viewed as the next big thing.
Believe it or not, the talks I'm hearing are that "GPUs" are going to be everywhere soon, Intel knows this, and who makes the best GPU? Not Intel.
I think the idea is that if you're card counting in your head, you can make a mistake. You could not account for any of the variations and distractions they provide. In this sense you're playing "the game", and if you win money they won't mess with you until you're too good. Hence the truly excellent won't attempt to bankrupt the house...they'll just net positive. Having a small time winner telling stories can only help you as a casino owner. If what he was doing was easy, you'd have to stop running the game.
If you use a machine, you're not really playing the game at all, you're just the arms. It's not a game anymore, there's no skill...it's just a matter of being obedient. I think they're well within their rights to boot you out, or if they can no longer prevent cheating, stop running the game.
In theory gambling is supposed to be fun, not a profitable career. Casino's are often their own worst enemies in creating the atmosphere where you believe you can make a good living by playing the odds. Unless you're ill, you will quickly see it's a losing proposition without working the system.
I read this as a warning that such and such ironclad defenses are not the complete picture of how a prosecution would go, and to listen to your lawyers legal advice.
True, smart people would have thought this through. There is no shortage of dumb criminals, the newspaper is full of them. Particularly so for teenagers, I can't count how many times I've heard "ironclad" loopholes for smoking pot, carrying drugs, getting away with shoplifting that any reasonable person would know has to be BS. Living in California for most of my teenager years, you can't imagine how many times I've heard the "minors cannot enter into contracts" law used as a defense in ways that couldn't ever work. Everyone was a lawyer...
I think it's healthy to point out that this isn't a game, that there is no magic pixie dust to escape you from criminal activity. The subtext might be, if you're going to commit a crime, assume big brother is watching and think through how he's go about proving you guilty. Assume he's competant.
I suspect that in most of the cases this guy is writing about, the people caught never expected they'd be investigated. The likely compounded their problem with lame defenses after the fact, because they're shocked/outraged/scared, and not listened to their lawyers advice, assuming he/she was too stupid to understand the technology. It comes across a bit weak that because one lawyer writes about the issue and clearly understands it, that should assume all lawyers would...but then I think he did a good job of explaining why it doesn't matter anyway.
[And no, I don't think "troll" is the right moderation for parent, although it could have been more civil]
It does seem that music and art, as with so many other things, the vision is what we're there for. Execution has to be good or we get distracted, but it's not what we turn the radio on for. Anything that conveys the full vision more completely, is a good thing.
Does anyone believe Britney has any actual talent outside of shaking her ass? Have you listened to her speak, do you think she's actually capable of stringing sentences together much less composing the lyrics to her songs? Come on. Someone writes her songs for her, composes and performs the music, modifies her voice... whatever. It doesn't change the fact that if you like her music, you actually like the team that creates it.
I think it's the right line of thinking, but putting on my evil corporate leadership that I'd say: contract work. No one in my company would be located outside of the US, but some people who aren't in my company will do all the work for me.
In essence corporate taxes are being paid through employee wages and benefits. But it doesn't quite cover all the cost advantages. In one company I worked, the employer considered my liability to be roughly 2.5x my salary. This included my benefits, the building I worked in, the equipment I used, etc. All of which are cheaper elsewhere.
If they wanted to avoid criminal charges for treason, they should be forced to do that. Unfortunately it's not defined that way in the US, although perhaps "aid and comfort to our enemies" might entail employing them and moving our industrial base to their countries.
This country is an expensive place to live and work because, as a democratic society, we've voted ourselves a lot of cruft. Some of it is good, some of it is excess. There is a price however, and the price is wages.
Corporations want to circumvent this cruft by simply moving away from the problem (while simultaneously leeching the benefits of it, by maintaining themselves in the US). They leech on our society, using it to protect them while they grow their businesses, taking full advantage of what the country has to offer...while simultaneously selling it out. If it isn't stopped, we'll bleed dry.
Hopefully people will look at this statement from IBM and say "I don't want to live in China, there's no bill of rights, their legal system doesn't work well [for us], there is no personal freedom, and it's barely a democracy."
s/China/wherever/g
Then ask why it is that IBM, who is based in Armonk, NY, should be able to make a profit by undermining our democracy - bypassing laws our government created to benefit us, because they don't really want to pay for it.
I may agree with them that there's a lot of inefficiencies and excess in some of the things that drive our wages up. But the proper solution is to work within the system, not erode it.
Why is murder wrong? Because if we allow someone to go around killing people, the result is that everyone but that guy is going to be paranoid. To the point that booby-traps, weapons, and fear of leaving ones house will cripple society. A possible scenario might be more people dying from "defense" than from the homicidal maniac in question.
Unless you are a spooky religious person, you cannot believe in anything as irrational as "natural law" or some incredible belief that taking another's life is anything but a social concern. Without the confines of society, things, people included, kill each other. They do it for food, they do it over mates, they do it for any damned reason at all. It is a pretty wretched and unfortunate existance, and once which humans have attempted to get away from. More to the point, we enforce our own social order by force. If you do not comply, we'll kill you. Even for a parking ticket, if you are sufficiently belligerent. It's an unlikely scenario, but ultimately that is the power we wield over one another.
At various points in history, select people have been allowed to kill people arbitrarily. Monarchs, religious clerics, soldiers, executioners, etc. have all, at times, had the authority and socially accepted power to murder. A problem that has occurred is that monarchs and clerics, have been known to abuse their power, causing social ills. Today, we do not accept that from our leadership, at least in the western world. In the US we do still have executioners, who by a jury of peers, can be ordered to put major criminals to death. This may change, or it may not. We have varying degrees of discomfort with this subject (i.e. "it could be us, wrongly accused"). However soldiers still kill, this will never change, our last resort is always, now and forever, going to be doing things by force. It will always be socially accepted when it happens. At risk of bringing in a stupid abortion debate: we also permit the murder of human fetuses. It is murder, whether or not you consider that object to be human or not. It was alive, and then someone killed it. This is not about whether it is right or wrong to have done so, it's about the only part of the debate that is fact: something is killed. It's not used for food or housing. The only justifiable reason for having done so is the negative social ramification of an unwanted human child exceeds the negative social ramification of killing something we don't necessarily have empathy for (yet).
So having disabused the notion that murder is always socially unacceptable, and in all cases wrong, and further highlighting our present (mixed) acceptance of killing humanesque things, what about critters that are maybe a bit human, and maybe a bit something else?
Is there a question? If they don't exist, there's no real question about whether murder is wrong. Once they do exist, our opinions are likely going to change based on the behavior and situation of the creature in question. If it performs advanced math while looking as cuddly as a new born kitten, we're not going to tolerate murdering it. On the other hand if it has the personality of a pissed off cobra, but makes a nice steak... I think i can eat dinner with a cleaner conscience than when cute peaceful cows are slaughtered.
All this "ethical dilemma" nonsense is really just a lot of noise to satisfy some spooky belief in God. Rational thinkers cannot come to the conclusion that if we created it, we would necessarily murder it. And if we were in a situation where murdering it is necessary, that it would be considered a social ill to do so. Modern medicine was built on the back of uncounted dead lab critters. Perhaps if we had one that was bio-chemically human, but didn't look, act or think like one, we could get away with killing less often?
Unless and until we get to the point where there is significant social concern, we can't begin to legislate behavior based on a maybe. If we're going to do that, then I propose we start this way: It is hereby legal to kill grey aliens for food, sport or scientific pursuit, but it is illegal to kill the equally succulent green alien.
It's real easy: if it is unethical to do, don't do it.
If someone, somewhere, could maybe do something unethical based on what you're doing, do it, and throw that other guy in jail when you catch him.
I don't see what "questions" are involved here.
Maybe aliens are everywhere, aware of us, and simply choosing not to communicate.
Many people have speculated this about cats. Owners know it to be true. Perhaps aliens live among us, and late at night, turn into psyochotic axe-murderer chasing predators from the foots of our very own beds.
I'd rather spend that money on his college fund, bank on a very low probability of cancer/etc. incidence (both by national average and by genetics) and hope for a cure for cancer for him, just like I will hope for one for me. The college fund has a pretty predictable and high return on my investment.
At $1k/year (roughly what they asked), for something that has no payout today, and very uncertain payout tomorrow... I think it's designed to tug on your heartstrings (and pursestrings) not rationality.
I'm technically minded, but not a biologist. I don't think I want to throw good money into a technology I don't understand, sponsored by people I don't really trust but who are clearly trying to turn a profit.
I might have a more optimistic view if I could be sure the cord blood bank was a non-profit research organization, run by respectable scientists doing non-private research. But I didn't see that. I saw guys in nice suits selling me nuclear shelters made out of tinfoil.
Absolutely we should be recruiting them to the US. Plus, how much of our problem are H1Bs? I want to see the government twisting arms to fire offshore employees and doing harm to companies who have moved their engineering out of the US entirely.
H1Bs pay the same rent we do, they pay the same "cost of living", and are subject to the same workforce protects the US has. They may be a little cheaper, but they can't be that much cheaper or they couldn't afford to live here.
US labor is expensive not entirely because of shortages, but because all the laws designed to protect workers make it that way. Anyone short circuiting that, ad hoc, deserves to be punished.
The show isn't a series of morality plays, it's to make you think about what's right. It's more social commentary, "this is how it is", not "how it should be". Right and wrong is a complicated issue, made easier for us viewers because we have (somewhat) perfect knowledge.
I believe that in general though, you're right, characters display less backbone than we, the audience would like them to. And I believe that's the point. We are unpassionate observers, watching two warring factions go at it. The more we watch, the less we necessarily have empathy for either side. The more clearly we see where this is headed. After the last episode, would you accept a Disney ending?
More importantly, are the times when characters actually do the right thing. Some characters do the right thing more often than not, on both sides. Sometimes the right thing had dire consequences, involving deaths of many people. How many people, your people, would you kill for the right thing? Would you lie to your people to unify them, to ensure their (brief) survival? What is the quest for earth if not a metaphor for our new president?
Baltar is, mostly, our example of the true self-serving egotist. He's even making a religion out of it. He's not all bad, he sometimes does the right thing, he certainly tries to think the right thoughts. But he is impossibly weak. Yet I think at some level we all identify with him. We hate what he does, but we understand why he does it. We'd like to think we'd do differently. Baltar, IMO, is ultimately dominated by his cowardice, not his intellect. He knows where he stands on the jedi-sith scale, but he's too much of a coward to take control of himself. This internal battle was fought out earlier on, with his "head six".
The show is pretty bleak, I think precisely for the reasons you cite for not liking the characters. Unlike Star Trek, the moral quandaries and decisions made persist and are affecting the outcome. They're absolutely not blown by, they're resolved one way or another. All the what-if's that were decided on in past episodes have forced them down the path they're on now, a path that has caused a lot of pain and suffering, more than what could have been if characters had acted differently.
Yeah that'll work. Ask 10 people what they want for dinner and get 10 different answers.
Try to do ANYTHING with your local home owners association and see. You can't agree to abolish the HOA, you can't agree on the speed limits, you can't agree on whether the rule against pink plastic flamingo's should be stricken. All of them think they're adults and have "reasons" for what they believe, however idiotic they may at times be. As a group, people are sheep, and we need a shepherd.
I'm not sure if it's in this article, but the belief was that in that state, the charges would be purged when they are 18. That's good enough protection IMO.
And as I said above, for the intent of this law, you can't charge teens differently than adults, or it would be exploited. You'd have adults paying/pressuring/manipulating teens, essentially creating a market for getting kids involved in illegal activity.
I believe prosecutors have the latitude to decide who to charge, and what bargains to accept. If not, that's where things need to be bent. If the prosecutor believes this is a porn ring, by all means go for it. If not...slap them on the wrists and move on.
To the extent that the parents/schools can be held legally responsible for activities the students are involved in (or rather the blissful and perhaps willful ignorance therein), minors should have limited freedoms and expectations of privacy. They are usually legally treated with kid gloves because we don't expect minors to necessarily understand right/wrong, consequence and danger. The downside is that minors do have freedoms limited by parents and guardians (and I disagree and think schools should count as guardians, although the law seems to vary).
I think the only thing noteworthy in this story is whether the kids will actually get convicted. This has "plea out" all over it, with a side of "I'll teach you a lesson you won't forget".
The question of whether it's appropriate to charge teens with porn charges is probably irrelevant. Underage porn laws are written with the intent (whether you agree or not) of protecting minors from themselves. Thus you can't differentiate who took it, or you could have adults paying/pressuring teens to do this. You need to be able to charge the teens if only to let them plea and turn in any adult who may have been involved. The question of whether these laws are well conceived isn't being raised.
This is a case where kids are being kids and should be treated like kids... but the law isn't great with exceptions. I question what "lesson" the prosecutor thinks can be taught by chasing this particular crime, and why not just let the parents handle it with a firm warning that this is illegal. If anything is wrong here, it's the attorney trying to play the role of a parent.
Would you have preferred instead a technologist from AT&T, Verizon, etc? Cisco is the "good guy" by comparison.
Which is unfortunate but true. Most people do not care about their government.
A slight exaggeration. We care, but we cannot follow along with it all day long, down to detailed minutia and throwing Filibuster Parties, complete with chips and dip. This ignores what they do when not in session, where the real wheeling and dealing is done. Everyone has an important part to contribute to society, for us, it's our day jobs. We need to supervise the government and ensure that the right trade-offs are being made.
We do rely on media agencies to pay detailed attention to the government, and boil it down in small chunks in an unbiased way. Unfortunately that doesn't happen...what coverage exists always seems to be around hot button issues. It's very difficult to follow the breadcrumbs to figure out what actually is happening...although we generally can know with some precision who Britney Spears is having sex with at any given moment in time.
So insofar as your statement is true, it's because viewers may have more curiosity in Britney's love life than in our senators. That doesn't mean we don't care about our senators or what they're up to. Someone has boiled coverage down to an "either or" scenario.
And the bottom line is that is where Globalization breaks. If the only difference between two countries was the price of labor, I'd say have at it (and be prepared to move myself).
But it's not. How is this obvious? Well Dell is based in Austin, Texas. One common theme in Texas is complaining about the "illegal's"...the mexican's jumping the border and living illegally in the US. They want the opportunities, freedoms and protections our government gives us. Why then, does Mr. Dell not talk to his friend Mr. G. W. Bush and say "let them in, they can work in my factory"?
Easy answer, once you let them in legally, they become protected by our labor laws, and become part of our society. By becoming citizens (or resident aliens), their price went up. It has nothing to do with them being brown skinned, it has to do with the fact that in order to create a fair, unexploited labor market, we have to raise the price of our labor. Mr. Dell (and many others, not to single him out), do not wish to pay the cost of the country that created him. It seems treasonous, but we justify it in economic terms as "inevitable".
No, it hasn't escaped my attention. It's just not really necessary for the network I deal with, so I'm wondering why I want to go out of my way for it.
One of the reasons cited for leaving IPv4 is not needing to NAT. I'm not sure how many people would really benefit from that.
Individuals do it to present a single IP to their ISP, who are known to be draconian and oppressive and may think they're entitled to money per machine used. Sure you can NAT with IPv6 too, but all you've done is make me buy a new gateway/router and given me no advantage. The day will come, but I'm not sure why I want to bring it on.
Corporations often funnel us all through single proxies or NAT servers just to keep tabs on us, not routing anything they don't approve of. They also will prefer the privacy NAT offers. I'm not sure how IPv6 improves your average corporate network.
The only advantage I see is for schools and data centers who need a large number of global IPs. I'm not sure anyone else wants to get excited about it.
Given that NAT at least partially became popular due to a few ISPs trying to argue that you can have only 1 machine on your network connected or you're breaking "the law" (their idiotic TOS), I have some doubts that IPV6 would bring about any real advantages to end users.
I'm not sure that I even want all my machines to have globally routable IPs.