I am not making an "argument," I am telling you what the supreme court said about the matter. Take it up with them if you don't like it. But since I seem to have offended you somehow, I apologize for trying to educate you.
Courts have ruled before that you can't take the 5th to refuse to unlock a safe that you own. The reasoning is that the information you're providing - the combination to a safe, or in this case a decryption password - could never be incriminating in and of itself. It's the same reasoning that they used when they decided that the 5th doesn't give you the right to refuse to disclose your name. Now, if he had wanted to claim that the encrypted files weren't his and he didn't know how they got on his laptop, then providing the password COULD potentially be incriminating, because it would be evidence that the files were indeed his. But now that he has admitted to owning the files, that scenario is no longer relevant.
You seem to be under the assumption that natural selection has a "goal" or something with respect to making animals better hunters etc., and that human activities undermine that goal. If hanging around humans starts to lower an animal's probability of survival and reproduction (eg, because people are shooting them) then that trait will be naturally selected against because those crocodiles are now less fit.
As I recall, GATTACA didn't depict people's future careers as being predetermined by their DNA. It was about a guy who was genetically predisposed to having heart conditions and did actually have a heart condition who wanted to be an astronaut, so he had to cheat on cardio stress tests and pretend to have a different genetic profile. I believe there was a scene in the movie where one of the managers said something along the lines of "The things we look for with our screening wouldn't prevent someone from being, say, a detective," which seemed to imply that most non-extreme jobs aren't so genetically selective. Although it's been a while since I watched it, I could be remembering it wrong.
Re:Why is this a problem again?
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 1
My (admittedly layman) understanding of cannon vs. wooden ship naval warfare was that they wanted cannons with just enough speed to punch through one side of the hull, rather than cannons that fired shot so fast that they punched through both sides of the ship. Apparently the cloud of flying splinters, debris, etc. from a slower shot did more damage than a faster shot that went in one side and out the other.
In my experience most companies will also be willing to confirm or refute any specific claims that you make in your application, like "Yes, he wrote the database program that we used to manage our inventory" or something similar. But it would be pretty unusual for them to comment on how well you actually did your job, ie. if the database software that you wrote was shitty and they replaced it a month after your wrote it, they probably won't tell anyone.
Whenever I hear police complaining about how they're being stifled by X technology, it always makes me wonder if perhaps they really have no problem at all, and are just trying to drive criminals to use it so that they will be easier to catch. Your average police agency might not bother with such a tactic, but when you hear big national agencies talk about how they're having trouble with terrorists/drug smugglers/mobsters/etc using a particular system, it makes you wonder...
"Internet vendors shouldn't have a tax-exempt advantage over Wisconsin's brick-and-mortar retail stores."
Umm, what? We're not talking about selling physical products, we're talking about selling data. Are there any brick and mortar stores in WI that let you come in and pay to download things to your USB drive using a connection at the cash register or something?
So do you think it's my naivete that makes me assume that someone who can't afford $5-10/month for a calling card or extra cell phone isn't going to be able to support themselves anyway? Or was that my pretentiousness? Please, I'm intrigued to know.
At your urging I went back and read over your posts to see if I missed anything, but so far as I can tell you said that a cellphone isn't a good replacement for blocked caller ID because 1) if the wife doesn't answer it the husband will report her to the police and 2) she has to pay for it. Your point 1 has already been addressed, and is the reason I called you dense. Your point 2 assumes that a woman is living on her own and possibly supporting her children, yet is unable to afford a few dollars/month for a pay-as-you-go cell plan or calling card. As was already pointed out, it seems very unlikely to me that such a trivial amount would be much of a burden, even for a poor person. This is of course assuming that they aren't living at a shelter or something, in which case I assume the shelter would pick up the small expense of a group calling card or something for wives who have a legal obligation to contact their husbands.
Now did you have some other point buried in there that I missed, or are you simply trying to imagine problems where none exist while ignoring the MANY possible solutions?
No, I am not dense. Perhaps phones should be used for contacting more than one person? Or maybe, just MAYBE she wants to be called by people who AREN'T abusive ex-husbands once in a while, and be able to know they're calling. Maybe she wants to be able to use her phone for normal things... like calling and receiving calls, instead of just using it as a portal into her home that welcomes harassment from abusive individuals if she wants to make it functional.
Then you would have to (GASP!) spend $20 on a cheap pay-as-you-go phone that comes preloaded with minuted to used for contacting the ex-husband, and shell out $20 for more minutes every three months..
Did you bother to actually think your logic through before rhetorically asking someone if they were dense?
Your initial argument was that she couldn't turn off the phone because it would prevent the husband from contacting her, which would prompt him to report her to the police and claim she had kidnapped the children. Apparently you didn't realize that blocking caller ID would prevent the husband from contacting the wife in exactly the same manner. That's why I called you dense.
Yes, the phone cards are a nice idea, but currently, they're not free (whereas anonymous calling is) -- and it's only a matter of time, like someone else mentioned, that there is a workaround for that as well.
The phone cards are available in denominations as small as $5. If you can't come up with $5/month to meet your court-mandated obligations to call your husband occasionally, you almost certainly aren't going to be able to feed and shelter yourself anyway.
The phones come with minutes pre-loaded, so you only need $20-$30 for the phone and another $20 three months later when the minutes expire. Take the DVD player with you on your way out and pawn it or sell it to a friend or something. Or If you really need to make a call the very night you run away from your husband AND you can't scrape together $30 for a cellphone, use a phone from a retail store or a gas station or something. Or use a payphone at a bus stop/airport/whatever. Or buy a $5 pre-paid calling card at Target. Or if you don't want to contact him at all and are worried that he'll accuse you of kidnapping the children, just stop by the police station and tell them that you're leaving your husband and taking the kids. Hell, use the phone AT THE POLICE STATION to call him. Problem solved in about 5 different ways, and that's just the first few solutions I came up with off the top of my head, I'm sure there are plenty of others. I really don't see the issue here. It sounds like the domestic violence support/recovery crowd in the article are just trying to make noise to keep their pet issue in the news, even if it makes them look like idiots.
This would be equivalent to the company including a paper EULA in the box with a big "You don't have permission to use this software until you sign this agreement!" warning. You could proceed to throw away the paper EULA and use the software anyway, but you would probably be breaking copyright law by using software that you weren't licensed to use.
An even easier way to beat it would be to use a pre-paid calling cards. The kind where you dial an 800 number and then enter a pin and the number you want to connect to. Those always appear to be coming from the calling card service.
If you can't come up with $20 every three months to pay for phone access, you almost certainly aren't going to be able to afford to feed and shelter yourself anyway.
Are you dense? If the battered woman was blocking caller ID, her husband wouldn't be able to contact her anyway. What is the difference between calling your husband from a secret number with a phone that blocks caller ID so that he can't call you back, and putting your phone on silent/turning it off so that he can't call you back? Either way, initiating contact is entirely one-way; the wife can contact the husband at will but the husband can't contact the wife. Or if cell phones really aren't your thing, just buy one of those pre-paid phone cards where you dial an 800 number and enter a PIN. Those are even cheaper than a cell phone, and always appear to be coming from the phone center of the calling card company. It sounds like the battered women advocates in the article are just trying to make noise in order to keep their cause in the news, even if it makes them sound like clueless idiots.
"So much money"? Are you kidding? I paid $30 for my phone, and $20 for 80 minutes that last three months. $7/month is a trivial expense, even for a relatively poor person.
So...cellphone? Payphone? Skype? Call from your lawyer's office? Ask to use the phone at a department store or something? Communicate by mail, using a PO box?
When my school wanted to build a Foucault pendulum that was less than 1 story high to decorate a new building, they installed a gadget at the top that automatically dampens the precession. This was over ten years ago.
The one disappointing thing here is that the court blames physicians for the public misconception. In reality, the blame lies more with the mass media, who turned the original claims into a massive health scare.
THIS!
Out of a population of many hundreds of millions of people, you will always be able to find someone willing to advocate any given view, no matter how crackpot or dishonest it is. That's just simple statistics, and isn't really a problem. The problem appears when the media decides to give these crackpots a platform that allows them to reach a national audience, and (at least implicitly) give their audience the impression that they think the crackpot might have a point.
About the only way to be allergic to a vaccine is to be allergic to the egg proteins found in the vaccine formula. If you are severely allergic to eggs, you might be allergic to vaccines. But there are egg-free versions of all the major vaccines readily available at a slightly higher price. Although even if you are allergic to eggs, the allergy would have to be VERY severe in order for vaccines to pose a serious risk to you, because the amount of egg protein found in them is quite tiny. If you truly know multiple people who are "very allergic" to most vaccines, you must know a greatly disproportionate number of people with unusually severe egg allergies. Note that any competent doctor/nurse/whatever will ask you if you (or your child) has egg allergies before administering the vaccine. This is also why they usually ask you to hang around for a short while after receiving the vaccination - it's to make sure you don't fall over and go into anaphylactic shock shortly after the injection. Again, I would like to reiterate that there are non-egg versions of vaccine available, so allergies should never prevent someone from getting a vaccination.
Suppose I have a contract to sell sheet music, but not CDs of the music actually being performed. If I develop a gadget that scans sheet music, turns it into a midi file, and then plays it, am I now breaking my contract if I sell sheet music to my customers who have also purchased my Magic Miditron 9000? I would argue that I am not. I might know that there is a high probability that such customers will end up using my gadget to listen to computer-generated renditions of the sheet music, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm not selling recordings of the music being performed.
Similarly, Amazon is merely selling text. The fact that their customers have a device that can turn text into sound doesn't mean that they are selling audio versions of the books. You can make a million analogies like this. Suppose I have a license to sell DVDs of certain movies, but not VHS tapes of them. It's still fine for me to sell my customers DVDs, blank VHS tapes, and a DVD/VHS combo player. Or if I have a license to sell frozen pizza but not hot pizza, I can sell my customers an oven and frozen pizza.
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Your argument is nonsense.
I am not making an "argument," I am telling you what the supreme court said about the matter. Take it up with them if you don't like it. But since I seem to have offended you somehow, I apologize for trying to educate you.
Courts have ruled before that you can't take the 5th to refuse to unlock a safe that you own. The reasoning is that the information you're providing - the combination to a safe, or in this case a decryption password - could never be incriminating in and of itself. It's the same reasoning that they used when they decided that the 5th doesn't give you the right to refuse to disclose your name. Now, if he had wanted to claim that the encrypted files weren't his and he didn't know how they got on his laptop, then providing the password COULD potentially be incriminating, because it would be evidence that the files were indeed his. But now that he has admitted to owning the files, that scenario is no longer relevant.
You seem to be under the assumption that natural selection has a "goal" or something with respect to making animals better hunters etc., and that human activities undermine that goal. If hanging around humans starts to lower an animal's probability of survival and reproduction (eg, because people are shooting them) then that trait will be naturally selected against because those crocodiles are now less fit.
As I recall, GATTACA didn't depict people's future careers as being predetermined by their DNA. It was about a guy who was genetically predisposed to having heart conditions and did actually have a heart condition who wanted to be an astronaut, so he had to cheat on cardio stress tests and pretend to have a different genetic profile. I believe there was a scene in the movie where one of the managers said something along the lines of "The things we look for with our screening wouldn't prevent someone from being, say, a detective," which seemed to imply that most non-extreme jobs aren't so genetically selective. Although it's been a while since I watched it, I could be remembering it wrong.
Correction; it's also called dating.
My (admittedly layman) understanding of cannon vs. wooden ship naval warfare was that they wanted cannons with just enough speed to punch through one side of the hull, rather than cannons that fired shot so fast that they punched through both sides of the ship. Apparently the cloud of flying splinters, debris, etc. from a slower shot did more damage than a faster shot that went in one side and out the other.
In my experience most companies will also be willing to confirm or refute any specific claims that you make in your application, like "Yes, he wrote the database program that we used to manage our inventory" or something similar. But it would be pretty unusual for them to comment on how well you actually did your job, ie. if the database software that you wrote was shitty and they replaced it a month after your wrote it, they probably won't tell anyone.
Whenever I hear police complaining about how they're being stifled by X technology, it always makes me wonder if perhaps they really have no problem at all, and are just trying to drive criminals to use it so that they will be easier to catch. Your average police agency might not bother with such a tactic, but when you hear big national agencies talk about how they're having trouble with terrorists/drug smugglers/mobsters/etc using a particular system, it makes you wonder...
"Internet vendors shouldn't have a tax-exempt advantage over Wisconsin's brick-and-mortar retail stores."
Umm, what? We're not talking about selling physical products, we're talking about selling data. Are there any brick and mortar stores in WI that let you come in and pay to download things to your USB drive using a connection at the cash register or something?
So do you think it's my naivete that makes me assume that someone who can't afford $5-10/month for a calling card or extra cell phone isn't going to be able to support themselves anyway? Or was that my pretentiousness? Please, I'm intrigued to know.
At your urging I went back and read over your posts to see if I missed anything, but so far as I can tell you said that a cellphone isn't a good replacement for blocked caller ID because 1) if the wife doesn't answer it the husband will report her to the police and 2) she has to pay for it. Your point 1 has already been addressed, and is the reason I called you dense. Your point 2 assumes that a woman is living on her own and possibly supporting her children, yet is unable to afford a few dollars/month for a pay-as-you-go cell plan or calling card. As was already pointed out, it seems very unlikely to me that such a trivial amount would be much of a burden, even for a poor person. This is of course assuming that they aren't living at a shelter or something, in which case I assume the shelter would pick up the small expense of a group calling card or something for wives who have a legal obligation to contact their husbands.
Now did you have some other point buried in there that I missed, or are you simply trying to imagine problems where none exist while ignoring the MANY possible solutions?
No, I am not dense. Perhaps phones should be used for contacting more than one person? Or maybe, just MAYBE she wants to be called by people who AREN'T abusive ex-husbands once in a while, and be able to know they're calling. Maybe she wants to be able to use her phone for normal things... like calling and receiving calls, instead of just using it as a portal into her home that welcomes harassment from abusive individuals if she wants to make it functional.
Then you would have to (GASP!) spend $20 on a cheap pay-as-you-go phone that comes preloaded with minuted to used for contacting the ex-husband, and shell out $20 for more minutes every three months..
Did you bother to actually think your logic through before rhetorically asking someone if they were dense?
Your initial argument was that she couldn't turn off the phone because it would prevent the husband from contacting her, which would prompt him to report her to the police and claim she had kidnapped the children. Apparently you didn't realize that blocking caller ID would prevent the husband from contacting the wife in exactly the same manner. That's why I called you dense.
Yes, the phone cards are a nice idea, but currently, they're not free (whereas anonymous calling is) -- and it's only a matter of time, like someone else mentioned, that there is a workaround for that as well.
The phone cards are available in denominations as small as $5. If you can't come up with $5/month to meet your court-mandated obligations to call your husband occasionally, you almost certainly aren't going to be able to feed and shelter yourself anyway.
The phones come with minutes pre-loaded, so you only need $20-$30 for the phone and another $20 three months later when the minutes expire. Take the DVD player with you on your way out and pawn it or sell it to a friend or something. Or If you really need to make a call the very night you run away from your husband AND you can't scrape together $30 for a cellphone, use a phone from a retail store or a gas station or something. Or use a payphone at a bus stop/airport/whatever. Or buy a $5 pre-paid calling card at Target. Or if you don't want to contact him at all and are worried that he'll accuse you of kidnapping the children, just stop by the police station and tell them that you're leaving your husband and taking the kids. Hell, use the phone AT THE POLICE STATION to call him. Problem solved in about 5 different ways, and that's just the first few solutions I came up with off the top of my head, I'm sure there are plenty of others. I really don't see the issue here. It sounds like the domestic violence support/recovery crowd in the article are just trying to make noise to keep their pet issue in the news, even if it makes them look like idiots.
This would be equivalent to the company including a paper EULA in the box with a big "You don't have permission to use this software until you sign this agreement!" warning. You could proceed to throw away the paper EULA and use the software anyway, but you would probably be breaking copyright law by using software that you weren't licensed to use.
An even easier way to beat it would be to use a pre-paid calling cards. The kind where you dial an 800 number and then enter a pin and the number you want to connect to. Those always appear to be coming from the calling card service.
If you can't come up with $20 every three months to pay for phone access, you almost certainly aren't going to be able to afford to feed and shelter yourself anyway.
Are you dense? If the battered woman was blocking caller ID, her husband wouldn't be able to contact her anyway. What is the difference between calling your husband from a secret number with a phone that blocks caller ID so that he can't call you back, and putting your phone on silent/turning it off so that he can't call you back? Either way, initiating contact is entirely one-way; the wife can contact the husband at will but the husband can't contact the wife. Or if cell phones really aren't your thing, just buy one of those pre-paid phone cards where you dial an 800 number and enter a PIN. Those are even cheaper than a cell phone, and always appear to be coming from the phone center of the calling card company. It sounds like the battered women advocates in the article are just trying to make noise in order to keep their cause in the news, even if it makes them sound like clueless idiots.
I would be a whole lot more worried about someone finding the shelter by following their wife/gf/whatever to it after a meeting or something.
"So much money"? Are you kidding? I paid $30 for my phone, and $20 for 80 minutes that last three months. $7/month is a trivial expense, even for a relatively poor person.
So...cellphone? Payphone? Skype? Call from your lawyer's office? Ask to use the phone at a department store or something? Communicate by mail, using a PO box?
So buy a $30 pay-as-you-go cellphone. Problem solved.
When my school wanted to build a Foucault pendulum that was less than 1 story high to decorate a new building, they installed a gadget at the top that automatically dampens the precession. This was over ten years ago.
The one disappointing thing here is that the court blames physicians for the public misconception. In reality, the blame lies more with the mass media, who turned the original claims into a massive health scare.
THIS!
Out of a population of many hundreds of millions of people, you will always be able to find someone willing to advocate any given view, no matter how crackpot or dishonest it is. That's just simple statistics, and isn't really a problem. The problem appears when the media decides to give these crackpots a platform that allows them to reach a national audience, and (at least implicitly) give their audience the impression that they think the crackpot might have a point.
I hate to break this to you, but we've already stopped vaccinating against smallpox.
About the only way to be allergic to a vaccine is to be allergic to the egg proteins found in the vaccine formula. If you are severely allergic to eggs, you might be allergic to vaccines. But there are egg-free versions of all the major vaccines readily available at a slightly higher price. Although even if you are allergic to eggs, the allergy would have to be VERY severe in order for vaccines to pose a serious risk to you, because the amount of egg protein found in them is quite tiny. If you truly know multiple people who are "very allergic" to most vaccines, you must know a greatly disproportionate number of people with unusually severe egg allergies. Note that any competent doctor/nurse/whatever will ask you if you (or your child) has egg allergies before administering the vaccine. This is also why they usually ask you to hang around for a short while after receiving the vaccination - it's to make sure you don't fall over and go into anaphylactic shock shortly after the injection. Again, I would like to reiterate that there are non-egg versions of vaccine available, so allergies should never prevent someone from getting a vaccination.
Suppose I have a contract to sell sheet music, but not CDs of the music actually being performed. If I develop a gadget that scans sheet music, turns it into a midi file, and then plays it, am I now breaking my contract if I sell sheet music to my customers who have also purchased my Magic Miditron 9000? I would argue that I am not. I might know that there is a high probability that such customers will end up using my gadget to listen to computer-generated renditions of the sheet music, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm not selling recordings of the music being performed.
Similarly, Amazon is merely selling text. The fact that their customers have a device that can turn text into sound doesn't mean that they are selling audio versions of the books. You can make a million analogies like this. Suppose I have a license to sell DVDs of certain movies, but not VHS tapes of them. It's still fine for me to sell my customers DVDs, blank VHS tapes, and a DVD/VHS combo player. Or if I have a license to sell frozen pizza but not hot pizza, I can sell my customers an oven and frozen pizza.