No, arguement was what I gave when I disputed your 'facts' (sucessfully, as you were simply wrong). - The real question is simple. Do you still want to claim that the modern corporation existed in the 1600's, given that the U.S. Supreme Court decision on corporations having the status of legal persons dates only from over two hundred and fifty years later? Are you somehow asserting that this decision and subsequent extensions have only a trivial effect on the legal accountability of corporations? Alternately, are you claiming that the full weight of the 14th amendment has only minor significance here? For that matter, do you want to claim that the U.S. government's general take on corporations in the 1770's to 1870's was functionally identical to European precident, in the face of everything from the federalist papers onward that shows it wasn't?
If you've got a point here, make it. Describe what properties of 16th century corporation-like entities have survived in fundamentally similar forms, and are so significant they overwhelm these modern changes. Alternately, show why the prior passage of the 14th amendment wasn't necessary to give us the modern limited liability corporation.
While we're at it, what's the point in comparing old models of corporation and new, within the particular context of predicting abuses of power? Even if you could somehow prove overwhelming similarity exists, overiding any significant distinctions, you'ld have to also claim examples such as the East India Company's actions re. British colonialism weren't proof of an underlieing problem with corporate power, or you've only refuted half the original poster's arguement, at the very most. So was he right about the other half, or not?
As long as you are unable or unwilling to answer those questions, there is no rational debate possible, through your choice. You made that choice when you chose to ignore the facts I asserted, and commented only on my use of a phrase adapted from your own writings. That you then claimed not to have made any assertions in the first place is simply icing on the cake.
You have no real facts, can't stand losing just because of that little detail, and have tried to backpedal on the assertions you clearly made. I've stopped argueing, because I've already won the point, and would be a polite and gracious winner, more concerned with getting these rather subsidiary facts straight and then shedding a little light on the main topic so we can all presumably move forward than in making this a personal matter, but incredibly, you're still trying to find some way to prove what you simultaneously claim you never said.
You've demonstrated a strong tendency to try and humiliate the earlier poster in this thread, I've stooped to a point still somewhere above you to pass a little of it back, played a little of your very own humiliation mantra back at you, and you think what passes for witty banter in unoriginal circles will pull your metaphorical chestnuts out of the flames of historical ignorance. Ergo, "can dish it out but not take it" is clinically accurate.
No, this is not what passes for arguement in 'my circles' this is what passes for 'the arguement's over, you already lost from not having any facts, so get a clue.' Digging up second hand quotes from Sir. Edmund Blackadder to salve your wounded pride is not the same as being able to support your prior contentions.
If this somehow got into a court, a lot of the legal questions involved would boil down to reasonableness tests. Blizzard could point to the record re. cheating in Diablo 2 online and earlier games to show what sort of problems they were addressing with this software, and could easily show how proportionately many customer complaints this heads off in the newer game. So it would be reasonable in the eyes of the court for them to be using this overall type of software for the stated goal. The hash function part of the design means it is equally reasonable to say Blizzard has tried to avoid possible abuses by their own employees or 3rd parties, so most of the legal precidents from recent distributed filesharing program cases wouldn't be remotely applicable to Blizzard. The EULA issue would be equally easy - it's reasonable that most consumers could fully understand that anti-cheating software was included in the EULA's definitions and still agree, since there's a sizable userbase that has complained about past cheating.
Legal complaints would thus be pretty limited. Instead of complaints that Blizzard failed to inform consumers of the very existence of the "anti-cheat" software, they'd be complaints the Blizzard failed to really spell out, in sufficient detail to satisfy the complainant, secondary aspects of the programs. Even if that stood up in court, with the judge siding totally with the complainant, Blizzard would be unlikely to have to pay damages OR remove the software - instead, their penalty at the very worst might be to add a little more explanation to the EULA, or they might have to put stickers saying something like "Contains cheat-detection software which must be installed with the game" on the unsold boxes, or something like that. I won't say there's no real issues here, but they simply are not on the level of most "your rights online" cases.
1. Don't put any RED LEDs in robots. With only blue LEDs, they can't flip the evil bit (This is exaustively demonstrated by that Will Smith movie that wasn't based on Isaac Asimov's I, Robot http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/)
2. Do what I do - twice a year, gather all your electronic devices, (except one video player system), set them in comfortable chairs in front of the tube, and give them a marathon showing of The Brave Little Toaster http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092695/. Warning, I tried adding popcorn to the experience, but surprisingly, it increases the risk of rebellion when it gets caught in the little workings.
Now for the real problem: If zombies rend, mangle, eviscerate and eat their living victims the way they do in movies, how do any of the victims have enough physical integrity left to turn into more zombies?
First, Nietzsche's far from my hero. I've read a bit of him, disagreed with a great deal, but at least understand something of his general thrust. I find his latter madness is better explained by his own philosophical mistakes than by the medically unsupported ad-hoc diagnosis of Syphilis - that's how little I respect some of his positions. And yet... I would like to see this argued on a plane as high as he reached on occasion. "Shalle we debate in valley, or on peak...", and all that. If I had to pick a proto-existentialist I actually empathize with, it would be Berkley, whom almost no one takes seriously anymore.
Second, you and I both know darned well he never wrote a single word of that quote. He wrote in German, and a translator wrote that English you presented. Present it in the original German, and then be prepared to argue about translation if you want, but most of the issues are more subtle than I can claim to speak German well enough to address. I remember reading N. in college, 30 years ago, when my German wasn't so rusty, and would have a hard time indeed explaining some things that seemed linguistically simple then.
Please remember that this common translation you gave does originate solidly in the Nazi era, and I urge you to consult some of the alternatives and see if they don't molify your view at least a trifle. I can refer you to some modern sources who seem to have more expertese in philology, but I'm reluctant, because any of them would still have to be taken partially on trust unless you're extremely, I might even say excessively fluent. This is an area where a person would have to microscopically scrutinize the political historys of whole families of translators and publishing firms if they wanted to really sort the pro-Nietzsche articles that attempt to be truthful and skim out the Nazi appologists and their spin artists that are unfortunately mixed in.
A simple Google style search for the quote will turn up a wiki that presents some of the counter arguements, but it will also get hits for some "neo-faschist" websites that I won't urge anyone to suffer through. Follow this quote enogh, and you're bound to run across "Stormfront", but then you can trace some other N. quotes and find manifold links to Conan the Barbarian, so what the web can do to resolve this is debatable.
Third, the quote appears in the middle of a long section about the internal development of individuality, integrity and character. Given its context, it just about has to be about the internal dialog between a man's own stronger and weaker parts, and some of that context includes warnings not to take it outside that internal conflict. For just one thing, N clarified several times that "will to power" wasn't the same thing as "will to survive", might even conflict with physical or biological survival, and shouldn't be reduced to that. I still don't agree with it, even taken that way, but Darwin himself wrote things in his second book that support Social Darwinism much better than anything N. ever wrote, yet his first, Origin of Species, is still a great work.
1. Shouting is ALL CAPS, boldface is merely emphasis. 2. If you think you know some way to castrate 95% of the males out there without them putting up a fight, I'd love to hear your plan. For that matter Why did you use terms such as hyper-agressive and yet now claim I'm the one bringing up fighting? What else besides fighting do you think hyper-agression means? You're the one who started off with grusome anecdotes, references to guns, bullets to the groin, the whole evolution in action/Social Darwinism schmeer and all that. If you're going to keep reading Freud, at least try the parts about "projection". 3. You keep switching between arguing for religion as a mental illness, and arguing specifically against just the Christian belief system. You just pulled this switch again in your response to my post (Yes, you added Judaic this time, but I don't know of a lot of Jews, offhand, that count as Intelligent Design advocates, so I'm going to assume you use that term just like Jerry Falwell, to make it sound like you're referring to a broader group than you actually are). You're using the buzzwords of science, but you don't have a clearly defined subject as a test group, so you can't do any actual logic or create a testable hypothesis. That's called pseudo-science. 4. By pretending to be talking about religion in general, then switching to target just Christianity, you get to aim your complaints so as to avoid rousing the ire of some 'militant' religions on slashdot(like that guy who's sig brags about how his god has a hammer), or the more militant religions in the real world (like Islam). You can say something that's technically against them as well, but your examples narrow the group you appear to be referring to, so they will either infer that Christianity is what you really oppose, or at least leave you lots of room to backpedal. Are you aiming at Christianity because you really think it's more mentally skewed than any of the others, or because deep inside you believe we really mean a bit of what we push as turning the other cheek, prince of peace, and all that, and figure you should pick on the religion least likely to fight back? (I'm flattered if you really think there's any significant likelyhood most Christians will live up to such ideals, but we usually fall short).
Better backpedal faster. You got your facts wrong, you got Pwnzored. All you are doing by pretending you didn't make your claims in support of any arguement is looking like a damned fool. Anyone can still read your posts and see you had an arguement - you were disagreeing with a previous poster, arguing to support that disagreement AND you decended to veiled personal attacks, then had them quoted back at you and proved you are too spineless to take what you can dish out. I meant to direct that comment right at you, and I mean this one - Bwaaaaaawwwkkk!.
Right, just like the concept of social justice was so 'vauge' and meaningless in the Indian raj, tha no one could figure out how to follow Ghandi, so the british have retained the jewel of their empire until the present day. Uhm, no wait...
The US supreme court decision that gave corporations the status of persons has not been around since the 1600's. It was derived from the 14th amendment, roughly 20 years after the civil war ended. As a matter of logic, when the facts are so fundamentally in error, the conclusion is worthless.
The way I heard it (in an active duty combatives class for combat MOS holding officers): An unarmed 98 pound 5'4" woman can beat a knife wielding 220 lb. 6' 2" man in prime condition. She just has to take this course every day from her commissioning as a second lieutenant until she pins on her fourth star. A little research on civilian equivalents reveals there are cases where it actually happens, but the much smaller person (of whatever gender) has rank like 8th dan black belt, previous real combat experience, or other such factors, not just a few classes or even a few years of 1 class a week.
My Grandmother was a nurse during the 1917 epidemic. She recalled calling orderlies to stack more bodies in the ward's closet every few hours until they could take them all out three days later. She saw more people who were in the hospital for something else catch the flu and die than come staggering in with it. She also had no recollection of ever catching the strain personally. (She lived to be 105, bless her.).
In her opinion, the sort of antisepsis hospitals developed during the 40's and up, plus the sorts of precautions HIV brought into use, would have massively cut the death toll in the original epidimic.
There's no possible way to refute the statement in the form you have it in quotes, since it has NULL semantic content. A contention that some group theoretically could do something they are physically, mentally, organizationally or financially capable of is always true, and always totally uninformative. It transmits zero information to the listener unless that listener is ignorant of the organization's capabilities. Switzerland could declare war on the US this afternoon. The US could devote 70% of its GDP to a revitalized space program starting next budget meeting. As analyzed, my best guess would be you have made the statement: "religious fundamentalists can vote", which I suspect the flamebate moderator also already knew. The fact that you chose to offer a statement with no semantic value to most beings over 10 years old is inferred by most readers to mean you saw some other value, i.e. a rhetorical one, but yes, that's their inference, and you may have not meant to imply anything. Only if you had a purpose in including that statement did you make a value judgement.
Now if you'd said "are likely to", we could further quantify the issue, in which case, I would say that "There are possible conditions for doing the research and development needed to produce a vaccine or other treatment based on this gene that would cause most fundamentalists to either approve or disapprove of the resulting methods, but fundamentalists being roughly (by an order of magnetude at least) as diverse as any other large group, there is unlikely to be 100% support or rejection whatever you propose."
I see religion as a mental illness with a genetic predisposition.
And I see an inability to integrate religion into your worldview as a genetic defect, like lack of sense of humor, inability to comprehend poetry, simile, abstract math or music, or perhaps just general dumbness based over-literalness. As proof of this, I point to you, publicly advocating castration as a solution when you are outnumbered 19 to 1 by armed, and by your very own words "delusional", "testosterone posion" (sic) -ed "schizophrenics". A reality based response here would be to avoid thinking that the issues reduce nicely to stopping some group from reproducing, as the 95% is likely to decide this means you, not them. A massively delusional choice is to sincerely believe you are surrounded by overwhelming numbers of insane, hyper-agressive gorrillas, and then try to make it a fight!
I feel your pique, but let's not blame Nietsche for this. You might blame his sister, who adapted some of his ideas (while he was in the asylum or already dead and so unable to argue), to make them more palletable to the Nazis, if you wish, but it's a real stretch to get social Darwinism out of the original Nietsche. Or if you said Nietsche-esque to avoid being Godwinned, you might want to go for it anyway. Accusing everyone who acts authoritarian of acting like Hitler is stretching a metaphor - saying that the real Nazis based their theories in large part on Social Darwinism is a simple fact.
Right - Suetonius was able to provoke a huge amount of interest by writing his lives of the 12 Caesers because he wrote it like a Fleet st. scandal sheet. Where a particular Caeser was unpopular for things like raising taxes, he always ferreted out the juicy details of their sex life and probably exaggerated them a little. He was hoping to reach a Roman audience that might fool around on their wives a little, but generally deplored such things in public. OTOH, the Romans seem to have had a different definition of Homosexuality than we generally do. It's a lot more "He who's on the recieving end is effeminate, disempowered and subordinate", and less about the orientation of the "dominant' partner. Even that's left traces in some people's attitudes today.
Getting back to individual configuration files sure motivated me. I found I was running dozens of different programs regularly, some of which used.ini type mechanisms, some of which used the registry. The more different things you do with a Windows system, the more you will run across programs that modify the registry in ideosyncratic, often flawed, and often hard to fix ways. Microsoft has let many companies have the Microsoft Windows compatable stickers on the box while not holding them to its own supposed standards, particularly with the registry. The GNU/Linux way (in as much as it is a 'way') lets me get back all the drive space much more easily when I uninstall a program, it keeps entry bloat from slowing the whole system down, and it makes most programs more customizable, more easily, to my intentions.
This may not be all that significant to a person who spends all their time in office, but it starts mattering more and more if you play a variety of multimedia files and have to seek out codecs to handle the occasional odd type, or you are into tracing your geneology and have to run both your preferred program and a couple of others to handle or convert data your correspondants send you, or, as in my case, you have several astronomy or graphics programs and frequently want/need to switch which ones you are working with.
I don't want to claim it's anything like an invariable rule, but my impression is, the larger the number of applications you use, the more likely you are to have problems that originate in the fundamental design philosophy of the registry. It's not a case of how well or poorly Microsoft re-implemented the old 'putting all your eggs in one basket' trick, it's just that, as Rocket J Squirrel put it "That trick never works!".
This is a USAian thing. Most viewers in the USA look at actors much more than directors, screenplay writers, or studios in picking a film. It's not world wide. As proof, I offer these points:
1. Watch the audience at a film, and see how many stay through part or all of the closing credits. With a little practice you can spot the guy who particularly liked the soundtrack, is staying to see the composer's name (and will probably buy a CD), and various things like that. These people will typically be less than 10% of the US audience. In Europe, the percentages are much higher, and it's an informed consumership, with more people who know the reputations of directors or studios, and what studios and producers append some funny outtakes or a bit of interesting stuff to the credits. One reason Jackie Chan caught on in Europe faster than USA, for example, is in Europe word quickly spread that there were comedy outtake bits after the credits of his early kung-fu films. 2. The USA has lots of support for pulicizing movies. Magazines like People exist largely to drum up more movie publicity. Movie stars that appear on late night TV ALWAYS make their appearances at an optimum time to plug a new film, and people like Conan O'Brien will even ham it up with the pre-scripted nature of the leading questions they ask to seet up the publicity anouncement. 3. If you can, find some classic US Movie posters and one sheets, and compare them with the same film's European release posters. You'll see plenty of European one-sheets where the big name actors are suddenly in much smaller type than the director, and words like "starring" get omitted. You'll also see more posters that show a panoramic scene or action scene from the film instead of a big floating head close-up. The only counter example I have ever seen is a few "David Hasselhoff" films in Austria.
All this leads to an overall point: One reason movie studios are overpaying "stars" and not making as much money on overseas releases as they would like is they reward the stars as though the effects of getting the right actor are going to be seen world-wide, when these effects are mostly largely confined to the USA. Part of this comes because the studios don't do a lot of publicity anouncements, posters, and newspaper clipping type things for the European and Eastern markets directly. They turn that stuff over to subcontractors who know what sells "over there', and then think those people are doing little more than translating the US campaign to a forign language.
Of course these studies are disputed. There have never been two studies on the same subject that came to total agreement with each other. There probably has never been a single study published that sombody didn't immediately reply with "Nuunt-nuuuhhh!, and your mother is a spooty-head too!". Guess what, you know those studies that say multi-gram doses of hydrogen cyanide, ingested orally, cause fatal infarctions? Somewhere out there is a person who will tell you they will give you clean teeth and fresh breath instead, just read his study.
How about you actually look up some of the studies, and look to see what they said, and which were funded by people who just might have a direct bias in the outcome. I'll even give you a few hints:
A neo-con funded "family first" group, just might be a trifle biased, and a group totally funded by "the industry" might as well, but some of the best studies have been done by people without anything like Jack Thompson's political axe to grind. Try seeing what the American Association of Pediatrics has to say on the subject, or look up the huge British sociological study that every 10 years, takes all the children born in hospitals in the British isles in that year and follows up on them with physical and mental testing at five, ten and fifteen. This one has been going on for 40 years now, with a million or so kids in each sample - that's some database. When someone bases their study on a near 100% sampling of all kids age 10 in Britain, and someone else disputes it based on a mere 20 kid sample from a single socio-economic substrait, I know which study I respect, and which one I think is done by a bloody idiot.
I guarentee, if you look for the studies that used large numbers of subjects, studies done by groups whose general reputations are apolitical and professional, and studies done by people who have broad competence and national reputations in fields like sociology or mental health, you will find a lot of those disputes don't exist among them, and there is some good solid agreement. I'd give you some links, quotes, and conclusions, but I've posted them before when this subject came up, and every time, half a dozen slashdotters who proved exaustively they didn't bother to read them fired back with one after another "those studies are disputed" type remark, and they all appeared to think they had said someting brilliant, irrefutable, and original. Follow up on the hints I've dropped above, and you will find you've done, if not a 180, at least a 90 or so in your thinking on the risks of exposure to video game violence to young people.
"What I don't like doing is handing over 25.99 for a cd, and having 23.99 go to a label,.50 to a another schmuck, and then.50 to the musician."
You're pretty close to hitting the nail on the head right there, although I'm going to argue for a little bit tighter definitions. The other smuck may be a songwriter, or at least the guy who came up with the nice album cover art, or a good audio engineer. All of these involve someone adding value to what's sold, and deserve compensation. You can treat this like you're paying them as part of a team effort, or pay the musician and let him or her treat those people as sub-contractors. Either way, that's likely to amount to about the same total.
This is why information doesn't want to be free (in the economic sense). Figure the two 50 cent sums, plus 23 cents for physical costs, and a CD 'ought' to cost at least $1.23 wholesale, and about 25-40% more for a retailer (Distributers costs and profits), and about 25-40% more than that (retailer's costs and profits). Downloading your own ought to save you at least the retailers markup, and your distribution costs (for an internet connection), should be less than your share of an old style distributer's costs (for warehouses and trucks, etc.). Net distribution shouldn't save you the physical media part of costs, if you burn it to a CD. (in fact, economies of scale say you can't possibly get blank CDs and a burner as cheap as a pressing house can mint CDs on a commercial scale). So right now, the information still has a base cost of at least 1.10 or so.
But for all the people who point out this fact one way or the other, there's another implication:
The Artist and those assistants or colaborators who contibute to the value of the information have a right to their compensation, agreed. Note that there's no right for a distributer or retailer to make a profit. If they have a contract that guarentees the presser won't wholesale to anyone else, or will ship all goods via distributer X, that's what the law used to treat as a vertical monopoly, and far from being a right protected by copyright law, is supposed to be illegal when it results in barriers to other people entering the trade. The difference between the average 17.50 for a CD (which i'll set lower than the 25.99 you're apparently paying where you live) and a reasonable amount to include distribution and retail, (say about $3.50), is entirely derived from monopoly price fixing agreements.
It doesn't matter whether we agree with each other's exact numbers or not. Even if someone is prepared to argue that the industry enjoys markups for distribution 10 to 15 times other industries without them having colluded in any way, that part of the CD's costs still isn't from copyright law at all, and shouldn't be protected by copyright law, at all. Most of use figure that it not only shouldn't be protected, but is actually criminal and should be opposed by act of government, but if we are wrong on that point, that still doesn't prove that the businesses that are involved as distribution, and charge for such things as promotion or distribution and even for production of the physical copy, have any right to be involved in cases that hinge upon the artist's copyrights.
Bad puns aside, the current thinking on population growth mostly predicts a maximum well below 15 billion, more like 9, maybe 10. Some sort of dieback still looks likely, but specific areas are affected, not the whole world. (I.e. India hasn't gotten a grip on its population growth, and will most probably have massive famines and lose 500 Million people in a single bad year, but China has managed to curb its growth rate and will probably be able to sustain its current population. Mexico and most of Central America will have relatively minor problems, while Brazil will get hit hard. Several Central African nations will see huge 80-90% diebacks (but those are comeing anyway now, from HIV, so they are effectively doubly inevitable.).
On your bright side, 'sustainable' doesn't look nearly so bad as it did in the 60's. Now planners are mostly talking about focusing economic growth into sustainable areas, rather than the Club of Rome's older 'no growth at all' model. Many countries are finding it possible to leapfrog around building themselves a 20th century infrastructure and jump right to the 21st. It's a lot cheaper to build cell-phone like networking than to lay copper wire everywhere. Training up a lot of PA and RN grade health care providers can raise the typical life expectancy much more than spending the equivalent on full fledged MDs. Some very traditional tech, like slash and burn agriculture is being changed, and not to the US massive industry farms, chemical fertilizers approaches that are nearly as bad in the long run, but to very cheap methods of protecting both locally optimal crops and the land underneath them.
Lesser involvement should still be very effective. You don't have to catch a child every time they do someting wrong, you just have to make punishment and reward appropriate to what you do observe, and observe often enough to catch the more severe abuses the child may do. I guarentee if the parent sets a policy of no trolling, no abusive language, etc, and spot checks for an hour after giving the kid a couple of weeks to develop any bad habits they may choose, any child that isn't sticking to the policy will either slip big time while they are watching, or the remarks other people make talking to that child will make it quite clear what's been going on. Discipline doesn't have to mean never using the net again either - The worst penalty my daughter was even warned about in advance in using chat involved having the machine locked away for a week, and she never even came close to earning one of those. I spent more time helping her install extra software and such than it took to spell out the actual restrictions, but what I spent on that was apparently enough.
Plus, it's not just about discipline. How many parents bother to sit down with the kid and discuss how some people might be trying to pry private information out over chat, or watch for a half hour when they first start and point out examples of other chatters who might be 43 year old guys just pretending to be 15 year old girls? Teach the kids how to fight back against some of the perils out there first - it lets them know you care, AND it warns them anonimity isn't perfect, and there are some ways to trace them if they abuse the system.
Course, my only child is a girl. Boys are probably a whole nother problem.
The Christian take on this just isn't all that whacko.
That part of the Christian faith that takes the revelation all that literally (and many consider it more a metaphorical work, or coded talk about what was happening in Rome under Nero more than a prediction for modern day times), usually agrees that ultimately, the real mark of the beast will require the receiver to swear an oath putting their governemt or leader above their allegience to God.
The 666 code part is supposed to be obvious only in retrospect, that is: First you get a government sponsered symbol that requires the reciever have it to sell or buy anything, AND requires they explicitly say something along the lines of "Glorious Leader is more important than my old God to me. Glorious leader is my new God." (Hopefully you see what's morally repugnant about that regardless of just how it's named). Then and only then you see how 666 fits in to confirm it.
Even if you are an Atheist or something, would you really want to swear that a secular leader now is your God? I'd figure that Atheists would be among the last people to want to go back to worshipping a deified Roman emperor, or something along those lines.
So if a lot of Christians don't think Barcodes or RFID are the actual Mark of the Beast, why do so many oppose them? Because we think they have a dehumanizing effect, for one. I certainly can't speak for all Xians, but it's pretty common to think that anything that encourages people to treat other people like just numbers, or in this case like conveniently exploitable data generators, instead of people, is a bad thing, and for many Christians, one step closer to the possible final BAD thing. What's sad is that most Agnostics, Secular Humanists, Platonists, Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Randroids and the Rotary Club all tend to agree with at least the first point, even if they don't believe the second point is ever coming.
"Whacko" is only a good term to use on this particular point, if you want to split the people saying "This is Bad!" from the people saying "Yeah, and I'm afraid it might get worse!".
What books are you reading that this would really make a difference?
Several persons who have had collections of military related books have been arrested for various things, and someone in LE has made statements to the press, or the press has made statements on their own before the trials that these collections constituted "Nazi paraphenalia". In one case I know personally, the person violated a BATF ordanance when reselling a civil war era replica firearm, showed no signs any of the times I met him of being either a Neo-nazi or even a racist, and had 10 times as many books on the Napoleonic wars as WW2, and more than either on Medeval warfare, knit your own chainmaille and join the SCA type stuff. This kind of smear is really super-extra-easy to fight, with both the authorities and the press claiming the other party put the spin on things.
With the right spin, a Playboy or Cosmo subscription or even a copy of C. Everett Koops writings as Surgeon General becomes a "hard core pornography" collection, especially if you are accused of child molestation. For that matter, Cosmo has a lot of cigarette ads... Are you sure you're a non-smoker? We're just asking because you told your insurance company that, and here you got lung cancer. Your subscription habits suggest you might be fudging the truth a little. You're not? Oh, we'll just mention the possibility to the jury anyway.
Method of birth control? The pill has some 'significant' cervical cancer related risks for women with a family history of the disease. That same insurance provider wants to know if you lied about that, too!
Are you running for office? Working to help elect someone? Those condoms you bought now are something at least a few voters will care about. Better hope the race isn't viciously close - when the margin is a few votes either way, no smear is too petty to try.
Drinking habits? You must have missed the congressional bill that will let your employer off the hook for that little accident with the chipper shredder machine. Yes, they took all the safety guards off and let an under-age trainee operate it unsupervised, but you had at least one drink within 72 hours of going to work that monday, and that means YOU are 0.01% at fault, which the new law translates to ALL. Quit trying to collect unemployment, ya lazy bum.
The McMartin daycare center scandal happened in that ultra-puritanical society, southern California in the 1980s. Read up on just what items were found in various accused people's homes and offices, and how these got described to or by the press. Then, you'll understand. You DO live in a puritanical society, where if a person in certain types of power wants to get you, a true crime novel or Harry Potter book becomes another tool to bury you before you ever get a trial. A how to manual for murder! Satanic ritual texts!
Why do you find it impossible to believe that this organization consists of total lunatics only? (At least at the ultimate decision making levels)
Remember when 9-11 happened, and the governemt passed the PATRIOT act. This is the organization whose lobbyists tried to convince the government to add illegal music uploading to the definition of terrorist acts. What is that, if not full blown paranoid schitzophrenia?
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No, arguement was what I gave when I disputed your 'facts' (sucessfully, as you were simply wrong). - The real question is simple. Do you still want to claim that the modern corporation existed in the 1600's, given that the U.S. Supreme Court decision on corporations having the status of legal persons dates only from over two hundred and fifty years later? Are you somehow asserting that this decision and subsequent extensions have only a trivial effect on the legal accountability of corporations? Alternately, are you claiming that the full weight of the 14th amendment has only minor significance here? For that matter, do you want to claim that the U.S. government's general take on corporations in the 1770's to 1870's was functionally identical to European precident, in the face of everything from the federalist papers onward that shows it wasn't?
If you've got a point here, make it. Describe what properties of 16th century corporation-like entities have survived in fundamentally similar forms, and are so significant they overwhelm these modern changes. Alternately, show why the prior passage of the 14th amendment wasn't necessary to give us the modern limited liability corporation.
While we're at it, what's the point in comparing old models of corporation and new, within the particular context of predicting abuses of power? Even if you could somehow prove overwhelming similarity exists, overiding any significant distinctions, you'ld have to also claim examples such as the East India Company's actions re. British colonialism weren't proof of an underlieing problem with corporate power, or you've only refuted half the original poster's arguement, at the very most. So was he right about the other half, or not?
As long as you are unable or unwilling to answer those questions, there is no rational debate possible, through your choice. You made that choice when you chose to ignore the facts I asserted, and commented only on my use of a phrase adapted from your own writings. That you then claimed not to have made any assertions in the first place is simply icing on the cake.
You have no real facts, can't stand losing just because of that little detail, and have tried to backpedal on the assertions you clearly made. I've stopped argueing, because I've already won the point, and would be a polite and gracious winner, more concerned with getting these rather subsidiary facts straight and then shedding a little light on the main topic so we can all presumably move forward than in making this a personal matter, but incredibly, you're still trying to find some way to prove what you simultaneously claim you never said.
You've demonstrated a strong tendency to try and humiliate the earlier poster in this thread, I've stooped to a point still somewhere above you to pass a little of it back, played a little of your very own humiliation mantra back at you, and you think what passes for witty banter in unoriginal circles will pull your metaphorical chestnuts out of the flames of historical ignorance. Ergo, "can dish it out but not take it" is clinically accurate.
No, this is not what passes for arguement in 'my circles' this is what passes for 'the arguement's over, you already lost from not having any facts, so get a clue.' Digging up second hand quotes from Sir. Edmund Blackadder to salve your wounded pride is not the same as being able to support your prior contentions.
If this somehow got into a court, a lot of the legal questions involved would boil down to reasonableness tests. Blizzard could point to the record re. cheating in Diablo 2 online and earlier games to show what sort of problems they were addressing with this software, and could easily show how proportionately many customer complaints this heads off in the newer game. So it would be reasonable in the eyes of the court for them to be using this overall type of software for the stated goal. The hash function part of the design means it is equally reasonable to say Blizzard has tried to avoid possible abuses by their own employees or 3rd parties, so most of the legal precidents from recent distributed filesharing program cases wouldn't be remotely applicable to Blizzard. The EULA issue would be equally easy - it's reasonable that most consumers could fully understand that anti-cheating software was included in the EULA's definitions and still agree, since there's a sizable userbase that has complained about past cheating.
Legal complaints would thus be pretty limited. Instead of complaints that Blizzard failed to inform consumers of the very existence of the "anti-cheat" software, they'd be complaints the Blizzard failed to really spell out, in sufficient detail to satisfy the complainant, secondary aspects of the programs. Even if that stood up in court, with the judge siding totally with the complainant, Blizzard would be unlikely to have to pay damages OR remove the software - instead, their penalty at the very worst might be to add a little more explanation to the EULA, or they might have to put stickers saying something like "Contains cheat-detection software which must be installed with the game" on the unsold boxes, or something like that. I won't say there's no real issues here, but they simply are not on the level of most "your rights online" cases.
1. Don't put any RED LEDs in robots. With only blue LEDs, they can't flip the evil bit (This is exaustively demonstrated by that Will Smith movie that wasn't based on Isaac Asimov's I, Robot http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/)
2. Do what I do - twice a year, gather all your electronic devices, (except one video player system), set them in comfortable chairs in front of the tube, and give them a marathon showing of The Brave Little Toaster http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092695/. Warning, I tried adding popcorn to the experience, but surprisingly, it increases the risk of rebellion when it gets caught in the little workings.
Now for the real problem: If zombies rend, mangle, eviscerate and eat their living victims the way they do in movies, how do any of the victims have enough physical integrity left to turn into more zombies?
With those names, more likely Welsh.
First, Nietzsche's far from my hero. I've read a bit of him, disagreed with a great deal, but at least understand something of his general thrust. I find his latter madness is better explained by his own philosophical mistakes than by the medically unsupported ad-hoc diagnosis of Syphilis - that's how little I respect some of his positions. And yet... I would like to see this argued on a plane as high as he reached on occasion. "Shalle we debate in valley, or on peak...", and all that. If I had to pick a proto-existentialist I actually empathize with, it would be Berkley, whom almost no one takes seriously anymore.
Second, you and I both know darned well he never wrote a single word of that quote. He wrote in German, and a translator wrote that English you presented. Present it in the original German, and then be prepared to argue about translation if you want, but most of the issues are more subtle than I can claim to speak German well enough to address. I remember reading N. in college, 30 years ago, when my German wasn't so rusty, and would have a hard time indeed explaining some things that seemed linguistically simple then.
Please remember that this common translation you gave does originate solidly in the Nazi era, and I urge you to consult some of the alternatives and see if they don't molify your view at least a trifle. I can refer you to some modern sources who seem to have more expertese in philology, but I'm reluctant, because any of them would still have to be taken partially on trust unless you're extremely, I might even say excessively fluent. This is an area where a person would have to microscopically scrutinize the political historys of whole families of translators and publishing firms if they wanted to really sort the pro-Nietzsche articles that attempt to be truthful and skim out the Nazi appologists and their spin artists that are unfortunately mixed in.
A simple Google style search for the quote will turn up a wiki that presents some of the counter arguements, but it will also get hits for some "neo-faschist" websites that I won't urge anyone to suffer through. Follow this quote enogh, and you're bound to run across "Stormfront", but then you can trace some other N. quotes and find manifold links to Conan the Barbarian, so what the web can do to resolve this is debatable.
Third, the quote appears in the middle of a long section about the internal development of individuality, integrity and character. Given its context, it just about has to be about the internal dialog between a man's own stronger and weaker parts, and some of that context includes warnings not to take it outside that internal conflict. For just one thing, N clarified several times that "will to power" wasn't the same thing as "will to survive", might even conflict with physical or biological survival, and shouldn't be reduced to that. I still don't agree with it, even taken that way, but Darwin himself wrote things in his second book that support Social Darwinism much better than anything N. ever wrote, yet his first, Origin of Species, is still a great work.
1. Shouting is ALL CAPS, boldface is merely emphasis.
2. If you think you know some way to castrate 95% of the males out there without them putting up a fight, I'd love to hear your plan. For that matter Why did you use terms such as hyper-agressive and yet now claim I'm the one bringing up fighting? What else besides fighting do you think hyper-agression means? You're the one who started off with grusome anecdotes, references to guns, bullets to the groin, the whole evolution in action/Social Darwinism schmeer and all that. If you're going to keep reading Freud, at least try the parts about "projection".
3. You keep switching between arguing for religion as a mental illness, and arguing specifically against just the Christian belief system. You just pulled this switch again in your response to my post (Yes, you added Judaic this time, but I don't know of a lot of Jews, offhand, that count as Intelligent Design advocates, so I'm going to assume you use that term just like Jerry Falwell, to make it sound like you're referring to a broader group than you actually are). You're using the buzzwords of science, but you don't have a clearly defined subject as a test group, so you can't do any actual logic or create a testable hypothesis. That's called pseudo-science.
4. By pretending to be talking about religion in general, then switching to target just Christianity, you get to aim your complaints so as to avoid rousing the ire of some 'militant' religions on slashdot(like that guy who's sig brags about how his god has a hammer), or the more militant religions in the real world (like Islam). You can say something that's technically against them as well, but your examples narrow the group you appear to be referring to, so they will either infer that Christianity is what you really oppose, or at least leave you lots of room to backpedal. Are you aiming at Christianity because you really think it's more mentally skewed than any of the others, or because deep inside you believe we really mean a bit of what we push as turning the other cheek, prince of peace, and all that, and figure you should pick on the religion least likely to fight back? (I'm flattered if you really think there's any significant likelyhood most Christians will live up to such ideals, but we usually fall short).
Better backpedal faster. You got your facts wrong, you got Pwnzored. All you are doing by pretending you didn't make your claims in support of any arguement is looking like a damned fool. Anyone can still read your posts and see you had an arguement - you were disagreeing with a previous poster, arguing to support that disagreement AND you decended to veiled personal attacks, then had them quoted back at you and proved you are too spineless to take what you can dish out. I meant to direct that comment right at you, and I mean this one - Bwaaaaaawwwkkk!.
Right, just like the concept of social justice was so 'vauge' and meaningless in the Indian raj, tha no one could figure out how to follow Ghandi, so the british have retained the jewel of their empire until the present day. Uhm, no wait...
The US supreme court decision that gave corporations the status of persons has not been around since the 1600's. It was derived from the 14th amendment, roughly 20 years after the civil war ended. As a matter of logic, when the facts are so fundamentally in error, the conclusion is worthless.
The way I heard it (in an active duty combatives class for combat MOS holding officers): An unarmed 98 pound 5'4" woman can beat a knife wielding 220 lb. 6' 2" man in prime condition. She just has to take this course every day from her commissioning as a second lieutenant until she pins on her fourth star. A little research on civilian equivalents reveals there are cases where it actually happens, but the much smaller person (of whatever gender) has rank like 8th dan black belt, previous real combat experience, or other such factors, not just a few classes or even a few years of 1 class a week.
The ridiculous episodes are the best part. Just ask Murray!
My Grandmother was a nurse during the 1917 epidemic. She recalled calling orderlies to stack more bodies in the ward's closet every few hours until they could take them all out three days later. She saw more people who were in the hospital for something else catch the flu and die than come staggering in with it. She also had no recollection of ever catching the strain personally. (She lived to be 105, bless her.).
In her opinion, the sort of antisepsis hospitals developed during the 40's and up, plus the sorts of precautions HIV brought into use, would have massively cut the death toll in the original epidimic.
There's no possible way to refute the statement in the form you have it in quotes, since it has NULL semantic content. A contention that some group theoretically could do something they are physically, mentally, organizationally or financially capable of is always true, and always totally uninformative. It transmits zero information to the listener unless that listener is ignorant of the organization's capabilities. Switzerland could declare war on the US this afternoon. The US could devote 70% of its GDP to a revitalized space program starting next budget meeting. As analyzed, my best guess would be you have made the statement: "religious fundamentalists can vote", which I suspect the flamebate moderator also already knew. The fact that you chose to offer a statement with no semantic value to most beings over 10 years old is inferred by most readers to mean you saw some other value, i.e. a rhetorical one, but yes, that's their inference, and you may have not meant to imply anything. Only if you had a purpose in including that statement did you make a value judgement.
Now if you'd said "are likely to", we could further quantify the issue, in which case, I would say that "There are possible conditions for doing the research and development needed to produce a vaccine or other treatment based on this gene that would cause most fundamentalists to either approve or disapprove of the resulting methods, but fundamentalists being roughly (by an order of magnetude at least) as diverse as any other large group, there is unlikely to be 100% support or rejection whatever you propose."
I see religion as a mental illness with a genetic predisposition.
And I see an inability to integrate religion into your worldview as a genetic defect, like lack of sense of humor, inability to comprehend poetry, simile, abstract math or music, or perhaps just general dumbness based over-literalness. As proof of this, I point to you, publicly advocating castration as a solution when you are outnumbered 19 to 1 by armed, and by your very own words "delusional", "testosterone posion" (sic) -ed "schizophrenics". A reality based response here would be to avoid thinking that the issues reduce nicely to stopping some group from reproducing, as the 95% is likely to decide this means you, not them. A massively delusional choice is to sincerely believe you are surrounded by overwhelming numbers of insane, hyper-agressive gorrillas, and then try to make it a fight!
I feel your pique, but let's not blame Nietsche for this. You might blame his sister, who adapted some of his ideas (while he was in the asylum or already dead and so unable to argue), to make them more palletable to the Nazis, if you wish, but it's a real stretch to get social Darwinism out of the original Nietsche. Or if you said Nietsche-esque to avoid being Godwinned, you might want to go for it anyway. Accusing everyone who acts authoritarian of acting like Hitler is stretching a metaphor - saying that the real Nazis based their theories in large part on Social Darwinism is a simple fact.
Right - Suetonius was able to provoke a huge amount of interest by writing his lives of the 12 Caesers because he wrote it like a Fleet st. scandal sheet. Where a particular Caeser was unpopular for things like raising taxes, he always ferreted out the juicy details of their sex life and probably exaggerated them a little. He was hoping to reach a Roman audience that might fool around on their wives a little, but generally deplored such things in public.
OTOH, the Romans seem to have had a different definition of Homosexuality than we generally do. It's a lot more "He who's on the recieving end is effeminate, disempowered and subordinate", and less about the orientation of the "dominant' partner. Even that's left traces in some people's attitudes today.
Getting back to individual configuration files sure motivated me. I found I was running dozens of different programs regularly, some of which used .ini type mechanisms, some of which used the registry. The more different things you do with a Windows system, the more you will run across programs that modify the registry in ideosyncratic, often flawed, and often hard to fix ways. Microsoft has let many companies have the Microsoft Windows compatable stickers on the box while not holding them to its own supposed standards, particularly with the registry. The GNU/Linux way (in as much as it is a 'way') lets me get back all the drive space much more easily when I uninstall a program, it keeps entry bloat from slowing the whole system down, and it makes most programs more customizable, more easily, to my intentions.
This may not be all that significant to a person who spends all their time in office, but it starts mattering more and more if you play a variety of multimedia files and have to seek out codecs to handle the occasional odd type, or you are into tracing your geneology and have to run both your preferred program and a couple of others to handle or convert data your correspondants send you, or, as in my case, you have several astronomy or graphics programs and frequently want/need to switch which ones you are working with.
I don't want to claim it's anything like an invariable rule, but my impression is, the larger the number of applications you use, the more likely you are to have problems that originate in the fundamental design philosophy of the registry. It's not a case of how well or poorly Microsoft re-implemented the old 'putting all your eggs in one basket' trick, it's just that, as Rocket J Squirrel put it "That trick never works!".
This is a USAian thing. Most viewers in the USA look at actors much more than directors, screenplay writers, or studios in picking a film. It's not world wide. As proof, I offer these points:
1. Watch the audience at a film, and see how many stay through part or all of the closing credits. With a little practice you can spot the guy who particularly liked the soundtrack, is staying to see the composer's name (and will probably buy a CD), and various things like that. These people will typically be less than 10% of the US audience. In Europe, the percentages are much higher, and it's an informed consumership, with more people who know the reputations of directors or studios, and what studios and producers append some funny outtakes or a bit of interesting stuff to the credits. One reason Jackie Chan caught on in Europe faster than USA, for example, is in Europe word quickly spread that there were comedy outtake bits after the credits of his early kung-fu films.
2. The USA has lots of support for pulicizing movies. Magazines like People exist largely to drum up more movie publicity. Movie stars that appear on late night TV ALWAYS make their appearances at an optimum time to plug a new film, and people like Conan O'Brien will even ham it up with the pre-scripted nature of the leading questions they ask to seet up the publicity anouncement.
3. If you can, find some classic US Movie posters and one sheets, and compare them with the same film's European release posters. You'll see plenty of European one-sheets where the big name actors are suddenly in much smaller type than the director, and words like "starring" get omitted. You'll also see more posters that show a panoramic scene or action scene from the film instead of a big floating head close-up. The only counter example I have ever seen is a few "David Hasselhoff" films in Austria.
All this leads to an overall point: One reason movie studios are overpaying "stars" and not making as much money on overseas releases as they would like is they reward the stars as though the effects of getting the right actor are going to be seen world-wide, when these effects are mostly largely confined to the USA. Part of this comes because the studios don't do a lot of publicity anouncements, posters, and newspaper clipping type things for the European and Eastern markets directly. They turn that stuff over to subcontractors who know what sells "over there', and then think those people are doing little more than translating the US campaign to a forign language.
Of course these studies are disputed. There have never been two studies on the same subject that came to total agreement with each other. There probably has never been a single study published that sombody didn't immediately reply with "Nuunt-nuuuhhh!, and your mother is a spooty-head too!". Guess what, you know those studies that say multi-gram doses of hydrogen cyanide, ingested orally, cause fatal infarctions? Somewhere out there is a person who will tell you they will give you clean teeth and fresh breath instead, just read his study.
How about you actually look up some of the studies, and look to see what they said, and which were funded by people who just might have a direct bias in the outcome. I'll even give you a few hints:
A neo-con funded "family first" group, just might be a trifle biased, and a group totally funded by "the industry" might as well, but some of the best studies have been done by people without anything like Jack Thompson's political axe to grind. Try seeing what the American Association of Pediatrics has to say on the subject, or look up the huge British sociological study that every 10 years, takes all the children born in hospitals in the British isles in that year and follows up on them with physical and mental testing at five, ten and fifteen. This one has been going on for 40 years now, with a million or so kids in each sample - that's some database. When someone bases their study on a near 100% sampling of all kids age 10 in Britain, and someone else disputes it based on a mere 20 kid sample from a single socio-economic substrait, I know which study I respect, and which one I think is done by a bloody idiot.
I guarentee, if you look for the studies that used large numbers of subjects, studies done by groups whose general reputations are apolitical and professional, and studies done by people who have broad competence and national reputations in fields like sociology or mental health, you will find a lot of those disputes don't exist among them, and there is some good solid agreement. I'd give you some links, quotes, and conclusions, but I've posted them before when this subject came up, and every time, half a dozen slashdotters who proved exaustively they didn't bother to read them fired back with one after another "those studies are disputed" type remark, and they all appeared to think they had said someting brilliant, irrefutable, and original. Follow up on the hints I've dropped above, and you will find you've done, if not a 180, at least a 90 or so in your thinking on the risks of exposure to video game violence to young people.
"What I don't like doing is handing over 25.99 for a cd, and having 23.99 go to a label, .50 to a another schmuck, and then .50 to the musician."
You're pretty close to hitting the nail on the head right there, although I'm going to argue for a little bit tighter definitions.
The other smuck may be a songwriter, or at least the guy who came up with the nice album cover art, or a good audio engineer. All of these involve someone adding value to what's sold, and deserve compensation. You can treat this like you're paying them as part of a team effort, or pay the musician and let him or her treat those people as sub-contractors. Either way, that's likely to amount to about the same total.
This is why information doesn't want to be free (in the economic sense). Figure the two 50 cent sums, plus 23 cents for physical costs, and a CD 'ought' to cost at least $1.23 wholesale, and about 25-40% more for a retailer (Distributers costs and profits), and about 25-40% more than that (retailer's costs and profits). Downloading your own ought to save you at least the retailers markup, and your distribution costs (for an internet connection), should be less than your share of an old style distributer's costs (for warehouses and trucks, etc.). Net distribution shouldn't save you the physical media part of costs, if you burn it to a CD. (in fact, economies of scale say you can't possibly get blank CDs and a burner as cheap as a pressing house can mint CDs on a commercial scale). So right now, the information still has a base cost of at least 1.10 or so.
But for all the people who point out this fact one way or the other, there's another implication:
The Artist and those assistants or colaborators who contibute to the value of the information have a right to their compensation, agreed. Note that there's no right for a distributer or retailer to make a profit. If they have a contract that guarentees the presser won't wholesale to anyone else, or will ship all goods via distributer X, that's what the law used to treat as a vertical monopoly, and far from being a right protected by copyright law, is supposed to be illegal when it results in barriers to other people entering the trade. The difference between the average 17.50 for a CD (which i'll set lower than the 25.99 you're apparently paying where you live) and a reasonable amount to include distribution and retail, (say about $3.50), is entirely derived from monopoly price fixing agreements.
It doesn't matter whether we agree with each other's exact numbers or not. Even if someone is prepared to argue that the industry enjoys markups for distribution 10 to 15 times other industries without them having colluded in any way, that part of the CD's costs still isn't from copyright law at all, and shouldn't be protected by copyright law, at all. Most of use figure that it not only shouldn't be protected, but is actually criminal and should be opposed by act of government, but if we are wrong on that point, that still doesn't prove that the businesses that are involved as distribution, and charge for such things as promotion or distribution and even for production of the physical copy, have any right to be involved in cases that hinge upon the artist's copyrights.
Bad puns aside, the current thinking on population growth mostly predicts a maximum well below 15 billion, more like 9, maybe 10. Some sort of dieback still looks likely, but specific areas are affected, not the whole world. (I.e. India hasn't gotten a grip on its population growth, and will most probably have massive famines and lose 500 Million people in a single bad year, but China has managed to curb its growth rate and will probably be able to sustain its current population. Mexico and most of Central America will have relatively minor problems, while Brazil will get hit hard. Several Central African nations will see huge 80-90% diebacks (but those are comeing anyway now, from HIV, so they are effectively doubly inevitable.).
On your bright side, 'sustainable' doesn't look nearly so bad as it did in the 60's. Now planners are mostly talking about focusing economic growth into sustainable areas, rather than the Club of Rome's older 'no growth at all' model. Many countries are finding it possible to leapfrog around building themselves a 20th century infrastructure and jump right to the 21st. It's a lot cheaper to build cell-phone like networking than to lay copper wire everywhere. Training up a lot of PA and RN grade health care providers can raise the typical life expectancy much more than spending the equivalent on full fledged MDs. Some very traditional tech, like slash and burn agriculture is being changed, and not to the US massive industry farms, chemical fertilizers approaches that are nearly as bad in the long run, but to very cheap methods of protecting both locally optimal crops and the land underneath them.
Lesser involvement should still be very effective. You don't have to catch a child every time they do someting wrong, you just have to make punishment and reward appropriate to what you do observe, and observe often enough to catch the more severe abuses the child may do. I guarentee if the parent sets a policy of no trolling, no abusive language, etc, and spot checks for an hour after giving the kid a couple of weeks to develop any bad habits they may choose, any child that isn't sticking to the policy will either slip big time while they are watching, or the remarks other people make talking to that child will make it quite clear what's been going on. Discipline doesn't have to mean never using the net again either - The worst penalty my daughter was even warned about in advance in using chat involved having the machine locked away for a week, and she never even came close to earning one of those. I spent more time helping her install extra software and such than it took to spell out the actual restrictions, but what I spent on that was apparently enough.
Plus, it's not just about discipline. How many parents bother to sit down with the kid and discuss how some people might be trying to pry private information out over chat, or watch for a half hour when they first start and point out examples of other chatters who might be 43 year old guys just pretending to be 15 year old girls? Teach the kids how to fight back against some of the perils out there first - it lets them know you care, AND it warns them anonimity isn't perfect, and there are some ways to trace them if they abuse the system.
Course, my only child is a girl. Boys are probably a whole nother problem.
The Christian take on this just isn't all that whacko.
That part of the Christian faith that takes the revelation all that literally (and many consider it more a metaphorical work, or coded talk about what was happening in Rome under Nero more than a prediction for modern day times), usually agrees that ultimately, the real mark of the beast will require the receiver to swear an oath putting their governemt or leader above their allegience to God.
The 666 code part is supposed to be obvious only in retrospect, that is: First you get a government sponsered symbol that requires the reciever have it to sell or buy anything, AND requires they explicitly say something along the lines of "Glorious Leader is more important than my old God to me. Glorious leader is my new God." (Hopefully you see what's morally repugnant about that regardless of just how it's named). Then and only then you see how 666 fits in to confirm it.
Even if you are an Atheist or something, would you really want to swear that a secular leader now is your God? I'd figure that Atheists would be among the last people to want to go back to worshipping a deified Roman emperor, or something along those lines.
So if a lot of Christians don't think Barcodes or RFID are the actual Mark of the Beast, why do so many oppose them? Because we think they have a dehumanizing effect, for one. I certainly can't speak for all Xians, but it's pretty common to think that anything that encourages people to treat other people like just numbers, or in this case like conveniently exploitable data generators, instead of people, is a bad thing, and for many Christians, one step closer to the possible final BAD thing. What's sad is that most Agnostics, Secular Humanists, Platonists, Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Randroids and the Rotary Club all tend to agree with at least the first point, even if they don't believe the second point is ever coming.
"Whacko" is only a good term to use on this particular point, if you want to split the people saying "This is Bad!" from the people saying "Yeah, and I'm afraid it might get worse!".
What books are you reading that this would really make a difference?
Several persons who have had collections of military related books have been arrested for various things, and someone in LE has made statements to the press, or the press has made statements on their own before the trials that these collections constituted "Nazi paraphenalia". In one case I know personally, the person violated a BATF ordanance when reselling a civil war era replica firearm, showed no signs any of the times I met him of being either a Neo-nazi or even a racist, and had 10 times as many books on the Napoleonic wars as WW2, and more than either on Medeval warfare, knit your own chainmaille and join the SCA type stuff. This kind of smear is really super-extra-easy to fight, with both the authorities and the press claiming the other party put the spin on things.
With the right spin, a Playboy or Cosmo subscription or even a copy of C. Everett Koops writings as Surgeon General becomes a "hard core pornography" collection, especially if you are accused of child molestation. For that matter, Cosmo has a lot of cigarette ads... Are you sure you're a non-smoker? We're just asking because you told your insurance company that, and here you got lung cancer. Your subscription habits suggest you might be fudging the truth a little. You're not? Oh, we'll just mention the possibility to the jury anyway.
Method of birth control? The pill has some 'significant' cervical cancer related risks for women with a family history of the disease. That same insurance provider wants to know if you lied about that, too!
Are you running for office? Working to help elect someone? Those condoms you bought now are something at least a few voters will care about. Better hope the race isn't viciously close - when the margin is a few votes either way, no smear is too petty to try.
Drinking habits? You must have missed the congressional bill that will let your employer off the hook for that little accident with the chipper shredder machine. Yes, they took all the safety guards off and let an under-age trainee operate it unsupervised, but you had at least one drink within 72 hours of going to work that monday, and that means YOU are 0.01% at fault, which the new law translates to ALL. Quit trying to collect unemployment, ya lazy bum.
The McMartin daycare center scandal happened in that ultra-puritanical society, southern California in the 1980s. Read up on just what items were found in various accused people's homes and offices, and how these got described to or by the press. Then, you'll understand. You DO live in a puritanical society, where if a person in certain types of power wants to get you, a true crime novel or Harry Potter book becomes another tool to bury you before you ever get a trial. A how to manual for murder! Satanic ritual texts!
Why do you find it impossible to believe that this organization consists of total lunatics only? (At least at the ultimate decision making levels)
Remember when 9-11 happened, and the governemt passed the PATRIOT act. This is the organization whose lobbyists tried to convince the government to add illegal music uploading to the definition of terrorist acts. What is that, if not full blown paranoid schitzophrenia?