This is because tradition holds that all persons who joined the marines and are no longer active should be referred to as former marines, or if they have their 20 years in, retired marines. I'ts basically "You joined a brotherhood that exists for life, even if and when the paychecks stop".
Here you have a trained killer threatening to severe heads with an axe.
I'm a former Armored Cav officer. I've been a range instructor and supervisor, and trained some of the instructors who are still active right now teaching soldiers how to use 50 cal. machine guns, grenade and rocket launchers, and even main battle tanks. I've taught courses in how to make improvised high explosives from common kitchen supplies, in amounts sufficient to lead an organized insurrection (and I still have all my fingers). So, I'd like to go on record as saying, If I ever threaten anyone with an axe, it's a metaphor or something. If I was at all serious, I'd be talking weapons that can literally do a thousand or more times that damage from literally 45 to 60,000 times that range (i.e. MLRS). Hell, If I was at all serious, I wouldn't be talking - that's called operational security, and is also a concept to which this marine was probably exposed. (And incidentally, it's sever, not severe http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sever ).
Yes, investigate. The situation justifies reasonable care. I'd consider a 24 hour detention for evaluation to be just possibly reasonable, or a properly warrented search to see if this former marine has a weapons collection, and what kind. Maybe even those should be reserved as options following up a quick law enforcement interview. And, yes, the government has the mandate to check into thretening sounding statments and see if there's serious intent connected to them, and can put a person to at least some inconvenience following up. Most jurisdictions have some standard of just how inconvienienced the former marine can be before he he has a valid complaint of government overreaction. However, I'd have to figure that any time a well trained soldier, airman, marine, or whatever is talking about archaic weaponry such as axes, the chances is they are actually less serious than some civilian nutcase who thinks an axe is some sort of really elite weapon that might easily get them past modern arm bearing security guards and such. I don't think the Marines are suddenly teaching people that axes beat assault rifles and sub-machine guns - at least I hope not.
The principle starts being abusive well short of that. Let's say Google provides 2,312,000 hits to a query. The first couple of pages don't really seeem to be what the querent is looking for. What happens to a site that tells people how to refine their searches to better get meaningful results?
Maybe Google has substantial non-infringing or otherwise legal uses and can claim a defense here, but what's to stop someone from arguing that, say, tips on refining searches lack that substantial use? For a specific example, suppose a site lists terms that will get a large number of webcam feeds that have been set up to enable public access? If the law says that any person who set up a web cam, and didn't password or otherwise protect it, has no valid complaint if people who were not specifically authorized recieve the feed, then a substantial portion of those search hints have non-criminal uses, but if it's presumed that tapping any webcam that you were not specifically told was public access is against one or another of the 'anti-hacking' laws, then presumably, the legal uses of that site are now small compared to illegal ones. Substantial non-infringing uses is not really very well defined, either in fair use doctrine or case law - it's more like obscenity - a judge just somehow knows it when he or she sees it.
Perjury in civil cases often has only the penalty of losing or at least helping lose the case. It's pretty usual for the judge not to sanction anyone, but to simply cite the instance in writing the final decision so as to limit grounds for appeal, and it's almost unheard of for a judge to turn the court transcript over to a DA seeking criminal charges. This was a question raised during the Clinton impeachment. Whether President Clinton lied or not, many court watchers were wondering what the relevence of it was, if the lie was about a civil matter not materially connected to High Crimes and Misdemeanors of the case? Would Congress really censure for something outside of the HC&D constitutional clause that was their mandate, and why were they acting so differently from a normal court?
Which raises the question: Why hasn't Apple integrated vertically, owning more of the hardware process, from chip making to board fabbing to plastic extrusion? Is the barrier to entry for becoming a mini-another-Intel beyond anyone new's ability to surmount, even Apple? Or could Apple have been seriously concerned about a vertical monopoly leading to an antitrust claim? (unlikely, considering Microsoft's own efforts at vertical integration).
Always indicate humor, sarcasm, or irony - this is the new Slashdot. While you are at it, if you are using Morrisetteian Irony instead of the real thing, you must add a link to a scholarly article about lamas, instead of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironic_(song)
For a while, I was starting to think Slashdot was attracting the attention of a lot of Aspergers sufferers, but I finally realized that most of these people don't have the highly functioning part, or even the autism part. They just don't 'get it', and I suspect some of them go through life irritating every single person they meet.
The better question might be, does CNBC explain what an Initial Public Offering or Profit/Earnings ratio is more or less often than does the Wall Street Journal, the Motley Fool, or Morningstar? If CNBC is actually professional, then every time someone writes an article that is likely to attract a lot of less informed readers, they actually go to extra lengths to explain Three Letter Acronyms and such in those particular articles. By that metric, this Slashdot summary is relatively unlikely to attract people unconversant with terms such as pico, and there's probably less need to spell everything out than in a summary about, say, "Why Windows 8 is dropping the Start button", or similar. That supports your take on the matter.
My own instinct in writing, though, is to err on the side of caution, as I've done here. I know of some pros who swear by always explaining any technical term the first time it is used in a story. I think of it as going to extra trouble for the occasional reader of genuinely good will who may be young, inexperienced, trying to follow something that isn't in his or her native tongue, or otherwise having a few extra obstacles, through no fault of his or her own. Yes, that's probably coddling some lazy readers too, but they aren't why I would do it.
Google abandoned neutrality for porn sites long ago. To see this, try typing a porn move term or an actor's or actress's name, and watch what auto-suggest does. For example, Typing Sasha Gray will get you suggestions until the letter "r" Even though some of those suggestions will be other names with "r" in that place, when you get to the "r", the auto-suggest will stop trying to complete rather than suggest "Sasha Gray". I found this out because apparently a seventies porn starlette became a doctor later, with the same name as one of my physicians, and my doctor noticed this problem when Googling her website, that auto-suggest just kicked out about half way through, and when she added the Dr. prefix, it got worse not better, until she got the whole name entered correctly - then she finally figured out whay it was happening. A few big 70's stars can be found even if you can't spell their name exactly right, because instead of suddenly coming up with nothing, when you get about halfway through the name, auto-suggest will refer the person to the Wiki site on them (people such as Ron Jeremy and Linda Lovelace), but often, auto-suggest just drops out completely. I'm not that up on current porn - for people who actually know a bunch of modern porn stars names or film titles, try a few and see how often Google just "mysteriously" stops trying to be helpful.
I'm not at all sure I would apply the word "Draconian" to these laws, as bad as they are, but let's say you are correct. The laws of the United States are supposed to be built to prevent Draconian terms. Whole sections of the constitution, such as the prohibition of Ex Post Facto lawmaking and the clause against Cruel and Unusual Punishment, are there to prevent Draconian terms from being codified into law and enforced. It could be argued that the clause relating to copyright that says "for a limited time", is an effort to keep copyright law from ever getting anywhere near Draconian. Certainly, putting all of copyright law originally in a non-criminal law section of the US legal code so it's limited to being tortuous, at worst, was a means of avoiding the risk of copyright violation being escalated from miisdemeanor to ever more serious felony - this is an area where people as disparate as Jefferson, Madison, and Jay all wrote to agree with that intent.
In the United States, the solution to Draconian laws is simple - armed rebellion. US citizens are supposed to rein in their government by less violent means long before anything gets to Draconian, and it's when the problem reached Draconian that we are supposed to reconize the less violent means have failed, and switch form ballots to bullets.
On the Texas/Mexico border right this year, there have been over a dozen cases where drug mules have driven trucks or cars into the Rio Grande at high rates of speed to get back across the border with their drugs and presumably try again rather than get caught. If they do lose the shipment, they will get killed in prison by a cartel agent, no ifs, ands or buts. Yet these people are still desperate enough to keep trying.
So, your argument boils down to: We're already doing what I advocate, and it isn't working, but if we just write down a law that says we actually mean to do what we are already doing, it will suddenly start working.
Competition s a basic tendency of humans. 2 billion dollars spent on getting an advanced robot to do something extremely difficult is so much better than competing to build more nuclear weapons, stealth drones, and cruise missiles, that disparaging it is counter your and my personal survival. The people who are hyper-paranoid will not stop feeling like all life is a savage competition because you criticise any non-violent competition between peoples groups or nations as not living up to your definition of 'loving'. Instead they will put all their competitive drive into making the whole planet into a smouldering pile of rubble in a misguided and delusional effort to wipe out everyone who even might be a potential enemy. If you want them to stop that, you learn to respect when competition gets focused into technological achievement, excellence in sports, creating art or pure science or even just persuing a harmless hobby, and not just taking care of people.
Sure, you can tell them that a civilised country proves it's the freeest and best by building a better and better safety net for its citizens, feeding its poor, finding meaningful work for everyone, educating all citizens, and other such dreams if you want, and some of the hyper-competitive paranoids will listen a little and get on the bandwagon and grow out of being so afraid, but if you keep slamming everything else but basic care of the poor, all you will do is drive those people back into their caves, where they currentlly keep about 3,000 Megatons of very bad solutions to the problem of the poor and all those other things that just might be good in your eyes.
Curiosity is about a lot more than just looking at some rocks, but even if you reduced it to that, how is it in any way morally inferior to spending about the same amount figuring out how to put Cobalt-60 jackets on thermonuclear weapons, just so you can make not only human life extinct but clear the planet of bacterial life as well? Spending 2 billion on preserving the 'vitally important' model railroading hobby is better than building more death machines. An Olympics is better than more instruments of totalitarian population control. Finding a cure for male pattern baldness is better than inventing weaponized Ebola. While we are at it, any of those things are better than rewarding bankers for screwing up everyone else's economy,. If you can waste your energy on sarcasm and insults for a program like Curiosity, just what are you willing to say to the Pentagon procurement offices, the TARP system, or Wall street in general? If you are not screaming at them, at the top of your lungs,every second of every waking day, your responses are not sanely proportionate.
No, he's saying its nausiating for a people to be proud of their Peaceful accomplishments. How morally depraved is that? Save the pride and 'jingoistic celebration' just for when your boys have spitted a few Gook babies on bayonets, nof for when you've done something decent, brilliant or pasionately life affirming. Personally, I think that keeping nationalism, pride, and even boasting out of success at all sorts of peaceful persuits is a great way to shift the focus of life to nothing but war.
The most interesting thing about this position, to me is applying the Kantian imperative. If we universialize his argument, then if somebody kills tp1024, in a bloody and gruesome manner, they may be acting like a barbarian to the rest of us, but they have not just physically defeated tp1024, they have won the intellectual argument (by Reducto ad Absurdum - if acting 100% in accordanced with what a person says he or she wants, resutls in that person's death by violence, and that doesn't show the person's arguments were absurd, then what the heck would?). Tp1024's argument is one of a precious handful of logical absurdities of that magnetude.
Let's look at an example that might indirectly shed light on your question:
Vampires - None of the various fictional forms of vampires are real, they are just stories. Various modern vampires punch Wesley Snipes, sparkle, spread their disease as a plague, or do various things that fit the author's intent. We know they aren't real because we don't actually observe their special effects magic in real life. Now take Dracula, in the original Bram Stoker. Stoker is clear about it, Dracula is a supernatural being, not the result of some weird virus or whatever the hell causes Anne Rice or Twilight vamps. Stoker vampires rise from the dead because Satan sends them back in mockery of Christ's resurrection, taking exactly three days to do so each and every time. Stoker vampires are turned by the Christian symbol of the crucifix, not by any other religious symbol. So Stoker vampires are internally contradictory. Anyone seeing the things Dracula does and having a little time to reason it out ought to just say "Aha! This is a Satan sent mockery of Jesus' rebirth. Ergo, the thing it mocked really happened! I now have unlimited faith that what the Bible says is true, and shall immediately pray to the Lord for succor from Dracula. Since I have immense faith, much greater than a mustard seed, my soul will then go to heaven when Dracula bites me, and so by sending a supernatural creature to try and gain souls for Hell, Satan has defeated himself. That was very stupid of Satan." Ergo, the reason not to believe in Dracula is it results in an internal contradiction, not just because we don't have evidence for Dracula in reality.
We reject some things because of lack of evidence, and even intelligent, honest and well meaning people may disagree over just what constitutes evidence. We reject other things more solidly because they are internally contradictiory. I reject stable elements above Element 118 because I see no good evidence for the proposed "masive isotope island of stability", but I at least bothered to read a couple of the papers on it. I reject four sided triangles because they are internally contradictory, and I don't bother to read anyone's explanation of why we should call squares by another name in the future.
The number of people who DO report 'near-death' experiences each year is in the six digit range (In a typical year, over 200,000 people report some variation on these experiences in a western medicine style clinical setting - for support of this claim, interested persons mighrt start with: Mauro, James "Bright lights, big mystery".Psychology Today, July 1992, and see where that article's references lead them.). If you want to claim there are 8 million books and churches to match that many living Americans who claim to have had such experiences, go right ahead, but as it stands, your absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Personally, I don't assume that everyone who says they have had a different experience than I have is motivated to lie by money. You do realize that in taking that position, you are revealing something rather unpleasant about yourself?
However, we may want to take your (non) experience as a disproof of the contemporary Pop-Christian style God, as presumably you would have had one of those negative versions of the white light experience so as to induce reform. Logicially then, there is either no afterlife, or there is, but you aren't on the list, or it IS a heaven or Hell thing, but you (of all people) don't need a nudge in the right direction, or it's not a Heaven or Hell type thing so there's no particular need to give everyone a sample.
Oh, and I'm neither selling a book or founding a church, but that does not mean I haven't seen the light. I just don't usually talk about such experiences.
When Richard Dawkins first proposed the word "Meme" in his book, 'The Selfish Gene', he admitted there were several basic problems with the concept of Memes as Replicators subject to natural Selection. He wrote that he hoped some of the difficulties could be overcome in the future. None of his own objections in this early work were ever successfully addressed, but he started writing as though they had been dealt with, perhaps because so many people seemed to sieze on the idea and accept it with various accolades. Unless those objections can be overcome, referring to Meme-infection is a way of disguising that you are stooping to an unfounded ad-hom attack on the persons you disagree with. (not that I'm saying you personally have that motivation, necessarily, just that you need to read the original objections one of the chief inventors of the meme concept once acknowledged existed and is now trying to sweep under the rug, and think about whether you still want to use the whole thing). I wouldn't chew you out for it, except you have several valid points if I understand you, one that reincarnation is not necessarily connected to any particular religion or religious idea, and another that there is evidence to suggest treating consiousness as just a brain epi-phenominon is inadiquate at best and missleading at worst. You don't need to buttress your arguments with references to Meme-infection.
Imagine there were only 19,000 people on Earth, roughly evenly distributed. What's the chance you'd ever run into another person? Now, instead of just the land area, make sure that 3/4ths of those people are on the ocean. What are the odds of running into one of them now?
A quick back of the envelope calculation shows that the odds of running into one are, to three significant digits, 29.2/70.8 of the chance of swimming into one. I hope this helps.
You left out a 'were' in the last sentence, ergo your argument is invalid. (Not really, I'm well over 30 and, looking back on my public school education, I was often indoctrinated by utter morons. I suspect it's gotten worse, not better, but perhaps that's an observer bias).
Pluto is now counted as a dwarf planet. By proper English, that means Pluto is still a planet, just as dwarf humans are still humans. The IAU can't get very basic English rules correct, so why does their opinion carry so much weight? If the US supreme court announced that they reviewed all four amendments and can't find any reason to support the concept of privacy, would you still respect the court's decisions? If your doctor didn't know how many kidneys you were supposed to have, wouldn't you find another doctor? So if the IAU thinks dwarfs in the real world are a species from Tolkien's Middle Earth, maybe it's time to start ignoring them until they at least learn how to speak at the eighth grade level or thereabouts, and understand that a modifier is not automatically, or even usually, a negating prefix.
I'm not a lawyer either, so we are two people going outside our respective professional competencies, but with that said, I suspect there IS something intrinisically wrong with a negligence claim here. The idea is that copyright law now implements statutory damages, and the statute says the standard for going from basic damages to more significant damages (the shift from $30,000 to $150,000 per incident), is "willfulness". Since negligence in most civil matters entalis a possible increase to the penalties as well, letting the plaintiff increase damages by the means spelled out in the statute and then increase them again by means of 'negligence', a cause outside the statute, is the problem.
The defendant committed one tort, by one single action, and allowing a claim of negligence would be treating that one tort as two seperate violations subject to different laws for the same single action, two sets of penalties, and since there are some types of copyright violation subject to criminal charges, even possible double jeopardy. (if a prosecutor decided to bring criminal charges based on one statute where the other didn't justify them, that might be double jeopardy, i.m.h.o., even where they didn't bring charges for both statutes. Certainly it would be where two sets of criminal charges were brought. Double jeopardy doesn't exactly extend to civil suits (you can normally refile unless a case is dismissed with prejudice, but in practice, you'd better have something new to litigate) and anyway, once even part of copyright law started addressing criminal penalties, just where double jeoplardy doctrine protects is something that will probably have to go all the way to the Supreme court someday.). You really can't build a court case over someone simply being negligent - you charge them with negligence only as part of a specific tort (or a crime, like negligent homicide, where negligence is sometimes actually spelled out as part of the crime). Can you imagine accusing someone of negligent (blank)?
The big content owners wanted copyright law extended more into criminal law, they wanted statutory penalties instead of having to show actual damages, and they got those things. It seems in this case someone wants the old laws back, but they would like to use pieces of both old and new law as they see fit to combine them. The judge was quite right to strike this down. It also shows some copyright claimants are simply not to be satisfied.
Time for a car analogy: If I give a hitch-hiker a lift and then the hitch-hiker starts demanding to have a look at my car's engine and wants to check the car's history, I'm going to chuck him out.
That's OK as far as it goes, but what if you're a cab company and the other person in your car is a paying customer? Chucking him out stops being so automatic. What if the vehicle is more complex and failures are more catastropic, and the paying customer and many fellows create a Federal Avvaition Administration to check your commercial airplane regularly before you haul him around? Maybe you or I individually have no right to see Google's source code, but If Google's more like Northwest airlines than it is a single car driving down the road, there's an increasing need with increasing size and power and public risk for somebody legally representing us to be able to check that code.
See, that's the trouble with analogies - they're never exact. I think mine is closer than yours, but it's not exact either.
The whole tax consequences point of a standard "C" corporation is they are not a pass through - that is, not all they gain has to pass through to people. An S-corp, a partnership, a sole proprietership - these are pass through entities. Eventually is a very slippery word in the way it's being used by Romney and the rest, as in "After the Collectivist aliens from Alpha Centauri take over the planet in 3987 a.d., humanity will languish for a thousand years before the Randroid is invented to throw off the mutant overlords of Quarb and finally balance those pesky books." . By any normal definitions, not only are corporations not people, period, but there is no guarentee what they earn or control will ever pass back into the hands of people. If it ever does, those people will pay half or less the tax rate other people with the same income range from non-capital gains sources pay, and probably bitch about how they ought to get extra votes for their lesser contribution. A corp can go bankrupt, for just one example, without prior years income ever becoming subject to individual taxation.
We don't need you Liberals telling us where Al Gore ithms got their start, you leftist hippy! (And if you're not sure if I'm joking either, then God bless you))
Once a country has codiifed 'fair use' and established some basics, it actually becomes easier to lobby to expand those basics. Not really spelling out what counts as even minimal fair use makes it hard to change things for better or worse, and when a related area such as infringement law gets more codifed, it tends to drive the uncodified area into that pesky 'for worse' category just as a side effect. Just think of how much less abusive U.S. law would be if we had a lot of fair use exceptions spelled out in good detail and all these laws such as the DMCA had riders that said , for example, "Nothing in this bill offsets Title 18 Section Foo04 - Codiefied minimum Fair Use exemptions.".
It's not as common as Basloroth makes it sound, but there is a real way for it to happen, and not just for cases where the profit is trivial by comparison with the main market. The corporation simply does a marketability study, and never even looks at the possibility of selling below a certain thereshold, a threshold set high enough there's points below it where they stand to mae only a few cents per unit, but sell enough units that there could be a serious profit on very high volume. If you don't think that happens, just consider all the DVDs that are not made for all of the 7 Region encodings.If companies think there is absolutely zero worthwhile interest in a product over an entire one of the seven regions, it's a pretty safe bet they are not really following the steps to maximize profits.
I use KDE when I can get get at least Version 4.5, and I have to say: Even at only version 0.17, Enlightenment is still much better than Gnome 3.x, IMNSHO.
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This is because tradition holds that all persons who joined the marines and are no longer active should be referred to as former marines, or if they have their 20 years in, retired marines. I'ts basically "You joined a brotherhood that exists for life, even if and when the paychecks stop".
Here you have a trained killer threatening to severe heads with an axe.
I'm a former Armored Cav officer. I've been a range instructor and supervisor, and trained some of the instructors who are still active right now teaching soldiers how to use 50 cal. machine guns, grenade and rocket launchers, and even main battle tanks. I've taught courses in how to make improvised high explosives from common kitchen supplies, in amounts sufficient to lead an organized insurrection (and I still have all my fingers). So, I'd like to go on record as saying, If I ever threaten anyone with an axe, it's a metaphor or something. If I was at all serious, I'd be talking weapons that can literally do a thousand or more times that damage from literally 45 to 60,000 times that range (i.e. MLRS). Hell, If I was at all serious, I wouldn't be talking - that's called operational security, and is also a concept to which this marine was probably exposed. (And incidentally, it's sever, not severe http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sever ).
Yes, investigate. The situation justifies reasonable care. I'd consider a 24 hour detention for evaluation to be just possibly reasonable, or a properly warrented search to see if this former marine has a weapons collection, and what kind. Maybe even those should be reserved as options following up a quick law enforcement interview. And, yes, the government has the mandate to check into thretening sounding statments and see if there's serious intent connected to them, and can put a person to at least some inconvenience following up. Most jurisdictions have some standard of just how inconvienienced the former marine can be before he he has a valid complaint of government overreaction. However, I'd have to figure that any time a well trained soldier, airman, marine, or whatever is talking about archaic weaponry such as axes, the chances is they are actually less serious than some civilian nutcase who thinks an axe is some sort of really elite weapon that might easily get them past modern arm bearing security guards and such. I don't think the Marines are suddenly teaching people that axes beat assault rifles and sub-machine guns - at least I hope not.
The principle starts being abusive well short of that. Let's say Google provides 2,312,000 hits to a query. The first couple of pages don't really seeem to be what the querent is looking for. What happens to a site that tells people how to refine their searches to better get meaningful results?
Maybe Google has substantial non-infringing or otherwise legal uses and can claim a defense here, but what's to stop someone from arguing that, say, tips on refining searches lack that substantial use? For a specific example, suppose a site lists terms that will get a large number of webcam feeds that have been set up to enable public access? If the law says that any person who set up a web cam, and didn't password or otherwise protect it, has no valid complaint if people who were not specifically authorized recieve the feed, then a substantial portion of those search hints have non-criminal uses, but if it's presumed that tapping any webcam that you were not specifically told was public access is against one or another of the 'anti-hacking' laws, then presumably, the legal uses of that site are now small compared to illegal ones. Substantial non-infringing uses is not really very well defined, either in fair use doctrine or case law - it's more like obscenity - a judge just somehow knows it when he or she sees it.
Perjury in civil cases often has only the penalty of losing or at least helping lose the case. It's pretty usual for the judge not to sanction anyone, but to simply cite the instance in writing the final decision so as to limit grounds for appeal, and it's almost unheard of for a judge to turn the court transcript over to a DA seeking criminal charges. This was a question raised during the Clinton impeachment. Whether President Clinton lied or not, many court watchers were wondering what the relevence of it was, if the lie was about a civil matter not materially connected to High Crimes and Misdemeanors of the case? Would Congress really censure for something outside of the HC&D constitutional clause that was their mandate, and why were they acting so differently from a normal court?
Which raises the question: Why hasn't Apple integrated vertically, owning more of the hardware process, from chip making to board fabbing to plastic extrusion? Is the barrier to entry for becoming a mini-another-Intel beyond anyone new's ability to surmount, even Apple? Or could Apple have been seriously concerned about a vertical monopoly leading to an antitrust claim? (unlikely, considering Microsoft's own efforts at vertical integration).
Always indicate humor, sarcasm, or irony - this is the new Slashdot. While you are at it, if you are using Morrisetteian Irony instead of the real thing, you must add a link to a scholarly article about lamas, instead of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironic_(song)
For a while, I was starting to think Slashdot was attracting the attention of a lot of Aspergers sufferers, but I finally realized that most of these people don't have the highly functioning part, or even the autism part. They just don't 'get it', and I suspect some of them go through life irritating every single person they meet.
The better question might be, does CNBC explain what an Initial Public Offering or Profit/Earnings ratio is more or less often than does the Wall Street Journal, the Motley Fool, or Morningstar? If CNBC is actually professional, then every time someone writes an article that is likely to attract a lot of less informed readers, they actually go to extra lengths to explain Three Letter Acronyms and such in those particular articles. By that metric, this Slashdot summary is relatively unlikely to attract people unconversant with terms such as pico, and there's probably less need to spell everything out than in a summary about, say, "Why Windows 8 is dropping the Start button", or similar. That supports your take on the matter.
My own instinct in writing, though, is to err on the side of caution, as I've done here. I know of some pros who swear by always explaining any technical term the first time it is used in a story. I think of it as going to extra trouble for the occasional reader of genuinely good will who may be young, inexperienced, trying to follow something that isn't in his or her native tongue, or otherwise having a few extra obstacles, through no fault of his or her own. Yes, that's probably coddling some lazy readers too, but they aren't why I would do it.
Google abandoned neutrality for porn sites long ago. To see this, try typing a porn move term or an actor's or actress's name, and watch what auto-suggest does. For example, Typing Sasha Gray will get you suggestions until the letter "r" Even though some of those suggestions will be other names with "r" in that place, when you get to the "r", the auto-suggest will stop trying to complete rather than suggest "Sasha Gray". I found this out because apparently a seventies porn starlette became a doctor later, with the same name as one of my physicians, and my doctor noticed this problem when Googling her website, that auto-suggest just kicked out about half way through, and when she added the Dr. prefix, it got worse not better, until she got the whole name entered correctly - then she finally figured out whay it was happening. A few big 70's stars can be found even if you can't spell their name exactly right, because instead of suddenly coming up with nothing, when you get about halfway through the name, auto-suggest will refer the person to the Wiki site on them (people such as Ron Jeremy and Linda Lovelace), but often, auto-suggest just drops out completely. I'm not that up on current porn - for people who actually know a bunch of modern porn stars names or film titles, try a few and see how often Google just "mysteriously" stops trying to be helpful.
I'm not at all sure I would apply the word "Draconian" to these laws, as bad as they are, but let's say you are correct. The laws of the United States are supposed to be built to prevent Draconian terms. Whole sections of the constitution, such as the prohibition of Ex Post Facto lawmaking and the clause against Cruel and Unusual Punishment, are there to prevent Draconian terms from being codified into law and enforced. It could be argued that the clause relating to copyright that says "for a limited time", is an effort to keep copyright law from ever getting anywhere near Draconian. Certainly, putting all of copyright law originally in a non-criminal law section of the US legal code so it's limited to being tortuous, at worst, was a means of avoiding the risk of copyright violation being escalated from miisdemeanor to ever more serious felony - this is an area where people as disparate as Jefferson, Madison, and Jay all wrote to agree with that intent.
In the United States, the solution to Draconian laws is simple - armed rebellion. US citizens are supposed to rein in their government by less violent means long before anything gets to Draconian, and it's when the problem reached Draconian that we are supposed to reconize the less violent means have failed, and switch form ballots to bullets.
On the Texas/Mexico border right this year, there have been over a dozen cases where drug mules have driven trucks or cars into the Rio Grande at high rates of speed to get back across the border with their drugs and presumably try again rather than get caught. If they do lose the shipment, they will get killed in prison by a cartel agent, no ifs, ands or buts. Yet these people are still desperate enough to keep trying.
So, your argument boils down to: We're already doing what I advocate, and it isn't working, but if we just write down a law that says we actually mean to do what we are already doing, it will suddenly start working.
Competition s a basic tendency of humans. 2 billion dollars spent on getting an advanced robot to do something extremely difficult is so much better than competing to build more nuclear weapons, stealth drones, and cruise missiles, that disparaging it is counter your and my personal survival. The people who are hyper-paranoid will not stop feeling like all life is a savage competition because you criticise any non-violent competition between peoples groups or nations as not living up to your definition of 'loving'. Instead they will put all their competitive drive into making the whole planet into a smouldering pile of rubble in a misguided and delusional effort to wipe out everyone who even might be a potential enemy. If you want them to stop that, you learn to respect when competition gets focused into technological achievement, excellence in sports, creating art or pure science or even just persuing a harmless hobby, and not just taking care of people. ,every second of every waking day, your responses are not sanely proportionate.
Sure, you can tell them that a civilised country proves it's the freeest and best by building a better and better safety net for its citizens, feeding its poor, finding meaningful work for everyone, educating all citizens, and other such dreams if you want, and some of the hyper-competitive paranoids will listen a little and get on the bandwagon and grow out of being so afraid, but if you keep slamming everything else but basic care of the poor, all you will do is drive those people back into their caves, where they currentlly keep about 3,000 Megatons of very bad solutions to the problem of the poor and all those other things that just might be good in your eyes.
Curiosity is about a lot more than just looking at some rocks, but even if you reduced it to that, how is it in any way morally inferior to spending about the same amount figuring out how to put Cobalt-60 jackets on thermonuclear weapons, just so you can make not only human life extinct but clear the planet of bacterial life as well? Spending 2 billion on preserving the 'vitally important' model railroading hobby is better than building more death machines. An Olympics is better than more instruments of totalitarian population control. Finding a cure for male pattern baldness is better than inventing weaponized Ebola. While we are at it, any of those things are better than rewarding bankers for screwing up everyone else's economy,. If you can waste your energy on sarcasm and insults for a program like Curiosity, just what are you willing to say to the Pentagon procurement offices, the TARP system, or Wall street in general? If you are not screaming at them, at the top of your lungs
No, he's saying its nausiating for a people to be proud of their Peaceful accomplishments. How morally depraved is that? Save the pride and 'jingoistic celebration' just for when your boys have spitted a few Gook babies on bayonets, nof for when you've done something decent, brilliant or pasionately life affirming. Personally, I think that keeping nationalism, pride, and even boasting out of success at all sorts of peaceful persuits is a great way to shift the focus of life to nothing but war.
The most interesting thing about this position, to me is applying the Kantian imperative. If we universialize his argument, then if somebody kills tp1024, in a bloody and gruesome manner, they may be acting like a barbarian to the rest of us, but they have not just physically defeated tp1024, they have won the intellectual argument (by Reducto ad Absurdum - if acting 100% in accordanced with what a person says he or she wants, resutls in that person's death by violence, and that doesn't show the person's arguments were absurd, then what the heck would?). Tp1024's argument is one of a precious handful of logical absurdities of that magnetude.
Let's look at an example that might indirectly shed light on your question:
Vampires - None of the various fictional forms of vampires are real, they are just stories. Various modern vampires punch Wesley Snipes, sparkle, spread their disease as a plague, or do various things that fit the author's intent. We know they aren't real because we don't actually observe their special effects magic in real life. Now take Dracula, in the original Bram Stoker. Stoker is clear about it, Dracula is a supernatural being, not the result of some weird virus or whatever the hell causes Anne Rice or Twilight vamps. Stoker vampires rise from the dead because Satan sends them back in mockery of Christ's resurrection, taking exactly three days to do so each and every time. Stoker vampires are turned by the Christian symbol of the crucifix, not by any other religious symbol. So Stoker vampires are internally contradictory. Anyone seeing the things Dracula does and having a little time to reason it out ought to just say "Aha! This is a Satan sent mockery of Jesus' rebirth. Ergo, the thing it mocked really happened! I now have unlimited faith that what the Bible says is true, and shall immediately pray to the Lord for succor from Dracula. Since I have immense faith, much greater than a mustard seed, my soul will then go to heaven when Dracula bites me, and so by sending a supernatural creature to try and gain souls for Hell, Satan has defeated himself. That was very stupid of Satan." Ergo, the reason not to believe in Dracula is it results in an internal contradiction, not just because we don't have evidence for Dracula in reality.
We reject some things because of lack of evidence, and even intelligent, honest and well meaning people may disagree over just what constitutes evidence. We reject other things more solidly because they are internally contradictiory. I reject stable elements above Element 118 because I see no good evidence for the proposed "masive isotope island of stability", but I at least bothered to read a couple of the papers on it. I reject four sided triangles because they are internally contradictory, and I don't bother to read anyone's explanation of why we should call squares by another name in the future.
The number of people who DO report 'near-death' experiences each year is in the six digit range (In a typical year, over 200,000 people report some variation on these experiences in a western medicine style clinical setting - for support of this claim, interested persons mighrt start with: Mauro, James "Bright lights, big mystery".Psychology Today, July 1992, and see where that article's references lead them.). If you want to claim there are 8 million books and churches to match that many living Americans who claim to have had such experiences, go right ahead, but as it stands, your absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Personally, I don't assume that everyone who says they have had a different experience than I have is motivated to lie by money. You do realize that in taking that position, you are revealing something rather unpleasant about yourself?
However, we may want to take your (non) experience as a disproof of the contemporary Pop-Christian style God, as presumably you would have had one of those negative versions of the white light experience so as to induce reform. Logicially then, there is either no afterlife, or there is, but you aren't on the list, or it IS a heaven or Hell thing, but you (of all people) don't need a nudge in the right direction, or it's not a Heaven or Hell type thing so there's no particular need to give everyone a sample.
Oh, and I'm neither selling a book or founding a church, but that does not mean I haven't seen the light. I just don't usually talk about such experiences.
When Richard Dawkins first proposed the word "Meme" in his book, 'The Selfish Gene', he admitted there were several basic problems with the concept of Memes as Replicators subject to natural Selection. He wrote that he hoped some of the difficulties could be overcome in the future. None of his own objections in this early work were ever successfully addressed, but he started writing as though they had been dealt with, perhaps because so many people seemed to sieze on the idea and accept it with various accolades. Unless those objections can be overcome, referring to Meme-infection is a way of disguising that you are stooping to an unfounded ad-hom attack on the persons you disagree with. (not that I'm saying you personally have that motivation, necessarily, just that you need to read the original objections one of the chief inventors of the meme concept once acknowledged existed and is now trying to sweep under the rug, and think about whether you still want to use the whole thing). I wouldn't chew you out for it, except you have several valid points if I understand you, one that reincarnation is not necessarily connected to any particular religion or religious idea, and another that there is evidence to suggest treating consiousness as just a brain epi-phenominon is inadiquate at best and missleading at worst. You don't need to buttress your arguments with references to Meme-infection.
Imagine there were only 19,000 people on Earth, roughly evenly distributed. What's the chance you'd ever run into another person? Now, instead of just the land area, make sure that 3/4ths of those people are on the ocean. What are the odds of running into one of them now?
A quick back of the envelope calculation shows that the odds of running into one are, to three significant digits, 29.2/70.8 of the chance of swimming into one. I hope this helps.
You left out a 'were' in the last sentence, ergo your argument is invalid. (Not really, I'm well over 30 and, looking back on my public school education, I was often indoctrinated by utter morons. I suspect it's gotten worse, not better, but perhaps that's an observer bias).
Pluto is now counted as a dwarf planet. By proper English, that means Pluto is still a planet, just as dwarf humans are still humans. The IAU can't get very basic English rules correct, so why does their opinion carry so much weight? If the US supreme court announced that they reviewed all four amendments and can't find any reason to support the concept of privacy, would you still respect the court's decisions? If your doctor didn't know how many kidneys you were supposed to have, wouldn't you find another doctor? So if the IAU thinks dwarfs in the real world are a species from Tolkien's Middle Earth, maybe it's time to start ignoring them until they at least learn how to speak at the eighth grade level or thereabouts, and understand that a modifier is not automatically, or even usually, a negating prefix.
I'm not a lawyer either, so we are two people going outside our respective professional competencies, but with that said, I suspect there IS something intrinisically wrong with a negligence claim here. The idea is that copyright law now implements statutory damages, and the statute says the standard for going from basic damages to more significant damages (the shift from $30,000 to $150,000 per incident), is "willfulness". Since negligence in most civil matters entalis a possible increase to the penalties as well, letting the plaintiff increase damages by the means spelled out in the statute and then increase them again by means of 'negligence', a cause outside the statute, is the problem.
The defendant committed one tort, by one single action, and allowing a claim of negligence would be treating that one tort as two seperate violations subject to different laws for the same single action, two sets of penalties, and since there are some types of copyright violation subject to criminal charges, even possible double jeopardy. (if a prosecutor decided to bring criminal charges based on one statute where the other didn't justify them, that might be double jeopardy, i.m.h.o., even where they didn't bring charges for both statutes. Certainly it would be where two sets of criminal charges were brought. Double jeopardy doesn't exactly extend to civil suits (you can normally refile unless a case is dismissed with prejudice, but in practice, you'd better have something new to litigate) and anyway, once even part of copyright law started addressing criminal penalties, just where double jeoplardy doctrine protects is something that will probably have to go all the way to the Supreme court someday.). You really can't build a court case over someone simply being negligent - you charge them with negligence only as part of a specific tort (or a crime, like negligent homicide, where negligence is sometimes actually spelled out as part of the crime). Can you imagine accusing someone of negligent (blank)?
The big content owners wanted copyright law extended more into criminal law, they wanted statutory penalties instead of having to show actual damages, and they got those things. It seems in this case someone wants the old laws back, but they would like to use pieces of both old and new law as they see fit to combine them. The judge was quite right to strike this down. It also shows some copyright claimants are simply not to be satisfied.
Time for a car analogy: If I give a hitch-hiker a lift and then the hitch-hiker starts demanding to have a look at my car's engine and wants to check the car's history, I'm going to chuck him out.
That's OK as far as it goes, but what if you're a cab company and the other person in your car is a paying customer? Chucking him out stops being so automatic. What if the vehicle is more complex and failures are more catastropic, and the paying customer and many fellows create a Federal Avvaition Administration to check your commercial airplane regularly before you haul him around? Maybe you or I individually have no right to see Google's source code, but If Google's more like Northwest airlines than it is a single car driving down the road, there's an increasing need with increasing size and power and public risk for somebody legally representing us to be able to check that code.
See, that's the trouble with analogies - they're never exact. I think mine is closer than yours, but it's not exact either.
The whole tax consequences point of a standard "C" corporation is they are not a pass through - that is, not all they gain has to pass through to people. An S-corp, a partnership, a sole proprietership - these are pass through entities. Eventually is a very slippery word in the way it's being used by Romney and the rest, as in "After the Collectivist aliens from Alpha Centauri take over the planet in 3987 a.d., humanity will languish for a thousand years before the Randroid is invented to throw off the mutant overlords of Quarb and finally balance those pesky books." . By any normal definitions, not only are corporations not people, period, but there is no guarentee what they earn or control will ever pass back into the hands of people. If it ever does, those people will pay half or less the tax rate other people with the same income range from non-capital gains sources pay, and probably bitch about how they ought to get extra votes for their lesser contribution. A corp can go bankrupt, for just one example, without prior years income ever becoming subject to individual taxation.
Xenu, is that you?
We don't need you Liberals telling us where Al Gore ithms got their start, you leftist hippy!
(And if you're not sure if I'm joking either, then God bless you))
Once a country has codiifed 'fair use' and established some basics, it actually becomes easier to lobby to expand those basics. Not really spelling out what counts as even minimal fair use makes it hard to change things for better or worse, and when a related area such as infringement law gets more codifed, it tends to drive the uncodified area into that pesky 'for worse' category just as a side effect. Just think of how much less abusive U.S. law would be if we had a lot of fair use exceptions spelled out in good detail and all these laws such as the DMCA had riders that said , for example, "Nothing in this bill offsets Title 18 Section Foo04 - Codiefied minimum Fair Use exemptions.".
It's not as common as Basloroth makes it sound, but there is a real way for it to happen, and not just for cases where the profit is trivial by comparison with the main market. The corporation simply does a marketability study, and never even looks at the possibility of selling below a certain thereshold, a threshold set high enough there's points below it where they stand to mae only a few cents per unit, but sell enough units that there could be a serious profit on very high volume. If you don't think that happens, just consider all the DVDs that are not made for all of the 7 Region encodings.If companies think there is absolutely zero worthwhile interest in a product over an entire one of the seven regions, it's a pretty safe bet they are not really following the steps to maximize profits.
I use KDE when I can get get at least Version 4.5, and I have to say: Even at only version 0.17, Enlightenment is still much better than Gnome 3.x, IMNSHO.