You don't know. Maybe the reason was a tip from somebody who might have had a grudge. Maybe the reason was something the suspect said at a political meeting. maybe somebody misspelled a name on a form. There are lots of possible reasons, some good, some bad, and some borderline cases that might call for closer oversight of Homeland Security, and the real questions here all depend on those reasons.
You mentioned his travel. If he travelled frequently, always to locations that are considered hotbeds of terrorism, at times that were suspiciously coincidental with some known terrorists, also visiting those locations, that's a pretty good indicator to probe further. If his travel isn't that clear cut an indicator, then maybe what needs to happen here is the FBI needs to refine their process to avoid spending a lot of money and time following up on bad intelligence. But, you don't know that one way or another.
The 'legal world', in this case, would be a declaration of war. You can't commit treason in time of war if there's no war, just some sort of nebulous police action. That is, you can't if the constitution, that pesky piece of paper, is followed. If the US now ignores the requirement for a specific enemy to try someone for Treason as a death penalty offense, that's just the sort of thing that has so many here arguing the gap between moral and legal.
The dates, i.e. 1924, 1930, and similar, are an important part of this problem. The other date that makes them important is 1929. When the great depression hit, a lot of judges divided up assets of failing companies among creditors and included trademarks and copyrights in those assets. You have a huge spike in bankruptcy cases, where they were overwhelming the courts, and where the IP was generally thought to be trivial, near worthless, and the courts were mostly focused on the physivcal property such as buildings, presses and even paper stock, treating the IP as an afterthought. Tremendous copyright extensions mean all those cases are part of sorting through who owns what today.
Take the Lovecraft estate. H P Lovecraft was generally out of the habit of selling all rights to a story to a magazine by 1926. He wrote in the amateur author's magazines about the advantages of selling just first rights in case there was an actual chance at further publication, and seems to have been very serious about it. His single, most famous work, The Call of Cthulhu, was published in 1926, presumably as a first rights sale if he kept to what he announced he would do. But, if you look at the Lovecraft copyright trail, there are a huge number of his most major works where, in the early 30's, as HPL lay dying of bright's disease, some small press or other claimed his works, gave them away as part of a bankruptcy case, and often awarded them to some other company that seems to have existed only for a few days as one court settlement after another cascaded through the overburdened system.
The system didn't promoter progress in the sciences and useful arts, it ripped off a great artist as he lay dieing in agony. The current versions of the laws preserve the right of litigants to dredge up some of the most spurious and fraudulent precedents ever entered into American law..All the court cases subsequent to that are tainted (fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine). I doubt either Brown University or the Estate of August Derleth could be said to have less than the highest respect for Lovecraft himself, but their court cases were based on a legal tangle that made them very hard to settle fairly and serve as a model of nobody being really satisfied once finally over. How many other authors are less known today, not for any flaw on their part but because the depression court battles wiped out any chance of their being published again?
It's a chilling effect. If you choose not to accept an article, you haven't created a chilling effect, but if you call all the other editors you know and say "This guy's so bad, I wouldn't waste time reading this manuscript, or anything else he ever sends you.", that's different. If you don't like how the author is disrespectful of your favorite politician, but claim without any evidence he's obviously a communist stooge, again, that's a chilling effect. Legally, chilling effects on financial transactions count as a form of harm, meaning if someone sues you for libel or slander, they have standing. (They won't necessarily win a case, of course, but they've proved there are damages worth suing over merely by establishing such an effect exists, and no longer have to show specific damages for a lawsuit to proceed).
Until an entity such as the Tolkien estate is reluctant to take such steps without much more cause than they have here, if only because the risk of a creating a successful countersuit is real if they make a few such legal missteps, the law is broken.
The definition that makes Pluto a dwarf planet specifically apples only to our solar system, and the part that calls for clearing the orbit was inserted in case a Kuiper belt object actually bigger than Mercury was found later, so the IAU would not have to debate the subject again, not as a straight-forward rule based on any physical fact. Incidentally, the belt is named after Kuiper because he was a. the third major working astronomer to propose such as zone, and b. the first to be fundamentally wrong about its nature, as he claimed such a belt could not still exist.
All the debate about how to define a an extra-solar planet will be driven by the very people who have totally screwed up any rational, scientific definitions when it comes to our own solar system. Expect a rule about how planets in the 'northern' part of the galaxy must have an eccentricity of less than 5.2%, and planets in the direction of Virgo are allowed 7.1%, but only if they move in square orbits on alternate St. Swithen'sdays.
Really good encryption is very similar to random noise. Civilizations could go silent by using wire or laser communications to avoid wasting power, ala. your comment, or by using highly efficient encodings, or probably by a dozen various other ways that are likely to get invented within a few hundred years of radio, without it having anything to do with extinction. It's intregueing that we can think of several things besides technological civilizations being inherently short lived that could explain a lack of radio type alien signals, but extinction hypothesi are still very popular with a great many people.
If we make contact with something that needs 4 Gs +, and an atmosphere predominantly of methane, at 143 Kelvin, we have the advantage of knowing we won't covet each other's preferred real estate. A basic treaty, where they tell us where the light, Oxygen covered worlds are, and we tell them where the cold heavy ones are, and we start off with a common benefit to help smooth the path for other negotiations.
There was a point last year when the total number of DHS warrented searches (you know, the ones where an actual judge goes through all those silly processes from the constitution), had been aimed at 6 actual suspected terrorists and over 5,000 suspected drug dealers since the program started. Homeland security was never about actually stopping terrorists, it's always been about how all the money we spend openly on the war against drugs isn't producing results, so lets covertly spend even more and see if that helps. Why do you think there's all those efforts to track money flow in the program, all the requirements to show current ID to take out a loan and such? . it's hard to actually catch terrorists by tracking any spending except possibly that aimed at actual bomb components, chemicals, and maybe biological support. No one is going to figure out a plot from tracking a terrorist renting a car or opening a regular checking account. But drug dealers need to do a LOT of money laundering. .
Actually, being on the receiving end of violence tends to reduce a person's resources, so a natural consequence is that it's often third parties who become involved in dealing with it. Traumatised survivors don't rely just on themselves to form lobbying groups, armies don't send just their previously wounded veterans to the front lines, and the very idea of getting a policeman to arrest your mugger is a third person involvement.
"Except in cases of disturbed individuals" isn't much of a limitation really. there are a lot of people out there who count as disturbed (or worse). Yeah, that doesn't justify banning any form of speech, any more than it justifies internal security checkpoints at state borders, or a lot of other steps, but if video games had that high a correlation with what disturbed individuals do, then that would justify pretty stringent steps. If you take what you said literally, 1% of video game uses that trigger temporary aggression result in actual physical violence among previously undisturbed individuals, and presumably the effect on the already disturbed would be higher, probably by an order of magnitude or more - if the numbers really ran like that, most of us would be survivors, (probably recently berieved survivors) of video induced psychotic assaults, and doubtless would support a total ban. It's because those disturbed individuals show plenty of other factors that we think contribute to their violence and plenty of the worst examples didn't have a lot of game related history one way or another, that reasonable people don't think it's worth censorship.
How is it stealing? For the US, the law says copyright is enforced at the federal level only - if violation is stealing, then the states are being prevented from prosecuting thefts that happen within their borders. Theft doesn't end with aging of the stolen goods. There's no interpretation of theft laws that says it's OK to steal antiques because the protection expires after X number of years, for example. If CV is theft, then copyright can never expire. That would take a constitutional amendment to make it possible. Theft has limits on civil suits for punitive damages based on the actual value of goods. Statutory damages for some kinds of theft, but limited actual damages for stealing other things of the same price? That sounds like a major violation of equal justice under law. doesn't it? I'm not saying that there aren't some such legal anomalies in theft law now, i.e. grand theft auto laws,, but we should be careful of legal interpretations that would create more of them. After all, past anomalies included the various death penalty for horse theft statutes Copyright violations are not always criminal, even now. What the hell is non criminal theft? Copyright law is all in one federal title, and ALL criminal law was originally kept carefully in a different Title. That sure sounds like such luminaries as Jefferson, Madison, John Hay and others didn't think the constitution should establish any link at all between copyright violation and theft, and went out of their way to make sure the original US federal code didn't draw such a link.
I stress, ALL the founding fathers, ALL the early supreme court justices, ALL both houses of congress for literally the first 200 years of US history as a separate nation thought this was the right way to treat it. This wasn't some area where many prominent legalists disagreed seriously and the law gradually became so cluttered with compromises that it eventually shifted, but, like the court decision recognising corporate personhood, making any forms of copyright violation criminal at all was the sudden, major break with just about everything prior to that point. In fact, there was much less precedent for the shift than for such major changes as the overturning of the Dred Scott decision or the adoption of Miranda rights, where several precedents that broke with tradition did actually exist to be reinterpreted, and there was strong support by some faction for such reinterpretation.
Bullshit. 1. Multi-vehicle accidents have an increased risk of fatalities, if only due to combined velocities being greater in so many cases. Do you really want to claim that all the persons in a multi-vehicle accident are at fault? 2. One of the jerkiest things a driver can do is buy an SUV and not be able to handle such a big vehicle properly.That's just one of many examples of a jerk passing the consequences along to an innocent victim.
In the past, I've posted to Slashdot half a dozen times with points that criticise some interpretation of the standard Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. Every single time, someone has challenged me over the part of what I posted that is in exact agreement with the standard theory, as taught at such institutions as MIT or Cornell.
I haven't been challenged over my unorthodox conclusions, but over the premises that no respectable evolutionary biologist or organic chemist would disagree with. I've been challenged over exact quotes from Gould, Dawkins or Simon Conway Morris, as though those people were fringe science types with cow college degrees in creation science. I've been told I'm a nut-case creationist for just those points where I am quoting the best standard college texts, every single time, without fail, by someone who thinks they know Evolution from the bits they remember from high school.
I figure if there is even a one in a million chance I'm right about any of it and not just a crank, then I will never be heard above such a high noise level, so I've shut up about it, but really, how bad is the situation when people here, on a journal for at least slightly technically educated types, are telling me I'm some kind of creation science idiot because I don't believe acquired traits can be inherited? I've been slammed for claiming that evolution proceeds by gradual, incremental changes, and that huge mutations are almost always lethal to the possessor. I've been criticised for presenting a careful timeline of the estimated age of the universe, the earth, and DNA based life (that would be 12.4 billion years, 4.5 billion, and 1.8 billion years respectively, with the last figure having the largest margin of error), by people who think evolution proves the earth is infinitely old, and call me a 6,000 year nut for not believing it.
I've cited evidence for Neanderthal burial practices that seem to indicate they believed in a life after death (without taking any position on whether they had any actual reasons to do so, one way or another), and been told the Egyptians invented that concept and the evidence is fraudulent, or simply can't be right (and someone added "anyway, what do sub-humans have to do with the true, white human race.?") All this, coming from people who claim to be defending the standard theory, not from those who disagree.
At this point, I cannot believe that, if the majority of public high schools are teaching evolution properly, there would be so much misinformation among a at least semi-smart crowd that is at least slightly selected to be more educated than the standard "Batboy is Elvis' secret Love Child" types. Slashdot readers are not that damned stupid about everything, ergo Evolution has been taught more poorly than most subjects in the schools.
It's a basic flaw in the criminal mind. The ones who view their position as lawyers or politicians as a liscence to abuse somebody always seem to think the system they are also abusing will protect them forever. They assume everyone with power plays as dirty as they do, and the people they target can't do anything because they don't have the same level of access to that particular source of power. They don't seem to notice that their are any other sorts of power out there until the mob with pitchforks leads them to the guillotine.
The biggest single flaw in the American political process is there are a lot of people who are honest or at least semi-honest, who have power, but don't realise just how close they are to a major eruption from the body politic because they have been ignorant of, or willing to ignore, the actions of the most corrupt among them. If America descends to actual mass attacks on the system, such as those we are seeing in Mexico , it will be because the flat out crooks, normally no more than 5% or so of the total, climbed to 10 or 15% before it was trimmed back, and probably 50% or more of the payback incidents will be badly targeted. It will be impossible in many cases to tell when some judge or politician is being shot by a person who was genuinely screwed over by the legal system and when it's just some nut dissatisfied that his wife won the divorce case.
The inflationary theory says that space expanded faster than c in the first fractions of a second after the big bang. It's important to note it doesn't say space is still expanding faster than c now.
What observable effect could possibly call an infinite number of parallel universes a side effect. Isn't that a bit like saying "New Zargotz, with a 0.0001 % chance of relieving your headache. Side effects include a 100% chance of spontaneous combustion of your entire species!" ? The very use of a phrase such as "side effect " there is begging the question.
God is a single unverifiable prediction. God plus seven different types of angels, or a hundred thousand Hindu style deities, are finite sets of predictions, which however can't be counted as science as they are unverifiable. Multiverse theories differ in that they make infinite numbers of untestable predictions, not just finite numbers. Occam says that the simpler of two theories, all other factors being equal, is always to be preferred. A prediction of an omnipotent God, seven orders of angels doing his bidding, and a single location of warped space where 144,000 can be a geometrically square number without non integer roots, is still simpler than an infinite number of non-observables, The whackyest sounding cosmology of the Hopi, Tantric Vrajayana Buddhism, Scientology, or even the Kaballa is actually more scientific, in that it better complies with Occam's razor even if it predicts many unobserveables., just because many, even a great many, is still better than infinitely many.
Plus, it's not like the people living on less than 2$ a day don't have much way to get video of any 'over-reactions' in riot control out of the country, or widely spread within it, but the minority who has more technology available does -- No wait, it is exactly like that. Oh, well, It's not like just one guy with a cell phone can play back one of those videos to a whole group, maybe multiple times -- No wait, it's exactly like that too.
I'm not sure you have it all right, but let's say you do. Then it follows, the way you've said it, that the President can do certain things only if he is also willing to declare martial law. That sounds like scope would be limited to the area under martial law itself. To illustrate, if a hurricane hits New Orleans, the President could declare martial law, and hit the kill switch for the New Orleans area (if that's physically possible). That wouldn't give him the authority to kill communications nationwide, outside the area of martial law itself. The public would probably react pretty strongly to the absurdity of declaring martial law nationwide for a natural disaster in one part of the nation, but might not react as strongly to a communications blackout, particularly an intermittent one or just using the threat of one to censor news coming out of the affected area. Again as you posit, there are some circumstances where the government could probably get away with major communications blackouts, like a major terrorist attack, but there are other cases where it would be harder. Offhand, that's not just natural disasters either - what happens when the government claims they have dealt effectively with the terrorist attack, but doesn't want to restore communications just yet? Do they have to maintain a state of martial law somewhere for as long as they want to block the net? Can they use it circularly, claiming that martial law is justified because there is a threat to the communications nets themselves, and then that martial law allows them to shut down the communications nets?
All technically true, but the zones are only kept out of the media by the willing complicity of the media. The press chooses not to show the protests, not to dig enough to find them, then gives the government what they want, effectively becomes just another arm of the government, and we don't challenge the press on their role any more than we challenge the (rest of) the government. .
What's hard to explain is why the press is willing to play useful idiot. They don't have the defenses the law enforcement or military elements have. If violent revolutionary movements get going, a lot of the press will be a detested and extremely vulnerable target, probably the single most vulnerable single target of all. Vilified by the far left as establishment toadies and by the far right as the "hyper-liberal" media, Why do people at CNN or MSNBC go along so readily when they know that any far right candidate elected has made it plain they won't have any reporter's backs except for possibly Fox news? Why do the people reporting actual news for Fox not worry about being so closely associated with the most extreme commentators on the same network - If Glen Beck has advertisers pulling out right and left, wouldn't you think there's a chance somebody who really doesn't like Glen Beck just might win an election and become the guy who would gladly throw you to the wolves if the shit hits the fan? Nobody on any side of the political spectrum can afford to not give a damn about just which enemies they make, and most politicians and businesses seem to proceed with some idea of the consequences of failure, but reporters play that game as though they haven't noticed those ominous fins breaking the water when they go to the deep end of the pool.
I see there's escalating levels of access, but it doesn't sound like those levels are tied to law. They probably should be, i.e. it's not so much file size as whether the file is about an adult person or a minor, whether the file contains medical information or not, and such things that should be the first consideration in defining those privileges. A single dental photo sounds like a small image under your definition, but its treatment depends on HIPAA first and foremost, never size or image format.
Author didn't say people routinely leave in anger, just that it happens. I've worked with a non profit charitable in the past, that had to make a decision whether to fund an alternative to planned parenthood, called choices. From what we saw, choices wasn't offering a lot of choice. They wanted to provide more of an alternative to abortions, and show women how adoptions could be a possible solution, and I really can't fault them for that, but they didn't want to provide information on preconception birth control, only abstinence, and in actual practice, they were tending to also push this message that not getting a ring from the male involved first made it all the woman's fault. Surely you can see how issues such as those can lead to angry resignations and workers who feel there's no compromise with management possible, and who might even break privacy laws as a result. Not all the risk is juvenile attitudes and L33Tspeak hacker volunteers who might get into petty arguments and storm out, much of it if is from people who sincerely think the issues are critical and worth bending a few rules over, and that the people who don't agree are all somehow stupid or hypocritical or venial, justified targets for anger.
Yes, at least some people are taking that potential cost into account. However,, I don't think the industry has that strategy driving their actions. The RIAA and MPAA tend to publicly stress that piracy is totally free (financially), and that's why they have such a hard time competing. One argument they make in international trade discussions and for justifying tougher international copyright enforcement is that lowering prices can't work, because there is no effective price point vrs. absolutely free.
Realistically, piracy isn't financially absolutely free. People pirating typically pay at least a little every month for something, for blank CDs, portable hard drives, dedicated Usenet servers, higher speed connections, more ram or other hardware upgrades, and several other sorts of costs. Piracy takes time, and time counts as a cost. Overall, illegally downloading probably looks cheaper for the total gains, rather than free. A given downloader may be assessing the costs of not having a professionally produced DVD and slipcase, or of upgrading a PC sooner, or of finding music playing and conversion software to handle an odd format, but that downloader probably is thinking in terms of some costs, and the industry doesn't seem to recognise that, The downloader may also be thinking in terms of benefits the industry doesn't recognise, such as being able to convert to formats that work in different devices without DRM blocking that.
Both the sequels had strong, thought provoking themes, they just dealt with the parts of philosophy that make everyone today edgy. Epistemology (how do we know what we think we know is real?) Is fun but it doesn't actually provoke fistfights most of the time. If someone starts discussing how we know that what you see as green isn't what I see as blue, we'd probably both roll our eyes and make a joke about laying off the whacky tobaccy - we may pitty the person who is unsure what is real, we may worry about his sanity, but we don't (most of us) feel threatened by his statements. Universality of Ethics (Neo isn't driven by Kantian imperatives to do what is 'universally' best, but by his specific emotive commitment to just one person (Trinity, of course), to do what's best for her.), and Free will vs. Predestination (particularly the Merovingian's take on it), both still give some people fits of blinding rage when they actually get invoked in conversations (for example, some people fight quite seriously over claims that a person was made to do something bad by society, to many people that's not just philosophy, it's politics), and I won't even mention what some people in the past have done over Philosophy of Religion issues. Matrix 2 and 3 went into areas of philosophy that more people get uncomfortable with. They didn't necessarily do it well, but they did it.
It's not even that the first one did a good job on the philosophy. Any speech about epistemology that uses such a distractingly, jarringly wrong metaphor for anyone who knows physics as Morpheus's coppertop soliloquy is certainly no better than the Merovingian's bits, and while the Architect's actions are not a really subtle, nuanced, mature commentary on how an all knowing being can allow evil either (unless you're a Gnostic and think he's representing the Demiurge, not the real God, then just maybe there's some little depth), at least there's some meaningful understatement from the actor there.
1. I always see it as a Christmas present with a really tight bow around the middle, so meh. 2. Algol is fairly bright, and very noticeably red, so we have a spare, plus the ones you point out. 3. The Hitchiker's guide is a classic, ergo there will soon be an annotated edition if there isn't one already. We can put in a footnote about Betelgeuse.
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You don't know. Maybe the reason was a tip from somebody who might have had a grudge. Maybe the reason was something the suspect said at a political meeting. maybe somebody misspelled a name on a form. There are lots of possible reasons, some good, some bad, and some borderline cases that might call for closer oversight of Homeland Security, and the real questions here all depend on those reasons.
You mentioned his travel. If he travelled frequently, always to locations that are considered hotbeds of terrorism, at times that were suspiciously coincidental with some known terrorists, also visiting those locations, that's a pretty good indicator to probe further. If his travel isn't that clear cut an indicator, then maybe what needs to happen here is the FBI needs to refine their process to avoid spending a lot of money and time following up on bad intelligence. But, you don't know that one way or another.
The 'legal world', in this case, would be a declaration of war. You can't commit treason in time of war if there's no war, just some sort of nebulous police action. That is, you can't if the constitution, that pesky piece of paper, is followed. If the US now ignores the requirement for a specific enemy to try someone for Treason as a death penalty offense, that's just the sort of thing that has so many here arguing the gap between moral and legal.
The dates, i.e. 1924, 1930, and similar, are an important part of this problem. The other date that makes them important is 1929. When the great depression hit, a lot of judges divided up assets of failing companies among creditors and included trademarks and copyrights in those assets. You have a huge spike in bankruptcy cases, where they were overwhelming the courts, and where the IP was generally thought to be trivial, near worthless, and the courts were mostly focused on the physivcal property such as buildings, presses and even paper stock, treating the IP as an afterthought. Tremendous copyright extensions mean all those cases are part of sorting through who owns what today.
Take the Lovecraft estate. H P Lovecraft was generally out of the habit of selling all rights to a story to a magazine by 1926. He wrote in the amateur author's magazines about the advantages of selling just first rights in case there was an actual chance at further publication, and seems to have been very serious about it. His single, most famous work, The Call of Cthulhu, was published in 1926, presumably as a first rights sale if he kept to what he announced he would do. But, if you look at the Lovecraft copyright trail, there are a huge number of his most major works where, in the early 30's, as HPL lay dying of bright's disease, some small press or other claimed his works, gave them away as part of a bankruptcy case, and often awarded them to some other company that seems to have existed only for a few days as one court settlement after another cascaded through the overburdened system.
The system didn't promoter progress in the sciences and useful arts, it ripped off a great artist as he lay dieing in agony. The current versions of the laws preserve the right of litigants to dredge up some of the most spurious and fraudulent precedents ever entered into American law..All the court cases subsequent to that are tainted (fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine). I doubt either Brown University or the Estate of August Derleth could be said to have less than the highest respect for Lovecraft himself, but their court cases were based on a legal tangle that made them very hard to settle fairly and serve as a model of nobody being really satisfied once finally over. How many other authors are less known today, not for any flaw on their part but because the depression court battles wiped out any chance of their being published again?
It's a chilling effect. If you choose not to accept an article, you haven't created a chilling effect, but if you call all the other editors you know and say "This guy's so bad, I wouldn't waste time reading this manuscript, or anything else he ever sends you.", that's different. If you don't like how the author is disrespectful of your favorite politician, but claim without any evidence he's obviously a communist stooge, again, that's a chilling effect. Legally, chilling effects on financial transactions count as a form of harm, meaning if someone sues you for libel or slander, they have standing. (They won't necessarily win a case, of course, but they've proved there are damages worth suing over merely by establishing such an effect exists, and no longer have to show specific damages for a lawsuit to proceed).
Until an entity such as the Tolkien estate is reluctant to take such steps without much more cause than they have here, if only because the risk of a creating a successful countersuit is real if they make a few such legal missteps, the law is broken.
The definition that makes Pluto a dwarf planet specifically apples only to our solar system, and the part that calls for clearing the orbit was inserted in case a Kuiper belt object actually bigger than Mercury was found later, so the IAU would not have to debate the subject again, not as a straight-forward rule based on any physical fact. Incidentally, the belt is named after Kuiper because he was a. the third major working astronomer to propose such as zone, and b. the first to be fundamentally wrong about its nature, as he claimed such a belt could not still exist.
All the debate about how to define a an extra-solar planet will be driven by the very people who have totally screwed up any rational, scientific definitions when it comes to our own solar system. Expect a rule about how planets in the 'northern' part of the galaxy must have an eccentricity of less than 5.2%, and planets in the direction of Virgo are allowed 7.1%, but only if they move in square orbits on alternate St. Swithen'sdays.
Really good encryption is very similar to random noise. Civilizations could go silent by using wire or laser communications to avoid wasting power, ala. your comment, or by using highly efficient encodings, or probably by a dozen various other ways that are likely to get invented within a few hundred years of radio, without it having anything to do with extinction. It's intregueing that we can think of several things besides technological civilizations being inherently short lived that could explain a lack of radio type alien signals, but extinction hypothesi are still very popular with a great many people.
If we make contact with something that needs 4 Gs +, and an atmosphere predominantly of methane, at 143 Kelvin, we have the advantage of knowing we won't covet each other's preferred real estate. A basic treaty, where they tell us where the light, Oxygen covered worlds are, and we tell them where the cold heavy ones are, and we start off with a common benefit to help smooth the path for other negotiations.
There was a point last year when the total number of DHS warrented searches (you know, the ones where an actual judge goes through all those silly processes from the constitution), had been aimed at 6 actual suspected terrorists and over 5,000 suspected drug dealers since the program started. Homeland security was never about actually stopping terrorists, it's always been about how all the money we spend openly on the war against drugs isn't producing results, so lets covertly spend even more and see if that helps. Why do you think there's all those efforts to track money flow in the program, all the requirements to show current ID to take out a loan and such? . it's hard to actually catch terrorists by tracking any spending except possibly that aimed at actual bomb components, chemicals, and maybe biological support. No one is going to figure out a plot from tracking a terrorist renting a car or opening a regular checking account. But drug dealers need to do a LOT of money laundering. .
Actually, being on the receiving end of violence tends to reduce a person's resources, so a natural consequence is that it's often third parties who become involved in dealing with it. Traumatised survivors don't rely just on themselves to form lobbying groups, armies don't send just their previously wounded veterans to the front lines, and the very idea of getting a policeman to arrest your mugger is a third person involvement.
"Except in cases of disturbed individuals" isn't much of a limitation really. there are a lot of people out there who count as disturbed (or worse). Yeah, that doesn't justify banning any form of speech, any more than it justifies internal security checkpoints at state borders, or a lot of other steps, but if video games had that high a correlation with what disturbed individuals do, then that would justify pretty stringent steps. If you take what you said literally, 1% of video game uses that trigger temporary aggression result in actual physical violence among previously undisturbed individuals, and presumably the effect on the already disturbed would be higher, probably by an order of magnitude or more - if the numbers really ran like that, most of us would be survivors, (probably recently berieved survivors) of video induced psychotic assaults, and doubtless would support a total ban. It's because those disturbed individuals show plenty of other factors that we think contribute to their violence and plenty of the worst examples didn't have a lot of game related history one way or another, that reasonable people don't think it's worth censorship.
How is it stealing?
For the US, the law says copyright is enforced at the federal level only - if violation is stealing, then the states are being prevented from prosecuting thefts that happen within their borders.
Theft doesn't end with aging of the stolen goods. There's no interpretation of theft laws that says it's OK to steal antiques because the protection expires after X number of years, for example. If CV is theft, then copyright can never expire. That would take a constitutional amendment to make it possible.
Theft has limits on civil suits for punitive damages based on the actual value of goods. Statutory damages for some kinds of theft, but limited actual damages for stealing other things of the same price? That sounds like a major violation of equal justice under law. doesn't it? I'm not saying that there aren't some such legal anomalies in theft law now, i.e. grand theft auto laws,, but we should be careful of legal interpretations that would create more of them. After all, past anomalies included the various death penalty for horse theft statutes
Copyright violations are not always criminal, even now. What the hell is non criminal theft?
Copyright law is all in one federal title, and ALL criminal law was originally kept carefully in a different Title. That sure sounds like such luminaries as Jefferson, Madison, John Hay and others didn't think the constitution should establish any link at all between copyright violation and theft, and went out of their way to make sure the original US federal code didn't draw such a link.
I stress, ALL the founding fathers, ALL the early supreme court justices, ALL both houses of congress for literally the first 200 years of US history as a separate nation thought this was the right way to treat it. This wasn't some area where many prominent legalists disagreed seriously and the law gradually became so cluttered with compromises that it eventually shifted, but, like the court decision recognising corporate personhood, making any forms of copyright violation criminal at all was the sudden, major break with just about everything prior to that point. In fact, there was much less precedent for the shift than for such major changes as the overturning of the Dred Scott decision or the adoption of Miranda rights, where several precedents that broke with tradition did actually exist to be reinterpreted, and there was strong support by some faction for such reinterpretation.
Bullshit.
1. Multi-vehicle accidents have an increased risk of fatalities, if only due to combined velocities being greater in so many cases. Do you really want to claim that all the persons in a multi-vehicle accident are at fault?
2. One of the jerkiest things a driver can do is buy an SUV and not be able to handle such a big vehicle properly.That's just one of many examples of a jerk passing the consequences along to an innocent victim.
In the past, I've posted to Slashdot half a dozen times with points that criticise some interpretation of the standard Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. Every single time, someone has challenged me over the part of what I posted that is in exact agreement with the standard theory, as taught at such institutions as MIT or Cornell.
I haven't been challenged over my unorthodox conclusions, but over the premises that no respectable evolutionary biologist or organic chemist would disagree with. I've been challenged over exact quotes from Gould, Dawkins or Simon Conway Morris, as though those people were fringe science types with cow college degrees in creation science. I've been told I'm a nut-case creationist for just those points where I am quoting the best standard college texts, every single time, without fail, by someone who thinks they know Evolution from the bits they remember from high school.
I figure if there is even a one in a million chance I'm right about any of it and not just a crank, then I will never be heard above such a high noise level, so I've shut up about it, but really, how bad is the situation when people here, on a journal for at least slightly technically educated types, are telling me I'm some kind of creation science idiot because I don't believe acquired traits can be inherited? I've been slammed for claiming that evolution proceeds by gradual, incremental changes, and that huge mutations are almost always lethal to the possessor. I've been criticised for presenting a careful timeline of the estimated age of the universe, the earth, and DNA based life (that would be 12.4 billion years, 4.5 billion, and 1.8 billion years respectively, with the last figure having the largest margin of error), by people who think evolution proves the earth is infinitely old, and call me a 6,000 year nut for not believing it.
I've cited evidence for Neanderthal burial practices that seem to indicate they believed in a life after death (without taking any position on whether they had any actual reasons to do so, one way or another), and been told the Egyptians invented that concept and the evidence is fraudulent, or simply can't be right (and someone added "anyway, what do sub-humans have to do with the true, white human race.?") All this, coming from people who claim to be defending the standard theory, not from those who disagree.
At this point, I cannot believe that, if the majority of public high schools are teaching evolution properly, there would be so much misinformation among a at least semi-smart crowd that is at least slightly selected to be more educated than the standard "Batboy is Elvis' secret Love Child" types. Slashdot readers are not that damned stupid about everything, ergo Evolution has been taught more poorly than most subjects in the schools.
It's a basic flaw in the criminal mind. The ones who view their position as lawyers or politicians as a liscence to abuse somebody always seem to think the system they are also abusing will protect them forever. They assume everyone with power plays as dirty as they do, and the people they target can't do anything because they don't have the same level of access to that particular source of power. They don't seem to notice that their are any other sorts of power out there until the mob with pitchforks leads them to the guillotine.
The biggest single flaw in the American political process is there are a lot of people who are honest or at least semi-honest, who have power, but don't realise just how close they are to a major eruption from the body politic because they have been ignorant of, or willing to ignore, the actions of the most corrupt among them. If America descends to actual mass attacks on the system, such as those we are seeing in Mexico , it will be because the flat out crooks, normally no more than 5% or so of the total, climbed to 10 or 15% before it was trimmed back, and probably 50% or more of the payback incidents will be badly targeted. It will be impossible in many cases to tell when some judge or politician is being shot by a person who was genuinely screwed over by the legal system and when it's just some nut dissatisfied that his wife won the divorce case.
The inflationary theory says that space expanded faster than c in the first fractions of a second after the big bang. It's important to note it doesn't say space is still expanding faster than c now.
What observable effect could possibly call an infinite number of parallel universes a side effect. Isn't that a bit like saying "New Zargotz, with a 0.0001 % chance of relieving your headache. Side effects include a 100% chance of spontaneous combustion of your entire species!" ? The very use of a phrase such as "side effect " there is begging the question.
God is a single unverifiable prediction. God plus seven different types of angels, or a hundred thousand Hindu style deities, are finite sets of predictions, which however can't be counted as science as they are unverifiable. Multiverse theories differ in that they make infinite numbers of untestable predictions, not just finite numbers. Occam says that the simpler of two theories, all other factors being equal, is always to be preferred. A prediction of an omnipotent God, seven orders of angels doing his bidding, and a single location of warped space where 144,000 can be a geometrically square number without non integer roots, is still simpler than an infinite number of non-observables, The whackyest sounding cosmology of the Hopi, Tantric Vrajayana Buddhism, Scientology, or even the Kaballa is actually more scientific, in that it better complies with Occam's razor even if it predicts many unobserveables., just because many, even a great many, is still better than infinitely many.
Plus, it's not like the people living on less than 2$ a day don't have much way to get video of any 'over-reactions' in riot control out of the country, or widely spread within it, but the minority who has more technology available does -- No wait, it is exactly like that. Oh, well, It's not like just one guy with a cell phone can play back one of those videos to a whole group, maybe multiple times -- No wait, it's exactly like that too.
I'm not sure you have it all right, but let's say you do. Then it follows, the way you've said it, that the President can do certain things only if he is also willing to declare martial law. That sounds like scope would be limited to the area under martial law itself.
To illustrate, if a hurricane hits New Orleans, the President could declare martial law, and hit the kill switch for the New Orleans area (if that's physically possible). That wouldn't give him the authority to kill communications nationwide, outside the area of martial law itself. The public would probably react pretty strongly to the absurdity of declaring martial law nationwide for a natural disaster in one part of the nation, but might not react as strongly to a communications blackout, particularly an intermittent one or just using the threat of one to censor news coming out of the affected area.
Again as you posit, there are some circumstances where the government could probably get away with major communications blackouts, like a major terrorist attack, but there are other cases where it would be harder. Offhand, that's not just natural disasters either - what happens when the government claims they have dealt effectively with the terrorist attack, but doesn't want to restore communications just yet? Do they have to maintain a state of martial law somewhere for as long as they want to block the net? Can they use it circularly, claiming that martial law is justified because there is a threat to the communications nets themselves, and then that martial law allows them to shut down the communications nets?
All technically true, but the zones are only kept out of the media by the willing complicity of the media. The press chooses not to show the protests, not to dig enough to find them, then gives the government what they want, effectively becomes just another arm of the government, and we don't challenge the press on their role any more than we challenge the (rest of) the government. .
What's hard to explain is why the press is willing to play useful idiot. They don't have the defenses the law enforcement or military elements have. If violent revolutionary movements get going, a lot of the press will be a detested and extremely vulnerable target, probably the single most vulnerable single target of all. Vilified by the far left as establishment toadies and by the far right as the "hyper-liberal" media, Why do people at CNN or MSNBC go along so readily when they know that any far right candidate elected has made it plain they won't have any reporter's backs except for possibly Fox news? Why do the people reporting actual news for Fox not worry about being so closely associated with the most extreme commentators on the same network - If Glen Beck has advertisers pulling out right and left, wouldn't you think there's a chance somebody who really doesn't like Glen Beck just might win an election and become the guy who would gladly throw you to the wolves if the shit hits the fan? Nobody on any side of the political spectrum can afford to not give a damn about just which enemies they make, and most politicians and businesses seem to proceed with some idea of the consequences of failure, but reporters play that game as though they haven't noticed those ominous fins breaking the water when they go to the deep end of the pool.
I see there's escalating levels of access, but it doesn't sound like those levels are tied to law. They probably should be, i.e. it's not so much file size as whether the file is about an adult person or a minor, whether the file contains medical information or not, and such things that should be the first consideration in defining those privileges. A single dental photo sounds like a small image under your definition, but its treatment depends on HIPAA first and foremost, never size or image format.
Author didn't say people routinely leave in anger, just that it happens. I've worked with a non profit charitable in the past, that had to make a decision whether to fund an alternative to planned parenthood, called choices. From what we saw, choices wasn't offering a lot of choice. They wanted to provide more of an alternative to abortions, and show women how adoptions could be a possible solution, and I really can't fault them for that, but they didn't want to provide information on preconception birth control, only abstinence, and in actual practice, they were tending to also push this message that not getting a ring from the male involved first made it all the woman's fault. Surely you can see how issues such as those can lead to angry resignations and workers who feel there's no compromise with management possible, and who might even break privacy laws as a result. Not all the risk is juvenile attitudes and L33Tspeak hacker volunteers who might get into petty arguments and storm out, much of it if is from people who sincerely think the issues are critical and worth bending a few rules over, and that the people who don't agree are all somehow stupid or hypocritical or venial, justified targets for anger.
Yes, at least some people are taking that potential cost into account. However,, I don't think the industry has that strategy driving their actions. The RIAA and MPAA tend to publicly stress that piracy is totally free (financially), and that's why they have such a hard time competing. One argument they make in international trade discussions and for justifying tougher international copyright enforcement is that lowering prices can't work, because there is no effective price point vrs. absolutely free.
Realistically, piracy isn't financially absolutely free. People pirating typically pay at least a little every month for something, for blank CDs, portable hard drives, dedicated Usenet servers, higher speed connections, more ram or other hardware upgrades, and several other sorts of costs. Piracy takes time, and time counts as a cost. Overall, illegally downloading probably looks cheaper for the total gains, rather than free. A given downloader may be assessing the costs of not having a professionally produced DVD and slipcase, or of upgrading a PC sooner, or of finding music playing and conversion software to handle an odd format, but that downloader probably is thinking in terms of some costs, and the industry doesn't seem to recognise that, The downloader may also be thinking in terms of benefits the industry doesn't recognise, such as being able to convert to formats that work in different devices without DRM blocking that.
Both the sequels had strong, thought provoking themes, they just dealt with the parts of philosophy that make everyone today edgy. Epistemology (how do we know what we think we know is real?) Is fun but it doesn't actually provoke fistfights most of the time. If someone starts discussing how we know that what you see as green isn't what I see as blue, we'd probably both roll our eyes and make a joke about laying off the whacky tobaccy - we may pitty the person who is unsure what is real, we may worry about his sanity, but we don't (most of us) feel threatened by his statements. Universality of Ethics (Neo isn't driven by Kantian imperatives to do what is 'universally' best, but by his specific emotive commitment to just one person (Trinity, of course), to do what's best for her.), and Free will vs. Predestination (particularly the Merovingian's take on it), both still give some people fits of blinding rage when they actually get invoked in conversations (for example, some people fight quite seriously over claims that a person was made to do something bad by society, to many people that's not just philosophy, it's politics), and I won't even mention what some people in the past have done over Philosophy of Religion issues. Matrix 2 and 3 went into areas of philosophy that more people get uncomfortable with. They didn't necessarily do it well, but they did it.
It's not even that the first one did a good job on the philosophy. Any speech about epistemology that uses such a distractingly, jarringly wrong metaphor for anyone who knows physics as Morpheus's coppertop soliloquy is certainly no better than the Merovingian's bits, and while the Architect's actions are not a really subtle, nuanced, mature commentary on how an all knowing being can allow evil either (unless you're a Gnostic and think he's representing the Demiurge, not the real God, then just maybe there's some little depth), at least there's some meaningful understatement from the actor there.
1. I always see it as a Christmas present with a really tight bow around the middle, so meh.
2. Algol is fairly bright, and very noticeably red, so we have a spare, plus the ones you point out.
3. The Hitchiker's guide is a classic, ergo there will soon be an annotated edition if there isn't one already. We can put in a footnote about Betelgeuse.