Some people fixate more strongly than others from their first sexual experiences. (This includes solo experiences, i.e. masturbation, not just their first experiences with others). So, somebody becomes aroused at 13 by the cleavage of a cute redhead who is developmentally ahead of them in Social studies class, and if they are a strong fixator, they may have a thing for busty readheads all their lives. Extreme fixators may get obsessive in lots of ways that damage relationships, for example pushing their partner to get breast augmentation surgery even though the partner doesn't want to. While the examples I've just mentioned are for hetero men, there's also common examples for all sorts of orientations, for example, the women who have Florence Nightingale Syndrome or a thing for 'bad boys'. People can become more devoted to there fixations during periods of stress, and sometimes fixations can transfer - for example a person could become fixated on prostitutes by their early sexual experiences, and gradually, this could transfer to a real fetish for related clothing. You have people who have such a thing for fishnets or high heels that they don't really see the person wearing them anymore.
Now what happens if the person fixates on the apparent age of the stimulus? There are people fixated on underage types, but surprisingly, there are equally people who have problems despite the partner being of perfectly legal age. Picture a strong fixater, who has some good sexual experiences with a woman of about his own age, at about age 22, and sooner or later marries her. As she ages along with him, he finds sex increasingly disappointing, and by the time he's about 30, he dumps her for a younger woman. When he's 45, he's on his fourth marriage, each time to a woman in her early 20's.
Extreme paedophilia may involve experiences at very young ages, which makes it difficult for the individual to remember the early triggers. It also involves the human weakness for wanting to be the one with all the power in a relationship, and means that some people might eventually become paedophiles by starting with a dominating position in relationships and trying to find relationships that exaggerate that dominance.(Power and dominance issues and government workers that seem clueless to consequences - could their be a pattern there?)
There definitely is a natural human trait to protect the young, but it takes some training to develop it, and it can be warped or, in exceptional cases, absent. Many paedophiles have a long set of internal justifications for how their behavior supposedly doesn't actually harm their victims. Real treatment to cure paedophiles is, in part, helping them see why these are rationalizations. It may also involve helping them develop skills that give them better options, either helping them fixate less, or to still fixate but on a more appropriate subject.
As you point out for the government types, there's a certain stupidity here. You mentioned lack of understanding of consequences and technology - I'd say there's also a lack of understanding of internal motivations and interpersonal dynamics. That suggests therapy for such people can be hard - dumber than average plus multiple issues that need worked on adds up to challenging. It also costs a bit to do it well enough to see real progress, and if any of these people have actually victimized children, the victims themselves could probably use some help too, and should come first in society's priorities.
I agree that the whole story sounds very fishy, but some parts could make sense. In a government or corporate mono-culture environment, there are cases where everybody in a particular group has exactly the same sized hard drive. There are also cases where the executable software that should be on the machine is a pretty well known list, and the size of the individual files shouldn't vary much, so how much unused drive space should be there is a pretty reliable value. And you get cases where a large deviation from that value is supposed to be suspicious of something - i.e. it's office policy at a law firm or medical office only currently active caseload records should be stored on the machine, and IT guys are expected to remind users to delete unnecessary records.
For a more specific example, I was once in a military unit where technical support manuals and diagnostics were stored on what were basically ruggedised olive drab PCs for field maintenence use. Hardware was almost always identical for several dozen users stationed with many different military unit types. Software/Data was supposed to match the whole units TOE (Table of Organization and Equipment). So, the amount of space used and left on the drive always varied in certain ways by type of unit. If someone brought in a machine that was supporting a military police unit (which had a pretty simple list of vehicles and weapons), and the drive space used or free looked out of range, the first thing techs were supposed to do was look for obvious reasons, i.e. someone loaned the equipment to a very different military outfit, or stuffed it full of higher level maintenance manuals (and was trying to do depot level or send it back to the manufacturer level maintenance in the field). It wasn't paranoia about everyone being up to something actively criminal that would trigger more detailed exams, so much as institutional reasons, initially. Of course, if the situation kept looking stranger and stranger with digging, someone might eventually suspect not just personal use of the machine, but criminal activity.
The point is, every person who doesn't break the law fears being falsely 'exposed' when it comes to child pornography. * What if one of the guys at Pentagon isn't secretly a murderer, but any accusation of murder in the press would be taken as automatically true by many regardless of the evidence? What if you didn't have a mistress/child on the side, so there was nothing for your wife to know about, but the simple accusation meant thousands of people would be assuming where there's smoke, there's fire, and posting here about how you doubtless could never be reformed and wishing for you to get a quickee rubber stamp trial so you could be raped by your fellow convicts faster.
The parent poster criticised stigmatizing child porn in the way our society does, not in having laws against it. A good example of this is that there have been some well done, high quality studies on the rate for long term repeat offenses after child molesters were released from prison. One Canadian study, for example, followed whether released molesters were arrested again after a full 20 years after end of sentence. It showed both that the rate of repeat offenses could be greatly reduced by therapy, and that even without therapy, the repeat offender rate was lower than for quite a few other crimes. Yet it's common for people to claim that all these paedophiles can't be cured and will always reoffend. That's stigmatization, when social forces such as the press constantly parrot a falsehood about something and ignore the actual facts.
* You're throwing around those universals such as every, everyone, etc. That really should be a strong clue you're overstating your case in a simplistic fashion. I'm using your remarks to frame my counter-argument, but I doubt strongly that it's really a matter of 'every'.
As copyright law was originally written, you sued only over financial damages. For roughly 200 years, you had no basis to pick and choose except financial harm. The law still doesn't give you that right in the US - if it did, it would include what are called 'moral copyright clauses', as, for example, the ones now used in French law which the US has deliberately avoided including in treaty. Now that parts of copyright law have been criminalised, you are in effect arguing that your right allows you to compel the state to engage in selective prosecution of crimes, as is expressly forbidden in the bill of rights, for damned good reasons.
Fullerines are made of baryonic matter (a.k.a. normal matter). That sort of thing is the first category of possible dark matter. Whole planets, rocks, brown dwarf stars, and such would all be baryonic matter, and all dark, at least at the ranges we would be looking for them. We could probably detect some big, solid dark bodies floating in interstellar space by their occasionally passing between some star and a telescope, and other methods.
Now put non-baryonic matter in a second category. Neutrinos are known to exist, and mostly don't interact with normal matter, but do just a little. Let's put them in category two, along with other, more exotic possibilities. Some of these category two types are only semi-weird, such as the neutrinos I mentioned. Others are very weird hypotheticals, such as kinds of matter, as yet unnamed, having irrational numbers for spin states and a tendency to couple with Higgs bosons only on alternate Tuesdays. In between is a laundry list of particles that have not really been confirmed, but either seem predicted by a few observations, or should be there if some theory such as supersymmetry or one of the many string theories is right.
There are some good, reliable observations on how fast stars at different distances from a galaxy's core orbit the center, that make it look very, very unlikely that all the dark matter can be any combinations from the first category. There's some evidence for a kind of acceleration to the universe's expansion, which would require a form of what's called dark energy and some particular types of dark matter as well, and some recent observations of more mass in distant galaxies that adjust the problem further.
Right now, the galaxy rotation data suggests we need an explanation that includes some form of second category dark matter, but if it turns out we also need to explain an oncoming big rip, or if it turns out we have underestimated how much conventional matter there is and how close to a flat universe we are in, then the explanation needs to fit those things too, so one reason astrophysicists have to leave this question open is there are a few things which definitely need explained, but there are also a bunch of related things which may or may not all be true and so may or may not have to be part of the final explanation.
It's like we know a bank was robbed, but we have some conflicting descriptions of the robbers. One witness swears the get-away card was a Mazda, the other says it was a Toyota, One witness swears he saw a fourth guy get in the car down the block as it pulled away, the others don't remember seeing that at all. One camera wasn't working, and the other caught something of the robbery on tape, but it wasn't at an ideal angle. Even if we are very confident that there really are some bank robbers on the loose, it's hard to figure out just what should be put in the APB.
1. German field commander gets taken to a top secret installation and shown all sorts of top secret planes, V-2 missiles, espionage and sabotage spy units and other stuff he has no need to know about, just before going back to combat.
2. repainted American Sherman M-4 tanks used for German tanks in some scenes.
2a. American M-24 Chaffee tanks used for American M-4 Sherman tanks in those same scenes, because they were now out of real M-4's.
3. Solder reading a 1964 issue of Playboy in the barracks of a WW2 movie.
4. Model tanks that blow up from small arms fire, and look like 1/48'th scale plastic models doing it. The same ones, repeatedly. Sometimes they are on fire and then not, then on fire again, then not, as people walk past them. No one seems to be worried about walking past burning tanks which may still have ammo cooking off.
5. A complete lack of historical accuracy. Most characters are composite, fictionalised people, so as to avoid offending any real Nazis. Omar Bradley is not mentioned in the film - General Patton is said to command all the units Bradley really commanded. Almost every 'fact' about what strategies or tactics were used, is made up and does not in any way match the historical record. For example in real life there was no organized American effort to wear the Germans down by making them use up their fuel before actually engaging them in combat.
6. Several parts of the battle take place in the immense almost Sahara-like deserts of northern Europe, where there are no living plants for miles and miles because of the merciless northern sun. That same sun must have melted off all the snow the real battle took place amidst.
Former armor officer here. After M1A1's, anything else has no noise or recoil at all, but shooting's still fun. It's not about the noise and kick for me, it's that sense of flow when your skills are all working together. I understand why there's a whole school of Zen devoted to archery. I don't hunt either. The deer know I'm a soft touch. I've had black bear encounters before, and as far as I know, all those bears are still alive. I will refrain from shooting a rattlesnake or copperhead unless it really insists (most snakes will back off if it's a territory thing, and you stay calm and work with them a little, but I have seen a few rattlesnakes that seemed to be out to commit suicide by me. The only one I ever actually killed by firearm took it from a blank M-16 training round, with his mouth actually closed on the end of the barrel). Aside from target shooting, here's why I keep current:
1. If a skunk comes into your yard in broad daylight, it is rabid. For a fox, those odds are only about 50%, and my town is such a big eco-green bird and animal sanctuary we actually have perfectly sane local raccoons who get used to moving around by daylight and mooching food*, but in my state, every single skunk that was tested after a mid-day encounter for the past five years was rabid. 2. If one of my dogs or cats is ever badly injured or something, and suffering horribly, I can put it down there and then, instead of making it suffer another hour through an obviously futile trip to the vet. 3. I do believe in self defense, and think that with my level of training and skill, the odds are better that a weapon will work for me than against me. I have used a weapon to protect myself in the past, by controlling a young criminal breaking into my car's gas tank until the police responded. That person is probably still alive and well too, AFAIK - if he had run when I ordered him to lay on the ground, I would simply have let him go, rather than shot him over something less than life or death, but as it turned out, he got juvenile detention.
*Hell, I saw three deer run across the parking lot in front of the federal building and into the Home Depot's garden department just last week - maybe this sanctuary business can be carried too far...
1. The FN P90 is an excellent example. Even though it looks more like a sub-machinegun with that 50 round top fed magazine, it is in fact firing an assault rifle round, and with the short overall design, deserves to be thought of as an assault carbine for some real world scenarios (i.e. urban combat, where reduced encounter range is practically a given). This is doubly strange, because Fabrique describes it both as a defensive weapon for REMF's, and as one very useful to vehicle drivers. That later designation would make it comparable to the old M-3 'grease gun', practically the quintessential sub-machinegun, yet it just isn't one, really.
Personally, I like the P90 because I'm a southpaw who often shoots cross-handed, and it fits equally either way. I used to have to qualify sometimes with an M-16-A1, shooting with my off hand, because the ejection port tended to spit hot cartridges either at your face or sometimes down the back of your shirt, if there wasn't a brass deflector fitted.* As far as I'm concerned, the P90 and possible variants are future firearms, at least for us lefties.
M-16s (and Stoner weapons based designs in general) actually evolved towards the P90's use model in the 1990's, by the simple expedient of going to larger, usually 30 round magazines. In retrospect, it's obvious - a smaller diameter, lighter round means you might as well carry a lot of them. The SAW is trying to carry the same idea further.
2. Recoil? How about backblast? Some of these games have rocket launchers being used in indoor environments. How about minimum arming distances for grenades? Alternately, how about 'freak' burst ranges for grenades - where sometimes they do almost no damage to some target only a few feet away and kill somebody at the extreme of effective range instead?
I'm thinking that the redwood forests should provide some resistance to them moving about freely, due to their enormous size. Lesser trees will, of course, represent absolutely no obstacle. Beyond that, this board is not currently cleared CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, so I'll just hint that people should stock up on 'classified' with all five points intact.
So long as 'Man-made' and 'Supernatural' are both common antonyms to 'Natural', natural is a word to use very cautiously. On Slashdot, it's also most frequently misused by the very same people who misuse 'Rational' to mean 'Reasonable', and 'Logical' to mean 'Scientific' (and various combinations of these). (In the wider world, 'natural' is as often misused by the same people who aren't clear about the differences between 'illegal' and 'immoral' - that seems less frequent around here).
As a preternaturalist, all this bugs me enough to hope something with tentacles does some pruning.
There's a spurious claim that Social Security must collapse because people are living so much longer on average than when it started. It's based on looking at what the average life expectancy from birth was when SS started and now, instead of what the life expectancy once you have already reached retirement age (using whatever the average retirement age for a given year is in all cases). How long people will collect from the system once they make it to retiring hasn't changed much at all - extending the base age to get full benefits as much has has already been done actually more than makes up for the whole difference that would result. The biggest cause of longer average lifespans, our greatly reducing infant mortality, hasn't had any impact at all on whether Social Security is economically sound. Why on Earth would it, when kids that died young back in the dark ages of the 1940s-50s didn't pay in or draw out back then either?
There's one hell of a lot of overlap between the people who are originating the exaggerated effects of lifespan arguments about cancer and about lifespan causing the collapse of Social Security, probably at least 90%. It's one strong reason to doubt the similar claims for cancer too.
The next time somebody launches a "religions are all teh evillle!" post, I'm going to be sure and lay the blame for 'Mayan's (and Aztecs, who did it more) cutting hearts out squarely on Darwin channeling Malthus, and not on any priestly visions. Dude, that rocks!
Soil salinity is a climate effect? Not all environmental change is climate change. Good thing those Mesapotwamians had advanced science "similarly' to your Mayans, to keep them from knowing about ignorant, no-scientific crop rotation. Course, your agricultural science is probably wrong too, as rotation treats nitrogen depletion, but the usual cure for excess salinity is a. stop using brackish water to irrigate, and b. additional fertilizers, as salt reduces fertilizer efficiency before it gets to concentrations sufficient to actually damage plant cell membranes.
A drill or a socket wrench cannot kill you if you drop it
I own a 3/4 Horsepower power drill. left to me by my father in law upon his death, that weighs over 40 lbs., and among my socket wrench sets are 3/4 inch drive metric and English ones, where the drive bars are about two feet long and the largest sockets over 4" diameter. I assure anyone who is that worried about guns discharging when dropped that there are drills and socket wrenches that can easily kill somebody if dropped under normal working conditions. It would be a bit more challenging to drop them on yourself with enough force to make your own death likely, but easily possible to cause someone else's.
One of the things I noticed re. Copyright law (a favorite subject for Slashdot, of course): I ran across the copyright indexes of several authors, such as H. P. Lovecraft, who were big on only giving magazines first publication rights, not the standard 'all rights' clause in contracts. Lovecraft was part of the amateur press scene of his time and actually wrote articles about it, aimed at new authors, plus he metioned it in several letters to fellow authors. HPL also died during the depression, and if you look at the copyright history of his work, a lot of stories pass from a single magazine such as Weird Tales, through many different small companies' hands, before the rights ended up being purchased by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei after the depression ended.
It looks like a bunch of small presses bought republication rights from magazines such as Weird Tales that the magazine may not have actually owned to sell, and passed these around in one standard contract after another. It looks very strange to see four stories published in the same magazine the same year, all passing through different small press owners hands, with a bunch of corporate names that are all swiftly out of existence, have little or no actual publication history, or seem to maybe be nothing but shell corporations. You have to wonder, if Lovecraft is any indicator, if Weird Tales actually took the time to sell off rights to thousands of old stories one at a time, to literally hundreds of separate companies, instead of bundling them somehow. The explanation seems to be that at least some of these contracts came out of bankruptcy courts, which were working overtime in that era. Unfortunately, only a few of these documents have good paper trails, and it's hard to really prove one way or another.
Given the middle of the Great Depression connection, I've wondered if this was because bankruptcy courts were distributing these assets as part of big pools of similar fluff, without taking the time to check all the details on items they doubtless felt were of little real worth. Probably they were focusing on the physical assets of the companies, where those existed, and didn't expect these 'IP' assets to ever come back into print.
This may bear out what the OP wrote. In practice, the bankruptcy courts seem to sometimes ignore restrictions in contract whether that's really what the law says to do or not, particularly if the asset is perceived as having little value compared to the rest of what the court has to deal with.
Except the Dept was really created to control nuclear applications, both for reactors and bombmaking. It wouldn't have become a Cabinet level post with armed agent personnel without the Nuclear side.
Here's their mission statement. I've highlighted the Nukestuff:
The Department of Energy's overarching mission is to advance the national, economic, and energy security of the United States; to promote scientific and technological innovation in support of that mission; and to ensure the environmental cleanup of the national nuclear weapons complex. The Department's strategic goals to achieve the mission are designed to deliver results along five strategic themes: Energy Security: Promoting America's energy security through reliable, clean, and affordable energy Nuclear Security: Ensuring America's nuclear security
Scientific Discovery and Innovation: Strengthening U.S. scientific discovery, economic competitiveness, and improving quality of life through innovations in science and technology Environmental Responsibility: Protecting the environment by providing a responsible resolution to the environmental legacy of nuclear weapons production
Management Excellence: Enabling the mission through sound management
You'll notice that Nuclear related technologies are explicitly mentioned three times, and that, while energy security is about 'reliable, clean and affordable energy', and presumably economic security is referenced again by that 'affordable' bit, there's also the phrase national security as a separable clause.
Infer what you want, but Mr. Hasler didn't imply that. For just one point, he never mentioned moral rights one way or another - you put the words into his mouth. To save you the trouble of putting words into mine That makes you a TROLL
1. The law needs to be built on facts: If there aren't some provable cases, how can the law impose punitive damages fairly? Remember, for the US, there's the cruel and unusual punishment angle - if there are no provable cases of piracy stifling creative expression, then one of the grounds for the law's severity is undermined, and so the argument that the law is unconstitutionally cruel gains weight.
2. How can there possibly be works that were never made because of piracy without there also being works that were attempted and failed? Are you seriously claiming that every film that bombed at the box office for one reason or another somehow proves the producers have perfect judgement about avoiding the risks caused by piracy, so they never attempt to make the ones that fail from that cause? If the various Heaven's Gate's and Howard the Duck's don't prove that Hollywood, at least, can fail abysmally to evaluate risks rationally, then no wonder you're arguing against proof, because to you nothing what-so-ever can be proved. Admit that they sometimes get it wrong, and if piracy is one of the factors in any significant way, there will simply have to be the product that failed from piracy. Provably.
With that said, a possible damage caused by piracy might well be works never created in the first place. If there are some provable cases where someone can demonstrate investors at least should have walked away because of piracy, then we can infer that piracy caused damage, either in the form of losses if they went ahead anyway, or your 'damage if the project was never made'. But claiming that piracy causes only the type of damage that, by you, can't be proved is also claiming that a bunch of big commercial content holders have perfect track records - obviously false to fact.
It's somewhat doable. Salaries claimed have to be in line with standards, but most professions have a range of salaries broad enough to claim about 1/2 or a third of the gross billables, particularly if the work was in legal or accounting services. (And yes, I know of cases personally). Hell, the biggest point of forming a single person based S corp is to do this*, and certainly many of them survive audits. This is not about C corps where there is a base corporate tax rate - 'S's are pass through entities.
Here's one way this can help cut somebody's tax burden. If a person is going to claim employee related expenses on schedule A, they have to meet a 2% of gross income test before any of it counts. Those same expenses, claimed directly by a company, have no threshold - all of them count. There can be other advantages in claiming all the expenses possible for larger vehicles, regular office or office in home expenses, and many other areas. The direct taxes owed to the general fund may be 10% less than otherwise, and as the parent pointed out, you can probably see another 10-20% less from reduced Social Security/Medicare and possibly Unemployment taxes, all without pushing the envelope. (What the parent didn't point out is that his example wasn't an optimal case, as 120K is already above the social security cap and so not all taxed anyway).
* The second biggest reason is if the person has multiple sources of unrelated income - i.e. you sell Myghtymax Juicers and win prizes in Bass fishing tournaments, and you want it so being sued when a Juicer's lid flies off and puts someone's eye out can't take what you made catching fish.
Because the biggest effect of this fraud is to prop up share value in the stock market. Most of the largest, 'most stable', 'all-american' companies found in hundreds of retirement portfolios and mutual funds today have more IP assets than tangible assets (with Walmart, Caterpillar, and International Paper as a few possible exceptions).
If this becomes obvious fraud, recognised by most investors, then the DOW is worth maybe 4,000, less than half its current value, and the severe recession we are currently experiencing becomes The Great Depression.
There's a risk this will grow to where the government is so paranoid it does care how long the TV is on. Right now, there are estimated to be 8 million US citizens on the Main Core list (although this is just a Wikipedia entry, so of course it could be a gross exaggeration):
How far is it from putting 8 million people on your critical threat list to making people document how much Wattage their TV draws so the government can tell if there's some other appliance running in tandem cycle and so determine if the citizen is watching wholesome major network programming or some subversive screed passed around on DVD? (Or worse, tivoing something illegally).
(WARNING: What follows is not a Slashmene, even though it begins like one. No joke here, Mkay?)
In Soviet Russia under Gorbachev, lots of non-party members had TVs and the KGB didn't care which channels they watched, but the government regulated many other items that could run with them much more strongly, such as PCs and Videotape machines. To do this, they had to indirectly deal with TVs - so much so, that this was a known procedure on raids: Units would take a portable color TV along. They would watch the glow of what might be a TV through apartment windows at the target address, and look to see if they could identify the channel a suspect was watching. If it's brightenings and dimmings didn't match any of the state channels, they would use this as grounds to enter on suspicion there was an unregistered computer or recording device in use.
Godel's theorem applies to mathematical formal systems that are sufficiently complex and powerful. 'Sufficiently' here is reached by formal systems far, far simpler and less powerful than the real number system. The only way Godel's theorem wouldn't apply to our models of the universe is if all the calculations used in all related physics could be encoded in a system much simpler than first year algebra or trig. You might get around it if you could describe all physics using only formulae that cannot under any circumstances what-so-ever generate an irrational number or any undefined value, that never require infinitesimals or infinities, and that can't even imply a potential need for imaginary numbers. Yes, Godel's theorem is that powerful.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people fixate more strongly than others from their first sexual experiences. (This includes solo experiences, i.e. masturbation, not just their first experiences with others). So, somebody becomes aroused at 13 by the cleavage of a cute redhead who is developmentally ahead of them in Social studies class, and if they are a strong fixator, they may have a thing for busty readheads all their lives. Extreme fixators may get obsessive in lots of ways that damage relationships, for example pushing their partner to get breast augmentation surgery even though the partner doesn't want to. While the examples I've just mentioned are for hetero men, there's also common examples for all sorts of orientations, for example, the women who have Florence Nightingale Syndrome or a thing for 'bad boys'. People can become more devoted to there fixations during periods of stress, and sometimes fixations can transfer - for example a person could become fixated on prostitutes by their early sexual experiences, and gradually, this could transfer to a real fetish for related clothing. You have people who have such a thing for fishnets or high heels that they don't really see the person wearing them anymore.
Now what happens if the person fixates on the apparent age of the stimulus? There are people fixated on underage types, but surprisingly, there are equally people who have problems despite the partner being of perfectly legal age. Picture a strong fixater, who has some good sexual experiences with a woman of about his own age, at about age 22, and sooner or later marries her. As she ages along with him, he finds sex increasingly disappointing, and by the time he's about 30, he dumps her for a younger woman. When he's 45, he's on his fourth marriage, each time to a woman in her early 20's.
Extreme paedophilia may involve experiences at very young ages, which makes it difficult for the individual to remember the early triggers. It also involves the human weakness for wanting to be the one with all the power in a relationship, and means that some people might eventually become paedophiles by starting with a dominating position in relationships and trying to find relationships that exaggerate that dominance.(Power and dominance issues and government workers that seem clueless to consequences - could their be a pattern there?)
There definitely is a natural human trait to protect the young, but it takes some training to develop it, and it can be warped or, in exceptional cases, absent. Many paedophiles have a long set of internal justifications for how their behavior supposedly doesn't actually harm their victims. Real treatment to cure paedophiles is, in part, helping them see why these are rationalizations. It may also involve helping them develop skills that give them better options, either helping them fixate less, or to still fixate but on a more appropriate subject.
As you point out for the government types, there's a certain stupidity here. You mentioned lack of understanding of consequences and technology - I'd say there's also a lack of understanding of internal motivations and interpersonal dynamics. That suggests therapy for such people can be hard - dumber than average plus multiple issues that need worked on adds up to challenging. It also costs a bit to do it well enough to see real progress, and if any of these people have actually victimized children, the victims themselves could probably use some help too, and should come first in society's priorities.
I agree that the whole story sounds very fishy, but some parts could make sense. In a government or corporate mono-culture environment, there are cases where everybody in a particular group has exactly the same sized hard drive. There are also cases where the executable software that should be on the machine is a pretty well known list, and the size of the individual files shouldn't vary much, so how much unused drive space should be there is a pretty reliable value. And you get cases where a large deviation from that value is supposed to be suspicious of something - i.e. it's office policy at a law firm or medical office only currently active caseload records should be stored on the machine, and IT guys are expected to remind users to delete unnecessary records.
For a more specific example, I was once in a military unit where technical support manuals and diagnostics were stored on what were basically ruggedised olive drab PCs for field maintenence use. Hardware was almost always identical for several dozen users stationed with many different military unit types. Software/Data was supposed to match the whole units TOE (Table of Organization and Equipment). So, the amount of space used and left on the drive always varied in certain ways by type of unit. If someone brought in a machine that was supporting a military police unit (which had a pretty simple list of vehicles and weapons), and the drive space used or free looked out of range, the first thing techs were supposed to do was look for obvious reasons, i.e. someone loaned the equipment to a very different military outfit, or stuffed it full of higher level maintenance manuals (and was trying to do depot level or send it back to the manufacturer level maintenance in the field). It wasn't paranoia about everyone being up to something actively criminal that would trigger more detailed exams, so much as institutional reasons, initially. Of course, if the situation kept looking stranger and stranger with digging, someone might eventually suspect not just personal use of the machine, but criminal activity.
The point is, every person who doesn't break the law fears being falsely 'exposed' when it comes to child pornography. *
What if one of the guys at Pentagon isn't secretly a murderer, but any accusation of murder in the press would be taken as automatically true by many regardless of the evidence? What if you didn't have a mistress/child on the side, so there was nothing for your wife to know about, but the simple accusation meant thousands of people would be assuming where there's smoke, there's fire, and posting here about how you doubtless could never be reformed and wishing for you to get a quickee rubber stamp trial so you could be raped by your fellow convicts faster.
The parent poster criticised stigmatizing child porn in the way our society does, not in having laws against it. A good example of this is that there have been some well done, high quality studies on the rate for long term repeat offenses after child molesters were released from prison. One Canadian study, for example, followed whether released molesters were arrested again after a full 20 years after end of sentence. It showed both that the rate of repeat offenses could be greatly reduced by therapy, and that even without therapy, the repeat offender rate was lower than for quite a few other crimes. Yet it's common for people to claim that all these paedophiles can't be cured and will always reoffend. That's stigmatization, when social forces such as the press constantly parrot a falsehood about something and ignore the actual facts.
* You're throwing around those universals such as every, everyone, etc. That really should be a strong clue you're overstating your case in a simplistic fashion. I'm using your remarks to frame my counter-argument, but I doubt strongly that it's really a matter of 'every'.
As copyright law was originally written, you sued only over financial damages. For roughly 200 years, you had no basis to pick and choose except financial harm. The law still doesn't give you that right in the US - if it did, it would include what are called 'moral copyright clauses', as, for example, the ones now used in French law which the US has deliberately avoided including in treaty. Now that parts of copyright law have been criminalised, you are in effect arguing that your right allows you to compel the state to engage in selective prosecution of crimes, as is expressly forbidden in the bill of rights, for damned good reasons.
A subtle Godwining is still a Godwining.
(And if I really believed that, the thread would be over in my eyes so I couldn't post to it.)
Now as a Zen Gnostic*, what color earring do I get?
* I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill your Buddha on the road for you.
Fullerines are made of baryonic matter (a.k.a. normal matter). That sort of thing is the first category of possible dark matter. Whole planets, rocks, brown dwarf stars, and such would all be baryonic matter, and all dark, at least at the ranges we would be looking for them. We could probably detect some big, solid dark bodies floating in interstellar space by their occasionally passing between some star and a telescope, and other methods.
Now put non-baryonic matter in a second category. Neutrinos are known to exist, and mostly don't interact with normal matter, but do just a little. Let's put them in category two, along with other, more exotic possibilities. Some of these category two types are only semi-weird, such as the neutrinos I mentioned. Others are very weird hypotheticals, such as kinds of matter, as yet unnamed, having irrational numbers for spin states and a tendency to couple with Higgs bosons only on alternate Tuesdays. In between is a laundry list of particles that have not really been confirmed, but either seem predicted by a few observations, or should be there if some theory such as supersymmetry or one of the many string theories is right.
There are some good, reliable observations on how fast stars at different distances from a galaxy's core orbit the center, that make it look very, very unlikely that all the dark matter can be any combinations from the first category. There's some evidence for a kind of acceleration to the universe's expansion, which would require a form of what's called dark energy and some particular types of dark matter as well, and some recent observations of more mass in distant galaxies that adjust the problem further.
Right now, the galaxy rotation data suggests we need an explanation that includes some form of second category dark matter, but if it turns out we also need to explain an oncoming big rip, or if it turns out we have underestimated how much conventional matter there is and how close to a flat universe we are in, then the explanation needs to fit those things too, so one reason astrophysicists have to leave this question open is there are a few things which definitely need explained, but there are also a bunch of related things which may or may not all be true and so may or may not have to be part of the final explanation.
It's like we know a bank was robbed, but we have some conflicting descriptions of the robbers. One witness swears the get-away card was a Mazda, the other says it was a Toyota, One witness swears he saw a fourth guy get in the car down the block as it pulled away, the others don't remember seeing that at all. One camera wasn't working, and the other caught something of the robbery on tape, but it wasn't at an ideal angle. Even if we are very confident that there really are some bank robbers on the loose, it's hard to figure out just what should be put in the APB.
Battle of the Bulge
1. German field commander gets taken to a top secret installation and shown all sorts of top secret planes, V-2 missiles, espionage and sabotage spy units and other stuff he has no need to know about, just before going back to combat.
2. repainted American Sherman M-4 tanks used for German tanks in some scenes.
2a. American M-24 Chaffee tanks used for American M-4 Sherman tanks in those same scenes, because they were now out of real M-4's.
3. Solder reading a 1964 issue of Playboy in the barracks of a WW2 movie.
4. Model tanks that blow up from small arms fire, and look like 1/48'th scale plastic models doing it. The same ones, repeatedly. Sometimes they are on fire and then not, then on fire again, then not, as people walk past them. No one seems to be worried about walking past burning tanks which may still have ammo cooking off.
5. A complete lack of historical accuracy. Most characters are composite, fictionalised people, so as to avoid offending any real Nazis. Omar Bradley is not mentioned in the film - General Patton is said to command all the units Bradley really commanded. Almost every 'fact' about what strategies or tactics were used, is made up and does not in any way match the historical record. For example in real life there was no organized American effort to wear the Germans down by making them use up their fuel before actually engaging them in combat.
6. Several parts of the battle take place in the immense almost Sahara-like deserts of northern Europe, where there are no living plants for miles and miles because of the merciless northern sun. That same sun must have melted off all the snow the real battle took place amidst.
Former armor officer here. After M1A1's, anything else has no noise or recoil at all, but shooting's still fun. It's not about the noise and kick for me, it's that sense of flow when your skills are all working together. I understand why there's a whole school of Zen devoted to archery. I don't hunt either. The deer know I'm a soft touch. I've had black bear encounters before, and as far as I know, all those bears are still alive. I will refrain from shooting a rattlesnake or copperhead unless it really insists (most snakes will back off if it's a territory thing, and you stay calm and work with them a little, but I have seen a few rattlesnakes that seemed to be out to commit suicide by me. The only one I ever actually killed by firearm took it from a blank M-16 training round, with his mouth actually closed on the end of the barrel). Aside from target shooting, here's why I keep current:
1. If a skunk comes into your yard in broad daylight, it is rabid. For a fox, those odds are only about 50%, and my town is such a big eco-green bird and animal sanctuary we actually have perfectly sane local raccoons who get used to moving around by daylight and mooching food*, but in my state, every single skunk that was tested after a mid-day encounter for the past five years was rabid.
2. If one of my dogs or cats is ever badly injured or something, and suffering horribly, I can put it down there and then, instead of making it suffer another hour through an obviously futile trip to the vet.
3. I do believe in self defense, and think that with my level of training and skill, the odds are better that a weapon will work for me than against me. I have used a weapon to protect myself in the past, by controlling a young criminal breaking into my car's gas tank until the police responded. That person is probably still alive and well too, AFAIK - if he had run when I ordered him to lay on the ground, I would simply have let him go, rather than shot him over something less than life or death, but as it turned out, he got juvenile detention.
*Hell, I saw three deer run across the parking lot in front of the federal building and into the Home Depot's garden department just last week - maybe this sanctuary business can be carried too far...
1. The FN P90 is an excellent example. Even though it looks more like a sub-machinegun with that 50 round top fed magazine, it is in fact firing an assault rifle round, and with the short overall design, deserves to be thought of as an assault carbine for some real world scenarios (i.e. urban combat, where reduced encounter range is practically a given). This is doubly strange, because Fabrique describes it both as a defensive weapon for REMF's, and as one very useful to vehicle drivers. That later designation would make it comparable to the old M-3 'grease gun', practically the quintessential sub-machinegun, yet it just isn't one, really.
Personally, I like the P90 because I'm a southpaw who often shoots cross-handed, and it fits equally either way. I used to have to qualify sometimes with an M-16-A1, shooting with my off hand, because the ejection port tended to spit hot cartridges either at your face or sometimes down the back of your shirt, if there wasn't a brass deflector fitted.* As far as I'm concerned, the P90 and possible variants are future firearms, at least for us lefties.
M-16s (and Stoner weapons based designs in general) actually evolved towards the P90's use model in the 1990's, by the simple expedient of going to larger, usually 30 round magazines. In retrospect, it's obvious - a smaller diameter, lighter round means you might as well carry a lot of them. The SAW is trying to carry the same idea further.
2. Recoil? How about backblast? Some of these games have rocket launchers being used in indoor environments. How about minimum arming distances for grenades? Alternately, how about 'freak' burst ranges for grenades - where sometimes they do almost no damage to some target only a few feet away and kill somebody at the extreme of effective range instead?
* yes, I'm an old fart. Get off of my lawn.
I'm thinking that the redwood forests should provide some resistance to them moving about freely, due to their enormous size. Lesser trees will, of course, represent absolutely no obstacle. Beyond that, this board is not currently cleared CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, so I'll just hint that people should stock up on 'classified' with all five points intact.
So long as 'Man-made' and 'Supernatural' are both common antonyms to 'Natural', natural is a word to use very cautiously. On Slashdot, it's also most frequently misused by the very same people who misuse 'Rational' to mean 'Reasonable', and 'Logical' to mean 'Scientific' (and various combinations of these). (In the wider world, 'natural' is as often misused by the same people who aren't clear about the differences between 'illegal' and 'immoral' - that seems less frequent around here).
As a preternaturalist, all this bugs me enough to hope something with tentacles does some pruning.
There's a spurious claim that Social Security must collapse because people are living so much longer on average than when it started. It's based on looking at what the average life expectancy from birth was when SS started and now, instead of what the life expectancy once you have already reached retirement age (using whatever the average retirement age for a given year is in all cases). How long people will collect from the system once they make it to retiring hasn't changed much at all - extending the base age to get full benefits as much has has already been done actually more than makes up for the whole difference that would result. The biggest cause of longer average lifespans, our greatly reducing infant mortality, hasn't had any impact at all on whether Social Security is economically sound. Why on Earth would it, when kids that died young back in the dark ages of the 1940s-50s didn't pay in or draw out back then either?
There's one hell of a lot of overlap between the people who are originating the exaggerated effects of lifespan arguments about cancer and about lifespan causing the collapse of Social Security, probably at least 90%. It's one strong reason to doubt the similar claims for cancer too.
The next time somebody launches a "religions are all teh evillle!" post, I'm going to be sure and lay the blame for 'Mayan's (and Aztecs, who did it more) cutting hearts out squarely on Darwin channeling Malthus, and not on any priestly visions. Dude, that rocks!
Soil salinity is a climate effect? Not all environmental change is climate change. Good thing those Mesapotwamians had advanced science "similarly' to your Mayans, to keep them from knowing about ignorant, no-scientific crop rotation. Course, your agricultural science is probably wrong too, as rotation treats nitrogen depletion, but the usual cure for excess salinity is a. stop using brackish water to irrigate, and b. additional fertilizers, as salt reduces fertilizer efficiency before it gets to concentrations sufficient to actually damage plant cell membranes.
A drill or a socket wrench cannot kill you if you drop it
I own a 3/4 Horsepower power drill. left to me by my father in law upon his death, that weighs over 40 lbs., and among my socket wrench sets are 3/4 inch drive metric and English ones, where the drive bars are about two feet long and the largest sockets over 4" diameter. I assure anyone who is that worried about guns discharging when dropped that there are drills and socket wrenches that can easily kill somebody if dropped under normal working conditions. It would be a bit more challenging to drop them on yourself with enough force to make your own death likely, but easily possible to cause someone else's.
Dammit, I'm 52, and the Stones are my parent's generation - you don't have a lawn, pyramids are surrounded by sand.
You'll take my beloved Caffeine from me when you pry my turquoise Amp from my still twitching fingers...
One of the things I noticed re. Copyright law (a favorite subject for Slashdot, of course): I ran across the copyright indexes of several authors, such as H. P. Lovecraft, who were big on only giving magazines first publication rights, not the standard 'all rights' clause in contracts. Lovecraft was part of the amateur press scene of his time and actually wrote articles about it, aimed at new authors, plus he metioned it in several letters to fellow authors. HPL also died during the depression, and if you look at the copyright history of his work, a lot of stories pass from a single magazine such as Weird Tales, through many different small companies' hands, before the rights ended up being purchased by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei after the depression ended.
It looks like a bunch of small presses bought republication rights from magazines such as Weird Tales that the magazine may not have actually owned to sell, and passed these around in one standard contract after another. It looks very strange to see four stories published in the same magazine the same year, all passing through different small press owners hands, with a bunch of corporate names that are all swiftly out of existence, have little or no actual publication history, or seem to maybe be nothing but shell corporations. You have to wonder, if Lovecraft is any indicator, if Weird Tales actually took the time to sell off rights to thousands of old stories one at a time, to literally hundreds of separate companies, instead of bundling them somehow. The explanation seems to be that at least some of these contracts came out of bankruptcy courts, which were working overtime in that era. Unfortunately, only a few of these documents have good paper trails, and it's hard to really prove one way or another.
Given the middle of the Great Depression connection, I've wondered if this was because bankruptcy courts were distributing these assets as part of big pools of similar fluff, without taking the time to check all the details on items they doubtless felt were of little real worth. Probably they were focusing on the physical assets of the companies, where those existed, and didn't expect these 'IP' assets to ever come back into print.
This may bear out what the OP wrote. In practice, the bankruptcy courts seem to sometimes ignore restrictions in contract whether that's really what the law says to do or not, particularly if the asset is perceived as having little value compared to the rest of what the court has to deal with.
I just checked, and I have a crowbar handy. Carry on.
Except the Dept was really created to control nuclear applications, both for reactors and bombmaking. It wouldn't have become a Cabinet level post with armed agent personnel without the Nuclear side.
Here's their mission statement. I've highlighted the Nukestuff:
The Department of Energy's overarching mission is to advance the national, economic, and energy security of the United States; to promote scientific and technological innovation in support of that mission; and to ensure the environmental cleanup of the national nuclear weapons complex. The Department's strategic goals to achieve the mission are designed to deliver results along five strategic themes:
Energy Security: Promoting America's energy security through reliable, clean, and affordable energy
Nuclear Security: Ensuring America's nuclear security
Scientific Discovery and Innovation: Strengthening U.S. scientific discovery, economic competitiveness, and improving quality of life through innovations in science and technology
Environmental Responsibility: Protecting the environment by providing a responsible resolution to the environmental legacy of nuclear weapons production
Management Excellence: Enabling the mission through sound management
You'll notice that Nuclear related technologies are explicitly mentioned three times, and that, while energy security is about 'reliable, clean and affordable energy', and presumably economic security is referenced again by that 'affordable' bit, there's also the phrase national security as a separable clause.
Infer what you want, but Mr. Hasler didn't imply that. For just one point, he never mentioned moral rights one way or another - you put the words into his mouth. To save you the trouble of putting words into mine That makes you a TROLL
1. The law needs to be built on facts: If there aren't some provable cases, how can the law impose punitive damages fairly? Remember, for the US, there's the cruel and unusual punishment angle - if there are no provable cases of piracy stifling creative expression, then one of the grounds for the law's severity is undermined, and so the argument that the law is unconstitutionally cruel gains weight.
2. How can there possibly be works that were never made because of piracy without there also being works that were attempted and failed? Are you seriously claiming that every film that bombed at the box office for one reason or another somehow proves the producers have perfect judgement about avoiding the risks caused by piracy, so they never attempt to make the ones that fail from that cause? If the various Heaven's Gate's and Howard the Duck's don't prove that Hollywood, at least, can fail abysmally to evaluate risks rationally, then no wonder you're arguing against proof, because to you nothing what-so-ever can be proved. Admit that they sometimes get it wrong, and if piracy is one of the factors in any significant way, there will simply have to be the product that failed from piracy. Provably.
With that said, a possible damage caused by piracy might well be works never created in the first place. If there are some provable cases where someone can demonstrate investors at least should have walked away because of piracy, then we can infer that piracy caused damage, either in the form of losses if they went ahead anyway, or your 'damage if the project was never made'. But claiming that piracy causes only the type of damage that, by you, can't be proved is also claiming that a bunch of big commercial content holders have perfect track records - obviously false to fact.
It's somewhat doable. Salaries claimed have to be in line with standards, but most professions have a range of salaries broad enough to claim about 1/2 or a third of the gross billables, particularly if the work was in legal or accounting services. (And yes, I know of cases personally). Hell, the biggest point of forming a single person based S corp is to do this*, and certainly many of them survive audits. This is not about C corps where there is a base corporate tax rate - 'S's are pass through entities.
Here's one way this can help cut somebody's tax burden. If a person is going to claim employee related expenses on schedule A, they have to meet a 2% of gross income test before any of it counts. Those same expenses, claimed directly by a company, have no threshold - all of them count. There can be other advantages in claiming all the expenses possible for larger vehicles, regular office or office in home expenses, and many other areas. The direct taxes owed to the general fund may be 10% less than otherwise, and as the parent pointed out, you can probably see another 10-20% less from reduced Social Security/Medicare and possibly Unemployment taxes, all without pushing the envelope. (What the parent didn't point out is that his example wasn't an optimal case, as 120K is already above the social security cap and so not all taxed anyway).
* The second biggest reason is if the person has multiple sources of unrelated income - i.e. you sell Myghtymax Juicers and win prizes in Bass fishing tournaments, and you want it so being sued when a Juicer's lid flies off and puts someone's eye out can't take what you made catching fish.
Because the biggest effect of this fraud is to prop up share value in the stock market. Most of the largest, 'most stable', 'all-american' companies found in hundreds of retirement portfolios and mutual funds today have more IP assets than tangible assets (with Walmart, Caterpillar, and International Paper as a few possible exceptions).
If this becomes obvious fraud, recognised by most investors, then the DOW is worth maybe 4,000, less than half its current value, and the severe recession we are currently experiencing becomes The Great Depression.
There's a risk this will grow to where the government is so paranoid it does care how long the TV is on. Right now, there are estimated to be 8 million US citizens on the Main Core list (although this is just a Wikipedia entry, so of course it could be a gross exaggeration):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Core
How far is it from putting 8 million people on your critical threat list to making people document how much Wattage their TV draws so the government can tell if there's some other appliance running in tandem cycle and so determine if the citizen is watching wholesome major network programming or some subversive screed passed around on DVD? (Or worse, tivoing something illegally).
(WARNING: What follows is not a Slashmene, even though it begins like one. No joke here, Mkay?)
In Soviet Russia under Gorbachev, lots of non-party members had TVs and the KGB didn't care which channels they watched, but the government regulated many other items that could run with them much more strongly, such as PCs and Videotape machines. To do this, they had to indirectly deal with TVs - so much so, that this was a known procedure on raids: Units would take a portable color TV along. They would watch the glow of what might be a TV through apartment windows at the target address, and look to see if they could identify the channel a suspect was watching. If it's brightenings and dimmings didn't match any of the state channels, they would use this as grounds to enter on suspicion there was an unregistered computer or recording device in use.
Godel's theorem applies to mathematical formal systems that are sufficiently complex and powerful. 'Sufficiently' here is reached by formal systems far, far simpler and less powerful than the real number system. The only way Godel's theorem wouldn't apply to our models of the universe is if all the calculations used in all related physics could be encoded in a system much simpler than first year algebra or trig. You might get around it if you could describe all physics using only formulae that cannot under any circumstances what-so-ever generate an irrational number or any undefined value, that never require infinitesimals or infinities, and that can't even imply a potential need for imaginary numbers. Yes, Godel's theorem is that powerful.