Just remember what else trickled down. Drone aircraft for military use were originally unarmed, observation only craft. When they started mounting Hellfires and 25 mm cannon, there were a few debates about the legal niceties, but it basically just happened.
It's not that you're not right as far as you went, but the same may or may not be true of paid government contractors, people in private industry, or just people in general. There are many areas of work where selection pressure is low.
The point is, there is no one who meets the basic definitions of human or informed without there being bias. Arguing about how not being paid creates a particular bias, as you are doing, is meaningless. The person who is paying out for the service also has biases. Paying someone may give the recipient a reason to do the job besides tilting the situation towards their own bias, but it also gives them a reason to tilt the situation towards the payer's bias. You're promogulating a myth, that the powerful interests who would pay for the job themselves don't have their own bias to substitute as part of the pay process. Whether this money comes from the government or the industry, the fact that it comes from and is controlled by humans ensures biases will enter into it.
I'm not sure if you are arguing from a 'our capitalist masters are more objective than we can be' perspective, or claiming the 'dedicated servants of society' lose their biases when they are elected, but neither is at all true.
Money for this makes sense, but it won't do a damned thing one way or another to eliminate any biases. It may shuffle them around a bit, that's all.
Right, but this could be a problem if Fusion power ever passes break even. We could end up with a Hydrogen shortage and a planet covered with Helium waste. I can see it now. Dry, dusty streets with knee high mounds of Helium laying about where people have shoveled out their storage tanks. Huge piles of Helium tailings filling in our picturesque canyons and glens. And mark my words, it won't just be a water shortage, we'll be running out of Di-hydrogen Monoxide too, and probably getting short on Hydric Acid. We'd better start doing something NOW.
Oil is two or more separable problems. Gasoline has environmental effects - we will never get it to burn cleanly enough in an application such as individual autos if they are at all widespread. The same goes for natural gas, ethanol, and all the alternates that involve any hydrocarbon compound - a few people with badly tuned engines can produce pollutants equal to what thousands of well tuned engines will produce, and even well tuned engines aren't really good enough when you expand use to hundreds of millions of consumers.
Then there's the geopolitics of who has oil and who doesn't. That remains a problem unless you get a substantial majority of hydrocarbon compounds from elsewhere or get off of hydrocarbons.
Here's the crux - there is a very real chance of both problems becoming critical. Nobody can make a real, high accuracy prediction of just how much damage our species will take because of burning so much oil, and nobody can make a high accuracy prediction of WW3 starting in the Middle East. We can't say the current rate of oil burning will contribute exactly X meters to sea level rise by year Y, and neither can we say that there is X probability of a brushfire war going Nuclear in year Y, but in both cases, some strong, negative consequences seem at least fairly likely. I don't think there are any good arguments that an environmental crisis will definitely be less serious for our species than a Nuclear war, or vice versa. We simply have to rate both as very grave risks with rather indeterminate deadlines for us to act.
Every resource we waste finding ways to wean ourselves off of Mideast oil rather than off of oil in general is actually part of the bigger problem, because it does nothing about the environmental side, and we have better chances overall if we act as though the environmental side at least could be as critical.
What puzzles me though, is what I don't see. For the environment, we have a substantial minority arguing that global warming is a hoax, and acting like the many other environmental consequences of burning so much oil somehow won't ever really matter just so they don't count as global warming. For politics, I don't see anybody claiming that the Mideast can't be the trigger-point for a major war. I also don't see anyone claiming that it won't be a big deal just so long as such a war doesn't go nuclear.
My whole country reacted to a non-nuclear spill over of the continual middle eastern disagreement as though it were pretty damned serious back in 2001. Was there anybody announcing then that it didn't mean a major war was any closer, or the terrorists didn't use nukes so it was no big deal? What's made a substantial group behave this way when it comes to air pollution?
Any time anybody introduces any new product, it's safe to infer they think that the competition isn't unbeatably perfect for all customers. If I plant a grove of Winesap apples in an area where nobody is growing that particular variety, it's fair to assume I think there's demand, or my product will meet some as yet unmet need. That doesn't "kind of imply" that I think Gates Orchards is selling unsafe Golden Delicious or overly complicated Granny Smiths. The summary sounded as though somebody has an ax to grind.
The counter argument is that the photoshopped (or in this case literally cut and pasted) image does harm real children, just not necessarily the same level of harm as forcing one to actually participate in a sex act. There were two children whose heads were used, and while Miley is famous, the other one was 'just some kid'.
If those photos get out, both of them face some possible harm to reputations, but in particular, there is probably less chance that the 'just some kid' will have any help from society if, a year from now, somebody prints of a bunch of copies and pastes them up all over her school with no explanation, or some nutcase sees them on the Internet, recognizes her, and is delusional enough to think she really did whatever her head was spliced into and starts stalking her. Damaging someone's reputation or recklessly endangering them are still harms. The real law has to look at how likely such risks are before they dismiss the idea that harm occurred.
If you want to argue that the chances are very low in this case, or that the overall damage done to the children is a lot less than forcible participation in making such photos would normally be, you may well be right, but look at the law on reckless endangerment. One person can leave a car parked on the top of a hill in neutral and no handbrake set, pointed right at a schoolyard. Another person can forget to lock the gate on his backyard swimming pool and go on vacation. One feels much more significant than the other, but the law in most places counts both as reckless.
In this case, it could well get into a debate about just how obviously the images are composites, and the accused may be better off if his skill level is low. Whether any of these images have 'leaked' by some action of the accused will also likely matter. It's pretty soon to be sure they haven't been posted to Usenet or something, after all.
Before you argue that this is still a protected right, please consider this. If the accused in this case had swapped the children's heads onto clothed adult bodies doing nothing particularly sexual, and then swapped those images into ads for cigarettes, and those images had actually been used, he could have been prosecuted on any of several counts. The law could have easily construed that using a child's face in advertising cigarettes was targeting the ads at minors, there would be the problems with model releases, in Miley's case at least it would have been fraud to represent her as supporting a product and trying to cash in on her name that way, and there are probably other laws that apply.
If there's problems in such laws, remember those laws are not Obscenity Law, they relate to other aspects of normally protected speech that have nothing to do with sex and/or minors. Those laws get applied all the time to recognized political, religious or commercial speech, and come up in libel, slander, and fraud cases. Even if sexually related speech should have all the protections of other speech, sexual aspects shouldn't give such speech more protection than we would give to philosophical, scientific, or political speech. This is why I don't think we really want a rule that no actual sex involving the children means we just assume no other harm should even be considered. Even if doing something with photoshop or old fashioned scissors isn't over the line, we need the law to look at what happens if such images go public and determine where the line really is. For now, the accused seems clearly to have committed at least some elements of several crimes, and at the least, a grand jury needs to determine if there are overall grounds to proceed.
Quality v. Crap is simplistic, but if you put the whole model in more accurate, not oversimplified terms, what the AC is saying makes real sense.
Let's say I would give new series Dr. Who about a B- to C+ if I was rating it - not crap, but not great art either. I browse Amazon US and UK for prices and while I'm on UK, I notice some other items, i.e. Branaugh's 'Much Ado about Nothing', and 'Henry V'. Personally, I'd give both of those an A or even A+.
Now, I look at prices - the Shakespeare costs about 10 dollars US a DVD, and I can get about the same price if I order from the US supplier, or several alternates in the US, so I can easily get optimum shipping times and costs.
Now the Dr. Who. If I order the US version (NTSC), it's about 80 bucks a season. I could save money ordering from the UK for about 45$, but it's PAL format, so it will only play in my PC, and shipping times and costs will eat up part of my savings.
If I really mean my ratings, I'm going to snap up the Shakespeare, but when it comes to the 'Okay" stuff, I've now got to decide whether a season of Dr. Who is worth five times the cost I have just decided is a good deal for a great film, or even eight, and whether I want to endure the problems of region encoding and format incompatibilities and limits to the devices I can play them on.
It's just the sort of content that isn't crap, but isn't really your personal 'must have work of staggering genius', that gets hurt by all the industry mechanisms. The more complex they make it, the less I have any options I actually like. They aren't for example, offering to give me a discount on a downloadable copy for my iPod if I buy the original DVD. They aren't putting the same pricing discount structure in effect for my region as they do for some others (Isn't it funny the distributors will sell US films cheaper overseas, but won't reduce prices on imports to the US proportionately? The US consumer's job is to bear markups no one else has to bear, and keep paying full price when the economy sucks while that results in price drops eleswhere.).
Unless I'm an idiot who doesn't care about spending my entertainment budget at all wisely, and never bothers to think anything is really crap, I'm having to think rationally about many different choices, but doing that highlights the negatives of ALL the choices. The result is selectively turning off the non-stupid part of the consumer population.
They are making it the most complicated for the very items that I personally kind of like but don't think are a big deal. When figuring out how to buy those, or use them in all my devices, becomes a big deal I have a strong incentive to just not buy.
If you rate Japanese Animation highly enough, you may not mind jumping through a few hoops to get dubbed or subtitled copies. If Rocky Horror is one of your all time favorites, buying it on VHS, and again on DVD, and again on Blue Ray, may be tolerable. But if you are a potential customer for Anime, who's slightly interested but doesn't know that much about it or speak Japanese, region encoding issues may be what keeps the producers from ever making a sale to you. It's hard for the industry to alienate its dedicated fanbase - but they can sure alienate everyone else. Disney doesn't have to worry much about losing DVD sales to the people who come to the parks four times a year, nearly as much as losing the people who just buy an occasional Disney release. But guess which loss will break the company in the long term.
Neat idea, taken a little farther. An advanced civilization prevents a more primitive one from developing advanced physics by making astrophysical observations look funny locally. The primitives assume the weak anthropic principle holds, come up with all these really strange theories about cosmic strings, dark energy and such, and never become competition.
It does pose an occasional hardship. I've applied at places that were totally clueless before. When your interviewer asks if you've ever had any management experience and you tell him you were a company commander, and he gets this blank look and you have to explain how you supervised and directed 90 or so people and had legal responsibility for over 1 billion dollars of equipment, and he still doesn't really see how that's management, and he says "But did you ever have to make any life or death decisions?", you don't direct him to an FSO or anybody else over the classified bits, you just leave, because if you put this clown in touch with anybody, he will screw you up somehow. I've bailed on four or five job interviews because the guy asking the questions had no idea that anybody really had a classified background, in businesses where he damned well should have. Never tried to get any of them fired, nor sued the companies involved, but maybe someone should have done that too. And no, I don't think these were people playing dumb to check my ethics, I think they were just dumb and not very ethical themselves, and some of them had probably had as many briefings and signings as professor Roth.
Honestly, would you let this guy out first, or are there some people you'd put ahead of him? Even if we're jailing more people than we should, is he one of the ones we shouldn't?
One of the factors pushing string theory is experiments that suggest 'something' is wrong with the standard model, without really pointing to a particular flaw. A result that supports the standard model is a result that makes various string theories less attractive. There are still some string theory variants that look interesting in the light of astrophysics (a few because of dark matter related data, but especially a lot from dark energy related data). This is one less reason to focus on string theory because of sub-atomic physics experiments.
Also, this experiment has a longer run and more 'robust' data collection than the one it conflicts with. There are real reasons to think this one is the more meaningful result, which is why it's being suggested the earlier one may have errors. If you are looking at a tiny disagreement with the standard model, say 0.001%, and your experimental error is possibly as big as the disagreement, that's not very helpful. If your experimental error is a full order of magnitude better, whatever you provided proof for becomes meaningful. Much beyond that, the results are 'very significant', all work in related areas has to take them into account, and the people who produced them are possible Nobel recipients.
There's some truth in that, but probably not as much as you think. This case also involved a really stupid legal argument on the part of the defense over constitutional rights, one with no real purpose except to muddy the waters. The accused also had indicated by public statements well before the trial that they would welcome being charged as the case would give them free publicity, and that they were more interested in making money off of any trial than the issues involved. Suppose some organization such as the ACLU got involved. Are they defending a legitimate first amendment right to free speech, or the illegitimate argument equating individual rights to privacy with a right to produce anything you want for those individuals?
You know, there have been all sorts of cases where a constitutional issue may have existed, but the accused also committed perjury, had a history as a pathological liar, or was charged with very serious other things where the constitutional issues weren't involved. Maybe some of them should have been fought to the supreme court to protect free speech, but a lot of them simply wouldn't have resulted in a free speech victory. The very persons you would defend wouldn't help you make the argument. I know Larry Flynt said he was the worst of them all, but he went into court caring about the rights issues and willing to work with the people who also cared.
Let's assume there was nothing actually slipped into her drink. Professional filmmakers, including a lot of XXX, don't get a model's release signed by anyone who has used drugs or alcohol in the hours before. They don't allow booze or drugs actually on the set. They take the time to check proof of age and consent, because they have to take the time to check a current HIV test anyways. They are regulated by laws, not just ones for the adult industry, but ones that apply to all film studios or professional photographers. The laws that say you check HIV status are part of workplace safety laws that affect, for another case, any stuntperson who might get a bleeding injury. The laws about booze and drugs are film industry wide, although I recall Nina Hartley once explaining that the adult industry had more incentive to stay squeaky clean on them than anyone, so nobody used them as an excuse to shut a production down. This isn't just about a few people conducting a normal private transaction (like me taking a date out to a bar). On one side, we have a business, bound by special regulations that affect all such businesses and not just the adult subset.
You do know that the law lets us charge the shooter, and then charge the people who pressured him to do it too? I mean that's basic to English and American common law, and if you're arguing that standard law somehow isn't treating personal responsibility properly, I've got to ask just what you want to substitute. In court, the 'coerced into porn' cases usually involve assigning personal responsibility to everyone, and it's quite possible for a jury to hold the young woman responsible for her own decisions, and the film producers for theirs, at the same time.
You might also want to be careful about the 'so full of it's and 'high school's. You're in the extreme minority position if you want to argue that personal responsibility overrides all related common law. When you're defending an unusual or unpopular viewpoint, with possibly extreme consequences, is no time to descend to personal attacks.
You really did stick up for criminals and rapists, repeatedly. It took a lot of detailed explanation before you finally got that you were sticking up for criminals and rapists, in fact I don't think you really get it even now. Even when you finally admit some validity for the other guy's point, you're still throwing back terms like meatbag. You earned it, the person you're throwing it back at didn't. You're being just as bad as those ignorant people on juries who bought the "She was asking for it by the way she was dressed" argument.
I hope I still have some empathy for you. I won't call you names, and I hope you get empathy as painlessly as possible. Here's a hint though. When you really get that you really did all the things people are accusing you of, it's time to get a little humility and figure out how to appologise in a way that proves you learned something, not throw insults back. The insult just says you don't really think you were wrong at all.
The right to privacy came up because the pornographers brought it up (or rather their legal defense did). The defense claimed that since individual viewers had a right to privacy in their own homes, that individual right would be abridged if the producer/distributer wasn't also extended a right of privacy in creating the work. While this next point wasn't specifically argued by the defense, if that were indeed true, one consequence would be the producer wouldn't have to show model releases that proved all actors were over 18 on demand of law enforcement.
That's why the appeals court had to rule - a ridiculous claim by a defense lawyer trying to stretch the hell out of an existing right, a claim with neither law or logic to support it.
Strong words, such as 'fool', are what a lot of people on Slashdot would call Microsoft bashing, EXCEPT this time, such words are eminently justified by the gravity of the situation. This time, you could pass a lot of the blame to other people and other software, and even then, Microsoft's share would be sufficient to justify words such as fool. In fact, it's hard to see how Microsoft's role in the English Stockmarket glitch could even conceivably be small enough that they don't deserve everything that's being said here. If you go solely by MS's own press releases and advertising claims, and how much they charged the exchange for their software, that's enough.
However, in the summary, shouldn't the excerpt be in double quotes? Single quotes make it look like a paraphrase, and it is intended to be an actual quote from the source. Right or wrong, these strong words are from the original article, not the Slashdot submitter.
HIV mutates a lot, but a whole lot of that is thought to be stochastic mutation. The most basic version of this would be where type A becomes type B, but type B also mutates back into type A just as fast, so after a few dozen generations, the population reaches an equilibrium, half of each type. The point is, it's not evolutionary mutation - you have the random mutation part, but until there's some sort of selection pressure, you don't have evolution. There's a difference between having to deal with non directed mutation (which is what stochastic means in this context) and actual evolution. HIV mutates a lot - HIV is NOT evolving rapidly.
HIV appears to have four types (in this case, of outer protein coats) which are usually called A, B, C & D, but again, nothing is selecting for one type over the others and there's theoretically no pressure for HIV to evolve because of this particular mutation. Some flus have a lot more than four types. Right now, the swine flue that has people worried is type H1N1, and there are six or seven types just for the N part of that classification, and maybe 30 or so total type combinations possible.
A highly effective vaccine in this case would probably require it make the body's immune system target some part of HIV's protein coat that doesn't usually mutate, just so it doesn't have to fiddle around dealing with the cycle of forward and backwards mutation.
If it doesn't work, they don't end up catching HIV, because they already have. Only if the vaccine is actually harmful and not just ineffectual are they put at greater risk. Animal testing has already proved that some kinds of harmfulness aren't possible here, so all phase one is doing is looking for a quite low chance of an unforeseen harmful effect. The researchers will watch to see if there's a large improvement in health of the subjects, just in case, but that's not the primary goal yet.
I'd suggest reading up on Thalidomide to see why this is necessary. For the short version, Thalidomide doesn't cause birth defects in most animals, but does in humans. A few species such as horses are at risk, but those species weren't routinely used for animal testing back then. Sometimes in developing new medicine, you get a situation where it's damned near impossible to catch harmfulness before you go to human testing. Because of Thalidomide and some other cases that could have been as bad, animal testing is done on a lot more different species, and human testing is usually done on select groups before it is applied to the general population. It's now common to not test on people who are or might become pregnant in the first series of human tests, or to test only on young people, or people who don't have certain other diseases.
In phase 2, the vaccine would be tested in ways that actually measure its effectiveness. Note that the vaccine could have had moderately bad results on a limited percentage of people in phase 1. but also showed some actual promise that might make it worth developing anyway - that's why the researchers do watch for other effects and not just harm even in phase 1.
Makes you wonder though, is it possible for a worker to wander away from her own colony and be accepted into another? Could that even be happening regularly? How about on rare occasions? If a queen dies unexpectedly, would a whole bunch of workers just move to a colony that still had one? How likely is it that drones released from one colony will fertilize local queens and how likely distant ones - is this different from other ant types? Do this bunch's drones and pre-mating queens fly farther from the parent nest, confident they will still find potential mates?
Individual ants really have no idea what's going on, but ant organizations are generally something that exists at higher levels than single ants even know they are part of (admittedly very different from most human organizations). But, look at a human organization, such as the Elks club. Not a lot of humans are affected by it, and most of us don't know how many local chapters their are, or if the whole is international in scope or not. You could watch a whole lot of humans for a whole lot of years before figuring out that a few check in at Elk's clubs any time they travel to a distant city. Maybe there are more real differences at the organizational levels than would show up frequently in watching a few colonies for a few months or even years. This could be more than we are likely to have seen yet, and more than 'just' similar scents may be involved.
I'm not sure why people make the complaint that some scientific research (like this) is a waste of time.
I know some scientists who are very human focused. They research something, say cancer, because they really want to help some of the victims they know. If they aren't focused on particularly immediate human scale problems, still they try to watch for ways whatever they are doing can contribute to human happiness or sheer survival. I know others who are mostly value neutral. To one of them, you could talk about breakthroughs in cloning, and he'd ask if they had any uses for fruit-fly studies and if it didn't, he really wouldn't care one way or another. That's pretty much distanced from a 'normal human focus', but the worst thing this guy could possibly do to anyone would be to maybe convince congress to spend a little too much on fruit-fly research. Why is this a big deal in evaluating a scientist?
I mean, I know some businessmen who give away extra shoes to needy children. I know a lot more who are focused on the bottom line. Almost never do I hear the ones who are focused on their own profits accused of wasting their lives or the time or money of everyone else. Some people may accuse them of greed, but not of being out of touch with human concerns. For lots of professions, having a focus on the bigger picture, thinking about the long term consequences of what you are doing is totally optional, and nobody expects to hear a phrase such as 'for the good of the whole human race'. Nobody criticizes a lawyer for focusing on inter-business contract law instead of becoming a crusading DA and putting more criminals away. Nobody really argues that cosmetic surgeons are evil for not doing heart surgery instead. It's just something in the way they think about science.
I know some politicians who, when they first heard about cloning, jumped to the idea of building clone armies to conquer the world thirty seconds later. I have never met a biologist who thought that way. If some people slam any scientist who isn't focused on local, immediate, human issues, why do those same people so seldom worry about some politicians who sound like movie cliche mad scientists?
I usually argue that research such as this example will probably feed back into the whole institution that is science, and benefit humanity in the long run anyway. I still think that's true, but let's assume I'm totally wrong on that point, and it and things like it will totally waste 0.0002% of the world's budgets, and accomplish nothing of significant interest to the bulk of humanity, ever. That makes it about like model trains. Who goes around bemoaning the vast, inhumane waste that is model train hobbydom?
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Just remember what else trickled down. Drone aircraft for military use were originally unarmed, observation only craft. When they started mounting Hellfires and 25 mm cannon, there were a few debates about the legal niceties, but it basically just happened.
It's not that you're not right as far as you went, but the same may or may not be true of paid government contractors, people in private industry, or just people in general. There are many areas of work where selection pressure is low.
The point is, there is no one who meets the basic definitions of human or informed without there being bias. Arguing about how not being paid creates a particular bias, as you are doing, is meaningless. The person who is paying out for the service also has biases. Paying someone may give the recipient a reason to do the job besides tilting the situation towards their own bias, but it also gives them a reason to tilt the situation towards the payer's bias. You're promogulating a myth, that the powerful interests who would pay for the job themselves don't have their own bias to substitute as part of the pay process. Whether this money comes from the government or the industry, the fact that it comes from and is controlled by humans ensures biases will enter into it.
I'm not sure if you are arguing from a 'our capitalist masters are more objective than we can be' perspective, or claiming the 'dedicated servants of society' lose their biases when they are elected, but neither is at all true.
Money for this makes sense, but it won't do a damned thing one way or another to eliminate any biases. It may shuffle them around a bit, that's all.
Right, but this could be a problem if Fusion power ever passes break even. We could end up with a Hydrogen shortage and a planet covered with Helium waste. I can see it now. Dry, dusty streets with knee high mounds of Helium laying about where people have shoveled out their storage tanks. Huge piles of Helium tailings filling in our picturesque canyons and glens. And mark my words, it won't just be a water shortage, we'll be running out of Di-hydrogen Monoxide too, and probably getting short on Hydric Acid. We'd better start doing something NOW.
Oil is two or more separable problems. Gasoline has environmental effects - we will never get it to burn cleanly enough in an application such as individual autos if they are at all widespread. The same goes for natural gas, ethanol, and all the alternates that involve any hydrocarbon compound - a few people with badly tuned engines can produce pollutants equal to what thousands of well tuned engines will produce, and even well tuned engines aren't really good enough when you expand use to hundreds of millions of consumers.
Then there's the geopolitics of who has oil and who doesn't. That remains a problem unless you get a substantial majority of hydrocarbon compounds from elsewhere or get off of hydrocarbons.
Here's the crux - there is a very real chance of both problems becoming critical. Nobody can make a real, high accuracy prediction of just how much damage our species will take because of burning so much oil, and nobody can make a high accuracy prediction of WW3 starting in the Middle East. We can't say the current rate of oil burning will contribute exactly X meters to sea level rise by year Y, and neither can we say that there is X probability of a brushfire war going Nuclear in year Y, but in both cases, some strong, negative consequences seem at least fairly likely. I don't think there are any good arguments that an environmental crisis will definitely be less serious for our species than a Nuclear war, or vice versa. We simply have to rate both as very grave risks with rather indeterminate deadlines for us to act.
Every resource we waste finding ways to wean ourselves off of Mideast oil rather than off of oil in general is actually part of the bigger problem, because it does nothing about the environmental side, and we have better chances overall if we act as though the environmental side at least could be as critical.
What puzzles me though, is what I don't see. For the environment, we have a substantial minority arguing that global warming is a hoax, and acting like the many other environmental consequences of burning so much oil somehow won't ever really matter just so they don't count as global warming. For politics, I don't see anybody claiming that the Mideast can't be the trigger-point for a major war. I also don't see anyone claiming that it won't be a big deal just so long as such a war doesn't go nuclear.
My whole country reacted to a non-nuclear spill over of the continual middle eastern disagreement as though it were pretty damned serious back in 2001. Was there anybody announcing then that it didn't mean a major war was any closer, or the terrorists didn't use nukes so it was no big deal? What's made a substantial group behave this way when it comes to air pollution?
The web is not the OS, but for a product aimed first at netbooks, the web is more important than for a product aimed at stand alone PCs.
The web is not the OS. but the less a person plans on running workware, bulk data storage, or games, the more the web apps are all that they need.
Any time anybody introduces any new product, it's safe to infer they think that the competition isn't unbeatably perfect for all customers. If I plant a grove of Winesap apples in an area where nobody is growing that particular variety, it's fair to assume I think there's demand, or my product will meet some as yet unmet need. That doesn't "kind of imply" that I think Gates Orchards is selling unsafe Golden Delicious or overly complicated Granny Smiths. The summary sounded as though somebody has an ax to grind.
The counter argument is that the photoshopped (or in this case literally cut and pasted) image does harm real children, just not necessarily the same level of harm as forcing one to actually participate in a sex act. There were two children whose heads were used, and while Miley is famous, the other one was 'just some kid'.
If those photos get out, both of them face some possible harm to reputations, but in particular, there is probably less chance that the 'just some kid' will have any help from society if, a year from now, somebody prints of a bunch of copies and pastes them up all over her school with no explanation, or some nutcase sees them on the Internet, recognizes her, and is delusional enough to think she really did whatever her head was spliced into and starts stalking her. Damaging someone's reputation or recklessly endangering them are still harms. The real law has to look at how likely such risks are before they dismiss the idea that harm occurred.
If you want to argue that the chances are very low in this case, or that the overall damage done to the children is a lot less than forcible participation in making such photos would normally be, you may well be right, but look at the law on reckless endangerment. One person can leave a car parked on the top of a hill in neutral and no handbrake set, pointed right at a schoolyard. Another person can forget to lock the gate on his backyard swimming pool and go on vacation. One feels much more significant than the other, but the law in most places counts both as reckless.
In this case, it could well get into a debate about just how obviously the images are composites, and the accused may be better off if his skill level is low. Whether any of these images have 'leaked' by some action of the accused will also likely matter. It's pretty soon to be sure they haven't been posted to Usenet or something, after all.
Before you argue that this is still a protected right, please consider this. If the accused in this case had swapped the children's heads onto clothed adult bodies doing nothing particularly sexual, and then swapped those images into ads for cigarettes, and those images had actually been used, he could have been prosecuted on any of several counts. The law could have easily construed that using a child's face in advertising cigarettes was targeting the ads at minors, there would be the problems with model releases, in Miley's case at least it would have been fraud to represent her as supporting a product and trying to cash in on her name that way, and there are probably other laws that apply.
If there's problems in such laws, remember those laws are not Obscenity Law, they relate to other aspects of normally protected speech that have nothing to do with sex and/or minors. Those laws get applied all the time to recognized political, religious or commercial speech, and come up in libel, slander, and fraud cases. Even if sexually related speech should have all the protections of other speech, sexual aspects shouldn't give such speech more protection than we would give to philosophical, scientific, or political speech. This is why I don't think we really want a rule that no actual sex involving the children means we just assume no other harm should even be considered. Even if doing something with photoshop or old fashioned scissors isn't over the line, we need the law to look at what happens if such images go public and determine where the line really is. For now, the accused seems clearly to have committed at least some elements of several crimes, and at the least, a grand jury needs to determine if there are overall grounds to proceed.
Quality v. Crap is simplistic, but if you put the whole model in more accurate, not oversimplified terms, what the AC is saying makes real sense.
Let's say I would give new series Dr. Who about a B- to C+ if I was rating it - not crap, but not great art either. I browse Amazon US and UK for prices and while I'm on UK, I notice some other items, i.e. Branaugh's 'Much Ado about Nothing', and 'Henry V'. Personally, I'd give both of those an A or even A+.
Now, I look at prices - the Shakespeare costs about 10 dollars US a DVD, and I can get about the same price if I order from the US supplier, or several alternates in the US, so I can easily get optimum shipping times and costs.
Now the Dr. Who. If I order the US version (NTSC), it's about 80 bucks a season. I could save money ordering from the UK for about 45$, but it's PAL format, so it will only play in my PC, and shipping times and costs will eat up part of my savings.
If I really mean my ratings, I'm going to snap up the Shakespeare, but when it comes to the 'Okay" stuff, I've now got to decide whether a season of Dr. Who is worth five times the cost I have just decided is a good deal for a great film, or even eight, and whether I want to endure the problems of region encoding and format incompatibilities and limits to the devices I can play them on.
It's just the sort of content that isn't crap, but isn't really your personal 'must have work of staggering genius', that gets hurt by all the industry mechanisms. The more complex they make it, the less I have any options I actually like. They aren't for example, offering to give me a discount on a downloadable copy for my iPod if I buy the original DVD. They aren't putting the same pricing discount structure in effect for my region as they do for some others (Isn't it funny the distributors will sell US films cheaper overseas, but won't reduce prices on imports to the US proportionately? The US consumer's job is to bear markups no one else has to bear, and keep paying full price when the economy sucks while that results in price drops eleswhere.).
Unless I'm an idiot who doesn't care about spending my entertainment budget at all wisely, and never bothers to think anything is really crap, I'm having to think rationally about many different choices, but doing that highlights the negatives of ALL the choices. The result is selectively turning off the non-stupid part of the consumer population.
They are making it the most complicated for the very items that I personally kind of like but don't think are a big deal. When figuring out how to buy those, or use them in all my devices, becomes a big deal I have a strong incentive to just not buy.
If you rate Japanese Animation highly enough, you may not mind jumping through a few hoops to get dubbed or subtitled copies. If Rocky Horror is one of your all time favorites, buying it on VHS, and again on DVD, and again on Blue Ray, may be tolerable. But if you are a potential customer for Anime, who's slightly interested but doesn't know that much about it or speak Japanese, region encoding issues may be what keeps the producers from ever making a sale to you. It's hard for the industry to alienate its dedicated fanbase - but they can sure alienate everyone else. Disney doesn't have to worry much about losing DVD sales to the people who come to the parks four times a year, nearly as much as losing the people who just buy an occasional Disney release. But guess which loss will break the company in the long term.
Neat idea, taken a little farther. An advanced civilization prevents a more primitive one from developing advanced physics by making astrophysical observations look funny locally. The primitives assume the weak anthropic principle holds, come up with all these really strange theories about cosmic strings, dark energy and such, and never become competition.
Look, we'll tell you what the thump on the roof was AFTER you prove you're not a Chines or Iranian grad student, and not until then - Got it?.
It does pose an occasional hardship. I've applied at places that were totally clueless before. When your interviewer asks if you've ever had any management experience and you tell him you were a company commander, and he gets this blank look and you have to explain how you supervised and directed 90 or so people and had legal responsibility for over 1 billion dollars of equipment, and he still doesn't really see how that's management, and he says "But did you ever have to make any life or death decisions?", you don't direct him to an FSO or anybody else over the classified bits, you just leave, because if you put this clown in touch with anybody, he will screw you up somehow. I've bailed on four or five job interviews because the guy asking the questions had no idea that anybody really had a classified background, in businesses where he damned well should have. Never tried to get any of them fired, nor sued the companies involved, but maybe someone should have done that too. And no, I don't think these were people playing dumb to check my ethics, I think they were just dumb and not very ethical themselves, and some of them had probably had as many briefings and signings as professor Roth.
Honestly, would you let this guy out first, or are there some people you'd put ahead of him? Even if we're jailing more people than we should, is he one of the ones we shouldn't?
One of the factors pushing string theory is experiments that suggest 'something' is wrong with the standard model, without really pointing to a particular flaw. A result that supports the standard model is a result that makes various string theories less attractive. There are still some string theory variants that look interesting in the light of astrophysics (a few because of dark matter related data, but especially a lot from dark energy related data). This is one less reason to focus on string theory because of sub-atomic physics experiments.
Also, this experiment has a longer run and more 'robust' data collection than the one it conflicts with. There are real reasons to think this one is the more meaningful result, which is why it's being suggested the earlier one may have errors. If you are looking at a tiny disagreement with the standard model, say 0.001%, and your experimental error is possibly as big as the disagreement, that's not very helpful. If your experimental error is a full order of magnitude better, whatever you provided proof for becomes meaningful. Much beyond that, the results are 'very significant', all work in related areas has to take them into account, and the people who produced them are possible Nobel recipients.
There's some truth in that, but probably not as much as you think. This case also involved a really stupid legal argument on the part of the defense over constitutional rights, one with no real purpose except to muddy the waters. The accused also had indicated by public statements well before the trial that they would welcome being charged as the case would give them free publicity, and that they were more interested in making money off of any trial than the issues involved. Suppose some organization such as the ACLU got involved. Are they defending a legitimate first amendment right to free speech, or the illegitimate argument equating individual rights to privacy with a right to produce anything you want for those individuals?
You know, there have been all sorts of cases where a constitutional issue may have existed, but the accused also committed perjury, had a history as a pathological liar, or was charged with very serious other things where the constitutional issues weren't involved. Maybe some of them should have been fought to the supreme court to protect free speech, but a lot of them simply wouldn't have resulted in a free speech victory. The very persons you would defend wouldn't help you make the argument. I know Larry Flynt said he was the worst of them all, but he went into court caring about the rights issues and willing to work with the people who also cared.
Let's assume there was nothing actually slipped into her drink. Professional filmmakers, including a lot of XXX, don't get a model's release signed by anyone who has used drugs or alcohol in the hours before. They don't allow booze or drugs actually on the set. They take the time to check proof of age and consent, because they have to take the time to check a current HIV test anyways. They are regulated by laws, not just ones for the adult industry, but ones that apply to all film studios or professional photographers. The laws that say you check HIV status are part of workplace safety laws that affect, for another case, any stuntperson who might get a bleeding injury. The laws about booze and drugs are film industry wide, although I recall Nina Hartley once explaining that the adult industry had more incentive to stay squeaky clean on them than anyone, so nobody used them as an excuse to shut a production down. This isn't just about a few people conducting a normal private transaction (like me taking a date out to a bar). On one side, we have a business, bound by special regulations that affect all such businesses and not just the adult subset.
You do know that the law lets us charge the shooter, and then charge the people who pressured him to do it too? I mean that's basic to English and American common law, and if you're arguing that standard law somehow isn't treating personal responsibility properly, I've got to ask just what you want to substitute. In court, the 'coerced into porn' cases usually involve assigning personal responsibility to everyone, and it's quite possible for a jury to hold the young woman responsible for her own decisions, and the film producers for theirs, at the same time.
You might also want to be careful about the 'so full of it's and 'high school's. You're in the extreme minority position if you want to argue that personal responsibility overrides all related common law. When you're defending an unusual or unpopular viewpoint, with possibly extreme consequences, is no time to descend to personal attacks.
You really did stick up for criminals and rapists, repeatedly. It took a lot of detailed explanation before you finally got that you were sticking up for criminals and rapists, in fact I don't think you really get it even now. Even when you finally admit some validity for the other guy's point, you're still throwing back terms like meatbag. You earned it, the person you're throwing it back at didn't. You're being just as bad as those ignorant people on juries who bought the "She was asking for it by the way she was dressed" argument.
I hope I still have some empathy for you. I won't call you names, and I hope you get empathy as painlessly as possible. Here's a hint though. When you really get that you really did all the things people are accusing you of, it's time to get a little humility and figure out how to appologise in a way that proves you learned something, not throw insults back. The insult just says you don't really think you were wrong at all.
The right to privacy came up because the pornographers brought it up (or rather their legal defense did). The defense claimed that since individual viewers had a right to privacy in their own homes, that individual right would be abridged if the producer/distributer wasn't also extended a right of privacy in creating the work. While this next point wasn't specifically argued by the defense, if that were indeed true, one consequence would be the producer wouldn't have to show model releases that proved all actors were over 18 on demand of law enforcement.
That's why the appeals court had to rule - a ridiculous claim by a defense lawyer trying to stretch the hell out of an existing right, a claim with neither law or logic to support it.
The material found obscene:
Forced Entry: The film depicts the beating, rape and murder of women by a serial killer, who is eventually killed by a mob of vigilantes.
So no, it wasn't the titties, and there were problems with killing people in movies. The court did exactly what you were complaining it didn't do.
(And I deserve your five +1 informatives, not that I'm going to get them on slashdot).
Strong words, such as 'fool', are what a lot of people on Slashdot would call Microsoft bashing, EXCEPT this time, such words are eminently justified by the gravity of the situation. This time, you could pass a lot of the blame to other people and other software, and even then, Microsoft's share would be sufficient to justify words such as fool. In fact, it's hard to see how Microsoft's role in the English Stockmarket glitch could even conceivably be small enough that they don't deserve everything that's being said here. If you go solely by MS's own press releases and advertising claims, and how much they charged the exchange for their software, that's enough.
However, in the summary, shouldn't the excerpt be in double quotes? Single quotes make it look like a paraphrase, and it is intended to be an actual quote from the source. Right or wrong, these strong words are from the original article, not the Slashdot submitter.
HIV mutates a lot, but a whole lot of that is thought to be stochastic mutation. The most basic version of this would be where type A becomes type B, but type B also mutates back into type A just as fast, so after a few dozen generations, the population reaches an equilibrium, half of each type. The point is, it's not evolutionary mutation - you have the random mutation part, but until there's some sort of selection pressure, you don't have evolution. There's a difference between having to deal with non directed mutation (which is what stochastic means in this context) and actual evolution. HIV mutates a lot - HIV is NOT evolving rapidly.
HIV appears to have four types (in this case, of outer protein coats) which are usually called A, B, C & D, but again, nothing is selecting for one type over the others and there's theoretically no pressure for HIV to evolve because of this particular mutation. Some flus have a lot more than four types. Right now, the swine flue that has people worried is type H1N1, and there are six or seven types just for the N part of that classification, and maybe 30 or so total type combinations possible.
A highly effective vaccine in this case would probably require it make the body's immune system target some part of HIV's protein coat that doesn't usually mutate, just so it doesn't have to fiddle around dealing with the cycle of forward and backwards mutation.
If it doesn't work, they don't end up catching HIV, because they already have.
Only if the vaccine is actually harmful and not just ineffectual are they put at greater risk. Animal testing has already proved that some kinds of harmfulness aren't possible here, so all phase one is doing is looking for a quite low chance of an unforeseen harmful effect. The researchers will watch to see if there's a large improvement in health of the subjects, just in case, but that's not the primary goal yet.
I'd suggest reading up on Thalidomide to see why this is necessary. For the short version, Thalidomide doesn't cause birth defects in most animals, but does in humans. A few species such as horses are at risk, but those species weren't routinely used for animal testing back then. Sometimes in developing new medicine, you get a situation where it's damned near impossible to catch harmfulness before you go to human testing. Because of Thalidomide and some other cases that could have been as bad, animal testing is done on a lot more different species, and human testing is usually done on select groups before it is applied to the general population. It's now common to not test on people who are or might become pregnant in the first series of human tests, or to test only on young people, or people who don't have certain other diseases.
In phase 2, the vaccine would be tested in ways that actually measure its effectiveness. Note that the vaccine could have had moderately bad results on a limited percentage of people in phase 1. but also showed some actual promise that might make it worth developing anyway - that's why the researchers do watch for other effects and not just harm even in phase 1.
Makes you wonder though, is it possible for a worker to wander away from her own colony and be accepted into another? Could that even be happening regularly? How about on rare occasions? If a queen dies unexpectedly, would a whole bunch of workers just move to a colony that still had one? How likely is it that drones released from one colony will fertilize local queens and how likely distant ones - is this different from other ant types? Do this bunch's drones and pre-mating queens fly farther from the parent nest, confident they will still find potential mates?
Individual ants really have no idea what's going on, but ant organizations are generally something that exists at higher levels than single ants even know they are part of (admittedly very different from most human organizations). But, look at a human organization, such as the Elks club. Not a lot of humans are affected by it, and most of us don't know how many local chapters their are, or if the whole is international in scope or not. You could watch a whole lot of humans for a whole lot of years before figuring out that a few check in at Elk's clubs any time they travel to a distant city. Maybe there are more real differences at the organizational levels than would show up frequently in watching a few colonies for a few months or even years. This could be more than we are likely to have seen yet, and more than 'just' similar scents may be involved.
I'm not sure why people make the complaint that some scientific research (like this) is a waste of time.
I know some scientists who are very human focused. They research something, say cancer, because they really want to help some of the victims they know. If they aren't focused on particularly immediate human scale problems, still they try to watch for ways whatever they are doing can contribute to human happiness or sheer survival. I know others who are mostly value neutral. To one of them, you could talk about breakthroughs in cloning, and he'd ask if they had any uses for fruit-fly studies and if it didn't, he really wouldn't care one way or another. That's pretty much distanced from a 'normal human focus', but the worst thing this guy could possibly do to anyone would be to maybe convince congress to spend a little too much on fruit-fly research. Why is this a big deal in evaluating a scientist?
I mean, I know some businessmen who give away extra shoes to needy children. I know a lot more who are focused on the bottom line. Almost never do I hear the ones who are focused on their own profits accused of wasting their lives or the time or money of everyone else. Some people may accuse them of greed, but not of being out of touch with human concerns. For lots of professions, having a focus on the bigger picture, thinking about the long term consequences of what you are doing is totally optional, and nobody expects to hear a phrase such as 'for the good of the whole human race'. Nobody criticizes a lawyer for focusing on inter-business contract law instead of becoming a crusading DA and putting more criminals away. Nobody really argues that cosmetic surgeons are evil for not doing heart surgery instead. It's just something in the way they think about science.
I know some politicians who, when they first heard about cloning, jumped to the idea of building clone armies to conquer the world thirty seconds later. I have never met a biologist who thought that way. If some people slam any scientist who isn't focused on local, immediate, human issues, why do those same people so seldom worry about some politicians who sound like movie cliche mad scientists?
I usually argue that research such as this example will probably feed back into the whole institution that is science, and benefit humanity in the long run anyway. I still think that's true, but let's assume I'm totally wrong on that point, and it and things like it will totally waste 0.0002% of the world's budgets, and accomplish nothing of significant interest to the bulk of humanity, ever. That makes it about like model trains. Who goes around bemoaning the vast, inhumane waste that is model train hobbydom?