Or we should all become polytheists, because God has open-sourced the project, and it's getting small and streamlined because of the 'many eyes' effect.
No, we don't mean progress towards something 'better'.
Evolution proceeds only towards a local optimum, never towards anything abstractly 'better' or 'more perfect'. Evolution has no interests, long term goals, or overall arrow of direction. That's standard. That's the version of the theory Darwin and Wallace framed, that's what Sir Francis Crick assumed to be true doing his work, that's what Richard Dawkins would argue right now.
Those same people would tell you evolution is not affected in the slightest by people changing environmental conditions so that some things which were once major disadvantages are not anymore, and that there is no 'should have died' in the theory.
I say this, because I disagree with some ideas people, including some prominent scientists, legitimately think are part of the theory. But usually if I bring that up on slashdot, I get negative modded to oblivion by people just like you. It's like being modded down for disagreeing with the "Standard Democratic Party" line, only to find out that the guys doing it also claim that party-line is "Strong spending for defense, no money for social programs". I never get to debate or discuss any real issues relating to Evolution, because by the time somebody who understands and agrees with the real theory is reading this thread, the whole topic will have drowned under dozens of mods from people who think they are defending Evolution from "Weirdo Creationists", when what they are defending is a weirdo theory with progress, devolution, and a bunch of other kerfluffle that has nothing to do with science.
Was Boole himself a computer scientist? People keep calling him a philosopher or at least a mathematician last I looked. A universal Turing machine didn't start out as something you buy from Dell, more as a totally abstract philosophical model almost nobody expected at first to lead to a concrete instantization as a constructible object. What programming languages did Babbage and Lovelace know, or was their work more on the level of abstract thinking about thought than that? Thinking about thought - by some, that's the very definition of philosophy. Where should we file "Godel, Escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid"?
What you're saying actually fits the concept of scientists in general. Science and Technology are basically very different things throughout human culture, but non-scientists and non-engineers almost never know it, and scientists and engineers themselves sometimes lose sight of it.
A geologist doesn't get oil to market without a petroleum engineer or two getting involved. A Molecular Biologist doesn't test a potential breakthrough on Humans without MDs first being included.
The law sets professional standards for MDs, engineers, lawyers and such, codifies ethics, and requires liscenses and performance bonds. Nobody makes a Physicist pass a state board to practice. Governments don't spell out specific ethical requirements for Chemists (much - there's some specifics for scientists who work for governments.).
Of course there are exceptions. Theoreticians in Astronomy are often assisted by observers who are themselves full fledged Astronomers (but then, Astronomy doesn't produce a lot of technological spinoffs, and seldom indeed does an astronomer propose a new theory that needs an industrial engineer to deal with scaling up a process to commercial size). Architects and Civil Architectural Engineers face most of the same legal requirements whether they work together or separately. And we are just now bringing software engineers into a legal model where they are beginning to be responsible for deaths and massive damage in the way, say, aeronautical engineers are.
In some ways, Lawyers are the engineer equivalents to legislators and judges. In some ways, the individual sciences aren't professions in the way the engineering branches are (there may be legal professional standards for acting as a scientist, as in how to properly publish or conduct peer review, but how many standards are there specific to some branch of science?). Military Officers would be the approximate equivalent of Engineers to their presumably more scientist-like civilian oversight.
The RIAA has done some serious nit-picking of its own. Given their behavior, the question becomes, does the defense stoop to their level, stay scrupulously above that level, or... .... only nit-pick when they think the judge won't censor them, or they think the censoring may come, but they can win something on appeal, or the RIAA will have to argue enough facts to settle the nit-pick that the judge or jury will become more educated, or the RIAA, in arguing against the nit-picks, will introduce claims that go against some of their own prior claims or undermine their position, etc.
Those last two rules might make a great deal of sense. Giving somebody a little rope and seeing if they can hang themselves from the damned if they do/damned if they don't tree is honorable lawyering. Make the RIAA be the ones to propose just where the line between public and private falls and they can hardly expect to win if their own definition hurts them on some other point, Plus how do you successfully appeal a loss where the judge accepted your definition? A solid win where an appeal is unlikely to be successful beats a marginal win where a route to appeal is obvious to all concerned.
I was once one of those people who had exceptionally broad rights to conduct searches. As a military officer, I could, in theory, have searched a whole barracks full of the personal effects of a whole company of enlisted soldiers for a single stolen item. But before they would have turned me loose to do that, even as a raw Lieutenant, the government made it very clear that there was paperwork that had to be kept on record, documenting the steps of the search AND what other steps were taken to solve the crime before command decided a search was necessary. They made it clear that I had to deliver a Miranda warning (and the military form of the Miranda actually explains more rights than the Civil form.). They made it clear that the decision to authorize a search was limited to command personnel and not staff officers/staff NCOs, and why.
If I was supposed to be searching for a stolen boom-box, I had to have a good description, and not search inside anything too small to hold that boom-box. Even if I thought I smelled dope (and I've been to a controlled burn and can claim legally to know what Pot smells like), I couldn't act on it (beyond mentioning the scent to the owner of that gear, as in "Smells like pot - I hope you wouldn't mess with that stuff. - You know it's illegal and they can throw you out of the Army if you do - oh well, I'm just here to look for a boom-box.).
If I could be held to that standard 20 years ago, when dealing with people who had agreed to give up some of their rights as a condition of enlistment, and to be bound by a special set of laws (The Uniform Code of Military Justice), I have to wonder why on Earth the US citizenry allows the present situation.
The part about the security people not believing that comic books have scripts, or maybe that there are people who get paid to write them, is also a bit ridiculous. I don't expect the average policeman to be up on the finer points of law, but imagine if a state trooper pulled over a motorcyclist claiming that he didn't think vehicles with less than four wheels were allowed on the highways, or a beat cop arresting someone for putting an envelope in the night deposit slot at the local bank, or something equally a matter of basic common knowledge.
I once got fair treatment in court after my car was hit by another driver because the cop knew enough basic general knowledge to realize that he could ask that driver to turn on his lights 'again'. (When the broken shelled bulb lit and very quickly flared out, that proved it hadn't been on at the time of the crash, and it went into the report as driver B 'flat out lied about having his lights on', which helped a lot when the jerk lied again in court.
Knowing that there are some words in a comic book, or being able to reason out that whoever put those words there probably got paid for it, or doesn't normally do the whole book himself in his basement, or things like that, isn't a very elitist standard to expect. In fact, I'd give more credit to people who assumed comic books were always published by big corporations such as Marvel and DC, and doubted someone's claim to be a one man self-publisher, than vice-versa.
We really need for everyone who has special authority over the average person to have at least certain basic knowledge. This account sounds like a whole group of security didn't meet what I'd consider a reasonable minimum standard. I hardly expect them to be rocket surgeons, but this sort of thing looks like we expect them to be Larry, Moe, and Curly.
But, saying we can't maintain a free press is basically saying the first amendment is now unworkable. If you start from that position, then taking all sorts of legal steps, all the way up to amending the constitution to make copyright something, anything, that can again bolster the first amendment, automatically become reasonable options. There are damned few prices too high to pay to 'restore the power of the first amendment', so you might want to hope it isn't really that threatened.
Hannibal seriously modified terrain to get those elephants across the Alps, so it's not surprising that modifying the structural map occurs to most players at some point. Designers are under pressure to offer more decision points (forks) on maps, and when they are leading the player by the nose, to at least fold routes (literally or metaphorically) so the shortest distance from start to exit isn't an obvious straight line. That's practically the definition of an environment where the ability to add your own shortcuts is going to look highly desirable.
Anyone remember Quake 1? Players hit upon Rocket Jumping as a way to shortcut some barriers, and the designers were initially surprised that anyone was willing to accept some damage to their own character just to gain the ability to bypass some of the normal route or even to explore normally inaccessible areas. Maybe the whole industry should have taken this as a sign that there was a relative lot of player desire to increase the number of routes across the map (again, literally OR metaphorically).
Your image of a society or strategy crumbling based on emergent gameplay sounds like one of the old turn based, space war between whole civilizations games, where the players invented what they called GMing. Not in the sense of having a game master, but in the sense of General Motors. It turned out, a really unexpected way to win the game was to put all your productivity into building more productivity for 30 turns or so, making factories just to make more more factories to make still more factories, and do the bare minimum for everything else.
At some point, the enemy players felt they had a pretty good map of where their enemies core worlds were, and had mapped and encountered enough of everyone's planets to confidently go to what they thought was full grade war, and began seriously kicking ass. Primarily at you, it felt, since they thought you were a weak society and easy pickings. Sometimes four or five other players came to the same conclusion about you at about the same turn and all dog-piled you. You then converted all that production into mammoth star destroying superhyperdreadnaughts with ubercool spiky bits and three turns later you effectively won the whole game with a fleet fifty times more powerful than anyone else's.
Eventually, people learned to strike before they were certain of the enemy's contours to head off GM'ing, and developed other tricks that made this emergent gameplay not so overwhelmingly, well, emergent. Wish I could remember what that game was called.
what is the difference between a "snack item" and a "food item"
Flour. Usually, if it's basically a candy bar, it's a snack item. Add enough flour to the same formula and it becomes a food item. (This is actually how my state determines the difference). Yes, you have to bake the mix differently, after letting it rise, to get a cake and not a candy bar, but the prep is not what's important for sales tax, its the presence or absence of a certain percentage of flour.
You keep using the word company, but talking about a specific subtype, the publicly traded corporation. There are lots of corporations incorporated in Delaware, not so many partnerships or sole proprietorships. Delaware presents a favorable corporate tax environment, not necessarily a favorable overall business tax environment, and so on. It could be a perfectly sensible strategy for a state to court businesses that aren't publicly traded corporations ahead of ones that are.
However, there are federal laws and court decisions that make it nearly impossible for a state to act in ways that favor, say, locally based businesses, or employee owned corps without common stock. Publicly traded corporations have made damned sure they aren't going to be discriminated against even where it might be a logical balance for the areas where they are given the advantages by law.
One of the results of this is the large number of people, such as you, who think the word company and the phrase 'publicly traded corporation' are essentially interchangeable concepts.
I'm pretty sure people have shot aggressive or troublesome hippos in the past. We've generally taken as much action as was needed against any big animal species to keep it in line. Unless you really mean to claim that anything short of total extinction doesn't count as taking action, yes, your analogy is false, but in a way that means you are asserting Mr. Slippery's analogy is true.
(We take some actions both against murderers and against heart disease. We generally catch a higher percentage of murderers than we do causes of heart disease, but we manage some reduction in both. We could spend less money on stopping murder so as to free up more for use against heart disease, but we don't have compelling proof we should change as a whole culture. We may not be getting the balance just right, but both actions are doing some good. Shifting focus is among our options, as well as choosing inaction. The choice of what to do is complex, with several alternatives. Our confidence we know the best path should be low and we should reevaluate the mix of actions and resource commitments frequently.)
(We can't do much if anything about the sun's contribution to global warming. We can do something about our own contribution. We can manage some reduction in only one source of the problem. In this case, spending less on fixing man made causes of global warming would not free up resources to deal with the sun's contribution, so we have even less reason to think we should stop fighting man made global warming than to think we should do less about murder. The sole action we can take is doing some good. Shifting focus to fight the sun is not an option, and so choosing inaction is the only alternative apparent. The choice of what to do is therefore simpler, with fewer alternatives. Our confidence we know the best path should actually be higher than in the murder/heart disease analogy case, as there are these fewer alternatives. We should stick to the plan of doing what we can about one of the two causes with high confidence unless something happens to give us more options and make the choice more complex.)
Now if you disagree that we are doing any good in some or all of those cases, go ahead, but that doesn't shoot Mr. Slippery's analogy down. If you think it's not fair to compare spending resources on two causes of death directly without including all the other things we also have to spend resources on, by all means make that point, but then that point goes for global warming and all those other things too, and you still haven't shot Slip's analogy down.
Higher in this thread, I've given a link to the supreme court decision of 2002, and quoted the clause that shows their reasoning why material that uses real children's images and not purely virtual sources is NOT necessarily protected.
This doesn't necessarily mean that the accused's cut and paste rises to the level of a crime, but I don't see an automatic first amendment appeal win either.
That's precisely what the law doesn't say. Instead, it requires the prosecution offer proof the person is a minor, but not necessarily their exact age. I repeat, the DA still has to prove the child was a minor, and that requirement HAS NOT BEEN DROPPED from this law, but quibbling over whether the child was, for example, 11 or 12 at the time of the violation isn't something where the DA has to offer proof. Do it differently, and you get possible cases where the child is a Jane Doe, and where you can bring forward a dozen medical experts who would testify the infant in question can't be more than nine months old, and the accused would still get to have the whole case dropped. The people who are misreading this clause as saying there's no need to prove the person is a minor are demanding a good clause be changed into a bad one, one that would make acquittals for not proving the child's age exactly, count as "guilty but getting off on a technicality".
By the way, that part of the Tennessee law is copied exactly from the system used by both New York and California to keep John Doe/Jane Doe status from blocking prosecution. That part of the law has been used by SCOTUS as an example of how to do it right, and if the Supremes find any part of the Tennessee law unconstitutional, it is incredibly unlikely to be that part, or the 41 other states that have adopted the same model for many of their laws will all need to rewrite about 20 to 30% of their entire legal codes. I have my doubts about some parts of the Tennessee law, but not that part.
This is not an RIAA thread, dammit! We're not talking about cooking the numbers in testimony before congress so as to accuse all the boycotters of being infringers instead, and falsely alleging the members aren't losing any sales to people who have just stopped buying RIAA product, but aren't doing anything to get bootleg copies. Don't go there, this is a child porn law thread.
I'm thinking of the bling and many other things more as part of a gestalt model. Gold chains certainly don't make a criminal. Hanging around with known criminals doesn't make a person a criminal. Not having an obvious job that pays enough to explain how a person affords their lifestyle doesn't mean it's a criminal lifestyle. Having been a criminal once, who has paid his debt to society, doesn't mean someone is still a criminal. Driving a flashy car doesn't make a person a criminal, nor do pinstripe suits, black shirts, white ties, and violin cases really mean someone is in the Mafia. Not every busty blonde, in a short red dress, hanging from a guy's arm, is a moll. But what happens if there's enough of these sorts of things together?
Maybe putting photo pieces together is just a little creepy, but just the sort of thing we all should avoid jumping to conclusions about if we want the bill of rights to mean something. But between immediately arresting him and ignoring it totally, isn't there a third possibility? Someone from police (or maybe it could be limited to human services or some other office to help keep society from rushing to judgment) talking to the child just to see if there's been anything more going on.
That doesn't have to be leading questions, showing mug shots, and such either. Police are usually trained in how to avoid soliciting and coaching testimony, even if some of them don't live up to the rules. Various departments have trained psychologists and even full psychiatrists in some cases. There are people who could check around to see if there's a real crime without framing anyone for more than they really did or driving some parent into taking the law into his own hands (and I'd like to add that the parent of the not famous child involved here appears to have acted responsibly and well within the law.).
"the state is not required to prove the actual identity"..."of the minor."
Tenneseee doesn't have to put a name or a social security number or whatever on the person shown. If Tennessee has an image in the court of a real person, that real person can be a 'John Doe' or 'Jane Doe'. There's a big difference between having to prove the actual identity and having to prove actuality itself.
"...or age..."
Tennessee just has to establish that the person was under age, not what exact age he or she was. There's a big difference between not having to prove the age of the minor and not having to prove minority itself.
I point out that both those rules (even just as said in the popular recap you quoted) still require the minor to be a minor and that it be a real person and not a toon. The original text of the clauses you quote is therefore perfectly in compliance with SCOTUS. (It should be, that part was taken verbatum from the standard New York and California state laws of similar nature, which the Supremes have specifically upheld). What's sad is you attacked a quote in the popular press as though it were the actual law, what's sadder is the press actually got that part right for once, and it makes sense to anyone with normal reading comprehension. There are parts of the state law I have doubts about. The part you savagely distorted into your parody of intent is not one of them.
There's images of real children (their faces). They were too young to give informed consent for those images being combined with the other images (adult women's bodies). (That last point technically assumes the faces weren't very old footage and in the interm the children hadn't grown up enough to give legal consent of course, and there could be other factors, such as whether anyone actually recognized a face and thought the photos were actually all of the person that went with the face, not composites.).
I.E. means 'id est', and the usual English translation of that is to hold it to mean 'that is'. I.e. is properly used when you intend to restate an idea, or expand upon it.
E.g. is an abbreviation for the Latin 'exempli gratia'. The normal English equivalent is 'for example'. If you mean to clairify by an example, and that example doesn't limit what other cases might also exist, e.g is correct.
While Jane Q Public used i.e., the original supreme court ruling didn't. Instead, it talked about possible harm to real minors, and used actual abuse or molestation as two examples of such harm, not as a limiting definition enumerating all possible harm connected to the production of material. Jane probably should have used 'e.g.'
Here's a bit from the SCOTUS decision in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002) " Section 2256(8)(C) prohibits a more common and lower tech means of creating virtual images, known as computer morphing. Rather than creating original images, pornographers can alter innocent pictures of real children so that the children appear to be engaged in sexual activity. Although morphed images may fall within the definition of virtual child pornography, they implicate the interests of real children and are in that sense closer to the images in Ferber."
(Ferber refers to a still standing older state child pornography law Ferber v. New York. The Supreme court is holding in this paragraph that morped images that start with some innocent image of a real child are not the same situation as the 'higher tech' virtual images that are implied to exist by the first sentence and already mentioned in other parts of the decision).
Note that the court said "implicate the interests of real children", which could include many other situations than actual abuse or molestation. Presumably, the effects on the child's interests would have to be negative, although that's not really spelled out, and presumably the normal legal principles about proportionality and gravity apply, so if casting Brooke Shields in Blue Lagoon had been a dumb career move, it wouldn't be enough to trigger a charge against her mother.
I am not a Lawyer either, but if you read this, it looks like Ferber v. new York, and the Miller standard that is referenced in this decision, are defining lines, and this new Tennessee case really does get pretty close to those lines if not over one or both.
Not to reflect on what Mr. Jobs did one way or the other, but probably population density doesn't have much to do with it (maybe a little). Tennessee has really pushed signing donor cards wherever people renew their driver's, vehicle or voter registrations. Billboards, TV ads, posters all around government offices. It seems to be working.
I wish I could say we have more healthy donors, but our alcohol abuse rate is a bit above the national average, and statewide we definitely have a problem with Meth that, I'm sure, matches any drug problems CA has. Maybe we're doing better on some industrial pollutants than CA, but all in all, the available donor/need ratio is probably a wash. it's just that more of them here have checked the little box.
I have seen a bunch of new AA members kick up a fuss about the step in the 12 step program where they are asked to turn their life over to a higher power and admit they are helpless to solve their problem without it. However, when I've talked to them, I've seen a lot of them are incredibly uncomfortable with these two steps:
# Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. # Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
(There's a lot of variation on just how these are expressed in different programs - 12 step programs are not all in lockstep. The above example is from one of the classic formulations where they specifically use the word 'God').
After having dealt with people who literally could not read those two steps out loud, or who became angry, sometimes to the point of physical violence, over suggestions they look a them, or discuss them, I really suspect that for every genuine intellectual objection to the idea of God, higher powers, or whatever, there are two or three people who just can't bear to think of making up with the people they have hurt, dealing with the people who are so estranged that they will never take an apology, or who have died before the addict sought help, and balking at the step before the one that is the real problem is just a coping mechanism.
You're right about most of what you wrote, although it's generally just not done to fly transplant candidates on commercial flights because of the possible exposure to germs and their weakened immune systems. Commercial lines do sometimes fly people with other conditions as corporate charity and certainly have no problem with putting people with those other conditions on a standby list and then watching for any opportunity to squeeze them in.
We're actually getting to the point where charity medical transportation isn't a problem even outside the Continental US. (But we're not completely there yet - see the bottom link for more on something that could set things back).
I'm on my church's outreach committee. We regularly donate to two different charities, both specifically about flying medically needy people to the right hospitals and surgical centers. We know several of the pilots, we know what sort of equipment they need, and we see their corporate books enough to be highly confident the money we donate is actually working. The reason we're supporting two different charities is one is focused on the continental US, the other on Haiti and the surrounding area.
All this argument before someone pointed out that you don't have to be rich to get a priority medical flight got me curious, just how many people got their flights this year and how many didn't. Turns out our donations so far (as of June), have been equivalent to 14 average flights, with a total of about 19 patients. While the CONUS based group has a bit higher success rate for the patients once delivered, both of them can boast that the surgical success rate for these patients once delivered is over 70% (remember, they are dealing with transplant cases, advanced cancers, and such, where there are going to be rejection issues, or the doctors discover an inoperable tumor after they open the patient, or other such events put a definite cap on absolute success rates). Both groups think they are meeting the needs of at least 6 cases out of 10 on the first try. (Remember transplant cases may be very time critical, but for some other situations, such as wanting to go while a particular surgical team is available, there often IS some leeway to reschedule). It would still be nice to get that up to 80% or more.
I'm not going to give a link to either of the charities I mentioned, because I want to highlight a bigger problem.
"Fees Could Ground Charity Medical Flights" "FAA Proposes More Fees For Pilots"
Here's a link to how one Indiana based medical rescue flight charity views newly proposed charges for calls to the local towers about runway conditions, weather and other such information. This bunch seems to be using more really small planes and doing relatively short haul flights, and they see these proposed changes as critical. I suspect the charities we sponsor will muddle through, maybe with some degradation of service, but it's likely to hit some local scale services harder, as the article shows.
He was under enormous economic pressures to continue the process at that point (much of which was his own fault - while Germany's economy had, of course, been trashed after WW1, there were new economic problems from the occupations themselves - Austria wasn't too bad, a bit over budget, but Czechoslovakia cost much more than projected and return benefits were much, much lower. You could compare it to the US claims circa 2002 that the Iraq war would cost 40 Billion total and oil production would be fully restored within 9 Months, although the Reich's predictions weren't that far off.
That's the point for all the people who are complaining about the Hang 'Em, then Burn 'Em posts. The guy did something wrong. Maybe fair punishment for that something is literally a slap on the wrist, or a 1 dollar fine, or something equally trivial. But if you literally slap a person's wrist often enough to finish punishing them for fifty million counts before they die of old age, about a million slaps into it their arm will look like a side of beef and they will go into shock and die. Even a few hundred thousand slaps will end up making that wrist look like its been slowly fed into a wood chipper. Try to devise a punishment that really counts as a punishment at all, yet fifty or a hundred million counts of it won't brutally kill a person. Hit him with a softly falling drop of water for each spam, and if you give them time to drain away it's the old Chinese water torture, and if you don't he drowns full fathom five.
Then there's time - If he serves 1 second per victim per spam, that's a dozen consecutive life sentences or more.
There's your perspective - If we make the punishment no more out of perspective than break even, an old fashioned eye for an eye, there's no way we can actually do it, one even exchange, one tiny penalty per one act of spam, at a time. We have to aggregate clusters of offenses, a few thousand spams here, a few thousands there, and then keep the penalties for those small, so that the accumulated total for clusters of clusters would still be humanly possible for him to serve.
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Or we should all become polytheists, because God has open-sourced the project, and it's getting small and streamlined because of the 'many eyes' effect.
No, we don't mean progress towards something 'better'.
Evolution proceeds only towards a local optimum, never towards anything abstractly 'better' or 'more perfect'. Evolution has no interests, long term goals, or overall arrow of direction. That's standard. That's the version of the theory Darwin and Wallace framed, that's what Sir Francis Crick assumed to be true doing his work, that's what Richard Dawkins would argue right now.
Those same people would tell you evolution is not affected in the slightest by people changing environmental conditions so that some things which were once major disadvantages are not anymore, and that there is no 'should have died' in the theory.
I say this, because I disagree with some ideas people, including some prominent scientists, legitimately think are part of the theory. But usually if I bring that up on slashdot, I get negative modded to oblivion by people just like you. It's like being modded down for disagreeing with the "Standard Democratic Party" line, only to find out that the guys doing it also claim that party-line is "Strong spending for defense, no money for social programs". I never get to debate or discuss any real issues relating to Evolution, because by the time somebody who understands and agrees with the real theory is reading this thread, the whole topic will have drowned under dozens of mods from people who think they are defending Evolution from "Weirdo Creationists", when what they are defending is a weirdo theory with progress, devolution, and a bunch of other kerfluffle that has nothing to do with science.
Was Boole himself a computer scientist? People keep calling him a philosopher or at least a mathematician last I looked. A universal Turing machine didn't start out as something you buy from Dell, more as a totally abstract philosophical model almost nobody expected at first to lead to a concrete instantization as a constructible object. What programming languages did Babbage and Lovelace know, or was their work more on the level of abstract thinking about thought than that? Thinking about thought - by some, that's the very definition of philosophy. Where should we file "Godel, Escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid"?
What you're saying actually fits the concept of scientists in general. Science and Technology are basically very different things throughout human culture, but non-scientists and non-engineers almost never know it, and scientists and engineers themselves sometimes lose sight of it.
A geologist doesn't get oil to market without a petroleum engineer or two getting involved. A Molecular Biologist doesn't test a potential breakthrough on Humans without MDs first being included.
The law sets professional standards for MDs, engineers, lawyers and such, codifies ethics, and requires liscenses and performance bonds. Nobody makes a Physicist pass a state board to practice. Governments don't spell out specific ethical requirements for Chemists (much - there's some specifics for scientists who work for governments.).
Of course there are exceptions. Theoreticians in Astronomy are often assisted by observers who are themselves full fledged Astronomers (but then, Astronomy doesn't produce a lot of technological spinoffs, and seldom indeed does an astronomer propose a new theory that needs an industrial engineer to deal with scaling up a process to commercial size). Architects and Civil Architectural Engineers face most of the same legal requirements whether they work together or separately. And we are just now bringing software engineers into a legal model where they are beginning to be responsible for deaths and massive damage in the way, say, aeronautical engineers are.
In some ways, Lawyers are the engineer equivalents to legislators and judges. In some ways, the individual sciences aren't professions in the way the engineering branches are (there may be legal professional standards for acting as a scientist, as in how to properly publish or conduct peer review, but how many standards are there specific to some branch of science?). Military Officers would be the approximate equivalent of Engineers to their presumably more scientist-like civilian oversight.
The RIAA has done some serious nit-picking of its own. Given their behavior, the question becomes, does the defense stoop to their level, stay scrupulously above that level, or... ... only nit-pick when they think the judge won't censor them, or they think the censoring may come, but they can win something on appeal, or the RIAA will have to argue enough facts to settle the nit-pick that the judge or jury will become more educated, or the RIAA, in arguing against the nit-picks, will introduce claims that go against some of their own prior claims or undermine their position, etc.
.
Those last two rules might make a great deal of sense. Giving somebody a little rope and seeing if they can hang themselves from the damned if they do/damned if they don't tree is honorable lawyering. Make the RIAA be the ones to propose just where the line between public and private falls and they can hardly expect to win if their own definition hurts them on some other point, Plus how do you successfully appeal a loss where the judge accepted your definition? A solid win where an appeal is unlikely to be successful beats a marginal win where a route to appeal is obvious to all concerned.
I was once one of those people who had exceptionally broad rights to conduct searches. As a military officer, I could, in theory, have searched a whole barracks full of the personal effects of a whole company of enlisted soldiers for a single stolen item. But before they would have turned me loose to do that, even as a raw Lieutenant, the government made it very clear that there was paperwork that had to be kept on record, documenting the steps of the search AND what other steps were taken to solve the crime before command decided a search was necessary. They made it clear that I had to deliver a Miranda warning (and the military form of the Miranda actually explains more rights than the Civil form.). They made it clear that the decision to authorize a search was limited to command personnel and not staff officers/staff NCOs, and why.
If I was supposed to be searching for a stolen boom-box, I had to have a good description, and not search inside anything too small to hold that boom-box. Even if I thought I smelled dope (and I've been to a controlled burn and can claim legally to know what Pot smells like), I couldn't act on it (beyond mentioning the scent to the owner of that gear, as in "Smells like pot - I hope you wouldn't mess with that stuff. - You know it's illegal and they can throw you out of the Army if you do - oh well, I'm just here to look for a boom-box.).
If I could be held to that standard 20 years ago, when dealing with people who had agreed to give up some of their rights as a condition of enlistment, and to be bound by a special set of laws (The Uniform Code of Military Justice), I have to wonder why on Earth the US citizenry allows the present situation.
The part about the security people not believing that comic books have scripts, or maybe that there are people who get paid to write them, is also a bit ridiculous. I don't expect the average policeman to be up on the finer points of law, but imagine if a state trooper pulled over a motorcyclist claiming that he didn't think vehicles with less than four wheels were allowed on the highways, or a beat cop arresting someone for putting an envelope in the night deposit slot at the local bank, or something equally a matter of basic common knowledge.
I once got fair treatment in court after my car was hit by another driver because the cop knew enough basic general knowledge to realize that he could ask that driver to turn on his lights 'again'. (When the broken shelled bulb lit and very quickly flared out, that proved it hadn't been on at the time of the crash, and it went into the report as driver B 'flat out lied about having his lights on', which helped a lot when the jerk lied again in court.
Knowing that there are some words in a comic book, or being able to reason out that whoever put those words there probably got paid for it, or doesn't normally do the whole book himself in his basement, or things like that, isn't a very elitist standard to expect. In fact, I'd give more credit to people who assumed comic books were always published by big corporations such as Marvel and DC, and doubted someone's claim to be a one man self-publisher, than vice-versa.
We really need for everyone who has special authority over the average person to have at least certain basic knowledge. This account sounds like a whole group of security didn't meet what I'd consider a reasonable minimum standard. I hardly expect them to be rocket surgeons, but this sort of thing looks like we expect them to be Larry, Moe, and Curly.
But, saying we can't maintain a free press is basically saying the first amendment is now unworkable. If you start from that position, then taking all sorts of legal steps, all the way up to amending the constitution to make copyright something, anything, that can again bolster the first amendment, automatically become reasonable options. There are damned few prices too high to pay to 'restore the power of the first amendment', so you might want to hope it isn't really that threatened.
Hannibal seriously modified terrain to get those elephants across the Alps, so it's not surprising that modifying the structural map occurs to most players at some point. Designers are under pressure to offer more decision points (forks) on maps, and when they are leading the player by the nose, to at least fold routes (literally or metaphorically) so the shortest distance from start to exit isn't an obvious straight line. That's practically the definition of an environment where the ability to add your own shortcuts is going to look highly desirable.
Anyone remember Quake 1? Players hit upon Rocket Jumping as a way to shortcut some barriers, and the designers were initially surprised that anyone was willing to accept some damage to their own character just to gain the ability to bypass some of the normal route or even to explore normally inaccessible areas. Maybe the whole industry should have taken this as a sign that there was a relative lot of player desire to increase the number of routes across the map (again, literally OR metaphorically).
Your image of a society or strategy crumbling based on emergent gameplay sounds like one of the old turn based, space war between whole civilizations games, where the players invented what they called GMing. Not in the sense of having a game master, but in the sense of General Motors. It turned out, a really unexpected way to win the game was to put all your productivity into building more productivity for 30 turns or so, making factories just to make more more factories to make still more factories, and do the bare minimum for everything else.
At some point, the enemy players felt they had a pretty good map of where their enemies core worlds were, and had mapped and encountered enough of everyone's planets to confidently go to what they thought was full grade war, and began seriously kicking ass. Primarily at you, it felt, since they thought you were a weak society and easy pickings. Sometimes four or five other players came to the same conclusion about you at about the same turn and all dog-piled you. You then converted all that production into mammoth star destroying superhyperdreadnaughts with ubercool spiky bits and three turns later you effectively won the whole game with a fleet fifty times more powerful than anyone else's.
Eventually, people learned to strike before they were certain of the enemy's contours to head off GM'ing, and developed other tricks that made this emergent gameplay not so overwhelmingly, well, emergent. Wish I could remember what that game was called.
what is the difference between a "snack item" and a "food item"
Flour. Usually, if it's basically a candy bar, it's a snack item. Add enough flour to the same formula and it becomes a food item. (This is actually how my state determines the difference). Yes, you have to bake the mix differently, after letting it rise, to get a cake and not a candy bar, but the prep is not what's important for sales tax, its the presence or absence of a certain percentage of flour.
You keep using the word company, but talking about a specific subtype, the publicly traded corporation. There are lots of corporations incorporated in Delaware, not so many partnerships or sole proprietorships. Delaware presents a favorable corporate tax environment, not necessarily a favorable overall business tax environment, and so on. It could be a perfectly sensible strategy for a state to court businesses that aren't publicly traded corporations ahead of ones that are.
However, there are federal laws and court decisions that make it nearly impossible for a state to act in ways that favor, say, locally based businesses, or employee owned corps without common stock. Publicly traded corporations have made damned sure they aren't going to be discriminated against even where it might be a logical balance for the areas where they are given the advantages by law.
One of the results of this is the large number of people, such as you, who think the word company and the phrase 'publicly traded corporation' are essentially interchangeable concepts.
I'm pretty sure people have shot aggressive or troublesome hippos in the past. We've generally taken as much action as was needed against any big animal species to keep it in line. Unless you really mean to claim that anything short of total extinction doesn't count as taking action, yes, your analogy is false, but in a way that means you are asserting Mr. Slippery's analogy is true.
(We take some actions both against murderers and against heart disease. We generally catch a higher percentage of murderers than we do causes of heart disease, but we manage some reduction in both. We could spend less money on stopping murder so as to free up more for use against heart disease, but we don't have compelling proof we should change as a whole culture. We may not be getting the balance just right, but both actions are doing some good. Shifting focus is among our options, as well as choosing inaction. The choice of what to do is complex, with several alternatives. Our confidence we know the best path should be low and we should reevaluate the mix of actions and resource commitments frequently.)
(We can't do much if anything about the sun's contribution to global warming. We can do something about our own contribution. We can manage some reduction in only one source of the problem. In this case, spending less on fixing man made causes of global warming would not free up resources to deal with the sun's contribution, so we have even less reason to think we should stop fighting man made global warming than to think we should do less about murder. The sole action we can take is doing some good. Shifting focus to fight the sun is not an option, and so choosing inaction is the only alternative apparent. The choice of what to do is therefore simpler, with fewer alternatives. Our confidence we know the best path should actually be higher than in the murder/heart disease analogy case, as there are these fewer alternatives. We should stick to the plan of doing what we can about one of the two causes with high confidence unless something happens to give us more options and make the choice more complex.)
Now if you disagree that we are doing any good in some or all of those cases, go ahead, but that doesn't shoot Mr. Slippery's analogy down. If you think it's not fair to compare spending resources on two causes of death directly without including all the other things we also have to spend resources on, by all means make that point, but then that point goes for global warming and all those other things too, and you still haven't shot Slip's analogy down.
Higher in this thread, I've given a link to the supreme court decision of 2002, and quoted the clause that shows their reasoning why material that uses real children's images and not purely virtual sources is NOT necessarily protected.
Here it is again:
http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-795.ZO.html
This doesn't necessarily mean that the accused's cut and paste rises to the level of a crime, but I don't see an automatic first amendment appeal win either.
That's precisely what the law doesn't say. Instead, it requires the prosecution offer proof the person is a minor, but not necessarily their exact age. I repeat, the DA still has to prove the child was a minor, and that requirement HAS NOT BEEN DROPPED from this law, but quibbling over whether the child was, for example, 11 or 12 at the time of the violation isn't something where the DA has to offer proof. Do it differently, and you get possible cases where the child is a Jane Doe, and where you can bring forward a dozen medical experts who would testify the infant in question can't be more than nine months old, and the accused would still get to have the whole case dropped. The people who are misreading this clause as saying there's no need to prove the person is a minor are demanding a good clause be changed into a bad one, one that would make acquittals for not proving the child's age exactly, count as "guilty but getting off on a technicality".
By the way, that part of the Tennessee law is copied exactly from the system used by both New York and California to keep John Doe/Jane Doe status from blocking prosecution. That part of the law has been used by SCOTUS as an example of how to do it right, and if the Supremes find any part of the Tennessee law unconstitutional, it is incredibly unlikely to be that part, or the 41 other states that have adopted the same model for many of their laws will all need to rewrite about 20 to 30% of their entire legal codes. I have my doubts about some parts of the Tennessee law, but not that part.
This is not an RIAA thread, dammit! We're not talking about cooking the numbers in testimony before congress so as to accuse all the boycotters of being infringers instead, and falsely alleging the members aren't losing any sales to people who have just stopped buying RIAA product, but aren't doing anything to get bootleg copies. Don't go there, this is a child porn law thread.
I'm thinking of the bling and many other things more as part of a gestalt model. Gold chains certainly don't make a criminal. Hanging around with known criminals doesn't make a person a criminal. Not having an obvious job that pays enough to explain how a person affords their lifestyle doesn't mean it's a criminal lifestyle. Having been a criminal once, who has paid his debt to society, doesn't mean someone is still a criminal. Driving a flashy car doesn't make a person a criminal, nor do pinstripe suits, black shirts, white ties, and violin cases really mean someone is in the Mafia. Not every busty blonde, in a short red dress, hanging from a guy's arm, is a moll. But what happens if there's enough of these sorts of things together?
Maybe putting photo pieces together is just a little creepy, but just the sort of thing we all should avoid jumping to conclusions about if we want the bill of rights to mean something. But between immediately arresting him and ignoring it totally, isn't there a third possibility? Someone from police (or maybe it could be limited to human services or some other office to help keep society from rushing to judgment) talking to the child just to see if there's been anything more going on.
That doesn't have to be leading questions, showing mug shots, and such either. Police are usually trained in how to avoid soliciting and coaching testimony, even if some of them don't live up to the rules. Various departments have trained psychologists and even full psychiatrists in some cases. There are people who could check around to see if there's a real crime without framing anyone for more than they really did or driving some parent into taking the law into his own hands (and I'd like to add that the parent of the not famous child involved here appears to have acted responsibly and well within the law.).
I'm going to parse this one for you:
"the state is not required to prove the actual identity"..."of the minor."
Tenneseee doesn't have to put a name or a social security number or whatever on the person shown. If Tennessee has an image in the court of a real person, that real person can be a 'John Doe' or 'Jane Doe'. There's a big difference between having to prove the actual identity and having to prove actuality itself.
"...or age..."
Tennessee just has to establish that the person was under age, not what exact age he or she was. There's a big difference between not having to prove the age of the minor and not having to prove minority itself.
I point out that both those rules (even just as said in the popular recap you quoted) still require the minor to be a minor and that it be a real person and not a toon. The original text of the clauses you quote is therefore perfectly in compliance with SCOTUS. (It should be, that part was taken verbatum from the standard New York and California state laws of similar nature, which the Supremes have specifically upheld). What's sad is you attacked a quote in the popular press as though it were the actual law, what's sadder is the press actually got that part right for once, and it makes sense to anyone with normal reading comprehension. There are parts of the state law I have doubts about. The part you savagely distorted into your parody of intent is not one of them.
There's images of real children (their faces). They were too young to give informed consent for those images being combined with the other images (adult women's bodies). (That last point technically assumes the faces weren't very old footage and in the interm the children hadn't grown up enough to give legal consent of course, and there could be other factors, such as whether anyone actually recognized a face and thought the photos were actually all of the person that went with the face, not composites.).
I.E. means 'id est', and the usual English translation of that is to hold it to mean 'that is'. I.e. is properly used when you intend to restate an idea, or expand upon it.
E.g. is an abbreviation for the Latin 'exempli gratia'. The normal English equivalent is 'for example'. If you mean to clairify by an example, and that example doesn't limit what other cases might also exist, e.g is correct.
While Jane Q Public used i.e., the original supreme court ruling didn't. Instead, it talked about possible harm to real minors, and used actual abuse or molestation as two examples of such harm, not as a limiting definition enumerating all possible harm connected to the production of material. Jane probably should have used 'e.g.'
Here's a bit from the SCOTUS decision in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002)
" Section 2256(8)(C) prohibits a more common and lower tech means of creating virtual images, known as computer morphing. Rather than creating original images, pornographers can alter innocent pictures of real children so that the children appear to be engaged in sexual activity. Although morphed images may fall within the definition of virtual child pornography, they implicate the interests of real children and are in that sense closer to the images in Ferber."
(Ferber refers to a still standing older state child pornography law Ferber v. New York. The Supreme court is holding in this paragraph that morped images that start with some innocent image of a real child are not the same situation as the 'higher tech' virtual images that are implied to exist by the first sentence and already mentioned in other parts of the decision).
Note that the court said "implicate the interests of real children", which could include many other situations than actual abuse or molestation. Presumably, the effects on the child's interests would have to be negative, although that's not really spelled out, and presumably the normal legal principles about proportionality and gravity apply, so if casting Brooke Shields in Blue Lagoon had been a dumb career move, it wouldn't be enough to trigger a charge against her mother.
Here's the whole thing:
http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-795.ZO.html
I am not a Lawyer either, but if you read this, it looks like Ferber v. new York, and the Miller standard that is referenced in this decision, are defining lines, and this new Tennessee case really does get pretty close to those lines if not over one or both.
Not to reflect on what Mr. Jobs did one way or the other, but probably population density doesn't have much to do with it (maybe a little). Tennessee has really pushed signing donor cards wherever people renew their driver's, vehicle or voter registrations. Billboards, TV ads, posters all around government offices. It seems to be working.
I wish I could say we have more healthy donors, but our alcohol abuse rate is a bit above the national average, and statewide we definitely have a problem with Meth that, I'm sure, matches any drug problems CA has. Maybe we're doing better on some industrial pollutants than CA, but all in all, the available donor/need ratio is probably a wash. it's just that more of them here have checked the little box.
I have seen a bunch of new AA members kick up a fuss about the step in the 12 step program where they are asked to turn their life over to a higher power and admit they are helpless to solve their problem without it. However, when I've talked to them, I've seen a lot of them are incredibly uncomfortable with these two steps:
# Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
# Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
(There's a lot of variation on just how these are expressed in different programs - 12 step programs are not all in lockstep. The above example is from one of the classic formulations where they specifically use the word 'God').
After having dealt with people who literally could not read those two steps out loud, or who became angry, sometimes to the point of physical violence, over suggestions they look a them, or discuss them, I really suspect that for every genuine intellectual objection to the idea of God, higher powers, or whatever, there are two or three people who just can't bear to think of making up with the people they have hurt, dealing with the people who are so estranged that they will never take an apology, or who have died before the addict sought help, and balking at the step before the one that is the real problem is just a coping mechanism.
You're right about most of what you wrote, although it's generally just not done to fly transplant candidates on commercial flights because of the possible exposure to germs and their weakened immune systems. Commercial lines do sometimes fly people with other conditions as corporate charity and certainly have no problem with putting people with those other conditions on a standby list and then watching for any opportunity to squeeze them in.
We're actually getting to the point where charity medical transportation isn't a problem even outside the Continental US. (But we're not completely there yet - see the bottom link for more on something that could set things back).
I'm on my church's outreach committee. We regularly donate to two different charities, both specifically about flying medically needy people to the right hospitals and surgical centers. We know several of the pilots, we know what sort of equipment they need, and we see their corporate books enough to be highly confident the money we donate is actually working. The reason we're supporting two different charities is one is focused on the continental US, the other on Haiti and the surrounding area.
All this argument before someone pointed out that you don't have to be rich to get a priority medical flight got me curious, just how many people got their flights this year and how many didn't. Turns out our donations so far (as of June), have been equivalent to 14 average flights, with a total of about 19 patients. While the CONUS based group has a bit higher success rate for the patients once delivered, both of them can boast that the surgical success rate for these patients once delivered is over 70% (remember, they are dealing with transplant cases, advanced cancers, and such, where there are going to be rejection issues, or the doctors discover an inoperable tumor after they open the patient, or other such events put a definite cap on absolute success rates). Both groups think they are meeting the needs of at least 6 cases out of 10 on the first try. (Remember transplant cases may be very time critical, but for some other situations, such as wanting to go while a particular surgical team is available, there often IS some leeway to reschedule). It would still be nice to get that up to 80% or more.
I'm not going to give a link to either of the charities I mentioned, because I want to highlight a bigger problem.
"Fees Could Ground Charity Medical Flights"
"FAA Proposes More Fees For Pilots"
Here's a link to how one Indiana based medical rescue flight charity views newly proposed charges for calls to the local towers about runway conditions, weather and other such information. This bunch seems to be using more really small planes and doing relatively short haul flights, and they see these proposed changes as critical. I suspect the charities we sponsor will muddle through, maybe with some degradation of service, but it's likely to hit some local scale services harder, as the article shows.
http://www.theindychannel.com/news/19761106/detail.html
Goodwin's Law: The longer a thread gets, the higher the chance someone will misspell 'Godwin'.
You're saying Quake doesn't teach Ammo Conservation?
He was under enormous economic pressures to continue the process at that point (much of which was his own fault - while Germany's economy had, of course, been trashed after WW1, there were new economic problems from the occupations themselves - Austria wasn't too bad, a bit over budget, but Czechoslovakia cost much more than projected and return benefits were much, much lower. You could compare it to the US claims circa 2002 that the Iraq war would cost 40 Billion total and oil production would be fully restored within 9 Months, although the Reich's predictions weren't that far off.
That's the point for all the people who are complaining about the Hang 'Em, then Burn 'Em posts. The guy did something wrong. Maybe fair punishment for that something is literally a slap on the wrist, or a 1 dollar fine, or something equally trivial. But if you literally slap a person's wrist often enough to finish punishing them for fifty million counts before they die of old age, about a million slaps into it their arm will look like a side of beef and they will go into shock and die. Even a few hundred thousand slaps will end up making that wrist look like its been slowly fed into a wood chipper. Try to devise a punishment that really counts as a punishment at all, yet fifty or a hundred million counts of it won't brutally kill a person. Hit him with a softly falling drop of water for each spam, and if you give them time to drain away it's the old Chinese water torture, and if you don't he drowns full fathom five.
Then there's time - If he serves 1 second per victim per spam, that's a dozen consecutive life sentences or more.
There's your perspective - If we make the punishment no more out of perspective than break even, an old fashioned eye for an eye, there's no way we can actually do it, one even exchange, one tiny penalty per one act of spam, at a time. We have to aggregate clusters of offenses, a few thousand spams here, a few thousands there, and then keep the penalties for those small, so that the accumulated total for clusters of clusters would still be humanly possible for him to serve.