I've been very scrupulously not downloading unliscensed content, partly because I've been posting about the issue for ten years or so, and don't want to give anyone grounds to say I'm just opposed to all this IP for life+ business because I'm a pirate. That said, I'm a living counter-example of the RIAA's position. I keep a budget, and about 10% goes to entertainment. If I downloaded, I'd use that to better decide what to buy, and still spend just as much or little. I suppose that, if I was paying for a download service, that would come out of the total so I'd buy a little less, but that's about it. Right now, I buy books a lot, TV shows a lot, and movies some, and music a little. I can pick up a book and skim though it pretty much at will, and usually have seen at least some episodes of a TV series I buy. Movies and music I often have only a very limited sample, and I've seen a lot of music where the one song I heard on the radio was the only good song on them, so I'm extra careful. Having more free samples available for some media already swings me towards buying more of those media, without any piracy factors at all figured in, so why wouldn't piracy also have the same effect?
Lets see - FOSS developers are doing something totally legal and ethical that benefits many other people, and even offers some benefits to the laid off Microsoft employee if he or she can still afford to use a computer. Hate them if you must, but it's like being a buggy whip maker who hates the inventors of that new-fangled horseless carriage.
Illegal downloaders inflict damage to a company's bottom line in at least some cases, but laid off employees are there because of that, plus lots of perfectly legal actions, (i.e. boycotts, spending your entertainment dollars on something else besides music, or your being too broke to have descressionary spending anymore). A big chunk of it is the industry's own choice. Illegal downloading by itself hasn't done nearly all the damage, and it's a least reasonable to claim that the industry's own mistakes were big enough to screw their own people without illegal downloading having any impact at all. Hate the downloaders if you must, but you'll do better in the long run if you at least apportion blame fairly, and don't let your former management pass the buck for its own share of the causes. (So sure, go ahead and hate, but don't hate blindly).
For this mess, 100% of the pain coming back is the consequences of these person's own unethical choices, and any hatred they feel is like the hatred of a caught criminal for the witnesses who fingered him. The rest of us either don't care or actively wish they'd catch a bullet. If you're one of their employees, and genuinely didn't know your management were viciously treasonous bastards, sorry.
Perspective sure is an interesting thing. I'm sure there's some guy on death row right now who killed a whole family because he wanted money for his fix, and from his perspective, there's no difference between him and Jesus walking to the cross, but for the rest of us, there is.
The parent poster didn't say that makes everything right, that's your inferrence.
The point about free and price is that pirating, including all sorts of digital media such as music and movies, and not just games, isn't really free. Cheap sometimes, but it has costs.
People are buying bigger hard drives to hold rared files and assemble them, or to hold torrent data so they can get an acceptable upload/download ratio. They are buying DVD burners instead of just players (and how many people would really need DVDs to store just their personal files?). They are taking added legal risks by uploading when they could just leach. They are paying for commercial ripping software or paying time to learn how to use exotic freeware. In the US, people pirating via Usenet pay an average of 21 dollars a month just for long retention Usenet servers, and many of them pay more for anonimizing proxies and encryption software, plus at least some of them wouldn't bother to pay so much for high speed access itself. Copies of commercial software specifically designed to burn digitally exact bitwise copies of files and to handle.iso's sell in the millions every year, and that sure ain't all Linux distros.
Sometimes the costs are pretty trivial. Sometimes they are pretty significant, and the question becomes, why do these people bother just to avoid paying a company money? Or it should become that, but we are still arguing with people like you who bother to post AC with a strawman attack, apparently just to try and keep that point from being addressed.
The arguments that people are basically crooks and free always wins are always at least a bit off. No one is getting pirated copies handed to them without some costs, and both the money costs and time related costs can be pretty substantial yet still not deter pirating. When somebody hikes 12 miles across broken terrain to avoid a toll road, we don't just say "Well of course, free always beats pay", we look at what prices they are really paying that a 12 mile hike still sometimes seems worth it. Maybe the toll is very high, or maybe it's other things, like the attendant being viciously rude, or the signs that say "We reserve the right to strip search you publicly when you drive this road."
They can certify that all the legal posts are noise free, complete, and sampled at a certain base quality. They can create a standard for quality assurance and guarantee the customer won't get any technological clinkers (artistic ones are obviously not within their competence). They can afford the storage to keep multiple versions available, and a business supporting them that ensures that they will most likely be around for years or decades. They can afford the storage to keep related works together in the same internet place and ease finding them (imagine, one stop shopping, with various size MP3, FLAC or OGG versions, ringtone versions, cover art, sheet music and lyric sheets all on the same website). They can provide discographies, linking between related artists or styles, and professional reviewing. They can help a consumer find things that consumer doesn't know exist yet.
How much of this can compete with free? I'm genuinely not sure. Probably some of it would help, but I don't see any proof in advance a particular model would be cost effective. Free's a pretty big word.
One of the RIAA arguments is that if you owned only a cassette version, you are stealing the superior quality version ripped from a CD instead of upgrading. Of course, if that's logical, then by the very same logic it's somehow less of an infringement to download a 128 K sampling rate MP3 than it is to download the same thing sampled at 196K or higher quality. Is downloading something you only have on cassette 140% more serious than at least having it on 8 track? (since 8 tracks were clearly superior).
One of the reasons the RIAA isn't doing too well in court is they are advancing legal arguments that often work as well against their position as for it, and basically asking the courts to ignore that part. (witness their definition of 'vexatious litigant').
In many cases, a woman (or man) standing on a corner at midnight dressed in hot pants, bikini top and spiked heels, is soliciting for prostitution, but to make an arrest stick, she (or he) still has to actually ask for money. We make cops go through the action of bringing up price and getting an answer, to avoid basing an arrest merely on whether that same cop thinks someone is dressed too provocatively.
Copyright infringement may be every bit as difficult to pinpoint as you say, but it's equally difficult to say just where to draw the line if we start drawing it somewhere in the largish space of 'making available'. Just like Barney Fife may honestly think that woman standing on the curb, trying to hail a cab, in the same outfit she went clubbing in, is a hooker, the RIAA may honestly think (or claim to think) that having a torrent program at all is over where the line should be drawn.
In debating just where to draw the legal line, it should always be remembered, some lines have practical problems when it comes to actually testing them, some are based on simple principles, and some require very intricate interpretations of those principles. Good laws are usually, if not always, ones where the lines are simple enough to apply in many cases, clear cut enough to repeatedly give the same verdicts when the same circumstances apply, and based on principles that can be explained to the general public's satisfaction.
As somebody with coke bottle lens glasses, I've always wondered why anyone would think eyes make a good example of irreducible complexity in the first place. Obviously, not all eyes are perfect, and even an imperfect eye is better than none (although I'm sure I'd be in a leopard's belly by now if I was a proto-human). Still, even a very basic eye-spot is of some use and might help an organism survive. Unless the argument is that the critter has to have at least a single eye-spot, a very basic optic nerve, and some pretty small amounts of brain tissue dedicated to interpreting the signal, what's the minimum complexity that's supposed to be irreducible? Now gender, there's an irreducible. One of Darwin's basic arguments was that unlimited amounts of blending in the genetic code would make natural selection grind to a halt (That's a testable prediction of Darwin's by the way. One reason Crick and Watson got the Nobel prize is the code they discovered didn't allow for unlimited blending. Anyone who claims Evolution isn't science because it makes no testable predictions might note that point.).
If most offspring in a sexual species weren't clearly expressing some gender specific trait,gender itself would swiftly vanish. So how does sexual reproduction evolve in the first place? If it isn't all or nothing 99.something % of the time, blending makes it fall back into asexual reproduction within a few generations. You have to have a situation much like human genetics with a lot of sexually related genes are all on the X/Y pair. That is, in some ancestor species, a whole bunch of gender related mutations have to occur at very close to the same time (same generation, or a most a very, very few), AND get themselves segregated onto one pair of chromosomes and moved off of the other chromosomes (again, within a very, very few generations), before a blending-like effect in the non-sex related chromosomes wipes them out.
You point out an odd advantage of developing the moon, which I don't recall seeing in print before now. With a 28 day rotation period, if there's a big solar flare or a slew of charged particles pass through the solar system from some interstellar event, (such as a nearby supernova), then with colonies scattered about Luna, some of them won't be exposed to radiation from a given direction until the event has presumably died down. There's probably a more optimum distribution than putting two colonies on exactly opposite points, but I wonder if anyone has done real work on this idea.
Perhaps increased budgets and high popularity, plus all the improvements in special effects since, say Tom Baker, mean it's more possible to do more stories where lots of physical movement, agility, and sheer conditioning play a part. A young Doctor is a Doctor who can run. Remember Tennant (as the Doctor) describing the job? "Well.. and running, lots and lots of running.".
The legal definition of 'local' is more likely to be the whole state where Microsoft makes its headquarters (Possibly for companies taking advantage of things such as Delaware's liberal incorporation rules, the headquarters rule is replaced with wherever they are incorporated). If the company gets any tax advantages for a branch office, factory or other physical presences being located in some other particular state, again, the definition of local is normally the whole state. Unless a city or town (or county) can wave enough local taxes to attract a business, it's too small a unit to be considered local in the legal sense.
This doesn't mean all benefits have to be spread out equally. For example, most MS employees in Washington live in or near Redmond, shop in that area, and if they are home owners pay county taxes there, and there's not so much benefit for a county on the other end of the state, but the whole state presumably benefits to a variable extent. The rest of the country presumably indirectly benefits from Washington being a more stable and prosperous state, and the whole world presumably indirectly benefits eventually, but the primary benefit is legally at the state level.
1. Microsoft benefits from many government programs, such as the H1B visa program. If MS doesn't like it here, there is no reason the US government should further subsidize Microsoft by selectively letting anyone MS wants to hire move to the head of the line to enter this country. If Microsoft plays hardball to maximize its profits, then the Government should play hardball to do its proper job as well,or are you one of those idiots too stupid to realize that the government has a duty to control immigration?
Oh, and the courts! That's the US government too, prosecuting those pirates. If Microsoft isn't willing to pay the US an equal share of taxes to get legal services any more, why are my taxes subsidizing their legal protection? If the shareholder's profit comes from getting my taxes to cover their operating costs, then damn every single shareholder to the deepest pits of Hell for the crooks they are.
Or are you implying that they aren't stealing unless the government (which you despise) agrees with the old fashioned definition of theft I just offered. Kind of a catch 22 that - 'The Government is a bunch of people who mismanage everything, but common people shouldn't call theft what it is unless the government agrees with them'. If you don't trust the government any more than your post indicates, why in hell do you think we should all just blindly follow that same government in closing an eye to theft?
2. The fiduciary duty to maximize profits is a legal term, defined by the very US government you knock. It's half a phrase, the other half being "within the accepted limits of proper corporate citizenship, and in accordance with the specifics of its charter". No stockholder can successfully sue MS for not violating its charter with the state (by relocating assets where they fall under the control of a foreign government, and coincidentally might be subject to that government's political instabilities). Interestingly, Ireland does not have a body of legal doctrine recognizing a corporation's duty to maximize shareholder profit. Are you one of those dumb assholes who thinks overseas banking and other people's sovereign nations are regulated by the US government?
Actually, I looked at the lists for my county, and two nearby counties that have a largeish city spanning them. The local list had several people convicted of rape of a child under age 12 or forcible rape, about 10 statutory rape charges where the perpetrator was at least 25 when the crime was committed, and one case I thought really shouldn't be worth a listing, for statutory with a three year age difference, involving a 17 year old tried as an adult.
I checked, and that last one is supposed to come of after 2 years or so. The notes on that one specify a bunch of other things about the kid, such as him still being ordered to attend his high school until graduation, but barred from participating in extracurricular activities there unless a teacher remains present at all times. In his case, the story is pretty well known, and I doubt anyone in the community is going to form a lynch mob, and there are probably people willing to hire him once he finishes school.
The large city listings however, had a lot more odd cases: A dozen or so were for aggravated prostitution, which I at first thought might mean the hooker was really bugging people who weren't interested or something like that. I asked a local lawyer who was up on these cases what that was about, and he told me the charge was usually used only when the prostitute was known to be HIV positive. He said that was always the case for female prostitutes, as far as he knew, but he thought some jurisdictions might be using it "more aggressively" for male prostitutes. About as many were for lewd conduct, specifically at public rest stops on the state highways or interstate. There were also some indecent exposure charges that stipulated the same locations, and had notes they were plea bargained down from either lewd conduct or solicitation.
Some points:
1. close to 95% of the rape of a child and statutory charges involved a relative, and many of them also had notations such as incest (stepfather), incest (blood relative), or similar. There were very few stranger molestation cases (and not a one in my county). There were a few in the larger city. These are very sick people to be sure, but for most of them, the threat to the wider community looks pretty small. I don't want any of them actually working at day cares or similar when they get out, but I'm not too worried if they get supervised release one day. The threat by general purpose rapists looks a lot larger.
2. There is a lot of other information on these. Just about always, if somebody was busted at a business, the business name was redacted (i.e. it would say 'a local bar', or 'local truck stop', rather than the name. For non-business locations, the entries got more specific, i.e. City public library, west branch). For people busted for child porn, the listings often specify the apparent age range of the victims and the approximate number of pieces of porn involved. In some cases, this shows types, i.e. VHS tapes or bound material (magazines or books, not bondage). In others, they use the term items, which could be anything from whole films to individual.jpgs as far as I can tell. I'm a bit concerned that whoever writes these up can evidently pick what parts of the story they want to tell to make a given case look better or worse.
3. The same people who were offered or somehow negotiated plea bargains frequently had notes if they were in a treatment program, or had completed one. Other cases which appeared by their photos to be reasonably able to afford lawyers often did too, and several cases had no photo and a note that they had completed treatment. None of the people shown as having been represented by a public defender had any notes indicating a plea bargain arrangement existed, and none of them showed any signs of being in a treatment program, or completing one. People with public defenders outnumbe
I'm sure that first claim was tongue in cheek, so I won't bother to disabuse you of the notion that you're an expert, but you asked a smart question so: As a classical mathematical concept, Markov Chains are considered stochastic processes (with the word stochastic meaning damned near exactly what the average guy means by random). Evolution is a non-random process. (Evolution has two major aspects, Mutation and Selection. Mutation itself is random, but Selection applies a pressure that should be mathematically treated as a non-random vector.).
From that alone, it would seem you could have a Markov Chain like process only to the extent there was no selection pressure. Imagine it's the Ediacaran, and there are no predators for sea pens yet. In fact, the seas are mostly empty, not just of predators, but of niche competitors. Sea pens have all evolved to the point where they have minimal anchor feet because they need them to resist occasional current surges from mud slides, but with no other real selection pressures, sea pens might develop in very exotic ways, expanding into what is effectively a vast, empty morpheme space. As the Ediacaran gives way to the Cambrian, some Sea Pens might end up completely dwelling under the mud, others become free swimming, some become incredibly diverse from their ancestors of only a few dozen generations, etc.
Parts of what is called the Cambrian Explosion would look like Markov Chains, at least approximately (as they do). Most times, evolutionary processes don't look like this, and the lack of Stochasticism explains why nicely.
Note there's one other problem with applying a Markov Chain model. It's assumed for actually deriving a Markov Chain's formula, that the probabilities for each step are a. known and can b. be independently calculated, and that's not a completely safe assumption in Biology.
Species has been defined for lay people as a population that cannot interbreed with others. Biologists know this is too simple, for example, just about any species, considered over multiple generations and not just in the present time, won't fit this rule, and the very word interbreeding is also ambiguous in some cases, (Does a sterile hybred, such as a mule, count as two species successfully interbreeding even though the process can't go a second generation?). There's another simple but wrong definition in all this: "A single gene codes for a single protein". That one is often used in freshman genetics, and also turns out to have exceptions.
I really wish we could somehow moderate this thread so that the people who don't know these definitions were down about -1, the ones who don't know anything of the exceptions were all at +1, and the ones who are pretty clear on at least that much biology could set their filters accordingly.
The Council that put together the Bible 200 years or so after Christ's birth, debated hotly which books went into it. The whole Old Testament was included for chiefly two reasons* 1. Some (not nearly all), wanted to include any OT book that seemed to have a prophecy of Jesus's coming, so that Christians could see that He met all the tests. 2. Some wanted all the Jewish laws in every copy of the Bible, so that Christians could see what laws Jesus was talking about when he spoke about living not by the law but by every breath which comes from the Mouth of God, and other such things.
While there were some people who favored a third reason, genuinely believing that God wanted all Christians to keep to all the OT rules, they actually were far, far short of a majority. Paul's writings on circumcision seemed to have already clarified that point to most.
Some of the council didn't want parts or even any of the OT. The resolution to cut it to just the five books of the Torah narrowly failed. Some felt that any Christians who wanted copies of what became the OT for their church should just make those on their own, as they were of the opinion that only churches with a large Jewish convert membership would want to go to the extra expense.
This same process happened with the New Testament. Some Gospels were excluded because they seemed to disagree with others, some were taken as true but left off the list just because they didn't add all that much to the first four. There was a debate about whether four was enough, or too many, and it ended up being settled by an argument that four was the number God must have wanted, since He made so many 4's in nature, such as the four classical Greek elements. (And half a dozen attendees wrote home saying that the argument was silly, but since enough people bought it that the council could move on to the next point, it was probably OK). There were lots of Revelations, and the council picked one that seemed best, but some of the ones they left out were believed to be doctrinally OK, just too long to add to an already huge book that the council was going to urge every church to get a copy of.
I have tried to keep the two commandments as Christ gave them, and I hope that Paul was right when he said 'the greatest of these is charity', for those times that faith and hope have seemed far away. I do not see how it is possible to be a Christian while denying the existence of God, but I have every hope that, if the first AC has tried earnestly to love his neighbor as himself, he just might make it through the needle's eye.
*As various of the members themselves said, in letters back to the churches that had sent them. These are letters of record, both ones found by modern archaeological digs and ones that have been in the Vatican's collections for centuries. Even if the latter may include forgeries and such, the people who have studied these have done real science to weed most of those out. It's extremely unlikely, for example, that anyone planted a forged letter in the Vatican's collection in, say, the 12th century, and then bothered to plant copies with the Ethiopian Coptic Church or the Eastern Orthodox churches too.
I hate to stop you from bashing someone who sounds like they are just begging for it, but: I don't believe that nucleonics or chemistry represent Evolution. If you can define a set of multiple generations for quarks, and show how those generations have changed, and perhaps more importantly, have been selected for, I might just change my mind. Show me just one quark that failed a natural selection test, and now lies dead without having given birth to a litter of baby quarks.
What you've done is to redefine 'evolution' to just mean 'change' and then argued in effect that no one in their right mind would disagree with the ancient Greek philosopher who said "Everything is Change". Real Evolution is for things that can know Death.
Now let's look at the amino acid bit. The classical experiment proved it was much easier to get very simple compounds to organize up to the Amino Acid level than was thought. A little electricity, UV light, some Methane and Ammonia, and a very short time was all it took. Scientists confidently predicted that Proteins and DNA were just a few weeks away, then months, then years... maybe if we built a glass sphere the size of the Pacific Ocean, and ran the experiment for a million years... maybe a billion... wait, nature only needed about a quarter of that...
The very same experiment that revealed one step in the synthesis of life was a lot easier than we once thought, ALSO showed that the next step was much, much harder. The whole Folding at Home project is really about producing just some of the data we will need to define the goals of the next experiment, and as you probably know, FaH isn't finished just yet.
Really calculating the total probabilities is hard, and even real, professional scientists disagree over a lot of assumptions that you have to make to determine if this experiment actually proved life is more a normal, near inevitable consequence of an early earth-like world's chemistry, or if it is actually as unlikely as pre-evolutionary thinkers thought it was, or just maybe, even more improbable.
The original comic had a lot of political content - without committing any real spoilers for the few who read this without actually having read the comic, the most central plotline of the whole miniseries involves using the 'big lie' technique to manipulate the masses. There are some '9/11' parallels to this. There's also some more tangential stuff. Sticking with just what's revealed early in the series and trying to avoid spoilers, Nixon stays in power for his second term because the approximate Superman equivalent hero intervenes in Vietnam, a somewhat Captain America like hero, complete with a patriotic red, white and blue costume, is increasingly revealed as a real bastard, and the prior generation of heroes includes at least one that sounds like he got his costume idea straight from a KKK meeting.
I'd gladly go into paranoid mode here and propose that this film's legal troubles might be from some people wanting to suppress the political criticism, but some of the rumors about what's still in and what's out make me wonder, is there actually anything left in it that involves even the tiniest bit of politically sensitive content? By some accounts, the only way the movie could make any comments the current administration might dislike would be by encouraging a few people to buy the graphic novel.
That's one of the differences in this case and a car analogy. In the analogy, Honda has a whole bunch of simple, obvious recourses that are collectively very powerful if they want to stop Ford from buying Honda engines and putting them in Fords:
1. They can refuse to sell at a volume discount, forcing Ford to buy engines at retail markup, through a third party. 2. They can refuse to honor warranties for any engine that has been used in a Ford. This could include powerful penalty clauses for anyone caught lying about an engine's Ford provenance and seeking service. They can use the existing criminal laws to prosecute aggressively anyone who alters a part serial number, as that is considered automatic proof that the person was running a chop shop. The cops bust you, you get to try to prove a negative (that there was no actual grand theft auto going on), and in some states, you still count as a chop shop just for having falsified the paperwork and misused the tools.
If Autozone, for example, took a few Honda Engines back in exchange for replacements, turned them in for rebuild, and they had altered serial numbers, Honda could stop selling engines and manufacturer's original parts to Autozone, seek criminal prosecution (which would force Autozone to turn in the end users or be accused themselves), AND enforce contracts that could easily have a 1 Million dollars per violation 'no Ford' clause. (And yes, they have the leverage to get such contracts). How long before Autozone simply stops offering exchange on Honda engines? Most legitimate Honda customers won't suffer from this, they can still work through a Honda dealer. Ford drivers with Honda engines can go to Ford dealers too, but (by step 1), Ford is paying retail for those parts... 3. Honda can announce to the public that they have formed the opinion that Ford has failed to integrate the engine in a fully effective way, and it won't have the fuel advantages or reliability it has in a real Honda. They make publicity off of Ford's using their gear, and still slam the competition. 4. Honda can announce the same thing, but include that they think the integration is unsafe, and could even petition the courts to force a mandatory recall of all Forddas. They could time this for maximal economic impact, and a court would be very likely to rule that the people who actually designed and built the engine were more expert than other people who merely adapted the engine, so Honda could very probably get the recall if they wanted it. They could then raise a separate issue over the safety of those Honda engines that Ford was rebuilding itself, whenever they wanted to let the other shoe drop.
Now here's why car analogies will only take you so far. A judge in the Ford vs. Honda case will usually see most of these recourses. If Honda claims they need the judge to do something, the judge will look at what Honda is capable of doing for themselves, as part of his decision.
How many of those methods I just mentioned can Apple use? Can apple claim that their OS is miss-installed in a way that may cause the computer to spontaneously catch fire? Is their an urgent safety risk? How easy is it to detect an altered serial number on an OS copy, compared to an engine block? (And does any of this involve people bringing back physical copies of the OS when they obtain an upgrade?). Are there third parties with stockpiles of replacement Apple OS's? Does Apple have the sort of leverage with these that a primary car manufacturer has with a parts retailer?
Ah, there's the problem. A change in Allele frequencies does not always equate to evolution. Some organisms are classed as known stochastic mutators. They can mutate regularly, changing the frequency of a given gene in a manner that looks superficially like there is selection pressure, and then subsequent generations can mutate back with just the same frequency, showing that there is no actual selection pressure. HIV, arguably one of the most studied organisms out there, is believed to be one of these, with four alleles that show the behavior. HIV is also a demonstrated non-stochastic mutator, on other alleles.
Re:Does anyone need to learn that torture hurts?
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Torture in Games
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· Score: 1
Your mention of 'physically' and 'emotionally crippling' effects is significant. One reason societies torture is it often messes the victim up permanently. The theory goes, leave a person barely able to walk, starting or even fainting at every loud noise, and trained in submission, and you have a person who won't make an effective enemy. He or she may hate your guts, but won't actually be functional enough to pose a threat. That's actually the most frequent goal, rather than to get information. And the goal includes the phrase "... for life."
It can be based on the person being a known enemy, but just as often it's a case of making that reporter who asked the embarrassing questions go away, or those people who were picketing the convention, or that kid who just may be related to somebody the government already had trouble with. The more nations get used to torture, the more often it's focused on their own internal problems.
Try this. the US's law supports locking up captured enemies only for the duration of the conflict. It supports locking up criminals only for sentences supposedly in proportion to their proven crimes. This is why the whole argument for classifying people as 'unlawful combatants' led to torture. The government made the new classification so they could impose penalties 'for life", and once they did, they took steps that have ruined these people for life. Punishment, not information gathering. Our government decided to impose a fate worse than death on some people, to make their supposed allies think they would rather die than risk the same treatment.
I'm trying to find a polite way to say this. 1. You just put a lot of words somebody didn't speak into their mouth, then debated that straw-man and not what they said. Frankly, you owe Baldrson (78598) an apology. 2. The old metrics have been changed to deliberately lie to the general public. That's a fact, both that the rules the government uses to define 'unemployment', 'cost of living', 'inflation' and other factors have all been changed, and that the intent was to mislead people. (To verify the second point, you need merely note that the use of the M3 was dropped entirely, but if that's not enough for you, there's the section in the IRS code where 'a well trained and educated workforce' is now listed as a form of intellectual property subject to capitalization or amortization right alongside patents and copyrights - that's right, if you are an employee, you now can be sold or written off (at least as the IRS sees it), and your estimated value to the company (different from what you actually get paid) is included in their stock valuation. If that's not a deliberate lie to prop up stock prices, what is it, a full revocation of the 14th amendment? 3. The old metric for unemployment didn't deliberately count 'housewives'. What it did count was people who had stopped contacting official government unemployment offices, (presumably because they weren't getting any help there), but weren't showing up on the official employment rolls (because if they were, they'd be having income tax and social security withholding, so we'd know they weren't unemployed) and so were working under the table, usually for less than minimum wage, or as migrant workers, or squatting (where they were farming the land they didn't own, not just living on it).
The old metric tried to take these into account, which often took some judgment calls, and some politicians argued that the methods of deciding who would work if a legal job was offered and who wouldn't really work anyway were flawed. Some of them even argued that we would end up counting a few women who dropped out just because they got married (housewives!). Maybe, but the number of people who would work legally and yet don't see any point in asking at the government office after twenty weeks of being told there's nothing available is certainly greater than zero, which is how it's counted now. There's something very crooked involved in saying 'We don't have a completely accurate number, so we're going to count the whole thing as zero. There - problem is gone, there are no unemployed (or homeless, or people without medical care, etc.) in America", and similar tricks.
For a lot of Joes, the economy hasn't been right since about the 5th to 7th year of that long period where minimum wage froze. For other Joes, it really hit about the time they were asked to pay for the whole 'End of the Cold War Peace Dividend' - for example the incredibly filthy trick played on the Airline Pilots Unions. (Don't know why banning the strike and busting the union led to the shortages of pilots, technicians and even air traffic controllers we see today? Then why are you commenting on economics?). People have been getting screwed over since Cain couldn't get a jury trial. This time, it's just about everybody reading this thread.
Re:It's Called "Mob Mentality"
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Censorship By Glut
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's a value neutral approach. You can do it while still respecting yourself, other people, and the truth, or you can abuse it.
Example: 90% or so of all pedophilia involves people the victims know, usually family or friends of family. When people propose laws and other solutions that focus on the 10% and ignore that remaining 90%, they want to waste a lot of money fixing only a small part of the problem and do nothing about the bulk of it. But, before you can point that out to them, you have to make sure they don't think you have a hidden agenda of protecting the 'bad guys'. After all, if they think it's all strangers, and they don't know you very well, you're on the suspect list yourself until they move you out of the stranger category.
So, you comment on how you can see they care about protecting kids. If you have kids too, you mention how upset and angry you would be if someone molested them. If you don't have kids of your own, you could mention something else, like your nieces and nephews, or a case you read about in the paper. Let the other person explain why they think their plan will work, and respect their feelings whether you respect the logic or not. You can be scrupulously honest. Once you've shown you have some common ground, you can usually discuss where you differ without being tuned out or starting a fight. (Usually, not always - if the other person has lousy people skills, you can try all you want, but he or she can still sabotage the dialog). It's at least worth a try.
The real problem is, some of the scummiest people around are very good at these techniques, and that sometimes gives them a bad name.
This is the most profound comment in this thread. For the next few years at least, can you imagine the public buying that mathematical prediction works? Knowing that we've predicted ourselves into the Great Depression? (That 1929 thing will be renamed the 'lesser depression' by the time this one plays out). Every negative review will start by making fun of a plot that takes mathematically guiding the future seriously.
"Foundation is set in a world where mile high building cover a whole planet. It starts off looking like Sci-Fi, but I realized it was wildly improbable fantasy when the plot had people predicting the future with math!"
-Locus
Slashdot Mirror
I've been very scrupulously not downloading unliscensed content, partly because I've been posting about the issue for ten years or so, and don't want to give anyone grounds to say I'm just opposed to all this IP for life+ business because I'm a pirate. That said, I'm a living counter-example of the RIAA's position. I keep a budget, and about 10% goes to entertainment. If I downloaded, I'd use that to better decide what to buy, and still spend just as much or little. I suppose that, if I was paying for a download service, that would come out of the total so I'd buy a little less, but that's about it. Right now, I buy books a lot, TV shows a lot, and movies some, and music a little. I can pick up a book and skim though it pretty much at will, and usually have seen at least some episodes of a TV series I buy. Movies and music I often have only a very limited sample, and I've seen a lot of music where the one song I heard on the radio was the only good song on them, so I'm extra careful. Having more free samples available for some media already swings me towards buying more of those media, without any piracy factors at all figured in, so why wouldn't piracy also have the same effect?
What's wrong with this analogy?
Lets see - FOSS developers are doing something totally legal and ethical that benefits many other people, and even offers some benefits to the laid off Microsoft employee if he or she can still afford to use a computer. Hate them if you must, but it's like being a buggy whip maker who hates the inventors of that new-fangled horseless carriage.
Illegal downloaders inflict damage to a company's bottom line in at least some cases, but laid off employees are there because of that, plus lots of perfectly legal actions, (i.e. boycotts, spending your entertainment dollars on something else besides music, or your being too broke to have descressionary spending anymore). A big chunk of it is the industry's own choice. Illegal downloading by itself hasn't done nearly all the damage, and it's a least reasonable to claim that the industry's own mistakes were big enough to screw their own people without illegal downloading having any impact at all. Hate the downloaders if you must, but you'll do better in the long run if you at least apportion blame fairly, and don't let your former management pass the buck for its own share of the causes. (So sure, go ahead and hate, but don't hate blindly).
For this mess, 100% of the pain coming back is the consequences of these person's own unethical choices, and any hatred they feel is like the hatred of a caught criminal for the witnesses who fingered him. The rest of us either don't care or actively wish they'd catch a bullet. If you're one of their employees, and genuinely didn't know your management were viciously treasonous bastards, sorry.
Perspective sure is an interesting thing. I'm sure there's some guy on death row right now who killed a whole family because he wanted money for his fix, and from his perspective, there's no difference between him and Jesus walking to the cross, but for the rest of us, there is.
The parent poster didn't say that makes everything right, that's your inferrence. .iso's sell in the millions every year, and that sure ain't all Linux distros.
The point about free and price is that pirating, including all sorts of digital media such as music and movies, and not just games, isn't really free. Cheap sometimes, but it has costs.
People are buying bigger hard drives to hold rared files and assemble them, or to hold torrent data so they can get an acceptable upload/download ratio. They are buying DVD burners instead of just players (and how many people would really need DVDs to store just their personal files?). They are taking added legal risks by uploading when they could just leach. They are paying for commercial ripping software or paying time to learn how to use exotic freeware. In the US, people pirating via Usenet pay an average of 21 dollars a month just for long retention Usenet servers, and many of them pay more for anonimizing proxies and encryption software, plus at least some of them wouldn't bother to pay so much for high speed access itself. Copies of commercial software specifically designed to burn digitally exact bitwise copies of files and to handle
Sometimes the costs are pretty trivial. Sometimes they are pretty significant, and the question becomes, why do these people bother just to avoid paying a company money? Or it should become that, but we are still arguing with people like you who bother to post AC with a strawman attack, apparently just to try and keep that point from being addressed.
The arguments that people are basically crooks and free always wins are always at least a bit off. No one is getting pirated copies handed to them without some costs, and both the money costs and time related costs can be pretty substantial yet still not deter pirating. When somebody hikes 12 miles across broken terrain to avoid a toll road, we don't just say "Well of course, free always beats pay", we look at what prices they are really paying that a 12 mile hike still sometimes seems worth it. Maybe the toll is very high, or maybe it's other things, like the attendant being viciously rude, or the signs that say "We reserve the right to strip search you publicly when you drive this road."
And (in the US at least), you lose three, maybe four major holidays and your boss will now expect you to work on them all.
They can certify that all the legal posts are noise free, complete, and sampled at a certain base quality. They can create a standard for quality assurance and guarantee the customer won't get any technological clinkers (artistic ones are obviously not within their competence). They can afford the storage to keep multiple versions available, and a business supporting them that ensures that they will most likely be around for years or decades. They can afford the storage to keep related works together in the same internet place and ease finding them (imagine, one stop shopping, with various size MP3, FLAC or OGG versions, ringtone versions, cover art, sheet music and lyric sheets all on the same website). They can provide discographies, linking between related artists or styles, and professional reviewing. They can help a consumer find things that consumer doesn't know exist yet.
How much of this can compete with free? I'm genuinely not sure. Probably some of it would help, but I don't see any proof in advance a particular model would be cost effective. Free's a pretty big word.
One of the RIAA arguments is that if you owned only a cassette version, you are stealing the superior quality version ripped from a CD instead of upgrading. Of course, if that's logical, then by the very same logic it's somehow less of an infringement to download a 128 K sampling rate MP3 than it is to download the same thing sampled at 196K or higher quality. Is downloading something you only have on cassette 140% more serious than at least having it on 8 track? (since 8 tracks were clearly superior).
One of the reasons the RIAA isn't doing too well in court is they are advancing legal arguments that often work as well against their position as for it, and basically asking the courts to ignore that part. (witness their definition of 'vexatious litigant').
In many cases, a woman (or man) standing on a corner at midnight dressed in hot pants, bikini top and spiked heels, is soliciting for prostitution, but to make an arrest stick, she (or he) still has to actually ask for money. We make cops go through the action of bringing up price and getting an answer, to avoid basing an arrest merely on whether that same cop thinks someone is dressed too provocatively.
Copyright infringement may be every bit as difficult to pinpoint as you say, but it's equally difficult to say just where to draw the line if we start drawing it somewhere in the largish space of 'making available'. Just like Barney Fife may honestly think that woman standing on the curb, trying to hail a cab, in the same outfit she went clubbing in, is a hooker, the RIAA may honestly think (or claim to think) that having a torrent program at all is over where the line should be drawn.
In debating just where to draw the legal line, it should always be remembered, some lines have practical problems when it comes to actually testing them, some are based on simple principles, and some require very intricate interpretations of those principles. Good laws are usually, if not always, ones where the lines are simple enough to apply in many cases, clear cut enough to repeatedly give the same verdicts when the same circumstances apply, and based on principles that can be explained to the general public's satisfaction.
As somebody with coke bottle lens glasses, I've always wondered why anyone would think eyes make a good example of irreducible complexity in the first place. Obviously, not all eyes are perfect, and even an imperfect eye is better than none (although I'm sure I'd be in a leopard's belly by now if I was a proto-human).
Still, even a very basic eye-spot is of some use and might help an organism survive. Unless the argument is that the critter has to have at least a single eye-spot, a very basic optic nerve, and some pretty small amounts of brain tissue dedicated to interpreting the signal, what's the minimum complexity that's supposed to be irreducible?
Now gender, there's an irreducible. One of Darwin's basic arguments was that unlimited amounts of blending in the genetic code would make natural selection grind to a halt (That's a testable prediction of Darwin's by the way. One reason Crick and Watson got the Nobel prize is the code they discovered didn't allow for unlimited blending. Anyone who claims Evolution isn't science because it makes no testable predictions might note that point.).
If most offspring in a sexual species weren't clearly expressing some gender specific trait,gender itself would swiftly vanish. So how does sexual reproduction evolve in the first place? If it isn't all or nothing 99.something % of the time, blending makes it fall back into asexual reproduction within a few generations. You have to have a situation much like human genetics with a lot of sexually related genes are all on the X/Y pair. That is, in some ancestor species, a whole bunch of gender related mutations have to occur at very close to the same time (same generation, or a most a very, very few), AND get themselves segregated onto one pair of chromosomes and moved off of the other chromosomes (again, within a very, very few generations), before a blending-like effect in the non-sex related chromosomes wipes them out.
You point out an odd advantage of developing the moon, which I don't recall seeing in print before now. With a 28 day rotation period, if there's a big solar flare or a slew of charged particles pass through the solar system from some interstellar event, (such as a nearby supernova), then with colonies scattered about Luna, some of them won't be exposed to radiation from a given direction until the event has presumably died down. There's probably a more optimum distribution than putting two colonies on exactly opposite points, but I wonder if anyone has done real work on this idea.
Perhaps increased budgets and high popularity, plus all the improvements in special effects since, say Tom Baker, mean it's more possible to do more stories where lots of physical movement, agility, and sheer conditioning play a part. A young Doctor is a Doctor who can run. Remember Tennant (as the Doctor) describing the job? "Well.. and running, lots and lots of running.".
The legal definition of 'local' is more likely to be the whole state where Microsoft makes its headquarters (Possibly for companies taking advantage of things such as Delaware's liberal incorporation rules, the headquarters rule is replaced with wherever they are incorporated). If the company gets any tax advantages for a branch office, factory or other physical presences being located in some other particular state, again, the definition of local is normally the whole state. Unless a city or town (or county) can wave enough local taxes to attract a business, it's too small a unit to be considered local in the legal sense.
This doesn't mean all benefits have to be spread out equally. For example, most MS employees in Washington live in or near Redmond, shop in that area, and if they are home owners pay county taxes there, and there's not so much benefit for a county on the other end of the state, but the whole state presumably benefits to a variable extent. The rest of the country presumably indirectly benefits from Washington being a more stable and prosperous state, and the whole world presumably indirectly benefits eventually, but the primary benefit is legally at the state level.
1. Microsoft benefits from many government programs, such as the H1B visa program. If MS doesn't like it here, there is no reason the US government should further subsidize Microsoft by selectively letting anyone MS wants to hire move to the head of the line to enter this country. If Microsoft plays hardball to maximize its profits, then the Government should play hardball to do its proper job as well,or are you one of those idiots too stupid to realize that the government has a duty to control immigration?
Oh, and the courts! That's the US government too, prosecuting those pirates. If Microsoft isn't willing to pay the US an equal share of taxes to get legal services any more, why are my taxes subsidizing their legal protection? If the shareholder's profit comes from getting my taxes to cover their operating costs, then damn every single shareholder to the deepest pits of Hell for the crooks they are.
Or are you implying that they aren't stealing unless the government (which you despise) agrees with the old fashioned definition of theft I just offered. Kind of a catch 22 that - 'The Government is a bunch of people who mismanage everything, but common people shouldn't call theft what it is unless the government agrees with them'. If you don't trust the government any more than your post indicates, why in hell do you think we should all just blindly follow that same government in closing an eye to theft?
2. The fiduciary duty to maximize profits is a legal term, defined by the very US government you knock. It's half a phrase, the other half being "within the accepted limits of proper corporate citizenship, and in accordance with the specifics of its charter". No stockholder can successfully sue MS for not violating its charter with the state (by relocating assets where they fall under the control of a foreign government, and coincidentally might be subject to that government's political instabilities). Interestingly, Ireland does not have a body of legal doctrine recognizing a corporation's duty to maximize shareholder profit. Are you one of those dumb assholes who thinks overseas banking and other people's sovereign nations are regulated by the US government?
Actually, I looked at the lists for my county, and two nearby counties that have a largeish city spanning them. The local list had several people convicted of rape of a child under age 12 or forcible rape, about 10 statutory rape charges where the perpetrator was at least 25 when the crime was committed, and one case I thought really shouldn't be worth a listing, for statutory with a three year age difference, involving a 17 year old tried as an adult. .jpgs as far as I can tell. I'm a bit concerned that whoever writes these up can evidently pick what parts of the story they want to tell to make a given case look better or worse.
I checked, and that last one is supposed to come of after 2 years or so. The notes on that one specify a bunch of other things about the kid, such as him still being ordered to attend his high school until graduation, but barred from participating in extracurricular activities there unless a teacher remains present at all times. In his case, the story is pretty well known, and I doubt anyone in the community is going to form a lynch mob, and there are probably people willing to hire him once he finishes school.
The large city listings however, had a lot more odd cases: A dozen or so were for aggravated prostitution, which I at first thought might mean the hooker was really bugging people who weren't interested or something like that. I asked a local lawyer who was up on these cases what that was about, and he told me the charge was usually used only when the prostitute was known to be HIV positive. He said that was always the case for female prostitutes, as far as he knew, but he thought some jurisdictions might be using it "more aggressively" for male prostitutes. About as many were for lewd conduct, specifically at public rest stops on the state highways or interstate. There were also some indecent exposure charges that stipulated the same locations, and had notes they were plea bargained down from either lewd conduct or solicitation.
Some points:
1. close to 95% of the rape of a child and statutory charges involved a relative, and many of them also had notations such as incest (stepfather), incest (blood relative), or similar. There were very few stranger molestation cases (and not a one in my county). There were a few in the larger city. These are very sick people to be sure, but for most of them, the threat to the wider community looks pretty small. I don't want any of them actually working at day cares or similar when they get out, but I'm not too worried if they get supervised release one day. The threat by general purpose rapists looks a lot larger.
2. There is a lot of other information on these. Just about always, if somebody was busted at a business, the business name was redacted (i.e. it would say 'a local bar', or 'local truck stop', rather than the name. For non-business locations, the entries got more specific, i.e. City public library, west branch). For people busted for child porn, the listings often specify the apparent age range of the victims and the approximate number of pieces of porn involved. In some cases, this shows types, i.e. VHS tapes or bound material (magazines or books, not bondage). In others, they use the term items, which could be anything from whole films to individual
3. The same people who were offered or somehow negotiated plea bargains frequently had notes if they were in a treatment program, or had completed one. Other cases which appeared by their photos to be reasonably able to afford lawyers often did too, and several cases had no photo and a note that they had completed treatment. None of the people shown as having been represented by a public defender had any notes indicating a plea bargain arrangement existed, and none of them showed any signs of being in a treatment program, or completing one. People with public defenders outnumbe
I'm sure that first claim was tongue in cheek, so I won't bother to disabuse you of the notion that you're an expert, but you asked a smart question so:
As a classical mathematical concept, Markov Chains are considered stochastic processes (with the word stochastic meaning damned near exactly what the average guy means by random).
Evolution is a non-random process. (Evolution has two major aspects, Mutation and Selection. Mutation itself is random, but Selection applies a pressure that should be mathematically treated as a non-random vector.).
From that alone, it would seem you could have a Markov Chain like process only to the extent there was no selection pressure. Imagine it's the Ediacaran, and there are no predators for sea pens yet. In fact, the seas are mostly empty, not just of predators, but of niche competitors. Sea pens have all evolved to the point where they have minimal anchor feet because they need them to resist occasional current surges from mud slides, but with no other real selection pressures, sea pens might develop in very exotic ways, expanding into what is effectively a vast, empty morpheme space. As the Ediacaran gives way to the Cambrian, some Sea Pens might end up completely dwelling under the mud, others become free swimming, some become incredibly diverse from their ancestors of only a few dozen generations, etc.
Parts of what is called the Cambrian Explosion would look like Markov Chains, at least approximately (as they do). Most times, evolutionary processes don't look like this, and the lack of Stochasticism explains why nicely.
Note there's one other problem with applying a Markov Chain model. It's assumed for actually deriving a Markov Chain's formula, that the probabilities for each step are a. known and can b. be independently calculated, and that's not a completely safe assumption in Biology.
Species has been defined for lay people as a population that cannot interbreed with others. Biologists know this is too simple, for example, just about any species, considered over multiple generations and not just in the present time, won't fit this rule, and the very word interbreeding is also ambiguous in some cases, (Does a sterile hybred, such as a mule, count as two species successfully interbreeding even though the process can't go a second generation?).
There's another simple but wrong definition in all this: "A single gene codes for a single protein". That one is often used in freshman genetics, and also turns out to have exceptions.
I really wish we could somehow moderate this thread so that the people who don't know these definitions were down about -1, the ones who don't know anything of the exceptions were all at +1, and the ones who are pretty clear on at least that much biology could set their filters accordingly.
The Council that put together the Bible 200 years or so after Christ's birth, debated hotly which books went into it. The whole Old Testament was included for chiefly two reasons*
1. Some (not nearly all), wanted to include any OT book that seemed to have a prophecy of Jesus's coming, so that Christians could see that He met all the tests.
2. Some wanted all the Jewish laws in every copy of the Bible, so that Christians could see what laws Jesus was talking about when he spoke about living not by the law but by every breath which comes from the Mouth of God, and other such things.
While there were some people who favored a third reason, genuinely believing that God wanted all Christians to keep to all the OT rules, they actually were far, far short of a majority. Paul's writings on circumcision seemed to have already clarified that point to most.
Some of the council didn't want parts or even any of the OT. The resolution to cut it to just the five books of the Torah narrowly failed. Some felt that any Christians who wanted copies of what became the OT for their church should just make those on their own, as they were of the opinion that only churches with a large Jewish convert membership would want to go to the extra expense.
This same process happened with the New Testament. Some Gospels were excluded because they seemed to disagree with others, some were taken as true but left off the list just because they didn't add all that much to the first four. There was a debate about whether four was enough, or too many, and it ended up being settled by an argument that four was the number God must have wanted, since He made so many 4's in nature, such as the four classical Greek elements. (And half a dozen attendees wrote home saying that the argument was silly, but since enough people bought it that the council could move on to the next point, it was probably OK). There were lots of Revelations, and the council picked one that seemed best, but some of the ones they left out were believed to be doctrinally OK, just too long to add to an already huge book that the council was going to urge every church to get a copy of.
I have tried to keep the two commandments as Christ gave them, and I hope that Paul was right when he said 'the greatest of these is charity', for those times that faith and hope have seemed far away. I do not see how it is possible to be a Christian while denying the existence of God, but I have every hope that, if the first AC has tried earnestly to love his neighbor as himself, he just might make it through the needle's eye.
*As various of the members themselves said, in letters back to the churches that had sent them. These are letters of record, both ones found by modern archaeological digs and ones that have been in the Vatican's collections for centuries. Even if the latter may include forgeries and such, the people who have studied these have done real science to weed most of those out. It's extremely unlikely, for example, that anyone planted a forged letter in the Vatican's collection in, say, the 12th century, and then bothered to plant copies with the Ethiopian Coptic Church or the Eastern Orthodox churches too.
I hate to stop you from bashing someone who sounds like they are just begging for it, but:
I don't believe that nucleonics or chemistry represent Evolution. If you can define a set of multiple generations for quarks, and show how those generations have changed, and perhaps more importantly, have been selected for, I might just change my mind. Show me just one quark that failed a natural selection test, and now lies dead without having given birth to a litter of baby quarks.
What you've done is to redefine 'evolution' to just mean 'change' and then argued in effect that no one in their right mind would disagree with the ancient Greek philosopher who said "Everything is Change". Real Evolution is for things that can know Death.
Now let's look at the amino acid bit. The classical experiment proved it was much easier to get very simple compounds to organize up to the Amino Acid level than was thought. A little electricity, UV light, some Methane and Ammonia, and a very short time was all it took. Scientists confidently predicted that Proteins and DNA were just a few weeks away, then months, then years... maybe if we built a glass sphere the size of the Pacific Ocean, and ran the experiment for a million years... maybe a billion... wait, nature only needed about a quarter of that...
The very same experiment that revealed one step in the synthesis of life was a lot easier than we once thought, ALSO showed that the next step was much, much harder. The whole Folding at Home project is really about producing just some of the data we will need to define the goals of the next experiment, and as you probably know, FaH isn't finished just yet.
Really calculating the total probabilities is hard, and even real, professional scientists disagree over a lot of assumptions that you have to make to determine if this experiment actually proved life is more a normal, near inevitable consequence of an early earth-like world's chemistry, or if it is actually as unlikely as pre-evolutionary thinkers thought it was, or just maybe, even more improbable.
The original comic had a lot of political content - without committing any real spoilers for the few who read this without actually having read the comic, the most central plotline of the whole miniseries involves using the 'big lie' technique to manipulate the masses. There are some '9/11' parallels to this. There's also some more tangential stuff. Sticking with just what's revealed early in the series and trying to avoid spoilers, Nixon stays in power for his second term because the approximate Superman equivalent hero intervenes in Vietnam, a somewhat Captain America like hero, complete with a patriotic red, white and blue costume, is increasingly revealed as a real bastard, and the prior generation of heroes includes at least one that sounds like he got his costume idea straight from a KKK meeting.
I'd gladly go into paranoid mode here and propose that this film's legal troubles might be from some people wanting to suppress the political criticism, but some of the rumors about what's still in and what's out make me wonder, is there actually anything left in it that involves even the tiniest bit of politically sensitive content? By some accounts, the only way the movie could make any comments the current administration might dislike would be by encouraging a few people to buy the graphic novel.
That's one of the differences in this case and a car analogy.
In the analogy, Honda has a whole bunch of simple, obvious recourses that are collectively very powerful if they want to stop Ford from buying Honda engines and putting them in Fords:
1. They can refuse to sell at a volume discount, forcing Ford to buy engines at retail markup, through a third party.
2. They can refuse to honor warranties for any engine that has been used in a Ford. This could include powerful penalty clauses for anyone caught lying about an engine's Ford provenance and seeking service. They can use the existing criminal laws to prosecute aggressively anyone who alters a part serial number, as that is considered automatic proof that the person was running a chop shop. The cops bust you, you get to try to prove a negative (that there was no actual grand theft auto going on), and in some states, you still count as a chop shop just for having falsified the paperwork and misused the tools.
If Autozone, for example, took a few Honda Engines back in exchange for replacements, turned them in for rebuild, and they had altered serial numbers, Honda could stop selling engines and manufacturer's original parts to Autozone, seek criminal prosecution (which would force Autozone to turn in the end users or be accused themselves), AND enforce contracts that could easily have a 1 Million dollars per violation 'no Ford' clause. (And yes, they have the leverage to get such contracts). How long before Autozone simply stops offering exchange on Honda engines? Most legitimate Honda customers won't suffer from this, they can still work through a Honda dealer. Ford drivers with Honda engines can go to Ford dealers too, but (by step 1), Ford is paying retail for those parts...
3. Honda can announce to the public that they have formed the opinion that Ford has failed to integrate the engine in a fully effective way, and it won't have the fuel advantages or reliability it has in a real Honda. They make publicity off of Ford's using their gear, and still slam the competition.
4. Honda can announce the same thing, but include that they think the integration is unsafe, and could even petition the courts to force a mandatory recall of all Forddas. They could time this for maximal economic impact, and a court would be very likely to rule that the people who actually designed and built the engine were more expert than other people who merely adapted the engine, so Honda could very probably get the recall if they wanted it. They could then raise a separate issue over the safety of those Honda engines that Ford was rebuilding itself, whenever they wanted to let the other shoe drop.
Now here's why car analogies will only take you so far. A judge in the Ford vs. Honda case will usually see most of these recourses. If Honda claims they need the judge to do something, the judge will look at what Honda is capable of doing for themselves, as part of his decision.
How many of those methods I just mentioned can Apple use? Can apple claim that their OS is miss-installed in a way that may cause the computer to spontaneously catch fire? Is their an urgent safety risk? How easy is it to detect an altered serial number on an OS copy, compared to an engine block? (And does any of this involve people bringing back physical copies of the OS when they obtain an upgrade?). Are there third parties with stockpiles of replacement Apple OS's? Does Apple have the sort of leverage with these that a primary car manufacturer has with a parts retailer?
Ah, there's the problem. A change in Allele frequencies does not always equate to evolution. Some organisms are classed as known stochastic mutators. They can mutate regularly, changing the frequency of a given gene in a manner that looks superficially like there is selection pressure, and then subsequent generations can mutate back with just the same frequency, showing that there is no actual selection pressure. HIV, arguably one of the most studied organisms out there, is believed to be one of these, with four alleles that show the behavior. HIV is also a demonstrated non-stochastic mutator, on other alleles.
Your mention of 'physically' and 'emotionally crippling' effects is significant. One reason societies torture is it often messes the victim up permanently. The theory goes, leave a person barely able to walk, starting or even fainting at every loud noise, and trained in submission, and you have a person who won't make an effective enemy. He or she may hate your guts, but won't actually be functional enough to pose a threat. That's actually the most frequent goal, rather than to get information. And the goal includes the phrase "... for life."
It can be based on the person being a known enemy, but just as often it's a case of making that reporter who asked the embarrassing questions go away, or those people who were picketing the convention, or that kid who just may be related to somebody the government already had trouble with. The more nations get used to torture, the more often it's focused on their own internal problems.
Try this. the US's law supports locking up captured enemies only for the duration of the conflict. It supports locking up criminals only for sentences supposedly in proportion to their proven crimes. This is why the whole argument for classifying people as 'unlawful combatants' led to torture. The government made the new classification so they could impose penalties 'for life", and once they did, they took steps that have ruined these people for life. Punishment, not information gathering. Our government decided to impose a fate worse than death on some people, to make their supposed allies think they would rather die than risk the same treatment.
I'm trying to find a polite way to say this.
1. You just put a lot of words somebody didn't speak into their mouth, then debated that straw-man and not what they said. Frankly, you owe Baldrson (78598) an apology.
2. The old metrics have been changed to deliberately lie to the general public. That's a fact, both that the rules the government uses to define 'unemployment', 'cost of living', 'inflation' and other factors have all been changed, and that the intent was to mislead people. (To verify the second point, you need merely note that the use of the M3 was dropped entirely, but if that's not enough for you, there's the section in the IRS code where 'a well trained and educated workforce' is now listed as a form of intellectual property subject to capitalization or amortization right alongside patents and copyrights - that's right, if you are an employee, you now can be sold or written off (at least as the IRS sees it), and your estimated value to the company (different from what you actually get paid) is included in their stock valuation. If that's not a deliberate lie to prop up stock prices, what is it, a full revocation of the 14th amendment?
3. The old metric for unemployment didn't deliberately count 'housewives'. What it did count was people who had stopped contacting official government unemployment offices, (presumably because they weren't getting any help there), but weren't showing up on the official employment rolls (because if they were, they'd be having income tax and social security withholding, so we'd know they weren't unemployed) and so were working under the table, usually for less than minimum wage, or as migrant workers, or squatting (where they were farming the land they didn't own, not just living on it).
The old metric tried to take these into account, which often took some judgment calls, and some politicians argued that the methods of deciding who would work if a legal job was offered and who wouldn't really work anyway were flawed. Some of them even argued that we would end up counting a few women who dropped out just because they got married (housewives!). Maybe, but the number of people who would work legally and yet don't see any point in asking at the government office after twenty weeks of being told there's nothing available is certainly greater than zero, which is how it's counted now. There's something very crooked involved in saying 'We don't have a completely accurate number, so we're going to count the whole thing as zero. There - problem is gone, there are no unemployed (or homeless, or people without medical care, etc.) in America", and similar tricks.
For a lot of Joes, the economy hasn't been right since about the 5th to 7th year of that long period where minimum wage froze. For other Joes, it really hit about the time they were asked to pay for the whole 'End of the Cold War Peace Dividend' - for example the incredibly filthy trick played on the Airline Pilots Unions. (Don't know why banning the strike and busting the union led to the shortages of pilots, technicians and even air traffic controllers we see today? Then why are you commenting on economics?). People have been getting screwed over since Cain couldn't get a jury trial. This time, it's just about everybody reading this thread.
It's a value neutral approach. You can do it while still respecting yourself, other people, and the truth, or you can abuse it.
Example: 90% or so of all pedophilia involves people the victims know, usually family or friends of family. When people propose laws and other solutions that focus on the 10% and ignore that remaining 90%, they want to waste a lot of money fixing only a small part of the problem and do nothing about the bulk of it. But, before you can point that out to them, you have to make sure they don't think you have a hidden agenda of protecting the 'bad guys'. After all, if they think it's all strangers, and they don't know you very well, you're on the suspect list yourself until they move you out of the stranger category.
So, you comment on how you can see they care about protecting kids. If you have kids too, you mention how upset and angry you would be if someone molested them. If you don't have kids of your own, you could mention something else, like your nieces and nephews, or a case you read about in the paper. Let the other person explain why they think their plan will work, and respect their feelings whether you respect the logic or not. You can be scrupulously honest. Once you've shown you have some common ground, you can usually discuss where you differ without being tuned out or starting a fight. (Usually, not always - if the other person has lousy people skills, you can try all you want, but he or she can still sabotage the dialog). It's at least worth a try.
The real problem is, some of the scummiest people around are very good at these techniques, and that sometimes gives them a bad name.
This is the most profound comment in this thread. For the next few years at least, can you imagine the public buying that mathematical prediction works? Knowing that we've predicted ourselves into the Great Depression? (That 1929 thing will be renamed the 'lesser depression' by the time this one plays out). Every negative review will start by making fun of a plot that takes mathematically guiding the future seriously.
"Foundation is set in a world where mile high building cover a whole planet. It starts off looking like Sci-Fi, but I realized it was wildly improbable fantasy when the plot had people predicting the future with math!"
-Locus