Kurosawa did it better (IMHO), but I don't think that makes Lucas's approach particularly wrong headed. He has at least given plenty of credit there. He's also given credit to some SF authors. He's been OK on questions about whether his core worlds were inspired by Asimov's Trantor, for example. The best film in the series (IMHO) Empire Strikes Back, gives Leigh Brackett credit for the screenplay, and she certainly counts as an old era SF author who's less known than the big 3 (Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein). But there's a lot of specific bits that seem to be falling through the cracks.
Your rant about a rioting bunch of young people is kind of strange and unrealistic...I don't really know how to react to that one.
Go back and look at the origination of the thread, read the submitter's paragraphs, and note how submitter wrote about violent crime rates. That was the subject for the whole thread, and the part you are dismissing as a rant is obviously on topic. If you really don't know how to react (instead of willfully sticking you head in the sand and muttering "Denial is just a river in Egypt"), then you don't get this whole thread, not just me.
OK, so lets say I agree with you 100% - every single one of these people is very, very stupid. Now if someone doesn't start dealing with this right, the whole system will collapse, and all those very stupid (and often heavily armed) people will be trying to kill you, among other people. You don't even seem to be looking at that point. You're going around calling these people stupid, like they're gonna wise up and agree, instead of them deciding a French style or communist revolution is a good idea in response. You think affixing blame solves the problem, and that all the people you want to blame will eventually either listen or die quietly without affecting you, even if nothing else gets done to actually change things. Your philosophy therefore predicts an unrealistic outcome, because stupid, irrational people don't suddenly grow up if a crisis comes, they get worse. My philosophy says a lot of that stupidity is lack of education and contradictory or manipulative messages from people with more power to shape the future, and both those are fixable problems, if we act rationally.
Overall, you have a great philosophy there - if you honestly say it to most of the people it applies to, it has a good chance of getting you roughed up or even killed, but you don't see that as a weakness of the philosophy itself. Now I can say what I honestly think to 95% + of the people I think it about, and in general, I will not be attacked for it. There's a few exceptions, as in I'm not necessarily gonna walk up to a mass murderer and start telling him everything I think about him unless he is in no position to successfully attack me.
But I could tell a group of poor people, of just about any ethnic background, that I think their current problems are a mixture of their own mistakes and a whole lot of other peoples, and the most important thing is to fix the problems, and only worry about assigning blame where it helps fix things more quickly. I could say it's not all rich vrs. all poor, but specific rich, (i.e. ones who use the law to block new startups by consortiums of poorer people), or specific poor who prey on their neighbors by crime, or specific cops who don't enforce the law equally, or whatever, and even where people disagree with me, I'll largely get a decent hearing. I know there's more to the issues than your sound bites, and I'll listen enough to find out what else there is. What scares me is attitudes like yours polarize, and the U.S. is moving towards a bunch of idiots on all sides of the issues drowning out my voice.
I'll advise some people to avoid reproduction yet - hell there's people I'll advise not to reproduce ever. I'll also advise some people who can make a real change, the Social Security system is based on the idea that there will be a large new generation of working class people to keep it going. By many in government, the poor have to breed, or that same enormously powerful government can't keep the economy going. There are incentive programs rich and successful people have designed to encourage breeding. If a single system as large as SS is not stable we all have a problem. IF the entire economy is not stable, well, that should be obvious. No, the fact that you have private retirement doesn't mean you don't have a problem too. No, you can't just say "I don't need Social Security, and people who didn't plan better t
1. Glucose and Fructose in HFCS (with only traces (less than 1.5%) of Dextrose). Dextrose and Fructose in table sugar (with only 5% or less Glucose). That's for batch produced ADM 55% Fructose grade HFCS, and assuming you mean genuine cane sugar for table sugar. I haven't seen a source for how much dextrose is in the ADM 42% grade, and I'll bet table sugar varies by both origin and process, so if anyone wants to check for more sources on these numbers, there may be better ones than I could find, but ADM's own site doesn't mention the Glucose percentages, only the Fructose.
Glucose gets absorbed early and quickly, that's why they call it blood sugar, it goes straight into the bloodstream. Glucose is absorbed before intestinal enzymes get involved, some straight through the stomach lining. People are still working on just how insulin gets from the islets (where it's made) to the intestinal villi (where it's used). Transport is at least partially by the blood stream, but notice that people who need extra insulin don't inject it straight into the vein, but into muscle tissue, partially to smooth out absorption cycle effects. The high and low blood sugar cycles get greater amplitude with lots of glucose in the diet, higher peaks, lower troughs. That too, may or may not be a big deal, but the evidence at least tilts slightly towards 'it is'. It's enough evidence that standard medical practice is to perscribe multiple varieties of insulins that absorb at different rates to most patients, just to smooth out the same peaks and troughs. I'm not arguing that there is an air tight case for my position, just that where you said 'little evidence' in your first post, there's more than a little.
2. Since you were smart enough to stipulate that your explanation of digestion is a huge overgeneralization, I want to add just one word - "simple", as in simple sugars and starches. I'm not at all convinced that the traces of complex sugars in HFCS cause a seperate problem, particularly not that it's a different effect from complex sugars found in non-processed foods, but it's a fairly high probability hypothesis, by close analogy. Look at some other examples of enzymatic metabolic processes. Any of the traditional illegal drugs has a structure similar to a brain chemical in most repects, different in just a few. All the opiates, Heroin to Methaqualone, mimic the backbone of the natural endorphins, until you get to a methyl group or something hanging off to one side. LSD and the other halucinogens all mimic Serotonin or the other 'putative' neurotransmitters like GABA (and NO2 is both an externally administered drug, and the actual brain chemical used as a neurotransmitter in smaller amounts). Even borderline brain affecting chemicals such as Caffeine or Nicotine are chemically close to adernalin or the intermediate oxidation process compounds leading to adrenochrome. (Glucose itself is both a nourisher for general cell use, and what's sometimes called a 'neuromoderator', which is why I rate this analogy pretty highly and am not trotting out anything involving automobiles.).
All of these compounds pass through one or more enzymatic stages in breakdown, and most are broken down by the appropriate enzyme nearly as quickly as the brain chemical they mimic. Then in the later stages, the molecular differences show up, some successor process can't work, or is thousands of times slower since the mediator enzyme is inefficent to totally useless. Again by analogy, I could see some of the more complex sugars as having unusual effects, possibly even in trace amounts much smaller than what's in foods - after all, mere microgram quantities of LSD can totally screw with the brain for hours, even though the amount of actual serotonin normally in the brain is much larger. If you'd merely said there was little evidence for this part of the arguement, I'd have to agree - what I'm passing on there is specualtive, worth looking at but far from a reason for legal controls. The glucose up/down cycle in the bloodstream effects link looks more significant though.
Because the prosecuter took the jury through the list of URLs and showed them how each was accessed, proving that the way those URLs got on the machine's logs was by a person choosing to click on links, and that those links were advertised as what they were, and not something more innocuous? Because probable cause doesn't extend to "There's this malware, see? And it installs URLs for all these sites that are registered with a number of different companies, in IE's browser records, see? And it hides the quite innocent looking URL where the process starts, see? And nobody else has this particular malware, see? And I can't show you how it does that, but take my word for it, see?"?
Yes, URLs can be spoofed/inserted. Time stamps can be altered. Someone might create malware that pops up links for a lot of sites owned by different people. Someone might be able to browse the net using this machine as a remote. But to use that as a defense, you have to come up with a specific possible scenario, i.e. "cracker uses already installed malware to browse porn via remote machine, then covers his tracks by tinkering with timestamps and recent/history lists.". Then you have to show that the malware that would allow that is among the malware found on the PC. From there, it may be reasonable to require a jury to consider the possibility that this is what happened, but before then, reasonable doubt isn't yet an issue.
By analogy (which I hope isn't too bad as analogies go), If you have an evil twin skippy, it can be reasonable to doubt that you were the one who held up that bank, but first you have to produce records establishing that you in fact have an evil twin. Sayimg "Back-Orifice 7.5 was found on the machine" may create reasonable doubt, but saying "Unspecified malware was found" doesn't. A forensic specialist saying "some time stamps have definitely been altered" may create reasonable doubt, but a non-expert saying "Isn't it possible for time stamps to be changed?" doesn't. "Reasonable doubt" isn't "any possible doubt", and juries are not expected to accept just any possible scenario.
It's a possible 40 year sentence. Maybe in this case the charge itself should be different. But is 40 years a reasonable maximum for a 'causing harm' charge? Maybe the state in question needs to rewrite their code, breaking down the charge into several categories so that there's no risk of sentencing someone to 40 years for minor or trivial harm, and so there's standards for defining psychological harm.
I know if my daughter was still a minor, and a teacher had shown her nude images at 10 years old, I'd be asking if this was for art class, or health, or what, before I'd even worry that anything might need to be done. If it was not class-relevant, and was simple nudity or even mild erotica, I might want the teacher to get a warning, and discharge if she repeated the act dispite it. I might even talk to my daughter and see how she felt, just in case this incident had given her some mistaken impressions about sex. But, depending on just what the material was, firing the teacher for a first action isn't necessarily unreasonable, and some charges may not be either. I think some of the scat, simulated rape, 'chicks like to be abused', 'interracial cuckold husband' type sites can do real mental harm to children who encounter them. Not 40 years worth mind you, but real harm.
This is one reason why 'malware did it' defenses should be taken seriously by the courts. Most pedophiles are collector types. For example, the FBI profiling guidelines for law enforcement officers who have discovered child porn, whether on or off a PC, just assume the perp is sn obsessive collector, likely to have dozens of CD photo collections burned, whole cabinets of VHS tapes, or similar sized caches in whatever forms they collect. Pedophiles almost invariably want tens of thousands of photos and hundreds of films, perhaps to validate their orientation ("See, lots of people do it, so I'm not a lone weirdo!"), or perhaps from a fear that the supply will dry up and whatever they have managed to collect will be all they see for the rest of their lives. That really creepy guy you mentioned is very typical.
If all the material is on the PC, and good searches of the suspect's home or workplace don't find back ups and additional material, it's time to look at the alternatives before rushing to convict. Conversely, local law enforcement ought to be trained that finding a back up cache or other off device child porn is one of the best ways to ensure solid convictions.
I found much of your post accurate in its fashion. Much of the poor diet typical of U.S. poor is not really required by their income, so much as their lifestyle. There's no need for most to go to red beans and rice more than 2 days a week, and most could afford chicken about 2 meals a week, lasagnia or spaghetti with beef 1x, etc. and have milk products in enough amounts to not need calcium supplements. Practically every kid that is now going to elemntary schools and needing a school breakfast program could be better fed at home on what the parent gets, either from a minimum wage job or food stamp programs, or both.
Much of the problem is getting educated and organized. Educated in how to cook and how to figure a balanced diet, special nutritional needs of kids and the elderly, etc., and getting organized enough so that there is time to shop and cook, including getting rides to grocery stores and such as needed. For most, pushing to get away from grabbing fast food on an irregular schedule between their two jobs and not letting the kids pick what they want are the two biggest improvements in organization needed.
But where you post about enzymatic actions, you're not really on target. When that enzymatic action slows or stops, we have what? Diabetes! The number of adult type 2 diabetics in the US is approaching 30 million, it's rising much faster than the population, AND much faster than the actual obesity rates, the distribution falls out heavily on economic lines, and people look at those figures and say "there is little evidence...". There's only little evidence if we assume in this case that corrolation definitely does not equal causation, and while it's not necessarily true that it does, it's generally the way to bet.
High Fructose Corn Syrup and regular old table sugar do not follow all the same enzymatic pathways - that's simply false. HFCS is generally either 42% or 55% fructose, with the other part being mostly Glucose, and almost no Sucrose (less than 1.5% of the non Fructose fraction)). Since Sucrose is normally split into Fructose and Glucose anyway, we end up the same sugars, but we also end up with HFCS not needing to be split. The Glucose portion goes swiftly into the bloodstream while the HFCS is still in the stomach, increasing the peak and trought effects of sugar metabolism over cane sugars or other such sources that have significant dextrose to be split later when the sugars reach the intestines. Whether HFCS also triggers excess production of insulin that ends up not being needed, or not, is still up for discussion among some well qualified researchers. I'll grant there's not nearly enough evidence for that yet to make it a factor in setting national policy, but there's enough evidence to make it an important area of research.
Prehaps of more concern, Significant quantities of more complex sugars, often reaching 6-8% of the total sugars, are included in some sources of HFCS. Many of those sugars are not found in any known natural sources (i.e. they don't compare at all closely chemically to the complex sugars found in similar levels in a naturally high fructose product, such as an orange). If all of these compounds follow the same metabolic pathways, I want it on record as absolute proof of intelligent design. It's a cinch Glucose itself doesn't follow the path, because it's already at the end point.
Comparative rates of obesity for Western European nations and Canada with the U.S. can be used to preselect a pool of countries where overall obesity problems are very similar, and the populations genetic heriatages are near identical on average, if this is done, we've ruled out most of the alternative explanations currently proposed for the known Diabetes increases, AND we end up with the US standing out for two factors.
1) Types 1 & 2 Diabetes are increasing at a much faster rate than general obesity.
So what you are saying is biology makes it natural for adult humans to bear young. Economics makes it inadvisable for many humans. Their alternative is to supress their natural reproductive drive, at least until they can afford contraception (and since most contraceptives are less than 100% reliable, back up plans like abortions, raising the result in a pinch, extra medical care, etc.).
Now, stand in front of a bunch of young adults with typical drives. Tell them they are not allowed to reproduce. Act mystified if they get angry. If there are any other sources of interpersonal problems, such as the bunch being of a different ethnic or linguistic group, or some other historical division, expect some of the bunch to claim this is motivated by predjudice and not this 'invisible hand of the market' thingee. Act even more mystified if they don't immediately stop this speculation and believe you sincerely are not letting any such personal issues color your model, just because you said so.
Congratulations, you just fscked up and made a bad life choice. You said something extremely stupid to a bunch of people, and made a mob. You'll just have to work harder, or live (or die) with your decisions. It isn't up to the world to force people like me to re-up in the armed forces for another 13 years and protect you from the mob you're inciting. (I'm getting too old for that anyway, and you can protect yourself from the people you've so cavalierly dismissed without me and many like me, can't you?).
Poor consumers aren't so much jealous, as fearful. They are bombarded by images of things that will supposedly make the fear go away, but they can't afford them. Insecurity is fostered by the consumer system. Jealousy has driven occasional poeple to murder, fear has driven millions at a time to overthrow governments.
This mythical DRM we are talking about would do none of those things.
This becomes an arguement like "Can God make a rock so heavy He can't lift it." There appear to be huge logical paradoxes in the idea that DRM that doesn't have the negative consequences real DRM has can exist. The whole question is equivalent to "Would you still oppose the death penalty if we could revive the criminal in the case of mistakes?". That's fundamentally not what the word Death means. Your mythical DRM is like a four sided triangle or simmilarly impossible concept.
Now DRM is fundamentally a legal issue. The original poster doubtless didn't mean to, but has just abused people, in the exact same way as putting someone on the witness stand and asking "Have you stopped beating your wife yet? please answer with a simple yes or no." is abusive. Your followthrough on this point is also personal abuse of the parent poster. Who the hell do you think you are that you have some special right to expect a logically defensable answer to a nonsensical question? I'm sure that, whatever the parent answered, you would be glad to pick logical holes in it, but you, not the parent poster, are the one putting those holes into the logical arguement. My answer to your question is, "I do not answer illogical questions from crazy-talking people who obviously want to pick a fight, and you are being a bully". (and yes, you are).
So, would you burn down an orphanage filled with cute toddlers if things were different enough that that wasn't a bad thing? Please answer quickly, so I can quote back just the part that lets me win an arguement with you and make you look bad.
I could look past the plot issues if there was enough good acting, but I can't look past all the stuff sombody else wrote first and didn't get nearly as much money for. There's an awful lot of 1960's Analog style SF in the Star Wars series. People who never read the stuff tend to think gravity polarized explosives, whole worlds that are one big city, cute little Ewoks, and such are all Lucas's ideas, or at least their synthesis is novel.
Poul Anderson H Beam Piper James Schmitz James Blish Keith Laumer
You can find damned near everything in the Star Wars films in astounding/Analog SF magazine from the 1950's and 60's, down to scenes where firefighter spaceships spray down a crippled starship burning from quick reentry and combat damage, or one man fighter sized ships hunt each other through an asteroid field with one of them using planar polarized explosive mines. You can find most (maybe 80%) of the SFish ideas in Star Wars just by reading only the Analog published stories of only those five authors above.
Just offhand, I have never heard George Lucas mention any of those five authors, nor Analog magazine. They have always been counted as second tier, behind the really big names like Clarke and Asimov, and they were all midlist or worse as money-making went. Piper committed suicide out of dire poverty and checks that stayed 'in the mail' too long. Laumer could only afford to write for the first 10 years of his carreer because of a government pension. Anderson was the only one who lived long enough after Star Wars to see any real profits from the rising interest in SF. Maybe Lucas has mentioned some of these sources and I missed it, but until I see Lucas give some real credit where it is most definitely due, I'm not impressed.
These may well be arguements that can sometimes affect a judge and are very likely to affect a jury, but it's not really required that they do so. If this were about trademark law, where there is a compulsory requirement to defend, then the RIAA would have done something that could automatically void their whole position, but since there's no requirement to defend a copyright or lose it, there's also no real requirement that the RIAA not give away some copies unless it wants to also give blanket permission for everyone else to keep on giving.
Giveaways are much more likely to affect the willfullness test than the whole law. Since without willful intent to infringe, damages per instance are limited to $30,000 U.S., this doesn't matter much - typical settlements are for less than $30,000/instance already. The RIAA is still able to threaten a bigger loss than most private citzzens can afford to risk, so the excess above that doesn't have as much significance.
There is a class of variable brightness star called a Cepheid, because the first example of the class was Delta Cephei. The pulse rate of these stars is very tightly correlated with their absolute luminosity. A three-day period Cepheid has an absolute luminosity about 800 times the Sun. A thirty-day period Cepheid is about 10,000 times as bright as the Sun. The scale has been calibrated much more precisely than those approximations, using nearby Cepheid stars, where the distance can be determined accurately from parallax observations.
Minor variations in rate are closely connected to certain metallic ions found in these stars in various proportions, and this can easily be determined as well for new Cepheids, by spectroscope. True Cepheids are population 1 stars, but there is also a related type, called either Type 2 Cepheids or W Virginis variables. These are the older, population 2 versions of the same phenominon. At first, the mix of types 1 and 2 made distance estimate figures rather blurry for distant galaxies, but once it was recognized that they could be divided into the two types, not only did type 1 Cepheids give us some very accurate estimates, but type 2 can be used to get an independant estimate and so check the first one.
All Cepheids are tremendously bright, and can be picked out individually at distances enormously greater than can a sun sized star. The time for a brightness cycle is long enough that a lot of detailed measurements are possible, but short enough that it will repeat many times in a single researcher's working lifetime, making them ideal in many ways.
I think the parent poster was referring to an Orion-like design, which would produce substantial fallout. Some Nuclear lift rocket designs don't spray radiation out the back. Some designs heat external air as a working fluid, some heat H2, water or some other carried mass, some (ion drives) toss electrons, which can be beta particles produced directly in a reaction, or otherwise, but are low acceleration devices (at least for the current generation).
Unless we get invaded by the Fithp, we probably don't really need an Orion design, but a 1,000 person lunar colony, with quarters, labs, machine shops, vehicles and five years life support supplies, all in one shot, might be worth setting off a few very clean nukes in atmosphere. Still, if you're fussy about that (as I am), sealed pile designs can give us, at the very least, human access to all exploitable worlds and moons as far out as Saturn. Fusion and a patient economic system can probably give us this arm of the galaxy, if it's not already occupied.
This, by itself, doesn't drive the market like you may think. If your competition has invested a lot in developing a treatment, and they stand to make all the profits for the life of a medical patent, why not focus on an actual cure? You make at least some profit off a cure, they lose their shirt developing a now unneeded treatment, and the patients should benefit. If this is not happening at least a good fraction of the time, there must be other factors distorting the market. I'm not saying that can't be the case, but what are those unmentioned factors? Monopolistic gentleman's agreements? The way government incentives distort research priorities? Incompetent scientific advisors?
As a former ARNG range safety officer and marksmanship instructor, I can attest there are plenty of people trained to the level of your average Air Marshal - Out of several thousand people who trained in various cycles, I probably helped train upwards of 200-300 of them to that standard myself. That doesn't mean every person who sometimes carries, or even has a modicum of training and a concealed carry permit, is likely to become a net positive factor in a terrorist situation. As a relaxed non-drinker on flights, far from a white knuckle flier, and someone who knows enough engineering to at least try not to hit the important parts of the plane (Hint: just about all of them), I don't know I'd want the government to let even people just like me carry a weapon on flights, unless they did some more checking first. Still, the reasonable pool is larger than just Air Marshals - At a minimum, every airline employee with appropriate background should be allowed the option to carry and given support for more training, and I'm sure we could come up with some other people to add to that list (i.e. bonded high-value couriers, some active duty and some reserve military people), some state and many federal law enforcement people, etc.) I'm wondering why we havn't seen some initiatives like this, outside ones focused exclusively on federal, nominally civilian agencies.
It doesn't show any such thing. The encouragement not to fight back is still fundamentally wrong when it's obvious that a hijacker may want to use the plane as a weapon. Based on what we now know, that's never going to change again, period. That Genie is out of the bottle. Passengers will never be encouraged to not fight back again, for a time much longer than either of us will probably live. Even if the U. S. government suddenly announced we should go back to expecting hijackers to possibly just want to divert the plane to Cuba, do you honestly think anyone would listen?
The windfall comes for companies that see their stock go up because they stand to win the lawsuit, even though they won't ever get the payoff. That's the fault of stupid investors. The lawyers aren't tricking organizations such as the RIAA into sueing, the RIAA member corps. are bragging about the potential gains from the lawsuits in their prospecti, boasting about how much their IP is worth, and the real trickery is happening in the stock market.
The repost under different title trick can really backfire, as regards freedom of speech. (Not that Brazil's laws exactly parellel the U.S.'s re the first amendment, but they don't seem too different). For the U.S., at least, once people start mislabeling something to hide its real nature, they leave themselves vulnerable to fraud claims, and criminal speech isn't protected.
There still isn't exactly an easy way to stop a video like this from circulating, but there may be a draconian one. If those file names look intentionally obfuscatory enough, the law can get a lot more medieval on the posters heineys than just for circulating the material.
Even in the U.S., once something is clearly not protected speech, going against a judge's orders is pretty serious, as in they don't necessarily subpoena the accused politely in daytime, they can kick in the door at 2 am, and the offender may find themself face down on their bedroom floor with guns litterally pointed at their head and a lot of angry people shouting. Some of the adult bookstore busts, adult comic writer busts, and such of the 60's 70's and 80's went like that. You can find at least a couple of examples for any recent decade.
I'm not saying that this particular bit of fluff will be taken nearly that seriously, mind you. Even if the judge gets really annoyed personally with all the people and web sites involved, he's unlikely to start demanding the IP addresses of every person trying to post a new copy. The whole machinery of the Brazilian state simply isn't going to be behind supressing this particular footage, because so few people involved would take it that seriously.
What I am saying is that if there's something the government has a serious interest in, i.e. video relating to a major criminal case, act of terrorism, or similar, and people start intentionally mislabeling it when they try to replace copies taken dawn from video websites, the kid gloves can come way, way off. From what I can see re. the Brazilian equivalent of the U.S. first amendement, there's less way a free speech claim would be any defense in this than there would be in the states, and it's not worth all that much here. Maybe some of the people that actually live in Brazil could clarify if there's some protections besides common sense to help restrain the power of the state in this and similar cases, but from what I've been able to check out, I'm not seeing it. Would the Brazillian press insist this was a free speech issue? Is there some BCLU type group that would go to court over this?
That's the trouble with TLAs. Even if the poster really meant IEDs instead of IUDs, we can only hope the distinction between "intra" and "improvised" is as clear. Intercontinental Unitarian Depilators? (Eeewwww!) Irridescent Ursine Dancers? (for all the Grateful Dead fans).
Bio makes even less sense for NK than for most places. They have an awful lot of starving people there. Malnutrition leads to increased disease vulnerability, particularly for airborne pathogens such as Smallpox or Anthrax. Even if the NK government is willing to write off a lot of the peasants in the countryside, those people are a huge reservoir of infection that means the Korean armed forces, and the politically prominent and educated types would get lots of exposure so they would be at greatly increased risk too. Except for possibly a few parts of central Africa, NK is the most vulnerable country on Earth to massive damage from any bio-release, from any source internal or external, that makes it into their general population. The only thing that keeps them from being a solid number one is generally cold weather.
"Are you telling me that my desire to walk into the local electronics superstore and purchase one of those flat, wide-screen TV's with the really cool mirrors is actually based on an evolutionary, instinctual if you will, response passed along through the genetic roots received from my ancestors developed during their hunter-gatherer days and not based on the commercials that have been airing with the kid out in the middle of the field with the rainbow coming out of her hand?"
There may well be an evolutionary or instinctual mechanism for adults to make kids happy, particularly kids geneticly related to us, AND one to enjoy seeing happy healthy kids around as a confirmation our immediate tribe is doing well. There's probably also a mechanism to drive us to seek empowerment, so something that the commercials imply gives us a 'magic' power like projecting rainbows can help bypass consious, rational decision making.
In fact, completely fictitious power symbolism may work better than realistic symbolism on many people, because the part of your brain that doesn't care if magic is real or not becomes involved, and helps supress the more realistic recognition that the item isn't really going to empower us either. We've (speaking for an entire consumer demographic group) become skeptical of claims that owning a new X will let us get ahead in real life, but since we don't take "It'll give ya magic powers!" seriously anyway, the skepticism filters never get a chance to kick in.
There's never any end to that arguement though. Imagine a state with no significant financial conflicts over medical care costs. Maybe the sort of medical care needed for anti-social act X becomes really cheap, or else the laws are changed to just write off self inflicted health problems from X and not fund treating them publicly.
What really changes for your arguement? People who get sick before normal retirement age don't pay into social security as much, so 'your right to smoke' (eat trans-fats, sit on the couch and watch the Springer show, etc.), still ends where it affects the livelyhood of others. People who become couch potatos are less valuable assets for the armed forces if a draft is needed, so 'your right not to exercise' ends where it affects the livelyhood of others. People who don't invest in their own retirement..., People who don't vote, or vote while unfamiliar with the issues... People who get pregnant too early, or too late in life, or not with an approved genetic match...
For years, people argued that ulcers were a stress related disease, and some people quite seriously argued for public health refusing to treat the condition unless the sufferers first made lifestyle changes. Ulcers turned out to have a bacterial cause. Right now, there's a huge arguement in social government and insurance circles for requiring diabetics to make lifestyle changes so they put less burden on the public health system, and some researchers suggesting that there may be a viral or bacteriological factor in diabetes, other research showing that eating habits don't really affect diabetes in the ways medical science just assumed, and so on. What happens if we limit public funding to treat this desease because it's really just a result of peoples own actions, and it turns out it isn't?
Every single action you ever take has some chance of affecting the livelyhood of others. In some cases, a clear, calculable risk/benefit ratio is available - In a great many it isn't. Governments are generally not skilled at assigning reward and punishment based on how much something really adversely impacts others, or how much uncertainty there may still be in an assessment of the risks. At least mine isn't - would we have the war on (some) drugs, massive dependance on foreign oil, and a 3,000+ page tax code if it was?
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Kurosawa did it better (IMHO), but I don't think that makes Lucas's approach particularly wrong headed. He has at least given plenty of credit there.
He's also given credit to some SF authors. He's been OK on questions about whether his core worlds were inspired by Asimov's Trantor, for example. The best film in the series (IMHO) Empire Strikes Back, gives Leigh Brackett credit for the screenplay, and she certainly counts as an old era SF author who's less known than the big 3 (Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein). But there's a lot of specific bits that seem to be falling through the cracks.
Your rant about a rioting bunch of young people is kind of strange and unrealistic...I don't really know how to react to that one.
Go back and look at the origination of the thread, read the submitter's paragraphs, and note how submitter wrote about violent crime rates. That was the subject for the whole thread, and the part you are dismissing as a rant is obviously on topic. If you really don't know how to react (instead of willfully sticking you head in the sand and muttering "Denial is just a river in Egypt"), then you don't get this whole thread, not just me.
OK, so lets say I agree with you 100% - every single one of these people is very, very stupid. Now if someone doesn't start dealing with this right, the whole system will collapse, and all those very stupid (and often heavily armed) people will be trying to kill you, among other people. You don't even seem to be looking at that point. You're going around calling these people stupid, like they're gonna wise up and agree, instead of them deciding a French style or communist revolution is a good idea in response. You think affixing blame solves the problem, and that all the people you want to blame will eventually either listen or die quietly without affecting you, even if nothing else gets done to actually change things. Your philosophy therefore predicts an unrealistic outcome, because stupid, irrational people don't suddenly grow up if a crisis comes, they get worse. My philosophy says a lot of that stupidity is lack of education and contradictory or manipulative messages from people with more power to shape the future, and both those are fixable problems, if we act rationally.
Overall, you have a great philosophy there - if you honestly say it to most of the people it applies to, it has a good chance of getting you roughed up or even killed, but you don't see that as a weakness of the philosophy itself. Now I can say what I honestly think to 95% + of the people I think it about, and in general, I will not be attacked for it. There's a few exceptions, as in I'm not necessarily gonna walk up to a mass murderer and start telling him everything I think about him unless he is in no position to successfully attack me.
But I could tell a group of poor people, of just about any ethnic background, that I think their current problems are a mixture of their own mistakes and a whole lot of other peoples, and the most important thing is to fix the problems, and only worry about assigning blame where it helps fix things more quickly. I could say it's not all rich vrs. all poor, but specific rich, (i.e. ones who use the law to block new startups by consortiums of poorer people), or specific poor who prey on their neighbors by crime, or specific cops who don't enforce the law equally, or whatever, and even where people disagree with me, I'll largely get a decent hearing. I know there's more to the issues than your sound bites, and I'll listen enough to find out what else there is. What scares me is attitudes like yours polarize, and the U.S. is moving towards a bunch of idiots on all sides of the issues drowning out my voice.
I'll advise some people to avoid reproduction yet - hell there's people I'll advise not to reproduce ever. I'll also advise some people who can make a real change, the Social Security system is based on the idea that there will be a large new generation of working class people to keep it going. By many in government, the poor have to breed, or that same enormously powerful government can't keep the economy going. There are incentive programs rich and successful people have designed to encourage breeding. If a single system as large as SS is not stable we all have a problem. IF the entire economy is not stable, well, that should be obvious. No, the fact that you have private retirement doesn't mean you don't have a problem too. No, you can't just say "I don't need Social Security, and people who didn't plan better t
Ah, there's the two tripping points:
1. Glucose and Fructose in HFCS (with only traces (less than 1.5%) of Dextrose). Dextrose and Fructose in table sugar (with only 5% or less Glucose). That's for batch produced ADM 55% Fructose grade HFCS, and assuming you mean genuine cane sugar for table sugar. I haven't seen a source for how much dextrose is in the ADM 42% grade, and I'll bet table sugar varies by both origin and process, so if anyone wants to check for more sources on these numbers, there may be better ones than I could find, but ADM's own site doesn't mention the Glucose percentages, only the Fructose.
Glucose gets absorbed early and quickly, that's why they call it blood sugar, it goes straight into the bloodstream. Glucose is absorbed before intestinal enzymes get involved, some straight through the stomach lining. People are still working on just how insulin gets from the islets (where it's made) to the intestinal villi (where it's used). Transport is at least partially by the blood stream, but notice that people who need extra insulin don't inject it straight into the vein, but into muscle tissue, partially to smooth out absorption cycle effects. The high and low blood sugar cycles get greater amplitude with lots of glucose in the diet, higher peaks, lower troughs. That too, may or may not be a big deal, but the evidence at least tilts slightly towards 'it is'. It's enough evidence that standard medical practice is to perscribe multiple varieties of insulins that absorb at different rates to most patients, just to smooth out the same peaks and troughs. I'm not arguing that there is an air tight case for my position, just that where you said 'little evidence' in your first post, there's more than a little.
2. Since you were smart enough to stipulate that your explanation of digestion is a huge overgeneralization, I want to add just one word - "simple", as in simple sugars and starches. I'm not at all convinced that the traces of complex sugars in HFCS cause a seperate problem, particularly not that it's a different effect from complex sugars found in non-processed foods, but it's a fairly high probability hypothesis, by close analogy. Look at some other examples of enzymatic metabolic processes. Any of the traditional illegal drugs has a structure similar to a brain chemical in most repects, different in just a few. All the opiates, Heroin to Methaqualone, mimic the backbone of the natural endorphins, until you get to a methyl group or something hanging off to one side. LSD and the other halucinogens all mimic Serotonin or the other 'putative' neurotransmitters like GABA (and NO2 is both an externally administered drug, and the actual brain chemical used as a neurotransmitter in smaller amounts). Even borderline brain affecting chemicals such as Caffeine or Nicotine are chemically close to adernalin or the intermediate oxidation process compounds leading to adrenochrome. (Glucose itself is both a nourisher for general cell use, and what's sometimes called a 'neuromoderator', which is why I rate this analogy pretty highly and am not trotting out anything involving automobiles.).
All of these compounds pass through one or more enzymatic stages in breakdown, and most are broken down by the appropriate enzyme nearly as quickly as the brain chemical they mimic. Then in the later stages, the molecular differences show up, some successor process can't work, or is thousands of times slower since the mediator enzyme is inefficent to totally useless. Again by analogy, I could see some of the more complex sugars as having unusual effects, possibly even in trace amounts much smaller than what's in foods - after all, mere microgram quantities of LSD can totally screw with the brain for hours, even though the amount of actual serotonin normally in the brain is much larger. If you'd merely said there was little evidence for this part of the arguement, I'd have to agree - what I'm passing on there is specualtive, worth looking at but far from a reason for legal controls. The glucose up/down cycle in the bloodstream effects link looks more significant though.
Because the prosecuter took the jury through the list of URLs and showed them how each was accessed, proving that the way those URLs got on the machine's logs was by a person choosing to click on links, and that those links were advertised as what they were, and not something more innocuous? Because probable cause doesn't extend to "There's this malware, see? And it installs URLs for all these sites that are registered with a number of different companies, in IE's browser records, see? And it hides the quite innocent looking URL where the process starts, see? And nobody else has this particular malware, see? And I can't show you how it does that, but take my word for it, see?"?
Yes, URLs can be spoofed/inserted. Time stamps can be altered. Someone might create malware that pops up links for a lot of sites owned by different people. Someone might be able to browse the net using this machine as a remote. But to use that as a defense, you have to come up with a specific possible scenario, i.e. "cracker uses already installed malware to browse porn via remote machine, then covers his tracks by tinkering with timestamps and recent/history lists.". Then you have to show that the malware that would allow that is among the malware found on the PC. From there, it may be reasonable to require a jury to consider the possibility that this is what happened, but before then, reasonable doubt isn't yet an issue.
By analogy (which I hope isn't too bad as analogies go), If you have an evil twin skippy, it can be reasonable to doubt that you were the one who held up that bank, but first you have to produce records establishing that you in fact have an evil twin. Sayimg "Back-Orifice 7.5 was found on the machine" may create reasonable doubt, but saying "Unspecified malware was found" doesn't. A forensic specialist saying "some time stamps have definitely been altered" may create reasonable doubt, but a non-expert saying "Isn't it possible for time stamps to be changed?" doesn't. "Reasonable doubt" isn't "any possible doubt", and juries are not expected to accept just any possible scenario.
It's a possible 40 year sentence. Maybe in this case the charge itself should be different. But is 40 years a reasonable maximum for a 'causing harm' charge? Maybe the state in question needs to rewrite their code, breaking down the charge into several categories so that there's no risk of sentencing someone to 40 years for minor or trivial harm, and so there's standards for defining psychological harm.
I know if my daughter was still a minor, and a teacher had shown her nude images at 10 years old, I'd be asking if this was for art class, or health, or what, before I'd even worry that anything might need to be done. If it was not class-relevant, and was simple nudity or even mild erotica, I might want the teacher to get a warning, and discharge if she repeated the act dispite it. I might even talk to my daughter and see how she felt, just in case this incident had given her some mistaken impressions about sex. But, depending on just what the material was, firing the teacher for a first action isn't necessarily unreasonable, and some charges may not be either. I think some of the scat, simulated rape, 'chicks like to be abused', 'interracial cuckold husband' type sites can do real mental harm to children who encounter them. Not 40 years worth mind you, but real harm.
This is one reason why 'malware did it' defenses should be taken seriously by the courts. Most pedophiles are collector types. For example, the FBI profiling guidelines for law enforcement officers who have discovered child porn, whether on or off a PC, just assume the perp is sn obsessive collector, likely to have dozens of CD photo collections burned, whole cabinets of VHS tapes, or similar sized caches in whatever forms they collect. Pedophiles almost invariably want tens of thousands of photos and hundreds of films, perhaps to validate their orientation ("See, lots of people do it, so I'm not a lone weirdo!"), or perhaps from a fear that the supply will dry up and whatever they have managed to collect will be all they see for the rest of their lives. That really creepy guy you mentioned is very typical.
If all the material is on the PC, and good searches of the suspect's home or workplace don't find back ups and additional material, it's time to look at the alternatives before rushing to convict. Conversely, local law enforcement ought to be trained that finding a back up cache or other off device child porn is one of the best ways to ensure solid convictions.
I found much of your post accurate in its fashion. Much of the poor diet typical of U.S. poor is not really required by their income, so much as their lifestyle. There's no need for most to go to red beans and rice more than 2 days a week, and most could afford chicken about 2 meals a week, lasagnia or spaghetti with beef 1x, etc. and have milk products in enough amounts to not need calcium supplements. Practically every kid that is now going to elemntary schools and needing a school breakfast program could be better fed at home on what the parent gets, either from a minimum wage job or food stamp programs, or both.
Much of the problem is getting educated and organized. Educated in how to cook and how to figure a balanced diet, special nutritional needs of kids and the elderly, etc., and getting organized enough so that there is time to shop and cook, including getting rides to grocery stores and such as needed. For most, pushing to get away from grabbing fast food on an irregular schedule between their two jobs and not letting the kids pick what they want are the two biggest improvements in organization needed.
But where you post about enzymatic actions, you're not really on target. When that enzymatic action slows or stops, we have what? Diabetes! The number of adult type 2 diabetics in the US is approaching 30 million, it's rising much faster than the population, AND much faster than the actual obesity rates, the distribution falls out heavily on economic lines, and people look at those figures and say "there is little evidence...". There's only little evidence if we assume in this case that corrolation definitely does not equal causation, and while it's not necessarily true that it does, it's generally the way to bet.
High Fructose Corn Syrup and regular old table sugar do not follow all the same enzymatic pathways - that's simply false. HFCS is generally either 42% or 55% fructose, with the other part being mostly Glucose, and almost no Sucrose (less than 1.5% of the non Fructose fraction)). Since Sucrose is normally split into Fructose and Glucose anyway, we end up the same sugars, but we also end up with HFCS not needing to be split. The Glucose portion goes swiftly into the bloodstream while the HFCS is still in the stomach, increasing the peak and trought effects of sugar metabolism over cane sugars or other such sources that have significant dextrose to be split later when the sugars reach the intestines. Whether HFCS also triggers excess production of insulin that ends up not being needed, or not, is still up for discussion among some well qualified researchers. I'll grant there's not nearly enough evidence for that yet to make it a factor in setting national policy, but there's enough evidence to make it an important area of research.
Prehaps of more concern, Significant quantities of more complex sugars, often reaching 6-8% of the total sugars, are included in some sources of HFCS. Many of those sugars are not found in any known natural sources (i.e. they don't compare at all closely chemically to the complex sugars found in similar levels in a naturally high fructose product, such as an orange). If all of these compounds follow the same metabolic pathways, I want it on record as absolute proof of intelligent design. It's a cinch Glucose itself doesn't follow the path, because it's already at the end point.
Comparative rates of obesity for Western European nations and Canada with the U.S. can be used to preselect a pool of countries where overall obesity problems are very similar, and the populations genetic heriatages are near identical on average, if this is done, we've ruled out most of the alternative explanations currently proposed for the known Diabetes increases, AND we end up with the US standing out for two factors.
1) Types 1 & 2 Diabetes are increasing at a much faster rate than general obesity.
So what you are saying is biology makes it natural for adult humans to bear young. Economics makes it inadvisable for many humans. Their alternative is to supress their natural reproductive drive, at least until they can afford contraception (and since most contraceptives are less than 100% reliable, back up plans like abortions, raising the result in a pinch, extra medical care, etc.).
Now, stand in front of a bunch of young adults with typical drives. Tell them they are not allowed to reproduce. Act mystified if they get angry. If there are any other sources of interpersonal problems, such as the bunch being of a different ethnic or linguistic group, or some other historical division, expect some of the bunch to claim this is motivated by predjudice and not this 'invisible hand of the market' thingee. Act even more mystified if they don't immediately stop this speculation and believe you sincerely are not letting any such personal issues color your model, just because you said so.
Congratulations, you just fscked up and made a bad life choice. You said something extremely stupid to a bunch of people, and made a mob. You'll just have to work harder, or live (or die) with your decisions. It isn't up to the world to force people like me to re-up in the armed forces for another 13 years and protect you from the mob you're inciting. (I'm getting too old for that anyway, and you can protect yourself from the people you've so cavalierly dismissed without me and many like me, can't you?).
Poor consumers aren't so much jealous, as fearful. They are bombarded by images of things that will supposedly make the fear go away, but they can't afford them. Insecurity is fostered by the consumer system. Jealousy has driven occasional poeple to murder, fear has driven millions at a time to overthrow governments.
This is a hypothetical situation.
This mythical DRM we are talking about would do none of those things.
This becomes an arguement like "Can God make a rock so heavy He can't lift it."
There appear to be huge logical paradoxes in the idea that DRM that doesn't have the negative consequences real DRM has can exist. The whole question is equivalent to "Would you still oppose the death penalty if we could revive the criminal in the case of mistakes?". That's fundamentally not what the word Death means. Your mythical DRM is like a four sided triangle or simmilarly impossible concept.
Now DRM is fundamentally a legal issue. The original poster doubtless didn't mean to, but has just abused people, in the exact same way as putting someone on the witness stand and asking "Have you stopped beating your wife yet? please answer with a simple yes or no." is abusive. Your followthrough on this point is also personal abuse of the parent poster. Who the hell do you think you are that you have some special right to expect a logically defensable answer to a nonsensical question? I'm sure that, whatever the parent answered, you would be glad to pick logical holes in it, but you, not the parent poster, are the one putting those holes into the logical arguement. My answer to your question is, "I do not answer illogical questions from crazy-talking people who obviously want to pick a fight, and you are being a bully". (and yes, you are).
So, would you burn down an orphanage filled with cute toddlers if things were different enough that that wasn't a bad thing? Please answer quickly, so I can quote back just the part that lets me win an arguement with you and make you look bad.
I could look past the plot issues if there was enough good acting, but I can't look past all the stuff sombody else wrote first and didn't get nearly as much money for. There's an awful lot of 1960's Analog style SF in the Star Wars series. People who never read the stuff tend to think gravity polarized explosives, whole worlds that are one big city, cute little Ewoks, and such are all Lucas's ideas, or at least their synthesis is novel.
Poul Anderson
H Beam Piper
James Schmitz
James Blish
Keith Laumer
You can find damned near everything in the Star Wars films in astounding/Analog SF magazine from the 1950's and 60's, down to scenes where firefighter spaceships spray down a crippled starship burning from quick reentry and combat damage, or one man fighter sized ships hunt each other through an asteroid field with one of them using planar polarized explosive mines. You can find most (maybe 80%) of the SFish ideas in Star Wars just by reading only the Analog published stories of only those five authors above.
Just offhand, I have never heard George Lucas mention any of those five authors, nor Analog magazine. They have always been counted as second tier, behind the really big names like Clarke and Asimov, and they were all midlist or worse as money-making went. Piper committed suicide out of dire poverty and checks that stayed 'in the mail' too long. Laumer could only afford to write for the first 10 years of his carreer because of a government pension. Anderson was the only one who lived long enough after Star Wars to see any real profits from the rising interest in SF. Maybe Lucas has mentioned some of these sources and I missed it, but until I see Lucas give some real credit where it is most definitely due, I'm not impressed.
These may well be arguements that can sometimes affect a judge and are very likely to affect a jury, but it's not really required that they do so. If this were about trademark law, where there is a compulsory requirement to defend, then the RIAA would have done something that could automatically void their whole position, but since there's no requirement to defend a copyright or lose it, there's also no real requirement that the RIAA not give away some copies unless it wants to also give blanket permission for everyone else to keep on giving.
Giveaways are much more likely to affect the willfullness test than the whole law. Since without willful intent to infringe, damages per instance are limited to $30,000 U.S., this doesn't matter much - typical settlements are for less than $30,000/instance already. The RIAA is still able to threaten a bigger loss than most private citzzens can afford to risk, so the excess above that doesn't have as much significance.
There is a class of variable brightness star called a Cepheid, because the first example of the class was Delta Cephei.
The pulse rate of these stars is very tightly correlated with their absolute luminosity. A three-day period Cepheid has an absolute luminosity about 800 times the Sun. A thirty-day period Cepheid is about 10,000 times as bright as the Sun. The scale has been calibrated much more precisely than those approximations, using nearby Cepheid stars, where the distance can be determined accurately from parallax observations.
Minor variations in rate are closely connected to certain metallic ions found in these stars in various proportions, and this can easily be determined as well for new Cepheids, by spectroscope. True Cepheids are population 1 stars, but there is also a related type, called either Type 2 Cepheids or W Virginis variables. These are the older, population 2 versions of the same phenominon. At first, the mix of types 1 and 2 made distance estimate figures rather blurry for distant galaxies, but once it was recognized that they could be divided into the two types, not only did type 1 Cepheids give us some very accurate estimates, but type 2 can be used to get an independant estimate and so check the first one.
All Cepheids are tremendously bright, and can be picked out individually at distances enormously greater than can a sun sized star. The time for a brightness cycle is long enough that a lot of detailed measurements are possible, but short enough that it will repeat many times in a single researcher's working lifetime, making them ideal in many ways.
I think the parent poster was referring to an Orion-like design, which would produce substantial fallout. Some Nuclear lift rocket designs don't spray radiation out the back. Some designs heat external air as a working fluid, some heat H2, water or some other carried mass, some (ion drives) toss electrons, which can be beta particles produced directly in a reaction, or otherwise, but are low acceleration devices (at least for the current generation).
Unless we get invaded by the Fithp, we probably don't really need an Orion design, but a 1,000 person lunar colony, with quarters, labs, machine shops, vehicles and five years life support supplies, all in one shot, might be worth setting off a few very clean nukes in atmosphere. Still, if you're fussy about that (as I am), sealed pile designs can give us, at the very least, human access to all exploitable worlds and moons as far out as Saturn. Fusion and a patient economic system can probably give us this arm of the galaxy, if it's not already occupied.
This, by itself, doesn't drive the market like you may think. If your competition has invested a lot in developing a treatment, and they stand to make all the profits for the life of a medical patent, why not focus on an actual cure? You make at least some profit off a cure, they lose their shirt developing a now unneeded treatment, and the patients should benefit. If this is not happening at least a good fraction of the time, there must be other factors distorting the market. I'm not saying that can't be the case, but what are those unmentioned factors? Monopolistic gentleman's agreements? The way government incentives distort research priorities? Incompetent scientific advisors?
As a former ARNG range safety officer and marksmanship instructor, I can attest there are plenty of people trained to the level of your average Air Marshal - Out of several thousand people who trained in various cycles, I probably helped train upwards of 200-300 of them to that standard myself. That doesn't mean every person who sometimes carries, or even has a modicum of training and a concealed carry permit, is likely to become a net positive factor in a terrorist situation. As a relaxed non-drinker on flights, far from a white knuckle flier, and someone who knows enough engineering to at least try not to hit the important parts of the plane (Hint: just about all of them), I don't know I'd want the government to let even people just like me carry a weapon on flights, unless they did some more checking first. Still, the reasonable pool is larger than just Air Marshals - At a minimum, every airline employee with appropriate background should be allowed the option to carry and given support for more training, and I'm sure we could come up with some other people to add to that list (i.e. bonded high-value couriers, some active duty and some reserve military people), some state and many federal law enforcement people, etc.) I'm wondering why we havn't seen some initiatives like this, outside ones focused exclusively on federal, nominally civilian agencies.
It doesn't show any such thing. The encouragement not to fight back is still fundamentally wrong when it's obvious that a hijacker may want to use the plane as a weapon. Based on what we now know, that's never going to change again, period. That Genie is out of the bottle. Passengers will never be encouraged to not fight back again, for a time much longer than either of us will probably live. Even if the U. S. government suddenly announced we should go back to expecting hijackers to possibly just want to divert the plane to Cuba, do you honestly think anyone would listen?
some of US should consider ourselves very fortunate
Just some? I didn't get on the list through any special qualifications/certifications I attained, don't know about you.
The windfall comes for companies that see their stock go up because they stand to win the lawsuit, even though they won't ever get the payoff. That's the fault of stupid investors. The lawyers aren't tricking organizations such as the RIAA into sueing, the RIAA member corps. are bragging about the potential gains from the lawsuits in their prospecti, boasting about how much their IP is worth, and the real trickery is happening in the stock market.
The repost under different title trick can really backfire, as regards freedom of speech. (Not that Brazil's laws exactly parellel the U.S.'s re the first amendment, but they don't seem too different). For the U.S., at least, once people start mislabeling something to hide its real nature, they leave themselves vulnerable to fraud claims, and criminal speech isn't protected.
There still isn't exactly an easy way to stop a video like this from circulating, but there may be a draconian one. If those file names look intentionally obfuscatory enough, the law can get a lot more medieval on the posters heineys than just for circulating the material.
Even in the U.S., once something is clearly not protected speech, going against a judge's orders is pretty serious, as in they don't necessarily subpoena the accused politely in daytime, they can kick in the door at 2 am, and the offender may find themself face down on their bedroom floor with guns litterally pointed at their head and a lot of angry people shouting. Some of the adult bookstore busts, adult comic writer busts, and such of the 60's 70's and 80's went like that. You can find at least a couple of examples for any recent decade.
I'm not saying that this particular bit of fluff will be taken nearly that seriously, mind you. Even if the judge gets really annoyed personally with all the people and web sites involved, he's unlikely to start demanding the IP addresses of every person trying to post a new copy. The whole machinery of the Brazilian state simply isn't going to be behind supressing this particular footage, because so few people involved would take it that seriously.
What I am saying is that if there's something the government has a serious interest in, i.e. video relating to a major criminal case, act of terrorism, or similar, and people start intentionally mislabeling it when they try to replace copies taken dawn from video websites, the kid gloves can come way, way off. From what I can see re. the Brazilian equivalent of the U.S. first amendement, there's less way a free speech claim would be any defense in this than there would be in the states, and it's not worth all that much here. Maybe some of the people that actually live in Brazil could clarify if there's some protections besides common sense to help restrain the power of the state in this and similar cases, but from what I've been able to check out, I'm not seeing it. Would the Brazillian press insist this was a free speech issue? Is there some BCLU type group that would go to court over this?
That's the trouble with TLAs. Even if the poster really meant IEDs instead of IUDs, we can only hope the distinction between "intra" and "improvised" is as clear. Intercontinental Unitarian Depilators? (Eeewwww!) Irridescent Ursine Dancers? (for all the Grateful Dead fans).
Bio makes even less sense for NK than for most places. They have an awful lot of starving people there. Malnutrition leads to increased disease vulnerability, particularly for airborne pathogens such as Smallpox or Anthrax. Even if the NK government is willing to write off a lot of the peasants in the countryside, those people are a huge reservoir of infection that means the Korean armed forces, and the politically prominent and educated types would get lots of exposure so they would be at greatly increased risk too. Except for possibly a few parts of central Africa, NK is the most vulnerable country on Earth to massive damage from any bio-release, from any source internal or external, that makes it into their general population. The only thing that keeps them from being a solid number one is generally cold weather.
"Are you telling me that my desire to walk into the local electronics superstore and purchase one of those flat, wide-screen TV's with the really cool mirrors is actually based on an evolutionary, instinctual if you will, response passed along through the genetic roots received from my ancestors developed during their hunter-gatherer days and not based on the commercials that have been airing with the kid out in the middle of the field with the rainbow coming out of her hand?"
There may well be an evolutionary or instinctual mechanism for adults to make kids happy, particularly kids geneticly related to us, AND one to enjoy seeing happy healthy kids around as a confirmation our immediate tribe is doing well. There's probably also a mechanism to drive us to seek empowerment, so something that the commercials imply gives us a 'magic' power like projecting rainbows can help bypass consious, rational decision making.
In fact, completely fictitious power symbolism may work better than realistic symbolism on many people, because the part of your brain that doesn't care if magic is real or not becomes involved, and helps supress the more realistic recognition that the item isn't really going to empower us either. We've (speaking for an entire consumer demographic group) become skeptical of claims that owning a new X will let us get ahead in real life, but since we don't take "It'll give ya magic powers!" seriously anyway, the skepticism filters never get a chance to kick in.
There's never any end to that arguement though. Imagine a state with no significant financial conflicts over medical care costs. Maybe the sort of medical care needed for anti-social act X becomes really cheap, or else the laws are changed to just write off self inflicted health problems from X and not fund treating them publicly.
What really changes for your arguement? People who get sick before normal retirement age don't pay into social security as much, so 'your right to smoke' (eat trans-fats, sit on the couch and watch the Springer show, etc.), still ends where it affects the livelyhood of others. People who become couch potatos are less valuable assets for the armed forces if a draft is needed, so 'your right not to exercise' ends where it affects the livelyhood of others. People who don't invest in their own retirement..., People who don't vote, or vote while unfamiliar with the issues... People who get pregnant too early, or too late in life, or not with an approved genetic match...
For years, people argued that ulcers were a stress related disease, and some people quite seriously argued for public health refusing to treat the condition unless the sufferers first made lifestyle changes. Ulcers turned out to have a bacterial cause. Right now, there's a huge arguement in social government and insurance circles for requiring diabetics to make lifestyle changes so they put less burden on the public health system, and some researchers suggesting that there may be a viral or bacteriological factor in diabetes, other research showing that eating habits don't really affect diabetes in the ways medical science just assumed, and so on. What happens if we limit public funding to treat this desease because it's really just a result of peoples own actions, and it turns out it isn't?
Every single action you ever take has some chance of affecting the livelyhood of others. In some cases, a clear, calculable risk/benefit ratio is available - In a great many it isn't. Governments are generally not skilled at assigning reward and punishment based on how much something really adversely impacts others, or how much uncertainty there may still be in an assessment of the risks. At least mine isn't - would we have the war on (some) drugs, massive dependance on foreign oil, and a 3,000+ page tax code if it was?
Hate to reply to my own post, but obviously, that should be "department, which transmitted...". I'm profoundly sorry.