This means the birth of the Crab Nebula was in the year 5446 BC. Mankind witnessed it 6,500 years later.
Since we're being pedantic, I'd like to ask: from who's point of view? Observers who move in relation to each other will not agree on when spatially separated events happened in relation to each other. There is an inertial frame where the birth of Crab Nebula indeed happened between the start and end of the year 1054 AD on some point of Earth's surface as recorded by the local populace.
News stories on such phenomena invariably leave out this little fact, i.e., that which is witnessed by man in the sky usually happened thousands of years earlier than when he actually saw it. This makes it confusing for the average reader.
The nova that gave birth to Crab Nebula is commonly referred as the nova of 1054 AD. You're far more likely to confuse people by insisting that it be called the nova of 5446 BC. Besides, like I pointed out above, your timing is questionable too.
Why would someone want to bypass a user's preference to not see signatures, especially since it requires extra work?
The signature in question appears to be an advertisement for a web site. Advertisers in general try to force people to see their ads. In other words, the signature is spam, and typing it by hand (or script) bypasses the spam filter.
Can someone please tell me where exactly free speech ends and defamation begins?
When your speech affects someone more powerful than yourself, it becomes defamation. In other words, the right to free speech only affects speech that doesn't matter.
I'm in The West, and run an exit node without fear. If some jack-hole starts spewing CP through my node, I'm covered... *I* wasn't the one who was transmitting the info.
"Your Honor and Honorable Jurors, this man knowingly and willingly ran software designed to allow pedophiles and other criminals, even terrorists, to hide their identities while conducting crimes against children online, and to circumvent filters put forth by lawful authority. He will continue to help these people exploit the defenseless, unless we stop him here and now."
Will the cops turn my electronic life inside out for a year or more? Yes. Will it be hella inconvenient? Yes. Will I be jailed? Fuck no.
It is quite possible that you will be jailed, at least until the trial, and even if you're not, you'll be harassed by the "save the children" -mob.
The spirit of Salem Witch Trials is alive and well.
There have been BitTorrent clients for I2P for years now. They're useless, largely, because anonymous networks are nightmarishly slow and unreliable, and very, very few people bother to upload anything interesting (at least in my opinion).
Ironically enough, Freenet is actually pretty fast nowadays. Still nowhere near BitTorrent, but automatically dividing each file into multiple pieces and the mechanism which causes each piece to become hosted in more peers the more it is accessed results in automatic load-balancing and a torrent-like effect. It's certainly much faster than Tor, and not subject to DoS attacks.
Before anyone accuses me of trolling, I've been using TOR off and on at home since 2005, and I've experimented with I2P for about 6 months in the wake of whistleblowing of the NSA wiretapping program.
Tor isn't a darknet. It's an anonymizer. The fact that you're running a Tor node is not hidden; only what you're doing with it is. Even then there's a simple way of locating hidden services: simply correlate the uptimes of the server in question with the uptimes of Tor nodes.
Freenet doesn't have that problem, since accessing inserted content doesn't require contacting the node that inserted it; however, on-demand insert by Frost might cause a vulnerability, if the attacker controls a node adjacent to yours, since they can then see that a disproportionate amount of pieces for that file are coming from your node. Premix routing should fix that once implemented.
Are they really serious about cutting out access to sites promoting or depicting child abuse? If so, I look forward to them blocking all sites which aid or abet or encourage the religious indoctrination of children. They're all malevolent, and far more prevalent than any other form of abuse.
TheAmazingAtheist, please keep your shit on Youtube where it belongs. Someone telling children something you happen to disbelief doesn't make said action abuse; and even if it were, it certainly isn't comparable to sexual abuse. And it takes an outright delusional nut to believe that all, most, or even any significant percentage fraction of people who preach religion do this out of malevolence.
How the Hell does an insane conspiracy theory with some really fucked up values get modded "Insightful"? And why is it that fanatical atheists can't resist preaching in every single story? Honestly, these people seem more like a cult every day - and not one of those New Age happy hippy ones, but a good old-fashioned "everyone but us is stupid or evil!!!" -style ones.
I wonder how long it'll take before some of these morons decide to start blowing up churches? I mean, if you really believe that religion is child abuse, then it would logically be the right and smart thing to do, right? Unless, of course, you're just talking shit online to make yourself look cool and get modded up.
Cretin.
Mods: go right ahead and mod me down. I'm sick and tired of every discussion turning into a religious flamewar. If it's not armchair theologists, it's the Rational Response Squad (lol) hangers-on. Fuck them both.
I'm pretty impressed by this. It seems to me that Western mainstream media still regards bloggers (I'm not talking about journalists who happen to have blogs, I'm talking about pure bloggers) as some kind of group of fringe weirdos.
Western mainstream media is competing with - and losing to - bloggers, so of course it tries to paint them as "weirdos". It won't work: too many "news sources" simply repeat what others have reported without doing any investigation themselves.
The only advantage a traditional newspaper has over a blogger is the ability to do some journalism: send reporters to interview people, investigate things, etc. That costs money, thought, so the quest for profit has optimized that away, reducing the whole paper to nothing more than a printed blog. Now its time to pay the price their lack of vision.
Still, in the end it's a good thing: those newspapers doing actual journalism will survive, since there's actual value to have access to prime sources, while worthless ones which just repeat rumours won't. Good riddance: blogs save paper and energy for distribution and are thus better for the environment.
We can better address the CA problems by making incentives line up in the correct way. Change the system so that the CAs have a financial incentive to not issue fraudulent certificates --- either regulate them, allow regular users to subscribe to a CA verification service, or require that more than one CA sign a particular certificate.
A CA is supposed to prove that the server your browser is talking with is the real owner of some domain. There is exactly one entity which can authoritatively state that: the DNS registry.
Pair every domain with a certificate, with the chain of proof of identity expanding up to the root DNS servers. Issue these certificates automatically with the domain, without any external CA's having any say in the matter. That way the problem goes away.
If you want, you can still have an external trustworthy CA - meaning they actually check from official sources - proving that some address belongs to, say, a bank; and the browser can show a more impressive padlock for sites showing that certificate in addition to the normal DNS one. However, the current system simply doesn't work, except to enrich parasites.
If you are looking at some run-of-the-mill picciotto (mafia soldier), or even a mafia boss, he will hardly know how to spell properly, let alone using a computer. Using Skype is already pretty advanced for their standards.
Mafia is organized crime. The whole point of organization is division of labour. The very fact that you distinguish between the Mafia soldier and Mafia boss is evidence enough of that. Consequently, it doesn't matter whether Don Stoneage knows a computer or not, since he has IT staff to do it for him; and if he doesn't have them yet, he'll certainly hire some after Don Dinosaur gets busted and the media helpfully discusses the poor state of his computer security and how it contributed to his arrest over and over again.
Natural selection favours Mafia bosses who are capable of learning from other people's mistakes.
I'm sorry, but did you actually use Netscape 4 and IE 4??
Yes. And Netscape Navigator 3 Gold before them.
I did. I even programmed in them. And hell, all the cool features did not work in IE!
But the uncool ones did. IE4 was reasonably stable, while NS4 wasn't. And as I remember, the "cool" things back then included such gems as a host of flies following the mouse cursor; I could live without them.
I don't know about the programmers point of view - I still avoid using Javascript if at all possible - but from the user's point of view, using NS4 was like flying the Hindenburg through a volcanic eruption: it wasn't a question of if it blew up, just when, and usually sooner rather than later.
DHTML? JavaScript? They were in the same horrible state as they are today.
Didn't matter. NS4 would keep on crashing constantly, especially if you tried to use more than one browser window, while IE4 could run for hours. There was no contest.
Besides, javascript is unnecessary for almost all Web sites; in fact I nowadays use NoScript to keep most of them from running it. That typically makes browsing a far more pleasant activity, since I'm spared the "cool" things various "Web developers" have cooked up.
And IE did not even have a mail client, calendar, or anything else.
Oh yes, the Communicator package which insisted on doing everything and did nothing well. All it resulted in was bloat and more things that could go wrong.
Why the Hell should a web browser include a calendar?
They did win for one simple reason: They gave their browser away with their os.
No, they won because NS4 was unusable and IE4 wasn't.
They did neither win fair nor square (whatever that means), they won trough EEE. So stop talking out of your ass.
NS4 was a disaster and IE4 was an improvement over it, mainly because almost everything would had been but an improvement nonetheless. And there were practically no standards to EEE back then. Since the whole market had been previously dominated by Netscape and the "standard" was "works in Navigator", rather than any format specification.
And if you don't know what "fair and square" means - in this context, it means they had the superior product rather than just a superior marketing department - then why are you claiming that it doesn't apply to this? How can you refute and assertion if you don't know what is being asserted?
As a casual observer, I don't know why I need to provide proof of age to post an advertisement.
Well, there's this thing called projection. It basically means that we tend to see other people as similar to ourselves. In this context it means that the people who write these laws are convinced that anyone who sees a child in anything less than a burka will face an irresistible urge to...
...Coming to think of it, I began writing this as a nasty joke, but it actually does explain a lot, now doesn't it?
In fact I could walk into Barnes & Noble right now and buy multiple books filled with naked children.
Yes, but since you bought them from Barnes & Noble they're artistic rather than low-brow smut from a swingers magazine. It's the thought that counts, even - especially - on crime. And everyone knows that a picture contains the soul of the subject, so if you look upon a picture lustfully, the subject gets raped. It's basic voodoo, and I for one am very shocked that you weren't taught it in the fine institutes of learning that teach Intelligent Design and Intelligent Falling.
It's called freedom of the press. It's called natural.
"And as long as I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony", quoth Susie Derkins apropriate enough. Drop us a line if you ever see that "freedom of the press" anywhere, okay?
"Because God created the human body, it may remain uncovered and still preserve His splendor." - Pope John Paul
"To the pure all things are pure, but to the impure and defiled is nothing pure" - another guy called Paul.
Now consider the people who write our laws in the light of the above and many things become quite clear.
No. They tried to murder them for power. Pure power. IE was the one browser to rule them all. Fortunately they were too stupid to do anything useful with that power. They only saved the money to continue developing their web developer torture instrument called IE
Netscape committed suicide through incompetence. Compared to Netscape 4, IE was - and still is - a far superior browser. So is Netscape 3, for that matter, and in fact I'd use Lynx before touching N4 ever again. Hard as it might be to believe, in this one instance Microsoft won a fair and square victory through the superior quality of their product.
Right. And if they are pointed at you, they will heat YOUR water.
Heaven forbid.
I understand the difference between microwave radiation and, say, ionizing radiation. But sufficient concentration of either one will kill you, albeit in much different ways.
No, based on your rather idiotic statement below, you clearly don't understand. Microwave radiation is less energetic than visible light. Your average reading light is putting out orders of magnitude more and "harder" radiation than the proposed satellite. So is your skin, for that matter.
So I get it, okay? But even though I know my new microwave is 1200W (and I even know what that means), that doesn't mean I won't find you in your office and shoot your ass if your satellite regularly aims 50mW at my kids.
Yes, you get it. You know that 50mW of microwave radiation does not have harmful effect on living tissue - since it takes 1200W, 2400 times that, to heat food in a reasonable time - yet you'll do whatever it takes to ensure that your kids will instead keep on choking on carcinogens and radioactive matter from coal-burning plants. You also make death threats over the matter. And to top the irony, your own body is putting out more and radiation (about 100W, according to Wikipedia) than that due to your body heat.
This is why I think that having children under the age of 18 should be disqualified from having input on any public decision.
That's clear enough, isn't it?
What is clear that you have no idea what you're talking about. Hysterical fool; but I guess this demonstrates why the most idiotic proposals go through when they're accompanied with "it's for the children".
Who is going to aim the thing, what guarantees are there against bad aim, and who is going to be liable if 100,000 people get irradiated with low-power microwaves?
You do realize that microwaves don't have any effect besides heating water (and other bipolar molecules) and causing sparks to fly off metal (which is how the energy gets collected)? They aren't scary nuclear radiation, they just make you uncomfortably hot. Make the beam wide enough and it won't hurt anyone or anything.
I agree with your point, which is well made, but try making it to the 1% who happened to get autism from the vaccine.
Go visit the graves of the 25% who died from preventable illnesses and explain to them they had to die so one out of 25 of them wouldn't live as autistic instead.
Sometimes I wish the "think of the children" -crowd would actually, you know, think:(.
SSL is flawed, at least for the web. Usability studies have shown time and time again that the vast majority of people do not understand and will ignore the bad cert error dialogs. That's a pretty fundamental problem, and why Firefox now makes it really hard to bypass them, but all it's doing is putting a sticking plaster on a bullet wound.
To put it bluntly: if you ignore a warning saying that you might be being scammed when visiting your banking site, the flaw is in your brains, not in SSL. Altought I suppose the neverending cascade of popups Windows is so fond of throwing on its poor users is at least partially to blame for training them to just click past all of them.
Fines are a completely different argument. In that case I agree that basing them on income is unfair, but bail is always supposed to be enough to make running for it a less attractive option than facing trial.
Fines need to be based on income. In the hypothethical case above, suppose both the industrialist and the high school dropout are convicted and given a fine of $100,000 dollars. For the industrialist, it's a "small fraction" of his liquid assets - it won't likely affect his life at all. The high school dropout, on the other hand, will be in debt for the rest of his life.
The same fine reslts in completely different level of punishment for people of different wealth. Consequently, to achieve the ideal of same punishment for the same crime, fines need to be adjusted for income, so they'll hurt equally regardless of your wealth. It isn't a matter of punishing success or rewarding failure; it's a matter of punishing criminals equally without letting their success in life interfere.
I'll finally be able to wipe the image of Goatse from my mind.
You know, this is something I've never quite understood. Goatse is, in the end, a man with a big ass mooning the camera. It's not shocking, it's not disgusting, it's not even particularly ugly. Far worse things get posted daily on Gurochan. So why is Goatse considered the archetypical shock site? Or is that the whole joke which just whooshed over my head?
Now suppose that you and your family were kidnapped from your home at gun point, and you had to watch while unspeakable things were done to them and to you.
One thing you would 'learn' (and have a terrifying anxiety attack in response to) is that sitting around in your own home with your family is an unsafe thing to be doing, because something really bad happened one day when you were doing that. That response would be completely useless and would make your life an absolute misery.
And, having learned that, you'd keep the door and windows locked and a gun at hand at all times, thus being far safer against that sort of thing again.
The reason people tend to be anxious is that the world really is an inherently brutal, nasty and downright evil place. People do get kidnapped at gunpoint from their homes, raped and shot. Sitting around in your own home with your family really is an unsafe thing to be doing, unless you're living in a fortress.
Besides, while there might be therapeutic value for an invention like this, abusing it would be more profitable, so that'll be more widespread.
In all these cases, things of value to you were devalued by acts of others. In all these cases, you still hold the "thing" in question containing the value that was stolen from you. You still have the stock from the company, you still have the source code on your computer, and you still have a (worthless) car. And yet, you've still been robbed.
So, if I start a competing company, and your company's stock falls due to me producing a better product cheaper, I've robbed you? And if I make a better program and your clients shift to it, am I a filthy thief for daring to devalue your source? Or does that only hold for some actions which cause devaluation but not others?
I understand it sucks to make financial mistakes; but if you make your decisions with the expectation that an arbitrary state-granted monopoly pretty much nobody respects is going to hold, you only have yourself to blame when it goes south. You are no more "robbed" than an initiate to a pyramid scheme who fails to find new suckers initiate, and just as deserving of sympathy.
If you have access to cheap food (as we do today) and effective loyalty inducement (brainwashing perhaps, or some sort of mind control) then slavery might be quite viable from a purely economic viewpoint.
If you have access to cheap food, you can simply arrange to pay some of the wage as food. It doesn't change the underlying economic situation at all.
Remember, your workers don't really want coloured pieces of paper with numbers on them, they want food/clothes/houses/televisions/cars/blow/hookers. Money simply makes the logistics of this all a lot easier for everyone involved; however, it is quite possible to receive some or all of the compensation in some other form than money.
Slashdot Mirror
Since we're being pedantic, I'd like to ask: from who's point of view? Observers who move in relation to each other will not agree on when spatially separated events happened in relation to each other. There is an inertial frame where the birth of Crab Nebula indeed happened between the start and end of the year 1054 AD on some point of Earth's surface as recorded by the local populace.
The nova that gave birth to Crab Nebula is commonly referred as the nova of 1054 AD. You're far more likely to confuse people by insisting that it be called the nova of 5446 BC. Besides, like I pointed out above, your timing is questionable too.
The signature in question appears to be an advertisement for a web site. Advertisers in general try to force people to see their ads. In other words, the signature is spam, and typing it by hand (or script) bypasses the spam filter.
When your speech affects someone more powerful than yourself, it becomes defamation. In other words, the right to free speech only affects speech that doesn't matter.
"Your Honor and Honorable Jurors, this man knowingly and willingly ran software designed to allow pedophiles and other criminals, even terrorists, to hide their identities while conducting crimes against children online, and to circumvent filters put forth by lawful authority. He will continue to help these people exploit the defenseless, unless we stop him here and now."
It is quite possible that you will be jailed, at least until the trial, and even if you're not, you'll be harassed by the "save the children" -mob.
The spirit of Salem Witch Trials is alive and well.
Ironically enough, Freenet is actually pretty fast nowadays. Still nowhere near BitTorrent, but automatically dividing each file into multiple pieces and the mechanism which causes each piece to become hosted in more peers the more it is accessed results in automatic load-balancing and a torrent-like effect. It's certainly much faster than Tor, and not subject to DoS attacks.
Tor isn't a darknet. It's an anonymizer. The fact that you're running a Tor node is not hidden; only what you're doing with it is. Even then there's a simple way of locating hidden services: simply correlate the uptimes of the server in question with the uptimes of Tor nodes.
Freenet doesn't have that problem, since accessing inserted content doesn't require contacting the node that inserted it; however, on-demand insert by Frost might cause a vulnerability, if the attacker controls a node adjacent to yours, since they can then see that a disproportionate amount of pieces for that file are coming from your node. Premix routing should fix that once implemented.
TheAmazingAtheist, please keep your shit on Youtube where it belongs. Someone telling children something you happen to disbelief doesn't make said action abuse; and even if it were, it certainly isn't comparable to sexual abuse. And it takes an outright delusional nut to believe that all, most, or even any significant percentage fraction of people who preach religion do this out of malevolence.
How the Hell does an insane conspiracy theory with some really fucked up values get modded "Insightful"? And why is it that fanatical atheists can't resist preaching in every single story? Honestly, these people seem more like a cult every day - and not one of those New Age happy hippy ones, but a good old-fashioned "everyone but us is stupid or evil!!!" -style ones.
I wonder how long it'll take before some of these morons decide to start blowing up churches? I mean, if you really believe that religion is child abuse, then it would logically be the right and smart thing to do, right? Unless, of course, you're just talking shit online to make yourself look cool and get modded up.
Cretin.
Mods: go right ahead and mod me down. I'm sick and tired of every discussion turning into a religious flamewar. If it's not armchair theologists, it's the Rational Response Squad (lol) hangers-on. Fuck them both.
Western mainstream media is competing with - and losing to - bloggers, so of course it tries to paint them as "weirdos". It won't work: too many "news sources" simply repeat what others have reported without doing any investigation themselves.
The only advantage a traditional newspaper has over a blogger is the ability to do some journalism: send reporters to interview people, investigate things, etc. That costs money, thought, so the quest for profit has optimized that away, reducing the whole paper to nothing more than a printed blog. Now its time to pay the price their lack of vision.
Still, in the end it's a good thing: those newspapers doing actual journalism will survive, since there's actual value to have access to prime sources, while worthless ones which just repeat rumours won't. Good riddance: blogs save paper and energy for distribution and are thus better for the environment.
A CA is supposed to prove that the server your browser is talking with is the real owner of some domain. There is exactly one entity which can authoritatively state that: the DNS registry.
Pair every domain with a certificate, with the chain of proof of identity expanding up to the root DNS servers. Issue these certificates automatically with the domain, without any external CA's having any say in the matter. That way the problem goes away.
If you want, you can still have an external trustworthy CA - meaning they actually check from official sources - proving that some address belongs to, say, a bank; and the browser can show a more impressive padlock for sites showing that certificate in addition to the normal DNS one. However, the current system simply doesn't work, except to enrich parasites.
Mafia is organized crime. The whole point of organization is division of labour. The very fact that you distinguish between the Mafia soldier and Mafia boss is evidence enough of that. Consequently, it doesn't matter whether Don Stoneage knows a computer or not, since he has IT staff to do it for him; and if he doesn't have them yet, he'll certainly hire some after Don Dinosaur gets busted and the media helpfully discusses the poor state of his computer security and how it contributed to his arrest over and over again.
Natural selection favours Mafia bosses who are capable of learning from other people's mistakes.
But on the good side, it's the one story where it's appropriate to talk about Irish Evil ;).
Yes. And Netscape Navigator 3 Gold before them.
But the uncool ones did. IE4 was reasonably stable, while NS4 wasn't. And as I remember, the "cool" things back then included such gems as a host of flies following the mouse cursor; I could live without them.
I don't know about the programmers point of view - I still avoid using Javascript if at all possible - but from the user's point of view, using NS4 was like flying the Hindenburg through a volcanic eruption: it wasn't a question of if it blew up, just when, and usually sooner rather than later.
Didn't matter. NS4 would keep on crashing constantly, especially if you tried to use more than one browser window, while IE4 could run for hours. There was no contest.
Besides, javascript is unnecessary for almost all Web sites; in fact I nowadays use NoScript to keep most of them from running it. That typically makes browsing a far more pleasant activity, since I'm spared the "cool" things various "Web developers" have cooked up.
Oh yes, the Communicator package which insisted on doing everything and did nothing well. All it resulted in was bloat and more things that could go wrong.
Why the Hell should a web browser include a calendar?
No, they won because NS4 was unusable and IE4 wasn't.
NS4 was a disaster and IE4 was an improvement over it, mainly because almost everything would had been but an improvement nonetheless. And there were practically no standards to EEE back then. Since the whole market had been previously dominated by Netscape and the "standard" was "works in Navigator", rather than any format specification.
And if you don't know what "fair and square" means - in this context, it means they had the superior product rather than just a superior marketing department - then why are you claiming that it doesn't apply to this? How can you refute and assertion if you don't know what is being asserted?
Well, there's this thing called projection. It basically means that we tend to see other people as similar to ourselves. In this context it means that the people who write these laws are convinced that anyone who sees a child in anything less than a burka will face an irresistible urge to...
...Coming to think of it, I began writing this as a nasty joke, but it actually does explain a lot, now doesn't it?
Yes, but since you bought them from Barnes & Noble they're artistic rather than low-brow smut from a swingers magazine. It's the thought that counts, even - especially - on crime. And everyone knows that a picture contains the soul of the subject, so if you look upon a picture lustfully, the subject gets raped. It's basic voodoo, and I for one am very shocked that you weren't taught it in the fine institutes of learning that teach Intelligent Design and Intelligent Falling.
"And as long as I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony", quoth Susie Derkins apropriate enough. Drop us a line if you ever see that "freedom of the press" anywhere, okay?
"To the pure all things are pure, but to the impure and defiled is nothing pure" - another guy called Paul.
Now consider the people who write our laws in the light of the above and many things become quite clear.
Why would Microsoft keep on releasing insecure products if it had competent security experts? Out of sheer malice?
Netscape committed suicide through incompetence. Compared to Netscape 4, IE was - and still is - a far superior browser. So is Netscape 3, for that matter, and in fact I'd use Lynx before touching N4 ever again. Hard as it might be to believe, in this one instance Microsoft won a fair and square victory through the superior quality of their product.
Heaven forbid.
No, based on your rather idiotic statement below, you clearly don't understand. Microwave radiation is less energetic than visible light. Your average reading light is putting out orders of magnitude more and "harder" radiation than the proposed satellite. So is your skin, for that matter.
Yes, you get it. You know that 50mW of microwave radiation does not have harmful effect on living tissue - since it takes 1200W, 2400 times that, to heat food in a reasonable time - yet you'll do whatever it takes to ensure that your kids will instead keep on choking on carcinogens and radioactive matter from coal-burning plants. You also make death threats over the matter. And to top the irony, your own body is putting out more and radiation (about 100W, according to Wikipedia) than that due to your body heat.
This is why I think that having children under the age of 18 should be disqualified from having input on any public decision.
What is clear that you have no idea what you're talking about. Hysterical fool; but I guess this demonstrates why the most idiotic proposals go through when they're accompanied with "it's for the children".
You do realize that microwaves don't have any effect besides heating water (and other bipolar molecules) and causing sparks to fly off metal (which is how the energy gets collected)? They aren't scary nuclear radiation, they just make you uncomfortably hot. Make the beam wide enough and it won't hurt anyone or anything.
Your mom's so massive she emitted you at just 14 years old.
Go visit the graves of the 25% who died from preventable illnesses and explain to them they had to die so one out of 25 of them wouldn't live as autistic instead.
Sometimes I wish the "think of the children" -crowd would actually, you know, think :(.
To put it bluntly: if you ignore a warning saying that you might be being scammed when visiting your banking site, the flaw is in your brains, not in SSL. Altought I suppose the neverending cascade of popups Windows is so fond of throwing on its poor users is at least partially to blame for training them to just click past all of them.
Fines need to be based on income. In the hypothethical case above, suppose both the industrialist and the high school dropout are convicted and given a fine of $100,000 dollars. For the industrialist, it's a "small fraction" of his liquid assets - it won't likely affect his life at all. The high school dropout, on the other hand, will be in debt for the rest of his life.
The same fine reslts in completely different level of punishment for people of different wealth. Consequently, to achieve the ideal of same punishment for the same crime, fines need to be adjusted for income, so they'll hurt equally regardless of your wealth. It isn't a matter of punishing success or rewarding failure; it's a matter of punishing criminals equally without letting their success in life interfere.
Just sue everyone using draconian measures for infringing on Dark Queen Takhisis's intellectual property ;).
You know, this is something I've never quite understood. Goatse is, in the end, a man with a big ass mooning the camera. It's not shocking, it's not disgusting, it's not even particularly ugly. Far worse things get posted daily on Gurochan. So why is Goatse considered the archetypical shock site? Or is that the whole joke which just whooshed over my head?
And, having learned that, you'd keep the door and windows locked and a gun at hand at all times, thus being far safer against that sort of thing again.
The reason people tend to be anxious is that the world really is an inherently brutal, nasty and downright evil place. People do get kidnapped at gunpoint from their homes, raped and shot. Sitting around in your own home with your family really is an unsafe thing to be doing, unless you're living in a fortress.
Besides, while there might be therapeutic value for an invention like this, abusing it would be more profitable, so that'll be more widespread.
So, if I start a competing company, and your company's stock falls due to me producing a better product cheaper, I've robbed you? And if I make a better program and your clients shift to it, am I a filthy thief for daring to devalue your source? Or does that only hold for some actions which cause devaluation but not others?
I understand it sucks to make financial mistakes; but if you make your decisions with the expectation that an arbitrary state-granted monopoly pretty much nobody respects is going to hold, you only have yourself to blame when it goes south. You are no more "robbed" than an initiate to a pyramid scheme who fails to find new suckers initiate, and just as deserving of sympathy.
If you have access to cheap food, you can simply arrange to pay some of the wage as food. It doesn't change the underlying economic situation at all.
Remember, your workers don't really want coloured pieces of paper with numbers on them, they want food/clothes/houses/televisions/cars/blow/hookers. Money simply makes the logistics of this all a lot easier for everyone involved; however, it is quite possible to receive some or all of the compensation in some other form than money.