there is a link between violence and videogames -- violence and TV, movies, everything your heart desires! And let's also assume that the link is direct and much stronger than it seems, right now, to be.
Well, what the fuck are you going to do about it? I still think the principle behind Amendment Numero Uno is superior to whatever kind of inducement people may find in forms of communication.
There are case law exceptions to freedom of speech, of course, and direct inducement of others to kill, or conspiracy with others to murder, is and should not be protected. But depictions of crimes, and even interactive simulations of them, are but vaporous, pale shadows of the crimes themselves, and should be protected as a matter of course -- NOT because they serve any specially useful purpose -- many don't, other than the glee we get ramming into simulated pedestrians -- but because that is the default judgment.
Moreover, as a matter of sublimating our more murderous urges, I applaud violent video games for making our streets safer.
I apologize -- what I meant is, why is it acceptable for patents to last only twenty years, while copyrights have to be good until everyone passingly acquainted with the original work is dead?
Top-down social control is not the province of the left. Rather, extreme leftism and extreme rightism land on the totalitarian continent. And make haste for tiki parties, book-burnings, etc.
Most Democrats in this country are, on a more cosmopolitan political scale, centrists. The Right in this country, however, is really, truly scarily far afield
At least at Toledo Public Schools here in Northwest Ohio, the effectiveness of prophylaxis and contraception is downplayed very rigorously, and the party line, "The only foolproof way to prevent pregnancy and STDs is abstinence," while of course technically true, is a disservice to sexually curious and turbulent students on the order of, "The only foolproof way to avoid motor vehicle accidents is not to drive at all."
It is more reponsible to assume sex will take place and advocate prophylaxis and contraception, since this results in a higher rate of use of said protection when the inevitable takes place. Teens taking virginity pledges, for instance, only end up postponing intercourse about six months compared to those who don't, and are less likely to use condoms when they do have it.
I get to decide what my child reads or not but I have no business doing to same with your kid. The problem is, how do I know if my kid gets a book I don't approve of at the school library? Maybe he reads it there and doesn't bring it home so I'll never find out.
I think there's a certain organic beauty to this situation: the kid may have incomplete access to materials his parent doesn't approve of, while at the same time the parent has far-reaching but not total control of what the kid consumes.
Here's the beauty: the kid has the opportunity to be exposed to things that otherwise, esp. if say his parents were closed-minded, he wouldn't be, while at the same time there are controls in place.
Since parents have varying abilities and varyingly appropriate views of child-upraising, I like that there's some give in the relationship--bad parents, therefore, don't have an oppressive grip on their children, while at the same time bad kids don't have complete autonomy from their folks.
Since we likely will never agree on just what kind of ideas, ethics, etc. to espouse officially, this organic solution seems right to at least allow a churning of the ideological waters.
It doesn't have to be like that. Especially with electronic resources.
The fact is, the public does have a right to free information through public domain, without compulsion on any person.
(Mind you, it seems this right is obliquely under attack, and has been for thirty years or so, as copyright protections have grown)
But listen: even if it were like that, consider countries which recognize free access to health care as a basic right; without enslaving health care professionals, they seem to get on well enough.
I think the poster's point is that much of our current teen pregnancy and STD problem is the result of things like abstinence-only education, skittish silence about the subject of sex, and other similar attitudes.
Kids--even younger kids--are naturally curious about their and others' bodies, and it seems both unnatural and slightly hypocritical to assume that there's no room for sexual dialogue of any kind until a certain age.
The point of these books (i.e., Heather....), I thought, was to get kids to recognize that homosexual relationships aren't unnatural, immoral, or unhealthy. Prepare them for a reality for which, if they were sheltered by for instance bigoted parents, they would not be prepared. Or worse--to which they would respond aggressively and violently.
Some people, it's to be admitted, don't agree with this message or this lesson. I'm going to act a bit un-Fox News-like for a second here, though, and suggest that maybe they're wrong and this is the right kind of thing to teach children, no matter what age.
Seriously, been feeling the love of Love sources for over a week now, with 60GB of reiser4 goodness.
Mind you, you have to take what the love-sources guys say seriously, about renicing the filesystem process to prevent it from bogging down under load -- but that was all prerelease stuff. Plus, as much as I b0rk that box, the constant rebooting while still mounted can't even dent the fs.
It seems from the literature that the ability to cross-infect is taken for granted by prion researchers. In many cases the species barrier may make it extremely difficult, but even in cases where an animal doesn't manifest clinical illness, its nervous tissues remain infectious, and a second pass may result in clinical disease.
Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies certainly aren't the biggest threat in the world right now. But unlike coconuts, whose threat is necessarily circumscribed, there is the biological possibility of a much more vast and devastating effect. Thank you, Darwin, Huxley, Morgan, and the rest.
Space travel between planets is usually accomplished by means of an orbital transfer. Visualize: here on Earth, if you want to go somewhere, you point your head in its direction and you go. Fortunately, most everything on Earth is relatively immobile. In space, everything's moving.
So to get to another planet, you start with a probe orbiting earth, and then you do a burn that basically swings out the orbit so far that it intersects with another planet, where it can get a gravity assist or a gravity brake (depending on what you want) and swing out to another planet. Etc., etc. Then you get to Mars.
Nokia's Design Philosophy:
Take the same twinkie form-factor and pepper on the numbers in some puerilely innovative fashion. E.g., make two rows of buttons, each one of which will dial one of two or three numbers whether you press the top, bottom, or fourth dimension.
Then, offer removeable faceplates!
Doesn't work that way in a Capatalist [sic] society.
1.) The United States is not a capitalist society, any more than the USSR was a communist one. There are free markets, and there are constrained markets; there is laissez-faire in some areas, and socialism in others.
2.) This being a democracy, we can actually choose how we want to value property, what counts as property, and how it should be distributed, not just through our checkbooks, but through the ballot box.
3.) Property is artificial. It's a legal construct enforced by government action. Intellectual property is even more artificial, in that it's an abstraction of (the already abstract) property. Which is not to say that the establishment of either is bad/evil/etc., but only that they are not Scriptural, and may be changed or abolished, if enough voters (and, as a practical matter, Congress and the Courts) approve.
4.) If the system as it now exists does not serve peoples' needs well enough, it may indicate a need to change it.
Giga- from Greek, gigas (damn, no greek entities!), which in modern Greek would come out more Klingonish, but certainly not like the letter J, even if you went back to Attic Greek.
Slashdot Mirror
there is a link between violence and videogames -- violence and TV, movies, everything your heart desires! And let's also assume that the link is direct and much stronger than it seems, right now, to be.
Well, what the fuck are you going to do about it? I still think the principle behind Amendment Numero Uno is superior to whatever kind of inducement people may find in forms of communication.
There are case law exceptions to freedom of speech, of course, and direct inducement of others to kill, or conspiracy with others to murder, is and should not be protected. But depictions of crimes, and even interactive simulations of them, are but vaporous, pale shadows of the crimes themselves, and should be protected as a matter of course -- NOT because they serve any specially useful purpose -- many don't, other than the glee we get ramming into simulated pedestrians -- but because that is the default judgment.
Moreover, as a matter of sublimating our more murderous urges, I applaud violent video games for making our streets safer.
I apologize -- what I meant is, why is it acceptable for patents to last only twenty years, while copyrights have to be good until everyone passingly acquainted with the original work is dead?
Patents last for twenty years. They used to last only seventeen years. Why is this acceptable for patents but not for copyrights?
I mean, I know why -- but is this unreasonable from anyone's viewpoint who doesn't charge $13.99 for a CD?
The Web was not created by companies like Intel. It wasn't created by companies at all, only in some cases co-opted by them.
When companies like Intel pitch these wide-ranging changes, it comes over like some seedy traveling salesman pitching a monorail.
If we want to make changes to the web, we will.
Top-down social control is not the province of the left. Rather, extreme leftism and extreme rightism land on the totalitarian continent. And make haste for tiki parties, book-burnings, etc.
Most Democrats in this country are, on a more cosmopolitan political scale, centrists. The Right in this country, however, is really, truly scarily far afield
At least at Toledo Public Schools here in Northwest Ohio, the effectiveness of prophylaxis and contraception is downplayed very rigorously, and the party line, "The only foolproof way to prevent pregnancy and STDs is abstinence," while of course technically true, is a disservice to sexually curious and turbulent students on the order of, "The only foolproof way to avoid motor vehicle accidents is not to drive at all."
It is more reponsible to assume sex will take place and advocate prophylaxis and contraception, since this results in a higher rate of use of said protection when the inevitable takes place. Teens taking virginity pledges, for instance, only end up postponing intercourse about six months compared to those who don't, and are less likely to use condoms when they do have it.
I think there's a certain organic beauty to this situation: the kid may have incomplete access to materials his parent doesn't approve of, while at the same time the parent has far-reaching but not total control of what the kid consumes.
Here's the beauty: the kid has the opportunity to be exposed to things that otherwise, esp. if say his parents were closed-minded, he wouldn't be, while at the same time there are controls in place.
Since parents have varying abilities and varyingly appropriate views of child-upraising, I like that there's some give in the relationship--bad parents, therefore, don't have an oppressive grip on their children, while at the same time bad kids don't have complete autonomy from their folks.
Since we likely will never agree on just what kind of ideas, ethics, etc. to espouse officially, this organic solution seems right to at least allow a churning of the ideological waters.
It doesn't have to be like that. Especially with electronic resources.
The fact is, the public does have a right to free information through public domain, without compulsion on any person.
(Mind you, it seems this right is obliquely under attack, and has been for thirty years or so, as copyright protections have grown)
But listen: even if it were like that, consider countries which recognize free access to health care as a basic right; without enslaving health care professionals, they seem to get on well enough.
I think the poster's point is that much of our current teen pregnancy and STD problem is the result of things like abstinence-only education, skittish silence about the subject of sex, and other similar attitudes.
Kids--even younger kids--are naturally curious about their and others' bodies, and it seems both unnatural and slightly hypocritical to assume that there's no room for sexual dialogue of any kind until a certain age.
The point of these books (i.e., Heather....), I thought, was to get kids to recognize that homosexual relationships aren't unnatural, immoral, or unhealthy. Prepare them for a reality for which, if they were sheltered by for instance bigoted parents, they would not be prepared. Or worse--to which they would respond aggressively and violently.
Some people, it's to be admitted, don't agree with this message or this lesson. I'm going to act a bit un-Fox News-like for a second here, though, and suggest that maybe they're wrong and this is the right kind of thing to teach children, no matter what age.
Tengo cojones grandes.
Seriously, been feeling the love of Love sources for over a week now, with 60GB of reiser4 goodness.
Mind you, you have to take what the love-sources guys say seriously, about renicing the filesystem process to prevent it from bogging down under load -- but that was all prerelease stuff. Plus, as much as I b0rk that box, the constant rebooting while still mounted can't even dent the fs.
Fantastic.
It seems from the literature that the ability to cross-infect is taken for granted by prion researchers. In many cases the species barrier may make it extremely difficult, but even in cases where an animal doesn't manifest clinical illness, its nervous tissues remain infectious, and a second pass may result in clinical disease.
Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies certainly aren't the biggest threat in the world right now. But unlike coconuts, whose threat is necessarily circumscribed, there is the biological possibility of a much more vast and devastating effect. Thank you, Darwin, Huxley, Morgan, and the rest.
Space travel between planets is usually accomplished by means of an orbital transfer. Visualize: here on Earth, if you want to go somewhere, you point your head in its direction and you go. Fortunately, most everything on Earth is relatively immobile. In space, everything's moving.
So to get to another planet, you start with a probe orbiting earth, and then you do a burn that basically swings out the orbit so far that it intersects with another planet, where it can get a gravity assist or a gravity brake (depending on what you want) and swing out to another planet. Etc., etc. Then you get to Mars.
Nokia's Design Philosophy: Take the same twinkie form-factor and pepper on the numbers in some puerilely innovative fashion. E.g., make two rows of buttons, each one of which will dial one of two or three numbers whether you press the top, bottom, or fourth dimension. Then, offer removeable faceplates!
Doesn't work that way in a Capatalist [sic] society.
1.) The United States is not a capitalist society, any more than the USSR was a communist one. There are free markets, and there are constrained markets; there is laissez-faire in some areas, and socialism in others.
2.) This being a democracy, we can actually choose how we want to value property, what counts as property, and how it should be distributed, not just through our checkbooks, but through the ballot box.
3.) Property is artificial. It's a legal construct enforced by government action. Intellectual property is even more artificial, in that it's an abstraction of (the already abstract) property. Which is not to say that the establishment of either is bad/evil/etc., but only that they are not Scriptural, and may be changed or abolished, if enough voters (and, as a practical matter, Congress and the Courts) approve.
4.) If the system as it now exists does not serve peoples' needs well enough, it may indicate a need to change it.
Giga- from Greek, gigas (damn, no greek entities!), which in modern Greek would come out more Klingonish, but certainly not like the letter J, even if you went back to Attic Greek.
/*My favorite method:*/
void get_over_it(trouble x) {
if (! good_ol_fashioned_capitalism(x))
printf("Must be communism!\n");
else {
corporation += joe6pack - absurd_amt;
printf("At least it's not communism!\n");
}
return;
}