It gets even stickier when you start taking into consideration the rape laws and the age of consent...
And it gets worse again when you start factoring in the "corruption of a minor" laws. In Ohio, it's legal to marry and have sex at the age of 16 with parental consent, but under 18, they're considered to be minors and any sexual contact can be considered to be corrupting them. Go figure.
I'm sorry, but you don't have to be an expert in *anything* to read a document before you sign it. Not reading a contract before signing it isn't naive, it's stupid. That goes for things as simple as a credit card receipt, and should be obvious for something as important as your tax return.
Most contracts can be read at about a 90% level of comprehension, but then you get into tricky things like obscure terms and the difference in meaning between "will" and "shall" (hint: it's the same as the strict grammatical sense of the words) and what you're signing may or not mean what you think it says. And the clerk in the store is not likely to know exactly what it means either.
Because you generally need to make several times the cost of the movie at the box office to break even. Theaters take a cut, distributors take a cut, then there's the advertising costs to pay on top... which can be massive: in the extreme case of low-budget movies, they can be many times the cost of the movie itself.
Unless, of course, you're Uwe Boll, in which case you've already made enough money to pay for the movie before it even opens. Say what you will about the man's skills in making movies (and believe you me, I'm willing to spill quite a bit of invective in that area) but he's a near genius at raising money. Between the German tax loophole and merchandising rights, he had his Tomb Raider movie paid off before opening.
There's a reason why Scorcese's "Raging Bull" doesn't center on the world frisbee champion, you know. Obviously, because people wouldn't be able to stand the sheer thrill and excitement if it did.
Let's see... several months ago he offered to supply a custom build of Windows free of charge for this machine. I don't see how he'd make any money off that venture.
Market penetration. Same reason he doesn't bother prosecuting piracy in China. The product is free to produce and he knows they can't (or won't) pay for it, so he "gives it away free," gaining goodwill and convincing people that Windows is the only operating system worth having.
Personally, I don't know that these laptops will do much to help these people. Yes, it gives them access to information, which will hopefully allow them to overcome the cultural barriers they have preventing them from having good food, but who will control the laptops?
Absent, of course, are any details as to how they will accomplish it when they are the party out of power in Congress."
Simple. They completely ignore the promise if elected, then blame partisan politics for the promise never bearing fruit. It's the same thing done when there's a majority in Congress, after all.
What next? Someone having to resign because he used an innocent word that sounded like 'nigger' and thus received rabid criticism? Oh wait, that already happened...
What, are you you too niggardly in your sharing of knowledge to use the actual word?
Sort of like the fact that most of Bones' tools in the Original Star Trek were made from salt and pepper shakers. Basically for the first episode the prop people had forgotten to make anything for his medical tools, and at the last minute just handed him a salt shaker. After that they went out searching for more and more elaborate salt shakers as a joke.
I hate to parade my Star Trek geek credentials, but in Star Trek Memories by Shatner, it's stated that the salt shakers came in during the episode with the salt vampire. Basically, the props guy was told to go out and find "futuristic-looking salt shakers." When he brought them back, they realized that the shakers didn't look enough like salt shakers for viewer recognition, so they turned them into medical instruments. *shrug* Then again, probably as many stories as there are cast and crew...
Everyone who makes money off of it says that the skill can be learned. There are people who have it naturally (including one guy I've read about who lacks the ability to forget anything--which really makes his life hell); but I have known people who got very impressive results simply from mnemonic tricks.
I remember a sci-fi story along those lines. Basically, the guy couldn't forget anything and it made his social life Hell because he was forever either creeping people out by remembering every detail about them even though he'd met them once several years before, or unintentionally socially "cutting" them by ignoring them because he figured they wouldn't remember him. He tried to use his abilities to make a living on bar bets, but found that the losers generally didn't believe him when he gave the right answer.
I wish I could remember the book or story title, but it was in an anthology of sci-fi stories regarding mutants. Supposedly, this guy's grandfather had the same ability/problem.
The other thing that's interesting is that the economy is moving from one based upon capital to one based upon debt. Americans, supposedly, owe more on credit cards than their net worth - as a whole (not the average!). This, combined with insane mortgages, and huge trade and federal budget defecits, will eventually weaken the military power of the United States, which is why it was allowed to happen in the first place. Americans are basically being sucked into the biggest usury racket ever.
Nothing new. Just look at what happened to people in the famous stock crash. They were "speculating," buying shares with the money they expected to get and when the market crashed, they were toast.
Personally, I try to avoid debt as much as possible. I bought my car outright. I don't carry balances on my credit card. If I can't afford to buy something outright, I take a good hard look at whether I'd actually need it. Most everyone in my family works this way, supposedly a legacy of my great-grandfather losing everything in the Crash and passing on the wisdom to his children. We've been lucky enough to be prosperous enough to maintain things this way (I know that there's a good chance I won't be able to buy my house outright as my parents did, for instance), but it's also a matter of good sense, living within our means.
For example, wilderness purchases if you should have the inclination to build a getaway cabin. Granted, there are no structures most of the time, it's just the land.
Unless, of course, the land turns out to be an environmental preserve, preserved wetlands, home to an endangered species, contaminated by toxic waste, etc...
Please enter your credit card number, security number, expiry, date of birth, mothers maiden name, social security, ATM pin and your home address for our databases!....
Suprisingly those still catch people.
Personally, I've always thought that what has the greatest potential would be to operate an entirely legitimate site that offers a genuine service which requires a user name and password, and then go out and hit the major sites (banking, eBay, stock, etc) and see how many people registered with the same username and password there too. I'll admit to having done this in the past, right up until the day that a site I'd used went bankrupt and a week later, another site with a similar premise was up and emailed me that everything was set up for my profile with them including my old password. Now it's possible that this was a case of the old company renaming itself after bankruptcy and trying again, but I suspect it's just a matter of all of my login information being part of the company assets that were bought.
"You know you're old when you remember when bacon, eggs, and sunshine were good for you."
"Studies show that research causes cancer in lab rats."
Quite honestly, all that these studies keep showing is that we still really don't understand how it all works and that, for now, you should just go ahead and eat what makes you feel healthy and good.
Take okcupid for example. Answer 500 muliple choice questions and the statistical grouping algorithm it uses matches you up with well lots of people who answered in a similar manner. You end up talking to people who think in a very similar way, often with similar interests. In fact it can be damned near telepathy at times. OK, that's great and getting on with someone is very easy but... As well as the influence of the nurture stuff there are underlying genetic mechanisms to the way people think and act but guess what, we're sorting these similar "good" and "bad" genes to be close to one another.
Well, first of all, you're assuming that these services match for similarity, that someone who put in the exact same answers as you will score the highest. While the early dating programs did exactly that, I highly suspect that the more modern ones work on a black box based on data from existing relationships. Odds are, the people who set it up don't even know whether it's a case of "like to like" or "opposites attract"; they just plug in all the data in and get back what appears to be the statistical patterns. The more people who sign up for your service, the more data that you have.
The result is potentially increased incidence of genetic diseases. Ultimately I think things like this will weed out the bad genes naturally as they express themselves in children but there's the suffering and potentally increased healthcare costs.
There's an additional fallacy you've got here, assuming that genetics are that influential. Unless the system is specifically matching to get blue-eyed, blond-haired, fair-skinned people together (eAryan?), I suspect a lot of the factors are personality-based, which is more of an environmental thing. I'll assuming that you're not arguing that a fondness for long walks on the beach correlate to a recessive gene coding for receding hairlines and color blindness.
That said, there is some interesting data regarding the rise of autism in Silicon Valley which is suggested to be the result of a generation or two of geeks breeding with geeks due to the environmental concentration thereof. While this is more of a case of them living in a target-rich environment rather than specifically matching for it over personality matrices, there is some fit there in that today's society allows you to pretty much pick your mate rather than having to select from the small pool of your local area.
The training creeped me out. the uber-patriotic person assigned to train our group was so into it. 3/4 of our group thought it was great... bringing down meth dealers who weren't smart enough to structure their money better. In fact, however, structuring is a crime as well... Go just below the radar one too many times, and you can be charged, eevn if there is no illegal activity behind the generation of money.
Having been a bank teller as summer employment, I can vouch for a good bit of what you say. But, to clarify your statement, you won't get "charged" with anything in a legal manner. You just come under more scrutiny. If your accounts all check out, then there's generally no problem. It's an annoyance, true, but it's not the OMFGWTFBBQ-Homeland-Security-wants-my-ass threat some people in the thread are making it out to be.
There was a scandal in my area, about twelve years ago, where several car dealers and a large number of car salesmen got into trouble for outfitting the area's drug dealers with very expensive cars on a cash basis. They were charged with money laundering and failing to report large cash transactions. I don't know why they didn't just lease the cars, that wouldn't be as obvious as walking into a dealership with a big bag of cash.
Well, just offhand, I believe that buying a car, particularly if one is paying cash, probably generates fewer records than leasing. Let me see... either I walk into a car dealership, put down the cash, and walk out with a car within an hour or so, or I get my legal signature on several pieces of paper as well as other identifying data, then have to regularly return to the car place or make payments. Which one generates fewer ties between me and the dealership? Admittedly, paying with cash is unusual enough these days that it makes peoples' heads turn, but I could see it from the drug dealer perspective.
not to be rude, but i hate this sentiment. american classics have always been trashy and they continue to be to this day...
The key to me is that while 90% of the content made 20 years ago is crap, just as the ratio is today, a large amount of that 90% has faded away into obscurity, leaving me with a better selection. It's been said (by Heinlein I think) that the biggest advantage to classical music is you've had a few hundred years to week out the crap.
Back in the 90s, California passed a law requiring all gun owners to register their guns. Eventually, the supreme court decided that convicted felons were not required to register since to do so would violate their 5th amendments rights (they're not legally allowed to have guns; registering one would be an admission of guilt).
Maybe it's true (As someone said, "There are two things which are infinite in this world, time and human stupidity and I'm not sure about time.") but to me, that seems like a misapplication of the 5th amendment. I mean, tax forms still have a section for listing illegal income so they could bring in gangsters, right?
I asked one veteran E.R. doc about the language situation in hospitals and he said it just wasn't that big a deal because often times the whole family would show up in the E.R., and someone in the bunch would be the terp. But that's just one data point.
When I was taking ASL courses, our teacher shared her own story about that. Due to vagaraies of genetics and the like, both she and her grandmother were deaf and had therefore learned sign language. The rest of the family, for whatever reason, had not. The grandmother was in the hospital, being treated, and they found that her condition was much more serious than they had taught. And so our teacher, at the age of 11, got to tell her grandmother that she was going to die. *shiver* Heck of a thing to do to a kid.
I'm sure there will be some indignant parent to come out of the wood work and shout loudly,"How could you say that? _MY_ child would never!"
Uh-huh... spare me. Your child is human, with human behavior, not some perfect deity.
*shrug* In the end, every party has the right to say no at any time prior to things happening. I don't know the particular case involved, but it's entirely possible that the girl did indeed show up, realized the lying about the age, and was still forced into sex. Heck, it could be that they even fooled around a bit beforehand, but she said no to the sex. She still has that right. What drives me crazy are the ones who admit to having said no retroactively. Those are the ones that make it difficult for the real cases to get their voices heard.
Personally, I think the laws on sexual congress should be based on maturity, not chronological age, but if we did that, a lot of people wouldn't legally have sex until they were 30. Then again, these are the same people having sex at 14 and getting people pregnant, so it wouldn't make that much of a difference.
We aren't talking about rape here - this is statutory rape, which just means the girls was underage. If it was just the boy who was underage, nobody would have been charged.
Unless, of course, you're Pamela Rogers... I'm sure there have been other cases. But you're right in that men have a societal barrier to claiming rape charges against a woman. Much like how earlier rulings stated that women who were dressed provocatively "were asking for it," it's assumed that men are always "asking for it" and therefore cannot be forced to have sexual congress.
Baseball? American Football?
on
Golf in Space
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· Score: 1
there are only three sports. Football; baseball; and basketball. Everything else is either a game or an activity.
I'd disagree with you on Baseball. I find it only slightly less boring than golf, at least at the major leagues. Watching a minor league game is still fun, because the players still care. And as for football, I assume George Carlin was talking about American football. *spits* Maybe half of the game is actually spent playing. The rest is abitrating rules.
But then again, it's all a matter of opinion. Some people would go on for hours about the skill and technique, the bodily conditioning even, required for a good round of golf. Anything which requires skill rather than just luck is, to me, a sport. It may not be something I like, but I'm willing to give it the label of sport. Football, even American football, can be considered a sport. FPS contests can be considered a sport. Tiddlywinks is a sport. Craps and playing War (the card game) aren't. Roulette isn't. Poker and blackjack are borderline in that there's skill involved, but I'd say that the element of chance plays a greater role than that of skill there.
ya..thats exatly what i wud have said (if u didnt say it b4 me)...same thing like...nuclear technology...einstein was not some one who wud like to bomb hiroshima,or some one who wud recommend Iran,israel or others to threaten each other for/with neuclear weapons!!! he was a nice guy!!
And this comment right here shows the real danger of kids going online, the fall of modern grammar and spelling. Do you really want your kid to sound like this?
And moyameehaa, maybe you're not a native English speaker. If so, I'm sorry that I had to use you as an example for this satire. If not... you should hang your head in shame, man.
A lot of the media and community chatter in response to these incidents has been about the dangers of the internet, but really it's about these not-quite-adults learning to behave responsibly. Drinking is questionable enough; getting caught shows even more lapse of judgment. And posting what the law considers "child pornography" (with one of the subjects apparently attempting suicide over it after they got passed around at school), is even worse judgment.
The internet gives teenagers like these one more place to demonstrate their lack of maturity, and can amplify the consequences. So yeah, parents need to be concerned about it. But it's not the internet per se that's the problem; it's kids learning to be adults.
What kids (and most adults) need to realize is that the Internet is one big bulletin board. You wouldn't paste pictures of you drinking on the school bulletin board. You wouldn't write a newsletter for free distribution to the public about your sex life. And yet, people do just this kind of thing with these weblog accounts. Heck, I know I've been guilty of it before, posting without realizing that I was not anonymous, that my parents, employers, and potential future employers can read it.
The school was way out of line with that suspension and alternative education program too. 10 days of suspension and permanent resignation to retread classes for a non-violent prank that really didn't hurt anyone except maybe their egos? It's not like this kid was posted death threat lists or even insinuating that the principal was up to illegal or immoral doings. He just said repeatedly that the principal was fat. IMO, this is part and parcel of this whole trend of labeling the typical behaviour of children and teenagers as abnormal and therefore not socially acceptable. Anybody else remember the days when getting into a schoolyard fight meant staying after school for a single day, not getting kicked out? And what the heck is with parents putting their kids on drugs for being rambunctious?
As for the demonization of MySpace over the cases of statutory rape, I see it as being very similar to the recent church sex scandals. You're more likely to be sexually abused by your elementary school teacher than you are your priest and even more likely to be sexually abused by your parents. Still, people want to be able to reduce the problem to a single factor, so you find a factor and you demonize it, stating that it is the problem, not just a single factor. This is human nature. Meh.
Slashdot Mirror
It gets even stickier when you start taking into consideration the rape laws and the age of consent...
And it gets worse again when you start factoring in the "corruption of a minor" laws. In Ohio, it's legal to marry and have sex at the age of 16 with parental consent, but under 18, they're considered to be minors and any sexual contact can be considered to be corrupting them. Go figure.
I'm sorry, but you don't have to be an expert in *anything* to read a document before you sign it. Not reading a contract before signing it isn't naive, it's stupid. That goes for things as simple as a credit card receipt, and should be obvious for something as important as your tax return.
Most contracts can be read at about a 90% level of comprehension, but then you get into tricky things like obscure terms and the difference in meaning between "will" and "shall" (hint: it's the same as the strict grammatical sense of the words) and what you're signing may or not mean what you think it says. And the clerk in the store is not likely to know exactly what it means either.
Because you generally need to make several times the cost of the movie at the box office to break even. Theaters take a cut, distributors take a cut, then there's the advertising costs to pay on top... which can be massive: in the extreme case of low-budget movies, they can be many times the cost of the movie itself.
Unless, of course, you're Uwe Boll, in which case you've already made enough money to pay for the movie before it even opens. Say what you will about the man's skills in making movies (and believe you me, I'm willing to spill quite a bit of invective in that area) but he's a near genius at raising money. Between the German tax loophole and merchandising rights, he had his Tomb Raider movie paid off before opening.
There's a reason why Scorcese's "Raging Bull" doesn't center on the world frisbee champion, you know.
Obviously, because people wouldn't be able to stand the sheer thrill and excitement if it did.
Corrected:
All slashdot folks substitute than for then and then for than.
Market penetration. Same reason he doesn't bother prosecuting piracy in China. The product is free to produce and he knows they can't (or won't) pay for it, so he "gives it away free," gaining goodwill and convincing people that Windows is the only operating system worth having.
Personally, I don't know that these laptops will do much to help these people. Yes, it gives them access to information, which will hopefully allow them to overcome the cultural barriers they have preventing them from having good food, but who will control the laptops?
Absent, of course, are any details as to how they will accomplish it when they are the party out of power in Congress."
Simple. They completely ignore the promise if elected, then blame partisan politics for the promise never bearing fruit. It's the same thing done when there's a majority in Congress, after all.
What next? Someone having to resign because he used an innocent word that sounded like 'nigger' and thus received rabid criticism? Oh wait, that already happened...
What, are you you too niggardly in your sharing of knowledge to use the actual word?
Sort of like the fact that most of Bones' tools in the Original Star Trek were made from salt and pepper shakers. Basically for the first episode the prop people had forgotten to make anything for his medical tools, and at the last minute just handed him a salt shaker. After that they went out searching for more and more elaborate salt shakers as a joke.
I hate to parade my Star Trek geek credentials, but in Star Trek Memories by Shatner, it's stated that the salt shakers came in during the episode with the salt vampire. Basically, the props guy was told to go out and find "futuristic-looking salt shakers." When he brought them back, they realized that the shakers didn't look enough like salt shakers for viewer recognition, so they turned them into medical instruments. *shrug* Then again, probably as many stories as there are cast and crew...
I remember a sci-fi story along those lines. Basically, the guy couldn't forget anything and it made his social life Hell because he was forever either creeping people out by remembering every detail about them even though he'd met them once several years before, or unintentionally socially "cutting" them by ignoring them because he figured they wouldn't remember him. He tried to use his abilities to make a living on bar bets, but found that the losers generally didn't believe him when he gave the right answer.
I wish I could remember the book or story title, but it was in an anthology of sci-fi stories regarding mutants. Supposedly, this guy's grandfather had the same ability/problem.
Nothing new. Just look at what happened to people in the famous stock crash. They were "speculating," buying shares with the money they expected to get and when the market crashed, they were toast.
Personally, I try to avoid debt as much as possible. I bought my car outright. I don't carry balances on my credit card. If I can't afford to buy something outright, I take a good hard look at whether I'd actually need it. Most everyone in my family works this way, supposedly a legacy of my great-grandfather losing everything in the Crash and passing on the wisdom to his children. We've been lucky enough to be prosperous enough to maintain things this way (I know that there's a good chance I won't be able to buy my house outright as my parents did, for instance), but it's also a matter of good sense, living within our means.
Unless, of course, the land turns out to be an environmental preserve, preserved wetlands, home to an endangered species, contaminated by toxic waste, etc...
Yeah, perfectly safe.
Suprisingly those still catch people.
Personally, I've always thought that what has the greatest potential would be to operate an entirely legitimate site that offers a genuine service which requires a user name and password, and then go out and hit the major sites (banking, eBay, stock, etc) and see how many people registered with the same username and password there too. I'll admit to having done this in the past, right up until the day that a site I'd used went bankrupt and a week later, another site with a similar premise was up and emailed me that everything was set up for my profile with them including my old password. Now it's possible that this was a case of the old company renaming itself after bankruptcy and trying again, but I suspect it's just a matter of all of my login information being part of the company assets that were bought.
"Studies show that research causes cancer in lab rats."
Quite honestly, all that these studies keep showing is that we still really don't understand how it all works and that, for now, you should just go ahead and eat what makes you feel healthy and good.
Well, first of all, you're assuming that these services match for similarity, that someone who put in the exact same answers as you will score the highest. While the early dating programs did exactly that, I highly suspect that the more modern ones work on a black box based on data from existing relationships. Odds are, the people who set it up don't even know whether it's a case of "like to like" or "opposites attract"; they just plug in all the data in and get back what appears to be the statistical patterns. The more people who sign up for your service, the more data that you have.
The result is potentially increased incidence of genetic diseases. Ultimately I think things like this will weed out the bad genes naturally as they express themselves in children but there's the suffering and potentally increased healthcare costs.
There's an additional fallacy you've got here, assuming that genetics are that influential. Unless the system is specifically matching to get blue-eyed, blond-haired, fair-skinned people together (eAryan?), I suspect a lot of the factors are personality-based, which is more of an environmental thing. I'll assuming that you're not arguing that a fondness for long walks on the beach correlate to a recessive gene coding for receding hairlines and color blindness.
That said, there is some interesting data regarding the rise of autism in Silicon Valley which is suggested to be the result of a generation or two of geeks breeding with geeks due to the environmental concentration thereof. While this is more of a case of them living in a target-rich environment rather than specifically matching for it over personality matrices, there is some fit there in that today's society allows you to pretty much pick your mate rather than having to select from the small pool of your local area.
The training creeped me out. the uber-patriotic person assigned to train our group was so into it. 3/4 of our group thought it was great... bringing down meth dealers who weren't smart enough to structure their money better. In fact, however, structuring is a crime as well... Go just below the radar one too many times, and you can be charged, eevn if there is no illegal activity behind the generation of money.
Having been a bank teller as summer employment, I can vouch for a good bit of what you say. But, to clarify your statement, you won't get "charged" with anything in a legal manner. You just come under more scrutiny. If your accounts all check out, then there's generally no problem. It's an annoyance, true, but it's not the OMFGWTFBBQ-Homeland-Security-wants-my-ass threat some people in the thread are making it out to be.
There was a scandal in my area, about twelve years ago, where several car dealers and a large number of car salesmen got into trouble for outfitting the area's drug dealers with very expensive cars on a cash basis. They were charged with money laundering and failing to report large cash transactions. I don't know why they didn't just lease the cars, that wouldn't be as obvious as walking into a dealership with a big bag of cash.
Well, just offhand, I believe that buying a car, particularly if one is paying cash, probably generates fewer records than leasing. Let me see... either I walk into a car dealership, put down the cash, and walk out with a car within an hour or so, or I get my legal signature on several pieces of paper as well as other identifying data, then have to regularly return to the car place or make payments. Which one generates fewer ties between me and the dealership? Admittedly, paying with cash is unusual enough these days that it makes peoples' heads turn, but I could see it from the drug dealer perspective.
not to be rude, but i hate this sentiment. american classics have always been trashy and they continue to be to this day...
The key to me is that while 90% of the content made 20 years ago is crap, just as the ratio is today, a large amount of that 90% has faded away into obscurity, leaving me with a better selection. It's been said (by Heinlein I think) that the biggest advantage to classical music is you've had a few hundred years to week out the crap.
Back in the 90s, California passed a law requiring all gun owners to register their guns. Eventually, the supreme court decided that convicted felons were not required to register since to do so would violate their 5th amendments rights (they're not legally allowed to have guns; registering one would be an admission of guilt).
Maybe it's true (As someone said, "There are two things which are infinite in this world, time and human stupidity and I'm not sure about time.") but to me, that seems like a misapplication of the 5th amendment. I mean, tax forms still have a section for listing illegal income so they could bring in gangsters, right?
I asked one veteran E.R. doc about the language situation in hospitals and he said it just wasn't that big a deal because often times the whole family would show up in the E.R., and someone in the bunch would be the terp. But that's just one data point.
When I was taking ASL courses, our teacher shared her own story about that. Due to vagaraies of genetics and the like, both she and her grandmother were deaf and had therefore learned sign language. The rest of the family, for whatever reason, had not. The grandmother was in the hospital, being treated, and they found that her condition was much more serious than they had taught. And so our teacher, at the age of 11, got to tell her grandmother that she was going to die. *shiver* Heck of a thing to do to a kid.
Uh-huh... spare me. Your child is human, with human behavior, not some perfect deity.
*shrug* In the end, every party has the right to say no at any time prior to things happening. I don't know the particular case involved, but it's entirely possible that the girl did indeed show up, realized the lying about the age, and was still forced into sex. Heck, it could be that they even fooled around a bit beforehand, but she said no to the sex. She still has that right. What drives me crazy are the ones who admit to having said no retroactively. Those are the ones that make it difficult for the real cases to get their voices heard.
Personally, I think the laws on sexual congress should be based on maturity, not chronological age, but if we did that, a lot of people wouldn't legally have sex until they were 30. Then again, these are the same people having sex at 14 and getting people pregnant, so it wouldn't make that much of a difference.
We aren't talking about rape here - this is statutory rape, which just means the girls was underage. If it was just the boy who was underage, nobody would have been charged.
Unless, of course, you're Pamela Rogers... I'm sure there have been other cases. But you're right in that men have a societal barrier to claiming rape charges against a woman. Much like how earlier rulings stated that women who were dressed provocatively "were asking for it," it's assumed that men are always "asking for it" and therefore cannot be forced to have sexual congress.
I'd disagree with you on Baseball. I find it only slightly less boring than golf, at least at the major leagues. Watching a minor league game is still fun, because the players still care. And as for football, I assume George Carlin was talking about American football. *spits* Maybe half of the game is actually spent playing. The rest is abitrating rules.
But then again, it's all a matter of opinion. Some people would go on for hours about the skill and technique, the bodily conditioning even, required for a good round of golf. Anything which requires skill rather than just luck is, to me, a sport. It may not be something I like, but I'm willing to give it the label of sport. Football, even American football, can be considered a sport. FPS contests can be considered a sport. Tiddlywinks is a sport. Craps and playing War (the card game) aren't. Roulette isn't. Poker and blackjack are borderline in that there's skill involved, but I'd say that the element of chance plays a greater role than that of skill there.
And this comment right here shows the real danger of kids going online, the fall of modern grammar and spelling. Do you really want your kid to sound like this?
And moyameehaa, maybe you're not a native English speaker. If so, I'm sorry that I had to use you as an example for this satire. If not... you should hang your head in shame, man.
The internet gives teenagers like these one more place to demonstrate their lack of maturity, and can amplify the consequences. So yeah, parents need to be concerned about it. But it's not the internet per se that's the problem; it's kids learning to be adults. What kids (and most adults) need to realize is that the Internet is one big bulletin board. You wouldn't paste pictures of you drinking on the school bulletin board. You wouldn't write a newsletter for free distribution to the public about your sex life. And yet, people do just this kind of thing with these weblog accounts. Heck, I know I've been guilty of it before, posting without realizing that I was not anonymous, that my parents, employers, and potential future employers can read it.
The school was way out of line with that suspension and alternative education program too. 10 days of suspension and permanent resignation to retread classes for a non-violent prank that really didn't hurt anyone except maybe their egos? It's not like this kid was posted death threat lists or even insinuating that the principal was up to illegal or immoral doings. He just said repeatedly that the principal was fat. IMO, this is part and parcel of this whole trend of labeling the typical behaviour of children and teenagers as abnormal and therefore not socially acceptable. Anybody else remember the days when getting into a schoolyard fight meant staying after school for a single day, not getting kicked out? And what the heck is with parents putting their kids on drugs for being rambunctious?
As for the demonization of MySpace over the cases of statutory rape, I see it as being very similar to the recent church sex scandals. You're more likely to be sexually abused by your elementary school teacher than you are your priest and even more likely to be sexually abused by your parents. Still, people want to be able to reduce the problem to a single factor, so you find a factor and you demonize it, stating that it is the problem, not just a single factor. This is human nature. Meh.