If I'm not mistaken, doesn't the existance of an intermediate life form (monkeys) show that "natural" selection lost, as we now have humans (selected appearantly) and monkeys together (the life form that "lost"). Another is "missing" fossil evidence showing these half ape creatures morphing into man, along with all of the other itermediate life forms for every other evolved creature that's out there. So I would go so far as to say real evidence contradicts postulates of evolution, not just some ho hum redneck teacher...
You know, I think that a lot of the opposition to evolution comes from creationists/ID'ers spouting a bunch of hogwash and CLAIMING that that's what evolution teaches. Since the thing they are CLAIMING is evolution is clearly hogwash, they convince people that evolution is clearly hogwash
Whoever explained evolution to you in that manner you just described was either grossly misinformed, or else intentionally using a straw-man argument.
Actually, quite a few public libraries do pay subscription fees for proprietary information so that you don't have to. (for instance, Boston Public Library: http://www.bpl.org/electronic/index.htm) You need to either be physically in the library or logged in with your library card to access it (subscribing to the databases doesn't allow the library to make it freely available to anyone anywhere in the world on the web), but it can get you access to a lot of information that would otherwise be quite expensive to obtain.
Not trusting a jury can come back and bite you - look at what happened with Jamie Thomas and the $222,000 copyright infringement award. The jurors were pissed that she lied to them [switched.com], and made it known both inside and outside the courtroom [wired.com].
"She's a liar. We wanted to send a message. I don't know what the fuck she was thinking." Wow, reading stuff like this makes me really glad I don't live in a country that has something as stupid trial by jury. I wouldn't want my fate to be decided by a bunch of random idiots. Isn't the jury supposed to decide if the accused is guilty of the deed they are accused of ? Instead of "sending her a message" because she hurt their feelings ? That statement by a member of the jury alone should have been enough to nullify the judgement.
There are two types of jury trials in the US-- criminal and civil. In a civil trial (where the punishment, if there is one, is in the form of a fine) the jury determines what the penelty is.
In a criminal trial (such as the one in TFA, which can result in imprisonment), all the jury decides is whether the prosecution has proven their case that the defendent is guilty. The judge then decides the penalties, based on guidelines, precedents, and his/her own judgement
The standard of proof required is also different. In a civil case (such as the one you quote), if a jury member is 60% sure the defendant is guilty, they are suppposed to find them "guilty". In a criminal case, the standard of proof is much higher, so the same 60% certainty of guilt should result in "not guilty", because their prosecution has not sufficiently proved their case.
The result is that the civil trial system is much more capricious than the criminal trial. Thus you should not hold up an example of a civil trial to complain about our criminal trial system. (There may still be things to complain about, but don't hold up an apple and complain about oranges.)
Because the previous rubber-stamp system left a paper-trail (albeit one they could claim was "classified for reasons of national security") as to who they were spying on and why, and thus had some amount of accountability, no matter how tiny.
The new system does not.
If there's anything this administration hates, it's accountability.
What gets me is that a 7-yo actually feels the need to hide things from her parents. This can be from watching her brother and deciding his frustration was bad, or it could be because she doesn't trust them so much.
Or it can just be for the same reason that kids like having a "secret hideout" or "secret clubs" or whatever. Like everyone else, they like space --whether physical or conceptual-- that is their own.
Children, even that young, DO need a certain amount of privacy. But that's too young to be having privacy from parents in connection with her interactions with the outside world, and her interactions with the random & anonymous people that she'll meet there.
And being in her own room gives a very dangerous illusion of complete safety-- she would probably want parents present when wandering through a large, bustling crowd of unfamiliar grown-ups, but she's far less likely to recognize any danger when she's alone in her house with her parents in the next room.
If this computer is not connected to the internet, then sure, let her have a password that keeps her parents out of the computer. It's like having a room with a door that closes, or a diary that no one else is allowed to read.
But if it's attached to the Internet? That's another story. Her parents NEED to be involved.
Also, although an aquatic species could conceivably develop intelligence, I can't imagine what form its technology would take. With such elementary things as fire denied to them, it's doubtful that they could progress to any reasonable level.
Then again, there may be aquatic intelligences out there somewhere doubting the feasibility of land-based civilization-- after all, without easy access to undersea vents, ocean currents, or the pressure differences between different depths in the great trenches, what in the world would a land-based intelligence use for fuel? air currents? rocks? The whole idea of a land-based civilization is absurd.
The Mytbusters often start with scale experiments before moving on to the real thing. Why shouldn't God?
Hmmm... given that all of the extra-solar planets that we've found --even the rocky ones-- have been considerably larger than Earth-- what does that make us?
(and do all you pedants out there-- yes, I KNOW that's because the methods we use to detect exoplanets work much better on much larger planets, so of course that's what we're going to find. That's not the point here.)
It isn't at all the fault of the people who actually broke the law?
You're forgetting that the *AA hasn't exactly been scrupulous about limiting it's scattershot lawsuits to those who actually broke the law-- that's what makes them bullies. (They're just the bully that never gets in trouble because their Uncle Joe is the principal.) And when they can, they intentionally make it so that it's both easier and cheaper to settle even if you are innocent. They don't care if you did anything illegal or not, just so long as they get your money.
Sure, there are people that would hate them just as much if they limited their lawsuits to people they had a solid reason to believe were actually guilty-- but that's a much smaller number than the set of people who hate them now.
huh? Call me crazy, but isn't extortion where you demand someone pay you to keep quiet? These guys are not demanding a silence payment.
You are describing "Blackmail".
"Blackmail" is a subset of extortion: All blackmail is extortion. Some, but not all, extortion is blackmail. There are other forms of extortion, including the good old-fashioned low-tech break-your-legs protection racket.
How did a comment expressing such an incredible lack of basic 7th grade-level vocabulary get modded "+5 insightful?" Was someone with Mod points saying "I don't see anything wrong with this happening to RealPlayer, therefore I'm going to mod up anyone who agrees, whether their point makes any sense or not"? Have whatever opinion you like, but look for facts that support your opinion, rather than trying to re-write the facts (or the English language).
Ah! I realized I'm thinking of dark energy, not dark matter. I think. Maybe my memory is just screwed up. As I'm not a cosmologist, the line for me sometimes blurs and I am unsure what the difference is. Perhaps you know more about it than I and someone can clear up the difference.
I'm not a cosmologist either, but her's the Cliff-notes, over-simplified version:
Dark Matter would explain why galaxy clusters hold together as well as they do
Dark Energy would explain why the visible universe as a whole is expanding at an accelerating rate, rather than a decelerating rate as we would have expected.
Dark matter is an attempt to explain why gravity works so "well" at a large scale, while dark energy is an attempt to explain why gravity works so "poorly" on a mega-gargantuan scale. There is a lot more observational evidence for the former than for the latter, and we've spend a lot more time looking for alternate explanations for dark matter. (The observational evidence that the universe was expanding faster than it "should" be was relatively recent.)
Oversimplification, but there it is.(Phantom Matter I've never heard of before, so I can't speak to it.)
If memory serves, mommy explicitly denied them access to her daughter, and the RIAA then called the school, pretending to be her grandmother or something, hoping to get her to confess over the phone.
No matter how you feel about file-sharing in general, that's messed up. If an eight-year old had shoplifted a thousand-dollar watch from a jewelry store, that response would be messed up. There is a reason that there are proper channels to go through when dealing with someone else's kid, regardless of what that kid is alleged to have done.
Which is why the RIAA was really, really, dumb to sink that low. That's not going to just piss off the slashdot crowd, or the technically apt-- which boogyman do you think is going to scare the average person more? The socially inept nerd pirating music from their parent's basement, or the strange man with ulterior motives sneaking around the parents back and lying in order to contact their eight-year-old without their knowledge?
The RIAA really is determined to self-destruct, aren't they?
If you only want to live a free life, and enjoy the things nature gives you, Anarchy is perfect.
Until someone with a bigger gun takes your little piece of nature and "what it has given you", and says "you have to do what I say now or I kill you".
A functional anarchy requires a large enough percentage of people to "play nice" on a consistent enough basis that, if it were true, life would be wonderful with any of many governmental structures-- especially one bearing even the remotest resemblance to a democracy.
I'll save you all the time of googling this cuz I know you wanna know too. There's 200-400 billion stars in the milky way for example but most are bigger than our sun I think. So 18 billion solar masses is A LOT of stars to suck up in one galaxy. Geeze the think probably looks like a big donut by now.
If you have sales people where you work, do they embody the spirit of your company, and truly represent it as a whole? I am guessing.... not. ...
But people, please... let's keep it in perspective. Comments like "this is why I'll never buy Intel" are just stupid. If you base decisions on things like this, then you'll never buy anything, because I can guarantee you that there are sales people in every organization that would step on their grandmother's throat to make a sale. Nature of the beast, if you will.
If Intel's reaction to this had been "Our salespeople did WHAT? Send us the specifics, we'll deal with this IMMEDIATELY", then you might have a point. But as it is...
Intel hired the salespeople, chose what parameters they were allowed to work within, decided how to reward them (and whether or not that synched up with the stated behavioral parameters), and they chose not to address the situation when it was brought to their attention.
The "a few bad apples..." argument just doesn't cut it here.
I sense this same energy with insurance. Wait 5 years and see what happens with it. I'm not a prognosticator by any means however I do sense energy and the stuffy insurance companies definitely have "old energy" and will therefore have to go the way of the Berlin Wall.
It seems to me that insurance will be a viable business as long as people (and companies, for that matter) have the very real and present risk of unexpectedly being hit with a bill that they find it difficult or impossible to pay (medical, car repair, being sued, house flooded or burned down, etc). Since I don't see any signs of it becoming less likely for people to be hit with unexpected incredibly large bills, it seems that insurance still has a very viable business model.
I'm not ruling out substantial changes in the insurance industry. Who knows? Maybe we'll see a rise of, say, non-profit cooperative insurance companies, which then run a lot of the for profit places out of business. That model would probably have a very different "energy". (Incidentally, this was the original model for insurance: Merchants knowing they could be ruined and impoverished by a single ship being sunk in a storm pooled their money, with the prior agreement that it would be used to compensate any of them who were unfortunate enough to loose a shipment of goods at sea. Then instead of the constant and very real danger of imminent financial ruin, each instead only had a single fixed expense: merchant marine insurance.)
But the insurance industry dying any time soon? That I just don't see.
Except that people who have been hit with Notability Hammer in Wikipedia generally tend to just shrug and go build their own topical wikis. People know that the wiki system as a collaboration technology doesn't suck; the only problem is that Wikipedia specifically isn't all-inclusive, but that problem doesn't exist in a topical wiki.
I've noticed a problem with topic-specific wikis (although fandom and pop-cultural wikis seem to be an exception to this problem). On Wikipedia, a general reference, everyone can be both a contributor and a user-- we all have things we know more about and things we know less about, so the same people that are contributing to the reference in one topical area can still get a lot of use out of the wiki in other topical areas.
However, with a topical wiki, the people who have the most reason to use it (novices looking for a starting place to find out more about a topic) and the people best able to contribute to it (experts on the subject) are two entirely distinct groups of people. An expert on a topic is unlikely to learn much about that topic from a wikipedia or other wiki entry. Therefore, a subject-specific wiki will have little to hold the interest of the people who are needed to make it worthwhile.
As I said, fandoms and pop-cultural subjects seem to be an exception to this. Probably because an expert in a fandom can gain status from other experts on that fandom by contributing to a fandom wiki that becomes a watering-hole. However, in other topics status is gained by being published by a respected source (especially if it's peer reviewed), not by self-publication on a wiki.
What eliminates a[n alien] race that focuses all of its aggression against others not of their [species]?
Ecological destruction?
Actually, a big part of the process of civilization and enlightement is expanding the idea of "we". From "we" being just our family, just our clan-- to hey, the people in the next village are human to-- then realization that someone who doesn't look like you is human, too-- then the realization that if all we worry about is humans at the expense of other life-forms on the planet, we end up destroying ourselves anyway, therefore for our civilization to survive, we need to expand "we" to included, to a greater or lesser extent, the Earth ecosystem as a whole.
A civilization that lasts to the space-faring stage, in order to survive, must have overcome the us-vs-them false polarity often enough that hopefully they would be beyond that-- or at least that any hint of falling into it again would set off warning bells.
Well, at least in the intelligent members of the species. That won't stop the politician-aliens from draining all of the alien's resources on a preemptive strike against Earth because hey, some other planet in this sector of the galaxy attacked them once, and therefore they can make a claim, however transparent, that we were working with them, and therefore must be dangerous, too. And so then they send their own economy into a tailspin by bombing earth back to the stone age, and it will be cold comfort to us if most of the alien population was less atavistic than that...
I've seen advertisements locally (near the MIT birthplace of the XO) for a program where you can pay for three of the laptops: two go to children in target countries, the third goes to you. So there are legitimate ways for middle-class people in industrialized nations to acquire these.
the person doing the surfing has requested the alteration ("show me the cache of this page, with the words I searched hilighted") and thus knows they are getting an altered page
It's very clear which parts were added/altered by google (the top frame, and the highlights) and which parts are the original content (everything else)
They will remove a page from their cache, or refrain from caching a site in the future, if asked to do so by the copyright holder
So, in my opinion, very different than the IP creating a new data stream that uses the original content, pretends to be true to it, but stealthily creates a derived work out of it.
The parent said Children with mental disabilities can find ways around it if they have had the sort of upbringing/education that has told them they can. which is like saying even if you have a disability you can work around it. I'm saying that's just not true.
"Working around" does not mean the same thing as "changing". For instance, upthread you mentioned having terrible handwriting. And yet, I'm not having any difficulty reading what you've written: it's all perfectly legible. You may never be a professional calligrapher, but you can work around that by typing your words when necessary.
Hypothetical example: someone who loves science and technology, grasps the big picture, and is good at making connections and explaining concepts. But say he is really, really, bad at math. He can decide that the math weakness means he's "not smart enough" for a science-related career, and take a job he finds dull and uninspiring. Or, he can stick with it long enough to discover that he has the rare talent of being able to write clearly and accurately about scientific topics for a non-technical audience-- and fulfill his desire to work in a scientific field by being a science writer instead of, say, an engineer.
I agree with you that the human mind is not a tabla rusa where we can each be equally talented at anything with the proper effort and encouragement. However, I do believe that, from your quote, "Children with mental disabilities can find ways around it if they have had the sort of upbringing/education that has told them they can." It just depends on what one means by "work around".
I'm very bad at simple, mundane, routine tasks, because my mind wanders and I have a hard time paying attention. I'm never going to be particularly good at things that require real attention without engaging me cognitively. But I can work around that by using what I'm good at (coding & scripting to automate), and/or hiring out what I'm bad at (say, routine housework). But if i had been taught growing up that being bad at these things meant I was too dumb even to do incredibly simple tasks, I probably would never have learned how much better I am at more complex tasks.
How do you know you wouldn't just experience being painfully killed: poof, bye-bye, assume afterlife, nonexistence, or reincarnation, depending on your beliefs.
Meanwhile, the copy of you with all your memories (or, all from before the "teleporter") doesn't realize that you have experienced death-- or even that s/he isn't you but a copy. It would be the same to everyone you know-- they wouldn't be able to tell that you'd been replaced by a dopoulganger. Your replacement, not knowing any better, would assure everyone that the process was completely safe and painless, and that "you" came to the other end just fine.
The only person that would know the difference is you, except you're not around anymore to know or tell. You're dead.
I'm not sure how one would test a teleportation system to see whether the person going in actually experiences coming out at the other end, or whether the person going in experiences death, and a copy at the other end doesn't know the difference. Or at least, how one could test it and relay the results to others.
Then we can further complicate the question: suppose that you die due to reasons unrelated to teleportation. And you last used a teleporter about a year back, but the teleporter saved your "pattern"-- so your grieving loved ones are able to "recreate" you, exactly as you were when you came out the teleporter-- the only difference is that you'd be confused as to how a year had passed since you'd gone in, and everyone else has memories of you during that time that you didn't experience. Is that you? Or not?
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I think that a lot of the opposition to evolution comes from creationists/ID'ers spouting a bunch of hogwash and CLAIMING that that's what evolution teaches. Since the thing they are CLAIMING is evolution is clearly hogwash, they convince people that evolution is clearly hogwash
Whoever explained evolution to you in that manner you just described was either grossly misinformed, or else intentionally using a straw-man argument.
Actually, quite a few public libraries do pay subscription fees for proprietary information so that you don't have to. (for instance, Boston Public Library: http://www.bpl.org/electronic/index.htm) You need to either be physically in the library or logged in with your library card to access it (subscribing to the databases doesn't allow the library to make it freely available to anyone anywhere in the world on the web), but it can get you access to a lot of information that would otherwise be quite expensive to obtain.
There are two types of jury trials in the US-- criminal and civil. In a civil trial (where the punishment, if there is one, is in the form of a fine) the jury determines what the penelty is.
In a criminal trial (such as the one in TFA, which can result in imprisonment), all the jury decides is whether the prosecution has proven their case that the defendent is guilty. The judge then decides the penalties, based on guidelines, precedents, and his/her own judgement
The standard of proof required is also different. In a civil case (such as the one you quote), if a jury member is 60% sure the defendant is guilty, they are suppposed to find them "guilty". In a criminal case, the standard of proof is much higher, so the same 60% certainty of guilt should result in "not guilty", because their prosecution has not sufficiently proved their case.
The result is that the civil trial system is much more capricious than the criminal trial. Thus you should not hold up an example of a civil trial to complain about our criminal trial system. (There may still be things to complain about, but don't hold up an apple and complain about oranges.)
Because the previous rubber-stamp system left a paper-trail (albeit one they could claim was "classified for reasons of national security") as to who they were spying on and why, and thus had some amount of accountability, no matter how tiny.
The new system does not.
If there's anything this administration hates, it's accountability.
Or it can just be for the same reason that kids like having a "secret hideout" or "secret clubs" or whatever. Like everyone else, they like space --whether physical or conceptual-- that is their own.
Children, even that young, DO need a certain amount of privacy. But that's too young to be having privacy from parents in connection with her interactions with the outside world, and her interactions with the random & anonymous people that she'll meet there.
And being in her own room gives a very dangerous illusion of complete safety-- she would probably want parents present when wandering through a large, bustling crowd of unfamiliar grown-ups, but she's far less likely to recognize any danger when she's alone in her house with her parents in the next room.
If this computer is not connected to the internet, then sure, let her have a password that keeps her parents out of the computer. It's like having a room with a door that closes, or a diary that no one else is allowed to read.
But if it's attached to the Internet? That's another story. Her parents NEED to be involved.
Then again, there may be aquatic intelligences out there somewhere doubting the feasibility of land-based civilization-- after all, without easy access to undersea vents, ocean currents, or the pressure differences between different depths in the great trenches, what in the world would a land-based intelligence use for fuel? air currents? rocks? The whole idea of a land-based civilization is absurd.
Hmmm... given that all of the extra-solar planets that we've found --even the rocky ones-- have been considerably larger than Earth-- what does that make us?
(and do all you pedants out there-- yes, I KNOW that's because the methods we use to detect exoplanets work much better on much larger planets, so of course that's what we're going to find. That's not the point here.)
You're forgetting that the *AA hasn't exactly been scrupulous about limiting it's scattershot lawsuits to those who actually broke the law-- that's what makes them bullies. (They're just the bully that never gets in trouble because their Uncle Joe is the principal.) And when they can, they intentionally make it so that it's both easier and cheaper to settle even if you are innocent. They don't care if you did anything illegal or not, just so long as they get your money.
Sure, there are people that would hate them just as much if they limited their lawsuits to people they had a solid reason to believe were actually guilty-- but that's a much smaller number than the set of people who hate them now.
You are describing "Blackmail".
"Blackmail" is a subset of extortion: All blackmail is extortion. Some, but not all, extortion is blackmail. There are other forms of extortion, including the good old-fashioned low-tech break-your-legs protection racket.
How did a comment expressing such an incredible lack of basic 7th grade-level vocabulary get modded "+5 insightful?" Was someone with Mod points saying "I don't see anything wrong with this happening to RealPlayer, therefore I'm going to mod up anyone who agrees, whether their point makes any sense or not"? Have whatever opinion you like, but look for facts that support your opinion, rather than trying to re-write the facts (or the English language).
I'm not a cosmologist either, but her's the Cliff-notes, over-simplified version:
Dark matter is an attempt to explain why gravity works so "well" at a large scale, while dark energy is an attempt to explain why gravity works so "poorly" on a mega-gargantuan scale. There is a lot more observational evidence for the former than for the latter, and we've spend a lot more time looking for alternate explanations for dark matter. (The observational evidence that the universe was expanding faster than it "should" be was relatively recent.)
Oversimplification, but there it is.(Phantom Matter I've never heard of before, so I can't speak to it.)
Isn't this pretty much the opposite of the "long-tail" theory?
I guess every stupid sociological theory deserves an equally stupid response.
How are the two even related? The Long Tail is about what people like to buy, TFA is about human interaction. Apples and TRS-80s.
No matter how you feel about file-sharing in general, that's messed up. If an eight-year old had shoplifted a thousand-dollar watch from a jewelry store, that response would be messed up. There is a reason that there are proper channels to go through when dealing with someone else's kid, regardless of what that kid is alleged to have done.
Which is why the RIAA was really, really, dumb to sink that low. That's not going to just piss off the slashdot crowd, or the technically apt-- which boogyman do you think is going to scare the average person more? The socially inept nerd pirating music from their parent's basement, or the strange man with ulterior motives sneaking around the parents back and lying in order to contact their eight-year-old without their knowledge?
The RIAA really is determined to self-destruct, aren't they?
Until someone with a bigger gun takes your little piece of nature and "what it has given you", and says "you have to do what I say now or I kill you".
A functional anarchy requires a large enough percentage of people to "play nice" on a consistent enough basis that, if it were true, life would be wonderful with any of many governmental structures-- especially one bearing even the remotest resemblance to a democracy.
Actually, my understanding is that the most common stars in the galaxy are Red Dwarfs, and thus smaller than our sun. (Yup, NASA confirms: http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/glossary/red_dwarf.html)
If Intel's reaction to this had been "Our salespeople did WHAT? Send us the specifics, we'll deal with this IMMEDIATELY", then you might have a point. But as it is...
Intel hired the salespeople, chose what parameters they were allowed to work within, decided how to reward them (and whether or not that synched up with the stated behavioral parameters), and they chose not to address the situation when it was brought to their attention.
The "a few bad apples..." argument just doesn't cut it here.
If you have to ask, then you're not the target audience =^)
It seems to me that insurance will be a viable business as long as people (and companies, for that matter) have the very real and present risk of unexpectedly being hit with a bill that they find it difficult or impossible to pay (medical, car repair, being sued, house flooded or burned down, etc). Since I don't see any signs of it becoming less likely for people to be hit with unexpected incredibly large bills, it seems that insurance still has a very viable business model.
I'm not ruling out substantial changes in the insurance industry. Who knows? Maybe we'll see a rise of, say, non-profit cooperative insurance companies, which then run a lot of the for profit places out of business. That model would probably have a very different "energy". (Incidentally, this was the original model for insurance: Merchants knowing they could be ruined and impoverished by a single ship being sunk in a storm pooled their money, with the prior agreement that it would be used to compensate any of them who were unfortunate enough to loose a shipment of goods at sea. Then instead of the constant and very real danger of imminent financial ruin, each instead only had a single fixed expense: merchant marine insurance.)
But the insurance industry dying any time soon? That I just don't see.
I've noticed a problem with topic-specific wikis (although fandom and pop-cultural wikis seem to be an exception to this problem). On Wikipedia, a general reference, everyone can be both a contributor and a user-- we all have things we know more about and things we know less about, so the same people that are contributing to the reference in one topical area can still get a lot of use out of the wiki in other topical areas.
However, with a topical wiki, the people who have the most reason to use it (novices looking for a starting place to find out more about a topic) and the people best able to contribute to it (experts on the subject) are two entirely distinct groups of people. An expert on a topic is unlikely to learn much about that topic from a wikipedia or other wiki entry. Therefore, a subject-specific wiki will have little to hold the interest of the people who are needed to make it worthwhile.
As I said, fandoms and pop-cultural subjects seem to be an exception to this. Probably because an expert in a fandom can gain status from other experts on that fandom by contributing to a fandom wiki that becomes a watering-hole. However, in other topics status is gained by being published by a respected source (especially if it's peer reviewed), not by self-publication on a wiki.
Ecological destruction?
Actually, a big part of the process of civilization and enlightement is expanding the idea of "we". From "we" being just our family, just our clan-- to hey, the people in the next village are human to-- then realization that someone who doesn't look like you is human, too-- then the realization that if all we worry about is humans at the expense of other life-forms on the planet, we end up destroying ourselves anyway, therefore for our civilization to survive, we need to expand "we" to included, to a greater or lesser extent, the Earth ecosystem as a whole.
A civilization that lasts to the space-faring stage, in order to survive, must have overcome the us-vs-them false polarity often enough that hopefully they would be beyond that-- or at least that any hint of falling into it again would set off warning bells.
Well, at least in the intelligent members of the species. That won't stop the politician-aliens from draining all of the alien's resources on a preemptive strike against Earth because hey, some other planet in this sector of the galaxy attacked them once, and therefore they can make a claim, however transparent, that we were working with them, and therefore must be dangerous, too. And so then they send their own economy into a tailspin by bombing earth back to the stone age, and it will be cold comfort to us if most of the alien population was less atavistic than that...
I've seen advertisements locally (near the MIT birthplace of the XO) for a program where you can pay for three of the laptops: two go to children in target countries, the third goes to you. So there are legitimate ways for middle-class people in industrialized nations to acquire these.
I would argue that the differences are:
So, in my opinion, very different than the IP creating a new data stream that uses the original content, pretends to be true to it, but stealthily creates a derived work out of it.
No, it's a Patriot Act subpoena complete with gag order.
"Working around" does not mean the same thing as "changing". For instance, upthread you mentioned having terrible handwriting. And yet, I'm not having any difficulty reading what you've written: it's all perfectly legible. You may never be a professional calligrapher, but you can work around that by typing your words when necessary.
Hypothetical example: someone who loves science and technology, grasps the big picture, and is good at making connections and explaining concepts. But say he is really, really, bad at math. He can decide that the math weakness means he's "not smart enough" for a science-related career, and take a job he finds dull and uninspiring. Or, he can stick with it long enough to discover that he has the rare talent of being able to write clearly and accurately about scientific topics for a non-technical audience-- and fulfill his desire to work in a scientific field by being a science writer instead of, say, an engineer.
I agree with you that the human mind is not a tabla rusa where we can each be equally talented at anything with the proper effort and encouragement. However, I do believe that, from your quote, "Children with mental disabilities can find ways around it if they have had the sort of upbringing/education that has told them they can." It just depends on what one means by "work around".
I'm very bad at simple, mundane, routine tasks, because my mind wanders and I have a hard time paying attention. I'm never going to be particularly good at things that require real attention without engaging me cognitively. But I can work around that by using what I'm good at (coding & scripting to automate), and/or hiring out what I'm bad at (say, routine housework). But if i had been taught growing up that being bad at these things meant I was too dumb even to do incredibly simple tasks, I probably would never have learned how much better I am at more complex tasks.
apersand-lt-semicolon results in <
apersand-gt-semicolon results in >
(no spaces or dashes.)
How would we know it didn't happen this way:
How do you know you wouldn't just experience being painfully killed: poof, bye-bye, assume afterlife, nonexistence, or reincarnation, depending on your beliefs.
Meanwhile, the copy of you with all your memories (or, all from before the "teleporter") doesn't realize that you have experienced death-- or even that s/he isn't you but a copy. It would be the same to everyone you know-- they wouldn't be able to tell that you'd been replaced by a dopoulganger. Your replacement, not knowing any better, would assure everyone that the process was completely safe and painless, and that "you" came to the other end just fine.
The only person that would know the difference is you, except you're not around anymore to know or tell. You're dead.
I'm not sure how one would test a teleportation system to see whether the person going in actually experiences coming out at the other end, or whether the person going in experiences death, and a copy at the other end doesn't know the difference. Or at least, how one could test it and relay the results to others.
Then we can further complicate the question: suppose that you die due to reasons unrelated to teleportation. And you last used a teleporter about a year back, but the teleporter saved your "pattern"-- so your grieving loved ones are able to "recreate" you, exactly as you were when you came out the teleporter-- the only difference is that you'd be confused as to how a year had passed since you'd gone in, and everyone else has memories of you during that time that you didn't experience. Is that you? Or not?