The 4th amendment to the US constitution, that authority that describes the limits of federal law, emphasis mine:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I'm having a lot of trouble reading this in any way at all that can justify trial- and conviction-free seizure and disposal of a citizen's property.
He's just as entitled to an opinion as you are. Try not to be abusive; there's no point to it. The voice over version had Roy's comments too; but they're about Roy's experience; Deckard's voice-over line was about Deckard's experience. Sometimes changes aren't for the best - even if they are made by the director. A movie, especially one like this, is more than the sum of its parts, more than one person's vision, and more than one character's experience. That's why you can see it one way, and the parent (and myself) can see it another. The real value here is that all three of us found great value in the experience.
IMHO, watch the one with the voiceover. Certainly watch that one first. Like most Hollywood movies, the transition from book to movie was made clumsily, protestations of "art" notwithstanding. Deckard's voiceover is done tastefully and serves to focus the movie in many places where it becomes meaningless and context-free in the "director's cut."
One of the best 2-3 SF movies ever made in the voiceover version.
Aside from your interesting 2 1/2 mile anecdote (which I strongly suggest you adjust for realistic human visual acuity before someone calls you on it directly), my experience has been exactly the opposite.
We have an ADHD son who was utterly intolerable and a solid non-performer in school, dangerous to himself and any other child around him unless medicated; on Ritalin, he excelled. Eventually - in his teens - he came off the drug, and he's a sweet, generous and well behaved human being of 33 today. Without it, he was an uncontrollable ball of foaming craziness. Further, at this time there is a grandson who is further down the spectrum, but politically correct attitudes here in our isolated small town resulted in his mother, who frankly isn't too bright, not medicating him. Now he's far behind his peers socially and can barely speak. We - grandma and grandpa - pointed out our experience with the other son (this is a son of our youngest, the subject of my first point was the oldest of three) but it fell of deaf ears.
I am certainly not saying that all active kids need medication, but I *am* saying that the current backlash against medicating kids is hurting some of them.
I think you're talking about the use of religion, once the mythos is crafted. I was, admittedly far too tersely for it to be obvious, referring to the genesis of religion.
On what grounds should I-the-reader take the means of child rearing you suspect was once prevalent to be a Bad Thing?
I did not say, or imply, that such would be a bad thing. The parent post to mine was engaged in some amusing (to me) speculation that a hyper child might have been a "great hunter." In so doing, my impression was that they were attempting to recast the social defects of a hyper child into something positive. I was pointing out that in reality, said child were more likely to be ostracized, or otherwise summarily dealt with, because loud, uncontrollable children are no asset to any hunt; my remark of "be grateful" was made in that light.
One of the best systems for checks and balances is the press, the media, checking on the politicians and reporting to the people.
Ok, let's look at that. The press discovers behavior X, for instance, voting themselves a raise constantly. Reports it to the people. The people have no method to control, punish or regulate this behavior. So the one thing the people can do is vote a politician out on the next cycle. This has to be done one at a time, because if you live in state A, you can't vote on the politician from state B. This also has to be done in the face of perceived good the politician has done in other areas for the locals. If successful, the political party, another entity the people have no power over, promptly provides a new candidate set with the same sets of inclinations, while rewarding the first politician with a lucrative seat on a thinktank or something similar for their service to the party. The people choose from this set, and we're right back where we started.
This is why the press doesn't work to police the system. The best it can do is knock off a politician here and there, but that has no significant effect on legislation or the behavior of the group because no law or other output from the group can be affected by the actions of any particular member. Remember: They're misbehaving as a group.
That's why we're getting laws that proclaim the Internet is a terrorist threat, the USAPATRIOT act (which very few legislators bothered to read), numerous unconstitutional laws, that's why the head of a committee very much responsible for affecting regulation of the Internet thought it was a "series of tubes", and so forth on the legislative front. There's no means for us to change any of that.
That's why pork and bill stuffing continues unabated; that's why PACs and corporations continue to purchase laws with money, sex, junkets, etc. on the manipulation front. That's why senators feel free to hardly ever show up in the senate when running for president or (fill in the blank) on the "duty" front. These things are blessed by the political parties, and that means that you will never have a candidate that doesn't support them, albeit tacitly.
Further, that's why the press feels free to try to manipulate the election process - because the only difference it will make is how responsive the system is to the corporations that own the press. So they're quite intent on getting the most corporate friendly candidate in there, it can affect their bottom line. Watch how they behave, and have been behaving, with regard to Ron Paul for a terrific current example of this kind of behavior. Poll manipulation, sidelining in debates, failure to mention in (otherwise) general coverage of the candidates... if you actually pay attention, it could hardly be more obvious. The problem is, and has been for quite some time, that paying attention doesn't solve the problem. We have no mechanism that can solve the problem; the system has evolved to lock us - the citizens - out.
I rather suspect that if a hyper child spoiled more than one hunt with uncontrollable noise, running about, and blathering, that said child would become dinner. Or a lone nomad at an early age. Like three.
Be grateful for modern society. Otherwise you'd see hyper kids enjoying such advanced treatment regimes as being tightly swaddled and hung from a hook.
Government - as implemented in the US system - isn't necessary; you're just habituated to it. We could have a lot less invasive system, and quite a few more checks and balances with regard to the politicians doing stupid things, without our society coming apart or changing in any negative way.
It would make more sense for you Americans to simply expect your politicians to be selfish like everybody, and not despise them for that, and instead despise your system if it doesn't provide suitable checks and balances. Which I think it doesn't.
+1 insightful, buddy. But the average American confuses the system with the nation. Despise the system? Then you're being unpatriotic. Another built-in design problem is that as you say, we should change the system so that the politicians have checks and balances. But we can't do that; only the politicians can. This is a deep and serious design flaw.
That page specifically says that they have no idea what these changes mean. Which of course is pretty obvious, since they don't know what the brain does, it'd be impossible to observe a change and characterize it in any sense even remotely similar to the assertion that the ability of teenagers to make informed decisions.
Before any weight at all can be given to the kind of blue-sky speculation we are constantly bombarded with as if it were fact, we're going to need a lot more actual knowledge. Maybe in fifty years or a hundred years, a statement like yours can be made based on objective fact instead of twisting what amounts to wild hand waving into pseudo-scientific tools primarily used to inflict one person's sexual mores upon another.
In the meantime, by all means, educate like crazy. Knowledge is power. Just watch out for psychobabble. The weakest sciences we have in terms of producing objective data are those dealing with brain function, other than the chemical and mechanical areas of research.
It isn't a reasonable argument to claim that because you know one dumass adult and some smart kids that kids are smarter then adults. It is reasonable to claim intelligent kids can be smarter then dumbass adults.
I didn't make any such argument. I used the plural, and I meant the plural. I'm 50. I've known a lot of dumbass adults. Many of them are/were dumb because they were inculcated with propaganda (fairy tales of god, religion-derived morals, pinheaded presumptions like everyone is created equal), not because they have no innate intelligence. I know a lot of smart kids - I'm an instructor, I've seen them in huge bunches. Today's kids in my area (NE Montana) know more about sex than most adults do, they're quite active, and they're doing fine. I suspect the majority of this is because they're well beyond the myth and social retardation that passed for sexual "larnin" among their parents, but in the end, it doesn't matter why, the simple fact is that it is. We have these pompous, superstitious, canned-moral spouting adults on the one hand, and we have young people just ignoring them on the other. It just pisses me off when someone starts impugning them as a group; they don't deserve it generally speaking, and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find that for the exceptions who do, again, they've not been educated, they've probably been singing hymns or hearing ridiculous lectures on "saving themselves" for marriage and avoiding the subject as best they can so they don't get swamped by their own hormones.
The problem with pushing sex is that they are teens who are not fully capable of making informed decisions. The part of the brain that handles that isn't fully developed until you reach about the age of 21.
Excuse me, but that's complete and utter bullshit. We have no idea how the brain works. None. Not even the tiniest inkling. We have a hundred years of psychobbabling (and massively conflicting) faddery, but no data. We barely understand what a single neuron does, we're just catching on to the idea that glial cells aren't "just structural", and we have not got a single clue about what parts of an intact, healthy brain are handling complex concepts like the consequences of sex.
I have known teens who were far more responsible than the adults around them; and I have known adults who should have had their reproductive facilities arbitrarily removed for rampant spawning of children they could not possibly take proper care of. You can't just wave you hand and indict teenagers as a group. Good grief. That's just moral heavy-handedness coupled with wishful thinking.
From experience, we know that making abortion illegal - just as with making drugs illegal - drives the disenfranchised to black market sources. Defrocked medical personal on the one end... all the way to coat hangers on the other. My feeling is the choice is best left to the mother and the government should stay out of it. We can't fix everything.
1: Good: "[...] through a facility or means of interstate or foreign commerce [...]" means only commercial entities, right?
No. That language is there to criminalize the act by virtue of the accused using a modem - audio, DSL, etc. Because they have deemed them as "instruments of interstate commerce." This is a legal trick to misuse the commerce clause to give the feds jurisdiction in matters the constitution clearly was denying them.
IT basically undoes a loophole in the existing laws that allow someone to set up a distribution network and remain disconnected from it.
You mean, like the post office? Or the phone system? Or the highways? Or the water system?
The only things that distinguishes this "distribution system" from any other are (a) it is privately maintained and run, and (b) the government has no incentive to protect the citizen, whereas it does, to protect itself. That's a problem inherent in the system, but it isn't a good excuse.
One of the biggest problems I have with abortion is that the time for birth control should have happened long before an abortion is part of any plan.
And what of rape, where the child was unwanted by the mother, and where carrying the spawn to term propagates the genes of what I would argue is a line of eminently disposable humans?
The reason it's a good thing to have easily accessible open networks is because it allows us to pursue our lives, business, etc more easily. Commerce, family, politics, whatever. The more open and easy communications (and roads, which are a direct analogy to data roads), the more productive and efficient we can be. Conversely, things that slow us down, inconvenience us, or stop us from using the roads / communications, are bad. So his argument isn't "ineffectual", it simply didn't describe why - it described how, instead.
The government needs to concentrate upon the making of child porn and worry considerably less about what wire it moves through. Identify the people who are making it using forsenic techniques and traditional, but constitutional, detective work and apply a serious deterrent. That's their job. You'll note that it is illegal to send child porn or bombs through the mail, but the post office isn't charged if it happens; it is the fault of the sender, as well it should be. If CP or other contraband is sent through your open network, you're in the precise position of the post office. Except, of course, that the government doesn't care to protect your participation in providing access to the network; after all, you're not going to be making any campaign contributions. This is a fault in government, not in your direct or indirect actions.
When you sing that tune, please don't leave out that they can also take your possessions and your home and etc and sell it without trial, conviction, recompense or any type of recourse. I think this is also a clear hallmark of a police state.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, I ran into the following on-target quote just now on Neatorama, and I hopped right back here to append it:
- Ernest Benn, publicist (1875 - 1954)
The 4th amendment to the US constitution, that authority that describes the limits of federal law, emphasis mine:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I'm having a lot of trouble reading this in any way at all that can justify trial- and conviction-free seizure and disposal of a citizen's property.
The primary value of the re-release to me is to get the original film on HD.
He's just as entitled to an opinion as you are. Try not to be abusive; there's no point to it. The voice over version had Roy's comments too; but they're about Roy's experience; Deckard's voice-over line was about Deckard's experience. Sometimes changes aren't for the best - even if they are made by the director. A movie, especially one like this, is more than the sum of its parts, more than one person's vision, and more than one character's experience. That's why you can see it one way, and the parent (and myself) can see it another. The real value here is that all three of us found great value in the experience.
IMHO, watch the one with the voiceover. Certainly watch that one first. Like most Hollywood movies, the transition from book to movie was made clumsily, protestations of "art" notwithstanding. Deckard's voiceover is done tastefully and serves to focus the movie in many places where it becomes meaningless and context-free in the "director's cut."
One of the best 2-3 SF movies ever made in the voiceover version.
Aside from your interesting 2 1/2 mile anecdote (which I strongly suggest you adjust for realistic human visual acuity before someone calls you on it directly), my experience has been exactly the opposite.
We have an ADHD son who was utterly intolerable and a solid non-performer in school, dangerous to himself and any other child around him unless medicated; on Ritalin, he excelled. Eventually - in his teens - he came off the drug, and he's a sweet, generous and well behaved human being of 33 today. Without it, he was an uncontrollable ball of foaming craziness. Further, at this time there is a grandson who is further down the spectrum, but politically correct attitudes here in our isolated small town resulted in his mother, who frankly isn't too bright, not medicating him. Now he's far behind his peers socially and can barely speak. We - grandma and grandpa - pointed out our experience with the other son (this is a son of our youngest, the subject of my first point was the oldest of three) but it fell of deaf ears.
I am certainly not saying that all active kids need medication, but I *am* saying that the current backlash against medicating kids is hurting some of them.
No, I didn't even address two children, much less causes. I talked about a (one) hyper child, that's all. Are you hallucinating?
I think you're talking about the use of religion, once the mythos is crafted. I was, admittedly far too tersely for it to be obvious, referring to the genesis of religion.
I did not say, or imply, that such would be a bad thing. The parent post to mine was engaged in some amusing (to me) speculation that a hyper child might have been a "great hunter." In so doing, my impression was that they were attempting to recast the social defects of a hyper child into something positive. I was pointing out that in reality, said child were more likely to be ostracized, or otherwise summarily dealt with, because loud, uncontrollable children are no asset to any hunt; my remark of "be grateful" was made in that light.
Ok, let's look at that. The press discovers behavior X, for instance, voting themselves a raise constantly. Reports it to the people. The people have no method to control, punish or regulate this behavior. So the one thing the people can do is vote a politician out on the next cycle. This has to be done one at a time, because if you live in state A, you can't vote on the politician from state B. This also has to be done in the face of perceived good the politician has done in other areas for the locals. If successful, the political party, another entity the people have no power over, promptly provides a new candidate set with the same sets of inclinations, while rewarding the first politician with a lucrative seat on a thinktank or something similar for their service to the party. The people choose from this set, and we're right back where we started.
This is why the press doesn't work to police the system. The best it can do is knock off a politician here and there, but that has no significant effect on legislation or the behavior of the group because no law or other output from the group can be affected by the actions of any particular member. Remember: They're misbehaving as a group.
That's why we're getting laws that proclaim the Internet is a terrorist threat, the USAPATRIOT act (which very few legislators bothered to read), numerous unconstitutional laws, that's why the head of a committee very much responsible for affecting regulation of the Internet thought it was a "series of tubes", and so forth on the legislative front. There's no means for us to change any of that.
That's why pork and bill stuffing continues unabated; that's why PACs and corporations continue to purchase laws with money, sex, junkets, etc. on the manipulation front. That's why senators feel free to hardly ever show up in the senate when running for president or (fill in the blank) on the "duty" front. These things are blessed by the political parties, and that means that you will never have a candidate that doesn't support them, albeit tacitly.
Further, that's why the press feels free to try to manipulate the election process - because the only difference it will make is how responsive the system is to the corporations that own the press. So they're quite intent on getting the most corporate friendly candidate in there, it can affect their bottom line. Watch how they behave, and have been behaving, with regard to Ron Paul for a terrific current example of this kind of behavior. Poll manipulation, sidelining in debates, failure to mention in (otherwise) general coverage of the candidates... if you actually pay attention, it could hardly be more obvious. The problem is, and has been for quite some time, that paying attention doesn't solve the problem. We have no mechanism that can solve the problem; the system has evolved to lock us - the citizens - out.
No, no. It's just obsolete usage. It's been replaced with "call a lawyer."
I rather suspect that if a hyper child spoiled more than one hunt with uncontrollable noise, running about, and blathering, that said child would become dinner. Or a lone nomad at an early age. Like three.
Be grateful for modern society. Otherwise you'd see hyper kids enjoying such advanced treatment regimes as being tightly swaddled and hung from a hook.
Government - as implemented in the US system - isn't necessary; you're just habituated to it. We could have a lot less invasive system, and quite a few more checks and balances with regard to the politicians doing stupid things, without our society coming apart or changing in any negative way.
+1 insightful, buddy. But the average American confuses the system with the nation. Despise the system? Then you're being unpatriotic. Another built-in design problem is that as you say, we should change the system so that the politicians have checks and balances. But we can't do that; only the politicians can. This is a deep and serious design flaw.
That page specifically says that they have no idea what these changes mean. Which of course is pretty obvious, since they don't know what the brain does, it'd be impossible to observe a change and characterize it in any sense even remotely similar to the assertion that the ability of teenagers to make informed decisions.
Before any weight at all can be given to the kind of blue-sky speculation we are constantly bombarded with as if it were fact, we're going to need a lot more actual knowledge. Maybe in fifty years or a hundred years, a statement like yours can be made based on objective fact instead of twisting what amounts to wild hand waving into pseudo-scientific tools primarily used to inflict one person's sexual mores upon another.
In the meantime, by all means, educate like crazy. Knowledge is power. Just watch out for psychobabble. The weakest sciences we have in terms of producing objective data are those dealing with brain function, other than the chemical and mechanical areas of research.
I didn't make any such argument. I used the plural, and I meant the plural. I'm 50. I've known a lot of dumbass adults. Many of them are/were dumb because they were inculcated with propaganda (fairy tales of god, religion-derived morals, pinheaded presumptions like everyone is created equal), not because they have no innate intelligence. I know a lot of smart kids - I'm an instructor, I've seen them in huge bunches. Today's kids in my area (NE Montana) know more about sex than most adults do, they're quite active, and they're doing fine. I suspect the majority of this is because they're well beyond the myth and social retardation that passed for sexual "larnin" among their parents, but in the end, it doesn't matter why, the simple fact is that it is. We have these pompous, superstitious, canned-moral spouting adults on the one hand, and we have young people just ignoring them on the other. It just pisses me off when someone starts impugning them as a group; they don't deserve it generally speaking, and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find that for the exceptions who do, again, they've not been educated, they've probably been singing hymns or hearing ridiculous lectures on "saving themselves" for marriage and avoiding the subject as best they can so they don't get swamped by their own hormones.
Excuse me, but that's complete and utter bullshit. We have no idea how the brain works. None. Not even the tiniest inkling. We have a hundred years of psychobbabling (and massively conflicting) faddery, but no data. We barely understand what a single neuron does, we're just catching on to the idea that glial cells aren't "just structural", and we have not got a single clue about what parts of an intact, healthy brain are handling complex concepts like the consequences of sex.
I have known teens who were far more responsible than the adults around them; and I have known adults who should have had their reproductive facilities arbitrarily removed for rampant spawning of children they could not possibly take proper care of. You can't just wave you hand and indict teenagers as a group. Good grief. That's just moral heavy-handedness coupled with wishful thinking.
From experience, we know that making abortion illegal - just as with making drugs illegal - drives the disenfranchised to black market sources. Defrocked medical personal on the one end... all the way to coat hangers on the other. My feeling is the choice is best left to the mother and the government should stay out of it. We can't fix everything.
Very interesting, thanks for the pointer.
Tighty whities? My first thought when I saw this was: "Countdown to helical-auxetic penis enlargement spam 10... 9..."
No. That language is there to criminalize the act by virtue of the accused using a modem - audio, DSL, etc. Because they have deemed them as "instruments of interstate commerce." This is a legal trick to misuse the commerce clause to give the feds jurisdiction in matters the constitution clearly was denying them.
You mean, like the post office? Or the phone system? Or the highways? Or the water system?
The only things that distinguishes this "distribution system" from any other are (a) it is privately maintained and run, and (b) the government has no incentive to protect the citizen, whereas it does, to protect itself. That's a problem inherent in the system, but it isn't a good excuse.
And what of rape, where the child was unwanted by the mother, and where carrying the spawn to term propagates the genes of what I would argue is a line of eminently disposable humans?
Will you oppose abortion of rape-spawn?
Let me help.
The reason it's a good thing to have easily accessible open networks is because it allows us to pursue our lives, business, etc more easily. Commerce, family, politics, whatever. The more open and easy communications (and roads, which are a direct analogy to data roads), the more productive and efficient we can be. Conversely, things that slow us down, inconvenience us, or stop us from using the roads / communications, are bad. So his argument isn't "ineffectual", it simply didn't describe why - it described how, instead.
The government needs to concentrate upon the making of child porn and worry considerably less about what wire it moves through. Identify the people who are making it using forsenic techniques and traditional, but constitutional, detective work and apply a serious deterrent. That's their job. You'll note that it is illegal to send child porn or bombs through the mail, but the post office isn't charged if it happens; it is the fault of the sender, as well it should be. If CP or other contraband is sent through your open network, you're in the precise position of the post office. Except, of course, that the government doesn't care to protect your participation in providing access to the network; after all, you're not going to be making any campaign contributions. This is a fault in government, not in your direct or indirect actions.
When you sing that tune, please don't leave out that they can also take your possessions and your home and etc and sell it without trial, conviction, recompense or any type of recourse. I think this is also a clear hallmark of a police state.