Every 2 terms of republican presidency, the national debt increases by a factor of 10.:D
Everybody loves to blame Republicans! But you need to realise both parties are at fault here. And by both parties, I mean mostly the Democrats.
Take a look at some legislation during the Clinton years. Look what he did! He created... some stuff, that... ruined our economy. Yes! Clinton, and all those other Democrats played their (foundational) part in causing this crisis of debt! The surplus that his administration ran was... well, misleading. In fact, Bush's deficit was in fact, when you think about it, a net contributor to the national surplus.
Both sides have caused problems here. Just look at legislation passed by the current Democratic controlled Congress. It's driving us under! OK, Republicans made some mistakes during their tenure, but it's clear from the fact that things are still bad, that the Democrats are not doing anything to fix the problem! I mean, the Republicans didn't leave that big of a mess behind them!
So just remember that no matter what the topic, there are two sides to every issue, and "Both Sides" are at fault. Equally. It's the basis of modern debate. Especially the fact about Republicans being less at fault.
I d not care that I am bald. I do not care if others are bald.
Two things. Firstly, I'll work under the assumption that you are male. Secondly, while most people will agree with your second statement when the others are men, there is a question as to what they will think about bald women.
But you are indeed correct. Baldness for men, while it may be initially discomforting, is perfectly acceptable in our society. It is even perfectly acceptable for a man who discovers he is going bald to shave his head completely. In this sense, baldness studies on men are really not of much medical benefit to our society. There are worthier causes to spend research money on.
Case in point: Baldness in women. I can imagine that going bald would be an extremely stressful thing to happen to any women in our society, at practically any age. Our society still expects women to look a certain way. I've heard people pass (unkind) comment when a woman cuts her hair short! It tough for women who have to go through chemotherapy, and you will find that many cover up their head, indoors and outdoors, with headscarves, even though the hair loss is temporary. They will even keep their hair covered until it reaches almost three inches in length!
For this reason, I would ask the legitimate question; why is so much more time and money being put into male baldness research than female baldness research? The answer of course, is obvious. More men become bald, and therefore researching cures and snake oils for them will pay off more than researching cures for women who arguably need them more. The "market", i.e. greed, dictates where our society invests its scientific research.
It's not the math that's the problem. 'Science' isn't really involved.
Not quite. You see, numbers without science are just numerology. Numbers with Science are Mathematics.
Numerology has run rampant in financial circles since the general advent of computers. MBA's and traders, trained in the art of numbers, but not of science, led themselves astray with whatever concoction of forumlae pleased them most. Combine this with the connectivity of the internet, and the general mysticism surrounding computers in ordinary eyes, and you get an environment ripe for selling all kinds of fancy snake oil.
It's true. Hollywood is a huge influence on culture in general and standards of beauty are no exception. Here's a story about cosmetic surgery in Asia, and how it is becoming more popular for people to make themselves look more caucasian, i.e. like western celebrities. It's very sad.
Now people are applying raw numbers to this travesty of beauty standards in an effort to "scientifically prove" that the hollywood ideal is the true one. The interested reader should watch The Trap to show just how damaging adherence to unsupported "objective" numbers can be.
But uh, mind if I ask: exactly what kind of pictures are you planning on taking on your vacation?;-)
Places you went to. Pictures of you in those places. Pictures of things you ate, things you found interesting. Pictures of your kids. Pictures of you with your kids. People in entertainment venues. People in swimsuits. People at their most informal, goofing off, making faces, having fun. All people you know or met, including yourself. These and more.
How many of these are you OK with customs sifting through? With a foreign or domestic government recording and preserving? How many images do care enough about to keep, but less enough to hand over to complete strangers?
Someone who represents themselves really does have a fool for a client.
Representing yourself is generally done under the basic principle that the court is just and fair and will come to the right decision. Time and again this has been proven completely and utterly wrong.
Courts and the bar system are essentially a private guild to which the government subcontracts the legal system. Like all guilds, the court is a closed shop. They operate under their own idiosyncratic rules and customs and demand that you do so as well. Hence someone representing themselves is a fly in their ointment and will generally find themselves tied and tripped up by layers of procedure and red tape before they even get a chance to plead their case.
And what most people don't realize is that most lawyers and indeed many judges have no interest in justice. They are interested in procedure and etiquette and quotas. If you are convicted, regardless of your guilt or innocence, then the prosecuting lawyer will be happy, the judge will be happy and because you have no layer representing you, there will be no one in the guild who is unhappy with the verdict. Since your please for fairness and justice are not phrased in the guilds technical language, no one in their will understand what you are saying, or will choose to ignore it with impunity. Hence the court will have little incentive, or reason to find you innocent. And please remember that despite some idealistic thinking to the contrary, it is not they who must prove your guilt, but you that must prove your innocence.
It would be nice to have a better legal system. The first step is to get rid of the current guild system. Until then, do not under any circumstance even think of representing yourself. Ever.
In certain fields, it is very easy to pass for a scientist without actually being one. See the cargo cult science speech for details of "fields" like Parapsychology populated by crackpots and true believers who play dress up in white lab coats an perform "experiments", yet no real science is going on.
Eugenics is just such a field. Populated as it is by closet racists, elitists and the like, who perform the most dubious of experiments and data analysis before proclaiming their profound conclusions. They no not rigor. To them, the law of large numbers is proof enough of anything. You know what the sad part is. People will listen to them before they listen to actual scientists.
Tragically, despite the excellent work done in the field in recent years, the field of genetics is being taken over by these cargo cultists. Or at least, its PR section is. And when you come right down to it, perception can become reality. If the public and prospective students see only crackpot geneticists, then sooner or later all the only geneticists left will be crackpots.
The onus is on the genetics community, and the scientific community in general, to stand up to and refute the claims of these charlatans.
Reminds me of a Maple mid term I had way back when as an undergraduate.
10 minutes after the start, one of the class arrives late and proceeds to sit down in front of his PC. The examiner hands him the question sheet. He settles in. He was obviously a bit tipsy, and there was a not so faint smell of alcohol, particularly as he spoke. After a few minutes, we had something similar to the following exchange:
Him: (whisper) Hey man. How'd you turn on Maple again? Me:Start. Programs. Math Software. Maple. Him:Cheers man.
A few minutes later....
Him:Hey man. Sorry, but, are we supposed to answer ALL the questions on this sheet? Me:Just four out of five.(or whatever the requirements were) Him:Aww right! Cheers man.
Top Gear is a show made by and made for the Lost Boys of Never Never Land. It's main presenter is the quintessential example of a boy who never grew up. On occasion, it produces the odd worthwhile comment. But overall it is a fairly juvenile affair, concerned more with how fast each vehicle can go from 0-60, and whether the exterior look "cool", than with say mileage or cost.
They review executive class cars on private race tracks and rate their performance on how much the experience evokes memories of bygone go-kart races. In every episode, the presenters drive far too quickly down country lanes, all the while taking their eyes off the road to stare into the in car cameras and deliver quips more usually encountered in video game magazines. The cars are always seem to be Italian or German affairs that the viewers will never be able to afford.
Predictably, it sells like hot cakes. As a younger male, I can no longer afford to insure a car.
I think that there is in fact quite a diversity of opinion on this site. A great many threads have rebuttals and counter-rebuttals running many levels deep, without any poster ever posting a second comment. If there is any consensus, it mostly has to do with most posters coming down on the side of common sense.
Since many of these "counterfeit" products are made in the very same factories, by the very same people, with the very same machines as make the "original" products once the orders for originals have been filled, I cannot say I have much sympathy for the western brands involved. They decided to make their brands of such low quality that the difference between counterfeit and genuine products has become academic. People do in fact care about quality when buying, but the sad fact is for all their markup, many western goods simply do not offer much over "knock offs". Case in point; DVD players.
He said there were actually a number of alternate measures put forth, that would have solved the problem without the massive bailout price tag to taxpayers, but,....
That's why people don't want your "Freedom" and "Democracy" in their own nations. It's because they see what you have done to yourselves, and they don't want any part of it.
That might be the sentiment of some. But the reality is that despite our failures, despite our "decadence" or "immorality", despite the current crisis, people living in free democracies are still much, much better off that people who do not. And I don't just mean better off financially. I mean better off socially, culturally, and yes morally.
Many people around the world live in simple poverty. But not living in a democracy will typically mean you live in subjugated poverty. Even if you are better off, you still live in subjugation. Ask the women who live in just about any third world or developing undemocratic country. Ask the ethnic or religious minorities. Ask the homosexuals. Ask the academics. Ask the journalists. Ask them if they're willing to risk western "corruption" for freedom and democracy? Better yet, ask yourself, and hope that you are not found wanting.
You may disagree with many things in western society. Hell, I disagree with quite a few of them myself. But freedom and democracy are not and never have been a negative or poisonous influence on any society that has accepted them. Whatever may have failed the west in the last few months, our basic values have not.
You must understand that Ireland, as a country, had nothing. The most common phrase I hear from older people about the past is: "This country had nothing". The sad fact is, beneath it all, Ireland still has nothing. We have no natural resources, a low population, poor infrastructure, no significant industrial base. We are an island, and communications with the continent have always been expensive, slow and prone to monopolies. Corruption is and always was a very serious problem. We have a weak judiciary, a rather inept legislature and an effective one-party system. None of these points is a crippling issue, but you must understand that Ireland was never traditionally an attractive place to invest.
The low corporation tax rate is the only, and I mean the only, thing that this country has to attract foreign investment. No one is very happy with this, least of all ordinary people who have to pay ~45% income tax rates to make up for the attractive 12.5% taxes paid by corporations and yet still have to put up with a substandard public service. Ireland is a leader in the race to the bottom, and it cannot be denied that this policy has paid off. Big fish like Microsoft, Pfizer, Dell, Intel, etc have contributed substantially to Ireland's transition from a second world country in 1990, to a... well talk to me after the current crisis is over, but I'll say for now a first world one.
The low corporation tax had lead to some substantial anomalies. Former Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald has argued for years that Ireland's official GDP figures are grossly misleading, with a very small amount of foreign companies contributing a sizeable fraction of GDP(If I remember correctly, Pfizer's Viagra operation in Cork alone was said to account for 3% of GDP). But because the tax rate is so low, these profits will largely be sent back to their home countries, and the country will not see the benefit(as much).
Make no mistake, Ireland has made a Faustian deal with multinational companies. If even one, just one, major american company decides to pack up and head elsewhere, this country will feel the impact for many years. The company might consider its presence relatively small in global terms, but in Irish terms Microsoft's Dublin office is akin to Ma Bell in its heyday. At this point, we literally cannot afford to ever increase the corporation tax rate to anywhere near the rate in England or the continent. If we do, one or more multinational companies will leave, and the country will go under.
Many of these same reasons lay behind the bail out of Irish banks this week by the government. Our banks are small in global terms, but if they go down, we go down with them. (And they were going down. Ireland's housing crisis is exactly the same as in the US only even more extreme). Before you mention it, I will say that yes, this country as a whole has been mismanaged. For many years. I and most people living here are chronically aware of this fact.
Ireland has changed substantially in the last ~15 years. But I must stress that our great national fear has never gone away. That fear is that the country will become utterly bankrupt, and everyone in it will be reduced to abject poverty. "This country was a disaster." I've been told this over and over ad nauseum since I was old enough to speak. Even the cubs of the Celtic Tiger, for all their confidence, are dimly aware of this fact. Despite all the mobile phones and iPods, green beer, SUV's, wine counters, foreign holidays, etc, etc, Irish people collectively have not and will never let go of this one, real and ever present terror that they will be, as a nation, pauperised. Again. It has happened over and over and over. In the 1930's, the 1950's and the 1980's, and that's just in the modern era.
Ireland still, to this day, has very little going for it, and people here will do everything they can to avoid going back to nothing. As such, I seriously doubt that they
This is the "selling the product" school of career promotion, otherwise known as outright lying. OK, you can mention google earth, but realistically, animated overflights of the grand canyon have nothing to do with what IT is actually about.
What you can do is throw up a few images of Google earth, then discuss the technical problem of how all that data needs to get from Google servers to your computer. Use big numbers, talk about the compromises that need to be made. Make them notice that the images are not "perfect". Tell them why. Tell them why it would be impractical for everyone to store the data on their own computers. Make them think.
Yes be interesting. But please remember to be educational as well.
The law does not deserve our automatic respect. The law does not deserve our unquestioning obedience. The law does not issue from divinity, nor does it necessarily reflect the will of the people.
Yes, people are quite flagrantly breaking the law of the land as it is written. The question is; is the law just. In the case of copyright law, the answer is no. It is clear that copyrights laws, and the fines imposed under them, are injust. Faced with this, there is a very serious question as to whether that law should be observed or respected at all.
You are correct though. Lack of respect for some laws leads to lack of respect for the law in general, and that can and has lead to the breakdown of society. But what you have failed to realise is that a general lack of respect for the law is caused by unjust laws. It's true. People are smart enough to realise when they are being had. The truth is that unjust laws do more to undermine our legal system than any amount of teenagers downloading files off the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody loves to blame Republicans! But you need to realise both parties are at fault here. And by both parties, I mean mostly the Democrats.
Take a look at some legislation during the Clinton years. Look what he did! He created... some stuff, that ... ruined our economy. Yes! Clinton, and all those other Democrats played their (foundational) part in causing this crisis of debt! The surplus that his administration ran was... well, misleading. In fact, Bush's deficit was in fact, when you think about it, a net contributor to the national surplus.
Both sides have caused problems here. Just look at legislation passed by the current Democratic controlled Congress. It's driving us under! OK, Republicans made some mistakes during their tenure, but it's clear from the fact that things are still bad, that the Democrats are not doing anything to fix the problem! I mean, the Republicans didn't leave that big of a mess behind them!
So just remember that no matter what the topic, there are two sides to every issue, and "Both Sides" are at fault. Equally. It's the basis of modern debate. Especially the fact about Republicans being less at fault.
Two things. Firstly, I'll work under the assumption that you are male. Secondly, while most people will agree with your second statement when the others are men, there is a question as to what they will think about bald women.
But you are indeed correct. Baldness for men, while it may be initially discomforting, is perfectly acceptable in our society. It is even perfectly acceptable for a man who discovers he is going bald to shave his head completely. In this sense, baldness studies on men are really not of much medical benefit to our society. There are worthier causes to spend research money on.
Case in point: Baldness in women. I can imagine that going bald would be an extremely stressful thing to happen to any women in our society, at practically any age. Our society still expects women to look a certain way. I've heard people pass (unkind) comment when a woman cuts her hair short! It tough for women who have to go through chemotherapy, and you will find that many cover up their head, indoors and outdoors, with headscarves, even though the hair loss is temporary. They will even keep their hair covered until it reaches almost three inches in length!
For this reason, I would ask the legitimate question; why is so much more time and money being put into male baldness research than female baldness research? The answer of course, is obvious. More men become bald, and therefore researching cures and snake oils for them will pay off more than researching cures for women who arguably need them more. The "market", i.e. greed, dictates where our society invests its scientific research.
At this point, if the network goes down then all clients, thin or thick, will effectively stop working anyway.
Not quite. You see, numbers without science are just numerology. Numbers with Science are Mathematics.
Numerology has run rampant in financial circles since the general advent of computers. MBA's and traders, trained in the art of numbers, but not of science, led themselves astray with whatever concoction of forumlae pleased them most. Combine this with the connectivity of the internet, and the general mysticism surrounding computers in ordinary eyes, and you get an environment ripe for selling all kinds of fancy snake oil.
Quants were quacks. They still are.
The FCC's job has, is and always will be to censor content that is broadcast in the US. It is the central and primary purpose of the organization.
For any competent private company, it is very easy to compete with the city. Hence the original suit.
One does not confirm truthiness. One feels it in ones belly.
It's true. Hollywood is a huge influence on culture in general and standards of beauty are no exception. Here's a story about cosmetic surgery in Asia, and how it is becoming more popular for people to make themselves look more caucasian, i.e. like western celebrities. It's very sad.
Now people are applying raw numbers to this travesty of beauty standards in an effort to "scientifically prove" that the hollywood ideal is the true one. The interested reader should watch The Trap to show just how damaging adherence to unsupported "objective" numbers can be.
Places you went to. Pictures of you in those places. Pictures of things you ate, things you found interesting. Pictures of your kids. Pictures of you with your kids. People in entertainment venues. People in swimsuits. People at their most informal, goofing off, making faces, having fun. All people you know or met, including yourself. These and more.
How many of these are you OK with customs sifting through? With a foreign or domestic government recording and preserving? How many images do care enough about to keep, but less enough to hand over to complete strangers?
To be fair, I believe most of those would agree that nothing on Slashdot belongs on the front page.
Someone who represents themselves really does have a fool for a client.
Representing yourself is generally done under the basic principle that the court is just and fair and will come to the right decision. Time and again this has been proven completely and utterly wrong.
Courts and the bar system are essentially a private guild to which the government subcontracts the legal system. Like all guilds, the court is a closed shop. They operate under their own idiosyncratic rules and customs and demand that you do so as well. Hence someone representing themselves is a fly in their ointment and will generally find themselves tied and tripped up by layers of procedure and red tape before they even get a chance to plead their case.
And what most people don't realize is that most lawyers and indeed many judges have no interest in justice. They are interested in procedure and etiquette and quotas. If you are convicted, regardless of your guilt or innocence, then the prosecuting lawyer will be happy, the judge will be happy and because you have no layer representing you, there will be no one in the guild who is unhappy with the verdict. Since your please for fairness and justice are not phrased in the guilds technical language, no one in their will understand what you are saying, or will choose to ignore it with impunity. Hence the court will have little incentive, or reason to find you innocent. And please remember that despite some idealistic thinking to the contrary, it is not they who must prove your guilt, but you that must prove your innocence.
It would be nice to have a better legal system. The first step is to get rid of the current guild system. Until then, do not under any circumstance even think of representing yourself. Ever.
In certain fields, it is very easy to pass for a scientist without actually being one. See the cargo cult science speech for details of "fields" like Parapsychology populated by crackpots and true believers who play dress up in white lab coats an perform "experiments", yet no real science is going on.
Eugenics is just such a field. Populated as it is by closet racists, elitists and the like, who perform the most dubious of experiments and data analysis before proclaiming their profound conclusions. They no not rigor. To them, the law of large numbers is proof enough of anything. You know what the sad part is. People will listen to them before they listen to actual scientists.
Tragically, despite the excellent work done in the field in recent years, the field of genetics is being taken over by these cargo cultists. Or at least, its PR section is. And when you come right down to it, perception can become reality. If the public and prospective students see only crackpot geneticists, then sooner or later all the only geneticists left will be crackpots.
The onus is on the genetics community, and the scientific community in general, to stand up to and refute the claims of these charlatans.
There are other User ID's besides your you know.
Reminds me of a Maple mid term I had way back when as an undergraduate.
10 minutes after the start, one of the class arrives late and proceeds to sit down in front of his PC. The examiner hands him the question sheet. He settles in. He was obviously a bit tipsy, and there was a not so faint smell of alcohol, particularly as he spoke. After a few minutes, we had something similar to the following exchange:
Him: (whisper) Hey man. How'd you turn on Maple again?
Me: Start. Programs. Math Software. Maple.
Him: Cheers man.
A few minutes later....
Him: Hey man. Sorry, but, are we supposed to answer ALL the questions on this sheet?
Me: Just four out of five.(or whatever the requirements were)
Him: Aww right! Cheers man.
A few minutes after that....
Him: Hey man. Sorry, again, but... Is this a test?
If I remember correctly, he got an A. Great guy.
That's because you can have a country without any of those things!
Top Gear is a show made by and made for the Lost Boys of Never Never Land. It's main presenter is the quintessential example of a boy who never grew up. On occasion, it produces the odd worthwhile comment. But overall it is a fairly juvenile affair, concerned more with how fast each vehicle can go from 0-60, and whether the exterior look "cool", than with say mileage or cost.
They review executive class cars on private race tracks and rate their performance on how much the experience evokes memories of bygone go-kart races. In every episode, the presenters drive far too quickly down country lanes, all the while taking their eyes off the road to stare into the in car cameras and deliver quips more usually encountered in video game magazines. The cars are always seem to be Italian or German affairs that the viewers will never be able to afford.
Predictably, it sells like hot cakes. As a younger male, I can no longer afford to insure a car.
I don't like that show.
I would submit that your childrearing priorities are somewhat confused.
Just don't ask where you got the apples from!
I think that there is in fact quite a diversity of opinion on this site. A great many threads have rebuttals and counter-rebuttals running many levels deep, without any poster ever posting a second comment. If there is any consensus, it mostly has to do with most posters coming down on the side of common sense.
Since many of these "counterfeit" products are made in the very same factories, by the very same people, with the very same machines as make the "original" products once the orders for originals have been filled, I cannot say I have much sympathy for the western brands involved. They decided to make their brands of such low quality that the difference between counterfeit and genuine products has become academic. People do in fact care about quality when buying, but the sad fact is for all their markup, many western goods simply do not offer much over "knock offs". Case in point; DVD players.
Name One.
That might be the sentiment of some. But the reality is that despite our failures, despite our "decadence" or "immorality", despite the current crisis, people living in free democracies are still much, much better off that people who do not. And I don't just mean better off financially. I mean better off socially, culturally, and yes morally.
Many people around the world live in simple poverty. But not living in a democracy will typically mean you live in subjugated poverty. Even if you are better off, you still live in subjugation. Ask the women who live in just about any third world or developing undemocratic country. Ask the ethnic or religious minorities. Ask the homosexuals. Ask the academics. Ask the journalists. Ask them if they're willing to risk western "corruption" for freedom and democracy? Better yet, ask yourself, and hope that you are not found wanting.
You may disagree with many things in western society. Hell, I disagree with quite a few of them myself. But freedom and democracy are not and never have been a negative or poisonous influence on any society that has accepted them. Whatever may have failed the west in the last few months, our basic values have not.
Ireland is not smarter. We are just desperate.
You must understand that Ireland, as a country, had nothing. The most common phrase I hear from older people about the past is: "This country had nothing". The sad fact is, beneath it all, Ireland still has nothing. We have no natural resources, a low population, poor infrastructure, no significant industrial base. We are an island, and communications with the continent have always been expensive, slow and prone to monopolies. Corruption is and always was a very serious problem. We have a weak judiciary, a rather inept legislature and an effective one-party system. None of these points is a crippling issue, but you must understand that Ireland was never traditionally an attractive place to invest.
The low corporation tax rate is the only, and I mean the only , thing that this country has to attract foreign investment. No one is very happy with this, least of all ordinary people who have to pay ~45% income tax rates to make up for the attractive 12.5% taxes paid by corporations and yet still have to put up with a substandard public service. Ireland is a leader in the race to the bottom, and it cannot be denied that this policy has paid off. Big fish like Microsoft, Pfizer, Dell, Intel, etc have contributed substantially to Ireland's transition from a second world country in 1990, to a ... well talk to me after the current crisis is over, but I'll say for now a first world one.
The low corporation tax had lead to some substantial anomalies. Former Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald has argued for years that Ireland's official GDP figures are grossly misleading, with a very small amount of foreign companies contributing a sizeable fraction of GDP(If I remember correctly, Pfizer's Viagra operation in Cork alone was said to account for 3% of GDP). But because the tax rate is so low, these profits will largely be sent back to their home countries, and the country will not see the benefit(as much).
Make no mistake, Ireland has made a Faustian deal with multinational companies. If even one, just one, major american company decides to pack up and head elsewhere, this country will feel the impact for many years. The company might consider its presence relatively small in global terms, but in Irish terms Microsoft's Dublin office is akin to Ma Bell in its heyday. At this point, we literally cannot afford to ever increase the corporation tax rate to anywhere near the rate in England or the continent. If we do, one or more multinational companies will leave, and the country will go under.
Many of these same reasons lay behind the bail out of Irish banks this week by the government. Our banks are small in global terms, but if they go down, we go down with them. (And they were going down. Ireland's housing crisis is exactly the same as in the US only even more extreme). Before you mention it, I will say that yes, this country as a whole has been mismanaged. For many years. I and most people living here are chronically aware of this fact.
Ireland has changed substantially in the last ~15 years. But I must stress that our great national fear has never gone away. That fear is that the country will become utterly bankrupt, and everyone in it will be reduced to abject poverty. "This country was a disaster." I've been told this over and over ad nauseum since I was old enough to speak. Even the cubs of the Celtic Tiger, for all their confidence, are dimly aware of this fact. Despite all the mobile phones and iPods, green beer, SUV's, wine counters, foreign holidays, etc, etc, Irish people collectively have not and will never let go of this one, real and ever present terror that they will be, as a nation, pauperised. Again. It has happened over and over and over. In the 1930's, the 1950's and the 1980's, and that's just in the modern era.
Ireland still, to this day, has very little going for it, and people here will do everything they can to avoid going back to nothing. As such, I seriously doubt that they
This is the "selling the product" school of career promotion, otherwise known as outright lying. OK, you can mention google earth, but realistically, animated overflights of the grand canyon have nothing to do with what IT is actually about.
What you can do is throw up a few images of Google earth, then discuss the technical problem of how all that data needs to get from Google servers to your computer. Use big numbers, talk about the compromises that need to be made. Make them notice that the images are not "perfect". Tell them why. Tell them why it would be impractical for everyone to store the data on their own computers. Make them think.
Yes be interesting. But please remember to be educational as well.
The law does not deserve our automatic respect. The law does not deserve our unquestioning obedience. The law does not issue from divinity, nor does it necessarily reflect the will of the people.
Yes, people are quite flagrantly breaking the law of the land as it is written. The question is; is the law just. In the case of copyright law, the answer is no. It is clear that copyrights laws, and the fines imposed under them, are injust. Faced with this, there is a very serious question as to whether that law should be observed or respected at all.
You are correct though. Lack of respect for some laws leads to lack of respect for the law in general, and that can and has lead to the breakdown of society. But what you have failed to realise is that a general lack of respect for the law is caused by unjust laws. It's true. People are smart enough to realise when they are being had. The truth is that unjust laws do more to undermine our legal system than any amount of teenagers downloading files off the internet.