"Before people suggest that it is still immoral to hunt whales just because they are whales (and absent from sustainability issues), let me say one thing. Every time you eat the standard chicken you get at the supermarket, every time you eat a hamburger, and every time you eat a boiled egg, unless you go out of your way to do otherwise, you are contributing to a system which imprisons animals in ways which are far more unethical."
that whale had friends... whales are that smart. it was part of a community of other whales who will even miss it... some of these whales have known each other for decades. Whales even mourn. whales are sentient and self aware. tradition is wonderful.. I value it. but knowing now what the inuit and everyone else knows about the intelligence of whales.. they should not be hunted.. it is comparible to hunting and eating 5 year old children. They are simply too intelligent to justify morally except in the case of the direst of emergencies.
We would not permit a traditionally canabilistic culture to hunt humans, nor should be permit the hunting of whales.
comparing a whale to a chicken or a cow is not a very persuasive argument.
"At least Americans are lucky they don't like in the former British Empire where you get some senile git wearing a black cape and a powdered wig banging a hammer and glaring at you, and expecting to be taken seriously. "This is my court!" they thunder. If any other public servant did that in their workplace, they'd be taken away for psychiatric assessment."
And whats with all that "your honour" and the 'oh yea oh yea. ' and 'God Save the Queen' and the bowing and the respect... then again prey tell, how should the Queen's Justice's dress? And what should they tell you when you are crossing the line and treading dangerously close to being summarily convicted and sentenced on the spot with contempt and thrown in prison (where you can contemplate whether or not you respect the Administration of Justice).
the british and canadians for that matter, have far more respect for their Judicial system than the Americans have for theirs. Maybe the robes and capes work?
"But in the real world, lawmakers don't even read a good chunk of the laws they pass, let alone understand them even if they could. It is absurd no doubt, but it is what it is."
it isn't what it is, because at the end of the day these laws must be comprehensible to lawyers and judges. And if they aren't the courts will either impose some interpretation or strike it as void.
congress has an obligation to pass laws that "reasonable people", the judicial and the executive branches can understand. Whether they read it or not. end of story.
We aren't discussing whether lawmakers read and understood all the laws. We are discussing whether they couldn't even read and understand the laws if they wanted to, because the laws are too confusing even to legal experts.
Are you aware of a single case, which wasn't ultimately overturned on appeal, where a judge admitted he didn't understand the law and then go ahead and enforce it.
"Out of curousity, what happens if the very existence of a law is one of the disputed facts? In that case the interpretation of the law, and the matters of fact become intertwined. Perhaps a more realistic example: somebody attempts to enforce a very old law. It turns out that law was repealed, but records of the repeal were lost in a fire at the statehouse. The defense has "witnesses" to testify about the repeal of the law, which the prosecution will be trying to discredit. That sort of thing can really mess up the clean separation of law and fact. What happens in those circumstances?"
The existence of a law, and its interpretation, is not a question of fact. It is a question of law.
Technically the The Court has final authority over questions of law. The only "experts" of any reliability on questions of law are lawyers. And the highest most qualified and reliable of those is the Judicial Branch of the government itself (whatever the highest court in that legal jurisdiction is).
If the court believes the law is in effect. It's in effect. Tough luck sherlock. If you still think its not in effect have the legislature repeal it all over again. You and your "witness" are in error if you think the laws says X and the highest courts think it says Y.
You would not want a judiciary which simply accepted "evidence" of laws from people walking in off the street. Thats absurd. It would give such witness godlike powers to make up laws willy nilly.
"I don't think so. Companies will just change their EULA to say that if any bugs or security vulnerabilities are found, they should be reported to the originating company and not sold for profit. Then the Company can just say that any deal with Intellectual Weapons is a violation of the EULA."
They can say it. But they can't prove it.
There is no legal duty to sign an EULA and therefore the onus to prove you did it rests upon them.
The court will not be very impressed by someone trying to claim they have a contract with another party if they have no actual physical proof of the contract and the other party simply states they are not aware of signing any contract.
patenting an improvement to someone elses product is one of the reasons a patent system exists. The court will not be sympathetic to someone trying to subvert the patent system by claiming that they implicitly own all conceivable improvements on their product simply because they stuck a contract on the side of their product.
"Because a more direct and effective route would be to skip right over religion and go straight to being be anti-falsehood promotion?"
There is no pro-falsehood movement to be "anti" towards.
And the reason most people are anti-religion is not because it spreads falsehoods, but rather because it advocates methods of reasoning which encourage the acceptance and belief of falsehoods and thereby inflict or allow incredible suffering and harm on humankind.
Even rational thought can lead to falsehoods.. but it has methods of catching and correcting its own errors where empirical evidence makes those errrors detectable.
Religious thought puts the final proof after your death. Which of course no one can ever report on and therefore it could say anything whatsoever without anyone being able to know if it is in agreement with anything real whatsoever. Acceptance of that kind of reasoning is what most anti-theists see as harmful.
why? because empirical evidence shows that ignoring the "real" is extremely dangerous. And there is no known evidence of anyone ever escaping a peril on the basis of ignoring observable reality.
perhaps rational thought is flawed, and imperfect.. perhaps the universe is not truly self consistant. We should bear that in mind..
logic may not actually represent the truth, but its the best game in town.
"Okay, then, how do we determine the legitimacy of the experts? "
by the same magical process the trier of fact (the jury, or judge where there is no jury) determines the veracity of any witnesses. In the case of experts you can also compare their credentials, and unlike regular run of the mill witnesses, usually the credentials of the expert must be disclosed in advance so the other party can be prepared to challenge their expertise. There is usually a voir dire to determine whether a witness is or is not an expert.
never the less. The law itself, which is the real issue here, must be comprehensible to judges, lawyers and politicians or else it is constitutionally invalid. And the contention that it is unreasonable to expect lawmakers to understand the law that they vote YES to is legally absurd.
"which is why I consider suspect any advice I get from any expert until I've had a chance to confirm the accuracy myself."
the judge is free to ask questions and demand the accuracy to be confirmed in whatever way he deems necessary to allow the jury to make an informed decision. And the jury can also ask questions. If the evidence is unclear they are going to disregard it. thats their duty. The onus is on the party trying to get the evidence in to make it convincing. This may involve teaching the jury the rudiments of just what is going on. Science is not magic or occult. It can be understood to any reasonable person (which legally jury members are supposed to be).
yes unfortunately.. charisma is part of it... this is a problem that legal scholars are not oblivious to.. and they argue with one another on how to address it. but that is all going to evidence of FACTS, not evidence of what the law says. The law itself is interpreted by the legal experts: judges and lawyers. they call no other witnesses.
"The idea that legislators or judges or whomever should be experts, or even more familiar than the average person, with a subject in front of them is just not viable."
The Courts have access to expert witnesses, and an adversarial system whereby all parties to the question can bring forth experts to testify on the expert stuff which lay people can't understand.
At any time if a judge believed that the evidence was too technical and a reasonable person could not understand it he is duty bound to rule the evidence inadmissible. On the other hand an incomprehensible law is legally impossible to resolve in court as no experts may be called to interpret the law.
There is no excuse for lawmakers to simply wash their hands of responsibility. If they dont understand what they are agreeing to, they should vote NO and say the law is incomprehensible to them. The whole point of science (and the law) is that any reasonable person can understand it if they put in the effort. Once science (or law) becomes incomprehensible to anyone except certain special individuals then we've gone beyond science or justice and entered the realm of mysticism, the occult and theocracy/technocracy.
Moreover, the courts, when interpretting laws presume that legislature knows exactly what the law means and wants it to mean that.
moreover, if politicians are too stupid to understand the law, then how the hell are judges, juries, lawyers supposed to ever understand it?
At the end of the day, the scenario that there are valid laws that judges, lawyers and politicians can not understand is legally impossible; it violates the fundamental principles of justice and would render any such law unconstitutional and of no force or effect.
"The only reason I can imagine a human being voluntarily subjecting themselves to a lifetime of [politics] would be because they see an opportunity to rob us all blind in the process."
alternatively they are a monarch and feel it is their obligation to their nation, and the community of sovereign nations, and it defines the very core reason of their personal existence. Of course, you dont have that in the US, so pure greed, corruption and kickbacks is probably the actual justification.
(there is also the remote possibility of an honest person being elected but that rarely ever happens)
I remember teachers having problems getting slide projectors to work.. let alone a computer. for all she knows taping paper on the monitor would overheat it and cause it to melt.
"Regardless of how the porn got onto the computer, her handling of the situation after that was grossly incompetent for a teacher. She could have simply covered the monitor."
"She could have effectively sought help. "
"That in all that time she could not come up with a single effective way to deal with the situation shows that she is totally unable to deal with being in charge of children."
how could she? porn destroys your mind, doesn't it? Isn't that the "injury" she risked inflicting on the children? Obviously the porn had damaged her brain and thus she can not be responsible for her actions after seeing porn.
"I'd hate to see how she would do in a medical emergency or a natural disaster or a fire."
If she lit 4 kids on fire, or injected them with hepatitis I dont think anyone would find 40 years to be an absurd consequence or object to her loosing her teaching license.
I think I first saw softcore porn around when I was 10 and hardcore porn not long afterwards... I aced all the sex ed courses incidentally...
little did I know it would destroy the rest of my life.
"In such debates, this deeper question always comes up and is never satisfactorily answered. Here we enter the realm of personal beliefs, and though debating these can be beneficial, it must be in a conducive environment."
how exactly is debating questions which can never be satisfactorily answered beneficial?
"Oh, well, sorry for the yelling, and in the end, it did get somewhat political, but still, the core argument remains. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PRIVACY IN PUBLIC, PERIOD"
That isn't an argument. That is a proposition. You haven't made any actual argument.
If there is no privacy in public places, then why should there be privacy in a private places? What makes a private place so sacrosact?
For that matter, why should the right to life be extended to public places? We should have the ability to attack and molest and kill one another at will in a public place. The moment you leave your little fortress of solitude all bets are off. Why do people think that human beings ought to recieve any respect or dignity once they are in public? When you are in public, the public owns you, and you lose all rights to yourself. Bend over and expose your ass, because it belongs to the "public".
"Since your eyes can only detect about 16,000 colors, it's a moot point, made all the mooter that even the best calibrated monitor can't show you low percentages of cyan or yellow. A well-calibrated monitor's best aspect is good gray balance, which tells you at a glance how much contrast is in your shot and whether or not you're losing detail in the highlights. Other than that, it's all about Photoshop's info palette, boys and girls."
I'd like to know where that figure comes from because whoever made it was not talking about computer graphics (or they were simply wrong). In computer graphics intensity is an aspect of colour, and the same colour with a higher intensity is defined as a completely seperate colour. Consequently what may normally be called 1 colour "white", can actually be easily distinguished into 256 seperate shades, and probably well over 1000 shades by most people. So take your 16,000 colours and multiply that by 1000 intensities and you get about 16 million colours in computer graphics terminology.
Although the end of the day its also irrelevant. Maybe I'm buying the monitor to entertain an octopus. Maybe I'm using it to test an optics system?
You can't promise millions of colours unless the monitor delivers. I could be blind and its still fraud.
The perpetrators assumption of the victim inability to detect the fraud is not a mitigating factor.
"even the best calibrated monitor can't show you low percentages of cyan or yellow"
that is especially irrelevant. No one is talking about what the best calibrated monitors deliver. We are talking about what was promised and not delivered on specific monitors.
"Also, your calculations are off, because you aren't considering that there's a second person making money in the family. While some people still have the wife stay home, the vast majority of families have both parents working. So, your 600K becomes 1.2 Million."
And if you put your kids to work, say starting at 5 years old oiling and cleaning machines at the workshop they can get into the hard to reach places without ever needing to stop the assembly line. Say at $4 per hour, thats $16 hours per day. * 52 weeks at 6 days a week, thats about $20000 a year per kid for 13 years. Or $260,000 per kid! For a family of 5, thats another $1,300,000 dollars. Hell.. you'd be foolish to turn down 30k. Its a fortune! Not to mention nothing stops you and wife from working 16 hours a day as well.. so thats another 1.2 million.
so your 600k becomes 3.7 million!
of course.. if you multiply the workforce by 7 fold (by putting men, women and children to work for 16 hours a day) then really wages must fall (law of supply and demand). But think of it this way.. After wages fall to about 1/7th of pre 1970 value (when most families only had 1 earner working a mere 40 hours), and the whole family earns combined what a single parent used to in half as many hours, then the US will finally be able to compete with China fair and square. but hey its a free country. No one is forcing you to work. And if you choose to raise your family on $4000 per year annual salary, thats your choice. But if you think you need some of the extra luxuries, like food and shelter then thats your choice also. sounds like a win win for everyone.
After that I suppose the US will have the advantage since everyone knows that americans are willing to forgo their vacations to live their blessed lifestyle of abundance. (thereby driving down wages, and simply making labour more extensive with no additional abundance for the labourer)
selling a product which you know does not meet specifications in order to derive a benefit is a crime called "fraud".
Trying to artificially inflate your bugfix ratings or trying to save money is a benefit.
I dont see how this company expects to evade legal CRIMINAL responsibility when someone is harmed because of a pre-existant security problem they knew about but did not disclose at the time of sale.
"If the answer is yes, I find that to be extremely disturbing in an Orwellian sense. While I find the concept of finding children sexually appealing to be personally abhorrent, I'm not sure the law extends (or should extend) into virtual roleplaying between consenting adults."
just curious.. do you find the concept of finding cars or guns sexually appealing abhorrent as well?
how about shoes?
how about members of the same sex?
how about seeing pretty girls murdered or kidnapped by gorillas?
in any event.. the orwellian laws you are not sure about are in full force in Canada. written stories, drawings, visual reproductions (which would include virtual reality), audio recordings, even purely textual descriptions.. are all defined as child pornography, even if it involved no actual children at any time in any way. It would be a crime to talk about it on the phone even. its not merely a crime to posses child porn. Even seeing it or hearing it is a criminal offense.
while your ad hominem attacks and straw men are very persuasive in the defense of this "dunderhead":
the granparent post was excusing US injustice on the basis of injustice in Egypt.
No one took the position that injustice elsewhere should be ignored. You simply presumed that anyone who points a finger at the US must for some reason automatically be excusing Egypt.
As far as 9/11 is concerned, I'm not sure what you want me to think about it.
What the hell does Egyptian fascism have to do with 9/11?
What the US is doing in Iraq or Afghanistan also has nothing to do with what we are talking about. We are talking about US FASCISM and stifling of human rights inside its own borders.
I'm afraid you wont get me to quake in fear at the word "9/11" either. 9/11 was NOT the worst thing that happened to humankind in the past 10 years by a longshot.
"There's a fine line between ambition and insanity."
insanity is not necessarily a bad thing in the end.
"The quest for "more" of "it" never ends, there's no satisfactoin, no end, no peace."
there are moments of peace... its called taking refreshment. But refreshment that doesn't lead to future action is in vain. And the remainder of your life is in vain the moment you say "this is enough: there is no more".
"When all you desire is "more" be it "challenges overcome, deeds accomplished, or inventions and creations" the difference between that and dollars is trifle. All those are merely things, and as you've poingantly stated you'll never sustain the capacity to achieve them, nor aquire the ability to hold on to them."
Ever heard of a guy called Jesus? or another guy called Lord Byron? Or Joan of Arc? Edgar Allan Poe?
creative works and original experiences DO have meaning. And after you are dead they still have meaning. They pass onto others and create within them something which could not have existed any other way.
these people did something ORIGINAL.. they died young and died BROKE. they would have been dead anyway but they left something far far more valuable than any sum of money they could have ever earned as a labourer. They have more today than they ever had. They lost nothing. And they have given more to humanity than any wad of cash could have done.
go and be an inspiration and your actions can have meaning beyond the date of your death.
do nothing but work your ass off and in the end people will give you a stupid eulogy like "he was a good father".. and leave off the words "but after the kids moved out he didn't really do anything else with his life"... "on the other hand here's a fat wad of cash! woo!!"
Sitting around and lamenting that you are bored with your high paying IT job but too scared to give it up to do something new, so you live the remainder of your days, empty and unfulfilled.... now *THAT* is insane.
"Unfortunately a lot of those fantastic selfless engineers and programmers are paid for their work by that evil advertising revenue. The majority of software developed for the interweb is one small example."
Where does this "advertising revenue" come from? It comes out of the pockets of firms which do productive industry. If there was no advertising revenue then this capital would stay with the productive industry to be invested directly into productive industry (such as making products superior so people selected those on the basis of their superiority rather than on the basis of its marketing department.. alternatively the prices could be reduced.. which frees up capital in other sectors of the economy). Those selfless engineers would find work in the original productive industries (or in the other sectors which find themselves with more spare capital) rather than in advertising firms.
You haven't made a convinving argument.
The fact that much of the crap on the internet is funded by advertising is irrelevant because other funding mechanisms exist or can be contrived for the good stuff and as far as the crap is concerned: if it vanished people would need to find other means of entertainment... perhaps real life friendship or sports? (what would the world come to?)
What you are describing is monopoly pricing. Where there is open competition then absolute costs do in fact influence prices. The reason is that where there is open competition, if absolute costs fall then the previous selling price earns much higher than the typical rate of profit; this in turn attract competetors into your market (where apparently above average profits are available). If absolute costs increase then profit margins fall to below average. This causes competetors to flee that market in pursuit of higher profits (at least average) elsewhere. when competition leaves the market, then supply diminishes and profit margins increase until something close to average profits are earned.
In a monopoly situation where no one is free to enter your market, then you can and will charge as much as people are willing to pay. If this is a hyerprofit margin it wont matter because your monopoly excludes competition.
DVD's are in fact a monopoly situation (thanks to copyright), (so are prescription drugs) so you are correct. It will NOT decrease the price of the movies. The actual cost of a DVD is compared to its selling price is virtually irrelevant. DVD's AND non-generic DRUGS sell for as much as consumers are willing to pay.
these types of monopoly products are optimal subjects for taxation. As the tax can't cause the price to actually increase since consumers are unwilling to pay more than the present monopoly prices. (i.e. if you slap a 20% sales tax on DVD's or prescription drugs, the actual selling price will not go up, because if it could, it already would have).
this particular technology seems absurd however. I suspect that most of the theft is performed by underpayed disgruntled store employees. At minimum wage these kids could never actually afford to buy a DVD movie legitimately. If you want to cut down theft.. give the employees free movies.
is this any less plausible than talking serpents, men walking on water, water turning to wine, immaculate conception, talking bushfires, resurrection or giants that live 800 years but leave no bones?
Slashdot Mirror
"Before people suggest that it is still immoral to hunt whales just because they are whales (and absent from sustainability issues), let me say one thing. Every time you eat the standard chicken you get at the supermarket, every time you eat a hamburger, and every time you eat a boiled egg, unless you go out of your way to do otherwise, you are contributing to a system which imprisons animals in ways which are far more unethical."
that whale had friends... whales are that smart. it was part of a community of other whales who will even miss it... some of these whales have known each other for decades. Whales even mourn. whales are sentient and self aware. tradition is wonderful.. I value it. but knowing now what the inuit and everyone else knows about the intelligence of whales.. they should not be hunted.. it is comparible to hunting and eating 5 year old children. They are simply too intelligent to justify morally except in the case of the direst of emergencies.
We would not permit a traditionally canabilistic culture to hunt humans, nor should be permit the hunting of whales.
comparing a whale to a chicken or a cow is not a very persuasive argument.
"At least Americans are lucky they don't like in the former British Empire where you get some senile git wearing a black cape and a powdered wig banging a hammer and glaring at you, and expecting to be taken seriously. "This is my court!" they thunder. If any other public servant did that in their workplace, they'd be taken away for psychiatric assessment."
And whats with all that "your honour" and the 'oh yea oh yea. ' and 'God Save the Queen' and the bowing and the respect...
then again prey tell, how should the Queen's Justice's dress? And what should they tell you when you are crossing the line and treading dangerously close to being summarily convicted and sentenced on the spot with contempt and thrown in prison (where you can contemplate whether or not you respect the Administration of Justice).
the british and canadians for that matter, have far more respect for their Judicial system than the Americans have for theirs. Maybe the robes and capes work?
"It's just that for most of the rest of the universe (which is more sedentary compared to that of the object), time speeds up."
not according to the theory of general relativity it doesn't.
"But in the real world, lawmakers don't even read a good chunk of the laws they pass, let alone understand them even if they could. It is absurd no doubt, but it is what it is."
it isn't what it is, because at the end of the day these laws must be comprehensible to lawyers and judges. And if they aren't the courts will either impose some interpretation or strike it as void.
congress has an obligation to pass laws that "reasonable people", the judicial and the executive branches can understand. Whether they read it or not. end of story.
We aren't discussing whether lawmakers read and understood all the laws. We are discussing whether they couldn't even read and understand the laws if they wanted to, because the laws are too confusing even to legal experts.
Are you aware of a single case, which wasn't ultimately overturned on appeal, where a judge admitted he didn't understand the law and then go ahead and enforce it.
"Out of curousity, what happens if the very existence of a law is one of the disputed facts? In that case the interpretation of the law, and the matters of fact become intertwined. Perhaps a more realistic example: somebody attempts to enforce a very old law. It turns out that law was repealed, but records of the repeal were lost in a fire at the statehouse. The defense has "witnesses" to testify about the repeal of the law, which the prosecution will be trying to discredit. That sort of thing can really mess up the clean separation of law and fact. What happens in those circumstances?"
The existence of a law, and its interpretation, is not a question of fact. It is a question of law.
Technically the The Court has final authority over questions of law. The only "experts" of any reliability on questions of law are lawyers. And the highest most qualified and reliable of those is the Judicial Branch of the government itself (whatever the highest court in that legal jurisdiction is).
If the court believes the law is in effect. It's in effect. Tough luck sherlock. If you still think its not in effect have the legislature repeal it all over again. You and your "witness" are in error if you think the laws says X and the highest courts think it says Y.
You would not want a judiciary which simply accepted "evidence" of laws from people walking in off the street. Thats absurd. It would give such witness godlike powers to make up laws willy nilly.
"I don't think so. Companies will just change their EULA to say that if any bugs or security vulnerabilities are found, they should be reported to the originating company and not sold for profit. Then the Company can just say that any deal with Intellectual Weapons is a violation of the EULA."
They can say it. But they can't prove it.
There is no legal duty to sign an EULA and therefore the onus to prove you did it rests upon them.
The court will not be very impressed by someone trying to claim they have a contract with another party if they have no actual physical proof of the contract and the other party simply states they are not aware of signing any contract.
patenting an improvement to someone elses product is one of the reasons a patent system exists. The court will not be sympathetic to someone trying to subvert the patent system by claiming that they implicitly own all conceivable improvements on their product simply because they stuck a contract on the side of their product.
"Because a more direct and effective route would be to skip right over religion and go straight to being be anti-falsehood promotion?"
There is no pro-falsehood movement to be "anti" towards.
And the reason most people are anti-religion is not because it spreads falsehoods, but rather because it advocates methods of reasoning which encourage the acceptance and belief of falsehoods and thereby inflict or allow incredible suffering and harm on humankind.
Even rational thought can lead to falsehoods.. but it has methods of catching and correcting its own errors where empirical evidence makes those errrors detectable.
Religious thought puts the final proof after your death. Which of course no one can ever report on and therefore it could say anything whatsoever without anyone being able to know if it is in agreement with anything real whatsoever. Acceptance of that kind of reasoning is what most anti-theists see as harmful.
why? because empirical evidence shows that ignoring the "real" is extremely dangerous. And there is no known evidence of anyone ever escaping a peril on the basis of ignoring observable reality.
perhaps rational thought is flawed, and imperfect.. perhaps the universe is not truly self consistant. We should bear that in mind..
logic may not actually represent the truth, but its the best game in town.
"Okay, then, how do we determine the legitimacy of the experts? "
by the same magical process the trier of fact (the jury, or judge where there is no jury) determines the veracity of any witnesses. In the case of experts you can also compare their credentials, and unlike regular run of the mill witnesses, usually the credentials of the expert must be disclosed in advance so the other party can be prepared to challenge their expertise. There is usually a voir dire to determine whether a witness is or is not an expert.
never the less. The law itself, which is the real issue here, must be comprehensible to judges, lawyers and politicians or else it is constitutionally invalid. And the contention that it is unreasonable to expect lawmakers to understand the law that they vote YES to is legally absurd.
"which is why I consider suspect any advice I get from any expert until I've had a chance to confirm the accuracy myself."
the judge is free to ask questions and demand the accuracy to be confirmed in whatever way he deems necessary to allow the jury to make an informed decision. And the jury can also ask questions. If the evidence is unclear they are going to disregard it. thats their duty. The onus is on the party trying to get the evidence in to make it convincing. This may involve teaching the jury the rudiments of just what is going on. Science is not magic or occult. It can be understood to any reasonable person (which legally jury members are supposed to be).
yes unfortunately.. charisma is part of it... this is a problem that legal scholars are not oblivious to.. and they argue with one another on how to address it. but that is all going to evidence of FACTS, not evidence of what the law says. The law itself is interpreted by the legal experts: judges and lawyers. they call no other witnesses.
"The idea that legislators or judges or whomever should be experts, or even more familiar than the average person, with a subject in front of them is just not viable."
The Courts have access to expert witnesses, and an adversarial system whereby all parties to the question can bring forth experts to testify on the expert stuff which lay people can't understand.
At any time if a judge believed that the evidence was too technical and a reasonable person could not understand it he is duty bound to rule the evidence inadmissible. On the other hand an incomprehensible law is legally impossible to resolve in court as no experts may be called to interpret the law.
There is no excuse for lawmakers to simply wash their hands of responsibility. If they dont understand what they are agreeing to, they should vote NO and say the law is incomprehensible to them. The whole point of science (and the law) is that any reasonable person can understand it if they put in the effort. Once science (or law) becomes incomprehensible to anyone except certain special individuals then we've gone beyond science or justice and entered the realm of mysticism, the occult and theocracy/technocracy.
Moreover, the courts, when interpretting laws presume that legislature knows exactly what the law means and wants it to mean that.
moreover, if politicians are too stupid to understand the law, then how the hell are judges, juries, lawyers supposed to ever understand it?
At the end of the day, the scenario that there are valid laws that judges, lawyers and politicians can not understand is legally impossible; it violates the fundamental principles of justice and would render any such law unconstitutional and of no force or effect.
"The only reason I can imagine a human being voluntarily subjecting themselves to a lifetime of [politics] would be because they see an opportunity to rob us all blind in the process."
alternatively they are a monarch and feel it is their obligation to their nation, and the community of sovereign nations, and it defines the very core reason of their personal existence. Of course, you dont have that in the US, so pure greed, corruption and kickbacks is probably the actual justification.
(there is also the remote possibility of an honest person being elected but that rarely ever happens)
It teaches you to not pretend that you know more existence than you really do.
"
I dont think many people are taking that lesson home with them.
I remember teachers having problems getting slide projectors to work.. let alone a computer. for all she knows taping paper on the monitor would overheat it and cause it to melt.
"Regardless of how the porn got onto the computer, her handling of the situation after that was grossly incompetent for a teacher. She could have simply covered the monitor."
"She could have effectively sought help. "
"That in all that time she could not come up with a single effective way to deal with the situation shows that she is totally unable to deal with being in charge of children."
how could she? porn destroys your mind, doesn't it? Isn't that the "injury" she risked inflicting on the children?
Obviously the porn had damaged her brain and thus she can not be responsible for her actions after seeing porn.
"I'd hate to see how she would do in a medical emergency or a natural disaster or a fire."
If she lit 4 kids on fire, or injected them with hepatitis I dont think anyone would find 40 years to be an absurd consequence or object to her loosing her teaching license.
I think I first saw softcore porn around when I was 10 and hardcore porn not long afterwards... I aced all the sex ed courses incidentally...
little did I know it would destroy the rest of my life.
oh how the nightmares plague me to this day
"In such debates, this deeper question always comes up and is never satisfactorily answered. Here we enter the realm of personal beliefs, and though debating these can be beneficial, it must be in a conducive environment."
how exactly is debating questions which can never be satisfactorily answered beneficial?
"Oh, well, sorry for the yelling, and in the end, it did get somewhat political, but still, the core argument remains.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PRIVACY IN PUBLIC, PERIOD"
That isn't an argument. That is a proposition. You haven't made any actual argument.
If there is no privacy in public places, then why should there be privacy in a private places?
What makes a private place so sacrosact?
For that matter, why should the right to life be extended to public places? We should have the ability to attack and molest and kill one another at will in a public place. The moment you leave your little fortress of solitude all bets are off. Why do people think that human beings ought to recieve any respect or dignity once they are in public? When you are in public, the public owns you, and you lose all rights to yourself. Bend over and expose your ass, because it belongs to the "public".
If you dont like it, kill yourself.
hows that for an argument?
(a: just as lame and idiotic as your own.)
"Since your eyes can only detect about 16,000 colors, it's a moot point, made all the mooter that even the best calibrated monitor can't show you low percentages of cyan or yellow. A well-calibrated monitor's best aspect is good gray balance, which tells you at a glance how much contrast is in your shot and whether or not you're losing detail in the highlights. Other than that, it's all about Photoshop's info palette, boys and girls."
I'd like to know where that figure comes from because whoever made it was not talking about computer graphics (or they were simply wrong). In computer graphics intensity is an aspect of colour, and the same colour with a higher intensity is defined as a completely seperate colour. Consequently what may normally be called 1 colour "white", can actually be easily distinguished into 256 seperate shades, and probably well over 1000 shades by most people. So take your 16,000 colours and multiply that by 1000 intensities and you get about 16 million colours in computer graphics terminology.
Although the end of the day its also irrelevant. Maybe I'm buying the monitor to entertain an octopus. Maybe I'm using it to test an optics system?
You can't promise millions of colours unless the monitor delivers. I could be blind and its still fraud.
The perpetrators assumption of the victim inability to detect the fraud is not a mitigating factor.
"even the best calibrated monitor can't show you low percentages of cyan or yellow"
that is especially irrelevant. No one is talking about what the best calibrated monitors deliver. We are talking about what was promised and not delivered on specific monitors.
"Also, your calculations are off, because you aren't considering that there's a second person making money in the family. While some people still have the wife stay home, the vast majority of families have both parents working. So, your 600K becomes 1.2 Million."
And if you put your kids to work, say starting at 5 years old oiling and cleaning machines at the workshop they can get into the hard to reach places without ever needing to stop the assembly line. Say at $4 per hour, thats $16 hours per day. * 52 weeks at 6 days a week, thats about $20000 a year per kid for 13 years. Or $260,000 per kid! For a family of 5, thats another $1,300,000 dollars. Hell.. you'd be foolish to turn down 30k. Its a fortune! Not to mention nothing stops you and wife from working 16 hours a day as well.. so thats another 1.2 million.
so your 600k becomes 3.7 million!
of course.. if you multiply the workforce by 7 fold (by putting men, women and children to work for 16 hours a day) then really wages must fall (law of supply and demand). But think of it this way.. After wages fall to about 1/7th of pre 1970 value (when most families only had 1 earner working a mere 40 hours), and the whole family earns combined what a single parent used to in half as many hours, then the US will finally be able to compete with China fair and square. but hey its a free country. No one is forcing you to work. And if you choose to raise your family on $4000 per year annual salary, thats your choice. But if you think you need some of the extra luxuries, like food and shelter then thats your choice also. sounds like a win win for everyone.
After that I suppose the US will have the advantage since everyone knows that americans are willing to forgo their vacations to live their blessed lifestyle of abundance. (thereby driving down wages, and simply making labour more extensive with no additional abundance for the labourer)
"Sadly instead of attempting to assist military and LEO's, the makers will let greed get in the way."
Yes. wouldn't it be a wonderful world if the power to impose your will on others cost nothing?
abusing a monopoly and commiting wilful fraud are entirely different things. I dont see what 1 has to do with the other.
But what are you trying to say about microsoft exactly?
selling a product which you know does not meet specifications in order to derive a benefit is a crime called "fraud".
Trying to artificially inflate your bugfix ratings or trying to save money is a benefit.
I dont see how this company expects to evade legal CRIMINAL responsibility when someone is harmed because of a pre-existant security problem they knew about but did not disclose at the time of sale.
"If the answer is yes, I find that to be extremely disturbing in an Orwellian sense. While I find the concept of finding children sexually appealing to be personally abhorrent, I'm not sure the law extends (or should extend) into virtual roleplaying between consenting adults."
just curious.. do you find the concept of finding cars or guns sexually appealing abhorrent as well?
how about shoes?
how about members of the same sex?
how about seeing pretty girls murdered or kidnapped by gorillas?
in any event.. the orwellian laws you are not sure about are in full force in Canada. written stories, drawings, visual reproductions (which would include virtual reality), audio recordings, even purely textual descriptions.. are all defined as child pornography, even if it involved no actual children at any time in any way. It would be a crime to talk about it on the phone even. its not merely a crime to posses child porn. Even seeing it or hearing it is a criminal offense.
while your ad hominem attacks and straw men are very persuasive in the defense of this "dunderhead":
the granparent post was excusing US injustice on the basis of injustice in Egypt.
No one took the position that injustice elsewhere should be ignored. You simply presumed that anyone who points a finger at the US must for some reason automatically be excusing Egypt.
As far as 9/11 is concerned, I'm not sure what you want me to think about it.
What the hell does Egyptian fascism have to do with 9/11?
What the US is doing in Iraq or Afghanistan also has nothing to do with what we are talking about. We are talking about US FASCISM and stifling of human rights inside its own borders.
I'm afraid you wont get me to quake in fear at the word "9/11" either. 9/11 was NOT the worst thing that happened to humankind in the past 10 years by a longshot.
lastly:
Invading IRAQ had nothing to do with 911.
Invading IRAQ had nothing to do with 911.
Invading IRAQ had nothing to do with 911.
Invading IRAQ had nothing to do with 911.
"There's a fine line between ambition and insanity."
.. and leave off the words "but after the kids moved out he didn't really do anything else with his life"... "on the other hand here's a fat wad of cash! woo!!"
insanity is not necessarily a bad thing in the end.
"The quest for "more" of "it" never ends, there's no satisfactoin, no end, no peace."
there are moments of peace... its called taking refreshment. But refreshment that doesn't lead to future action is in vain. And the remainder of your life is in vain the moment you say "this is enough: there is no more".
"When all you desire is "more" be it "challenges overcome, deeds accomplished, or inventions and creations" the difference between that and dollars is trifle. All those are merely things, and as you've poingantly stated you'll never sustain the capacity to achieve them, nor aquire the ability to hold on to them."
Ever heard of a guy called Jesus? or another guy called Lord Byron? Or Joan of Arc? Edgar Allan Poe?
creative works and original experiences DO have meaning. And after you are dead they still have meaning. They pass onto others and create within them something which could not have existed any other way.
these people did something ORIGINAL.. they died young and died BROKE. they would have been dead anyway but they left something far far more valuable than any sum of money they could have ever earned as a labourer. They have more today than they ever had. They lost nothing. And they have given more to humanity than any wad of cash could have done.
go and be an inspiration and your actions can have meaning beyond the date of your death.
do nothing but work your ass off and in the end people will give you a stupid eulogy like "he was a good father"
Sitting around and lamenting that you are bored with your high paying IT job but too scared to give it up to do something new, so you live the remainder of your days, empty and unfulfilled.... now *THAT* is insane.
"Unfortunately a lot of those fantastic selfless engineers and programmers are paid for their work by that evil advertising revenue.
The majority of software developed for the interweb is one small example."
Where does this "advertising revenue" come from? It comes out of the pockets of firms which do productive industry. If there was no advertising revenue then this capital would stay with the productive industry to be invested directly into productive industry (such as making products superior so people selected those on the basis of their superiority rather than on the basis of its marketing department.. alternatively the prices could be reduced.. which frees up capital in other sectors of the economy). Those selfless engineers would find work in the original productive industries (or in the other sectors which find themselves with more spare capital) rather than in advertising firms.
You haven't made a convinving argument.
The fact that much of the crap on the internet is funded by advertising is irrelevant because other funding mechanisms exist or can be contrived for the good stuff and as far as the crap is concerned: if it vanished people would need to find other means of entertainment... perhaps real life friendship or sports? (what would the world come to?)
What you are describing is monopoly pricing. Where there is open competition then absolute costs do in fact influence prices. The reason is that where there is open competition, if absolute costs fall then the previous selling price earns much higher than the typical rate of profit; this in turn attract competetors into your market (where apparently above average profits are available). If absolute costs increase then profit margins fall to below average. This causes competetors to flee that market in pursuit of higher profits (at least average) elsewhere. when competition leaves the market, then supply diminishes and profit margins increase until something close to average profits are earned.
In a monopoly situation where no one is free to enter your market, then you can and will charge as much as people are willing to pay. If this is a hyerprofit margin it wont matter because your monopoly excludes competition.
DVD's are in fact a monopoly situation (thanks to copyright), (so are prescription drugs) so you are correct. It will NOT decrease the price of the movies. The actual cost of a DVD is compared to its selling price is virtually irrelevant. DVD's AND non-generic DRUGS sell for as much as consumers are willing to pay.
these types of monopoly products are optimal subjects for taxation. As the tax can't cause the price to actually increase since consumers are unwilling to pay more than the present monopoly prices. (i.e. if you slap a 20% sales tax on DVD's or prescription drugs, the actual selling price will not go up, because if it could, it already would have).
this particular technology seems absurd however. I suspect that most of the theft is performed by underpayed disgruntled store employees.
At minimum wage these kids could never actually afford to buy a DVD movie legitimately. If you want to cut down theft.. give the employees free movies.
is this any less plausible than talking serpents, men walking on water, water turning to wine, immaculate conception, talking bushfires, resurrection or giants that live 800 years but leave no bones?