Seconded. Black Isle/Obsidian are a damn fine developer. PS:T and Icewind Dale are every bit as good as the Bioware games made using the same engine, which is saying something.
Plus, if you look at the stuff that was cut from KOTOR 2 at the last minute, you begin to see the potential it had. I think it would have been head and shoulders above the first game, had they been given the time to get it right. Of course, "developer makes good game, publisher forces early release (usually for Christmas)" is an old and often repeated tale in the games industry...
Ay, but you can't make a sound bite of that now, can you? Football is a widespread, socially acceptable sport. Going up against it would be political suicide. Jack Thompson and his ilk would piss off tens of millions of people if his scapegoat was sports instead of games.
That fundamentally is what this is all about. Forget about the question of whether games actually have a negative impact on mental health or not - what matters is that games are an extremely convenient scapegoat on which to pin society's ills. They don't have widespread acceptance (yet), the people who play them are young males (a group predisposed to violence already), and a sizable percentage of the population grew up long before gaming even existed. That's a recipe right there for pinning the blame.
Addictions aren't manageable, by definition. They take over all aspects of your life.
Just a minor quibble with your argument - there are such things as high functioning addicts. Typically in such a case the person is able to pull themselves together enough of the time to function more or less like a normal person, but they are unable to quit. I've known at least one high functioning alcoholic (who later hit a downward spiral, but the alcoholism went back before that). I'd say that such cases show addiction to be "manageable".
I do agree with your main point however. Statements like "one in nine MMO players are addicted" reflect an overly broad definition of "addict". When somebody can get bored with their MMO and quit, or move on, they don't qualify - try that with an alcoholic and see how far they get.
Why not put a tax on breathing then ? Every time someone breaths out 4% of the gas volume is made of CO2?
Don't be ridiculous.
The Co2 we release via metabolism comes from food. That food in turn takes carbon from the air via photosynthesis (either directly in the case of plants we eat, or indirectly in the case of herbivores who eat plants, and are consumed by us in turn). Every mole of Co2 you breath out, is equal to one mole of Co2 that a crop plant took in. We're carbon neutral already.
Well, a big move towards nuclear fission as a power source could be one. I'm sure it would cut carbon emissions, but it causes other problems. In the end, the cure might be worse than the disease. I don't know enough of the specifics to know if this is the case, but I do know that toxic waste that will be dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years is nothing to sneeze at, and that there are concerns about nuclear weapons that could be developed by countries employing fission plants.
Eh, the concerns about fission are really more public perception than reality.
Per the waste issue, we do have the option of reprocessing it. Much of what we call nuclear "waste" is actually nuclear fuel - it's just mixed up with other stuff that is, in fact, waste. It can be recycled, thus reducing the amount of waste we have to deal with.
Also, the "ten thousand years" argument is selective perception. Some radioactive waste lasts a ridiculously long time, some radioactive waste is incredibly toxic, but these aren't the same kinds of waste.
To give an example made relevant by current events, Polonium-210, which was used to poison that Russian expatriate, is really nasty stuff. A pinhead will kill you. But it has a half-life of all of about 138 days. That's days, not years. The reason for this is that radioactive decay is a finite process. The longer a type of waste lasts, the less radiation it emits, and the more radioactive a type of waste is, the shorter its half-life.
Per the issue of nuclear proliferation, I think the cat's already out of the bag. The US managed to make nuclear weapons with 1940s tech; it is unreasonable to assume that other nations will be unable to duplicate their 60 year old success, with or without reactors to supply them.
I don't disagree with your overall point that taking any and all measures to combat climate change could backfire. I do think however that switching to nuclear power is a good idea, even without the global warming angle. Given the choice between a form of power that dumps its waste into the air (some of which is even radioactive!) and a form of power that contains its waste within the reactor vessel, I'd take the latter.
However, planting trees does seem better than doing nothing
Ay, the trees do indeed do some good. Essentially, you're storing X many tonnes of carbon as biomass per Y many square kilometers (miles if you prefer) of land used. Key word here is "storing" though - those X tonnes of carbon will remain as biomass as long as there is a forest covering Y land. If you later decide to log, or burn, or otherwise clear, or if the forest dies due to natural causes (if for example the land was unsuitable for sustaining trees without human intervention, and we stop interfering) you undo the process. And let's be honest, eventually we will do exactly that. Nothing lasts forever.
Sagan's point (per the GP) is that in order to have a lasting impact on the amount of airborne Co2 in the carbon cycle, you need to first plant trees, then cut them down, then bury them. You need to lock up the carbon as biomass, and then remove that biomass from the system. Otherwise, you just end up back at square one when the carbon compounds in question burn, decay, or are otherwise returned to the air.
I'd be in favor of switching over to biofuels, to ditch the fossil fuel habit, and then creating an artificial carbon sink by diverting some of the biomass used in making the fuel to long term storage. Burying it deep enough should do the trick; it isn't dangerous, so it doesn't matter if the carbon sink leaks a bit over time. That, or we find a way to make plastics from biomass, and start using those in construction and the like (make a useful carbon sink, instead of a mere dump).
There may not be legal precedent for an action of this sort, but that doesn't mean that it's unconstitutional.
No, there is legal precedent. The precedent is stuff like the ruling in TFA; judgments have invariably favored free speech over nanny-state censorship laws. The precedent is against you.
They government should easily be able to regulate sales to minors. Explicit content will have just as much of an effect on a person as alcohol or cigarettes will
Get back to me when games start causing cancer. Or impair your driving. Or ruin your liver, or damage your brain, or clog your cardiovascular system, or... well you get the idea.
The reason for underage smoking and drinking laws isn't to make up for shitty parenting. The reason for those laws is because the substances they regulate are genuinely harmful. We live in a free society, so we allow adults to risk their health if they so choose, but we do not allow the same for children, as we do not grant them all the rights of an adult.
Equating entertainment with substances that damage your health as if they're on par is utter, utter bullshit. Period. Even if one were to take the semi-rational argument that people can become desensitized to violence at face value, that still doesn't add up to the same impact as smoking. Only a brain dead monkey (like say, Jack Thompson) could think otherwise.
Moreover, even if we were to regulate entertainment "for the children", singling out games is unjust; books, movies and TV should get the same treatment. The law does not exist for politicians to make scapegoats with.
Hardly. Banning the sale of the games would be unconstitutional. Banning their sale to minors is no more unconstitutional than banning the sale of alcohol to minors, and about as interesting.
Wrong.
Games are not alcohol. Games are not cigarettes. Games are entertainment - the same as novels, movies and television. Regulating the sale of books/movies/TV to minors? Unconstitutional.
Porn is treated as it's own category under law, and in any case would apply to pornographic games regardless. There are broadcast rules, but those given legal justification by the fact that they govern public airwaves - cable, satellite and rental are exempt, as they're opt in (just like gaming). Contrary to what many people think, the restrictions preventing the sale of tickets to R rated movies to minors are put in place by the theaters, not by law - games already have those same restrictions in place (Wal-mart et al will not sell M rated games to kids).
So your justification for this law isn't substantiated by the facts. If there were prior rulings stating that selling DVDs of violent movies to minors could be regulated, then you might have a point, but in actual fact such laws are similarly seen as unconstitutional. Pretty much the only way to justify censorship is pornographic content (since there are laws governing porn) or broadcast (thus involving the FCC).
There's a quote by Douglas Adams along those same lines: "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
Slightly off topic, but still apt. The people who get snookered into thinking these laws are a good thing are very much in the last category.
Well, for 1), I'd point out that in cases like this the judges involved would be shown the game (as in, watch somebody else play it), or read summaries about it. I haven't played GoW, but I know enough about it to think that a passing look, or a general summary, would tell a judge that it's borrowed (loosely) from Greek mythology.
Moreover, the gist of the argument from TFS seems to be that actual Greek mythology is plenty bloody already. Ergo it is inconsistent to limit the expression of a game borrowing from that mythology while treating the original stories as high art, or protected speech. This is akin to the argument brought up on/. whenever stories like this emerge that if you want to shield children from violent or sexual themes, the first thing you should ban from their lives is the bible. Yet it's invariably the fundies who push hardest for censorship in the name of "decency".
As for 2), this is the US we're talking about. There's this pervasive puritanical notion that sex is an evil corrupting thing, whereas violence is not. I happen to agree with the second part (I don't think exposing children to fake violence is going to do any harm), but I'll freely admit the first part isn't at all rational.
Why is this surprising? That the law was blatantly unconstitutional was clear. This was strictly a political move from the get-go.
The politicians involved said to the public "look, I'm taking a stand on the evil violent games! Vote for me!" because games are a wonderful scapegoat, and because taking such a stance is politically safe. The law didn't need to remain in effect in order to serve its purpose, it only needed to be passed. I doubt anyone who drafted the thing will care at this stage, months after the fact.
Now what will they say to the public? "Oh folks, I tried, but those damn activist judges ruled against me. So sorry." It's so easy to shift the blame when the public doesn't care whether those in power respect the constitution.
What amazes me isn't that the judges showed common sense. That's their job. What amazes me is that voters continue to fall for these simple tricks.
Does this review suggest that the mainstream media in the US is ready to turn a critical eye on the music companies?
I'm not sure somebody who does the technical column for a print newspaper is quite the same thing as "the mainstream media".
As a gross generalization, people who write on technical subjects for a general audience are semi-technical geeks. They aren't in the really tech heavy category, like engineers or programmers, but they're still quite comfortable with gadgets. Think of the sorta guy who'd end up doing tech support for his extended family, or who could take apart his computer and put it back together again without breaking it. Skilled, but amateur.
The reason for this is that writing on technical subjects for a non-geek audience is difficult for people who are steeped in the subject. Ever watched an engineer try to explain to a non-geek what exactly it is that they do? So if your job is reviewing the latest gadget for a general audience, you have to be enough of a geek to really understand the device, but not so technically minded that you'll slip into incomprehensible jargon.
So the writer in TFA would probably fit right in on slashdot. There are plenty of people here who are geeks, but not professional geeks. It isn't surprising that he therefor doesn't much like the music companies, or their stance on issues like DRM.
OTOH, obviously if he's writing for a dead tree publication, he must have an editor. If the editor doesn't mind him sniping at Universal, then maybe progress is being made.
I think it's from a book (or series) called "The Medical Detectives", published about 40 odd years ago, which in turn was an aggregation of stories compiled by a doctor who wrote for a magazine. My parents still have a copy lying around somewhere - I read through it when I was a kid. Interesting stuff, though I'm pretty sure some of the medicine involved is now out of date.
Actually, not so much. As many a SysAdmin has pointed out, one of the most common (if not the most common) vectors for illegal porn is P2P networks. I challenge you to show me how those obey the laws of supply and demand, or how anyone can make a buck off distributing pictures or videos via Bittorrent.
A bigger part of the problem is that most people are technologically illiterate. The ISPs can, in this case, sell their anti kiddie porn blacklist as a PR move, since 90% of their customers won't know that it doesn't actually work.
You'd get better millage with honeypots and proper law enforcement. Blocking helps nobody, and has the potential for abuse; actually catching predatory pedophiles with pornographic pictures of children on their hard drives would do some good. As long as common sense and due process are applied, of course (which, in a politically charged climate, they may not be).
Ay, that's the definition of child porn espoused by you and me. Is it the definition espoused by this "Cybertip" organization?
Put another way, I have a simple definition for child porn. Child porn to me is porn made by or for predatory pedophiles. Simple nudity doesn't qualify, nor does a 16 year old engaging in sexual acts (the former because nudity doesn't have to be sexual in nature, and the latter because most pedos wouldn't find a 16 year old to their liking). There are gray areas to be sure, but there is a distinction to be made.
I'm all in favour of arresting people who make or consume porn involving children (ie sexually explicit photos/movies involving very young subjects). I'd also be in favour of making sure they get a fair trial; that means ensuring things like the privacy of the accused (since the mere accusation would be ruinous for an innocent person).
That being said, how do I know that the organization in TFA uses the same definition as I do? Maybe to them "child porn" is any pornography involving women who may or may not be adults. Without transparency and public oversight, I wouldn't trust them with such a responsibility. Neither should you.
And, as I mentioned elsewhere, I have serious doubts as to the effectiveness of blacklisting websites as a solution. This whole thing reeks of a PR stunt by the ISPs involved.
OTOH, when they did this with BT in the UK (as mentioned in TFA), there were significant problems with the blacklists. The organization providing the list of "child porn sites" had very little transparency, all in the name of "protecting the children", since if they allowed people to have a list what sites were blocked, they'd be letting the site owners relocate. They were also apparently apathetic when it came to unlisting innocent sites.
I don't know squat about this Cybertip organization. Maybe they're on the level. But I do know that letting somebody else make blacklisting decisions for me isn't wise. There is potential for abuse, regardless of what proponents say, and I'm not sure what good this will do.
Who exactly are we keeping away from these sites? The pervs would get thrown in jail anyway for collecting child porn (illegal under Canadian law), and your average citizen wouldn't come into contact with these sorts of material anyway, barring accidents or "accidents". And if the only materials affected are web sites, doesn't that leave P2P, usenet, email lists, and all other manner of distributing illegal material online? That's a pretty big oversight, more than large enough to render the blacklists irrelevant.
In short, I view this as little more than a PR move. Likely irrelevant in its intended purpose, and inconvenient for those who get wrongly blacklisted, but it'll give the corporations involved brownie points among the technologically illiterate public.
The same can't be said for the production of CO2 from combustion of fossil fuels versus organic processes. And I have never seen spontaneous precipitation of liquid or frozen CO2, but I have seen a lot of rain and snow when humidity levels get high enough. It's pretty clear to me that there are non-biological processes for the regulation of water-vapour content in the atmosphere that don't have an equivalent for CO2. It seems therefore plausible to me that CO2 would have a higher risk of continuing increase than water vapour.
Actually, CO2 concentrations are mediated by biological processes, in much the same way water is. So, while it doesn't precipitate, it does indeed leave the atmosphere easily; if it didn't, we'd be awful short of oxygen.
The problem is the net amount of carbon in the system. Biological activity (and this includes man-made activity like farming or biofuel production) has no net impact on the amount of carbon in the carbon cycle; what gets added to the air by respiration or by combustion of biofuel/wood/waste gets removed by photosynthesis (even if this isn't immediate, it will have to balance out due to conservation of matter). However, carbon locked up in fossil fuels has been outside of that cycle for millions of years; our reintroduction of it into the air is the root problem.
There is no equivalent with the hydrological cycle. We move water around a lot, but we don't add or remove it; digging wells, or irrigation canals, or creating reservoirs doesn't alter the net amount of water in circulation. There could be a disequilibrium of water due to human activity (that is, we lower the amount of water in aquifers, and raise the amount of vapor in the air), but that's not going to have the same impact as causing a net increase in circulating CO2.
blaming an entire religion for a murderous action is silly unless you can point to justification for the action in the foundational religious text/s.
Actually, when people use religion to justify violence, you can usually count on them to do this themselves. "See, what I did was morally right. It says right here in [insert religious text] to kill all the unbelievers/sinners/whoever."
Of course, this doesn't get around the fact that usually the religious reasons are a pretext used by those with power to justify actions for their own gain. But therein lies part of the problem; when a leader uses a religion or ideology to motivate people to do wrong for his own gain, is that religion/ideology culpable? If a political figure or a preacher tells his followers to kill in the name of X, does X therefor share some of the blame? Does communism get the blame for what Stalin did, or Christianity the blame for what the Crusaders did? After all, the people doing the actual killing have probably been led to believe that what they're doing is right. The people in power may not be true believers, but you can bet their goons are.
And that gets you to a second problem. If the religion or ideology is not to be blamed for the evil it can be used to justify, should it therefor get any credit for the good it can cause? Christianity brought us intolerant fundamentalism on the one hand, and numerous charities on the other. If it can't be blamed for the former, can it be given any credit for the latter?
I'd suggest that one of two positions is possible. Either you can claim that religion is an ideology that can be used for good or evil, but is itself neutral, or that religion is a driving force that can cause people to turn into saints or monsters. Too many people on both sides want to cherry pick their facts to support both ideas when it suits them; fundamentalists would have you believe that when Christians do good, the credit lies with the religion, and when they do evil, the blame lies only with themselves, while people who dislike religion would blame it for all the evil it causes and ignore the good.
(Side note: I should probably mention that I'm a strongly secular agnostic. I don't dislike religion, but I don't particularly like it either.)
Neutrons have no electrical charge, hence the "neutral" part of their name, so a magnetic field won't contain them. The containment field is essentially transparent to neutron radiation, and to all wavelengths of light; what is contained is the charged plasma that makes up the fuel.
This has certain advantages (like letting you breed tritium from lithium in the reactor walls), and certain drawbacks (the aforementioned material degradation/neutron activation, plus the need for radiation shielding to protect the operators). I don't share the GP's pessimism about our ability to solve the materials problem, but it is a significant problem to be sure.
1. There are aneutronic fusion reactions. We aren't at the stage where we can use them, but the possibility is there. With such a reaction, neutron flux is absent, and the materials problem goes away. The drawback, of course, is the need for much higher plasma temperatures, but that may be a solvable one once we've worked out the kinks in getting D-T fusion running.
2. I'm quite sure fusion researchers are aware of this problem. Once we've gotten past the current hurdles, then materials degradation will become a major focus. You're putting the cart before the horse; first you get a self-sustaining reaction then you work out the bugs in the reactor design. And this isn't the only bug that will need to be addressed before we move beyond the prototype stage; we don't yet have a way to put new fuel in and get waste out without dampening the reaction either. Stuff like IFMIF is further down the road.
3. Given the above (the fact that we're not at that stage yet), why is it reasonable to assume these are insurmountable? We don't know if they can be fixed until we try; if we haven't yet tried, then it's still too early to say that fixing them "may never be possible".
4. Finally, wasn't the whole idea of using a replaceable lithium blanket supposed to alleviate this? You put lithium in the reactor to breed more tritium, then replace the lithium as it gets used up by the neutron induced reactions.
Oh, and just so we're clear, I agree with you on the notion of building fission reactors in the meantime. I view nuclear as the lesser of several evils, and a far better choice for power generation than fossil fuels. I disagree with the notion that we should give up fusion R&D however - fission has drawbacks that fusion would lack, assuming commercial fusion reactors became a reality.
Please do some basic fact checking before commenting. This thing is a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor. The design is common knowledge, decades old and is proven to work. No pseudo science involved, period. Your comment would have potentially made sense if we were talking cold fusion, or if the kid had claimed to have made a toroidal reactor.
Moreover, differentiating between a nuclear reaction and a chemical one is easy; the former is going to give off some highly recognizable forms of radiation (X-rays are specifically mentioned in TFA, and IIRC Fusors give off neutrons as well).
Slashdot Mirror
What? It doesn't not make sense to me. :-)
Seconded. Black Isle/Obsidian are a damn fine developer. PS:T and Icewind Dale are every bit as good as the Bioware games made using the same engine, which is saying something.
Plus, if you look at the stuff that was cut from KOTOR 2 at the last minute, you begin to see the potential it had. I think it would have been head and shoulders above the first game, had they been given the time to get it right. Of course, "developer makes good game, publisher forces early release (usually for Christmas)" is an old and often repeated tale in the games industry...
Ay, but you can't make a sound bite of that now, can you? Football is a widespread, socially acceptable sport. Going up against it would be political suicide. Jack Thompson and his ilk would piss off tens of millions of people if his scapegoat was sports instead of games.
That fundamentally is what this is all about. Forget about the question of whether games actually have a negative impact on mental health or not - what matters is that games are an extremely convenient scapegoat on which to pin society's ills. They don't have widespread acceptance (yet), the people who play them are young males (a group predisposed to violence already), and a sizable percentage of the population grew up long before gaming even existed. That's a recipe right there for pinning the blame.
I do agree with your main point however. Statements like "one in nine MMO players are addicted" reflect an overly broad definition of "addict". When somebody can get bored with their MMO and quit, or move on, they don't qualify - try that with an alcoholic and see how far they get.
Start?
The Co2 we release via metabolism comes from food. That food in turn takes carbon from the air via photosynthesis (either directly in the case of plants we eat, or indirectly in the case of herbivores who eat plants, and are consumed by us in turn). Every mole of Co2 you breath out, is equal to one mole of Co2 that a crop plant took in. We're carbon neutral already.
Per the waste issue, we do have the option of reprocessing it. Much of what we call nuclear "waste" is actually nuclear fuel - it's just mixed up with other stuff that is, in fact, waste. It can be recycled, thus reducing the amount of waste we have to deal with.
Also, the "ten thousand years" argument is selective perception. Some radioactive waste lasts a ridiculously long time, some radioactive waste is incredibly toxic, but these aren't the same kinds of waste.
To give an example made relevant by current events, Polonium-210, which was used to poison that Russian expatriate, is really nasty stuff. A pinhead will kill you. But it has a half-life of all of about 138 days. That's days, not years. The reason for this is that radioactive decay is a finite process. The longer a type of waste lasts, the less radiation it emits, and the more radioactive a type of waste is, the shorter its half-life.
Per the issue of nuclear proliferation, I think the cat's already out of the bag. The US managed to make nuclear weapons with 1940s tech; it is unreasonable to assume that other nations will be unable to duplicate their 60 year old success, with or without reactors to supply them.
I don't disagree with your overall point that taking any and all measures to combat climate change could backfire. I do think however that switching to nuclear power is a good idea, even without the global warming angle. Given the choice between a form of power that dumps its waste into the air (some of which is even radioactive!) and a form of power that contains its waste within the reactor vessel, I'd take the latter.
Sagan's point (per the GP) is that in order to have a lasting impact on the amount of airborne Co2 in the carbon cycle, you need to first plant trees, then cut them down, then bury them. You need to lock up the carbon as biomass, and then remove that biomass from the system. Otherwise, you just end up back at square one when the carbon compounds in question burn, decay, or are otherwise returned to the air.
I'd be in favor of switching over to biofuels, to ditch the fossil fuel habit, and then creating an artificial carbon sink by diverting some of the biomass used in making the fuel to long term storage. Burying it deep enough should do the trick; it isn't dangerous, so it doesn't matter if the carbon sink leaks a bit over time. That, or we find a way to make plastics from biomass, and start using those in construction and the like (make a useful carbon sink, instead of a mere dump).
Get back to me when games start causing cancer. Or impair your driving. Or ruin your liver, or damage your brain, or clog your cardiovascular system, or... well you get the idea.
The reason for underage smoking and drinking laws isn't to make up for shitty parenting. The reason for those laws is because the substances they regulate are genuinely harmful. We live in a free society, so we allow adults to risk their health if they so choose, but we do not allow the same for children, as we do not grant them all the rights of an adult.
Equating entertainment with substances that damage your health as if they're on par is utter, utter bullshit. Period. Even if one were to take the semi-rational argument that people can become desensitized to violence at face value, that still doesn't add up to the same impact as smoking. Only a brain dead monkey (like say, Jack Thompson) could think otherwise.
Moreover, even if we were to regulate entertainment "for the children", singling out games is unjust; books, movies and TV should get the same treatment. The law does not exist for politicians to make scapegoats with.
Games are not alcohol. Games are not cigarettes. Games are entertainment - the same as novels, movies and television. Regulating the sale of books/movies/TV to minors? Unconstitutional.
Porn is treated as it's own category under law, and in any case would apply to pornographic games regardless. There are broadcast rules, but those given legal justification by the fact that they govern public airwaves - cable, satellite and rental are exempt, as they're opt in (just like gaming). Contrary to what many people think, the restrictions preventing the sale of tickets to R rated movies to minors are put in place by the theaters, not by law - games already have those same restrictions in place (Wal-mart et al will not sell M rated games to kids).
So your justification for this law isn't substantiated by the facts. If there were prior rulings stating that selling DVDs of violent movies to minors could be regulated, then you might have a point, but in actual fact such laws are similarly seen as unconstitutional. Pretty much the only way to justify censorship is pornographic content (since there are laws governing porn) or broadcast (thus involving the FCC).
There's a quote by Douglas Adams along those same lines:
"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
Slightly off topic, but still apt. The people who get snookered into thinking these laws are a good thing are very much in the last category.
Well, for 1), I'd point out that in cases like this the judges involved would be shown the game (as in, watch somebody else play it), or read summaries about it. I haven't played GoW, but I know enough about it to think that a passing look, or a general summary, would tell a judge that it's borrowed (loosely) from Greek mythology.
/. whenever stories like this emerge that if you want to shield children from violent or sexual themes, the first thing you should ban from their lives is the bible. Yet it's invariably the fundies who push hardest for censorship in the name of "decency".
Moreover, the gist of the argument from TFS seems to be that actual Greek mythology is plenty bloody already. Ergo it is inconsistent to limit the expression of a game borrowing from that mythology while treating the original stories as high art, or protected speech. This is akin to the argument brought up on
As for 2), this is the US we're talking about. There's this pervasive puritanical notion that sex is an evil corrupting thing, whereas violence is not. I happen to agree with the second part (I don't think exposing children to fake violence is going to do any harm), but I'll freely admit the first part isn't at all rational.
Why is this surprising? That the law was blatantly unconstitutional was clear. This was strictly a political move from the get-go.
The politicians involved said to the public "look, I'm taking a stand on the evil violent games! Vote for me!" because games are a wonderful scapegoat, and because taking such a stance is politically safe. The law didn't need to remain in effect in order to serve its purpose, it only needed to be passed. I doubt anyone who drafted the thing will care at this stage, months after the fact.
Now what will they say to the public? "Oh folks, I tried, but those damn activist judges ruled against me. So sorry." It's so easy to shift the blame when the public doesn't care whether those in power respect the constitution.
What amazes me isn't that the judges showed common sense. That's their job. What amazes me is that voters continue to fall for these simple tricks.
As a gross generalization, people who write on technical subjects for a general audience are semi-technical geeks. They aren't in the really tech heavy category, like engineers or programmers, but they're still quite comfortable with gadgets. Think of the sorta guy who'd end up doing tech support for his extended family, or who could take apart his computer and put it back together again without breaking it. Skilled, but amateur.
The reason for this is that writing on technical subjects for a non-geek audience is difficult for people who are steeped in the subject. Ever watched an engineer try to explain to a non-geek what exactly it is that they do? So if your job is reviewing the latest gadget for a general audience, you have to be enough of a geek to really understand the device, but not so technically minded that you'll slip into incomprehensible jargon.
So the writer in TFA would probably fit right in on slashdot. There are plenty of people here who are geeks, but not professional geeks. It isn't surprising that he therefor doesn't much like the music companies, or their stance on issues like DRM.
OTOH, obviously if he's writing for a dead tree publication, he must have an editor. If the editor doesn't mind him sniping at Universal, then maybe progress is being made.
I think it's from a book (or series) called "The Medical Detectives", published about 40 odd years ago, which in turn was an aggregation of stories compiled by a doctor who wrote for a magazine. My parents still have a copy lying around somewhere - I read through it when I was a kid. Interesting stuff, though I'm pretty sure some of the medicine involved is now out of date.
A bigger part of the problem is that most people are technologically illiterate. The ISPs can, in this case, sell their anti kiddie porn blacklist as a PR move, since 90% of their customers won't know that it doesn't actually work.
You'd get better millage with honeypots and proper law enforcement. Blocking helps nobody, and has the potential for abuse; actually catching predatory pedophiles with pornographic pictures of children on their hard drives would do some good. As long as common sense and due process are applied, of course (which, in a politically charged climate, they may not be).
(Joking aside, I'd agree with your solution.)
Ay, that's the definition of child porn espoused by you and me. Is it the definition espoused by this "Cybertip" organization?
Put another way, I have a simple definition for child porn. Child porn to me is porn made by or for predatory pedophiles. Simple nudity doesn't qualify, nor does a 16 year old engaging in sexual acts (the former because nudity doesn't have to be sexual in nature, and the latter because most pedos wouldn't find a 16 year old to their liking). There are gray areas to be sure, but there is a distinction to be made.
I'm all in favour of arresting people who make or consume porn involving children (ie sexually explicit photos/movies involving very young subjects). I'd also be in favour of making sure they get a fair trial; that means ensuring things like the privacy of the accused (since the mere accusation would be ruinous for an innocent person).
That being said, how do I know that the organization in TFA uses the same definition as I do? Maybe to them "child porn" is any pornography involving women who may or may not be adults. Without transparency and public oversight, I wouldn't trust them with such a responsibility. Neither should you.
And, as I mentioned elsewhere, I have serious doubts as to the effectiveness of blacklisting websites as a solution. This whole thing reeks of a PR stunt by the ISPs involved.
OTOH, when they did this with BT in the UK (as mentioned in TFA), there were significant problems with the blacklists. The organization providing the list of "child porn sites" had very little transparency, all in the name of "protecting the children", since if they allowed people to have a list what sites were blocked, they'd be letting the site owners relocate. They were also apparently apathetic when it came to unlisting innocent sites.
I don't know squat about this Cybertip organization. Maybe they're on the level. But I do know that letting somebody else make blacklisting decisions for me isn't wise. There is potential for abuse, regardless of what proponents say, and I'm not sure what good this will do.
Who exactly are we keeping away from these sites? The pervs would get thrown in jail anyway for collecting child porn (illegal under Canadian law), and your average citizen wouldn't come into contact with these sorts of material anyway, barring accidents or "accidents". And if the only materials affected are web sites, doesn't that leave P2P, usenet, email lists, and all other manner of distributing illegal material online? That's a pretty big oversight, more than large enough to render the blacklists irrelevant.
In short, I view this as little more than a PR move. Likely irrelevant in its intended purpose, and inconvenient for those who get wrongly blacklisted, but it'll give the corporations involved brownie points among the technologically illiterate public.
The problem is the net amount of carbon in the system. Biological activity (and this includes man-made activity like farming or biofuel production) has no net impact on the amount of carbon in the carbon cycle; what gets added to the air by respiration or by combustion of biofuel/wood/waste gets removed by photosynthesis (even if this isn't immediate, it will have to balance out due to conservation of matter). However, carbon locked up in fossil fuels has been outside of that cycle for millions of years; our reintroduction of it into the air is the root problem.
There is no equivalent with the hydrological cycle. We move water around a lot, but we don't add or remove it; digging wells, or irrigation canals, or creating reservoirs doesn't alter the net amount of water in circulation. There could be a disequilibrium of water due to human activity (that is, we lower the amount of water in aquifers, and raise the amount of vapor in the air), but that's not going to have the same impact as causing a net increase in circulating CO2.
Of course, this doesn't get around the fact that usually the religious reasons are a pretext used by those with power to justify actions for their own gain. But therein lies part of the problem; when a leader uses a religion or ideology to motivate people to do wrong for his own gain, is that religion/ideology culpable? If a political figure or a preacher tells his followers to kill in the name of X, does X therefor share some of the blame? Does communism get the blame for what Stalin did, or Christianity the blame for what the Crusaders did? After all, the people doing the actual killing have probably been led to believe that what they're doing is right. The people in power may not be true believers, but you can bet their goons are.
And that gets you to a second problem. If the religion or ideology is not to be blamed for the evil it can be used to justify, should it therefor get any credit for the good it can cause? Christianity brought us intolerant fundamentalism on the one hand, and numerous charities on the other. If it can't be blamed for the former, can it be given any credit for the latter?
I'd suggest that one of two positions is possible. Either you can claim that religion is an ideology that can be used for good or evil, but is itself neutral, or that religion is a driving force that can cause people to turn into saints or monsters. Too many people on both sides want to cherry pick their facts to support both ideas when it suits them; fundamentalists would have you believe that when Christians do good, the credit lies with the religion, and when they do evil, the blame lies only with themselves, while people who dislike religion would blame it for all the evil it causes and ignore the good.
(Side note: I should probably mention that I'm a strongly secular agnostic. I don't dislike religion, but I don't particularly like it either.)
Neutrons have no electrical charge, hence the "neutral" part of their name, so a magnetic field won't contain them. The containment field is essentially transparent to neutron radiation, and to all wavelengths of light; what is contained is the charged plasma that makes up the fuel.
This has certain advantages (like letting you breed tritium from lithium in the reactor walls), and certain drawbacks (the aforementioned material degradation/neutron activation, plus the need for radiation shielding to protect the operators). I don't share the GP's pessimism about our ability to solve the materials problem, but it is a significant problem to be sure.
A few points:
1. There are aneutronic fusion reactions. We aren't at the stage where we can use them, but the possibility is there. With such a reaction, neutron flux is absent, and the materials problem goes away. The drawback, of course, is the need for much higher plasma temperatures, but that may be a solvable one once we've worked out the kinks in getting D-T fusion running.
2. I'm quite sure fusion researchers are aware of this problem. Once we've gotten past the current hurdles, then materials degradation will become a major focus. You're putting the cart before the horse; first you get a self-sustaining reaction then you work out the bugs in the reactor design. And this isn't the only bug that will need to be addressed before we move beyond the prototype stage; we don't yet have a way to put new fuel in and get waste out without dampening the reaction either. Stuff like IFMIF is further down the road.
3. Given the above (the fact that we're not at that stage yet), why is it reasonable to assume these are insurmountable? We don't know if they can be fixed until we try; if we haven't yet tried, then it's still too early to say that fixing them "may never be possible".
4. Finally, wasn't the whole idea of using a replaceable lithium blanket supposed to alleviate this? You put lithium in the reactor to breed more tritium, then replace the lithium as it gets used up by the neutron induced reactions.
Oh, and just so we're clear, I agree with you on the notion of building fission reactors in the meantime. I view nuclear as the lesser of several evils, and a far better choice for power generation than fossil fuels. I disagree with the notion that we should give up fusion R&D however - fission has drawbacks that fusion would lack, assuming commercial fusion reactors became a reality.
Please do some basic fact checking before commenting. This thing is a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor. The design is common knowledge, decades old and is proven to work. No pseudo science involved, period. Your comment would have potentially made sense if we were talking cold fusion, or if the kid had claimed to have made a toroidal reactor.
Moreover, differentiating between a nuclear reaction and a chemical one is easy; the former is going to give off some highly recognizable forms of radiation (X-rays are specifically mentioned in TFA, and IIRC Fusors give off neutrons as well).