Are you sure now? Because the terms of service of the forum might claim copyright of all posts.
They can claim all sorts of things, but that does not mean it will stand up in court. Even if the forum owns the copyright, that does not help the person who has not licensed it from anyone.
In general, letters sent by post are considered property of the recipient.
And books are considered the property of the purchaser, but that does not make them the copyright holder.
So a statement made for public consumption might be considered property of the public.
Nope, it is assumed all copyrighted material is for public consumption, since copyright law exists to promote publication. Try republishing a story from a large newspaper and see what happens.
Otherwise, what is to stop FDR family from claiming copyright on the phrase "we have nothing to fear by fear itself"?
Well, several things. First, that is not the exact words he used, but paraphrase. He said, "...the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Second, it predates the copyright extension so it has entered the public domain by now. it was said in 1933 and the copyright expired in 1961. Third, Copyright law includes a large and somewhat vague doctrine called "Fair Use" which makes it legal to use parts of or entire works for certain purposes, subject to certain restrictions. Using a quote like this almost always fair use. Finally, Providing attribution, that is FDR said, "...the only thing we have to fear is fear itself..." is a fact, and facts are not copyrightable.
That's simply not true. You do not have the right to commit suicide. You do not have the right to marry your sibling.
According to the constitution, however, you should have those rights under federal law.
You do not have the right to do insider trading.
The constitution specifically grants congress the right to manage interstate trading and insider trading falls into that category.
You do not have the right to have consensual sex with a 16 year old.
This becomes an issue because it involves a conflict of rights between you and the 16 year old, whose rights are held in trust for them by the state and their guardians. Strictly according to the constitution, the minor's guardian would have to approve, subject to guidelines from the state.
I think maybe you're confusing what the constitution says, with what laws are enforced today, many of which are unconstitutional. (See Bush's comments about how relevant he finds the constitution.)
This case is special, however, since, morally and ethically, people cannot agree on the definition of 'person' here and the law cannot therefore determine who the rights are meant to protect.
Ahh but since so much of the constitution hinges on this question, the feds are the ones that have to make this determination, otherwise states could just as easily define a person as excluding blacks or hispanic, or gays. Even leaving this question up to the states, that definition still has to be based upon observable criteria and specifically not on religious beliefs, since it otherwise violates the constitutional separation of church and state. I've not seen a since anti-abortion law that defines a person in terms that are not based upon religious beliefs and explain what a person is and why a fetus qualifies, but my sperm, my kidney, or a pot bellied pig does not without resorting to religious arguments about souls or transparent, contrived criteria to hide that fact.
Absent that determination, the State has a responsibility to protect the freedoms of the mother.
Well, or the mother and to a lesser extent the father.
There is no rational way to decide that issue and if decided arbitrarily, a large portion of the population will strongly oppose it on deep moral grounds (to the point of violence).
Sure there is. You base the definition upon a conservatively agreed upon scientific consensus, as has already been done. It is illegal to ban abortions now, and there has been no large violent revolution as a result. There is violence, but it is on the same level or less of other violent acts committed by religious zealots against those they feel are "evil" because of different beliefs (like violence against gays and jews).
Like-minded individuals need to debate and decide the issue in their communities, not at the federal level.
Debate is fine and state level laws are fine, just so long as they are not laws enforcing a given religion without any non-religious definitions... which is exactly what happened and what was deemed unconstitutional.
As for abortion, IMO it's not a religious issue... sure the religious zealots have a strong pro-life stance but religion aside if you believe that life exists at conception wouldn't abortion violate that unborn person's right to live? Is the right to abort the "inconvenience" of pregnancy more important than that unborn person's right to live?
It certainly is not straightforward, but abortion bans would need to have a non-religious definition of what a "person" is who is deserving of human rights and that definition would have to be based scientifically and logical and not just a contrived justification for religious beliefs. That has not been the case with any anti-abortion law I've seen.
...if you believe that life exists at conception wouldn't abortion violate that unborn person's right to live?
More specifically addressing this point... we don't ban killing in the US. I can legally kill all sorts of living beings, even intelligent ones and I can legally kill human tissues, like my kidney if I have it removed. For an anti-abortion law to be constitutional it would have to have a clear definition of what is deserving of protection and human rights that explains why my sperm or my kidney or a pot bellied pig or an AI is not deserving of that same protection from me... and that definition would need to have a non-religious basis with no mentions of the soul or the bible. Further, like the creationism debate, it would have to be more than a thin disguise for pushing a particular religion's beliefs. Anything less is a violation of the separation of church and state, in my opinion.
I'm not a religious person but I've always considered that consensual unprotected sex to be a sort of physical contract agreeing to pregnancy with abortion a violation of that contract at the expense of someone else's life.
Why? What if one party claimed to be using protection (the pill or a vasectomy)? What if they claimed to have counted the days properly? What if the people involved mistakenly believed that sex could not result in pregnancy because their education was lacking? None of those would stand up as agreeing to a contract, legally.
I consider sex and pregnancy to be separate issues. After all, one is no longer required for the other due to technology. Personally, I feel that if both people want a baby, great. If a woman wants a baby and a man does not, fine let her have one, but then it is wholly her responsibility and there is no reason her beliefs should force him to support a child. He should be responsible for half the costs of the abortion. If he wants one and she does not, too bad she is taking the medical risks and has the right to abort to remove those risks. That is informed consent in my mind. The fetus at the point where it is legal to abort deserves no more rights than my kidney, at least from a scientific standpoint.
Of course that all depends on when you believe life exists...
Not life, but personhood. Dandelions are alive, but not legally protected from my killing them. The point at which "life" exists is a talking point for religious advocates. Ditto, for a soul. The law needs to be based upon observable facts and real, scientific differences. When a fetus has more humanity and value to society than a pig, or when we're ready to grant the right to life to pigs, well I'm willing to reconsider.
That's an important part of what the founders had in mind when they wrote the constitution as they did. Allowing different states to take different approaches is a *good* thing, particularly since it's very easy for the population of the US to move to a different state if the system in their state doesn't work for them.
You're missing an important caveat. Allowing states to do things differently is a good thing... provided all the states are adhering to the federal constitution, which I believe banning abortion would violate. As for allowing people to easily travel to another state as a solution, it is a poor one. There are already laws making it illegal to cross the state border for the purpose of doing some act. Also, because people travel the problems of one state can quickly become the problems of another. For example, if one state passes laws which decrease crime and increase the quality of living in that state, criminals from another state will likely cross the border to commit crimes where they can make more profit. (Note, no this is not off topic as the link between abortion and lower crime rates is well established at this point.)
This creates a sort of competitive market of political approaches, where the approaches that work best *for the people* attract the largest number of people.
I agree in principal, but the feds still need to regulate interstate issues and issues of the federal constitution to protect minority groups from the tyranny of the majority. In my mind federal taxes that are "given back" to states with strings attached is a huge problem with the balance of power and the main cause of our current weak state's rights.In that, Ron Paul is right, the feds should not be funding abortions in states, but neither should they be collecting the taxes they are currently using to do that.
Your reading comprehension needs some work. He is against federal regulation of pregnancy, which is the de facto situation right now and UNCONSTITUTIONAL, as that right is reserved to the states and the people by default.
I disagree. Abortion is fundamentally a debate on whether or not the government should pass laws that are based upon religious beliefs, given the constitutional separation of church and state. States are also forbidden from passing laws that violate the federal constitution, and trying to shift this decision to them is simply trying to do and end run around the constitution in the guise of state's rights.
I also fail to see how the legality of abortion, regardless of one's position on the matter, has anything to do with privacy.
It has little to do with it, but invariably political discussions of candidates will expand to other topics and positions of that candidate. The privacy issues are: does a minor's parent's need to be informed, does any government agency keep records, can private organizations videotape everyone entering an abortion clinic (even when those tapes are used to create lists of victims for criminal acts by organized crime/terrorists), and does the father need to be informed.
I think the problem here is what people do to others when they're so high they're out of control and then they hurt other people.
Which people, do, but not very often on drugs. The main way drugs breed crime is through addiction, and that crime is largely mitigated by sane, free treatment programs such as they have in most of Europe.
I'd also argue that drugs breed crime. Crime which is usually perpetrated against people who are NOT the ones doing drugs.
Statistically, drug bans breed crime. Did we learn nothing from prohibition? By making drugs illegal we create an entire, multi-billion dollar economy of crime, motivating not only the crimes of doing and selling drugs, but the violent crime caused by criminal competition and resistance to the police. Take a look at countries where drugs are not legal but are decriminalized and you'll note they invariably have lower violent crime rates than the US. Capitalism uses human greed to motivate, but drug bans simply pit the police against capitalism, and human greed wins.
If society didn't force people to live up to a certain standard we'd be living in anarchy. This may or may not be your desire.
Live up to or live down to? It is simply a matter of opinion. From a legal point of view, laws are only justified when they mitigate a conflict of rights between individuals, not when they try to make someone act in a certain way, regardless of the effect of that person on society. That is freedom, which used to be an American value.
We also have the issue of the rights of the infant, who is also a human being. Just because the infant is still in the womb does not mean it is not a sentient, emotional, feeling human being. Abortion of children, especially after the 1 to 2 month period when the neurological system becomes active, is the violent murder of a human being.
Here's where the flaw in your argument appears. Scientifically speaking, a fetus has fewer of the qualities of a human our society values as important, than a pig does. It is not illegal to kill a pig. Legally abort-able fetuses have no real brain, no rational thought, no ability to survive on their own, cannot reason, and cannot even perceive their environment in most cases. They do have human DNA, but so does my spit, and we don't grant it any human rights under the law. They do have the potential to become a human being under the right circumstances, but so does my sperm and it is not granted human rights under the law.
At some point a fetus becomes "human enough" to deserve protection as a human being. Our current laws give said fetus extreme benefit of the doubt in this case. 50% or so of all pregnancies abort naturally, but no one has suggested a program to monitor women to detect these pregnancies and try to save all that half of all "people." As a pro-life person would you support such a program? Do you support a ban on killing all animals, as they too are alive and scientifically no less like us then a fetus? Do you support a ban on killing plants? They are alive and have as much of a nervous system and consciousness as early stage fetuses. How pro-life are you, or are you really "pro-human fetus life?"
I've discussed this topic with many people. Scientifically, no one has provided justification for why human fetuses should be protected while pigs and human semen are not... except those people who fall back on religious concepts and start to argue unscientific things like souls and the bible. I'm curious to hear your response to my questions and reasoning for them.
The Abortion issues aside the idea of letting individual states decide on topics like this is a very good idea IMO.
I disagree. Now I'm a huge proponent of state's rights and shrinking the role of the federal government as well as federal taxes. Abortion and many other topics, however, need to be addressed federally because they are constitutional issues. States cannot be allowed to pass laws that violate the constitution, including the separation of church and state.
How can we expect individual preferences to be respected if we can't even respect the majority preferences of a state sized community?
The reason we have a bill of rights is to prevent the majority from abusing minorities. If states are allowed to pass laws that violate the constitution we'd have states banning all religions except christianity in short order, and that goes directly against individual freedom. Abortion is simply a more convoluted application of the very same thing. The only justification given for abortion bans is religious, and the government at both the state and federal level is and should be prohibited from enforcing religious laws when there is no conflict of rights between individual citizens.
Here's the deal: This is a QuickTime problem, not a Firefox problem. Apple needs to fix QuickTime. There should be nothing wrong with Firefox handing off the request to an application that's supposed to handle it correct.
I 90% agree with you; however, I do think operating systems should handle transactions with internet applications differently than normal processes. Both Vista and Leopard and any Linux distro with SELinux enhancements has the ability to sandbox certain processes for added security. The reason this exploit does not work with IE is because runs it as a plug-in and sandboxes all of those plug-ins within IE. I'd argue that any process to which data is "handed off" by a Web browser, e-mail client, or chat client should run in a sandbox as an extra layer of protection against this common type of attack.
Yeah, Quicktime is the culprit here and Firefox is not to blame, but I'd argue that the OS (all of them currently) is partly to blame for not sandboxing data coming into the machine via the Web.
You forgot 3) "switch to an operating system where your development tools aren't beholden to the whims of a single OS+Hardware vendor"
Umm, I think this article in part demonstrates that on OS X your tools are not beholden to the whims of Apple, if anyone seriously thought they were. Apple is providing less support for Java in their included dev tools, but it is not like there are not other popular development tools like Eclipse and obviously not even the runtime is being held up significantly by Apple's glacial pace.
Personally, I think Apple is making a mistake by ignoring Java, but then again, why should they do all the work when others will do it for them. I'd much rather Apple and Sun and the community worked together for the benefit of all, since Java is not going away anytime soon, but it would be foolish to rely upon any one supplier for all your dev tools. A big part of the draw of Java is the choices available; unlike.Net or the Visual environments. If this is the response when Apple does not immediately switch to Java 6 I wonder how hardcore C developers will react when/if Apple moves away from GCC.
I'm with you on this one. (as I type away on my Mac-mini) I would be UTTERLY LIVID if a Windows update horked my grub bootloader, Apple deserves no less rage for this shenanigan.
What if when you downloaded Grub, you downloaded a.8 beta release that made it clear that it was both unsupported and would expire in a few months, but you kept using the beta version of Grub anyway and then it conflicted with a Linux update, because it had not been tested, because it was no longer supported now that the final version was out. The answer is, upgrade to the real release version once the beta test is over, or don't complain about it.
When you buy a product, ANY product, there's an implied agreement.
Yeah, and when you sign up for a beta test program there is more than an implied agreement, there is a specifically spelled out, "use at your own risk" "don't use after the beta program" and "backup your data" warning. If you ignore it, you deserve what you get.
One important note is this commercial started airing shortly after Boot Camp was announced. A later version of the same commercial changes the part that says "Purchase of Windows XP required." to "Purchase of Windows and Parallels software required." implying in the initial version that no extra software other than Windows was required.
But you didn't need Bootcamp as you could set it up to dual boot without it the same as Linux users have been doing for decades. You still don't need it, it is just an easy way to install a boot manager and the Windows drivers. Then, when Apple's Bootcamp beta program became popular they went out of their way to clarify the commercials to make sure people knew Bootcamp was not supported, officially endorsing Parallels. It sounds to me like they bent over backwards on this one, and some people are still bitching.
People are just whiney cheapskates who not only want something for nothing, they want that something supported and updated for nothing for all time.
At least Microsoft extended the life of XP since it knows where its bottom line comes from - customer loyalty.
What the hell are you taking about? Apple has not EOLed 10.4 or even 10.3 yet. This is about set of patches for 10.4 for the love of Kali! This is about Apple no longer supporting a beta version of a payware product, now that the final version is out.
If you want bootcamp, buy it or use one of the free alternatives. If you don't want it, don't buy it. Just don't complain when you're using an unsupported beta version you downloaded as part of a beta test and something breaks because Apple isn't supporting it.
Sure, but one that only shows up if you're running expired beta software, so not really a priority for Apple.
Why doesn't Apple let Tiger users download Bootcamp? Smells like a "forced update".
Umm, because it is a feature of their new OS and they want people to pay for new features. The only way this is different from all the other new features in 10.5 is that they offered a beta that worked on 10.4 and told you when you installed it that:
It was a beta and not supported
The beta expires in October 2007, and using it beyond that is strictly "at your own risk."
If someone installed an update and was still running the 10.5 beta instead of the real version and it broke something, would you complain that Apple was just trying to get money out of them by forcing them to buy the real version instead of testing and supporting the beta still?
Apple has insufficiently tested updates before and messed up and accidentally broken fixes with updates and deserve to be taken to task when that happens. They've been pretty good about getting right on the problem and issuing a new fix within a week or so. This, however, expired beta software, seems like a non-issue to me.
Yeah if you're running a beta boot loader that you've hacked to prevent it from expiring (or intentionally set your system clock to a couple months ago) and you install an OS system update on it without waiting to see how it works on other people's hacked machines, then your system may not boot until you fix it. Why is the OS relevant in this case again?
Probably. According to anecdotes from people with this problem on the forums, using the included archive re-install option on the install disk fixes it without having to wipe any data or preferences.. although it does reload the OS itself.
There are two ways I know, existing credit card numbers and SSNs. Since most dating sites are free, people generally don't provide either and don't want to. Some states have laws that make it illegal to require a SSN in order to identify a person. For the most part, these sites just try to match the name and location with lists of felons, and using a fake name, makes the check fail, as noted by people who tested MySpace's check for felony convictions. It results in false positives and is trivial to bypass. All it is, is marketing to make people feel safer, when they really are no safer.
If you have access to another Mac that is still working:
Supposedly, just reinstalling from disk and selecting the archive old data option works too, without needing an external disk. Of course if you have an external disk, backing up is a good idea.
Or is this just the easy fix for Joe Sixpack and there's really a more in-depth fix that doesn't involve wiping the drive but is too difficult for the average user?
On the support forum users are reporting the option to reinstall the OS while archiving the old data seems to work. There is no need to wipe the drive and I imagine it is just people conditioned by years of windows use; wiping the drive versus the correct option is just a matter of which selection button you pick and is no harder.
This seems like a rather glaring oversight. The only reason that something available previously being available only for newer versions of a product is to force someone to upgrade.
Previously only a beta version was available. When they released the final version it was included with 10.5. It would be nice if they kept the beta that worked on 10.4 available, but it is beta software and it is understandable if they don't want to deal with the support headaches. If they were shipping a real version for 10.4, then they'd have to test every new patch to OS X and see if it worked with bootcamp (which admittedly would have been nice).
You're kidding me, right? The background check, conducted by some presumably reliable company, with corporate resources behind it, is unlikely to uncover any information on the potential date... but I'm going to do better myself by using "personal responsibility"?
Okay, so assume you're running a corporation and you want your users to feel safe and use your site. What is more cost effective real methods, or empty marketing? Now as your business people go to your Web page and input personal information. You have no way of checking if the information they enter, even their name is correct. What kind of background check do you think you can perform that will be effective? You don't even know the person's real name if they decide to just make up an alias.
Okay now you're an individual who wants to meet someone. Should you abrogate your own personal responsibility and trust the company you're doing business with to keep you safe or should you assume that the company has neither the means nor the motivation to protect you and take personal responsibility for your own safety? Taking person responsibility does not mean you do or don't run your own background check, but just meeting someone in a public place puts you in a much better position to determine if a person is dangerous than the dating company. Hell, you can ask them for their driver's license and have a good shot at seeing if they are who they claim, then you can run a background check on them.
The point is, if this type of bill is used to create advertising for a few companies, many people will assume those companies are in a position to really provide some safety to them, when that is certainly not the case. In my mind it is better to be upfront and advocate responsibility on the part of customers and save a lot of grief.
Excuse me but last time I checked it was farely easy to uncover if somebody has beem convicted of a Felony.
You're missing the point. It is fairly easy to tell if someone is convicted of a felony if you know their real name because you saw their ID. None of these dating sites are asking for ID, so they only show if the name a person put into their profile is the same name as a person with a felony conviction. Most actual criminals who know the site does such a check, will just use a different name. On the other hand, people who just happen to have the same name as a criminal, will probably have trouble using dating sites. Then some of those people will have to start using a disclaimer and some real criminals will start claiming to likewise be falsely identified.
The bottom line, all such checks do is muddle the issue and provide some people with a false sense of security.
I think the websites should enforce the policy themselves without needless legislation.
The last time I heard, most sites considered it, realized it was useless, and decided not to do it, except one company that advertises that feature heavily and is the one lobbying for this law in the first place.
So in other words, background checks can be very useful if used correctly.
Since many states have laws making it illegal to require a SSN for private transactions and since they're just filling out a form on the internet and you have no way of knowing if they are lying, how can you perform a reliable check. Hi My name might be Erin Kuzniki and I might be a 26 year old woman from Ohio... or maybe I'm someone completely else. Why don't you run a check to see if I'm a criminal and tell everyone here on Slashdot so they know if they can trust me.
It's always been resistant toward going to the middle-low and low-end market in terms of price. In the 90s, they experimented with licensing out their software and letting generic makers market hardware bundled with it -- but it cannabalized their own sales. I wonder if they could make it work differently today
I doubt it. MS still has a monopoly on desktop OS's and Apple licensing their OS to OEMs puts then in direct competition with that monopoly. Investing in competing against an entrenched monopoly is a fool's game. It costs more money to overcome their abuses and in the end, even if you win market share, the market is less lucrative for you than it was for them because without a monopoly you can't price gouge.
Even in the PC market there are higher-end manufacturers (Lenovo/IBM laptops) so why not apple?
Apple is a higher end PC manufacturer, they just use OS X as a differentiator to win sales against Lenovo, etc.
I can't imagine the other manufacturers will put out a pretty package that will compete with Apple directly but one for budget conscious consumers that Apple could never have hoped to catch anyway.
There are many smaller markets Apple is not pursuing, including the very low end. There are some good reasons. For one thing, will Apple's cut of low-end sales make them as much money as they make on their medium level machines and refurb machines they currently sell to those same customers? Will the low end machines have firewire including target disk mode, needed to take advantage of some of OS X's features and motivate future upgrades from Apple? Will people buy these low end machines as their first Mac and conclude OS X is really slow and a lot of the features are not useful, because they don't have the hardware needed to make it work well? Will that poison Apple's brand for these people and people they talk to and people who read reviews written by them?
Apple may some day pursue the low end of the market with new machines, but probably not until it becomes profitable for them to do so in the long term. Ideally, the market will be repaired and Apple will stop bundling their OS and hardware, but for that to happen MS's monopoly would have to be broken... and I don't see that happening with our current political culture of legalized bribery.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope.
They can claim all sorts of things, but that does not mean it will stand up in court. Even if the forum owns the copyright, that does not help the person who has not licensed it from anyone.
In general, letters sent by post are considered property of the recipient.And books are considered the property of the purchaser, but that does not make them the copyright holder.
So a statement made for public consumption might be considered property of the public.Nope, it is assumed all copyrighted material is for public consumption, since copyright law exists to promote publication. Try republishing a story from a large newspaper and see what happens.
Otherwise, what is to stop FDR family from claiming copyright on the phrase "we have nothing to fear by fear itself"?Well, several things. First, that is not the exact words he used, but paraphrase. He said, "...the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Second, it predates the copyright extension so it has entered the public domain by now. it was said in 1933 and the copyright expired in 1961. Third, Copyright law includes a large and somewhat vague doctrine called "Fair Use" which makes it legal to use parts of or entire works for certain purposes, subject to certain restrictions. Using a quote like this almost always fair use. Finally, Providing attribution, that is FDR said, "...the only thing we have to fear is fear itself..." is a fact, and facts are not copyrightable.
check out the USCO site for more info.
I am not a lawyer. Are you?Nope, but I can read and I'm not afraid to educate myself on issues that effect me.
According to the constitution, however, you should have those rights under federal law.
You do not have the right to do insider trading.The constitution specifically grants congress the right to manage interstate trading and insider trading falls into that category.
You do not have the right to have consensual sex with a 16 year old.This becomes an issue because it involves a conflict of rights between you and the 16 year old, whose rights are held in trust for them by the state and their guardians. Strictly according to the constitution, the minor's guardian would have to approve, subject to guidelines from the state.
I think maybe you're confusing what the constitution says, with what laws are enforced today, many of which are unconstitutional. (See Bush's comments about how relevant he finds the constitution.)
Ahh but since so much of the constitution hinges on this question, the feds are the ones that have to make this determination, otherwise states could just as easily define a person as excluding blacks or hispanic, or gays. Even leaving this question up to the states, that definition still has to be based upon observable criteria and specifically not on religious beliefs, since it otherwise violates the constitutional separation of church and state. I've not seen a since anti-abortion law that defines a person in terms that are not based upon religious beliefs and explain what a person is and why a fetus qualifies, but my sperm, my kidney, or a pot bellied pig does not without resorting to religious arguments about souls or transparent, contrived criteria to hide that fact.
Absent that determination, the State has a responsibility to protect the freedoms of the mother.Well, or the mother and to a lesser extent the father.
There is no rational way to decide that issue and if decided arbitrarily, a large portion of the population will strongly oppose it on deep moral grounds (to the point of violence).Sure there is. You base the definition upon a conservatively agreed upon scientific consensus, as has already been done. It is illegal to ban abortions now, and there has been no large violent revolution as a result. There is violence, but it is on the same level or less of other violent acts committed by religious zealots against those they feel are "evil" because of different beliefs (like violence against gays and jews).
Like-minded individuals need to debate and decide the issue in their communities, not at the federal level.Debate is fine and state level laws are fine, just so long as they are not laws enforcing a given religion without any non-religious definitions... which is exactly what happened and what was deemed unconstitutional.
It certainly is not straightforward, but abortion bans would need to have a non-religious definition of what a "person" is who is deserving of human rights and that definition would have to be based scientifically and logical and not just a contrived justification for religious beliefs. That has not been the case with any anti-abortion law I've seen.
...if you believe that life exists at conception wouldn't abortion violate that unborn person's right to live?More specifically addressing this point... we don't ban killing in the US. I can legally kill all sorts of living beings, even intelligent ones and I can legally kill human tissues, like my kidney if I have it removed. For an anti-abortion law to be constitutional it would have to have a clear definition of what is deserving of protection and human rights that explains why my sperm or my kidney or a pot bellied pig or an AI is not deserving of that same protection from me... and that definition would need to have a non-religious basis with no mentions of the soul or the bible. Further, like the creationism debate, it would have to be more than a thin disguise for pushing a particular religion's beliefs. Anything less is a violation of the separation of church and state, in my opinion.
I'm not a religious person but I've always considered that consensual unprotected sex to be a sort of physical contract agreeing to pregnancy with abortion a violation of that contract at the expense of someone else's life.Why? What if one party claimed to be using protection (the pill or a vasectomy)? What if they claimed to have counted the days properly? What if the people involved mistakenly believed that sex could not result in pregnancy because their education was lacking? None of those would stand up as agreeing to a contract, legally.
I consider sex and pregnancy to be separate issues. After all, one is no longer required for the other due to technology. Personally, I feel that if both people want a baby, great. If a woman wants a baby and a man does not, fine let her have one, but then it is wholly her responsibility and there is no reason her beliefs should force him to support a child. He should be responsible for half the costs of the abortion. If he wants one and she does not, too bad she is taking the medical risks and has the right to abort to remove those risks. That is informed consent in my mind. The fetus at the point where it is legal to abort deserves no more rights than my kidney, at least from a scientific standpoint.
Of course that all depends on when you believe life exists...Not life, but personhood. Dandelions are alive, but not legally protected from my killing them. The point at which "life" exists is a talking point for religious advocates. Ditto, for a soul. The law needs to be based upon observable facts and real, scientific differences. When a fetus has more humanity and value to society than a pig, or when we're ready to grant the right to life to pigs, well I'm willing to reconsider.
You're missing an important caveat. Allowing states to do things differently is a good thing... provided all the states are adhering to the federal constitution, which I believe banning abortion would violate. As for allowing people to easily travel to another state as a solution, it is a poor one. There are already laws making it illegal to cross the state border for the purpose of doing some act. Also, because people travel the problems of one state can quickly become the problems of another. For example, if one state passes laws which decrease crime and increase the quality of living in that state, criminals from another state will likely cross the border to commit crimes where they can make more profit. (Note, no this is not off topic as the link between abortion and lower crime rates is well established at this point.)
This creates a sort of competitive market of political approaches, where the approaches that work best *for the people* attract the largest number of people.I agree in principal, but the feds still need to regulate interstate issues and issues of the federal constitution to protect minority groups from the tyranny of the majority. In my mind federal taxes that are "given back" to states with strings attached is a huge problem with the balance of power and the main cause of our current weak state's rights.In that, Ron Paul is right, the feds should not be funding abortions in states, but neither should they be collecting the taxes they are currently using to do that.
I disagree. Abortion is fundamentally a debate on whether or not the government should pass laws that are based upon religious beliefs, given the constitutional separation of church and state. States are also forbidden from passing laws that violate the federal constitution, and trying to shift this decision to them is simply trying to do and end run around the constitution in the guise of state's rights.
I also fail to see how the legality of abortion, regardless of one's position on the matter, has anything to do with privacy.It has little to do with it, but invariably political discussions of candidates will expand to other topics and positions of that candidate. The privacy issues are: does a minor's parent's need to be informed, does any government agency keep records, can private organizations videotape everyone entering an abortion clinic (even when those tapes are used to create lists of victims for criminal acts by organized crime/terrorists), and does the father need to be informed.
Which people, do, but not very often on drugs. The main way drugs breed crime is through addiction, and that crime is largely mitigated by sane, free treatment programs such as they have in most of Europe.
I'd also argue that drugs breed crime. Crime which is usually perpetrated against people who are NOT the ones doing drugs.Statistically, drug bans breed crime. Did we learn nothing from prohibition? By making drugs illegal we create an entire, multi-billion dollar economy of crime, motivating not only the crimes of doing and selling drugs, but the violent crime caused by criminal competition and resistance to the police. Take a look at countries where drugs are not legal but are decriminalized and you'll note they invariably have lower violent crime rates than the US. Capitalism uses human greed to motivate, but drug bans simply pit the police against capitalism, and human greed wins.
If society didn't force people to live up to a certain standard we'd be living in anarchy. This may or may not be your desire.Live up to or live down to? It is simply a matter of opinion. From a legal point of view, laws are only justified when they mitigate a conflict of rights between individuals, not when they try to make someone act in a certain way, regardless of the effect of that person on society. That is freedom, which used to be an American value.
Here's where the flaw in your argument appears. Scientifically speaking, a fetus has fewer of the qualities of a human our society values as important, than a pig does. It is not illegal to kill a pig. Legally abort-able fetuses have no real brain, no rational thought, no ability to survive on their own, cannot reason, and cannot even perceive their environment in most cases. They do have human DNA, but so does my spit, and we don't grant it any human rights under the law. They do have the potential to become a human being under the right circumstances, but so does my sperm and it is not granted human rights under the law.
At some point a fetus becomes "human enough" to deserve protection as a human being. Our current laws give said fetus extreme benefit of the doubt in this case. 50% or so of all pregnancies abort naturally, but no one has suggested a program to monitor women to detect these pregnancies and try to save all that half of all "people." As a pro-life person would you support such a program? Do you support a ban on killing all animals, as they too are alive and scientifically no less like us then a fetus? Do you support a ban on killing plants? They are alive and have as much of a nervous system and consciousness as early stage fetuses. How pro-life are you, or are you really "pro-human fetus life?"
I've discussed this topic with many people. Scientifically, no one has provided justification for why human fetuses should be protected while pigs and human semen are not... except those people who fall back on religious concepts and start to argue unscientific things like souls and the bible. I'm curious to hear your response to my questions and reasoning for them.
I disagree. Now I'm a huge proponent of state's rights and shrinking the role of the federal government as well as federal taxes. Abortion and many other topics, however, need to be addressed federally because they are constitutional issues. States cannot be allowed to pass laws that violate the constitution, including the separation of church and state.
How can we expect individual preferences to be respected if we can't even respect the majority preferences of a state sized community?The reason we have a bill of rights is to prevent the majority from abusing minorities. If states are allowed to pass laws that violate the constitution we'd have states banning all religions except christianity in short order, and that goes directly against individual freedom. Abortion is simply a more convoluted application of the very same thing. The only justification given for abortion bans is religious, and the government at both the state and federal level is and should be prohibited from enforcing religious laws when there is no conflict of rights between individual citizens.
I 90% agree with you; however, I do think operating systems should handle transactions with internet applications differently than normal processes. Both Vista and Leopard and any Linux distro with SELinux enhancements has the ability to sandbox certain processes for added security. The reason this exploit does not work with IE is because runs it as a plug-in and sandboxes all of those plug-ins within IE. I'd argue that any process to which data is "handed off" by a Web browser, e-mail client, or chat client should run in a sandbox as an extra layer of protection against this common type of attack.
Yeah, Quicktime is the culprit here and Firefox is not to blame, but I'd argue that the OS (all of them currently) is partly to blame for not sandboxing data coming into the machine via the Web.
Umm, I think this article in part demonstrates that on OS X your tools are not beholden to the whims of Apple, if anyone seriously thought they were. Apple is providing less support for Java in their included dev tools, but it is not like there are not other popular development tools like Eclipse and obviously not even the runtime is being held up significantly by Apple's glacial pace.
Personally, I think Apple is making a mistake by ignoring Java, but then again, why should they do all the work when others will do it for them. I'd much rather Apple and Sun and the community worked together for the benefit of all, since Java is not going away anytime soon, but it would be foolish to rely upon any one supplier for all your dev tools. A big part of the draw of Java is the choices available; unlike .Net or the Visual environments. If this is the response when Apple does not immediately switch to Java 6 I wonder how hardcore C developers will react when/if Apple moves away from GCC.
What if when you downloaded Grub, you downloaded a .8 beta release that made it clear that it was both unsupported and would expire in a few months, but you kept using the beta version of Grub anyway and then it conflicted with a Linux update, because it had not been tested, because it was no longer supported now that the final version was out. The answer is, upgrade to the real release version once the beta test is over, or don't complain about it.
When you buy a product, ANY product, there's an implied agreement.Yeah, and when you sign up for a beta test program there is more than an implied agreement, there is a specifically spelled out, "use at your own risk" "don't use after the beta program" and "backup your data" warning. If you ignore it, you deserve what you get.
But you didn't need Bootcamp as you could set it up to dual boot without it the same as Linux users have been doing for decades. You still don't need it, it is just an easy way to install a boot manager and the Windows drivers. Then, when Apple's Bootcamp beta program became popular they went out of their way to clarify the commercials to make sure people knew Bootcamp was not supported, officially endorsing Parallels. It sounds to me like they bent over backwards on this one, and some people are still bitching.
People are just whiney cheapskates who not only want something for nothing, they want that something supported and updated for nothing for all time.
What the hell are you taking about? Apple has not EOLed 10.4 or even 10.3 yet. This is about set of patches for 10.4 for the love of Kali! This is about Apple no longer supporting a beta version of a payware product, now that the final version is out.
If you want bootcamp, buy it or use one of the free alternatives. If you don't want it, don't buy it. Just don't complain when you're using an unsupported beta version you downloaded as part of a beta test and something breaks because Apple isn't supporting it.
Sure, but one that only shows up if you're running expired beta software, so not really a priority for Apple.
Why doesn't Apple let Tiger users download Bootcamp? Smells like a "forced update".Umm, because it is a feature of their new OS and they want people to pay for new features. The only way this is different from all the other new features in 10.5 is that they offered a beta that worked on 10.4 and told you when you installed it that:
If someone installed an update and was still running the 10.5 beta instead of the real version and it broke something, would you complain that Apple was just trying to get money out of them by forcing them to buy the real version instead of testing and supporting the beta still?
Apple has insufficiently tested updates before and messed up and accidentally broken fixes with updates and deserve to be taken to task when that happens. They've been pretty good about getting right on the problem and issuing a new fix within a week or so. This, however, expired beta software, seems like a non-issue to me.
Yeah if you're running a beta boot loader that you've hacked to prevent it from expiring (or intentionally set your system clock to a couple months ago) and you install an OS system update on it without waiting to see how it works on other people's hacked machines, then your system may not boot until you fix it. Why is the OS relevant in this case again?
Probably. According to anecdotes from people with this problem on the forums, using the included archive re-install option on the install disk fixes it without having to wipe any data or preferences.. although it does reload the OS itself.
There are two ways I know, existing credit card numbers and SSNs. Since most dating sites are free, people generally don't provide either and don't want to. Some states have laws that make it illegal to require a SSN in order to identify a person. For the most part, these sites just try to match the name and location with lists of felons, and using a fake name, makes the check fail, as noted by people who tested MySpace's check for felony convictions. It results in false positives and is trivial to bypass. All it is, is marketing to make people feel safer, when they really are no safer.
Supposedly, just reinstalling from disk and selecting the archive old data option works too, without needing an external disk. Of course if you have an external disk, backing up is a good idea.
On the support forum users are reporting the option to reinstall the OS while archiving the old data seems to work. There is no need to wipe the drive and I imagine it is just people conditioned by years of windows use; wiping the drive versus the correct option is just a matter of which selection button you pick and is no harder.
Previously only a beta version was available. When they released the final version it was included with 10.5. It would be nice if they kept the beta that worked on 10.4 available, but it is beta software and it is understandable if they don't want to deal with the support headaches. If they were shipping a real version for 10.4, then they'd have to test every new patch to OS X and see if it worked with bootcamp (which admittedly would have been nice).
Okay, so assume you're running a corporation and you want your users to feel safe and use your site. What is more cost effective real methods, or empty marketing? Now as your business people go to your Web page and input personal information. You have no way of checking if the information they enter, even their name is correct. What kind of background check do you think you can perform that will be effective? You don't even know the person's real name if they decide to just make up an alias.
Okay now you're an individual who wants to meet someone. Should you abrogate your own personal responsibility and trust the company you're doing business with to keep you safe or should you assume that the company has neither the means nor the motivation to protect you and take personal responsibility for your own safety? Taking person responsibility does not mean you do or don't run your own background check, but just meeting someone in a public place puts you in a much better position to determine if a person is dangerous than the dating company. Hell, you can ask them for their driver's license and have a good shot at seeing if they are who they claim, then you can run a background check on them.
The point is, if this type of bill is used to create advertising for a few companies, many people will assume those companies are in a position to really provide some safety to them, when that is certainly not the case. In my mind it is better to be upfront and advocate responsibility on the part of customers and save a lot of grief.
You're missing the point. It is fairly easy to tell if someone is convicted of a felony if you know their real name because you saw their ID. None of these dating sites are asking for ID, so they only show if the name a person put into their profile is the same name as a person with a felony conviction. Most actual criminals who know the site does such a check, will just use a different name. On the other hand, people who just happen to have the same name as a criminal, will probably have trouble using dating sites. Then some of those people will have to start using a disclaimer and some real criminals will start claiming to likewise be falsely identified.
The bottom line, all such checks do is muddle the issue and provide some people with a false sense of security.
I think the websites should enforce the policy themselves without needless legislation.The last time I heard, most sites considered it, realized it was useless, and decided not to do it, except one company that advertises that feature heavily and is the one lobbying for this law in the first place.
So in other words, background checks can be very useful if used correctly.Since many states have laws making it illegal to require a SSN for private transactions and since they're just filling out a form on the internet and you have no way of knowing if they are lying, how can you perform a reliable check. Hi My name might be Erin Kuzniki and I might be a 26 year old woman from Ohio... or maybe I'm someone completely else. Why don't you run a check to see if I'm a criminal and tell everyone here on Slashdot so they know if they can trust me.
I doubt it. MS still has a monopoly on desktop OS's and Apple licensing their OS to OEMs puts then in direct competition with that monopoly. Investing in competing against an entrenched monopoly is a fool's game. It costs more money to overcome their abuses and in the end, even if you win market share, the market is less lucrative for you than it was for them because without a monopoly you can't price gouge.
Even in the PC market there are higher-end manufacturers (Lenovo/IBM laptops) so why not apple?Apple is a higher end PC manufacturer, they just use OS X as a differentiator to win sales against Lenovo, etc.
I can't imagine the other manufacturers will put out a pretty package that will compete with Apple directly but one for budget conscious consumers that Apple could never have hoped to catch anyway.There are many smaller markets Apple is not pursuing, including the very low end. There are some good reasons. For one thing, will Apple's cut of low-end sales make them as much money as they make on their medium level machines and refurb machines they currently sell to those same customers? Will the low end machines have firewire including target disk mode, needed to take advantage of some of OS X's features and motivate future upgrades from Apple? Will people buy these low end machines as their first Mac and conclude OS X is really slow and a lot of the features are not useful, because they don't have the hardware needed to make it work well? Will that poison Apple's brand for these people and people they talk to and people who read reviews written by them?
Apple may some day pursue the low end of the market with new machines, but probably not until it becomes profitable for them to do so in the long term. Ideally, the market will be repaired and Apple will stop bundling their OS and hardware, but for that to happen MS's monopoly would have to be broken... and I don't see that happening with our current political culture of legalized bribery.