Yes, if XBox goes the way of the Dreamcast (cancelled with no successor in sight) then nobody will be screaming for the XBox2--because there won't be one. On the other hand, if Sega had had deep enough pockets to keep the Dreamcast alive, instead of cancelling it when its online games were just beginning to take off, then we might indeed be clamoring for Dreamcast2.
Actually, all the Court seems to have done was rule that the special nature of the internet does not exempt it from being subjected to the same kind of obscenity restrictions that have been found Constitutionally acceptable with respect to other media.
It certainly is inconvenient, since a prosecutor can choose the least-tolerant community available to file his obscenity case. But that has always been true.
If you are like most people in our culture, you probably have to think pretty hard to remember your last serious bacterial infection. Actually, you probably were unaware of it, because it was a mild case of food poisoning, and you were over it by the next day. Most of our common illnesses are viral. The major bacterial infections healthy people have to deal with routinely are food poisoning (where there is probably a pretty large dose of bacteria and/or toxin) and local infections. So unless you have had an infected finger, you probably haven't picked up a bacterial infection from your keyboard.
Now viruses are another matter. People mainly catch colds from other people's hands (they touch their runny nose, they touch something else, you touch it, you touch your nose, bingo). Shared keyboards probably play a role here, but probably less than handshaking, doorknobs, railings, and telephone handsets....
Yes, Katz has it exactly backwards. The enduring comic book "myths" are *products* of the Comics Code era. I think that breaking away from the CC restrictions is very much a good thing, but the limitations of CC (and simply the fact that comics were at the time very much a medium for kids) meant that writers could not rely upon extreme violence or sex to build audience appeal. So, whether by design, instinct, or trial and error, they tapped into fundamental and enduring power fantasies. Adolescent fantasies, to be sure, but even those who have outgrown them still remember what it was like to feel that way. Spiderman, of course, was the product of the Marvel "revolution," which added the insight that great power did not necessarily bring happiness. In a sense, Spiderman was the first hero to truly capture this post-war sensibility.
I say enabling parents to shelter their children from bad influence because that is all this law does. There is nothing saying that kids can't get their parents to go out and rent or buy these games for them. Just as parents are free let their kids watch Terminator 2 as they deem fit, parents would still be able to buy their children a copy of GTA 3.
However, there is nothing that prevents parents from monitoring their children's videogame play in the absence of such a law. So the law benefits parents who are too lazy to bother to monitor their children themselves, while penalizing (with regulatory burdens) parents who do not agree with the federally-imposed ratings, merchants who sell those games, and developers who create them.
Generally, the courts have held that to justify restriction of free speech, the hazard must be both clear and immediate, as indicated by the "fire in a crowded theater" example. Videogames fail both tests. Harm from videogames is certainly not "clear," as the incidence of youth violence has dropped steadily as videogame violence has become more realistic. And even those who advocate such restrictions don't claim the harm is "immediate."
This is just a typical example of Microsoft being intentionally misleading. What the *law* says is that you can't donate your PC to the school with Windows on it and keep a copy of operating system for installation on another PC. Of course, in practice this is largely irrelevant, as Microsoft's agreements with computer manufacturers make it nearly impossible to buy a PC without Windows, so who would want an extra copy of an obsolete version? But Microsoft manages to explain this in such a way as to give the false impression that you (or the school) cannot simply erase Windows, destroy the license and the Windows disks, and install LINUX.
Step 1: relegate all "adult" materials to.prn Step 2: pressure schools, libraries, and ISP's (in that order; divide and conquer) to block access to.prn sites
It's a familar strategy. Does anybody remember X-rated commercial movies? By putting a label on serious, but controversial, movies, regulators painted a target on them. Pretty soon, no theater chain or studio wanted to be assoicated with X-rated movies, which were idenfified with pornography in the public mind. Result: de facto censorship, but nobody has to take the blame. The ".prn" name is a dead giveaway.
After interviewing individuals arrested for possession of such material (and nothing else), it was found that over %80 of those say they would eventually try something with a child.
So? What if you interviewed people who had been fantasizing about having sex with children, but only masturbating over "non-pornographic" images of children (Sears catalogs, etc.). Do you really doubt that a substantial percentage, perhaps even 80%, would say that they would eventually try to act out their fantasies with a child?
Of course people who are strongly motivated toward sex with children are drawn to look at child pornography. I would venture to suggest, even, that those who are most likely to act out in the real world will also be the most likely to seek out illicit pornography. And this would be the case whether or not looking at pornography had any influence on the likelihood that they would molest a real child.
Unfortunately, this is a flawed argument. The problem is that sick people are almost never satisfied with a moderate amount of whatever makes them sick. If you give them all the virtual child porn they want, then some of them will want to take it to the "next level".
Seems circular. You want to argue that child porn is what makes pedophiles sick. But if they were not sick, why were they looking at child porn to begin with? Healthy people don't find child porn erotic--if anything, they find it disgusting, and they certainly are not going to look at it.
Certainly, people with these sorts of deviations frequently progress from fantasies to acting out, but it is very different to argue that this progression will not occur if they are denied fake child porn, and have to content themselves with fantasizing about the real kids on Sesame Street.
I worry a lot less about this than about drugs. A drug potentially can act with every single molecule in your body. But basically, a photon is a photon, your eyes are designed to handle photons. So long as they stay well below the UV frequencies (which can break bonds and produce actual chemical changes), you should be pretty safe. Even if you manage to bleach out all your visual pigment, it should eventually recover. I suppose that if you pumped enough photons into the retina, you could cook it from purely thermal effects, but that would take quite a bit of power.
My eye doctor believes that anything that interacts closely with a user's eyes should be classified as medical equipment and held to the same high, fault-tolerant standards as dialysis machines, heary defiberators, and breathing tents.
Anything that produces light can reasonably set to interact "closely" with the user's eyes. There are all sorts of light sources that have the potential to damage vision--many high-intensity desk lamps can damage your eyes if you screw up replacing the bulb and leave out the UV filter.
It seems to me that it should be possible to design reasonably fail-safe limits on power output to make such a device at least as safe as other common light sources to which consumers are exposed.
The Deadhead cult broke up when their leader died of a drug overdose in the mid-90s.
No, he died of an ordinary heart attack. Perhaps all those years of drug use contributed, but plenty of people who never use drugs die of heart attacks in their fifties. And of all the drugs he used over the year, the one most likely to have contributed to his demise was tobacco.
It says much about the misunderstanding of market principals when people equate circumvention of 'unfair prices' (as determined by the market) as the death of a market. The music industry is a monopoly. People dont feel the value/price ratio is fair. Given paying an unfair price and free, people choose free.
Yeah, and given a choice between paying a fair price and free, they still tend to choose free. Retail prices are determined by the market--CDs cost what they do because that is how much they are worth to their buyers. But an while that CD may be worth $15 to the average buyer, that doesn't mean he wouldn't rather pay $7.50 and pocket the difference. Or pay nothing and pocket it all. Voluntarily, most people will choose to pay much less for a product than what it is worth to them. In some cases, the product may be so great that the pittance that people choose to pay is nevertheless enough for the creator to make a living, but that doesn't mean that consumers aren't ripping off the creator by paying much less for the product than it is worth to them. The value of a product to you is the highest price that you would be willing to pay if the only alternative is doing without.
I think this is an extremely interesting legal issue. Destruction of evidence is a crime. But routine destruction of documents that might or might not be considered evidence at some time in the future is not. So if you can destroy them, why can't you transfer them to an offshore depository with highly restrictive rules about when/whether they can be retrieved?
The shift to the Power PC was amazing--most of the older apps ran just fine. And the shift to OSX has been equally amazing, with the great majority of OS9 applications working at least as well as they did before. In fact, it's not uncommon to run an application over a decade old and have it work fine.
Chemistry, like math or physics, is an exact science where elements are used as "building blocks" for other elements and compounds. Taxonomy is an inexact science, and the fact that a rare Jamaican fruit fly doesn't have a name yet will not affect other areas of science.
These days, taxonomy is as exact as you want to make it, because the species identity of an organism is ultimately reducible to its "building blocks"--namely, its DNA code. Of course,certain aspects of taxonomy are always going to be arbitrary, because there are not (nor should there be) always clear lines between species. But "arbitrary" is not the same thing as "inexact."
That's why the burden of proof is ultimately on the school to prove that you did cheat. If you did, in fact, copy your paper from someone else, it should be trivial for them to produce the paper that you copied as evidence that they are correct.
Correct. And no school ever accuses anybody of plagiarism without having done that. So rather, the school is saying, "we believe that we have proof that you are guilty."
And one important thing that everybody should learn in college is not to plagiarize. And it is better to learn it as undergraduate, where the consequences are rarely any worse than a poor grade, than to have to learn it the hard way: in graduate school, or worse, as a professional, when the consequences can easily be catestrophic to one's career.
You are right in saying that plagiarism is like drugs, because it is very seductive, and you can slip into it almost without realizing it. But a more apt comparison is to sending a space shuttle up on cold days. You start out doing it just a little bit, and you get away with it. So you do it a little more. And still you get away with it, and you start to think of it as no big deal. And then your career crashes and burns.
So a college that does not attempt to catch plagiarism is fundamentally short-changing its students.
because students use the service themselves FIRST and then change their paper until it passes. that way when it gets to the professor it won't bring up all the hits it should.
And how is that different from what students used to do to avoid plagiarism--restate content in their own words?
Many of the world's greatest artists, writers, and musicians had genetic "defects" of some kind. For these people, their problems are what drove them to greatness.
Perhaps. Or maybe that is just another "just-so story" that we tell ourselves to console ourselves for misfortunes that we couldn't do anything about before now. In fact, we have no idea whether great men were great because of--or in spite of--their defects.
Sure it goes against natural selection. So do antibiotics. So what? Natural selection may have supplanted God as an explanation for the origin of species, but that does not make it holy.
Besides the fact that most traits are caused not by one gene, but by the interaction of dozens of genes and the proteins they create, you have to consider that almost all human traits develop in accordance to someone's environment.
You hear this said a lot, but it really falls more into the category of "wishful thinking" than science. We'd like this to be the case, because it would let us put off the difficult question of where (or if) to draw the line. "We won't be able to do it anytime soon, so we don't have to worry about it."
The fact is that we don't have the least knowledge how many genes need to be altered to make a significant alteration in a human being. There might well turn out to be a relatively small number of common genes that significantly impair mathematical, musical, social, or athletic ability. Screen out any one of them, and you greatly improve your offspring's chance of excelling in that particular area.
And once such a gene is found, it automatically becomes a genetic disease. Find a gene that prevents you from having perfect pitch, and you've defined "impaired pitch perception disorder" (IPPD) which musically-inclined parents will imediately want to begin screening for.
The handwaving about "environment" is similar nonsense. Yes, all traits develop as an interaction between genes and environment, but there are plenty of examples of traits that express themselves in a wide range of environments. Sure, you can probably screw just about any child up by locking him in the basement and never talking to him, but that's more relevant to child abuse than genetic screening.
Answers? I don't have one. I think we are going to see screening for such traits within a decade. And I don't think it is possible to stop it, because you really can't draw a line that defines the difference between genetic disease and natural variation--there simply isn't one. So if it isn't done here, it will be done somewhere else.
And there will be undoubtedly be problems and unintended consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, if XBox goes the way of the Dreamcast (cancelled with no successor in sight) then nobody will be screaming for the XBox2--because there won't be one. On the other hand, if Sega had had deep enough pockets to keep the Dreamcast alive, instead of cancelling it when its online games were just beginning to take off, then we might indeed be clamoring for Dreamcast2.
Actually, all the Court seems to have done was rule that the special nature of the internet does not exempt it from being subjected to the same kind of obscenity restrictions that have been found Constitutionally acceptable with respect to other media.
It certainly is inconvenient, since a prosecutor can choose the least-tolerant community available to file his obscenity case. But that has always been true.
If you are like most people in our culture, you probably have to think pretty hard to remember your last serious bacterial infection. Actually, you probably were unaware of it, because it was a mild case of food poisoning, and you were over it by the next day. Most of our common illnesses are viral. The major bacterial infections healthy people have to deal with routinely are food poisoning (where there is probably a pretty large dose of bacteria and/or toxin) and local infections. So unless you have had an infected finger, you probably haven't picked up a bacterial infection from your keyboard.
Now viruses are another matter. People mainly catch colds from other people's hands (they touch their runny nose, they touch something else, you touch it, you touch your nose, bingo). Shared keyboards probably play a role here, but probably less than handshaking, doorknobs, railings, and telephone handsets....
Yes, Katz has it exactly backwards. The enduring comic book "myths" are *products* of the Comics Code era. I think that breaking away from the CC restrictions is very much a good thing, but the limitations of CC (and simply the fact that comics were at the time very much a medium for kids) meant that writers could not rely upon extreme violence or sex to build audience appeal. So, whether by design, instinct, or trial and error, they tapped into fundamental and enduring power fantasies. Adolescent fantasies, to be sure, but even those who have outgrown them still remember what it was like to feel that way. Spiderman, of course, was the product of the Marvel "revolution," which added the insight that great power did not necessarily bring happiness. In a sense, Spiderman was the first hero to truly capture this post-war sensibility.
However, there is nothing that prevents parents from monitoring their children's videogame play in the absence of such a law. So the law benefits parents who are too lazy to bother to monitor their children themselves, while penalizing (with regulatory burdens) parents who do not agree with the federally-imposed ratings, merchants who sell those games, and developers who create them.
Generally, the courts have held that to justify restriction of free speech, the hazard must be both clear and immediate, as indicated by the "fire in a crowded theater" example. Videogames fail both tests. Harm from videogames is certainly not "clear," as the incidence of youth violence has dropped steadily as videogame violence has become more realistic. And even those who advocate such restrictions don't claim the harm is "immediate."
This is just a typical example of Microsoft being intentionally misleading. What the *law* says is that you can't donate your PC to the school with Windows on it and keep a copy of operating system for installation on another PC. Of course, in practice this is largely irrelevant, as Microsoft's agreements with computer manufacturers make it nearly impossible to buy a PC without Windows, so who would want an extra copy of an obsolete version? But Microsoft manages to explain this in such a way as to give the false impression that you (or the school) cannot simply erase Windows, destroy the license and the Windows disks, and install LINUX.
Step 1: relegate all "adult" materials to .prn .prn sites
Step 2: pressure schools, libraries, and ISP's (in that order; divide and conquer) to block access to
It's a familar strategy. Does anybody remember X-rated commercial movies? By putting a label on serious, but controversial, movies, regulators painted a target on them. Pretty soon, no theater chain or studio wanted to be assoicated with X-rated movies, which were idenfified with pornography in the public mind. Result: de facto censorship, but nobody has to take the blame. The ".prn" name is a dead giveaway.
So? What if you interviewed people who had been fantasizing about having sex with children, but only masturbating over "non-pornographic" images of children (Sears catalogs, etc.). Do you really doubt that a substantial percentage, perhaps even 80%, would say that they would eventually try to act out their fantasies with a child?
Of course people who are strongly motivated toward sex with children are drawn to look at child pornography. I would venture to suggest, even, that those who are most likely to act out in the real world will also be the most likely to seek out illicit pornography. And this would be the case whether or not looking at pornography had any influence on the likelihood that they would molest a real child.
Seems circular. You want to argue that child porn is what makes pedophiles sick. But if they were not sick, why were they looking at child porn to begin with? Healthy people don't find child porn erotic--if anything, they find it disgusting, and they certainly are not going to look at it.
Certainly, people with these sorts of deviations frequently progress from fantasies to acting out, but it is very different to argue that this progression will not occur if they are denied fake child porn, and have to content themselves with fantasizing about the real kids on Sesame Street.
So you take the words of a convicted killer, who is undoubtedly strongly motivated to blame his behavior on somebody/something else, as evidence?
Most forms of behavior develop. That is quite independent of post hoc ergo propter hoc blaming it on a particular influence or stimulus.
I worry a lot less about this than about drugs. A drug potentially can act with every single molecule in your body. But basically, a photon is a photon, your eyes are designed to handle photons. So long as they stay well below the UV frequencies (which can break bonds and produce actual chemical changes), you should be pretty safe. Even if you manage to bleach out all your visual pigment, it should eventually recover. I suppose that if you pumped enough photons into the retina, you could cook it from purely thermal effects, but that would take quite a bit of power.
I think this is an extremely interesting legal issue. Destruction of evidence is a crime. But routine destruction of documents that might or might not be considered evidence at some time in the future is not. So if you can destroy them, why can't you transfer them to an offshore depository with highly restrictive rules about when/whether they can be retrieved?
The shift to the Power PC was amazing--most of the older apps ran just fine. And the shift to OSX has been equally amazing, with the great majority of OS9 applications working at least as well as they did before. In fact, it's not uncommon to run an application over a decade old and have it work fine.
You are right in saying that plagiarism is like drugs, because it is very seductive, and you can slip into it almost without realizing it. But a more apt comparison is to sending a space shuttle up on cold days. You start out doing it just a little bit, and you get away with it. So you do it a little more. And still you get away with it, and you start to think of it as no big deal. And then your career crashes and burns.
So a college that does not attempt to catch plagiarism is fundamentally short-changing its students.
Sure it goes against natural selection. So do antibiotics. So what? Natural selection may have supplanted God as an explanation for the origin of species, but that does not make it holy.
The fact is that we don't have the least knowledge how many genes need to be altered to make a significant alteration in a human being. There might well turn out to be a relatively small number of common genes that significantly impair mathematical, musical, social, or athletic ability. Screen out any one of them, and you greatly improve your offspring's chance of excelling in that particular area.
And once such a gene is found, it automatically becomes a genetic disease. Find a gene that prevents you from having perfect pitch, and you've defined "impaired pitch perception disorder" (IPPD) which musically-inclined parents will imediately want to begin screening for.
The handwaving about "environment" is similar nonsense. Yes, all traits develop as an interaction between genes and environment, but there are plenty of examples of traits that express themselves in a wide range of environments. Sure, you can probably screw just about any child up by locking him in the basement and never talking to him, but that's more relevant to child abuse than genetic screening.
Answers? I don't have one. I think we are going to see screening for such traits within a decade. And I don't think it is possible to stop it, because you really can't draw a line that defines the difference between genetic disease and natural variation--there simply isn't one. So if it isn't done here, it will be done somewhere else.
And there will be undoubtedly be problems and unintended consequences.