But I would say that on average, the threshold in Europe is a bit higher than in the US
I would not agree with this statement, for while Europe might have higher threshold than the US, they have a muuch lower threshold on hate speech. Without getting into the relative merits of hate speech and porn, I would say that the standards are different, but not necessarily higher or lower.
The US may act unilaterally, but it is not the US government controlling the internet, it is ICANN, a private comany. As soon as the Department of Commerce starts insisting that ICANN remove foreign servers from the internet, I will whole heartedly endorse the EU's plan. As it is the internet operates without meddling government hands, and I don't think that situation will improve by splintering the net. It would make things worse, not better if individual governments could censor their internet.
Neither do I, and I'd have some serious problems with the US controlling the internet if they did force their opinions of free speach on the world. As it is if the US has a problem they don't make the ICANN remove the site from the internet, they either raid the location the servers are kept if it is in the US, or they work with interneational authorities to get the servers removed. If you are producing, destributing, or hosting obscene material in the US, I do not have a problem with the (local) government going after you.
All I'm trying to say is that porn and obscenety are not the same things, obsenity laws are not contrary to the first amendment.
Every country will ban something, and I think the Miller test is a reasonable standard - even if it could be improved be better defining community. For this reason, and combined with the fact that the US doesn't try to strong-arm ICANN, I think that control of the internet should not change hands.
Are you saying that you'd be OK with full color billboards depicting the Nicolas Berg beheading? What about live sex shows outside, on private ground, across from an elementry school? Kiddy porn?
Banning something something that is deemed by the community to be improper is fine, so long as it isn't done to opress a minority, prevent political/social change, or have literary or artistic value.
The work community is in fact a potential loophole, which is the biggest issue I have with the FBI being involved in something that should be taken care of at a local level.
At a local level it is pretty obvious what the community is, the place where the content was produced, AND the place in which the buisness is located. If the community standards in either location consider the material obscene, then it is not protected speech.
Juries, as the poster above me stated, but to expound the defense in an obsenity case (nearly always the ACLU) hires a company to poll the community on what is obscene - not what is offensive.
Old ladies consider a lot less obsene than you may have been lead to believe.
No they don't go door to door, they call them, you don't need to show someone a picture of a woman and a goat to ask them if they think it's obscene.
I know someone who did this for a living in collge... It's the way things work, perhaps you should look into things before declaring something, about which you clearly have no idea, naive.
I'm at work so I'm going to refrain from googling anything that contains pornography, thank you very much... But I could guess that you are refering to the FBI obsenity task force. Obsenity is not pornography. Pornography is protected speech, obsenity is not. In order for something to be obscene it has to pass the Miller test:
* Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
* Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law,
* Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
Note the parts about community standards. This means that the government doen't get to decide what is obscene. The community does.
There may very well be European nations with more free speach than Europe, but I'd trust a history of strong free speech over a slightly freer but considerably younger instance of free speech.
First of all I don't believe you. If pronography is under threat I would be willing to bet that it is under threat on a local level, not a National level. There is always some outrageous obsenity case soemwhere in the US, but this does not mean the US is banning porn.
Second of all even if it were true you missed the point. If the US has problems with a sever they don't make ICANN remove it from the internet, they persue legal channels, and try to work with foriegn govenments.
Third he didn't say the USA has "the most free speech," he said,
The United States has a stronger free speech than most of Europe (in that we allow racism and nazi speech) and certainly stronger than countries like Iran and China
which I would find hard to argue against.
Fourth, I challenge you to find a country with a longer history of actual strong free speech.
The problem is that you were expeccting something different than what Mythbusters sets out to do. Yes, they try to prove/disporve thing, but by experiment, not through rigerous theory. I believe that both of the host are Hollywood stunt persons by trade, so mostly they know how do blow things up.
As far as dialogue and mistakes, that's supposed to show that the show is real. It is supposed to be unrehearsed, not staged.
All in all, I find the show interesting, and sometimes they surprise me with things I don't know about, but it is not scientifically insightful (nor is it supposed to be.)
I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but I'm going to hazard a guess that you mean the billiard ball analogy of subatomic particles.
If that is indeed what you are talking about then it almost certainly is wrong. However, it's not the model or the equations that are wrong, but rather the way in which the implications are described. The problem is that it is hard to describe a matter wave, so we fall back on the old orbiting electrons that everyone is familiar with. In this situation the particle model is sufficient to describe a great deal, which is why it's still around.
This case is different because the physicist had convinced themselves that old (incorrect) Newtonian model was actually the way things worked, so the equations were wrong as a result.
That issue is so 1980s. All the sattelite companies rebroadcast the local brodcast channels now.
Not true. All satelite companies reboradcast major market channels by now. My parents, as recently as two years ago had DirecTV, and did not recieve the local stations for a mediumish city in Ohio.
As soon as their contract was up they canceled and went back to cable.
While I am certianly not qualified I'm going to offer my opinion anyways.
I suspect that the reason restaurants sing their own song, and not the "Happy Birthday Song" is not for fear of copyright suits, but rather to add their own flavor.
I do have problems with your suggestion on an intellectual level. Information is not a commodity like any other, it is of unlimited supply, so libertarian economics do not work well for it. If I make one sprocket and sell it to you you now have a sprocket, and I have none. If I have information and sell it to you now we both have information and can both sell it again. There is now twice as much information in the world, so is the same information now worth half as much?
The problem with libertarian economics in general is that it makes the (poor) assumption that everyone is an educated consumer. That is to say they will research and understand all of the differences in price for a similar product. E.g. two companies make widgets, one charges 10% less, they can do so because rather than monitor emissions they just dump whatever isn't a widget into the river downstream from the consumers house. Now while some libertarians would be assign a greater than 10% value to eco-friendliness others would not. If only a few consumers make poor choices it can greatly impact everyone.
The notion that paying for everything will increase everything's value is not good in theory or practice, and will only serve to make some people very rich, some people very poor, and ignore everything that cannot be tied to a bottom line.
then I thought about it and realized that marketing should serve a purpose, it should tell you whats really worth buying, and lesser products should get less marketing. Too bad the process has been bastardized since at least the '80s and good marketing no longer means good product.
then I thought a little harder and wondered if that was niave thinking that marketing used to serve a purpose other than hyping product good or bad. Cigarettes were successfully marketed after all...
I agree with you, the problem is the **AAs are trying to make computers less useful through trusted computing and the like, and place draconian punishments on people who they think have violated their license. All in an attempt to make digital media uncopyable. So in theory I see no problem with buying licenses and use rights, but in practice it's impossible so stop distribution. I do have a problem with the steps they are taking to try to accomplish the impossible.
DRM isn't and can't be for regular products. You aren't reproducing your lipstick, car, lawnmower, or flashlight. The only reason DRM is being implemented is because you can give someone a copy and still have it yourself.
DRM is not a good thing, but not because it's unique to digital media.
You missed the point. If God is omnipotent he has to be able to intervene in the natural universe. If every observation we make is suspect because God could have changed something then science becomes useless.
My position is that if God has made any changes in the past they have been indistinguishable from "natural" phenomena. Such an argument allows for the existence of God, does not diminish His power (as the watch maker theory does), and is logically consistent.
However, the argument also allows that everything could change tomorrow. God could make universal constants variable, throw a monkey wrench in physical laws, and cause people to blink out of existence. None of that is of any consequence to science today though. Today's science is about making falsifiable predictions based on past observation.
Yeah, that's known as the master watch smith theory (or some such similar name); the problem is that God has to be able to change things or he's not omnipotent. If he's not omnipotent then he couldn't have created the universe. So if he's able to change things then it's possible that God is interfering in the function of the universe. It is however plausible that God is interfering, but doing so in a way that is consistent with the laws of our universe, so that we can't tell the difference anyway. IMO this is a better way of putting together faith and science.
I agree with you're point on intelligent design not understanding science, but reject your characterization of faith.
Faith is IMO actually an extension of intellect, not at odds with it. The problem is that many televangelists misrepresent faith as intentional ignorance. It will always be possible to have faith in a God outside the observable universe. By definition if it's not observable it's outside the realm of science.
It is very possible to believe in God and accept evolution, just ask John Paul II. God doesn't have to be constantly tinkering and tuning the universe to be God, he just has to be able to. Furthermore there is no reason to think that God's tinkerings would look any different to us than the normal processes of the Universe.
There are ways to make the readings meaningless, but this would indicate some fishy behavior and cause for "other" means of investigation
Maybe in the lab this is true, but in the field that complicated display that can sequence proteins is going to be replaced by one green, and one red light. Field operators will not be able to tell if something is fishy.
I haven't done much digging into the availability of unlocked phones, but if they are very hard or impossible to come by then yes I see the problem.
However, if you have the choice of either buying an expensive unlocked phone, or a cheap locked in phone if the service provider sells you a cheep phone they can lock it in forever for all I care. Thats the trade off of getting it cheap.
I'm sure my phone is locked in, and if I feel the need to switch carriers I'll just get another cheap phone from another company. Cell phone service providers offer cell phones as a loss leader, if I were in their buisness you better believe I'd do everything to keep that phone carrying only my signal. You paid for hardware that will operate on thier network, they are under no obligation to make the phone work on any network, even if the phone is capable of that.
So long as they don't mis-represent the handset, and it is feasable to purchase an unlocked phone if you so desire it seems like a good buisness practice to me.
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I would not agree with this statement, for while Europe might have higher threshold than the US, they have a muuch lower threshold on hate speech. Without getting into the relative merits of hate speech and porn, I would say that the standards are different, but not necessarily higher or lower.
The US may act unilaterally, but it is not the US government controlling the internet, it is ICANN, a private comany. As soon as the Department of Commerce starts insisting that ICANN remove foreign servers from the internet, I will whole heartedly endorse the EU's plan. As it is the internet operates without meddling government hands, and I don't think that situation will improve by splintering the net. It would make things worse, not better if individual governments could censor their internet.
Neither do I, and I'd have some serious problems with the US controlling the internet if they did force their opinions of free speach on the world. As it is if the US has a problem they don't make the ICANN remove the site from the internet, they either raid the location the servers are kept if it is in the US, or they work with interneational authorities to get the servers removed. If you are producing, destributing, or hosting obscene material in the US, I do not have a problem with the (local) government going after you.
All I'm trying to say is that porn and obscenety are not the same things, obsenity laws are not contrary to the first amendment.
Every country will ban something, and I think the Miller test is a reasonable standard - even if it could be improved be better defining community. For this reason, and combined with the fact that the US doesn't try to strong-arm ICANN, I think that control of the internet should not change hands.
Are you saying that you'd be OK with full color billboards depicting the Nicolas Berg beheading? What about live sex shows outside, on private ground, across from an elementry school? Kiddy porn?
Banning something something that is deemed by the community to be improper is fine, so long as it isn't done to opress a minority, prevent political/social change, or have literary or artistic value.
Obscene material does none of these things.
The work community is in fact a potential loophole, which is the biggest issue I have with the FBI being involved in something that should be taken care of at a local level.
At a local level it is pretty obvious what the community is, the place where the content was produced, AND the place in which the buisness is located. If the community standards in either location consider the material obscene, then it is not protected speech.
Juries, as the poster above me stated, but to expound the defense in an obsenity case (nearly always the ACLU) hires a company to poll the community on what is obscene - not what is offensive.
Old ladies consider a lot less obsene than you may have been lead to believe.
No they don't go door to door, they call them, you don't need to show someone a picture of a woman and a goat to ask them if they think it's obscene.
I know someone who did this for a living in collge... It's the way things work, perhaps you should look into things before declaring something, about which you clearly have no idea, naive.
The FBI considers the obsenity task force to be a high priority.
In my opinion this is a mistake, but please look up the difference between porn and obsenity. You can start here here
Obsenity by definition is neither porn nor protected speech.
I'm at work so I'm going to refrain from googling anything that contains pornography, thank you very much...
But I could guess that you are refering to the FBI obsenity task force.
Obsenity is not pornography. Pornography is protected speech, obsenity is not.
In order for something to be obscene it has to pass the Miller test:
* Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
* Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law,
* Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
Note the parts about community standards. This means that the government doen't get to decide what is obscene. The community does.
There may very well be European nations with more free speach than Europe, but I'd trust a history of strong free speech over a slightly freer but considerably younger instance of free speech.
If pronography is under threat I would be willing to bet that it is under threat on a local level, not a National level. There is always some outrageous obsenity case soemwhere in the US, but this does not mean the US is banning porn.
Second of all even if it were true you missed the point.
If the US has problems with a sever they don't make ICANN remove it from the internet, they persue legal channels, and try to work with foriegn govenments.
Third he didn't say the USA has "the most free speech," he said, which I would find hard to argue against.
Fourth, I challenge you to find a country with a longer history of actual strong free speech.
The problem is that you were expeccting something different than what Mythbusters sets out to do. Yes, they try to prove/disporve thing, but by experiment, not through rigerous theory. I believe that both of the host are Hollywood stunt persons by trade, so mostly they know how do blow things up.
As far as dialogue and mistakes, that's supposed to show that the show is real. It is supposed to be unrehearsed, not staged.
All in all, I find the show interesting, and sometimes they surprise me with things I don't know about, but it is not scientifically insightful (nor is it supposed to be.)
I think so.
The fundemental difference between relativity and Newtonian physics is that time doesn't pass at the same rate everywhere.
This is considerably more complicated than assuming that one clock accurately describes all time.
You should also keep in mind that the form is the theory. The way someone explains it to you is much less useful than the actual equations.
I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but I'm going to hazard a guess that you mean the billiard ball analogy of subatomic particles.
If that is indeed what you are talking about then it almost certainly is wrong. However, it's not the model or the equations that are wrong, but rather the way in which the implications are described. The problem is that it is hard to describe a matter wave, so we fall back on the old orbiting electrons that everyone is familiar with. In this situation the particle model is sufficient to describe a great deal, which is why it's still around.
This case is different because the physicist had convinced themselves that old (incorrect) Newtonian model was actually the way things worked, so the equations were wrong as a result.
Not true. All satelite companies reboradcast major market channels by now.
My parents, as recently as two years ago had DirecTV, and did not recieve the local stations for a mediumish city in Ohio.
As soon as their contract was up they canceled and went back to cable.
While I am certianly not qualified I'm going to offer my opinion anyways.
I suspect that the reason restaurants sing their own song, and not the "Happy Birthday Song" is not for fear of copyright suits, but rather to add their own flavor.
Think of it as auditory flare.
Ok cheap shot.
I do have problems with your suggestion on an intellectual level. Information is not a commodity like any other, it is of unlimited supply, so libertarian economics do not work well for it. If I make one sprocket and sell it to you you now have a sprocket, and I have none. If I have information and sell it to you now we both have information and can both sell it again. There is now twice as much information in the world, so is the same information now worth half as much?
The problem with libertarian economics in general is that it makes the (poor) assumption that everyone is an educated consumer. That is to say they will research and understand all of the differences in price for a similar product. E.g. two companies make widgets, one charges 10% less, they can do so because rather than monitor emissions they just dump whatever isn't a widget into the river downstream from the consumers house. Now while some libertarians would be assign a greater than 10% value to eco-friendliness others would not. If only a few consumers make poor choices it can greatly impact everyone.
The notion that paying for everything will increase everything's value is not good in theory or practice, and will only serve to make some people very rich, some people very poor, and ignore everything that cannot be tied to a bottom line.
So, if this were posted in wikipedia you'd have to pay me to read it?
Yeah but just wait for the crazy taxi movie.
I read your comment, and at first I chuckled,
then I got a little sad,
then I thought about it and realized that marketing should serve a purpose, it should tell you whats really worth buying, and lesser products should get less marketing. Too bad the process has been bastardized since at least the '80s and good marketing no longer means good product.
then I thought a little harder and wondered if that was niave thinking that marketing used to serve a purpose other than hyping product good or bad. Cigarettes were successfully marketed after all...
ok im done ranting now
Not only that but grey and brown would really have capture the public's level of interest in 2000.
I agree with you, the problem is the **AAs are trying to make computers less useful through trusted computing and the like, and place draconian punishments on people who they think have violated their license. All in an attempt to make digital media uncopyable. So in theory I see no problem with buying licenses and use rights, but in practice it's impossible so stop distribution. I do have a problem with the steps they are taking to try to accomplish the impossible.
DRM isn't and can't be for regular products. You aren't reproducing your lipstick, car, lawnmower, or flashlight. The only reason DRM is being implemented is because you can give someone a copy and still have it yourself.
DRM is not a good thing, but not because it's unique to digital media.
You missed the point. If God is omnipotent he has to be able to intervene in the natural universe. If every observation we make is suspect because God could have changed something then science becomes useless.
My position is that if God has made any changes in the past they have been indistinguishable from "natural" phenomena. Such an argument allows for the existence of God, does not diminish His power (as the watch maker theory does), and is logically consistent.
However, the argument also allows that everything could change tomorrow. God could make universal constants variable, throw a monkey wrench in physical laws, and cause people to blink out of existence. None of that is of any consequence to science today though. Today's science is about making falsifiable predictions based on past observation.
Yeah, that's known as the master watch smith theory (or some such similar name); the problem is that God has to be able to change things or he's not omnipotent. If he's not omnipotent then he couldn't have created the universe. So if he's able to change things then it's possible that God is interfering in the function of the universe. It is however plausible that God is interfering, but doing so in a way that is consistent with the laws of our universe, so that we can't tell the difference anyway.
IMO this is a better way of putting together faith and science.
I agree with you're point on intelligent design not understanding science, but reject your characterization of faith.
Faith is IMO actually an extension of intellect, not at odds with it. The problem is that many televangelists misrepresent faith as intentional ignorance. It will always be possible to have faith in a God outside the observable universe. By definition if it's not observable it's outside the realm of science.
It is very possible to believe in God and accept evolution, just ask John Paul II. God doesn't have to be constantly tinkering and tuning the universe to be God, he just has to be able to. Furthermore there is no reason to think that God's tinkerings would look any different to us than the normal processes of the Universe.
Maybe in the lab this is true, but in the field that complicated display that can sequence proteins is going to be replaced by one green, and one red light. Field operators will not be able to tell if something is fishy.
I haven't done much digging into the availability of unlocked phones, but if they are very hard or impossible to come by then yes I see the problem.
However, if you have the choice of either buying an expensive unlocked phone, or a cheap locked in phone if the service provider sells you a cheep phone they can lock it in forever for all I care. Thats the trade off of getting it cheap.
I'm sure my phone is locked in, and if I feel the need to switch carriers I'll just get another cheap phone from another company. Cell phone service providers offer cell phones as a loss leader, if I were in their buisness you better believe I'd do everything to keep that phone carrying only my signal. You paid for hardware that will operate on thier network, they are under no obligation to make the phone work on any network, even if the phone is capable of that.
So long as they don't mis-represent the handset, and it is feasable to purchase an unlocked phone if you so desire it seems like a good buisness practice to me.