The U.S. has sanctions against Iran, and the sale of any technology to the Iranian government (even through a third party in another country) is forbidden by Iranian Transactions
Regulations, 31 C.F.R. Part 560.
Where in that statement, or in the subsequent argument from PopeRatzo, is there any discussion of Iran, slavery, or timelines? I don't see it. Even in your answer, there's the understanding that liberal is better and conservative is worse. However you define "better" or "worse", it makes no sense to apply one country's present to another country's past, because the present is what we're living in. What good does it do you to say, "The Iran of 700 years ago was a great place."? It doesn't exist anymore. The only thing that makes sense is to compare what you have in front of you. Looking to the past might tell you that it's possible for Iran to be that way again, but it doesn't change what Iran is now, which is what you have to work with.
Anyone above the age of consent should know that one of the consequences of having sex could be pregnancy.... No one should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term when they didn't have a say in the sex act that led to the pregnancy.
And you could really argue they "had a say" if they weren't educated (oftentimes thanks to conservative abstinence-only no-contraceptive education policies, like the federal policies Bush Jr. and co. backed) and thought simply pulling out was a proper contraceptive?
Yeah. Actually, you could. As long as you give kids accurate information about what causes pregnancy, you gave them the tools to not get pregnant. Getting pregnant isn't the result of voodoo magic. If avoiding pregnancy is that important to you, don't fuck. If you do (assuming it's vaginal, and both partners have healthy reproductive systems) you stand a chance, however remote, of getting pregnant -- whether one partner wears a condom, the other is on the pill, or both. I'm all for teaching kids about safe sex for disease prevention, but any penis-to-vagina sex between healthy partners has the potential to result in pregnancy. So yeah, if you were told, "Keep it in your pants, and you won't get pregnant", and you decided not to keep it in your pants, that's the choice you made, and you have to live with the consequences.
And then, if the thing's not aborted, the kid's going to be born to parents that didn't want it. And that's fair to the kid? You could argue never having been born is more fair if the resultant person's completely unwanted.
You could argue that, but you probably shouldn't. Lots of people are raised (or not raised) by incompetent, unloving parents, and they do fine. If someone acts like a sociopathic asshole later in life, it's because of how they responded to the hand they were dealt. I've known some people who were treated horribly as youngsters (everything from physical to sexual abuse). Surprisingly enough, they're not out raping and pillaging, and they don't wish they were dead. Was the recovery easy? No, but weighed against death, they made the choice to recover, when they could've offed themselves.
Don't tell me about how huge the adoption backlogs are--if abortion was made illegal, that backlog (if there even is one) would be obliterated within a year or two.
And that's a bad thing, is it?
I'm not doubting there would be more children waiting to be adopted than people willing to adopt. I don't know either way for a fact, but it doesn't really make a difference. Again, compare "hard life" with "dead".
Look, I've got spina bifida myself, so I'm not just talking out of my ass. Spina bifida, at the level I have it, is a pretty serious condition, but it's nothing compared to some of the stuff I've seen people go through with handicaps. You think Steven Hawking couldn't find a way to kill himself (or have someone do it for him) if he wanted to? Yes, some people (especially if they were disabled, rather than handicapped) might choose it, but in general, people are resilient, and they soldier on. Saying, "They're better off dead, anyway." is really an astounding rationalization, and that's all it is.
How is going to such lengths to allow someone to avoid the natural consequences of their actions even remotely okay?
"Going to such lengths"? And allowing an individual power over their own body is a great length to go to, instead of telling them they're just a baby generator and are locked into an undesirable life because of a previous bad decision? It's funny you'd mention this, because oftentimes opposition to abortion rights really comes down to opposing the capability of women to be promiscuous, with which there's nothing inherently
I don't think it's a strange assumption at all. The point he was addressing was simply:
One country cannot be "better" than another.
That statement itself has nothing to do with Iran or slavery. The only claim was that you can legitimately claim one country is "better" than another, so long as you define what "better" means. And since Sweden and the Belgian Congo didn't exist as countries in the time of the Vikings, it stands to reason the post I was referring to was comparing apples to apples, i.e., modern countries to each other.
Unfortunately for you the supreme court disagrees... I can't believe people like you still exist in 2010.
You realize that all you'd have to do is change "2010" to "1857", and you could be talking about Dred Scott v. Sanford, right?
The Supreme Court is not infallible. That's why the occasionally overturn their previous decisions (see Plessy v. Ferguson). I would be astonished (and, frankly, appalled) if the Supreme Court did a complete 180 and found that a woman had no right to an abortion under any circumstances, but the viability rationale that the court used to restrict abortions in the third trimester isn't what it used to be.
You didn't pass Health class, did you? A sperm cell never becomes a baby. You only get a baby from the fertilization of an egg by a sperm. The sperm itself has no potential for life. Ditto for the an egg that's unfertilized. Further, a sperm cell is incontrovertibly a cell from the donor's body. A zygote, on the other hand, has DNA that is distinct from the egg and sperm, as it is a combination of the two, with mutations thrown in. It's biologically distinct.
Reasonable people can differ as to whether or not a woman should be allowed to terminate her pregnancy, and if so, under what conditions, but it's important to be clear about what's actually going on: An abortion is the termination of a human life, albeit one at a very early stage of development.
There is a good reason for this case not to go forward: How does the plaintiff prove that the surveillance and tracking and detention were illegal under IRANIAN law?
That's not part of the case. The only issue of the case, from what I'm reading, is the distribution of the equipment to Iran's government. The people in the U.S. were the ones breaking U.S. law.
Maybe I just want to play my iOS games on a larger screen. Maybe my kids wants to use a "fingerpaint" app on the computer. There are things that a touchscreen interface is better for than a keyboard/mouse. Why not have a machine that can switch between the two interfaces depending on what you want to do?
Just to be clear here, we're talking about an iMac with a screen that doesn't detach from its base, right? It's hard to picture playing the same kinds of games on an iMac Touch (as this is envisioned) as on an iPad or iPod Touch. With the latter two, you pick up the display and hold it. With the iMac Touch display, you reach out and touch it. It's a different animal.
I have no issue with a iMac with a touchscreen. It just seems like putting an OS for portable devices on an iMac (other than in emulation for testing) doesn't sound like a step forward. If they're going to go in this direction, they should go all the way and let the display be detachable from the base, giving you an iMac/iPad hybrid.
Why would you want iOS on an iMac? I could see going in the other direction, and putting OSX on an iPad, This doesn't make sense to me unless iOS kicks in when it's taken off its base and used as a tablet.
There's a reason we have age of consent laws, and part of that reason is that we assume that at a certain age, a person is responsible for their own sexual activity. Anyone above the age of consent should know that one of the consequences of having sex could be pregnancy. If we're saying that women can't be expected to appreciate the consequences of sexual activity while they're of child-bearing age, should we just go ahead and say that a woman cannot legally consent until the onset of menopause? How is going to such lengths to allow someone to avoid the natural consequences of their actions even remotely okay?
Going to such lengths? A simple out patient procedure is "such lengths"? If someone falls down a flight of stairs because they're clumsy do we not give them a cast on their broken bones? How can we go to such lengths as to x-ray and bandage them just to avoid the natural consequences of their actions!?!?
I've never heard of a woman falling down a flight of steps and landing on a man's penis to get impregnated. Sounds a wee bit far-fetched to me.
Having sex, on the other hand, is a deliberate act, for which there are potential consequences. Assuming normal mental acuity (without which I'm fairly certain consent can't be established), by the age of consent, a woman should know that having sex could lead to pregnancy. She can, of course, use contraceptives, but she does so with the understanding that contraceptives could potentially fail. That goes with the territory of being an adult with functioning reproductive organs.
Forgetting the concept of viability - are we to convict all women who have had an abortion with murder? Or manslaughter at the very least? That would be the judicial consequence of killing another person. Likewise, if you know of anyone who has ever had one, you'll need to go to jail for failing to report the murder (aiding and abetting, you know).
Technically, it would be the doctor that performed the abortion, so if we were going to charge anyone with murder, that would be the person. The relationship of the woman to the murder would probably be solicitation of murder or conspiracy to commit murder. But I see that as unwise, unlikely to pass into law, and almost certainly unjust, as an abortion is almost never a dispassionate, cold-blooded decision. Certainly, some room needs to be made for the emotional strain of the situation. I'm not a lawyer, but manslaughter sounds about right to me.
Simply knowing of someone who has committed a murder doesn't legally obligate you to report it. (I think it certainly obligates you morally, but that's another matter). If this person comes to you and asks you to hide them or to cover for them, and you agree, then you're aiding and abetting. So no, you won't need to go to jail for failing to report an abortion, if it becomes illegal. It would be between you and your conscience, unless the police came and asked you about it.
That's not to say I think all abortions should be illegal, either. Certainly I think a strong case could be made for excluding rape, incest (which is not really consensual sex, because of the power disparity involved) and to save the life of the mother (who, I think most would agree, has more of a stake in life than the unborn baby/fetus).
Very easy discussion. Both countries had quite a bit of viking presence. Vikings were people who taught their kids how to be inherently cruel by forcing them to rip wigs off live birds at the age of three.
I assume that the OP was talking about modern Sweden vs. the Republic of Congo (which would make sense, because, IIRC, neither country existed in Viking times).
That's some serious cultural relativism you've got going there. Would any sane person (which would exclude Kim Jong-Il) choose to live in North Korea, rather than moving with their family to pretty much any Western democracy?
True, but the quoted text states that it was the electronic monitoring that was unlawful, not the act of exporting the equipment needed to do so.
Actually, the quoted text states that it was the delivery of the equipment that was unlawful:
Defendants knowingly and willingly delivered very capable and sophisticated equipment for unlawful intercepting, monitoring, and filtering of electronic communications ("Intelligence Solutions") to Iranian officials,' the complaint alleged.
It's the Iranians that are accused of the "unlawful intercepting, monitoring, and filtering of electronic communications".
Do you think it is rational that a woman would be forced to carry the child? Just forcing someone to carry a several kilos weight for a few months continuously should sound stupid.
There's a reason we have age of consent laws, and part of that reason is that we assume that at a certain age, a person is responsible for their own sexual activity. Anyone above the age of consent should know that one of the consequences of having sex could be pregnancy. If we're saying that women can't be expected to appreciate the consequences of sexual activity while they're of child-bearing age, should we just go ahead and say that a woman cannot legally consent until the onset of menopause? How is going to such lengths to allow someone to avoid the natural consequences of their actions even remotely okay?
That's what makes rape a different situation in relation to abortion. No one should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term when they didn't have a say in the sex act that led to the pregnancy. And certainly, if you have to pick one, the life of the mother should come first. But a pregnancy represents a human life (unless you've been having sex with other species, in which case it would only be partially human), with DNA distinct from either parent. The fact that the Supreme Court, nearly 40 years ago, chose to cloud the issue with the concept of viability is irrelevant to that. Lest we forget, the Supreme Court also gave us Dredd Scott. Occasionally, they screw things up and have to go back and fix them.
If you support abortion in the cases of rape then you support the use of abortion as birth control.
So if I support the death penalty, I support executing people for jaywalking? There's a big difference between someone having consensual sex and someone being raped. It's much easier to contemplate an abortion in a situation in which the woman was forced into the sex act.
If you support abortions that are medically necessary then you place a higher value on the mother than the fetus. Therefore, you should have no issue with abortion in all cases.
That would only be true if all abortions were medically necessary. They're not. In a case where you have to pick one, then that type of judgment is called for. But there are many cases (if not most) where the health (let alone the life) of the mother isn't at risk. You can certainly support medically necessary abortions without supporting the others.
You do realize that Second Life is different from just about anything applicable to the real world, don't you? You're in a world where people pay real money for absolutely no tangible benefit. You do realize the real world doesn't work like that, don't you?
Secondly, I didn't say that people don't bother to copy obscure authors. What I said was:
The Stephen Kings of the world can afford to give away content in the hope that some people will buy their next work, but for someone starting out, every book they sell is important, and piracy really affects that.
In other words, someone who's obscure is more vulnerable to piracy, not less.
Lastly, what you're doing is a hobby. While the fact that you make any money at it at all is commendable, you're not making a living. Writing a book takes several orders of magnitude more time for months, if not years. When you put that kind of work into a book, making enough money for half an ISP bill doesn't really make it worth it. Now, I'm not saying that authors don't know the risk that their books won't sell from the outset. Every author goes through that. But how pissed would you be if you put a piece of software out that you'd spent months on, and people were pirating it like it was nothing? It's one thing to simply have someone not buy your work. It's quite a different thing when they not only don't buy it, but pilfer it.
And for the record, I'm in favor of non-DRM'd books. I think if you've got an easy enough system, and your prices aren't outrageous, people won't bother to pirate. But that's quite a different thing from saying that giving away a book is a way to market that book. That's been tried already by authors (including Steven King), with dismal results.
I guess that depends on how you define "right", eh? We've been having that argument on Slashdot a lot recently. Some people contend that "right" means whatever you can do without fear of legal reprisal when caught. Other people contend that it means what set of things you ought morally be given licence to do, such that if everyone were allowed to pursue those actions it would lead to the greatest profit for society in general and the practitioners in particular.
I hold to the second definition, as the first definition immediately means you have no rights whatsoever. Thanks to overlapping laws and selective prosecution, every action up to and beyond breathing is illegal if your enemy sics enough lawyers at you. Everyone jay walks, everyone wafts a mile per hour above the speed limit.. especially as measured by a faulty radar gun. Everyone sings Happy Birthday at parties without paying ASCAP fees. Defining "rights" against a legal background is probably the stupidest thing I've heard in the last fifteen minutes.
First off, speaking in an absolute sense, you don't have any rights whatsoever. You should probably get used to the idea. It'll help you take politics and the law more seriously. Holding the second definition (yours) will just set you up for a lifetime of disappointment and disillusionment.
Does that mean that you have no say in what your rights are? Of course not. You can vote, and you can claim your right from the Constitution. What you can't do (rationally, at least) is claim a right simply because you want it. Again, the idea that you could invalidate a law simply because you didn't like it was itself invalidated in the 1860's. In the end, rights are whatever the majority says they are (although it's obviously harder to change the Constitution than to write a law).
Go ahead and proclaim your right to declare your house a sovereign nation, and disregard all federal laws. Let me know how that works out for you.
As far as Slashdot goes, if you post something here, it's public domain material. You reproducing it is irrelevant (on Slashdot or anywhere else). If I really had intellectual property to protect, I wouldn't put it on a public forum. If I was to write a book and put it on Amazon, though, you bet your ass I'd go after you for illegally distributing it, if you did that. Anyone with brain and a pulse would. 70 years after I die, sure, you can reproduce it to your heart's content.
I wasn't trying to cherry-pick. That's why I used Twilight as an example. It's what you were using.:)
Anyway, the important thing is what we agree on: Authors need to be compensated for what they do. How much value that adds to the book is a separate issue.
Well, that's one way to look at it. I don't think there's any shame in using spell-check (especially when your words are being seen in real-time), but I could see some people being freaked out by that. On the other hand, though, Wave allowed you to turn that feature off if you didn't want people to see you typing.
I just thought that was a really novel feature. For some reason, I really missed that when the talk command went out of style.
Yeah, but that just makes it worse, doesn't it? Not only are the guilty going free, but they're going free on the basis of their money, putting poorer clients at a disadvantage.
Blagojevich is the epitome of all the corruption in the political and legal systems. If he's convicted at retrial, I'd support the death penalty. For what he's done, I think he deserves it.
Doesn't a juror who has his/her mind made up, regardless of the facts or arguments of the other jurors, constitute someone who's failing to deliberate?
I mean, maybe I'm being too idealistic here, but it shocks and saddens me that it's this easy to buy a verdict, and it kind of makes me wonder: If it really works this way, how does anyone, anywhere, ever get convicted, if their attorney has an IQ even slightly above room temperature?
There's a substantial difference between voting in a booth and voting on a jury. In a booth, no one can see how you vote. On a jury, the other jurors can go to the judge and say, "This woman isn't considering the evidence and isn't following the law." It takes a lot more chutzpah to do something that brazen.
I would say that all teachers teaching a certain grade should come in at the same salary, since, as you say, they don't have a baseline yet.
After that, you could have a combination of test results and student evaluations. I don't really know how you'd rank teachers that moved, although I suspect that if a teacher moved to a different specialization, they'd have to start at the base salary for that specialization, with a clean slate as far as performance.
As far as tests, I've never bought the argument that giving tests encourages teachers to teach to the test. Here's why: You have to measure performance somehow. The only way you can measure if someone knows something is to test them on it. If tests aren't a good measure of learning, why have the kids in school at all? It's pointless, because you'll never know whether or not they learned anything, if you don't trust the test.
I think the best way to prevent "teaching to the test", in the cases where it occurs, is to change the test every year, and not tell the teachers anything about the test beforehand, other than the day on which you're administering it. They've got a curriculum they have to teach, and they teach it. If they teach the whole curriculum correctly, kids grades will fall on the bell curve. If they don't, then you'll know something's up.
As for seniority, it might be a good deal for teachers, but it sucks for actual education. It should work for teachers the same way it works for the rest of us: If you're successful, you should be well-compensated and happy. If you're not successful, you should be fired and find yourself a more suitable line of work. The idea that poor teachers aren't at risk of losing their jobs is a lot more than disappointing. It's shameful.
Thanks for the link. I find the whole thing nauseating. What it basically says to me is that a clever defendant will always be able to hang a jury. It's a shame that common sense can't prevail, and that a juror like that can't be shown the door, by the judge, in the interest of a fair trial. Why even give both sides a certain number of challenges? If there are valid reasons to keep someone off the jury, both sides should be able to challenge every single person who's brought up, and the judge should decide whether it's valid to exclude them or not.
When Ford released his first vehicle, he had ad writers tell people what it was for, and people added ideas onto that.
This really hurt Wave with the public. They had engineers try to sell it to people, rather than hiring an ad agency to go over it and create a campaign. I would invite people to Wave, and the response I got invariably was, "What can I do with it?". The real-time chat was a novelty, but people couldn't really picture in their minds the kind of collaboration that Wave made possible. I used to use planning a party as an example, but almost any discussion lent itself well to Wave -- especially if you had more than one language involved. Wave was a kind of e-mail and wiki on steroids, but it was hard to get people to take that leap, when Google wasn't selling it well, and when there wasn't the initial penetration like there was with Gmail. If they'd made the invite-only period far shorter, they would've had a better chance with it.
Slashdot Mirror
The U.S. has sanctions against Iran, and the sale of any technology to the Iranian government (even through a third party in another country) is forbidden by Iranian Transactions Regulations, 31 C.F.R. Part 560.
One country cannot be "better" than another.
Where in that statement, or in the subsequent argument from PopeRatzo, is there any discussion of Iran, slavery, or timelines? I don't see it. Even in your answer, there's the understanding that liberal is better and conservative is worse. However you define "better" or "worse", it makes no sense to apply one country's present to another country's past, because the present is what we're living in. What good does it do you to say, "The Iran of 700 years ago was a great place."? It doesn't exist anymore. The only thing that makes sense is to compare what you have in front of you. Looking to the past might tell you that it's possible for Iran to be that way again, but it doesn't change what Iran is now, which is what you have to work with.
Anyone above the age of consent should know that one of the consequences of having sex could be pregnancy.... No one should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term when they didn't have a say in the sex act that led to the pregnancy.
And you could really argue they "had a say" if they weren't educated (oftentimes thanks to conservative abstinence-only no-contraceptive education policies, like the federal policies Bush Jr. and co. backed) and thought simply pulling out was a proper contraceptive?
Yeah. Actually, you could. As long as you give kids accurate information about what causes pregnancy, you gave them the tools to not get pregnant. Getting pregnant isn't the result of voodoo magic. If avoiding pregnancy is that important to you, don't fuck. If you do (assuming it's vaginal, and both partners have healthy reproductive systems) you stand a chance, however remote, of getting pregnant -- whether one partner wears a condom, the other is on the pill, or both. I'm all for teaching kids about safe sex for disease prevention, but any penis-to-vagina sex between healthy partners has the potential to result in pregnancy. So yeah, if you were told, "Keep it in your pants, and you won't get pregnant", and you decided not to keep it in your pants, that's the choice you made, and you have to live with the consequences.
And then, if the thing's not aborted, the kid's going to be born to parents that didn't want it. And that's fair to the kid? You could argue never having been born is more fair if the resultant person's completely unwanted.
You could argue that, but you probably shouldn't. Lots of people are raised (or not raised) by incompetent, unloving parents, and they do fine. If someone acts like a sociopathic asshole later in life, it's because of how they responded to the hand they were dealt. I've known some people who were treated horribly as youngsters (everything from physical to sexual abuse). Surprisingly enough, they're not out raping and pillaging, and they don't wish they were dead. Was the recovery easy? No, but weighed against death, they made the choice to recover, when they could've offed themselves.
Don't tell me about how huge the adoption backlogs are--if abortion was made illegal, that backlog (if there even is one) would be obliterated within a year or two.
And that's a bad thing, is it?
I'm not doubting there would be more children waiting to be adopted than people willing to adopt. I don't know either way for a fact, but it doesn't really make a difference. Again, compare "hard life" with "dead".
Look, I've got spina bifida myself, so I'm not just talking out of my ass. Spina bifida, at the level I have it, is a pretty serious condition, but it's nothing compared to some of the stuff I've seen people go through with handicaps. You think Steven Hawking couldn't find a way to kill himself (or have someone do it for him) if he wanted to? Yes, some people (especially if they were disabled, rather than handicapped) might choose it, but in general, people are resilient, and they soldier on. Saying, "They're better off dead, anyway." is really an astounding rationalization, and that's all it is.
How is going to such lengths to allow someone to avoid the natural consequences of their actions even remotely okay?
"Going to such lengths"? And allowing an individual power over their own body is a great length to go to, instead of telling them they're just a baby generator and are locked into an undesirable life because of a previous bad decision? It's funny you'd mention this, because oftentimes opposition to abortion rights really comes down to opposing the capability of women to be promiscuous, with which there's nothing inherently
One country cannot be "better" than another.
That statement itself has nothing to do with Iran or slavery. The only claim was that you can legitimately claim one country is "better" than another, so long as you define what "better" means. And since Sweden and the Belgian Congo didn't exist as countries in the time of the Vikings, it stands to reason the post I was referring to was comparing apples to apples, i.e., modern countries to each other.
Unfortunately for you the supreme court disagrees... I can't believe people like you still exist in 2010.
You realize that all you'd have to do is change "2010" to "1857", and you could be talking about Dred Scott v. Sanford, right?
The Supreme Court is not infallible. That's why the occasionally overturn their previous decisions (see Plessy v. Ferguson). I would be astonished (and, frankly, appalled) if the Supreme Court did a complete 180 and found that a woman had no right to an abortion under any circumstances, but the viability rationale that the court used to restrict abortions in the third trimester isn't what it used to be.
You didn't pass Health class, did you? A sperm cell never becomes a baby. You only get a baby from the fertilization of an egg by a sperm. The sperm itself has no potential for life. Ditto for the an egg that's unfertilized. Further, a sperm cell is incontrovertibly a cell from the donor's body. A zygote, on the other hand, has DNA that is distinct from the egg and sperm, as it is a combination of the two, with mutations thrown in. It's biologically distinct.
Reasonable people can differ as to whether or not a woman should be allowed to terminate her pregnancy, and if so, under what conditions, but it's important to be clear about what's actually going on: An abortion is the termination of a human life, albeit one at a very early stage of development.
There is a good reason for this case not to go forward: How does the plaintiff prove that the surveillance and tracking and detention were illegal under IRANIAN law?
That's not part of the case. The only issue of the case, from what I'm reading, is the distribution of the equipment to Iran's government. The people in the U.S. were the ones breaking U.S. law.
Maybe I just want to play my iOS games on a larger screen. Maybe my kids wants to use a "fingerpaint" app on the computer. There are things that a touchscreen interface is better for than a keyboard/mouse. Why not have a machine that can switch between the two interfaces depending on what you want to do?
Just to be clear here, we're talking about an iMac with a screen that doesn't detach from its base, right? It's hard to picture playing the same kinds of games on an iMac Touch (as this is envisioned) as on an iPad or iPod Touch. With the latter two, you pick up the display and hold it. With the iMac Touch display, you reach out and touch it. It's a different animal.
I have no issue with a iMac with a touchscreen. It just seems like putting an OS for portable devices on an iMac (other than in emulation for testing) doesn't sound like a step forward. If they're going to go in this direction, they should go all the way and let the display be detachable from the base, giving you an iMac/iPad hybrid.
Why would you want iOS on an iMac? I could see going in the other direction, and putting OSX on an iPad, This doesn't make sense to me unless iOS kicks in when it's taken off its base and used as a tablet.
There's a reason we have age of consent laws, and part of that reason is that we assume that at a certain age, a person is responsible for their own sexual activity. Anyone above the age of consent should know that one of the consequences of having sex could be pregnancy. If we're saying that women can't be expected to appreciate the consequences of sexual activity while they're of child-bearing age, should we just go ahead and say that a woman cannot legally consent until the onset of menopause? How is going to such lengths to allow someone to avoid the natural consequences of their actions even remotely okay?
Going to such lengths? A simple out patient procedure is "such lengths"? If someone falls down a flight of stairs because they're clumsy do we not give them a cast on their broken bones? How can we go to such lengths as to x-ray and bandage them just to avoid the natural consequences of their actions!?!?
I've never heard of a woman falling down a flight of steps and landing on a man's penis to get impregnated. Sounds a wee bit far-fetched to me.
Having sex, on the other hand, is a deliberate act, for which there are potential consequences. Assuming normal mental acuity (without which I'm fairly certain consent can't be established), by the age of consent, a woman should know that having sex could lead to pregnancy. She can, of course, use contraceptives, but she does so with the understanding that contraceptives could potentially fail. That goes with the territory of being an adult with functioning reproductive organs.
Forgetting the concept of viability - are we to convict all women who have had an abortion with murder? Or manslaughter at the very least? That would be the judicial consequence of killing another person. Likewise, if you know of anyone who has ever had one, you'll need to go to jail for failing to report the murder (aiding and abetting, you know).
Technically, it would be the doctor that performed the abortion, so if we were going to charge anyone with murder, that would be the person. The relationship of the woman to the murder would probably be solicitation of murder or conspiracy to commit murder. But I see that as unwise, unlikely to pass into law, and almost certainly unjust, as an abortion is almost never a dispassionate, cold-blooded decision. Certainly, some room needs to be made for the emotional strain of the situation. I'm not a lawyer, but manslaughter sounds about right to me.
Simply knowing of someone who has committed a murder doesn't legally obligate you to report it. (I think it certainly obligates you morally, but that's another matter). If this person comes to you and asks you to hide them or to cover for them, and you agree, then you're aiding and abetting. So no, you won't need to go to jail for failing to report an abortion, if it becomes illegal. It would be between you and your conscience, unless the police came and asked you about it.
That's not to say I think all abortions should be illegal, either. Certainly I think a strong case could be made for excluding rape, incest (which is not really consensual sex, because of the power disparity involved) and to save the life of the mother (who, I think most would agree, has more of a stake in life than the unborn baby/fetus).
Very easy discussion. Both countries had quite a bit of viking presence. Vikings were people who taught their kids how to be inherently cruel by forcing them to rip wigs off live birds at the age of three.
I assume that the OP was talking about modern Sweden vs. the Republic of Congo (which would make sense, because, IIRC, neither country existed in Viking times).
One country can not be "better" than another.
That's some serious cultural relativism you've got going there. Would any sane person (which would exclude Kim Jong-Il) choose to live in North Korea, rather than moving with their family to pretty much any Western democracy?
True, but the quoted text states that it was the electronic monitoring that was unlawful, not the act of exporting the equipment needed to do so.
Actually, the quoted text states that it was the delivery of the equipment that was unlawful:
Defendants knowingly and willingly delivered very capable and sophisticated equipment for unlawful intercepting, monitoring, and filtering of electronic communications ("Intelligence Solutions") to Iranian officials,' the complaint alleged.
It's the Iranians that are accused of the "unlawful intercepting, monitoring, and filtering of electronic communications".
Do you think it is rational that a woman would be forced to carry the child? Just forcing someone to carry a several kilos weight for a few months continuously should sound stupid.
There's a reason we have age of consent laws, and part of that reason is that we assume that at a certain age, a person is responsible for their own sexual activity. Anyone above the age of consent should know that one of the consequences of having sex could be pregnancy. If we're saying that women can't be expected to appreciate the consequences of sexual activity while they're of child-bearing age, should we just go ahead and say that a woman cannot legally consent until the onset of menopause? How is going to such lengths to allow someone to avoid the natural consequences of their actions even remotely okay?
That's what makes rape a different situation in relation to abortion. No one should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term when they didn't have a say in the sex act that led to the pregnancy. And certainly, if you have to pick one, the life of the mother should come first. But a pregnancy represents a human life (unless you've been having sex with other species, in which case it would only be partially human), with DNA distinct from either parent. The fact that the Supreme Court, nearly 40 years ago, chose to cloud the issue with the concept of viability is irrelevant to that. Lest we forget, the Supreme Court also gave us Dredd Scott. Occasionally, they screw things up and have to go back and fix them.
If you support abortion in the cases of rape then you support the use of abortion as birth control.
So if I support the death penalty, I support executing people for jaywalking? There's a big difference between someone having consensual sex and someone being raped. It's much easier to contemplate an abortion in a situation in which the woman was forced into the sex act.
If you support abortions that are medically necessary then you place a higher value on the mother than the fetus. Therefore, you should have no issue with abortion in all cases.
That would only be true if all abortions were medically necessary. They're not. In a case where you have to pick one, then that type of judgment is called for. But there are many cases (if not most) where the health (let alone the life) of the mother isn't at risk. You can certainly support medically necessary abortions without supporting the others.
Secondly, I didn't say that people don't bother to copy obscure authors. What I said was:
The Stephen Kings of the world can afford to give away content in the hope that some people will buy their next work, but for someone starting out, every book they sell is important, and piracy really affects that.
In other words, someone who's obscure is more vulnerable to piracy, not less.
Lastly, what you're doing is a hobby. While the fact that you make any money at it at all is commendable, you're not making a living. Writing a book takes several orders of magnitude more time for months, if not years. When you put that kind of work into a book, making enough money for half an ISP bill doesn't really make it worth it. Now, I'm not saying that authors don't know the risk that their books won't sell from the outset. Every author goes through that. But how pissed would you be if you put a piece of software out that you'd spent months on, and people were pirating it like it was nothing? It's one thing to simply have someone not buy your work. It's quite a different thing when they not only don't buy it, but pilfer it.
And for the record, I'm in favor of non-DRM'd books. I think if you've got an easy enough system, and your prices aren't outrageous, people won't bother to pirate. But that's quite a different thing from saying that giving away a book is a way to market that book. That's been tried already by authors (including Steven King), with dismal results.
I guess that depends on how you define "right", eh? We've been having that argument on Slashdot a lot recently. Some people contend that "right" means whatever you can do without fear of legal reprisal when caught. Other people contend that it means what set of things you ought morally be given licence to do, such that if everyone were allowed to pursue those actions it would lead to the greatest profit for society in general and the practitioners in particular.
.. especially as measured by a faulty radar gun. Everyone sings Happy Birthday at parties without paying ASCAP fees. Defining "rights" against a legal background is probably the stupidest thing I've heard in the last fifteen minutes.
I hold to the second definition, as the first definition immediately means you have no rights whatsoever. Thanks to overlapping laws and selective prosecution, every action up to and beyond breathing is illegal if your enemy sics enough lawyers at you. Everyone jay walks, everyone wafts a mile per hour above the speed limit
First off, speaking in an absolute sense, you don't have any rights whatsoever. You should probably get used to the idea. It'll help you take politics and the law more seriously. Holding the second definition (yours) will just set you up for a lifetime of disappointment and disillusionment.
Does that mean that you have no say in what your rights are? Of course not. You can vote, and you can claim your right from the Constitution. What you can't do (rationally, at least) is claim a right simply because you want it. Again, the idea that you could invalidate a law simply because you didn't like it was itself invalidated in the 1860's. In the end, rights are whatever the majority says they are (although it's obviously harder to change the Constitution than to write a law).
Go ahead and proclaim your right to declare your house a sovereign nation, and disregard all federal laws. Let me know how that works out for you.
As far as Slashdot goes, if you post something here, it's public domain material. You reproducing it is irrelevant (on Slashdot or anywhere else). If I really had intellectual property to protect, I wouldn't put it on a public forum. If I was to write a book and put it on Amazon, though, you bet your ass I'd go after you for illegally distributing it, if you did that. Anyone with brain and a pulse would. 70 years after I die, sure, you can reproduce it to your heart's content.
I wasn't trying to cherry-pick. That's why I used Twilight as an example. It's what you were using. :)
Anyway, the important thing is what we agree on: Authors need to be compensated for what they do. How much value that adds to the book is a separate issue.
Well, that's one way to look at it. I don't think there's any shame in using spell-check (especially when your words are being seen in real-time), but I could see some people being freaked out by that. On the other hand, though, Wave allowed you to turn that feature off if you didn't want people to see you typing.
I just thought that was a really novel feature. For some reason, I really missed that when the talk command went out of style.
Yeah, but that just makes it worse, doesn't it? Not only are the guilty going free, but they're going free on the basis of their money, putting poorer clients at a disadvantage.
Blagojevich is the epitome of all the corruption in the political and legal systems. If he's convicted at retrial, I'd support the death penalty. For what he's done, I think he deserves it.
Doesn't a juror who has his/her mind made up, regardless of the facts or arguments of the other jurors, constitute someone who's failing to deliberate?
I mean, maybe I'm being too idealistic here, but it shocks and saddens me that it's this easy to buy a verdict, and it kind of makes me wonder: If it really works this way, how does anyone, anywhere, ever get convicted, if their attorney has an IQ even slightly above room temperature?
There's a substantial difference between voting in a booth and voting on a jury. In a booth, no one can see how you vote. On a jury, the other jurors can go to the judge and say, "This woman isn't considering the evidence and isn't following the law." It takes a lot more chutzpah to do something that brazen.
I would say that all teachers teaching a certain grade should come in at the same salary, since, as you say, they don't have a baseline yet.
After that, you could have a combination of test results and student evaluations. I don't really know how you'd rank teachers that moved, although I suspect that if a teacher moved to a different specialization, they'd have to start at the base salary for that specialization, with a clean slate as far as performance.
As far as tests, I've never bought the argument that giving tests encourages teachers to teach to the test. Here's why: You have to measure performance somehow. The only way you can measure if someone knows something is to test them on it. If tests aren't a good measure of learning, why have the kids in school at all? It's pointless, because you'll never know whether or not they learned anything, if you don't trust the test.
I think the best way to prevent "teaching to the test", in the cases where it occurs, is to change the test every year, and not tell the teachers anything about the test beforehand, other than the day on which you're administering it. They've got a curriculum they have to teach, and they teach it. If they teach the whole curriculum correctly, kids grades will fall on the bell curve. If they don't, then you'll know something's up.
As for seniority, it might be a good deal for teachers, but it sucks for actual education. It should work for teachers the same way it works for the rest of us: If you're successful, you should be well-compensated and happy. If you're not successful, you should be fired and find yourself a more suitable line of work. The idea that poor teachers aren't at risk of losing their jobs is a lot more than disappointing. It's shameful.
Thanks for the link. I find the whole thing nauseating. What it basically says to me is that a clever defendant will always be able to hang a jury. It's a shame that common sense can't prevail, and that a juror like that can't be shown the door, by the judge, in the interest of a fair trial. Why even give both sides a certain number of challenges? If there are valid reasons to keep someone off the jury, both sides should be able to challenge every single person who's brought up, and the judge should decide whether it's valid to exclude them or not.
When Ford released his first vehicle, he had ad writers tell people what it was for, and people added ideas onto that.
This really hurt Wave with the public. They had engineers try to sell it to people, rather than hiring an ad agency to go over it and create a campaign. I would invite people to Wave, and the response I got invariably was, "What can I do with it?". The real-time chat was a novelty, but people couldn't really picture in their minds the kind of collaboration that Wave made possible. I used to use planning a party as an example, but almost any discussion lent itself well to Wave -- especially if you had more than one language involved. Wave was a kind of e-mail and wiki on steroids, but it was hard to get people to take that leap, when Google wasn't selling it well, and when there wasn't the initial penetration like there was with Gmail. If they'd made the invite-only period far shorter, they would've had a better chance with it.