On the face of it, it sounds good - it's unlikely parents will agree to child pornography prosecutions against their own child. But looking closer at it, this is just batshit-insanity dressed up with a legal fig-leaf. "Appearing in a photograph provides no evidence as to whether that person possessed or transmitted the photo" sounds to me like they judges are merely arguing that childporn charges do no apply because images themselves do not provide much evidence of who took the picture. It still completely neglects the issue that the current childporn laws apply to people under the age of consent who took naked pictures of themselves! Yes, I know, then there could be a loophole that pedophiles just force their victims to take their own pictures. Honestly - I don't care. The current laws not only make criminals out of people who really didn't do anything wrong, but also terminally fuck someone for the rest of their lives just because they took a picture of themselves.
Yes, yes, pedophilia is the root password to the Constitution, etc. But apathy and fatalism isn't gonna cut it. Write to your congress critters, and interrupt people who blather on about the danger of random strangers taking pictures. Tell them that they ought to look up the weird uncle first.
No. And this is why people keep going to Slashdot. Because while it isn't great (and I can tell you that the old memories are heavily clouded), the alternatives are much, much worse. People who complain are the same people complain that democracy sucks, all the while forgetting the alternatives.
It's the same problem that appears in pretty much any article on China from a western newspaper. Like clockwork, a significant chunk of the comments will be from Chinese who claim that the article, and therefore the newspaper, is biased against China, that whichever country in which the newspaper is published in never gets criticized even though it committed far worse sins, and that China in general is much better and that no one who is not Chinese cannot fully understand China and the Chinese.
I fully expect that the small minority of radical Chinese nationalists (which, mind you, still probably number at least a few million) will inject their rhetoric into anything resembling Chinese criticism or even anything that isn't laudatory enough.
I can actually see the flicker when I run with an LED headlight: looking at my shoes, I can see about 3-5 impressions of the reflective strips in my retina. That doesn't bother me too much though - I suspect that the frequency is high enough that my eye doesn't try to adjust to it.
One gripe though - my head light makes everything superflat. Not sure if that's a feature of the rapid oscillations, or if that's a feature of every headlamp.
Newsflash: there are several types of democracy, of which direct and representative are only two. Want to try that again? Or, if you really want to rely on official dictionaries, here are a few definitions: # the political orientation of those who favor government by the people or by their elected representatives # a political system in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who can elect people to represent them # majority rule: the doctrine that the numerical majority of an organized group can make decisions binding on the whole group
I'm curious - why do you think that telecoms differ from electrical utilities in terms of f? For one, you can run the former over the infrastructure of the latter. For two, the infrastructure necessary is very similar. Lotsa cable strung or buried everywhere? Check. Big centers hosting big machines requiring lots of maintenance? Check. Start-up cost in the billions if building everything from scratch? Check.
As far as I can tell, they're identical in their propensity to form natural monopolies.
A Republic with Laws to protect individual rights is superior to a Tyranny of the majority (democracy).
And yet, we had Jim Crow laws and slavery, which were the product of your precious "Republic". Republic in quotes because you clearly have no idea what a Republic or what a democracy is, and no idea that we live in exactly a democracy. Or why do you think it is so easy to enact laws that trample the rights of minorities?
You're assuming that pirates would have paid for the content if it had not been available via filesharing. That's an unsupported assumption. Not only that, it flies in the face of Econ 101: a product that is free has higher demand than a non-free one.
Now, if anything needs to be hidden, then somebody has to be making the everyday decisions on what gets classified, and enforcing them. Governments are the most natural pick for that, if only because they are — by design — charged with national security.
Correct.
Any "leakers" inside the government usurp that decision-making to themselves and to the Wikileaks. Instead of relying on the judgment of people charged with making it, we will depend on the judgment of the "leaker" and of the Wikileaks editors.
Correct.
Personally, I'd prefer the government officials...
I disagree. To some extent, because the people doing the leaking are government officials as well, just not as high up the food chain as the people who classify and declassify things. To quote Cheney, anything the president says is by definition declassified (I think it was him - see the Valerie Plame incident). That doesn't mean he's automatically right with his declassification.
Thus any leakers (and the Wikileaks personnel) are to be prosecuted with the prosecutors having only to prove their involvement in leaking. They could counter by proving, that the particular leak was justified (see also "whistleblower laws"), but the burden of proof is on them...
Not just "they could counter by proving that the particular leak was justified", but proving that the particular leak was justified needs to be a definitive defense for leaking classified documents.
By the way, I have no idea why you're trying to link a quote from Karl Marx with Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. Unless you're going for a Google bomb, in which case you're doing it wrong.
Primarily because the only way for a government to work is if it is accountable to its electors - and they only way to hold an organization accountable is to make it transparent. I'm not accountable to my neighbor for what I'm doing in my office, but my representatives are sure as hell accountable to me for what they're doing in their offices.
Entertainment and media aren't an asset. They are entertainment and media, two intellectual concepts who benefit tremendously from the network effect: the more people know about it and have access to it, the better it becomes.
Let's put it this way - if Chinese citizens actually paid for even a small fraction more of the American software, movies, and music they consume, the trade deficit picture would be significantly different.
Newsflash: if Chinese citizens would actually have to pay for the American software, music and movies they consume, they wouldn't consume it.
Obama talking about entertainment and media as one of the major US assets scares the living daylights out of me: it means we've become a nation of circuses, jesters and clowns, employed by other nations like the dancing bears of yore.
Please do not quote Wikipedia in a politically charged discussion. Especially when all you do is quote a few sentences from a full wikipedia article without linking to the supporting articles outside of wikipedia. It makes it difficult to take your point seriously.
More specifically to your point: you're omitting the million other reasons people were killed off during Stalin's purges. As a result, you're pretending that the one overriding principle behind the purges was religion, when it really was any opposition to power.
For example, imagine that a media company such as Fox/CNN/whatever decided to run stories on how Bush/Obama was assassinated. Imagine that that media company decided not only to post that information but also kept it up for days, although it was repeatedly contacted to be informed that no, Bush/Obama was still very much alive. If, after that, Bush/Obama complained that you shouldn't post false information to your heart's content, would that make Bush/Obama dictators who hate freedom and want to wage war on openness?
Let's take a real example: Fox News calling a number of Republican representatives and senators Democrats when they were caught with some sex scandal. What happened? Nothing. And quite frankly, nothing should have happened. Maybe the DNC could have sued for slander, but what happened was exactly what was supposed to have happened.
Contrast that with Chavez's posturing, who wants to control what gets posted to the Internet. There's no need to knee-jerk, because it is patently obvious what's happening: someone wants a method to shut people down when they become bothersome.
And for the record, that's exactly the outcry that comes up here in the US when a wannabe dictator tries to implement rules like that.
Good grief people, troll isn't a mod for disagree. For anyone interested, here's the CDC link: http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/varicella/faqs-nipinfo-varicella.htm In a nutshell, vaccinated people have had shingles. Whether the risk is identical is unclear at this point, and requires more study.
I'm gonna take a wild guess and say the country is "Iran." There are some interesting parallels there. I doubt we'll get Mullahs storming embassies within the next ten years, but I won't hold my hand to the fire that it won't happen within my life time. There's a definite potential for progression here, and rewriting text books is a favorite way of starting that process.
What's your point? Is there nothing good that has come from the Republicans in the last 130 years or so that you must hang your hat on something that happened that long ago, and wasn't even as cut-and-dry as you make it out to be? And where everyone who participated in it has died long ago?
As does the vaccine. In this case, shingles is tied to the virus itself. Since the vaccine consists of live, but attenuated viruses, the vaccine can lead to shingles just as much as getting chicken pox can.
Ok, so this one person talks to a few other people in one area, and only finds a few cases of autism. Shocking. I'd like to wait for a proper field study that does at least some proper random sampling. Not to mention that the article fails to account for the possibility that the Amish, being a very segregated group, just might not have the genetic predisposition that leads to autism.
I personally find the abundant anecdotal evidence of such a link quite disturbing, requiring thorough investigation, though this is unlikely to happen due to the above reason.
The thorough investigation has happened. Several times. See for example here and here. Or you could read the CDC article. Oh, but wait, they're all government institutions! They would all be devastated by that link! That's why they lie! They all lie! The cake is a lie! Wait, wrong channel...
The point is that the anti-vaxxers - and yes, the derogative term is appropriate - are about as concerned about truth and as scientifically literate as all the Moon-hoaxers. There is nothing that scientists can do to change the minds of the anti-vaxxers, because the anti-vaxxers do not operate on a scientific basis. I just hope this blows over before too many people stop vaccinating.
I agree with your analysis of the situation on the ground. However, what I do need to point out is that there's an inherent short-sightedness in trading a fridge for the ability to hold your government accountable. Sure, things are peachy right now for the average Chinese. But the average Chinese does not exist, and the majority of the people who are better off mask the millions who are shafted or just plain killed because of a corrupt government. Not to mention that things like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are inherently harder to pull off in an open government. It's a question of whether people want their fridge or a decreased likelihood of a government catastrophe. It's clear what the Chinese are choosing, but I also know that that would never be my decision.
I wonder how the next Google stockholder's meeting will go if Google leaves, how can the Board answer the question of why the stockholders' interests (i.e. profits) were blatantly compromised for empty, useless proclamations of "human rights?"
That says more about the personal beliefs of the stock holders (who, let's not forget, are people and supposed to act like people) than about Google's commercial practices.
Slashdot Mirror
On the face of it, it sounds good - it's unlikely parents will agree to child pornography prosecutions against their own child. But looking closer at it, this is just batshit-insanity dressed up with a legal fig-leaf. "Appearing in a photograph provides no evidence as to whether that person possessed or transmitted the photo" sounds to me like they judges are merely arguing that childporn charges do no apply because images themselves do not provide much evidence of who took the picture. It still completely neglects the issue that the current childporn laws apply to people under the age of consent who took naked pictures of themselves! Yes, I know, then there could be a loophole that pedophiles just force their victims to take their own pictures. Honestly - I don't care. The current laws not only make criminals out of people who really didn't do anything wrong, but also terminally fuck someone for the rest of their lives just because they took a picture of themselves.
Yes, yes, pedophilia is the root password to the Constitution, etc. But apathy and fatalism isn't gonna cut it. Write to your congress critters, and interrupt people who blather on about the danger of random strangers taking pictures. Tell them that they ought to look up the weird uncle first.
No. And this is why people keep going to Slashdot. Because while it isn't great (and I can tell you that the old memories are heavily clouded), the alternatives are much, much worse. People who complain are the same people complain that democracy sucks, all the while forgetting the alternatives.
It's the same problem that appears in pretty much any article on China from a western newspaper. Like clockwork, a significant chunk of the comments will be from Chinese who claim that the article, and therefore the newspaper, is biased against China, that whichever country in which the newspaper is published in never gets criticized even though it committed far worse sins, and that China in general is much better and that no one who is not Chinese cannot fully understand China and the Chinese.
I fully expect that the small minority of radical Chinese nationalists (which, mind you, still probably number at least a few million) will inject their rhetoric into anything resembling Chinese criticism or even anything that isn't laudatory enough.
I can actually see the flicker when I run with an LED headlight: looking at my shoes, I can see about 3-5 impressions of the reflective strips in my retina. That doesn't bother me too much though - I suspect that the frequency is high enough that my eye doesn't try to adjust to it.
One gripe though - my head light makes everything superflat. Not sure if that's a feature of the rapid oscillations, or if that's a feature of every headlamp.
Newsflash: there are several types of democracy, of which direct and representative are only two. Want to try that again?
Or, if you really want to rely on official dictionaries, here are a few definitions:
# the political orientation of those who favor government by the people or by their elected representatives
# a political system in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who can elect people to represent them
# majority rule: the doctrine that the numerical majority of an organized group can make decisions binding on the whole group
Moron.
I'm curious - why do you think that telecoms differ from electrical utilities in terms of f? For one, you can run the former over the infrastructure of the latter. For two, the infrastructure necessary is very similar. Lotsa cable strung or buried everywhere? Check. Big centers hosting big machines requiring lots of maintenance? Check. Start-up cost in the billions if building everything from scratch? Check.
As far as I can tell, they're identical in their propensity to form natural monopolies.
A Republic with Laws to protect individual rights is superior to a Tyranny of the majority (democracy).
And yet, we had Jim Crow laws and slavery, which were the product of your precious "Republic". Republic in quotes because you clearly have no idea what a Republic or what a democracy is, and no idea that we live in exactly a democracy. Or why do you think it is so easy to enact laws that trample the rights of minorities?
You're assuming that pirates would have paid for the content if it had not been available via filesharing. That's an unsupported assumption. Not only that, it flies in the face of Econ 101: a product that is free has higher demand than a non-free one.
Now, if anything needs to be hidden, then somebody has to be making the everyday decisions on what gets classified, and enforcing them. Governments are the most natural pick for that, if only because they are — by design — charged with national security.
Correct.
Any "leakers" inside the government usurp that decision-making to themselves and to the Wikileaks. Instead of relying on the judgment of people charged with making it, we will depend on the judgment of the "leaker" and of the Wikileaks editors.
Correct.
Personally, I'd prefer the government officials...
I disagree. To some extent, because the people doing the leaking are government officials as well, just not as high up the food chain as the people who classify and declassify things. To quote Cheney, anything the president says is by definition declassified (I think it was him - see the Valerie Plame incident). That doesn't mean he's automatically right with his declassification.
Thus any leakers (and the Wikileaks personnel) are to be prosecuted with the prosecutors having only to prove their involvement in leaking. They could counter by proving, that the particular leak was justified (see also "whistleblower laws"), but the burden of proof is on them...
Not just "they could counter by proving that the particular leak was justified", but proving that the particular leak was justified needs to be a definitive defense for leaking classified documents.
By the way, I have no idea why you're trying to link a quote from Karl Marx with Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. Unless you're going for a Google bomb, in which case you're doing it wrong.
Primarily because the only way for a government to work is if it is accountable to its electors - and they only way to hold an organization accountable is to make it transparent. I'm not accountable to my neighbor for what I'm doing in my office, but my representatives are sure as hell accountable to me for what they're doing in their offices.
Entertainment and media aren't an asset. They are entertainment and media, two intellectual concepts who benefit tremendously from the network effect: the more people know about it and have access to it, the better it becomes.
Let's put it this way - if Chinese citizens actually paid for even a small fraction more of the American software, movies, and music they consume, the trade deficit picture would be significantly different.
Newsflash: if Chinese citizens would actually have to pay for the American software, music and movies they consume, they wouldn't consume it.
Obama talking about entertainment and media as one of the major US assets scares the living daylights out of me: it means we've become a nation of circuses, jesters and clowns, employed by other nations like the dancing bears of yore.
Please do not quote Wikipedia in a politically charged discussion. Especially when all you do is quote a few sentences from a full wikipedia article without linking to the supporting articles outside of wikipedia. It makes it difficult to take your point seriously.
More specifically to your point: you're omitting the million other reasons people were killed off during Stalin's purges. As a result, you're pretending that the one overriding principle behind the purges was religion, when it really was any opposition to power.
For example, imagine that a media company such as Fox/CNN/whatever decided to run stories on how Bush/Obama was assassinated. Imagine that that media company decided not only to post that information but also kept it up for days, although it was repeatedly contacted to be informed that no, Bush/Obama was still very much alive. If, after that, Bush/Obama complained that you shouldn't post false information to your heart's content, would that make Bush/Obama dictators who hate freedom and want to wage war on openness?
Let's take a real example: Fox News calling a number of Republican representatives and senators Democrats when they were caught with some sex scandal. What happened? Nothing. And quite frankly, nothing should have happened. Maybe the DNC could have sued for slander, but what happened was exactly what was supposed to have happened.
Contrast that with Chavez's posturing, who wants to control what gets posted to the Internet. There's no need to knee-jerk, because it is patently obvious what's happening: someone wants a method to shut people down when they become bothersome.
And for the record, that's exactly the outcry that comes up here in the US when a wannabe dictator tries to implement rules like that.
See my CDC link. While the risk might not be identical, it's also not clear that it is significantly less likely to cause an outbreak.
Good grief people, troll isn't a mod for disagree. For anyone interested, here's the CDC link: http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/varicella/faqs-nipinfo-varicella.htm
In a nutshell, vaccinated people have had shingles. Whether the risk is identical is unclear at this point, and requires more study.
I'm gonna take a wild guess and say the country is "Iran." There are some interesting parallels there. I doubt we'll get Mullahs storming embassies within the next ten years, but I won't hold my hand to the fire that it won't happen within my life time. There's a definite potential for progression here, and rewriting text books is a favorite way of starting that process.
Damn those hedonistic heathens! No wonder the Texas School board took pains to reduce the importance of Thomas Jefferson.
What's your point? Is there nothing good that has come from the Republicans in the last 130 years or so that you must hang your hat on something that happened that long ago, and wasn't even as cut-and-dry as you make it out to be? And where everyone who participated in it has died long ago?
As does the vaccine. In this case, shingles is tied to the virus itself. Since the vaccine consists of live, but attenuated viruses, the vaccine can lead to shingles just as much as getting chicken pox can.
Shoulda known better that the research into Amish autism rates had already been done...
You can still die from chicken pox. Despite the vaccine, about 100 Americans die from it per year.
Ok, so this one person talks to a few other people in one area, and only finds a few cases of autism. Shocking. I'd like to wait for a proper field study that does at least some proper random sampling. Not to mention that the article fails to account for the possibility that the Amish, being a very segregated group, just might not have the genetic predisposition that leads to autism.
I personally find the abundant anecdotal evidence of such a link quite disturbing, requiring thorough investigation, though this is unlikely to happen due to the above reason.
The thorough investigation has happened. Several times. See for example here and here. Or you could read the CDC article. Oh, but wait, they're all government institutions! They would all be devastated by that link! That's why they lie! They all lie! The cake is a lie! Wait, wrong channel...
The point is that the anti-vaxxers - and yes, the derogative term is appropriate - are about as concerned about truth and as scientifically literate as all the Moon-hoaxers. There is nothing that scientists can do to change the minds of the anti-vaxxers, because the anti-vaxxers do not operate on a scientific basis. I just hope this blows over before too many people stop vaccinating.
I agree with your analysis of the situation on the ground. However, what I do need to point out is that there's an inherent short-sightedness in trading a fridge for the ability to hold your government accountable. Sure, things are peachy right now for the average Chinese. But the average Chinese does not exist, and the majority of the people who are better off mask the millions who are shafted or just plain killed because of a corrupt government. Not to mention that things like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are inherently harder to pull off in an open government. It's a question of whether people want their fridge or a decreased likelihood of a government catastrophe. It's clear what the Chinese are choosing, but I also know that that would never be my decision.
I wonder how the next Google stockholder's meeting will go if Google leaves, how can the Board answer the question of why the stockholders' interests (i.e. profits) were blatantly compromised for empty, useless proclamations of "human rights?"
That says more about the personal beliefs of the stock holders (who, let's not forget, are people and supposed to act like people) than about Google's commercial practices.