My answers are no to both, as I assume yours are, but this is ABSOLUTELY NOT a legal/civil liberties issue.
I agree that anyone bothered by this should just take their business elsewhere. I also agree that this isn't a legal issue. But I disagree about it being a civil liberties issue. This is yet another little bit of presumptuous oversight that people will eventually acclimate to. It's not some huge step in Big Brother control, but it is yet another situation where people will get used to surrendering things because the authority figure said so. No single raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood.
The policy states that you can drop off the PDA at a PDA holding place, if you like, but you are never forced to.
No, that's not quite what they are proposing. From the BoingBoing atricle: "But Alton Towers amusement park in the UK has instituted a new rule, and has instituted 'special wardens' to enforce it. If you are seen using a Palm, iPaq or other personal digital assistant or smartphone, the special wardens will take it away from you."
The whole monopoly aspect is what prevents and hampers the creation of wealth and flow of information.
The whole monopoly aspect is what controls and channels wealth and information. This doesn't have anything to do with protecting the artists, it has everything to do with protecting the artist's overlords ability to control and profit from the artists in their stable.
Shouldn't governments be particularly sensitive about not having a role in picking economic winners and losers?
Someone mod that +1 funny. How are they supposed to pay for their re-election campaigns if they don't take direct action to influence the economy? The government is made up of people who, every few years, need to raise millions of dollars on nothing but promises, the only thing they can promise that makes that worthwhile is a good return on a campaign "investment".
Right now, they wouldn't learn anything, because they would be dead. If NASA is dicking around with anything, it would be the ISS. Haul that low orbit pile of resources into a much more stable orbit, and then use it for parts/construction platform for a station with centrifugal gravity and as close to a closed ecosystem as we can manage. Until we improve those technologies, to the level of near permanent space habitats, then multi-year space exploration will be the sole domain of robots.
It was on natural selection. It works great for the rest of the animal kingdom... maybe we should try it more often.
Reinstating Natural Selection in humans would involve allowing all of our old, sick, or ineffective (read:welfare cycle) members of society to die from neglect. It would also involve allowing entire populations in famine areas to die of starvation. This approach would do wonders for the global economy and, with the accompanying population decline, the environment. But given how completely opposite this is to Judeo-Christian ethics, it wouldn't bet on seeing this on any kind of scale any time soon. Which is good really, because if you anthropomorphize most animals enough to prescribe morals to them, well animals are usually selfish assholes.
they may even be able to get human cells to produce energy through photosynthesis.
So someday there will green skinned chicks sunbathing their way to ever better levels of physical fitness? The day I see that, I'm totally changing my name to James T. Kirk.
Try remembering two, three digit numbers and one single digit. I don't exactly know why it helps, but it makes numbers and their order a lot easier. Perhaps it's something about treating a three digit number like a single concept.
Ritalin has helped me micro-focus, and not just cram for exams but actually learn topics.
I was prescribed Ritalin throughout grade school for ADD by the end of freshman year of college I decided to stop taking it because I had learned to "fake" the cognitive effects. Ritalin takes effect so quickly, that I was able to perceive the difference and use that to learn ways to be almost as effective, but without the drug. 14 years later I still have ADD but can function pretty normally because of what I learned with Ritalin. I have to wonder if the same thing could be done with Provigil, learn the thought patterns that give you the increased cognition, but eventually have the benifit without the drug.
Groups inside a society who have no tolerance for other views are a serious issue.
The inverse, groups that cannot be tolerated by society can be problematic as well. Giving the Puritans land far far from the rest of England was just as much a blessing to England as the Puritans. Any modern day cult that builds a compound in the middle of nowhere could be said to tolerate other's views, but they don't really fit in so well when we find that they are like to marry 14 year old girls to 45 year old men. But out in the middle of the ocean, it wouldn't really bother us anymore. Or would it? Would the American people allow such a society to sit just off our shores? What about a cannabis farming floating island anchored just north of Bermuda, do you think Uncle Sam would let them alone? I don't think these floating islands are going to be the escape from global government/society that many want them to be.
Meh, calling middle-eastern nations representative of Islam is like calling America representative of Christianity.
I didn't say it was representative of Islam (the religion), I said it was representative of the Nation of Islam (the cultural idea). The Platonic Ideals of a culture don't mean nearly as much as the daily reality, and the daily reality, even in rich Islamic countries, shows me that the Western culture is superior to the Islamic culture, all hypocrisies included.
America deliberately act against its own interest. Why should America act contrary to its interests?
You assume that the interests of America (as represented by the incumbent elected officials) is the same as interests of America (the general populace) or the same as the interests of America (the Platonic Ideal put forth by our founding fathers and daydreamed of by starry-eyed libertarians). Those in power take actions based on staying in power. The general populace takes actions based on increasing wealth and/or comfort. Platonic Ideals are talking points not action points, they almost never result in real world actions.
perhaps the removed videos were the ones with beheadings and the ones that are still there are the ones with i dunno terrorist training camps & osama bin laden speeches & other Anti-American propaganda.
I think the ones with the beheadings and stonings and abuse of women are the most important to keep. They show the true face of Militant Islam and Sharia Law. It's easy to make a convincing Anti-American propaganda video, we make lots of mistakes and some of them are quite shameful (Gitmo and Katrina come to mind) but let not forget to closely examine what our critics are proposing to replace our imperfect America with.
Someone needs to pull Lieberman aside explain to him meaning of "the only thing you have to fear is fear itself." Fight lies and propaganda with truth and transparency, not secrets and censorship.
When I'm training for a triathlon, I eat twice as much as anyone else I know. Added to that, the food I eat is more labor intensive than junk food, fresh organic stuff uses more resources per calorie than McDonald's and Hostess. A society of athletes would consume more food/resources than the couch potato society. Although there would be far fewer cars and many more bicycles.
Or maybe I've just lost all faith in humanity. Either way, society already turns a blind eye to the atrocious acts of mankind. A little more torture and murder won't change the way those in power control the planet and its inhabitants.
There are some pretty good arguments that we actually live in one of the least violent times in human history.
The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply--for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.
With the 24 hour News cycle and instant global communications, we now see and hear about bad things from all over the world. The earthquake in China would have only been a small blurb in a western paper 50 years ago and would have been almost unknown in the western world 100 years ago. Darfur wouldn't have been an issue to anyone outside of Africa 100 years ago. I would say that rather than turning a blind eye to atrocities, we are paying ever closer attention. The total numbers of atrocities may be going up, but the number per capita is going down, after we reach our global peak population (predicted for 2070) then the amount of global violence should decline as humans become ever more civilized and our populations slowly decline.
It follows that either there was liquid water and water vapor on mars to deposit the ice at the pole, or there was a horde of very determined Martians with trucks to move it there:). I would go with the canals and oceans theory myself.
So then we need to find out what happened to the Martian atmosphere and figure out a way to reverse it, before we can go about re-establishing breathable air. It would be a shame to just have all that water vapor blow off into space, but boosting a planet's magnetosphere would be a considerable task. The polar ice would make a nice source of oxygen for inflating domes over colonies while we wait.
I think to make the laws worthy of the high empotions that surround them we need to write in a distinction between true children, and teenagers. as well as a distinction between forced and voluntary pictures on the part of the teenagers. A 19 year-old that hooks up with a 16 year old shouldn't be facing the same charges as someone who rapes a 5 year old. Every story about some teen who ends up on the sexual predator list for life because they photographed themselves naked only serves to weaken the moral strength of the laws that are passed to protect young children from malevolent adults.
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My answers are no to both, as I assume yours are, but this is ABSOLUTELY NOT a legal/civil liberties issue.
I agree that anyone bothered by this should just take their business elsewhere. I also agree that this isn't a legal issue. But I disagree about it being a civil liberties issue. This is yet another little bit of presumptuous oversight that people will eventually acclimate to. It's not some huge step in Big Brother control, but it is yet another situation where people will get used to surrendering things because the authority figure said so. No single raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood.
The policy states that you can drop off the PDA at a PDA holding place, if you like, but you are never forced to.
No, that's not quite what they are proposing. From the BoingBoing atricle: "But Alton Towers amusement park in the UK has instituted a new rule, and has instituted 'special wardens' to enforce it. If you are seen using a Palm, iPaq or other personal digital assistant or smartphone, the special wardens will take it away from you."
The whole monopoly aspect is what prevents and hampers the creation of wealth and flow of information.
The whole monopoly aspect is what controls and channels wealth and information. This doesn't have anything to do with protecting the artists, it has everything to do with protecting the artist's overlords ability to control and profit from the artists in their stable.
Yeah the police don't like it when databasing is used to track them. The president of the California Police Chiefs association is petitioning the legislature for a law making sites like this illegal.
Shouldn't governments be particularly sensitive about not having a role in picking economic winners and losers?
Someone mod that +1 funny. How are they supposed to pay for their re-election campaigns if they don't take direct action to influence the economy? The government is made up of people who, every few years, need to raise millions of dollars on nothing but promises, the only thing they can promise that makes that worthwhile is a good return on a campaign "investment".
I take that back, Natural Selection is waiting for the right catastrophe to return.
Right now, they wouldn't learn anything, because they would be dead. If NASA is dicking around with anything, it would be the ISS. Haul that low orbit pile of resources into a much more stable orbit, and then use it for parts/construction platform for a station with centrifugal gravity and as close to a closed ecosystem as we can manage. Until we improve those technologies, to the level of near permanent space habitats, then multi-year space exploration will be the sole domain of robots.
It was on natural selection. It works great for the rest of the animal kingdom... maybe we should try it more often.
Reinstating Natural Selection in humans would involve allowing all of our old, sick, or ineffective (read:welfare cycle) members of society to die from neglect. It would also involve allowing entire populations in famine areas to die of starvation. This approach would do wonders for the global economy and, with the accompanying population decline, the environment. But given how completely opposite this is to Judeo-Christian ethics, it wouldn't bet on seeing this on any kind of scale any time soon. Which is good really, because if you anthropomorphize most animals enough to prescribe morals to them, well animals are usually selfish assholes.
they may even be able to get human cells to produce energy through photosynthesis.
So someday there will green skinned chicks sunbathing their way to ever better levels of physical fitness? The day I see that, I'm totally changing my name to James T. Kirk.
Try remembering two, three digit numbers and one single digit. I don't exactly know why it helps, but it makes numbers and their order a lot easier. Perhaps it's something about treating a three digit number like a single concept.
Ritalin has helped me micro-focus, and not just cram for exams but actually learn topics.
I was prescribed Ritalin throughout grade school for ADD by the end of freshman year of college I decided to stop taking it because I had learned to "fake" the cognitive effects. Ritalin takes effect so quickly, that I was able to perceive the difference and use that to learn ways to be almost as effective, but without the drug. 14 years later I still have ADD but can function pretty normally because of what I learned with Ritalin. I have to wonder if the same thing could be done with Provigil, learn the thought patterns that give you the increased cognition, but eventually have the benifit without the drug.
Groups inside a society who have no tolerance for other views are a serious issue.
The inverse, groups that cannot be tolerated by society can be problematic as well. Giving the Puritans land far far from the rest of England was just as much a blessing to England as the Puritans. Any modern day cult that builds a compound in the middle of nowhere could be said to tolerate other's views, but they don't really fit in so well when we find that they are like to marry 14 year old girls to 45 year old men. But out in the middle of the ocean, it wouldn't really bother us anymore. Or would it? Would the American people allow such a society to sit just off our shores? What about a cannabis farming floating island anchored just north of Bermuda, do you think Uncle Sam would let them alone? I don't think these floating islands are going to be the escape from global government/society that many want them to be.
Ok genius, exactly what ideals do you think the terrorists are attempting to promote with their terrorism if not Islam and Sharia?
Meh, calling middle-eastern nations representative of Islam is like calling America representative of Christianity.
I didn't say it was representative of Islam (the religion), I said it was representative of the Nation of Islam (the cultural idea). The Platonic Ideals of a culture don't mean nearly as much as the daily reality, and the daily reality, even in rich Islamic countries, shows me that the Western culture is superior to the Islamic culture, all hypocrisies included.
Often enough I think Islam "insults" itself, when the true face of it's most vocal proponents show their ideals in action. I don't need a cartoon Mohamed or Anti-Islamic video to show me that the Nation of Islam is inferior to the nation I already have. I simply look at the daily life in Islamic nations and life in western nations, and I have my answer. Even in the wealth and luxury of Saudi Arabia, I find nothing appealing.
Google/YouTube has been censoring anything that 'insults Islam'
"That's because droids don't rip your arms out of their sockets when they lose. Wookies are known to do that."
How about just tracking the payment back to the source, thus actually helping a child in ongoing danger.
America deliberately act against its own interest. Why should America act contrary to its interests?
You assume that the interests of America (as represented by the incumbent elected officials) is the same as interests of America (the general populace) or the same as the interests of America (the Platonic Ideal put forth by our founding fathers and daydreamed of by starry-eyed libertarians). Those in power take actions based on staying in power. The general populace takes actions based on increasing wealth and/or comfort. Platonic Ideals are talking points not action points, they almost never result in real world actions.
perhaps the removed videos were the ones with beheadings and the ones that are still there are the ones with i dunno terrorist training camps & osama bin laden speeches & other Anti-American propaganda.
I think the ones with the beheadings and stonings and abuse of women are the most important to keep. They show the true face of Militant Islam and Sharia Law. It's easy to make a convincing Anti-American propaganda video, we make lots of mistakes and some of them are quite shameful (Gitmo and Katrina come to mind) but let not forget to closely examine what our critics are proposing to replace our imperfect America with.
Someone needs to pull Lieberman aside explain to him meaning of "the only thing you have to fear is fear itself." Fight lies and propaganda with truth and transparency, not secrets and censorship.
You can imagine govememnts using it matrix style "What good is a phone call if you can't speak, mr anderson?"
It pretty much already happens. You get a National Security Letter gag order, and you are threatened with five years of prison for even trying to communicate the fact that you are under a gag order, let alone trying to address what the gag order is about. The FBI now issues 30,000 National Security Letters a year.
You stick your credit card in your wife's mouth? ... That's just weird.
the study itself has some serious flaws.
When I'm training for a triathlon, I eat twice as much as anyone else I know. Added to that, the food I eat is more labor intensive than junk food, fresh organic stuff uses more resources per calorie than McDonald's and Hostess. A society of athletes would consume more food/resources than the couch potato society. Although there would be far fewer cars and many more bicycles.
There are some pretty good arguments that we actually live in one of the least violent times in human history. With the 24 hour News cycle and instant global communications, we now see and hear about bad things from all over the world. The earthquake in China would have only been a small blurb in a western paper 50 years ago and would have been almost unknown in the western world 100 years ago. Darfur wouldn't have been an issue to anyone outside of Africa 100 years ago. I would say that rather than turning a blind eye to atrocities, we are paying ever closer attention. The total numbers of atrocities may be going up, but the number per capita is going down, after we reach our global peak population (predicted for 2070) then the amount of global violence should decline as humans become ever more civilized and our populations slowly decline.
It follows that either there was liquid water and water vapor on mars to deposit the ice at the pole, or there was a horde of very determined Martians with trucks to move it there :). I would go with the canals and oceans theory myself.
So then we need to find out what happened to the Martian atmosphere and figure out a way to reverse it, before we can go about re-establishing breathable air. It would be a shame to just have all that water vapor blow off into space, but boosting a planet's magnetosphere would be a considerable task. The polar ice would make a nice source of oxygen for inflating domes over colonies while we wait.
I think to make the laws worthy of the high empotions that surround them we need to write in a distinction between true children, and teenagers. as well as a distinction between forced and voluntary pictures on the part of the teenagers. A 19 year-old that hooks up with a 16 year old shouldn't be facing the same charges as someone who rapes a 5 year old. Every story about some teen who ends up on the sexual predator list for life because they photographed themselves naked only serves to weaken the moral strength of the laws that are passed to protect young children from malevolent adults.