Online libel is serious even if you are an Average Joe, looking to get a job or maybe just stay out of prison. There has been enough of this kind of stuff discussed here on/. recently that it should be obvious that a carefully made false FaceBook page could be seriously damaging to even an average person. Just a site that degrades you might be enough to create a bad impression if it shows up on the first page when your name is Googled. Now if that site appears to be made by you it's even worse.
I thought school was for learning things rather than getting a fancy piece of paper.
That really depends on what you get your degree in, especially with masters degrees. A masters in engineering or physics might be about knowledge, but and MBA or MFA is more about the people that you get introduced/networked to. Yale business school will open a lot of doors with that fancy piece of paper.
600kWh a day per home seems quite high, where'd you get that figure from?
Oh! Nice catch. I was thinking about monthly usage when I used 600kWh. 600kWh is what a moderately green household would use in a month (I was reading online about off-grid homes a few days ago), but the average household usage is 920kWh per month. So daily that's about 31kWh. So that solar array would power 98,923,354 households, about 91% of the households in the US. Thanks for that.
I agree, gaming is a major driving force in the advancement of PCs from a consumer point of view. It's why graphics cards exist. It's why 30' monitors are cool. It's why CPUs and Ram get upgraded. Touch screen for games would be a disaster for two major reasons: The fact that you have to block your vision to the part of the screen you are interacting with and the way touch screens pull you out of the world of the game. When I play City of Heroes, I pretty quickly stop thinking about my interactions with the computer itself, and just enjoy the game. Watching myself put my hands on the screen would only serve destroy the illusion. That illusion is what makes the games fun. Guitar Hero is fun because the game's input device adds to the illusion. Why is a mouse more immersive than a touchscreen? Because once I put my hand on the mouse, my brain mostly overlooks the idea that my hand and the mouse pointer at seperate. The pointer exists there in cyberspace, and my brains uses it to influence the world in cyberspace. I am mostly unaware of my hand physically holding the mouse. With a touchscreen, my meatspace hand is only interacting when I hold it up to the screen, where it blocks my view and reminds my brain of the separation between meatspace and cyberspace.
First, the area of desert directly affected by the atomic bomb test is peanuts.
I wouldn't call 1,375 square miles, peanuts. That's 38,332,800,000 square feet, If we assume 10 watts per sq ft that's 383,328,000 KW per hour or 3,066,624,000 KWH in an 8 hour day. If the average home uses 600 KWH a day, that's 5,111,040 homes. Granted it would take 22 solar arrays like that to power all 107 million homes in the US (2001 census) if we tried to go by solar alone, and we had ways to store that power to use it 24 hours a day. A 1,375 sq mile array could likely supply the mid-day (non-peak) power needs to about 20 million homes because of the correlation of sunshine and power usage, little to no storage needed. That's the mid-day household power usage for almost the entire "West" census region. Not peanuts at all.
That a vast number of black folks are poor is the symptom of years of racism and the problem.br> While that may have been very true in the past, that reasoning doesn't hold water any more. You may have noticed that there is a black man that will hopefully be our next president. The reason that there is a cycle of poverty in poor urban Black culture, is because of the values that the culture has. Education and hard work are discouraged. Poor urban Asian youth have a much higher graduation rate and a much lower incarceration rate because they hold a different set of standards. You may rightly point out that potential employers view Asian youth very differently from Black youth, but that is because the Asian youth have earned a reputation for being hard working, respectful and self disciplined. Yes there are Asian street gangs, but the over all culture embraces values that employers see as assets. There is no evil rich white man preventing urban Black culture from adopting these values that lead to success. But being called an "Oreo" for valuing education and hard work and clean living is going to hold down poor Blacks. Guess which demographic is mostly likely to hate someone for being an "Oreo"? I'm not mouthing off in ignorance, I'm looking at world I walk through every day here in northern half of Manhattan (Harlem and Washington Heights). To simply categorize poor urban Blacks as "victims" and then assume that they are unable to have personal accountability is dehumanizing and racist. The only potential thing that poor urban Blacks don't have that poor urban Asians do have is the understanding that education and hard honest work will lead to success. They only reason that they don't have that understanding is because everyone is too overrun with white guilt or victim mentality to assert such a simple truth. Stop holding people back by making excuses for them like they are somehow deficient.
It's not a substitute for basic competency, it's a way to improve on factors that are already deemed adequate
But knowing and respecting your limitations is basic competency. Including knowing if you shouldn't be driving at night or in the fog. Bad night vision might not be a reason to take away someone's license, but driving at night with bad night vision is a reason to take away that license.
Tee Vee doing gangsta rap doesn't make that indicative of what you call "black culture"
I didn't that it "black culture", you did. I go to But the gangsta culture, is primarily made up of African-Americans. So when a very large percentage of gangsta culture goes to jail for the crimes that are bragged about on the radio, everyone says it's discrimination against African-Americans. Of course the black folks you know don't act like that, you met them in church, which if you had read the link to Bill Cosby's speech you would have seen that not going to church is one of reasons for the cultural failing of poor urban culture. My church here in NYC is about 25% Black, 40% Latino, 35% White. We don't have any gangs, we don't have any shootings, most everyone there is a very decent person (except me I'm a bigoted asshole). But when I come home from work on the subway and over hear a group of teenage boys bragging and laughing about jumping some kid, six to one: "Ha ha ha, I kicked him in the head BAM. Gotta respect me son." Can you guess what kind of music was playing from the crappy speaker in one of their cell phones? I'll give you a clue, the music strongly advocated that the way to get bitches was to earn money and respect by shooting people for failing to give you money and respect. I see something similar close to one a week. Now, this was at at 11pm on a week day, during the school year. Where the kids you knew growing up allowed at age 15 or so to be out at 11pm miles from home on a school night? Since I work evenings, I also get to see the kids hanging out during the day while school is in session. Guess what most of the teenage kids I see skipping school have in common? A culture that places very little value on education or authority. Now perhaps it is just chance that the majority of those kids have the same skin color, but it's not chance that those kids, embracing that culture, end up being crime statistics. Modern poor urban culture is a recipe for disaster. Until the people that propagate that culture face up to that, the situation will only get worse. Not everyone who is black is a proponent of that culture, but most of the people that propagate the culture are black. The culture is the problem, but the skin color is what is reported in the statistics that seem to point to racism.
So they can convert a military cargo plane into a private jet for the top brass... ...and certain civilians, like maybe Senators. No one in Congress or the Air Force brass is loosing any sleep over this. They just have stall until the next affront to the average tax paying citizen overshadows this one. Then the media/public pressure is off and the can go enjoy their fancy new hotel-room-in-a-plane. Trying to get any accountability out of today's government requires that you let ten offenses slide by, just you can finish addressing one offense. Good luck with that in today's ADD-like, sound bite ridden, OMG Amy Winehouse is a post-op transvestite!!11! What were we upset about again?
Let's not forget the possibility that a culture that built up around gangstas, bragging about prison time, and shooting people in the face for dissing you; might actually be committing more crimes. What is the product of this kind of culture? Black youth are six times more likely to die of homicide than white youth and seven times more likely to commit a homicide. Homicide is the leading cause of death among African-American males ages 15 to 29. I don't think about skin color, it's about cultural values. Bill Cosby has it right.
It's simply not possible to design in that much choice flexibility and world impact. If my character's actions don't really affect the world state, it's not an RPG.
If some ever gets the realm vs realm thing done properly (not Warhammer, sadly) then choice and flexibility and world impact are totally possible. Although the first thing that would need to change would be the ridiculous power level differences between low and high levels. I don't see any big company having the cojones to release an MMO where three or four newbies working together can reliably take down a max level character; but to make RvR work that is what is needed, and to make your character's actions (an everyone else's) have a real impact on the game world, RvR seems the most viable solution. So look to small currently unknown companies to give you anything other than a re-themed WoW variant.
No this is feel good bullshit that won't even put a dent in kiddy porn.
If they actually took actions that put a stop to the majority of the production of kiddie porn, what would legislators use for their debate proof vehicle for over-reaching legislation? Terrorism seems to be loosing steam slowly, and the historic boogie men of homosexuality, communism, and drugs are all kinda trendy now. Without kiddie porn a whole new "evil that must be stopped at all costs" would need to be invented.
Outlawing evidence of a crime sounds, if you're very very stupid, a way to stop that crime from being committed, but in actuality just makes the actual crime harder to solve.
Thank you for a much clearer, more concise explanation than what I was able to make in GP post. I don't think the people making these laws are necessarily very stupid but that the topic is very emotionally charged, which leads to the same fault. Voters are driven by emotion, not logic; so heavily emotional topics like this become undebatable for elected officials and poorly thought out legislation become law.
"A girl can bare herself and do the nasty with a guy, on her own decision, at the age of 16!" then turn around and say "A girl CANNOT bare herself to a bunch of guys for pictures, on her own decision, at the age of 16!"
The same way they can say: "You may join the Army at age 18 and be called upon to die for your country, but you can't buy alcohol until you are 21." They do it because everyone who makes the laws is old, things like fucking and fighting are vague memories and theories to them.
Killing usenet won't kill kiddie porn, but it makes it more difficult.
But it wouldn't protect any children, it would just make their plight less publicized. The children that are in child pornography pictures are being abused (obviously)The people abusing them are not the one viewing them on the web, but are the people taking the pictures. It is the children that we are trying to protect here isn't it? Ending the distribution of pictures does nothing to stop the real life abuse. It's just sweeping the problem under the rug. Attacking distribution instead of production shows that the protection of children comes second to the punishing of the pedophile. While protecting the actual children being abused would seem to be a higher moral priority, it isn't as media savvy/lucrative as simply chasing the pedophiles. Look at things like "To Catch a Predator" or the FBI's fake hyperlinks. Did they save a single child? No there was never any actual child danger. How often do you hear about an actual child being saved from sexual abuse vs hearing about the arrest of someone with downloaded kiddie porn? Yes the two crimes are related, but shouldn't we be focusing on the root problem (child abuse) instead of just treating the symptoms (online kiddie porn)
Society needs employers to tolerate female employees having children. Government compensation to employers is probably the best way of achieving that. Make having children financially viable again.
This is where I disagree with you, it isn't the employers which need to change, but society. In my house growing up we had: one TV, one slightly obsolete computer, a lot of the furniture from when my parents first got married, cars which lasted a decade or more, and less than 500 sq ft of house per person. We were middle class. But now middle class assumes a dual income, so things like only one modest TV or old cars or 20 year old furniture (but not antiques) are considered shabby and viewed as signs of poverty. A single income will be just fine once society gets over it's rampant consumerism.
While I am more than willing to give my time for the work I love there does need to be an understanding that working 16 hour days without breaks for weeks on end should not be expected.
I respect that and think it is a choice that will give you a much higher quality of life. However it's ridiculous to think that a person working 40-50 hour weeks should have the same consideration for raises and promotions as a person working 60-80 hour weeks. If you have children and (rightly) choose to value your family life over you work life, then you should expect that your childless co-workers who pull the all nighters will make more money than you and get more career opportunities than you. That isn't "punishing" you for having a family life, it is rewarding other for their sacrifices. Sacrifices which you aren't making, so you don't get the reward.
Women should not be forced to choose between having a career or having a family
No one should feel entitled to "have their cake and eat it to". There are only so many waking hours in a day, some will be invested in your career and some will be invested in your family, your success in each will be dependent largely on how much time you choose to invest. Divide your time according to your values and then don't bitch about not having optimal results in both areas of your life.
I asked Harvard economist Claudia Goldin if there is sufficient evidence to conclude that women experience systematic pay discrimination. "No," she replied. There are certainly instances of discrimination, she says, but most of the gap is the result of different choices. Other hard-to-measure factors, Goldin thinks, largely account for the remaining gap -- "probably not all, but most of it."...June O'Neill, an economist at Baruch College and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, has uncovered something that debunks the discrimination thesis. Take out the effects of marriage and child-rearing, and the difference between the genders suddenly vanishes. "For men and women who never marry and never have children, there is no earnings gap,"
What about racial equality? Is that one just not cool anymore?
It's still cool, it's just that some people have started to figure out that if you get the job because of a quota, you will never really be equal. Of course you will also never really be equal if during the first decade of your career when you are supposed to be proving yourself and being a workhorse for you industry you are prone to taking one or more legally protected one year hiatuses. I have no problems with working mothers, but they need to stop pretending that give as much to their careers as career driven men do. I'm fine with the fact that family life makes it impossible for a woman to do 50 and 60 hour weeks, but I'm not fine when she then demands "equal consideration" when it's time for raises and promotions. There are women out there who are ever bit as dedicated to their careers as the most career driven men, but they are as rare as stay at home fathers.
Law, psychology, education, journalism, etc. are dominated by women. Should we expect to see male quotas there?
Don't forget about parenting. Thanks to most Fathers a pushed away from having as strong relationships with their children as mothers are by being made to feel incompetent as a parent. Of course this is just accepted and even flaunted in our culture these days, we went from having TV shows about "Father Knows Best" to having every sitcom dad being a likable but incompetent bumbler who is always saved from his parental ineptitude by the always correct super mom. Imagine the public outcry there were a movie released that took the treatment that "Kindergarten Cop" or "Three Men and a Baby" gave to men's ability to be parents and applied it to women's ability to be scientists.
Just as no one is wise enough (IMHO) to take another's life for any reason, I don't think we are wise enough to be scanning our dna for anything but the most flagrant of errors.
Institutionalized health care will disagree with you on that. If we stay with private health insurance or if we switch to nationalized health care, it doesn't matter. As the ability to "optimize" a zygote becomes a reality, that tool will at first be only used in extreme cases, then later by request, and eventually it will be required in order to keep that child covered under whatever health care system is in place. Designer babies will be more efficient and cost effective. We all know that very large industries prize efficiency and cost effectiveness over just about everything else. Health Care is a HUGE industry. All children will be pre-screened and optimized, just give it time.
Not if you factor in that time = money. Then they aren't so economically competitive with jet aircraft because of how slow they are.
For business trips, I agree with your point. For vacation travel I might disagree, depending on the cost and luxury of airship travel. A airship ticket from NYC to London that costs the same as the airplane ticket might be a good deal if I have a decent sized seat and can walk to a dining area and eat real food on my 24 hr trip as opposed to being cramped in an economy seat with a microwave meal for 7 hrs. If the trip is actually part of the vacation it could be worth it.
We have lost that right by failing to practice due diligence in protecting it. It's like a right-of-way footpath in the UK. If you let people walk across your land often enough, they develop a legal right to walk across your land. This is what is happening with our privacy; it is being trodden on but we are failing to take effective action to prevent that, so precedent is being set to allow more corporations and government agencies to walk all over our right to privacy.
Now the courts have spoken in regards to our privacy on YouTube, so that particular video sharing sight should be avoided or we should stop talking about a right to privacy because we will have willingly abdicated that right. No you cannot have it both ways. If you have anything posted on YouTube, I suggest you pull it and post it somewhere else. Because this isn't just giving them a footpath over your privacy be over the marketing possibilities of your video IP. If you stay on YouTube, get used to the idea that Viacom will be pinching your ideas if you get good traffic.
Inidividuals have rights and there can be dire consequences for abridging those rights.
Sadly that is where you are wrong, the consequences would be dire if they happened to a private individual or small business, but a few million dollars punitive damages is just a business expense to the like of Viacom. From an artcle in 2007:Viacom, parent of cable TV's MTV Networks and the Paramount Pictures movie studio, reported quarterly net income of $641.6 million....Reflecting last year's acquisition of the DreamWorks SKG studio, Viacom's filmed entertainment division logged an operating profit of $71.7 million. So if some independent producer wins $10 or $20 million, it would hurt Viacom, but would hardly break them. By contrast if an individual must pay $100K in damages to Viacom, that pretty much breaks that person. They lose their house and car and hope for a decent life. That's why big corporations can fuck with individuals, but not vice versa. The only way individuals can take on a large corporation is to unionize, so if people want to protect privacy in their YouTube usage then there needs to be a YouTube Contributors Union, because a strike that involved every private contributor taking down their postings would break YouTube in less than a month.
Slashdot Mirror
Online libel is serious even if you are an Average Joe, looking to get a job or maybe just stay out of prison. There has been enough of this kind of stuff discussed here on /. recently that it should be obvious that a carefully made false FaceBook page could be seriously damaging to even an average person. Just a site that degrades you might be enough to create a bad impression if it shows up on the first page when your name is Googled. Now if that site appears to be made by you it's even worse.
I thought school was for learning things rather than getting a fancy piece of paper.
That really depends on what you get your degree in, especially with masters degrees. A masters in engineering or physics might be about knowledge, but and MBA or MFA is more about the people that you get introduced/networked to. Yale business school will open a lot of doors with that fancy piece of paper.
600kWh a day per home seems quite high, where'd you get that figure from?
Oh! Nice catch. I was thinking about monthly usage when I used 600kWh. 600kWh is what a moderately green household would use in a month (I was reading online about off-grid homes a few days ago), but the average household usage is 920kWh per month. So daily that's about 31kWh. So that solar array would power 98,923,354 households, about 91% of the households in the US. Thanks for that.
I agree, gaming is a major driving force in the advancement of PCs from a consumer point of view. It's why graphics cards exist. It's why 30' monitors are cool. It's why CPUs and Ram get upgraded. Touch screen for games would be a disaster for two major reasons: The fact that you have to block your vision to the part of the screen you are interacting with and the way touch screens pull you out of the world of the game. When I play City of Heroes, I pretty quickly stop thinking about my interactions with the computer itself, and just enjoy the game. Watching myself put my hands on the screen would only serve destroy the illusion. That illusion is what makes the games fun. Guitar Hero is fun because the game's input device adds to the illusion.
Why is a mouse more immersive than a touchscreen? Because once I put my hand on the mouse, my brain mostly overlooks the idea that my hand and the mouse pointer at seperate. The pointer exists there in cyberspace, and my brains uses it to influence the world in cyberspace. I am mostly unaware of my hand physically holding the mouse. With a touchscreen, my meatspace hand is only interacting when I hold it up to the screen, where it blocks my view and reminds my brain of the separation between meatspace and cyberspace.
First, the area of desert directly affected by the atomic bomb test is peanuts.
I wouldn't call 1,375 square miles, peanuts. That's 38,332,800,000 square feet, If we assume 10 watts per sq ft that's 383,328,000 KW per hour or 3,066,624,000 KWH in an 8 hour day. If the average home uses 600 KWH a day, that's 5,111,040 homes. Granted it would take 22 solar arrays like that to power all 107 million homes in the US (2001 census) if we tried to go by solar alone, and we had ways to store that power to use it 24 hours a day. A 1,375 sq mile array could likely supply the mid-day (non-peak) power needs to about 20 million homes because of the correlation of sunshine and power usage, little to no storage needed. That's the mid-day household power usage for almost the entire "West" census region. Not peanuts at all.
That a vast number of black folks are poor is the symptom of years of racism and the problem.br>
While that may have been very true in the past, that reasoning doesn't hold water any more. You may have noticed that there is a black man that will hopefully be our next president. The reason that there is a cycle of poverty in poor urban Black culture, is because of the values that the culture has. Education and hard work are discouraged. Poor urban Asian youth have a much higher graduation rate and a much lower incarceration rate because they hold a different set of standards. You may rightly point out that potential employers view Asian youth very differently from Black youth, but that is because the Asian youth have earned a reputation for being hard working, respectful and self disciplined. Yes there are Asian street gangs, but the over all culture embraces values that employers see as assets. There is no evil rich white man preventing urban Black culture from adopting these values that lead to success. But being called an "Oreo" for valuing education and hard work and clean living is going to hold down poor Blacks. Guess which demographic is mostly likely to hate someone for being an "Oreo"? I'm not mouthing off in ignorance, I'm looking at world I walk through every day here in northern half of Manhattan (Harlem and Washington Heights). To simply categorize poor urban Blacks as "victims" and then assume that they are unable to have personal accountability is dehumanizing and racist. The only potential thing that poor urban Blacks don't have that poor urban Asians do have is the understanding that education and hard honest work will lead to success. They only reason that they don't have that understanding is because everyone is too overrun with white guilt or victim mentality to assert such a simple truth. Stop holding people back by making excuses for them like they are somehow deficient.
It's not a substitute for basic competency, it's a way to improve on factors that are already deemed adequate
But knowing and respecting your limitations is basic competency. Including knowing if you shouldn't be driving at night or in the fog. Bad night vision might not be a reason to take away someone's license, but driving at night with bad night vision is a reason to take away that license.
Tee Vee doing gangsta rap doesn't make that indicative of what you call "black culture"
I didn't that it "black culture", you did. I go to But the gangsta culture, is primarily made up of African-Americans. So when a very large percentage of gangsta culture goes to jail for the crimes that are bragged about on the radio, everyone says it's discrimination against African-Americans. Of course the black folks you know don't act like that, you met them in church, which if you had read the link to Bill Cosby's speech you would have seen that not going to church is one of reasons for the cultural failing of poor urban culture. My church here in NYC is about 25% Black, 40% Latino, 35% White. We don't have any gangs, we don't have any shootings, most everyone there is a very decent person (except me I'm a bigoted asshole). But when I come home from work on the subway and over hear a group of teenage boys bragging and laughing about jumping some kid, six to one: "Ha ha ha, I kicked him in the head BAM. Gotta respect me son." Can you guess what kind of music was playing from the crappy speaker in one of their cell phones? I'll give you a clue, the music strongly advocated that the way to get bitches was to earn money and respect by shooting people for failing to give you money and respect. I see something similar close to one a week. Now, this was at at 11pm on a week day, during the school year. Where the kids you knew growing up allowed at age 15 or so to be out at 11pm miles from home on a school night? Since I work evenings, I also get to see the kids hanging out during the day while school is in session. Guess what most of the teenage kids I see skipping school have in common? A culture that places very little value on education or authority. Now perhaps it is just chance that the majority of those kids have the same skin color, but it's not chance that those kids, embracing that culture, end up being crime statistics. Modern poor urban culture is a recipe for disaster. Until the people that propagate that culture face up to that, the situation will only get worse. Not everyone who is black is a proponent of that culture, but most of the people that propagate the culture are black. The culture is the problem, but the skin color is what is reported in the statistics that seem to point to racism.
So they can convert a military cargo plane into a private jet for the top brass...
...and certain civilians, like maybe Senators. No one in Congress or the Air Force brass is loosing any sleep over this. They just have stall until the next affront to the average tax paying citizen overshadows this one. Then the media/public pressure is off and the can go enjoy their fancy new hotel-room-in-a-plane. Trying to get any accountability out of today's government requires that you let ten offenses slide by, just you can finish addressing one offense. Good luck with that in today's ADD-like, sound bite ridden, OMG Amy Winehouse is a post-op transvestite!!11!
What were we upset about again?
Let's not forget the possibility that a culture that built up around gangstas, bragging about prison time, and shooting people in the face for dissing you; might actually be committing more crimes. What is the product of this kind of culture? Black youth are six times more likely to die of homicide than white youth and seven times more likely to commit a homicide. Homicide is the leading cause of death among African-American males ages 15 to 29. I don't think about skin color, it's about cultural values. Bill Cosby has it right.
It's simply not possible to design in that much choice flexibility and world impact. If my character's actions don't really affect the world state, it's not an RPG.
If some ever gets the realm vs realm thing done properly (not Warhammer, sadly) then choice and flexibility and world impact are totally possible. Although the first thing that would need to change would be the ridiculous power level differences between low and high levels. I don't see any big company having the cojones to release an MMO where three or four newbies working together can reliably take down a max level character; but to make RvR work that is what is needed, and to make your character's actions (an everyone else's) have a real impact on the game world, RvR seems the most viable solution. So look to small currently unknown companies to give you anything other than a re-themed WoW variant.
Lucasarts should really have had its arse whipped for the state of the game.
Lucas should really have his arse whipped for the state of the franchise. FTFY
No this is feel good bullshit that won't even put a dent in kiddy porn.
If they actually took actions that put a stop to the majority of the production of kiddie porn, what would legislators use for their debate proof vehicle for over-reaching legislation? Terrorism seems to be loosing steam slowly, and the historic boogie men of homosexuality, communism, and drugs are all kinda trendy now. Without kiddie porn a whole new "evil that must be stopped at all costs" would need to be invented.
Outlawing evidence of a crime sounds, if you're very very stupid, a way to stop that crime from being committed, but in actuality just makes the actual crime harder to solve.
Thank you for a much clearer, more concise explanation than what I was able to make in GP post. I don't think the people making these laws are necessarily very stupid but that the topic is very emotionally charged, which leads to the same fault. Voters are driven by emotion, not logic; so heavily emotional topics like this become undebatable for elected officials and poorly thought out legislation become law.
"A girl can bare herself and do the nasty with a guy, on her own decision, at the age of 16!" then turn around and say "A girl CANNOT bare herself to a bunch of guys for pictures, on her own decision, at the age of 16!"
The same way they can say: "You may join the Army at age 18 and be called upon to die for your country, but you can't buy alcohol until you are 21." They do it because everyone who makes the laws is old, things like fucking and fighting are vague memories and theories to them.
Killing usenet won't kill kiddie porn, but it makes it more difficult.
But it wouldn't protect any children, it would just make their plight less publicized. The children that are in child pornography pictures are being abused (obviously)The people abusing them are not the one viewing them on the web, but are the people taking the pictures. It is the children that we are trying to protect here isn't it? Ending the distribution of pictures does nothing to stop the real life abuse. It's just sweeping the problem under the rug. Attacking distribution instead of production shows that the protection of children comes second to the punishing of the pedophile. While protecting the actual children being abused would seem to be a higher moral priority, it isn't as media savvy/lucrative as simply chasing the pedophiles. Look at things like "To Catch a Predator" or the FBI's fake hyperlinks. Did they save a single child? No there was never any actual child danger. How often do you hear about an actual child being saved from sexual abuse vs hearing about the arrest of someone with downloaded kiddie porn? Yes the two crimes are related, but shouldn't we be focusing on the root problem (child abuse) instead of just treating the symptoms (online kiddie porn)
Society needs employers to tolerate female employees having children. Government compensation to employers is probably the best way of achieving that. Make having children financially viable again.
This is where I disagree with you, it isn't the employers which need to change, but society. In my house growing up we had: one TV, one slightly obsolete computer, a lot of the furniture from when my parents first got married, cars which lasted a decade or more, and less than 500 sq ft of house per person. We were middle class. But now middle class assumes a dual income, so things like only one modest TV or old cars or 20 year old furniture (but not antiques) are considered shabby and viewed as signs of poverty. A single income will be just fine once society gets over it's rampant consumerism.
While I am more than willing to give my time for the work I love there does need to be an understanding that working 16 hour days without breaks for weeks on end should not be expected.
I respect that and think it is a choice that will give you a much higher quality of life. However it's ridiculous to think that a person working 40-50 hour weeks should have the same consideration for raises and promotions as a person working 60-80 hour weeks. If you have children and (rightly) choose to value your family life over you work life, then you should expect that your childless co-workers who pull the all nighters will make more money than you and get more career opportunities than you. That isn't "punishing" you for having a family life, it is rewarding other for their sacrifices. Sacrifices which you aren't making, so you don't get the reward.
Women should not be forced to choose between having a career or having a family
No one should feel entitled to "have their cake and eat it to". There are only so many waking hours in a day, some will be invested in your career and some will be invested in your family, your success in each will be dependent largely on how much time you choose to invest. Divide your time according to your values and then don't bitch about not having optimal results in both areas of your life.
The causes of the apparent pay gap are discussed here.
What about racial equality? Is that one just not cool anymore?
It's still cool, it's just that some people have started to figure out that if you get the job because of a quota, you will never really be equal. Of course you will also never really be equal if during the first decade of your career when you are supposed to be proving yourself and being a workhorse for you industry you are prone to taking one or more legally protected one year hiatuses. I have no problems with working mothers, but they need to stop pretending that give as much to their careers as career driven men do. I'm fine with the fact that family life makes it impossible for a woman to do 50 and 60 hour weeks, but I'm not fine when she then demands "equal consideration" when it's time for raises and promotions. There are women out there who are ever bit as dedicated to their careers as the most career driven men, but they are as rare as stay at home fathers.
Law, psychology, education, journalism, etc. are dominated by women. Should we expect to see male quotas there?
Don't forget about parenting. Thanks to most Fathers a pushed away from having as strong relationships with their children as mothers are by being made to feel incompetent as a parent. Of course this is just accepted and even flaunted in our culture these days, we went from having TV shows about "Father Knows Best" to having every sitcom dad being a likable but incompetent bumbler who is always saved from his parental ineptitude by the always correct super mom. Imagine the public outcry there were a movie released that took the treatment that "Kindergarten Cop" or "Three Men and a Baby" gave to men's ability to be parents and applied it to women's ability to be scientists.
Just as no one is wise enough (IMHO) to take another's life for any reason, I don't think we are wise enough to be scanning our dna for anything but the most flagrant of errors.
Institutionalized health care will disagree with you on that. If we stay with private health insurance or if we switch to nationalized health care, it doesn't matter. As the ability to "optimize" a zygote becomes a reality, that tool will at first be only used in extreme cases, then later by request, and eventually it will be required in order to keep that child covered under whatever health care system is in place. Designer babies will be more efficient and cost effective. We all know that very large industries prize efficiency and cost effectiveness over just about everything else. Health Care is a HUGE industry. All children will be pre-screened and optimized, just give it time.
Not if you factor in that time = money. Then they aren't so economically competitive with jet aircraft because of how slow they are.
For business trips, I agree with your point. For vacation travel I might disagree, depending on the cost and luxury of airship travel. A airship ticket from NYC to London that costs the same as the airplane ticket might be a good deal if I have a decent sized seat and can walk to a dining area and eat real food on my 24 hr trip as opposed to being cramped in an economy seat with a microwave meal for 7 hrs. If the trip is actually part of the vacation it could be worth it.
How about those who own the right to privacy?
We have lost that right by failing to practice due diligence in protecting it. It's like a right-of-way footpath in the UK. If you let people walk across your land often enough, they develop a legal right to walk across your land. This is what is happening with our privacy; it is being trodden on but we are failing to take effective action to prevent that, so precedent is being set to allow more corporations and government agencies to walk all over our right to privacy.
Now the courts have spoken in regards to our privacy on YouTube, so that particular video sharing sight should be avoided or we should stop talking about a right to privacy because we will have willingly abdicated that right. No you cannot have it both ways. If you have anything posted on YouTube, I suggest you pull it and post it somewhere else. Because this isn't just giving them a footpath over your privacy be over the marketing possibilities of your video IP. If you stay on YouTube, get used to the idea that Viacom will be pinching your ideas if you get good traffic.
Inidividuals have rights and there can be dire consequences for abridging those rights.
Sadly that is where you are wrong, the consequences would be dire if they happened to a private individual or small business, but a few million dollars punitive damages is just a business expense to the like of Viacom. From an artcle in 2007:Viacom, parent of cable TV's MTV Networks and the Paramount Pictures movie studio, reported quarterly net income of $641.6 million....Reflecting last year's acquisition of the DreamWorks SKG studio, Viacom's filmed entertainment division logged an operating profit of $71.7 million. So if some independent producer wins $10 or $20 million, it would hurt Viacom, but would hardly break them. By contrast if an individual must pay $100K in damages to Viacom, that pretty much breaks that person. They lose their house and car and hope for a decent life. That's why big corporations can fuck with individuals, but not vice versa. The only way individuals can take on a large corporation is to unionize, so if people want to protect privacy in their YouTube usage then there needs to be a YouTube Contributors Union, because a strike that involved every private contributor taking down their postings would break YouTube in less than a month.