How do you get your SO to leave you alone for long enough to get stuff like this done? I'm not even being rhetorical...do you not have an arm's-length list of domestic tasks that needs addressing whenever you're not actually at work?
In the end, at the end of the year, my taxes sumto roughly the same amount plus or minus 5%, the roads have roughly the same number of holes, there's about the same amount of construction, public transit still begs for money that I don't think it should have, the same number of hookers are on the same corners, and the same rocket-powered homeless person manages to get from the theatre performance to the stadium faster than I can.
Hm. Non-voter; significant complainer...Somebody call the WAH-mbulance.
(would you vote if a party came along that promised something significantly worse?)
I believe what you're looking for are The Fly Papers; research by Bill Bialek and various co-authors which date back almost a decade. For a great overview, check his book, Spikes.
Not quite true. If I don't like the way "big business" is regulating the Internet, I'm free to start my own business to compete with "big business," one which is less expensive and provides more features to customers. This is still possible even in today's heavily regulated free market economy.
On the other hand, I am not free to start a competing government and remain an American citizen. This is the fundamental flaw in most government regulatory arguments: bad companies tend to go away, but bad government regulations tend to stick around for a LONG LONG time.
Huh!? I'm not seeing the analogy you're trying to make here...you ARE perfectly free to start up a new (state or federal) political party, one which "provides more features" to its clients. In fact, it's probably EASIER to do that than it would be to start up a new telco and try to gain any traction.
I don't think that Assange would have the high ground in this hypothetical case [...] Clearly, it can't just be that transparency is always a morally superior end state [...]
is conjectural, and probably unproveable. I may well be that transparency always gives one the moral high ground. Of course, that's more or less orthogonal to the degree of umbrage taken (is umbrage taken in degrees?) by John Q. Public. Nobody likes their laundry aired by other people, regardless of how clean it is...even as people put more and more of their lives online for all to see, I suspect that we all want to be the people who control the flow on our personal information pipes.
I wonder whether there isn't a threshold to be (admittedly, somewhat arbitrarily) drawn in terms of "degree of influence". What an average member of the public chooses to divulge or keep secret affects a (comparatively) small group of people. Conversely, the machinery of international diplomacy, or the military, or corporate greed/corruption, etc. are---rightly or wrongly---perceived to affect a much wider group of people...potentially spanning multiple nations. It seems to me that this is the yardstick by which we (implicitly) judge the rightness/wrongness of divulging information. The greater the number of people affected, the more we want transparency (subject to my earlier caveat that agents seek to retain control over their information pipes, where e.g. the military, or Mega-Company Inc. can plausibly be construed as agents).
Hmm. That reads a bit ranty and disorganized. Just fired this off without much thought...
Method for dissipation of influenza symptoms through prolong dietary restriction versus current methods of hypercaloric intake treatment of cold virus carriers.
I'm skeptical of the notion that he no longer has Harper's ear, given his role in the Conservatives' rise to power. Moreover, I suspect a goodly chunk of the Canadian voting public (mostly West of Ontario) don't think what he says is really that outrageous.
Given the often controversial/incendiary nature of some of Flanagan's comments (not to mention the content of some of his books), I'd bet the truth is closer to formley publicly aknowledged advisor...
I would like to think that he recanted because enough Canadians, like me, e-mailed him directly to express outrage and make clear that he---as a [former?] close advisor to PM Harper---made it clear just how out of alignment the Conservative Party is with the Canadian moral compass.
If this becomes the norm we might as well start actually stealing from stores, since the penalty is so much smaller.
THIS. I recently moved to the US from Canada...the law is much clearer here about what kinds of penalties await. I won't be downloading anymore...but I may just turn to petty theft.
This probably should have been modded higher; it's an astute observation. You can, indeed, say "a water", but pretty much only in the context you've highlighted here, you're actually using some kind of elliptical form to say "a [vessel filled with] water", i.e. you're effectively saying something other than what we're discussing above.
OK, let's start with a handily recent post on the Language Log about Latin plurals (the post is about "syllabus", but "virus/viruses/*viri/**virii" show up in the comments).
Now, onward...
Well, if you want to get all prissy about the Latin, then it's incorrect to use the word to describe a single unit of the substance, in the way it's not correct to call a single water molecule "a water".
Actually (and ignoring the somewhat startling categorisation of computer virus as "substance"), not in the same way at all. You can't call a single molecule of water "a water" because "water" is a mass noun in English, and those don't (i) take indefinite articles, and (ii) don't pluralize nicely (inter alia). It's possible that this portion of your argument comes from here, which points out that in Latin, "virus" ("poison") was a mass noun. Of course, in English, "virus" is very clearly a count noun in English, since it can be (and overwhelmingly is) used with an indefinite article.
Id est, since a viral program is itself a cell in the viral infection of many computers, there's no term for it other than "viral program" and no term for several of them other than "viral programs".
You appear in the preceding to be claiming that the word "virus" doesn't exist in English (or perhaps simply that is has no referent) a claim some information security researchers (and doctors!) might take issue with (cue lambasting for the stranded preposition in 3...2..1).
That being said, this raises an interesting point about...something. Maybe the type/token distinction? When someone says "I wrote a virus", we take him (or her, I suppose) to be making a claim about an implementation of some specific algorithm in some specific language, but not to any particular token of it.
The "virus" would be some arbitrarily bounded subset of the population of said viral programs infecting machines, [...]
I don't understand the grounds on which you're making this claim.
[...] which could devolve to a single program infecting a single machine, but would still not be the correct term for that program or, indeed, for the viral infection being suffered by that machine. It could correctly refer to the running program and its data (which in most computers includes its instructions) and the progress of its states,
OK, so the "running program, and its data" counts pretty much as a "single token of the substance" at hand, in my book. So now it sounds like you're contradicting your opening claim.
but I'm pretty sure nobody much thinks of it that clearly when using the word "virus".
As I just mentioned, you seem to be contradicting yourself (although I may just be misreading you), so you'll forgive if I take claims of clear thinking only quasi-seriously.
Nor is it correct to use "a virus" to refer to a type of virus (exempli gratia Stuxnet, Sasser, Hopper, et cetera) [...]
Why is this 'incorrect'? "I wrote a virus. I'm calling it Johnny5." Seems like a perfectly good use of "a virus" to me.
[...] but only to an instance of that type of virus as it is spreading, [...]
Again, isn't this in contradiction to how you started this comment?
or, again, some arbitrary subset thereof, wherein it has its physical expression and aggregate, fluid form.
Aside from the impossibility of "some arbitrary subset" of an instance (I'll assume that was just a typo/thinko), now you're just engaged in verbal wankery. I mean, I suppose you might choose to model the spread of contagion in a network of computers as the flow of a kind of flu
You've got a fair point that underage sexual activity is largely irrelevant to the topic of pedophilia.
Or, y'know, completely irrelevant, since pedophilia is adult attraction to children.
But [bluefoxlucid's] point, as I understood it, is that there's a distinction between underage sex and sexual abuse - and that it's not the act of underage sex that's harmful, but the scenario of being raped.
Rape is perhaps a more direct, physical form of harm, that evokes a visceral reaction because of its associated violence, but the basic premise w.r.t. underage sex (and I believe it's largely correct), is that children/tweens are incapable of giving informed consent. Even ignoring the complicated power dynamics that come with large age differences and focusing on two underage (but beyond the age of "playing doctor") kids having sex, the chains of reasoning and long-term thinking that are a prerequisite of informed consent simply elude most kids.
[...] when I use the word "rape" I refer specifically and exclusively to cases where the sexual activity is non-consensual.
See above. Children's "consent" is not the same as your consent.
Let me ask you this very simple question: Would you want somebody who can say these things teaching *your* 12 year old daughter about sex?
This seems like a ridiculous and somewhat vague question.
No, it seems pretty clear what the question means, but I can concretize it a bit more for you: would you want bluelucidfox teaching your 12-year-old daughter about sex?
No, I wouldn't want my daughter to have sex when she's 12, at all. I expect I'd do my best to prevent that. But if she chose to do so, I don't think it would then be right to say the other party had committed "rape".
I said this in reply to one of bluelucidfox's points; your (hypothetical?) 12-year-old's choice isn't free and informed the same way yours or mine is. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you were convinced that you had successfully explained to her why you didn't want her to have sex. Then she comes home one day and the following (exaggerated-to-make-a-point) dialogue takes place:
Her: "I had sex with that 18-year-old, Tommy, who lives next door." You: "Dang, I asked you not to do that, and explained what the long-term consequences are. Why'd you do it?" Her: "Well, it felt pretty good. Plus he gave me an iPod."
Would you not feel like Tommy had somehow "taken advantage of" your daughter? Well, "taking advantage of" is tantamount to coercion, which is tantamount to rape. Coerced (whether by carrot or stick) consent, is not consent.
Whatever the law says, I think 12 is old enough that a child should be able to take a certain level of personal responsibility for their decisions.
Sure, if you're talking about "too many snacks before dinner", or "shoplift", or "skip class". Not, crucially, in the cases under discussion.
If my daughter makes a decision and then finds she regrets it, is it right then to use the law to ruin someone else's life for it? I don't think that's something to be taken lightly.
No, not lightly, but the issues warrant deeper thinking, and a willingness to "ruin someone else's life" if we feel it's warranted.
But there's how I view the issue in principle, and how I'd actually react when this is no longer an abstract question, and there's decisions I might be obligated to make based on other facets of the law. I honestly don't know what I would do in that situation. I hope I'll never have to find out.:)
Yeah, so clearly I didn't make the point I meant to (or else you're being willfully obtuse). I was not agreeing with your assessment of child/teen/adult sexual dynamics...
So we're down to misbehaving kids; force (rape); power dynamics from adult-predating-child (coercion) [...]
Coercion is coercion; rape is coerced sex. The latter two are basically the same w.r.t. the level of moral repugnance they typically engender. In fact, the last seems to be worst, if the treatment of child molesters as compared to "garden variety" rapists in jail is any indicator.
[...] power dynamics from child-predating-adult (seduction).
Someone else already called you on it, but this really doesn't happen anywhere near as often as you think it does, and perhaps more to the point, hypersexualised behaviour in kids is often a symptom of prior abuse. Also, something I was clearly too implicit about is that this kind of behaviour is licensed and even somewhat encouraged by many current sociocultural portrayals/expectations of tween/teen girls. It doesn't help that onset of puberty is going down, and so the "odd hormones [...] showing up and messing with shit" is happening at an age when girls are even less equipped (cognitively) to reason their way through.
People want to conveniently ignore the first one [...]
Huh? People talk about kids playing doctor all the time. Typically it's relatively innocent exploration, and there are usually clearly identifiable signs when it's symptomatic of something more nefarious.
[...]and treat the last two as the second one;
Newsflash: they are effectively the same. The reason we have age of consent laws is that we recognise that people under a certain age are typically (obviously absolutes are impossible in a situation like this) incapable of the kind of long-term thinking necessary to actually reason through the consequences and implications of making this kind of decision. Evidently, there's a lot of responsibility on parents' shoulders here to have frank discussions with their children exactly about this, and as a society we are collectively failing our parental duties on this score. The best thing we can do is to help our children through the reasoning.
unfortunately that means they treat all such situations identically, and really the damage (or non-damage) done in any of these situations is related to the exact situation here (for example, a victim of coercion won't be as traumatized as a victim of rape;
You're thinking short-term here. Victims of rape don't typically go on to become rapists, but victims of abuse/coercion often go on to become abusers/coercers. It's exactly these long-term implications that I'm saying are at issue.
while a misbehaved 12 year old seductress probably...
Again with this. These lolitas that you seem to think are ubiquitous are in the overwhelming (underwhelming?) minority; I can assure you that you are not surrounded by them. Tweens who act this way are often in thrall to peer pressure or other forms of social coercion. They are, in some sense, not even fully consenting to their own behaviour.
For my money this is one of the most exciting "terminal Masters" degrees out there right now (of course, I'm a linguist, so probably biased).
It will serve you in bioinformatics should you choose to continue in that field subsequently, will definitely tax/challenge your coding chops, and will teach you some cool stuff about language. Also, some of the people who run this program are affiliated with MS Research (you know, the cool arm of MS), and doing this degree is plausibly some kind of foot in the door there.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you get your SO to leave you alone for long enough to get stuff like this done? I'm not even being rhetorical...do you not have an arm's-length list of domestic tasks that needs addressing whenever you're not actually at work?
I composed a lengthy reply and then decided that it wasn't worth my while. So I'll settle for pointing this out:
I was here for the G20, it went perfectly.
[...]
I didn't die in the g20, I don't think anyone did, but that big of an event can't ever go perfectly.
and saying that your post makes clear that you're a fairly egocentric person who doesn't care for the welfare of his or her fellow Canadian.
In the end, at the end of the year, my taxes sumto roughly the same amount plus or minus 5%, the roads have roughly the same number of holes, there's about the same amount of construction, public transit still begs for money that I don't think it should have, the same number of hookers are on the same corners, and the same rocket-powered homeless person manages to get from the theatre performance to the stadium faster than I can.
Hm. Non-voter; significant complainer...Somebody call the WAH-mbulance.
(would you vote if a party came along that promised something significantly worse?)
I believe what you're looking for are The Fly Papers; research by Bill Bialek and various co-authors which date back almost a decade. For a great overview, check his book, Spikes.
On the third(?!) hand [...]
I believe it's called The Gripping Hand.
Not quite true. If I don't like the way "big business" is regulating the Internet, I'm free to start my own business to compete with "big business," one which is less expensive and provides more features to customers. This is still possible even in today's heavily regulated free market economy.
On the other hand, I am not free to start a competing government and remain an American citizen. This is the fundamental flaw in most government regulatory arguments: bad companies tend to go away, but bad government regulations tend to stick around for a LONG LONG time.
Huh!? I'm not seeing the analogy you're trying to make here...you ARE perfectly free to start up a new (state or federal) political party, one which "provides more features" to its clients. In fact, it's probably EASIER to do that than it would be to start up a new telco and try to gain any traction.
I think that
I don't think that Assange would have the high ground in this hypothetical case [...] Clearly, it can't just be that transparency is always a morally superior end state [...]
is conjectural, and probably unproveable. I may well be that transparency always gives one the moral high ground. Of course, that's more or less orthogonal to the degree of umbrage taken (is umbrage taken in degrees?) by John Q. Public. Nobody likes their laundry aired by other people, regardless of how clean it is...even as people put more and more of their lives online for all to see, I suspect that we all want to be the people who control the flow on our personal information pipes.
I wonder whether there isn't a threshold to be (admittedly, somewhat arbitrarily) drawn in terms of "degree of influence". What an average member of the public chooses to divulge or keep secret affects a (comparatively) small group of people. Conversely, the machinery of international diplomacy, or the military, or corporate greed/corruption, etc. are---rightly or wrongly---perceived to affect a much wider group of people...potentially spanning multiple nations. It seems to me that this is the yardstick by which we (implicitly) judge the rightness/wrongness of divulging information. The greater the number of people affected, the more we want transparency (subject to my earlier caveat that agents seek to retain control over their information pipes, where e.g. the military, or Mega-Company Inc. can plausibly be construed as agents).
Hmm. That reads a bit ranty and disorganized. Just fired this off without much thought...
Method for dissipation of influenza symptoms through prolong dietary restriction versus current methods of hypercaloric intake treatment of cold virus carriers.
Best. Starve-a-fever-feed-a-cold. Evar.
I'm totally stealing this...
I'm skeptical of the notion that he no longer has Harper's ear, given his role in the Conservatives' rise to power. Moreover, I suspect a goodly chunk of the Canadian voting public (mostly West of Ontario) don't think what he says is really that outrageous.
Given the often controversial/incendiary nature of some of Flanagan's comments (not to mention the content of some of his books), I'd bet the truth is closer to formley publicly aknowledged advisor...
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tom_Flanagan
I would like to think that he recanted because enough Canadians, like me, e-mailed him directly to express outrage and make clear that he---as a [former?] close advisor to PM Harper---made it clear just how out of alignment the Conservative Party is with the Canadian moral compass.
Of course, given the following:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tom_Flanagan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Flanagan_(political_scientist)
I recognize that that's pretty much a fantasy on my part, and that parent is closer to the truth.
*sigh* I'm not super-proud of being a Canuck lately...
Funniest thing I've read on Slashdot in a while...thanks!
If this becomes the norm we might as well start actually stealing from stores, since the penalty is so much smaller.
THIS. I recently moved to the US from Canada...the law is much clearer here about what kinds of penalties await. I won't be downloading anymore...but I may just turn to petty theft.
(j/k DHS...I'll be a good J-1, I promise!)
any potential buyer is essentially spending an assloadde of money for a fairy tale.
FTFY.
Thank you, Zeno.
Q: why do people who either never took, or failed, Cal I get modded Insightful?
This probably should have been modded higher; it's an astute observation. You can, indeed, say "a water", but pretty much only in the context you've highlighted here, you're actually using some kind of elliptical form to say "a [vessel filled with] water", i.e. you're effectively saying something other than what we're discussing above.
Um...thanks?
+5, Informative?...REALLY?!?...
OK, let's start with a handily recent post on the Language Log about Latin plurals (the post is about "syllabus", but "virus/viruses/*viri/**virii" show up in the comments).
Now, onward...
Well, if you want to get all prissy about the Latin, then it's incorrect to use the word to describe a single unit of the substance, in the way it's not correct to call a single water molecule "a water".
Actually (and ignoring the somewhat startling categorisation of computer virus as "substance"), not in the same way at all. You can't call a single molecule of water "a water" because "water" is a mass noun in English, and those don't (i) take indefinite articles, and (ii) don't pluralize nicely (inter alia). It's possible that this portion of your argument comes from here, which points out that in Latin, "virus" ("poison") was a mass noun. Of course, in English, "virus" is very clearly a count noun in English, since it can be (and overwhelmingly is) used with an indefinite article.
Id est, since a viral program is itself a cell in the viral infection of many computers, there's no term for it other than "viral program" and no term for several of them other than "viral programs".
You appear in the preceding to be claiming that the word "virus" doesn't exist in English (or perhaps simply that is has no referent) a claim some information security researchers (and doctors!) might take issue with (cue lambasting for the stranded preposition in 3...2..1).
That being said, this raises an interesting point about...something. Maybe the type/token distinction? When someone says "I wrote a virus", we take him (or her, I suppose) to be making a claim about an implementation of some specific algorithm in some specific language, but not to any particular token of it.
The "virus" would be some arbitrarily bounded subset of the population of said viral programs infecting machines, [...]
I don't understand the grounds on which you're making this claim.
[...] which could devolve to a single program infecting a single machine, but would still not be the correct term for that program or, indeed, for the viral infection being suffered by that machine. It could correctly refer to the running program and its data (which in most computers includes its instructions) and the progress of its states,
OK, so the "running program, and its data" counts pretty much as a "single token of the substance" at hand, in my book. So now it sounds like you're contradicting your opening claim.
but I'm pretty sure nobody much thinks of it that clearly when using the word "virus".
As I just mentioned, you seem to be contradicting yourself (although I may just be misreading you), so you'll forgive if I take claims of clear thinking only quasi-seriously.
Nor is it correct to use "a virus" to refer to a type of virus (exempli gratia Stuxnet, Sasser, Hopper, et cetera) [...]
Why is this 'incorrect'? "I wrote a virus. I'm calling it Johnny5." Seems like a perfectly good use of "a virus" to me.
[...] but only to an instance of that type of virus as it is spreading, [...]
Again, isn't this in contradiction to how you started this comment?
or, again, some arbitrary subset thereof, wherein it has its physical expression and aggregate, fluid form.
Aside from the impossibility of "some arbitrary subset" of an instance (I'll assume that was just a typo/thinko), now you're just engaged in verbal wankery. I mean, I suppose you might choose to model the spread of contagion in a network of computers as the flow of a kind of flu
Not if you take into account anyone who's got line-of-sight to you, or is within earshot of you...
Linguists to the rescue...Here's an interesting, relatively well-written, and informative read on just that question...
Txtng: The Gr8 Db8
and for the shorter version...
Txtng: The Gr8 Db8
or
review by Melissa Katsoulis in The Sunday Times
You've got a fair point that underage sexual activity is largely irrelevant to the topic of pedophilia.
Or, y'know, completely irrelevant, since pedophilia is adult attraction to children.
But [bluefoxlucid's] point, as I understood it, is that there's a distinction between underage sex and sexual abuse - and that it's not the act of underage sex that's harmful, but the scenario of being raped.
Rape is perhaps a more direct, physical form of harm, that evokes a visceral reaction because of its associated violence, but the basic premise w.r.t. underage sex (and I believe it's largely correct), is that children/tweens are incapable of giving informed consent. Even ignoring the complicated power dynamics that come with large age differences and focusing on two underage (but beyond the age of "playing doctor") kids having sex, the chains of reasoning and long-term thinking that are a prerequisite of informed consent simply elude most kids.
[...] when I use the word "rape" I refer specifically and exclusively to cases where the sexual activity is non-consensual.
See above. Children's "consent" is not the same as your consent.
Let me ask you this very simple question: Would you want somebody who can say these things teaching *your* 12 year old daughter about sex?
This seems like a ridiculous and somewhat vague question.
No, it seems pretty clear what the question means, but I can concretize it a bit more for you: would you want bluelucidfox teaching your 12-year-old daughter about sex?
No, I wouldn't want my daughter to have sex when she's 12, at all. I expect I'd do my best to prevent that. But if she chose to do so, I don't think it would then be right to say the other party had committed "rape".
I said this in reply to one of bluelucidfox's points; your (hypothetical?) 12-year-old's choice isn't free and informed the same way yours or mine is. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you were convinced that you had successfully explained to her why you didn't want her to have sex. Then she comes home one day and the following (exaggerated-to-make-a-point) dialogue takes place:
Her: "I had sex with that 18-year-old, Tommy, who lives next door."
You: "Dang, I asked you not to do that, and explained what the long-term consequences are. Why'd you do it?"
Her: "Well, it felt pretty good. Plus he gave me an iPod."
Would you not feel like Tommy had somehow "taken advantage of" your daughter? Well, "taking advantage of" is tantamount to coercion, which is tantamount to rape. Coerced (whether by carrot or stick) consent, is not consent.
Whatever the law says, I think 12 is old enough that a child should be able to take a certain level of personal responsibility for their decisions.
Sure, if you're talking about "too many snacks before dinner", or "shoplift", or "skip class". Not, crucially, in the cases under discussion.
If my daughter makes a decision and then finds she regrets it, is it right then to use the law to ruin someone else's life for it? I don't think that's something to be taken lightly.
No, not lightly, but the issues warrant deeper thinking, and a willingness to "ruin someone else's life" if we feel it's warranted.
But there's how I view the issue in principle, and how I'd actually react when this is no longer an abstract question, and there's decisions I might be obligated to make based on other facets of the law. I honestly don't know what I would do in that situation. I hope I'll never have to find out. :)
Amen to that.
Yeah, so clearly I didn't make the point I meant to (or else you're being willfully obtuse). I was not agreeing with your assessment of child/teen/adult sexual dynamics...
So we're down to misbehaving kids; force (rape); power dynamics from adult-predating-child (coercion) [...]
Coercion is coercion; rape is coerced sex. The latter two are basically the same w.r.t. the level of moral repugnance they typically engender. In fact, the last seems to be worst, if the treatment of child molesters as compared to "garden variety" rapists in jail is any indicator.
[...] power dynamics from child-predating-adult (seduction).
Someone else already called you on it, but this really doesn't happen anywhere near as often as you think it does, and perhaps more to the point, hypersexualised behaviour in kids is often a symptom of prior abuse. Also, something I was clearly too implicit about is that this kind of behaviour is licensed and even somewhat encouraged by many current sociocultural portrayals/expectations of tween/teen girls. It doesn't help that onset of puberty is going down, and so the "odd hormones [...] showing up and messing with shit" is happening at an age when girls are even less equipped (cognitively) to reason their way through.
People want to conveniently ignore the first one [...]
Huh? People talk about kids playing doctor all the time. Typically it's relatively innocent exploration, and there are usually clearly identifiable signs when it's symptomatic of something more nefarious.
[...]and treat the last two as the second one;
Newsflash: they are effectively the same. The reason we have age of consent laws is that we recognise that people under a certain age are typically (obviously absolutes are impossible in a situation like this) incapable of the kind of long-term thinking necessary to actually reason through the consequences and implications of making this kind of decision. Evidently, there's a lot of responsibility on parents' shoulders here to have frank discussions with their children exactly about this, and as a society we are collectively failing our parental duties on this score. The best thing we can do is to help our children through the reasoning.
unfortunately that means they treat all such situations identically, and really the damage (or non-damage) done in any of these situations is related to the exact situation here (for example, a victim of coercion won't be as traumatized as a victim of rape;
You're thinking short-term here. Victims of rape don't typically go on to become rapists, but victims of abuse/coercion often go on to become abusers/coercers. It's exactly these long-term implications that I'm saying are at issue.
while a misbehaved 12 year old seductress probably ...
Again with this. These lolitas that you seem to think are ubiquitous are in the overwhelming (underwhelming?) minority; I can assure you that you are not surrounded by them. Tweens who act this way are often in thrall to peer pressure or other forms of social coercion. They are, in some sense, not even fully consenting to their own behaviour.
Argh, no mod points. Why was this modded Troll?
Parent (and to a lesser extent Parallel Parent) makes valid points. The difference between
are hugely different.
For my money this is one of the most exciting "terminal Masters" degrees out there right now (of course, I'm a linguist, so probably biased).
It will serve you in bioinformatics should you choose to continue in that field subsequently, will definitely tax/challenge your coding chops, and will teach you some cool stuff about language. Also, some of the people who run this program are affiliated with MS Research (you know, the cool arm of MS), and doing this degree is plausibly some kind of foot in the door there.
Thank you, good sir/madam.
Re: your sig...Try reading this one, instead...
Structured Procrastination