"What's funny is that the mortgage industry and derivative trading schemes that caused the implosion were mostly passed by a Republican congress and Democratic president... "
"The idea that Clinton somehow brought on the mortgage crisis by forcing banks to lend to poor people is simply ludicrous."
The financial crisis brought about by mortgage fraud and securities manipulation was brought on by the cumulative actions of several Administrations and Congresses. It is not a simple as CRA, but fundamentally goes back to repealing Glass-Steagell and the S&L scandals.
To try and pin it on one party or President is misguided, and misses the salient points; that our government permitted unsound and failing financial regulation to be enacted, that the financial industry saw th opportunity to profit from it without concern for their inevitable failure, and that much of that process was driven by a huge segment of the financial industry that sponsored or committed criminal fruad on several different levels, and has not yet faced judgment. Indeed, they played the gambit that we would bail them out, if the problem got too big, and we did.
Until we see many (thousands) of financiers, analysts, executives, brokers, and other agents do the perp walk, we are not done fully undestanding the cause and prevention of this sort of problem. CRA was just a part of this. Glass-Steagell was the precipitator of this chain of events. The S&L scandals predated and predicted this, and another attempt to do the same favor for the credit unions should be expected. The NCUA has so far been able to refuse the Congress' largesse.
In 2009, Google earned about $0.1016 per visitor. So pay them about $37 a year and never see an ad.
There. Next question?
Anyways, the math:
620 million visitors per day.
23 billion yearly revenue.
$37.0968/visitor..1016/day/visitor.
Actually, subscription search services are sounding like they are practical. This adds $3.09/month to your Internet bill. Add in obscene escalators for ludicrous groth in revenue, and this isn't much worse than your current ISP's rate increases, certainly not as bad as the TV bill.
Wow. And we could let the advertisers torture those too cheap to pay. Nice.
"Ask me to design my ideal car and it'll have a lightweight but strong aluminium body, a simple, efficient diesel engine, comfortable seats and a decent stereo. Everything else is chaff, I don't even need ABS."
1969 Land Rover Diesel, aftermarket stereo, you may not find the seats adequate.
You didn't specify sufficient climate control, sound deadening, rollover characteristics, or 5-mph bumpers. Nor did you specify windshield wipers, functional defrosters, or any number of other useful safety features. But the Rover does meet your specs, depending on the subjective seating quality requirement. Aftermarket stereo can be fitted by any Rover dealer or local Best Buy, and there of course the 'adequate' feature may be met without useful bass response, since very few vehicles are conducive to hearing the bass over road and tire noise anyways, even the best of the luxury sedans just suppresses rumble, not eliminates it.
But hey, some people think an old Rover is indeed ideal.
"An iPad inspired revolution may stir a few OEMs to release ARM tablets but Joe Consumer will be stuck with Windows 7 or higher on x86-64 for the foreseeable future"
Like, say Apple, though of course their table isn't going to be competitive, since it's not running Windows, right?
Your arguments vary from well-reasoned to, IMHO, mistaken...
We, as a society, define 'children' by an arbitrary age. Please, offer a different definiton that can be universally applied and offers a better result. I'm all ears. BTW, this is not MY choice. I would prefer to define children by criteria including their ability to provide for their own support and expenses. (Ability, not necessarily current status. Unemployemt by itself should not negate ability.)
In the U.S., we permit the States to set some of their own standards, and defining maturity is a classic case of that. Your argument over inconsistency is a Constitutional one, and one to fight 51 times. I wish you luck. the argument that inconsistency shows some flaw in the system is incorrect. The system is designed to be inconsistent. Perhaps you should stick to the argument that allowing marriage at a younger age than posing for lascivious images is genuinely inappropriate, and should be reconsidered. I'm with you on that.
I do, however, agree with the law's premise that at least SOME children cannot grant consent to certain acts. I hope we can agree that children under the age of 10 can rarely, if ever, give consent to sexual acts, much less to being photographed doing so. Certainly there is some lower age limit where we can agree that such acts are reprehensible. And that leads to the next point.
If you permit possession of such reprehensible images, you encourage distribution, whether for profit or not. the example of claiming that free distribution discourages creativity is specious and immaterial. If you permit it, it will be done. In fact, the law does NOT permit it, and it is done anyways. Some images depict what should, again IMHO, be universally understood as unacceptable behavior. If you're not inclined to agree with this, you need not read any further.
Repeating myself, I do not agree that "the free (as in freedom) distribution of material discourages creativity".
You wrote:
"and We in the ROW don't really appreciate having your views pushed onto us. But anyway. How far do you go then, to protect children? Which rights get trampled (such as right to a fair trial, right to life - although you don't have that in the US, of course)?"
First, my discussion was intended to explore the law, the intent, and its consequences. Don't think that I agree with the motiviations or the legislation that resulted. I do believe CAI should be generally banned, but the specifics of how we do that aren't entirely acceptable to me. For instance, the mere possession should not be prima facie evidence of anything else. Punishing distribution would be appropriate. Sadly, this is the model of laws against marijuana, marginally successful in controlling the trade in the U.S. Well, ok, a failure. But we will never entirely end the trade in either, so the law at best keeps it minimized. Is it worth it? Time will tell, perhaps.
Second, you are entirely correct that 'right to life' in the U.S. is not very well protected. Now we need to define how YOUNG a child needs to be to be considered a human being, and derserving of protection. A moment old? Conceived? Fingers and toes? This is a complex debate we have not yet given an honest hearing to.
We also had this exchange:
"Rational debate goes out the window when it comes to your kids.
And this sums up the problem. Rational debate should never go out the window when discussing law (or anything else really). It may seem cold and dispassionate, but that is what I think."
Well, yes, paternal love and care may be rational, but the expression may not be. If you are asking for humans to be rational in all things, you do not yet understand the human condition in any useful way. I know you are not asking that. So this is an area where irrational responses will be common. It is not the only one.
And last:
"Remember, all legislation is someone's morality.
This is a sad truth; ideally law should be based on logic
So the 'problem' with religion is that, for some, it has benefit?
Please don't rely on the argument that believers are deceived. Science has deceived us with incomplete or incorrect answers before, and yet we don't discard Science as a failure, or even by design misleading. We instead improve upon it.
Improving on faith is a personal thing.
Of course, most who defy religion do so based on the abject failures and shortcomings. You can't judge a philosophy by its abuse. And if one does in fact live their life by a belief system based on God, and they die, and there is no God, have they been cheated? Are they wronged? Only if that life was diminished by their faith. Many Christians do not feel diminished at all by their faith. Is it for you to define their life as less than it could have been? I propose it is not for you to judge.
If you rely, instead, on some principle of absolute truth, and claim that belief in God cannot be true, I would of course then ask you for evidence supporting your claim. Please, enlighten us.
When I claimed my faith was founded on 'evidence', I meant specifically:
- A physical healing in my presence. Not a temporary one repeated over and over, but restoration of documented hearing loss, confirmed by an agnostic physician, and confirmed to have been healed without any allopathic treatment.
- Multiple people who were able to become sober and regain functional lives despite addictions to several substances, including alcohol and heroin. This is much more interesting than mere physical healing. I've checked in with these people, and all three are still sober 6 years later. None had had a sober day before for decades. THEY credit God. I'm at a loss how to discredit their belief, but perhaps this one stays in the realm of 'possible.
Other examples I cannot cite, because they occured after I accepted Christ. You were asking about the evidence that lead me to believe.
"I have seen more cases of sloppy web design, UI design and lack of CPU optimisations in Flash than in other things I have used...
If some of these issues were addressed I might change my mind about Flash...
the lack of evidence that Adobe is actually trying to address these concerns..."
Um, by your logic, Microsoft has some responsibility for poor.NET programming, Linus and the crew have some responsibility for poor open source programming, and who do we blame for bad C, C+, C++, and C# code?
No, next thing I know, you'll be blaming Estwing for bad house designs, and Exxon for narrow roads. Sheesh. You can't get much more wrong than that. It's not the tool, my friend.
I know your former company, and they have changed their temp labor policy recently. In fact, the mix of foreign workers has been changing from largely Indian nationals to Asian nationals. But the offices worldwide still exist, and show no signs of being dininished.
Offshoring is still in progress. But I'm being converted as we speak.
It's a tangled mess, but I'm still disappointed. We just got a new temp in who is in the U.S. on an H1B. Seriously, they are doing the very same job that dozens of U.S. citizens did in 2008m the VERY SAME JOB. And many of those U.S. citzens that were laid off in 2008 are still looking for that work.
It's abusive, and has been for a long time. H1Bs need to be reduced dramatically. There are, repeat ARE, citizens that can do the work.
Power - Always has been a local monopoly in America. Usually driven by who owns the power distribution network.
Automobiles - Ford, GM, Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan, Subaru, Mitsubishi, Honda, Kia, Hyundai, Volkswagen/BMW, Mercedes, Fiat, Tata, and I'm forgetting a few actual companies. Plenty of competition I think.
Computers - Lenovo, Dell, Gateway, Toshiba, Panasonic, HP, Acer, Apple. Now this is an area where competition seems lacking, right? Who did I miss?
Food - I'm lost, but there are a lot of huge conglomerates, though competition I cannot judge.
Media - There are dominant players, but I'm not sure the Internet has let them be so dominant as before. Except for Google.
Now the real competition/monopoly issue is further along. Wal-Mart is dominating retail, Amazon/iTunes dominate other areas. I don't know that there is no price fixing going on, but it is the suppliers probably. Look for the scarcity and you will find the collusion. LCD screens are in short supply, probably due to fixing. RAM seems tolerably priced. CPUs are not cheap, but AMD keeps pressuring Intel on price. Other components seem cheap enough. Blu-Ray drives are expensive. Hard drives seem pretty competitive, but you never know, cause that is a small group of manufacturers - Seagate, Samsumg, Toshiba, who else?
It's an easy complaint to make. I wonder how true it is.
Yes. Remember, 'neocon' is a term invented by a leftist, and as a perjorative. No one I consider a Conservative uses that term in any other fashion, and certainly not about themselves. The Left and the uncommitted use it.
You can try and deny it, but the truth is obvious for anyone who cares to look into it. It is a common political tactic to try and define your opposition in either the least-favorable light, or into an untenable position. All sides use it.
And Obama's policy on wiretaps and surveillance is left-wing? There's not a nickel's worth difference between them. this is not Left v Right, Republicans v Democrats, it is Us v Them.
This isn't hard to do with existing technology, GPS not required. Just require drivers to purchase those transmitters and put up readers along the road. Like a toll, it will tell you who drove by what.
In Maine, it was called TransPass for a while now EasyPass which works all the way down to Florida, with some pockets of resistance here and there.
Yes, as alternative fuel cars proliferate, the gas tax won't work. I predict that the government will increasingly tax truckers first, for various reasons. Then the excise tax on alt fuel cars will skyrocket, and eventually you will report your odometer reading and calculate a tax based on that. If you underreport the odometer, you will pay for it when you sell the vehicle. If you scrap the vehicle, you will pay then, or when you buy a replacement. Makes sense, as gas tax is essentially a tax on mileage, though I pay more for my Explorer than you do for your Prius, and I'm not sure the 'damage' I do to the roads is proportionally worse than what you do. Truckers have always paid higher fuel taxes on that premise alone.
This is the 'new' Beetle. There have been 18 different engine choices for the new Beetle so far, and all appear to be liquid-cooled. Some are TDIs. All appear to be inline 4 cylinder engines.
And like the old flat 4 aircooled, they can run on many different fuels. But there the similarity ends.
- The only consent that matters is informed consent. Children cannot provide this.
- We choose an age limit as a convenience. What it is can be of some concern, but the debate is never that children are not too young and inexperienced, underdeveloped in social and ethical skills, and uninformed to give informed consent for any number of different activities, it is just an argument over age. In the U.S., I wonder how nude photos of your wife, if legally married under the age of majority (which is possible somewhere over here), would be handled. But common sense should prevail. We are not discussing those cases, are we?
- U.S. law has taken the position that the potential for abuse is so great and the interest in the child's safety is so overriding that we will take an unusually strong stance against the practice, and so will punish even possession, in an effort to make the creation of the material less and less practical, with an eye to eventually destroying the market for this. It may or may not work, but we are trying that.
- U.S. law also seems to presume that a child is harmed by the act of involving them in creating this material. Period. Harm is assumed, rightly or wrongly. Again, to further suppress the market.
- And yes, some of this is reactionary. Remember, all legislation is someone's morality.
But an interesting, somewhat unrelated point you make at the end:
"It always amuses me when the anti-piracy lobby, when campaigning for Internet filters to block access to copyrighted material, hold up the success of the filters already being used to block child porn."
Yes, they do.
"According to them, the distribution of their content (for free) discourages the production of material"
No, I am unware of ANY media group claiming that piracy discourages production. It discourages PURCHASE, but the material is still very desireable, and there is a continuing market for the material, just diminished by the presence of pirated or 'free' copies.
"but in the case of child porn the distribution (potentially for free) encourages it."
Yes, it must. Actually, the distribution fundamentally makes it possible to exist. Ipso facto, I think. Since there is a genuine legal market for music, movies, etc., the piracy issue is one of revenue and loss. For child porn, the legal market is nonexistant. So the issue is that distribution, by definition, must be illegal also. As is possession. I can have an MP3 file on mhy computer and not have a presumption that it is an illegal copy. For CAI, there is no such presumption.
"or they are encouraging the production of child porn (by supporting the blocking) for their own goals"
That is a twisted logic I assume you came to as justification for your logic otherwise. Clearly, the RIAA etc. could not do any such thing, and cannot intend to. Their mere existence would bge threatened otherwise.
Again, we in the U.S. have largely decided that this stuff is so dangerous that it cannot be allowed to exist, and we go out of our way to destroy the ability, motivation, and methods to do so. We trample rights in an effort to offer protection for other, even more basic and important rights. Right or wrong, that's the environment now.
The 'it's for the children' gambit has been played in other issues in the U.S. Drunk driving legislation, for example, and education. We can expect to see this in healthcare and food as well. Rational debate goes out the window when it comes to your kids.
"remind me again why mere viewing of material should be illegal?"
It's not the viewing of the material, per se, that should be illegal, but the creation of the material.
Most societies assume that children cannot consent to such photography, and so the material must be assumed to be created without their consent. Consider the problems for kids if they are photographed or recorded for any of this stuff and it gets around their friends, family, etc. Even if they agreed, how can they really be expected to understand the potential consequences? And of course, this is an extension of statuatory rape and assault laws, for obvious reasons.
Since children are assumed to be incapable of consent, then the mere existence of the material is now, under most law, prima facie evidence of unlawful conduct. No defense. And distribution is generally held, ot seems, to encourage this material in a way that is unacceptable to society. Therefore, even possession is illegal, you don't even seem to need to know you have it. Even entirely contrived (animated or digitally/otherwise artificially created) child porn is illegal, as it is assumed to both inspire creating 'real' material, and being indistinguishable from 'real' material, the law intends to punish it in the same fashion in many jurisdictions.
In the balance between protecting children and the rights of the accused, the children are held to be so important that the accused is denied many rights. Right or wrong, this is where we are.
Privacy laws are the first to be trampled when child porn is involved. Since there is no defense, there is no tolerance for possession, and it doesn;t seem to matter how the evidence was obtained. I suspect we will see Supreme Court decisions on both legality of certain searches and lifelong restrictions on convicted offenders.
So, to answer your question, it is not only illegal to merely view the material, to discourage its creation, but mere possession, even unknowingly, is being punished to further discourage the act of creating the material. It's all about the children, for better or worse.
I happen to agree, though reluctantly, that the extreme reaction to child porn is correct. I'm only reluctant because of the potential of incidents such as the OP describes.
You still have to throw those cute nuclear and electric motors out of Earth atmosphere. Thermal rockets are still the most practical way, and it seems that nuclear has a LONG ways to go to be possible, much less affordable.
And of course the concept of nuclear on the launch pad will frighten the Luddites. Maybe even me.
And then there are some who, when confronted with incontrovertible evidence of the existence of a God, accept it. Yes, there are a few, and yes, they were faced with even physical evidence. YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
"What's funny is that the mortgage industry and derivative trading schemes that caused the implosion were mostly passed by a Republican congress and Democratic president... "
"The idea that Clinton somehow brought on the mortgage crisis by forcing banks to lend to poor people is simply ludicrous."
The financial crisis brought about by mortgage fraud and securities manipulation was brought on by the cumulative actions of several Administrations and Congresses. It is not a simple as CRA, but fundamentally goes back to repealing Glass-Steagell and the S&L scandals.
To try and pin it on one party or President is misguided, and misses the salient points; that our government permitted unsound and failing financial regulation to be enacted, that the financial industry saw th opportunity to profit from it without concern for their inevitable failure, and that much of that process was driven by a huge segment of the financial industry that sponsored or committed criminal fruad on several different levels, and has not yet faced judgment. Indeed, they played the gambit that we would bail them out, if the problem got too big, and we did.
Until we see many (thousands) of financiers, analysts, executives, brokers, and other agents do the perp walk, we are not done fully undestanding the cause and prevention of this sort of problem. CRA was just a part of this. Glass-Steagell was the precipitator of this chain of events. The S&L scandals predated and predicted this, and another attempt to do the same favor for the credit unions should be expected. The NCUA has so far been able to refuse the Congress' largesse.
You should pay to not see ads.
In 2009, Google earned about $0.1016 per visitor. So pay them about $37 a year and never see an ad.
There. Next question?
Anyways, the math:
620 million visitors per day.
23 billion yearly revenue.
$37.0968/visitor. .1016/day/visitor.
Actually, subscription search services are sounding like they are practical. This adds $3.09/month to your Internet bill. Add in obscene escalators for ludicrous groth in revenue, and this isn't much worse than your current ISP's rate increases, certainly not as bad as the TV bill.
Wow. And we could let the advertisers torture those too cheap to pay. Nice.
"Ask me to design my ideal car and it'll have a lightweight but strong aluminium body, a simple, efficient diesel engine, comfortable seats and a decent stereo. Everything else is chaff, I don't even need ABS."
1969 Land Rover Diesel, aftermarket stereo, you may not find the seats adequate.
You didn't specify sufficient climate control, sound deadening, rollover characteristics, or 5-mph bumpers. Nor did you specify windshield wipers, functional defrosters, or any number of other useful safety features. But the Rover does meet your specs, depending on the subjective seating quality requirement. Aftermarket stereo can be fitted by any Rover dealer or local Best Buy, and there of course the 'adequate' feature may be met without useful bass response, since very few vehicles are conducive to hearing the bass over road and tire noise anyways, even the best of the luxury sedans just suppresses rumble, not eliminates it.
But hey, some people think an old Rover is indeed ideal.
They also rotate the L1s and B1s, and H1Bs, so no one gets an expired visa. Great fun.
By considering the evidence. You could research it a little.
Um, you blew it:
"An iPad inspired revolution may stir a few OEMs to release ARM tablets but Joe Consumer will be stuck with Windows 7 or higher on x86-64 for the foreseeable future"
Like, say Apple, though of course their table isn't going to be competitive, since it's not running Windows, right?
You were doing so well, too.
Your arguments vary from well-reasoned to, IMHO, mistaken...
We, as a society, define 'children' by an arbitrary age. Please, offer a different definiton that can be universally applied and offers a better result. I'm all ears. BTW, this is not MY choice. I would prefer to define children by criteria including their ability to provide for their own support and expenses. (Ability, not necessarily current status. Unemployemt by itself should not negate ability.)
In the U.S., we permit the States to set some of their own standards, and defining maturity is a classic case of that. Your argument over inconsistency is a Constitutional one, and one to fight 51 times. I wish you luck. the argument that inconsistency shows some flaw in the system is incorrect. The system is designed to be inconsistent. Perhaps you should stick to the argument that allowing marriage at a younger age than posing for lascivious images is genuinely inappropriate, and should be reconsidered. I'm with you on that.
I do, however, agree with the law's premise that at least SOME children cannot grant consent to certain acts. I hope we can agree that children under the age of 10 can rarely, if ever, give consent to sexual acts, much less to being photographed doing so. Certainly there is some lower age limit where we can agree that such acts are reprehensible. And that leads to the next point.
If you permit possession of such reprehensible images, you encourage distribution, whether for profit or not. the example of claiming that free distribution discourages creativity is specious and immaterial. If you permit it, it will be done. In fact, the law does NOT permit it, and it is done anyways. Some images depict what should, again IMHO, be universally understood as unacceptable behavior. If you're not inclined to agree with this, you need not read any further.
Repeating myself, I do not agree that "the free (as in freedom) distribution of material discourages creativity".
You wrote:
"and We in the ROW don't really appreciate having your views pushed onto us. But anyway. How far do you go then, to protect children? Which rights get trampled (such as right to a fair trial, right to life - although you don't have that in the US, of course)?"
First, my discussion was intended to explore the law, the intent, and its consequences. Don't think that I agree with the motiviations or the legislation that resulted. I do believe CAI should be generally banned, but the specifics of how we do that aren't entirely acceptable to me. For instance, the mere possession should not be prima facie evidence of anything else. Punishing distribution would be appropriate. Sadly, this is the model of laws against marijuana, marginally successful in controlling the trade in the U.S. Well, ok, a failure. But we will never entirely end the trade in either, so the law at best keeps it minimized. Is it worth it? Time will tell, perhaps.
Second, you are entirely correct that 'right to life' in the U.S. is not very well protected. Now we need to define how YOUNG a child needs to be to be considered a human being, and derserving of protection. A moment old? Conceived? Fingers and toes? This is a complex debate we have not yet given an honest hearing to.
We also had this exchange:
"Rational debate goes out the window when it comes to your kids.
And this sums up the problem. Rational debate should never go out the window when discussing law (or anything else really). It may seem cold and dispassionate, but that is what I think."
Well, yes, paternal love and care may be rational, but the expression may not be. If you are asking for humans to be rational in all things, you do not yet understand the human condition in any useful way. I know you are not asking that. So this is an area where irrational responses will be common. It is not the only one.
And last:
"Remember, all legislation is someone's morality.
This is a sad truth; ideally law should be based on logic
So the 'problem' with religion is that, for some, it has benefit?
Please don't rely on the argument that believers are deceived. Science has deceived us with incomplete or incorrect answers before, and yet we don't discard Science as a failure, or even by design misleading. We instead improve upon it.
Improving on faith is a personal thing.
Of course, most who defy religion do so based on the abject failures and shortcomings. You can't judge a philosophy by its abuse. And if one does in fact live their life by a belief system based on God, and they die, and there is no God, have they been cheated? Are they wronged? Only if that life was diminished by their faith. Many Christians do not feel diminished at all by their faith. Is it for you to define their life as less than it could have been? I propose it is not for you to judge.
If you rely, instead, on some principle of absolute truth, and claim that belief in God cannot be true, I would of course then ask you for evidence supporting your claim. Please, enlighten us.
When I claimed my faith was founded on 'evidence', I meant specifically:
- A physical healing in my presence. Not a temporary one repeated over and over, but restoration of documented hearing loss, confirmed by an agnostic physician, and confirmed to have been healed without any allopathic treatment.
- Multiple people who were able to become sober and regain functional lives despite addictions to several substances, including alcohol and heroin. This is much more interesting than mere physical healing. I've checked in with these people, and all three are still sober 6 years later. None had had a sober day before for decades. THEY credit God. I'm at a loss how to discredit their belief, but perhaps this one stays in the realm of 'possible.
Other examples I cannot cite, because they occured after I accepted Christ. You were asking about the evidence that lead me to believe.
"I have seen more cases of sloppy web design, UI design and lack of CPU optimisations in Flash than in other things I have used...
If some of these issues were addressed I might change my mind about Flash...
the lack of evidence that Adobe is actually trying to address these concerns..."
Um, by your logic, Microsoft has some responsibility for poor .NET programming, Linus and the crew have some responsibility for poor open source programming, and who do we blame for bad C, C+, C++, and C# code?
No, next thing I know, you'll be blaming Estwing for bad house designs, and Exxon for narrow roads. Sheesh. You can't get much more wrong than that. It's not the tool, my friend.
I know your former company, and they have changed their temp labor policy recently. In fact, the mix of foreign workers has been changing from largely Indian nationals to Asian nationals. But the offices worldwide still exist, and show no signs of being dininished.
Offshoring is still in progress. But I'm being converted as we speak.
It's a tangled mess, but I'm still disappointed. We just got a new temp in who is in the U.S. on an H1B. Seriously, they are doing the very same job that dozens of U.S. citizens did in 2008m the VERY SAME JOB. And many of those U.S. citzens that were laid off in 2008 are still looking for that work.
It's abusive, and has been for a long time. H1Bs need to be reduced dramatically. There are, repeat ARE, citizens that can do the work.
"power, automobiles, computers, food, media"
Power - Always has been a local monopoly in America. Usually driven by who owns the power distribution network.
Automobiles - Ford, GM, Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan, Subaru, Mitsubishi, Honda, Kia, Hyundai, Volkswagen/BMW, Mercedes, Fiat, Tata, and I'm forgetting a few actual companies. Plenty of competition I think.
Computers - Lenovo, Dell, Gateway, Toshiba, Panasonic, HP, Acer, Apple. Now this is an area where competition seems lacking, right? Who did I miss?
Food - I'm lost, but there are a lot of huge conglomerates, though competition I cannot judge.
Media - There are dominant players, but I'm not sure the Internet has let them be so dominant as before. Except for Google.
Now the real competition/monopoly issue is further along. Wal-Mart is dominating retail, Amazon/iTunes dominate other areas. I don't know that there is no price fixing going on, but it is the suppliers probably. Look for the scarcity and you will find the collusion. LCD screens are in short supply, probably due to fixing. RAM seems tolerably priced. CPUs are not cheap, but AMD keeps pressuring Intel on price. Other components seem cheap enough. Blu-Ray drives are expensive. Hard drives seem pretty competitive, but you never know, cause that is a small group of manufacturers - Seagate, Samsumg, Toshiba, who else?
It's an easy complaint to make. I wonder how true it is.
Yes. Remember, 'neocon' is a term invented by a leftist, and as a perjorative. No one I consider a Conservative uses that term in any other fashion, and certainly not about themselves. The Left and the uncommitted use it.
You can try and deny it, but the truth is obvious for anyone who cares to look into it. It is a common political tactic to try and define your opposition in either the least-favorable light, or into an untenable position. All sides use it.
And Obama's policy on wiretaps and surveillance is left-wing? There's not a nickel's worth difference between them. this is not Left v Right, Republicans v Democrats, it is Us v Them.
You're losing this argument.
The Obama administration is continuing the practices. Stop apologizing for them. It is not necessary.
This isn't hard to do with existing technology, GPS not required. Just require drivers to purchase those transmitters and put up readers along the road. Like a toll, it will tell you who drove by what.
In Maine, it was called TransPass for a while now EasyPass which works all the way down to Florida, with some pockets of resistance here and there.
Yes, as alternative fuel cars proliferate, the gas tax won't work. I predict that the government will increasingly tax truckers first, for various reasons. Then the excise tax on alt fuel cars will skyrocket, and eventually you will report your odometer reading and calculate a tax based on that. If you underreport the odometer, you will pay for it when you sell the vehicle. If you scrap the vehicle, you will pay then, or when you buy a replacement. Makes sense, as gas tax is essentially a tax on mileage, though I pay more for my Explorer than you do for your Prius, and I'm not sure the 'damage' I do to the roads is proportionally worse than what you do. Truckers have always paid higher fuel taxes on that premise alone.
This is the 'new' Beetle. There have been 18 different engine choices for the new Beetle so far, and all appear to be liquid-cooled. Some are TDIs. All appear to be inline 4 cylinder engines.
And like the old flat 4 aircooled, they can run on many different fuels. But there the similarity ends.
I did not make my point sufficiently clear;
- The only consent that matters is informed consent. Children cannot provide this.
- We choose an age limit as a convenience. What it is can be of some concern, but the debate is never that children are not too young and inexperienced, underdeveloped in social and ethical skills, and uninformed to give informed consent for any number of different activities, it is just an argument over age. In the U.S., I wonder how nude photos of your wife, if legally married under the age of majority (which is possible somewhere over here), would be handled. But common sense should prevail. We are not discussing those cases, are we?
- U.S. law has taken the position that the potential for abuse is so great and the interest in the child's safety is so overriding that we will take an unusually strong stance against the practice, and so will punish even possession, in an effort to make the creation of the material less and less practical, with an eye to eventually destroying the market for this. It may or may not work, but we are trying that.
- U.S. law also seems to presume that a child is harmed by the act of involving them in creating this material. Period. Harm is assumed, rightly or wrongly. Again, to further suppress the market.
- And yes, some of this is reactionary. Remember, all legislation is someone's morality.
But an interesting, somewhat unrelated point you make at the end:
"It always amuses me when the anti-piracy lobby, when campaigning for Internet filters to block access to copyrighted material, hold up the success of the filters already being used to block child porn."
Yes, they do.
"According to them, the distribution of their content (for free) discourages the production of material"
No, I am unware of ANY media group claiming that piracy discourages production. It discourages PURCHASE, but the material is still very desireable, and there is a continuing market for the material, just diminished by the presence of pirated or 'free' copies.
"but in the case of child porn the distribution (potentially for free) encourages it."
Yes, it must. Actually, the distribution fundamentally makes it possible to exist. Ipso facto, I think. Since there is a genuine legal market for music, movies, etc., the piracy issue is one of revenue and loss. For child porn, the legal market is nonexistant. So the issue is that distribution, by definition, must be illegal also. As is possession. I can have an MP3 file on mhy computer and not have a presumption that it is an illegal copy. For CAI, there is no such presumption.
"or they are encouraging the production of child porn (by supporting the blocking) for their own goals"
That is a twisted logic I assume you came to as justification for your logic otherwise. Clearly, the RIAA etc. could not do any such thing, and cannot intend to. Their mere existence would bge threatened otherwise.
Again, we in the U.S. have largely decided that this stuff is so dangerous that it cannot be allowed to exist, and we go out of our way to destroy the ability, motivation, and methods to do so. We trample rights in an effort to offer protection for other, even more basic and important rights. Right or wrong, that's the environment now.
The 'it's for the children' gambit has been played in other issues in the U.S. Drunk driving legislation, for example, and education. We can expect to see this in healthcare and food as well. Rational debate goes out the window when it comes to your kids.
"remind me again why mere viewing of material should be illegal?"
It's not the viewing of the material, per se, that should be illegal, but the creation of the material.
Most societies assume that children cannot consent to such photography, and so the material must be assumed to be created without their consent. Consider the problems for kids if they are photographed or recorded for any of this stuff and it gets around their friends, family, etc. Even if they agreed, how can they really be expected to understand the potential consequences? And of course, this is an extension of statuatory rape and assault laws, for obvious reasons.
Since children are assumed to be incapable of consent, then the mere existence of the material is now, under most law, prima facie evidence of unlawful conduct. No defense. And distribution is generally held, ot seems, to encourage this material in a way that is unacceptable to society. Therefore, even possession is illegal, you don't even seem to need to know you have it. Even entirely contrived (animated or digitally/otherwise artificially created) child porn is illegal, as it is assumed to both inspire creating 'real' material, and being indistinguishable from 'real' material, the law intends to punish it in the same fashion in many jurisdictions.
In the balance between protecting children and the rights of the accused, the children are held to be so important that the accused is denied many rights. Right or wrong, this is where we are.
Privacy laws are the first to be trampled when child porn is involved. Since there is no defense, there is no tolerance for possession, and it doesn;t seem to matter how the evidence was obtained. I suspect we will see Supreme Court decisions on both legality of certain searches and lifelong restrictions on convicted offenders.
So, to answer your question, it is not only illegal to merely view the material, to discourage its creation, but mere possession, even unknowingly, is being punished to further discourage the act of creating the material. It's all about the children, for better or worse.
I happen to agree, though reluctantly, that the extreme reaction to child porn is correct. I'm only reluctant because of the potential of incidents such as the OP describes.
You still have to throw those cute nuclear and electric motors out of Earth atmosphere. Thermal rockets are still the most practical way, and it seems that nuclear has a LONG ways to go to be possible, much less affordable.
And of course the concept of nuclear on the launch pad will frighten the Luddites. Maybe even me.
"Unfortunately, religion is not about evidence, it's about faith."
True, but some come to faith by evidence.
"Which is why religion has caused humanity so much suffering over the milleniums."
Suffering is the human condition. Religion is merely one of the 'causes', and perhaps not the most common or greatest.
And some believers find solace and comfort, even relief, from their religion.
And then there are some who, when confronted with incontrovertible evidence of the existence of a God, accept it. Yes, there are a few, and yes, they were faced with even physical evidence. YMMV.
Yea, it's just a game. Not a reiable simulation.
Feh.
To stop storing images.
AND to delete all existing images.
AND modify the system to prevent storing images in the future.
AND submit to an independent audit to verify that this is done. On a regular basis. And reported to the court.
Not that this suprises me at all. We should expect this, and then go to court and fight it.
ASCII back when there was 'just' ASCII, was an 8 space tab. MS adopted that where it was needed, and in my world, 8 spaces for a tab is standard.
If you're just indenting, whatever you like. If your envirenment or prefers a different standard, either adopt it or be prepared to cause problems.
I tend to indent 1 or 2 spaces, because I can make sense of it. But some editing software has its own ideas.
And this is not the most important topic for us to consider.
Foon sounds like it is sitting outside a bar in the parking lot with a bloody nose.