Yes, and a book placed on the teacher's door is likely to cause more damage.

The act of placing a bottle in a place where people are going to be around when it pops is the issue.... and it's EXACTLY the same issue as putting a heavy book on top of the door. Yes, it CAN injure someone. Yes, it IS wrong to do.

No, making dry ice and soda (or a combination of them) a felony and arresting the parents for child endangerment... that's not the solution. Not even close. Not even in the same solar system...

That's absolutely not true.

The "theory of relativity" is just a theory because we can't MATHEMATICALLY prove it from some fundamental basis, but it has withstood TENS OF THOUSANDS of experimental results.

The "theory of gravity" is just a theory because, while it works PERFECTLY in the real world, we do not yet know how to derive it from a more fundamental law and we find VERY subtle changes in it at relativistic speeds and subatomic distances.

It's not so much about observing or testing. It has a lot more to do with the fact that a scientist has a very high bar for what is "proven". This should be obvious when the forces such as gravity and electromagnetism are "theories" despite having very lasting and real-world demonstrable consistencies that conform to known mathematical rules for the most part.

It has nothing to do with experimental.

When a drug is prescription, it costs a lot more. It's just a rule in the drug market.

Drug companies fight HARD to make sure that while the drug is patented (first 7 years) that it is prescription so they can sell it for a higher price while they have a monopoly on the product.

When the 7 years is running out and generics are about to come out, they fight HARD to make sure it is over-the-counter, because they have a better chance of beating out generics when they don't have informed pharmacists and doctors notifying patients that the generic is identical and cheaper.

It's all about the Benjamins.

It is interesting to point out that child sex offenses have an average sentence in 2009 of 41 years, where first degree murder has an average sentence of 34 years.

There are over 300 people serving "indefinite civil confinement" for child pornography. Many states adopted these rules for sex offenders during the last 15 years, and in many of these states NOBODY has EVER BEEN RELEASED after being placed in such a confinement. This is de facto "life sentence" for possession of digital images.

I won't even BEGIN to argue that the creation of child porn is a good thing, but I will strenuously argue that its mere possession does not warrant a life sentence, regardless of what sort of doublespeak you can come up with about which sort of non-human that person is and what sort of evil deeds they "might one day do".

You give "people" too much credit.

Most people probably nod their head and say "I don't know about no internets. The gubment needs to make the chillins more safer."

I'm dead serious. If you think that 30% or 40% of the population wouldn't have something ABOUT that intelligent to say....

haha. what?

There is a law... they are changing that law.

Which part was hard to understand?

There are a lot of common sense ideas in the Scandinavian countries.

I've been thinking about it and I think that perhaps it's related to their increased tolerance for failure. A Swede or Norwegian or Finn is able to say "yes, this was a mistake" and not be derided in public for it.

The concept that humans aren't perfect isn't lost on these people as it seems to be in much of the rest of the world.

Another great example of this is the sex offender registries in the area. They're not only non-existent, they're actually illegal. They contend that it is a gross violation of personal privacy for those who already served their time and point out (probably correctly) that they do very little than encourage fear and paranoia amongst the populace. There was even a very public protest in OPPOSITION to a group who set up a private registry with similar information, after which, the site was removed due to its illegal content (in violation of local privacy laws).

To bring up another example, in these countries, there are very few frivolous lawsuits, as the system is carefully balanced to make it burdensome to bring one.

It is much easier for a judge to deem the plaintiff liable for all court costs and all defense costs if he feels the lawsuit was brought with malice or with little hope of succeeding.

Additionally, the state represents both parties in some cases, removing the financial burden of defending yourself from lawsuits. What they then do is place that burden on one of the parties in the case that they have been shown to be "willfully" out of compliance with civil law, but in cases where it is a genuine misunderstanding, the costs are absorbed by the system.

Rather than having a heirarchy where the rich can do whatever they want and the poor get fucked. Or a system where the powerful control everything and those down on their luck are brazenly left out to dry, these countries seem to have found a balance.

Also, worth noting, that these countries, despite their low populations and high standard of living, are not in the list of struggling economies, even during this "European crisis".

Absolutely brilliant. :-)

"Create a combination of tor's onion routing, bittorrent's high bandwidth downloads"

TOR is slow BECAUSE it is a distributed onion router. This requirement is basically saying "throw more hardware at TOR". That's the best you could do.....

There is this interesting phenomonon recently of legislators discussing what I call "negative freedoms". They're essentially subverting the word "freedom" to mean something it never has in the past, and as a result, they get wide backing.

For example, the passing of the PATRIOT act was shrouded in claims of "Freedom from terror".

That's not a "freedom" as you might describe it according to the constitution. It actually results in a net LOSS of "freedom" as we normally consider it.

When passing the Sex offender registry laws, I heard the mantra of "freedom from fear of your neighbors". That's not freedom! Besides, it didn't do a lot in that regard. It may have done the opposite, in fact!!

The politicians have suberted that word... nay... the politicians may actually NOT UNDERSTAND the word, or at best, simply use it as a convienant pawn in their ploy to make the general populace think they are "doing something useful" to justify their existance.

Meh.

Agreed.

The commentary about 1984 being unrealistically negative in its approach is a very salient discussion, because it leads down the path of discussing the many other ways you michg achieve the same sort of control.

The two points in 1984 that I did find more realistic are the aspects of the government in the story using positive feedback.

The changing of the names of departments, like "ministry of truth" and the "ministry of peace" echoes very true in the modern era. The department of war, slowly transofrms to the department of "homeland security". If the department of war was digging through your purse every time you stepped food in certain public buildings, people would probably react negatively. But since it's "homeland security"... ahhh, no problem.

Additionally, the mantra of the government being the sold arbiter of "order from chaos" compels people to fear a life without the party. They assume that life would degrade to inhuman conditions without that rigid control, in much the same way people do today. But in reality, that order they create is an illusion that covers up a loss of individual freedoms.

After all, the world is full of "dangerous peederfiles" and "terrorists, oh no!" and only the gubment can stop them (or so, people seem to think), giving them a carte blanche to do whatever they wish. Never mind that building code enforcement would save more lives than eliminating terrorism and your child is 8 times more likely to die after being struck by lightening than murdered by a known sex offender.

Scary, if you ask me.

The problem is with our culture of "absolute safety".

When it becomes a government mandate to make sure that no depressed teenager is EVER pushed over the edge by a snarky online comment....

when it becomes the government's mandate to make sure that no child EVER witnesses something they haven't been taught about already at school....

etc etc

That's the current issue. The problem is that most people feel that this SERVES them. It makes them safer, so they like it and ask for more.

In that sense, the government is ABSOLUTELY serving the people. I may disagree. You may disagree. Legal scholars may disagree, but Joe Sixpack says "them peederfiles are stealing children, how come the gubment won't fix it?"

There lies the problem. It's a problem of social indoctrination and realistic expectations, not (in this case) necessarily one of overstepping the public's mandate.

the only mandate they're perhaps ignoring is the one to represent ALL the people. The government actually represents the wealthiest 20% for the most part. Usually those are much more likely to be soccer moms and investment bankers than they are to be lower-middle class fans of hentai or "dreaded peederfiles", so those groups are under-represented.

Hah, you haven't read it, have you?

Russel's Teapot..... :-)

It would have been highly unusual if she was over the age of about 15, though, at least for the time.

There are lots of studies on this.

Here is just one of them.

Holland, etc al. 2009
http://www.scientificjournals.org/journals2009/articles/1439.pdf

Female average sentence 11.60 years
Male average sentence 28.05 years

And if the victim and perpetrators are both male, the mean sentence is over 45 years. (this usually includes very long probationary periods ~20 years)

The mean sentence for first degree murder is currently around 34 years.