I agreed with you initially, but If you read through the posts attached to this story, there are quite a few reasonable arguments for doing so.

Basically they all boil down to this: If I'm a specialist now, and my company decided to eliminate my specialty, would I want to stay around, even if they agreed to retain me while I retrained on a new technology?

The answer might be yes if I wanted to learn a new skillset. If I'm a Linux admin who had never worked in a Windows environment and I thought this would be advantageous, that might be nice.

But what if my specialty doesn't translate well into the new technology ecosystem, or I'm a very senior specialist like a Systems Architect? I can see feeling devalued by the change and perhaps wanting to move on.

That said, I have the feeling that the person who submitted the question is not in that situation. By their question it seems like they just can't learn, or refuse to entirely out of ideology, which seems silly, given what we're talking about.

Yes, it is a problem. I agree, these riders are usually a problem.

But my point stands that this bill is different from NDAA. SOPA will have to stand or fall on its own, because it is a stand alone bill.

NDAA is not a good comparison to this legislation.

The NDAA is considered "must pass" legislation. While we can't know for sure what the President would have done had a bill landed on his desk separate from the NDAA, which included its controversial provisions, we do know that they cited the "must pass" nature of NDAA as the reason they reluctantly signed it into law.

This legislation, however is not attached to anything of the sort. It will pass or fail on its own merits. Congress can't use this as pressure, and the White House can't use it as an excuse.

I like your point, but I think you're missing out on something.

Radio isn't just used to tell stories. It's used to communicate. Nobody is telling stories in the cockpit of an aircraft, for instance. It's just communicating messages. Information back and forth.

There are lots of examples where this is true. And to extend your analogy with other species, there are plenty of other species that communicate on our own planet (even microbes!). It just so happens that the complexity of that communication seems to scale to a degree with the complexity of the organism. And it also so happens that we're the only species thus far that's developed the reasoning level and had the ability to develop tools to extend communication like radio.

Further, any other species that wishes to communicate over great distances on another world, regardless of whether or not they are culturally story tellers or not, will likely face similar problems to us, in terms of the physical limitations of passing messages across space within the universe (whether that space is a light year or a mile).

It stands to reason that similar solutions (radiation) will be sought. You could argue that they'd use different bands. Perhaps. We use the bands we use because they work best in our environment. For instance, most of our environment is opaque on the visual and IR bands, so that doesn't work. That's why we don't use those bands for much. Radio, on the other hand is easy to generate, can give you good range, is not very bad for you (like x-ray or gamma), and much of the world is transparent to it, so you don't need to worry about line of sight so much.

Now that said, we have no idea what they would transmit. Sound? Visuals? Digital representations of something? What are the odds that another intelligent civilization uses sound to communicate in the first place? I have no idea. If not sound, what? If a civilization is transmitting say, smell, or some abstraction of a sense we do not posses, how would we interpret this if we detected it? If we realized that it was intelligent, how would we decode it?

I agree. But I also agree that Israel's two-faced behavior contributes to some bigoted anti-semitic attitudes.

Israel isn't a free democratic state that has a constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion, and freedom from persecution. It is a "Jewish State". A democratic one that happens to be open to non-Jewish citizens, but they too often act as the "Jewish state" and alienate non-Jews. Particularly when they combat the Palestinians.

It's not all Israel's fault. The Palistinian and other Middle East state leaders have deamonized every action and made it a "those evil Jews" issue. But their insane, over-reactionary use of force, and the Zionist ideology doesn't help.

As an American, I've always been conflicted about Israel and our support for them. On the one hand, we ostensibly support them because they are a democracy. And true. They are (mostly). Arabs and Muslims are a well represented minority in government. They sit in the Knesset

But they are also this quasi-theocracy. This idea that one particular group of people (based on race or religion) should enjoy special protection, or special citizenship offends my ideals of equality. This would be entirely academic and probably something I could live with if Israel behaved themselves and treated dealt with the Palestinians in a way that seems humane, just, and in good faith. But while the Palestinians seem just as bad sometimes, I don't see them doing that.

The Arab Muslim population in Israel is a minority, but it's one that's growing faster than the Jewish majority. I am very curious to see how the Israeli government acts as this tipping point approaches. Will they stick to their democratic ideals? Or will keeping a "Jewish State" be more important?

But you're talking about the kind of behavior that would be considered reasonable for law enforcement before even obtaining a warrant. In fact, this behavior is sometimes required to build the evidence required to go to a judge for a warrant in the first place.

Stalking is illegal not because of simple privacy rules, or because the stalker might build a profile about you, but because it's a behavior that is frequently linked to violence.

Someone building a profile of your daily life may be undesirable. But can you make a case that it should protected against? I'm not certain that I have a right not to be skeeved out, nor that there is a case to be made for such a right to be enacted.

If you were to pass such rules, where would you place the limits on these restrictions? I've had daily commutes where I realized there was a car I'd see every day from my neighborhood to the same part of the city I worked in each day. I know what parking garage they parked in. I wasn't stalking them, we just took the same route on our commute five days a week. Is it different because I'm not a state actor? If that's the case, what about private cameras?

There are a lot of questions here, and I don't see a strong case for why there should be restrictions on what amounts to public information. But I'm open to hear ideas.

No. I don't. Can your neighbors see this? Passers by on the street? How is the camera different?

I'll grant you that it's a difference of degree because the camera can watch 24/7. But it's not a difference in kind. If I am somewhere where I have a reasonable expectation to be seen by other people, I think it's silly to complain about privacy and cameras.

But selective breeding for traits that are not inherited isn't Eugenics. It's not anything.

If you selectively breed for people who's middle initials is "K", you accomplish nothing. Because our names are not passed on genetically.

That economic status tends to prevail across generations is a happenstance of environment, not generics. Can the effect be the same as Eugenics? Sure. But it's not the same thing.

Morally equivalent? Perhaps. But not the same.

Let's take it a step further. If Eugenicists succeed, it pushes populations out of the breeding pool. Whatever race is deemed inferior will (if they're successful) disappear. No more black people, or jewish people, or whoever they deem undesirable.

But if you selectively breed out poor people, or people who like plaid, or anything else that's not passed on in genes, it doesn't keep other people from having those traits later. A person who has well off parents is likely to be well off themselves. But they're not guaranteed. The course their life takes can change that.

But a person born white, or a red head, or black or Persian will remain so his or her entire life. If you exterminate them, they're gone. That's the practical difference between this and Eugenics.

Again, I'm not supporting this. Just trying to explain that while there are similarities, it's not Eugenics.

The vulgar one has a point though. There are classes of software that are aimed at audiences that wouldn't want them if they had the skills to write them on their own.

Do you think that most children's games would exist if they had to be written by kids?

BASIC is this kind of problem. I suspect that nobody who ever wrote a BASIC interpreter had a practical use for it themselves. Maybe during the Apple II / TRS80 days, but certainly not more recently than that. In recent times, it's a tool for less experienced programmers to learn with and solve very simple problems, not a tool someone who could write software would employ to solve a practical problem.

Yeah, as others have alluded to, NewYorkCountryLawyer is one of several well-known Slashdot users. Like CleverNickname and some others of note.

Maybe not everyone on Slashdot knows who these folks are, but they are known by many if not most.