Religious Discussion

Discussion regarding the Outsider webcomic, science, technology and science fiction.

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discord
Posts: 629
Joined: Thu Mar 24, 2011 7:44 am
Location: Umeå, Sweden

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by discord »

Absalom:
On nukes. I was actually referring to legislation actually forcing media and education to portray nuclear power incorrectly, much as comic books had heroes throwing around cars because teaching kids to 'punch' could be cause for litigation or something.

Radiation, many are scared shitless of this silent green glowing killer! Without understanding that they get irradiated daily and during a trip to Chernobyl the part you get most radiation poisoning from would be during the flight.
Unless of course you go cuddle the Elephants foot for a few minutes which would kill you.


The US does not really have postal privacy it seems...which basically says that information(mail) sent by you to someone is not to be read en route by(federal agency, private individuals or anyone really) and thereby your information transaction should not be seized nor searched without probable cause and a goddamn search warrant, since it is an intrusion on someones private life.
Without that I suppose you can't claim observer effect will infringe on your freedom to say whatever the bloody hell you like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence <----that stuff
But there is still the fourth, which basically says the same thing, just without specifically mentioning postal service or mail, and therefor not applicable?

Side note, would artistic expression be covered by the first? that is a big thing about not letting anyone 'infringe' on the copyrighted material.


So, you should not have the right to vote unless..... what exactly?
Universal suffrage is such a nice wording.

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Siber
Posts: 362
Joined: Sun Mar 06, 2011 5:10 pm

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by Siber »

The fact that secrecy of letters is not enshrined exactly in the constitution doesn't mean it does not exist, as that wikpedia page goes on to explain how it arose through case law.


And it's funny, I seem to have stumbled on a lot of easily accessible information about how nuclear weapons work just from sources like wikipedia. What seems to be suppressed if anything is specific geometries, and tricks that got used in later designs like the Teller-Ulam design. This is the first I've heard of deliberate misinformation campaigns, I'd be curious to see sources.
Atomic Space Race, a hard sci-fi orbital mechanics puzzle game.
Homeworld Fulcrum, a Homeworld Remastered Mod

Absalom
Posts: 718
Joined: Sat Sep 24, 2011 4:33 am

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by Absalom »

discord wrote:But there is still the fourth, which basically says the same thing, just without specifically mentioning postal service or mail, and therefor not applicable?
The beauty of the Constitution and Amendments is that in conjunction with the freedom of interpretation of the common-law system, they don't need to specifically list cases in order to apply. The Supreme Court ruled against the police secretly placing GPS tracers on peoples cars without a warrant a few years ago despite the relevant portion of the Constitution mentioning nothing about electronics or cars. This inherent flexibility is one of the things the Constitution has over other styles of base-most laws: you don't have to update it on a weekly basis to keep it relevant, and instead can just put foundational matters into it, while leaving the details and balance to laws, administrative policies, and judicial decisions.
discord wrote:Side note, would artistic expression be covered by the first? that is a big thing about not letting anyone 'infringe' on the copyrighted material.
It depends. Either the constitution or the law enshrines "fair use" requirements, but what one person deems fair use is not necessarily what the courts deem fair use. Definitions tend to float, which they usually need to.

What we can say is that those guys that upload entire episodes of tv series and stick a note about fair use in the comments are 99% of the time not making fair use, because there is no reason for them to use that much of the show at once except to infringe upon the usage rights of the rights owners.

At the same time, we can also know that you are absolutely justified in using enough of the material from the show to represent what the show is: for the Battlestar Galactica reboot it might be pretty easy to justify directly grabbing their "previously on" sequences, for example.

To generalize a bit more: the Constitution seeks to have a well-rounded system rather than a pure system, so provisions of both it and the amendments often clash. These conflicts are resolved in the fashion that makes sense at the time, which drifts over time; a process that was in fact recognized by at least some of the founding fathers (it's mentioned at least once in the Federalist Papers).
discord wrote:So, you should not have the right to vote unless..... what exactly?
Universal suffrage is such a nice wording.
I would never suggest any particular wording, because I don't particularly want to see restrictions passed. In fact, that was (mostly) a throw-away joke.

The "correct option" is of course to require a certain level of civics education (and probably logic, philosophy, and debate training to support it) be instituted throughout the school system. Regretfully, that won't happen until we develop a wiser society, which itself can't realistically happen until something like this is instituted, which won't happen until we develop a wiser society, which...

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Grayhome
Posts: 550
Joined: Fri Apr 22, 2011 2:11 am

Re: Religious Discussion

Post by Grayhome »

Jhon Oliver from "Last Week Tonight" with a video on LGBT discrimination in the United States.
This video does a good job of explaining the problems facing the LBGT community.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d667Bb_iYA

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