This is a very creative CAPTCHA. However, computers are rather good at playing chess, so a chess problem is probably the least thing you want to use to distinguish between humans and computers (unless your aims is to keep stupid humans out).
Other possibilities: guess fruits (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/ip-std030613....), human emotions, animals etc.
I. Facebook is obligated by law to provide the following for the natural persons who want to use www.facebook.com in Schleswig-Holstein:
1. It must be possible to register with a pseudonym.
2. Accounts of registered users whose registration is blocked because of incomplete disclosure or non-disclosure of their real information must be reactivated.
3. Users are to be informed on www.facebook.com about the possibility to register with a pseudonym before the registration.
II. The immediate execution of the provision I. N°2 is decreed.
III. If Facebook does not implement the provisions of I. within two weeks after the delivery of this notice, it will be handed out a penalty of 20,000 EUR.
The change in policy is demanded by the "Independent State Centre for Data Protection, Schleswig-Holstein", a public institution of a constituent state, but not a court of law.
It will probably go through all the court instances, before a conclusion is reached. So let's talk about it next year.
Depends. Some countries empower the local data protection commission to make binding injunctions forcing a company/person to do/not do a thing. I know Ireland has this. No idea of Germany, but presume it's similar.
So, yes, this might have the same legal force as a court injunction.
Unlikely. Considering how the new Data Protection Directive being written goes further than the current one, and seems to be targetting various things Facebook does (like having all it's EU stuff in Ireland). It seems like a lot of EU law is on the side of privacy and data protection.
I think it's a great little package; the perfect gift for an Indiana Jones buff. Unless that Indiana Jones buff is also a graphic designer:
"This is amazing! All of the little details like the illustrations and photos make it look really authentic, and the letterheads...OH MY GOD, IT'S PAPYRUS!!! GET IT AWAY FROM ME!!!!"
That particular font is a copy of Tolkein's personal handwriting, but you can find similar font design in any of a dozen Gaelic fonts. (Or probably find a font that's a copy of his handwriting, too; I don't know.)
The truth is that humans, like all other animals, have been selective breeding all the time, it's called evolution. We select our mates based on their phenotypes (like aggression, intelligence etc). It was more so in the past than now. People used to abandon infants that are born "defective" (we now have abortions). Parents selected the mates for their children because they are believed to be better judges of "good" phenotypes. It was customary to ensure that the family of the respective mate has no members with mental illness. Yet, after millennia of selective breeding, we still have all the crazies among us. The fact that those "bad" genes still exist must mean that they confer some benefits to the carrier.
The interplay between genes, RNA, proteins and other macromolecules is so complex that I doubt we can pin down a mental illness to a single gene or safely remove a mutation that causes mental illness from the gene pool without reducing other collateral beneficial traits.
The benefits that natural selection causes to propagate are those which improve the organism's reproductive opportunities. Those "benefits" aren't necessarily all that great when you've got a civilization. To take it to a ridiculous extreme, if a gene exists which makes you kill all the other men in your village, then impregnate all the women, that gene will be pretty popular in the next generation.
That ridiculous extreme must be quite a popular gene, because it still exists: It's called war and mass war rape.
Yet, we are not all warmongers and rapists (I hope). So civilisation is already putting its slow but steady evolutionary pressure onto our genes. Let's hope that it's putting our gene pool onto the right track.
I simply don't share joonix' optimism that genetic screening can eradicate "unbeneficial" traits within next centuries without wrongly removing "beneficial" ones, before we have a better and complete understanding of our biological makeup.
This is also a bit simplistic I think. I don't think most abortions are because of a physical defect or deformity, or at least, many abortions are not. As well, in many cultures that selected mates for their children, it usually did not exactly involve phenotype checking, but usually other kinds of economic and cultural reasons. Also, the fact that "bad" genes still exist does not mean they confer some benefit, that's a very panglossian view.
The question here, as I understand, is not whether breeding programmes are ethical, but whether misleading the general population with false information is ethical.
Is it ethical to ask for donations or ticket prices to zoos by giving people the impression that their money will (partially) go to conservation efforts, while the money is spent to breed animals that cannot survive in the wild but only for "marketing" purposes?
