Illicit means maybe against the law but definitely against the rules, for example an illicit affair. The word for against the law is illegal, from Latin, or unlawful, from Germanic. I guess the Germanic cousin of "illicit" would be "forbidden."
"Licit" in English usage also carries the weight of its connotation in church ("canon") law, wherein it can refer to acts that are considered not only to have occurred spiritually ("valid") according to the law, but have been done in conformity with the process laid out in the law.
For example, canon law asserts that certain sacraments such as marriage or baptism can be conducted validly but illicitly, such that the marriage is still considered to have occurred, but it wasn't done the "right way." In contrast, there are some things that, if done illicitly, aren't valid either. (In this case I think it's because there's a notion that there's a supernatural/spiritual aspect to certain acts that transcends whether they're done licitly, whereas certain other acts are purely creations of human law and therefore if not done licitly are void ab initio.)
Extramarital affairs are against the law in many countries and 17 US states. “Illicit affair” is potentially a holdover from when it was illegal more places, not just a conflating of against the rules with illegality.
I tried to clone a HTTP (not HTTPS) site, and it's giving me `navigation failed: net::ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED`. Even when I explicitly included the protocol with `http://<FQDN>`.
if you personally believe there is a positive correlation between having an ethnic background (mexican or middle eastern or whatever) and doing bad things, I can't control your beliefs
Beliefs can't be "gross", they can only be true or false, justified or unjustified. There is no such thing as a morally wrong belief. That would be the confusion between fact and value.
Despite being full of arrogant intellectual superiority, evidently the majority of the HN crowd has little understanding of basic economics.
While I personally wouldn't go as far as "Society profits immensely from their contribution", these types business people do serve an important function in the economy.
Much like traditional middle-men sellers, commodity speculators, insurance providers, and the like, domain name re-sellers take on the risk that no one else are willing to bear at some particular time (that the domain they're "squatting" could be worth nothing in X years). If and when the domains they're "squatting" later on become more valuable, either through their own direct efforts, or by re-selling them to other parties that can make better use of them, then the profits they make from such transactions are justified for the aforementioned risks they bore.
What risk? They contributed nothing, they have performed no function. Their only claim on it is having been first on the dictionary attack and laid claim to a bunch of useful letter combinations without providing any value or service.
If they didn't do any of this that combination of letters doesn't disappear, it just goes back to being available from the primary registrars.
The squatters are just vacuuming up some of the profit off people that would/could use that combination of letters to actually provide a service.
I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction.
>I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction.
Seeing middlemen businesses as "parasitic behavior" is a common misunderstanding of their role in the economy. They make possible commercial transactions between initial producers and ultimate end-consumers, where and/or when such transactions could never have taken place affordably without their presence.
Except in this case the middleman added thousands of dollars to the cost without adding anything of value: not curation, not discovery, nothing. Without this middleman acquiring an expired domain would have been whatever the nominal registrar cost (somewhere between $10 to $100 or so per year for a domain)
Useful middlemen do serve a role and add value. A parasitic middleman just extracts value without adding any value anything in return.
>Useful middlemen do serve a role and add value. A parasitic middleman just extracts value without adding any value anything in return.
And do tell how you distinguish "useful middlemen" from "parasitic middlemen". These are meaningless terms based on your own value judgements. In other words, they're completely useless in practice.
A universally recognized transaction-coordinating mechanism works much better. And guess what? We already have that: price.
>Without this middleman acquiring an expired domain would have been whatever the nominal registrar cost (somewhere between $10 to $100 or so per year for a domain)
Except you have no idea if $10-100 charged by registrars should be the actual price of those domains. The only two factors that should determine the price of something is the lowest price the seller is willing to sell it at, and the highest price any single customer is willing to pay. That's it.
If some government policy existed that enforced domain names must be priced below $x, then that functions as an artificial price ceiling, which necessarily results in a misallocation of the resource in question. In this case, that would mean, domains going to people who are less incentivized to put them to the best possible use.
Take the very example of friendster.com: when Mike Carson bought the domain from his park.io customer, friendster.com went from a website that only generated ad revenue to now a new social networking app idea he's developing, which I'm sure even you'd agree is an improvement to its previous use. And that was only possible, because Carson believed the 30k he was being asked to pay in order to acquire ownership of friendster.com was worth it (to him).
If all domain prices were artificially capped to $100 (or whatever other arbitrary threshold) and below, then in all likelihood, you'd see the problem of malicious actors who bulk buy then squat domains become worse, not better. You might counter, why would they do that? Since on the surface, it'd appear that they cannot profit from those domains by re-selling them at a higher price later on. Sure, perhaps not directly (but even this is debatable, because what'll likely happen is you'll just create a black market for it); but maybe they'll just tell the people who want to take the domain off of him that whatever app idea they're building, he wants a x% stake in?
In economics, your intentions don't matter, it's all about the incentives your proposed policies create. And to that end, price caps never work, because they just shift the collateral damage elsewhere, while making the economy worse in net.
An ideologically driven subset of urban educated youths that was proportionally a tiny subset of the entire Chinese population marched for it in 1989. FTFY.
They are ruling themselves in the sense that their governing systems are emergent consequences of their own cultures. All peoples ultimately deserve the governments they have.
That your point about support for Chinese democracy, could also be applied to Chinese communism - was that not obvious? Also in the Chase of Chinese communism the cult was facing a KMT that had suffered from just defeating the Japanese.
More of the point though they support for Chinese democracy was broad enough to the Beijing army could not be used to suppress the protests. The tanks and the people that killed the students had to come in from outside the city.
Ironic then that most of the students throughout China who supported and even participated in the Tiananmen protests would later admit that Deng acted correctly in squashing it, and that China is better off today for that. This is a sentiment most Chinese living in China today share.
Could things eventually go south with the CCP in charge? Of course, and given long enough time, that's almost a certainty. But even when that day comes, it still does not directly imply a liberal democracy was the better governing system for the Chinese people, as your original comment strongly implied.
“ most of the students throughout China who supported and even participated in the Tiananmen protests would later admit that Deng acted correctly in squashing it”
That’s a very big claim to make without a reference.
>That your point about support for Chinese democracy, could also be applied to Chinese communism
Incorrect - my point about Chinese democracy does not apply to the current governing body of China (whether you choose to view and harp on them as communist or not is irrelevant).
The Cultural Revolution, which the previous commenter presented as a gotcha, is widely regarded as a dark period and unequivocally a mistake by the majority of Chinese today. But Chinese communism today is both much more and much different than Chinese communism under Mao.
OTOH Tiananmen is much more emblematic of "Chinese democracy" than the Cultural Revolution was of Chinese communism. And as already stated, the way Tiananmen was handled is deemed to be correct by the majority of the Chinese populace today.
And so once again, this goes back to my original point: peoples of different nations choose their own government, including the form of that government, and not just in the narrow sense of who their next public-facing leader should be during the next several years. The Chinese already does exactly that.
Mao's cult as you call it, shares little similarities to the modern day Chinese government, which is arguably the most pragmatic government that exists in the world today, certainly amongst developed countries. So once again, wrong.
Presumably this hypothesis is meant to explain why there is this observed asymmetry in the type of Neanderthal DNA we find in modern human populations that contain them, which is entirely autosomal. With none in the mitochondrial form, which is exclusively passed down along the female line, and also none in the Y-chromosome form, which is exclusively passed down along the male line.
Without weighing on the validity of their hypothesis that one or both sides found the other“especially attractive”, an alternative mechanism that could explain why we only see Neanderthal autosomal DNA in modern humans could be that only the female offspring of male-Neanderthal and female-sapiens pairings were reproductively fertile. This is more commonly the case in interspecies hybrids, see Haldane’s rule.
> Without weighing on the validity of their hypothesis that one or both sides found the other“especially attractive”
I get that it's survivor bias and all, but modern racial preference also paints a clear picture, I don't understand why we are so against this hypothesis that male homo sapiens did not particularly like the female neanderthal (I can clearly see why as any modern male would).
We found neanderthal fossils with sapiens DNA (afir it was something like 7% so not sterile hybrids, but a few generations after the hybridisation).
I don't think we have ANY evidence for non viability of male sapiens + female neanderthal non-viability, we just don't like the fact that this viability proves the asymetri.
Perhaps because modern psyche loves to picture males as sexual brutes and women as these higher wonderful rosy elves and this "shocking" neanderthal(i.e. "beastly") preference goes strongly against this meme?
Why would it be so inconcievable that the male part of homo sapiens drove the sexual selection for the more "refined" features of the species and the preference for intelligence of women was not intrinsic but partially "forced" -- i.e. warbrides and all -- so it would make perfect sense that some homo sapiens women would be attracted to the physical strength cues of male neanderthals, just like... gasp... modern women are?
Ancestral Neanderthal Y-DNA was completely replaced by an incursion of Sapiens Y-DNA long before they(/we?) went extinct, so your whole theory of "we ain’t hitting that" is not very convincing to say the least.
"DNA deserts" likely indicate spots where there were issues with hybrid viability and not some half-disguised fantasy.
Because these hybrids would contain mtDNA from their human female line. Neanderthal mtDNA could only be passed down by Neanderthal females.
And because none of those are found in any modern human populations, we can conclude no humans today are descended from female Neanderthals. Though whether hybridized descendants from male-sapiens female-Neanderthal pairings never existed, or they did exist for some time then eventually went extinct, we cannot currently say with certainty.
Strictly speaking we don't know that. It may always turn up an extremely rare Y or mtdna variant which was thought to be extinct. Ötzi's mt like was thought to be extinct (Wikipedia page even still says so) but very recently a North African man took a full mtdna test and it turned out he had the same. That could happen with neanderthal variants too for all we know.
> we can conclude no humans today are descended from female Neanderthals.
that looks worded wrong, strictly speaking. if there's a male neanderthal ancestor, then he very likely has a neanderthal mom or grandma or ... great^N grandma for some N.
We don't know that. I cannot imagine we have a perfectly accurate mapping of all mDNA neanderthals had. All current mDNA could actually have been neanderthal at one point in history.
How would we know otherwise? With absolute accuracy?
We certainly don't have access to thousands upon thousands of samples. Do we?
