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As a matter of fact, I happen to know a few young women who do porn modeling. They all seem to like it. I don't know a lot of the finer details, but it sounds like they regularly do photo shoots where they get airfare, hotel or some other accomidation, some cash, and sometimes rights to repost some/all pics on certain other sites. They really seem to like the travel and the work. They don't make a lot of money, but it seems to be enough to pay the bills. Some work part time at "normal" jobs.

One woman in particular I know hated her day job and gradually started to earn enough to finally quit. She launched her own website (warning, not just any 'ole porn... kinky rope bondage porn, but this link goes to the consent splash page).

It is not exactly a "happy funtime" industry to work in. Unless reaching the status of a Jenna Jamison or Ron Jeremy, they are considered little more than filthy whores, and treated as less than dirt.

If you follow that link to her website, you'll see she has a journal over at livejournal. She updates her journal not just daily.... but usually multiple times per day. Go ahead, read a bit. Is this the writing and life of a degraded woman driven to the brink of committing suicide?

Then again, if you don't have time to read the journal, perhaps scroll down to Oct 7th for some eye candy (again, warning: graphic images... though the one with nudity has an additional link to click).

Have it in animated gif form!

In order to get anywhere with Shakrai's question--which is a good one--we need to try to agree on the essential principles and desirable qualities for a system. A related point I'll make briefly is that it's worth considering the (de)merits of both the voting machines themselves, and the system that makes use of them. Good designs for each are necessary in order to get good results, so it's not sufficient to just evaluate the machines.

So here's a link to a short essay that I've written, in response to this post:

from which a brief excerpt:

I haven't used the lever operated machines that Shakrai describes, so my analysis is based on my best guesses and his brief description, and I might have missed something. In any event, it sounds like it covers the essentials fairly well, although it's not clear how well it provides security. As for the desirable qualities, if we score them on a 1 (bad) to 5 (excellent) scale, I'd guess clarity: 3 (no pictures by the names), flexibility: 1 (changing scheme probably requires replacing hardware), transparency: 4+, convenience: 2 (sounds difficult for blind, disabled, illiterate, or non-English-speaking voters), efficiency: 2, interoperability: 2, privacy: 4 (not 5 because the low convenience may, as you pointed out later, require a voter to get help to make their choices). So: a workable system, but one that has room for improvement.

I don't think that, at least for UC San Diego, this is particularly a matter of censorship of critical opinions, or even obscene content. In my four years at UCSD, there were a number of "free speech" rights incidents, and the university seems to be more concerned with protecting trademark rather than silencing any voices. For example:

1. The Koala: An associated student funded organization which constantly used its funds to print obscene material, including an issue called "The Jizzlam" featuring women in burqas superimposed on porn images. The paper has been accused of racism and anti-semitism many times over, and yet the UCSD administration has not shut it down despite the fact it is printed with student funds.

2. The Che Cafe linking fiasco. Details here in an article I wrote at the time. This is actually a DeCSS case where the university invoked the principle that hyperlinking to terrorist groups was tantomount to supporting terrorism, but ultimately backed down once it was clear that the Che was only linking to other groups and not hosting any material. The douse of national media attention probably helped a bit as well.

3. The UCSD Livejournal community. Embarresingly enough, I actually precipitated this one with this article. Shortly after this was written, the university demanded that the LJ community change it's name to the "unofficial UCSD livejournal community."

The consistent tone among all of this is that the university is willing to tolerate both terrorist and obscene content, and even content highly critical of the university (as is shown in many AS-funded student newspapers, along with the LJ community). What they are not fine with is:

1. Bad publicity - which is probably why they won't censor things based on content.

2. Being associated with any media: critical of the administration or not, without big "UNOFFICIAL" and "INDEPENDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY" stickers slapped on it, especially on the internet. This is because they do not want their trademark diluted, which is entirely understandable, because if they don't enforce it, they lose it.

The short response: things aren't always as simple as they seem. Not every large institution thinks stilfing dissent is the path to peace. The record shows the university isn't trying to muzzle anyone; it just wants to protect itself and its assets.

OOO! Let me try. How about build a house with one room. Once inside, take away the door. Hilarity ensues.

As I've said other places (not actually the best summary but the only one I can find right now), simply acknowledging God as a civic leader does not mean you're establishing a theocracy. Watch this interview (\. screws up the direct link), you'll see he says the same thing. Rather, I believe you'll see your 1st Am. freedoms better defended by someone who sees it as a religious obligation to do so.

"Separation of church and state" is a misstatement of what our freedom is. That phrase was used by Jefferson, IIRC, only as an analogy. The 1st Am. actually says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof [...]". The Founders were religious people of diverse denominations. It was because of their religious beliefs, and their acknowledgment of God as the giver of liberty, that we have a Constitution that protects those freedoms. Peroutka will not establish any one religion as official nor compel anyone to worship any special way or even worship at all. I believe he would, however, remove many of the restrictions gov't has placed on religious groups.

To summarize, the "wall of separation" only means that gov't is not going to dictate your beliefs to you, nor is any church going to run the government. There is no direct influence from one to the other. It does not mean a complete divorce of God from one's civic service. These indirect effects, such as a leader's personal attempts to govern in a moral and godly way, are completely permissible.

If the damned fools would at least be intelligent enough to even change their access point's passwords that'd be a significant help right there. I had to deal with this stupidity the other evening in my own apartment building.

JFGI (just freaking Google it):

Google Search

Some nice pictures:

• http://www.wired.com/news/images/0,2334,64440-1376 6,00.html
• http://www.livejournal.com/users/benjiesque/72874. html

First, the old Pegasos 1 (which that usenet post mentioned) is long discontinued. The parent post to yours was talking about the successor, Peg2.

Second, you might wanna let people see that post in context, including the responses to the post. Perhaps a separate link to the following retraction and apology for some of the false accusations against Genesi would be in order as well.

And do we slashdotters really need to be reminded of that Theo "The rat" De Raadt is an absofuckinglutely raving lunatic?

They still have yet to fix a much more serious bug.

Just because most of us don't live in South America doesn't mean it isn't huge problem.

Aha, what good timing. I just found my very own kitten mewing outside my window, couldn't have been more than a month old. Unfortunately, my lease doesn't let me keep animals, so I gave it up to the animal rescue league. I think it's still available. If you're in the Worcester MA area, email me at kitten AT waymouth DOT org to adopt it (free).

obCutePictures

Yes, based on Christian principles. Because the bible says "thou shalt not kill" and "thou shalt not steal" I believe we should have laws against murder and theft. Do you disagree with me just because I'm basing them on Christian principles? I'm following the Christian God's teachings, but you won't support me simply because of that?

Are you seeing yet how simply acknowledging God in one's duties as a civil servant does not equate to the same thing as establishing an official religion?

A government that fairly dispenses justice and upholds the rights of all individuals is one that honors God. God is honored when persons of good character stand up for and work for what is right and true. I do this because I'm a Christian. Maybe you do it just because you think it sounds like a good idea. In my opinion, your work honors God even though you never intended it to, and might even be offended when I say so!

I believe there is ample evidence that Christian principles shaped our country. (Others interpret the facts differently and disagree.) I don't see anything wrong with acknowledging the source of our freedom in this nation being the work of men who sought to do their Christian duty. In that sense, God really did bless us with our liberties. Even if God doesn't really exist, because those men thought He did and tried to serve Him, we have the freedom that we enjoy today. Acknowledging this as a historical fact does not compel anyone to believe in a specific religious creed, establish any kind of state religion, nor prevent anyone from practicing their religion as they see fit. There is no First Amendment violation in this.

Plus, if amateurs were so great the flood of high quality home-made porno would be a ton better than what Vivid puts out. Personally, I'd rather watch the oversized men fuck women with over-sized Nip/Tuck'd boobs and airbrushed looking bodies than watching a fat, hairy, man fuck some underaged looking dark-circle eyed skank on the floor of a Super8 hotel room. That's me though ;)

'kay, I'll reply to this because I'm so fond of amateur porn. I believe that there's a certain barrier to entry for real, full, media production. For decent photography, one needs at minimum a $200 digital camera (as opposed to the shitty one on a cell phone---wait, things have suddenly gotten cheaper, you can get a Powershot A75 for $160 or so) and to spend five or ten minutes setting up some lights. For the extraordinarily cheap (that's me!), those clamp lights you can get for a few bucks at the hardware store work. Yeah, the lighting is uneven, but it's better than available room light.

Still, too many amateurs don't really put the basic kind of effort required to make their pictures Not Suck. Oh, the content itself may be good, but it's frequently noisy and underexposed.

As for video, I really do think the cost is generally prohibitive. Still cameras that also capture bits of video tend to, let's face it, suck horribly. A decent miniDV cam is around $250 (though this is surprising to me; when I got mine a few years ago, it was bottom-of-the-barrel at $550). Then there's tapes, time and effort to be expended.

Capture and encoding requires a dorky level of interest in learning how to use Virtualdub (or transcode, I suppose), do deinterlacing and muxing, etc.) to even work then. Too much time and effort, I guess.

Which really does disappoint me, because despite my complaints, amateur porn really is the best porn. Whether it be one or another LJ community, or a mostly-free picture post (getting original-resolution images requires a membership), there's a lot of good stuff out there.

'Course, that's really just my opinion. Mileage may vary.

--grendel drago

Plus, if amateurs were so great the flood of high quality home-made porno would be a ton better than what Vivid puts out. Personally, I'd rather watch the oversized men fuck women with over-sized Nip/Tuck'd boobs and airbrushed looking bodies than watching a fat, hairy, man fuck some underaged looking dark-circle eyed skank on the floor of a Super8 hotel room. That's me though ;)

'kay, I'll reply to this because I'm so fond of amateur porn. I believe that there's a certain barrier to entry for real, full, media production. For decent photography, one needs at minimum a $200 digital camera (as opposed to the shitty one on a cell phone---wait, things have suddenly gotten cheaper, you can get a Powershot A75 for $160 or so) and to spend five or ten minutes setting up some lights. For the extraordinarily cheap (that's me!), those clamp lights you can get for a few bucks at the hardware store work. Yeah, the lighting is uneven, but it's better than available room light.

Still, too many amateurs don't really put the basic kind of effort required to make their pictures Not Suck. Oh, the content itself may be good, but it's frequently noisy and underexposed.

As for video, I really do think the cost is generally prohibitive. Still cameras that also capture bits of video tend to, let's face it, suck horribly. A decent miniDV cam is around $250 (though this is surprising to me; when I got mine a few years ago, it was bottom-of-the-barrel at $550). Then there's tapes, time and effort to be expended.

Capture and encoding requires a dorky level of interest in learning how to use Virtualdub (or transcode, I suppose), do deinterlacing and muxing, etc.) to even work then. Too much time and effort, I guess.

Which really does disappoint me, because despite my complaints, amateur porn really is the best porn. Whether it be one or another LJ community, or a mostly-free picture post (getting original-resolution images requires a membership), there's a lot of good stuff out there.

'Course, that's really just my opinion. Mileage may vary.

--grendel drago

There are several solutions to the problems you describe. I'll address the few I'm most comfortable with responding to - not because the others are unsovable, simply because I don't want to provide inadequate information.

All information on the web should be taken with, as they say, a grain of salt. Depending on what you are looking at, it has more or less value. For example, something on Wikipedia can probably be assumed to be relatively accurate, whereas something on Joe Schmo's website on Geocities will probably be considered to be less accurate in general. The semantic web allows for you to see who is saying something in a number of ways, and to verify this information:

• URI Source - If the source of data about Chevy Trucks is at chevy.com/trucks.rdf, you'll probably have a pretty good reason to trust it.
• dc:creator - a self-assigned name for the creator of the document
• Most importantly, wot:assurance: a signature, using standard public/private key encryption, of a document, assuring that the signer indeed did create the information

Each of these methods of determining where information is coming from has its own special place in assigning credence to the document in question. Thus, if a document signed by crschmidt@crschmidt.net says that the person "CHristopher Schmidt" owns the email address crschmidt@crschmidt.net - it's probably safe to trust that person.

Once the data is available on the web, it is easy to find other data: one of the basic terms is "seeAlso" - a way for providing other URLs to look for data at. Once the web starts, it is easy to link it, and to do so is to increase the data .You don't need something smart or intelligent - simply wander around, collect all the rdfs:seeAlso links, and download those - and continue from there. This process, known as "scuttering", is an easy way to start creating a relatively large data store.

Using descriptions of when information is updated allows tools to understand when they should check back for more information. Similar to the way RSS feeds (which are a part of the Semantic Web) can inform tools that they will be updated in 2, 4, 6, 24 hours, general RDF documents can do the same thing - saying 'check me again in a week" or more.

There are currently tools for working with the semantic web in a small scale. Although this is nothing like the big dream - having almost everything described, so that computers can really understand the world around them - these tools do have their usefulness. I can now ask "What is the name of the person whose aim name is cr5chmidt", and be told the answer. Although it's not perfect - very little about the semantic web is perfect yet - it doesn't need to be. For more information, see my post on the bot I created to spider semweb data in my blog.

As you said, it won't be easy. However, it is possible, and it seems to me more and more likely each day that working on these tools and increasing the amount of semantic data in every little way can help.

Well, then I really hope the NSA will allow us all to urinate.

SomethingAwful posted an article about The Sims 2 recently. The idea was not only to trap people in the bathroom, but to see how many people he could kill, then throw a party with all the gravestones. It is a very entertaining read.

Click here for a hyperlink to the OP's URL.

The good ol' Pervy Hobbit Fancier's Diary.

If you want to read the originals, direct from the original author, pleased to be visiting http://www.livejournal.com/users/cassieclaire/.

Thanking you.

You dont know nothing about bad english until you read this

Hilarious!!

For all the Jane fans out there that modded her to +5...

Here's her journal...

Which links to her web site...

Which is full of pics! Look! A girl who likes hardware! *runs*

Yeah, and then you find Ludmila. 'Nuff said.

I just checked out that link, scanning down through the pictures, noo-ne-noo-ne-noo, until...

Jesus H Fucking Christ, What the HELL is THIS!

Actually, according to this post from Brad, the slashdotting barely made a dent in LJ's load. All the slashdotters are also, as someone else pointed out, hitting the lower priority "unpaid" servers.

What those who believe the site is slashdotted don't realize is that they have put in load balances that give preference to paid subscribers. Brad posted a blog entry on that yesterday, showing under 1 sec reponse time for paid subscribers, but up to 15 sec (they are waiting for new servers to be delivered) for unpaid subscribers.

so it is a joke right? i mean there are lots of livejournal jokes: i love the live journal of ripley the cat, the user comments are particularly wonderful

so it is a joke right? i mean there are lots of livejournal jokes: i love the live journal of ripley the cat, the user comments are particularly wonderful

OMG! He's got a goat link right on the front page.

Ok, so most of the Journals lack even a scrap of entertainment value... but the data feeds are normally fun. Is there anyone left that hasn't wasted a few bytes on the following url?

http://www.livejournal.com/stats/latest-img.bml

Hint - its a constantly updating list of all the new images posted to journals. After a while you give up waiting for a hot chick to post and decide crazy survey graphics are as good as it gets. And then some hot chick posts her birthday party pictures, but she's only 14 and suddenly you wish you'd spent the day doing something else.

How true

From link --
speakin of french and korea did u no they both opposed the war in iraq? 1 is a comunist country and the othr is a no-fight-anytime country. mabye there in this 2gethr to squash the american gold medals an make ppl think there strong! HEY KOREA WE BLEW U UP IN WW2 W/ TEH ATOM BOMB WE'LL DO IT AGAIN. an french ppl suck.

Yes. See Wikipedia (Reds) (and other pages at the same site), Wikipedia Watch, English Wikipedia User Richardchilton, English Wikipedia User Secretlondon, etc.

Articles like "Measuring progress", "Genuine Progress Indicator" or "State services" are regularly sysop-vandalized or deleted, and activist groups like the "Legion of Trolls" or the "Wikipedia Red Faction" have been totally censored.

Polling: Daily Kos Wonderful poll analysis, great community, lots of smart commenters

Economics: Brad DeLong He's a PhD economist and a former economic advisor to the Clinton administration

Social Policy: Body and Soul She blogs the uncomfortable places where others won't go.

Politics: Atrios The man reads everything. This site is especially good for U.S. politics.

Snark: Sisyphus Shrugged This woman has it. Her recent posts on Nader are vicious and painfully accurate.

Satire: Fafblog!!! The world's only source of Fafblog. Do not drink while reading. Your keyboard will thank you.

i've been reading a blog from a certain third party and it sounds very interesting
http://www.livejournal.com/users/kim_jong_il__/

I've become a fan of two blogs about the Middle East recently, and especially now that I've got RSS feeds figured out.

http://www.juancole.com/ , or Informed Comment, is an excellent commentary on the Middle East in general from a professor well versed in Arabic and Islamic studies. He's very good at explaining the deeper culture issues behind different events.

http://www.livejournal.com/~collounsbury/ is another enjoyable web log on the Middle East from the point of view of a Risk Analyst. While the author is very abrasive and does not suffer fools at all, one eventually gets used to and enjoys the style and information available.

Both of these are professional blogs, more focused on giving their own perspective on issues than really examining how the media presents them.

Ok I will stop whining about old news

I mean come on that is what you get for posting NPR news! *ducks*

I think /. should have a news source rating system. Or even an author rating system.

Give the people something to do between stories!

This guy blogged his full ANSI C source with the solution: http://www.livejournal.com/users/vab1916/3492.html

I'd estimate that I made it to, oh, say question 24 before the story went live and site died as fast as you can say "Please estimate the air speed of an unladen swallow"

--
I write stuff, but not that well and not that often...

That incident has always symbolised the entire Open Source movement to me -- distributed thinking and determination coming up with a powerful solution, despite all the naysayers' opinions.

Ah and you are the obligatory /. intellectual snob --- ok on you go then.

Heh, maybe you should set your homepage to this, then. After all, you care about all that because you are not an intellectual snob, are you? :P

There's a blog with 53 comments on the thread of de Branges and Reimann: $1,000,000 prize for solving Riemann Hypothesis? The thread includes real Math, background, hotlinks, and the limerick: Riemann Hypothesis Solved? -- copyright (c) 2004 by Magic Dragon Multimedia

Louis de Branges de Bourcia
Overcame awful inertia.
He conquered Riemann
the way Ghengis Khan
rode a quarter-horse halfway to Persia.

The Washington Monthly

The Daily Kos

The Columbia Journalism Review Campaign Desk

The Center for American Progress

Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall

Tom Toles political cartoons

Ben Sargent cartoons

Pat Oliphant cartoons

Jamie Zawinski's freinds

Ed Fitzgerald's blog

more to follow-up...

It doesn't matter how good your sound card is if the game is outputting a simple stereo single with a music loop and some canned effects. If the developer doesn't go the extra mile to create decent sound content and a good audio playback engine in the game, then it will never sound as good as it looks- but it is possible to do both at once with the right approach.

There's an interesting rant from one of Halo's programmers here about the state and future directions of game audio.

"This, by the way, is the origin of Clippy."

I'm going to skip around the obvious jokes lying here, and actually say something serious. Clippy. Serious. It's making me sweat.

The biggest problem with recent MS interfaces - and Word in particular - is the, ahem, helpful suggestions they try to make, that only confuse the issue entirely. I ranted about it here.

Poor man. Here, have some amateur lesbian porn. (No joke. Stuff's impossible to find, but there it is.)

Clearly not work-safe, of course.

--grendel drago

But what about the bananapocalypse?

Yah.. socialism sucks.

Yet another reason that skinnable apps are evil.

I'm so relieved that even though I live in an era with constant threats such as domestic terrorism, senatorial flight risks, the patriot act, the induce act, and non-Christian "citizens" running amok, that Pope Ashcroft can see through the unholy mess and guide our nation in the direction it needs. "Need not you worry", he said to his congregation of corporate leaders and wealthy elite, "For I, a federal chair, shall perform all of your duties in this civil matter." Praise Jesus that in these treacherous times a man of a singular holy vision shall unite American corporations with its 228 year old government to make the most self-righteous, most capitalistic, most federally pervasive and invasive political embodiment in all of recorded human history.

For more interesting reading on Ashcroft and his fight for the status-quo and his battles against individuality, please visit the following links:
BBC Profile
Rotten.com
Eldred v. Ashcroft
Extreme Ashcroft
Ashcroft's Detention Camps
Some guys blog

But doesn't it also sound appealing that this is a choice, that can be bypassed?

Superficially, yes. That's why X has no policy in the server, because back in the '80s when people were trying to understand how window systems worked there were a lot of questions about the best way to handle a 2d windowing environment. Putting the policy in the application let people easily experiment with different models. Today, though, applications that create their own menu and widget styles are actually a problem. The interactions in the standard GUI are so complex that applications that do their own thing end up having to reproduce an enormous amount of code (like Mozilla, for example), or do a poor job of implementing all the functionality of the standard libraries.

Consider jwz's excellent rant on skinnable applications. Not only would this result in chaos, but it does result in chaos, all the time.

And in any case, this isn't the kind of bypass that's really interesting.

First, it's trivial to implement: if a programmer really wants to design their own GUI, they can still do it. Just ask for a structured drawing widget and lay down bitmaps and nested objects in it.

Second, the really interesting kind of bypass is something that gives you realtime control of the graphics processor... and having the underlying window system implemented in terms of cliprects and damage lists doesn't help there, you need OpenGL and DirectX and SDL. Letting a bypass happen by accident doesn't help, you need to send structured objects to the GPU through the window system, so having a window system that operates on structured objects inherently at a deep level should actually help.

It's published by Ubisoft, but developed by Stardock. Stardock has a history of giving such things as CD protection the finger.

http://elf-inside.livejournal.com/116304.html

http://totalgaming.stardock.com/Articles.asp?MID=5 &AID=21876

grep for 'Tuesday'