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Australian Visitors Must Declare Illegal Porn To Customs Officers
Australian Justice Minister Brendan O'Connor has advised visitors to take a better safe than sorry policy when it comes to their porn stashes, and declare all porn that they think might be illegal with customs officers. From the article: "The government said it changed the wording on passenger arrival cards after becoming aware of confusion among travellers about what pornography to declare. 'People have a right to privacy and while some pornography is legal and does not need to be disclosed, all travellers should be aware that certain types of pornography are illegal and must be declared to customs,' Mr O'Connor said."
Americans have the expectation of privacy in some issues. In others they have an interesting culture. It is common for Americans to talk to strangers as if they were family, because it is in their culture. I am not talking trash about them, I admire this type of culture. A friend of mine went to America and she said there was always someone talking to her -- she even had a little child come to her and say "Will you believe how this cheese is expensive".
That kind of thing is considered rude for us in here, because it violates our privacy. So you see, in crucial issues like these, Americans have an "expectation of privacy", but with the Western European definition of privacy, they only expect it when it is good for them. I do enjoy that they can be such an open-minded people in this type of thing...but I am sad they are so close-minded with respect to other issues...
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
I'm a marihuana smoker (in a country where this is "depenalized" - meaning it is still illegal, but no punishment for using it), and if somebody asks me about that during a job interview I am open about it. I used to work for a US software/consultancy company which had clients such as NSA and CIA - the company policy was: if we ask you to go to such customers and you're a drug user, tell us. They would not fire us, they would just send another consultant.
Whereas when I was living in Germany, it wasn't totally uncommon to have someone sit at an empty chair at your table in a restaurant. That sort of thing would cause the manager of the restaurant to be called to have the person ejected from the premises if it happened here in the US. Different things are "rude" to different folks.
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
Animals can bite, and Animals can kick - Don't tell me they can't say no...
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
More to the point it's asking for trouble. "Gosh, I wonder what's in this giant encrypted blob on this guys hard drive?" Just zip all your porn into a file, and rename it to something innocuous and approximately appropriate in size. Anything over about 600 MB you could probably just rename "RedHatLinux.iso" or something. You think they're doing deep inspections of every lap top that comes in through customs? They probably do a search for some subsection of the normal graphic and video file extensions then browse the thumbnails for anything that looks wrong. Anything more than that would slow down the inspections to crawl.
You're not dealing with an MIT forensics teams here, these guy have been taught a very simplistic procedure and will follow it to the letter. Most likely they don't even *care* if you have porn, they just have to check every 5th laptop to keep the boss happy.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I wouldn't risk my freedom on those assumptions. If I had to take my porn collection across an Australian border I would transfer it with scp.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The therapist you saw speak was Dan Savage, who writes the sex advice column Savage Love. He's fond of telling that story when people ask him what's the weirdest question he's ever been asked. Savage is largely known for popularizing a sexually offensive neologism, 'santorum' (I'll let you look it up) to the point that it's now the first hit on google, rather than the target of the satire, ex-senator and likely 2012 presidential candidate Rick Santorum. Savage's current big publicity project is the It Gets Better Project, trying to encourage gay teenagers to not kill themselves because of abuse; it's been getting a fair amount of news attention in the last month.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
By that order of thought, posting on /. is not natural (ever seen an animal do it?), yet females eating the males after having sex is.
Or maybe that argument is bollocks because the correlation between "natural" and moral is not strong at all.
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You seem to be assuming (or insinuating) that only self-righteous hippies are vegetarian. Hundreds of millions of people - most notably those of certain communities on the Indian subcontinent - live long, healthy, balanced lives without ever consuming a scrap of meat. In their case it is a religious choice, but it flies in the face of your assertion that humans need what meat supplies.
I choose to eat meat, but I recognize this as a choice I make.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
What if you wait until the animal has been slaughtered (which is, in this hypothetical example, what eventually will happen to it) and then have sex with it? At that point it's an object, and consent doesn't matter, right?
So by that logic, zoophilia totally okay if you add in a side order of necrophilia.