I realize this is a technical forum, so excuse the OT-ness of this rant. But does anybody else think the law has gone totally insane? Most likely the brief exposure to those naked pics will not do those kids even a tiny shred of harm. (And yes, I AM a parent, a good tolerance-and-diversity-teaching liberal dad.) Even if you granted that the teacher _had_ been grossly negligent, I don't think it should be more than a misdemeanor, 30 days in the county jail at most. We live in one of the most sex-saturated societies on earth which is simultaneously one of the most hypocritical. The line between something that is totally legal and a 10-year felony is razor thin - whether, say, the naked girl in the photo is one minute shy of her 18th birthday - and who could possibly tell? We have a bunch of fundamentalist neanderthals who would like to do that with all pornography, no doubt, but the courts have not yet been totally corrupted. So these Bible-thumpers satisfy their lust for punishing people by slowly ratcheting up the concept of "harm to minors" to include anything and everything sexually related.
Therefore we have a situation that's almost worse than living in Saudi Arabia, because there, you probably don't have much chance of getting into this kind of nonsense. But, absent the corrupting factor of religion, any healthy male will have a hankering to look at naked females - or naked males, I'm no homophobe - and this activity harms no one. (And a lot of women share this vice - or so we only can hope.) Even those of us that are in a monogamous relationship - let's say, for example, your partner has a headache on a particular night.:-) You can do your best to avoid what you think is illegal material, yet you can still access it accidentally, without realizing it. The police seem powerless to cleanse the Net of that sort of thing. Worse yet, I've heard rumors that police actually traffic in child porn as a method of entrapment. Our society has to grow up and accept that fact that occasionally, minors will access sexually explicit material, and even (gasp) engage in the activity themselves, and that this is NOT A PROBLEM. Human nature does not change. There were teenage girls who got "in trouble" even in my grandparents' day. We can turn into a bunch of head-chopping Muslim-type fanatics or we can become civilized, enlightened humanists. The choice is ours.
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I realize this is a technical forum, so excuse the OT-ness of this rant. But does anybody else think the law has gone totally insane? Most likely the brief exposure to those naked pics will not do those kids even a tiny shred of harm. (And yes, I AM a parent, a good tolerance-and-diversity-teaching liberal dad.) Even if you granted that the teacher _had_ been grossly negligent, I don't think it should be more than a misdemeanor, 30 days in the county jail at most. We live in one of the most sex-saturated societies on earth which is simultaneously one of the most hypocritical. The line between something that is totally legal and a 10-year felony is razor thin - whether, say, the naked girl in the photo is one minute shy of her 18th birthday - and who could possibly tell? We have a bunch of fundamentalist neanderthals who would like to do that with all pornography, no doubt, but the courts have not yet been totally corrupted. So these Bible-thumpers satisfy their lust for punishing people by slowly ratcheting up the concept of "harm to minors" to include anything and everything sexually related. Therefore we have a situation that's almost worse than living in Saudi Arabia, because there, you probably don't have much chance of getting into this kind of nonsense. But, absent the corrupting factor of religion, any healthy male will have a hankering to look at naked females - or naked males, I'm no homophobe - and this activity harms no one. (And a lot of women share this vice - or so we only can hope.) Even those of us that are in a monogamous relationship - let's say, for example, your partner has a headache on a particular night. :-) You can do your best to avoid what you think is illegal material, yet you can still access it accidentally, without realizing it. The police seem powerless to cleanse the Net of that sort of thing. Worse yet, I've heard rumors that police actually traffic in child porn as a method of entrapment. Our society has to grow up and accept that fact that occasionally, minors will access sexually explicit material, and even (gasp) engage in the activity themselves, and that this is NOT A PROBLEM. Human nature does not change. There were teenage girls who got "in trouble" even in my grandparents' day. We can turn into a bunch of head-chopping Muslim-type fanatics or we can become civilized, enlightened humanists. The choice is ours.