The issue is what happens when material that might be innocuous in some contexts is found on e.g. a website along with a ton of images of straightforward child rape. Obviously you or I won't regard that image as porn because (presumably) we are not sexually aroused by pics of naked children. THAT'S BECAUSE WE'RE NOT PAEDOPHILES. Duh.
You completely missed the point. If a bunch of experts look at an image and say "this counts as child porn as defined by the UK law", then it is. If not, not. *shrug* who cares? that's just a detail, not a matter of principle.
You're complaining about an implementation detail, ie what is actually defined as child porn, not about the principle of taking down child porn. I have no opinion on whether this image is or isn't something that should be classed as porn; I'm happy to leave that call to the experts. Being human they will sometimes get it wrong. So what? What's the big deal?
What I don't get is this hype about it being a Chinese-style "great firewall". Obviously it's nothing of the sort; there's no restriction on political or religious traffic or indeed anything except child porn. So, what happens in the US when a child pron website is discovered? Is it legal to possess child porn in the US?? Do the cops not boot the door in, seize the servers and send the perps down for a 30 stretch? Explain, pleas
If the 4998 other images do not involve penetration with a penis, dildo, fingers, or other object, there is NO sex and there is NO victim of childhood rape.
Agreed. However this is not the rationale behind the filtering. The idea is not "we must prevent representations of people breaking the law"; otherwise the multiplexes would be full of Tarkovsky movies:) The implicit assumptions are (a) the use of child porn increases the risk that someone who has paedophilic masturbatory fantasies will act out and actually harm a child, and (b) the use of child porn is regarded as so uniquely abhorrent as to make it's possession a crime in the eyes of society as a whole. Personally I could care less about what someone's thinking of when they get the Jester's Toes, but (whilst I don't claim to be an expert) I think (a) is sufficiently plausible to merit making possession a crime.
The other issue is that if being able to say "But officer, this image is not of a REAL child rape, it is merely a depiction by actors" were sufficient to make an image non-infringeing, obviously all the perps would be doing it. Complicated, isn't it?
I don't agree it's a non-sexual pose, but let's set that aside for now...
I think the problem is that whilst that album cover may indeed be innocuous sitting in the racks of a vinyl obsessive along with another 5000 LPs, things are rather different if it's found, say, along with the Blind Faith cover and 4998 child porn images on Gary Glitter's computer. Suppose Gary Glitter had 4998 other images like the album covers? Is that legal? Should it be legal? It's a complicated issue, and running around screaming OMFG The Brits are censoring the Internet!!! is a really dumb response. Unless you think all child porn images should be freely available? Is that what you think? If not, you're arguing about an implementation detail.
"apparently embedded in most motherboards" -- not meaning to sound snide, but where the hell have you been for the last five years? Google things like TPM, Palladium, trustworthy computing, untrusted computing, Ross Anderson...
The costs of manufacturing p/v (electricity-generating) cells is still high enough that they're not yet a mass-market item. Solar water heating, however, is getting pretty mainstream here in the UK. Unsolicited testimonial: to my left I have a view out the window of a misty, grey, drizzly and damp prospect (a typical English summer, in other words.) To my right, a bathroom with gallons of free hot water. Result, happiness:)
On the other hand -- I've noticed very small p/v and wind turbine installations popping up on the roadsides in our area in the last few years - powering things like illumination lights for traffic signs, lights at bus-stops, speed-triggered LED speed warning signs and the like. The wind turbines are dinky things with rotor diameters of perhaps three or four feet. (Note, this is along the shore of the Severn Estuary, which is presumably more reliably windy than most places inland.) I'm curious if manufacturing economies of scale have brought such small devices down to the point that they're cost effective, as well as green, anyone know?
Yet, if we really want to explore AND to preserve mankind, then we MUST go along. Look, if you can't accept that humans will go extinct one day, here's a whisky and perspective. Life is short, get used to it. I can't understand how so many intelligent people really think the future of humanity is something like a bad 60s movie with everyone living in domes on the moon. IT'S NOT SUSTAINABLE. How is that so hard to understand? A popular way to look at this is to ask: why isn't the future of humanity living in the middle of the Gobi desert?: It's millions of times easier to get there and to live there, and there's a lot more there that's useful to humans than there is on the kmoon (setting aside pure knowledge for the sake of knowing - which is a different argument altogether.)
Whenever I express this opinion here on/. I'm -1 troll'd in seconds flat, so mods - before you mod me down - take the time to tell me WHY? What do you know about physics that I don't? Note, resorting to metaphysical arguments about Destiny won't get you anywhere. Real physics (and biology, psychology, social psychology etc) trumps metaphysics every time, I'm afraid.
As much as I dislike W, he has the right idea in going back to the moon. Even if you agree with the goal, which I don't, there's not much point saying "go back to the moon!" when you don't provide the neccessary funding. Hence the gutting on the unmanned Mars program (did you know NASA will be missing two out of three of the next bi-annual Mars launch slots, because the MSL (Mars Science Lab) mega-rover has spent all the money?)
We know, as every real Microsoft employee secretly knows in their heart of hearts, that it's all over... Nordlicht has failed, the winter's setting in, and Ballmer's down there in his bunker with a roomful of expensive matchwood. Still clutching a splintered fragment of a tasteful sofa in his hand (although it would be impolite to mention the shreds of fabric hanging from his mouth), his eyes dart wildly from a shredded "The WOW starts Now!" poster, to a voodoo doll of RMS, to a dartboard with Michael Dell's picture pinned to it. Outside, the loyal generals are choosing lots about who wants to go in and tell him the latest disastrous news from the Western front...
For bread, I can't recommend highly enough getting your own breadmaker. When I was a kid we were pretty poor, to the extent that Mum was doing home-mad bread not for some health tip or to expany her culinary skillz, but to save 5p on the cost of a processed white loaf of "New Chorleywood Method" cereals-based mush cube - the stuff that dissolves into wallpaper paste if you leave it in a bowl of water for 5 mins... er where was I. Anyway back in the 70s it was a terrible, slow process, with vigorous exertion to kneed the dough, and produced an incredibly stodgy lump that was high in fibre, and substantial enough to substitute for bricks in non load-bearing walls. Now she has a cheap electric breadmaker; she picks a recipe for the day from the dozens and dozens in the manual, pours in measured quantities of flour, water, salt, fat and yeast, sets the timer and the loaf number. At 3am it kicks off, three hours later the wonderful smell of new-baked bread fills the kitchen, sun streams thru the window, fresh coffee brewing, birds singing... it's like a life insurance ad, or a bad property development programme on telly. The only problem is that after you've taken the freshly baked loaf out and rinsed out the removable tin, it pipes up with "Howdy doodly-doo! Can I interest you in a muffin? teacake? buns? baps? baguettes? bagels? croissants? crumpets? pancakes? potato cakes? hot cross buns? No?
...so, you're a waffle man!
Actually, the bread it produces is absolutely delicious, when given decent wholemeal flour and some malty bits and cracked grains. Add some nice lightly salted butter and home-made marmalade from proper seville oranges,cane sugar and a drop of lemon juice to set, follow with a decent filter coffee and a fag and I feel pretty damn bulletproof. Admittedly you can't actually move anywhere for 30-40 mins afterwards, but you can use that time to smile benevolently at the world and remind yourself how nice it is to be alive, sometimes.
No, the problem is that some bloody moron instructed them to spend all their money on a white elephant manned mission to the moon. ISS at least keeps the Russians and Euroweenies happy; manned flight out of LEO is a dead end, though, and unfortunately the Mars and outer planet budgets have been gutted to pay for it. Did you know that several of the biannual launch slots for Mars vehicles are going to be empty over the next decade? MSL (a little bit) and lunar pie-in-the-sky (mostly) are to blame.
Don't say I didn't tell you so. Enjoy the MERs while you still got 'em (you do check what they're up to every now and then, right?) and keep your fingers crossed for Phoenix at 00:30 UTC on the 26th. (Personally I will be glued to NASA TV and crapping myself at that point. Not a good combo.)
Well you know, a slippery slope isn't so funny when you go arse over tit and crack your head on the pavement! - not to mention the stench of dog shit all over your shoe. Well done the government, I say, for cracking down on this insidious menace! They've certainly got my vote, oh yes.
Get caught with this and you'll disappear forever). Sure, you'd be in serious trouble, but there'd be no big drama to the STS program per se; they'd just change the keys. (Cos if it's real crypto, they'll have revocation processes and suchlike. Right? Sure they will. Uh huh. )
Well, there are only ten more Shuttle flights to go now (assuming they don't lose another vehicle.)
Blake disappeared between series 2 and 3 (of four.) Several other members of the crew had "rotated out" (Gan got a rock on the head, my eponymous first crush died in an exploding sabotaged underground bunker.
CervalaN, the chief villain, was "just" a superb S&M Dominatrix-stroke-polician; in the last two series, she's backstabbed and betrayed her way to the position of Supreme Commander (a job title she pronounced with lip-curling and lacivious precision... though I didn't quite get it at the time. I was 8 when the first series was shown, and I remember my father dubbed her "Mrs Thatcher Syndrome". Years later a survey of the generation of boys who were 13-14 in 1977-81 "revealed" that Cervelan was their favourite masturbatory fantasy; the actress who played to role has said that this is the best accolade of her career.
Now Cally... Cally was GEEK sexy, and probably my first ever crush. It's the combination of vulnerability with enormous strength of character (and being a hardened revolutionary killer, of course:) ) Her death was probably the first time a TV show had really shaken my core assumptions about how the world worked. (The idea that you could kill off one of your main characters, and a "goodie" at that, was pretty earth-shaking!)
unmannedspaceflight.com - but don't mention Slashdot. And don't post until you know who the person you're disagreeing with is... there are some, let's say, well-informed people over there.
Uh, let me just limit myself to pointing out that Afghans are not Arabs... & the rest of your commment is similarly ill-informed. Hope you're not planning to vote this year.
Slashdot Mirror
Fuck open source. They should Free the iPod; not because it would make them the most money, but because Freedom is the Right Thing. GPL FTW!!!
Oh noes, the police are enforcing laws which limit my liberty to do whatever the fuck I want?!?!?!?! It's a police state!?!?!?! Bollocks.
The implication of your statement is the publication and possession of child porn should be legal. Is that really what you think?
The issue is what happens when material that might be innocuous in some contexts is found on e.g. a website along with a ton of images of straightforward child rape. Obviously you or I won't regard that image as porn because (presumably) we are not sexually aroused by pics of naked children. THAT'S BECAUSE WE'RE NOT PAEDOPHILES. Duh.
You completely missed the point. If a bunch of experts look at an image and say "this counts as child porn as defined by the UK law", then it is. If not, not. *shrug* who cares? that's just a detail, not a matter of principle.
You're complaining about an implementation detail, ie what is actually defined as child porn, not about the principle of taking down child porn. I have no opinion on whether this image is or isn't something that should be classed as porn; I'm happy to leave that call to the experts. Being human they will sometimes get it wrong. So what? What's the big deal?
What I don't get is this hype about it being a Chinese-style "great firewall". Obviously it's nothing of the sort; there's no restriction on political or religious traffic or indeed anything except child porn. So, what happens in the US when a child pron website is discovered? Is it legal to possess child porn in the US?? Do the cops not boot the door in, seize the servers and send the perps down for a 30 stretch? Explain, pleas
If the 4998 other images do not involve penetration with a penis, dildo, fingers, or other object, there is NO sex and there is NO victim of childhood rape.
Agreed. However this is not the rationale behind the filtering. The idea is not "we must prevent representations of people breaking the law"; otherwise the multiplexes would be full of Tarkovsky movies :) The implicit assumptions are (a) the use of child porn increases the risk that someone who has paedophilic masturbatory fantasies will act out and actually harm a child, and (b) the use of child porn is regarded as so uniquely abhorrent as to make it's possession a crime in the eyes of society as a whole. Personally I could care less about what someone's thinking of when they get the Jester's Toes, but (whilst I don't claim to be an expert) I think (a) is sufficiently plausible to merit making possession a crime.
The other issue is that if being able to say "But officer, this image is not of a REAL child rape, it is merely a depiction by actors" were sufficient to make an image non-infringeing, obviously all the perps would be doing it. Complicated, isn't it?
How is this insightful? It's a complete straw man. No-one's trying to prevent "talking about child abuse".
I don't agree it's a non-sexual pose, but let's set that aside for now...
I think the problem is that whilst that album cover may indeed be innocuous sitting in the racks of a vinyl obsessive along with another 5000 LPs, things are rather different if it's found, say, along with the Blind Faith cover and 4998 child porn images on Gary Glitter's computer. Suppose Gary Glitter had 4998 other images like the album covers? Is that legal? Should it be legal? It's a complicated issue, and running around screaming OMFG The Brits are censoring the Internet!!! is a really dumb response. Unless you think all child porn images should be freely available? Is that what you think? If not, you're arguing about an implementation detail.
..that if I find a piece of anything tomorrow, keeping away is the LAST thing I'll be doing.
thangyewverymuchyoureamarvellousaudiencelaydisgenlmn
Thinkpads certainly have them as standard; they're used by the fingerprint reader, IIRC.
"apparently embedded in most motherboards" -- not meaning to sound snide, but where the hell have you been for the last five years? Google things like TPM, Palladium, trustworthy computing, untrusted computing, Ross Anderson...
On the other hand -- I've noticed very small p/v and wind turbine installations popping up on the roadsides in our area in the last few years - powering things like illumination lights for traffic signs, lights at bus-stops, speed-triggered LED speed warning signs and the like. The wind turbines are dinky things with rotor diameters of perhaps three or four feet. (Note, this is along the shore of the Severn Estuary, which is presumably more reliably windy than most places inland.) I'm curious if manufacturing economies of scale have brought such small devices down to the point that they're cost effective, as well as green, anyone know?
Listen, this guy's a killer, and a pimp, and a loanshark. Careful who you disrespect, yanowaddaimyn?
Woa, dude. My whole world just turned upside-down.
We know, as every real Microsoft employee secretly knows in their heart of hearts, that it's all over... Nordlicht has failed, the winter's setting in, and Ballmer's down there in his bunker with a roomful of expensive matchwood. Still clutching a splintered fragment of a tasteful sofa in his hand (although it would be impolite to mention the shreds of fabric hanging from his mouth), his eyes dart wildly from a shredded "The WOW starts Now!" poster, to a voodoo doll of RMS, to a dartboard with Michael Dell's picture pinned to it. Outside, the loyal generals are choosing lots about who wants to go in and tell him the latest disastrous news from the Western front...
...so, you're a waffle man!
Actually, the bread it produces is absolutely delicious, when given decent wholemeal flour and some malty bits and cracked grains. Add some nice lightly salted butter and home-made marmalade from proper seville oranges,cane sugar and a drop of lemon juice to set, follow with a decent filter coffee and a fag and I feel pretty damn bulletproof. Admittedly you can't actually move anywhere for 30-40 mins afterwards, but you can use that time to smile benevolently at the world and remind yourself how nice it is to be alive, sometimes.
Don't say I didn't tell you so. Enjoy the MERs while you still got 'em (you do check what they're up to every now and then, right?) and keep your fingers crossed for Phoenix at 00:30 UTC on the 26th. (Personally I will be glued to NASA TV and crapping myself at that point. Not a good combo.)
Well you know, a slippery slope isn't so funny when you go arse over tit and crack your head on the pavement! - not to mention the stench of dog shit all over your shoe. Well done the government, I say, for cracking down on this insidious menace! They've certainly got my vote, oh yes.
Well, there are only ten more Shuttle flights to go now (assuming they don't lose another vehicle.)
CervalaN, the chief villain, was "just" a superb S&M Dominatrix-stroke-polician; in the last two series, she's backstabbed and betrayed her way to the position of Supreme Commander (a job title she pronounced with lip-curling and lacivious precision... though I didn't quite get it at the time. I was 8 when the first series was shown, and I remember my father dubbed her "Mrs Thatcher Syndrome". Years later a survey of the generation of boys who were 13-14 in 1977-81 "revealed" that Cervelan was their favourite masturbatory fantasy; the actress who played to role has said that this is the best accolade of her career. Now Cally... Cally was GEEK sexy, and probably my first ever crush. It's the combination of vulnerability with enormous strength of character (and being a hardened revolutionary killer, of course :) ) Her death was probably the first time a TV show had really shaken my core assumptions about how the world worked. (The idea that you could kill off one of your main characters, and a "goodie" at that, was pretty earth-shaking!)
unmannedspaceflight.com - but don't mention Slashdot. And don't post until you know who the person you're disagreeing with is... there are some, let's say, well-informed people over there.
Uh, let me just limit myself to pointing out that Afghans are not Arabs... & the rest of your commment is similarly ill-informed. Hope you're not planning to vote this year.