With all due respect, you're what the Constitution is there to protect us from. Should everyone be constrained in what they can read or see by what might set off the most unstable among us? I admit to not having researched the matter, but I wouldn't be surprised if pedophiles can also get some jollies from Underoos ads, or the child models in the inserts in the Sunday paper. Should those be made illegal as well?
A book by a Japanese linguist (titled Words in Context in its English translation, Kotoba to Bunka in the original) mentions in passing Turkish literature that goes on at length about women's eyes as other literature does about other women's body parts, and hypothesizes that the obsession with eyes comes about from (pre-Ataturk, presumably...) times when Islamic constraints on women's clothing meant that the eyes were all men could see!
Pedophiles will find some sort of stimulation no matter what--the children's clothing sections of Sears catalogs, or the Sunday advertising insert for Target or K-Mart, or El Diario de Daniela on Univisión. You'll have to put us all in chadours, put blinders on us, and make everybody look down under pain of death with constant monitoring to really prevent perverts from finding arousing images...and if you do, they'll switch to something else, like voices. (Obviously we all need devices that disguise our voices. It's for the children...)
So thanks, but no thanks; I refuse to let the few deranged among us limit what everybody can see, hear, or read--subject of course to the constraint of not injuring anyone (which rules out real child porn).
Eh? Why can't you prosecute for the real thing if the fakes become good enough? If it's real, surely there's evidence over and above the images themselves--someone seeing the child and filmmaker heading into a hotel room, etc.
When we have proper virtual adult porn, how hard is it going to be to load in a less mature looking model?
Not hard at all. Heck, look at any book on portraiture for artists and you will see a section on how children's faces change as they mature--it won't be hard to do the inverse transformation. Presto! Baby Seka, by analogy with Muppet Babies.
Actually, apart from the virtual kid pr0n issue, this would provide porn, um, performers with some major advantages--they could have themselves digitized in their prime and sell their images for productions when they're old and gray, and all sorts of customizations would be possible that needn't conform to the laws of physics or biology...but that's another iss--er, matter.
I'll agree that lex talionis is not the best moral code (though OTOH, it may well have been an advance in its time--back then it probably lowered the amount of retaliation!)...but what in your "pity the poor spammer, trying to feed his hungry children..." argument wouldn't apply to any crime, however heinous? Sorry, but the perpetrator deserves punishment of some kind--actually, better still would be restitution. How about this: require spammers to pay for selected people or organizations' net access for a length of time determined by the bandwidth they screwed people out of.
Agreed, you can't make unbeatable copy protection...but then, you can't keep people from getting drugs, either, and that doesn't stop our idiot government from trying at enormous expense and at the cost of turning the country into a police state.
So, now we can look forward to more cases of grandparents keeling over from a heart attack or being shot down as they try to defend themselves from intruders where the intruders are government agents--but now, instead of looking for drugs and having the wrong address, they'll be looking for DeCSS or something like it and have the wrong address.
It's the government that can seize your property and break down your door in the middle of the night based on nothing more than a rumor that you were involved with drug trafficking. It's the government that wants to make sure it can read all data traffic. It's the government that seizes a hefty percentage of your (and my) income every year. It's the government that presumes that anyone using or carrying large amounts of cash merits suspicion as a criminal, and that wants to put the banks in the business of monitoring your financial transactions and reporting anything "unusual" to them. The government can seize your property and pay you what it cares to, or declare your property a wetland or habitat for a supposedly endangered species and thus render it worthless to you and unsaleable. Much as I despise Microsoft, they've yet to do any of these things to me.
Where've you been? One of the wonderful "self-repairing" features of W2K, if I understand what I've read elsewhere, is noticing that your drive's MBR has been messed with (by installing LILO, say...?) and putting it back the way it was (i.e. so it directly boots to W2K).
This "feature," by the way, wasn't present in the beta of W2K, but was in the release.
Alas, history shows both kinds of bad outcome, both Type 1 and Type 2 errors, so to speak. In the case of color TV, the government by golly established a standard--the universally derided NTSC. In the case of AM stereo, the government refused to choose...and how many AM stereo stations or receivers are there now?
I can't say that I have the answer, because I don't. But surely there's a way not to require everybody to use the Windows API, but require that MS publish a complete definition of it, available to everybody. I think that one thing.NET will allow is for MS to actually implement something IBM, back in the "big iron" days, was rumored to be working on--a perpetually-changing "fan dance" interface. Back then, it was supposedly going to frustrate the "PCMs" (plug-compatible manufacturers); now it can frustrate programmers. If software and data are fetched across the network rather than kept locally, it simplifies doing "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run" on a massive scale. Requiring full, open documentation of MS APIs is what it will take to avoid this kind of lock-in.
Agreed. In the past, French was the language of philosophy (e,g, Descartes), science (e,g, Lavoisier), diplomacy, mathematics (Lagrange, Laplace, Cauchy, and many others), literature (too many to name).
But... that French now requires such defense is itself an indication of decline, wouldn't you say?
Uh-oh! I'm agreeing with Katz!
on
The Renaissance
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· Score: 1
Scary, kids...:-)
Seriously, I will snarf this book, and I know just the place for it--on the shelf next to Jacob Bronowski's The Abacus and the Rose, with the script of a short radio play at the end that beautifully illustrates the same point.
Bubble RAM missed its window--other storage got bigger (in capacity) and faster not long after it came out. (Sort of like the "floptical"--I have one of those, wanna buy it? It's a big 20 Mbytes; I got along with a 20 M hard drive on my CoCo for a long time.:-)
I'm sorry, but I don't respect it. The intent isn't education, it's indoctrination. If the rant is correct, the materials aren't teaching about computers--they're teaching the Windows API. Once through that, what will you really know about computers? Not a whole lot...but you'll be quite well trained to be comfortable with and expect the MS way of doing things.
The First Amendment protects us from certain kinds of indoctrination in school; I wonder whether other kinds are as bad.
Sigh. Seems to me they'd have the same problems as Web filters, compounded by the international nature of the net. (As Mario Pei pointed out long ago, French speakers get a laugh out of seeing references to "Con Edison," but I bet they don't filter for that...)
I wonder what they'd do with a domain I ran across once. I was following links from a web page of a fellow I know who does fight orchestration, and one of the links was to a page for something called the Actors' Exchange...but when I saw http://www.actorsexchange.com/, I thought "Actor sex change?! Seems like an awfully limited clientele..." I hasten to add that the site is a fine one, and has nothing at all to do with what I originally feared.
Well, yes, but...people have the option of installing Netscape, too. Care to bet that the default will be to have it turned on, with lots of nice FUD about the dangers of running software not approved by Microsoft?
For what it's worth, I voted for all Libertarians that were on my ballot. (That would be President/VP and Representative.) Otherwise, I voted Republican, figuring better that than Democrat.
I oppose the seizure of my money by the government for any purpose, much less subsidizing artists, but I can't agree with the "artists don't need to get paid; they'll do their thing anyway." The analogy to professional programmers doing Open Source on the side is bogus--when musicians et al. talk about their "day jobs," they are not talking about, say, acting in a soap opera by day and then heading out at night to do Shakespeare or Beckett. You have the luxury of getting paid to hone your chops--flipping burgers or waiting tables doesn't replace Hanon.
You say that will lead to corporate-approved pablum, to the domination of vapid boy groups and perky teen girl solo acts churning out mindless cookie-cutter dreck? That's odd...my musical interests are fairly obscure: I like early music. Ask the average guy on the street what his favorite Machaut virelai is and you'll probably get a blank look. For a long time I had to keep an eye out at the record stores and snatch up what few discs I happened across because they weren't all that common. Funny, but nowadays there's a quarterly magazine in the bookstores down the street about nothing but early music (Early Music America; check it out--anybody whose phone number is 1-888-SACKBUT has won my affection:-), and a bunch of others only a little harder to get to. Those same bookstores feature enough early music CDs that I can easily spend way too much money on them. Look for early music resources on the web and you'll find enough to keep you busy for a LONG time (it's not all stuffy either; check out Bang Lassies). How can this be? I thought that commercial art was doomed to pander to the lowest common denominator, and that we need a panel of judges unsullied by the market to hand out government-seized money to their friends--er, to fund high art.
I think it's great that, for example, musicians are starting to get out from under the thumbs of the record companies--I support PatroNet and November Project--but I don't think that government coercion is necessary to encourage what I think is great art.
How can an individual realistically influence any of the above without government?
I don't know about individuals, but consider this: when I was a child, one would see WB cartoons such as one I recall featuring a mouse that happened into a large building that was a production line for various processed foods--I recall that in one segment he stumbled into a vat of "pickling solution" and emerged intoxicated, after which we got to see him stagger down the conveyor belt barely missing knives that sliced the pickles for canning. At night, one could see the Jackie Gleason Show, in which Gleason would do a sketch as "Joe the Bartender," whose regular customer was one "Crazy" Guggenheimer, a punch-drunk if not actually drunken person. That was also the era of Sheb Wooley's alter ego, "Ben Colder," who blundered drunkenly through parodies of popular C&W songs of the time, and Foster Brooks's unshaven drunk character on one of Bill Cosby's variety shows.
Would anyone dare to show such characters on TV nowadays? Hell, no! Why not? Is there a law against portraying alcoholics or the brain-damaged as figures to be made fun of? Not that I'm aware of. What's changed is the average opinion of people; it's not funny any more. It's just sad, and anyone who does laugh at it is liable to get ostracized. No government action necessary.
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With all due respect, you're what the Constitution is there to protect us from. Should everyone be constrained in what they can read or see by what might set off the most unstable among us? I admit to not having researched the matter, but I wouldn't be surprised if pedophiles can also get some jollies from Underoos ads, or the child models in the inserts in the Sunday paper. Should those be made illegal as well?
Pedophiles will find some sort of stimulation no matter what--the children's clothing sections of Sears catalogs, or the Sunday advertising insert for Target or K-Mart, or El Diario de Daniela on Univisión. You'll have to put us all in chadours, put blinders on us, and make everybody look down under pain of death with constant monitoring to really prevent perverts from finding arousing images...and if you do, they'll switch to something else, like voices. (Obviously we all need devices that disguise our voices. It's for the children...)
So thanks, but no thanks; I refuse to let the few deranged among us limit what everybody can see, hear, or read--subject of course to the constraint of not injuring anyone (which rules out real child porn).
Eh? Why can't you prosecute for the real thing if the fakes become good enough? If it's real, surely there's evidence over and above the images themselves--someone seeing the child and filmmaker heading into a hotel room, etc.
Not hard at all. Heck, look at any book on portraiture for artists and you will see a section on how children's faces change as they mature--it won't be hard to do the inverse transformation. Presto! Baby Seka, by analogy with Muppet Babies.
Actually, apart from the virtual kid pr0n issue, this would provide porn, um, performers with some major advantages--they could have themselves digitized in their prime and sell their images for productions when they're old and gray, and all sorts of customizations would be possible that needn't conform to the laws of physics or biology...but that's another iss--er, matter.
So, you're objecting to the thought that the government might actually have to make its case?
I'll agree that lex talionis is not the best moral code (though OTOH, it may well have been an advance in its time--back then it probably lowered the amount of retaliation!)...but what in your "pity the poor spammer, trying to feed his hungry children..." argument wouldn't apply to any crime, however heinous? Sorry, but the perpetrator deserves punishment of some kind--actually, better still would be restitution. How about this: require spammers to pay for selected people or organizations' net access for a length of time determined by the bandwidth they screwed people out of.
Would I hire such a person? If I knew about his methods, hell no. I'm surprised you haven't fired him.
So, now we can look forward to more cases of grandparents keeling over from a heart attack or being shot down as they try to defend themselves from intruders where the intruders are government agents--but now, instead of looking for drugs and having the wrong address, they'll be looking for DeCSS or something like it and have the wrong address.
I'm just wondering whether BOB or the talking paperclip will be present in certain versions...
It's the government that can seize your property and break down your door in the middle of the night based on nothing more than a rumor that you were involved with drug trafficking. It's the government that wants to make sure it can read all data traffic. It's the government that seizes a hefty percentage of your (and my) income every year. It's the government that presumes that anyone using or carrying large amounts of cash merits suspicion as a criminal, and that wants to put the banks in the business of monitoring your financial transactions and reporting anything "unusual" to them. The government can seize your property and pay you what it cares to, or declare your property a wetland or habitat for a supposedly endangered species and thus render it worthless to you and unsaleable. Much as I despise Microsoft, they've yet to do any of these things to me.
This "feature," by the way, wasn't present in the beta of W2K, but was in the release.
I can't say that I have the answer, because I don't. But surely there's a way not to require everybody to use the Windows API, but require that MS publish a complete definition of it, available to everybody. I think that one thing .NET will allow is for MS to actually implement something IBM, back in the "big iron" days, was rumored to be working on--a perpetually-changing "fan dance" interface. Back then, it was supposedly going to frustrate the "PCMs" (plug-compatible manufacturers); now it can frustrate programmers. If software and data are fetched across the network rather than kept locally, it simplifies doing "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run" on a massive scale. Requiring full, open documentation of MS APIs is what it will take to avoid this kind of lock-in.
But... that French now requires such defense is itself an indication of decline, wouldn't you say?
Seriously, I will snarf this book, and I know just the place for it--on the shelf next to Jacob Bronowski's The Abacus and the Rose, with the script of a short radio play at the end that beautifully illustrates the same point.
Bubble RAM missed its window--other storage got bigger (in capacity) and faster not long after it came out. (Sort of like the "floptical"--I have one of those, wanna buy it? It's a big 20 Mbytes; I got along with a 20 M hard drive on my CoCo for a long time. :-)
...will it need shielding?
The First Amendment protects us from certain kinds of indoctrination in school; I wonder whether other kinds are as bad.
I wonder what they'd do with a domain I ran across once. I was following links from a web page of a fellow I know who does fight orchestration, and one of the links was to a page for something called the Actors' Exchange...but when I saw http://www.actorsexchange.com/, I thought "Actor sex change?! Seems like an awfully limited clientele..." I hasten to add that the site is a fine one, and has nothing at all to do with what I originally feared.
Well, yes, but...people have the option of installing Netscape, too. Care to bet that the default will be to have it turned on, with lots of nice FUD about the dangers of running software not approved by Microsoft?
You might want to read the Green Party platform, and then reconsider your statement. The Democrats are bad enough; the Green Party is scary.
For what it's worth, I voted for all Libertarians that were on my ballot. (That would be President/VP and Representative.) Otherwise, I voted Republican, figuring better that than Democrat.
I oppose the seizure of my money by the government for any purpose, much less subsidizing artists, but I can't agree with the "artists don't need to get paid; they'll do their thing anyway." The analogy to professional programmers doing Open Source on the side is bogus--when musicians et al. talk about their "day jobs," they are not talking about, say, acting in a soap opera by day and then heading out at night to do Shakespeare or Beckett. You have the luxury of getting paid to hone your chops--flipping burgers or waiting tables doesn't replace Hanon.
You say that will lead to corporate-approved pablum, to the domination of vapid boy groups and perky teen girl solo acts churning out mindless cookie-cutter dreck? That's odd...my musical interests are fairly obscure: I like early music. Ask the average guy on the street what his favorite Machaut virelai is and you'll probably get a blank look. For a long time I had to keep an eye out at the record stores and snatch up what few discs I happened across because they weren't all that common. Funny, but nowadays there's a quarterly magazine in the bookstores down the street about nothing but early music ( Early Music America ; check it out--anybody whose phone number is 1-888-SACKBUT has won my affection :-), and a bunch of others only a little harder to get to. Those same bookstores feature enough early music CDs that I can easily spend way too much money on them. Look for early music resources on the web and you'll find enough to keep you busy for a LONG time (it's not all stuffy either; check out Bang Lassies). How can this be? I thought that commercial art was doomed to pander to the lowest common denominator, and that we need a panel of judges unsullied by the market to hand out government-seized money to their friends--er, to fund high art.
I think it's great that, for example, musicians are starting to get out from under the thumbs of the record companies--I support PatroNet and November Project--but I don't think that government coercion is necessary to encourage what I think is great art.
I don't know about individuals, but consider this: when I was a child, one would see WB cartoons such as one I recall featuring a mouse that happened into a large building that was a production line for various processed foods--I recall that in one segment he stumbled into a vat of "pickling solution" and emerged intoxicated, after which we got to see him stagger down the conveyor belt barely missing knives that sliced the pickles for canning. At night, one could see the Jackie Gleason Show, in which Gleason would do a sketch as "Joe the Bartender," whose regular customer was one "Crazy" Guggenheimer, a punch-drunk if not actually drunken person. That was also the era of Sheb Wooley's alter ego, "Ben Colder," who blundered drunkenly through parodies of popular C&W songs of the time, and Foster Brooks's unshaven drunk character on one of Bill Cosby's variety shows.
Would anyone dare to show such characters on TV nowadays? Hell, no! Why not? Is there a law against portraying alcoholics or the brain-damaged as figures to be made fun of? Not that I'm aware of. What's changed is the average opinion of people; it's not funny any more. It's just sad, and anyone who does laugh at it is liable to get ostracized. No government action necessary.
It all boils down to extortion eventually, eh? Give us your money or we poor people will mug you.