The terrorists can simply shoot passengers until the pilots open the door. That's why the armored door idea never surfaced even after the hijacking madness of the seventies. Not logical or possible without the willingness of the crew to sacrifice the passengers and the flight attendants.
There is no safety, not in guns or armor or guards, not against someone who wants to murder AND commit suicide. Just get used to it.
Hm. We could take a train.
IF we go through all these convolutions, we give up sanity and freedom, and the bastards win. AND IT WOULDN'T WORK ANYWAY. There is not a thing that could have stopped those planes from hitting those targets save the willingness of the passengers and crew to sacrifice themselves.
I hope that I can measure up to the heroism shown by the Pennsylvania plane's passengers. They are my gods now. Honor them.
I doubt very much the constitutional congress wanted to be shot by outraged citizenry.
This argument is specious.. a fantasy. The 2nd amendment was not created so that Pennsylvania farmers could march into colonial New York and assassinate the President because they disagreed with his tax laws, to make an extreme example.
And, since the Federal government always has a standing military force that could wipe out you, your shotgun, and the landscape around you for fifty miles, your Lone American Anti-Guvmint Hero scenario is just adolescent masturbation.
Osama does not use cell phones, radio, land lines, or PC's. He eliminated them from his ops years ago,
Strangling our privacy does nothing to him at all.
It gives control freaks what they want, tho. The ability to watch everything, all the time... a policing dream come true. Until someday you are the target, or the Church of Scientology or your boss or your neighbors get a hold of the info that allegedly only the Good Guys get to see.
Don't Tread on Me. Good advice to murdering scum and also for the opportunistic bastards who want to take advantage of this situation to get Christmas early this year.
Your hatred of the UN is irrational and at the moment, a non sequitur in relation to the very small army of anational commandos who carried out this operation. The UN is the only global organization capable of bringing disputants together, monitoring DMZs, bringing food and medicine to the helpless. Demonization of such thing because of a fear of world domination is hysterical, especially since WE are for all intents and purposes the UN nowadays.. even tho we don't pay any of our dues, we still insist on setting its agenda.
Stick with the real. We have, I'd guess, religious psychotics who want to kick our ass for supporting Israel. Staying home and sticking our head in our collective asses will get us killed a lot faster than maintaining liason with the planet. At least we get good spy posts.
All the attackers would need to do is to threaten to kill the passengers if the crew doesn't open up the security door. I imagine that's why such a system was never used in the first place. A locking door would be useless.
No evidence whatsover that radio causes cancer, microwave or no. The famous cell-phone-causes-cancer bull started with a lawyer who "just supposed" the idea into existence. Hm. Client's husband with brain cancer, dead + used cell phone == cell phone caused cancer.
I believe the jury didn't buy it, but it now is part of the national folklore. How would you test this, tape tiny cell phones to the ears of white rats?
Anything can be supposed. It isn't science's job to disprove harm whenever someone dreams up an idea like microwave=death, it's the proponent's job to provide evidence to even consider researching the topic. What if the plastic on the cell phone caused the brain cancer? How about his shoulder position? The angle of his neck while using the thing? Maybe the tinny sound of the phone somehow triggers a genetic flaw that causes cancer cells to multiply in the brain; and on and on and on...
Point: you'll be dead in 50 years anyway, don't sweat the small stuff.
I was just reading the H1B thread, and the IT-People-Are-Not-Ageist argument was being bandied about. Then I see 40=over the hill here:)
Nah, this isn't a kingdom run by 25 year olds:)
When I was punk kid of 20, I used to wonder why the old farts of 40 used to smile at us when we so rightously derided their gray hairs and hairy ears. Now I know why they smiled...
If they would have said something in response, it would have been this: "It's your turn REAL SOON, monkey boy. And I'm doing yer girlfriend."
I hope the yunguns here enjoy the scenery, 'cause it ain't gonna last long for them. I wonder, with how much aplomb will they face the end of their careers at 35?
get their real life coding experience in Elbonia? Employers seem to think -- why? -- that they come to the job with years of U.S. business experience.
Is it the B.S. CompSci + RL experience that you all are looking for, or is it cheap programmers?
As for training full-timers, it's my experience and that of a lot of the posters here as well that training isn't in the cards for them either, which leads to the question: who the hell is getting trained??
In a more useful vein, I recall about eight years ago or so, a group of companies decided to alleviate the coder shortage in a new way. They hired... classical musicians. And trained them in basic coding (C++, COBOL, whatever). And guess what? They proved to be excellent coders. Good memory and the ability to think in patterns (I was a sketch artist once, for instance) let them adapt easily. Such a program would never fly today due to the arrogance and bullheaded stupidity of IT people, management and programmers alike.
Teaching pseudocode takes an hour. Teaching C takes a week of pretty damned easy lessons. If you start with people who can think, and believe it or not, most can, you can make an adequate coder in a month. A good one in a few months, and excellent one in a year.
Programming is blocked by barriers to entry that are getting sillier all the time. Mathematics is the least silly, but frankly, what the hell do most coders use differential calc for? Why is it required? Object based code is machine friendly, but is a bear for a human to think in.
The social blocks are the geek clubbiness and arrogance of IT itself. School snobbery. Class affectations. Disdain for age, no matter how it's cloaked in the excuse that the programmer is not "currrent" -- of course they are not "current", if by "current" you mean they graduated in your class. Guess what? Programming ain't changed all that much, and won't in the future either. Another huge, HUGE block to entering IT is the adamant self-interest motivated refusal of the industry to train people. I find it hard to think of examples of other lines of business that won't hire people unless they are sprung full-grown from their father's brow. It's impossible. Workers should be grown into jobs. But the circular non-logic driving the industry of we-don't-train-we-want-experience will grind it slowly into the mud.
Teen I can live with; as for the other two terms, guess what? That kind of porn rarely exists. I don't think I've ever seen it. It's somewhere, probably decades old, too, but as for file-sharing... who would be insane enough to host such dynamite? It's a non-issue.
I think the people who are searching for it, are first, not finding it, and secondly, not expecting to find it either. I think they are just trying to be as wicked as they can in the privacy of their little heads, without really expecting to find anything. Just nihilistic impulses.
Real sickos use the U.S. mail and UPS, just like always.
I don't want them to try. Prohibition 3: the Idiots Take Over the World.
Americans swallowed copyright police; swallowing ultimate censorship to Save Johnny from Porn will be even easier. The problem is, since we are now the only world power left, we will drag the rest of the planet into our pious, fatuous madness.
Well, if it is never possible to prove that something is not harmful, then anything, anytime, can be assumed harmful, and prohibited.
To descend into the silly, I'll dredge up the long-ago days of the early seventies. The issue: Saturday morning cartoons, the eagerly-awaited joys of my youth.
In church basements around the country, serious parents watched the 'toons, and toted up the number of punches, anvil-drops, nose-squishings, well, you get the idea. They sent their "studies" of violence in children's cartoons to each other, and formented boycotts and congressional hysterial about the destruction of our nation's youth. Result: the bland pap of the seventies and eighties in children's programming, alleviated at last by the Cartoon Network in recent years.
NO ONE I have EVER heard of went psychotically violent because of Bugs Bunny cartoons or Three Stooges shorts. None. But the "studies" of "violent TV" have stood up as tho gospel for decades now. No proof necessary, nor is it possible, that cartoons caused violence. Actually, we deprived children for generations of the gorgeous artwork of the Warner Brothers studios, for instance. I grew up without ever seeing a Ted Avery cartoon.
Funny, even tho "violence" was expunged from TV, even in prime time, the violent crime stats for the country were soaring. If one uses the "proof" of selective statistics, banning cartoon violence cause the larges explosion of street violence in U.S. history.
The foregoing is nonsense of course. The crime stats were up because the nation had a historic surge of teenagers, born during the Baby Boom, and where teenagers go, a certain amount of mayhem follows.
Now about porn. There is NO PROOF at all that naked women and men involved in sexual acts destroys the warp and woof of a child's soul. Studies that purport to show this are highly suspect, for several reasons.
How are the studies structured? What kids are you sampling? Young white kids from the 'burbs? How do you set up the control group? Do you put a group of 12 year old boys in one room for a year, feeding them Disney channel fare, and another group in a different room seeing Vanessa del Rio classics? Do you then measure rape stats for each group for the next several years? Or... do you interview them, looking for signs of disrespect for women, disregarding of course that these are 12 year-olds, and of course treat girls like alien beings? How do you "measure" damage -- questions and answers? Ink blots? Nonsense.
Just the fact that a researcher wants to conduct such an impossible study is a red flag, since it signals that the researcher believes that such damage is actually happening, and of course will set out to find it -- without control groups, metrics of any objective sort, and with the unspoken but clear assumption that erotica is bad, bad, bad, hence necessitating the study.
America has been steered by prudes for a couple of centuries now. Now we have an Attorney General who won't dance, because God tells him that it leads to fornication and sin, determined to launch a campaign to stamp out "smut" on the 'net at all costs... and it will cost us plenty, believe it, in censorship, legal costs, and our precious freedom.
All because of the children...
Really?? I remember people who grew up in the '50's. I read diaries from that era, novels, articles... kids got hold of nudie mags, cheap porn, breathless romance novels. The read Masters and Johnson, eventually Nancy Friday, you name it, they read it.
You know what? Those kids didn't grow up to be drooling sex maniacs. Or anything particularly frightening. So I have to ask, what exactly is decontructing the Internet to Save the Children supposed to give us as a benefit?
For decades now, hysterical parents have tried to block their children's eyes from seeing Evil Porn, with the result of course that the kids went somewhere else to see it, and grew up with a sexual imagination slightly better for it. Kids that parents successfully prohibit from growing up to be.. well, I guess... hysterical censors of the next generation of kids, I guess.
Let's cut to the chase. It ain't about the kids, it's about the censors themselves. They don't want people to see erotica. It is evil to them. And since it is an ultimate evil, they want everyone safe from seeing it.
OF course, taking kids into the forest to blow away animals, playing with knives, watching movies in which hundreds are killed without conscience -- this is fine.
It depends entirely on what is important to the individual. Of course, Saving the Kids is a damned hard standard to fight against, in a sound bite CNN/Fox News culture, but it is a canard that must be fought, lest we lose that incredible freedom the Internet gives us... not that it's going away anyway.
Mean while these law makers get to sit in DC and kill young girls
God, what have we wrought. Listen, I don't have cable, and I don't listen to talk radio, and I never will again. You and people like you are whipping the fires of partisan insanity.
In no way does having an affair, or hiding it, make you a murderer, no matter what Ann Coulter says on FOX NEWS. The repetition of such crap has degraded the entirety of cable and radio news. It is innuendo, it is slander, it is reprehensible. Affair != Murder.
CBS News is the only, ONLY outlet not to jump on the rumor-n-ratings bandwagon a la Clinton and Monica. Thank god for the last of a dying breed: news organizations not run for maximum profit.
I remember watching MS-NBC back in the day, 3 years ago, when it was the MonicaStain-NBC network. It was in the middle of the day, and it was a few minutes short of the hour, and inadvertently a 13 year old kid made it through with, gawd help us, a criticism of the 24/7 Monica Sex Watch. I don't remember off-hand the name of the talking head, but he's moved on to his rightful home, FOX News I understand. The exchange between the kid and dimbulb went something like this:
KID: I have to say that I think that it is a disgrace, the way you have beaten this to death for months now. Have you no shame?
DIMBULB SOON-TO-BE-FOX apparatchik: Kid, kid, hold it right there. Tell me something. Do you watch this program? Since you are, you are causing us to cover it.
KID: I... I..
RIGHT-WINGNUT: As long as you viewers tune in to watch this, we will show it. This is a BUSINESS, and someday you'll understand it. We have to make a profit.
KID (Flustered): I..
IDIOT (smugly smiling): We have to go now. Stay tuned for yet another look of Monica hugging the President.
All right, I fubbed in that last comment. But it was true. As long as profit rules news, and right-wing businessmen choose the managers and talking heads of their networks, the Gary Condits of the world will constantly be prone to slander and defamation, often for partisan politcal ends.
We constantly criticize politicians, but frankly, who the hell would want to be one? Unless they are Repubs; they tend to get away with anything (see Newt Gingrich...). They are open to the most vicious rumor-implantation in the New Media, and can be accused of just about any crime, without recourse. And their accusers can create a cottage industry of personal destruction for YEARS.
Again: who the hell would ever want to work for The People when they can be annihilated at anytime by appeals to the basest prejudices of the mob? As L. Ron Hubbard once said, (paraphrasing): to destroy enemies, feed the press "evidence" of lurid sex crimes... if possible, destroy them utterly.
He was such a nice guy. Good to see our entire political process is now a gleaming example of such evil.
Having an affair is not murder. It isn't illegal. And I'd have to state that if the secret lives of all those smiling apes on FOX and CNN slandering their political enemies were to be brought to light, and judged by their own standards, there would nothing on cable but Mr. Ed reruns.
What's next? Are they going to break down your door in the middle of the night because you set up a share at home to listen to your CDs at work?
Actually, yes, they will do exactly that. Picture it this way: they supoena you; you refuse to go to court. They convict you in absentia. You refuse to pay. They issue a warrant eventually. You refuse to open the door when the cops or the court officers arrive. Your door gets kicked in, and you, my friend, are going to prison.
For the most part, the authors don't see a damned penny of the royalties gleaned from copyrights. Musicians owe the companies, mostly; don't even THINK that movie screenwriters get a percentage of the net of a movie. The money collected goes to media companies.
How much of the Napster money collected by RIAA went to musicians? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
Using Gnutella servents is not a declaration of copyright-infringing activity, nor is hosting an mp3 named Beatles-Yesterday.mp3 declaring that you are trading it either. I don't know how Judge Patel could just flip her gavel and declare that it must be so. I thought that U.S. law required proof, or some such silly thing. Giving the benefit of the assumption to record companies just because they are rich and huge is obscene. And the copyright bounty hunters can go blow the goats they so richly deserve.
Eventually files moving over the net will be filtered based on content companies' demands. I can't think of any way to avoid the coming corporate censorship other than laser networks on rooftops with 802.11x connections to local networks. Even then, government, ISP and media company sniffer trucks will be trawling the streets, looking for trouble.
I foresee the day, analogous with today's forfeiture and mandatory prison sentence laws, when copyright infringement bounty hunting will be a major industry on a par with drug testing. Imagine all the money if you get a percentage of 500,000 dollar fines per each infraction? People will be dedicating part of their lifetime earnings to paying off enormous fines to media companies and the government. People, there's just too much money floating around this issue; they'r are going to go dog-wild on us if we don't keep an eye on the IP maniacs.
The DMCA took away that status from the ISPs. They are now considered co-infringers if the "copyrighted" material is not removed immediately.
Curious. The first users and abusers of this provision was the Church of Scientology, who uses it like a sledgehammer to shut down sites critical of its activities. For all the bluster, the USENET group alt.religion.scientology was years ahead of the rest of the geek nation when it came to the implications of the DMCA.
NO ONE was very tall. You giant six footers are historical aberrations. Most adult men ranged in size from five to five and half feet tall for the last hundred thousand years, I'd speculate.
Look at old suits of armor the next time you are in a museum.
Actually, in the U.S. we have franchised copy centers, located in thousands of places. Kinkos is one such.
If one comes into such an establishment with a presumably copyrighted work such as a magazine or a book, the staff is required to stop you from using the photocopier, if they assume that you are about to use it to circumvent copyright law. The old Russian copying laws are alive and well in the U.S.A.
Slashdot Mirror
The terrorists can simply shoot passengers until the pilots open the door. That's why the armored door idea never surfaced even after the hijacking madness of the seventies. Not logical or possible without the willingness of the crew to sacrifice the passengers and the flight attendants.
There is no safety, not in guns or armor or guards, not against someone who wants to murder AND commit suicide. Just get used to it.
Hm. We could take a train.
IF we go through all these convolutions, we give up sanity and freedom, and the bastards win. AND IT WOULDN'T WORK ANYWAY. There is not a thing that could have stopped those planes from hitting those targets save the willingness of the passengers and crew to sacrifice themselves.
I hope that I can measure up to the heroism shown by the Pennsylvania plane's passengers. They are my gods now. Honor them.
I doubt very much the constitutional congress wanted to be shot by outraged citizenry.
This argument is specious.. a fantasy. The 2nd amendment was not created so that Pennsylvania farmers could march into colonial New York and assassinate the President because they disagreed with his tax laws, to make an extreme example.
And, since the Federal government always has a standing military force that could wipe out you, your shotgun, and the landscape around you for fifty miles, your Lone American Anti-Guvmint Hero scenario is just adolescent masturbation.
Osama does not use cell phones, radio, land lines, or PC's. He eliminated them from his ops years ago,
Strangling our privacy does nothing to him at all.
It gives control freaks what they want, tho. The ability to watch everything, all the time... a policing dream come true. Until someday you are the target, or the Church of Scientology or your boss or your neighbors get a hold of the info that allegedly only the Good Guys get to see.
Don't Tread on Me. Good advice to murdering scum and also for the opportunistic bastards who want to take advantage of this situation to get Christmas early this year.
But... George Sr... how exactly would monitoring our email, phone calls, public places, and having a backdoor into all our encrypted systems...
HAVE DONE A DAMNED THING TO STOP THOSE PLANES??
Your hatred of the UN is irrational and at the moment, a non sequitur in relation to the very small army of anational commandos who carried out this operation. The UN is the only global organization capable of bringing disputants together, monitoring DMZs, bringing food and medicine to the helpless. Demonization of such thing because of a fear of world domination is hysterical, especially since WE are for all intents and purposes the UN nowadays.. even tho we don't pay any of our dues, we still insist on setting its agenda.
Stick with the real. We have, I'd guess, religious psychotics who want to kick our ass for supporting Israel. Staying home and sticking our head in our collective asses will get us killed a lot faster than maintaining liason with the planet. At least we get good spy posts.
All the attackers would need to do is to threaten to kill the passengers if the crew doesn't open up the security door. I imagine that's why such a system was never used in the first place. A locking door would be useless.
Actually, it was one book, split into three by the original publishers.
Actually, you are correct, it will not scale to the Drug War; it will be much, much bigger and will never end.
"It's the information, Marty. It's who controls the information..."
Ideas and writings are going to become corporate property, and the copyrights will never expire.
The future is your face, with a fat lawyer stamping on it, endlessly.
I've long predicted the new war, and christened it Prohibition III.
Welcome to my future.
No evidence whatsover that radio causes cancer, microwave or no. The famous cell-phone-causes-cancer bull started with a lawyer who "just supposed" the idea into existence. Hm. Client's husband with brain cancer, dead + used cell phone == cell phone caused cancer.
I believe the jury didn't buy it, but it now is part of the national folklore. How would you test this, tape tiny cell phones to the ears of white rats?
Anything can be supposed. It isn't science's job to disprove harm whenever someone dreams up an idea like microwave=death, it's the proponent's job to provide evidence to even consider researching the topic. What if the plastic on the cell phone caused the brain cancer? How about his shoulder position? The angle of his neck while using the thing? Maybe the tinny sound of the phone somehow triggers a genetic flaw that causes cancer cells to multiply in the brain; and on and on and on...
Point: you'll be dead in 50 years anyway, don't sweat the small stuff.
Nor is he a citizen.
I was just reading the H1B thread, and the IT-People-Are-Not-Ageist argument was being bandied about. Then I see 40=over the hill here :)
:)
Nah, this isn't a kingdom run by 25 year olds
When I was punk kid of 20, I used to wonder why the old farts of 40 used to smile at us when we so rightously derided their gray hairs and hairy ears. Now I know why they smiled...
If they would have said something in response, it would have been this: "It's your turn REAL SOON, monkey boy. And I'm doing yer girlfriend."
I hope the yunguns here enjoy the scenery, 'cause it ain't gonna last long for them. I wonder, with how much aplomb will they face the end of their careers at 35?
I'm hoping for 150 meself.
get their real life coding experience in Elbonia? Employers seem to think -- why? -- that they come to the job with years of U.S. business experience.
Is it the B.S. CompSci + RL experience that you all are looking for, or is it cheap programmers?
As for training full-timers, it's my experience and that of a lot of the posters here as well that training isn't in the cards for them either, which leads to the question: who the hell is getting trained??
In a more useful vein, I recall about eight years ago or so, a group of companies decided to alleviate the coder shortage in a new way. They hired... classical musicians. And trained them in basic coding (C++, COBOL, whatever). And guess what? They proved to be excellent coders. Good memory and the ability to think in patterns (I was a sketch artist once, for instance) let them adapt easily. Such a program would never fly today due to the arrogance and bullheaded stupidity of IT people, management and programmers alike.
Teaching pseudocode takes an hour. Teaching C takes a week of pretty damned easy lessons. If you start with people who can think, and believe it or not, most can, you can make an adequate coder in a month. A good one in a few months, and excellent one in a year.
Programming is blocked by barriers to entry that are getting sillier all the time. Mathematics is the least silly, but frankly, what the hell do most coders use differential calc for? Why is it required? Object based code is machine friendly, but is a bear for a human to think in.
The social blocks are the geek clubbiness and arrogance of IT itself. School snobbery. Class affectations. Disdain for age, no matter how it's cloaked in the excuse that the programmer is not "currrent" -- of course they are not "current", if by "current" you mean they graduated in your class. Guess what? Programming ain't changed all that much, and won't in the future either. Another huge, HUGE block to entering IT is the adamant self-interest motivated refusal of the industry to train people. I find it hard to think of examples of other lines of business that won't hire people unless they are sprung full-grown from their father's brow. It's impossible. Workers should be grown into jobs. But the circular non-logic driving the industry of we-don't-train-we-want-experience will grind it slowly into the mud.
HOW? What kid would admit it? Such data collection is impossible.
It's all assumptions, never to be challenged.
Teen I can live with; as for the other two terms, guess what? That kind of porn rarely exists. I don't think I've ever seen it. It's somewhere, probably decades old, too, but as for file-sharing... who would be insane enough to host such dynamite? It's a non-issue.
I think the people who are searching for it, are first, not finding it, and secondly, not expecting to find it either. I think they are just trying to be as wicked as they can in the privacy of their little heads, without really expecting to find anything. Just nihilistic impulses.
Real sickos use the U.S. mail and UPS, just like always.
I don't want them to try. Prohibition 3: the Idiots Take Over the World.
Americans swallowed copyright police; swallowing ultimate censorship to Save Johnny from Porn will be even easier. The problem is, since we are now the only world power left, we will drag the rest of the planet into our pious, fatuous madness.
Good points.
Well, if it is never possible to prove that something is not harmful, then anything, anytime, can be assumed harmful, and prohibited.
To descend into the silly, I'll dredge up the long-ago days of the early seventies. The issue: Saturday morning cartoons, the eagerly-awaited joys of my youth.
In church basements around the country, serious parents watched the 'toons, and toted up the number of punches, anvil-drops, nose-squishings, well, you get the idea. They sent their "studies" of violence in children's cartoons to each other, and formented boycotts and congressional hysterial about the destruction of our nation's youth. Result: the bland pap of the seventies and eighties in children's programming, alleviated at last by the Cartoon Network in recent years.
NO ONE I have EVER heard of went psychotically violent because of Bugs Bunny cartoons or Three Stooges shorts. None. But the "studies" of "violent TV" have stood up as tho gospel for decades now. No proof necessary, nor is it possible, that cartoons caused violence. Actually, we deprived children for generations of the gorgeous artwork of the Warner Brothers studios, for instance. I grew up without ever seeing a Ted Avery cartoon.
Funny, even tho "violence" was expunged from TV, even in prime time, the violent crime stats for the country were soaring. If one uses the "proof" of selective statistics, banning cartoon violence cause the larges explosion of street violence in U.S. history.
The foregoing is nonsense of course. The crime stats were up because the nation had a historic surge of teenagers, born during the Baby Boom, and where teenagers go, a certain amount of mayhem follows.
Now about porn. There is NO PROOF at all that naked women and men involved in sexual acts destroys the warp and woof of a child's soul. Studies that purport to show this are highly suspect, for several reasons.
How are the studies structured? What kids are you sampling? Young white kids from the 'burbs? How do you set up the control group? Do you put a group of 12 year old boys in one room for a year, feeding them Disney channel fare, and another group in a different room seeing Vanessa del Rio classics? Do you then measure rape stats for each group for the next several years? Or... do you interview them, looking for signs of disrespect for women, disregarding of course that these are 12 year-olds, and of course treat girls like alien beings? How do you "measure" damage -- questions and answers? Ink blots? Nonsense.
Just the fact that a researcher wants to conduct such an impossible study is a red flag, since it signals that the researcher believes that such damage is actually happening, and of course will set out to find it -- without control groups, metrics of any objective sort, and with the unspoken but clear assumption that erotica is bad, bad, bad, hence necessitating the study.
America has been steered by prudes for a couple of centuries now. Now we have an Attorney General who won't dance, because God tells him that it leads to fornication and sin, determined to launch a campaign to stamp out "smut" on the 'net at all costs... and it will cost us plenty, believe it, in censorship, legal costs, and our precious freedom.
All because of the children...
Really?? I remember people who grew up in the '50's. I read diaries from that era, novels, articles... kids got hold of nudie mags, cheap porn, breathless romance novels. The read Masters and Johnson, eventually Nancy Friday, you name it, they read it.
You know what? Those kids didn't grow up to be drooling sex maniacs. Or anything particularly frightening. So I have to ask, what exactly is decontructing the Internet to Save the Children supposed to give us as a benefit?
For decades now, hysterical parents have tried to block their children's eyes from seeing Evil Porn, with the result of course that the kids went somewhere else to see it, and grew up with a sexual imagination slightly better for it. Kids that parents successfully prohibit from growing up to be.. well, I guess... hysterical censors of the next generation of kids, I guess.
Let's cut to the chase. It ain't about the kids, it's about the censors themselves. They don't want people to see erotica. It is evil to them. And since it is an ultimate evil, they want everyone safe from seeing it.
OF course, taking kids into the forest to blow away animals, playing with knives, watching movies in which hundreds are killed without conscience -- this is fine.
It depends entirely on what is important to the individual. Of course, Saving the Kids is a damned hard standard to fight against, in a sound bite CNN/Fox News culture, but it is a canard that must be fought, lest we lose that incredible freedom the Internet gives us... not that it's going away anyway.
God, what have we wrought. Listen, I don't have cable, and I don't listen to talk radio, and I never will again. You and people like you are whipping the fires of partisan insanity.
In no way does having an affair, or hiding it, make you a murderer, no matter what Ann Coulter says on FOX NEWS. The repetition of such crap has degraded the entirety of cable and radio news. It is innuendo, it is slander, it is reprehensible. Affair != Murder.
CBS News is the only, ONLY outlet not to jump on the rumor-n-ratings bandwagon a la Clinton and Monica. Thank god for the last of a dying breed: news organizations not run for maximum profit.
I remember watching MS-NBC back in the day, 3 years ago, when it was the MonicaStain-NBC network. It was in the middle of the day, and it was a few minutes short of the hour, and inadvertently a 13 year old kid made it through with, gawd help us, a criticism of the 24/7 Monica Sex Watch. I don't remember off-hand the name of the talking head, but he's moved on to his rightful home, FOX News I understand. The exchange between the kid and dimbulb went something like this:
KID: I have to say that I think that it is a disgrace, the way you have beaten this to death for months now. Have you no shame?
DIMBULB SOON-TO-BE-FOX apparatchik: Kid, kid, hold it right there. Tell me something. Do you watch this program? Since you are, you are causing us to cover it.
KID: I... I..
RIGHT-WINGNUT: As long as you viewers tune in to watch this, we will show it. This is a BUSINESS, and someday you'll understand it. We have to make a profit.
KID (Flustered): I..
IDIOT (smugly smiling): We have to go now. Stay tuned for yet another look of Monica hugging the President.
All right, I fubbed in that last comment. But it was true. As long as profit rules news, and right-wing businessmen choose the managers and talking heads of their networks, the Gary Condits of the world will constantly be prone to slander and defamation, often for partisan politcal ends.
We constantly criticize politicians, but frankly, who the hell would want to be one? Unless they are Repubs; they tend to get away with anything (see Newt Gingrich...). They are open to the most vicious rumor-implantation in the New Media, and can be accused of just about any crime, without recourse. And their accusers can create a cottage industry of personal destruction for YEARS.
Again: who the hell would ever want to work for The People when they can be annihilated at anytime by appeals to the basest prejudices of the mob? As L. Ron Hubbard once said, (paraphrasing): to destroy enemies, feed the press "evidence" of lurid sex crimes... if possible, destroy them utterly.
He was such a nice guy. Good to see our entire political process is now a gleaming example of such evil.
Having an affair is not murder. It isn't illegal. And I'd have to state that if the secret lives of all those smiling apes on FOX and CNN slandering their political enemies were to be brought to light, and judged by their own standards, there would nothing on cable but Mr. Ed reruns.
For the most part, the authors don't see a damned penny of the royalties gleaned from copyrights. Musicians owe the companies, mostly; don't even THINK that movie screenwriters get a percentage of the net of a movie. The money collected goes to media companies.
How much of the Napster money collected by RIAA went to musicians? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
Using Gnutella servents is not a declaration of copyright-infringing activity, nor is hosting an mp3 named Beatles-Yesterday.mp3 declaring that you are trading it either. I don't know how Judge Patel could just flip her gavel and declare that it must be so. I thought that U.S. law required proof, or some such silly thing. Giving the benefit of the assumption to record companies just because they are rich and huge is obscene. And the copyright bounty hunters can go blow the goats they so richly deserve.
Eventually files moving over the net will be filtered based on content companies' demands. I can't think of any way to avoid the coming corporate censorship other than laser networks on rooftops with 802.11x connections to local networks. Even then, government, ISP and media company sniffer trucks will be trawling the streets, looking for trouble.
I foresee the day, analogous with today's forfeiture and mandatory prison sentence laws, when copyright infringement bounty hunting will be a major industry on a par with drug testing. Imagine all the money if you get a percentage of 500,000 dollar fines per each infraction? People will be dedicating part of their lifetime earnings to paying off enormous fines to media companies and the government. People, there's just too much money floating around this issue; they'r are going to go dog-wild on us if we don't keep an eye on the IP maniacs.
The DMCA took away that status from the ISPs. They are now considered co-infringers if the "copyrighted" material is not removed immediately.
Curious. The first users and abusers of this provision was the Church of Scientology, who uses it like a sledgehammer to shut down sites critical of its activities. For all the bluster, the USENET group alt.religion.scientology was years ahead of the rest of the geek nation when it came to the implications of the DMCA.
NO ONE was very tall. You giant six footers are historical aberrations. Most adult men ranged in size from five to five and half feet tall for the last hundred thousand years, I'd speculate.
Look at old suits of armor the next time you are in a museum.
Actually, in the U.S. we have franchised copy centers, located in thousands of places. Kinkos is one such.
If one comes into such an establishment with a presumably copyrighted work such as a magazine or a book, the staff is required to stop you from using the photocopier, if they assume that you are about to use it to circumvent copyright law. The old Russian copying laws are alive and well in the U.S.A.
It is possible for a law to be unconstitutional, or to violate precedent, or to violate current law. But I do get your point.
The Japanese internment camps in California during WWII were illegal, but they were tolerated anyway. But I deny they were legal.