It's different than a police helicopter in the same way it would be different if police set up video cameras watching everything a beat cop might ever see. Rather than one cop walking down a block, say, you'd have several thousand video cameras pointed at everyone's windows and doors, monitored by software. Regardless of whether that's a realistic scenario, I hope you can see that there is a *difference* when technology is used to expand the surveilance capabilities of police and the government.
The human element makes it a patrol, which people generally accept. Pervasive surveilance is something entirely different, and leads to the kind of paranoia you're seeing here. At the very least, it's reasonable for people to be concerned about where all this is going.
Er, what do you think MS bases their decisions on, if not their beliefs about what gamers want? Do you think that somewhere in MS headquarters, someone is cackling with glee, saying "Wow, 1080P is really important to gamers, but we're not going to offer it just out of SPITE!"?
I guess I just don't see the (implied) incompetence or evil intent. If they thought something was important, they'd do it, no? And if they don't do something, presumably that means that they don't think it's important (enough) to gamers. They may be wrong, and the market will show if that's the case, but it sounds like you're trying to cast MS as somehow in the wrong about basic product design decisions that they have absolutely no incentive to be wrong about.
Yeah, I can't stand those people who make unssupported statements aimed at discrediting those who disagree with them. You're absolutely correct that relying on vague assertions and a generally dismissive attitude is the weakest form of argument, and it's unfortunate to see so much of it here.
Your insightful illustrations of why people are wrong about unions, supported with such irrefutable documentation of that way large corporations are directly responsible for anti-union misinformation, should surely serve as a model to us all. It's just unfortunate that everyone doesn't make such well-grounded arguments.
That's a pretty vehement opinion for someone clearly not educated on the issue.
Check out ICRA.org. Pretty much every porn site uses ICRA ratings, and most parental control software (and many browsers) support easily filtering based on ICRA ratings.
If your goal is truly to protect children, why not just require ICRA filtering software be installed on any computer that can be used by a child?.XXX made no sense; all it would have done is created huge grey areas, since everyone's definition of what's "harmful" to children differs. It was a terrible idea, and was rightfully opposed by pretty much everyone from porn companies to the fundies you so despise.
6 people can't agree on a movie to rent. 6 billion people sure aren't going to be able to agree on what content should be relegated to.xxx. The most effective way to limit your childrens' exposure to content you don't want them to see is to monitor their internet and technology usage. If you must have some kind of technological solution to your limitations as a parent,.kids mades a thousand times more sense, because it can have clear definitions of what is "safe," which is a hell of a lot easier and more reasonable than trying to move everything "unsafe" into a ghetto.
Have you considered getting some medication? That much anger can't be good for you. Something to calm your nerves might also give you a newfound appreciation for paragraph breaks.
I don't see any hypocrisy at all. Presumably, he respects both his children's and his models' right to decide their own lives. For his part, he'd recommend staying behind the scenes. Fair enough.
Your position is as twisted as someone in upper management refusing to hire programmers because they want their kid to get an MBA. Not everyone wants the same things in life.
Hate porn with as much vigor as you want, but at least be honest about your emotional response rather than concocting this tortured malarky.
Mission statements are a classic one. Everyone wants them to be short, but to also convey everything from marketing to technical to business to philosophical goals. That lends itself to buzzword-ization, and (worse) buzzword creation. I've seen crap like "marcommification" and "optionally recentralizable" in mission statements. Therapy has helped.
Best mission statement ever? Reebok in the 1990's: "Beat Nike." Some would argue against mentioning a competitor, etc, but if you acknowledge that you're not the market leader, and make it your goal to become the market leader, that's all anyone needs to know.
A proper mission statement is really simple: WTF are we all trying to do every day? If your company has an obfuscated, pretentions mission statement, consider the medium to be the message: "we're trying to impress each other and our investors." Not a great corporate goal.
Welcome to how corporate types have felt for years about techie jargon.
Management-speak, like tech speak, is a specialized jargon which, when properly used, simplifies and clarifies communication between peers. However, just like geek talk, it can be abused by the pretentious and self-promoting.
You know how you always cringe when someone in a movie talks about reversing the binary encryption bus, and everyone around you nods? Well, that's how (real) management types feel when they hear someone talking about synergistic upmarket brand dilution. There are poseurs in all fields, and fakes *love* jargon.
Just like some geeks actually know what they're talking about and can communicate in english when needed, if you give it some time you will find that there is a place in the world for management speak.
And, just like geek speak, don't hesitate to ask for an explanation. Just like pretentions geek wanna-be's, smarmy management wanna-be's can't explain what they just said because they're just buzzwording. And if they *can* explain, they're knowledgeable enough that you can stand to learn from 'em.
Better: dynamically change the names of form fields ("subject", "message", etc) based on the current time. MD5 hash the current hour with the field name, and have the software only check the current and previous values. Spam bots generally have to be told what field names to look for.
Best: have good moderators who kill spam and block IP's more or less instantly. Not practical for smaller sites, of course.
Are you really expressing shock and outrage that a public corporation is focused on the bottom line? Um, yeah -- if combatting piracy cost more than it earned, they wouldn't do it. You've really, er, made a point there. A rather obvious point to get all fired up about, in my opinion, but whatever floats your boat.
Just for kicks, can you elabortate on your moral outrage that Microsoft would refuse to give free updates for software that wasn't paid for? And how, exactly, did you get from a software company wanting to validate that a user asking for updates actually paid for the software to the (false) claim that it's illegal for banks to run a credit report before allowing someone to open an account?
(FYI, it is illegal for banks to require a social security number as an account identifier; it is perfectly legal for them to check and see if you represent an unwanted credit risk. And all banking is credit; even a savings account can be abused.)
Is there any rationale there at all, or just general anti-everything zealotry?
- "Harmful to minors" is in the eye of the beholder. It is unconstitutional for a law to be vague, since it means people can't know if they're breaking the law or not. Is a warez site "harmful to minors" since it corrupts their morals? How about frank discussions of wartime atrocities? Sites that debunk Santa Claus?
- This particular proposed law would require, for instance, websites for crappy teenage hijinks movies (Dukes of Hazard, etc) to use the.xxx domain. Basically, anything sexual that has no artistic or social merit gets taggede
- Laws like this impringe on adults' rights to free speech. Have a blog where you share your innermost thoughts? Hosted on a.com? Write about the hot sex you had last night, get fined (or go to jail).
And, of course, in addition to the blatant unconstitutionality, there's the fact that it's pointless:.com is an international domain.
The only solution for this kind of thing is a.kids type domain, where only content that meets certain criteria is allowed *in*. Trying to regulate the entire world's speech in the.com domain "for the children" is a bad idea, totally unconstitutional, and ultimately doomed to failure anyway, since.com is an internataionl domain.
With regards to the CAN-SPAM issue, sure, spam is bad and spammers are evil. But does anyone really want a court system where there's no requirement to prove that the defendent was aware of the illegal activities of their subcontractors? Just saying they "should have been" is emotionally rewarding, but I for one am glad that the judge here is insisting on proof.
Actually, car enthusiasts spend lots of time drooling over prototypes, "concept cars," and all sorts of other trivia about new cars long before their specs are final or the model even has a release date. Ask me how I know this:)
I don't see the problem. Casual gamers go down to Walmart and pick up a game. Enthusiasts eat up news months or years in advance. Is the idea here that those poor dumb enthusiasts who actively seek out news and rumour sites are suckered into hiding under a rock between the demos and the release, and then end up making a purchasing decision based on the demos? Just seems like weird logic to me.
Piracy may have some tiny, tiny role in the decline, but there are so many more important factors:
- Ticket prices going up
- Movie quality and originality going down
- Annoying "pre-show" ads in most theatres
- Misleading "start times" in most theatres
- Increasing affordability of decent home theater setups
- Netflix, et al
- The MPAA's increasing demonization of their customers ("I don't want to give money to *those* bastards")
At this point, I can take my girlfriend to see a movie and spend $30 for the two of us for one movie that we'll probably be disappointed in, or I can spend that same $30 on a 5-at-a-time plan from Netflix and watch maybe 10 classic and/or good movies in a month. The choice just isn't that hard: one crappy movie a month loaded with ads, or 10 good ones on a decent home theater setup.
Seeing as how all of the elements continuing to the trend are show no signs of slowing, I'd be surprised if it doesn't continue for the next several years.
But unless you're actually breaking the law, you can simply explain what you did -- show the receipts for freelancing, or have your parents call if they're gifting money to you, or whatever.
In short, as long as you can prove that you're innocent, you've got nothing to worry about.
Chording might be a reasonable solution; imagine in your BF2 sceario if the Q key meant controlling the chopper, and holding it down changedd the functions of the other keys on the left side, such that Q+T = bail out.
I'm not saying that's the best solution, just that there need not be a one-to-one correlation between possible interactions with a game and number of buttons required.
Well, what can I say? I'm more into gameplay than how many pixel shaders or polygons are being used onscreen. I *could* play the hottest, fanciest games that take (more) advantage of the expensive hardware... but they just don't look like that much fun to me.
So, yeah, my life would have been perfectly complete with a PC, a decent USB control, a usb headset, and Ventrillo. Oh, assuming I cound find games with a similar level of fun gameplay and people online to play them with.
But, for me, it was worth $500 or so to be able to just plunk down in front of the TV, open a beer, start Marble Blast, and get my ass handed to my by some obnoxious kid halfway around the world.
So I stand by my point: the "problem" is illusory, and is in fact a good thing for consumers. Making gameplay and word of mouth more important for a game's success has led to cheaper, more fun games. If EA is losing out because they're institutionally incapable of delivering either 1) a fun game, or 2) any game at all with less than 250 people on the team making it, it's not going to keep me up at night.
Mark my words: availability of inexpensive, fun downloadable games is going to do the same thing to EA and the other big producers that cable TV's myriad of channels did to the big networks. And that is a Good Thing.
Do you actually own a 360, or is that just an impression?
For my part, I bought the thing specifically to play the xbox live arcade games that I'd heard so much about: geometry wars, marble blast, etc. Since then, I've discovered another 5 or 7 games that make me totally happy with the purchase -- and each one of those games cost $10 or less.
I also spent $60 on madden 2006, and have played it for a total of about 10 minutes. That purchase I do regret.
So maybe the "problem" is that the downloadable games favor cheaper, more fun, easier to produce games over huge, expensive, marketing-driven games. Less revenue for game developers, but less expense and more fun for consumers. I'm just not going to lose sleep over that one.
Of course, spammers would go around to every site and add their own href's that pretended to me mirrors, but actually redirected to their own sites (or downloaded malware instead of the intended app).
I think the internet already has enough issues surrounding authentication and identity; no need to break something as basic as the web with yet another one.
Most people would *not* consdier the functional purpose of nudie pics to be seeing as many pixels of detail as possible. In fact, for many peoples' functional purpose, a thumbnail does just fine.
Are you suggesting that only people who gamble, do drugs, or hire prostitutes ask for government handouts? Or that they do so disproportinately?
If you can show a causal linkage between gambling and asking for government handouts that isn't there for other high-risk havior (skydiving, say, or day trading), you'll have a better argument. Otherwise, the whole "we need to limit everyone's freedom because the only people who use the freedom to do X are a burden on society" argument is a little weak.
Politicians have absolutely NO RIGHT nor should they have the power to tell the population what is right or moral for what sould be completely obvious reasons to anyone smarter than the average barnyard monkey.
I am confused by your point.
Who keeps monkeys in barns? Doesn't it seem like they'd always be escaping and causing mayhem? And is the average barnyard monkey more or less intelligent than the average monkey in general? And how do they get along with horses, anyway?
Porn will be illegal soon? Yeah, you're right... I have been noticing a severe drop in the number of porn sites recently. Online porn is a $3 billion business, which means it has a lot of clout. There is no way a buisiness that brings in that kind of money will let itself be legislated out of existance (Cigarettes are way more harmfull than Porn, but cig corporations are still making a ton of money).
Look at my email address. I know a little bit about this topic.
The so-called social conservatives are smarter than to outright outlaw porn -- instead, they're concentrating on making the regulatory burdens so great that it's impossible to produce or distribute porn in the US legally. A subtle distinction, but an important one. For instance, if the FSC loses the court battle over the new 2257 regulations, US companies won't be able to accept foreign passports as proof of age. Worse, a company in Los Angeles shooting porn overseas would have to have someone in their Los Angeles office at any hour, day or night, when shooting was taking place overseas. You want to go to work at 3am and sit around waiting for an inspection?
I know several people who have sold their adult businesses to overseas concerns for fear of prosecution here in the US. Not for anything illegal, just for basic porn. Even more people are moving their servers overseas, which I personally think is pointless, but some people believe it will help.
Believe what you want, but there is a well funded, very intelligently run effort to get rid of porn in general in the US, not just on the internet. It's hopeless and stupid, of course, but that doesn't make it any less dangerous
As for free speech, who needs laws? Heard about NTFU?. They got shut down for posting pics from Iraq. Government landed on them with both feet with a 300 or so obscenity charges; got the guy jailed without bail (!), got a plea bargain, got the site shut down. No more unauthorized pics from Iraq.
So snide insinuations aside and generally smugly superior tone aside, what are your credentials for being knowledgeable in this area? Do you think the new Supreme Court will uphold the 10th circuit's Sundance ruling? Can I suggest some reading?
Pornography is *not* illegal in the US, despite what many people think of it.
Yet.
And we certainly don't setup nation-wide firewalls to enforce laws that we don't have.
Yet.
Nor do we raid and shutdown free speech projects like FreeNET, even if bad guys abuse it to spread illegal materials.
Yet.
All things that our "public servants" in washington are working on (well, the firewall won't happen until we drive porn companies and servers overseas, but mark my words: it's a matter of time). China isn't wrong about what the west (or the US, at least) is up to. They're just more honest about their intentions.
Slashdot Mirror
It's different than a police helicopter in the same way it would be different if police set up video cameras watching everything a beat cop might ever see. Rather than one cop walking down a block, say, you'd have several thousand video cameras pointed at everyone's windows and doors, monitored by software. Regardless of whether that's a realistic scenario, I hope you can see that there is a *difference* when technology is used to expand the surveilance capabilities of police and the government.
The human element makes it a patrol, which people generally accept. Pervasive surveilance is something entirely different, and leads to the kind of paranoia you're seeing here. At the very least, it's reasonable for people to be concerned about where all this is going.
-b
Er, what do you think MS bases their decisions on, if not their beliefs about what gamers want? Do you think that somewhere in MS headquarters, someone is cackling with glee, saying "Wow, 1080P is really important to gamers, but we're not going to offer it just out of SPITE!"?
I guess I just don't see the (implied) incompetence or evil intent. If they thought something was important, they'd do it, no? And if they don't do something, presumably that means that they don't think it's important (enough) to gamers. They may be wrong, and the market will show if that's the case, but it sounds like you're trying to cast MS as somehow in the wrong about basic product design decisions that they have absolutely no incentive to be wrong about.
-b
Yeah, I can't stand those people who make unssupported statements aimed at discrediting those who disagree with them. You're absolutely correct that relying on vague assertions and a generally dismissive attitude is the weakest form of argument, and it's unfortunate to see so much of it here.
Your insightful illustrations of why people are wrong about unions, supported with such irrefutable documentation of that way large corporations are directly responsible for anti-union misinformation, should surely serve as a model to us all. It's just unfortunate that everyone doesn't make such well-grounded arguments.
-b
That's a pretty vehement opinion for someone clearly not educated on the issue.
.XXX made no sense; all it would have done is created huge grey areas, since everyone's definition of what's "harmful" to children differs. It was a terrible idea, and was rightfully opposed by pretty much everyone from porn companies to the fundies you so despise.
.xxx. The most effective way to limit your childrens' exposure to content you don't want them to see is to monitor their internet and technology usage. If you must have some kind of technological solution to your limitations as a parent, .kids mades a thousand times more sense, because it can have clear definitions of what is "safe," which is a hell of a lot easier and more reasonable than trying to move everything "unsafe" into a ghetto.
Check out ICRA.org. Pretty much every porn site uses ICRA ratings, and most parental control software (and many browsers) support easily filtering based on ICRA ratings.
If your goal is truly to protect children, why not just require ICRA filtering software be installed on any computer that can be used by a child?
6 people can't agree on a movie to rent. 6 billion people sure aren't going to be able to agree on what content should be relegated to
-b
Have you considered getting some medication? That much anger can't be good for you. Something to calm your nerves might also give you a newfound appreciation for paragraph breaks.
I don't see any hypocrisy at all. Presumably, he respects both his children's and his models' right to decide their own lives. For his part, he'd recommend staying behind the scenes. Fair enough.
Your position is as twisted as someone in upper management refusing to hire programmers because they want their kid to get an MBA. Not everyone wants the same things in life.
Hate porn with as much vigor as you want, but at least be honest about your emotional response rather than concocting this tortured malarky.
-b
Mission statements are a classic one. Everyone wants them to be short, but to also convey everything from marketing to technical to business to philosophical goals. That lends itself to buzzword-ization, and (worse) buzzword creation. I've seen crap like "marcommification" and "optionally recentralizable" in mission statements. Therapy has helped.
Best mission statement ever? Reebok in the 1990's: "Beat Nike." Some would argue against mentioning a competitor, etc, but if you acknowledge that you're not the market leader, and make it your goal to become the market leader, that's all anyone needs to know.
A proper mission statement is really simple: WTF are we all trying to do every day? If your company has an obfuscated, pretentions mission statement, consider the medium to be the message: "we're trying to impress each other and our investors." Not a great corporate goal.
-b
Welcome to how corporate types have felt for years about techie jargon.
Management-speak, like tech speak, is a specialized jargon which, when properly used, simplifies and clarifies communication between peers. However, just like geek talk, it can be abused by the pretentious and self-promoting.
You know how you always cringe when someone in a movie talks about reversing the binary encryption bus, and everyone around you nods? Well, that's how (real) management types feel when they hear someone talking about synergistic upmarket brand dilution. There are poseurs in all fields, and fakes *love* jargon.
Just like some geeks actually know what they're talking about and can communicate in english when needed, if you give it some time you will find that there is a place in the world for management speak.
And, just like geek speak, don't hesitate to ask for an explanation. Just like pretentions geek wanna-be's, smarmy management wanna-be's can't explain what they just said because they're just buzzwording. And if they *can* explain, they're knowledgeable enough that you can stand to learn from 'em.
-b
Good: CAPTCHA
Better: dynamically change the names of form fields ("subject", "message", etc) based on the current time. MD5 hash the current hour with the field name, and have the software only check the current and previous values. Spam bots generally have to be told what field names to look for.
Best: have good moderators who kill spam and block IP's more or less instantly. Not practical for smaller sites, of course.
-b
Are you really expressing shock and outrage that a public corporation is focused on the bottom line? Um, yeah -- if combatting piracy cost more than it earned, they wouldn't do it. You've really, er, made a point there. A rather obvious point to get all fired up about, in my opinion, but whatever floats your boat.
Just for kicks, can you elabortate on your moral outrage that Microsoft would refuse to give free updates for software that wasn't paid for? And how, exactly, did you get from a software company wanting to validate that a user asking for updates actually paid for the software to the (false) claim that it's illegal for banks to run a credit report before allowing someone to open an account?
(FYI, it is illegal for banks to require a social security number as an account identifier; it is perfectly legal for them to check and see if you represent an unwanted credit risk. And all banking is credit; even a savings account can be abused.)
Is there any rationale there at all, or just general anti-everything zealotry?
-b
That's not it at all. There are several issues:
.xxx domain. Basically, anything sexual that has no artistic or social merit gets taggede
.com? Write about the hot sex you had last night, get fined (or go to jail).
.com is an international domain.
.kids type domain, where only content that meets certain criteria is allowed *in*. Trying to regulate the entire world's speech in the .com domain "for the children" is a bad idea, totally unconstitutional, and ultimately doomed to failure anyway, since .com is an internataionl domain.
- "Harmful to minors" is in the eye of the beholder. It is unconstitutional for a law to be vague, since it means people can't know if they're breaking the law or not. Is a warez site "harmful to minors" since it corrupts their morals? How about frank discussions of wartime atrocities? Sites that debunk Santa Claus?
- This particular proposed law would require, for instance, websites for crappy teenage hijinks movies (Dukes of Hazard, etc) to use the
- Laws like this impringe on adults' rights to free speech. Have a blog where you share your innermost thoughts? Hosted on a
And, of course, in addition to the blatant unconstitutionality, there's the fact that it's pointless:
The only solution for this kind of thing is a
-b
With regards to the CAN-SPAM issue, sure, spam is bad and spammers are evil. But does anyone really want a court system where there's no requirement to prove that the defendent was aware of the illegal activities of their subcontractors? Just saying they "should have been" is emotionally rewarding, but I for one am glad that the judge here is insisting on proof.
-b
Actually, car enthusiasts spend lots of time drooling over prototypes, "concept cars," and all sorts of other trivia about new cars long before their specs are final or the model even has a release date. Ask me how I know this :)
I don't see the problem. Casual gamers go down to Walmart and pick up a game. Enthusiasts eat up news months or years in advance. Is the idea here that those poor dumb enthusiasts who actively seek out news and rumour sites are suckered into hiding under a rock between the demos and the release, and then end up making a purchasing decision based on the demos? Just seems like weird logic to me.
-b
Piracy may have some tiny, tiny role in the decline, but there are so many more important factors:
- Ticket prices going up
- Movie quality and originality going down
- Annoying "pre-show" ads in most theatres
- Misleading "start times" in most theatres
- Increasing affordability of decent home theater setups
- Netflix, et al
- The MPAA's increasing demonization of their customers ("I don't want to give money to *those* bastards")
At this point, I can take my girlfriend to see a movie and spend $30 for the two of us for one movie that we'll probably be disappointed in, or I can spend that same $30 on a 5-at-a-time plan from Netflix and watch maybe 10 classic and/or good movies in a month. The choice just isn't that hard: one crappy movie a month loaded with ads, or 10 good ones on a decent home theater setup.
Seeing as how all of the elements continuing to the trend are show no signs of slowing, I'd be surprised if it doesn't continue for the next several years.
-b
In short, as long as you can prove that you're innocent, you've got nothing to worry about.
-b
Chording might be a reasonable solution; imagine in your BF2 sceario if the Q key meant controlling the chopper, and holding it down changedd the functions of the other keys on the left side, such that Q+T = bail out.
I'm not saying that's the best solution, just that there need not be a one-to-one correlation between possible interactions with a game and number of buttons required.
-b
Well, what can I say? I'm more into gameplay than how many pixel shaders or polygons are being used onscreen. I *could* play the hottest, fanciest games that take (more) advantage of the expensive hardware... but they just don't look like that much fun to me.
So, yeah, my life would have been perfectly complete with a PC, a decent USB control, a usb headset, and Ventrillo. Oh, assuming I cound find games with a similar level of fun gameplay and people online to play them with.
But, for me, it was worth $500 or so to be able to just plunk down in front of the TV, open a beer, start Marble Blast, and get my ass handed to my by some obnoxious kid halfway around the world.
So I stand by my point: the "problem" is illusory, and is in fact a good thing for consumers. Making gameplay and word of mouth more important for a game's success has led to cheaper, more fun games. If EA is losing out because they're institutionally incapable of delivering either 1) a fun game, or 2) any game at all with less than 250 people on the team making it, it's not going to keep me up at night.
Mark my words: availability of inexpensive, fun downloadable games is going to do the same thing to EA and the other big producers that cable TV's myriad of channels did to the big networks. And that is a Good Thing.
-b
Do you actually own a 360, or is that just an impression?
For my part, I bought the thing specifically to play the xbox live arcade games that I'd heard so much about: geometry wars, marble blast, etc. Since then, I've discovered another 5 or 7 games that make me totally happy with the purchase -- and each one of those games cost $10 or less.
I also spent $60 on madden 2006, and have played it for a total of about 10 minutes. That purchase I do regret.
So maybe the "problem" is that the downloadable games favor cheaper, more fun, easier to produce games over huge, expensive, marketing-driven games. Less revenue for game developers, but less expense and more fun for consumers. I'm just not going to lose sleep over that one.
-b
Of course, spammers would go around to every site and add their own href's that pretended to me mirrors, but actually redirected to their own sites (or downloaded malware instead of the intended app).
I think the internet already has enough issues surrounding authentication and identity; no need to break something as basic as the web with yet another one.
-b
Well, you definitely win your geek merit badge :)
Most people would *not* consdier the functional purpose of nudie pics to be seeing as many pixels of detail as possible. In fact, for many peoples' functional purpose, a thumbnail does just fine.
-b
Some pretty broad generalizations there.
Are you suggesting that only people who gamble, do drugs, or hire prostitutes ask for government handouts? Or that they do so disproportinately?
If you can show a causal linkage between gambling and asking for government handouts that isn't there for other high-risk havior (skydiving, say, or day trading), you'll have a better argument. Otherwise, the whole "we need to limit everyone's freedom because the only people who use the freedom to do X are a burden on society" argument is a little weak.
-b
I am confused by your point.
Who keeps monkeys in barns? Doesn't it seem like they'd always be escaping and causing mayhem? And is the average barnyard monkey more or less intelligent than the average monkey in general? And how do they get along with horses, anyway?
-b
Look at my email address. I know a little bit about this topic.
The so-called social conservatives are smarter than to outright outlaw porn -- instead, they're concentrating on making the regulatory burdens so great that it's impossible to produce or distribute porn in the US legally. A subtle distinction, but an important one. For instance, if the FSC loses the court battle over the new 2257 regulations, US companies won't be able to accept foreign passports as proof of age. Worse, a company in Los Angeles shooting porn overseas would have to have someone in their Los Angeles office at any hour, day or night, when shooting was taking place overseas. You want to go to work at 3am and sit around waiting for an inspection?
I know several people who have sold their adult businesses to overseas concerns for fear of prosecution here in the US. Not for anything illegal, just for basic porn. Even more people are moving their servers overseas, which I personally think is pointless, but some people believe it will help.
Believe what you want, but there is a well funded, very intelligently run effort to get rid of porn in general in the US, not just on the internet. It's hopeless and stupid, of course, but that doesn't make it any less dangerous
As for free speech, who needs laws? Heard about NTFU?. They got shut down for posting pics from Iraq. Government landed on them with both feet with a 300 or so obscenity charges; got the guy jailed without bail (!), got a plea bargain, got the site shut down. No more unauthorized pics from Iraq.
So snide insinuations aside and generally smugly superior tone aside, what are your credentials for being knowledgeable in this area? Do you think the new Supreme Court will uphold the 10th circuit's Sundance ruling? Can I suggest some reading?
-b
No, just in one long stripe along the equator.
-b
All things that our "public servants" in washington are working on (well, the firewall won't happen until we drive porn companies and servers overseas, but mark my words: it's a matter of time). China isn't wrong about what the west (or the US, at least) is up to. They're just more honest about their intentions.
-b
That's also why they paint the black helicopters white. Bet that doesn't fool you, either.
-b