If the question is whether porn should be banned, the question of whether it can, in some cases, be harmful is irrelevant. We don't ban milk just because some people are lactose intolerant; likewise, we don't ban porn just because some people are in porn-intolerant marriages.
My original point stands: if you're going to ban porn because it may be harmful to some marriages, then you need to ban science fiction and video games as well. And if you're not going to ban it despite it potentially being harmful to some marriages, then what was the point of your post? I doubt anyone in a marriage that could potentially be harmed by porn is unaware of that fact, so I can't even call you informative.
Saying the PSAs are "awesomely ridiculous" is not the same as saying that it's silly to avoid porn. PSAs are awesomely ridiculous more often than not, even when they're arguing against things that most sane people would avoid, like random violence or heroin addiction.
Having been married for plenty of years, I've concluded that pornography can actually quite harmful to some marriages if not most marriages.
So can video games, interest in science fiction, political conviction, religion, lack of religion, overeating, eating (or not eating) the wrong things, etc., etc. Should we legislate all those as well? Or put out PSAs to try to drive people away from those things?
The same way they do with all the other of thousands of laws that are based, in part or in whole, on intent. Murder is a matter of intent--without intent, it's generally considered manslaughter. Intent in copyright and patent cases can result in triple damages. You'd be hard-pressed to find a law where intent isn't a factor. That's one of the reasons the courts use juries--to judge intent.
Actually, it doesn't even have to annoy or offend you. They just have to have intended to annoy or offend you. Which is good, because I'm hard to offend, but I can still take advantage of this law and sue everyone who posts even a mildly snarky response to one of my posts.
Of course, I may have to moderate my own tendencies towards online snark, but surely that's a small price to pay for the ability to sue such a large number of random commenters. Suing people is fun and rewarding.
(Uh oh, I think my last para may have revealed a bit of snark towards the creators of this bill, who live in AZ. If they see through my mild tone to my plain intent to annoy and offend, I could be in big trouble!):)
That doesn't even begin to address the issues. I suspect he was trying to make a joke, but his psuedo-code was so bad that the joke was entirely lost--I can't even begin to guess what he was trying to convey. Furthermore, posting psuedo-code that bad/buggy on slashdot is hardly a way to gain geek cred points.
Nope, it's the other way around. Homeopathy claims that if you dilute something harmful to the point where none of it is left, the ghost memory of its existance will protect you. So, to cure a stomache ache, find something that causes stomache aches, dilute it to the point where none is left, and consume the pure water that results. OP had it exactly right--except that the dilution probably hasn't gone far enough yet.
Plus, I think you're supposed to dilute the substance in a series of steps, each of which involves a 10:1 dilution. Given that this is magical thinking, I'm not sure if the exact factor of dilution matters, but I suspect it probably does. If you dilute it by a random amount--even if that random amount results in the same result (0% of the original substance)--it probably won't work because you didn't perform the exact required number of steps with the exact required level of dilution at each step. Plus, I think you have to have been bitten by a radioactive spider before you're qualified to perform the dilutions.:)
You can still eat a 1500kcal popcorn bucket if you so choose, nobody is forcing you to look at the nutritional information label.
More importantly: you can still eat a 1500kcal popcorn bucket even if you do choose to look at the nutritional information.
(As a side note, totally irrelevant to anything you said, all of which I basically agree with: please learn what a "comma splice" is and how to avoid it.)
Wait, so sexual predators are people who go exclusively after 18-year-olds? No older, no younger?
Even if I assume that slashdot ate your '<' and you really meant "user_a.age<=18", that's still flawed in two ways: 1) 18 is legal (so '<=' was not the right operator to use), and, 2) in most states (and most countries outside the US), 17 is legal, and in several states (and several countries), 16 is legal. Also many sexual predators (possibly most) go after adults and/or don't really care about the age of their victim.
Misleading perhaps, but not technically incorrect. For Slashdot, that's a case of "better than it often is". On top of that, the important distinction is clarified by reading the summary--you don't even need to RTFA to figure out what's going on. For Slashdot, that's definitely better than usual.:)
So us Australians should put all our [taxpayers] research that we funded into the public domain for other countries to use for free?
That's how it (theoretically) works in the US. Technically, for example, all the parts of SELinux that aren't a direct-derivative of Linux are in the public domain. Of course, companies that work for the government have all sorts of tricks to get around this. The government doesn't design planes--Boeing does.
Also, information can be classified and in the public domain. Public domain just means that nobody owns the copyright. FBI and CIA files are all technically in the public domain, but you generally need to file a Freedom of Information Act Request to get access to them (with no guarantees the request will succeed).
Bottom line, though--huge amounts of the technology you use every day was funded by the US taxpayers. TCP/IP is in the public domain because it was developed by US Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
He wasn't "sacked for heresy"--he wasn't sacked. He resigned. And only as head of the project. He's still a scientist. Heading a project is generally a heavily political position--you're in charge of funding and administrivia. Being the primary name associated with this project and very public mistake wasn't a scientific misstep, but it was a political one. So now he's out of politics (by his own choice), but I see no sign that he's out of science.
In contrast, a priest who spouted heresy from the pulpit would likely be ousted completely, and not voluntarily.
The rootkit actually came from BMG. Yes, they were owned by Sony when it was released, but they had just been bought. Unless they had truly miraculous coding skills, the rootkit must have been planned, designed and mostly implemented by BMG independently.
Yes, they revoked the ability to boot into Linux, but they were the only console vendors to offer such an option in the first place. And before that, they actually sold full Linux kits for the PS, including their own distro. I actually bought my PS3 in part because it had the OtherOS option, and I still think I made the best choice at the time despite later developments.
Everything else you said is very true, but their current stance on such matters is actually more surprising than a naive glance might suggest--and a naive glance is all that most slashdotters (or people in general) can muster.
Yes, there are regional British accents, but when considered as a whole they are clearly distinct from American ones.
Yes, that's why Americans so often think that Aussie or Kiwi or Boston accents are British. Because the set of British accents is so clearly distinctive.
The original author of cron and bind is a "tech writer"? The man who claims to hold the record for the most CERT advisories due to a single author? When it comes to the Internet, the man has at least demi-god status, and when it comes to DNS, I think you have to call him a full-fledged god.
Well, given that all the first-page results from Murdoch+Palpatine are about their surprising similarity, while all the first-page results from Murdoch+Furter are about Rocky Horror showing on channels that Murdoch owns, I'm going to say...not much.:)
Anyone who's old enough to remember the first moon landing knows that. Our notions of how the solar system was formed, and in particular, how the moon was formed, have undergone drastic modification as physical evidence started coming in. When I was young, the accreted-from-the-same-cloud theory was still the prevailing one. My parents may well remember the Mars-has-canals theory.
As I understand it, the mass, composition, and age of the moon are all wrong for that that theory (which was the prevailing hypothesis when I was young).
Wikipedia says: "the co-formation of the Earth and the Moon together in the primordial accretion disk [...] does not explain the depletion of metallic iron in the Moon." It also doesn't explain the 40 million years or so difference in age betwen the Earth and the Moon.
Given the recent SCOTUS decision about the patentability of "laws of nature" (Mayo v Prometheus), following right on the heels of Bilski, I would be dumping software patents as fast as I could, and would be overjoyed to find someone like Facebook willing to pay me for them.
Except that first-to-file is irrelevant to prior art, and prior art means just as much (or little) as it ever did. First-to-file has had exactly zero change on prior art and how it affects patents. The only thing that's really changed is that some silly people who refuse to understand first-to-file like to run around screaming that the sky is falling.
Really. Four digits in my id, and you think I must be new here?
This is the planet where...
Oh, you mean here on Earth? But this wasn't just posted on Earth--it was posted on Slashdot. News for Nerds! When it comes to idiotic ignorance, we reserve that for: what women want, how governments and companies work, what a marketing department does, what "offsides" means, why anyone might think that software is patentable, why anyone would care about aesthetics or bathing, and similar questions.
When it comes to physics and astronomy and anything else that might have to do with SciFi, our knowledge is second to none. So why post all that stuff here? On Fox/MSNBC, sure. But why here?
Well the first step is to not know anything of what you just said about Betelgeuse.
Sorry, I thought this was slashdot. We may not RTFA; we may not know how to pleasure a woman, or what a goverment does, but when it comes to computers or tech or Star Wars or Star Trek or anything to do with stars, really, I expect a level of knowledge second to none. If you really need to be told any of this stuff, I think you may be on the wrong site.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, that's funny. My BASIC parser threw at the "introduce". :)
If the question is whether porn should be banned, the question of whether it can, in some cases, be harmful is irrelevant. We don't ban milk just because some people are lactose intolerant; likewise, we don't ban porn just because some people are in porn-intolerant marriages.
My original point stands: if you're going to ban porn because it may be harmful to some marriages, then you need to ban science fiction and video games as well. And if you're not going to ban it despite it potentially being harmful to some marriages, then what was the point of your post? I doubt anyone in a marriage that could potentially be harmed by porn is unaware of that fact, so I can't even call you informative.
Saying the PSAs are "awesomely ridiculous" is not the same as saying that it's silly to avoid porn. PSAs are awesomely ridiculous more often than not, even when they're arguing against things that most sane people would avoid, like random violence or heroin addiction.
Having been married for plenty of years, I've concluded that pornography can actually quite harmful to some marriages if not most marriages.
So can video games, interest in science fiction, political conviction, religion, lack of religion, overeating, eating (or not eating) the wrong things, etc., etc. Should we legislate all those as well? Or put out PSAs to try to drive people away from those things?
The same way they do with all the other of thousands of laws that are based, in part or in whole, on intent. Murder is a matter of intent--without intent, it's generally considered manslaughter. Intent in copyright and patent cases can result in triple damages. You'd be hard-pressed to find a law where intent isn't a factor. That's one of the reasons the courts use juries--to judge intent.
Actually, it doesn't even have to annoy or offend you. They just have to have intended to annoy or offend you. Which is good, because I'm hard to offend, but I can still take advantage of this law and sue everyone who posts even a mildly snarky response to one of my posts.
Of course, I may have to moderate my own tendencies towards online snark, but surely that's a small price to pay for the ability to sue such a large number of random commenters. Suing people is fun and rewarding.
(Uh oh, I think my last para may have revealed a bit of snark towards the creators of this bill, who live in AZ. If they see through my mild tone to my plain intent to annoy and offend, I could be in big trouble!) :)
That doesn't even begin to address the issues. I suspect he was trying to make a joke, but his psuedo-code was so bad that the joke was entirely lost--I can't even begin to guess what he was trying to convey. Furthermore, posting psuedo-code that bad/buggy on slashdot is hardly a way to gain geek cred points.
Nope, it's the other way around. Homeopathy claims that if you dilute something harmful to the point where none of it is left, the ghost memory of its existance will protect you. So, to cure a stomache ache, find something that causes stomache aches, dilute it to the point where none is left, and consume the pure water that results. OP had it exactly right--except that the dilution probably hasn't gone far enough yet.
Plus, I think you're supposed to dilute the substance in a series of steps, each of which involves a 10:1 dilution. Given that this is magical thinking, I'm not sure if the exact factor of dilution matters, but I suspect it probably does. If you dilute it by a random amount--even if that random amount results in the same result (0% of the original substance)--it probably won't work because you didn't perform the exact required number of steps with the exact required level of dilution at each step. Plus, I think you have to have been bitten by a radioactive spider before you're qualified to perform the dilutions. :)
If you post calories then people buy less popcorn, so you reduce concession sales.
[Citation needed]
As far as I can tell, most of the theater-going public seems to consider the purchase of popcorn a mandatory part of the theater experience.
You can still eat a 1500kcal popcorn bucket if you so choose, nobody is forcing you to look at the nutritional information label.
More importantly: you can still eat a 1500kcal popcorn bucket even if you do choose to look at the nutritional information.
(As a side note, totally irrelevant to anything you said, all of which I basically agree with: please learn what a "comma splice" is and how to avoid it.)
Wait, so sexual predators are people who go exclusively after 18-year-olds? No older, no younger?
Even if I assume that slashdot ate your '<' and you really meant "user_a.age<=18", that's still flawed in two ways: 1) 18 is legal (so '<=' was not the right operator to use), and, 2) in most states (and most countries outside the US), 17 is legal, and in several states (and several countries), 16 is legal. Also many sexual predators (possibly most) go after adults and/or don't really care about the age of their victim.
Misleading perhaps, but not technically incorrect. For Slashdot, that's a case of "better than it often is". On top of that, the important distinction is clarified by reading the summary--you don't even need to RTFA to figure out what's going on. For Slashdot, that's definitely better than usual. :)
So us Australians should put all our [taxpayers] research that we funded into the public domain for other countries to use for free?
That's how it (theoretically) works in the US. Technically, for example, all the parts of SELinux that aren't a direct-derivative of Linux are in the public domain. Of course, companies that work for the government have all sorts of tricks to get around this. The government doesn't design planes--Boeing does.
Also, information can be classified and in the public domain. Public domain just means that nobody owns the copyright. FBI and CIA files are all technically in the public domain, but you generally need to file a Freedom of Information Act Request to get access to them (with no guarantees the request will succeed).
Bottom line, though--huge amounts of the technology you use every day was funded by the US taxpayers. TCP/IP is in the public domain because it was developed by US Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
He wasn't "sacked for heresy"--he wasn't sacked. He resigned. And only as head of the project. He's still a scientist. Heading a project is generally a heavily political position--you're in charge of funding and administrivia. Being the primary name associated with this project and very public mistake wasn't a scientific misstep, but it was a political one. So now he's out of politics (by his own choice), but I see no sign that he's out of science.
In contrast, a priest who spouted heresy from the pulpit would likely be ousted completely, and not voluntarily.
The rootkit actually came from BMG. Yes, they were owned by Sony when it was released, but they had just been bought. Unless they had truly miraculous coding skills, the rootkit must have been planned, designed and mostly implemented by BMG independently.
Yes, they revoked the ability to boot into Linux, but they were the only console vendors to offer such an option in the first place. And before that, they actually sold full Linux kits for the PS, including their own distro. I actually bought my PS3 in part because it had the OtherOS option, and I still think I made the best choice at the time despite later developments.
Everything else you said is very true, but their current stance on such matters is actually more surprising than a naive glance might suggest--and a naive glance is all that most slashdotters (or people in general) can muster.
The standard term is General American" (GE) or "Standard American Accent" (SAE). It's not an average (or even just average).
Yes, there are regional British accents, but when considered as a whole they are clearly distinct from American ones.
Yes, that's why Americans so often think that Aussie or Kiwi or Boston accents are British. Because the set of British accents is so clearly distinctive.
The original author of cron and bind is a "tech writer"? The man who claims to hold the record for the most CERT advisories due to a single author? When it comes to the Internet, the man has at least demi-god status, and when it comes to DNS, I think you have to call him a full-fledged god.
Well, given that all the first-page results from Murdoch+Palpatine are about their surprising similarity, while all the first-page results from Murdoch+Furter are about Rocky Horror showing on channels that Murdoch owns, I'm going to say...not much. :)
Anyone who's old enough to remember the first moon landing knows that. Our notions of how the solar system was formed, and in particular, how the moon was formed, have undergone drastic modification as physical evidence started coming in. When I was young, the accreted-from-the-same-cloud theory was still the prevailing one. My parents may well remember the Mars-has-canals theory.
As I understand it, the mass, composition, and age of the moon are all wrong for that that theory (which was the prevailing hypothesis when I was young).
Wikipedia says: "the co-formation of the Earth and the Moon together in the primordial accretion disk [...] does not explain the depletion of metallic iron in the Moon." It also doesn't explain the 40 million years or so difference in age betwen the Earth and the Moon.
Given the recent SCOTUS decision about the patentability of "laws of nature" (Mayo v Prometheus), following right on the heels of Bilski, I would be dumping software patents as fast as I could, and would be overjoyed to find someone like Facebook willing to pay me for them.
Once again, IBM proves that they're no dummies. :)
Except that first-to-file is irrelevant to prior art, and prior art means just as much (or little) as it ever did. First-to-file has had exactly zero change on prior art and how it affects patents. The only thing that's really changed is that some silly people who refuse to understand first-to-file like to run around screaming that the sky is falling.
You must be new here.
Really. Four digits in my id, and you think I must be new here?
This is the planet where...
Oh, you mean here on Earth? But this wasn't just posted on Earth--it was posted on Slashdot. News for Nerds! When it comes to idiotic ignorance, we reserve that for: what women want, how governments and companies work, what a marketing department does, what "offsides" means, why anyone might think that software is patentable, why anyone would care about aesthetics or bathing, and similar questions.
When it comes to physics and astronomy and anything else that might have to do with SciFi, our knowledge is second to none. So why post all that stuff here? On Fox/MSNBC, sure. But why here?
Well the first step is to not know anything of what you just said about Betelgeuse.
Sorry, I thought this was slashdot. We may not RTFA; we may not know how to pleasure a woman, or what a goverment does, but when it comes to computers or tech or Star Wars or Star Trek or anything to do with stars, really, I expect a level of knowledge second to none. If you really need to be told any of this stuff, I think you may be on the wrong site.