When you think how eager the German government is to collect, filter, file and dissect data passing through the internet pipes, the whole deal feels a bit hollow
I lived in small, rural town in Thailand for 3 months last year with my Thai girlfriend and her family and we talked about the King a number of times. Never once did I get any hint that they were afraid of not liking him. They liked him because he was a good man and he had done a lot for his country.
The Lèse majesté trials are known and well publicized. And while you might not agree with the law it is the law in Thailand so while in their country you have to live by their laws.
The 43,000 sites that defame him are only in the opinion of the government, not the King. The King himself has never invoked the law. It was the government that passed the law and it is the government that files the charges. The King has even stated that he is not above being criticised and routinely pardons people found guilty. As a constitutional monarch he can not change the law or stop the government from laying charges but granting pardons is within his power.
Last year I lived for 3 months in a small, rural town in NE Thailand and I can tell you that a lot has change from what you describe of Thailand in 1974 (it's OK to swat a fly now) but culturally it is still like landing on Mars. I think the availability of TV and the internet have played a big part in that. When you have a window out to the rest of the world it's going to have an impact on your views and expectations of your life. It always amazed me every time I saw one of the 2 or 3 room shacks with a tin roof on the edge of town with a satellite dish.
They're still very protective of the King's image but I didn't get the impression it was because they saw him as a god or anything but simply because they have a tremendous amount of respect and gratitude for what he and his wife have done for the country. He is the one stabilizing force in a country that has had tremendous political upheaval in the last 60 years.
I would compare this to the way the British viewed the "Queen Mum". She and her husband King George were an important symbol during WWII as they stayed in London throughout the war. Even though there was no law against it I'm sure more than a few Brits would have a less than polite reaction to anyone who insulted or criticised her in any way. Of course, the Thai approach to protecting the King is more extreme but having spent time living in their world the way they do I understand their view.
Every business and home does have a picture of the king and on Mondays a lot of people wear yellow as a show of respect for the king. Why Monday? Because Thai tradition assigns lucky colours to the days of the week the same as we have birth stones and astrological signs. Monday is yellow and the king was born on a Monday.
It's perfectly acceptable to draw a picture of the king as long as it does not show disrespect. So political cartoons would be out of the question. If you spend any time with Thai people you will understand how much they respect and revere their king. With all the political upheaval there has been during his > 64 years as king he has been the only constant that has kept the country from imploding.
While I don't agree with their extreme protection of the king (for the record, neither does he) but I do understand it.
If we look at Apple as a merchant rather than a publisher (in this case, a merchant running an App Store,) can we not make comparisons to merchants in brick and mortar stores? Wouldn't a clothing store owner be within her rights to decree that any shirt sold in her store must not advertise competitor's stores? The creator of the shirt can still go to other outlets to sell his shirt, and doesn't the proprietor of a store have a right to control the merchandise sold through that store?
Personally I don't think the problem is that they want to control what they sell in their store. I think the heart of the problem is that they also want to prevent you from wearing that shirt with a pair of pants you purchased at another store.
I could not disagree more. NO government has a right to make "moral" decisions for me or anyone else. Porn is victimless. It harms no one, even those to whom porn is disgusting suffer no hard in looking at it, willingly or not. Censorship is in no way the "very definition of government.
Governments make moral decisions every day. Our laws, passed and enforced by the government, are a reflection of the moral code of society in general. For example, abortion laws (for or against) are going to be considered immoral by one group and moral by the opposing group. If you are in the opposing group then the government has made a moral decision that you disagree with.
And governments censor things all the time. Hate speech is censored. Nudity and swearing is censored (on network not cable TV). Those things are censored because society collectively thinks that they are wrong. What if a society collectively thinks that porn is wrong? Well, the government would censor it like hate speech and nudity on TV.
And all porn being victimless is not necessarily true. Child porn is not victimless.
Sure they would. It would not be right, but is technically feasible. Better to allow a mechanism for individual to decide if they want ".xxx" domains blocked - like changing the Google search to "resticted" vice "off" in viewing images.
It depends on the attitudes of society as a whole. In some countries they may prefer that it is filtered at the border. You may not agree and if your country decides to do that then you can protest but don't criticize another country for their choice.
From what I hear and know first-hand, if anything Europe is much looser in this regard. Asia is pretty conservative and restrictive - although there are exceptions (Japan). In any event, morality should not and cannot be legislated.
Morality can be and is legislated all the time. Prostitution, murder, theft, rape, abortion, child abuse, to name a few. These are all moral issues with laws that define what people are and are not allowed to do.
Are you really trying to say that looking at pornography is damaging to the person doing the looking, even when they want to look?
My previous comment said nothing of the sort. I was commenting on whether it was moral for a government to decide what pornography, if any, it's citizens are allowed to see.
And no, there really aren't multiple shades of morality. If you take event X, it's morality changes only from other events surrounding and/or leading up to it (for example, the sequence of events leading up to killing someone would have a say in if that killing was moral), not from the geographic location in which it occurred.
I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. When I referred to shades of morality outside the U.S. border I meant that other societies may have a different moral code, not that a given person's moral code changed as they changed locations.
What you may think is moral someone from a different country or culture may think is immoral and vice versa. But if you think that for every event X there is only one moral interpretation then I believe you are mistaken. You may have only one interpretation but that does not mean that someone else's different interpretation is any less valid. How we define ourselves as a society is how we resolve those different interpretations.
However, I will concede that, for any event X, humans are piss poor at being able to determine if X was indeed moral or not.
Browser hijacking? An urban myth that you swallowed hook, line and sinker. What would porn site even gain from that?
Try doing a Google search. It's not a myth.
Finally, "unfortunate search results" still require you to click on them. If you search for "Gerri Halliwell", to pick up your example, and then get a link that says "nude photos of Gerri Halliwell!", you can still refuse to check it out.
Google search results often include images at the top of the page without having to click on them.
The IETF disagrees with you.
Well, I disagree with the IETF. None of the technical issues are show stoppers and seem to be a smoke screen to sidestep the legal and philosophical issues which I agree are non-trivial. However, it's just a classic case of decision paralysis, "I can't come up with a perfect solution so I'll do nothing".
I didn't intend to suggest that.xxx would be a silver bullet. It's more of a 90/10 rule. If.xxx would take care of say 90% of the porn then it's easier to deal with the 10% that's left.
The point I was trying to make is that having a.xxx red light district makes it easier to avoid for people who want to avoid it but at the same time not infringing on the right of those who do want it.
Absolutely a country has the moral right to decide that it's citizens are not allowed to see porn just like it has the moral right to make any other decision to protect and provide for it's citizens. That's the very definition of government. Just because you disagree with the decision does not make it immoral.
If there was a.xxx domain I'm sure there are more than a few countries that would consider a nationwide block. I'm not saying I agree with it but it's not immoral for a country to attempt to do it.
I'm going to assume you're an American and suggest you peek outside the borders of your country and you'll see that there are many different shades of morality around the world.
While I don't believe that trying to ban porn on the internet is practical neither is telling people to just not look at it. There are popups, browser hijacking and unfortunate search results that could subject people to porn even though they did not actively seek it out. I remember hearing a story a few years ago of a public school teacher showing kids how to use Google and she suggested typing in "Spice Girls" and at the time one of the top results had nude photos of Geri Halliwell.
If we take the example of how porn is handled in the non-virtual world, porn content is segregated into specialized stores, that dimly lit room at the back of your video rental shop or the top row of the magazine rack.
The controversial.xxx domain, if it ever gets approved, would allow people and countries that do not want to see porn to have a way to ensure that they will never see it unless they intentionally go to those sites. That is assuming that porn sites agree to migrate. After all, migration would be in their best interests as a way of heading off eventual government regulation that would likely be more restrictive. They likely wouldn't lose any money since porn always sells.
Only if mainstream Republicans advocate a form of guild socialism - central planning, where market competition is suppressed by the State, and sectors of society and the economy, such as agriculture, business, labor, etc. are regimented by the State into organizations subservient to it, and forced to negotiate with each other to establish policies in the interest of the State.
The Republicans do all those things but do it covertly within the framework of an elected government (FYI, Htiler was elected too). Powerful lobby groups and corporate campaign contributions ensure that politicians behave in a way beneficial to large corporations even when it is to the detriment of the people that elected them.
One of the differences is that fascism benefits the political elite while the non-elites get what's left over whereas the Republicans benefit the business elite while the non-elites get what's left over. For 99% of the population there's little economic difference.
In Japanese law, the one dressed as a schoolgirl. In Russian law, the one who can bench press the most.. In Canadian law, the one with the most donuts. In U.S. law, the one with the biggest tits (See Australian law). In Italian law, the one with the biggest tits (See Australian and U.S. law). In French law, the one with the hairiest armpits. In Saudi law, the one with the least amount of skin showing. In Dutch law, the one with the most pot. In Latvian law...got nothin'. In Irish law, the one who can drink the most beer. In Scottish law, the one who can drink the most scotch (duh) while playing golf. In English law, the one with the straightest teeth. In Brazilian law, the one with a Brazilian.
Don't be so sure. If The Tea Party and the Republicans are to believed then the U.S. is on the fast track to being a socialist state with everyone working for the government.
Better start sanitizing your internet footprints now.
I am aware of those perfectly valid reasons but that doesn't seem to stop the ATI fanboys from making the same demand of NVIDIA. That's why I used it here against ATI.
I rather doubt that the company is going to change its stance on openness, so Dr. Daly's statement opens up the parallel computing arena very nicely to its traditional rival ATI, which under AMD's ownership is now a strongly committed open-source company.
I would agree with you if ATI's supposed commitment to open source had any impact on reality.
Has ATI's commitment to open source provided timely Catalyst drivers for the year old Fedora 12 release on my 3-month old (at the time of install) laptop? Oh right, they still aren't out and I'm stuck with the experimental Mesa drivers.
How about NVIDIA's closed source driver? Supported my 3 year old video card on my 5 year old server almost from the day F12 was released.
I'll take a well supported, closed driver from a company that actually supports Linux than a driver from a company that just pays lip service to open source. If they were truly committed to open source why did they only release partial documentation and not the source code for their Catalyst driver?
For over 20 years ATI has always fancied itself a supporter of niche markets but their intentions (I'll assume their intentions are genuine and not just lies to get market share) always fall short of reality. It seems that culture of promising the moon and delivering nothing has survived their acquisition by AMD.
That may be true if a given area was served only by the local power plants and only one renewable resource is harnessed but our power grids are much more complicated than that. To understand how big and interconnected they are you only have to recall the scope of the blackout of 2003 that affected 55 million people.
A grid the size of the one impacted in 2003 could easily have hundreds of solar, thermal, wind, hydro, etc generating facilities that with the proper implementation could keep the proper load on the grid. Especially if used in conjunction with grid energy storage techniques. Even in the extremely rare case where all or some of these renewable sources have simultaneous drops you could have a few high efficiency natural gas plants to fill the gaps.
We don't necessarily need a base load from a given renewable resource in a given area. What we need is a combination of various renewable resources dispersed across a large geographic area that when combined can provide a base load.
Since when has Apple ever been a software company? Apple has always considered themselves a hardware company. Any software they have has been a loss leader to sell their over priced uber snob hardware to elitist geek wannabees.
And absolutely they want to buy ARM so they can control the supply of ARM processors for their own benefit. That doesn't mean they'll cut off competitors because Jobs is no idiot. Assuming the acquisition is allowed to go through he won't risk drawing government attention by cutting off competitors so he'll simply "reduce shipments" and claim it's only "manufacturing difficulties". And these "manufacturing difficulties" will miraculously not impact shipments to iPhone assembly plants.
Slashdot Mirror
Citation please.
The purpose of being an artist is to get laid.
I lived in small, rural town in Thailand for 3 months last year with my Thai girlfriend and her family and we talked about the King a number of times. Never once did I get any hint that they were afraid of not liking him. They liked him because he was a good man and he had done a lot for his country.
The Lèse majesté trials are known and well publicized. And while you might not agree with the law it is the law in Thailand so while in their country you have to live by their laws.
The 43,000 sites that defame him are only in the opinion of the government, not the King. The King himself has never invoked the law. It was the government that passed the law and it is the government that files the charges. The King has even stated that he is not above being criticised and routinely pardons people found guilty. As a constitutional monarch he can not change the law or stop the government from laying charges but granting pardons is within his power.
Last year I lived for 3 months in a small, rural town in NE Thailand and I can tell you that a lot has change from what you describe of Thailand in 1974 (it's OK to swat a fly now) but culturally it is still like landing on Mars. I think the availability of TV and the internet have played a big part in that. When you have a window out to the rest of the world it's going to have an impact on your views and expectations of your life. It always amazed me every time I saw one of the 2 or 3 room shacks with a tin roof on the edge of town with a satellite dish.
They're still very protective of the King's image but I didn't get the impression it was because they saw him as a god or anything but simply because they have a tremendous amount of respect and gratitude for what he and his wife have done for the country. He is the one stabilizing force in a country that has had tremendous political upheaval in the last 60 years.
I would compare this to the way the British viewed the "Queen Mum". She and her husband King George were an important symbol during WWII as they stayed in London throughout the war. Even though there was no law against it I'm sure more than a few Brits would have a less than polite reaction to anyone who insulted or criticised her in any way. Of course, the Thai approach to protecting the King is more extreme but having spent time living in their world the way they do I understand their view.
Every business and home does have a picture of the king and on Mondays a lot of people wear yellow as a show of respect for the king. Why Monday? Because Thai tradition assigns lucky colours to the days of the week the same as we have birth stones and astrological signs. Monday is yellow and the king was born on a Monday.
It's perfectly acceptable to draw a picture of the king as long as it does not show disrespect. So political cartoons would be out of the question. If you spend any time with Thai people you will understand how much they respect and revere their king. With all the political upheaval there has been during his > 64 years as king he has been the only constant that has kept the country from imploding.
While I don't agree with their extreme protection of the king (for the record, neither does he) but I do understand it.
Personally I don't think the problem is that they want to control what they sell in their store. I think the heart of the problem is that they also want to prevent you from wearing that shirt with a pair of pants you purchased at another store.
Since when does a shirt need an EULA?
Governments make moral decisions every day. Our laws, passed and enforced by the government, are a reflection of the moral code of society in general. For example, abortion laws (for or against) are going to be considered immoral by one group and moral by the opposing group. If you are in the opposing group then the government has made a moral decision that you disagree with.
And governments censor things all the time. Hate speech is censored. Nudity and swearing is censored (on network not cable TV). Those things are censored because society collectively thinks that they are wrong. What if a society collectively thinks that porn is wrong? Well, the government would censor it like hate speech and nudity on TV.
And all porn being victimless is not necessarily true. Child porn is not victimless.
It depends on the attitudes of society as a whole. In some countries they may prefer that it is filtered at the border. You may not agree and if your country decides to do that then you can protest but don't criticize another country for their choice.
Morality can be and is legislated all the time. Prostitution, murder, theft, rape, abortion, child abuse, to name a few. These are all moral issues with laws that define what people are and are not allowed to do.
My previous comment said nothing of the sort. I was commenting on whether it was moral for a government to decide what pornography, if any, it's citizens are allowed to see.
I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. When I referred to shades of morality outside the U.S. border I meant that other societies may have a different moral code, not that a given person's moral code changed as they changed locations.
What you may think is moral someone from a different country or culture may think is immoral and vice versa. But if you think that for every event X there is only one moral interpretation then I believe you are mistaken. You may have only one interpretation but that does not mean that someone else's different interpretation is any less valid. How we define ourselves as a society is how we resolve those different interpretations.
No argument here.
Try doing a Google search. It's not a myth.
Google search results often include images at the top of the page without having to click on them.
Well, I disagree with the IETF. None of the technical issues are show stoppers and seem to be a smoke screen to sidestep the legal and philosophical issues which I agree are non-trivial. However, it's just a classic case of decision paralysis, "I can't come up with a perfect solution so I'll do nothing".
I didn't intend to suggest that .xxx would be a silver bullet. It's more of a 90/10 rule. If .xxx would take care of say 90% of the porn then it's easier to deal with the 10% that's left.
The point I was trying to make is that having a .xxx red light district makes it easier to avoid for people who want to avoid it but at the same time not infringing on the right of those who do want it.
Absolutely a country has the moral right to decide that it's citizens are not allowed to see porn just like it has the moral right to make any other decision to protect and provide for it's citizens. That's the very definition of government. Just because you disagree with the decision does not make it immoral.
If there was a .xxx domain I'm sure there are more than a few countries that would consider a nationwide block. I'm not saying I agree with it but it's not immoral for a country to attempt to do it.
I'm going to assume you're an American and suggest you peek outside the borders of your country and you'll see that there are many different shades of morality around the world.
Does this really surprise anyone?
While I don't believe that trying to ban porn on the internet is practical neither is telling people to just not look at it. There are popups, browser hijacking and unfortunate search results that could subject people to porn even though they did not actively seek it out. I remember hearing a story a few years ago of a public school teacher showing kids how to use Google and she suggested typing in "Spice Girls" and at the time one of the top results had nude photos of Geri Halliwell.
If we take the example of how porn is handled in the non-virtual world, porn content is segregated into specialized stores, that dimly lit room at the back of your video rental shop or the top row of the magazine rack.
The controversial .xxx domain, if it ever gets approved, would allow people and countries that do not want to see porn to have a way to ensure that they will never see it unless they intentionally go to those sites. That is assuming that porn sites agree to migrate. After all, migration would be in their best interests as a way of heading off eventual government regulation that would likely be more restrictive. They likely wouldn't lose any money since porn always sells.
The Republicans do all those things but do it covertly within the framework of an elected government (FYI, Htiler was elected too). Powerful lobby groups and corporate campaign contributions ensure that politicians behave in a way beneficial to large corporations even when it is to the detriment of the people that elected them.
One of the differences is that fascism benefits the political elite while the non-elites get what's left over whereas the Republicans benefit the business elite while the non-elites get what's left over. For 99% of the population there's little economic difference.
In Japanese law, the one dressed as a schoolgirl.
In Russian law, the one who can bench press the most..
In Canadian law, the one with the most donuts.
In U.S. law, the one with the biggest tits (See Australian law).
In Italian law, the one with the biggest tits (See Australian and U.S. law).
In French law, the one with the hairiest armpits.
In Saudi law, the one with the least amount of skin showing.
In Dutch law, the one with the most pot.
In Latvian law...got nothin'.
In Irish law, the one who can drink the most beer.
In Scottish law, the one who can drink the most scotch (duh) while playing golf.
In English law, the one with the straightest teeth.
In Brazilian law, the one with a Brazilian.
Don't be so sure. If The Tea Party and the Republicans are to believed then the U.S. is on the fast track to being a socialist state with everyone working for the government.
Better start sanitizing your internet footprints now.
If you haven't seen it then you'll like Rick Mercer's version of a Tim Hortons commercial.
Actually the Tim Hortons protect our armed forces.
Whose going to attack someone that gives you free coffee and Timbits?
In my case it's a home server cobbled together from spare parts and connected to a monitor via a KVM.
I am aware of those perfectly valid reasons but that doesn't seem to stop the ATI fanboys from making the same demand of NVIDIA. That's why I used it here against ATI.
What do you connect that monitor thingy to?
I would agree with you if ATI's supposed commitment to open source had any impact on reality.
Has ATI's commitment to open source provided timely Catalyst drivers for the year old Fedora 12 release on my 3-month old (at the time of install) laptop? Oh right, they still aren't out and I'm stuck with the experimental Mesa drivers.
How about NVIDIA's closed source driver? Supported my 3 year old video card on my 5 year old server almost from the day F12 was released.
I'll take a well supported, closed driver from a company that actually supports Linux than a driver from a company that just pays lip service to open source. If they were truly committed to open source why did they only release partial documentation and not the source code for their Catalyst driver?
For over 20 years ATI has always fancied itself a supporter of niche markets but their intentions (I'll assume their intentions are genuine and not just lies to get market share) always fall short of reality. It seems that culture of promising the moon and delivering nothing has survived their acquisition by AMD.
That may be true if a given area was served only by the local power plants and only one renewable resource is harnessed but our power grids are much more complicated than that. To understand how big and interconnected they are you only have to recall the scope of the blackout of 2003 that affected 55 million people.
A grid the size of the one impacted in 2003 could easily have hundreds of solar, thermal, wind, hydro, etc generating facilities that with the proper implementation could keep the proper load on the grid. Especially if used in conjunction with grid energy storage techniques. Even in the extremely rare case where all or some of these renewable sources have simultaneous drops you could have a few high efficiency natural gas plants to fill the gaps.
We don't necessarily need a base load from a given renewable resource in a given area. What we need is a combination of various renewable resources dispersed across a large geographic area that when combined can provide a base load.
That's not my XPerience. At least 95 - 98% of the time.
I think thou DOS protest too much.
Since when has Apple ever been a software company? Apple has always considered themselves a hardware company. Any software they have has been a loss leader to sell their over priced uber snob hardware to elitist geek wannabees.
And absolutely they want to buy ARM so they can control the supply of ARM processors for their own benefit. That doesn't mean they'll cut off competitors because Jobs is no idiot. Assuming the acquisition is allowed to go through he won't risk drawing government attention by cutting off competitors so he'll simply "reduce shipments" and claim it's only "manufacturing difficulties". And these "manufacturing difficulties" will miraculously not impact shipments to iPhone assembly plants.