Times New Roman, Arial and Verdana are all horrible fonts.
I won't disagree on Arial or TNR, but Verdana is a very well-designed font for use on low-res screen displays with sub-pixel rendering. But that's not how most people use it, they think it is just another "kinda Helvetica" that happens to be wider than Arial. In fact, all of the original design web fonts MS released were very well-made and well-designed, but are just very rarely well-used.
The world would not be much poorer had this licensing agreement expired, indeed it would save me the hassle of telling Safari and Firefox to substitute decent fonts for Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier New.
As someone who has been to Ketchikan many times, the opposition to this bridge just shows how ignorant most people are of the situation.
Or it shows that they understand it quite well and are annoyed to be paying for lavish developments in other states that have plenty of money to pay for their own stuff. Most of us don't have billions and billions of dollars in oil revenue we can barely spend fast enough, and if we want to build a new bridge we have to do bonds, loans, and tolls to finance it, possibly with matching funds from the feds if it is a significant piece of infrastructure. But we sure as hell don't get the whole thing as a gift from our Uncle Sam for some place out in the boonies just because we're annoyed by rising property values.
The real reason may be that now there are several countries developing long range missiles. Old Saturn design could well be used for such purpose.
Yeah, why use any of the Russian designs available when you could spend 1,000 times as much building a Saturn V? At least then you'd have bragging right of being able to nuke the moon when your country goes bankrupt.
On the contrary, you'll find that service contracts like cell providers say they can change the contract terms, but you then have the ability to cancel the service with no penalty if you don't agree to the new terms.
So I presume you are against the police using spyware as a tool in all circumstances?
I don't know about the OP, but to me this has nothing to do with the police. I'm against using any antivirus or antispyware that has a built-in backdoor. It defeats the entire purpose of using such software -- all hackers/crackers would have to do is figure out what the "police code" is and they can distribute undetectable viruses all they like.
Profits, every dollar, come from the businesses customers. Every dollar spent to pay a fine came from them and every dollar spent to recoup that fine will as well. Customers pay the businesses fines, just like taxes.
Well where do you think the customers got their money? From the business that they work for. So really it's just the other business that's paying the fine. But THAT business is really just getting its money from its customers, etc.
Arguing that business never really pay anything is just as silly as arguing that individuals never really pay anything. We're all part of the same economy, and if you have an extra, unnecessary expense while you're holding the money, you become less able to compete with others who don't have that same expense because they didn't screw up.
you can still punish corporations that don't understand motivations other than financial penalties, but remove all profit incentive from the equation. Would this have any drawbacks?
Well, yeah, nobody would file class action lawsuits because there'd be no money in it. The whole point of the class-action statutes is essentially to recognize that the government is incapable of fixing every illegal corporate behavior, yet individual victims of widespread behavior face a hopelessly lopsided and financially ruinous fight even in the best-case scenario. So rather than increasing taxes by huge amounts to increase government oversight, we provide a profit incentive for private attorneys to essentially act as freelance regulators by filing class-action suits on their own dime.
Of course, the problem is that the courts and legislatures are doing a piss-poor job of ensuring that settlements are actually in the consumer's interest. Settlements that are essentially expensive marketing campaigns for the violator are becoming sickeningly common. They still prove to be a costly thing for companies to want to avoid, but they don't have the teeth to truly make better consumer contracts and such more commonplace.
If you have released GPL software, you must abide by your end of the GPL as long as it applies....If you release GPL software, you must uphold your end of the GPL. You can't attach the GPL to your code and then not meet the provider requirements in the GPL. A license is a contract between *two* parties;
The owner of the code is not required to do anything. The owner can distribute as much or as little he wants under any terms because he's distributing under the terms of copyright law, not the terms of the GPL. It is only recipients of the code who subsequently redistribute code _they don't own_ that have any obligations under the GPL. There is no "contract" between the owner of GPL code and anyone they provide it to.
The only legal obligations assumed under the GPL are when someone OTHER THAN the owner distributes, since they don't have the legal ability under copyright law to do so, so they MUST use the rights granted to them under the GPL to do so, and in return they accept the obligations of the GPL as well. The owner does not need the GPL to have the right to distribute, so he has no obligations under the GPL.
Considering the timing, the only explanation that makes sense to me is that Apple wanted to prevent a switch to GPLv3.
But there's still tons of other GPL/LGPL code in OSX. The idea that this is defensive strikes me as silly, they'll have to rip out lots more than CUPS if the GPL3 is worrying them.
I would assume it's because they want to have the lead developer following their direction on where CUPS should go -- into more user-friendly territory. Since they bought the code, the other possibility that strikes me is that they want to be able to let printer manufacturers more easily make full-featured binary drivers on OS X by giving them the ability to include CUPS code. As it is, CUPS is fantastic on a technical level but requires an awful lot of jumping through hoops to do some things that printers drivers on Windows can do with a click.
Apple has bought CUPS to forestall any problems coming from using the GPL
They would have to buy a lot more than just CUPS if that was their goal. There's lots of GPL/LGPL code in OS X, and the source is available from Apple. They certainly didn't need to buy CUPS to keep using it.
It's far more logical to assume that Apple is well aware of the many...peculiarities...CUPS has compared to the printing system in Windows and it just made sense to go ahead and hire the lead and buy the code so that they could be more hands-on in the development direction.
It's been a bit of a black eye for Apple ever since OS X was released that the printing system was a bit of a beast for all those high-end professional media users to deal with. I have about 12 different "printers" installed on my system because each physical printer has to be set up multiple times for different configurations that should logically just be driver options, but CUPS just doesn't work that way.
It may also be, quite frankly, that they realized in order to offer the kind of printing support they used to have (and Windows still does), that they need to be able to let printer manufacturers seal up some of the code in their binary drivers. I certainly don't know, but that would be a very rational reason for them to buy the code and it would have no effect on CUPS licensing, only on the ability of printer manufacturers to build better drivers for OS X.
you are ignorant about the justification for the US invasion in 2003.
Oh, wow, are we already back to trying to sell the fig leaf that we invaded to defend the integrity of the UN? I thought retro took at least two decades to be cool again.
I guess next season we'll be back to the Uranium from Africa for the months-from-completion Iraqi nuclear weapon program. I need to have that dry-cleaned or I just won't be fit to be seen!
I think you also have a misconception about exactly how much support we gave to Iraq during this timeframe.
No, you just like to cherry-pick statistics that only *seem* to contradict what I actually said. I never claimed we provided them with chemical weapons, or that we were their primary direct arms supplier. Sure, we provided them with plenty of dual-use equipment, lots of cash -- we even escorted their oil to help fund the war with the US Navy!
Hell, Iraq attacked one of our own ships and killed a couple dozen Americans -- and we continued to side with them! That's friendship for ya!
We had no hand in that, and we didn't do anything to support him once he took over. If anyone has any evidence we supported him in his eight year war with Iran in the 1980's, please provide it.
I simply can't conceive that you know there was a war between Iran and Iraq but don't know we supported Iraq quite openly, but I'll take your statement at face value. There's plenty of documentation of our support of Hussein throughout the war, I don't know how in the past few years of our war you managed to miss the photograph of Donald Rumsfeld shaking his hand.
The world witnessed Saddam use his WMD against the Iranians and Kurds on multiple occasions. This takes the notion that he had WMD out of the "belief" realm and plants it solidly in the "proven fact" category.
We didn't claim to invade for weapons he had in the 1980s (when he was an ally and we were PROVIDING him weapons and technical expertise). We claimed he had WMDs in the year 2003 and was refusing to get rid of them *in 2003*. Please, stop trying to move the goalposts to make yourself feel better about wasting a trillion dollars and thousands of lives.
he went to war without planning for the inevitable eventuality that the spineless half of the country would stab him in the back when the going got tough.
Now, now, I'm assured that far less than half of Iraq is actively fighting against US forces...
the MDI way (that is, the "photoshop way of arranging the windows)
No, that's the (old) Windows way of managing windows. Even Photoshop on Windows doesn't lock everything in the MDI container anymore (and hasn't for several years). Photoshop on the Mac (where it was created) has never behaved like a Windows MDI app.
As it stands, I think we're seeing a lot of selection bias.
Well, selection bias against anyone who has ever used other computer programs, not just image editors. I don't know of many computer users who are accustomed to having a program with 12 different windows that doesn't even have a single document open.
If they want to create a new, more intuitive UI from scratch, then do it. Don't steal icons, toolbars, and palettes from Photoshop and then cry that it is unfair when people are baffled that it doesn't behave even remotely like Photoshop. There have been lots of successful image editors in the past 20 years that used different metaphors and tools and layouts and methods than Photoshop does. People don't universally complain about the horrible UI of Paint Shop Pro or iPhoto or MS Photo Editor or Lightroom or Aperture (or Photostyler or Live Picture or...).
People complain about the GIMP UI because it is a horrific example of what happens when programmers design interfaces, not because they're trained monkeys who can't operate anything but Photoshop.
Every IP lawyer I know (and I know several) advises their clients to stay away from writing or contributing to GPL projects
Well, yeah, but you're saying the opposite of what the post you're replying to is talking about. You're saying that many lawyers worry the GPL is TOO viral, and that may well be the case -- who knows how the courts will interpret it should someone push it that far? But that's a far cry from saying the GPL may not be valid at all, since copyright law already restricts any redistribution and therefore no GPL violator would have the right to redistribute in the first place unless they agreed to the license.
IIRC what got the brits with their panties in a knot about extreme porn, was a case where one deranged guy watched a bunch of snuff movies, then went and strangled a woman to death.... At that point we're not even talking about an aversion to sex, but about an aversion to _murder_. That's a fundamentally different thing.
First of all, there is no such thing as snuff films, so I find it highly unlikely. And if the Brits have an aversion to murder, maybe they should make murder illegal rather than beat around the bush.
This bill most certainly does not restrict itself in any way to some narrow category like you're describing.
And I do find it a little offputting that you're so willing to categorize people with particularly sexual fantasies as needing a psychiatrist. Fantasies are not reality. Healthy adults know that. Most people have fantasized about killing another person at some point, that doesn't mean if they see a murder on TV that they'll suddenly be triggered to do it in real life.
Sex surveys have shown that most people have "unacceptable" sex fantasies. The classic internet one is furries, but furries do not commonly get triggered to go out and commit bestiality. One of the most common fantasies women have is the rape fantasy. To you, that may sound sick, but it has nothing to do with real rape, it's about power exchange with someone they care about, they wouldn't welcome real rape in any way shape or form, nor would the men who fantasize about it. Asphyxiation is one of the few "common" ways that people do actually die during sex, and even there it has nothing to do with harm, it's about adding an endorphine rush from asphyxiation to sex as well as power.
You say someone who has a fantasy is sick. I say as long as he knows the difference between fantasy and reality, that's not sick, that's perfectly normal. You say that this is "only" about stopping the most exxxtreme stuff, not about "normal" fantasies, but I don't see what the difference is, it all sounds to me like "if it isn't a fantasy I approve of, you're unbalanced". If some guy gets off by having his wife sit in an ice bath and then lie still while they have sex, what difference does it make to you or me?
It's like the law we had here in the US outlawing "simulated" child porn -- ie, drawings or animation or even films with actors pretending to be under 18. It was thrown out precisely because, as abhorrent as child porn is, there's still no reason in a free society to outlaw the fantasy. As long as you aren't actually committing a crime, who cares? There's just no evidence to support the claim that someone who knows the difference between fantasy and reality is any more likely to go out and commit a real crime simply because they were exposed to a fantasy version of it.
Hmm.. Not so sure if the cause and effect can be proved here. I mean, that decline could be caused by a number of other factors. See Roe v. Wade.
I wasn't claiming cause and effect, only that what happened was the exact opposite of what anti-pornography crusaders claim should be the inevitable effect of a dramatic increase in porn consumption (particularly the increase in hardcore porn, the subject of the proposed regulation).
People need some form of entertainment. Or, perhaps more accurately, a society benefits if its people are entertained. Whereas no person or society needs pornography except for the aforementioned unbalanced people.
And some people's chosen form of entertainment is pornography. You've somehow convinced yourself that only "unbalanced" people enjoy pornography, but I know of no scientific study that indicates it is anything more than just another form of entertainment that many perfectly healthy adults enjoy watching. Most surveys since the VHS days indicate that the majority of the population in western countries has viewed pornography at one point or another, and a significant fraction of the population views it on a regular basis.
There's no indication that those huge numbers of people have become molesters or otherwise scarred by their exposure. Indeed, sex crimes in the US have declined greatly as the internet became more available, which brought pornography into many homes on a dramatically more frequent and extreme basis. If pornography led to criminal behavior in healthy individuals, we should be in the middle of the most horrific crime spree of sexual assaults in the history of mankind.
The main "damage" that psychologists have found with some pornography viewers is that pornography can set up unrealistic expectations, both for what sex "should" be like and what physical ideals and -- a criticism that is similarly offered for most forms of recorded entertainment, where actors and actresses are unrealistically attractive and their lives generally are much more interesting and exciting than the average viewers'.
You sounds bit like a headmaster circa 1900, when masturbation was considered to be a horrible act children should be beaten for experimenting with. It was widely "known" at the time that masturbation led to criminal behavior, insanity, and sexual deviancy. Of course the same charges were leveled against homosexuality and every other form of sex that is outside "missionary position in marriage for procreation under the covers with the lights out". Of course there's no evidence whatsoever for such claims other than mere belief by those who espouse them.
A developer earning 50-60k up here is considered middle-upper class.
Though to be fair, the same is true of 99% of the US as well. It's only in the silicon valley and redmond and NYC and such that people are aghast at the notion anyone can survive on less than $200k/year. Most normal cities are perfectly livable and have houses the average family making $50k/year can afford.
It's worse for porn since it's much more addictive than violence and has zero benefits for anyone save for the wallets of people in the industry.
You could say the same thing about any other form of entertainment. In a free society, we're supposed to be able to decide how to spend our free time, so long as we aren't harming anyone while doing so.
Give unbalanced people opportunities to feed their problems and they'll take them.
I agree completely. It sounds like this politician is unbalanced and needs a reality check. Porn doesn't encourage any stable person to go out and rape any more than Die Hard makes stable people go out and shoot people.
Re:What's good for the goose...
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Explosives Camp
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This might seem crazy, but I dont have a gun, or a dog or an alarm in my house.
I don't have any of those, either.
It's called living in the US. Stop believing stereotypes.
Slashdot Mirror
I won't disagree on Arial or TNR, but Verdana is a very well-designed font for use on low-res screen displays with sub-pixel rendering. But that's not how most people use it, they think it is just another "kinda Helvetica" that happens to be wider than Arial. In fact, all of the original design web fonts MS released were very well-made and well-designed, but are just very rarely well-used.
The world would not be much poorer had this licensing agreement expired, indeed it would save me the hassle of telling Safari and Firefox to substitute decent fonts for Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier New.
Or it shows that they understand it quite well and are annoyed to be paying for lavish developments in other states that have plenty of money to pay for their own stuff. Most of us don't have billions and billions of dollars in oil revenue we can barely spend fast enough, and if we want to build a new bridge we have to do bonds, loans, and tolls to finance it, possibly with matching funds from the feds if it is a significant piece of infrastructure. But we sure as hell don't get the whole thing as a gift from our Uncle Sam for some place out in the boonies just because we're annoyed by rising property values.
Yeah, why use any of the Russian designs available when you could spend 1,000 times as much building a Saturn V? At least then you'd have bragging right of being able to nuke the moon when your country goes bankrupt.
On the contrary, you'll find that service contracts like cell providers say they can change the contract terms, but you then have the ability to cancel the service with no penalty if you don't agree to the new terms.
Sorry, else who installs Windows XP has the version that Microsoft shipped where the wizard is limited in FAT formatting.
I don't know about the OP, but to me this has nothing to do with the police. I'm against using any antivirus or antispyware that has a built-in backdoor. It defeats the entire purpose of using such software -- all hackers/crackers would have to do is figure out what the "police code" is and they can distribute undetectable viruses all they like.
Well where do you think the customers got their money? From the business that they work for. So really it's just the other business that's paying the fine. But THAT business is really just getting its money from its customers, etc.
Arguing that business never really pay anything is just as silly as arguing that individuals never really pay anything. We're all part of the same economy, and if you have an extra, unnecessary expense while you're holding the money, you become less able to compete with others who don't have that same expense because they didn't screw up.
Well, yeah, nobody would file class action lawsuits because there'd be no money in it. The whole point of the class-action statutes is essentially to recognize that the government is incapable of fixing every illegal corporate behavior, yet individual victims of widespread behavior face a hopelessly lopsided and financially ruinous fight even in the best-case scenario. So rather than increasing taxes by huge amounts to increase government oversight, we provide a profit incentive for private attorneys to essentially act as freelance regulators by filing class-action suits on their own dime.
Of course, the problem is that the courts and legislatures are doing a piss-poor job of ensuring that settlements are actually in the consumer's interest. Settlements that are essentially expensive marketing campaigns for the violator are becoming sickeningly common. They still prove to be a costly thing for companies to want to avoid, but they don't have the teeth to truly make better consumer contracts and such more commonplace.
The owner of the code is not required to do anything. The owner can distribute as much or as little he wants under any terms because he's distributing under the terms of copyright law, not the terms of the GPL. It is only recipients of the code who subsequently redistribute code _they don't own_ that have any obligations under the GPL. There is no "contract" between the owner of GPL code and anyone they provide it to.
The only legal obligations assumed under the GPL are when someone OTHER THAN the owner distributes, since they don't have the legal ability under copyright law to do so, so they MUST use the rights granted to them under the GPL to do so, and in return they accept the obligations of the GPL as well. The owner does not need the GPL to have the right to distribute, so he has no obligations under the GPL.
But there's still tons of other GPL/LGPL code in OSX. The idea that this is defensive strikes me as silly, they'll have to rip out lots more than CUPS if the GPL3 is worrying them.
I would assume it's because they want to have the lead developer following their direction on where CUPS should go -- into more user-friendly territory. Since they bought the code, the other possibility that strikes me is that they want to be able to let printer manufacturers more easily make full-featured binary drivers on OS X by giving them the ability to include CUPS code. As it is, CUPS is fantastic on a technical level but requires an awful lot of jumping through hoops to do some things that printers drivers on Windows can do with a click.
They would have to buy a lot more than just CUPS if that was their goal. There's lots of GPL/LGPL code in OS X, and the source is available from Apple. They certainly didn't need to buy CUPS to keep using it.
It's far more logical to assume that Apple is well aware of the many...peculiarities...CUPS has compared to the printing system in Windows and it just made sense to go ahead and hire the lead and buy the code so that they could be more hands-on in the development direction.
It's been a bit of a black eye for Apple ever since OS X was released that the printing system was a bit of a beast for all those high-end professional media users to deal with. I have about 12 different "printers" installed on my system because each physical printer has to be set up multiple times for different configurations that should logically just be driver options, but CUPS just doesn't work that way.
It may also be, quite frankly, that they realized in order to offer the kind of printing support they used to have (and Windows still does), that they need to be able to let printer manufacturers seal up some of the code in their binary drivers. I certainly don't know, but that would be a very rational reason for them to buy the code and it would have no effect on CUPS licensing, only on the ability of printer manufacturers to build better drivers for OS X.
Oh, wow, are we already back to trying to sell the fig leaf that we invaded to defend the integrity of the UN? I thought retro took at least two decades to be cool again.
I guess next season we'll be back to the Uranium from Africa for the months-from-completion Iraqi nuclear weapon program. I need to have that dry-cleaned or I just won't be fit to be seen!
No, you just like to cherry-pick statistics that only *seem* to contradict what I actually said. I never claimed we provided them with chemical weapons, or that we were their primary direct arms supplier. Sure, we provided them with plenty of dual-use equipment, lots of cash -- we even escorted their oil to help fund the war with the US Navy!
Hell, Iraq attacked one of our own ships and killed a couple dozen Americans -- and we continued to side with them! That's friendship for ya!
I simply can't conceive that you know there was a war between Iran and Iraq but don't know we supported Iraq quite openly, but I'll take your statement at face value. There's plenty of documentation of our support of Hussein throughout the war, I don't know how in the past few years of our war you managed to miss the photograph of Donald Rumsfeld shaking his hand.
We didn't claim to invade for weapons he had in the 1980s (when he was an ally and we were PROVIDING him weapons and technical expertise). We claimed he had WMDs in the year 2003 and was refusing to get rid of them *in 2003*. Please, stop trying to move the goalposts to make yourself feel better about wasting a trillion dollars and thousands of lives.
Now, now, I'm assured that far less than half of Iraq is actively fighting against US forces...
No, that's the (old) Windows way of managing windows. Even Photoshop on Windows doesn't lock everything in the MDI container anymore (and hasn't for several years). Photoshop on the Mac (where it was created) has never behaved like a Windows MDI app.
Well, selection bias against anyone who has ever used other computer programs, not just image editors. I don't know of many computer users who are accustomed to having a program with 12 different windows that doesn't even have a single document open.
If they want to create a new, more intuitive UI from scratch, then do it. Don't steal icons, toolbars, and palettes from Photoshop and then cry that it is unfair when people are baffled that it doesn't behave even remotely like Photoshop. There have been lots of successful image editors in the past 20 years that used different metaphors and tools and layouts and methods than Photoshop does. People don't universally complain about the horrible UI of Paint Shop Pro or iPhoto or MS Photo Editor or Lightroom or Aperture (or Photostyler or Live Picture or...).
People complain about the GIMP UI because it is a horrific example of what happens when programmers design interfaces, not because they're trained monkeys who can't operate anything but Photoshop.
Well, yeah, but you're saying the opposite of what the post you're replying to is talking about. You're saying that many lawyers worry the GPL is TOO viral, and that may well be the case -- who knows how the courts will interpret it should someone push it that far? But that's a far cry from saying the GPL may not be valid at all, since copyright law already restricts any redistribution and therefore no GPL violator would have the right to redistribute in the first place unless they agreed to the license.
First of all, there is no such thing as snuff films, so I find it highly unlikely. And if the Brits have an aversion to murder, maybe they should make murder illegal rather than beat around the bush.
This bill most certainly does not restrict itself in any way to some narrow category like you're describing.
And I do find it a little offputting that you're so willing to categorize people with particularly sexual fantasies as needing a psychiatrist. Fantasies are not reality. Healthy adults know that. Most people have fantasized about killing another person at some point, that doesn't mean if they see a murder on TV that they'll suddenly be triggered to do it in real life.
Sex surveys have shown that most people have "unacceptable" sex fantasies. The classic internet one is furries, but furries do not commonly get triggered to go out and commit bestiality. One of the most common fantasies women have is the rape fantasy. To you, that may sound sick, but it has nothing to do with real rape, it's about power exchange with someone they care about, they wouldn't welcome real rape in any way shape or form, nor would the men who fantasize about it. Asphyxiation is one of the few "common" ways that people do actually die during sex, and even there it has nothing to do with harm, it's about adding an endorphine rush from asphyxiation to sex as well as power.
You say someone who has a fantasy is sick. I say as long as he knows the difference between fantasy and reality, that's not sick, that's perfectly normal. You say that this is "only" about stopping the most exxxtreme stuff, not about "normal" fantasies, but I don't see what the difference is, it all sounds to me like "if it isn't a fantasy I approve of, you're unbalanced". If some guy gets off by having his wife sit in an ice bath and then lie still while they have sex, what difference does it make to you or me?
It's like the law we had here in the US outlawing "simulated" child porn -- ie, drawings or animation or even films with actors pretending to be under 18. It was thrown out precisely because, as abhorrent as child porn is, there's still no reason in a free society to outlaw the fantasy. As long as you aren't actually committing a crime, who cares? There's just no evidence to support the claim that someone who knows the difference between fantasy and reality is any more likely to go out and commit a real crime simply because they were exposed to a fantasy version of it.
I wasn't claiming cause and effect, only that what happened was the exact opposite of what anti-pornography crusaders claim should be the inevitable effect of a dramatic increase in porn consumption (particularly the increase in hardcore porn, the subject of the proposed regulation).
And some people's chosen form of entertainment is pornography. You've somehow convinced yourself that only "unbalanced" people enjoy pornography, but I know of no scientific study that indicates it is anything more than just another form of entertainment that many perfectly healthy adults enjoy watching. Most surveys since the VHS days indicate that the majority of the population in western countries has viewed pornography at one point or another, and a significant fraction of the population views it on a regular basis.
There's no indication that those huge numbers of people have become molesters or otherwise scarred by their exposure. Indeed, sex crimes in the US have declined greatly as the internet became more available, which brought pornography into many homes on a dramatically more frequent and extreme basis. If pornography led to criminal behavior in healthy individuals, we should be in the middle of the most horrific crime spree of sexual assaults in the history of mankind.
The main "damage" that psychologists have found with some pornography viewers is that pornography can set up unrealistic expectations, both for what sex "should" be like and what physical ideals and -- a criticism that is similarly offered for most forms of recorded entertainment, where actors and actresses are unrealistically attractive and their lives generally are much more interesting and exciting than the average viewers'.
You sounds bit like a headmaster circa 1900, when masturbation was considered to be a horrible act children should be beaten for experimenting with. It was widely "known" at the time that masturbation led to criminal behavior, insanity, and sexual deviancy. Of course the same charges were leveled against homosexuality and every other form of sex that is outside "missionary position in marriage for procreation under the covers with the lights out". Of course there's no evidence whatsoever for such claims other than mere belief by those who espouse them.
Though to be fair, the same is true of 99% of the US as well. It's only in the silicon valley and redmond and NYC and such that people are aghast at the notion anyone can survive on less than $200k/year. Most normal cities are perfectly livable and have houses the average family making $50k/year can afford.
You could say the same thing about any other form of entertainment. In a free society, we're supposed to be able to decide how to spend our free time, so long as we aren't harming anyone while doing so.
I agree completely. It sounds like this politician is unbalanced and needs a reality check. Porn doesn't encourage any stable person to go out and rape any more than Die Hard makes stable people go out and shoot people.
I don't have any of those, either.
It's called living in the US. Stop believing stereotypes.