Seriously, though. There are very, very few people left who use the USENET for anything real.
You should write to all these independent Usenet providers. Maybe you'll convince them to have an epiphany and instantly drop their service to their hundreds of thousands of customers.
I mean, give me a break, the alt groups were a problem 10 years ago, and some ISPs are still carrying them? That's just stupid. When we were carrying the alt groups at BEST we had to set the article timeout for the high-bandwidth groups to 1-day, and that actually did a pretty good job stopping all the idiots trying to download 5000 part port movies over their dialup modems. They just couldn't keep up before the stuff timed out.
You're confusing alt.* and alt.binaries.*. There are plenty of good and active text groups in alt.*. In modern terms, the bandwidth they consume is insignificant. There is no reason you should have to carry binaries.
And then of course there's the Big 8 hierarchies, which you conveniently declared dead right along with alt.binaries.* even though none of them carry any binaries. Please stop conflating issues.
My experience with Usenet was a bunch of people responding with PLONK, and usually an insulting message, if you said something that slightly offended them. Bunch of geeks with no social skills, in my experience. Good riddance.
While Usenet does have useful value, it IS full of kiddie porn.
Bullshit. I challenge you to find a single actual kiddie porn picture in any of those groups. I think you won't find any. Just going by the names of the groups is sheer idiocy, especially in alt.* where any joker can start a group at a whim under any name (and maybe two or three providers will even actually carry it).
You forgot a biggie: decentralized distribution. Get your Usenet feed from your local (or otherwise preferred) site. If one Usenet site goes down or goes crappy, simply switch to another one. Conversely, if your favourite web forum goes away, you're fucked.
Let's say Hans gets out in 7 years (Good behavior and all that),
In exchange for the deal, he got 15 years to life (instead of 25 years to life). So he cannot get out after less than 15 years under any circumstances. And after those 15 years, if I understand it right, he'll have to convince a parole board that it would be a good idea to release him. Can you imagine Hans Reiser convincing a parole board of anything? I think he may very well stay locked up for life.
Leaders maybe... But we sure as hell didn't get to vote for any of the European Parliament. They're not democratically elected.
Actually, they're the only EU body that is democratically elected! If you refused to vote in the 2004 EP elections, that's another matter; next year you'll have a chance to remedy that.
(And of course the Lisbon treaty was supposed to give the EP more power, which would have increased democracy in the EU. Too bad.)
So it's more like entering an unlocked house to take a sip from the faucet. The only crime committed is that you didn't pay for bottled water.
Except that you didn't enter any house. Your neighbour is transmitting their open-access signal into your own house for you to use. Your analogy is therefore broken.
There's nothing wrong with dismissing an idea when there's not enough evidence to support it. [...] A scientist was right to doubt the existence of tectonic plates before based on your observation, and is right to believe in them now.
But his science teacher didn't just doubt their existence, he dismissed the idea out of hand because it didn't conform with prevailing dogma. That doesn't have anything to do with science. A hypothesis that can be neither proven or disproven by existing evidence should not be considered false; it should be considered an unknown, meriting further research.
A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq.
For the first time, the extent to which some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding has been researched by the BBC's Panorama using US and Iraqi government sources.
A US gagging order is preventing discussion of the allegations.
The order applies to 70 court cases against some of the top US companies.
A lot of early games, especially choose your own adventure style ones, as well as multimedia presentations, and educational tools were created as HyperCard stacks.
It means that my communications are being scanned by a third party, and that I should self-censor accordingly. If your mail passes through the USA, this is unavoidable.
Which is an excellent reason for non-USA companies to avoid Gmail and any other US-based email service like the plague.
These are the IBM Common User Access commands. So, they were never "Windows commands" to begin with.
And before that (since the Mac's introduction in 1984) they were Macintosh commands - Command-X, Command-C and Command-V. At the time, Macs didn't have a CTRL key, and PCs still don't have a Command key. This being the only reason for the difference in modifier key, it's obvious that the Mac originated this convention.
(Now cue the replies saying Apple stole it from Xerox, never mind that Xerox's implementation did not include a clipboard, or many other Apple-pioneered features we now consider basic...)
(In fairness, Apple are no better for hiding options in the command line and requiring the use of the defaults command to set them, but at least these aren't very very basic things...)
I had to use two terminal commands to turn off Tiger's "Safe Sleep" feature that makes it take about a minute for my computer to fall asleep while it dumps my 2 GB of RAM onto the hard drive. I sleep and wake my MacBook frequently so I'm not at risk of losing RAM contents, so I'm better off without this feature. I think this is a pretty basic configuration option.
I disagree. This does not fit the definition of pornography (from the American Heritage Dictionary, and others): "Sexually explicit pictures, writing, or other material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal." The primary purpose of this picture is clearly not "to cause sexual arousal," but to illustrate the lyrics of the album's title song, and of course to get attention (which would make the purpose "marketing.")
And how does this picture manage to get so much attention? By its intention to cause sexual arousal. QED.
Did you even bother to read the article? The girl in question was fine with posing for the photo, and still is.
Have you ever heard of the term "age of consent"? What gives you the idea that a ten year old is capable of being sexually exploited? Consent is not retroactive, it doesn't matter what she thinks about it now. She might have blocked out the trauma.
Did you know that many (if not most) nude paintings and sculptures made during the Renaissance used "underage" models?
So evil that happened centuries ago justifies evil happening now?
Are you aware of the fact that humans are born naked?
Are you aware that children are not born as sexual beings, but that they develop sexuality during puberty? This was a sexual pose that no normal ten year old would even conceive of, let alone voluntarily assume. If this girl voluntarily put herself in front of the camera in this heavily suggestive position, it means she was probably sexually abused throughout her childhood (which happened a lot in the sixties and seventies since pedophilia was quite fasionable, especially in high society "artistic" circles). So I actually hope she was forced into it, because the alternative suggests something far worse.
Maybe you're the one who needs to examine his feelings when it comes to naked children...
The same right back atcha, Mr. Anonymous Coward. I hope you don't have children.
Who said she was forced to do it? (It would surprise me if she was).
Have you ever heard of the term "age of consent"? What gives you the sick idea that a ten year old is capable of consenting to being sexually exploited?
It's art. Do you find it sexually attractive? I don't. It's normal to see a naked child and not be aroused, that's one reason adults look different to children.
So do you think it's normal to force a ten year old to pose naked for the camera in a sexually suggestive position, for a public of millions?
Slashdot Mirror
You should write to all these independent Usenet providers. Maybe you'll convince them to have an epiphany and instantly drop their service to their hundreds of thousands of customers.
You're confusing alt.* and alt.binaries.*. There are plenty of good and active text groups in alt.*. In modern terms, the bandwidth they consume is insignificant. There is no reason you should have to carry binaries.
And then of course there's the Big 8 hierarchies, which you conveniently declared dead right along with alt.binaries.* even though none of them carry any binaries. Please stop conflating issues.
PLONK
Bullshit. I challenge you to find a single actual kiddie porn picture in any of those groups. I think you won't find any. Just going by the names of the groups is sheer idiocy, especially in alt.* where any joker can start a group at a whim under any name (and maybe two or three providers will even actually carry it).
You forgot a biggie: decentralized distribution. Get your Usenet feed from your local (or otherwise preferred) site. If one Usenet site goes down or goes crappy, simply switch to another one. Conversely, if your favourite web forum goes away, you're fucked.
In exchange for the deal, he got 15 years to life (instead of 25 years to life). So he cannot get out after less than 15 years under any circumstances. And after those 15 years, if I understand it right, he'll have to convince a parole board that it would be a good idea to release him. Can you imagine Hans Reiser convincing a parole board of anything? I think he may very well stay locked up for life.
Adium 1.2.6 is now out which fixes ICQ connectivity.
Uh, yeah. He always does. That's why he's a visionary.
Actually, they're the only EU body that is democratically elected! If you refused to vote in the 2004 EP elections, that's another matter; next year you'll have a chance to remedy that.
(And of course the Lisbon treaty was supposed to give the EP more power, which would have increased democracy in the EU. Too bad.)
For the language nerds, it might be interesting to know that 'voorwerp' is in fact a direct loan translation of Latin 'obiectum' (object).
Wow. I bow to your superior Googlewhack.
Except that you didn't enter any house. Your neighbour is transmitting their open-access signal into your own house for you to use. Your analogy is therefore broken.
Nah. Belgium doesn't actually exist, it's just a leftist ruse; a device applied to propagate the Liberal agenda throughout the world.
Very true.
[...]
A scientist was right to doubt the existence of tectonic plates before based on your observation, and is right to believe in them now.
But his science teacher didn't just doubt their existence, he dismissed the idea out of hand because it didn't conform with prevailing dogma. That doesn't have anything to do with science. A hypothesis that can be neither proven or disproven by existing evidence should not be considered false; it should be considered an unknown, meriting further research.
There is a difference between not hating oneself and considering oneself superior and others unworthy.
It may be a delicate balance to strive for the former, but it's an important one.
On a related note...
A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq.
For the first time, the extent to which some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding has been researched by the BBC's Panorama using US and Iraqi government sources.
A US gagging order is preventing discussion of the allegations.
The order applies to 70 court cases against some of the top US companies.
(more)
What's more, even the original Myst was a set of HyperCard stacks.
Which is an excellent reason for non-USA companies to avoid Gmail and any other US-based email service like the plague.
And before that (since the Mac's introduction in 1984) they were Macintosh commands - Command-X, Command-C and Command-V. At the time, Macs didn't have a CTRL key, and PCs still don't have a Command key. This being the only reason for the difference in modifier key, it's obvious that the Mac originated this convention.
(Now cue the replies saying Apple stole it from Xerox, never mind that Xerox's implementation did not include a clipboard, or many other Apple-pioneered features we now consider basic...)
I had to use two terminal commands to turn off Tiger's "Safe Sleep" feature that makes it take about a minute for my computer to fall asleep while it dumps my 2 GB of RAM onto the hard drive. I sleep and wake my MacBook frequently so I'm not at risk of losing RAM contents, so I'm better off without this feature. I think this is a pretty basic configuration option.
How about the sick sexual pose that this naked 10-year old child is in?
So the sexual exploitation for children for marketing purposes is perfectly allright as long as the parents agree to it?
And how does this picture manage to get so much attention? By its intention to cause sexual arousal. QED.
Have you ever heard of the term "age of consent"? What gives you the idea that a ten year old is capable of being sexually exploited? Consent is not retroactive, it doesn't matter what she thinks about it now. She might have blocked out the trauma.
So evil that happened centuries ago justifies evil happening now?
Are you aware that children are not born as sexual beings, but that they develop sexuality during puberty? This was a sexual pose that no normal ten year old would even conceive of, let alone voluntarily assume. If this girl voluntarily put herself in front of the camera in this heavily suggestive position, it means she was probably sexually abused throughout her childhood (which happened a lot in the sixties and seventies since pedophilia was quite fasionable, especially in high society "artistic" circles). So I actually hope she was forced into it, because the alternative suggests something far worse.
The same right back atcha, Mr. Anonymous Coward. I hope you don't have children.
Have you ever heard of the term "age of consent"? What gives you the sick idea that a ten year old is capable of consenting to being sexually exploited?
So do you think it's normal to force a ten year old to pose naked for the camera in a sexually suggestive position, for a public of millions?
Would you want that to happen to your daughter?