I never said they should. Infact I said the oposite: current DRM has the effect of stopping the non-technical user while having little or no effect on the geek. I find this strongly objectionable.
Look, most existing implementations of DRM are completely screwed. But the concept is valid.
That's precisely where we disagree. You claim, in principle, it migth be possible to make a system that is less obnoxious, and this migth actually have some desirable qualities.
I claim, in *practice* those implementing DRM, those doing the development-work, those deciding which DRM to implement have not ACTUALLY developed and implemented such non-obnoxious DRM. Instead they've implemented DRM with all of the problems I mentioned, and many more. Yes, in *principle* they could act differently in the future, but their interests are fundamentally not aligned with those of consumers, so I consider it likely there'll always be a conflict. (and they'll continue to choose DRM that aids *their* interests first and the interests of normal consumers second (if that))
Resurfacing disks is cheap and easy.
Let me guess, you don't have many children ? Ever tried "resurfacing" a disc after your kid stepped on the DVD *with* shoes on *with* sand under those shoes ? Here's a hint: if the data-layer is damaged, no recovery is possible.
This is a problem with the overbearingness of current implementations. With a "deterrent" implementation, this shouldn't be an issue.
Yes. I freely admit to talking about ACTUAL problems experienced by ACTUAL people buying products that are ACTUALLY on the market today. If you want to go wandering off, defending DRM on the basis of some hypothethical non-obnoxious DRM that has the chief disadvantage of not actually existing (or being extremely rare), go ahead.
It harms the fully legal customer who wants to listen to his music-CD in the computer at work.
Again, shouldn't be an issue. You should never have to pair a physical media with a playback device.
Again: "shouldn't be" an issue. So you say. But in actual real life it IS an issue. I talk of reality, not dreamland.
Now you're talking about regional lockout, the arguably illegal practice of artifically subdividing a market. Again, shouldn't be there.
Ok, so we agree this is fundamentally wrong. (nevertheless it's there -- and DMCA et al make it harder to figth it)
It [drm] has no effect whatsoever on those that get their music from p2p.
So? They weren't going to buy it anyway.
But the stated point of DRM is to curb piracy. If it fails that (its claimed primary mission!) then what's the point supposed to be again ?
It has no effect whatsoever on the large professional comercial pirates. (those that copy and *sell* copyrigthed material)
So? A: that's what law enforcement is for and B: that's a pretty damned tiny group in the west anyway.
It's a small group, but the damages are large. Also the stated point of DRM is to curb piracy. If it fails that (its claimed primary mission!) then what's the point supposed to be again ? Why have DRM at all if you admit up-front that it is unlikely to influence piracy ?
The best implementation of this I've seen has to be Steam (now that it doesn't crash every few minutes). Sure, it manages to a degree what you can and can't do with your games. But it also improves the end-user experience by removing trips to the store and allowing you to take your games with you to whatever PC you happen to be on. Assuming your network connection is reasonable, that's actually really nice.
Ok, so let's make steam your 'benchmark' non-obnoxious DRM. Steam has, atleast unless I misunderstood something, the following problems (there's bound to be more, these are just of the top of my head)
You can only access content protected by it as long as the steam-servers are up and reachable.
You're forced to reveal your identity when buying and using content.
First sale is fucked -- you can't easily resell a steam-game you're tired of.
Having web-directories 755 or similar ain't in itself a threat. Now, if the setup is such that you can't restrict readability of config-files and have them still readable by your php (or whatever!) process, then they're seriously fucked, agreed.
My web-directory is 755 too, along with 644 for the static content there. However all my script and config-files are 640 with the group set to a group ( user_web ) that all scripts run as.
Basic idea ? If you're clueless you're screwed no-matter-what. And if your hosting-provider is sufficiently clueless, then you're screwed even if you have a clue. Unless you use that clue to find a new hosting-provider.
It further adds to the problems non-technical people may have in legally using material they own, while making no difference whatsoever for the large comercial pirates.
Mass-copying copyrigthed DVDs and selling the resulting discs is blatantly illegal -- but it was illegal before the DMCA came too. And I don't think all too many pirates will be thinking Oh, so that'd be breaking *two* laws -- I better not then!
I disagree: DRM would be a problem even without DMCA (though a somewhat smaller one).
You can't count on anything 100%. Your best bet is a mix of independent technologies, but even then there's going to be situations where all comms are down.
The main shared vulnerability tends to be power. When power goes down, it takes a lot of communicaiton-infrastructure with it. Some rigth away (most people aren't equipped to get online, or watch television without power) and some of it later when UPSen run out of juice or generators fail in various ways.
Still, we've improved a LOT. When my father was small their total 2-way communications consisted of a single copper landline. They could also watch TV and hear radio. Only the phone would work without power.
Today, my household (for example) has access to:
One POTS-landline over copper.
Two mobile-phones (independent providers)
One ip-connection over coax (along with cable-tv)
One ip-connection over optic fibre
3 ip-connections over WIFI.
The 3 first of these work without power. (for aslong as the laptop-batteries can take it anyway) I can reroute telephone or ip over any of these in 5 minutes and without any problems. (for example, I can use my old modem and transport IP over POTS. Or the other way around I can fire up Skype and do telephony over any ip-connection.)
Not to sound too pedantic, but DRM of some form still has a place. DRM should be there to discourage casual copying by non-geek people.
Which is the oposite effect from the one the RIAA claims to want:
It hurts the family-mother wanting to make copies of the overused childrens-DVD to avoid having to buy it anew next time it gets scratched.
It hurts the non-technical customer who just wants to listen to his music bougth for player-X 5 years later after player-X broke and he bougth player-Y.
It harms the fully legal customer who wants to listen to his music-CD in the computer at work.
It harms the tourist that wants to buy some Japanese DVDs as souvenirs from his travels in Japan.
It harms the customer who for whatever reason needs to get a new computer. (yes, I know, there are ways -- but it's extra hassle)
Meanwhile:
It has no effect whatsoever on those that get their music from p2p.
It has no effect whatsoever on the large professional comercial pirates. (those that copy and *sell* copyrigthed material)
It has no effect whatsoever on the cracker-team that get a kick out of being the first to "release" whatever new music or movie to various p2p-networks. It may even *add* to their prestige.
I don't see how this adds up to "90% of the goodness", nor how it amounts to "5% of the annoyance".
More like 90% of the annoyance for 5% of the benefits.
The only stunning thing is that so many, even some reasonably intelligent people, claim to not understand this.
Notice I said "claim to" -- I don't nessecarily believe them. I think all competent companies developing technologies like this know from the get-go that they product they're trying to create is fundamentally impossible. Likely most of their customers (i.e. RIAA) knows it too.
That is true. But at the same time context *does* matter. It is in many cases impossible to fairly evaluate a message without a little context.
For example, if PJ was actually a team of IBM-lawyers (which I consider bullshit -- but then again, pretty much anything coming out of SCO is bullshit) then it'd mean that they lied. I personally tend to trust sources less after discovering that they deliberately and systematically lied to me.
But it's moot anyway -- by all accounts PJ is who she claims to be and SCO is grasping for non-existing straws again -- which seems to be all theyre doing these days.
I remember it too. The Internet held up remarkably well. And did indeed route-around damage, in the sense that when channels failed, they where made up for by literally thousands and thousands of mirrors and alternative routes.
Thousands of people spontaneously decided to mirror important sites that experienced problems.
IRC-channels got hooked up to major news-sources (even those normally only for subscribers)
Email surged trough the tubes (Hah!), for a few hours the majority of email in the world was *NOT* spam.
Hell, even MUDs and MMORPGs spontaneously converted into information-exchange centres.
Internet was severly strained in some areas of the USA. So people routed around it. I personally helped getting 3 people living in NY get a decent net-connection, by *modem* to a Norwegian modem-pool. Yes, sure it was 28.8. Yes sure it cost $0.10/minute. There's some situations where youre honestly *happy* to pay $6/hour for surfing the net at modem-speed. (I know, in some areas phone-service was also spotty)
It was impressive. I think, on that day I realized the net had grown up. When disasters strike, and people go turn on their laptops, you realize this thing ain't just a toy anymore.
The mortality-rate is probably a lot lower in reality -- it's a given there'll be an unknown amount of people who get infected with bird-flu, yet never turn seriously ill, so they never enter the statistics at all.
We don't know how many this is. Could be half the people who get bird-flu gets seriously ill (and 60% of those die), but it could also be that 5% of the people infected with bird-flu gets seriously ill (and 60% of *those* 5%, or 3% of the total infected die)
Evilviper: "IF Co2 is only responsible for 10% of global warming"
$uperJay: "If global warming was reduced by 10%," In order to get 10% out of 10%, that means a 100% reduction in CO2.
Assuming things scale linearily (which ain't at all a given!). Anyway, that's just someone not really thinking what they're writing. All current research shows CO2 is likely responsible for a lot more than 10% of the warming, and nobody is seriously suggesting that -zero- is the highest CO2-emission permissible from human activity. (human CO2-emissions have -never- been zero since the first human drew his/her first breath anyway)
It's not an all-or-nothing thing anyway. It's perfectly possible, likely even, that less CO2 causes *less* damage. Even if neither the damage nor the CO2 is zero.
the budgets for pumping CO2 from gas-powered powerplants back into the wells where the gas originally came from rather than releasing it to the atmosphere are that it'll make the powerplant ~20% more expensive, and will make them emit 95% less CO2.
20% is quite a big expense, doesn't scale up, and all for a very small change in the level of atmospheric CO2.
20% extra cost in building powerplants would lead to electricity costing 20% more. (assuming the operating-costs are similarily influenced, which is actually an overstatement in this case, but close enough) If new powerplants started generally doing this, it'd lead to an 80% reduction in CO2 emitted from them, compared to not doing anything. I'm not sure what you mean by "scaling up", the powerplants *are* full-scale comercial powerplants.
It's also potentially quite dangerous to sequester CO2. Should it ever leak, it could suffocate anyone in the vicinity. Potentially a huge number of people killed, even dozens of miles away (if they're downhill from the leak).
Except the Norwegian gas-wells are under typically 1-3 *KM* of rock, in the middle of the north sea, a hundred km or so from anything or anyway -- even ignoring the fact that *should* the wells end up leaking CO2 back to the atmosphere, they'd do it slowly, it's not like a Balloon, we're talking gargantuan volumes of *rock* here. Rock that today hold natural gases. (which are, by the way, equally suffocating and *worse* for global warming should they suddenly be released)
Another example -- building a house that needs 1/3rd the energy for heating and AC compared to a standard house costs on the order of 10% more Now THAT'S a REAL straw man!
Why ? It's just an example of something that saves a lot of energy with modest cost. It also reduces global warming, assuming your energy was produced by a CO2-producing powerplant.
Besides, the bill won't be picked up by those doing the polluting anyway, rigth ? Most of the damage from flooding will be in low-lying regions with little resources to defend themselves, like for example poor islands in the pacific.
You're putting up a straw-man. Nobody is suggesting "stopping all activities that emit Co2", that would, for starters, mean stop breathing, because as you may (or may not, seeing your political inclination) be aware our metabolism emits CO2 every time you exhale.
The truth is, the price varies. There are some areas where huge reductions are cheap, and I don't see any reason not to do it. For example, the budgets for pumping CO2 from gas-powered powerplants back into the wells where the gas originally came from rather than releasing it to the atmosphere are that it'll make the powerplant ~20% more expensive, and will make them emit 95% less CO2. Another example -- building a house that needs 1/3rd the energy for heating and AC compared to a standard house costs on the order of 10% more -- cheap enough that at todays energy-prices it makes sense even in strict economic terms. (i.e. it makes sense even if you completely ignore the benefits to the environment)
We've had this in Norway for a long long time. Not specifically about fake websites, but more generally our truth-in-advertising laws say that: (roughly translated) "All marketing should be presented in a way that makes it obvious that the material is marketing."
(All markedsføring skal utformes og presenteres på en slik måte at den tydelig framstår som markedsføring.)
It does have some effect -- though it's not enforced as well as I'd like -- for example movies with paid product-placements are accepted, despite imho being a straigthforward violation of the above law. No idea why.
What kind of advertisement do you prefer: the marketoid speak, bland, noisy, blinking commercial spots rotated a hundred times on every channel every day, or more game-like advertising,
You're creating a false dictohomy. My answer is *neither*.
I like to get the facts. It's fine with me to get them presented in a fun way -- but I want the facts. I react strongly negatively when I detect that people are trying to bullshit me. There's so much bullshit though, that these days you're pretty much forced to assume that any claim you yourself can't evaulate the probability of is bullshit.
Marketing camoflaging as non-marketing is noising up our communication-channels. I see no reason to allow it. Marketing can look any way it want aslong as it's truthful, and it clearly indicates that it is indeed marketing.
Not that level. There's still the network-effects. If MS-software is what you and/or your friends know and what most people around you use, it makes sense to use that even if there is another equally-good alternative available under the same terms.
Besides, in RL you're making love to a *person*. And as they say, what goes between the ears is more important than what goes between the legs. porn-actors on the other hand don't have (well they migth *have* but the typical flick doesn't give any opportunity to show it) anything between their ears.
It's not comparable. At all. My wife is the most beautiful girl in the world. I tend to start crying if I look at pictures of her for too long. Some model with looks very close to the current "ideal" could never do that.
In practice jealousy tends to be a just as serious problem among swingers as other people. Indeed not wanting to deal with all that is probably the main reason the swinger-scene ain't 10 times larger than it is.
You're being silly. I never said anything about stern hands, nor about sex for that matter. I also never claimed that all-male groups never argue.
To the contrary -- ANY group whatsoever will have internal conflicts. That's completely unavoidable and beside the point. You're not even trying to eliminate conflict -- you're trying to keep conflicts at a level where they don't interfere with the objectives of the mission in a negative way.
As for sexual fantasies -- sure It'd be fun to get to try out zero-G sometime. I'm fairly sure it'd be more hilarious than erotic though, it also has nothing whatsoever to do with conflict-levels in small groups -- you're just tossing mud and hoping something will stick.
True, but that wasn't the point. The point is that any one thing is unlikely -- but still *something* happens.
If you'd asked anyone when I was a baby what the odds are that I'll marry a german girl named Silvia (I'm not german), have twins and finish 17th in the ACM programming-contest, they'd have said the odds that all those things happen are miniscule.
Nevertheless, they did, but that in no way whatsoever indicates divind intervention in my life.
Actually, if you look at the research you find that all-male groups work better than all-female groups. But you also find that diverse groups work best of all -- and that larger, diverse groups with reasonable space works best of all.
It's unlikely to be practical to make the first mars-crew very large though, or give them lots of space.
If you're gonna send a dozen people for a 5-year mission your best bet is probably all-male. Second-best probably to send half a dozen older established couples.
Seriously, I was refering to the woman in the article. And I was somewhat flattering -- she isn't (and wasn't) stunning. But honestly, she looked better-than-average, which in my experience is actually typical for women taking plastical surgery.
The US is nuts with alcohol-laws anyway. In Germany you can buy beer from age 16. In the US you're old enough to die for your country at 18, but somehow not old enough for a beer. Screw that.
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That's precisely where we disagree. You claim, in principle, it migth be possible to make a system that is less obnoxious, and this migth actually have some desirable qualities.
I claim, in *practice* those implementing DRM, those doing the development-work, those deciding which DRM to implement have not ACTUALLY developed and implemented such non-obnoxious DRM. Instead they've implemented DRM with all of the problems I mentioned, and many more. Yes, in *principle* they could act differently in the future, but their interests are fundamentally not aligned with those of consumers, so I consider it likely there'll always be a conflict. (and they'll continue to choose DRM that aids *their* interests first and the interests of normal consumers second (if that))
Resurfacing disks is cheap and easy.
Let me guess, you don't have many children ? Ever tried "resurfacing" a disc after your kid stepped on the DVD *with* shoes on *with* sand under those shoes ? Here's a hint: if the data-layer is damaged, no recovery is possible.
This is a problem with the overbearingness of current implementations. With a "deterrent" implementation, this shouldn't be an issue.
Yes. I freely admit to talking about ACTUAL problems experienced by ACTUAL people buying products that are ACTUALLY on the market today. If you want to go wandering off, defending DRM on the basis of some hypothethical non-obnoxious DRM that has the chief disadvantage of not actually existing (or being extremely rare), go ahead.
It harms the fully legal customer who wants to listen to his music-CD in the computer at work. Again, shouldn't be an issue. You should never have to pair a physical media with a playback device.
Again: "shouldn't be" an issue. So you say. But in actual real life it IS an issue. I talk of reality, not dreamland.
Now you're talking about regional lockout, the arguably illegal practice of artifically subdividing a market. Again, shouldn't be there.
Ok, so we agree this is fundamentally wrong. (nevertheless it's there -- and DMCA et al make it harder to figth it)
It [drm] has no effect whatsoever on those that get their music from p2p. So? They weren't going to buy it anyway.
But the stated point of DRM is to curb piracy. If it fails that (its claimed primary mission!) then what's the point supposed to be again ? It has no effect whatsoever on the large professional comercial pirates. (those that copy and *sell* copyrigthed material) So? A: that's what law enforcement is for and B: that's a pretty damned tiny group in the west anyway.
It's a small group, but the damages are large. Also the stated point of DRM is to curb piracy. If it fails that (its claimed primary mission!) then what's the point supposed to be again ? Why have DRM at all if you admit up-front that it is unlikely to influence piracy ?
The best implementation of this I've seen has to be Steam (now that it doesn't crash every few minutes). Sure, it manages to a degree what you can and can't do with your games. But it also improves the end-user experience by removing trips to the store and allowing you to take your games with you to whatever PC you happen to be on. Assuming your network connection is reasonable, that's actually really nice.
Ok, so let's make steam your 'benchmark' non-obnoxious DRM. Steam has, atleast unless I misunderstood something, the following problems (there's bound to be more, these are just of the top of my head)
Ok, so fine. I just got this Gnuicus-like picture of you in my mind currently. I assure you, you look awesome !
My web-directory is 755 too, along with 644 for the static content there. However all my script and config-files are 640 with the group set to a group ( user_web ) that all scripts run as.
Basic idea ? If you're clueless you're screwed no-matter-what. And if your hosting-provider is sufficiently clueless, then you're screwed even if you have a clue. Unless you use that clue to find a new hosting-provider.
It further adds to the problems non-technical people may have in legally using material they own, while making no difference whatsoever for the large comercial pirates.
Mass-copying copyrigthed DVDs and selling the resulting discs is blatantly illegal -- but it was illegal before the DMCA came too. And I don't think all too many pirates will be thinking Oh, so that'd be breaking *two* laws -- I better not then!
I disagree: DRM would be a problem even without DMCA (though a somewhat smaller one).
The main shared vulnerability tends to be power. When power goes down, it takes a lot of communicaiton-infrastructure with it. Some rigth away (most people aren't equipped to get online, or watch television without power) and some of it later when UPSen run out of juice or generators fail in various ways.
Still, we've improved a LOT. When my father was small their total 2-way communications consisted of a single copper landline. They could also watch TV and hear radio. Only the phone would work without power.
Today, my household (for example) has access to:
The 3 first of these work without power. (for aslong as the laptop-batteries can take it anyway) I can reroute telephone or ip over any of these in 5 minutes and without any problems. (for example, I can use my old modem and transport IP over POTS. Or the other way around I can fire up Skype and do telephony over any ip-connection.)
Which is the oposite effect from the one the RIAA claims to want:
Meanwhile:
I don't see how this adds up to "90% of the goodness", nor how it amounts to "5% of the annoyance".
More like 90% of the annoyance for 5% of the benefits.
Notice I said "claim to" -- I don't nessecarily believe them. I think all competent companies developing technologies like this know from the get-go that they product they're trying to create is fundamentally impossible. Likely most of their customers (i.e. RIAA) knows it too.
For example, if PJ was actually a team of IBM-lawyers (which I consider bullshit -- but then again, pretty much anything coming out of SCO is bullshit) then it'd mean that they lied. I personally tend to trust sources less after discovering that they deliberately and systematically lied to me.
But it's moot anyway -- by all accounts PJ is who she claims to be and SCO is grasping for non-existing straws again -- which seems to be all theyre doing these days.
Internet was severly strained in some areas of the USA. So people routed around it. I personally helped getting 3 people living in NY get a decent net-connection, by *modem* to a Norwegian modem-pool. Yes, sure it was 28.8. Yes sure it cost $0.10/minute. There's some situations where youre honestly *happy* to pay $6/hour for surfing the net at modem-speed. (I know, in some areas phone-service was also spotty)
It was impressive. I think, on that day I realized the net had grown up. When disasters strike, and people go turn on their laptops, you realize this thing ain't just a toy anymore.
We don't know how many this is. Could be half the people who get bird-flu gets seriously ill (and 60% of those die), but it could also be that 5% of the people infected with bird-flu gets seriously ill (and 60% of *those* 5%, or 3% of the total infected die)
It makes perfect sense to limit human interaction in order to brake or halt the spread of infectious disease.
Assuming things scale linearily (which ain't at all a given!). Anyway, that's just someone not really thinking what they're writing. All current research shows CO2 is likely responsible for a lot more than 10% of the warming, and nobody is seriously suggesting that -zero- is the highest CO2-emission permissible from human activity. (human CO2-emissions have -never- been zero since the first human drew his/her first breath anyway)
It's not an all-or-nothing thing anyway. It's perfectly possible, likely even, that less CO2 causes *less* damage. Even if neither the damage nor the CO2 is zero.
the budgets for pumping CO2 from gas-powered powerplants back into the wells where the gas originally came from rather than releasing it to the atmosphere are that it'll make the powerplant ~20% more expensive, and will make them emit 95% less CO2.
20% is quite a big expense, doesn't scale up, and all for a very small change in the level of atmospheric CO2.
20% extra cost in building powerplants would lead to electricity costing 20% more. (assuming the operating-costs are similarily influenced, which is actually an overstatement in this case, but close enough) If new powerplants started generally doing this, it'd lead to an 80% reduction in CO2 emitted from them, compared to not doing anything. I'm not sure what you mean by "scaling up", the powerplants *are* full-scale comercial powerplants.
It's also potentially quite dangerous to sequester CO2. Should it ever leak, it could suffocate anyone in the vicinity. Potentially a huge number of people killed, even dozens of miles away (if they're downhill from the leak).
Except the Norwegian gas-wells are under typically 1-3 *KM* of rock, in the middle of the north sea, a hundred km or so from anything or anyway -- even ignoring the fact that *should* the wells end up leaking CO2 back to the atmosphere, they'd do it slowly, it's not like a Balloon, we're talking gargantuan volumes of *rock* here. Rock that today hold natural gases. (which are, by the way, equally suffocating and *worse* for global warming should they suddenly be released)
Another example -- building a house that needs 1/3rd the energy for heating and AC compared to a standard house costs on the order of 10% more Now THAT'S a REAL straw man!
Why ? It's just an example of something that saves a lot of energy with modest cost. It also reduces global warming, assuming your energy was produced by a CO2-producing powerplant.
You're putting up a straw-man. Nobody is suggesting "stopping all activities that emit Co2", that would, for starters, mean stop breathing, because as you may (or may not, seeing your political inclination) be aware our metabolism emits CO2 every time you exhale.
The truth is, the price varies. There are some areas where huge reductions are cheap, and I don't see any reason not to do it. For example, the budgets for pumping CO2 from gas-powered powerplants back into the wells where the gas originally came from rather than releasing it to the atmosphere are that it'll make the powerplant ~20% more expensive, and will make them emit 95% less CO2. Another example -- building a house that needs 1/3rd the energy for heating and AC compared to a standard house costs on the order of 10% more -- cheap enough that at todays energy-prices it makes sense even in strict economic terms. (i.e. it makes sense even if you completely ignore the benefits to the environment)
It does have some effect -- though it's not enforced as well as I'd like -- for example movies with paid product-placements are accepted, despite imho being a straigthforward violation of the above law. No idea why.
You're creating a false dictohomy. My answer is *neither*.
I like to get the facts. It's fine with me to get them presented in a fun way -- but I want the facts. I react strongly negatively when I detect that people are trying to bullshit me. There's so much bullshit though, that these days you're pretty much forced to assume that any claim you yourself can't evaulate the probability of is bullshit.
Marketing camoflaging as non-marketing is noising up our communication-channels. I see no reason to allow it. Marketing can look any way it want aslong as it's truthful, and it clearly indicates that it is indeed marketing.
Possibly. But I don't think it'd subtract from the hilarity. (is that even a word ?)
It's not comparable. At all. My wife is the most beautiful girl in the world. I tend to start crying if I look at pictures of her for too long. Some model with looks very close to the current "ideal" could never do that.
In practice jealousy tends to be a just as serious problem among swingers as other people. Indeed not wanting to deal with all that is probably the main reason the swinger-scene ain't 10 times larger than it is.
To the contrary -- ANY group whatsoever will have internal conflicts. That's completely unavoidable and beside the point. You're not even trying to eliminate conflict -- you're trying to keep conflicts at a level where they don't interfere with the objectives of the mission in a negative way.
As for sexual fantasies -- sure It'd be fun to get to try out zero-G sometime. I'm fairly sure it'd be more hilarious than erotic though, it also has nothing whatsoever to do with conflict-levels in small groups -- you're just tossing mud and hoping something will stick.
If you'd asked anyone when I was a baby what the odds are that I'll marry a german girl named Silvia (I'm not german), have twins and finish 17th in the ACM programming-contest, they'd have said the odds that all those things happen are miniscule.
Nevertheless, they did, but that in no way whatsoever indicates divind intervention in my life.
It's unlikely to be practical to make the first mars-crew very large though, or give them lots of space.
If you're gonna send a dozen people for a 5-year mission your best bet is probably all-male. Second-best probably to send half a dozen older established couples.
Seriously, I was refering to the woman in the article. And I was somewhat flattering -- she isn't (and wasn't) stunning. But honestly, she looked better-than-average, which in my experience is actually typical for women taking plastical surgery.
The US is nuts with alcohol-laws anyway. In Germany you can buy beer from age 16. In the US you're old enough to die for your country at 18, but somehow not old enough for a beer. Screw that.