Banging 16 year olds is simply both illegal and unfavorable in today's society
It's legal at 16 in the UK, and "unfavorable" is very subjective indeed.
It's an extremely complex moral area, and the law has to cut through the crap by applying somewhat arbitrary limits. Obviously it's a nonsense that sexual intercourse with someone aged 15 years and 364 days is wrong, but doing it the very next day is fine. But it's also nonsense that driving with 799mg/L of alcohol in your blood is fine, while driving with 800mg/L is wrong. But the only manageable way to codify this stuff into law is to draw a line at some arbitrary point somewhere near where the public consensus is.
I would say arbitrary and fuzzy -- the line is chosen arbitrarily by society, and changes over time, and the line is blurred.
However the point is, the MP did not prepare a list of exempt works from history. He named a book as an example of the kind of thing which in his opinion would be clearly unaffected. If something with similar content to Lolita was published tomorrow, that too would be unaffected.
He wants to ban literature in which the sexual abuse of a child is depicted explicitly in order to arouse the reader. Lolita is not that, so Lolita would not be covered. (Have you even read Lolita?).
And just how do we determine the intent of the author? How do we determine the physical/psychological reaction of the reader?
Who is going to sit on the committee to determine whether an account of child rape was "depicted explicitly in order to arouse the reader"?
To be clear: I don't think this bill is a good idea. However Lolita is not even an edge case.
The words the MP used were "reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal". I don't know what's in the bill, but similar language appears in other laws, I believe. Yes, it's subjective. But unfortunately, law is. I was a juror on a case where we had to judge the intent of an attacker who (accidentally or deliberately?) killed someone. How do you determine the intent? Only by examining evidence that is subjective.
So as with other laws, we determine by asking a jury. The crown prosecution service will decide whether to prosecute based on their experts' view on what a jury will think. In the case of traditional publishing, someone in the publishing company's legal department will take a view on what the CPS will do, and some exec will take a view on the risk/reward.
I can hypothesise works of literature which *do* contain explicit descriptions of child abuse. Then you can start exploring the author's intent, and it might be interesting. But Lolita doesn't contain any explicit description of child abuse, so there's no intent to explore.
I can see how "reasonably assumed" could go wrong with this proposed law (and to be clear: I'm opposed to censorship in principle).
However in the specific scenario described, no jury would convict, and it would be very unlikely to go to court: A harrowing account from the victim's perspective, on a forum for fellow victims.
I'm much more worried about art. Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho contains passages which in isolation are indistinguishable from porn, and morph into gruelling violence -- and in context it's art. Now, that doesn't involve children. But you can hypothesise a novel that used porn-like language to describe child abuse, in order to make a wider artistic point. I think that kind of stuff is legitimate, but you could probably a jury who would "reasonably assume" it was just porn.
Would your story "reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal".
No. So this guy doesn't want to ban your forum posting.
But it does raise questions. Clearly a description of your ordeal could be written in different ways; it could be written from the perspective of the abuser. It could project "the child loved it really" thoughts into the victim. It could revel in the sadism. It could revel in projected masochism. Of course your version wouldn't do any of these things. But how does a law manage to distinguish, when the interpretation might be very subjective?
Also, I imagine there's some sadists who would get turned on by a victim's account; who actually enjoys the damage they've done. But you can't ban everything that presses every weirdo's buttons, because you then deprive decent people to whom it has value.
He wants to ban literature in which the sexual abuse of a child is depicted explicitly in order to arouse the reader. Lolita is not that, so Lolita would not be covered. (Have you even read Lolita?).
Let's disagree with what he's actually proposed, rather than disagreeing with a strawman.
But he doesn't seem to have an exception for the psychiatrists who possess such descriptions as they are attempting to treat patients.Or researchers who possess such descriptions as they are attempting to write papers about human sexual behavior.
I would imagine that in order to get passed into law, that kind of thing would get covered. For example, the UK law relating to extreme pornographic material excludes those with a "legitimate work reason" for possessing an image. I assume that's for jobs like academic researcher, policeman, etc., and not for jobs like "extreme pornographer"...
So I assume Maya Angelou's previous written account of how her uncle molested her would be ok in that case, it's just any new material she writes about that trauma that would get her books burned and her readers prosecuted??
It would be OK because it is clearly not intended to arouse. To be banned "it must reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal".
Those thrillers and spy stories are at least sold as fiction.
This proposal would cover fictional accounts of child abuse. In fact, I think that's the primary target.
The precise scenario the MP has in mind:
- Person A writes detailed fictional story in which a child is sexually abused; the purpose of the story is to arouse a reader who fantasises about being the abuser.
- Person B reads the story, is aroused, fantasises about it
- Person B may go on to abuse in real life
So he wants to ban the possession of such fictional stories. Having a big disclaimer at the top of the text file saying "THIS IS A FICTIONAL WORK INTENDED FOR ENTERTAINMENT ONLY" would not be a defence.
The first thing I thought is, how are we going to record any actual child abuse? How about social workers detailing such events, are they falling foul of the law with their reports?
From TFA: The law would be tightly written, he insisted, to cover obscene writing of a nature "that it must reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal".
My concerns are more about slippery slopes, categorisation creep, thoughtcrime, and enforceability.
It's field-specific. If it doesn't forget everything after power cycling, we in the computer business call that "storage."
Er, in my CS textbooks (admittedly from the early 90s), memory and storage are interchangeable terms, and RAM counts as "storage" too.
In those books, RAM is "primary storage" and hard drives are "secondary storage".
By a different definition, coming from a different part of the computing field, primary storage is what you get from malloc() and secondary storage is what you get from fopen() -- but we all know how blurry *that* can get.
Good luck running 64 separate VMs on your small server (not saying it's not impossible but I really wonder which one is faster to set up) and you won't be able to test any of the very different interconnects that easily.
Very easy indeed, and almost certainly quicker/easier to set up than the physical way, either using something like Vagrant or by rolling your own scripts to drive VirtualBox.
However, I think it's instructive for students to do it the physical way first. By analogy: first understand LANs, then learn about VLANs.
Did the definition of PC change. Last I checked PC == x86.
The meaning of PC was never really solid. It just means "Personal Computer". In this case I just meant "something with a CPU, RAM, a filesystem, keyboard, monitor and ethernet. (although the keyboard and monitor aren't relevant to this particular project).
Mmm, but it *is* a nice environment for *students* to experiment with the *principles* of parallel computing in a tactile manner.
I began learning to code on an 8 bit 2Mhz CPU, with 32KB of RAM. If I wrote an inefficient loop, I'd often notice the slowness without benchmarking. If I was careless with memory, my program would crash. On my quad core laptop today, I only notice issues like that if I benchmark or do deliberate load testing. So working on low-spec systems is instructive.
Likewise, working with clusters of low-powered units on a slow comms bus is going to teach these students a lot about optimising parallel programs. They're going to have to deal with race conditions, memory ceilings, etc. which might not even show up on faster systems.
I'm a big fan of the RP project. But I'm a bit bored of seeing news items in which someone does something with this Linux box, which obviously a Linux box can do. Raspberry Pi compiles C! Raspberry Pi controls a robot! Raspberry Pi runs MAME! Well of course it does, it's a little PC, and that's what PCs can do.
SD cards are memory. Wikipedia: "Secure Digital or (SD) is a non-volatile memory card format for use in portable devices.".
Hard disks are memory too. So are tapes. So are CDs.
Just because you might habitually use "memory" as shorthand for RAM, doesn't mean it's the only meaning of the word. And why do you think we need the "Random Access" disambiguation?
I assume if you're RVing, you want to be in reasonably rural areas -- not in city RV parks.
I RV'd through British Columbia and Alaska 3 years ago. For much of the route, 3G wasn't available. State/County campsites don't have WiFi. Commercial campsites almost always have WiFi.
However, the quality of the WiFi can vary wildly. You could easily find yourself camped on the edge of the coverage area of a consumer-grade 802.11b access point, sharing a basic DSL connection with everyone else on the site. Sometimes even basic web browsing is frustrating. I wouldn't want to be reliant on it for VOIP, screen sharing, email attachments of reasonable size, or largeish file transfers.
So I think you'll find yourself hunting out sites with reliable WiFi, which means you won't be as free as you might have hoped.
Similar to the oldest profession it is only done for the money not the enjoyment.
It only takes one black swan to disprove this theory. Is it so hard to imagine that somewhere in the world there is an escort who does it because they like sex, they're not all that choosy who with, and they've realised they can make money at the same time?
I'm certain there's lots of sex workers who are getting no pleasure at all out of it. But I don't imagine that's all of them.
Clearly my figures were made up and illustrative, but "I spend that $10 on tending an apple tree" needs to account for all costs, including what you're calling externalities. I'm not sure what you mean by "the apples are worth". Either I can sell them at an acceptable profit (taking into account the interest payments the bank expects from me), or I can't. If I can't, the business isn't viable. Nobody's claiming that all businesses are viable.
Perhaps you'll claim that I'll be in competition with someone with all the same costs as me, except that they have their own capital and hence no interest to pay. Well, maybe. But maybe the market is big enough for us both. Or maybe I have a better marketing department. It doesn't matter; the point is that lots of successful businesses get started by taking loans (or by selling shares, which is effectively the same thing).
If I want my apple business to be sustainable in the long term, then yes I should replace the nutrients. I could go organic from the get-go, or I could use the inorganic fertilizer you allude to until it becomes scarce enough to be too expensive, then migrate to organic. Either way, phosphorus doesn't leave the planet (unlike helium!), so it will always be available in some form.
The finite resources are ultimately made of sunshine.
The market grows *faster* when you're using up a glut of finite resource. But overall it must grow forever due to input from the sun. Yes there are (possibly severe and long-lasting) peaks and troughs.
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Banging 16 year olds is simply both illegal and unfavorable in today's society
It's legal at 16 in the UK, and "unfavorable" is very subjective indeed.
It's an extremely complex moral area, and the law has to cut through the crap by applying somewhat arbitrary limits. Obviously it's a nonsense that sexual intercourse with someone aged 15 years and 364 days is wrong, but doing it the very next day is fine. But it's also nonsense that driving with 799mg/L of alcohol in your blood is fine, while driving with 800mg/L is wrong. But the only manageable way to codify this stuff into law is to draw a line at some arbitrary point somewhere near where the public consensus is.
I would say arbitrary and fuzzy -- the line is chosen arbitrarily by society, and changes over time, and the line is blurred.
However the point is, the MP did not prepare a list of exempt works from history. He named a book as an example of the kind of thing which in his opinion would be clearly unaffected. If something with similar content to Lolita was published tomorrow, that too would be unaffected.
And just how do we determine the intent of the author? How do we determine the physical/psychological reaction of the reader?
Who is going to sit on the committee to determine whether an account of child rape was "depicted explicitly in order to arouse the reader"?
To be clear: I don't think this bill is a good idea. However Lolita is not even an edge case.
The words the MP used were "reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal". I don't know what's in the bill, but similar language appears in other laws, I believe. Yes, it's subjective. But unfortunately, law is. I was a juror on a case where we had to judge the intent of an attacker who (accidentally or deliberately?) killed someone. How do you determine the intent? Only by examining evidence that is subjective.
So as with other laws, we determine by asking a jury. The crown prosecution service will decide whether to prosecute based on their experts' view on what a jury will think. In the case of traditional publishing, someone in the publishing company's legal department will take a view on what the CPS will do, and some exec will take a view on the risk/reward.
I can hypothesise works of literature which *do* contain explicit descriptions of child abuse. Then you can start exploring the author's intent, and it might be interesting. But Lolita doesn't contain any explicit description of child abuse, so there's no intent to explore.
I can see how "reasonably assumed" could go wrong with this proposed law (and to be clear: I'm opposed to censorship in principle).
However in the specific scenario described, no jury would convict, and it would be very unlikely to go to court: A harrowing account from the victim's perspective, on a forum for fellow victims.
I'm much more worried about art. Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho contains passages which in isolation are indistinguishable from porn, and morph into gruelling violence -- and in context it's art. Now, that doesn't involve children. But you can hypothesise a novel that used porn-like language to describe child abuse, in order to make a wider artistic point. I think that kind of stuff is legitimate, but you could probably a jury who would "reasonably assume" it was just porn.
Would your story "reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal".
No. So this guy doesn't want to ban your forum posting.
But it does raise questions. Clearly a description of your ordeal could be written in different ways; it could be written from the perspective of the abuser. It could project "the child loved it really" thoughts into the victim. It could revel in the sadism. It could revel in projected masochism. Of course your version wouldn't do any of these things. But how does a law manage to distinguish, when the interpretation might be very subjective?
Also, I imagine there's some sadists who would get turned on by a victim's account; who actually enjoys the damage they've done. But you can't ban everything that presses every weirdo's buttons, because you then deprive decent people to whom it has value.
No, that's not what he said at all.
He wants to ban literature in which the sexual abuse of a child is depicted explicitly in order to arouse the reader. Lolita is not that, so Lolita would not be covered. (Have you even read Lolita?).
Let's disagree with what he's actually proposed, rather than disagreeing with a strawman.
But he doesn't seem to have an exception for the psychiatrists who possess such descriptions as they are attempting to treat patients.Or researchers who possess such descriptions as they are attempting to write papers about human sexual behavior.
I would imagine that in order to get passed into law, that kind of thing would get covered. For example, the UK law relating to extreme pornographic material excludes those with a "legitimate work reason" for possessing an image. I assume that's for jobs like academic researcher, policeman, etc., and not for jobs like "extreme pornographer"...
So I assume Maya Angelou's previous written account of how her uncle molested her would be ok in that case, it's just any new material she writes about that trauma that would get her books burned and her readers prosecuted??
It would be OK because it is clearly not intended to arouse. To be banned "it must reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal".
Those thrillers and spy stories are at least sold as fiction.
This proposal would cover fictional accounts of child abuse. In fact, I think that's the primary target.
The precise scenario the MP has in mind:
- Person A writes detailed fictional story in which a child is sexually abused; the purpose of the story is to arouse a reader who fantasises about being the abuser.
- Person B reads the story, is aroused, fantasises about it
- Person B may go on to abuse in real life
So he wants to ban the possession of such fictional stories. Having a big disclaimer at the top of the text file saying "THIS IS A FICTIONAL WORK INTENDED FOR ENTERTAINMENT ONLY" would not be a defence.
The first thing I thought is, how are we going to record any actual child abuse? How about social workers detailing such events, are they falling foul of the law with their reports?
From TFA: The law would be tightly written, he insisted, to cover obscene writing of a nature "that it must reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal".
My concerns are more about slippery slopes, categorisation creep, thoughtcrime, and enforceability.
It's field-specific. If it doesn't forget everything after power cycling, we in the computer business call that "storage."
Er, in my CS textbooks (admittedly from the early 90s), memory and storage are interchangeable terms, and RAM counts as "storage" too.
In those books, RAM is "primary storage" and hard drives are "secondary storage".
By a different definition, coming from a different part of the computing field, primary storage is what you get from malloc() and secondary storage is what you get from fopen() -- but we all know how blurry *that* can get.
Good luck running 64 separate VMs on your small server (not saying it's not impossible but I really wonder which one is faster to set up) and you won't be able to test any of the very different interconnects that easily.
Very easy indeed, and almost certainly quicker/easier to set up than the physical way, either using something like Vagrant or by rolling your own scripts to drive VirtualBox.
However, I think it's instructive for students to do it the physical way first. By analogy: first understand LANs, then learn about VLANs.
Did the definition of PC change. Last I checked PC == x86.
The meaning of PC was never really solid. It just means "Personal Computer". In this case I just meant "something with a CPU, RAM, a filesystem, keyboard, monitor and ethernet. (although the keyboard and monitor aren't relevant to this particular project).
Mmm, but it *is* a nice environment for *students* to experiment with the *principles* of parallel computing in a tactile manner.
I began learning to code on an 8 bit 2Mhz CPU, with 32KB of RAM. If I wrote an inefficient loop, I'd often notice the slowness without benchmarking. If I was careless with memory, my program would crash. On my quad core laptop today, I only notice issues like that if I benchmark or do deliberate load testing. So working on low-spec systems is instructive.
Likewise, working with clusters of low-powered units on a slow comms bus is going to teach these students a lot about optimising parallel programs. They're going to have to deal with race conditions, memory ceilings, etc. which might not even show up on faster systems.
I work with some people who persist in calling hard disks DASD -- even on PC hardware.
A quick google validates this. But I abhor it. It's blackberries, not raspberries, that grow on a bramble.
A supercomputer is any overall system that's IO limited not CPU limited like most machines.
So if I cripple all IO to my 486, except a 300 baud modem, I've built a supercomputer?
I'm a big fan of the RP project. But I'm a bit bored of seeing news items in which someone does something with this Linux box, which obviously a Linux box can do. Raspberry Pi compiles C! Raspberry Pi controls a robot! Raspberry Pi runs MAME! Well of course it does, it's a little PC, and that's what PCs can do.
SD cards are memory. Wikipedia: "Secure Digital or (SD) is a non-volatile memory card format for use in portable devices.".
Hard disks are memory too. So are tapes. So are CDs.
Just because you might habitually use "memory" as shorthand for RAM, doesn't mean it's the only meaning of the word. And why do you think we need the "Random Access" disambiguation?
There are lots of ways to store energy other than chemical batteries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage
Are any of them suitable for this purpose? I don't know.
Yes as long as you don't mind latency (could be an issue for VOIP)
I assume if you're RVing, you want to be in reasonably rural areas -- not in city RV parks.
I RV'd through British Columbia and Alaska 3 years ago. For much of the route, 3G wasn't available. State/County campsites don't have WiFi. Commercial campsites almost always have WiFi.
However, the quality of the WiFi can vary wildly. You could easily find yourself camped on the edge of the coverage area of a consumer-grade 802.11b access point, sharing a basic DSL connection with everyone else on the site. Sometimes even basic web browsing is frustrating. I wouldn't want to be reliant on it for VOIP, screen sharing, email attachments of reasonable size, or largeish file transfers.
So I think you'll find yourself hunting out sites with reliable WiFi, which means you won't be as free as you might have hoped.
Similar to the oldest profession it is only done for the money not the enjoyment.
It only takes one black swan to disprove this theory. Is it so hard to imagine that somewhere in the world there is an escort who does it because they like sex, they're not all that choosy who with, and they've realised they can make money at the same time?
I'm certain there's lots of sex workers who are getting no pleasure at all out of it. But I don't imagine that's all of them.
Clearly my figures were made up and illustrative, but "I spend that $10 on tending an apple tree" needs to account for all costs, including what you're calling externalities. I'm not sure what you mean by "the apples are worth". Either I can sell them at an acceptable profit (taking into account the interest payments the bank expects from me), or I can't. If I can't, the business isn't viable. Nobody's claiming that all businesses are viable.
Perhaps you'll claim that I'll be in competition with someone with all the same costs as me, except that they have their own capital and hence no interest to pay. Well, maybe. But maybe the market is big enough for us both. Or maybe I have a better marketing department. It doesn't matter; the point is that lots of successful businesses get started by taking loans (or by selling shares, which is effectively the same thing).
If I want my apple business to be sustainable in the long term, then yes I should replace the nutrients. I could go organic from the get-go, or I could use the inorganic fertilizer you allude to until it becomes scarce enough to be too expensive, then migrate to organic. Either way, phosphorus doesn't leave the planet (unlike helium!), so it will always be available in some form.
The finite resources are ultimately made of sunshine.
The market grows *faster* when you're using up a glut of finite resource. But overall it must grow forever due to input from the sun. Yes there are (possibly severe and long-lasting) peaks and troughs.