While I think the Miller Test replaced "I know it when I see it" at the SCOTUS level, the fact of the matter is that the Miller Test is "I know it when I see it", just applied at a lower level. If this gets appealed, I'm sure the SCOTUS will just say "well, after the most dire of voires, the prosecutors managed to find 12 stuck-up prudes that were offended by your movie, so it's obscene". The real problem is that the government has managed to convince everyone that "obscenity" isn't speech. Since they control the definition of obscenity, they control the definition of speech.
As I noted above it won't get appealed - they pleaded guilty. But what you say here is spot on: "The real problem is that the government has managed to convince everyone that 'obscenity' isn't speech." There is a state Supreme Court that held otherwise -- Oregon v. Henry -- effectively decriminalizing "obscenity" in the state. Their rationale was that the notion of a sexual "obscenity" exemption didn't exist at the time the first amendment was crafted. It would be interesting to see if the Sup Court ever dealt with this question but I don't expect any member of the current Court to be willing to reconsider whether obscenity could be protected speech.
Did you miss that Extreme Associates pleaded guilty? There's no dispute about whether the material meets the definition of "obscene." It's not going to the Supreme Court.
Sure they do. Course, here in the States, you can go to jail for 'possession of kiddie porn' for having copies of certain animes laying around, on the theory that some child somewhere was exploited to make it, even though, as anime, no children whatsoever were involved. Talk about victimless crimes, if no kids are involved, how can it be kiddie porn?
That's just not true. I mean, you can be arrested for any sort of nonsense, but the current common law thinking in the US is quite the opposite -- the most recent case I'm aware of is Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition which held that in order to be not protected by the first amendment, the material must involve the actual exploitation of children. (Or be held "obscene" but that is a totally different issue). In fact, the City of LA even dropped the case it had against Paul Little for "virtual child porn" - involving over-18 actresses portrayed as under age - after the Ashcroft case was decided. The idea that anime porn would not be protected speech is really off base.
Umm, maybe on slashdot, but not in the real world.
In any case, to answer the original question, "porn" is not illegal, but "obscenity" is. And "obscenity" is currently defined in US common law according to the standard set forth in Miller v. California (1973); there's a halfway decent summary of the standard on Wikipedia. It's ultimately a pretty subjective determination and it's based on puritan standards of morality rather than on things like actual harm to participants and/or viewers.
He also took on the Bush administration for the right to report from the battlefield after they went against 200yrs of journalistic tradition and made it illeagal at the start of the Afghan war, he set another important precedent by winning that one too.
Did you even actually read his story or his comments, or did you just trot out your all-too-stereotypical knee-jerk response to any story you hear about porn and abuse? For fuck's sake, the guy never said "porn degrades all women." He told a story about a girl who got in the porn industry - a story that is indeed all too typical - and pointed out that parts of the industry really are abusive to real people. Yes the crime here is rape, among other things -- I don't think the original poster has denied this at all. And I think it's possible to see this without saying "all porn should be banned."
Jesus, you're an ass. He hasn't changed his story a bit. And he never said that porn should be banned; in fact, if you re-read his original post, the last sentence was something to the effect of, all that said, the statement of the US Attorney made him sick.
What he said was, in a lot of the porn that portrays degradation and exploitation of women, those women really ARE being degraded and exploited. The fact is, US obscenity law doesn't care about that -- it is based on puritan morality standards that the poster rightly rejected. However his point that the porn industry is a messed up industry with a lot of casualties is quite true. (Same is probably true of the tobacco industry or the oil industry, for example). Yes the girl should have had her wits and her self esteem about her enough to call in rape charges when things first went to far. But the fact that she didn't does not mean that the people who did this to her are without blame or that they are simply exercising their free speech. One thing has nothing to do with the other.
Funny, I played with one of these in Borders and it seemed like a piece of crap to me. The screen was decently readable but not all that better than a black and white LCD screen -- it certainly didn't make me think "digital paper is here!" But it was nevertheless quite readable; what really pissed me off was the software. Navigating text in any way other than turning pages seemed difficult, and even that took an unusually long time. Perhaps the model I played with had been abused already so it wasn't working up to snuff; what is the reaction time when you turn pages or move from book to book? I thought it would be incredibly frustrating to actually try to read a book or long article with this device.
3- "Monocultures" increase risk. Even if this program is wildly successful, and they create a huge supply of "perfect" Tuna - they will be a single species, and their success will be a risk - a single other species or virus could wipe them out.
Excellent point. The obvious solution is to create several different species of Super Tuna!
Following Iranian elections on Twitter was amazing, but from what I can see 99% of Twitter traffic boils down to "I had a bagel for lunch" and "I'm going poo-poo and Twittering it on my iPhone."
Thats not true at all. I follow a lot of people on twitter and though there are frequent poo messages, people actually eat a lot of different things for lunch. Bagels aren't nearly as common as you think.
On his second mission, he used his knowledge of celestial mechanics and eclipses to fool some island tribes into thinking he was a god, saving his crew from torture or starvation.
Is there a good link to this story in full? I've heard about it before - there was a party here years ago commemorating it called "Our God will eat your moon!" - but have yet to read a full account.
Look, I'm just as cynical as the next guy (read my comment history if you want to verify it), but as a resident of Alaska for 20 years, Palin -- while certainly not perfect -- has in many ways been a breath of fresh air. Under her administration as governor, Alaska has (finally!!!) started cleaning house. The investigations into government corruption in AK have toppled both Dems and Republicans. I would really like to have seen what would have happened had she made it to V.P.
Are you fucking kidding me? Were you just notpayingattention during the campaign??
In any case, she couldn't possibly have been worse than the "change" and "hope" that we ended up putting in the White House:(
Well, first of all, she was running for VP, not President, so I gather you're comparing Mr. "bomb bomb bomb Iran" - the guy who didn't know the difference between shiites and sunnis - to the current president, not Sarah Palin. Second, thank goodness neither of them will ever be entrusted with that kind of power in this country. I'm sure that Barbie Spice, like McCain, is well meaning and well intentioned, but neither of them have demonstrated they understand jack shit about relating to people outside a certain (thankfully dwindling) segment of "middle America." That's fine for getting elected governor of Alaska but what a nightmare that would be for dealing with the rest of the world. Obama may be a charming impostor but he at least can speak eloquently and knowledgeably about many of the bigger issues we face in the world today. He may not be a perfect American leader, but for fuck's sake, Palin and McCain can't even hold a candle to him. To McCain's credit, he's at least intelligent enough to understand that.
Slashdot Mirror
While I think the Miller Test replaced "I know it when I see it" at the SCOTUS level, the fact of the matter is that the Miller Test is "I know it when I see it", just applied at a lower level. If this gets appealed, I'm sure the SCOTUS will just say "well, after the most dire of voires, the prosecutors managed to find 12 stuck-up prudes that were offended by your movie, so it's obscene". The real problem is that the government has managed to convince everyone that "obscenity" isn't speech. Since they control the definition of obscenity, they control the definition of speech.
As I noted above it won't get appealed - they pleaded guilty. But what you say here is spot on: "The real problem is that the government has managed to convince everyone that 'obscenity' isn't speech." There is a state Supreme Court that held otherwise -- Oregon v. Henry -- effectively decriminalizing "obscenity" in the state. Their rationale was that the notion of a sexual "obscenity" exemption didn't exist at the time the first amendment was crafted. It would be interesting to see if the Sup Court ever dealt with this question but I don't expect any member of the current Court to be willing to reconsider whether obscenity could be protected speech.
Did you miss that Extreme Associates pleaded guilty? There's no dispute about whether the material meets the definition of "obscene." It's not going to the Supreme Court.
Sure they do. Course, here in the States, you can go to jail for 'possession of kiddie porn' for having copies of certain animes laying around, on the theory that some child somewhere was exploited to make it, even though, as anime, no children whatsoever were involved. Talk about victimless crimes, if no kids are involved, how can it be kiddie porn?
That's just not true. I mean, you can be arrested for any sort of nonsense, but the current common law thinking in the US is quite the opposite -- the most recent case I'm aware of is Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition which held that in order to be not protected by the first amendment, the material must involve the actual exploitation of children. (Or be held "obscene" but that is a totally different issue). In fact, the City of LA even dropped the case it had against Paul Little for "virtual child porn" - involving over-18 actresses portrayed as under age - after the Ashcroft case was decided. The idea that anime porn would not be protected speech is really off base.
since almost everyone looks at porn
Umm, maybe on slashdot, but not in the real world.
In any case, to answer the original question, "porn" is not illegal, but "obscenity" is. And "obscenity" is currently defined in US common law according to the standard set forth in Miller v. California (1973); there's a halfway decent summary of the standard on Wikipedia. It's ultimately a pretty subjective determination and it's based on puritan standards of morality rather than on things like actual harm to participants and/or viewers.
He also took on the Bush administration for the right to report from the battlefield after they went against 200yrs of journalistic tradition and made it illeagal at the start of the Afghan war, he set another important precedent by winning that one too.
You're talking about Flynt v. Rumsfeld. He lost that one.
Did you even actually read his story or his comments, or did you just trot out your all-too-stereotypical knee-jerk response to any story you hear about porn and abuse? For fuck's sake, the guy never said "porn degrades all women." He told a story about a girl who got in the porn industry - a story that is indeed all too typical - and pointed out that parts of the industry really are abusive to real people. Yes the crime here is rape, among other things -- I don't think the original poster has denied this at all. And I think it's possible to see this without saying "all porn should be banned."
Jesus, you're an ass. He hasn't changed his story a bit. And he never said that porn should be banned; in fact, if you re-read his original post, the last sentence was something to the effect of, all that said, the statement of the US Attorney made him sick.
What he said was, in a lot of the porn that portrays degradation and exploitation of women, those women really ARE being degraded and exploited. The fact is, US obscenity law doesn't care about that -- it is based on puritan morality standards that the poster rightly rejected. However his point that the porn industry is a messed up industry with a lot of casualties is quite true. (Same is probably true of the tobacco industry or the oil industry, for example). Yes the girl should have had her wits and her self esteem about her enough to call in rape charges when things first went to far. But the fact that she didn't does not mean that the people who did this to her are without blame or that they are simply exercising their free speech. One thing has nothing to do with the other.
It's quite possible that some of them killed themselves!
You can't organize PDFs into directories on the Kindle, which makes accessing a large number of PDFs a serious problem. It's like 1984.
You mean it's like a boot stomping on a human face over and over forever??
Funny, I played with one of these in Borders and it seemed like a piece of crap to me. The screen was decently readable but not all that better than a black and white LCD screen -- it certainly didn't make me think "digital paper is here!" But it was nevertheless quite readable; what really pissed me off was the software. Navigating text in any way other than turning pages seemed difficult, and even that took an unusually long time. Perhaps the model I played with had been abused already so it wasn't working up to snuff; what is the reaction time when you turn pages or move from book to book? I thought it would be incredibly frustrating to actually try to read a book or long article with this device.
it does sound like a great way to store all books ever written in your living room.
How many books have you written in your living room?
She's quite a Smooth Criminal then to be charged with this and be able to Beat It.
Apple, for its part, won't support Ogg Theora in QuickTime, expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free.
Or perhaps their concern is precisely because of this fact?
3- "Monocultures" increase risk. Even if this program is wildly successful, and they create a huge supply of "perfect" Tuna - they will be a single species, and their success will be a risk - a single other species or virus could wipe them out.
Excellent point. The obvious solution is to create several different species of Super Tuna!
and I, for one, welcome our ichthyous overlords!
Don't know about you, but I like my USB drives to be small things.
Then why would you want them to be FAT?
It's not FAT; it's just big-boned.
Following Iranian elections on Twitter was amazing, but from what I can see 99% of Twitter traffic boils down to "I had a bagel for lunch" and "I'm going poo-poo and Twittering it on my iPhone."
Thats not true at all. I follow a lot of people on twitter and though there are frequent poo messages, people actually eat a lot of different things for lunch. Bagels aren't nearly as common as you think.
You don't even get mad cow from eating the beef.
That's correct. You have to digest it first.
I can't find the option for "-1, Mean-Spirited and Douchebaggy"
So you're going with Change, then?
On his second mission, he used his knowledge of celestial mechanics and eclipses to fool some island tribes into thinking he was a god, saving his crew from torture or starvation.
Is there a good link to this story in full? I've heard about it before - there was a party here years ago commemorating it called "Our God will eat your moon!" - but have yet to read a full account.
That would really suck.
You read the article!
Look, I'm just as cynical as the next guy (read my comment history if you want to verify it), but as a resident of Alaska for 20 years, Palin -- while certainly not perfect -- has in many ways been a breath of fresh air. Under her administration as governor, Alaska has (finally!!!) started cleaning house. The investigations into government corruption in AK have toppled both Dems and Republicans. I would really like to have seen what would have happened had she made it to V.P.
Are you fucking kidding me? Were you just not paying attention during the campaign??
In any case, she couldn't possibly have been worse than the "change" and "hope" that we ended up putting in the White House :(
Well, first of all, she was running for VP, not President, so I gather you're comparing Mr. "bomb bomb bomb Iran" - the guy who didn't know the difference between shiites and sunnis - to the current president, not Sarah Palin. Second, thank goodness neither of them will ever be entrusted with that kind of power in this country. I'm sure that Barbie Spice, like McCain, is well meaning and well intentioned, but neither of them have demonstrated they understand jack shit about relating to people outside a certain (thankfully dwindling) segment of "middle America." That's fine for getting elected governor of Alaska but what a nightmare that would be for dealing with the rest of the world. Obama may be a charming impostor but he at least can speak eloquently and knowledgeably about many of the bigger issues we face in the world today. He may not be a perfect American leader, but for fuck's sake, Palin and McCain can't even hold a candle to him. To McCain's credit, he's at least intelligent enough to understand that.