When I use WiFi signals that are in the air somewhere that I've got a right to be myself, like in my own home or office, I feel the same way about using it as I do when I use an electrical ground wire. Or reading a newspaper in the incident light.
If those electrons or photons are trespassing in my private property, whoever sent them there is fortunate that I don't take countermeasures, in court or with a lethal focusing reflector.
I expect McCain to revive ideas that looked great in the 20th Century, including those that failed so badly. Especially those that lied their way into being funded for BIG BIG bucks, especially where the Federal government spent $BILLIONS in taxes subsidizing and "securing". it, but then had to admit that the payback and security risks were much worse, but only after we were stuck with them, and had to live with their consequences instead of doing the right thing in the first place.
Invading Iraq, nuke power - what's the difference, to John McCain? He doesn't have to live in the real future for very long. Just on an airconditioned bus, where relativity warps spacetime so much that to himself, McCain's talk is "straight".
The good news is that McCain will probably drag policies renuking America down with him as he turns to lead before our eyes this Fall.
Crews has a similar history to Freud's, about Freud. He started out his career applying Freudian analysis to literature, then "lost faith in the theory" and has spent the rest of his career working against it. Crews is a literary critic, not a shrink. He sells a lot more books than most literary theorists, probably a lot of them to Scientologists. Who are batshit crazy.
As for Freud, he was obsessed with sex in a way that most people aren't, though he'd say we all are. I'm not surprised that in his early career he changed his mind a lot about his theory of the mind, or its utility. Hearing that he said he cured more people later than he said before doesn't necessarily mean he was making them up: he could have decided later that more were cured who he was pessimistic about, or they could have completed their recovery after they'd completed therapy awhile. Just because Crews and others haven't tracked down a dozen kooky Germans living over a century ago using Freuds totally incomplete records in his correspondence doesn't mean they didn't exist. And since patients tend to leave a doctor when they're cured, I'm not shocked that Freud's patient roster shrank at any time, especially considering that his theories were even more rejected by Victorian society than they are by Crews.
Crews' condemnation of Freud is easily another example of cherrypicking are retelling the story to suit the teller's ends. So many people's mental lives have been improved by Freudian technique over the past 3/4 century or so that it's clear that he had something worth using. It's not the totality of the mind's model, unless you make that pliable universe into that, but if it were as worthless as people like Crews (did you say Tom Cruise, or was that a Freudian slip?) then it would have been rejected in practice a long time ago.
Freud hasn't been throughly debunked. That's crazy talk, and not supported by actual science by noncrazy people.
That could be. But the effects I know about personally are pretty consistent, the mechanism seems pretty clear, everything is consistent, and anyone finding otherwise at all conclusively could make quite an important career for themself, even revolutionize "child psychology", which is one of the most lucrative fields, and constantly looking for new insights to publish and wave at us. It's easy enough to fund one of these studies, in any of many venues. I don't think it's being suppressed, and I think there's plenty of motivation to try it.
So unless someone does, I'll have plenty of reason to presume that the conventional wisdom of adult sex with kids is bad for everyone involved, especially the kids. Extraordinary claims (like "debunking" that strong and clear value) require extraordinary evidence, and there's practically none. Next issue.
Er, you found that study at IPCE.info , which is NAMBLA, or a "playmate":
Ipce is a forum for people who are engaged in scholarly discussion about the understanding and emancipation of mutual relationships between children or adolescents and adults. In this context, these relationships are intended to be viewed from an unbiased, non-judgmental perspective and in relation to the human rights of both the young and adult partners. Ipce meets once every one or two years in a different country, publishes a newsletter and a web site, co-ordinates the (electronic) exchange of texts and keeps an archive of specific written publications.
Yeah, they're "non-judgemental". They're child molesters who cherrypicked a single APA study (and probably some more, when they suit them) that says they're not hurting anybody.
What I'd need to defy the obvious common sense that sex with children by adults is bad for the children (and thereby bad for the adults, too) would be a comprehensive study of people who had sex with adults when they were children, some breakdown of the circumstances (other relationship between them, degree of coercion, specific sexual acts, other relationships like other family members associated with both and other sexual activity among those people, etc), and then groupings of subsequent behaviors by those children when adults, whether (statistically) "normal", sex workers, other abusive relationships, self destructive behavior, sex with new children or other (statistically) abnormal sexual behavior, other (statistically) abnormal behavior, any other factors that correlate between consistent childhood sexual activity and adult behavior. A study corroborated by other studies, all with scientific methodologies (double blind, control groups, statistical analysis, random collection of populations, etc).
Not the "good news" from a group of international child molesters who meet every couple of years in a different country.
Really, you've got to be willfully ignoring the public facts for the past decade not to see the collaboration among Scalia, Thomas, now Alito and Roberts, but once usually O'Connor, and often Kennedy, to erect superficial paper covers over the Unitary Executive method of defying the Constitution's power balance.
Those 4 judges (in the minority, this time) just ruled that the right to Habeas Corpus can be suspended. The Constitution clearly says that it cannot. Their office requires them to say what the Constitution says. They have violated that requirement of their office. Not so hard to see, if you look. And when you look, you see it throughout their records, up to and after their watershed vote to install Bush as that Unitary Executive.
Here's what George Bush said he thinks about the way he can violate the Constitution despite the courts saying he can't. Short version: "I got away with it, didn't I?"
Considering that just seeing their mom and dad fighting a few times when they happen to not be wearing their clothes in bed, and also seeing them fucking once or twice, without being educated enough to tell the difference, has caused all kinds of lifelong psychological damage from those confusing, traumatic primal scenes, I expect that yes, the damage from acting in a kiddie porn scene does significant damage. And since the adults who perpetrate those acts nearly never do it only once, but rather do it to many children, or for years to the same few (or single) children, the damage done is large, and as deeply damaging as possible.
I've known enough (adult) strippers, porno models and just sluts (in NYC, Toronto, San Francisco, New Orleans and points between, my homes through the years) to have heard how consistently their sexuality was kicked off by either outright rape, other coercion, or just sleazy trickery before they were old enough to learn about sex unharmed. I'm sure that plenty of the sexual deviance in many of the men I've encountered has roots in similar scenes, including a few I've heard about for sure, but since boys are more rarely molested and even less talkative about that kind of thing I think each gender is as vulnerable, if not as often exploited. And we can see around us a world of people struggling their whole lives, too largely defined by that early trauma.
"Normality" vs "irrecoverable corrupted innocence" is a false choice. Our sense of "normal" includes quite a lot of damaged sexuality, and practically everyone's innocence gets irrecoverably corrupted sometime. There is no case to make for adult sex with children who aren't sophisticated enough to understand what's happening, which includes children posing naked, even if "alone" (in the camera's view), for adult exploitation. The likelihood of damage is as common as if the adult shot a nailgun into their skull: plenty of people survive without noticeable longterm damage, but most people suffer irreversible harm the rest of their lives, many lives ruined or at least derailed from their own independent destiny.
So while any judgment of such serious acts must be taken only soberly and in proportion, including the judgment of invading people's lives with investigations on suspicion, the judgement is justifiably weighty when it decides what has happened. The hatred and fear are understandable, and of course partly the product of unresolved damage to the people themselves driven by these powerful emotions because of their own early experiences (or of their parents, who forcibly repressed their own children's sexuality after they, the parents, were damaged as children). But the actual prosecution of justice requires reason and compassion. Or it's just yet another turn in the cycle of harm.
Well, you're right about the need for calm reason whenever invading people's privacy, at either end of a camera/monitor. And that cops can't enforce morality.
But there is certainly damage to children when they're put through a sexually exploitave scenario, whether or not there's a camera. The camera is just a prop in the exploitation. Even without the camera, that kind of sexual abuse is damaging, regardless of whether children can absorb that kind of abuse (not without harm - we're just used to a lot of harm that we shouldn't accept). But then there is indeed further damage to that young person through severe defamation. And if the child knows about the defamation, that is even more damaging.
The pornographic exploitation of these children is mostly at the hands of the people photographing and publishing the images. The people consuming them contribute to the damage, but more in the way that people who knowingly buy stolen goods contribute to the harm from the theft. They have some guilt, but they're much more useful as ways to collect evidence, set up stings, and catch the people directly acting criminally and harmfully on the victim. Probably using evidence of consumers' contribution to the harm as pressure for them to cooperate in exchange for leniency, even reduced to merely a public record that they confessed to consuming kiddie porn, is worth their value in setting up the actual pornographers.
There are a handful problems with your "EFF porn" scenario, though not really problems with you, but rather with our government. One is that the government can invade someone's privacy (their data) without evidence, or having a chance to even "confront their accuser", which is blatantly un-Constitutional. Another is that the "kiddie porn" isn't necessarily that, but tangentially related to that. The biggest is that fending off a baseless or illegal police investigation into "Not Guilty" isn't at all a zero sum game - the investigation guarantees costs without a reason, and the risk of a failed process that destroys you without legitimacy at any point is large.
The Constitution was written to prevent exactly these kinds of abuses. But even the Constitution has "sovereign immunity" written into it, some arbitrary rule that protects a state from being sued by a resident of another state, which in turn is used to protect governments (and the people who operate in them) from the consequences of all manner of actions, Constitutional and otherwise.
You know, I think you should post a diary of your experiences with AP's "Internet spirit" over at the Daily Kos. They're leading the pushback against AP's copyright greed right now. Their readers would probably love to hear some firsthand accounts about the "deciders" over there who hide behind webservers run by people who actually know how the Internet works.
Look, you're right about a lot of what you just posted. Some of it is wrong, but not so much on the topic of the Constitution. Suffice to say that war is always a crime, even when it's "legal" under some country's laws. FWIW, though there aren't adequate terms to measure the race to the bottom, today's Russia (into its southern neighbors), China (into Tibet), Venezuela (into Colombia), Lebanon's southern Hezbollah state into Israel (and vice versa), and many other states all routinely violate other nations' sovereignty, have for years, and surely did again today - and will tomorrow. That doesn't make any of it acceptable, so getting mad is appropriate. But saying "USA #1" is as wrong as when it's used by idiotic patriots to ignore the truth about the world.
But what makes Kollar-Kotelly a fascist for ruling "the United States has no right to interfere with the judicial processes of another nation's courts" is not that ruling. It's her ignoring the US interference with foreign courts, especially Iraq's courts, which the US has created and played like a puppet, including in the trial of Saddam Hussein, which was the scope of that decision she wrote, that is fascist. Fascists will lie about their impotence when someone begs for help that they've previously amply demonstrated they will throw around at a whim when it serves their interest, if their newfound impotence also serves their interest. That is what Kollar-Kotelly did, as a professional fascist.
The AP's Terms of Service contract that their paying customers sign prohibits using AP content to criticize the AP, though such contract terms are void under the Constitution, which protects such primary cases of fair use:
[T]heir Terms of Use explicitly prohibit you, even if you've paid them, from quoting the Associated Press in order to criticize the Associated Press:
There. Now I have quoted the AP's own content, using it to criticize AP, even criticizing the contract that would prohibit me from doing any of that.
Am I glad that I never signed their contract. Nah - it wouldn't matter if I did. That contract is unenforceable, and they're sending illegit DMCA takedowns to people who never signed it.
It's reassuring to know that the AP is managed exactly like every other large corporation I've ever worked with (and that's hundreds).
Have any stories that show the AP brass don't know anything about "the Internet spirit" of increasing information's value by letting others share it outside of the org's control? The kind of stuff that geeks get intuitively, but suits can't see as dollar signs, so waste more money than they gain fighting the spirit?
I'm sure the endless rounds of crazy "Hussein Obama secret Muslim" emails, amplified on blogs, had its effect.
As well as the further blowing up in outlets like Fox News (and CNN, and CBS, and nearly everyone else). The people who work at those TV news orgs are among the biggest consumers of blogs, and don't just consume blogs in proportion to the blogs's general popularity. The Drudge Report has totally disproportionate influence on news producers' context, even more than its crazily large general popularity.
Where's all the people who are always screaming "I'm keeping my guns so the government can't take my country from me"? These people who claim that the mass murder by guns of so many Americans is acceptable "collateral damage", the price we pay for defending ourselves from government tyranny?
They're frauds. The US government has violated the Constitution every day, in every way for 2,706 days. Yet instead of taking to the streets to protect themselves from the tyranny, these gun fetishists are among the strongest protectors of Bush's reign of terror.
Yes, any decent country would have filled the streets by now, carrying pitchforks and torches, to rip these tyrants from their privileged thrones. But the tyrants have the gun freaks and the army and the cops.
That's why we have impeachment, but that too has failed us - because we elected an entire generation of greedy traitors, the worst of whom know no partisan boundaries. All we have left is elections and activism. It's not enough to stop the tyranny right now, but it could reverse its direction in November. And if we keep up the pressure it could fix a lot in the years after. America changed pretty quickly from a sustainably damaging world dominator into a catastrophic one hastening its own destruction first. It can at least as quickly change back.
But only if we keep up the pressure. Unfortunately, just like the gun freaks on the other side, people screaming for revolution aren't really serious or committed, either. How many will vote in November, the least they can do to get change? How many will find decent representatives to campaign for to get into those elections? How many will keep in touch with representatives to force them to acknowledge, and then accept, and then lead on policies that protect our freedoms?
Revolution is easy - to talk about. Even easier than buying a gun. But we've got to use those tools, not just stockpile them as fetish objects, and yell about them when we get mad. Take your talk to the streets, and knock on doors to register more voters. Register only the ones who agree with you. That will actually make a difference. And you'll see: it will also make you feel better than ranting about revolution on Slashdot. I don't know if it feels as good as unloading a clip into someone, but it will have a lot more effect on politics than talking about guns will, either.
You have a good point, but it's a larger issue that strengthens my point.
I haven't seen any naked children's pictures on Usenet. In fact it's been several years since I used Usenet at all (except Web editions of it), though I did use it for over a decade, especially when it was where most of the Internet's content could be found. Even then I don't think I ever saw naked children, but I wasn't looking for it, either.
But that's not the point. If indeed there are no naked children's pictures, then there is no evidence, there is no basis whatsoever for legal activity. If there is, then (this is my point) those pictures are evidence, and shutting down Usenet destroys the trail that leads to the actual crime: exploiting children in a room with a camera.
Your point just shows how using Usenet to find evidence, or to demonstrate its lack, is the proper method for law enforcement (the job that AG Cuomo is charged with doing). My point is predicated on the evidence actually existing. If it doesn't, then indeed the entire undertaking is moot.
But in no case is cutting off Usenet serving justice, but rather impeding it.
His 1934 masterpiece, the Traité de documentation, was reprinted in 1989 by the Centre de Lecture publique de la Communauté française in Belgium. The original edition has recently been digitized ( https://archive.ugent.be/handle/1854/5612 ). Unfortunately, neither the Traité nor its companion work, "Monde" (World) has been translated into English so far. In 1990 Professor W. Boyd Rayward published an English translation of some of Otlet's best writings (available at http://hdl.handle.net/2142/4004 ).
Otlet would probably be very satisfied that we'd come far enough to his life's vision that we can just hear about him, then click to read his vision (of hearing about him then clicking to read his vision).
I run off the road any cars that still have a "W04" or "Bush/Cheney" sticker on them. Those people are too stupid and dangerous to allow in traffic with live humans.
As of this posting, about half on the front page say he is and half say he isn't
Good example. Because of blogs and chain e-mail, 1) the issue has been brought to the forefront, and 2) we can gather needed facts from those with an agenda to bring those facts to light (from each side) and then draw our own conclusions.
No, it's a good example of how yellow blog journalism fails to inform properly, but does a good job of misinforming. When half the people believe a lie, that is easily and widely debunked, that is contradicted by the simple truth of the most sensational news (ie. that Obama's Christian minister is highly controversial), that proves that people aren't "better" informed. They're just more informed, but through disinformation they're badly misinformed.
The truth isn't a matter of mass consensus; Obama is not a Muslim. When half the people think he is, their way of knowing the facts is deeply broken. How you can think that's proof that "drawing our own conclusions" from "each side" (from the truth vs lies) is working is beyond me. You either have no respect for the facts, or you have no respect for Obama, or both.
Yes, IFRAMEs don't serve to let the publisher of the external content control the integrity of what they're "pointing to".
If HTTP included content signing that could at least let the publisher of the link help readers clicking it to see that the target content has changed. Eventually there will probably be a "distributed archiving" system that points at URIs, "content names", rather than URLs, which point at "content location", regardless of whether the content changes.
In the meantime, "fair use" quoting isn't just fair. It's more fair than the content publishers who bait & switch when their original content brings blowback pressure they don't like. AP has to get with the 20th Century laws if it's going to survive in the 21st Century. That's why it's trying to change the laws in the 21st Century, so it can drag us back to 19th Century yellow journalism that pays, but doesn't inform.
Letters to the editor are not journalism. But the articles they're discussing are.
Comments in a blog's discussion threads are the exact parallel. Except the comments are much closer to journalism, because they're not edited as much, so they're a closer reflection of the actual world outside an editor's head.
Slashdot Mirror
One man's pith helmet is another man's myth helmet. Yow!
When I use WiFi signals that are in the air somewhere that I've got a right to be myself, like in my own home or office, I feel the same way about using it as I do when I use an electrical ground wire. Or reading a newspaper in the incident light.
If those electrons or photons are trespassing in my private property, whoever sent them there is fortunate that I don't take countermeasures, in court or with a lethal focusing reflector.
I expect McCain to revive ideas that looked great in the 20th Century, including those that failed so badly. Especially those that lied their way into being funded for BIG BIG bucks, especially where the Federal government spent $BILLIONS in taxes subsidizing and "securing". it, but then had to admit that the payback and security risks were much worse, but only after we were stuck with them, and had to live with their consequences instead of doing the right thing in the first place.
Invading Iraq, nuke power - what's the difference, to John McCain? He doesn't have to live in the real future for very long. Just on an airconditioned bus, where relativity warps spacetime so much that to himself, McCain's talk is "straight".
The good news is that McCain will probably drag policies renuking America down with him as he turns to lead before our eyes this Fall.
Crews has a similar history to Freud's, about Freud. He started out his career applying Freudian analysis to literature, then "lost faith in the theory" and has spent the rest of his career working against it. Crews is a literary critic, not a shrink. He sells a lot more books than most literary theorists, probably a lot of them to Scientologists. Who are batshit crazy.
As for Freud, he was obsessed with sex in a way that most people aren't, though he'd say we all are. I'm not surprised that in his early career he changed his mind a lot about his theory of the mind, or its utility. Hearing that he said he cured more people later than he said before doesn't necessarily mean he was making them up: he could have decided later that more were cured who he was pessimistic about, or they could have completed their recovery after they'd completed therapy awhile. Just because Crews and others haven't tracked down a dozen kooky Germans living over a century ago using Freuds totally incomplete records in his correspondence doesn't mean they didn't exist. And since patients tend to leave a doctor when they're cured, I'm not shocked that Freud's patient roster shrank at any time, especially considering that his theories were even more rejected by Victorian society than they are by Crews.
Crews' condemnation of Freud is easily another example of cherrypicking are retelling the story to suit the teller's ends. So many people's mental lives have been improved by Freudian technique over the past 3/4 century or so that it's clear that he had something worth using. It's not the totality of the mind's model, unless you make that pliable universe into that, but if it were as worthless as people like Crews (did you say Tom Cruise , or was that a Freudian slip?) then it would have been rejected in practice a long time ago.
Freud hasn't been throughly debunked. That's crazy talk, and not supported by actual science by noncrazy people.
That could be. But the effects I know about personally are pretty consistent, the mechanism seems pretty clear, everything is consistent, and anyone finding otherwise at all conclusively could make quite an important career for themself, even revolutionize "child psychology", which is one of the most lucrative fields, and constantly looking for new insights to publish and wave at us. It's easy enough to fund one of these studies, in any of many venues. I don't think it's being suppressed, and I think there's plenty of motivation to try it.
So unless someone does, I'll have plenty of reason to presume that the conventional wisdom of adult sex with kids is bad for everyone involved, especially the kids. Extraordinary claims (like "debunking" that strong and clear value) require extraordinary evidence, and there's practically none. Next issue.
Yeah, they're "non-judgemental". They're child molesters who cherrypicked a single APA study (and probably some more, when they suit them) that says they're not hurting anybody.
What I'd need to defy the obvious common sense that sex with children by adults is bad for the children (and thereby bad for the adults, too) would be a comprehensive study of people who had sex with adults when they were children, some breakdown of the circumstances (other relationship between them, degree of coercion, specific sexual acts, other relationships like other family members associated with both and other sexual activity among those people, etc), and then groupings of subsequent behaviors by those children when adults, whether (statistically) "normal", sex workers, other abusive relationships, self destructive behavior, sex with new children or other (statistically) abnormal sexual behavior, other (statistically) abnormal behavior, any other factors that correlate between consistent childhood sexual activity and adult behavior. A study corroborated by other studies, all with scientific methodologies (double blind, control groups, statistical analysis, random collection of populations, etc).
Not the "good news" from a group of international child molesters who meet every couple of years in a different country.
Because I read their opinions. They're public.
Really, you've got to be willfully ignoring the public facts for the past decade not to see the collaboration among Scalia, Thomas, now Alito and Roberts, but once usually O'Connor, and often Kennedy, to erect superficial paper covers over the Unitary Executive method of defying the Constitution's power balance.
Those 4 judges (in the minority, this time) just ruled that the right to Habeas Corpus can be suspended. The Constitution clearly says that it cannot. Their office requires them to say what the Constitution says. They have violated that requirement of their office. Not so hard to see, if you look. And when you look, you see it throughout their records, up to and after their watershed vote to install Bush as that Unitary Executive.
Here's what George Bush said he thinks about the way he can violate the Constitution despite the courts saying he can't. Short version: "I got away with it, didn't I?"
Considering that just seeing their mom and dad fighting a few times when they happen to not be wearing their clothes in bed, and also seeing them fucking once or twice, without being educated enough to tell the difference, has caused all kinds of lifelong psychological damage from those confusing, traumatic primal scenes, I expect that yes, the damage from acting in a kiddie porn scene does significant damage. And since the adults who perpetrate those acts nearly never do it only once, but rather do it to many children, or for years to the same few (or single) children, the damage done is large, and as deeply damaging as possible.
I've known enough (adult) strippers, porno models and just sluts (in NYC, Toronto, San Francisco, New Orleans and points between, my homes through the years) to have heard how consistently their sexuality was kicked off by either outright rape, other coercion, or just sleazy trickery before they were old enough to learn about sex unharmed. I'm sure that plenty of the sexual deviance in many of the men I've encountered has roots in similar scenes, including a few I've heard about for sure, but since boys are more rarely molested and even less talkative about that kind of thing I think each gender is as vulnerable, if not as often exploited. And we can see around us a world of people struggling their whole lives, too largely defined by that early trauma.
"Normality" vs "irrecoverable corrupted innocence" is a false choice. Our sense of "normal" includes quite a lot of damaged sexuality, and practically everyone's innocence gets irrecoverably corrupted sometime. There is no case to make for adult sex with children who aren't sophisticated enough to understand what's happening, which includes children posing naked, even if "alone" (in the camera's view), for adult exploitation. The likelihood of damage is as common as if the adult shot a nailgun into their skull: plenty of people survive without noticeable longterm damage, but most people suffer irreversible harm the rest of their lives, many lives ruined or at least derailed from their own independent destiny.
So while any judgment of such serious acts must be taken only soberly and in proportion, including the judgment of invading people's lives with investigations on suspicion, the judgement is justifiably weighty when it decides what has happened. The hatred and fear are understandable, and of course partly the product of unresolved damage to the people themselves driven by these powerful emotions because of their own early experiences (or of their parents, who forcibly repressed their own children's sexuality after they, the parents, were damaged as children). But the actual prosecution of justice requires reason and compassion. Or it's just yet another turn in the cycle of harm.
Well, you're right about the need for calm reason whenever invading people's privacy, at either end of a camera/monitor. And that cops can't enforce morality.
But there is certainly damage to children when they're put through a sexually exploitave scenario, whether or not there's a camera. The camera is just a prop in the exploitation. Even without the camera, that kind of sexual abuse is damaging, regardless of whether children can absorb that kind of abuse (not without harm - we're just used to a lot of harm that we shouldn't accept). But then there is indeed further damage to that young person through severe defamation. And if the child knows about the defamation, that is even more damaging.
The pornographic exploitation of these children is mostly at the hands of the people photographing and publishing the images. The people consuming them contribute to the damage, but more in the way that people who knowingly buy stolen goods contribute to the harm from the theft. They have some guilt, but they're much more useful as ways to collect evidence, set up stings, and catch the people directly acting criminally and harmfully on the victim. Probably using evidence of consumers' contribution to the harm as pressure for them to cooperate in exchange for leniency, even reduced to merely a public record that they confessed to consuming kiddie porn, is worth their value in setting up the actual pornographers.
There are a handful problems with your "EFF porn" scenario, though not really problems with you, but rather with our government. One is that the government can invade someone's privacy (their data) without evidence, or having a chance to even "confront their accuser", which is blatantly un-Constitutional. Another is that the "kiddie porn" isn't necessarily that, but tangentially related to that. The biggest is that fending off a baseless or illegal police investigation into "Not Guilty" isn't at all a zero sum game - the investigation guarantees costs without a reason, and the risk of a failed process that destroys you without legitimacy at any point is large.
The Constitution was written to prevent exactly these kinds of abuses. But even the Constitution has "sovereign immunity" written into it, some arbitrary rule that protects a state from being sued by a resident of another state, which in turn is used to protect governments (and the people who operate in them) from the consequences of all manner of actions, Constitutional and otherwise.
You know, I think you should post a diary of your experiences with AP's "Internet spirit" over at the Daily Kos. They're leading the pushback against AP's copyright greed right now. Their readers would probably love to hear some firsthand accounts about the "deciders" over there who hide behind webservers run by people who actually know how the Internet works.
Look, you're right about a lot of what you just posted. Some of it is wrong, but not so much on the topic of the Constitution. Suffice to say that war is always a crime, even when it's "legal" under some country's laws. FWIW, though there aren't adequate terms to measure the race to the bottom, today's Russia (into its southern neighbors), China (into Tibet), Venezuela (into Colombia), Lebanon's southern Hezbollah state into Israel (and vice versa), and many other states all routinely violate other nations' sovereignty, have for years, and surely did again today - and will tomorrow. That doesn't make any of it acceptable, so getting mad is appropriate. But saying "USA #1" is as wrong as when it's used by idiotic patriots to ignore the truth about the world.
But what makes Kollar-Kotelly a fascist for ruling "the United States has no right to interfere with the judicial processes of another nation's courts" is not that ruling. It's her ignoring the US interference with foreign courts, especially Iraq's courts, which the US has created and played like a puppet, including in the trial of Saddam Hussein, which was the scope of that decision she wrote, that is fascist. Fascists will lie about their impotence when someone begs for help that they've previously amply demonstrated they will throw around at a whim when it serves their interest, if their newfound impotence also serves their interest. That is what Kollar-Kotelly did, as a professional fascist.
It's reassuring to know that the AP is managed exactly like every other large corporation I've ever worked with (and that's hundreds).
Have any stories that show the AP brass don't know anything about "the Internet spirit" of increasing information's value by letting others share it outside of the org's control? The kind of stuff that geeks get intuitively, but suits can't see as dollar signs, so waste more money than they gain fighting the spirit?
Right back atcha ;).
My post was really designed for the dimwitted reader who would repeat either "rumors". Kind of a "rumor tracer", or perhaps more like a "suckerfish".
I figured that you were savvy enough to both post sarcasm and see my own.
I'm sure the endless rounds of crazy "Hussein Obama secret Muslim" emails, amplified on blogs, had its effect.
As well as the further blowing up in outlets like Fox News (and CNN, and CBS, and nearly everyone else). The people who work at those TV news orgs are among the biggest consumers of blogs, and don't just consume blogs in proportion to the blogs's general popularity. The Drudge Report has totally disproportionate influence on news producers' context, even more than its crazily large general popularity.
I heard you're a secret child molester.
Excellent to hear from someone with actual qualifications and insight.
Do you have any AP war stories that you can share? Specifically about AP's Internet savvy running contrary to what we know the Internet is for.
Where's all the people who are always screaming "I'm keeping my guns so the government can't take my country from me"? These people who claim that the mass murder by guns of so many Americans is acceptable "collateral damage", the price we pay for defending ourselves from government tyranny?
They're frauds. The US government has violated the Constitution every day, in every way for 2,706 days. Yet instead of taking to the streets to protect themselves from the tyranny, these gun fetishists are among the strongest protectors of Bush's reign of terror.
Yes, any decent country would have filled the streets by now, carrying pitchforks and torches, to rip these tyrants from their privileged thrones. But the tyrants have the gun freaks and the army and the cops.
That's why we have impeachment, but that too has failed us - because we elected an entire generation of greedy traitors, the worst of whom know no partisan boundaries. All we have left is elections and activism. It's not enough to stop the tyranny right now, but it could reverse its direction in November. And if we keep up the pressure it could fix a lot in the years after. America changed pretty quickly from a sustainably damaging world dominator into a catastrophic one hastening its own destruction first. It can at least as quickly change back.
But only if we keep up the pressure. Unfortunately, just like the gun freaks on the other side, people screaming for revolution aren't really serious or committed, either. How many will vote in November, the least they can do to get change? How many will find decent representatives to campaign for to get into those elections? How many will keep in touch with representatives to force them to acknowledge, and then accept, and then lead on policies that protect our freedoms?
Revolution is easy - to talk about. Even easier than buying a gun. But we've got to use those tools, not just stockpile them as fetish objects, and yell about them when we get mad. Take your talk to the streets, and knock on doors to register more voters. Register only the ones who agree with you. That will actually make a difference. And you'll see: it will also make you feel better than ranting about revolution on Slashdot. I don't know if it feels as good as unloading a clip into someone, but it will have a lot more effect on politics than talking about guns will, either.
You have a good point, but it's a larger issue that strengthens my point.
I haven't seen any naked children's pictures on Usenet. In fact it's been several years since I used Usenet at all (except Web editions of it), though I did use it for over a decade, especially when it was where most of the Internet's content could be found. Even then I don't think I ever saw naked children, but I wasn't looking for it, either.
But that's not the point. If indeed there are no naked children's pictures, then there is no evidence, there is no basis whatsoever for legal activity. If there is, then (this is my point) those pictures are evidence, and shutting down Usenet destroys the trail that leads to the actual crime: exploiting children in a room with a camera.
Your point just shows how using Usenet to find evidence, or to demonstrate its lack, is the proper method for law enforcement (the job that AG Cuomo is charged with doing). My point is predicated on the evidence actually existing. If it doesn't, then indeed the entire undertaking is moot.
But in no case is cutting off Usenet serving justice, but rather impeding it.
Otlet would probably be very satisfied that we'd come far enough to his life's vision that we can just hear about him, then click to read his vision (of hearing about him then clicking to read his vision).
I run off the road any cars that still have a "W04" or "Bush/Cheney" sticker on them. Those people are too stupid and dangerous to allow in traffic with live humans.
No, it's a good example of how yellow blog journalism fails to inform properly, but does a good job of misinforming. When half the people believe a lie, that is easily and widely debunked, that is contradicted by the simple truth of the most sensational news (ie. that Obama's Christian minister is highly controversial), that proves that people aren't "better" informed. They're just more informed, but through disinformation they're badly misinformed.
The truth isn't a matter of mass consensus; Obama is not a Muslim. When half the people think he is, their way of knowing the facts is deeply broken. How you can think that's proof that "drawing our own conclusions" from "each side" (from the truth vs lies) is working is beyond me. You either have no respect for the facts, or you have no respect for Obama, or both.
Tell me: is Obama a Muslim?
Yes, IFRAMEs don't serve to let the publisher of the external content control the integrity of what they're "pointing to".
If HTTP included content signing that could at least let the publisher of the link help readers clicking it to see that the target content has changed. Eventually there will probably be a "distributed archiving" system that points at URIs, "content names", rather than URLs, which point at "content location", regardless of whether the content changes.
In the meantime, "fair use" quoting isn't just fair. It's more fair than the content publishers who bait & switch when their original content brings blowback pressure they don't like. AP has to get with the 20th Century laws if it's going to survive in the 21st Century. That's why it's trying to change the laws in the 21st Century, so it can drag us back to 19th Century yellow journalism that pays, but doesn't inform.
Letters to the editor are not journalism. But the articles they're discussing are.
Comments in a blog's discussion threads are the exact parallel. Except the comments are much closer to journalism, because they're not edited as much, so they're a closer reflection of the actual world outside an editor's head.