While I completely agree with your assessment of what porn is and does, I think blaming porn is at least half wrong.
What is porn? Porn is media ( image, sound, story) that is designed to cause or enhance sexual arousal. I cannot see what is wrong with that. I thing being sexualy aroused is a good and healthy thing when it happens when you want it to happen. And getting some mediation to help is useful to many people and may be indispensable to some ( older folks, adolescents, people who just want to masturbate right now, people stranded alone on an island;-), etc. )
The problem with the porn we have is that it reveals the innards of a sick culture. Not only unrealistic but positively disgusting imagery is mainstream in the porn industry. I fail to see what how so many people get aroused sexually by watching women degraded and abused, or by contemplating mechanical humping that I find as sexy as watching robots build a new Ford SUV, or the endless galleries of women faces adorned with sperm, etc.
Don't blame the porn industry for handing us a mirror to see how disgusting we are. The problem is not porn, the problem is men who hate women. Go buy a collection of stories called Herotica ( can be found at an amazon.com near you) and it might change your idea of porn so much that you might recommend it to your next boyfriend.
seems to me the sucees of sex sites reveals the hitherto uknown fact that so many men get sexually aroused by watching uncontrolled popping windows.
Who would have guessed...
To be serious, sex sites never participated in the NASDAQ's irrational exuberance and it is not at all surprising that they are not affected by the market dive. Sex sites don't need investors because they are already cash cows.
If you think about it, sex sites and fancy business ideas like priceline and co have something in common at a root of their business plan. They both market the costumer's own desire back to him in a shiny wrap. They "add value" to our desires. The difference is that sex sites succeed because they have a grip on the end customer's desire, whereas most dot coms figured out that you could make a kill out of investors' desires and fantasies and never have to deal with real customers. To bad it will end soon. There is little in life more asthetically pleasing then watchig a fool and his money part.
C++ is slower to compile, but you only compile once. You see there'll be a penalty for perl every run and not just once. So in perl the fact that it becomes OO has longer lasting consequence.
Seems to me the opposite is true. Right now using objects and packages incur high overhead. Moving the inheritence code from the interpreter to the core ( which is compiled) should eliminate some of it and improve performance of OO perl code. The basic issue is that we are not talking about adding OO to perl but about correcting a faulty OO implementation. You ask what is wrong with thingies and packages. basically, IMHO, performance and the inhereritence mechanism. If Perl 6 improves on these issues it will be a Good Thing.
I certainly see the danger of screw-up, and simulating java performance will be a disaster. But we ought to give Larry Wall some credit;-)
First, since "basic" data types in perl are internally complex data structures, returning objects does not make such a big difference in perl as it does in c++.
Second, Perl5 is already ebject oriented. But the OO stuff is kind of kludgy and particularly unieldy when dealing with class hierarchies. I cannot see how moving OO features to the core, as I understand is planned, and cleaning up the way inheritence is handled based on Perl5 experience can make Perl6 worse than Perl5. This is not adding features, this is correcting suboptimal design.
sorry, a botched deregulation is a deregulation, just as a botched open heart surgery is an open heart surgery.
When you recommend a treatment, you must factor in the risk of failure, if you are honest.
You may have had a point if the deregulation in California had been carried out by some tongue in cheek socialist. It wasn't. It was designed and carried out by a cohort of republican and "new democrat" politicians, business officials, and economists. They botched it, and now they say, "this is not what we meant by deregulation".
Sounds like whining to me.
Besides, sciencific theories can be proven wrong. The theory that deregulation is always good for consumers seems like a theory that cannot be possibly proven wrong, because, every time deregulation fails, it isn't "really" deregulation ( see, Russia, California, etc.) Show me one example of a real failed deregulation that should not have been attempted and I will take you more seriously.
hmm. Interesting, how come the cities that kept their electicity under municipal control have been least affected by the shortage?
And your view is also very scientific. A is a problem. You claim B is the solution. we try B and it makes things worse. Whose to blame? Anything but B.
look at it another way. the claim: the government failed to deregulate in the 'right' way. Why we want the government to deregulate? Because the government is a bad manager. So if good deregulation depends on good management of the deregulation process, and if we assume that government is not capable of good management, and if we assume that bad deregulation is worse than regulation ( we now know that de facto, both California and on a bigger scale Russia prove it), shouldn't we advice government not to deregulate under such risks? So why did the economists come out with the opposite advice? Maybe because they weren't concerned about what is good for Californians but about what is good for the energy companies that fill their pockets to make them sing in the right key.
You just said it. The shareholders sold the company before honoring their liabilities. If the regulators' legal advice is sound, I assume AT&T bought something that the shareholders have no right to sell. What happens is the same thing as when you sell someone your house that has been
under lien to the IRS. The guy who bought it is a fool. isn't 135M enough to maintain service for 30 days?
The thing that keeps (some) journalists from asking different questions or reporting different view-points is not obeisance to corporate over-lords but the herd mentality
Not according to my sources. Plus, herd mentality means follow the leader. People behave like a herd because they know that being different is punished. Who does the punishing? Who creates the work environment that rewards herdlike behavior and punishes serious journalism? Who pays six-figures salaries to the members of your happy milquetoast, instead of wipping their ass with their shabby product?
the number of protesters refers to protesters during presidential inauguration, sorry for not being clear.
The press cannot ignore all corporate wrongdoing because sensationalism sells. And their own competition insures that once something is out, they have to milk it to the end and beyond. Yet even under these constraints the press manages to ignore a lot of things, The long actors strike for-example, the war over copyright extension, etc. The corporate world is competitive and the fact that there are some common corporate interests does not mean that corporations never hurt one another. But as you point out, the acceptable way to report things that heavily damage corporate interests is under the guise of hysteria. Serious journalism would have required that someone went and investigated these things before they are made known by a lawsuit. Serious reporting would feature corporate news at the top of every news item ( without histeria), and would analyze every merger and every major corporate decision because these decisions affect our life. Serious reporting would invesigate the 'crisis' in California on primetime instead of merely reporting what politicians have to say about it.
Bottom line: Media executives are beholden to the bottomline, and if they were not their shareholders would be suing them. Democracy is something else.
I won't dispute that because I am not watching the daily show ( I think I saw it once ). My point is general. The only interviewer who pushed Bush beyond his comfort zone before the elections was Letterman. Not all jesters are telling the truth, some are crap, maybe most. But many jesters do and almost no 'serious' network journalist does. I think that is bad enough.
Now, my dear hard scientist, surely you don't think slashdot is the place to write a PhD? If anything, the formatting options are too restrictive, and the peer review leaves something to be desired. So please consider my post to be written in jest;-).
Yes I am aware of King Lear being literature. I am also aware that all around the world and all throughout history, literature and theatre have been a (sometimes ) safe haven for people who wanted to express in roundabout ways criticism that could not be said in a straight face without dire consequences for themselves.
Considering the US: No, the President cannot kill journalists. He doesn't have to. As I said earlier. Power has adapted to the new rules. You can say what you want. But what you say has no political imact. You cannot see serious journalists asking tough questions and speaking in an unrestrained manner on TV or in major newsparers. The BBC described "Indecision 2000" as a stolen election. The American media barely reported that Bush's inauguration drew more protesters to Washington than have been there since the Vientam era. The only people on TV who dare mention Bush's legitimacy issue are comedians. The only people on TV who point out that Bush's ( and Clinton's ) drug policies are a supreme case of hypocrisy are comedians. The US has very tough laws that allow journalists to say extremely offensive things without liability, on the assumption that the role of the media is to protect democracy. This assumption is no longer true in the US. The role of the US media today is to increase shareholders value and that is way Jay Leno has become a source of news whereas the evening news have become a mild entretainment whose obsequesness and constant groveling is second only to Pravda's.
The journalists who worked at Pravda cooperated because they didn't want to spend the rest of their life in Siberia. Those who work at Fox cooperate because they want to retire comfortably.
The result is the almost the same, and the first ammendment cannot be of help here.
PS.
If you think that Shakespeare made theatre for idiots, you really need a visit to your local academia to refresh your memory.
Come to think of it. It used to be the case, in the old days of tough and tempestuous monarchs, that nobody in his right mind would dare criticize the powerfuls. The only ones who could speak freely were 'fools', or 'court jesters'. (That is why, for example, the fool in 'King Lear' is the only one telling the truth to Lear ).
Then some people invented Democracy and free speech and even fought and got killed to put those ideas into law so that people could say whatever they wanted without having to pretend they are jesters.
It took some time but eventually the powerfull figured out a way around and we are all back to square one, where only jesters tell the truth on the screens of the corporate media.
All the smart arguments are...well, smart. But in the end, it stands or falls on the judge's political disposition, which gives, I would say, 65% chances that such a patch would be dimmed illegal.
<p>
The bright side is that not all hackers pay taxes to Uncle Sam. And I suspect that German courts, for example, will be much less friendly to the RIAA.
<p>
Why did consumers accept VHS devices with built-in copy protection?
They didn't, but nobody asked them and they got it anyway. Because it fitted the interest of "content providers" and because it got legislators on board, hardware makers joined in.
In this case hardware/software makers are joining because they have an interest. And legislators will join in also. So consumers will have to gobble it as usual. remember that the life of the average computer is three years. When Joe Consumer buys his new 7GHz computer with 800Tb harddrive, the only hardware available will implement copy protection, unless you believe that Joe Consumer will build himself a beowulf cluster just to escape AOL Time Warner
I suppose there is more awareness now and the organizational power of open source will allow a larger area of resistence. But unless something dramatic happens to block it, or the cartel somehow manages to shoot itself in the foot, that resistence will be an off-off-bradway show as usual.
I hope one day enough people will figure out that a constitution without a democratic representative government is just a piece of paper with funny glyphs.
The main problem is not length of patents, per se. Software patents are evil in themselves because they have nothing to do with the goal of patents. Developers do don't create algorithms for the sake of selling them on the market. They create algorithms because they have a technical problem standing in a way of creating a marketable product. Thus the granting of a patent has no effect on their willingness to invest time in creating better algorithms.
In general, given the sophistication of available economic analysis, the static process of patents is obsolete. Patents should be used to encourage innovation. The time length of patents and the areas that are patentable should not be statically legislated. They should be determined dynamically by the USPTO at regular intervals ( say every five years) based on economic data, to ensure that patents serve their purpose at minimal cost to the public.
of course, the current USPTO is not the vehicle for such an approach. The office should be upgraded to something more like the level of a central bank.
The internet already provides the same capabilities. Someone at the USPTO should have all employees undergo a training session on using google.
One solution to the problem of prior art is to require patent applicants to submit a prior art report signed by an independent prior art specialist that could be sued for
not seeing the obvious. Such specialists could work in the same way as real estate appraisors work.
Thank you for your two cents. Unfortunately, you have to realize that both the senate and the whitehouse can handle only so much legislation in one year. The very high demand for the President's services makes it utterly impossible for the President to push through every cause presented to him by supporters like yourself. The President deeply believes that markets should regulate the choice of legislation he champions through judicious use of price signals thats reflect supply and demand.
The President is thefore forced to refuse your contribution, unless you up it to $2000, which is the current minimum for an executive order. If you want a pricelist for lobbying Congress, please send $25 and a self-stamped enveloppe.
Sorry, I misquoted, the email was to the CEO of Enron, not Alcoa. Keeping track of the web of payback, bribery and corruption in Bush's white hose is just too big a task for my limited brain.
from what we know already Bush is, if he is President at all, the Off-line President.
When he talks, he is mostly off-line, the rest of the time he isn't even on. I think Dick Cheney boots him every day before the press conference, but the ELISA implementantion is so buggy that after 10 questions from journalists all the memory is gone and the disk starts trashing. So they have to take him away and ALT-CTRL-DELETE him till the next day.
For the same reason that the government can tell its employees not to browse porn on government computers, Prince George cannot expect to send private email through government network.
His correspondence is public record unless classified, and it cannot be classified unless it is a matter of national security.
So his recent email to the CEO of Alcoa:
Hi buddy, California is yours, if the regulators annoy you, all you have to do is whistle.
Oh dear, Governments always redistribute wealth. If they hadn't, nobody would have payed attention to them. The difference between decent governments and obscene governments is the direction of the redistribution.
Communism BTW redistributes much less wealth than capitalism because communist countries have had traditionally little wealth.
Right now Resident Bush is masterminding an immense transfer of wealth from Californians to shareholders of hot spot energy trading companies like Enron. Can you imagine Enron spending 2 million dollars on helping the election of Brezniev?
And one more word about transfer of wealth and government: Mark Rich.
Slashdot Mirror
While I completely agree with your assessment of what porn is and does, I think blaming porn is at least half wrong.
What is porn? Porn is media ( image, sound, story) that is designed to cause or enhance sexual arousal. I cannot see what is wrong with that. I thing being sexualy aroused is a good and healthy thing when it happens when you want it to happen. And getting some mediation to help is useful to many people and may be indispensable to some ( older folks, adolescents, people who just want to masturbate right now, people stranded alone on an island ;-), etc. )
The problem with the porn we have is that it reveals the innards of a sick culture. Not only unrealistic but positively disgusting imagery is mainstream in the porn industry. I fail to see what how so many people get aroused sexually by watching women degraded and abused, or by contemplating mechanical humping that I find as sexy as watching robots build a new Ford SUV, or the endless galleries of women faces adorned with sperm, etc.
Don't blame the porn industry for handing us a mirror to see how disgusting we are. The problem is not porn, the problem is men who hate women. Go buy a collection of stories called Herotica ( can be found at an amazon.com near you) and it might change your idea of porn so much that you might recommend it to your next boyfriend.
Who would have guessed...
To be serious, sex sites never participated in the NASDAQ's irrational exuberance and it is not at all surprising that they are not affected by the market dive. Sex sites don't need investors because they are already cash cows.
If you think about it, sex sites and fancy business ideas like priceline and co have something in common at a root of their business plan. They both market the costumer's own desire back to him in a shiny wrap. They "add value" to our desires. The difference is that sex sites succeed because they have a grip on the end customer's desire, whereas most dot coms figured out that you could make a kill out of investors' desires and fantasies and never have to deal with real customers. To bad it will end soon. There is little in life more asthetically pleasing then watchig a fool and his money part.
Seems to me the opposite is true. Right now using objects and packages incur high overhead. Moving the inheritence code from the interpreter to the core ( which is compiled) should eliminate some of it and improve performance of OO perl code. The basic issue is that we are not talking about adding OO to perl but about correcting a faulty OO implementation. You ask what is wrong with thingies and packages. basically, IMHO, performance and the inhereritence mechanism. If Perl 6 improves on these issues it will be a Good Thing.
I certainly see the danger of screw-up, and simulating java performance will be a disaster. But we ought to give Larry Wall some credit ;-)
Second, Perl5 is already ebject oriented. But the OO stuff is kind of kludgy and particularly unieldy when dealing with class hierarchies. I cannot see how moving OO features to the core, as I understand is planned, and cleaning up the way inheritence is handled based on Perl5 experience can make Perl6 worse than Perl5. This is not adding features, this is correcting suboptimal design.
When you recommend a treatment, you must factor in the risk of failure, if you are honest.
You may have had a point if the deregulation in California had been carried out by some tongue in cheek socialist. It wasn't. It was designed and carried out by a cohort of republican and "new democrat" politicians, business officials, and economists. They botched it, and now they say, "this is not what we meant by deregulation". Sounds like whining to me.
Besides, sciencific theories can be proven wrong. The theory that deregulation is always good for consumers seems like a theory that cannot be possibly proven wrong, because, every time deregulation fails, it isn't "really" deregulation ( see, Russia, California, etc.) Show me one example of a real failed deregulation that should not have been attempted and I will take you more seriously.
hmm. Interesting, how come the cities that kept their electicity under municipal control have been least affected by the shortage?
And your view is also very scientific. A is a problem. You claim B is the solution. we try B and it makes things worse. Whose to blame? Anything but B.
look at it another way. the claim: the government failed to deregulate in the 'right' way. Why we want the government to deregulate? Because the government is a bad manager. So if good deregulation depends on good management of the deregulation process, and if we assume that government is not capable of good management, and if we assume that bad deregulation is worse than regulation ( we now know that de facto, both California and on a bigger scale Russia prove it), shouldn't we advice government not to deregulate under such risks? So why did the economists come out with the opposite advice? Maybe because they weren't concerned about what is good for Californians but about what is good for the energy companies that fill their pockets to make them sing in the right key.
You just said it. The shareholders sold the company before honoring their liabilities. If the regulators' legal advice is sound, I assume AT&T bought something that the shareholders have no right to sell. What happens is the same thing as when you sell someone your house that has been
under lien to the IRS. The guy who bought it is a fool. isn't 135M enough to maintain service for 30 days?
The thing that keeps (some) journalists from asking different questions or reporting different view-points is not obeisance to corporate over-lords but the herd mentality
Not according to my sources. Plus, herd mentality means follow the leader. People behave like a herd because they know that being different is punished. Who does the punishing? Who creates the work environment that rewards herdlike behavior and punishes serious journalism? Who pays six-figures salaries to the members of your happy milquetoast, instead of wipping their ass with their shabby product?
the number of protesters refers to protesters during presidential inauguration, sorry for not being clear.
The press cannot ignore all corporate wrongdoing because sensationalism sells. And their own competition insures that once something is out, they have to milk it to the end and beyond. Yet even under these constraints the press manages to ignore a lot of things, The long actors strike for-example, the war over copyright extension, etc. The corporate world is competitive and the fact that there are some common corporate interests does not mean that corporations never hurt one another. But as you point out, the acceptable way to report things that heavily damage corporate interests is under the guise of hysteria. Serious journalism would have required that someone went and investigated these things before they are made known by a lawsuit. Serious reporting would feature corporate news at the top of every news item ( without histeria), and would analyze every merger and every major corporate decision because these decisions affect our life. Serious reporting would invesigate the 'crisis' in California on primetime instead of merely reporting what politicians have to say about it.
Bottom line: Media executives are beholden to the bottomline, and if they were not their shareholders would be suing them. Democracy is something else.
I won't dispute that because I am not watching the daily show ( I think I saw it once ). My point is general. The only interviewer who pushed Bush beyond his comfort zone before the elections was Letterman. Not all jesters are telling the truth, some are crap, maybe most. But many jesters do and almost no 'serious' network journalist does. I think that is bad enough.
Yes I am aware of King Lear being literature. I am also aware that all around the world and all throughout history, literature and theatre have been a (sometimes ) safe haven for people who wanted to express in roundabout ways criticism that could not be said in a straight face without dire consequences for themselves.
Considering the US: No, the President cannot kill journalists. He doesn't have to. As I said earlier. Power has adapted to the new rules. You can say what you want. But what you say has no political imact. You cannot see serious journalists asking tough questions and speaking in an unrestrained manner on TV or in major newsparers. The BBC described "Indecision 2000" as a stolen election. The American media barely reported that Bush's inauguration drew more protesters to Washington than have been there since the Vientam era. The only people on TV who dare mention Bush's legitimacy issue are comedians. The only people on TV who point out that Bush's ( and Clinton's ) drug policies are a supreme case of hypocrisy are comedians. The US has very tough laws that allow journalists to say extremely offensive things without liability, on the assumption that the role of the media is to protect democracy. This assumption is no longer true in the US. The role of the US media today is to increase shareholders value and that is way Jay Leno has become a source of news whereas the evening news have become a mild entretainment whose obsequesness and constant groveling is second only to Pravda's.
The journalists who worked at Pravda cooperated because they didn't want to spend the rest of their life in Siberia. Those who work at Fox cooperate because they want to retire comfortably. The result is the almost the same, and the first ammendment cannot be of help here.
PS.
If you think that Shakespeare made theatre for idiots, you really need a visit to your local academia to refresh your memory.
Then some people invented Democracy and free speech and even fought and got killed to put those ideas into law so that people could say whatever they wanted without having to pretend they are jesters.
It took some time but eventually the powerfull figured out a way around and we are all back to square one, where only jesters tell the truth on the screens of the corporate media.
All the smart arguments are ...well, smart. But in the end, it stands or falls on the judge's political disposition, which gives, I would say, 65% chances that such a patch would be dimmed illegal.
<p>
The bright side is that not all hackers pay taxes to Uncle Sam. And I suspect that German courts, for example, will be much less friendly to the RIAA.
<p>
I guess I drank tooo much. the numbers are
640 nominal 608 real.
sorry
Title says it all. plus they are very professional and understand unix. They charge 49 including static IP.
They didn't, but nobody asked them and they got it anyway. Because it fitted the interest of "content providers" and because it got legislators on board, hardware makers joined in.
In this case hardware/software makers are joining because they have an interest. And legislators will join in also. So consumers will have to gobble it as usual. remember that the life of the average computer is three years. When Joe Consumer buys his new 7GHz computer with 800Tb harddrive, the only hardware available will implement copy protection, unless you believe that Joe Consumer will build himself a beowulf cluster just to escape AOL Time Warner
I suppose there is more awareness now and the organizational power of open source will allow a larger area of resistence. But unless something dramatic happens to block it, or the cartel somehow manages to shoot itself in the foot, that resistence will be an off-off-bradway show as usual.
I hope one day enough people will figure out that a constitution without a democratic representative government is just a piece of paper with funny glyphs.
The main problem is not length of patents, per se. Software patents are evil in themselves because they have nothing to do with the goal of patents. Developers do don't create algorithms for the sake of selling them on the market. They create algorithms because they have a technical problem standing in a way of creating a marketable product. Thus the granting of a patent has no effect on their willingness to invest time in creating better algorithms.
In general, given the sophistication of available economic analysis, the static process of patents is obsolete. Patents should be used to encourage innovation. The time length of patents and the areas that are patentable should not be statically legislated. They should be determined dynamically by the USPTO at regular intervals ( say every five years) based on economic data, to ensure that patents serve their purpose at minimal cost to the public.
of course, the current USPTO is not the vehicle for such an approach. The office should be upgraded to something more like the level of a central bank.
One solution to the problem of prior art is to require patent applicants to submit a prior art report signed by an independent prior art specialist that could be sued for not seeing the obvious. Such specialists could work in the same way as real estate appraisors work.
please note, the above idea has been patented ;-)
Thank you for your two cents. Unfortunately, you have to realize that both the senate and the whitehouse can handle only so much legislation in one year. The very high demand for the President's services makes it utterly impossible for the President to push through every cause presented to him by supporters like yourself. The President deeply believes that markets should regulate the choice of legislation he champions through judicious use of price signals thats reflect supply and demand.
The President is thefore forced to refuse your contribution, unless you up it to $2000, which is the current minimum for an executive order. If you want a pricelist for lobbying Congress, please send $25 and a self-stamped enveloppe.
John S. Leaze
secretary of corporate payback
Sorry, I misquoted, the email was to the CEO of Enron, not Alcoa. Keeping track of the web of payback, bribery and corruption in Bush's white hose is just too big a task for my limited brain.
When he talks, he is mostly off-line, the rest of the time he isn't even on. I think Dick Cheney boots him every day before the press conference, but the ELISA implementantion is so buggy that after 10 questions from journalists all the memory is gone and the disk starts trashing. So they have to take him away and ALT-CTRL-DELETE him till the next day.
Well, given that he plans to distribute the national surplus to all Americans he plays golf with, I guess that was work.
Haven't you noticed yet that the present King of US is working 9-5 and going to Camp-David every weekend?
His correspondence is public record unless classified, and it cannot be classified unless it is a matter of national security.
So his recent email to the CEO of Alcoa:
Hi buddy, California is yours, if the regulators annoy you, all you have to do is whistle.
will one day be in the national archive.
Actually the bible says a lot about cloning, please revisit the fabulous genesis chapter 2.
Communism BTW redistributes much less wealth than capitalism because communist countries have had traditionally little wealth. Right now Resident Bush is masterminding an immense transfer of wealth from Californians to shareholders of hot spot energy trading companies like Enron. Can you imagine Enron spending 2 million dollars on helping the election of Brezniev?
And one more word about transfer of wealth and government: Mark Rich.