In the early days of copyright, copyright needed to be actively requested - depending on country by either registering it with a central office, or by putting in an intentional 'copyright blah year, all rights reserved' notice somewhere. So trivial things were not copyrighted - under that system this post, for example would be instantly public domain.
This was long ago changed by international agreement to make copyright automatic for anything and everything, though. For practical reasons, mostly - lots of ugly arguments in court relating to drafts and leaked documents which didn't have the vital notice on, or things accidentally going public domain because someone just neglected to put the tag on (It's A Wonderful Life, for example, lapsed copyright because the holder neglected to file a renewal notice on what was then a worthless and obscure film - though they later managed to re-copyright it on a technicality). So now every work is automatically copyrighted upon creation, including this post. I'm sure if you scour the Slashdot sign up agreement you'll find the paragraph where I agreed to let them publish my comments so you can read this.
It solved one problem, but created another. Now we have 'orphan works' - potentially useful material which is legally unusable because the author didn't sign it, thinking it too trivial to bother, and now no-one has any way to figure out who the author was. You might be happy to re-post some meme that's been passed around the image boards for a year, but no company will touch such material for fear that exposure will lead to the original artist crawling out the woodwork and hiring a lawyer.
It can actually be a lot more complicated than that when you take international law into account. You need a legal specialist to hand sometimes just to figure out of a work is under copyright or not. It's easy to find cases where, for example, the music and lyrics of a song are both under copyright, but the first recording of it is not. Or vice versa. It was a major headache for the producers of MST3K, because it wasn't enough for them to just find old movies they could license - they needed to also secure permission for every piece of music within that movie, including ambient tracks that were likely taken from some stock music record that no-one had seen in thirty years. Some of their episodes ended up dealing with this by simply cutting out scenes with music in.
Here in the UK we define copyright duration differently for books, plays, live television broadcasts (think sports), sound recordings, films and Peter Pan.
When the UK last extended our copyright duration for music - from fifty years, up to seventy - the change was not made entirely retroactive. Like the US it imposed a 'freeze' on new works entering the public domain, but unlike the US it did not re-copyright works which had already expired. This situation only refers to what the law calls 'sound recordings,' so it's quite possible for a specific recording of a song to now be public domain but the music and lyrics both still under copyright.
Thus, the Open Music Archive has been compiling all the pre-1963 music they can get their hands on and hosting it in the UK. http://www.openmusicarchive.or...
There's also a UK-hosted music archive to be found on IPFS, under key QmPEiNptxQ6LepGWSnfseLsYxDDBhXc6hiGqYP6a7sSpuH.
Texas. Alabama. States which actually do ban vibrators, and show it can pass (though enforcement is, to understate, lacking). Sex robots will be easier to ban because the market is smaller, and not many potential customers are going to campaign publicly. They'll fly under the radar until they get common enough to draw media coverage (which will be very uncommon, given how the media loves stories about sex, and how the public loves to read them), and soon after a few politicians will decide to prove their 'pro-family' credentials by proposing a ban, which will then sail through easily because no politician wants to go down on record as supporting sex robots.
They won't reach mass adoption anyway. Too expensive to produce a really sophisticated sex robots, and a crude one wouldn't be able to compete with the plain old zero-cost hand.
I do sometimes read Return of Kings for entertainment, in much the same way as people once visited the circus to gawk at the freak show. They currently have an article titled "4 Common Mistakes Men Make That Lower Their Testosterone" on the front page. It's a really bizare place - articles giving advice on how to get laid and bragging of how many women the author has had (or of how many different nationalities of woman), put up alongside articles decrying the moral decay that has turned women into promiscuous sluts who cannot be trusted to show loyalty to their man and stressing how important it is
Sometimes they even come very close to recognising this double standard. As one writer for the site puts it, "When I’m in the mood for easy sex, I’ll date. I’ll approach a girl, spit my game, and bang her no later than the third date, but I’d be a fool to use that strategy to find a wife, because I know that a woman who is open to dating random men has a sexual history that my strict standards simply won’t be able to accept."
The term may be new, but the behavior it describes is ancient. The bible has a verse in the new testament, one of those which seems to be easily overlooked, warning about people who make a big show of praying in public so that all their community can be impressed by how devout they appear.
There are a lot of people who want to divert attention that way, though. A lot of people are opposed to prostitution on moral grounds, and will use any chance to further criminalise it. They might also believe that no woman could possibly consent, therefore they are all coerced - and if they claim otherwise, that just proves they have been thoroughly brainwashed.
It's a bit of political posturing in this case. The NCOSE used to be an overtly Christian, right-wing pressure group dedicated to stamping out sinful media - they were called Morality in Media, and they tended to use language associated with the right-wing faction of politics - decency, morality, family. A few years ago they noticed that their name was a joke and nothing they said was taken seriously, so they completely reinvented themselves to turn from a right-wing anti-pornography organisation into a left-wing (superficially) anti-pornography organisation. Now they talk instead about needing to protect women, and use left-wing language - talking about rights, and equality. But beneath their surface appearance their actual policy positions have not changed at all - they even retain their opposition to homosexuality.
As much as I like the idea of sexbots, I also expect that the moment they become even half-way realistic there will be a worldwide movement to ban them. It'll probably involve stories describing how perverts can modify sex-bots to look or act like children.
Remember that even America, one of the world's more sexually open countries (if not so much as parts of Europe), it is a criminal offence to sell a dildo in Texas or Alabama.
I don't want to 'work on my game.' I know I'm not going to pull - but I'd rather not-pull as myself then read some slimeball guides so I can emotionally manipulate someone into sleeping with me through psychology and trickery.
The numbers estimated seem a bit inconsistent. Somewhere between 1000 and 100,000 cases a year? Something seems a bit dodgy when the estimates span two orders of magnitude.
On one those 'anti-trafficking' organisations, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation* (better know by their old name of Morality in Media, they rebranded because they were a laughing stock) features a 'dirty dozen' list every year of the twelve organisations they consider most destructive to sexual morality. Amnesty International is on the last two lists because they support decriminalisation of prostitution.
They also list the American Library Association (for opposing government-mandated filtering), Amazon (for selling pornography), youtube, Comcast (for not blocking pornography by default) and HBO (for making Game of Thones, with "with copious amounts of gratuitous nudity, sex, and sexual violence.").
There's a lesson to be learned here: Sometimes organisations try to veil their real goals. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation sounds like an organisation dedicated to protecting women, superficially, and their front page supports this interpretation - boldly claiming "NCOSE has a proven track record of changing corporate and government policies that previously facilitated sexual exploitation." But dig a little deeper and you find that their definition of 'exploitation' includes not only trafficking, but consentual prostitution and even the very absolute softest titillation of pornography - they have called upon Steam to ban Mass Effect: Andromeda as too racy. Dig a bit deeper still and you find they have campaigned for schools to block gay rights websites for 'promoting the homosexual lifestyle.'
*Abbreviated NCOSE, by their own choice. Probably to avoid confusion with the NCSE, the National Center for Science Education.
I might guess - and it's only guess, but a plausible one - that their anti-piracy measures may involve blocking incoming connections. It's a good way to render p2p clients less capable without impacting web browsing.
The bicameral system was based upon the English house of commons and house of lords, but adapted to a representative democracy. The idea is to provide some more stability to government - the senators stick around. Otherwise you'd end up with a government constantly in flux, as a new party takes over every few years and sets about burning down everything the last accomplished.
Actually, it doesn't sound like it works after all.
The only reason I think cinemas exist at all is for people who want to watch new releases rather than wait for them to come out on disc.
The cinema used to offer something no other place could: A gigantic screen, supremely clear images, and an audio system that'd give you powerful volume from the chair-rumbling explosions to the chirping giggles of children. Then home cinema technology advanced. What does a cinema offer now that you cannot get just by having a big screen TV (or, as we call them now, a TV) and some half-decent speakers? You can't go for the social experience. Comfort of other viewers mandates watching in silence, so you might as well watch alone.
All they can offer now is the time to drive out there, a captive audience to show trailers and advertising, the crying child behind you, the tall man in front, and the fat person who tries to squeeze past you mid-film to get to the toilets.
The usual measure of intelligence in population studies is IQ. It's an awful measurement, but it's also easy to measure and analyse when you have thousands of subjects to process. IQ scores follow a normal distribution - and always will, because they are intentionally normalised to make sure of it. So, in this case, it doesn't matter. Mean, median, mode, all the same.
I have seen many organisations claim that porn destroys society. I have seen many claim that they have scientific backing for their claim. I have even gone so far as to examine some of this backing, though as a layperson I am not competent to fully analyse the published body of work.
I have concluded that, though research in the area is very difficult to carry out, there is no solid evidence that widespread availability of pornography is harmful to society. It seems to have surprisingly little impact at all.
Plus, on some common sense but unscientific reasoning: If pornography were a threat to society, the collapse would have been very apparent shortly after the internet became widely available. The sheer quantity and variety of pornography now available for almost zero effort is so vast it cannot even be measured - if it was going to destroy society, the effects would surely be readily apparent by now.
For almost all people, their moral judgements are founded in only two principles: "This makes me feel icky, therefore it is wrong" and "People get punished for this, therefore it is wrong." Pornography makes a lot of people feel icky. It's also an excellent pretext for controlling the internet. Once you have a national censorship system in place to 'protect the children,' it's almost trivial to use it to censor other things too.
Except it doesn't work. China has a history of forcing out foreign companies as soon as a domestic version is available, no matter how much the foreign company bends over backwards to comply with Chinese censorship laws.
He can be both. It is true that felons have great difficulty in finding employment. They have to disclose to any employer that they are a felon, and in almost all cases this results in their application being instantly thrown in the trash - plenty of people looking for work with a clean record. Unless they have a personal friend who will pull a few strings for them, chances of getting into employment are slim. Is it any surprise that some of them conclude they have no choice but to return to crime to support themselves?
This particular felon, however, doesn't seem to have the aptitude to be a successful career criminal. Perhaps that is why he got caught, twice. He is both desperate and stupid.
The server which, after a string of political investigations, had still not been found to have contained any classified material? The only classified information to touch it are documents that were classified retroactively, after they were already sent.
She used a personal email address to avoid open records laws, probably so she could discuss things frankly with officials and not have to worry about how the public would react to everything she said. It is certainly a bit sleezy, but it was not illegal act the time, and it is a very common practice in politics.
The electoral college exists because, when the country was formed, less--populous states knew very well that giving all citizens equal say would result in their minority voice getting overpowered by the much greater numbers who would disagree with them. We have a word for this: We call it 'democracy.'
Slashdot Mirror
In the early days of copyright, copyright needed to be actively requested - depending on country by either registering it with a central office, or by putting in an intentional 'copyright blah year, all rights reserved' notice somewhere. So trivial things were not copyrighted - under that system this post, for example would be instantly public domain.
This was long ago changed by international agreement to make copyright automatic for anything and everything, though. For practical reasons, mostly - lots of ugly arguments in court relating to drafts and leaked documents which didn't have the vital notice on, or things accidentally going public domain because someone just neglected to put the tag on (It's A Wonderful Life, for example, lapsed copyright because the holder neglected to file a renewal notice on what was then a worthless and obscure film - though they later managed to re-copyright it on a technicality). So now every work is automatically copyrighted upon creation, including this post. I'm sure if you scour the Slashdot sign up agreement you'll find the paragraph where I agreed to let them publish my comments so you can read this.
It solved one problem, but created another. Now we have 'orphan works' - potentially useful material which is legally unusable because the author didn't sign it, thinking it too trivial to bother, and now no-one has any way to figure out who the author was. You might be happy to re-post some meme that's been passed around the image boards for a year, but no company will touch such material for fear that exposure will lead to the original artist crawling out the woodwork and hiring a lawyer.
It can actually be a lot more complicated than that when you take international law into account. You need a legal specialist to hand sometimes just to figure out of a work is under copyright or not. It's easy to find cases where, for example, the music and lyrics of a song are both under copyright, but the first recording of it is not. Or vice versa. It was a major headache for the producers of MST3K, because it wasn't enough for them to just find old movies they could license - they needed to also secure permission for every piece of music within that movie, including ambient tracks that were likely taken from some stock music record that no-one had seen in thirty years. Some of their episodes ended up dealing with this by simply cutting out scenes with music in.
Here in the UK we define copyright duration differently for books, plays, live television broadcasts (think sports), sound recordings, films and Peter Pan.
When the UK last extended our copyright duration for music - from fifty years, up to seventy - the change was not made entirely retroactive. Like the US it imposed a 'freeze' on new works entering the public domain, but unlike the US it did not re-copyright works which had already expired. This situation only refers to what the law calls 'sound recordings,' so it's quite possible for a specific recording of a song to now be public domain but the music and lyrics both still under copyright.
Thus, the Open Music Archive has been compiling all the pre-1963 music they can get their hands on and hosting it in the UK.
http://www.openmusicarchive.or...
There's also a UK-hosted music archive to be found on IPFS, under key QmPEiNptxQ6LepGWSnfseLsYxDDBhXc6hiGqYP6a7sSpuH.
That idea doesn't handle works with multiple creators. Anything from a 'music and lyrics' collaboration to a film produced by a staff of hundreds.
Texas. Alabama. States which actually do ban vibrators, and show it can pass (though enforcement is, to understate, lacking). Sex robots will be easier to ban because the market is smaller, and not many potential customers are going to campaign publicly. They'll fly under the radar until they get common enough to draw media coverage (which will be very uncommon, given how the media loves stories about sex, and how the public loves to read them), and soon after a few politicians will decide to prove their 'pro-family' credentials by proposing a ban, which will then sail through easily because no politician wants to go down on record as supporting sex robots.
They won't reach mass adoption anyway. Too expensive to produce a really sophisticated sex robots, and a crude one wouldn't be able to compete with the plain old zero-cost hand.
I do sometimes read Return of Kings for entertainment, in much the same way as people once visited the circus to gawk at the freak show. They currently have an article titled "4 Common Mistakes Men Make That Lower Their Testosterone" on the front page. It's a really bizare place - articles giving advice on how to get laid and bragging of how many women the author has had (or of how many different nationalities of woman), put up alongside articles decrying the moral decay that has turned women into promiscuous sluts who cannot be trusted to show loyalty to their man and stressing how important it is
Sometimes they even come very close to recognising this double standard. As one writer for the site puts it, "When I’m in the mood for easy sex, I’ll date. I’ll approach a girl, spit my game, and bang her no later than the third date, but I’d be a fool to use that strategy to find a wife, because I know that a woman who is open to dating random men has a sexual history that my strict standards simply won’t be able to accept."
The term may be new, but the behavior it describes is ancient. The bible has a verse in the new testament, one of those which seems to be easily overlooked, warning about people who make a big show of praying in public so that all their community can be impressed by how devout they appear.
There are a lot of people who want to divert attention that way, though. A lot of people are opposed to prostitution on moral grounds, and will use any chance to further criminalise it. They might also believe that no woman could possibly consent, therefore they are all coerced - and if they claim otherwise, that just proves they have been thoroughly brainwashed.
It's a bit of political posturing in this case. The NCOSE used to be an overtly Christian, right-wing pressure group dedicated to stamping out sinful media - they were called Morality in Media, and they tended to use language associated with the right-wing faction of politics - decency, morality, family. A few years ago they noticed that their name was a joke and nothing they said was taken seriously, so they completely reinvented themselves to turn from a right-wing anti-pornography organisation into a left-wing (superficially) anti-pornography organisation. Now they talk instead about needing to protect women, and use left-wing language - talking about rights, and equality. But beneath their surface appearance their actual policy positions have not changed at all - they even retain their opposition to homosexuality.
As much as I like the idea of sexbots, I also expect that the moment they become even half-way realistic there will be a worldwide movement to ban them. It'll probably involve stories describing how perverts can modify sex-bots to look or act like children.
Remember that even America, one of the world's more sexually open countries (if not so much as parts of Europe), it is a criminal offence to sell a dildo in Texas or Alabama.
I don't want to 'work on my game.' I know I'm not going to pull - but I'd rather not-pull as myself then read some slimeball guides so I can emotionally manipulate someone into sleeping with me through psychology and trickery.
The numbers estimated seem a bit inconsistent. Somewhere between 1000 and 100,000 cases a year? Something seems a bit dodgy when the estimates span two orders of magnitude.
On one those 'anti-trafficking' organisations, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation* (better know by their old name of Morality in Media, they rebranded because they were a laughing stock) features a 'dirty dozen' list every year of the twelve organisations they consider most destructive to sexual morality. Amnesty International is on the last two lists because they support decriminalisation of prostitution.
They also list the American Library Association (for opposing government-mandated filtering), Amazon (for selling pornography), youtube, Comcast (for not blocking pornography by default) and HBO (for making Game of Thones, with "with copious amounts of gratuitous nudity, sex, and sexual violence.").
There's a lesson to be learned here: Sometimes organisations try to veil their real goals. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation sounds like an organisation dedicated to protecting women, superficially, and their front page supports this interpretation - boldly claiming "NCOSE has a proven track record of changing corporate and government policies that previously facilitated sexual exploitation." But dig a little deeper and you find that their definition of 'exploitation' includes not only trafficking, but consentual prostitution and even the very absolute softest titillation of pornography - they have called upon Steam to ban Mass Effect: Andromeda as too racy. Dig a bit deeper still and you find they have campaigned for schools to block gay rights websites for 'promoting the homosexual lifestyle.'
*Abbreviated NCOSE, by their own choice. Probably to avoid confusion with the NCSE, the National Center for Science Education.
I might guess - and it's only guess, but a plausible one - that their anti-piracy measures may involve blocking incoming connections. It's a good way to render p2p clients less capable without impacting web browsing.
The bicameral system was based upon the English house of commons and house of lords, but adapted to a representative democracy. The idea is to provide some more stability to government - the senators stick around. Otherwise you'd end up with a government constantly in flux, as a new party takes over every few years and sets about burning down everything the last accomplished.
Actually, it doesn't sound like it works after all.
The only reason I think cinemas exist at all is for people who want to watch new releases rather than wait for them to come out on disc.
The cinema used to offer something no other place could: A gigantic screen, supremely clear images, and an audio system that'd give you powerful volume from the chair-rumbling explosions to the chirping giggles of children. Then home cinema technology advanced. What does a cinema offer now that you cannot get just by having a big screen TV (or, as we call them now, a TV) and some half-decent speakers? You can't go for the social experience. Comfort of other viewers mandates watching in silence, so you might as well watch alone.
All they can offer now is the time to drive out there, a captive audience to show trailers and advertising, the crying child behind you, the tall man in front, and the fat person who tries to squeeze past you mid-film to get to the toilets.
The usual measure of intelligence in population studies is IQ. It's an awful measurement, but it's also easy to measure and analyse when you have thousands of subjects to process. IQ scores follow a normal distribution - and always will, because they are intentionally normalised to make sure of it. So, in this case, it doesn't matter. Mean, median, mode, all the same.
I have seen many organisations claim that porn destroys society. I have seen many claim that they have scientific backing for their claim. I have even gone so far as to examine some of this backing, though as a layperson I am not competent to fully analyse the published body of work.
I have concluded that, though research in the area is very difficult to carry out, there is no solid evidence that widespread availability of pornography is harmful to society. It seems to have surprisingly little impact at all.
Plus, on some common sense but unscientific reasoning: If pornography were a threat to society, the collapse would have been very apparent shortly after the internet became widely available. The sheer quantity and variety of pornography now available for almost zero effort is so vast it cannot even be measured - if it was going to destroy society, the effects would surely be readily apparent by now.
For almost all people, their moral judgements are founded in only two principles: "This makes me feel icky, therefore it is wrong" and "People get punished for this, therefore it is wrong." Pornography makes a lot of people feel icky. It's also an excellent pretext for controlling the internet. Once you have a national censorship system in place to 'protect the children,' it's almost trivial to use it to censor other things too.
Except it doesn't work. China has a history of forcing out foreign companies as soon as a domestic version is available, no matter how much the foreign company bends over backwards to comply with Chinese censorship laws.
He can be both. It is true that felons have great difficulty in finding employment. They have to disclose to any employer that they are a felon, and in almost all cases this results in their application being instantly thrown in the trash - plenty of people looking for work with a clean record. Unless they have a personal friend who will pull a few strings for them, chances of getting into employment are slim. Is it any surprise that some of them conclude they have no choice but to return to crime to support themselves?
This particular felon, however, doesn't seem to have the aptitude to be a successful career criminal. Perhaps that is why he got caught, twice. He is both desperate and stupid.
The server which, after a string of political investigations, had still not been found to have contained any classified material? The only classified information to touch it are documents that were classified retroactively, after they were already sent.
She used a personal email address to avoid open records laws, probably so she could discuss things frankly with officials and not have to worry about how the public would react to everything she said. It is certainly a bit sleezy, but it was not illegal act the time, and it is a very common practice in politics.
The electoral college exists because, when the country was formed, less--populous states knew very well that giving all citizens equal say would result in their minority voice getting overpowered by the much greater numbers who would disagree with them. We have a word for this: We call it 'democracy.'
Sex robots and meat substitute are no replacement... yet. But every year they grow a little closer.
Or you can just eat a bit of meat. Cut back without completely cutting out.