So, if someone was to take the prosecutor's face and photoshop it onto a picture of a dead body, that photoshop artist would be arrested for murder? Clearly, the way the prosecutor has re-worded the law in his favor, the victim is being charged with a thought-crime.
And if MERELY THINKING of a sexual act with a minor is punishable, then we are in a very sad state of affairs.
Funny, but those bluetooth headsets reminded me more of what Spock had sticking out of his ear for half the episodes of Star Trek. Frankly, I find it humorous we're having this discussion, since Gene Rodenberry seemed more capable of predicting the future than William Gibson.
For everthing that Gibson got right, Rodenberry got it MORE right.
So, over an extended period of time, I receieve emails that indicate that my penis is too small, and eventually, this harassment leads me to commit suicide. So now that spammer is guily of murder?
Just remember that we're living in a country that wants to ban Tylenol because some people damage their livers. Just try and imagine what kind of censorship we're going to have if this type of Lori Drew thing gets treated as a real crime.
We're living in a nation of a lot of stupid laws, where a nanny-state wants to control everything about our lives. Big-Brother couldn't have come up with anything better, George Orwell would be aghast that his warnings have gone unheeded.
So go ahead, put Lori Drew in jail for writing some emails. Next, we'll be burning you for what's written in your diary. Good luck with that. Anyone here with a blog? Not any more.
"Spaceport America" is such a dull name. What, would Lucas have threatened to sue if they named it something like "Mos Eisley". I mean, just think of the T-Shirt potential in the duty-free zone!
We had space planes in the 60's, and we had space planes on the drawing boards that would have essentially been the forerunners of the Space Shuttle. But then the Russians launched Sputnik and the game changed on the Air Force. Suddenly the government wanted spam in a can, monkey in a missle. yadda yadda garbage.
See "The Right Stuff" If we had continued the X-plane research, we would have gotten to pure space planes alright. But the pentagon switched gears suddenly, and everything became about rockets. We spent a lot of time and money to play catch up with the Soviet Union, when we should have simply developed better planes.
The X-15 was already close enough that it needed control thrusters after reaching apogee, and the pilots were weightless. Many from the X-15 program were awarded astronaut wings (But Alan Shepard is considered the first American in space, and Yuri Gagarin the first man, although I believe the X-15 pilots beat them both to that record).
Admittedly, Gagarin orbited, while the X-15 pilots did not. Still, with a little more time and money, it probably could have been done. We would have needed a little more research into the ablative coating, and if the X-15 had had a titanium skin, it probably would have been very doable.
So, if you help me move my furniture, and I treat you to dinner afterwards as a sign of appreciation for the help, the IRS is "right" to tax you for the meal as "income"?
By that definition, everything is taxable, right down to Pokemon cards. I hope your kids have filled out their 1099's properly, as that Pickachu card is pretty valuable!
Dude, Reagan spent a shitload of money on research. Not to defend the Republican agenda, but, when it came to "defense research", Reagan spent a lot of money. That's how concepts like SSTO got started, and although many of those projects are just dusty remains now, a lot of gains were made in materials research and propulsion technologies.
Don't underestimate what Reagan did for basic research. He spent so much money in the defense arena that the Soviet Union essentially bankrupted itself trying to keep up with him. The Berlin wall fell mostly due to the fact that the Soviets were still stuck with a lot of WWII technology, and they ran out of money in the technological war of the 80's.
Consider seat belts in cars. Manufacturers didn't even want to include them in cars because they carried the illusuion that if the car needed them, the car was somehow unsafe. Then they were available as an option, then they were built into every car, then we were pestered with PSAs to wear them, and then they became LAW. And now we are faced with stiff penalties if we do not wear them. In the space of less than 50 years, we went from zero seat belts to getting a ticket if you're not wearing it while in the car.
I'm sure this will be spun the same way, that the internet will be censured for our "protection", that, somehow, not being able to access what we want to access is for the safety and protection of all Americans, and to be against that is unpatriotic.
Ummm. Haven't we already done this, and it all failed miserably? There has yet to be a successful "internet appliance". Think of the Audrey, the nIC (later called ThinkNIC), and a host of other cheap, but ultimately useless web-boxes that could not update the browser. So they all died, mostly because they companies couldn't sustain enough "internet rent" by providing a proprietary dial-in to the internet.
Even client-server mostly died, but now they are pushing client-cloud, which is even worse, because once you put everything on a cloud, one little storm and nothing is accessible.
Even the most basic appliances included some built-in games and a text editor for when you weren't online. Now they want to stuff an OS into some flash, leave you 4 megs of free space for cookies, and then impose a non-upgradeable browser (and probably tons of DRM), to force us to use the web like it's TV, and if you do want to use a computer for what it is actually for, you have to rent time on cloud apps.
Except anyone who buys these pieces of garbage will find after a year they have to throw it away because the company they are renting cloud-time on went out of business because not enough people rented cloud-time.
And when they shut down, ooops, there goes all your data. Remember that a cloud can also be a puff of smoke, and blow away just as easily.
I was recently watching the news, and they were showing how children are being killed in record numbers by gun violence in Chicago.
And the reporter asked "If these deaths were caused by the swine flu, the media, government, and the public would be be all over it. But because it's just urban violence, nobody cares about these deaths."
It seems to me that this country has it's priorities backwards. NOT ok to have 2 people die of Swine Flu, but OK for 30 kids to die from guns. OK for tens of thousands to die from lack of affordable healthcare EVERY YEAR, but billions and trillions spent because 3000 people die from ONE isolated incident of terrorism.
Yeppers, makes me proud to be an American. I'm gonna throw up now.
So, when these guys scan someone who's under 18, aren't they liable for charges of child porn?
It seems to me that we are a nation of wildly conflicting laws, and everything can be "made" illegal in some way, regardless of the actual intent. This is why our courtrooms are so crowded, and 'justice' moves at a snail's pace.
Which is too bad, since Avatar, The Last Airbender is very likely superior in terms of plot, pacing, characterization, music and action to whatever comes out of the flawed, egotesticle James Cameron. No that was not a typo.
His older movies were good, but I think he took one deep dive too many while hunting Titanic memorabilia.
Gee, I don't remember Americans having a problem with Saddam when WE WERE PAYING HIM with our Tax Dollars to fight Iran for us.
How about embracing the teachings of Jesus? He who is without sin, cast the first stone. Didn't the United States kill 1000's of it's own people indescriminately? Oh, you must have forgotten. They were called "Native Americans", or at the time... "Indians". And we're a country that for generations endorsed SLAVERY.
Imagine, if you will.. how this country would be seen if in some kind of Star Trek "Mirror Mirror" universe, we were still doing that to this day, or that American from the 1800's was suddenly catapulted into the year 2000...
Is it really our place to stick our more developed moralities onto the rest of the undeveloped world? Is Saddam any better than Thomas Jefferson, a man who owned slaves and often raped the women (how many Black Americans are part of the Jefferson lineage?)?
So, while you sit on your high horse dispatching justice as you see fit, tell me how you think this country is so much better than Iraq that we had the right to go in there and destroy everything so that we could make life even more miserable for the average Iraqi, but now they are "free"...
At what point in your delusion do you realise that all developing nations go through a period, often lasting 100 years or more, where things are shitty? And just because we got past that period, somehow we assume that everyone else has gotten past that period as well?
I don't like any lie, and usually in a movie there are several lies every few minutes.
--
Actually, *every* movie is a lie, 24 times per second. Even movies which are documentaries are edited to favor the bias of the director or producer. In movies, people are more attractive than in real life, and are often capable of feats physically impossible in the real world.
My favorite is when you show the progress over time with a montage, and somehow, the character is capable of amazing things that should have taken months or years of training, and now has done it within the passage of a week or so. (see Team America: World Police)
How is it that a movie is more secret than the identity of an undercover CIA agent?
When it was leaked that Valerie Plame was an undercover operative for the CIA, a person dealing with NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUES, there was no rush to fire the journalists involved, remove names from websites, and purge Google's cache. There was no immediate FBI investigation, and when there finally was, there was a single fall-guy who was given a slap on the wrist, while the real criminals were given medals and honored as heroes.
But, a crappy movie about a comic-book character leaks onto the internet, and people are getting their heads chopped off over that. Suddenly, even having your name in print next to a review of the crappy movie is enough to get you fired. Web sites are fearing even mentioning it for DMCA takedown notices, and there's an army of thought-police making us afraid of the leak itself.
Excuse me. My head is spinning from the frakked-up priorities of this nation.
Yeah, and show me a 40 yr old GM car still in use as a daily driver.
Perhaps what you're missing about the VW microbus is that: A) it's EASY to repair with simple hand tools (no diagnostic computer needed), B) it's essentially a tough, all-terrain vehicle that just happens to look like a cheap piece of crap C) it will carry more crap than you ever thought possible, D) it's bigger on the inside than on the outside, E) It won't get you there fast, but it will get you there, F) while this van's a rockin' don't come knockin' G) these days, retro is in, so it looks very cool.
I own a Vanagon these days, but I grew up in a microbus.
You said: "If the people in the picture are younger than the age at which they can legally consent to having that picture taken, then that picture is illegal. If it's a picture of sex or nudity, then it's child pornography." ---
Please. You have got to be kidding me.
I can cite a a hundred examples in your own photo album that are therefore, illegal.
If you take a picture of your own kids, if they aren't old enough to sign your waiver, it's illegal???
The old pampers diapers commericals used to show babies rear-ends... are those child pornography? What about Coppertone's mascot/logo? Kiddie Porn???
If anyone photographs the birth of their baby, it's off to jail?
There's a world of great art out there, photos, paintings, sculpture -- and quite a bit of it has underage nudity.... How about we ban all that, along with burning any books that might have such published photos.
Then we can move on on to the banning of all books and all art and all thought, which is what the government really wants... "to protect the children"..
Kindly rethink your approach, because you've taken an already slippery slope and greased it up.
There were plenty of things I recall about the Amiga that were just mindblowing for it's time. I mean, while the Mac was getting a foothold in the "Desktop publishing" arena, Amiga folks were starting to mess around with "Desktop Video".
Show me another computer at the time capable of full-screen "page flipping" to produced real-time animation -- just press "record" on your VCR and dump the output to tape for editing into broadcast. Deluxe Paint could perform "rotation" and animation, making it a 2-1/2 D animation application.
And you could render 3D raytraced images in the background, format two floppies at the same time, and you had a dynamic RAM DISK -- the size of the ramdisk was the size of whatever you put into it... Need more RAM for your apps? Take stuff out of the RAM disk, and boom, more memory free to run stuff.
The Ramdisk would survive a warm-boot, so, I had my BBS set to boot from the Ram disk for speed.
And the hardware was completely controllable by software -- want your floppy to hold more than 800k? Write a library for workbench that shoved more into the sectors and you've got it.
The Amiga, as far as I'm concerned is *still* revolutionary -- because decades later, the mainstream OSes *still* do not have many of the features you'd find in Workbench 1.3
Go ahead, find me another computer where you can pull down the screen, and find a second screen behind it RUNNING AT A DIFFERENT RESOLUTION....
Slashdot Mirror
So, if someone was to take the prosecutor's face and photoshop it onto a picture of a dead body, that photoshop artist would be arrested for murder? Clearly, the way the prosecutor has re-worded the law in his favor, the victim is being charged with a thought-crime.
And if MERELY THINKING of a sexual act with a minor is punishable, then we are in a very sad state of affairs.
What is up with this country?
Funny, but those bluetooth headsets reminded me more of what Spock had sticking out of his ear for half the episodes of Star Trek. Frankly, I find it humorous we're having this discussion, since Gene Rodenberry seemed more capable of predicting the future than William Gibson.
For everthing that Gibson got right, Rodenberry got it MORE right.
So, over an extended period of time, I receieve emails that indicate that my penis is too small, and eventually, this harassment leads me to commit suicide. So now that spammer is guily of murder?
Just remember that we're living in a country that wants to ban Tylenol because some people damage their livers. Just try and imagine what kind of censorship we're going to have if this type of Lori Drew thing gets treated as a real crime.
We're living in a nation of a lot of stupid laws, where a nanny-state wants to control everything about our lives. Big-Brother couldn't have come up with anything better, George Orwell would be aghast that his warnings have gone unheeded.
So go ahead, put Lori Drew in jail for writing some emails. Next, we'll be burning you for what's written in your diary. Good luck with that. Anyone here with a blog? Not any more.
"We put the KILL in pain-killers!"
I don't suppose the researcher's name was Janik?
"Spaceport America" is such a dull name. What, would Lucas have threatened to sue if they named it something like "Mos Eisley". I mean, just think of the T-Shirt potential in the duty-free zone!
Please google Dyna-Soar.
We had space planes in the 60's, and we had space planes on the drawing boards that would have essentially been the forerunners of the Space Shuttle. But then the Russians launched Sputnik and the game changed on the Air Force. Suddenly the government wanted spam in a can, monkey in a missle. yadda yadda garbage.
See "The Right Stuff" If we had continued the X-plane research, we would have gotten to pure space planes alright. But the pentagon switched gears suddenly, and everything became about rockets. We spent a lot of time and money to play catch up with the Soviet Union, when we should have simply developed better planes.
The X-15 was already close enough that it needed control thrusters after reaching apogee, and the pilots were weightless. Many from the X-15 program were awarded astronaut wings (But Alan Shepard is considered the first American in space, and Yuri Gagarin the first man, although I believe the X-15 pilots beat them both to that record).
Admittedly, Gagarin orbited, while the X-15 pilots did not. Still, with a little more time and money, it probably could have been done. We would have needed a little more research into the ablative coating, and if the X-15 had had a titanium skin, it probably would have been very doable.
So, if you help me move my furniture, and I treat you to dinner afterwards as a sign of appreciation for the help, the IRS is "right" to tax you for the meal as "income"?
By that definition, everything is taxable, right down to Pokemon cards. I hope your kids have filled out their 1099's properly, as that Pickachu card is pretty valuable!
Dude, Reagan spent a shitload of money on research. Not to defend the Republican agenda, but, when it came to "defense research", Reagan spent a lot of money. That's how concepts like SSTO got started, and although many of those projects are just dusty remains now, a lot of gains were made in materials research and propulsion technologies.
Don't underestimate what Reagan did for basic research. He spent so much money in the defense arena that the Soviet Union essentially bankrupted itself trying to keep up with him. The Berlin wall fell mostly due to the fact that the Soviets were still stuck with a lot of WWII technology, and they ran out of money in the technological war of the 80's.
10. Doom
9. AOL
8. BASIC
7. SMTP (E-mail)
6. chat/instant messaging
5. TCP/IP (or internet access)
4. Apache / HTTP
3. Visicalc
2. Wordstar
1. Spacewar
The same thing we have always done.... nothing.
Consider seat belts in cars. Manufacturers didn't even want to include them in cars because they carried the illusuion that if the car needed them, the car was somehow unsafe. Then they were available as an option, then they were built into every car, then we were pestered with PSAs to wear them, and then they became LAW. And now we are faced with stiff penalties if we do not wear them. In the space of less than 50 years, we went from zero seat belts to getting a ticket if you're not wearing it while in the car.
I'm sure this will be spun the same way, that the internet will be censured for our "protection", that, somehow, not being able to access what we want to access is for the safety and protection of all Americans, and to be against that is unpatriotic.
If you download... You're downloading terrorism.
Ummm. Haven't we already done this, and it all failed miserably? There has yet to be a successful "internet appliance". Think of the Audrey, the nIC (later called ThinkNIC), and a host of other cheap, but ultimately useless web-boxes that could not update the browser. So they all died, mostly because they companies couldn't sustain enough "internet rent" by providing a proprietary dial-in to the internet.
Even client-server mostly died, but now they are pushing client-cloud, which is even worse, because once you put everything on a cloud, one little storm and nothing is accessible.
Even the most basic appliances included some built-in games and a text editor for when you weren't online. Now they want to stuff an OS into some flash, leave you 4 megs of free space for cookies, and then impose a non-upgradeable browser (and probably tons of DRM), to force us to use the web like it's TV, and if you do want to use a computer for what it is actually for, you have to rent time on cloud apps.
Except anyone who buys these pieces of garbage will find after a year they have to throw it away because the company they are renting cloud-time on went out of business because not enough people rented cloud-time.
And when they shut down, ooops, there goes all your data. Remember that a cloud can also be a puff of smoke, and blow away just as easily.
Amen brother;
I was recently watching the news, and they were showing how children are being killed in record numbers by gun violence in Chicago.
And the reporter asked "If these deaths were caused by the swine flu, the media, government, and the public would be be all over it. But because it's just urban violence, nobody cares about these deaths."
It seems to me that this country has it's priorities backwards. NOT ok to have 2 people die of Swine Flu, but OK for 30 kids to die from guns. OK for tens of thousands to die from lack of affordable healthcare EVERY YEAR, but billions and trillions spent because 3000 people die from ONE isolated incident of terrorism.
Yeppers, makes me proud to be an American. I'm gonna throw up now.
So, when these guys scan someone who's under 18, aren't they liable for charges of child porn?
It seems to me that we are a nation of wildly conflicting laws, and everything can be "made" illegal in some way, regardless of the actual intent. This is why our courtrooms are so crowded, and 'justice' moves at a snail's pace.
Which is too bad, since Avatar, The Last Airbender is very likely superior in terms of plot, pacing, characterization, music and action to whatever comes out of the flawed, egotesticle James Cameron. No that was not a typo.
His older movies were good, but I think he took one deep dive too many while hunting Titanic memorabilia.
Palin's daughter isn't that fat!!!!
Costs a buck an ear!
HAHAHAHAHAH
I kill me.
I guess it was your destiny to be the King of Pain.
Anything Saddam could have done to the captured George Bush would have been far better than what George Bush did to this country.
Gee, I don't remember Americans having a problem with Saddam when WE WERE PAYING HIM with our Tax Dollars to fight Iran for us.
How about embracing the teachings of Jesus? He who is without sin, cast the first stone. Didn't the United States kill 1000's of it's own people indescriminately? Oh, you must have forgotten. They were called "Native Americans", or at the time... "Indians". And we're a country that for generations endorsed SLAVERY.
Imagine, if you will.. how this country would be seen if in some kind of Star Trek "Mirror Mirror" universe, we were still doing that to this day, or that American from the 1800's was suddenly catapulted into the year 2000...
Is it really our place to stick our more developed moralities onto the rest of the undeveloped world? Is Saddam any better than Thomas Jefferson, a man who owned slaves and often raped the women (how many Black Americans are part of the Jefferson lineage?)?
So, while you sit on your high horse dispatching justice as you see fit, tell me how you think this country is so much better than Iraq that we had the right to go in there and destroy everything so that we could make life even more miserable for the average Iraqi, but now they are "free"...
At what point in your delusion do you realise that all developing nations go through a period, often lasting 100 years or more, where things are shitty? And just because we got past that period, somehow we assume that everyone else has gotten past that period as well?
I don't like any lie, and usually in a movie there are several lies every few minutes.
--
Actually, *every* movie is a lie, 24 times per second. Even movies which are documentaries are edited to favor the bias of the director or producer. In movies, people are more attractive than in real life, and are often capable of feats physically impossible in the real world.
My favorite is when you show the progress over time with a montage, and somehow, the character is capable of amazing things that should have taken months or years of training, and now has done it within the passage of a week or so. (see Team America: World Police)
How is it that a movie is more secret than the identity of an undercover CIA agent?
When it was leaked that Valerie Plame was an undercover operative for the CIA, a person dealing with NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUES, there was no rush to fire the journalists involved, remove names from websites, and purge Google's cache. There was no immediate FBI investigation, and when there finally was, there was a single fall-guy who was given a slap on the wrist, while the real criminals were given medals and honored as heroes.
But, a crappy movie about a comic-book character leaks onto the internet, and people are getting their heads chopped off over that. Suddenly, even having your name in print next to a review of the crappy movie is enough to get you fired. Web sites are fearing even mentioning it for DMCA takedown notices, and there's an army of thought-police making us afraid of the leak itself.
Excuse me. My head is spinning from the frakked-up priorities of this nation.
What's the definition of FASCISM???
Yeah, and show me a 40 yr old GM car still in use as a daily driver.
Perhaps what you're missing about the VW microbus is that: A) it's EASY to repair with simple hand tools (no diagnostic computer needed), B) it's essentially a tough, all-terrain vehicle that just happens to look like a cheap piece of crap C) it will carry more crap than you ever thought possible, D) it's bigger on the inside than on the outside, E) It won't get you there fast, but it will get you there, F) while this van's a rockin' don't come knockin' G) these days, retro is in, so it looks very cool.
I own a Vanagon these days, but I grew up in a microbus.
You said:
"If the people in the picture are younger than the age at which they can legally consent to having that picture taken, then that picture is illegal. If it's a picture of sex or nudity, then it's child pornography."
---
Please.
You have got to be kidding me.
I can cite a a hundred examples in your own photo album that are therefore, illegal.
If you take a picture of your own kids, if they aren't old enough to sign your waiver, it's illegal???
The old pampers diapers commericals used to show babies rear-ends... are those child pornography? What about Coppertone's mascot/logo? Kiddie Porn???
If anyone photographs the birth of their baby, it's off to jail?
There's a world of great art out there, photos, paintings, sculpture -- and quite a bit of it has underage nudity.... How about we ban all that, along with burning any books that might have such published photos.
Then we can move on on to the banning of all books and all art and all thought, which is what the government really wants... "to protect the children"..
Kindly rethink your approach, because you've taken an already slippery slope and greased it up.
There were plenty of things I recall about the Amiga that were just mindblowing for it's time. I mean, while the Mac was getting a foothold in the "Desktop publishing" arena, Amiga folks were starting to mess around with "Desktop Video".
Show me another computer at the time capable of full-screen "page flipping" to produced real-time animation -- just press "record" on your VCR and dump the output to tape for editing into broadcast. Deluxe Paint could perform "rotation" and animation, making it a 2-1/2 D animation application.
And you could render 3D raytraced images in the background, format two floppies at the same time, and you had a dynamic RAM DISK -- the size of the ramdisk was the size of whatever you put into it... Need more RAM for your apps? Take stuff out of the RAM disk, and boom, more memory free to run stuff.
The Ramdisk would survive a warm-boot, so, I had my BBS set to boot from the Ram disk for speed.
And the hardware was completely controllable by software -- want your floppy to hold more than 800k? Write a library for workbench that shoved more into the sectors and you've got it.
The Amiga, as far as I'm concerned is *still* revolutionary -- because decades later, the mainstream OSes *still* do not have many of the features you'd find in Workbench 1.3
Go ahead, find me another computer where you can pull down the screen, and find a second screen behind it RUNNING AT A DIFFERENT RESOLUTION....