Nice try but poor analogy. Most copyrighted digital content can be transcoded which involves lossy / corruptive conversion from the original. Using a shitty handycam to copy a release in the cinema is also considered a copyright violation though it deviates significantly in quality and detail to the original. I don't see how listening to music and writing down the notes is essentially different. It is just a lossy encoding of the artists original ideas.
The heading in the article is completely wrong. From the contents
"In particular, they didn't buy Perez's arguments that a "mere association between an IP address and a physical address is insufficient to establish probable cause"
The primary evidence in this case was the instant message from his IP address containing a child porn pic not the open WAP. The police then had probable cause to execute a warrant against the premises associated with the ip address. Specifically the judge ruled that the Open WAP was no defence against the previous assertion of probable cause.
I guess the headings were added by an editor or sub-editor after the main article was written, perhapps with the view to getting a slashdotting hmmm.
> Either way, the developer deserves to be beaten to pulp.
Very rarely does anybody deserve to get 'beaten to a pulp' over technical choice issues. I am surprised and saddened that the parent was modded insightful for the above comment. Only days after 35 people are gunned down by a nutcase with petty grievances we see pre-pubescent slashdotters suggesting people should be killed because they choose to support a particular web browser. I understand that this whole M$ thingie gets people a little hot under the collar. However the whole debate gets rather dogmatic and quasi-religious. Some of the comments flying round fit better to religious extremist websites than a supposed tech geek sites. Tone it down!!
A decentralized power generating system is good for national security. Imagine that every house had solar generating capacity. There could be a guaranteed minimum power capacity per house. Sure, the system would be degraded in the event of the base supply being knocked out but supply would be enough for critical services that people rely on, heating, cooking, water pumping etc. It may take a long while for the base supply to be re-integrated in the event of a coordinated strike/failure against public utilities.
In Australia a few years ago there was a major disaster in the gas supply system that took a whole season to fix. The entire southern region was without gas for heating and cooking for weeks. Luckily the electricity system was still operational but a simultaneous failure would have resulted in a calamity.
What this would do is that as companies released music, more and more people would be sharing it, and with time, the value for that music would go down to zero.
uhmmmmm. I think that you mean "in no time" the value of the music would go down to zero. A company is not going to invest any time at all in making music if they can know that as soon as they release their tracks it is available at no penalty or risk on a file sharing network to any granny who wants it. There is no distribution delay on the internet to create a value curve that falls over time as you suggest. If it were legal there would be a music site along the lines of UTUBE where new music is instantly available. Nobody would buy music ever! Maybe you think that would be a good thing but I doubt you would see your plethora of new music. And my guess anyway about the people bitching about the lack of new music from the studios is they have a total lack of imagination. There is more music from around the world in thousands of different genres available for your pleasure than at any time in the past.
This is evidence for G.D and intelligent design. The sudden emergence of the new fin features, previously unobserved, can only be attributed to an intelligent interlocuter. As a threatened species it is obvious that the dolphins have handed an extra feature as a device to counter the current human threats against them. Alas the capture of the enhanced doplhin and it likely demise as pricey Terriaki Tokyo Flipper Burger also lends weight to the argument that the human species has finally outwitted G.d and that we are well on the way to deep sixing the michief making little bugger for good.
Why does everybody want a "revolution" when evolution does the job? You only have to look at the language popularity charts to see the trend away from low level programming languages to higher level languages with more expressive constructs. Yes they were here years ago but it takes time for things to catch on properly. I program aeronautical systems for a living and never step outside strict ANSI C for flight code. However for the supporting tools around us we use Python. It isn't FAST but it is fast enough to get the job done and we can develop new tools faster and easier than coding them in C/C++. Why becase Python is a more expressive language than C and for a large domain of problems is now more suitable. The current state of programming language usage is more like a sliding window over the domain of currently available and yet to be available languages. There are rarely revolutions but it is dumb to say that what we are doing today is no differnt to 40 years ago. System complexity rises all the times and new ways of expressing the problems and solutions to those problems will evolve over time. Reusing a 20 years old library will not cut it.
The article is a bit of nonsense really. It ignores the fact that building software is a vertical problem anyway where most often you pick the highest level tool to get the job done. You now have
Transistors Digital Logic Machine Code Compilers C Code Family Dynamic Languages / Visual Languages What next...
In 20 years time nobody will be pissing around with C code or Java or or Lisp ( ok maybe lisp) except for historical/maintaince reasons. There will be new higher level constructs leveraging streamlined minimal lower level constructs. Many of the problems defined today by large code bases will be rewritten using less effort and more sophisticated expressive tools. In 20 years time there will be 2^20 cores on a chip, perhapps. I doubt code bits from today will solve those sorts of problems.
Have a central server that logs the IP addresses of the customer entering the CAPTCHA. A website owner can query this database with an IP address and find out how often this IP address has registered a CAPTCHA in the last hour. If the CAPTCHA entry rate is higher than a threshold you either throw them out or make them wait longer for entry. So the more often you enter a CAPTCHA the more time it takes you to enter your next CAPTCHA. Obviously for privacy concerns the database holds nothing more than a mapping between CAPTCHA rates and IP addresses.
Can the CAPTCHA drones have their IP addresses anonymized of randomly generated to bypass such a monitoring system?
"Last year, Sweden banned the downloading of copyright material after being singled out for criticism by Hollywood. The issue of file sharing and copyright has been emotive in Sweden, a hi-tech country with a tradition of openness."
See Reuters Link
The problem is that there were NO states in the middle east earlier this century. The quote above has some truth. When the European powers pulled out of the middle east they drew arbitrary borders and gave control of those borders to tribes or sects or warlords in a somewhat arbitrary way. The states as drawn in the Middle East do not really reflect the ethnicity or culture of the people who live within. Inevitably the strongest group within each country rises to power and persecutes the minority.
Israel is just one of all the states in the Middle East that had arbitrary borders drawn by the European powers at the end of the war. The only reason the Israeli/Palestinian conflict gets so much press is that Arab governments have long used Israel as "the enemy" as a political tool. There is much rhetoric and little real care for the suffering of the Palestinian people. There is more interest in humiliating Israel than alleviating the suffering of the people. If the conflict in Israel evaporated tomorrow and an equitable solution was found most Arab goverment would be very unhappy. Then the brutalities that these governments perpetuate on thier own people equalling and exceeding those that the Israeli army hands out will become the focus of the peoples anger.
Take for example Iran, long a champion of the Palestinian people. It holds big rallies, funds Hamas and takes every opportunity to denounce the evil Zionist empire. However, the Iranian regime fervently persecutes it's own religious minorites. The Bahai's for instance are one of the most peacefull and sensible religious groups I have come across and yet in Iran they are refugees in thier own country, unable to get jobs or practise thier religion for fear of the wrath of the government, yet the Bahai's have never once advocated rebellion or war or raised a weapon against the Iranian government. In fact part of their doctrine states that they must always act in accordance with the laws of the land in which they reside. I can't agree or disagree with this but it leads to a bunch of peacefull people who are nothing to be scared of yet the Iranians stamp on them very hard.
This however doesn't justify Israeli army actions against civilians in the West Bank or Gaza, the collective punishments, and the roadblock strip/search humilations that occur. Still the conflict should be seen in light of the history of the area and that there is no simple one line bit of rhetoric that will justify or condemn one group or another. In the end they all live on one bit of land and will have to figure out how to live together.
An hypothesis is an idea before it becomes a theorey. A theorey is much stronger than a hypothesis. Very few things are facts, possibly only in mathematics, ie ( 1 + 1 == 2 ). So yes, Evolution is a *theorey*! That is it can be used to model a process and make predictions with some accuracy about what you will find when you either do an experiment or research something new. These predictions can turn out to be close to the truth, far from the truth or somewhere in between, rarely true or false.
Intelligent Design is not a theorey. It is an hypothesis and untestable at that. You can't do experiments with it. You can't make testable statements about it. It is an argument from ignorance and goes. "I have no idea how this works or happened therefore God/ID did it". This is exactly what the hypothesis of irreducible complexity states. "Some systems are so complex and irreducibly complex that they could not be formed by natural processes". Translate that as "I don't know how it happened so God did it." History is full of points in science where it was thought too hard or too complex to understand systems any deeper than at that current point but then breakthoughs were made and we stumbled on. Behe and Dembski would have us believe in the end of science and that we know as much as we can ever know and everything else must be assigned to God.
Intelligent design is not a theorey and thus not a scientific theorey and thus should not be taught in high school science classes but in religion classes where untestable hypothesis are discussed all day.
It has an interesting [flash based] visulisation engine that shows associations between artists and their peers. The interface is reasonably nice and quick to use. It seems if you create an account then you can create your own maps and recommendations.
I have a google account and have played around with it a little. Part of the integrity bit seems to be using spam filtering techniques to prevent you creating SPAM entries in the database. See below thier editorial guidelines.
----
The most effective item communicates a clear message to a targeted audience. Once you determine whom you want to reach and develop appropriate text, you need to create an item that will inform users. The Google Base Editorial Guidelines will help you create effective items to meet your goals
Underlying all the Editorial Guidelines are two simple principles:
* Be honest, accurate, and factual.
* Clearly and accurately describe your message.
Our ultimate goal is your success, and we believe that providing a great user experience is the best way to ensure it. To submit items to Google, you must adhere to these guidelines.
Use Standard Punctuation
* No repeated and unnecessary punctuation or symbols.
* Your title may not contain an exclamation point.
Use Standard Capitalization
* No excessive capitalization such as "FREE" or "GOOGLE BASE."
* Capitalization of the first letter of each word within a URL is permitted.
No Repetition
* Avoid gimmicky repetition.
Use Correct Spelling
* Check that you use correct spelling.
Use Proper Grammar
* Your item text must be in relevant, logical sentences and must contain grammatically correct spacing.
* The use of symbols, numbers, or letters must adhere to the true meaning of the symbol.
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Adhere to the Program Policies
* As a business, Google must make decisions about where we draw the line in regards to the items we accept. We, therefore, may not accept items containing some content or relating to certain products or services. We reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when it comes to the items we accept on our site, as noted in our terms and conditions. Please note that the decisions we make concerning items in no way affect the search results we deliver. To learn more, please review our Program Policies.
> The UK Gov't hasn't given us a whole heck of a lot of trouble since...
Really they fuc8ed you over big time. If they hadn't gone with you on the Iraq war fiasco then Iraq II would not have happened and you Yanks would still have a reasonably good international reputation. The UK gov plan is to make the US look so bad that the UK can lead Europe as this centuries only super power.
The point to point speeding measurements are much fairer than the spot speeding checks. For example if you average 150MPH down the freeway over 1km you can't really complain when you get busted. If however you get caught at 150MPH when passing a truck at the unfortunate location of a Gatso then that may just be bad luck.
>> Why wouldn't these people be in favour of an.xxx domain? Hell, wouldn't it make it easier to block sites at work or home?
Quite the opposite. My guess is that all these fundies are closet porn eaters but are worried that if all the porn goes.XXX they can't pretend they were viewing sites by accident when they get busted surfing porn on their PSP during sermon time.
"Pornography generates billions of dollars in sales in the United States alone, and economists have suggested that it has now gotten to the point where the outlawing of the industry, which has been tried on many occasions, could have a major negative economic impact upon the country, and a prohibition-style legislated ban might spark a rise in organized crime."
I suspect that it is just that over exposure to one sort of fetishism leads to desensitization which leads you to codemn the Japanese porn industry as depraved whilst implicity giving the OK to the US one. It would be interesting to hear from a Japanese person on what thier view of American porn is and whether they see it as depraved as compared to Japanese stuff. I suspect the result would be interesting.
Though I do agree that it is hard to use one metric to judge an entire society. That's just predjudice.
Many posts here will state that the right to bear arms is in the constitution and therefore it is not the responsibility of guns manufacturers to look out for the use of their products. Well then the "right to censor" is part of China's legal backbone, as inviolable as "the right to bear arms".
However as I disagree with "the right to bear arms" and censorship I guess what I am saying is that documents like the constitution are just as silly and self serving of special interest groups as is the flawed Chinese system. A true democracy wouldn't need a constitution and everything would be up for bids at each election. You could have an honest debate about gun control without resorting to obscure language in a very dated document. If a party campaigns on the right to bear arms and wins then so be it, everyone can carry a gun but it is also fair that the opposite result will also hold true.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice try but poor analogy. Most copyrighted digital content can be transcoded which involves lossy / corruptive conversion from the original. Using a shitty handycam to copy a release in the cinema is also considered a copyright violation though it deviates significantly in quality and detail to the original. I don't see how listening to music and writing down the notes is essentially different. It is just a lossy encoding of the artists original ideas.
The heading in the article is completely wrong. From the contents
"In particular, they didn't buy Perez's arguments that a "mere association between an IP address and a physical address is insufficient to establish probable cause"
The primary evidence in this case was the instant message from his IP address containing a child porn pic not the open WAP. The police then had probable cause to execute a warrant against the premises associated with the ip address. Specifically the judge ruled that the Open WAP was no defence against the previous assertion of probable cause.
I guess the headings were added by an editor or sub-editor after the main article was written, perhapps with the view to getting a slashdotting hmmm.
I dunno. I just figured you were an American and wouldn't care too much about how many Iraqi's were being killed.
> Either way, the developer deserves to be beaten to pulp.
Very rarely does anybody deserve to get 'beaten to a pulp' over technical choice issues. I am surprised and saddened that the parent was modded insightful for the above comment. Only days after 35 people are gunned down by a nutcase with petty grievances we see pre-pubescent slashdotters suggesting people should be killed because they choose to support a particular web browser. I understand that this whole M$ thingie gets people a little hot under the collar. However the whole debate gets rather dogmatic and quasi-religious. Some of the comments flying round fit better to religious extremist websites than a supposed tech geek sites. Tone it down!!
My 2c
KA
A decentralized power generating system is good for national security. Imagine that every house had solar generating capacity. There could be a guaranteed minimum power capacity per house. Sure, the system would be degraded in the event of the base supply being knocked out but supply would be enough for critical services that people rely on, heating, cooking, water pumping etc. It may take a long while for the base supply to be re-integrated in the event of a coordinated strike/failure against public utilities.
In Australia a few years ago there was a major disaster in the gas supply system that took a whole season to fix. The entire southern region was without gas for heating and cooking for weeks. Luckily the electricity system was still operational but a simultaneous failure would have resulted in a calamity.
What this would do is that as companies released music, more and more people would be sharing it, and with time, the value for that music would go down to zero.
uhmmmmm. I think that you mean "in no time" the value of the music would go down to zero. A company is not going to invest any time at all in making music if they can know that as soon as they release their tracks it is available at no penalty or risk on a file sharing network to any granny who wants it. There is no distribution delay on the internet to create a value curve that falls over time as you suggest. If it were legal there would be a music site along the lines of UTUBE where new music is instantly available. Nobody would buy music ever! Maybe you think that would be a good thing but I doubt you would see your plethora of new music. And my guess anyway about the people bitching about the lack of new music from the studios is they have a total lack of imagination. There is more music from around the world in thousands of different genres available for your pleasure than at any time in the past.
This is evidence for G.D and intelligent design. The sudden emergence of the new fin features, previously unobserved, can only be attributed to an intelligent interlocuter. As a threatened species it is obvious that the dolphins have handed an extra feature as a device to counter the current human threats against them. Alas the capture of the enhanced doplhin and it likely demise as pricey Terriaki Tokyo Flipper Burger also lends weight to the argument that the human species has finally outwitted G.d and that we are well on the way to deep sixing the michief making little bugger for good.
Why does everybody want a "revolution" when evolution does the job? You only have to look at the language popularity charts to see the trend away from low level programming languages to higher level languages with more expressive constructs. Yes they were here years ago but it takes time for things to catch on properly. I program aeronautical systems for a living and never step outside strict ANSI C for flight code. However for the supporting tools around us we use Python. It isn't FAST but it is fast enough to get the job done and we can develop new tools faster and easier than coding them in C/C++. Why becase Python is a more expressive language than C and for a large domain of problems is now more suitable. The current state of programming language usage is more like a sliding window over the domain of currently available and yet to be available languages. There are rarely revolutions but it is dumb to say that what we are doing today is no differnt to 40 years ago. System complexity rises all the times and new ways of expressing the problems and solutions to those problems will evolve over time. Reusing a 20 years old library will not cut it.
The article is a bit of nonsense really. It ignores the fact that building software is a vertical problem anyway where most often you pick the highest level tool to get the job done. You now have
Transistors
Digital Logic
Machine Code
Compilers
C Code Family
Dynamic Languages / Visual Languages
What next...
In 20 years time nobody will be pissing around with C code or Java or or Lisp ( ok maybe lisp) except for historical/maintaince reasons. There will be new higher level constructs leveraging streamlined minimal lower level constructs. Many of the problems defined today by large code bases will be rewritten using less effort and more sophisticated expressive tools. In 20 years time there will be 2^20 cores on a chip, perhapps. I doubt code bits from today will solve those sorts of problems.
--
My slashdot captcha was "pervert" huh!
Thanks for the insight on how these things work.
Have a central server that logs the IP addresses of the customer entering the CAPTCHA. A website owner can query this database with an IP address and find out how often this IP address has registered a CAPTCHA in the last hour. If the CAPTCHA entry rate is higher than a threshold you either throw them out or make them wait longer for entry. So the more often you enter a CAPTCHA the more time it takes you to enter your next CAPTCHA. Obviously for privacy concerns the database holds nothing more than a mapping between CAPTCHA rates and IP addresses.
Can the CAPTCHA drones have their IP addresses anonymized of randomly generated to bypass such a monitoring system?
K
In Australia, there is a Hoop Snake that takes its tail in its mouth and then goes bowling merrily along. See Hoop Snakes
"Last year, Sweden banned the downloading of copyright material after being singled out for criticism by Hollywood. The issue of file sharing and copyright has been emotive in Sweden, a hi-tech country with a tradition of openness." See Reuters Link
The problem is that there were NO states in the middle east earlier this century. The quote above has some truth. When the European powers pulled out of the middle east they drew arbitrary borders and gave control of those borders to tribes or sects or warlords in a somewhat arbitrary way. The states as drawn in the Middle East do not really reflect the ethnicity or culture of the people who live within. Inevitably the strongest group within each country rises to power and persecutes the minority.
Israel is just one of all the states in the Middle East that had arbitrary borders drawn by the European powers at the end of the war. The only reason the Israeli/Palestinian conflict gets so much press is that Arab governments have long used Israel as "the enemy" as a political tool. There is much rhetoric and little real care for the suffering of the Palestinian people. There is more interest in humiliating Israel than alleviating the suffering of the people. If the conflict in Israel evaporated tomorrow and an equitable solution was found most Arab goverment would be very unhappy. Then the brutalities that these governments perpetuate on thier own people equalling and exceeding those that the Israeli army hands out will become the focus of the peoples anger.
Take for example Iran, long a champion of the Palestinian people. It holds big rallies, funds Hamas and takes every opportunity to denounce the evil Zionist empire. However, the Iranian regime fervently persecutes it's own religious minorites. The Bahai's for instance are one of the most peacefull and sensible religious groups I have come across and yet in Iran they are refugees in thier own country, unable to get jobs or practise thier religion for fear of the wrath of the government, yet the Bahai's have never once advocated rebellion or war or raised a weapon against the Iranian government. In fact part of their doctrine states that they must always act in accordance with the laws of the land in which they reside. I can't agree or disagree with this but it leads to a bunch of peacefull people who are nothing to be scared of yet the Iranians stamp on them very hard.
This however doesn't justify Israeli army actions against civilians in the West Bank or Gaza, the collective punishments, and the roadblock strip/search humilations that occur. Still the conflict should be seen in light of the history of the area and that there is no simple one line bit of rhetoric that will justify or condemn one group or another. In the end they all live on one bit of land and will have to figure out how to live together.
K
4 years ago actually
m l?tid=99
- Building a digicam from a scanner -
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/05/05/1823207.sht
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4545822.stm
Thought I'd pre-empt the inevitable slashdot article on the subject.
Tee Hee Hee
Say it with me **HYPOTHESIS**
An hypothesis is an idea before it becomes a theorey. A theorey is much stronger than a hypothesis. Very few things are facts, possibly only in mathematics, ie ( 1 + 1 == 2 ). So yes, Evolution is a *theorey*! That is it can be used to model a process and make predictions with some accuracy about what you will find when you either do an experiment or research something new. These predictions can turn out to be close to the truth, far from the truth or somewhere in between, rarely true or false.
Intelligent Design is not a theorey. It is an hypothesis and untestable at that. You can't do experiments with it. You can't make testable statements about it. It is an argument from ignorance and goes. "I have no idea how this works or happened therefore God/ID did it". This is exactly what the hypothesis of irreducible complexity states. "Some systems are so complex and irreducibly complex that they could not be formed by natural processes". Translate that as "I don't know how it happened so God did it." History is full of points in science where it was thought too hard or too complex to understand systems any deeper than at that current point but then breakthoughs were made and we stumbled on. Behe and Dembski would have us believe in the end of science and that we know as much as we can ever know and everything else must be assigned to God.
Intelligent design is not a theorey and thus not a scientific theorey and thus should not be taught in high school science classes but in religion classes where untestable hypothesis are discussed all day.
try out http://www.musicplasma.com./
It has an interesting [flash based] visulisation engine that shows associations between artists and their peers. The interface is reasonably nice and quick to use. It seems if you create an account then you can create your own maps and recommendations.
I have a google account and have played around with it a little. Part of the integrity bit seems to be using spam filtering techniques to prevent you creating SPAM entries in the database. See below thier editorial guidelines.
----
The most effective item communicates a clear message to a targeted audience. Once you determine whom you want to reach and develop appropriate text, you need to create an item that will inform users. The Google Base Editorial Guidelines will help you create effective items to meet your goals
Underlying all the Editorial Guidelines are two simple principles:
* Be honest, accurate, and factual.
* Clearly and accurately describe your message.
Our ultimate goal is your success, and we believe that providing a great user experience is the best way to ensure it. To submit items to Google, you must adhere to these guidelines.
Use Standard Punctuation
* No repeated and unnecessary punctuation or symbols.
* Your title may not contain an exclamation point.
Use Standard Capitalization
* No excessive capitalization such as "FREE" or "GOOGLE BASE."
* Capitalization of the first letter of each word within a URL is permitted.
No Repetition
* Avoid gimmicky repetition.
Use Correct Spelling
* Check that you use correct spelling.
Use Proper Grammar
* Your item text must be in relevant, logical sentences and must contain grammatically correct spacing.
* The use of symbols, numbers, or letters must adhere to the true meaning of the symbol.
No Unacceptable Phrases
* Your item cannot contain universal call-to-action phrases such as "click here," "link here," "visit this link," or other similar phrases that could apply to any item, regardless of content.
* Use a call-to-action unique to the information you provide.
No Inappropriate Language
* Your item cannot contain offensive or inappropriate language.
Adhere to the Program Policies
* As a business, Google must make decisions about where we draw the line in regards to the items we accept. We, therefore, may not accept items containing some content or relating to certain products or services. We reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when it comes to the items we accept on our site, as noted in our terms and conditions. Please note that the decisions we make concerning items in no way affect the search results we deliver. To learn more, please review our Program Policies.
> The UK Gov't hasn't given us a whole heck of a lot of trouble since...
Really they fuc8ed you over big time. If they hadn't gone with you on the Iraq war fiasco then Iraq II would not have happened and you Yanks would still have a reasonably good international reputation. The UK gov plan is to make the US look so bad that the UK can lead Europe as this centuries only super power.
God shave the Queen!
The point to point speeding measurements are much fairer than the spot speeding checks. For example if you average 150MPH down the freeway over 1km you can't really complain when you get busted. If however you get caught at 150MPH when passing a truck at the unfortunate location of a Gatso then that may just be bad luck.
> And then there *is* the articles that are really ...
...
Methinks you mean
And then there *are* the articles that are really
>> Why wouldn't these people be in favour of an .xxx domain? Hell, wouldn't it make it easier to block sites at work or home?
.XXX they can't pretend they were viewing sites by accident when they get busted surfing porn on their PSP during sermon time.
Quite the opposite. My guess is that all these fundies are closet porn eaters but are worried that if all the porn goes
PP in regards to Japan.
... causing the ultimate out-bursting of the repressed emotion in deviant behaviour"
n ]
>> "
I'm not sure Japan is any worse but just that the fetish's are slightly different. The porn industry in the USA is huge.
from [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_by_regio
"Pornography generates billions of dollars in sales in the United States alone, and economists have suggested that it has now gotten to the point where the outlawing of the industry, which has been tried on many occasions, could have a major negative economic impact upon the country, and a prohibition-style legislated ban might spark a rise in organized crime."
I suspect that it is just that over exposure to one sort of fetishism leads to desensitization which leads you to codemn the Japanese porn industry as depraved whilst implicity giving the OK to the US one. It would be interesting to hear from a Japanese person on what thier view of American porn is and whether they see it as depraved as compared to Japanese stuff. I suspect the result would be interesting.
Though I do agree that it is hard to use one metric to judge an entire society. That's just predjudice.
Many posts here will state that the right to bear arms is in the constitution and therefore it is not the responsibility of guns manufacturers to look out for the use of their products. Well then the "right to censor" is part of China's legal backbone, as inviolable as "the right to bear arms".
However as I disagree with "the right to bear arms" and censorship I guess what I am saying is that documents like the constitution are just as silly and self serving of special interest groups as is the flawed Chinese system. A true democracy wouldn't need a constitution and everything would be up for bids at each election. You could have an honest debate about gun control without resorting to obscure language in a very dated document. If a party campaigns on the right to bear arms and wins then so be it, everyone can carry a gun but it is also fair that the opposite result will also hold true.