Developers need to stand up for their rights, but unions (especially those that dominate an entire industry) can themselves become like the bureaucrats they're supposed to fight against. I'm not usually one to argue for new laws, but I think I'd rather have employees' rights protected through specific legislation than be forced to join or otherwise be represented by a union before being allowed to work for a particular employer.
While I'm sure you can often tell when a video is fake, I'm not convinced it's so easy to tell for a fact that a video is not. Without the ability to somehow confirm that a video is real, telling the fakes apart from the real videos is an exercise in futility. That certain videos look real compared to others that look fake to you is no way to confirm the accuracy of your identifications. Some extreme videos may indeed show enough as to leave very little doubt as to their reality, but are all the videos that seem real to you quite so extreme as that?
I do agree, however, that a video that's convincing enough to look real will be disturbing to those who are convinced that it's real. I guess I'm just skeptical about the number of such videos in existence... or it could be I just have my head buried in the sand.
I don't envy these people their jobs, but I have to wonder how much of the content in question is truly illegal versus how much of the content is simply disturbing (like the stuff you might see in a graphic movie). Perhaps this is naive of me, but it seems to me this article is playing up the negatives in true yellow-journalistic form.
Well now in social situations when somebody asks you how many chicken nuggets you want...
Why would I use my fingers to determine the number of chicken nuggets I want? Now if somebody asks me how many chicken nuggets me and my friends have in total, I'll concede your point.
The shutdown apparently had something to do with content posted to the server by unidentified third parties. A number of people in that thread have made a big deal about how the guy is responsible for all content posted to his server, which strikes me as bullshit. Is Slashdot liable for whatever people write here? Is Google liable for what people post on blogger.com? For what people post on YouTube?
I can understand authorities and hosting providers doing everything possible to shut down and determine the origin of infringing or illegal material, but the notion that the guy should be liable for content he didn't post and wasn't aware of is simply ridiculous. It is the hosting providers prerogative to shut down the website for whatever reason, but it makes as much sense as shutting down all of Slashdot due to somebody using it to leak classified government documents.
Because that is how science works. Any decent scientist would rather say "here is my data, please help me find something wrong with it."
That only works when the person asking for the data is honest. When that person's only goal is to discredit you by any means possible, it is human nature not to want to cooperate with them.
At my university, in scenic New Jersey, we had an Honor Code that we had to sign after every exam; saying that I didn't cheat. I felt proud signing that, and believe that most of the other students felt the same.
I think I would be offended at having to affirm that I am not a cheater. Cheaters, on the other hand, wouldn't care.
"Yesterday my boyfriend said to me: 'You are, without a doubt, the most beautiful and intelligent woman in the world.' I love my husband so much. He is so perceptive!"
Let's all pretend the above quote says "husband" instead of "boyfriend", so the joke makes sense.
Usually coming from people who score low but are absolutely convinced they are smarter than the average bear.
"Yesterday my boyfriend said to me: 'You are, without a doubt, the most beautiful and intelligent woman in the world.' I love my husband so much. He is so perceptive!"
"Hear them hum! Watch them run! Oh, our job is never done, For our roadways go rolling along! While you ride, While you glide, We are watching down inside, So your roadways keep rolling along!"
From sea to forest in a short geological time span and back then humans weren't around.
Are you actually suggesting there are people out there who believe only human activity could possibly lead to significant climate change? Why must climate change be explained either exclusively in terms of human influence or exclusively in terms of non-human factors? It doesn't make sense.
While I'm very much in favor of disconnecting zombies and computers running network-degrading malware, I am not at all in favor of disconnecting people's devices for not running approved versions of software (or, worse yet, for not running approved software packages). To do so is to give ISPs far too much control over my computer for not enough benefit.
I think the key is to invest in:
1) Attack detection tools, to disconnect users who are knowingly or unknowingly participating in online attacks. 2) Safer coding practices, to avoid the kinds of vulnerabilities that make such attacks possible. 3) Educate users to be more conscious of security issues.
Hey, you were the one who said restricting XXX content to an.xxx TLD was censorship.
Restricting XXX content to the xxx TLD means prohibiting its hosting under other domains. It is, quite unambiguously, a form of censorship.
And yeah, it is being regulated because it's porn. We as a society have already decided that - which is why its illegal to sell it to minors.
Yet it isn't illegal to host it online, even if minors can get to it. A mandate to classify all pornography under an xxx domain would be more restrictive than the current system and would force makers of pornography to deal directly with the xxx domain's registrar and accept whatever rules the registrar decides to impose. That is not acceptable.
Just like shelving all the fiction books together in the library is? I think you have a very wide view of censorship.
What a ridiculous analogy. I don't see any TLDs being proposed for other categories of speech, do you? It's only XXX that's being singled out for special treatment, because it's porn.
... since.com wasn't ever really very well monitored with respect to child porn and criminal activity
That's because it's not a registrar's job to regulate content. When content is illegal it's actually the host's job -- or, if necessary, the police's job -- to remove it. Allowing registrars to regulate content is dangerous and ultimately undesirable.
It wouldn't be the first time somebody accused them of racketeering. So far, it doesn't seem to have worked. It seems they can win any case by merely claiming that some of their artists' songs have been played without permission.
Holy shit. After reading the above I started searching Google for other instances of similar bullying and found this:
"[Hines said] 'Hey we need to sit down and talk and I've got some contracts here for you to sign.' I was like, 'Who are you again?' He told me and said, 'Yeah, it's been real difficult to get ahold of you. You've been avoiding us. I'm here now and you need to take care of this. You don't really have a choice in the matter. We need to sit down and you need to sign this paperwork with me.'
...
"I said I didn't have time to talk with him then, that he could send me something in the mail or email me but I don't have time, as far as I was concerned we were in compliance with all of the licensing or copyright laws.
...
"He was, 'James, James you don't have a choice. I'm leaving this right here. If I don't get this paperwork from you soon, the next person you see will be an investigator. They're going to come in and you're not going to have a choice.' I said, 'Prove that we're violating your laws. Find a song that you own the rights to that we're playing, it's not going to happen.'
"He said, 'That's not how it works, James. It's going to be too late. By the time we have an investigator come in, we don't have to prove anything.'
I'm not usually a violent person, but if some ASCAP pisher came to my place of business and said those things to me it is very likely I'd end up in jail for assault after breaking the bastard's nose with a baseball bat.
Stop being disingenuous, they did it with prior notice, and with your permission.
It seems to me you're the one who's being disingenuous. While they do give notice of their "right to remotely remove" certain applications from people's devices, they gave no prior notice with respect to the particular application being removed and obtained no explicit permission for such removal. It's all hidden away in the terms of service, which most people never read and which people are presumed to have agreed to merely on the basis of their use of the service.
Most likely, every ISP in the US would be required to respect an order by the president to shut down communications between certain points on the Internet. Thus, if a website such as Wikileaks should somehow manage to get their hands on embarrassing videos of possibly illegal wartime activity, the president could issue a shutdown order under the guise of a national security and thus require all US ISPs to block access to said embarrassing videos.
Why? The TLDs were designed to break up the WWW based on categories. Ok, so the US never really enforced the other TLDs, but other countries haven't been so lax.
The difference between com, net and org domains was originally a matter of organizational structure rather than content.
I don't see any problem requiring pornographic sites onto a.xxx domain - and yes, legally there are fairly clear distinctions on what is pornographic.
Even if these "fairly clear distinctions" existed, there's still the matter of websites that host both pornographic and non-pornographic content. Some websites may be primarily pornographic in nature and therefore fit neatly into an xxx domain, but others may be primarily non-pornographic and might not be well-suited to splitting apart at the TLD level.
The problem starts when you get government-level censorship of that particular TLD, but the problem is censorship, not categorisation.
To prevent pornographic content from being hosted outside of xxx domains is itself a form of censorship, and TLDs are hardly the best way to categorize content.
Slashdot Mirror
Developers need to stand up for their rights, but unions (especially those that dominate an entire industry) can themselves become like the bureaucrats they're supposed to fight against. I'm not usually one to argue for new laws, but I think I'd rather have employees' rights protected through specific legislation than be forced to join or otherwise be represented by a union before being allowed to work for a particular employer.
While I'm sure you can often tell when a video is fake, I'm not convinced it's so easy to tell for a fact that a video is not. Without the ability to somehow confirm that a video is real, telling the fakes apart from the real videos is an exercise in futility. That certain videos look real compared to others that look fake to you is no way to confirm the accuracy of your identifications. Some extreme videos may indeed show enough as to leave very little doubt as to their reality, but are all the videos that seem real to you quite so extreme as that?
I do agree, however, that a video that's convincing enough to look real will be disturbing to those who are convinced that it's real. I guess I'm just skeptical about the number of such videos in existence... or it could be I just have my head buried in the sand.
I don't envy these people their jobs, but I have to wonder how much of the content in question is truly illegal versus how much of the content is simply disturbing (like the stuff you might see in a graphic movie). Perhaps this is naive of me, but it seems to me this article is playing up the negatives in true yellow-journalistic form.
But how do you know it's involuntary? How do you know it's not role-playing (as with BSDM) or special effects (like in fake snuff films)?
Why would I use my fingers to determine the number of chicken nuggets I want? Now if somebody asks me how many chicken nuggets me and my friends have in total, I'll concede your point.
What makes you think TI calculators only do arithmetic?
The shutdown apparently had something to do with content posted to the server by unidentified third parties. A number of people in that thread have made a big deal about how the guy is responsible for all content posted to his server, which strikes me as bullshit. Is Slashdot liable for whatever people write here? Is Google liable for what people post on blogger.com? For what people post on YouTube?
I can understand authorities and hosting providers doing everything possible to shut down and determine the origin of infringing or illegal material, but the notion that the guy should be liable for content he didn't post and wasn't aware of is simply ridiculous. It is the hosting providers prerogative to shut down the website for whatever reason, but it makes as much sense as shutting down all of Slashdot due to somebody using it to leak classified government documents.
The same way it's always been done: offer speculation with no basis in reality, but treat it as fact.
That only works when the person asking for the data is honest. When that person's only goal is to discredit you by any means possible, it is human nature not to want to cooperate with them.
It would seem that "don't be evil" doesn't include not doing business with the likes of this asshole.
I think I would be offended at having to affirm that I am not a cheater. Cheaters, on the other hand, wouldn't care.
Let's all pretend the above quote says "husband" instead of "boyfriend", so the joke makes sense.
"Yesterday my boyfriend said to me: 'You are, without a doubt, the most beautiful and intelligent woman in the world.' I love my husband so much. He is so perceptive!"
Exactly what I was thinking.
"Hear them hum!
Watch them run!
Oh, our job is never done,
For our roadways go rolling along!
While you ride,
While you glide,
We are watching down inside,
So your roadways keep rolling along!"
It's as if a million chipmunk voices suddenly cried out in terror and turned into baritones.
Are you actually suggesting there are people out there who believe only human activity could possibly lead to significant climate change? Why must climate change be explained either exclusively in terms of human influence or exclusively in terms of non-human factors? It doesn't make sense.
While I'm very much in favor of disconnecting zombies and computers running network-degrading malware, I am not at all in favor of disconnecting people's devices for not running approved versions of software (or, worse yet, for not running approved software packages). To do so is to give ISPs far too much control over my computer for not enough benefit.
I think the key is to invest in:
1) Attack detection tools, to disconnect users who are knowingly or unknowingly participating in online attacks.
2) Safer coding practices, to avoid the kinds of vulnerabilities that make such attacks possible.
3) Educate users to be more conscious of security issues.
Restricting XXX content to the xxx TLD means prohibiting its hosting under other domains. It is, quite unambiguously, a form of censorship.
Yet it isn't illegal to host it online, even if minors can get to it. A mandate to classify all pornography under an xxx domain would be more restrictive than the current system and would force makers of pornography to deal directly with the xxx domain's registrar and accept whatever rules the registrar decides to impose. That is not acceptable.
What a ridiculous analogy. I don't see any TLDs being proposed for other categories of speech, do you? It's only XXX that's being singled out for special treatment, because it's porn.
That's because it's not a registrar's job to regulate content. When content is illegal it's actually the host's job -- or, if necessary, the police's job -- to remove it. Allowing registrars to regulate content is dangerous and ultimately undesirable.
It wouldn't be the first time somebody accused them of racketeering. So far, it doesn't seem to have worked. It seems they can win any case by merely claiming that some of their artists' songs have been played without permission.
Holy shit. After reading the above I started searching Google for other instances of similar bullying and found this:
I'm not usually a violent person, but if some ASCAP pisher came to my place of business and said those things to me it is very likely I'd end up in jail for assault after breaking the bastard's nose with a baseball bat.
It seems to me you're the one who's being disingenuous. While they do give notice of their "right to remotely remove" certain applications from people's devices, they gave no prior notice with respect to the particular application being removed and obtained no explicit permission for such removal. It's all hidden away in the terms of service, which most people never read and which people are presumed to have agreed to merely on the basis of their use of the service.
Most likely, every ISP in the US would be required to respect an order by the president to shut down communications between certain points on the Internet. Thus, if a website such as Wikileaks should somehow manage to get their hands on embarrassing videos of possibly illegal wartime activity, the president could issue a shutdown order under the guise of a national security and thus require all US ISPs to block access to said embarrassing videos.
The difference between com, net and org domains was originally a matter of organizational structure rather than content.
Even if these "fairly clear distinctions" existed, there's still the matter of websites that host both pornographic and non-pornographic content. Some websites may be primarily pornographic in nature and therefore fit neatly into an xxx domain, but others may be primarily non-pornographic and might not be well-suited to splitting apart at the TLD level.
To prevent pornographic content from being hosted outside of xxx domains is itself a form of censorship, and TLDs are hardly the best way to categorize content.