Non-manditory use of.xxx is as well. I don't think that forced use of.xxx is advisable. I DO believe that the advantages will be enough to get many if not most to volentarily use the.xxx TLD.
Voluntary is fine, I misread some of your earlier arguments as enforcing this. I'm happy for the majority of these sites to be in area like this, whether for their own commercial reasons or because they consider their impact on the community. As long as it's a matter of personal choice...
I do have other problems with the idea, it's very English-centric for example, and what if other top-level domains are allowed? (.pr0n, etc:) Do we witness the same duplication of effort that I'm sure.biz/.com will... and thus double the registrar's income for those sections of the market?
I've since given it up for marijuana, and I challenge anyone from Oz to a weekend of smoking. You can bring your inferior strains if you like, but they won't be needed....
Here in South Australia, possession of ( n=3 ) plants (used to be 10:) is decriminalised -- i.e. police give you an on-the-spot fine and take the plants. Unsurprisingly, this has led to some fine developments of the form through hydroponic experimentation...
Invoke Godwin's Law on me here... but I have an uneasy feeling that this 'tagging' sounds a lot like a yellow Star of David.
So would PICS. Laws already in place relegate adult content to 'those channels' or 'that part' of the book store and in some cases 'that' part of town, this is no different.
PICS, however, is self-labelling (i.e. done by the provider/vendor). If someone chooses not to use it and breaks local laws or standards, then that is a matter for the police/courts/etc. (I disagree with film & TV censorship regimes as well, but let's not get into that here:) It's a 'populist' way to suppress unpopular viewpoints, whether or not those viewpoints have any artistic or intellectual merit (look at Henry Miller or James Joyce for examples of misapplied censorship).
No technical solution will keep the witch hunters quiet, only the hearty belly laughs of a more sensible society could do that. I WISH there were a technical way to achieve that!
Oh, so true:) I believe that any material that is available to adults under current legislation in a particular country should also be available over the net (e.g. not much in Afghanistan:), and I'm sick of 'Internet' being used as a scare-word in news reports, leading more to making the 'net safe for corporations (suppression of dissent) than making it safe for children.
I seriously doubt it that they are, but that won't stop someone from alleging it (possably a politition trolling for votes) and dragging them into court. By having an.xxx domain, porn operators could simply reply to the charge with 'We are accessable only through iwantporn.xxx which explicitly informs the surfer that this is an adults only site and can easily be blocked for children.'. In other words, it would remove the allegation from the relm of believability.
What does.xxx do that PICS already doesn't? What about porn sites outside the US?
Invoke Godwin's Law on me here... but I have an uneasy feeling that this 'tagging' sounds a lot like a yellow Star of David.
Just because the majority of people in a democracy hold certain beliefs doesn't necessarily make those beliefs right, and definitely doesn't mean that they should be able to enforce those beliefs on others by restricting them to virtual ghettos. (Assuming, of course, that the views of the minority are still legal in this democracy -- if they are made illegal that's a whole different ball-game).
At some point in the early 1990s paedophilia witch-hunts got so bad that it didn't seem necessary to actually provide any proof of the accused's guilt; the mere accusation was enough. I fear that the religious right will attempt to extend this principle of 'guilt' to legal but morally dubious areas like pornography, and thought control scares me just about as much as some of the evils and excesses of pornography do.
Why would a porn operator want to hide the fact they they serve porn? The only outcome is that those who want porn can't find them and those who don't will click away, possably [sic] in disgust, possably [sic] to find out where to report a porn operator targeting their kids.
So any porn operator not hosting on.xxx is automatically targeting children? That means that every single porn site these days is aimed at little 8-year-old Johnny's accidental click-through. Strange, it doesn't seem like a good business model to me.
Anyone wondering whether or not their site is a pornographic should grab a dictionary: the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement.
But what if I'm sexually excited by pictures of spark plugs, or something equally bizarre, and want others to share my 'joy'? I have to get a.xxx domain for my site?
Sexual excitement is a pretty broad church, and one man's meat is another man's.... urrgh... anyway, insert appropriate analogy here:)
The biggest argument against the net and FOR filtering is that porn doesnt belong near kids. With this system in place, the filtering software could be BUILT INTO THE BROWSER...
Like PICS couldn't be? Enforced labelling & filtering is a really bad idea -- I know, I live in Australia where porn on the net has been declared illegal. Reminiscent of King Canute ordering the tides back, really... except done without a similar level of irony:(
Slashdot won't let me set the font sizes right, but look for Mirage: Isaac Asimov's Robot Mystery by Mark W Tiedemann, with "Asimov" stretched across the cover in 48-point all caps and "by Mark W Tiedemann" in a 6-point footnote at the bottom. Or any of a dozen similar titles that have been popping up for some time..
The really tacky thing is often the "approved by the estate of..." label. Also seems to be happening to Frank Herbert... I've heard the new Dune book is terrible.
Of course, Arthur C. Clarke doesn't seem to have very much input on his co-authored books... but then the man deserves some rest:)
Not that I've read any, I imagine it must be like reading Star Trek novels.
Hey, isn't that what happened to James Blish? Used to be a decent writer... Star Trek novels have their place, I read a few but then I turned 10:)
This is pathetic. Reminds me of situations in which some doctors keep adding equipment and experiments to keep somebody alive, although the brain's fried.
This has nothing to do with Amiga except the name. Just think of it as a bunch of opportunists, trying to get some attention.:)
I speak as a current Amiga user and lover, although I'm not using the 4000 very much these days... spend much more time in Linux:)
I certainly look forward to book publishers checking to make sure groups aren't using photocopies or cover ripped books.
What about second-hand books? Wouldn't they be illegal, too, if we applied standards like this?
Seriously, I photocopied a book once; it was 20 years out of print, and it cost me at least half the price the book would have cost me if I could buy it, plus over an hour of my time slaving over a hot photocopier (not pleasant). Anthony Burgess writing on James Joyce, IIRC...
If I were you, I'd save my money for the next Asimov book.
Got some news for ya, son -- Isaac's dead!
Re:More than a couple:
on
D&D Trailer
·
· Score: 1
D&D player (14 years old) Sean Sellers was convicted of killing his parents and a convenience store clerk in Greeley, Oklahoma (1/11/87). He is the youngest inmate of death row in the country as of this writing (22 now). His involvement in hard-core Satanism began with D&D, according to his own testimony. Praise the Lord, he is now a Born Again Christian!
I agree, it can happen. There are mentally ill kids all over.
...and what makes him mentally ill -- murdering three people or being a born-again Christian?
Sick, I know, but when I read this part that's how it scanned to me... I'm agnostic:)
If by paying $79 I can occasionally get someone on the phone who can tell me how to get an app working with a beta of XR1146-whatever, excellent. I'll pay.
Your experience with tech support seems to be better than mine. Most of the time I make tech support calls on behalf of my clients, I know so much more about the problem domain than the people on the other end of the line that it's just not funny -- and they're charging my clients for the time we take. (Me: "OK, here's File Permissions 101. Files can be..." etc.)
Of course, the informal tech support behind free software is usually almost as bad, but at least there's no money changing hands...
I'll modify my point some - not everyone WANTS things for free. Regardless of quality, many end users want to pay
I would much rather pay the authors for free software, in the RMSian sense, than pay software companies for proprietary software. After all, they have to make a buck somehow, and I'm prepared to put my money where my mouth is.
BlockOut (don't know if that was *ever* available on any console system)
I've had BlockOut on the Atari Lynx since it first came out in the early 90s -- I still play that occasionally, and it's one of the best three or so of the 30-odd games I have:)
Tetris *is* a great game though... WRT the Lynx, I'm hoping that the GBA brings Lynx-like games to the masses, as obviously Atari couldn't market or improve the machine like they should have - second generation Lynxen were cool, but the battery life sucked.:(
There is a certain class of programmers who don't use debuggers very much because mostly their code is so well designed and thought out that they don't put very many bugs into it in the first place. Such people can see that the code produced by the other types of programmers - who heavily require debuggers - is sloppy and the result of confused thinking.
Those who do use debuggers heavily are incapable of understanding the thought processes of those who don't use debuggers because the thought processes of the 'use a debugger' school are too confused to allow such understanding. Indeed, the people who depend upon debuggers lack the clarity of thought to even understand that another way of doing things might exist.
I think this is a bit of a generalisation; you are artificially separating programmers into two groups, when really some slippage does exist.
I use debuggers occasionally, usually when I know what I think the code I wrote does, and something else is happening. This then allows me to correct the semantics, to more closely match my envisioned solution. As far as I am concerned, this is the right way to use them; the "oh, it barfs on 0, add a check for that" school of programming just leads to grief and heartache.:)
If you want a good Australian beer try Cascade Premium, and if you want the beer that we all drink get VB or XXXX. They won't win any competitions but they do the job, and don't completely taste like piss.
Cascade is a good beer, as is anything by Coopers and James Boag. Unfortuantely, VB and XXXX do taste completely like piss.... Toohey's Old & and Toohey's New aren't too bad if you're stuck in Sydney, though.
The main reason VB sells so well in Victoria and XXXX in Queensland is saturation marketing of their home turf.
Somehow I had gottten this rosy picture that engineers (especially software engineers), being people who were paid to think, would be smarter than to use drugs. I personally don't do drugs (scared of needles), drink (hate the taste of alchohol), smoke (allergic to tobacco smoke) or gamble (inefficient).
Now that I look over that list of reasons, none of them is "because I'm smart". Maybe thinking has nothing to do with it.
I think it's all down to a matter of taste (and occasional boredom). I've injected drugs previously (maybe 6 or 7 times total, to see what the various experiences were like), I've snorted, smoked dope, etc. But I don't do much of that any more, mainly because I have no real reason to continue doing so (if drugs were legalised, I'd consider some experimentation with the psychedelic drugs a la Alexander Shulgin, but I don't see that happening soon)...
I think smart people know when to use drugs and when not to. Operating heavy machinery? Probably a bad idea. Working in a high pressure environment? Occasional uppers (caffeine, speed, etc.) to keep you on top of things. And so on. Drugs are tools, just like any other... you have to be careful with them, but they're working for you, not the other way round.
The whole illegal/legal issue is another matter; I don't tend to recognise Government authority over personal choice, so I'm careful with what I do, and make sure it fits into my ethical structure.
the solutions proposed require a similar technological baseline but result from placing the tools in the hands of the most capable, making them the means to a humane society
While no-one can fault his technological vision and predictions of future trends, too often his politics are straight-out 60s socialism, or worse, some sort of Platonic meritocracy. Unfortunately these Brunner-ite utopias are not explored in his books...
Disclaimer: I haven't read Shockwave Rider, I've never found a copy:(. However I have read 25 or so of Brunner's other books...
Slashdot Mirror
Non-manditory use of .xxx is as well. I don't think that forced use of .xxx is advisable. I DO believe that the advantages will be enough to get many if not most to volentarily use the .xxx TLD.
:) Do we witness the same duplication of effort that I'm sure .biz/.com will... and thus double the registrar's income for those sections of the market?
:)
Voluntary is fine, I misread some of your earlier arguments as enforcing this. I'm happy for the majority of these sites to be in area like this, whether for their own commercial reasons or because they consider their impact on the community. As long as it's a matter of personal choice...
I do have other problems with the idea, it's very English-centric for example, and what if other top-level domains are allowed? (.pr0n, etc
We should all go back to IP numbers, I say!
I've since given it up for marijuana, and I challenge anyone from Oz to a weekend of smoking. You can bring your inferior strains if you like, but they won't be needed....
:) is decriminalised -- i.e. police give you an on-the-spot fine and take the plants. Unsurprisingly, this has led to some fine developments of the form through hydroponic experimentation...
Here in South Australia, possession of ( n=3 ) plants (used to be 10
And any legislation they propose will not be to protect the innocent but to make the act of catching the criminals easier.
And if they arrest and convict a few of the innocent along the way... ah, it's only collateral damage, "don't worry about my rights, officer".
What an indictment on governments and the sheep who support them.
Invoke Godwin's Law on me here... but I have an uneasy feeling that this 'tagging' sounds a lot like a yellow Star of David.
So would PICS. Laws already in place relegate adult content to 'those channels' or 'that part' of the book store and in some cases 'that' part of town, this is no different.
PICS, however, is self-labelling (i.e. done by the provider/vendor). If someone chooses not to use it and breaks local laws or standards, then that is a matter for the police/courts/etc. (I disagree with film & TV censorship regimes as well, but let's not get into that here
No technical solution will keep the witch hunters quiet, only the hearty belly laughs of a more sensible society could do that. I WISH there were a technical way to achieve that!
Oh, so true
I seriously doubt it that they are, but that won't stop someone from alleging it (possably a politition trolling for votes) and dragging them into court. By having an .xxx domain, porn operators could simply reply to the charge with 'We are accessable only through iwantporn.xxx which explicitly informs the surfer that this is an adults only site and can easily be blocked for children.'. In other words, it would remove the allegation from the relm of believability.
.xxx do that PICS already doesn't? What about porn sites outside the US?
What does
Invoke Godwin's Law on me here... but I have an uneasy feeling that this 'tagging' sounds a lot like a yellow Star of David.
Just because the majority of people in a democracy hold certain beliefs doesn't necessarily make those beliefs right, and definitely doesn't mean that they should be able to enforce those beliefs on others by restricting them to virtual ghettos. (Assuming, of course, that the views of the minority are still legal in this democracy -- if they are made illegal that's a whole different ball-game).
At some point in the early 1990s paedophilia witch-hunts got so bad that it didn't seem necessary to actually provide any proof of the accused's guilt; the mere accusation was enough. I fear that the religious right will attempt to extend this principle of 'guilt' to legal but morally dubious areas like pornography, and thought control scares me just about as much as some of the evils and excesses of pornography do.
It's a thin line...
Why would a porn operator want to hide the fact they they serve porn? The only outcome is that those who want porn can't find them and those who don't will click away, possably [sic] in disgust, possably [sic] to find out where to report a porn operator targeting their kids.
.xxx is automatically targeting children? That means that every single porn site these days is aimed at little 8-year-old Johnny's accidental click-through. Strange, it doesn't seem like a good business model to me.
So any porn operator not hosting on
Anyone wondering whether or not their site is a pornographic should grab a dictionary: the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement.
.xxx domain for my site?
:)
But what if I'm sexually excited by pictures of spark plugs, or something equally bizarre, and want others to share my 'joy'? I have to get a
Sexual excitement is a pretty broad church, and one man's meat is another man's.... urrgh... anyway, insert appropriate analogy here
The biggest argument against the net and FOR filtering is that porn doesnt belong near kids. With this system in place, the filtering software could be BUILT INTO THE BROWSER...
:(
Like PICS couldn't be? Enforced labelling & filtering is a really bad idea -- I know, I live in Australia where porn on the net has been declared illegal. Reminiscent of King Canute ordering the tides back, really... except done without a similar level of irony
The first one, actually -- the position for the second is still open.
.com' position was already taken :(
Unfortunately, the 'dot in
Slashdot won't let me set the font sizes right, but look for Mirage: Isaac Asimov's Robot Mystery by Mark W Tiedemann, with "Asimov" stretched across the cover in 48-point all caps and "by Mark W Tiedemann" in a 6-point footnote at the bottom. Or any of a dozen similar titles that have been popping up for some time..
:)
:)
The really tacky thing is often the "approved by the estate of..." label. Also seems to be happening to Frank Herbert... I've heard the new Dune book is terrible.
Of course, Arthur C. Clarke doesn't seem to have very much input on his co-authored books... but then the man deserves some rest
Not that I've read any, I imagine it must be like reading Star Trek novels.
Hey, isn't that what happened to James Blish? Used to be a decent writer... Star Trek novels have their place, I read a few but then I turned 10
This is pathetic. Reminds me of situations in which some doctors keep adding equipment and experiments to keep somebody alive, although the brain's fried.
:)
:)
This has nothing to do with Amiga except the name. Just think of it as a bunch of opportunists, trying to get some attention.
I speak as a current Amiga user and lover, although I'm not using the 4000 very much these days... spend much more time in Linux
I certainly look forward to book publishers checking to make sure groups aren't using photocopies or cover ripped books.
What about second-hand books? Wouldn't they be illegal, too, if we applied standards like this?
Seriously, I photocopied a book once; it was 20 years out of print, and it cost me at least half the price the book would have cost me if I could buy it, plus over an hour of my time slaving over a hot photocopier (not pleasant). Anthony Burgess writing on James Joyce, IIRC...
If I were you, I'd save my money for the next Asimov book.
Got some news for ya, son -- Isaac's dead!
D&D player (14 years old) Sean Sellers was convicted of killing his parents and a convenience store clerk in Greeley, Oklahoma (1/11/87). He is the youngest inmate of death row in the country as of this writing (22 now). His involvement in hard-core Satanism began with D&D, according to his own testimony. Praise the Lord, he is now a Born Again Christian!
:)
I agree, it can happen. There are mentally ill kids all over.
...and what makes him mentally ill -- murdering three people or being a born-again Christian?
Sick, I know, but when I read this part that's how it scanned to me... I'm agnostic
If by paying $79 I can occasionally get someone on the phone who can tell me how to get an app working with a beta of XR1146-whatever, excellent. I'll pay.
Your experience with tech support seems to be better than mine. Most of the time I make tech support calls on behalf of my clients, I know so much more about the problem domain than the people on the other end of the line that it's just not funny -- and they're charging my clients for the time we take. (Me: "OK, here's File Permissions 101. Files can be..." etc.)
Of course, the informal tech support behind free software is usually almost as bad, but at least there's no money changing hands...
I'll modify my point some - not everyone WANTS things for free. Regardless of quality, many end users want to pay
I would much rather pay the authors for free software, in the RMSian sense, than pay software companies for proprietary software. After all, they have to make a buck somehow, and I'm prepared to put my money where my mouth is.
Psychoacoustic
:)
Models change inaudible
Sounds; no protection.
(apologies for completely murdering the form there
BlockOut (don't know if that was *ever* available on any console system)
:)
:(
I've had BlockOut on the Atari Lynx since it first came out in the early 90s -- I still play that occasionally, and it's one of the best three or so of the 30-odd games I have
Tetris *is* a great game though... WRT the Lynx, I'm hoping that the GBA brings Lynx-like games to the masses, as obviously Atari couldn't market or improve the machine like they should have - second generation Lynxen were cool, but the battery life sucked.
There is a certain class of programmers who don't use debuggers very much because mostly their code is so well designed and thought out that they don't put very many bugs into it in the first place. Such people can see that the code produced by the other types of programmers - who heavily require debuggers - is sloppy and the result of confused thinking.
Those who do use debuggers heavily are incapable of understanding the thought processes of those who don't use debuggers because the thought processes of the 'use a debugger' school are too confused to allow such understanding. Indeed, the people who depend upon debuggers lack the clarity of thought to even understand that another way of doing things might exist.
I think this is a bit of a generalisation; you are artificially separating programmers into two groups, when really some slippage does exist.
I use debuggers occasionally, usually when I know what I think the code I wrote does, and something else is happening. This then allows me to correct the semantics, to more closely match my envisioned solution. As far as I am concerned, this is the right way to use them; the "oh, it barfs on 0, add a check for that" school of programming just leads to grief and heartache.
> Hello Kitty's Pie-Throwing Splatmatch
Be afraid... be very afraid.
I believe MS Office was the first Office suite to use XML for file formats.
:)
Wow, XML tags wrapped around COM objects. That must interoperate really well with the non-Windows world.
(BTW, that's sarcasm, in case you hadn't guessed
If you want a good Australian beer try Cascade Premium, and if you want the beer that we all drink get VB or XXXX. They won't win any competitions but they do the job, and don't completely taste like piss.
Cascade is a good beer, as is anything by Coopers and James Boag. Unfortuantely, VB and XXXX do taste completely like piss.... Toohey's Old & and Toohey's New aren't too bad if you're stuck in Sydney, though.
The main reason VB sells so well in Victoria and XXXX in Queensland is saturation marketing of their home turf.
Somehow I had gottten this rosy picture that engineers (especially software engineers), being people who were paid to think, would be smarter than to use drugs. I personally don't do drugs (scared of needles), drink (hate the taste of alchohol), smoke (allergic to tobacco smoke) or gamble (inefficient).
Now that I look over that list of reasons, none of them is "because I'm smart". Maybe thinking has nothing to do with it.
I think it's all down to a matter of taste (and occasional boredom). I've injected drugs previously (maybe 6 or 7 times total, to see what the various experiences were like), I've snorted, smoked dope, etc. But I don't do much of that any more, mainly because I have no real reason to continue doing so (if drugs were legalised, I'd consider some experimentation with the psychedelic drugs a la Alexander Shulgin, but I don't see that happening soon)...
I think smart people know when to use drugs and when not to. Operating heavy machinery? Probably a bad idea. Working in a high pressure environment? Occasional uppers (caffeine, speed, etc.) to keep you on top of things. And so on. Drugs are tools, just like any other... you have to be careful with them, but they're working for you, not the other way round.
The whole illegal/legal issue is another matter; I don't tend to recognise Government authority over personal choice, so I'm careful with what I do, and make sure it fits into my ethical structure.
PS - I *am* the real John Carmack
Sure, Mr Carr-nack, and I'm the real Stanley Kubrick...
:/
the solutions proposed require a similar technological baseline but result from placing the tools in the hands of the most capable, making them the means to a humane society
:(. However I have read 25 or so of Brunner's other books...
While no-one can fault his technological vision and predictions of future trends, too often his politics are straight-out 60s socialism, or worse, some sort of Platonic meritocracy. Unfortunately these Brunner-ite utopias are not explored in his books...
Disclaimer: I haven't read Shockwave Rider, I've never found a copy