Secondly, it is being claimed that "services" will reside on various servers. But a simple mathematical argument shows that distributed web services will be *much* less reliable than centralized servers:
You're wrong, since you assume that adding more servers means adding more single points of failure, and that the failure rate for each server stays constant.
This is misguided for two reasons: A major reason for splitting up things over multiple servers is to run less complex services on each machine. As you reduce complexity, you also reduce the likelyhood of a failure on that specific machine (if nothing else, then for the reason that you may have moved the buggy parts of your code to another server).
Now, if you keep a sequential path through your servers, with no failover, you still may (depending on the quality of your hardware and OS maintenance) achieve greater stability, since most software handle high load/low memory etc. situations worse than they should. It's a good chance your applications will have a lower rate of failure if you can split it up to reduce the chance of resource allocation problems.
But with a well engineered distributed system you will also either make calls persistent, so short term outages for services that aren't time critical doesn't matter because the call will be completed when the system is back up, or you will add multiple servers handling a specific service, and make the caller automatically fail over to one of the other servers if one is down.
Redundancy is a much safer way to bring you to 5-nine's than running everything on a single server: 5-nine's imply about 5 minuts of downtime
a year. That doesn't give you much room to deal with hardware failure. I'd much rather have a distributed system where non-critical parts are farmed out to other machines, and critical parts
are duplicated on multiple servers.
Actually, we're designing an XML based distributed communications system for our mission critical
system right now: The ".name" gTLD registry, that I'm head of development for.
And of course there's no way around that.... No... Of course Asimov didn't spend the better part of his career writing books about unexpected effects and ways to sidestep and circumwent those laws..
What kinds of VoIP systems have you used? I tested VoIP two years ago that was available then, and that delivered chrystal clear trans-atlantic calls
over the public internet at low bandwidths, and I tested 9.6kbps systems that gave better quality than most residential analog phones I've used.
Of course, if you're using VoIP over networks that are also being used for data transfers without switching or quality of service limitations on data transfers, VoIP will suck, because someone will eat up the needed bandwidth.
As for Vovida's system, it seems mostly geared at integrators that wish to put together either custom systems or telephony "appliances" to place with customers. It seems well suited both as a full PBX solution for corporate use, as well as for components if you want to build larger, carrier type, systems.
Obviously, if you want to build carrier type systems you'll need to know what you're doing, and the software is only a small part of what you need.
The problem is that many nazi sites that would be illegal under German law "simply" for putting forward Nazi propaganda does not in themselves incite and organize violence.
In many cases they may represent organizations that do so offline, or hidden for view, or they may represent "research institutes" and similar that claim to do unbiased research on nazi ideology, but that acts as propaganda fronts. Some of them will take great care to avoid anything that can be construed as inciting to violence or racial hatred, and leave that for private conversation with people interested in their sites.
That does not mean they don't pose a threat.
But it does mean that you suddenly have to go much farther in censoring ideans and thought if you want to stop them.
Germany does, in many cases, provided it is nazi material. Most other countries do not.
Many countries have special provisions for nazi propaganda, but most of them are specific enough to only prevent material or manifestations of ideas that clearly incite violence or racial hatred, and allow material that present, discuss, or even can be interpreted as propaganda for, nazism to go through.
One could discuss whether those laws should be stricted, but there's a slipperly slope from censoring hate groups to censoring legitimate political activity, and the further down you go, the harder it is to stop.
In Norway you become a member of the State church at birth if your mother (perhaps your father too? - don't know for sure) is a member of the State church. That was actually what finally got my mother around to relinquishing her membership. My parents didn't wish me to be automatically enrolled.
It also used to be a mess to get out - you typically had to go to your local priest or similar and hand him a statement saying you didn't wish to be a member anymore, and frequently they'd be upset about it and try to convince you not to.
Now, however, it is very easy.
The issue of separation keeps resurfacing at regular intervals, often when the debate starts raging about whether or not gay and lesbian priests are supposed to have the same rights as others, or similar issues where the conservative leadership of the church is heavily at odds both with Norwegian law and with the people in general.
Sweden has taken some steps towards separation, in that the local leadership of the state church is actually elected. A while back a group of atheists or agnostics (don't remembers which) actually almost managed to gain control of the church leadership in some counties, because most people don't give a damn about who contols the church.
Sweden is clearly the Scandinavian country where the debate seems to be least heated, and where it seems the path is pretty clear towards separation, and where there has even been talks about deciding on a specific year (don't know if anything was agreed on with regards to that) for separation or for a vote on it (I don't follow Swedish politics much...:-)
The issue of separation is important not the least because the state church get advantages none others do: In Norway the state church can count as members anyone who has not actively registered as non members, or that haven't registered as a member of another recognized religious or atheist organization, and that have parents that are members of the church.
The other organizations, on the other hand, have to get the membership of the child reaffirmed at the age of 15, and effectively have to require membership dues or similar methods of getting a legally recognizable recognition of your membership to get money support from the government.
The state church doesn't have to care about their membership numbers to get money, either. The way the money allocation is done is that the government decides how much to give the state church, then divides that sum by the number of people that haven't left the church, and that is the amount of money that the other organizations will get per registered member.
This effectively mean that because the church has seriously bloated membership numbers because most people don't care, the state church get a lot more money per active member than the other organizations get.
The state church also have special legal privileges (at least in Norway, don't know about the rest of the Scandinavian countries). For instance the king (and possibly the prime minister?) and at least half the cabinet has to be members of the state church.
So what do you value more? Intelligence and strength of character, or mindless insect pleasure? It's entirely possible to balance the two, but if you go toward either extreme, you must give up some of the other.
I value intelligence and strength of character and freely chosen pleasure most. And I see it as a clear sign of intelligence and strength of character to have broken free from religious dogma, which is basically what I said in the post you replied to.
You said yourself: "As intelligent beings, we are naturally predisposed to be biased towards anything that gives us pleasure"
However, this I disagree with. Most beings, intelligent or otherwise, seek pleasure. That is one of the primary reasons sexual acts for instance typically bring pleasure: we are more likely to reproduce if the immediate act of reproduction produces a benefit for us.
Intelligent beings, on the other hand, explicitly plan their lives to increase pleasure, and to create situations and stimuli that create pleasure - such as porn.
If anything, porn is tool created specifically to give pleasure.
The weakness lie in those who accept outside pressure to let their lives be controlled, instead of choosing to live their own lives and seek pleasure.
To put it short: I value those who break with religion, and lead their lives in a way that give them pleasure and fulfilment, whether sexual or spiritual, provided they don't step on other peoples chances of the same by doing so.
We've only been listening for a short period of time. It's not as if you could expect to get alien TV broadcasts on your TV set. SETI hasn't been around long, and only listens to a very limited set of the potential data.
Even if we say that we'll never find anything better than radiowaves in the spectrum SETI is searching to communicate with, SETI have still listened to a narrow time band of only a few decades for each star.
It doesn't take much imagination to see how large the chances of civilizations occuring that had either not reached a radio sending age at the point where the signals SETI are now processing originated, or that had either found some other way of communicated by then, or been destroyed in some way by then.
And that is assuming that life may exist or existed in places where SETI might have detected life in had it existed and been at a radio-sending stage at the right time.
We've only looked at a microscopic part of the universe for an incredibly short time period. There's still a chance;)
What happens is that if a man views porn regularly, he gets a very distorted view of sex and women, which can cause two things. First he will treat women that do allow him to become close to them in ways that are (for many women) highly inappropriate, which is abuse of those women, and damaging to an otherwise good relationship. And secondly he will be approaching all women with this distorted view, which will cause him to find it more difficult to form relationships with women, and lead back, via frustration, to yet more porn. Its a negative feedback loop, and one that some men find very hard to see their way clear from. This is potentially harmful and dangerous to these men and the women around them.
Can you please point us to ANY credible research that shows that this is the case, please?
This is an old argument, and I have yet to see any evidence for it. Several researches have concluded the opposite: That pornography serve as a healthy way of getting fantasies "out of your system", to prevent them from affecting your daily life.
Note also one of the classic mistakes made in much of the research of this issue: Many reports have described high usage of porn by rapists, and equate that with porn causing or contributing to the rape.
But those numbers are also consistent with the suggestion above that pornography serve as a way of getting fantasies out - if that is correct, then it would be natural to also find a high consumption of pornography by people who have used it to try to stay under control, but that have failed.
For a study to present credible evidence on any connection as mentioned above, the very least they would have to do would be to find a random sample of people that do use porn and a random sample of people who dont use porn, and let parts of the group that does use porn stop using it, and parts of the group that does not use porn start using it, and follow the resulting four groups over a prolonged period of time to see whether members of any of the groups are more or less likely to get abusive or to get problems handling relationships.
This page presents some research (mostly supportive of porn). If you have any specifics criticism of the research presented there, or any
credible research showing different results, I'd like to see references to it, to take a look at it.
You are also making the typical mistake and assuming that porn is only consumed by men, when the major market for mainstream porn videos is couples, and videos for use by couples are typically chosen and bought by the woman.
The major reasons couples cite for watching porn together? To inject fantasies and excitement into their relationship, and to explore sides of each other they do not yet know well. In other words: To get closer. How that is detrimental to a relationship, I fail to see. I can however agree that that some couples choose to do so does not mean it's right for everyone.
You're assuming the same people are supporting both standpoints. This is a fatal flaw in the way many people look at communities like Slashdot.
Yes, some standpoints are more popular than others. But that does not give you any reason to claim that there's a double standard unless you find concrete examples that the same people are supporting mutually contradictory standpoints.
As for the case here: Sure there's exploitation in porn. Sure there's exploitation in politics. And there's exploitation practically everywhere else too.
Whether that is relevant in a discussion of whether porn is bad or not, depends on whether you or someone else can show that there's more exploitation in porn than elsewhere, and if so that that extra exploitation is an inherent feature of porn, and not of specific companies or persons in the porn business.
It is also too easy to say that "she's a drug addict, so she must be exploited since she's working in porn". That is making the assumption that because someone is working in porn, and has a problem, they must automatically have been exploited. In reality there's also other possibilities:
It might be easier for someone with problems to get work in porn, since the porn business is used to stigma, and may look more favorably on other people that are stigmatised than mainstream businesses. It may be that the person doesn't have any moral objections to working in porn.
Unless you claim that hiring someone with drug problems or other problems is inherently exploitation, then making the assumption that it is inherently exploitation if they're hired to do porn require more arguments to back it up.
If someone presents evidence that there's more exploitation in porn than elsewhere, and that is a result of porn in itself and not specific players in the porn business, then yes, porn might be bad.
So far I haven't seen anyone even trying to address that question, however - the focus is normally on equating porn with exploitation without looking at who is exploiting and why, to try to find out whether the exploitation is an inherent problem with porn or with specific companies or people.
If the case is that the exploitation is a result of specific players in the business, then go after those players - force them to comply with the appropriate laws - instead of whine about the product.
No. Michaelangelo's David is art celebrating the beauty of God's creation, Debbie Does Dallas is just immoral smut designed to appeal to the pruriant tastes of sad lonely men. There can be no artistic merit in films made with exploitation and abuse.
While I don't know about Debbie Does Dallas (haven't seen it, even though it recently passed British film censors), if you try to claim that all porn fall in this category, then you're way out there. Lots of porn is made specifically to appeal to women. And in the current market, most mainstream porn videos are targetted towards couples. Yes, there are porn out there for "sad lonely men", but there's also porn out there for happily married women, couples, and anything in between.
Why? Because there's a market for it, and because the most stereotypical market has long been saturated, and targetting other demographics, like women, gives you access to a much larger, broader market.
It shows that you haven't seen any porn... Try investigating before you make broad, sweeping claims about what is for whom. Maybe you'll even find something you like.
Sex is there for the purposes of procreation and between two people married with God's blessing. Pornography is quite simply the antithesis of this idea, in that it encourages promiscuity without responsibility, a dangerous idea for any society that wishes to hold itself to any kind of moral values.
This argument assumes whoever you're arguing with believe in the christian God, and care about the silly procreation argument.
It also assumes that there exists no pornography depicting the joys of procreation in a marriage.
The first is a belief that certainly has no proof, and which a great deal of humanity simply rejects.
The argument that sex is only for procreation assigns a purpose to nature, which either implies that nature is sentient, or implies a creator, which brings us back to the first argument - it's just as disputed, and certainly not proven in any way. For those of us who prefer evolution, sex is there because it works as a driving force to get living beings to procreate. And it gives pleasure because that makes it more likely that we'll procreate. But neither assigns any purpose to it. Unless you believe in a deity, sex is just a process, and have no more purpose than the oceans or the stars.
If you want to argue that since sex allows us to procreate, then procreation is it's purpose, even if it wasn't conceived by someone who assigned for a purpose, then you can just as well argue that since sex give us pleasure, then pleasure is also one of the purposes of sex. Seeings as sex is a driving force behind much of the work of man, it can even be said to be a very important purpose.
This argument can just as well be applied in the case of the existence of a "God" as well: If this God fellow didn't intend for people to have sex for fun he must be a complete idiot for making it so much fun. If sex has procreation as its purpose because procreation is one of its functions, then sex can just as well have pleasure as a purpose because pleasure is one of its functions.
You also assume that promiscuous behaviour is "dangerous idea for any society that wishes to hold itself to any kind of moral values". But that is simply wrong. It may be dangerous for a society that wishes to hold iself to any kind of christian moral values, but you are making the assumption that anyone else will share your view of what "any kind of moral values" is.
You go on to criticize even porn made willingly and happly by a married couple:
Because sex is not something to be used to satiate the urges of weaker people. That is pure and simply immoral.
Again you're assuming everyone else share your views about what is moral. You are not explaining what is unnatural or morally reprehensible, as the previous poster asks you to, instead you're just giving the blanked response that it's bad because it violates your morals.
Assuming that we agree with you that people who like porn are "weaker people" (weaker than who? The couple making the video? Presumably if they're happily making porn they like porn themselves), that still leaves us with the question of why it is bad to "willingly (and happlily)" (to quote the previous poster) do something to satiate the urges of those "weaker people"?
Unless you claim that seeing people have sex is somehow harmful?
But back to the "weaker people" part. Presumable this comes from some illution that people who watch porn are lost souls who don't believe in God.
In my eyes, if they've "lost" their faith, that makes them stronger, not weaker: They've managed to break free from the indoctrination of dogma, and to stop relying on a book of mutually inconsistent and ridiculous stories to find meaning in their lives.
Thus, that argument too breaks down if people don't agree with you from the start.
If you want to convince anyone who doesn't already share your beliefs, you better try some arguments that doesn't depend on conservative christian beliefs from the outset...
Actually you're as wrong as could be. This recent court decision is a result of the fraud comitted to obtain the domain name, not theft as Kremen originally attempted to use.
The decision that a domain is like a telephone number, and thus is not real estate, and therefore can't be stolen, still stands. However, it is still illegal to commit fraud to get control over it.
But these islands all use IP-addresses assigned by a centralized organization assigning blocks to the regional authorities (RIPE etc.), who have monopolies on handing out IP addresses for their region to ISPs etc.. I fail to see how this is different from the way the domain space is currently run.
The only reason the allocation of IP addresses doesn't really matter is that nobody care if their IP address is easy to remember. Well, almost noone.
If you seriously think that it's "just paying someone to enter your name in a database", then I'm glad you're not going to be handling a gTLD anytime soon.
Some of the issues involved are: Legal hassles involved with disputes of ownership, serving the zone files for the TLD (which is certainly not trivial, nor cheap), providing fault tolerance in all systems (multiple fault tolerant servers in multiple locations worldwide), etc.
I happen to be Head of Development for the company that will be handling.name, so I do know what kinds of amounts that are involved, and it's not a pretty sight.
For your family example: That's exactly what.name is intended for. (disclaimer: I'm co-founder
of the company that was awarded it) You'll be able to register your-firstname.your-lastname.name, and optionally get e-mail forwarding for your-firstname@your-lastname.name. This scheme also has the advantage that if you have a common lastname, and want an address on the format mentioned, you won't block others with the same lastname from also getting that kind of address.
.name will be the only TLD that require that a name that's registered is the name of a person or a fictional character, and not a company or product name etc.
If you want highly cost efficient production in huge quantities, you are right. If you want just one, you can use an FPGA (the article specifically mentions using Xilinx chips) and reprogram it at will - great for testing and development, or if you want a small series there are a number of companies producing small series of chips.
The downside? Cost and performance. You won't get high-end performance out of a FPGA, for instance. But on the other hand, for an embedded system an FPGA give you the opportunity of "easily" developing a full system on a chip, test it, debug it in actual hardware, and depending on the volume you need decide whether to use FPGAs or custom ASICs in the final, shipping device.
No, but April/May 2000 was... I know. My company just went through second round financing a few weeks before Nasdaq started shaking and then plunged deeper and deeper.
You don't typically get the VC jackpot that early, and most VC financed companies go through multiple financing rounds before they can stand on their own feet.
The problem is that it is not possible to create a compression algorithm that will always be able to compress it's inputs without being lossy. It's easy to show:
Take any file. Compress it with your algorithm.
Store the result to a file. Compress it again.
Repeat until the result is just a bit. You can't get further down with a computer. And no matter what representation you choose, you'll run into the same limitation.
So while it may seem intuitive that you could use this for compression to yield very small results,
and it indeed could work that for a small subset of information, you would still have a huge set of data you would be unable to compress.
In many cases you will see that compression algorithms that work extremely well on some data will work very badly on anything outside a very narrowly defined set. As an example, I can easily
compress a megabyte of data to one bit. The only problem is I'll only be able to compress two different sets of a megabyte, and I won't be able to encode anything else, since one bit only allow me to choose between two outputs.
In other words: Sure, you can use it for a compression algorithm, but don't expect to be able to get any revolutionary results from it, because if you want to be able to compress a large set of different inputs, the numbers will necessarily get big for most of the input sets.
In this case the DMCA is requiring that Slashdot take down a document that is posted in blatant violation of copyright law. You may not agree that that should be illegal, buth IMHO, the DeCSS case stands a lot better chance of affecting the DMCA than something like this.
You completely miss the point here. The DMCA would essentially made Slashdot liable if they refuse to take down material that are clearly in violation of copyright law, regardless of whether Slashdot owns or has any control over or liability for the post in question, and regardless of whether they are guilty in the initial violation of copyright law that occured when the posting was made.
The difference, whether you like it or not (I don't like it), is that the bible predates copyright law, have unknown authors for the most part, and all the authors have been dead long enough that copyright would have expired anyway.
Even with Disney's and others massive lobbying to extend it...:-)
The CoS texts, on the other hand have been written in recent years, and has the same copyright protection as any other work. You may not agree that an organization claiming to be a church should be allowed to use copyright protection, but most religious organizations do - just rarely for their core religious texts.
But I suspect thats more a result of the age of most established religions, than a lack of interest in using copyright to protect income.
Actually, I'm one of the co-founders of the company that got.name (see GNRs website), and if someone registers your..name, and they don't have a legitimate interest in it, they will lose it. I'm not sure if that appendix to the contract has been published for.name yet, but all the new TLDs have been required to write and publish and appendix that specifies in details what restrictions will be enforced, and how disputes shall be handled. The appendices are published
on ICANNs pages.
I'm not going to say too much about it here, but in.name's case, there will be clear restrictions favoring people that either register their own personal name, or a name they have a strong relation or ownership to (and which they must be able to document, if disputed). Look out for Appendix L on the page above - it shouldn't be too long before it is published for.name too.
Slashdot Mirror
You're wrong, since you assume that adding more servers means adding more single points of failure, and that the failure rate for each server stays constant.
This is misguided for two reasons: A major reason for splitting up things over multiple servers is to run less complex services on each machine. As you reduce complexity, you also reduce the likelyhood of a failure on that specific machine (if nothing else, then for the reason that you may have moved the buggy parts of your code to another server).
Now, if you keep a sequential path through your servers, with no failover, you still may (depending on the quality of your hardware and OS maintenance) achieve greater stability, since most software handle high load/low memory etc. situations worse than they should. It's a good chance your applications will have a lower rate of failure if you can split it up to reduce the chance of resource allocation problems.
But with a well engineered distributed system you will also either make calls persistent, so short term outages for services that aren't time critical doesn't matter because the call will be completed when the system is back up, or you will add multiple servers handling a specific service, and make the caller automatically fail over to one of the other servers if one is down.
Redundancy is a much safer way to bring you to 5-nine's than running everything on a single server: 5-nine's imply about 5 minuts of downtime a year. That doesn't give you much room to deal with hardware failure. I'd much rather have a distributed system where non-critical parts are farmed out to other machines, and critical parts are duplicated on multiple servers.
Actually, we're designing an XML based distributed communications system for our mission critical system right now: The ".name" gTLD registry, that I'm head of development for.
And of course there's no way around that.... No... Of course Asimov didn't spend the better part of his career writing books about unexpected effects and ways to sidestep and circumwent those laws..
</sarcasm>
That's a question of what equipment you use. Sure, some VoIP equipment suck, but you'll find plenty of normal PBX's that suck just as much.
Of course, if you're using VoIP over networks that are also being used for data transfers without switching or quality of service limitations on data transfers, VoIP will suck, because someone will eat up the needed bandwidth.
As for Vovida's system, it seems mostly geared at integrators that wish to put together either custom systems or telephony "appliances" to place with customers. It seems well suited both as a full PBX solution for corporate use, as well as for components if you want to build larger, carrier type, systems.
Obviously, if you want to build carrier type systems you'll need to know what you're doing, and the software is only a small part of what you need.
In many cases they may represent organizations that do so offline, or hidden for view, or they may represent "research institutes" and similar that claim to do unbiased research on nazi ideology, but that acts as propaganda fronts. Some of them will take great care to avoid anything that can be construed as inciting to violence or racial hatred, and leave that for private conversation with people interested in their sites.
That does not mean they don't pose a threat.
But it does mean that you suddenly have to go much farther in censoring ideans and thought if you want to stop them.
Germany does, in many cases, provided it is nazi material. Most other countries do not. Many countries have special provisions for nazi propaganda, but most of them are specific enough to only prevent material or manifestations of ideas that clearly incite violence or racial hatred, and allow material that present, discuss, or even can be interpreted as propaganda for, nazism to go through.
One could discuss whether those laws should be stricted, but there's a slipperly slope from censoring hate groups to censoring legitimate political activity, and the further down you go, the harder it is to stop.
It also used to be a mess to get out - you typically had to go to your local priest or similar and hand him a statement saying you didn't wish to be a member anymore, and frequently they'd be upset about it and try to convince you not to.
Now, however, it is very easy.
The issue of separation keeps resurfacing at regular intervals, often when the debate starts raging about whether or not gay and lesbian priests are supposed to have the same rights as others, or similar issues where the conservative leadership of the church is heavily at odds both with Norwegian law and with the people in general.
Sweden has taken some steps towards separation, in that the local leadership of the state church is actually elected. A while back a group of atheists or agnostics (don't remembers which) actually almost managed to gain control of the church leadership in some counties, because most people don't give a damn about who contols the church.
Sweden is clearly the Scandinavian country where the debate seems to be least heated, and where it seems the path is pretty clear towards separation, and where there has even been talks about deciding on a specific year (don't know if anything was agreed on with regards to that) for separation or for a vote on it (I don't follow Swedish politics much ... :-)
The issue of separation is important not the least because the state church get advantages none others do: In Norway the state church can count as members anyone who has not actively registered as non members, or that haven't registered as a member of another recognized religious or atheist organization, and that have parents that are members of the church.
The other organizations, on the other hand, have to get the membership of the child reaffirmed at the age of 15, and effectively have to require membership dues or similar methods of getting a legally recognizable recognition of your membership to get money support from the government.
The state church doesn't have to care about their membership numbers to get money, either. The way the money allocation is done is that the government decides how much to give the state church, then divides that sum by the number of people that haven't left the church, and that is the amount of money that the other organizations will get per registered member.
This effectively mean that because the church has seriously bloated membership numbers because most people don't care, the state church get a lot more money per active member than the other organizations get.
The state church also have special legal privileges (at least in Norway, don't know about the rest of the Scandinavian countries). For instance the king (and possibly the prime minister?) and at least half the cabinet has to be members of the state church.
So what do you value more? Intelligence and strength of character, or mindless insect pleasure? It's entirely possible to balance the two, but if you go toward either extreme, you must give up some of the other.
I value intelligence and strength of character and freely chosen pleasure most. And I see it as a clear sign of intelligence and strength of character to have broken free from religious dogma, which is basically what I said in the post you replied to.
You said yourself: "As intelligent beings, we are naturally predisposed to be biased towards anything that gives us pleasure"
However, this I disagree with. Most beings, intelligent or otherwise, seek pleasure. That is one of the primary reasons sexual acts for instance typically bring pleasure: we are more likely to reproduce if the immediate act of reproduction produces a benefit for us.
Intelligent beings, on the other hand, explicitly plan their lives to increase pleasure, and to create situations and stimuli that create pleasure - such as porn.
If anything, porn is tool created specifically to give pleasure.
The weakness lie in those who accept outside pressure to let their lives be controlled, instead of choosing to live their own lives and seek pleasure.
To put it short: I value those who break with religion, and lead their lives in a way that give them pleasure and fulfilment, whether sexual or spiritual, provided they don't step on other peoples chances of the same by doing so.
Religion is oppression.
Even if we say that we'll never find anything better than radiowaves in the spectrum SETI is searching to communicate with, SETI have still listened to a narrow time band of only a few decades for each star.
It doesn't take much imagination to see how large the chances of civilizations occuring that had either not reached a radio sending age at the point where the signals SETI are now processing originated, or that had either found some other way of communicated by then, or been destroyed in some way by then.
And that is assuming that life may exist or existed in places where SETI might have detected life in had it existed and been at a radio-sending stage at the right time.
We've only looked at a microscopic part of the universe for an incredibly short time period. There's still a chance ;)
What happens is that if a man views porn regularly, he gets a very distorted view of sex and women, which can cause two things. First he will treat women that do allow him to become close to them in ways that are (for many women) highly inappropriate, which is abuse of those women, and damaging to an otherwise good relationship. And secondly he will be approaching all women with this distorted view, which will cause him to find it more difficult to form relationships with women, and lead back, via frustration, to yet more porn. Its a negative feedback loop, and one that some men find very hard to see their way clear from. This is potentially harmful and dangerous to these men and the women around them.
Can you please point us to ANY credible research that shows that this is the case, please?
This is an old argument, and I have yet to see any evidence for it. Several researches have concluded the opposite: That pornography serve as a healthy way of getting fantasies "out of your system", to prevent them from affecting your daily life.
Note also one of the classic mistakes made in much of the research of this issue: Many reports have described high usage of porn by rapists, and equate that with porn causing or contributing to the rape.
But those numbers are also consistent with the suggestion above that pornography serve as a way of getting fantasies out - if that is correct, then it would be natural to also find a high consumption of pornography by people who have used it to try to stay under control, but that have failed.
For a study to present credible evidence on any connection as mentioned above, the very least they would have to do would be to find a random sample of people that do use porn and a random sample of people who dont use porn, and let parts of the group that does use porn stop using it, and parts of the group that does not use porn start using it, and follow the resulting four groups over a prolonged period of time to see whether members of any of the groups are more or less likely to get abusive or to get problems handling relationships.
This page presents some research (mostly supportive of porn). If you have any specifics criticism of the research presented there, or any credible research showing different results, I'd like to see references to it, to take a look at it.
You are also making the typical mistake and assuming that porn is only consumed by men, when the major market for mainstream porn videos is couples, and videos for use by couples are typically chosen and bought by the woman.
The major reasons couples cite for watching porn together? To inject fantasies and excitement into their relationship, and to explore sides of each other they do not yet know well. In other words: To get closer. How that is detrimental to a relationship, I fail to see. I can however agree that that some couples choose to do so does not mean it's right for everyone.
Yes, some standpoints are more popular than others. But that does not give you any reason to claim that there's a double standard unless you find concrete examples that the same people are supporting mutually contradictory standpoints.
As for the case here: Sure there's exploitation in porn. Sure there's exploitation in politics. And there's exploitation practically everywhere else too.
Whether that is relevant in a discussion of whether porn is bad or not, depends on whether you or someone else can show that there's more exploitation in porn than elsewhere, and if so that that extra exploitation is an inherent feature of porn, and not of specific companies or persons in the porn business.
It is also too easy to say that "she's a drug addict, so she must be exploited since she's working in porn". That is making the assumption that because someone is working in porn, and has a problem, they must automatically have been exploited. In reality there's also other possibilities:
It might be easier for someone with problems to get work in porn, since the porn business is used to stigma, and may look more favorably on other people that are stigmatised than mainstream businesses. It may be that the person doesn't have any moral objections to working in porn.
Unless you claim that hiring someone with drug problems or other problems is inherently exploitation, then making the assumption that it is inherently exploitation if they're hired to do porn require more arguments to back it up.
If someone presents evidence that there's more exploitation in porn than elsewhere, and that is a result of porn in itself and not specific players in the porn business, then yes, porn might be bad.
So far I haven't seen anyone even trying to address that question, however - the focus is normally on equating porn with exploitation without looking at who is exploiting and why, to try to find out whether the exploitation is an inherent problem with porn or with specific companies or people.
If the case is that the exploitation is a result of specific players in the business, then go after those players - force them to comply with the appropriate laws - instead of whine about the product.
While I don't know about Debbie Does Dallas (haven't seen it, even though it recently passed British film censors), if you try to claim that all porn fall in this category, then you're way out there. Lots of porn is made specifically to appeal to women. And in the current market, most mainstream porn videos are targetted towards couples. Yes, there are porn out there for "sad lonely men", but there's also porn out there for happily married women, couples, and anything in between.
Why? Because there's a market for it, and because the most stereotypical market has long been saturated, and targetting other demographics, like women, gives you access to a much larger, broader market.
It shows that you haven't seen any porn... Try investigating before you make broad, sweeping claims about what is for whom. Maybe you'll even find something you like.
This argument assumes whoever you're arguing with believe in the christian God, and care about the silly procreation argument.
It also assumes that there exists no pornography depicting the joys of procreation in a marriage.
The first is a belief that certainly has no proof, and which a great deal of humanity simply rejects.
The argument that sex is only for procreation assigns a purpose to nature, which either implies that nature is sentient, or implies a creator, which brings us back to the first argument - it's just as disputed, and certainly not proven in any way. For those of us who prefer evolution, sex is there because it works as a driving force to get living beings to procreate. And it gives pleasure because that makes it more likely that we'll procreate. But neither assigns any purpose to it. Unless you believe in a deity, sex is just a process, and have no more purpose than the oceans or the stars.
If you want to argue that since sex allows us to procreate, then procreation is it's purpose, even if it wasn't conceived by someone who assigned for a purpose, then you can just as well argue that since sex give us pleasure, then pleasure is also one of the purposes of sex. Seeings as sex is a driving force behind much of the work of man, it can even be said to be a very important purpose.
This argument can just as well be applied in the case of the existence of a "God" as well: If this God fellow didn't intend for people to have sex for fun he must be a complete idiot for making it so much fun. If sex has procreation as its purpose because procreation is one of its functions, then sex can just as well have pleasure as a purpose because pleasure is one of its functions.
You also assume that promiscuous behaviour is "dangerous idea for any society that wishes to hold itself to any kind of moral values". But that is simply wrong. It may be dangerous for a society that wishes to hold iself to any kind of christian moral values, but you are making the assumption that anyone else will share your view of what "any kind of moral values" is.
You go on to criticize even porn made willingly and happly by a married couple:
Because sex is not something to be used to satiate the urges of weaker people. That is pure and simply immoral.
Again you're assuming everyone else share your views about what is moral. You are not explaining what is unnatural or morally reprehensible, as the previous poster asks you to, instead you're just giving the blanked response that it's bad because it violates your morals.
Assuming that we agree with you that people who like porn are "weaker people" (weaker than who? The couple making the video? Presumably if they're happily making porn they like porn themselves), that still leaves us with the question of why it is bad to "willingly (and happlily)" (to quote the previous poster) do something to satiate the urges of those "weaker people"?
Unless you claim that seeing people have sex is somehow harmful?
But back to the "weaker people" part. Presumable this comes from some illution that people who watch porn are lost souls who don't believe in God.
In my eyes, if they've "lost" their faith, that makes them stronger, not weaker: They've managed to break free from the indoctrination of dogma, and to stop relying on a book of mutually inconsistent and ridiculous stories to find meaning in their lives.
Thus, that argument too breaks down if people don't agree with you from the start.
If you want to convince anyone who doesn't already share your beliefs, you better try some arguments that doesn't depend on conservative christian beliefs from the outset...
Only if he was a complete idiot when signing the contract with the lawyer.
The decision that a domain is like a telephone number, and thus is not real estate, and therefore can't be stolen, still stands. However, it is still illegal to commit fraud to get control over it.
Guess what? You've just reinvented the DNS hierarchy, but going from the left hand instead of the right hand, and without solving anything.
The only reason the allocation of IP addresses doesn't really matter is that nobody care if their IP address is easy to remember. Well, almost noone.
Some of the issues involved are: Legal hassles involved with disputes of ownership, serving the zone files for the TLD (which is certainly not trivial, nor cheap), providing fault tolerance in all systems (multiple fault tolerant servers in multiple locations worldwide), etc.
I happen to be Head of Development for the company that will be handling .name, so I do know what kinds of amounts that are involved, and it's not a pretty sight.
The downside? Cost and performance. You won't get high-end performance out of a FPGA, for instance. But on the other hand, for an embedded system an FPGA give you the opportunity of "easily" developing a full system on a chip, test it, debug it in actual hardware, and depending on the volume you need decide whether to use FPGAs or custom ASICs in the final, shipping device.
You don't typically get the VC jackpot that early, and most VC financed companies go through multiple financing rounds before they can stand on their own feet.
Take any file. Compress it with your algorithm. Store the result to a file. Compress it again. Repeat until the result is just a bit. You can't get further down with a computer. And no matter what representation you choose, you'll run into the same limitation.
So while it may seem intuitive that you could use this for compression to yield very small results, and it indeed could work that for a small subset of information, you would still have a huge set of data you would be unable to compress.
In many cases you will see that compression algorithms that work extremely well on some data will work very badly on anything outside a very narrowly defined set. As an example, I can easily compress a megabyte of data to one bit. The only problem is I'll only be able to compress two different sets of a megabyte, and I won't be able to encode anything else, since one bit only allow me to choose between two outputs.
In other words: Sure, you can use it for a compression algorithm, but don't expect to be able to get any revolutionary results from it, because if you want to be able to compress a large set of different inputs, the numbers will necessarily get big for most of the input sets.
In this case the DMCA is requiring that Slashdot take down a document that is posted in blatant violation of copyright law. You may not agree that that should be illegal, buth IMHO, the DeCSS case stands a lot better chance of affecting the DMCA than something like this.
The real problem here is the DMCA.
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer)
Even with Disney's and others massive lobbying to extend it... :-)
The CoS texts, on the other hand have been written in recent years, and has the same copyright protection as any other work. You may not agree that an organization claiming to be a church should be allowed to use copyright protection, but most religious organizations do - just rarely for their core religious texts.
But I suspect thats more a result of the age of most established religions, than a lack of interest in using copyright to protect income.
I'm not going to say too much about it here, but in .name's case, there will be clear restrictions favoring people that either register their own personal name, or a name they have a strong relation or ownership to (and which they must be able to document, if disputed). Look out for Appendix L on the page above - it shouldn't be too long before it is published for .name too.