You have no idea what you're talking about, do you?
Did I know about Facebook Connect? Nope. Do I believe that gives me any more reason to trust in this? Absolutely not.
Then again, I've disabled APIs against my Facebook account... I don't want every web site I visit to be able to access that information.
You don't even need to provide your password if you're already logged in.
That's the last thing I'd want enabled. Otherwise half of the websites you hit would suddenly have access to my information. Fuck that.
In fact, it sounds incredibly stupid and risky. Because when I think of Microsoft and Facebook, neither of them are making me think "now there's a couple of companies I trust to share my information without me needing to do anything".
This is just another example of companies trying to make their products share information that the users generally probably don't.
users can log in with Facebook or Windows Live IDs
So, you need to provide Microsoft with your login credentials to do this. Brilliant. Bet that violates Facebook's TOS.
I rank that right up there with trusting Facebook with my gmail password so they can find me new friends... sorry there skippy, but WTF do you think makes me want to trust you with the password to my account? Sure, I believe you when you tell me you won't save it. Oh, wait, I don't.
I have no idea of why I would want Microsoft to allow Facebook to know all of the searches I do on Bing. In fact, I have no idea of who would want this.
This just sounds like one of those solutions in search of a problem.
Dude, it's done something like $1 billion in box office revenue, and this is Slashdot... do you really think anybody needs a link to know who the hell Iron Man is?;-)
one-passenger capsule intended for a purely ballistic flight
So, how does one handle landing with that purely ballistic flight? Wouldn't this just be a crater on impact?
I think this got summed up nicely in Armageddon...
Rockhound: Yeah, I remember this one. Its where the, uh, the coyote
sat his ass down in a slingshot then he strapped himself to an Acme
rocket. Is that - is that what were doin here? Harry Stamper: [under his breath] Rockhound. Rockhound: No, no, really, because it didnt work out too well for
the coyote, Harry. Harry Stamper: [talking over him] Hey, Rock. Knock it off. Truman: Well, actually, we have a lot better rockets than the coyote.
I'm sure this is slightly more complicated than Wile E Coyote, but it sure as heck sounds like it.
It's not something I'd be willing to do based on the description, but I'm sure someone will.
In what court is Iran going so sue Google? Does Google have a presence in Iran? Or are they going to send lawyers over to the Great Satan and file in their jurisdiction? That would be hilarious -- country has feelings hurt by multinational company.
If I look on google Maps, Tibet is labelled as Tibet... not the "northern resource area" or whatever China calls it. I still refer to it as Burma, not Myanmar.
omitting the name Persian Gulf is (like) playing with the feelings and realities of the Iranian nation
And therein lies the rub... countries don't have feelings. Getting all butt-hurt because the rest of the world won't label things to match what you want them to is childish and petulant... but I guess that's pretty much Iran's foreign policy.
The Foreign Ministry spokesman has a tiny penis, and a brain to match.
I'd kind of like to see Sasha Baron Cohen as the Dictator simply reading the public statements which have come out of Iran over the last several years -- that would be bloody hilarious. Or, totally indistinguishable from the real thing.
What the boss is referring to as "monkey work" is what you'd toss in the lap of "programmers" while the rest is what you'd toss in the lap of the "engineers"
I have simply never seen the kind of "programmer" you describe. It may exist, but I've got no idea where.
All of the development I've ever been involved was a group of people, usually with BSc's and/or MSc's in comp-sci, who did their design and development work, planned out the spec, and implemented it themselves.
In my experience, we're the guys sitting in the meetings working on designing a solution, and we see it to its conclusion.
I have never seen the kind of programmer you describe in which people design the whole thing, and they come in to "hang flesh on bone".
Maybe this is unique to a certain kind of shop, and maybe I just never actually saw it -- but in my experience, that kind of distinction seems a little artificial.
I've seen a couple of people who want to be architects and try to flesh out some high-level conceptual stuff about what we're trying to build -- but then you need to take the "we're going to build a pony" kind of design and turn that into an actual meaningful software design. Do people actually 'design' a software architecture in its entirety and then toss it over the fence as an exercise for the reader to implement? Who has that kind of luxury?
Heck, in my experience, people who expected to have a fully fleshed out design handed to them to implement... well, we never wanted any of those.
I used to work with a team of developers, but for reasons outside the scope of this question, my boss and I are the only ones left. My boss says that our new strategy is to use outsourced developers to do the 'monkey work' for us.
You have no hope in hell of keeping a product going. You have no way of enforcing your deadlines. You're basically middle-men who may or may not be able to cajole your supplier into doing what you need when you need it.
The projects I've been on that have used outsourcing usually required a fair amount of management to get them to do well-defined tasks to spec, and deliver that on time and working as expected. What you're describing sounds like it simply can't work.
If what you do is primarily make software, and your boss calls that the "monkey work", then you're screwed. That's not really a strategy which is going to work, which means your small IT company will implode in a while
Seriously, what is left for you guys to do? Collect the money and laugh all the way to the bank? What value do you guys add at this point?
I can't say whether entity relationship diagrams were appropriate in the situation you describe but there is nothing wrong in principle in using ER diagrams to describe non-RDB systems. ER diagrams describe the logical or semantic model, not the physical implementation, and are therefore DB agnostic.
LOL, let me paint a more vivid picture... what you say is true for the most part, but in this example it was fairly egregious.
Imagine you're a new middle manager at a tech company. Imagine you come from a world where everything is an RDB. Now imagine that based on a few meetings, you've taken a system you know nothing about, and designed your own ER diagram and insisted everybody use it in their documentation.
Now imagine that the resulting ER diagram had nothing to do with the actual system, incorrectly described the semantics of the whole thing, and was written in a piece of software which only that middle manager had a license to (his own personal license) and therefore nobody else in the company could access -- other than the exported image he provided us. Oh, and you've taken everything to fourth normal form making it apply even less to the system in question. It's a pretty, but meaningless, abstraction.
In this case, the manager was completely wrong, and there were aspects of the behavior which couldn't be modeled using his ER diagrams -- they just didn't line up conceptually, and worked differently.
This was a highly specialized problem domain, wasn't implemented using an RDB in any way, and had a couple of things which didn't map to the vocabulary available to him -- or at least it didn't map to what the tool provided.
The guy was such a prat it took about two weeks for the technical people to start completely ignoring everything he said. It took about 2-3 weeks after that before the rest of the managers also started ignoring him. Not long after that, he wasn't around.
In this context, in this system, I believe the ER diagram was incapable of actually expressing some of the relationships and/or semantics of the system (this was now well over a decade ago so I don't remember the particulars) and it was being championed by someone who was an idiot -- it may not be the ER diagram itself. But when we tried to explain how his model was completely inaccurate, he didn't seem to be able to grasp the reasoning and kept sputtering about how it must be correct because there was no way we could have implemented it without it being just like his diagram.
So, you're right -- maybe in this context someone else could have been able to map the actual stuff to the model. But I do remember a couple of 20+ year geeks with big grey beards trying to explain why this was never going to be suitable in this case (to no avail).
If you're Oracle, and you're claiming that "checking if an integer is within a range is your super top secret IP that Google stole" it is. Their lawyer was outright saying this would be difficult to write.
A judge with a working BS meter is never a good thing for the plaintiff -- I believe you missed the inherent sarcasm.
The ones who see "database" and think it must have a rigid structure, where all connections are made with JOINs
So, I'm actually curious about this part.
I've worked in RDB's, and I've worked in things that are more based on Berkeley DB... but I am actually having a hard time thinking of specific examples of where I'd want something database-ish and not have the need for JOINs.
Berkeley gives you key value pairs, but the product I worked on which was based on it allowed us to do searching on multiple of those, which was kind of join-ish.
I just can't think of a specific case in which I have data structured enough to be in a database, but unstructured enough to never have joins, schemas, or the rest of the RDB trappings. But it may just be that I've not encountered any yet.
And most importantly, make sure you know the difference.
Because I should think someone who thinks you should ditch your RDBMS when it's the thing you need to keep using is going to cause you more problems than they're worth. Of course, the opposite is true... I remember someone who insisted in writing ER diagrams to describe our system, despite it not being an RDB, and not being accurately described by ER diagrams -- but to him everything was an ER diagram.
It's not uncommon for geeks to push to use the latest stuff simply because it's the latest. (Or, as you point out, use something because that's what they've always used)
I've actually seen someone suggesting we scrap an architecture to go with something he'd read recently -- despite having insisted we switch to the current architecture after reading about that.
After a certain point, you just realize they're a technology magpie and tell them to STFU if they're not providing solid reasoning for why this is better in this context. After a while "because it's newer and better" becomes code for "shiny and pretty". Especially if these whims happen in shorter periods than your development lifecycle.
Easiest solution is to state (via rule or regulation) that no TSA screener can open a bag if the camera's are "out of service" for any reason
Yeah, brilliant, that should bring them into line.
I mean, it's not as if there's any rules against them to stealing from your luggage or using their position to smuggle drugs, which is why they can get away with it now. We just need a rule -- why did nobody think of this before?
Seriously, though -- we just need to stop trusting them by default and make sure they're under video surveillance all the time, just like the rest of us. There's been enough instances of the airport security/baggage people being the ones stealing and smuggling that you can't just take them on face value.
This is absolutely a case where "trust, but verify" is needed. But, of course, they'll complain their privacy is being invaded and that it's not cost effective to monitor them -- despite that's what happened to the rest of us.
Strictly speaking, it's not a 'lie'. It just glosses over things like what you said.
When he said "more security gives you a chance at being more secure", it's a totally un-falsifiable statement. It's such an open ended statement as to be meaningless since it doesn't say anything at all.
I'm not going to refute anything you said, because I agree with you. But in terms of the justification they provided, it can't be refuted because it's not a true enough statement to be refuted.
And, of course, trying to apply reason here will only get you a "Why do you hate America?" kind of response because those pushing these things are beyond any form of fully rational discussion.
Every airport in the world with a little spare money will follow the American example eventually, and flying anywhere will turn into a truly Orwellian experience
Actually, it might be worse -- the USA will require that any airport boarding passengers destined for the US will have an equivalent level of security, and be required to share this in real time with the CIA, or be told they can't send planes.
So, it won't really be about 'spare' money, as money you have to spend if you plan on being a departure point for US bound people.
I'm waiting for them to just give up and start stripping people so they can be put into blast-proof shipping containers while they're bound and blindfolded for transport -- just to be sure. You know, like Silence of the Lambs meets Cattle Class in air travel.
I wish I was only joking. But we seem to be trending there.
Maybe now they can finally catch all those TSA screeners pilfering things from people's bags.
I'm betting somehow they won't be putting cameras there, or they'll be conveniently out of service most of the time.
But I would absolutely agree these people need to be under 100% surveillance as well -- they pose far more risk than most air travelers, both in terms of smuggling and in terms of security risk.
"The ability to have more coverage, by definition, is you have the chance to be safer."
Who needs 'proof' when all you've said is that having more coverage gives you a chance to be safer? Well, yes, "it might help", which simply can't be refuted since it doesn't really say much.
One more step towards the 100% surveillance society we're moving towards.
It's kind cool, and if you're that far into the whole body piercing thing, go ahead.
But I've already seen commercial products which basically give you a watch strap to attach to the exact same iPod. Google for "ipod watch" and you'll find them.
So, me, I'd stick with the solution which doesn't involve embedding something in my arm for a product which is likely to change over time or get replaced. Especially since I own more than one watch.
Still, it is kind of cool from a certain perspective.
And the costs would be much higher. Just look at the cost of the US prison system.
It's the one thing those claiming "why should I pay for your child's education" would all agree to pay for I bet.
As long as the government is protecting their property rights by locking up people who would take it from them, they owe nothing else to the rest of us.
Kind of an asymmetrical system if you ask me. One which only favors those with wealth.
I tried one in my living/dining area. It got stuck under the dining room table amongst the chair/table legs, and it got hung up on the living room rug.
So does mine, but that doesn't mean it's not worth it to move the chairs and police up the stuff it gets stuck on.
Overall, our carpets have been vacuumed a whole lot more with the Roomba than without.
How is that? At one time, owning child pornography images meant that the images were very likely to have been paid for by the owner, so that statement followed. I am not sure that owning child pornography still implies that the owner paid for or otherwise encouraged its production.
The illegality has never been based on having paid for it. I don't know why you keep bringing that up. It's spurious, and irrelevant. It's a complete red-herring.
The images are a record of a criminal act. So in the same way a snuff film would be illegal, having a depiction of an illegal act is just propagating the illegal act. Same for statutory rape.
Producing child pornography is an example of a justifiable limit on free speech rights: to produce child pornography, a child has to be harmed.
So then why are you looking for justification of why it shouldn't be illegal to possess child pornography? Either you accept what you just wrote on face value, or you think it should be otherwise. If the latter, please enlighten us.
Oh look, name-calling and ad hominem attacks.
Hardly -- you're the one asking me to explain why possession of child pornography should be illegal. Which means you're either in favor of it, or engaging in a highly abstract logic exercise and think the rest of us should play along.
You think that some laws require no justification
I never said that, and you know it. What I did say is that since I agree with those laws as being fairly self evident, I have no intention of defending them to someone who feels like I should be the one to justify them. For the same reason I don't feel the need to justify laws against beating your wife, murder, or many other things.
You're the one saying it should be okay to have child pornography unless you bought it, as if the act of purchasing it is what exclusively makes the possession of it illegal. I can't even begin to fathom why you might differentiate on the basis of if you paid for it or not.
you will not even expend two seconds of mental effort to figure out why it makes sense for thousands of men to be imprisoned, at tax payer expense
OK, if you're the kind of person who wants to keep pictures which commemorate and perpetuate an illegal act, then your personal culpability for that illegal act is the same as if you were involved. Short of fantasizing about doing the exact same kind of illegal act, I fail to see why you should be in lawful possession of those images.
Since I have yet to hear of why this should be protected speech, or qualify as 'art', I fail to see why this shouldn't lead to those thousands of men being imprisoned -- in the same way that if you're keeping a video of the gang rape of a 12 year old girl, I fail to see how that has any merit or legal standing.
You're the one saying we should be having the argument to the contrary, but you've yet to say a single thing in defense of that position. So, again, please, enlighten us with how you believe that possession of child pornography you didn't buy should be any different from stuff you downloaded for free?
Before you accuse me of ad hominem attacks and being closed minded, why don't you actually say something in defense of your own position? So far you've mostly just insisted that everyone else justify why it is illegal.
Now, if you have a good reason why possessing child pornography is the problem in and of itself, as opposed to it being a problem because it encourages child abuse, let us hear it.
How about you tell me how possessing child pornography is a good thing that can be justified? Simply owning those images encourages child abuse -- at least, that's the position of the law, and not one I'm inclined to disagree with.
How, exactly, does possessing child pornography not encourage child abuse? Why should it be legal to possess those images?
The laws regulating Child Pornography are strict liability laws. This means that you have violated the laws when you knowingly create, distribute or view material considered to be child pornography.
There's no wiggle room or ambiguity -- it's like statutory rape, that 12 year old can't consent no matter how much you want her to. This court ruling just gives a little more room for people who accidentally find it.
But if you seek it out and download it, I still agree it should be illegal.
But, hey, if you want to make your NAMBLA pitch here, go ahead... I'm sure that would be fascinating. One so rarely hears someone defending child pornography. It could be amusing. But I'm sure as hell not going to defend why child pornography should be illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Did I know about Facebook Connect? Nope. Do I believe that gives me any more reason to trust in this? Absolutely not.
Then again, I've disabled APIs against my Facebook account ... I don't want every web site I visit to be able to access that information.
That's the last thing I'd want enabled. Otherwise half of the websites you hit would suddenly have access to my information. Fuck that.
In fact, it sounds incredibly stupid and risky. Because when I think of Microsoft and Facebook, neither of them are making me think "now there's a couple of companies I trust to share my information without me needing to do anything".
This is just another example of companies trying to make their products share information that the users generally probably don't.
So, you need to provide Microsoft with your login credentials to do this. Brilliant. Bet that violates Facebook's TOS.
I rank that right up there with trusting Facebook with my gmail password so they can find me new friends ... sorry there skippy, but WTF do you think makes me want to trust you with the password to my account? Sure, I believe you when you tell me you won't save it. Oh, wait, I don't.
I have no idea of why I would want Microsoft to allow Facebook to know all of the searches I do on Bing. In fact, I have no idea of who would want this.
This just sounds like one of those solutions in search of a problem.
Dude, it's done something like $1 billion in box office revenue, and this is Slashdot ... do you really think anybody needs a link to know who the hell Iron Man is? ;-)
So, how does one handle landing with that purely ballistic flight? Wouldn't this just be a crater on impact?
I think this got summed up nicely in Armageddon ...
I'm sure this is slightly more complicated than Wile E Coyote, but it sure as heck sounds like it.
It's not something I'd be willing to do based on the description, but I'm sure someone will.
In what court is Iran going so sue Google? Does Google have a presence in Iran? Or are they going to send lawyers over to the Great Satan and file in their jurisdiction? That would be hilarious -- country has feelings hurt by multinational company.
If I look on google Maps, Tibet is labelled as Tibet ... not the "northern resource area" or whatever China calls it. I still refer to it as Burma, not Myanmar.
And therein lies the rub ... countries don't have feelings. Getting all butt-hurt because the rest of the world won't label things to match what you want them to is childish and petulant ... but I guess that's pretty much Iran's foreign policy.
The Foreign Ministry spokesman has a tiny penis, and a brain to match.
I'd kind of like to see Sasha Baron Cohen as the Dictator simply reading the public statements which have come out of Iran over the last several years -- that would be bloody hilarious. Or, totally indistinguishable from the real thing.
I have simply never seen the kind of "programmer" you describe. It may exist, but I've got no idea where.
All of the development I've ever been involved was a group of people, usually with BSc's and/or MSc's in comp-sci, who did their design and development work, planned out the spec, and implemented it themselves.
In my experience, we're the guys sitting in the meetings working on designing a solution, and we see it to its conclusion.
I have never seen the kind of programmer you describe in which people design the whole thing, and they come in to "hang flesh on bone".
Maybe this is unique to a certain kind of shop, and maybe I just never actually saw it -- but in my experience, that kind of distinction seems a little artificial.
I've seen a couple of people who want to be architects and try to flesh out some high-level conceptual stuff about what we're trying to build -- but then you need to take the "we're going to build a pony" kind of design and turn that into an actual meaningful software design. Do people actually 'design' a software architecture in its entirety and then toss it over the fence as an exercise for the reader to implement? Who has that kind of luxury?
Heck, in my experience, people who expected to have a fully fleshed out design handed to them to implement ... well, we never wanted any of those.
You have no hope in hell of keeping a product going. You have no way of enforcing your deadlines. You're basically middle-men who may or may not be able to cajole your supplier into doing what you need when you need it.
The projects I've been on that have used outsourcing usually required a fair amount of management to get them to do well-defined tasks to spec, and deliver that on time and working as expected. What you're describing sounds like it simply can't work.
If what you do is primarily make software, and your boss calls that the "monkey work", then you're screwed. That's not really a strategy which is going to work, which means your small IT company will implode in a while
Seriously, what is left for you guys to do? Collect the money and laugh all the way to the bank? What value do you guys add at this point?
LOL, let me paint a more vivid picture ... what you say is true for the most part, but in this example it was fairly egregious.
Imagine you're a new middle manager at a tech company. Imagine you come from a world where everything is an RDB. Now imagine that based on a few meetings, you've taken a system you know nothing about, and designed your own ER diagram and insisted everybody use it in their documentation.
Now imagine that the resulting ER diagram had nothing to do with the actual system, incorrectly described the semantics of the whole thing, and was written in a piece of software which only that middle manager had a license to (his own personal license) and therefore nobody else in the company could access -- other than the exported image he provided us. Oh, and you've taken everything to fourth normal form making it apply even less to the system in question. It's a pretty, but meaningless, abstraction.
In this case, the manager was completely wrong, and there were aspects of the behavior which couldn't be modeled using his ER diagrams -- they just didn't line up conceptually, and worked differently.
This was a highly specialized problem domain, wasn't implemented using an RDB in any way, and had a couple of things which didn't map to the vocabulary available to him -- or at least it didn't map to what the tool provided.
The guy was such a prat it took about two weeks for the technical people to start completely ignoring everything he said. It took about 2-3 weeks after that before the rest of the managers also started ignoring him. Not long after that, he wasn't around.
In this context, in this system, I believe the ER diagram was incapable of actually expressing some of the relationships and/or semantics of the system (this was now well over a decade ago so I don't remember the particulars) and it was being championed by someone who was an idiot -- it may not be the ER diagram itself. But when we tried to explain how his model was completely inaccurate, he didn't seem to be able to grasp the reasoning and kept sputtering about how it must be correct because there was no way we could have implemented it without it being just like his diagram.
So, you're right -- maybe in this context someone else could have been able to map the actual stuff to the model. But I do remember a couple of 20+ year geeks with big grey beards trying to explain why this was never going to be suitable in this case (to no avail).
If you're Oracle, and you're claiming that "checking if an integer is within a range is your super top secret IP that Google stole" it is. Their lawyer was outright saying this would be difficult to write.
A judge with a working BS meter is never a good thing for the plaintiff -- I believe you missed the inherent sarcasm.
So, I'm actually curious about this part.
I've worked in RDB's, and I've worked in things that are more based on Berkeley DB ... but I am actually having a hard time thinking of specific examples of where I'd want something database-ish and not have the need for JOINs.
Berkeley gives you key value pairs, but the product I worked on which was based on it allowed us to do searching on multiple of those, which was kind of join-ish.
I just can't think of a specific case in which I have data structured enough to be in a database, but unstructured enough to never have joins, schemas, or the rest of the RDB trappings. But it may just be that I've not encountered any yet.
And most importantly, make sure you know the difference.
Because I should think someone who thinks you should ditch your RDBMS when it's the thing you need to keep using is going to cause you more problems than they're worth. Of course, the opposite is true ... I remember someone who insisted in writing ER diagrams to describe our system, despite it not being an RDB, and not being accurately described by ER diagrams -- but to him everything was an ER diagram.
It's not uncommon for geeks to push to use the latest stuff simply because it's the latest. (Or, as you point out, use something because that's what they've always used)
I've actually seen someone suggesting we scrap an architecture to go with something he'd read recently -- despite having insisted we switch to the current architecture after reading about that.
After a certain point, you just realize they're a technology magpie and tell them to STFU if they're not providing solid reasoning for why this is better in this context. After a while "because it's newer and better" becomes code for "shiny and pretty". Especially if these whims happen in shorter periods than your development lifecycle.
Utterly false.
If you don't let anybody on the plane, nobody can blow it up.
By which I believe you mean the Sears catalog. ;-)
Yeah, brilliant, that should bring them into line.
I mean, it's not as if there's any rules against them to stealing from your luggage or using their position to smuggle drugs, which is why they can get away with it now. We just need a rule -- why did nobody think of this before?
Seriously, though -- we just need to stop trusting them by default and make sure they're under video surveillance all the time, just like the rest of us. There's been enough instances of the airport security/baggage people being the ones stealing and smuggling that you can't just take them on face value.
This is absolutely a case where "trust, but verify" is needed. But, of course, they'll complain their privacy is being invaded and that it's not cost effective to monitor them -- despite that's what happened to the rest of us.
Strictly speaking, it's not a 'lie'. It just glosses over things like what you said.
When he said "more security gives you a chance at being more secure", it's a totally un-falsifiable statement. It's such an open ended statement as to be meaningless since it doesn't say anything at all.
I'm not going to refute anything you said, because I agree with you. But in terms of the justification they provided, it can't be refuted because it's not a true enough statement to be refuted.
And, of course, trying to apply reason here will only get you a "Why do you hate America?" kind of response because those pushing these things are beyond any form of fully rational discussion.
Actually, it might be worse -- the USA will require that any airport boarding passengers destined for the US will have an equivalent level of security, and be required to share this in real time with the CIA, or be told they can't send planes.
So, it won't really be about 'spare' money, as money you have to spend if you plan on being a departure point for US bound people.
I'm waiting for them to just give up and start stripping people so they can be put into blast-proof shipping containers while they're bound and blindfolded for transport -- just to be sure. You know, like Silence of the Lambs meets Cattle Class in air travel.
I wish I was only joking. But we seem to be trending there.
I'm betting somehow they won't be putting cameras there, or they'll be conveniently out of service most of the time.
But I would absolutely agree these people need to be under 100% surveillance as well -- they pose far more risk than most air travelers, both in terms of smuggling and in terms of security risk.
I for one welcome our new running-through-the-airport-buttnaked people-of-color overlords.
I believe that would make air travel far more interesting. :-P
Who needs 'proof' when all you've said is that having more coverage gives you a chance to be safer? Well, yes, "it might help", which simply can't be refuted since it doesn't really say much.
One more step towards the 100% surveillance society we're moving towards.
It's kind cool, and if you're that far into the whole body piercing thing, go ahead.
But I've already seen commercial products which basically give you a watch strap to attach to the exact same iPod. Google for "ipod watch" and you'll find them.
So, me, I'd stick with the solution which doesn't involve embedding something in my arm for a product which is likely to change over time or get replaced. Especially since I own more than one watch.
Still, it is kind of cool from a certain perspective.
And the costs would be much higher. Just look at the cost of the US prison system.
It's the one thing those claiming "why should I pay for your child's education" would all agree to pay for I bet.
As long as the government is protecting their property rights by locking up people who would take it from them, they owe nothing else to the rest of us.
Kind of an asymmetrical system if you ask me. One which only favors those with wealth.
I think this is more like the "middle of the end" of RIM -- they've been losing ground for a couple of years now.
We're well past the beginning.
So does mine, but that doesn't mean it's not worth it to move the chairs and police up the stuff it gets stuck on.
Overall, our carpets have been vacuumed a whole lot more with the Roomba than without.
The illegality has never been based on having paid for it. I don't know why you keep bringing that up. It's spurious, and irrelevant. It's a complete red-herring.
The images are a record of a criminal act. So in the same way a snuff film would be illegal, having a depiction of an illegal act is just propagating the illegal act. Same for statutory rape.
So then why are you looking for justification of why it shouldn't be illegal to possess child pornography? Either you accept what you just wrote on face value, or you think it should be otherwise. If the latter, please enlighten us.
Hardly -- you're the one asking me to explain why possession of child pornography should be illegal. Which means you're either in favor of it, or engaging in a highly abstract logic exercise and think the rest of us should play along.
I never said that, and you know it. What I did say is that since I agree with those laws as being fairly self evident, I have no intention of defending them to someone who feels like I should be the one to justify them. For the same reason I don't feel the need to justify laws against beating your wife, murder, or many other things.
You're the one saying it should be okay to have child pornography unless you bought it, as if the act of purchasing it is what exclusively makes the possession of it illegal. I can't even begin to fathom why you might differentiate on the basis of if you paid for it or not.
OK, if you're the kind of person who wants to keep pictures which commemorate and perpetuate an illegal act, then your personal culpability for that illegal act is the same as if you were involved. Short of fantasizing about doing the exact same kind of illegal act, I fail to see why you should be in lawful possession of those images.
Since I have yet to hear of why this should be protected speech, or qualify as 'art', I fail to see why this shouldn't lead to those thousands of men being imprisoned -- in the same way that if you're keeping a video of the gang rape of a 12 year old girl, I fail to see how that has any merit or legal standing.
You're the one saying we should be having the argument to the contrary, but you've yet to say a single thing in defense of that position. So, again, please, enlighten us with how you believe that possession of child pornography you didn't buy should be any different from stuff you downloaded for free?
Before you accuse me of ad hominem attacks and being closed minded, why don't you actually say something in defense of your own position? So far you've mostly just insisted that everyone else justify why it is illegal.
How about you tell me how possessing child pornography is a good thing that can be justified? Simply owning those images encourages child abuse -- at least, that's the position of the law, and not one I'm inclined to disagree with.
How, exactly, does possessing child pornography not encourage child abuse? Why should it be legal to possess those images?
Child pornography is a strict liability law:
There's no wiggle room or ambiguity -- it's like statutory rape, that 12 year old can't consent no matter how much you want her to. This court ruling just gives a little more room for people who accidentally find it.
But if you seek it out and download it, I still agree it should be illegal.
But, hey, if you want to make your NAMBLA pitch here, go ahead ... I'm sure that would be fascinating. One so rarely hears someone defending child pornography. It could be amusing. But I'm sure as hell not going to defend why child pornography should be illegal.