I don't think "paid for" has ever been the threshold for determining if you've been viewing kiddie porn or if it's illegal.
the reason we imprison people for possessing child pornography is that we assume they paid for it
Ummm... really? I think we imprison people for possessing child pornography is because it's illegal to possess it. Not because they paid for it.
This decision is more about the threshold for 'downloaded' and basically says an image in your cache isn't enough to face legal charges because you may have stumbled into it without any intention to see that crap. So a malicious link that isn't what you think it is isn't enough to land you in jail as a sex offender. Having found some of this crap on usenet once, I think this ruling makes sense if accidentally finding it doesn't make you a felon.
This has nothing to do with if you've paid for it -- it's not like they're trying to make sure you pay your taxes on it.
Or are you seriously claiming that child pornography would be OK if you got it for free? Because you'll truly be well into some creepy territory if you're claiming that.
I never quite understood this privacy thing. What is the problem of someone watching a shadow image of your genitalia? Even if some agent chuckle a bit at your not-so-male panties or broccoli-shaped penis, what is the matter? Probably this sort of thing gets boring after some days having to look at this machine...
Well, in what other context in your life would you essentially be strip searched? The answer is probably nowhere.
So, why do you feel we should subject ourselves to it at the airport? Why should we accept this bit of indignity on the basis that the high-school dropout with a one week training course watching it is probably bored by now?
You go ahead and feel free to get into it anytime you like... me, I will continue to refuse to get into the damned thing. Largely because I simply don't believe them to be safe, and also because I fail to see why I should make it easy on them.
I get mine done at Costco. Cheaper and better than any printer you can buy.
This, or something like this is what I was going to say.
The photos printed from an actual photolab from your digital images are better quality, cheaper, and since they're not on ink-jet ink they don't tend to fade as much.
I concluded several years ago you can't really efficiently buy the ink, paper, and printer to do this on your own. It's just not cost effective. In the long run (and possibly the short run) it's more work and more cost for less overall quality.
Every year for Christmas, the wife prints out a stack of photos I've taken of the family over the last year, and gives them to her grandmother -- grandma loves the pictures and is far more interested in those than anything else.
Wal Mart, Costco, a local photo/camera store... all can do much better than you can do on your own.
because from our point of view, 12.7 billion years ago, that part of the universe didn't exist
Oh come on, do you guys just make this stuff up as you go?;-)
No, seriously, I actually understood that we were seeing what was there 12.7 billion years ago -- WTF does it mean then? I thought this was what existed 12.7 billion years ago from our point of view.
only a blossom slowly opening and revealing parts of the universe to us that's new to us
That sounds dirty, and I'm not sure if it actually sheds any, er, light on this.
I think this actually confirms what I knew in university -- astrophysicists must spend much of their time drunk in order to be able to reconcile this stuff with everything else.
I honestly don't know how physicists keep it straight -- verb tenses must be a bitch. When the photon will have arrived yesterday after it's long journey of instantaneous, we will have known tomorrow what something looked like billions of years ago but never not almost today. Next year, we might know what happened before that.
Somehow I have a vision of a bunch of physicists all trying to convince themselves and one another that they follow this. Possibly precede or happen at the same time, I'm confused.
I would like to propose that "for the children" becomes the new Godwin. If you utter the phrase, the discussion is over, and you've lost the debate automatically.
Except, it seems to operate in reverse.
From a legal standpoint, once someone says "for the children", they win. The rest of us are just nutters at that point since it's not about rational debate any more.
Bribing foreign officials is a violation of the US law Foreign Corrupt Practices Act [wikipedia.org]. So it's surprising that he would admit this to a journalist.
Did you read the article you linked? It's about businesses and trade.
The anti-bribery provisions of the FCPA make it unlawful for a U.S. person, and certain foreign issuers of securities, to make a payment to a foreign official for the purpose of obtaining or retaining business for or with, or directing business to, any person.
So, if you're a retired, wealthy person living in a foreign country, it would seem not to apply if the bribery isn't related to your business.
As I read it, unless he was doing it to gain a competitive advantage or get approval for something faster, the 'normal' level of bribery we've all been told to expect in some countries is fine for him in this case. That's just to keep the locals from hassling you as you go about your daily stuff. But if he's doing it as a wealthy private citizen to avoid being harassed, and not to secure contracts or permits, then this is the status quo of shake down in places where the cops are all corrupt.
For instance, I used to work with a guy from Vietnam. He said when he went back, there was an expectation that when you came through customs that you would have dutifully inserted cash into your passport before handing it to them. Failure to do that could lead to big hassles at the airport. Apparently similar things can happen with cops -- pay a small 'fine' on the spot (or however you want to term it) and they'll refrain from shaking you down for a while.
To me this sounds more like the kind of bribes you pay in places so the police don't come knocking on your door with trumped charges -- pretty much what happened to him. Sounds like someone felt left out.
So, please tell me exactly when we started to differentiate that way. I would dearly love to know this, and I've never been able to figure out exactly where it came from.
In the mid 80's, it was hacker for both. To me 'cracker' is a term which started in the late 90s or so long after plenty of us were already using the word hacker to describe both of those.
I've never bought this distinction, because it sounds arbitrary, and completely doesn't agree with the usage that was widespread at the time.
Someone came along after we'd been using 'hacker' and demanded we start using cracker, and people since then have been saying "oooh, it's cracker, not hacker" ever since.
So, in my experience and opinion, it's a totally bullshit distinction that everyone gets all butt hurt about, but which happened after the term hacker was already widely used for both. I can just never dig up a reference to when the usage started to shift.
They used 'hack' in the populist security sense, rather than the traditional sense
Where does everybody get the sense that back in the day we didn't use the word for both of those things?
In 1988, a hack was used to describe a clever tweak of something to do something new, social engineering, and security intrusions. And, as far as I know, had been used in those ways for some time.
I've simply never gotten this whole "it's crack not hack" stuff, because it feels like we're changing after the fact how the word was actually used in practice. But when I was in highschool in the mid 80s, hacker was the only word we used -- 'cracker' came later.
So how much does the whole organ donations thing add to Facebook's value? Must be another couple of billion easily.
They seem a little overvalued to me. It sounds like when Red Hat went IPO in the late 90's. What is Facebook's actual revenues? Something like $200M quarterly?
Cutting jobs that aren't needed is one way to continue doing well by business standards.
Provided, of course, that these are actually jobs that aren't needed. Corporations sometimes suck at that part.
Several years ago, the entire project team I was on was notified we were being let go. As we got closer to our final days, Sales had their knickers in a twist because they had a huge business deal on the line for the product we built.
Trying to explain to a panicked salesman that fixing that bug or adding that feature wasn't going to happen because your last day is the end of the week is always fun. It boiled down to "wow, how unfortunate for you to be trying to close a multi-million dollar sale when the company has decided they don't need any of the people involved". Of course, the salesman was frantic about the sale and his commission -- couldn't quite understand why that was no longer our problem.
I've seen several instances where the bean counters decided to get rid of certain people without actually knowing what their role was.
Does forensic science care if you can find evidence of blood in a 5000 year old really, really cold case?
Other than the fact they've never found red blood cells that old before? Probably not.
The point here is that they continue to uncover a wealth of information from this Iceman.
In this case, the "crime" isn't so much important as what all they've been able to reconstruct from this body.
Identifying clotting agents in a 5000 year old corpse is definitely getting into uncharted territory. Probably more about the archeology and anthropology as much as anything.
I'd be more impressed if they could pull off specific biochemical markers off the red cells - like blood types or similar markers.
LOL, have you recovered red blood cells from a 5000 year old mummy? You make it sound like what they're doing is common place or something.
The US did manage to get new copyright laws passed in Iraq and Afghanistan. This seems to be a high priority issue for some politicians.
Amazing what happens when you're an occupying force. It used to be called Colonialism.
I seriously doubt that this was a priority in either country -- more like "if you don't pass this law, we're going to stop financial support or have you replaced".
The USTR report also confirms the Canadian government's view that the Special 301 exercise produces little more than a lobbying document on behalf of U.S. industry. The Canadian position, as described to a House of Commons committee in 2007 (and repeated regularly in internal government documents):
In regard to the watch list, Canada does not recognize the 301 watch list process. It basically lacks reliable and objective analysis. It's driven entirely by U.S. industry. We have repeatedly raised this issue of the lack of objective analysis in the 301 watch list process with our U.S. counterparts.
Which basically means the people writing this report are well known shills, who are predisposed to write something which is in favor of what the content industry wants.
Glad to see these guys being told to bugger off if they don't have any facts. Far too much of American policy is dictated by lobbyists.
Constantly listening to the content industry in the US bleating that Canada is a horrible evil country of people who violate copyrights gets tedious.
I have a WP7 phone (HTC). I've never seen those issues. I'm guessing they are hardware/driver issues.
If users are going to have to fight with drivers on their Windows phones, then Microsoft has already lost the race. Nobody wants to muck with drivers on their friggin' phone. What the hell does that even mean? It's not like someone swapped out the network adapter or anything -- so if they wifi doesn't work out of the box, the entire phone is suspect and isn't ready for consumers.
And you can't blame the phone OS if the store can't make their WiFi and phones work together.
Well, then maybe the OS+phone combo, but people kind of expect wi-fi to be a well solved problem. Find the network, enter the password, and go. It's not like it's new or anything.
If I was testing out a phone, and I couldn't get it to use the wifi in the store, I'd simply move onto the next phone. That's some serious warning signals the phone is going to be problematic.
MR. HARRY BLACKITT: Look at them, bloody Catholics, filling the bloody world up with bloody people they can't afford to bloody feed. MRS. BLACKITT: What are we dear?
MR. BLACKITT: Protestant, and fiercely proud of it. MRS. BLACKITT: Hmm. Well, why do they have so many children? MR. BLACKITT: Because... every time they have sexual intercourse, they have to have a baby. MRS. BLACKITT: But it's the same with us, Harry. MR. BLACKITT: What do you mean? MRS. BLACKITT: Well, I mean, we've got two children, and we've had sexual intercourse twice. MR. BLACKITT: That's not the point. We could have it any time we wanted. MRS. BLACKITT: Really? MR. BLACKITT: Oh, yes, and, what's more, because we don't believe in all that Papist claptrap, we can take precautions. MRS. BLACKITT: What, you mean... lock the door? MR. BLACKITT: No, no. I mean, because we are members of the Protestant Reformed Church, which successfully challenged the autocratic power of the Papacy in the mid-sixteenth century, we can wear little rubber devices to prevent issue. MRS. BLACKITT: What d'you mean? MR. BLACKITT: I could, if I wanted, have sexual intercourse with you,... MRS. BLACKITT: Oh, yes, Harry. MR. BLACKITT:...and, by wearing a rubber sheath over my old feller, I could insure... that, when I came off, you would not be impregnated. MRS. BLACKITT: Ooh! MR. BLACKITT: That's what being a Protestant's all about. That's why it's the church for me. That's why it's the church for anyone who respects the individual and the individual's right to decide for him or herself. When Martin Luther nailed his protest up to the church door in fifteen-seventeen, he may not have realised the full significance of what he was doing, but four hundred years later, thanks to him, my dear, I can wear whatever I want on my John Thomas,... [sniff]...and, Protestantism doesn't stop at the simple condom! Oh, no! I can wear French Ticklers if I want. MRS. BLACKITT: You what? MR. BLACKITT: French Ticklers. Black Mambos. Crocodile Ribs. Sheaths that are designed not only to protect, but also to enhance the stimulation of sexual congress. MRS. BLACKITT: Have you got one? MR. BLACKITT: Have I got one? Uh, well, no, but I can go down the road any time I want and walk into Harry's and hold my head up high and say in a loud, steady voice, 'Harry, I want you to sell me a condom. In fact, today, I think I'll have a French Tickler, for I am a Protestant.' MRS. BLACKITT: Well, why don't you?
MR. BLACKITT: But they-- Well, they cannot, 'cause their church never made the great leap out of the Middle Ages and the domination of alien episcopal supremacy.
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I don't think "paid for" has ever been the threshold for determining if you've been viewing kiddie porn or if it's illegal.
Ummm ... really? I think we imprison people for possessing child pornography is because it's illegal to possess it. Not because they paid for it.
This decision is more about the threshold for 'downloaded' and basically says an image in your cache isn't enough to face legal charges because you may have stumbled into it without any intention to see that crap. So a malicious link that isn't what you think it is isn't enough to land you in jail as a sex offender. Having found some of this crap on usenet once, I think this ruling makes sense if accidentally finding it doesn't make you a felon.
This has nothing to do with if you've paid for it -- it's not like they're trying to make sure you pay your taxes on it.
Or are you seriously claiming that child pornography would be OK if you got it for free? Because you'll truly be well into some creepy territory if you're claiming that.
Well, except that's simile not a metaphor.
That's a euphemism. Again, not a metaphor.
So hopefully the people writing this remember a little more of high school literature. ;-)
Well, in what other context in your life would you essentially be strip searched? The answer is probably nowhere.
So, why do you feel we should subject ourselves to it at the airport? Why should we accept this bit of indignity on the basis that the high-school dropout with a one week training course watching it is probably bored by now?
You go ahead and feel free to get into it anytime you like ... me, I will continue to refuse to get into the damned thing. Largely because I simply don't believe them to be safe, and also because I fail to see why I should make it easy on them.
This, or something like this is what I was going to say.
The photos printed from an actual photolab from your digital images are better quality, cheaper, and since they're not on ink-jet ink they don't tend to fade as much.
I concluded several years ago you can't really efficiently buy the ink, paper, and printer to do this on your own. It's just not cost effective. In the long run (and possibly the short run) it's more work and more cost for less overall quality.
Every year for Christmas, the wife prints out a stack of photos I've taken of the family over the last year, and gives them to her grandmother -- grandma loves the pictures and is far more interested in those than anything else.
Wal Mart, Costco, a local photo/camera store ... all can do much better than you can do on your own.
Oh come on, do you guys just make this stuff up as you go? ;-)
No, seriously, I actually understood that we were seeing what was there 12.7 billion years ago -- WTF does it mean then? I thought this was what existed 12.7 billion years ago from our point of view.
That sounds dirty, and I'm not sure if it actually sheds any, er, light on this.
I think this actually confirms what I knew in university -- astrophysicists must spend much of their time drunk in order to be able to reconcile this stuff with everything else.
May I be excused? My brain is full.
I honestly don't know how physicists keep it straight -- verb tenses must be a bitch. When the photon will have arrived yesterday after it's long journey of instantaneous, we will have known tomorrow what something looked like billions of years ago but never not almost today. Next year, we might know what happened before that.
Somehow I have a vision of a bunch of physicists all trying to convince themselves and one another that they follow this. Possibly precede or happen at the same time, I'm confused.
Wait, what? If the photons travelled at the speed of light, they've been doing that for 12.7 billion years.
Assuming photons can count and measure time, would they really "see" this as instantaneous? Or would they have had time to catch up on their reading?
Relativity and light speed are so damned confusing some times.
Except, it seems to operate in reverse.
From a legal standpoint, once someone says "for the children", they win. The rest of us are just nutters at that point since it's not about rational debate any more.
Did you read the article you linked? It's about businesses and trade.
So, if you're a retired, wealthy person living in a foreign country, it would seem not to apply if the bribery isn't related to your business.
As I read it, unless he was doing it to gain a competitive advantage or get approval for something faster, the 'normal' level of bribery we've all been told to expect in some countries is fine for him in this case. That's just to keep the locals from hassling you as you go about your daily stuff. But if he's doing it as a wealthy private citizen to avoid being harassed, and not to secure contracts or permits, then this is the status quo of shake down in places where the cops are all corrupt.
For instance, I used to work with a guy from Vietnam. He said when he went back, there was an expectation that when you came through customs that you would have dutifully inserted cash into your passport before handing it to them. Failure to do that could lead to big hassles at the airport. Apparently similar things can happen with cops -- pay a small 'fine' on the spot (or however you want to term it) and they'll refrain from shaking you down for a while.
To me this sounds more like the kind of bribes you pay in places so the police don't come knocking on your door with trumped charges -- pretty much what happened to him. Sounds like someone felt left out.
So say you. I'm familiar with the usage, but the 'crack' would have been done by a 'hacker'.
The crack purely denoted a version which had the copyright broken. It was still widely described as hacking.
So, please tell me exactly when we started to differentiate that way. I would dearly love to know this, and I've never been able to figure out exactly where it came from.
In the mid 80's, it was hacker for both. To me 'cracker' is a term which started in the late 90s or so long after plenty of us were already using the word hacker to describe both of those.
I've never bought this distinction, because it sounds arbitrary, and completely doesn't agree with the usage that was widespread at the time.
Someone came along after we'd been using 'hacker' and demanded we start using cracker, and people since then have been saying "oooh, it's cracker, not hacker" ever since.
So, in my experience and opinion, it's a totally bullshit distinction that everyone gets all butt hurt about, but which happened after the term hacker was already widely used for both. I can just never dig up a reference to when the usage started to shift.
Where does everybody get the sense that back in the day we didn't use the word for both of those things?
In 1988, a hack was used to describe a clever tweak of something to do something new, social engineering, and security intrusions. And, as far as I know, had been used in those ways for some time.
I've simply never gotten this whole "it's crack not hack" stuff, because it feels like we're changing after the fact how the word was actually used in practice. But when I was in highschool in the mid 80s, hacker was the only word we used -- 'cracker' came later.
Yes.
So how much does the whole organ donations thing add to Facebook's value? Must be another couple of billion easily.
They seem a little overvalued to me. It sounds like when Red Hat went IPO in the late 90's. What is Facebook's actual revenues? Something like $200M quarterly?
Bah, they were too busy lining up the hookers. ;-)
Well, the original headline was copied verbatim from the first linked Article.
Whining about Slashdot writing an inflammatory headline that they didn't write is kinda pointless. TFS is pretty much a cut and paste as well.
Provided, of course, that these are actually jobs that aren't needed. Corporations sometimes suck at that part.
Several years ago, the entire project team I was on was notified we were being let go. As we got closer to our final days, Sales had their knickers in a twist because they had a huge business deal on the line for the product we built.
Trying to explain to a panicked salesman that fixing that bug or adding that feature wasn't going to happen because your last day is the end of the week is always fun. It boiled down to "wow, how unfortunate for you to be trying to close a multi-million dollar sale when the company has decided they don't need any of the people involved". Of course, the salesman was frantic about the sale and his commission -- couldn't quite understand why that was no longer our problem.
I've seen several instances where the bean counters decided to get rid of certain people without actually knowing what their role was.
How the hell do you keep something like moving POTUS a secret? The convoy and Airforce One aren't exactly subtle.
Once this information is known by anybody, it can just as easily become public ... more so with things like Twitter.
Other than the fact they've never found red blood cells that old before? Probably not.
The point here is that they continue to uncover a wealth of information from this Iceman.
In this case, the "crime" isn't so much important as what all they've been able to reconstruct from this body.
Identifying clotting agents in a 5000 year old corpse is definitely getting into uncharted territory. Probably more about the archeology and anthropology as much as anything.
LOL, have you recovered red blood cells from a 5000 year old mummy? You make it sound like what they're doing is common place or something.
And people have been ignoring it just as long.
Which may or may not suggest that from a biological perspective, monogamy is a purely social construct. Quite possibly one which doesn't work so well.
Looks like we've melted their server already.
So, I'll just welcome our new hexapod overlords, and hope to eventually see pics.
How do economists make 'accurate' predictions now?
Amazing what happens when you're an occupying force. It used to be called Colonialism.
I seriously doubt that this was a priority in either country -- more like "if you don't pass this law, we're going to stop financial support or have you replaced".
Classy.
This is the best part:
Which basically means the people writing this report are well known shills, who are predisposed to write something which is in favor of what the content industry wants.
Glad to see these guys being told to bugger off if they don't have any facts. Far too much of American policy is dictated by lobbyists.
Constantly listening to the content industry in the US bleating that Canada is a horrible evil country of people who violate copyrights gets tedious.
If users are going to have to fight with drivers on their Windows phones, then Microsoft has already lost the race. Nobody wants to muck with drivers on their friggin' phone. What the hell does that even mean? It's not like someone swapped out the network adapter or anything -- so if they wifi doesn't work out of the box, the entire phone is suspect and isn't ready for consumers.
Well, then maybe the OS+phone combo, but people kind of expect wi-fi to be a well solved problem. Find the network, enter the password, and go. It's not like it's new or anything.
If I was testing out a phone, and I couldn't get it to use the wifi in the store, I'd simply move onto the next phone. That's some serious warning signals the phone is going to be problematic.
Can't resist this one: