The legislator's counterpoint is that the actual act which took place was not illegal. Thus, we might imagine that if someone made a film fictionally depicting a murder, it could be legal on the grounds that no actual assault occurred and that there's an understanding that it is fiction. On the other hand, if it's a real murder, it's a snuff film. On the other hand, if it's a real murder, it's a snuff film. Similarly, at least some "violent" pornography goes to lengths to show that the persons involved consent to and even enjoy the act by showing before/after interviews.
It's perfectly possible for a porn movie to involve acting, stunts, effects, camera tricks, etc. just as much as any other movie. You have no way of knowing if the "interviews" are scripted. Only the people who were actually "on set" know what actually happened.
I can't see the difference between this and banning "violent" movies of any type. That includes pretty much anything coming out of Hollywood with 16+ years age limit.
The "ratings bar" is rather lower than 16+. It's rather hard to get more violent that something like the Star Wars "Death Star".
A movie simulating a murder is a movie simulating a murder. Whether or not the story is acted out by actors with or without clothes shouldn't really matter.
Similarly a movie showing a WMD being deployed is also simulating murder, even if you don't see any bodies (even in the real world extremely violent deaths tend not to leave much in the way of identifiable bodies), especially if a character with telepathic abilities notices the resulting death of billions of people.
What it comes down to is that there's no rational reason to believe that violent pornography has any effect on committing violent crimes. Yes, it's common sense, but in my experience, common sense and truth are often diametrically opposed.
Which is something which applies to various fields of engineering, security as well as to all sorts of human behaviour. e.g. getting a movie, book, record, etc banned is a very effective way of ensuring that the number of people who want to view/read/listen to/etc it will be substantially increased. Also this is something which many people with a political axe to grind just fail to comprehend. Though it only takes a comparativly few "fools" to make enough fuss to have an effect:)
Here's what I am saying: there is enough anectdotal evidence to warrant research into the effects of Violent Porn on Violent Sexual Behavior.
Where you have lobbying involved, as is the case here, it is difficult to work out where "anectdotal evidence" ends and "propaganda" begins. Political advocates tend only to be interested in anecdotes which support their position. Indeed sometimes they appear to put more effort into having anecdotes which do not dismissed than anything else.
Passing the laws without the research is, as far as I am concerned, an unwarrented breach of liberty.
It's also foolish and even counterproductive. The unintended consequences of the legislation may be worst than the intended ones. Assuming that it even has the intended consequences at all.
I'm not talking about the ban, I'm talking about the real crime of rape. Viewing images of someone play-acting rape is never a "crime" as there are no victims.
The most relevent word here is acting there is no more "crime" here than a movie which features a bank robbery.
It doesn't really matter how much that material might influence someone, they haven't committed a "real" crime until they've violated the rights of someone else.
Typically there is little actual evidence of any such influence, even though there have been attempts to find such evidence.
So unless you can show that nobody is actually entertained by it, that everyone who watches it will necessarily be compelled to rape someone else (which is absurd),
It's absurd because it is perfectly possible to find non-violent people who like violent entertainment as well as very violent people who like non-violent forms of entertainment. Added to the mix is that some forms of violent entertainment (including some very violent things shown in mainstream movies) are socially acceptable, whereas other's arn't.
It's like the ban on drug use because drug abusers sometimes commit "real" crimes to support their habits.... sorry, but you should be catching and punishing for the "real" crimes.
With the added irony that if the drugs in question were legal there would be less actual crime associated with them.
When you remove from prison all the people there for using and selling drugs, you'll have plenty of room for those who have no self control and actually commit crimes against other people.
Which would also give the police less reasons to avoid dealing with those who are actually dangerous. When the police have a choice between arresting dangerous and non dangerous "criminals" they are likely to prefer to deal with the non dangerous ones. Police officers being only human and tend to want to avoid getting hurt/killed as much as anyone else. If you remove "druggies", "perverts", etc from the definition of "criminals" then the police are more likely to do something about the "hooligans".
I agree that a substantial number of rapists and molesters and whatnot probably do get off on "violent" porn.
Even if they do you'd also need to find out what difference, if any, this made to their likelyhood of attacking actual people.
But so do quite a few very normal people who will never rape someone.
Maybe these are the vast majority to viewers.
The fact that some rapists get off on it is insufficient to justify banning it, after all, last I heard quite a few rapists drink water and eat bread.
Together with thousands of other activities which anyone who advocated banning would be ridiculed. Even if you could find interests or entertainment preferences which had a high corrollation with violent people these activities might not themselves be violent. If would be kind of ironic if something non violent was a good indicator of a violent personality.
Microsoft's own encryption services/products could have a backdoor that is used by the COFEE. Which would of course be a good reason not to trust Microsoft products (what if bad guys got the COFEE software?).
You mean when the bad guys get hold of the tools. Which in the case of corrupt police isn't likely to be very long at all.
Blake was a deeply cynical space opera, with every character angling for their own objectives. I get the impression that is what Whedon tried to do with Firefly.
There are plenty of parallels between Firefly and B7. Indeed Firefly might have done better had it been made outside of the US, especially considering the amount of character development involved.
Sound in flash still doesn't work correctly out of the box on Ubuntu systems, there's no mp3 support by default, nor does Quicktime really work. There's still not a decent movie player.
In many business situations these might actually be positives:)
The main reason is that there is zero business case to upgrade. Nobody at Microsoft has been able to explain in concrete terms how Vista will increase my revenue or reduce my expenses.
Even if there was such a case then benefits of it would need to outweigh the costs of the "upgrade". Both the immediate downtime required to do the change and coping with everything which either failed or worked in a different way.
Unfortunately, humanity is really good at that kind of homework. Take a look at the conflict in Darfur right now.
However there are plenty of people in parts of the world where nothing like this is happening.
Beneath all the sectarian and racial tensions is a very real survival pressure for the people involved -- Sudan is going through a pretty bad drought, one which most observers believe is the result of climate change. Population pressures are helping to push people to kill each other for access to water and usable farmland.
The population of Sudan would probably be well above 2,000 even if people there were to kill enough of each other to render "population pressure" meaningless.
If starvation kills off 50% there is twice as much food left for the remaining 50%. Starvation is a self limiting mechanism. You have a lot more homework to do to get down to 2000 remaining individuals.
Even if that did happen you'd need a population already reduced to 4,000 to get down to that number.
As for diseases, there is no earthly disease that kills 100% of its victims, (because such a disease would then itself become extinct).
Also such a disease would probably only ever spread to a small proportion of possible victims. Both parasites and hosts tend to evolve towards hosts not being killed. Since a parasite which kills its host tends to die along with it.
This has only been true for a limited span of time, since the green revolution, which started in 1943, massively increased farming output, which had been only increasing at a steady linear pace in the past. Since then, populations have surged to meet the new level of food supply. Historically (before 1943) population was kept in check by a limited supply of food.
IIRC late Iron age agriculture produced yields comparable with that in Europe and North America in the 1950's. It isn't simply that agriculture suddenly getting better in the 20th century. Somewhere in a period of two thousand years agriculture had become less productive.
56,000 allegations of child molestation in Brazil linked to Orkut should be enough reason for Google to look at that data. That is more than a hunch. That is probable cause.
Put against Brazil's population of 186 million the number looks less impressive. It might also be interesting to know how many people are actually making these allegations and if they have anything in common. If most (or even all) of the allegations were to be from members of the same political group then it's probably them who need investigation.
We're on the verge of making knowledge illegal. Scratch the verge, we're already there with making it illegal to inform people of bomb building. Yes, I know how to make a bomb out of rather easily gathered over the counter chemicals. That doesn't make me a terrorist. I know how to make LSD. That doesn't make me the next drug cook. I read "The Capital" online. That doesn't make me a communist.
Knowlage can also let you know when "authorities" or "the media" are talking nonsense about something. Knowing how to build a bomb or produce LSD also tends to enable you to know how not to do these things (or what has so little chance of sucess that it is pointless.) e.g. the whole binary liquid explosive aircraft bombing thing. Being able to identify bovine excrement can be a very powerful skill.
A company operating in a country must follow the laws there. For instance, in Germany, it is illegal to deny the Holocaust. Google must enforce censorship laws in Germany, and no one calls them evil for that.
No doubt quite a few people do... Note that "deny the Holocaust" actually equates to being openly skeptical of set of claims about a period of history. Such laws tend to indicate that at best the "legal truth" is unproven (more likely that there is at least one major lie involved. A wild guess would be that a proper investigation of this period of history would turn up the names of currently unknown collaberators.)
There is a reasonable middle ground. It's called a warrant. The government shows to a judge that they have sufficient evidence to show probable cause a) that the person did the crime, and b) that the person they're asking for information from has specific and relevant information to this case.
Before a & b they need to convince the judge that a crime actually happened. Where as with the kind of "fishing trip" you don't have to actually prove anything at all. Just that if you look in enough "water" you are likely to find some "fish".
The sad part is, Mr. Doe has never done anything more wrong in his meager life than cross against the light.
Thus is exactly the kind of person poorly supervised police officers are likely want to target. They'd want to avoid "career criminals" who know how to play the system (or have lawyers who do). Similarly it's dangerous to go trying to arrest a well armed terrorist suspect, especially one who might view dead police officers as having more "points" than dead civilians.
Ignorance causes people to hide behind the falsity "If you have nothing to hide then why do you need privacy?". The sad fact is, everyone, and I really DO mean EVERYONE, has SOMETHING that they don't want to be made public knowledge, period.
It isn't even a matter of "public knowledge". Plenty of people have little reason to trust even their own government, let alone random foreign governments. Even if you trust "your government" do you trust everyone they trust? (As well as all the entities which have infiltrated either "your government" or some entity they happen to trust. Your information can easily end up in all sorts of places due to combinations of "trust" and spying.)
If you had RTFA, you would see that the government didn't get warrants for any of these "suspects" and freely admitted that there wasn't enough evidence to do so. This isn't a case of some cop going before a judge and saying "Your honor, I need to subpoena this guy's records because I suspect he's a pedophile and here's my preliminary evidence." This was a case of the government saying "Here's a list of names. Give us all their information and don't ask any questions."
Which has the likely result that instead of the police actually investigating anything they will instead pick names at random to ask Google for information about. Requirements for warrants arn't just about protecting the innocent from police harassment. They also help keep police officers focussed on the job they are intended to be doing.
The "viral nature" of the GPL ONLY takes effect if you want the benefits that come with getting the free step-up that the GPL software provides.
Actually the "viral nature" is part of copyright law.
By all means, use free software to develop your closed source stuff... that just means you have to develop it from the ground up and not try to take any shortcuts by including other people's code that they generously allowed you to use.
So long as you are not creating derived works on GPL code you are free to use GPL software however you like. Nothing stops you using a GPL editor to write proprietary code, you could probably even compile proprietary software using GCC and produce a proprietary object if you were careful. Claims of "if you use our tool then we own your data" are much more common when it comes to proprietary tools. With GPL tools there actually has to be some good reason for making any such claims.
Of course, if MSOOXML had gone through the regular track, it probably would have taken years to finish (since it's so large, complex, and poorly defined), and MS couldn't afford to wait.
Assuming it actually did finish.
So instead they bought themselves a standards committee or twelve.
Slashdot Mirror
The legislator's counterpoint is that the actual act which took place was not illegal. Thus, we might imagine that if someone made a film fictionally depicting a murder, it could be legal on the grounds that no actual assault occurred and that there's an understanding that it is fiction. On the other hand, if it's a real murder, it's a snuff film. On the other hand, if it's a real murder, it's a snuff film. Similarly, at least some "violent" pornography goes to lengths to show that the persons involved consent to and even enjoy the act by showing before/after interviews.
It's perfectly possible for a porn movie to involve acting, stunts, effects, camera tricks, etc. just as much as any other movie. You have no way of knowing if the "interviews" are scripted. Only the people who were actually "on set" know what actually happened.
I can't see the difference between this and banning "violent" movies of any type. That includes pretty much anything coming out of Hollywood with 16+ years age limit.
The "ratings bar" is rather lower than 16+. It's rather hard to get more violent that something like the Star Wars "Death Star".
A movie simulating a murder is a movie simulating a murder. Whether or not the story is acted out by actors with or without clothes shouldn't really matter.
Similarly a movie showing a WMD being deployed is also simulating murder, even if you don't see any bodies (even in the real world extremely violent deaths tend not to leave much in the way of identifiable bodies), especially if a character with telepathic abilities notices the resulting death of billions of people.
What it comes down to is that there's no rational reason to believe that violent pornography has any effect on committing violent crimes. Yes, it's common sense, but in my experience, common sense and truth are often diametrically opposed.
:)
Which is something which applies to various fields of engineering, security as well as to all sorts of human behaviour. e.g. getting a movie, book, record, etc banned is a very effective way of ensuring that the number of people who want to view/read/listen to/etc it will be substantially increased.
Also this is something which many people with a political axe to grind just fail to comprehend. Though it only takes a comparativly few "fools" to make enough fuss to have an effect
Here's what I am saying: there is enough anectdotal evidence to warrant research into the effects of Violent Porn on Violent Sexual Behavior.
Where you have lobbying involved, as is the case here, it is difficult to work out where "anectdotal evidence" ends and "propaganda" begins. Political advocates tend only to be interested in anecdotes which support their position. Indeed sometimes they appear to put more effort into having anecdotes which do not dismissed than anything else.
Passing the laws without the research is, as far as I am concerned, an unwarrented breach of liberty.
It's also foolish and even counterproductive. The unintended consequences of the legislation may be worst than the intended ones. Assuming that it even has the intended consequences at all.
I'm not talking about the ban, I'm talking about the real crime of rape. Viewing images of someone play-acting rape is never a "crime" as there are no victims.
The most relevent word here is acting there is no more "crime" here than a movie which features a bank robbery.
It doesn't really matter how much that material might influence someone, they haven't committed a "real" crime until they've violated the rights of someone else.
Typically there is little actual evidence of any such influence, even though there have been attempts to find such evidence.
So unless you can show that nobody is actually entertained by it, that everyone who watches it will necessarily be compelled to rape someone else (which is absurd),
It's absurd because it is perfectly possible to find non-violent people who like violent entertainment as well as very violent people who like non-violent forms of entertainment. Added to the mix is that some forms of violent entertainment (including some very violent things shown in mainstream movies) are socially acceptable, whereas other's arn't.
It's like the ban on drug use because drug abusers sometimes commit "real" crimes to support their habits.... sorry, but you should be catching and punishing for the "real" crimes.
With the added irony that if the drugs in question were legal there would be less actual crime associated with them.
When you remove from prison all the people there for using and selling drugs, you'll have plenty of room for those who have no self control and actually commit crimes against other people.
Which would also give the police less reasons to avoid dealing with those who are actually dangerous. When the police have a choice between arresting dangerous and non dangerous "criminals" they are likely to prefer to deal with the non dangerous ones. Police officers being only human and tend to want to avoid getting hurt/killed as much as anyone else. If you remove "druggies", "perverts", etc from the definition of "criminals" then the police are more likely to do something about the "hooligans".
I agree that a substantial number of rapists and molesters and whatnot probably do get off on "violent" porn.
Even if they do you'd also need to find out what difference, if any, this made to their likelyhood of attacking actual people.
But so do quite a few very normal people who will never rape someone.
Maybe these are the vast majority to viewers.
The fact that some rapists get off on it is insufficient to justify banning it, after all, last I heard quite a few rapists drink water and eat bread.
Together with thousands of other activities which anyone who advocated banning would be ridiculed.
Even if you could find interests or entertainment preferences which had a high corrollation with violent people these activities might not themselves be violent. If would be kind of ironic if something non violent was a good indicator of a violent personality.
Microsoft's own encryption services/products could have a backdoor that is used by the COFEE. Which would of course be a good reason not to trust Microsoft products (what if bad guys got the COFEE software?).
You mean when the bad guys get hold of the tools. Which in the case of corrupt police isn't likely to be very long at all.
Blake was a deeply cynical space opera, with every character angling for their own objectives. I get the impression that is what Whedon tried to do with Firefly.
There are plenty of parallels between Firefly and B7. Indeed Firefly might have done better had it been made outside of the US, especially considering the amount of character development involved.
Describing the effects as 'average' is a bit of an exaggeration - they were absolutely terrible.
Actually the effects were "state of the art". Just that they were nearly 30 years ago.
Sound in flash still doesn't work correctly out of the box on Ubuntu systems, there's no mp3 support by default, nor does Quicktime really work. There's still not a decent movie player.
:)
In many business situations these might actually be positives
The main reason is that there is zero business case to upgrade. Nobody at Microsoft has been able to explain in concrete terms how Vista will increase my revenue or reduce my expenses.
Even if there was such a case then benefits of it would need to outweigh the costs of the "upgrade". Both the immediate downtime required to do the change and coping with everything which either failed or worked in a different way.
Unfortunately, humanity is really good at that kind of homework. Take a look at the conflict in Darfur right now.
However there are plenty of people in parts of the world where nothing like this is happening.
Beneath all the sectarian and racial tensions is a very real survival pressure for the people involved -- Sudan is going through a pretty bad drought, one which most observers believe is the result of climate change. Population pressures are helping to push people to kill each other for access to water and usable farmland.
The population of Sudan would probably be well above 2,000 even if people there were to kill enough of each other to render "population pressure" meaningless.
If starvation kills off 50% there is twice as much food left for the remaining 50%. Starvation is a self limiting mechanism. You have a lot more homework to do to get down to 2000 remaining individuals.
Even if that did happen you'd need a population already reduced to 4,000 to get down to that number.
As for diseases, there is no earthly disease that kills 100% of its victims, (because such a disease would then itself become extinct).
Also such a disease would probably only ever spread to a small proportion of possible victims. Both parasites and hosts tend to evolve towards hosts not being killed. Since a parasite which kills its host tends to die along with it.
This has only been true for a limited span of time, since the green revolution, which started in 1943, massively increased farming output, which had been only increasing at a steady linear pace in the past. Since then, populations have surged to meet the new level of food supply.
Historically (before 1943) population was kept in check by a limited supply of food.
IIRC late Iron age agriculture produced yields comparable with that in Europe and North America in the 1950's. It isn't simply that agriculture suddenly getting better in the 20th century. Somewhere in a period of two thousand years agriculture had become less productive.
If the data is hosted on servers outside of the country, then they can't get a warrant for that data. Brazil's court system lacks the jurisdiction.
There are most likely "channels" which could be used. Especially if the whatever is also against the law where the data is actually being held.
56,000 allegations of child molestation in Brazil linked to Orkut should be enough reason for Google to look at that data. That is more than a hunch. That is probable cause.
Put against Brazil's population of 186 million the number looks less impressive. It might also be interesting to know how many people are actually making these allegations and if they have anything in common. If most (or even all) of the allegations were to be from members of the same political group then it's probably them who need investigation.
We're on the verge of making knowledge illegal. Scratch the verge, we're already there with making it illegal to inform people of bomb building. Yes, I know how to make a bomb out of rather easily gathered over the counter chemicals. That doesn't make me a terrorist. I know how to make LSD. That doesn't make me the next drug cook. I read "The Capital" online. That doesn't make me a communist.
Knowlage can also let you know when "authorities" or "the media" are talking nonsense about something. Knowing how to build a bomb or produce LSD also tends to enable you to know how not to do these things (or what has so little chance of sucess that it is pointless.) e.g. the whole binary liquid explosive aircraft bombing thing. Being able to identify bovine excrement can be a very powerful skill.
A company operating in a country must follow the laws there. For instance, in Germany, it is illegal to deny the Holocaust. Google must enforce censorship laws in Germany, and no one calls them evil for that.
No doubt quite a few people do... Note that "deny the Holocaust" actually equates to being openly skeptical of set of claims about a period of history. Such laws tend to indicate that at best the "legal truth" is unproven (more likely that there is at least one major lie involved. A wild guess would be that a proper investigation of this period of history would turn up the names of currently unknown collaberators.)
There is a reasonable middle ground. It's called a warrant. The government shows to a judge that they have sufficient evidence to show probable cause a) that the person did the crime, and b) that the person they're asking for information from has specific and relevant information to this case.
Before a & b they need to convince the judge that a crime actually happened. Where as with the kind of "fishing trip" you don't have to actually prove anything at all. Just that if you look in enough "water" you are likely to find some "fish".
The sad part is, Mr. Doe has never done anything more wrong in his meager life than cross against the light.
Thus is exactly the kind of person poorly supervised police officers are likely want to target. They'd want to avoid "career criminals" who know how to play the system (or have lawyers who do). Similarly it's dangerous to go trying to arrest a well armed terrorist suspect, especially one who might view dead police officers as having more "points" than dead civilians.
Ignorance causes people to hide behind the falsity "If you have nothing to hide then why do you need privacy?". The sad fact is, everyone, and I really DO mean EVERYONE, has SOMETHING that they don't want to be made public knowledge, period.
It isn't even a matter of "public knowledge". Plenty of people have little reason to trust even their own government, let alone random foreign governments. Even if you trust "your government" do you trust everyone they trust? (As well as all the entities which have infiltrated either "your government" or some entity they happen to trust. Your information can easily end up in all sorts of places due to combinations of "trust" and spying.)
If you had RTFA, you would see that the government didn't get warrants for any of these "suspects" and freely admitted that there wasn't enough evidence to do so. This isn't a case of some cop going before a judge and saying "Your honor, I need to subpoena this guy's records because I suspect he's a pedophile and here's my preliminary evidence." This was a case of the government saying "Here's a list of names. Give us all their information and don't ask any questions."
Which has the likely result that instead of the police actually investigating anything they will instead pick names at random to ask Google for information about. Requirements for warrants arn't just about protecting the innocent from police harassment. They also help keep police officers focussed on the job they are intended to be doing.
The "viral nature" of the GPL ONLY takes effect if you want the benefits that come with getting the free step-up that the GPL software provides.
Actually the "viral nature" is part of copyright law.
By all means, use free software to develop your closed source stuff... that just means you have to develop it from the ground up and not try to take any shortcuts by including other people's code that they generously allowed you to use.
So long as you are not creating derived works on GPL code you are free to use GPL software however you like. Nothing stops you using a GPL editor to write proprietary code, you could probably even compile proprietary software using GCC and produce a proprietary object if you were careful. Claims of "if you use our tool then we own your data" are much more common when it comes to proprietary tools. With GPL tools there actually has to be some good reason for making any such claims.
Of course, if MSOOXML had gone through the regular track, it probably would have taken years to finish (since it's so large, complex, and poorly defined), and MS couldn't afford to wait.
Assuming it actually did finish.
So instead they bought themselves a standards committee or twelve.
Did they also pick the time of the vote...
So a senator said something stupid about a subject outside of his domain of expertise.
Most likely his only area of expertise is being a senator though...
Just kindly wite to the man and inform him that within a week of any such law coming into play, P2P programs would be randomizing the filenames.
Probably withe the program generating the file names having a list of Congressmen amongst it's source material...
Has writing letters to congressmen ever resulted in significant change in the government?
Possibly when they contained Anthrax.