My parents told me it would all get better, but it was cold comfort at the time. I wish Why Nerds are Unpopular had been around at the time; it would have made it all so much more bearable if I had know why it was bad then, and why it wouldn't be that way forever. Wouldn't have been so damned hopeless at the time.
So you're saying that child pornography has no net effect. Huh.
The argument, of course, goes that if pedophiles were to get organized and spread an idea that would preseve and even increase their access to child porn, it would be precisely the second one above. "No, really, it helps me."
That doesn't discredit it, of course, but it certainly raises suspicions...
I think the point is that the marginal cost of doing most of these things is pretty much nil. Scanning the books is definitely not free, but when you've got hundreds of GB of space, and the bandwidth to download hundreds of MB of porn a day, the cost of downloading a few hundred KB of text with your already paid-for broadband is small enough to be imperceptible, and thus to be, in the mind of the consumer, free. Which was the original point.
but if we lived in an anarcho-capitalist society, which some people would consider a lot more free, we very likely would have them.
And if I had a magic bottle of pixie dust, I'd grow me some glowing green antlers. What's your point?
To recap: you claim that America has censorship just like China has censorship. I point out that what you call "censorship" in America consists of private bodies deciding whether or not to publish, and that they can be easily circumvented by self-publishing on the internet, something that real censorship (see China) does not allow for. You retort with "but if we had censorship like China does, then we'd have censorship like China does!"
What exactly do you want? Do you want CBS to be forced to publish every "lol jews did 911" twit who thinks they have story? Do you want the RIAA to publish every teenager's abortive basement band? There are limited resources to do so. The Internet removes these limits, which is why every fool has a livejournal and a myspace. If nobody cares about what you have to say, that's your problem. You're free to speak, but nobody's obliged to listen.
And then we should get rid of all the hate speech! Like all that Koranic and biblical crap exhorting its followers to head-chop nonbelievers. Who needs it? And you know what? It'd be a lot easier to enforce this if you needed a license to publish. We should have a standards body to enforceour community standards. A Communications Commission, of sorts. The licensing system could be subsidized by our great institutions--those heroic, risk-taking corporations--placing small, unobtrusive advertisements among the approved content. And in time, perhaps the Internet could become as shimmering a beacon of American ingenuity and creativity as television is.
Are you seriously equating "CBS won't run my favorite story, boo frickin' hoo!" to "well, you can't talk about the government, of course; there are spies everywhere"? (The latter being an actual quote from a grad student describing life growing up in China.) If CBS won't give you the airtime you so madly desire, you can damned well get a blog. The right to publish brings with it a right to be ignored. Can you seriously not tell the difference between being ignored and the mailed fist of an oppressive government telling you what can and cannot be said?
Wait, wait... the oppressive government we're talking about directly descends from the theoretical father of socialism, calls itself socialism, and enjoys (or at least, has enjoyed in the past) an extremely broad base of support from those calling themselves socialists outside its domain.
Of course, we're assuming that people are uniformly linked, and that they call forty-two people at some point. Is there a back-of-the-envelope formula for the number of degrees of separation on average between any two points in a randomly generated graph with i nodes and j links per node?
I'm not going to bother pointing out why.xxx is a bad idea; others have done it for me already. But about those someones "in charge of ensuring that all the girls on the sites are over 18", 18 USC 2257 (in the United States, at least) enforces a requirement to that effect. Most porn sites already label themselves with a variety of metadata. (View-source on a porn site's front page and see for yourself.) So, what else are you suggesting, then?
I hope that because Google bent over for the Chinese, they've lost their common carrier status and are now responsible for every damned thing they index. It'd serve 'em right.
It's quite possible. I mean, there were fighter pilots who engaged in one-on-one duels (with very different rules and settings, but still) and the very best of them came away victorious after a dozen or more fights. So it's not impossible on the face of it.
Child porn was mentioned in this week's Savage Love. Point was made that, whereas there used to be a clear distinction between children who were in such porn and the adults who made it, those lines has become blurred, what with the recent myspace arrests and such. I can't come up with a good way to disentangle that. Our current system of laws leads to some ridiculous outcomes (take naked pictures of yourself when you're underage, grow older, be arrested for exploiting... yourself?), but anything I can think of isn't much better.
Who translated 'tovarisch' as 'comrade'? It sounds just weird enough for people to go around calling each other 'comrade' that we'll think of them as weird and otherish. Why isn't it translated as 'buddy'? Does it really sound as strange and alien to the Russian ear to call each other 'tovarisch' as it does to American ears to call each other 'comrade'?
Four sounds pretty low. What about all those missing-children posters that don't say "abducted by non-custodial parent", but rather, "may have gone to meet with an adult male in such-and-such a city". Does it count if some fourteen year old runs away from home to get molested?
If the developers pick up a report on Malone, it'll get dealt with quite quickly. However, if they don't, it can linger for months in 'Unconfirmed' status, even if it's trivially reproducible. I've had much better luck filing bugs directly with the GNOME Bugzilla team (for GNOME apps, in any case). The KDE team won't even accept bug reports for the software in Breezy, because they don't support their old releases.
Slashdot Mirror
My parents told me it would all get better, but it was cold comfort at the time. I wish Why Nerds are Unpopular had been around at the time; it would have made it all so much more bearable if I had know why it was bad then, and why it wouldn't be that way forever. Wouldn't have been so damned hopeless at the time.
My guess is it's a little of both.
So you're saying that child pornography has no net effect. Huh.
The argument, of course, goes that if pedophiles were to get organized and spread an idea that would preseve and even increase their access to child porn, it would be precisely the second one above. "No, really, it helps me."
That doesn't discredit it, of course, but it certainly raises suspicions...
Those Norwegians hunger for the sweet taste of American freedom! We must fight the terrorists among the fjords so we don't have to fight them here!
I think the point is that the marginal cost of doing most of these things is pretty much nil. Scanning the books is definitely not free, but when you've got hundreds of GB of space, and the bandwidth to download hundreds of MB of porn a day, the cost of downloading a few hundred KB of text with your already paid-for broadband is small enough to be imperceptible, and thus to be, in the mind of the consumer, free. Which was the original point.
Yeah, those Norwegians (third biggest oil exporter in the world, above Iran and Venezuela!) are really sitting atop the world...
A good number of computer programming books at the local Borders have a PDF copy of the book on a CD in the back, convenient for searching and such.
but if we lived in an anarcho-capitalist society, which some people would consider a lot more free, we very likely would have them.
And if I had a magic bottle of pixie dust, I'd grow me some glowing green antlers. What's your point?
To recap: you claim that America has censorship just like China has censorship. I point out that what you call "censorship" in America consists of private bodies deciding whether or not to publish, and that they can be easily circumvented by self-publishing on the internet, something that real censorship (see China) does not allow for. You retort with "but if we had censorship like China does, then we'd have censorship like China does!"
What exactly do you want? Do you want CBS to be forced to publish every "lol jews did 911" twit who thinks they have story? Do you want the RIAA to publish every teenager's abortive basement band? There are limited resources to do so. The Internet removes these limits, which is why every fool has a livejournal and a myspace. If nobody cares about what you have to say, that's your problem. You're free to speak, but nobody's obliged to listen.
Is that a portmanteau of Solidus and Dot? 'Cause they call a slash a 'Solidus' in some places...
And then we should get rid of all the hate speech! Like all that Koranic and biblical crap exhorting its followers to head-chop nonbelievers. Who needs it? And you know what? It'd be a lot easier to enforce this if you needed a license to publish. We should have a standards body to enforceour community standards. A Communications Commission, of sorts. The licensing system could be subsidized by our great institutions--those heroic, risk-taking corporations--placing small, unobtrusive advertisements among the approved content. And in time, perhaps the Internet could become as shimmering a beacon of American ingenuity and creativity as television is.
Are you seriously equating "CBS won't run my favorite story, boo frickin' hoo!" to "well, you can't talk about the government, of course; there are spies everywhere"? (The latter being an actual quote from a grad student describing life growing up in China.) If CBS won't give you the airtime you so madly desire, you can damned well get a blog. The right to publish brings with it a right to be ignored. Can you seriously not tell the difference between being ignored and the mailed fist of an oppressive government telling you what can and cannot be said?
All morals are relative and as such the only way to judge morality is with respect to personal beliefs
Sweet. I have a strongly held personal belief in stabbing you in the face. Morally, I'm in the clear. Thanks!
Wait, wait... the oppressive government we're talking about directly descends from the theoretical father of socialism, calls itself socialism, and enjoys (or at least, has enjoyed in the past) an extremely broad base of support from those calling themselves socialists outside its domain.
But, according to you, it ain't socialism.
Of course, we're assuming that people are uniformly linked, and that they call forty-two people at some point. Is there a back-of-the-envelope formula for the number of degrees of separation on average between any two points in a randomly generated graph with i nodes and j links per node?
Please speak directly into the flowerpot, sir...
Five people voted for this crap? Man, that's unsettling...
I'm not going to bother pointing out why .xxx is a bad idea; others have done it for me already. But about those someones "in charge of ensuring that all the girls on the sites are over 18", 18 USC 2257 (in the United States, at least) enforces a requirement to that effect. Most porn sites already label themselves with a variety of metadata. (View-source on a porn site's front page and see for yourself.) So, what else are you suggesting, then?
I hope that because Google bent over for the Chinese, they've lost their common carrier status and are now responsible for every damned thing they index. It'd serve 'em right.
underaged human-animal hybrid cloned gay kiddie hitler porn that carries avian flu
It's quite possible. I mean, there were fighter pilots who engaged in one-on-one duels (with very different rules and settings, but still) and the very best of them came away victorious after a dozen or more fights. So it's not impossible on the face of it.
Child porn was mentioned in this week's Savage Love. Point was made that, whereas there used to be a clear distinction between children who were in such porn and the adults who made it, those lines has become blurred, what with the recent myspace arrests and such. I can't come up with a good way to disentangle that. Our current system of laws leads to some ridiculous outcomes (take naked pictures of yourself when you're underage, grow older, be arrested for exploiting... yourself?), but anything I can think of isn't much better.
Who translated 'tovarisch' as 'comrade'? It sounds just weird enough for people to go around calling each other 'comrade' that we'll think of them as weird and otherish. Why isn't it translated as 'buddy'? Does it really sound as strange and alien to the Russian ear to call each other 'tovarisch' as it does to American ears to call each other 'comrade'?
I'm almost afraid to ask, and I have a weird feeling that it would be bad to google for that string.
Four sounds pretty low. What about all those missing-children posters that don't say "abducted by non-custodial parent", but rather, "may have gone to meet with an adult male in such-and-such a city". Does it count if some fourteen year old runs away from home to get molested?
How'd you get that? The version of ruby1.8 from Breezy is 1.8.2; Dapper uses 1.8.4. What does 'dpkg -l ruby1.8' say?
If the developers pick up a report on Malone, it'll get dealt with quite quickly. However, if they don't, it can linger for months in 'Unconfirmed' status, even if it's trivially reproducible. I've had much better luck filing bugs directly with the GNOME Bugzilla team (for GNOME apps, in any case). The KDE team won't even accept bug reports for the software in Breezy, because they don't support their old releases.