Actually it can't qualify as bad upbringing in itself - unless we're moving into the couch potato vs. physically active schism. Feeding children violent entertainment isn't any different than feeding them bad quiz and game shows. It might actually be better if it's creatively done violence as the game show diet is a proven intelligence killer.
Isn't that similar to the guy that got tired of having his mailbox smashed with a baseball bat wielded by a teenager in a car driving by... He replaced the wooded pole with a concrete one that looked like wood and mounted a mailbox filled with concrete on top. The next day he found a shattered baseball bat next to a slightly dented mailbox and got sued by the teenager now in the hospital with a broken arm and a smashed shoulder...
... lock down the server to prevent unneeded network services and software installation (don't allow outbound curl, for example).
Excuse me? - The ability to fetch patches is essential to keeping a server secure. Allowing it to fetch patches from an intermediary server only doesn't make anything more secure as that server is easily compromised if the attacker already have root on the production server. It will only serve as a delay and an annoyance to the attacker, nothing more.
No, the only way to go is to prevent the server from being owned in the first place. Sane code- and SQL-design plus a stripped down server should do the trick. Don't use java and other unnecessary complex languages with too many features. Use PHP or similar which doesn't launch tons of junk processes for each thread, each with thousands of possible buffer overflows (java leaks memory in case of even the smallest error). Feel free to use whatever for the customer service interface but hand off handling the credit card info to a minimal ultra-secure server that basically does nothing except to get the info and return the result. No bells and whistles, no unnecessary features.
Only partially true. In a block dump of the HDD, the hidden volume appears as (not necessarily contiguous) blocks of data with perfect entropy. They may not know what's in them, but it's by no means invisible.
No, the hidden volume cannot be distinguished from the other data inside the visible volume as it has got identical entropy and so on as the truly unused data. It is truly invisible and the presence of the hidden volume can only be inferred from changes in the supposedly 'unused' (unallocated) data, which requires snapshots taken some time apart.
It might be that evolution slows down when there's no incentive to evolve, but it will never stop. Evolution is part adaption, part 'new ideas' which may be either useful or useless.
What's more, there's no reason why humans wouldn't purposely evolve themselves through biological and technological enhancements (augmentation), first to use our current planet better (ability to digest cellulose, breathe underwater, tolerate temperature extremes and the pressure of the deepest oceans which some whales (also mammals) already can, resistance to most or all diseases) and then the easy step to move to Mars, Jupiter's moon Europe and whatever we find in our neighborhood that's livable perhaps with a bit of terraforming, then into pure space. This may take a billion years but I'm sure it'll happen in just a few hundred or a few thousand years. The benefits are just too great not to do this, especially in the long run.
There are nice sftp GUI-clients for Macs, Windows and Linux so there's really no reason at all for using old-fashioned ftp anymore.
Three reasons for using sftp instead of ftp:
1) Security. The remote server is verified and the transfer is encrypted. Also keys can be used instead of passwords. 2) Integrity. The data transferred is validated as part of the protocol so random corruption due to crappy connections or faulty NICs (which is not so rare using ftp) doesn't happen; corrupted packets are detected and resent - or the connection is terminated if there's too many errors. 3) Firewalls. Making old-fashioned ftp work through firewalls is a bitch and often requires work-arounds or compromises. No such problems with sftp.
I haven't been using ftp at all for several years now despite transferring exabytes worth of data back and forth. For me sftp is the only way to go.
These days they simple break into stores, open up card readers at the checkout counters, and add devices that record PINs and magnetic strips. One week later they break in again to retrieve their devices... some even use WiFi to read the data remotely from a nearby van, reducing the chances of getting caught.
Actually here in Denmark we've had devices that sent data via bluetooth to a relay device hidden nearby that sent the data on using a mobile phone, and even one where direct mobile interface was attempted. The transmitter fortunately caused the electronics in the terminal to fail and when it was sent in for repair, the hack was discovered. But most simply record data on some memory card for later manual retrieval.
Yes. Very much so actually. A large part of its doctrine is based not on the writing in its holy book (The Quran) but on interpretations made by clerics over the centuries. Most of these directly contradicts the writing in the holy book but it still considered both valid and sacred. One of the most obvious are the women headscarves (or more extreme coverings) and the male beards. These are almost considered a pillar of the faith but are not in any way founded on the holy writings; they are based on what the people around Muhammad did and said, plus later adaptions and interpretations. Another is the antisemitic rantings we hear from almost all the Islamic sects today; the Quran actually states quite clearly in several places that Christian and Jews worship the same God and thus are the brothers of all muslims and must be respected and treated as such. But modern Islam is a cesspool of antisemitism and blind hate towards jews that makes the nazi philosophy look tame in comparison. This very negative attitude towards 'enemies of the faith' to the point of megalomania and outright warfare is very typical of a cult - just look at the Branch Davidians and their 'war' against the US authorities.
but Falun Gong is pretty stupid. It's all that superstitious, mystical, focusing-your-spiritual-energy BS that attributes sickness and pain with your mind force being out of alignment...
Well, is it all that different than say Scientology where sickness (especially mental sickness) are attributed to fragments of evil aliens that got blown to bits in a super volcano explosion and the fragments now pollutes all non-clean souls, and can only be cleaned through extensive (and expensive!) auditing by people whose souls are clean...?
Face it, most faiths and religions are stupid in every aspect.
This whole censorship scheme is deeply flawed and morally bankrupt. Any society that feel the need to implement censorship in order to 'function' is already badly broken and censorship will only prolong the suffering and delay the inevitable, making it unavoidable. If there really is a need to prevent access to something, use sound advice and education so the need to access 'the forbidden' goes away. It is this need to will be the downfall of any society that use censorship because the human spirit can never be kept in a cage, no matter how many bars and locks you add to it.
1) They make the world aware of the censorship taking place. 2) They make it obvious that a secret list might contain anything. We can't check. 3) They make it obvious that the list needs to be public because that would make it possible to avoid non-relevant censorship. Even if the list is publicly available, it cannot be used to find the blocked stuff because - well - the stuff is blocked. 4) They force the authorities to engage in debates about the censorship thus again making the world aware of what happening. 5) They show that such secrets can never be kept and thus shouldn't.
There's no reason to have such a blocklist to begin with except to engage in censorship. You don't protect anybody against anything with a blacklist. For every site listed there's 10 others just like it. List those and each has 10 alternatives... The odds of you hitting one is the same with or without the blacklist.
"No one interested in cyber safety would condone the leaking of this list."
What a load of BS! - Just the use of the word "cyber safety" ranks this as ignorant remark by a buzzword-happy moron.
Now, let's do this one more time... Nobody has ever been harmed by looking at something on the net. Offended maybe. Provoked probably. Annoyed very likely. But harmed? - Never.
Now, there are studies that very clearly show absolutely no harm to children from looking at porn. If they're too young, they don't care and don't understand. When they're old enough they'll seek it out actively and no amount of censorship can stop them.
Hate speech? - It's free speech protected by basic human rights. Just because your opinions isn't mainstream doesn't mean that you have less right right to have them or to express them. Yes, racism legislation is a basic human rights violation because it restricts free speech.
Kiddie porn? - Blocking based on a blacklist only affects the rank beginners in this field. Everybody else knows the 'secret' sites with everychanging names and adresses, and those really into it don't use regular websites at all but circulate their 'warez' using closed ftp-sites with encrypted connections and heavily password protected access.
In other words: This blacklist serves no other real purpose but pure censorship.
Exactly! - The Scene has nothing to do with P2P filesharing, and among all the torrent trackers TPB is the most despised one in The Scene due to its mass appeal.
First of all: Copyright Infringement is not theft! - Never was, never will be.
Second: You clearly don't know the history of the site. It was formed as a political statement by Piratbyran (the pirate agency) which also spawned Piratpartiet (the pirate party) in order to fight copyright and promote file sharing. There's a big difference between sharing popular music and films and sharing everything like The Pirate Bay does. It is actually a form of continuation on the old 'cyberpunk' credo "Information Wants To Be Free" where nothing is supposed to be non-sharable, and what is non-sharable must be shared through hacking and whatever else it takes.
The internet (v1) is nothing more than a reflection of the real world it exists in. A 'safer' version will be an illusion as long as the real world hasn't changed.
The problems in the real world must be fixed first, starting with the biggest problems. In the middle east there's a religion which is being severely abused to incite hate and wage wars around the globe. Defeating the fanatics there is essential to free up all the resources currently being used to make war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Israel. With all the money now available from the military budgets no longer needed it's possible to fix most of the social inequalities around the world, thus further reducing the conflict potential. Now all that remains are the criminals profiting from crime both in the real world and on the internet, especially the Russian Mafia and similar. They can fairly easily defeated through international cooperation (which is much easier without major international conflicts) in blocking their money transfers, and when they go broke they go away. Same thing with the spammers and so on. Kill their money flow and they die.
There! - Fixed it. No need for a brand new illusion of safety and security.
Hmmm... bought vs. brought? - Yeah, it probably wasn't a random slip that's for sure!:)
For complexities in the case, see "Illegal Warrant", "Illegal Search" (no valid warrant), "Excessive Collateral Damage" and "Failure To Return Seized Equipment in Due Time"...
Especially the first is serious - a minister of justice cannot sign a warrant despite being a judge. The separation of powers in the constitutional law of the Scandinavian countries explicitly prevents a lawgiver from talking part in the enforcement of laws. Legal proceedings are underway in this matter in Sweden, although the cabinet from back then has been replaced since. So, with no legal warrant the search and seizure is illegal, and on top of that they seized dozens of servers completely unrelated to TPB, which they kept (and searched) for a long time (months) despite serious complaints from the owners, resulting in a massive lawsuit seeing restitution and damages.
All those filters are usually erected in an attempt to 'protect the children' but so far I haven't seen any kind of hard evidence showing the children are 'damaged' from looking at porn or similar.
Actually I've seen a study showing quite clearly that porn has no negative effect on children at all. Back in 1968 porn was legalized in Denmark and porn shops popped up everywhere, especially in a section of Copenhagen called Vesterbro. About 1/3 of all shops there were porn or porn-related shops in those days. This meant that almost no matter where children looked they saw porn (dildos, explicit magazines, books, movies) and there was a lot of prostitutes in the area as well. All this happened when the children was mostly unsupervised by adults (on the way to school etc.). Now the study compared the children that grew up in this area with similar children from similar backgrounds growing up elsewhere, and looked at deviations from 'normal' when it came to crime (especially sex offenses), sexual preferences and orientation, attitude towards sexual deviations and so on. The result was quite clear: The 'porn-exposed' children had a similar life to the 'normal' children but had a more tolerant attitude towards everything sex-related, and often had more friends from the 'deviant' groups like homosexuals, transsexuals or so on.
The conclusion was therefore clear: Porn does not hurt children emotionally or sexually and it even seems to create more tolerant adults that is less likely to be ignorant of sexual themes. This is a good thing in my book.
The weirdo is here... I'm a leftie and I always have my mouse on the left... Always had actually. We're 12 in the office where I work and there's at least one other leftie with the same habit. Only drawback to that is that a lot of mice are made (moulded) for right handed use only which I suspect is the major reason why most lefties use their right hand to handle the mouse.
You can easily turn that on which you need to work. But stupid ad-serving junk, dumb statistics which delay loading significantly, annoying animations and downright mean stuff stays turned off for me.
I find NoScript absolutely vital to a useful web surfing experience, and it's always the first extension I install on new FF installations.
Just block excessive web-requests or mails coming from a regular home connection and you have defanged whatever bot or zombie that might be lurking there. Without the ability to send spam or to participate in DDoS blackmail attacks, the machine is essentially worthless to the cyber-criminals. Sure, it might provide a password to some online backing and maybe a credit card number, but that's about it.
A lot of cyber-bullying involves sharing private or fake private information with the world/school/whatever - such a thing can never be reversed or healed.
Apart from stopping it, the only recourse for cyber-bullying is payback, but while you might get some satisfaction from that, and might even stop the initial attacks, you're just ruining more people, not solving anything.
Physical bullying is far easier to stop and payback is a proven method of equaling the score. In my class (grade 1-9 in Denmark) there was initially some bullying but our teacher was cleaver and turned the tables on the bully immediately by - for a short period - constantly picking this person for everything, from questions in class to tedious tasks like wiping the blackboard. He would also talk to the bully after class and let him/her know that the special treatment would stop as soon as the bullying stopped. It worked every time and there as was no more bullying at all after grade 6. Our class had a lot of benefit from the lack of cliques and bullying and we finished with the highest GPA ever on that school because people could focus on learning and not stupid personal vendettas.
Well, the issue is that as long as the spam doesn't originate from the ISP or the spamvertised sites isn't hosted on the ISP, it can be really hard in certain countries to get rid of a malicious customer.
Sure, in this case there's no doubt the ISP was very much a part of the evil operation, but some ISPs find themselves between a rock and a hard place if their customers only host nameservers or what turns out to be C&C servers because they might not be able to terminate the hosting contract prematurely due to the activities not being illegal according to local law, nor is it listed in the law regarding spamming and similar rogue advertising. And it might be that you cannot enforce a contract termination based on perceived damage unless some law is broken.
I've worked at such an ISP and we found ourselves unable to get rid of a client (a subsidiary of a corporation that had another porn spamming subsidiary) who only hosted nameservers on our networks. As a nameserver is pretty innocent in itself, we could not terminate them. The only damage they were causing was the blacklisting provided by the vigilantes in SPEWS and that just wasn't enough for an early termination.
I call "Bullshit!" on the articles I've read on that realclimate.org website...
They do a great job at debunking other theories but they still fall flat on two very basic scientific premises:
1) You cannot use a data set to predict anything with a greater accuracy than the accuracy of the worst data in your set. The accuracy of estimated temperatures just 200 years ago are bad and the guesses on temperatures a millennium ago are just that - barely qualified guesses.
2) Any theory that tries to explain something either already covered by another still-valid theory or which has a major hole in the middle due to the alternate theory still being valid, is basically bullshit. As we have major historic climate changes during the interglacial periods which hasn't been understood or explained fully, it is scientifically impossible to claim that any change we see today are solely or primarily the result of human activities. As the best theories on the ancient climate changes involves a combination of variations in solar output, cosmic radiation and ionization of the atmosphere, variation on the chemical makeup of the atmosphere or the interplay between all these, combined with singular events like volcanic eruptions, meteors and similar, which cannot be ruled out today, Occams Razor tell us that instead of inventing a new theory to explain the changes we may be seeing today, stick to the original one which still cannot be eliminated to be partially or fully responsible for any change observed.
Not only is the cuban leader a dictator, he was also responsible for stealing everything of value from the people that had made/created it (forcing them into exile), thus being able to finance a top-notch health care system on stolen money.
The public health care systems in Europe are slowly being privatized, offering superior care, non-existent waiting lists (they are fatally long for the public hospitals at least here in Denmark) and greater expertise - if you are willing and able to pay for it in addition to crippling taxes already paying for the public system that quite frankly doesn't work.
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Actually it can't qualify as bad upbringing in itself - unless we're moving into the couch potato vs. physically active schism. Feeding children violent entertainment isn't any different than feeding them bad quiz and game shows. It might actually be better if it's creatively done violence as the game show diet is a proven intelligence killer.
Isn't that similar to the guy that got tired of having his mailbox smashed with a baseball bat wielded by a teenager in a car driving by... He replaced the wooded pole with a concrete one that looked like wood and mounted a mailbox filled with concrete on top. The next day he found a shattered baseball bat next to a slightly dented mailbox and got sued by the teenager now in the hospital with a broken arm and a smashed shoulder...
... lock down the server to prevent unneeded network services and software installation (don't allow outbound curl, for example).
Excuse me? - The ability to fetch patches is essential to keeping a server secure. Allowing it to fetch patches from an intermediary server only doesn't make anything more secure as that server is easily compromised if the attacker already have root on the production server. It will only serve as a delay and an annoyance to the attacker, nothing more.
No, the only way to go is to prevent the server from being owned in the first place. Sane code- and SQL-design plus a stripped down server should do the trick. Don't use java and other unnecessary complex languages with too many features. Use PHP or similar which doesn't launch tons of junk processes for each thread, each with thousands of possible buffer overflows (java leaks memory in case of even the smallest error). Feel free to use whatever for the customer service interface but hand off handling the credit card info to a minimal ultra-secure server that basically does nothing except to get the info and return the result. No bells and whistles, no unnecessary features.
Only partially true. In a block dump of the HDD, the hidden volume appears as (not necessarily contiguous) blocks of data with perfect entropy. They may not know what's in them, but it's by no means invisible.
No, the hidden volume cannot be distinguished from the other data inside the visible volume as it has got identical entropy and so on as the truly unused data. It is truly invisible and the presence of the hidden volume can only be inferred from changes in the supposedly 'unused' (unallocated) data, which requires snapshots taken some time apart.
It might be that evolution slows down when there's no incentive to evolve, but it will never stop. Evolution is part adaption, part 'new ideas' which may be either useful or useless.
What's more, there's no reason why humans wouldn't purposely evolve themselves through biological and technological enhancements (augmentation), first to use our current planet better (ability to digest cellulose, breathe underwater, tolerate temperature extremes and the pressure of the deepest oceans which some whales (also mammals) already can, resistance to most or all diseases) and then the easy step to move to Mars, Jupiter's moon Europe and whatever we find in our neighborhood that's livable perhaps with a bit of terraforming, then into pure space. This may take a billion years but I'm sure it'll happen in just a few hundred or a few thousand years. The benefits are just too great not to do this, especially in the long run.
Yes, why?
There are nice sftp GUI-clients for Macs, Windows and Linux so there's really no reason at all for using old-fashioned ftp anymore.
Three reasons for using sftp instead of ftp:
1) Security. The remote server is verified and the transfer is encrypted. Also keys can be used instead of passwords.
2) Integrity. The data transferred is validated as part of the protocol so random corruption due to crappy connections or faulty NICs (which is not so rare using ftp) doesn't happen; corrupted packets are detected and resent - or the connection is terminated if there's too many errors.
3) Firewalls. Making old-fashioned ftp work through firewalls is a bitch and often requires work-arounds or compromises. No such problems with sftp.
I haven't been using ftp at all for several years now despite transferring exabytes worth of data back and forth. For me sftp is the only way to go.
These days they simple break into stores, open up card readers at the checkout counters, and add devices that record PINs and magnetic strips. One week later they break in again to retrieve their devices... some even use WiFi to read the data remotely from a nearby van, reducing the chances of getting caught.
Actually here in Denmark we've had devices that sent data via bluetooth to a relay device hidden nearby that sent the data on using a mobile phone, and even one where direct mobile interface was attempted. The transmitter fortunately caused the electronics in the terminal to fail and when it was sent in for repair, the hack was discovered. But most simply record data on some memory card for later manual retrieval.
Well, his Hawaiian birth certificate (the one he published himself during the election campaign) is an obvious fake so why not?
I don't know if he really was born in Hawaii or not, but if he was, why not just publish the real certificate?
Oh, and GM can easily revive the Pontiac brand at a later date when times are better. Reviving old brands has been done many times before.
Yes. Very much so actually. A large part of its doctrine is based not on the writing in its holy book (The Quran) but on interpretations made by clerics over the centuries. Most of these directly contradicts the writing in the holy book but it still considered both valid and sacred. One of the most obvious are the women headscarves (or more extreme coverings) and the male beards. These are almost considered a pillar of the faith but are not in any way founded on the holy writings; they are based on what the people around Muhammad did and said, plus later adaptions and interpretations. Another is the antisemitic rantings we hear from almost all the Islamic sects today; the Quran actually states quite clearly in several places that Christian and Jews worship the same God and thus are the brothers of all muslims and must be respected and treated as such. But modern Islam is a cesspool of antisemitism and blind hate towards jews that makes the nazi philosophy look tame in comparison. This very negative attitude towards 'enemies of the faith' to the point of megalomania and outright warfare is very typical of a cult - just look at the Branch Davidians and their 'war' against the US authorities.
Well, is it all that different than say Scientology where sickness (especially mental sickness) are attributed to fragments of evil aliens that got blown to bits in a super volcano explosion and the fragments now pollutes all non-clean souls, and can only be cleaned through extensive (and expensive!) auditing by people whose souls are clean...?
Face it, most faiths and religions are stupid in every aspect.
Good for them if they did.
This whole censorship scheme is deeply flawed and morally bankrupt. Any society that feel the need to implement censorship in order to 'function' is already badly broken and censorship will only prolong the suffering and delay the inevitable, making it unavoidable. If there really is a need to prevent access to something, use sound advice and education so the need to access 'the forbidden' goes away. It is this need to will be the downfall of any society that use censorship because the human spirit can never be kept in a cage, no matter how many bars and locks you add to it.
Actually they do help... A lot actually!
1) They make the world aware of the censorship taking place.
2) They make it obvious that a secret list might contain anything. We can't check.
3) They make it obvious that the list needs to be public because that would make it possible to avoid non-relevant censorship. Even if the list is publicly available, it cannot be used to find the blocked stuff because - well - the stuff is blocked.
4) They force the authorities to engage in debates about the censorship thus again making the world aware of what happening.
5) They show that such secrets can never be kept and thus shouldn't.
There's no reason to have such a blocklist to begin with except to engage in censorship. You don't protect anybody against anything with a blacklist. For every site listed there's 10 others just like it. List those and each has 10 alternatives... The odds of you hitting one is the same with or without the blacklist.
What a load of BS! - Just the use of the word "cyber safety" ranks this as ignorant remark by a buzzword-happy moron.
Now, let's do this one more time... Nobody has ever been harmed by looking at something on the net. Offended maybe. Provoked probably. Annoyed very likely. But harmed? - Never.
Now, there are studies that very clearly show absolutely no harm to children from looking at porn. If they're too young, they don't care and don't understand. When they're old enough they'll seek it out actively and no amount of censorship can stop them.
Hate speech? - It's free speech protected by basic human rights. Just because your opinions isn't mainstream doesn't mean that you have less right right to have them or to express them. Yes, racism legislation is a basic human rights violation because it restricts free speech.
Kiddie porn? - Blocking based on a blacklist only affects the rank beginners in this field. Everybody else knows the 'secret' sites with everychanging names and adresses, and those really into it don't use regular websites at all but circulate their 'warez' using closed ftp-sites with encrypted connections and heavily password protected access.
In other words: This blacklist serves no other real purpose but pure censorship.
Exactly! - The Scene has nothing to do with P2P filesharing, and among all the torrent trackers TPB is the most despised one in The Scene due to its mass appeal.
You are wrong in so many ways...
First of all: Copyright Infringement is not theft! - Never was, never will be.
Second: You clearly don't know the history of the site. It was formed as a political statement by Piratbyran (the pirate agency) which also spawned Piratpartiet (the pirate party) in order to fight copyright and promote file sharing. There's a big difference between sharing popular music and films and sharing everything like The Pirate Bay does. It is actually a form of continuation on the old 'cyberpunk' credo "Information Wants To Be Free" where nothing is supposed to be non-sharable, and what is non-sharable must be shared through hacking and whatever else it takes.
The internet (v1) is nothing more than a reflection of the real world it exists in. A 'safer' version will be an illusion as long as the real world hasn't changed.
The problems in the real world must be fixed first, starting with the biggest problems. In the middle east there's a religion which is being severely abused to incite hate and wage wars around the globe. Defeating the fanatics there is essential to free up all the resources currently being used to make war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Israel. With all the money now available from the military budgets no longer needed it's possible to fix most of the social inequalities around the world, thus further reducing the conflict potential. Now all that remains are the criminals profiting from crime both in the real world and on the internet, especially the Russian Mafia and similar. They can fairly easily defeated through international cooperation (which is much easier without major international conflicts) in blocking their money transfers, and when they go broke they go away. Same thing with the spammers and so on. Kill their money flow and they die.
There! - Fixed it. No need for a brand new illusion of safety and security.
Hmmm... bought vs. brought? - Yeah, it probably wasn't a random slip that's for sure! :)
For complexities in the case, see "Illegal Warrant", "Illegal Search" (no valid warrant), "Excessive Collateral Damage" and "Failure To Return Seized Equipment in Due Time"...
Especially the first is serious - a minister of justice cannot sign a warrant despite being a judge. The separation of powers in the constitutional law of the Scandinavian countries explicitly prevents a lawgiver from talking part in the enforcement of laws. Legal proceedings are underway in this matter in Sweden, although the cabinet from back then has been replaced since. So, with no legal warrant the search and seizure is illegal, and on top of that they seized dozens of servers completely unrelated to TPB, which they kept (and searched) for a long time (months) despite serious complaints from the owners, resulting in a massive lawsuit seeing restitution and damages.
So yes, there are 'complexities' in this case...
All those filters are usually erected in an attempt to 'protect the children' but so far I haven't seen any kind of hard evidence showing the children are 'damaged' from looking at porn or similar.
Actually I've seen a study showing quite clearly that porn has no negative effect on children at all. Back in 1968 porn was legalized in Denmark and porn shops popped up everywhere, especially in a section of Copenhagen called Vesterbro. About 1/3 of all shops there were porn or porn-related shops in those days. This meant that almost no matter where children looked they saw porn (dildos, explicit magazines, books, movies) and there was a lot of prostitutes in the area as well. All this happened when the children was mostly unsupervised by adults (on the way to school etc.). Now the study compared the children that grew up in this area with similar children from similar backgrounds growing up elsewhere, and looked at deviations from 'normal' when it came to crime (especially sex offenses), sexual preferences and orientation, attitude towards sexual deviations and so on. The result was quite clear: The 'porn-exposed' children had a similar life to the 'normal' children but had a more tolerant attitude towards everything sex-related, and often had more friends from the 'deviant' groups like homosexuals, transsexuals or so on.
The conclusion was therefore clear: Porn does not hurt children emotionally or sexually and it even seems to create more tolerant adults that is less likely to be ignorant of sexual themes. This is a good thing in my book.
The weirdo is here... I'm a leftie and I always have my mouse on the left... Always had actually. We're 12 in the office where I work and there's at least one other leftie with the same habit. Only drawback to that is that a lot of mice are made (moulded) for right handed use only which I suspect is the major reason why most lefties use their right hand to handle the mouse.
You can easily turn that on which you need to work. But stupid ad-serving junk, dumb statistics which delay loading significantly, annoying animations and downright mean stuff stays turned off for me.
I find NoScript absolutely vital to a useful web surfing experience, and it's always the first extension I install on new FF installations.
Just block excessive web-requests or mails coming from a regular home connection and you have defanged whatever bot or zombie that might be lurking there. Without the ability to send spam or to participate in DDoS blackmail attacks, the machine is essentially worthless to the cyber-criminals. Sure, it might provide a password to some online backing and maybe a credit card number, but that's about it.
A lot of cyber-bullying involves sharing private or fake private information with the world/school/whatever - such a thing can never be reversed or healed.
Apart from stopping it, the only recourse for cyber-bullying is payback, but while you might get some satisfaction from that, and might even stop the initial attacks, you're just ruining more people, not solving anything.
Physical bullying is far easier to stop and payback is a proven method of equaling the score. In my class (grade 1-9 in Denmark) there was initially some bullying but our teacher was cleaver and turned the tables on the bully immediately by - for a short period - constantly picking this person for everything, from questions in class to tedious tasks like wiping the blackboard. He would also talk to the bully after class and let him/her know that the special treatment would stop as soon as the bullying stopped. It worked every time and there as was no more bullying at all after grade 6. Our class had a lot of benefit from the lack of cliques and bullying and we finished with the highest GPA ever on that school because people could focus on learning and not stupid personal vendettas.
Well, the issue is that as long as the spam doesn't originate from the ISP or the spamvertised sites isn't hosted on the ISP, it can be really hard in certain countries to get rid of a malicious customer.
Sure, in this case there's no doubt the ISP was very much a part of the evil operation, but some ISPs find themselves between a rock and a hard place if their customers only host nameservers or what turns out to be C&C servers because they might not be able to terminate the hosting contract prematurely due to the activities not being illegal according to local law, nor is it listed in the law regarding spamming and similar rogue advertising. And it might be that you cannot enforce a contract termination based on perceived damage unless some law is broken.
I've worked at such an ISP and we found ourselves unable to get rid of a client (a subsidiary of a corporation that had another porn spamming subsidiary) who only hosted nameservers on our networks. As a nameserver is pretty innocent in itself, we could not terminate them. The only damage they were causing was the blacklisting provided by the vigilantes in SPEWS and that just wasn't enough for an early termination.
I call "Bullshit!" on the articles I've read on that realclimate.org website...
They do a great job at debunking other theories but they still fall flat on two very basic scientific premises:
1) You cannot use a data set to predict anything with a greater accuracy than the accuracy of the worst data in your set. The accuracy of estimated temperatures just 200 years ago are bad and the guesses on temperatures a millennium ago are just that - barely qualified guesses.
2) Any theory that tries to explain something either already covered by another still-valid theory or which has a major hole in the middle due to the alternate theory still being valid, is basically bullshit. As we have major historic climate changes during the interglacial periods which hasn't been understood or explained fully, it is scientifically impossible to claim that any change we see today are solely or primarily the result of human activities. As the best theories on the ancient climate changes involves a combination of variations in solar output, cosmic radiation and ionization of the atmosphere, variation on the chemical makeup of the atmosphere or the interplay between all these, combined with singular events like volcanic eruptions, meteors and similar, which cannot be ruled out today, Occams Razor tell us that instead of inventing a new theory to explain the changes we may be seeing today, stick to the original one which still cannot be eliminated to be partially or fully responsible for any change observed.
Not only is the cuban leader a dictator, he was also responsible for stealing everything of value from the people that had made/created it (forcing them into exile), thus being able to finance a top-notch health care system on stolen money.
The public health care systems in Europe are slowly being privatized, offering superior care, non-existent waiting lists (they are fatally long for the public hospitals at least here in Denmark) and greater expertise - if you are willing and able to pay for it in addition to crippling taxes already paying for the public system that quite frankly doesn't work.