Interesting you should bring that up. I'm about to retire from lifelong service under the federal Civil Service Retirement System. I'm one of the last group hired under CSRS nearly 30 years ago before the system was scrapped and a hybrid system more closely resembling private industry was put in place.
Back during the dotcom bubble, I was (I've since moved on) a reasonably competent sysadmin in an all-Unix environment. Not a fortnight passed that I didn't turn down a job offer for at least double my salary. Some were willing to pay me 5 times my salary. Of course, those guys all wanted me to work 100 hours a week and carry a pager, to boot. I had no idea if any of them were going to be in business in 5 years. I turned them all down.
In a few months (or 5 years, depending on how our current reorg goes), I'll be retired. I'll have good (not great, but good) life, health, and long-term care insurance for the rest of my life. After deductions and assuming a frugal lifestyle, I'll get a small pension that amounts to, based on my projections, about 110-130% of my expenses. I have a few hundred grand in savings but I don't actually need any of that to live.
I got to this point via a willingness to delay gratification in exchange for stability and long-term viability. Y'see, when I was in my early 20s, I was unemployed for a couple of years. I felt like a leech. I was consumed with guilt for not pulling my weight. When I got a job, I was damn well going to keep it come hell or high water. As a result of that attitude, I've been willing to take the safe course and it's worked out reasonbly well for me.
My point is that I reject the notion that offering a generous retirement is necessarily a bad deal for the government and for society. The government has saved a bunch of money via my willingness to accept below-market-rate salaries over the last quarter century. Now they get to pay my pension with less valuable, post-inflation dollars. Not a bad deal for them, for me, or for any young person who can see themselves in their old age. It's too bad that such systems are gone now; I think they could still serve a valuable function.
The article goes on at length to (rightfully) decry the chasm between work and the management of it, how actual tasks that are useful tend to get divorced from policy, procedures, and presence on the management radar. At its root, this attitude is what makes it possible to outsource to other continents. There's no longer a feeling that management and directing vision need to coexist in the same space in order to stay aligned and keep working well and synergistically. (And that may be the only time in the last few years I'd consider it appropriate to use that management-jargon-co-opted word.)
Since the author is a motorcycle mechanic, I thought I'd toss this out. When I was a young man, bike enthusiasts were decrying the fall of Triumph. That once-great motorcycle company was dying. They sold few bikes. They had run through many unsuccessful models that weren't very good bikes when they were working well and didn't work well very often because they were poorly assembled. It was enough to make an old gearhead shed a tear.
And then a story came out, perhaps apocryphal, that pinpointed the precise moment when Triumph stopped their forward progress and began their long fall. Some time in the early 1960s, so the story went, the upper management had gotten so successful that they started looking like upper management. They were driven to work. They dressed in expensive suits. They came to view themselves as businessmen. Or, rather, as typically happens with businesses as they become big, the guys who were bike lovers gradually got replaced in the executive suites by guys who were supposed to be good at the business of business, guys for whom the actual product was unimportant.
Finally, one day, there was a big, routine board meeting and one of the last of the old guard, who had ridden his bike that day, showed up to the meeting room in full leathers. He was informed that such was not appropriate. A rule that "proper dress," specifically meaning "no leathers," was required at all business meetings. The break between management and the iron on the road was now complete. Management had been outsourced to people who were distant (mentally, emotionally, and philosophically, if not physically) from the actual work.
At that point, Triumph was toast. It took years for the motorcycle brand to die. I remember one of the (perhaps the very) last bike they produced, a brilliant triple in sporting trim. I remember thinking it was a death rattle, the last gasp of a company that didn't know what in the bloody hell to do to stay alive and had, in desperation, actually let the engineers and bike lovers have a crack at producing something. It was far too little, far too late.
What I'm saying is the same as, in part, the article. Not only is working with your hands a good thing, when any company is run by people who are *incapable* of hands-on work or, at minimum, hands-on appreciation of that work - the company is doomed.
What happens when 10,000 anti-war activists all file individual suits against the president? He's supposed to put out of pocket to defend himself?
Government officials, including the president, get sued all the time. Because they are being sued pursuant to their job, their employer defends them. Hell, I was just a lowly Officer with the IRS back in the day and I managed to get myself sued once or twice. The government has some really good lawyers and I was glad of it.
Sometimes, things get even more indisidious. Back in the day (20+ years ago) every local district office of the IRS had a director. There were 66 of them spread around the country and they were the public face of the IRS. Ours was a good guy, totally in the "firm but fair" mode, who even had a sense of humor. He used to donate his time (very occasionally) to charity to sit in a dunk tank and let the public try to drop him into the water.
So what was his reward for trying to be open, transparent, and just plain *human* to the public? Not only did he get sued pretty much every week, lots of anti-tax protestors would go to various county courthouses in the area and file "common law liens." These bogus documents were a bunch of rambling nonsense that basically says "The IRS is illegal so the local director should be held personally liable for all the damage they cause." Said "damage" was calculated in various ways, ranging from just the amount the aggrieved citizen-idiot owed all the way up to some approximation of the entire amount of money collected by the IRS in that city that year, typically billions.
The clerks at the county courthouses eventually learned to recognize this crap and refuse to accept bogus documents for filing but that put them on thin ice; they are supposed to let anything be filed and let the courts decide if a filing is fraudulent. Sometimes they just held the filings until the lawyers could have a look. Most time, the filings just went through.
Our guy was a good person, making a good salary, filing all required financial disclosure reports that showed he never defaulted on a loan or was late with bills. But at the courthouse, there were filings showing that he was a multi-billion dollar deadbeat. The poor guy had the worst credit in the world. Getting a loan to buy a house or car or just getting a credit card was an exercise in frustration for him.
So the answer to your question is "Lots of government lawyers spend their time going to court, time that could have been better spent doing work in the public interest. The few people filing frivoulous actions waste lots of your tax money. That's what happens."
Thanks. No, I honestly don't get it. I know what Monty Python is though I was never a huge fan; my ready knowledge of their work is pretty much limited to the spam sketch and The Ministry of Silly Walks. I might have been more of a fan if back when I was a kid there had been a PBS station near enough to me for me to receive their signal. As it was, I got no Monty Python, no Sesame Street, etc. Sometimes, people make references to those shows and I'm just lost. Apparently that's what happened in this case. (I *love* The Princess Bride, tho.)
There's a limit to how much time I should waste at work, so when I get home tonite, I'll check the links you provided.
Why was this modded funny? I absolutely don't get the joke.
The range of MV of any round is dependent on lots of things; in full-pressure loadings, mostly the bullet weight and barrel length. But there are dozens of factors that can come into play. So the question is legit. "If you fire a.223 through a chonograph, what range of readings can you expect?" is a reasonable, if esoteric, question.
In the U.S., the answer would normally be expressed in feet per second. I assume that in both Europe and Africa, the answer would be expressed in meters per second. So what's the humorous contrast between Africa and Europe?
The GP was listing esoteric questions to illustrate a point and this one seems to fit that bill. So I don't get why the "African or European" response was modded funny. I just don't get it. Somebody help me out.
BTW - Who said "Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. No one enjoys it and the frog dies."?
Yes, the sworn statement works, but only because it's part of our contract negotiation from the beginning. We set it up as a part of each acquisition that we won't be returning any drives. Since we buy more that 30,000 computers a year, the people who sell them to us (currently, mostly HP) are OK with it. Occasionally there's some tension when a particular run of drives fails at a high rate; the contracts can be unprofitable if things go badly enough. But that's rare.
Such arrangements are far more common than most people realize.
I work for the IRS and we supposedly use the DOD standard. Our wiping software actually has a "/DOD" switch. However, unlike the standard quoted in another post, our software just reinitializes the MBR and then does 7 random overwrites. Is that better or worse than writing patterns? I dunno.
I do know, however, that we never let a drive out of our inventory without a wipe. If the drive has failed completely, we have a big magnetic blanker we use. (Local option - in my office, we then take those drives apart, abuse the platters, and one of our techs makes sculptures from them. Neat stuff.)
As an aside, we never RMA drives, either. If a drive in our possession fails, we call for a warranty replacement and send back in the return box a signed statement swearing that we destroyed the old drive. If a laptop has a failure that requires a contractor tech to replace parts, we make them come on-site then have someone stand over them the whole time to make sure they don't try to actually read anything off the drive.
I would expect the military to do at least as well. Am I wrong?
Many years ago, back when the internet was only recently become a consumer-level, money-making prospect, I spent several months surfing porn for the IRS. I got my untraceable "investigative workstation" complete with exhaustive logging. The actual online work was done in a higher-level secure room. We had full discretion to begin our own investigations with required emphasis in just a couple of areas.
I'm sure the investigations continue to this day; soon after I started the job, the function that did the work moved to a different city and I chose not to follow the work. But in the few months I worked it, we were finding a few interesting things. First, the big porn companies were making too much money to want to deal with us; they were paying their taxes. Second, there were lots of small porn operators doing strip shows, live sex shows, and making custom niche market videos (mostly bestiality) whose compliance was middling to poor; they got forwarded for audit. Third, there were obscenity purveyors (mostly child porn) that were probably making a lot of money but we simply couldn't figure out who they were; most were offshore, anyway.
Finally, the first group of big crooks we managed to profile in some detail were rogue CPAs who were selling bogus tax advice for high prices. In those days, you could do outrageously stupid things with tax shelters that were obviously illegal but *if* you had relied on the advice of a "competent authority" to make those investment decisions then you could avoid expensive penalties when you finally got caught. Lots of CPAs just decided to drop out of doing real accountancy work and threw up web sites where they sold, typically, single-page letters for USD$5000 that informed you that whatever stupid tax dodge you were about to invest in was perfectly legal. When you got caught (if you got caught), you'd produce the letter and claim that you were an innocent victim who had relied on an accountant for advice. At that point, the Revenue Agents job got a lot harder; the RA would have to not only prove you did a bogus tax dodge but that you and some third party in another state knew it was bogus beforehand. Lots of RAs just threw up their hands and let people skate on some penalties. ALL those crooked CPAs, though, advertised on the internet and I'm proud to say that the project I worked on was instrumental in getting a bunch of them barred from practice.
My point? Getting paid to surf porn isn't so cool. The time always comes when you have to actually get some work done and the real work tends to be nowhere near as much fun as you might think.
If the activity is illegal, claming it on your taxes is among the least of your problems.
Take it from someone who has witnessed co-workers receiving suitcases full of cash with "John Doe" tax returns attached: When your illegal activity results in your prosecution and your illegal income is about to be revealed to the whole world, you'll sleep a lot better knowing that the IRS will not be in line to take a chunk out of your hide.
ST:TNG...That show was ABYSMAL in its first season...
Abysmal? OK, maybe. I did get tired of the "Quick! Have Troi make a face like she's constipated and announce that she 'feels something'!" plot devices.
But y'know what? Ever since I was a geeky teen who studied my Star Trek Technical Manual twenty times as much as my schoolbooks I had been waiting to see the Enterprise saucer section separate from the main hull. Encounter at FarPoint gave me that in the first few minutes. After earning that much goodwill from me, I would have put up with several seasons of crap. Thankfully, I only had to put up with a couple.
Hint for the people making the next movie: Read your old, original tech manuals; I'm still waiting to see a Dreadnaught-class ship on-screen.
In truth, it will probably be at least a couple of years before I can make the trip. Even then, I'll probably limit myself to Chisinau for the jazz festival. With that in mind, I'll try to remember to drop you a line before I come.
Moldova is on my short list of places I want to visit in this world before I die. I'm happy to go places that aren't exactly tourist-ready but any place where "students are storming the presidency and parliament" is just too unstable to contemplate.
Cross Moldova off the list for now. Maybe in a couple of years, though.
You bring up some great issues, but it's late and I'm only going to take time to correct one little mistake in your post. To wit:
In most countries, it's illegal to watch any child porn...
No.
According to the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, child porn is legal in most countries. (See their report here.) Only five countries specifically and completely outlaw child porn. Add in the countries that partially outlaw it and those that don't specifically address child porn but essentially outlaw all porn (like, iirc, China and most strongly Muslim countries) and it's probably true to say that child porn is illegal for the majority of the worlds population.
However, the fact remains that child porn is more or less legal in most countries.
There's more to the issue than the (contestable) facts you cite.
The child porn exception has continued to be kept narrow by the Supreme Court.
Not really. Without going into cases (much), "lascivious exhibition" and "intended to arouse" are the practical criteria involved. It is possible (not necessarily reasonable, but possible) to prosecute anyone for possession of child porn if they possess any picture of a young-looking person. All you need is an overzealous official willing to stupidly overexert his authority.
Artistic works, for example, cannot be prosecuted as child pornography
Yes, they can. It depends on who possesses them and why.
Nor can baby pictures of the kids in the tub.
Nor can computer-generated images which appear to be kids (and in the process of creating, no kids were actually harmed).
The guy sitting in jail in Virginia for possession of anime would disagree.
Nor can images of adults pretending to be children.
Paul Little (aka Max Hardcore) would disagree. He's been prosecuted for exactly that. The fact that the California case against him failed doesn't really matter, does it, when said failure makes you a marked man who will be repeatedly prosecuted for everything under the sun until something sticks? He's finally headed to jail now, convicted in a case where any geek with a cursory understanding of both the law and communications technology would have acquitted him in a heartbeat.
I've met and talked with Paul/Max; I think he's an unlikable bozo. But he's going to (or is he already there?) jail for making porn and he would have never been prosecuted if he hadn't beaten the child porn rap when he made a video of a clearly older actress pretending to be young.
But don't just look at porn. Sally Mann no longer does her incredible portraits of young girls. She was accused of child porn, investigated, hounded. This great artist was forced to give up her first love and now does mostly landscapes. Jock Sturges (if I'm remembering my artists correctly) was run out of the country after having his studio repeatedly ransacked by the police pursuant to bogus search warrants.
You don't have to be convicted of producing child porn to be a victim of child porn laws. In practical terms, the fight against child porn can ruin lives without ever chalking up a single prosecutorial win.
The exception is still extremely narrow, and I am reasonably sure that the courts would throw out a prosecution such as this on an as-applied challenge as this sort of case meets none of the criteria in the child porn cases upholding the exception.
In this particular case, you may be right. But take those same photos, sell them to pervs with a promise that they will provide sexual arousal, and they become child porn.
In the Pierson case, as a lead-in to prosecuting the Webe Webb case, Pierson took a plea bargain convicting him of two counts even though everyone involved agreed that there was no sex, no sexual activity, no nudity at all in any of the tens of thousands of photos he made.
Hell, if you can find a pedophile who gets off on pictures of little kids in winter clothes and you sell said pedophile pictures you took of fully clothed children bundled up in bulky coats with the understanding that those pictures will get him off, then you are guilty of producing and distributing child porn under U.S. law.
Y'see, it's not the content of the pictures that make them child porn. The way the law works, it's the thoughts that are in the head of the seller and buyer, the producer and possessor, that make certain pictures illegal. The exact same picture that's legal for one person to possess may be illegal for someone else, depending on their states of mind. The ambiguity tha
Thanks for the insight, although it begs the question of how you'd get to be so knowledgeable on the topic.
Thanks. I needed a smile this morning.
But just for the record, I became knowledgeable on the subject because I'm a computer geek and I'm dedicated to the whole concept that civil rights (including free speech) are important.
My dedication goes way back. I was speaking to political action groups (I have great stories about giving a speech to the local chapter of the John Birch Society when I was 15 years old) long before I graduated high school. I've been involved in First and Second amendment issue fights for as long as I've been able. As a computer geek, I came to realize that there was a huge body of knowledge that needed to be categorized and understood in ways people were neglecting; to wit - the crossroads of electronic communications technology and free speech issues. (Short version - effective censorship is potentially possible only in electronic media. Computer geeks and free-speechers *really* need to talk more; both their butts are in the fire at the moment, even if they don't realize it.)
The free speech wedge issues that most threaten the whole concept of free speech are "fighting terrorism" and "protecting children." Where either issue is involved, you can pass any sort of damn fool legislation you want because people think emotionally, not critically, when you bring up the twin spectres of mad bombers and pervs. Thankfully, even the mainstream media is beginning to realize that the anti-speech components of anti-terrorism legislation can do far more harm than good. There's still a big battle to be fought in that arena, but lots of good people are already joining the fray.
Where the issue is "protecting the children," the situation is different. There are still far too few people who are willing to stand up and say that destroying free speech is too high a price to pay to protect the children.
There's work to be done in that arena. Somebody's got to do it. I'm willing to be one of those somebodies.
...if child porn was first criminalised because it involved molesting children, shouldn't we, instead of making the production and possession of child porn a crime, make it an evidence of crime (the crime of molesting children) and prosecute along those lines, instead of prosecuting children for strictly victimless crimes?
You're thinking logically. The nanny-staters who agitate for more and more ridiculous laws in this arena don't know how to do that.
We also have lobbyists who claim that the reason for child porn laws wasn't as you point out, but was because looking at images turned people into pedophiles.
Just for the record, you're right. There are lobbyists who say these things.
However, these are new statements. Child porn was made illegal (in the U.S.) in the 1970s, worked its way to the Supreme Court in the early 1980s, and finally became illegal to possess in every state and under federal law in (iirc) 1990. During all that, no one brought up such arguments very widely, if at all. The argument that the availability of the material turned edge cases into full-blown pedophiles came later.
I have real problems responding to this. It's so insane, it's hard to come up with a good answer. For example, I'm male and straight but I can appreciate the male form as art. But no matter how many gorgeous Mapplethorpe photos of male genitalia I view, I'm never going to want to spend any time in close proximity to such appendages.
The notion that child porn can make anyone a pedo who isn't already one is just absurd. How do you respond to that?
Now, let's take it to a whole new level. There are people in the U.S. who are arguing to make child porn more illegal (or arguing that the reason that child porn should be illegal is) because viewing a photo of a child rape is the equivalent of raping that child again.
Notice that I put no qualifiers in the previous sentence. I didn't say "moral equivalent." I said "equivalent." There are actually nutjobs who will, with a straight face, tell you that the possession of a picture is or should be a crime EQUAL to the rape of a child.
We have now moved to the level of religious faith. The notion that looking at a picture is the same as committing rape is so far out there, so insane, so completely divorced from objective reality that there's simply no way I can conceive to counter their arguments.
Bottom line: There are people out there who would lock you up for the rest of your life for the thoughts you hold in your head. Some of them hold public office. That's something that really shouldn't happen in democratic societies. That's the sort of mindset that's required to put people in jail for possession of cartoons.
Given that these repressive laws exist, of course people whose careers depend on enforcing them will have a strong incentive to be obtuse, but that can't explain why they exist in the first place.
Thanks for asking the question. Most people just assume that child porn has always been illegal and never give a thought to the basis for those laws.
I'm old and I've viewed porn since long before videotape existed as a consumer product. I'm also from the U.S., so my experience is limited to the laws in my country. I'll take a stab at answering your question because it's a very important one.
For most of the history of the U.S., child porn was legal. (Some will argue that child porn has always been illegal because obscenity has always been illegal and child porn is obscene. They have a point but not a practical one. There was negligible prosecution for obscenity in child porn cases in the past because they were hard cases to make and you couldn't be sure of a conviction. Thus,) Until the 1970s, child porn magazines and 8mm films were easily available in any large adult book store in any large city.
This bothered people for good reason. In those days, there was no amateur child porn. Film photography (no digital back then, remember) is expensive and developing film isn't easy. Almost no one took pictures of child porn unless they were doing it as a business. Further, there was no (essentially) cost-free distribution medium in those pre-internet days.
The bottom line is that back in those days, child porn was a business. If you possessed child porn, you had to have bought it. If you bought it, you were giving money to adults who were in the business of molesting children.
That's not a good thing.
In fact, it's such a bad thing that when we started making child porn illegal, the few objections on free-speech grounds (and there were some) were easily dismissed. The value of free speech, in these narrow circumstances, is not enough to overcome the legitimate interest of the state in protecting children. Remember, in this case, we're talking about the REAL protection of children. The act of buying child porn back then was functionally equivalent to paying a group of adults to rape kids. No court had a problem with outlawing it.
From that perfectly reasonable beginning, weirdness soon began to grow.
Simple possession was outlawed and nobody raised a fuss because, well, who cares, really? The few pervs who collected large amounts of the stuff were also the people most likely to buy more, so making their lives more difficult wasn't seen as a problem.
Remember, at that time child porn laws came into existence because child porn consisted of adults being paid to rape children. Child porn prohibition had a positive effect on reducing that problem and everybody was happy - except the pedos. In the immediate pre-consumer-internet period, child porn had ceased to exist as a commercial product. Essentially no one in the U.S. was selling it except for the U.S. Postal Service as a part of sting operations. About the only place to get it was alt.sex.pedophilia (and related groups); most of what was available there was simply scans of old nudist magazines. Child porn, for a while, was essentially dead.
Then, the consumer-level internet and ubiquitous digital media technologies came into existence. EVERYTHING changed. Comparing then to now:
Then, child porn was expensive to produce. Now, it's cheap.
Then, child porn was a business. Now, it's amateur hour, all the time.
Then, child porn exclusively involved adults molesting kids. Now, the most common forms of child porn involve children molesting themselves.
Then, child porn only saw the light of day because an adult sold it. Now, most child porn involves no adults at any stage of production or distribution.
Then, child porn was rare because it was difficult to physically distribute the magazines and films in quanti
It's a fine site with lots of good information. But it skips some things that people interested in privacy should probably know about. I see no mention on the site of Freenet or the concept of darknets/opennets. The section on disk encryption doesn't mention hardware-based solutions at all, even though they are about the easiest for a non-geek user to implement.
That's the best reply I've ever gotten to my pet peeve about number pronunciation. Thank you very much. Three points:
You assert that there are "regular" places to put the "ands" when speaking numbers. If that were true, I'd have no objection. It's my observation, though, that connectives are scattered about nearly at random in long numbers. My example was exaggerated but, in truth, I commonly hear something along the lines of "one million, one hundred and five thousand, six hundred and fifteen" when saying "1,105,615." It seems people sprinkle the "ands" into spoken words according to no generally-accepted rules. If there were such rules, such a "regular" way of using them, I'd have no problem.
The rules that I adhere to about how to say words do apply for most Americans during the only time they actually write out the pronunciation of a word - when they write a check. I take that as proof that there's a correct, formal way to write and (by extension) say numbers. Other folks view it as a special, too-formal case that should be abandoned in speech. I can't argue with that, of course; it's just personal preference.
Finally, spoken money amounts are a special case. I find much more consistency in the way people speak dollar amounts and it's far less irritating to me. Generally speaking, most Americans would say "one thousand, seven hundred and twenty five dollars and ninety five cents." I'd say the same, just omitting the first and. I might even shorten it to "seventeen hundred twenty fine and ninety five cents."
I'm certainly open to people saying words however they wish. In spoken communications, it's getting the idea across that's important and pretty much any form will get the job done. The fact that extra connectives irritate me is something I keep to myself except in functionally anonymous internet locales. There's certainly nothing about the way people say numbers that irritates me nearly as much as pull handles on doors that must be pushed and vice versa.:-)
ps - I agree with you about the sprinkling of extra prepositions. I find myself doing it when writing and must focus my editing efforts on rooting them out.
I was taught this way and have no authorities to appeal to, so dismiss me if you wish. It's just that, as long as we're expressing annoyances...
"two thousand and nine"?
Two thousand and nine what? Two thousand and nine tenths? Two thousand and nine hundredths?
The connective "and" is used in spoken numbers to point out the decimal. "Two thousand and nine" is 2000.9 (or 2000.09, or 2000.009, etc.) To speak the number 2009, say "Two thousand nine".
Simple and logical, right?
OK, folks, flame away.
PS - I've had this discussion before, so to save people trouble, here's my favorite response to me on this subject: "I can throw as many connectives into a spoken number as I wish. I say 'point' or 'decimal' when I mean to designate the spot where the decimal goes."
Fun attitude, that. That means that the last bank deposit I made was "one thousand and seven hundred and twenty and five decimal ninety and five dollars" or some such clumsy nonsense.
Multiple/misused/misplaced/extra "ands" when speaking numbers == the run-on sentences of the numeric world.
On AOL, people lied less
on
Jurassic Web
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Believe it or not, youngsters, back then the people you talked to online tended to actually be who they said they were. Without going into excessive detail, before AOL began routinely violating their own terms of service by monitoring private chat rooms and interfering with that communications channel (either by banning people who did naughty things or by closing rooms), it was possible to open a room, have a conversation, exchange phone numbers, and get to...ahem..."know" people rather quickly. And I mean online, on the phone, and in a hotel room. That all went to hell when the infamous Community Action Team was given great powers and no oversight, thus allowing them to close anything that offended them personally. When CATWatch01 came into your room, that room was endangered and so was your account.
It's been many years since I was there, but the last time I was in the room named "phonesex", the lonely housewives were guys with problems trolling for suckers and the teen girls were LEOs trolling for still more suckers. Sad, really. A tragedy of the commons, I think.
To some extent, the same was true on IRC. It was often possible to talk to people who would tell you who they were. And they wouldn't be lying! Amazing, huh?
I'm in the U.S. where, like in most places, viewing/possessing child pornography is a crime.
Uh, no.
Not even close.
According to this 2006 report only 5 countries in the world totally outlaw child porn. Lots more have laws against it to some degree or another, but simple possession is legal in many countries and in some there are absolutely zero laws against it.
Caveats: Yes, I'm sure things have changed some since 2006. (I know Brazil criminalized simple possession in 2008, for example.) Yes, in many places where making child porn is technically legal, other laws against child abuse would be broken, thus resulting in a de facto ban on making and marketing child porn. But it's a huge, huge error to say that viewing child porn is illegal "in most places."
I think it would be more accurate to say that "most places" realize that raping kids is a crime; that fighting *that* crime is a worthwhile use of resources; and that criminalizing the possession of crime scene photos is probably best treated as little more than a silly distraction.
Some people will say that checklists begin to break down when there are too many tasks that are too complex. I guess you can reach that point, but I haven't seen it yet.
I once worked on a deployment that took a group of grumpy field investigators and completely changed everything they did. The centerpiece was giving them each a computer (first computer most of them had ever touched) with an application designed to automate their paperwork. Around that, we changed everything else - new location, new furniture, new work processes - all at the same time. The highest potential seemed to be for total disaster.
Then we got *the* checklist. Starting two years before the go live date, the list took us from step to step to step, thousands of them, in order. The thing was a completely incomprehensible jumble if you tried to take it all in at one time but if you just concentrated on finishing step 555, then doing step 556, then step 557, the entire thing got cut into manageable little tasks that everyone could wrap their head around.
The result was a rousing success, far greater than any project I've worked on before or since. Lockheed Martin was the primary contractor. I've often thought those guys should go into some other business where their organizational skills could be put to good use completing mind-bogglingly complex tasks like, oh, I dunno, building military aircraft or something.
In case you can't tell, I'm a real fan of checklists.
I'll bet most of your old tormentors are loving parents who'd enjoy showing off the mini versions of themselves,...
I don't know.
I've done standup comedy as a hobby and drawn on my high school experiences for jokes. If I were actually to run into the kids of some of my former classmates, I don't think I'd be able to resist going off on a major riff that starts: "Wait'll you hear what a total slut your daddy was in high school!"
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Interesting you should bring that up. I'm about to retire from lifelong service under the federal Civil Service Retirement System. I'm one of the last group hired under CSRS nearly 30 years ago before the system was scrapped and a hybrid system more closely resembling private industry was put in place.
Back during the dotcom bubble, I was (I've since moved on) a reasonably competent sysadmin in an all-Unix environment. Not a fortnight passed that I didn't turn down a job offer for at least double my salary. Some were willing to pay me 5 times my salary. Of course, those guys all wanted me to work 100 hours a week and carry a pager, to boot. I had no idea if any of them were going to be in business in 5 years. I turned them all down.
In a few months (or 5 years, depending on how our current reorg goes), I'll be retired. I'll have good (not great, but good) life, health, and long-term care insurance for the rest of my life. After deductions and assuming a frugal lifestyle, I'll get a small pension that amounts to, based on my projections, about 110-130% of my expenses. I have a few hundred grand in savings but I don't actually need any of that to live.
I got to this point via a willingness to delay gratification in exchange for stability and long-term viability. Y'see, when I was in my early 20s, I was unemployed for a couple of years. I felt like a leech. I was consumed with guilt for not pulling my weight. When I got a job, I was damn well going to keep it come hell or high water. As a result of that attitude, I've been willing to take the safe course and it's worked out reasonbly well for me.
My point is that I reject the notion that offering a generous retirement is necessarily a bad deal for the government and for society. The government has saved a bunch of money via my willingness to accept below-market-rate salaries over the last quarter century. Now they get to pay my pension with less valuable, post-inflation dollars. Not a bad deal for them, for me, or for any young person who can see themselves in their old age. It's too bad that such systems are gone now; I think they could still serve a valuable function.
I'm as susceptible to urban myths as anyone, I suppose. Especially when they dovetail so well with my prejudices.
Nice to be corrected, nice to learn something.
The article goes on at length to (rightfully) decry the chasm between work and the management of it, how actual tasks that are useful tend to get divorced from policy, procedures, and presence on the management radar. At its root, this attitude is what makes it possible to outsource to other continents. There's no longer a feeling that management and directing vision need to coexist in the same space in order to stay aligned and keep working well and synergistically. (And that may be the only time in the last few years I'd consider it appropriate to use that management-jargon-co-opted word.)
Since the author is a motorcycle mechanic, I thought I'd toss this out. When I was a young man, bike enthusiasts were decrying the fall of Triumph. That once-great motorcycle company was dying. They sold few bikes. They had run through many unsuccessful models that weren't very good bikes when they were working well and didn't work well very often because they were poorly assembled. It was enough to make an old gearhead shed a tear.
And then a story came out, perhaps apocryphal, that pinpointed the precise moment when Triumph stopped their forward progress and began their long fall. Some time in the early 1960s, so the story went, the upper management had gotten so successful that they started looking like upper management. They were driven to work. They dressed in expensive suits. They came to view themselves as businessmen. Or, rather, as typically happens with businesses as they become big, the guys who were bike lovers gradually got replaced in the executive suites by guys who were supposed to be good at the business of business, guys for whom the actual product was unimportant.
Finally, one day, there was a big, routine board meeting and one of the last of the old guard, who had ridden his bike that day, showed up to the meeting room in full leathers. He was informed that such was not appropriate. A rule that "proper dress," specifically meaning "no leathers," was required at all business meetings. The break between management and the iron on the road was now complete. Management had been outsourced to people who were distant (mentally, emotionally, and philosophically, if not physically) from the actual work.
At that point, Triumph was toast. It took years for the motorcycle brand to die. I remember one of the (perhaps the very) last bike they produced, a brilliant triple in sporting trim. I remember thinking it was a death rattle, the last gasp of a company that didn't know what in the bloody hell to do to stay alive and had, in desperation, actually let the engineers and bike lovers have a crack at producing something. It was far too little, far too late.
What I'm saying is the same as, in part, the article. Not only is working with your hands a good thing, when any company is run by people who are *incapable* of hands-on work or, at minimum, hands-on appreciation of that work - the company is doomed.
Government officials, including the president, get sued all the time. Because they are being sued pursuant to their job, their employer defends them. Hell, I was just a lowly Officer with the IRS back in the day and I managed to get myself sued once or twice. The government has some really good lawyers and I was glad of it.
Sometimes, things get even more indisidious. Back in the day (20+ years ago) every local district office of the IRS had a director. There were 66 of them spread around the country and they were the public face of the IRS. Ours was a good guy, totally in the "firm but fair" mode, who even had a sense of humor. He used to donate his time (very occasionally) to charity to sit in a dunk tank and let the public try to drop him into the water.
So what was his reward for trying to be open, transparent, and just plain *human* to the public? Not only did he get sued pretty much every week, lots of anti-tax protestors would go to various county courthouses in the area and file "common law liens." These bogus documents were a bunch of rambling nonsense that basically says "The IRS is illegal so the local director should be held personally liable for all the damage they cause." Said "damage" was calculated in various ways, ranging from just the amount the aggrieved citizen-idiot owed all the way up to some approximation of the entire amount of money collected by the IRS in that city that year, typically billions.
The clerks at the county courthouses eventually learned to recognize this crap and refuse to accept bogus documents for filing but that put them on thin ice; they are supposed to let anything be filed and let the courts decide if a filing is fraudulent. Sometimes they just held the filings until the lawyers could have a look. Most time, the filings just went through.
Our guy was a good person, making a good salary, filing all required financial disclosure reports that showed he never defaulted on a loan or was late with bills. But at the courthouse, there were filings showing that he was a multi-billion dollar deadbeat. The poor guy had the worst credit in the world. Getting a loan to buy a house or car or just getting a credit card was an exercise in frustration for him.
So the answer to your question is "Lots of government lawyers spend their time going to court, time that could have been better spent doing work in the public interest. The few people filing frivoulous actions waste lots of your tax money. That's what happens."
Thanks. No, I honestly don't get it. I know what Monty Python is though I was never a huge fan; my ready knowledge of their work is pretty much limited to the spam sketch and The Ministry of Silly Walks. I might have been more of a fan if back when I was a kid there had been a PBS station near enough to me for me to receive their signal. As it was, I got no Monty Python, no Sesame Street, etc. Sometimes, people make references to those shows and I'm just lost. Apparently that's what happened in this case. (I *love* The Princess Bride, tho.)
There's a limit to how much time I should waste at work, so when I get home tonite, I'll check the links you provided.
Sincerely - thanks.
Why was this modded funny? I absolutely don't get the joke.
The range of MV of any round is dependent on lots of things; in full-pressure loadings, mostly the bullet weight and barrel length. But there are dozens of factors that can come into play. So the question is legit. "If you fire a .223 through a chonograph, what range of readings can you expect?" is a reasonable, if esoteric, question.
In the U.S., the answer would normally be expressed in feet per second. I assume that in both Europe and Africa, the answer would be expressed in meters per second. So what's the humorous contrast between Africa and Europe?
The GP was listing esoteric questions to illustrate a point and this one seems to fit that bill. So I don't get why the "African or European" response was modded funny. I just don't get it. Somebody help me out.
BTW - Who said "Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. No one enjoys it and the frog dies."?
Yes, the sworn statement works, but only because it's part of our contract negotiation from the beginning. We set it up as a part of each acquisition that we won't be returning any drives. Since we buy more that 30,000 computers a year, the people who sell them to us (currently, mostly HP) are OK with it. Occasionally there's some tension when a particular run of drives fails at a high rate; the contracts can be unprofitable if things go badly enough. But that's rare.
Such arrangements are far more common than most people realize.
I work for the IRS and we supposedly use the DOD standard. Our wiping software actually has a "/DOD" switch. However, unlike the standard quoted in another post, our software just reinitializes the MBR and then does 7 random overwrites. Is that better or worse than writing patterns? I dunno.
I do know, however, that we never let a drive out of our inventory without a wipe. If the drive has failed completely, we have a big magnetic blanker we use. (Local option - in my office, we then take those drives apart, abuse the platters, and one of our techs makes sculptures from them. Neat stuff.)
As an aside, we never RMA drives, either. If a drive in our possession fails, we call for a warranty replacement and send back in the return box a signed statement swearing that we destroyed the old drive. If a laptop has a failure that requires a contractor tech to replace parts, we make them come on-site then have someone stand over them the whole time to make sure they don't try to actually read anything off the drive.
I would expect the military to do at least as well. Am I wrong?
Many years ago, back when the internet was only recently become a consumer-level, money-making prospect, I spent several months surfing porn for the IRS. I got my untraceable "investigative workstation" complete with exhaustive logging. The actual online work was done in a higher-level secure room. We had full discretion to begin our own investigations with required emphasis in just a couple of areas.
I'm sure the investigations continue to this day; soon after I started the job, the function that did the work moved to a different city and I chose not to follow the work. But in the few months I worked it, we were finding a few interesting things. First, the big porn companies were making too much money to want to deal with us; they were paying their taxes. Second, there were lots of small porn operators doing strip shows, live sex shows, and making custom niche market videos (mostly bestiality) whose compliance was middling to poor; they got forwarded for audit. Third, there were obscenity purveyors (mostly child porn) that were probably making a lot of money but we simply couldn't figure out who they were; most were offshore, anyway.
Finally, the first group of big crooks we managed to profile in some detail were rogue CPAs who were selling bogus tax advice for high prices. In those days, you could do outrageously stupid things with tax shelters that were obviously illegal but *if* you had relied on the advice of a "competent authority" to make those investment decisions then you could avoid expensive penalties when you finally got caught. Lots of CPAs just decided to drop out of doing real accountancy work and threw up web sites where they sold, typically, single-page letters for USD$5000 that informed you that whatever stupid tax dodge you were about to invest in was perfectly legal. When you got caught (if you got caught), you'd produce the letter and claim that you were an innocent victim who had relied on an accountant for advice. At that point, the Revenue Agents job got a lot harder; the RA would have to not only prove you did a bogus tax dodge but that you and some third party in another state knew it was bogus beforehand. Lots of RAs just threw up their hands and let people skate on some penalties. ALL those crooked CPAs, though, advertised on the internet and I'm proud to say that the project I worked on was instrumental in getting a bunch of them barred from practice.
My point? Getting paid to surf porn isn't so cool. The time always comes when you have to actually get some work done and the real work tends to be nowhere near as much fun as you might think.
Take it from someone who has witnessed co-workers receiving suitcases full of cash with "John Doe" tax returns attached: When your illegal activity results in your prosecution and your illegal income is about to be revealed to the whole world, you'll sleep a lot better knowing that the IRS will not be in line to take a chunk out of your hide.
Abysmal? OK, maybe. I did get tired of the "Quick! Have Troi make a face like she's constipated and announce that she 'feels something'!" plot devices.
But y'know what? Ever since I was a geeky teen who studied my Star Trek Technical Manual twenty times as much as my schoolbooks I had been waiting to see the Enterprise saucer section separate from the main hull. Encounter at FarPoint gave me that in the first few minutes. After earning that much goodwill from me, I would have put up with several seasons of crap. Thankfully, I only had to put up with a couple.
Hint for the people making the next movie: Read your old, original tech manuals; I'm still waiting to see a Dreadnaught-class ship on-screen.
In truth, it will probably be at least a couple of years before I can make the trip. Even then, I'll probably limit myself to Chisinau for the jazz festival. With that in mind, I'll try to remember to drop you a line before I come.
Moldova is on my short list of places I want to visit in this world before I die. I'm happy to go places that aren't exactly tourist-ready but any place where "students are storming the presidency and parliament" is just too unstable to contemplate.
Cross Moldova off the list for now. Maybe in a couple of years, though.
You bring up some great issues, but it's late and I'm only going to take time to correct one little mistake in your post. To wit:
No.
According to the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, child porn is legal in most countries. (See their report here.) Only five countries specifically and completely outlaw child porn. Add in the countries that partially outlaw it and those that don't specifically address child porn but essentially outlaw all porn (like, iirc, China and most strongly Muslim countries) and it's probably true to say that child porn is illegal for the majority of the worlds population.
However, the fact remains that child porn is more or less legal in most countries.
There's more to the issue than the (contestable) facts you cite.
Not really. Without going into cases (much), "lascivious exhibition" and "intended to arouse" are the practical criteria involved. It is possible (not necessarily reasonable, but possible) to prosecute anyone for possession of child porn if they possess any picture of a young-looking person. All you need is an overzealous official willing to stupidly overexert his authority.
Yes, they can. It depends on who possesses them and why.
The guy sitting in jail in Virginia for possession of anime would disagree.
Paul Little (aka Max Hardcore) would disagree. He's been prosecuted for exactly that. The fact that the California case against him failed doesn't really matter, does it, when said failure makes you a marked man who will be repeatedly prosecuted for everything under the sun until something sticks? He's finally headed to jail now, convicted in a case where any geek with a cursory understanding of both the law and communications technology would have acquitted him in a heartbeat.
I've met and talked with Paul/Max; I think he's an unlikable bozo. But he's going to (or is he already there?) jail for making porn and he would have never been prosecuted if he hadn't beaten the child porn rap when he made a video of a clearly older actress pretending to be young.
But don't just look at porn. Sally Mann no longer does her incredible portraits of young girls. She was accused of child porn, investigated, hounded. This great artist was forced to give up her first love and now does mostly landscapes. Jock Sturges (if I'm remembering my artists correctly) was run out of the country after having his studio repeatedly ransacked by the police pursuant to bogus search warrants.
You don't have to be convicted of producing child porn to be a victim of child porn laws. In practical terms, the fight against child porn can ruin lives without ever chalking up a single prosecutorial win.
In this particular case, you may be right. But take those same photos, sell them to pervs with a promise that they will provide sexual arousal, and they become child porn.
In the Pierson case, as a lead-in to prosecuting the Webe Webb case, Pierson took a plea bargain convicting him of two counts even though everyone involved agreed that there was no sex, no sexual activity, no nudity at all in any of the tens of thousands of photos he made.
Hell, if you can find a pedophile who gets off on pictures of little kids in winter clothes and you sell said pedophile pictures you took of fully clothed children bundled up in bulky coats with the understanding that those pictures will get him off, then you are guilty of producing and distributing child porn under U.S. law.
Y'see, it's not the content of the pictures that make them child porn. The way the law works, it's the thoughts that are in the head of the seller and buyer, the producer and possessor, that make certain pictures illegal. The exact same picture that's legal for one person to possess may be illegal for someone else, depending on their states of mind. The ambiguity tha
Thanks. I needed a smile this morning.
But just for the record, I became knowledgeable on the subject because I'm a computer geek and I'm dedicated to the whole concept that civil rights (including free speech) are important.
My dedication goes way back. I was speaking to political action groups (I have great stories about giving a speech to the local chapter of the John Birch Society when I was 15 years old) long before I graduated high school. I've been involved in First and Second amendment issue fights for as long as I've been able. As a computer geek, I came to realize that there was a huge body of knowledge that needed to be categorized and understood in ways people were neglecting; to wit - the crossroads of electronic communications technology and free speech issues. (Short version - effective censorship is potentially possible only in electronic media. Computer geeks and free-speechers *really* need to talk more; both their butts are in the fire at the moment, even if they don't realize it.)
The free speech wedge issues that most threaten the whole concept of free speech are "fighting terrorism" and "protecting children." Where either issue is involved, you can pass any sort of damn fool legislation you want because people think emotionally, not critically, when you bring up the twin spectres of mad bombers and pervs. Thankfully, even the mainstream media is beginning to realize that the anti-speech components of anti-terrorism legislation can do far more harm than good. There's still a big battle to be fought in that arena, but lots of good people are already joining the fray.
Where the issue is "protecting the children," the situation is different. There are still far too few people who are willing to stand up and say that destroying free speech is too high a price to pay to protect the children.
There's work to be done in that arena. Somebody's got to do it. I'm willing to be one of those somebodies.
You're thinking logically. The nanny-staters who agitate for more and more ridiculous laws in this arena don't know how to do that.
Just for the record, you're right. There are lobbyists who say these things.
However, these are new statements. Child porn was made illegal (in the U.S.) in the 1970s, worked its way to the Supreme Court in the early 1980s, and finally became illegal to possess in every state and under federal law in (iirc) 1990. During all that, no one brought up such arguments very widely, if at all. The argument that the availability of the material turned edge cases into full-blown pedophiles came later.
I have real problems responding to this. It's so insane, it's hard to come up with a good answer. For example, I'm male and straight but I can appreciate the male form as art. But no matter how many gorgeous Mapplethorpe photos of male genitalia I view, I'm never going to want to spend any time in close proximity to such appendages.
The notion that child porn can make anyone a pedo who isn't already one is just absurd. How do you respond to that?
Now, let's take it to a whole new level. There are people in the U.S. who are arguing to make child porn more illegal (or arguing that the reason that child porn should be illegal is) because viewing a photo of a child rape is the equivalent of raping that child again.
Notice that I put no qualifiers in the previous sentence. I didn't say "moral equivalent." I said "equivalent." There are actually nutjobs who will, with a straight face, tell you that the possession of a picture is or should be a crime EQUAL to the rape of a child.
We have now moved to the level of religious faith. The notion that looking at a picture is the same as committing rape is so far out there, so insane, so completely divorced from objective reality that there's simply no way I can conceive to counter their arguments.
Bottom line: There are people out there who would lock you up for the rest of your life for the thoughts you hold in your head. Some of them hold public office. That's something that really shouldn't happen in democratic societies. That's the sort of mindset that's required to put people in jail for possession of cartoons.
It's time to be very, very afraid.
Thanks for asking the question. Most people just assume that child porn has always been illegal and never give a thought to the basis for those laws.
I'm old and I've viewed porn since long before videotape existed as a consumer product. I'm also from the U.S., so my experience is limited to the laws in my country. I'll take a stab at answering your question because it's a very important one.
For most of the history of the U.S., child porn was legal. (Some will argue that child porn has always been illegal because obscenity has always been illegal and child porn is obscene. They have a point but not a practical one. There was negligible prosecution for obscenity in child porn cases in the past because they were hard cases to make and you couldn't be sure of a conviction. Thus,) Until the 1970s, child porn magazines and 8mm films were easily available in any large adult book store in any large city.
This bothered people for good reason. In those days, there was no amateur child porn. Film photography (no digital back then, remember) is expensive and developing film isn't easy. Almost no one took pictures of child porn unless they were doing it as a business. Further, there was no (essentially) cost-free distribution medium in those pre-internet days.
The bottom line is that back in those days, child porn was a business. If you possessed child porn, you had to have bought it. If you bought it, you were giving money to adults who were in the business of molesting children.
That's not a good thing.
In fact, it's such a bad thing that when we started making child porn illegal, the few objections on free-speech grounds (and there were some) were easily dismissed. The value of free speech, in these narrow circumstances, is not enough to overcome the legitimate interest of the state in protecting children. Remember, in this case, we're talking about the REAL protection of children. The act of buying child porn back then was functionally equivalent to paying a group of adults to rape kids. No court had a problem with outlawing it.
From that perfectly reasonable beginning, weirdness soon began to grow.
Simple possession was outlawed and nobody raised a fuss because, well, who cares, really? The few pervs who collected large amounts of the stuff were also the people most likely to buy more, so making their lives more difficult wasn't seen as a problem.
Remember, at that time child porn laws came into existence because child porn consisted of adults being paid to rape children. Child porn prohibition had a positive effect on reducing that problem and everybody was happy - except the pedos. In the immediate pre-consumer-internet period, child porn had ceased to exist as a commercial product. Essentially no one in the U.S. was selling it except for the U.S. Postal Service as a part of sting operations. About the only place to get it was alt.sex.pedophilia (and related groups); most of what was available there was simply scans of old nudist magazines. Child porn, for a while, was essentially dead.
Then, the consumer-level internet and ubiquitous digital media technologies came into existence. EVERYTHING changed. Comparing then to now:
Then, child porn was expensive to produce. Now, it's cheap.
Then, child porn was a business. Now, it's amateur hour, all the time.
Then, child porn exclusively involved adults molesting kids. Now, the most common forms of child porn involve children molesting themselves.
Then, child porn only saw the light of day because an adult sold it. Now, most child porn involves no adults at any stage of production or distribution.
Then, child porn was rare because it was difficult to physically distribute the magazines and films in quanti
It's a fine site with lots of good information. But it skips some things that people interested in privacy should probably know about. I see no mention on the site of Freenet or the concept of darknets/opennets. The section on disk encryption doesn't mention hardware-based solutions at all, even though they are about the easiest for a non-geek user to implement.
Good start. Keep it up, EFF.
That's the best reply I've ever gotten to my pet peeve about number pronunciation. Thank you very much. Three points:
You assert that there are "regular" places to put the "ands" when speaking numbers. If that were true, I'd have no objection. It's my observation, though, that connectives are scattered about nearly at random in long numbers. My example was exaggerated but, in truth, I commonly hear something along the lines of "one million, one hundred and five thousand, six hundred and fifteen" when saying "1,105,615." It seems people sprinkle the "ands" into spoken words according to no generally-accepted rules. If there were such rules, such a "regular" way of using them, I'd have no problem.
The rules that I adhere to about how to say words do apply for most Americans during the only time they actually write out the pronunciation of a word - when they write a check. I take that as proof that there's a correct, formal way to write and (by extension) say numbers. Other folks view it as a special, too-formal case that should be abandoned in speech. I can't argue with that, of course; it's just personal preference.
Finally, spoken money amounts are a special case. I find much more consistency in the way people speak dollar amounts and it's far less irritating to me. Generally speaking, most Americans would say "one thousand, seven hundred and twenty five dollars and ninety five cents." I'd say the same, just omitting the first and. I might even shorten it to "seventeen hundred twenty fine and ninety five cents."
I'm certainly open to people saying words however they wish. In spoken communications, it's getting the idea across that's important and pretty much any form will get the job done. The fact that extra connectives irritate me is something I keep to myself except in functionally anonymous internet locales. There's certainly nothing about the way people say numbers that irritates me nearly as much as pull handles on doors that must be pushed and vice versa. :-)
ps - I agree with you about the sprinkling of extra prepositions. I find myself doing it when writing and must focus my editing efforts on rooting them out.
I was taught this way and have no authorities to appeal to, so dismiss me if you wish. It's just that, as long as we're expressing annoyances...
"two thousand and nine"?
Two thousand and nine what? Two thousand and nine tenths? Two thousand and nine hundredths?
The connective "and" is used in spoken numbers to point out the decimal. "Two thousand and nine" is 2000.9 (or 2000.09, or 2000.009, etc.) To speak the number 2009, say "Two thousand nine".
Simple and logical, right?
OK, folks, flame away.
PS - I've had this discussion before, so to save people trouble, here's my favorite response to me on this subject: "I can throw as many connectives into a spoken number as I wish. I say 'point' or 'decimal' when I mean to designate the spot where the decimal goes."
Fun attitude, that. That means that the last bank deposit I made was "one thousand and seven hundred and twenty and five decimal ninety and five dollars" or some such clumsy nonsense.
Multiple/misused/misplaced/extra "ands" when speaking numbers == the run-on sentences of the numeric world.
Believe it or not, youngsters, back then the people you talked to online tended to actually be who they said they were. Without going into excessive detail, before AOL began routinely violating their own terms of service by monitoring private chat rooms and interfering with that communications channel (either by banning people who did naughty things or by closing rooms), it was possible to open a room, have a conversation, exchange phone numbers, and get to...ahem..."know" people rather quickly. And I mean online, on the phone, and in a hotel room. That all went to hell when the infamous Community Action Team was given great powers and no oversight, thus allowing them to close anything that offended them personally. When CATWatch01 came into your room, that room was endangered and so was your account.
It's been many years since I was there, but the last time I was in the room named "phonesex", the lonely housewives were guys with problems trolling for suckers and the teen girls were LEOs trolling for still more suckers. Sad, really. A tragedy of the commons, I think.
To some extent, the same was true on IRC. It was often possible to talk to people who would tell you who they were. And they wouldn't be lying! Amazing, huh?
Uh, no.
Not even close.
According to this 2006 report only 5 countries in the world totally outlaw child porn. Lots more have laws against it to some degree or another, but simple possession is legal in many countries and in some there are absolutely zero laws against it.
Caveats: Yes, I'm sure things have changed some since 2006. (I know Brazil criminalized simple possession in 2008, for example.) Yes, in many places where making child porn is technically legal, other laws against child abuse would be broken, thus resulting in a de facto ban on making and marketing child porn. But it's a huge, huge error to say that viewing child porn is illegal "in most places."
I think it would be more accurate to say that "most places" realize that raping kids is a crime; that fighting *that* crime is a worthwhile use of resources; and that criminalizing the possession of crime scene photos is probably best treated as little more than a silly distraction.
Some people will say that checklists begin to break down when there are too many tasks that are too complex. I guess you can reach that point, but I haven't seen it yet.
I once worked on a deployment that took a group of grumpy field investigators and completely changed everything they did. The centerpiece was giving them each a computer (first computer most of them had ever touched) with an application designed to automate their paperwork. Around that, we changed everything else - new location, new furniture, new work processes - all at the same time. The highest potential seemed to be for total disaster.
Then we got *the* checklist. Starting two years before the go live date, the list took us from step to step to step, thousands of them, in order. The thing was a completely incomprehensible jumble if you tried to take it all in at one time but if you just concentrated on finishing step 555, then doing step 556, then step 557, the entire thing got cut into manageable little tasks that everyone could wrap their head around.
The result was a rousing success, far greater than any project I've worked on before or since. Lockheed Martin was the primary contractor. I've often thought those guys should go into some other business where their organizational skills could be put to good use completing mind-bogglingly complex tasks like, oh, I dunno, building military aircraft or something.
In case you can't tell, I'm a real fan of checklists.
I don't know.
I've done standup comedy as a hobby and drawn on my high school experiences for jokes. If I were actually to run into the kids of some of my former classmates, I don't think I'd be able to resist going off on a major riff that starts: "Wait'll you hear what a total slut your daddy was in high school!"
Somehow, I don't think that would go over well.