> Watching somebody else buggering little boys may well embolden > (or at least excite) some idiot enough to plan and execute > something for themselves.
Prove your assertion. Personally, I agree with the Canadian judge who struck down a particular law forbidding the personal possession (not distribution) of child pornography--the argument that convinced him was that viewing child pornography could be a sexual "release valve" for pedophiles the same way regular pornography is a release vavle for normal heterosexual males.
Be rational--what do people do when they view porn? They masturbate, orgasm, and then their sex drive temporarily wanes. I'd imagine it's exactly the same with pedophiles. From a rational standpoint, the mere posession of child pornography by a pedophile might actually help control his urges and keep them in the realm of fantasy.
In what way does some anonymous pervert in New York downloading images that someone probably posted months or years previous from someplace hundreds or thousands of miles away constitute encouraging anything? Be serious for a second and think rationally about how these images are produced and get disseminated.
As a writer I've researched the matter, and the fact is that 99% or more of what most people would consider "child pornography" to be (hardcore sexual images of pre-adolescent or early adolescent minors) comes from two sources. Once-legal magazines and videos that were published in the 1970's before any child pornography laws existed, and which were later scanned or captured to digital format, are one source. Child molesters who film their abuse and pass it on to "friends" online are the other.
Now, with regard to the former, no one possessing such images can truly be said to have been encouraging anything--the abuse occurred 20 or 30 years previously, when the abusing was just as illegal as it is today yet the filming and distribution were not explicitly illegal yet. It is *exactly* the same situation as viewing concentration-camp footage--no one doing so is encouraging or discouraging anything. It's simply a heinous relic of the past. No one makes money off it anymore--it's no longer a commercial industry and hasn't been for 20 years and more.
Regarding the latter, yes, if you are one of the "friends" to whom the child molestor sent his imagery, then you can truly be said to be encouraging the abuse. However, most people who view child pornography view it as distant links in a tenuous chain, after it has been e-mailed between countless people and posted to websites and posted on USENET hundreds or thousands of times. This becomes a very gray area both ethically and morally, even though the law makes no distinction. Posting the material, passing it on along the tenuous chain, could reasonably be argued to be a subtle form of encouragement of what is depicted. That's an argument that makes some sense, though is still ambiguous. However, what if the college professor in this case merely downloaded the images for his own private viewing and never passed them on to anyone, never posted them anywhere, never became another link in the chain because the images stopped at his hard drive and weren't further disseminated by him?
Well, then the idea that he encouraged anything at all through his possession, but not dissemination, of the imagery, becomes far from convincing. In fact, I'd say the argument fails entirely--facelessly copying a digital file off a public forum like the Net isn't unethical *or* immoral on its face. Yet, it is still illegal, although one can clearly say it *might* be unjustly so.
There is no commercial industry in such material being "fed" by the consumer. That's a common misconception. The child molestor does what he does for the sex and power, and shares the material with people he deems as like-minded. Those people can be thought of as supporting him and the abuse, but somewhere along the line the imagery leaves the purview of him and his "friends" and just floats through the electronic ether for strangers to find.
However, what most people would consider child pornography is not the same as what is actually considered child pornography in the U.S. It's a much broader category, which includes nude images as well as hardcore videos of 16 and 17 year olds which were produced legally in parts of Europe until recently. In places where the age of consent was 16 and child pornography laws stated that child pornography constituted imagery of people below that age, adult material featuring 16 and 17 year olds was once as common and legal as adult material featuring 18 and 19 year olds is in the U.S.--and yet U.S. law makes no disctinction between this material and something produced by a child molestor raping a young girl or boy. One has to seriously question the rationale there, since
> I fought with my sister over whether to watch Garfield and Friends or Teenage Mutant > Ninja Turtles.
The Saturday-morning cartoons I most easily remember from when I was a kid are *The Smurfs* and those public service type edu-toons the stations were required to run, like the *Schoolhouse Rock* cartoons, as well as the musical advertisements from cheese manufacturers' or beef industry associations...
I also recall that my favorite Saturday-morning show wasn't a cartoon, but rather some show in which a bearded guy would tell stories to a room full of kids. Just like story time in elementary school, only on TV. He'd tell some really gruesome kids' stories though, like the one in which a man fights with some sort of man-beast and cuts a chunk out of its flesh during the fight, and takes it home and cooks it up to serve for his family...
A few years later the arrival of *Saved By the Bell* started to change the landscape of Saturday-morning kids' TV, turning it into a time for kids' versions of sitcoms and other live-character shows instead of so many cartoons. Mmmmm, the crush I had on those *Saved By the Bell* gals when I was a kid...
BTW, for anyone who doesn't know, the classic *Schoolhouse Rock* series is available on a special-edition DVD these days. Great nostalgia.
Exactly. You know, I wouldn't mind paying an extra tax on recordable music and video media, if that tax entitled me to make and use noncommercial copies of RIAA and MPAA member content. But it doesn't, so...WTF? What a rip-off. The consumer gets cornholed yet again...
This isn't exactly what you're asking about, but the closest thing I can think of offhand would be PGPfone--a product abandoned years ago for encrypting voice communications much as PGP encrypts text.
There are both binaries and source code available here: http://www.pgpi.org/products/pgpfone/
Windows and Mac only, and it's a very crude app... It would be nice for someone to develop something more robust and with better features.
That was my reaction. Unless you're in one of the several countries governed by semi-theocratic laws where pr0n of any sort is illegal, and showing a little ankle is considered risque.:-) Or, unless you're in the business of amassing kinderporn, which is quite fortunately illegal in most Western countries.
However, you may have other things to hide. Your real accounting books, so you can keep the IRS at bay while keeping more of your income. Your "cracker tools" and the fruits of your cracking efforts. Your copies of all those public documents formerly available on CD-ROM which the U.S. government ordered destroyed shortly after Sept. 11th in the name of national security. Your list of contacts and informants as a reporter. Your MP3 and OGG files, so that if the RIAA comes knocking...
As you can see, some things you could use a secret storage device for are pretty bad, while some are completely good. Everyone should be entitled to a measure of privacy, and the ability to protect it. In fact, it used to be a matter of law in prior centuries that a man's personal papers, books, diaries and such, could not be used against him as evidence--because we're supposed to have freedom of thought. Sadly, this has eroded...
This device has many waknesses which the submitter points out. However, one could very easily build a similar device without those deficiencies in security. For one thing, wireless is out--too traceable, sniffable, and breakable. So, you'd have to go wired--and disguise the wired connection as something innocuous and unconnected to a "secret network". Hmmm... The many possibilities include phoneline networking, as long as you're willing to do a little remodeling and don't mind the slow speed. If you really think about it, there are many ways in which one could adequately disguise a wired network, as long as you're willing to do a little remodeling or build custom, disguised dual-use devices. Hell, as Cringely mentioned, even TiVos have USB ports these days... The possibilities are literally endless.
> Compare a similarly configured Dell to an Apple and then > tell how much more the Apple is.
Two to three times as much, actually. You see, assuming the box is going to be used for real apps and not 3D gaming, you can find a great P4 or even P4 Xeon machine from the small business link on Dell's site, for a very small price. If you're smart, you'll even wait until Dell has a special on one of these nice business boxes and get a nice P4 Xeon machine for under $1300.
Apple never has any of their machines, except for the ultra-low-end cheapest models, available for a comparable price. As the performance numbers at Adobe's "pcpreferred" page point out, a single P4 at above the 2.4GHz mark trounces those dual-processor PowerMacs in serious productivity apps.
And by the way, building your own computer, when done by the knowledgeable, creates a machine far more reliable and high-quality than any Apple or Dell, with enough money saved to easily pay for any replacement parts should a part fail after the manufacturer's warranty period. For example, here's what I've been planning to build for my next upgrade:
Supermicro X5DAE dual P4 Xeon motherboard, $450 Two Intel P4 Xeon Processors, $486 Two 256MB sticks of Registered ECC Kingston memory, $134 Antec TruePower 550watt EPS12v Power Supply, $108
I don't need the case, hard drives, optical drives, video card, and other crap Apple makes you pay for during an upgrade because I already have them and they're working great. Total cost: $1178, for a dual-processor Xeon rig that will eat any and all Macs that will be made this year for lunch. Oh, and $15 flat shipping fee since I sourced all the parts from the same very reliable and highly rated vendor. As for quality and reliability, the Supermicro motherboard only has a 1 year warranty, but Supermicro has *the* best reputation of any motherboard maker; they're used in the best, most reliable servers and workstations. The processors have a 3 year warranty. The memory has a lifetime warranty. The power supply has a 1 year warranty, and Antec's TruePower supplies are very highly respected. Even if the most expensive part fails after the warranty period is up, buying a brand new (and probably upgraded) one would still cost me A LOT less than having bought a dual-processor PowerMac, which this dual-processor Xeon will outclass severely.
Of course, if I were on a budget, I'd even more cheaply beat up a top-of-the-line PowerMac by buying Supermicro's E7205-based single-processor P4 motherboard for $205 and a single P4 processor for $218 instead of the more expensive dual Xeon setup.
These are highest-quality parts from reputable manufacturers with good warrantees, not bargain-basement items. They'll most likely live longer than the cheap components I've seen in some PowerMacs.
I believe computers should be used for researching papers and typing them. Once that is taught, computers should have no place in the classroom (except in computer classes) because they can distract from the core curriculum more than they can enhance it. Ask any college professor who teaches freshmen and they'll all tell you that students come into college today knowing much less about language and good writing style than they did 10 and 20 years ago. The reason for this is that classroom time is finite, and it's squandered on non-essential things today at the expense of writing and comprehension skills. The basics must always come first, but today there isn't time to teach them because new-wave curricula insist on too much use of computers and too much "cultural exchange" and soft stuff in place of tangible disciplines and skills.
A college graduate from most big "warehouse" universities today is typically no better educated when it comes to literature, history, and math than a high school graduate was decades ago.
But seriously, I don't love it because it's essentially a year late from when it was originally hinted to be launched, and several months late from when it was officially supposed to be launched according to the company's old roadmaps. And it still won't be here relatively soon.
I seriously wanted my next machine to be a Hammer machine, and it would be if only they were out by now--which they should have been. All my machines, except for one 486 laptop, have been AMD based. However, my 800MHz Athlon died, and I need to upgrade *now* without waiting for the Hammer, which disappoints me greatly. So, the best PC I can build from existing parts is going to be a dual Xeon box. I'd rather have a single Hammer because its 64-bitness and strong, efficient performance at lower clockspeeds appeal to me--but I'm buying a Placer motherboard and dual Xeons because they're here *now*. They also offer a guaranteed upgrade path to probably 3.5GHz or better since Intel is good about keeping Xeon platforms viable for some time. Whereas, if I were to buy a non-Hammer Athlon right now, I'd be almost guaranteed to have little upgrade room by comparison.
AMD just lost a long-time customer because of their lateness to market with Hammer, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
I can't agree with that article at all. The fact is, I've gotten literally dozens of e-mails with Klez attached, and if I had been a typical home user I'd have been using Outlook/Express and been automatically infected when previewing the file. The fact that Klez uses return addresses you may know and uses random subject lines taken from real e-mails guarantees I've had to look at some of them before deleting them--fortunately my client doesn't automatically activate attachments and I never run executable attachments. And I *still* occasionally get Klez e-mails, as well as automated notifications that virus-laden e-mails have supposedly originated (been spoofed, in reality) from my address since someone with my e-mail address in their address book is clearly infected and doesn't know how to get rid of it.
> Yes, there are a lot of bad things about the internet
The only bad thing I see about the Internet is spam. Aside from that, the rest is stuff we can live with even if we don't all necessarily like it... In fact, every other "bad" thing about the Internet which is usually cited is something that's easily dealt with on the client side through filters, firewalls, etc. Spam and the bandwidth it wastes is the only 100% bad thing I can think of about the net.
Well, I'd personally love to have an audio search tool to comb through all the mp3 files of talk radio programs such as *Loveline*, *Opie & Anthony*, and *The Greaseman*, which I have. Sometimes I think, "Now which show had that cool bit about..." and I have no hope of finding it.
For a professional rather than personal use, imagine how useful this could be to radio stations if they keep digital archives of their programs--if someone wanted to look up a particular program based on a vague memory of some of the text, a tool like this would be invaluable.
That comment got me to thinking. If you pay real cash instead of imaginary gold for in-game items, imagine how far you can push the concept, at least in theory. If you're really unusually successful in a game like this, what about rewarding that with real money transferred into your game account? As long as the game kept taking in more than it paid out, which would be easy since items degrade over time and need to be repurchased, that could actually be workable.
Imagine the implications--some of the top players could actually make a significant amount of money by becoming major in-game personalities. Some people have already been taking online games like *Ultima Online* seriously for years, developing complex characters with long histories and amassing many items. But imagine how many more people would take something like that seriously, and become really immersed in it, if money were to be had.
The in-game economy could in effect become a real economy, with the game becoming essentially a job to some people. That could get really scary...
No, it isn't the least bit new. My college has been handing out laptops to all incoming students since *1997*. Five years ago. And the students get to keep the laptops.
Of course, unfortunately I didn't get one because I wasn't a freshman in '97, so all these new students got nice shiny new laptops and I had to leave empty-handed...:-(
Yes, but be careful if you do try to visit them. Q and Bond might accidentally shoot you during one of those VR simulations.*
On the other hand, I wouldn't mind finding the simulator unattended and programming it to have a little tryst with Seven of Nine and Xev while Natalie Portman pours hot grits down my pants...
*: [Die Another Day reference, for those who haven't seen it.]
Re:Still lives within the EV6 AMD Athlon...
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End In Sight For Alpha
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· Score: 5, Informative
This is true, but hyperthreading seems to have great potential for fixing the weaknesses inherent in having such a long pipeline. Few apps have specifically been optimized for it yet, but even so it provides a small to large increase in productivity depending on how many threads you have going at once and how much each app is optimized for hyperthreading or dual processors. The benchmarks posted at places like Anandtech and Tom's Hardware demonstrate this, even at this early stage.
Add to that the fact that Intel is pushing for developers to compile using optimizations for hyperthreading and dual processors, and to make apps more multithreaded, and you get an even greater likelihood of performance increases in the future. The cost of that long pipeline is clearly being lowered, and P4 with hyperthreading can get more done per clock cycle than the P4 without.
I was one of the people who laughed at Intel when the P4 was released in its original incarnation, believing the Athlon's Alpha-like brute force would continue to trounce the comparatively puny NetBurst architecture at every turn. But in the end, the larger cache, faster FSB, and now Hyperthreading ability of the newer P4, seem to be adding up to be just as valuable as the P4's GHz scalability.
All I can say is, brute force doesn't seem to cut it any more. Intel is finally improving the little things, and not just clockspeed. The fact that next year Intel is planning to move to an 800MHz effective FSB with matching dual-channel 400MHz DDR memory just goes to show that. Who ever would have thought?:-)
The question was about a utility to make full-motion screen captures of the desktop/computer screen. Windows Media Encoder is just an encoder, it can't capture video of the desktop/computer screen, you need an application for that. Then if you wanted to you could encode the capture with WME, but that's irrelevant because the question was about the app to make the capture, not an encoder.
Anyway, I've made low-res screencaps before by taking the video-out port of an ATI All-in-Wonder 128 (several newer versions are available) and feeding it back into the video-in port while using VirtualDub to encode it into an AVI file. Again, low-res, but I've only used it for capturing protected full-screen streaming content that wouldn't download using standard hacks, so it worked OK for that.
However, for higher quality, one might set up an external capture box using any decent S-Video capture card and VirtualDub, and have the main box run a video card with an S-Video Out. That would be the best quality I can think of because I don't know of any video capture cards that have a VGA-in capture port.
> People getting off on this and being excited must be addicted to kiddie pr0n then.
What an insipid and societally brainwashed attitude. A 15 year old is typically in the middle stages of adolescence, and therefore will be sexually attractive to a majority of adult males. Indeed, in the interview she mentions that the Farrelly brothers had some interest in casting her for a film, until they learned that she was only 15--by implication they thought she was older.
Therefore, physically, what's the difference between a 15 year old Ellen Feiss and an 18 year old it's socially acceptable to find attractive? Nothing. There are *assumed* differences in maturity and intellect which make it socially unacceptable for adults to express sexual attraction towards 15 year olds--though not in all countries and cultures. That does not however mean that the attraction doesn't or shouldn't exist--it does exist, as proven time and again by performing tests on control groups of "average" adult males using penile plethismographs.
So, don't mistake a social convention for anything more than it is. Psychologically, it is considered normative for adult males to be sexually attracted to mid and late adolescents; pedophilia by definition is a condition which only applies if the adult is primarily attracted to pre-adolescents. Unfortunately, most Americans and some from other Puritanical countries don't even want to acknowledge biological and psychological facts, instead equating normative attraction (notice I said attraction, not taking action on it) with pedophilia or other conditions of abnormality.
To sum up: Ellen Feiss looks very fuckable, and it's perfectly okay for an adult to admit that.;-)
> And snuff films (if they existed) would be illegal
Your linkage is nice, but doesn't show in any way that snuff films would be "illegal" in the U.S. naturally, they'd be illegal to produce because the production woul;d involve crimes including murder. However, distribution by a third party not involved in the production would only possibly illegal under obscenity statutes, which vary from state to state, and in more liberal jurisdictions such distribution wouldn't be considered obscenity and hence would be legal. As for possession, in the U.S. the only images/videos it can be illegal to possess are those involving child pornography--possession of obscene materials is perfectly legal in the U.S. as long as they don't involve minors and the possession doesn't include distribution.
So, producing or in any way being directly involved in a snuff film would be illegal. The film itself would in no way be illegal to possess, and would be legal to distribute in some jurisdictions but not in others.
The sole reason the police or FBI have "confiscated" suspected snuff films in the past is because they have been potential evidence of a crime.
> Of course, I don't have a neon colored case but neither do I want/need one
But if you *did* want one, you can buy the same case in the same funky colors. They're Chieftec/Antec cases (both brands made by same manufacturer), available for $65-$120 on NewEgg.com . Thermaltake and other companies love to take the same brand of case and modify it a little to sell as their own. I'm sure Alienware probabloy adds a few nice clear protective coats to the paintjob, but that's easy enough...
Hell, anyone who can build his own PC could easily recreate a better Alienware-like PC for much less, right down to printing out his own Alienware logo to put under a clear case badge. I think that's why they finally added the decal up the side of their cases, to actually make it more difficult for DIYers to "fake" Alienware PCs.
What a pathetically overly legalistic society we live in these days. The party here may in fact be guilty of libel, slander, or some other offense, but there's something the defamed can do other than sue.
He can GROW UP and handle some immature bozo who bothers him in online forums like a man. It's an online service, and people know that anything said must be taken *cum grano salis*, particularly when said by someone who's being a jerk via anonymous harassment. If an online kook can cause real damage to this person's business by posting nonsense on online forums, then quite frankly it wasn't much of a business to start with.
At the risk of being flamed for not jumping to the defense of the wronged party, people really need to grow up and learn that fretting over online kooks causes infinitely more harm than the kooks themselves can usually perpetrate.
Look at me, for example. As a writer I did investigative journalism into the world of online child pornography, and because I took positions such that the producers of hardcore materials should be more aggressively sought while the downloaders should largely be left alone because the manpower is being wasted, and that Playboy-like softcore materials being produced in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states are most likely harmless and may serve as a release valve for the sexual desires of borderline pedophiles, I managed to accumulate some kooks of my own.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with my assessment of the situation after doing legitimate and careful journalistic research by interviewing people involved in the trade of such electronic material, as well as law enforcement and legislative officials, one can probably agree that I wouldn't deserve to be harassed and even threatened online for a very long time. Yet I was, for merely expressing an opinion. One of a few kooks I accumulated followed me around to several different forums, including ones where I used my real identity. Did he cause harm to my reputation? Maybe, but anyone who'd take a kook or troll's commentary to heart is a moron in the first place. Did he cost me online contacts? Again, maybe. Did he threaten me and know my real identity? Yes. Did he post personal information on public forums? Yes. Did he commit libel? Sure. Did I sue him? Of course not--why would any rightminded individual bother?
What did I do? I stopped responding, went about my business, and he went away. In other words, I acted like a man instead of bringing lawyers into it like a whiny little pussy. Quite frankly, people need to just grow up about such matters instead of fattening the attorneys.
But most importantly, people should be mature enough not to be bothered by online kooks in the first place. Everyone has enemies. That's just life. Just don't let the bastards get you down. Nothing is as harmful as one's own worries.
Sure, but they *wouldn't* like the Bradley if it had been constructed without the safety modifications mentioned in the film. Hot aluminum vapor filling the cabin when the tank gets fired upon isn't a good thing...
Plus, it was originally designed as a fast troop transport and ended up a slower smaller tank after decades of bureaucracy and *billions* of dollars--a huge waste of resources at the taxpayers' expense. Remember the outcry against military cost overruns in the 80s? The Bradley was one of the big reasons.:-)
Re:Hello Shitty Quality
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Review: EyeTV
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· Score: 2
> DVD, on the other hand, has exactly one resolution: 480 lines at 59.94 fields per second
No, you forget that NTSC is not the only encoding system in common usage. There are DVDs which are encoded to PAL resolution--for example, the "Red Edition" of *Dellamorte Dellamore* which I just finished watching a few hours ago on my region-free DVD setup.;-)
> A DVD set top recorder is going to need to encode in real time, > which means a fairly simple codec.
They all use MPEG-2 right now, because that's what a DVD is--an MPEG-2 encoded in a special format. I think some standalone DVD recorders can do MPEG-1, but I don't think anyone cares--that isn't standard and won't play back on most normal DVD players.
> This means no DIVX or XVID
There are already commercial MPEG-4 encoding chips available. They're trivial since everything is done in hardware--it's very simple to make an ASIC or similar that can do something with no effort than would strain a general-purpose CPU. They're just too expensive right now for consumer-level applications--exactly like items with hardware MPEG-2 encoders were a couple of years back.
> standard T120 VCR tapes can record a full 6 hours and they're > dirt cheap and reusable.
The reason they're called T-120 tapes is because they last 120 minutes at the best quality; as you know they only last 6 hours if you use a mode like SLP/EP and don't mind having a *very* poor picture with black lines here and there every few frames. Only very cheap or very poor people, or people with bad eyesight, or people who intend to just time-shift and not keep the recorded program, use longer-play modes. I can't even do that for time-shifting programs, the picture's so bad.
Aside from which, that's what DVD-RW is for. Reusable. Perfect for time-shifting, while DVD-R is perfect for archiving. And you may not fit 6 hours of low-quality craptastic video on one without invovking a nonstandard (for DVD) MPEG-1 stream, but so what--just buy three, since they'll be cheaper than even the cheapest VHS tapes within the next 2 years. DVD-R and DVD-RW discs are destined to follow the same path CD-R and CD-RW discs did when they were a relative novelty in the consumer space--they started out expensive, they're getting cheaper, and in a few years they'll be available for pennies each. Today you can find excellent-quality Taiyo Yuden-made CD-Rs on sale at Best Buy for $5 per 50 after a main-in rebate, or $20 before the rebate--that is where DVD-Rs will be in five years.
> how often do you really need to burn like 8 cds for one project anyway?
Look at the audience you're speaking to.:-) Many/. users have multiple 80-120GB hard drives, RAID arrays, etc.--and that's on our *home* computers, not just at the office...
And I tell you, once you start downloading SVCDs and MP3s and games (God Bless USENET!), that hard drive space goes quickly. Sure, you could have 500 CD-Rs lying around--but that's inconvenient as hell. Better would be to have it on 60 DVDs, and even better would be to have it on hard drive arrays *backed up* to DVDs.
Not to mention home video recordings--what better way to store them long-term than on high-quality DVDs? Even DV tape is capable of degrading over time, especially with repeated viewings, because it's a tape-based format--whereas the optical DVD format is both more durable (esp. if you make multiple back-ups) and will definitely be long-lasting in terms of format readability since it has been adopted by the movie industry. I have wedding and birth film on DV just waiting for me to be able to afford a DVD-R/W recorder so I can transfer it to DVD and make copies to distribute to friends and family.
Let's face it--the time has come for the recordable DVD to go mainstream. Even set-top DVD recorders are available at Best Buy and Circuit City in the $800 range now, whereas they were $2000 and hard to find last year. In a couple more years they'll be replacing the VCR in most middle-income households, and only the low-income will still be using VCRs instead of DVDRs.
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> Watching somebody else buggering little boys may well embolden
> (or at least excite) some idiot enough to plan and execute
> something for themselves.
Prove your assertion. Personally, I agree with the Canadian judge who struck down a particular law forbidding the personal possession (not distribution) of child pornography--the argument that convinced him was that viewing child pornography could be a sexual "release valve" for pedophiles the same way regular pornography is a release vavle for normal heterosexual males.
Be rational--what do people do when they view porn? They masturbate, orgasm, and then their sex drive temporarily wanes. I'd imagine it's exactly the same with pedophiles. From a rational standpoint, the mere posession of child pornography by a pedophile might actually help control his urges and keep them in the realm of fantasy.
Think about it.
> viewing the material just encourages it.
In what way does some anonymous pervert in New York downloading images that someone probably posted months or years previous from someplace hundreds or thousands of miles away constitute encouraging anything? Be serious for a second and think rationally about how these images are produced and get disseminated.
As a writer I've researched the matter, and the fact is that 99% or more of what most people would consider "child pornography" to be (hardcore sexual images of pre-adolescent or early adolescent minors) comes from two sources. Once-legal magazines and videos that were published in the 1970's before any child pornography laws existed, and which were later scanned or captured to digital format, are one source. Child molesters who film their abuse and pass it on to "friends" online are the other.
Now, with regard to the former, no one possessing such images can truly be said to have been encouraging anything--the abuse occurred 20 or 30 years previously, when the abusing was just as illegal as it is today yet the filming and distribution were not explicitly illegal yet. It is *exactly* the same situation as viewing concentration-camp footage--no one doing so is encouraging or discouraging anything. It's simply a heinous relic of the past. No one makes money off it anymore--it's no longer a commercial industry and hasn't been for 20 years and more.
Regarding the latter, yes, if you are one of the "friends" to whom the child molestor sent his imagery, then you can truly be said to be encouraging the abuse. However, most people who view child pornography view it as distant links in a tenuous chain, after it has been e-mailed between countless people and posted to websites and posted on USENET hundreds or thousands of times. This becomes a very gray area both ethically and morally, even though the law makes no distinction. Posting the material, passing it on along the tenuous chain, could reasonably be argued to be a subtle form of encouragement of what is depicted. That's an argument that makes some sense, though is still ambiguous. However, what if the college professor in this case merely downloaded the images for his own private viewing and never passed them on to anyone, never posted them anywhere, never became another link in the chain because the images stopped at his hard drive and weren't further disseminated by him?
Well, then the idea that he encouraged anything at all through his possession, but not dissemination, of the imagery, becomes far from convincing. In fact, I'd say the argument fails entirely--facelessly copying a digital file off a public forum like the Net isn't unethical *or* immoral on its face. Yet, it is still illegal, although one can clearly say it *might* be unjustly so.
There is no commercial industry in such material being "fed" by the consumer. That's a common misconception. The child molestor does what he does for the sex and power, and shares the material with people he deems as like-minded. Those people can be thought of as supporting him and the abuse, but somewhere along the line the imagery leaves the purview of him and his "friends" and just floats through the electronic ether for strangers to find.
However, what most people would consider child pornography is not the same as what is actually considered child pornography in the U.S. It's a much broader category, which includes nude images as well as hardcore videos of 16 and 17 year olds which were produced legally in parts of Europe until recently. In places where the age of consent was 16 and child pornography laws stated that child pornography constituted imagery of people below that age, adult material featuring 16 and 17 year olds was once as common and legal as adult material featuring 18 and 19 year olds is in the U.S.--and yet U.S. law makes no disctinction between this material and something produced by a child molestor raping a young girl or boy. One has to seriously question the rationale there, since
> I fought with my sister over whether to watch Garfield and Friends or Teenage Mutant
> Ninja Turtles.
The Saturday-morning cartoons I most easily remember from when I was a kid are *The Smurfs* and those public service type edu-toons the stations were required to run, like the *Schoolhouse Rock* cartoons, as well as the musical advertisements from cheese manufacturers' or beef industry associations...
I also recall that my favorite Saturday-morning show wasn't a cartoon, but rather some show in which a bearded guy would tell stories to a room full of kids. Just like story time in elementary school, only on TV. He'd tell some really gruesome kids' stories though, like the one in which a man fights with some sort of man-beast and cuts a chunk out of its flesh during the fight, and takes it home and cooks it up to serve for his family...
A few years later the arrival of *Saved By the Bell* started to change the landscape of Saturday-morning kids' TV, turning it into a time for kids' versions of sitcoms and other live-character shows instead of so many cartoons. Mmmmm, the crush I had on those *Saved By the Bell* gals when I was a kid...
BTW, for anyone who doesn't know, the classic *Schoolhouse Rock* series is available on a special-edition DVD these days. Great nostalgia.
Exactly. You know, I wouldn't mind paying an extra tax on recordable music and video media, if that tax entitled me to make and use noncommercial copies of RIAA and MPAA member content. But it doesn't, so...WTF? What a rip-off. The consumer gets cornholed yet again...
This isn't exactly what you're asking about, but the closest thing I can think of offhand would be PGPfone--a product abandoned years ago for encrypting voice communications much as PGP encrypts text.
There are both binaries and source code available here: http://www.pgpi.org/products/pgpfone/
Windows and Mac only, and it's a very crude app... It would be nice for someone to develop something more robust and with better features.
> Since when is having porn illegal?
:-) Or, unless you're in the business of amassing kinderporn, which is quite fortunately illegal in most Western countries.
That was my reaction. Unless you're in one of the several countries governed by semi-theocratic laws where pr0n of any sort is illegal, and showing a little ankle is considered risque.
However, you may have other things to hide. Your real accounting books, so you can keep the IRS at bay while keeping more of your income. Your "cracker tools" and the fruits of your cracking efforts. Your copies of all those public documents formerly available on CD-ROM which the U.S. government ordered destroyed shortly after Sept. 11th in the name of national security. Your list of contacts and informants as a reporter. Your MP3 and OGG files, so that if the RIAA comes knocking...
As you can see, some things you could use a secret storage device for are pretty bad, while some are completely good. Everyone should be entitled to a measure of privacy, and the ability to protect it. In fact, it used to be a matter of law in prior centuries that a man's personal papers, books, diaries and such, could not be used against him as evidence--because we're supposed to have freedom of thought. Sadly, this has eroded...
This device has many waknesses which the submitter points out. However, one could very easily build a similar device without those deficiencies in security. For one thing, wireless is out--too traceable, sniffable, and breakable. So, you'd have to go wired--and disguise the wired connection as something innocuous and unconnected to a "secret network". Hmmm... The many possibilities include phoneline networking, as long as you're willing to do a little remodeling and don't mind the slow speed. If you really think about it, there are many ways in which one could adequately disguise a wired network, as long as you're willing to do a little remodeling or build custom, disguised dual-use devices. Hell, as Cringely mentioned, even TiVos have USB ports these days... The possibilities are literally endless.
> Compare a similarly configured Dell to an Apple and then
> tell how much more the Apple is.
Two to three times as much, actually. You see, assuming the box is going to be used for real apps and not 3D gaming, you can find a great P4 or even P4 Xeon machine from the small business link on Dell's site, for a very small price. If you're smart, you'll even wait until Dell has a special on one of these nice business boxes and get a nice P4 Xeon machine for under $1300.
Apple never has any of their machines, except for the ultra-low-end cheapest models, available for a comparable price. As the performance numbers at Adobe's "pcpreferred" page point out, a single P4 at above the 2.4GHz mark trounces those dual-processor PowerMacs in serious productivity apps.
And by the way, building your own computer, when done by the knowledgeable, creates a machine far more reliable and high-quality than any Apple or Dell, with enough money saved to easily pay for any replacement parts should a part fail after the manufacturer's warranty period. For example, here's what I've been planning to build for my next upgrade:
Supermicro X5DAE dual P4 Xeon motherboard, $450
Two Intel P4 Xeon Processors, $486
Two 256MB sticks of Registered ECC Kingston memory, $134
Antec TruePower 550watt EPS12v Power Supply, $108
I don't need the case, hard drives, optical drives, video card, and other crap Apple makes you pay for during an upgrade because I already have them and they're working great. Total cost: $1178, for a dual-processor Xeon rig that will eat any and all Macs that will be made this year for lunch. Oh, and $15 flat shipping fee since I sourced all the parts from the same very reliable and highly rated vendor. As for quality and reliability, the Supermicro motherboard only has a 1 year warranty, but Supermicro has *the* best reputation of any motherboard maker; they're used in the best, most reliable servers and workstations. The processors have a 3 year warranty. The memory has a lifetime warranty. The power supply has a 1 year warranty, and Antec's TruePower supplies are very highly respected. Even if the most expensive part fails after the warranty period is up, buying a brand new (and probably upgraded) one would still cost me A LOT less than having bought a dual-processor PowerMac, which this dual-processor Xeon will outclass severely.
Of course, if I were on a budget, I'd even more cheaply beat up a top-of-the-line PowerMac by buying Supermicro's E7205-based single-processor P4 motherboard for $205 and a single P4 processor for $218 instead of the more expensive dual Xeon setup.
These are highest-quality parts from reputable manufacturers with good warrantees, not bargain-basement items. They'll most likely live longer than the cheap components I've seen in some PowerMacs.
I believe computers should be used for researching papers and typing them. Once that is taught, computers should have no place in the classroom (except in computer classes) because they can distract from the core curriculum more than they can enhance it. Ask any college professor who teaches freshmen and they'll all tell you that students come into college today knowing much less about language and good writing style than they did 10 and 20 years ago. The reason for this is that classroom time is finite, and it's squandered on non-essential things today at the expense of writing and comprehension skills. The basics must always come first, but today there isn't time to teach them because new-wave curricula insist on too much use of computers and too much "cultural exchange" and soft stuff in place of tangible disciplines and skills.
A college graduate from most big "warehouse" universities today is typically no better educated when it comes to literature, history, and math than a high school graduate was decades ago.
Hehe, funny-funny...
But seriously, I don't love it because it's essentially a year late from when it was originally hinted to be launched, and several months late from when it was officially supposed to be launched according to the company's old roadmaps. And it still won't be here relatively soon.
I seriously wanted my next machine to be a Hammer machine, and it would be if only they were out by now--which they should have been. All my machines, except for one 486 laptop, have been AMD based. However, my 800MHz Athlon died, and I need to upgrade *now* without waiting for the Hammer, which disappoints me greatly. So, the best PC I can build from existing parts is going to be a dual Xeon box. I'd rather have a single Hammer because its 64-bitness and strong, efficient performance at lower clockspeeds appeal to me--but I'm buying a Placer motherboard and dual Xeons because they're here *now*. They also offer a guaranteed upgrade path to probably 3.5GHz or better since Intel is good about keeping Xeon platforms viable for some time. Whereas, if I were to buy a non-Hammer Athlon right now, I'd be almost guaranteed to have little upgrade room by comparison.
AMD just lost a long-time customer because of their lateness to market with Hammer, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
I can't agree with that article at all. The fact is, I've gotten literally dozens of e-mails with Klez attached, and if I had been a typical home user I'd have been using Outlook/Express and been automatically infected when previewing the file. The fact that Klez uses return addresses you may know and uses random subject lines taken from real e-mails guarantees I've had to look at some of them before deleting them--fortunately my client doesn't automatically activate attachments and I never run executable attachments. And I *still* occasionally get Klez e-mails, as well as automated notifications that virus-laden e-mails have supposedly originated (been spoofed, in reality) from my address since someone with my e-mail address in their address book is clearly infected and doesn't know how to get rid of it.
> Yes, there are a lot of bad things about the internet
The only bad thing I see about the Internet is spam. Aside from that, the rest is stuff we can live with even if we don't all necessarily like it... In fact, every other "bad" thing about the Internet which is usually cited is something that's easily dealt with on the client side through filters, firewalls, etc. Spam and the bandwidth it wastes is the only 100% bad thing I can think of about the net.
Well, I'd personally love to have an audio search tool to comb through all the mp3 files of talk radio programs such as *Loveline*, *Opie & Anthony*, and *The Greaseman*, which I have. Sometimes I think, "Now which show had that cool bit about..." and I have no hope of finding it.
For a professional rather than personal use, imagine how useful this could be to radio stations if they keep digital archives of their programs--if someone wanted to look up a particular program based on a vague memory of some of the text, a tool like this would be invaluable.
That comment got me to thinking. If you pay real cash instead of imaginary gold for in-game items, imagine how far you can push the concept, at least in theory. If you're really unusually successful in a game like this, what about rewarding that with real money transferred into your game account? As long as the game kept taking in more than it paid out, which would be easy since items degrade over time and need to be repurchased, that could actually be workable.
Imagine the implications--some of the top players could actually make a significant amount of money by becoming major in-game personalities. Some people have already been taking online games like *Ultima Online* seriously for years, developing complex characters with long histories and amassing many items. But imagine how many more people would take something like that seriously, and become really immersed in it, if money were to be had.
The in-game economy could in effect become a real economy, with the game becoming essentially a job to some people. That could get really scary...
No, it isn't the least bit new. My college has been handing out laptops to all incoming students since *1997*. Five years ago. And the students get to keep the laptops.
:-(
Of course, unfortunately I didn't get one because I wasn't a freshman in '97, so all these new students got nice shiny new laptops and I had to leave empty-handed...
> Ghost Stations of the London Underground
Yes, but be careful if you do try to visit them. Q and Bond might accidentally shoot you during one of those VR simulations.*
On the other hand, I wouldn't mind finding the simulator unattended and programming it to have a little tryst with Seven of Nine and Xev while Natalie Portman pours hot grits down my pants...
*: [Die Another Day reference, for those who haven't seen it.]
This is true, but hyperthreading seems to have great potential for fixing the weaknesses inherent in having such a long pipeline. Few apps have specifically been optimized for it yet, but even so it provides a small to large increase in productivity depending on how many threads you have going at once and how much each app is optimized for hyperthreading or dual processors. The benchmarks posted at places like Anandtech and Tom's Hardware demonstrate this, even at this early stage.
:-)
Add to that the fact that Intel is pushing for developers to compile using optimizations for hyperthreading and dual processors, and to make apps more multithreaded, and you get an even greater likelihood of performance increases in the future. The cost of that long pipeline is clearly being lowered, and P4 with hyperthreading can get more done per clock cycle than the P4 without.
I was one of the people who laughed at Intel when the P4 was released in its original incarnation, believing the Athlon's Alpha-like brute force would continue to trounce the comparatively puny NetBurst architecture at every turn. But in the end, the larger cache, faster FSB, and now Hyperthreading ability of the newer P4, seem to be adding up to be just as valuable as the P4's GHz scalability.
All I can say is, brute force doesn't seem to cut it any more. Intel is finally improving the little things, and not just clockspeed. The fact that next year Intel is planning to move to an 800MHz effective FSB with matching dual-channel 400MHz DDR memory just goes to show that. Who ever would have thought?
The question was about a utility to make full-motion screen captures of the desktop/computer screen. Windows Media Encoder is just an encoder, it can't capture video of the desktop/computer screen, you need an application for that. Then if you wanted to you could encode the capture with WME, but that's irrelevant because the question was about the app to make the capture, not an encoder.
Anyway, I've made low-res screencaps before by taking the video-out port of an ATI All-in-Wonder 128 (several newer versions are available) and feeding it back into the video-in port while using VirtualDub to encode it into an AVI file. Again, low-res, but I've only used it for capturing protected full-screen streaming content that wouldn't download using standard hacks, so it worked OK for that.
However, for higher quality, one might set up an external capture box using any decent S-Video capture card and VirtualDub, and have the main box run a video card with an S-Video Out. That would be the best quality I can think of because I don't know of any video capture cards that have a VGA-in capture port.
> People getting off on this and being excited must be addicted to kiddie pr0n then.
;-)
What an insipid and societally brainwashed attitude. A 15 year old is typically in the middle stages of adolescence, and therefore will be sexually attractive to a majority of adult males. Indeed, in the interview she mentions that the Farrelly brothers had some interest in casting her for a film, until they learned that she was only 15--by implication they thought she was older.
Therefore, physically, what's the difference between a 15 year old Ellen Feiss and an 18 year old it's socially acceptable to find attractive? Nothing. There are *assumed* differences in maturity and intellect which make it socially unacceptable for adults to express sexual attraction towards 15 year olds--though not in all countries and cultures. That does not however mean that the attraction doesn't or shouldn't exist--it does exist, as proven time and again by performing tests on control groups of "average" adult males using penile plethismographs.
So, don't mistake a social convention for anything more than it is. Psychologically, it is considered normative for adult males to be sexually attracted to mid and late adolescents; pedophilia by definition is a condition which only applies if the adult is primarily attracted to pre-adolescents. Unfortunately, most Americans and some from other Puritanical countries don't even want to acknowledge biological and psychological facts, instead equating normative attraction (notice I said attraction, not taking action on it) with pedophilia or other conditions of abnormality.
To sum up: Ellen Feiss looks very fuckable, and it's perfectly okay for an adult to admit that.
> And snuff films (if they existed) would be illegal
Your linkage is nice, but doesn't show in any way that snuff films would be "illegal" in the U.S. naturally, they'd be illegal to produce because the production woul;d involve crimes including murder. However, distribution by a third party not involved in the production would only possibly illegal under obscenity statutes, which vary from state to state, and in more liberal jurisdictions such distribution wouldn't be considered obscenity and hence would be legal. As for possession, in the U.S. the only images/videos it can be illegal to possess are those involving child pornography--possession of obscene materials is perfectly legal in the U.S. as long as they don't involve minors and the possession doesn't include distribution.
So, producing or in any way being directly involved in a snuff film would be illegal. The film itself would in no way be illegal to possess, and would be legal to distribute in some jurisdictions but not in others.
The sole reason the police or FBI have "confiscated" suspected snuff films in the past is because they have been potential evidence of a crime.
> Of course, I don't have a neon colored case but neither do I want/need one
But if you *did* want one, you can buy the same case in the same funky colors. They're Chieftec/Antec cases (both brands made by same manufacturer), available for $65-$120 on NewEgg.com . Thermaltake and other companies love to take the same brand of case and modify it a little to sell as their own. I'm sure Alienware probabloy adds a few nice clear protective coats to the paintjob, but that's easy enough...
Hell, anyone who can build his own PC could easily recreate a better Alienware-like PC for much less, right down to printing out his own Alienware logo to put under a clear case badge. I think that's why they finally added the decal up the side of their cases, to actually make it more difficult for DIYers to "fake" Alienware PCs.
What a pathetically overly legalistic society we live in these days. The party here may in fact be guilty of libel, slander, or some other offense, but there's something the defamed can do other than sue.
He can GROW UP and handle some immature bozo who bothers him in online forums like a man. It's an online service, and people know that anything said must be taken *cum grano salis*, particularly when said by someone who's being a jerk via anonymous harassment. If an online kook can cause real damage to this person's business by posting nonsense on online forums, then quite frankly it wasn't much of a business to start with.
At the risk of being flamed for not jumping to the defense of the wronged party, people really need to grow up and learn that fretting over online kooks causes infinitely more harm than the kooks themselves can usually perpetrate.
Look at me, for example. As a writer I did investigative journalism into the world of online child pornography, and because I took positions such that the producers of hardcore materials should be more aggressively sought while the downloaders should largely be left alone because the manpower is being wasted, and that Playboy-like softcore materials being produced in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states are most likely harmless and may serve as a release valve for the sexual desires of borderline pedophiles, I managed to accumulate some kooks of my own.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with my assessment of the situation after doing legitimate and careful journalistic research by interviewing people involved in the trade of such electronic material, as well as law enforcement and legislative officials, one can probably agree that I wouldn't deserve to be harassed and even threatened online for a very long time. Yet I was, for merely expressing an opinion. One of a few kooks I accumulated followed me around to several different forums, including ones where I used my real identity. Did he cause harm to my reputation? Maybe, but anyone who'd take a kook or troll's commentary to heart is a moron in the first place. Did he cost me online contacts? Again, maybe. Did he threaten me and know my real identity? Yes. Did he post personal information on public forums? Yes. Did he commit libel? Sure. Did I sue him? Of course not--why would any rightminded individual bother?
What did I do? I stopped responding, went about my business, and he went away. In other words, I acted like a man instead of bringing lawyers into it like a whiny little pussy. Quite frankly, people need to just grow up about such matters instead of fattening the attorneys.
But most importantly, people should be mature enough not to be bothered by online kooks in the first place. Everyone has enemies. That's just life. Just don't let the bastards get you down. Nothing is as harmful as one's own worries.
Sure, but they *wouldn't* like the Bradley if it had been constructed without the safety modifications mentioned in the film. Hot aluminum vapor filling the cabin when the tank gets fired upon isn't a good thing...
:-)
Plus, it was originally designed as a fast troop transport and ended up a slower smaller tank after decades of bureaucracy and *billions* of dollars--a huge waste of resources at the taxpayers' expense. Remember the outcry against military cost overruns in the 80s? The Bradley was one of the big reasons.
> DVD, on the other hand, has exactly one resolution: 480 lines at 59.94 fields per second
;-)
No, you forget that NTSC is not the only encoding system in common usage. There are DVDs which are encoded to PAL resolution--for example, the "Red Edition" of *Dellamorte Dellamore* which I just finished watching a few hours ago on my region-free DVD setup.
> A DVD set top recorder is going to need to encode in real time,
> which means a fairly simple codec.
They all use MPEG-2 right now, because that's what a DVD is--an MPEG-2 encoded in a special format. I think some standalone DVD recorders can do MPEG-1, but I don't think anyone cares--that isn't standard and won't play back on most normal DVD players.
> This means no DIVX or XVID
There are already commercial MPEG-4 encoding chips available. They're trivial since everything is done in hardware--it's very simple to make an ASIC or similar that can do something with no effort than would strain a general-purpose CPU. They're just too expensive right now for consumer-level applications--exactly like items with hardware MPEG-2 encoders were a couple of years back.
> standard T120 VCR tapes can record a full 6 hours and they're
> dirt cheap and reusable.
The reason they're called T-120 tapes is because they last 120 minutes at the best quality; as you know they only last 6 hours if you use a mode like SLP/EP and don't mind having a *very* poor picture with black lines here and there every few frames. Only very cheap or very poor people, or people with bad eyesight, or people who intend to just time-shift and not keep the recorded program, use longer-play modes. I can't even do that for time-shifting programs, the picture's so bad.
Aside from which, that's what DVD-RW is for. Reusable. Perfect for time-shifting, while DVD-R is perfect for archiving. And you may not fit 6 hours of low-quality craptastic video on one without invovking a nonstandard (for DVD) MPEG-1 stream, but so what--just buy three, since they'll be cheaper than even the cheapest VHS tapes within the next 2 years. DVD-R and DVD-RW discs are destined to follow the same path CD-R and CD-RW discs did when they were a relative novelty in the consumer space--they started out expensive, they're getting cheaper, and in a few years they'll be available for pennies each. Today you can find excellent-quality Taiyo Yuden-made CD-Rs on sale at Best Buy for $5 per 50 after a main-in rebate, or $20 before the rebate--that is where DVD-Rs will be in five years.
> how often do you really need to burn like 8 cds for one project anyway?
:-) Many /. users have multiple 80-120GB hard drives, RAID arrays, etc.--and that's on our *home* computers, not just at the office...
Look at the audience you're speaking to.
And I tell you, once you start downloading SVCDs and MP3s and games (God Bless USENET!), that hard drive space goes quickly. Sure, you could have 500 CD-Rs lying around--but that's inconvenient as hell. Better would be to have it on 60 DVDs, and even better would be to have it on hard drive arrays *backed up* to DVDs.
Not to mention home video recordings--what better way to store them long-term than on high-quality DVDs? Even DV tape is capable of degrading over time, especially with repeated viewings, because it's a tape-based format--whereas the optical DVD format is both more durable (esp. if you make multiple back-ups) and will definitely be long-lasting in terms of format readability since it has been adopted by the movie industry. I have wedding and birth film on DV just waiting for me to be able to afford a DVD-R/W recorder so I can transfer it to DVD and make copies to distribute to friends and family.
Let's face it--the time has come for the recordable DVD to go mainstream. Even set-top DVD recorders are available at Best Buy and Circuit City in the $800 range now, whereas they were $2000 and hard to find last year. In a couple more years they'll be replacing the VCR in most middle-income households, and only the low-income will still be using VCRs instead of DVDRs.