There's an important distinction between a lone sentence and a lone sentence fragment. The key word is fragment. A fragment is not a sentence. A sentence is not a fragment. Distinctions which add to clarity and prevent many possible misunderstandings are what is lost when you write for people to skim.
We're geeks here. Give us the fine print, not the misleading ad headline.
The two are related, and both are desirable. However, they are mostly two different issues. You have the source and can put it on to any hardware for which you have proper access. Your problem here isn't the software license. It's the hardware license. You also need to get hardware for which you are granted the proper access. The distinction is clear, and I'm not sure why there is so much confusion.
I agree it's dangerous to be a woman, and that's not news to me. Thanks for trying to point it out, though, even if you were snarky and condescending doing so.
The problem is that we don't make things better for women by making innocent men less safe. We make things better for women by making women safer, including making it less safe for men to actually victimize women.
Making things worse for innocent men is just that -- making things worse for innocent men. It doesn't help innocent women one bit, but it could help a woman become the attacker and a man the victim.
How about real equality and making things better for the upstanding members of both genders rather than seeking vengeance on men as a gender for the wrongs of other men?
Unfortunately the same thing can happen in the US. The company would likely not do much investigation, either, unless they feared the lawyer of the accused more than the lawyer of the accuser. It seems it would usually be safer (no stats to show, just a feeling) to side with the accuser, especially if it's a woman accusing a man. As I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread, sexual harassment that isn't a man harassing a woman has a very different response from many people.
You've hit on a key issue in not just small donations but in lots of business models, too. There are problems with most payment methods for small payments.
Small checks through the mail are efficient for the sender, but are terribly inefficient for the recipient. That's even true if a stamp is used to endorse them. Then there's the small but real risk of fraudulent ACH transactions when you send an unknown entity a check. Then there are failed check hassles, too. Even small checks can be insufficient funds if someone's overdrawn already or they could write an old check on a closed account by accident.
Accepting credit and debit cards is pretty efficient for the recipient for larger values, but with fixed per-transaction fees in addition to the percentages, most merchant accounts aren't worth using if a large proportion of transactions are for small amounts.
Sending coin or currency through standard post is fairly efficient, and there's typically a reasonable risk of loss on the part of the sender if the payments are small enough. There are pretty good systems for counting coin and cash. There's an issue of security through obscurity for the recipient, though, since targeting the recipient's end of the mail could score a pretty good chunk. How does one let honest people out in the public know where to send cash while keeping the delivery end secure? A post office box is more secure than the average customer location mail drop, as are slots into a building or a locked customer box. There's still lots of people involved in getting the money there, though. People, even ones screened by the Postal Service for honesty and integrity, are always a possible weak link to security. Some projects have had at least limited success with this process, though. Barry Kauler of the Puppy Linux project accepts cash for mailing CDs to people (and would probably accept donations in cash, too). He accepts US dollars, Australian dollars, and Euros/a>. He recommends PayPal. I hope I haven't hurt the security of this system for him by mentioning it on Slashdot; anyone who's been to the Puppy site could have already known about it.
PayPal is an option. They have similar per-transaction and percentage-of-transaction fees to credit cards. For donations, they require no setup fees, no monthly fees, and no monthly minimum. There is a $0.30 transaction fee on top of the percentage for donation receipts of less than $3000 per month (if this source is timely). That makes single-dollar donations feasible but expensive. Anything less is not worthwhile. I haven't found the pricing info for donations on PayPal's site after a few minutes looking, but the prices listed at that fundraising news site are in line with their commercial payment services.
Google has Google Donations which for any US 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6) non-profit (but not other 501(c) subcategories) which follows the standard transaction fees. For organizations that are qualified and are accepted into the Google Grants program, Google Donations processing is free while the organization is in good stand
I love how you use "like being a dick" to paraphrase how a court would view it. It's funny because it's true. Your response reads like an Onion article or the script for The Daily Show.
One really difficult situation I've seen a few times is in same-gender sexual harassment. Sometimes gay guy hits on a straight guy or worse hits on a closeted gay guy in public on purpose. I've even seen guys do this to attempt to out someone against his will. Maybe a straight guy makes jokes about another co-worker or fellow student and the target is afraid to complain because that would be seen as effete by the harasser. In younger students, around middle school, boys tease each other about what they may or may not have done sexually yet. If a gay guy asks someone out who's not willing and the target makes sexual harassment complaints, there's a possible counter-complaint about homophobia and possibly about sexual harassment based on homophobia. If the guy being hit on is in the closet, the investigation of the complaint may out him as surely as the original harassment. Teasing people about their sexuality or their effectiveness at finding sex partners is clearly sexual harassment, but it's often overlooked and underreported. It's often embarrassing for the victim and not taken seriously by authorities.
I personally had a problem with a female student sexually harassing me back in high school. I had to contact the equal rights officer for the district, remind him that men were just as equal as victims as women were as athletes and students, and threaten a lawsuit before the school even attempted to alter her behavior. I had previously complained to the vice principal in charge of student discipline and the school principal, and it was still a nearly daily issue until that point.
I find it sad in this day and age of supposed equality that men's treatment of women is closely watched and critiqued, but men against men or women against men isn't even given credence once it's been brought to light. That combined with many people believing allegations and not questioning accusers or waiting for evidence, especially when it's a woman or child making the accusations (or as likely someone making allegations on behalf of a child) makes it a dangerous time to be a man.
I'm from the US and not Ireland (and I'm not a lawyer here), but as I see it the problem here would be that the university doesn't have a right to do anything they want. They are responsible for the workplace they provide for their employees and the behavior of their employees. Once Employee A makes a formal complaint, the employer must investigate it and put Employee B on warning not to engage in the alleged behavior whether or not the alleged behavior actually happened in the past. Otherwise, the employer will get sued and possibly investigated criminally right along with the alleged perpetrator for allowing the behavior. Employers can be placed in a very distasteful situation either by someone harassing a coworker or someone making a frivolous complaint. It's often difficult to prove and even more difficult to disprove (how do you prove a negative without exhaustive search and perfect isolation outside of precisely approved channels?).
Some companies go so far as having a separate handbook for sexual harassment. Some even have training and certification classes on harassment (sexual and otherwise) to go right along with customer service standards, technical training, and office flow of paperwork standards.
Sexual harassment is a matter of unwelcome sexual advances or offensive treatment based on sexual themes. If she led him to believe they were welcome at some point, then she needed to inform him that they were not and give him an opportunity to stop. Otherwise, nearly every break-up of a couple could involve retroactive "harassment". There are, of course, things you don't do in certain cultures until you're sure they're okay with the other person. There are others that are not always as clear, and it would really help if people whose comfort levels with physical contact and certain discussion topics differ would talk about those before engaging in any sort of borderline acts. Kissing a friend on the cheek is pretty common, as is hugging. If they weren't friends or she's not okay with hugging friends, then both he and she should have sought to make that clear.
It sounds more like he thought they were friends and she thought of him as just a work acquaintance than that he was actually pursuing her. If that's the case, then he doesn't have to be a lecher to decide to kiss her on the cheek as a greeting or a farewell. That'd be a pretty serious misunderstanding on his part, but if she let it slide after the first couple of times then his understanding that it'd be okay would be reinforced. So it's actually pretty easy, if you take a step back from the accusation, to see how he could have been wrong but didn't intentionally do anything wrong toward her. Intent is usually a big part of the law in Western societies.
I think the board deciding to oversee his behavior for a while might not be such an overreaction. There is reason to be concerned about him. To be sure he intended to force himself on an unwilling victim I think would be jumping the gun. We have no evidence he knew she was unwilling, or even that she didn't become unwilling only after some point.
Accusers are often no better people than the accused, and can just as easily cherry-pick facts or outright lie. To call the guy a creep because she made a complaint shows a bit of a bias in her favor. I'm not sure why she'd make a false complaint, but I know it can be done and has been done against other people who turned out to be innocent of any wrongdoing. In same cases, the accused didn't even do anything that most people would consider offensive. Since offense is in the mind of the offended, it can happen even if external events don't necessarily warrant it. False offense for whatever reason (jealousy, revenge, power trip, politics, dickishness on the part of the accuser, maybe more) is even worse than a strange and overactive sense of offense.
To really know whether the guy was creepy to her probably takes a lot more information than we have. Determining whether he would have been creepy or offensive to some random individual other than her would also be difficult without more info.
I'll bite. Not killing him is wrong if killing him is the only way to stop him. If you can stop him through lesser means and get him arrested and tried, then perhaps that's better. Letting a serial rapist, serial molester, or serial killer just go after people is what'd be wrong.
Is eating fish or deer evil? What about farming cattle for meat? For milk? Swatting a mosquito is a sin to you? What about larvacide in your local decorative fountains and ponds? We really need to know what level of violence you consider alright before we can even discuss all violence. Are you just talking about human-on-human violence? Is human-v-human sport violence evil? I'm sure boxers, wrestlers, MMAs, football players, and paintball players would say that some level of violence is just clean fun.
Someone doesn't have to believe in a "Sky Daddy" to accuse someone of sexual harassment nor to impose sanctions on someone for it. That may be the reason in this case. Really, though, the "fictional book" to which you're most likely referring is really horrible for feminist activists to cite. Women in it are generally objectified and even referred to as property. It's often the buckled-down religious zealots who are okay with men subjugating women and women accepting it in both Christian and Muslim societies. This sort of humanist egalitarian railroading of a guy for showing a scientific paper that shouldn't even be considered offensive is most likely just that: humanist, not deist.
I'm in favor of outside help for the parents. I'm in favor of the labels. I'm not in favor of banning things just because their labels would be "18+". How you came to the conclusion that because I'm against the ban and because I think parents should pay enough attention to their children to actually read the labels that I'm against the labels I'll never know.
The whole idea of "groupthink" is insulting, and telling someone they only come to a conclusion because it's a popular one is a terrible form of condescension. There are many ways to come to the same conclusion, and often people who seem to have come to the same conclusion actually have only similar and not identical opinions if you actually examine them. You apparently didn't even understand my stand on the issue earlier in the thread, so how you could lump it in with some sort of mythical Slashdot hive mind with such authority is pretty laughable.
In fact, it seems that after all the carping on me and arguing for what appears to be argument's sake that you actually agree with the position I support. I guess that'd make you part of the same "groupthink" according to you?
You're the one who brought "constant surveillance" into the thread. That's quite a strawman for someone who doesn't want them to be used.
Yes, you can make the world safer through regulation. You can also trample the rights of everyone else around you to do so. You shouldn't be allowed to trample those rights in a free society, though. With freedom comes responsibility, in this case the right of an adult to play a video game not suitable for children comes with the responsibility of keeping those games out of the hands of children.
Unfortunately, some people think the freedom means only the parents gain responsibility. Ideally (not that we live in an ideal world), everyone who wants the 18+ ban lifted should be willing to help keep those games available only to those over 18 and those kids whose parents are willing to supply particular games to particular well-adjusted kids who are almost 18.
You attacked me as a Slashdot reader by implying that because I post here and you disagree with me that I must operate under some "groupthink". Go ahead and read your posts. You come off sounding like you think you're the only individual on Slashdot. That may not be your intent, but it does read that way.
If you're disgusted by how debates are carried out and you're a participant in those debates, then perhaps you should consider all the participants.
It's only a strawman if it misrepresents the argument of your opponent in the debate. I think you need to study up on your fallacies.
You're attacking Slashdot readers (of which you are one) and thereby everything posted on Slashdot. That's guilt by association, and that's another logical fallacy.
Real parents who really care about their kids can get busy or lazy. Parents are real people. Parents who are picky enough about their kids playing violent or sexually charged video games shouldn't make excuses when they get too busy or too lazy, though, if there's a clear label on the merchandise. You can't keep kids safe by making everything in the world safe for kids. You need to keep the kids away from things that are unsafe for them.
It's possible for kids to play games at other kids' houses, yeah. I think most of us did something at some point as kids over at a friend's house we weren't supposed to do at home. Kids will always do that, and parents will always try and often fail to keep track of standards set by the parents of the other kids. That still doesn't mean adults should be banned from playing adult-only rated games.
There is no strawman. The actual complaint about no 18+ games is that there is a valid 18+ market that cannot buy the games because the government won't allow them to be sold. I didn't say that was or wasn't your position, so I'm not even sure how you can try to call it a strawman. Here's a definition of "straw man" for you. I'm not telling you what your position is. I'm pointing out the complaint of many Australians that I have read over and over online.
Unfortunately it's one of the better distros out there, despite having business problems. As a whole, the Linux community would be better served if, say, Vector or Ultimate bit the dust and the effort went to Mandriva.
Slackware was there once. Red Hat was, too. Don't worry, something that actually has good hardware support will eventually displace Ubuntu. Actually, Canonical would be smart to be the buyer here. They could take all the great KDE support, the HAL, and the installer and open it all up for Ubuntu and contribute it upstream to Debian.
I always forget Massachusetts is in Europe. I keep wanting to place it somewhere among the original 13 of the United States.;-)
Yeah, some of the people from Suse are still in Germany. Some of the Novell people I'm sure are still in Utah, too. It's all headquartered on the east coast of the US, though. Never underestimate the influence of top-level management in determining where people think of a company representing.
It's funny you say "if Suse perished" in a message thread about Mandriva being up for sale. Suse, as a company, is gone. It's part of Novell. A company selling is not necessarily the death of a distribution.
Red Hat, on a completely different sort of track, killed their unified Red Hat Linux distro and separated things into their product Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a community-driven desktop known as Fedora. So the company being intact doesn't mean the distro will continue as-is either.
Hear, hear! I'm posting this reply from an x86 laptop running Mandriva 2010 with IceWM. I'm currently pulling a torrent of 2010 Free x86_64 for my desktop.
I got tired of Windows 7, so I tried to see what would be a decent replacement for it on my desktop. I tried the beta of Fedora 13, and sound doesn't seem to work at all. I chalked that up to it being a beta.
So I tried the new LTS Kubuntu 10.04 instead. Sound works for some things, but not with many of the programs. I tried installing different audio services like PulseAudio and such. KPackageKit couldn't grab packages from the DVD. The desktop in question is very rarely hooked up to the Internet lately (long story), so that's a real problem.
I have a DVD for Fedora 11, so I could use that. I could grab 12 and see if that works. Or I could just go ahead and work with the one distro that has consistently worked with all of my systems since Mandriva 2006 (and worked with almost everything since Mandrake 6.0).
I figured since I've got two Mandriva desktops, a Mandriva server, a Mandriva firewall box, and a Mandriva laptop I might do well to use something else on my new quad-core desktop. It never hurts to have some variety, after all. The problem is, I just can't seem to count on anything else to just work.
Maybe I should put regular Ubuntu on it. I'm guessing Xubuntu would really fly. Hopefully they'd work better than Kubuntu, but they're all three supposed to be fully supported.
The box might still end up with Fedora 13 on it once the release hits. Maybe I'll even try OpenSuse again -- once every two years or so doesn't hurt.
Meanwhile, the distros I never seem to have issues with are Mandriva, Slackware (which is great if you have that much time), Arch (which is great if you are okay with the constantly rolling releases and have the network always available on the system in question), Gentoo (again with even more time issues than Slack), and Puppy (which unfortunately likes to auto-log you as root).
So Mandriva with urpmi, good hardware support, good DE and WM support, and a responsive bug tracking team seems to be destined to remain my distro of choice so long as there's still a company to put it out.
Perhaps it's time to buy the PowerPack again. Every little bit helps.
My parents always knew when they bought me something with an age-based rating on it. Sometimes they would buy certain things above my age rating and sometimes they wouldn't, depending on the specific item in question.
Even once I was making my own money, when I was living in their home and under the age of majority they interacted with me enough to notice if something I was spending a lot of time watching or playing was excessively offensive to their ideas of what was appropriate for me.
This isn't about parents putting anyone under 24-hour surveillance. It's about whether or not the sale of video games rated 18+ and clearly labeled as such should even be legal in an entire country. I believe most parents would be fine with the local store selling an 18+ video game to someone over 18, even if they didn't consider a specific title alright for their 13-year-old kid. What they wouldn't want is the 13-year-old to be able to buy the game with no labeling system in place at all. That's why ratings exist. To make the categories and then just stop using them and ban anything in the "adult" category is undue censorship of what adults can buy.
Adults play an ever-increasing share of video games by both title count and by hours played. They shouldn't be limited by fear mongering to playing games appropriate to young teens.
Yes, the interest groups they are talking about are. The interest groups that keep the problem around are very influential considering they are the other 4% and the problem still isn't solved.
How about allow adults to play 18+ and the parents can tell little Jimmy he can't play it. That's the current problem in a nutshell -- there is no 18+ category for video games in Australia. The rating should be enough for the parents to just glance at it and have some idea. Yet adults can't buy 18+ games, because anything that doesn't fit into some lower classification is just outright banned from sale.
Slashdot Mirror
There's an important distinction between a lone sentence and a lone sentence fragment. The key word is fragment. A fragment is not a sentence. A sentence is not a fragment. Distinctions which add to clarity and prevent many possible misunderstandings are what is lost when you write for people to skim.
We're geeks here. Give us the fine print, not the misleading ad headline.
The two are related, and both are desirable. However, they are mostly two different issues. You have the source and can put it on to any hardware for which you have proper access. Your problem here isn't the software license. It's the hardware license. You also need to get hardware for which you are granted the proper access. The distinction is clear, and I'm not sure why there is so much confusion.
I agree it's dangerous to be a woman, and that's not news to me. Thanks for trying to point it out, though, even if you were snarky and condescending doing so.
The problem is that we don't make things better for women by making innocent men less safe. We make things better for women by making women safer, including making it less safe for men to actually victimize women.
Making things worse for innocent men is just that -- making things worse for innocent men. It doesn't help innocent women one bit, but it could help a woman become the attacker and a man the victim.
How about real equality and making things better for the upstanding members of both genders rather than seeking vengeance on men as a gender for the wrongs of other men?
Unfortunately the same thing can happen in the US. The company would likely not do much investigation, either, unless they feared the lawyer of the accused more than the lawyer of the accuser. It seems it would usually be safer (no stats to show, just a feeling) to side with the accuser, especially if it's a woman accusing a man. As I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread, sexual harassment that isn't a man harassing a woman has a very different response from many people.
You've hit on a key issue in not just small donations but in lots of business models, too. There are problems with most payment methods for small payments.
Small checks through the mail are efficient for the sender, but are terribly inefficient for the recipient. That's even true if a stamp is used to endorse them. Then there's the small but real risk of fraudulent ACH transactions when you send an unknown entity a check. Then there are failed check hassles, too. Even small checks can be insufficient funds if someone's overdrawn already or they could write an old check on a closed account by accident.
Accepting credit and debit cards is pretty efficient for the recipient for larger values, but with fixed per-transaction fees in addition to the percentages, most merchant accounts aren't worth using if a large proportion of transactions are for small amounts.
Sending coin or currency through standard post is fairly efficient, and there's typically a reasonable risk of loss on the part of the sender if the payments are small enough. There are pretty good systems for counting coin and cash. There's an issue of security through obscurity for the recipient, though, since targeting the recipient's end of the mail could score a pretty good chunk. How does one let honest people out in the public know where to send cash while keeping the delivery end secure? A post office box is more secure than the average customer location mail drop, as are slots into a building or a locked customer box. There's still lots of people involved in getting the money there, though. People, even ones screened by the Postal Service for honesty and integrity, are always a possible weak link to security. Some projects have had at least limited success with this process, though. Barry Kauler of the Puppy Linux project accepts cash for mailing CDs to people (and would probably accept donations in cash, too). He accepts US dollars, Australian dollars, and Euros/a>. He recommends PayPal. I hope I haven't hurt the security of this system for him by mentioning it on Slashdot; anyone who's been to the Puppy site could have already known about it.
PayPal is an option. They have similar per-transaction and percentage-of-transaction fees to credit cards. For donations, they require no setup fees, no monthly fees, and no monthly minimum. There is a $0.30 transaction fee on top of the percentage for donation receipts of less than $3000 per month (if this source is timely). That makes single-dollar donations feasible but expensive. Anything less is not worthwhile. I haven't found the pricing info for donations on PayPal's site after a few minutes looking, but the prices listed at that fundraising news site are in line with their commercial payment services.
Amazon has a system that lets any Amazon customer pay you a donation for 5% plus as little as $0.05 if you're a 501(c)(3) non-profit in the US and the donation is less than $10. Check out their prices. They also have a similar low-cost cutoff for non-donation payments and even a micropayment system that tracks payments under $0.05 at 20% with a quarter-cent minimum cost for both donations and sales.
Google has Google Donations which for any US 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6) non-profit (but not other 501(c) subcategories) which follows the standard transaction fees. For organizations that are qualified and are accepted into the Google Grants program, Google Donations processing is free while the organization is in good stand
I love how you use "like being a dick" to paraphrase how a court would view it. It's funny because it's true. Your response reads like an Onion article or the script for The Daily Show.
One really difficult situation I've seen a few times is in same-gender sexual harassment. Sometimes gay guy hits on a straight guy or worse hits on a closeted gay guy in public on purpose. I've even seen guys do this to attempt to out someone against his will. Maybe a straight guy makes jokes about another co-worker or fellow student and the target is afraid to complain because that would be seen as effete by the harasser. In younger students, around middle school, boys tease each other about what they may or may not have done sexually yet. If a gay guy asks someone out who's not willing and the target makes sexual harassment complaints, there's a possible counter-complaint about homophobia and possibly about sexual harassment based on homophobia. If the guy being hit on is in the closet, the investigation of the complaint may out him as surely as the original harassment. Teasing people about their sexuality or their effectiveness at finding sex partners is clearly sexual harassment, but it's often overlooked and underreported. It's often embarrassing for the victim and not taken seriously by authorities.
I personally had a problem with a female student sexually harassing me back in high school. I had to contact the equal rights officer for the district, remind him that men were just as equal as victims as women were as athletes and students, and threaten a lawsuit before the school even attempted to alter her behavior. I had previously complained to the vice principal in charge of student discipline and the school principal, and it was still a nearly daily issue until that point.
I find it sad in this day and age of supposed equality that men's treatment of women is closely watched and critiqued, but men against men or women against men isn't even given credence once it's been brought to light. That combined with many people believing allegations and not questioning accusers or waiting for evidence, especially when it's a woman or child making the accusations (or as likely someone making allegations on behalf of a child) makes it a dangerous time to be a man.
I'm from the US and not Ireland (and I'm not a lawyer here), but as I see it the problem here would be that the university doesn't have a right to do anything they want. They are responsible for the workplace they provide for their employees and the behavior of their employees. Once Employee A makes a formal complaint, the employer must investigate it and put Employee B on warning not to engage in the alleged behavior whether or not the alleged behavior actually happened in the past. Otherwise, the employer will get sued and possibly investigated criminally right along with the alleged perpetrator for allowing the behavior. Employers can be placed in a very distasteful situation either by someone harassing a coworker or someone making a frivolous complaint. It's often difficult to prove and even more difficult to disprove (how do you prove a negative without exhaustive search and perfect isolation outside of precisely approved channels?).
Some companies go so far as having a separate handbook for sexual harassment. Some even have training and certification classes on harassment (sexual and otherwise) to go right along with customer service standards, technical training, and office flow of paperwork standards.
Sexual harassment is a matter of unwelcome sexual advances or offensive treatment based on sexual themes. If she led him to believe they were welcome at some point, then she needed to inform him that they were not and give him an opportunity to stop. Otherwise, nearly every break-up of a couple could involve retroactive "harassment". There are, of course, things you don't do in certain cultures until you're sure they're okay with the other person. There are others that are not always as clear, and it would really help if people whose comfort levels with physical contact and certain discussion topics differ would talk about those before engaging in any sort of borderline acts. Kissing a friend on the cheek is pretty common, as is hugging. If they weren't friends or she's not okay with hugging friends, then both he and she should have sought to make that clear.
It sounds more like he thought they were friends and she thought of him as just a work acquaintance than that he was actually pursuing her. If that's the case, then he doesn't have to be a lecher to decide to kiss her on the cheek as a greeting or a farewell. That'd be a pretty serious misunderstanding on his part, but if she let it slide after the first couple of times then his understanding that it'd be okay would be reinforced. So it's actually pretty easy, if you take a step back from the accusation, to see how he could have been wrong but didn't intentionally do anything wrong toward her. Intent is usually a big part of the law in Western societies.
I think the board deciding to oversee his behavior for a while might not be such an overreaction. There is reason to be concerned about him. To be sure he intended to force himself on an unwilling victim I think would be jumping the gun. We have no evidence he knew she was unwilling, or even that she didn't become unwilling only after some point.
Accusers are often no better people than the accused, and can just as easily cherry-pick facts or outright lie. To call the guy a creep because she made a complaint shows a bit of a bias in her favor. I'm not sure why she'd make a false complaint, but I know it can be done and has been done against other people who turned out to be innocent of any wrongdoing. In same cases, the accused didn't even do anything that most people would consider offensive. Since offense is in the mind of the offended, it can happen even if external events don't necessarily warrant it. False offense for whatever reason (jealousy, revenge, power trip, politics, dickishness on the part of the accuser, maybe more) is even worse than a strange and overactive sense of offense.
To really know whether the guy was creepy to her probably takes a lot more information than we have. Determining whether he would have been creepy or offensive to some random individual other than her would also be difficult without more info.
I'll bite. Not killing him is wrong if killing him is the only way to stop him. If you can stop him through lesser means and get him arrested and tried, then perhaps that's better. Letting a serial rapist, serial molester, or serial killer just go after people is what'd be wrong.
Is eating fish or deer evil? What about farming cattle for meat? For milk? Swatting a mosquito is a sin to you? What about larvacide in your local decorative fountains and ponds? We really need to know what level of violence you consider alright before we can even discuss all violence. Are you just talking about human-on-human violence? Is human-v-human sport violence evil? I'm sure boxers, wrestlers, MMAs, football players, and paintball players would say that some level of violence is just clean fun.
Someone doesn't have to believe in a "Sky Daddy" to accuse someone of sexual harassment nor to impose sanctions on someone for it. That may be the reason in this case. Really, though, the "fictional book" to which you're most likely referring is really horrible for feminist activists to cite. Women in it are generally objectified and even referred to as property. It's often the buckled-down religious zealots who are okay with men subjugating women and women accepting it in both Christian and Muslim societies. This sort of humanist egalitarian railroading of a guy for showing a scientific paper that shouldn't even be considered offensive is most likely just that: humanist, not deist.
I'm in favor of outside help for the parents. I'm in favor of the labels. I'm not in favor of banning things just because their labels would be "18+". How you came to the conclusion that because I'm against the ban and because I think parents should pay enough attention to their children to actually read the labels that I'm against the labels I'll never know.
The whole idea of "groupthink" is insulting, and telling someone they only come to a conclusion because it's a popular one is a terrible form of condescension. There are many ways to come to the same conclusion, and often people who seem to have come to the same conclusion actually have only similar and not identical opinions if you actually examine them. You apparently didn't even understand my stand on the issue earlier in the thread, so how you could lump it in with some sort of mythical Slashdot hive mind with such authority is pretty laughable.
In fact, it seems that after all the carping on me and arguing for what appears to be argument's sake that you actually agree with the position I support. I guess that'd make you part of the same "groupthink" according to you?
You're the one who brought "constant surveillance" into the thread. That's quite a strawman for someone who doesn't want them to be used.
Yes, you can make the world safer through regulation. You can also trample the rights of everyone else around you to do so. You shouldn't be allowed to trample those rights in a free society, though. With freedom comes responsibility, in this case the right of an adult to play a video game not suitable for children comes with the responsibility of keeping those games out of the hands of children.
Unfortunately, some people think the freedom means only the parents gain responsibility. Ideally (not that we live in an ideal world), everyone who wants the 18+ ban lifted should be willing to help keep those games available only to those over 18 and those kids whose parents are willing to supply particular games to particular well-adjusted kids who are almost 18.
You attacked me as a Slashdot reader by implying that because I post here and you disagree with me that I must operate under some "groupthink". Go ahead and read your posts. You come off sounding like you think you're the only individual on Slashdot. That may not be your intent, but it does read that way.
If you're disgusted by how debates are carried out and you're a participant in those debates, then perhaps you should consider all the participants.
It's only a strawman if it misrepresents the argument of your opponent in the debate. I think you need to study up on your fallacies.
You're attacking Slashdot readers (of which you are one) and thereby everything posted on Slashdot. That's guilt by association, and that's another logical fallacy.
Real parents who really care about their kids can get busy or lazy. Parents are real people. Parents who are picky enough about their kids playing violent or sexually charged video games shouldn't make excuses when they get too busy or too lazy, though, if there's a clear label on the merchandise. You can't keep kids safe by making everything in the world safe for kids. You need to keep the kids away from things that are unsafe for them.
It's possible for kids to play games at other kids' houses, yeah. I think most of us did something at some point as kids over at a friend's house we weren't supposed to do at home. Kids will always do that, and parents will always try and often fail to keep track of standards set by the parents of the other kids. That still doesn't mean adults should be banned from playing adult-only rated games.
There is no strawman. The actual complaint about no 18+ games is that there is a valid 18+ market that cannot buy the games because the government won't allow them to be sold. I didn't say that was or wasn't your position, so I'm not even sure how you can try to call it a strawman. Here's a definition of "straw man" for you. I'm not telling you what your position is. I'm pointing out the complaint of many Australians that I have read over and over online.
Unfortunately it's one of the better distros out there, despite having business problems. As a whole, the Linux community would be better served if, say, Vector or Ultimate bit the dust and the effort went to Mandriva.
Slackware was there once. Red Hat was, too. Don't worry, something that actually has good hardware support will eventually displace Ubuntu. Actually, Canonical would be smart to be the buyer here. They could take all the great KDE support, the HAL, and the installer and open it all up for Ubuntu and contribute it upstream to Debian.
I always forget Massachusetts is in Europe. I keep wanting to place it somewhere among the original 13 of the United States. ;-)
Yeah, some of the people from Suse are still in Germany. Some of the Novell people I'm sure are still in Utah, too. It's all headquartered on the east coast of the US, though. Never underestimate the influence of top-level management in determining where people think of a company representing.
It's funny you say "if Suse perished" in a message thread about Mandriva being up for sale. Suse, as a company, is gone. It's part of Novell. A company selling is not necessarily the death of a distribution.
Red Hat, on a completely different sort of track, killed their unified Red Hat Linux distro and separated things into their product Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a community-driven desktop known as Fedora. So the company being intact doesn't mean the distro will continue as-is either.
Hear, hear! I'm posting this reply from an x86 laptop running Mandriva 2010 with IceWM. I'm currently pulling a torrent of 2010 Free x86_64 for my desktop.
I got tired of Windows 7, so I tried to see what would be a decent replacement for it on my desktop. I tried the beta of Fedora 13, and sound doesn't seem to work at all. I chalked that up to it being a beta.
So I tried the new LTS Kubuntu 10.04 instead. Sound works for some things, but not with many of the programs. I tried installing different audio services like PulseAudio and such. KPackageKit couldn't grab packages from the DVD. The desktop in question is very rarely hooked up to the Internet lately (long story), so that's a real problem.
I have a DVD for Fedora 11, so I could use that. I could grab 12 and see if that works. Or I could just go ahead and work with the one distro that has consistently worked with all of my systems since Mandriva 2006 (and worked with almost everything since Mandrake 6.0).
I figured since I've got two Mandriva desktops, a Mandriva server, a Mandriva firewall box, and a Mandriva laptop I might do well to use something else on my new quad-core desktop. It never hurts to have some variety, after all. The problem is, I just can't seem to count on anything else to just work.
Maybe I should put regular Ubuntu on it. I'm guessing Xubuntu would really fly. Hopefully they'd work better than Kubuntu, but they're all three supposed to be fully supported.
The box might still end up with Fedora 13 on it once the release hits. Maybe I'll even try OpenSuse again -- once every two years or so doesn't hurt.
Meanwhile, the distros I never seem to have issues with are Mandriva, Slackware (which is great if you have that much time), Arch (which is great if you are okay with the constantly rolling releases and have the network always available on the system in question), Gentoo (again with even more time issues than Slack), and Puppy (which unfortunately likes to auto-log you as root).
So Mandriva with urpmi, good hardware support, good DE and WM support, and a responsive bug tracking team seems to be destined to remain my distro of choice so long as there's still a company to put it out.
Perhaps it's time to buy the PowerPack again. Every little bit helps.
24-hour surveillance is your strawman. I never suggested it, but my isn't it easy for you to tear down?
My parents always knew when they bought me something with an age-based rating on it. Sometimes they would buy certain things above my age rating and sometimes they wouldn't, depending on the specific item in question.
Even once I was making my own money, when I was living in their home and under the age of majority they interacted with me enough to notice if something I was spending a lot of time watching or playing was excessively offensive to their ideas of what was appropriate for me.
This isn't about parents putting anyone under 24-hour surveillance. It's about whether or not the sale of video games rated 18+ and clearly labeled as such should even be legal in an entire country. I believe most parents would be fine with the local store selling an 18+ video game to someone over 18, even if they didn't consider a specific title alright for their 13-year-old kid. What they wouldn't want is the 13-year-old to be able to buy the game with no labeling system in place at all. That's why ratings exist. To make the categories and then just stop using them and ban anything in the "adult" category is undue censorship of what adults can buy.
Adults play an ever-increasing share of video games by both title count and by hours played. They shouldn't be limited by fear mongering to playing games appropriate to young teens.
Yes, the interest groups they are talking about are. The interest groups that keep the problem around are very influential considering they are the other 4% and the problem still isn't solved.
How about allow adults to play 18+ and the parents can tell little Jimmy he can't play it. That's the current problem in a nutshell -- there is no 18+ category for video games in Australia. The rating should be enough for the parents to just glance at it and have some idea. Yet adults can't buy 18+ games, because anything that doesn't fit into some lower classification is just outright banned from sale.