On one hand, Facebook has been famous for banning pictures of breast feeding as 'offensive' (while having no problems with burlesque dancers in pasties).
On the other hand, they stood behind the 'Draw Mohammed Day' page as "a free speech issue" despite the fact that the page was designed to be incredibly offensive to one of the world's majour religions
I was actually thinking of starting a "Jesus and Mary Making Out" image contest, to see how Facebook would react to that. My guess is that they would have banned my page as offensive, even while they were defending the Mohammed day contest as free speech -- despite the fact that the Jesus with Mary images (I'm talking about Mary Magdalene here, not his mother) would be much less offensive to Christians than the Mohammed images are to Muslims.
(( One interesting thing about images of Mohammed in Islam is that the rule against having pictures of Mohammed was to prevent the man from being revered -- as opposed to the teachings he wrote in the Koran. Unfortunately, the rule against pictures has now, itself, become a way of revering him... ah, silly humans. ))
Also known in Canada. I worked at the University of Alberta in the late '70s and the '80s. They had a Plato system... I've got all sorts of interesting stories (( like reaching 15Mlillion Gs in Dog, having my account be the default destination for print jobs, etc...).
$500M is less than the cost of of the drilling rig.
It's also about 4 months worth of (gross) income from a 50,000 barrel/day oil well (now the minimum estimate of what's actually leaking from the well.
Really -- you wouldn't want to something that would actually impinge on BPs profits would you? It might discourage them from doing something like this in the future.
Seriously, this group is just as fundamentalist a religious block as the Taliban -- just a different religion, but the fundamentalism and danger remain the same.
If they could, they'd probably introduce a version or the burqa, but with a different, less Muslim name -- "Victorian Modesty Clothing", for example.
It's things like this that make one thankful for the 'separation of church and state' language in the US constitution. Now, we just need some work to enforce that language.
Is there a stack of explicit sexual images of cartoon characters depicted as under 18?
I looked on the lollicon page, and there's a picture there that's pretty tame in my books ((essentially, a bunch of girls at a slumber party )). There's nothing in it that I'd call overtly sexual, although they are in somewhat skimpy pajamas.
Nobody's made notable changes to the page in the last couple of days, so -- unless somebody changed the actual image (didn't check that), then this whole thing's been something of a tempest in a teapot.
Maybe the offending picture's elsewhere and/or perhaps Sanger hoped that people would go on a witch hunt. There's nothing like a bit if innuendo to stir up a hornet's nest of controversy.
Yes, children can, and do, have sexual thoughts when they're young. Perhaps they'll even act on them.
That's completely different from suggesting that adults should 'help them along'.
Let them develop normally, and make sure that they have the knowledge of how the body works and what they can expect when (rarely 'if') they become sexually active and what's going to be happening to them and around them during puberty. (( as far as can be told, education is often the best anti-aphrodisiac -- If nothing else, it makes informed kids more likely to use birth control... even if it is just the rhythm method )).
I'm willing to discuss the question of kiddy porn manga, but I'm pretty clear that the live-child kind is incredibly harmful. I do know people who were used in the sex trade when they were kids, and the effects linger on decades later.
If young kids want to experiment sexually when they're young, that's one thing (discourage it but don't freak out about it), but adults are old enough to say better. If a young kid hits on you, it's your responsibility to say no, not theirs.... and if you hit on a kid much younger than you, then don't depend on me to do much more than shake my head and turn my back if somebody decides to castrate you with a rusty spoon.
It may depend on where you live. If you live in an area with high density population (e.g. much of the east coast) it might take a good bit of work to find someplace with bad enough reception that you will notice that your cell phone isn't telling you the time.
On the other hand, if you live someplace like the mountainous (and sparsely populated) interior of BC, it can sometimes be pretty easy to find someplace where you just don't get cell phone reception. There are actually a couple of towns in BC that pride themselves on being cell-phone free.
For my part, even though I've rarely been outside of cell reception in the last decade or so, I've still found a use for the ancient wrist watch. There are various times when it's just not worth the trouble of hunting through my myriad pockets to find my (increasingly) tiny cell phone. A flick of the wrist, and I know what time it is.
That having been said, I am one of the crowd that uses my cell phone as an alarm clock.
There are some good side benefits to refusing to exploit local energy reserves until the last minute. As everybody else is fighting and freaking over the last scraps, you just start tapping into the locked in reserves.
A court's lein would probably simply prevent him from selling or re-mortgaging the house. It doesn't give the court the ability to sell the house to repay his victims.
I can understand having it as an option for those few people who actually like the ribbon (which, IMHO reduces usability, while taking up way more space), but forcing that garbage on the general public seems like a waste of both energy and goodwill.
If some group in Afghanistan was threatening to send (one or two) nukes into the USSR, there would be no need to activate dead hand. Even if it was activated, it is unlikely that the one or two nukes that a rogue (non) state could muster would be able to trigger all the requirements of dead hand.... and if it was activated and triggered, all it would take would be a single call from the (possibly) low-level officer in the control bunker to his/her superiors to realize that something screwy was going on and he shouldn't hit the button.
It's an ingenious system and it (thankfully) worked. Did they get a patent on it?
Great, but let's say I'm just a lowly "user". I'm not a developer and not the Israeli government. Now what?
If you want to compare a 'lowly user' to The Israeli government in getting a FLOSS change done, then you should also compare a 'lowly user' to the Israeli government in getting Microsoft to make a change in, what's for you, a show-stopper bug.
If $7M plus the promise of a 10,000 unit sale isn't enough to get Microsoft to 'listen to their users' and fix an obvious and major usability problem, then what's the chances for me, a lowly user?
With Microsoft, that's your only choice.
With Freed software, you have a number of other solutions open to you (whether you choose use them or not).
First, there's the expectation that if something breaks or something isn't working for you, you can just "fix it". Now this might mean anything from editing a configuration file to rewriting the code, which is far above a lot of people's heads. Plus, as you mention, sometimes it seems like developers focus on some technical aspect of the problem while ignoring the end-user aspect. It's great that ODF is an open format, but it doesn't really work as a universal file format if every program has a different implementation.
This is one of the common refrains of the anti-FOSS FUD patrol -- that 'all of us non-programmers have no control'. That couldn't be furter from the truth. It's actually a close relative of Microsoft's 'are you going to trust your business to code written by amateurs' FUD.
Truth of the matter is that the bulk of the code that goes into the major FLOSS projects is put there by people who are paid to do the work. It's not a bunch of lone wolves doing it for their own gratification. This means that they take their orders from the people who pay them to do that work. In other words, you don't have to be a programmer to get a wanted fix into your (not so) favorite FLOSS project, you just have to convince a programmer (by hook, crook or paycheque) to do it.
This is quite a bit different than with proprietary software, where it has to be in the business interests of the program seller to fix what for you is a show-stopper bug. For example, when MS-Word for OSX first came out, it's multilingual support (especially for RTL languages like Hebrew) was abysmal. The Israeli government offered Microsoft 7million of dollars (plus a guaranteed bulk contract to fix it, but MS was more interested in using the bugs as a leverage point to force people to move from the MAC to Windows. Microsoft didn't budge on the issue until Israel's Department of defence paid a group of programmers $1/2 Million to port Open Office to the Mac, and ordered a halt to further Microsoft contracts.
So the moral of the story is: If you have a show-stopper bug in a FLOSS project, then hire someone to fix it, then sit back and laugh at the people who spend 10 times as much money working around similar problems in proprietary programs. If you then feed your fix to the greater community, then not only don't you have to support your fix, as the base code is updated, you also get to bathe in the good karma of having contributed to the greater commumity. That's what FLOSS is all about.
That's why the server sit is only 8 miles away.. It's close enough that you can drive over and hit 'reset' once a day, if you have to.
With SUN servers, on the other hand, I've set up their serial ports back-to-back such that I could SSH into a box's 'partner', shut down the OS, wipe the drive and re-install the OS without setting foot in the server room (not that I ever needed to make use of that functionality, but it was reassuring to have it in place, given that the boxes were a 3-4 hour drive away and across an international border (US/Canada)).
I have no problems administering Unix/Linux boxes 200 miles away, but -- MS PR aside -- I'd want to keep a Windows box 'close to home'.
Yeah, what would you rather have be the result for your best friend?
* died happy, or
* Live, well, and annoyed as hell by the doctor that saves his life.
Now, granted, I'd rather have someone who's both competent and nice, but -- given the choice, I'd choose competent, too. I can ignore jerkiness, but I actually have to fix errors.
Well, it's about the right size^W length, and they've both got tripods (well, bipods... whatever you want to call them), but I'd say that the similarity ends about there.
1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
Current jurisprudence says that the law should , if feasible, be interpreted in such a way as to make it consistent with the charter.
Now, there are clearly cases of hate speech that are so egregious as to be inherently inconsistent with Canada retaining it's status as a free and democratic language. In this way, I'd say that the law could be interpreted as being consistent with the charter.
In this case, I would say that, if the speech being encouraged on this website was mild enough that it wouldn't justify the exception in section 1 of the charter, then it should be deemed to be below the threshold of application of the law. To declare unconstitutional a law that is meant to prevent the kind of hate speech that results, at it's worst, in things like lynch mobs is to ignore both the purpose of that law and the purpose of the charter of rights.
To put it another way, If you're going to declare this law unconstitutional, you might as well disband the entire human rights commission as unconstitional.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, they stood behind the 'Draw Mohammed Day' page as "a free speech issue" despite the fact that the page was designed to be incredibly offensive to one of the world's majour religions
I was actually thinking of starting a "Jesus and Mary Making Out" image contest, to see how Facebook would react to that. My guess is that they would have banned my page as offensive, even while they were defending the Mohammed day contest as free speech -- despite the fact that the Jesus with Mary images (I'm talking about Mary Magdalene here, not his mother) would be much less offensive to Christians than the Mohammed images are to Muslims.
(( One interesting thing about images of Mohammed in Islam is that the rule against having pictures of Mohammed was to prevent the man from being revered -- as opposed to the teachings he wrote in the Koran. Unfortunately, the rule against pictures has now, itself, become a way of revering him. .. ah, silly humans. ))
The robots.txt file is ignored if the final target is not in the domain.
Then edit the robots.txt on the target domain so that Google doesn't go there.
Also known in Canada. I worked at the University of Alberta in the late '70s and the '80s. They had a Plato system... I've got all sorts of interesting stories (( like reaching 15Mlillion Gs in Dog, having my account be the default destination for print jobs, etc...).
It's also about 4 months worth of (gross) income from a 50,000 barrel/day oil well (now the minimum estimate of what's actually leaking from the well.
Really -- you wouldn't want to something that would actually impinge on BPs profits would you? It might discourage them from doing something like this in the future.
If they could, they'd probably introduce a version or the burqa, but with a different, less Muslim name -- "Victorian Modesty Clothing", for example.
It's things like this that make one thankful for the 'separation of church and state' language in the US constitution. Now, we just need some work to enforce that language.
You can always click on 'Options' and then choose 'no karma bonus' (like I just did now).
After that, precisely how you go about the process is more a matter of the side effect of other choices.
This feels, to me, rather like arguing if it's better to put the women's washroom to the right or left of the men's.
Is there a stack of explicit sexual images of cartoon characters depicted as under 18?
I looked on the lollicon page, and there's a picture there that's pretty tame in my books ((essentially, a bunch of girls at a slumber party )). There's nothing in it that I'd call overtly sexual, although they are in somewhat skimpy pajamas.
Nobody's made notable changes to the page in the last couple of days, so -- unless somebody changed the actual image (didn't check that), then this whole thing's been something of a tempest in a teapot.
Maybe the offending picture's elsewhere and/or perhaps Sanger hoped that people would go on a witch hunt.
There's nothing like a bit if innuendo to stir up a hornet's nest of controversy.
That's completely different from suggesting that adults should 'help them along'.
Let them develop normally, and make sure that they have the knowledge of how the body works and what they can expect when (rarely 'if') they become sexually active and what's going to be happening to them and around them during puberty. (( as far as can be told, education is often the best anti-aphrodisiac -- If nothing else, it makes informed kids more likely to use birth control ... even if it is just the rhythm method )).
I'm willing to discuss the question of kiddy porn manga, but I'm pretty clear that the live-child kind is incredibly harmful. I do know people who were used in the sex trade when they were kids, and the effects linger on decades later.
If young kids want to experiment sexually when they're young, that's one thing (discourage it but don't freak out about it), but adults are old enough to say better. If a young kid hits on you, it's your responsibility to say no, not theirs. ... and if you hit on a kid much younger than you, then don't depend on me to do much more than shake my head and turn my back if somebody decides to castrate you with a rusty spoon.
That's my preferred optimization strategy, and it seems to work a lot more often than Best Buy's.
On the other hand, if you live someplace like the mountainous (and sparsely populated) interior of BC, it can sometimes be pretty easy to find someplace where you just don't get cell phone reception. There are actually a couple of towns in BC that pride themselves on being cell-phone free.
For my part, even though I've rarely been outside of cell reception in the last decade or so, I've still found a use for the ancient wrist watch. There are various times when it's just not worth the trouble of hunting through my myriad pockets to find my (increasingly) tiny cell phone. A flick of the wrist, and I know what time it is.
That having been said, I am one of the crowd that uses my cell phone as an alarm clock.
There are some good side benefits to refusing to exploit local energy reserves until the last minute. As everybody else is fighting and freaking over the last scraps, you just start tapping into the locked in reserves.
Then again....
A court's lein would probably simply prevent him from selling or re-mortgaging the house. It doesn't give the court the ability to sell the house to repay his victims.
I can understand having it as an option for those few people who actually like the ribbon (which, IMHO reduces usability, while taking up way more space), but forcing that garbage on the general public seems like a waste of both energy and goodwill.
It's an ingenious system and it (thankfully) worked. Did they get a patent on it?
Great, but let's say I'm just a lowly "user". I'm not a developer and not the Israeli government. Now what?
If you want to compare a 'lowly user' to The Israeli government in getting a FLOSS change done, then you should also compare a 'lowly user' to the Israeli government in getting Microsoft to make a change in, what's for you, a show-stopper bug.
If $7M plus the promise of a 10,000 unit sale isn't enough to get Microsoft to 'listen to their users' and fix an obvious and major usability problem, then what's the chances for me, a lowly user?
With Microsoft, that's your only choice.
With Freed software, you have a number of other solutions open to you (whether you choose use them or not).
First, there's the expectation that if something breaks or something isn't working for you, you can just "fix it". Now this might mean anything from editing a configuration file to rewriting the code, which is far above a lot of people's heads. Plus, as you mention, sometimes it seems like developers focus on some technical aspect of the problem while ignoring the end-user aspect. It's great that ODF is an open format, but it doesn't really work as a universal file format if every program has a different implementation.
This is one of the common refrains of the anti-FOSS FUD patrol -- that 'all of us non-programmers have no control'. That couldn't be furter from the truth. It's actually a close relative of Microsoft's 'are you going to trust your business to code written by amateurs' FUD.
Truth of the matter is that the bulk of the code that goes into the major FLOSS projects is put there by people who are paid to do the work. It's not a bunch of lone wolves doing it for their own gratification. This means that they take their orders from the people who pay them to do that work. In other words, you don't have to be a programmer to get a wanted fix into your (not so) favorite FLOSS project, you just have to convince a programmer (by hook, crook or paycheque) to do it.
This is quite a bit different than with proprietary software, where it has to be in the business interests of the program seller to fix what for you is a show-stopper bug. For example, when MS-Word for OSX first came out, it's multilingual support (especially for RTL languages like Hebrew) was abysmal. The Israeli government offered Microsoft 7million of dollars (plus a guaranteed bulk contract to fix it, but MS was more interested in using the bugs as a leverage point to force people to move from the MAC to Windows. Microsoft didn't budge on the issue until Israel's Department of defence paid a group of programmers $1/2 Million to port Open Office to the Mac, and ordered a halt to further Microsoft contracts.
So the moral of the story is: If you have a show-stopper bug in a FLOSS project, then hire someone to fix it, then sit back and laugh at the people who spend 10 times as much money working around similar problems in proprietary programs. If you then feed your fix to the greater community, then not only don't you have to support your fix, as the base code is updated, you also get to bathe in the good karma of having contributed to the greater commumity. That's what FLOSS is all about.
With SUN servers, on the other hand, I've set up their serial ports back-to-back such that I could SSH into a box's 'partner', shut down the OS, wipe the drive and re-install the OS without setting foot in the server room (not that I ever needed to make use of that functionality, but it was reassuring to have it in place, given that the boxes were a 3-4 hour drive away and across an international border (US/Canada)).
I have no problems administering Unix/Linux boxes 200 miles away, but -- MS PR aside -- I'd want to keep a Windows box 'close to home'.
* died happy, or
* Live, well, and annoyed as hell by the doctor that saves his life.
Now, granted, I'd rather have someone who's both competent and nice, but -- given the choice, I'd choose competent, too. I can ignore jerkiness, but I actually have to fix errors.
In Canada, "No Name(tm)" is tradmarked by Superstore.(tm).
Well, it's about the right size^W length, and they've both got tripods (well, bipods ... whatever you want to call them), but I'd say that the similarity ends about there.
Are you happy now?
Hello?
Sigh, lost another one...
And yes, I need a reboot to come back
. . . or, just a boot, as the case may be.
First of all, the charter of rights has certain limits:
Current jurisprudence says that the law should , if feasible, be interpreted in such a way as to make it consistent with the charter.
Now, there are clearly cases of hate speech that are so egregious as to be inherently inconsistent with Canada retaining it's status as a free and democratic language. In this way, I'd say that the law could be interpreted as being consistent with the charter.
In this case, I would say that, if the speech being encouraged on this website was mild enough that it wouldn't justify the exception in section 1 of the charter, then it should be deemed to be below the threshold of application of the law. To declare unconstitutional a law that is meant to prevent the kind of hate speech that results, at it's worst, in things like lynch mobs is to ignore both the purpose of that law and the purpose of the charter of rights.
To put it another way, If you're going to declare this law unconstitutional, you might as well disband the entire human rights commission as unconstitional.