There's plenty of empirical evidence that suggests that letting people look at porn diffuses their 'lustful mentality' so that they are not as likely to commit an act of physical abuse.
If that's the case, why has paedophilia been on a statistical rise for the past decade or so? What changed in society?
If access to child porn reduces attacks, why are people charged with possession of child porn discovered after they're charged with molesting a child? Shouldn't those charged with abuse be the least likely to have a kiddie porn collection if your argument is valid?
We can try to stick our heads in the sand as with climate change, but statistics show paedophilia charges and convictions are on the rise.
Do you have a better explanation than a weak-kneed permissive social attitude or a conditioning by media influences?
"Think of the children" is a specious argument when it's raised in a context that is (at best) only loosely associated with children. But when the direct victim is children, the argument is very valid. Even hardened criminals with life sentences have children they'll kill to protect -- and sometimes have.
No one likes a paedophile. It's hard wired at an instinctual level as a biological protection of our own offspring. There is no "moral question" -- it's so important it's a physically hardwired response to view such activities with disgust and contempt.
We're talking about child porn that tries to play games with legal loopholes about whether a child is actually harmed. It encourages the direct physical abuse of real children by conditioning the paedophile to consider their lustful and abusive mentality "acceptable" or "normal". It's the same problem that is caused by allowing pre-teen and teen models to be dressed up as if they were adults by clothing advertisers.
Comparing South Park's creative and repetitive killing of the self-repairing Kenny to someone trying to portray a realistic scene of rape and torture is disingenuous at best. No one would ever confuse Kenny with being real, but when you consider the stellar work done by SquareSoft, Pixar, or the team behind Ghost in the Shell 2, it's pretty clear that we can do the synthetic actors that Lucas fantasized about years ago.
Even Hentai isn't a fair comparison, because while the material is deeply disturbing "tentacle sex demons" ties in with some Japanese religions and folklore. It is an excellant example of a storyline where you don't want live human actors, but that doesn't mean it should be suppressed by people who don't understand the cultural significance.
When's the last time some sicko dressed up as a Japanese sex demon and tried to molest a horde of young women?
When's the last time a child got dragged off by a paedophile to be raped in darkness and terror?
I've worked several companies that not only encourage telework, they require it. Most people call it "tech support", and making yourself available in that capacity is not a bad thing for the career. It just means you spend your life carrying pagers and cell phones, contractually guaranteeing response times that tie you close to home and network.
But face time is important. If no one sees you or knows what you do, you don't exist. Come budget time, neither does your paycheque.
Autoboxing still comes at an instance-construction expense, no matter how well-tuned the implementation.
I'd much rather see signatures that distinguish between intrinsic and box arguments, as it allows fine-grained performance tweaking.
I am rather disappointed that we still don't have unsigned types in Java. It really is critical for providing efficient mapping of XML types, database types, and CORBA/IDL/IIOP interfaces. I'm also going to have to find an appropriate library that will map Java's 64-bit signed millitimestamp intrinsic to local platform libraries/data types. Mapping BigInteger and BigNumber at that lower level is probably inconsistent as well.
XML string types are trivial. Just use a string pattern to validate setter arguments.
Extinction happens when the environment changes. Whether overpopulation by another species, pollution, or just flattening of current ecosystems for housing, there is always an impact. Probably the most important role communities will face in the future is urban planning or engineering, but the role will have to encompass environmental concerns.
Some planned communities already demonstrate excellent use of parkland and greenspace to provide walking and cycling paths, park spaces, and street clusters designed to limit drive-through traffic speed. Brampton/Bramalea have some districts that follow these patterns, and it does seem to make a difference in local crime rates.
Other districts have switched to tree-bands instead of noise walls along interstates and freeways. It also gives the illusion that you're driving in countryside between city centers, when behind that tree line is wall-to-wall industry and housing. It may be an illusion, but it beats the concrete jungle/skyscraper maze rat environment, which is a subtle daily hammering on the psyche.
Sadly, some districts live down to their reputation. Subways that stink of urine. Rats. (Big rats! Louie, you're having that stupid rat dream again!)
There really is no need for people to have to go through that kind of mess every day on their way to work. It convinces them the rest of the world is full of graceless animals.
I know IBM and other vendors have clusters available for developers to do test ports.
Is there any sort of facility for mapping a project source tree to multiple distribution builds? Sort of a meta-ant for the different vendor packagings. If the efforts to standardize the Linux distributions was effective, the build and bundle should be the only real difference anymore. Especially if you were sticking to POSIX APIs for the core OS services.
DRM can be turned on it's head. Each developer in charge of an OSS project could use such a build cluster, maybe hosted or supported by various vendors or a.org. The build manager for the project would effectively sign the source and binaries, then the various distros would be responsible for integration test and rollout.
Plus it makes cash-poor farmers net-energy producers instead of net-energy consumers. Biodiesel fuel crops including flax, hemp, and canola grow in poorer conditions than many food crops, and if they were segregated you could safely use the non-processed recycled water.
It's still a carbon emission, though.
I see the dependancy on rare metals as the bigger block to hydrogen fuel cell technologies. They might be more feasible in dense urban areas than they would in rural districts. Imagine the size of the fuel cells a midwest farm tractor would require!
Even in C/C++, 24 character id's using a 5-character library prefix made it a lot easier to keep track of all the modules. 3-character acronyms have as much capacity as IPv4.
The "futurists" of the late 19th and early 20th century predicted many of the technological developments of the past 100 years remarkably well...
The more leeway you give to ideas when comparing them to cultures of the past, the farther back you can find a match. Check out the roots of the word "automaton", and you'll find a vision of robotics long before any of the current technology was feasible. "Science fiction" and "fantasy" have laid the foundations for centuries, if not millenia, pointing the creative thinkers of their times to ideas that seem plausible.
Once someone tenacious latches on to a plausible idea and grasps the potential, it's a matter of time and sweat equity; a matter of "when", not "if".
Personally I like the fact that national media leaves a lot of local stories uncovered. It gives the accused a chance to have an unbiased jury, though a change of venue may be required. If they're cleared, the minimal media slam means they can rebuild elsewhere after the page 2 apologies fails to change the minds of those who "know" they're guilty.
Papparatzi chasing famous people while they make fools of themselves in public is one thing. That same mentality destroying careers on the basis of accusation instead of conviction is not what "freedom of speech" was ever about.
Canadian courts typically restrict publication from the initial hearing onwards. The only time you see further information is if the defense is making preliminary statements about their planned approach, especially if they expect to raise constitutional or human rights issues. That serves to warn the bar that there may be a precedence case coming up.
I hope the accusations turn out false, but Hans' infamous temper isn't going to help him with this argument.
Saskatchewan is dealing with the last-mile problem for rural areas, but the major (and even minor) towns are wired. It's rumoured to be the best coverage in North America.
Most of the Bell and cable affiliates in Canada have been dealing with the smaller towns, not just the big cities where ROI is maximized. China, India, and some other districts are going with high-speed wireless solutions.
If you don't have high-speed and you're not at least 5-10 miles out of town, maybe you should talk to your local government to find out why you aren't getting service. At worst, you should be able to get an ISDN link of some kind without having to pay per-minute connect charges.
A basic Intel P4 2.53GHz, 1GB dual-channel DDR, and a fast HDD with a few megs of cache (8, I think.)
It takes about 90 seconds to cold-boot with full memory scans, McAfee, etc. It takes a total of about 2-3 minutes to finish initializing and be useful. WinXP lets you log in earlier than *nix systems do, but it just means you watch busy cursors and desktop redraws take up all the CPU anyhow. Windows employs psychovisual and psychoacoustic feedback early so people can see the machine is busy; *nix just makes you wait until it's done initializing.
But you might want to check for stuff that is starting up.Net v2 apps. Some device driver control panels are being written with it, and that seems to add a good 60 seconds of startup churn.
I was speaking of the DRM being used as a security module to prevent injection of malicious code into the VM manager, kernel, device drivers, or core system libraries and services. i.e. A hardware-enhanced variant on the kind of checksum validation that AppArmour and older implementations do. Good admins have doing that kind of checksumming in secure environments for decades, but using homebrewed scripts and implementations.
Vista had the opportunity to demonstrate a hardware-enhanced variant on that approach, and blew it.
Excellant clarification of some of the terms involved.
The most common explanations of the reasoning for the second amendment from a 10-15 year old Florida LE training course is that the "right to bear arms" and have a militia were to enable the population to resist the government itself if it ever became as oppressive as the British empire the US had just freed itself from. People were encouraged to keep watch on what government does, and a system of checks and balances were explicitly written into the fundamental document defining the roles and restrictions on government: the US Constitution.
The amendments themselves are the most important points about the relationship between citizen and government, and you can generally treat the ordering of those amendments as the "priority list" in the eyes of the people and politicians of those times. Remember that the "founding fathers" were effectively the British empire's "hippies" -- rebels, activists, people with a different vision than "traditional government."
If IBM were to settle with SCO, it would leave too many legal questions open. That leaves the field open for another IP leech to use the same tactics as SCO. If those tactics are launched against a startup company or small organization, they won't have the resources to fight such a protracted court case. As long as cases settle out of court, the law continues to be a cudgel for stifling innovation and competition, when the IP laws were intended to protect and encourage those aspects of business.
IBM generates a huge portion of their revenue from OSS through their consulting services. To continue the battle is the best of both worlds: they get paid for providing an honourable defense of OSS.
This is the first time I've disagreed with PJ on an issue. The Novell-Microsoft deal does not affect GPLv2 or v3 software, because the clauses are written such that any IP attack invalidates the GPL for the jurisdiction in question. A side-deal does not miraculously create a new license that would grant Novell continued access to the disputed code -- they'd be forced to cease distribution along with any other US-based vendor (presuming the case were launched in the US.)
Both versions of the GPL are very clear on that.
As to side-line technologies like Novell implementing software that can access Microsoft's document formats, the issue may be a bit fuzzier. You can't branch GPL code and integrate it to proprietary software that will be used or accessible outside your own organization, regardless of licenses to the proprietary components. Any such modules would have to be isolated similar to NVidia's video drivers or the code for Oracle, Sybase, and DB/2.
In the event that OSS zealots decide to take up the battle against any and all proprietary software running alonside or on top of a GPL-based kernel, OSS will die for any use other than hobby programming. Even video games would no longer be ported to OSS platforms, video drivers would be yanked from distribution, and the OSS zealots would be left with nowhere and nothing to run.
Zealotry does not buy any benefits except stroking the egos of the zealots themselves.
I don't see RFID itself as a problem, but my understanding is that the security of the currently deployed RFID chips has already been cracked. Therefore, I would not want it used for bank cards.
The idea of an encrypted wireless short-range link instead of a mag-stripe swipe doesn't seem too outre to me. But using a technology that is known to be insecure is foolish.
The use of firehoses for crowd control is frowned upon if not outright illegal as a human rights violation since their use in the race riots of the 1960's. Those weren't lethal either.
Can anyone explain why weapons that would incense the human rights activists in the US or Canada are being deployed overseas? Aren't people overseas considered human by the administration(s)?
I think the real problem is that "we" (that is, we software developers) are in a permanent state of emergency, grasping at straws to get our work done.
How often have you worked on a prototype or demo, only to have the time/expense budget slashed because management decided you must be almost finished when they see a demo GUI?
How often have you encountered copy-paste-edit code replicated throughout a system because no one had the time to refactor the replicated code into a reusable module?
When did you last have the time and budget to clean up that rushed prototype via refactoring before the next phase was in crunch mode?
How often were you told you can't refactor code because it's already been tested and put into production?
How many "silver bullet" tools have you tried over the decades, only to find that they're marketing hype and often increase the total workload instead of saving time? (e.g. Now you have to maintain UML models as well as the code and database schemas.)
As long as the "push" is to get it done faster regardless of long-term costs, crap code will continue to churn.
The parent poster has the issue dead bang on. Propose something insane and jackbootish, then compromise so it's "merely" oppressive.
On the flip side, it does sound like the current issue is explicitly and expressly granting media conversion and playback rights to people. That isn't what I'd call "oppressive", but a clarification of personal use rights that should have been obvious in any country.
Slashdot Mirror
If that's the case, why has paedophilia been on a statistical rise for the past decade or so? What changed in society?
If access to child porn reduces attacks, why are people charged with possession of child porn discovered after they're charged with molesting a child? Shouldn't those charged with abuse be the least likely to have a kiddie porn collection if your argument is valid?
We can try to stick our heads in the sand as with climate change, but statistics show paedophilia charges and convictions are on the rise.
Do you have a better explanation than a weak-kneed permissive social attitude or a conditioning by media influences?
"Think of the children" is a specious argument when it's raised in a context that is (at best) only loosely associated with children. But when the direct victim is children, the argument is very valid. Even hardened criminals with life sentences have children they'll kill to protect -- and sometimes have.
No one likes a paedophile. It's hard wired at an instinctual level as a biological protection of our own offspring. There is no "moral question" -- it's so important it's a physically hardwired response to view such activities with disgust and contempt.
We're talking about child porn that tries to play games with legal loopholes about whether a child is actually harmed. It encourages the direct physical abuse of real children by conditioning the paedophile to consider their lustful and abusive mentality "acceptable" or "normal". It's the same problem that is caused by allowing pre-teen and teen models to be dressed up as if they were adults by clothing advertisers.
Comparing South Park's creative and repetitive killing of the self-repairing Kenny to someone trying to portray a realistic scene of rape and torture is disingenuous at best. No one would ever confuse Kenny with being real, but when you consider the stellar work done by SquareSoft, Pixar, or the team behind Ghost in the Shell 2, it's pretty clear that we can do the synthetic actors that Lucas fantasized about years ago.
Even Hentai isn't a fair comparison, because while the material is deeply disturbing "tentacle sex demons" ties in with some Japanese religions and folklore. It is an excellant example of a storyline where you don't want live human actors, but that doesn't mean it should be suppressed by people who don't understand the cultural significance.
When's the last time some sicko dressed up as a Japanese sex demon and tried to molest a horde of young women?
When's the last time a child got dragged off by a paedophile to be raped in darkness and terror?
I've worked several companies that not only encourage telework, they require it. Most people call it "tech support", and making yourself available in that capacity is not a bad thing for the career. It just means you spend your life carrying pagers and cell phones, contractually guaranteeing response times that tie you close to home and network.
But face time is important. If no one sees you or knows what you do, you don't exist. Come budget time, neither does your paycheque.
Sometimes theory has to bend to make room for the practical.
Do you get this "global warming" thing? It's all about the CO2 emissions.
Autoboxing still comes at an instance-construction expense, no matter how well-tuned the implementation.
I'd much rather see signatures that distinguish between intrinsic and box arguments, as it allows fine-grained performance tweaking.
I am rather disappointed that we still don't have unsigned types in Java. It really is critical for providing efficient mapping of XML types, database types, and CORBA/IDL/IIOP interfaces. I'm also going to have to find an appropriate library that will map Java's 64-bit signed millitimestamp intrinsic to local platform libraries/data types. Mapping BigInteger and BigNumber at that lower level is probably inconsistent as well.
XML string types are trivial. Just use a string pattern to validate setter arguments.
Extinction happens when the environment changes. Whether overpopulation by another species, pollution, or just flattening of current ecosystems for housing, there is always an impact. Probably the most important role communities will face in the future is urban planning or engineering, but the role will have to encompass environmental concerns.
Some planned communities already demonstrate excellent use of parkland and greenspace to provide walking and cycling paths, park spaces, and street clusters designed to limit drive-through traffic speed. Brampton/Bramalea have some districts that follow these patterns, and it does seem to make a difference in local crime rates.
Other districts have switched to tree-bands instead of noise walls along interstates and freeways. It also gives the illusion that you're driving in countryside between city centers, when behind that tree line is wall-to-wall industry and housing. It may be an illusion, but it beats the concrete jungle/skyscraper maze rat environment, which is a subtle daily hammering on the psyche.
Sadly, some districts live down to their reputation. Subways that stink of urine. Rats. (Big rats! Louie, you're having that stupid rat dream again!)
There really is no need for people to have to go through that kind of mess every day on their way to work. It convinces them the rest of the world is full of graceless animals.
I know IBM and other vendors have clusters available for developers to do test ports.
Is there any sort of facility for mapping a project source tree to multiple distribution builds? Sort of a meta-ant for the different vendor packagings. If the efforts to standardize the Linux distributions was effective, the build and bundle should be the only real difference anymore. Especially if you were sticking to POSIX APIs for the core OS services.
DRM can be turned on it's head. Each developer in charge of an OSS project could use such a build cluster, maybe hosted or supported by various vendors or a .org. The build manager for the project would effectively sign the source and binaries, then the various distros would be responsible for integration test and rollout.
Plus it makes cash-poor farmers net-energy producers instead of net-energy consumers. Biodiesel fuel crops including flax, hemp, and canola grow in poorer conditions than many food crops, and if they were segregated you could safely use the non-processed recycled water.
It's still a carbon emission, though.
I see the dependancy on rare metals as the bigger block to hydrogen fuel cell technologies. They might be more feasible in dense urban areas than they would in rural districts. Imagine the size of the fuel cells a midwest farm tractor would require!
Well, it's probably got the most educated audience from the widest variety of sectors. Computers and techies are everywhere.
Even in C/C++, 24 character id's using a 5-character library prefix made it a lot easier to keep track of all the modules. 3-character acronyms have as much capacity as IPv4.
The more leeway you give to ideas when comparing them to cultures of the past, the farther back you can find a match. Check out the roots of the word "automaton", and you'll find a vision of robotics long before any of the current technology was feasible. "Science fiction" and "fantasy" have laid the foundations for centuries, if not millenia, pointing the creative thinkers of their times to ideas that seem plausible.
Once someone tenacious latches on to a plausible idea and grasps the potential, it's a matter of time and sweat equity; a matter of "when", not "if".
Personally I like the fact that national media leaves a lot of local stories uncovered. It gives the accused a chance to have an unbiased jury, though a change of venue may be required. If they're cleared, the minimal media slam means they can rebuild elsewhere after the page 2 apologies fails to change the minds of those who "know" they're guilty.
Papparatzi chasing famous people while they make fools of themselves in public is one thing. That same mentality destroying careers on the basis of accusation instead of conviction is not what "freedom of speech" was ever about.
Canadian courts typically restrict publication from the initial hearing onwards. The only time you see further information is if the defense is making preliminary statements about their planned approach, especially if they expect to raise constitutional or human rights issues. That serves to warn the bar that there may be a precedence case coming up.
I hope the accusations turn out false, but Hans' infamous temper isn't going to help him with this argument.
Saskatchewan is dealing with the last-mile problem for rural areas, but the major (and even minor) towns are wired. It's rumoured to be the best coverage in North America.
Most of the Bell and cable affiliates in Canada have been dealing with the smaller towns, not just the big cities where ROI is maximized. China, India, and some other districts are going with high-speed wireless solutions.
If you don't have high-speed and you're not at least 5-10 miles out of town, maybe you should talk to your local government to find out why you aren't getting service. At worst, you should be able to get an ISDN link of some kind without having to pay per-minute connect charges.
A basic Intel P4 2.53GHz, 1GB dual-channel DDR, and a fast HDD with a few megs of cache (8, I think.)
It takes about 90 seconds to cold-boot with full memory scans, McAfee, etc. It takes a total of about 2-3 minutes to finish initializing and be useful. WinXP lets you log in earlier than *nix systems do, but it just means you watch busy cursors and desktop redraws take up all the CPU anyhow. Windows employs psychovisual and psychoacoustic feedback early so people can see the machine is busy; *nix just makes you wait until it's done initializing.
But you might want to check for stuff that is starting up .Net v2 apps. Some device driver control panels are being written with it, and that seems to add a good 60 seconds of startup churn.
I was speaking of the DRM being used as a security module to prevent injection of malicious code into the VM manager, kernel, device drivers, or core system libraries and services. i.e. A hardware-enhanced variant on the kind of checksum validation that AppArmour and older implementations do. Good admins have doing that kind of checksumming in secure environments for decades, but using homebrewed scripts and implementations.
Vista had the opportunity to demonstrate a hardware-enhanced variant on that approach, and blew it.
Excellant clarification of some of the terms involved.
The most common explanations of the reasoning for the second amendment from a 10-15 year old Florida LE training course is that the "right to bear arms" and have a militia were to enable the population to resist the government itself if it ever became as oppressive as the British empire the US had just freed itself from. People were encouraged to keep watch on what government does, and a system of checks and balances were explicitly written into the fundamental document defining the roles and restrictions on government: the US Constitution.
The amendments themselves are the most important points about the relationship between citizen and government, and you can generally treat the ordering of those amendments as the "priority list" in the eyes of the people and politicians of those times. Remember that the "founding fathers" were effectively the British empire's "hippies" -- rebels, activists, people with a different vision than "traditional government."
The DRM module doesn't block unsigned drivers, allowing injection of attack code.
The license module has been spoofed, which means it's not protecting Microsoft's revenue.
Does Vista protect anything other than media restrictions imposed by producers?
If IBM were to settle with SCO, it would leave too many legal questions open. That leaves the field open for another IP leech to use the same tactics as SCO. If those tactics are launched against a startup company or small organization, they won't have the resources to fight such a protracted court case. As long as cases settle out of court, the law continues to be a cudgel for stifling innovation and competition, when the IP laws were intended to protect and encourage those aspects of business.
IBM generates a huge portion of their revenue from OSS through their consulting services. To continue the battle is the best of both worlds: they get paid for providing an honourable defense of OSS.
This is the first time I've disagreed with PJ on an issue. The Novell-Microsoft deal does not affect GPLv2 or v3 software, because the clauses are written such that any IP attack invalidates the GPL for the jurisdiction in question. A side-deal does not miraculously create a new license that would grant Novell continued access to the disputed code -- they'd be forced to cease distribution along with any other US-based vendor (presuming the case were launched in the US.)
Both versions of the GPL are very clear on that.
As to side-line technologies like Novell implementing software that can access Microsoft's document formats, the issue may be a bit fuzzier. You can't branch GPL code and integrate it to proprietary software that will be used or accessible outside your own organization, regardless of licenses to the proprietary components. Any such modules would have to be isolated similar to NVidia's video drivers or the code for Oracle, Sybase, and DB/2.
In the event that OSS zealots decide to take up the battle against any and all proprietary software running alonside or on top of a GPL-based kernel, OSS will die for any use other than hobby programming. Even video games would no longer be ported to OSS platforms, video drivers would be yanked from distribution, and the OSS zealots would be left with nowhere and nothing to run.
Zealotry does not buy any benefits except stroking the egos of the zealots themselves.
I don't see RFID itself as a problem, but my understanding is that the security of the currently deployed RFID chips has already been cracked. Therefore, I would not want it used for bank cards.
The idea of an encrypted wireless short-range link instead of a mag-stripe swipe doesn't seem too outre to me. But using a technology that is known to be insecure is foolish.
The use of firehoses for crowd control is frowned upon if not outright illegal as a human rights violation since their use in the race riots of the 1960's. Those weren't lethal either.
Can anyone explain why weapons that would incense the human rights activists in the US or Canada are being deployed overseas? Aren't people overseas considered human by the administration(s)?
Oh, and what of sites like Slashdot? What is the fundamental difference between MySpace and a forum?
Near as I can tell, a Blog is nothing more than a personal forum that allows some media attachments.
From the article:
How often have you worked on a prototype or demo, only to have the time/expense budget slashed because management decided you must be almost finished when they see a demo GUI?
How often have you encountered copy-paste-edit code replicated throughout a system because no one had the time to refactor the replicated code into a reusable module?
When did you last have the time and budget to clean up that rushed prototype via refactoring before the next phase was in crunch mode?
How often were you told you can't refactor code because it's already been tested and put into production?
How many "silver bullet" tools have you tried over the decades, only to find that they're marketing hype and often increase the total workload instead of saving time? (e.g. Now you have to maintain UML models as well as the code and database schemas.)
As long as the "push" is to get it done faster regardless of long-term costs, crap code will continue to churn.
The parent poster has the issue dead bang on. Propose something insane and jackbootish, then compromise so it's "merely" oppressive.
On the flip side, it does sound like the current issue is explicitly and expressly granting media conversion and playback rights to people. That isn't what I'd call "oppressive", but a clarification of personal use rights that should have been obvious in any country.