Ah yes, because spare floppy drives, floppy discs, cd drives, and writable media are everywhere in places where all they have access to are machines which can barely run win2k.
Maybe you were intending to be ironic, but actually, that statement is pretty much true. I've got boxes full of that kind of stuff I haven't got around to throwing out; anyone who needed that kind of gear could get it free just by asking around.
I see nowhere where the AC expressed the opinion that this applied "for everyone" outside the US.
Of course not, because he doesn't know or care anything about other countries.
Your rant about English is also unwarranted. Did an English-speaker kick your puppy recently?
Another demonstration that Americans think their "English" is the only English.
I'm a native English speaker. Just not American English. So when I write "Aluminium is silver in colour", I don't want little red squiggles under the words. OK?
And I DO know how to localise my software and I have. But as I said, most people just accept the defaults, which are American, and I can't count the number of times I've had to fix this, or the messes that resulted.
Funny enough, AOL has a 24 hour 1-800 number you can call to talk with the postmaster.
Those motherfuckers -- they block me because I'm in Hong Kong. I spent hours looking for a contact address. Never found a fucking thing. Not even a webform. Where the hell is this number listed? Though it would only be good in the USA anyway. They seem to have the attitude "foreigners are spammers", and especially anyone in Asia. I've had to get my clients to use Yahoo mail so I can communicate with them.
When an electrician installs your light switch, the default is for up to mean ON, and down to mean OFF.
And here we have an example: An American thinks his local usage is just "the default" for everyone. Light switches, for instance in Australia, are up for off and down for on. (Cue Simpsons jokes).
And in some countries, the default side of the road is the left, not the right! Some countries DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH!! Believe it or not.
Back to computer defaults: It really, really pisses me off when software defaults to Letter size paper, Imperial (non-metric) measures, MDY dates, American spelling. Often WITHOUT EVEN MENTIONING OR ASKING THE USER. And so 90% of people in the world (okay, 90% of the computers in other countries I have personally seen) are set up with these inappropriate settings. So print jobs are weirdly distorted, spelling is mysteriously "corrected", spreadsheet dates are scrambled. Etc, etc. All thanks to "User friendly" install defaults.
Something like "it doesn't show weird ass icons and bars when Slashdot decides to change CSS" is probably much more important. Firefox 3 totally screws up Slashdot in Default mode.
It's totally fucked up in Opera too. Aside from graphics elements appearing randomly all over the screen, it takes a minute to load the page before I can scroll the damn thing. Then it freezes and jerks around.
And the fucking front page that decides to load another 10 stories when IT wants to, and again freezes the screen till it's done.
I can turn off javascript and get a reasonable page that loads quickly and is responsive, or just close the window and go somewhere else.
How the hell they can unleash this piece of shit on a million users is beyond me.
It indeed may be able to reduce the amount of child porn watched in Germany
I doubt that. There have been enough high-profile cases that anyone who is actually looking for child porn must be already taking precautions. And I really have a hard time believing those who say that it will stop "accidental" exposure. I spend hours online every day, visit a lot of sleazy sites, and I haven't see anything that could qualify as real child porn (photos, movies of real children) for at least three years. You used to sometimes run into a bunch of images, which would quickly be deleted (presumably placed to troll a website), but not even that recently, as the penalties became more severe. The point is that the risk of accidental exposure is already pretty low -- you have to have passwords, and probably pay, to get access -- and those actively looking for it will trivially bypass any blocking.
What of course they should be doing is tracking the SOURCES of the porn, not wasting effort chasing the poor schlubs who get off on looking at images.
If they come to your desk and cough on you, I find it perfectly acceptable to lodge a complaint
Wear a surgical mak. Common in densely populated Japan and Hong Kong since SARS. Though people imagine they protect the wearer, which they don't, much, they do very effectively stop an infected person spraying a fine aerosol of virus-laden spit into the air around them with every breath and cough.
Send 'em a copy of the US Constitution, with the Bill of Rights in red highlight.
China's constitution has just as many homilies, pious hopes and guarantees of human rights as the US's. See, eg http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html As does almost every country in the word. It's how it plays in practice that makes the difference. (And last year I might have snarked that you should send one to the White House -- but I'm giving Obama the benefit of the doubt, so far.)
How about the infringed content when someone walks into a theater with a camera then posts it online?
Who gives a shit about a video cam? Watching that is nothing like seeing a real DVD or much less, watching a movie in the cinema. I think people who DO watch them use them as preview. Anyway, I sometimes get one of these accidentally when I buy secondhand DVDs at flea markets. And 10 seconds into them when it's clear what it is, shadows moving on the screen, rustling cellophane, mobile phones ringing, I press eject and throw it in the bin. In all the celebrated cases when cam version have gone online and the movie company cried about their loss, the movie was a turkey and the cam might have prevented some people from being suckered by the advertising.
How about the latest Photoshop version showing up on torrent sites hours after (or even before) their release?
Again, so what? DTP professionals aren't going to use it. No support, no tax deduction, etc. And they are the true market. A bunch of guys do use the pirate edition to make fake porn or design their MySpace pages. They would have managed with a dozen cheaper or free paint programs if they didn't have PhotoShop. And I strongly suspect that Adobe is quite happy that this entrenches PhotoShop as the standard, those who do later get design jobs are already trained up on it, and now insist their companies buy the legit version. Just look at all the sneers at any alternatives (eg, Gimp) when the question comes up here.
No no.. the producers of the software that requires E.I. cannot "simply install I.E."
Of course they can. Perhaps you're too young to remember the 90s; back in that era, when you put in your CDROM installer, it would include, as well as the app you'd paid for, quite often such things as Internet Explorer, perhaps Adobe Acrobat, etc, etc. Sometimes they were quite insistent in installing these (Application X require Internet Explorer 4 or later, installing now....) and you'd have to spend 10 minutes removing them afterwards if they messed up your system.
And you're right - like all porn, I'm sure it's been around for a long time. I'm still not sure I want it in my mainstream media, though.
Of course not. But keeping it "under the counter" or however you want to restrict it is one thing; criminalising it is another. And again, no one seems bothered by gory slasher movies. I can't get how it's fine to enjoy those myself. But I wouldn't want to ban them.
But how many shows or games do you know of that visually depict Rape? The cork is still in the bottle, but for how long?
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,160,000 for "rape video"
Of course, that doesn't mean there are a million rape videos. But there are certainly thousands of them a mouseclick away. That cork was pulled a long time ago.
Child pornography is abhorred because of the harm done to children in its creation. No children are harmed in making a cartoon. So it is entirely appropraiate that they not be treated as if they were movies or photographs of real sex crimes.
90% of video games involve depictions of violent crime, murder, war. Most people (with obvious exceptions, Jack Thompson), accept that they are FICTION.
Argue that these are disgusting, encourage degradation of women: don't say that they are in themselves criminal.
Japan's child-pornography laws don't apply to animations or computer games, nor do they criminalize the possession of child pornography, an issue that was raised by outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Japan Thomas Schieffer in January.
"Only Japan allows people to possess these hideous images without penalty," Schieffer wrote in an editorial in the Asahi newspaper on Jan 1. "Six of the G-7 countries have found ways to protect the innocent from being prosecuted for possession of child pornography. Is it not time for Japan to find a way to punish the guilty?"
"Punish the guilty". Nice turn of phrase. Just declare something you don't like is criminal, assume anyone charged with looking at it is "guilty", and proceed directly to punishment.
The dog detects the odour of the disc manufacturing process and the handler inspect the packages, if they are labelled as DVD coming from a expected source and going to and expected source, fin....
However, while the DVDs themselves are probably chemically identical, I have noticed that the case of bootleg discs often have a quite unpleaqsnt odour. But I guess bootleg disks are shipped on spindles or in cellophane envelopes, and packaged at the point of sale, since you can legally buy empty boxes anywhere.
No, I don't. But can you say the US has lived up to its principles, this last decade? America has lost its moral high ground. You can't sneer at other countries for their abuses without expecting your own to come up. Doesn't excuse, say China's actions in Tibet, but it makes it much easier for China to blow you off if you try to raise the subject.
they've had enough life experience that they've figured out more drugs isn't the answer to society's problems
That is irrelevant to the question of legalisation.
And more likely people know that to get on in their career, they had better not espouse support for such an idea, or draw attention from law enforcement -- if you are sporting a "Legalise marijuana" bumper sticker, you'd have to be prepared to have your car, and your person, searched rather more often than otherwise, for example.
He asked for opinions on a technical solution, not for parenting advice.
If the parenting was irrelevant, he would have just asked for a "personal GPS tracking system", not pulled the heartstrings with the story of his little girl on the wrong bus. The "technical solution" he geeked out on was not at all the real problem, just an excuse for him to play with toys, not help his daughter to get home in one piece.
Good job on the cursing and name calling though.
When you insult and belittle someone online, you can expect to be called an asshole.
isn't a very effective way of getting anyone to take you seriously.
You'd already stopped listening, as was also indicated by the tedious repetition of your "cellphones are so cool" comments.
Think of the consequences, of an oppressive state, that willingly attacks anyone (esp. cyber attacks), blackmails its neighbours (over North Korea), and completely ignores any laws on copyright
Sorry, could you specify whether you're referring to China, or the US. Hard to differentiate on those criteria. If you'd said "invades or bombs foreign countries on a whim", "kidnaps, imprisons and tortures nationals of any country without due process", I might have guessed.
Slashdot Mirror
Because with BT anyone can see who (or which IP) is downloading what. People have been busted for using BT, not for RS as far as I know.
Maybe you were intending to be ironic, but actually, that statement is pretty much true. I've got boxes full of that kind of stuff I haven't got around to throwing out; anyone who needed that kind of gear could get it free just by asking around.
Of course not, because he doesn't know or care anything about other countries.
Your rant about English is also unwarranted. Did an English-speaker kick your puppy recently?
Another demonstration that Americans think their "English" is the only English.
I'm a native English speaker. Just not American English. So when I write "Aluminium is silver in colour", I don't want little red squiggles under the words. OK?
And I DO know how to localise my software and I have. But as I said, most people just accept the defaults, which are American, and I can't count the number of times I've had to fix this, or the messes that resulted.
Maybe you should fuck off and die?
I'm talking about LICENSED software installed on corporate desktops, dipshit.
That wasn't my example. Take it up with whoever said it was.
Those motherfuckers -- they block me because I'm in Hong Kong. I spent hours looking for a contact address. Never found a fucking thing. Not even a webform. Where the hell is this number listed? Though it would only be good in the USA anyway. They seem to have the attitude "foreigners are spammers", and especially anyone in Asia. I've had to get my clients to use Yahoo mail so I can communicate with them.
Angry? Me? How perceptive.
And here we have an example: An American thinks his local usage is just "the default" for everyone. Light switches, for instance in Australia, are up for off and down for on. (Cue Simpsons jokes).
And in some countries, the default side of the road is the left, not the right! Some countries DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH!! Believe it or not.
Back to computer defaults: It really, really pisses me off when software defaults to Letter size paper, Imperial (non-metric) measures, MDY dates, American spelling. Often WITHOUT EVEN MENTIONING OR ASKING THE USER. And so 90% of people in the world (okay, 90% of the computers in other countries I have personally seen) are set up with these inappropriate settings. So print jobs are weirdly distorted, spelling is mysteriously "corrected", spreadsheet dates are scrambled. Etc, etc. All thanks to "User friendly" install defaults.
It wasn't a "blue dot" but a circle, the size of a city block.
Even if the police believed it, they're not going to bust down the doors of a whole apartment building to search for a phone.
It's totally fucked up in Opera too. Aside from graphics elements appearing randomly all over the screen, it takes a minute to load the page before I can scroll the damn thing. Then it freezes and jerks around.
And the fucking front page that decides to load another 10 stories when IT wants to, and again freezes the screen till it's done.
I can turn off javascript and get a reasonable page that loads quickly and is responsive, or just close the window and go somewhere else.
How the hell they can unleash this piece of shit on a million users is beyond me.
I doubt that. There have been enough high-profile cases that anyone who is actually looking for child porn must be already taking precautions. And I really have a hard time believing those who say that it will stop "accidental" exposure. I spend hours online every day, visit a lot of sleazy sites, and I haven't see anything that could qualify as real child porn (photos, movies of real children) for at least three years. You used to sometimes run into a bunch of images, which would quickly be deleted (presumably placed to troll a website), but not even that recently, as the penalties became more severe. The point is that the risk of accidental exposure is already pretty low -- you have to have passwords, and probably pay, to get access -- and those actively looking for it will trivially bypass any blocking.
What of course they should be doing is tracking the SOURCES of the porn, not wasting effort chasing the poor schlubs who get off on looking at images.
s/mak/mask/
Wear a surgical mak. Common in densely populated Japan and Hong Kong since SARS. Though people imagine they protect the wearer, which they don't, much, they do very effectively stop an infected person spraying a fine aerosol of virus-laden spit into the air around them with every breath and cough.
China's constitution has just as many homilies, pious hopes and guarantees of human rights as the US's. See, eg http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html As does almost every country in the word. It's how it plays in practice that makes the difference. (And last year I might have snarked that you should send one to the White House -- but I'm giving Obama the benefit of the doubt, so far.)
Who gives a shit about a video cam? Watching that is nothing like seeing a real DVD or much less, watching a movie in the cinema. I think people who DO watch them use them as preview. Anyway, I sometimes get one of these accidentally when I buy secondhand DVDs at flea markets. And 10 seconds into them when it's clear what it is, shadows moving on the screen, rustling cellophane, mobile phones ringing, I press eject and throw it in the bin. In all the celebrated cases when cam version have gone online and the movie company cried about their loss, the movie was a turkey and the cam might have prevented some people from being suckered by the advertising.
How about the latest Photoshop version showing up on torrent sites hours after (or even before) their release?
Again, so what? DTP professionals aren't going to use it. No support, no tax deduction, etc. And they are the true market. A bunch of guys do use the pirate edition to make fake porn or design their MySpace pages. They would have managed with a dozen cheaper or free paint programs if they didn't have PhotoShop. And I strongly suspect that Adobe is quite happy that this entrenches PhotoShop as the standard, those who do later get design jobs are already trained up on it, and now insist their companies buy the legit version. Just look at all the sneers at any alternatives (eg, Gimp) when the question comes up here.
Of course they can. Perhaps you're too young to remember the 90s; back in that era, when you put in your CDROM installer, it would include, as well as the app you'd paid for, quite often such things as Internet Explorer, perhaps Adobe Acrobat, etc, etc. Sometimes they were quite insistent in installing these (Application X require Internet Explorer 4 or later, installing now....) and you'd have to spend 10 minutes removing them afterwards if they messed up your system.
Of course not. But keeping it "under the counter" or however you want to restrict it is one thing; criminalising it is another. And again, no one seems bothered by gory slasher movies. I can't get how it's fine to enjoy those myself. But I wouldn't want to ban them.
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,160,000 for "rape video"
Of course, that doesn't mean there are a million rape videos. But there are certainly thousands of them a mouseclick away. That cork was pulled a long time ago.
I'll just assume that you meant this ironically. If so, very funny, if not, consider "thoughtcrime" and "precrime" for some obvious drawbacks.
90% of video games involve depictions of violent crime, murder, war. Most people (with obvious exceptions, Jack Thompson), accept that they are FICTION.
Argue that these are disgusting, encourage degradation of women: don't say that they are in themselves criminal.
"Punish the guilty". Nice turn of phrase. Just declare something you don't like is criminal, assume anyone charged with looking at it is "guilty", and proceed directly to punishment.
However, while the DVDs themselves are probably chemically identical, I have noticed that the case of bootleg discs often have a quite unpleaqsnt odour. But I guess bootleg disks are shipped on spindles or in cellophane envelopes, and packaged at the point of sale, since you can legally buy empty boxes anywhere.
No, I don't. But can you say the US has lived up to its principles, this last decade? America has lost its moral high ground. You can't sneer at other countries for their abuses without expecting your own to come up. Doesn't excuse, say China's actions in Tibet, but it makes it much easier for China to blow you off if you try to raise the subject.
That is irrelevant to the question of legalisation.
And more likely people know that to get on in their career, they had better not espouse support for such an idea, or draw attention from law enforcement -- if you are sporting a "Legalise marijuana" bumper sticker, you'd have to be prepared to have your car, and your person, searched rather more often than otherwise, for example.
"where do you get off telling everyone else that since you don't think it's necessary they're basically all idiots for wanting it themselves?"
"I was civil"
Civilly said I have no right to have an opinion.
You ignored or deliberately, or just carelessly, misconstrued almost everything I wrote.
So fuck you and good night.
==30==
If the parenting was irrelevant, he would have just asked for a "personal GPS tracking system", not pulled the heartstrings with the story of his little girl on the wrong bus. The "technical solution" he geeked out on was not at all the real problem, just an excuse for him to play with toys, not help his daughter to get home in one piece.
Good job on the cursing and name calling though.
When you insult and belittle someone online, you can expect to be called an asshole.
isn't a very effective way of getting anyone to take you seriously.
You'd already stopped listening, as was also indicated by the tedious repetition of your "cellphones are so cool" comments.
Sorry, could you specify whether you're referring to China, or the US. Hard to differentiate on those criteria. If you'd said "invades or bombs foreign countries on a whim", "kidnaps, imprisons and tortures nationals of any country without due process", I might have guessed.
Sorry, couldn't resist that straight line.