Every time I hear that argument, I have to laugh. If we had any reason to believe Snowden's constitutional rights would be upheld and he'd be given what he has a right to (a fair, speedy, and public trial) I might agree with you. The problem is, Snowden exposed the government in their violations of the basic rights theoretically protected by our Constitution, and it's not as if the government is acknowledging the other rights therein outlined. That's what is at hand here.
Snowden has been in an airport terminal for several weeks precisely because he is aware that his actions have consequences. Neither you nor the US government gets to micromanage what those consequences are, no matter how much Uncle Sam wants to pretend they do.
The sexual repression, just to be clear, is far from exclusive to puritanical d-bags. There are plenty of people on the opposite end of the spectrum whose presence has created desires and expectations for people that simply aren't possible in a healthy and stable relationship. Some friends of mine have fought with these same problems, often caused by the depravity and extreme nature of the pornography they were exposed to at a young age.
Certainly we agree on some points, but my argument remains technical.
I'm not convinced that even 50% is a reasonable goal of such a project (even if entirely voluntary on the users' part.) Sure, you'll get the commercial pure porn sites, generally speaking. But you'll probably never successfully block more than a token fraction of the other random places out there that are on otherwise legitimately non-ponographic sites. Flickr, for example, or various blogs, news sources, etc, where standards may be less stringent than what the users would define as porn (which is of course defined more by its viewer than by a codified standard, I mean, some people get off looking at feet and whatnot.)
On the other side of the coin, if you do go ahead and block whatever someone might find sexually pleasurable in a pornographic context, you will end up like some private religious colleges. The one I attended was so zealous in their filtering that female students living on campus had to go down to McDonalds and use the free wifi to order bras.
Morality and ethics aside, the technical barriers to success are twofold. First, accurately defining pornography in a meaningful way that can hold the force of such a law, and second, the impossibility of sufficiently identifying the sites to be blocked under such determined definition.
The crews constructing this series of tubes have been hailed for their efficiency, completing their task slightly more than three months before their scheduled November Fifth completion.
I was just commenting to a Scottish friend of mine who is a firm supporter of anti-pornography pushes that no matter how good the intentions may be of the politicians who back this kind of thing, inevitably they show their technological incompetence by believing such efforts will not either fall so short as to be worthless or overreach to the point where they have to be disabled to perform even day-to-day tasks.
Ms. Perry has just demonstrated this same technical illiteracy to an extent I couldn't have hoped yesterday to be able to argue as a point without being accused of hyperbole.
Isn't this pretty much what privacy adocates have advised for years? The NSA is one of the groups gathering people's data against their will. If anyone knows what possibilities to avoid if you don't want people in your data, it's them.
Until you put the Americans on any form of public transit. Metro, BART, DART, Marta, MARC, SEPTA, you name it. Grab a seat by the door and you're in business.
(I may be a visionary but I'm fucking tired of being right.)
AMEN! A thousand times amen. I liked it better when I could hope I was wrong, but alas, all the horrible things I have long been saying (which are ironically the same concerns which led to our bill of rights) are being confirmed on a daily basis at this point.
At least you can contact your congressman. I live in a rural part of the border region of his district and despite my geographic location being in his district, I have to flat out lie on his website about my address to be allowed to send him anything at all. And at that point, it still fails more than half the time and eats my text. Good thing I know how to cut and paste.
People aren't after news. They're after information. They don't care what kind, whether it's useful, whether it's new, or whether it's even true. I genuinely think information addiction will be a legitimately recognized disorder before too long.
Tell you what, if the print media starts providing us with some good long-form investigative journalism on some consistent basis, I'll concede your point.
There's also the fact that people haven't been impressed by what they've seen enough to pay for more of it.
There's good reporting out there, but when most people think of "news" these days they think of the incessant coverage of the Zimmerman trial, baseball suspensions that are even slower and more boring than baseball, and whatever vacation Barack Obama is on during any given week. You know, the same rubbish they report on every day. It's not even new stories.
Relevance matters. Interest matters. Reporting on the same stories constantly isn't news, even if you present new but minor details buried in more of the same information as every other day.
Don't get me wrong, I generally agree with your reasoning, the problem is that it's only valuable if people use it. If not, it's useless. A book on a shelf, for example, is completely useless unless someone takes it off the shelf and reads it. What you're describing is all kinds of information existing that generally won't get purchased, much less read.
I think it's a stupid reality, but it's still reality.
That would seem to vary by locale, your Royal Highness the Prince of Cups. I am told there are some locales where this is indeed the case, but my experience has been quite the opposite. Seldom do I encounter a local news source that provides these important stories. In fact, I was remarking how poor the roads were in our county, and suggested to my wife that we should petition our local Count, but his contact information could not be found. Would Your royal Highness happen to have that information for me?
There's not enough manned pilots, and there's not enough missions to give out. I'd say it's win-win. Besides, if I were a fighter pilot, I'd shy away from F-35 assignments as well. There's something about a single-engine fighter in a possible combat situation in this day and age that just doesn't sit well with me. That's just cheap and dangerous.
No, there will be an equal amount of bitching and moaning. It will just be done from a soapbox that more poeple will notice than anyone did with the buggy whip and whale oil lamp crowd.
People have bought newspapers over the years for many reasons, and thanks to the Internet, almost all of them have dried up. I can get news from any of a hundred or more countries from the comfort of my computer. No longer am I captive to newspapers to tell me how yesterday's stocks did, find a used car, or look up movie and stage showtimes. Meanwhile, local print news outlets have been bought by major news companies and turned into watered down versions of their parent company's product, with a few local fluff pieces.
If there's a niche for print news left in the world, they'd better find it quick. If they don't, someone else will find it and put it on a website.
Slashdot Mirror
It's bad enough that voters already don't pay attention to the process without making it impossible for them to do so.
Every time I hear that argument, I have to laugh. If we had any reason to believe Snowden's constitutional rights would be upheld and he'd be given what he has a right to (a fair, speedy, and public trial) I might agree with you. The problem is, Snowden exposed the government in their violations of the basic rights theoretically protected by our Constitution, and it's not as if the government is acknowledging the other rights therein outlined. That's what is at hand here.
Snowden has been in an airport terminal for several weeks precisely because he is aware that his actions have consequences. Neither you nor the US government gets to micromanage what those consequences are, no matter how much Uncle Sam wants to pretend they do.
The sexual repression, just to be clear, is far from exclusive to puritanical d-bags. There are plenty of people on the opposite end of the spectrum whose presence has created desires and expectations for people that simply aren't possible in a healthy and stable relationship. Some friends of mine have fought with these same problems, often caused by the depravity and extreme nature of the pornography they were exposed to at a young age.
There are dangers at both extremes.
Certainly we agree on some points, but my argument remains technical.
I'm not convinced that even 50% is a reasonable goal of such a project (even if entirely voluntary on the users' part.) Sure, you'll get the commercial pure porn sites, generally speaking. But you'll probably never successfully block more than a token fraction of the other random places out there that are on otherwise legitimately non-ponographic sites. Flickr, for example, or various blogs, news sources, etc, where standards may be less stringent than what the users would define as porn (which is of course defined more by its viewer than by a codified standard, I mean, some people get off looking at feet and whatnot.)
On the other side of the coin, if you do go ahead and block whatever someone might find sexually pleasurable in a pornographic context, you will end up like some private religious colleges. The one I attended was so zealous in their filtering that female students living on campus had to go down to McDonalds and use the free wifi to order bras.
Morality and ethics aside, the technical barriers to success are twofold. First, accurately defining pornography in a meaningful way that can hold the force of such a law, and second, the impossibility of sufficiently identifying the sites to be blocked under such determined definition.
Exactly. It takes no longer than reading the card does anywhere else. It's pretty much instant.
The crews constructing this series of tubes have been hailed for their efficiency, completing their task slightly more than three months before their scheduled November Fifth completion.
I was just commenting to a Scottish friend of mine who is a firm supporter of anti-pornography pushes that no matter how good the intentions may be of the politicians who back this kind of thing, inevitably they show their technological incompetence by believing such efforts will not either fall so short as to be worthless or overreach to the point where they have to be disabled to perform even day-to-day tasks.
Ms. Perry has just demonstrated this same technical illiteracy to an extent I couldn't have hoped yesterday to be able to argue as a point without being accused of hyperbole.
Isn't this pretty much what privacy adocates have advised for years? The NSA is one of the groups gathering people's data against their will. If anyone knows what possibilities to avoid if you don't want people in your data, it's them.
Until you put the Americans on any form of public transit. Metro, BART, DART, Marta, MARC, SEPTA, you name it. Grab a seat by the door and you're in business.
AMEN! A thousand times amen. I liked it better when I could hope I was wrong, but alas, all the horrible things I have long been saying (which are ironically the same concerns which led to our bill of rights) are being confirmed on a daily basis at this point.
At least you can contact your congressman. I live in a rural part of the border region of his district and despite my geographic location being in his district, I have to flat out lie on his website about my address to be allowed to send him anything at all. And at that point, it still fails more than half the time and eats my text. Good thing I know how to cut and paste.
People aren't after news. They're after information. They don't care what kind, whether it's useful, whether it's new, or whether it's even true. I genuinely think information addiction will be a legitimately recognized disorder before too long.
Tell you what, if the print media starts providing us with some good long-form investigative journalism on some consistent basis, I'll concede your point.
...so we're just going to legalize it."
People elected these politicians. And they will probably re-elect them. Stupid people.
I'm still trying to figure out why this would be superior to an iPad or Android tablet with a case that integrates a stand and keyboard.
That's true, but often these exist almost solely for their classified sections and are more likely to be ad-funded than based on subscribers.
There's also the fact that people haven't been impressed by what they've seen enough to pay for more of it.
There's good reporting out there, but when most people think of "news" these days they think of the incessant coverage of the Zimmerman trial, baseball suspensions that are even slower and more boring than baseball, and whatever vacation Barack Obama is on during any given week. You know, the same rubbish they report on every day. It's not even new stories.
Relevance matters. Interest matters. Reporting on the same stories constantly isn't news, even if you present new but minor details buried in more of the same information as every other day.
Don't get me wrong, I generally agree with your reasoning, the problem is that it's only valuable if people use it. If not, it's useless. A book on a shelf, for example, is completely useless unless someone takes it off the shelf and reads it. What you're describing is all kinds of information existing that generally won't get purchased, much less read.
I think it's a stupid reality, but it's still reality.
I'm not sure you actually read my post. I referred to building a single-engine aircraft where redundancy counts as being cheap.
Are you trying to argue that the two are not connected?
That would seem to vary by locale, your Royal Highness the Prince of Cups. I am told there are some locales where this is indeed the case, but my experience has been quite the opposite. Seldom do I encounter a local news source that provides these important stories. In fact, I was remarking how poor the roads were in our county, and suggested to my wife that we should petition our local Count, but his contact information could not be found. Would Your royal Highness happen to have that information for me?
Horizontally-placed monitor and a squeegee. Show some frickin' adaptability.
There's not enough manned pilots, and there's not enough missions to give out. I'd say it's win-win. Besides, if I were a fighter pilot, I'd shy away from F-35 assignments as well. There's something about a single-engine fighter in a possible combat situation in this day and age that just doesn't sit well with me. That's just cheap and dangerous.
No, there will be an equal amount of bitching and moaning. It will just be done from a soapbox that more poeple will notice than anyone did with the buggy whip and whale oil lamp crowd.
People have bought newspapers over the years for many reasons, and thanks to the Internet, almost all of them have dried up. I can get news from any of a hundred or more countries from the comfort of my computer. No longer am I captive to newspapers to tell me how yesterday's stocks did, find a used car, or look up movie and stage showtimes. Meanwhile, local print news outlets have been bought by major news companies and turned into watered down versions of their parent company's product, with a few local fluff pieces.
If there's a niche for print news left in the world, they'd better find it quick. If they don't, someone else will find it and put it on a website.