I had a ton of information here, but accidentally closed the window (argh). So here's the short version: we're talking about smut here, which is controlled through local decency/obscenity rulings and laws. Pornography, however, is a legal term and is not local in scope, rather being prosecuted at higher levels (state/federal).
Examples of smut include things that might upset a spouse or violate an AUP - imagery of people posed in erotic and suggestive positions (to differentiate it from nudism/art), or imagery of couples engaged in sexual activity for same. Pornography, however, entails imagery of children either exposed or inappropriately positioned - having legs spread is a pretty open-and-shut case for this - or imagery of (some) acts being carried out with corpses or animals.
Smut is not illegal; Pornography is. It is an important distinction to make.
Jeffrey Satinover, a psychiatrist and advisor to the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality echoed Layden's concern about the internet and the somatic effects of pornography.
Hmmm... methinks I see a group with an Agenda. So... we remove Internet Pornography [sic]. Given that the person here is from the NARTH (hehe - even the acronym sounds awful), are we going to advocate that young homosexual or bi/curious men and women should go to bars resembling 1970/1980s San Fransisco? That doesn't seem like a good public health policy, in my eyes. I'm not homosexual myself, but believe that homo-erotic imagery might be a good thing to prevent widespread sexual intercourse from happening when the individuals involved may or may not be fully aware of their leanings. Indeed, I think that the removal of any kind of smut or erotic materials from the open market may potentially lead to more risky sexual behavior; I would much rather face the "evil" of a society that masturbates than the spectre of a ubiquitous STD rearing its head. But that's just me.
"Pornography really does, unlike other addictions, biologically cause direct release of the most perfect addictive substance," Satinover said. "That is, it causes masturbation, which causes release of the naturally occurring opioids. It does what heroin can't do, in effect."
Pornography [sic] causes masturbation? God, this reminds me of the turn-of-the-century Parisian leaflets that showed a healthy young male turning into an enfeebled zombie of a man because he touched himself. Or maybe of the actions that led up to the Comstock Act around the turn of the century (well, 1912 or so, IIRC). Or Reefer Madness, the movie that was one of the things that led to the use of Schedules for classifying illegal drugs in this country (The US).
However, as the panelists themselves acknowledged, there is no consensus among mental health professionals about the dangers of porn or the use of the term "pornography addiction."
Many psychologists and most sexologists find the concepts of sex and pornography addiction problematic, said Carol Queen, staff sexologist for the San Francisco-based, woman-owned Good Vibrations.
Queen questioned the validity of the panel for not including anyone who thinks "pornography is not particularly problematic in most people's lives."
Yes, it's called an Agenda.
Bottom line: pornography is already regulated (e.g. email, fax, web, and mail is all subject to search and siezure) and illegal. Smut has no such regulation at a top-level (yet... let's give it until the summer), but is subject to varying local loose-and-sloppy "community standards".
Don't the rights to this go to Berkeley and Vint Cerf, if anywhere? How 'bout BBN? This confuses me, as I don't know how MS will be able to show prior art here.
One interesting thing about Bittorrent is that most people are getting only a small bit of data from you, and from lots of other people.
How much material needs to come from your computer in order for them to be able to sue you? If I provided only a second of content (say for a movie) how liable am I then for damages since I'm not providing the whole work?
Heh - also, I'm just providing a bitstream. The actual ACT of assembling it and making something out of it... well, that is fully beyond my client.;)
At least the article went into an aside that, indeed, BT's are not ONLY used for illegal purposes. *sigh* If you're a company, these are a WONDERFUL software dissemination device - you have your CUSTOMERS host your downloads, and you can pretty much tell when the "novelty has worn off", as the seeds will start to vanish with declining demand/use of your product. The distribution model (Peer-2-Peer) makes a lot of sense here, I think - or is it just me?
Do you see yourself, primarily in the guise of an author, as a knowledge worker or intellectual?
Furthermore, do you see the general malaise that we seem to exhibit towards Knowledge Work, and if so, how do you deal with it? For instance, how do you deal with a (typical) assertion that "you just sit around and write books all day", and therefore do no "real" work - like building a house, say. Personally, I bloody loved Cryptonomicon - and am here in Ames - but it worries me that the global feel is not friendly towards authors/writers/scientists as a large generalized field.
Sorry to do this, but current interests (no, NOT "porn") force me to say...
What you're (both) talking about is smut. Porn is illegal ("porn" itself being a legal term, while "smut" predominantly refers to explicit materials going against the grain of local "community standards"). Er... at least... I hope you're talking about smut.
Because it looks like NONE of us remember Amoeba. Amoeba was a free* download, and could be used as an add-on to a *nix filesystem - I think, at the time, I was using Unixware7.0 or somesuch.
As for me, I'd say that Donald's larger and more reaching contribution to *nix would be the network drivers that he wrote (3cX0Y cards, and the Tulip drivers come to mind).
* "Free", here, as in beer definitely, and speech likely. I think that the source was provided, but cannot remember.
The interface is cleaner, it's easier to use, there is very little to set up, it doesn't require a clunky PC, and integrates nicely with whatever you've got in your home entertainment system (except for HDTV).
Erm. Try MythTV. Really. As you can run MythTV as a client-server program, you can do all the "heavy lifting" back on the server in the basement. Or, better yet, throw a Hauppauge PVR-350 in there (about $180) and get hardware MPEG-2 encoding AND decoding. Or h/w MPEG-2 encoding alone (I think) with the PVR-250.
I've jumped in with this some time ago in response to an earlier Slashdot HUD-in-the-motorcycle-helmet article, but I'll say this again:
It has been shown that this task is a divided attention one (obviously). Hence, when a "highway in the sky" or runway overlay is added, this tends to draw attention to it - and away, in the study (Ames Lab, I think it was) from the sample Cessna that pulled out in front of the sim during landing.
Pilots on the sim landed "through" the small plane without reporting seeing it. 2 pilots, upon hearing the result and seeing the tapes, felt that they ought not fly anymore.
Point being: it is a dangerous thing to try to augment reality when a mission-critical, divided-attention task is being carried out. Disagree if you will, but there are some tasks that are better left as ACTIVE, IMO.
How is this different from racketeering? Seriously; is it just that the forces involved have accountants that seperates them from the mob, or is it more that the mob will *only* break your knees, so that you can at least pay them back for services rendered...
Not a troll. I'm just curious about how this "protection money" and such is not being jumped all over. I'm sure that I'm just seeing one side of this, but it - to me - appears to be an execution of a more strong-arm agenda.
Oooh, so we can "now" show datamining results in 3d. Wait, we've been doing this with Cubes and Caves for years now (have you recently seen hydrologists getting a full idea from a 2d map? Nope, they pump the data through a viz tool [matlab would be one] and can throw it up on the walls of a "cave", or a "C-6", as we call our implimentation here). This is not news.
Hmmm... it seems to me that use of the human body as a power grid is immediately extensible to the use of it as any other type of grid upon which electron flow is contingent *cough* MS PAN Patent *cough*.
I happen to share his views that some things should be done For The Good of Mankind and should be Free, but with this aside (or maybe because of this), were I in his shoes, I'd strive for a few things:
1) Contact EFF for legal funding of Me v. Microsoft.
2) If/When MS's patent is overturned, then turn the patent over to Public Domain.
3) Don't profit! Just know that I righted a wrong and successfully defended Prior Art to boot!
This has to be by far one of the worst things i've seen posted on slashdot. Really, the fact that someone even took the time to write this article amazing me.
How many ways can I destroy a computer... yahh
Maybe if there were good gory pictures or something
In reading this, I thought, "this guy... is employed? In computers/tech??".
I understand that we all have our moments... but this really takes the cake of, "not doing any research before dropping money out of my pocket". You know the saying... "a fool and his money are soon parted" - well... (Mother of All) case in point.
Absolutely right. I remember back in the day you could "decode" your SSN through use of a program. I ran mine through and it correctly reported the location and year of issue.
This makes me glad that I live in a state that utilizes MATRIX and seems to strive against individuals' digital personas being kept close to the individual's chest. *sigh*
On a more serious note, perhaps the government should look into being this tight-lipped when it comes to combining, merging, and actively data- and text-mining databases and data sets... you know, such as those that paint a complete and full picture about a person from individually innocuous bits of datum. Maybe EFF ought to get involved in this (don't flame - I've not hopped over to EFF for soem time now; I'm sure that they actually *are* involved). Then again, hopefully the INDIVIDUAL would ultimately attain/retain ALL IP over their OWN data.
Yeah, I know. I can hear 100,000 people muttering, pipedream, along with me.
(Google cache of this site: cache: gmail.prattboy.net)
Wonderful. So we finally have an article which provides... *drumroll*... an actual cache to the content! Rockin'. I don't care who hosts the cache (although I suspect that google is better equipped than most, in both cost absorbtion and raw bandwidth / failover capability), and in fact I don't want it to be slashdot. That'd be stupid, IMO.
It's funny; I've got the article PDF'ed back here and whip it out to show how ALL people seem to have a desire to be "normal" or "average" or what have you. The TRULY brilliant downplay it. The TRULY dumb typically make all sorts of excuses/claims/etc. Those in the middle seem to slog along just fine.
Now, on to the fun part of this post: my take on the discussion. It is this:
Go out and find something hard for you and do it!
I tend to find work quite simple and, abeit fun and all, just not horribly challenging. Now, does this mean I'm brilliant? Not in itself, no. Just means that I'm good at this type of thing. So I chose to enter grad school. And the funny thing is, I'm flourishing, while at the same time learning my limitations (yeah, a PhD program will do that to you!) and figuring out how to overcome them (with "nudges" by all interested parties). I got my first 4.0 in college last semester. Is this important at this stage? Not really, but it does help to paint a picture of going out and doing something on the borders of your comfort, and putting yourself into something hard... and if it even comes out that you do well and like it... hey, then that's about the best that anyone can ask out of life, IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a ton of information here, but accidentally closed the window (argh). So here's the short version: we're talking about smut here, which is controlled through local decency/obscenity rulings and laws. Pornography, however, is a legal term and is not local in scope, rather being prosecuted at higher levels (state/federal).
Examples of smut include things that might upset a spouse or violate an AUP - imagery of people posed in erotic and suggestive positions (to differentiate it from nudism/art), or imagery of couples engaged in sexual activity for same. Pornography, however, entails imagery of children either exposed or inappropriately positioned - having legs spread is a pretty open-and-shut case for this - or imagery of (some) acts being carried out with corpses or animals.
Smut is not illegal; Pornography is. It is an important distinction to make.
Hmmm ... methinks I see a group with an Agenda. So ... we remove Internet Pornography [sic]. Given that the person here is from the NARTH (hehe - even the acronym sounds awful), are we going to advocate that young homosexual or bi/curious men and women should go to bars resembling 1970/1980s San Fransisco? That doesn't seem like a good public health policy, in my eyes. I'm not homosexual myself, but believe that homo-erotic imagery might be a good thing to prevent widespread sexual intercourse from happening when the individuals involved may or may not be fully aware of their leanings. Indeed, I think that the removal of any kind of smut or erotic materials from the open market may potentially lead to more risky sexual behavior; I would much rather face the "evil" of a society that masturbates than the spectre of a ubiquitous STD rearing its head. But that's just me.
Pornography [sic] causes masturbation? God, this reminds me of the turn-of-the-century Parisian leaflets that showed a healthy young male turning into an enfeebled zombie of a man because he touched himself. Or maybe of the actions that led up to the Comstock Act around the turn of the century (well, 1912 or so, IIRC). Or Reefer Madness, the movie that was one of the things that led to the use of Schedules for classifying illegal drugs in this country (The US).
Yes, it's called an Agenda.
Bottom line: pornography is already regulated (e.g. email, fax, web, and mail is all subject to search and siezure) and illegal. Smut has no such regulation at a top-level (yet ... let's give it until the summer), but is subject to varying local loose-and-sloppy "community standards".
Bloody wonderful
I wish there were a +6 option to give you
:)
Don't the rights to this go to Berkeley and Vint Cerf, if anywhere? How 'bout BBN? This confuses me, as I don't know how MS will be able to show prior art here.
Heh - also, I'm just providing a bitstream. The actual ACT of assembling it and making something out of it ... well, that is fully beyond my client. ;)
At least the article went into an aside that, indeed, BT's are not ONLY used for illegal purposes. *sigh* If you're a company, these are a WONDERFUL software dissemination device - you have your CUSTOMERS host your downloads, and you can pretty much tell when the "novelty has worn off", as the seeds will start to vanish with declining demand/use of your product. The distribution model (Peer-2-Peer) makes a lot of sense here, I think - or is it just me?
Hmm. Now the site just resolves to a cPanel screen giving a 404 Not Found error. Looks like we blew them off their host. :(
Do you see yourself, primarily in the guise of an author, as a knowledge worker or intellectual?
Furthermore, do you see the general malaise that we seem to exhibit towards Knowledge Work, and if so, how do you deal with it? For instance, how do you deal with a (typical) assertion that "you just sit around and write books all day", and therefore do no "real" work - like building a house, say. Personally, I bloody loved Cryptonomicon - and am here in Ames - but it worries me that the global feel is not friendly towards authors/writers/scientists as a large generalized field.
Sorry to do this, but current interests (no, NOT "porn") force me to say...
What you're (both) talking about is smut. Porn is illegal ("porn" itself being a legal term, while "smut" predominantly refers to explicit materials going against the grain of local "community standards"). Er ... at least ... I hope you're talking about smut.
Because it looks like NONE of us remember Amoeba. Amoeba was a free* download, and could be used as an add-on to a *nix filesystem - I think, at the time, I was using Unixware7.0 or somesuch.
As for me, I'd say that Donald's larger and more reaching contribution to *nix would be the network drivers that he wrote (3cX0Y cards, and the Tulip drivers come to mind).
* "Free", here, as in beer definitely, and speech likely. I think that the source was provided, but cannot remember.
Erm. Try MythTV. Really. As you can run MythTV as a client-server program, you can do all the "heavy lifting" back on the server in the basement. Or, better yet, throw a Hauppauge PVR-350 in there (about $180) and get hardware MPEG-2 encoding AND decoding. Or h/w MPEG-2 encoding alone (I think) with the PVR-250.
Aha!
A fishy joke for us, then!
:D
I love it.
I've jumped in with this some time ago in response to an earlier Slashdot HUD-in-the-motorcycle-helmet article, but I'll say this again:
It has been shown that this task is a divided attention one (obviously). Hence, when a "highway in the sky" or runway overlay is added, this tends to draw attention to it - and away, in the study (Ames Lab, I think it was) from the sample Cessna that pulled out in front of the sim during landing.
Pilots on the sim landed "through" the small plane without reporting seeing it. 2 pilots, upon hearing the result and seeing the tapes, felt that they ought not fly anymore.
Point being: it is a dangerous thing to try to augment reality when a mission-critical, divided-attention task is being carried out. Disagree if you will, but there are some tasks that are better left as ACTIVE, IMO.
N
How is this different from racketeering? Seriously; is it just that the forces involved have accountants that seperates them from the mob, or is it more that the mob will *only* break your knees, so that you can at least pay them back for services rendered...
Not a troll. I'm just curious about how this "protection money" and such is not being jumped all over. I'm sure that I'm just seeing one side of this, but it - to me - appears to be an execution of a more strong-arm agenda.
Oooh, so we can "now" show datamining results in 3d. Wait, we've been doing this with Cubes and Caves for years now (have you recently seen hydrologists getting a full idea from a 2d map? Nope, they pump the data through a viz tool [matlab would be one] and can throw it up on the walls of a "cave", or a "C-6", as we call our implimentation here). This is not news.
By the way: PAN I used to stand for Personal Area Network. I'm not exactly certain what it is called, but deemed this logical and reasonable.
Hmmm ... it seems to me that use of the human body as a power grid is immediately extensible to the use of it as any other type of grid upon which electron flow is contingent *cough* MS PAN Patent *cough*.
I happen to share his views that some things should be done For The Good of Mankind and should be Free, but with this aside (or maybe because of this), were I in his shoes, I'd strive for a few things:
1) Contact EFF for legal funding of Me v. Microsoft.
2) If/When MS's patent is overturned, then turn the patent over to Public Domain.
3) Don't profit! Just know that I righted a wrong and successfully defended Prior Art to boot!
In reading this, I thought, "this guy ... is employed? In computers/tech??".
I understand that we all have our moments ... but this really takes the cake of, "not doing any research before dropping money out of my pocket". You know the saying ... "a fool and his money are soon parted" - well ... (Mother of All) case in point.
There's actually a book out on this, The Paradox of Choice, if you're interested.
However, given the two extremes, I would personally carry the cross of choice rather than the yoke of non-choice.
YMMV, though. I'm convinced that it comes out of the context and richness therein, but that may not be the case at all.
Touche! I was just going to comment that, "as they're the #1 destroyer of systems, they may as well set themselves up as a service depot".
Note: this was pretty much tongue-in-cheek ... however, I have had the occasion to see a nice boot/cleat mark on a computer box before.
Absolutely right. I remember back in the day you could "decode" your SSN through use of a program. I ran mine through and it correctly reported the location and year of issue.
So clearly the numbers are NOT arbitrary. :)
Obligatory Simpsons quote follows:
Mr. Burns: Lets see, social security number. Nought nought nought nought nought nought nought nought two. Damn Roosevelt!
This makes me glad that I live in a state that utilizes MATRIX and seems to strive against individuals' digital personas being kept close to the individual's chest. *sigh*
On a more serious note, perhaps the government should look into being this tight-lipped when it comes to combining, merging, and actively data- and text-mining databases and data sets ... you know, such as those that paint a complete and full picture about a person from individually innocuous bits of datum. Maybe EFF ought to get involved in this (don't flame - I've not hopped over to EFF for soem time now; I'm sure that they actually *are* involved). Then again, hopefully the INDIVIDUAL would ultimately attain/retain ALL IP over their OWN data.
Yeah, I know. I can hear 100,000 people muttering, pipedream, along with me.
Wonderful. So we finally have an article which provides ... *drumroll* ... an actual cache to the content! Rockin'. I don't care who hosts the cache (although I suspect that google is better equipped than most, in both cost absorbtion and raw bandwidth / failover capability), and in fact I don't want it to be slashdot. That'd be stupid, IMO.
Anyway ... yay!
I can see the code now:
;) Yeah, I know, I know ... "==" should be a rexgrep ... and that's likely not the correct tag to call a referring site, but it's 8am on a Sunday. ;)
It's funny; I've got the article PDF'ed back here and whip it out to show how ALL people seem to have a desire to be "normal" or "average" or what have you. The TRULY brilliant downplay it. The TRULY dumb typically make all sorts of excuses/claims/etc. Those in the middle seem to slog along just fine.
Now, on to the fun part of this post: my take on the discussion. It is this:
Go out and find something hard for you and do it!
I tend to find work quite simple and, abeit fun and all, just not horribly challenging. Now, does this mean I'm brilliant? Not in itself, no. Just means that I'm good at this type of thing. So I chose to enter grad school. And the funny thing is, I'm flourishing, while at the same time learning my limitations (yeah, a PhD program will do that to you!) and figuring out how to overcome them (with "nudges" by all interested parties). I got my first 4.0 in college last semester. Is this important at this stage? Not really, but it does help to paint a picture of going out and doing something on the borders of your comfort, and putting yourself into something hard ... and if it even comes out that you do well and like it ... hey, then that's about the best that anyone can ask out of life, IMO.
G'luck!