So it's really all just a circle jerk after all -- your own content doesn't matter, as long as everyone can see how many "cool people" you're networked with. Right?
Yes, I know the concept of having "friends", and also using new-fangled technologies like The Internet to help communicate with them when you're not around them, may seem bizarre to many people on Slashdot, and be seen as one of those "cool" fads, but we're not all like this.
Bearing in mind that these deletions were based on having a keyword such as "incest" in the "Interests" list...
I see that Warriors for Innocence itself has several naughty words listed in the META tags, including "pedophile", "child love", "nambla", "abuse", "molestation", "boy lover", "girl lover", "grooming".
Perhaps we all need to complain Blogger about that...? (Although they have a domain name, the site is hosted on blogger, username warriorsforinnocence - unfortunately the "Flag as Objectionable" button isn't visible, and I'm not sure how to do that for them...?)
Sure - but you still come to Slashdot don't you, even though a 3rd party might ruin it?
See my post here - you're right that it's a problem relying on a 3rd party, but the problem isn't easy to solve simply by having a standalone blog.
And sure, if I knew I was going to write something of a highly-controversial-or-illegal nature I might start off with a standalone blog despite the limitations. But in this case, people are being banned without warning based on a keyword in their profile.
Yes, that is what I thought he said. Just because they may have the "right" to doesn't mean it's a Good Thing that companies start imposing their moral views on what people can write about. (And it's also dubious in the case where people have paid for a service only to have the service revoked - yeah, yeah, I know they might say that in the TOS, but this seems to be very much like EULA terrority...)
If Slashdot did the same, I bet people would bitch about it here too.
True - but I think this does touch on constitutional issues because of the suggestion that merely talking about something is in itself illegal. In fact, merely listing "incest" in the "Interests" list on a user or community profile was enough to get suspended. Supposedly from Livejournal's abuse team:
So although no one's being prosecuted (which itself is interesting - if we really were talking about pedophiles are, shouldn't LiveJournal and/or the 3rd party which reported the accounts to them be, I dunno, talking to the police?) they're acting under the belief that it's illegal to talk about, or write fiction about (in the case of fan-fiction, which counts for many deleted accounts) things which are illegal.
And it's people like this 3rd party ("warriors for innocence") who try to make it actually illegal to talk, write fiction or draw pictures about illegal things, and even extend that to consensual adults acts which have nothing to do with child abuse (e.g., adult incest, or things like BDSM). I'm in the UK, and I see a similar fight here with the Government and pro-censorship groups such as Mediawatch-UK wanting to criminalise possession of various adult porn.
In that sense, this is more than simply accounts on LiveJournal (although that in itself worries me, as a paid user of the service). It's a fight about freedom of speech versus censorship, and I fear the belief that freedom of speech shouldn't extend to things some people personally find distasteful when it comes to sex is all too strong.
Yes, we know basic HTML thanks very much - but plenty of geeks prefer not to reinvent the wheel. I was doing that, oh, ten years ago, but just like I no longer consider writing in assembly language, I prefer to use the tools available to me.
Furthermore, you're ignoring the community aspect of LiveJournal, in that it makes it much easier to read other people's journals. All too often standalone blogs seem to be read by hardly anyone, and even supposedly popular blogs only get a comment here and there, but it's commonplace for journals on LiveJournal to have hundreds of readers (and get tens or even hundreds of comments to each post). This is because it's easy to create a list of journals which you then read, and can easily comment on.
But yes, it is a big problem that all of this is dependent on a single company - it's as if using an email account was dependent on a single company, or relying on one company for instant messaging. However, "write your own HTML" does not solve the problems.
Technologies such as RSS and OpenID go some way to fix the problem (allowing easier reading of multiple journals on different sites, and allowing authentication without having to sign up for an account, respectively), but there are still issues, such as security/privacy (LiveJournal allows you to restrict viewing of a journal entry to a set of people).
It's not like the users are paying for the privilege. If the journals are lost for good then it really is the users fault for not backing up their own stuff.
And not just fanfic communities, I've seen adult/fetish communities also suspended, and support sites for survivors of abuse may be at risk (since they list keywords such as "incest" or "rape"...).
LiveJournal has yet to make a statement, but I find the quote from Six Apart's CEO given in the article rather worrying:
"Our decision here was not based on pure legal issues. It was based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what's not."
Righto, so Six Apart are saying it doesn't matter if it's entirely legal, they're going to start banning journals based on what they think is "appropriate".
Perhaps seeing a future where they won't be able to make money selling individual copies of music, they are being creative and trying to get money from the radio stations (both terrestrial and online) for the playing music. It hasn't gone over well around here.
"Finding a new business model" and "Trying to make it so that other people are forced to pay you for something they can currently legally do for free" are not the same.
Likewise, a few years ago, when the record companies stated that concert prices would be going up due to losses due to piracy, Slashdotters similarly called bullshit.
Link? I presume the issue there was the claim "losses due to piracy", and not that they chose to increase their prices. If they put up concert prices because of cheap imports, and people complained at that, you might have a point.
Last I heard you need a TV licence for ANY equipment capable of viewing the BBCs output, and that includes a computer.
Only if it has a TV card, otherwise, no.
But they have been trying to change it, IIRC, so that anyone with a computer would need to pay. Also, if you currently use a computer to watch anything that is simultaneously being broadcast as TV, you need to pay.
Anyone who refuses to pay this and is proud should really be ashamed.
It may be good value, but I find it worrying that someone who feels it isn't good value for them, and they don't want to pay for it, should be ashamed.
Facts and theories are different things - facts are things which happen, theories are models which explain why.
Evolution is a fact and a theory - it's is a proven fact that we developed from earlier simpler lifeforms, and theory of evolution is the model which explains the mechanism by which this happened.
Your statement that schools should not teach theories even if evidence supports them means that no theories could be taught in science lessons, which is rather bizarre.
We're talking about one school, but the Daily Mail mislead you into thinking this is widespread. They also don't mention that it's non-compulsory, and that the Government plans to address the issue by making it compulsory.
There may be a real issue here that kids are brainwashed with religion, but I wouldn't trust the Daily Mail's version of events, and also this problem doesn't just go for Islam - oddly, the Daily Mail never seems to complain that all state schools much have daily Christian preaching and worship (and they'd probably be the first to complain if it ended!)
So funny how the Brits love slagging the US government when theirs is so amusing to watch
What, is this a competition or do you just like slagging off strawmen?
Criticising the US Government doesn't mean you think that your own Government is better, it's perfectly possible to dislike both. In fact, given the "special" relationship between Blair and Bush, I suspect that those who slag off the US Government dislike our own too.
Fortunately, an LCD screen has three times as many pixels than the advertised number.
And this is the important point - if a manufacturer wants to advertise thousands/millions of colours rather than 3*64 or 3*256, then when it comes to advertising the resolution, they have to count 3 sub-pixels as being 1 pixel. They can't have it both ways, and claim thousands/millions of colours, as well as a resolution three times greater.
Similarly, it would be fair to take into account dithering when advertising the numbers of colours, if the advertised screen resolution was reduced accordingly.
Thanks for the information, I hadn't realised it was dithering with respect to time.
If the outcome of this case is that manufacturers have to inform customers whether it's 6 bit with dithering, or 8 bit, I don't think that's a bad thing.
The fact that you hadn't noticed this is a pretty good argument that this type of dithering isn't really false advertising.
But I'm not the one suing them - I've never used a laptop for any graphics work. But that doesn't mean that someone else, perhaps someone doing professional graphics work, won't notice.
So YOU are the reason my McDonald's coffee warns me of hot contents! Can I thank you for the notice that cigarettes cause cancer? How about the notice that alchohol impairs my ability to operate machinery? Gee, thanks for looking out for me!
As well as the point that the anonymous coward made, there is also the point that these are warnings, and not to do with informing the customer what they are getting.
Would it be okay for me to sell you coffee that was cold? After all, it's still coffee.
Now all we will have is three color displays, and we won't have any numbers to guage them with.
But if this is thrown out, we'll have every manufacturer advertising "billions of colours", with no way of measuring how they actually compare.
Knowing the number of colours each pixel can display, together with the screen resolution, is a standard way of comparing graphics displays. But if Apple can get away with this, we'll no longer have a way to compare them.
(Actually, it would be interesting to know what resolution they advertised - the point is that grouping pixels together does gain you more colours, but it effectively does so at the expense of screen resolution. If they advertised millions of colours, but also reduced the advertised resolution, that would be reasonable. But if they didn't, that's an outright lie.)
What next? Perhaps we can start including hard disk sizes in the memory advertised, because of virtual memory?
I mean sure that level of pedanticism is tolerated in some forums, but this is a court of law.
I'd say the other way round - being pedantic is more important in legal matters and advertising, than it is on a forum.
And this isn't being pedantic - surely it's long established that "number of colours" refers to the number of possible colours an individual pixel can display, and not using tricks like dithering? Otherwise, back in the 80s/90s when computers only had 256 colours or less, why didn't we see manufacturers claiming they could actually display thousands of colours? Why weren't the computers which could display thousands of colours back then advertised as displaying millions? And maybe the original black and white classic Macs should actually be greyscale, because you could dither the black and white pixels?
I'm curious, as I thought 24 bit displays had been standard on computers for well over a decade now - is it common for laptops to have an 18 bit display, or is it only Apple that have decided to take us back to the 1990s?
Ask someone who was raped, and get back with me on that.
What, are you suggesting that they would rather be dead than alive? (Although some victims do commit suicide, that clearly doesn't apply to anyone that you are able to ask.)
The UK has some odd laws too - the age of consent is 16, but the age limit for photos was recently raised to 18, so 16/17 year olds in a legal relationship would be breaking the law if they privately took naughty pictures of each other.
The Government also plans to criminalise possession of naughty "extreme" adult images, just because some people find them abhorrent.
yes it's the parent's responsability to watch what he or she is doing but what about outside, dont fucking tell me it's o.k for a ten year old to get his sex education on INMYASS.COM, or to build home made bombs, tape himself beating up someone or getting beaten up and having that video on the internet.
Okay then: No, it's not okay for you to let your ten year old watch porn etc on the Internet.
Oh wait, you meant that you wanted us to look after your kids?
China censors it's citizen, you want China to stop this but at the same time arent you yourself trying to censor CHina's motive, if everyone has freedom to do whatever they want on the net then China has also the right to ban and block whatever it wants since the net is for the taking.
Slashdot Mirror
So it's really all just a circle jerk after all -- your own content doesn't matter, as long as everyone can see how many "cool people" you're networked with. Right?
Yes, I know the concept of having "friends", and also using new-fangled technologies like The Internet to help communicate with them when you're not around them, may seem bizarre to many people on Slashdot, and be seen as one of those "cool" fads, but we're not all like this.
Bearing in mind that these deletions were based on having a keyword such as "incest" in the "Interests" list...
I see that Warriors for Innocence itself has several naughty words listed in the META tags, including "pedophile", "child love", "nambla", "abuse", "molestation", "boy lover", "girl lover", "grooming".
Perhaps we all need to complain Blogger about that...? (Although they have a domain name, the site is hosted on blogger, username warriorsforinnocence - unfortunately the "Flag as Objectionable" button isn't visible, and I'm not sure how to do that for them...?)
Sure - but you still come to Slashdot don't you, even though a 3rd party might ruin it?
See my post here - you're right that it's a problem relying on a 3rd party, but the problem isn't easy to solve simply by having a standalone blog.
And sure, if I knew I was going to write something of a highly-controversial-or-illegal nature I might start off with a standalone blog despite the limitations. But in this case, people are being banned without warning based on a keyword in their profile.
Yes, that is what I thought he said. Just because they may have the "right" to doesn't mean it's a Good Thing that companies start imposing their moral views on what people can write about. (And it's also dubious in the case where people have paid for a service only to have the service revoked - yeah, yeah, I know they might say that in the TOS, but this seems to be very much like EULA terrority...)
If Slashdot did the same, I bet people would bitch about it here too.
True - but I think this does touch on constitutional issues because of the suggestion that merely talking about something is in itself illegal. In fact, merely listing "incest" in the "Interests" list on a user or community profile was enough to get suspended. Supposedly from Livejournal's abuse team:
"we have been advised that listing an interest in an illegal activity must be viewed as using LiveJournal to solicit that illegal activity."
And will they unsuspend you if you'll remove the interest? Nope:
"Our legal counsel advises us that it would increase LiveJournal's liability if we were to allow your journal to be unsuspended for you to delete the illegal interests from your profile. This is because if someone were to remove the illegal interests from his or her profile, but was in fact using LiveJournal to coordinate, solicit, or participate in illegal activity, LiveJournal would most likely be considered to have foreknowledge of that activity and thus become liable."
So although no one's being prosecuted (which itself is interesting - if we really were talking about pedophiles are, shouldn't LiveJournal and/or the 3rd party which reported the accounts to them be, I dunno, talking to the police?) they're acting under the belief that it's illegal to talk about, or write fiction about (in the case of fan-fiction, which counts for many deleted accounts) things which are illegal.
And it's people like this 3rd party ("warriors for innocence") who try to make it actually illegal to talk, write fiction or draw pictures about illegal things, and even extend that to consensual adults acts which have nothing to do with child abuse (e.g., adult incest, or things like BDSM). I'm in the UK, and I see a similar fight here with the Government and pro-censorship groups such as Mediawatch-UK wanting to criminalise possession of various adult porn.
In that sense, this is more than simply accounts on LiveJournal (although that in itself worries me, as a paid user of the service). It's a fight about freedom of speech versus censorship, and I fear the belief that freedom of speech shouldn't extend to things some people personally find distasteful when it comes to sex is all too strong.
Yes, we know basic HTML thanks very much - but plenty of geeks prefer not to reinvent the wheel. I was doing that, oh, ten years ago, but just like I no longer consider writing in assembly language, I prefer to use the tools available to me.
Furthermore, you're ignoring the community aspect of LiveJournal, in that it makes it much easier to read other people's journals. All too often standalone blogs seem to be read by hardly anyone, and even supposedly popular blogs only get a comment here and there, but it's commonplace for journals on LiveJournal to have hundreds of readers (and get tens or even hundreds of comments to each post). This is because it's easy to create a list of journals which you then read, and can easily comment on.
But yes, it is a big problem that all of this is dependent on a single company - it's as if using an email account was dependent on a single company, or relying on one company for instant messaging. However, "write your own HTML" does not solve the problems.
Technologies such as RSS and OpenID go some way to fix the problem (allowing easier reading of multiple journals on different sites, and allowing authentication without having to sign up for an account, respectively), but there are still issues, such as security/privacy (LiveJournal allows you to restrict viewing of a journal entry to a set of people).
It's not like the users are paying for the privilege. If the journals are lost for good then it really is the users fault for not backing up their own stuff.
Er, yes we are. And yes I have backed up my journal.
See here.
And not just fanfic communities, I've seen adult/fetish communities also suspended, and support sites for survivors of abuse may be at risk (since they list keywords such as "incest" or "rape"...).
LiveJournal has yet to make a statement, but I find the quote from Six Apart's CEO given in the article rather worrying:
"Our decision here was not based on pure legal issues. It was based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what's not."
Righto, so Six Apart are saying it doesn't matter if it's entirely legal, they're going to start banning journals based on what they think is "appropriate".
Perhaps seeing a future where they won't be able to make money selling individual copies of music, they are being creative and trying to get money from the radio stations (both terrestrial and online) for the playing music. It hasn't gone over well around here.
"Finding a new business model" and "Trying to make it so that other people are forced to pay you for something they can currently legally do for free" are not the same.
Likewise, a few years ago, when the record companies stated that concert prices would be going up due to losses due to piracy, Slashdotters similarly called bullshit.
Link? I presume the issue there was the claim "losses due to piracy", and not that they chose to increase their prices. If they put up concert prices because of cheap imports, and people complained at that, you might have a point.
They act without considering the consequences to themselves or others. They are irresponsible and generally stupid, with a few exceptions.
They sound just like adults, to me...
Last I heard you need a TV licence for ANY equipment capable of viewing the BBCs output, and that includes a computer.
Only if it has a TV card, otherwise, no.
But they have been trying to change it, IIRC, so that anyone with a computer would need to pay. Also, if you currently use a computer to watch anything that is simultaneously being broadcast as TV, you need to pay.
Anyone who refuses to pay this and is proud should really be ashamed.
It may be good value, but I find it worrying that someone who feels it isn't good value for them, and they don't want to pay for it, should be ashamed.
Facts and theories are different things - facts are things which happen, theories are models which explain why.
Evolution is a fact and a theory - it's is a proven fact that we developed from earlier simpler lifeforms, and theory of evolution is the model which explains the mechanism by which this happened.
Your statement that schools should not teach theories even if evidence supports them means that no theories could be taught in science lessons, which is rather bizarre.
no new species were made.
Speciation has been observed.
And by "evolution / secular humanism movement", you mean "science".
If she is taking Apple's "sillhouette ads" and copying them to advertise her "device", it is copyright infringement, pure and simple.
They aren't doing that. It's a trademark issue, not copyright.
If you did read the article you would have seen that half of it was quoting the government report.
2 048161,00.html. asp
It doesn't matter how much of the article quotes, when they mislead you on the important bits.
See:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,
http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/holocaust
We're talking about one school, but the Daily Mail mislead you into thinking this is widespread. They also don't mention that it's non-compulsory, and that the Government plans to address the issue by making it compulsory.
There may be a real issue here that kids are brainwashed with religion, but I wouldn't trust the Daily Mail's version of events, and also this problem doesn't just go for Islam - oddly, the Daily Mail never seems to complain that all state schools much have daily Christian preaching and worship (and they'd probably be the first to complain if it ended!)
So funny how the Brits love slagging the US government when theirs is so amusing to watch
What, is this a competition or do you just like slagging off strawmen?
Criticising the US Government doesn't mean you think that your own Government is better, it's perfectly possible to dislike both. In fact, given the "special" relationship between Blair and Bush, I suspect that those who slag off the US Government dislike our own too.
Fortunately, an LCD screen has three times as many pixels than the advertised number.
And this is the important point - if a manufacturer wants to advertise thousands/millions of colours rather than 3*64 or 3*256, then when it comes to advertising the resolution, they have to count 3 sub-pixels as being 1 pixel. They can't have it both ways, and claim thousands/millions of colours, as well as a resolution three times greater.
Similarly, it would be fair to take into account dithering when advertising the numbers of colours, if the advertised screen resolution was reduced accordingly.
Thanks for the information, I hadn't realised it was dithering with respect to time.
If the outcome of this case is that manufacturers have to inform customers whether it's 6 bit with dithering, or 8 bit, I don't think that's a bad thing.
The fact that you hadn't noticed this is a pretty good argument that this type of dithering isn't really false advertising.
But I'm not the one suing them - I've never used a laptop for any graphics work. But that doesn't mean that someone else, perhaps someone doing professional graphics work, won't notice.
So YOU are the reason my McDonald's coffee warns me of hot contents! Can I thank you for the notice that cigarettes cause cancer? How about the notice that alchohol impairs my ability to operate machinery? Gee, thanks for looking out for me!
As well as the point that the anonymous coward made, there is also the point that these are warnings, and not to do with informing the customer what they are getting.
Would it be okay for me to sell you coffee that was cold? After all, it's still coffee.
Now all we will have is three color displays, and we won't have any numbers to guage them with.
But if this is thrown out, we'll have every manufacturer advertising "billions of colours", with no way of measuring how they actually compare.
Knowing the number of colours each pixel can display, together with the screen resolution, is a standard way of comparing graphics displays. But if Apple can get away with this, we'll no longer have a way to compare them.
(Actually, it would be interesting to know what resolution they advertised - the point is that grouping pixels together does gain you more colours, but it effectively does so at the expense of screen resolution. If they advertised millions of colours, but also reduced the advertised resolution, that would be reasonable. But if they didn't, that's an outright lie.)
What next? Perhaps we can start including hard disk sizes in the memory advertised, because of virtual memory?
I mean sure that level of pedanticism is tolerated in some forums, but this is a court of law.
I'd say the other way round - being pedantic is more important in legal matters and advertising, than it is on a forum.
And this isn't being pedantic - surely it's long established that "number of colours" refers to the number of possible colours an individual pixel can display, and not using tricks like dithering? Otherwise, back in the 80s/90s when computers only had 256 colours or less, why didn't we see manufacturers claiming they could actually display thousands of colours? Why weren't the computers which could display thousands of colours back then advertised as displaying millions? And maybe the original black and white classic Macs should actually be greyscale, because you could dither the black and white pixels?
I'm curious, as I thought 24 bit displays had been standard on computers for well over a decade now - is it common for laptops to have an 18 bit display, or is it only Apple that have decided to take us back to the 1990s?
Ask someone who was raped, and get back with me on that.
What, are you suggesting that they would rather be dead than alive? (Although some victims do commit suicide, that clearly doesn't apply to anyone that you are able to ask.)
Why only "these types of laws"? Why not all laws, whether it's littering, burglary or murder?
The UK has some odd laws too - the age of consent is 16, but the age limit for photos was recently raised to 18, so 16/17 year olds in a legal relationship would be breaking the law if they privately took naughty pictures of each other.
The Government also plans to criminalise possession of naughty "extreme" adult images, just because some people find them abhorrent.
yes it's the parent's responsability to watch what he or she is doing but what about outside, dont fucking tell me it's o.k for a ten year old to get his sex education on INMYASS.COM, or to build home made bombs, tape himself beating up someone or getting beaten up and having that video on the internet.
Okay then: No, it's not okay for you to let your ten year old watch porn etc on the Internet.
Oh wait, you meant that you wanted us to look after your kids?
China censors it's citizen, you want China to stop this but at the same time arent you yourself trying to censor CHina's motive, if everyone has freedom to do whatever they want on the net then China has also the right to ban and block whatever it wants since the net is for the taking.
China isn't a person.