If it's the first one, how is that any different from banning bondage pics, for example? or s/m
Don't speak too soon! The UK Government plans to criminalise possession of certain images - even if they are entirely simulated or performed with consenting actors - just because they are considered "abhorrent".
To me it seems obvious that things should be illegal because of the actual abuse caused, but there are people out there, including Governments, who think possession should be criminalised just because some are offended by them.
RTFA. It's not just that some people were PRETENDING to be children, there were, allegedly, groups in there trading actual illegal material within SL.
You RTFA. The point is that even if there was no actual material, the pretending would still have been illegal.
The fact that there's actual images of abuse makes this all the more worrying - why the need to prosecute for the virtual images?
The problem is that laws like this get strengthened and enforced in courts by first going for those who have images of actual abuse (because, like you, no jury wants to defend them). But that sets a precedent for innocent adults where children aren't involved at all.
Then I assume you supported the US/British/Spanish/Australian invasion Iraq. I presume you are currently pressing your government to liberate Saudi Arabia, Syria, Russia, and Iran, all in the name of freedom of course.
This is a silly comparison - it's perfectly possible to oppose and voice disgust of a Government, without supporting a war that kills 10,000s of that country's population!
The OP may well disapprove of those Governments, just as he disapproves of ID being introduced into the US - in which case, your point is not valid. He's not suggesting we go to war with the US(!) so there's no reason he should support war with other countries.
But that's an idea, if the US brings in ID, maybe we should go to war with it, because obviously that's the only way to state one's disagreement.
Tell her that's she's spreading government disinformation when she mentions how she's seen a massive increase in the number of referrals for people who smoke cannabis.
Not government disinformation, but she should learn some basic statistics if she's trying to imply anything by this observation. That some mentally ill people take drugs doesn't in itself tell us what effect taking drugs has on mental health.
I imagine alcohol is involved in a large amount of accidents needing hospital treatment, but this doesn't mean people who drink will end up in A&E, or that we should criminalise it.
Many of them can't hold down jobs or integrate into society well. I think that because it's illegal here, fewer of the normal law abiding folks tend to be admitted potheads while the "fight-the-man" types are. Personally, I'm happy it's illegal for recreational use.
Some people can't hold down jobs, therefore other productive members of society should be criminalised? What sort of logic is that?
How well do you think someone will be able to get a job after getting a criminal record?
Second, we assume that the laws of nature are universal -- they're good any time, any place. If something behaves differently in one circumstance than another, this doesn't mean the laws change, it just means the laws are complex and take factors into account that make those two circumstances different with regards to them.
I don't think this is an assumption, but a tautology - if any observed behaviour changed depending on time or place, we would rewrite the law to take that into account. Perhaps it's an assumption that they don't change randomly, however.
I think the most general idea behind science is that the behaviour of the universe can be expressed in a simpler form - basically compressing the information. If there was no order behind things, all we could do would be to write down a list of "things which happened", with no way to compress that information, or predict future events.
I don't see any difference between supporting theories that have not bee preven (in the purest sense of scientific definitions) and theories of faith (God, creation, world).
Proof: Evidence which compels one to believe something is true.
Something with vast amounts of supporting evidence takes the same level of faith to believe as something with no evidence? I don't think so.
Yeah I'm curious by that too - people on LiveJournal link to other blogs all the time, just as much as other blogs I've seen.
Also you can set up feeds on LiveJournal which pick up blogs via their RSS feeds, which is probably a much more common way for people on LiveJournal to follow non-LJ blogs - I do hope that they weren't just going by old fashioned web links, that kind of misses the whole point of blogs and new technologies like RSS, and would make their image rather innaccurate.
If I am mistaken, please enlighten me and show me exactly where explicit violence targeting women (i.e. beating, raping, torture, etc) is promoted in The Bible.
We won't know for sure until a bill is produced, but typically the way this works is that even though someone calls for banning "promotion", the resultant law has no such requirement. The implication is that any image is inherently promoting the act.
For some reason, literature tends to be exempt from such censorship these days, so the Bible wouldn't count on those grounds, but there's plenty of religious artwork showing violence. But for some reason, no one has a problem with that.
Send an email to Joy Smith [mailto] (the MP who introduced this half baked bill).
Writing to MPs is good - I don't know how the Canadian system works exactly, but presumably it's best for people to write to their own MPs. Furthermore, writing to ones who are more likely to listen will be more effective - letters to idiots who introduce such proposals typically get ignored.
Because, according to them, images which involve men as the "victim" don't exist.
Apparently, they will to be able to block material "that promotes violence against women"
Also, if recent events in the UK is anything to go by, note that any image seen as violent (even if simulated and consensual - yes, some adults are into stuff like that remember) is automatically assumed to be "promoting violence". The UK Government is planning to criminalise possession of images (even if simulated and consensual, even private images never published), and it's very hard to oppose without being branded as "supporting violence against women" - even though most the time, it's men wanting to be the "victims".
Some go so far as to say that _any_ pr0n should count as a "hate crime" against women.
But just because something is legal doesn't mean it should be accepted in school - the same applies even for adults in workplaces.
Yes, someone should be legally free to say what they like, but if someone was harrassing or insulting a work colleague, I would expect the company (or school) to do something about it.
And yes - even if that happened outside of work time, if someone was staking and harrassing fellow employees, I wouldn't think it necessarily unreasonable for the company to take an interest.
Your comment that I originally replied to said that they weren't exclusive to the Amiga, and it was only after that that someone else brought up being first. So, they're not exclusive, and it's not that they were first, but many of them were best known as, just like Doom on the PC.
I also wonder if you're in the US, seeing your other comment that no one you know ever owned an Amiga? I'm in the UK, and just about every kid I knew in the early '90s had an Amiga. From a US-only perspective I can understand this article looking strange, but the Amiga was immensely more popular in Europe; it was rare to find anyone owning machines like Macs.
So it kinda depends on which numbering scheme you use... but MS can't keep their numbers straight anyway!
Well it's even more confusing with Apple, in that we have things like MacOS X 10.5. If X is the version number, why do they repeat it? And if it's part of the name, why did they start with version 10?
I'm curious what they'll do when they want to up the version number. Will it be Mac OS X 11? MacOS XI? MacOS XI 11...?
Well, NT was the modern advanced OS, they made the switch to an OS that had memory protection, stability (yes, whatever anecdotes people may have of Windows' stability, the point is that stability today of Windows and presumably MacOS X is light years ahead of the bad old days when we had DOS and MacOS) years before Apple did (though it wasn't until XP that they moved the home consumers away from the Windows 9x line). The old MacOS didn't even have proper multitasking.
Windows may have its downpoints, but that's nothing anywhere near like the distinction of old vs modern that Apple had to overcome with classic MacOS.
True, in some ways Vista is a bit like copeland/rhapsody in that they're possibly making a hash of moving Windows onto something else. But then, they have finally managed to release it, unlike what happened with Apple, who had to ditch MacOS for a new OS based on NeXT. It's not clear what the next stage would be - unlike the situation with classic MacOS where modern operating systems existed in competition and which had features that MacOS didn't have and couldn't be added to it. There are no "modern advanced OSs" out there that make today's Mac OS X/Windows look like yesterday's Mac OS/DOS.
So the Macintosh hardware gives you three OS choices. The other two only give you two OS choices each. I fail to see how the Apple hardware locks you in more than PC hardware.
The hardware may not lock you in - but then we are talking about the operating system here. The reason Mac OS can only run on Macs whilst Windows runs on a range of hardware is due to the choices of Apple and Microsoft respectively - so if any one is a lock-in, it would be Mac OS, and that's hardly Microsoft's fault. (Not that I think there's anything wrong with Apple making MacOS only run on Macs, before anyone mods me down, but it's clearly misleading to suggest this is a downpoint for Windows, or a plus point for Mac.)
Indeed, if you were really talking about hardware, I'm curious why you said "Windows machine"? Surely a Mac is also a Windows machine, if you buy it to run Windows?
It's true that a simple high-resolution (even if it was only 2 colour) display option on the Amiga's original chipset would have done a lot to help the Amiga in more general business applications.
But later on this wasn't an issue - the Amiga could display higher resolutions on monitors without flicker just like a PC. It is not true at all to say that this required abandoning the custom chipsets, as the updated chipsets were still custom, and backwards compatible. I happily ran 640x480 without interlace, and without needing whatever "grafted on solutions" you are referring to.
The stigma only stuck because most people used a TV, which was why the resolution was poor, and back then PCs couldn't use a TV at all (well, without additional hardware).
The situation you describe of needing to move onto graphics cards was well after Commodore went bust, so can hardly be seen as a cause of failure (if Commodore had still been around, presumably they'd have stuck updated chipsets - whether they were "custom" or generic like you get in Macs and laptops - into newer Amigas).
We were discussing a computationally intensive game, Populous. The increase in CPU speed also gave the ST a small edge in 3D graphics, which the Amiga's custom hardware couldn't help with.
Surely the 3D graphics in Populous weren't 3D in anywhere near the same sense as we know them today - I thought it was isometric graphics, i.e., just pasting 2D graphic images onto the screen. And the Amiga's custom hardware certainly was good at that.
Now imagine if all you classmates, with their celebrity loving subculture, had the same right to vote. Imagine what would happen if Madonna (Paris Hilton is too young) got into the White House.
And the general adult population isn't a celebrity loving culture? Yes, just image if a celebrity ever got elected!
but just downgrading anonymous comments would solve the problem of having to read the occasional real drivel. And it would do it without censorship.
Except this assumes that anonymous comments are more likely to be trolls/worthless than people who have signed up. I soon learned on Slashdot that this wasn't the case - plenty of anonymous comments are insightful, whilst logged in users talk rubbish, so I set my preferences so that anon comments don't get the -1 penalty. Suddenly it made reading here a lot nicer.
For blogs with low numbers of readers, I think it's better to just manually moderate/screen anonymous comments.
Slashdot Mirror
Except if you read the article...
Except if you read the article, you'd have seen that possession of virtual images alone will get someone three years in prison.
If it's the first one, how is that any different from banning bondage pics, for example? or s/m
Don't speak too soon! The UK Government plans to criminalise possession of certain images - even if they are entirely simulated or performed with consenting actors - just because they are considered "abhorrent".
To me it seems obvious that things should be illegal because of the actual abuse caused, but there are people out there, including Governments, who think possession should be criminalised just because some are offended by them.
RTFA. It's not just that some people were PRETENDING to be children, there were, allegedly, groups in there trading actual illegal material within SL.
You RTFA. The point is that even if there was no actual material, the pretending would still have been illegal.
The fact that there's actual images of abuse makes this all the more worrying - why the need to prosecute for the virtual images?
The problem is that laws like this get strengthened and enforced in courts by first going for those who have images of actual abuse (because, like you, no jury wants to defend them). But that sets a precedent for innocent adults where children aren't involved at all.
Then I assume you supported the US/British/Spanish/Australian invasion Iraq. I presume you are currently pressing your government to liberate Saudi Arabia, Syria, Russia, and Iran, all in the name of freedom of course.
This is a silly comparison - it's perfectly possible to oppose and voice disgust of a Government, without supporting a war that kills 10,000s of that country's population!
The OP may well disapprove of those Governments, just as he disapproves of ID being introduced into the US - in which case, your point is not valid. He's not suggesting we go to war with the US(!) so there's no reason he should support war with other countries.
But that's an idea, if the US brings in ID, maybe we should go to war with it, because obviously that's the only way to state one's disagreement.
Tell her that's she's spreading government disinformation when she mentions how she's seen a massive increase in the number of referrals for people who smoke cannabis.
Not government disinformation, but she should learn some basic statistics if she's trying to imply anything by this observation. That some mentally ill people take drugs doesn't in itself tell us what effect taking drugs has on mental health.
I imagine alcohol is involved in a large amount of accidents needing hospital treatment, but this doesn't mean people who drink will end up in A&E, or that we should criminalise it.
Many of them can't hold down jobs or integrate into society well. I think that because it's illegal here, fewer of the normal law abiding folks tend to be admitted potheads while the "fight-the-man" types are. Personally, I'm happy it's illegal for recreational use.
Some people can't hold down jobs, therefore other productive members of society should be criminalised? What sort of logic is that?
How well do you think someone will be able to get a job after getting a criminal record?
Second, we assume that the laws of nature are universal -- they're good any time, any place. If something behaves differently in one circumstance than another, this doesn't mean the laws change, it just means the laws are complex and take factors into account that make those two circumstances different with regards to them.
I don't think this is an assumption, but a tautology - if any observed behaviour changed depending on time or place, we would rewrite the law to take that into account. Perhaps it's an assumption that they don't change randomly, however.
I think the most general idea behind science is that the behaviour of the universe can be expressed in a simpler form - basically compressing the information. If there was no order behind things, all we could do would be to write down a list of "things which happened", with no way to compress that information, or predict future events.
I don't see any difference between supporting theories that have not bee preven (in the purest sense of scientific definitions) and theories of faith (God, creation, world).
Proof: Evidence which compels one to believe something is true.
Something with vast amounts of supporting evidence takes the same level of faith to believe as something with no evidence? I don't think so.
Yeah I'm curious by that too - people on LiveJournal link to other blogs all the time, just as much as other blogs I've seen.
Also you can set up feeds on LiveJournal which pick up blogs via their RSS feeds, which is probably a much more common way for people on LiveJournal to follow non-LJ blogs - I do hope that they weren't just going by old fashioned web links, that kind of misses the whole point of blogs and new technologies like RSS, and would make their image rather innaccurate.
If I am mistaken, please enlighten me and show me exactly where explicit violence targeting women (i.e. beating, raping, torture, etc) is promoted in The Bible.
We won't know for sure until a bill is produced, but typically the way this works is that even though someone calls for banning "promotion", the resultant law has no such requirement. The implication is that any image is inherently promoting the act.
For some reason, literature tends to be exempt from such censorship these days, so the Bible wouldn't count on those grounds, but there's plenty of religious artwork showing violence. But for some reason, no one has a problem with that.
Send an email to Joy Smith [mailto] (the MP who introduced this half baked bill).
Writing to MPs is good - I don't know how the Canadian system works exactly, but presumably it's best for people to write to their own MPs. Furthermore, writing to ones who are more likely to listen will be more effective - letters to idiots who introduce such proposals typically get ignored.
Because, according to them, images which involve men as the "victim" don't exist.
i re/5297600.stm (also covered on Slashdot somewhere).
Apparently, they will to be able to block material "that promotes violence against women"
Also, if recent events in the UK is anything to go by, note that any image seen as violent (even if simulated and consensual - yes, some adults are into stuff like that remember) is automatically assumed to be "promoting violence". The UK Government is planning to criminalise possession of images (even if simulated and consensual, even private images never published), and it's very hard to oppose without being branded as "supporting violence against women" - even though most the time, it's men wanting to be the "victims".
Some go so far as to say that _any_ pr0n should count as a "hate crime" against women.
See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/berksh
Well, there's other issues such as harrassment.
But just because something is legal doesn't mean it should be accepted in school - the same applies even for adults in workplaces.
Yes, someone should be legally free to say what they like, but if someone was harrassing or insulting a work colleague, I would expect the company (or school) to do something about it.
And yes - even if that happened outside of work time, if someone was staking and harrassing fellow employees, I wouldn't think it necessarily unreasonable for the company to take an interest.
Your comment that I originally replied to said that they weren't exclusive to the Amiga, and it was only after that that someone else brought up being first. So, they're not exclusive, and it's not that they were first, but many of them were best known as, just like Doom on the PC.
I also wonder if you're in the US, seeing your other comment that no one you know ever owned an Amiga? I'm in the UK, and just about every kid I knew in the early '90s had an Amiga. From a US-only perspective I can understand this article looking strange, but the Amiga was immensely more popular in Europe; it was rare to find anyone owning machines like Macs.
Nice try, but you can't switch from "exclusive" to "best known as".
If we're talking "best known as", then many of those games were best known as Amiga games, just as much as Doom was known as a PC game.
So it kinda depends on which numbering scheme you use... but MS can't keep their numbers straight anyway!
Well it's even more confusing with Apple, in that we have things like MacOS X 10.5. If X is the version number, why do they repeat it? And if it's part of the name, why did they start with version 10?
I'm curious what they'll do when they want to up the version number. Will it be Mac OS X 11? MacOS XI? MacOS XI 11...?
Well, NT was the modern advanced OS, they made the switch to an OS that had memory protection, stability (yes, whatever anecdotes people may have of Windows' stability, the point is that stability today of Windows and presumably MacOS X is light years ahead of the bad old days when we had DOS and MacOS) years before Apple did (though it wasn't until XP that they moved the home consumers away from the Windows 9x line). The old MacOS didn't even have proper multitasking.
Windows may have its downpoints, but that's nothing anywhere near like the distinction of old vs modern that Apple had to overcome with classic MacOS.
True, in some ways Vista is a bit like copeland/rhapsody in that they're possibly making a hash of moving Windows onto something else. But then, they have finally managed to release it, unlike what happened with Apple, who had to ditch MacOS for a new OS based on NeXT. It's not clear what the next stage would be - unlike the situation with classic MacOS where modern operating systems existed in competition and which had features that MacOS didn't have and couldn't be added to it. There are no "modern advanced OSs" out there that make today's Mac OS X/Windows look like yesterday's Mac OS/DOS.
So the Macintosh hardware gives you three OS choices. The other two only give you two OS choices each. I fail to see how the Apple hardware locks you in more than PC hardware.
The hardware may not lock you in - but then we are talking about the operating system here. The reason Mac OS can only run on Macs whilst Windows runs on a range of hardware is due to the choices of Apple and Microsoft respectively - so if any one is a lock-in, it would be Mac OS, and that's hardly Microsoft's fault. (Not that I think there's anything wrong with Apple making MacOS only run on Macs, before anyone mods me down, but it's clearly misleading to suggest this is a downpoint for Windows, or a plus point for Mac.)
Indeed, if you were really talking about hardware, I'm curious why you said "Windows machine"? Surely a Mac is also a Windows machine, if you buy it to run Windows?
There's more to the idea of a "right" than what the US Constitution says. In fact, I believe the US Constitution explicitly states this.
By that logic, Doom wasn't an influential PC game, because it was ported to the Amiga...
I agree - also an often forgotten point is that Commodore also produced PCs, so it's not clear that the Amiga was the fault for them going bust.
It's true that a simple high-resolution (even if it was only 2 colour) display option on the Amiga's original chipset would have done a lot to help the Amiga in more general business applications.
But later on this wasn't an issue - the Amiga could display higher resolutions on monitors without flicker just like a PC. It is not true at all to say that this required abandoning the custom chipsets, as the updated chipsets were still custom, and backwards compatible. I happily ran 640x480 without interlace, and without needing whatever "grafted on solutions" you are referring to.
The stigma only stuck because most people used a TV, which was why the resolution was poor, and back then PCs couldn't use a TV at all (well, without additional hardware).
The situation you describe of needing to move onto graphics cards was well after Commodore went bust, so can hardly be seen as a cause of failure (if Commodore had still been around, presumably they'd have stuck updated chipsets - whether they were "custom" or generic like you get in Macs and laptops - into newer Amigas).
We were discussing a computationally intensive game, Populous. The increase in CPU speed also gave the ST a small edge in 3D graphics, which the Amiga's custom hardware couldn't help with.
Surely the 3D graphics in Populous weren't 3D in anywhere near the same sense as we know them today - I thought it was isometric graphics, i.e., just pasting 2D graphic images onto the screen. And the Amiga's custom hardware certainly was good at that.
Now imagine if all you classmates, with their celebrity loving subculture, had the same right to vote. Imagine what would happen if Madonna (Paris Hilton is too young) got into the White House.
And the general adult population isn't a celebrity loving culture? Yes, just image if a celebrity ever got elected!
but just downgrading anonymous comments would solve the problem of having to read the occasional real drivel. And it would do it without censorship.
Except this assumes that anonymous comments are more likely to be trolls/worthless than people who have signed up. I soon learned on Slashdot that this wasn't the case - plenty of anonymous comments are insightful, whilst logged in users talk rubbish, so I set my preferences so that anon comments don't get the -1 penalty. Suddenly it made reading here a lot nicer.
For blogs with low numbers of readers, I think it's better to just manually moderate/screen anonymous comments.