I have no interest in a PDA phone and neither do the vast majority of people.
But these people also have no interest in spending $500+ on a phone - instead they spend a fraction of the amount, and get one that still includes all the extra bits like camera and yes, mp3 player (I take your point about combining it with the ipod, but the hard disk size of the iphone places the mp3 capability more in the category of low end flash based players and other phones, and not an ipod which stores all your music).
So like it or not, those people who do want a $500 phone are going to be comparing to PDAs.
So, by having short copyright I can take Harry Potter, chop it up a bit, put a couple of different names in it and make a new book out of it? How does that work?
You could do that now with Shakespeare, so I don't see what the problem is. Whether you could make any money out of it is another matter.
WE need to pick an age, and make that age the global age limit.
To be safe, assume under 18 is in risky territory.
And that is why you won't get your international consensus.
Clearly, to get consensus, you should be looking at the minimum age of all countries, not the maximum! (Since countries can still keep their own laws with higher ages if they like, but they can't opt out with lower ages.)
Pick an age that clearly includes pre-adolescent children, and you will get a consensus . Trying to get the whole world to accept the idea that an image of a 17 year old is the same as an image of a child, then no, you won't.
That is debateable, but the bf should not take pictures of the 17 year old because he has a conscience, not because shes a child.
What is unethical about taking a photo of an adult who consents, for your own private mutual pleasure (i.e., we're not talking about taking a photo and spreading it online without someone's knowledge)?
If you have a gf who is underaged, don't take nude pictures of her.
In the UK, age of consent is 16, but photos are still illegal if of 16 and 17 year olds.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with your general point - there should be an international consensus at least on all pictures of those below a certain age (presumably pre-adolescent). But part of the problem is that many countries want to extend the laws to include all sorts of extra things, possibly things which most consider not to unethical in the first place (another example would be the issue of fake images - the UK wants to ban underage cartoon characters!) - ironically, it may be the attempts to expand the laws which cause disagreements, and prevent a proper international consensus.
Yeah, because a boxcutter is superior to a couple of rounds of frangible ammo at close range.
If guns were allowed, I doubt the terrorists would have stuck with boxcutters...
Didn't happen that way on Flight 93 though, did it? If accounts are correct, it was one trained judoka and a couple of other guys taking on the "superior" terrorists.
Doesn't this prove the point the other way round? - If it was so easy for them to do this without guns, then the question of why this didn't happen on the other flights is not to do with lack of guns.
The obvious answer is that no one had any idea what was going to happen - people assumed if they cooperated, they'd be okay. Even if someone did have a gun, you can't assume they'd have tried to be a hero, given the risks involved (especially with the terrorists all armed as well).
But now passengers are aware of what might happen - and the argument you make about Flight 93 argues in favour of not needing guns.
Also, thanks for the history lesson on MacOS 9 that was EIGHT years ago. Somehow, this is relevant today. Perhaps we should also discuss Windows 3.1.
Your timescales are off - MacOS X wasn't released until almost six years ago, when Windows 2000 (which I still happily use today) had been available for over a year; Windows 3.1 doesn't come anywhere near the same timeframe.
That's not what the link you gave says, Wikipedia supports that GB can be used for 2^30 bytes. Yes, a new definition has been introduced, but it has not replaced the old one.
With MySpace, your information is instantaneously available to not just your local weirdos but weirdos nation and world-wide.
If you choose to put it out there - you don't have to put your address and phone number on. I don't see why posting on MySpace is inherently more risky than posting on Slashdot.
Another problem with MySpace, people can create accounts for you and post information about you and you may be completely unawares.
This is true of everywhere on the Internet. Maybe someone could post all your details to Slashdot.
liberals actually try to fix human problems, rather than simplying claiming the magical free market will do so (despite the evidence that it hasn't and never will)
But surely someone who is economically liberal favours the free market.
This whole thread seems rather confusing - for example, the post you replied to I would have said those things most certainly do not apply to liberals, but apply to those who support a nanny/authoritarian state, which is the complete opposite.
I suspect part of the problem is that "liberal" means many things. There's liberal in an economic sense, there's liberal as opposed to authoritarianism, and there's liberal as opposed to conservatism (i.e., favouring change). These are often not compatible (e.g., "liberals" who oppose new far reaching draconian laws are actually being literally conservative, but the point is they are classed here as liberal as opposed to authoritarian).
Now who's using emotive language - it's not "nerve" when those involved have consented or it is simulated (as is the case when it comes to these porn sites, and is the case when people talk about "breathplay").
to choke somebody else in the middle of sex, but you can't quite bring yourself to call it "choking?"
Call it choking fetish, asphyxiation fetish, whatever you like, it's just that "choking fetish" isn't really a common term as far as I know, but I don't really care what you call it. There's no political correctness - in fact, you're the one being politically correct if you're insisting I use a different term for it.
You miss my point - I'm fine with him not being extradited due to it being a trivial matter, but by the same reasoning, the trivial matter of one broken window is not an argument to bring in legislation to censor the entire Internet.
The argument of him being out of the country applies to the servers too.
Just so we're clear, their logic is that the internet is a catalyst for youth vandalism?
Sadly a common theme. It reminds me of when a guy with a breathplay fetish was convicted of murdering someone, at which point there was a campaign to ban the porn sites he looked at (sites such as Necrobabes). The Government was unable to do this - because the sites are entirely legal and the US presumably wasn't willing to listen - so it has now responded by saying that anyone who possesses "extreme" porn will now go to prison for three years.
So if this follows a similar pattern, after realising they can't regulate the Internet, it'll instead be a criminal offence for UK citizens to view or possess images of schoolkids breaking windows.
And YouTube's servers aren't outside of the UK too?
It seems odd to me that the criminal moving out of the country means we give up trying to catch them, yet at the same time, they think they can control servers across the entire world...
I think there is a misnomer with the social networking on the internet. Social Networking is a legitimate human need. We are social animals. We crave human interaction. The internet presents sites that try to mimic this through some kind of interface like MySpace but they fail to achieve the real requirement of human to human contact.
The same could have been said of phones when they were introduced.
Sure, phones, video chat, emails, online discussions all mimic the social interaction we get in physical real life, but that doesn't mean it doesn't count as human contact. The point isn't that these replace physical contact, the point is that now people have more opportunities for communication with their friends whilst before they just watched TV or posted to Slashdot...
I too find it ironic that the English bitch so much about the US being a dominant super power when Great Britain used to be a much more dominating and way more savage super power than the US is.
Show me a post from someone who moans about the US, but supports the way Britain used to behave.
I've been to the UK a good few times and each time, I've been harassed by Airport security and police. Sometimes they made it blatantly obvious that they were harassing me because I'm Irish. Anyone I know that's ever been to England has also received similar hospitality.
Show me a post from someone who complains about treatment entering the US, but supports what you describe here.
The US is reacting to terrorism in a frighteningly similar manner to the way the Brits reacted to the struggle by nationalists in Ireland.
In what way? What countries did we invade?
And no, I don't think the paranoia is comparable - in fact, even the UK is now reacting to terrorism in a far more paranoid way than we did when the IRA were active. So no, I'm not US-bashing, I'm just pointing out how all Governments are behaving like this now.
I like to quote Bill Hicks in saying that all Governments are liars and murderers. There's no point in trying to turn this into some kind of US vs. Europe thing or even West vs. East thing.
Exactly! But no one has been trying to do this until someone brought up the UK and CCTV.
Eh? Where's the US bashing? If I'm worried about loss of privacy, then I'm bothered by both things that happen from the US and the UK.
I don't think "Well the US wants to take away my rights and the UK lets them, but the UK takes away my rights too, so that's okay then". That doesn't make sense at all.
I know, next time there's a post about rights being lost in the UK, let's instead say how that's okay, because of things which happen in the US.
I don't know why people always bring up CCTV and turn it into a US-vs-UK argument. There's no irony - UK citizens are not the ones choosing to have CCTV everywhere. It's perfectly possible to be annoyed about CCTV and to be annoyed about hassles travelling to the US.
Indeed, it's the UK Government being happy to hand our data (or ourselves, in the case of extradition), the same Government that has put up all the CCTV, so far from being ironic, it's entirely consistent.
The TV licensing people are the last people you ask for advice on this - they'll say you need a licence for just about anything, in an attempt to get your money.
What worries me more is that they're starting to think it'd be ok for them to lobby about computers being able to use a TV card and thus must come under the rules aswell.
A computer with a TV card counts as a TV, but a computer without such a card doesn't. However, they are trying to claim that all computers should count since they can download TV.
The flip side of this argument is that since I do have a licence, I fail to see why I shouldn't happily download any TV I want...
People must have some serious problems if they are taking the time to generate this kind of stuff.
Heaven forbid that people expend time and effort to get sexual gratification, in a manner which does not involve harm to others. Showing this level of ethics must represent serious problems.
And what about all those people who take the time to chat up women and go on dates, when it'd be far less effort to rape someone? They must have serious problems.
and whats constitutes porn? Provocative poses? Skimpy clothing? No Clothing? touching or not touching?
If the "extreme porn" proposals are anything to go by, porn will be defined as: "material that has been solely or primarily produced for the purpose of sexual arousal".
Note, there is no requirement for the image to be sexually explicit - so it need not involve sexual acts or nudity, this would cover anything which could be considered erotic.
It's also odd that laws about possession are based on assumptions on the intent of the producer. Quite how one is expected to know the mind of the producer when you are viewing a particular image on the Internet, I don't know.
Not only Kenny, one of my favourite Ghastly Comic Strips, where Crackle is ordered to shut his sissy mouth and take a big rubber cock, would now surely become illegal to possess. Up until now, I thought the only thing that might be violated other than Crackle's behind was trademark law.
I guess the real question is whether this starts down the slippery slope.
I think we're already on the slippery slope. Pseudo-photos of child porn were made illegal in 1994. My understanding of the difference is that that only covers things which appear to be a photo, so realistic images, photo manipulations etc. This new talk is about any depiction, including cartoons.
Other signs of the slippery slope are the extreme porn law also mentioned in the summary, extending the idea of fictional child abuse to any simulated sexual activity which might depict something showing serious harm, or could be likely to result in serious harm.
Furthermore, groups like mediawatch-uk are pushing for possession of a wider range of pornography to be a criminal offence, including R18 material. This includes any porn with sexual activity - so, film yourselves having sex, even for your own private use, and it's three years in prison! And the worry is that the Government appear to be listening to these campaign groups.
The slope is feeling very slippery.
It seems to me that there's a general push to make anything which might come under the Obscene Publications Act to also be illegal for possession, but the Government are pretending that this is more comparable to child porn laws than obscenity laws. And it's worse than that, in that these new laws do not require proof that the material would "corrupt and deprave", which is required for a conviction under the OPA.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no interest in a PDA phone and neither do the vast majority of people.
But these people also have no interest in spending $500+ on a phone - instead they spend a fraction of the amount, and get one that still includes all the extra bits like camera and yes, mp3 player (I take your point about combining it with the ipod, but the hard disk size of the iphone places the mp3 capability more in the category of low end flash based players and other phones, and not an ipod which stores all your music).
So like it or not, those people who do want a $500 phone are going to be comparing to PDAs.
A $300 phone which can't function as an mp3 player? That's pretty much standard in even cheap phones...
So, by having short copyright I can take Harry Potter, chop it up a bit, put a couple of different names in it and make a new book out of it? How does that work?
You could do that now with Shakespeare, so I don't see what the problem is. Whether you could make any money out of it is another matter.
WE need to pick an age, and make that age the global age limit.
To be safe, assume under 18 is in risky territory.
And that is why you won't get your international consensus.
Clearly, to get consensus, you should be looking at the minimum age of all countries, not the maximum! (Since countries can still keep their own laws with higher ages if they like, but they can't opt out with lower ages.)
Pick an age that clearly includes pre-adolescent children, and you will get a consensus . Trying to get the whole world to accept the idea that an image of a 17 year old is the same as an image of a child, then no, you won't.
That is debateable, but the bf should not take pictures of the 17 year old because he has a conscience, not because shes a child.
What is unethical about taking a photo of an adult who consents, for your own private mutual pleasure (i.e., we're not talking about taking a photo and spreading it online without someone's knowledge)?
If you have a gf who is underaged, don't take nude pictures of her.
In the UK, age of consent is 16, but photos are still illegal if of 16 and 17 year olds.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with your general point - there should be an international consensus at least on all pictures of those below a certain age (presumably pre-adolescent). But part of the problem is that many countries want to extend the laws to include all sorts of extra things, possibly things which most consider not to unethical in the first place (another example would be the issue of fake images - the UK wants to ban underage cartoon characters!) - ironically, it may be the attempts to expand the laws which cause disagreements, and prevent a proper international consensus.
Yeah, because a boxcutter is superior to a couple of rounds of frangible ammo at close range.
If guns were allowed, I doubt the terrorists would have stuck with boxcutters...
Didn't happen that way on Flight 93 though, did it? If accounts are correct, it was one trained judoka and a couple of other guys taking on the "superior" terrorists.
Doesn't this prove the point the other way round? - If it was so easy for them to do this without guns, then the question of why this didn't happen on the other flights is not to do with lack of guns.
The obvious answer is that no one had any idea what was going to happen - people assumed if they cooperated, they'd be okay. Even if someone did have a gun, you can't assume they'd have tried to be a hero, given the risks involved (especially with the terrorists all armed as well).
But now passengers are aware of what might happen - and the argument you make about Flight 93 argues in favour of not needing guns.
Also, thanks for the history lesson on MacOS 9 that was EIGHT years ago. Somehow, this is relevant today. Perhaps we should also discuss Windows 3.1.
Your timescales are off - MacOS X wasn't released until almost six years ago, when Windows 2000 (which I still happily use today) had been available for over a year; Windows 3.1 doesn't come anywhere near the same timeframe.
You could always run Vista via Bootcamp, which isn't a VM.
Which is completely useless for this context unless you enjoy rebooting everytime you want to switch between applications.
That's not what the link you gave says, Wikipedia supports that GB can be used for 2^30 bytes. Yes, a new definition has been introduced, but it has not replaced the old one.
There are still people like you? Sometimes, the first idea is a bad idea. When a better one comes along, people switch.
Yep, everyone has switched, it's just except him, and the OS used by most PCs on the planet.
you will realize that redefining common binary prefixes in one field but not another leads to confusion and ambiguity where those fields combine.
Not anywhere near as much as the confusion from redefining a common prefix in the same field...
With MySpace, your information is instantaneously available to not just your local weirdos but weirdos nation and world-wide.
If you choose to put it out there - you don't have to put your address and phone number on. I don't see why posting on MySpace is inherently more risky than posting on Slashdot.
Another problem with MySpace, people can create accounts for you and post information about you and you may be completely unawares.
This is true of everywhere on the Internet. Maybe someone could post all your details to Slashdot.
liberals actually try to fix human problems, rather than simplying claiming the magical free market will do so (despite the evidence that it hasn't and never will)
But surely someone who is economically liberal favours the free market.
This whole thread seems rather confusing - for example, the post you replied to I would have said those things most certainly do not apply to liberals, but apply to those who support a nanny/authoritarian state, which is the complete opposite.
I suspect part of the problem is that "liberal" means many things. There's liberal in an economic sense, there's liberal as opposed to authoritarianism, and there's liberal as opposed to conservatism (i.e., favouring change). These are often not compatible (e.g., "liberals" who oppose new far reaching draconian laws are actually being literally conservative, but the point is they are classed here as liberal as opposed to authoritarian).
You've got the nerve
Now who's using emotive language - it's not "nerve" when those involved have consented or it is simulated (as is the case when it comes to these porn sites, and is the case when people talk about "breathplay").
to choke somebody else in the middle of sex, but you can't quite bring yourself to call it "choking?"
Call it choking fetish, asphyxiation fetish, whatever you like, it's just that "choking fetish" isn't really a common term as far as I know, but I don't really care what you call it. There's no political correctness - in fact, you're the one being politically correct if you're insisting I use a different term for it.
You miss my point - I'm fine with him not being extradited due to it being a trivial matter, but by the same reasoning, the trivial matter of one broken window is not an argument to bring in legislation to censor the entire Internet.
The argument of him being out of the country applies to the servers too.
Just so we're clear, their logic is that the internet is a catalyst for youth vandalism?
Sadly a common theme. It reminds me of when a guy with a breathplay fetish was convicted of murdering someone, at which point there was a campaign to ban the porn sites he looked at (sites such as Necrobabes). The Government was unable to do this - because the sites are entirely legal and the US presumably wasn't willing to listen - so it has now responded by saying that anyone who possesses "extreme" porn will now go to prison for three years.
So if this follows a similar pattern, after realising they can't regulate the Internet, it'll instead be a criminal offence for UK citizens to view or possess images of schoolkids breaking windows.
And YouTube's servers aren't outside of the UK too?
It seems odd to me that the criminal moving out of the country means we give up trying to catch them, yet at the same time, they think they can control servers across the entire world...
I think there is a misnomer with the social networking on the internet. Social Networking is a legitimate human need. We are social animals. We crave human interaction. The internet presents sites that try to mimic this through some kind of interface like MySpace but they fail to achieve the real requirement of human to human contact.
The same could have been said of phones when they were introduced.
Sure, phones, video chat, emails, online discussions all mimic the social interaction we get in physical real life, but that doesn't mean it doesn't count as human contact. The point isn't that these replace physical contact, the point is that now people have more opportunities for communication with their friends whilst before they just watched TV or posted to Slashdot...
I too find it ironic that the English bitch so much about the US being a dominant super power when Great Britain used to be a much more dominating and way more savage super power than the US is.
Show me a post from someone who moans about the US, but supports the way Britain used to behave.
I've been to the UK a good few times and each time, I've been harassed by Airport security and police. Sometimes they made it blatantly obvious that they were harassing me because I'm Irish. Anyone I know that's ever been to England has also received similar hospitality.
Show me a post from someone who complains about treatment entering the US, but supports what you describe here.
The US is reacting to terrorism in a frighteningly similar manner to the way the Brits reacted to the struggle by nationalists in Ireland.
In what way? What countries did we invade?
And no, I don't think the paranoia is comparable - in fact, even the UK is now reacting to terrorism in a far more paranoid way than we did when the IRA were active. So no, I'm not US-bashing, I'm just pointing out how all Governments are behaving like this now.
I like to quote Bill Hicks in saying that all Governments are liars and murderers. There's no point in trying to turn this into some kind of US vs. Europe thing or even West vs. East thing.
Exactly! But no one has been trying to do this until someone brought up the UK and CCTV.
Eh? Where's the US bashing? If I'm worried about loss of privacy, then I'm bothered by both things that happen from the US and the UK.
I don't think "Well the US wants to take away my rights and the UK lets them, but the UK takes away my rights too, so that's okay then". That doesn't make sense at all.
I know, next time there's a post about rights being lost in the UK, let's instead say how that's okay, because of things which happen in the US.
I don't know why people always bring up CCTV and turn it into a US-vs-UK argument. There's no irony - UK citizens are not the ones choosing to have CCTV everywhere. It's perfectly possible to be annoyed about CCTV and to be annoyed about hassles travelling to the US.
Indeed, it's the UK Government being happy to hand our data (or ourselves, in the case of extradition), the same Government that has put up all the CCTV, so far from being ironic, it's entirely consistent.
I asked the TV licensing people
The TV licensing people are the last people you ask for advice on this - they'll say you need a licence for just about anything, in an attempt to get your money.
What worries me more is that they're starting to think it'd be ok for them to lobby about computers being able to use a TV card and thus must come under the rules aswell.
A computer with a TV card counts as a TV, but a computer without such a card doesn't. However, they are trying to claim that all computers should count since they can download TV.
The flip side of this argument is that since I do have a licence, I fail to see why I shouldn't happily download any TV I want...
People must have some serious problems if they are taking the time to generate this kind of stuff.
Heaven forbid that people expend time and effort to get sexual gratification, in a manner which does not involve harm to others. Showing this level of ethics must represent serious problems.
And what about all those people who take the time to chat up women and go on dates, when it'd be far less effort to rape someone? They must have serious problems.
and whats constitutes porn? Provocative poses? Skimpy clothing? No Clothing? touching or not touching?
If the "extreme porn" proposals are anything to go by, porn will be defined as: "material that has been solely or primarily produced for the purpose of sexual arousal".
Note, there is no requirement for the image to be sexually explicit - so it need not involve sexual acts or nudity, this would cover anything which could be considered erotic.
It's also odd that laws about possession are based on assumptions on the intent of the producer. Quite how one is expected to know the mind of the producer when you are viewing a particular image on the Internet, I don't know.
Not only Kenny, one of my favourite Ghastly Comic Strips, where Crackle is ordered to shut his sissy mouth and take a big rubber cock, would now surely become illegal to possess. Up until now, I thought the only thing that might be violated other than Crackle's behind was trademark law.
Whilst Crackle's age is unclear, he is certainly described as a child - "the good-hearted, fun middle child".
I guess the real question is whether this starts down the slippery slope.
I think we're already on the slippery slope. Pseudo-photos of child porn were made illegal in 1994. My understanding of the difference is that that only covers things which appear to be a photo, so realistic images, photo manipulations etc. This new talk is about any depiction, including cartoons.
Other signs of the slippery slope are the extreme porn law also mentioned in the summary, extending the idea of fictional child abuse to any simulated sexual activity which might depict something showing serious harm, or could be likely to result in serious harm.
Furthermore, groups like mediawatch-uk are pushing for possession of a wider range of pornography to be a criminal offence, including R18 material. This includes any porn with sexual activity - so, film yourselves having sex, even for your own private use, and it's three years in prison! And the worry is that the Government appear to be listening to these campaign groups.
The slope is feeling very slippery.
It seems to me that there's a general push to make anything which might come under the Obscene Publications Act to also be illegal for possession, but the Government are pretending that this is more comparable to child porn laws than obscenity laws. And it's worse than that, in that these new laws do not require proof that the material would "corrupt and deprave", which is required for a conviction under the OPA.