In the "good old days," all the people on your street used to know what you were up to. If you did something, the grapevine usually got that information to your folks before you got home. Of course it wasn't a perfect system and if you worked at it, you could hide your deeds from prying eyes (that's what tree forts were for).
And that's how it is on the Internet - Facebook is not public to everyone on the planet, and people use systems such as restricting content to a few people, or writing under a pseuodonym. And just like in real life, it's not perfect, but usually works good enough that it's better than not being online at all.
It I stalked you, took photos, made notes of everywhere you went in real life, and broadcast this information on national TV, that'd be okay, because if you wanted privacy you shouldn't have stepped out your front door?
Should be noted that there are allegations that Dr. Hawking is into either spousal abuse roleplay. Last years there were pictures of injuries to Dr. Hawking consistent with the above practice, a police inquiry was initiated; to this, Dr. Hawking responded: "mind your own business".
I presume that was supposed to be "either spousal abuse or roleplay";) I heard these rumours too... and yeah, if the latter, it should be mind your own business.
But if you're willing to pay the premium and trade money for time (presuming that owning a Mac results in a better experience and fewer headaches -- anecdotal evidence goes both ways, but seems to skew towards saying Macs are 'better' in this measure).
But my anecdotal evidence seems to skew towards saying PCs are better - how can this be?
Clearly, since this guy used a Commodore 64, the Government should criminalise possession of Commodore 64s! After all, it's the same logic used by the UK Government to justify criminalising images between consenting adults...
On that note, I can now see a plan to convert images to Amiga IFF format, and save them all onto Amiga formatted floppies...
Emulate an Amiga 3000? I'd like to believe you, but that particular machine is notoriously difficult to achieve anything near accurate emulation. Can I ask what you would use?
WinUAE ( http://www.winuae.net/ ) does the job well. I'm not sure how well the chipset emulation is these days, but the emulated CPU speed is way faster than the fastest 68060 Amigas that ever existed.
Is the latest version (or any version) of Java released with Windows and other OSes these days? I certainly remember it was common to have to download it with a browser.
Another example would be various GUI toolkits, including using IDEs like Borland Builder. Or any 3rd party library that someone might need, e.g., for example an image loading library.
I can see the reasoning for doing so, as you say, but this seems a bit of a hacky way round it. This is a particular problem for obscure non-mainstream OSs where a lot of useful additions have had to be added via 3rd party libraries. And how does it apply to operating systems themselves - couldn't Microsoft get away with keeping parts closed sourced by putting them in separate libraries, as those would be shipped with the OS?
There seems to be a fairly clear difference between portraying a rape in a film in order, e.g., to show the development of a character, and portraying a rape in a film in order to titillate the viewer.
But there are still films where, even though they have a plot and aren't considered "porn", still clearly have an erotic aspect. Would Crash for example be illegal under this law?
Of course, there will be borderline cases where we can't tell which one was intended, but there will still be fairly clear cases.
Given that we're talking about violent images, and not traditional porn which is about sex, I would say it would be incredibly hard in most cases to know what the intent was in making a particular violent image.
With normal porn it's easy - you have images of actual sex, or erect penises and semen flying around. But what about say, images of people covered in what looks like blood, pretend images of mutilated people, images of someone putting their hands around someone's neck (i.e., all faked/consensual)? How do you tell if these are porn, or something else like art, or real images taken by the media?
And, yes, laws do, and need to, take intentions into account. (It's only attempted murder if you intended to something lethal.)
Laws take into account the intention of the defendant. The problem here is it's the possession which is criminalised, but it's dependent on the intent of the person who produced it. And suppose the source of the image isn't even known (easily the case with the Internet)?
But the problem is that in some cases, it does replace "traditional" encyclopedias, news articles, and research in general. People are tending to go to wikipedia and ONLY wikipedia when looking up new information. And most people are reading Wpedia as gospel truth, thus any inaccuracy in Wpedia is going to likely become accepted as truth, whether or not it *is* truth.
But before these sorts of people weren't checking Britannica, they were checking #1 Google hit, and accepting it as truth. And Wikipedia easily outstrips news articles in terms of accuracy and neutral point of view.
It's bad enough, imo when people use a single source, esp. a secondary or teriary source as their only source in a serious report.
It's no better to be citing any encyclopedia in a serious report.
Worse still is when they trust the accuracy of people who don't leave their names or list credentials, which means that there is no chance of determining whether or not the person behind the page (or in the case of Wpedia) has any actual knowledge of the subject, has an agenda, or is a 12-year old having fun by reversing terms in that math equation.
The sorts of stupid people you describe are hardly going to be the people to dig out names and addresses and past histories of the particular person who wrote the news or encyclopedia article they just read.
When you seek medical advice, do you ask a doctor's opinion, or do you listen to someone who wishes he were a doctor?
Except no one is suggesting you go to Wikipedia rather than a doctor. If you know of an expert, then sure, talk to him.
And secondly, Wikipedia is not "someone who wishes he were a doctor" - instead it's a collection of statements sourced from doctors and other sources.
What Wikipedia is compared to are other reference sources - not "experts" - but anyone who writes a book, the media, and even websites. People are not replacing doctors with Wikipedia, instead they are replacing books, media, and Google searches, many of which have far more potential for bias and inaccuracy.
And yes, if I want to know about some potential controversial medical treatment, you're damn right I'd check out what Wikipedia has to say, to see if there are controversies, what they are, and where I can find out further information on the subject (yes, from experts).
Not everything is black and white in medicine - you have issues such as risks of certain treatments, side-effects to medication, and controversies over mental illness diagnoses. Any sensible person would try to find out more about these topics from a variety of people (both "experts", and people who were patients) and sources rather than accepting what their doctor says as 100% truth.
What worries me is not that people use Wikipedia, but that people live in this dream world where every non-Wikipedia material is taken as 100% truth.
"let's see... hrm, that's a class-M planet, that's a gas giant, that's a dead rock, all of these have moons and they're spherical and dominate their orbits, but hey, here's a neat looking body there dancing with another body, I guess that's a planet too, let's call it Mickey and forget the thing it's spinning with." Where does it end? We need a concise definition that works every time, no exceptions.
Well actually, now that you mention class-M planet... the Star Trek classification is rather detailed and thought out. I think we should use this!
(Really though, it does seem to me that there are different kinds of objects rather than things either being planets or non-planets and a class system would solve that debate. We use Classes for stars, so it's not like it's copying Star Trek entirely...)
You might be correct in that they are doing this for the attention.
It seems to me the other way round. Scientists have refined their terminology for their own purposes and now moved on, and there's a bunch of people complaining about "historical reasons", like it really matters. Seems to me it's these people who want the attention.
What you're missing in your rush to defend it, and to disagree with me (even though I think the plan is a good idea), is that most wikipedia users ARE "random" not-logged-in anonymous users. They're not registering accounts. They're not editing pages. They're using wikipedia as a resource. Those people will never see anything but the most recent "approved" page on version-flagged pages, and that takes away a certain amount of the "wiki" nature, at least from those pages.
Compared with currently protected pages, where they will never see those unapproved edits at all, because the unapproved edits could never be made!
I take your point though that it would be bad if more pages were put under this new system. I'd oppose that, and hope it only gets used in cases where protection would currently be needed.
When you have logins, you might have a better chance of tracking vandals across pages. So when you find one instance of vandalism and see what user did it, you can ban that user, but then you can look at their past changes and see if they've caused any other vandalism that you've missed.
But you can do this with anon users by looking at the IP.
Otherwise, it's pretty easy (and I think frequent) for the same vandal to make multiple attacks from a few different computers (say at school, at home, and at the library) and banning one IP wouldn't do anything, nor would it show you any of the other instances of vandalism. And of course, it results in a lot of "innocent" IP's getting banned.
And it's even easier for a vandal to have several accounts, and banning one account wouldn't do anything.
Anyway, I think it makes the process for tracking down vandalism a little different, but not necessarily that much harder.
I'll accept that, but that's my point really - whilst people might say it helps stop vandalism in some ways, in other ways it is worse, and there is no overall benefit. But on top of that, you potentially lose good edits from users who can't be bothered to get an account (I have seen many good edits from anons). If overall it doesn't help the vandalism issue, why introduce the restriction?
Utter rubbish. The communities for consensual acts (which these laws would also cover) make it quite clear the distinction between consensual and non-consensual acts. People are capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality - it seems to me that it is those who favour these laws have trouble distinguishing the two.
Furthermore, this law would criminalise these communities which emphasise consent, but still leave any ones where non-consensual violence is encouraged. And that's a good thing?
All that is changing here is that posession of this material is also going to be made illegal. I confess that making it illegal to sell something but legal to buy it never made a whole lot of sense to me
People who take photos of their own private acts? People who give images to their friends but don't publish them to everyone?
And even if we accept the absurd notion that these images cause harm to those who view it, then the harm is caused by the person creating and selling the material, not someone who buys it (who are they harming?)
It's worse than that though - a knife can at least be used to kill someone. An image can't.
This is nothing more than correlation (and correlation based on a study of 1 person, so it's not really correlation!) A better analogy would be banning food, because 1 murderer ate food.
But even if we accepted this study, this is an argument to criminalise all porn.
Clearly no Government will get away with doing that - what I object is that they seek to persecute a minority of the population, simply because they can get away with it.
Many women's groups in the US argue that any pornography is violent and demeaning to women by its very nature.
Indeed, there were responses to the consultation from "Women's groups" arguing for even tighter controls, claiming that all porn is degrading. That's what worries me - much of this isn't really about the supposed effects of "extreme" material, but instead has been hijacked by the anti-porn groups.
Where will these "women's groups" be when a woman is prosecuted for private images she possesses?
ISTR there was also a reponse from "Feminists Against Censorship" though...
However, I think we should not allow anonymous edits! I think it would help a lot. An account IS free after all.
Right, so now all the vandals get accounts.
The proposal is that anonymous edits will be hidden until marked okay by logged in users. With your solution, we've no longer got this distinction, so we're back to people vandalising again.
The idea is that we can make use of the fact that vandals are more likely not to bother registering. Another example is that I pay more attention to recent changes made by anonymous edits. However, as soon as everyone has an account, checking for vandalism becomes far more time consuming.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely RSS is pull? The reader has to decide which RSS feeds he wants to read, unlike say email which is pushed to him.
In the "good old days," all the people on your street used to know what you were up to. If you did something, the grapevine usually got that information to your folks before you got home. Of course it wasn't a perfect system and if you worked at it, you could hide your deeds from prying eyes (that's what tree forts were for).
And that's how it is on the Internet - Facebook is not public to everyone on the planet, and people use systems such as restricting content to a few people, or writing under a pseuodonym. And just like in real life, it's not perfect, but usually works good enough that it's better than not being online at all.
It I stalked you, took photos, made notes of everywhere you went in real life, and broadcast this information on national TV, that'd be okay, because if you wanted privacy you shouldn't have stepped out your front door?
Well children obviously do have rights - but more to the point, what about the rights of someone hosting a website?
The academic equivalent of a resume.
Actually in the UK it's used to mean any resume, academic or not.
Should be noted that there are allegations that Dr. Hawking is into either spousal abuse roleplay. Last years there were pictures of injuries to Dr. Hawking consistent with the above practice, a police inquiry was initiated; to this, Dr. Hawking responded: "mind your own business".
;) I heard these rumours too ... and yeah, if the latter, it should be mind your own business.
I presume that was supposed to be "either spousal abuse or roleplay"
So make it a small "tower". The point is, make it separate.
But if you're willing to pay the premium and trade money for time (presuming that owning a Mac results in a better experience and fewer headaches -- anecdotal evidence goes both ways, but seems to skew towards saying Macs are 'better' in this measure).
But my anecdotal evidence seems to skew towards saying PCs are better - how can this be?
Clearly, since this guy used a Commodore 64, the Government should criminalise possession of Commodore 64s! After all, it's the same logic used by the UK Government to justify criminalising images between consenting adults...
On that note, I can now see a plan to convert images to Amiga IFF format, and save them all onto Amiga formatted floppies...
Reminds me of this guy who was arrested for "looking suspicious" - I wonder what the police made of his BeBox...
Emulate an Amiga 3000? I'd like to believe you, but that particular machine is notoriously difficult to achieve anything near accurate emulation. Can I ask what you would use?
WinUAE ( http://www.winuae.net/ ) does the job well. I'm not sure how well the chipset emulation is these days, but the emulated CPU speed is way faster than the fastest 68060 Amigas that ever existed.
Is the latest version (or any version) of Java released with Windows and other OSes these days? I certainly remember it was common to have to download it with a browser.
Another example would be various GUI toolkits, including using IDEs like Borland Builder. Or any 3rd party library that someone might need, e.g., for example an image loading library.
I can see the reasoning for doing so, as you say, but this seems a bit of a hacky way round it. This is a particular problem for obscure non-mainstream OSs where a lot of useful additions have had to be added via 3rd party libraries. And how does it apply to operating systems themselves - couldn't Microsoft get away with keeping parts closed sourced by putting them in separate libraries, as those would be shipped with the OS?
There seems to be a fairly clear difference between portraying a rape in a film in order, e.g., to show the development of a character, and portraying a rape in a film in order to titillate the viewer.
But there are still films where, even though they have a plot and aren't considered "porn", still clearly have an erotic aspect. Would Crash for example be illegal under this law?
Of course, there will be borderline cases where we can't tell which one was intended, but there will still be fairly clear cases.
Given that we're talking about violent images, and not traditional porn which is about sex, I would say it would be incredibly hard in most cases to know what the intent was in making a particular violent image.
With normal porn it's easy - you have images of actual sex, or erect penises and semen flying around. But what about say, images of people covered in what looks like blood, pretend images of mutilated people, images of someone putting their hands around someone's neck (i.e., all faked/consensual)? How do you tell if these are porn, or something else like art, or real images taken by the media?
And, yes, laws do, and need to, take intentions into account. (It's only attempted murder if you intended to something lethal.)
Laws take into account the intention of the defendant. The problem here is it's the possession which is criminalised, but it's dependent on the intent of the person who produced it. And suppose the source of the image isn't even known (easily the case with the Internet)?
But the problem is that in some cases, it does replace "traditional" encyclopedias, news articles, and research in general. People are tending to go to wikipedia and ONLY wikipedia when looking up new information. And most people are reading Wpedia as gospel truth, thus any inaccuracy in Wpedia is going to likely become accepted as truth, whether or not it *is* truth.
But before these sorts of people weren't checking Britannica, they were checking #1 Google hit, and accepting it as truth. And Wikipedia easily outstrips news articles in terms of accuracy and neutral point of view.
It's bad enough, imo when people use a single source, esp. a secondary or teriary source as their only source in a serious report.
It's no better to be citing any encyclopedia in a serious report.
Worse still is when they trust the accuracy of people who don't leave their names or list credentials, which means that there is no chance of determining whether or not the person behind the page (or in the case of Wpedia) has any actual knowledge of the subject, has an agenda, or is a 12-year old having fun by reversing terms in that math equation.
The sorts of stupid people you describe are hardly going to be the people to dig out names and addresses and past histories of the particular person who wrote the news or encyclopedia article they just read.
When you seek medical advice, do you ask a doctor's opinion, or do you listen to someone who wishes he were a doctor?
Except no one is suggesting you go to Wikipedia rather than a doctor. If you know of an expert, then sure, talk to him.
And secondly, Wikipedia is not "someone who wishes he were a doctor" - instead it's a collection of statements sourced from doctors and other sources.
What Wikipedia is compared to are other reference sources - not "experts" - but anyone who writes a book, the media, and even websites. People are not replacing doctors with Wikipedia, instead they are replacing books, media, and Google searches, many of which have far more potential for bias and inaccuracy.
And yes, if I want to know about some potential controversial medical treatment, you're damn right I'd check out what Wikipedia has to say, to see if there are controversies, what they are, and where I can find out further information on the subject (yes, from experts).
Not everything is black and white in medicine - you have issues such as risks of certain treatments, side-effects to medication, and controversies over mental illness diagnoses. Any sensible person would try to find out more about these topics from a variety of people (both "experts", and people who were patients) and sources rather than accepting what their doctor says as 100% truth.
What worries me is not that people use Wikipedia, but that people live in this dream world where every non-Wikipedia material is taken as 100% truth.
"let's see... hrm, that's a class-M planet, that's a gas giant, that's a dead rock, all of these have moons and they're spherical and dominate their orbits, but hey, here's a neat looking body there dancing with another body, I guess that's a planet too, let's call it Mickey and forget the thing it's spinning with." Where does it end? We need a concise definition that works every time, no exceptions.
Well actually, now that you mention class-M planet... the Star Trek classification is rather detailed and thought out. I think we should use this!
(Really though, it does seem to me that there are different kinds of objects rather than things either being planets or non-planets and a class system would solve that debate. We use Classes for stars, so it's not like it's copying Star Trek entirely...)
You might be correct in that they are doing this for the attention.
It seems to me the other way round. Scientists have refined their terminology for their own purposes and now moved on, and there's a bunch of people complaining about "historical reasons", like it really matters. Seems to me it's these people who want the attention.
What you're missing in your rush to defend it, and to disagree with me (even though I think the plan is a good idea), is that most wikipedia users ARE "random" not-logged-in anonymous users. They're not registering accounts. They're not editing pages. They're using wikipedia as a resource. Those people will never see anything but the most recent "approved" page on version-flagged pages, and that takes away a certain amount of the "wiki" nature, at least from those pages.
Compared with currently protected pages, where they will never see those unapproved edits at all, because the unapproved edits could never be made!
I take your point though that it would be bad if more pages were put under this new system. I'd oppose that, and hope it only gets used in cases where protection would currently be needed.
When you have logins, you might have a better chance of tracking vandals across pages. So when you find one instance of vandalism and see what user did it, you can ban that user, but then you can look at their past changes and see if they've caused any other vandalism that you've missed.
But you can do this with anon users by looking at the IP.
Otherwise, it's pretty easy (and I think frequent) for the same vandal to make multiple attacks from a few different computers (say at school, at home, and at the library) and banning one IP wouldn't do anything, nor would it show you any of the other instances of vandalism. And of course, it results in a lot of "innocent" IP's getting banned.
And it's even easier for a vandal to have several accounts, and banning one account wouldn't do anything.
Anyway, I think it makes the process for tracking down vandalism a little different, but not necessarily that much harder.
I'll accept that, but that's my point really - whilst people might say it helps stop vandalism in some ways, in other ways it is worse, and there is no overall benefit. But on top of that, you potentially lose good edits from users who can't be bothered to get an account (I have seen many good edits from anons). If overall it doesn't help the vandalism issue, why introduce the restriction?
Because these laws do not just cover "advocacy" of non-consensual acts.
Utter rubbish. The communities for consensual acts (which these laws would also cover) make it quite clear the distinction between consensual and non-consensual acts. People are capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality - it seems to me that it is those who favour these laws have trouble distinguishing the two.
Furthermore, this law would criminalise these communities which emphasise consent, but still leave any ones where non-consensual violence is encouraged. And that's a good thing?
All that is changing here is that posession of this material is also going to be made illegal. I confess that making it illegal to sell something but legal to buy it never made a whole lot of sense to me
People who take photos of their own private acts?
People who give images to their friends but don't publish them to everyone?
And even if we accept the absurd notion that these images cause harm to those who view it, then the harm is caused by the person creating and selling the material, not someone who buys it (who are they harming?)
It's worse than that though - a knife can at least be used to kill someone. An image can't.
This is nothing more than correlation (and correlation based on a study of 1 person, so it's not really correlation!) A better analogy would be banning food, because 1 murderer ate food.
But even if we accepted this study, this is an argument to criminalise all porn.
Clearly no Government will get away with doing that - what I object is that they seek to persecute a minority of the population, simply because they can get away with it.
Many women's groups in the US argue that any pornography is violent and demeaning to women by its very nature.
Indeed, there were responses to the consultation from "Women's groups" arguing for even tighter controls, claiming that all porn is degrading. That's what worries me - much of this isn't really about the supposed effects of "extreme" material, but instead has been hijacked by the anti-porn groups.
Where will these "women's groups" be when a woman is prosecuted for private images she possesses?
ISTR there was also a reponse from "Feminists Against Censorship" though...
However, I think we should not allow anonymous edits! I think it would help a lot. An account IS free after all.
Right, so now all the vandals get accounts.
The proposal is that anonymous edits will be hidden until marked okay by logged in users. With your solution, we've no longer got this distinction, so we're back to people vandalising again.
The idea is that we can make use of the fact that vandals are more likely not to bother registering. Another example is that I pay more attention to recent changes made by anonymous edits. However, as soon as everyone has an account, checking for vandalism becomes far more time consuming.