One of the terms is that the univ. cannot disclose the terms of the agreement. If part of that agreement is "cannot use Linux on-campus", they can't disclose it.
FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) is a particular type of BS where the liar is a propagandist who produces a cloud of vague assertions to instill a general sense of worry about how good something is. Microsoft is known for doing this toward Linux, since it is very hard to come up with concrete points of criticism where their products win.
While you're right that this particular issue does not warrant someone calling Ashcroft a Nazi, neither is it likely that they suddenly formed their opinion about Ashcroft from this single incident. Furthermore, the Bush administration has more parallels with Hitler's Nazi administration than any US administration since, and Ashcroft is probably one of the most similar figures -- he is uber-authoritarian, promotes the idea of the government setting the people's ethics, advocates large-scale domestic spying and analysis, opposes oversight of the government by the administration, plays fear games with "terrorists" as a boogeyman, and has steadily pushed for and recieved unprescedented police powers.
My guess is more that it's a typical IT ("We can't do that because of [insert stupid, simple, and potentially disasterous technical reason]") BS statement. The real reason is probably more along the lines of "We don't have funding to do this", "Someone in the administration will get pissed at me if we do this", "I don't feel like doing this", "I don't like you", "I'm too busy to handle this", "I don't want to risk *touching* this thing because any interactions have some possibility of placing me open to blame for taking it down, and that would get me in trouble", etc. He probably didn't think this would get as far as Slashdot.
Oh, IANAL as well. Pretty much assumed unless "AIAL" is included. That's just my reading.
I certainly appreciate what you've done, and I'm not trying to attack it, but better to be safe than sorry, you know? I've seen some nice volunteer folks get horribly screwed over by rather nasty people that bought someone else out or changed their minds (Blizzard and bnetd, SCO and Linux), and I wouldn't want someone distributing your software (say, Red Hat) to get nailed because there might have been a mistaken reading of a legal bit.
Unfortunately, on the internet it's also pretty easy to get the idea that sex with animals and with "women" with male genitilia are commonplace.
You know, they aren't exactly uncommon. The best network engineer I know is a transvestite, I've a couple of friends that are homosexual, and beastiality is not uncommon -- look at somewhere where such behavior is less forcibly covered up, like Sweden. Remember the recent series of world news articles about the increasing number of pets in Sweden that required medical attention after sexual activity with humans? People just aren't interested in being open about their sexual practices if there's a massive effort to villify them for it.
They're also likely to get the idea that only women that look like young teenage girls are really desirable
No, I don't agree. Sexual desire is pretty low-level, or else it wouldn't universally surface (even without interaction with the Internet!) It may be that it comes out that women that look like young teenage girls are more sexually desireable than our current "equality in appearance" post-feminist social-movement society would like you to believe, but "only" is absurd.
and that they should have as many sexual partners as physically possible at one time.
"Should"? As in, from an ethical standpoint? I don't know of anyone that has their ethics visibly set by random porn websites. It might make them interested in trying sex with multiple people, but that's quite a different thing than setting their ideals.
I'm glad you said that. It is a major problem especially considering porn turns women into sex objects and therefor invalid in terms of having feelings or being human.
It focuses on a single attribute of the actors/actresses, yes. Frequently these people have big breasts or large penises.
How is this any worse than any *other* character represented in any form of mass media? I mean, I don't get to see all sides of, say, Will Smith. Only a funny, irreverent side of him is portrayed. He might be a very serious, introspective person in real life, who speaks perfect traditional English.
As for unrealistic expectations, Olympic atheletes will be more fit than I ever will be, and Michael Moore will probably be more famous than I ever will be. The lead in a romance will never have irritable days or be thoughtless, as a real person would. I don't understand why you single out porn for producing unrealistic expections or objectification when all mass media does the same thing.
The right to treat people as anything less than human and with some degree of respect isn't actually a right.
Well, technically it is a legal right in the United States, as it is covered by the First Amendment and not specifically amended with exemptions regarding dignity.
However, that's really not your point, and I can understand that -- you mean that "People shouldn't treat people without respect." I agree that this is nice as an ideal to strive for, but I'm not sure that I'm comfortable forcing people to do so -- and porn is nowhere *near* the primary source of people in my life and in the culture of America that are not treated with respect.
We're going to have an entire generation of kids who are completely jaded concerning sex while simultaneously haveing all kinds of complexes because their boobs, penis, butt, etc. is too small.
How is this different from *any* form of large-scale media where the "best in a field" are chosen? The Olympics? Pro sports? Actors who pretend to be inhumanly comptent police detectives or car drivers? I mean, don't get me wrong, I can understand the issue that you're raising, but I don't understand how porn is a significant source of it. Mass media can cause people to have unrealistic expectations unless they lean to deal with them.
The fact that there are so many titty bars and so much porn proves there are many many (probably hypocritical) people out there consuming this product.
I think that adults generally advocate isolating children from sexual material. This would allow them to treat themselves as "distinct, not involved". It's kind of like sending someone else's kids off to fight in a war -- you have a mental justification for excluding yourself from the affected group.
Christianity in its purer forms, without dogma attached, is not, by my reading, particularly violent. One "turns the other cheek", rather than "strikes back". The invasion of Afghanistan, for instance, was a singularly un-Christian act.
However, there is a lot of culture tied up in the thing, and when one combines a set of culture with religion, one gets a stunningly persistent set of social institutions (look around the world at how influential these are).
So wouldn't that be solved by legitimizing the pornography industry, and by treating pornography actors with the respect that more conventional actors/actresses recieve?
Plus, it's hardly as if porn would be a dominant cause of this. I mean, if you want to ban porn because it encourages objectification of humans, surely you'd take greater issue with things like waiters, who are expected to act subservient in *real life*, directly to people?
The simple reason parents don't want their kids knowing about sex is because kids are stupid and will get knocked up or knock someone else up and the parents don't want to deal with that shit. It's not about their kids being addicted, or rapists, or any of that shit. Parents don't want to see their kids throw their lives away by becoming a parent at 16.
So...I don't know of *anyone* who didn't know the ins and the outs (no pun intended) of sex, whether or not they'd had it, at sixteen. I knew of a lot of people whose *parents* thought that their kids never discussed sex or sexual topics, but no kids.
It doesn't seem that preventing people from acquiring sexual knowledge is *possible*, and in a day and age of safe abortions and inexpensive, reliable birth control, I'd be curious as to why you consider it more feasible to engage in a massive and mind-boggling expensive information suppression campaign (the War on Drugs is a drop in the bucket compared to the War on Sex) than to just supply contraceptives and other stuff. That all assumes that the real issue is unplanned parenthood, and not
Also, how do you deal with the argument that kids with access to porn and not rabidly discouraged from masturbation to relieve sexual urges are *less* likely to lose control and go out and have sex with someone, resulting in pregnancy?
If a poster agrees that the sight of boobies isn't really likely to harm a child, then you're going to use it as evidence for your first contention, that pornography in general doesn't harm children.
This is not about Janet jackson's nipple or something similarly trivial (No offense Janet), it's about depictions of all sorts, from basic hetero or homo-sex to beastiality, S & M, and scat, and beyond.
Aren't you doing the same? He's using a very minimal example, and you're using an extreme example.
How many people fixate during their earliest sexual experiences? Most of them. Males vey often end up being leg men or breast men, preferring blondes or redheads, or having a phillia for garterbelts or high heels because such things are mentally connected to their first masturbatory or intercourse experiences. (It's just a harmless philia if you find high heels an interesting addition to a woman, whereas it's pathological if you desire sex with your collection of stolen high heels).
Sounds plausible. Can you provide a link to a major study that supports your insinuation that viewing unconventional sexual acts produces sexual interests of the same type, and then justify your assumption that this is a bad thing (as opposed to a focus on hetero, missionary sex)?
Even real psychos, such as Ted Bundy, usually have more normal fixations as well, (Bundy had a thing for long, straight haired bruinettes). If Bundy hadn't decided to become a serial killer (or been exposed to whatever influences made him one if you prefer) he would still likely have been the type to focus really hard on just one physical type of woman.
"Whatever influences made him one"? What are you implying, that porn made Bundy a serial killer? Heck, how do you know that porn wouldn't have let Bundy work off his fantasies in a non-damaging way? Each possibility is equally unjustified.
All of this suggests some pornography can well be harmful to minors.
(a) "Can well" is an awfully weak statement. Walking across the street "could well" be a fatal decision. If you want to claim that, say, homosexual behavior is doubled after the presence of below-18 homosexual pornography exposure, and can justify such a claim, then we can move along to the phase where you argue why this would be a bad thing, and then you can top it off with why you think all of society should be restricted by rules that may depend on your specific values.
(b) I haven't seen anything but suggestion. You've done nothing but engage in classic propaganda technique, mentioning awful but unrelated things to try to build associations in your readers' heads. You immediately mentioned " beastiality, S & M, and scat, and beyond." in justifying a ban affecting "basic heterosex". You rapidly moved on to mentioning sexual interests that reach to the point of negatively affecting someone's life, again without tying your mention to a pornography-based cause at all. Then you included, out of the blue, an anecdotatal reference to a serial killer and provided absolutely zero association between him and pornography. You then had two sentences referring to things that you didn't talk about, and then feel that what you've written is, in some way, convincing that pornography has negative social impact? You've *got* to be joking.
It is quite possible that it does damage to children who are passing through one of their sexual development phases
Really? Would you be so kind as to provide, y'know, a link or something, or is this just something that sounds plausible to you?
or who have a more than average tendency to fixate, and it could be argued that some children are at relatively little risk, but the high risk group is a sizable one (estimated at around 30% of the current population of children)
Now, we've got a number. This is interested. I assume that you *could* provide a reference to support this, but just chose not to actually do so. I also
I ask whether child pornogrpahy causes social problems every time we get a "Brits in another child porn online spat" article posted, and I still maintain a pretty healthy friends/foes ratio.
It's rare that questioning things that you see as illogical is bad. Being silent for the sake of being politically correct is just silly.
Despite the first amendment, there are restrictions on what you can say in America.
Yes, but your argument is a straw man. The restrictions are very limited -- things that can cause direct physical damage (the "FIRE" in a crowded theater) or false and damaging claims (libel and slander). We have a definition of "obscene" speech, but in general we've been moving to be come more liberal about it.
A sensible restriction would be self-classification of pornographers into a.XXX TLD, with jail time and other punishments only for those who attempt to sneak into.COM and others.
That's absurd. XXX has been proposed before, considered by many intelligent people who have repeatedly shot it down for a number of excellent reasons. First, you have to defined *what* a "porn site" is. That means trying to clean the rest of the web of "obscene" speech, using the only existing legal definition we have that might apply. What is porn to one person is not to another. Should Freud's or McKinsey's work be placed in.xxx, since it contains information that the religious right finds disturbing? Second, you're trying to legislate things *world-wide* -- or if not, you're not going to do much good, as www.sexybabes.co.br is quite feasible, and you can't reasonably block all of Brazil.
This would allow respectable ISPs such as AOL to block all pornographers simply by blocking.XXX
What good do you propose this would do?
However it is completely irresponsible of the court to have struck down the only law protecting America's nearly forty million Internet-savvy children from the horrors (and yes, there are HORRORS on the Internet... child pornography, sadomasochism, rape, anything Satan can imagine...) being peddled at sites with otherwise innocuous names.
There are *pictures* of such things. Real life contains untimely death, drug addiction, terminal disease, estranged parents, and many, far, far worse things. With all those issues to deal with, you're worrying about text and images? Have you lost your mind? I can understand you being upset about someone being raped in real life, but rape-themed pornography? Who *cares*?
Let me tell you a story. My aunt's niece Dorothy got a file in email from me called "reunion_photos.zip"
Wouldn't that be, y'know, either a cousin or a sister, not "aunt's niece"?
a bundle of photos from our family reunion. She asked her aunt what to do with a.zip file, and was told she needed to "unzip the file". So of course Dorothy opened up Internet Explorer and typed "www.unzip.com"*.
And you could come up with all manner of equally improbable interactions in real life. Someone might say "we need hustle", and said girl obtaining a copy of "Hustler".
I won't even describe what happened that day- the shock, the screaming, the tears... but it was horrible. Children should be given some warning before seeing grown women stripped and tied to walls. And this law was all we had.
Instead of screaming, wouldn't it have been easier to explain that, y'know, said women were paid actresses who were acting out being tied up, rather than trying to traumatize the girl? Why do we have such an immature approach to sex in this country?
I mean, Christ, what do you do when Dorthy sees a flaming wreck on a TV movie with people getting killed in the crash? Is that okay to just laugh off?
1) Kids are not going to 'stumble' across pr0n. They are going to go out looking for it.
I disagree with the first sentence. It is quite possible to stumble across porn. Any teacher or lecture giver or someone in a "dignified" situation who is using Internet Explorer and has had porn pop-ups come up can attest to this.
On the other hand, I agree with the second. If you expect Johnny isn't going to look for porn at some point, you're just plain stupid. And if you honestly think that said porn or potential subsequent masturbation is going to taint/twist him, either you're living in a religious commune, or you're vastly unaware of the world around you. If you think that you're going to *stop* Johnny from seeing nudity (or that Johnny is going to magically become more able to deal with nudity at some age after living in a sheltered environment, you're dreaming).
2) The primary responsibility for children who browse the net, lies not with the government, or lawmakers, or ISPs, or pr0n websites, or even the owner of the computer. It lies with their parents.
I always thought that this was rather a bullshit argument. There's nothing inherently wrong with the government assisting parents in doing something that they're voting for. I do take issue with the associated problems of (a) the impact on other people, (b) the fact that the whole thing is entirely unrealistic, and (c) the fact that this is largely a religious agenda that the government should be keeping it's paws out of.
3) Pr0n is not the work of satan, despite what many(including 4 S.C. judges) believe. People need a more mature attidude towards sex.
Second that. Even the fact that you used a euphamism ("pr0n") instead of "pornography" drives home the fact that a good many people have worked hard to mentally attach shame and disquiet to the term "pornography".
The Internet changed all of that, and kids today use the Internet for just about anything, including breaking the law and viewing pornography. Isn't technology wonderful?
Did you not own an audio cassette deck capable of tape duplication? You never saw people copying audio or VHS tapes? The Internet wasn't the dawn of copyright infringement. It's a useful tool -- the Internet is designed for data transfer, and it can be used more efficiently, but it's nothing more than that.
As for porn...what exactly is *wrong* with someone seeing porn? I don't mean some sort of vague emotional feeling somewhere induced by years of religious or cultural indoctrination...I mean, flat out, what specific pragmatic issues do you have with someone seeing porn?
Make the kid paranoid that he's going to be walked in on every few minutes, and it will opening that site the same as trying to sneak a dirty magazine in the house.
Do you consider this a healthy psychological state of affairs?
The exemption is *only* WRT reverse-engineering on anti-circumvention on software to which you are able to do what you're doing under copyright law. It does *not* provide a new fair-use exemption under copyright law.
The DMCA's clauses providing exemptions for reverse engineering to ensure compatibility do not extend to shielding one from copyright infringement. The original work is still copyrighted. Just because you (may) not be hit by the DMCA's anticircumvention laws doesn't mean that you are legally clear in regard to the actual copyright on the software. You have modified a disassembled copy of the original (rather than producing a clone, which would be legal), and hence are distributing a derivative copy of a copyrighted work to which you do not own the copyright or a license to the copyright. The DMCA doesn't concern you -- traditional copyright law does.
The clause in the DMCA gives the example of the Internet Archive needing to be able to put software to which they *have rights* and are not infringing on copyright ("If the Internet Archive is given computer software..."). The exemption only allows them to modify the software. It does not grant them more rights under copyright law.
The extent of this ruling is to cover people that write and apply cracks that allow software to run on newer media formats that would otherwise not have the right to do so (If the CD becomes obsolete, it is legal to bypass Safe CD). It does not mean that any works that are protected by Safe CD become public domain.
It is possible that Silas' widow owns the copyright, if Silas published his own game. In this case, she probably *does* have the ability to grant you distribution rights, and you're fine.
Didn't any of these people know enough to think that no reports are magically sent to Microsoft when you e-mail someone?
Microsoft produces a major e-mail server (Exchange) and the dominant email clients (Outlook/Outlook Express). I agree that this email is stupid; that being said, if anyone could orchestrate a system where a special header passing through a system triggered a message being sent to Microsoft, it would be Microsoft.
(... imagine the privacy implications!)
Microsoft advocates *Passport* as a global authentication system, which lets them obtain your personal information and monitor who you are authenticating yourself to anytime, anywhere. You think they'd be concerned about the privacy issues involved with passing on an email?
Or have enough elementary business sense to realize that Microsoft won't just send people money for nothing?
Microsoft hands out a web browser and an email client "for nothing". A lot of companies are willing to take a short-term loss for some kind of gain. If there was some huge marketing advantage to knowing something about how email or ideas propagate, I could see this being worthwhile (though perhaps not in the sums that Microsoft is using). Knowing which people know which people can be terribly valuable information when designing marketing campaigns, and this would provide a neat graph. Microsoft *did* in fact do something similar to this when it purchased Hotmail, which allows it to harvest email addresses and derive social graphs that determine who knows and interacts with whom, and how quickly ideas and memes flow. The marketing information inherent in aggregate data derived from Hotmail's contents is incredibly valuable. Suppose "Spiderman 2" marketing goes out, and a bunch of derived data from emails containing "Spiderman 2" in one of the world's largest email systems was made commercially available? How much would you, as the Marketing Director involved, pay to know what people in Phoenix, Arizona were privately saying about your film and your ads? Would it be worth a million dollars to avoid mis-targeting your next multi-million-dollar marketing campaign element?
PS. This defence speech was not meant to say that MS currently applies such a judgement. They are currently doing a sloppy job - no doubt about that. Go get them, Spot! Bite!
The problem is also that they *deliberately* ignored security problems for years, failing to establish barriers within software. IE is a massive security problem for Windows, because it crosses so many boundaries -- it is the update system, a web browser, the file browser, and provides many services to other applications -- it can be used by apps to slip by spyware blockers, or to use a hole of the huge and impossible to properly secure IE to exploit one of its many allowed capabilities.
Really, this is an issue settled by termination of the employee responsible for not keeping a good record of patches and updates
Why is it so frequently MS's official response to security problems with their software "fire/blame the IT people responsible for maintaining the software, as they didn't deploy the patch that we released two weeks ago?"
It's counterproductive and stupid, as nobody buys it as an excuse for insecure software, and it pisses off the very people that will have input into purchasing in the future.
1) Ability of running any Windows shortcut or folder within the browser or explorer.
You absolutely do not want this. The mingling of file browser and web browser are what cause a huge number of IE security holes.
You could probably just set up a helper or something, but you don't want to. Really. Mozilla is not a file manager.
2) Autologin of websites (form filling-username, pass)
Exists, and I've seen it, but I don't know what plugin to use. IIRC Mozilla has this built-in.
3) Make your own search engines (like if I want to add yahoo maps and all i type is the destination)
Firefox rocks at this. Do a search, bookmark it, and replace the query text in the address field in the bookmark's properties with "%s", and then give it an alias (say, "gg"). If I did this with a Google search, I can just type "gg foobar" to Google for "foobar". I have imdb, google, and tons of other databases usable through Firefox directly. Absolutely wonderful.
4) "Groups" of websites that open in tabs at the same time
Create a folder in your bookmarks, and choose the menu item "open in tabs" for that folder under the Boomarks menu in Firefox.
5) In-line Flash/Advertsing blocks (I noticed one of Achilles' Heels of FF is that it eats cpu like crazy when flash is used on the page)
So say if 5% votes for Nader and Kerry Looses by close or under 5% then the democratic and the republican party will need to do some thinking about their stances and issues. Now 5% of the population is a good amount of people with some views.
The Demms can't *become* more left, because then they lose centrist votes.
This election, it's Demm or Republican. I'm sorry, but if Nader wants votes, he needs to work on attacking the Republicans so that the Demms have a clear majority, so that left Demm voters feel comfortable voting further left, for Nader, instead of Demm.
On the *other* hand, the best Republican strategy at the moment is to try to divide the Demm vote by encouraging Nader votes.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, lovely agreement.
One of the terms is that the univ. cannot disclose the terms of the agreement. If part of that agreement is "cannot use Linux on-campus", they can't disclose it.
"FUD" != "BS".
FUD is a subset of BS.
FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) is a particular type of BS where the liar is a propagandist who produces a cloud of vague assertions to instill a general sense of worry about how good something is. Microsoft is known for doing this toward Linux, since it is very hard to come up with concrete points of criticism where their products win.
The statement was BS, but was not FUD.
The system is already crashed. The Attorney General, head of the Department of Justice, is nothing but an incompetent liar.
To the Ministry of Truth!
While you're right that this particular issue does not warrant someone calling Ashcroft a Nazi, neither is it likely that they suddenly formed their opinion about Ashcroft from this single incident. Furthermore, the Bush administration has more parallels with Hitler's Nazi administration than any US administration since, and Ashcroft is probably one of the most similar figures -- he is uber-authoritarian, promotes the idea of the government setting the people's ethics, advocates large-scale domestic spying and analysis, opposes oversight of the government by the administration, plays fear games with "terrorists" as a boogeyman, and has steadily pushed for and recieved unprescedented police powers.
My guess is more that it's a typical IT ("We can't do that because of [insert stupid, simple, and potentially disasterous technical reason]") BS statement. The real reason is probably more along the lines of "We don't have funding to do this", "Someone in the administration will get pissed at me if we do this", "I don't feel like doing this", "I don't like you", "I'm too busy to handle this", "I don't want to risk *touching* this thing because any interactions have some possibility of placing me open to blame for taking it down, and that would get me in trouble", etc. He probably didn't think this would get as far as Slashdot.
Oh, IANAL as well. Pretty much assumed unless "AIAL" is included. That's just my reading.
I certainly appreciate what you've done, and I'm not trying to attack it, but better to be safe than sorry, you know? I've seen some nice volunteer folks get horribly screwed over by rather nasty people that bought someone else out or changed their minds (Blizzard and bnetd, SCO and Linux), and I wouldn't want someone distributing your software (say, Red Hat) to get nailed because there might have been a mistaken reading of a legal bit.
I'm sorry I didn't read your whole FAQ.
Unfortunately, on the internet it's also pretty easy to get the idea that sex with animals and with "women" with male genitilia are commonplace.
You know, they aren't exactly uncommon. The best network engineer I know is a transvestite, I've a couple of friends that are homosexual, and beastiality is not uncommon -- look at somewhere where such behavior is less forcibly covered up, like Sweden. Remember the recent series of world news articles about the increasing number of pets in Sweden that required medical attention after sexual activity with humans? People just aren't interested in being open about their sexual practices if there's a massive effort to villify them for it.
They're also likely to get the idea that only women that look like young teenage girls are really desirable
No, I don't agree. Sexual desire is pretty low-level, or else it wouldn't universally surface (even without interaction with the Internet!) It may be that it comes out that women that look like young teenage girls are more sexually desireable than our current "equality in appearance" post-feminist social-movement society would like you to believe, but "only" is absurd.
and that they should have as many sexual partners as physically possible at one time.
"Should"? As in, from an ethical standpoint? I don't know of anyone that has their ethics visibly set by random porn websites. It might make them interested in trying sex with multiple people, but that's quite a different thing than setting their ideals.
I'm glad you said that. It is a major problem especially considering porn turns women into sex objects and therefor invalid in terms of having feelings or being human.
It focuses on a single attribute of the actors/actresses, yes. Frequently these people have big breasts or large penises.
How is this any worse than any *other* character represented in any form of mass media? I mean, I don't get to see all sides of, say, Will Smith. Only a funny, irreverent side of him is portrayed. He might be a very serious, introspective person in real life, who speaks perfect traditional English.
As for unrealistic expectations, Olympic atheletes will be more fit than I ever will be, and Michael Moore will probably be more famous than I ever will be. The lead in a romance will never have irritable days or be thoughtless, as a real person would. I don't understand why you single out porn for producing unrealistic expections or objectification when all mass media does the same thing.
The right to treat people as anything less than human and with some degree of respect isn't actually a right.
Well, technically it is a legal right in the United States, as it is covered by the First Amendment and not specifically amended with exemptions regarding dignity.
However, that's really not your point, and I can understand that -- you mean that "People shouldn't treat people without respect." I agree that this is nice as an ideal to strive for, but I'm not sure that I'm comfortable forcing people to do so -- and porn is nowhere *near* the primary source of people in my life and in the culture of America that are not treated with respect.
We're going to have an entire generation of kids who are completely jaded concerning sex while simultaneously haveing all kinds of complexes because their boobs, penis, butt, etc. is too small.
How is this different from *any* form of large-scale media where the "best in a field" are chosen? The Olympics? Pro sports? Actors who pretend to be inhumanly comptent police detectives or car drivers? I mean, don't get me wrong, I can understand the issue that you're raising, but I don't understand how porn is a significant source of it. Mass media can cause people to have unrealistic expectations unless they lean to deal with them.
The fact that there are so many titty bars and so much porn proves there are many many (probably hypocritical) people out there consuming this product.
I think that adults generally advocate isolating children from sexual material. This would allow them to treat themselves as "distinct, not involved". It's kind of like sending someone else's kids off to fight in a war -- you have a mental justification for excluding yourself from the affected group.
Christianity in its purer forms, without dogma attached, is not, by my reading, particularly violent. One "turns the other cheek", rather than "strikes back". The invasion of Afghanistan, for instance, was a singularly un-Christian act.
However, there is a lot of culture tied up in the thing, and when one combines a set of culture with religion, one gets a stunningly persistent set of social institutions (look around the world at how influential these are).
So wouldn't that be solved by legitimizing the pornography industry, and by treating pornography actors with the respect that more conventional actors/actresses recieve?
Plus, it's hardly as if porn would be a dominant cause of this. I mean, if you want to ban porn because it encourages objectification of humans, surely you'd take greater issue with things like waiters, who are expected to act subservient in *real life*, directly to people?
The simple reason parents don't want their kids knowing about sex is because kids are stupid and will get knocked up or knock someone else up and the parents don't want to deal with that shit. It's not about their kids being addicted, or rapists, or any of that shit. Parents don't want to see their kids throw their lives away by becoming a parent at 16.
So...I don't know of *anyone* who didn't know the ins and the outs (no pun intended) of sex, whether or not they'd had it, at sixteen. I knew of a lot of people whose *parents* thought that their kids never discussed sex or sexual topics, but no kids.
It doesn't seem that preventing people from acquiring sexual knowledge is *possible*, and in a day and age of safe abortions and inexpensive, reliable birth control, I'd be curious as to why you consider it more feasible to engage in a massive and mind-boggling expensive information suppression campaign (the War on Drugs is a drop in the bucket compared to the War on Sex) than to just supply contraceptives and other stuff. That all assumes that the real issue is unplanned parenthood, and not
Also, how do you deal with the argument that kids with access to porn and not rabidly discouraged from masturbation to relieve sexual urges are *less* likely to lose control and go out and have sex with someone, resulting in pregnancy?
If a poster agrees that the sight of boobies isn't really likely to harm a child, then you're going to use it as evidence for your first contention, that pornography in general doesn't harm children.
This is not about Janet jackson's nipple or something similarly trivial (No offense Janet), it's about depictions of all sorts, from basic hetero or homo-sex to beastiality, S & M, and scat, and beyond.
Aren't you doing the same? He's using a very minimal example, and you're using an extreme example.
How many people fixate during their earliest sexual experiences? Most of them. Males vey often end up being leg men or breast men, preferring blondes or redheads, or having a phillia for garterbelts or high heels because such things are mentally connected to their first masturbatory or intercourse experiences. (It's just a harmless philia if you find high heels an interesting addition to a woman, whereas it's pathological if you desire sex with your collection of stolen high heels).
Sounds plausible. Can you provide a link to a major study that supports your insinuation that viewing unconventional sexual acts produces sexual interests of the same type, and then justify your assumption that this is a bad thing (as opposed to a focus on hetero, missionary sex)?
Even real psychos, such as Ted Bundy, usually have more normal fixations as well, (Bundy had a thing for long, straight haired bruinettes). If Bundy hadn't decided to become a serial killer (or been exposed to whatever influences made him one if you prefer) he would still likely have been the type to focus really hard on just one physical type of woman.
"Whatever influences made him one"? What are you implying, that porn made Bundy a serial killer? Heck, how do you know that porn wouldn't have let Bundy work off his fantasies in a non-damaging way? Each possibility is equally unjustified.
All of this suggests some pornography can well be harmful to minors.
(a) "Can well" is an awfully weak statement. Walking across the street "could well" be a fatal decision. If you want to claim that, say, homosexual behavior is doubled after the presence of below-18 homosexual pornography exposure, and can justify such a claim, then we can move along to the phase where you argue why this would be a bad thing, and then you can top it off with why you think all of society should be restricted by rules that may depend on your specific values.
(b) I haven't seen anything but suggestion. You've done nothing but engage in classic propaganda technique, mentioning awful but unrelated things to try to build associations in your readers' heads. You immediately mentioned " beastiality, S & M, and scat, and beyond." in justifying a ban affecting "basic heterosex". You rapidly moved on to mentioning sexual interests that reach to the point of negatively affecting someone's life, again without tying your mention to a pornography-based cause at all. Then you included, out of the blue, an anecdotatal reference to a serial killer and provided absolutely zero association between him and pornography. You then had two sentences referring to things that you didn't talk about, and then feel that what you've written is, in some way, convincing that pornography has negative social impact? You've *got* to be joking.
It is quite possible that it does damage to children who are passing through one of their sexual development phases
Really? Would you be so kind as to provide, y'know, a link or something, or is this just something that sounds plausible to you?
or who have a more than average tendency to fixate, and it could be argued that some children are at relatively little risk, but the high risk group is a sizable one (estimated at around 30% of the current population of children)
Now, we've got a number. This is interested. I assume that you *could* provide a reference to support this, but just chose not to actually do so. I also
I ask whether child pornogrpahy causes social problems every time we get a "Brits in another child porn online spat" article posted, and I still maintain a pretty healthy friends/foes ratio.
It's rare that questioning things that you see as illogical is bad. Being silent for the sake of being politically correct is just silly.
Despite the first amendment, there are restrictions on what you can say in America.
.XXX TLD, with jail time and other punishments only for those who attempt to sneak into .COM and others.
.xxx, since it contains information that the religious right finds disturbing? Second, you're trying to legislate things *world-wide* -- or if not, you're not going to do much good, as www.sexybabes.co.br is quite feasible, and you can't reasonably block all of Brazil.
.XXX
.zip file, and was told she needed to "unzip the file". So of course Dorothy opened up Internet Explorer and typed "www.unzip.com"*.
Yes, but your argument is a straw man. The restrictions are very limited -- things that can cause direct physical damage (the "FIRE" in a crowded theater) or false and damaging claims (libel and slander). We have a definition of "obscene" speech, but in general we've been moving to be come more liberal about it.
A sensible restriction would be self-classification of pornographers into a
That's absurd. XXX has been proposed before, considered by many intelligent people who have repeatedly shot it down for a number of excellent reasons. First, you have to defined *what* a "porn site" is. That means trying to clean the rest of the web of "obscene" speech, using the only existing legal definition we have that might apply. What is porn to one person is not to another. Should Freud's or McKinsey's work be placed in
This would allow respectable ISPs such as AOL to block all pornographers simply by blocking
What good do you propose this would do?
However it is completely irresponsible of the court to have struck down the only law protecting America's nearly forty million Internet-savvy children from the horrors (and yes, there are HORRORS on the Internet... child pornography, sadomasochism, rape, anything Satan can imagine...) being peddled at sites with otherwise innocuous names.
There are *pictures* of such things. Real life contains untimely death, drug addiction, terminal disease, estranged parents, and many, far, far worse things. With all those issues to deal with, you're worrying about text and images? Have you lost your mind? I can understand you being upset about someone being raped in real life, but rape-themed pornography? Who *cares*?
Let me tell you a story. My aunt's niece Dorothy got a file in email from me called "reunion_photos.zip"
Wouldn't that be, y'know, either a cousin or a sister, not "aunt's niece"?
a bundle of photos from our family reunion. She asked her aunt what to do with a
And you could come up with all manner of equally improbable interactions in real life. Someone might say "we need hustle", and said girl obtaining a copy of "Hustler".
I won't even describe what happened that day- the shock, the screaming, the tears... but it was horrible. Children should be given some warning before seeing grown women stripped and tied to walls. And this law was all we had.
Instead of screaming, wouldn't it have been easier to explain that, y'know, said women were paid actresses who were acting out being tied up, rather than trying to traumatize the girl? Why do we have such an immature approach to sex in this country?
I mean, Christ, what do you do when Dorthy sees a flaming wreck on a TV movie with people getting killed in the crash? Is that okay to just laugh off?
1) Kids are not going to 'stumble' across pr0n. They are going to go out looking for it.
I disagree with the first sentence. It is quite possible to stumble across porn. Any teacher or lecture giver or someone in a "dignified" situation who is using Internet Explorer and has had porn pop-ups come up can attest to this.
On the other hand, I agree with the second. If you expect Johnny isn't going to look for porn at some point, you're just plain stupid. And if you honestly think that said porn or potential subsequent masturbation is going to taint/twist him, either you're living in a religious commune, or you're vastly unaware of the world around you. If you think that you're going to *stop* Johnny from seeing nudity (or that Johnny is going to magically become more able to deal with nudity at some age after living in a sheltered environment, you're dreaming).
2) The primary responsibility for children who browse the net, lies not with the government, or lawmakers, or ISPs, or pr0n websites, or even the owner of the computer. It lies with their parents.
I always thought that this was rather a bullshit argument. There's nothing inherently wrong with the government assisting parents in doing something that they're voting for. I do take issue with the associated problems of (a) the impact on other people, (b) the fact that the whole thing is entirely unrealistic, and (c) the fact that this is largely a religious agenda that the government should be keeping it's paws out of.
3) Pr0n is not the work of satan, despite what many(including 4 S.C. judges) believe. People need a more mature attidude towards sex.
Second that. Even the fact that you used a euphamism ("pr0n") instead of "pornography" drives home the fact that a good many people have worked hard to mentally attach shame and disquiet to the term "pornography".
The Internet changed all of that, and kids today use the Internet for just about anything, including breaking the law and viewing pornography. Isn't technology wonderful?
Did you not own an audio cassette deck capable of tape duplication? You never saw people copying audio or VHS tapes? The Internet wasn't the dawn of copyright infringement. It's a useful tool -- the Internet is designed for data transfer, and it can be used more efficiently, but it's nothing more than that.
As for porn...what exactly is *wrong* with someone seeing porn? I don't mean some sort of vague emotional feeling somewhere induced by years of religious or cultural indoctrination...I mean, flat out, what specific pragmatic issues do you have with someone seeing porn?
Make the kid paranoid that he's going to be walked in on every few minutes, and it will opening that site the same as trying to sneak a dirty magazine in the house.
Do you consider this a healthy psychological state of affairs?
Take another look at the text involved.
The exemption is *only* WRT reverse-engineering on anti-circumvention on software to which you are able to do what you're doing under copyright law. It does *not* provide a new fair-use exemption under copyright law.
The DMCA's clauses providing exemptions for reverse engineering to ensure compatibility do not extend to shielding one from copyright infringement. The original work is still copyrighted. Just because you (may) not be hit by the DMCA's anticircumvention laws doesn't mean that you are legally clear in regard to the actual copyright on the software. You have modified a disassembled copy of the original (rather than producing a clone, which would be legal), and hence are distributing a derivative copy of a copyrighted work to which you do not own the copyright or a license to the copyright. The DMCA doesn't concern you -- traditional copyright law does.
The clause in the DMCA gives the example of the Internet Archive needing to be able to put software to which they *have rights* and are not infringing on copyright ("If the Internet Archive is given computer software..."). The exemption only allows them to modify the software. It does not grant them more rights under copyright law.
Read discussion here
The extent of this ruling is to cover people that write and apply cracks that allow software to run on newer media formats that would otherwise not have the right to do so (If the CD becomes obsolete, it is legal to bypass Safe CD). It does not mean that any works that are protected by Safe CD become public domain.
It is possible that Silas' widow owns the copyright, if Silas published his own game. In this case, she probably *does* have the ability to grant you distribution rights, and you're fine.
Didn't any of these people know enough to think that no reports are magically sent to Microsoft when you e-mail someone?
Microsoft produces a major e-mail server (Exchange) and the dominant email clients (Outlook/Outlook Express). I agree that this email is stupid; that being said, if anyone could orchestrate a system where a special header passing through a system triggered a message being sent to Microsoft, it would be Microsoft.
(... imagine the privacy implications!)
Microsoft advocates *Passport* as a global authentication system, which lets them obtain your personal information and monitor who you are authenticating yourself to anytime, anywhere. You think they'd be concerned about the privacy issues involved with passing on an email?
Or have enough elementary business sense to realize that Microsoft won't just send people money for nothing?
Microsoft hands out a web browser and an email client "for nothing". A lot of companies are willing to take a short-term loss for some kind of gain. If there was some huge marketing advantage to knowing something about how email or ideas propagate, I could see this being worthwhile (though perhaps not in the sums that Microsoft is using). Knowing which people know which people can be terribly valuable information when designing marketing campaigns, and this would provide a neat graph. Microsoft *did* in fact do something similar to this when it purchased Hotmail, which allows it to harvest email addresses and derive social graphs that determine who knows and interacts with whom, and how quickly ideas and memes flow. The marketing information inherent in aggregate data derived from Hotmail's contents is incredibly valuable. Suppose "Spiderman 2" marketing goes out, and a bunch of derived data from emails containing "Spiderman 2" in one of the world's largest email systems was made commercially available? How much would you, as the Marketing Director involved, pay to know what people in Phoenix, Arizona were privately saying about your film and your ads? Would it be worth a million dollars to avoid mis-targeting your next multi-million-dollar marketing campaign element?
PS. This defence speech was not meant to say that MS currently applies such a judgement. They are currently doing a sloppy job - no doubt about that. Go get them, Spot! Bite!
The problem is also that they *deliberately* ignored security problems for years, failing to establish barriers within software. IE is a massive security problem for Windows, because it crosses so many boundaries -- it is the update system, a web browser, the file browser, and provides many services to other applications -- it can be used by apps to slip by spyware blockers, or to use a hole of the huge and impossible to properly secure IE to exploit one of its many allowed capabilities.
Really, this is an issue settled by termination of the employee responsible for not keeping a good record of patches and updates
Why is it so frequently MS's official response to security problems with their software "fire/blame the IT people responsible for maintaining the software, as they didn't deploy the patch that we released two weeks ago?"
It's counterproductive and stupid, as nobody buys it as an excuse for insecure software, and it pisses off the very people that will have input into purchasing in the future.
1) Ability of running any Windows shortcut or folder within the browser or explorer.
You absolutely do not want this. The mingling of file browser and web browser are what cause a huge number of IE security holes.
You could probably just set up a helper or something, but you don't want to. Really. Mozilla is not a file manager.
2) Autologin of websites (form filling-username, pass)
Exists, and I've seen it, but I don't know what plugin to use. IIRC Mozilla has this built-in.
3) Make your own search engines (like if I want to add yahoo maps and all i type is the destination)
Firefox rocks at this. Do a search, bookmark it, and replace the query text in the address field in the bookmark's properties with "%s", and then give it an alias (say, "gg"). If I did this with a Google search, I can just type "gg foobar" to Google for "foobar". I have imdb, google, and tons of other databases usable through Firefox directly. Absolutely wonderful.
4) "Groups" of websites that open in tabs at the same time
Create a folder in your bookmarks, and choose the menu item "open in tabs" for that folder under the Boomarks menu in Firefox.
5) In-line Flash/Advertsing blocks (I noticed one of Achilles' Heels of FF is that it eats
cpu like crazy when flash is used on the page)
You want Click to View.
So say if 5% votes for Nader and Kerry Looses by close or under 5% then the democratic and the republican party will need to do some thinking about their stances and issues. Now 5% of the population is a good amount of people with some views.
The Demms can't *become* more left, because then they lose centrist votes.
This election, it's Demm or Republican. I'm sorry, but if Nader wants votes, he needs to work on attacking the Republicans so that the Demms have a clear majority, so that left Demm voters feel comfortable voting further left, for Nader, instead of Demm.
On the *other* hand, the best Republican strategy at the moment is to try to divide the Demm vote by encouraging Nader votes.