Sexual strangulation is a difficult area because it can be done without breaking the law, a trait not shared by necrophilia or cannibalism. If you do accidentially strangle someone during sex, you can try to implicate that website just as you would a book about sexual strangulation. If you met the girl through the website, the site owners may (or may not) share some liability. The same goes for whipping.
I guess where I draw the line is that there is no way to participate in cannibalism or necrophilia without breaking a law. If these websites were anything beyond a collection of facts (ie. had dating services, etc.) then they shouldn't be protected speech. Just my opinion.
I think the difference [and stress that this is an assumption] is that a book about cannibalism could at best be a documentary. The more you try to glorify eating people, the less credible you would appear.
While the same is true of a website, you can also have chatrooms, forums, and that sort of thing. Now your fans with a common interest can meet and communicate with each other. Your website is no longer just a documentary (of whatever quality) but has become a tool to build a community of people interested in cannibalism. Some of these people might have legitimate academic interests, but you have precious little ability to control that.
If you know a guy named FriendA who always talks about murdering blonde girls, and you set him up with FriendB who is a blonde girl, and she gets murdered, I'm pretty sure that your knowledge of FriendA and involvement in their meeting makes you criminally liable in the US and probably any industrialized nation. A website can do this but a book cannot, and I think that's the crux of the case against these extreme sites.
This could very easily be unpopular, but I really don't understand why "freedom of speech" needs to protect obviously dangerous elements of society. Unpopular political comments - yes. Unpopular civil rights issues - yes. Unpopular labor or global commerce issues - yes. Taboo (sexual) medical conditions - yes. Necrophilia? No. Cannibalism? No. Sites that feature these as popular topics provide no real service to anyone yet they can easily be used as tools to commit a crime. There is a recent German case where two people hooked up through a cannibalism fantasy website - now one of them is poop and the other is in jail. Nice, real nice.
If the site serves a legitimate positive purpose then I'd give it some leeway. Whether you agree or not, there is some argument for pro-gun sites that relates to open source code. Not an extremely strong argument, mind you, but if you know that the SWAT team is using a SIG-551 and you can only muster an MAC-10, maybe you'll stay at home. I'm not even entirely convinced that all pro-gun sites should be protected (and I am generally pro-guns) but at least you can sort of say that there is some type of benefit provided by those sites.
Necrophilia? For God's sake, this is, in my non-professional opinion, not a sexual preference but a symptom of some psychological problems. A necrophilia fan website is not far removed from giving heroin to a junkie - it's what he wants but it's not going to help him.
I like freedom of speech. I don't think that harmful speech that serves no purpose but to facilitate violent crimes needs to be protected. If the cannibalism and necrophilia website fans disagree with me, then let them produce a website that promotes dealing with these fetishes and becoming productive members of society rather than glorify violent crimes - that I would gladly see protected by freedom of speech.
Goddamn, man. If you can write a program with an installer that expects the existence of a vital system function like "Favorites", but you're completely lost if key pieces of system equipment like "Favorites" don't exist, how in hell did you write a program in the first place?
Christ Almighty as my witness, I remember a day when installation scripts could deal with an unknown or two. I haven't installed anything in about two weeks, though, so I'm just observing that it's a real shame how the software installation technology has gone to hell in a handbasket.
The best contradiction of the whole fiasco was when one cable news magazine show opened their hour with 20 minutes of shock and outrage at Janet Jackson's offensive demonstration, and then ended it with 20 minutes of Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Edition photo shoots, complete with extreme closeups of all portions of women's anatomy. I think that in reality, about four Americans were offended and the rest just wanted a media debacle.
I hate to be cynical - but apple has 100% of the Macintosh desktop market
Whaddya know, Ford has a monopoly in the Escort economy car market! Those bastards! Comedy Central has a monopoly on South Park! Capitalist vultures! Mozilla has a monopoly in the Firefox browser market! Those evildoers!
I once ordered $6.66 worth of food from the Taco Bell in Cumberland Gap, Kentucky on 25E. The nice enough, yet misguided Kentucky girl working the cash register nearly fainted. She asked me three times if I wanted to buy something else. I wasn't that concerned about the total, actually. She ended up giving me the 10% or 15% senior citizen discount so that she wouldn't be tainted by taking six dollars and sixty-six cents in her hand.
Don't go and ruin this for the rest of us! We have our torches, we have our pitchforks. We've decided to discard our individual responsibility and replace our own thoughts with groupthink! Damn it, man, don't ruin this for the rest of us with your petty "details" and "facts"! This is no time for the voice of reason. No time at all!!!!
They make alot of money from loyal customers. But I admit my 13 year old 91 honda civic with 140k miles is getting on my nerves with repair costs. WOuld a 91 ford escort still be running today? I think not.
For what it's worth, I have a 93 Ford Escort that is running just fine. All I've had to repair in the last 3 years is a timing belt, rusted out exhaust (lived in Michigan), and tie rods. Everything else has been standard maintenance items like brakes, tires, etc.
1992-1994 was the turning point for American car manufacturers. There are a few exceptions (like early Neons) but most American cars after those years will compete well with imports if you want reliable transportation. My Escort still gets 30+ highway miles to the gallon.
Sadly, not enough to make the conceptual leap from hamster-controlled-MIDI to MIDI-controlled-hamsters.
DUDE! That's exactly what my first thought was when I read the headline! Hamsters controlling MIDI, who cares? I've got a keyboard with 61 velocity sensitive keys and a seperate box with 16 fully assignable control knobs! If that's not enough inputs to tap into a hamster's brain stem and turn him into a fuzzy little soul-less automaton (for science!) then I don't know what is.
Too bad the site is slashdotted. Some incredible opportunities are being overlooked here.
I haven't read the article, but changing the length of the string is forbidden. While you can change the pitch of the open string this way, you guarantee that every single fret will be out of tune. The 12th fret MUST be at EXACTLY the halfway point from the nut to the bridge. This makes tuning by moving the bridge a useless method of autotuning.
Actually, there are footboxes that very brightly display a chromatic tuner while killing the output signal. So between songs, you can stomp on the box (which makes your guitar silent) and then very easily tune it visually.
You can even do this while you're talking, chewing gum, or arguing about which song to play next.
Tuning by eye, however, is something else entirely. It is an obscure talent that I've only seen demonstrated once. The guy played a steel string and he would just hold the where he could see it from the front and then turn all the knobs. When he was done, he'd announce, "That looks about right," and then hold up the guitar for the audience to inspect it. He was good, too -- the guitar was always in tune.
(It was an act of misdirection while he used his footpedal tuner. It got a great reaction from the crowd.)
I worked at an independent custom PC shop for almost a year and can add two things.
In November/December-ish, we stopped selling 1.8GHz P4s and offered the 2.0 as our bottom of the line P4. We still carried some boards with CPUs already attached, including a 1.(2 or 3)GHz Cyrix, a Celeron, and an AMD2000 Pro. So the assertion that computers bought last year have beefy processors is correct.
The second thing, though, is that for every tricked out gaming rig we sold, we must have sold 15-20 computers so Mom & Dad could check email or the college freshman could surf the internet and write papers. That's the bread and butter of a small custom PC business, not the high end gaming rigs. There's more profit in those, of course, but they sell such in such relatively low numbers that one can hardly say that it drives the business.
As far as new products are concerned, there are a couple areas that are clearly pushed by gamers. To the computer industry as a whole, I think they represent a pretty nominal demographic.
You're right that I'm not aware of the IE plugins. As great as they may be, I find myself on the other side of the fence now, and instead of saying, "But you can get popup blockers for IE, so why switch?" I'm saying, "But Mozilla comes WITH the popup blocking and better feature management, why switch?"
I [em|sym]pathize with those forced to develop for IE only. Though I didn't mention it in my first post, those people aren't the target of my diatribe. My point is that a non-IE browser is the only sensible decision for anyone that has any choice, and it's even a feasible solution for some people with limited choice.
I would suggest that using IE for intranet solutions is a slightly different ballgame than surfing the internet, and it might not be a bad choice for that. As an internet browser, though, only the unlucky and the foolish stick with Microsoft's product.
You may have a point, but practically anybody that I ever talk to about web browsers switches to Mozilla/Firebird/Firefox. People complain about the internet all the time - I just say, "Well, I don't have that problem."
Mozilla will win ground on 3 representative features: No popups, different security issues, and tabbed browsing.
The popups affects everyone using IE. Impress upon people that popups are the result of Microsoft screwing people over and not caring - it's not even a half truth. It's an obnoxious misfeature that irritates end users but gives Microsoft friends in business. It should have never been implemented. While Microsoft serves their own interests and contemplates their cash flow, Mozilla went ahead and solved the problem.
Internet Explorer has about ninety billion security flaws. Even if you have all the patches, you'll still want to disable ActiveX. You still don't have a convenient way of blocking images from particular servers (spam related, annoying, inappropriate). I'm not going to pretend that Mozilla is flawless on the security front, but it does represent a distinct minority of security problems. Bad people attack IE, Microsoft is slow to fix IE, Microsoft designed IE with a million other security issues. While Microsoft drags their feet and does everything possible to make money, Mozilla went ahead and solved the problem.
Mozilla presents tabbed browsing, among other features, that are simply better than what IE offers. Type ahead links, one key to search for text, Google built into the button bar, a spiffy download manager in Firebird 0.8, and 2 clicks to block images are fantastic additions to your web browser.
So really, you'd be a complete fool to use IE. Maybe Mozilla isn't your cup of tea, but you'd be a fool to use IE. Maybe you are required to use IE for a few specific sites, but you'd be a fool to therefore use IE for all your web browsing. Maybe you can't install Mozilla on your lab/work computer, but you can install Firebird on a USB Flash Drive ($20 or less) and take a better browser with you everywhere.
So maybe they aren't switching in droves, but a person would have to be a complete fool to use IE exclusively. When the word really gets out about that, the results will be hardly surprising. Like they say, "Lead, follow, or get out of the way". Internet Explorer is no longer a leader.
I'm not trolling here, but if you are [burning to death in an automobile fire] just because you use [Brand M automobile], well, you're an idiot. There are so many [flame retardant body suits] out there that it should be a non-issue. The [not exploding] feature that is built into [Brand F automobiles] (soon to be added to [Brand M]) is nice, but this is hardly a feature to brag about for trying to convince someone to switch.
Right. If I formed a business called "Lab" and sold collections of mice pointer graphics, called "Lab Mice", I'd have a similar problem. If a company called "White Incorporated" began to compete with a similar product called "White Lice", I couldn't claim that I had ownership of "Mice" because it was a common term before I arrived in the market. However white lice are parasitic in nature and could arguably defeat lab mice in a gladiator duel, though shrewd business deals on my part ensure that I have a larger legal warchest to fight this in the courts. As you can see, the situation is really obvious. You can usurp someone's generic trademark even if they have lots of money as long as your mascot would beat their mascot in a knife fight.
Like I said, they're not perfect all of the time. They are pretty good, though. Despite all the various layouts, icons, and functions, a moderately smart person never gets into an unfamiliar car and becomes bewildered.
Bewildered pretty well describes me at an Apple or my grandmother at any computer, yet we can both drive any make of automobile without a problem.
I'm white, against affirmative action, aware of the double standard applied to appreciating white culture and so forth, but that doesn't mean that every negative reference to a white person is racism, even if it points out the person's race.
A stuffy, boring book about a dead black man would be different in context and motif from the same book about a dead white man. The dialogue, colloqialisms, humor, attitude, and statement about the world would be different. It could be argued that it's even a different genre. In my opinion, saying that this book could have been about a "dead white man" is similar to saying that it could have been a boring book about Swedish ancestry. The fact that it might have been boring and about a white guy doesn't make it racist.
Now, if the author of the review had driven the point home a little more, then perhaps there's merit to the claim of racism. As it stands, I don't agree. But that's just my opinion.
Spare your credit card and buy two shades of red spray paint, a Ferarri logo sticker, and record a.wav of a kid's Tyco dumptruck with Real Engine Noises!
Seriously, hold the presses. "THIS LAPTOP IS RED! OMG!"
Now for the insightful part of the post: People have pointed out for years that auto manufacturers are experts at user interface design (though they're not always perfect and Ferarri perhaps focuses on other aspects) so I would expect some revolution in form factor on a Ferarri laptop. Maybe put the touchpad above the keyboard, or be the first to market a laptop with a non-qwerty keyboard, or to implement a new metaphor for interacting with your computer. "Desktop" is so cliche.
This product, of course, is nothing but a laptop spray painted red with a Tyco toys engine noise and a Ferarri sticker. Seriously, man, strive for a better purchase with that exorbitant interest rate.
I just used Firefox 0.8 to view the entire content of the article and had no problems, but perhaps I wasn't shown the Realplyer ad. There was a bunch of obnoxious Flash, of course.
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po
on
Hackers Hall of Fame
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· Score: 1
Commodore VIC-20, then briefly on a second hand ZX-81 which never really worked, and then a 486SX 25MHz with Windows 3.1. I was five years old when I was first playing with the VIC, too young to understand any code, but I was still copying games out of the magazines character by character. I never did it right, but I got enough of the work done that a parent could correct the typing in about an hour giving me with yet another computer game to play. Those were the days.
I was born in 1980. How many people got their first computer experience with Microsoft? I dunno, them young kids, most likely. Not me, I come from class.
Slashdot Mirror
Sexual strangulation is a difficult area because it can be done without breaking the law, a trait not shared by necrophilia or cannibalism. If you do accidentially strangle someone during sex, you can try to implicate that website just as you would a book about sexual strangulation. If you met the girl through the website, the site owners may (or may not) share some liability. The same goes for whipping.
I guess where I draw the line is that there is no way to participate in cannibalism or necrophilia without breaking a law. If these websites were anything beyond a collection of facts (ie. had dating services, etc.) then they shouldn't be protected speech. Just my opinion.
While the same is true of a website, you can also have chatrooms, forums, and that sort of thing. Now your fans with a common interest can meet and communicate with each other. Your website is no longer just a documentary (of whatever quality) but has become a tool to build a community of people interested in cannibalism. Some of these people might have legitimate academic interests, but you have precious little ability to control that.
If you know a guy named FriendA who always talks about murdering blonde girls, and you set him up with FriendB who is a blonde girl, and she gets murdered, I'm pretty sure that your knowledge of FriendA and involvement in their meeting makes you criminally liable in the US and probably any industrialized nation. A website can do this but a book cannot, and I think that's the crux of the case against these extreme sites.
If the site serves a legitimate positive purpose then I'd give it some leeway. Whether you agree or not, there is some argument for pro-gun sites that relates to open source code. Not an extremely strong argument, mind you, but if you know that the SWAT team is using a SIG-551 and you can only muster an MAC-10, maybe you'll stay at home. I'm not even entirely convinced that all pro-gun sites should be protected (and I am generally pro-guns) but at least you can sort of say that there is some type of benefit provided by those sites.
Necrophilia? For God's sake, this is, in my non-professional opinion, not a sexual preference but a symptom of some psychological problems. A necrophilia fan website is not far removed from giving heroin to a junkie - it's what he wants but it's not going to help him.
I like freedom of speech. I don't think that harmful speech that serves no purpose but to facilitate violent crimes needs to be protected. If the cannibalism and necrophilia website fans disagree with me, then let them produce a website that promotes dealing with these fetishes and becoming productive members of society rather than glorify violent crimes - that I would gladly see protected by freedom of speech.
Christ Almighty as my witness, I remember a day when installation scripts could deal with an unknown or two. I haven't installed anything in about two weeks, though, so I'm just observing that it's a real shame how the software installation technology has gone to hell in a handbasket.
The best contradiction of the whole fiasco was when one cable news magazine show opened their hour with 20 minutes of shock and outrage at Janet Jackson's offensive demonstration, and then ended it with 20 minutes of Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Edition photo shoots, complete with extreme closeups of all portions of women's anatomy. I think that in reality, about four Americans were offended and the rest just wanted a media debacle.
Whaddya know, Ford has a monopoly in the Escort economy car market! Those bastards! Comedy Central has a monopoly on South Park! Capitalist vultures! Mozilla has a monopoly in the Firefox browser market! Those evildoers!
I'll take my insightful mod points now. Thanks.
Hey, around here it's at least as likely as "LAID TO REST".
I once ordered $6.66 worth of food from the Taco Bell in Cumberland Gap, Kentucky on 25E. The nice enough, yet misguided Kentucky girl working the cash register nearly fainted. She asked me three times if I wanted to buy something else. I wasn't that concerned about the total, actually. She ended up giving me the 10% or 15% senior citizen discount so that she wouldn't be tainted by taking six dollars and sixty-six cents in her hand.
Don't go and ruin this for the rest of us! We have our torches, we have our pitchforks. We've decided to discard our individual responsibility and replace our own thoughts with groupthink! Damn it, man, don't ruin this for the rest of us with your petty "details" and "facts"! This is no time for the voice of reason. No time at all!!!!
Was read as And just what do recursive victims have? And I immediately thought, "Nightmares, probably."
For what it's worth, I have a 93 Ford Escort that is running just fine. All I've had to repair in the last 3 years is a timing belt, rusted out exhaust (lived in Michigan), and tie rods. Everything else has been standard maintenance items like brakes, tires, etc.
1992-1994 was the turning point for American car manufacturers. There are a few exceptions (like early Neons) but most American cars after those years will compete well with imports if you want reliable transportation. My Escort still gets 30+ highway miles to the gallon.
DUDE! That's exactly what my first thought was when I read the headline! Hamsters controlling MIDI, who cares? I've got a keyboard with 61 velocity sensitive keys and a seperate box with 16 fully assignable control knobs! If that's not enough inputs to tap into a hamster's brain stem and turn him into a fuzzy little soul-less automaton (for science!) then I don't know what is.
Too bad the site is slashdotted. Some incredible opportunities are being overlooked here.
I haven't read the article, but changing the length of the string is forbidden. While you can change the pitch of the open string this way, you guarantee that every single fret will be out of tune. The 12th fret MUST be at EXACTLY the halfway point from the nut to the bridge. This makes tuning by moving the bridge a useless method of autotuning.
You can even do this while you're talking, chewing gum, or arguing about which song to play next.
Tuning by eye, however, is something else entirely. It is an obscure talent that I've only seen demonstrated once. The guy played a steel string and he would just hold the where he could see it from the front and then turn all the knobs. When he was done, he'd announce, "That looks about right," and then hold up the guitar for the audience to inspect it. He was good, too -- the guitar was always in tune.
(It was an act of misdirection while he used his footpedal tuner. It got a great reaction from the crowd.)
DUH! The motorcycle doesn't belong because the other two have a composite number of wheels. What, you didn't know that?!
In November/December-ish, we stopped selling 1.8GHz P4s and offered the 2.0 as our bottom of the line P4. We still carried some boards with CPUs already attached, including a 1.(2 or 3)GHz Cyrix, a Celeron, and an AMD2000 Pro. So the assertion that computers bought last year have beefy processors is correct.
The second thing, though, is that for every tricked out gaming rig we sold, we must have sold 15-20 computers so Mom & Dad could check email or the college freshman could surf the internet and write papers. That's the bread and butter of a small custom PC business, not the high end gaming rigs. There's more profit in those, of course, but they sell such in such relatively low numbers that one can hardly say that it drives the business.
As far as new products are concerned, there are a couple areas that are clearly pushed by gamers. To the computer industry as a whole, I think they represent a pretty nominal demographic.
I [em|sym]pathize with those forced to develop for IE only. Though I didn't mention it in my first post, those people aren't the target of my diatribe. My point is that a non-IE browser is the only sensible decision for anyone that has any choice, and it's even a feasible solution for some people with limited choice.
I would suggest that using IE for intranet solutions is a slightly different ballgame than surfing the internet, and it might not be a bad choice for that. As an internet browser, though, only the unlucky and the foolish stick with Microsoft's product.
Mozilla will win ground on 3 representative features: No popups, different security issues, and tabbed browsing.
The popups affects everyone using IE. Impress upon people that popups are the result of Microsoft screwing people over and not caring - it's not even a half truth. It's an obnoxious misfeature that irritates end users but gives Microsoft friends in business. It should have never been implemented. While Microsoft serves their own interests and contemplates their cash flow, Mozilla went ahead and solved the problem.
Internet Explorer has about ninety billion security flaws. Even if you have all the patches, you'll still want to disable ActiveX. You still don't have a convenient way of blocking images from particular servers (spam related, annoying, inappropriate). I'm not going to pretend that Mozilla is flawless on the security front, but it does represent a distinct minority of security problems. Bad people attack IE, Microsoft is slow to fix IE, Microsoft designed IE with a million other security issues. While Microsoft drags their feet and does everything possible to make money, Mozilla went ahead and solved the problem.
Mozilla presents tabbed browsing, among other features, that are simply better than what IE offers. Type ahead links, one key to search for text, Google built into the button bar, a spiffy download manager in Firebird 0.8, and 2 clicks to block images are fantastic additions to your web browser.
So really, you'd be a complete fool to use IE. Maybe Mozilla isn't your cup of tea, but you'd be a fool to use IE. Maybe you are required to use IE for a few specific sites, but you'd be a fool to therefore use IE for all your web browsing. Maybe you can't install Mozilla on your lab/work computer, but you can install Firebird on a USB Flash Drive ($20 or less) and take a better browser with you everywhere.
So maybe they aren't switching in droves, but a person would have to be a complete fool to use IE exclusively. When the word really gets out about that, the results will be hardly surprising. Like they say, "Lead, follow, or get out of the way". Internet Explorer is no longer a leader.
Yeah, good point!
I really should have gone to law school.
Bewildered pretty well describes me at an Apple or my grandmother at any computer, yet we can both drive any make of automobile without a problem.
I'm white, against affirmative action, aware of the double standard applied to appreciating white culture and so forth, but that doesn't mean that every negative reference to a white person is racism, even if it points out the person's race.
A stuffy, boring book about a dead black man would be different in context and motif from the same book about a dead white man. The dialogue, colloqialisms, humor, attitude, and statement about the world would be different. It could be argued that it's even a different genre. In my opinion, saying that this book could have been about a "dead white man" is similar to saying that it could have been a boring book about Swedish ancestry. The fact that it might have been boring and about a white guy doesn't make it racist.
Now, if the author of the review had driven the point home a little more, then perhaps there's merit to the claim of racism. As it stands, I don't agree. But that's just my opinion.
Seriously, hold the presses. "THIS LAPTOP IS RED! OMG!"
Now for the insightful part of the post: People have pointed out for years that auto manufacturers are experts at user interface design (though they're not always perfect and Ferarri perhaps focuses on other aspects) so I would expect some revolution in form factor on a Ferarri laptop. Maybe put the touchpad above the keyboard, or be the first to market a laptop with a non-qwerty keyboard, or to implement a new metaphor for interacting with your computer. "Desktop" is so cliche.
This product, of course, is nothing but a laptop spray painted red with a Tyco toys engine noise and a Ferarri sticker. Seriously, man, strive for a better purchase with that exorbitant interest rate.
I just used Firefox 0.8 to view the entire content of the article and had no problems, but perhaps I wasn't shown the Realplyer ad. There was a bunch of obnoxious Flash, of course.
I was born in 1980. How many people got their first computer experience with Microsoft? I dunno, them young kids, most likely. Not me, I come from class.