Yeah... just like watching "normal" pornography makes you more likely to rape random women on the street
This isn't "normal" pornography.
It becomes an obsession. Downloads in the tens of thousands of images.
We've seen evidence locally of profoundly self-absorbed and self-destructive behavior: Middle school teachers caught downloading kiddie porn through their district's network.
If I could browse, email, send and view files completely anonymously, I'd personally feel much safer.
Just my gut reaction, but I can appreciate yours as well.
The problem is that the sex trade guarantees that the FBI. RCMP, CSIS, INTERPOL and God alone knows who else, will be maintaining a presence on Freenet.
You want privacy, you don't hit the bars that everyone knows are under around-the-clock surveillance.
It is not a defense where strict/absolute liability applies. You are not a common carrier. You clicked on a EULA that makes it plain that porn may be routed through your system.
Plausible Deniablity does not play well to a Western judge or jury. Your wife. Your kids. Your pastor. Your neighbors. Your boss.
It won't serve a defendant any better in the Islamic republics or before a People's Court in China.
I have always failed to see the extra harm done through dissemination of such material.
Then you have never been a parent or the victim of sexual abuse. Child pornography is the rape of a child for the sexual entertainment of an adult. The damage continues beyond the act itself.
Any way I look at it, all objections to Freenet seem to boil down to one of two things:
1. "By golly, we have to do something about all of this child pr0n!"
2. "I don't want to get in trouble with the authorities."
Freenet's security, performance, and funding depends on its reaching a critical mass of users. Users you can trust, at least a little.
Why the stereotypically paranoid Geek would open his networks and systems to someone as pathological as the child pornographer and his audience is beyond me.
Unbiquitous access to information is very powerfull, it can change those societies on a lot of different ways.
Geeks confuse access with understanding.
Agricultural extension agents in the US had a century of experience learning how to communicate with farmers who were unlikely to have had more than a grade school education.
You want to be effective, you need people on the ground.
I've yet to see a working model of the $100 laptop. You get to the $100 price point only with massive government subsidies. If at all. Remember the Linux Simputer? Which ended up costing much more and delivering much less than what was promised.
open source has the benefit of more people actively working to improve the code base than any commercial software company can afford to pay.
Why is it then, that flagship projects like OpenOffice.org and Firefox are organized. led, staffed and funded by a single corporate entity like IBM, Sun or the Moz Foundation? That many open source projects do not attract an army of volunteers and are in fact starving for manpower and resources?
Rockefeller engaged in a lot of well-publicized philanthropy in an effort to polish his image too, but in the end he was still a monster, who did a lot of damage along the way.
Rockefeller delivered a product that was safe and cheap: "Standard Oil"
That meant something in the days when you could be widowed by the explosion of a gasoline stove.
When the trust was broken up, customers remained loyal to the product and the regional divisions grew stronger and more profitable than before.
What I want is a sticker that says wether the hardware is DRM ready. That is the thing I am intrested in for Windows Vista. Not in the way MS/Intel/etc wants. Just so I know wich products to avoid like the plague. A nice shiny sticker "Big Brother Ready" so we can let them rot on the shops shelves.
The reality is that DRM'd media content sells.
The Harry Potter franchise alone is worth a billion dollars to Time-Warner.
Your DRM-free PC won't even make it to the shelves at Walmart. Where the Vista HTPC will be positioned as the perfect compliment to your high-def TV and X-Box 360.
...as soon as the big box vendors just say to hell with it and pick one major Linux distro and start offering it on a joe homeowner/small business desktop.
Just don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen.
MSDOS and Windows have been in the home and office for twenty-five years.
No one comes into this market as a first time buyer. They have a substantial investment in Windows hardware, software, peripherals and skills. Migration has all the appeal of root canal.
There is no home market for a OEM Linux PC that can't play Windows games or DRM'd media content out of the box.
OEM Linux at Walmart has shrunk to three mediocre Microtel boxes. While the chain positions itself for WinMCE and HTPC sales at $500-$2000.
Just curious, do you know even a single person that had a machine running Windows 2000 (or Win98, or WinME) go out and buy a boxed version of WinXP at CompUSA (paying $200 of their own money, not warez edition,) take it home and install it on their fully operational computer?
The Upgrade package (retail boxed, $99 for XP Home) has held a strong position on the Amazon sales charts for the past four to five years.
You now too can be the envy of all your friends, and in 3 years you can pull your hair out because TVs will only come with HDMI X-TREME DRM that will be incompatible with your player.
DRM is essentially the same in both systems. The only substantial question remaining is that of mandatory managed copy: hard disc backup in high definition, home networking, and related issues.
I guess thats a slight incentive to buy this early, but not enough to justify the rest of the horribly crippling DRM features it will have.
The discs will work fine for most users. Microsoft has been pushing for mandatory managed copy in HD-DVD. It won't be better and could certainly be worse with Blu-Ray.
As for copyright: The Chinese government is interested in protecting its domestic cultural institututions and industries from cheap (pirated) foreign imports. It also would also like to see Chinese culture exported as successfully and profitably as the Western product.
Given the rocky adoption of HD, it seems pretty risky to set up these ultra-high-power consoles to be suitable to only 15% of customers.
RCA introduced all-electronic color in 1954. It took ten years for color tv to become mass market and RCA and NBC were out there alone.
In one leap, HD buyers are moving to big-screen, wide-screen projection, high-definition video and multichannel digital television sound---and they are paying Walmart prices to get there. That 21" RCA color tv set of the mid-fifties cost $1100 uninflated post-war dollars.
I'm sure that Microsoft will stick to the first Tuesday of every month (or whenever it is) to release signature updates, security patches, etc., which will give third-party vendors the upper hand.
Microsoft's corporate customers like a fixed release schedule. Updates from third-party vendors like Symantec have not been without problems lately...
Having beautiful products helps with the whole mystique thing, and Windows "Fisher Price" XP on some cheap shitty HP or Dell box doesn't really have quite the same impact
Yeah, all it gets you is a 95% share of the PC market.
But the real question here is why don't they make small, cheap HDTVs? Why does everything have to be 40"+ plasma screen? Why can't they make 24" CRT HDTVs? Or do they make them and just not market them?
It is the big screen experience that sells.
This is the sci-fi technology Popular Science has been promising the television audience since the 1950's. Television as The Jetsons know it, televison as The Incredibles know it.
We don't have flying cars but we do have this. In color, high definition and in multichannel theater sound. Interactive and affordable. $1700 at Walmart.
I think Nintendo has badly underestimated what HD brings to the market.
The problem is, HD isn't going away. It is in ten to fifteen per cent of households now.
When Walmart positions the X-Box 360 as the natural compliment to the big screen home theater experience it's just possible that the console market is changing.
the United States got its start in the textile industry not by producing higher quality stuff than you'd find in, say, Britain, but by producing lower quality stuff that was "good enough", but much cheaper
The american textile industry was jump-started by stiff tariffs on imports, 25% in 1816. In the beginning, factories produced coarse cloth for the domestic market, not finished goods. Reader's Companion to American History The concentration of industry, trade and finance in the North would have dire consequences for the slave-holding South.
Do we really want to sink down to the level of these idiots running corporate america
Since it is corporate america, IBM, Sun, the Mozilla Foundation, that provide staff and funding for projects like OpenOffice.org and Firefox, the answer is "Yes."
Even MS employees know they can't sell their crap, they have to force it down peoples throats or it won't sell.
Nonsense, people want Windows. If Dell went 100% Linux tomorrow their sales would drop to near zero... Apple's Mac OS X has been a far better alternative for regular users than Linux...yet nearly everyone sticks with Windows.
Microsoft has been in the home and office for over twenty-five years, and most of that time has been spent building ground-level relationships with users.
This is something very different from the authoritarian, top-down approach, in Linux, too often seen here, in which users are lusers to be set on the right track by a technocratic elite.
If I steal a loaf of bread from you, you no longer have that loaf of bread to eat. If I copy the recipie for making that bread without your permission, it does you no harm (unless, possibly, you're the proprieter of a bakery.
The property that you steal is the intangible (but legally recognized) right of the artist to control the distribution of his work.
The bakery analogy is suggestive because most films must see a significant return in their first few days and weeks of releae in theaters and on DVD to be profitable.
It is not easy to make money on a small-scale but labor-intensive project like The Corpse Bride. But I think we all lose when films like these cannnot find funding.
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If this is true, the obvious question to ask is "Why?" Because this doesn't read like the description of a healthy and viable network.
This isn't "normal" pornography.
It becomes an obsession. Downloads in the tens of thousands of images.
We've seen evidence locally of profoundly self-absorbed and self-destructive behavior: Middle school teachers caught downloading kiddie porn through their district's network.
Just my gut reaction, but I can appreciate yours as well.
The problem is that the sex trade guarantees that the FBI. RCMP, CSIS, INTERPOL and God alone knows who else, will be maintaining a presence on Freenet.
You want privacy, you don't hit the bars that everyone knows are under around-the-clock surveillance.
Two words your lawyer does not want to hear.
It is not a defense where strict/absolute liability applies. You are not a common carrier. You clicked on a EULA that makes it plain that porn may be routed through your system.
Plausible Deniablity does not play well to a Western judge or jury. Your wife. Your kids. Your pastor. Your neighbors. Your boss.
It won't serve a defendant any better in the Islamic republics or before a People's Court in China.
I have always failed to see the extra harm done through dissemination of such material.
Then you have never been a parent or the victim of sexual abuse. Child pornography is the rape of a child for the sexual entertainment of an adult. The damage continues beyond the act itself.
Any way I look at it, all objections to Freenet seem to boil down to one of two things: 1. "By golly, we have to do something about all of this child pr0n!" 2. "I don't want to get in trouble with the authorities."
Freenet's security, performance, and funding depends on its reaching a critical mass of users. Users you can trust, at least a little.
Why the stereotypically paranoid Geek would open his networks and systems to someone as pathological as the child pornographer and his audience is beyond me.
I don't want this. I don't need this.
Geeks confuse access with understanding.
Agricultural extension agents in the US had a century of experience learning how to communicate with farmers who were unlikely to have had more than a grade school education.
You want to be effective, you need people on the ground.
I've yet to see a working model of the $100 laptop. You get to the $100 price point only with massive government subsidies. If at all. Remember the Linux Simputer? Which ended up costing much more and delivering much less than what was promised.
Why is it then, that flagship projects like OpenOffice.org and Firefox are organized. led, staffed and funded by a single corporate entity like IBM, Sun or the Moz Foundation? That many open source projects do not attract an army of volunteers and are in fact starving for manpower and resources?
Rockefeller delivered a product that was safe and cheap: "Standard Oil"
That meant something in the days when you could be widowed by the explosion of a gasoline stove.
When the trust was broken up, customers remained loyal to the product and the regional divisions grew stronger and more profitable than before.
The reality is that DRM'd media content sells.
The Harry Potter franchise alone is worth a billion dollars to Time-Warner.
Your DRM-free PC won't even make it to the shelves at Walmart. Where the Vista HTPC will be positioned as the perfect compliment to your high-def TV and X-Box 360.
Just don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen.
MSDOS and Windows have been in the home and office for twenty-five years.
No one comes into this market as a first time buyer. They have a substantial investment in Windows hardware, software, peripherals and skills. Migration has all the appeal of root canal.
There is no home market for a OEM Linux PC that can't play Windows games or DRM'd media content out of the box.
OEM Linux at Walmart has shrunk to three mediocre Microtel boxes. While the chain positions itself for WinMCE and HTPC sales at $500-$2000.
The Upgrade package (retail boxed, $99 for XP Home) has held a strong position on the Amazon sales charts for the past four to five years.
When it defines a genre for both the PC and the console gamer. Perhaps this is an experience the "Revolution" can't deliver.
DRM is essentially the same in both systems. The only substantial question remaining is that of mandatory managed copy: hard disc backup in high definition, home networking, and related issues.
The discs will work fine for most users. Microsoft has been pushing for mandatory managed copy in HD-DVD. It won't be better and could certainly be worse with Blu-Ray.
Think again: Ministry of Science and Technology: Policies and Regulations
As for copyright: The Chinese government is interested in protecting its domestic cultural institututions and industries from cheap (pirated) foreign imports. It also would also like to see Chinese culture exported as successfully and profitably as the Western product.
RCA introduced all-electronic color in 1954. It took ten years for color tv to become mass market and RCA and NBC were out there alone.
In one leap, HD buyers are moving to big-screen, wide-screen projection, high-definition video and multichannel digital television sound---and they are paying Walmart prices to get there. That 21" RCA color tv set of the mid-fifties cost $1100 uninflated post-war dollars.
Ten times the price of B/W from Mad Man Muntz.
Microsoft's corporate customers like a fixed release schedule. Updates from third-party vendors like Symantec have not been without problems lately...
I'll let you in on a little secret about local politics: It is local.
E-mail from the out-of-town Geek gets deleted without a second thought. No one in Tuttle gives a damn about what you say or what you think.
Yeah, all it gets you is a 95% share of the PC market.
It is the big screen experience that sells.
This is the sci-fi technology Popular Science has been promising the television audience since the 1950's. Television as The Jetsons know it, televison as The Incredibles know it.
We don't have flying cars but we do have this. In color, high definition and in multichannel theater sound. Interactive and affordable. $1700 at Walmart.
I think Nintendo has badly underestimated what HD brings to the market.
The problem is, HD isn't going away. It is in ten to fifteen per cent of households now.
When Walmart positions the X-Box 360 as the natural compliment to the big screen home theater experience it's just possible that the console market is changing.
The american textile industry was jump-started by stiff tariffs on imports, 25% in 1816.
In the beginning, factories produced coarse cloth for the domestic market, not finished goods. Reader's Companion to American History The concentration of industry, trade and finance in the North would have dire consequences for the slave-holding South.
Since it is corporate america, IBM, Sun, the Mozilla Foundation, that provide staff and funding for projects like OpenOffice.org and Firefox, the answer is "Yes."
Nonsense, people want Windows. If Dell went 100% Linux tomorrow their sales would drop to near zero... Apple's Mac OS X has been a far better alternative for regular users than Linux...yet nearly everyone sticks with Windows.
Microsoft has been in the home and office for over twenty-five years, and most of that time has been spent building ground-level relationships with users.
This is something very different from the authoritarian, top-down approach, in Linux, too often seen here, in which users are lusers to be set on the right track by a technocratic elite.
The property that you steal is the intangible (but legally recognized) right of the artist to control the distribution of his work.
The bakery analogy is suggestive because most films must see a significant return in their first few days and weeks of releae in theaters and on DVD to be profitable.
It is not easy to make money on a small-scale but labor-intensive project like The Corpse Bride. But I think we all lose when films like these cannnot find funding.