"By the letter of the law they may be correct in claiming a high ground, but morally, you are as guilty as someone who stands in front of a junior school with a list of crack houses and hand them out to the kids, then claims he was doing nothing wrong as he didn't posses the drugs."
Morally? Are you kidding?
Morally, what was HSBC bank doing funding a nation like Iraq to buy arms? Morally, now that the regime changed, should the people of Iraq still be forced to pay that debt back?
Now I know that some people might think that it's an irrelevant argument, but then so are morals.
"I fucking HATE these people. They ruin everything they touch."
Including new developers. Take a step back from the elitist angle (was 'elite' mentioned?) and consider for a moment that some of these games may have taken your breath away for scope, graphics or plot, when plots were fashionable.
I'm constantly pissed of with the quality of backstory, or technology or environment of games because they always appear to be tacked on, and it's one of the things I'm fairly sensitive to when playing a game.
I'd like some of EAs developers to be slapped around the back of the head with Wing Commander:Prophecy.
So yes, the idea of a 'Canon' could be elitist rubbish, but at the same time it could be a method of pointing out those true classics to people getting into the industry.
I didn't see 'Uplink' get a mention, though. repetitive, but a very, very cool idea.
"Kidding aside, is that actual specialty of law now?"
It'll have it's own department shortly, just called 'Intellectual Property'. In all seriousness, though, If you followed the SCO thing in great detail you want to go take a look at Mark Haise's take on the GPL. It makes you weep and laugh at the same time.
"Maybe you should do some research before you spout off."
I do snookums. Nothing you mentioned seemed to indicate that Iraq could have fueled and launched in a 45 minute window, and smacked of high irrelevency, not to mention 'AC'. Just to take some of your things on board;
"a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001"
Dude, it's 2003. Note the double curly bit that indicates an integer at least two above the one.
"Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000 km"
I have the build specs for the fatman nuclear bomb dropped over Japan in 1945. Do have a 45 minute launch window?
No.
So next time you have a moment, go back over the speeches made by Tony Blair and ask yourself if anything stated there was false. Hindsight says yes; public opinion says yes; confidence ratings say yes, and it's likely the man will not see another term of office. He's been discredited.
Think about it. Someone offs Jack Thompson in a Barney suit. Current logic dictates that Barney is evil. Everyone wins.*
* Please note that this is comedic and should not be taken orally or literally.
""SETI's famous 1977 'Wow' signal has been discredited in the Astrophysical Journal, using the University of Tasmania Hobart 26 m radio telescope to search for intermittent and possibly periodic emissions at the 'Wow' locale."
Are submitters reading articles? There was no discrediting of the 'Wow' signal, just an indicator that they couldn't find it again.
Discrediting is removal of importance. Discrediting is when a national leader claims a 45 minute launch capability for a middle-eastern nation that turns out to have nothing of the sort.
"The web services model is actually client-server."
Nope, that's the client-server web services model. The P2P web services model uses UDDI for discovery. Some more info here and here
Essentially they're both so similar (P2P is more of a philosophy of interconnection that the internet was originally suposed to use) that I'll avoid being a git over it, it's just that it is a commercial use for P2P that the original poster didn't mention.
"These broadcast flags may be a Bad Thing. But, if we all watch less TV, the world may be a better place."
I'm with you, but I'm also going to enjoy Jack Valenti spinning in tighter and tighter circles when he realises that sales are down after the bit is set and blames pirates.
Hopefully he'll end up being cared for by kind people while seeing pirates climbing out of the walls.
"Battlefield lasers are not illegal if their purpose is to destroy targets. Weapons whose purpose is specifically to blind ARE illegal.
If one is hit by a bullet and blinded, for example, the blinding is a not-specifically-intended effect of the bullet."
Semantical argument; a side-effect of a wildly swinging laser over a great distance translating the angular component of errors in the pointing gear is going to be that it blinds people. Bullets don't have the inherent ability to fragment into specular components when hitting something like concrete. Seriously, concrete has specularity and reflectivity.
Funnily enough I re-read the article and it didn't mention that the Navy want to use this in place of such things as the Phalanax point defense system, which is an entirely logical and good use for it in terms of targetting terminal guidance anti-ship missiles in flight. I just get worried when they talk about putting it in the hands of artillery crew.
I also get ragingly annoyed when people start to talk about reducing 'collateral damage' through new and exciting weapons. Speeding up warfare to the extent that it has means that there is less, not more, discrimination of targets. MOAB's do not know what they're being dropped on, they rely on a best guess by intelligence, and given that intelligence identified bio-weapons plants that seem to have disappeared in Iraq...
"I do believe in UFOs, as in "things in the sky which haven't been identified". It's a long stretch from that to aliens, of course."
Forget it. Don't even bother with the caveat because even slightly alliance with the UFO crowd means that you have to believe that aliens are behind UFOs. Seriously, I spent fifteen years investigating these things as an exercise in the workings of the human mind, and I found that people individually have their own beliefs, and form groups based on alignment with those beliefs. Challenge them even slightly and you've got trouble.
Worse are the people that sit on the fringes and keep these things spinning by releasing 'new' research, or 'startling new evidence' in terms of yet another person that 'saw dat darn ufo buzzin' ma daisy'. The fact that it's not seen on radar is an indicator of 'Gubbiment coverup', the lack of traces shows how covert the entire thing is...in fact, every possible flaw or problem can be neatly shuffled away out of sight.
So, yes, you can see something that you'll never be able to identify, but it's not a UFO. The acronym is associated with godlike entities.
"True philosophers know that they truly know nothing."
That would tend to indicate that they also produce nothing, when a number of philosophers have actually helped to pick their way through the problems of human perception and a certain amount of fuzziness connected with that. In other words your concluding sentence was balderdash and more in keeping with a Freshman T-shirt.
"It is impossible and infeasible to analyze everything this way."
It would be unfeasible if you needed to test everything, but that's why you learn so quickly when you grow up regarding some fairly basic truths...how you proceed further in life is you decision, and I certainly won't decry the efforts of anyone pushing back the envelope of knowledge _even if they're wrong_, but constant recycling of mythologies like UFOs (which curious seem to be prolific and yet scarce at the same time) by a vocal minority that get frothy when they rant is counter-productive because it feeds into the idea that science is flawed as a method of enquiry.
"Ultimately, I just don't see SETI as anything that could be really called science"
Is that because you personally don't believe that anyone out there would be using radio signals, or that there's nobody out there? I mean, you obviously have a belief structure in place to produce that opinion...
One could say this same thing about the Higgs Boson...noones found it yet, so why bother looking. But this is the basis of scientific enquiry; you just happen to be colouring it with a sure knowledge that it's a waste of time.
"Why do they have to file a lawsuit? Why exactly is NASA keeping in secret?"
First you'd have to establish that there is a secret; Project Bluebook was filled full of lights, dancing balls and hosts of unidentified things that will remain unidentified simply because 'Bright light' could mean anything.
This is typical of a world that's slipping into mysticism as a way of making things more exciting, and mouthbreathers will lap it up. What annoys me is they could actually produce some programming rather than the extend the agenda of idiots like Kean and keep the UFO fun wheel turning. It would be better to have a word with the chaps at Norad about the objects they're tracking because they're looking at orbital debris in extremely close detail.
Power falls off as a function of both distance (scattering effects because you can't focus light beyond collimation) and the reflectivity of the surface. In terms of the cutting ability, you're probably more used to a profiler that has a cutting distance of around 25mm from the surface.
"actual technology involved in deploying a battlefield laser is immense"
Not to mention that they've already been banned under the Geneva convention after the US unveiled it's man-portable laser rifle for the express use of blinding enemy troops.
The Geneva convention is no respecter of cool toys and instead rules on the maiming of combatants.
"meaning that you are constantly at risk of the laser beam bouncing back and obliterating you."
Given a high enough energy, the laser beam will destroy the reflectivity of most materials, and there is the scattering effect of most non-smooth surfaces.
"What is worse is that if the surface is concave and you are roughly a focal length away then the beam with become focussed upon you and will so be many times more powerful."
If that happened, it would tend to promote the idea of an unlucky gene, and therefore you'd probably be better off out of the gene pool. Wanna take a shot at the calculations just to see how vanishingly small the chance will be?
"This would not look good for the US government if it started turning enemy cities into poisonous wastegrounds with a supposedly surgical weapon."
Oh no, Lordy, that would be terrible.
We'll just have to stick to the depleted uranium and explosive denial of area submunitions because they're so much cleaner.
The main problem is that this constant use of the word 'surgical'; these weapons aren't surgical. Hell, a GBU-15 can still be guided extremely accurately in through the window of a school, they're just trying to give the impression that these things won't happen. Likewise, a laser weapon in the hands of military force that _shoots down it's allies_ because of a jittery trigger finger is going to cause so much trouble that it's insane to consider.
"As for this stuff, it may be well-suited for tile repair or use as a tile substitute or augmentation in some areas. Clearly, more testing is needed."
The best application for it would be emergency repair, but given the materials this guy can buy for '$25' a barrel, I doubt they'd be easy or even possible to apply in zero-G. I've got this guy pegged in the same bracket as those selling NBC suits after 9-11.
I'm sure I've seen something like this before somewhere, though...
"So you see, it's not a morality thing, it's a social impact thing. Children should be protected from porn."
Again, although you provide the only decent argument against it, that's not the impression I get from the foam-flecked masses that use words like 'decency' and start talking about moral decay; obviously people who romanticise various 'golden eras' simply because they seemed more 'right or safe'.
The problem is that the things you described don't just stop at imagery of sex and pornography and for people to start the crusade against things about porn they'd have to start looking at Saturday morning programming, particularly advertising, as a method of creating desire in non-consenting adults.
"If you try to pull the free speech defense when you're running a free porn site without a barrier to entry, your... screwed."
Not only that, but the entry barrier page with pneumatic blondes designed as a 'teaser' should be flat out.
Personally I've always been of the idea that you don't stick something in six-foot neon letters, but likewise you don't curtail something because a vocal minority think it's 'icky'.
"I could coat the belly of the NASA space shuttle with fire paste for $25,000 (US), instead of the $60 million it costs for them to put tiles on it," Hurtubise said.
"It can stand up to the heat of re-entry to the earth's atmosphere, and then they can simply wash it off.""
First of all, it's not simply a matter of applying a 'big blowtorch' to the underside of the shuttle. There's a lot of laminar flow that accompanies the heat and for something that can be 'washed' off, I'd be interested in both viscosity and lateral movement.
The other aspect is that plasma entered the interior of the port wing; it's not about the heat shielding failing so much as it was about having a bloody great hole in the leading edge. I'd be surprised if the paste could bridge that.
"I'm not condoning pornographic content where it's likely to be seen by young, impressionable kids"
That's the bit that I've always had a problem with. British culture being the way it is, I was exposed to porn at around eight from the usual vector of the railway embankment, but I don't think it harmed me any more than the (late) conversation I had with my parents about sex.
If anything I suspect that there's some kind of sociological embarrassment with dealing with the whole subject when little johnny asks what a 'blowjob' is at the dinner table...some people react by trying to cover up, some explain and have a laugh later...
The whole porn issue seems less to be about protecting children than using the excuse of protecting children to remove something distasteful from society, when society, through the media generally, is filled full of images of models, pop stars and actors making close-to-the-knuckle references to sex, dressing provocatively and generally doing the things adults do.
Usually the people who speak loudest about protecting the children get into objectifying children as innocence, when the truth is that at 10-14 you're already pretty aware of the world around you. Hell, girls are getting pregnant at 14 because of the biological imperatives of the hormone whirlwind that slams into gear during puberty, with or without sex education and porn. It's that kind of thing that assured the continuation of the human race before flipcharts and the sex cliff notes came along.
Admittedly I wouldn't be that happy about my kids seeing some of the niche stuff (scat, bestial, etc), but I think I'd make it my duty to explain that some people like that kind of stuff and let them make their minds up if they did see it. Bear in mind that the internet is a convienient transport, there's still cable, video, DVD, R Kelly, magazines and books that aren't legislated.
Firstly some of your links are broken because you're supplying internal dns for 'h20dev' and the rest of the internet doesn't know what that's about.
I'm interested in it as a project having waded through legal documents before, but it seems to me that these things are highly individual, except for structure, so it might be better to go back to the 'root' boilerplate or structure documents rather than using real world examples that people may or may not like you using.
Maybe Natalie Portman will express a desire to date a geek.
Meanwhile the _certainty is that they'll listen to besuited salespeople and friends on golf courses about the real cut'n'thrust technological advancement, and come tell you about it rather than asking an opinion. You're beneath asking, y'see.
So the reason the PHBs get treated with such contempt is karmic. What goes around, comes around. So you keep hoping that someday they'll throw you a bone.
While you're about it, check out who else in the heirarchy they 'reward'.
"Maybe you ought to look at your over-reliance on window dressing and geegaws, and pay more attention to good basic information design."
I apologise in advance for breathing, and ask your forgiveness. I didn't catch the name of your book, though.
"I do still blame developers for this one."
Non-standard compliance of browsers? Or the vast amount of non-standards compliant code still around? Psst. Try 'view source'.
"Exactly what brilliant thing are you forced to deprive your users of, because of browser compliance issues?"
Specific layout elements, dumbass. Those mentioned in the w3c standards documents for devices other than browsers; broken or buggy implementations of CSS that _should_ allow for a flat development model across the board, but instead frustrate when you get the positioning of an element correct under one browser, and then have to figure out why it didn't work in another. And before you harp on about design, bear in mind that in the commercial universe, there are the graphic designers that demand certain things, and I have to be stubborn to a point to stop them using flash, activeX, that cute little java scroller, but you can't be stubborn all the way because they fire you for things like that.
Catch a clue, and stop assuming the worst of someone you haven't even engaged in conversation. Jesus.
Slashdot Mirror
"By the letter of the law they may be correct in claiming a high ground, but morally, you are as guilty as someone who stands in front of a junior school with a list of crack houses and hand them out to the kids, then claims he was doing nothing wrong as he didn't posses the drugs."
Morally? Are you kidding?
Morally, what was HSBC bank doing funding a nation like Iraq to buy arms? Morally, now that the regime changed, should the people of Iraq still be forced to pay that debt back?
Now I know that some people might think that it's an irrelevant argument, but then so are morals.
"I fucking HATE these people. They ruin everything they touch."
Including new developers. Take a step back from the elitist angle (was 'elite' mentioned?) and consider for a moment that some of these games may have taken your breath away for scope, graphics or plot, when plots were fashionable.
I'm constantly pissed of with the quality of backstory, or technology or environment of games because they always appear to be tacked on, and it's one of the things I'm fairly sensitive to when playing a game.
I'd like some of EAs developers to be slapped around the back of the head with Wing Commander:Prophecy.
So yes, the idea of a 'Canon' could be elitist rubbish, but at the same time it could be a method of pointing out those true classics to people getting into the industry.
I didn't see 'Uplink' get a mention, though. repetitive, but a very, very cool idea.
"Kidding aside, is that actual specialty of law now?"
It'll have it's own department shortly, just called 'Intellectual Property'. In all seriousness, though, If you followed the SCO thing in great detail you want to go take a look at Mark Haise's take on the GPL. It makes you weep and laugh at the same time.
"Maybe you should do some research before you spout off."
I do snookums. Nothing you mentioned seemed to indicate that Iraq could have fueled and launched in a 45 minute window, and smacked of high irrelevency, not to mention 'AC'. Just to take some of your things on board;
"a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001"
Dude, it's 2003. Note the double curly bit that indicates an integer at least two above the one.
"Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000 km"
I have the build specs for the fatman nuclear bomb dropped over Japan in 1945. Do have a 45 minute launch window?
No.
So next time you have a moment, go back over the speeches made by Tony Blair and ask yourself if anything stated there was false. Hindsight says yes; public opinion says yes; confidence ratings say yes, and it's likely the man will not see another term of office. He's been discredited.
Think about it. Someone offs Jack Thompson in a Barney suit. Current logic dictates that Barney is evil. Everyone wins.* * Please note that this is comedic and should not be taken orally or literally.
"I believe p2p is the future."
;o)
Yes, but it's more fashionably known as grid computing.
""SETI's famous 1977 'Wow' signal has been discredited in the Astrophysical Journal, using the University of Tasmania Hobart 26 m radio telescope to search for intermittent and possibly periodic emissions at the 'Wow' locale."
Are submitters reading articles? There was no discrediting of the 'Wow' signal, just an indicator that they couldn't find it again.
Discrediting is removal of importance. Discrediting is when a national leader claims a 45 minute launch capability for a middle-eastern nation that turns out to have nothing of the sort.
"The web services model is actually client-server."
Nope, that's the client-server web services model. The P2P web services model uses UDDI for discovery. Some more info here and here
Essentially they're both so similar (P2P is more of a philosophy of interconnection that the internet was originally suposed to use) that I'll avoid being a git over it, it's just that it is a commercial use for P2P that the original poster didn't mention.
"You can never underestimate the intellegence of the average American consumer."
Personally I'd remove 'American' and 'under'.
"These broadcast flags may be a Bad Thing. But, if we all watch less TV, the world may be a better place."
I'm with you, but I'm also going to enjoy Jack Valenti spinning in tighter and tighter circles when he realises that sales are down after the bit is set and blames pirates.
Hopefully he'll end up being cared for by kind people while seeing pirates climbing out of the walls.
"P2P has been around for a while now, but they still haven't found a way to use it commercially."
The web services model is peer to peer. And it's being used commercially.
"Battlefield lasers are not illegal if their purpose is to destroy targets. Weapons whose purpose is specifically to blind ARE illegal. If one is hit by a bullet and blinded, for example, the blinding is a not-specifically-intended effect of the bullet."
Semantical argument; a side-effect of a wildly swinging laser over a great distance translating the angular component of errors in the pointing gear is going to be that it blinds people. Bullets don't have the inherent ability to fragment into specular components when hitting something like concrete. Seriously, concrete has specularity and reflectivity.
Funnily enough I re-read the article and it didn't mention that the Navy want to use this in place of such things as the Phalanax point defense system, which is an entirely logical and good use for it in terms of targetting terminal guidance anti-ship missiles in flight. I just get worried when they talk about putting it in the hands of artillery crew.
I also get ragingly annoyed when people start to talk about reducing 'collateral damage' through new and exciting weapons. Speeding up warfare to the extent that it has means that there is less, not more, discrimination of targets. MOAB's do not know what they're being dropped on, they rely on a best guess by intelligence, and given that intelligence identified bio-weapons plants that seem to have disappeared in Iraq...
"I do believe in UFOs, as in "things in the sky which haven't been identified". It's a long stretch from that to aliens, of course."
Forget it. Don't even bother with the caveat because even slightly alliance with the UFO crowd means that you have to believe that aliens are behind UFOs. Seriously, I spent fifteen years investigating these things as an exercise in the workings of the human mind, and I found that people individually have their own beliefs, and form groups based on alignment with those beliefs. Challenge them even slightly and you've got trouble.
Worse are the people that sit on the fringes and keep these things spinning by releasing 'new' research, or 'startling new evidence' in terms of yet another person that 'saw dat darn ufo buzzin' ma daisy'. The fact that it's not seen on radar is an indicator of 'Gubbiment coverup', the lack of traces shows how covert the entire thing is...in fact, every possible flaw or problem can be neatly shuffled away out of sight.
So, yes, you can see something that you'll never be able to identify, but it's not a UFO. The acronym is associated with godlike entities.
"True philosophers know that they truly know nothing."
That would tend to indicate that they also produce nothing, when a number of philosophers have actually helped to pick their way through the problems of human perception and a certain amount of fuzziness connected with that. In other words your concluding sentence was balderdash and more in keeping with a Freshman T-shirt.
"It is impossible and infeasible to analyze everything this way."
It would be unfeasible if you needed to test everything, but that's why you learn so quickly when you grow up regarding some fairly basic truths...how you proceed further in life is you decision, and I certainly won't decry the efforts of anyone pushing back the envelope of knowledge _even if they're wrong_, but constant recycling of mythologies like UFOs (which curious seem to be prolific and yet scarce at the same time) by a vocal minority that get frothy when they rant is counter-productive because it feeds into the idea that science is flawed as a method of enquiry.
"Ultimately, I just don't see SETI as anything that could be really called science"
Is that because you personally don't believe that anyone out there would be using radio signals, or that there's nobody out there? I mean, you obviously have a belief structure in place to produce that opinion...
One could say this same thing about the Higgs Boson...noones found it yet, so why bother looking. But this is the basis of scientific enquiry; you just happen to be colouring it with a sure knowledge that it's a waste of time.
Why?
"Why do they have to file a lawsuit? Why exactly is NASA keeping in secret?"
First you'd have to establish that there is a secret; Project Bluebook was filled full of lights, dancing balls and hosts of unidentified things that will remain unidentified simply because 'Bright light' could mean anything.
This is typical of a world that's slipping into mysticism as a way of making things more exciting, and mouthbreathers will lap it up. What annoys me is they could actually produce some programming rather than the extend the agenda of idiots like Kean and keep the UFO fun wheel turning. It would be better to have a word with the chaps at Norad about the objects they're tracking because they're looking at orbital debris in extremely close detail.
Power falls off as a function of both distance (scattering effects because you can't focus light beyond collimation) and the reflectivity of the surface. In terms of the cutting ability, you're probably more used to a profiler that has a cutting distance of around 25mm from the surface.
"actual technology involved in deploying a battlefield laser is immense"
Not to mention that they've already been banned under the Geneva convention after the US unveiled it's man-portable laser rifle for the express use of blinding enemy troops.
The Geneva convention is no respecter of cool toys and instead rules on the maiming of combatants.
"meaning that you are constantly at risk of the laser beam bouncing back and obliterating you."
Given a high enough energy, the laser beam will destroy the reflectivity of most materials, and there is the scattering effect of most non-smooth surfaces.
"What is worse is that if the surface is concave and you are roughly a focal length away then the beam with become focussed upon you and will so be many times more powerful."
If that happened, it would tend to promote the idea of an unlucky gene, and therefore you'd probably be better off out of the gene pool. Wanna take a shot at the calculations just to see how vanishingly small the chance will be?
"This would not look good for the US government if it started turning enemy cities into poisonous wastegrounds with a supposedly surgical weapon."
Oh no, Lordy, that would be terrible.
We'll just have to stick to the depleted uranium and explosive denial of area submunitions because they're so much cleaner.
The main problem is that this constant use of the word 'surgical'; these weapons aren't surgical. Hell, a GBU-15 can still be guided extremely accurately in through the window of a school, they're just trying to give the impression that these things won't happen. Likewise, a laser weapon in the hands of military force that _shoots down it's allies_ because of a jittery trigger finger is going to cause so much trouble that it's insane to consider.
"As for this stuff, it may be well-suited for tile repair or use as a tile substitute or augmentation in some areas. Clearly, more testing is needed."
The best application for it would be emergency repair, but given the materials this guy can buy for '$25' a barrel, I doubt they'd be easy or even possible to apply in zero-G. I've got this guy pegged in the same bracket as those selling NBC suits after 9-11.
I'm sure I've seen something like this before somewhere, though...
"So you see, it's not a morality thing, it's a social impact thing. Children should be protected from porn."
Again, although you provide the only decent argument against it, that's not the impression I get from the foam-flecked masses that use words like 'decency' and start talking about moral decay; obviously people who romanticise various 'golden eras' simply because they seemed more 'right or safe'.
The problem is that the things you described don't just stop at imagery of sex and pornography and for people to start the crusade against things about porn they'd have to start looking at Saturday morning programming, particularly advertising, as a method of creating desire in non-consenting adults.
"If you try to pull the free speech defense when you're running a free porn site without a barrier to entry, your... screwed."
Not only that, but the entry barrier page with pneumatic blondes designed as a 'teaser' should be flat out.
Personally I've always been of the idea that you don't stick something in six-foot neon letters, but likewise you don't curtail something because a vocal minority think it's 'icky'.
"I could coat the belly of the NASA space shuttle with fire paste for $25,000 (US), instead of the $60 million it costs for them to put tiles on it," Hurtubise said. "It can stand up to the heat of re-entry to the earth's atmosphere, and then they can simply wash it off.""
First of all, it's not simply a matter of applying a 'big blowtorch' to the underside of the shuttle. There's a lot of laminar flow that accompanies the heat and for something that can be 'washed' off, I'd be interested in both viscosity and lateral movement.
The other aspect is that plasma entered the interior of the port wing; it's not about the heat shielding failing so much as it was about having a bloody great hole in the leading edge. I'd be surprised if the paste could bridge that.
"I'm not condoning pornographic content where it's likely to be seen by young, impressionable kids"
That's the bit that I've always had a problem with. British culture being the way it is, I was exposed to porn at around eight from the usual vector of the railway embankment, but I don't think it harmed me any more than the (late) conversation I had with my parents about sex.
If anything I suspect that there's some kind of sociological embarrassment with dealing with the whole subject when little johnny asks what a 'blowjob' is at the dinner table...some people react by trying to cover up, some explain and have a laugh later...
The whole porn issue seems less to be about protecting children than using the excuse of protecting children to remove something distasteful from society, when society, through the media generally, is filled full of images of models, pop stars and actors making close-to-the-knuckle references to sex, dressing provocatively and generally doing the things adults do.
Usually the people who speak loudest about protecting the children get into objectifying children as innocence, when the truth is that at 10-14 you're already pretty aware of the world around you. Hell, girls are getting pregnant at 14 because of the biological imperatives of the hormone whirlwind that slams into gear during puberty, with or without sex education and porn. It's that kind of thing that assured the continuation of the human race before flipcharts and the sex cliff notes came along.
Admittedly I wouldn't be that happy about my kids seeing some of the niche stuff (scat, bestial, etc), but I think I'd make it my duty to explain that some people like that kind of stuff and let them make their minds up if they did see it. Bear in mind that the internet is a convienient transport, there's still cable, video, DVD, R Kelly, magazines and books that aren't legislated.
Firstly some of your links are broken because you're supplying internal dns for 'h20dev' and the rest of the internet doesn't know what that's about.
I'm interested in it as a project having waded through legal documents before, but it seems to me that these things are highly individual, except for structure, so it might be better to go back to the 'root' boilerplate or structure documents rather than using real world examples that people may or may not like you using.
Nice effort, though. I like it.
"maybe"
Maybe Natalie Portman will express a desire to date a geek.
Meanwhile the _certainty is that they'll listen to besuited salespeople and friends on golf courses about the real cut'n'thrust technological advancement, and come tell you about it rather than asking an opinion. You're beneath asking, y'see.
So the reason the PHBs get treated with such contempt is karmic. What goes around, comes around. So you keep hoping that someday they'll throw you a bone.
While you're about it, check out who else in the heirarchy they 'reward'.
"Maybe you ought to look at your over-reliance on window dressing and geegaws, and pay more attention to good basic information design."
I apologise in advance for breathing, and ask your forgiveness. I didn't catch the name of your book, though.
"I do still blame developers for this one."
Non-standard compliance of browsers? Or the vast amount of non-standards compliant code still around? Psst. Try 'view source'.
"Exactly what brilliant thing are you forced to deprive your users of, because of browser compliance issues?"
Specific layout elements, dumbass. Those mentioned in the w3c standards documents for devices other than browsers; broken or buggy implementations of CSS that _should_ allow for a flat development model across the board, but instead frustrate when you get the positioning of an element correct under one browser, and then have to figure out why it didn't work in another. And before you harp on about design, bear in mind that in the commercial universe, there are the graphic designers that demand certain things, and I have to be stubborn to a point to stop them using flash, activeX, that cute little java scroller, but you can't be stubborn all the way because they fire you for things like that.
Catch a clue, and stop assuming the worst of someone you haven't even engaged in conversation. Jesus.