Yes, Mark Foley would probably qualify as a 'minor attracted adult'.
I doubt they're a support group for pedophiles seeking help in avoiding molesting children (the site I mentioned was explicitly supportive of pedophilia), because I doubt such a site would generate the complaints upon which Verizon would act. Moreover, the host, Epifora, explicitly supports 'controversial' speech, and a forum for pedophiles and ephebophiles seeking medical and legal restraints doesn't seem very controversial. Such a forum would be welcome, I'd imagine.
As for what to do with them, meaning those who've identified themselves but haven't committed a crime, that's just a hard question. Intervention and counseling come to mind, and perhaps free access to things like chemical castration, but fundamentally there's no feel-good solution to the problem. The term 'preventative detention' is too Kafka-esque to take seriously (especially these days).
There's a difference between demonizing someone and simply refusing to accept their self-justifying rhetoric. Seriously, can you imagine someone identifying as a "minor attracted adult" seeking help? What I can imagine is them going on TV and trying to justify molesting children by describing attempts to stop them or treat them as oppression against a sexual identity.
Stop them on the beaches. Don't let them set the terms of the debate in their favour.
What the hell is a "minor attracted adult", if not a pedophile?
Notwithstanding the common carrier issue and the legality of the material, it bothers me to see the mainstreaming of pedophilia with terms like this. Years ago I worked at a Montreal ISP. Someone notified us of one of our user's 'secret' webpages--a page not linked from his home page, requiring you to know the exact URL. The page was a collection of links to NAMBLA and like organizations and websites, including a message board for "child lovers".
On the message board, pedophiles alternately discussed sitting in parks watching children play, and discussing how they "came out" to themselves and each other, and accepted themselves for who they are. What was most subtly grotesque was the manner in which they'd adopted the rhetorical stance of the queer community. They talked about 'coming out', and about accepting themselves, and reclaiming terms like 'boy lover'. They were mentally and emotionally setting the stage for the same sort of battle for public acceptance that the gay community has fought and mostly won over the last few decades.
I don't want them to 'come out', I don't want them to have supportive underground communities, and it was saddening to see the entirely appropriate discourse of public acceptance of homosexuality and queer identity perverted like this. This is exactly the slippery slope that the right uses to justify non-acceptance of gays, and we need to bring a big heavy boot down on crap like 'minor attracted adult' to demonstrate that we can make moral choices about who we will accept and who we won't.
The world's a better place because homosexuality has been mainstreamed. It'll be a better place still when pedophilia is absolutely and explicitly denied the same path and the same acceptance. It starts by calling bullshit on terms like 'minor attracted adult'.
You're right in that the heavy lifting of porting the game engine has been done, but including Mac and Linux involves a whole separate QA architecture with significant overhead--every test case has to be repeated three times, every change to handle a Linux quirk has to be retested to make sure it didn't screw up something in Windows, etc. That's the cost that fails to be offset by an increase of a few percentage points of marketshare.
I work for a company that sells a component that integrates with the major web and app servers, and there are several significant versions of certain platforms that we don't support, because no customer has complained loudly enough to justify the formal QA process that we use for all our software, even though we know from a quick smoke test that it works.
This is a good point--how many people fairly labelled as blackhats are real hackers in the best sense of the word, vs. getting caught at something stupid and easily downloaded from a l33t site?
In fact, if someone was actually a blackhat, it would tend to count against them in my mind as a capable hacker because it implies that they got caught.
How hard is it to hire similarly qualified people who *weren't* blackhats? If the only difference between two candidates is that one has a felony record, it's not a hard decision to make. While it may look to the blackhat like it was solely his record prevented him from getting the job, it's really the fact that he's not that rare a commodity.
No one will pay to index any news sites because it sets the precedent that content providers can charge them to let them index. It may seem like a small cost per site, but the strength of any search engine is breadth, and no search engine can afford to pay even a portion of the content they index. Especially since no search engine has a viable business model beyond advertising, a dubious income stream at best.
The Belgian newspapers shot themselves in the foot, and they'll cave after a while when they recognize that they can't strongarm Google into paying, and the cost of their attempt is a serious drop in the traffic they've come to expect.
You're buying a licence to the data on that physical disc.
In other words (as Ray said elsewhere), having owned the disc and then lost it does not legally entitle you to download a copy of the data from Kazaa. You haven't purchased a licence to have the data itself, you've got a right to the data *as provided by the disc*.
The balloon Ray is trying to pop is the argument that, because the disc is orthogonal to the data, they are logically and therefore legally separate entities. They're not, and while the conflation of the two may be archaic, that's still the law, and you'll still be in trouble for breaking it.
Because bean-counters are notorious rationalizers. All he'd hear is "no one's that stupid" or "so people should RTFM."
Good user-centric design means making things as easy and obvious as possible for the user, treating the user with as much charity as possible. It's not imagining that users are really stupid, it's designing for the user who's in a hurry, or distracted, or just doesn't feel much like paying attention. It's going from relatively easy to seamless, something with definite costs that are hard to quantify up front.
Don't show the bean counters the UI. Show them the spreadsheet showing a sample of 10 users, half of whom took twice as long to do something, a quarter of whom simply gave up (there's your lost sale).
I've asked him to write an apology. That should take 2 minutes. See, it's
no biggie.
He has caused enormous pain and suffering and he needs to apologize.
Although he has not been asked to do it, (becuase I know he won't) he should
apologize to all the sick people whose time and opportunities have been
squandered.
I often wonder how many people have suffered and died while waiting on a
cure from those like Ringach who have had countless animals and
money---resources--- to do research.
PFP is all for medical research but we want these resources to be channeled
into areas that have proven track records.
Did you know, (according to the World Health Organization) that Cuba has
fewer infant mortalities than the US? In fact, the US ranks waaaay down the
list in childhood diseases because we squander so many of our resources.
Imagine how many people could be helped if the NIH invested in alternatives
to animal experiments!
Not only that but the research industry is so caught up in graft, deception
etc. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12749497/from/RSS/ is a story you may have
heard about. Every week there's a new story where those in research have
lied about their data or stolen tons of money.
I'm in Atlanta and we have Emory University here. Charles Nemeroff from
Emory University resigned his position as editor of the journal
Neuropsychopharmacology this week because he and others were caught hiding
the fact they get kickbacks for promoting drugs that have harmed people.
Don't even get me started about Dr. Graham's testimony about Vioxx and the
other drugs he mentioned in his testimony to the US Senate!
This is such a corrupt industry it rivals any banana republic you can
mention. If it was just about the money that would be understandable but
people are depending on these cures and they believe the lies they are
hearing and the animals are being used in experiments that the researchers
know are only a way to get their federal grants renewed.
Especially interesting given the parallels between their tactics: List the names of the various offenders, and urge activists to do something about it.
I know what the website says becuase I'm the one who updates it. Yes, it
does say he has quit and yes we have confirmation from UCLA.
No, not by my own words. Those are YOUR words.
Thanks for the input but I think I can handle the website.
I have contacted him about the subject and now, the ball is in his court.
He has one thing left to do. I don't know how to make it any clearer.
For your information, local activists are no longer working on Ringach.
They are moving on to someone else. That's what you should be interested
in. Now, you have info the Seattle reporter does not have.
You need to be patient and let Ringach finish this. If the reporter had
contacted me, I would have told her this last part just as I did a reporter
who wrote about it earlier in the month.
You should know that this did not just happen. It's been almost a month.
You are just now finding out about it so please let Ringach do what he wants
in regard to having his name removed.
You did not answer me. Do you have knowledge of cellular biology?
I've responded:
My background is in philosophy, not biology. Animal rights is a subject with
which I'm familiar, and to which I'm generally sympathetic. I also have a
small background in political activism that leans to the left.
You still haven't told me what Ringach has to do: What answer he has to give
or action he has to undertake in order for you to remove his contact
information from your site.
FYI, I'm in no way connected to UCLA, Ringach, or anyone remotely near the
field.
It's sort of like the article. There's more than meets the eye. The reporter did not bother to contact us for any comments or our side of the story. Plus, she just assumed UCLA was telling the truth. That was a mistake on her part.....surely no investigative skills there. She basically just printed UCLA's press release and didn't move a muscle to find out anything else.
My responsibility is to the animals...not to Ringach. They are who we represent.
Ringach represents Ringach.
I am waiting on Ringach's answer and then I'll remove it.
How much do you know about cellular biology? Also, are you familiar with our national website? www.primatefreedom.com Visit it if you are interested. If not, have a nice day.
I've responded:
You didn't answer my question. Your site says that it has confirmed Ringach will no longer experiment on primates. You have his email, you have UCLA's press release. By your own words, he has met your conditions. By leaving his contact information up, you imply that there is more use for activists to make of his that information. What's left for activists to do with respect to Ringach? For what answer are you waiting?
I sent the following email to the link ucla@primatefreedom.com:
Now that Ringach has stopped researching on primates, are you going to remove his personal information from your website?
Jean Barnes (quiver@bellsouth.net, administrator and technical contact for the domain uclaprimatefreedom.com) responded:
We have contacted Ringach about removing his information and are awaiting his response.
Thank you for contacting us.
I responded:
Why do you need to contact Ringach? His permission isn't required for you to remove his information. It's solely within your power and responsibility to do so.
WTF? Why do they need to contact him in order to take him off their target list? Are they waiting for a statement of contrition from him or something?
That's the standard joke, but it exposes the basic point of ISO9000 certification: Your processes suck, but do you even know why?
Every organization struggles with doing what they say/think they're doing. How often have you heard the joke "do we do it the way we're supposed to do it, or the way we actually do it?" At the manufacturer where I worked, this was a common refrain.
The first step in eliminating the gap, and the point of ISO certification, is establishing the discipline of figuring out how things are actually getting done, and sticking to that method. Only then are you actually in a position to evaluate what you're doing and improve it.
I saw an endless stream of vice presidential policy announcements and procedure documents that got ignored on the warehouse floor. What good is an attempt to improve operations when there's a disconnect between the people writing the procedures and those (not) carrying them out?
Like others said, some like the Wild West atmosphere where there's no protection, it's all about skill and brains.
Having said that, there's lot of safe space to play in for a long time that never requires brutal PvP action, and you're under no obligation to invest in scams like EIB. Carebears, as they're called, get along just as well as pirates.
You stand on the backs of legions of incredible people who spent their lives enriching everyone else's, and piss all over them because the world isn't perfect yet.
We know nothing, and yet you can post bitchy comments to slashdot, on a computer, connected to the Internet, powered by a physical plant hundreds or thousands of miles away piping electricity directly into your laptop, and then watch a show on TV over cable distributed by satellite.
I'd hazard a guess that we actually do know a thing or two.
It's not the lack of support, it's the lack of *accountable* support, meaning a single point of contact who can be visibly blamed for the system not functioning. The contents of an IRC session may actually offer better support, but a nick makes a lousy scapegoat.
the 1993 WTC bombing, the terrorists returned twice for their deposit on the van used to carry the explosives.
This actually isn't as stupid as it sounds. Had the explosion gone off properly, the truck (meaning the identifiable marks of the truck) would have been vaporized and buried. The truck wouldn't have been identifiable for months, at least.
That being the case, it would have been suspicious not to report the truck stolen and claim the deposit. Imagine you're the rental agent. The WTC just blew up, and an appropriately sized truck that you rented out has had no one claim the deposit. That's a direct line to the renter, which is how they actually caught the guys (but only because they identified the truck almost immediately).
While I agree with your general sentiment, I believe Gonzales means that they have many legal avenues open to them, starting with several different appeals paths; using any of them stays the order until it's ruled on, I believe, so this ruling is the first act, not the last, in this very sordid play.
The defendent's lawyers claimed that the plaintiffs had no standing to bring the case because they had no standing to be aware of the methods. The judge in this case sidestepped the methods question by relying upon public statements of the scope and nature of the unwarranted wiretapping program by the Bush Administration. By doing so she avoided grounds for appealing her decisions on arguments of state secrets principles. Her whole ruling amounts to: The president can't ignore the due process requirements (i.e., the requirement to follow laws by Congress) in executing his duties, and in so ignoring, violated the first amendment rights of the plaintiffs as well.
It's not the mystery method that's covered by a legal loophole. The Bush Administration is arguing that legally, under the 'unitary executive' theory, the president has the authority to ignore the law in cases of national security. It's this argument that the judge slammed the door on when she said that all powers derive from the constitution, so it's not possible to ignore the constitutional protections that are guaranteed, except within the framework of a law passed by Congress that passes constitutional muster.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, Mark Foley would probably qualify as a 'minor attracted adult'.
I doubt they're a support group for pedophiles seeking help in avoiding molesting children (the site I mentioned was explicitly supportive of pedophilia), because I doubt such a site would generate the complaints upon which Verizon would act. Moreover, the host, Epifora, explicitly supports 'controversial' speech, and a forum for pedophiles and ephebophiles seeking medical and legal restraints doesn't seem very controversial. Such a forum would be welcome, I'd imagine.
As for what to do with them, meaning those who've identified themselves but haven't committed a crime, that's just a hard question. Intervention and counseling come to mind, and perhaps free access to things like chemical castration, but fundamentally there's no feel-good solution to the problem. The term 'preventative detention' is too Kafka-esque to take seriously (especially these days).
There's a difference between demonizing someone and simply refusing to accept their self-justifying rhetoric. Seriously, can you imagine someone identifying as a "minor attracted adult" seeking help? What I can imagine is them going on TV and trying to justify molesting children by describing attempts to stop them or treat them as oppression against a sexual identity.
Stop them on the beaches. Don't let them set the terms of the debate in their favour.
What the hell is a "minor attracted adult", if not a pedophile?
Notwithstanding the common carrier issue and the legality of the material, it bothers me to see the mainstreaming of pedophilia with terms like this. Years ago I worked at a Montreal ISP. Someone notified us of one of our user's 'secret' webpages--a page not linked from his home page, requiring you to know the exact URL. The page was a collection of links to NAMBLA and like organizations and websites, including a message board for "child lovers".
On the message board, pedophiles alternately discussed sitting in parks watching children play, and discussing how they "came out" to themselves and each other, and accepted themselves for who they are. What was most subtly grotesque was the manner in which they'd adopted the rhetorical stance of the queer community. They talked about 'coming out', and about accepting themselves, and reclaiming terms like 'boy lover'. They were mentally and emotionally setting the stage for the same sort of battle for public acceptance that the gay community has fought and mostly won over the last few decades.
I don't want them to 'come out', I don't want them to have supportive underground communities, and it was saddening to see the entirely appropriate discourse of public acceptance of homosexuality and queer identity perverted like this. This is exactly the slippery slope that the right uses to justify non-acceptance of gays, and we need to bring a big heavy boot down on crap like 'minor attracted adult' to demonstrate that we can make moral choices about who we will accept and who we won't.
The world's a better place because homosexuality has been mainstreamed. It'll be a better place still when pedophilia is absolutely and explicitly denied the same path and the same acceptance. It starts by calling bullshit on terms like 'minor attracted adult'.
You're right in that the heavy lifting of porting the game engine has been done, but including Mac and Linux involves a whole separate QA architecture with significant overhead--every test case has to be repeated three times, every change to handle a Linux quirk has to be retested to make sure it didn't screw up something in Windows, etc. That's the cost that fails to be offset by an increase of a few percentage points of marketshare.
I work for a company that sells a component that integrates with the major web and app servers, and there are several significant versions of certain platforms that we don't support, because no customer has complained loudly enough to justify the formal QA process that we use for all our software, even though we know from a quick smoke test that it works.
This is a good point--how many people fairly labelled as blackhats are real hackers in the best sense of the word, vs. getting caught at something stupid and easily downloaded from a l33t site?
In fact, if someone was actually a blackhat, it would tend to count against them in my mind as a capable hacker because it implies that they got caught.
How hard is it to hire similarly qualified people who *weren't* blackhats? If the only difference between two candidates is that one has a felony record, it's not a hard decision to make. While it may look to the blackhat like it was solely his record prevented him from getting the job, it's really the fact that he's not that rare a commodity.
No one will pay to index any news sites because it sets the precedent that content providers can charge them to let them index. It may seem like a small cost per site, but the strength of any search engine is breadth, and no search engine can afford to pay even a portion of the content they index. Especially since no search engine has a viable business model beyond advertising, a dubious income stream at best.
The Belgian newspapers shot themselves in the foot, and they'll cave after a while when they recognize that they can't strongarm Google into paying, and the cost of their attempt is a serious drop in the traffic they've come to expect.
You're buying a licence to the data on that physical disc.
In other words (as Ray said elsewhere), having owned the disc and then lost it does not legally entitle you to download a copy of the data from Kazaa. You haven't purchased a licence to have the data itself, you've got a right to the data *as provided by the disc*.
The balloon Ray is trying to pop is the argument that, because the disc is orthogonal to the data, they are logically and therefore legally separate entities. They're not, and while the conflation of the two may be archaic, that's still the law, and you'll still be in trouble for breaking it.
Because bean-counters are notorious rationalizers. All he'd hear is "no one's that stupid" or "so people should RTFM."
Good user-centric design means making things as easy and obvious as possible for the user, treating the user with as much charity as possible. It's not imagining that users are really stupid, it's designing for the user who's in a hurry, or distracted, or just doesn't feel much like paying attention. It's going from relatively easy to seamless, something with definite costs that are hard to quantify up front.
Don't show the bean counters the UI. Show them the spreadsheet showing a sample of 10 users, half of whom took twice as long to do something, a quarter of whom simply gave up (there's your lost sale).
Barnes has responded:
Especially interesting given the parallels between their tactics: List the names of the various offenders, and urge activists to do something about it.
Barnes has responded:
I've responded:
Barnes has responded:
I've responded:
I sent the following email to the link ucla@primatefreedom.com:
Jean Barnes (quiver@bellsouth.net, administrator and technical contact for the domain uclaprimatefreedom.com) responded:
I responded:
WTF? Why do they need to contact him in order to take him off their target list? Are they waiting for a statement of contrition from him or something?
That's the standard joke, but it exposes the basic point of ISO9000 certification: Your processes suck, but do you even know why?
Every organization struggles with doing what they say/think they're doing. How often have you heard the joke "do we do it the way we're supposed to do it, or the way we actually do it?" At the manufacturer where I worked, this was a common refrain.
The first step in eliminating the gap, and the point of ISO certification, is establishing the discipline of figuring out how things are actually getting done, and sticking to that method. Only then are you actually in a position to evaluate what you're doing and improve it.
I saw an endless stream of vice presidential policy announcements and procedure documents that got ignored on the warehouse floor. What good is an attempt to improve operations when there's a disconnect between the people writing the procedures and those (not) carrying them out?
Sony's hardware hasn't been top notch since someone first uttered the name "Vaio"...
Seriously, their reputation for good hardware has plummetted in the last ten years too.
Like others said, some like the Wild West atmosphere where there's no protection, it's all about skill and brains.
Having said that, there's lot of safe space to play in for a long time that never requires brutal PvP action, and you're under no obligation to invest in scams like EIB. Carebears, as they're called, get along just as well as pirates.
You stand on the backs of legions of incredible people who spent their lives enriching everyone else's, and piss all over them because the world isn't perfect yet.
How fucking pathetic.
We know nothing, and yet you can post bitchy comments to slashdot, on a computer, connected to the Internet, powered by a physical plant hundreds or thousands of miles away piping electricity directly into your laptop, and then watch a show on TV over cable distributed by satellite.
I'd hazard a guess that we actually do know a thing or two.
It's not the lack of support, it's the lack of *accountable* support, meaning a single point of contact who can be visibly blamed for the system not functioning. The contents of an IRC session may actually offer better support, but a nick makes a lousy scapegoat.
This actually isn't as stupid as it sounds. Had the explosion gone off properly, the truck (meaning the identifiable marks of the truck) would have been vaporized and buried. The truck wouldn't have been identifiable for months, at least.
That being the case, it would have been suspicious not to report the truck stolen and claim the deposit. Imagine you're the rental agent. The WTC just blew up, and an appropriately sized truck that you rented out has had no one claim the deposit. That's a direct line to the renter, which is how they actually caught the guys (but only because they identified the truck almost immediately).
While I agree with your general sentiment, I believe Gonzales means that they have many legal avenues open to them, starting with several different appeals paths; using any of them stays the order until it's ruled on, I believe, so this ruling is the first act, not the last, in this very sordid play.
What part of "72 hours to retroactively obtain a warrant" don't you understand?
The defendent's lawyers claimed that the plaintiffs had no standing to bring the case because they had no standing to be aware of the methods. The judge in this case sidestepped the methods question by relying upon public statements of the scope and nature of the unwarranted wiretapping program by the Bush Administration. By doing so she avoided grounds for appealing her decisions on arguments of state secrets principles. Her whole ruling amounts to: The president can't ignore the due process requirements (i.e., the requirement to follow laws by Congress) in executing his duties, and in so ignoring, violated the first amendment rights of the plaintiffs as well.
It's not the mystery method that's covered by a legal loophole. The Bush Administration is arguing that legally, under the 'unitary executive' theory, the president has the authority to ignore the law in cases of national security. It's this argument that the judge slammed the door on when she said that all powers derive from the constitution, so it's not possible to ignore the constitutional protections that are guaranteed, except within the framework of a law passed by Congress that passes constitutional muster.