While I think it's clear that treating victims of child abuse the way we do and surrounding them with our societies concerns about it is doing more harm than good we shouldn't confuse child pornography with a victimless crime.
The problem with child pornography has nothing to do with child pornography or even really with child molestation (Which we could probably find some kind of psychological solution to), the real problem is that there is a definite progression of acts leading from pornography->child molesting -> child murder.
Another interesting thing about it is that the victims are 4:1 male children which differentiates these crimes from adult sexual attacks. These numbers on gender might be reaching parity with society acknowledging and accepting homosexuality but I think it will be a while before parity is reached.
Pedophiles (like rapists) go after victims because they feel powerless, and we haven't found any way to fix this... They are sick but the progression of their disease is innevitable, these people NEED to be locked up and most of them know it.
Microsoft will do what it always does, discover innovation early.
When companies start, before they go public they are weak little things.
If Microsoft can find these companies before investors do, or before governments realize how promising they are, trump up some fake charges and go to the counties government frothing.
Government's cave like a matchstick, coming from the business world who would think that a software startup could challenge a billion dollar company? And coming from the perspective that they can't Microsoft's challenge seems legitimate.
In most cases governments don't research the case (And when they do they find that the companies don't know what they're being attacked for (Either because Microsoft didn't tell them or they came to the government with a diffrent complaint) and instead find a company talking about the possibilities of their product. This sounds like a sales pitch and as the company is small a desperate one.
The lawsuit proceeds and the microsoft lawyers get involved...
The American Dream is a lottery, and with Domain's going for $5 hosing going for $7 a month and Ruby/CSS/Flash/Sql texts available for free... there really isn't any cost involved.
Sure you're going to be shouting in a screaming convention so some marketting skills are required.
Why haven't we moved to a system where you NEVER delete?
Security would become a concern (But not too much of one, you should already shred your drive, and if you could overwrite all of one type of bits with the other one)...
This would require a new type of file system (One with a pretty strange [or flash based] file table). But you could have data that would last thousands or millions of years, and considering how many dots I can fit on a peice of paper and how much I suck at making dots a pretty damn large storage size.
If "name is..." link voice 1 or Voice 2 with data set X.
I've thought about doing this for a while, with voip and a portable device (Think home computer linking to your phone line) it would be pretty good. It could even keep a 64kpbs buffer of a few hours... then you could erase it just before you leave:P
I keep hearing people talking about how underpowered the Wii is and how much that sucks, then I hear the counter arguement that Wii games look just as good and crazy graphics are pushing game programming time.
I would like to provide a counter arguement, at some point Wii houses will be trying to keep up with the 360 and PS3 graphics wise and they'll break the first rule of optimization - "Don't", optimizing is extremely costly to get that last few percent and I think the 360 and ps3 may have got the power thing right, so I don't think we can call this a win for either side, both groups will be spending more and eventually the hardware in the ps3 and 360 is going to pay off in cheaper dev times.
As far as the Wii becoming less popular let me be the first on Slashdot to say "I -wn n00bs", like hardcore. Quake 1vs1 took more hours than school or girls (Maybe not both combined)... and I do mean Quake 1, I'm in a CS clan and when I play on a public server I get depressed if I can't maintain a 4:1 KDR (Me > 4 other people[I -wn remember]), I think that hardcore gaming carries many of the same elements that make other hardcore activities fun (such as chess, squash, or tennis) in that they become increasingly mental as skill sets level out.
I don't think AI will ever provide the mental game you find in CS (Which does including calling out the best player on the other squad, think flame war) or even a meaningful way to improve our killer instinct (derogatory term I'd agree, but sizing up and analysing your opponent).
More disturbing then the loss of good FPSs (Which we were essentially promised for the Wii) is the loss of that feeling where I make you go off your mousepad and I win( you used to be able to get noobs to hit the windows key:(), that next level of competition.
I'll keep playing PC games (Surpreme Commander offers a chance to wait until you blink for my attack, or take a sip of your soda:P) and hopefully this feeling of laise faire gaming won't penetrate all the way (The commitment of WOW players makes me happy) but there's something about this whole thing that makes me worry that the people who could get to level 100 in tetris, the people who could beat pac-man with two quarters, and the people who could rocket jump around corners, those people will be gone.
The punk kids in CS are those types of gamers, they polish their skills because they want to be the best and they know playing against people who care is just plain more FUN.
I'd love to see a replacement for Chess, once a computer can beat a human then it's time to move on, and it sure isn't going to come from the developers of Spiderman or Cars (Developers who barely deserve the name). The commercials for the DS show people watching people playing single player.
As you can tell I'm passionate, but don't get me wrong, I loved Katamari Damancy. But when I really really love a game, I want to know there's still people there with me.
I think that the amount of lock in, the benefit for content (And hardware) providers inherent in DRM essentially means that it will be quite easy to corner the market.
Apple is making a play to be the only distributer of AAC with Plays For Sure (Or whatever friendly name they put on their DRM) they'd love to be nice and make their DRM totally transparent until every single consumer device supports it.
And all they want is for us to accept it until that's the case.
Even the EU has figured this out, I don't understand why Apple fanbois can't...
Simple, put the battery on the car as a bumper, make 1 or 2 available to be changed manually at a service station (better mechanical systems to follow) and have the service techs plug it into a wall socket after changing it.
If the service techs find a battery that is worn out have them ship it back to the manufacturer for cost + 5% ( recycling, research on defective batteries etc.)
Or just put a massive capacitor in each fueling station, but meh that's too easy.
Actually I've been thinking of a new system for hydrogen, put solar panneling tied to hydrogen production (And the city's abundant water supply) in the centre of intersections and put nozzles and credit card readers at the corners. Surely hydrogen can take you a few blocks, and once the infrastructure is in place it's only maintenance costs.
Gasoline is so efficient that we've stopped being creative about distribution methods, when were the first gas stations set up? The 19th century? We've got robots now:)
The solution to your woes exists but good lord is it ugly, there are mother boards that support Core 2, DDR1, AGP and IDE.
Unfortunately these boards are designed to be very low end and this tends to come at the cost of reliability, stability, and driver support.
Asrock makes several such boards and these boards are responsible for their reputation of poor quality.
When performance starts to degrade and the upgrade market doesn't look promising overclock (hey you were gonna replace it anyway right? If it blows up it saves you wasting your precious mental cycles on the problem), format your OS (Windows), or move to a faster GUI (Linux, I recommend Enlightenment).
So if I meet a Nazi, deep down he likes Jewish people. But Hitler offered him some money to kill a few of them...
I should think he's a nice guy?
I know people think that Apple will eventually get to a point where the music industry needs them more than vice versa but it's NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.
And EVEN if it did happen people would be so ingrained in using DRM that they wouldn't even THINK of being able to copy music anymore, just like people have come to grips with DVD players not having recording functionality.
Plus the media industry would LOVE IT if we all just shut up until they managed to DRM our CD players CD-Roms, CPU's, GPU's, etc and got out a generation of music that allowed that kind of stuff.
This is 100% a slippery slope and it ends up with us all forced to buy Sony Brand music to play on our Sony Brand DRMeXtreme player which charges you 2c a play to hear music.
This is the time to be loudest, hopefully governments will put a moratorium on this (Or some governments will see the light and other more draconian governments will spend years falling behind and then give in)...
Just cuz Stalin buys a loaf of bread doesn't mean that you should say "well one or two gulags won't hurt"...
I'm sure you have lots of interesting thoughts, you could write a book. But I doubt you could get it published, we lost that fight but I think we owe it to future generations to win this one, because this might be the last chance we get to free information.
Well before we had Eisenburg or Einstein it seemed we couldn't continue making progress. Considering that reports are coming out that String Theory is being disproven it looks like we may need another genius to move our understanding forward:( Meanwhile people will stop wanting to go into the field (because it's not progressing) and if we're really unlucky the genius will never become interested in the field and it'll be a dead subset of science. Like Alchemy.
I just used synaptic to upgrade from Dapper to Edgy, it hosed my swap partition (The move from logical disks to UUIDs broke them)... My local linux guru can't fix it.
So please go on about how great the official packages are?
I live in Canada in Guelph Ontario and attend the University of Guelph.
I pirate Software, music, movies and books. And I maintain a share ratio of 1.2 (Which I'm quite particular about). I believe information should be free though labour should not. I donate money to artists I think are worth while, usually web-comic artists and occasionaly local performers.
For me it is not about saving money, before I became a pirate I didn't spend much money on media.
What I did do before I was a pirate was take those little magnetic stickers found on the back of CD's and attach them to my monitor, one for each cd I purchased.
Those stickies cost more than twice what it costs to burn a cd and buy a jewel case and were a constant reminder of what the information age is all about.
Meanwhile items like well designed combustion engines are kept out of the hands of developing countries through I.P. Which I discovered on trips to the third world as a volunteer.
At which point I decided that it was time we seriously considered a reset on information laws to allow the third world to benefit from the works of humanity.
I started ripping music and movies which were not available through local distribution (Largely chinese films which have since become more popular and English electronic music which has also found broader western acceptance since). If you drop by Socis and ask for my Nick you can meet me, feel free to bring the police.
I.P. is still a font of imperialism and until I feel that as a society we have examined it as such I will continue to be a pirate.
then they would just say "Well, our theory is: The Data Is As It Is." Such a theory would be absolutely right. It would even be science. It would be pretty poor science,
Actually no it wouldn't... Science is by definition predictive, that is how scientific theories are disproven. This is a very common misconception and one which is fundamental to many people's distrust of science.
Slashdot Mirror
While I think it's clear that treating victims of child abuse the way we do and surrounding them with our societies concerns about it is doing more harm than good we shouldn't confuse child pornography with a victimless crime.
The problem with child pornography has nothing to do with child pornography or even really with child molestation (Which we could probably find some kind of psychological solution to), the real problem is that there is a definite progression of acts leading from pornography->child molesting -> child murder.
Another interesting thing about it is that the victims are 4:1 male children which differentiates these crimes from adult sexual attacks. These numbers on gender might be reaching parity with society acknowledging and accepting homosexuality but I think it will be a while before parity is reached.
Pedophiles (like rapists) go after victims because they feel powerless, and we haven't found any way to fix this... They are sick but the progression of their disease is innevitable, these people NEED to be locked up and most of them know it.
if you want to play Halo XXV on a Mars server, you'll need to figure out a way to communicate with that installation at superluminal speeds.
AS GOOD AS SOLVED.
Microsoft will do what it always does, discover innovation early.
When companies start, before they go public they are weak little things.
If Microsoft can find these companies before investors do, or before governments realize how promising they are, trump up some fake charges and go to the counties government frothing.
Government's cave like a matchstick, coming from the business world who would think that a software startup could challenge a billion dollar company? And coming from the perspective that they can't Microsoft's challenge seems legitimate.
In most cases governments don't research the case (And when they do they find that the companies don't know what they're being attacked for (Either because Microsoft didn't tell them or they came to the government with a diffrent complaint) and instead find a company talking about the possibilities of their product. This sounds like a sales pitch and as the company is small a desperate one.
The lawsuit proceeds and the microsoft lawyers get involved...
Every Business?
The American Dream is a lottery, and with Domain's going for $5 hosing going for $7 a month and Ruby/CSS/Flash/Sql texts available for free... there really isn't any cost involved.
Sure you're going to be shouting in a screaming convention so some marketting skills are required.
Why haven't we moved to a system where you NEVER delete?
Security would become a concern (But not too much of one, you should already shred your drive, and if you could overwrite all of one type of bits with the other one)...
This would require a new type of file system (One with a pretty strange [or flash based] file table). But you could have data that would last thousands or millions of years, and considering how many dots I can fit on a peice of paper and how much I suck at making dots a pretty damn large storage size.
I would think that linking voices to people would be considerably easier than determining which words are spoken, though I might be wrong.
Tag information could be done with GPS, clock or anything.
Besides I'd rather know what people said than where or when they said it.
As far as making conversations searchable that's exactly what I meant.
My ICQ logs contain all the phone #'s I forgot to put in my cell phone...
There is an ongoing attempt to fight back against the over production of movies.
Called Dogma. Featuring natural lighting, hand held cameras, and strict limitations on post production.
One example I enjoyed is called "Italian for Beginners" (disclaimer I'm Danish Canadian so this may not be one of the better films).
Would it be better with Voice Recognition?
..." link voice 1 or Voice 2 with data set X.
:P
If "name is
I've thought about doing this for a while, with voip and a portable device (Think home computer linking to your phone line) it would be pretty good. It could even keep a 64kpbs buffer of a few hours... then you could erase it just before you leave
Underpowered System...
:(), that next level of competition.
:P) and hopefully this feeling of laise faire gaming won't penetrate all the way (The commitment of WOW players makes me happy) but there's something about this whole thing that makes me worry that the people who could get to level 100 in tetris, the people who could beat pac-man with two quarters, and the people who could rocket jump around corners, those people will be gone.
I keep hearing people talking about how underpowered the Wii is and how much that sucks, then I hear the counter arguement that Wii games look just as good and crazy graphics are pushing game programming time.
I would like to provide a counter arguement, at some point Wii houses will be trying to keep up with the 360 and PS3 graphics wise and they'll break the first rule of optimization - "Don't", optimizing is extremely costly to get that last few percent and I think the 360 and ps3 may have got the power thing right, so I don't think we can call this a win for either side, both groups will be spending more and eventually the hardware in the ps3 and 360 is going to pay off in cheaper dev times.
As far as the Wii becoming less popular let me be the first on Slashdot to say "I -wn n00bs", like hardcore. Quake 1vs1 took more hours than school or girls (Maybe not both combined)... and I do mean Quake 1, I'm in a CS clan and when I play on a public server I get depressed if I can't maintain a 4:1 KDR (Me > 4 other people[I -wn remember]), I think that hardcore gaming carries many of the same elements that make other hardcore activities fun (such as chess, squash, or tennis) in that they become increasingly mental as skill sets level out.
I don't think AI will ever provide the mental game you find in CS (Which does including calling out the best player on the other squad, think flame war) or even a meaningful way to improve our killer instinct (derogatory term I'd agree, but sizing up and analysing your opponent).
More disturbing then the loss of good FPSs (Which we were essentially promised for the Wii) is the loss of that feeling where I make you go off your mousepad and I win( you used to be able to get noobs to hit the windows key
I'll keep playing PC games (Surpreme Commander offers a chance to wait until you blink for my attack, or take a sip of your soda
The punk kids in CS are those types of gamers, they polish their skills because they want to be the best and they know playing against people who care is just plain more FUN.
I'd love to see a replacement for Chess, once a computer can beat a human then it's time to move on, and it sure isn't going to come from the developers of Spiderman or Cars (Developers who barely deserve the name). The commercials for the DS show people watching people playing single player.
As you can tell I'm passionate, but don't get me wrong, I loved Katamari Damancy. But when I really really love a game, I want to know there's still people there with me.
Which came first,
The Chicken or the Egg
Not really, just map the various package trees and modify the install accordingly.
How about a webservice that uses a database to correlate my hardware and software with my needs.
Compiling proprietary blobs for my machine?
It's not like the linux community doesn't have the API's documented....
Also remember this is a brand new industry which has done something that very few industries have ever done before...
Do you remember 1995-9 when Napster was the most powerful brand in the world?
How many billions is that worth?
And you don't think that lock in is an issue? People would kill for a 100th that brand recognition let alone the kind of lock-in Apple is looking for.
Quick name 2 other music stores that distribute AAC files?
I think that the amount of lock in, the benefit for content (And hardware) providers inherent in DRM essentially means that it will be quite easy to corner the market.
Apple is making a play to be the only distributer of AAC with Plays For Sure (Or whatever friendly name they put on their DRM) they'd love to be nice and make their DRM totally transparent until every single consumer device supports it.
And all they want is for us to accept it until that's the case.
Even the EU has figured this out, I don't understand why Apple fanbois can't...
Make battery changing manual...
:)
Simple, put the battery on the car as a bumper, make 1 or 2 available to be changed manually at a service station (better mechanical systems to follow) and have the service techs plug it into a wall socket after changing it.
If the service techs find a battery that is worn out have them ship it back to the manufacturer for cost + 5% ( recycling, research on defective batteries etc.)
Or just put a massive capacitor in each fueling station, but meh that's too easy.
Actually I've been thinking of a new system for hydrogen, put solar panneling tied to hydrogen production (And the city's abundant water supply) in the centre of intersections and put nozzles and credit card readers at the corners. Surely hydrogen can take you a few blocks, and once the infrastructure is in place it's only maintenance costs.
Gasoline is so efficient that we've stopped being creative about distribution methods, when were the first gas stations set up? The 19th century? We've got robots now
The solution to your woes exists but good lord is it ugly, there are mother boards that support Core 2, DDR1, AGP and IDE.
Unfortunately these boards are designed to be very low end and this tends to come at the cost of reliability, stability, and driver support.
Asrock makes several such boards and these boards are responsible for their reputation of poor quality.
When performance starts to degrade and the upgrade market doesn't look promising overclock (hey you were gonna replace it anyway right? If it blows up it saves you wasting your precious mental cycles on the problem), format your OS (Windows), or move to a faster GUI (Linux, I recommend Enlightenment).
So if I meet a Nazi, deep down he likes Jewish people. But Hitler offered him some money to kill a few of them...
I should think he's a nice guy?
I know people think that Apple will eventually get to a point where the music industry needs them more than vice versa but it's NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.
And EVEN if it did happen people would be so ingrained in using DRM that they wouldn't even THINK of being able to copy music anymore, just like people have come to grips with DVD players not having recording functionality.
We just sold a bunch to China, they'll save our ass if the U.S. goes batshit.
I think Canada has a friendly enough reputation that the (Conservatives to follow Hillary) won't be able to lie that we have WMDs..
There are an awful lot of people of Chinese descent in Canada too... Too bad their a bunch of commies...
Oh wait Canada's gonna piss off the U.S. by being too left wing.... good good.
Um, then why is iTunes still using DRMed files?
Plus the media industry would LOVE IT if we all just shut up until they managed to DRM our CD players CD-Roms, CPU's, GPU's, etc and got out a generation of music that allowed that kind of stuff.
This is 100% a slippery slope and it ends up with us all forced to buy Sony Brand music to play on our Sony Brand DRMeXtreme player which charges you 2c a play to hear music.
This is the time to be loudest, hopefully governments will put a moratorium on this (Or some governments will see the light and other more draconian governments will spend years falling behind and then give in)...
Just cuz Stalin buys a loaf of bread doesn't mean that you should say "well one or two gulags won't hurt"...
I'm sure you have lots of interesting thoughts, you could write a book. But I doubt you could get it published, we lost that fight but I think we owe it to future generations to win this one, because this might be the last chance we get to free information.
Well before we had Eisenburg or Einstein it seemed we couldn't continue making progress. :( Meanwhile people will stop wanting to go into the field (because it's not progressing) and if we're really unlucky the genius will never become interested in the field and it'll be a dead subset of science. Like Alchemy.
Considering that reports are coming out that String Theory is being disproven it looks like we may need another genius to move our understanding forward
I just used synaptic to upgrade from Dapper to Edgy, it hosed my swap partition (The move from logical disks to UUIDs broke them)... My local linux guru can't fix it.
So please go on about how great the official packages are?
Um, could we get a system for something like a web based .bat (Or any kind of script) with basic security?
Well sir, I'm an open Pirate.
I live in Canada in Guelph Ontario and attend the University of Guelph.
I pirate Software, music, movies and books. And I maintain a share ratio of 1.2 (Which I'm quite particular about). I believe information should be free though labour should not. I donate money to artists I think are worth while, usually web-comic artists and occasionaly local performers.
For me it is not about saving money, before I became a pirate I didn't spend much money on media.
What I did do before I was a pirate was take those little magnetic stickers found on the back of CD's and attach them to my monitor, one for each cd I purchased.
Those stickies cost more than twice what it costs to burn a cd and buy a jewel case and were a constant reminder of what the information age is all about.
Meanwhile items like well designed combustion engines are kept out of the hands of developing countries through I.P. Which I discovered on trips to the third world as a volunteer.
At which point I decided that it was time we seriously considered a reset on information laws to allow the third world to benefit from the works of humanity.
I started ripping music and movies which were not available through local distribution (Largely chinese films which have since become more popular and English electronic music which has also found broader western acceptance since). If you drop by Socis and ask for my Nick you can meet me, feel free to bring the police.
I.P. is still a font of imperialism and until I feel that as a society we have examined it as such I will continue to be a pirate.
then they would just say "Well, our theory is: The Data Is As It Is." Such a theory would be absolutely right. It would even be science. It would be pretty poor science,
Actually no it wouldn't... Science is by definition predictive, that is how scientific theories are disproven. This is a very common misconception and one which is fundamental to many people's distrust of science.
Does anyone have a confirmation that OpenGL is crippled in Vista?
I heard some rumours that it received an intentional performance hit (Some kind of wait command apparently).
Any information?