If he had not agreed to "cooperate" and be charged personally, the Corporation itself could have faced charges, causing CA even more problems than it is already facing.
The Corporation should be facing charges. It ought to be fucking disbanded. The real problem these days is that the Corporations have rights of Persons, but do not face the same liability as Persons.
If I, as an individual, cheat you out of millions of dollars, I'll probably spend 20 years in prison. If I, as the CEO of a Corporation, cheat my shareholders or some other Corporation out of millions of dollars, I'll probably have to resign as CEO, take a 5 million dollar golden parachute, and retire to South Beach. If I'm stupid enough to lie to federal agents during the ensuing investigation, I might do 5 months' time in Club Martha. If I'm a major contributor to the President's political party, I won't even be indicted.
This is the problem, the Corporate Veil is the problem. I have nothing against limited liability; if you incorporate and your company fucks up, there's no reason it should bankrupt you personally for eternity. But when Corporations are given many of the same rights as Persons, they must also be held accountable as Persons would be in similar situations.
We are in dire need of a Corporate Death Penalty. Enron, WorldCom, and others should not be able to simply file for bankruptcy and erupt as phoenixes from their own ashes to repeat their sins.
What is so bad about the idea of establishing criteria for high risk passengers?... I don't think that maintaining flexible profiles for high risk passengers is such a bad idea.
Yeah, seriously. Because Ted Kennedy and Cat Stevens are such a threat to US national security!
Then, they will claim that they are acting on behalf of the copyright holder of the work. LIE. The work in question is not really a film, so they are NOT acting on behalf of the real copyright holder of the item in question.
If you ask me, they should at the VERY least be legally liable for the second big lie, and be forced to pay some kind of damages every time they send out something this blatantly false.
The problem is in the loose wording of the DMCA. I don't feel like dredging through that hogwash at 4 in the morning, but the idea is that the "penalty of perjury" claim applies only to the statement that the person making the notice is legally authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder. It does not apply to the assertion that the person making the notice is the copyright holder, or that the work in question is owned by the copyright holder.
In other words, let's say I produced a file called TEST.JPG, and I find that you have a file named TEST.JPG on your website. I could send a DMCA takedown notice to your ISP requesting that they remove the TEST.JPG file, and regardless of any inconvenience this caused you, I would not be liable for any consequences. That's because even though the two TEST.JPGs are clearly not the same, I do hold copyright to a file named TEST.JPG, and that's all I'm claiming under penalty of perjury in the DMCA notice.
The DMCA is a bad law. It must be struck down, the sooner the better.
Only a fucking antisocial troll would ruin a fucking valid and possibly well-fucking-reasoned statement with such a fucking derisive insertion of profanity and fucking insult.
In 29 words or fewer, describe what you would strive to accomplish if you worked at Google Labs.
"Need laid. Prefer geek but chic chick who doesn't mind Searching and doesn't oppose Groups. Tight on cash, she must be Froogle. I want to create porn.google.com."
The FCC is the only body with the legal authority to regulate the spectrum. The vast majority of the comments in the original/. story agreed with this.
UTD didn't own the apartments in question, even if they did they aren't allowed to prohibit their tenants from establishing legal wireless links. FCC regs allow tenants the ability to place dishes as necessary, antennas as necessary (so long as they're legal), and amateur radio equipment as necessary. Landlords cannot interfere with the above legal placements. End of story.
I'm glad to see that UTD backed down. As much as I loathe the FCC for going after Howard Stern, and for making a huge issue out of Janet's n1ppl4g3, this is a major victory for the average joe.
To illustrate my points, I've created a series of screenshots. They demonstrate the large amount of screen real estate that gaim takes up on Windows compared to AIM and ICQ, the offset preferences window that gtk generates compared to AIM's small and centered preference window, and the disk space required by AIM, ICQ, gaim+gtk, and AIM+ICQ vs. gaim+gtk.
My conclusion is obvious, but please draw your own. You should definitely install gaim 1.0.0 if you haven't already, even if only to test it out.
his problem gaim is too heavy / resource intensive for their workstations
To an extent, I can agree with this, and I'm not exactly on a "stuck" workstation. I'm running XP on an AMD 2600+ with 512 megs of RAM. I just installed gaim 1.0.0 to give it a test run. gaim.exe uses about 18 megs of RAM, whereas aim.exe uses about 5 megs and ICQ runs about 4 megs. AIM and ICQ are the only IM services I use, so for me, it makes more sense to run both AIM and ICQ instead of running gaim. The two of them combined use about half the RAM of gaim, so I can see where this would be a major issue with an older machine.
I also can't seem to get over the gtk interface; under Windows, it's just clunky. I'm sorry, but I don't know of another way to put it. The widgets (icons, buttons, select lists) are huge, gaim takes twice as much screen real estate as AIM or ICQ's native win32 apps. I have the same issue with the Windows version of Ethereal, its screen presence is bloated. Maybe I'm missing a setting somewhere?
I love the idea of gaim (and I use Ethereal on a regular basis, kludgy interface or not) but I don't think gaim will ever supplant win32 clients until its interface is slimmed down. I'm not saying that Windows is gaim's target platform - obviously, quite the contrary - but if you're hoping to convince your Windows-using friends to abandon 2 or 3 IM clients in favor of gaim, I don't think it's going to happen just yet.
All that said, congrats to the gaim team. gaim is an impressive piece of software, from the "behind the scenes" side, especially.
Someone is flooding the thread with comments they've scraped out of other stories. For example, this comment (just down the page) originally appeared in a story on March 14th.
At least it's a bit more creative than GNAA application forms...
If they're any relation to wanadoo.[fr|nl], they probably have the least secure theme park in the world, with the rowdiest guests on the planet. They probably need RFID to keep track of what their customers are doing.
After having just spent an afternoon cleaning up puppy poop from the living room, and cleaning puppy vomit from the back seat of the car, I immediately thought of Nature's Miracle
You, sir, are a more compassionate man than I. After spending an afternoon cleaning up puppy poop and puppy vomit, my first thought would have been more along the lines of a free gift to the nearest Korean restaurant...
Out of interest, which law would I be breaking for *not* looking at child porn (assuming there is no illegal content on the fake site) ?
None that I know of. If you surf by one of these fake sites, no biggie. But if the fake site purports to offer child porn, and you sign up, you are definitely breaking the law. That's where the sting comes in, and tracking you by your credit card info is pretty easy.
I never claimed to be a "child porn expert." I have had a number of encounters with child porn, and if you're so curious about the history, I will explain.
I was AOL remote staff for a number of years, beginning when I was only 14 myself. I started in the Mac Help forum, and was there throughout my AOL tenure. Eventually I wound up working in the Youth Tech forum, and later, I instructed other remote staff as a member of KARES (Kids Area Resource for Education and Safety), part of the CLC (Community Leaders College). As a KARES instructor I taught Terms of Service enforcement to other remote staff who worked in areas like Nickelodeon.
My duties in Youth Tech were fairly mundane, I did content publishing through RAINMAN and also had file library and message board tools. On at least one occasion, child porn was uploaded into the Youth Tech file library. As a file library tool holder, I was one of the people whose responsibility it was to download files that people uploaded into our file library, in order to determine whether or not the files were suitable for the public. Someone uploads something, well, one of the staff have to download it to see whether or not it's worth keeping in the library. And yes, I encountered files which I would classify as child porn. There was no procedure at that point, and (being a kid myself) I just deleted the weird shit out of the file library.
Chat hosting was another story. By the time I was instructing in CLC/KARES, I was 17 or 18, and had also taken over some chat hosting slots in Youth Tech. While the forum was called "Youth Tech," the chat rooms were what you might expect, more like "youth flirt." A bunch of "A/S/L" and "13/f/nj" type stuff. As a chat host I was empowered to gag and/or remove offensive participants. What I was not prepared to deal with was the pervs who would come in and mass-email everyone in the chat room with child porn.
Again, as it was my duty, when we would get a mass-email to the room, if there was a file attachment I would check it out and see what it was, to determine whether or not action needed to be taken, whether or not to warn the room about a virus, etc. On multiple occasions, some pervert would enter the chat room, and send an email to everyone in the room containing an attachment of child porn. At this point it was up to "TOS Kids" to deal with it, and I have no idea what they did, and I do not speak on behalf of AOL as to what took place. All I know is the procedure I followed in terms of alerting the TOSA/AOBaseball/ActionFast/DeadVolvo/etc as to what was going on.
I am not a "child porn expert," nor do I want to be. I'm just someone who has spent many years online, a lot of them dealing with kids (much of that time I was a "kid" myself) and encountering child porn in those situations.
I was trying to make the point that blocking kiddie porn will not have the desired effect. I think you agree with me on this. But if no one wanted kiddie porn, even daddies, then there would be none.
I'm not sure that we really disagree upon the main point: dads are always going to be abusing daughters. It doesn't matter if "no one wanted kiddie porn, even daddies" - the daddies aren't in it for the porn, they're in it for the sexual gratification. The people who make kiddie porn aren't doing it to make kiddie porn, they're doing it to get their own rocks off. And I believe they'd be doing it whether there was an audience or not. Even if they didn't have a video camera, they'd still be abusing the children. 99% of dads don't abuse their daughters. The remaining 1% do, and will, whether porn is a factor or not.
I'm not sure that smoking is a viable analogy. I've smoked since the day I turned 18. Smoking was my choice as a legal citizen of the US. No one forced it upon me, I knew the risks going in, I still know the risks today. My health insurance premiums are sky high due to my choice. But it's still my choice, and always was. Child porn is not the choice of the victim.
And really, who's freedom of speech is the judge trying to uphold here? The people hosting such content or the people trying to access?
Neither. RTFA:
Over two years, the groups said, ISPs trying to obey blocking orders were forced to cut access to at least 1.5 million legal Web sites that had nothing to do with child pornography or even legal pornography, but shared Internet addresses with the offending sites.
So, apparently, during the course of "blocking kiddie porn," ISPs operating in Pennsylvania were also forced to block more than 1.5 million websites that were totally legal. Sounds to me like the PA authorities were issuing bans by IP address. In this day and age of virtual hosting accounts, tens or even hundreds of websites can be hosted on a single IP address, so long as the browsers are using HTTP/1.1.
Imagine if your website was hosted on a server that happened to be also serving a customer who, according to Pennsylvania lawmakers, was hosting a child porn site. All of a sudden, you're dead in the water, and potential customers in Pennsylvania can't reach you. Meanwhile, neither you nor your web hosting provider have any idea that this is happening, because the law made the "dirty list" a secret.
This was a bad law. Striking it down was the right thing to do.
Certainly if the false positive problem was big, they'd be getting complaints. No?
And how would you, as a BT Yahoo! customer, know whether or not they're getting complaints about "Cleanfeed" blocking legitimate websites? Do you trust BT or Yahoo! to be 100% unbiased?
If the software can identify the porn/sites to block the stuff, then surely people who look at it could be offered help. Tackle the problem at the source. Remove the kiddie porn and the problem doesn't go away, remove the desire for kiddie porn and you have solved the problem.
This assumes the consumer mentality, and I don't agree with the idea. You aren't going to stop child pornography by going after the people who look at it; in fact, this is ass-backwards, and unfortunately it's the way that the US government seems to be pursuing the issue.
The viewers aren't the root of the problem, you have to target the producers. Child abuse happens, this is a fact and always will be. Sometimes it's filmed, or photographed, or whatever. This is going to happen even if there are no "end users." Somewhere in America, right now, a father is abusing his daughter and he's recording it with his camcorder. He's not doing it because he wants to make money off the movie, he may not even have any idea how to sell the movie, he's doing it because it gets him off. If he can figure out how to share the video with others, that's just a "bonus."
People were sexually abusing children long before the advent of digicams, and even before the advent of cameras themselves. I don't buy the idea that child pornography is a "consumer driven" industry, no matter how hard the government tries to push that paradigm. The perpetrators of these crimes are going to do the child abuse whether they make profit or not, their goal isn't profit, it's the sexual gratification.
Even if we magically managed to stop all child porn tomorrow, hundreds of daddies are going to be diddling their daughters tomorrow, if for no other reason than to ejaculate. And this is why going after the "consumers" of kid porn is never going to solve the problems. We've got to target the producers, the people who are actually doing the child abuse.
No, it's not illegal, as long as no actual child porn is displayed prior to the "signup page," and this is how a lot of child porn busts are made. The feds set up a fake child porn website, wait for people to sign up, and then take them down. Similar activity takes place on Usenet. Legal porn newsgroups are covered with posts like "MANBOY TRADE," fishing for people who are willing to offer up their address in exchange for illegal pornography.
There is no entrapment, because the feds aren't encouraging a crime that would not otherwise have taken place. The cops are making a situation available, but they aren't coercing anyone into the deal. It's perfectly legal for a cop to stand on a street corner "looking like" a drug dealer, and he can bust anyone who attempts to buy drugs from him. Likewise, it's perfectly legal for the law to set up a site that "looks like" a child porn site, and bust anyone who attempts to sign up.
It's called a sting operation, and it's totally legal. IMO, this is where the majority of child protection tax dollars should be going. Not to legislation that gives states the right to set up secret "website blacklists" that ISPs are required to obey.
What does freedom of speech have to do with child porn apart from technical implementation of filtering?
As I recall, the Pennsylvania law required ISPs operating in PA to block access to a "master list" of sites which were deemed to be providing child pornography, but the list of sites was kept secret (ostensibly to prevent the public from getting a list of kiddie porn websites). It's a good idea in theory: the gummint finds kiddy porn, tells ISPs to block it, and doesn't give the goods away to the public by revealing the list of sites.
The problem is that you have a government-created list of websites which all ISPs in the state must, by law, block access to... But the list itself is a secret. In other words, state regulators could add just about any website to the list, force all ISPs operating in Pennsylvania to block access to that site, without any sort of publicly accountable procedure to determine whether or not that website was actually distributing anything illegal. Because the list of banned sites was secret, who knows what they're banning?
Just to burn some karma, I'll toss in the fact that Tom Ridge, head of the Department of Homeland Security, was formerly the governor of Pennsylvania.
Most airports dont have a smoking section nor even a place in the terminal to think about smoking.
Thank heaven for the Atlanta airport, ever been through there? They have a dedicated smoking room (or perhaps more than one), based on an interesting pressure balance built into the HVAC system.
Fresh, clean, filtered air is constantly pumped into the terminals at regular locations. There are only two places where this air escapes, one is the actual doors into and out of the airport itself, the other is a series of fans located inside the smokers' lounge. The fans create a suction which draws air from the rest of the airport through the smokers' lounge and out to the exterior. It's impossible for secondhand smoke to escape the lounge, and if you stand in the doorways, you can actually feel the breeze.
I smile everytime I'm there, content in the knowledge that whomever designed the airport must have been a smoker:)
To keep this relatively on-topic, I'll mention that I've all but stopped carrying lighters when I plan to fly. I tuck a box of wooden matches into my pocket, it doesn't trigger the metal detector, and there doesn't seem to be any sort of "flammable chemical detector." The box of matches is simple to work around when pulling out loose change, so that I wind up with the change in my hand and into the basket if need be, without ever revealing that I have any matches.
I buy a lighter on the ground at the other end, unless I'm staying in NYC. The Paramount has some very nice wooden matches.
But then I noticed that it was for Win2k/XP/2k3 only. WTF? That's great for home, but at work (where I spend most of my time), I'm stuck on Windows ME!!
So install it anyway. What's the worst that will happen, it doesn't work? Unlikely.
The difference in Win32 API calls which affect the systray between ME and 2K is negligible if there's any difference at all. I ran ME (by choice, even) on one machine for more than two years, and never found anything that "required" 2K or NT but didn't work on ME. I'd wager that Gmail Notifier works fine on Win98 as well. Google either didn't test on those platforms, or just don't want to support them.
So why do they serve alchohol on the flights? Can't be drunk getting ON the plane, but once you're in the air, then it's okay to become drunk???
To mangle a line from Albert Collins, drunk and drinking are not the same thing. Airlines serve alcohol for two reasons:
1) Comfort.
Some passengers are extremely anxious when it comes to flying. Even though it's widely believed that you're safer on board an airplane than you are in your own car, there are people who are terrified of flying. As you can imagine, the number of people with this anxiety has risen since 2001.
Alcohol is a depressant, it has a relaxing effect on most people. Yes, there are some who become violent when intoxicated, but when it comes to dispensing alcohol, your friendly flight attendant is going to be more anal than the stingiest barkeep you've ever encountered. He or she will cut you off if it's believed that you've had enough, and not only is that decision final, you can face criminal consequences if you get rowdy about it.
Who would you rather be seated adjacent to, a passenger who's had 3 or 4 shots of the good stuff and is either relaxed or passed out, or a passenger who's enduring a multi-hour panic attack? From the airline's perspective and from the other passengers' perspectives, the guy with a buzz is certainly preferable to the guy who's freaking out.
2) Profit.
The little one-shot-worth bottles of hooch and the cocktails that flight attendants mix with them are a lucrative market. You're on board an airplane, maybe you're nervous or maybe you'd just like to pass the next 4 hours calmly, and (assuming you're flying a class without free beverages) you're willing to fork over a little extra for some relief. Five bucks for a six ounce screwdriver? Sure, why not! $7.50 for a 50 milliliter bottle of Jack to mix with your Coke? Hey, it'll relax me!
Airlines are raking in a lot of money on the Great Bar in the Sky. So much so that the little pony bottles of booze are an attractive target for employee theft. I can't recall which airport, but in the mid-nineties, there was a very well organized theft ring operating with the vending contractor (Dobbs?). Employees who stocked the flight deck food and beverage supplies were pilfering a bag here, a bag there of those bottles. The feds infiltrated the ring, brought them down, some of them had hundreds of thousands in cash along with caches of airplane booze bottles in their homes.
If stockers could make a few hundred grand selling stolen, tax-free liquor at cut rates, imagine what the airlines are making charging full price per bottle. It's profit, lots of profit.
And that's why they serve alcohol on flights. Because drunk and drinkin' are not the same thing, there's a lot of money to be had in the booze biz, and some people wouldn't fly at all (read: lost profit) if they couldn't get loose on the plane.
Here's a news item: Boston Student Nurse performs CPR on fellow student, saving his life. See how stupid it looks?
Hmm, you're right. boston is a pretty small town compared to other cities around the world, so I guess the capital b is a bit much after all. Oh, and go bruins, can't wait for the NHL season to start back up!
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If I, as an individual, cheat you out of millions of dollars, I'll probably spend 20 years in prison. If I, as the CEO of a Corporation, cheat my shareholders or some other Corporation out of millions of dollars, I'll probably have to resign as CEO, take a 5 million dollar golden parachute, and retire to South Beach. If I'm stupid enough to lie to federal agents during the ensuing investigation, I might do 5 months' time in Club Martha. If I'm a major contributor to the President's political party, I won't even be indicted.
This is the problem, the Corporate Veil is the problem. I have nothing against limited liability; if you incorporate and your company fucks up, there's no reason it should bankrupt you personally for eternity. But when Corporations are given many of the same rights as Persons, they must also be held accountable as Persons would be in similar situations.
We are in dire need of a Corporate Death Penalty. Enron, WorldCom, and others should not be able to simply file for bankruptcy and erupt as phoenixes from their own ashes to repeat their sins.
In other words, let's say I produced a file called TEST.JPG, and I find that you have a file named TEST.JPG on your website. I could send a DMCA takedown notice to your ISP requesting that they remove the TEST.JPG file, and regardless of any inconvenience this caused you, I would not be liable for any consequences. That's because even though the two TEST.JPGs are clearly not the same, I do hold copyright to a file named TEST.JPG, and that's all I'm claiming under penalty of perjury in the DMCA notice.
The DMCA is a bad law. It must be struck down, the sooner the better.
The FCC is the only body with the legal authority to regulate the spectrum. The vast majority of the comments in the original /. story agreed with this.
UTD didn't own the apartments in question, even if they did they aren't allowed to prohibit their tenants from establishing legal wireless links. FCC regs allow tenants the ability to place dishes as necessary, antennas as necessary (so long as they're legal), and amateur radio equipment as necessary. Landlords cannot interfere with the above legal placements. End of story.
I'm glad to see that UTD backed down. As much as I loathe the FCC for going after Howard Stern, and for making a huge issue out of Janet's n1ppl4g3, this is a major victory for the average joe.
To illustrate my points, I've created a series of screenshots. They demonstrate the large amount of screen real estate that gaim takes up on Windows compared to AIM and ICQ, the offset preferences window that gtk generates compared to AIM's small and centered preference window, and the disk space required by AIM, ICQ, gaim+gtk, and AIM+ICQ vs. gaim+gtk.
My conclusion is obvious, but please draw your own. You should definitely install gaim 1.0.0 if you haven't already, even if only to test it out.
I also can't seem to get over the gtk interface; under Windows, it's just clunky. I'm sorry, but I don't know of another way to put it. The widgets (icons, buttons, select lists) are huge, gaim takes twice as much screen real estate as AIM or ICQ's native win32 apps. I have the same issue with the Windows version of Ethereal, its screen presence is bloated. Maybe I'm missing a setting somewhere?
I love the idea of gaim (and I use Ethereal on a regular basis, kludgy interface or not) but I don't think gaim will ever supplant win32 clients until its interface is slimmed down. I'm not saying that Windows is gaim's target platform - obviously, quite the contrary - but if you're hoping to convince your Windows-using friends to abandon 2 or 3 IM clients in favor of gaim, I don't think it's going to happen just yet.
All that said, congrats to the gaim team. gaim is an impressive piece of software, from the "behind the scenes" side, especially.
Someone is flooding the thread with comments they've scraped out of other stories. For example, this comment (just down the page) originally appeared in a story on March 14th.
At least it's a bit more creative than GNAA application forms...
If they're any relation to wanadoo.[fr|nl], they probably have the least secure theme park in the world, with the rowdiest guests on the planet. They probably need RFID to keep track of what their customers are doing.
:)
Just sayin'..
I never claimed to be a "child porn expert." I have had a number of encounters with child porn, and if you're so curious about the history, I will explain.
I was AOL remote staff for a number of years, beginning when I was only 14 myself. I started in the Mac Help forum, and was there throughout my AOL tenure. Eventually I wound up working in the Youth Tech forum, and later, I instructed other remote staff as a member of KARES (Kids Area Resource for Education and Safety), part of the CLC (Community Leaders College). As a KARES instructor I taught Terms of Service enforcement to other remote staff who worked in areas like Nickelodeon.
My duties in Youth Tech were fairly mundane, I did content publishing through RAINMAN and also had file library and message board tools. On at least one occasion, child porn was uploaded into the Youth Tech file library. As a file library tool holder, I was one of the people whose responsibility it was to download files that people uploaded into our file library, in order to determine whether or not the files were suitable for the public. Someone uploads something, well, one of the staff have to download it to see whether or not it's worth keeping in the library. And yes, I encountered files which I would classify as child porn. There was no procedure at that point, and (being a kid myself) I just deleted the weird shit out of the file library.
Chat hosting was another story. By the time I was instructing in CLC/KARES, I was 17 or 18, and had also taken over some chat hosting slots in Youth Tech. While the forum was called "Youth Tech," the chat rooms were what you might expect, more like "youth flirt." A bunch of "A/S/L" and "13/f/nj" type stuff. As a chat host I was empowered to gag and/or remove offensive participants. What I was not prepared to deal with was the pervs who would come in and mass-email everyone in the chat room with child porn.
Again, as it was my duty, when we would get a mass-email to the room, if there was a file attachment I would check it out and see what it was, to determine whether or not action needed to be taken, whether or not to warn the room about a virus, etc. On multiple occasions, some pervert would enter the chat room, and send an email to everyone in the room containing an attachment of child porn. At this point it was up to "TOS Kids" to deal with it, and I have no idea what they did, and I do not speak on behalf of AOL as to what took place. All I know is the procedure I followed in terms of alerting the TOSA/AOBaseball/ActionFast/DeadVolvo/etc as to what was going on.
I am not a "child porn expert," nor do I want to be. I'm just someone who has spent many years online, a lot of them dealing with kids (much of that time I was a "kid" myself) and encountering child porn in those situations.
I'm not sure that smoking is a viable analogy. I've smoked since the day I turned 18. Smoking was my choice as a legal citizen of the US. No one forced it upon me, I knew the risks going in, I still know the risks today. My health insurance premiums are sky high due to my choice. But it's still my choice, and always was. Child porn is not the choice of the victim.
Imagine if your website was hosted on a server that happened to be also serving a customer who, according to Pennsylvania lawmakers, was hosting a child porn site. All of a sudden, you're dead in the water, and potential customers in Pennsylvania can't reach you. Meanwhile, neither you nor your web hosting provider have any idea that this is happening, because the law made the "dirty list" a secret.
This was a bad law. Striking it down was the right thing to do.
The viewers aren't the root of the problem, you have to target the producers. Child abuse happens, this is a fact and always will be. Sometimes it's filmed, or photographed, or whatever. This is going to happen even if there are no "end users." Somewhere in America, right now, a father is abusing his daughter and he's recording it with his camcorder. He's not doing it because he wants to make money off the movie, he may not even have any idea how to sell the movie, he's doing it because it gets him off. If he can figure out how to share the video with others, that's just a "bonus."
People were sexually abusing children long before the advent of digicams, and even before the advent of cameras themselves. I don't buy the idea that child pornography is a "consumer driven" industry, no matter how hard the government tries to push that paradigm. The perpetrators of these crimes are going to do the child abuse whether they make profit or not, their goal isn't profit, it's the sexual gratification.
Even if we magically managed to stop all child porn tomorrow, hundreds of daddies are going to be diddling their daughters tomorrow, if for no other reason than to ejaculate. And this is why going after the "consumers" of kid porn is never going to solve the problems. We've got to target the producers, the people who are actually doing the child abuse.
There is no entrapment, because the feds aren't encouraging a crime that would not otherwise have taken place. The cops are making a situation available, but they aren't coercing anyone into the deal. It's perfectly legal for a cop to stand on a street corner "looking like" a drug dealer, and he can bust anyone who attempts to buy drugs from him. Likewise, it's perfectly legal for the law to set up a site that "looks like" a child porn site, and bust anyone who attempts to sign up.
It's called a sting operation, and it's totally legal. IMO, this is where the majority of child protection tax dollars should be going. Not to legislation that gives states the right to set up secret "website blacklists" that ISPs are required to obey.
The problem is that you have a government-created list of websites which all ISPs in the state must, by law, block access to... But the list itself is a secret. In other words, state regulators could add just about any website to the list, force all ISPs operating in Pennsylvania to block access to that site, without any sort of publicly accountable procedure to determine whether or not that website was actually distributing anything illegal. Because the list of banned sites was secret, who knows what they're banning?
Just to burn some karma, I'll toss in the fact that Tom Ridge, head of the Department of Homeland Security, was formerly the governor of Pennsylvania.
Fresh, clean, filtered air is constantly pumped into the terminals at regular locations. There are only two places where this air escapes, one is the actual doors into and out of the airport itself, the other is a series of fans located inside the smokers' lounge. The fans create a suction which draws air from the rest of the airport through the smokers' lounge and out to the exterior. It's impossible for secondhand smoke to escape the lounge, and if you stand in the doorways, you can actually feel the breeze.
I smile everytime I'm there, content in the knowledge that whomever designed the airport must have been a smoker
To keep this relatively on-topic, I'll mention that I've all but stopped carrying lighters when I plan to fly. I tuck a box of wooden matches into my pocket, it doesn't trigger the metal detector, and there doesn't seem to be any sort of "flammable chemical detector." The box of matches is simple to work around when pulling out loose change, so that I wind up with the change in my hand and into the basket if need be, without ever revealing that I have any matches.
I buy a lighter on the ground at the other end, unless I'm staying in NYC. The Paramount has some very nice wooden matches.
The difference in Win32 API calls which affect the systray between ME and 2K is negligible if there's any difference at all. I ran ME (by choice, even) on one machine for more than two years, and never found anything that "required" 2K or NT but didn't work on ME. I'd wager that Gmail Notifier works fine on Win98 as well. Google either didn't test on those platforms, or just don't want to support them.
1) Comfort.
Some passengers are extremely anxious when it comes to flying. Even though it's widely believed that you're safer on board an airplane than you are in your own car, there are people who are terrified of flying. As you can imagine, the number of people with this anxiety has risen since 2001.
Alcohol is a depressant, it has a relaxing effect on most people. Yes, there are some who become violent when intoxicated, but when it comes to dispensing alcohol, your friendly flight attendant is going to be more anal than the stingiest barkeep you've ever encountered. He or she will cut you off if it's believed that you've had enough, and not only is that decision final, you can face criminal consequences if you get rowdy about it.
Who would you rather be seated adjacent to, a passenger who's had 3 or 4 shots of the good stuff and is either relaxed or passed out, or a passenger who's enduring a multi-hour panic attack? From the airline's perspective and from the other passengers' perspectives, the guy with a buzz is certainly preferable to the guy who's freaking out.
2) Profit.
The little one-shot-worth bottles of hooch and the cocktails that flight attendants mix with them are a lucrative market. You're on board an airplane, maybe you're nervous or maybe you'd just like to pass the next 4 hours calmly, and (assuming you're flying a class without free beverages) you're willing to fork over a little extra for some relief. Five bucks for a six ounce screwdriver? Sure, why not! $7.50 for a 50 milliliter bottle of Jack to mix with your Coke? Hey, it'll relax me!
Airlines are raking in a lot of money on the Great Bar in the Sky. So much so that the little pony bottles of booze are an attractive target for employee theft. I can't recall which airport, but in the mid-nineties, there was a very well organized theft ring operating with the vending contractor (Dobbs?). Employees who stocked the flight deck food and beverage supplies were pilfering a bag here, a bag there of those bottles. The feds infiltrated the ring, brought them down, some of them had hundreds of thousands in cash along with caches of airplane booze bottles in their homes.
If stockers could make a few hundred grand selling stolen, tax-free liquor at cut rates, imagine what the airlines are making charging full price per bottle. It's profit, lots of profit.
And that's why they serve alcohol on flights. Because drunk and drinkin' are not the same thing, there's a lot of money to be had in the booze biz, and some people wouldn't fly at all (read: lost profit) if they couldn't get loose on the plane.
P.S. hiawatha bray is going to kill me for this.