It's not just "stupid people" who have zombied machines, who operate open proxies, who allow unlimited anonymous connections to their machines...
As nations crack down on the free exchange of information of all sorts you can expect this type of activity to rise. It's called "creating plausible deniability." Not everyone knows the details of how the internet works, but everyone knows if you have sub7 on your machine and you're caught doing things your government might frown on, you've at least got a chance of defending yourself.
Those extra two bits are used to linearize the output
Without seeing the software how do you know how they are being used? I don't use windows, I have no idea what it will do - but X will certainly support more color resolution than 8bpp and film Gimp and other software available for linux will support even floating point color formats.
The software on the computer can't tell the graphics card a 10bpp/channel pixel
As I just pointed out: yes, it can.
A giant sticking point you are overlooking is 24 bits is only, at best, one of many file formats. JPEG certainly doesn't set such limits, nor does MPEG. A decoding algorithm that employs dithering can generate essentially an infinite number of bits using a nearly infinite variety of algorithms.
But a card that has three 8 bit DACs doesn't even support the full range of 24 bits in a practicel sense because settings like gamma, black level, brightness and contrast are going to squash even these ranges. Having a 30 bit graphics card (and an X11 driver written for it) corrects this - in fact that is really pretty much the ONLY way to get the full range of "24 bit color" on a CRT monitor.
The display can't show any more than 256 shades of grey.
Utterly wrong. CRTs use analog electronics. There is no quantization in the RGB amplifiers in a CRT monitor, for example - or really in any of the amplifiers. Their limitation is set by noise and nonlinearity, not discrete quantized steps as in a DVI signal or the driver circuitry of an LCD.
I have a Panasonic DVD player almost a decade old now, it was one of the first to have 10 bit DACs. and yes, the picture quality IS noticeable better than most, this is only part of the reason it was (at the time) nearly $1000 DVD player.
Many graphics cards now have ten bit D/A convertors. With the proper driver this means 30 bits of color resolution and yes, it does make a difference.
The parents may know what the money is being spent on, but they cannot know who. It's no different than giving your kid a credit card which she uses to buy clothes or jewelry, which she sells and buys drugs.
When I was in Jr. High I had a friend (yes, I really did) and he was on the school lunch program so every day he could get in whichever line he wanted and only had to show his card. But he never ate lunch. Instead he would go through the line where you get a hamburger and fries for a buck.., and then sell it for fifty cents.
yes, those chips let you own your console again, instead of renting it for a one time fee from the manufacturer whom you purchased it from...
This is idiocy. It is like claiming napster users were not in it for free music.
Look: whether you buy a britney spears CD or download it from the net and leave it in your shared folder, either way YOU yourself are feeding that machine of opression you are now trying to feel so noble over.
If you disagree with this shit STOP GIVING THEM MONEY - but more importantly STOP GIVING THEM MARKET SHARE! When you buy a console, I don't care if it's a thousand dollars of hardware they're clearing out for twenty bucks, you are feeding the marketing machine that lets them sell a thousand more to people who are NOT like you, who will NOT use one of those circumvention devices, who WILL pay fifty bucks a pop for those copy protected games.
If you are going to buck the system you need to stop feeding it. The game you are playing right now is nothing but a sucker's game.
I live in the sticks, dialup is all I can get. and I got sick of paying twenty bucks a month when so many are offering it for half, so I decided to go with Netscape's bargain offer.
It's not even worth it at half the price of "regular service." they DO NOT support anything besides windows and even if you are lucky enough to get on you still get to deal with AOL's sucklicious proxy nest. the only way I was able to reach secure sites like paypal and my bank from behind my IP Cop router was to create a tunnel to a third party server and connect from there, somehow AOL has managed to completely screw up this part of the service.
They don't support Mozilla or Firefox or any of their own products and in fact they have these special applets that REQUIRE you to run windows lest you be forever unable to reconnect after the first time some tiny thing goes wrong with your account.
I never would have believed anyone could screw up simple DIALUP service so incredibly badly... until I dropped them and tried Netzero. But that's a whole 'nother rant, suffice to say I am back to paying twenty bucks a month to a local ISP for dialup and I'm not likely to be complaining about the price anytime soon.
[i]You may think its stupid, but unfortunately, its reality. The reality is that even though it slower, its still effective.[/i]
"Effective" in what way? that it is a nuisance? Or that it has knocked you into darkness? according to your parable there you haven't yet been knocked down by it and you don't talk like you are from cnet or Microsoft or someplace "big." If such an "attack" cannot even knock you down what chance does it have in a larger attack?
the fact some absuse goes on is both to be expected and, given the purpose of tor in the first place, not entirely "bad." In a network of few central arteries where some degree of anonymity is the intended function having so many packets bouncing around willy nilly helps to clutter the channel, to reduce the likelihood of an atacker launcing a successful timing attack against someone with legitimate interests.
Where I live a girl of 13 is "legal" if she is no longer a virgin. But if you are more than a few years older you can still be tried if she is under 16. Yet you can marry her with her parent's consent as young as 14.
It's a screwed up mess and the way things are heading it is only going to get worse. I know a couple of teenage girls who model for websites, I can assure you they are not "victims" except to those who insist on "protecting" them from their own desire for expression - and they do not seem at all happy about the way the puritans running the show right now are taking things, either. These are real people - kids - who make money from those sites, one of them is stashing it away for college and every one of the "crackdowns" like has been going on lately drives off customers and impacts them financially as well as emotionally.
Ye olde backlash can be a real bitch... and these kids are soon going to be of voting age. I just hope they start hitting their marks before the courts are able to completely overturn the constitution.
it is 100 verified nodes. To become "verified" is to be "blessed" wiht a certain level of trust. It means your node is held somewhat accountable, it can be trusted to not be intercepting packets. Although every packet is re-encrypted at each node and it knows only the IP of the next and last in the chain, honeypots could do some damage because there is likely to be some incriminating content inside the packet itself - cookies, usernames, etc.
So the tor net is setup by default that the first and last hops go through "trusted" nodes but traffic in the middle may go through untrusted nodes - and anyone can setup an untrusted node and, in fact, tor comes OOTB ready to run as an untrusted server if it detects you have a decent connection to do so.
So in this respect the TOTAL number of nodes is constantly changing as people enter and leave the network. The total number of nodes is separate and not directly related at all to the number of TRUSTED, registered nodes.
I use tor routinely. I'm using it right now. I have it on my laptop, too. It goes browser>privoxy>tor>website. There are only a tiny few sites where I go around this chain (slashdot here is one of them, but not the "affiliated" sites). Is it because I have something to hide?
Yeah, I do. Just like I put on pants before I leave the house, the same way I keep my money in a wallet and not on a chain around my neck.
I have a right to a reasonable expectation of privacy and this allows me to have some of that. When I am on my laptop on the filthy campus network I don't have to worry someone sitting across the hall with a packet sniffer on his laptop is eavesdropping on my browsing. And if I want to go haul in something off edonkey or even the evil mean and nasty freenet I can do so from anywhere on campus even behind the firewall that filters out all p2p traffic to the commons areas.
But to say people are going to use this to ddos sites is just stupid. Use the network before making such claims and see for yourself how it works. People who ddos sites don't need tor and wouldn't bother, it's too slow, too easy to trace via timing analysis, and the convenience factor alone means it will probably remain slow due to contantly being overloaded.
The people who ddos sites are going to run a scanner on a couple of irc servers, track down the same poorly configured and/or rooted out proxies all the script kiddies sharing movies and wanking in front of webcams are trying to hide behind, and set up a few chains with some decent bandwidth to stage an attack...
And screw the chinese. It amazes me how people still drag out this inflamed and rancid red herring every time there is a discussion of anonymity on the net.
Remember when it was SUPPOSED to be about freedom of speech? Yeah even when it's the "bad" kind. Look how they keep these kiddie porn pictures locked away where only a tiny few detectives and the pervs who obsessively seek out the images can find them. When they FINALLY admit defeat and roll out a few carefully altered pictures worldwide in an unprecedented "have you seen this place" (still cannot see the kid who probably could have been identified much quicker) they find out the guy was locked up and the girl has been safe now for YEARS!
How many years did she go on being abused because the friends and neighbors of this kid never had the chance to identify her?
Now, having said that let me remind you of something else: "child porn" is a moving target and especially in the US there is a VERY heavy footed march toward defining anyone under the age of 18 as a "child."
And the primary motivation for this is NOT to stop at "child porn" but to stamp out every modeling site and every ADULT porn publisher by overloading them and binding them with red tape and overzealous, politically correct "laws" brought about through uniting the most intrusive elements of the right wing religious nuts and the left wing feminist nuts. The door was thrown open decades ago when the court said "intent" was good enough for prosecution even in cases of pictures where no "harm" was done to the children and that was all about one thing: punishing people for beiung who they are and not punishing them for their actions.
I've said this before here and people go "oh they can';t get away with tat we have the supreme court" well yeah, it was the SCOTUS that sent down the first ruling and did so even in a much more liberal atmosphere, think of how that might go today. Better yet just look around, watch the news over the next few weeks and you will see it being played out right before you.
In germany magazines target at 13 to 15 year olds have frontal nudity and articles on buying condoms and giving head. They prepare kids for adulthood and recognize their right to their own bodies and their own sexuality. In the US and UK the political machination is moving in the exact opposite direction, seeking to strip away even adults from their inalienable liberty of self.
Compare side by side a HD rip of the pilot to the DVD and try saying that.
If a rip is made from hidef, it is a rip made from hidef, period. A rip made from SD (even digital) cannot compare to a well made rip made from HD, even if the rip is resized to DVD rez.
704 something is standard DVD resolution but I pointed out I got these BEFORE I knew I would like the series. If you had bothered to look in the groups I mentioned you would see some very large hi-def rips available.
Torrents are great if you have the full time bandwidth available. Not all of us do, I could never get a high enough "quality" score to get a decent place in the queue; it's easier just to pay ten bucks a month for easynews and know one can get a sustained 4-5MBps without any games.
I got the entire series in 704xsomething HD rips before I knew I would like it so much. I had a hard drive problem and lost a few eps, now I need to fetch them again and I find all the eps right on usenet in HD format. Check alt.binaries.multimedia, alt.binaries.multimedia.scifi, or maybe even alt.binaries.battlestar-galactica
I don't watch much TV. Yeah it's cool universal will run them in HD, but I really feel kinda "whoopee" about it - I can download them with no commercials and watch them anytime I want. Thanks to congress and the FCC it's easier just to download them than to watch and rip myself.
I had a local ISP that offered this "feature." After a while I noticed certain domains (even specified by IP) never worked. At first I thought it was just because they had disappeared, then one day I noticed they worked from another ISP. Seems their "optional" feature wasn't so entirely "optional," I dropped them immediately and found a local ISP that made a point of stating in their TOS they do not, in any way, provide such "features" and it is up to the subsciber alone to be responsible for how their connection is used.
Because our representatives have repeatedly made the point "money is speech." I find the very nature of this law offensive, therefore I have the right to NOT support it by givng them my money. Yet this law completely denies anyone living in Utah the ability to express that speech.
I got my first copy of Seargent Pepper's in like 1970. That money was spent a loooong time ago and I actually bought it a couple times again after that. Listening to it now doesn't mean a damn thing to Lennon and McCartney.
Paying for it, however, would mean something to them and their distributor.
Sure the RIAA sucks and Apple is maximizing their profit. Buying tunes from an overseas source that isn't authorized to sell them doesn't help solve anything.
Neither does handing over money to the parasites who will use that money to lobby washington to erode the liberties of the citizens of this country.
You are allowing unethical laws to define your expectations of morality. That sure as hell isn't going to "help solve the problem."
Bush is a snake, Kerry is a weasel. Both suck, but they were NOT the only candidates running. I know I didn't vote for either of them (not that it would matter, me being in a relatively "uncontested" state).
One thing about Bush is he IS predictable. During his first campaign he said "well, maybe we need a little less freedom of speech" and he's fucking well doing all he can to live up to that ideal.
Don't forget one of the justices is pretty much at death's door and the idiots of this country, in spite of knowing this all along, went ahead and elected someone simply because he was hailing the holy book. Once the laws are changed, whether they abide by constitutionalist principles or not, if the courts are stacked against you you lose.
step 1: paint the internet as evil mean and nasty. Get the brainwashed masses on your side (from both the left and the right) by demonizing the internet as a haven for pornographers and child molestors.
step 2: stack the courts
step 3: get a judgement against one of those non-pornographic child model sites you've been demonizing that equates their content with porn.
step 4: now you can define porn any way you like, the SCOTUS won't stop you because they're stacked 5-4 for the bible beaters and you have a precedent saying porn isn't about content it's about intent of the viewer. Now EVERYTHING "we don't like" can be called porn. Say bye-bye to freedom of expression on the internet, hello to the new corporate padlocks "to protect the children."
step 5: profit! (at least if you're a giant media corp)
This is pretty insane on the part of the trekkers. I mean, they are DONATING money to produce a COMMERCIAL PROGRAM! The program gets produced, shown on tv crammed full of commercials and the studio gets to bank all that profit from the distribution.
Pay for production, get zero points in the profit. What a great investment!
Posting pictures of abused children isn't 'speech' or 'freedom of speech'.
What the fuck is it then? Dog walking? Auto polishing?
If someone wants to post a NAMBLA rant that is fine too, let them tell the world how fucked up they are. Like I mentioned in another post, giving wackos freedom of speech is like giving them the rope to hang themselves with.
"Fine." Then by that very same logic the obvious direction is to ENCOURAGE them to share pictures with the world of them fucking their kids. Every picture is just one more clue that will lead to a possible rescue of the kids being abused.
What about all those millions of kids that are abused every year whose pictures are NOT shared?
It's completely about freedom of speech and your sad attempt at making excuses just provides one more great example of the logical inconsistencies and complete lack of critical thinking on the part of those who, like you, continue to parrot the dictates of the politburo.
Lets take a look at what Germany is censoring. From the Article:
child pornography,
Good... fine... fine... fine...
So you're apparently just "fine" with all sorts of censorship... why even bother to post? You said nothing at all, contributed no "insight" at all. How the fuck does this get modded "insightful?"
If you're about freedom of speech none of it is "fine" including that ever so easily demonized first entry.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just "stupid people" who have zombied machines, who operate open proxies, who allow unlimited anonymous connections to their machines...
As nations crack down on the free exchange of information of all sorts you can expect this type of activity to rise. It's called "creating plausible deniability." Not everyone knows the details of how the internet works, but everyone knows if you have sub7 on your machine and you're caught doing things your government might frown on, you've at least got a chance of defending yourself.
Those extra two bits are used to linearize the output
Without seeing the software how do you know how they are being used? I don't use windows, I have no idea what it will do - but X will certainly support more color resolution than 8bpp and film Gimp and other software available for linux will support even floating point color formats.
The software on the computer can't tell the graphics card a 10bpp/channel pixel
As I just pointed out: yes, it can.
A giant sticking point you are overlooking is 24 bits is only, at best, one of many file formats. JPEG certainly doesn't set such limits, nor does MPEG. A decoding algorithm that employs dithering can generate essentially an infinite number of bits using a nearly infinite variety of algorithms.
But a card that has three 8 bit DACs doesn't even support the full range of 24 bits in a practicel sense because settings like gamma, black level, brightness and contrast are going to squash even these ranges. Having a 30 bit graphics card (and an X11 driver written for it) corrects this - in fact that is really pretty much the ONLY way to get the full range of "24 bit color" on a CRT monitor.
The display can't show any more than 256 shades of grey.
Utterly wrong. CRTs use analog electronics. There is no quantization in the RGB amplifiers in a CRT monitor, for example - or really in any of the amplifiers. Their limitation is set by noise and nonlinearity, not discrete quantized steps as in a DVI signal or the driver circuitry of an LCD.
I have a Panasonic DVD player almost a decade old now, it was one of the first to have 10 bit DACs. and yes, the picture quality IS noticeable better than most, this is only part of the reason it was (at the time) nearly $1000 DVD player.
Many graphics cards now have ten bit D/A convertors. With the proper driver this means 30 bits of color resolution and yes, it does make a difference.
You get a kid filled with junk food, no vitamins, and too much sugar, and they act like little monkeys jumping out of their pants.
Aha! So that's how you do it!
The parents may know what the money is being spent on, but they cannot know who. It's no different than giving your kid a credit card which she uses to buy clothes or jewelry, which she sells and buys drugs.
When I was in Jr. High I had a friend (yes, I really did) and he was on the school lunch program so every day he could get in whichever line he wanted and only had to show his card. But he never ate lunch. Instead he would go through the line where you get a hamburger and fries for a buck.., and then sell it for fifty cents.
Love that dirty laundry...
yes, those chips let you own your console again, instead of renting it for a one time fee from the manufacturer whom you purchased it from...
This is idiocy. It is like claiming napster users were not in it for free music.
Look: whether you buy a britney spears CD or download it from the net and leave it in your shared folder, either way YOU yourself are feeding that machine of opression you are now trying to feel so noble over.
If you disagree with this shit STOP GIVING THEM MONEY - but more importantly STOP GIVING THEM MARKET SHARE! When you buy a console, I don't care if it's a thousand dollars of hardware they're clearing out for twenty bucks, you are feeding the marketing machine that lets them sell a thousand more to people who are NOT like you, who will NOT use one of those circumvention devices, who WILL pay fifty bucks a pop for those copy protected games.
If you are going to buck the system you need to stop feeding it. The game you are playing right now is nothing but a sucker's game.
I live in the sticks, dialup is all I can get. and I got sick of paying twenty bucks a month when so many are offering it for half, so I decided to go with Netscape's bargain offer.
It's not even worth it at half the price of "regular service." they DO NOT support anything besides windows and even if you are lucky enough to get on you still get to deal with AOL's sucklicious proxy nest. the only way I was able to reach secure sites like paypal and my bank from behind my IP Cop router was to create a tunnel to a third party server and connect from there, somehow AOL has managed to completely screw up this part of the service.
They don't support Mozilla or Firefox or any of their own products and in fact they have these special applets that REQUIRE you to run windows lest you be forever unable to reconnect after the first time some tiny thing goes wrong with your account.
I never would have believed anyone could screw up simple DIALUP service so incredibly badly... until I dropped them and tried Netzero. But that's a whole 'nother rant, suffice to say I am back to paying twenty bucks a month to a local ISP for dialup and I'm not likely to be complaining about the price anytime soon.
[i]You may think its stupid, but unfortunately, its reality. The reality is that even though it slower, its still effective.[/i]
"Effective" in what way? that it is a nuisance? Or that it has knocked you into darkness? according to your parable there you haven't yet been knocked down by it and you don't talk like you are from cnet or Microsoft or someplace "big." If such an "attack" cannot even knock you down what chance does it have in a larger attack?
the fact some absuse goes on is both to be expected and, given the purpose of tor in the first place, not entirely "bad." In a network of few central arteries where some degree of anonymity is the intended function having so many packets bouncing around willy nilly helps to clutter the channel, to reduce the likelihood of an atacker launcing a successful timing attack against someone with legitimate interests.
Where I live a girl of 13 is "legal" if she is no longer a virgin. But if you are more than a few years older you can still be tried if she is under 16. Yet you can marry her with her parent's consent as young as 14.
It's a screwed up mess and the way things are heading it is only going to get worse. I know a couple of teenage girls who model for websites, I can assure you they are not "victims" except to those who insist on "protecting" them from their own desire for expression - and they do not seem at all happy about the way the puritans running the show right now are taking things, either. These are real people - kids - who make money from those sites, one of them is stashing it away for college and every one of the "crackdowns" like has been going on lately drives off customers and impacts them financially as well as emotionally.
Ye olde backlash can be a real bitch... and these kids are soon going to be of voting age. I just hope they start hitting their marks before the courts are able to completely overturn the constitution.
Tha name is Mary, frank.. and don't you forget it!
it is 100 verified nodes. To become "verified" is to be "blessed" wiht a certain level of trust. It means your node is held somewhat accountable, it can be trusted to not be intercepting packets. Although every packet is re-encrypted at each node and it knows only the IP of the next and last in the chain, honeypots could do some damage because there is likely to be some incriminating content inside the packet itself - cookies, usernames, etc. So the tor net is setup by default that the first and last hops go through "trusted" nodes but traffic in the middle may go through untrusted nodes - and anyone can setup an untrusted node and, in fact, tor comes OOTB ready to run as an untrusted server if it detects you have a decent connection to do so. So in this respect the TOTAL number of nodes is constantly changing as people enter and leave the network. The total number of nodes is separate and not directly related at all to the number of TRUSTED, registered nodes.
I use tor routinely. I'm using it right now. I have it on my laptop, too. It goes browser>privoxy>tor>website. There are only a tiny few sites where I go around this chain (slashdot here is one of them, but not the "affiliated" sites). Is it because I have something to hide?
Yeah, I do. Just like I put on pants before I leave the house, the same way I keep my money in a wallet and not on a chain around my neck.
I have a right to a reasonable expectation of privacy and this allows me to have some of that. When I am on my laptop on the filthy campus network I don't have to worry someone sitting across the hall with a packet sniffer on his laptop is eavesdropping on my browsing. And if I want to go haul in something off edonkey or even the evil mean and nasty freenet I can do so from anywhere on campus even behind the firewall that filters out all p2p traffic to the commons areas.
But to say people are going to use this to ddos sites is just stupid. Use the network before making such claims and see for yourself how it works. People who ddos sites don't need tor and wouldn't bother, it's too slow, too easy to trace via timing analysis, and the convenience factor alone means it will probably remain slow due to contantly being overloaded.
The people who ddos sites are going to run a scanner on a couple of irc servers, track down the same poorly configured and/or rooted out proxies all the script kiddies sharing movies and wanking in front of webcams are trying to hide behind, and set up a few chains with some decent bandwidth to stage an attack...
And screw the chinese. It amazes me how people still drag out this inflamed and rancid red herring every time there is a discussion of anonymity on the net.
Remember when it was SUPPOSED to be about freedom of speech? Yeah even when it's the "bad" kind. Look how they keep these kiddie porn pictures locked away where only a tiny few detectives and the pervs who obsessively seek out the images can find them. When they FINALLY admit defeat and roll out a few carefully altered pictures worldwide in an unprecedented "have you seen this place" (still cannot see the kid who probably could have been identified much quicker) they find out the guy was locked up and the girl has been safe now for YEARS!
How many years did she go on being abused because the friends and neighbors of this kid never had the chance to identify her?
Now, having said that let me remind you of something else: "child porn" is a moving target and especially in the US there is a VERY heavy footed march toward defining anyone under the age of 18 as a "child."
And the primary motivation for this is NOT to stop at "child porn" but to stamp out every modeling site and every ADULT porn publisher by overloading them and binding them with red tape and overzealous, politically correct "laws" brought about through uniting the most intrusive elements of the right wing religious nuts and the left wing feminist nuts. The door was thrown open decades ago when the court said "intent" was good enough for prosecution even in cases of pictures where no "harm" was done to the children and that was all about one thing: punishing people for beiung who they are and not punishing them for their actions.
I've said this before here and people go "oh they can';t get away with tat we have the supreme court" well yeah, it was the SCOTUS that sent down the first ruling and did so even in a much more liberal atmosphere, think of how that might go today. Better yet just look around, watch the news over the next few weeks and you will see it being played out right before you.
In germany magazines target at 13 to 15 year olds have frontal nudity and articles on buying condoms and giving head. They prepare kids for adulthood and recognize their right to their own bodies and their own sexuality. In the US and UK the political machination is moving in the exact opposite direction, seeking to strip away even adults from their inalienable liberty of self.
Just watch... you'll see soon enough.
Compare side by side a HD rip of the pilot to the DVD and try saying that.
If a rip is made from hidef, it is a rip made from hidef, period. A rip made from SD (even digital) cannot compare to a well made rip made from HD, even if the rip is resized to DVD rez.
Idiot.
704 something is standard DVD resolution but I pointed out I got these BEFORE I knew I would like the series. If you had bothered to look in the groups I mentioned you would see some very large hi-def rips available.
Torrents are great if you have the full time bandwidth available. Not all of us do, I could never get a high enough "quality" score to get a decent place in the queue; it's easier just to pay ten bucks a month for easynews and know one can get a sustained 4-5MBps without any games.
I got the entire series in 704xsomething HD rips before I knew I would like it so much. I had a hard drive problem and lost a few eps, now I need to fetch them again and I find all the eps right on usenet in HD format. Check alt.binaries.multimedia, alt.binaries.multimedia.scifi, or maybe even alt.binaries.battlestar-galactica
I don't watch much TV. Yeah it's cool universal will run them in HD, but I really feel kinda "whoopee" about it - I can download them with no commercials and watch them anytime I want. Thanks to congress and the FCC it's easier just to download them than to watch and rip myself.
I had a local ISP that offered this "feature." After a while I noticed certain domains (even specified by IP) never worked. At first I thought it was just because they had disappeared, then one day I noticed they worked from another ISP. Seems their "optional" feature wasn't so entirely "optional," I dropped them immediately and found a local ISP that made a point of stating in their TOS they do not, in any way, provide such "features" and it is up to the subsciber alone to be responsible for how their connection is used.
Because our representatives have repeatedly made the point "money is speech." I find the very nature of this law offensive, therefore I have the right to NOT support it by givng them my money. Yet this law completely denies anyone living in Utah the ability to express that speech.
I got my first copy of Seargent Pepper's in like 1970. That money was spent a loooong time ago and I actually bought it a couple times again after that. Listening to it now doesn't mean a damn thing to Lennon and McCartney.
Paying for it, however, would mean something to them and their distributor.
Sure the RIAA sucks and Apple is maximizing their profit. Buying tunes from an overseas source that isn't authorized to sell them doesn't help solve anything.
Neither does handing over money to the parasites who will use that money to lobby washington to erode the liberties of the citizens of this country.
You are allowing unethical laws to define your expectations of morality. That sure as hell isn't going to "help solve the problem."
Bush is a snake, Kerry is a weasel. Both suck, but they were NOT the only candidates running. I know I didn't vote for either of them (not that it would matter, me being in a relatively "uncontested" state).
One thing about Bush is he IS predictable. During his first campaign he said "well, maybe we need a little less freedom of speech" and he's fucking well doing all he can to live up to that ideal.
Don't forget one of the justices is pretty much at death's door and the idiots of this country, in spite of knowing this all along, went ahead and elected someone simply because he was hailing the holy book. Once the laws are changed, whether they abide by constitutionalist principles or not, if the courts are stacked against you you lose.
step 1: paint the internet as evil mean and nasty. Get the brainwashed masses on your side (from both the left and the right) by demonizing the internet as a haven for pornographers and child molestors.
step 2: stack the courts
step 3: get a judgement against one of those non-pornographic child model sites you've been demonizing that equates their content with porn.
step 4: now you can define porn any way you like, the SCOTUS won't stop you because they're stacked 5-4 for the bible beaters and you have a precedent saying porn isn't about content it's about intent of the viewer. Now EVERYTHING "we don't like" can be called porn. Say bye-bye to freedom of expression on the internet, hello to the new corporate padlocks "to protect the children."
step 5: profit! (at least if you're a giant media corp)
This is pretty insane on the part of the trekkers. I mean, they are DONATING money to produce a COMMERCIAL PROGRAM! The program gets produced, shown on tv crammed full of commercials and the studio gets to bank all that profit from the distribution.
Pay for production, get zero points in the profit. What a great investment!
[i]A crime in the civilized world, dipshit.[/i]
It's still speech, "dipshit."
And it seems pretty obvious you have never heard of Godwin.
Moron.
Gee, I feel so cool now.
Posting pictures of abused children isn't 'speech' or 'freedom of speech'.
What the fuck is it then? Dog walking? Auto polishing?
If someone wants to post a NAMBLA rant that is fine too, let them tell the world how fucked up they are. Like I mentioned in another post, giving wackos freedom of speech is like giving them the rope to hang themselves with.
"Fine." Then by that very same logic the obvious direction is to ENCOURAGE them to share pictures with the world of them fucking their kids. Every picture is just one more clue that will lead to a possible rescue of the kids being abused.
What about all those millions of kids that are abused every year whose pictures are NOT shared?
It's completely about freedom of speech and your sad attempt at making excuses just provides one more great example of the logical inconsistencies and complete lack of critical thinking on the part of those who, like you, continue to parrot the dictates of the politburo.
Lets take a look at what Germany is censoring. From the Article:
child pornography,
Good...
fine...
fine...
fine...
So you're apparently just "fine" with all sorts of censorship... why even bother to post? You said nothing at all, contributed no "insight" at all. How the fuck does this get modded "insightful?"
If you're about freedom of speech none of it is "fine" including that ever so easily demonized first entry.
Cowardice and hypocrisy.