Because someone who is "offended" that their child was exposed to a lesbian has no real grounds for a lawsuit, and would likely lose. There's this whole "first amendment" thing, as well as the "experience may change during online gameplay" thing. If Microsoft was really concerned about that, why haven't they started banning people for teabagging?
Someone who is being banned in this form of discrimination certainly would seem to have a legitimate complaint. And, what would you suggest? They've already taken it to the press, I suppose Microsoft has some time to respond...
Thirty years ago, Hollywood took a similar threat -- the VCR -- and turned it into a new source of revenue, building customer loyalty in the process.
Actually, they fought it as long and as hard as they could, and only embraced it when it was clear it was going to happen.
I distinctly remember comments comparing the VCR to the Boston Strangler. I'm too lazy to track it down, and most of you should remember...
Keep in mind, this is Hollywood's attitude (and the Music Industry's attitude, incidentally) towards the ideas which ultimately provide them the most value. The music box, the phonograph, VCRs, digital audio tape, DVDs...
I'm confused -- I had assumed it was the other way around.
That is, I'd assumed that hardware vendors would want their hardware to be known as compatible, thus resulting in higher sales. And that to obtain such status, they would have to follow Microsoft's standards -- implying that if anything, they'd be paying Microsoft for the privilege, not the other way around.
You don't need social skills to fire a gun -- in fact, lack of social skills may help there. The less interaction with fellow human beings, the less empathy.
Good nutrition, maybe not -- but it's not like that's hard. They do make protein bars which taste every bit as good as the kind of crap snacks you'd be eating. Coffee instead of coke means less sugar, and cheaper.
Suntans, oh well, give em sunscreen, and makeup (blackface even) if they need it for camo purposes. But if they're healthier, more physically fit, and know strategy, they might go to the beach more, either for the girls or deliberately for the suntan.
Corporations have a legal obligation to make a profit.
Wait, what? When did it become a legal obligation?
I imagine I'm missing something big, and I'm about to be ridiculed for it.
in nearly every circumstance, if the chance of getting caught * the fine it would have to pay
Right. That is the problem, essentially -- whether or not it is a real obligation, corporations seem driven to make a profit in the most efficient way possible.
we could nix the public stock market and finally get the Supreme Court to announce "Corporations are not People".
That doesn't depend on the stock market -- there are some limited partnerships which are traded on the open market.
Why did we invent corporations, again, when we already had partnerships?
However, it seems pretty clear that if you think about this for even a moment, the purpose of government is not to prevent people from thinking "government is not our moral compass".
And I would argue, further, that the original post in this thread has a point:
As long as no one is hurt, it should be legal.
Nor does that imply that everything that hurts people should be illegal. Nor that everything that's immoral should also be illegal.
For example, I doubt I will get very much argument here that sodomy laws are hopelessly outdated, as are laws concerning eating garlic after a certain time of day, etc. Why? Well, it's not difficult to stay out of range of someone with garlic-breath, and so long as it's consensual, what happens in the bedroom (or closet, or kitchen table, or...) is none of the government's business.
It's fair to ask why this shouldn't be a logical extension of the same principle.
A law that criminalises sex with someone who has not met some vague unmeasurable definition of maturity would be a very bad law.
Granted -- but there has got to be a more accurate (but still solid) definition of maturity than age.
People would live in fear of being prosecuted if it turns out the person doesn't meet the test, but would have no way of knowing that until they are prosecuted and go to court.
At the moment, there is always the possibility that the person lied about their age.
Library support is about 10000% more important than actual language design.
Perhaps. But most languages, including D, don't have a real problem with library support.
That is: Most languages will let you bind to C libraries. A highly productive language likely means that I will save far more time writing and maintaining the program itself than I might lose having to write C bindings.
Like it's not possible to supply the "referrer" in the link you post?
It's "Referer". Capital R, and I know it's misspelled -- that is how the HTTP header was originally misspelled, and it has stuck.
And it has nothing to do with me supplying it. It is automatically supplied by every user who clicks through. It lets your server know that they came from my server, and not from somewhere else on your website.
It is pretty much a one-line fix to protect a resource from being linked to directly, without going through your site.
Hey, thanks for the public domain code, guy, I'm sorry if you didn't prevent me from linking around your license agreement.
Except, you didn't.
I mean, I thought for a moment you were from this firm, being an AC who doesn't know the first thing about technology or the Web -- but it looks as though you also don't know the first thing about the law, either.
Lack of a license doesn't imply public domain, at least not in the US. Instead, it implies automatic copyright, all rights reserved. This is why various licenses like the GPL actually do not take away rights -- they provide them.
Yeah, I know that nude picture of your boyfriend was supposed to be password protected, but unfortunately, I'm clever
It's unlikely anyone here except you would be stupid enough to hide private information in the URL, rather than employing simple access controls. Some basic HTTP Auth, and you can't deep-link it without at least providing a password -- one which can be revoked.
this is what should happen
Startups should be raped with legal fees for daring to link to stuff that is actually on the public record?
If you have some right to link, against my permission, shouldn't that right be vindicated in court
Possibly. Notice how there wasn't actually a judgment made -- the judge just refused to dismiss the case, and warned that the startup would have to spend quite a lot of money to defend themselves. That does make him an asshole, but it doesn't actually constitute legal precedent.
So, even if you believe it should be proven in court -- while I think it's kind of self-evident that it should be legal, in the same way as specifying paragraph three on page two hundred ninety six of a particular edition of The Great Gatsby is plainly legal citation -- I still don't see how having the case settled out of court due to sheer intimidation is what "should happen", by your logic or any other.
From long experience, we all get bitten sooner or later. I would say we most often remember the upgrades as being more hazardous, because we blame ourselves for those -- should've known better than to use that new, untrusted code. At least with inaction (not patching), it's negligence, rather than active incompetence -- harder to blame yourself, or for others to blame you.
But this should not be about escaping blame, it should be about minimizing risk.
Recently, though? I see far less debate about the morality of the issue, and far more assumption that 18 (or 16) really is a magic number.
A law is a generalization of the moral of many people, you could even say it is an average. There is no platonic law to aim to.
There is, however, often a purpose.
This law, for instance, is roughly like sexual harassment laws -- there is an assumed power advantage by one party (in this case, the adult, or the boss), which raises the bar for consent. The purpose is to prevent people from being taken advantage of -- from being pressured into doing something they wouldn't ordinarily do.
That is why it's called "statutory rape" -- if there really wasn't consent, it actually is rape.
Yet, clearly, co-workers have sex, couples even start businesses. It might be worth looking at how sexual harassment deals with these issues.
Now, you could claim that many people do not agree with that morality. But I am also arguing morality here -- I don't think it's moral or right to have a determination of "adult" based purely on physical age, and I especially don't think an 18-year-old deserves to be listed as a sex offender for life for having a 17-year-old girlfriend.
Regardless, it's clearly out of line with the original purpose of that law -- to protect children. Or, if you want to be technical, it's completely irrelevant to the original original purpose -- to put an end to child prostitution. If that was really the purpose, well, we already have laws against prostitution.
there is a limit, the limit being the issues where you can't get an agreement. Those disagreements happen more often as you add complexity to a law.
That is true. The one advantage of the current laws is that they're usually simple enough that it just takes time -- just wait, and it becomes legal.
Of course, "just wait" is an unrealistic expectation, especially when it might mean you get a few months together before you go off to separate colleges...
But what he pointed out can't be solved by setting a fuzzy limit, because there is no way to determine such fuzzy limit.
Have we tried?
since the law is a good law in its spirit we should honor it by enforcing it
It's a good law in spirit, but with a glitch. I don't think a flawed law deserves honoring, I think it deserves revision. After all...
But we are currently goings toward a society that would condemn, blacklist and ostracize a 18 years old for having sex with his 17 years old girlfriend.
But, if we don't do that, we're also being hypocritical, unless we change the law. A simple change, adopted by several states, is to also add an age difference -- over 18, you can fuck anyone else over 18. Under 18, 5 years difference -- so 17 and 20 is fine, but 17 and 40 is statutory rape.
Even that is still pretty flawed -- is she really going to be less attracted to that 40-year-old man in a few months when she's 18? -- and there have been cases where a difference of a few days or months means the difference between a healthy relationship (among teens) and getting on the sex offender list, even with laws like that.
I think we should fix the law, instead of selectively enforcing it, which seems to be what you're advocating -- or at least, enforcing it universally, but having the sentence be lessened in cases we "like".
The "magical age" is because it is easier to determine someone's age...
I'm sorry, I thought this is about morality and laws. Since when is "easier" a valid criterion here?
That would be like saying we should jail every Mexican immigrant, because they are likely to have been illegal immigrants, and it's easier to just lock 'em all up than to sort out who has a valid visa (or citizenship), and who sneaked across the border (or overstayed a visa).
It would also be "easier" just to let anyone practice law, rather than requiring a bar exam. And it would be similarly "easier" to charge anyone with long hair with being a Marijuana user, since we all know hippies smoke pot.
It's not about what's easy. It's about what's right, and a test of mental fitness would be far closer to "right", IMO.
Well, and why should it not only be illegal, but a sex offense, thus putting the young man on a sex offender's list for life because he didn't wait 5-6 days?
It might help if we had an objective way to measure someone's ability to have informed consent.
At the same time, once someone is an "adult" -- which we've arbitrarily defined as 18 -- it doesn't matter if it's informed or not. Yes means yes.
I'm not arguing a three-year-old that's barely learned yes should be able to consent. But what about a six-year-old prodigy?
Or, for that matter, what about an 18-year-old retarded person?
I'm actually not sure what the answer is. I do think that there needs to be real debate about it, and not an automatic, Puritanical recoiling in horror at the mere thought of underage sex. (Not that I am accusing you of that, but it is the common reaction.)
The only thing a court needs to convict you of possession of child pornography is 'reasonable suspicion' that the subject of the photo is underage and the pose is considered 'sexual.'
So, what about Lady Justice? Wasn't the model for that statue 12 or so?
Netbooks and PCs without any OS or with Linux pre-installed are very easy to get.
It does, however, narrow the selection quite a bit. Even among manufacturers who sell Linux versions, they're usually differentiated somehow.
For example, this laptop, when it comes with Vista, has an 802.11n card (and even has an "n series" sticker on it) and the option of 3 or 4 gigs of RAM. With Linux, it has an 802.11g card (one that's well supported) and only 4 gigs of RAM (can't get it with 3).
And that's within a specific model. There are a number of other models which might've been much better for me -- might even include a fscking Gigabit card -- but all come with Windows, most with Vista.
That is, of course, ignoring the bad old days of Microsoft selling Windows licenses by number of PCs sold, not by number sold with Windows -- thus, if they did offer a Linux machine, you'd either be paying the same price as if you got it with Windows, or the manufacturer would be eating that Microsoft tax.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't really blame them for doing the same things all other companies operating in the US are allowed to do.
Why not?
Because someone who is "offended" that their child was exposed to a lesbian has no real grounds for a lawsuit, and would likely lose. There's this whole "first amendment" thing, as well as the "experience may change during online gameplay" thing. If Microsoft was really concerned about that, why haven't they started banning people for teabagging?
Someone who is being banned in this form of discrimination certainly would seem to have a legitimate complaint. And, what would you suggest? They've already taken it to the press, I suppose Microsoft has some time to respond...
Yeah, I was without sleep, only two hours or so now. So yes, really lazy.
Thirty years ago, Hollywood took a similar threat -- the VCR -- and turned it into a new source of revenue, building customer loyalty in the process.
Actually, they fought it as long and as hard as they could, and only embraced it when it was clear it was going to happen.
I distinctly remember comments comparing the VCR to the Boston Strangler. I'm too lazy to track it down, and most of you should remember...
Keep in mind, this is Hollywood's attitude (and the Music Industry's attitude, incidentally) towards the ideas which ultimately provide them the most value. The music box, the phonograph, VCRs, digital audio tape, DVDs...
I'm confused -- I had assumed it was the other way around.
That is, I'd assumed that hardware vendors would want their hardware to be known as compatible, thus resulting in higher sales. And that to obtain such status, they would have to follow Microsoft's standards -- implying that if anything, they'd be paying Microsoft for the privilege, not the other way around.
"Do you need help with that?"
You don't need social skills to fire a gun -- in fact, lack of social skills may help there. The less interaction with fellow human beings, the less empathy.
Good nutrition, maybe not -- but it's not like that's hard. They do make protein bars which taste every bit as good as the kind of crap snacks you'd be eating. Coffee instead of coke means less sugar, and cheaper.
Suntans, oh well, give em sunscreen, and makeup (blackface even) if they need it for camo purposes. But if they're healthier, more physically fit, and know strategy, they might go to the beach more, either for the girls or deliberately for the suntan.
That's just put a dampner on your next night of playing Left 4 Dead eh?
Not really. Fat out of breath kids waving and flailing about, jingly bits flapping in the wind, especially with an appropriate lack of hygiene...
Sounds like about the most immersive Left 4 Dead ever -- playing with people who look and smell just like real live zombies!
Corporations have a legal obligation to make a profit.
Wait, what? When did it become a legal obligation?
I imagine I'm missing something big, and I'm about to be ridiculed for it.
in nearly every circumstance, if the chance of getting caught * the fine it would have to pay
Right. That is the problem, essentially -- whether or not it is a real obligation, corporations seem driven to make a profit in the most efficient way possible.
we could nix the public stock market and finally get the Supreme Court to announce "Corporations are not People".
That doesn't depend on the stock market -- there are some limited partnerships which are traded on the open market.
Why did we invent corporations, again, when we already had partnerships?
However, it seems pretty clear that if you think about this for even a moment, the purpose of government is not to prevent people from thinking "government is not our moral compass".
And I would argue, further, that the original post in this thread has a point:
As long as no one is hurt, it should be legal.
Nor does that imply that everything that hurts people should be illegal. Nor that everything that's immoral should also be illegal.
For example, I doubt I will get very much argument here that sodomy laws are hopelessly outdated, as are laws concerning eating garlic after a certain time of day, etc. Why? Well, it's not difficult to stay out of range of someone with garlic-breath, and so long as it's consensual, what happens in the bedroom (or closet, or kitchen table, or...) is none of the government's business.
It's fair to ask why this shouldn't be a logical extension of the same principle.
A law that criminalises sex with someone who has not met some vague unmeasurable definition of maturity would be a very bad law.
Granted -- but there has got to be a more accurate (but still solid) definition of maturity than age.
People would live in fear of being prosecuted if it turns out the person doesn't meet the test, but would have no way of knowing that until they are prosecuted and go to court.
At the moment, there is always the possibility that the person lied about their age.
Library support is about 10000% more important than actual language design.
Perhaps. But most languages, including D, don't have a real problem with library support.
That is: Most languages will let you bind to C libraries. A highly productive language likely means that I will save far more time writing and maintaining the program itself than I might lose having to write C bindings.
Like it's not possible to supply the "referrer" in the link you post?
It's "Referer". Capital R, and I know it's misspelled -- that is how the HTTP header was originally misspelled, and it has stuck.
And it has nothing to do with me supplying it. It is automatically supplied by every user who clicks through. It lets your server know that they came from my server, and not from somewhere else on your website.
It is pretty much a one-line fix to protect a resource from being linked to directly, without going through your site.
Hey, thanks for the public domain code, guy, I'm sorry if you didn't prevent me from linking around your license agreement.
Except, you didn't.
I mean, I thought for a moment you were from this firm, being an AC who doesn't know the first thing about technology or the Web -- but it looks as though you also don't know the first thing about the law, either.
Lack of a license doesn't imply public domain, at least not in the US. Instead, it implies automatic copyright, all rights reserved. This is why various licenses like the GPL actually do not take away rights -- they provide them.
Yeah, I know that nude picture of your boyfriend was supposed to be password protected, but unfortunately, I'm clever
It's unlikely anyone here except you would be stupid enough to hide private information in the URL, rather than employing simple access controls. Some basic HTTP Auth, and you can't deep-link it without at least providing a password -- one which can be revoked.
this is what should happen
Startups should be raped with legal fees for daring to link to stuff that is actually on the public record?
If you have some right to link, against my permission, shouldn't that right be vindicated in court
Possibly. Notice how there wasn't actually a judgment made -- the judge just refused to dismiss the case, and warned that the startup would have to spend quite a lot of money to defend themselves. That does make him an asshole, but it doesn't actually constitute legal precedent.
So, even if you believe it should be proven in court -- while I think it's kind of self-evident that it should be legal, in the same way as specifying paragraph three on page two hundred ninety six of a particular edition of The Great Gatsby is plainly legal citation -- I still don't see how having the case settled out of court due to sheer intimidation is what "should happen", by your logic or any other.
To prevent exactly this -- or, more specifically, to prevent spamming from having much point, once the spam is modded to -1.
Or, they move it to a separate package. For example, on Ubuntu, this is fortunes-off.
No need to make it more complicated than it is.
if it isn't broken, don't fix it.
That also implies, if it is broken, fix it.
From long experience, we all get bitten sooner or later. I would say we most often remember the upgrades as being more hazardous, because we blame ourselves for those -- should've known better than to use that new, untrusted code. At least with inaction (not patching), it's negligence, rather than active incompetence -- harder to blame yourself, or for others to blame you.
But this should not be about escaping blame, it should be about minimizing risk.
"we" (as in humankind) have tried for centuries.
Recently, though? I see far less debate about the morality of the issue, and far more assumption that 18 (or 16) really is a magic number.
A law is a generalization of the moral of many people, you could even say it is an average. There is no platonic law to aim to.
There is, however, often a purpose.
This law, for instance, is roughly like sexual harassment laws -- there is an assumed power advantage by one party (in this case, the adult, or the boss), which raises the bar for consent. The purpose is to prevent people from being taken advantage of -- from being pressured into doing something they wouldn't ordinarily do.
That is why it's called "statutory rape" -- if there really wasn't consent, it actually is rape.
Yet, clearly, co-workers have sex, couples even start businesses. It might be worth looking at how sexual harassment deals with these issues.
Now, you could claim that many people do not agree with that morality. But I am also arguing morality here -- I don't think it's moral or right to have a determination of "adult" based purely on physical age, and I especially don't think an 18-year-old deserves to be listed as a sex offender for life for having a 17-year-old girlfriend.
Regardless, it's clearly out of line with the original purpose of that law -- to protect children. Or, if you want to be technical, it's completely irrelevant to the original original purpose -- to put an end to child prostitution. If that was really the purpose, well, we already have laws against prostitution.
there is a limit, the limit being the issues where you can't get an agreement. Those disagreements happen more often as you add complexity to a law.
That is true. The one advantage of the current laws is that they're usually simple enough that it just takes time -- just wait, and it becomes legal.
Of course, "just wait" is an unrealistic expectation, especially when it might mean you get a few months together before you go off to separate colleges...
But what he pointed out can't be solved by setting a fuzzy limit, because there is no way to determine such fuzzy limit.
Have we tried?
since the law is a good law in its spirit we should honor it by enforcing it
It's a good law in spirit, but with a glitch. I don't think a flawed law deserves honoring, I think it deserves revision. After all...
But we are currently goings toward a society that would condemn, blacklist and ostracize a 18 years old for having sex with his 17 years old girlfriend.
But, if we don't do that, we're also being hypocritical, unless we change the law. A simple change, adopted by several states, is to also add an age difference -- over 18, you can fuck anyone else over 18. Under 18, 5 years difference -- so 17 and 20 is fine, but 17 and 40 is statutory rape.
Even that is still pretty flawed -- is she really going to be less attracted to that 40-year-old man in a few months when she's 18? -- and there have been cases where a difference of a few days or months means the difference between a healthy relationship (among teens) and getting on the sex offender list, even with laws like that.
I think we should fix the law, instead of selectively enforcing it, which seems to be what you're advocating -- or at least, enforcing it universally, but having the sentence be lessened in cases we "like".
The "magical age" is because it is easier to determine someone's age...
I'm sorry, I thought this is about morality and laws. Since when is "easier" a valid criterion here?
That would be like saying we should jail every Mexican immigrant, because they are likely to have been illegal immigrants, and it's easier to just lock 'em all up than to sort out who has a valid visa (or citizenship), and who sneaked across the border (or overstayed a visa).
It would also be "easier" just to let anyone practice law, rather than requiring a bar exam. And it would be similarly "easier" to charge anyone with long hair with being a Marijuana user, since we all know hippies smoke pot.
It's not about what's easy. It's about what's right, and a test of mental fitness would be far closer to "right", IMO.
Well, and why should it not only be illegal, but a sex offense, thus putting the young man on a sex offender's list for life because he didn't wait 5-6 days?
It might help if we had an objective way to measure someone's ability to have informed consent.
At the same time, once someone is an "adult" -- which we've arbitrarily defined as 18 -- it doesn't matter if it's informed or not. Yes means yes.
I'm not arguing a three-year-old that's barely learned yes should be able to consent. But what about a six-year-old prodigy?
Or, for that matter, what about an 18-year-old retarded person?
I'm actually not sure what the answer is. I do think that there needs to be real debate about it, and not an automatic, Puritanical recoiling in horror at the mere thought of underage sex. (Not that I am accusing you of that, but it is the common reaction.)
the problem is that a lot of people think exactly that
Why is that a problem? That's circular reasoning, unless your argument is that anything a lot of people here agree with is inherently bad.
What is the purpose of government?
The only thing a court needs to convict you of possession of child pornography is 'reasonable suspicion' that the subject of the photo is underage and the pose is considered 'sexual.'
So, what about Lady Justice? Wasn't the model for that statue 12 or so?
So you can't have child stars? Home Alone was a mistake? (Ok, bad example, but you get the idea.)
Or do you mean any nude model?
Netbooks and PCs without any OS or with Linux pre-installed are very easy to get.
It does, however, narrow the selection quite a bit. Even among manufacturers who sell Linux versions, they're usually differentiated somehow.
For example, this laptop, when it comes with Vista, has an 802.11n card (and even has an "n series" sticker on it) and the option of 3 or 4 gigs of RAM. With Linux, it has an 802.11g card (one that's well supported) and only 4 gigs of RAM (can't get it with 3).
And that's within a specific model. There are a number of other models which might've been much better for me -- might even include a fscking Gigabit card -- but all come with Windows, most with Vista.
That is, of course, ignoring the bad old days of Microsoft selling Windows licenses by number of PCs sold, not by number sold with Windows -- thus, if they did offer a Linux machine, you'd either be paying the same price as if you got it with Windows, or the manufacturer would be eating that Microsoft tax.