Yes. People have probably already been charged with crimes like that, it's conspiracy. Are you saying it's ok to finance child porn as long as you're not the one committing it? I don't know how that would make any current law unnecessary though.
No, I'm saying your analogy was false because the only way someone would be charged with paying for a snuff film is it they paid someone to commit a crime. Hence the conspiracy.
The same would not hold true in the vast majority of child pornography situations, where a person may be paying for it or simply downloading it well after the abuse has occurred, and wouldn't know the actual child abuser at all. If you wanted to revamp the laws to fit with your snuff film example, then all the current child pornography possession and distribution laws would be off the books.
Also, in most cases these pictures are sold, not given away freely.
I love how this argument is trotted out and then denied, depending on the context.
Ask why child porn possession is a bad thing? ----> It's a multi-billion dollar industry, the financial incentive causes more abuse of children
Ask why the exact opposite is argued in MPAA/RIAA situations -----> It's not really about money, it's about demand. The mere knowledge that there is demand causes more abuse of children
It has been shown, in multiple studies, that pornography leads to sexual deviancy and inconsistent expectations of sex
All studies completed by family first and christian groups I'm sure. Do you realize that sex crimes in general have gone down in the last twenty years? Do you know what went up in the last twenty years? Pornography consumption, thanks to the internet. A lot.
People that seek this out are just as responsible as the people making the content.
I have trouble understanding this logic. Someone who seeks out a picture of a child being abused (say on a free p2p network) are just as responsible as the person who actually abused the child? There's no difference to you? Really?
You can be damned sure that if you were paying someone to make snuff tapes you'd be charged along with the producers.
Maybe, under a conspiracy charge, yes. Yet if you were just seeking out snuff tapes you wouldn't be charged. Or if you just possess snuff tapes. Or even if you pay someone for snuff tapes after the fact. By that logic we could charge people with conspiracy to commit sexual abuse of a child if they were paying for a child to be abused before it actually occurred, and thus our current child porn laws would be unnecessary. Otherwise your analogy is completely false.
He's absolutely right. At the end of the day, the KDE 4.x series moved as quickly as it did, probably because of broad user feedback. nothing beats good quality user feedback, or having people rant on their blogs about how software X should have feature Y etc.
I disagree. The bugs in 4.0 were so glaring that there was no need for user feedback. For instance, keyboard shortcuts for things such as the terminal didn't work (and still didn't work in 4.1). This isn't something you need user feedback on. The KDE team deliberately chose to ignore obvious bugs in their software and still release it as being out of beta.
And look, they weren't exactly unclear about it - they stated fairly openly that it was a beta-ish release, and they were trying to get user feedback. It's an open-source project, release early, release often.
That's not the way I remember it at all. I think they were very forthcoming about it being a beta-ish release after the release when they started receiving heavy criticism.
Put it this way, if you can install KDE/Linux, I'm sure you can put up with a bit of quirkiness in your desktop manager, or file a bug report.
A bit of quirkiness is fine, but having the next major release of one of the most used linux desktop environments be an unusable buggy mess is an entirely different matter.
Then why is it that trolls like you have been bringing it up EVERY fucking KDE article/announcement since then? Really, what the fuck is the big deal? Is it really that you think KDE is suffering because of the extreme cost of naming conventions? Really?
Terribly sorry that I wish to contribute to the discussion with something other than glowing praise for KDE4. The naming conventions are not a big deal, you're right, but it's another example IMO of how the KDE team is losing perspective on the important things (stability, usability, user feedback), and instead chasing windmills (social desktop, new paradigms, grand marketing strategies) which so far have shown little measure of success.
He's absolutely right. At the end of the day, the KDE 4.x series moved as quickly as it did, probably because of broad user feedback. nothing beats good quality user feedback, or having people rant on their blogs about how software X should have feature Y etc.
Which is why naming it "beta" would have been just fine. Frankly, I don't think the KDE team were very receptive to user feedback after 4.0; I think the wave of harsh criticism and trolling caused them to be a little more inflexible about their version of the "new paradigm".
And look, they weren't exactly unclear about it - they stated fairly openly that it was a beta-ish release, and they were trying to get user feedback. It's an open-source project, release early, release often.
From what I recall, the vast majority of the beta-ish, eat-your-children talk was made after the initial release, while facing a storm of criticism. I remember there being lots of hype prior to the release. I also remember the concerns about 4.0 beta, when the general answer seemed to be: "it's still beta, a lot of these bugs will be ironed out". There was little stability change from the beta stage of the project to the "final" 4.0 stage.
Then there's a simple solution. If it's blatantly obvious that your software project won't be stable for day-to-day use for at least 6 months or more (as was the case with KDE4.0), then classify it as a beta. Don't tarnish the brand itself (as both MS and KDE did).
Here, a short list of apparently "not big" software projects using Qt: Autodesk Maya, Mathematica, Google Earth, Symbian, MeeGo, Opera, Skype, VLC, VirtualBox, Adobe Photoshop Album, , Last.fm Player, Scribus, Xconfig; not very exhaustive, too.
I think opera moved off of QT in its latest release. But point taken.
I already understood what they were trying to accomplish with their silly renaming... and gawd, that convoluted explanation only makes it worse. Why is the KDE team spending so much time creating arbitrary new naming conventions? No one cares. IMO it comes off as pompous. Similar to when they were insisting that a.0 release signifies extreme beta or alpha quality software.
The bitterness about 4.0 comes up in every single goddamned KDE thread.
And that's exactly why it was such a terrible release strategy.
You can let go.
I know that I can, but it still tainted the entire KDE4 project IMO. This isn't helped by the fact that a lot of KDE4 devs continue to insist that it was the correct way to launch KDE4.
Wrong. Windows Vista was crap, and everyone hated it so much they went back to XP, and demanded the distributors sell them XP instead of Vista.
Windows Vista Redux (aka Windows 7) fixed all the problems and now people aren't complaining.
Then Vista is an example of how major software releases should not be handled. Same for KDE4.0.
And Windows 7 was mostly polished on release, and has received a very good reception. Which example should software projects follow?
If the KDE team wanted to temper down expectations on the release of KDE4.0, then they shouldn't have had a big google release party and been extolling KDE4's virtues for months before. Yes, we're still talking about the 4.0 release, because frankly, it took the KDE team a long time to limp to a somewhat usable 4.2.
...I still (still!) have a bad taste in my mouth from that horrible trainwreck of a 4.0 release, and how Aaron Seigo and other KDE devs defended the release strategy. And still do to this day! I think that debacle really hurt the KDE project in the longterm. Big software projects like google-chrome still aren't flocking to QT and KDE.
It's a fairly nice desktop environment, but it's obvious that the focus (for the desktop user experience at least) has always been eye-candy first and stability later. I understand they needed the lay down the framework initially, but shouldn't that framework have at least been somewhat stable before worrying about all the translucent crap and literal bells and whistles? Plasma is still prone to crashing last I checked (4.4). I know, I know... different contributors want to work on different things, and many prefer to work on the eye-candy junk. But to me that just points out how terrible the KDE project has been in managing and organizing KDE4.
And this "SC" crap? Who possibly thought that was needed, or was even remotely a good idea?
Uhh... draw the line when real-life children are involved in the production? Seems pretty common sense, since that was supposedly the reason child porn was made illegal in the first place.
So if I view pirated movies then I am assisting the market and encouraging the creation of more movies? Funny, the MPAA has been saying the exact opposite for years.
But more to the point, if someone downloads CP from usenet (or similar service) and thus there is no indication to the producer/creator that it was being consumed, how is that encouraging more creation of the product?
One of whom had only a 37 month sentence for possession of child pornography. No mention that he had ever touched a child.
That's the most frightening part for me. Someone has to explain just what warranted the decision that this guy is "sexually dangerous." Is the threat of him looking at more pictures so severe that he has to be kept locked up for the rest of his life at taxpayer expense?
Well, it didn't fit with the rest of the sentence. Communist and terrorist are terms frequently used to slander others (or at the very least terrorist-sympathizer). As others have pointed out, everyone is jumping at the chance these days to be labeled a libertarian.
Stop your spamming. The tracker sees your real ip, game over. It's disingenuous to name something "anomos" when it is anything but anonymous (not even pseudo-anonymous).
Because every source in the article uses quotes from law enforcement and groups like NCMEC, who have an incentive to exaggerate the numbers to keep their funding (and to keep people like you scared and angry). Just like when the police arrest someone for possessing 3 ounces of weed, and it is listed in the paper as having a street value of $50,000.
I would be interested in seeing what percentage of child pornography arrests in the last five years had a financial component.
It seems that most of the time the "but it's funding rape!" argument is used as a convenient mask for the less defensible "it should be illegal because they're having creepy thoughts" argument. Maybe I'm wrong. Would you support there being different penalties based on whether someone paid for the stuff or not? Or if someone possessed photo-realistic CGI child porn?
This tired old argument really needs to die. These crimes are committed because there is an audience for the photos. This is a very lucrative business.
People still believe CP is a lucrative business? Really? Let me guess... it's a $800 trillion a year business ZOMG!
maybe while the feature was introduced for all the right reasons (recovering lost/stolen laptops), they're admitting that students/parents should've been notified? i.e. they're admitting they made a mistake, but denying that they are pedophiles who used this "feature" to spy on acne-faced teenage boys masturbating to vogue magazine.
Now that's just ridiculous! I highly doubt teenage boys are masturbating to vogue magazine. Especially with the school-issued laptop computer (i.e. gateway to the universe of porn) right in front of them.
You couldn't download it from them without seeing the warnings. You couldn't install it from a distro without seeing the same warnings. They made it clear it wasn't even "alpha" quality, it was just a snapshot to show the new direction they were taking, because people were asking to see it.
I don't believe that is correct. Here is the KDE4.0 release announcement:
Not a thing about being a testing or development version. And I believe you could have downloaded and compiled it without any warnings. Certainly there were no warnings when I added the extra software repository in ubuntu and installed it that way.
Seriously. Provide a damn option to get rid of the cashew. I realize suse has put this option in, but it's a little annoying that the KDE team refuses to add that option in (at least as far as 4.3) given the overwhelming negative feedback they've received. The only person in the world who likes that stupid cashew is Aaron Seigo.
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Yes. People have probably already been charged with crimes like that, it's conspiracy. Are you saying it's ok to finance child porn as long as you're not the one committing it? I don't know how that would make any current law unnecessary though.
No, I'm saying your analogy was false because the only way someone would be charged with paying for a snuff film is it they paid someone to commit a crime. Hence the conspiracy.
The same would not hold true in the vast majority of child pornography situations, where a person may be paying for it or simply downloading it well after the abuse has occurred, and wouldn't know the actual child abuser at all. If you wanted to revamp the laws to fit with your snuff film example, then all the current child pornography possession and distribution laws would be off the books.
Also, in most cases these pictures are sold, not given away freely.
I love how this argument is trotted out and then denied, depending on the context.
Ask why child porn possession is a bad thing? ----> It's a multi-billion dollar industry, the financial incentive causes more abuse of children
Ask why the exact opposite is argued in MPAA/RIAA situations -----> It's not really about money, it's about demand. The mere knowledge that there is demand causes more abuse of children
It has been shown, in multiple studies, that pornography leads to sexual deviancy and inconsistent expectations of sex
All studies completed by family first and christian groups I'm sure. Do you realize that sex crimes in general have gone down in the last twenty years? Do you know what went up in the last twenty years? Pornography consumption, thanks to the internet. A lot.
People that seek this out are just as responsible as the people making the content.
I have trouble understanding this logic. Someone who seeks out a picture of a child being abused (say on a free p2p network) are just as responsible as the person who actually abused the child? There's no difference to you? Really?
You can be damned sure that if you were paying someone to make snuff tapes you'd be charged along with the producers.
Maybe, under a conspiracy charge, yes. Yet if you were just seeking out snuff tapes you wouldn't be charged. Or if you just possess snuff tapes. Or even if you pay someone for snuff tapes after the fact. By that logic we could charge people with conspiracy to commit sexual abuse of a child if they were paying for a child to be abused before it actually occurred, and thus our current child porn laws would be unnecessary. Otherwise your analogy is completely false.
He's absolutely right. At the end of the day, the KDE 4.x series moved as quickly as it did, probably because of broad user feedback. nothing beats good quality user feedback, or having people rant on their blogs about how software X should have feature Y etc.
I disagree. The bugs in 4.0 were so glaring that there was no need for user feedback. For instance, keyboard shortcuts for things such as the terminal didn't work (and still didn't work in 4.1). This isn't something you need user feedback on. The KDE team deliberately chose to ignore obvious bugs in their software and still release it as being out of beta.
And look, they weren't exactly unclear about it - they stated fairly openly that it was a beta-ish release, and they were trying to get user feedback. It's an open-source project, release early, release often.
That's not the way I remember it at all. I think they were very forthcoming about it being a beta-ish release after the release when they started receiving heavy criticism.
Put it this way, if you can install KDE/Linux, I'm sure you can put up with a bit of quirkiness in your desktop manager, or file a bug report.
A bit of quirkiness is fine, but having the next major release of one of the most used linux desktop environments be an unusable buggy mess is an entirely different matter.
Then why is it that trolls like you have been bringing it up EVERY fucking KDE article/announcement since then? Really, what the fuck is the big deal? Is it really that you think KDE is suffering because of the extreme cost of naming conventions? Really?
Terribly sorry that I wish to contribute to the discussion with something other than glowing praise for KDE4. The naming conventions are not a big deal, you're right, but it's another example IMO of how the KDE team is losing perspective on the important things (stability, usability, user feedback), and instead chasing windmills (social desktop, new paradigms, grand marketing strategies) which so far have shown little measure of success.
He's absolutely right. At the end of the day, the KDE 4.x series moved as quickly as it did, probably because of broad user feedback. nothing beats good quality user feedback, or having people rant on their blogs about how software X should have feature Y etc.
Which is why naming it "beta" would have been just fine. Frankly, I don't think the KDE team were very receptive to user feedback after 4.0; I think the wave of harsh criticism and trolling caused them to be a little more inflexible about their version of the "new paradigm".
And look, they weren't exactly unclear about it - they stated fairly openly that it was a beta-ish release, and they were trying to get user feedback. It's an open-source project, release early, release often.
From what I recall, the vast majority of the beta-ish, eat-your-children talk was made after the initial release, while facing a storm of criticism. I remember there being lots of hype prior to the release. I also remember the concerns about 4.0 beta, when the general answer seemed to be: "it's still beta, a lot of these bugs will be ironed out". There was little stability change from the beta stage of the project to the "final" 4.0 stage.
Then there's a simple solution. If it's blatantly obvious that your software project won't be stable for day-to-day use for at least 6 months or more (as was the case with KDE4.0), then classify it as a beta. Don't tarnish the brand itself (as both MS and KDE did).
Here, a short list of apparently "not big" software projects using Qt: Autodesk Maya, Mathematica, Google Earth, Symbian, MeeGo, Opera, Skype, VLC, VirtualBox, Adobe Photoshop Album, , Last.fm Player, Scribus, Xconfig; not very exhaustive, too.
I think opera moved off of QT in its latest release. But point taken.
It took Google less than a second to turn "kde sc branding" into http://dot.kde.org/2009/11/24/repositioning-kde-brand
I already understood what they were trying to accomplish with their silly renaming... and gawd, that convoluted explanation only makes it worse. Why is the KDE team spending so much time creating arbitrary new naming conventions? No one cares. IMO it comes off as pompous. Similar to when they were insisting that a .0 release signifies extreme beta or alpha quality software.
The bitterness about 4.0 comes up in every single goddamned KDE thread.
And that's exactly why it was such a terrible release strategy.
You can let go.
I know that I can, but it still tainted the entire KDE4 project IMO. This isn't helped by the fact that a lot of KDE4 devs continue to insist that it was the correct way to launch KDE4.
Wrong. Windows Vista was crap, and everyone hated it so much they went back to XP, and demanded the distributors sell them XP instead of Vista. Windows Vista Redux (aka Windows 7) fixed all the problems and now people aren't complaining.
Then Vista is an example of how major software releases should not be handled. Same for KDE4.0.
And Windows 7 was mostly polished on release, and has received a very good reception. Which example should software projects follow?
If the KDE team wanted to temper down expectations on the release of KDE4.0, then they shouldn't have had a big google release party and been extolling KDE4's virtues for months before. Yes, we're still talking about the 4.0 release, because frankly, it took the KDE team a long time to limp to a somewhat usable 4.2.
...I still (still!) have a bad taste in my mouth from that horrible trainwreck of a 4.0 release, and how Aaron Seigo and other KDE devs defended the release strategy. And still do to this day! I think that debacle really hurt the KDE project in the longterm. Big software projects like google-chrome still aren't flocking to QT and KDE.
It's a fairly nice desktop environment, but it's obvious that the focus (for the desktop user experience at least) has always been eye-candy first and stability later. I understand they needed the lay down the framework initially, but shouldn't that framework have at least been somewhat stable before worrying about all the translucent crap and literal bells and whistles? Plasma is still prone to crashing last I checked (4.4). I know, I know... different contributors want to work on different things, and many prefer to work on the eye-candy junk. But to me that just points out how terrible the KDE project has been in managing and organizing KDE4.
And this "SC" crap? Who possibly thought that was needed, or was even remotely a good idea?
Uhh... draw the line when real-life children are involved in the production? Seems pretty common sense, since that was supposedly the reason child porn was made illegal in the first place.
So if I view pirated movies then I am assisting the market and encouraging the creation of more movies? Funny, the MPAA has been saying the exact opposite for years.
But more to the point, if someone downloads CP from usenet (or similar service) and thus there is no indication to the producer/creator that it was being consumed, how is that encouraging more creation of the product?
One of whom had only a 37 month sentence for possession of child pornography. No mention that he had ever touched a child.
That's the most frightening part for me. Someone has to explain just what warranted the decision that this guy is "sexually dangerous." Is the threat of him looking at more pictures so severe that he has to be kept locked up for the rest of his life at taxpayer expense?
Well, it didn't fit with the rest of the sentence. Communist and terrorist are terms frequently used to slander others (or at the very least terrorist-sympathizer). As others have pointed out, everyone is jumping at the chance these days to be labeled a libertarian.
Stop your spamming. The tracker sees your real ip, game over. It's disingenuous to name something "anomos" when it is anything but anonymous (not even pseudo-anonymous).
Because every source in the article uses quotes from law enforcement and groups like NCMEC, who have an incentive to exaggerate the numbers to keep their funding (and to keep people like you scared and angry). Just like when the police arrest someone for possessing 3 ounces of weed, and it is listed in the paper as having a street value of $50,000.
I would be interested in seeing what percentage of child pornography arrests in the last five years had a financial component.
It seems that most of the time the "but it's funding rape!" argument is used as a convenient mask for the less defensible "it should be illegal because they're having creepy thoughts" argument. Maybe I'm wrong. Would you support there being different penalties based on whether someone paid for the stuff or not? Or if someone possessed photo-realistic CGI child porn?
This tired old argument really needs to die. These crimes are committed because there is an audience for the photos. This is a very lucrative business.
People still believe CP is a lucrative business? Really? Let me guess... it's a $800 trillion a year business ZOMG!
Anyone else listen to the two samples? They sound horrible. I put on some Mozart afterwards, and Wolfgang put the robotunes to shame.
maybe while the feature was introduced for all the right reasons (recovering lost/stolen laptops), they're admitting that students/parents should've been notified? i.e. they're admitting they made a mistake, but denying that they are pedophiles who used this "feature" to spy on acne-faced teenage boys masturbating to vogue magazine.
Now that's just ridiculous! I highly doubt teenage boys are masturbating to vogue magazine. Especially with the school-issued laptop computer (i.e. gateway to the universe of porn) right in front of them.
You couldn't download it from them without seeing the warnings. You couldn't install it from a distro without seeing the same warnings. They made it clear it wasn't even "alpha" quality, it was just a snapshot to show the new direction they were taking, because people were asking to see it.
I don't believe that is correct. Here is the KDE4.0 release announcement:
http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/
Not a thing about being a testing or development version. And I believe you could have downloaded and compiled it without any warnings. Certainly there were no warnings when I added the extra software repository in ubuntu and installed it that way.
Seriously. Provide a damn option to get rid of the cashew. I realize suse has put this option in, but it's a little annoying that the KDE team refuses to add that option in (at least as far as 4.3) given the overwhelming negative feedback they've received. The only person in the world who likes that stupid cashew is Aaron Seigo.