I agree. But having done some volunteer work inside prisons a few times, and having spent a significant amount of time conversing with pedophillic sex offenders, I can tell you one thing: unlike 'regular' porn, child porn plays to an entirely different audience. People who desire it see any child nudity as erotic.
I know this wasn't what you were getting at, but this is precisely why the definition of child porn should be very narrowly drawn. Pedophiles may find the sunday paper underwear ads erotic, but we can't go around banning them. The point should be whether there was any harm to the child involved in the production, not how turned on the viewer/consumer gets by looking at it. In most cases, pictures/videos of simple nudity should not be illegal to possess.
The real intent of these modern child porn laws is to punish people for having thoughts we're not comfortable with.
Actually I find that most religious folks are more content with the offerings they're given in their lives compared to the atheists who scramble to find some meaning in their lives.
Then why the obsession with preaching to others and trying to convert them?
I don't know of any atheists who "scramble to find some meaning in their lives."
If you just die and rot then what difference does it make how you spend your time anyway?
Because you may as well enjoy yourself while you are alive. Many bible-beating christians seem to try their best *not* to enjoy themselves while alive, because they are preparing for a wonderful afterlife.
The jokes on him when he dies and rots into the ground like all the rest of the organic lifeforms. Meanwhile he'll waste a good portion of his life babbling about his "savior".
The poor sap is going to miss out on a lot of good porn!
The OP was talking about a nicely integrated desktop. This is hardly the case if options and file dialogs differ between applications. But simply put, if I don't even use one single QT based app I see no need to run a heavyweight QT-based desktop environment.
KDE is just technically better these days. It is implemented in a better programming language (even C++ is better than the C-and-GObject hellhole), built upon a better GUI toolkit (Qt kicks the fuck out of GTK+), and offers much better desktop applications and a more integrated desktop experience.
Funny, that's the main thing that stops me from using KDE (that and the continued instability of plasma). I have a hard time finding nice simple kde equivalents to audacious, deluge (vastly prefer it to ktorrent), gimp, pidgin and of course firefox (and now chrome). Since all my productive apps are GTK based, it is very hard for me to justify switching to KDE4.
If you are an attorney then you should also realize that in many states both strict liability and restrictions against jury nullification come into effect, meaning that even if the girl is 17 but acts older, looks older, and has a fake id that says she's older, the [b]jury has to follow the law[/b] and risk a mistrial if they don't.
Oh really? Tell that to the face of the child in the image he downloaded.
This is exactly the type of reactionary nonsense I was talking about. That emotionally-charged statement does nothing to explain why the connection between downloading an image off of limewire and the sexual abuse of a child is not tenuous.
This is like someone getting 3 years for walking out of a store with the clerk's pen. The solution isn't to legalize theft, its to try to do something about the corruption of the 'justice' system.
That's the whole point. You can't get 3 years for walking out of a store with the clerk's pen (at least not first offense). Yes, the prosecutors aren't using their discretion, but the laws need to be reformed.
In my opinion, it's irrelevant whether or not he downloaded the images on purpose. The connection between downloading an image off of limewire and the sexual abuse of a child is so tenuous it's absurd. The only way people can justify it is to make up crazy hypotheticals and market demand theories which are used in no other context.
Exactly. They'd dismiss the charges and refile them once they cracked the password. They only time limitation for them would be the statute of limitations.
as for the semantic desktop, don't use it if it isn't useful to you. it's that simple. however, with apps starting to use it behind the scenes, you'll likely be using it without even knowing it. you'll just be finding that things work nicely and wondering how all that information gets shuttled about. an interesting use case is the groupware system (akonadi) is now using the semantic framework (nepomuk) extensively.
This raises a red flag for me. Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but are you saying that metadata will be attached to some of my files without my knowledge/permission?
When you say, "Frankly, it would be difficult to do one without the other", you are in fact advocating the protection of distribution of pictures of child rape. Its disingenuous to avoid the issue by calling the plain statement of your position 'inflammatory'. If you're not bothered much by child rape, then you shouldn't be offended by being accused of protecting it. If you are bothered by it, then you can find a way to distinguish it from teenage romance.
You're making the common mistake of conflating pictures of child rape as equivalent to actual child rape. No, I don't think simple possession of any particular photograph or media should be illegal if the possessor does not participate in any financial exchange and has no contact or affiliation with the producer or victim.
What I meant when I said it would be difficult to do one without the other is that it would be hard to legalize the possession of some sexual photographs of minors and not others. If a 19 year possesses a video of his (legal) 17 year old girlfriend, would that be acceptable? What if a 14 year old makes a video and then sells it for money? What if a 16 year old possesses a sexual photo of another 16 year old but does not know them? What if a 40 year old possesses a sexual picture of a 15 year old that the 15 year old took him/herself? What if someone accidentally downloads an illegal photograph from usenet? These laws are outdated and incredibly harsh with punishments. They were designed for a time when stores would sell underage pornography over the counter, not for the age of the internet and camera-phones.
I'm extremely bothered by child rape, as most rational human beings are. However, I am able to intellectually separate someone possessing evidence of a crime from the actual crime. I also want to take measures to prevent the actual sexual assault of children, not grandstand around while foaming at the mouth, proud to throw people in prison for downloading some picture from kazaa (and calling anyone who dares to question me a pedophile).
Unless of course you're only bothered by people speaking plainly of abuse, because the reality of it doesn't enter your personal space. In which case this would exhibit the kind of spoiled frivolity that twostix accused you of.
Great, more personal insults.
It would be like saying that the distribution of all films of staged murders should be allowed, because not all snuff films are real, then saying its unfair to insinuate that murder is being protected. That trick can be played with any law at all.
What a fascinating example to use, although I'm sure I'm missing your point. Are you trying to say that someone who thinks staged murder films should be legal (like they are) is proposing that murder is acceptable?
On that note, it's easy to proceed to the obvious example: if you watch a video of an al queda member sawing off someone's head, does that mean you are a terrorist? Or that you are supporting terrorism? Or advocating it?
As a side note, whenever someone starts a statement with "frankly", I always wonder at the implied hesitation at being up front about ones position. As if deviating from a pattern of habitual dishonesty needs to be prefaced with an apology.
Frankly, that sort of psychological assessment would be hard to come by just by reading a couple brief slashdot posts. But frankly, I don't care.
Pedophiles do blatantly post on slashdot. I apologize if I've lumped you in with them unfairly.
Half-hearted apology accepted. Obviously I should have used the example of the recent federal law banning animal cruelty videos. Brains seems to shut off when child pornography is mentioned.
Interesting. I loathe the nautilus' video thumbnails and always turn it off. It's horribly slow and CPU intensive. And does not play nicely with video torrents.
Weird. I think nautilus does a great job with video thumbnails, and they allow me to quickly and easily differentiate between video files.
But what irritates me the most is that they're just plain useless. Which frame should you pick? Not the first, they're usually black. In the first minute? In the middle? It's hard to pick up a representative frame, and even if you do, it will be mostly meaningless. Contrast with photos' thumbnails.
I'm not sure how nautilus does it, but I never have black thumbnails. Again, I find them quite useful, and it seems to be a very basic feature present in most file managers. Didn't konqueror in 3.5.x have video thumbnails? It would be nice to at least have the option of video thumbnails built in.
If what you're opposed to is the misuse of pornography laws to prosecute teenage lovers, and are not merely using it as an excuse to protect the distribution of pictures of 40 year olds having sex with 4 year olds, then I'm in agreement completely.
Frankly, it would be difficult to do one without the other, but that wasn't my point. It's interesting (but not particularly surprising) that even the mention of child pornography causes you to insinuate that someone is advocating that child rape should be a human right.
And when discussing child pornography laws, you should probably limit using inflammatory language concerning sadistic young child rape, given that with the ubiquity of cameras the vast majority of child pornography currently being produced is likely teenagers taking pictures of themselves.
Will this basic file-manager feature be available in 4.4? And no, I don't want to install mplayerthumbs; it's horribly slow and CPU intensive. It should be integrated into the file manager like nautilus and explorer.
GNOME 3 isn't supposed to be out until September 2010. That's quite a long time for a software project. And once it's released, it'll suffer from the problems that the early KDE 4.x releases did. A barely-stable release won't be available until September 2011 at the earliest, but more likely by September 2012.
Oh please. The new gnome-shell is already usable and mostly stable. Just because the KDE team made their transition into a new release a massive trainwreck doesn't mean every software project will follow in their footsteps.
Gnome hasn't stagnated, it's a mature and stable desktop environment. Because of this, Gnome is often the preferred choice for enterprise desktops. KDE is obsessed with shiny objects and web 2.0 garbage, which is why it has taken so very long for the 4.X series to be merely usable.
I'm not claiming that KDE is down for the count, just that the desktop environments seem to have taken a different development strategy as of late.
Relax, Mr. Angry. I wasn't making a comparison to China, nor the Soviet Union, nor Nazi Germany. I was simply saying that a lot of American politicians will bark about a free internet and the freedom of speech all day long, but will be the first to support censoring certain information when it is an easy boogieman target.
But I'm glad I gave you an opportunity to vent. Hope it felt good.
Well said. I find the lack of decency expressed by the 'child porn market = free speech' crowd to be staggering. As if the opportunity to sadistically destroy children, or leer from a safe distance while other people do it for you, is a human right.
Ah yes. "...sadistically destroy children." Typical inflammatory speech used whenever the topic of child pornography comes up, hoping to silence all debate on the subject. That's also how politicians use it to pass misguided laws and pander to voters.
So when a 16 year old sends a nude video of herself to her boyfriend, which one is sadistically destroying children?
I'm glad that in the United States, the president agrees that an open and uncensored internet is important to ensure the free exchange of ideas. Sometimes, to ensure true freedom of speech, you have to allow that which you may find objectionable or offensive, because once you start blocking some information, you start to... OMG what's that? Child pornography?!? BLOCK EVERYTHING, ARREST EVERYONE, MONITOR ALL TRAFFIC!
Thanks for the reply. Very interesting. Regarding the UI slowness and graphics drivers (I use the proprietary nvidia driver), whether it is the fault of KDE devs or the poor state of linux graphic driver support, the end result is frustrating for users. We're looking back with rose-tinted glasses, but 3.5.x ran quite well and was snappy regardless of which graphics chipset it was run on. There has been a lot of finger pointing about graphics drivers in the 4.x series, none of which makes a slow desktop easier to use.
Anyway, your response was well thought out. There are a few KDE devs who seem to the take the "admit no mistakes, push forward!" attitude without stepping back for a minute and analyzing how the progress is going. I do look forward to trying KDE4 again in the future.
You make a lot of good points. No clue what you're talking about regarding "two processes to manage one desktop", but I will just make the observation that as a relative layperson, it's extremely difficult to understand why a desktop environment would concentrate on the inclusion of what were previously 3rd party apps before attaining adequate stability and basic feature-level. The reasons for not holding off 4.0 have been discussed ad nauseum because a few high profile holdouts from the KDE team won't admit that it was a complete disaster. Which it was.
KDE4 is getting a lot better and has some pretty sweet eyecandy, but is still slow and buggy for me. I am on ubuntu, so YMMV.
XP has been and is the most popular OS environment partially because it is stable and fast, and provides a simple environment to launch applications from (while having all desktop options available, unlike wonderful WMs like openbox). Applications including 3rd party desktop widgets. I know it's difficult to control the relative popularity of different coding projects, but I would think keeping a sane priority for feature progression is part of the reason for having an all inclusive desktop environment.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. But having done some volunteer work inside prisons a few times, and having spent a significant amount of time conversing with pedophillic sex offenders, I can tell you one thing: unlike 'regular' porn, child porn plays to an entirely different audience. People who desire it see any child nudity as erotic.
I know this wasn't what you were getting at, but this is precisely why the definition of child porn should be very narrowly drawn. Pedophiles may find the sunday paper underwear ads erotic, but we can't go around banning them. The point should be whether there was any harm to the child involved in the production, not how turned on the viewer/consumer gets by looking at it. In most cases, pictures/videos of simple nudity should not be illegal to possess.
The real intent of these modern child porn laws is to punish people for having thoughts we're not comfortable with.
Actually I find that most religious folks are more content with the offerings they're given in their lives compared to the atheists who scramble to find some meaning in their lives.
Then why the obsession with preaching to others and trying to convert them?
I don't know of any atheists who "scramble to find some meaning in their lives."
If you just die and rot then what difference does it make how you spend your time anyway?
Because you may as well enjoy yourself while you are alive. Many bible-beating christians seem to try their best *not* to enjoy themselves while alive, because they are preparing for a wonderful afterlife.
Yes, yes, I know... -1 flamebait or troll.
The jokes on him when he dies and rots into the ground like all the rest of the organic lifeforms. Meanwhile he'll waste a good portion of his life babbling about his "savior".
The poor sap is going to miss out on a lot of good porn!
The OP was talking about a nicely integrated desktop. This is hardly the case if options and file dialogs differ between applications. But simply put, if I don't even use one single QT based app I see no need to run a heavyweight QT-based desktop environment.
KDE is just technically better these days. It is implemented in a better programming language (even C++ is better than the C-and-GObject hellhole), built upon a better GUI toolkit (Qt kicks the fuck out of GTK+), and offers much better desktop applications and a more integrated desktop experience.
Funny, that's the main thing that stops me from using KDE (that and the continued instability of plasma). I have a hard time finding nice simple kde equivalents to audacious, deluge (vastly prefer it to ktorrent), gimp, pidgin and of course firefox (and now chrome). Since all my productive apps are GTK based, it is very hard for me to justify switching to KDE4.
If you are an attorney then you should also realize that in many states both strict liability and restrictions against jury nullification come into effect, meaning that even if the girl is 17 but acts older, looks older, and has a fake id that says she's older, the [b]jury has to follow the law[/b] and risk a mistrial if they don't.
Oh really? Tell that to the face of the child in the image he downloaded.
This is exactly the type of reactionary nonsense I was talking about. That emotionally-charged statement does nothing to explain why the connection between downloading an image off of limewire and the sexual abuse of a child is not tenuous.
This is like someone getting 3 years for walking out of a store with the clerk's pen. The solution isn't to legalize theft, its to try to do something about the corruption of the 'justice' system.
That's the whole point. You can't get 3 years for walking out of a store with the clerk's pen (at least not first offense). Yes, the prosecutors aren't using their discretion, but the laws need to be reformed.
In my opinion, it's irrelevant whether or not he downloaded the images on purpose. The connection between downloading an image off of limewire and the sexual abuse of a child is so tenuous it's absurd. The only way people can justify it is to make up crazy hypotheticals and market demand theories which are used in no other context.
Exactly. They'd dismiss the charges and refile them once they cracked the password. They only time limitation for them would be the statute of limitations.
as for the semantic desktop, don't use it if it isn't useful to you. it's that simple. however, with apps starting to use it behind the scenes, you'll likely be using it without even knowing it. you'll just be finding that things work nicely and wondering how all that information gets shuttled about. an interesting use case is the groupware system (akonadi) is now using the semantic framework (nepomuk) extensively.
This raises a red flag for me. Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but are you saying that metadata will be attached to some of my files without my knowledge/permission?
You can turn the shiny off...
I know, but I can't turn some features and stability on!
When you say, "Frankly, it would be difficult to do one without the other", you are in fact advocating the protection of distribution of pictures of child rape. Its disingenuous to avoid the issue by calling the plain statement of your position 'inflammatory'. If you're not bothered much by child rape, then you shouldn't be offended by being accused of protecting it. If you are bothered by it, then you can find a way to distinguish it from teenage romance.
You're making the common mistake of conflating pictures of child rape as equivalent to actual child rape. No, I don't think simple possession of any particular photograph or media should be illegal if the possessor does not participate in any financial exchange and has no contact or affiliation with the producer or victim.
What I meant when I said it would be difficult to do one without the other is that it would be hard to legalize the possession of some sexual photographs of minors and not others. If a 19 year possesses a video of his (legal) 17 year old girlfriend, would that be acceptable? What if a 14 year old makes a video and then sells it for money? What if a 16 year old possesses a sexual photo of another 16 year old but does not know them? What if a 40 year old possesses a sexual picture of a 15 year old that the 15 year old took him/herself? What if someone accidentally downloads an illegal photograph from usenet? These laws are outdated and incredibly harsh with punishments. They were designed for a time when stores would sell underage pornography over the counter, not for the age of the internet and camera-phones.
I'm extremely bothered by child rape, as most rational human beings are. However, I am able to intellectually separate someone possessing evidence of a crime from the actual crime. I also want to take measures to prevent the actual sexual assault of children, not grandstand around while foaming at the mouth, proud to throw people in prison for downloading some picture from kazaa (and calling anyone who dares to question me a pedophile).
Unless of course you're only bothered by people speaking plainly of abuse, because the reality of it doesn't enter your personal space. In which case this would exhibit the kind of spoiled frivolity that twostix accused you of.
Great, more personal insults.
It would be like saying that the distribution of all films of staged murders should be allowed, because not all snuff films are real, then saying its unfair to insinuate that murder is being protected. That trick can be played with any law at all.
What a fascinating example to use, although I'm sure I'm missing your point. Are you trying to say that someone who thinks staged murder films should be legal (like they are) is proposing that murder is acceptable?
On that note, it's easy to proceed to the obvious example: if you watch a video of an al queda member sawing off someone's head, does that mean you are a terrorist? Or that you are supporting terrorism? Or advocating it?
As a side note, whenever someone starts a statement with "frankly", I always wonder at the implied hesitation at being up front about ones position. As if deviating from a pattern of habitual dishonesty needs to be prefaced with an apology.
Frankly, that sort of psychological assessment would be hard to come by just by reading a couple brief slashdot posts. But frankly, I don't care.
Pedophiles do blatantly post on slashdot. I apologize if I've lumped you in with them unfairly.
Half-hearted apology accepted. Obviously I should have used the example of the recent federal law banning animal cruelty videos. Brains seems to shut off when child pornography is mentioned.
Interesting. I loathe the nautilus' video thumbnails and always turn it off. It's horribly slow and CPU intensive. And does not play nicely with video torrents.
Weird. I think nautilus does a great job with video thumbnails, and they allow me to quickly and easily differentiate between video files.
But what irritates me the most is that they're just plain useless. Which frame should you pick? Not the first, they're usually black. In the first minute? In the middle? It's hard to pick up a representative frame, and even if you do, it will be mostly meaningless. Contrast with photos' thumbnails.
I'm not sure how nautilus does it, but I never have black thumbnails. Again, I find them quite useful, and it seems to be a very basic feature present in most file managers. Didn't konqueror in 3.5.x have video thumbnails? It would be nice to at least have the option of video thumbnails built in.
The most welcome improvement is that there's finally a checkbox to hide the retarded cashew thingy. Woohoo!
Can anyone confirm that this will be available as default in 4.4? AFAIK it is only available in Suse installs.
I was under the impression that aseigo would rather sacrifice his first born than remove that stupid cashew from the desktop.
While I don't know if this will help in your particular situation, I've found random sluggishness like that much reduced after I got an Intel SSD.
Now that's a ringing endorsement. KDE4: it won't be sluggish if you use a SSD!
If what you're opposed to is the misuse of pornography laws to prosecute teenage lovers, and are not merely using it as an excuse to protect the distribution of pictures of 40 year olds having sex with 4 year olds, then I'm in agreement completely.
Frankly, it would be difficult to do one without the other, but that wasn't my point. It's interesting (but not particularly surprising) that even the mention of child pornography causes you to insinuate that someone is advocating that child rape should be a human right.
And when discussing child pornography laws, you should probably limit using inflammatory language concerning sadistic young child rape, given that with the ubiquity of cameras the vast majority of child pornography currently being produced is likely teenagers taking pictures of themselves.
Will this basic file-manager feature be available in 4.4? And no, I don't want to install mplayerthumbs; it's horribly slow and CPU intensive. It should be integrated into the file manager like nautilus and explorer.
GNOME 3 isn't supposed to be out until September 2010. That's quite a long time for a software project. And once it's released, it'll suffer from the problems that the early KDE 4.x releases did. A barely-stable release won't be available until September 2011 at the earliest, but more likely by September 2012.
Oh please. The new gnome-shell is already usable and mostly stable. Just because the KDE team made their transition into a new release a massive trainwreck doesn't mean every software project will follow in their footsteps.
Gnome hasn't stagnated, it's a mature and stable desktop environment. Because of this, Gnome is often the preferred choice for enterprise desktops. KDE is obsessed with shiny objects and web 2.0 garbage, which is why it has taken so very long for the 4.X series to be merely usable.
I'm not claiming that KDE is down for the count, just that the desktop environments seem to have taken a different development strategy as of late.
Relax, Mr. Angry. I wasn't making a comparison to China, nor the Soviet Union, nor Nazi Germany. I was simply saying that a lot of American politicians will bark about a free internet and the freedom of speech all day long, but will be the first to support censoring certain information when it is an easy boogieman target.
But I'm glad I gave you an opportunity to vent. Hope it felt good.
Well said. I find the lack of decency expressed by the 'child porn market = free speech' crowd to be staggering. As if the opportunity to sadistically destroy children, or leer from a safe distance while other people do it for you, is a human right.
Ah yes. "...sadistically destroy children." Typical inflammatory speech used whenever the topic of child pornography comes up, hoping to silence all debate on the subject. That's also how politicians use it to pass misguided laws and pander to voters.
So when a 16 year old sends a nude video of herself to her boyfriend, which one is sadistically destroying children?
I'm glad that in the United States, the president agrees that an open and uncensored internet is important to ensure the free exchange of ideas. Sometimes, to ensure true freedom of speech, you have to allow that which you may find objectionable or offensive, because once you start blocking some information, you start to... OMG what's that? Child pornography?!? BLOCK EVERYTHING, ARREST EVERYONE, MONITOR ALL TRAFFIC!
Thanks for the reply. Very interesting. Regarding the UI slowness and graphics drivers (I use the proprietary nvidia driver), whether it is the fault of KDE devs or the poor state of linux graphic driver support, the end result is frustrating for users. We're looking back with rose-tinted glasses, but 3.5.x ran quite well and was snappy regardless of which graphics chipset it was run on. There has been a lot of finger pointing about graphics drivers in the 4.x series, none of which makes a slow desktop easier to use.
Anyway, your response was well thought out. There are a few KDE devs who seem to the take the "admit no mistakes, push forward!" attitude without stepping back for a minute and analyzing how the progress is going. I do look forward to trying KDE4 again in the future.
You make a lot of good points. No clue what you're talking about regarding "two processes to manage one desktop", but I will just make the observation that as a relative layperson, it's extremely difficult to understand why a desktop environment would concentrate on the inclusion of what were previously 3rd party apps before attaining adequate stability and basic feature-level. The reasons for not holding off 4.0 have been discussed ad nauseum because a few high profile holdouts from the KDE team won't admit that it was a complete disaster. Which it was.
KDE4 is getting a lot better and has some pretty sweet eyecandy, but is still slow and buggy for me. I am on ubuntu, so YMMV.
XP has been and is the most popular OS environment partially because it is stable and fast, and provides a simple environment to launch applications from (while having all desktop options available, unlike wonderful WMs like openbox). Applications including 3rd party desktop widgets. I know it's difficult to control the relative popularity of different coding projects, but I would think keeping a sane priority for feature progression is part of the reason for having an all inclusive desktop environment.