A lot of artists and photographers would probably take issue with that comment.
Okay...who and why? Unless the goal of the creation is to have naked people and say "hey, no clothes, come look!", it wouldn't be porn (at least in my definition). I can't think of too many people, artists or not, who would disagree with that.
The line is far from clear-cut and this is not the first argument over what is classified art vs pornographic material.
I agree, the line is far from clear-cut, which is why I didn't say we could ever have specificity, just broad concensus on that question.
And not just visual/audio information is a problem. What if people blog about something inappropriate (sexual experiences, whatever), are then, all Livejournal/Blogger/etc. sites required to move to.xxx or at least a subset of journals thereof? I don't consider that pornography, although probably not something I'd want my young child to read. But I don't think it should be moved to the red-light district of the internet.
That's a *really* good question. Outside of the mainstream internet, there are plenty of places you can go to find pornographic texts (ala Anne Rice's pseudonymous novels about the character "Beauty", but seedier...just look in the alt.sex newsgroups a bit). I have four kids, and there's a lot of stuff out there that I don't especially want them reading or looking at, at least not at their current ages (2, 5, 7, and 10 years old), but I'm savvy enough to be able to limit their access to internet-based stuff, at least at home.
Not everyone is knowledgeable enough to manage that, even though they might want to, and many, many people don't want to have a discussion on rape-fantasy, electro-torture, lolimanga, or tentacle-sex with their kids (or even with other adults, probably).
I think that, for the most part, what would be looked at would be intent and visual content in making a determination. Ideally, *all* filtering would be at the discretion of the individual (IMHO), but I'll admit, there is ample room for lobbying and government interference with such a system in place.
As I wrote this, I began to wonder what current filtering companies think about the idea...I'm willing to bet they don't much like it, since it'd make them a lot less necessary.
You make good points, and there are some very real first-amendment issues that *could* come up if it was implemented and government got involved in filtering.
We already have pictures of naked people that aren't sex, and (other than pictures for anatomical purposes), they're typically classified as pornography. Pictures of naked people for people to look at just because they're naked are porn...seems a fair definition.
I suppose that there would be some edge cases that would cause a lot of discussion classification-wise, but I don't see the definition being too terribly difficult to come to some broad concensus on.
I imagine that most of the opposition came from the porn industry because they don't want to have to deal with the ease-of-filtering issue (as was pointed out in the post prior to yours), but that seems excessive to me. Other than at work or school (or public libraries, maybe), I can't see a sufficient profit motive for blocking access. If you live somewhere that Playboy can't be sold in a store, then you might have to worry about some kind of local law, but that's the type of thing you address with your local government, and since it's the community that decides, I wouldn't think such blocking would be unreasonable at the community level.
It's a bit of a potential slippery slope, if decisions regarding blocking access creep upward to state and federal government (at least in the US) but it also makes porn sites easier to find and easier to block, which is a positive for people on both sides of the question of "do you enjoy looking at porn?"
Well, I suppose that if you ignore the reality that internet porn will continue to exist, then it's a good thing to not have it segregated to a particular TLD.
I really don't get why "conservative" groups would *not* want it...it would make filtering (for sites following the rules) so trivial it'd be ridiculous.
For that matter, why are some of the porn outfits against the idea? Aside from worrying about a squatter getting your domain name, what's the downside? It's not like a.xxx domain is going to have some stigma that customers would avoid.
Even If I were to accept your modified definition of socialism, which I do not, it would still work against your argument because the government by no means controls corporations. Regulates certain abusive activities yes, but they nowhere near control them. Furthermore those companies that are subject to broader control than average are generally local/regional monopolies that received government funding for the endorsement of their monopoly and agreed to the restrictions
You must be confused as to my point, then. The posts I saw later in the thread said something to the effect of "creeping socialism is doing X". You argued that there is no socialism in our economic model, and I disagree, for the reasons I mentioned. We do not have a socialist government, but government regulation of the market is definitely socialistic, as opposed to capitalistic.
Simply looking at the root of each word points you in the right direction...socialist practices have society (i.e. government, in this example) in control of some economic aspect, capitalistic practices have the market (capital...money) in control of some economic aspect. Our economic model is a mix of those, so id has a socialist aspect to it, and that aspect grows with each new law related to business practices that define market interactions.
Even if the regulation doesn't nearly control them *completely*, it still controls them, and is therefore socialist in aspect, as opposed to pure capitalism. I'm not arguing against regulation, just against what I think is an inncorrect statement.
They are required, by EPA regulation, to report what the car got on a dynamometer under certain cycles meant to simulate actually driving. The EPA regulates that this is the way. The EPA is therefore responsible for the validity of the results.
No, the EPA is responsible for the accuracy of the results under the specified conditions. The validity of the results is a function of whether the test conditions reflect the typical use of your average vehicle. Since (in most cases) they fail to set test conditions that reflect that usage pattern, they are at odds with actual mileage seen by the purchaser of an automobile.
Granted, this year one change is to run the test with the air conditioner running...that should help, but it doesn't help to sell a car at an advertised 50 MPG and have the driver of the car get 35 MPG. Putting the "actual mileage may vary" disclaimer on the ad is a band-aid for a flawed testing methodology (flawed in that it does not give results that apply to real-world use, which is the supposed selling point for MPG ratings).
How about a new example: If the fictional graphics card manufacturer S3vidiaTI claims a framerate of X fps on some particular game, using some particular hardware setup, and you buy the card and see 50-75 percent of that framerate on identical hardware, not knowing that they first disabled every nonessential driver on the system first, you might see it as a bit misleading.
I have to take issue with a particular word in reference.com's definition #1:
1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
I'd have to say s/owned/controlled/ to agree with it.
If the government or some collective organization representing "the people" controls the means of production and distributing goods, that's socialism. Ownership is not explicitly necessary. It's a subtle but important distinction.
For example, if you owned a company, but it's activities were primarily controlled by a government, you would not be able to say that capitalism was the economic model your company operated under. If market forces are not the primary factors in determining the actions of a company, then capitalism is not the economic model it operates under.
I notice that there is some discussion about whether socialism is a part of our current economic model, and the answer, of course, is yes. In addition to various governmental regulations controlling various markets and business interactions, we have a number of programs meant solely to control the distribution of goods (via subsidies) that are government programs.
Setting aside the question of whether it's hurting or helping, socialism is a part of how our economy works. Saying there's no socialism in our economy is not correct.
You are a tard. "up to" means "at this point under definable conditions". It's like the EPA ratings on your car, EG: 23 city, 31 highway.
If you drive on a level highway, with a fully-tuned car, with a recent oil change, properly inflated tires, at 75 degrees farenheit, at *exactly* 55 degrees, you'll see your 31 MPH.
Poor example...you forgot to add in "with your air conditioner off" as a condition. That said, I think the post you reply to makes a good point about advertising in general.
Just as car companies regularly exploit EPA mileage ratings that normal driving does not bear out (just ask a Prius or Insight owner), the phrase "up to" is the functional equivalent of "="...could be 75%, could be 23%, they're not specifying any modifiers to define the expectation of savings under any particular set of conditions, so it's an impossible statement to evaluate as far as real-worl use goes.
So basically, random individuals on the Internet (who had no connection to Sun I assume) made you lose interest in a programming language. I can understand if the developers of a product are pricks and that turns you off of a product, but I'm sick of hearing "I don't use it because people told me 'RTFM' or 'Google'". That happens everywhere on the Internet. That's what anonymous/semi-anonymous non-face-to-face communication does to people. Get over it.
That's what I get for trying to offer a better explanation. I will refrain from writing "RRMFP" (reread my f-ing post) and try to address your response succinctly.
No, random individuals on the internet didn't make me lose interest in a programming language. They prevented me from becoming interested in bothering to expend any effort to learn it, however. I mentioned that at the time, I was just curious...not in any particular need of learning Java, and I asked what I thought would be an easily answered question and didn't get any useful responses. At a certain point, I shrugged it all off, and said, oh well, who cares, and went back to hacking some huge and ugly Perl script.
So I take it you don't use Linux either because some big, bad forum jerks told you "RTFM" too?
Here's where I considered saying RRMFP. If you scroll up, you'll note that I actually had a need to use Linux, and put in the time and effort necessary to make it work for me. I also already said (two or three times) that the "RTFM, n00b" attitude is prevalent in both Linux and Java groups all over the place, although there are exceptions. My comment was an agreement that the Java and Linux communities share this problem, which I then followed with a personal anecdote to illustrate that point.
I have nothing against people who enjoy programming in Java or any other programming language, I just have a certain distaste for the language itself because of my past experiences.
Here's an analogy for you...not a great one: Say you buy a car...a Kia, for example. You like the car, but have a few small problems with it, so you take it to a local dealership to have it looked at. They ask you to describe the problem, and when you explain to them that it's making a funny noise, they laugh at you and tell you diagnostics don't show that there's a problem and you must be imagining it.
After that happens a couple of times, you might get irritated. If you don't need to drive a Kia, you might even trade it in on a vehicle from a company that has been more considerate in response to your questions, and not really consider buying any Kia vehicles in the future.
You sound like you're upset that my opinion of whether it's worth my effort to learn Java isn't affirmative, which leads me to assume that you like programming in Java. By that same token, I'd assume that you want me to believe that it should be worth the effort. The problem being that you're displaying (to a much lesser degree) the same type of attitude that made me not want to bother in the first place.
Maybe one day, I'll be looking for a new programming language to learn again, and I'll bother with Java again. Maybe someone can even give a link to a Java beginners list that's actually easy on newcomers. Maybe Javascript and XMLHTTP will take over the world and it'll be a moot point.
In your world, monopoly situations that stagnate industries, raise prices and lower value to the consumer are good things that should be encouraged and silly companies like Google should just try to behave in the same way. After all the whole point in capatalism is to crush the competition so you can then use your monopoly to create new monopolies in other industries!
I understand the emotion, but you missed the point. The idea of mandating a manufacturer to make part of their product better serve the needs of their competitors isn't about controlling monopoly, it's about frustration.
Part of what I just said was that I think that interoperability is a GOOD thing. I have am given pause, however, when faced with the concept that we can use the law to dictate that someone that makes a product must change that product to favor that company's competitors.
Should GM be forced to allow every auto manufacturer to include OnStar? Yes, it would benefit me as a consumer, and yes, I'd have more choice, but it disregards the thinking, planning, execution, and resources spent by GM to ensure a competitive advantage.
Microsoft makes software...they make a popular OS that happens to be installed on a huge percentage of the world's PCs...somewhere in that situation, there is a case to be made for them being monopolistic, via the agreements they forge with many PC manufacturers.
That does not, by extension, make the fact that they have a web browser in that OS, or a search feature within that web browser a sign of a monopoly. If Google ever offered a Linux distribution with a web browser that had a search function, would anyone expect the default search engine to be something other than a Google offering? If it was trivial to change the default, would there be discussion about whether it was trivial enough?
The whole point of capitalism is to allow competition to let the cream rise to the top, as is happening with Linux and Google. We all know a good thing when we see it, and more and more people are beginning to see the value in Open Source. Let's not screw that up by throwing too many lawyers in the mix. Unintended consequences can be painful.
This is an issue where all the screaming leaves me shaking my head. People are up in arms that Microsoft put their own search engine as the default in their own web browser that runs on their own OS (GASP!). As of sometime last year, you can (after doing some digging) get a PC, even from Dell, with a non-Microsoft OS installed on it.
To a lesser extent, this bothers me about the whole "Legislated interoperability" thing that everyone keeps throwing at MS. I agree that it's a much better idea and situation to allow interoperability, and to provide the info necessary to developers to allow it to happen easily and reliably, but are we really saying that MS shouldn't be able to keep their secrets to themselves?
Let them stay behind their walls of obfuscation as they watch FOSS gain market share and MS becomes less relevant.
Hopefully the ODF ISO blessing is a sign of things to come. As for the next step, I think Tridge needs to come up with a new Samba that has better functionality than Microsoft's implementation and force *them* to play catch-up.
Let me make myself (slightly) better understood here, so you get the correct impression.
The first time I decided to check into Java (at the time just at the hobbyist/experimenter level) was about 5 years ago. At the time, there wasn't a lot of online tutorial material that was answering the questions I was asking, and Java seemed unnecessarily complex, so I shrugged it off.
The next time I got interested was as a result of a little contest that Sun or IBM had...I don't remember...where you program these tanks in Java and then let them battle it out together. Again, I found not a lot of online material that was answering the questions I was asking (primarily questions of the "why doesn't what I'm trying to do work" variety).
In both cases it wasn't something I wanted to do badly enough to plunk down money for a book or some course, and in both cases, the community responses I got were of the "RTFM n00b" variety.
I've been on both sides of that equation before...I sat in on the Perl-beginners mailing list for a few years, first asking, and then answering questions. In my mind, when somebody comes to a place like that to ask a question, you answer it...even a trivial question may be something that not everybody knows, but most people won't ask for fear of looking stupid.
If I have to do something because of a genuine need, of course I'll buy the book or put in the sweat equity to get to where I need to be, but at the time that I cared about learning Java, that wasn't the case, and an attitude of elitism, whether real or percieved, was what made me say "never mind".
So basically Java is the Linux of programming languages?
You hit it precisely on the head. Linux and Java proponents tend to have a particular problem with being unsympathetic to n00bs (please note that I like Linux a lot, and dislike Java a lot...a result of my own experiences).
I've checked Java out a few times thinking I might want to add it to my repetoire, but I got irritated by how difficult it seemed to be to do things...or, more specifically, how hard it was to find out how to do things.
As happens in Linux circles sometimes, my basic questions were treated with RTFM and rudeness...well, more like elitism, I guess...it wasn't *quite* rude, if you know what I mean.
It's not even that I'm especially stupid, it's just that after years of thinking in C-64 BASIC, DOS batch syntax, GW-BASIC, VB, javascript, and Perl, I wasn't really primed for it. Not having anything beyond a "Do you have any Grey Poupon?" response didn't make me any more enamored of it, so it's not so much the licensing that needs help to me, but the community.
Maybe I just had a bad experience, but from my perspective, you're exactly right...Java is the Linux of programming languages.
And fortunately, thanks to the efforts of many of the people in that rounding error, you have an internet, computer, and forum in which to have read that description.;)
Yeah, some of us (US-ians) are shortsighted, pompous, insipid asses, but we're not all *completely* worthless, you know.
I like dig. I use dig all the time. Dig does indeed return multiple results for PTR records.
Unfortunately, the brain-dead software you refer to is still pretty widespread, and until that changes, PTR records are broken if you want to use them to reliably identify whether a mailserver and a particular IP address are tied together. So, it *is* true, practically speaking, but it's not true, technically speaking.
Thank you for keeping me honest, though...I should be more precise.
That just kills me. The whole point of SPF is so that you can ID and block (accurately) places that you don't want to get mail from. If a domain has an SPF record, then you know who's allowed to send mail for that domain. If you're getting spam from the mail servers *on* the SPF list, then they can't very well say "hey, that wasn't us". It's a system that *should* work great.
The biggest problem I have with it is that I have to pay a lot more money to have an email server running now. Last year, I could send to pretty much anyone I needed to from my server at the house (SPF, dynamic DNS via no-ip.com, and DSL), and it worked fine. Now, unless I have a reverse-DNS entry (and not even that works, since "I've been identified as being on a suspicious network") for my DSL address, I can't send to a lot of people.
Granted, a lot of them are AOL subscribers, and I don't personally care about that, but still, it's the principle of the matter.
It sucks when there's a great solution for a problem, and then a whole bunch of people decide not to do it. *sigh*...yes, that IS screwed up.
No, reverse DNS is damn near impossible (unless you only ever want a single mail domain hosted from a particualr IP address) because reverse DNS only returns the first PTR record for a given IP address.
SRV records (SPF specificaly), on the other hand, are actually helpful here.
I see it a bit differently. ARS is interested in copyright because they have some vague idea that there's a copyright problem or they're being deprived of revenue somehow.
Before seeing the Miro-ized logo (and clicking on it), I had no idea who Joan Miro was, although I recognized the style of painting from the logo. *Because* of the logo, I took 15 minutes out of my day and looked up some of his other work...
The next day I read an article about ARS telling google to take the logo down (or else), and I find that I suddenly care a lot less about who Joan Miro is or what particular works he might have created.
It's one thing to get upset when another artist uses your work to their benifit. I can see talk of copyright violation over that. It's another thing when someone creates a small homage to an artist, replete with a link to a vast repository of articles about said artist, which will be viewed by at least 60% of all people who use a search engine, and start crying foul.
It's an extremely disappointing and myopic reaction to what amounts to free advertising. I even took another 15 minutes out of my day to tell that to ARS.
'There is no court order forcing Microsoft to do anything. Anything that is being done is of Microsoft's own choosing,'
So, the court order didn't force anybody to do anything, I guess. Oh, except to pay Eolas bucketloads of cash forthe supposedly novel concept of being able to open up non-html content by clicking some arbitrarily low number of times.
I'm sure they weren't thinking this could *ever* happen [shock!]...
I've had a hotmail account since '97 or so, and it got upgraded to 250MB just like everyone else's (no delete/recreate account dance required)...maybe he's doing something wrong.
Some would even say that configuring a compressor correctly is impossible, if your goal is to maintain the fidelity of a recorded signal. There's nothing quite like removing dynamic range from a recording on purpose...
People that listen to anything remotely acoustic hate compressors. Compressors are great for normalizing a recording so that it's more uniformly loud on playback ("ready-for-radio"), but they suck for maintaining fidelity. It doesn't matter quite as much with britney spears (or whatever the neo-grunge band of the day is) as it does with something more dynamic (songs with strong vocals and light accompaniment, acoustic instrumentals, etc), because the overall level of the song doesn't change much, and you don't notice losing detail.
What you are saying, I think, is that once you sign up to the military, you defer any moral consequences to your actions (under legal orders) to your superiors. Under that assumption you can only conclude that censoring information is right. A soldier's morality is implemented in the rules of engagement and his orders, so the effect on morale is all that a commander needs to consider.
Actually, no, I'm not quite saying that. A soldier's morality is the sum of the rules of engagement, the constitution, and his personal beliefs. Normally, the context for moral decisions is what to do in the course of an engagement. Do I shoot this person or not, etc.
I'm not seeing censorship as a moral issue, but an administrative issue, since while you are engaged in a military operation, that's something that you decidedly have no control over or right to demand. Soldiers and sailors do not have the same rights as civilians while they serve (and someone above mentioned the issue of preserving bandwidth for vital communications, which recreational browsing cannot preempt for fear of endangering soldiers' lives).
Still not convinced that this is the Right Way to do things, although I concede the initial point. I expect that every recruit is asked if they are happy to abrogate their moral responsibility to people they may consider to be idiots[1].
You owe me a new keyboard, since there's coke all over mine after reading that...her's an instance where your phrasing demonstrates the vast gulf between reality in military and civilian life.
The word "asked" is an aberration in discussing what a soldier is expected to do. No one asks a soldier to do anything, they are told what to do. There are two possible outs when you are told to do something, one is to blow it off, and get reprimanded, and the second is to bring some legitimate deficiency in the order to the attention of your superiors and state that as a reason why you refuse to carry out the order (in which case, you may still get reprimanded, if the order is a lawful one...no big deal if you seriously object).
Is the reverse true? Is every person who has a hand in authorising military action told very clearly that the resulting blood is on that hand? I suspect that even if it is, many of them don't accept that responsibility - hence your notation that Congress said the President can do whatever he wants.
Within the military, the concept of where responsibility lies is very clearly laid out. A commander is ultimately responsible for the actions that the troops he or she commands take as a result of their orders, as well as whatever harm may befall those troops.
In the civilian part of the government, aside from swearing to uphold the constitution and server the citizens of the US faithfully, I don't think there is any such clarity.
The presidency is a different matter, however, since the president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Orders from him are subject to that same idea of responsibility as the orders of any other military commander, although in practice, he has little to do with military planning, other than to give direction for broad objectives or deployment to specific locations.
Actually, I think that's one of the reasons that congress decided to give the president so much say in the matter. They didn't want people to come to them and be able to petition them for removing troops from harm's way. As it stands, they can say "well, it's the president who's calling the shots, be mad at him", while strenuously avoiding any mention that they gave him the power, and that they can rescind that power and bear some responsibility themselves.
Call it 50% cowardice and 50% pragmatism, since congress is basically a committee, and that's not who you want directing a war, really. If they honestly thought (noises aside) that we should get out of Iraq, etc. they would take steps to revoke the assignment of power that they previously gave. They won't do it because this way, they ge
I'm obviously splitting "civilian" and "military" differently than you are. Here's how it works in my head:
Military: people in uniforms that have a military rank and recieve a paycheck corresponding to that rank.
Civilian: anyone not meeting the definition of military above
Of course they had plans for the occupation. They also had new directives from civilian government officials concerning what they were supposed to accomplish that may or may not have had anything to do with their initial plan. What, exactly, do you believe they failed to plan for? Why, if you want to make sure that you still *have* a military, would you ditch a plan that you had worked hard on making sure was sound, unless you were forced to do so (and yes, I think this happened)?
Imagine that you had been asked to undertake a particular project, and it was fraught with difficult and dangerous possibilities and uncertainty. You would make sure to identify as many pitfalls as possible and come up with contingency plans ahead of time.
Imagine, then, that your boss, once the project was about half complete, gave you a completely new set of requirements, how good would your planning look to an outsider? If you've ever worked on a software project, this kind of thinking shouldn't be too much of a stretch.
What do you see as the problem, and what *should* have been done by who?
Let me start out by saying that you're about to get friended. It's very seldom I find someone who both disagrees with me and knows how to argue without becoming hostile. It's a beautiful thing.
You can argue that no authoritative "This war is illegal" is equivalent to "This war is legal" - innocent until proven guilty and all that. However, "This war is immoral" is trickier. Nobody can make that statement authoritatively except for an individual. Does a soldier have a duty to consider if his actions are immoral or not? I understood that he did (post-Nuremberg, anyway). If so, he needs access to public opinion, or his moral judgement will be skewed by only speaking to other soldiers.
I don't necessarily agree with that last bit. Nurenburg was a different situation. We're not talking about death camps, in this case, we're talking about combat, and I think that most instances where life is taken or lost can stand on their own, as far as moral judgement is concerned. You know that it is wrong to kill, but you know that if you are in a situation where someone else is trying to kill you, there can be justification in killing that (those) person (people).
The question of "should we have soldiers in the country of Iraq" is open to interpretation, but consensus seems to be that we should, or else we'd be fighting many other countries, as well.
Morality in a given situation is something I think the soldiers stationed there are better equipped to answer than we are, since they are not insulated from either the people they are trying to find/kill or the people that they are trying to protect. I might have opinions on what a particular football team should do, in terms of strategy, and I might be right or wrong, but I'm far less qualified to say whether or not a player was justified in getting into a brawl with an opposing player. That's a personal moral decision that only that person (or soldier) can make, and they know best whether it's right or not.
Not so sure about that. History is littered with examples of idiotic military decisions made in the face of overwhelming evidence that they were wrong. See the Battle of the Somme, for example. Do you have evidence that they've studied the pros and cons of censorship, are you taking it on faith, or are you assuming that "they must have done"?
I'm going on personal experience, there. At least as far back as the late 80's, the military analyzes everything (and I mean everything) to death on a regular basis. They practice information security, force protection, psychological warfare, etc whether there's fighting going on or not, and they ahve a vested interest in keeping their much smaller forces in good operational shape. I don't have evidence to provide (and if I did, I'm pretty certain it would be classified), but experience tells me that things have changed a bit since 1916 (and you're also talking about the British and French military, in that example).
Define "true" in this context. I'm pretty convinced that there were never WMDs in Iraq and that there was never any terrorist connection. Some people disagree with me on one or both counts. Who is right? Who should get to decide who is right for the soldiers? Their ultimate commanders, or the soldiers themselves?
Well, the logical answer (to an ex-military volunteer) is that the Congress should decide who is right for the soldiers. They pretty much abdicated that responsibility and said "let the president decide", which is cowardly, but safe for them. The soldiers themselves get to decide whether or not any particular action they take is correct. One thing our volunteer force has going for it is the fact that they don't get summarily executed for refusing to follow what they believe to be unlawful orders...in fact, they are ordered not to follow such orders. The tricky bit here lies in the arguments about what level of threat Iraq posed, directly or indirectly to the US, and whether or not that matters (in the sense of defining the legality of
Well, just add it to the incredibly long list of other things they didn't bother to think about.
Like...
Like what to do after the "war" was "won".
Not sure why the word war is in scary-quotes, but let me say this...It's not the military that didn't know what to do after the initial occupation push was done. Now the Executive branch of our government...they definitely didn't know what to do next, but that says nothing about the planning process of the military. The military works much better than the civilian part of the federal government because it has to. There's not the same beureaucracy mucking things up and politicizing decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay...who and why? Unless the goal of the creation is to have naked people and say "hey, no clothes, come look!", it wouldn't be porn (at least in my definition). I can't think of too many people, artists or not, who would disagree with that.
The line is far from clear-cut and this is not the first argument over what is classified art vs pornographic material.
I agree, the line is far from clear-cut, which is why I didn't say we could ever have specificity, just broad concensus on that question.
And not just visual/audio information is a problem. What if people blog about something inappropriate (sexual experiences, whatever), are then, all Livejournal/Blogger/etc. sites required to move to .xxx or at least a subset of journals thereof? I don't consider that pornography, although probably not something I'd want my young child to read. But I don't think it should be moved to the red-light district of the internet.
That's a *really* good question. Outside of the mainstream internet, there are plenty of places you can go to find pornographic texts (ala Anne Rice's pseudonymous novels about the character "Beauty", but seedier...just look in the alt.sex newsgroups a bit). I have four kids, and there's a lot of stuff out there that I don't especially want them reading or looking at, at least not at their current ages (2, 5, 7, and 10 years old), but I'm savvy enough to be able to limit their access to internet-based stuff, at least at home.
Not everyone is knowledgeable enough to manage that, even though they might want to, and many, many people don't want to have a discussion on rape-fantasy, electro-torture, lolimanga, or tentacle-sex with their kids (or even with other adults, probably).
I think that, for the most part, what would be looked at would be intent and visual content in making a determination. Ideally, *all* filtering would be at the discretion of the individual (IMHO), but I'll admit, there is ample room for lobbying and government interference with such a system in place.
As I wrote this, I began to wonder what current filtering companies think about the idea...I'm willing to bet they don't much like it, since it'd make them a lot less necessary.
You make good points, and there are some very real first-amendment issues that *could* come up if it was implemented and government got involved in filtering.
We already have pictures of naked people that aren't sex, and (other than pictures for anatomical purposes), they're typically classified as pornography. Pictures of naked people for people to look at just because they're naked are porn...seems a fair definition.
I suppose that there would be some edge cases that would cause a lot of discussion classification-wise, but I don't see the definition being too terribly difficult to come to some broad concensus on.
I imagine that most of the opposition came from the porn industry because they don't want to have to deal with the ease-of-filtering issue (as was pointed out in the post prior to yours), but that seems excessive to me. Other than at work or school (or public libraries, maybe), I can't see a sufficient profit motive for blocking access. If you live somewhere that Playboy can't be sold in a store, then you might have to worry about some kind of local law, but that's the type of thing you address with your local government, and since it's the community that decides, I wouldn't think such blocking would be unreasonable at the community level.
It's a bit of a potential slippery slope, if decisions regarding blocking access creep upward to state and federal government (at least in the US) but it also makes porn sites easier to find and easier to block, which is a positive for people on both sides of the question of "do you enjoy looking at porn?"
I really don't get why "conservative" groups would *not* want it...it would make filtering (for sites following the rules) so trivial it'd be ridiculous.
For that matter, why are some of the porn outfits against the idea? Aside from worrying about a squatter getting your domain name, what's the downside? It's not like a .xxx domain is going to have some stigma that customers would avoid.
I just don't get it.
You must be confused as to my point, then. The posts I saw later in the thread said something to the effect of "creeping socialism is doing X". You argued that there is no socialism in our economic model, and I disagree, for the reasons I mentioned. We do not have a socialist government, but government regulation of the market is definitely socialistic, as opposed to capitalistic.
Simply looking at the root of each word points you in the right direction...socialist practices have society (i.e. government, in this example) in control of some economic aspect, capitalistic practices have the market (capital...money) in control of some economic aspect. Our economic model is a mix of those, so id has a socialist aspect to it, and that aspect grows with each new law related to business practices that define market interactions.
Even if the regulation doesn't nearly control them *completely*, it still controls them, and is therefore socialist in aspect, as opposed to pure capitalism. I'm not arguing against regulation, just against what I think is an inncorrect statement.
No, the EPA is responsible for the accuracy of the results under the specified conditions. The validity of the results is a function of whether the test conditions reflect the typical use of your average vehicle. Since (in most cases) they fail to set test conditions that reflect that usage pattern, they are at odds with actual mileage seen by the purchaser of an automobile.
Granted, this year one change is to run the test with the air conditioner running...that should help, but it doesn't help to sell a car at an advertised 50 MPG and have the driver of the car get 35 MPG. Putting the "actual mileage may vary" disclaimer on the ad is a band-aid for a flawed testing methodology (flawed in that it does not give results that apply to real-world use, which is the supposed selling point for MPG ratings).
How about a new example: If the fictional graphics card manufacturer S3vidiaTI claims a framerate of X fps on some particular game, using some particular hardware setup, and you buy the card and see 50-75 percent of that framerate on identical hardware, not knowing that they first disabled every nonessential driver on the system first, you might see it as a bit misleading.
1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
I'd have to say s/owned/controlled/ to agree with it.
If the government or some collective organization representing "the people" controls the means of production and distributing goods, that's socialism. Ownership is not explicitly necessary. It's a subtle but important distinction.
For example, if you owned a company, but it's activities were primarily controlled by a government, you would not be able to say that capitalism was the economic model your company operated under. If market forces are not the primary factors in determining the actions of a company, then capitalism is not the economic model it operates under.
I notice that there is some discussion about whether socialism is a part of our current economic model, and the answer, of course, is yes. In addition to various governmental regulations controlling various markets and business interactions, we have a number of programs meant solely to control the distribution of goods (via subsidies) that are government programs.
Setting aside the question of whether it's hurting or helping, socialism is a part of how our economy works. Saying there's no socialism in our economy is not correct.
You are a tard. "up to" means "at this point under definable conditions". It's like the EPA ratings on your car, EG: 23 city, 31 highway. If you drive on a level highway, with a fully-tuned car, with a recent oil change, properly inflated tires, at 75 degrees farenheit, at *exactly* 55 degrees, you'll see your 31 MPH.
Poor example...you forgot to add in "with your air conditioner off" as a condition. That said, I think the post you reply to makes a good point about advertising in general.
Just as car companies regularly exploit EPA mileage ratings that normal driving does not bear out (just ask a Prius or Insight owner), the phrase "up to" is the functional equivalent of "="...could be 75%, could be 23%, they're not specifying any modifiers to define the expectation of savings under any particular set of conditions, so it's an impossible statement to evaluate as far as real-worl use goes.
That's what I get for trying to offer a better explanation. I will refrain from writing "RRMFP" (reread my f-ing post) and try to address your response succinctly.
No, random individuals on the internet didn't make me lose interest in a programming language. They prevented me from becoming interested in bothering to expend any effort to learn it, however. I mentioned that at the time, I was just curious...not in any particular need of learning Java, and I asked what I thought would be an easily answered question and didn't get any useful responses. At a certain point, I shrugged it all off, and said, oh well, who cares, and went back to hacking some huge and ugly Perl script.
So I take it you don't use Linux either because some big, bad forum jerks told you "RTFM" too?
Here's where I considered saying RRMFP. If you scroll up, you'll note that I actually had a need to use Linux, and put in the time and effort necessary to make it work for me. I also already said (two or three times) that the "RTFM, n00b" attitude is prevalent in both Linux and Java groups all over the place, although there are exceptions. My comment was an agreement that the Java and Linux communities share this problem, which I then followed with a personal anecdote to illustrate that point.
I have nothing against people who enjoy programming in Java or any other programming language, I just have a certain distaste for the language itself because of my past experiences.
Here's an analogy for you...not a great one: Say you buy a car...a Kia, for example. You like the car, but have a few small problems with it, so you take it to a local dealership to have it looked at. They ask you to describe the problem, and when you explain to them that it's making a funny noise, they laugh at you and tell you diagnostics don't show that there's a problem and you must be imagining it.
After that happens a couple of times, you might get irritated. If you don't need to drive a Kia, you might even trade it in on a vehicle from a company that has been more considerate in response to your questions, and not really consider buying any Kia vehicles in the future.
You sound like you're upset that my opinion of whether it's worth my effort to learn Java isn't affirmative, which leads me to assume that you like programming in Java. By that same token, I'd assume that you want me to believe that it should be worth the effort. The problem being that you're displaying (to a much lesser degree) the same type of attitude that made me not want to bother in the first place.
Maybe one day, I'll be looking for a new programming language to learn again, and I'll bother with Java again. Maybe someone can even give a link to a Java beginners list that's actually easy on newcomers. Maybe Javascript and XMLHTTP will take over the world and it'll be a moot point.
I understand the emotion, but you missed the point. The idea of mandating a manufacturer to make part of their product better serve the needs of their competitors isn't about controlling monopoly, it's about frustration.
Part of what I just said was that I think that interoperability is a GOOD thing. I have am given pause, however, when faced with the concept that we can use the law to dictate that someone that makes a product must change that product to favor that company's competitors.
Should GM be forced to allow every auto manufacturer to include OnStar? Yes, it would benefit me as a consumer, and yes, I'd have more choice, but it disregards the thinking, planning, execution, and resources spent by GM to ensure a competitive advantage.
Microsoft makes software...they make a popular OS that happens to be installed on a huge percentage of the world's PCs...somewhere in that situation, there is a case to be made for them being monopolistic, via the agreements they forge with many PC manufacturers.
That does not, by extension, make the fact that they have a web browser in that OS, or a search feature within that web browser a sign of a monopoly. If Google ever offered a Linux distribution with a web browser that had a search function, would anyone expect the default search engine to be something other than a Google offering? If it was trivial to change the default, would there be discussion about whether it was trivial enough?
The whole point of capitalism is to allow competition to let the cream rise to the top, as is happening with Linux and Google. We all know a good thing when we see it, and more and more people are beginning to see the value in Open Source. Let's not screw that up by throwing too many lawyers in the mix. Unintended consequences can be painful.
This is an issue where all the screaming leaves me shaking my head. People are up in arms that Microsoft put their own search engine as the default in their own web browser that runs on their own OS (GASP!). As of sometime last year, you can (after doing some digging) get a PC, even from Dell, with a non-Microsoft OS installed on it.
To a lesser extent, this bothers me about the whole "Legislated interoperability" thing that everyone keeps throwing at MS. I agree that it's a much better idea and situation to allow interoperability, and to provide the info necessary to developers to allow it to happen easily and reliably, but are we really saying that MS shouldn't be able to keep their secrets to themselves?
Let them stay behind their walls of obfuscation as they watch FOSS gain market share and MS becomes less relevant.
Hopefully the ODF ISO blessing is a sign of things to come. As for the next step, I think Tridge needs to come up with a new Samba that has better functionality than Microsoft's implementation and force *them* to play catch-up.
The first time I decided to check into Java (at the time just at the hobbyist/experimenter level) was about 5 years ago. At the time, there wasn't a lot of online tutorial material that was answering the questions I was asking, and Java seemed unnecessarily complex, so I shrugged it off.
The next time I got interested was as a result of a little contest that Sun or IBM had...I don't remember...where you program these tanks in Java and then let them battle it out together. Again, I found not a lot of online material that was answering the questions I was asking (primarily questions of the "why doesn't what I'm trying to do work" variety).
In both cases it wasn't something I wanted to do badly enough to plunk down money for a book or some course, and in both cases, the community responses I got were of the "RTFM n00b" variety.
I've been on both sides of that equation before...I sat in on the Perl-beginners mailing list for a few years, first asking, and then answering questions. In my mind, when somebody comes to a place like that to ask a question, you answer it...even a trivial question may be something that not everybody knows, but most people won't ask for fear of looking stupid.
If I have to do something because of a genuine need, of course I'll buy the book or put in the sweat equity to get to where I need to be, but at the time that I cared about learning Java, that wasn't the case, and an attitude of elitism, whether real or percieved, was what made me say "never mind".
So basically Java is the Linux of programming languages?
You hit it precisely on the head. Linux and Java proponents tend to have a particular problem with being unsympathetic to n00bs (please note that I like Linux a lot, and dislike Java a lot...a result of my own experiences).
I've checked Java out a few times thinking I might want to add it to my repetoire, but I got irritated by how difficult it seemed to be to do things...or, more specifically, how hard it was to find out how to do things.
As happens in Linux circles sometimes, my basic questions were treated with RTFM and rudeness...well, more like elitism, I guess...it wasn't *quite* rude, if you know what I mean.
It's not even that I'm especially stupid, it's just that after years of thinking in C-64 BASIC, DOS batch syntax, GW-BASIC, VB, javascript, and Perl, I wasn't really primed for it. Not having anything beyond a "Do you have any Grey Poupon?" response didn't make me any more enamored of it, so it's not so much the licensing that needs help to me, but the community.
Maybe I just had a bad experience, but from my perspective, you're exactly right...Java is the Linux of programming languages.
And fortunately, thanks to the efforts of many of the people in that rounding error, you have an internet, computer, and forum in which to have read that description. ;)
Yeah, some of us (US-ians) are shortsighted, pompous, insipid asses, but we're not all *completely* worthless, you know.
Thank you for keeping me honest, though...I should be more precise.
That just kills me. The whole point of SPF is so that you can ID and block (accurately) places that you don't want to get mail from. If a domain has an SPF record, then you know who's allowed to send mail for that domain. If you're getting spam from the mail servers *on* the SPF list, then they can't very well say "hey, that wasn't us". It's a system that *should* work great.
The biggest problem I have with it is that I have to pay a lot more money to have an email server running now. Last year, I could send to pretty much anyone I needed to from my server at the house (SPF, dynamic DNS via no-ip.com, and DSL), and it worked fine. Now, unless I have a reverse-DNS entry (and not even that works, since "I've been identified as being on a suspicious network") for my DSL address, I can't send to a lot of people.
Granted, a lot of them are AOL subscribers, and I don't personally care about that, but still, it's the principle of the matter.
It sucks when there's a great solution for a problem, and then a whole bunch of people decide not to do it. *sigh*...yes, that IS screwed up.
SRV records (SPF specificaly), on the other hand, are actually helpful here.
Before seeing the Miro-ized logo (and clicking on it), I had no idea who Joan Miro was, although I recognized the style of painting from the logo. *Because* of the logo, I took 15 minutes out of my day and looked up some of his other work...
The next day I read an article about ARS telling google to take the logo down (or else), and I find that I suddenly care a lot less about who Joan Miro is or what particular works he might have created.
It's one thing to get upset when another artist uses your work to their benifit. I can see talk of copyright violation over that. It's another thing when someone creates a small homage to an artist, replete with a link to a vast repository of articles about said artist, which will be viewed by at least 60% of all people who use a search engine, and start crying foul.
It's an extremely disappointing and myopic reaction to what amounts to free advertising. I even took another 15 minutes out of my day to tell that to ARS.
Just my opinion...
'There is no court order forcing Microsoft to do anything. Anything that is being done is of Microsoft's own choosing,'
So, the court order didn't force anybody to do anything, I guess. Oh, except to pay Eolas bucketloads of cash forthe supposedly novel concept of being able to open up non-html content by clicking some arbitrarily low number of times.
I'm sure they weren't thinking this could *ever* happen [shock!]...
Hell, everyone else was doing it.
I've had a hotmail account since '97 or so, and it got upgraded to 250MB just like everyone else's (no delete/recreate account dance required)...maybe he's doing something wrong.
People that listen to anything remotely acoustic hate compressors. Compressors are great for normalizing a recording so that it's more uniformly loud on playback ("ready-for-radio"), but they suck for maintaining fidelity. It doesn't matter quite as much with britney spears (or whatever the neo-grunge band of the day is) as it does with something more dynamic (songs with strong vocals and light accompaniment, acoustic instrumentals, etc), because the overall level of the song doesn't change much, and you don't notice losing detail.
Just my $0.02
Actually, no, I'm not quite saying that. A soldier's morality is the sum of the rules of engagement, the constitution, and his personal beliefs. Normally, the context for moral decisions is what to do in the course of an engagement. Do I shoot this person or not, etc.
I'm not seeing censorship as a moral issue, but an administrative issue, since while you are engaged in a military operation, that's something that you decidedly have no control over or right to demand. Soldiers and sailors do not have the same rights as civilians while they serve (and someone above mentioned the issue of preserving bandwidth for vital communications, which recreational browsing cannot preempt for fear of endangering soldiers' lives).
Still not convinced that this is the Right Way to do things, although I concede the initial point. I expect that every recruit is asked if they are happy to abrogate their moral responsibility to people they may consider to be idiots[1].
You owe me a new keyboard, since there's coke all over mine after reading that...her's an instance where your phrasing demonstrates the vast gulf between reality in military and civilian life.
The word "asked" is an aberration in discussing what a soldier is expected to do. No one asks a soldier to do anything, they are told what to do. There are two possible outs when you are told to do something, one is to blow it off, and get reprimanded, and the second is to bring some legitimate deficiency in the order to the attention of your superiors and state that as a reason why you refuse to carry out the order (in which case, you may still get reprimanded, if the order is a lawful one...no big deal if you seriously object).
Is the reverse true? Is every person who has a hand in authorising military action told very clearly that the resulting blood is on that hand? I suspect that even if it is, many of them don't accept that responsibility - hence your notation that Congress said the President can do whatever he wants.
Within the military, the concept of where responsibility lies is very clearly laid out. A commander is ultimately responsible for the actions that the troops he or she commands take as a result of their orders, as well as whatever harm may befall those troops.
In the civilian part of the government, aside from swearing to uphold the constitution and server the citizens of the US faithfully, I don't think there is any such clarity.
The presidency is a different matter, however, since the president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Orders from him are subject to that same idea of responsibility as the orders of any other military commander, although in practice, he has little to do with military planning, other than to give direction for broad objectives or deployment to specific locations.
Actually, I think that's one of the reasons that congress decided to give the president so much say in the matter. They didn't want people to come to them and be able to petition them for removing troops from harm's way. As it stands, they can say "well, it's the president who's calling the shots, be mad at him", while strenuously avoiding any mention that they gave him the power, and that they can rescind that power and bear some responsibility themselves.
Call it 50% cowardice and 50% pragmatism, since congress is basically a committee, and that's not who you want directing a war, really. If they honestly thought (noises aside) that we should get out of Iraq, etc. they would take steps to revoke the assignment of power that they previously gave. They won't do it because this way, they ge
Military: people in uniforms that have a military rank and recieve a paycheck corresponding to that rank.
Civilian: anyone not meeting the definition of military above
Of course they had plans for the occupation. They also had new directives from civilian government officials concerning what they were supposed to accomplish that may or may not have had anything to do with their initial plan. What, exactly, do you believe they failed to plan for? Why, if you want to make sure that you still *have* a military, would you ditch a plan that you had worked hard on making sure was sound, unless you were forced to do so (and yes, I think this happened)?
Imagine that you had been asked to undertake a particular project, and it was fraught with difficult and dangerous possibilities and uncertainty. You would make sure to identify as many pitfalls as possible and come up with contingency plans ahead of time.
Imagine, then, that your boss, once the project was about half complete, gave you a completely new set of requirements, how good would your planning look to an outsider? If you've ever worked on a software project, this kind of thinking shouldn't be too much of a stretch.
What do you see as the problem, and what *should* have been done by who?
You can argue that no authoritative "This war is illegal" is equivalent to "This war is legal" - innocent until proven guilty and all that. However, "This war is immoral" is trickier. Nobody can make that statement authoritatively except for an individual. Does a soldier have a duty to consider if his actions are immoral or not? I understood that he did (post-Nuremberg, anyway). If so, he needs access to public opinion, or his moral judgement will be skewed by only speaking to other soldiers.
I don't necessarily agree with that last bit. Nurenburg was a different situation. We're not talking about death camps, in this case, we're talking about combat, and I think that most instances where life is taken or lost can stand on their own, as far as moral judgement is concerned. You know that it is wrong to kill, but you know that if you are in a situation where someone else is trying to kill you, there can be justification in killing that (those) person (people).
The question of "should we have soldiers in the country of Iraq" is open to interpretation, but consensus seems to be that we should, or else we'd be fighting many other countries, as well.
Morality in a given situation is something I think the soldiers stationed there are better equipped to answer than we are, since they are not insulated from either the people they are trying to find/kill or the people that they are trying to protect. I might have opinions on what a particular football team should do, in terms of strategy, and I might be right or wrong, but I'm far less qualified to say whether or not a player was justified in getting into a brawl with an opposing player. That's a personal moral decision that only that person (or soldier) can make, and they know best whether it's right or not.
Not so sure about that. History is littered with examples of idiotic military decisions made in the face of overwhelming evidence that they were wrong. See the Battle of the Somme, for example. Do you have evidence that they've studied the pros and cons of censorship, are you taking it on faith, or are you assuming that "they must have done"?
I'm going on personal experience, there. At least as far back as the late 80's, the military analyzes everything (and I mean everything) to death on a regular basis. They practice information security, force protection, psychological warfare, etc whether there's fighting going on or not, and they ahve a vested interest in keeping their much smaller forces in good operational shape. I don't have evidence to provide (and if I did, I'm pretty certain it would be classified), but experience tells me that things have changed a bit since 1916 (and you're also talking about the British and French military, in that example).
Define "true" in this context. I'm pretty convinced that there were never WMDs in Iraq and that there was never any terrorist connection. Some people disagree with me on one or both counts. Who is right? Who should get to decide who is right for the soldiers? Their ultimate commanders, or the soldiers themselves?
Well, the logical answer (to an ex-military volunteer) is that the Congress should decide who is right for the soldiers. They pretty much abdicated that responsibility and said "let the president decide", which is cowardly, but safe for them. The soldiers themselves get to decide whether or not any particular action they take is correct. One thing our volunteer force has going for it is the fact that they don't get summarily executed for refusing to follow what they believe to be unlawful orders...in fact, they are ordered not to follow such orders. The tricky bit here lies in the arguments about what level of threat Iraq posed, directly or indirectly to the US, and whether or not that matters (in the sense of defining the legality of
Like...
Like what to do after the "war" was "won".
Not sure why the word war is in scary-quotes, but let me say this...It's not the military that didn't know what to do after the initial occupation push was done. Now the Executive branch of our government...they definitely didn't know what to do next, but that says nothing about the planning process of the military. The military works much better than the civilian part of the federal government because it has to. There's not the same beureaucracy mucking things up and politicizing decisions.