The strange thing about American court system is that you may sue for anything and only risk your legal expenses. That's why it is not uncommon to have mutually contradictory claims in your lawsuit, in hope that at least some of them will be recognised by court.
You are a fool. Next you'll be arguing that nytrogen atoms, like those in cyanide, are harmless! But I know better and I am suing the university for not filtering the nitrogen out of the rooms. Ban the atoms!
(note that I agree with the sentiment expressed elsewhere in this dicussion that she should have taken the filled in form away with her and destoryed it herself.)
And I disagree with that. There are things like personal integrity and business honesty. I don't want to expect people to do things like this to me. I absolutely refuse to expect that.
Media in the past often touted the Internet as a child porn heaven. It was repeatedly claimed that Internet users are constantly bombarded with child pornography in their spam, on seeminly innoculous pages, among the search results for "Britney Spears" or "Pokemon" and on P2P, masquerading as vanilla porn. But the facts do not support these assertions. Seek, and ye shall find. Don't and you won't.
But as another saying goes, if it exists, it must be somewhere on the Internet. And yes, this is true for child porn as well. The continuing attempts to eradicate online child pornography made it more difficult to find, but not impossible. Still, it usually requires considerable Internet search skills and experience, otherwise users are trapped into countless pop-up ads and surrounded by images of 35+ year old "lolitas" with pigtails. This article is a collection of techniques for finding child pornography on the Net. I will probably scorned by both paedophiles (for indirectly helping law enforcement) and "normal people" alike, but freedom of speech is paramount to me. Let the knowledge spread!
Disclaimer: I am against rape, violence and coercion, whether applied to children or to adults. I realise that child porn sometimes harms the children involved. But bits and pixels are not humans. No additional harm is being done. Downloading and posession of child porn is legal in many countries. IANAL. YMMV.
Sources of child porn
Child porn was de facto and de jure allowed before 1980s. There have been numerous porn magazines featuring photos of naked children and photos of children having consensual sex with other children and with adults. These magazines operated completely in the open and even solicited photos from their readers' families. These magazines, of course, were closed a long time ago and there is no place to buy the back issues today. But many images from these magazines were scanned and are now distributed on the BBSes and on the Net. For example, the most known series of hardcore scans from print magazines such as Lolita, called LL (Little Lolita) is well-represented online.
There are different laws regarding child pornography in countries all other the world. For example, in Japan child erotica was legal all the way until 1999. It was not usually exported officially, but scanners again filled this niche. One of the best known series, called Black Cat Scans (named after the scanner), available in many places online, features photos of beautiful young (early teens) girls from Russia and other countries made by Japanese photographers. One of the Black Cat Scans models, a beautiful 12 year-old girl called Laika even had an online cult following with a virtual church set up in one of the Usenet newsgroups. Other well-known series include MCLT (My Collection of Lolitas and Teens) by Atom, Yossy Scans and others.
Another abundant source of softcore child erotica is the nudism subculture. Nudists have no qualms about child nudity and hundreds of thousands of photos and videos featuring nude teenagers and kids are freely available. Banning such images is probably impossible without effectively outlawing the entire nudist subculture.
When American courts worked out the differences between art and child pornography, a new generation of legitimate softcore child pornography sites blossomed on the Web. Photos of Next Door Lolitas, Astral Nymphets, Natural Angels, Little Virgins and, of course, Most Erotic Teens appeared online, open to any person with a valid credit card. These sites can be thought about as Playboy with kids, offering viewers a lot of stylish sexual innuendo, but none of the blunt smut that usually characterises porno. And the best thing is that t
I believe a recent verdict in federal court found that explicit instructions on capital crimes are themselves capital crimes.
These are the words of Halspal, a Everything2 user, in a discussion regarding a controversial write-up regarding finding child porn on the Net. I bet a sizable portion of slashdotters has just clenched the fists. But free speech is free speech. If it needs to be approved by a censor first, it's no longer so free. You see, explaining how to press a Shift Key is now illegal, posting a link to bomb-making instructions is illegal. Apparently people are already scared enough to believe that instructions on capital crimes are themselves capital crimes. Really nice, isn't it?
The write-up was nuked on E2. It was later deleted from Wikipedia in violation of their own Deletion policy. It was restored after a complaint, but immediately deleted again, probably because the admin is scared it might be a doubleplusungood thinkcrime to leave the article.
Was there anything so bad that it should be instantly banned? How would a site like Slashdot react to it? I don't know, but I am willing to find out. Please find it in the reply to this post. The text is released under the GNU Free Documentation License, so feel free to mirror it or use in any other way.
WIth reversible computers we don't need a large hard drive. We can mostly likely manage with just 1Mb of memory (probably much less - 5Kb is enough for an online chess program). You need to store the current state of the board, some logic and recursion stack. Design a system to enumerate moves from the given position. Design a procedure to determine whether the position is winning for blacks or for whites. Now assume for the sake of simplicity that all games should be no longer than 1000 moves or so (if optimal strategies are longer, my method doesn't work). The procedure works as follows. Make a move N1 by whites (or blacks). Now determine if this position is a win for whites (or blacks). If yes, well done, if not, try another move.
Now just call the procedure from the initial position.
The only thing that you need to store is the history of moves (If you reduce the total number of states by 10^149 (a very large reduction), you still have approximately 10^150 states.
Hey, quantum computers doesn't reduce number of states by a few percent (10% on your case), it reduces them by orders of magnitude.
If you think like a normal person, yes it does imply it. But if you think like a label executive, then only the right to use this specific CD is licensed, not the music, but this copy of it. It's basically like rent (without time limit) with you being responsible for the rented object.
It seems that the real debate is over whether you are buying a license or the media.
There is no real debate. The labels believe that you are buying a license to use the media. Get it?:) I personally couldn't care less. I am not paying them anything, because these money would be much better spent by me than by anybody else.;)
Here is what I use, for what it's worth. Sorry, no links, too lazy for that - AllTheWeb is your friend.
Top 10: Browser - Opera Mail client - The Bat! IM - Miranda File navigator - FAR Treepad - extremely useful thing Winamp - play music BSPlayer or Sasami2k - play video Antivirus - Kaspersky AVP ACDSee or IrfanView to view images. PicaView is also very cool. Firewall - AtGuard!
some more Spam filter - either use built-in or get K9 (easy to use bayesian filter) A news reader (if needed) - ForteAgent (although I don't like it, but haven't seen anything better) Media Player Classic with Real and Quicktime support (check Kazaa Lite Plus page) - no need to use clunky proprietary players Something to rip CDs, encode MP3s and record CDs. I use Nero and RazorLame. A virtual CD, like Alcohol 120%, may be. Image editor - PhotoImpact To view annoying PDF files - Acrobat Reader WatzNew - to check websites Proximotron - for fixing the web:) Internet Maniac - a bunch of tools like Ping and Traceroute NetLimiter - manage bandwidth between applications filesharing - Kazaa, eMule, Shareaza Download managers - Offline Explorer Stream downloaders - StreamBox Alarm - Music Alarm Clock (the only one I know with fadein/fadeout) Desknote - to place post-it notes on your desktop Cool Desk - virtual desktops Ad-aware - to remove adware and spyware VoptXP - drive defragmenter Remote Administrator or VNC - for remote administration PGPTools - encryption
Yeah, it's more than 10, but there is no such thing as too much software.:)
You want such and such system. The one you describe might very well be perfect for you. The problem is that it is probably not very scalable.;) There are 50 million people who want unwanted calls blocked. Many of them would like to still receive calls from charities. If these are blocked as well there is also another problem - charities are important for the US, since the "safety net" is not as strong as in Europe and the state will not help everyone. Without the right to make fundraising calls (even if not all Americans will sing up) many charities will face significant problems and this will lead to problems in the society (no, it's not the same as telemarketers losing their jobs). The political calls are important, because the system works poorly enough as it is and without the ability of candidates to get support from the citizens, even more campaigns will be financed through corporate sell-outs.
Compared to that, telemarketers are clearly evil and serve no useful purpose, being only marginally closer to being actual humans than spammers. I agree that having separate do-not-call lists for charities and political candidates might have some benefits (as well as the shortcomings outlined above), but if we are comparing the accepted system with your idea about caller ids, the accepted one is better for the society as a whole (but not for every individual).
Disclaimer: I do not really know how bad telemarketers are, because I have never ever received a single call from either a telemarketer or a charity. I've received a few calls (American Language Center, is the different story, though...
Well, it seems to me that the preamble holds less power than real chapters, although I may be mistaken. Still, we have to admit that the US managed pretty well, but compared with relatively recent constitutions, such as the Russian one and probably the new EU constitution, the US is, in fact, outdated. I much prefer the Russian version (with all the shortcomings of the actual state of affairs in Russia), which explicitly states that people and people only hold the ultimate power.
All things equal, it would probably work better than the US one.
It seems no one in the binary camp likes these bis. Gibibyte is just silly. How about we leave gigabytes as they are, but add gidebytes, which stands for decimal-giga-bytes. The rest of the units would be:
kidebyte
medebyte
gidebyte
tedebyte
pedebyte and so on.
Now if you decimal people really like the base-10 units so much, how about starting using these names? And we keep our binary ones.
Absolutely.;) I am a real, phisical, breathing human being. Although for you I am only virtual.:) But if you refer to my arguments, they are just as real as the parent poster's. And what is extremely funny is that you disagreed with only two of my answers.:) My point was that when our traditional notions of property do not work, finding the right answer is next to impossible, as illustrated by my answer to the AC. The only practical way is to look at the social norms and then codify them in laws. Ideologically I favour giving more freedom to the people, in this case freedom to copy, modify and distribute everything whatsoever. Not surprisingly, this is what most people prefer too.
What parent wrote is not true because Jefferson wrote it or because the idea is 200 years old. No, it's true because it is logical, ethical and natural, as argued by Jefferson in this letter and many other people in many other documents. And whether the ideas are still relevant is found out by checking the reasoning and applying it to the present. If the logic still works, then the ideas are relevant. The last time I checked the ideas still could be freely copied, so I guess, the ideas are still relevant.
What he wrote about ideas does not apply 100% to the movies, but the general principle applies. Society (as in "people", not "corporations") decides what incentive to give to the producers if any and it also decides when to take it back. I don't know if it's in American Consitution somewhere, but in my country it's said in the Chapter 1, Article 3.1 of the Constitution that "The multinational people of the Russian Federation shall be the vehicle of sovereignty and the only source of power in the Russian Federation." You see, the only source of power. It seems that the US Consitution says something along the lines of "the corporations, and lobbysts and the Bush family and also the people (if the first three groups have no objections) should be the sources of power" or even simplier "the money should be the only source of power in the United States"...
Vox populi, vox Dei. If people decide "no more money for MPAA/RIAA", then no more money for MPAA/RIAA.
Completely arbitrary answers. The fact that the music industry pretends that these are the right answers, doesn't mean anything. RIAA's position is absolutely clear, but it's not clear what is legal and what is ethical.
If I bought an album in 1982, but my mom threw it out after I got married in 1987, can I legally download a song from that album?
Yes. You already compensated the artist. Your neighbour didn't throw the album and listens to it as often as you do. Why should you pay differently?
Am I allowed to listen to music on the radio that I haven't paid for?
No. If everyone listens to radio, they wouldn't buy any CDs and musicians will starve.
Can I record music that a radio station plays?
Yes. If radio (or TV) waves pass over your property, you can do anything you want with them, including recording. Also, if you are allowed to listen to a song 10 times a day by tuning to the radio station, why not to a song that you recorded when it was first played?
Is it OK to buy a cassette or CD at a yard sale for 50 cents and listen to it?
No. CD is not like traditional goods, where the marginal cost is significant. The real cost of the music is in writing, performing and recording and people should compensate the artists for these costs, not for the cost of printing a CD. That's why when you pay 50 cents for a CD, you deprive the artist of sales and send an invalid market signal (the demand for this music is low - noone buys CDs from the producer).
Our library has CD's that can be checked out...can I record those?
Yes. In many countries this right is even recognised in the written law - ask any Canadian.
If I can copy music I legally purchased, can I copy music I legally borrowed?
Yes. Same as above. I will not say anything about lending to somone the music that you legally copied...;)
Well, the music industry successully argues that they do not sell you a CD, they sell you a right to listen to that CD. That's why there is no free replacements, that's why you had to pay for casettes and then for CDs of the same music, that's why they create cop-restricting schemes. They feel that they can dictate what you can and what you can't do with what you bought.
I personally, don't care about all that. I will copy the music, movies, books, software and child pornography all the way I want. Information should be free and I will set it free. I will also infringe on copyrights in other creative ways, infringe on patents and trademarks as I see fit. You need to fight the encroaching totalitarian state and piracy is the best way to do it. But please remember, uploading has much more effect then downloading.:)
Raising a child is one of the most difficult things on this planet. Why do we allow people without any qualification do it? We need to impose limits on procreation and concentrate on developing better schools (incl. boarding schools), where professional and caring teachers mold the children into smart, creative and ethical persons.
What good it makes to let people just "have children"? You end up with questionable results. Think about it - half of children have lower than average IQ!:) And the average IQ is not that high. It would be much cheaper for the society to simply import the same idiots from India or any other country. Why waste hundreds of thousands raising the same idiot from scratch?
And if you want decent results, let the professionals handle it. Of course, that would be expensive, or shall we rather say "look expensive", because in the end it will be more efficient than traditional parenting. Every child can potentially be raised into a genius if you find the right approach. And what is the actual success rate? There is only one industry with more appaling success rate - the semiconductor industry where only 3 processors out of 100 work - but we let that slide because of the Moore's Law.:) In any other industry it would not be tolerated.
So the solution is - screw parenting, halve the military spendings and build an excellent education system by uniting the nation around this idea (think of it as the 21st century Moon mission).
The progress we are making is not in producing a better DNA. It would be really difficult to beat nature here and design a better genetics system from scratch (although possible in the long term). But we are making progress is our ability to understand the nature (genetics and molecular biology) and do various exciting thing with existing "technology" (viruses, cells, DNA, etc.).
The sequencing speed is growing exponentially and will continue to do so until we can do it approximately as fast as the cell does or even faster. Here the analogue of the Moore's Law applies. In addition, our ability to correct the genetic code will increase very fast (probably exponentially as well, although it's not clear what single variable would be growing - may be the number of new drugs/treatments, or number of GM people, or number of genetic operations per year).
It would be better to solve all of these problems technologically than through litigation.
Guess what, they are doing exactly this. They set up a web-site (technology) and they will produce a database (technology again) of people who do not want to be called. The only purpose of the law is to force all participants to play by the rules and not abuse the system.
You want build a technological solution with caller IDs, but it would be more expensive, much more complicated and much easier to abuse. The solution that is being implemented is simply more effective.
That's irrelevant. Although the journalists and Valve claim that the code was "stolen", that's fucking nonsense. It was copied. I don't see the reason why they have to delay and this article doesn't tell about that either.
A third of the source code was stolen... it forces us to delay the launch of the game by at least four months... Just the time to rewrite parts of the game.
What a load of claptrap! It's not like the hacker phisically stole the lines of code from the server and they are no longer there.:) My guess would be that Valve still has the code (they make backups, don't they) and the reasons to delay the game are completely unrelated to the incident.
Yeah, sure, the security is important, but I still haven't heard a strong argument why this code leak is bad for Valve (other than a slightly higher cheating risk due to code exposure).
There is almost nothing to disagree about in the article. This guy has very smart ideas and I am glad that BBC is ready to start implementing them.
TV was limited all the time by difficulties in distribution of content. There was only one way to do it cheaply on the large scale - broadcast on the air and let every TV show it. Of course, that is completely ineffective, because it severely limits the access of viewers to the content - you can only watch what is shown right now. The obvsious solutions are to record it (TiVo) or download it on demand.
This brings some really exciting possibilities, about which Highfield speaks in the article. like personally customized news, etc. There is nothing overly complex about this, but for some reason most TV networks were slow in the uptake. Good to see the situation change.
Don't get me wrong. I use IMDB all the time. It is very useful. But when looking at artistic films, I just don't rely on IMDB that much.
But why? It seems just as accurate for them as it is for mainstream films. People who enjoy artistic films watch them and rate them. Those who prefer mainstream films watch these and rate them on IMDB. Because of that ratings usually reflect quite well the objective quality of the film as a representative of its sub-genre. Your examples are skewed, because you admit they are not underrated, but just look at the IMDB ratings for them.
Slashdot Mirror
The strange thing about American court system is that you may sue for anything and only risk your legal expenses. That's why it is not uncommon to have mutually contradictory claims in your lawsuit, in hope that at least some of them will be recognised by court.
You are a fool. Next you'll be arguing that nytrogen atoms, like those in cyanide, are harmless! But I know better and I am suing the university for not filtering the nitrogen out of the rooms. Ban the atoms!
(note that I agree with the sentiment expressed elsewhere in this dicussion that she should have taken the filled in form away with her and destoryed it herself.)
And I disagree with that. There are things like personal integrity and business honesty. I don't want to expect people to do things like this to me. I absolutely refuse to expect that.
This text was nuked from Everything2> and deleted from Wikipedia.
Media in the past often touted the Internet as a child porn heaven. It was repeatedly claimed that Internet users are constantly bombarded with child pornography in their spam, on seeminly innoculous pages, among the search results for "Britney Spears" or "Pokemon" and on P2P, masquerading as vanilla porn. But the facts do not support these assertions. Seek, and ye shall find. Don't and you won't.
But as another saying goes, if it exists, it must be somewhere on the Internet. And yes, this is true for child porn as well. The continuing attempts to eradicate online child pornography made it more difficult to find, but not impossible. Still, it usually requires considerable Internet search skills and experience, otherwise users are trapped into countless pop-up ads and surrounded by images of 35+ year old "lolitas" with pigtails. This article is a collection of techniques for finding child pornography on the Net. I will probably scorned by both paedophiles (for indirectly helping law enforcement) and "normal people" alike, but freedom of speech is paramount to me. Let the knowledge spread!
Disclaimer: I am against rape, violence and coercion, whether applied to children or to adults. I realise that child porn sometimes harms the children involved. But bits and pixels are not humans. No additional harm is being done. Downloading and posession of child porn is legal in many countries. IANAL. YMMV.
Sources of child porn
Child porn was de facto and de jure allowed before 1980s. There have been numerous porn magazines featuring photos of naked children and photos of children having consensual sex with other children and with adults. These magazines operated completely in the open and even solicited photos from their readers' families. These magazines, of course, were closed a long time ago and there is no place to buy the back issues today. But many images from these magazines were scanned and are now distributed on the BBSes and on the Net. For example, the most known series of hardcore scans from print magazines such as Lolita, called LL (Little Lolita) is well-represented online.
There are different laws regarding child pornography in countries all other the world. For example, in Japan child erotica was legal all the way until 1999. It was not usually exported officially, but scanners again filled this niche. One of the best known series, called Black Cat Scans (named after the scanner), available in many places online, features photos of beautiful young (early teens) girls from Russia and other countries made by Japanese photographers. One of the Black Cat Scans models, a beautiful 12 year-old girl called Laika even had an online cult following with a virtual church set up in one of the Usenet newsgroups. Other well-known series include MCLT (My Collection of Lolitas and Teens) by Atom, Yossy Scans and others.
Another abundant source of softcore child erotica is the nudism subculture. Nudists have no qualms about child nudity and hundreds of thousands of photos and videos featuring nude teenagers and kids are freely available. Banning such images is probably impossible without effectively outlawing the entire nudist subculture.
When American courts worked out the differences between art and child pornography, a new generation of legitimate softcore child pornography sites blossomed on the Web. Photos of Next Door Lolitas, Astral Nymphets, Natural Angels, Little Virgins and, of course, Most Erotic Teens appeared online, open to any person with a valid credit card. These sites can be thought about as Playboy with kids, offering viewers a lot of stylish sexual innuendo, but none of the blunt smut that usually characterises porno. And the best thing is that t
These are the words of Halspal , a Everything2 user, in a discussion regarding a controversial write-up regarding finding child porn on the Net. I bet a sizable portion of slashdotters has just clenched the fists. But free speech is free speech. If it needs to be approved by a censor first, it's no longer so free. You see, explaining how to press a Shift Key is now illegal, posting a link to bomb-making instructions is illegal. Apparently people are already scared enough to believe that instructions on capital crimes are themselves capital crimes. Really nice, isn't it?
The write-up was nuked on E2. It was later deleted from Wikipedia in violation of their own Deletion policy. It was restored after a complaint, but immediately deleted again, probably because the admin is scared it might be a doubleplusungood thinkcrime to leave the article.
Was there anything so bad that it should be instantly banned? How would a site like Slashdot react to it? I don't know, but I am willing to find out. Please find it in the reply to this post. The text is released under the GNU Free Documentation License, so feel free to mirror it or use in any other way.
Bingo! This wall of darkness is exactly what we observe (or do not observe, depending on your terminology) behind the visible universe. :)
WIth reversible computers we don't need a large hard drive. We can mostly likely manage with just 1Mb of memory (probably much less - 5Kb is enough for an online chess program). You need to store the current state of the board, some logic and recursion stack. Design a system to enumerate moves from the given position. Design a procedure to determine whether the position is winning for blacks or for whites. Now assume for the sake of simplicity that all games should be no longer than 1000 moves or so (if optimal strategies are longer, my method doesn't work).
The procedure works as follows. Make a move N1 by whites (or blacks). Now determine if this position is a win for whites (or blacks). If yes, well done, if not, try another move.
Now just call the procedure from the initial position.
The only thing that you need to store is the history of moves (If you reduce the total number of states by 10^149 (a very large reduction), you still have approximately 10^150 states.
Hey, quantum computers doesn't reduce number of states by a few percent (10% on your case), it reduces them by orders of magnitude.
If you think like a normal person, yes it does imply it. But if you think like a label executive, then only the right to use this specific CD is licensed, not the music, but this copy of it. It's basically like rent (without time limit) with you being responsible for the rented object.
It seems that the real debate is over whether you are buying a license or the media.
:) I personally couldn't care less. I am not paying them anything, because these money would be much better spent by me than by anybody else. ;)
There is no real debate. The labels believe that you are buying a license to use the media. Get it?
Here is what I use, for what it's worth. Sorry, no links, too lazy for that - AllTheWeb is your friend.
:)
:)
Top 10:
Browser - Opera
Mail client - The Bat!
IM - Miranda
File navigator - FAR
Treepad - extremely useful thing
Winamp - play music
BSPlayer or Sasami2k - play video
Antivirus - Kaspersky AVP
ACDSee or IrfanView to view images. PicaView is also very cool.
Firewall - AtGuard!
some more
Spam filter - either use built-in or get K9 (easy to use bayesian filter)
A news reader (if needed) - ForteAgent (although I don't like it, but haven't seen anything better)
Media Player Classic with Real and Quicktime support (check Kazaa Lite Plus page) - no need to use clunky proprietary players
Something to rip CDs, encode MP3s and record CDs. I use Nero and RazorLame. A virtual CD, like Alcohol 120%, may be.
Image editor - PhotoImpact
To view annoying PDF files - Acrobat Reader
WatzNew - to check websites
Proximotron - for fixing the web
Internet Maniac - a bunch of tools like Ping and Traceroute
NetLimiter - manage bandwidth between applications
filesharing - Kazaa, eMule, Shareaza
Download managers - Offline Explorer
Stream downloaders - StreamBox
Alarm - Music Alarm Clock (the only one I know with fadein/fadeout)
Desknote - to place post-it notes on your desktop
Cool Desk - virtual desktops
Ad-aware - to remove adware and spyware
VoptXP - drive defragmenter
Remote Administrator or VNC - for remote administration
PGPTools - encryption
Yeah, it's more than 10, but there is no such thing as too much software.
You want such and such system. The one you describe might very well be perfect for you. The problem is that it is probably not very scalable. ;) There are 50 million people who want unwanted calls blocked. Many of them would like to still receive calls from charities. If these are blocked as well there is also another problem - charities are important for the US, since the "safety net" is not as strong as in Europe and the state will not help everyone. Without the right to make fundraising calls (even if not all Americans will sing up) many charities will face significant problems and this will lead to problems in the society (no, it's not the same as telemarketers losing their jobs). The political calls are important, because the system works poorly enough as it is and without the ability of candidates to get support from the citizens, even more campaigns will be financed through corporate sell-outs.
Compared to that, telemarketers are clearly evil and serve no useful purpose, being only marginally closer to being actual humans than spammers. I agree that having separate do-not-call lists for charities and political candidates might have some benefits (as well as the shortcomings outlined above), but if we are comparing the accepted system with your idea about caller ids, the accepted one is better for the society as a whole (but not for every individual).
Disclaimer: I do not really know how bad telemarketers are, because I have never ever received a single call from either a telemarketer or a charity. I've received a few calls (American Language Center, is the different story, though...
Well, it seems to me that the preamble holds less power than real chapters, although I may be mistaken. Still, we have to admit that the US managed pretty well, but compared with relatively recent constitutions, such as the Russian one and probably the new EU constitution, the US is, in fact, outdated. I much prefer the Russian version (with all the shortcomings of the actual state of affairs in Russia), which explicitly states that people and people only hold the ultimate power.
All things equal, it would probably work better than the US one.
Or you can say thousand bytes, million bytes, billion bytes, trillion bytes, etc.
kidebyte
medebyte
gidebyte
tedebyte
pedebyte
:)
and so on.
Now if you decimal people really like the base-10 units so much, how about starting using these names? And we keep our binary ones.
P.S. Just think - a pedebyte of porn.
Are you for real?
;) I am a real, phisical, breathing human being. Although for you I am only virtual. :) But if you refer to my arguments, they are just as real as the parent poster's. And what is extremely funny is that you disagreed with only two of my answers. :) My point was that when our traditional notions of property do not work, finding the right answer is next to impossible, as illustrated by my answer to the AC. The only practical way is to look at the social norms and then codify them in laws. Ideologically I favour giving more freedom to the people, in this case freedom to copy, modify and distribute everything whatsoever. Not surprisingly, this is what most people prefer too.
Absolutely.
What parent wrote is not true because Jefferson wrote it or because the idea is 200 years old. No, it's true because it is logical, ethical and natural, as argued by Jefferson in this letter and many other people in many other documents. And whether the ideas are still relevant is found out by checking the reasoning and applying it to the present. If the logic still works, then the ideas are relevant. The last time I checked the ideas still could be freely copied, so I guess, the ideas are still relevant.
What he wrote about ideas does not apply 100% to the movies, but the general principle applies. Society (as in "people", not "corporations") decides what incentive to give to the producers if any and it also decides when to take it back. I don't know if it's in American Consitution somewhere, but in my country it's said in the Chapter 1, Article 3.1 of the Constitution that "The multinational people of the Russian Federation shall be the vehicle of sovereignty and the only source of power in the Russian Federation." You see, the only source of power. It seems that the US Consitution says something along the lines of "the corporations, and lobbysts and the Bush family and also the people (if the first three groups have no objections) should be the sources of power" or even simplier "the money should be the only source of power in the United States"...
Vox populi, vox Dei. If people decide "no more money for MPAA/RIAA", then no more money for MPAA/RIAA.
Completely arbitrary answers. The fact that the music industry pretends that these are the right answers, doesn't mean anything. RIAA's position is absolutely clear, but it's not clear what is legal and what is ethical.
;)
If I bought an album in 1982, but my mom threw it out after I got married in 1987, can I legally download a song from that album?
Yes. You already compensated the artist. Your neighbour didn't throw the album and listens to it as often as you do. Why should you pay differently?
Am I allowed to listen to music on the radio that I haven't paid for?
No. If everyone listens to radio, they wouldn't buy any CDs and musicians will starve.
Can I record music that a radio station plays?
Yes. If radio (or TV) waves pass over your property, you can do anything you want with them, including recording. Also, if you are allowed to listen to a song 10 times a day by tuning to the radio station, why not to a song that you recorded when it was first played?
Is it OK to buy a cassette or CD at a yard sale for 50 cents and listen to it?
No. CD is not like traditional goods, where the marginal cost is significant. The real cost of the music is in writing, performing and recording and people should compensate the artists for these costs, not for the cost of printing a CD. That's why when you pay 50 cents for a CD, you deprive the artist of sales and send an invalid market signal (the demand for this music is low - noone buys CDs from the producer).
Our library has CD's that can be checked out...can I record those?
Yes. In many countries this right is even recognised in the written law - ask any Canadian.
If I can copy music I legally purchased, can I copy music I legally borrowed?
Yes. Same as above. I will not say anything about lending to somone the music that you legally copied...
Well, the music industry successully argues that they do not sell you a CD, they sell you a right to listen to that CD. That's why there is no free replacements, that's why you had to pay for casettes and then for CDs of the same music, that's why they create cop-restricting schemes. They feel that they can dictate what you can and what you can't do with what you bought.
:)
I personally, don't care about all that. I will copy the music, movies, books, software and child pornography all the way I want. Information should be free and I will set it free. I will also infringe on copyrights in other creative ways, infringe on patents and trademarks as I see fit. You need to fight the encroaching totalitarian state and piracy is the best way to do it. But please remember, uploading has much more effect then downloading.
Raising a child is one of the most difficult things on this planet. Why do we allow people without any qualification do it? We need to impose limits on procreation and concentrate on developing better schools (incl. boarding schools), where professional and caring teachers mold the children into smart, creative and ethical persons.
:) And the average IQ is not that high. It would be much cheaper for the society to simply import the same idiots from India or any other country. Why waste hundreds of thousands raising the same idiot from scratch?
:) In any other industry it would not be tolerated.
What good it makes to let people just "have children"? You end up with questionable results. Think about it - half of children have lower than average IQ!
And if you want decent results, let the professionals handle it. Of course, that would be expensive, or shall we rather say "look expensive", because in the end it will be more efficient than traditional parenting. Every child can potentially be raised into a genius if you find the right approach. And what is the actual success rate? There is only one industry with more appaling success rate - the semiconductor industry where only 3 processors out of 100 work - but we let that slide because of the Moore's Law.
So the solution is - screw parenting, halve the military spendings and build an excellent education system by uniting the nation around this idea (think of it as the 21st century Moon mission).
The progress we are making is not in producing a better DNA. It would be really difficult to beat nature here and design a better genetics system from scratch (although possible in the long term). But we are making progress is our ability to understand the nature (genetics and molecular biology) and do various exciting thing with existing "technology" (viruses, cells, DNA, etc.).
The sequencing speed is growing exponentially and will continue to do so until we can do it approximately as fast as the cell does or even faster. Here the analogue of the Moore's Law applies. In addition, our ability to correct the genetic code will increase very fast (probably exponentially as well, although it's not clear what single variable would be growing - may be the number of new drugs/treatments, or number of GM people, or number of genetic operations per year).
It would be better to solve all of these problems technologically than through litigation.
Guess what, they are doing exactly this. They set up a web-site (technology) and they will produce a database (technology again) of people who do not want to be called. The only purpose of the law is to force all participants to play by the rules and not abuse the system.
You want build a technological solution with caller IDs, but it would be more expensive, much more complicated and much easier to abuse. The solution that is being implemented is simply more effective.
If I want to speak to someone about a product I will call them
:)
Hey, why these double standards? The whole thing was started because of the right to call people to speak about products with them!
That's irrelevant. Although the journalists and Valve claim that the code was "stolen", that's fucking nonsense. It was copied. I don't see the reason why they have to delay and this article doesn't tell about that either.
... Just the time to rewrite parts of the game.
:) My guess would be that Valve still has the code (they make backups, don't they) and the reasons to delay the game are completely unrelated to the incident.
A third of the source code was stolen... it forces us to delay the launch of the game by at least four months
What a load of claptrap! It's not like the hacker phisically stole the lines of code from the server and they are no longer there.
Yeah, sure, the security is important, but I still haven't heard a strong argument why this code leak is bad for Valve (other than a slightly higher cheating risk due to code exposure).
There is almost nothing to disagree about in the article. This guy has very smart ideas and I am glad that BBC is ready to start implementing them.
TV was limited all the time by difficulties in distribution of content. There was only one way to do it cheaply on the large scale - broadcast on the air and let every TV show it. Of course, that is completely ineffective, because it severely limits the access of viewers to the content - you can only watch what is shown right now. The obvsious solutions are to record it (TiVo) or download it on demand.
This brings some really exciting possibilities, about which Highfield speaks in the article. like personally customized news, etc. There is nothing overly complex about this, but for some reason most TV networks were slow in the uptake. Good to see the situation change.
But why? It seems just as accurate for them as it is for mainstream films. People who enjoy artistic films watch them and rate them. Those who prefer mainstream films watch these and rate them on IMDB. Because of that ratings usually reflect quite well the objective quality of the film as a representative of its sub-genre. Your examples are skewed, because you admit they are not underrated, but just look at the IMDB ratings for them.
Trois Couleur trilogy (Blue - 7.8/10, White - 7.5/10, Red - 8.1/10, top 250: #178)
Cinemas Paradiso - 8.3/10 (top 250: #107)
Cidade de Deus - 8.6/10 (top 250: #74)
Farewell my Concubine - 7.6/10
il Postino - 7.5/10
Urga - 7.4/10
All are 7+, three of them are 8+ and are in the top 250. Just proves my point that you can successfully use IMDB to find good films.
P.S. I've seen several of them, but not all, so I will add the rest to my "to see" list and hope I come across them one day. Thanks for the pointers.