What, they changed that? Last time I was on a US American highway people passed wherever they wanted. And as far as I know that was legal.
In Germany you can only pass on the left unless you're in a traffic jam or passing a standing car. OTOH, you can drive as fast as you want on our Autobahns - at least on those parts of them that don't have speed signs (WP* says 3/4 are unregulated, but I think it's more like 2/3). Driving as fst as you want and overtaking everywhere probably don't mix; I prefer being able to drive as fast as I want.
* By the way, that's a really nice article the English Wikipedia has on Autobahns. It even lays out some traffic laws one should remember when driving on a German Autobahn.
If I was a Canadian politician I would point out instances where US citizens inside the USA violate Canadian law.
As a German, I can just point out that many Americans are in gross violation of German road traffic law (for example, they're overtaking on the right side all the time) as well as German gun regulations. Also, no American carries an ID card compliant with 1-2, PersAuswG (the German ID card law). Those violations have to stop immediately!
Also, most American laws are not written in the German language, which is at odds with the German basic law. What kind of rogue country are the USA?
Actually, the implementation of iTunes on OS X is also quite convoluted. It's pretty much the only Apple software that doesn't care about Apple's audio APIs.
I'm actually reasonably happy with that option. Most of the time the way iTunes organizes the stuff is okay and I'd have nothing to complain if I could just drag and drop files from iTunes to a Finder window.
Reorgnizing my collection from hand certainly is not an option.
Apparently someone at Apple also uses VMWare Fusion in a different Space - in 10.5.2 VMWare's progress bar now just causes the icon to bounce instead of forcing you to remain its Space.
Some apps can be real pests in Spaces. VMWare Fusion is determined to have you watch the progress bar while it freeses/unfreezes a VM.
You tell VMWare to freeze and exit, then switch to another Space.
VMWare brings you back so you can watch the progress bar.
You switch back to your intended Space.
VMWare brings you back so you can watch the progress bar.
You switch back AGAIN.
VMWare brings you back so you can watch the progress bar.
You give up and watch that damn bar until VMWare is done writing the VM's state to disk.
It's like playing Progress Quest in a singletasking environment.
Ah yes, the hell bug. OS X occasionally mistakenly assumes you're a Microsoft UI developer and sends you to hell. If you dualboot your Mac, try removing all files related to Visual Studio from the Windows partition; VS sometimes sets off the "MS UI developer" trigger.
I hear they're working on the bug but the fix wasn't yet ready for 10.5.2.
I'm annoyed to no end that the engineers at Apple managed to screw up Stacks. Again. Okay, so now we get a list view that sorta kinda works like it did in Tiger. That's a good thing. But unfortunately, the people developing Stacks apparently never heard of aliases and symbolic links. Yes, Stacks' list view doesn't resolve those, it just presents them as a clickable file. Thus, Stacks are marginally less useless than before but still mere fluff that just takes up space in the Dock without being of any actual value.
One would think that Apple's engineers haven't forgotten how to manage symbolic links and aliases since Tiger, but apparently they have.
Combine that with the "Num-Lock and Caps-Lock randomly get inverted at boot time" bug and 10.5.2 is pretty underwhelming.
That's nice, but I don't own an iPod and I don't necessarily want to copy the MP3s onto my MP3 player.
I like iTunes' user interface, but they are turning the program itself into shit more and more. Not only is iTunes just about the only application on OS X that doesn't know what Core Audio is or how to use it to open files, now it also requires you to hunt around in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/ to copy files somewhere. That's expecially funny when you have a large compilation playlist where you need to copy every single file out of its own folder.
If XMMS actually worked on the Mac I'd use that instead of iTunes, but unfortunately iTunes still happens to be the best choice on the Mac.
You had Norton on your computer for more than two weeks and you can still access the internet? How did that happen? But surely it vaporized your system tray, didn't it? Maybe the entire taskbar or perhaps even the task manager?
I wish I was kidding, but after having seen the logic bombs Symantec calls antivirus software expect any machine running them to develop random issues like complete freezing of all NICs. Although, to be honest, crap like the taskbar disappearing is usually only caused by their uninstaller (but in my opinion it happens pretty consistently).
So you argue that paedophilia is a special case that has a 100% chance of making the affected person rape a child? I find it hard to believe that paedophilia would be such a special, irresistible paraphilia.
One paedophile might not be able to control himself on his own, but if he had a group of sympathetic people who help him with that, he might. There are a lot of people who would've drunk themselves to death if it wasn't for Alcoholics Anonymous. Similar self-help groups help other people to control other (self-)destructive urges like bulimia. I think that an environment that helps the paedophiles keep themselves under control is more likely to succeed in its task than simply saying "no touching the kids" and wagging a bat.
Yes, the children must be protected. But just like drug abuse, paedophilia can't be controlled simply by outlawing it and letting the police handle the rest. We have methadone programs, counselling, self-help groups and treatments to help drug addicts live a normal, drug-free life. Why not create similar programs to help paedophiliacs stay "clean"? If they become dangerous we can still lock them up. (And if they are more accepted in society we have a much higher chance of noticing the dangerous ones before they become active. Currently we can just hope to accidentally uncover child porn.)
I agree. But hey, if we actually started going down that road, people would hear that psychologists are in desperate need and flock towards the psychology courses at university. Fields with many open jobs tend to attract students.
By the way, when I mentioned therapy I was more thinking of voluntary sessions. While most people would not want to do anything about their sexual urges (and that's just fine), some might decide that they'd like to repress those particular ones for the good of society. Some might do it out of altruism (giving up part of their fulfillment for the greater good) and some might just figure that state-sponsored urge control training might save them from getting themselves into trouble later on.
Supervision. Sure, it's not perfect and it's invasive, but I believe that it can be pulled off in a way that leaves the affected's dignity mostly intact. I'm thinking of something similar to parole.
Christians could learn a thing or two about acceptance from these 'savages'
Modern people could learn a thing or two from the Christians. I hear there are a few people who actually do follow Christ, but most just follow institutions that use his name but are mostly unrelated. If they actually followed his example sometimes, the world would most probably be a better place.
Exactly. Once the punishment for something becomes so extreme that you'd do anything over taking that punishment, well... you do. A child rapist probably has a lower chance of being found if he kills the child, cuts the body into pieces and buries those pieces in the woods. If you are found to be a child rapist, your life is essentially over - if you do ever come out of prison, everyone will be informed who you are and regular interaction with other humans is made very difficult. So why not cut up that little boy and bury him? It's much safer.
Whether a harsh punishment is a deterrent or not is irrelevant here - we're talking about someone being unable to vent a basic urge. No punishment will deter him from having sex with a child, but the punishment may "force" him to kill it afterwards. Like a cornered animal, once he has nothing to lose he will do things he would normally find abhorrent just to save his hide. This kind of behavior is well-documented.
Yeah, some child rapists would still kill the victim afterwards, even if people made an effort to reintegrate even child rapists. But not all of them, I posit.
There's also a song, which is not only hilarious but also gives you insight into what the video is all about. Warning: Less disturbing than the real video, but still decidedly NSFW due to explicit lyrics.
4) Destigmatize paedophilia so the afflicted can actually deal with it.
Paedophilia isn't something you can outlaw into oblivion - paraphilias aren't something you decide to have, they're parts of your psyche. Thus, demonizing paedophilia so that the affected don't even dare to seek professional help isn't going to help anyone. Offering them safe, discreet counseling and perhaps ways of satisfying their desires without breaking laws and/or mentally scarring children is much better. One could try to suppress the paraphilia with help of a psychologist, but I don't expect that approach to be very useful.
Paedophilia isn't going to suddenly disappear. We need to accept that it does occur amongst us and find a way to cope with it in a constructive manner. Whether that means mandatory (but discreet!) counselling, giving lolicon hentai to paedophiliacs to divert their attention from real children, psychological treatement or a combination of any of the above, we need to work on this.
The internet can actually help with some of those approaches. Web forums could supplement/act as AA-style self-help groups where the members encourage and police each other to ensure they don't screw up. If Paedophilia wouldn't be treated as "OMG YOU'RE A MONSTER LEAVE MY CHILDREN ALONE AND DIE" by the general public, something like that would be very much possible; until then nobody would join such a forum for fear that some wacko obtains their personal information and lynches them.
And of course it's easy to obtain lolicon on the internet; all porn is easy to obtain on the internet.
Seriously; we need to actually work with these people, not against them. It's not like they're antisocial crimnal masterminds; they just have urges they can't legally fulfill. It's no wonder that they break laws, then (and kill children out of fear that they're discovered).
But it looked just like a regular business website! It was only after I subscribed with my credit card information and completed a wget -m on the site that I noticed I had been forwarded to latexgirlswithwhippedcream.com!
That's what I meant with "we can produce the protein". The problem with goat silk is that it's just the protein in raw form. Spiders do some very specific things with their silk protein in order to form strands of it. The company that came up with goat silk tried to replicate it but failed - they finally abandoned the effort. However, if this new technology also worked for spider silk protein, we could get close to the real deal. It'd probably still not match what real spiders produce, but it's better than a bottle full of a gel that just happens to be made up of the same proteins as spider silk.
It is well known that string instruments Wouldn't it be interesting to know how a Stradivari sounded when it was only a few months old? We could have compared that information to surviving examples and had a better understanding of how the instruments age.
It appears that you have accidentally deleted part of your post. Just a heads up.
This could mean that artificial silk is around the corner. And I don't mean some silk-like synthetic but instead something with the exact properties of real silk but a much lower price. If they do manage to make silk that way I predict that in a few years silk will be the next big fad. Of course this doesn't work like a real silk gland at all, but maybe something workable can be achieved.
Outside of the fashion world (where things actually matter), this might also mean a big step towards artificial spider silk, which a lot of people are very interested in - spider silk is very tough and is would be useful wherever you need a very light tough fabric, especially when you want something that is biodegradable. Currently we can produce the protein, but we can't spin it. Perhaps this technology might enable us to create something reasonably similar to real spider silk.
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What, they changed that? Last time I was on a US American highway people passed wherever they wanted. And as far as I know that was legal.
In Germany you can only pass on the left unless you're in a traffic jam or passing a standing car. OTOH, you can drive as fast as you want on our Autobahns - at least on those parts of them that don't have speed signs (WP* says 3/4 are unregulated, but I think it's more like 2/3). Driving as fst as you want and overtaking everywhere probably don't mix; I prefer being able to drive as fast as I want.
* By the way, that's a really nice article the English Wikipedia has on Autobahns. It even lays out some traffic laws one should remember when driving on a German Autobahn.
If I was a Canadian politician I would point out instances where US citizens inside the USA violate Canadian law.
As a German, I can just point out that many Americans are in gross violation of German road traffic law (for example, they're overtaking on the right side all the time) as well as German gun regulations. Also, no American carries an ID card compliant with 1-2, PersAuswG (the German ID card law). Those violations have to stop immediately!
Also, most American laws are not written in the German language, which is at odds with the German basic law. What kind of rogue country are the USA?
If the links point to app bndles, that will work. What doesn't work are links to regular directories; those will just be opened in Finder.
Actually, the implementation of iTunes on OS X is also quite convoluted. It's pretty much the only Apple software that doesn't care about Apple's audio APIs.
I'm actually reasonably happy with that option. Most of the time the way iTunes organizes the stuff is okay and I'd have nothing to complain if I could just drag and drop files from iTunes to a Finder window.
Reorgnizing my collection from hand certainly is not an option.
Apparently someone at Apple also uses VMWare Fusion in a different Space - in 10.5.2 VMWare's progress bar now just causes the icon to bounce instead of forcing you to remain its Space.
Some apps can be real pests in Spaces. VMWare Fusion is determined to have you watch the progress bar while it freeses/unfreezes a VM.
You tell VMWare to freeze and exit, then switch to another Space.
VMWare brings you back so you can watch the progress bar.
You switch back to your intended Space.
VMWare brings you back so you can watch the progress bar.
You switch back AGAIN.
VMWare brings you back so you can watch the progress bar.
You give up and watch that damn bar until VMWare is done writing the VM's state to disk.
It's like playing Progress Quest in a singletasking environment.
I hear they're working on the bug but the fix wasn't yet ready for 10.5.2.
I'm annoyed to no end that the engineers at Apple managed to screw up Stacks. Again. Okay, so now we get a list view that sorta kinda works like it did in Tiger. That's a good thing. But unfortunately, the people developing Stacks apparently never heard of aliases and symbolic links. Yes, Stacks' list view doesn't resolve those, it just presents them as a clickable file. Thus, Stacks are marginally less useless than before but still mere fluff that just takes up space in the Dock without being of any actual value.
One would think that Apple's engineers haven't forgotten how to manage symbolic links and aliases since Tiger, but apparently they have.
Combine that with the "Num-Lock and Caps-Lock randomly get inverted at boot time" bug and 10.5.2 is pretty underwhelming.
That's nice, but I don't own an iPod and I don't necessarily want to copy the MP3s onto my MP3 player.
I like iTunes' user interface, but they are turning the program itself into shit more and more. Not only is iTunes just about the only application on OS X that doesn't know what Core Audio is or how to use it to open files, now it also requires you to hunt around in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/ to copy files somewhere. That's expecially funny when you have a large compilation playlist where you need to copy every single file out of its own folder.
If XMMS actually worked on the Mac I'd use that instead of iTunes, but unfortunately iTunes still happens to be the best choice on the Mac.
You had Norton on your computer for more than two weeks and you can still access the internet? How did that happen? But surely it vaporized your system tray, didn't it? Maybe the entire taskbar or perhaps even the task manager?
I wish I was kidding, but after having seen the logic bombs Symantec calls antivirus software expect any machine running them to develop random issues like complete freezing of all NICs. Although, to be honest, crap like the taskbar disappearing is usually only caused by their uninstaller (but in my opinion it happens pretty consistently).
So you argue that paedophilia is a special case that has a 100% chance of making the affected person rape a child? I find it hard to believe that paedophilia would be such a special, irresistible paraphilia.
One paedophile might not be able to control himself on his own, but if he had a group of sympathetic people who help him with that, he might. There are a lot of people who would've drunk themselves to death if it wasn't for Alcoholics Anonymous. Similar self-help groups help other people to control other (self-)destructive urges like bulimia. I think that an environment that helps the paedophiles keep themselves under control is more likely to succeed in its task than simply saying "no touching the kids" and wagging a bat.
Yes, the children must be protected. But just like drug abuse, paedophilia can't be controlled simply by outlawing it and letting the police handle the rest. We have methadone programs, counselling, self-help groups and treatments to help drug addicts live a normal, drug-free life. Why not create similar programs to help paedophiliacs stay "clean"? If they become dangerous we can still lock them up. (And if they are more accepted in society we have a much higher chance of noticing the dangerous ones before they become active. Currently we can just hope to accidentally uncover child porn.)
I agree. But hey, if we actually started going down that road, people would hear that psychologists are in desperate need and flock towards the psychology courses at university. Fields with many open jobs tend to attract students.
By the way, when I mentioned therapy I was more thinking of voluntary sessions. While most people would not want to do anything about their sexual urges (and that's just fine), some might decide that they'd like to repress those particular ones for the good of society. Some might do it out of altruism (giving up part of their fulfillment for the greater good) and some might just figure that state-sponsored urge control training might save them from getting themselves into trouble later on.
Supervision. Sure, it's not perfect and it's invasive, but I believe that it can be pulled off in a way that leaves the affected's dignity mostly intact. I'm thinking of something similar to parole.
If nothing else helps, there's always detention.
No, it's those damn Spaniards. I say we nuke Spania to rid the world of them once and for all.
Yeah, I'm disillusioned.
Exactly. Once the punishment for something becomes so extreme that you'd do anything over taking that punishment, well... you do. A child rapist probably has a lower chance of being found if he kills the child, cuts the body into pieces and buries those pieces in the woods. If you are found to be a child rapist, your life is essentially over - if you do ever come out of prison, everyone will be informed who you are and regular interaction with other humans is made very difficult. So why not cut up that little boy and bury him? It's much safer.
Whether a harsh punishment is a deterrent or not is irrelevant here - we're talking about someone being unable to vent a basic urge. No punishment will deter him from having sex with a child, but the punishment may "force" him to kill it afterwards. Like a cornered animal, once he has nothing to lose he will do things he would normally find abhorrent just to save his hide. This kind of behavior is well-documented.
Yeah, some child rapists would still kill the victim afterwards, even if people made an effort to reintegrate even child rapists. But not all of them, I posit.
There's also a song, which is not only hilarious but also gives you insight into what the video is all about. Warning: Less disturbing than the real video, but still decidedly NSFW due to explicit lyrics.
Not to forget:
4) Destigmatize paedophilia so the afflicted can actually deal with it.
Paedophilia isn't something you can outlaw into oblivion - paraphilias aren't something you decide to have, they're parts of your psyche. Thus, demonizing paedophilia so that the affected don't even dare to seek professional help isn't going to help anyone. Offering them safe, discreet counseling and perhaps ways of satisfying their desires without breaking laws and/or mentally scarring children is much better. One could try to suppress the paraphilia with help of a psychologist, but I don't expect that approach to be very useful.
Paedophilia isn't going to suddenly disappear. We need to accept that it does occur amongst us and find a way to cope with it in a constructive manner. Whether that means mandatory (but discreet!) counselling, giving lolicon hentai to paedophiliacs to divert their attention from real children, psychological treatement or a combination of any of the above, we need to work on this.
The internet can actually help with some of those approaches. Web forums could supplement/act as AA-style self-help groups where the members encourage and police each other to ensure they don't screw up. If Paedophilia wouldn't be treated as "OMG YOU'RE A MONSTER LEAVE MY CHILDREN ALONE AND DIE" by the general public, something like that would be very much possible; until then nobody would join such a forum for fear that some wacko obtains their personal information and lynches them.
And of course it's easy to obtain lolicon on the internet; all porn is easy to obtain on the internet.
Seriously; we need to actually work with these people, not against them. It's not like they're antisocial crimnal masterminds; they just have urges they can't legally fulfill. It's no wonder that they break laws, then (and kill children out of fear that they're discovered).
But it looked just like a regular business website! It was only after I subscribed with my credit card information and completed a wget -m on the site that I noticed I had been forwarded to latexgirlswithwhippedcream.com!
That's what I meant with "we can produce the protein". The problem with goat silk is that it's just the protein in raw form. Spiders do some very specific things with their silk protein in order to form strands of it. The company that came up with goat silk tried to replicate it but failed - they finally abandoned the effort. However, if this new technology also worked for spider silk protein, we could get close to the real deal. It'd probably still not match what real spiders produce, but it's better than a bottle full of a gel that just happens to be made up of the same proteins as spider silk.
This could mean that artificial silk is around the corner. And I don't mean some silk-like synthetic but instead something with the exact properties of real silk but a much lower price. If they do manage to make silk that way I predict that in a few years silk will be the next big fad. Of course this doesn't work like a real silk gland at all, but maybe something workable can be achieved.
Outside of the fashion world (where things actually matter), this might also mean a big step towards artificial spider silk, which a lot of people are very interested in - spider silk is very tough and is would be useful wherever you need a very light tough fabric, especially when you want something that is biodegradable. Currently we can produce the protein, but we can't spin it. Perhaps this technology might enable us to create something reasonably similar to real spider silk.