The most juvenile act in this story was the vindictive way the guy was hunted down.
I agree with you mostly, but I think that's the second most juvenile act in the story. The most juvenile act was posting and gloating about having made someone lose their job over a vulgar word.
Only doing it twice a few minutes apart doesn't qualify as a troll yet. As others have pointed out, the person could have simply though his comment didn't go through (if it didn't show up right away), and tried again, not realizing it had gone into a moderation queue.
Won't help, in the followup post, the guy claims that:
Did I reveal private information? No. I had none to reveal and wouldn’t have if I had it. From me, the school learned three things: 1) That the comments were posted; 2) When the comments were posted; 3) That I knew they came from the school based on the DNS information that accompanied the IP address. The school knows its own IP address. Knowing when the comments were posted allowed them to track them to a specific work station through its own server logs.
So he apparently doesn't think sharing the time and IP address of a poster is "private information". Or he's trying to cover his ass and not lose his own job. Whichever you think is more likely.
Many of the anti-spam plugins for WordPress automatically do a reverse lookup and add it in the report they automatically E-mail you about comments that have been held for modification. In fact, I believe WordPress core does the same when it E-mails you to notify you a comment has been received. TFA mentions he noticed the reverse lookup in the E-mail alert WordPress sent him, so he didn't do one on his own, it was just an automatic thing done to help blog owners deal with potential spam comments.
I still think he's a jerk though, what kind of person gloats about making someone lose their job over such a minor thing?
If everybody put their money and their reputation where there mouths were, civilization might just lurch forward a little bit.
And where does a newspaper gloating about making someone lose their job for posting a single vulgar word twice on their site fall in there? I expect papers to have more ethics than that in a civilized society, so I think they've set civilization back a bit with this, not forward.
The newspaper did the right thing. Someone repeatedly posting something after it has been deleted should be addressed.
Twice does not make for "repeatedly". So, twice, at least a few minutes apart. There was apparently no attempt to do it a third time before it was reported. I've seen spambots post stuff more frequently than that. So no, it wasn't the right thing, the reporter at the paper got offended by something someone said (such irony there) twice, reported it and ended up causing someone to lose their job.
And that bit about irony is important there. How often have you been offended by something you read in a newspaper? How often have people complained to papers about being offended by something in them? (This has happened a lot over the years with regards to comic strips. One of the examples I remember is a few papers refused to run one of the Opus strips.) Now how often has a reporter gotten fired and/or resigned because of those complaints? Seems to me this paper has a double standard. If they offend you, well, it's freedom of the press, you should just deal with it. But if someone posts something they find offensive as a comment on an article on their site? By God they'll report you and make you lose your job. Then they'll post about it gloating that they did so.
And besides, it was ONE FREAKING WORD. That's all the person posted. They probably though they were being witty. Hell, how many of us would think of that response when reading the question "What's one of the strangest thing you've ever eaten?" I'm surprised more people didn't think of it and post it. And if the person posting had really wanted to be vulgar they'd have used more than one word.
If Toyota wants to argue that the fine print spelled it out and it's her fault she didn't read it carefully enough, maybe they can win the case through legalistic hairsplitting. But if they buried it in fine print and incomprehensible language, they're jerks no matter what.
If I give someone my email address and at the same time click a checkbox that says subscribe to correspondence, then it's as informed as you get. Result: I get emails. Maybe the fineprint deep in there somewhere states what will and what won't be sent, but as far as I am concerned, anything is fair game. "Here's my email address, send me stuff." If I end up with too much crap that's rubbish, I click the unsubscribe bit and be done with it. That's it. No silly $10 million dollar goldmine.
Except it doesn't sound like the E-mails came from Toyota, but appeared to come from an individual, one that she didn't know. If the E-mails all were from random-stranger@toyota.com then you have a point, but if they didn't, and it wasn't blindingly obvious that they were Toyota marketing E-mails, then your point's no good. I haven't seen the E-mails in question, but given that this was a viral marketing campaign, I'm betting they weren't obviously from Toyota.
I am not against immigration or work permits but I am against paying for (via taxes) medical and infrastructure expenses for those who do not contribute and merely send money out of the country. If they pay their fair share and are here legally, good on them and they are welcome.
Well, looking through the sheriff's Wikipedia entry, I haven't even finished reading the list of inmates that have died or been severely injured due to their treatment under Arpaio and I've totaled up at least $20million in settlements the county's had to pay out. Still think the taxpayers are saving money this way? Seems to me they're paying more than they would have if they treated the prisoners more civilly.
And let's not forget that some of those deaths an injuries involved rather barbaric treatment of the prisoners. Like the guy they forced into a restraint chair, broke his neck with the guards laughing the entire time. Sounds like Arpaio's just the biggest thug of a group of thugs. And we already know what can happen when even normal people are given ultimate control in a prison setting. Letting people naturally inclined to such behavior be in charge of the prisons, and then making demeaning/degrading treatment the norm, is bound to have even worse outcomes --- like all those deaths and injuries listed as happening in Arpaio's prison.
Apple got the cover of time magazine when the iMac G4 came out. Apple got that coverage, because they had something to offer to Time, and they had it to offer because of the diligence with which they maintained secrecy. You can't buy Time's front cover as an ad placement. If you could, it's easily worth tens of millions of dollars.
While this is true, Apple doesn't get the front cover of Time for every product they launch. Sure maybe the costs pay off for the times they end up on Time's cover, but what about all the other times they don't?
Your claim that Apple doesn't get free press due to the secrecy is complete nonsense.
Did you actually RTFA? Here's what he said about that: "This isn't true -- for almost every major announcement of the past several years, we've known the major points days, or even weeks, in advance." He went on to say "In fact, they earn the majority of their press from the extraordinary appeal of their products in design and user experience, as well as the pure showmanship they put into their signature launch events, which are unequalled thus far in the industry." And he's right, even with all of Apple's secrecy more and more leaks are occurring and the big secrets are mostly not so secret by the unveil. But the press would cover them anyways because they do incredible unveils that generate a lot of excitement, even though most of the attendees know what's coming due to leaks.
Well, i have an idea, and it's TFO (Totally Frackin' Obvious)... and might be how it happened. A poor old cleanup crew member may have been elicited to put a USB device on a bank manager machine that might not have been watched by a camera. Might have trained the cleaner to surveil the PCs, determine their visibility to cameras, then trained the dupe into deftly/swiftly attaching a USB attack device while feigning scraping something sticky from the floor, or emptying waste bins that were tough to get the bag from....
More likely the treasurer was running with admin rights and cluelessly visited a link from an E-mail using IE that infected the PC. That or they stupidly downloaded and ran something because it promised a free screensaver/funny video/porn/etc. You don't need complicated scenarios to infect an end-user's Windows PC with a trojan, just bad IT practices and clueless users. As for anti-virus/other security software, this was probably a new variant of the Zeus trojan (considering the article says the direct connection part was new supports this) and said software may have missed it simply because it wasn't in their definitions yet.
because it is entirely ridiculous and indicative of what the users (how can you call them players, when they ignore the intent of the game) are doing. Basically, he played the game (actually fighting villains) and was hated for it. Not because he was being vile or crude (indeed, completely contrary to what you suggest) but by violating game defeating "customs."
Not to defend what the other players were doing (harassing the guy obviously went way too far), but even in real life there are "customs" in societies that disallow certain actions even though said actions are legal. If you're going to be a part of a community, any community, you have to follow the unwritten rules of that community or you're going to be mighty unpopular. Just because it's a game doesn't mean the community can be ignored, and you do so at your own peril. If you read the article it noted that players at first gently informed him that he was breaking custom, and he ignored them and continued to do so. After that the players gradually increased the attacks on him trying to force him to conform.
And when someone does play the game, the natives get pissy as all get out. Sounds like a bunch of crybabies inhabit those games if you ask me.
Just to give a real world comparison, in most places it'd be perfectly legal for me to sit on my front porch and cuss out everyone who happens to walk down the street. But if I do so all my neighbors will begin to hate me and do whatever they can to discourage my behavior. Sound like a bunch of crybabies to you? Or am I being an unrepentant asshole who deserves to be hated by his neighbors? If you don't want to be part of a community, fine, but don't whine about the repercussions. That's what this professor's doing, he ignored the customs of the community he was in, and he faced the consequences and whined about it. He's the crybaby, not the other players.
Who could take two grams of acetaminophen?!? My god, that is a lot of stuff! While we're at it, let's ban water, because if you drink like 1/4 gallon or more at one time, you could die!
It's easier than you'd think with prescription pain meds like Vicodin (aka hydrocodone/acetaminophen). I've had that prescribed for the 5/500 version to take 1-2 pills every 4-6 hours as needed for pain. If you take 2 pills every 6 hours, you're taking 1 gram of acetaminophen every 6 hours. If you take just 1 pill every 4 hours, you'd be taking 3 grams of acetaminophen daily. So you can easily take 3-4 grams total in one day, just taking it as prescribed. In my experience hydrocodone meds nearly always have much more acetaminophen in them than oxycodone ones do. But oxycodone is apparently more addictive than hydrocodone so doctors don't like to prescribe it. At a minimum the FDA should do something to limit the amount of acetaminophen allowed in combination pills, to avoid cases where taking the medication as prescribed could damage your liver.
All this ban is saying is that you can't buy the drugs as an all-in-one formulation. You can still buy them just the same as separate pills.
I think the concern is that oxycodone and hydrocodone aren't as commonly available outside the combination pills. Doctors nearly always prescribe the combination versions, and that's what's mostly manufactured. If the FDA's going to ban them, they need to do it with a transition period so that manufacturing of the single versions can ramp up. Otherwise there will be shortages and lots of people will be screwed over with no pain meds available.
Pedophilia would have to be a disease then, which it isn't
And therein lies the problem, people continue to think this way. It's not true, pedophilia is a form of paraphilia and considered a mental illness. A treatable mental illness, albeit one that's not curable, but that's not too unusual. Schizophrenia and bipolar aren't curable either, but they are treatable. As long as people like you insist pedophilia isn't a disease, then it'll never be treated. And ultimately treatments are the solution if you really want to stop pedophiles from acting on their impulses.
I don't think we have a very good understanding of how the brain operates in this capacity, so I'm not sure we even have the capability to treat pedophiles aside from chemical castration.
There are some treatments available, but none of them are a cure, not even chemical castration. One big issue is that all of them require cooperation on part of the pedophile to some extent (especially things like cognitive behavior therapy, but even medical treatments because if they stop taking the medicine it's obviously not going to help). But the real issue may be a lack of interest in trying to find cures. I saw this from the Wikipedia article on pedophilia: "Dr. Fred Berlin, founder of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic, believes that pedophilia could be successfully treated if the medical community would give it more attention." So why don't we do so? For some reason, society prefers to just lock them up and/or make them register for life instead of trying to treat them.
Keep in mind -- NO ONE HAS BEEN HARMED. NO ONE. Whether or not something should be done and if so, what? That's yet another question, but I think the lines should be defined.
Not entirely true, this guy's been publicly accused of this and his life is pretty much destroyed now, even if he's never found guilty of anything.
- Recognized in depictions later in life, more emotional abuse
Woops. I wonder how the children, the pictures of whose faces were used, would feel if they were sent these photos. Or if their parents received them.
This always assumes people would recognize them, and it's utter bullshit in most cases. Look at pictures of when you were a little kid, say around 5/6, then look at pictures of you now. Do you really look that similar? Would anyone recognize you that didn't already know what you looked like as a kid? Most people are going to have to say no. And if someone's mailing child porn of you to you or your parents, I think you have other laws that'll work just fine and dandy to go after them with. (Harassment, blackmail assuming they're trying to blackmail you, etc.)
When you suggest that someone who thinks about the nature of crime would actually commit the crime, that doesn't help either. How about just saying that prosecuting people for thinking is something only done by those afraid of thinking?
Because that implies the idiots doing this have enough brain cells to think in the first place.
Interesting you should say that. I just recently finished reading "Witch Hunt", which is about the "Child Sex Ring" debacle that happened in Wenatchee, WA, in the '90s.
All it took was one overzealous police officer, in conjunction with some overprotective "Child Services" employees of the state, to ruin something on the order of 23 families. The book is out of print, but it is still available on Amazon. It was written by an attorney. I highly recommend it to people who think "it can't happen here", or "if they were arrested, they must be guilty of something." What happened in Wenatchee seems almost unbelievable... but you better believe it.
IMO, a bigger travesty of justice has seldom if ever occurred in the United States.
Read up on the Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic of the 1980s, lots of families ruined there as well. Also see the Red Scares, there were two of those, the most famous being run by McCarthy. The US seems to enjoy having moral panics that destroy lots of innocent lives. Apparently we're "Land of the free, home of the scared silly". *sigh*
However, this really is a crime. Can we really imprison someone for likely intending to rape a child?
Well then, might as well throw the whole world in prison for "likely intending to rape" all those people they've fantasized about having sex with. It's the same thing, without actual proof of intent it's a thought crime.
How can you prove that the person in a picture is a minor if you can't figure out their age? For a toddler, it's obvious, but what about someone in high school? Summer Glau, 27, played a 15 year old in Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Nathalie Portman was 18 when she played a 13 year old in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Sarah Michelle Geller was 21 when she played a 15 year old Buffy Summers in Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. There's a pretty wide margin of error if all you have to go by is a picture.
Which is probably why the bit you quoted says the law doesn't require them to either prove identity or age. They can just claim they're underage and go after you. Feeling worried yet? This is a horrid law, it basically allows the cops to charge you with child porn/child sexual exploitation based on their whims, not actual evidence.
It's not child porn, but I think the article said "exploitation of a minor". This makes sense... it's kind of like slander, I think. A photographer can't publish your photo without your written consent. How much worse is this? Publishing an image of my face on someone else's naked body certainly seems like exploitation to me.
The article doesn't say he published them, and even says they don't believe he ever had any contact with the girls. I also doubt he did publish them or they'd be going after him for distribution as well as sexual exploitation. Remember they like to pile on as many charges as possible (not just in these types of cases, but in general). So do you still think it's sexual exploitation to privately slap someone's head on a nude body? How about if they just fantasize about them nude privately? That'd be just as bad, might as well make that illegal too.
ruled that in order for something to be "child pornography", it had to be depictions of (1) real children, and (2) real pornography.
This is interesting, though, if the faces were of real children. Which side of the line does that land on?
The article mentions that, and has this little tidbit: Nearly every state, however, has adopted a law in response to the Supreme Court decision in the case, Fitzsimmons said. For instance, Tennessee's laws state that in prosecuting the offense of sexual exploitation of a minor, "the state is not required to prove the actual identity or age of the minor." So somehow they took "it has to have real children and be real pornography" and decided to go with "we don't have to even bother proving that it's really a real person or that they're really underage". That's pretty damn scary. Although this other bit here may explain it a lot: "It's definitely on the increase," said Justin Fitzsimmons, a former prosecutor and senior attorney with the National Center for the Prosecution of Child Abuse, part of the National District Attorneys' Association. "People are trying to come up with creative ways to continue to sexually exploit children using digital evidence." How the hell are you supposed to sexually exploit a child using digital evidence? Fiddling with a photo in Photoshop != sexual exploitation in my book. This is really starting to sound more and more like a fucking witch hunt.
Slashdot Mirror
The most juvenile act in this story was the vindictive way the guy was hunted down.
I agree with you mostly, but I think that's the second most juvenile act in the story. The most juvenile act was posting and gloating about having made someone lose their job over a vulgar word.
Only doing it twice a few minutes apart doesn't qualify as a troll yet. As others have pointed out, the person could have simply though his comment didn't go through (if it didn't show up right away), and tried again, not realizing it had gone into a moderation queue.
Umm ... you quote it right there pretty clearly:
"We may disclose personal information ... to protect against misuse ... of our web sites."
So ... what?
Except that's not the excuse he's using, he claims he didn't share private information because he had none to share. Apparently the IP address and timestamp of when the posts were made weren't private information. From the followup post about the issue here: http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/the-editors-desk/the-editors-desk/2009/11/follow-up-the-case-of-the-vulgar-comment-and-the-school/
Won't help, in the followup post, the guy claims that:
Did I reveal private information? No. I had none to reveal and wouldn’t have if I had it. From me, the school learned three things: 1) That the comments were posted; 2) When the comments were posted; 3) That I knew they came from the school based on the DNS information that accompanied the IP address. The school knows its own IP address. Knowing when the comments were posted allowed them to track them to a specific work station through its own server logs.
So he apparently doesn't think sharing the time and IP address of a poster is "private information". Or he's trying to cover his ass and not lose his own job. Whichever you think is more likely.
Many of the anti-spam plugins for WordPress automatically do a reverse lookup and add it in the report they automatically E-mail you about comments that have been held for modification. In fact, I believe WordPress core does the same when it E-mails you to notify you a comment has been received. TFA mentions he noticed the reverse lookup in the E-mail alert WordPress sent him, so he didn't do one on his own, it was just an automatic thing done to help blog owners deal with potential spam comments.
I still think he's a jerk though, what kind of person gloats about making someone lose their job over such a minor thing?
If everybody put their money and their reputation where there mouths were, civilization might just lurch forward a little bit.
And where does a newspaper gloating about making someone lose their job for posting a single vulgar word twice on their site fall in there? I expect papers to have more ethics than that in a civilized society, so I think they've set civilization back a bit with this, not forward.
The newspaper did the right thing. Someone repeatedly posting something after it has been deleted should be addressed.
Twice does not make for "repeatedly". So, twice, at least a few minutes apart. There was apparently no attempt to do it a third time before it was reported. I've seen spambots post stuff more frequently than that. So no, it wasn't the right thing, the reporter at the paper got offended by something someone said (such irony there) twice, reported it and ended up causing someone to lose their job.
And that bit about irony is important there. How often have you been offended by something you read in a newspaper? How often have people complained to papers about being offended by something in them? (This has happened a lot over the years with regards to comic strips. One of the examples I remember is a few papers refused to run one of the Opus strips.) Now how often has a reporter gotten fired and/or resigned because of those complaints? Seems to me this paper has a double standard. If they offend you, well, it's freedom of the press, you should just deal with it. But if someone posts something they find offensive as a comment on an article on their site? By God they'll report you and make you lose your job. Then they'll post about it gloating that they did so.
And besides, it was ONE FREAKING WORD. That's all the person posted. They probably though they were being witty. Hell, how many of us would think of that response when reading the question "What's one of the strangest thing you've ever eaten?" I'm surprised more people didn't think of it and post it. And if the person posting had really wanted to be vulgar they'd have used more than one word.
If Toyota wants to argue that the fine print spelled it out and it's her fault she didn't read it carefully enough, maybe they can win the case through legalistic hairsplitting. But if they buried it in fine print and incomprehensible language, they're jerks no matter what.
If I give someone my email address and at the same time click a checkbox that says subscribe to correspondence, then it's as informed as you get. Result: I get emails. Maybe the fineprint deep in there somewhere states what will and what won't be sent, but as far as I am concerned, anything is fair game. "Here's my email address, send me stuff." If I end up with too much crap that's rubbish, I click the unsubscribe bit and be done with it. That's it. No silly $10 million dollar goldmine.
Except it doesn't sound like the E-mails came from Toyota, but appeared to come from an individual, one that she didn't know. If the E-mails all were from random-stranger@toyota.com then you have a point, but if they didn't, and it wasn't blindingly obvious that they were Toyota marketing E-mails, then your point's no good. I haven't seen the E-mails in question, but given that this was a viral marketing campaign, I'm betting they weren't obviously from Toyota.
I am not against immigration or work permits but I am against paying for (via taxes) medical and infrastructure expenses for those who do not contribute and merely send money out of the country. If they pay their fair share and are here legally, good on them and they are welcome.
Well, looking through the sheriff's Wikipedia entry, I haven't even finished reading the list of inmates that have died or been severely injured due to their treatment under Arpaio and I've totaled up at least $20million in settlements the county's had to pay out. Still think the taxpayers are saving money this way? Seems to me they're paying more than they would have if they treated the prisoners more civilly.
And let's not forget that some of those deaths an injuries involved rather barbaric treatment of the prisoners. Like the guy they forced into a restraint chair, broke his neck with the guards laughing the entire time. Sounds like Arpaio's just the biggest thug of a group of thugs. And we already know what can happen when even normal people are given ultimate control in a prison setting. Letting people naturally inclined to such behavior be in charge of the prisons, and then making demeaning/degrading treatment the norm, is bound to have even worse outcomes --- like all those deaths and injuries listed as happening in Arpaio's prison.
Apple got the cover of time magazine when the iMac G4 came out. Apple got that coverage, because they had something to offer to Time, and they had it to offer because of the diligence with which they maintained secrecy. You can't buy Time's front cover as an ad placement. If you could, it's easily worth tens of millions of dollars.
While this is true, Apple doesn't get the front cover of Time for every product they launch. Sure maybe the costs pay off for the times they end up on Time's cover, but what about all the other times they don't?
Your claim that Apple doesn't get free press due to the secrecy is complete nonsense.
Did you actually RTFA? Here's what he said about that: "This isn't true -- for almost every major announcement of the past several years, we've known the major points days, or even weeks, in advance." He went on to say "In fact, they earn the majority of their press from the extraordinary appeal of their products in design and user experience, as well as the pure showmanship they put into their signature launch events, which are unequalled thus far in the industry." And he's right, even with all of Apple's secrecy more and more leaks are occurring and the big secrets are mostly not so secret by the unveil. But the press would cover them anyways because they do incredible unveils that generate a lot of excitement, even though most of the attendees know what's coming due to leaks.
Well, i have an idea, and it's TFO (Totally Frackin' Obvious)... and might be how it happened. A poor old cleanup crew member may have been elicited to put a USB device on a bank manager machine that might not have been watched by a camera. Might have trained the cleaner to surveil the PCs, determine their visibility to cameras, then trained the dupe into deftly/swiftly attaching a USB attack device while feigning scraping something sticky from the floor, or emptying waste bins that were tough to get the bag from....
More likely the treasurer was running with admin rights and cluelessly visited a link from an E-mail using IE that infected the PC. That or they stupidly downloaded and ran something because it promised a free screensaver/funny video/porn/etc. You don't need complicated scenarios to infect an end-user's Windows PC with a trojan, just bad IT practices and clueless users. As for anti-virus/other security software, this was probably a new variant of the Zeus trojan (considering the article says the direct connection part was new supports this) and said software may have missed it simply because it wasn't in their definitions yet.
Did it loose 73% of its core developer?
I dunno, but what I'm interested in is what they did with the other 27% of him.
Try the meatloaf in the cafeteria.
because it is entirely ridiculous and indicative of what the users (how can you call them players, when they ignore the intent of the game) are doing. Basically, he played the game (actually fighting villains) and was hated for it. Not because he was being vile or crude (indeed, completely contrary to what you suggest) but by violating game defeating "customs."
Not to defend what the other players were doing (harassing the guy obviously went way too far), but even in real life there are "customs" in societies that disallow certain actions even though said actions are legal. If you're going to be a part of a community, any community, you have to follow the unwritten rules of that community or you're going to be mighty unpopular. Just because it's a game doesn't mean the community can be ignored, and you do so at your own peril. If you read the article it noted that players at first gently informed him that he was breaking custom, and he ignored them and continued to do so. After that the players gradually increased the attacks on him trying to force him to conform.
And when someone does play the game, the natives get pissy as all get out. Sounds like a bunch of crybabies inhabit those games if you ask me.
Just to give a real world comparison, in most places it'd be perfectly legal for me to sit on my front porch and cuss out everyone who happens to walk down the street. But if I do so all my neighbors will begin to hate me and do whatever they can to discourage my behavior. Sound like a bunch of crybabies to you? Or am I being an unrepentant asshole who deserves to be hated by his neighbors? If you don't want to be part of a community, fine, but don't whine about the repercussions. That's what this professor's doing, he ignored the customs of the community he was in, and he faced the consequences and whined about it. He's the crybaby, not the other players.
Who could take two grams of acetaminophen?!? My god, that is a lot of stuff! While we're at it, let's ban water, because if you drink like 1/4 gallon or more at one time, you could die!
It's easier than you'd think with prescription pain meds like Vicodin (aka hydrocodone/acetaminophen). I've had that prescribed for the 5/500 version to take 1-2 pills every 4-6 hours as needed for pain. If you take 2 pills every 6 hours, you're taking 1 gram of acetaminophen every 6 hours. If you take just 1 pill every 4 hours, you'd be taking 3 grams of acetaminophen daily. So you can easily take 3-4 grams total in one day, just taking it as prescribed. In my experience hydrocodone meds nearly always have much more acetaminophen in them than oxycodone ones do. But oxycodone is apparently more addictive than hydrocodone so doctors don't like to prescribe it. At a minimum the FDA should do something to limit the amount of acetaminophen allowed in combination pills, to avoid cases where taking the medication as prescribed could damage your liver.
All this ban is saying is that you can't buy the drugs as an all-in-one formulation. You can still buy them just the same as separate pills.
I think the concern is that oxycodone and hydrocodone aren't as commonly available outside the combination pills. Doctors nearly always prescribe the combination versions, and that's what's mostly manufactured. If the FDA's going to ban them, they need to do it with a transition period so that manufacturing of the single versions can ramp up. Otherwise there will be shortages and lots of people will be screwed over with no pain meds available.
Pedophilia would have to be a disease then, which it isn't
And therein lies the problem, people continue to think this way. It's not true, pedophilia is a form of paraphilia and considered a mental illness. A treatable mental illness, albeit one that's not curable, but that's not too unusual. Schizophrenia and bipolar aren't curable either, but they are treatable. As long as people like you insist pedophilia isn't a disease, then it'll never be treated. And ultimately treatments are the solution if you really want to stop pedophiles from acting on their impulses.
I don't think we have a very good understanding of how the brain operates in this capacity, so I'm not sure we even have the capability to treat pedophiles aside from chemical castration.
There are some treatments available, but none of them are a cure, not even chemical castration. One big issue is that all of them require cooperation on part of the pedophile to some extent (especially things like cognitive behavior therapy, but even medical treatments because if they stop taking the medicine it's obviously not going to help). But the real issue may be a lack of interest in trying to find cures. I saw this from the Wikipedia article on pedophilia: "Dr. Fred Berlin, founder of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic, believes that pedophilia could be successfully treated if the medical community would give it more attention." So why don't we do so? For some reason, society prefers to just lock them up and/or make them register for life instead of trying to treat them.
Keep in mind -- NO ONE HAS BEEN HARMED. NO ONE. Whether or not something should be done and if so, what? That's yet another question, but I think the lines should be defined.
Not entirely true, this guy's been publicly accused of this and his life is pretty much destroyed now, even if he's never found guilty of anything.
- Recognized in depictions later in life, more emotional abuse
Woops. I wonder how the children, the pictures of whose faces were used, would feel if they were sent these photos. Or if their parents received them.
This always assumes people would recognize them, and it's utter bullshit in most cases. Look at pictures of when you were a little kid, say around 5/6, then look at pictures of you now. Do you really look that similar? Would anyone recognize you that didn't already know what you looked like as a kid? Most people are going to have to say no. And if someone's mailing child porn of you to you or your parents, I think you have other laws that'll work just fine and dandy to go after them with. (Harassment, blackmail assuming they're trying to blackmail you, etc.)
When you suggest that someone who thinks about the nature of crime would actually commit the crime, that doesn't help either. How about just saying that prosecuting people for thinking is something only done by those afraid of thinking?
Because that implies the idiots doing this have enough brain cells to think in the first place.
Interesting you should say that. I just recently finished reading "Witch Hunt", which is about the "Child Sex Ring" debacle that happened in Wenatchee, WA, in the '90s.
All it took was one overzealous police officer, in conjunction with some overprotective "Child Services" employees of the state, to ruin something on the order of 23 families. The book is out of print, but it is still available on Amazon. It was written by an attorney. I highly recommend it to people who think "it can't happen here", or "if they were arrested, they must be guilty of something." What happened in Wenatchee seems almost unbelievable... but you better believe it.
IMO, a bigger travesty of justice has seldom if ever occurred in the United States.
Read up on the Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic of the 1980s, lots of families ruined there as well. Also see the Red Scares, there were two of those, the most famous being run by McCarthy. The US seems to enjoy having moral panics that destroy lots of innocent lives. Apparently we're "Land of the free, home of the scared silly". *sigh*
However, this really is a crime. Can we really imprison someone for likely intending to rape a child?
Well then, might as well throw the whole world in prison for "likely intending to rape" all those people they've fantasized about having sex with. It's the same thing, without actual proof of intent it's a thought crime.
How can you prove that the person in a picture is a minor if you can't figure out their age? For a toddler, it's obvious, but what about someone in high school? Summer Glau, 27, played a 15 year old in Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Nathalie Portman was 18 when she played a 13 year old in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Sarah Michelle Geller was 21 when she played a 15 year old Buffy Summers in Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. There's a pretty wide margin of error if all you have to go by is a picture.
Which is probably why the bit you quoted says the law doesn't require them to either prove identity or age. They can just claim they're underage and go after you. Feeling worried yet? This is a horrid law, it basically allows the cops to charge you with child porn/child sexual exploitation based on their whims, not actual evidence.
It's not child porn, but I think the article said "exploitation of a minor". This makes sense... it's kind of like slander, I think. A photographer can't publish your photo without your written consent. How much worse is this? Publishing an image of my face on someone else's naked body certainly seems like exploitation to me.
The article doesn't say he published them, and even says they don't believe he ever had any contact with the girls. I also doubt he did publish them or they'd be going after him for distribution as well as sexual exploitation. Remember they like to pile on as many charges as possible (not just in these types of cases, but in general). So do you still think it's sexual exploitation to privately slap someone's head on a nude body? How about if they just fantasize about them nude privately? That'd be just as bad, might as well make that illegal too.
ruled that in order for something to be "child pornography", it had to be depictions of (1) real children, and (2) real pornography.
This is interesting, though, if the faces were of real children. Which side of the line does that land on?
The article mentions that, and has this little tidbit: Nearly every state, however, has adopted a law in response to the Supreme Court decision in the case, Fitzsimmons said. For instance, Tennessee's laws state that in prosecuting the offense of sexual exploitation of a minor, "the state is not required to prove the actual identity or age of the minor." So somehow they took "it has to have real children and be real pornography" and decided to go with "we don't have to even bother proving that it's really a real person or that they're really underage". That's pretty damn scary. Although this other bit here may explain it a lot: "It's definitely on the increase," said Justin Fitzsimmons, a former prosecutor and senior attorney with the National Center for the Prosecution of Child Abuse, part of the National District Attorneys' Association. "People are trying to come up with creative ways to continue to sexually exploit children using digital evidence." How the hell are you supposed to sexually exploit a child using digital evidence? Fiddling with a photo in Photoshop != sexual exploitation in my book. This is really starting to sound more and more like a fucking witch hunt.