It depends is meant by "stronger". Most likely the parent means "more anonymous". IP packets identify their destination and source (unless spoofed, although most networks filter out spoofed IP packets... our should), and most ISPs can associate an IP address and timestamp with a customer.
Various facilities running on the net offer substantially enhanced anonymity, usually at the expense of performance; examples include Freenet, Invisible IRC (which I'm not terribly familiar with), and mixmaster-based remailers. It's not generally possible (without advanced methods and considerable effort, if at all) to determine the source and destination of a given message. I'm not familiar with more recent anonymous P2P networks, although I'll admit to some skepticism, Freenet's been working on this for years and it's not as easy as it sounds.
If by "stronger" the parent means "more reliable" then this is obviously true; TCP is more reliable than IP by design.
I'd remind you the parent poster said "Unless you've snorted enough crack to think that all police officers are nice..." (emphasis mine), not "... think that police officers are nice... ". He wasn't claiming police in general are corrupt or evil, only that some are. It's the corrupt ones who will use this decision to their personal advantage; obviously the good cops will exercise restraint.
Oh, and I am grateful that the police put their lives on the line to protect the citizens against violent criminals (I wish they didn't have to waste their time on vice crimes... I'll change my mind the day Amsterdam dissolves into chaos... which hasn't happened yet!)
[...] from this difference does any harm emerge because she is engaged in the second pose?
I assume by "she" you're referring to a child (as I was when I suggested harm)... I don't have a problem with adults doing anything they like with other adults, whether there's money involved or not.
No evidence is no evidence. Agreed, that doesn't mean there isn't any harm, but it does mean the onus is on people who say there is harm to back up their claims with evidence or argument.
I don't think it's currently possible to untangle the effects of photographing a child nude in a sexual pose from the other unfortunate ways in which these children suffer, e.g., chaotic environments, poverty, and sexual exploitation. Tho I'd like to see how the non-nude "teen models" are faring in about ten years, because if there's harm from sexually suggestive nudity (and I believe there is) I suspect it's got more to do with the sexual part than the nudity.
As for arguments, among those I've encountered are that children who are photographed nude for softcore KP are exploited as child laborers, develop an abnormal and dysfunctional view of sexuality, and are perceptive of (and affected by) their adult employers' negative and exploitive relationship to them. I find the last rather compelling; it's been my experience that children are quite perceptive, at an emotional level at least, of how others perceive and relate to them. Given that early experiences shape brain development I think it's entirely appropriate to err on the side of caution.
However, the age of consent is not decreasing with this current reality. This only compounds the problem as individuals are being locked away, then branded as sex offenders for the rest of their life upon release, for having sex with sexually mature individuals that are below the official age of consent.
It's true that laws in the US don't distinguish between ephebophilia (wish I could find that in my dictionary to verify spelling) and pedophilia. And I would agree that they should, because the statistics would be useful and strategies for prevention probably differ. That's beside the point. The age of consent is based upon emotional and intellectual maturity, not physical maturity. Whether you are physically capable of having sex with an adult isn't at issue; at issue is whether you are sufficiently emotionally mature (e.g., to recognize when you are being manipulated or taken advantage of, or to make rational choices, or to take responsibility for your actions).
I disagree. It is hard to determine the mind of evolution.
You misunderstood me. I said "It's not so understandable". I did not say "it is impossible". There may be some way in which pedophilia makes evolutionary sense (tho I doubt), but it's not obvious in the way that ephebophilia is.
The Bonobo Chimps often have intergenerational sexual activity
Please document that bonobo adults engage in sexual activity with preadolescents and that this behaviour is culturally sanctioned. Your link was simply a brief overview of the bonobos, and I've never heard your claim before (for all I know you may be right, I just haven't heard that). If it does occur, I'm not sure it's relevant to the issue of evolutionary fitness in humans; our culture is rather different from bonobo culture, so what's harmful for us may not be for them.
Homosexuality too does not seem, on the face of it, to have any evolutionary advantages.
Not that it's relevant, but I've read several good hypotheses on just that subject. It's a bit less opaque when you realize that group survival is important to individual survival, especially in higher primates where it takes a long time to reach maturity.
Pedophilia seems even more common then homosexuality in the population
Sorry, I'm going to call you on that one, because that's a hell of a claim to make (unless you broaden pedophilia to include attraction to unde
I actually agree with you on some of the points you've made (see my other response), for example I don't think outlawing KP made much of a difference.
It's worth noting a few things here. There's clearly a difference between a picture of a woman casually naked (e.g., what you might find in National Geographic) and a picture of, for example, a woman in stockings and heels holding her vagina open and licking her lips, as one might find in your average softcore magazine (to the extent they haven't all gone out of business). If I recall correctly the phrase the LEO used to describe the softcore porn of KP websites was "Penthouse beaver shots".
Outside of other factors I don't see any reason why children in National Geographic style nudity are harmed in any way. I'm not convinced the same is true for Penthouse style nudity. I haven't seen solid evidence so I can't claim statistical support for my concern, but I'll be a lot happier when CGI gets good/cheap enough to make this whole question moot.
One other point. The age of puberty has been steadily declining (as a result of better nutrition, and yes it happens to people fed hormone-free meat too). The age at which one is emotionally mature has IMO been increasing as well (possibly because society has become more complex tho I'm guessing here), but that's harder to measure. What we're left with are people who become fertile at a much younger age (and much less mature) than when our behaviour evolved.
Being attracted to a pubescent, but underage, person isn't technically pedophilia; there's another term for it (ephebophilia?). The terms are distinct because the populations (pedophiles and ephebophiles) are largely distinct. It's understandable from an evolutionary perspective to be attracted to someone who has entered puberty and is fertile; the brain (at least the male brain) is wired to recognize secondary sexual characteristics. It's not so understandable to be attracted to a four year old, and be aware that the children in softcore KP are frequently that young.
Actually I agree with you 100% -- if parents are permitted (or in some cases, forced by economic circumstance) to peddle out their kids to work, they should be paid a fare wage (relative to value to the employer). So should adults, of course, but adults can consent to be exploited and children cannot. Child labor is child labor, regardless of whether it's posing nude or sewing clothing.
And the difference between casual nudity (i.e., the sort of photo your parents likely have of you) and preteen beaver shots is largely intent. I don't think that should matter from a legal perspective (intent can be hard to prove), although I think it certainly does from a moral perspective. I also suspect that a child who spends a good deal of their childhood emulating adult porn is going to grow up with a warped sense of sexuality, but then again it beats starving to death.
In short: they can't, because the KP they're talking about is almost all softcore legally produced in (among other places) former Soviet countries. For a (much) longer explanation, continue reading.
I built and manage a Usenet binaries site (one of the original ones, but now sadly in need of an update and, since Cidera bit it, not terribly complete). A lot of pure Usenet servers (no binaries decoding) make all newsgroups available under the hope that common carrier law will apply if (when) the shit hits the fan, but we suspected early on that common carrier law wouldn't apply as we were decoding and thumbnailing images. Thus, one of the first things I did when I wrote the code was to create an MD5 checksum database to block images. Anything that appeared in a known KP group would be be checksummed and added to the database, and anything anywhere else with a checksum in the database would be blocked (a good idea, since pedophiles change newsgroups frequently, and commonly take over abandoned groups in alt.*). New or newly active newsgroups were quarantined, no image decoding but with the subject lines presented in a report for our review. We could tell fairly quickly whether a newsgroup should go into the blocklist just based on the subject lines and content filenames.
A few years ago I had occasion to speak to law enforcement (police and FBI) who were investigating someone for KP possession, and he had a subscription to our site. They decided we weren't the source (biggest sigh of relief in my life) but were interested in our blacklist system and wanted a copy of our blacklist database. I spoke with one guy (FBI if I recall correctly) for an hour or so and I got to hear more than I ever wanted to know about KP on the net. Here's what he told me. He seemed to know what he was talking about (and seemed to be rather discouraged by the whole mess) but for all I know it could be bullshit.
There are three major sources of KP on the net. The first, present in Usenet but not on the web, is scans from magazines and such that were, at one time, legal to possess, but were criminalized during the Reagan administration (I think). As you might imagine the sickos who had stacks of "lolita" magazines weren't exactly rushing to turn them in to the cops. Once scanners became available, people started scanning in images and distributing them. Now, the original scanners' series are passed back and forth endlessly on Usenet and probably will be until the end of time. Fortunately, they're pretty easy to block by name and checksum.
The second and by far largest major category of KP on the net is softcore websites (nudity and sexually suggestive poses, but no penetration or sex acts), and reposts of same on Usenet. I'd always assumed this meant casual nudity (like nudist camp photos) but the guy I spoke with corrected me and said a lot of them are highly sexual poses and attire, with genital closeups. There are only a handful of major companies involved, each one runs multiple websites, and they tend to use the same limited number of "models" (i.e., exploited kids).
And "exploited" is the right word. Regardless of the fact that there's no penetration involved, these are poor kids making very little money for themselves and a shitload for the websites, and IMO it's similar to (tho not as bad as) parents selling their kids into prostitution. But in the areas where this occurs (largely but not exclusively former Soviet republics), it's legal, or in some cases just ignored because the cops are bribed or have bigger concerns to worry about (like actual child prostitution, organized crime, etc.)
The third category, appearing on Usenet and P2P networks but not the web, is hardcore material produced by the same evil fucks who are raping the kids. There's no money involved, but most of it is privately traded (or posted encrypted on Usenet with keys exchanged privately) and to be admitted to trading circles you either have to find rare content or produce your own stuff. So this *definitely*
If you are going to advocate preemption, perhaps you should learn what "proactive" means.
If you're on a plane, and terrorists take over the plane, putting your life on the line to resist (whether you know their intentions are not) is NOT proactive, it's reactive. You're reacting to aggression by the terrorists.
If you're on a plane and decide to start shooting all the brown people because they might be terrorists and might someday attack you, now THAT is proactive. Stupid, but proactive.
"This day and age" nothing. In this day and age, people in the US have an unprecedented level of safety and security. Terrorism is an insignificant risk compared to the threats that faced the architects and early defenders of democracy (or for that matter people just a few generations ago).
Well, no, and technically, the transformer substations aren't the power grid, and the switches aren't the phone network. But whether you're susceptible or not, it's not going to matter if your upstreams' routes dampen because they (like just about everyone) are using susceptible Cisco or Juniper routers.
The relevant parts of this vulnerability are 1) that RST attacks are much, much easier than formerly thought, making them possible for your average broadband sub, and 2) that BGP in particular is highly vulnerable, given the consequences of a terminated BGP session.
A recently published I-D (here) claims 200 seconds is sufficient time for a broadband sub to successfully attack a TCP session, provided their ISP doesn't use egress filtering (and way too few do so).
This is rather serious. Whether you personally aren't susceptible is irrelevant if your upstreams are.
You are either assuming that "there is no member of set S such that T" is itself a member of set S, or that all truths are morals (if all morals were truths but not all truths were morals, then it would be possible to have objective truths but no objective morals). You have failed to establish either of these. A statement about moral right or wrong is not inherently a moral, any more than a statement about dogs is inherently a dog. And "the set of real numbers R is closed under addition" is true but not a moral statement.
Unfortunately, people who try Freenet, decide it sucks, and then leave after a day or two are partly to blame for the problem.
If you read the documentation and the mailing list you'll find there are a few simple steps you can take that will dramatically improve the performance of your node:
Use the unstable network and release, not the stable network. Performance is at least an order of magnitude better. Make sure to get the unstable seednodes.ref too.
Keep your node online for at a week before assessing performance. It takes time for your routing table to fill. Trying links during this time does seem to speed this up, but don't be surprised if you have serious problems in the first week.
Increase your cache size to several GB. The recommendations on the website are way too low.
Change your browser settings as per the instructions (i.e., increase number of concurrent requests and timeout), otherwise you'll be waiting forever just because a key or two comes up missing. Oh, and don't use IE, it breaks any security Freenet offers.
If at all possible, run it on a spare box and accept the CPU load (and configure it to permit web access from your local network and nowhere else). It's a CPU hog, and will probably continue to be a CPU hog for awhile. The unstable release seems to be a lot better.
Keep it running as much as possible; whenever you go offline you adversely impact the net.
Follow the mailing list, you'll get recommendations for what settings to adjust and why.
Realize that whenever a lot of people try Freenet and then quit (e.g., when it's mentioned in slashdot), the performance of the network will go to hell for awhile.
Yes, you'll get some key lookup failures, but it's a lot better with the above. More problematic, I think, is the type of content that's available on Freenet. Anonymous and unblockable publishing and retrieval means anything and everything can appear, no matter how illegal or reprehensible. That's the price you pay for totally free speech. I'm still not entirely comfortable with that, and a lot of people think that price is way too high.
Can't believe I bothered to check if anyone responded to that post...
In eight sentences you've advocated burning all religious books and anything with symbolic violence, utterly misused the term "symbolism" to refer to advocacy (the latter being orthogonal to your original argument anyway; while fake fur may symbolize real fur it certainly isn't advocating it), and, tellingly, invoked the Holocaust.
I invoke Godwin's Law (look it up), ergo you lose. Before you try trolling again, you should really learn some finesse. Back in the glory days you would have been laughed off of Usenet.
Um, when the crack wears off, perhaps you should contemplate the implications of your argument.
OK, let's posit that killing animals for their fur is wrong (at least unless you need the fur). Now, you're saying that wearing fake fur is wrong because it's symbolic of the harming animals.
Fine. Now, hopefully you'll agree with me that murder, rape, assault, and other violent crimes are wrong because they hurt people. By your argument (if X is wrong, and Y is symbolic of X, Y is wrong), any literature and art which includes symbolism of these violent crimes is wrong. I assume then you'll be down at your local library checking out and burning every major work of literature since, and including, the Bible.
I don't know anyone who wears fake fur because it's symbolic of skinning an animal. I know lots of people who wear fake fur because it doesn't hurt any animals, they think it's pretty, they want to look stylish, and/or it feels nice after a couple hits of ecstasy. Given that I don't care if someone else wears a "fake person" costume, I certainly don't think the animals give a shit.
The first amendment does not guarantee that I have the right to say what I wish to you and make you pay for it. The cost of junk mail, telemarketing, etc. is paid by the sender. The cost of email is paid primarily by the recipient (and her or his ISP). And, of course, there is substantial precedent that limiting commercial speech is constitutional.
Oh, and your estimates of the waste of energy involved in spam are off by several orders of magnitude. Back of envelope calculations based on incoming mail volume, power consumption (which I've measured), and cluster size has 100,000 emails per day costing at least 10KWhr, and that's just on the receiving mail server cluster (it would be lower without redundancy, of course). Once you add in the sender and all intermediate hops I wouldn't be surprised if that figure doubled. And that's just the beginning; of all network services we run, email is by far the greatest suck of money, brains, and time.
Before you claim free speech in defense of spam again, perhaps you should spend some quality time with systems and network engineers, and see how un-free this "free speech" really is. I'd be glad to do so myself over the telephone... I assume given your argument you do take collect calls from everyone, right?
a "large portion" of a multi-billion dollar, heavily regulated industry with extensive record-keeping and age validation requirements is engaged in a criminal conspiracy of kidnapping and rape, and absolutely nobody in the industry has come forward to law enforcement or the media to speak about it despite the fact that much of this would be captured on camera (your theory)
or
Out of the endless stream of people willing to do "heavy" porn for money, some of them are good enough to do what B- and C-movie actors do every day, i.e., portray fear and humiliation well enough not to interrupt some people's suspension of disbelief... and even then, they occasionally need to look off camera for direction or to make sure they aren't screwing up (my theory)
Hmm. I think I'll stick with my theory, it requires less tinfoil.
It's just cheaper (not to mention less dangerous) to follow the law, and producers aren't going to waste money and risk disaster for no good reason. So yes, the "rape porn" is fake (why do it any other way?), the "hidden cam" stuff often isn't (a cheap camera and some fresh talent and you've got "hidden cam" porn), and the amateurs are plenty willing but not always what I'd call amateurs.
Desperation, exploitation, and people trading their self-respect for cash? That I'll believe. Industry-wide conspiracy, I don't. Of course, if you have any evidence to the contrary, other than having been convinced by bad plots and marketing, please present it to us... or better yet your local law enforcement officer.
(sheesh! next thing you'll be telling us that your mom seduced by that horrible MILF Hunter).
Amen to that. I've done, and continue to do, contract work for website and database backends for some adult businesses (I've never been fortunate or determined enough to wrangle it into a full-time job). The adult product and service industry has never struck me as being any more disreputable than any other. I've always been compensated fairly and treated with respect, which is better than I can say for most contract jobs I've done.
There are a lot of small businesses -- I hesitate to say "mom and pop outfits" tho you do see those occasionally;) -- who will bear the brunt of Ashcroft's pathological desire for control. Larry Flynt can afford the lawyers, somehow I doubt that Wifey's World (just an example, no I didn't do any work for them) can... and fucktarded bullies like Ashcroft always seem to go after the people who can't fight back.
Oh, and thank you for not spamming. Advertising responsibly is tough enough in any industry, but spammers just give pornographers a bad name.
You are simply in denial. You need to realize this.
I think you missed the word "inherently". Body piercing, makeup, and various clothing styles have different meanings in different cultures and subcultures. Hell, there was a time in Western culture when men got hot and bothered if they saw a woman's wrist.
Men are wired to respond to visual stimulation. Women are not.
And your evidence for this is? If you don't think women respond to visual stimulation, perhaps you should try hanging out with a few and wait until an attractive man passes by. If they know you well enough, you might get an earful about his package, not to mention his face, hair, abs, butt, shoulders,... and of course the chiselled jaw.
I know enough women who wear makeup regularly, and who do so even before going to an all-female environment, to think your view is a bit narrow here. In many places makeup is simply part of the cultural tradition of being an adult female. And among the women I know who wear makeup regularly (this is more common in the southern and rural US), the makeup style for seduction differs from that of everyday wear.
Makeup on men is pointless, and I think you're lying when you say businessmen use it to gain any sort of edge.
Well, I guess it's time for all those companies making men's hair dye to fess up they've been cooking the books this whole time, since obviously nobody's buying their products and they must by lying too. If that doesn't qualify (despite having exactly the same function), I know (straight) men who use makeup to cover facial blemishes especially before public appearances.
The person in need of help is the parent who thought it would be a good idea to allow their child to display a blatantly sexual signal.
No disagreement that the parent(s) need help, but a lot of people wear many different styles of makeup for many different reasons. A woman at a singles bar, a mime, a stage actor, and Tammy Faye Baker all wear makeup, but they all send very different signals. In the case of five-year-olds the only real signal I think they're sending is "my parents are freaks".
No, [halter tops and piercings] are a symptom of the quiet sexualization of society.
I don't agree there's a direct relationship. If Brittany Spears et al started wearing propeller beanies, millions of girls across the US would pester their parents until they wore them too. It may be sexual for Brittany, but I think most girls are just following fashion trends.
That wasn't my point. My point is, if you TRULY believe in that system, that SHOULD be your attitude.
Not at all. Children are not adults, as has already been discussed.
Furthermore, I think it's entirely appropriate for an individual (not a government) to try and convince another adult that a particular behaviour should be undertaken or avoided. If a friend of mine wanted to commit suicide, I might try to talk him or her out of it. That doesn't mean I have the right to kidnap him to stop it from happening, and it certainly doesn't mean the government has the right to intervene.
Illegal drugs ARE bad for you, etc.
Name me some activity that doesn't have a measure of risk. At least some illegal drugs are less dangerous than many societally sanctioned behaviours. And regardless of how dangerous a given drug may be, I see no compelling reason to prevent a free adult from taking it (excepting antimicrobials). We don't outlaw bungee jumping, hang gliding, or scuba diving; why should we outlaw cannabis, for example?
My bad, I should say that society is a macrocosm of the family, and that all its members are formed within a family. Hence, weak families make for a weak society.
I'm sorry, but that's not convincing. I don't accept that society is a macrocosm of "the" family (whose family?). Nor do I think it would follow that, even if society is a macrocosm of the family, the rules for families apply to society. Things change when you change scale; ask any quantum physicist.
Oh, you know, rampant drug and alchohol abuse
which occur regardless of the presence of laws (although I can't imagine how being an addict is worse than being an addict and in jail)
millions in jails
who wouldn't be there without vice laws. Even if society should intervene, rehab is a lot cheaper.
etc. etc.
Two examples and "etc". Nice handwaving. "Society" is very large, very complex, and full of subcultures with wildly different values and beliefs. Where you see "breakdown" I see the inevitable consequences of growth and complexity, compounded many times over by vice laws that shouldn't exist.
I think porn, by its nature views women as object.
I'll remember that the next time I'm looking at gay porn. Or female-dominant BDSM porn. Or lesbian porn intended for women. Or straight porn that emphasizes eroticism over exploitation (mind you, exploitation is in the mind of the exploited). Maybe you need to broaden your sample size.
Oh, and is it any worse (or better) to be treated as a sexual object than any other kind? At least two women I know who worked in the adult industry found those jobs far less demeaning than some minimum wage service jobs (and not because of sexual harassment).
Hence you have 8 year girls dressing like Britney Spears.
No, you have 8 year old girls dressing like Britney Spears because we have a consumer culture with a pathological fetishization of youth, and we have parents who yield responsibility for parenting to the teevee and then buy their kids whatever they want. I know plenty of families whose children do not currently, nor are ever likely to, dress like Britney Spears. I know others whose kids did dress like Britney, and grew out of it, no worse for the experience than a closet full of tacky clothes.
Re:Encryption ain't it all tapped out to be...
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Feds Want to Tap VoIP
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· Score: 1
Having followed you for awhile now, I'm not entirely sure what your agenda is, but I suspect you are either seriously misinformed or disingenuous.
Both the commonly used encryption software (e.g., GPG and openssl), and the algorithms (RSA, blowfish, twofish, etc.) have been subject to extensive peer review by some of the best minds in the business. If you have some background in mathematics, you can do so yourself, and I encourage you to take a look.
As for key generation, most systems (including linux) use a kernel-provided source of randomness; the truly paranoid can of course use a hardware-based random number generator. Again, the source code is available for review.
In order to deduce one key of an asymmetric pair from the other, one would need to be able to predict (in some fashion) the output of the random number generator. This same random number generator sees frequent use in applications demanding a high degree of randomness (e.g., neural networks). Were the randomness limited as you suggest, it would be quickly discovered.
If you have evidence of problems with the random number generator, asymmetric or symmetric ciphers, or GPG, please tell us. Otherwise, I trust my own, and others', review of the source and algorithms more than I trust unsubstantiated allegations. It would be far easier, and cheaper, for the government to insert a bug into your home than attack to software that's been subject to peer review for several years now.
1. Because if we don't, we can be fined, shut down, or go to jail. Yes, really.
2. To stop people from spamming you (intentionally or as zombies).
3. To identify viruses and inform customers (some of them, e.g. Welchia, wreak havoc with an extremely common brand of routers).
4. So our upstream providers don't drop us like a rock when we can't handle abuse reports.
5. For bandwidth metered billing (we don't, some do).
6. So when customer X calls and says "why can't I connect/get a DHCP lease/get to the web/etc" we can actually help them.
7. So we can catch and resolve problems with RADIUS or dhcpd.
If none of the above applied I wouldn't waste the disk space, because it's just not that thrilling to know that user jsmith had IP 1.2.3.4 yesterday at 15:00GMT. Of course, if you're paranoid, feel free to use Freenet, MUTE, or whatever.
A slippery slope argument isn't inherently fallacious (or inherently valid). If I recall correctly it's an inductive argument, and analogous to the idea (or myth) that if you put a frog in a pot of water and heat it up slowly enough, it won't know it's being cooked to death.
There are three assumptions, any or all of which may be true. First, people tend to adapt to changes to the status quo, and eventually come to view their new condition as normal. Second, there is a tendency for conditions to drift in one direction, as a result of human nature, the dynamics of bureaucracy or political power, or whatever (this assumption is IMO sometimes naive). Third, the end-point of this drift is unwanted. As a consequence of these three factors, over time the variable in question will tend towards a (usually unwanted) attractor point.
The slippery slope argument as applied to civil rights: First, although people may initially object to decreased civil rights, over time they (and especially their children) come to think of the condition of fewer civil rights as normal. Second, it is the nature of government (any kind of government) to increase the degree of control over the governed (e.g., pass an overreaching law, which is then exploited by a subsequent administration), and conversely curtail the rights of the governed. Third, having few or no civil rights sucks. Therefore, we ought to resist on principle all attempts by any government, democratic or not, to take away our rights.
Of course, sometimes the slippery slope works to one's advantage, e.g., decreasing gender gap in wages, more racial integration, etc. As people live, work, and interact with others different from themselves they (hopefully) begin to see those differences as less important than character or merit, and pass that to their own kids.
Of course the concern, or appeal, depends on whether the attractor point (zero civil rights, or a merit based culture, in the above two examples) is to your liking or not. For me it's no and yes, respectively, but YMMV.
My chief concern, in this particular case, is that this bill will inspire bills of this nature in the US. It's been my experience that US politicians tend to make a mess of things when they try to attack social or technological problems with laws (especially once Rep. Foozle from Bumblefuck County, and a hundred of his peers, attach riders to exempt every large corporation on the planet). I don't know the state of civil rights in the UK, and I'm not going to presume to object for people who have the right to speak up for themselves.
Bad example. Cyanide is used extensively in industry and there are some home uses. Mostly, home uses I'm aware of involve KFeCN -- don't recall the valence -- such as photography and growing pretty crystals (despite the name it's not particularly toxic as long as you keep it away from acids).
Should you be allowed to possess the chemical formula on how to manufacture cyanide?
The top secret formula? Add an acid to a cyanide salt. Congratulations, all you terrorists out there now know as much as a high-school chem student. As Kibo says, You're Allowed.
Should you only be prevented from actually making and storing cyanide?
I'm storing a cyanide salt right now, perfectly legally. I purchased it from a photography supply store which sold it legally. With effort, I could make it into a weapon, but I can think of much better things to do with it. For that matter, I could do the same with fertilizer and diesel, or gunpoweder, or about a gazillion other things. But then, last time I checked, I wasn't a sociopath.
We'll never be able to prevent terrorists or murderers (or recreational drug chemists, whom I don't put in the same category) from knowing basic chemistry, and there are just too many widely available precusors for things like cyanide or explosives.
It's an entirely different issue than gun control. Many gun murders are crimes of passion or opportunity. Crimes involving poisons or home-made explosives are almost exclusively premeditated.
I think the key here for a lot of people is "can't afford new gear". For the amateur (and for that matter some artists I know who aren't exactly rolling in cash) digital P&S is reasonably priced but a digital SLR isn't. And while P&S cameras are convenient -- I love my (film) Yashica -- they don't really have the flexibility of SLRs.
Then too, there are some things I can do with a film camera that may not even be possible with a digital (tho I'm not sure of this) -- extreme exposure times and use in low temperatures come to mind. I've also blown 35mm up to poster size with good results, I'm not sure how well that would go with digital (again, at least in my price range).
I'm not doubting that digital is better for catalogs, magazines, ad copy, etc., in fact it really sounds like an ideal fit for the problem domain. And I certainly look forward to digital SLRs coming down in price. But I suspect that there will always be cases where film is preferrable for technical or financial reasons (as opposed to romance or nostalgia).
Besides, everyone knows that when you go to document that alien landing, the EMP will knock out digital cameras.;)
Contrary to popular belief, "Ebonics" is not a "degenerate" dialect. Among other interesting characteristics, it has tense forms not present in English. It's also not new, although the term "Ebonics" is. It also predates the term "Ebonics" (African American Vernacular English is the official term according to my dictionary). IANAL (linguist) but I believe the technical term is a creole (named, obviously, from Creole).
Further, the original purpose in promoting the recognition of "Ebonics" in schools was not to teach it as a foreign language (although I've known a few linguistic students who studied it extensively, thankfully science occasionally puts scholarship ahead of politcs). Instead, the original purpose was to be familiar with the dialect so as to facilitate the teaching of standard English. In this sense, it's no different than being familiar with, say, Spanish, if one were teaching English to children who spoke Spanish as a first language.
Whether this purpose was maintained once the politicians got ahold of things is doubtful; it certainly wasn't once the media did.
Well, I'm only 18 hours too late... but since you asked:
Non-optimistic memory allocation is almost always the Wrong Thing. Consider, for example, forking. Forking in just about every modern Unix (Linux included) is done with copy-on-write, so you don't copy the entire address space from the parent, just those pages that get dorked with. If you were to force the kernel to ensure every allocated page were available to a process and its children, your process spawning (and reaping) speed would drop through the floor, and you'd need a 60GB swap drive for a webserver.
If you really care, write your own allocation library (or better yet, hack glibc's malloc and link it in at runtime with LD_LIBRARY_PATH or LD_PRELOAD or whatever). You might be able to use mlock if you're running as root, if not, just touch a byte in each page after brk(). Of course you'll still see processes (possibly yours) eat it if you run out of memory, so you might want to follow/proc/meminfo during page touching and abort if things get ugly. Oh, and kindly warn everyone else in big 8-point type that your code doesn't play well with others.;)
Or don't bother, and realize that if the system is going to run out of memory AND swap, being screwed early is rarely that much better than being screwed later. Either way, you're still screwed.
Slashdot Mirror
Various facilities running on the net offer substantially enhanced anonymity, usually at the expense of performance; examples include Freenet, Invisible IRC (which I'm not terribly familiar with), and mixmaster-based remailers. It's not generally possible (without advanced methods and considerable effort, if at all) to determine the source and destination of a given message. I'm not familiar with more recent anonymous P2P networks, although I'll admit to some skepticism, Freenet's been working on this for years and it's not as easy as it sounds.
If by "stronger" the parent means "more reliable" then this is obviously true; TCP is more reliable than IP by design.
Oh, and I am grateful that the police put their lives on the line to protect the citizens against violent criminals (I wish they didn't have to waste their time on vice crimes ... I'll change my mind the day Amsterdam dissolves into chaos ... which hasn't happened yet!)
I assume by "she" you're referring to a child (as I was when I suggested harm) ... I don't have a problem with adults doing anything they like with other adults, whether there's money involved or not.
No evidence is no evidence. Agreed, that doesn't mean there isn't any harm, but it does mean the onus is on people who say there is harm to back up their claims with evidence or argument.
I don't think it's currently possible to untangle the effects of photographing a child nude in a sexual pose from the other unfortunate ways in which these children suffer, e.g., chaotic environments, poverty, and sexual exploitation. Tho I'd like to see how the non-nude "teen models" are faring in about ten years, because if there's harm from sexually suggestive nudity (and I believe there is) I suspect it's got more to do with the sexual part than the nudity.
As for arguments, among those I've encountered are that children who are photographed nude for softcore KP are exploited as child laborers, develop an abnormal and dysfunctional view of sexuality, and are perceptive of (and affected by) their adult employers' negative and exploitive relationship to them. I find the last rather compelling; it's been my experience that children are quite perceptive, at an emotional level at least, of how others perceive and relate to them. Given that early experiences shape brain development I think it's entirely appropriate to err on the side of caution.
However, the age of consent is not decreasing with this current reality. This only compounds the problem as individuals are being locked away, then branded as sex offenders for the rest of their life upon release, for having sex with sexually mature individuals that are below the official age of consent.
It's true that laws in the US don't distinguish between ephebophilia (wish I could find that in my dictionary to verify spelling) and pedophilia. And I would agree that they should, because the statistics would be useful and strategies for prevention probably differ. That's beside the point. The age of consent is based upon emotional and intellectual maturity, not physical maturity. Whether you are physically capable of having sex with an adult isn't at issue; at issue is whether you are sufficiently emotionally mature (e.g., to recognize when you are being manipulated or taken advantage of, or to make rational choices, or to take responsibility for your actions).
I disagree. It is hard to determine the mind of evolution.
You misunderstood me. I said "It's not so understandable". I did not say "it is impossible". There may be some way in which pedophilia makes evolutionary sense (tho I doubt), but it's not obvious in the way that ephebophilia is.
The Bonobo Chimps often have intergenerational sexual activity
Please document that bonobo adults engage in sexual activity with preadolescents and that this behaviour is culturally sanctioned. Your link was simply a brief overview of the bonobos, and I've never heard your claim before (for all I know you may be right, I just haven't heard that). If it does occur, I'm not sure it's relevant to the issue of evolutionary fitness in humans; our culture is rather different from bonobo culture, so what's harmful for us may not be for them.
Homosexuality too does not seem, on the face of it, to have any evolutionary advantages.
Not that it's relevant, but I've read several good hypotheses on just that subject. It's a bit less opaque when you realize that group survival is important to individual survival, especially in higher primates where it takes a long time to reach maturity.
Pedophilia seems even more common then homosexuality in the population
Sorry, I'm going to call you on that one, because that's a hell of a claim to make (unless you broaden pedophilia to include attraction to unde
It's worth noting a few things here. There's clearly a difference between a picture of a woman casually naked (e.g., what you might find in National Geographic) and a picture of, for example, a woman in stockings and heels holding her vagina open and licking her lips, as one might find in your average softcore magazine (to the extent they haven't all gone out of business). If I recall correctly the phrase the LEO used to describe the softcore porn of KP websites was "Penthouse beaver shots".
Outside of other factors I don't see any reason why children in National Geographic style nudity are harmed in any way. I'm not convinced the same is true for Penthouse style nudity. I haven't seen solid evidence so I can't claim statistical support for my concern, but I'll be a lot happier when CGI gets good/cheap enough to make this whole question moot.
One other point. The age of puberty has been steadily declining (as a result of better nutrition, and yes it happens to people fed hormone-free meat too). The age at which one is emotionally mature has IMO been increasing as well (possibly because society has become more complex tho I'm guessing here), but that's harder to measure. What we're left with are people who become fertile at a much younger age (and much less mature) than when our behaviour evolved.
Being attracted to a pubescent, but underage, person isn't technically pedophilia; there's another term for it (ephebophilia?). The terms are distinct because the populations (pedophiles and ephebophiles) are largely distinct. It's understandable from an evolutionary perspective to be attracted to someone who has entered puberty and is fertile; the brain (at least the male brain) is wired to recognize secondary sexual characteristics. It's not so understandable to be attracted to a four year old, and be aware that the children in softcore KP are frequently that young.
And the difference between casual nudity (i.e., the sort of photo your parents likely have of you) and preteen beaver shots is largely intent. I don't think that should matter from a legal perspective (intent can be hard to prove), although I think it certainly does from a moral perspective. I also suspect that a child who spends a good deal of their childhood emulating adult porn is going to grow up with a warped sense of sexuality, but then again it beats starving to death.
I built and manage a Usenet binaries site (one of the original ones, but now sadly in need of an update and, since Cidera bit it, not terribly complete). A lot of pure Usenet servers (no binaries decoding) make all newsgroups available under the hope that common carrier law will apply if (when) the shit hits the fan, but we suspected early on that common carrier law wouldn't apply as we were decoding and thumbnailing images. Thus, one of the first things I did when I wrote the code was to create an MD5 checksum database to block images. Anything that appeared in a known KP group would be be checksummed and added to the database, and anything anywhere else with a checksum in the database would be blocked (a good idea, since pedophiles change newsgroups frequently, and commonly take over abandoned groups in alt.*). New or newly active newsgroups were quarantined, no image decoding but with the subject lines presented in a report for our review. We could tell fairly quickly whether a newsgroup should go into the blocklist just based on the subject lines and content filenames.
A few years ago I had occasion to speak to law enforcement (police and FBI) who were investigating someone for KP possession, and he had a subscription to our site. They decided we weren't the source (biggest sigh of relief in my life) but were interested in our blacklist system and wanted a copy of our blacklist database. I spoke with one guy (FBI if I recall correctly) for an hour or so and I got to hear more than I ever wanted to know about KP on the net. Here's what he told me. He seemed to know what he was talking about (and seemed to be rather discouraged by the whole mess) but for all I know it could be bullshit.
There are three major sources of KP on the net. The first, present in Usenet but not on the web, is scans from magazines and such that were, at one time, legal to possess, but were criminalized during the Reagan administration (I think). As you might imagine the sickos who had stacks of "lolita" magazines weren't exactly rushing to turn them in to the cops. Once scanners became available, people started scanning in images and distributing them. Now, the original scanners' series are passed back and forth endlessly on Usenet and probably will be until the end of time. Fortunately, they're pretty easy to block by name and checksum.
The second and by far largest major category of KP on the net is softcore websites (nudity and sexually suggestive poses, but no penetration or sex acts), and reposts of same on Usenet. I'd always assumed this meant casual nudity (like nudist camp photos) but the guy I spoke with corrected me and said a lot of them are highly sexual poses and attire, with genital closeups. There are only a handful of major companies involved, each one runs multiple websites, and they tend to use the same limited number of "models" (i.e., exploited kids).
And "exploited" is the right word. Regardless of the fact that there's no penetration involved, these are poor kids making very little money for themselves and a shitload for the websites, and IMO it's similar to (tho not as bad as) parents selling their kids into prostitution. But in the areas where this occurs (largely but not exclusively former Soviet republics), it's legal, or in some cases just ignored because the cops are bribed or have bigger concerns to worry about (like actual child prostitution, organized crime, etc.)
The third category, appearing on Usenet and P2P networks but not the web, is hardcore material produced by the same evil fucks who are raping the kids. There's no money involved, but most of it is privately traded (or posted encrypted on Usenet with keys exchanged privately) and to be admitted to trading circles you either have to find rare content or produce your own stuff. So this *definitely*
If you're on a plane, and terrorists take over the plane, putting your life on the line to resist (whether you know their intentions are not) is NOT proactive, it's reactive. You're reacting to aggression by the terrorists.
If you're on a plane and decide to start shooting all the brown people because they might be terrorists and might someday attack you, now THAT is proactive. Stupid, but proactive.
"This day and age" nothing. In this day and age, people in the US have an unprecedented level of safety and security. Terrorism is an insignificant risk compared to the threats that faced the architects and early defenders of democracy (or for that matter people just a few generations ago).
Well, no, and technically, the transformer substations aren't the power grid, and the switches aren't the phone network. But whether you're susceptible or not, it's not going to matter if your upstreams' routes dampen because they (like just about everyone) are using susceptible Cisco or Juniper routers.
A recently published I-D (here) claims 200 seconds is sufficient time for a broadband sub to successfully attack a TCP session, provided their ISP doesn't use egress filtering (and way too few do so).
This is rather serious. Whether you personally aren't susceptible is irrelevant if your upstreams are.
You are either assuming that "there is no member of set S such that T" is itself a member of set S, or that all truths are morals (if all morals were truths but not all truths were morals, then it would be possible to have objective truths but no objective morals). You have failed to establish either of these. A statement about moral right or wrong is not inherently a moral, any more than a statement about dogs is inherently a dog. And "the set of real numbers R is closed under addition" is true but not a moral statement.
If you read the documentation and the mailing list you'll find there are a few simple steps you can take that will dramatically improve the performance of your node:
Yes, you'll get some key lookup failures, but it's a lot better with the above. More problematic, I think, is the type of content that's available on Freenet. Anonymous and unblockable publishing and retrieval means anything and everything can appear, no matter how illegal or reprehensible. That's the price you pay for totally free speech. I'm still not entirely comfortable with that, and a lot of people think that price is way too high.
In eight sentences you've advocated burning all religious books and anything with symbolic violence, utterly misused the term "symbolism" to refer to advocacy (the latter being orthogonal to your original argument anyway; while fake fur may symbolize real fur it certainly isn't advocating it), and, tellingly, invoked the Holocaust.
I invoke Godwin's Law (look it up), ergo you lose. Before you try trolling again, you should really learn some finesse. Back in the glory days you would have been laughed off of Usenet.
OK, let's posit that killing animals for their fur is wrong (at least unless you need the fur). Now, you're saying that wearing fake fur is wrong because it's symbolic of the harming animals.
Fine. Now, hopefully you'll agree with me that murder, rape, assault, and other violent crimes are wrong because they hurt people. By your argument (if X is wrong, and Y is symbolic of X, Y is wrong), any literature and art which includes symbolism of these violent crimes is wrong. I assume then you'll be down at your local library checking out and burning every major work of literature since, and including, the Bible.
I don't know anyone who wears fake fur because it's symbolic of skinning an animal. I know lots of people who wear fake fur because it doesn't hurt any animals, they think it's pretty, they want to look stylish, and/or it feels nice after a couple hits of ecstasy. Given that I don't care if someone else wears a "fake person" costume, I certainly don't think the animals give a shit.
Oh, and your estimates of the waste of energy involved in spam are off by several orders of magnitude. Back of envelope calculations based on incoming mail volume, power consumption (which I've measured), and cluster size has 100,000 emails per day costing at least 10KWhr, and that's just on the receiving mail server cluster (it would be lower without redundancy, of course). Once you add in the sender and all intermediate hops I wouldn't be surprised if that figure doubled. And that's just the beginning; of all network services we run, email is by far the greatest suck of money, brains, and time.
Before you claim free speech in defense of spam again, perhaps you should spend some quality time with systems and network engineers, and see how un-free this "free speech" really is. I'd be glad to do so myself over the telephone ... I assume given your argument you do take collect calls from everyone, right?
a "large portion" of a multi-billion dollar, heavily regulated industry with extensive record-keeping and age validation requirements is engaged in a criminal conspiracy of kidnapping and rape, and absolutely nobody in the industry has come forward to law enforcement or the media to speak about it despite the fact that much of this would be captured on camera (your theory)
or
Out of the endless stream of people willing to do "heavy" porn for money, some of them are good enough to do what B- and C-movie actors do every day, i.e., portray fear and humiliation well enough not to interrupt some people's suspension of disbelief ... and even then, they occasionally need to look off camera for direction or to make sure they aren't screwing up (my theory)
Hmm. I think I'll stick with my theory, it requires less tinfoil.
It's just cheaper (not to mention less dangerous) to follow the law, and producers aren't going to waste money and risk disaster for no good reason. So yes, the "rape porn" is fake (why do it any other way?), the "hidden cam" stuff often isn't (a cheap camera and some fresh talent and you've got "hidden cam" porn), and the amateurs are plenty willing but not always what I'd call amateurs.
Desperation, exploitation, and people trading their self-respect for cash? That I'll believe. Industry-wide conspiracy, I don't. Of course, if you have any evidence to the contrary, other than having been convinced by bad plots and marketing, please present it to us ... or better yet your local law enforcement officer.
(sheesh! next thing you'll be telling us that your mom seduced by that horrible MILF Hunter).
There are a lot of small businesses -- I hesitate to say "mom and pop outfits" tho you do see those occasionally ;) -- who will bear the brunt of Ashcroft's pathological desire for control. Larry Flynt can afford the lawyers, somehow I doubt that Wifey's World (just an example, no I didn't do any work for them) can ... and fucktarded bullies like Ashcroft always seem to go after the people who can't fight back.
Oh, and thank you for not spamming. Advertising responsibly is tough enough in any industry, but spammers just give pornographers a bad name.
I think you missed the word "inherently". Body piercing, makeup, and various clothing styles have different meanings in different cultures and subcultures. Hell, there was a time in Western culture when men got hot and bothered if they saw a woman's wrist.
Men are wired to respond to visual stimulation. Women are not.
And your evidence for this is? If you don't think women respond to visual stimulation, perhaps you should try hanging out with a few and wait until an attractive man passes by. If they know you well enough, you might get an earful about his package, not to mention his face, hair, abs, butt, shoulders, ... and of course the chiselled jaw.
I know enough women who wear makeup regularly, and who do so even before going to an all-female environment, to think your view is a bit narrow here. In many places makeup is simply part of the cultural tradition of being an adult female. And among the women I know who wear makeup regularly (this is more common in the southern and rural US), the makeup style for seduction differs from that of everyday wear.
Makeup on men is pointless, and I think you're lying when you say businessmen use it to gain any sort of edge.
Well, I guess it's time for all those companies making men's hair dye to fess up they've been cooking the books this whole time, since obviously nobody's buying their products and they must by lying too. If that doesn't qualify (despite having exactly the same function), I know (straight) men who use makeup to cover facial blemishes especially before public appearances.
The person in need of help is the parent who thought it would be a good idea to allow their child to display a blatantly sexual signal.
No disagreement that the parent(s) need help, but a lot of people wear many different styles of makeup for many different reasons. A woman at a singles bar, a mime, a stage actor, and Tammy Faye Baker all wear makeup, but they all send very different signals. In the case of five-year-olds the only real signal I think they're sending is "my parents are freaks".
No, [halter tops and piercings] are a symptom of the quiet sexualization of society.
I don't agree there's a direct relationship. If Brittany Spears et al started wearing propeller beanies, millions of girls across the US would pester their parents until they wore them too. It may be sexual for Brittany, but I think most girls are just following fashion trends.
Not at all. Children are not adults, as has already been discussed.
Furthermore, I think it's entirely appropriate for an individual (not a government) to try and convince another adult that a particular behaviour should be undertaken or avoided. If a friend of mine wanted to commit suicide, I might try to talk him or her out of it. That doesn't mean I have the right to kidnap him to stop it from happening, and it certainly doesn't mean the government has the right to intervene.
Illegal drugs ARE bad for you, etc.
Name me some activity that doesn't have a measure of risk. At least some illegal drugs are less dangerous than many societally sanctioned behaviours. And regardless of how dangerous a given drug may be, I see no compelling reason to prevent a free adult from taking it (excepting antimicrobials). We don't outlaw bungee jumping, hang gliding, or scuba diving; why should we outlaw cannabis, for example?
My bad, I should say that society is a macrocosm of the family, and that all its members are formed within a family. Hence, weak families make for a weak society.
I'm sorry, but that's not convincing. I don't accept that society is a macrocosm of "the" family (whose family?). Nor do I think it would follow that, even if society is a macrocosm of the family, the rules for families apply to society. Things change when you change scale; ask any quantum physicist.
Oh, you know, rampant drug and alchohol abuse
which occur regardless of the presence of laws (although I can't imagine how being an addict is worse than being an addict and in jail)
millions in jails
who wouldn't be there without vice laws. Even if society should intervene, rehab is a lot cheaper.
etc. etc.
Two examples and "etc". Nice handwaving. "Society" is very large, very complex, and full of subcultures with wildly different values and beliefs. Where you see "breakdown" I see the inevitable consequences of growth and complexity, compounded many times over by vice laws that shouldn't exist.
I think porn, by its nature views women as object.
I'll remember that the next time I'm looking at gay porn. Or female-dominant BDSM porn. Or lesbian porn intended for women. Or straight porn that emphasizes eroticism over exploitation (mind you, exploitation is in the mind of the exploited). Maybe you need to broaden your sample size.
Oh, and is it any worse (or better) to be treated as a sexual object than any other kind? At least two women I know who worked in the adult industry found those jobs far less demeaning than some minimum wage service jobs (and not because of sexual harassment).
Hence you have 8 year girls dressing like Britney Spears.
No, you have 8 year old girls dressing like Britney Spears because we have a consumer culture with a pathological fetishization of youth, and we have parents who yield responsibility for parenting to the teevee and then buy their kids whatever they want. I know plenty of families whose children do not currently, nor are ever likely to, dress like Britney Spears. I know others whose kids did dress like Britney, and grew out of it, no worse for the experience than a closet full of tacky clothes.
Both the commonly used encryption software (e.g., GPG and openssl), and the algorithms (RSA, blowfish, twofish, etc.) have been subject to extensive peer review by some of the best minds in the business. If you have some background in mathematics, you can do so yourself, and I encourage you to take a look.
As for key generation, most systems (including linux) use a kernel-provided source of randomness; the truly paranoid can of course use a hardware-based random number generator. Again, the source code is available for review.
In order to deduce one key of an asymmetric pair from the other, one would need to be able to predict (in some fashion) the output of the random number generator. This same random number generator sees frequent use in applications demanding a high degree of randomness (e.g., neural networks). Were the randomness limited as you suggest, it would be quickly discovered.
If you have evidence of problems with the random number generator, asymmetric or symmetric ciphers, or GPG, please tell us. Otherwise, I trust my own, and others', review of the source and algorithms more than I trust unsubstantiated allegations. It would be far easier, and cheaper, for the government to insert a bug into your home than attack to software that's been subject to peer review for several years now.
1. Because if we don't, we can be fined, shut down, or go to jail. Yes, really.
2. To stop people from spamming you (intentionally or as zombies).
3. To identify viruses and inform customers (some of them, e.g. Welchia, wreak havoc with an extremely common brand of routers).
4. So our upstream providers don't drop us like a rock when we can't handle abuse reports.
5. For bandwidth metered billing (we don't, some do).
6. So when customer X calls and says "why can't I connect/get a DHCP lease/get to the web/etc" we can actually help them.
7. So we can catch and resolve problems with RADIUS or dhcpd.
If none of the above applied I wouldn't waste the disk space, because it's just not that thrilling to know that user jsmith had IP 1.2.3.4 yesterday at 15:00GMT. Of course, if you're paranoid, feel free to use Freenet, MUTE, or whatever.
A slippery slope argument isn't inherently fallacious (or inherently valid). If I recall correctly it's an inductive argument, and analogous to the idea (or myth) that if you put a frog in a pot of water and heat it up slowly enough, it won't know it's being cooked to death.
There are three assumptions, any or all of which may be true. First, people tend to adapt to changes to the status quo, and eventually come to view their new condition as normal. Second, there is a tendency for conditions to drift in one direction, as a result of human nature, the dynamics of bureaucracy or political power, or whatever (this assumption is IMO sometimes naive). Third, the end-point of this drift is unwanted. As a consequence of these three factors, over time the variable in question will tend towards a (usually unwanted) attractor point.
The slippery slope argument as applied to civil rights: First, although people may initially object to decreased civil rights, over time they (and especially their children) come to think of the condition of fewer civil rights as normal. Second, it is the nature of government (any kind of government) to increase the degree of control over the governed (e.g., pass an overreaching law, which is then exploited by a subsequent administration), and conversely curtail the rights of the governed. Third, having few or no civil rights sucks. Therefore, we ought to resist on principle all attempts by any government, democratic or not, to take away our rights.
Of course, sometimes the slippery slope works to one's advantage, e.g., decreasing gender gap in wages, more racial integration, etc. As people live, work, and interact with others different from themselves they (hopefully) begin to see those differences as less important than character or merit, and pass that to their own kids.
Of course the concern, or appeal, depends on whether the attractor point (zero civil rights, or a merit based culture, in the above two examples) is to your liking or not. For me it's no and yes, respectively, but YMMV.
My chief concern, in this particular case, is that this bill will inspire bills of this nature in the US. It's been my experience that US politicians tend to make a mess of things when they try to attack social or technological problems with laws (especially once Rep. Foozle from Bumblefuck County, and a hundred of his peers, attach riders to exempt every large corporation on the planet). I don't know the state of civil rights in the UK, and I'm not going to presume to object for people who have the right to speak up for themselves.
Bad example. Cyanide is used extensively in industry and there are some home uses. Mostly, home uses I'm aware of involve KFeCN -- don't recall the valence -- such as photography and growing pretty crystals (despite the name it's not particularly toxic as long as you keep it away from acids).
Should you be allowed to possess the chemical formula on how to manufacture cyanide?
The top secret formula? Add an acid to a cyanide salt. Congratulations, all you terrorists out there now know as much as a high-school chem student. As Kibo says, You're Allowed.
Should you only be prevented from actually making and storing cyanide?
I'm storing a cyanide salt right now, perfectly legally. I purchased it from a photography supply store which sold it legally. With effort, I could make it into a weapon, but I can think of much better things to do with it. For that matter, I could do the same with fertilizer and diesel, or gunpoweder, or about a gazillion other things. But then, last time I checked, I wasn't a sociopath.
We'll never be able to prevent terrorists or murderers (or recreational drug chemists, whom I don't put in the same category) from knowing basic chemistry, and there are just too many widely available precusors for things like cyanide or explosives.
It's an entirely different issue than gun control. Many gun murders are crimes of passion or opportunity. Crimes involving poisons or home-made explosives are almost exclusively premeditated.
Then too, there are some things I can do with a film camera that may not even be possible with a digital (tho I'm not sure of this) -- extreme exposure times and use in low temperatures come to mind. I've also blown 35mm up to poster size with good results, I'm not sure how well that would go with digital (again, at least in my price range).
I'm not doubting that digital is better for catalogs, magazines, ad copy, etc., in fact it really sounds like an ideal fit for the problem domain. And I certainly look forward to digital SLRs coming down in price. But I suspect that there will always be cases where film is preferrable for technical or financial reasons (as opposed to romance or nostalgia).
Besides, everyone knows that when you go to document that alien landing, the EMP will knock out digital cameras. ;)
Further, the original purpose in promoting the recognition of "Ebonics" in schools was not to teach it as a foreign language (although I've known a few linguistic students who studied it extensively, thankfully science occasionally puts scholarship ahead of politcs). Instead, the original purpose was to be familiar with the dialect so as to facilitate the teaching of standard English. In this sense, it's no different than being familiar with, say, Spanish, if one were teaching English to children who spoke Spanish as a first language.
Whether this purpose was maintained once the politicians got ahold of things is doubtful; it certainly wasn't once the media did.
Non-optimistic memory allocation is almost always the Wrong Thing. Consider, for example, forking. Forking in just about every modern Unix (Linux included) is done with copy-on-write, so you don't copy the entire address space from the parent, just those pages that get dorked with. If you were to force the kernel to ensure every allocated page were available to a process and its children, your process spawning (and reaping) speed would drop through the floor, and you'd need a 60GB swap drive for a webserver.
If you really care, write your own allocation library (or better yet, hack glibc's malloc and link it in at runtime with LD_LIBRARY_PATH or LD_PRELOAD or whatever). You might be able to use mlock if you're running as root, if not, just touch a byte in each page after brk(). Of course you'll still see processes (possibly yours) eat it if you run out of memory, so you might want to follow /proc/meminfo during page touching and abort if things get ugly. Oh, and kindly warn everyone else in big 8-point type that your code doesn't play well with others. ;)
Or don't bother, and realize that if the system is going to run out of memory AND swap, being screwed early is rarely that much better than being screwed later. Either way, you're still screwed.