"Any port in a storm" applies to ships at sea, because a ship can only be one place at a time.
"Any port in a storm" applies to any situation where you can choose between unpleasant company and certain death.
An employee stuck in a metaphorical storm off the metaphorical horn of Africa, on the other hand, has the luxury of finding out whether there's a storm off Lisbon too, and if there isn't, the employee can miraculously teleport there rather than sailing on through the storm.
The problem is that in the globalized laissez-faire clusterfuck, the waves will also teleport. None of the seven seas are safe, and won't be for a while, if ever.
Losing your job is like getting washed overboard: sure, you can in theory be picked into another ship before you drown, but don't count on that. A ship led by a rabid baboon who whips his crew for fun is still better than a wet grave, right ?
Simple example to show the flaw in your logic. You think viewing numbers for a program like House in now reflect the future production of the show? Of course they do, just like with EVERYTHING ELSE.
Everywhere where viewing allows the makers to make money off their product, yes. I did specify the precondition that the viewer does not pay for CP. Do you have some kind of reading comprehension problem ?
Of course you're not a pedophile as watching child porn doesn't seem to fit your definition of that.
I don't watch child porn.
Since you don't seem to have anything but ad hominems to add, I'm not going to bother arguing with you any further. Have a good life, witch hunter.
You're an idiot and your circular logic is pathetic.
Your ad hominem, on the other hand, is the height of intellectual brilliance. You forgot to show where, exactly speaking, is this logical error you speak of.
Yes, if no one watched child porn it would continue to be made. Yes, watching something in no way contributes to it's supply.
I doubt the former - some people might tape their exploits - but the latter is correct. Well done, you've finally gotten the concept of causality down: you watching someone's deeds after the fact doesn't affect them. You paying him money to watch them might convince him to repeat them, but merely viewing them doesn't.
I think only one group of people defend those who watch child porn with such a stupid argument and I bet you know who they are.
Did you mean that as another ad hominem or an argument from intimidation ? Or both ?
But no, I'm not a witch. Or a pedophile. Crawl back to Salem, Mather.
The state-worshipper advocates violence against anyone who dares disagree with him. Typical. So typical.
Considering the poverty, misery and disaster that free market fundamentalism has led to, it really should come as no surprise that people advocating it are meeting increasing hostility from its victims. That these zealots often make it clear that they want to remove social security and make the poor beg for a living doesn't help either.
"Let them eat cake" once sparked a revolution and cost its speaker her head; that's something that's healthy to remember. Most people don't want to live in a jungle ruled by the heaviest gorilla; and the only known alternative is a strong state which can keep King Kong in check.
This "idea" from Congress is the equivalent of breaking all the windows in your house, just so you can keep the glass-makers employed. It is the exact *opposite* of productivity. It is wasteful. Like burning money.
Well, if one is inclined to be charitable, it could be considered more like paying people to replace their old drafty single-panes with new triple-pane windows.
PLUS every new car built costs the energy equivalent of 50,000 miles of gasoline (2000 gallons). It is better for the environment to keep older cars operational than to waste energy/resources building new ones.
Maybe. But keeping old cars operational is not costless either. You need to replace rusted parts and make increasingly intensive maintenance operations as the years wear them down.
Not that any of this actually matters. The nasty thing about global economy is that problems somewhere cause cascade reactions everywhere; consequently, any attempt to help national economy is doomed, since the problems in the rest of the world will drag it down. It would require coordinated efforts from all industrial nations to actually get anything done, but that's not going to happen, since everyone is too busy looking after their own interests to worry about common good.
I'm glad I didn't think that way about my first ex-wife or my first car, which was a Chevy Vega. It's OK to lose some history. That's what photographs are for.
The poor who can't find a Used Junker end up staying poor and often go on welfare. I'm all for the environment but not at the expense of humans, especially the disadvantaged poor.
This rises a question: why do cars cost so much ? I see them competing on looks, "sportiness", extra equipment etc. but never on price. How much would a car designed to be cheap (which, obviously, includes being energy efficient) with nothing extra (not even a radio) cost ?
That might be something for auto makers to consider.
In theory you could have something that resisted acceleration, but had zero or negative gravitational mass.
Not unless Einstein was wrong. After all, in General Relativity, things fall because mass and energy cause space to curve, so a straight path through it will curve towards all other straight paths. This means that if you are holding something in your hands, from its point of view, you aren't holding it stationary; you are accelerating it upwards at the rate of 9.81m/s^2. Its mass resist acceleration, and you feel this resistance as its weight.
TL;DR: in General Relativity, inertial mass and gravitational mass are a single variable which of course can't be unequal to itself.
Not unless he pays for it. In fact the producer is unlikely to even know that someone's viewing his stuff otherwise. How could he ?
You're whole premise is that if no one watched child porn it would still exist.
No, my premise is that it's better for everyone that pedophiles sit on front of their computers viewing child porn than prowling the streets looking for someone to molest.
Yes, the person viewing child porn may not be out molesting, but he's viewing a child being molested... So in the end, you're still getting children being molested and filmed.
He's viewing a child being molested, or some more or less accurate facsimile of it. Whatever he's viewing, if it's real, it's already happened, and his viewing of it doesn't affect it at all anymore, unless the laws of causality have been overthrown. So why punish him from it ?
Go after producers, leave consumers alone; the existing material won't disappear, and with advancing state of the art in 3D software, it's just a matter of time before more can be produced without harming anyone.
Unless of course, you think it's reasonable to throw a few kids into the fire to potentially lower child molestation rates in other parts of the world/country, thus taking the burden completely off the paedophile.
No, I'm suggesting making the "masturbating to existing child porn" a safe option and "molesting children" a non-safe option, thus giving anyone interested in children an incentive to do the former instead of latter.
It's because production of Child Porn hurts children.
So make that illegal, but leave the viewers alone. Presumably there's such material already in existence, and in plentiful numbers according to all the fearmongers, so the pedophiles would not run out of material even if nothing new ever got produced.
But of course it is simple to produce child porn without hurting children: lolicon is infamous, and computer graphics are on the verge of photorealism, even on consumer grade equipment. And in future, with advancing robotics, who knows ? Maybe we could come up with robotic lovers to solve this problem once and for all; but if we did, the moral, upright people would no doubt pass a law to keep them from being made in the form of children, thus ensuring that real ones will keep on getting molested, all in the name of protecting them.
And let's not focus on the government here, let's focus on the scum that brought this about; the child abusing kiddy porn people.
The pretext for this filter was preventing people from viewing child porn. It is not aimed against child molesters or the people who produce child porn. It's aimed - or so the government claims - against Joe Masturbator, not Joe Predator. Hell, if it's successful, it might even turn a few of the former into the latter due to mounting frustration.
Yes, some people will always find a way to do evil but let's make it as difficult as reasonably possible for them.
By, for example, preventing them from hiding their evil deeds with censorship ?
The only thing we need to implement a fully encrypted internet is a reason to do so.
Well, that and the unwillingness of a government to simply block all encryption which doesn't have a built-in backdoor, or isn't going to a host in a whitelist of approved sites.
More people should read "the art of war" and concentrate on the paragraph about not starting battles you're going to lose until they finally understood it's meaning.
Yes, including you. We're going to lose this one. But don't worry; after the next World War - the one we're heading inevitably now that the generation which saw the last one no longer has any significant power - there's going to be another period of freedom, and after that another of tyranny and war, and so on.
That's the way it goes. People say "never again" and sometimes even mean it, but they won't be around forever, and a newer generation repeats the whole mess - because "this time will be different ! It's not different at all, is it Steve ?" to paraphrase AMV Hell 0.
But trying to stop people from accessing Kiddie Porn is a good thing.
Since access to pornography seems to correlate with reduction in sex crimes such as assaults, I'd have to say that no, it isn't a good thing, not for the children at least. It's quite understandable, really: a pedophile with one hand on a mouse and another in his pants doesn't have a third one to molest a child with simultaneously, and just doesn't have the energy to afterwards.
I've never quite understood why our politicians want pedophiles out in the streets, sexually frustrated and amidst all the temptations, rather than quietly masturbating with pornography and hurting no one; maybe these politicians simply hate children and want them to get molested ?
So, German politicians: why do you hate children so much ?
You will get zero traction from the general population trying to keep access to kiddie porn. You can get traction trying to keep it from being abused.
Ah, I guess that would explain it. I have to admit, thought, advocating a policy that will get children raped just to advance their own career is pretty low, even for a politician.
My initial gut reaction was to denounce this guy as a $SCOUNDREL (substitute your preferred profane term). But a little voice told me to go read the article, and now I'm not as sure as I was previously.
If you go to the lengths this little shit did to make your software as hard to remove as possible, the chances are that you know perfectly well that said people don't want it in their machines. There is no uncertainty here; the guy is a villain.
Also don't confuse libraries with the language itself - java without its libraries would be virtually useless
Seeing how the only I/O capacity C without standard library has is to take program parameters and return an errorlevel value, I'd say that Java is not alone there;).
No, you're right, but it's also one of the more bullshit rules D&D has, considering it's unfair, frustrating, and doesn't even add flavor to the game (since XP is an abstraction of your character learning from his/her experiences, and when you fail at something, you don't suddenly become more inexperienced. You actually become more experienced, or at worst, are where you started). It's one of the idiotic D&D rules that I'd house rule away if I ran a campaign.
Most of the time, the rules seem to treat XP as an abstraction for "life force" of the characters, rather than having anything to do with experience. Negative levels, XP costs for spells, resurrection penalty, etc.; they all make sense if - and only if - XP is the character's life.
XP is life, and the primary way of getting it is to kill something. The more that something had levels - or XP - the more XP you get. Which of course means that the player characters are all vampires. They've all been brainwashed and given a magical disguise and sent to combat their fellow monsters, but it's just a matter of time before their memories return.
You know, I went through military service at 18, and managed to not kill anyone, despite having access to an assault rifle.
Child: Not able to tell that 'murder' is a bad idea.
Pleading insanity in a court is not the same thing as actually being insane. And 17-year old is not a child.
How is it anything other than the parents fault? They're responsible for 17 years of this child's development, and he ended up sufficiently screwed up to murder them as they slept. There's no one else you get to pass that responsibility on to.
But how can you blame the parents, when it's obvious that they were screwed up by their parents ? Those evil grandparents are to bl... no wait, they were raised by their parents, who were raised by theirs, and so on.
I guess we'll have to blame Adam or the amoebas, depending on which theory you subscribe to.
Who knows, maybe this priest was one of the cornholing variety (they don't all need to be catholics, do they?) and that's what this is all really about. Odds are we'll never really know the whole story.
We'll never know the whole story, so let's speculate about incestuous rape. Right on, drinkypoo !
The true crime here is that he will likely be tried as an adult, although he have never been treated as one.
It's nice to know that you don't find murder to be a true crime.
He does not act because to do so would be a greater evil. Namely the violation of our free will.
So if I see someone's about to be raped, should I simply walk away, since interfering would be a violation of the rapist's free will ? What about murder ? And how about a terrorist trying to nuke a city ?
The choice between either "no freedom and no evil" or "freedom and evil from abuse of that freedom" has been explored in a non-supernatural context in several science-fiction works, but curiously once you bring god/God into the question people start to switch from preferring the freedom to preferring no-evil.
Except that we don't prefer freedom to no-evil. In fact we devote a lot of resources to prevent people from harming other people. Those science-fiction works in question typically show a dystopia where the system is run by people who are evil themselves and thus abuse the system for their personal gain; this seems to be the main argument against various surveillance systems in real life too - the guards can't be trusted.
Furthermore, while preferring freedom to no-evil certainly sounds noble, it implies that the perpetrators of that evil are more important than their victims. Sure, you could argue that freedom is more important than safety, but what if the perpetrators are doing something which strips their victims of freedom, such as slave trade ? Then you have a situation where either the perpetrator loses some of his freedom, or the victim all of it (and all of his safety too, of course), so it's simply a matter of who you value more.
If it weren't those things what would it be? I reckon that it would have to be something even more outlandish than those already are, thus they would bring a smaller following.
Communism comes to mind. You know, the small insignificant movement which was used as an excuse for mass murder by people like Stalin and Mao ?
the concept of 'religious freedom' has always intrigued me since it explicitly grants the dismissal of N gods but not N-1 for *any set* of N as long as N > 1.
Interesting. What country did you live in, again ? I know of none which actually forces you to pick a god to worship.
it almost says you *have to* pick a god - any god will do.
Ah, so it doesn't, really, just almost. Poor you, you're almost oppressed.
Slashdot Mirror
"Any port in a storm" applies to any situation where you can choose between unpleasant company and certain death.
The problem is that in the globalized laissez-faire clusterfuck, the waves will also teleport. None of the seven seas are safe, and won't be for a while, if ever.
Losing your job is like getting washed overboard: sure, you can in theory be picked into another ship before you drown, but don't count on that. A ship led by a rabid baboon who whips his crew for fun is still better than a wet grave, right ?
Everywhere where viewing allows the makers to make money off their product, yes. I did specify the precondition that the viewer does not pay for CP. Do you have some kind of reading comprehension problem ?
I don't watch child porn.
Since you don't seem to have anything but ad hominems to add, I'm not going to bother arguing with you any further. Have a good life, witch hunter.
Your ad hominem, on the other hand, is the height of intellectual brilliance. You forgot to show where, exactly speaking, is this logical error you speak of.
I doubt the former - some people might tape their exploits - but the latter is correct. Well done, you've finally gotten the concept of causality down: you watching someone's deeds after the fact doesn't affect them. You paying him money to watch them might convince him to repeat them, but merely viewing them doesn't.
Did you mean that as another ad hominem or an argument from intimidation ? Or both ?
But no, I'm not a witch. Or a pedophile. Crawl back to Salem, Mather.
Considering the poverty, misery and disaster that free market fundamentalism has led to, it really should come as no surprise that people advocating it are meeting increasing hostility from its victims. That these zealots often make it clear that they want to remove social security and make the poor beg for a living doesn't help either.
"Let them eat cake" once sparked a revolution and cost its speaker her head; that's something that's healthy to remember. Most people don't want to live in a jungle ruled by the heaviest gorilla; and the only known alternative is a strong state which can keep King Kong in check.
Well, if one is inclined to be charitable, it could be considered more like paying people to replace their old drafty single-panes with new triple-pane windows.
Maybe. But keeping old cars operational is not costless either. You need to replace rusted parts and make increasingly intensive maintenance operations as the years wear them down.
Not that any of this actually matters. The nasty thing about global economy is that problems somewhere cause cascade reactions everywhere; consequently, any attempt to help national economy is doomed, since the problems in the rest of the world will drag it down. It would require coordinated efforts from all industrial nations to actually get anything done, but that's not going to happen, since everyone is too busy looking after their own interests to worry about common good.
Therefore making new cars more competitive. I think the auto industry and whoever they bribed realizes that just fine.
Reiser, did you get Internet access in prison ?-)
This rises a question: why do cars cost so much ? I see them competing on looks, "sportiness", extra equipment etc. but never on price. How much would a car designed to be cheap (which, obviously, includes being energy efficient) with nothing extra (not even a radio) cost ?
That might be something for auto makers to consider.
Not unless Einstein was wrong. After all, in General Relativity, things fall because mass and energy cause space to curve, so a straight path through it will curve towards all other straight paths. This means that if you are holding something in your hands, from its point of view, you aren't holding it stationary; you are accelerating it upwards at the rate of 9.81m/s^2. Its mass resist acceleration, and you feel this resistance as its weight.
TL;DR: in General Relativity, inertial mass and gravitational mass are a single variable which of course can't be unequal to itself.
Not unless he pays for it. In fact the producer is unlikely to even know that someone's viewing his stuff otherwise. How could he ?
No, my premise is that it's better for everyone that pedophiles sit on front of their computers viewing child porn than prowling the streets looking for someone to molest.
Strawmen usually are.
A good solid kick to the balls doesn't wear your shoes down that much, you know.
He's viewing a child being molested, or some more or less accurate facsimile of it. Whatever he's viewing, if it's real, it's already happened, and his viewing of it doesn't affect it at all anymore, unless the laws of causality have been overthrown. So why punish him from it ?
Go after producers, leave consumers alone; the existing material won't disappear, and with advancing state of the art in 3D software, it's just a matter of time before more can be produced without harming anyone.
No, I'm suggesting making the "masturbating to existing child porn" a safe option and "molesting children" a non-safe option, thus giving anyone interested in children an incentive to do the former instead of latter.
So make that illegal, but leave the viewers alone. Presumably there's such material already in existence, and in plentiful numbers according to all the fearmongers, so the pedophiles would not run out of material even if nothing new ever got produced.
But of course it is simple to produce child porn without hurting children: lolicon is infamous, and computer graphics are on the verge of photorealism, even on consumer grade equipment. And in future, with advancing robotics, who knows ? Maybe we could come up with robotic lovers to solve this problem once and for all; but if we did, the moral, upright people would no doubt pass a law to keep them from being made in the form of children, thus ensuring that real ones will keep on getting molested, all in the name of protecting them.
The pretext for this filter was preventing people from viewing child porn. It is not aimed against child molesters or the people who produce child porn. It's aimed - or so the government claims - against Joe Masturbator, not Joe Predator. Hell, if it's successful, it might even turn a few of the former into the latter due to mounting frustration.
By, for example, preventing them from hiding their evil deeds with censorship ?
Well, that and the unwillingness of a government to simply block all encryption which doesn't have a built-in backdoor, or isn't going to a host in a whitelist of approved sites.
Yes, including you. We're going to lose this one. But don't worry; after the next World War - the one we're heading inevitably now that the generation which saw the last one no longer has any significant power - there's going to be another period of freedom, and after that another of tyranny and war, and so on.
That's the way it goes. People say "never again" and sometimes even mean it, but they won't be around forever, and a newer generation repeats the whole mess - because "this time will be different ! It's not different at all, is it Steve ?" to paraphrase AMV Hell 0.
Since access to pornography seems to correlate with reduction in sex crimes such as assaults, I'd have to say that no, it isn't a good thing, not for the children at least. It's quite understandable, really: a pedophile with one hand on a mouse and another in his pants doesn't have a third one to molest a child with simultaneously, and just doesn't have the energy to afterwards.
I've never quite understood why our politicians want pedophiles out in the streets, sexually frustrated and amidst all the temptations, rather than quietly masturbating with pornography and hurting no one; maybe these politicians simply hate children and want them to get molested ?
So, German politicians: why do you hate children so much ?
Ah, I guess that would explain it. I have to admit, thought, advocating a policy that will get children raped just to advance their own career is pretty low, even for a politician.
If you go to the lengths this little shit did to make your software as hard to remove as possible, the chances are that you know perfectly well that said people don't want it in their machines. There is no uncertainty here; the guy is a villain.
Seeing how the only I/O capacity C without standard library has is to take program parameters and return an errorlevel value, I'd say that Java is not alone there ;).
Most of the time, the rules seem to treat XP as an abstraction for "life force" of the characters, rather than having anything to do with experience. Negative levels, XP costs for spells, resurrection penalty, etc.; they all make sense if - and only if - XP is the character's life.
XP is life, and the primary way of getting it is to kill something. The more that something had levels - or XP - the more XP you get. Which of course means that the player characters are all vampires. They've all been brainwashed and given a magical disguise and sent to combat their fellow monsters, but it's just a matter of time before their memories return.
How's that for a campaign idea ?-)
You know, I went through military service at 18, and managed to not kill anyone, despite having access to an assault rifle.
Pleading insanity in a court is not the same thing as actually being insane. And 17-year old is not a child.
But how can you blame the parents, when it's obvious that they were screwed up by their parents ? Those evil grandparents are to bl... no wait, they were raised by their parents, who were raised by theirs, and so on.
I guess we'll have to blame Adam or the amoebas, depending on which theory you subscribe to.
We'll never know the whole story, so let's speculate about incestuous rape. Right on, drinkypoo !
It's nice to know that you don't find murder to be a true crime.
I just have to play Devil's advocate here.
So if I see someone's about to be raped, should I simply walk away, since interfering would be a violation of the rapist's free will ? What about murder ? And how about a terrorist trying to nuke a city ?
Except that we don't prefer freedom to no-evil. In fact we devote a lot of resources to prevent people from harming other people. Those science-fiction works in question typically show a dystopia where the system is run by people who are evil themselves and thus abuse the system for their personal gain; this seems to be the main argument against various surveillance systems in real life too - the guards can't be trusted.
Furthermore, while preferring freedom to no-evil certainly sounds noble, it implies that the perpetrators of that evil are more important than their victims. Sure, you could argue that freedom is more important than safety, but what if the perpetrators are doing something which strips their victims of freedom, such as slave trade ? Then you have a situation where either the perpetrator loses some of his freedom, or the victim all of it (and all of his safety too, of course), so it's simply a matter of who you value more.
Communism comes to mind. You know, the small insignificant movement which was used as an excuse for mass murder by people like Stalin and Mao ?
Interesting. What country did you live in, again ? I know of none which actually forces you to pick a god to worship.
Ah, so it doesn't, really, just almost. Poor you, you're almost oppressed.
Almost everything supports UTF-8 already, Slashdot being a notable exception, dunno why.