The major reason why women couldn't sell sex legally in our history is this: they'd be rich and independent, and that was NOT to be allowed by men, period. After all, they are the sole providers of a highly valued commodity.
I disagree. Firstly though, the main reason women have been repeatedly denigrated in patriarchal cultures is because naturally, they can assign status. All the posturing and the wealth and dominance games of men is about one thing - getting laid. If women are free to choose their partners, to leave their partners, to change their partners, then every man's status is at the mercy of women. The only solution is to repress female sexual choice.
But this is not the reason for denigrating prostitutes. You are under the misapprehension that prostitutes have much choice in who they sleep with. Not if they need the money they don't. Prostitution is the last resort.
Young men hope a woman will choose to have sex with him. Young women want to choose a good partner. A woman who is a prostitute has lost that choice which is central to being a woman.
Instead of undermining male supremacy, prostitution actually undermines female power. If you're a wife or a girlfriend, i.e. you've made a choice of a man and you want to keep him yours, the last thing you want is him to be able to indulge himself with a string of easily available and discardable women. There are words like "slut" and "tart" and "slapper" and they're insults that a woman will use about another woman. There aren't really any male equivalents though, are there? The reason for that is because we don't really blame a man for sleeping with a woman. We blame the woman. There's a cultural aspect to that, but it has a biological basis.
And prostitutes are the ultimate discardible woman and it's not men who hate them.
I think you are wrong portraying prostitution as something that would be a source of wealth if it weren't for the illegality. Prostitution is a last resort. The wealth, for those women who want it, is in marrying a rich man and keeping hold of him. And those women would hate any prostitute their husband slept with.
It should be noted in all this however, that we are overlooking the equally unfortunate men (usually very young) who end up as prostitutes. A friend of mine was one. He commited suicide a few years ago. Prostitution should be legalised, but only so we can help those who have to turn to it and so we can deal with those scum who live off prostituting others.
I find it very hard to believe that anyone becomes a prostitute as a chosen career path. There may be some psychologically disturbed exceptions to this.
I mean, think what it must be like to have to sleep with someone repulsive, to have to open yourself up to a succession of these men in order to have money for rent, or food, or to look after your children.
While it may be possible to still form a relationship with a man, someone you care about after being a prostitute, I'd bet that it's hard. How do you seperate his desires for you from the desires of all those other men that you despised. Wouldn't the boundaries blur and wouldn't you resent him for wanting sex with you? Once you've come to see sex as something you sell, something you trade to get something, how do you ever unsee it can be something that you share with someone. It's a long way back from being a prostitute to that.
Am I in favour of legalizing prostitution? Maybe, I'm not sure, but only because punishing someone for prostitution is like kicking someone for being hurt. Not because prostitution is an okay thing.
If prostitution were some movie style abstraction, where a working girl never has to sleep with a succession of men she hates to pay the rent, then perhaps some girls would dabble in it. Some girls do by choice, but that's experimenting, not dependence. How many men do you think you would have to sleep with every day to pay rent on an apartment? Just to start with? And you think women could earn be a professional prostitute?
There is a debate to be had on prostitution, but on this subject, no-one should be talking unless they have really known prostitutes or been one.
From my original post: communistic is not an unreasonable description, even if it's not the most specific.
Communism is an extension of Socialism, or a subset if you like. When I said that the original poster's description of the funding as communistic was valid, I could likewise have said that if he'd used the term socialist. In order to distinguish between which would be more accurate, then we would have to have a different funding model that could only be described by one model.
Yes, if I had used the term then I would be more likely to have said Socialist rather than Communist but for the original poster to have been called troll for using a communist description is wrong.
For reference, I would probably have used neither term as I would have looked at the funding model purely on its effects. But I am not USian (use-i-an) and tend not to care which camp claims ownership of a model. Sorry, I know that is a gross generalisation and unfair to many, but I'm tired and every debate on/. seems to be swamped with people polarising debates into extremes. I think it is symptomatic of a big problem in the US at the moment.
I'm really not sure I want to get into an argument over the definition of communism with someone called Politburo.;) But communism is an extension of socialism. Whilst what I said could describe socialism, it could also describe communism by extension.
And as the point I made was that the GP's description of the funding mechanism as communistic was reasonable, then to say that calling it socialist would likewise have been reasonable does not invalidate what I said. My point stands.
Having debated politics on/. for a while now, I am getting the impression that Communist is an emotive term over in the USA, rather than just a political and economic viewpoint. In fact it seems that almost everything in the USA is polarised to a very alarming degree.
I dunno, but I'd guess someone who can't spell "tantamount" doesn't have a lot of experience of working in a university.
An inability to spell some words correctly, or being dyslexic, does not indicate that someone is incapable of having a good argument. Nor does it indicate that he's making things up.
Even if it did, you should make allowance for the fact that in an international forum the poster could be working in his second language.
And as I seem to be the only poster here that has actually read the article, I'll quote the relevant passage:
The Director called me and first asked me to remove any link to the university from my website, and also to "hide" the fact that I was teaching there. Then he told me about the pressures and threats he and the Program received (to be subjected to software licenses inspection, copyright violations inspections, or anything that may damage them). Obviously I had to resign to save his job (and everybody else's at the Masters Program). So I did.
He says that this is why he resigned, which I would say is tantamount to being fired.
Let's try it the other way round. How is it a communistic principle?
It's certainly communistic in the soviet implementation of communisim. You have the resources of many being directed by a central body (federal government) to develop the community.
The original troll moderation is underserved. While I disagree with the poster, communistic is not an unreasonable description, even if it's not the most specific. Perhaps in the USA, communism is regarded as an insult and this is regarded as name calling. This is not universal.
It is definitely bad for the people of the USA, there is no doubt about that. Whether we get a slumping as the mass of IT patents begin to expire or if there is a secession of countries from the patent laws before that remains to be seen. If the US loses its ability to intimidate other countries then the latter may well happen. Aside from the huge debt the USA has, bear in mind that it's not easy to threaten those you depend on. By outsourcing to the other countries, the US loses power over them. Contrary to common perception, the power resides not in the employer but in the worker.
Exploring what might happen a little further though, it's wrong to analyse this solely in terms of nations. Taking that view indicates an acceptance of the subtle propaganda of nationalism. By this I'm just pointing out that the wealthy stock-holders of the corporations that do this are not synonymous with the people of the USA. Nor are the wealthy of China. As modern governments seem willing to open any doors for the wealthy, we get an effective class of people that are tied to no nation. The people in the USA who are monopolizing ideas and pushing for more patent laws have their counterparts in China and India and elsewhere. When the USA begins to suffer from the collapsing of the trade imbalance, we may find that those who brought it about in the US have long since invested their money in Chinese and Indian companies, or wherever else the power has gone. The result will be a perpetuation of the IP paradigm and an increasing poverty of the non-IP owning majority.
While the USA is in a dominant position, it should be creating a fair system designed at increasing the size of the cake, not just grabbing more of what is there. They should do this while other countries want to rise to their position and are willing to help. US power has already passed it's zenith however, and the opportunity is sliding away. The result will be reaping exactly what has been sown in years to come.
I would like to see more concilliation from the USA, but instead it just seems to be tightening its grip which is always a sign of fear. As Shakespeare said: "'Tis better playing with a Lion's whelp, than with an old one, dying."
Yes, I'm being dramatic. However, I think a debt of US$7,782,816,000,000 deserves a little rhetoric.
Me? I'm campaigning against European Software Patents over here and learning a couple more languages just in case.
The nasty thing with the software patent laws that the US is pushing is how it puts the foundations of so much in their control. Unless you have something radically new (which may happen) then you'll be building on previous work "owned" by some US corporation which will take its cut.
It's like one of those pyramid schemes and like a pyramid scheme it will eventually collapse. No-one will be happy with a situation where the US sits on its arse and takes its IP tax off all the working people. Not even the US people will benefit as the ones making money off this IP racket are just the wealthy elite who are becoming more and more nation-indpendent.
The US will rely on its economic and military right to enforce international IP laws to the benefit of these people but this will simply postpone the inevitable and make the fall all that much harder. The reason being that with all the work and development transported to other nations, the balance of power, the capability of doing something, has shifted. US dominance in that circumstance is an unstable state.
It's blindingly obvious to anyone who thinks about it for themself, and like many blindingly obvious things, many haven't thought about it at all. The US is happily selling the rope to the hangman right now for a handsome short term windfall.
The parable of the digital reproduction! *snort* Wouldn't I love to have you defending fair use in the Senate!
Re:Indirect connections
on
Revamping Freenet
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm not an expert in this area, but I'm not convinced of the feasability of transmitting useful amounts of data concealed in this manner. You might be able to get a decent amount of text in a series of image files using steganography, but normal usage patterns are of people downloading images. A steady stream of uploading images to strangers, especially if not done through email, would stand out, I think.
What I think is a wonderful idea however, is giving people a popular cause to use this. I feel that people should be using it for the reasons it is created - there can be no element of trickery in this - but a supplemental reason could increase popularity. If for (hypothetical example) the network were popularised in repressive countries such as China or Saudi Arabia, then people here who participated in the network would essentially be aiding people in these countries by building and supporting the network.
This might be naive but I think there's the kernel of a good idea in there.
I don't see Emma Watson either dressing, acting, talking or in any way being a sexual being in any of the films. Unless you're one of those people who think she's asking for it by dressing in a private school uniform.
I wasn't talking about Emma Watson, I was speaking about the girl on the street. I figured the discussion had moved on to general issues about young sexuality. I don't fancy Hermione for reasons that would be pretty obvious if this discussion were in person.;) She's a very good actress though.
The thing with T.A.T.U. also passed me by, but I think if anything the two girls were getting a good laugh out of the act, at the expense of a lot of men. I don't see that it did them any real harm, unless they're totally unable to get past it later on, and always regard sex as just a way to exploit men - in which case they'll miss out on something special. But I'm sure that they weren't threatened by their admirers, and that's the essence of it, I think. A girl of 15, if not already active, will certainly be exploring and attracted to it. She may be attracted to an adult, but the problem is one of power. It can be very easy for a young girl to be overawed by a grown man and not all men are good men who are able to understand that and treat a girl gently, or hold off if they know that she'll get hurt.
But I'm probably omitting cases where it could conceivably be a positive thing. I lost my virginity to a significantly older partner. I don't think it did me harm - probably I got a better idea than with some fumbling teenager. But I was likewise able to accept it for what it was and walk away afterwards. I think most teenage girls (at least here in the UK) are emotionally capable of doing the same, though not all. The age of consent laws are probably about right. 16 is okay unless you're in a "position of trust" such as being their teacher, in which case 18 years old is required.
I dunno - a fully grown woman vs. a 15 year old. I'd take the 15 year old. Used to be the sex symbols were people like Marilyn Monroe and Betty Page who had adult bodies. These days people are being steered to 12 year olds, or people with those builds.
I'm surprised by this from what you wrote in your earlier posts, but perhaps this is why you have such strong feelings on the subject. I think most men would prefer the grown woman. While the media is obsessesed with skinny, it's also obsessed with huge tits and shapely butts, things that young girls just can't compete on. And I also don't think the media can overide our evolutionary preferances to any large degree. But we can't generalise about sexual preferences - you would probably go for the young girl, okay. But my biggest point I guess is this, if you talk to the girl for a couple of hours, and realize the discrepancy between you in terms of interests, music, what you want from life, etc, then I would think this would often put an older man off. The clothes and the makeup can make a young girl appear more than she is.
Anyway, that's my £0.02. I did read your earlier posts and just as an aside, you don't take account of how old the other posters might be. Any one of the people you were arguing with could easily have been under eighteen, which would undermine what you were saying considerably. Also, saying that it makes no difference between a six- and a fifteen-year old is very wrong. Legally, you are correct, but I would base my criticism of a man sleeping with a fifteen year old on ethical grounds rather than legal which makes for a much stronger argument.
I think one of the things that confuses issues here is that biological indicators that existed in evolutionary terms are over-ridden by social indicators. I'm stepping into this topic with trepidation, but it seems to me that young girls are imitating the sexual signals they are shown by older girls in a way that wouldn't be possible without the clothes, the make-up etc. Putting on tights and short skirts, or lipstick, eyeliner, etc. are advertising sexuality that the girl doesn't actually possess. Stand a naked 15 year old next to a naked 23 year old and you can see which one is the sexually attractive one (and I mean the older one for anyone who is uncertain on that point), but dress right and maybe a guy is less able to see that she's just a little girl.
I don't really know much about this, but I'm guessing the imitation of sexual advertising by younger girls can confuse the issue. These days people are paying too much attention to clothes, make-up etc, and less to what someone actually is.
* Note: Both the book and the film were retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the U.S., with similar alterations to the text
Do any of you guys over there feel patronized by that? It reminds me of the story (I hope apocryphal) that George III was renamed to The Madness of King George because it was thought Americans wouldn't go and see it without having seen George I & II.
You are illustrating one possible outcome amongst many in your example.
In practice, if a minority party holds the balance of power, then yes, deals will be made. But those deals will be based on common policies. If 40% of the parliament want X and 40% of the parliament are against it, the 20% minority party will side with the party that aligns with their policies giving them a 60%. But isn't that what democracy is about? Because presumably part of the reason they got the 20% was on the basis of their policies on X.
So proportional representation leads to a finer granularity on the issues. You're no longer forced to choose between two supersets of policies - you come closer to picking and choosing.
I think that it's very likely a large number of those students were simply ignorant. When asked whether they support X or Y and they don't know much about either, then you'll get a lot saying Y just because they want to answer something. It'll be based on snippets of debate picked up from others, vague reactions to current news stories and confusion of issues (e.g. invasion of privacy of public figures, exposure of government agents, etcetera). I'm not saying that the ignorance is not a huge problem, in some ways it is worse, but I don't think many of these students are out there clamouring for government censoship.
I could be wrong, but it's worth thinking what the survey might be telling us.
(a) Because there are pleasures to be had even in making their lives difficult. You can't always stop people treading on you, but you can hurt their foot.
(b) Sometimes the impossible can happen. Look at the Ghandis of the world. The will to rebel is latent in all the "mind-numbed" consumers - it just needs some ignition. If you wake up one person with your resistance, then there are two people resisting. And between you, you might encourage another two. And so on, and so forth. You don't have to destroy your opponent - you just have to make them give up.
Oh, one more thing: deadlines... if by enforcing you mean that "rather than extend deadlines, finish and release whatever you have" (ie. reduce the scope, fix the time and resources), I agree: if you somehow think that you can just force people to "just get it done", then that is extremely foolish (since in reality you'll reduce the quality, and still jeopardize both scope and time, PLUS increase attrition/burnout). As to blocking Slashdot; geez, if your developers can't control themselves, you do NOT have good people, and have failed the basic premise (which I agreeis the first thing you do need for a succesful project).
On deadlines, the first critical part of what I said was set realistic deadlines. That means listen to the developers. I was hired by a company once that utterly disregarded the dire warnings from the development team and set their project deadline according to what the salesman had negotiated. It was a complete fuck-up and the company is gone.
On enforcing them, I didn't mean arbitrarily, just keep some good standards about meeting them. If they were realistic in the first place, then with the traditional last week of mad overtime before it goes to final testing, then it should be more or less alright.
The/. thing was just a joke and a little jib at anyone who's reading this when they're supposed to be working. I'm not in favour of strict Web-browsing policies in the workplace. As you say, if this becomes an issue then its a symptom not the cause and you should address why your staff are browsing when they should be working. The same company I mentioned previously paid for Websense. Aside from the stupidity of thinking it would work against a roomful of Programmers, it tried to block both articles on mathematics and news on chess as "category games has been filtered." I used to read this sort of stuff on my lunchbreak - no different to someone reading a paper - and it was insulting that they tried to block that. Anyway,/rant off.
In other words - carry on the way you were. Is it really such a revolution to say "don't do unnecessary work?"
Why, thank you! I'd never thought of that. If you're "in a project where you can go ahead successfully without performing an initial design phase," then you're probably working on Hello World.
Really, the secret is hire good people to do the job, set realistic deadlines but enforce them, block/. at your company firewall.
The XP "methodology" works for evolving things like GUIs and little else.
But going to see a musical no more makes one a music nerd than playing computer games makes one a computer nerd.
A music nerd is the sort of person who analyses the development of modernism in Prokofiev's symphonies contrasted with the influence of the pre-something or other underlying metaphor, or some such.
So Children's books should be value free? We should only feed them literary pablum?
The parent said that no-one complained about Mein Kampf or 1984 promoting particular values. If Mein Kamph had been a children's fairy tale with thinly disguised allegories of "evil Jews" and the joys of Fascism, then yes, I think you would probably have a stronger objection to people peddling it to your offspring. I don't think you could have a good story that wasn't value laden, but that wasn't the point I was making. The point I was making is that using Mein Kampf as a comparison to The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is dubious.
Anyhow, the whole argument is fallacious as (a) people do complain about Mein Kampf - it's nasty - and (b) it's a variant on this is bad so something else bad is okay. False logic.
Anyway, I get pissed off with people who don't read my posts properly. I was highlighting a flaw in the logic, not criticising C. S. Lewis.
Slashdot Mirror
The major reason why women couldn't sell sex legally in our history is this: they'd be rich and independent, and that was NOT to be allowed by men, period. After all, they are the sole providers of a highly valued commodity.
I disagree. Firstly though, the main reason women have been repeatedly denigrated in patriarchal cultures is because naturally, they can assign status. All the posturing and the wealth and dominance games of men is about one thing - getting laid. If women are free to choose their partners, to leave their partners, to change their partners, then every man's status is at the mercy of women. The only solution is to repress female sexual choice.
But this is not the reason for denigrating prostitutes. You are under the misapprehension that prostitutes have much choice in who they sleep with. Not if they need the money they don't. Prostitution is the last resort.
Young men hope a woman will choose to have sex with him. Young women want to choose a good partner. A woman who is a prostitute has lost that choice which is central to being a woman.
Instead of undermining male supremacy, prostitution actually undermines female power. If you're a wife or a girlfriend, i.e. you've made a choice of a man and you want to keep him yours, the last thing you want is him to be able to indulge himself with a string of easily available and discardable women. There are words like "slut" and "tart" and "slapper" and they're insults that a woman will use about another woman. There aren't really any male equivalents though, are there? The reason for that is because we don't really blame a man for sleeping with a woman. We blame the woman. There's a cultural aspect to that, but it has a biological basis.
And prostitutes are the ultimate discardible woman and it's not men who hate them.
I think you are wrong portraying prostitution as something that would be a source of wealth if it weren't for the illegality. Prostitution is a last resort. The wealth, for those women who want it, is in marrying a rich man and keeping hold of him. And those women would hate any prostitute their husband slept with.
It should be noted in all this however, that we are overlooking the equally unfortunate men (usually very young) who end up as prostitutes. A friend of mine was one. He commited suicide a few years ago. Prostitution should be legalised, but only so we can help those who have to turn to it and so we can deal with those scum who live off prostituting others.
My £0.02.
I find it very hard to believe that anyone becomes a prostitute as a chosen career path. There may be some psychologically disturbed exceptions to this.
I mean, think what it must be like to have to sleep with someone repulsive, to have to open yourself up to a succession of these men in order to have money for rent, or food, or to look after your children.
While it may be possible to still form a relationship with a man, someone you care about after being a prostitute, I'd bet that it's hard. How do you seperate his desires for you from the desires of all those other men that you despised. Wouldn't the boundaries blur and wouldn't you resent him for wanting sex with you? Once you've come to see sex as something you sell, something you trade to get something, how do you ever unsee it can be something that you share with someone. It's a long way back from being a prostitute to that.
Am I in favour of legalizing prostitution? Maybe, I'm not sure, but only because punishing someone for prostitution is like kicking someone for being hurt. Not because prostitution is an okay thing.
If prostitution were some movie style abstraction, where a working girl never has to sleep with a succession of men she hates to pay the rent, then perhaps some girls would dabble in it. Some girls do by choice, but that's experimenting, not dependence. How many men do you think you would have to sleep with every day to pay rent on an apartment? Just to start with? And you think women could earn be a professional prostitute?
There is a debate to be had on prostitution, but on this subject, no-one should be talking unless they have really known prostitutes or been one.
That sounds horrific. How do they manage to get money for non-spanish artists. You don't just mean through the blank media tax, do you?
And Internet Driving Licence? Please tell me you are joking? How can that possibly work?
*sigh*
From my original post:
communistic is not an unreasonable description, even if it's not the most specific.
Communism is an extension of Socialism, or a subset if you like. When I said that the original poster's description of the funding as communistic was valid, I could likewise have said that if he'd used the term socialist. In order to distinguish between which would be more accurate, then we would have to have a different funding model that could only be described by one model.
Yes, if I had used the term then I would be more likely to have said Socialist rather than Communist but for the original poster to have been called troll for using a communist description is wrong.
For reference, I would probably have used neither term as I would have looked at the funding model purely on its effects. But I am not USian (use-i-an) and tend not to care which camp claims ownership of a model. Sorry, I know that is a gross generalisation and unfair to many, but I'm tired and every debate on
I'm really not sure I want to get into an argument over the definition of communism with someone called Politburo.
And as the point I made was that the GP's description of the funding mechanism as communistic was reasonable, then to say that calling it socialist would likewise have been reasonable does not invalidate what I said. My point stands.
Having debated politics on
Key phrase : "He says..."
Sheesh.
So I take it that as you only addressed the last line of my post, the previous three paragraphs stand?
You seem to be arguing for the sake of it rather because every time someone counters something you've written, you move on to a different point.
I dunno, but I'd guess someone who can't spell "tantamount" doesn't have a lot of experience of working in a university.
An inability to spell some words correctly, or being dyslexic, does not indicate that someone is incapable of having a good argument. Nor does it indicate that he's making things up.
Even if it did, you should make allowance for the fact that in an international forum the poster could be working in his second language.
And as I seem to be the only poster here that has actually read the article, I'll quote the relevant passage:
He says that this is why he resigned, which I would say is tantamount to being fired.
Let's try it the other way round. How is it a communistic principle?
It's certainly communistic in the soviet implementation of communisim. You have the resources of many being directed by a central body (federal government) to develop the community.
The original troll moderation is underserved. While I disagree with the poster, communistic is not an unreasonable description, even if it's not the most specific. Perhaps in the USA, communism is regarded as an insult and this is regarded as name calling. This is not universal.
It is definitely bad for the people of the USA, there is no doubt about that. Whether we get a slumping as the mass of IT patents begin to expire or if there is a secession of countries from the patent laws before that remains to be seen. If the US loses its ability to intimidate other countries then the latter may well happen. Aside from the huge debt the USA has, bear in mind that it's not easy to threaten those you depend on. By outsourcing to the other countries, the US loses power over them. Contrary to common perception, the power resides not in the employer but in the worker.
Exploring what might happen a little further though, it's wrong to analyse this solely in terms of nations. Taking that view indicates an acceptance of the subtle propaganda of nationalism. By this I'm just pointing out that the wealthy stock-holders of the corporations that do this are not synonymous with the people of the USA. Nor are the wealthy of China. As modern governments seem willing to open any doors for the wealthy, we get an effective class of people that are tied to no nation. The people in the USA who are monopolizing ideas and pushing for more patent laws have their counterparts in China and India and elsewhere. When the USA begins to suffer from the collapsing of the trade imbalance, we may find that those who brought it about in the US have long since invested their money in Chinese and Indian companies, or wherever else the power has gone. The result will be a perpetuation of the IP paradigm and an increasing poverty of the non-IP owning majority.
While the USA is in a dominant position, it should be creating a fair system designed at increasing the size of the cake, not just grabbing more of what is there. They should do this while other countries want to rise to their position and are willing to help. US power has already passed it's zenith however, and the opportunity is sliding away. The result will be reaping exactly what has been sown in years to come.
I would like to see more concilliation from the USA, but instead it just seems to be tightening its grip which is always a sign of fear. As Shakespeare said: "'Tis better playing with a Lion's whelp, than with an old one, dying."
Yes, I'm being dramatic. However, I think a debt of US$7,782,816,000,000 deserves a little rhetoric.
Me? I'm campaigning against European Software Patents over here and learning a couple more languages just in case.
The nasty thing with the software patent laws that the US is pushing is how it puts the foundations of so much in their control. Unless you have something radically new (which may happen) then you'll be building on previous work "owned" by some US corporation which will take its cut.
It's like one of those pyramid schemes and like a pyramid scheme it will eventually collapse. No-one will be happy with a situation where the US sits on its arse and takes its IP tax off all the working people. Not even the US people will benefit as the ones making money off this IP racket are just the wealthy elite who are becoming more and more nation-indpendent.
The US will rely on its economic and military right to enforce international IP laws to the benefit of these people but this will simply postpone the inevitable and make the fall all that much harder. The reason being that with all the work and development transported to other nations, the balance of power, the capability of doing something, has shifted. US dominance in that circumstance is an unstable state.
It's blindingly obvious to anyone who thinks about it for themself, and like many blindingly obvious things, many haven't thought about it at all. The US is happily selling the rope to the hangman right now for a handsome short term windfall.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
The parable of the digital reproduction! *snort* Wouldn't I love to have you defending fair use in the Senate!
I'm not an expert in this area, but I'm not convinced of the feasability of transmitting useful amounts of data concealed in this manner. You might be able to get a decent amount of text in a series of image files using steganography, but normal usage patterns are of people downloading images. A steady stream of uploading images to strangers, especially if not done through email, would stand out, I think.
What I think is a wonderful idea however, is giving people a popular cause to use this. I feel that people should be using it for the reasons it is created - there can be no element of trickery in this - but a supplemental reason could increase popularity. If for (hypothetical example) the network were popularised in repressive countries such as China or Saudi Arabia, then people here who participated in the network would essentially be aiding people in these countries by building and supporting the network.
This might be naive but I think there's the kernel of a good idea in there.
Nononono. Very cold is just very cold. This is <in-a-world-voice> Ultra cold.</in-a-world-voice>
I don't see Emma Watson either dressing, acting, talking or in any way being a sexual being in any of the films. Unless you're one of those people who think she's asking for it by dressing in a private school uniform.
I wasn't talking about Emma Watson, I was speaking about the girl on the street. I figured the discussion had moved on to general issues about young sexuality. I don't fancy Hermione for reasons that would be pretty obvious if this discussion were in person.
The thing with T.A.T.U. also passed me by, but I think if anything the two girls were getting a good laugh out of the act, at the expense of a lot of men. I don't see that it did them any real harm, unless they're totally unable to get past it later on, and always regard sex as just a way to exploit men - in which case they'll miss out on something special. But I'm sure that they weren't threatened by their admirers, and that's the essence of it, I think. A girl of 15, if not already active, will certainly be exploring and attracted to it. She may be attracted to an adult, but the problem is one of power. It can be very easy for a young girl to be overawed by a grown man and not all men are good men who are able to understand that and treat a girl gently, or hold off if they know that she'll get hurt.
But I'm probably omitting cases where it could conceivably be a positive thing. I lost my virginity to a significantly older partner. I don't think it did me harm - probably I got a better idea than with some fumbling teenager. But I was likewise able to accept it for what it was and walk away afterwards. I think most teenage girls (at least here in the UK) are emotionally capable of doing the same, though not all. The age of consent laws are probably about right. 16 is okay unless you're in a "position of trust" such as being their teacher, in which case 18 years old is required.
I dunno - a fully grown woman vs. a 15 year old. I'd take the 15 year old. Used to be the sex symbols were people like Marilyn Monroe and Betty Page who had adult bodies. These days people are being steered to 12 year olds, or people with those builds.
I'm surprised by this from what you wrote in your earlier posts, but perhaps this is why you have such strong feelings on the subject. I think most men would prefer the grown woman. While the media is obsessesed with skinny, it's also obsessed with huge tits and shapely butts, things that young girls just can't compete on. And I also don't think the media can overide our evolutionary preferances to any large degree. But we can't generalise about sexual preferences - you would probably go for the young girl, okay. But my biggest point I guess is this, if you talk to the girl for a couple of hours, and realize the discrepancy between you in terms of interests, music, what you want from life, etc, then I would think this would often put an older man off. The clothes and the makeup can make a young girl appear more than she is.
Anyway, that's my £0.02. I did read your earlier posts and just as an aside, you don't take account of how old the other posters might be. Any one of the people you were arguing with could easily have been under eighteen, which would undermine what you were saying considerably. Also, saying that it makes no difference between a six- and a fifteen-year old is very wrong. Legally, you are correct, but I would base my criticism of a man sleeping with a fifteen year old on ethical grounds rather than legal which makes for a much stronger argument.
I think one of the things that confuses issues here is that biological indicators that existed in evolutionary terms are over-ridden by social indicators. I'm stepping into this topic with trepidation, but it seems to me that young girls are imitating the sexual signals they are shown by older girls in a way that wouldn't be possible without the clothes, the make-up etc. Putting on tights and short skirts, or lipstick, eyeliner, etc. are advertising sexuality that the girl doesn't actually possess. Stand a naked 15 year old next to a naked 23 year old and you can see which one is the sexually attractive one (and I mean the older one for anyone who is uncertain on that point), but dress right and maybe a guy is less able to see that she's just a little girl.
I don't really know much about this, but I'm guessing the imitation of sexual advertising by younger girls can confuse the issue. These days people are paying too much attention to clothes, make-up etc, and less to what someone actually is.
* Note: Both the book and the film were retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the U.S., with similar alterations to the text
Do any of you guys over there feel patronized by that? It reminds me of the story (I hope apocryphal) that George III was renamed to The Madness of King George because it was thought Americans wouldn't go and see it without having seen George I & II.
You are illustrating one possible outcome amongst many in your example.
In practice, if a minority party holds the balance of power, then yes, deals will be made. But those deals will be based on common policies. If 40% of the parliament want X and 40% of the parliament are against it, the 20% minority party will side with the party that aligns with their policies giving them a 60%. But isn't that what democracy is about? Because presumably part of the reason they got the 20% was on the basis of their policies on X.
So proportional representation leads to a finer granularity on the issues. You're no longer forced to choose between two supersets of policies - you come closer to picking and choosing.
I think that it's very likely a large number of those students were simply ignorant. When asked whether they support X or Y and they don't know much about either, then you'll get a lot saying Y just because they want to answer something. It'll be based on snippets of debate picked up from others, vague reactions to current news stories and confusion of issues (e.g. invasion of privacy of public figures, exposure of government agents, etcetera). I'm not saying that the ignorance is not a huge problem, in some ways it is worse, but I don't think many of these students are out there clamouring for government censoship.
I could be wrong, but it's worth thinking what the survey might be telling us.
Why not join them?
(a) Because there are pleasures to be had even in making their lives difficult. You can't always stop people treading on you, but you can hurt their foot.
(b) Sometimes the impossible can happen. Look at the Ghandis of the world. The will to rebel is latent in all the "mind-numbed" consumers - it just needs some ignition. If you wake up one person with your resistance, then there are two people resisting. And between you, you might encourage another two. And so on, and so forth. You don't have to destroy your opponent - you just have to make them give up.
MOD STORY +5 Ironic.
Oh, one more thing: deadlines... if by enforcing you mean that "rather than extend deadlines, finish and release whatever you have" (ie. reduce the scope, fix the time and resources), I agree: if you somehow think that you can just force people to "just get it done", then that is extremely foolish (since in reality you'll reduce the quality, and still jeopardize both scope and time, PLUS increase attrition/burnout). As to blocking Slashdot; geez, if your developers can't control themselves, you do NOT have good people, and have failed the basic premise (which I agreeis the first thing you do need for a succesful project).
On deadlines, the first critical part of what I said was set realistic deadlines. That means listen to the developers. I was hired by a company once that utterly disregarded the dire warnings from the development team and set their project deadline according to what the salesman had negotiated. It was a complete fuck-up and the company is gone.
On enforcing them, I didn't mean arbitrarily, just keep some good standards about meeting them. If they were realistic in the first place, then with the traditional last week of mad overtime before it goes to final testing, then it should be more or less alright.
The
In other words - carry on the way you were. Is it really such a revolution to say "don't do unnecessary work?"
Why, thank you! I'd never thought of that. If you're "in a project where you can go ahead successfully without performing an initial design phase," then you're probably working on Hello World.
Really, the secret is hire good people to do the job, set realistic deadlines but enforce them, block
The XP "methodology" works for evolving things like GUIs and little else.
No worries. This is
But going to see a musical no more makes one a music nerd than playing computer games makes one a computer nerd.
A music nerd is the sort of person who analyses the development of modernism in Prokofiev's symphonies contrasted with the influence of the pre-something or other underlying metaphor, or some such.
So Children's books should be value free? We should only feed them literary pablum?
The parent said that no-one complained about Mein Kampf or 1984 promoting particular values. If Mein Kamph had been a children's fairy tale with thinly disguised allegories of "evil Jews" and the joys of Fascism, then yes, I think you would probably have a stronger objection to people peddling it to your offspring. I don't think you could have a good story that wasn't value laden, but that wasn't the point I was making. The point I was making is that using Mein Kampf as a comparison to The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is dubious.
Anyhow, the whole argument is fallacious as (a) people do complain about Mein Kampf - it's nasty - and (b) it's a variant on this is bad so something else bad is okay. False logic.
Anyway, I get pissed off with people who don't read my posts properly. I was highlighting a flaw in the logic, not criticising C. S. Lewis.