Why, is "borrowing", or intent to borrow, some kind of a constitutionally protected act that invalidates other laws? We aren't arguing mens rea, we're arguing the legal definition of speech.
The first thing I think of here is encode all the porn as ascii art, or as colored text where the letters are so small they are no longer visually register.
I could put an LED billboard up in times square where every pixel was shaped into a letter, spelling out Moby Dick or some such, and if the billboard displayed Moby's Dick instead then one could argue that I am using words to convey information, therefor it is protected speech.:3
This is all rather farcical obviously, but it illustrates how a message cannot so cleanly categorized as "words" or not. "fire" in a crowded movie theater, and all that.
I get the feeling the law is not codified this way, but I prefer to look at the matter as the *content* of speech should be protected, but that the *implementation* of speech should be something we can legislate against in order to protect the rights of others so long as alternate methods exist to convey the content.
> As a general rule, economic systems run more efficiently when people pay for the resources that they use, and run inefficiently when other people pay for resources that somebody else uses. Just a general rule to keep in mind.
Hmm. Does it run efficiently when the significant segment of the population (children, elderly, ill, disabled, mentally unbalanced) that cannot earn *any* revenue to pay for their own weight are left to slowly starve? õ_O
I know you're saying it's just a general rule, it's hard to balance systems on rules that require as many presumptions as this one to find balance, and slide out of balance as soon as those presumptions fail.
You've claimed that any investment in a fixed supply of something is a pyramid scheme. We mention Gold and Land (which also fit these criteria) and you hand wave about whether you're trying to use something as a currency or not.
Virtually all commodity investments have static supply in the short term. Bitcoin is a digital commodity. In fact it's the first digital commodity to be both counterfeit-proof and non-centralized, and those four properties (digital + commodity + counterfeit-proof + decentralized) drive 90% of it's value as a transaction and value store system. Can you name any alternatives which satisfy all four of those criteria?
What I ask from you is to disambiguate how it is that you view Bitcoin as a scam compared to any other fixed-supply commodity investment.
Then how the average server admin can take advantage of this?;)
This.
Good god, screw the standards. If it's good enough for microgoogle, we should be doing it too. The only thing we have to lose is visitors to our own damn sites, right? So how can I tune my kernel / apache to firehose the TCP window? xD
There is much evidence that contradicts such a belief.
If you actually care, you have more than the necessary resources to look it up yourself. Mine it is not to convince someone against their will that a cherished belief is wrong.
So which is it? Are you going to factually challenge someone's belief or backpedal from a badly played bluff because you simply don't have the cards?
I responded to you because I had just got done complaining about how much argument is taking place on this subject without a single mention of evidence. And then I happen upon you, who not only talks of evidence but suggests that there is an abundance of it, in favor of censorship — which is the windmill I happen to be tilting at today.
I mean I don't knowanything aboutporn — I'd be lucky if I could perform a Google search on the topic without somehow lousing it up — but I strongly resist censorship. Especially when the folks doing the censoring cannot produce empirical data about what ill is being resolved by slicing up other people's access to empirical data and replacing it with falsehood.
I mean, no matter how many citations we might potentially find suggesting there is no causal link to harm, how can I find the studies you specifically claim to have that there is? Your claim is fantastic. On par with claiming to have proof of evidence of God. So imagine my disappointment when I learn you were just making it up as you went.
As to the Ad Hominem (please look that up too), If it's any help, I am sorry for suggesting you don't know the meaning of the word "poison". That was very passive-aggressive of me. I should have just flat out said it instead.
It's just that I have high expectations for people who spam promo codes, trying to make a buck convincing people that coconut oil can cure hypothyroidism. You've got to at least demonstrate knowledge of the basics, or you'll be taken about as seriously as Sarah Palin when somebody calls Bullshit on you.
"I've never heard of" != "There is no such thing as"
Nonetheless, I would imagine from his vantage of tech support he's never heard of it only because it's such a delicate topic that it is not often discussed with tech monkeys. But that's the danger of not hearing about things: it's easy to infer they must not exist or must not be a serious threat.
This demonstrates that Censorship, be it systemic blacklisting at an ISP or self-censorship due to embarrassment, dooms any population to fall prey to exactly what dangers they use the censorship to avoid.
While I can't profess that this statement is accurate, it paints an interesting stereotype of how each political movement sees the other, doesn't it?
(American) Conservatives want to centralize morality..
(American) Liberals want to centralize equality..
Authoritarians want to centralize.. well.. authority..
Socialists want to centralize industry..
Anarchists want to decentralize everything.
Us Libertarians just want to slap y'all upside the head, and centralize absolutely as little as we have to in order to optimize both liberty and social order. We see liberty as important because it pushes routing decisions to the edge of the network where they belong. Without it civilization and culture really cannot scale. But we also require a minimum of centralized power in the form of government as an officiator to resolve exceptions and disputes.. lest too much power collect in one organization which would rise up as a de facto government and endanger liberty all over again.
Your point of view sounds reasonable but it does appear that you (like many other slashdotters) regard pornography as being harmless. There is much evidence that contradicts such a belief.
Brilliant! We've been waiting for you to step up to the podium, sir. Now, please link to some of this wonderful evidence you speak of demonstrating that pornography is in any way harmful, and if possible that it is sufficiently harmful to warrant censorship as a remedy. Maybe you can even churn out a good definition for "pornography" seeing as how, you know, "harmfulness" would have to be a good litmus at this point. Yes? No? I mean, why bother blocking "pornography" in specific if we could just block whatever data is proven to be harmful?
It's hard to make progress in any direction in a debate like this without some hard facts. Please get our lazy, slashdotting butts off of the couch by bringing some peer-reviewed results to the party and up the ante.:)
Also, I really cannot help but directly refute your basic illustration:
if you know a drink is poisonous, how much of it do you drink?
To which I really need to refer you to my home boy Paracelsus:
All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison
Which leads to the answer: "I would seek to imbibe at most a sub-toxic amount of the drink".
But that's something I really would have expected someone hawking "iHerb.com" in their sig to know already? I'm just saying..
The problem with people is that most of them truly believe that what they do, say and think is "right" in some sense.
The problem isn't believing you are right, the problem is panning empirical evidence in order to make your views sound somehow superior to those other's have.
That is my personal belief. The funny thing is that any conservative with a brain (they exist!) could probably argue his belief just as consistently and eloquently, and find as many flaws in mine as I in his.
But you did not find flaws in any conservative's argument in this post, you've simply listed your beliefs which are dissimilar to theirs. I argue that they cannot find flaws in your "beliefs" without first citing empirical evidence. No amount of eloquence can take the place of hard facts.
That said, I'd like to muster what little eloquence I have to reframe the debate and help clarify where evidence ought to be gathered.
This argument revolves around the ethics of censoring or not censoring access to certain kinds of information to certain persons. I don't care if it's censoring pornography from minors or censoring world events and critical discussion in North Korea. Censorship by definition separates a subset of people from information available in the wild, necessarily replacing said information with falsehood. Intentional deception made for personal gain against the (expected) will of the deceived is the definition of Fraud.
Thus, all Censorship is a form of Fraud.
Now I cannot speak to the morality of this until someone less lazy than I dredges up some hard facts and evidence about whether or not lying to your children about the basic nature of the world by way of censoring their access to facts outside of the home causes more psychological harm than images or viral ideas can.
Or else perhaps someone can reframe the debate if they believe I am doing it an injustice? I really do believe that pornography is nothing more than a macguffin and a red herring in a debate about whether or not parents deserve government support in shielding their children from ideas which challenge whatever the household doctrine is. Christian parents want to protect their children's eyes from the "devil" of non-christian ideas. Secular parents want to protect their children from the secular devil of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll. Chinese parents support a government which actually makes strides in shielding their children's eyes from ideas which they fear will provoke civil unrest: including democracy, Falun Gong, and any material critical of the status quo.
But unlike China we are culturally heterogeneous. Our legal definition of "pornography" is so ambiguous that we leave it up to community standards to decide what is or is not obscene. We're left in a position where one person's pornography is another persons' politically protected speech (maybe even a PETA advertisement?)
So anyone who is in favor of government managed filters has to not only provide evidence that a generation raised alongside 15+ years of unfiltered internet access is any worse off than previous generations for it, but they have to very clearly define what they seek to filter and how that material is actually harmful enough to justify being replaced by misinformation.
users, the owners of their private information, should decide what happens.
Sorry U, you're still being vague.
"Should decide what happens".. to what? How do you "own" information?
People around you be trippin because it sounds like you are saying putting PII into facebook's database entitles users to make facebook do certain things. Please clarify?:P
They now know that software comes from the repositories, not via email or random websites so anything asking them to download and run an arbitrary program throws up warning flags.
So if they are asked to install a.deb file for a package that does not match the nit-picky philosophies of their distro, such as FFMPEG vs Debian, or else asked to modify their repo list to include these third parties, do the newbies A> research and make the right decision using their keen powers of observation, or B> rely on you to guide them each time?
That might not be a terribly common problem today, but as Linux Desktop acceptance rises both the sheer number of software projects to add to the repo and the number which fail to meet a distro's philosophy will rise as well.
FBOW, there are magnitudes more applications available for Windows than there are for *nix at present, from ameture to polished, from open source to boxed, and that number grows daily. This is possible partly because the distribution of Windows software is not presently bottlenecked in any centralized repository.
It stands to reason that the ecosystem of any distribution would have to scale hugely to be able to support a comparable number of apps. Does the current Repository model scale to certifying thousands of millions of applications as being free of malware?
If not, users will still be asked to install "uncertified" software from websites or boxes to fill the gap. Of course they should avoid anything coming through Email, but some users have a hell of a time distinguishing websites from email.
For example, my parents ended up getting one because it's essentially free with their internet and their house is a cell dead zone.
Hunh. "Free with their internet" would normally indicate VOIP on cable or channelized DSL where I live. So those guys get listed in the white pages then?
Man, I can't even keep track.:D Next question: Who actually wants to be listed in the white pages?:P
How about you just stop pretending you know anything about meat and we'll go on not caring what you do or don't eat?
Well, we could start by admitting you know nothing about me. I'm not a vegetarian, and I don't see anyone else this far down the thread who says that they are either. Why don't you look at some meat and calm down.:P
I eat meat in some form in pretty much every meal, and have my whole life, though the meat selection is largely beef, some chicken and a little pork from time to time. However I live in a small town, on the West Coast, and I'm not certain what a butcher's shop even looks like. I eat fast food, take-away, frozen food, and I have yet to even see "lamb" on a menu anywhere. I imagine it's a fairly unusual thing to eat in my region. Might just be more popular in the mid-west.
By "our point", I also don't mean "vegetarians", I mean people who don't feel we need to see a doctor just for panning the differences of timbre and undertone between farm animals. If you enjoy the tableau, more power to you, just lose the snobbery.
"Get our basic package to access the internet very slowly at low priority, only £9.99/month. Want to be able to use the iPlayer during waking hours? Get our BBC pack for only £4.99/month extra. Sorry, but due to a dispute with Google over pricing, we're unable to offer our Search Engine pack this month, so you won't be able to find anything on the internet".
Absolutely correct, this is how Big Media wants all information to be made available. Only when you pay the appropriate ultra-specific, overinflated toll, and even then only at their discretion and convenience.
Try watching Crackle/C-spot videos (bankrolled by Sony) on Youtube outside of the US. Oops! Not available in your country.:3 Nor available for purchase. Just, not, legally available at all.
I'm sure glad Copyright Law encourages artists to create more works to fill the gap left by Copyright Law empowering rights holders to censor any content they had a hand or a pinky in creating. And it's refreshing to see the same creative spirit funding important content creation via triple-dipped internet pricing, which may or may not allow you access to the services we all enjoy today.
I've come pretty far down the thread without anyone explaining to me why there is still content for the white pages.
I mean, you're normally not listed there if you have a cell, right? or VOIP? How many non-businesses (aka non-yellow page fodder) still have landlines?
Slashdot Mirror
Why, is "borrowing", or intent to borrow, some kind of a constitutionally protected act that invalidates other laws? We aren't arguing mens rea, we're arguing the legal definition of speech.
The first thing I think of here is encode all the porn as ascii art, or as colored text where the letters are so small they are no longer visually register.
I could put an LED billboard up in times square where every pixel was shaped into a letter, spelling out Moby Dick or some such, and if the billboard displayed Moby's Dick instead then one could argue that I am using words to convey information, therefor it is protected speech. :3
This is all rather farcical obviously, but it illustrates how a message cannot so cleanly categorized as "words" or not. "fire" in a crowded movie theater, and all that.
I get the feeling the law is not codified this way, but I prefer to look at the matter as the *content* of speech should be protected, but that the *implementation* of speech should be something we can legislate against in order to protect the rights of others so long as alternate methods exist to convey the content.
but the fact is that we have an age of consent and an age of majority for a reason.
Too bad you apparently can't even fathom what those reasons are, or you'd have shared them instead of appealing to ridicule.
> As a general rule, economic systems run more efficiently when people pay for the resources that they use, and run inefficiently when other people pay for resources that somebody else uses. Just a general rule to keep in mind. Hmm. Does it run efficiently when the significant segment of the population (children, elderly, ill, disabled, mentally unbalanced) that cannot earn *any* revenue to pay for their own weight are left to slowly starve? õ_O I know you're saying it's just a general rule, it's hard to balance systems on rules that require as many presumptions as this one to find balance, and slide out of balance as soon as those presumptions fail.
So I'm sure if they offer fiber in your neighborhood you wouldn't touch that with a ten foot pole. :>
You've claimed that any investment in a fixed supply of something is a pyramid scheme. We mention Gold and Land (which also fit these criteria) and you hand wave about whether you're trying to use something as a currency or not.
Virtually all commodity investments have static supply in the short term. Bitcoin is a digital commodity. In fact it's the first digital commodity to be both counterfeit-proof and non-centralized, and those four properties (digital + commodity + counterfeit-proof + decentralized) drive 90% of it's value as a transaction and value store system. Can you name any alternatives which satisfy all four of those criteria?
What I ask from you is to disambiguate how it is that you view Bitcoin as a scam compared to any other fixed-supply commodity investment.
On the other hand, accept "non-functional today, but I promise tomorrow it will be amazing!" then that's all you'll ever have, too.
Then how the average server admin can take advantage of this? ;)
This.
Good god, screw the standards. If it's good enough for microgoogle, we should be doing it too. The only thing we have to lose is visitors to our own damn sites, right? So how can I tune my kernel / apache to firehose the TCP window? xD
There is much evidence that contradicts such a belief.
If you actually care, you have more than the necessary resources to look it up yourself. Mine it is not to convince someone against their will that a cherished belief is wrong.
So which is it? Are you going to factually challenge someone's belief or backpedal from a badly played bluff because you simply don't have the cards?
I responded to you because I had just got done complaining about how much argument is taking place on this subject without a single mention of evidence. And then I happen upon you, who not only talks of evidence but suggests that there is an abundance of it, in favor of censorship — which is the windmill I happen to be tilting at today.
I mean I don't know anything about porn — I'd be lucky if I could perform a Google search on the topic without somehow lousing it up — but I strongly resist censorship. Especially when the folks doing the censoring cannot produce empirical data about what ill is being resolved by slicing up other people's access to empirical data and replacing it with falsehood.
I mean, no matter how many citations we might potentially find suggesting there is no causal link to harm, how can I find the studies you specifically claim to have that there is? Your claim is fantastic. On par with claiming to have proof of evidence of God. So imagine my disappointment when I learn you were just making it up as you went.
As to the Ad Hominem (please look that up too), If it's any help, I am sorry for suggesting you don't know the meaning of the word "poison". That was very passive-aggressive of me. I should have just flat out said it instead.
It's just that I have high expectations for people who spam promo codes, trying to make a buck convincing people that coconut oil can cure hypothyroidism. You've got to at least demonstrate knowledge of the basics, or you'll be taken about as seriously as Sarah Palin when somebody calls Bullshit on you.
Wait, you're still talking about Jeeves and Wooster, rite?
"I've never heard of" != "There is no such thing as"
Nonetheless, I would imagine from his vantage of tech support he's never heard of it only because it's such a delicate topic that it is not often discussed with tech monkeys. But that's the danger of not hearing about things: it's easy to infer they must not exist or must not be a serious threat.
This demonstrates that Censorship, be it systemic blacklisting at an ISP or self-censorship due to embarrassment, dooms any population to fall prey to exactly what dangers they use the censorship to avoid.
While I can't profess that this statement is accurate, it paints an interesting stereotype of how each political movement sees the other, doesn't it?
(American) Conservatives want to centralize morality.. .. well .. authority..
(American) Liberals want to centralize equality..
Authoritarians want to centralize
Socialists want to centralize industry..
Anarchists want to decentralize everything.
Us Libertarians just want to slap y'all upside the head, and centralize absolutely as little as we have to in order to optimize both liberty and social order. We see liberty as important because it pushes routing decisions to the edge of the network where they belong. Without it civilization and culture really cannot scale. But we also require a minimum of centralized power in the form of government as an officiator to resolve exceptions and disputes.. lest too much power collect in one organization which would rise up as a de facto government and endanger liberty all over again.
It's lucky that porn doesn't in any way desensitize people isn't it, shit-for-brains?
Mom! tehcyder said a bad word, why isn't he filtered yet? D:
Your point of view sounds reasonable but it does appear that you (like many other slashdotters) regard pornography as being harmless. There is much evidence that contradicts such a belief.
Brilliant! We've been waiting for you to step up to the podium, sir. Now, please link to some of this wonderful evidence you speak of demonstrating that pornography is in any way harmful, and if possible that it is sufficiently harmful to warrant censorship as a remedy. Maybe you can even churn out a good definition for "pornography" seeing as how, you know, "harmfulness" would have to be a good litmus at this point. Yes? No? I mean, why bother blocking "pornography" in specific if we could just block whatever data is proven to be harmful?
It's hard to make progress in any direction in a debate like this without some hard facts. Please get our lazy, slashdotting butts off of the couch by bringing some peer-reviewed results to the party and up the ante. :)
Also, I really cannot help but directly refute your basic illustration:
if you know a drink is poisonous, how much of it do you drink?
To which I really need to refer you to my home boy Paracelsus:
All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison
Which leads to the answer: "I would seek to imbibe at most a sub-toxic amount of the drink".
But that's something I really would have expected someone hawking "iHerb.com" in their sig to know already? I'm just saying..
The problem with people is that most of them truly believe that what they do, say and think is "right" in some sense.
The problem isn't believing you are right, the problem is panning empirical evidence in order to make your views sound somehow superior to those other's have.
That is my personal belief. The funny thing is that any conservative with a brain (they exist!) could probably argue his belief just as consistently and eloquently, and find as many flaws in mine as I in his.
But you did not find flaws in any conservative's argument in this post, you've simply listed your beliefs which are dissimilar to theirs. I argue that they cannot find flaws in your "beliefs" without first citing empirical evidence. No amount of eloquence can take the place of hard facts.
That said, I'd like to muster what little eloquence I have to reframe the debate and help clarify where evidence ought to be gathered.
This argument revolves around the ethics of censoring or not censoring access to certain kinds of information to certain persons. I don't care if it's censoring pornography from minors or censoring world events and critical discussion in North Korea. Censorship by definition separates a subset of people from information available in the wild, necessarily replacing said information with falsehood. Intentional deception made for personal gain against the (expected) will of the deceived is the definition of Fraud.
Thus, all Censorship is a form of Fraud.
Now I cannot speak to the morality of this until someone less lazy than I dredges up some hard facts and evidence about whether or not lying to your children about the basic nature of the world by way of censoring their access to facts outside of the home causes more psychological harm than images or viral ideas can.
Or else perhaps someone can reframe the debate if they believe I am doing it an injustice? I really do believe that pornography is nothing more than a macguffin and a red herring in a debate about whether or not parents deserve government support in shielding their children from ideas which challenge whatever the household doctrine is. Christian parents want to protect their children's eyes from the "devil" of non-christian ideas. Secular parents want to protect their children from the secular devil of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll. Chinese parents support a government which actually makes strides in shielding their children's eyes from ideas which they fear will provoke civil unrest: including democracy, Falun Gong, and any material critical of the status quo.
But unlike China we are culturally heterogeneous. Our legal definition of "pornography" is so ambiguous that we leave it up to community standards to decide what is or is not obscene. We're left in a position where one person's pornography is another persons' politically protected speech (maybe even a PETA advertisement?)
So anyone who is in favor of government managed filters has to not only provide evidence that a generation raised alongside 15+ years of unfiltered internet access is any worse off than previous generations for it, but they have to very clearly define what they seek to filter and how that material is actually harmful enough to justify being replaced by misinformation.
Most spoken languages are not detailed tho, there is lots of ambiguity. If you want it to be short and informative, you should use Math.
0
1
0u!!
No, they most certainly have not. >:C
users, the owners of their private information, should decide what happens.
Sorry U, you're still being vague.
"Should decide what happens" .. to what? How do you "own" information?
People around you be trippin because it sounds like you are saying putting PII into facebook's database entitles users to make facebook do certain things. Please clarify? :P
They now know that software comes from the repositories, not via email or random websites so anything asking them to download and run an arbitrary program throws up warning flags.
So if they are asked to install a .deb file for a package that does not match the nit-picky philosophies of their distro, such as FFMPEG vs Debian, or else asked to modify their repo list to include these third parties, do the newbies A> research and make the right decision using their keen powers of observation, or B> rely on you to guide them each time?
That might not be a terribly common problem today, but as Linux Desktop acceptance rises both the sheer number of software projects to add to the repo and the number which fail to meet a distro's philosophy will rise as well.
FBOW, there are magnitudes more applications available for Windows than there are for *nix at present, from ameture to polished, from open source to boxed, and that number grows daily. This is possible partly because the distribution of Windows software is not presently bottlenecked in any centralized repository.
It stands to reason that the ecosystem of any distribution would have to scale hugely to be able to support a comparable number of apps. Does the current Repository model scale to certifying thousands of millions of applications as being free of malware?
If not, users will still be asked to install "uncertified" software from websites or boxes to fill the gap. Of course they should avoid anything coming through Email, but some users have a hell of a time distinguishing websites from email.
Agreed. The last thing the Kernel team needs to worry about is improving the Kernel. D:
For example, my parents ended up getting one because it's essentially free with their internet and their house is a cell dead zone.
Hunh. "Free with their internet" would normally indicate VOIP on cable or channelized DSL where I live. So those guys get listed in the white pages then?
Man, I can't even keep track. :D Next question: Who actually wants to be listed in the white pages? :P
How about you just stop pretending you know anything about meat and we'll go on not caring what you do or don't eat?
Well, we could start by admitting you know nothing about me. I'm not a vegetarian, and I don't see anyone else this far down the thread who says that they are either. Why don't you look at some meat and calm down. :P
I eat meat in some form in pretty much every meal, and have my whole life, though the meat selection is largely beef, some chicken and a little pork from time to time. However I live in a small town, on the West Coast, and I'm not certain what a butcher's shop even looks like. I eat fast food, take-away, frozen food, and I have yet to even see "lamb" on a menu anywhere. I imagine it's a fairly unusual thing to eat in my region. Might just be more popular in the mid-west.
By "our point", I also don't mean "vegetarians", I mean people who don't feel we need to see a doctor just for panning the differences of timbre and undertone between farm animals. If you enjoy the tableau, more power to you, just lose the snobbery.
"Get our basic package to access the internet very slowly at low priority, only £9.99/month. Want to be able to use the iPlayer during waking hours? Get our BBC pack for only £4.99/month extra. Sorry, but due to a dispute with Google over pricing, we're unable to offer our Search Engine pack this month, so you won't be able to find anything on the internet".
Absolutely correct, this is how Big Media wants all information to be made available. Only when you pay the appropriate ultra-specific, overinflated toll, and even then only at their discretion and convenience.
Try watching Crackle/C-spot videos (bankrolled by Sony) on Youtube outside of the US. Oops! Not available in your country. :3 Nor available for purchase. Just, not, legally available at all.
I'm sure glad Copyright Law encourages artists to create more works to fill the gap left by Copyright Law empowering rights holders to censor any content they had a hand or a pinky in creating. And it's refreshing to see the same creative spirit funding important content creation via triple-dipped internet pricing, which may or may not allow you access to the services we all enjoy today.
I've come pretty far down the thread without anyone explaining to me why there is still content for the white pages.
I mean, you're normally not listed there if you have a cell, right? or VOIP? How many non-businesses (aka non-yellow page fodder) still have landlines?