Bullshit. There are numerous valid reasons for having the phone numbers of minors in your contact list, and they have been discussed extensively already.
Even so, if you kissed a twelve year old instead of your own (adult) girlfriend because some freak of nature (let's say a wormhole swapped them out or something ridiculous like that), there should be no other consequences than your social responsibility to apologize to the girl and possbily her parents or guardians. No liability whatsoever, crininal or otherwise.
Why? Because true accidents, in which neither party is really to blame in any way, should NEVER, EVER have repercussions that last a lifetime.
"You go to kiss your girlfriend who had been sitting next to you, but without realizing it at first you kiss a 16 year old girl who had somehow changed places with her instead. Now you did intend to kiss someone, but it was not the girl in question. When you get arrested for sexual assault of a minor (and served civily for assault as a tort) you will have to argue that their was no transfer of mens rea and instead was a pure accident with no wrongful intent."
In a sane world you would not have to prove your innocence at all. The opposing party would have to prove your guilt in this matter.
Jury justice is a silly form of justice anyway. Suspects should at least get the chance of a fair trial. There is no chance of that with the jury system. The person who invented the jury system was a probably a moron who liked lynchparties.
Obviously (at least if the Daily Mail is to be believed, and I do have some doubts about this), the guy does not belong in jail, nor does he belong on the sex offenders list. The worst that should have happened to him was that he had to apologize to everyone he sent this message to, nothing more, nothing less.
Negligent? Maybe, but to err is human. All too often these days a simple mistake (whether it be sending the message or buying a Blackberry in the first place) is twisted into something that it simply is not: a crime.
I can think of one way that might be accomplished. It's gross, but I am sure that somewhere on this forsaken world there is a pervert who would lay the blame on someone else by doing just that.
So long as that remains a possibility, however slim, you can never use the argument 'your DNA was found where it does not belong, so you were there', and have it be anything other than circumstantial evidence.
ISPs, Websites and such should not be forced to filter any content whatsoever, as long as that content is legal. Making sure your kid is not exposed to anything that for some ((pseudo-)scientific) reason is considered harmful to him, is not their job. It's yours. You are responsible for taking good care of your kid. And if your kid is at school, at a daycare center or anything of that sort, it is the job of the people directly involved with him and his peers. Not the ISP, not the website owner, not the BOFH who sits at the computer screen of the administration console of any of the aforementioned institutes, it's you the one you trust to be your surrogate.
Installing a content-filter is severely counterproductive. Why? Because whatever one does as an administrator and however smart one is in keeping up with the latest updates, there is always someone else who is smarter in cirvumventing whatever measures one takes. What you end up with is a digital arms race and an overworked admin whose only source of solace is the fact that he's root and that whatever you throw at him when the content filter failed for the zillionth time, he knows how to press proverbial big red button that says "(A)DSL STOP".
Making it "illegal" for anyone to access sites that aren't filtered for whatever reason is not only a violation of anyone's right of free (as freedom of choice) access to the internet, it is also sordidly reminiscent of trigger happy media institutes forcing ISPs to block certain websites and then making it "illegal" for ISPs and website owners to document how to circumvent those website blocks (which makes for interesting paradoxes, such as what to do with the minutes of the court's decision and the entire process, which in my home country are published on a government operated website).
I actually run an OpenIndiana installation on a system with an Atom D510 and two 320GB 2.5" drives. The performance is actually not all that bad. Even so, I didn't really build it to perform very well, I built it to see if I could set up something that eats less than 100 Watts while still offering something remotely resembling a performance. With regard to that, the system is working perfectly;-).
I am terribly disappointed with ext4. If you want a good and stable combination of volume management and a filesystem, I'd recommend LVM (which of all the software solutions I've worked with is by far the best), combined with XFS, which is a stable and reliable journalling filesystem. Where ext4 fails just as terribly as its predecessor, ext3, as far as disk performance goes (kjournald, big kernel lock and the likes), XFS just ploughs on and on.
As for Solaris and ZFS. At the company I work for we still use UFS for everything. ZFS has its niceties, but it does one thing many applications, especially DBMSes, won't like: it does not support direct I/O (http://blogs.sybase.com/database/2009/07/directio-file-system-devices/). Even if you do the zpool, zvol-as-raw-disk-device option you'll end up terribly disappointed, because although it claims to support direct I/O, you will not bypass the primary cache. Also, using ZFS on a SAN LUN does not really make any sense. It wants to do things with your disk devices that you don't want it to do with them. So, while as a concept ZFS is marvelous, quite brilliant actually, its practical application is not well-suited for a high-performance, high-load datawarehouse. Why? Because like another software company whose name I will not mention, Sun designed ZFS to be a little too smart for its own good.
It was pretty much the same with D&D 3.5e, but at least you had (more or less) sensible mechanics combined with a load of fun. And if you didn't have miniatures like most of my D&D companions did, there was always something to replace that: distinctly coloured marbles, rarely used dice.
D&D 4e has its plethora of powers (just about everything has been turned into a power, even the combat styles), but with its lack of applicability: the really good ones are limited to per-encounter or per-day use, while the at-will powers would not penetrate a Minotaur's hide (or perhaps it's the Minotaur's thick hide that's the problem here). To me, that is no fun at all. If you base your character purely on what your ideas about it are, it would basically suck. If you min-maxed it to the point that it was no longer a joy to play with you might get lucky and maybe, maybe, if you were really, really, luck, you would hit something.
I've played a multitude of characters in 3.5e settings and there was always something off about them because I "designed" them that way. I don't like my characters to be perfect examples of virtue or perfect masters of sword and archery. Oftentimes I like my character to be something different as well, paradoxical even. Sometimes even mysterious.
Cancelling your subscription is the worst thing you could have done. You do not get it, do you? If a company, be it an ISP or anything else, is ordered by a court, to block access to something, the only thing that company CAN do is execute that order, however nonsensical said order. Why? Because, if they want to fight the judge's decision - and both Ziggo and XS4ALL have already announced they are going to - their chances of winning that appeal go way up. Not executing a court's order opens up a whole can of worms of possibilities for the counterparty to sue them into the ground for all eternity, or for the (next, higher) court to find them in contempt in the appeal. At least now they can say they complied with the order, even if it was under great protest.
The judge - who almost certainly must have made a fortune with this case or must be the dumbest judge in the world - has basically given Brein carte blanche to have Ziggo and XS4ALL block anything on the internet they deem to be violating the copyrights of the artists they represent, which to me is a far greater concern than the fact that the instigating factor happens to be TPB. If BREIN, or its trigger happy director Tim Kuik sees anything it does not like, for example on '/.'. In name, it will always be something along the lines of 'that page on that site is violating the rights of this and that artist', but because the judge's decision does not allow verification of the lists BREIN sends to these ISPs, virtually any ip-address or fqhn could appear on that list and the ISPs in question would - at least until their appeal is fought and won - have no choice but to block access to it.
I'm no expert, but cases like these fascinate me, because they touch on the very cornerstone of everything we hold dear, both in the internet community and in the real world: freedom, in every way possible. How far does freedom of expression go? How high (or how low) should the powers of big conglomerates reach? How far does the concept of 'fair use' extend? Holland was one of the first countries to actually implement a law requiring net neutrality. The very first if I'm not mistaken. Now that supposed net neutrality has been given a serious blow, and so has the freedom of expression in Holland.
There is something to be said for getting rid of all patents. There is, however, also something to be said for keeping them.
Patents should serve their primary purpose, which is protect and acknowledge original art, and should serve it well. But they should never, ever be allowed to be used to ban products from the market. Why? Because the customer is king, not the other way around.
So far, it has only been about banning the sales of specific products, but there comes a time when the litigation escalates to such an extent that the customer will be left with inoperable hardware (because the automatic update of his favorite tool has invalidated its use), or even that the company that built the device goes bankrupt.
"They will make an arrest (looks good), seize the computers, and then the prosecutor will attempt to get the accused to plead guilty on reduced charges (once again it looks good). "
That is why plea-bargains are the worst kind of mistake ever invented as far a concepts in justice systems goes, side by side with the concept of a jury. The former is fundamentally flawed because it does not make sense to criminalize perjury, but at the same time allow for a suspect to confess to something he did not do in exchange for a lighter conviction. The latter is fundamentally flawed because having lay men determine the guilt or innocence of a person is virtually the same as having a lynchmob execute the suspect right away.
The worst part of it is that this so-called puritanism is blowing over back to Europe as well. Whole legions of quasi-politicians, yet full-blown demagogues are crying wolf over the (fictitious) advent of Sharia law in European countries, while at the same time implementing their own version of it in the name of national security and general protection of the populace. Both are symptoms of the underlying problem: when it comes to "hot" issues such as acts of terrorism or child abuse people loose all sense of proportion and grab straight for the proverbial jackpot: they look for a scapegoat and blame everything on it.
Child abuse bad. But labelling teenagers who photograph themselves (in whatever way) and send these photos to eachother as sex offenders is worse, because it does away with the common sense that teenagers are adolescents: they are developing from child to grownup. What do you think would damage their psyches (and their futures) more: time in prison and being labelled a sex offender, or the fact that someone else sees them naked? I think the answer is obvious.
Moreover, modesty is adopted behaviour. We learned it from our parents, who learned it from theirs and so forth. In turn we teach it to our children. Nothing wrong with that, but the fact remains that our natural state of being, and the state in which we are born, is nude. Everything around it is subject to social and cultural convention. And no matter how you dress, there is always some idiot who considers it offensive or even harmful, whether it is to himself or to you. If we start making laws for every single case, all of us (as mondial citizens) should consider buying land on the moon, put fences around our patch of land and insulate ourselves from everyone else. Only then does it even have the tiniest bit of chance of succeeding in pleasing everyone, and who knows, maybe even that idiot.
By the way, labelling the recipient of such pictures as the offender if he or she does not report it is even worse. Receiving an SMS message or any other kind of message is not an act, and as such cannot and should not be criminialized. Ever heard of the phrase 'the cure is worse than the disease'? This is just that. Only now, there is no cure. Or a disease for that matter.
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Bullshit. There are numerous valid reasons for having the phone numbers of minors in your contact list, and they have been discussed extensively already.
A little addendum to my post above: obviously, it would also be prudent and certainly civil to apologize to your girlfriend.
Even so, if you kissed a twelve year old instead of your own (adult) girlfriend because some freak of nature (let's say a wormhole swapped them out or something ridiculous like that), there should be no other consequences than your social responsibility to apologize to the girl and possbily her parents or guardians. No liability whatsoever, crininal or otherwise.
Why? Because true accidents, in which neither party is really to blame in any way, should NEVER, EVER have repercussions that last a lifetime.
Actually, several of my family members still do that. It's a common courtesy. Although personally, I prefer to give them a call.
"You go to kiss your girlfriend who had been sitting next to you, but without realizing it at first you kiss a 16 year old girl who had somehow changed places with her instead. Now you did intend to kiss someone, but it was not the girl in question. When you get arrested for sexual assault of a minor (and served civily for assault as a tort) you will have to argue that their was no transfer of mens rea and instead was a pure accident with no wrongful intent."
In a sane world you would not have to prove your innocence at all. The opposing party would have to prove your guilt in this matter.
Chances are that that kid knows more about sex than any of us will ever forget.
Jury justice is a silly form of justice anyway. Suspects should at least get the chance of a fair trial. There is no chance of that with the jury system. The person who invented the jury system was a probably a moron who liked lynchparties.
Obviously (at least if the Daily Mail is to be believed, and I do have some doubts about this), the guy does not belong in jail, nor does he belong on the sex offenders list. The worst that should have happened to him was that he had to apologize to everyone he sent this message to, nothing more, nothing less.
Negligent? Maybe, but to err is human. All too often these days a simple mistake (whether it be sending the message or buying a Blackberry in the first place) is twisted into something that it simply is not: a crime.
There is no such thing as 'good' censorship, with the possible exception of self-censoring by an author.
How about the millions of damages for the idea of a tablet computer, posthumously, to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke?
"Microsoft is making your life easier! You no longer have to input your whole password! Just put in the first 16 characters!"
Unfortunately, so it is for the hacker trying to hack your account as well..
I have actually seen demos of old games like Quake or Doom in a CAVE.
The fact that Micro$oft has been granted this pattern shows once again how f***i*g incompetent the US Patent Bureau is.
I can think of one way that might be accomplished. It's gross, but I am sure that somewhere on this forsaken world there is a pervert who would lay the blame on someone else by doing just that.
So long as that remains a possibility, however slim, you can never use the argument 'your DNA was found where it does not belong, so you were there', and have it be anything other than circumstantial evidence.
Remember Santorum?
ISPs, Websites and such should not be forced to filter any content whatsoever, as long as that content is legal. Making sure your kid is not exposed to anything that for some ((pseudo-)scientific) reason is considered harmful to him, is not their job. It's yours. You are responsible for taking good care of your kid. And if your kid is at school, at a daycare center or anything of that sort, it is the job of the people directly involved with him and his peers. Not the ISP, not the website owner, not the BOFH who sits at the computer screen of the administration console of any of the aforementioned institutes, it's you the one you trust to be your surrogate.
Installing a content-filter is severely counterproductive. Why? Because whatever one does as an administrator and however smart one is in keeping up with the latest updates, there is always someone else who is smarter in cirvumventing whatever measures one takes. What you end up with is a digital arms race and an overworked admin whose only source of solace is the fact that he's root and that whatever you throw at him when the content filter failed for the zillionth time, he knows how to press proverbial big red button that says "(A)DSL STOP".
Making it "illegal" for anyone to access sites that aren't filtered for whatever reason is not only a violation of anyone's right of free (as freedom of choice) access to the internet, it is also sordidly reminiscent of trigger happy media institutes forcing ISPs to block certain websites and then making it "illegal" for ISPs and website owners to document how to circumvent those website blocks (which makes for interesting paradoxes, such as what to do with the minutes of the court's decision and the entire process, which in my home country are published on a government operated website).
I actually run an OpenIndiana installation on a system with an Atom D510 and two 320GB 2.5" drives. The performance is actually not all that bad. Even so, I didn't really build it to perform very well, I built it to see if I could set up something that eats less than 100 Watts while still offering something remotely resembling a performance. With regard to that, the system is working perfectly ;-).
I am terribly disappointed with ext4. If you want a good and stable combination of volume management and a filesystem, I'd recommend LVM (which of all the software solutions I've worked with is by far the best), combined with XFS, which is a stable and reliable journalling filesystem. Where ext4 fails just as terribly as its predecessor, ext3, as far as disk performance goes (kjournald, big kernel lock and the likes), XFS just ploughs on and on.
As for Solaris and ZFS. At the company I work for we still use UFS for everything. ZFS has its niceties, but it does one thing many applications, especially DBMSes, won't like: it does not support direct I/O (http://blogs.sybase.com/database/2009/07/directio-file-system-devices/). Even if you do the zpool, zvol-as-raw-disk-device option you'll end up terribly disappointed, because although it claims to support direct I/O, you will not bypass the primary cache. Also, using ZFS on a SAN LUN does not really make any sense. It wants to do things with your disk devices that you don't want it to do with them. So, while as a concept ZFS is marvelous, quite brilliant actually, its practical application is not well-suited for a high-performance, high-load datawarehouse. Why? Because like another software company whose name I will not mention, Sun designed ZFS to be a little too smart for its own good.
It was pretty much the same with D&D 3.5e, but at least you had (more or less) sensible mechanics combined with a load of fun. And if you didn't have miniatures like most of my D&D companions did, there was always something to replace that: distinctly coloured marbles, rarely used dice.
D&D 4e has its plethora of powers (just about everything has been turned into a power, even the combat styles), but with its lack of applicability: the really good ones are limited to per-encounter or per-day use, while the at-will powers would not penetrate a Minotaur's hide (or perhaps it's the Minotaur's thick hide that's the problem here). To me, that is no fun at all. If you base your character purely on what your ideas about it are, it would basically suck. If you min-maxed it to the point that it was no longer a joy to play with you might get lucky and maybe, maybe, if you were really, really, luck, you would hit something.
I've played a multitude of characters in 3.5e settings and there was always something off about them because I "designed" them that way. I don't like my characters to be perfect examples of virtue or perfect masters of sword and archery. Oftentimes I like my character to be something different as well, paradoxical even. Sometimes even mysterious.
Cancelling your subscription is the worst thing you could have done. You do not get it, do you? If a company, be it an ISP or anything else, is ordered by a court, to block access to something, the only thing that company CAN do is execute that order, however nonsensical said order. Why? Because, if they want to fight the judge's decision - and both Ziggo and XS4ALL have already announced they are going to - their chances of winning that appeal go way up. Not executing a court's order opens up a whole can of worms of possibilities for the counterparty to sue them into the ground for all eternity, or for the (next, higher) court to find them in contempt in the appeal. At least now they can say they complied with the order, even if it was under great protest.
The judge - who almost certainly must have made a fortune with this case or must be the dumbest judge in the world - has basically given Brein carte blanche to have Ziggo and XS4ALL block anything on the internet they deem to be violating the copyrights of the artists they represent, which to me is a far greater concern than the fact that the instigating factor happens to be TPB. If BREIN, or its trigger happy director Tim Kuik sees anything it does not like, for example on '/.'. In name, it will always be something along the lines of 'that page on that site is violating the rights of this and that artist', but because the judge's decision does not allow verification of the lists BREIN sends to these ISPs, virtually any ip-address or fqhn could appear on that list and the ISPs in question would - at least until their appeal is fought and won - have no choice but to block access to it.
I'm no expert, but cases like these fascinate me, because they touch on the very cornerstone of everything we hold dear, both in the internet community and in the real world: freedom, in every way possible. How far does freedom of expression go? How high (or how low) should the powers of big conglomerates reach? How far does the concept of 'fair use' extend? Holland was one of the first countries to actually implement a law requiring net neutrality. The very first if I'm not mistaken. Now that supposed net neutrality has been given a serious blow, and so has the freedom of expression in Holland.
Everyone is screaming at M$oft to bring back the drop-down menus (and in some cases they did), and now Ubuntu is getting ready to drop them as well.
There is something to be said for getting rid of all patents. There is, however, also something to be said for keeping them.
Patents should serve their primary purpose, which is protect and acknowledge original art, and should serve it well. But they should never, ever be allowed to be used to ban products from the market. Why? Because the customer is king, not the other way around.
So far, it has only been about banning the sales of specific products, but there comes a time when the litigation escalates to such an extent that the customer will be left with inoperable hardware (because the automatic update of his favorite tool has invalidated its use), or even that the company that built the device goes bankrupt.
Did you ever get around to coding your own synthesizer on de C64?
"They will make an arrest (looks good), seize the computers, and then the prosecutor will attempt to get the accused to plead guilty on reduced charges (once again it looks good). "
That is why plea-bargains are the worst kind of mistake ever invented as far a concepts in justice systems goes, side by side with the concept of a jury. The former is fundamentally flawed because it does not make sense to criminalize perjury, but at the same time allow for a suspect to confess to something he did not do in exchange for a lighter conviction. The latter is fundamentally flawed because having lay men determine the guilt or innocence of a person is virtually the same as having a lynchmob execute the suspect right away.
The worst part of it is that this so-called puritanism is blowing over back to Europe as well. Whole legions of quasi-politicians, yet full-blown demagogues are crying wolf over the (fictitious) advent of Sharia law in European countries, while at the same time implementing their own version of it in the name of national security and general protection of the populace. Both are symptoms of the underlying problem: when it comes to "hot" issues such as acts of terrorism or child abuse people loose all sense of proportion and grab straight for the proverbial jackpot: they look for a scapegoat and blame everything on it.
Child abuse bad. But labelling teenagers who photograph themselves (in whatever way) and send these photos to eachother as sex offenders is worse, because it does away with the common sense that teenagers are adolescents: they are developing from child to grownup. What do you think would damage their psyches (and their futures) more: time in prison and being labelled a sex offender, or the fact that someone else sees them naked? I think the answer is obvious.
Moreover, modesty is adopted behaviour. We learned it from our parents, who learned it from theirs and so forth. In turn we teach it to our children. Nothing wrong with that, but the fact remains that our natural state of being, and the state in which we are born, is nude. Everything around it is subject to social and cultural convention. And no matter how you dress, there is always some idiot who considers it offensive or even harmful, whether it is to himself or to you. If we start making laws for every single case, all of us (as mondial citizens) should consider buying land on the moon, put fences around our patch of land and insulate ourselves from everyone else. Only then does it even have the tiniest bit of chance of succeeding in pleasing everyone, and who knows, maybe even that idiot.
By the way, labelling the recipient of such pictures as the offender if he or she does not report it is even worse. Receiving an SMS message or any other kind of message is not an act, and as such cannot and should not be criminialized. Ever heard of the phrase 'the cure is worse than the disease'? This is just that. Only now, there is no cure. Or a disease for that matter.
Or a Heineken beer tender.