Things like Janet Jackson at the super bowl don't make me feel sorry for the guilty parties at all. National tv with children watching and people feel the need to "push the envenlope."
Please explain exactly the harm you think is caused to children when they see a naked nipple. Toddlers that even suck those nipples don't seem to be harmed in any way either (ok, that is, in the case of Janet Jackson they would probably suffer a silicone intoxication).
I think your comment is a fine example of - IMO - US double standards when it comes to "youth-threatening" material on TV - sex vs. violence. As a wise American put it once (whose name unfortunately I can't remember...), you can only show naked breasts on national television if they're cut off with a chainsaw. As a non-American the hysteria about (think about it) a single bare nipple kind of baffles me. As if the kids that watched this "incident" would all automagically be turned into emotionless murdering sex-perverts.
Do people really verify the integrity of *any binary file* they've downloaded, no matter how? Even with MD5? Most people do not, including slashdotters. p2p or otherwise.
You don't see any difference between downloading binaries from whoever-put-it-there on P2P, as opposed to downloading binaries from e.g. ftp.mozilla.org?
I don't recall anything untoward in this movie (aside from the violence.) Sure the girl was in love with him, but he never did anything other than care for here and protect her as if she were his own. That was the whole point of the movie, how he was raising her as an assassin.
WARNING: MOVIE SPOILER
There is a scene where Mathilda tries to persuade Léon into having sex with her, being as erotic as she can be (she dresses up and IIRC even puts on lipstick). Certainly lots of "postures with sexual emphasis" here. Léon declines since she is still a child - breaking her heart and causing her to threaten to commit suicide.
So there is nothing in this movie to indicate child pornography, but still it would have to be banned if the new EU legislation is enacted.
As already mentioned, you may have seen the censored US version where this (central) scene was already cut out. Until now, it is still legal to display and possess the full movie in most of Europe. I'm not sure whether it is still legal in Germany, though.
Who needs Bin Laden if we can destroy our freedom and democracy ourselves?
- Firstly, most of the people in the pictures on rotten.com are dead.
[cynical]So the exchange of CP should be allowed if the child died during the abuse?[/cynical]
Thirdly, rotten.com is a legally run site with a named owner and so can be dealt with through the criminal and civil law. Distribution of kiddy porn site illegal in almost all jurisdictions, and so people whose rights are violated won't have legal recourse.
You're contradicting your own argument - if banning CP makes it harder for victims to find legal recourse, why ban it in the first?
Fourthly, it's irrelevant. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Depends on whether you want to see rotten.com as a wrong. Personally, I don't. It's the perfect site to test freedom-of-speech rights...
Fifthly, answer my question: how would you feel if me and a bunch of pals were to come around to your place, forcibly rape you and submit you to terrible indignities, and then distribute the film on the net for the rest of eternity?
I certainly won't answer your question because it is loaded. You pretend that the rape itself was in question, but we're discussing the swapping of picture/movie material instead. So your question should look somewhat more like this: "Wouldn't being forcibly raped be much nicer if you knew that everyone who downloaded a movie clip of your rape would have to go to prison?"
Oh, now it looks like a really ridiculous question, but that is my point. Compared to the rape itself, the video swapping looks like a minor nuisance. And note that the alternative to unlimited swapping is not "no swapping", because this is simply unenforcable. So the alternative is: it will be swapped, but swappers can go to prison if they get caught. Does this help you as a rape victim in any way? Most definitely not!
Anyway, I don't really mind restrictions on CP exchange as long as they remain just that. People here have ridiculed "liberal" arguments as slippery slope, like "Yeah, first they ban murder, and then they ban softdrinks". However, I don't think you would find this as funny any more, if a ban on softdrinks was actually already passed as a law in Germany, and being planned by the EU commission - at least not if you're an EU citizen!
And precisely this - as applied to "protection of minors" - is the case. Let me state a few facts:
In Germany, it is now illegal to display any images involving minors (where a minor is a person younger than 18) in a "posture with sexual emphasis". Note that it is not even a requirement that this person is nude, and it may be a 17 year old girl/young woman who has had sexual feelings since >=5 years! Any erotic posture is sufficient - or maybe even a laszive facial expression?
The EU is planning to do the same with the added goodie that it is not even a requirement that the person in question actually is a minor. Instead, merely looking like <18yrs qualifies this person for "protection" and anyone who displays him/her in a "posture with sexual emphasis" will be committing a crime!
This movie will have to be banned (or crippled by cutting it). Sad - I found it a lot more worthwile than your average Police Academy 17. Well - I guess it's okay, since such movies are obviously degenerate art.
The German conservatives are trying to enact a complete ban on movies and computer games which "glorify violence". Computer games of this kind have long been severely penalized in Germany. In fact, you may not even resell used games like Quake over ebay, since this counts as (illegal) advertising. If the conservatives have their way, even "mainstream" movies like Terminato
A short recap of my attempted reply, which I accidentally killed:
First, pornography does not by definition involve sexual acts, but only a "primary intent to cause sexual arousal". Thus, there can even be pornographic writings ("She thoughtfully circled her succulent nipple with her finger, stroking her soft vulva with the other hand."). This means a picture of a 3 year old girl peeing on the nightpot may be counted as child pornography, and you can be sure that politicians do include such images/movies into their CP statistics.
Second, from what I heard/read of child abuse victims, most forms of child abuse are "softer" than actual rape, and they rarely include physical force. Instead, most of the time, the gullibility and naïveté of children is abused in order to make them e.g. masturbate an adult, or simulate sexual behavior (the abusers tell them exactly what to do) with other children. E.g. someone could make a 5 year old girl suck the penis of her 7 year old brother by telling them that this was medically necessary, and her brother would get very sick otherwise. This sounds extremely silly to an adult, but, lacking life experience and critical thinking abilities, children are very susceptible to this kind of manipulation.
So I don't have numbers either, but I would say your imagination that, like, all child pornography shows double penetration rape, is rather ridiculous. In fact, I guess that less than 5% of all imagery rsp. movies traded this way display rape.
Is jerking off to the picture of said girl peeing in the pot wrong? At least it is disgusting. But is it a crime? I can't say it should be. Should viewing "soft" child abuse videos (for sexual stimulation) be punished? Maybe. Should viewing material of child rape for the same purpose be punished? Probably. And should actual abuse be punished? Absolutely! Is there a quality difference between those respective acts? Yes. And I don't think those people who shout "Just cut their dicks and heads off!" are willing to acknowledge it.
Microsoft was not the first to either invent or implement the start menu, the integrated file system / net browser, or the safety-checked bytecode-based API. In fact with all of these they were literally years and years behind other commercially successful implementations.
Ok, they may not have invented the start menu, the integrated fs/net browser or bytecode. But didn't they invent the virtual desktop pager?
Re:I reported the leak on October 17, 2003:
on
A New Look For Firefox
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Blatant MS bashing gets you mod points aparently. When you reach the upper limit of memory, this "disk thrashing" you speak of is the cache being resised. All that you need to do to stop that is set your cache minimum size the same as the maximum. No more disk thrashing. Or you could just hate on M$, that might be even easier.
Poppycock. In order to shrink the cache, only dirty pages have to be flushed. However, dirty pages have to be written much earlier than that in order to reduce the damaging effects of system or power failures anyway, so most of the cache will very likely not be dirty at that time. Cache pages which are not dirty, i.e. identical to the version on disk do not need to be written out, but can simply be discarded. So shrinking the cache should typically involve little disk I/O. Exceptions would be times where you do write lots of data to harddisk (e.g. downloads over a fast connection).
Btw, Linux may write "anonymous" pages (e.g. application memory) that haven't been recently accessed into swapspace before it actually runs out of physical RAM, but keeps them in RAM as "not dirty". That way, it can also just discard them once memory conditions get critical, and thus avoid a lot of disk I/O delays.
Since child pornography is indisputably illegal, is there anything wrong with this? (granted, many of the other things you've mentioned are indisputably illegal also, and while having them taken down would be a great inconvenience to me, i wouldn't see such an action as an unconscionable abuse of power).
you haven't been here long have you? unfettered access to porn, any porn, is a basic human right acording to many/.'ers. It's right after food, water, and oxygen.
Well, I can see why the two of you are posting as Anonymous Cowards... First, child porn is indisputably illegal? This is quite a vague statement. Exactly what is illegal about child pornography? Possessing it? Copying it? Downloading it? Looking at it through a browser window? Only if it's done intentionally, or even when it happens unintentionally (I knew tinyurl sucks, but I didn't know it can get you in jail).
AFAIK, possessing child pornography is illegal in Europe, even a crime. So technically, hitting the wrong link so an image turns up in your browser cache will make you a criminal. The image could even be hidden using HTML techniques, so you don't even know you are. This legislation already strikes me as absurd and unworthy of a constitutional state.
But wait - that's not all! The EU is currently planning legislation that would prohibit the display of minors, where minors includes persons less than 18 years old, and persons of 18 years or above who merely look like they were younger than 18, in any "posture with sexual emphasis". This would make movies like Lolita
and Léon illegal to be sold, rent or displayed on television, and their possession would constitute a crime.
Let's face it: This sort of legislation is like throwing a nuke on a city to destroy a wasp's nest. The pioneers of the Fourth Reich will have to work hard to top this kind of repression.
PS: I suggest that authorities use the term "degenerate art" when dealing with films like Léon. It worked well enough for the Nazis, to be sure!
Only a very dumb company would try that. The negative publicity when they were caught would be worse than the original criticism sites.
You would think so, but in fact this has already happened in Germany, where the large ISP Mobilcom freenet has blocked its customers' access to the websites of freenet critics. And yes, they got a lot of negative publicity, but it's not certain whether the censorship actually caused them a net loss in revenue.
As for the question whether freenet is a very dumb company, I will have to consult my lawyer before I comment on that one.;)
No, you miss the point. Nobody can make the vending machines or the programs differentiate between counterfeit and real money. This program would prevent you from working on counterfeit money or on real money. That's completely different and very much easier.
Nonsense! An image manipulation program such as Photoshop or GIMP could only use an optical image (and, typically only RGB or CMYK channels) to determine whether it sees a banknote or not. A vending machine, having access to the physical banknote, could not only perform more thorough optical checks, but also verify that the harder to copy security features are present (e.g. watermarks, metal parts, bumps, holograms, UV-sensitive colors etc., even the thickness of the paper). And people who can circumvent those measures will certainly not give a wet sh** about some EU ban on graphics software.
Even a simple check for the presence of the metal strip in Euro banknotes would weed out almost all "hobbyist fakes". Hell, if people even took one look at their paper money, they could tell by themselves, since even the humble 5 Euro-note has a hologram on it (the strip on the right side of the front). Plus, this solution would not curb the innocent citizen's freedom of speech (art, inclusive art involving banknotes is speech, and so is Open Source Software!).
Some people argue for outlawing P2P because it would be used mostly for copyright infringing activities (I have no numbers, but I don't think it's that improbable). However, image editing software, which would be crippled or (as in the case of GIMP) even outlawed is not used primarily for illegal purposes! So the situation is somewhat comparable to a ban on sharp knifes, because sharp knifes are occasionally used by murderers. Nevermind most people use 'em to cut onions...
Slashdot Mirror
Ever heard of distcc? I compile my Gentoo on a Beowulf cluster of C64s, Gameboys and Amiga 500s.
Seriously though, there is a mozilla-firefox-bin ebuild, and you can always unpack binary tgzs from mozilla.org anywhere.
Please explain exactly the harm you think is caused to children when they see a naked nipple. Toddlers that even suck those nipples don't seem to be harmed in any way either (ok, that is, in the case of Janet Jackson they would probably suffer a silicone intoxication).
I think your comment is a fine example of - IMO - US double standards when it comes to "youth-threatening" material on TV - sex vs. violence. As a wise American put it once (whose name unfortunately I can't remember...), you can only show naked breasts on national television if they're cut off with a chainsaw. As a non-American the hysteria about (think about it) a single bare nipple kind of baffles me. As if the kids that watched this "incident" would all automagically be turned into emotionless murdering sex-perverts.
Do people really verify the integrity of *any binary file* they've downloaded, no matter how? Even with MD5? Most people do not, including slashdotters. p2p or otherwise.
You don't see any difference between downloading binaries from whoever-put-it-there on P2P, as opposed to downloading binaries from e.g. ftp.mozilla.org?
> > But didn't they invent the virtual desktop pager?
> no.
Is it better to use irony tags, then? ;)
WARNING: MOVIE SPOILER
There is a scene where Mathilda tries to persuade Léon into having sex with her, being as erotic as she can be (she dresses up and IIRC even puts on lipstick). Certainly lots of "postures with sexual emphasis" here. Léon declines since she is still a child - breaking her heart and causing her to threaten to commit suicide.
So there is nothing in this movie to indicate child pornography, but still it would have to be banned if the new EU legislation is enacted.
As already mentioned, you may have seen the censored US version where this (central) scene was already cut out. Until now, it is still legal to display and possess the full movie in most of Europe. I'm not sure whether it is still legal in Germany, though.
Who needs Bin Laden if we can destroy our freedom and democracy ourselves?
[cynical]So the exchange of CP should be allowed if the child died during the abuse?[/cynical]
You're contradicting your own argument - if banning CP makes it harder for victims to find legal recourse, why ban it in the first?
Depends on whether you want to see rotten.com as a wrong. Personally, I don't. It's the perfect site to test freedom-of-speech rights...
I certainly won't answer your question because it is loaded. You pretend that the rape itself was in question, but we're discussing the swapping of picture/movie material instead. So your question should look somewhat more like this: "Wouldn't being forcibly raped be much nicer if you knew that everyone who downloaded a movie clip of your rape would have to go to prison?"
Oh, now it looks like a really ridiculous question, but that is my point. Compared to the rape itself, the video swapping looks like a minor nuisance. And note that the alternative to unlimited swapping is not "no swapping", because this is simply unenforcable. So the alternative is: it will be swapped, but swappers can go to prison if they get caught. Does this help you as a rape victim in any way? Most definitely not!
Anyway, I don't really mind restrictions on CP exchange as long as they remain just that. People here have ridiculed "liberal" arguments as slippery slope, like "Yeah, first they ban murder, and then they ban softdrinks". However, I don't think you would find this as funny any more, if a ban on softdrinks was actually already passed as a law in Germany, and being planned by the EU commission - at least not if you're an EU citizen!
And precisely this - as applied to "protection of minors" - is the case. Let me state a few facts:
A short recap of my attempted reply, which I accidentally killed:
First, pornography does not by definition involve sexual acts, but only a "primary intent to cause sexual arousal". Thus, there can even be pornographic writings ("She thoughtfully circled her succulent nipple with her finger, stroking her soft vulva with the other hand."). This means a picture of a 3 year old girl peeing on the nightpot may be counted as child pornography, and you can be sure that politicians do include such images/movies into their CP statistics.
Second, from what I heard/read of child abuse victims, most forms of child abuse are "softer" than actual rape, and they rarely include physical force. Instead, most of the time, the gullibility and naïveté of children is abused in order to make them e.g. masturbate an adult, or simulate sexual behavior (the abusers tell them exactly what to do) with other children. E.g. someone could make a 5 year old girl suck the penis of her 7 year old brother by telling them that this was medically necessary, and her brother would get very sick otherwise. This sounds extremely silly to an adult, but, lacking life experience and critical thinking abilities, children are very susceptible to this kind of manipulation.
So I don't have numbers either, but I would say your imagination that, like, all child pornography shows double penetration rape, is rather ridiculous. In fact, I guess that less than 5% of all imagery rsp. movies traded this way display rape.
Is jerking off to the picture of said girl peeing in the pot wrong? At least it is disgusting. But is it a crime? I can't say it should be. Should viewing "soft" child abuse videos (for sexual stimulation) be punished? Maybe. Should viewing material of child rape for the same purpose be punished? Probably. And should actual abuse be punished? Absolutely! Is there a quality difference between those respective acts? Yes. And I don't think those people who shout "Just cut their dicks and heads off!" are willing to acknowledge it.
Just my 2 cent.
Poppycock. In order to shrink the cache, only dirty pages have to be flushed. However, dirty pages have to be written much earlier than that in order to reduce the damaging effects of system or power failures anyway, so most of the cache will very likely not be dirty at that time. Cache pages which are not dirty, i.e. identical to the version on disk do not need to be written out, but can simply be discarded. So shrinking the cache should typically involve little disk I/O. Exceptions would be times where you do write lots of data to harddisk (e.g. downloads over a fast connection).
Btw, Linux may write "anonymous" pages (e.g. application memory) that haven't been recently accessed into swapspace before it actually runs out of physical RAM, but keeps them in RAM as "not dirty". That way, it can also just discard them once memory conditions get critical, and thus avoid a lot of disk I/O delays.
Well, I can see why the two of you are posting as Anonymous Cowards... First, child porn is indisputably illegal? This is quite a vague statement. Exactly what is illegal about child pornography? Possessing it? Copying it? Downloading it? Looking at it through a browser window? Only if it's done intentionally, or even when it happens unintentionally (I knew tinyurl sucks, but I didn't know it can get you in jail).
AFAIK, possessing child pornography is illegal in Europe, even a crime. So technically, hitting the wrong link so an image turns up in your browser cache will make you a criminal. The image could even be hidden using HTML techniques, so you don't even know you are. This legislation already strikes me as absurd and unworthy of a constitutional state.
But wait - that's not all! The EU is currently planning legislation that would prohibit the display of minors, where minors includes persons less than 18 years old, and persons of 18 years or above who merely look like they were younger than 18, in any "posture with sexual emphasis". This would make movies like Lolita and Léon illegal to be sold, rent or displayed on television, and their possession would constitute a crime.
Let's face it: This sort of legislation is like throwing a nuke on a city to destroy a wasp's nest. The pioneers of the Fourth Reich will have to work hard to top this kind of repression.
PS: I suggest that authorities use the term "degenerate art" when dealing with films like Léon. It worked well enough for the Nazis, to be sure!
Nonsense! An image manipulation program such as Photoshop or GIMP could only use an optical image (and, typically only RGB or CMYK channels) to determine whether it sees a banknote or not. A vending machine, having access to the physical banknote, could not only perform more thorough optical checks, but also verify that the harder to copy security features are present (e.g. watermarks, metal parts, bumps, holograms, UV-sensitive colors etc., even the thickness of the paper). And people who can circumvent those measures will certainly not give a wet sh** about some EU ban on graphics software.
Even a simple check for the presence of the metal strip in Euro banknotes would weed out almost all "hobbyist fakes". Hell, if people even took one look at their paper money, they could tell by themselves, since even the humble 5 Euro-note has a hologram on it (the strip on the right side of the front). Plus, this solution would not curb the innocent citizen's freedom of speech (art, inclusive art involving banknotes is speech, and so is Open Source Software!).
Some people argue for outlawing P2P because it would be used mostly for copyright infringing activities (I have no numbers, but I don't think it's that improbable). However, image editing software, which would be crippled or (as in the case of GIMP) even outlawed is not used primarily for illegal purposes! So the situation is somewhat comparable to a ban on sharp knifes, because sharp knifes are occasionally used by murderers. Nevermind most people use 'em to cut onions...