I expect the immediate return of my passport and the termination of further attempts to arrest me.
*pats Julian on the head like a mother consoling her preschool child* Dear, dear, dear Julian, you can expect that all you want, but that won't make it come true. *hugs*
In most cases, electronic devices should be able to be reset back to a factory state by their owners, preferably with a hardware switch that cannot be disabled by any software.
Exceptions would be for things like car-odometers/disk-drive-power-on-hours logs that need to be kept for fraud-prevention or things that the customer himself doesn't want to be re-settable, like anti-theft protection.
By "illegal" I mean a civil violation of warranty- and false-advertising laws that say products are supposed to meet their intended purpose, as a common everyday consumer would understand the term "intended purpose."
Charities have advisory boards to represent their communities.
Find some formal way of getting input from the community, with over-weighted representation from people who have been around awhile. Maybe set up a rotating system where anyone with good-or-better Karma and who has contributed at least once in each of the last 5 years and in at least 24 of the last 48 months and in at least 6 of the last 12 months and at least once in the last month gets a random shot at getting an invite to be on the "advisory board" for the next 3 months.
1) I thing you mis-read my numbered predictions, unless you were referring to my closing "unless" remark.
2) Re: Criminalization/de-criminalization of victimless immoral acts: Until the 1970s adultery was a felony in some US states. Until 2003, "gay sex" was a misdemeanor in some states (and possibly still a felony in some, my memory is hazy). In some of the British colonies in what became the USA, sodomy between a man and a man, boy, or male animal was a capital offense for any adult or animal involved. I'm not sure if the same laws applies if the "passive" partner was female and I expect it was legal or as least not a death-sentence offense if the couple was already married.
The feds will shut down the sleeping-kids search engine in a couple of weeks, after they infect a bunch of computers with phone-home-ware.
What's that you say? I'm posting in the wrong thread? Sorry, saw "kids" and "cameras" and "creepy" and they sort of blended together there for a minute.
Strange but true: My captcha is warrants. Now THAT is creepy!
Now that the battle to normalize homosexuality is largely won there are a growing number of voices in society (including academicians) working to normalize pedophilia.
I'm not seeing this, at least not among respected mainstream academics.
I am seeing some movement in the legal community to restore sanity for "young offenders" through things like close-in-age exceptions for consensual sex, youthful-offender-diversion programs for teenagers (including very young adults), and the like, but (IMHO) we still have along way to go here. In a perfect world, ex-offenders who were no longer dangerous thanks to intervention/therapy/whatever or simply because they "grew up" wouldn't be treated as if they were still dangerous upon release (i.e. non-dangerous ex-sex-offenders shouldn't be cluttering up a public sex offender registry - leave the public registry for those who are demonstrably still "dangerous enough" that the public needs to be notified but the person is not "so dangerous" that a dangerously-mentally-ill detention-hearing is warranted).
Arguably, existing mandatory reporting laws on child abuse and exploitation also apply to child porn: If a mandatory reporter sees child porn, he is arguably aware that child abuse has occurred and he has an obligation to report it.
I say "arguably" because there are good counter-arguments, including: * Many if not all state-level US mandatory-reporting laws require that the abuse be happening in the jurisdiction of the state the mandatory reporter is in, which is usually not know-able from a photograph unless there are clear landmarks in the image such a window with a distinctive skyline showing in the photo * Many if not all state-level US mandatory-reporting laws require that the abuse happened recently enough that the victim is still alive or is still actively being abused, which is also usually not know-able from a photograph unless there are clear indications of "recency" such as last month's new-hot-toy showing up in the photo * With image-manipulation being as good as it is, if the image is very-low-quality a person could argue that "I sincerely believed it was a picture of a kid who was NOT being abused that was photo-manipulated to look like he was" or "I sincerely believed this was a foreign photo from decades ago doctored up to look like it was from Chicago last month" and arguably not longer fall under the mandatory-reporting laws.
By the way, in some US states, practically all adult residents are considered "mandatory reporters" for child abuse, not just those holding certain professional credentials.
Prediction:
In a decade or two, when computer can generate images of "people" that are so realistic that even an expert can't tell fact from fiction by just looking at the on-screen image with the naked eye, you will see specific applications of child-porn laws being challenged in courts on a case-by-case basis. The prosecutor's "a reasonable person would believe this was an actual photograph not a computer-generated image" argument will become less and less convincing over time and more and more people accused of child-porn related offenses will either be set free or prosecutors will decline prosecution because the burden of proof on them that it's real is just too high.
I predict that within my lifetime, countries like the USA whose constitutions protect computer-generated "fake child porn" that doesn't involve real victims will have a sea change: 1) Almost nobody in those countries will make or knowingly distribute real or suspected-to-be-real child porn (stupid child-raping parents/uncles/caregivers who get their jollies sharing their own "trophy photos" being the major exception) 2) In order to convict, prosecutors will have a burden to show that either the defendant knew or had some reason to believe the image involved an actual child besides what the image looked like. And, sadly, 3) What real child porn that does circulate will be able to hide in among the mass of fake stuff since nobody will be able to prove it's not fake, emboldening some child-abusers who would otherwise be scared of arrest.
#1 and #3 will partially cancel each other out, so it's hard to say if there will be a net increase or a net decrease in victimization. My gut says it will be a net decrease.
These predictions may not come true if courts re-interpret the constitution so the "there must be a real victim in the image (or at least that the defendant believed there was)" idea is no longer a constitutional requirement for conviction. I'm not sure if such a re-interpretation is a good thing or a bad thing. There are good moral arguments on both sides of that question.
People watching child porn are not a danger to my children.
They may not be a direct danger, but to the extent that their viewing the stuff makes your "friendly neighborhood wanna-be child porn producer" think there is a demand for it, he may decide to start producing.
There is also the issue of "porn isn't enough any more" - your local child-porn viewer may decide just watching kids on-screen isn't enough and he may start acting out what he sees.
While your children are probably safe just because of the extremely low percentage of kids who are victimized in this way, the odds are > zero.
On the flip side, your neighborhood would-be child molester may be one of those who, if child porn were legal outright or at least available in a rherapeutic setting, would satisfy himself with those images while he and his therapist work out his issues and/or work on teaching him that lusting after people (besides your spouse or someone you have a realistic chance of dating) is at a minimum just plain disrespectful.
Bottom line: On balance, the wide availablility of child porn raises the risk that your kids will be sexually abused, but the increase in risk is probably so close to zero that it's probably statistical noise to you. BUT, worldwide, the harm done to children through sexual abuse would go down significantly if child porn were extremely difficult to obtain and if those who wanted to make or view it were identified and force-marched into some kind of therapy and/or convinced that if they ever tried to abuse a child or seek or such images, they would almost certainly be caught and punished.
The tricky or impossible task is doing that without creating a police state. If I had to choose between the current state of the world and a Nineteen Eighty-Four-esque world free of child sexual abuse, I would take the world as it is today.
You are looking for a tool that extracts the meaning from a text then re-writes it in a standardized, canonical format, or at least "washes" it into one of a list of possible formats such that if you take a bunch of random input from a bunch of different authors, you can't tell from the output who wrote what.
I expect this will be successful within 10 years if we work hard on it.
A publisher doesn't have to publish the manuscripts at all; it can instead hoard them as trade secrets and publish only edited versions.
True, however almost all ancient Biblical manuscripts that were found before WWII saw the light of day long enough ago that they are in the public domain.
I will concede that if new manuscripts were found today, those finding them would probably only publish them in full if it was in their financial or political interest to do so. That is, they would either have to make more money through publication than through hoarding or the political pressure (read: pressure from academics, the general public, governments, etc.) to publish would have to make up the expected financial loss.
I can't speak for Europe, but in the USA, copyright was not automatic until relatively recent times.
For awhile in the 20th century, US copyright was "almost automatic" - you had to either mark it (c) or register it within a few years of first publication or it would fall into the public domain.
I assume something similar is/was true for the country or countries in Europe where the diary was published in its various editions.
A translation almost always requires human creative input (computer and "by-the-numbers" algorithmic translations and translations where there is only 1 reasonable translation are likely exceptions).
A typeset letter-for-letter re-publication of ancient manuscripts should have no additional copyright, at least not in any sane copyright regime. Bear in mind that adding punctuation marks and spaces is, in many cases, a creative endeavor.
Disclaimers: * I am not a lawyer. * I am not claiming that any modern copyright regime is sane.
Would content that was common (verbatim copy) to both the 1947 and 1983 editions be considered "first published" in 1947?
Assuming yes, then copyrights on the common content would likely expire based on either the 1944 authorship under 1944 laws or 1947 publication under 1947 posthumous-publication laws, probably whichever one gave a later expiration.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and I don't play one on the Internet.
The original diary, and any direct quotations from it that show up in edited editions, are in the public domain (in Europe)
Editions consisting only of quotations from the original, such as "censored" editions, are in the public domain.
Editions which have copyright-able creative content added by someone else are the works of more than one author and the death of Anne Frank 70 years ago doesn't put the entire work in the public domain, just those parts that are direct quotations or non-copyright-able changes. These are similar to musical arrangements - the authorship of the arrangement is shared.
Translations generally get a fresh copyright (well, at least those done by professional human translators - which is almost certainly true here), so they aren't automatically in the public domain. Short excerpts from a translation where there is only one reasonable way to translation the original probably are in the public domain, as there was no creativity involved in translating that short section. However, anything longer than a few sentences and excerpts longer than a few words can be translated multiple ways and the translator probably has a copyright interest. A machine-translation or an "algorithmic" translation done by a human which has only one possible outcome (basically, a "human computer" doing the translation) very likely does not have a fresh copyright.
Here's the rub:
I don't know if the actual original manuscripts are available for inspection. If they are not, then anyone re-publishing any published materials is taking a big legal gamble.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect the immediate return of my passport and the termination of further attempts to arrest me.
*pats Julian on the head like a mother consoling her preschool child* Dear, dear, dear Julian, you can expect that all you want, but that won't make it come true. *hugs*
"but we are going anyways, so please give us money."
In most industries with pricing tiers, the more you buy, the less you pay per unit.
In most cases, electronic devices should be able to be reset back to a factory state by their owners, preferably with a hardware switch that cannot be disabled by any software.
Exceptions would be for things like car-odometers/disk-drive-power-on-hours logs that need to be kept for fraud-prevention or things that the customer himself doesn't want to be re-settable, like anti-theft protection.
By "illegal" I mean a civil violation of warranty- and false-advertising laws that say products are supposed to meet their intended purpose, as a common everyday consumer would understand the term "intended purpose."
Charities have advisory boards to represent their communities.
Find some formal way of getting input from the community, with over-weighted representation from people who have been around awhile. Maybe set up a rotating system where anyone with good-or-better Karma and who has contributed at least once in each of the last 5 years and in at least 24 of the last 48 months and in at least 6 of the last 12 months and at least once in the last month gets a random shot at getting an invite to be on the "advisory board" for the next 3 months.
So, you are saying it's an after-market add-on?
Where do I sign up?
"Minero's case does not have merit, and its patent ... would suck even if it wasn't expired."
It's true, it's hilarious, but it's not an argument to make in court.
"it would not be in the public interest even if it wasn't expired" is marginally better.
"it would be invalid even if it wasn't expired, for the following reasons..." is much better, as long as the reasons it is invalid are legally sound.
But yeah, "it sucks" does have a nice ring to it. Just not in a courtroom.
Get him a book on how math is used for amazing things or a book on "math tricks" (also called "number sense").
Get one written at his reading level "plus a year or two" - he may have difficulty reading it today but he'll come back to it later.
So why are they helping companies get corporate welfare?
*checks calendar* oh wait, they must need donations for their upcoming election. Nevermind.
1) I thing you mis-read my numbered predictions, unless you were referring to my closing "unless" remark.
2) Re: Criminalization/de-criminalization of victimless immoral acts: Until the 1970s adultery was a felony in some US states. Until 2003, "gay sex" was a misdemeanor in some states (and possibly still a felony in some, my memory is hazy). In some of the British colonies in what became the USA, sodomy between a man and a man, boy, or male animal was a capital offense for any adult or animal involved. I'm not sure if the same laws applies if the "passive" partner was female and I expect it was legal or as least not a death-sentence offense if the couple was already married.
The feds will shut down the sleeping-kids search engine in a couple of weeks, after they infect a bunch of computers with phone-home-ware.
What's that you say? I'm posting in the wrong thread? Sorry, saw "kids" and "cameras" and "creepy" and they sort of blended together there for a minute.
Strange but true: My captcha is warrants. Now THAT is creepy!
That's two more than the number of child-porn images most /. readers will see in a lifetime.
Well, I hope it is anyways.
Now that the battle to normalize homosexuality is largely won there are a growing number of voices in society (including academicians) working to normalize pedophilia.
I'm not seeing this, at least not among respected mainstream academics.
I am seeing some movement in the legal community to restore sanity for "young offenders" through things like close-in-age exceptions for consensual sex, youthful-offender-diversion programs for teenagers (including very young adults), and the like, but (IMHO) we still have along way to go here. In a perfect world, ex-offenders who were no longer dangerous thanks to intervention/therapy/whatever or simply because they "grew up" wouldn't be treated as if they were still dangerous upon release (i.e. non-dangerous ex-sex-offenders shouldn't be cluttering up a public sex offender registry - leave the public registry for those who are demonstrably still "dangerous enough" that the public needs to be notified but the person is not "so dangerous" that a dangerously-mentally-ill detention-hearing is warranted).
Arguably, existing mandatory reporting laws on child abuse and exploitation also apply to child porn: If a mandatory reporter sees child porn, he is arguably aware that child abuse has occurred and he has an obligation to report it.
I say "arguably" because there are good counter-arguments, including:
* Many if not all state-level US mandatory-reporting laws require that the abuse be happening in the jurisdiction of the state the mandatory reporter is in, which is usually not know-able from a photograph unless there are clear landmarks in the image such a window with a distinctive skyline showing in the photo
* Many if not all state-level US mandatory-reporting laws require that the abuse happened recently enough that the victim is still alive or is still actively being abused, which is also usually not know-able from a photograph unless there are clear indications of "recency" such as last month's new-hot-toy showing up in the photo
* With image-manipulation being as good as it is, if the image is very-low-quality a person could argue that "I sincerely believed it was a picture of a kid who was NOT being abused that was photo-manipulated to look like he was" or "I sincerely believed this was a foreign photo from decades ago doctored up to look like it was from Chicago last month" and arguably not longer fall under the mandatory-reporting laws.
By the way, in some US states, practically all adult residents are considered "mandatory reporters" for child abuse, not just those holding certain professional credentials.
Prediction:
In a decade or two, when computer can generate images of "people" that are so realistic that even an expert can't tell fact from fiction by just looking at the on-screen image with the naked eye, you will see specific applications of child-porn laws being challenged in courts on a case-by-case basis. The prosecutor's "a reasonable person would believe this was an actual photograph not a computer-generated image" argument will become less and less convincing over time and more and more people accused of child-porn related offenses will either be set free or prosecutors will decline prosecution because the burden of proof on them that it's real is just too high.
I predict that within my lifetime, countries like the USA whose constitutions protect computer-generated "fake child porn" that doesn't involve real victims will have a sea change:
1) Almost nobody in those countries will make or knowingly distribute real or suspected-to-be-real child porn (stupid child-raping parents/uncles/caregivers who get their jollies sharing their own "trophy photos" being the major exception)
2) In order to convict, prosecutors will have a burden to show that either the defendant knew or had some reason to believe the image involved an actual child besides what the image looked like.
And, sadly,
3) What real child porn that does circulate will be able to hide in among the mass of fake stuff since nobody will be able to prove it's not fake, emboldening some child-abusers who would otherwise be scared of arrest.
#1 and #3 will partially cancel each other out, so it's hard to say if there will be a net increase or a net decrease in victimization. My gut says it will be a net decrease.
These predictions may not come true if courts re-interpret the constitution so the "there must be a real victim in the image (or at least that the defendant believed there was)" idea is no longer a constitutional requirement for conviction. I'm not sure if such a re-interpretation is a good thing or a bad thing. There are good moral arguments on both sides of that question.
People watching child porn are not a danger to my children.
They may not be a direct danger, but to the extent that their viewing the stuff makes your "friendly neighborhood wanna-be child porn producer" think there is a demand for it, he may decide to start producing.
There is also the issue of "porn isn't enough any more" - your local child-porn viewer may decide just watching kids on-screen isn't enough and he may start acting out what he sees.
While your children are probably safe just because of the extremely low percentage of kids who are victimized in this way, the odds are > zero.
On the flip side, your neighborhood would-be child molester may be one of those who, if child porn were legal outright or at least available in a rherapeutic setting, would satisfy himself with those images while he and his therapist work out his issues and/or work on teaching him that lusting after people (besides your spouse or someone you have a realistic chance of dating) is at a minimum just plain disrespectful.
Bottom line: On balance, the wide availablility of child porn raises the risk that your kids will be sexually abused, but the increase in risk is probably so close to zero that it's probably statistical noise to you. BUT, worldwide, the harm done to children through sexual abuse would go down significantly if child porn were extremely difficult to obtain and if those who wanted to make or view it were identified and force-marched into some kind of therapy and/or convinced that if they ever tried to abuse a child or seek or such images, they would almost certainly be caught and punished.
The tricky or impossible task is doing that without creating a police state. If I had to choose between the current state of the world and a Nineteen Eighty-Four-esque world free of child sexual abuse, I would take the world as it is today.
http://www.davidsharp.com/baby...
Back in 1998 or so there was a contest to program a re-built 50-year-old computer for a museum.
I think it was the Manchester Baby Mark 1.
There were only like 5 or 6 instructions and very limited memory.
The "wow factor" for kids was the memory:
It was a 32x32 "dot matrix" on a CRT.
There was a java simulator for it.
A pair of eyes, a pair of hands, a pair of monitors, a pair of ....
You are looking for a tool that extracts the meaning from a text then re-writes it in a standardized, canonical format, or at least "washes" it into one of a list of possible formats such that if you take a bunch of random input from a bunch of different authors, you can't tell from the output who wrote what.
I expect this will be successful within 10 years if we work hard on it.
A publisher doesn't have to publish the manuscripts at all; it can instead hoard them as trade secrets and publish only edited versions.
True, however almost all ancient Biblical manuscripts that were found before WWII saw the light of day long enough ago that they are in the public domain.
I will concede that if new manuscripts were found today, those finding them would probably only publish them in full if it was in their financial or political interest to do so. That is, they would either have to make more money through publication than through hoarding or the political pressure (read: pressure from academics, the general public, governments, etc.) to publish would have to make up the expected financial loss.
I can't speak for Europe, but in the USA, copyright was not automatic until relatively recent times.
For awhile in the 20th century, US copyright was "almost automatic" - you had to either mark it (c) or register it within a few years of first publication or it would fall into the public domain.
I assume something similar is/was true for the country or countries in Europe where the diary was published in its various editions.
A translation almost always requires human creative input (computer and "by-the-numbers" algorithmic translations and translations where there is only 1 reasonable translation are likely exceptions).
A typeset letter-for-letter re-publication of ancient manuscripts should have no additional copyright, at least not in any sane copyright regime. Bear in mind that adding punctuation marks and spaces is, in many cases, a creative endeavor.
Disclaimers:
* I am not a lawyer.
* I am not claiming that any modern copyright regime is sane.
Would content that was common (verbatim copy) to both the 1947 and 1983 editions be considered "first published" in 1947?
Assuming yes, then copyrights on the common content would likely expire based on either the 1944 authorship under 1944 laws or 1947 publication under 1947 posthumous-publication laws, probably whichever one gave a later expiration.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and I don't play one on the Internet.
The original diary, and any direct quotations from it that show up in edited editions, are in the public domain (in Europe)
Editions consisting only of quotations from the original, such as "censored" editions, are in the public domain.
Editions which have copyright-able creative content added by someone else are the works of more than one author and the death of Anne Frank 70 years ago doesn't put the entire work in the public domain, just those parts that are direct quotations or non-copyright-able changes. These are similar to musical arrangements - the authorship of the arrangement is shared.
Translations generally get a fresh copyright (well, at least those done by professional human translators - which is almost certainly true here), so they aren't automatically in the public domain. Short excerpts from a translation where there is only one reasonable way to translation the original probably are in the public domain, as there was no creativity involved in translating that short section. However, anything longer than a few sentences and excerpts longer than a few words can be translated multiple ways and the translator probably has a copyright interest. A machine-translation or an "algorithmic" translation done by a human which has only one possible outcome (basically, a "human computer" doing the translation) very likely does not have a fresh copyright.
Here's the rub:
I don't know if the actual original manuscripts are available for inspection. If they are not, then anyone re-publishing any published materials is taking a big legal gamble.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.