It only has to be compulsory if you are arguing that nothing short of a 100 percent success rate in filtering is acceptable. I am arguing that even if 90% of porn sites would not use it voluntarily, that STILL equates to 10 percent less porn in the "hard to filter out" bucket.
Yes, there will still be some pornographic material available outside the.xxx domain. So what? Creating a new TLD for porn costs us NOTHING (in fact the only economic impact I can think of is that the domain administrator and registrars MAKE money). So how is it relevant that it won't solve the problem altogether?
Hell, even if almost nobody opted to use it, it cost us nothing! What exactly do we have to lose by creating it?
If I discovered a no-cost home remedy that would completely cure cancer in one out of ten patients, your logic would say, "It won't cure everyone? Well then it's worthless."
And if they choose not to be in.xxx, then fine! Not every porn site will. I still don't see how that is relevant to the question of whether the domain should exist. (And yes, I realize our whole discussion on the domain barely relevant to the original post).
Should we not have roads because not everyone will drive on them? Should we not have sushi restaurants because some people (my mom) will never try them?
I say create the domain and let people use it if they choose to. The market will soon answer the question of whether it is valuable, and if few choose to use it, what have we lost?
Every time I read about the possible.xxx domain, it seems like everyone is asking how it would be enforced, and that seems to my like a non-issue. Who says it has to be enforced? Let it be voluntary! The sites that choose to use it get plenty of benfits for doing so -- they are shielded from harrassment and lawsuits about the "obscenity" standards in various locations, they can reach more of their target audience because search engines that target exclusively that domain will likely form to capitalize on it, and so on.
It's not like they would have a lot to gain by remaining in.com (or other TLDs). It's not like they desperately want to reach underage kids at the library, pimply teenage boys searching for the free preview pages -- there's no money in them.
Even if only half of the porn sites on the net opt into the.xxx domain, schools and parents can now filter out half of the stuff flawlessly. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
So, please, enough about "who is going to enforce it?" The only real question is whether xxx should exist as a TLD at all, and I can't think of any good reason why it shouldn't.
Uh. . . I'm pretty sure the episodes from before the death-and-resurrection of Family Guy were just as filled with spoofs and references to old TV shows. Maybe you just lost your sense of humor while it was off the air.
Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for a sexy party.
They check a person's credit record in situations where he/she would, as an employee, be in a position to steal money from them relatively easy, or situations in which the person could easily provide illegal information or access to an outside entity.
It's not that having fallen on hard times refelects badly on their potential job perfomance -- it's that having fallen on hard times gives otherwise good people a greater motive to steal or take bribes than someone who isn't in dire straits financially.
For the record, I think the whole idea of banning certain words in user names is idiotic.
But the answer to why ban "allah" and not "god" is pretty simple, I imagine. How many commonly used words/names contain the substring "allah?" How many contain the substring "god?" I'm sure you could come up with plenty of examples for both, but the number containing "god" is going to be an order of magnitude larger. If they banned it, they would inadvertantly ban tons and tons of other words, just like they inadvertantly banned the name Callahan.
I'm sure when they ban a certain sequence of characters, they make a judgement call about how frequently it would come up. The three character "god" is just much more likely to come up, so they leave it alone.
So, therefore, the government should not check that anyone drives on the road with a haywire jalopy, and if it breaks down, crashes and kills a widow driving her three orphans to soccer practice, it's though luck for the widow?
If the widow's three kids are already orphans before the crash, then the widow was a ZOMBIE, and the the jalopy-driver is a hero!
You're right, and I think we agree on the basic dynamics. . . there are two different markets, and two different "correct" price points. One for those who want to own the movie, and one for those who just want to rent it.
I just can't see a download delivery model succeeding if they are trying to price it for those who want to own. In my Netflix example, I point out that I spend more money per month, even though each individiual rental costs me less -- but it is not just the lower price point that makes that work. If that was the only factor, I would rent more movies the cheaper they got, but only in direct proportion. That is, if I was willing to rent 1 film a month for 5 bucks each, I'd be willing to rent 2 films a month for 2.50.
The reason I am willing to rent disproportionally more movies from them is because of the added convenience of having them delivered. If there were a download version of Netflix, my usage of it would increase more than enough to cover another discount in price, because of the convenience of no longer having to mail discs back and forth. So a downloadable movie model would work great for those of us in our boat -- the renters.
I don't think the same logic would apply if such a service were sold as a replacement for buying the film, because downloading it is in many ways less convenient than buying the physical disc. You have to provide the hard drive space, or the media if you want to burn it, and so on, and you don't get all the little niceties that a physical product entails, like the lovely art covered box set that displays so nicely in your bookshelf.:)
I think you are right that if "selling" the films by download were the model, they would have to price them around 8-12 dollars. I just don't think it would encourage people to buy more films than they otherwise would. People would just see it as paying less because they are getting less of a product.
Hell, I think 5 bucks is too much. I would have said $3.50, maybe $4.00. Here's why.
$20 bucks IS way too much to pay for a DVD. I will do it occassionally, for films I really love, and will watch over and over, films where every deleted scene, commentary track, and outtake are precious to me.
There aren't very many of those.
Most films I will watch once, and if I can keep them around, maybe a couple more times later on, if I want to show them to a friend that hasn't watched them. Hell, seeing them in the theatre is cheaper than getting a DVD if you only watch it once or twice.
Now, a rental price is more reasonable. 4 or 5 bucks. But I still never do that, because it is inconvenient. The price is fair for the value of the entertainment I get, but they don't get very many sales out of me because it takes too much effort on my part.
Enter netflix -- The monthly subscription model means I am spending way more money on movies than I would without netflix. The price per movie is less than a rental, but the convenience means that I watch way more movies. Win-win. I get more movies, and they get more money. . . just less money PER movie. It's like a discount for buying in bulk, and giving them a guaranteed amount of business each month.
Any downloadable movie distribution service needs to accept the same philosophy. Since the product isn't physical, and they don't actually deplete their stock of content by letting me download it, it isn't about how much 1 movie should be worth -- it is about what price will maximize the total amount that I spend.
If they will sell me one downloaded movie for 5 bucks, I might buy one, now and again. Maybe once a month. But if they sell them to me for 3 bucks each, I'll probably buy two a month. They just made an extra dollar by charging me less per film.
Hmmm. Odd. I use IM all the time at work, both for business and personal communications. I've never worked anyplace where the ports for it have been blocked, and if they were, well that's what SSH and port forwarding are for.
Email is for worthless bulk communications from HR to everyone, corporate announcements, meeting invitations, and sending attachments. And maybe for sending someone a message when they are away from their desk, if you need to do so before you forget.
If you need to communicate with one person, why not IM? You can easily see if they are away or busy or not, and you don't have to disturb your 5 cube-neighbors by talking on the phone.
And when a message comes in, you can interrupt your thoughts at the next convenient moment to respond, without having to be interrupted by a visitor right in the middle of a line of code. It's semi-realtime, but not realtime.
Persephone? Persephone! People don't want planets named after hungry old Greek broads! They want names like "Mustang" and "Cheetah"--vicious animal names!
The upside to paying for incoming calls is that in many parts of the U.S. it is illegal for telemarketers to call you on your cellphone. When I first switched from a landline to a mobile, I enjoyed several years without a single telemarketer calling me. It is not quite as peaceful now, because without a land line I have had to give my cell number to the cable company, my credit card companies, etc. But I still don't get any calls from companies I haven't done business with.
I was speaking about the efficiency of making use of the energy produced, not incidental energy costs of running the system, but your point is still well taken.
But if you want to bring up the energy costs of running the system, well. . . I should think that is where the bulk of the problem lies! Remember that in order for this nanoscopic black hole to come into existence, you need to expend an enourmous amount of energy to create and maintain the black hole, and to accelerate particles into it. Remember, the black hole's gravity is negligible at this size, it won't be sucking the particles in all by itself.
And the mass you are totally converting to energy is a bunch of subatomic particles! They have very little mass to begin with. I am no quantum physicist, but I'd bet real money that if you did the math on this problem your energy output would be less than your energy input.
That would be assuming that Hawking Radiation will directly power our homes, automobiles, and blenders. You might totally convert the mass to Hawking Radiation, but unless all of our devices just suck up hawking radiation out of their surroundings, it is going to become dependent on the efficincy of whatever process you use to convert that radiation into electricity.
300x hotter than the surface of the sun, and smaller than a subatomic particle doesn't actually amount to very much heat.
And you wouldn't get more energy out of the black hole than the amount of energy you expended in creating it and the mass you fed into it. Why? SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS!
Ack! Second Law! You're breaking the Second Law!
Yes, I know you're joking. But its amazing how many otherwise intelligent people think plans like that will work.
We used Groove for a bit in my office. Basically, it is a private p2p network. You define workspaces, people become members of the workspaces, and then any files you add to the workspace are automatically copied to the other members machines. It attempts to provide a single interface for discussing and referencing all that information. You can share bookmarks, files, it has chat and forum-like threads, email, etc.
Personally, I didn't care for it. The automatic sharing of files in the workspace was nice, as it was a convienient place to put documentation or relevant links. But all the other applications seemed like poor alternatives to existing standalone solutions. I already have email. I already have instant messaging. I got really tired of having to watch both MSOutlook, AIM, and 3 different mediums within Groove to see if someone was communicating with me.
No, I think it is a valid comparison. The protest was against the unfair tax on TEA. They weren't forced to pay that either, they could have chosen not to buy tea.
The problem there, of course, is that then they would have had no caffeine.
A choice between paying whatever someone demands for something or not being able to get it is hardly a real choice at all. Real choice is when you have more than one vendor to choose from for the same product, so that neither of them can price-gouge you without losing your business to the other.
In the case of the RIAA, you have only them to buy from, and they can set the price to whatever they like. Your only legal alternative is to not have music. That's exactly the same as what the colonists in Boston found so unfair about the tax on tea.
This seems like a bit of a reactionary argument to me. We are talking about people who have already been convicted, and about using the technology to enforce the terms of the probation, which would typically be along the lines of staying within a certain distance of home and work, or staying a certain distance away from the home and work of their former victims.
The technology has no effect on how long probations should be imposed. And there is nothing fundamentally unjust or unconstitutional about imposing a permanent loss of certain rights once someone has been convicted under due process of law. We already do enforce permanent probation with people convicted of being sex offenders -- they are required register with local authorities wherever they move and inform all the neighbors of their past crimes. Tracking tech wouldn't change the legality or ethics of this practice, it would only enhance its effectiveness.
It is quite a fatuous leap in logic to say that because we can effectively enforce restrictions placed on convicted criminals, that society would decide to just enforce those restrictions on everyone for being potential criminals. That would be unconstitutional, because there would not have been due process of law before depriving the person of his/her rights.
I'm not discounting another version, but the one I watched was the one on the Amazon site.
Maybe you had a slow connection, and the video got choppy? The shot zooming out from Ford's thumb through the Vogon fleet and into a distant view of Earth was very fast. Earlier than that though, there was still the shot of the underside of the ship as seen from the ground, similar to scenes from Independence Day.
Were we watching the same trailer? They showed the whole sky full of a Vogon ship with Arthur yelling something to the effect of "What the hell is that." Then the shot of Ford using the subspace ether signalling device zoomed out past hundres of Vogon ships (which lamely looked like Borg Cubes) until the shot was showing the earth from a distance.
I'm not making any statement about the morality of downloading the file, or saying that everything should be free.
I'm simply tired of the constantly repeated argument that the act of downloading the file is depriving someone of a sale. It simply isn't.
Both physical theft and downloading a copyrighted file without compensation may be crimes, but in the former the damages are measurable and known. In the latter the damages an unmeasurable fraction of that known amount. (Meaning it can only be estimated if you know how many of the downloaders would have paid for the file if they were unable to download it).
Because the damages cannot be measured in the same way, well. . . that's what makes them different crimes! Theft vs. Copyright Violation. I don't really have a big opinion on which should be regarded as deserving the more severe penalty, but the "stolen sale" analogy should be left out of the discussion. It it just bad logic.
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Yes, there will still be some pornographic material available outside the .xxx domain. So what? Creating a new TLD for porn costs us NOTHING (in fact the only economic impact I can think of is that the domain administrator and registrars MAKE money). So how is it relevant that it won't solve the problem altogether?
Hell, even if almost nobody opted to use it, it cost us nothing! What exactly do we have to lose by creating it?
If I discovered a no-cost home remedy that would completely cure cancer in one out of ten patients, your logic would say, "It won't cure everyone? Well then it's worthless."
And if they choose not to be in .xxx, then fine! Not every porn site will. I still don't see how that is relevant to the question of whether the domain should exist. (And yes, I realize our whole discussion on the domain barely relevant to the original post).
Should we not have roads because not everyone will drive on them? Should we not have sushi restaurants because some people (my mom) will never try them?
I say create the domain and let people use it if they choose to. The market will soon answer the question of whether it is valuable, and if few choose to use it, what have we lost?
It's not like they would have a lot to gain by remaining in .com (or other TLDs). It's not like they desperately want to reach underage kids at the library, pimply teenage boys searching for the free preview pages -- there's no money in them.
Even if only half of the porn sites on the net opt into the .xxx domain, schools and parents can now filter out half of the stuff flawlessly. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
So, please, enough about "who is going to enforce it?" The only real question is whether xxx should exist as a TLD at all, and I can't think of any good reason why it shouldn't.
Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for a sexy party.
It's not that having fallen on hard times refelects badly on their potential job perfomance -- it's that having fallen on hard times gives otherwise good people a greater motive to steal or take bribes than someone who isn't in dire straits financially.
For the record, I think the whole idea of banning certain words in user names is idiotic.
But the answer to why ban "allah" and not "god" is pretty simple, I imagine. How many commonly used words/names contain the substring "allah?" How many contain the substring "god?" I'm sure you could come up with plenty of examples for both, but the number containing "god" is going to be an order of magnitude larger. If they banned it, they would inadvertantly ban tons and tons of other words, just like they inadvertantly banned the name Callahan.
I'm sure when they ban a certain sequence of characters, they make a judgement call about how frequently it would come up. The three character "god" is just much more likely to come up, so they leave it alone.
And no matter how low they fly, they'll still be over your head.
If the widow's three kids are already orphans before the crash, then the widow was a ZOMBIE, and the the jalopy-driver is a hero!
I just can't see a download delivery model succeeding if they are trying to price it for those who want to own. In my Netflix example, I point out that I spend more money per month, even though each individiual rental costs me less -- but it is not just the lower price point that makes that work. If that was the only factor, I would rent more movies the cheaper they got, but only in direct proportion. That is, if I was willing to rent 1 film a month for 5 bucks each, I'd be willing to rent 2 films a month for 2.50.
The reason I am willing to rent disproportionally more movies from them is because of the added convenience of having them delivered. If there were a download version of Netflix, my usage of it would increase more than enough to cover another discount in price, because of the convenience of no longer having to mail discs back and forth. So a downloadable movie model would work great for those of us in our boat -- the renters.
I don't think the same logic would apply if such a service were sold as a replacement for buying the film, because downloading it is in many ways less convenient than buying the physical disc. You have to provide the hard drive space, or the media if you want to burn it, and so on, and you don't get all the little niceties that a physical product entails, like the lovely art covered box set that displays so nicely in your bookshelf. :)
I think you are right that if "selling" the films by download were the model, they would have to price them around 8-12 dollars. I just don't think it would encourage people to buy more films than they otherwise would. People would just see it as paying less because they are getting less of a product.
$20 bucks IS way too much to pay for a DVD. I will do it occassionally, for films I really love, and will watch over and over, films where every deleted scene, commentary track, and outtake are precious to me.
There aren't very many of those.
Most films I will watch once, and if I can keep them around, maybe a couple more times later on, if I want to show them to a friend that hasn't watched them. Hell, seeing them in the theatre is cheaper than getting a DVD if you only watch it once or twice.
Now, a rental price is more reasonable. 4 or 5 bucks. But I still never do that, because it is inconvenient. The price is fair for the value of the entertainment I get, but they don't get very many sales out of me because it takes too much effort on my part.
Enter netflix -- The monthly subscription model means I am spending way more money on movies than I would without netflix. The price per movie is less than a rental, but the convenience means that I watch way more movies. Win-win. I get more movies, and they get more money. . . just less money PER movie. It's like a discount for buying in bulk, and giving them a guaranteed amount of business each month.
Any downloadable movie distribution service needs to accept the same philosophy. Since the product isn't physical, and they don't actually deplete their stock of content by letting me download it, it isn't about how much 1 movie should be worth -- it is about what price will maximize the total amount that I spend.
If they will sell me one downloaded movie for 5 bucks, I might buy one, now and again. Maybe once a month. But if they sell them to me for 3 bucks each, I'll probably buy two a month. They just made an extra dollar by charging me less per film.
Hmmm. Odd. I use IM all the time at work, both for business and personal communications. I've never worked anyplace where the ports for it have been blocked, and if they were, well that's what SSH and port forwarding are for. Email is for worthless bulk communications from HR to everyone, corporate announcements, meeting invitations, and sending attachments. And maybe for sending someone a message when they are away from their desk, if you need to do so before you forget. If you need to communicate with one person, why not IM? You can easily see if they are away or busy or not, and you don't have to disturb your 5 cube-neighbors by talking on the phone. And when a message comes in, you can interrupt your thoughts at the next convenient moment to respond, without having to be interrupted by a visitor right in the middle of a line of code. It's semi-realtime, but not realtime.
Persephone? Persephone! People don't want planets named after hungry old Greek broads! They want names like "Mustang" and "Cheetah"--vicious animal names!
The upside to paying for incoming calls is that in many parts of the U.S. it is illegal for telemarketers to call you on your cellphone. When I first switched from a landline to a mobile, I enjoyed several years without a single telemarketer calling me. It is not quite as peaceful now, because without a land line I have had to give my cell number to the cable company, my credit card companies, etc. But I still don't get any calls from companies I haven't done business with.
But if you want to bring up the energy costs of running the system, well. . . I should think that is where the bulk of the problem lies! Remember that in order for this nanoscopic black hole to come into existence, you need to expend an enourmous amount of energy to create and maintain the black hole, and to accelerate particles into it. Remember, the black hole's gravity is negligible at this size, it won't be sucking the particles in all by itself.
And the mass you are totally converting to energy is a bunch of subatomic particles! They have very little mass to begin with. I am no quantum physicist, but I'd bet real money that if you did the math on this problem your energy output would be less than your energy input.
That would be assuming that Hawking Radiation will directly power our homes, automobiles, and blenders. You might totally convert the mass to Hawking Radiation, but unless all of our devices just suck up hawking radiation out of their surroundings, it is going to become dependent on the efficincy of whatever process you use to convert that radiation into electricity.
And you wouldn't get more energy out of the black hole than the amount of energy you expended in creating it and the mass you fed into it. Why? SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS!
Ack! Second Law! You're breaking the Second Law! Yes, I know you're joking. But its amazing how many otherwise intelligent people think plans like that will work.
We used Groove for a bit in my office. Basically, it is a private p2p network. You define workspaces, people become members of the workspaces, and then any files you add to the workspace are automatically copied to the other members machines. It attempts to provide a single interface for discussing and referencing all that information. You can share bookmarks, files, it has chat and forum-like threads, email, etc. Personally, I didn't care for it. The automatic sharing of files in the workspace was nice, as it was a convienient place to put documentation or relevant links. But all the other applications seemed like poor alternatives to existing standalone solutions. I already have email. I already have instant messaging. I got really tired of having to watch both MSOutlook, AIM, and 3 different mediums within Groove to see if someone was communicating with me.
Hate to be a bit redundant since I posted this above, but the child's clothing did turn up, three years later, near a dingo's den. http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/c hamberlain/chamberlainaccount.html
It ought to be pointed out that it was later revealed that the woman's baby WAS in fact eaten by a dingo, and she had been wrongfully convicted. http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/c hamberlain/chamberlainaccount.html/
The problem there, of course, is that then they would have had no caffeine.
A choice between paying whatever someone demands for something or not being able to get it is hardly a real choice at all. Real choice is when you have more than one vendor to choose from for the same product, so that neither of them can price-gouge you without losing your business to the other.
In the case of the RIAA, you have only them to buy from, and they can set the price to whatever they like. Your only legal alternative is to not have music. That's exactly the same as what the colonists in Boston found so unfair about the tax on tea.
The technology has no effect on how long probations should be imposed. And there is nothing fundamentally unjust or unconstitutional about imposing a permanent loss of certain rights once someone has been convicted under due process of law. We already do enforce permanent probation with people convicted of being sex offenders -- they are required register with local authorities wherever they move and inform all the neighbors of their past crimes. Tracking tech wouldn't change the legality or ethics of this practice, it would only enhance its effectiveness.
It is quite a fatuous leap in logic to say that because we can effectively enforce restrictions placed on convicted criminals, that society would decide to just enforce those restrictions on everyone for being potential criminals. That would be unconstitutional, because there would not have been due process of law before depriving the person of his/her rights.
I'm not discounting another version, but the one I watched was the one on the Amazon site. Maybe you had a slow connection, and the video got choppy? The shot zooming out from Ford's thumb through the Vogon fleet and into a distant view of Earth was very fast. Earlier than that though, there was still the shot of the underside of the ship as seen from the ground, similar to scenes from Independence Day.
Were we watching the same trailer? They showed the whole sky full of a Vogon ship with Arthur yelling something to the effect of "What the hell is that." Then the shot of Ford using the subspace ether signalling device zoomed out past hundres of Vogon ships (which lamely looked like Borg Cubes) until the shot was showing the earth from a distance.
I'm simply tired of the constantly repeated argument that the act of downloading the file is depriving someone of a sale. It simply isn't.
Both physical theft and downloading a copyrighted file without compensation may be crimes, but in the former the damages are measurable and known. In the latter the damages an unmeasurable fraction of that known amount. (Meaning it can only be estimated if you know how many of the downloaders would have paid for the file if they were unable to download it).
Because the damages cannot be measured in the same way, well. . . that's what makes them different crimes! Theft vs. Copyright Violation. I don't really have a big opinion on which should be regarded as deserving the more severe penalty, but the "stolen sale" analogy should be left out of the discussion. It it just bad logic.