So a souvereign country joining the space age destabilises the region, why several hundred thousand foreign soldiers including carrier groups and airstrike capabilities covering pretty much all of the region doesn't ?
Sorry to break this to you, but invading that other country destabilised the region. There's no superlative of "unstable". The region is unstable thanks to Bush and his oil buddies and claiming that anything else anyone else is doing would "destabilise" it is just a weak attempt at shifting the blame elsewhere....or looking for an excuse for the next war. But we know that, it's been going on for months now. All they're waiting for is a Tonkin Gulf incident, isn't it?
The point wasn't that creating those pictures should be legal. On the contrary, if any kids were harmed doing it, then a crime has been committed and should be prosecuted.
However, watching those pictures has been declared a crime. A picture of a crime is now a crime itself. What's next? Describing the crime? Talking about it? Our discussion about child porn here could get someone thinking about it, wanting it. Certainly it should be outlawed, right?
a child is incapable of informed consent when it comes to taking pictures of them in sexual situations Define "sexual situation", will you? Please define it in such a way that it applies regardless of age of the participants, because otherwise you'd have a looped argument.
Actually, kids are a lot more resilient than you give them credit for. Animal kids are exposed to live shows of sex, often among their parents, from birth. What exactly do you think makes humans so special that the same thing does irreparable damage to our minds?
There have been scientific studies on how kids of various ages react to sexual pictures. They're most interesting to read, some of the material can be found via Google. You'd be surprised.
As for actual sex acts - yeah, I'd agree that it's ok to outlaw taking advantage of a child that way. But remember that when you read "child porn", the chances that it's about pictures of naked kids is higher than the chance that it's about hardcore sex. And there's fairly solid evidence that the damage to a kid from being photographed without clothes on is essentially zero. The gravest danger is that the pictures will be embarrasing to them when they're adults.
This thing has just gone out of control. There's this case currently in the media where two teenagers in love with each other made pictures of themselves - and are now being prosecuted for distribution of child porn, even though that "distribution" was only between themselves.
Driving drunk constitues an immediate danger to other traffic participants.
Looking at child porn endangers nobody immediately. If children were harmed producing those pictures, that has already happened. Yes, supply and demand, they would've never been made, yadda, yadda. I'm all for throwing the people who harm small kids into a deep hole.
If you really don't want to see the difference between a picture of a crime and the crime itself, I can't help you.
Welcome to the Land Of The Free, where you can be locked up for two years for looking at pictures.
Yeah, mod me flamebait because I didn't think of the chiiiiildren. It's still a fact that we yell and cry about the horrors of tyranny if people are forbidden from reading any book they like, but in our own culture people don't have the freedom to look at any pictures they like. And there are cases where people have been sentenced for child porn that was created digitially, with no actual childs harmed.
My wife and I are getting a Wii next December, once all the plebeians have found the bugs. That's the weirdest reason I've heard so far. Care to elaborate? I've not yet encountered any bugs that damage the fun value, and I've had a Wii since launch day.
Which is why the difference between Free Software and Open Source Software matters so much. The GPL takes patents into account. Most OSS-but-not-Free licenses don't.
It's also why we need software to be Free, not just "open source". Open Source is easily bastardized ("Shared Source" anyone), while Free is free and not as easily embraced, extended, extinguished.
* Germany used to be very liberal in hacking laws * We had (well, on paper we still have), strong privacy protection laws * Thanks to CCC and others, German officials used to be somewhat educated in many privacy and general computing matters
Now it's not much of a secret that our new government, especially Mrs. Merkel, is very much more US-leaning than the previous one (which, for all its failures, at least kept us out of the stupid Iraq war). Ever since the government changed, we get stuff like this, which 5 years or so ago I would've expected from the US, but never from my home country.
She isn't as bad as Blair, but Merkel is another state leader sitting up and begging at Bush's table. She's the reason I care for US politics, because at most a year later, someone from her following will propose something similar over here. I wish we had a proper chancellor again, instead of this cardbox stand-in.
If it weren't for the fact that especially MS has been proven to finance pseudo-grasroots movements, your reply would be merely insulting.
Yes, many people laud things simply because they love them. However, quite a lot of people are paid to laud things. Some of them are paid to laud things and create the impression that they're doing it due to honest fandom.
And yes, many people complain about things simply because they hate them. However, some people are paid to complain about things and create the impression... you get the idea.
We know for a fact that MS has done it before. And they weren't exactly very sorry when they were caught red-handed.
It is deeply disturbing to realise that millions of adults have lives so fucking meaningless that their choice of games system becomes a major facet of their personality. You ever thought about things the other way around? That the choice of gaming system reflects the personality? I bought a Wii because it reflects what I want a gaming system to be - simple, fun and not too expensive. I also think it's great that you get to move around a bit instead of sitting in a chair for hours. If the PS3 had had these features, I might've bought that instead.
A typical put-down article. Maybe the author couldn't get his own Wii and is angry, or he's being paid by MS and/or Sony. Or maybe he's just really a bit slow.
Nintendo's "inability to keep units on the shelves" is a good one. They're sold-out is what it really means. And not thanks to artificial shortage, Nintendo has shipped a lot of these machines.
Is the excitement still there? Not as in the first few days, which is natural. But I'm still enjoying it a lot, and so does everyone I've had over to play a game or three. It isn't the cure to cancer, but it's a great living-room gaming system, and I'm still proud of owning one.
Now, someone please send the poor author of TFA one so he can stop being all stuffed up.
I'm certain OpenID would be more widely adopted, if actually setting it up weren't such a PITA. I've tried it twice, and at least for the PHP libraries, there are numerous inconsistencies, lack of documentation and version conflicts, that unless you're devoted to the idea, the approach of "heck, why not, it's nice to have" doesn't give you enough incentive to get it done. I've tried a third time just today, using the Wikimedia OpenID extension, and no luck. Segmentation fault, no docs explaining more than the bare essentials. It certainly looks a lot like the OpenID implementations are still in beta.
I like the idea, but as long as it's such a hassle to get it running, AOL and others who are either fans of OpenID or have the resources to simply tell a few coders to get it done and take a week if need be, that's where you'll find it and nowhere else.
No, I do not think Google has an obligation to list them.
I simply pointed out that "then we delist you. There!" was a mighty childish thing to do. Typical/. knee-jerk reaction, much like the "then MS should pull out of europe" stupidity.
No ads on Wikipedia, please! Ads are a lot like cancer: Once you've got 'em, they spread. Look at/. for an example! Once you have advertisers paying your bills, they are in a position to make demands, and they will. They will offer you more money for more prominent placement, they will threaten to pull out if that hostile facts about their companies don't disappear, they will ask for animated GIFs and flash ads, they will annoy the hell out of your visitors, and once the annoyance has reached the level where people are leaving, they'll become ever more annoying to keep click-through rates up despite the loss of eyes.
Advertisement spreads once it's there. The only safe and stable level of advertisement is zero.
People should be encouraged to follow licenses be in Sony's music license, microsoft's eula, or FSF's gpl. Err, no? Totally absolutely not. Whoever modded that as "insightful", please hand back your breathing license.
People should be highly discouraged to follow stupid license that further restrict their right after they've already bought something. The whole "software license" crap rests on the legal construction that by installing from CD/DVD to disk (and in some countries by loading it into memory), you are creating a copy of the thing and thus need a special permit. Almost everyone a little more enlightened than that knows that that's total bullshit. But back when the first rulings of this kind were made, computers were a strange new technology and a little frightening, well and now it's case law.
Now for the GPL, that's a different animal. It doesn't take any rights you should have by buying the thing away (buying something and then not being able to use it unless you sign some paper would be considered insane in any other area!). The GPL grants you additional rights you would not normally have for something you bought.
Seriously, work-life-balance only works if both parties to the deal understand it. And a lot of companies, bosses and other parties on the employer side don't. They're under pressure from investors, their bosses, etc. to turn a profit this quarter, and fuck five years down the road, by then we'll have moved our shares elsewhere.
Responsible use of resources - no matter if natural or human - is only important if you're interested in long-term viability, i.e. sustainability. If you only care for this quarter or this year, then raping it for what it's worth is the rational way to go.
As long as we as a society haven't decided where to go with this dilemma, it'll hit most of us in our work lives.
Yes, I am a part of their business. Which is exactly what this lawsuit was all about. The newspapers were complaining that Googles business consisted of using copyrighted text from their webpage, without permission or giving them a share of the profits.
Why don't they use whitelisting? We all know blacklisting doesn't work well enough. Please? Now that they've started making idiots out of themselves, they should at least go the whole nine yards.
Winning is who is shaping the market place, not who paid the fine That definition of winning only works if all participants are playing in the same market. Google, the EU competition office and a court of law don't exactly do that, do they?
I agree that the choice of media players hasn't happened. However, I very much doubt (and hope!) that courts don't think in terms of "winning" and "losing".
Are you an idiot, or do you just play one on slashdot? For the past 10 years or so, why do you ask?:-)
If Google were to delist these Newspapers, that would not be an attack on the Newspapers. Re-read grandparent, please. His comment was specifically aimed at Google delisting them in revenge. That would be a knee-jerk reaction, but the grandparents argument was that by doing so, Google would "show them". We have a court system to "show it". Google is smart enough to use it (they already announced they'll appeal), grandparent isn't.
Our society does not have a court system with the intent of it being used by corporation A to get government force on their side to prevent corporation B from doing something which is beneficial to the rest of us. Correct. The court doesn't care about benefits, it cares about whether or not corporation B is acting illegally.
The argument that a crime for the sake of the public good has been discussed extensively by the ancient greek. It's one of those which can not be objectively concluded, but all legal systems based on the roman code of laws has realized that you can not let people off because their crime benefited someone or even everyone. You might lower his punishment, but not too much.
Ok, I realize that "socialist" has very different meanings on either side of the atlantic ocean. I haven't heard France nor Sweden call themselves socialist, and I live within a thousand miles or so of both. But I might be mistaken, it's not as if I study either country.
Most of the communist countries, however, did call themselves socialist. There are also fairly strong socialist parties in most of Europe. However, pretty much every adult member of society realizes they are about as socialist as the "christian democratic union" of Germany is christian (which is: Not that any difference is visible. It's historic baggabe from back in the early 50s when they joined with a centrist christian party, but let's cut the history lesson short).
Almost everything the average american appears to consider "socialist" is considered centrist in Europe. Health care, for example. Maybe that's why our system is slightly less broken than yours. Gun control is just common sense if you consider that Europe has a much higher concentration of cities than the USA (and let's face it, owning a couple guns isn't as much of a problem somewhere out in Texas as it is somewhere down in the Bronx).
Anyways, without an objective definition of "socialist", the argument probably rests on semantics.
However, I still object to the use of the word in this context, because about half the time some dofus from southern Texas uses it, it's means as an insult, not as a political classification.
Force doesn't have to be physical. It can be psychological (talk to any mobbing victim if you don't believe that) or money/market based (talk to Stacker, Netscape, Novell's DRDOS department - if you can find any of them).
Slashdot Mirror
So a souvereign country joining the space age destabilises the region, why several hundred thousand foreign soldiers including carrier groups and airstrike capabilities covering pretty much all of the region doesn't ?
...or looking for an excuse for the next war. But we know that, it's been going on for months now. All they're waiting for is a Tonkin Gulf incident, isn't it?
Sorry to break this to you, but invading that other country destabilised the region. There's no superlative of "unstable". The region is unstable thanks to Bush and his oil buddies and claiming that anything else anyone else is doing would "destabilise" it is just a weak attempt at shifting the blame elsewhere.
Hi, other moron,
The point wasn't that creating those pictures should be legal. On the contrary, if any kids were harmed doing it, then a crime has been committed and should be prosecuted.
However, watching those pictures has been declared a crime. A picture of a crime is now a crime itself. What's next? Describing the crime? Talking about it? Our discussion about child porn here could get someone thinking about it, wanting it. Certainly it should be outlawed, right?
Actually, kids are a lot more resilient than you give them credit for. Animal kids are exposed to live shows of sex, often among their parents, from birth. What exactly do you think makes humans so special that the same thing does irreparable damage to our minds?
There have been scientific studies on how kids of various ages react to sexual pictures. They're most interesting to read, some of the material can be found via Google. You'd be surprised.
As for actual sex acts - yeah, I'd agree that it's ok to outlaw taking advantage of a child that way. But remember that when you read "child porn", the chances that it's about pictures of naked kids is higher than the chance that it's about hardcore sex. And there's fairly solid evidence that the damage to a kid from being photographed without clothes on is essentially zero. The gravest danger is that the pictures will be embarrasing to them when they're adults.
This thing has just gone out of control. There's this case currently in the media where two teenagers in love with each other made pictures of themselves - and are now being prosecuted for distribution of child porn, even though that "distribution" was only between themselves.
Driving drunk constitues an immediate danger to other traffic participants.
Looking at child porn endangers nobody immediately. If children were harmed producing those pictures, that has already happened. Yes, supply and demand, they would've never been made, yadda, yadda. I'm all for throwing the people who harm small kids into a deep hole.
If you really don't want to see the difference between a picture of a crime and the crime itself, I can't help you.
Welcome to the Land Of The Free, where you can be locked up for two years for looking at pictures.
Yeah, mod me flamebait because I didn't think of the chiiiiildren. It's still a fact that we yell and cry about the horrors of tyranny if people are forbidden from reading any book they like, but in our own culture people don't have the freedom to look at any pictures they like. And there are cases where people have been sentenced for child porn that was created digitially, with no actual childs harmed.
Which is why the difference between Free Software and Open Source Software matters so much. The GPL takes patents into account. Most OSS-but-not-Free licenses don't.
It's also why we need software to be Free, not just "open source". Open Source is easily bastardized ("Shared Source" anyone), while Free is free and not as easily embraced, extended, extinguished.
Mod me flamebait, but hear the facts first:
* Germany used to be very liberal in hacking laws
* We had (well, on paper we still have), strong privacy protection laws
* Thanks to CCC and others, German officials used to be somewhat educated in many privacy and general computing matters
Now it's not much of a secret that our new government, especially Mrs. Merkel, is very much more US-leaning than the previous one (which, for all its failures, at least kept us out of the stupid Iraq war). Ever since the government changed, we get stuff like this, which 5 years or so ago I would've expected from the US, but never from my home country.
She isn't as bad as Blair, but Merkel is another state leader sitting up and begging at Bush's table. She's the reason I care for US politics, because at most a year later, someone from her following will propose something similar over here. I wish we had a proper chancellor again, instead of this cardbox stand-in.
Yes, many people laud things simply because they love them.
However, quite a lot of people are paid to laud things. Some of them are paid to laud things and create the impression that they're doing it due to honest fandom.
And yes, many people complain about things simply because they hate them.
However, some people are paid to complain about things and create the impression... you get the idea.
We know for a fact that MS has done it before. And they weren't exactly very sorry when they were caught red-handed. It is deeply disturbing to realise that millions of adults have lives so fucking meaningless that their choice of games system becomes a major facet of their personality. You ever thought about things the other way around? That the choice of gaming system reflects the personality? I bought a Wii because it reflects what I want a gaming system to be - simple, fun and not too expensive. I also think it's great that you get to move around a bit instead of sitting in a chair for hours. If the PS3 had had these features, I might've bought that instead.
A typical put-down article. Maybe the author couldn't get his own Wii and is angry, or he's being paid by MS and/or Sony. Or maybe he's just really a bit slow.
Nintendo's "inability to keep units on the shelves" is a good one. They're sold-out is what it really means. And not thanks to artificial shortage, Nintendo has shipped a lot of these machines.
Is the excitement still there? Not as in the first few days, which is natural. But I'm still enjoying it a lot, and so does everyone I've had over to play a game or three. It isn't the cure to cancer, but it's a great living-room gaming system, and I'm still proud of owning one.
Now, someone please send the poor author of TFA one so he can stop being all stuffed up.
The OpenID PHP libraries, yes. The fact that other PHP extensions are just as bad doesn't make it any better, does it?
I'm certain OpenID would be more widely adopted, if actually setting it up weren't such a PITA. I've tried it twice, and at least for the PHP libraries, there are numerous inconsistencies, lack of documentation and version conflicts, that unless you're devoted to the idea, the approach of "heck, why not, it's nice to have" doesn't give you enough incentive to get it done. I've tried a third time just today, using the Wikimedia OpenID extension, and no luck. Segmentation fault, no docs explaining more than the bare essentials. It certainly looks a lot like the OpenID implementations are still in beta.
I like the idea, but as long as it's such a hassle to get it running, AOL and others who are either fans of OpenID or have the resources to simply tell a few coders to get it done and take a week if need be, that's where you'll find it and nowhere else.
No, I do not think Google has an obligation to list them.
/. knee-jerk reaction, much like the "then MS should pull out of europe" stupidity.
I simply pointed out that "then we delist you. There!" was a mighty childish thing to do. Typical
No ads on Wikipedia, please! Ads are a lot like cancer: Once you've got 'em, they spread. Look at /. for an example! Once you have advertisers paying your bills, they are in a position to make demands, and they will. They will offer you more money for more prominent placement, they will threaten to pull out if that hostile facts about their companies don't disappear, they will ask for animated GIFs and flash ads, they will annoy the hell out of your visitors, and once the annoyance has reached the level where people are leaving, they'll become ever more annoying to keep click-through rates up despite the loss of eyes.
Advertisement spreads once it's there. The only safe and stable level of advertisement is zero.
People should be highly discouraged to follow stupid license that further restrict their right after they've already bought something. The whole "software license" crap rests on the legal construction that by installing from CD/DVD to disk (and in some countries by loading it into memory), you are creating a copy of the thing and thus need a special permit. Almost everyone a little more enlightened than that knows that that's total bullshit. But back when the first rulings of this kind were made, computers were a strange new technology and a little frightening, well and now it's case law.
Now for the GPL, that's a different animal. It doesn't take any rights you should have by buying the thing away (buying something and then not being able to use it unless you sign some paper would be considered insane in any other area!). The GPL grants you additional rights you would not normally have for something you bought.
Huge difference.
Seriously, work-life-balance only works if both parties to the deal understand it. And a lot of companies, bosses and other parties on the employer side don't. They're under pressure from investors, their bosses, etc. to turn a profit this quarter, and fuck five years down the road, by then we'll have moved our shares elsewhere.
Responsible use of resources - no matter if natural or human - is only important if you're interested in long-term viability, i.e. sustainability. If you only care for this quarter or this year, then raping it for what it's worth is the rational way to go.
As long as we as a society haven't decided where to go with this dilemma, it'll hit most of us in our work lives.
Yes, I am a part of their business. Which is exactly what this lawsuit was all about. The newspapers were complaining that Googles business consisted of using copyrighted text from their webpage, without permission or giving them a share of the profits.
Why don't they use whitelisting? We all know blacklisting doesn't work well enough. Please? Now that they've started making idiots out of themselves, they should at least go the whole nine yards.
"failed" and "lost" aren't the same thing. Really not.
I agree that the choice of media players hasn't happened. However, I very much doubt (and hope!) that courts don't think in terms of "winning" and "losing".
The argument that a crime for the sake of the public good has been discussed extensively by the ancient greek. It's one of those which can not be objectively concluded, but all legal systems based on the roman code of laws has realized that you can not let people off because their crime benefited someone or even everyone. You might lower his punishment, but not too much.
Ok, I realize that "socialist" has very different meanings on either side of the atlantic ocean. I haven't heard France nor Sweden call themselves socialist, and I live within a thousand miles or so of both. But I might be mistaken, it's not as if I study either country.
Most of the communist countries, however, did call themselves socialist. There are also fairly strong socialist parties in most of Europe. However, pretty much every adult member of society realizes they are about as socialist as the "christian democratic union" of Germany is christian (which is: Not that any difference is visible. It's historic baggabe from back in the early 50s when they joined with a centrist christian party, but let's cut the history lesson short).
Almost everything the average american appears to consider "socialist" is considered centrist in Europe. Health care, for example. Maybe that's why our system is slightly less broken than yours. Gun control is just common sense if you consider that Europe has a much higher concentration of cities than the USA (and let's face it, owning a couple guns isn't as much of a problem somewhere out in Texas as it is somewhere down in the Bronx).
Anyways, without an objective definition of "socialist", the argument probably rests on semantics.
However, I still object to the use of the word in this context, because about half the time some dofus from southern Texas uses it, it's means as an insult, not as a political classification.
Force doesn't have to be physical. It can be psychological (talk to any mobbing victim if you don't believe that) or money/market based (talk to Stacker, Netscape, Novell's DRDOS department - if you can find any of them).