You think money just printed itself? That borders came from nowhere? That cadastral systems just manage themselves? "Wealth" itself *is given by states.* The very possibility of a having a stable society with a relatively stable currency that allows you to own land and exchange your labor in a technological society with educated workers and consumers exists only because the state "forcibly redistributes" wealth. If that's tyranny, then the terms "tyranny" and "liberty" are meaningless.
I switched to Mac right after Leopard was released, and I'm starting to get annoyed by the incompatibilities across versions of the OS already. (My wife has the Leopard machine, mine is Snow Leopard - Snow Leopard's removal of support for InputManager-based plug-ins) It looks like it only gets more annoying.
"Take turns when you talk" is huge. Absolutely huge. The most annoying geeks I know are those who monopolize conversation, who betray a snarky know-it-all attitude, who are horrible listeners and indefatigable talkers, always eager to show how smart they are. I want to beat them up.
Rule of thumb: if this is you, for the next month, say no more than 4 sentences - small ones - before surrendering conversation to the next speaker. Then, listen to what other people say. Rephrase it and repeat the rephrased version of what they said back to them - nuance it maybe, but don't try to negate it or one-up it.
It will make you more popular, by an order of magnitude.
I think this would be the smart defense in this case. If someone without a prior for actual CP gets charged for possessing Lisa Simpson porn, they could probably make this defense. And, interestingly enough, it would also keep it illegal to produce, for example, a hand-drawn realistic pornoographic sketch of an actually-existing child, which I think is defensible.
My posts on this thread are about findings of fact: his previous guilt, its role in the current decision, and the nature of the law. Your claim about a "should" is based on an entire political philosophy that is neither universal nor self-evident, thus you cannot treat it as axiomatic, nor as bringing any particular clarity toward this story, any more than it would be if I invoked the Divine Right of Kings.
Google is controlled by two people: Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They together own about 59% of the voting rights for the company. (Over the next few years, they plan to reduce that to about 49%, but that will be de facto control as well.)
This means that they can generally do what they want. They are not mindlessly piloted by the anonymous avarice of its shareholders.
That is your political ideology. It is not everyone's. Many are comfortable with a more active stance against things they do not want to see occur in their societies, and are quite willing to use the state to preempt them. At this point, we're just talking about "shoulds," which is like talking about flavors of ice cream.
It doesn't work that way, especially for offenses that are associated with profound behaviorial disorders. After a conviction, in many countries, you can lose rights that are protected for most other people, and sometimes the rights you lose are vague or designed for your circumstances. Restraining orders are characteristic of these sorts of things: for the past crime of threatening someone, you are forbidden from doing something that in and of itself is legal (getting within so many meters of someone.) Hackers are often prohibited from getting near a computer after they've been found guilty and then served their time: your very example is, in fact, a substantive one, and hackers may well lose their parole or be brought in for questioning if they start hanging out on exploit sites. There are pragmatic, if not legal, limits to the presumption of innocence when in an effective state of probation or parole. Sometimes, parole is made contingent on therapy, or abstinence from alcohol, or such.
And in this case, it was within the letter of the law that he was convicted, anyway. That's what makes him a bad test case: he almost proves the case that links the cartoon images with the real ones.
The "slippery slope" argument is that he was slipping back down, that there is a correlation between the position of the real ones and the fake ones.
See my discussion of it above. The rationale is that it normalizes the market for CP, that the proliferation of these images makes the real ones more acceptable, and that it stokes an appetite for more. It is, partially, a gateway-drug argument. i am not convinced that this argument has been proved accurate, but I also understand the public interest in erring on the side of caution.
Also, he wasn't thrown in jail. He had a prior conviction which was "taken off the books" due to apparent good behavior; they find evidence suggesting he's not trying that hard to get over his past behavior. He was fined, forced to actually register, and then given probation for a 1 year sentence. He's actually being let off pretty easily considering his past.
I pity pedophiles, but I think that the best that they can hope for is a life under supervision and scrutiny.
However it was also to deter the production of other material, including cartoons, that could "fuel demand for material that does involve the abuse of children."
It's not clear whether this is a "gateway drug" argument or something somewhat different.
Personally, I would not advocate criminalizing these images, but this guy makes a horrible test-case. It could be argued that it makes sense to register him as a sex offender for his previous case, that this situation revokes the basis for earlier leniency, but then to let it go at that. But this guy makes a horrible poster child for arguing for the right to produce and distribute these kinds of images: he practical makes the case for the "slippery slope" argument.
All that may be true. It doesn't change the fact that he was a sexual offender before this case took place, and that his claim that these were mere amusements rings false.
This is not what got him registered as a sex offender: he was already registered as a sex offender from a previous case, in which he had been found guilty of actually having child porn (with images of real children) on his computer. The prior conviction is reason for the severe response to the cartoon images. This being the case, his claim that he didn't get sexual titillation from these images rings rather false.
Which means if you want to walk away, you have to walk to another career entirely.
And they get away with it because there's a huge pool of young, dumb, eager workers streaming out of universities, eager to do "anything" to work in the game industry. And, conveniently, the industry is supporting education at places like DigiPen to make it difficult for this swelling labor pool to find work outside of that industry easily.
One reason why most videogames are so insipid is that they are created by these one-dimensional workaholics who have almost no real experience of the world outside of the game industry, too.
I think the answer is lawsuits and unions, with regulations a distant third.
Taste still comes into play. But the fact is that I know a lot more about music than you do. If you knew more than you do, as much as I do, you may well not like what I do now. But you probably wouldn't think as highly of what you do like now.
See my "Farmville" analogy elsewhere. If someone else only knows Farmville and a handful of other games, and you like, for example, Braid or Portal or BioShock, wouldn't you feel in some sense that their tastes were less informed than yours? Even if, should they have learned a lot more, they might like different games?
You may also not like those musicians because you don't know how to appreciate them yet. There is an element of learning involved - just like there would be if you jumped into a completely new genre of games, and chose a rather advanced title (say, a Tetris player picking up Ninja Gaiden.)
Again, I won't say that you would have the same tastes as me if your understanding of music and music history were more sophisticated - I don't even always have the same tastes as me, from week to week - but you wouldn't have the tastes you do now.
OK, that's a fair dig, especially because I'm criticizing that idea implicitly at the beginning. But it wouldn't be a stretch to say that the senior management of Apple might be cheesed at Google...
The thing I love about this story, in the way that I love to see a brawl break out in the stands, is that while Microsoft aficionados - or even tolerators - are a distinct minority in Slashdot, Apple fans and Google fans are about equal in representation here. So this is a perfect wedge story. (Grabs popcorn.)
For myself, I use Google Products and Microsoft Office on Mac OS X 10.6 on my MacBook Pro, running Windows 7 in Parallels and bootcamping to play games. I like open source stuff when I can use, too (scientific and data viz/analysis software especially - yay, R.) So, I don't have a dog in this fight. Or, I have 3 dogs. That all smell. I do like the Google dog just a little better than the others, though.
You are delusional. Most users do not switch their defaults. Most users do not hear about these kinds of decisions at all. And Google is an ad company. Not have Google be the default engine isn't a shot-across-the-bow, it's pissing in their Corn Flakes.
Microsoft saved Apple. Microsoft kept Apple viable in the workplace by continuing to release Office for Mac (indeed, Office on a Mac is much nicer than Office on a PC.) Apple produces great hardware to run Microsoft software, even their OS, on. And while Jobs is an avid competitor, I seriously doubt that the has any animus for Microsoft.
Google, on the other hand, is threatening Apple in its biggest growth market: mobile devices. Google offers an alternate ecosystem to Apple, to.Mac and now iDisk. Google is encroaching, encroaching, encroaching more into Apple territory than Microsoft is. Apple probably feels betrayed by Google (and vice versa, after the rejection of Google's app in the AppStore.)
All three are competing with each other in various sectors, but I think if there is bad blood anywhere right now, it is between Apple and Google.
If I only know four games, and all of them are just the most accessible, well-known casual games in the world - let's say, "Farmville" - and I go around praising Farmville because it's so engaging and original, aren't you going to say "you don't know what you're talking about - you just know about these games because you're on Facebook. I'm glad you enjoy Farmville, but it's neither deep nor innovative,"?
Slashdot Mirror
You think money just printed itself? That borders came from nowhere? That cadastral systems just manage themselves? "Wealth" itself *is given by states.* The very possibility of a having a stable society with a relatively stable currency that allows you to own land and exchange your labor in a technological society with educated workers and consumers exists only because the state "forcibly redistributes" wealth. If that's tyranny, then the terms "tyranny" and "liberty" are meaningless.
I know a big group of people who are going to be upset: Zotero users.
I switched to Mac right after Leopard was released, and I'm starting to get annoyed by the incompatibilities across versions of the OS already. (My wife has the Leopard machine, mine is Snow Leopard - Snow Leopard's removal of support for InputManager-based plug-ins) It looks like it only gets more annoying.
I think this may be my last round of Macs.
"Take turns when you talk" is huge. Absolutely huge. The most annoying geeks I know are those who monopolize conversation, who betray a snarky know-it-all attitude, who are horrible listeners and indefatigable talkers, always eager to show how smart they are. I want to beat them up.
Rule of thumb: if this is you, for the next month, say no more than 4 sentences - small ones - before surrendering conversation to the next speaker. Then, listen to what other people say. Rephrase it and repeat the rephrased version of what they said back to them - nuance it maybe, but don't try to negate it or one-up it.
It will make you more popular, by an order of magnitude.
I think this would be the smart defense in this case. If someone without a prior for actual CP gets charged for possessing Lisa Simpson porn, they could probably make this defense. And, interestingly enough, it would also keep it illegal to produce, for example, a hand-drawn realistic pornoographic sketch of an actually-existing child, which I think is defensible.
My posts on this thread are about findings of fact: his previous guilt, its role in the current decision, and the nature of the law. Your claim about a "should" is based on an entire political philosophy that is neither universal nor self-evident, thus you cannot treat it as axiomatic, nor as bringing any particular clarity toward this story, any more than it would be if I invoked the Divine Right of Kings.
Google is controlled by two people: Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They together own about 59% of the voting rights for the company. (Over the next few years, they plan to reduce that to about 49%, but that will be de facto control as well.)
This means that they can generally do what they want. They are not mindlessly piloted by the anonymous avarice of its shareholders.
That is your political ideology. It is not everyone's. Many are comfortable with a more active stance against things they do not want to see occur in their societies, and are quite willing to use the state to preempt them. At this point, we're just talking about "shoulds," which is like talking about flavors of ice cream.
It doesn't work that way, especially for offenses that are associated with profound behaviorial disorders. After a conviction, in many countries, you can lose rights that are protected for most other people, and sometimes the rights you lose are vague or designed for your circumstances. Restraining orders are characteristic of these sorts of things: for the past crime of threatening someone, you are forbidden from doing something that in and of itself is legal (getting within so many meters of someone.) Hackers are often prohibited from getting near a computer after they've been found guilty and then served their time: your very example is, in fact, a substantive one, and hackers may well lose their parole or be brought in for questioning if they start hanging out on exploit sites. There are pragmatic, if not legal, limits to the presumption of innocence when in an effective state of probation or parole. Sometimes, parole is made contingent on therapy, or abstinence from alcohol, or such.
And in this case, it was within the letter of the law that he was convicted, anyway. That's what makes him a bad test case: he almost proves the case that links the cartoon images with the real ones.
The "slippery slope" argument is that he was slipping back down, that there is a correlation between the position of the real ones and the fake ones.
See my discussion of it above. The rationale is that it normalizes the market for CP, that the proliferation of these images makes the real ones more acceptable, and that it stokes an appetite for more. It is, partially, a gateway-drug argument. i am not convinced that this argument has been proved accurate, but I also understand the public interest in erring on the side of caution.
Also, he wasn't thrown in jail. He had a prior conviction which was "taken off the books" due to apparent good behavior; they find evidence suggesting he's not trying that hard to get over his past behavior. He was fined, forced to actually register, and then given probation for a 1 year sentence. He's actually being let off pretty easily considering his past.
I pity pedophiles, but I think that the best that they can hope for is a life under supervision and scrutiny.
This is the rationale of the Judge:
It's not clear whether this is a "gateway drug" argument or something somewhat different.
Personally, I would not advocate criminalizing these images, but this guy makes a horrible test-case. It could be argued that it makes sense to register him as a sex offender for his previous case, that this situation revokes the basis for earlier leniency, but then to let it go at that. But this guy makes a horrible poster child for arguing for the right to produce and distribute these kinds of images: he practical makes the case for the "slippery slope" argument.
All that may be true. It doesn't change the fact that he was a sexual offender before this case took place, and that his claim that these were mere amusements rings false.
This is not what got him registered as a sex offender: he was already registered as a sex offender from a previous case, in which he had been found guilty of actually having child porn (with images of real children) on his computer. The prior conviction is reason for the severe response to the cartoon images. This being the case, his claim that he didn't get sexual titillation from these images rings rather false.
Well, you do power it up by holding down the period key...
3D animation schools do not produce artists. They produce people who know how to use 3D animation software.
The entire game industry is like this.
The entire industry.
Which means if you want to walk away, you have to walk to another career entirely.
And they get away with it because there's a huge pool of young, dumb, eager workers streaming out of universities, eager to do "anything" to work in the game industry. And, conveniently, the industry is supporting education at places like DigiPen to make it difficult for this swelling labor pool to find work outside of that industry easily.
One reason why most videogames are so insipid is that they are created by these one-dimensional workaholics who have almost no real experience of the world outside of the game industry, too.
I think the answer is lawsuits and unions, with regulations a distant third.
Actually, as it is, it's the best joke ever.
Taste still comes into play. But the fact is that I know a lot more about music than you do. If you knew more than you do, as much as I do, you may well not like what I do now. But you probably wouldn't think as highly of what you do like now.
See my "Farmville" analogy elsewhere. If someone else only knows Farmville and a handful of other games, and you like, for example, Braid or Portal or BioShock, wouldn't you feel in some sense that their tastes were less informed than yours? Even if, should they have learned a lot more, they might like different games?
You may also not like those musicians because you don't know how to appreciate them yet. There is an element of learning involved - just like there would be if you jumped into a completely new genre of games, and chose a rather advanced title (say, a Tetris player picking up Ninja Gaiden.)
Again, I won't say that you would have the same tastes as me if your understanding of music and music history were more sophisticated - I don't even always have the same tastes as me, from week to week - but you wouldn't have the tastes you do now.
More details on the various players here.
OK, that's a fair dig, especially because I'm criticizing that idea implicitly at the beginning. But it wouldn't be a stretch to say that the senior management of Apple might be cheesed at Google...
The thing I love about this story, in the way that I love to see a brawl break out in the stands, is that while Microsoft aficionados - or even tolerators - are a distinct minority in Slashdot, Apple fans and Google fans are about equal in representation here. So this is a perfect wedge story. (Grabs popcorn.)
For myself, I use Google Products and Microsoft Office on Mac OS X 10.6 on my MacBook Pro, running Windows 7 in Parallels and bootcamping to play games. I like open source stuff when I can use, too (scientific and data viz/analysis software especially - yay, R.) So, I don't have a dog in this fight. Or, I have 3 dogs. That all smell. I do like the Google dog just a little better than the others, though.
You are delusional. Most users do not switch their defaults. Most users do not hear about these kinds of decisions at all. And Google is an ad company. Not have Google be the default engine isn't a shot-across-the-bow, it's pissing in their Corn Flakes.
Microsoft saved Apple. Microsoft kept Apple viable in the workplace by continuing to release Office for Mac (indeed, Office on a Mac is much nicer than Office on a PC.) Apple produces great hardware to run Microsoft software, even their OS, on. And while Jobs is an avid competitor, I seriously doubt that the has any animus for Microsoft.
Google, on the other hand, is threatening Apple in its biggest growth market: mobile devices. Google offers an alternate ecosystem to Apple, to .Mac and now iDisk. Google is encroaching, encroaching, encroaching more into Apple territory than Microsoft is. Apple probably feels betrayed by Google (and vice versa, after the rejection of Google's app in the AppStore.)
All three are competing with each other in various sectors, but I think if there is bad blood anywhere right now, it is between Apple and Google.
I'm not going to bother with links, but you can Google them: for starters, Morton Feldman. Louis Andriessen. Arvo Part.
If I only know four games, and all of them are just the most accessible, well-known casual games in the world - let's say, "Farmville" - and I go around praising Farmville because it's so engaging and original, aren't you going to say "you don't know what you're talking about - you just know about these games because you're on Facebook. I'm glad you enjoy Farmville, but it's neither deep nor innovative,"?
Well, you're being that guy, but for music.