Not a concern for my project - it's free, open-source. I'm not even asking for donations. Mainly because I'm worried that if I start profiting from it, I'll get sued into oblivion - the list of copyrights being fairly used at the end of the readme is longer than some of the code files, and some of those have a history of not giving two craps about fair use. As far as I'm concerned, the game is just my resume - when a game dev I'm trying to get hired by says "so what can you do?", I can point to it and say "This."
But, from what I read, the console will be app-store only - no SD card slot, no streaming. Just copy the data into the 2GB (base model - there'll probably be more expensive options with more space) internal flash. The terms of the app store are already set - 90% of the gross goes to the developer. Which seems rather reasonable. No word on what apps will be approved, or if approval will even be needed, but it's open-source, so I think the restrictions will be "no blatant warez, no illegal games, and no malware".
That could end up the position for some of my games as well, but alternatively if you can make a profit and you don't need to breach copyright assuming there aren't software patents all over the place, why not? It could even be open source and you could still make a profit if they come up with the right scheme.
Here's the thing - SDL is easy. It's easy to pick up, easy to use, and easy to debug. And, surprisingly, most indie games don't stress the hardware to anything resembling a limit. Even the 3D ones - my two-year old laptop can max out Magicka. So optimization isn't usually a problem.
Sure, if you find that it is too slow, using something more optimal, or even rolling your own, might make sense. But what was it someone once said? Is not premature optimization the root of all evil?
Ease of use is more important than optimization for indie games. If a programmer has years of experience making games why wouldn't they just make games for the PC or for something else? But when a programmer is just starting out the last thing they will want is to have to deal with assembly and all the hardcore shit. What is more important is that the indie games are fun, the frame rates can be optimized in the sequel.
The kit should make developing games as easy as possible because if one thing has changed since the 1980s golden era of game development its that the process has become so goddamn complicated that you need 20 or 30 experienced programmers to write a decent game while in the 1980s you only needed one programmer. We need to go back to only needing one programmer to write the entire game, and we need to make the graphics engines as templates which can be reused by many different linux developers which means BSD license.
This sort of indie system will be made or broken by the ease of development and by the power of the development kit.
If SDL is hard to program for, then I might think twice. If they are going to go with SDL then they need to make it work with as many programming languages as possible. If I can program for this thing in Python, Perl, Ruby, Basic, C, C++, or whatever works for me, and it can connect to the development kit or SDL, then there will be plenty of games to choose from and it will be much easier for me and others to develop games for it.
However if they make it so it's only programmable in C, and the tools are hard to deal with, then forget about it.
First of all, and I cannot stress this enough, this is an auxilliary point for me. The view that everyone agrees the government is too damn big is simply incorrect. While there are plenty of people who do think this, there are plenty of others who would prefer they take a far more active role in addressing social problems.
Yeah those are the social conservatives. They want the government to micromanage our behavior. They want to ban stuff. They want to criminalize possession and create victimless offenses. Many religious people are convinced to support them for moral values reasons, but this isn't usually a position based on rational self interest. In the short term they feel morally righteous, they feel better, but in the long term these laws and precedents will be turned against them and theirs. Such as the social conservative who reaches old age and has a terminal illness and wants to commit suicide. This person would not be allowed to do that because the laws on assisted suicide would prevent them from being in control of the way they die.
I don't claim that most people approve of congress, or that a majority want bigger government, or anything like that. I was more commenting for the sake of discussion. My point, the one I really care about, is that out of the laws we have now, if you pick any one law and one person at random, the chances are the person would agree with the law being in place.
And I think you are absolutely wrong. There are so many federal (and state) laws in existence that no one actually knows every single federal law. I'm convinced if you told each person a random law from the list of tens of thousands of obscure esoteric laws, around half will agree with the law and the other half wont. And in some cases if not in most, we'd first hear about the law at that point. It's illegal to have a lobster of the wrong size. That is a federal crime, but I'm sure you didn't know about that did you and never even had the chance to determine how you feel about it. I think thats how the majority of laws would be, and if you Google "Stupid laws" or "Dumb laws" there will probably be a lot of laws you never even knew existed so you would have no way to know whether or not you agree with them.
What you are doing and what the lawmakers do is they present to the public media all the laws they think that we are likely to agree with but then they keep quiet or don't mention the laws they passed which would upset us or which they know we wouldn't agree with. I do not think the majority of people would agree with the majority of laws, but I do think a loud minority of people agree with the laws being presented to the public. And I think politicians are careful which laws to talk about in public and which laws not to talk about in public. The patriot act for example they don't like to talk about, or eminent domain, or gun control, or internet gambling, or marijuana and the drug laws. They know most Americans disagree with these laws so they go out of their way not to focus on talking about it.
This does not imply that people are satisfied with congress. Case in point: what percentage, roughly, of the laws I referred to earlier did you disagree with? Are you satisfied with the government?
No I'm not satisfied with government, and while I do think government should fight violent crimes, those laws you mention are but a small fraction of the laws actually in place. If the only thing the government did was protect life and liberty I would not have a problem with government.
OK, now that I have the defensive-sounding stuff out of the way, I can go back on the attack. It's interesting your interpretation of the 20% approval rating. It seems to me that you didn't even consider the possibility that you were wrong. What makes you assume that all the people were unhappy with passing more laws? Perhaps it was the wrong laws? Perhaps it was the relative inaction of congress t
And they'll get it out of him one way or another. It looks to me like they have taken the gloves off. He will probably have it as bad if not worse than Bradley Manning.
Usually it means the government has something really bad in store for you when they label you crazy.
Sluggishly progressing schizophrenia or sluggish schizophrenia (Russian: ; vyalotekushchaya shizofreniya) was a category of schizophrenia diagnosed by psychiatrists in the Soviet Union. At the time, Western psychiatry recognized only four types of schizophrenia: catatonic, hebephrenic, paranoid, and simple. The diagnostic criteria for this fifth category were so vague that it could be applied to virtually any person not suffering from mental function impairment and having interests beyond survival needs. The diagnosis was sometimes applied to dissidents who were not in fact mentally ill, so that they could be forcibly hospitalized in mental institutions and subjected to treatments including powerful antipsychotics and electroconvulsive therapy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggishly_progressing_schizophrenia
I think this hacker in specific Ryan Cleary has pissed off the CIA syndrome. The treatment is indefinite detention in a mental institution where he can be treated for his obvious malfunction.
Any voting machine which is closed source is equal to allowing a magician to count the votes.
First of all there must be a papertrail for any electronic voting machine. While the counting process can be automated, the voting machine should only exist to make voting easier, such as push a button to select a candidate. This should generate a receipt with a unique number representing the digital signature of the person voting. This would make counting easier and would also allow one to vote via the internet where they select a candidate, print out their receipt, and mail it in.
The point is it doesn't accomplish anything. The people who actually harm children in the pictures aren't necessarily the ones who possess the pictures
I disagree. So I went hunting:
Currently Interpolâ(TM)s Child Abuse Image database has more than 200,000 images showing the sexual abuse of over 20,000 individual children. [...] but fewer than 500 of these had been identified.
The authorities try and identify the children being abused, to provide support, prevent further abuse and ideally prosecute the abusers.
If someone has 200 pictures that are known to be of child abuse, and then has another 80 pictures that have never been seen before, there's a chance further identifying information will be available to aid tracking down the victim or the perpetrator, and there's a chance the person holding those images is involved in producing them.
If the police were to just talk to them and ask them where they got the pictures from without the stigma, and the threat of "sex offender for life", maybe these people could help them track down the perpetrators. But you and I both know the police are more interested in the witch hunt than in protecting children.
There have been cases where the police have undeleted files on a computer to recover child porn to get a conviction. There have been cases where the police have demanded the encryption key to an encrypted harddrive to retrieve evidence of child porn possession. If the police truly wanted to investigate the matter, they would probably know which ones just collect images and which ones are sex offenders who are a real threat to children. The police should obviously treat someone who has been convicted of child molestation differently than some person who just has pictures. The child molester is a predator, the picture collector is a pervert. The police can question the pervert but they should investigate the predator.
If you look at a lot of guys being caught up in child porn cases, many of them aren't sex offenders and thats their only offense. Some people have been convicted over sexting, over receiving images or trivial distribution. It's the law the needs to be changed here. Maybe if people who collect these images could report anonymously where they found these images to the police then you'd have something to build an investigation from.
Most people? I don't think most people would say the laws are just.
I disagree. Whether they know it or not, I think that out of all the laws that enforced out there, at least in functioning democracies, they would agree with most of them. Some may focus so much on the select few they consider unjust, that they actually lose sight on how many laws they willingly obey, and would suffer from the loss thereof. Things like various bans on violent/sexual crimes, laws protecting property, the major traffic offences, safety regulations for public places, education requirements (ignorance is a dangerous thing), worker's rights, environmental protection legislation, etc, etc. In these categories alone, there are hundreds of examples of laws that, while we could do without, we would be significantly worse off.
Everyone is under suspicion and surveillance because there's so many laws that we are all treated as suspects. So I suspect the majority believe most of the laws are unjust and that there's too many laws and too much government.
Not everyone lives in the US, you know. Most of us aren't so paranoid about our governments.
I don't see or meet people who think we need more intrusive bigger government and I don't meet people who say they want more laws to police people.
Ever heard the phrase, "There ought to be a law..."? I know plenty of people who applaud various police crack-downs, or bans on things they consider dangerous. But, that's really neither here nor there. You don't have to want to extend the current set of laws in order to appreciate them. The fact that most people don't want to specifically extend the laws is more a product of there being no reason to, rather than a general dislike of laws themselves.
The numbers prove you wrong. Polls have been taken year after year and the congress approval rating is around 20%. Only the 20% agree with the laws they are passing. That means 80% disagree. And it's not just the federal laws, most young people dislike how the government treats them in general.
If you are young and gay you don't like the laws which discriminate against you. If you are a minority you don't like the laws which discriminate against you. If you are poor, you don't like the fact that healthcare and college isn't free or that there is a war on drugs which targets you. If you are rich you don't like the high taxes.
No, most people don't like being a target of the law but everyone is. This is why most people think the government is too big, and is in everyones business. Are you telling me that the majority of people want bigger government? Are you telling me they want the government to police their lives?
Most of the laws being passed are the sort of laws which give the government more power whether the people agree with it or not. This is why the people are trying to starve the beast and force the government to cut spending. It's because the people don't like the laws.
"Because the police cannot make anyone actually safe" of course they can. Patrols lower crime.
A community that feels safwe, but isn't is more dangerous the visa versa.
" It simply means less people are reporting violent crimes." So what would cause a reduction beside there being less violent crime?
" A lot of murders will never be found or arrested by the police, " not really. A few will not be found. Anyways they STILL get reported; which is the discussion here.
In the US, we are pretty safe, overall. Either you haven't looked into this, or you have a perverse definition of 'safe'.
Police do not make the community safe. It's a myth to think anybody other than yourself can make you safe. It's also incredibly naive to think the police organizations cannot be corrupted and that the community's safety should depend entirely on them.
If less people report violent crime it could be because there is actually so much violent crime that people are intimidated. When a community does not believe in snitching for example and it gets to the point where they can witness a violent crime and not report it, it's because that community knows the police cannot keep them safe. There are organized criminals who have cops on their team, this makes it so the community no longer trusts the cops at all even to report violent crimes.
You say murders always get reported? That has never been true. If the murder is committed by the right person against the wrong person it's less likely to be reported.
And your belief that "in the US, we are pretty safe, overall." shows you are too naive and trusting of authority to really understand what the dangers are. You take everyone at face value, and you believe institutions filled with complete strangers are dedicated to protecting you. You ignore the politics and corruption, you ignore the fact that these organizations are run like businesses. No, they do not care about you. How many laws do they have to pass against you for you to accept that they don't give a shit about you?
If you just want to reduce how safe a community feels, then just reduce media coverage of crime. There's little correlation over time between crime rates and "feeling safe". It's nearly entirely based on how much our politicians want to keep up afraid, so we'll support their agenda, and how much the news is trying to boost ratings by being sensationalistic. This is why there are no "crime rate" stories for the 5 years in a row when the rates are falling, and on the 6th year, when it ticks up a bit, every local station is all over the "story".
Maybe there is too much media coverage. I think the war on drugs and the war on terror were media creations. Yes there are always drug dealers and terrorists, but most people will never be a victim of either. Most people only see the "thug" as a character in a TV show, or in the news, but never have actually known a thug, or done business with a thug. The same goes for drug dealers, most people seeing that stuff on TV don't really know whats going on in the real world and only know based on the media.
So yes media coverage shouldn't be censored but it should be more diversified. The internet allows people to get the wider perspective from members of their own community rather than the perspective of media people who don't know shit and who didn't grow up around the stuff they are covering. It's like media people who cover the internet but don't know shit about the culture, so they end up scaring other people who don't know shit or who know even less than they do, which makes them all want to collectively crack down on the whole internet.
Maybe if they actually asked the community when making the news the news would reflect the views of the community with regard to what makes the community feel safe. The crime rate doesn't matter, what matters is what are the concerns of the community? Slashdot could be polled to find out what they fear most online and I highly doubt it will be "discovering child pornography" at the top of the list. But more like "Finding out my bank account has been hacked".
Reducing crime levels should not be the goal. The goal should be to make communities feel safer.
Huh? What good does it do to make people feel safer if you don't actually reduce crime?
I agree that "reducing crime" =/= "making more arrests"; any DA or CLEO that says "look at how many arrests I made" is essentially saying "look at how many people I put in a cage". Yes, arresting the right people will help reduce crimes because you're getting the repeat offenders off the street, but just as important in reducing crime is effective community policing and intervention. Arresting hookers and teenage pot smokers makes your numbers look good, but doesn't actually do anything to make the community safer.
To do that, kids need intervention to break them out of the cycle of increasing crime and get them back in school. Police need to get out there and patrol, getting to know the neighborhood and making a positive presence in the community instead of hiding out and making revenue-enhancing traffic stops. People need to take more steps to help avoid and deter crime and protect themselves from it. Parents need to be more involved with their kids. And so on.
Point is, feeling safe and being safe are not necessarily the same thing.
Because the police cannot make anyone actually safe, it's all about whether or not the community feels safe. A community that feels safe wouldn't need to hire as many police which is why police typically criminalize a lot of victimless behaviors in order to look like they are doing something for the community.
Reducing violent crime on paper doesn't mean it's reduced in practice. It simply means less people are reporting violent crimes. Increasing violent crime on paper doesn't mean there is more or less violence, it simply means the arrest and conviction rate along with the amount of reports have increased.
What this means is that a lot of violence will never be reported. A lot of murders will never be found or arrested by the police, and when they are it might be the police in another state or another country. In the end no one is actually safe, you just have some communities which live under the illusion that they are safe and some communities which know from experience that they aren't safe. In reality we aren't safe, and never have been, and the police only exist to help us feel safe.
If someone is going to physically destroy you, the police cannot protect you.
Reducing relative and absolute crime levels should very much be an objective of government. Violent criminals are few and far between, whilst petty crimes grind away at society day by day. It's *nice* when you can leave your door unlocked and no-one comes in, or if you leave the gps in the car by accident, it's still there when you come back. You can then spend the day doing something productive, rather than mending broken windows and replacing stolen goods.
Shoplifting eats into shop's margins and forces them to hire more personnel to guard the shelves. otherwise those people could be gainfully employed making new things to sell in the shops (or they could start shops on their own).
And when there is less crime, people are more likely to be trusting towards each other, and are more likely to do business.
To put it another way: Don't lose sight of the little things!
Nobody is defending shoplifters or violent criminals. I'm saying the police don't actually seem to take statistics on how safe the community feels. Do they even care?
Slashdot Mirror
If the device costs $50 because it has a strong graphics chip so be it.
vector graphics or SVG can't work?
Not a concern for my project - it's free, open-source. I'm not even asking for donations. Mainly because I'm worried that if I start profiting from it, I'll get sued into oblivion - the list of copyrights being fairly used at the end of the readme is longer than some of the code files, and some of those have a history of not giving two craps about fair use. As far as I'm concerned, the game is just my resume - when a game dev I'm trying to get hired by says "so what can you do?", I can point to it and say "This."
But, from what I read, the console will be app-store only - no SD card slot, no streaming. Just copy the data into the 2GB (base model - there'll probably be more expensive options with more space) internal flash. The terms of the app store are already set - 90% of the gross goes to the developer. Which seems rather reasonable. No word on what apps will be approved, or if approval will even be needed, but it's open-source, so I think the restrictions will be "no blatant warez, no illegal games, and no malware".
That could end up the position for some of my games as well, but alternatively if you can make a profit and you don't need to breach copyright assuming there aren't software patents all over the place, why not? It could even be open source and you could still make a profit if they come up with the right scheme.
Here's the thing - SDL is easy. It's easy to pick up, easy to use, and easy to debug. And, surprisingly, most indie games don't stress the hardware to anything resembling a limit. Even the 3D ones - my two-year old laptop can max out Magicka. So optimization isn't usually a problem.
Sure, if you find that it is too slow, using something more optimal, or even rolling your own, might make sense. But what was it someone once said? Is not premature optimization the root of all evil?
Ease of use is more important than optimization for indie games. If a programmer has years of experience making games why wouldn't they just make games for the PC or for something else? But when a programmer is just starting out the last thing they will want is to have to deal with assembly and all the hardcore shit. What is more important is that the indie games are fun, the frame rates can be optimized in the sequel.
The kit should make developing games as easy as possible because if one thing has changed since the 1980s golden era of game development its that the process has become so goddamn complicated that you need 20 or 30 experienced programmers to write a decent game while in the 1980s you only needed one programmer. We need to go back to only needing one programmer to write the entire game, and we need to make the graphics engines as templates which can be reused by many different linux developers which means BSD license.
This sort of indie system will be made or broken by the ease of development and by the power of the development kit.
If SDL is hard to program for, then I might think twice. If they are going to go with SDL then they need to make it work with as many programming languages as possible. If I can program for this thing in Python, Perl, Ruby, Basic, C, C++, or whatever works for me, and it can connect to the development kit or SDL, then there will be plenty of games to choose from and it will be much easier for me and others to develop games for it.
However if they make it so it's only programmable in C, and the tools are hard to deal with, then forget about it.
Are we talking about streaming games? cartridges? cds? downloads?
I'll make a game or two if I can make a dollar or two.
Maybe Mark knows some dirty secret about him. Any gay sex hazing ritual involved in this?
Facebook is the last company I would have expected him to take a job from. This is like as if he took a job working at Sony.
How should we interpret this? Ah well I don't care. He should get what money he can get while he can get it.
First of all, and I cannot stress this enough, this is an auxilliary point for me. The view that everyone agrees the government is too damn big is simply incorrect. While there are plenty of people who do think this, there are plenty of others who would prefer they take a far more active role in addressing social problems.
Yeah those are the social conservatives. They want the government to micromanage our behavior. They want to ban stuff. They want to criminalize possession and create victimless offenses. Many religious people are convinced to support them for moral values reasons, but this isn't usually a position based on rational self interest. In the short term they feel morally righteous, they feel better, but in the long term these laws and precedents will be turned against them and theirs. Such as the social conservative who reaches old age and has a terminal illness and wants to commit suicide. This person would not be allowed to do that because the laws on assisted suicide would prevent them from being in control of the way they die.
I don't claim that most people approve of congress, or that a majority want bigger government, or anything like that. I was more commenting for the sake of discussion. My point, the one I really care about, is that out of the laws we have now, if you pick any one law and one person at random, the chances are the person would agree with the law being in place.
And I think you are absolutely wrong. There are so many federal (and state) laws in existence that no one actually knows every single federal law. I'm convinced if you told each person a random law from the list of tens of thousands of obscure esoteric laws, around half will agree with the law and the other half wont. And in some cases if not in most, we'd first hear about the law at that point. It's illegal to have a lobster of the wrong size. That is a federal crime, but I'm sure you didn't know about that did you and never even had the chance to determine how you feel about it. I think thats how the majority of laws would be, and if you Google "Stupid laws" or "Dumb laws" there will probably be a lot of laws you never even knew existed so you would have no way to know whether or not you agree with them.
What you are doing and what the lawmakers do is they present to the public media all the laws they think that we are likely to agree with but then they keep quiet or don't mention the laws they passed which would upset us or which they know we wouldn't agree with. I do not think the majority of people would agree with the majority of laws, but I do think a loud minority of people agree with the laws being presented to the public. And I think politicians are careful which laws to talk about in public and which laws not to talk about in public. The patriot act for example they don't like to talk about, or eminent domain, or gun control, or internet gambling, or marijuana and the drug laws. They know most Americans disagree with these laws so they go out of their way not to focus on talking about it.
This does not imply that people are satisfied with congress. Case in point: what percentage, roughly, of the laws I referred to earlier did you disagree with? Are you satisfied with the government?
No I'm not satisfied with government, and while I do think government should fight violent crimes, those laws you mention are but a small fraction of the laws actually in place. If the only thing the government did was protect life and liberty I would not have a problem with government.
OK, now that I have the defensive-sounding stuff out of the way, I can go back on the attack. It's interesting your interpretation of the 20% approval rating. It seems to me that you didn't even consider the possibility that you were wrong. What makes you assume that all the people were unhappy with passing more laws? Perhaps it was the wrong laws? Perhaps it was the relative inaction of congress t
This is happening in the UK, not the US.
Ah thats right. Only the US government is capable of torture.
How is that possibly germane?
Theft is theft. If you can't understand that there is no point in continuing the discussion.
Someone has to lose something for it to be theft.
And they'll get it out of him one way or another. It looks to me like they have taken the gloves off. He will probably have it as bad if not worse than Bradley Manning.
Usually it means the government has something really bad in store for you when they label you crazy.
Sluggishly progressing schizophrenia or sluggish schizophrenia (Russian: ; vyalotekushchaya shizofreniya) was a category of schizophrenia diagnosed by psychiatrists in the Soviet Union. At the time, Western psychiatry recognized only four types of schizophrenia: catatonic, hebephrenic, paranoid, and simple.
The diagnostic criteria for this fifth category were so vague that it could be applied to virtually any person not suffering from mental function impairment and having interests beyond survival needs. The diagnosis was sometimes applied to dissidents who were not in fact mentally ill, so that they could be forcibly hospitalized in mental institutions and subjected to treatments including powerful antipsychotics and electroconvulsive therapy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggishly_progressing_schizophrenia
I think this hacker in specific Ryan Cleary has pissed off the CIA syndrome. The treatment is indefinite detention in a mental institution where he can be treated for his obvious malfunction.
In a hospital the government will have absolute control over him mentally and physically. He will have no rights whatsoever.
He might be better off in a prison where at least he wont be psychologically and medically tortured.
Any voting machine which is closed source is equal to allowing a magician to count the votes.
First of all there must be a papertrail for any electronic voting machine. While the counting process can be automated, the voting machine should only exist to make voting easier, such as push a button to select a candidate. This should generate a receipt with a unique number representing the digital signature of the person voting. This would make counting easier and would also allow one to vote via the internet where they select a candidate, print out their receipt, and mail it in.
Just because it's open source doesn't mean you can feel safe. There could be backdoors critical areas such as the compiler, or other places.
We know that government agencies would pay, bribe, or trick developers into sneaking a backdoor in. That's all it would take.
So who audits the code? How is it audited? In specific the kernel and compilers must be free of backdoors.
Here is some supporting evidence
http://www.expertlaw.com/forums/showthread.php?t=119583&page=1
The point is it doesn't accomplish anything. The people who actually harm children in the pictures aren't necessarily the ones who possess the pictures
I disagree. So I went hunting:
Currently Interpolâ(TM)s Child Abuse Image database has more than 200,000
images showing the sexual abuse of over 20,000 individual children.
[...]
but fewer than 500 of these had been identified.
(from http://www.nspcc.org.uk/inform/policyandpublicaffairs/policysummaries/childabuseimages_wdf56933.pdf)
The authorities try and identify the children being abused, to provide support, prevent further abuse and ideally prosecute the abusers.
If someone has 200 pictures that are known to be of child abuse, and then has another 80 pictures that have never been seen before, there's a chance further identifying information will be available to aid tracking down the victim or the perpetrator, and there's a chance the person holding those images is involved in producing them.
If the police were to just talk to them and ask them where they got the pictures from without the stigma, and the threat of "sex offender for life", maybe these people could help them track down the perpetrators. But you and I both know the police are more interested in the witch hunt than in protecting children.
There have been cases where the police have undeleted files on a computer to recover child porn to get a conviction. There have been cases where the police have demanded the encryption key to an encrypted harddrive to retrieve evidence of child porn possession. If the police truly wanted to investigate the matter, they would probably know which ones just collect images and which ones are sex offenders who are a real threat to children. The police should obviously treat someone who has been convicted of child molestation differently than some person who just has pictures. The child molester is a predator, the picture collector is a pervert. The police can question the pervert but they should investigate the predator.
If you look at a lot of guys being caught up in child porn cases, many of them aren't sex offenders and thats their only offense. Some people have been convicted over sexting, over receiving images or trivial distribution. It's the law the needs to be changed here. Maybe if people who collect these images could report anonymously where they found these images to the police then you'd have something to build an investigation from.
I disagree. Whether they know it or not, I think that out of all the laws that enforced out there, at least in functioning democracies, they would agree with most of them. Some may focus so much on the select few they consider unjust, that they actually lose sight on how many laws they willingly obey, and would suffer from the loss thereof. Things like various bans on violent/sexual crimes, laws protecting property, the major traffic offences, safety regulations for public places, education requirements (ignorance is a dangerous thing), worker's rights, environmental protection legislation, etc, etc. In these categories alone, there are hundreds of examples of laws that, while we could do without, we would be significantly worse off.
Not everyone lives in the US, you know. Most of us aren't so paranoid about our governments.
Ever heard the phrase, "There ought to be a law..."? I know plenty of people who applaud various police crack-downs, or bans on things they consider dangerous. But, that's really neither here nor there. You don't have to want to extend the current set of laws in order to appreciate them. The fact that most people don't want to specifically extend the laws is more a product of there being no reason to, rather than a general dislike of laws themselves.
The numbers prove you wrong. Polls have been taken year after year and the congress approval rating is around 20%. Only the 20% agree with the laws they are passing. That means 80% disagree. And it's not just the federal laws, most young people dislike how the government treats them in general.
If you are young and gay you don't like the laws which discriminate against you.
If you are a minority you don't like the laws which discriminate against you.
If you are poor, you don't like the fact that healthcare and college isn't free or that there is a war on drugs which targets you.
If you are rich you don't like the high taxes.
No, most people don't like being a target of the law but everyone is. This is why most people think the government is too big, and is in everyones business.
Are you telling me that the majority of people want bigger government? Are you telling me they want the government to police their lives?
Most of the laws being passed are the sort of laws which give the government more power whether the people agree with it or not. This is why the people are trying to starve the beast and force the government to cut spending. It's because the people don't like the laws.
"Because the police cannot make anyone actually safe"
of course they can. Patrols lower crime.
A community that feels safwe, but isn't is more dangerous the visa versa.
" It simply means less people are reporting violent crimes."
So what would cause a reduction beside there being less violent crime?
" A lot of murders will never be found or arrested by the police, "
not really. A few will not be found. Anyways they STILL get reported; which is the discussion here.
In the US, we are pretty safe, overall.
Either you haven't looked into this, or you have a perverse definition of 'safe'.
Police do not make the community safe. It's a myth to think anybody other than yourself can make you safe. It's also incredibly naive to think the police organizations cannot be corrupted and that the community's safety should depend entirely on them.
If less people report violent crime it could be because there is actually so much violent crime that people are intimidated. When a community does not believe in snitching for example and it gets to the point where they can witness a violent crime and not report it, it's because that community knows the police cannot keep them safe. There are organized criminals who have cops on their team, this makes it so the community no longer trusts the cops at all even to report violent crimes.
You say murders always get reported? That has never been true. If the murder is committed by the right person against the wrong person it's less likely to be reported.
And your belief that "in the US, we are pretty safe, overall." shows you are too naive and trusting of authority to really understand what the dangers are. You take everyone at face value, and you believe institutions filled with complete strangers are dedicated to protecting you. You ignore the politics and corruption, you ignore the fact that these organizations are run like businesses. No, they do not care about you. How many laws do they have to pass against you for you to accept that they don't give a shit about you?
Is what would generate the new traffic. The user would be able to stream in HD to a dozen people who would also be streaming in HD. HD video chat.
The video quality and voice quality is never quite good enough so there will be plenty of room to up the resolution and sound quality.
If you just want to reduce how safe a community feels, then just reduce media coverage of crime. There's little correlation over time between crime rates and "feeling safe". It's nearly entirely based on how much our politicians want to keep up afraid, so we'll support their agenda, and how much the news is trying to boost ratings by being sensationalistic. This is why there are no "crime rate" stories for the 5 years in a row when the rates are falling, and on the 6th year, when it ticks up a bit, every local station is all over the "story".
Maybe there is too much media coverage. I think the war on drugs and the war on terror were media creations. Yes there are always drug dealers and terrorists, but most people will never be a victim of either. Most people only see the "thug" as a character in a TV show, or in the news, but never have actually known a thug, or done business with a thug. The same goes for drug dealers, most people seeing that stuff on TV don't really know whats going on in the real world and only know based on the media.
This is what they know about the internet http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6qiXJUaK5E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNO6G4ApJQY
So yes media coverage shouldn't be censored but it should be more diversified. The internet allows people to get the wider perspective from members of their own community rather than the perspective of media people who don't know shit and who didn't grow up around the stuff they are covering. It's like media people who cover the internet but don't know shit about the culture, so they end up scaring other people who don't know shit or who know even less than they do, which makes them all want to collectively crack down on the whole internet.
Maybe if they actually asked the community when making the news the news would reflect the views of the community with regard to what makes the community feel safe. The crime rate doesn't matter, what matters is what are the concerns of the community? Slashdot could be polled to find out what they fear most online and I highly doubt it will be "discovering child pornography" at the top of the list. But more like "Finding out my bank account has been hacked".
Reducing crime levels should not be the goal. The goal should be to make communities feel safer.
Huh? What good does it do to make people feel safer if you don't actually reduce crime?
I agree that "reducing crime" =/= "making more arrests"; any DA or CLEO that says "look at how many arrests I made" is essentially saying "look at how many people I put in a cage". Yes, arresting the right people will help reduce crimes because you're getting the repeat offenders off the street, but just as important in reducing crime is effective community policing and intervention. Arresting hookers and teenage pot smokers makes your numbers look good, but doesn't actually do anything to make the community safer.
To do that, kids need intervention to break them out of the cycle of increasing crime and get them back in school. Police need to get out there and patrol, getting to know the neighborhood and making a positive presence in the community instead of hiding out and making revenue-enhancing traffic stops. People need to take more steps to help avoid and deter crime and protect themselves from it. Parents need to be more involved with their kids. And so on.
Point is, feeling safe and being safe are not necessarily the same thing.
Because the police cannot make anyone actually safe, it's all about whether or not the community feels safe.
A community that feels safe wouldn't need to hire as many police which is why police typically criminalize a lot of victimless behaviors in order to look like they are doing something for the community.
Reducing violent crime on paper doesn't mean it's reduced in practice. It simply means less people are reporting violent crimes.
Increasing violent crime on paper doesn't mean there is more or less violence, it simply means the arrest and conviction rate along with the amount of reports have increased.
What this means is that a lot of violence will never be reported. A lot of murders will never be found or arrested by the police, and when they are it might be the police in another state or another country. In the end no one is actually safe, you just have some communities which live under the illusion that they are safe and some communities which know from experience that they aren't safe. In reality we aren't safe, and never have been, and the police only exist to help us feel safe.
If someone is going to physically destroy you, the police cannot protect you.
Because you can reduce hate crimes, that can be objectively measured right?
Reducing relative and absolute crime levels should very much be an objective of government. Violent criminals are few and far between, whilst petty crimes grind away at society day by day. It's *nice* when you can leave your door unlocked and no-one comes in, or if you leave the gps in the car by accident, it's still there when you come back. You can then spend the day doing something productive, rather than mending broken windows and replacing stolen goods.
Shoplifting eats into shop's margins and forces them to hire more personnel to guard the shelves. otherwise those people could be gainfully employed making new things to sell in the shops (or they could start shops on their own).
And when there is less crime, people are more likely to be trusting towards each other, and are more likely to do business.
To put it another way: Don't lose sight of the little things!
Nobody is defending shoplifters or violent criminals. I'm saying the police don't actually seem to take statistics on how safe the community feels. Do they even care?