As a local small business advertiser, I would welcome a website catering to local people. The problem is not to keep non-locals out, but to get more locals in. In the newspaper biz, this is called density of circulation. I've never seen a local website that has much.
A website with as strong a local following as a popular small-town newspaper would be good for both website visitors and advertisers.
Common decency should prevent people from shouting inanities into their cell phones in crowded places.
However, decency is not common; therefore, there ought to be a law against using cell phones in such places as restaurants and zen retreats. It should be backed up with electronic countermeasures against the loudmouths and troglodytes who would be inclined to disobey it.
Parental influence is a joke compared to peer pressure. You've been in high school, right?
As long as the big men on campus are athletes and not academic superstars, and as long as hours in the malls and hair salons trump hours logged in the labs and libraries, all the boys and girls will try to ape the popular kids.
If you don't believe me, you need to get out more. After you do, take a look at the most popular kids at Chinese high schools. Who are they? The Beijing- and Fudan-bound bookworms, that's who.
There is, however, one thing in favor of high school and university athletics. When we become the low-wage manufacturing center for Japan, China, and the EU, at least we'll have some young college graduates with strong backs to tote the boxes.
Of course public education is free, especially for students who can least afford private schools. Yours is one of the most disingenous arguments to appear here in quite some time.
I covered the great American novel case--the student could ask the teacher to read it outside of turnitin.com, which he or she would certainly do.
In other words, please don't be flippant about a serious issue. We can't afford widespread cheating.
1. Turnitin.com, however imperfect, deters cheating and so fulfills a social purpose. 2. Students get a free education, and whatever value their intellectual property may have is a very small down payment. 3. In exceptional cases, most teachers would allow students to opt out of the system, just as students can usually ask that scantron tests be hand-graded. A quick google search is probably more effective than turnitin.com anyway, at least insofar as copying from public sources is concerned. 4. We are competing in a global economy, which competition depends upon the quality and integrity of our educational system. Even if students' rights were somehow at risk here--and they are not--the rights of honest students and society as a whole are overriding.
Here is a brief summary from the first few paragraphs of the the carefully-written New York Times Story
But it is no longer just chatter in the ether. What started online almost two decades ago as a means of swapping child pornography has transformed in recent years into a more complex and diversified community that uses the virtual world to advance its interests in the real one.
Today, pedophiles go online to seek tips for getting near children -- at camps, through foster care, at community gatherings and at countless other events. They swap stories about day-to-day encounters with minors. And they make use of technology to help take their arguments to others, like sharing online a printable booklet to be distributed to children that extols the benefits of sex with adults.
The community's online infrastructure is surprisingly elaborate. There are Internet radio stations run by and for pedophiles; a putative charity that raised money to send Eastern European children to a camp where they were apparently visited by pedophiles; and an online jewelry company that markets pendants proclaiming the wearer as being sexually attracted to children, allowing anyone in the know to recognize them.
Any crime involving more than one person begins with "chatting" of one kind or another, and yes, "horror" is the right word for men telling each other exactly how to accomplish intercourse with a seven- or eight-year-old girl.
The article that you describe as sensationalistic was called "world-class journalism" by Alex Jones, the director of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. This quotation is from the link I provided in my first post. The NYT article requires registration to read and may soon cost money, but slashdot readers who read it may decide for themselves whether its contents are merely sensationalistic.
What I meant by "ten-year prison sentences" was that simply that the threat of punishment deters crime. I do not propose that these sentences be handed out without due process. But I do think that a person convicted of knowingly hosting a private, secret website that allows people to plan and carry out crimes against children should go to prison. Under our system, such a conviction would not be easy to obtain, nor should it be.
I tried to distinguish between protected free speech, such as a letter to the editor of a newspaper or a website posting defending the right to read and distribute child pornography--on the one hand--and conspiratorial use of the mail, telephone service, or Internet to carry out a crime, on the other. Some war protesters once blew their noses into an American flag in front of a marine recruiter in an attempt to provoke him--a protected, if disgusting, act of free expression. Had they met in secret to make explicit plans to blow up the recruiting office and took steps to carry these plans out--that would not be protected speech.
You should not have construed what I wrote to suggest that I want to abandon the Bill of Rights. I explicitly said otherwise. I do not believe we need to "balance" our rights against the need to fight crime, but I do believe we need to fight crime. Many kiddie porn laws are probably unconstitutional, as you suggest. For example, it would probably be possible to ban Nabokov's Lolita under some of them on the grounds that the author may seem to be "approving" of underage sex. On the other hand, we can strengthen laws to stop people like this currently over-publicized creep from Thailand (trebly a creep for confessing to a crime he would have liked to have committed but probably didn't) from lurking around Internet back alleys exchanging information about child care centers that hire men without background checks.
The founding fathers had good reason to fear the government and fear the police. And yet, they needed government, and they needed police, as do we. The Times story shows why the Internet needs better governing and better policing.
I believe that public sites, like slashdot, are protected by the first amendment.
I believe that a personal hard drive is protected against unreasonable searches by the fourth amendment.
But private and semi-private uses of the Internet, which are used to facilitate a great many other crimes and conspiracies than crimes against children, belong in a somewhat different category. Consider, for example, the difference between ordering a product with a credit card over the telephone and ordering a product with a credit card over the Internet. In one case, a single credit card number is at risk; in the other, tens of thousands are at risk.
One poster said that sex crimes against children are not especially serious, but if four year olds could type, I'm not sure they would agree. The NYT recently published a chilling study of Internet usage by pedophiles who did much worse than simply store dirty pictures on their hard drives. And while I agree that this is an especially emotion-laden issue, the successful use of the Internet by any group of criminals to further crime should be of concern to all.
If crime in the U.S. reaches the level it has in the former Soviet Union, there will be no Bill of Rights left to protect. When it comes to kicking your door in, gangsters can be as bad as policemen.
The first step should be an increase in legal remedies and penalties for misuse of the Internet. A ten-year prison sentence for knowingly abetting a felony on the Internet could help, just as the simple steps of putting posters of criminals on Post Office walls and threatening kidnappers with the death penalty both did some good.
This is a constitutional minefield, but we need to protect not only the Bill of Rights but also our most vulnerable, youngest, and most helpless citizens. Raping a child is no laughing matter, and whether the rapist is a criminal or a mental patient (he is both), such a rapist needs to be captured and locked away forever, not necessarily in a hell-hole, but some place with a lock on the door and no kids in reach.
The IDEA of putting technology in the hands of the have-nots is a spectacularly important, inspiring, and, indeed, glorious idea.
Words matter as much as bandwidth; this too was a publicity stunt:
THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
But read to freezing volunteers on the banks of an ice-cold river, on the eve of the first victory in the American revolution, these words mattered as much as technology, as much as bullets and powder.
For example I ask if you believe that virtually everyone in America has a cell phone? CBS reports that 43% do not--while neglected pay phones vanish from the hands of people who need them most.
The measure of our civilization is our treatment of the poor, the weak, and the friendless. Technology without conscience is a rusting bucket of scrap iron.
Shame on you and others for mocking the goals of this idealistic project.
You shouldn't ever plug in a computer if you can't take a joke.
If someone is rude to me, I can reply, probably with overwhelming force. I am, after all, a f**king English major. What I can't do is understand the inner recesses of technology. So I keep asking questions until I get an answer that helps.
I would rather endure the rudeness and inarticulate grunting of engineers who actually know something than the insincere smiles of marketing pukes who know only that they want my money.
Like you, if someone asks me about Shakespeare, I usually suggest that he or she read one of the plays first.
Numerous reasons have been suggested for the rudeness described in the article. I think the most likely one is that Linux dude is worried about his bills. He could probably be making a lot more money installing Windows servers that don't work for guys like me who don't know any better.
Because the Web has so many articles, it is easy to imagine that they represent nearly everything that has been written on a subject. However, the first 30 search results often merely repeat, sometimes erroneously, the same thing. Wikipedia is only one example. Try searching for the lyrics of a popular song. If someone has made a mistake, it is replicated so much that you start singing it that way in your shower.
On almost any given subject, especially in the humanities or social sciences, the difference between what is available on the Internet and what is available in a library is astounding. A "Google Books" search provides some insight into this problem, which is caused by the proprietary nature of much "content," keeping it off the Web.
Steve Jobs is not a team player. If the Pixar deal was just to trade unknown for classy stock, why take the board seat?
What's in it for Apple?
1. Credibility and market share.. Disney is one of 30 Dow Jones Industrial Average components. Apple, despite its impressive successes, is still a bit of a laughing stock in some quarters, with a large "They'll never make it" reputation that has endured for decades and will die only with greybeards who like to say it.
2. Massive, elaborate, hard-to-duplicate co-marketing relationships. These will shove the Apple brand (or are at least its products) into places they've never been. There have been many jokes about "Mickey Mouse technology" on this board--some of them quite clever--but do you doubt that a Disney-branded iPod or even iMac would light up the Christmas trees during the big selling season? Screw the low-margin corporate computer market; sell to the people.
3. A doubled advertisng budget. Apple needs brute-force TV dollars to keep the iPod share and increase the sales of Macs. With "Intel inside," the new Disney computer (perhaps running Windows) could make one helluva splash.
4. Four hundred new store locations worldwide. A majority of Apple sales come through its stores, and the value is $1 billion+. Granted, the Disney stores are smaller, and it would be difficult to hire that many "geniuses" quickly, but how much of genius do you have to be to sell iPods?
5. A new outlet for Apple's creative engineering department. Despite all the heavy breathing about OS X, it is like all "innovations" on the moribund PC, more of the same shit on a different day. Faster, smaller, cheaper, better. Yawn. Disney, in its early days, had "imagineers," and was one of the most innovative companies in the world. Apple could breathe life into imagineering and its own engineering resources.
What's in it for Disney?
1. Profits. For a public company, they're a beautiful thing. 2. A superstar quarterback at CEO. They need somebody to slash expenses and start anew. 3. A technology infusion into special effects, both for movies and theme parks
What do I know? Like everyone else, Bupkis. But I gotta believe it could happen.
I think it ought to illegal to refuse to ship via USPS. At the very least, it should be illegal to make me fill out a long-assed order form only to find at the end that the company is too ornery to ship to a PO Box. Buy a stamp, dude. How tough could it be?
Slashdot Mirror
This is a serious question. I am an English major.
As a local small business advertiser, I would welcome a website catering to local people. The problem is not to keep non-locals out, but to get more locals in. In the newspaper biz, this is called density of circulation. I've never seen a local website that has much.
A website with as strong a local following as a popular small-town newspaper would be good for both website visitors and advertisers.
Wait for someone to discriminate against you on that basis and sue for libel, slander, and breach of breakfast.
Common decency should prevent people from shouting inanities into their cell phones in crowded places. However, decency is not common; therefore, there ought to be a law against using cell phones in such places as restaurants and zen retreats. It should be backed up with electronic countermeasures against the loudmouths and troglodytes who would be inclined to disobey it.
Parental influence is a joke compared to peer pressure. You've been in high school, right? As long as the big men on campus are athletes and not academic superstars, and as long as hours in the malls and hair salons trump hours logged in the labs and libraries, all the boys and girls will try to ape the popular kids. If you don't believe me, you need to get out more. After you do, take a look at the most popular kids at Chinese high schools. Who are they? The Beijing- and Fudan-bound bookworms, that's who. There is, however, one thing in favor of high school and university athletics. When we become the low-wage manufacturing center for Japan, China, and the EU, at least we'll have some young college graduates with strong backs to tote the boxes.
Of course public education is free, especially for students who can least afford private schools. Yours is one of the most disingenous arguments to appear here in quite some time.
I covered the great American novel case--the student could ask the teacher to read it outside of turnitin.com, which he or she would certainly do.
In other words, please don't be flippant about a serious issue. We can't afford widespread cheating.
1. Turnitin.com, however imperfect, deters cheating and so fulfills a social purpose.
2. Students get a free education, and whatever value their intellectual property may have is a very small down payment.
3. In exceptional cases, most teachers would allow students to opt out of the system, just as students can usually ask that scantron tests be hand-graded. A quick google search is probably more effective than turnitin.com anyway, at least insofar as copying from public sources is concerned.
4. We are competing in a global economy, which competition depends upon the quality and integrity of our educational system. Even if students' rights were somehow at risk here--and they are not--the rights of honest students and society as a whole are overriding.
Why is the contract so deceptive that people--of any age--are likely to sign up for something they don't understand?
Why, in other words, should I have to read any of that shit? Doesn't the product or service works as advertised?
If I were granny, I would thank my lucky stars I got out away from those thieves with all my personal belongings.
Here is a brief summary from the first few paragraphs of the the carefully-written New York Times Story
But it is no longer just chatter in the ether. What started online almost two decades ago as a means of swapping child pornography has transformed in recent years into a more complex and diversified community that uses the virtual world to advance its interests in the real one.
Today, pedophiles go online to seek tips for getting near children -- at camps, through foster care, at community gatherings and at countless other events. They swap stories about day-to-day encounters with minors. And they make use of technology to help take their arguments to others, like sharing online a printable booklet to be distributed to children that extols the benefits of sex with adults.
The community's online infrastructure is surprisingly elaborate. There are Internet radio stations run by and for pedophiles; a putative charity that raised money to send Eastern European children to a camp where they were apparently visited by pedophiles; and an online jewelry company that markets pendants proclaiming the wearer as being sexually attracted to children, allowing anyone in the know to recognize them.
Any crime involving more than one person begins with "chatting" of one kind or another, and yes, "horror" is the right word for men telling each other exactly how to accomplish intercourse with a seven- or eight-year-old girl.
The article that you describe as sensationalistic was called "world-class journalism" by Alex Jones, the director of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. This quotation is from the link I provided in my first post. The NYT article requires registration to read and may soon cost money, but slashdot readers who read it may decide for themselves whether its contents are merely sensationalistic.
What I meant by "ten-year prison sentences" was that simply that the threat of punishment deters crime. I do not propose that these sentences be handed out without due process. But I do think that a person convicted of knowingly hosting a private, secret website that allows people to plan and carry out crimes against children should go to prison. Under our system, such a conviction would not be easy to obtain, nor should it be.
I tried to distinguish between protected free speech, such as a letter to the editor of a newspaper or a website posting defending the right to read and distribute child pornography--on the one hand--and conspiratorial use of the mail, telephone service, or Internet to carry out a crime, on the other. Some war protesters once blew their noses into an American flag in front of a marine recruiter in an attempt to provoke him--a protected, if disgusting, act of free expression. Had they met in secret to make explicit plans to blow up the recruiting office and took steps to carry these plans out--that would not be protected speech.
You should not have construed what I wrote to suggest that I want to abandon the Bill of Rights. I explicitly said otherwise. I do not believe we need to "balance" our rights against the need to fight crime, but I do believe we need to fight crime. Many kiddie porn laws are probably unconstitutional, as you suggest. For example, it would probably be possible to ban Nabokov's Lolita under some of them on the grounds that the author may seem to be "approving" of underage sex. On the other hand, we can strengthen laws to stop people like this currently over-publicized creep from Thailand (trebly a creep for confessing to a crime he would have liked to have committed but probably didn't) from lurking around Internet back alleys exchanging information about child care centers that hire men without background checks.
The founding fathers had good reason to fear the government and fear the police. And yet, they needed government, and they needed police, as do we. The Times story shows why the Internet needs better governing and better policing.
...but I'm not sure his server is.
y Id=5069301
I believe that public sites, like slashdot, are protected by the first amendment.
I believe that a personal hard drive is protected against unreasonable searches by the fourth amendment.
But private and semi-private uses of the Internet, which are used to facilitate a great many other crimes and conspiracies than crimes against children, belong in a somewhat different category. Consider, for example, the difference between ordering a product with a credit card over the telephone and ordering a product with a credit card over the Internet. In one case, a single credit card number is at risk; in the other, tens of thousands are at risk.
One poster said that sex crimes against children are not especially serious, but if four year olds could type, I'm not sure they would agree. The NYT recently published a chilling study of Internet usage by pedophiles who did much worse than simply store dirty pictures on their hard drives. And while I agree that this is an especially emotion-laden issue, the successful use of the Internet by any group of criminals to further crime should be of concern to all.
If crime in the U.S. reaches the level it has in the former Soviet Union, there will be no Bill of Rights left to protect. When it comes to kicking your door in, gangsters can be as bad as policemen.
The first step should be an increase in legal remedies and penalties for misuse of the Internet. A ten-year prison sentence for knowingly abetting a felony on the Internet could help, just as the simple steps of putting posters of criminals on Post Office walls and threatening kidnappers with the death penalty both did some good.
This is a constitutional minefield, but we need to protect not only the Bill of Rights but also our most vulnerable, youngest, and most helpless citizens. Raping a child is no laughing matter, and whether the rapist is a criminal or a mental patient (he is both), such a rapist needs to be captured and locked away forever, not necessarily in a hell-hole, but some place with a lock on the door and no kids in reach.
Here's an NPR audio clip on the NY Times story:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
Words matter as much as bandwidth; this too was a publicity stunt:
THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
But read to freezing volunteers on the banks of an ice-cold river, on the eve of the first victory in the American revolution, these words mattered as much as technology, as much as bullets and powder.
For example I ask if you believe that virtually everyone in America has a cell phone? CBS reports that 43% do not--while neglected pay phones vanish from the hands of people who need them most.
The measure of our civilization is our treatment of the poor, the weak, and the friendless. Technology without conscience is a rusting bucket of scrap iron.
Shame on you and others for mocking the goals of this idealistic project.
Butt-headed art critics.
You shouldn't ever plug in a computer if you can't take a joke.
If someone is rude to me, I can reply, probably with overwhelming force. I am, after all, a f**king English major. What I can't do is understand the inner recesses of technology. So I keep asking questions until I get an answer that helps.
I would rather endure the rudeness and inarticulate grunting of engineers who actually know something than the insincere smiles of marketing pukes who know only that they want my money.
Like you, if someone asks me about Shakespeare, I usually suggest that he or she read one of the plays first.
Numerous reasons have been suggested for the rudeness described in the article. I think the most likely one is that Linux dude is worried about his bills. He could probably be making a lot more money installing Windows servers that don't work for guys like me who don't know any better.
Because the Web has so many articles, it is easy to imagine that they represent nearly everything that has been written on a subject. However, the first 30 search results often merely repeat, sometimes erroneously, the same thing. Wikipedia is only one example. Try searching for the lyrics of a popular song. If someone has made a mistake, it is replicated so much that you start singing it that way in your shower. On almost any given subject, especially in the humanities or social sciences, the difference between what is available on the Internet and what is available in a library is astounding. A "Google Books" search provides some insight into this problem, which is caused by the proprietary nature of much "content," keeping it off the Web.
Steve Jobs is not a team player. If the Pixar deal was just to trade unknown for classy stock, why take the board seat?
What's in it for Apple?
1. Credibility and market share.. Disney is one of 30 Dow Jones Industrial Average components. Apple, despite its impressive successes, is still a bit of a laughing stock in some quarters, with a large "They'll never make it" reputation that has endured for decades and will die only with greybeards who like to say it.
2. Massive, elaborate, hard-to-duplicate co-marketing relationships. These will shove the Apple brand (or are at least its products) into places they've never been. There have been many jokes about "Mickey Mouse technology" on this board--some of them quite clever--but do you doubt that a Disney-branded iPod or even iMac would light up the Christmas trees during the big selling season? Screw the low-margin corporate computer market; sell to the people.
3. A doubled advertisng budget. Apple needs brute-force TV dollars to keep the iPod share and increase the sales of Macs. With "Intel inside," the new Disney computer (perhaps running Windows) could make one helluva splash.
4. Four hundred new store locations worldwide. A majority of Apple sales come through its stores, and the value is $1 billion+. Granted, the Disney stores are smaller, and it would be difficult to hire that many "geniuses" quickly, but how much of genius do you have to be to sell iPods?
5. A new outlet for Apple's creative engineering department. Despite all the heavy breathing about OS X, it is like all "innovations" on the moribund PC, more of the same shit on a different day. Faster, smaller, cheaper, better. Yawn. Disney, in its early days, had "imagineers," and was one of the most innovative companies in the world. Apple could breathe life into imagineering and its own engineering resources.
What's in it for Disney?
1. Profits. For a public company, they're a beautiful thing.
2. A superstar quarterback at CEO. They need somebody to slash expenses and start anew.
3. A technology infusion into special effects, both for movies and theme parks
What do I know? Like everyone else, Bupkis. But I gotta believe it could happen.
I think it ought to illegal to refuse to ship via USPS. At the very least, it should be illegal to make me fill out a long-assed order form only to find at the end that the company is too ornery to ship to a PO Box. Buy a stamp, dude. How tough could it be?
Yes, I saw that too, as well as examples from Henry Fielding and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Bums like that.
..and I'm not sure they pay to dig the bullet out. I wouldn't worry about your cockamamie paint job.