Some of the research out there is starting to show that consuming pornography over time changes the reward centers in our brains and impacts our ability to have relationships with the opposite sex. Some of it even suggests that over time there is a need for kinkier pornography because the normal stuff no longer has as much of a dopamine release as it once did. This applies to both men and women, and not just with visual pornography (reading erotica can be an issue as well). I'm not trying to make a case for a blanket pornography ban, but those who imply that consuming explicit media "harms no one" are starting to slowly find themselves on the losing side of the science.
You have a significantly higher draw among women than Samsung does. You better make your forthcoming TV sets ultra secure if they go this route and have an update process that is ridiculously simple and effective. Otherwise God help you if this happens with your products.
I'm sick of the people who defend him on the basis of his contributions by way of GNU as though that somehow mitigates the harm he does from his soap box. Instead of doing something like taking the bull by the horns and making a slick Android distro that embodies his values AND is friendly to non-geeks, he froths at the mouth at any company or group that makes moves which earn them some money and make things easier for non-technical users.
Contribute to Haiku, fork Android, become benevolent dictator of OpenWebOS. Actually do something that matters today.
The ugly reality is that our society has shifted toward one focused on inward spending and care, not outward focus and exploration. This was inevitable with the radical demographics change that has happened in the last 15 years as the Baby Boomers, who are something like 1:1.5 with Generation X and Millennial put together got to the point where they need to start retiring. Aging societies become inward focused, with the focus being on domestic spending, not "young activities" like exploring new frontiers at tax payers expenses.
An elderly relative of mine was complaining about the cost overruns on the F35, and I pointed out to them that the whole federal R&D budget across all departments was likely less than the $112B in Medicare fraud that the OIG for Medicare uncovered about six months to a year ago. Many of those overruns aren't even "fraud" but rather are caused by things like different government "stakeholders" coming in at the 11th hour to add new requirements on projects (IIRC, the F35 was almost done, and the USMC nearly killed it by demanding that they get their VTOL piece come hell or high water even though it was ready for NATO naval forces).
It was disheartening for them to hear the plain and simple truth: we are an aging society that is cannibalizing its stored wealth to lavish retirement and health care benefits on the older citizens. It is absolutely true that we don't have money anymore for foreign wars and big military adventures. It's also true that at present budget projections we won't have a budget for NASA, the NSF, federal law enforcement, the US highway system, education subsidies and anything else that doesn't revolve around pure entitlement spending for the massive waves of retirees hitting and about to hit the system.
Funny how no one right-thinking human being even seriously contemplates a massive, intrusive regulatory apparatus for fertilizer even though it did a heck of a job in the hands of Timothy McVeigh. It's also like common sense sometimes prevails...
Are you going to ban hex edditors or text edditors?
No.
What about file systems that don't support metadata like fat?
How is that relevant to file formats which have their own metadata built into them?
Or what about when people don't like your naming/notation conventions will that be banned to?
No. It's about conveying basic ownership information, but you already knew that...
How will they deal with faulty programs like that will they be liable for removal of metadata?
iTunes removes metadata on your personal files. Facebook is a completely different case. Anyone who puts two brain cells into it can see a fundamental difference in liability between software meant to organize a personal collection and software meant to facilitate public consumption of media. It would not be hard to pass a law requiring the preservation of copyright ownership metadata in file formats which support that metadata in software intended to be used for the public dissemination of media.
The major ISPs have no desire to actually "spy on you." The worst they may do is run analytics on you to target advertising at you. Unlike with government, there are actually laws protecting you from some of this anyway. For example, if your ISP overrides my ads on my site or adds them, I can sue them for creating a derivative work.
At least we get to vote on the government
And when you lose the vote or the issue you want to vote on is never brought up for a vote, you don't get to opt out the way you do with a relationship with a corporation. So yea, it's like totally the same....
They cry about their precious "Net Neutrality" even as this bill unconditionally outlaws...
1) Data retention mandates. 2) New surveillance powers, claims, etc. 3) Any new intelligence community moves into further "securing the net" (think about that recent controversy over the NSA secretly claiming to "invade private networks") 4) New powers to seize domain names or any thing else Hollywood wants
Yeah, what a trade off. Give me some of that DoJDHSDoD Internet love any day so long as Verizon has to be 100% "fair and neutral..."
Yeah so when the German government decides to go postal on Google for not censoring Nazi-related searches on Google.de, which may or may not be hosted from US territory, I'm sure you'll be more than fine with Google having to bend to the will of Germany, right? Or how about China...? Ohhhh and what about when Pakistan decides to charge YouTube executives with blasphemy for being "incorrigible" about allowing blasphemous videos on YouTube?
It's rigged against you. Everything is. In Britain (at least England & Wales) a cop has never been found guilty of illegally killing someone during the course of their job. So, if you want a license to kill, just join an English police force. But in most other places (including the USA and Australia), cops also literally get away with murder.
In almost every jurisdiction in the US, the police were bound in their arrest and use of force powers to what the legislature authorized. Anything outside of that was kidnapping and/or illegal use of force up to murder. Citizens could lawfully shoot dead a cop who came onto their property, broke the 4th amendment and then began to wave their firearm at the homeowner who ordered them off their property.
But then the same forces that have been trying to eradicate private firearm ownership in the anglosphere decided that it would be better to have private citizens have **only** the theoretical protection of the courts than any right to use force to defend themselves from criminal acts by the police. Those of us who aren't stupid know that this invariably means that the citizen will be defending themselves from trumped up charges, not getting the cop held responsible.
Children are not fully-formed adults, we can't treat them as such. They do not have full control over their lives as adults do. If you believe that children should be treated as adults than whatever age you believe that begins they should be allowed to drink, smoke, gamble and vote.
That they are not fully-formed adults is a red herring because no one wakes up one day a mature, responsible adult. As minors grow, they become steadily more capable of certain things and being held accountable for them. Furthermore, you are treating several different topics as though they require the same level of maturity to handle properly. It is complete and utter bullshit to say that if we can expect a 14 year old to obey rules and laws about assault and battery at the same level as a legal adult that we can expect them to be able to vote or drink alcohol without supervision because there are serious differences of kind between obeying rules and laws on the use of force, drinking and voting.
Now, do you think that the upheaval of the aristocracy was sugar cookies and lemonade for the economy of France? What about all the merchants employed by the Aristocracy? How evil of those revolutionaries to do such a thing to the Aristocracy because it affected merchants!
And yet you leave out the mass killings that presaged the democides of the 20th century that came from these proto-leftists. Can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, amiright? (And ironically, the man who coined that phrase was one of the mass-murderers who lead the Reign of Terror)
What? The ENTIRE NATION OF PAKISTAN took a day of prayers in response to this episode. There were protests against it across Pakistan. Prayer leaders condemned the attacks. Schools were closed. Rallies against the attacks were held in all the major cities. I don't know how you missed that.
And several thousand innocent people died in the previous ones mentioned. However, because they were almost down to a man and woman "infidels," they didn't garner anywhere near the sympathy this one shooting got. A Muslim girl was attacked by a Muslim extremist. That is why they could muster a normal level of outrage over this.
IFF what has been said about peaceful Muslims and Islam being a peaceful religion were actually true, there would be swift and brutal action taken against the violent attacks on religious minorities in Muslim lands, the funding of terrorism, etc. Muslim jurists would be teaching that "it is the duty of all good Muslims to offer no peace, no sanctuary, no protection to those who kill innocents in the name of Islam."
Terrorism is not just people who kill human bodies, but who kill human feelings as well
Then you will be more than happy to set the example by going back to your ancestral homelands to deal with all of the imams who preach hate and violence.
And to my fellow Americans, if you make any attempt to form a moral equivocation between what they preach about religious minorities (terms that are lifted often literally out of Nazi propaganda) and preaching against gay marriage and other weak sauce like that, then you are rightly regarded as a fellow traveler with these censorious cretins by every liberty-loving American.
Second, there is only one country in the world that has, throughout its history, used its military power and political influence consistently to try to export its ideas of morality and law to the world, and it ain't no abode of Muslin desperation, it is the U-S-of-A.
Right, because every empire from Egypt, to Greece, Rome, Carthage, Persia, China, Japan, the Aztecs and Mayans, Britain, the various Caliphates, the Ottoman Empire and the Soviet Union had no consistent history of aggressive expansion that pushed their ideas, laws and morality on others. Truly, the United States' efforts to remake the world in its image are just unprecedented. Look Solomon, there is something new under the sun after all!...
Moreover, the US rationale for this was always the perception of the superior morality of the American way, not some logical, scientific argument.
And your rationale for anything you said is as close to the reality of human history as saying that dinosaurs died out because the Og the Caveman and his Merry Men rode around on their flying unicorns and gunned them down for sport.
That online forums, blogs, etc. tend to attract that percentage of the population online that is capable of behaving like this. I bet if you met a lot of the people who behave rudely online, their "offline" personas are simply a change of degree from how they behave online. I think it's far more likely that the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is not only true, but that fuckwads aren't really normal, decent people in their daily lives and they tend to pool together online.
Now the PM needs to follow up by tasking their equivalent of the US Attorney General to investigate and prosecute. If that equivalent is implicated, the PM needs to appoint a special prosecutor to carry out the investigation and file charges where appropriate. As a conservative American, I gladly include our representatives to New Zealand in that mix if legally possible and they conspired to break the laws (meaning were briefed and involved in the strategy for taking down Dotcom). If the roles were reversed, I'd want to see New Zealand's people taken away in dark SUVs by G-Men on charge of violating civil liberties under color of authority (a felony in the US).
Was keep the old Windows 7 desktop and make switching to Metro seamless. OS X can gracefully switch to full screen apps. Why can't Windows 8 just gracefully slide in a Metro app into full screen mode?
I'll tell you why. Because Microsoft is like a jack booted thug who sees Steve Jobs compelling people to accept a new UI and completely misses the Steve Jobs-era quality control and salesmanship for the authority he has in the eyes of the customer. Therefore they think "if Steve Jobs can make them like it, anyone with some type of authority can compel change."
News flash, Microsoft. Metro will fail on the desktop until you realize that Metro can only work on the desktop app as a part of the desktop that takes over the whole screen.
With some products like PostgreSQL, they can go to the enterprise fork vendor and put in the contract that government-made features will be submitted back. Therefore they can get the best of both worlds. If EnterpriseDB truly screwed them over, hopefully all of their patches would be good enough to make it into PostgreSQL proper. That's a compelling carrot/stick that Microsoft and Oracle don't have.
One of the recurring themes that keeps popping up in blog posts on prominent civil libertarians' blogs is that the judges rarely, if ever, call out blatant bullshit such as "bite mark analysis" or sanction prosecutors for withholding evidence. We need reforms that let judges be swiftly fired in some of these cases.
IFF the extent of it is to scan the wireless broadcast, not join the network and access the internet, their private network, files, printer(s), etc. then I think this is an amazing case of common sense. Joining their network and using the internet or anything similar to that is akin to going into someone's house and sleeping on their couch while they're not home. Sure, "you may not be harming them" and they're "not using it right now" but that's not relevant to whether you can jump in and use their resources.
Wireless broadcasts without encryption, however, are akin to a neighbor who yells loud enough for everyone to know their family's business. I don't see any difference between my neighbors having a heated conversation that I can hear inside my house and them sending unencrypted packets into my house. The criminality should only come in if and when they are used maliciously.
Fark apparently got one to back down by threatening to pierce the corporate veil and go after the executives directly as individuals. How about start ups bring their cases forward and crowd source their defenses with a promise that they will pierce the corporate veil and directly attack the trolls' executives and their families? The only way to legally stop this short of legal reform is to make it clear to the trolls that their wives/husbands and kids will be put into abject poverty.
And depending on how frivolous, I'd even add crowdsourcing an assault on the bar licensing of the troll's lawyers and a campaign to run their law firm's name into the ground.
1. They're just lying. This is the FBI, after all. The group whose IG basically called their field agents a bunch of incorrigible criminals when it came to obeying the law on when and how to use National Security Letters from 2006 onward.
2. This was done by a few agents and their management and the FBI leadership and public relations genuinely had no idea that some of their people were soliciting and/or receiving (solicited or not) such information. If this be the case, I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI throws this agent under the bus and runs it over him several times for a federal offense or two related to dragneting. It's not that they'd be genuinely upset by him getting this data, so much as the FBI does not suffer employees who make it look bad for any reason (I have relatives who used to be federal law enforcement, and they used to refer to the FBI as publicity whores).
in the name of The Children, I think it's about time we grab all of the activists and other paranoiacs who've created the hysteria about the dangers to children and throw them into a Soviet-style labor camp and surround it with two miles of landmines. As an American, I volunteer Death Valley or some place in northern Alaska. If you're going to gut civil liberties like that, you have no right to complain when someone does it to you.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the research out there is starting to show that consuming pornography over time changes the reward centers in our brains and impacts our ability to have relationships with the opposite sex. Some of it even suggests that over time there is a need for kinkier pornography because the normal stuff no longer has as much of a dopamine release as it once did. This applies to both men and women, and not just with visual pornography (reading erotica can be an issue as well). I'm not trying to make a case for a blanket pornography ban, but those who imply that consuming explicit media "harms no one" are starting to slowly find themselves on the losing side of the science.
You have a significantly higher draw among women than Samsung does. You better make your forthcoming TV sets ultra secure if they go this route and have an update process that is ridiculously simple and effective. Otherwise God help you if this happens with your products.
I'm sick of the people who defend him on the basis of his contributions by way of GNU as though that somehow mitigates the harm he does from his soap box. Instead of doing something like taking the bull by the horns and making a slick Android distro that embodies his values AND is friendly to non-geeks, he froths at the mouth at any company or group that makes moves which earn them some money and make things easier for non-technical users.
Contribute to Haiku, fork Android, become benevolent dictator of OpenWebOS. Actually do something that matters today.
The ugly reality is that our society has shifted toward one focused on inward spending and care, not outward focus and exploration. This was inevitable with the radical demographics change that has happened in the last 15 years as the Baby Boomers, who are something like 1:1.5 with Generation X and Millennial put together got to the point where they need to start retiring. Aging societies become inward focused, with the focus being on domestic spending, not "young activities" like exploring new frontiers at tax payers expenses.
An elderly relative of mine was complaining about the cost overruns on the F35, and I pointed out to them that the whole federal R&D budget across all departments was likely less than the $112B in Medicare fraud that the OIG for Medicare uncovered about six months to a year ago. Many of those overruns aren't even "fraud" but rather are caused by things like different government "stakeholders" coming in at the 11th hour to add new requirements on projects (IIRC, the F35 was almost done, and the USMC nearly killed it by demanding that they get their VTOL piece come hell or high water even though it was ready for NATO naval forces).
It was disheartening for them to hear the plain and simple truth: we are an aging society that is cannibalizing its stored wealth to lavish retirement and health care benefits on the older citizens. It is absolutely true that we don't have money anymore for foreign wars and big military adventures. It's also true that at present budget projections we won't have a budget for NASA, the NSF, federal law enforcement, the US highway system, education subsidies and anything else that doesn't revolve around pure entitlement spending for the massive waves of retirees hitting and about to hit the system.
Funny how no one right-thinking human being even seriously contemplates a massive, intrusive regulatory apparatus for fertilizer even though it did a heck of a job in the hands of Timothy McVeigh. It's also like common sense sometimes prevails...
No.
How is that relevant to file formats which have their own metadata built into them?
No. It's about conveying basic ownership information, but you already knew that...
iTunes removes metadata on your personal files. Facebook is a completely different case. Anyone who puts two brain cells into it can see a fundamental difference in liability between software meant to organize a personal collection and software meant to facilitate public consumption of media. It would not be hard to pass a law requiring the preservation of copyright ownership metadata in file formats which support that metadata in software intended to be used for the public dissemination of media.
The major ISPs have no desire to actually "spy on you." The worst they may do is run analytics on you to target advertising at you. Unlike with government, there are actually laws protecting you from some of this anyway. For example, if your ISP overrides my ads on my site or adds them, I can sue them for creating a derivative work.
And when you lose the vote or the issue you want to vote on is never brought up for a vote, you don't get to opt out the way you do with a relationship with a corporation. So yea, it's like totally the same....
They cry about their precious "Net Neutrality" even as this bill unconditionally outlaws...
1) Data retention mandates.
2) New surveillance powers, claims, etc.
3) Any new intelligence community moves into further "securing the net" (think about that recent controversy over the NSA secretly claiming to "invade private networks")
4) New powers to seize domain names or any thing else Hollywood wants
Yeah, what a trade off. Give me some of that DoJDHSDoD Internet love any day so long as Verizon has to be 100% "fair and neutral..."
Yeah so when the German government decides to go postal on Google for not censoring Nazi-related searches on Google.de, which may or may not be hosted from US territory, I'm sure you'll be more than fine with Google having to bend to the will of Germany, right? Or how about China...? Ohhhh and what about when Pakistan decides to charge YouTube executives with blasphemy for being "incorrigible" about allowing blasphemous videos on YouTube?
In almost every jurisdiction in the US, the police were bound in their arrest and use of force powers to what the legislature authorized. Anything outside of that was kidnapping and/or illegal use of force up to murder. Citizens could lawfully shoot dead a cop who came onto their property, broke the 4th amendment and then began to wave their firearm at the homeowner who ordered them off their property.
But then the same forces that have been trying to eradicate private firearm ownership in the anglosphere decided that it would be better to have private citizens have **only** the theoretical protection of the courts than any right to use force to defend themselves from criminal acts by the police. Those of us who aren't stupid know that this invariably means that the citizen will be defending themselves from trumped up charges, not getting the cop held responsible.
1. New media sites that were born and bred online will fill in most of the gap.
2. Bloggers who quote the MSM will fill in the rest and be the main venue by which these papers even get back into Google in some capacity.
That they are not fully-formed adults is a red herring because no one wakes up one day a mature, responsible adult. As minors grow, they become steadily more capable of certain things and being held accountable for them. Furthermore, you are treating several different topics as though they require the same level of maturity to handle properly. It is complete and utter bullshit to say that if we can expect a 14 year old to obey rules and laws about assault and battery at the same level as a legal adult that we can expect them to be able to vote or drink alcohol without supervision because there are serious differences of kind between obeying rules and laws on the use of force, drinking and voting.
And yet you leave out the mass killings that presaged the democides of the 20th century that came from these proto-leftists. Can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, amiright? (And ironically, the man who coined that phrase was one of the mass-murderers who lead the Reign of Terror)
And several thousand innocent people died in the previous ones mentioned. However, because they were almost down to a man and woman "infidels," they didn't garner anywhere near the sympathy this one shooting got. A Muslim girl was attacked by a Muslim extremist. That is why they could muster a normal level of outrage over this.
IFF what has been said about peaceful Muslims and Islam being a peaceful religion were actually true, there would be swift and brutal action taken against the violent attacks on religious minorities in Muslim lands, the funding of terrorism, etc. Muslim jurists would be teaching that "it is the duty of all good Muslims to offer no peace, no sanctuary, no protection to those who kill innocents in the name of Islam."
Then you will be more than happy to set the example by going back to your ancestral homelands to deal with all of the imams who preach hate and violence.
And to my fellow Americans, if you make any attempt to form a moral equivocation between what they preach about religious minorities (terms that are lifted often literally out of Nazi propaganda) and preaching against gay marriage and other weak sauce like that, then you are rightly regarded as a fellow traveler with these censorious cretins by every liberty-loving American.
Right, because every empire from Egypt, to Greece, Rome, Carthage, Persia, China, Japan, the Aztecs and Mayans, Britain, the various Caliphates, the Ottoman Empire and the Soviet Union had no consistent history of aggressive expansion that pushed their ideas, laws and morality on others. Truly, the United States' efforts to remake the world in its image are just unprecedented. Look Solomon, there is something new under the sun after all!...
And your rationale for anything you said is as close to the reality of human history as saying that dinosaurs died out because the Og the Caveman and his Merry Men rode around on their flying unicorns and gunned them down for sport.
That online forums, blogs, etc. tend to attract that percentage of the population online that is capable of behaving like this. I bet if you met a lot of the people who behave rudely online, their "offline" personas are simply a change of degree from how they behave online. I think it's far more likely that the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is not only true, but that fuckwads aren't really normal, decent people in their daily lives and they tend to pool together online.
Now the PM needs to follow up by tasking their equivalent of the US Attorney General to investigate and prosecute. If that equivalent is implicated, the PM needs to appoint a special prosecutor to carry out the investigation and file charges where appropriate. As a conservative American, I gladly include our representatives to New Zealand in that mix if legally possible and they conspired to break the laws (meaning were briefed and involved in the strategy for taking down Dotcom). If the roles were reversed, I'd want to see New Zealand's people taken away in dark SUVs by G-Men on charge of violating civil liberties under color of authority (a felony in the US).
Was keep the old Windows 7 desktop and make switching to Metro seamless. OS X can gracefully switch to full screen apps. Why can't Windows 8 just gracefully slide in a Metro app into full screen mode?
I'll tell you why. Because Microsoft is like a jack booted thug who sees Steve Jobs compelling people to accept a new UI and completely misses the Steve Jobs-era quality control and salesmanship for the authority he has in the eyes of the customer. Therefore they think "if Steve Jobs can make them like it, anyone with some type of authority can compel change."
News flash, Microsoft. Metro will fail on the desktop until you realize that Metro can only work on the desktop app as a part of the desktop that takes over the whole screen.
With some products like PostgreSQL, they can go to the enterprise fork vendor and put in the contract that government-made features will be submitted back. Therefore they can get the best of both worlds. If EnterpriseDB truly screwed them over, hopefully all of their patches would be good enough to make it into PostgreSQL proper. That's a compelling carrot/stick that Microsoft and Oracle don't have.
One of the recurring themes that keeps popping up in blog posts on prominent civil libertarians' blogs is that the judges rarely, if ever, call out blatant bullshit such as "bite mark analysis" or sanction prosecutors for withholding evidence. We need reforms that let judges be swiftly fired in some of these cases.
IFF the extent of it is to scan the wireless broadcast, not join the network and access the internet, their private network, files, printer(s), etc. then I think this is an amazing case of common sense. Joining their network and using the internet or anything similar to that is akin to going into someone's house and sleeping on their couch while they're not home. Sure, "you may not be harming them" and they're "not using it right now" but that's not relevant to whether you can jump in and use their resources.
Wireless broadcasts without encryption, however, are akin to a neighbor who yells loud enough for everyone to know their family's business. I don't see any difference between my neighbors having a heated conversation that I can hear inside my house and them sending unencrypted packets into my house. The criminality should only come in if and when they are used maliciously.
Fark apparently got one to back down by threatening to pierce the corporate veil and go after the executives directly as individuals. How about start ups bring their cases forward and crowd source their defenses with a promise that they will pierce the corporate veil and directly attack the trolls' executives and their families? The only way to legally stop this short of legal reform is to make it clear to the trolls that their wives/husbands and kids will be put into abject poverty.
And depending on how frivolous, I'd even add crowdsourcing an assault on the bar licensing of the troll's lawyers and a campaign to run their law firm's name into the ground.
1. They're just lying. This is the FBI, after all. The group whose IG basically called their field agents a bunch of incorrigible criminals when it came to obeying the law on when and how to use National Security Letters from 2006 onward.
2. This was done by a few agents and their management and the FBI leadership and public relations genuinely had no idea that some of their people were soliciting and/or receiving (solicited or not) such information. If this be the case, I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI throws this agent under the bus and runs it over him several times for a federal offense or two related to dragneting. It's not that they'd be genuinely upset by him getting this data, so much as the FBI does not suffer employees who make it look bad for any reason (I have relatives who used to be federal law enforcement, and they used to refer to the FBI as publicity whores).
in the name of The Children, I think it's about time we grab all of the activists and other paranoiacs who've created the hysteria about the dangers to children and throw them into a Soviet-style labor camp and surround it with two miles of landmines. As an American, I volunteer Death Valley or some place in northern Alaska. If you're going to gut civil liberties like that, you have no right to complain when someone does it to you.