Or perhaps a better example of how as soon as some dick decided to write down a bunch of words and call his spelling "proper". Spoken language came first, its still the most common usage case. Had it been spoken, it would have been perfect. You read it fine, you got the meaning, it served its purpose.
Kind of like Grammar nazi's. Soon as one person studies the language and writes down an incomplete set of how people in a few dialects of the language talk, someone else starts using it as a textbook on how to speak "properly".
Why do so many people seem to have a hard on for "rules" even when they just aren't that important.
I think I agree with your idea, but not quite with how you express it.
Its not so much violence per se as coercion. If you have sex with me because I put a gun to your head, thats violent rape. Yes, nobody is going to disagree there. I could see some disagreement as to whether drugging is violence... but I don't think its a far stretch to say it falls into the category.
However, what if its more like: "Strip naked and bend over so I can have sex with you" (yes, hot dialog I know) "No" "It would really suck if the school board found out your nephew didn't live with you and he had to go back to that inner city school where he pissed off those gang bangers"
Is it blackmail? yes it is. However, its not really a violent act. Hell, in many places its a threat to expose "wrongdoing". Its also playing on a persons emotions.... but can we say its really that much better than violence?
Or how about... a person who drugged themselves? Drunk girl is stumbling down the street alone, falls over passed out cold at someones feet. He walks her to more private space, removes her clothes, has sex with her. Its certainly rape, but, its not really violence by any definition that I am aware of.
Of course... is violence violence if it is consensual? What about conensual but violent sex?
Overall I think its clear that its not so much about violence but about non-consent either through incapacity or coercion. Violence is merely a means to effect either incpacity or coercion, and thus to get what the rapist wants without the other persons consent. Does it really matter if that non-consent is attained via a direct threat of violence, its application, or some other means?
On the other hand... a person who was convicted and is now free has, at least in theory, paid their debt. I don't see why restrictions should persist after the sentance has been served. If such a restriction is warrented as ongoing, I think it makes sense for that to have to be part of said sentance.
But hey, lawmakers have a lot on their plates and tend to prefer grandstanding to taking the time and energy to write good law. While a disciplined programmer knows to throw some edge cases through their routine and make sure it doesn't break... lawmakers have no such discipline. Thats why we end up with situations like paddleboro; where a number of people were arrested for, essentially, domestic abuse because they were at a sex party spanking their partners.
Excuse my while my head stops spinning... let me get this straight:
GP: Argues that when rape can mean consensual sex between a 15 and 20 year old, you can't say rape is always violent You: Rape is violent always. Of course, I don't think statutory rape should be called rape.
um.... so... essentially.... you disagreed by agreeing?
> Thus, an illustration of that which is plainly demonstrable diverging from that which is is legally > demonstrable. Rightly so however, the ends of finding definitive evidence ought never justify the means of > beating (or water boarding) someone for the information.
I thought understanding what someone else said was against/. policy?
But thank you, yes, thats a good way to put it "Plainly demonstrable vs legally demonstrable"
Then again... if someone is willing to beat a "confession" out of someone, despite how illegal that is... then you could say that not only can the confession not be trusted, but even the fact that his confession contained otherwise occluded details can be called into suspect; All we have to do is consider the case where the offending questioner planted the murder weapon and then forced him to add that detail into his confession.
Its kind of like the anti-gun-control argument: If the aim is to stop criminals, whats to say they wont break the gun control laws too?
Though... still the point remains. You can have facts that are plainly demonstrable but can't be proven under the rules of evidence in court. Hence the plaurality of shades of meaning on the word "guilt"
You do have a real point there. Look at Tracy Lords. She lied about her age and was in a whole series of hardcore movies... then turned 18, revealed her real age, and did one more movie. You almost have to wonder if it was planned that way!
Of course, when you are talking images on the net, there is always the problem of well... what is what? How often is there even exif data? Most are not named in any identifiable way. Unless the model in the photo is known from something else, how would you know who she is?
But that goes both ways. If you can't identify the girl and the year it was taken, you can't show her age one way or the other unless shes REALLY young. Even then, I have seen legitimate 25 year olds that don't look a day over 14.
Then the fatty diet that people are raised on these days, well, any biologist can tell you that a human female becomes fertile as soon as her body develops enough body fat. Thats increasingly become younger and younger (good work parents, raising your kids on McDonalds!) which skews age determination by erasing some of the clues as to how mature they are.
I do wonder if this actually protects them from pedofiles who, by definition, are turned on by pre-pubecents. Of course, thats kind of like protecting yourself from the cold by jumping on a frying pan, since theres a lot less pedofiles than guys attracted to "mature" girls (I obviously mean physically mature)
I think this is a general problem I have with the laws, they try to do the right thing. I mean, I don't WANT child pornographers and their ilk abusing kids. However, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Its fine to say we need rules but, its so hard to make rules that are truely fair. That is, rules that stop bad behaviour without punishing people who, really, were not bad and just acting in a perfectly reasonable manner.
Well, then there is the question of why. An Elite, long time editor, knows how to write in the encyclopedic style, picks and chooses his edits etc. A "onsie" could be anyone, and probably often is. Aside from it being plastered all over the page, how do you know a onesie even read up on the style and has any clue?
I think the reality is, its not that Wikipedia is running out of community... its running out of changes that the average person can make. There are many areas where I know quite a bit more than the average person, they are my specialties. Seldom do I even find that I have anything to add in these areas, never mind elsewhere.
Combine that with a standard of all statements being backed up by outside sources etc... and its hard. Essentially, a lot of whats appropriate for an encyclopedic edition, on just about any topic that you can think of, is already there.... and to top it off, even if it isn't, the chances that J Random Netuser has the chops to edit it is slim. Otherwise, it would have a high probability of being done already.
So far I have made all of one or two edits myself. What did I do? Well... I reworded a redundant statement because it didn't flow right. oooh. Then I commented on a few stylistic points in a discussion node....oooh.
Frankly, I think that if you actually read and understand the concept of an encyclopedia, then you are probably far ahead of half the "onsies" and probably have a fair chance of not having your edit removed.
Actually thats true. In fact, I am one of those weirdos who decided he didn't like downloading music back when napster was new... not for any moral reason... just that the quality was so variable and I am a bit of a zealot about how my music is organized.
I also don't watch that many movies. However, I still have to imagine that a cat is a random input. A random input should cause downloads of various types of things based on the relative ratios of whats found online in general.
So essentially, thousands of pieces of child porn, would only make sense if it was interspersed amongst an absolute mess of other things, including hundreds of thousands or millions of pieces of adult porn.
There is another possibility. My lack of use of file downloading means I have missed out on the fact that the majority of files for download on the internet are actually child porn.
Since that being the case would tend to require that a substantial portion of the net, and thus the people using, are involved in child porn. If thats the case, then I am disgusted to be associated with you people.
man when you are 16 you make do with what you have. Its kinda like being a kid and watching the scrambled playboy channel because every once in a while, the screen isn't so messed up and you can see some titty.
Admittedly that was around the time someone did make a VGA card for the GS, but... I didn't even know about it until later, and I certainly couldn't afford it.
Believe me, if this had been something that happened within the past several years, I probably wouldn't have. However, I haven't used Usenet to download porn since I was 16 and on an Apple 2 GS. Given that I am over 30 now, and the only evidence that it ever happened is well... me telling a story about something that happened so many years ago.... while I was a minor myself.... well....
Lets just say, I am not terribly worried. Should it end up requiring me to dig out an OLD GS, and display some jpegs on it to show people exactly how horrendous the image quality was (would you like 640x200 in 4 shades of grey or 320x200 in 16?) then... I guess I could even do that. Actually, after 15 years, I am not even sure that it supported both video modes. (and yes, 320x200@256 was possible by a really funky assembly routine, but the JPEG software couldn't really support that since just drawing the screen that way took 90% of the CPU time just to push pallets ahead of the scan line... leaving precious little for JPEG decoding which already took forever at just a few shades of gray)
And of course, to top it all off, Its not like it said "kiddie porn" anywhere. For all I know, it was a very young looking 18 year old model. It wouldn't be the first time. However, I was convinced enough to be a bit sick to my stomach and delete it immediately.
Any DA wishing to use these statements against me is going to have a real fight on his hands, and I promise to bring public opinion to bear on that one. If anything, they should call me as an expert witness against this asshole:) I would happily state, unequivocally that there is no way a cat or other random event input downloaded that much kiddie porn from the internet. There just isn't that much out there that is publicly available. If there was, I am pretty sure I would have stumbled on more of it by now.
Of course, then reality sets in. The best refutation I can think of is the amounts. If the car downloaded thousands of kiddie porn images, then there should be lots of other kinds of images (perhaps 100s of thousands) along with them.
Now, I have downloaded a fair amount of porn myself since I was 16 and first got online (15 years now! wow...) anyway.... in that time, how many times, looking for porn or not, did I stumble on child porn.
The answer: Once. While on usenet and doing the old "download multiple messages and string them together" on my Apple 2 GS which took about 5 minutes to render a JPG in black and white online... well...
I built up a collection in those days... and one of those pictures it turned out was child porn (which wasn't evident until it was viewed on a more powerful machine with much better resolution, and in color years later)
So one, out of, several thousand images over 15 years, was child porn. It turned up on usenet.... which nobody really uses for porn anymore as far as I know.
I MIGHT believe this guy if a handful... 2 or 3 or something images were downloaded. I might even believe he did it himself accidentally. However.... this argument just doesn't fit the evidence.
The only other way it would make sense is if it was taken from the cache of a freenet node he was running. However, I would think a specific case like that would be mentioned in the article, and would not necessitate the "cat story" . -Steve
> Not at all. I'm saying that once a court has determined legal guilt that that is basically all we have to > go on
Not true. Lets take the case where Alice has committed a murder. An overzealous police officer crosses the line, gets really angry and beats her until she gives him details. He passes on the details, the body is found. Alice is provably guilty. She provided (under duress of course) information that only the killer could have had, and it was verified.
Of course, the judge rules that her confession is invalid, and all evidence aquired from it is "Fruit of a poison tree" and is all tossed out.
Legally speaking, Alice is aquitted, she walks away "Legally innocent" even though, its known (possibly widely, possibly not) that Alice is really guilty, but must be let go for various reasons that we can debate separately, but are fairly well established as needed for a fair system.
> Once the court has made their decision, that's that. If they're found not guilty then they're innocent in > every way that counts, and history has proven time and again what bad results come from people just > deciding outside of a trial that the accused "really is guilty, cuz I just know he did it".
I will not disagree here. In the situation outlined, Alice is innocent "in every way that counts". However, thats different from saying she didn't do it. Certainly people who know the facts of the case will not count her as a true innocent so much as one that was let go for just reasons.
If we are to attribute guilt or innocence solely to the legal definition, then you are right. However, there are many shades and types of guilt that go beyond the law. How about moral guilt or innocence? I know a person who is "seriously" dating two women that don't know about eachother, and both believe they have a monogamous relationship. I would say he is "guilty" of misleading them both (and have told him as much). I am aware of no law against what he is doing (he has married neither of them) but he *IS* guilty of a moral transgression, if not a legal one.
Then again, there are some who would say the same of a person who is married but screws around with their spouses permission. So this can hardly be said to be a totally objective measure, but, what makes a law so sacred? I never signed the constitution.
Why not Debian? Debian runs rings around Ubuntu performance-wise IME, and there's no real learning curve coming from Ubuntu.
I would tend to agree there, especially if the alternative is just CentOS. I mean, if you want to go full on RHEL with satellite server (not a cheap option), then you are getting something thats going to make manageing a large environment easier... (thats what my work uses)
However, if your not going to buy big support and tools... then debian is definitely the way I would go. but, I have always been biased towards debian.
Though a lot like the idea of being raped, especially women. Of course, the average female rape fantasy involves a man who is already her lover, so I have to wonder how many aren't so much real "rape fantasies" as just "rough sex" or "domination" fantasies. (in my mind, far more likely). However, it is a fairly common fantasy if surveys are to be believed.
Nor any evidence that it impairs driving. There was a great study done that concluded that all of the previous studies they could find were seriously flawed in that they either looked at crash statistics that didn't separate stoned drivers from drunk drivers, or they did functional impairment studies on people who don't smoke. Yes, great science.
Anyway, long study short, they found no significant impairment. Slightly decreased reaction times, but the test subjects adequetly adjusted by driving more cautiously. But...don't take my word for it, Actually... there have been a couple:
Or the actual study I read from: (I found it on the actual UK government site a few months back, can't find it now, I welcome the new link if its out there)
Actually, after seeing what 8 years of his reign did to the republican party, I wish I had voted for him!
I mean he really caused them a severe loss in stature. The real upside though, seems to be that the republicans sound like they are abandoning the crazy nutjob evangelical messages and letting the real conservatives actually try to push an agenda again. Thats such a breath of fresh air.
A real conservative is someone that can be reasoned with. This false-flag conservatism that has been pushed by the wingnuts out there always stuck in my craw. I may be no conservative, but, I agree way more with men like William F Buckley than any of the clowns in the Bush Gang.
I had always assumed that was the case. There has never been any evidence I have seen to believe that "organic" production produced far better food. Certainly some of the things that major food producers do with the "non-organic" foods do decrease overall quality, and that simply by avoiding these, organic foods are better... but better from a flavor and aesthetic perspective, its still the same basic fruits and vegetables.
Thats why meat is the only thing I buy from a "local organic" farm. It has nothing to do with thinking the food is better, even the whole growth hormone myth is relatively well debunked in terms of human effect. However, they are free range, and they treat their animals better. Local farm helps the local economy, overall, I would love to see more of it.
Do you seriously want to know or is that rhetorical? I think the answer is obvious, it is because the image in our mind of a "sex offender" is someone who is likely to steal a young child, rape and kill it, leaving its family torn and destroyed with grief.
Its a powerful image. An utterly bullshit image. However, its the image that people have in their mind when they froth as they mark their disdain for sex offenders.
Its also a bullshit image, when the majority of child abuse is done by family members. Bullshit when getting drunk and taking a piss behind a bush at 2 am makes you a sex offender. Bullshit when a girl claiming to be of age when she isn't can have you labeled a sex offender.
I am just waiting for the first time a child is lost and someone jumps to conclusions when they see a red dot on their map and some innocent person is killed for their hysteria.
I wont disagee. Though, one or two cameras, and three or four fakes, would probably do a lot to discourage people.
There is often some amount of feeling that a University is part of the community that it is in. I worked at one where residents of the area surrounding the gym were allowed access to use the facilities. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Library do similar.
It would be a shame to see a few bad apples ruin it for everyone. Cameras ae fairly cheap, and allow these people to be caught by police, rather than just shoved off onto the rest of the community.
How many incidents are we talking about here? I mean really. Are there THAT many people who go and jerk off in "out of the way spots" in the library? I mean, I could see it being a bit more in a university, mostly because of the number of teenage boys who are notorious risk takers but.... still. It just doesn't seem like something more than a small number of people would engage in.
Also, there are ways to get around technology. However, nothing stops crime like increasing the likelyhood of getting caught. Shit, put up some fake camera domes and see who jerks off in the corner with a visible "camera" that might be pointed at them.... is that so hard?
Hell, put up real cameras! Be really progressive and post that there is a policy of overwriting the tapes every few days, so there is no danger of film of you picking up a controversial book haunting you years down the road. The vast majority of complaints will come in fast enough to put the appropriate tapes aside for evidence. The rest well... its not intended to be a panecea, just to make public pud pullers go elsewhere.
Then consider well... I mean.... its a bit of a shock to catch someone polishing their knob, and a surporize in the library but... traumatizing? Um.... whats wrong with these girls? No seriously.... theres nothing there aside from the fact that its in a library that should be so shocking really. I mean, the vast majority of men they know, and many women, engage in this act every single day... just not in a library.
Ok.... 2,000 (taking the low) to 20,000 is an order of magnitude. However.... when the range is 2,000 to 6,000 well thats a pretty big range. There is a factor of 3 between the low and high water marks for the previous tech. Does it seem fair to judge the new tech based solely on the low water mark for the old tech?
So essentially its anywhere from a factor of 3 to an order of magnitude. Which is, at least in my mind, not really as good as saying its "an order of magnitude"
> yet even so, the new process would represent an order of magnitude improvement.
Nope.
6,000 to 20,000 is somewhere around a factor of 3. An order of magnitude is a factor of 10. Or as wikipedia puts it:
"An order of magnitude difference between two values is a factor of 10. For example, the mass of the planet Saturn is 95 times that of Earth, so Saturn is two orders of magnitude more massive than Earth. Order of magnitude differences are called decades when measured on a logarithmic scale."
Incorrect (and not IIRC, I have played enough with SSL)
While its not impossible to for this to be done from an SSL standpoint (you can start a TLS/SSL session in the middle of an existing conversation), its not how it works in any implementation that I have seen for https.
SMTP does this, it lets you open a normal session then initiate TLS. However, doing that allows a single port to be used. Have you EVER seen an http server handle both ssl and non-ssl on the same port? Normally, what I have seen, is that it DOES indeed see non-ssl requests on 443, but gives an error.
What happens is your browser opens a connection, does an SSL handshake, and from that point on, the conversation is encrypted...BEFORE you ever send a get.
In fact, tor relys on this fact to allow onion routers to be setup on 443 and be virtually indistinguishable from web servers. Since no protocol information goes out unencrypted, as long as the server advertises fairly standard encryption modes (which are seen in the clear or at least are determinable by connecting), then there really isn't much way to tell by just looking at one stream.
Makese good sense to me. If you only encrypt the things that are very sensitive or private, then its obvious which messages are important. Frankly, would like to see unencrypted IP go away entirely. Sure, whats in wiki may be public...but what portion of it you are accessing is your business only, if simply adding a single character to the URL is enough to keep prying eyes off... well...
Its minor benefit, but the cost is nearly zero (its 2008, setting up an SSL connection isn't going to slow things down that much).
Its kind of why I encrypt my hard drive on the laptop. Even if theres very little of any use to anyone that isn't secondarily encrypted. Its still my data, and I am not going to just give it away, especially to someone who was willing to steal my laptop, fuck him on the grounds that he might find something useful.
Just encrypt everything by default, then you can always switch to unencrypted when you really feel the need. Of course, when are you going to especially WANT your data in the clear? How often have you said "Gee, I hope someone is out there recording all the sites I go to and read"?
but hey, maybe you have never looked up anything that might be embarassing or might hurt your name or career if people heard that you read it...out of context of course. Never?
Sure, but how many people finish reading a physical book and then hand it off to someone else? Shit, many don't even ask for the book back later. This turns out to be a good thing, since most people don't seem to give back books that they are leant, even when told up front that this is expected.
Hell most people don't even reread a book, an ebook, once read, for a large percentage of the ebook reader population may as well be deleted. Just like most of the books I put on my book shelf when done may as well be tossed in the recycle bin (or be given away), theres MAYBE 10% of my bookshelf that gets looked at again within a 5-10 year time frame, and less that get a serious look more than twice.
Overall, I would think that this is really a minor issue at best. The bigger issue, is that its so easy for one person to post an ebook online and many people to download it. This magnifies the "give away" problem by requiring a lot less people engaging in buying and giving to give it to many.
Though, DRM at best is a short term solution to that, since evnetually it will be broken. Actually, I don't think there is a real solution to that long term. Its just the way it is. Its like complaining that water gets things wet.
Slashdot Mirror
Or perhaps a better example of how as soon as some dick decided to write down a bunch of words and call his spelling "proper". Spoken language came first, its still the most common usage case. Had it been spoken, it would have been perfect. You read it fine, you got the meaning, it served its purpose.
Kind of like Grammar nazi's. Soon as one person studies the language and writes down an incomplete set of how people in a few dialects of the language talk, someone else starts using it as a textbook on how to speak "properly".
Why do so many people seem to have a hard on for "rules" even when they just aren't that important.
-Steve
I think I agree with your idea, but not quite with how you express it.
Its not so much violence per se as coercion. If you have sex with me because I put a gun to your head, thats violent rape. Yes, nobody is going to disagree there. I could see some disagreement as to whether drugging is violence... but I don't think its a far stretch to say it falls into the category.
However, what if its more like:
"Strip naked and bend over so I can have sex with you" (yes, hot dialog I know)
"No"
"It would really suck if the school board found out your nephew didn't live with you and he had to go back to that inner city school where he pissed off those gang bangers"
Is it blackmail? yes it is. However, its not really a violent act. Hell, in many places its a threat to expose "wrongdoing". Its also playing on a persons emotions.... but can we say its really that much better than violence?
Or how about... a person who drugged themselves? Drunk girl is stumbling down the street alone, falls over passed out cold at someones feet. He walks her to more private space, removes her clothes, has sex with her. Its certainly rape, but, its not really violence by any definition that I am aware of.
Of course... is violence violence if it is consensual? What about conensual but violent sex?
Overall I think its clear that its not so much about violence but about non-consent either through incapacity or coercion. Violence is merely a means to effect either incpacity or coercion, and thus to get what the rapist wants without the other persons consent. Does it really matter if that non-consent is attained via a direct threat of violence, its application, or some other means?
On the other hand... a person who was convicted and is now free has, at least in theory, paid their debt. I don't see why restrictions should persist after the sentance has been served. If such a restriction is warrented as ongoing, I think it makes sense for that to have to be part of said sentance.
But hey, lawmakers have a lot on their plates and tend to prefer grandstanding to taking the time and energy to write good law. While a disciplined programmer knows to throw some edge cases through their routine and make sure it doesn't break... lawmakers have no such discipline. Thats why we end up with situations like paddleboro; where a number of people were arrested for, essentially, domestic abuse because they were at a sex party spanking their partners.
-Steve
Excuse my while my head stops spinning... let me get this straight:
GP: Argues that when rape can mean consensual sex between a 15 and 20 year old, you can't say rape is always violent
You: Rape is violent always. Of course, I don't think statutory rape should be called rape.
um.... so... essentially.... you disagreed by agreeing?
-Steve
> Thus, an illustration of that which is plainly demonstrable diverging from that which is is legally
> demonstrable. Rightly so however, the ends of finding definitive evidence ought never justify the means of
> beating (or water boarding) someone for the information.
I thought understanding what someone else said was against /. policy?
But thank you, yes, thats a good way to put it "Plainly demonstrable vs legally demonstrable"
Then again... if someone is willing to beat a "confession" out of someone, despite how illegal that is... then you could say that not only can the confession not be trusted, but even the fact that his confession contained otherwise occluded details can be called into suspect; All we have to do is consider the case where the offending questioner planted the murder weapon and then forced him to add that detail into his confession.
Its kind of like the anti-gun-control argument: If the aim is to stop criminals, whats to say they wont break the gun control laws too?
Though... still the point remains. You can have facts that are plainly demonstrable but can't be proven under the rules of evidence in court. Hence the plaurality of shades of meaning on the word "guilt"
-Steve
You do have a real point there. Look at Tracy Lords. She lied about her age and was in a whole series of hardcore movies... then turned 18, revealed her real age, and did one more movie. You almost have to wonder if it was planned that way!
Of course, when you are talking images on the net, there is always the problem of well... what is what?
How often is there even exif data? Most are not named in any identifiable way. Unless the model in the photo is known from something else, how would you know who she is?
But that goes both ways. If you can't identify the girl and the year it was taken, you can't show her age one way or the other unless shes REALLY young. Even then, I have seen legitimate 25 year olds that don't look a day over 14.
Then the fatty diet that people are raised on these days, well, any biologist can tell you that a human female becomes fertile as soon as her body develops enough body fat. Thats increasingly become younger and younger (good work parents, raising your kids on McDonalds!) which skews age determination by erasing some of the clues as to how mature they are.
I do wonder if this actually protects them from pedofiles who, by definition, are turned on by pre-pubecents. Of course, thats kind of like protecting yourself from the cold by jumping on a frying pan, since theres a lot less pedofiles than guys attracted to "mature" girls (I obviously mean physically mature)
I think this is a general problem I have with the laws, they try to do the right thing. I mean, I don't WANT child pornographers and their ilk abusing kids. However, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Its fine to say we need rules but, its so hard to make rules that are truely fair. That is, rules that stop bad behaviour without punishing people who, really, were not bad and just acting in a perfectly reasonable manner.
-Steve
Well, then there is the question of why. An Elite, long time editor, knows how to write in the encyclopedic style, picks and chooses his edits etc. A "onsie" could be anyone, and probably often is. Aside from it being plastered all over the page, how do you know a onesie even read up on the style and has any clue?
I think the reality is, its not that Wikipedia is running out of community... its running out of changes that the average person can make. There are many areas where I know quite a bit more than the average person, they are my specialties. Seldom do I even find that I have anything to add in these areas, never mind elsewhere.
Combine that with a standard of all statements being backed up by outside sources etc... and its hard. Essentially, a lot of whats appropriate for an encyclopedic edition, on just about any topic that you can think of, is already there.... and to top it off, even if it isn't, the chances that J Random Netuser has the chops to edit it is slim. Otherwise, it would have a high probability of being done already.
So far I have made all of one or two edits myself. What did I do? Well... I reworded a redundant statement because it didn't flow right. oooh. Then I commented on a few stylistic points in a discussion node....oooh.
Frankly, I think that if you actually read and understand the concept of an encyclopedia, then you are probably far ahead of half the "onsies" and probably have a fair chance of not having your edit removed.
-Steve
Actually thats true. In fact, I am one of those weirdos who decided he didn't like downloading music back when napster was new... not for any moral reason... just that the quality was so variable and I am a bit of a zealot about how my music is organized.
I also don't watch that many movies. However, I still have to imagine that a cat is a random input. A random input should cause downloads of various types of things based on the relative ratios of whats found online in general.
So essentially, thousands of pieces of child porn, would only make sense if it was interspersed amongst an absolute mess of other things, including hundreds of thousands or millions of pieces of adult porn.
There is another possibility. My lack of use of file downloading means I have missed out on the fact that the majority of files for download on the internet are actually child porn.
Since that being the case would tend to require that a substantial portion of the net, and thus the people using, are involved in child porn. If thats the case, then I am disgusted to be associated with you people.
-Steve
man when you are 16 you make do with what you have. Its kinda like being a kid and watching the scrambled playboy channel because every once in a while, the screen isn't so messed up and you can see some titty.
Admittedly that was around the time someone did make a VGA card for the GS, but... I didn't even know about it until later, and I certainly couldn't afford it.
-Steve
Believe me, if this had been something that happened within the past several years, I probably wouldn't have. However, I haven't used Usenet to download porn since I was 16 and on an Apple 2 GS. Given that I am over 30 now, and the only evidence that it ever happened is well... me telling a story about something that happened so many years ago.... while I was a minor myself.... well....
Lets just say, I am not terribly worried. Should it end up requiring me to dig out an OLD GS, and display some jpegs on it to show people exactly how horrendous the image quality was (would you like 640x200 in 4 shades of grey or 320x200 in 16?) then... I guess I could even do that. Actually, after 15 years, I am not even sure that it supported both video modes. (and yes, 320x200@256 was possible by a really funky assembly routine, but the JPEG software couldn't really support that since just drawing the screen that way took 90% of the CPU time just to push pallets ahead of the scan line... leaving precious little for JPEG decoding which already took forever at just a few shades of gray)
And of course, to top it all off, Its not like it said "kiddie porn" anywhere. For all I know, it was a very young looking 18 year old model. It wouldn't be the first time. However, I was convinced enough to be a bit sick to my stomach and delete it immediately.
Any DA wishing to use these statements against me is going to have a real fight on his hands, and I promise to bring public opinion to bear on that one. If anything, they should call me as an expert witness against this asshole :) I would happily state, unequivocally that there is no way a cat or other random event input downloaded that much kiddie porn from the internet. There just isn't that much out there that is publicly available. If there was, I am pretty sure I would have stumbled on more of it by now.
-Steve
Of course, then reality sets in. The best refutation I can think of is the amounts. If the car downloaded thousands of kiddie porn images, then there should be lots of other kinds of images (perhaps 100s of thousands) along with them.
Now, I have downloaded a fair amount of porn myself since I was 16 and first got online (15 years now! wow...) anyway.... in that time, how many times, looking for porn or not, did I stumble on child porn.
The answer: Once. While on usenet and doing the old "download multiple messages and string them together" on my Apple 2 GS which took about 5 minutes to render a JPG in black and white online... well...
I built up a collection in those days... and one of those pictures it turned out was child porn (which wasn't evident until it was viewed on a more powerful machine with much better resolution, and in color years later)
So one, out of, several thousand images over 15 years, was child porn. It turned up on usenet.... which nobody really uses for porn anymore as far as I know.
I MIGHT believe this guy if a handful... 2 or 3 or something images were downloaded. I might even believe he did it himself accidentally. However.... this argument just doesn't fit the evidence.
The only other way it would make sense is if it was taken from the cache of a freenet node he was running. However, I would think a specific case like that would be mentioned in the article, and would not necessitate the "cat story"
.
-Steve
> Not at all. I'm saying that once a court has determined legal guilt that that is basically all we have to
> go on
Not true. Lets take the case where Alice has committed a murder. An overzealous police officer crosses the line, gets really angry and beats her until she gives him details. He passes on the details, the body is found. Alice is provably guilty. She provided (under duress of course) information that only the killer could have had, and it was verified.
Of course, the judge rules that her confession is invalid, and all evidence aquired from it is "Fruit of a poison tree" and is all tossed out.
Legally speaking, Alice is aquitted, she walks away "Legally innocent" even though, its known (possibly widely, possibly not) that Alice is really guilty, but must be let go for various reasons that we can debate separately, but are fairly well established as needed for a fair system.
> Once the court has made their decision, that's that. If they're found not guilty then they're innocent in
> every way that counts, and history has proven time and again what bad results come from people just
> deciding outside of a trial that the accused "really is guilty, cuz I just know he did it".
I will not disagree here. In the situation outlined, Alice is innocent "in every way that counts". However, thats different from saying she didn't do it. Certainly people who know the facts of the case will not count her as a true innocent so much as one that was let go for just reasons.
If we are to attribute guilt or innocence solely to the legal definition, then you are right. However, there are many shades and types of guilt that go beyond the law. How about moral guilt or innocence? I know a person who is "seriously" dating two women that don't know about eachother, and both believe they have a monogamous relationship. I would say he is "guilty" of misleading them both (and have told him as much). I am aware of no law against what he is doing (he has married neither of them) but he *IS* guilty of a moral transgression, if not a legal one.
Then again, there are some who would say the same of a person who is married but screws around with their spouses permission. So this can hardly be said to be a totally objective measure, but, what makes a law so sacred? I never signed the constitution.
-Steve
I would tend to agree there, especially if the alternative is just CentOS. I mean, if you want to go full on RHEL with satellite server (not a cheap option), then you are getting something thats going to make manageing a large environment easier... (thats what my work uses)
However, if your not going to buy big support and tools... then debian is definitely the way I would go.
but, I have always been biased towards debian.
-Steve
Though a lot like the idea of being raped, especially women. Of course, the average female rape fantasy involves a man who is already her lover, so I have to wonder how many aren't so much real "rape fantasies" as just "rough sex" or "domination" fantasies. (in my mind, far more likely). However, it is a fairly common fantasy if surveys are to be believed.
-Steve
Maybe it was born in Hawaii where there is no such thing as a long form birth certificate?
Nor any evidence that it impairs driving. There was a great study done that concluded that all of the previous studies they could find were seriously flawed in that they either looked at crash statistics that didn't separate stoned drivers from drunk drivers, or they did functional impairment studies on people who don't smoke. Yes, great science.
Anyway, long study short, they found no significant impairment. Slightly decreased reaction times, but the test subjects adequetly adjusted by driving more cautiously. But...don't take my word for it, Actually... there have been a couple:
http://www.cannabisconsumers.org/rpt_view.php?rec_num=17
Or maybe you don't want to trust Cannabisconsumers.org...
http://www.ukcia.org/research/driving2.htm
Or the actual study I read from: (I found it on the actual UK government site a few months back, can't find it now, I welcome the new link if its out there)
http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_driving6.pdf
So really, the main argument against pot legalization was another misconception.
But who would have expected what some of the other things studies have found. Damned sciend!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_cannabis
-Steve
Actually, after seeing what 8 years of his reign did to the republican party, I wish I had voted for him!
I mean he really caused them a severe loss in stature. The real upside though, seems to be that the republicans sound like they are abandoning the crazy nutjob evangelical messages and letting the real conservatives actually try to push an agenda again. Thats such a breath of fresh air.
A real conservative is someone that can be reasoned with. This false-flag conservatism that has been pushed by the wingnuts out there always stuck in my craw. I may be no conservative, but, I agree way more with men like William F Buckley than any of the clowns in the Bush Gang.
-Steve
I had always assumed that was the case. There has never been any evidence I have seen to believe that "organic" production produced far better food. Certainly some of the things that major food producers do with the "non-organic" foods do decrease overall quality, and that simply by avoiding these, organic foods are better... but better from a flavor and aesthetic perspective, its still the same basic fruits and vegetables.
Thats why meat is the only thing I buy from a "local organic" farm. It has nothing to do with thinking the food is better, even the whole growth hormone myth is relatively well debunked in terms of human effect. However, they are free range, and they treat their animals better. Local farm helps the local economy, overall, I would love to see more of it.
-Steve
Do you seriously want to know or is that rhetorical? I think the answer is obvious, it is because the image in our mind of a "sex offender" is someone who is likely to steal a young child, rape and kill it, leaving its family torn and destroyed with grief.
Its a powerful image. An utterly bullshit image. However, its the image that people have in their mind when they froth as they mark their disdain for sex offenders.
Its also a bullshit image, when the majority of child abuse is done by family members. Bullshit when getting drunk and taking a piss behind a bush at 2 am makes you a sex offender. Bullshit when a girl claiming to be of age when she isn't can have you labeled a sex offender.
I am just waiting for the first time a child is lost and someone jumps to conclusions when they see a red dot on their map and some innocent person is killed for their hysteria.
MAYBE that will wake some people up.
-Steve
I wont disagee. Though, one or two cameras, and three or four fakes, would probably do a lot to discourage people.
There is often some amount of feeling that a University is part of the community that it is in. I worked at one where residents of the area surrounding the gym were allowed access to use the facilities. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Library do similar.
It would be a shame to see a few bad apples ruin it for everyone. Cameras ae fairly cheap, and allow these people to be caught by police, rather than just shoved off onto the rest of the community.
-Steve
Why would it help tremendously?
How many incidents are we talking about here? I mean really. Are there THAT many people who go and jerk off in "out of the way spots" in the library? I mean, I could see it being a bit more in a university, mostly because of the number of teenage boys who are notorious risk takers but.... still. It just doesn't seem like something more than a small number of people would engage in.
Also, there are ways to get around technology. However, nothing stops crime like increasing the likelyhood of getting caught. Shit, put up some fake camera domes and see who jerks off in the corner with a visible "camera" that might be pointed at them.... is that so hard?
Hell, put up real cameras! Be really progressive and post that there is a policy of overwriting the tapes every few days, so there is no danger of film of you picking up a controversial book haunting you years down the road. The vast majority of complaints will come in fast enough to put the appropriate tapes aside for evidence. The rest well... its not intended to be a panecea, just to make public pud pullers go elsewhere.
Then consider well... I mean.... its a bit of a shock to catch someone polishing their knob, and a surporize in the library but... traumatizing? Um.... whats wrong with these girls? No seriously.... theres nothing there aside from the fact that its in a library that should be so shocking really. I mean, the vast majority of men they know, and many women, engage in this act every single day... just not in a library.
-Steve
Ok.... 2,000 (taking the low) to 20,000 is an order of magnitude. However.... when the range is 2,000 to 6,000 well
thats a pretty big range. There is a factor of 3 between the low and high water marks for the previous tech. Does it seem fair to judge the new tech based solely on the low water mark for the old tech?
So essentially its anywhere from a factor of 3 to an order of magnitude. Which is, at least in my mind, not really as good as saying its "an order of magnitude"
-Steve
> yet even so, the new process would represent an order of magnitude improvement.
Nope.
6,000 to 20,000 is somewhere around a factor of 3. An order of magnitude is a factor of 10. Or as wikipedia puts it:
"An order of magnitude difference between two values is a factor of 10. For example, the mass of the planet Saturn is 95 times that of Earth, so Saturn is two orders of magnitude more massive than Earth. Order of magnitude differences are called decades when measured on a logarithmic scale."
Still impressive.
-Steve
Incorrect (and not IIRC, I have played enough with SSL)
While its not impossible to for this to be done from an SSL standpoint (you can start a TLS/SSL session in the middle of an existing conversation), its not how it works in any implementation that I have seen for https.
SMTP does this, it lets you open a normal session then initiate TLS. However, doing that allows a single port to be used. Have you EVER seen an http server handle both ssl and non-ssl on the same port? Normally, what I have seen, is that it DOES indeed see non-ssl requests on 443, but gives an error.
What happens is your browser opens a connection, does an SSL handshake, and from that point on, the conversation is encrypted...BEFORE you ever send a get.
In fact, tor relys on this fact to allow onion routers to be setup on 443 and be virtually indistinguishable from web servers. Since no protocol information goes out unencrypted, as long as the server advertises fairly standard encryption modes (which are seen in the clear or at least are determinable by connecting), then there really isn't much way to tell by just looking at one stream.
-Steve
Makese good sense to me. If you only encrypt the things that are very sensitive or private, then its obvious which messages are important. Frankly, would like to see unencrypted IP go away entirely. Sure, whats in wiki may be public...but what portion of it you are accessing is your business only, if simply adding a single character to the URL is enough to keep prying eyes off... well...
Its minor benefit, but the cost is nearly zero (its 2008, setting up an SSL connection isn't going to slow things down that much).
Its kind of why I encrypt my hard drive on the laptop. Even if theres very little of any use to anyone that isn't secondarily encrypted. Its still my data, and I am not going to just give it away, especially to someone who was willing to steal my laptop, fuck him on the grounds that he might find something useful.
Just encrypt everything by default, then you can always switch to unencrypted when you really feel the need. Of course, when are you going to especially WANT your data in the clear? How often have you said "Gee, I hope someone is out there recording all the sites I go to and read"?
but hey, maybe you have never looked up anything that might be embarassing or might hurt your name or career if people heard that you read it...out of context of course. Never?
-Steve
Sure, but how many people finish reading a physical book and then hand it off to someone else? Shit, many don't even ask for the book back later. This turns out to be a good thing, since most people don't seem to give back books that they are leant, even when told up front that this is expected.
Hell most people don't even reread a book, an ebook, once read, for a large percentage of the ebook reader population may as well be deleted. Just like most of the books I put on my book shelf when done may as well be tossed in the recycle bin (or be given away), theres MAYBE 10% of my bookshelf that gets looked at again within a 5-10 year time frame, and less that get a serious look more than twice.
Overall, I would think that this is really a minor issue at best. The bigger issue, is that its so easy for one person to post an ebook online and many people to download it. This magnifies the "give away" problem by requiring a lot less people engaging in buying and giving to give it to many.
Though, DRM at best is a short term solution to that, since evnetually it will be broken. Actually, I don't think there is a real solution to that long term. Its just the way it is. Its like complaining that water gets things wet.
-Steve