well more importantly, a guy wacking off to a child porn image is a guy who is someone who is sexually aroused by children. you are comfortable with such a person being free in your community?
Honestly? As long as they can keep it to themselves and not try to have sex with any children, I really do not care. I do not want to be in the business of judging people or imprisoning them for what they are thinking about, no matter how perverse their thoughts may be. What people become sexually aroused by is not really anyone's business. Arrest or ostracize people for their actions, not their thoughts.
Now, I say this knowing full well that I would try to keep a person who admits to being aroused by children as far away from my little cousin (I have no children to speak of) as I can. It is only natural to be suspicious of someone who is not afraid to admit to being a pedophile, even if they never act out on that impulse. Yet being distrustful of someone is not the same as thinking that the police should march in and arrest them, or that tax dollars should be spent housing them in a prison.
if you demonstrate pedophile urges, you need to be permanently kept away from society
No, if someone demonstrates pedophile behavior they need to be kept away. We should not be in the business of prosecuting people for thinking things that disturb us, that is a path that ends in tyranny.
your sexual urges means you have no right to freedom
No, a person's thoughts are their business and theirs alone. Arrest people only for actions, and only for actions that can be shown to harm others. Prisons are not disposal bins for anyone whose thoughts or fantasies disgust us, nor are prisons a memory hole for people we do not trust.
How about you tell me how possessing child pornography is a good thing that can be justified?
First of all, I did not say that possessing child pornography is a "good thing." What I said is that there must be a justification for making it illegal, and that the original justification may need to be updated for the reality of this century.
Simply owning those images encourages child abuse
How is that? At one time, owning child pornography images meant that the images were very likely to have been paid for by the owner, so that statement followed. I am not sure that owning child pornography still implies that the owner paid for or otherwise encouraged its production.
Now, if you have some other reason for that statement being true, why not share that reason with the world?
Why should it be legal to possess those images?
How about the fact that any law which forbids a person from possessing an image is a law that places limits on free speech rights? Those rights are not unlimited, but any limit that is placed on freedom speech must be justified, and the limit must be as minimal as possible. Producing child pornography is an example of a justifiable limit on free speech rights: to produce child pornography, a child has to be harmed.
Oh look, name-calling and ad hominem attacks. Yes, clearly anyone who thinks that the laws surrounding child pornography require more justification than, "OH MY GOD PEDOPHILES" must be a member of NAMBLA.
I'm sure as hell not going to defend why child pornography should be illegal.
Oh, OK, then why are we even bothering with this conversation? You think that some laws require no justification, and you will not even expend two seconds of mental effort to figure out why it makes sense for thousands of men to be imprisoned, at tax payer expense. I guess the conversation basically ends there, right?
just because you can't put a dollar sign on it doesn't mean that the rules of demand and supply don't apply
If nobody is willing to trade, supply and demand do not enter the picture. You might say there is "no demand" -- that is, nobody is willing to pay any price or make any sort of trade. Now, there are some people who are willing to pay -- and I think there is are good arguments for arresting them -- but people who are unwilling to make any trade for child pornography are people who do not even count in terms of demand.
Let's put it this way: distributing a child porn image is a risky activity, especially if you are the one depicted in that image (and likewise, allowing someone to photograph you abusing a child is risky). That risk necessitates some sort of trade; there must be some incentive for someone to take on that sort of risk, perhaps money, perhaps additional child pornography, perhaps something else. Someone who is just downloading child pornography, without paying or trading, is someone who is doing nothing to encourage its production, and may even discourage its production by making the producers nervous (e.g. someone who downloads an image and disappears could be a cop or someone who will report the image to the cops).
So yeah, just consuming child pornography is not encouraging its production, unless there are people out there who are willing to pay or trade. Which is why I said that people who pay are people who should be arrested: they are actually creating the market.
Yes, I know that what I am saying is that some guy sitting there getting off to a child porn image should be left alone, as long as he did not pay for the image. It is not something that people like to hear, but someone who cannot be shown to have harmed children is not someone who needs to be kept in prison, He may be a creep, he may be a pervert, you may not feel comfortable having your children near him, but an image does not harm a child. We also have limited law enforcement resources, and a large number of child abusers who should be in prison -- and people who pay for child pornography are not only encouraging child abuse, they are also a source of valuable intelligence for finding child abusers (whatever they pay with must be sent somewhere, and even a digital cash transaction still has to have some counterparty).
Take for example all the people making videos for YouTube or RedTube, obviously they're doing it for the attention even though they don't get paid
This is different for one very important reason: you do not risk spending the rest of your life in prison when you upload a video of you and your adult lover having sex. Child pornography is different, since child pornography images or videos are evidence of a serious crime, evidence which will almost certainly be used against its producer should the police find him. That risk basically eliminates any possibility of a child porn producer releasing such material without demanding something in return; not necessarily money, it could be child porn traded for other child porn.
Particularly if you're on a site that sells it
If nobody buys, such a site would simply disappear. Visitors who do not buy are a risk -- they have seen the evidence of a crime without paying, and might make a report to the police or otherwise create a problem. This is not a market where "samples" make any economic sense, and sites that offer samples should be expected to ultimately die off (except perhaps those offering samples on "safe" message boards e.g. Dreamboard, which was busted recently).
maybe they need something better to get a better conversion rate?
Again, without at least some paying customers, such an operation could not continue for long. Sure, they might try to attract new visitors, but the simple truth is that people who do not pay are people who are encouraging the site to shut down. It is a very risky business to be in -- not the sort of business where you want people to look around, then leave without paying.
Maybe ideally if you could take it entirely without anyone knowing
Almost certainly -- someone else noted that child pornography is posted to Usenet without encryption, and child pornography on P2P filesharing networks remains a problem. I would guess that there are a substantial number of people out there who are in possession of child pornography they received secretly and anonymously.
But to me is seems pretty hard to not give away any interest at all, and an interested person is a potential.
A potential paying customer (payment here might mean barter) -- and that is exactly my point. Someone has to be willing to pay for that sort of thinking to even happen. If nobody is willing to pay, if people do nothing but download child pornography without "contributing" to that market in some (economic) way, the market will die. The demand for child pornography will never disappear, it is a psychological phenomenon; the market relies on that demand resulting in some kind of trade, and that trade is what drives the cycle of child abuse.
Everything you said about enticing people and advertising serves the purpose of getting people to engage in trade. Once that trade has happened, there is no question that the people involved have encouraged child abuse in some way. Before that trade has happened, it is not clear to me how anyone has encouraged any child abuse.
Ummm... really? I think we imprison people for possessing child pornography is because it's illegal to possess it. Not because they paid for it.
That law would have been struck down on constitutional grounds if it were not for the argument that people who possess child pornography have, by obtaining it, encouraged its production. As an argument, that made sense decades ago, when child pornography was hard to obtain and could not be found at no cost online. Laws need justification; child pornography laws are no exception to this rule, and if the justification for banning possession is not that it encourages production, then what is the justification?
Or are you seriously claiming that child pornography would be OK if you got it for free?
Well, let's put it this way: who is harming children? Clearly, anyone who produces child pornography is harming children, as evidenced by the images and videos they produce (which show them sexually abusing a child). People who pay for child porn to be produced are equally culpable, I think that should go without saying, and that includes people who pay by trading their own child pornography.
Yet someone who downloads a child porn video at no cost, without having contacted its producer or anyone in the supply chain (say, someone who downloaded the video anonymously over a P2P network) is not so clearly contributing to the abuse of children. People who produce child pornography are not sitting there saying, "I think I will give out evidence of my crimes to anonymous strangers on the Internet, without asking for anything in return!"
Now, if you have a good reason why possessing child pornography is the problem in and of itself, as opposed to it being a problem because it encourages child abuse, let us hear it.
Oh those groups. My Usenet provider does not even carry binaries groups (thus allowing them to run a free service), so I guess I have been shielded from such things. A few years ago I saw cleartext advertisements for child porn on some newsgroup, I thought perhaps you were referring to that sort of spam...
Well, a few years ago there was a large group of people who used anonymous remailers to send encrypted images to each other over Usenet. Most of them managed to remain anonymous, as far as I know, and law enforcement was only able to identify a small number of the participants or their victims. That was encrypted, however; some years ago I saw cleartext advertisements for child porn posted on Usenet, but it was a while ago.
You cannot arrest someone for wanting to cause harm; everyone will want to harm another person at some point in their life. The point of arresting people who possess child pornography is that they might have paid for it, and thus encouraged someone to abuse children i.e. they indirectly caused harm to children. Yet a line must be drawn somewhere; having images in a browser cache is not proof that a person paid for child pornography or otherwise encouraged its production, and moreover it is not even proof that a person deliberately accessed child pornography (as you noted).
There are still child porn spammers in newsgroups? It could be that I only really read a handful of technical groups, but I have not seen such things in pretty long time...
If they are not paying, they are not contributing to the abuse of children, so what is the justification for imprisoning them? As I remember it, the reason we imprison people for possessing child pornography is that we assume they paid for it; so if someone just browsed to a child porn website, paid nothing for it and just looked at the pictures, why should they be tossed in jail (where tax dollars are used to house, feed, and protect them)?
good reason to maintain some quality control and put limits.
No, there is no good reason for anyone to control the quality of a product after it has been purchased, nor is there a good reason to "put limits" on computation. This is just an attempt by Microsoft to join the lock-down party, dictating how computers can be used by their users and shutting out competition.
You must be new here if you have not seen the criticisms of Apple's lock-down for iOS. As for ChromeOS, there are few articles about it, but rest assured that the first thing I asked when a Google presenter came here was how hard it is to install custom or otherwise unapproved software on ChromeOS devices.
then they'll whine about how one single post that is vaguely defending MS is PROOF that Slashdot is overrun with MS shills.
You mean like your post, which reads, "Wahh wahh nobody criticizes Apple so Microsoft should not be criticized either!" even though Apple bashing is a favorite activity here on Slashdot?
Old cars, because they hate all these fancy engines that they can't just fix
That is a legitimate complaint in an age where car manufacturers are shipping engines that are designed to thwart attempts at diagnostics or repairs unless you have authorized, proprietary tools. We have not yet passed any version of the right to repair act, which would protect us from these sorts of antics.
In my opinion, it is not new technology that is the problem, but the new attitude about technology users. Increasingly we see home appliances, personal computers (including tablets), cars, etc. that are not user-serviceable. It has gotten to the point where even replacing a phone's battery is not something that the owner can do. Routine maintenance now requires a trip to an authorized repair shop. It is not enough to make a sale to a customer; now the customer needs to be dependent on you for the entire useful lifetime of whatever you make.
Choose the pay-for method that you prefer, and factor it into your November vote accordingly.
I prefer option three: not starting people out in life with massive, difficult to escape debts. I think I will vote for the candidate who wants to change that system, rather than the politicians who want us to believe that the problem is keep the interest rates low.
So on the one hand, you have Democrats who want to use tax dollars to keep loan interest rates low. On the other, Republicans who want to use tax dollars to keep loan interest rates low. The only disagreement is on whether the money should be raised by closing loopholes or de-funding another program.
Did anyone stop to ask why we are forcing people to take on huge debts just to be educated? That is where there is no difference between these parties: neither one seems to think that the fact that we have millions of young men and women whose adult lives begin with tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt is a problem. Not only that, but we are talking about debts that are very difficult to escape through bankruptcy procedures.
The philosophy that underlies this sort of thinking? That college education is a fancy form of vocational training, that a college degree is a ticket to a "good" (i.e. high paying) job, that people are investing in their own future (on margin, of course). Which of the major parties begins its approach to education with the stance that an educated populace is good for society as a whole? Which major party is pushing a solution that is based on the idea that universities are not vocational schools, and that educating people is an investment that benefits everyone in the country?
The problem here is not that student loan rates need to be kept low, and that we must find the money for that; the problem is that we have an education system that is based on people taking out loans in the first place.
The problem is that people who have debt piling up are under pressure to just get their degree and start working, and they are under pressure to focus on doing the minimum effort needed to get through vocational courses. Engineers, business majors, accounting majors -- they are all under pressure to rush through their programs, and they are annoyed with having to be slowed down by general education requirements. Schools in turn are under pressure to make those general education requires and even vocational courses as easy to pass as possible. The end result is an education system that fails in its primary purpose: education.
That is the problem with the student loan system: it encourages mediocre education, minimal effort, and a narrow focus.
If we are even going to pretend to that elections are meaningful, we need people who have been educated beyond the minimum vocational training they need to secure a job. How can people be expected to evaluate a politician's actions, a proposed solution to a problem, or a longstanding policy, if they have never been taught politics or philosophy?
It is not just a matter of "useless" degrees; the general education requirements have been drastically reduced, and within majors topics that are deemed "irrelevant" to jobs have suffered. As I said, there are large numbers of people with degrees in CS who cannot even explain the P vs. NP problem, who have no idea what the Church-Turing thesis says, who have never programmed in a declarative language...there are even people who cannot explain the significance of the Entscheidungsproblem. That is not a good thing; if people want vocational programming training, they should not be in a 4 year CS program, and schools should be reducing the depth of CS education to cater to people who want vocational training.
Why should we even bother with 4 year degrees? If all we are going to give people is minimum vocational training, why not just have everyone get a 2 year degree, where nothing but vocational education is given (perhaps with a week or two of ethics training, to prevent disastrous ethical violations)? You are right: people do not need to be well educated to perform their jobs.
Of course, there is more to life than a person's job, and poorly educated people (which includes people who have never learned anything outside of their own trade) are easily taken advantage of. That is why we have four year colleges, and that is why four year colleges should not be placing non-vocational topics and majors on the chopping block.
FTFY. Nobody really cares about the education you received -- it is unusual for an employer to even look at your transcript or to read your senior project report. A quick perusal of your resume reveals what degrees or certifications you hold, and where you worked previously. Nothing else really matters in most jobs; there are a few exceptions, places where management realizes that a person's education is more valuable than their certifications, but those are the minority of jobs.
No one said that the Democrats are pushing for students to go to four-year colleges. They want to allow students to receive the financial aid to do so, and they want to prevent the predatory for-profit schools from abusing the system.
The Democrats want students to receive loans as financial aid. That is worse than just not encouraging people to get an education; it actively attacks our education system, by encouraging the "well I am going to have this huge debt when I graduate, so I better focus on vocational training and nothing more!" It is not just the humanities that suffer for it, although those subjects are hardest hit; even in my field (computer science), there is a push to use languages that are popular in industry (Java, C++) instead of languages that are academically interesting, theoretical courses fall by the wayside (there are a scary number of CS graduates who cannot explain the P vs. NP problem), and there are more career events than special lectures.
So how is it that the Democrats or the Republicans are standing up for the little guy? The Democrats are trying to make it easy for the little guy to pile up a big debt and receive a mediocre four year education; the Republicans are not interested in helping the little guy receive a four year education at all. Neither of those choices seems to actually benefit the middle or lower class in any meaningful way, especially when you consider the fact that most jobs will just as readily hire a person with a two year degree and professional certifications as someone with a four year degree.
How much greater is your income because you received those loans and could go to a much better school?
Thus the destruction of our education system continues. "I piled up loan debt to be at this school, therefore I need to get the degree with this school's name printed on it so that I can get a high paying job to repay that debt!"
How does this make the Democrats "hate the small guy"?
How about the fact that, like the Republicans, the Democrats believe that four year degrees are a fancy form a job training? You know, they are encouraging "the small guy" to take on a substantial debt to receive a four year degree so that they can get a "good job." Meanwhile, the education itself provides them with the same job skills and overall education quality as a less expensive two year degree.
University education in America has been declining in quality, and the Democrats are just as guilty as the Republicans for that. The difference is that the Democrats want to sound like they are making it easy to get "an education" -- by piling up student loan debt, thus ensuring that you will need a high paying job afterward to repay that debt. At the end of the day, is it any surprise that most students are rushing to take the "easy A" courses so that they can just get a bachelor's degree and find that $80k/yr job?
If you want to improve access to education, you need to remove the loan debt aspect of high education, and essentially make college education free for those who pass the admission process. Of course, that would be terribly socialist, and would be bad news for those banks that profit from the student loan debt, so I doubt any politician will really push for it.
We should be asking why the quality of higher education has decreased so significantly. Of course, everyone knows the answer to the question, but nobody wants to say it: it is because universities have fallen into the trap of providing students with vocational training and minimal education. Professors are pressured not to make required general education courses too challenging, departments are pressured to make their curricula more relevant to what students will see on the job, and subjects which contribute little to vocational skills are the first on the chopping block when budgets become tight.
The question is not really about who should be allowed to shut down the cell phone system; the point of the question is that there is never a legitimate reason for anyone to shut it down. The fact that an emergency call might be missed as a result of a shutdown is not the main problem. The main problem is that when a communication system is shut down, people lose their ability to speak -- there is no legitimate use for such power.
Why not allow the government to dictate when people can talk to each other? That is what shutting a communication system down, or restricting the system so that only emergency calls can be made, is doing: restricting how, when, and with whom people can communicate (in a very literal sense).
Slashdot Mirror
well more importantly, a guy wacking off to a child porn image is a guy who is someone who is sexually aroused by children. you are comfortable with such a person being free in your community?
Honestly? As long as they can keep it to themselves and not try to have sex with any children, I really do not care. I do not want to be in the business of judging people or imprisoning them for what they are thinking about, no matter how perverse their thoughts may be. What people become sexually aroused by is not really anyone's business. Arrest or ostracize people for their actions, not their thoughts.
Now, I say this knowing full well that I would try to keep a person who admits to being aroused by children as far away from my little cousin (I have no children to speak of) as I can. It is only natural to be suspicious of someone who is not afraid to admit to being a pedophile, even if they never act out on that impulse. Yet being distrustful of someone is not the same as thinking that the police should march in and arrest them, or that tax dollars should be spent housing them in a prison.
if you demonstrate pedophile urges, you need to be permanently kept away from society
No, if someone demonstrates pedophile behavior they need to be kept away. We should not be in the business of prosecuting people for thinking things that disturb us, that is a path that ends in tyranny.
your sexual urges means you have no right to freedom
No, a person's thoughts are their business and theirs alone. Arrest people only for actions, and only for actions that can be shown to harm others. Prisons are not disposal bins for anyone whose thoughts or fantasies disgust us, nor are prisons a memory hole for people we do not trust.
How about you tell me how possessing child pornography is a good thing that can be justified?
First of all, I did not say that possessing child pornography is a "good thing." What I said is that there must be a justification for making it illegal, and that the original justification may need to be updated for the reality of this century.
Simply owning those images encourages child abuse
How is that? At one time, owning child pornography images meant that the images were very likely to have been paid for by the owner, so that statement followed. I am not sure that owning child pornography still implies that the owner paid for or otherwise encouraged its production.
Now, if you have some other reason for that statement being true, why not share that reason with the world?
Why should it be legal to possess those images?
How about the fact that any law which forbids a person from possessing an image is a law that places limits on free speech rights? Those rights are not unlimited, but any limit that is placed on freedom speech must be justified, and the limit must be as minimal as possible. Producing child pornography is an example of a justifiable limit on free speech rights: to produce child pornography, a child has to be harmed.
There's no wiggle room or ambiguity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_child_pornography
make your NAMBLA pitch
Oh look, name-calling and ad hominem attacks. Yes, clearly anyone who thinks that the laws surrounding child pornography require more justification than, "OH MY GOD PEDOPHILES" must be a member of NAMBLA.
I'm sure as hell not going to defend why child pornography should be illegal.
Oh, OK, then why are we even bothering with this conversation? You think that some laws require no justification, and you will not even expend two seconds of mental effort to figure out why it makes sense for thousands of men to be imprisoned, at tax payer expense. I guess the conversation basically ends there, right?
just because you can't put a dollar sign on it doesn't mean that the rules of demand and supply don't apply
If nobody is willing to trade, supply and demand do not enter the picture. You might say there is "no demand" -- that is, nobody is willing to pay any price or make any sort of trade. Now, there are some people who are willing to pay -- and I think there is are good arguments for arresting them -- but people who are unwilling to make any trade for child pornography are people who do not even count in terms of demand.
Let's put it this way: distributing a child porn image is a risky activity, especially if you are the one depicted in that image (and likewise, allowing someone to photograph you abusing a child is risky). That risk necessitates some sort of trade; there must be some incentive for someone to take on that sort of risk, perhaps money, perhaps additional child pornography, perhaps something else. Someone who is just downloading child pornography, without paying or trading, is someone who is doing nothing to encourage its production, and may even discourage its production by making the producers nervous (e.g. someone who downloads an image and disappears could be a cop or someone who will report the image to the cops).
So yeah, just consuming child pornography is not encouraging its production, unless there are people out there who are willing to pay or trade. Which is why I said that people who pay are people who should be arrested: they are actually creating the market.
Yes, I know that what I am saying is that some guy sitting there getting off to a child porn image should be left alone, as long as he did not pay for the image. It is not something that people like to hear, but someone who cannot be shown to have harmed children is not someone who needs to be kept in prison, He may be a creep, he may be a pervert, you may not feel comfortable having your children near him, but an image does not harm a child. We also have limited law enforcement resources, and a large number of child abusers who should be in prison -- and people who pay for child pornography are not only encouraging child abuse, they are also a source of valuable intelligence for finding child abusers (whatever they pay with must be sent somewhere, and even a digital cash transaction still has to have some counterparty).
Take for example all the people making videos for YouTube or RedTube, obviously they're doing it for the attention even though they don't get paid
This is different for one very important reason: you do not risk spending the rest of your life in prison when you upload a video of you and your adult lover having sex. Child pornography is different, since child pornography images or videos are evidence of a serious crime, evidence which will almost certainly be used against its producer should the police find him. That risk basically eliminates any possibility of a child porn producer releasing such material without demanding something in return; not necessarily money, it could be child porn traded for other child porn.
Particularly if you're on a site that sells it
If nobody buys, such a site would simply disappear. Visitors who do not buy are a risk -- they have seen the evidence of a crime without paying, and might make a report to the police or otherwise create a problem. This is not a market where "samples" make any economic sense, and sites that offer samples should be expected to ultimately die off (except perhaps those offering samples on "safe" message boards e.g. Dreamboard, which was busted recently).
maybe they need something better to get a better conversion rate?
Again, without at least some paying customers, such an operation could not continue for long. Sure, they might try to attract new visitors, but the simple truth is that people who do not pay are people who are encouraging the site to shut down. It is a very risky business to be in -- not the sort of business where you want people to look around, then leave without paying.
Maybe ideally if you could take it entirely without anyone knowing
Almost certainly -- someone else noted that child pornography is posted to Usenet without encryption, and child pornography on P2P filesharing networks remains a problem. I would guess that there are a substantial number of people out there who are in possession of child pornography they received secretly and anonymously.
But to me is seems pretty hard to not give away any interest at all, and an interested person is a potential.
A potential paying customer (payment here might mean barter) -- and that is exactly my point. Someone has to be willing to pay for that sort of thinking to even happen. If nobody is willing to pay, if people do nothing but download child pornography without "contributing" to that market in some (economic) way, the market will die. The demand for child pornography will never disappear, it is a psychological phenomenon; the market relies on that demand resulting in some kind of trade, and that trade is what drives the cycle of child abuse.
Everything you said about enticing people and advertising serves the purpose of getting people to engage in trade. Once that trade has happened, there is no question that the people involved have encouraged child abuse in some way. Before that trade has happened, it is not clear to me how anyone has encouraged any child abuse.
Ummm ... really? I think we imprison people for possessing child pornography is because it's illegal to possess it. Not because they paid for it.
That law would have been struck down on constitutional grounds if it were not for the argument that people who possess child pornography have, by obtaining it, encouraged its production. As an argument, that made sense decades ago, when child pornography was hard to obtain and could not be found at no cost online. Laws need justification; child pornography laws are no exception to this rule, and if the justification for banning possession is not that it encourages production, then what is the justification?
Or are you seriously claiming that child pornography would be OK if you got it for free?
Well, let's put it this way: who is harming children? Clearly, anyone who produces child pornography is harming children, as evidenced by the images and videos they produce (which show them sexually abusing a child). People who pay for child porn to be produced are equally culpable, I think that should go without saying, and that includes people who pay by trading their own child pornography.
Yet someone who downloads a child porn video at no cost, without having contacted its producer or anyone in the supply chain (say, someone who downloaded the video anonymously over a P2P network) is not so clearly contributing to the abuse of children. People who produce child pornography are not sitting there saying, "I think I will give out evidence of my crimes to anonymous strangers on the Internet, without asking for anything in return!"
Now, if you have a good reason why possessing child pornography is the problem in and of itself, as opposed to it being a problem because it encourages child abuse, let us hear it.
Oh those groups. My Usenet provider does not even carry binaries groups (thus allowing them to run a free service), so I guess I have been shielded from such things. A few years ago I saw cleartext advertisements for child porn on some newsgroup, I thought perhaps you were referring to that sort of spam...
Well, a few years ago there was a large group of people who used anonymous remailers to send encrypted images to each other over Usenet. Most of them managed to remain anonymous, as far as I know, and law enforcement was only able to identify a small number of the participants or their victims. That was encrypted, however; some years ago I saw cleartext advertisements for child porn posted on Usenet, but it was a while ago.
You cannot arrest someone for wanting to cause harm; everyone will want to harm another person at some point in their life. The point of arresting people who possess child pornography is that they might have paid for it, and thus encouraged someone to abuse children i.e. they indirectly caused harm to children. Yet a line must be drawn somewhere; having images in a browser cache is not proof that a person paid for child pornography or otherwise encouraged its production, and moreover it is not even proof that a person deliberately accessed child pornography (as you noted).
There are still child porn spammers in newsgroups? It could be that I only really read a handful of technical groups, but I have not seen such things in pretty long time...
If they are not paying, they are not contributing to the abuse of children, so what is the justification for imprisoning them? As I remember it, the reason we imprison people for possessing child pornography is that we assume they paid for it; so if someone just browsed to a child porn website, paid nothing for it and just looked at the pictures, why should they be tossed in jail (where tax dollars are used to house, feed, and protect them)?
good reason to maintain some quality control and put limits.
No, there is no good reason for anyone to control the quality of a product after it has been purchased, nor is there a good reason to "put limits" on computation. This is just an attempt by Microsoft to join the lock-down party, dictating how computers can be used by their users and shutting out competition.
then they'll whine about how one single post that is vaguely defending MS is PROOF that Slashdot is overrun with MS shills.
You mean like your post, which reads, "Wahh wahh nobody criticizes Apple so Microsoft should not be criticized either!" even though Apple bashing is a favorite activity here on Slashdot?
Old cars, because they hate all these fancy engines that they can't just fix
That is a legitimate complaint in an age where car manufacturers are shipping engines that are designed to thwart attempts at diagnostics or repairs unless you have authorized, proprietary tools. We have not yet passed any version of the right to repair act, which would protect us from these sorts of antics.
In my opinion, it is not new technology that is the problem, but the new attitude about technology users. Increasingly we see home appliances, personal computers (including tablets), cars, etc. that are not user-serviceable. It has gotten to the point where even replacing a phone's battery is not something that the owner can do. Routine maintenance now requires a trip to an authorized repair shop. It is not enough to make a sale to a customer; now the customer needs to be dependent on you for the entire useful lifetime of whatever you make.
Choose the pay-for method that you prefer, and factor it into your November vote accordingly.
I prefer option three: not starting people out in life with massive, difficult to escape debts. I think I will vote for the candidate who wants to change that system, rather than the politicians who want us to believe that the problem is keep the interest rates low.
So on the one hand, you have Democrats who want to use tax dollars to keep loan interest rates low. On the other, Republicans who want to use tax dollars to keep loan interest rates low. The only disagreement is on whether the money should be raised by closing loopholes or de-funding another program.
Did anyone stop to ask why we are forcing people to take on huge debts just to be educated? That is where there is no difference between these parties: neither one seems to think that the fact that we have millions of young men and women whose adult lives begin with tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt is a problem. Not only that, but we are talking about debts that are very difficult to escape through bankruptcy procedures.
The philosophy that underlies this sort of thinking? That college education is a fancy form of vocational training, that a college degree is a ticket to a "good" (i.e. high paying) job, that people are investing in their own future (on margin, of course). Which of the major parties begins its approach to education with the stance that an educated populace is good for society as a whole? Which major party is pushing a solution that is based on the idea that universities are not vocational schools, and that educating people is an investment that benefits everyone in the country?
The problem here is not that student loan rates need to be kept low, and that we must find the money for that; the problem is that we have an education system that is based on people taking out loans in the first place.
The problem is that people who have debt piling up are under pressure to just get their degree and start working, and they are under pressure to focus on doing the minimum effort needed to get through vocational courses. Engineers, business majors, accounting majors -- they are all under pressure to rush through their programs, and they are annoyed with having to be slowed down by general education requirements. Schools in turn are under pressure to make those general education requires and even vocational courses as easy to pass as possible. The end result is an education system that fails in its primary purpose: education.
That is the problem with the student loan system: it encourages mediocre education, minimal effort, and a narrow focus.
If we are even going to pretend to that elections are meaningful, we need people who have been educated beyond the minimum vocational training they need to secure a job. How can people be expected to evaluate a politician's actions, a proposed solution to a problem, or a longstanding policy, if they have never been taught politics or philosophy?
It is not just a matter of "useless" degrees; the general education requirements have been drastically reduced, and within majors topics that are deemed "irrelevant" to jobs have suffered. As I said, there are large numbers of people with degrees in CS who cannot even explain the P vs. NP problem, who have no idea what the Church-Turing thesis says, who have never programmed in a declarative language...there are even people who cannot explain the significance of the Entscheidungsproblem. That is not a good thing; if people want vocational programming training, they should not be in a 4 year CS program, and schools should be reducing the depth of CS education to cater to people who want vocational training.
Why should we even bother with 4 year degrees? If all we are going to give people is minimum vocational training, why not just have everyone get a 2 year degree, where nothing but vocational education is given (perhaps with a week or two of ethics training, to prevent disastrous ethical violations)? You are right: people do not need to be well educated to perform their jobs.
Of course, there is more to life than a person's job, and poorly educated people (which includes people who have never learned anything outside of their own trade) are easily taken advantage of. That is why we have four year colleges, and that is why four year colleges should not be placing non-vocational topics and majors on the chopping block.
Our society currently values a college degree
FTFY. Nobody really cares about the education you received -- it is unusual for an employer to even look at your transcript or to read your senior project report. A quick perusal of your resume reveals what degrees or certifications you hold, and where you worked previously. Nothing else really matters in most jobs; there are a few exceptions, places where management realizes that a person's education is more valuable than their certifications, but those are the minority of jobs.
No one said that the Democrats are pushing for students to go to four-year colleges. They want to allow students to receive the financial aid to do so, and they want to prevent the predatory for-profit schools from abusing the system.
The Democrats want students to receive loans as financial aid. That is worse than just not encouraging people to get an education; it actively attacks our education system, by encouraging the "well I am going to have this huge debt when I graduate, so I better focus on vocational training and nothing more!" It is not just the humanities that suffer for it, although those subjects are hardest hit; even in my field (computer science), there is a push to use languages that are popular in industry (Java, C++) instead of languages that are academically interesting, theoretical courses fall by the wayside (there are a scary number of CS graduates who cannot explain the P vs. NP problem), and there are more career events than special lectures.
So how is it that the Democrats or the Republicans are standing up for the little guy? The Democrats are trying to make it easy for the little guy to pile up a big debt and receive a mediocre four year education; the Republicans are not interested in helping the little guy receive a four year education at all. Neither of those choices seems to actually benefit the middle or lower class in any meaningful way, especially when you consider the fact that most jobs will just as readily hire a person with a two year degree and professional certifications as someone with a four year degree.
They violated our privacy! Let's talk about it on Facebook and Twitter!
How much greater is your income because you received those loans and could go to a much better school?
Thus the destruction of our education system continues. "I piled up loan debt to be at this school, therefore I need to get the degree with this school's name printed on it so that I can get a high paying job to repay that debt!"
How does this make the Democrats "hate the small guy"?
How about the fact that, like the Republicans, the Democrats believe that four year degrees are a fancy form a job training? You know, they are encouraging "the small guy" to take on a substantial debt to receive a four year degree so that they can get a "good job." Meanwhile, the education itself provides them with the same job skills and overall education quality as a less expensive two year degree.
University education in America has been declining in quality, and the Democrats are just as guilty as the Republicans for that. The difference is that the Democrats want to sound like they are making it easy to get "an education" -- by piling up student loan debt, thus ensuring that you will need a high paying job afterward to repay that debt. At the end of the day, is it any surprise that most students are rushing to take the "easy A" courses so that they can just get a bachelor's degree and find that $80k/yr job?
If you want to improve access to education, you need to remove the loan debt aspect of high education, and essentially make college education free for those who pass the admission process. Of course, that would be terribly socialist, and would be bad news for those banks that profit from the student loan debt, so I doubt any politician will really push for it.
We should be asking why the quality of higher education has decreased so significantly. Of course, everyone knows the answer to the question, but nobody wants to say it: it is because universities have fallen into the trap of providing students with vocational training and minimal education. Professors are pressured not to make required general education courses too challenging, departments are pressured to make their curricula more relevant to what students will see on the job, and subjects which contribute little to vocational skills are the first on the chopping block when budgets become tight.
helping people get four years of partying to get a job certificate
FTFY. Sorry, but the vast majority of college students are not interested in education, only in getting a career boost with minimum effort.
The question is not really about who should be allowed to shut down the cell phone system; the point of the question is that there is never a legitimate reason for anyone to shut it down. The fact that an emergency call might be missed as a result of a shutdown is not the main problem. The main problem is that when a communication system is shut down, people lose their ability to speak -- there is no legitimate use for such power.
Why not allow the government to dictate when people can talk to each other? That is what shutting a communication system down, or restricting the system so that only emergency calls can be made, is doing: restricting how, when, and with whom people can communicate (in a very literal sense).