Again, name these nebulous effects that seem to affect you so personally. How does the porn habit of your neighbor affect you? How about the guy across town? Across the state line? Across the nation?

You know what, I want to live in a society without the outsize effect that Texas has on science textbooks throughout the country. I don't always get what I want either. So stop pretending that you moralists are so damn persecuted. At the end of the day, we might just have to agree to disagree, and get on with our own lives.

And really? You're jumping to kiddie porn and nazi comparisons? Congratulations, you've stooped to the same level as those who want to ban gay marriage because, obviously, making that legal will inevitably lead to polygamy, child brides, and bestiality.

We don't outlaw child porn because of its "negative effects on society" -- we outlaw it because of the negative effects on the child. We've decided that minors don't have the capacity to understand the consequences of engaging in that activity and that they are subject to coercion into such acts. If we do not believe the can participate of their own informed free will, then the only other option for production of such material is sexual assault of some form. Therefore, its outlawed. There's also the social stigma aspect, leading to decisions in courts such as that computer-simulated child porn is still, legally, child porn, but at its core it is stigma and *fear* that legalizing it would encourage people to engage in child sexual abuse, but that is not a proven link -- there's little research, and its far from conclusive.

Here's another little something that will blow your mind -- in a handful of states it is legal for 16-year-olds to perform in strip clubs. I don't particularly think that's a good thing either, but there's no evidence that child sexual abuse is any greater in those states, much less any causal link between the two.

As for holocaust, et al, fine, we agree, Nazis = BAD. I encourage you in your crusade against Nazis and naked girl-bits. In America you have the freedom and liberty to voice your opinion, make your case, and possibly influence policy, and all the while you're free to postulate, bitch, and whine about The Bad Thing, and even tell the rest of us what horrible, ignorant people we must be to not see it--But you damn certain don't get to just magic away our exercise of free will and infantilize us all. Under the German regime and the propaganda-induced fervor over ever-simmering anti-semitism, not enough Germans came out an opposed what was going on, or ignored it for fear of retribution or death. I've got a Hitler comparison of my own though--one of the things he did first to grab power and hold influence, was to persecute people for exercising their freedom of speech. When you give those with power the ability to determine what speech is protected, they will invariably use that power to persecute dissent--that is why it's so critical to preserve this freedom in the utmost, even when people use it to express unpopular or negative views. The constitution affirms us many rights, but the right to not be offended is not among them.

If you want things to change, stand in front of a mirror somewhere, give yourself a good BraveHeart speech, and go campaign for change. Battling your points on in internet forum will get you nowhere -- but know that I and millions of other Americans will gladly meet you on the battlefield of public policy, and I'd wager you'll face much longer odds than old William Wallace ever did.

What necessary function does not having porn serve?

What does that contribute?

No my friend, you can't just turn the tables here when you get backed into a corner. If you would seek to take something away from me and a couple hundred million other Americans, the onus is on you to prove that thing is harmful--the onus does not fall to us to justify our own personal choices. That very notion is the crux of true freedom and true liberty.

So, name the harm, prove it, quantify it, prove it is universal, and then justify that taking it away is the only way to curb these negative effects you claim, because simple regulation wouldn't do so. I await your case.

Also:

>> If I want to live in a porn-free society, that's my only option. Are you OK with that?

[sarcasm]If your unporn is that important to you, it's a small sacrifice.[/sarcasm]

Do you see just how fucking ridiculous of a suggestion relocation is, now?

You don't get to choose what society does, but if *you* want to live porn-free, then you have the freedom to not consume porn. It really is that simple.

But I honestly don't expect this kind of reasoning to go anywhere, since the argument began with your suggestion that free speech should be protected by limiting it.

That is, hands down, the single dumbest argument I've read in all my time on Slashdot. In fact, it gives some of the dumbest arguments I've read anywhere on the Internet a run for their money.
If you don't like the way the majority sees things, you just move? And that's perfectly reasonable? If other things, like my family, friends, job, and the life I've built are *so important* to me, I should willingly give up other less-important but perfectly harmless things, because you and some other fools don't like it? What if your job were outsourced and you had trouble finding work that was as satisfying? No problem, right? You should just accept it and move to Mexico?
I'm not making a direct comparison here, because those are two different things, but I would argue that I've got more inherent right to enjoy porn if I want to, than for you to have security in a job that you enjoy. I'm just trying to get you to think about how ridiculous of a suggestion it is that someone should-not choose, but be forced to (a very important distinction)-relocate to in order to maintain some aspect of their life that's harmless.

I'm 100% against the use of drones, but lets not confuse this guy with someone who's using his 2nd Amendment rights to fight tyranny. Firstly, because even if he was railroaded, corruption in and of itself is not tyranny. Secondly, and more importantly, he lost claim to the moral high ground by targeting the family of those he has a grudge for -- two of the three victims were the daughter of someone he holds a grudge against and her fiancee. There's nothing heroic about that. That's murder, plain and simple.

Honestly, all the dislike for Windows 8 comes down to belly-aching about how "different" the effing Start Screen is.

Windows 8 is hands down a better OS than Windows 7. It's faster, it's lighter, it has better security, it manages memory better, it has some great features that same-level Windows 7 doesn't--like BitLocker and Storage Spaces-- hell, gamers are even seeing small performance gains (~4%, but good for an extra frame or two per second.)

Plus, if you *really* still hate the Start Screen, there's software from StarDock and others that add a very good start menu back to the classic desktop, and very-nearly transform Win8 into a Win7 doppelganger.

I just mean that if you aren't philosophically opposed to Windows as a whole, then foregoing Windows 8 is akin to buying last year's model of your preferred automobile just because you don't like the paint on this year's model -- You're giving up enhanced functionality for what is essentially aesthetics.

DigiPen offers a game development camp during the summer months, with roaming camps offered in many good-sized cities across the US, and many sessions in their home base of Redmond, WA. Your child may or may not be interested in developing computer games, but its an engaging way to present a good variety of CS topics and for your student to get their hands dirty with real code.

The camps are taught by Digipen upperclassmen who typically are among the top students, and who attend ~4 weeks of training themselves, before leading their own classes. If you don't live in one of the metro areas their camps service (and don't have family who do that would let your child couch-surf for a week), their on-premise courses will usually hook camp-attendees up with DigiPen students (who's roommates may be home for summer) for room and board. Its not required to do so, but one advantage is that the student is usually willing to provide light tutoring/help with homework, or include your child in their usual (age appropriate) social activities. The school also provides social activities for camp attendees.

"Forbes analyst Adam Hartung makes wild prediction to drive up add revenue"

Came hoping to learn what's so beautiful about iD's code, left convinced that the author (Shawn McGrath) and I have rather different opinions on that... iDs code is certainly not an example of poor code, in a previous job I had the opportunity to view code from around 20 different AAA game studios, its definitely in the top quarter (but that's not saying a great deal); mostly the article is 50 paragraphs of cooing "iD does what I do, guys!" Analysis of what makes said style "beautiful" is subjective at best, and furthermore the author describes himself as "not a coder". For what its worth, IMHO, the best code that I've seen came out of Remedy.

Technically they do--they just haven't called in on our foreign debt yet.

Real parents put tracking devices *in* their children.

Ugh... Sick of all these knee-jerk "It's a terrible deal" articles from assholes that haven't done their research properly.

First of all, if you get your xbox this way, it's warrantied for the two years you're under contract, compared to one year for the usual retail package. The extra year's warranty retails for $50.

When you figure in the extended warranty, the price gap (using the author's Amazon sale prices) shrinks to about $25. If you use the usual retail price of things it actually works out to be $10 cheaper to take the subsidized deal.

Secondly, yes, if you get it on sale and can pay up front, it's cheaper in the long-run. Welcome to the world of finance, asshat. In the end, for everyone else, you're paying a premium of just over a $1.04 per month for the privilege of having the thing now, rather than later. Try getting anything even close to that on a credit card -- at even a relatively modest interest rate of 9%, credit works out to $422 over the course of 2 years.

Nearly every goddamn article and blog on this acts as if Microsoft if fleecing everyone, when in fact the terms are very reasonable, if not generous. Of course they're counting on re-couping the costs elsewhere (games, peripherals, continued growth of XBL), but so be it. The fact that they expect to expand their revenue in this way is not underhanded, allows them to offer a better deal than credit companies, and frankly, is a good business move.

If you have philosophical differences with entering into such contracts yourself, then fine, but that doesn't mean this offer isn't valuable for other folks.

There is no dichotomy because I'm not endorsing that we should, as a nation, focus our economy on innovation. I think it's inevitable that a national government with few exportable resources and an expensive labor force must seek to shore up its ability to monetize IP, yes, but I don't personally advocate that this is a good thing. Without goods extracted from the earth here, or made by US factories, all that's left to offer the rest of the world is innovation and services. Since services are subject to competition from sources that we can't compete with cost-wise, the government is pinning its hope on IP. This is an entirely logical conclusion to come to if the goal is maintaining the status quo of economic advantage over other countries, but again, that's not what I personally am advocating as policy here.

As for your example, I can sympathize that some R&D may not pay off immediately, but I don't think that patents should be a hedge against making a poor investment, being ahead of your times, or simply speculating. These activities are risky. Likewise, I'm not convinced that incidental discoveries are something entities should profit from (though I grant they're probably impossible to distinguish from non-incidental discoveries, or that it's possible to predict all discoveries). I don't have a suggestion as to what the term should be, though I do think that a one-size-fits-all term is not appropriate across industries.

I'm not convinced that a strictly-capitalist view of things is the right way to go. I'll grant that it does many things well, and that the opposite extreme is certainly not successful at industrial scale, but it also fails entirely at other things. Capitalism fails entirely when profits cannot be measured in dollars and cents, for example. It also tends to make the rich richer, and the poor poorer. To say that capitalism is the only way to success is true only in as much as capitalism defines for itself that success means economic success. I'm no socialist hippie, but a lot of pure-capitalist logic is quite circular in nature.

I think you've come to the wrong conclusion about what I was saying.

The first paragraph I'm merely acknowledging what I see as the inevitability that any developed nation must realize: That without raw resources or cheap labor to offer up to the world economy, all that's really left is innovation. And if that nation intends to support itself on the fruit of that innovation, then they must have themselves, and lobby for others to adopt, IP laws that benefit those who hold the most. This is not something I'm arguing for myself, I just think it happens to be on the natural course of things if we desire to maintain the economic status quo.

The second paragraph does advocate for reasonable protections that grant individuals, and their governments through taxation, to benefit from their efforts. The problem with the current system is that there are essentially no limits to the amount of control that the IP holder can exercise, nor any real limit to the length of time one can reap the benefit from their innovation. Current IP law is essentially a land-grab: it says "This thought is mine." and also "If you have to pass through my thought on the way to yours, I can collect a toll. If the price I want is too high, sorry, you and the world are denied your thought." Combined with lengthy protection terms, this allows patent holders to exercise too much control over future innovation.

Patents should exist in some form in order to spur investments as you say, but likewise they should expire in a reasonable term so that they cannot be lorded over future innovation essentially indefinitely. This is a distinctly anti-capitalist idea, but I believe that, at some point, society as a whole has indeed paid all that's due to the inventor, and their invention should at that point essentially become public domain.

I don't take this stance as an outsider. The kind of work I do is digital, and therefore solely protected by IP laws, anyone can replicate the fruit of my labor bit-by-bit, with no real capital cost. I choose not to employ DRM, and to instead encourage people to support me by providing them with a great product, and in the future, supporting services. I *should* be able to seek recompense should someone illicitly distribute or clone my work, but I don't care to have a bludgeon that can be used to prevent those who might do a better job than I, or who might take my ideas in a distinct direction, from doing so.

In college I knew a guy who belonged to the family who's ancestor had invented the modern ball-point pen. He's a really nice guy. I wouldn't begrudge him or anyone else the good fortune of being born into wealth. That such a simple but ubiquitous invention could bring wealth to a family is what should happen when the system works. On the other hand, it seems a little ludicrous that royalties and licenses still flow several generations on.

Also keep in mind that all of IP is not some god-given right of inventive minds. It's a social contract in which society at large agrees to play by certain rules in order to spur innovation and investment. If one side abuses the other, they'll take their ball and go home--this is not the exclusive right of IP holders.