i would never think a country like britain would fall victim to this sort of censorial nonsense, and it is a troubling development

however, i don't buy the argument it is because of feminism

you need to understand that feminism there is the older valid causes against the maltreatment of women and the removal of their rights. which used to be far worse in the west. and is indeed still a major problem in the world, especially in areas like india and islamic countries

but the kind of feminism you seem to be reacting to isn't really feminism at all, it is instead this sort of clueless teenaged reactive naval gazing by immature clowns

kind of like how dismantling all governmental protections against abuses by large market players is called "libertarianism" in the usa. while actual genuine libertarianism of the original european sort has to do with social issues. real valid libertarians are interested in legalizing marijuana, not freeing plutocrats from paying their fair share of taxes

so like the word "libertarian" in the usa has been hijacked corrupted and rendered invalid by a plutocrat agenda, so to have a few headcases coopted the word "feminist" and advanced truly nutty causes that only mark the believer in those causes as having some sort of psychological or social deficiency

furthermore, for you to react to these fringe idiots, and believe what they stand for is actual feminism, just means you have been horribly trolled. snap out of it, you've been fooled

real, valid feminism is a very important ideology in this world, against the very real and very evil treatment of women in many parts of this world

thank you, that's a valid clarification

i am aware some countries outlaw fantasy cartoon child porn as well as actual real child porn

while real child porn should never be legal and should always be blocked, i think that fantasy drawings and cartoons do have valid cathartic use and should be legal

also, the legal status quo against fantasy content precludes the tactic of honey pots

outlawing the fantasy content drives it underground, while allowing it to flow freely allows the authorities to track profile, and locate consumers of it

as they should

because viewing this material indicates a proclivity that allows us to find pedophiles

and pedophiles should never be able to exist in open society without monitoring

like drug addiction, we should not incarcerate pedophiles, we should treat them as having a healthcare issue. pedophiles, once identified, should be treated, not jailed

and closely watched nonetheless

because like how valid porn between consenting adults does not prevent all rape, only minimize it, fantasy child porn would also only mitigate child abduction and victimization, not prevent all of it

being a pedophile marks you as fundamentally incompatible with human society in a truly horrible way. i feel sorry for pedophiles, i'd rather have painful cancer than be a pedophile, it is a truly life destroying, life hobbling vile affliction

because to be a pedophile means you have a sexual proclivity which immediately elicits the completely valid parental response and societal response to protect their children. some of that instinct outside the realm of law will find immediate and violent impulse, and even large sympathy for that violent impulse. the imperative to protect children is strong, as it should be, and pedophilia is a valid threat. but even in the realm of legality, society has to strongly consider the potential for grave harm that a pedophile represents in open society. a pedophile is truly screwed in many ways, and there is little empathy for them

pedophilia, like homosexuality, is merely a genetic aberration in the formation of sexual attraction. but while homosexuality is fine because it involves consenting adults, pedophilia will never be ok because it involves one party that can never consent (in an informed way, not a bullshit "i gave you toys and candy and you said 'ok' to my suggestion of sex" because a child can never give informed consent on the topic)

i think maybe in the future we can treat pedophilia with child shaped robots

but even so, treatment will never prevent all pedophiles from hurting real children. and therefore society must always view them in a very critical, suspicious, dim light. because they always represent the potential for grave harm

i think if i were a pedophile i'd choose self-banishment to greenland or something. having a strong sense of morality is only a guide, not a cloak of protection, we all have moments of weakness, and i would never want a moment of weakness of mine to result in harm to a child

truly a life-crippling, monstrous affliction

No, it just shows your lack of reading comprehension. Go back and find any mention in my posts of morality. It's OK. I'll wait.

agreed 100%

you have no principles or morality in your "thinking" on the topic. that's the actual point

you have mindless contrarianism where one person can do something evil because somebody else did. and then blame that evil action on someone else anyways, due to your lack of understanding of the concept of accountability

you demonstrate your own personal failures of character rather than any valid commentary on geopolitics. you are projecting choices and consequences as understood by your own dim wattage mind:

1. "somebody did something bad so i should be able to do something bad"

two-wrongs-make-a-right logic

2. "the reason i did something bad is because of what someone else did that does not actually logically imply my action, but whatever"

wife beater logic

your arguments depend upon this "thinking", therefore you mark yourself as an immoral and irresponsible douchebag

i actually feel sorry for anyone who has to work with you or is related to you/ friends with you. you're obviously a horrible piece of shit in the way you think about what is justified or not in this world according to #1 and #2 above

here's some bullshit arguments similar to yours:

"if we legalize marijuana, that means we have to legalize heroin and meth"

"if we legalize gay marriage, that means we have to legalize marrying corpses or animals"

see the problem? people actually think in your world. and they can tell the difference between different topics. we don't slide effortlessly into lack of thought on major issues of liberty and rights. no one does. your argument is illogical FUD

simply having the tool or liberty to do one thing, does not automatically mean that using that tool or liberty in all cases is therefore legitimized or inevitable or even more likely

because people can tell the difference between different topics. we think. we're not blind

the very concept of the slippery slope is a logical fallacy that instantly marks the argument as invalid. it is used to make fear-based demagogue arguments

this doesn't mean i support blocking porn websites, it simply means that the act of blocking websites: phishing sites, child porn sites, etc., does not in any way have anything to do with restricting websites that have genuine free expression use that the govt may not like. to block those, the govt has to actually do that, and therefore is doing something new and different and not in any way related to blocking sites that really do need to be blocked (child porn, phishing, etc.)

you have to remove the thinking human being from the equation to make your bullshit argument work. or do you believe blocking websites requires some vast infrastructure that would not be viable nor exist if we didn't block child porn first? nonsense

you can say having a police dept is a slippery slope to martial law. except there is no actual slippery slope because people can actually tell the difference between different concepts of use for a police dept. as recent controversies in the usa demonstrate. and in fact without a police dept, society quickly succumbs to chaos

think

invoking the concept of the slippery slope removes you from the land of logic and reason and places you firmly in the land of fear based emotion

more socially conservative societies that restrict outlets for harmless sexual release do indeed have higher rates of rape and sexual violence in general. there is much truth to the concept of catharsis as a way to reduce rape and sexual violence. it doesn't prevent everything, just some of it

but bringing up child porn in this context is a red herring because the creation of child porn victimizes actual children, and this is why it is genuinely immoral illegal and verboten

sexual content between consenting adults is completely unrelated to child porn. to believe it is marks you as woefully inadequate to comment intelligently on the topic, or a failed troll

Wrong. You only have a natural right to control whether or not you create it at all.

A third party certainly doesn't have a right to compel you to reveal your work to them. But if you do deliberately or inadvertently reveal it, they do have a natural free speech right to copy it and to distribute those copies as they see fit.

how socially clueless and sheltered can someone be?

you have asperger's maybe?

there's some sort of large social deficit at work here resulting in spouting this nonsense

I agree. What's your point?

All you've identified there is a gap between what copyright policy requires and what we actually have implemented. I'd be the last person to say that our copyright laws, as enacted, have lived up to our proper policy goals. But that doesn't change what the correct policy is.

Copyright doesn't exist absent affirmative action by the government, and it is wholly utilitarian in nature. This means that there is no policy of balancing interests. Rather, it is a question of how it can best serve the public interest; if giving something to authors may accomplish that, then we should do it to an appropriate extent, and if not, we shouldn't do it.

It's little different than the farmer who wants to haul his carrot harvest to market in a wagon pulled by a mule. He might have to feed the mule some of the carrots to get it to pull the wagon, but there's no balancing act between the farmer and the mule. (Indeed, as soon as it's more cost-effective for the farmer to just get a gas-powered truck, the mule gets sent to the glue factory)

That's not true. You're arguing in favor of monopolies controlling commodity goods, which is an odd stance to take. Society benefits tremendously from works being in the public domain, and available for the economic exploitation of any and every party that cares to give it a go. So long as anyone is free to make copies of Shakespeare, it doesn't hurt society if some publishers charge for copies of it. Given that competition is possible for copies of the same public domain work, all that will happen if one publisher tries to charge too much is that someone else will step in and sell it for less. This all works to bring the price of copies down, which in turn increases the public's access to the work, which is necessary for the work to be of use.

The widows and orphans argument has always been unmitigated bullshit. Works usually have zero copyright-related economic value; of the few that do have such value, they usually burn through the vast majority of it within a short time after the first publication in a given medium. Only the tiniest fraction of works have long-lasting copyright related economic value.

Suggesting that the survivors of a deceased author need longer terms in order to live off the value of a copyright requires that it be a copyright of this sort. Given the rarity of such works, it's as stupid a suggestion as saying that you might as well leave them a shoebox full of lottery tickets.

If you actually care about providing for your family, you need to take out a life insurance policy, and you need to save and invest your money wisely in a diverse portfolio. And just to be safe, you'd better vote for politicians who will enact government programs to provide actual, useful assistance to poor people.

The reality behind the widows and orphans argument is that a handful of authors and publishers who already won the lottery, as it were, by holding the copyrights on works with long-lasting copyright related economic value, wanted to preserve their gravy train. It's as if the winner of a $100 million dollar jackpot used some of that money to successfully lobby for a retroactive increase to a $200 million dollar jackpot.

I'm not arguing in favor of extremism in any direction. I don't think that copyrights should be short, I think that they should be no longer than absolutely necessary. An overly-long copyright is harmful to the public because it is waste. An overly-short copyright is harmful to the public because it doesn't incentivize authors as much as is appropriate. What we need are copyright terms (and scope) that hit the sweet spot where we get the most efficiency: the most works created and published yet for the least restrictions on the public.

But this also means that your disrespect for 'moochers' is totally inappropriate. Ideally we could grant copyright terms (we'll set aside scope for now) on a case-by-case basis. If the minimum copyright incentive that author Smith needs to write and publish his book is 3 years, then we grant him 3 years. If the minimum copyright incentive that filmmaker Jones needs to film and distribute his movie is 10 years, then we grant him 10 years. If the minimum copyright incentive that painter Brown needs to paint and sell copies of his painting is 0 years, we don't grant him a copyright at all. Does this allow for third parties to compete against Smith in 3 years, Jones in 10 years, and Brown from day one? Sure. But who cares? Granting one day's worth of a longer term to any of them is pointless, because they've already got the minimum amount they needed to do what we want them to do: create and publish works. It's as wasteful to grant them more as it would be to offer a construction project to the lowest bidder, yet to then double the payment to the winner just for the hell of it.

In practice, we can't fine tune copyright grants that well; we'd need to staff the Copyright Office with a legion of psychics. But we can still try to make it work efficiently. For example, requiring registration helps us weed out authors like Brown who have so little reason to care about copyright that they wouldn't bother to register. Offering short terms and renewals helps us weed out authors like Smith, who only care about copyright for a little while, and then stop because it's no longer valuable enough to them to merit filing the renewal. (We know that few works were ever renewed historically, so that's a real thing) And for authors like Jones, longer maximum term lengths -- up to a point -- could still be available. They just wouldn't be automatic, so that we don't inadvertently grant such long terms to Smith and Brown, who don't need them.

And as for authors like Black, who create a work but insist on a copyright that lasts forever, or at least for an immensely long time, even if that really is the necessary term in order to incentivize the creation and publication of the work, we can say fuck it; Black wants more than the work is worth to the public. It might be nice to have that work created and published, but a sane copyright system is more valuable than that particular work, so we'll just all have to live without, and Black can get a job doing something else.

At no point however, is the idea that we should discourage third parties from being able to compete freely ever considered, because it's dumb, basically. The copyright monopoly should not last any longer than it needs to to get works created and published. If this allows for third parties to step in while a work is commercially viable (and given that people still reprint works from antiquity, that can be a very long length of time indeed!) then so be it. There's nothing at all wrong with it. In fact, it's great, because it drives down prices and increases access to works.

I don't understand your comment. I'm saying that whatever Disney's trademark rights in the Mickey Mouse character are, once the first work in which the character appears enters the public domain, that opens the door for third parties -- that is, parties other than Disney -- to use the character, at least in some ways, and it limits the scope of Disney's trademark.

How the hell did you get from that to shilling in favor of Disney? I think perhaps you should read posts more carefully before replying.

The mods, not the mod points.

I'm pretty sure the movie introduced the other varieties of Soylent (red and yellow), with the green kind being a new version with the surprising secret feature.

I haven't seen the movie in decades and don't recall if I finished the book, though.

I use both G+ and FB, and they are different for me.

Facebook is a morass of annoying acquaintances sprinkled among family and friends. I rarely post there.

G+ is a much more interesting community for me.

Yes, my choices make each site different. FB is where most of my family is, so it also has a loft of noise, and i filter it.

So I use both.

Maybe Hillary could conduct a pilot project in her own home. Throw a few panels on the roof. It might even generate enough to power an email server.

Umm...it appears that the email server has been disconnected. Well, never mind. It's the thought that counts :-)

The other thing is that the Internet has a lot of overhead.

When it was originally developed, networking was very slow and unreliable, so small packets were picked. As hardware has improved and available bandwidth has grown exponentially, the benefits of larger packet sizes are mostly lost since, for compatibility reasons, everybody continues to use tiny packet sizes in order to avoid dropped/fragmented packets.