Images of sexually exploited children are not a judgment call issue, for the most part. It's an obvious thing.

You claim there was "way, shape, or form causing any sort of abuse", and yet those who would react to seeing the pics of your kids in the raw would define those pictures as abuse. That's the "obvious thing", "not a judgement call" attitude.

I was just going to move my cursor over to the little flag in the lower right corner of your comment when the irony hit me. No, actually, it hit me as soon as I read the summary. "Report" is not "censorship", unless the "report" button automatically removes something. Moderation here is closer to censorship because that can automatically lower a comment's rating below the limit the reader has set.

What was actually chilling in TFA was this comment:

Also, the comparison to child porn is a common one, but wrong. Images of sexually exploited children are not a judgment call issue, for the most part. It's an obvious thing.

Tell that to any parent who has had the police visit because they took snaps of the kids doing something while naked and had them processed by the local drugstore. Or the parents who post pics and videos on their blogs of little Jimmy learning to use the potty or taking a bath.

Ashcroft said it best: "I cannot define obscenity but I know it when I see it." And in many people's minds, "picture of kid without clothes" is pornography. There is no judgement involved.

No, sadly, most of them do not. Most of them care about what they can get the government to do for them so they don't have to do it themselves. If what they want done doesn't happen to mesh with what the Constitution says can be done, well, if you change the meaning of the words and read them backwards then the Constitution says you CAN do what I want...

If you cannot make your own arguments, at least stop making them up in my name. I made no demand. I stated my opinion.

Yeah, there are a lot of old traditions that the sole reason they can't be changed is because they are old traditions. The Democrat voting machine in Chicago being one. Using paper ballots at a physical polling place would be another. Oh, wait, That 'old tradition' is one you think should change. Hmmm. Seems like 'old tradition' is only an argument against change when you don't want something to change.

Since you seem unwilling to defend that "old tradition" of people who don't live someplace getting to set the rules for those who do live there, I'll assume you have no reason other than it is "old tradition", similar to the "old tradition" where the British Parliament and His/Her Majesty set the rules for their colonies.

I'm WHAT? I'm arguing for a change? Now I know you're replying to someone else.

I've already commented on the events that came about based on people in one place voting on laws to be followed elsewhere. That you equate a fictional requirement for some public service to earn the right to vote, and a logical and existing requirement that you be a resident of the jurisdiction in which that right exists, is the tiresome part here.

'Lax' is not 'none', and maintaining a residence is creating a less than location-independent lifestyle. Your use of the term "currently" when referring to the ex-pats implies a short-term nature of the ex-pat status, which also makes them less than location-independent.

Where did I say that?

And you can explain why they should have any say in any election in a country they've chosen not to live in? I don't particularly care about those who think they should change where I live to be more like where they live.

Not legally. It's hard to claim residency in one state when you don't live there anymore.

Neither are an example of location-independent people, especially not the latter. "Currently" is a dead giveaway.

The difference being that it is impossible to differentiate between the electrons you take off the wire, while it is critical that you get the same packets your ISP is putting on the wire for you and not just any packet that happens to be coming by.

That means that when an energy provider is "broken" and not putting electrons onto the distribution grid, it is a problem that that provider and the owner of the distribution grid both are very interested in solving (your payment through the distributor goes to the provider and the provider isn't). If your ISP is broken and not putting the right packets onto the distribution medium for you, the distributor doesn't care and probably doesn't know, YOU care and YOU have to deal with the ISP -- who would then blame the distributor who will blame the ISP ...

In other words, alternate energy provides can break and you'd never know it but those who have to fix it will. If your ISP breaks, YOU'll know it, but probably nobody else will.

No, "back in the day", you got to pick one local phone service and they were tied to one LD. Divestiture change the latter because the LD services were put onto the one local telco's wires to the subs at the CO or above and the LD service didn't need physical access to the copper to your house. In fact, which LD you used became an entirely switching-based question, and you could use access codes to pick a different LD provider every time you called someone. A different local provider would need that physical access, and that didn't happen, because the switching system was hardwired to your copper pair. Your phone talked to the local telco switch and you couldn't say "connect my pair to someone else."

And if you think getting something fixed is difficult now, just wait until there are three or four different companies involved in your one broadband connection. It's hard enough now to really determine where a packet loss problem is happening, just think what it would be like to determine if Comcast (the wire) was dropping packets or is it Frank's Hometown ISP and Dry Cleaner that's messing up.

In five years the "I gave up cable TV ... and my life is so great" meme that appears in /. every time a discussion even touches on how bad cable TV providers are will have morphed into "I gave up the internet ... and my life is so great".

Yes, you can subscribe to my newsletter.

You can have all the virtual-space representative government you want, just as long as it doesn't intrude on the meat-space real government we all have to live with.

If you care so little about a place that you cannot bother to live there, why should you be allowed to vote there? Voting on location-dependent laws has been and should be done by location-dependent people who are subject to them. I think there was a war or something about one group of people who thought the proper location for voting on laws wasn't the place where the laws were being applied, wasn't there? Something about tea, IIRC

A better example of the silly interpretations of what 'net neutrality' means would be hard to find.

This situation is so analogous to the long distance deregulation from decades ago that we'd be silly not to learn from it.

I remember when "Ma Bell" owned the phone system. They owned the wire into your house and the phones attached to it. They did the long distance. If it broke, you called the repair number and someone fixed it.

The only time I ever had a problem getting repair to do something back then was when I had to call the repair number in another state because the mechanical first selector in the local CO had stuck and I was only able to call numbers in a city across the state line that was in our "extended local calling area". Any number that started with '2' was Elkhart, IN, and that's what my line was frozen to. The op who answered the Elkhart repair number had a hard time understanding what I meant when I told him to have someone go to my local CO and smack the step-by-step that was frozen.

Then the great divestiture. The local telco became the "last mile" for the long distance providers. You now own the wire from the demarc into the house. You own the phones attached to it. When it breaks ...

You call the local repair number. They ask you if you've tested all your phones, even if the "break" is an inability to make long distance calls but local works fine. They say they'll send someone out, but threaten you with a big fee if they determine the problem is in your equipment.

Once the local provider determines you're calling about an LD issue, they claim it is the LD provider's problem and you need to call them.

You call the LD provider and they tell you it is a local telco issue, call them.

Yes, there were issues when Ma Bell owned it all, but getting good response to service calls was not one of them. I'd really rather not have to live through all of that again with local broadband internet. 'Hey Comcast, it's broke, fix it" is much easier than having to call two different companies eight times each to get one of them to accept responsibility and do something.

What utter bollocks. The originals were on FACEBOOK. You asked about putting them on an academic department home page on a college or university website. Those are two VERY different venues with two very different purposes and audiences.

Any academic department that put pictures of breastfeeding women on their HOME PAGE, where potential and current students are supposed to come to find information about the department, just because someone figures those pictures are FUN, should be laughed out of the college.

Nobody was evaluating the pictures as pictures, they were evaluating the entire content/venue combination. And I have no doubt that you know that, but you just wanted yet another long rant on /.

But the issue is "groups of what"? The original groups were "people who are racist and don't like seeing pictures of black women breastfeeding because they are black" and "people who aren't etc." He converted the groups being tested into "people who think pictures of women of any color breastfeeding posted to a faculty webpage is inappropriate" and "people who don't...".

You can't ask a radically different question and expect to get statistically significant information about the original question out of it. It's like claiming that you've determined that there is no difference in preference of ownership between a Lambo and a Yugo by randomly showing pictures of one of the two to a large number of people and asking "should a driver of this car be allowed to drive up on the sidewalk and run over pedestrians?" Yeah, you get 94% for both cars saying "no". That's a clear lack of preference in ownership, isn't it?

The actual weakness is that he asked a completely different question in a completely different context and is trying to shoehorn the answer to fit his personal view, and wasting a lot of electrons in doing it.

No, that's not what he said. He said nothing about "advertised price", and it is already against the law for bait and switch or other kinds of that fraud.

With regards to rebates and coupons, companies are assuming that some non-trivial percentage of people simply will not follow through on the rebate process. The way to redeem either is usually specified up front, and the customer has the right to either accept the terms or not.

It's not every company that tries to rip the customer off by failing to honor a rebate, but many customers choose not to spend the time doing it. I, too, ignore rebate numbers when I compare prices because I know I'm lazy enough not to spend a lot of time getting a $5 rebate on something.

That's nonsense. The 'real cost' is what they pay. They get to see that before they hand over the money. If they choose not to redeem a coupon or rebate, that's their choice, freely made.

Also nonsense. "What's your price before rebate?" "What's YOUR price before rebate?" A>B? B : A.

Part of competition is rebates and coupons. It's not inherently fraud, it only becomes so when one side violates the terms of the rebate or coupon. And fraud is already illegal.