Dune was a great movie. Maybe I wouldn't feel that way had I read the book first, but the movie is a timeless masterpiece in its own right.

I am advocating censorship. There's is and has been a lot of bad censorship in the world, but to ban it wholesale would be foolish. Freedom of speech is a guaranteed right in the USA, but not everywhere. I assume that's what you mean by fundamental. But even fundamental rights have limits, and these limits usually occur at the boundary of safety and public health.

You're fixated on rape. I'm talking about sexual dysfunction and deviant behaviour, which have always been associated with the decline of civilisations. To open the door to child pornography (even the animated sort) is to consent to the poisoning of one's own society. There are worse things than metered and responsible censorship.

Some freedoms are more important than others, and some safety mechanisms are more effective than others. The TSA (and arguably most or all real consequences of the Patriot Act) is a sham, and it's disingenuous to lump together baby formula and baby porn as being even remotely comparable on the danger scale.

It's perfectly reasonable to suggest that when you have a bell curve or any other spectrum of dangerous behaviour, sanctioning any activity that is known or likely to push that bell curve in the direction of more dangerous activity is socially irresponsible. We don't have to prove that "people will go out and rape children" as a result of child porn. It is sufficient to show that child pornography, in whatever form it may take, is a contributing factor to child sexual abuse.

I'm not sure what you're even asserting here. That I should use Google to research the impetus of child pornography laws in nations that include animation or other non-real representations in the ban? No, I think common sense dictates that there is more than the one reason that you state.

Again, your point is not clear. You're saying that the availability of animated child pornography has no demonstrable link with the social acceptability of the practice of paedophilia? I don't see what that has to do with the idea of conditioning and generalization.

That's a really poor restatement of my point, and pretty much a straw man. I'm saying that training oneself to respond sexually to images that look like children will normally increase one's sexual response to children, and that's a bad thing.

I slept in this morning, but chose to get up and go to work anyway. I don't see one failure as justification for letting oneself go completely.

Classical conditioning and generalization are pretty well understood phenomena by now. If you don't think that generalization for sexual stimulus can occur between animations and living persons, then how do you propose people are being stimulated by animations in the first place?

Citation needed. No doubt that's one reason, but what about the effects of conditioning people (or leaving the legal door open for them to condition themselves, if you prefer) to respond sexually to minors? There are some very good reasons not to encourage or allow child pornography which doesn't directly involve children.

So if the constitution was suspended and the leader of the constitutional court appointed leader, does the first action cancel the potency of the second?

Under the circumstances I'm guessing not, but the irony is at least a little bit tasty.

159cm annually. It takes more time to get around on a bike in the winter (getting dressed, moving slower, cleaning the bike), but it's certainly doable if you are riding on paved roads where the snow at least gets packed down from day to day, if not ploughed. But much like biking in the summer, biking in the winter carries with it some measure of pleasure and satisfaction.

d8 m8 s8 gr8 (with apologies to Wayne White)

The Acer settlement (and all the others mentioned here, if I had to guess) is for US residents only. It's too bad this couldn't have been mentioned in the summary, the linked article, or even the front page for the settlement.

Are the /. editors yet unaware that the majority of its readership lives outside the US?

Also interesting is the fact that the entire world of computing outside of the XBOX 360 was able to adapt to the Pb-free initiative without all the drama and years of failed hardware.

Not until we can rule out NAT acceleration.

Poe's Law

We've got to HELP THEM!