I pretty much agree with you, but I can't help but cringe when I see the SC moniker after KDE. The amateur marketing crap has got to go.

Porn is neither, no matter how much some would wish it was so.

Umm what exactly do you think it is then? Prostitution? Because then it would be illegal.

You may not think it qualifies as art, but that is just your misinformed opinion. Just because I don't consider Uwe Boll movies art doesn't mean they aren't treated as such and protected by copyright. You're wrong.

The summary states that they turned away 600 participants. I'm betting all 600 were males.

Well, most would say no, that doesn't count, and this hypocrisy is exactly why most of the rage about child porn is actually directed at what should be considered a thought crime. A cop/judge/jury can look at a picture of child pornography and no harm is done. But if an ordinary citizen looks at the same picture, many will say (NCMEC for one) that the child is being molested all over again. This is how punishments for possession of child pornography have successfully been ratcheted up to levels equal to (and in many cases greater) than the punishment for sexual abusing a child.

The use of child pornography as justification to restrict other rights won't end anytime soon. Law enforcement and interested groups have successfully convinced most of the public that possession of child porn is equivalent to molesting a child. Literally, one and the same. This has inflamed any conversation about child pornography well past the point of any rationality.

Wait... you can grow guns in closets? Or in national forests? Or make them in homemade "gun labs"? I did not know that.

Your entire argument accepts at face value that child porn is universally produced for profit, yet if you look at a sample of recent arrest reports for child porn possession seldom few appear to have any financial exchange involved. People are arrested every day for downloading child porn for free off of P2P networks. And of course when people use P2P to download movies and games it is harmful to their respective industries, but when P2P is used to download child porn it supposedly supports the industry.

Well said. I agree completely. If you haven't already, you should check out one of Aaron Seigo's posts from earlier this year on his blog:

http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-dont-need-no-stinking-nepomuk-right.html

He attempts to justify and defend the thorough integration of neopomuk and akonadi with KDE4 in his post and the subsequent comments. He mostly fails.

In my opinion Aaron Seigo needs to go. He seems like a really nice guy and all, but he still defends the release strategy of KDE4.0 (and this despite being one of the lead devs of the -at the time- completely bug-ridden and barely functional plasma), and seems to always be at the forefront of KDE4's questionable future plans. They've reached feature parity(?) with 3.5.X. Now they need to work on stability and speed. Stability and speed. Stability and speed. The obsession with social networking integration is stupid and shortsighted. The SC naming scheme is lame. And almost as many users are now annoyed by neopomuk and akonadi as they are by that damn cashew.

Even if the child pornography is created by the one being exploited? A lot of the "child porn" being produced today is self-shot by teenagers. People have to stop taking the black and white approach to child pornography because time and technology has changed. Laws originally intended to stop a financially driven market for child porn are being used against teenagers sending cell-phone pictures to their friends.

It's already been diluted beyond recognition. The original intent behind child pornography laws was to try and cut off the market for pictures and videos of children engaged in sex acts. Now there is virtually no market to speak of, and thousands of people each year are arrested for simple possession without having engaged in any financial transaction to buy the stuff. Not to mention the teenagers being arrested for taking pictures of themselves in the mirror. And the penalties are completely out of line. In most jurisdictions, you're much better off facing a criminal charge of actually molesting a child then you are facing any sort of child porn charge (which can inevitably be prosecuted on the federal level).

People have inundated with the "child porn = worst evil evar on earth" propaganda for so long that they only weakly question if an upskirt pic of 17 year old Miley Cyrus taken in public should be considered child pornography: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/06/17/earlyshow/leisure/celebspot/main6590770.shtml

Whether an actual child is being exploited is no longer of any concern. It's simply the easiest way for governments and law enforcement agencies to have some control over the flow of information on the internet.

He came up with the name Purefoy from a book entitled Ulysses. Imagine that.

I tried to install that a while ago on kubuntu and it didn't work for whatever reason. Yes, yes I know, kubuntu sucks, every other kde4 implementation is perfect. Regardless, it didn't work. I just wish there would be a simple option to disable it, like opensuse has added; it makes no sense to me to have it on my desktop when I can just right click and get the same functionality.

IMO it's a prime example of the stubbornness and inflexibility of the current KDE dev team.

On a related note, Aaron Seigo had an interesting post on his blog (http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-dont-need-no-stinking-nepomuk-right.html) where he struggled (mostly in vain) to explain to people why akonadi and nepomuk were needed or even useful. A lot of comments were similar to yours... basically, just give us a stable KDE desktop to run apps and stop messing around with whizzbang buggy features and eye-candy.

The only way to truly fix the cashew is to enable a way to remove it (not just in opensuse). Have they done that yet?

I haven't seen any posts here claiming that child pornography is a positive thing. They are just disputing the rationality of penalizing aspects of it.

But again, you're avoiding the question. Do you think a 16 year old taking a sexual picture of themselves should be illegal or not?