Meetings, Usual Life Stuff, News

[tcpip]

Tomorrow evening I am speaking at the Melbourne Existentialist Society on "Autonomy and the Phenomenology of Nature and Property", which relates to an interest some fifteen years old in my persective; developing a political and economic outlook to existentialism. Next week (same location, same time) is the Melbourne Atheist Society, with Russell Blackford speaking on "Religious Vilification and Freedom of Speech", on which I've already stated my point-of-view in various forums (simply put: many racial and religious practises and beliefs and the people who espouse them are deserving of ridicule, contempt and even hatred; I encourage and incite others to express the same).

Work has mainly consisted of more server hardware builds and Xen installs along with transferring sites and mail to a new server. Jon Oxer is back onboard giving presentations and tutorials at OsCon. Social life has struggled a bit with caseopaya not being the most well critter this week. Played Ars Magica Festival of the Damned courtesy of Michael and ran Stormbringer Rogue Mistress.

Well-paid stupidity: Kevin Zuccato, head of the Australian High Tech Crime Centre in Canberra, says terrorists can gain training in games such as World of Warcraft in a simulated environment, using weapons that are identical to real-world armaments (from begedel). Paid users now can't avoid "ads" in livejournal (just call it 'sponsorship'. Welcome our new (armed) robot overlords in Iraq (from mundens). Russia is getting very serious about claiming the North pole (with some justification I may add). Finally, vale, Dr. Ellis, another hero of the human species.

Comments

[angel80.livejournal.com]

I'm at a loss to know what's going on with LJ. I presume you can still avoid ads by not using the sponsored layouts and/or mood icons and then having your friends page display in your own layout?

There's also some crap going on with Harry Potter and so-called 'child porn'. Apparently in the US the age of consent is 18.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I believe the community linked is still engaging in custom-layouts that effectively block ads, although iirc such things are technically breaches of service.

The crap you refer to was a witchhunt and journal banning by the lj-authorities, on the behest of some white supremicists (of all people), against fan-fiction (amateur sf, fantasy etc) which included sexual content which incorporated under-18s.

I saw a couple of epic lists of famous literature which includes such material (including the Bible of course) which were rather pointed in their comments. A couple of law enforcement agents had some rather unkind comments to say as well.

The whole horrible mess can be read here:

http://news.livejournal.com/99159.html

As for the age of consent in the U.S., it varies according to State (yeah, real smart that)

http://www.avert.org/aofconsent.htm

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

No, that was the saga, but round 2 is now in progress. After the apology and reinstatement from that flap, LJ have now banned a couple of users for HP porn.

Australia has the same problem with age of consent. Which has lead to the odd, and somewhat ridiculous situation, where in many states two 17 year olds can legally perform all sorts of sexual acts on each other, but if one of them whips out a camera phone to record the moment they technically become a child pornographer liable for serious jail time. Or, for that matter, technically if they write a story about it.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Ahh, I was not aware at all of round 2.

WRT to your second point it's true enough; there is a set of rules that seems to say that individuals can perform and act but not record it.

Which as far as moral ontology goes is just a whole new degree of stupidity; the law is often an ass and the more complex and more fragmented it is, the more prone to pressure groups which leads to rational inconsistencies, such as what you describe.

[cluebyfour.livejournal.com]

White supremacists? That's an angle I hadn't heard before. I thought it was just a group of fundies who feared that HP was going to turn their kids into amoral, "Crucio!"-spewing Satanists.

At any rate, the latest round of suspensions seems to be the final straw for the HP fandom; I understand they're going to move en masse to friendlier climes. Unfortunately, with the child porn laws in the U. S. being what they are, I don't know what service they'll find (unless it's off-shore) that won't be immune to the same kind of pressure.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

IIRC the livejournal news link has someone pointing out the connection on the first page of comments.

Livejournal is being very daft. A fund should be establish to buy it off Six Apart. They have amazing levels of incompetence.

[angel80.livejournal.com]

Brad Fitz has now departed too.

And springheel_jack linked to a post yesterday on declining numbers. They now have only 200,000 people posting within the last day, a little more than half of the average number when 6A took it over.

As for other services, there are several using the LJ code - insanejournal, greatestjournal, deadjournal - and blurty. But there's hardly anyone on them.

It seems that 6A also owns typepad, which is also rumoured to be in trouble.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

LJs strength is the critical mass they have. Their loss is their managment.

The new places with lj's code will be fighting among themselves for the critical mass; whereas SA, apparently, will continue to alienate the customer base.

It's a rather depressing scenario.