Messages

[ALL]

I started using Trillian around the version 0.4, and stood by it right up until version 2-something Pro, which I actually purchased.

It eventually turns out to be too much, even if it is comfortable for a while. T2 turned out to be very disorganized. Paid the very cheap update, and I tried T3. Was sorely disappointed, and removed completely.

GAIM is great on Linux, but the Windows version if ugly and hap-hazard.

The IM client I've been using ever since I stopped using Trillian is called Miranda.

I like it a lot, because the interface is very simple, yet very customizable. You can get it to do practically anything, will not having it load up features you won't load. For a very long time, I had so few plugins (just AIM, MSN and the basic conversation interface), that it would never take up more than 1 MB in memory.

The icing on the cake, and feature I love most about it ... is that it saves *ALL* your convos in a very searchable database. One of my biggest tragedies was when I accidentally erased all my convos from three years back. You can export everything as text, or XML.

Also, you can very effectively merge several contacts seemlessly in a metacontact.

Finally, it keeps all its settings, and all information in ONE single "Profile" file. Meaning it won't clog up your registery or system folder or anything, and you actually can put it on a floppy disk and use it wherever (I've often used it in the "Business Room" that many hotels now offer for at convenience of their clients).

I think any Sierra games online to download for free, is illegal, as Sierra never ever did anything for “abandonware”.

Everybody is invited, considering that you'll need to be 18. No matter if you've discussed with me or do you hate me, or do you think that you're going to. My experience says that Mittens cures that.

Mittens cures animosity? Wow. I should've gone there a long time ago.

On the subject of dates, perhaps something more formal could be done? Perhaps if everybody gave the ranges of vacation, school, and exam periods, and if we super-impose those periods to touristing seasons ... you might be able to see which periods are the lesser evil, no?

I volunteer to write a program to view all the ranges!

where do you stop? For some people, porn won't do it -- do you then have to provide them with prostitutes because they have the right to fulfil their sexual needs?

Crap. I really brought that one onto me, didn't I 

www.locustleaves.com/jazz.ogg

Cool!!

BTW, forgive my ignorance but what are you playing to? I mean what's the "loop" (?) in the background, on which your half-overwanking

Yes. Pedophilic porn is of course outlawed in all possible instances. And it was never question here whether it should be made legal or not.

[a small parenthesis : I'm going against what I've been saying here, but I'd say that regarding pedophilic porn, it's not always cut and clear ... I had a friend who's younger brother, when he was 14 (a couple years ago), shot himself with a webcam masturbating and penatrating himself with a pen and distributed it on a P2P network.

What is there to do? Are the people who downloaded the video guilty? Is the young brother guilty himself of distributing illegal pornography? Or is he judged incapable of discerning judgment? Perhaps the latter is an example in which common sense prevails over rules?]

[training]

Allowing prisoners to sit back and watch TV and read porn just makes them idle and no less likely to reoffend.

I couldn't agree more. However, to be honest and cynical, *training* prisoners into productive members of society, to help them reinsert into society (and thus be much less likely to "reoffend") costs a LOT more money than installing a TV in their rooms. I imagine the porn is paid for by the prisoners (and I was under the impression you weren't going to wilfully spend one fifth of your hardly earned salary to train convicts---I probably wouldn't).

How is access to pornography a basic human right? It's a luxury item, and as such is a privilege, not a right.

I must say I was originally turned down by this line thought, because I thought you targeted only a certain "kind" of offensers. Now that I know that you do not, I personally have less objections, though objections I have nonetheless.

I don't believe porn is a luxury. Considering the convicts (theoritically) won't have sex for months, years, sometimes decades (especially in the case of pedophiles, BTW) ... how are they supposed to respond to their sexual needs? It's not because they're bad guys, that they don't have needs anymore, and sexuality can arguably be considered a basic need.

And what do you consider basic human rights? Could an isolation chamber represent basic human rights, according to you? And that begs the question, should we put all prisoners in isolations chambers? Better, should we put prisoners in those small cube cages, where there's no room to stand or sit, and you have to stay crouched for hours?

[Dow]

Well we here have two different opinions. Rui, you're saying sex offenders should not porn, and Pumaman, you're saying all (?) prisoners shouldn't have porn.

Is that right?


(PS: my nick is Dowland, not Download  ; though are faaaaar from being the first to misspell it!!)

Should, according to you, a bank robber be allowed to have porn?


Regarding loss of freedom and loss of voting right. That is not a bit different. Loss of freedom, because the prisoner has commited an offense, and it is to prevent them from committing it again (and of course, is a punitive measure too). Loss of the right to vote, is indeed punishment called disenfranchisement ... and it's not necessarily good either. You can completely lose your right to vote for having shoplifted (Wynona Rider was almost disenfranchised).


But you say that felons should "surely" have to sacrifice some of their rights as punishment. Which rights would that be?

I don't know if you really think that people actually has the same opinion about people who freely chooses to life its sexuallity with people with its same sex than people who violates babies. I tell you. NO. We had an actor who is gay in the list of the most popular guys in Spain this month.

Pretend as though I don't believe anything.

Again here, quantity is not what determines validity. It isn't because less people view homosexuality as a sin (oh, believe me, there definitely are people who view gays as sinners), or because being gay be perceived as less than a sin, that there aren't people nonetheless who view homosexuality as sin, almost as bad as child raping.

I remember it wasn't so long ago that having same-sex intercourse in Texas was actually a crime (I'm not even sure it has changed since), that could get you jailed up.

Sorry Dowland... I must develop my post.

I am sick by that pedophile. I am sick by him getting porn in his jail. And I am sick that some "human rights" allow that.

If we sum all the "sicknesses" of all the people who are sick about that, we'll probably get an amount of sickness higher that the one that that bastard might have.

So... What about our human rights ? Ain't the sum of all those rights bigger that the human right of the pedophile?

Again, not a valid argument. First of all sickness is an emotion, or a "passion", in the same way desire, or love is.

What you're saying, is that because this man is making a LOT of people sick, than he should punished moreso---those people want to take, in essence, revenge.

My following reasoning is a stupid one, but it goes in the same direction. G. W. Bush is making a whole lot of people sick, starting with a little bit less than 50% of US citizens, back in November 2004 (and according to recent news coverage, probably more now). He's making me sick. Literally. The No Child Left Behind act makes me sick.

Again homosexuals, men loving other men, fucking other men, displaying their sexuality in the open ... that makes a lot of people---mostly religious but not solely---very, very sick. I've seen and heard those people talk about gay people, and it has made me want to lurch, because so much hatred, disgust, revulsion, and bigotry is bundled in their words. Because they feel sick of homosexuals (and there are a lot of religious biggots in the world, a LOT), should they be allowed to punish gays?

Likewise, last century, masturbation was the deadly sin. Should all masturbators been hung by their balls? Can you consider that a few centuries ago, pedophiles weren't hunted as now, and that family's sold their virgin girls to rich dukes? ... but then, I digress, because the issue I raised was certainly not whether pedophiles are criminals (they most certainly are), but whether they are criminals within criminals. The worst of the worse.

Does the sickness those people creates in normal people count as "doing something to us"?

Just one more thing. In that respect, pedophiles and homosexuals are in the same category, aren't they? I mean, if we agree that pedophiles make a great majority of people sick ... well homosexuals make quite a deal of people sick too.

The fact is, it should have nothing to do with how you feel about them.

Hell, if ALL the other prisoners had porn and he hadn't, it might well be enough punishment for him.

No. A prisonner has made an offense. He his judged on that offense, and given a punishment which, theoretically, is in measure of that offense. The offense is a short or longer time served in prison.
BUT you cannot decide to strip such and such prisonner from such or such right. Rights are just that, rights. You CANNOT take them away, because that lets the door open to any sort of abuse. Stripping rights is not a procedure that can be theoritized, because the in essence, it would mean that some individuals, or systems, or government, or penal systems, have rights above others. Which they don't.

As far as I know prisonners are allowed access to porn. I have no idea if that is the case in UK, Germany, Asia, and US though.

Cool. Someone who didn't read through. (plus "create sickness" = "grossing you out")

[you]

[OFF TOPIC]

the recent case of a convicted pedophile who demanded that he be supplied porn in his jail cell because it was his "human right" to have access to it; and he won his case

I was going to write a whole speech, but I really just want to ask a question first and foremost ... What the hell do you care? What have you to be angry about?  This pedophile, did he do *you* any wrong? Did the crime he commit diminish your property otherwise than by just grossing you out?

Do you think being locked in jail will be any more pleasant now that he has access to porn?

It's trendy nowadays to catch the pedophiles. People see pedophiles everywhere, it's our century's witch hunt. I am most disgusted with Michael Jackson's case, of how he got into trouble for saying he liked sleeping with kids. That could be understood so many ways, and the only way it is understood is in some twisted pedophilic plot to sodomize preteens.

It's trendy nowadays to DISLIKE pedophiles. If you consider that there's some sort of hierarchy to crimes, then you usually tend to put child molesting at the very top, the highest rated crime, the most disgusting. Why? Even people who don't like children at all, hate pedophiles above all. It's like there's a general consensus.

I believe it's highly arrogant, and egocentrical. That the world revolves around your sensibilities; that crimes were commited solely so you could feel outragedâ€"and by feeling outraged, that you could feel good about yourself.

Because that's what it really is. Pedophiles are vilified not only because raping a child is a hainous act in itself, but because not being ABSOLUTELY against child molesting, not wanting them to SUFFER through hell, would mean (for you, for others) that perhaps, somewhere deep inside of you, you have those unwanted feelings.

It's a dramatic case of “if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.”

[... ramblings cut off ...]

The fact of the matter is, first of all, forbidding porn to prisonners is not a punishment. Prisonners, whatever you'd like to think, and whatever crimes they commited, are not animals that you can just throw in a stable, and butt-fuck themselves because they can't let it out any other way. As I recall, no prisonner has ever been forbidden porn ... so why now? Why just for this pedophile, why should he be denied that "right" over father stabbers, or mother rappers, or jail robbers?


It's not because you have, for whatever reason, a desire of revenge on this person that he should suffer your wrath. The penal system, beside having quite an homoerotic name, should not be your way/society's way of taking revenge.

As far as I can remember, the first Human Rights bill was created as a reaction to the first-half of the century inhumane infamy. After those atrocities were known of the general public---horror, disgust, outrage, (and guilt also I imagine) led everybody to do everything to prevent such a thing from ever happening again. This led to the HR bill, and two important "alliances", namely UNO and ECSC (to become EU).

The "HR only benefits the bad guys" argument is one I hear a lot. From right wing extremists. While I've also witnessed those OJ type trials, or irrational rules ... it is such a carricature to think that we'd be better off without them.

Banned? Thank the Lord, I wasn't 13 when I joined this community.

Seems like the whole concept of adult language is very anglo-saxon.

I know children who live in Marseilles (France) for instance, who have absolutely no qualms about using such words as “connard”, “con” (and it sounds like “kong”, with the accent).

No such censoring exists in Parisians, I believe. The few times I've spent time in Spain, I did not notice anybody being careful. In Barcelona, “hijo de puta” (was it?) were flying out the windows ...


I believe it's very much a cultural thing, hence some people being head-on against “it”, and other not able to care less.

Why make a Henry VIII game? I mean, by the time they get to 8th installment, those sequels get pretty predictable.

Thanks for your very clear reply. You do make very valid points! 

[EDIT:]

Were the following points made (before I put the issue back to rest) :

• if anybody is serious enough about pinching art, they'll do it one way or another ;
  
• this includes reverse-engineering the files, something which is certainly not unheard of ;
  
• nobody ever opposed Lucas-Arts or Sierra game editors (which most often had no other purpose than to take the animated walking frames of Indy, or of Hoagie ...).

Furthermore was the possibility that they might be released privately, on a per case basis, left open?

EDIT: Umpf ... just realized Pumaman = CJ. Silly me.