Phaedrus

Since iTunes just threw it at me... Anthrax - Ekilnikufesin (NFL)

I would like to offer my most profound felicitations to His Imperial and Royal Highness the Archduke of Crossover on the occasion of his millennial post, and express my fondest desire that copious others be forthcoming in subsequent days.

WANT!!!

Good luck with whatever you're up to next!

Er... which law, precisely? If a poster in BC using an Ontario-based ISP posts a comment on a website that uses a British domain, is hosted on servers in California by a Texan company and run by a guy in Ireland, and a German who's on holiday in Spain decides he's going to complain that the comment is somehow illegal... which law applies? And no, this is not just a hypothetical example. It happens all the time. Many of the people reading this are doing so via an ISP that's based in another province. People - especially those know know they may be subject to attempts at censorship - do things like making sure their website, hosting company and hosting servers are all in different jurisdictions as a matter of course (bloggers who make a point of pissing off the powers that be are particularly good at this). And Germans do sometimes take vacations in Spain. The point here is that there really isn't such a thing as "basic" law in this area, because some of the most basic questions of law - such as jurisdiction - are completely unresolved. Even if there were, it's utterly unreasonable to expect someone running a website to keep on top of it. So... imagine, if you will, that a client posts on one of the other boards that he visited a SP and she ripped him off. She contends that YMMV, because hygiene. They can't both be right. One of them is almost certainly defaming the other. Both complain and ask for the other's post to be taken down. Now, tell me... who's telling the truth? Who's lying? Whose post stays up, and whose post is removed? What do you do when someone goes to the lawyers? If you play safe and take everything down, what do you do when users work out that they can get everything taken down by complaining? The consequences of this aren't hard to see: if you're running a website where you might get sued at the drop of a hat, you just shut the whole thing down. And that doesn't just go for sites like this one: it applies to every interactive site on the entire Internet. No more Facebook. No more Twitter. No CERB, no blogs, no websites with any content that might offend anybody. In short, oblivion for most of the online world as we know it. Newspapers DO report stories without fact-checking, all the time. That's why they also print apologies and corrections and letters to the editor that point out their mistakes on a regular basis. Yes, they have legal teams that look at some stuff in more detail... but even then, they sometimes screw up and lose a huge libel case. And they have the advantage that they're generally only published in a limited number of jurisdictions - frequently, only one. And if newspapers, with their huge budgets and in-house lawyers can't get it right in a single jurisdiction, how the hell is a website run by one guy in his spare time supposed to get it right in every jurisdiction where a reader or commenter resides? It's utterly unreasonable to expect this.

I have to say, I disagree completely. The problem is that there's simply no way a website can police everything that's posted to it. They don't even have the resources to do a proper validation of things that are reported to them as contravening some law or other; there's just too much content being posted by too many people too fast. That really only leaves them with two viable options when handling complaints. First, they can simply pull down anything that anyone complains about. This is the safe option, but it means that anyone who wants to can effectively censor another poster by complaining (illegitimately) about the things they post. Secondly, they can ignore complaints until they pass some sort of threshold (maybe a lot of users complain, or the complaint comes from some sort of official source). This is the way most sites operate today, but this approach simply isn't viable if you make the site owner legally responsible for what's posted; eventually, you're bound to miss something and get utterly screwed over. I think it's fair to say that making online publishers legally responsible for user-generated content would destroy much of the Internet as we know it today. Sites like Facebook and Twitter would have to either shut down entirely, or limit themselves to accounts that were firmly verified as belonging to a real, known individual. Many blogs would go down for the same reason. Discussion boards where users have relatively anonymous handles (such as this one) would vanish entirely. The concept of commenting on things like news stories or Youtube videos or anything else would vanish. I quite like the Internet the way it is, free speech and all. I'd prefer to see it stay that way.

Lee, I've told you before. Please stop doing this with my beer. You can do it with your own, but not mine, okay?

Good job! Congratulations!

More specifically for this audience... there was a Supreme Court verdict (I forget the case, alas) where they ruled that the Internet in general was not a "place" that might apply to the laws relating to prostitution. That's why the ladies can advertize here - and anywhere else online - without fear of prosecution. Given that this is a SCC ruling, it probably won't change short of Parliament enacting some new law to make it illegal.

Congrats, SteveyK!

Sounds like the blocking functionality is screwed up to me. I'd have assumed that this was pretty high on the list of things it'd do. May be worth asking Mod about this? For future reference (and anyone else who may be thinking about doing this), the best way is just to drop Mod a PM and he'll change your handle for you. That way you get to keep the account, post history, friends, reputation, etc. AFAIK that's actually less work for Mod than creating a new account, because many people who create new accounts when they already have existing ones do so for nefarious reasons (they've been suspended, or maybe they've got a deservedly bad reputation with the ladies).

No... south of the border they run stings on both clients and SPs all the time, and it doesn't even make the headlines unless someone notable gets caught. But that's because the exchange of sex for money is illegal there (mostly), whereas it's legal here.

Yesterday was National Orgasm Day. Today is Clear Browser History Day. :)

Have you ever been to American wedding? Where is the vodka, where is marinated herring?

Well, that just means she's no longer at that particular MP. She could have gone somewhere else or gone indy, so the question is worth asking. However, I have no useful information in this case. Sorry!

Fancy English beers? We can't afford THOSE at the lodge. Neither can we afford fancy Belgian beers, fancy German beers, fancy American beers, fancy Czech beers or fancy Canadian beers. We are, alas, down to drinking 50 at the moment. Turns out it's not so bad, if you drink enough of it... So, could you bring a truck-load of decent beer with you next time you visit? The truck is important - I need something to distract Lee and OD while I run off with the beer :)

I think that's the same with all diets, isn't it? :)

I own a well-traveled hat. The good thing about this hat is that it's done all its traveling with me under it.

Finding out that pretty much anyone who uses the same computer as you can trivially find out all your usernames and passwords for all the websites you visit. I know this stuff is boring, but seriously folks, read this thread. It may save your ass.