I couldn't finish this article. Not because it was written by a sick person -- it was -- but because it didn't seem to have a lot of interesting things to say.
As a libertarian I'm all for wide-ranging freedoms, but I'm also a parent and not a complete moron. I retain the right to have moral opinions even if I think it is wrong to impose them on others. As a parent, I can see that kids don't have the cognitive abilities to make decisions until later in life. I don't want my 9-year-old joining the army. I also don't want my nephew with Down's Syndrome to be sold life insurance, or my senile grandmother in a nursing home to open a credit card account. We limit freedoms based on cognitive ability -- that's just common sense. We should not provide the tools for kids to do things they will regret the rest of their life. CP, from our experience in many past cases, is something that leaves lasting scars.
I was especially amused at his fierce stance against fundamentalist Christians, those bastards. Seems like he is convinced they are the only ones keeping law-abiding perverts from their child porn.
If that's the case, you can count me in as a fundamentalist Christian.
With the technical angle, I'm sure its HN, but I'll let somebody else dig out the good pieces. I feel like I have to go wash after reading the small part that I did.
The most useful thing I got from the article was that the web is not really used much for commercial trade of child porn. The traders have gone on to much more sophisticated methods such as renting out encrypted remote access to virtual machines full of material.
This is important to remember next time a politician tries to tell you why there should be a secret list of banned websites, something we're grappling with in Australia at the moment.
We limit freedoms based on cognitive ability -- that's just common sense.
This sounds like a slippery slope. I'm all for helping to protect innocent people who are incapable of defending or protecting themselves, but there's a reason why, in the US, you're considered an "adult" at certain ages, rather than based on the results of some test that determines your cognitive abilities.
I don't know about DanielBMarkham in particular, but usually, being a parent (especially a mother, but fathers, too, to a lesser extent) does change how you think about things, purely from a hormonal, biological standpoint. In many cases, it can change your whole value system. Whether you view this as insight or the loss of insight is another matter, of course.
Being a true professional in some area gives you special insight in that particular area.
You don't have to repeat all experiments from Galileo's era till nowadays to make scientifically sound statements but it doesn't mean that anything one says should be regarded as such.
Moral is poor guidance for scientist. One doesn't not tell the Universe what it should be. One hope to find out what it is.
Would a reading a scientific study give me more insight into how to better painter, programmer, car driver, hockey player, or parent than actually doing these things? Reading about anything bestows more insight than collecting anecdotes (experience) in it?
Doing something is completely different than knowing about something. Parenting is likely the best way for a person to learn how to parent (though supplementing reading, mentoring, and so on will likely be even better), but reading a scientific study is going to give you a more accurate concept of the mental and emotional capabilities of children in general than your experiences parenting a single child (or several).
As the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data.
So basically you say that you didn't read the article, don't have any privileged information, but because of your beliefs you strongly disagree with it? And of course, you're not biased because you're a libertarian.
As far as little arguments you provided, the article's author would probably agree with you. Nine is too young an age to make career or sexual decision (he mentioned post-puberty at least 3 or 4 times), as for people with Down Syndrome or senility...
The thing we really should have an open debate about (not on HN, though) is how much of a scar CP leaves on the children. There is a lot of "common knowledge" floating around and way to little fact.
Also, some of the technical part was really cool. At one point he mentioned how zombie computers can be turned into something like Freenet, offering distributed storage and hosting. I always thought this could be one possible future for the Internet (a real "cloud"). It's somewhat a shame the first people doing it are outside the law. (Not that i dispute that they should be - most of them do stuff much more obviously harmful then porn).
As a libertarian I'm all for wide-ranging freedoms, but I'm also a parent and not a complete moron. I retain the right to have moral opinions even if I think it is wrong to impose them on others. As a parent, I can see that kids don't have the cognitive abilities to make decisions until later in life. I don't want my 9-year-old joining the army. I also don't want my nephew with Down's Syndrome to be sold life insurance, or my senile grandmother in a nursing home to open a credit card account. We limit freedoms based on cognitive ability -- that's just common sense. We should not provide the tools for kids to do things they will regret the rest of their life. CP, from our experience in many past cases, is something that leaves lasting scars.
I was especially amused at his fierce stance against fundamentalist Christians, those bastards. Seems like he is convinced they are the only ones keeping law-abiding perverts from their child porn.
If that's the case, you can count me in as a fundamentalist Christian.
With the technical angle, I'm sure its HN, but I'll let somebody else dig out the good pieces. I feel like I have to go wash after reading the small part that I did.