Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Unintended consequences of outlawing common sense
The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned.
New scanners break child porn laws | Politics | The Guardian
Ooooh, I just love unintended consequences, or as jwz said when he posted this: “What happens when the immovable object of terrorism meets the unstoppable force of kiddie porn?” I can see this playing out thusly: those under 18 are exempt, so terrorists now use kids to smuggle the bomb materials aboard. Once that is discovered, the next step is to force parents and kids to separate sections of the planes, so now the terrorist kids are trained to trigger the explosions themselves. Kids are then banned from flying (not that I would argue with such an outcome).
The other scenario—pedophiles attempt en mass to become security screeners.
Speaking of unintended consequences and pedophiles, comes this story of a grandmother charged with kiddie porn because she took the obligatory grandkids in the bathtub photo. I swear, given the level of hysteria here (and it's not even limited to the United States) that one would think pedophiles by now would know to develop their own film, but I guess common sense has been legislated out of existence.
“Oh, did you pee in your pants again, Firefox?”
Thank you so much Firefox for deciding right now was the perfect time to force a download and upgrade of yourself. Never mind that I was in the middle of using you, but no, it's more important to you that I not run a version of Firefox older than 20 minutes.
Sigh.
Worse still, I have to rehack Firefox 3.5 so it even runs on my system. It's actually amusing (and rather pathetic) that I not only installed a program I don't even use just to get one pre-compiled shared library on the system, but I have to reinstall Flash every time I launch Firefox (bascially, I copy two files just prior to starting Firefox) or it doesn't work.
