Movies

We went out to see Pan's Labyrinth tonight at La Premiere with asagwe and shadow_5tails.

Movie was very good, although not for the faint-hearted - there's plenty of brutality to establish the Fascists as the bad guys, and without spoilers... well, the second task involved one of the creepiest things I've seen in quite a while.

Sadly, cannot give La Premiere the same endorsement. The tickets have always included free popcorn and drinks, which made up for most of the price difference between that and a normal seat; when we got there tonight they told us LP no longer includes drinks and we'd have to buy our own, which we did. Checked afterwards on the website where we booked our tickets and confirmed that it still advertises 'complimentary soft drinks and popcorn', so a grumpy letter is in order.

Protecting minors, or something

Via pharyngula: Connecticut schoolteacher Julie Amero has been convicted on four counts of 'impairing the morals of a child' after a classroom computer got locked in a porn pop-up loop.

On a projected image of the list of Web sites visited while Amero was working, Lounsbury pointed out several highlighted links. "You have to physically click on it to get to those sites," Smith said. "I think the evidence is overwhelming that she did intend to access those Web sites."

I am fascinated by the claim that the only way a classroom computer with lapsed virus-protection could have visited a porn site is by physically clicking on that link. (And also by the implication that the only person in a seventh-grade classroom who could possibly have done any such clicking is the teacher...)

More technical comments here and here. (Note that Amero - a substitute teacher - had been logged in by a regular teacher who told her not to turn the machine off, which may be why she didn't pull the plug ASAP.)

And via ambitious_wench, an old USA Today report (several years old, but the same flavour of idiocy) on a fifteen-year-old girl who posted nude photographs of herself on the net and was charged with 'sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography and dissemination of child pornography'. Now while I am very much against all three of those things, I fail to see how arresting a minor and giving her a life-long record as a sex-offender for crimes committed against herself would seem like a useful thing to do.