Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Scramjet, Golden Ears, Preciousness
Everything that rises must come down under. spam-it-to-me-baby writes: "The Australian trial of a scramjet engine has fizzed. 'The experiment at the Department of Defence's Woomera Prohibited Area, 500 kilometres north of Adelaide, was not successful because the [United States-supplied] rocket experienced flight anomalies prior to the scramjet experiment,' an analysis of what went wrong says. Not to worry, another test is tentatively scheduled for next week, assuming researchers can work out what went wrong with this one on the way up."
Not to be confused with this previous scramjet test, also unsuccessful.
Ah, much better, I thought you were being unreasonable there for a minute. After Jamie drew attention to it in a Slashdot piece on Saturday, SafeSurf changed their legislative proposal. In Jamie's words, "Woo!"
That's not all he said, of course: "Please note that, now, they ONLY want to fine you thousands of dollars for failing to label anything you write that is harmful to an 8-year-old. What a relief! "The penalty for a first offense of failing to label or mislabeling material harmful to minors shall be limited to a fine of under five thousand dollars."
Bennett Haselton passed on this commentary as well:
"If you go to http://www.safesurf.com/online.htm in Netscape and "View Document Info", it shows it was last modified on October 29, 2001. (This function doesn't work in IE.)The original OCPA is [at google]. SafeSurf apparently removed this paragraph from section 6:
Publishers may be sued in civil court by any parent who feels their children were harmed by the data negligently published. The parents shall be given presumption in all cases and do not have to prove that the content actually produced harm to their child, only that the material was severe enough to reasonably be considered to have needed a rating label to protect children.and replaced it with:Publishers may be sued in civil court by any parent who feels their children were harmed by the data negligently published. The parents/plantiffs shall be given presumption, if the case involves graphic images, and do not have to prove that the content actually produced harm to their child, only that the material was severe enough to reasonably be considered to have needed a rating label to protect children.and then added three new paragraphs listing more exemptions from this rule."
Can you hear that pea through the mattresses? For the audio objectivists, a good update to CmdrTaco's recent MP3 v. Ogg Vorbis inquiry: E1ven writes: "Everyone is always arguing about whether Vorbis sounds better than MP3, or vice versa. Here is your chance to see who is right! ff123 is doing a set of Blind Listening tests and could use your help. The more ears the better!"
whats going on with the land of the free? we're always told about the fact that in the US you're innocent until proven guilty.
maybe in the economic downturn we can't afford to wait before you're guilty.
I must be missing something, because without proof of harm, the kids wouldn't even need to see it! make money via surfing the web, I guess the offers were true...
Harm is anything you don't like, don't agree with, or don't understand.
You ain't seen nothin' yet!
Yeah, right.
Whats to stop these publishers from directing people to other subdomains that aren't labeled? This sounds like a rather large loophole in their policy. I guess if I ran a pr0n site I could label the index page, advertise only unlabeled subdomains and be protected from lawsuits. Sounds like the geniuses at SafeSurf did it again!
Bobuhabu
As long as they pass the PCGA (Protection of Children from Government Act) at the same time. Here's my proposed text for the PCGA:
What do you think? Unanimous support in Congress?
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
...that being that some bright fellow here on Slashdot (sadly, I can't find the original post) observed that, should this bill pass, he'd promptly sue SafeSurf for the harm their online material (ie any blocklist they publish) had done to his daughter! A brilliant post, that... pity they (apparently) read it.
Yes, it would be nice to have tests at 192 or 256 kbit/sec. It would also be nice to have tests at 96 or 64 kbit/sec to see which codec does best in low-bandwidth situations. But 128 kbit/sec tests are valid too. (If anything, this slants the test towards Vorbis enormously, since 128 kbit/sec MP3 sounds like crap even with a good encoder, while 128 kbit/sec Vorbis sounds pretty good.)
Basically: don't assume that you are the target audience of every test.
For MP3, sure. I prefer Vorbis.Jeez people; the US is not perfect.. This is not an anti-US comment, merely a point.. Look at the disasters NASA has had.. Ya know, big boom, dead astronouts?
Just because it came from the US, doesn't mean it's automatically gonna be flawless.. Maby it wasn't a perfect design, maby it got damaged in transit, who knows..
What I want to know is whether there are any portable Ogg players out there yet? Can someone point me to one? I've got a whole music collection in MP3 that I'm ready to re-encode from CD into OGG format as soon as I can get a portable player.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
someone's strobing flash animation could give someone siezures?
lately I've been getting the impression that overzealous censorship like this is an adult manifestation of fear of cooties.
The Safesurf MAPS rant complains about them stealth-blocking websites that may contain important information, and people won't know they're being censored. But they've got the technology wrong: MAPS doesn't block websites - they provide tools that are normally used for blocking emails and furthermore, sites that implement MAPS tools properly normally provide bouncegrams telling people they block how and why their email was rejected, so they can fix their problems. The only way a company like Safesurf would be "censored" by a MAPS-using mailbox service would be if they sent out email to people - and since they'd find out they had a problem the first time they tried to send mail, they could put a notice on their website about it and tell people who want followup communications from them how to contact them.
Furthermore, Safesurf's web site violates Safesurf's proposed law creating (and mixing up) civil and criminal penalties and tort liability for mislabeling or failing to label web sites. Their original proposal was more aggressive than their current one, but it still doesn't require any actual harm to any actual child, as long as there are graphic images on the site (logos and decorations may not be harmful, but they're graphics, so we're covered there.) Plaintiffs can sue if the site doesn't provide appropriate ratings labels on material severe enough to be potentially harmful to children. Certainly, any proposal to throw people in jail for what they write on the net is pretty severe, and could cause harm to children who write things without labeling them if such a law were passed, and telling kids that people want to do that kind of harm to them just for what they write, even if there's no law passed, can also be pretty scary. www.safesurf.com's label says
"CONTENT='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.classify.org/safesurf/" l r (SS~~000 1))'"
which if you look it up on the explanatory web site doesn't have any indication of what the rating means. It does point to a site that tells you how to download a ".rat" file into your browser, and if you open up that file with a text editor instead of installing it, the file indicates something about "all ages", but doesn't indicate whether it's appropriate or inappropriate for all ages, so that a web browser could be set to do the appropriate thing with it, though it clearly implies that the really scary material complained about above should be appropriate for all ages....
"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-PICS-services" has more PICS explanations.
Update - their web page indicates that MAPS has now unblocked them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Lately I've been getting the impression that overzealous censorship like this is an adult manifestation of fear of cooties.
That's a beautiful sentence, and it needs to get some seriously wide exposure. It manages to convey the perfect sense of contempt that is the only fitting response to the "morality" brigade's attitudes.
As I recall, through a lot of these discussions, e.g., on some of the reports from town-hall meetings regarding library-censorship proposals, a lot of us have been frustrated with trying to articulate this. Not just pointing out how unworkable censorware is from a technical standpoint (true, but reducing the argument that far is granting too much). Not even just arguing for the importance of freedom (also a vitally important argument to make, of course). But attacking the fundamental immaturity of attitudes that lies behind all of their motives.
Why would they even want to do this? Even assuming it were technically possible (which it isn't), and granting that it were important enough to justify giving up so much freedom (which I don't) -- what kind of priorities does this indicate? Why, given all the really horrible things things in the world to which kids' "fragile litle minds" are exposed, not to even get started on the things that threaten them physically, would parents choose this to focus so much attention on?
I can only think that it's because the parents aren't really grown up themselves in terms of being comfortable with sexuality, and they can't even begin to contemplate it for their kids. They live in absolute dread of the day they'll have to give the "birds and bees" talk and will lash out at anything that threatens to hasten that day.
Maybe this kind of ridicule -- attributing the censors' fears to a failure to outgrow something as childish as "fear of cooties" -- could be an effective way to drive the point across in a pulic forum.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
This has always struck me as ideal. If you don't like how pornography is defined in your community, find a new one. There will always be a place for the puritans and the purient.
The Internet is great for that sort of thing. Whatever you want, you can find, from DADV to wwjd.org. Except that, lacking any boundaries at all, it's ridiculously easy to stumble into other communities, where you aren't a member, and aren't comfortable.
A great many people, (and I certainly don't think Slashdotters are immune) react to areas of the public Internet they don't like with anger, fear and loathing. I'm especially impressed by the irony of seeing these two sentiments in the same page (which is possibly the only justification for this Slashback):
- Evil people want to eliminate that which they don't understand.
- These tests are bogus! I encode things at far more than 128b/s!
I take away the feeling that on the one hand we recognize that the correct response to information for which one isn't the audience is to ignore it, but we still resent the idea that there is information for which we aren't the audience.Much as we might despise them, the MPAA solved a similar problem to this decades ago with a nifty little idea called "self-regulation." Granted the movie rating system isn't very descriptive (the US TV ratings are much more descriptive; isn't it great to see if any Adult Content:Nudity is on?)
Yes, Safeweb is going at this in an utterly braindead way. But, rating based web regulation would cope with much of the "For The Children" acts facing the US and the world at large. It seems to me that either a rating system (technically already existant) needs to be generally adopted, and browsers support it by default, even treating Unrated paged as if they were Drugs-Sex-Dismemberment-Adult-Themes, and allowing a simple browser level config. (I can see it now, as part of the Internet Setup Wizard: "How do you feel about pornography?"), or it should be included in the next batch of web standards, with the default of "horribly awful" being specified.
The pressure, then (at the cost of the collective headache of web designers everywhere) is to rate your site appropriately, because unrated sites will have a smaller audience (similar to the reasoning that leads to websites supporting IE first). But a lax rating will lead to complaints, and so on. Besides, imagine google searches by rating. It's in my interest to describe my site appropriately, since it'll bring the audience that wants my services, (At google picture: "rating:porn=MAX"). In general, I tend to see ratings not as censorship, but as a screen, because it takes away the "for the kids" argument of censors. You can say "well, it can be rated unsuitable" and demonstrate that parents can protect their children using ratings, rather than censorship.
Then they have to admit that they want to force everyone to live by their values, and that's just not in the realm of acceptability these days.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl