Slashdot Mirror
Utah Governor Signs Net-Porn Bill
All Names Have Been writes "House bill 260 has been signed into law by Utah's governor. It creates a list of websites that are not 'safe for children' and forces ISPs to block these sites for those who request it.
In addition, content providers who host or create content in Utah for profit must now rate their websites or face 3rd degree felony charges.
A similar law in Pennsylvania was struck down last year." (See this earlier story, too.)
At first, I thought this was horrible.
But now, I can't wait for that list to leak.
*Rubs hands together*
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Despite the fact that both states have elected Bushes as governor, we've never done anything quite as pointless and unenforceable as trying to outlaw internet porn.
Thank you, Utah, for boldy diving head first into the shallow end of the pool to prove how stupid it is for the rest of us.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Can we stop calling things dupes when they're actually follow ups to earlier stories? Pretty please?
I suppose yro.slashdot.org really stands for year old...
sex.com, bigtits.com, groklaw.net, allgirls.com...
Look at my sig to know my politics.
I had a friend who just got back from Utah after doing two years worth of contract work. He explained to me how the political situation is there. The Mormons control the polical apparatik, and they in turn are a very top-down organization, with mandates coming from the President, and those mandates very frequently becoming law. No one can oppose them, because so much of the state is Mormon. And there is little disagreement amongst Mormons, because of their inherent loyalty to the church.
So to those who have more familiarity with the region I have two questions. 1) Did this legislation come about as a result of the elders in the church? And 2) Is this basically an accurate summation of Mormon politics? If so, that seems scary to me. I wouldn't want a society where there is so much homogenity, even if everyone were basically like me. Nor do I think rigid hierachical organizations are the best way to run a nation (or state, really).
I love how it seems to be OK for legislators to just completely ignore the Constitution these days, just in order to make a point.
I used to think the judiciary was out of line but apparently they're now the only people willing to stand between us and total madness.
Can't wait for this to go to court. Shame they can't fine the representatives who waste the people's time and money passing crap legislation like this.
Boycott everything - they're all trying to fuck you one way or another
The first slashdot post said the governor was considering it. This one says he has.
Now, Dupe Nazi, how else am I supposed to know he actually signed it, unless there's a follow up article? Guess? Assume?
Is justified! This is a free speech issue. From the article:
The controversial bill . . . will require ISPs to block access to websites deemed "harmful to minors" on request. This blacklist will be drawn up by the state's Attorney General.
Poppycock. Clearly, the first amendment protects free speech - and this is a clear abridgement of this right. Just because perhaps most of the good citizens of Utah don't agree with their children being able to view pornography does not justify this move. Of course, I'm not the only one to think this way and hopefully this law will be struck down as in these other cases:
Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union go further and warn the bill violates the US Constitution's First Amendment on free speech and the Commerce Clause. Six other states have had similar legislation ruled unconstitutional, resulting in huge legal bills for residents, Media Coalition director David Horowitz told the Salt Lake City Tribune.
Meh, thank goodness I don't pay taxes in those states. Stupid legislators.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
The controversial bill (PDF)will require ISPs to block access to websites deemed "harmful to minors" on request. This blacklist will be drawn up by the state's Attorney General.
on request.
ON REQUEST.
This is not going to block every user from playboy.com. It will give people access to a list of websited to filter ON REQUEST.
Seriously, how long until they move three feet over the state border to circumvent this?
Html versions of the bill's introduction, amendment, and enrollment
It's a brave new world.
How many here would like to work for the UT AG's office as the official porn site screener? Can you imagine, getting decent pay, good benefits and spending your days surfing porn? I wonder if telecomuting is an option (I need saltwater proximity).
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
While I, though perhaps not to the extent that most of you take it, love my internet porn, I have to side with the state legislature on this item. Utah, known for it's very conservative bent due to the overwhelming majority of its citizens being Mormons, has every right to shape the law to fit their "community standards".
This isn't about any sort of Freedom of Speech issue. No one is banning the creation of internet porn inside the state. That is still covered by the Freedom of Speech clause. However, access to such is not a right, at least to those of a certain philosophical mind.
I hope that there is no further erosion of the concept of State's Rights as fallout from this.
It should be made clear that this bill does NOT force ISP's to block the sites all the time, but rather forces them to block those sites for specific subscribers, upon request. So this is basically saying "if you want to block people from accessing these sites from your home, your ISP will do this for you."
Not that I think this law is a good idea, but it's easy to read a bit fast and mistake it for something even worse.
Oh, but it's for the children! We must protect the children! If they go to too many porn sites, they might forget to take their 80 milligrams of Ritalin every day!
"requires a service provider to prevent certain access to Internet material harmful to minors, if requested by the consumer;" If requested by the consumer. If you want to surf porn, you still can. What's the problem here? It's just like having people choose whether or not they want to have those kinds of things filtered.
Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union go further and warn the bill violates the US Constitution's First Amendment on free speech and the Commerce Clause. Six other states have had similar legislation ruled unconstitutional, resulting in huge legal bills for residents, Media Coalition director David Horowitz told the Salt Lake City Tribune.
You would think that they would learn not to mess with the free speech rights of adults and children here. The main objection to these kinds of bills is that the block access to sites giving medical or social information about topics like teen sexuality, pregnancy, and homosexuality. This is due to the fact that the blacklist is drawn up by a bunch of conservative idiots rather than people that know the difference between Debbie Does Dallas and Gray's Anatomy. The laws prevent teens who have a right to know this kind of information without the consent of their parents (the ACLU has defended teen medical rights before) which is stupid since most of the problems with teen sex are due to ignorance on the part of teens about sexuality. Since they are taught nothing but abstinence, those who do have sex don't use protection. And because of the lack of communication between parents and teens in this case, the teens won't tell their parents nor will they get medical help which just makes the situation worse. One of these days they'll figure out that teaching children proper morals and letting them deal with the dangers of the world regarding sex is better than just blindfolding them and threaten them with eternal damnation if they have sex before marriage.
--
Want a free iPod?
Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof
Texas has a ban on dildos. Can't buy then, although, here in Houston you certainly can find a lot of porn shops sans dildos. I think this is the same thing really. Banning what people do in the privacy of their own homes. It's wrong.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
The only black market you need is a black market for Anonymous Proxy Servers lists...
WHY OH WHY MUST MY STATE SUCK SO BAD!!!!!! May the god of my fellow Utah residents smite me. Or better yet smite them!
"Napalm is nature's toothpaste" - Chef Brian
"...for those who request it." They're going to go to the trouble of blocking specific subscribers from viewing these sites? Or am I not getting this?
And this is somehow bad? We rate our movies we rate our TV we rate our Vidio games so what is so different about a web site? Why would toss-the-salad.com have a problem with stating that they are an X rated web site? your company certainly has the right to block you from spending 6 hours a day at sportsline.com running your fantasy baseball league. Why should I not as a parent have the right to say "please block all X rated sites"? I understand that there is a lot of grey area here and perhaps that is the problem. My kids are not old enough yet to worry about but in 5 years I am thinking that slap-the-bitch.com might be a sight I would want blocked.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
Finally! It was about time someone addresses the need for a porn directory with no credit card involved in this country!
Wanna bet Talk.Origins gets in the first list?
People seem to be screeming about the first ammendment being raped here by some right wing governor in Utah. Can we be resonable and think clearly for a second (i know this is slashdot but let's try.)
So this state passes a law that says ISPs have to filter content for people that want it filtered. Person A living in Utah says they like porn so they don't call their ISP and everything continues like normal. Person B thinks this is a great idea because they don't like porn and don't want their 10 year old "accidentally" getting to a porn site so they call their ISP and have it filtered (which by the way, this isn't really stomping the rights of the child since A) they are a minority and have very few rights as it is and B) the parent pays for the service and is there for the one who is able to control it).
Now this doesn't screem to me that the constitution is being abused. It just tells me that people are silly. The reason i say they are silly is because there are a bunch of ISPs that already filter out porn and those kinds of sites as a service to their (largely christian) customers, so why do we need a bill for this? Just tell everyone that wants the content filtered to switch from their current ISP to one of the christian ISPs.
People are always complaining about those who don't RTFA. Seems like now people are stopping at the headline, and not even reading the summary. Dudes, the bill requires ISP's to implement a SERVICE to FILTER out particular websites using a standard list, AT THE CUSTOMER'S REQUEST. This is no form of CENSORSHIP because it is AT THE CUSTOMER'S REQUEST. I see this is a GREAT SERVICE.
Loban Amaan Rahman ==> Anagram of ==> Aha! An Abnormal Man!
Well, in this case we are talking about Utah and backasswards laws based on childish religious beliefs. So you probably just should have assumed. But in other cases, yeah, a followup would probably have been needed.
You would think they'd be tripping over themselves to get out of there. Of course another possibility is that other states think this is a good idea and pass similar laws. Or the Feds might decide to make the other states follow suit. They can't directly mandate such a thing but hey, they technically can't mandate a drinking age either. You want your highway funds? Raise your drinking age to 21. Or else.
The Federal Election Commission, of all things, is currently thinking about prohibiting websites from endorsing candidates or political parties. Any website that wants to say "The RebuboCrat candidate is a scumbag" will have to host outside of the U.S. Maybe that's what happens to pr0n sites too. Then, because of The Children, the FBICIA will be authorized to track all web usage all the time. Paranoid? Maybe, but if you look at how things have transpired over the last 15 or 20 years, every bad thing you could have predicted to happen has come true. Why should it change now?
It's Utah. Just assume any law restricting porn in any way will pass.
This whole line of thought is so flawed. "Protect the children" seems to take priority over everything including common sense.
Creating rules for criminals, cons, scammers, spammers, and porn distributers is not effective. These people either do not care about laws at all, or they care but still wont stop.
The state of utah can effectively ban the bad sites from being in their state, but this will just lead to Utah residents hosting, or more likely routing to Asia (add obligatory korean joke).
The seen effect is that Utah is clean of all porn sites, but the residents of Utah (and their precious children) are still exposed to all kinds of filth from other areas.
These examples just show why blacklisting doesn't work. If anyone should blacklist it's the citizen, and this should be done by not viewing any site which is in a whitelist.
In this case, I think Utah should strongly encourage sites to identify their strong points, and identify as clean child friendly sites.
The more internet content that can be classified unconditionally as clean, the better for protection. It's possible that Utah will actually help this problem, as only the child friendly minds will be obeying the laws.
I can see that having a censorship vibe with unconditional rules here would discourage legit content providers from participating. A blogger, or community site builder would be infinitly more pleased with conforming to these rules if "friendly" sites were praised, linked highly, or even supported with something simple like a lottery or free hosting.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
It's UTAH.
No guessing or assuming required.
..don't panic
This does not bode well for the people and ISPs in Utah. Without the 'common carrier' protection, an ISP is liable for any/all content viewed/received by a subscriber. All you need is one pervert to download illegal pron, or one child to download (without authorization) a piece of media and the lawsuits would be be staggering.
This gives ISPs a list of websites that people may want to visit. How long until ISPs begin blocking websites on the list by default, and charge extra for unblocking them?
Let's take a look at the bill:
So this bill is creating an OPT-IN list, preventing access to sites only to those customers who ask the ISP to do this. How is this violating free speech? If I don't want spam and decide to use a spam filter, am I violating the free speech rights of the spammers?Not if the user CHOOSES not to use the filter. Never let the truth get in the way of a good troll.
"Ask not for whom the bone bones. It bones for thee." --Bender
Maybe the governor wants to save bandwidth for drug company spam? After all, Utah has the highest consumption of Prozac among its populace in the entire nation. I'm sure all that net porn is obviously to blame, but I can't imagine with so many ADHD kids in the state that they could even sit still long enough to download porn.
That'd be every ISP user in the state.
..don't panic
For not putting a rating on your website?!
Hey you didn't slap a PG-13 rating on your website.
You're not allowed to vote ever again or own a gun.
Gives a whole new meaning to being goatse bombed..
My brother got kicked out of a mall in Utah because they didn't like his "punk" haircut. Guess they thought he was gonna murder someone or spit on the floor or something.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
This is veering OT. Someone in UT please inform me otherwise or confirm, but IIRC, for you to be patrons in bars, you have to be "members" and for you to be "members" you have to have someone sponsor you, correct? Well, is it not true that you can just walk in a bar and just ask around for people to sponsor you? Doesn't this internet bill sound all too familiar? Putting on more red tape than they should. If the people want to drink, the thought of sponsorship isn't going to stop them, and if people want porn, bills like this isn't going to stop them either.
Linux at home
The problem with this is that Utah is redefining what an ISP is. Traditionally, it is exactly what it stands for: a provider of Internet service. Nothing more, nothing less. You want access? We'll give it to you.
Now some ISPs provide services on top of mere access. For example, my ISP provides some Web hosting space, some e-mail accounts, and so on. However, there is no law forcing them to do so, they do it to get my business.
Content filtering, which is what this law deals with, is exactly like those other services: something above and beyond what an ISP has to do. Utah has now changed that. No longer is an ISP merely an Internet Service Provider, now they have to muck around with the content they are providing. That's just wrong in my mind.
I love analogies, so I'll present one here. What they have done is essentially the same thing as if they passed a law saying that upon consumer request, courier and mail delivery services have to inspect all packages for sexually explicit material, and if they don't and something offensive gets delivered to someone, it's a felony. A company can't just deliver the mail any more, they are now held responsible for what gets sent and received.
ISPs in Utah have the option of blocking sites or providing customers with third-party filtering products unless they want to risk felony charges under the new law.
My suggestion? If I were an ISP in Utah, I would simply post a link to the Proxomitron on my home page and be done with it. After all, I don't see anything in the article (didn't read the bill) to say that the third-party filtering product that the ISP provides has to cost anything or be easy to use.
eb.com...
I received a flyer in the mail last week from Rogers (a big cable/internet service hereabouts in Ontario). The headline on the front was "You'll do anything to keep your kids from seeing inappropriate material... so will we." I nearly tossed it (I'm a student in student housing), but I looked again... the REST of the front was an image of an encyclopedia page, one of those standard full-color bits that show a peel-away view of the human body. This one was a muscle diagram, showing the major muscle groups. The sketch was female, and sure enough, the groin and chest areas had been physically cut out of the flyer, apparently to make Rogers' point that parents would reasonably do things like this. The image didn't even have any skin, it was a freakin' muscle diagram just like most of us see in 7th grade science!
So the obvious message was, "We will keep your kids from seeing legitimate, educational material. We will go overboard just like you."
Will the lists in Utah be "reasonable," with ideas like that being supposedly "mainstream"? I'm not holding my breath.
How long before sites with "biased" scientific information such as evolution are placed on the list
Pete Ashdown, the owner and president of Xmission, one of Utah's first and best locally owned and operated ISP's posted the following message to NANOG today:
On Tue, Mar 22, 2005 at 02:59:20PM -0600, Rachael Treu wrote:
> How, exactly, *did* this pass, anyway?
Any bill with "anti-pornography" as its title is going to be a freight train
in the Utah legislature. Nobody is going to get in front of it for fear of
being portrayed as "pro-pornography".
I knew this sobering fact early on in the life of this bill. In its original
form, it would have used IP addresses for blocking and would have introduced
criminal penalties on ISPs if anything managed to slip by. Regardless of
whether the ISP's filter was being circumvented or not.
The bill's sponsor was good in working with me, the only ISP here that
knew or was willing to come out against the bill. However, I was well aware
that all I could strive for was to reduce the ISP impact of the bill, not make
large deletions or changes. There were also a handful of individuals here who
had direct experience with commercial software who were appalled at the nature
of the bill and also worked against it. Large nationwide ISPs, who were
involved in discussions early on, were strangely silent, instead letting the
Internet Alliance write a letter for them.
I do not believe the Attorney General's office here knows what they are
signing up for. You may remember they had a "porn-czar" a few years back
whose position was dissolved over lack of funding. Somehow the AG believes
that maintaining and arbitrating an Internet blacklist will be easier and
cheaper.
In the end the bill itself doesn't have a big impact on this ISP's business.
We have used Dansguardian for many years now along with URLblacklist.com for
our customers that request filtering. The fact that its lists and software
are open for editing and inspection is the reason I chose this over other
commercial methods.
This bill is a waste of time and money. It also does further damage to the
Utah tech industry, portraying it as an idiotic backwater. Please do not
generalize and think everyone here agrees with the methods promoted by a
select few.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Damnit! All the best porn sites are Utah based!
Stupid lazy parent: "I can't supervise my own child on my own computer in my own house so I will request the ISP to block the nasties and anything that might be nasty."
This is one that is gona' end up at the supper cort fo sure! For one is flys strait into the constution of every person!
Mo matter what happens - GOD is in control!
As it was presented, the bill doesn't force anything on anyone (except ISP's who have to come up with a list). The bill makes ISP's come up with a list of content and gives users the *option* to block that list or not.
or else!
Think of the children, please. Maybe some of you guys don't have to worry because you spend 4 hours-a-day actually SEARCHING for porn on the web, but please, a 5 or 6 year old girl, or even a boy?
Maybe you're complaining about something being taken from you (porn, "freedom of speech", etc). But I value the children's innocence much more.
And please don't blame it on the "evil censorship monster", because a simple meta tag would have taken care of everything. If the porn market can't regulate itself, then it's about time the Internet providers do.
And please, don't go with all "But this is today, TOMORROW THEY WILL" crap. What do you think the "F" in FUD means?
obligitory quote for Non-US to understand the situation of how the conservitive views of Utah are viewed by other Americans:
"Gees dude, where are from..."
"Utah"
"oh... sorry"
Yes, all I know about America I have learnt from Southpark and Trey Parker films...
please laugh now!
My other favourite quote
"I'm Orgazmo"
"I am Sanchos"
I like how everyone is upset with this law for wrong reason.
"Oh no, the gub'ment is gonna take away mah pr0n!"
Um, no. The law says that ISPs are required to add an extra service to consumers blocking porn sites on request. If you want to keep having porn, don't request the service.
No, the real problem with this law-- and the real reason we should be upset-- is that it requires those hosting sites in Utah to rate their sites. Now that's the outrage. They're telling you what kind of site you're not allowed to publish (an unrated one)!! Now, this actually is censorship, censoring the publication of unrated sites. That's the real abridgment of the 1st Amendment, but no one seems to care.
Requiring ISPs to add an extra, optional service isn't really a good thing or a bad thing of itself. You would think that if there was demand for it, ISPs would offer "New! Porn Blocker!" for an extra $2/month anyway. (In fact, they do and this is what AOL means when it advertises its "parental controls.") Personally, I feel like we should let the markets decide to add this service or not, but government already regulates a lot of how ISPs work and how they are allowed to connect to each other anyway. It's a shame from a libertarian point of view, but it doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with the 1st Amendment and censorship. The censorship issue is the mandatory rating of sites. Now that's what I oppose.
Alabama used to be best answer but with SCO and now this I am not so sure
Help fight continental drift.
So, even if you don't subscribe to the filtering service, you'll end up paying for some other bible thumper filtering his kid's surfing.
Shame they can't fine the representatives who waste the people's time and money passing crap legislation like this.
:)
I guess instead of fines we have elections.
Now all we need is for people to actually know (and care) about that gets carried out in their name.
so who's gonna decide which sites are in the block list and which ones are not? Or is that another mormon oversight? I don't support porn sites and their cause but it's about time to stop all this BS that has been going on in the US for whay too long. Probabition, sensored tv, politically correct language, controling that kids can and cannot watch and the list goes on. What happened to learn from your mistakes? Hell kids can't even hit each other anymore or they get send to therapy for aggresive behaviour. I say enough is enough!
Since the Utah Attorney General is in charge of making up this restricted site list, it's obviously a big cover to allow him to surf porn sites on company time.
How old fashioned. Most people just use a credit card nowdays.
... block these sites for those who request it.
This is an opt-out policy. Fine with me.
I do have a problem with the rating of a website. A subjective measure at best.
Customers should have the option to block websites if they request it. It is no different than blocking a channel on cable.
I guess I don't see how this applies to My rights online other than the rating system. (It looks like another "feel good" policy. There is almost no way to enforce it.)
"I love how it seems to be OK for legislators to just completely ignore the Constitution these days, just in order to make a point."
Given that the blockage is optional, how is the Constitution being violated? (Note: I'm actually asking in all seriousness, I'm not challenging your point.)
"Derp de derp."
It creates a list of websites that are not 'safe for children' and forces ISPs to block these sites for those who request it.
That list must be like 99% of DNS...could an ISP really have the resources to run a filter that big for every packet going to or from specific customers?
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
this law states that ISPs must provide parents pr0n-filtering/blocking software for free if requested?
damn, I can't flame that.
Slashdot never posts followups though, pr0n must mean a lot to the editors.
Utah is overwhelmed by a kitten population explosion in the near future...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
SCO
You know that Truth is an affirmative defense for slander and libel
Help fight continental drift.
The problem is when any group is a vast majority of the population, They start to do funny things. Especially when the defining charactoristic is something that you cannot apply scientific rigor to. This is the problem with 'Utah Mormons" - yes, they do tend to act differently than Mormons outside of Utah/Idaho.
This is why Democracy is a lousy form of government. It's only real asset, is that it takes longer to corrupt than most other forms of government.
And yes, IAA Mormon. Utah is not 'backward' (or advanced..) It just suffers from too much group-think. That it is Mormon group-think is less important.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
The only Internet filter that works 100% of the time is a pair of wirecutters. (You can't call them "dykes" in Utah.)
In order to keep the emotionally immature citizens of Utah protected from sites exploiting biology, we must remove *all* Internet connections from Utah. This means all communication more advanced than a paper cup and a waxed string needs to be disconnected from Utah.
If they want to live in the 19th century, then let them. But they don't get Internet access until they grow up.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
jeebus people . . .
harmonious design
Thanks, Utah!
This is going to cause a lot of monitoring for hosting providers. I think it time to bring out the "Hold Harmless" agreements. This is make hosted customer run off to non-utah based hosting providers, because they don't want to be bothered with putting a "RATED G" sticker on thier site? Your comments please
If the Chinese and Iranians can't shut down the web why do the mormon think they can? I guess someone will get drunk, hold rocks to their chest and have someone else write it all down in a book.
is that the ability for parents to block all of this ALREADY EXISTS. and so, in addition to regulation on how ISPs must provide extra services, they're now literally destroying the "netnanny" industry for all of utah. congratulations, utah, you've made me sound like a libertarian.
I love how it seems to be OK for legislators to just completely ignore the Constitution these days, just in order to make a point.
Not just "these days". More like "in the past century".
I was just watching 100 most shocking moments in music on vh1 (yeah yeah, standard vh1 fare). I was suprised how many of those moments involved congress trying to censor, ban, fine, label etc music. Elvis was corrupting our kids with "nigger music". The Beatles were evil. Judas Priest drove its fans to commit suicide. Ozzie wants his fans to commit suicide. Jim Morrison was arrested for using profanity and *threatening* to take off his pants during a concert.
Tipper Gore and Lynne Cheney both attempted to censor or ban types of music. (Beware of Vice Presidential Wives.. aparently they have too much time on their hands)
Apologies in advance to Simon Travaglia.
.. mm, no problem, one moment, *clickety-clickety-click* ... there you go, all set, give that a try.
Here's how I see Utah ISPs conforming to this new (yes, at this point, only proposed) legislation, *should* it become law:
Utah ISP rep: Thanks for calling XYZ Internet, how may I help you?
Caller: Um, yes, per SB 260, I demand you make any indecent or pornographic material inaccessible from my account!
Utah ISP rep: No problem ma'am, I can do that right now. What is your account name please?
Caller: My account is blah-de-blah.
Utah ISP rep:
Caller: ah, great, lemme just get online and uh.. hey, it says login incorrect.. and.. what the..
Utah ISP rep: *CLICK* (dial tone).. "If you'd like to make a call, please hangup and dial your operator."
Caller: AAAARGGHH!
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
I really wish whoever had modded my previous post as 'Overrated' would simply have pressed 'Reply' instead.
"Derp de derp."
There are some websites and forums out there that made it a lot easier for me to come to terms with being queer as a kid. I couldn't imagine what my life would have been like if I hadn't had those resources available.
It would not surprise me one bit if the folks who get to decide what is objectionable in Utah are the kind of folks who think that exposure to anything remotely gay damages children.
that to get the anwser all you have to do is pray?
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
I had a local ISP that offered this "feature." After a while I noticed certain domains (even specified by IP) never worked. At first I thought it was just because they had disappeared, then one day I noticed they worked from another ISP. Seems their "optional" feature wasn't so entirely "optional," I dropped them immediately and found a local ISP that made a point of stating in their TOS they do not, in any way, provide such "features" and it is up to the subsciber alone to be responsible for how their connection is used.
Because our representatives have repeatedly made the point "money is speech." I find the very nature of this law offensive, therefore I have the right to NOT support it by givng them my money. Yet this law completely denies anyone living in Utah the ability to express that speech.
Jeez...They only had me up to 20mg thrice a day before they realized it wasn't going to work...
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Where do you get the idea that kids have rights to do anything without parent consent? Parents can pull thier kid out of public schools, homeschool them, keep them in the house 24 hours a day, and they would not violate one right of the child.
I don't know where you get your ideas from, but parents have an absolute right to pick what their kids will read, what they will watch on tv, and what websites they can see. If a parent wishes to enroll their kid in a church school, and shut any outside access to information, then until that kid turns 18 s/he has no choice.
I know of people with a 12 year old, and they won't let her use the internet for any reason, and when she watches tv, it has to be pre-approved. She is not allowed to date, and she wears clothing her parents buy her. She is also enrolled in a private school, and the parents review the curriculum, to ensure they approve. If the parents don't approve of something, they either will pull their kid out that day, or withdraw altogether. And the parents are 100% in the right.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
State representative David Clark will be speaking at the St. George Area Chamber of Commerce in St. George Utah. His purpose is to give a legislative overview of new bills that have been passed by the house and the senate. I will be asking lots of questions about this bill. The first one will be ..WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?????
The bill pretty much spells out what they are looking for, but I thought the Internet user was the one responsible for their action. For families, there is a ton of filtering software that is pretty cheap, that they can put on their local machine. Is this another case of,
"Were the Government and we're here TO HELP YOU."
Now with all the liberal judges, this bill will be in the courts forever. Hmmm the governor committed all this money to Utah schools. Better have budget hearing, this one is going to be expensive.
"...It creates a list of websites that are not 'safe for children' and forces ISPs to block these sites for those who request it. In addition, content providers who host or create content in Utah for profit must now rate their websites or face 3rd degree felony charges..." Now, really, is this so bad? The ISP's are not charged with creating a "magic porn blocking machine", they are required to block a set list of websites, and only for those who request it. As for the mandatory rating system, though... well... I'm glad I don't live in Utah.
Here's an idea that I haven't the time nor the inclination to work on. At work (a network security research team) we have begun using Ciphire. It installs itself between the operating system and the network stack. Any mail that goes out, no matter the client, is encrypted and then transported. Any and all mail going out being sent from registered email accounts is seemlessly encrypted without user interaction.
Now, my question is why don't we have a content filter available to parents that filters out any and all communication destined for websites/address blocks on a blacklist no matter the method? The current method of filtering seems to be configuring web browsers to use some software as a proxy. This is easily bypassed despite the user's permissions on the box. At least I've done it many times with, say, Norton Internet Security.
Just an idea. One I think could be worth something. Now, if any of you guys do decide to implement this, I'm gonna sue your ass for stealing my intellectual property as I have just now thought of this and it is all mine! All I need to do is bookmark this post and I;ll have all the evidence I need! I'll be rich!
What is your penile percentile?
A Study in Scarlet is a good legitimate source...
:)
Manufacture in China
Your country doesn't consider minors to be part of "the people" then?
Coming from a state with a population that is 75%+ mormon, this doesn't surprise me one bit. This is the same state that wanted to ban alcohol (or was it alcohol ads) at the winter olympics.
We've been here before folks!
The issue here is not if it's optional or not for the Customer.
The issue that will kill this law is that the Government (the AG of Utah) will be responsible for maintaining a list of sites to block.
It is the speech of the people ON THE BLOCKED LIST who are being silenced by the government. You can even add violation of due-process becasue there's no detail as to who, what, or why a site is added to the list.
Thise issue has ALREADY been decided by the SCOTUS.
Do we need another 20 judges on this one too?
Can these people in government read?
"If we allow one brain-dead Floridian to die, what's to stop us from extending that policy to include the rest of the state?"
Libertas in infinitum
Now lemme get this straight...
I can marry a handfull of 16 year old girls in Utah but I face felony charges if I see/post don't filter/label pictures of my honeymoon on the 'Net? WTF?
There are, however, products that exist for this already. The internet isn't like cable TV... where the selection is fixed and easy to manage. With this, you'd have to possibly do a lot of changes including creating segregated customer groups for those that do/do-not want filtering. And I could almost guarantee that some sites may be blocked that aren't hardcore porn etc and that subscribing customers will be annoyed at the ISP because they blocked a site that wasn't desired.
The easiest way I supposed would be to have a proxy for those that want a filtered connection, but it's still a pain.
Want a filter, go out and subscribe to one. Why make it a mandated burden on the ISP to satisfy the needs of a particular customer base. The way business usually works, another ISP would offer it as a service.
Mandating such things as laws is what is wrong here...
Contrary to popular belief polygamy is outlawed in Utah. Granted the law isn't always enforced, but it is against the law.
It's called "providing a service as a feature." Companies do this because *surprise* if there's a demand then they can either get customers over those that don't supply it. Mandating it as law is dumb.
Yes, because parents who have values but are not willing to force or teach them to their children expect the goverment, content suppliers, and ISP's to do their damn job.
What about wireless access providers (or free access providers), internet kiosks, schools, libarys and so on. Is it their job too, kids will find porn one way or another if they want it, be it analog or digital.
Seems like alot of work for everyone else just because some parent is too damn lazy to teach their kids the values they expect them to follow, or to buy/install their own filtering software like www.puresight.com
TruePunk | Games
Second hand reviews of the movie Orgazmo, hear in detail why you should keep your wife/wives and children from seeing it.
Jittery in Seattle, also called 'They drink by night', lurid tales of coffee junkies in Seattle, staying up till way after 11pm, Not for the weak of stomach.
Christ-sploitation websites and how to thump your bible for Her Maximum pleasure.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Once again, parents can't do that job so they get a law passed for them. If parents were paid, they'd be fired. What happened to all that child-safety software parents wanted yet never bought? DOn't want your kids to see porn but fucking at night across the hall is fine.
I live in Utah and this is not surprising in the least. Even though the LDS chruch doesn't overtly run the state, everyone who is elected (most of the time) is LDS and so will do whatever the church wants.
I can't wait until I can move to an adult state..
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
>The list will be provided by the state AG
I wonder if this Official Porn List Compiler is a new position, or if this is ongoing work in the AG's office. Perhaps all of the good workers there spend an hour a day cruising for new pR0n sites. They do spring up quickly. I'm sure this activity generates a bit of incoming email with links that need to be tracked down a checked out.I'm certain that it will take a full-time upper-level management position to supervise all of this activity. It will certainly take someone with a bit of experience to tell whether some of these sites a actual pR0n or just creative amature photgraphs. Since there probably aren't too many experts on this subject in Salt Lake City, they will probably need to advertise the position in New York or Las Vegas. Could be the start of a whole new career in the law.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
LOL! Only if I had mod points.
I mean, come on. Porn is _not_ harmful. Bad parenting, however, is. Children who are under a certain "magic" (or "Evil" for the mormons) age will find looking at porn is just boring - they'd quickly loose interest and wander off. Children past the age would experience no ill affects....other than a slight rise in libido, of course. So why block it? I'm 16, and since I was about 6 I've had free access to information - and I've never looked back. Heck, in this country (the UK), the government sent a very nice leaflet home to all parents saying how "The internet was dangerous for children" but "trying to censor anything is an excise in futility, as tech-savvy kids can get around most blocks". It then went on to say that "talking to your children" is the best answer there is.
Can't you do that over there?
And I want that list....
My UID is prime. Is yours?
To honor the moment I will post a favorite of mine. http://www.persiankitty.com/
Am I missing something or is this Utah law really as idiotic as it seems at face value?
I'm sure all the Russian and Finnish ISPs are just all shaky in their boots and peeing themselves in terror at the might of the Utah State Gummint.
FUCK! What a bunch of retards.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
This law will be bitch slapped so fast by the supreme court.. that gov won't know what hit him.
"The controversial legislation will create an official list of Web sites with publicly available material deemed "harmful to minors." Internet providers in Utah must provide their customers with a way to disable access to sites on the list or face felony charges"
There is no possible way anyone could keep an updated list of all the adult websites on the internet. It is also a step towards enforced censorship, let the parents do their job instead of doing it for them
Business Voyeur
I agree that only seeing the sites you want to see is a good thing, but why in the world involve the ISPs? This is like requiring taxi companies to refuse to take you to a list of restaurants you don't like. If you don't want to go there, don't go there!
But the point is there's no way, short of monitoring every moment of a child's internet usage (which isn't truly practical) to ensure they don't end up going there.
It's not about whether an adult wants to go there or not - it's about whether an adult has the means to ensure their children don't go there.
The law's treatment of ISPs is nothing like a taxi firm, it's like a news seller:
Hardcore porn, right now, can be sitting anywhere on a newseller's shelves - right amongst the comics. Worse, it's virtually impossible to identify which links will and won't take a kid to porn or what endless cycles of pop-ups will. That's the equivalent of hardcore porn makers wrapping their content in Yu-Gi-Oh covers to ensure it gets more impressions.
What the law is saying is: Utah magazine publishers aren't allowed to wrap an innocent looking cover around their porn mags anymore and, as Utah can't legislate against out of state magazines, they're requiring news sellers to put magazines from a given list on the top shelf.
It's not even as if it prohibits free speach. You still have the right to speak. It's just that parents are being given the right to decide they and their families don't want to listen (and still have the right to decide to listen if they want to).
I agree it's not an ideal system. I agree it's not perfect. I agree some non-porn sites will mistakenly end up on the list. I agree there are better alternatives out there (though, as many parents evidently don't know of them, "better" is obviously a relative term).
But, just because something's not ideal, it doesn't mean it should automatically be ignored if, as non-ideal, it's still better than not doing it.
What are the costs? The real, genuine costs? Minimal if anything - a piece of cheap software that blocks a supplied list really doesn't cost much at all. Give a decent programmer a few hours, they can knock it up for you. Other than that and the Utah state government's money - the other costs are arguably negligible.
What are the benefits? Maybe not as great as promised but they do exist. Block a few thousand typo domains like hotmale.com, the obvious ones kids try like playboy.com and the most prolific ad/spyware based ones and you can make a reasonable sized dent - even if you can't catch everything.
Do the benefits outweigh the costs? Yes. Does it trample any civil liberties or anything else with a hard to immediately prove but ultimately huge cost? No.
So stop whining. You see flaws in it? Write to the Utah congresscritters and senators. Suggest better solutions. They evidently see it as a problem worth addressing, they obviously see the benefits as outweighing the costs - so suggest your better solution and see if they'll act on it. Just don't bitch for the sake of bitching that people chose a non-perfect solution that they still regard as better than the costs of implementing it.
The parent was obviously being sarcastic.
(i) providing network-level filtering to prevent receipt of material harmful to minors; or
(ii) providing at the time of a consumer's request under Subsection (1), software for contemporaneous installation on the consumer's computer that blocks, in an easy-to-enable and commercially reasonable manner, receipt of material harmful to minors.
(b) (i) Except as provided in Subsection (3)(b)(ii), a service provider may not charge a consumer for blocking material or providing software under this section, except that a service provider may increase the cost to all subscribers to the service provider's services to recover the cost of complying with this section.
So bundling "NetNanny" with ISP service, for those who want it, is sufficient to comply.
If you're in Utah, expect your ISP bill to go up by something under a dollar per month, based on bulk pricing for NetNanny.
(Does entering "~frontdoor" as the password still turn off NetNanny?)
Given the considerations of this law, I'd say a very large hosts file is in order.
Of the kind that brings Windows to a crawl. This huge hosts file will direct people away from the site to one explaining what the hosts file is and why their computer is now so slow.
It can also explain that it was neccisary because law makers pass laws trying to govern things they don't understand.
It would also be good to provide info on how to support groups like the EFF and even more importantly so how to write their elected officials.
Sounds like a good excuse to get the average Utah net user involved.
Not long ago I caught my 9-year-old son printing out pictures of naked ladies on the old inkjet. I was light on him (first offense). But I can relate to these Utah lawmakers, that _something_ ought to be done.
That's not to say that bone-headed, unenforceable legislation that's bound to lose in court is the answer. I mean RSAC is a joke; most pr0n sites don't bother with it because it's such a pain in the ass.
I'd like to see something like SURBL (spam URL block list) that identifies pr0n sites quickly via DNS so a parent can elect to block those URLs with some software. That's not censorship, any more than keeping pr0n mags out of kids' easy reach or putting warning labels on products.
Not really.
From TFA:
The controversial bill (PDF)will require ISPs to block access to websites deemed "harmful to minors" on request. This blacklist will be drawn up by the state's Attorney General.
The law empowers the AG to determine what is "harmful to minors." That is the first problem: our federal constitution forbids laws that abridge speech as this one does by turning the state AG into a gatekeeper of literary, artistic, sexual, or other content. Community standards? Fine, prosecute; but you can't legislate with such a broad brush.
Far from the niceties of an opt-out solution, this noxious law requires ISPs either to block sites themselves or give customers filtering software. Either solution will result in normal, nonpornographic content being blocked, too. That will creates costs and headaches for creators and consumers.
Now, it's one thing for parents who use imperfect filtering software to say, "I don't care if my kid doesn't get to see some good web sites as long as all the bad ones are blocked." But the state has no such luxury, being nobody's parent; indeed, our Bill of Rights is there to slap down the state when it overreaches, and it is overreaching here. The slap will be forthcoming in court and it will be applied severely.
I guess I don't see how this applies to My rights online other than the rating system.
Even if you can't appreciate what's at stake, you'll understand soon enough if you're a Utah resident and your state persists in this folly. Lawsuits against this kind of mischievous puritanism end up being very costly for taxpayers. That should be incentive enough to rein in the state's Taliban.
SUBSCRIBE
- opt-in censorship list. Not opt-out/force-down-your-throat. Don't want porn? ask "no porn, please".
- relatively efficient blocking mechanism - at ISP. Even if your kid is a script kiddie with total control over your computer, and you don't know a thing about it, the blocking happens at the ISP. Still, there are proxies, anonymizing etc, but it's better than "Would you please install that software that is supposed to stop you from accessing pages you shouldn't see?"
- If you write "slippery" content, mark it as such. One meta tag more doesn't hurt and may help a lot.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
The parent's entire belief system is based on the premise that Native Americans (Indians in less politically correct parlaince) are descendants of the original 13 tribes of Israel. This can be proven or disproven using mitochondrial DNA, which has a near-constant rate of mutation from generation to generation. Now given the timeframe of this supposed transplant, the amount of mutation within samples of mitochondrial DNA between actual Israeli Jews and Native Americans from all areas of North and Central America completely quashes the notion that they were recently (within the last 2500 years) transplanted. I hate to mess with their brainwashed state, but science doesn't lie.
l ds_x.htm There are other sites dedicated to this subject, but the USA Today article is as neutral as they get.
Furthermore, the DOCTOR who did the research was a bishop in the LDS church himself. He was excommunicated by his church for his work. Dr. Simon Southerton was a professor at BYU, but left after he realized that the Book of Mormon was nothing more than the imaginations of Joseph Smith.
I just have one question for the hardcore Mormons who refuse to believe in scientific fact: how did the 14-year-old Smith manage to translate the gold plates from an unintelligible ancient language into english? Or where did they go for that matter? Surely the man would have not lost the gold plates, considering just their historical importance and not their theological importance.
If you have not heard about Dr. Southerton, here's USA Today's article on the subject, for starters. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-07-26-dna-
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
I thought the grandparent was funny.
Why should it be a problem to make fun of people's religion ?
If they can't hack it, they can't believe it too much.
Plus, you've got to know that most religions are false simply by the number of them out there, and their incompatibilities. (For me, "most" equals "all").
What's wrong with making fun of people believing silly sounding, probably wrong stuff ?
the state that, per capita, buys the most porn, has the most wife beaters and sells the most hip flasks?
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
But the point is there's no way, short of monitoring every moment of a child's internet usage (which isn't truly practical) to ensure they don't end up going there.
It's not about whether an adult wants to go there or not - it's about whether an adult has the means to ensure their children don't go there.
This can be done with whitelisting (children are only allowed to see specific web sites, and receive e-mail from specific addresses). Simple and effective.
No need for draconian laws or turning society into a kindergarden.
Think of the children, please.
I AM thinking of the children, which is why I think this is a bad idea.
I've seen this in other posts in this thread, but I'll say it again. It's not the governments/ISP's job to teach kids how to live - it's the parents job. Yes, the state does help out a bit, (school) but the responsibility still rests on the parent to guide thier child into adulthood. A parent shouldn't just let thier kid surf the web alone, just as a parent shouldn't let thier kid watch TV alone, just as a parent wouldn't let thier (little) kid go outside alone. The parent needs to guide thier kid along until the kid has shown an adequate level of maturity and responsibility, only then can the parent start to relax the level of supervision they apply.
Also, a law like this will make parents overly lax. They won't check thier childs Internet usage at all because they figure it is all filtered and the kid can't see anything bad. When the kid then gets his own connection, he'll go straight for what he hasn't seen yet - all the bad stuff.
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
I just spent like 5 minutes reading through the entire bill looking for any mentions of specific sites... for.. science.
That is a good, albeit scary, thing to point out. But I think Mormons are pretty pro-science and technology (hell, I think they even believe that the lost tribes of israel were taken up by extraterrestrials or something). It's the bible-beating south that should be watched closer in this regard.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
My fiance's uncle, in Utah joked with us once about Utah being the highest per-capita prozac prescription state in the US. He then pointed out that Mormons couldn't drink, smoke, or do drugs. He thinks there's some conincidence there ;)
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I'm sick and tired of people complaining that the Internet is not suitable for children, so it needs to be cleaned up and made family-friendly.
.....
Does it bollocks!
The Internet isn't suitable for kids, that's a given. But the conclusion is not the only one that fits the premise. My suggestion is, instead, ban children from using the Internet. It's not rocket science! Keeping kids off the Internet has got to be an easier proposition than keeping unsuitable material off the Internet. Face it, life isn't all that family-friendly. That's why you can't even go into a bar till you turn fourteen, and then you have to wait another four years drinking lemonade while you watch other people drink alcohol before they'll sell you any. That's why you can't have sex until you're sixteen, or watch other people having sex until you're eighteen, or drive a car till you're seventeen. There is such a thing as being too young.
Kids managed just fine {better, even?} before there was such a thing as the Internet, and they'll manage fine being barred from using it. They're kids; and growing up and dealing with things is Just What Kids Do.
It's just a pity those in authority can't
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
It's not optional, but the heavy-handed EVIL law asks them to do what? To put a meta-tag into their pages with a rating. That's it. It doesn't make it illegal to host that content; it doesn't make it illegal to serve that content. What disadvantages does this system imply for the pr0n companies? They need to write a two-line Perl script that puts the proper tag into their HTML, and they're done. (Memo to self: 1. Write said two-line Perl script. 2. Sell to pr0n masters in Utah. 3. ??? 4. Profit!) However, this means that parents are able to block those sites more easily with the client-side technology that everyone is pushing here.
I suppose you could argue that the third-degree felony is too much for failing to run their Perl script. I suppose that the content providers are going to lose some income from ad impressions from the five and six-year-old kids (or older kids with less-permissive parents, or adults who are using the corporate Internet connection to surf pr0n) who can no longer hit their pages because there is an effective means of blocking. (Naturally, the fact that only Utah-based porn has to be rated cuts down the effectiveness of the measure...)
The pr0n industry has essentially refused to do voluntary rating of pages, thus producing the perceived need for the legislation. I can't feel too sorry for them...
The thing with having the search engines have to rate the content of links seems to be unacceptable and likely unenforceable.
In other news Conrad F'Tang (little known King of Uj-bal-dabistan) has created a new law stating that when he closes his eyes the universe ceases to exist.
Heroes of the King include Englands King Canute who valiantly commanded the tide not to change (which has to this day left large swathes of southern England without tidal motion)
Biblical scholars however poured scorn on the Utah Puritans and reminded them to remember biblical teachings as "If thine eye offends thee pluck it out".
Leading Biblician Cardinal Fang even went on record as saying "The Lord is after all responsible for ALL aspects of the creation. Yes even the bits that puny humans find unpleasant like maggots, those wasps that paralyse spiders and lay their eggs in them, death rays, AIDS and Microsoft".
More news after the late film.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
It seems to me what is being overlooked here is that this requires every single website to have a content rating.
This opens the door not only to greatly increased revenue for content rating systems that charge for use of tags, but also to further filtering once the public decides that gaming or science education is a bad thing.
And actually the safest thing for Utah ISP to do would be to automatically label every website that did not have a rating with a default rating of "racist monkey lesbian snuff sex site".
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Heh. Actually, it made him look funny and you look like a whiny, PC dickhead.
He wasn't looking for scientific sites listed. He was looking for a list of porn sites. To look at for "Research" purposes. (wink wink)
I can't imagine how any reasonable person would think this sort of law, as I understand it from reading the article, could possibly be effective.
n .com.
for hot girl on moose action, go to http://www.girlsgoingnutsformoose.com. Citizens of Utah go to http://www.randomlychangingurlforgirlonmooseactio
So porn opperators, still trying to meet Utah's citizen's insatiable demand for hot porno action, can keep changing URLs to get past the blocked senders list, and the only one who gets punished are the ISPs, who despite their best efforts cannot possibly keep up with the "unsafe" websites and maintain a list to block them.
There is only one surefire way to protect your kids from questionable material on the Internet: Keep the computer out of your kid's rooms and in a general area where you can keep tabs on them!!!.
It's bad enough when the state thinks it should set decency standards for raising children, but when the state makes a law that puts that responsibility on ISPs, when the ISPs can not possibly comply, is pure insanity.
The Internet is generally stupid
Paul Robinson
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
all they need is a hosts file that they can allow their customers to download and map all those urls to 127.0.0.1 (which is localhost) and replace the current one located in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.
of course this solution only works for windows, but i'm pretty sure a similar solution is available for macs and linux systems.
HD Trailers
This really is the stupid way to do things, young kids (say up to 8 or 10) only need a small selection of websites they do not need to traverse the wide sea of knowledge on the internet until they are old enough to deal with whatever they find there. Websites that are suitable for kids should apply for a rating that proves they are suitable, then a list of good sites can be compiled and if you want you can set your ISP to only allow good sites. The advantage of this is as follows:
-'Bad' sites may try and get themselves off a black list by constantly adding alias addresses.
-There is NO way to get all the 'bad' sites on a list, it only takes 1 site to 'ruin' a childs life.
I was given full net access, to my room, no restrictions, when I was about 13. I'd say if you can't handle being able to see what you want to see at 13, you can't handle life.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
...for the archives
The Ro Factor - Jeep/Linux Weblog
Thank you for hitting it right on the head, but I would have said it a bit more eloquently ;).
I don't believe that MS even kept the etc directory when they ported the BSD stack! That's lazy. For the record, the UNIX file is /etc/hosts.
I'm an adult- if I were for instance still living in Salt Lake City would I be able to access a website that is 'not appropriate' ? or does the ISP contact you asking if you'd be interested in having this service at which point your modem or ip would be provisioned to have full access or the 'safe' internet.
I fully realize there is a great difference between what Utah (and other states) are doing compared to China/Iran as the programs are "opt-out" instead of state mandated, but I find the situation a bit funny. Imagine this conversation:
Bush: China, you are evil! You need to give your people "free" access to the internet so they can have free access to all ideas and opinion, not just yours!
China: But this is just our socities norms, we think there are certain things they shouldn't see.
Bush: Yeah, but your socity is STUPID, you atheist bastards. You are all going to HELL!
China: I'm sorry you feel that way, but its our right to decide that on our own.
Bush: If you didn't have so many people worried about blocking the internet and spent the time developing useful technology you could bring more wealth to your people, you are just being stupid!!!
Utah Gov: Psst, Mr President the people of our state want to block pornographic sites.
Bush: Hey, thats a great idea! My lord and saviour will love that!!! Hey, China can we get a download of that blocking software you have?
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
They will finally be getting listed *somewhere* :D
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
This, and all law like it, is pure BS. There is no desire to protect children involved, but rather a desire to control adults.
If you want to do this right and really protect children of parents who want the government protecting their children, then do this:
Pass a law that states what defines a site as "Safe for Children" and then issue certificates to any site who claims to meet those requirements. Anyone can get a certificate for their site and concerned parents could get browsers that required the certificate to function.
Anyone using the certificate in violation of the limits of the law would be prosecuted for sending smut to kids, but the entire adult world would not have to be censored.
In other words, don't mark the porn as "not child safe". Mark the child safe crap as "child safe" and punish people who misuse the mark.
If you want your government to control what your kids see, make them police children's content. Don't make them police all content. Censoring all content is just a way to use government to sponsor religion.
Ah, but here no one's banning anything. The ISP only has to filter - or provide filtering technology - to customers who request it. To continue your analogy, it would be like Houston publishing a directory of "adult entertainment" establishments and requiring the yellow pages to distribute it to you. It doesn't prevent consenting adults from engaging in the behavior, and shifts the blame completely to the parents since they had the opportunity to stop the kiddies from getting into the naughty stuff.
The only gripe is that, if filtering client software was enough to do the trick, why the ISPs had to get involved in this unfunded mandate at all. But as kneejerk "save the children" laws go, this is the least onerous I've seen yet.
Anything can be a "content provider."
Actually, if you read your own post a little closer, is sats that companies that post electronic data FOR PROFIT. Do you make money from your blog? More importantly, do you make a profit?! This is not a draconian law. It requires professional web content providers to stick a meta tag or something into their code. For 99% of us, that means we add it to the template that this site is rated E for everyone and we move on. There are very few people who would rate their site differently and they will probably stick the same meta tag in their code but it will say X for eXplicit or whatever. And they will probably welcome this. Now the onus is even more on the consumer to monitor what their kids see. While this is pretty much unenforcable, I don't think it's the kind of smack down you're making it out to be.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
If you need instructions on how to use a condom, I'd prefer you allowed Darwinian evolution to do its thing. ;-)
I believe you have it backwards. Failure to use a condom properly would spread the genes you seem to find undesirable.
On a more serious note, proper use of a condom is not quite as intuitive as you seem to think. Condoms with a reservoir tip need to have the tip pinched shut while it's being rolled onto the penis. Condoms without one need to have about a quarter of an inch pinched shut for the same purpose. And of course there are always the standard disclaimers for those who aren't quite thinking straight at the moment of passion: never reuse a condom, and never try to wear multiple condoms at the same time. Finally, be sure to hold the condom tightly against the penis while withdrawing.
That should cover about 98% of it. The rest, I'll leave to the professionals.
When polygamy was outlawed in Utah, thepolygamists just built their town (Colorado City/Hilldale) on the UT/AZ border. Now when the police show up, they just walk across the state line.
Best Slashdot Co
For me, "most" equals "all".
What's wrong with making fun of people believing silly sounding, probably wrong stuff?
The average layman's belief in science is indistinguishable from religious belief: in both cases the believers are listening to a handful of "prophets" making astounding claims about the nature of the universe, based on things the believers have never seen and is not in a position to test for themselves. Science-believers have simply decided, based on what they have heard, that the scientists' explanation makes more sense than the others. Religious fundamentalists have come to the opposite conclusion. Most people hover somewhere in between.
Unless you are one of the top 1% of physicists, therefore, your "rational" beliefs are essentially religious beliefs, and your statement that "all" religions are wrong becomes nonsensical.
Here's an experiment, if you don't believe me. Go out onto a street, accost an average-looking housewife, and try to tell her about Jesus. Now accost another one and try to tell her about string theory. Dollars to donuts you'll get the same reaction from both.
How do I actually put one of these so-called ratings on my web site? I want everyone to know that my mail tutorial and my picture of myself in my T-shirt (and so on) are not safe for children, old ladies, hamsters, or gastropods. In fact, all multicellular organisms should beware! I'm not currently in Utah, but I don't think that should be an excuse. It's clearly my civic duty to warn everyone, regardless of their geographic location, that my "content" is dangerous. After all, someone might mirror it.
So how do I do it? Is there a "meta" tag I need to put in? Do I need to have a special file in each directory, like robots.txt?
what neolithic tosspot modded the parent post flamebait???
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
oh great, more gov't telling us what's "safe". look we've bent over and accepted authority so much. The founders have rolled over in their graves.
How does this in any way ignore the Consitution. It's basically providing ISPs a list of content for them to block when people request it. Sure it costs the ISPs a little extra software, but they probably already have that software and this way they can't get sued when a site slips past the list. As for requiring site builders to rate their site. It requires professional web content providers to stick a meta tag or something into their code. For 99% of us, that means we add it to the template that "this site is rated E for everyone" and we move on. There are very few people who would rate their site differently and they will probably stick the same meta tag in their code but it will say "X for eXplicit" or whatever. And they will probably welcome this change as well since those kids eating up their bandwidth to look at the free previews don't have a credit card anyway.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
If an ISP wants to supply filter software, all it really needs is a list of the forbidden sites and to put them into a hosts.txt file which can be put onto the customer machine. Easy to create, easy to apply. Of course the software in that case is also easy to edit, but if parents don't want kids to edit that file, they can keep kids from having admin privs on their W2K or WXP or ... boxes, or equivalent in Linux, and use file system protections, which are perfectly ablt to prevent alterations. If parents want kids to be controlled, they should not let them be admins or root anyhow. Also the list then serves as a handy reference to just what is blocked, so adults can do as they like with it. There would need to be an installation script, I suppose, but that would not be rocket science either, and the software would work on most every OS out there. Indeed, others from other states might want a copy of the list...
Don't you remember what it was like to be a kid? The whole point of a good 20-75% of your activity was based on getting away with something! Parents were kept in the dark as much as humanly possible. . . and just having the computer in the TV room isn't enough.
That said, I don't think this is going to stop kids from acquiring porn either. . . they'll shoplift a Hustler like we did back when I was a wee lad. (or if they're lucky, their buddy's truckdriver dad would have a stash under his bed. God bless you, Brandon's dad)
Frankly, I don't know how I feel about the bill. On one hand, if I was a parent this could potentially make my job of monitoring/protecting my kids a little easier. On the other hand, if this is an excuse for ISPs to raise rates then it's not a good thing, and it should be footed by the parents in the form of blocking software. I pay enough taxes for everybody else's kids already and wouldn't want my internet costs to go up because parents are preventing their kids from going to the sites I'm a member of.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Ok, after reading comments talking about how this is just more censorship, or how this is giving even more control to governments, I have to say that I disagree with that. This is in fact, IMHO, a mostly good thing.
First off, it's not censorship. Censorship is shutting down, or forcing the alterations of ones message. This is neither. This ensures the rights of those who wish to exercise them. E.G. Your rights stop where mine begin, and likewise. If I choose not to listen to what your saying, then I don't have to listen to it. The same applies here. Those people, parents or otherwise, who choose to have such content filtered, may do so. It is, in no way, pushed onto them. Nor is pushed onto those sites who affected by it. This simply provides a regulated means to solve a perceived problem.
Secondly, I feel a rating system is long over-due. It's no different, in principal, than say a movie type rating system. For those who don't want to their kids to an 'R' rated movie, don't buy movies with 'R' ratings. Others don't really care, and it doest affect them. How, in principal, is this any different. I foresee some implementation issues, and growing pains on the technical side, but thats to be expected.
More importantly, this only affects those in Utah. So if your not in Utah, your current impact of this decision is ZERO. Sure, this could become some federal rule down the road. It's probable that some other states will adopt similar policies. Hell, we could even have an asteroid destroy all of mankind.
My point is, is that this allows those who feel offended by such content, a means not to feel exposed to it. It's really a government approved Net-Nanny. Thats all.
http://www.accelerateglobalwarming.com
I don't have children myself. But, I have friends who have real problems protecting their children from the internet.
For example, they leave AIM up while they are away from their PC, and come back to find all kinds of porn pushed to them.
Utah is going in the wrong direction, but I have to wonder: what is a concerned parent to do? I have heard that "netnanny" kind of stuff is useless.
In the entire bill, they avoided declaring what sorts of things are "harmful to minors." They left that to a bureaucrat who will soon be public enemy #1, of both the pro- and anti-censorship forces.
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
I know what you're talking about. I hate politically correctness. Hey I know lets talk about niggers now.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
I just map *.com, *.net, *.org, *.uk, *.cx to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file. I hardly ever see anything offensive...
We've gone into an offtopic flamewar now, and it will undoubtably be modded into oblivion, but what the hell...
The guy you were responding to was not trolling, and I doubt you "dont like to post things that are insulting" if you accuse him of such. He stated that telling him that he has to take your word for the existance of a god that answers your prayers was BS. His reasoning, as I understood it, was that if a god was answering your prayers, if there was an "interventionist" god running the universe and responding to you in person, then it should be simple for you to demonstrate this. If you can't prove the existance of a deity that will answer you if asked, then what proof do you have that you aren't just hearing voices in your head?
I am willing to take you at your word that you believe in something above. I can see that your faith in this matter is strong. But the fact that you beleive in it doesn't matter to me and I doubt it mattered to the parent. You can assert that "there is a god and he answers when I pray", I can honestly state that I dont know what powers may exist in the universe, and an aethist can assert that "there is no god". But your assertion required blind faith and your own evidence requires preconceptions about the nature of god. You are certain about a matter that cannot be proved, according to the standard of proof the parent poster demanded. To say that "god answers me" and "I cant prove the existance of god to you" while believing that this god intervenes within our universe is contradictory; either you can prove the matter through prayer, or your god doesn't exist as you've portayed him, or he does exist, but doesn't answer/intervene (in which case you are mistaken in your belief that you have been answered in the past).
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Funny +1
Spit morning coffee in laughter +1
====
+2
Great tag!
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
The difference is when you ask the "prophets" why they believe what they do.
The scientist will tell you they performed experiments to confirm the results; that these experiments have been done repeatedly by different people; that their theories are backed up by evidence. Also note how all those following the scientific method generally come to an agreement on what they claim (in cases where there are disagreements, it would be less rational for a layman to believe one scientific claim over an alternative one).
The religious person will tell you it's true because of his wobbly interpretation of a book written thousands of years ago, or it's true because he claims "God said so". Also note how people following the "God said so" route cannot agree at all on anything; there are countless different contradictory religious viewpoints.
Now sure, it could be that there's a worldwide conspiracy where all the scientists are lying to us. But for those of us who don't subscribe to crackpot beliefs like that, the idea that the believing what scientists say is comparable to believing what one particular religious person says is absurd.
If the scientists are making it up, how does your computer work? Through religious magic?
Science-believers have simply decided, based on what they have heard, that the scientists' explanation makes more sense than the others. Religious fundamentalists have come to the opposite conclusion.
What "others"? There are no "other scientists". Religious fundamentalists however seem to have some reason to believe one small group of religious people over every other group.
Go out onto a street, accost an average-looking housewife, and try to tell her about Jesus. Now accost another one and try to tell her about string theory. Dollars to donuts you'll get the same reaction from both.
The interesting thing is that it's only the Jesus-believers who seem to have a need to force their beliefs on random passerbys..
And string theory isn't a fair example of science - it's something new and (AFAIK) untestable; if a layman went around saying that string theory was correct, I would say he was being irrational. But this is not the same at all of more accepted and tested science (eg, quantum theory or relativity).
Don't you have someone else's birthday candles to blow out?
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Proof also helps. Science has brought us things like medicine, TV's, computers, transportation etc. I don't need to be "top 1 % physicist" to see the benefits of science and scientific study.
However, there is a considerable lack of gorgeous blondes around be, my close relatives are dying, I'm penniless and life in general sucks, so I'm yet to be convinced about the power of prayer.
while true;do echo -e -n "\033[s\n\033[u\134_\033[B";done
Bye First Amendment, and Thank you so much for serving me all this time. I'll be sure to miss you.
I'M NOT ANGRY!
do you even know the difference between parody and being flat-out derrogatory(sp?)?
You have to love Utah spitting on basic concepts such as freedom of speech and, oh, PARENTING. For a state that, in general, is comprised of Mormons who wail on and on about their tight knit communities, I wonder why an ISP has to do the screening for them? Based on WHAT criteria will an ISP have to black-list a site? How INSANE is this?!
The same result can be made if the parents enabled a firewall or other basic filtering that comes in most any parental control package. If on a PC, Norton comes to mind alnog with a plethora of others. In fact, most PC's probably come with this software. And, if a parent is THAT worried about their children seeing something offensive (it's out there) shouldn't THEY take the time to block it?
I'd love to know if Utah has similar laws preventing people from calling phone sex lines.
The problem I have with legislation like this is the line of thinking that breeds this ignorance. People take the stance that they want you to adhere to their moral code. What's ironic about this in Utah, is that the majority of the state has a religious moral code that they abide by. If they were all following that code then they wouldn't have to have laws like this, would they? In which case, perhaps the problem doesn't lie with the content-- it lies with the culture of enforcing the unenforcable.
I'm not saying that there's horrble shit out there that I wouldn't want my kids to see-- I'm saying it's my own responsibility to take care of it.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
"Can I go on record as saying I have near-zero respect for anyone who believes in creationism in any of the classical ways." Sure. My inability to prove god exists is not proof positive that he/she/it doesn't exist. It's all faith, my friend. You've just chosen to place your faith in the belief that there is no "higher power."
So, what do you have to do to be considered an ISP in Utah? Sell dialup accounts? Provide wi-fi at a bookstore? Set up an open WAP? Where's the threshold between "provides access to the Internet" and "Internet service provider" under this law?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Sure, why not. Run more businesses out of your state.
If it costs too much to do business there, they will move elsewhere. And take their jobs with them.
Beteen laws that make it hard to do business at all, or raising taxes, other areas are doing it as well.
Seems to be the way to go these days.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Tin plated would-be Theocratic dictators who are no better then the Taliban deserve no respect ever. This sort of Ashcroftism needs to be ridiculed at every step.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
OK. I tried this experiment. You were absolutely correct! I got the EXACT same reaction from both!
As a result I'm setting up a paypal account for all you slashdotters to poney up the dough for my bail. Who'd have guessed accosting a couple average-looking housewives would have stirred up so much trouble? BTW, NEVER, EVER tell a woman she is average looking...
The scientist will tell you they performed experiments to confirm the results; that these experiments have been done repeatedly by different people; that their theories are backed up by evidence.
Only the scientist who has actually performed these experiments. That can't be said for most people...
The religious person will tell you it's true because of his wobbly interpretation of a book written thousands of years ago, or it's true because he claims "God said so". Also note how people following the "God said so" route cannot agree at all on anything; there are countless different contradictory religious viewpoints.
Too funny. The science-advocate will tell you that his beliefs are true because of his wobbly interpretation of what he's read in school or periodicals, or heard from his friends about wild (and not so wild) theories that were produced in an attempt to explain an environment whos complexity still eludes our ability to perfectly model. Or he'll tell you it's true because his professor said so. Also note how people following the science route cannot agree on anything, as theories change frequently; there are countless different contradictory scientific theories.
Now sure, it could be that there's a worldwide conspiracy where all the scientists are lying to us. But for those of us who don't subscribe to crackpot beliefs like that, the idea that the believing what scientists say is comparable to believing what one particular religious person says is absurd.
The funny thing is, it's not the scientists who are lying. A good scientist generally presents his or her ideas as a theory (with no misrepresentation involved). Unfortunately, when professors and the media pick it up, what gets presented to students and the public takes little regard for clarifying what is fact and what is a theory based on that fact. I personally find it easier to believe a level-headed religious leader than what gets distored by the news media.
The interesting thing is that it's only the Jesus-believers who seem to have a need to force their beliefs on random passerbys..
Yes, those against religious beliefs are generally more organized, instead showing up at odd moments to disrupt private conversations that they've been eavesdropping on just because they don't like or agree with what they are hearing.
But see, this is the issue. If you truly understand science, you'll know that neither quantum theory nor relativity are actually correct. They are merely the closest we can come to a model that defines the universe based on what observations we've been able to make. These theories, while very valuable for making predictions, will undoubtedly fall prey to a newer and better theory sometime in the future. The best one can hope for is that new theories will merely add to or slightly adjust those that already exist.
I agree that there are a lot of nuts spouting religious beliefs to people who obviously don't want to hear. But there are many more who observe much more reasonable beliefs with some evidence to back them up, and a clear statement of faith where evidence fails.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Incidentally, Texas is also very heavily Southern Baptist... and Southern Baptists make Mormons look like the Hells Angels. Ah, but you know... the Bible Belt, or as I like to call it, the Ignorance Belt, is the world capital of hypocrisy.
Well I guess they better force all the CableTV companies to provide set-top boxes (STBs), and a list of all shows and movies that "aren't safe" for children (anything above a G rating). This way the parents will have a device that can block shows with access codes or just disable the TV show automagically at certain timeslots. While they're at it, the government should provide facemasks for all children walking in public so if a lady with a short skirt or low-cut top walks by, the parents can block their innocent eyes! SEX IS WRONG, AND THINKING ABOUT SEX IS WRONG. Unless all these sites are hate literature or something... I admit it, I didn't RTFA. If the government REALLY cared, they could offer tax refunds on parental control software so people could go out and purchase it themselves. OR, you can just TELL PEOPLE WHAT THEY ALREADY KNOW. The internet has a bunch of good and bad things (both those terms are relative to what you believe), and you should take a proactive stance about what your kids are viewing online (if that's your cup of tea). If you don't like it, don't go online. It's the same thing as if you have a satellite and all those (great) movies come on at midnight. Don't let your kids watch if you want them to see something. This is just some bullshit politician (i almost think those words should always be used together) flexing his muscles. It makes a few people happy (the lazy parents), and pisses off a bunch of other people who's rates will go up for Internet access to pay for these lazy parents.
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
Not exactly the South, but I'm much more worried about the bible beaters 62 ft Jesus.
You certainly have that right. As a Mormon myself, I have no problem with you making fun of "us". Where people tend to be more sensitive, however, is when the "making fun" is done in a manner that spreads erroneous information about what the Mormons actually believe. Most of the "moronic" beliefs that I have heard being attributed to Mormons are actually not true. Now if you are one of those inclined to consider all religious beliefs as moronic, then not much can be done about that. But if you really knew what Mormons believed, I think you might find that they aren't quite as moronic as you may have been lead to believe thus far.
"Intel[l]igent design" folks are at least trying to justify their beliefs, but creationists creating the Earth before the Sun? Do you expect me to take you seriously on anything else when you are that naive/stupid/gullible?
I'm not sure where that comes from. The basic creationist belief (as outlined in the Bible) states that "And God said, let there be light...and the morning and the night were the first day." In other words, the "light" (the Sun) was created before all else. I'm not sure how all religions deal with it, but as Mormons, we also believe that the "creation" was more of an organization in the sense that matter was organized to create the Earth, sun, stars, etc... and not mysteriously created out of nothing. But the Sun was still created first.
And, yes, "Ra" (as I understand it, anyway) is representative of God. God has been represented in many different ways by many different religions and many different cultures. That certainly does not preclude the idea that they are talking about the same Being. We all have different understandings, and have recorded those different understandings in different ways. So I agree that it is rediculous to dismiss the similarities out-of-hand.
The problem with this bill is that it poorly defines what an ISP is. I am internet security engineer for an ISP that is, more or less, mere conduit. That is, we provide no content services whatsoever, unlike AOL... you get a pipe, and a gateway for authenticated TCP/IP traffic... from there, you're on your own.
The Pennsylvania law presents considerable problems for us because we do not monitor content. One cannot filter content fairly without monitoring it. No content filtering system can be expected to not cause collateral damage, and considerable collateral damage will occur where content filtering is "blind" (preprogrammed) and not facilitated by active, intelligent monitoring. These conclusions are supported by the findings of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board in a 2002 publication, titled, "Youth, Pornography and the Internet."
If we move past the boundary of being mere conduit, we may establish a number of false expectations that are not aligned with the scope of services we can reasonably provide. We have thousands of users who are customers of a customer of a customer of ours... As a Tier 1 ISP, this is a reality that Utah has, apparently, ignored.
What's the result? For example... Some enduser of an ISP which leases lines from another ISP which leases lines from us... is surfing the internet. Both the DMCA (17 USC 12) and the Utah statute (HB 260) do not clearly delineate between upstream ISPs and enduser ISPs... so where does the responsibility for providing content filtering begin and end?
It should be only a matter of time before this one gets overturned, because it's incredibly difficult to enforce and, more importantly, it ignores one of the most fundamental aspects of the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment. As a parent, you have the ultimate responsibility to police what your child does and doesn't see/read/hear.
In principle, and upheld largely by case law, the Establishment Clause prohibits government from becoming a censor in place of a parent's lack of involvement or judgment. Utah H.B. 260 violates this standard, by way of the exclusion in the Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution.
In the last paragraph, meant to say the Free Exercise Clause... not the Establishment Clause.
Why is it a religious issue to not want your children to see something like that old slashdot favorite image with "goat" in the name?
I'm sure there are plenty of athiests with children who would like to protect them from seeing a wide variety of images on the internet. Boobies? Come on. If the internet had nothing more extreme than Playboy Magazine, I seriously doubt you'd have legislation like this.
Also this does not infringe anyone's first amendment rights, because it is voluntary. If you want to continue to see everything, you do nothing. If you want to block the sites on the list, you have to request that they be blocked.
To summarize why I reject your logic:
Now, unfortunately, comes my reason why this bill won't do much good... It is amazingly easy to set up a new domain name. It is impossible for ANY group to keep an adequate list of sites to block. As soon as owners of a site find it blocked, they can spend about 15 minutes at most to get a new name that ISN'T blocked.
The best solution I ever heard was from one of the columnists in eWeek (back when it was PCWeek) circa 1996-7. Can't remember which one. His suggestion was a separate domain designator for porn. Something like .xxx
This way anyone could publish anything, but people who choose to avoid such things could simply block the .xxx domains.
I used to live in Utah and I'm glad I left! Just another attempt of the state to micro-legislate its people.
Excessive drinking is fine...in moderation.
You had me there right up until....get married.
Man...I just don't understand why you'd want to do that..unless you WANT to have kids. But, other than that, why the hell do you want to risk giving away half your stuff, and having to sleep with only woman the rest of your days? I say at the most...just live with them, kind of like 'leasing with an option to buy'.
Much better I say, to find one you like...hang with awhile, till it is time to 'trade in for a newer model'.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
According to http://www.biblegateway.com/ creation goes as follows (new international translation, but this is consistent with every translation I've seen):
The above says that both heavens and earth were created before light, so why do you claim that the Sun was created first ? Is this passage different in whatever version of the Bible Mormons use ?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Perhaps if the Fundies weren't trying to destroy science education in schools, the public at large would understand it better. As it is, science is probably the single most useful tool ever invented for understanding the natural world.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There are tons of "family friendly" ISPs out here, and evrybody knows you can get filtering software for your computers.
What's next, movies? There are CleanFlicks signs all over this town (talk about a bastardization of culture!). Maybe that's not good enough. Let's have The State maintain a list of objectionable movies so we can force the private sector to bend its practices due to our lack of ability to control our children (or ourselves, in the case of porn).
This is just ridiculous. What next, a state Porn Czar? Oh wait...
Method of processing duck feet
Let's put it this way. If I don't bother to 'rate' my site, you may safely assume it's X by default, and anyone who wants can keep their kids away from it.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
I'm sure someone just clicked on the wrong mod category. Or they didn't like my sig line. ;-)
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
Mormons use the King James Version, but it's essentially the same. However, unlike many other Christian faiths, Mormons don't take the Bible completely literally (and have other books). So parent is wrong about traditional Christian creationism, but grandparent is wrong about Mormons.
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
We tolerate this "religion" dementia too much. Look, it's OK if you bite your nails to satisfy your neurosis, but stop passing laws to get me to believe. Acceptance of acceptable behavior, like thinking, is OK. But your own comment betrays the problem: those white sheets and twisted crosses are costumes for the religious amok, who are even more dangerous when covered by Washington lobbyists.
--
make install -not war
if there really was a high demand for pre-censored web access in utah then i am sure some enterprising individual would have taken it upon themselves to provide the service. i wouldn't be surprised to discover there already is one such company.
this just in: newsstands in utah now required to provide porn-free copies of penthouse to all customers making the request.
sum.zero
Actually, all science is entirely based on faith. Very obviously, there's the faith in one's senses, and consistency - repeated experiments *will* produce the same results, right? Always and forever? And the actual scientific principle is based on tests - that can be failed. Logical positivism is the formal statement of the scientific principle: statements are scientific only if they could possibly fail an applied test, whether or not that test is feasible or even known; otherwise they're metaphysics. But that statement itself cannot be "falsified" in a test, so it's metaphysics. Faith.
So what? That little bit of scientific inquiry just proves that faith is at least a fundamental basis of our minds, if not existence (that distinction is metapyhsical). It certainly says nothing about the proof of faith ("god"), except that it can't exist. So give me the faith that demands nothing other than I trust my immediate place in the universe, that delivers (tech) miracles daily, that doesn't tell me to do anything to anyone else, that doesn't traffic in fear and submission. I worship science by turning on the lights - and lo, there was light!
--
make install -not war
Jesus, man, get a sense of humor. Making a little fun is certainly a far cry from burning those who believe differently than you do. It's all this sensitivity bullshit that has gotten out of hand. You can't even make fun of someone who is white/black/christian/muslim/etc... for any reason without being labeled some type of racist or bigot. Political correctness is not the solution to the world's hatred problems. It only makes things worse, because you and the rest of the pussies expect to go through life completely unoffended by anything that anyone else says. Guess what? That's not going to happen; people are always going say things that you don't like or don't agree with. That's their opinion and they're entitled to it. If others can't take a joke, fuck them. If it makes me an intollerent(sic) moron then so be it.
This sig intentionally left blank...
i) providing in-network filtering to prevent receipt of material harmful to minors:
or
ii) providing software for contemporaneous installation on the consumer's computer that blocks, in an easy-to-enable and commercially reasonable manner, receipt of material harmful to minors.
I don't think Proxomitron would qualify as easy-to-enable.
What is with these religious socialists in Utah? All the lobbyists who forced this law on all their neighbors statewide could have started an ISP which blocks porn sites on request, with a default list for subscribers. That's right: free enterprise. If it were really popular, Utahans would switch over in droves; eventually, every ISP in Utah would do it that way. And it would create demand elsewhere for such boring ISPs. But no, they call on Caesar to do the Lord's work. What a gang of hypocrites - they obviously need porn more than the average person, or at least to get laid once in a while. That would prove there's a god.
--
make install -not war
If I make fun of my own god, it's blasphemy. If I make fun of someone else's god, it's monotheism.
You seem to be a reasonable sort; if you will indulge my curiosity there are a couple things I would appreciate clarification on in your post.
note how people following the science route cannot agree on anything, as theories change frequently; there are countless different contradictory scientific theories
I think you may have a misunderstanding of some terms. There are countless contradictory hypotheses... at the point something is declared a theory there is a degree of general acceptance. Example: Theory of Gravity, Theory of Evolution. An hypothesis is much more of a guess - and scientists recognize that.
You make it sound as if disagreement is a bad thing - strong disagreement is the only way that science advances. If people always believed the first thing that someone told them, we'd be in a different world now. Or were you saying that everyone should be unified in one belief?
A good scientist...
A "bad" scientist is not a scientist at all, by purest definition. Sure, someone might call themselves one but then again not everyone who claims to be Christian follows the beliefs they profess. Is Clinton a Christian even though he got busy in the Oval Office? Is Bush a Christian, even though his right-to-life stance doesn't extend to Death Row? Aren't we supposed to forgive everyone?
I personally find it easier to believe a level-headed religious leader than what gets distored by the news media.
Since the media will never distort what a religious leader says...? This one was actually a point of curiosity - would you name some of these religious leader role-models? And no Mother Teresa-type things; real, outspoken people in the modern world please.
Without having read through the bill I have no doubt that it's deeply flawed, but just speaking conceptually I like the idea of requiring ratings on websites if the requirements are reasonable (yeah, that's a big can of worms, I know).
It might ease some of the objections from parents (and I am one) about how easy it is for kids to access porn (and I'm especially concerned about younger kids who aren't emotionally ready to be exposed to that sort of thing).
It could also eliminate the current problem of content filters that are based upon secret blacklists of sites which may or may not contain actual porn - the blocking would be much more accurate.
For this to be done right it would have to be an internationally agreed-upon standard, and ideally a voluntary one, always keeping in mind that the ratings are only an extra bit of information placed somewhere on the web site and that it's completely up to the client (or client site) to do any filtering.
Of course, I'm not holding my breath for anything reasonable to happen.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Personally, I'd rather have my kids see Bob Goatse in all his glory than have them stumble across this poisonous filth accidentially. Somehow I doubt the things I think are offensive will find their way on to the list.
One flaw with our system of government is that politicians are not punished for intentionally passing legislation they know to be unconstitutional. Politicians who sponsor, vote for, or enact unconstitutional laws should be held criminally liable for their malfeasance.
Virtually every elected official in the country has sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. By willfully violating this oath they should by rights forfeit their office.
It's my opinon that promoting and lobbying for blatantly unconstituional laws constitutes seditious conspiricy under US law. IMHO The governer of Utah should be arrested, stripped of power, and sent to Federal PMITA prison for 20 years.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
One flaw with our system of government is that politicians are not punished for intentionally passing legislation they know to be unconstitutional. Politicians who sponsor, vote for, or enact unconstitutional laws should be held criminally liable for their malfeasance.
Virtually every elected official in the country has sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. By willfully violating this oath they should by rights forfeit their office.
It's my opinon that promoting and lobbying for blatantly unconstituional laws constitutes seditious conspiricy under US law. IMHO The governer of Utah should be arrested, stripped of power, and sent to Federal PMITA prison for 20 years.
Wow! I must say your last 3 paragraphs make complete sense to me. Maybe not as harsh as a prison sentance but I think they should be held accountable and depending the severity of it, stripped of power and be told that you can't ever run again. In business executives are held accountable for everything they do, but it does seem that there is this gaping hole in our government. Excellent idea!
If you are a parent you should take responsibility.
You're not a parent, are you. Or, if you are, only of younger children. That view is regularly cited and, almost exclusively, only ever held by people without experience of actually being a parent.
The point is, no matter how much responsibility you try and take, the reality of parenthood is that you can't always be there to monitor every moment of their lives. Even if you're a stay at home parent - the moment you have more than one child, there will come times when you have one child burst in to tears in another room and have to go to them, etc.
What's wrong with having the PC in the same room as the TV set until you've taught the kid your values?
And how much good does watching them do? Just after the ad for a site where women make horses very happy comes on to the screen, because they accidentally clicked a link, you dive across the room and turn off the screen. So, does that make them "un" see it? Of course not. No amount of vigilence and sensible teaching in the world can make the web a place most parents would consider "safe" to surf - even if they monitor every moment of their child's usage.
Filtering, while not perfect (but that debate is for the parent post), is an attempt to address that. Even if you do monitor - you can only be reactive. A filter is a means of being proactive.
Ouch!
As a devout Mormon and a follower of Science (and no that isn't an oxymoron), I find your closed minded hatred of something you don't understand to be deeply disturbing.
Not that I am trying to convert you, but you might be a bit happier in life if you attempted to open your mind to concepts, theories, and technologies which fell outside your currently accepted sphere of understanding...
Don't be afraid to learn and test new theories.. It doesn't make you naive/stupid/gullible.
By the way, as a friend of John Dougall (the bill's author) I do find the bill a little far-reaching and hard to enforce, but I appreciate the effort at bringing up the issues involved in creating an environment where our children can be protected from things we want them to avoid...
There are some sticky issues involved with regulation of behavior in a networked world, which need to be resolved in order to have the internet continue as a viable medium for communication and commerce.
1) It is internationally connected, so laws passed in one country can not touch content providers in another country
2) Who shoulders the burden of responsibility for protecting the populace of a country against foreign agression. (We have food inspectors/laws/embargos to protect against tainted food, and yet we have nothing to protect us from 300 personal daily spam messages and phishing sites from Russia.)
3) Individuals (and their Parents) ultimately shoulder the responsibility for what they choose to do, but what tools should be made available to them to make that job easier.... (My daughter ended up on a hardcore site while trying to get to the Virgin Mobile site to pay her Cell bill -- all because of a typo)
4) Technology will always lead legislation... This bill does not cover some of the favorite mechanisms for transmission of porn (irc, P2P, usenet) it only covers websites (http).
Whether or not this bill will actually accomplish the stated goal of forcing ISPs to provide a filtering solution is debatable, but I hope it encourages public dialog which expands beyond the filtering of pornography and into the realm of finding technical solutions to do things like
- Prevent Spam
- Stoping Phishing
- Improving protection against Identity Theft
- More reliable mechanisms for filtering for those who wish it
Good can happen, and just because you hate Mormons and love Porn, doesn't mean that you can't benefit from the dialog established by efforts such as this which can result in technological advances which ultimately solve the problem better than any legislation will ever be able to accomplish.
---
Smile... (It makes people wonder what you've been up to)
First off, there's the commerce clause. Only Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce, the states are denied this power under the tenth amendment. About the only thing which MIGHT pass Constitutional muster are ISPs who only have customers in Utah. The only websites that could be put on the list would be those that are hosted in Utah, run by Utah-based companies, and have no customers outside of Utah.
Secondly, there's the matter of due process. One could argue that being put on the list deprives you of your liberty to conduct lawful business and unfairly stigmitizes you. Some faceless beaurocrat blacklisting you and forcing you to go through an appeals process to prove that you are not guilty is antithetical to the concept of due process.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Princess Amidala?
[UID-HeinzIntel]
Quote: If others can't take a joke, #$%^ them.
So, let me understand... If someone disagrees with you, it is ok to rape them....
Or perhaps your use of that term demonstrates that you lack sufficient grasp of the English language to realize what you are saying.
In other words... Please mind your language. Profanity in forums such as this usually does little more than demonstrate a person's propensity to throw tantrums when logical discussion is beyond their reach.
This law is just political pandering. Forcing the ISP's to provide this list, is just so that the politicians pushing it can distinguish themselves as being anti-pornography. I think most ISP's would voluntarily provide the list anyway. Parents would probably favor those and most all other ISP's would follow. If they couldn't do so, then they could just explain to the customer "caveat emptor".
If you were on the state legislature in Utah, would you dare vote against this bill? That would be like publicly announcing that you were in favor of pornography.
You aren't obligated to respect the spirit of the law, just the letter of it. So, the ISPs will only have to do the bare minimum to comply. Screw the Google caches and the open relays. If the site doesn't appear on the list, they don't have to block it.
You have a very fundamental misunderstanding of science versus religion. I have 6 words for you:
Empirical evidence supported by repeatable experiment.
It's slightly more compelling that believe preacher Joe who insists there's a definite number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
Or perhaps your use of that term demonstrates that you lack sufficient grasp of the English language to realize what you are saying.
What, you thought he was using the word "fuck" in a literal sense? Get your lazy ass out into the real world! The word is often used figuratively, as an expletive with no meaning beyond the dismissiveness in the remark.
Profanity in forums such as this usually does little more than demonstrate a person's propensity to throw tantrums when logical discussion is beyond their reach.
See, now I recognize your type: You belong to the "superior" ASSHOLES who think that you can get away with such denigrating remarks just because you don't use any of that profanity stuff.
Hint: People can actually be more offended by shit like you wrote than the occasional expletive. What you practice is called "looking down on people who are different from you", or "Übermench worship", depending on how far you take your hate of non-conformists.
Get a life, and use it well.
"You can have my dildo when you pry it from my...
hot...
wet..."
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
I think you may have a misunderstanding of some terms. There are countless contradictory hypotheses...
No misunderstanding, but an unintentional misrepresentation. You are correct. Those ideas that are most contradictory are generally only hypotheses. Theories are frequently proven wrong, but not usually in whole. Instead, it is usually the case that some extension is needed to satisfy new observations that have been found. But make no mistake. Theories are not necessarily fact. They are merely strongly supported conclusions that have been generally accepted. It does happen that a previously accepted theory is completely contradicted when it is found that it utterly fails to explain some new observations. This doesn't happen very frequently, though.
You make it sound as if disagreement is a bad thing - strong disagreement is the only way that science advances.
Not at all. In fact, that whole paragraph I wrote was just using the grandparent's words about religion in reference to science instead. Like in science, in religion disagreements don't have to be a "bad" thing, although there are some core beliefs that when transgressed yield rather unhealthy friction.
A "bad" scientist is not a scientist at all, by purest definition.
Try convincing the "bad" scientiest of that. ;)
Sure, someone might call themselves one but then again not everyone who claims to be Christian follows the beliefs they profess.
Agreed.
Is Clinton a Christian even though he got busy in the Oval Office?
I don't think anyone can say for sure. All I can say is that his behavior was not reflective of Christian beliefs. But, Christians are human too.
Is Bush a Christian, even though his right-to-life stance doesn't extend to Death Row?
I'm not sure you can compare these two, as the only crime usually committed by a fetus is one of inconvenience to its parents.
Aren't we supposed to forgive everyone?
One could argue that there is a difference between forgiveness and consequences. If you steal something from me, my forgiveness of that act can be separate from the time you spend in jail. Although, they can be intertwined. What makes Death Row different is that there is no opportunity for retribution afterwards. I think the scariest thing about capital punishment is the possibility of executing someone who is innocent.
Since the media will never distort what a religious leader says...?
Oh, this happens all the time. I never meant to imply that it doesn't. In fact, there are probably any number of potential religious leaders in whom I can place no trust because I don't know if the media is lying or not.
This one was actually a point of curiosity - would you name some of these religious leader role-models?
The best public example I could provide is Billy Graham. But there are plenty of leaders with whom I interact that the general public wouldn't be aware of, including my own pastor. There are also some Christian artists that I've had the pleasure of meeting, and who've had an impact on my life. By the way, this is not to say that these people aren't human. Just like anybody else, they can make mistakes, so one shouldn't set them on a pedestal.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
No, I didn't say that. They may be a god. I certainally think there are likely beings out there in the universe that we might consider "god".
However, believing that god created man in his own image is clearly backwards. We created god. Why do you think he is always represented a white male? Because he was created by white males. Of course, the fact that everyone in biblical times would have been black doesn't seem present on the stained-glass windows at my local church.
The bible is wrong on many key fundamental concepts. Normally when you read something and realise that the author is wrong, you put it down and move on. With the bible, people seem to come up with crazy ideas that might make it all fit in about what is known about the history of this planet. Where did the dinosaurs fit in exactly? They weren't known about when the bible was written, though if they had been they would have been a part of the story.
wow... how cute and stupid.
you do realize that many men who ARE married or with soemone still look at pr0n? heck, i should not leave women out of the picture too.
the simple point is i don't want government siding with lazy parents over my right to see what i want.
ISP's are required to block sites on a certain list? WTF?? isn't that what 3rd party software already does? Buy a friggin' blocker software yourself.
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
Or better yet, why doesn't he go out and pass a law ensuring that people with different moral values have to live their lives according to his?
Oh wait.
All Hail the Maggott Show
Most of the "moronic" beliefs that I have heard being attributed to Mormons are actually not true.
I gotta admit, most of my "knowledge" of the Mormon faith is from an episode of South Park that you are likely familiar with. From it I got the impression that Mormons believe that the biblical events all took place in North America, and that Native Americans look the way they do as a punishment. I of course took this at face value (I am critical of most information "fed" to me), but I figured that as the episode was contraversial, it would be as acurate as possible, lest it be easilly torn appart by critics.
And, yes, "Ra" (as I understand it, anyway) is representative of God. God has been represented in many different ways by many different religions and many different cultures
Many preach that other ones are false gods and that theirs is the only real one. The worst guy I ever spoke to believed that there would never be peace on earth until everyone was Christian. Of course, he was willing to fight to make that happen. Ironic, don't you think?
> Blaming religion for evil acts of people who prefess religious beliefs is the same as blaming science because nuclear weapons can kill lots of people
No one died from nukes dropped "in the name of science." Those religious whackjobs act "in the name of God" or "for God's grace" or whatever bullshit they believe. So no, it is not even close to being the same at all.
> It wouldn't be fair to force everyone into what my view of distasteful is but a voluntary database is a good idea.
Great, then use one that already exists. There have been programs available to block content since before the World Wide Web was a household name. Use one of those.
I think the punishment is perfectly fine.
After all, you could easily consider that knowingly trying to pass laws that violate constitutional rights is treason.
There's been more than a few atrocities in the name "of science. Nazi medical expirimentation comes to mind. The numbers pale in comparison to religious atrocity, though. Further, you have to compare the beliefs and guidelines of the religion. For example, Christianity is a bloody death-cult, and it's hardly suprising that plenty of people have been killed in it's name. On the other hand, hardly anyone has been killed in Buddhist jihads.
Then dont sign up for this voluntary service...
Personally, I'd rather have my kids see Bob Goatse in all his glory than have them stumble across this poisonous filth accidentially. Somehow I doubt the things I think are offensive will find their way on to the list.
Then dont sign up for this voluntary service...
One flaw with our system of government is that politicians are not punished for intentionally passing legislation they know to be unconstitutional.
how is this any more unconstitutioanl than the rating system on movies?
The more extreme religious figures need no media exaggeration, either. Just as the more extreme fringe "scientists" don't either.
> What's wrong with making fun of people
> believing silly sounding, probably wrong
> stuff ?
You need to do this - go home, and slap your mother and father for not teaching you the basic idea of respect. "Making fun of people" is just a bad idea. Period.
Next, slap yourself for being an insensitive jerk.
Critiquing, debating, and discussing: feel free! That's what this country is about. Being disrespectful? No... although it certainly seems that the media outlets are encouraging this behavior.
Here's a clue - treat people with respect, and, most likley, they'll treat you with respect, too.
Theres a commandment against adultery but it's condoned and even advocated in more than one spot in the bible (polygamy, rape, and the use of prostitutes is endemic in the bible)
It's important to follow who is condoning what and when in the bible.
-mkb
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
By all means you should rape those whose opinions differ from yours, that is exactly what I was saying(sarcasm, btw). Seriously, you're the type of person I was talking about in my original post: the one who gets his panties bunched up over silly things like profanity. Why does it offend you so much? Your comment regarding tantrum throwing is irrelevant as while I may have been on a slight rant, my thoughts were otherwise well ordered and logical. I saw your post where you stated that you are a Mormon. I can only assume that your church taught you that the f-word is wrong, and that's why it bothers you so much. FYI, "fuck them" in the sense that I meant it could also be translated "go fuck yourself" or "fuck off" or even "why don't you shut the fuck up?" none of which mean, by the definitions of most reasonable people, to actually go and commit a felony sexual violation of a person. Sorry to throw another tantrum, but my propensity to do so flares up worse than normal when talking to idiots.
This sig intentionally left blank...
The fundamentalist/literalist belief is that the Bible, all of it, is the literal word of God, protected from corruption and loss by His will through the years. This is obviously contradictory with picking and choosing which parts you're going to listen to. But that doesn't seem to actually bother anyone.
The problem is eventually you get old, and it becomes more and more difficult to attract that newer model. You should get married just before you reach that point in your life. For men, it can be anywhere from 30-40 years old, depending on your looks and income.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
Great, but that's not what I'm talking about.
-mkb
You obviously didn't get it...
Only the scientist who has actually performed these experiments. That can't be said for most people...
Of course I get it; I never disputed the point that the layperson hasn't performed the experiments. My point is that it isn't unreasonable to suggest that the scientific method is a more reliable means than "God says so". Sure, it could be that every scientist is wrong, or perhaps there is some conspiracy where they are all lying, but the point is that these extra conditions make it less likely that this is the case. A religious preacher, even if he is being entirely truthful in that he believes God is telling him thse things, is still relying on the method of "I think God says so".
Also note how people following the science route cannot agree on anything, as theories change frequently; there are countless different contradictory scientific theories.
I already covered the "contradictory scientific theories" in my original post by pointing out that it would be irrational for a layperson to say that something like that is true (eg, cold fusion) or something which has made predictions found to be true (eg, string theory). Apart from that, accepted theories are improved when we know more - I cannot think of a case where a scientific theory that was accepted by the entire scientific community was after found to be entirely wrong (as opposed to improved, such as Newtonian gravitation being replaced by general relativity).
I personally find it easier to believe a level-headed religious leader than what gets distored by the news media.
So now we've replaced believing a scientist with believing the media. Sure, there I agree with you, you can't believe the media and I suppose it could be argued that they can't be trusted anymore than religious leaders.
If you truly understand science, you'll know that neither quantum theory nor relativity are actually correct. They are merely the closest we can come to a model that defines the universe based on what observations we've been able to make. These theories, while very valuable for making predictions, will undoubtedly fall prey to a newer and better theory sometime in the future. The best one can hope for is that new theories will merely add to or slightly adjust those that already exist.
In science, there will likely never be a "correct" model in the sense of knowing exactly how things work. I'm aware of what you say - by "correct", I mean whether it is a good approximation of reality, has made predictions confirmed to be true by experiments, and has not been disproven. I do not think it is irrational for a layperson to believe scientists saying that quantum mechanics is a good approximation of reality, and a theory which has yet to be disproven, just because he hasn't personally performed any experiments. I don't believe it's irrational for a person to believe that gravity attracts inversely proportional to the square of distance - even if this were found out to be false in future, it would still be a damn good approximation, and likely to be closer to the truth than many religious claims.
Indeed you have pointed out yet another reason why science is different to religion: scientists put forward theories; religious preachers claim "the truth".
Put it this way - I have no idea about how things like a CPU really work (beyond simple descriptions) and how one would build one. But does this mean that believing my computer runs on "magic" is just as reasonable as believing it runs due to the reasons that scientists tell me?
This is what I'm saying - I'm not saying that science can be 100% trusted all the time, I'm saying that the idea that it is "indistinguishable from religious belief" is absurd, for a great many reasons that I have pointed out.
The numbers pale in comparison to religious atrocity, though.
Are abortions science? If so, then I might disagree with you.
For example, Christianity is a bloody death-cult, and it's hardly suprising that plenty of people have been killed in it's name.
But if you state that, to be fair, you should state how many truly non-Christian cults pop up "in the name of Christianity" that kill themselves or others. Christianity is about love and forgiveness. All things done in the name of Christianity are not Christian, my friend. Next time you see someone with a Jesus sticker on the back of their minivan racing 20 MPH over the speed limit, remember that. I'd very difficult to be a Christian in this world when people who proclaim Christianity don't act like it.
When millions disappear from earth, it's not aliens, it's the rapture.
For what it's worth, it's not especially hard to justify getting a BJ in the Oval Office with Christian principles, assuming you go straight to the source.
I don't know Clinton's heart, but he sure isn't acting like a Christian.
Theres a commandment against adultery but it's condoned and even advocated in more than one spot in the bible (polygamy, rape, and the use of prostitutes is endemic in the bible).
Please review what part of the Bible you're talking about. A lot of things changed between the OT and the NT. OT is no longer applicable as we are now saved by grace and not by anical sacrifice and following the 10 Commandments.
So-called "Christian beliefs" are, generally speaking, made up out of whole cloth. I don't know of anyone who actually strictly maintains a set of Christian beliefs based on the Bible, and such a person would probably be schizophrenic.
You're supposed to try to be more Christ-like when you are saved. We're all sinners and fall short of the glory of God, however.
When millions disappear from earth, it's not aliens, it's the rapture.
Where did the dinosaurs fit in exactly? They weren't known about when the bible was written, though if they had been they would have been a part of the story.
Isaiah 27:1 Job 41
When millions disappear from earth, it's not aliens, it's the rapture.
See, that just what I mean. In my parent post, I say how people interpret things how they want. I googled for the passage you suggested and got this. From that page:
Now, WTF? I see what you are suggesting and I think my search was bang on in terms of what you were aluding to. However, you are missing the point; the Bible is NOT GODS WORDS. It is mans words (and if you are a believer) interpreting gods actions. The history of the bible is checkered; large sections were removed to produce each of the major revisions of the text, bits were added; e.g. during the King James Directors Cut edition. It has been translated through two or three DEAD languages. You cannot interpret it to that level! Take it in spirit and try to be a good person. Anything beyond that is pervered and kind of sad.
You have given me an example where the Bible talks of dragons (literally, it's the classic description) and people have taken this to mean:
Dragons existed based on description in Job -> no longer exist -> they are extinct -> so are dinosaurs -> bible is cool with fossils!!
That's not very good logic, is it, especially given that the original version of that edition of the bible (King James) was written at a time when dragons were quite in fashion with pop culture. They got written in; that's how translation works, these languages did not have literal equivalence and translation was more of a form of interpretation. Modern languages share roots in dead languages, e.g. Latin that make them easier to understand. It's kind of like translating Russian to Chinese when there aren't any living native speakers of the language left. I'd love to see some different readings of the original documents, but I can't be bothered looking it up to be honest. I did see a documentary on the subject of the origins of the modern Bible that cast doubts on the asserion that Mary was a virgin. Apparently the word used actually means "young girl". I mean, woa, the whole Immaculate Conception / "sex is dirty" thing might have been a typo!
Lawyers NEVER translate contracts between LIVE languages. There's a reason for that. It just don't work. People who believe that the Bible is 100% Gods Word scare me. They are really easy to lead as they don't critically analyse things that they are told. George W Bush is unfortunately one of them, and has said so himself... :-(
Actually the rationale for experimenting on those people was they they were untermenschen as opposed to Ayran ubermenschen, so it was the warped Nazi ideology of eugenics that led to it, and not a commitment to science.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
That said, they should do it because it's good for business (and performance), not because the government micromanages how their service is supposed to work.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It's a use of my tax dollars, no matter how small, for something I don't see the need for, instead of (say) improving education. Teach parents to be better parents. Teach them to innoculate their children, rather than prohibit.
Let me put it this way -- my parents keep alcohol in the house, but I always knew that alcohol was not for kids and not too often for adults, either. They offered to let me try it at home, because it's safer that way than to have my first exposure be something unknown at a party.
I didn't take the offer, and I haven't touched it since. Next year I'm a freshman in college, and I doubt I'll touch it there.
The same attitude should be taken towards all things. I'd get pissed if Google started having pornographic ads, because you can't easily opt out of that, but it's better for parents to teach their kids what's bad and tell them not to look at it than to block a list of domains.
Trust me. Especially with blocklists, if you prohibit something, it becomes a martyr -- an object of obsession. Install a porn-blocker, and they will spend a lot of time disabling it or staring at the sites it didn't catch. I know. I've been there.
It doesn't cost much to keep a list of manditory ratings. It also doesn't cost much to provide good education, so that we will have good parents.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
A scientist's beliefs can be verified through logical reasoning and experimentation. We can get a rough idea of exactly how likely they are to be true. Things that we were pretty sure about, such as newtonian physics, are still true, they've just been clarified a bit.
Much of science is almost as obvious as "2+2=4". Sure, someone could say that's a belief, and that 2+2=5, and they'd be dead wrong, or at least very likely wrong.
Religion, on the other hand, cannot be verified easily. Even religious leaders often consider people who claim to hear God's voice to be crazy -- and that's about the only experimentation that's ever been done.
All that leaves is logic, and the Jesus people believe in is flakey logic if I ever saw it. He came to Earth to save us, and tried to teach us to love each other -- all of us -- and we nailed him to a chunk of wood, claimed that we were saved because we nailed him to a chunk of wood, and went on to hate and kill each other in his name. If Jesus was alive today, he'd be ashamed.
Hell, if he came back to life today, he'd be scared shitless of all the crosses everywhere. He'd think we were all out to nail him to a chunk of wood AGAIN.
God has fared no better. Thou shalt not kill. IT'S FOUR FUCKING WORDS!!! But we can't even follow that law without adding fine print. Thou shalt not kill, unless thine enemy doth verily piss thee off. If God is up there, I'm sure he's ashamed.
Of course, there's always faith, and you're right that laypeople "believe" in science just as they "believe" in religion. BUT -- if they want to spend the time, they can verify science, but they have to wait till they die to verify religion.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
... but not an answer.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Really.
Anyway, I can see some uses for porn, and I'm saying this objectively although I am addicted from time to time.
But what I'm really sad about is that parents would rather block porn than explain what it is, show it to their kids, and so innoculate them. Better that they know why it slowly kills your soul, and avoid it of their own volition, which is still very possible.
Because if you do what this bill does and simply ban it from certain households, you martyr it and the kids will go out of their way to get it, even if they don't really like it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Right on. Senator McCarthy blacklisted people. That black list didn't have any legal weight, in fact was created through fairly illegal means, but if you were on that list, good luck getting a job somewhere.
So, McCarthy didn't have any legal power, but his list gave him real power -- the power to destroy someone's life without technically lifting a figure, since everyone was voulentarily following him.
I would much more likely trust dmoz than the government, and I don't even know who's in power at dmoz. Bush has destroyed any confidence I ever had in these United States.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Don't forget the Mesopotamian belief in the God Marduk, slayer of Tiamat, the great dragon of chaos, enemy of Venger, eater of Uni the cute unicorn.
Evil Space Monkeys could be stealing YOUR bandwidth!
You see it from man's logical perspective. I don't. That same human perspective says that there could not have been a world-wide flood or that God even exists for that matter. It's a belief not always backed up by evidence. And I do believe the Bible is the literal Word of God - written by men. So I guess I scare you, too! :)
Regarding the virgin Mary thing, why don't you do some research yourself to see what the word meant? People today quickly take a documentary as fact and don't make a point of checking facts (of course news sources do this too (ahem...Dan Rather).
I hope you'll maybe take the time one day to get a commentary and read through at least parts of the New Testament. It's a beautiful story of one person who died to save the world. And He died for you, me and everyone that ever lived and ever will live.
When millions disappear from earth, it's not aliens, it's the rapture.
I have. I've discussed it with people who fall on either side of that debate. One person I spoke to was familiar with the story, and was able to elaborate on it for me. The trend was towards it not meaning "virgin".
People today quickly take a documentary as fact and don't make a point of checking facts (of course news sources do this too (ahem...Dan Rather).
No real need. It was a UK documentary, not an American-style "Tornados!!" type show. These shows are in a very different style, they have evidence etc and no "wow! bang! drama!" type presentation. He had interviews with scholars, and the guy that presented it was a very religious person himself; he was seeking to enhance his own faith (he did) but came to the conclusion that the bible should be treated as a guide, not a literal transcript. To be honest, I never really realised how many versions there are; I just assumed there were a few more than the traditional ones (Good News, King James). It's a very interesting subject.
They aren't done *in the name of science*, which is what we're talking about here. If, say, we had baby-farms where we specifcally aborted fetuses for scientific research, then it'd count. Use of fetuses aborted for other reasons doesn't. Priest molesting boys doesn't count against religion, either, unless it's some sort of cult where molestation is an article of worship. You'd be wrong anyway, if you wanted to count numbers.
But if you state that, to be fair, you should state how many truly non-Christian cults pop up "in the name of Christianity" that kill themselves or others.
Vanishingly few, actually. Especially since you can't count the various Christian cults that do the same thing.
Christianity is about love and forgiveness
Eh. You'd have a hard time proving it on the merits. Read your bible, buddy. Christianity, if categorized without prejudice would be a blood cult. Ritual cannibalism, glorification of death, penitence through suffering. The very core and most important belief of any Christian faith is that Christ died for your sins! Think about what your religion would be like if Christ was born, preached that you were all forgiven now, and then went on his way in peace.
All things done in the name of Christianity are not Christian, my friend.
Well. Yes, they are. If you don't act like all the other Christians, maybe it's *you* who isn't the Christian. Defining anyone who does something you don't like as "non-Christian" is a pretty pathetic rhetorical refuge. Driving over the speed limit, by the way, has not a damn thing to do with being a Christian.
I'll stop calling you on all the nasty parts of the Bible when all the major Christian faiths remove them from the Bible, stop using them in sermons, and generally stop treating them as articles of faith except when it's inconvenient or bad PR, mmmkay? It's pretty damn hypocritical to get up there and blather on about how X is bad and preaching fire and brimstone from the OT, but to turn around and claim you don't need to follow it when someone brings up the nasty bits. If you look *only* to the NT, then Clinton is totally off the hook and you're the one out of line for condemning him. 400 years ago Clintons main failing as a Christian would be that he wasn't abusive enough of Jews. Look at the history of your own religion before you go re-defining all your terms to exclude anything you don't approve of.
http://www.icra.org/
enter your site, answer some questions and you will get the correct code for a meta tag for your site/page
Aha! (Why don't they put things like that in the article?) By the way, I never did manage to find the questionnaire part where it's supposed to generate a label for you, but that's not really what I wanted anyway. The full set of labels and their meanings is what I actually needed.
Here's an experiment, if you don't believe me. Go out onto a street, accost an average-looking housewife, and try to tell her about Jesus. Now accost another one and try to tell her about string theory. Dollars to donuts you'll get the same reaction from both.
...
;-> ) is essentially a religious belief? Of course you can apply that thinking to ANY subject, including sport. Existentially you'd be right, but practically there's a line to be drawn between universally accepted "truths" and faith based beliefs. I draw that line between science and religion. YMMV, but your experiment doesn't help explain the difference.
:)
Not sure what you're getting at, maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree, BUT
You'd get the same reaction if you were to tell her that Owen moving to the Gunners next season may be a good thing on paper, but there's far from a unanimous warm welcome for him.
So does that mean football opinion (soccer for you colonials
Help me out here
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
never try to wear multiple condoms at the same time
Of course there are some exceptions.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I agree about the whole "arresting people who break the public trust by violating the Constitution that they have sworn to uphold" thing... but would they get conjugal visits?
I am scientifically inaccurate.
... and on Wednesday the Gov gave the keynote speech at Novell's Brainshare conference.
Shurely there's no connection.....?
as to your "we don't fully understand the universe" being a matter of faith, it's not. It's demonstrably factual. We don't and may not. However thats no reason to bow in the direction of the Unknowable, Why Not is the basis of science.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Guys,
They say a little science will draw a man away from God and a lot of science will bring him back. Just as unstudied scientists may not know the teachings of the Accadamy of Science very well, unstudied christians may not know the teachings God very well. The solution is obvious, study more.
There are many great minds teaching in the Acadamy of Science and many great minds teaching in churches across the world. Indeed I would expect you'll find many more beliving scientists than either of you would expect. You'll probably even find some teach at both the Academy of Science and in the churches across the world.
Seeking the truth should be a practice of every intelegent person on the planet. Believing in God will only come when He calls you (study this scientifically and academically in scripture and you'll find this to be true both ways).
Evolution is a very misrepresented word. It's akin to saying a bird flies through the air and rocks fly through the air too. A rock falls through the air, but because when it's thrown it falls like a flying bird it's refered to in a similar manner. And all the evidence to prove a bird flies doesn't support the idea that a rock flies. It's also like seeing beaver tracks on both sides of a river and saying the beavers can fly. And if beavers were all dead, how could you prove it wasn't true?
Micro evolution is observable. All the other forms of evolution are unsupported theories. Many seeking to earn a name for themselves or promote their beliefs have fabricated lies to support evolution. The same is true in christian circles teaching things like the OT is irrelevent since Christ came and died for our sin. This in does discredit some of the honest teachers in both circles, since they trust these sources until they learn the truth.
I have not met a person yet who belives the entire theroy of evolution as expressed by Darwin (or any other form of it since). They speak in terms of maybe and could have been when they get to parts they don't agree with. I myself was an avid evolutionist and taught others about how the theory works. I find myself in crowds explaining how evolution is not as stupid as many christians say it is (giving explainations to explain those statements) and not as smart as many non-christians say it is (also with evidence to explain those statements).
I have met people who belive every word of the bible is true, even though they don't understand how it can be. Indeed I am one of these people. I know there is an explaination, even if I don't know what the explaination is. Never be afraid to confess you don't know.
The overwhelming evidence to support things that are in scripture leads to the obvious conclusion that if it's right about all those things it must also be right about the other things I don't understand. And so begins the search for an explaination. Yes Jesus walked on water, Yes God parted the Red Sea for the nation of Israel to pass through. We've found the walls of Jerico fallen straight down. The flood happened, many many cultures have veriations of the story including Noah and his boat full of animals (Native Americans, Chinese...)
Do you see how neither science nor religion are belief w/o evidence, but rather, belief based on the trustworthiness of the source.
For more information on evidence and theories check these sites:
http://www.nationalacademies.org/
http://www.answersingenesis.org/
William at phodex.dot.us
It's nice to talk with someone who's actually read some of the bible before commenting on it.
You're comment on spouse abuse is almost right. But it's not God initiating the abuse. God just rescued them from the slavery of Egypt when they turned to worship a golden calf they made themselves and when they were given the promise land they refused to take it, so God sent them ot the next best place (sarcasm). It's akin to being in the first week of marriage and finding the bride running off with another man. Or finding a man has punched his wife because she has awoken him by hitting him with the bottom of a frying pan again. God has done everything right and yet the nation of Israel forsakes Him. They deserve death, yet He restrains Himself because of His promise to their Father Abraham. But if you don't understand the roll of death in the world, you'll have a hard time understanding the forgiveness in the story.
Yes, my rational is "I don't understand, therefore I will take God at His word." Instead of disbelive Him just because I don't understand.
It's not without reason that I belive the accounts in scripture. Assuming you haven't studied it in depth, you dont know how a frog comes from a tadpole, but you still belive it does, based on the testimony of those who've seen it. I belive the testimony of God as written by the authors He chose and there is a lot of study that goes into verifying that the books in the bible should all be there and are of God, so I won't wander off on that rabit trail right now.
The harlet in Jericho who was spared (only one "hooker" not many as you said [Numbers ]) was spared because she blieved in God, and on less spiritual level also because she help the victors be victory. Back to the moral angle, are you saying others in the city kept God's law better than she did? Or that even one other person in Jericho even wanted to?
This will be a stretch for you, but here goes. The whole world is God's, he made it. If He wants you off a certian part of land, you should go. That is right. If you resist, He has the right to force you off. If you refuse, you can cost yourself the lose of your own life. It is your action that causes it, not His.
As for the old man, he was in Gibeah, not Sodom (Sodom was destroyed in Genesis, long before judges). This was not Lot who was the only righteous man in Sodom, but rather, the old man "was from the hill country of Ephraim". The old man offered his own daughter and his guest's concubine who had played the harlot against the man so that those outside could "Do what ever they felt was right" and they refused to do good. It was at that point that the guest put his concubine out himself. She had played the harlet and her husband now put her out with the men. The old man did not do it, and the old man's daughter was not put out or abused. Only the woman who had committed adultry was put out, and dispite adultry being punishable by death, the mens outside still did wrong with the way they treated her. There's more to the story and the men outside are delt with for their action. If you want to know "The rest of the story" then "Read the book". [Judges this exerpt is from chapter 19]
You are quite right on one very strong point that many new christians find hard to get past. The bible is full of graphic matterial and strong descriptions of right and wrong and even several stories that don't declair a matter one way or the other directly as if it's implied by an established code of ethics.
I have to comment on an earlier remark in the thread. It was said 'A "bad" scientist is not a scientist at all, by purest definition.' What is that "purest" definition of Scientist?
And as a reminder of where the thread started, it's about net pron. I haven't seen it address this way, so here's my take on the issue. If you have established laws on what can and cannot be shown in public, the web is public. To show it on the web is the same as to show it in public, therefore it's bound by th