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France's Citizens Expected to Help Build Internet Blacklist
Corrupt links to a Sydney Morning Herald article which begins "The French state and internet service providers have struck a deal to block sites carrying child pornography or content linked to terrorism or racial hatred, Interior Minister Michel Alliot-Marie announced on Tuesday." The article is thin on details, but what it does say is bad enough: "Under the French plan, internet users, via a platform, will be able to signal inappropriate sites and the state, receiving the complaints in real time, will then decide whether the sites are to go on a so-called black list to be passed on to internet service providers to enforce site blocks." It sounds like the perfect way to organize an especially malicious DDoS attack. The French government has never been shy about wanting to "protect" French people by censoring Internet content, though.
That's what they call their new president and this plan lives up to the name. Massive censorship to "fight child porn" is a very American stupidity that I doubted any other state besides the Vatican would follow.
The SF Gate had another story about this four days ago. They point out that several other countries have done similar things. Everyone's censoring like it's 1998 again.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's Michèle, not Michel. Wrong gender. (And damn you /. ! I shouldn't have to know HTML entities to type simple accents !)
This
That's *Quaero*, latin for "I seek".
The thing actually has backing from several French universities and France Télécom (and Deutsche Telekom until the German started their own project). Now, while I agree it was largely spawned out of a misplaced patriotism, it was actually started by the Chirac government, not the current one (disclaimer : I am not a fan of either). Plus, it has, since march 2008, funding from the European Commission, so it's not going nowhere, either.
At worse, we'll get something on data mining out of this, since actual, live scientists are participating.
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This would appear to apply to a society that had absolutely no religious basis. A truly atheist society, perhaps.
But on the contrary, even an atheist society is likely to ban things which threaten the species. Incest / inbreeding causes serious genetic problems. Pregnancy in prematurity causes serious physical problems. Sexual experience in the emotionally inexperienced causes serious psychosocial problems.
So, as such, they are just as likely to be banned in an atheist society than in any other.
It's not just that we, as a society, believe them to be wrong, but we as a civilization have proof that these behaviours cause problems that we, as a society, just don't want to have.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
New gun control laws were passed in 2006; in 2007, the homicide rate was 20% lower than it had been in 2006 (although one can't be sure that's a direct result of the gun laws). It hadn't been that low since the 60's.
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While I agree with the basics of your argument, I believe you are still missing my fundamental point - It is not MY assumption that other things are not factors; rather it is the assumption of those pushing gun control laws to begin with. There are obviously many factors involved in crime and violence, and while I would argue that the availability of guns is not a major contributor, gun control advocated want to argue that firearms are the ONLY contributor. When faced with documented evidence that crime rates have NOT gone down with increased gun control, the only solution that gun control advocates see is MORE gun control.
Here's an example. The State of Maryland passed a law requiring "ballistic imaging" of all new handguns sold in the state. Each gun would be supplied with a fired cartridge casing, which would be scanned into a State Police database so that they could be matched against future crime scenes where brass is recovered. It was hailed as a model for other stares and a breakthrough in law enforcement, despite some obvious flaws (revolvers don't leave spent brass, and it is trivially easy to deface the chamber of a firearm so the pattern on the brass is different).
Fast forward. The law has been in place for years, and $2.5 million has been spent on it, and not a single crime has been solved using the data. Not.A.Single.One. The State police even issued a recommendation that the program be terminated because the money could be better spent elsewhere in the criminal forensics devision. But just recently, a prominent politician introduced a bill to INCREASE the scope of the program, supported by the the state police commissioner. Their theory is that, since the program isn't getting the results they expected, they need to expand it. This would in turn take away funds from other programs that have been proven to work (like basic police investigation), but the only thing they can see is that the current program MUST be effective - they just aren't trying hard enough. It's like a battered spouse not moving out because she believes she just isn't trying hard enough to be a good wife.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson