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COPA Suffers Yet Another Court Defeat
A US federal appeals court today struck down COPA, the Child Online Protection Act, a Clinton-era censorship law that the Justice Department has been struggling to get implemented for a decade. (The ACLU filed suit as soon as COPA was signed in 1998 and won an immediate injunction.) The battle has made it to the Supreme Court twice, and the DoJ has essentially never gotten any satisfaction out of the courts. This was the case for which the DoJ famously went trolling for search histories. In the ruling issued today, the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower-court ruling that COPA violates the First Amendment because it is not the most effective way to keep children from visiting adult Web sites. The law would require sites to check visitors' ages, e.g. by taking a credit card, if the site contained any material that is "harmful to minors," whatever that means.
Parents, it's your job to watch your kids, not anybody else's.
Je me fous du passé
Finally. Now my children don't have to keep bugging me for my credit card when they want to visit adult sites.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080721/1545501748.shtml">Techdirt's latest on the topic
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Fuck parental controls. If you believe that your children are not old enough to "surf" on their own, then just put the computer next to you while your children use it.
"Parenting" - it doesn't end at birth.
What causes more harm to Children? Porn or Religion?
I see reports of kids dying because their parents were too superstitious to take them to a doctor because of their religion. i have never heard of a kid dying because he watched a porno movie or read a dirty book.
Oh wait... These are Metaphorical Children. They don't obey natural laws, only metaphorical ones.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Pen island. Who represents. Please, hold your applause.
Cynical Idealist
Fuck the children!
George Carlin FTW.
Licenses and education required for breeding.
Sure. As long as I, and only I, get to decide who gets the license and who doesn't. Remember, the country is currently run by jeezmoid fantatics who believe - literally - in forced breeding.
Real penalties for not getting help when you can't parent your offspring properly.
Sure. With a very precise definition of what constitutes "getting help," which will involve getting it from some government office (who else could we trust?). Said office will be open 24 hours a day in affluent, mostly white neighborhoods, and one hour a month in poor, mostly non-white neighborhoods. Of course.
End absent-parent child support - no amount of money paid to the mother makes up for lack of a responsible two-parent family. If you can't be bothered with birth control you get to live with the results of your inattentiveness.
Unless, of course, you are a man, in which case you obviously should have no responsibility whatsoever for where you dip your wick. (Yes, that is exactly what you just said - live with the results, but only if you are a woman.)
Oh, and, BTW, get ready for the tax increases, since all those women will be on welfare. Except, of course, you'd rather let them literally starve. I mean, really, it's not like women are people or anything, right?
Holding parents responsible for the actions of their children, really. This means that when the 10-year-old kills a neighbor child the parents and the child are responsible. Today often as not the child gets some slap on the wrist punishment because of their age and the parents get nothing. How could you be an effective parent and not know your kid is seriously screwed up when a 10-year-old kills someone?
Hold the parents responsible in exactly what way? Put them in prison? More tax increases. Plus, more tax increases to take care of their other kids.
Undoubtably this means more "community resources" and "social workers" to help failing parents.
Which is to say, more taxes. Lots more taxes. And, if so many parents aren't capable of raising their kids properly, where are you going to find social workers who can? If we can train social workers to raise other people's kids, why can't we use the same money to train parents to raise their own, and then no pay them middle class wages for the rest of their working lives?
But we are either going to spend the money on the front end or the back end. Right now you can check the prisons for the results of dealing with the problem on the back end.
You appaerently want to put more people in prison. Then, you turn around and decry how many people are in prison.
Is it just me that remembers that the idea of "childhood" is at most a century old? Prior to that they were adults-in-training.
So this entire "Think of the children" crap is more about protecting an idea that these small humans should be shielded from the realities of life instead of educated so they actually do become adults.
I think the new definition of childhood actually extends into the mid-20s because of more societal pressure. They're in college, they really aren't responsible yet, etc.
Screw that. It's the parents job to get those little monsters properly trained to be responsible adults. Heck, overseas 'kids' are in professional training schools by they time they're sixteen. Here they're still considered helpless babes who can't do anything without mommy and daddy there to make sure they don't get 'damaged'.
Don't even get me started on that whole self-esteem vs actual value stuff that the schools are promoting.
I realize I'm starting to sound like an old fogey but I guess that's what I am. I'm tired of seeing these poor young adults with absolutely no idea of what is expected of them or how to achieve it. And all because of some misguided idea that they should be protected while they're young instead of taught.
I despair.