Who funded the study? How would they profit from putting out apparently authoritative word that video games are a BAD thing? We can't tell from the article.
As for the alleged correlation, effects of loss of prefrontal function, i.e. loss of creativity and emotional functionality. . . shouldn't this show up in game programmers first as a decline in programming skills and in increasingly bizarre behavior? When I say 'bizarre', I mean of the sort that gets people arrested or committed.
I suspect something is going on here, but I doubt it means what the researcher thinks. Or the results he was paid to 'discover'.
Keep an eye out for it and post when you find out the bill number and perhaps the name. We can't tell our Congressmen and Senators how to vote if we can't tell them what it is we want them to vote for.
When I saw the article, I checked both mac.com and salon on my browser, Opera 6.02 . Salon still works fine and I sent myself an e-card via mac.com... i.e. everything works. Starting the article with an obvious fuckup like that detracts from its credibility.
I generally use Netscape 4.78 about twice a week for sites that Opera won't render. I'm beginning to run into sites that work on Opera 6 and not Netscape, when I run into them in significant numbers, I'll upgrade my Netscape.
Opera doesn't render in most cases because:
The tard site author told the browser detection not to support anything but IE/Netscape... Note in most cases that if one can bypass browser detection, the site will work fine in the great majority of cases.
Incompatible Javascript and rarely, Java applets.
The only site I couldn't get into with either Opera or Netscape was when MSN declared itself offlimits to everyone not running IE.
As someone else pointed out, cross-platform compatibility is one way to tell developers from wannabes.
Also, the browser-specific stuff tends to be bloated bandwidth hogs done by dipshits who forget the rest of the world generally runs dialup.
In the great majority of cases, any site that isn't platform neutral has a direct competitor who is, whether the site is informational or sells products/services. Patronize the competitor and leave the IE-only site to Darwin.
situation where no harm can come to the users of the products
If you don't consider being ripped off harm, why don't you post your real name, social security and bank account numbers?
Didn't you hear what happens when you shove an RIAA special into a Mac? I've heard scattered reports of other kinds of damage to audio systems as well from the noise bursts.
The Libertarian in me cringes at this idea.
Well, tell him to pull out and get lost, and I hope for your sake he was wearing a condom. And listen to people with common sense, not Libertarians in the future.
With respect to use of the Compact Disk logo, that's a matter of convincing Phillips to enforce the use of its trademarks... because they've said publically that they do NOT consider copy-protected CDs to be CDs within the use of that trademark. For that, a law isn't necesary.
You should check into the rest of the law as described. Modifying the DMCA and restoring "fair use" to something that can't be circumvented via new technology is a very good idea.
This presupposes you think that colonization and exploitation of Solar System resources is a good idea.
Moving heavy industry off earth would make it possible to turn this planet into a garden.
An space business infrastructure means it will be possible for ordinary people to go to space, meaning there will be jobs up there for everything from network admins to fry cooks.
The US "powers that be" aren't going to move by themselves on cleaning up the environment or space colonization, given that the horizon of the CEO of a publically traded company is next quarter's financial results.
Encouraging public panic and channeling it into towards the solution that the WWF (WORLD WILDLIFE FUND!!!) apparently thinks impossible might actually work in getting some money thrown at the technological problems that mostly remain to be solved with respect to space industrialization.
The editor probably mistook slashdotters for a literate population with a general understanding of some sort of the world beyond the computer and cyberspace. It probably didn't occur to him that there would be people here who actually would not know that WWF would stand for World Wildlife Fund in this case.
Much less that the majority of people who did know believe that global warming is "junk science" and that running out of finite resources of known size is impossible based on pronoucements of well known scientific authorities like Rush Limbaugh, George Bush, and Pat Robertson.
Reading the posts to this thread, I wonder if there shouldn't be a basic.science.slashdot.org or a regular series of "Science 101" postings for the people around here who either cut or managed to avoid any science classes that didn't start with the word "computer".
However, I believe that most slashdotters who are ignorant of everything but computers take pride in their ignorance and really don't want to do anything about it. The good news... when they post on public policy issues of any sort, it's generally apparent that they are noise, not signal.
Forgot to say that it used to be that the only way one could get MS Office compatibility in *nix was by buying a Mac. Now, CodeWeavers means one can run MS Office in Linux, and of course, there's OpenOffice.
There's increasingly little to choose from between Mac and *nix environments.
The graphics / multimedia stuff is getting ported, if one wants hardware quality comparable to Apple, be prepared to spend a lot of time checking out published and user reviews of things like motherboards, cases, power supplies, but it's possible.
I've been seriously considering Apple... but if I want to buy from a company that tries to control its own press, I might as well buy an AMD box and run XP on it.
As I said, it's becoming a marginal choice, and I'm not a Mac fanatic.
If Apple continues to blow off its fanatics, they may find their fanatics discovering that the choice between *nix/86xxx and Mac-unix-OS/Gx is also a marginal one, and that they'll be trying *nix/86xxx .
Didn't Apple almost kill itself once already by blowing off their hard-core users? Do they learn from their mistakes?
How would it accomplish that? In order to determine whether a program was properly signed, one would need to get its checksum. In order to do that, you would have no choice but to load it into memory of some form. I suppose you could bypass the RAM, DMA it through a dedicated calculator... But that would be inefficient; you'd need to scan it once, and then load it for execution. And you'd need to do it every time you ran the code, or someone could have compromised the data on the system's drive by editing it on a non- Palladium system.
Especially if it has to go online to get an OK on the signatures from MS.
Think of this happening on your Web server or dedicated financial services database machine. That's why I've been warning people including a recent article I did for VAR Business. It isn't just about civil rights, it's about spending more for a computer and getting less performance out of it.
Every single engineering and scientific reference and textbook would have to be translated to the new "standard time". Changes would have to be made to accommodate this at the OS level. (changing every single PC clock would be worse) That's just a start, I think.
Cost? Tens of billions, possibly hundreds. It doesn't buy us anything.
We're supposed to treat them with respect because?
While I do not regard myself as a Cordon Bleu chef, I do regard myself as competent to spot rotten food or excrement served to me in a restaurant. I'm sure that even as an attorney, you don't need my help to tell you that your computer has crashed. You may not know that the problem is an interrupt conflict or even an intermittent cable connection, but you don't need me to tell you that you've got a blue screen in front of you.
I'm a lawyer and I deal with issues that I barely understand every day. The point is that I hire an expert (doctors, economists, CPAs) to teach me what I need to know and/or testify at trial. That's the way the system works.
Yes, but which experts? If you're so far from being clued in an area that you don't know how to pick the right expert. . . of course, you can hope that your opposition is the same shape, with a good chance of being right. Offhand, I would guess that you don't "barely" understand the issue you are arguing, it's more likely that you simply don't understand them but what you have to say is treated with respect in court because your opposite number and the judge are equally ignorant.
However, a situation where neither side really understands what's really at issue is not likely to produce a just or fair outcome.
Things are to the point where even speaking as a layman, it's obvious that there's something rotten in the kitchen. People no longer believe that the court system will produce just or fair outcomes. It is widely believed and with good reason that situations where technology is at issue are even less likely to produce just and fair outcomes.
The idea that a lawyer given access to experts is capable of understanding any issue far enough to argue a matter or render a decision about it might have been true in the days of Blackstone, but that was hundreds of years ago.
Remember that the purpose of law and courts is from the point of view of a layman, not to generate income for lawyers, or to make sure that the side with the largest bank account wins a legal dispute, but to dispense justice.
As an income machine, the law and the courts work.
Anyone who asserts that US courts dispense justice is going to be laughed at, not with, in any forum that isn't limited to the legal community.
s. And you've just seen how phenomenally fucking stupidly the music industry is behaving; someone has set up a lending library around the corner and they are trying to shut it down on the theory that one person bought it and others are enjoying it for free
No, the idea is to prevent end users from getting exposed to musicians who don't have contracts with RIAA labels.
That's the reality underlying "concerns about piracy" and artists being enlisted behind industry propaganda and payola, why LP FM radio has been given so much trouble, etc. and why Internet Radio is being shut down in the US.
The RIAA wants a situation where an artist who wants to make a living in music must be signed to an RIAA label. An artist who sells music otherwise isn't contributing towards the lifestyles of the suits at record companies. The RIAA suits consider this immoral and where possible, something to be made illegal.
I'm sure that the record industry knows that the P2P networks can be quite reasonably seen as a group of individuals promoting music for RIAA companies and artists at their own expense. This isn't what they have problems with.
The problem is that since the RIAA has no control over these channels, there's no way to prevent them from presenting the music of musicians not signed to RIAA labels.
The consumer will pay for an entertainment product when he is convinced he is getting value for money.
As for why the consumer doesn't feel that he's getting value for money when buying CDs, this quote from a record industry exec says it all: Urie says his company doesn't heavily research consumer attitude, noting, "We tend to ask how can we make more money and sell more product, not deal with consumer gripes."
I'm not sure if the journalist is as clueless as "Or are they just products of an Internet culture that has them believing that whatever's on the Web is free for the taking?" suggests or it's that given that this is the local paper for the entertainment industry, he can't say what he really thinks. Or if he simply didn't read through the entire article before hitting the send button.
I'd like to see the innards of google discussed in a lot more detail. What I mean here is a good technical article on just how one puts together 10K+ machines into a working system.
I'm also interested in seeing a discussion with actual google people on their policy on what's "suitable" and "unsuitable" as far as advertising goes. I've heard that pro-gun sites are considered "unsuitable" for no other reason than someone at google doesn't like guns. Google's right, but one starts to wonder if those biases are going to get built into the search engine algorithms sooner or later.
As google becomes a more and more important tool for getting to the rest of the Net, their politics are an issue whether they like it or not.
If currently illegal drugs were decriminalized, the mainframe or distributed computing setup that replaced the drug cartel AS/400 would suddenly be on eBay for a fraction of the price.
Of course, it would be unpatriotic to suggest that this will never happen because the cartels are spending far more on US politician campaign contributions than they are on IT, right?
Apparently I'm not the only one who's noticed the ignorance of the average technogeek whose expertise in the field of real life stops 1 inch from his computer or if he's very lucky, at the front door at his workplace.
The average reader here doesn't understand that there are social issues having to do with the use of technology that affect him and everybody else and that he might be in a position to do something about that use or misuse.
Apparently, the people running slashdot decided to do something about this ignorance.
While any thread relating to any article that doesn't focus 100% on technology abundantly exposes the ignorance I referred to, I think the slashdot management deserve props for trying to let a small crack of light into the stygian darkness between the ears of many people here on any topic that isn't AMD vs Intel or OpenBSD v. Red Hat.
While Katz is obviously wrong a fair amount of the time, his value is that he makes people think. As I see it, that's the real reason for the knee-jerk Katz bashing. Because no matter what most of us say about our interest in thinking about new and different things, even the average bright person doesn't really like to think outside his accustomed reality tunnel.
Choice of gender in the above deliberate, most female g33ks from my observation aren't nearly as narrowly focused and don't need to be reminded that there's a world outside one's computer.
And he published it in an attempt to discredit the lawsuit, by claiming that the people behind the suit were just trying to tear down ICANN
And our problem with that is supposed to be?
Where the hell did anyone get the idea that ICANN has a constituency in the Internet community? It looked like a wonderful experiment in the beginning. It went straight to hell. Perhaps examination of its records by historians or more likely, attorneys will tell us what really happened.
First problem: you don't have your facts straight. I'm sure I'm not the first, or even the thousandth person to tell you that.
12 year old Kenny can buy Marilyn Manson, etc. at WalMart or more likely, Best Buy.
Sure, so you feel messing up the voting system is a constructive action?
In this case, certainly. The only way a PHM/PHB who decided to buy the filterware is going to be persuaded that something is wrong with it is from experience, if he's even capable of learning from that. If his favorite news-related sites are inaccessible, that might actually make him wonder what the hell he's bought.
With respect to censorware, try Peacefire. It would work better if you had an open mind, but I'm not sure if you've got one to open.
I really don't care if you respect me or not. I can not respect you as a person, regardless of your technical expertise, if any.
Another fact you don't have straight. It isn't a decision between filterware access to the Net and no access in schools and libraries for children anymore, except in areas where the school board or library board of trustees are imbecilic fuckheads like you.
CIPA (Children's Internet Protection Act) was shot down in flames by a Federal Court. The three-judge panel didn't buy the horseshit you believe, either. Despite the best efforts of DOJ attorneys to present your flawed arguments in the best possible light.
Hmmm... dumbest people with an Internet connect... are you an elected public official or do you actually work for a censorware company? You obviously aren't bright enough for Microsoft.
i'm getting a little sick of spoiled Westerners applying their rosy ideals to a completely different world. "Twenty cents a week?? But how can they afford latté??"
Of course you do. They remind you of a far off period in your youth when you had a social conscience of sorts, and you could get women without paying by the hour for them. When people talked about you without using words like "yuppie, sociopath, wannabe, neofascist, fuckhead".
Your whines amuse the rest of us, so don't let me stop you from making them.
So we didn't setup a central phone listening system like some dictatorship, we crafted a reasonable system of requiring police to get evidence that someone needed to be snooped on and get a warrant. We think this is 'routine' now, but it was a very new and strange thing in the early years of the last century.
Hope the above was meant as satire. I suggest you do a Web search on CALEA. It is the law of the land and mandates the central phone/data listening system.
Or search here on the recent theft (confiscation is just a prettier synonym) of PCs by FBI and police on a complaint about cablemodem bandwidth uncapping by a cable company without any pretense of due process.
The real problem with the legal 'pundits' quoted in the article is while they don't get quoted by the media or invited to cyberlaw conferences, their articles DO get read by lawyers and judges in legal journals.
In other words, law journals publish articles about Internet-related law written by people who almost know how to use e-mail and might even know that http: is the start of a Website address and their readers take them seriously.
Law journals are the legal industry trade press.
The reader of one of these journals might be judging YOUR DMCA case using bad ideas coming from, say, the clown who supports the French decision to attack websites outside France because they are an offense against French law.
As for a solution, all I can say is that it's time that attorneys who do get the Internet start publishing more articles.
Presumably, your omission of your company name isn't an accident.
If filterware is intended to make the workplace more friendly to women and minorities, why is it that is use in a workplace is never featured in HR recruiting ads?
I bow to your expertise in the area of stupidity, and I'm sure the rest of slashdot feels the same way.
Just like 12-year old Kenny can't go into Wal-Mart by himself and by the latest Eminem CD
12-year-old Kenny can. Though I'm sure I could come up with reasons why you shouldn't be allowed to, any more than you should be allowed in an adult discussion of public policy.
Censorware in the workplace is a band-aid fix for bad management. As for its use in schools or libraries, I suggest getting the facts about the databases this class of crapware uses before whining about how nasty we are all about it in public.
The purpose of school and public library Internet access is education. The assignment of site ratings is at best arbitrary and at worst a reflection of a political agenda the management of these companies refuse to share with the public because if it were public knowledge, no institution could afford to be publically associated with these products. Censorware interferes with the educational process.
While I'm sure that given the miserable failure of the educational system in your case, you have no problem with this, the rest of us who pay for it do.
Degrading the operation of these sites to the point where even the PHMs who buy it see that it has problems is something I have no trouble with at all.
Your corporation doesn't consider you professional enough to be able to figure out for yourself which sites are appropriate for you to browse on company time.
So they've delegated that task to a retarded electronic babysitter.
Suck it up and be a good drone or update your resume and start looking for a better place to work.
A competent professional doesn't need to have his/her time and efficiency wasted by this kind of crap. Competent management doesn't hire people who need electronic babysitters.
Slashdot Mirror
However, I will say that... cool handle... but why S instead of another 74xx00 series family?
As for the alleged correlation, effects of loss of prefrontal function, i.e. loss of creativity and emotional functionality. . . shouldn't this show up in game programmers first as a decline in programming skills and in increasingly bizarre behavior? When I say 'bizarre', I mean of the sort that gets people arrested or committed.
I suspect something is going on here, but I doubt it means what the researcher thinks. Or the results he was paid to 'discover'.
Keep an eye out for it and post when you find out the bill number and perhaps the name. We can't tell our Congressmen and Senators how to vote if we can't tell them what it is we want them to vote for.
I generally use Netscape 4.78 about twice a week for sites that Opera won't render. I'm beginning to run into sites that work on Opera 6 and not Netscape, when I run into them in significant numbers, I'll upgrade my Netscape.
Opera doesn't render in most cases because:
The only site I couldn't get into with either Opera or Netscape was when MSN declared itself offlimits to everyone not running IE.
As someone else pointed out, cross-platform compatibility is one way to tell developers from wannabes.
Also, the browser-specific stuff tends to be bloated bandwidth hogs done by dipshits who forget the rest of the world generally runs dialup.
In the great majority of cases, any site that isn't platform neutral has a direct competitor who is, whether the site is informational or sells products/services. Patronize the competitor and leave the IE-only site to Darwin.
If you don't consider being ripped off harm, why don't you post your real name, social security and bank account numbers?
Didn't you hear what happens when you shove an RIAA special into a Mac? I've heard scattered reports of other kinds of damage to audio systems as well from the noise bursts. The Libertarian in me cringes at this idea.
Well, tell him to pull out and get lost, and I hope for your sake he was wearing a condom. And listen to people with common sense, not Libertarians in the future.
With respect to use of the Compact Disk logo, that's a matter of convincing Phillips to enforce the use of its trademarks... because they've said publically that they do NOT consider copy-protected CDs to be CDs within the use of that trademark. For that, a law isn't necesary.
You should check into the rest of the law as described. Modifying the DMCA and restoring "fair use" to something that can't be circumvented via new technology is a very good idea.
Moving heavy industry off earth would make it possible to turn this planet into a garden.
An space business infrastructure means it will be possible for ordinary people to go to space, meaning there will be jobs up there for everything from network admins to fry cooks.
The US "powers that be" aren't going to move by themselves on cleaning up the environment or space colonization, given that the horizon of the CEO of a publically traded company is next quarter's financial results.
Encouraging public panic and channeling it into towards the solution that the WWF (WORLD WILDLIFE FUND!!!) apparently thinks impossible might actually work in getting some money thrown at the technological problems that mostly remain to be solved with respect to space industrialization.
Much less that the majority of people who did know believe that global warming is "junk science" and that running out of finite resources of known size is impossible based on pronoucements of well known scientific authorities like Rush Limbaugh, George Bush, and Pat Robertson.
Reading the posts to this thread, I wonder if there shouldn't be a basic.science.slashdot.org or a regular series of "Science 101" postings for the people around here who either cut or managed to avoid any science classes that didn't start with the word "computer".
However, I believe that most slashdotters who are ignorant of everything but computers take pride in their ignorance and really don't want to do anything about it. The good news... when they post on public policy issues of any sort, it's generally apparent that they are noise, not signal.
The choice is even more marginal now.
The graphics / multimedia stuff is getting ported, if one wants hardware quality comparable to Apple, be prepared to spend a lot of time checking out published and user reviews of things like motherboards, cases, power supplies, but it's possible.
I've been seriously considering Apple... but if I want to buy from a company that tries to control its own press, I might as well buy an AMD box and run XP on it.
As I said, it's becoming a marginal choice, and I'm not a Mac fanatic.
If Apple continues to blow off its fanatics, they may find their fanatics discovering that the choice between *nix/86xxx and Mac-unix-OS/Gx is also a marginal one, and that they'll be trying *nix/86xxx .
Didn't Apple almost kill itself once already by blowing off their hard-core users? Do they learn from their mistakes?
Especially if it has to go online to get an OK on the signatures from MS.
Think of this happening on your Web server or dedicated financial services database machine. That's why I've been warning people including a recent article I did for VAR Business. It isn't just about civil rights, it's about spending more for a computer and getting less performance out of it.
Cost? Tens of billions, possibly hundreds. It doesn't buy us anything.
We're supposed to treat them with respect because?
While I do not regard myself as a Cordon Bleu chef, I do regard myself as competent to spot rotten food or excrement served to me in a restaurant. I'm sure that even as an attorney, you don't need my help to tell you that your computer has crashed. You may not know that the problem is an interrupt conflict or even an intermittent cable connection, but you don't need me to tell you that you've got a blue screen in front of you.
I'm a lawyer and I deal with issues that I barely understand every day. The point is that I hire an expert (doctors, economists, CPAs) to teach me what I need to know and/or testify at trial. That's the way the system works.
Yes, but which experts? If you're so far from being clued in an area that you don't know how to pick the right expert. . . of course, you can hope that your opposition is the same shape, with a good chance of being right. Offhand, I would guess that you don't "barely" understand the issue you are arguing, it's more likely that you simply don't understand them but what you have to say is treated with respect in court because your opposite number and the judge are equally ignorant.
However, a situation where neither side really understands what's really at issue is not likely to produce a just or fair outcome.
Things are to the point where even speaking as a layman, it's obvious that there's something rotten in the kitchen. People no longer believe that the court system will produce just or fair outcomes. It is widely believed and with good reason that situations where technology is at issue are even less likely to produce just and fair outcomes.
The idea that a lawyer given access to experts is capable of understanding any issue far enough to argue a matter or render a decision about it might have been true in the days of Blackstone, but that was hundreds of years ago.
Remember that the purpose of law and courts is from the point of view of a layman, not to generate income for lawyers, or to make sure that the side with the largest bank account wins a legal dispute, but to dispense justice.
As an income machine, the law and the courts work.
Anyone who asserts that US courts dispense justice is going to be laughed at, not with, in any forum that isn't limited to the legal community.
No, the idea is to prevent end users from getting exposed to musicians who don't have contracts with RIAA labels.
That's the reality underlying "concerns about piracy" and artists being enlisted behind industry propaganda and payola, why LP FM radio has been given so much trouble, etc. and why Internet Radio is being shut down in the US.
The RIAA wants a situation where an artist who wants to make a living in music must be signed to an RIAA label. An artist who sells music otherwise isn't contributing towards the lifestyles of the suits at record companies. The RIAA suits consider this immoral and where possible, something to be made illegal.
I'm sure that the record industry knows that the P2P networks can be quite reasonably seen as a group of individuals promoting music for RIAA companies and artists at their own expense. This isn't what they have problems with.
The problem is that since the RIAA has no control over these channels, there's no way to prevent them from presenting the music of musicians not signed to RIAA labels.
The consumer will pay for an entertainment product when he is convinced he is getting value for money.
As for why the consumer doesn't feel that he's getting value for money when buying CDs, this quote from a record industry exec says it all:
Urie says his company doesn't heavily research consumer attitude, noting, "We tend to ask how can we make more money and sell more product, not deal with consumer gripes."
I'm not sure if the journalist is as clueless as "Or are they just products of an Internet culture that has them believing that whatever's on the Web is free for the taking?" suggests or it's that given that this is the local paper for the entertainment industry, he can't say what he really thinks. Or if he simply didn't read through the entire article before hitting the send button.
I'm also interested in seeing a discussion with actual google people on their policy on what's "suitable" and "unsuitable" as far as advertising goes. I've heard that pro-gun sites are considered "unsuitable" for no other reason than someone at google doesn't like guns. Google's right, but one starts to wonder if those biases are going to get built into the search engine algorithms sooner or later.
As google becomes a more and more important tool for getting to the rest of the Net, their politics are an issue whether they like it or not.
Of course, it would be unpatriotic to suggest that this will never happen because the cartels are spending far more on US politician campaign contributions than they are on IT, right?
Apparently I'm not the only one who's noticed the ignorance of the average technogeek whose expertise in the field of real life stops 1 inch from his computer or if he's very lucky, at the front door at his workplace.
The average reader here doesn't understand that there are social issues having to do with the use of technology that affect him and everybody else and that he might be in a position to do something about that use or misuse.
Apparently, the people running slashdot decided to do something about this ignorance.
While any thread relating to any article that doesn't focus 100% on technology abundantly exposes the ignorance I referred to, I think the slashdot management deserve props for trying to let a small crack of light into the stygian darkness between the ears of many people here on any topic that isn't AMD vs Intel or OpenBSD v. Red Hat.
While Katz is obviously wrong a fair amount of the time, his value is that he makes people think. As I see it, that's the real reason for the knee-jerk Katz bashing. Because no matter what most of us say about our interest in thinking about new and different things, even the average bright person doesn't really like to think outside his accustomed reality tunnel.
Choice of gender in the above deliberate, most female g33ks from my observation aren't nearly as narrowly focused and don't need to be reminded that there's a world outside one's computer.
And our problem with that is supposed to be?
Where the hell did anyone get the idea that ICANN has a constituency in the Internet community? It looked like a wonderful experiment in the beginning. It went straight to hell. Perhaps examination of its records by historians or more likely, attorneys will tell us what really happened.
12 year old Kenny can buy Marilyn Manson, etc. at WalMart or more likely, Best Buy.
Sure, so you feel messing up the voting system is a constructive action?
In this case, certainly. The only way a PHM/PHB who decided to buy the filterware is going to be persuaded that something is wrong with it is from experience, if he's even capable of learning from that. If his favorite news-related sites are inaccessible, that might actually make him wonder what the hell he's bought.
With respect to censorware, try Peacefire. It would work better if you had an open mind, but I'm not sure if you've got one to open.
I really don't care if you respect me or not. I can not respect you as a person, regardless of your technical expertise, if any.
Another fact you don't have straight. It isn't a decision between filterware access to the Net and no access in schools and libraries for children anymore, except in areas where the school board or library board of trustees are imbecilic fuckheads like you.
CIPA (Children's Internet Protection Act) was shot down in flames by a Federal Court. The three-judge panel didn't buy the horseshit you believe, either. Despite the best efforts of DOJ attorneys to present your flawed arguments in the best possible light.
Hmmm... dumbest people with an Internet connect... are you an elected public official or do you actually work for a censorware company? You obviously aren't bright enough for Microsoft.
Of course you do. They remind you of a far off period in your youth when you had a social conscience of sorts, and you could get women without paying by the hour for them. When people talked about you without using words like "yuppie, sociopath, wannabe, neofascist, fuckhead".
Your whines amuse the rest of us, so don't let me stop you from making them.
Hope the above was meant as satire. I suggest you do a Web search on CALEA. It is the law of the land and mandates the central phone/data listening system.
Or search here on the recent theft (confiscation is just a prettier synonym) of PCs by FBI and police on a complaint about cablemodem bandwidth uncapping by a cable company without any pretense of due process.
In other words, law journals publish articles about Internet-related law written by people who almost know how to use e-mail and might even know that http: is the start of a Website address and their readers take them seriously.
Law journals are the legal industry trade press.
The reader of one of these journals might be judging YOUR DMCA case using bad ideas coming from, say, the clown who supports the French decision to attack websites outside France because they are an offense against French law.
As for a solution, all I can say is that it's time that attorneys who do get the Internet start publishing more articles.
If filterware is intended to make the workplace more friendly to women and minorities, why is it that is use in a workplace is never featured in HR recruiting ads?
12-year-old Kenny can. Though I'm sure I could come up with reasons why you shouldn't be allowed to, any more than you should be allowed in an adult discussion of public policy.
Censorware in the workplace is a band-aid fix for bad management. As for its use in schools or libraries, I suggest getting the facts about the databases this class of crapware uses before whining about how nasty we are all about it in public.
The purpose of school and public library Internet access is education. The assignment of site ratings is at best arbitrary and at worst a reflection of a political agenda the management of these companies refuse to share with the public because if it were public knowledge, no institution could afford to be publically associated with these products. Censorware interferes with the educational process.
While I'm sure that given the miserable failure of the educational system in your case, you have no problem with this, the rest of us who pay for it do.
Degrading the operation of these sites to the point where even the PHMs who buy it see that it has problems is something I have no trouble with at all.
So they've delegated that task to a retarded electronic babysitter.
Suck it up and be a good drone or update your resume and start looking for a better place to work.
A competent professional doesn't need to have his/her time and efficiency wasted by this kind of crap. Competent management doesn't hire people who need electronic babysitters.