I'm awake, thanks. It's 10PM and I'm baking bread.
> I don't know of a school which currently allows > pornography to be viewed on their system.
I've been a student at both a private college (MIT) and a public one (Queens College, CUNY), and neither one filters their internet access. Each school sets its own standards for appropriate behavior without input from the State. I believe that is the way it should be. Do these schools "allow pornography to be viewed"? No. But they decide for themselves what "pornography" means.
> It should also be up to the town (which has the > library) on what they wish to show,...
I agree with you here. Under the proposed law, would each school and town be permitted to decide what should be blocked, or would there be pressure to block sites on the State mandated list? This isn't a rhetorical question, I honestly don't know the answer.
Why do you believe that only pornography will be blocked? Any site that a politician believes is "harmful" is at risk of being blocked.
The voluntary nature of the blocking does not eliminate my concerns. According to the article, it is the Utah State government that will define what sites are "harmful." There will be organizations, like schools and libraries, which are forced by political pressure to turn on blocking for their captive audience. There will be political pressure to add certain types of information to the blacklist.
It isn't up to the State to determine what kinds of speech are "harmful."
In the late 1970's I worked for a defense contractor that built specialized signal processing computers. The NSA was a major customer. We tried to find other
applications, like oil and gas exploration, but nobody else was buying.
My job was to write microcode assemblers and then write the microcode that handled I/O.
My description of the hardware is here.
Up to 24 voice grade channels (8K samples per second each) arrived time and/or frequency multiplexed onto a single data channel. The system detected the presence of the subchannels, determined the type of modulation being used, and ran them through the appropriate demodulator algorithm. I don't know what happened to the data after that.
We didn't use custom chips. A cabinet full of Schottky MSI chips was enough for a three processor system. The system's speed was due to parallelism, not high clock rate.
By the way, one of our computer rooms was built inside a big metal box that was suspended from the roof on cables. When it mattered, all external connections except for power were unplugged. We were too cheap to pay for a shielded air-conditioning system, so tests lasted a maximum of 20 minutes.
If aliens on earth have evaded detection (except by late-night radio talk show hosts and their ilk) it must be because they value their privacy. I think we should respect that, and leave them alone. If the *want* attention, a physics textbook would convince me fast.
Slashdot Mirror
> Maybe you should wake up a little?
I'm awake, thanks. It's 10PM and I'm baking bread.
> I don't know of a school which currently allows
> pornography to be viewed on their system.
I've been a student at both a private college (MIT) and a public one (Queens College, CUNY), and neither one filters their internet access. Each school sets its own standards for appropriate behavior without input from the State. I believe that is the way it should be. Do these schools
"allow pornography to be viewed"? No. But they decide for themselves what "pornography" means.
> It should also be up to the town (which has the
> library) on what they wish to show,...
I agree with you here.
Under the proposed law, would each school and town be permitted to decide what should be blocked, or would there be pressure to block sites on the State mandated list? This isn't a rhetorical question, I honestly don't know the answer.
Why do you believe that only pornography will be blocked? Any site that a politician believes is "harmful" is at risk of being blocked.
The voluntary nature of the blocking does not eliminate my concerns. According to the article, it is the Utah State government that will define what sites are "harmful." There will be organizations, like schools and libraries, which are forced by political pressure to turn on blocking for their captive audience. There will be political pressure to add certain types of information to the blacklist.
It isn't up to the State to determine what kinds of speech are "harmful."
In the late 1970's I worked for a defense contractor that built specialized signal processing computers. The NSA was a major customer. We tried to find other applications, like oil and gas exploration, but nobody else was buying.
My job was to write microcode assemblers and then write the microcode that handled I/O. My description of the hardware is here.
Up to 24 voice grade channels (8K samples per second each) arrived time and/or frequency multiplexed onto a single data channel. The system detected the presence of the subchannels, determined the type of modulation being used, and ran them through the appropriate demodulator algorithm. I don't know what happened to the data after that.
We didn't use custom chips. A cabinet full of Schottky MSI chips was enough for a three processor system. The system's speed was due to parallelism, not high clock rate.
By the way, one of our computer rooms was built inside a big metal box that was suspended from the roof on cables. When it mattered, all external connections except for power were unplugged. We were too cheap to pay for a shielded air-conditioning system, so tests lasted a maximum of 20 minutes.
If aliens on earth have evaded detection
(except by late-night radio talk show hosts
and their ilk) it must be because they value
their privacy.
I think we should respect that, and leave them alone.
If the *want* attention, a physics textbook
would convince me fast.