If I publish a webpage and the state of Texas tells people that they are forbidden from using government-funded equipment to read my document because the state finds the content of my speech to be offensive, the state has abridged by First Amendment rights.
That is both false and not relevent to what we were discussing.
Now, which one is content-neutral and which one is content-specific?
Both are content specific, since in both cases the responce depends on what you ask for.
Neither is censorship, since they are not stopping you getting the information, only not helping you. If the doctor started picketing the pub to prevent you getting the leaflet there, then we would have censorship.
You seem to want to force every bad/stupid/evil action by the state into the `censorship' box. This massively undrestimates the power of the state to be obnoxious.
If you tried to fight the truck stop filter policy using anti-censorship arguments you would be unlikely to win, because the first thing they would say is `go home and get your porn on your own network'.
If you identify the obnoxiousness as being technical stupidity plus attempts to infantalise the population, then you have a real argument they would at least have to think for a moment to counter.
Material is withheld from the citizens specifically because of what it says or portrays.
No material is being withheld from the citizens. Some information is being made available in one extra place.
If I were to wander around the corner to the local doctor's surgery, I am sure I would see some government funded leaflets about, for instance, healthy diets. This will be terribly one sided, nothing about the joys of the traditional Scottish ale, pie and chips diet. Someone might object to the government engaging in this kind of one sided information provision, especially if they run the local chip shop, but it is not reasonable to call it censorship, since nothing stops me from finding out how to make chips some other way.
At the point where you use filtering to promote or discourage certain values and opinions.
So, does the fact that government health campagn advertisements don't tell you that using heroin feels nice, or drinking and driving is sometimes convinient count as censorship?
Imagine the access points "generously" allow access to pro-abortion web sites but not to anti-abortion websites
Then you have political corruption, using tax payers money for propoganda without a proper mandate.
Evil but not censorship. (of course, if a large enough proportion of voters back the one-sided propoganda, then it becomes a public information programme like don't drink and drive)
It becomes censorship when they stop you seeing those anti-abortion web sites, say by installing a Chinese style filterring infrastructure across all reasonably available ISPs.
a democratic country should not try to tell its citizens what to read and view.
They are not telling you what to read or view, just making it easy for you to read or view some things. No differet from putting leaflets through your door or providing a local public library which doesn't contain everything ever published.
But as soon as you allow some general-internet access but filter out other content, you engage in a form of censorship.
So, giving you more information is now censorship?
At what point does that switch happen? What if they gave access to federal, state and local government web sites, plus/. -- would that be censorship? What if they added one more site? Two more? At what point does it become censorship to add more sites to the available list?
So if the state were to force everyone to wear special goggles[...]
Are you being forced to do all your internet access via those truck stop wifi hotspots?
If not your analogy fails at the 7th word.
If the state were to offer free (ie tax funded) goggles, that would be analogous. Then it just becomes a stupid government programme among many others with no rights implications.
from a statistical averages perspective [AOL] would likely be safer than "Joe's Kids Club".
Do you have a reference for those statistics?:-)
Seems to me that I hear very little about toy shop owners or independent child minders being a problem, and rather a lot from big organisations like childrens homes, the police and churches.
the parent takes their child to a supervised playground where the playground owner specifies that by paying an entrance fee the playground will ensure that the children are properly supervised, the parent has acted properly
Er, no.
Just because some bloke you know nothing about says your kid will be safe, that is not enough to justify handing them over.
if the state provides a service, it should do so without discrimination.
That may or may not be a good rule of thumb, depending on the service (I'm happy for them to limit driving on the roads to people who have passed a test for instance), but it does not mean that their deciding not to do so is a freedom of speech issue.
Consider a state funded library system. It makes selections of what books and periodicals to carry. It probably doesn't supply girlie magazines.
Imagine they had set up these wifi spots just to allow you to connect to state information services, official traffic report web sites and so on. Clearly that would have been perfectly fine, no different from them putting out leaflets about state services at truck stops.
If they decide to go further and allow limited general-internet access, then they are adding to the flow of informationavailable to you, not limiting it.
We all know that the selection of information is going to be almost random -- the filterring technology is a standing joke. However, the fact that they are providing a stupid service is not a rights issue, just a standard `vote the bastards out' issue.
It is impossible for a parent to know much more than the superficial over all of the people in a school that may supervise your kids
If the kid was going to spend an extended period of time being supervised by one person alone, then rather than just being in a class, then I would think you'd want to know that teacher a little better than `oh some guy I never even heard of at AOL is supervisng her today'.
Aparently the parents didn't feel she was worth protecting. Otherwise we'd have heard about them dragging AOL and the pervert through the courts 4 years ago, rather than the girl doing it now.
It isn't really that easy, you can't watch your children 24/7, especially not if you want them to have some integrity of their own, which is reasonable at 15-17 years age.
If you decide the child is responsible enough to be allowed access to the world on their own, then your argument is with them if they decide to investigate the red light district.
[...] Like that AOL service claimed to be.
If I set up a club for children claiming I was a nice guy, honest, would you let your kids join without finding out anything more about it? And you have no reason to believe I have an ulterior motive, whereas you know that AOL is just trying to squeeze money out of you, so will be running the cheapest possible service with minimum possible regulation and supervision, hireing people for peanuts and so potentially attracting people who get more than the wage packet out of the job.
if a parent bought a game for children and it contained harsh violence and strong sex references. Would that be the parents fault?
Yes.
Well, not if they just bought it, but if they gave it to the kid without checking whether it was actually what they thought it to be.
Would you be that perfect parent that you expect everyone else to be?
The question is not whether parents can be perfect, but whether they should be able to not try and then blame the rest of the world for the resulting problems.
in this instance, AOL were advertising the service as being safe for kids.
The two issues are separate. The girl should be pissed off with AOL for running a sham operation, and with her parents for letting her run loose in a perverts' playground.
If I advertise my chainsaw juggling classes as suitable for under 5s, and your toddler ends up substantially topologically modified, I am clearly at fault, but you are arguably even more so. Why did you leave your kid with someone insane enough to think chainsaw juggling is suitable for toddlers?
Filtering a "public service" in such a way as to restrict free speech (and its complement, the freedom to hear said speech if you so choose) is an abridgment,
The government deciding not to provide you with some particular service is not restriction on freedom of speech as that is usually understood.
The first amendment is an expression of the idea that the state should not prevent you from speaking, not that the state is obliged to in any way help people hear you. If you want people to see your pron at truckstops, set up your own wifi infrastructure.
As proof, take the extreme case. Assume there is at least one truck stop at which they provide no wifi service at all (for technical or financial reasons). That is a 100% filter on the service provided to people who stop at that stop. I doubt any court would decide that was a first amendment issue.
Or take state funded media. Obviously I can't give a Texas example, the UK government recently started broadcasting a channel of professional education programmes for teachers. Imagine Texas did the same. They would not thereby be obliged to broadcast every single possible programme on their channel.
If this is actual design work, rather than just drawing, even that wouldn't protect the work. They could decide they like the design, then get someone cheap to apply it.
Certainly when we work with designers, it is the design work, not the mere operation of a graphics program, that we are paying for. Once you give me enough of a sample for me to be able to say whether you have done the job well, I have already got 90% of the value. So copy protection or low resolution would not improve your bargaining position if I turned out to be a bastard wanting to get the work for free.
Of course, the best protection is to be valueable enough that they know they want to work with you again. This is puts them in the prisoner's dilemma next to you.
I get the impression he's complaining about people who call to whine that the phone doesn't work in certain, limited patches even though it works fine everywhere else.
I get the impression he said that one shouldn't expect cellphones to work inside homes, perhaps because that is what he said. Given that in much of the US homes are made of timber and flypaper this makes me wonder what on earth Verizon uses for transmitters.
`` They want it to work in the elevator''
They damn well should. This is mature technology, which works in `elevators' the world over.
Slashdot Mirror
That is both false and not relevent to what we were discussing.
See the supreme court decision about filters in libraries.
And it's irrelevant because they have not made any claim about the blocked content being offensive. Read the bill.
Your sequence of steps fails at step two where they impose a restriction on what someone else can distribute. That is censorship.
Both are content specific, since in both cases the responce depends on what you ask for.
Neither is censorship, since they are not stopping you getting the information, only not helping you. If the doctor started picketing the pub to prevent you getting the leaflet there, then we would have censorship.
You seem to want to force every bad/stupid/evil action by the state into the `censorship' box. This massively undrestimates the power of the state to be obnoxious.
If you tried to fight the truck stop filter policy using anti-censorship arguments you would be unlikely to win, because the first thing they would say is `go home and get your porn on your own network'.
If you identify the obnoxiousness as being technical stupidity plus attempts to infantalise the population, then you have a real argument they would at least have to think for a moment to counter.
No material is being withheld from the citizens. Some information is being made available in one extra place.
If I were to wander around the corner to the local doctor's surgery, I am sure I would see some government funded leaflets about, for instance, healthy diets. This will be terribly one sided, nothing about the joys of the traditional Scottish ale, pie and chips diet. Someone might object to the government engaging in this kind of one sided information provision, especially if they run the local chip shop, but it is not reasonable to call it censorship, since nothing stops me from finding out how to make chips some other way.
So, does the fact that government health campagn advertisements don't tell you that using heroin feels nice, or drinking and driving is sometimes convinient count as censorship?
Imagine the access points "generously" allow access to pro-abortion web sites but not to anti-abortion websites
Then you have political corruption, using tax payers money for propoganda without a proper mandate.
Evil but not censorship. (of course, if a large enough proportion of voters back the one-sided propoganda, then it becomes a public information programme like don't drink and drive)
It becomes censorship when they stop you seeing those anti-abortion web sites, say by installing a Chinese style filterring infrastructure across all reasonably available ISPs.
a democratic country should not try to tell its citizens what to read and view.
They are not telling you what to read or view, just making it easy for you to read or view some things. No differet from putting leaflets through your door or providing a local public library which doesn't contain everything ever published.
So, giving you more information is now censorship?
At what point does that switch happen? What if they gave access to federal, state and local government web sites, plus /. -- would that be censorship? What if they added one more site? Two more? At what point does it become censorship to add more sites to the available list?
Are you being forced to do all your internet access via those truck stop wifi hotspots?
If not your analogy fails at the 7th word.
If the state were to offer free (ie tax funded) goggles, that would be analogous. Then it just becomes a stupid government programme among many others with no rights implications.
The catholic church has been around for two millenia serving a billion+. Would you trust your child to a random priest?
Do you have a reference for those statistics?:-)
Seems to me that I hear very little about toy shop owners or independent child minders being a problem, and rather a lot from big organisations like childrens homes, the police and churches.
Er, no.
Just because some bloke you know nothing about says your kid will be safe, that is not enough to justify handing them over.
Must be touch for nursury schools and toy shop and so on where you live.
AOL, on the other hand, is a large corporation
Which of course makes all their employees above reporach.
Something going wrong with a child due to corporate negligence is tantamount to corporate suicide.
So, you predict AOL/Time Warner won't exist this time next year?
But none carry all periodicals, and I bet damn few cary hardcore pr0n.
So, vote the bastards out.
That may or may not be a good rule of thumb, depending on the service (I'm happy for them to limit driving on the roads to people who have passed a test for instance), but it does not mean that their deciding not to do so is a freedom of speech issue.
Consider a state funded library system. It makes selections of what books and periodicals to carry. It probably doesn't supply girlie magazines.
Imagine they had set up these wifi spots just to allow you to connect to state information services, official traffic report web sites and so on. Clearly that would have been perfectly fine, no different from them putting out leaflets about state services at truck stops.
If they decide to go further and allow limited general-internet access, then they are adding to the flow of informationavailable to you, not limiting it.
We all know that the selection of information is going to be almost random -- the filterring technology is a standing joke. However, the fact that they are providing a stupid service is not a rights issue, just a standard `vote the bastards out' issue.
Yes, and I tell you my chainsaw juggling lessons are. I still see no difference.
If the kid was going to spend an extended period of time being supervised by one person alone, then rather than just being in a class, then I would think you'd want to know that teacher a little better than `oh some guy I never even heard of at AOL is supervisng her today'.
How could it possibly do that?
The most it could do is make them wait until they got home or to the nearest Starbucks or whatever.
The state not providing a service to help you get your speech out a little earlier is not censorship.
Debbie Does Decompression.
Man, you haven't lived until you see what happens to those implants.
I wouldn't allow, let alone pay, someone I didn't know anything about to supervise my kids.
Aparently the parents didn't feel she was worth protecting. Otherwise we'd have heard about them dragging AOL and the pervert through the courts 4 years ago, rather than the girl doing it now.
You think I'm going to be giving chainsaw juggling lessons for free?
I really don't see a difference between the two cases. If you send your kid unsupervised into either service you deserve a good slapping.
If you decide the child is responsible enough to be allowed access to the world on their own, then your argument is with them if they decide to investigate the red light district.
[...] Like that AOL service claimed to be.
If I set up a club for children claiming I was a nice guy, honest, would you let your kids join without finding out anything more about it? And you have no reason to believe I have an ulterior motive, whereas you know that AOL is just trying to squeeze money out of you, so will be running the cheapest possible service with minimum possible regulation and supervision, hireing people for peanuts and so potentially attracting people who get more than the wage packet out of the job.
if a parent bought a game for children and it contained harsh violence and strong sex references. Would that be the parents fault?
Yes.
Well, not if they just bought it, but if they gave it to the kid without checking whether it was actually what they thought it to be.
Would you be that perfect parent that you expect everyone else to be?
The question is not whether parents can be perfect, but whether they should be able to not try and then blame the rest of the world for the resulting problems.
The two issues are separate. The girl should be pissed off with AOL for running a sham operation, and with her parents for letting her run loose in a perverts' playground.
If I advertise my chainsaw juggling classes as suitable for under 5s, and your toddler ends up substantially topologically modified, I am clearly at fault, but you are arguably even more so. Why did you leave your kid with someone insane enough to think chainsaw juggling is suitable for toddlers?
The government deciding not to provide you with some particular service is not restriction on freedom of speech as that is usually understood.
The first amendment is an expression of the idea that the state should not prevent you from speaking, not that the state is obliged to in any way help people hear you. If you want people to see your pron at truckstops, set up your own wifi infrastructure.
As proof, take the extreme case. Assume there is at least one truck stop at which they provide no wifi service at all (for technical or financial reasons). That is a 100% filter on the service provided to people who stop at that stop. I doubt any court would decide that was a first amendment issue.
Or take state funded media. Obviously I can't give a Texas example, the UK government recently started broadcasting a channel of professional education programmes for teachers. Imagine Texas did the same. They would not thereby be obliged to broadcast every single possible programme on their channel.
If this is actual design work, rather than just drawing, even that wouldn't protect the work. They could decide they like the design, then get someone cheap to apply it.
Certainly when we work with designers, it is the design work, not the mere operation of a graphics program, that we are paying for. Once you give me enough of a sample for me to be able to say whether you have done the job well, I have already got 90% of the value. So copy protection or low resolution would not improve your bargaining position if I turned out to be a bastard wanting to get the work for free.
Of course, the best protection is to be valueable enough that they know they want to work with you again. This is puts them in the prisoner's dilemma next to you.
I get the impression he said that one shouldn't expect cellphones to work inside homes, perhaps because that is what he said. Given that in much of the US homes are made of timber and flypaper this makes me wonder what on earth Verizon uses for transmitters.
`` They want it to work in the elevator''
They damn well should. This is mature technology, which works in `elevators' the world over.