There's a reason why I have postings by Jon Katz filtered. Its because I don't feel like reading what he has to say. Can you please make an option to have submissions _about_ Katz filtered as well? It just annoys me. I don't read his stuff. I don't want to read his stuff. I know you don't want people annoyed with/.
Ask _any_ psychiatrist if exposing pre-adolescents to sexual activity is healthy or harmful. I _know_ for a fact that they will tell you that its permanently harmful. If you don't believe me, then go ask a psychiatrist. Thats as far as I'm going to discuss it.
Harmed in the sense that, in my opinnion, pornography when combined with sexual abuse is harmful to children. It has lasting psychological effects.
I agree with you that lame softwareis an issue, and I'd rather not use blocking software but rather just not allow it. The way people look at this is that it filters 20 sites out of 1B. Thats a pretty good ratio in my opinnion. Sure it could be improved, but they need to start somewhere. It will get better though.
I understand that its going to piss someone off. Every action pisses off atleast one group of people. The actions a library makes to keep porn off the computers is no different (as I see it) than censoring swears and nudity on television. Yes the utilities used to censor need to be improved, but no, I don't think that because 20 or so legit websites are banned, that they should cease doing this. There's a certain amount of decency you want to keep in a public institution, so that nobody is harmed. Yes that sounds PC, but I seriously believe in it. Go to any college campus in the country and I assure you that viewing pornography on library computers is not allowed. I have yet to see one single student be vocal about such an issue. Are they embaressed to be vocal? I doubt it. I honetly wonder why.
Hey, I know the argument. I'm saying that porn can be left out of the public library. It already has no substance in public libraries anyways, so I really don't see why this is an issue.
Libraries are academic institutions. I fail to see how porn fits in the roll of academics. Sure, some may consider Michaelangelo's "David" as porn as opposed to art. Like I said before, I'm not concerning myself with the definition of porn. Lets just state that at some point, art crosses into porn. However fine that line may be, its still porn on one side and art on the other. I don't care where that line lies, just that it does exist. So lets ban the porn from libraries. I think we'll all live without it AND none of your rights are remotely violated.
Look guy, a library is not a goddamn peep-show. Your argument is just as valid as someone arguing to remove any laws against indecent exposure. I hardly consider viewing it on a public machine part of your first amendment rights. Thats as valid as having sex in a public park and claiming religious freedom. Your argument just isn't there. We all know what porn is, so don't even try to drop the definition argument on me, because I won't bite. We're talking about a freaking library, not your own private home. If you need to look at porn so bad, then buy a playboymag/hooker or go to an internet cafe/home pc, and have at it. Otherwise, don't waste the taxpayers bandwidth. Then again, I guess you can;t expect much from someone who uploads nudey pics of his 9y/o daughter everynight to usenet.
p.s. your website sucks, and nobody cares about your redundant cliche arguments... go find a hobby or something
Honestly, I don't see people arguing for censorship in your public library is at all zealous. Censoring your home, yes, but a public library? Please! Censorship is not a good thing in most cases, but Christ, we're talking about keeping porn out of the site of children, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Yes, some politicians have gone overboard and are trying to outright ban porn, but thats already failed once and _will_fail_again_ if attempted. I'm not worried, because I vote, and we do have a democracy. The problem with most people is that they don't put their vote where their mouth is.
Hell, if you're going to bitch about anything, you might as well make it campaign financing. Its outright bribery, but I never see anyone complain about that! Rest assured, I'm putting my vote where my mouth is, and it has nothing to do with some lame software banning 10/1,000,000,000 webpages on the net. I just don't see that as a priority.
I think the mere fact that he uses vi and does all his work "alternative"-style makes him exempt from the suit genre. To be called a suit, first you must be with the mainstream suit population. This guy deviates from the mean. I consider this guy a Linux guy who felt like writing about the dent he's put in the suits. Truth is, suits don't even know wtf Linux is, let alone how to use vi, or even what "root" is.
They've obviously violated the GNU Public License, so why doesn't GNU file a lawsuit? Hell if they need funding for the lawsuit (which I don't believe they do), I'm sure they would find plenty of donors. This company is a blatent fraud, and they insult the intelligence of the OSS community and the concept of Linux as a whole. This is definately something that needs to be acknowldeged and made an example of legally. When do they get their Cease and Desist order?
You're right, the Judicial branch doesn't always take action on things. However, there are plenty of porn sites on the net to brin issue to this type of thing, and all it takes is 1 lawsuit or criminal prosecution for them to need to take action. I'm not saying to not concern yourself with such things, I'm merely saying that the usual/. FUD about how evil the government is and how oppressed we are, etc. are just a bit ridiculous. As for the protecting children stuff and the grey area... thats totally true, it is a grey area. Thats basically why we need to keep porn out of libraries, schools, etc. and allow it only in private surroundings. I don't care who you are, having porn popup on a screen with a child at the keyboard is an outrage. Some people in Congress just recognize this. I wouldn't call them evil oppressors (not that you have, I'm speaking more to the stereo-typical/. crowd).
I wouldn't go so far as to say logging will ever occur without a court order. Those legislations are the equivalent of not allowing nudity on television. That juvenile law especially, is to protect kids against pron, which _is_ known to have lasting psychological effects (mostly when combined with sexual abuse). I don't have a problem with that because I don't really see that there's a need for someone to lookup pron in a library or a school. I don't consider that a necessity. As for what appears to be all-out restriction of the Internet in exhibit b,c, I can't see that as passing and actually being enforced. See, we have this branch of government called the Judicial branch. Everytime something is unconstitutional, they nix it. So the only way something like this will ever come to effect (for more than a couple months) is if they write an actual amendment into the constitution. They're a long way away from taking a bold measure like that.
I'm not worried. We've already seen the Computer Decency Act or whatever it was called. That didn't hold up as much... just a waste of Congressional time and money.
How would it work in space? I think I read something once about satelites and spacecraft needing special hardware to survive in space. Could this apply there?
By mainstream America, I mean The United States. I'll keep using that term because everyone (with the exception of.0001% of the world's population in Uruguay) know what I'm talking about when I use it. Therefore, its completely irrelevent.
As for AOL bringing the net to mainstream America, my point wasn't that they have, its that there's a reason why they were able to do it: marketing and quality service. Of course they had issues when they reduced their fee to a flat rate, but that was poor planning. They don't have a history of being malicious. As for it completely wiping out all dialup information, I don't buy it. In fact, I know of atleast one person who has installed it without experiencing any adverse effects with dialup networking outside of AOL. There's no proof here that this was purposeful. Other than an overseen bug, there's nothing here thats tells you they're being malicious, simply because you (and I) do not know specificly what and how the new version effects the system. They mostlikely have a completely innocent goal: to simply things. Now obviously there has been a mistake made by AOL. Thats not the issue, so stop arguing it. What the issue here is whether they did it purposefully. I'm pretty confident that they didn't.
I never said AOL was the Internet. I said they're bringing the Internet to mainstream America, and they are. Your screen name is your email address. You have IM to talk to other people both on AOL and on the net. You get a basic tcp/ip connection when you dialup, for telnet/ftp/www/gopher/etc. If you don't call this providing Internet access thats easily configurable and easy to use, then I don't know what you'd call it. Yes AOL provides their own content and forums, etc. That does not mean that they don't also provide Internet access.
Look, I'm not saying its not a slippery slope, but if it prompted you for every driver it wanted to update, then everyone in the world would still click "yes" a million times and the same result would happen. AOL wants to simplify things. So if you say that its your default internet connection, then it'll make things really, really simple and dumb-down your machine. Thats the end result, no matter who you ask in this issue, its a fact. The fact that some stuff breaks (which mind you not everything breaks...) is merely a side-effect of the simplification process. They allow you to op-out of the it, just don't specify AOL as your default internet connection. There really is no issue here.
Get it right, MS never released updates/versions of windows that broke competitors software. What they broke were drivers written by Microsoft by replacing newer versions with older ones. You must've read Brian Livingston's article on CNN/IDG, which was pretty blasphemous to those who legitimately dislike MS. AOL does not deserve whatever they get, because $8B is a ridiculous amount of money to have to shell out because they were trying to make their product easier to use. When it comes down to it, thats all this is. I'm highly skeptical of the maliciousness of version 5.0. I truely believe that they wished to make it easier to use, which is exactly what it does. I still think they're doing an excellent job marketing themselves and bringing the net to mainstream America. So being beligerant about something like this is pretty much ridiculous. No company is going to purposely disable competitor software and think they could get away with it, especially after MS' little runin with making it impossible to download Netscape through IE.
There's no reason why anyone should be remotely alarmed by this. If you have any decent security in your website, then you filter everything between code here(-- did they appear?). As for adding that crap to a link, anyone who knows what a QUERY_STRING is, knows that this can be done. So in all reality, there's nothing remotely alarming here. If there were good browser security on the client side to begin with, then this wouldn't be an issue at all.
I wouldn't call this a legitimate issue. My school has all the Napster ports firewalled, and although I think its annoying, I completely agree with them. Bandwidth hoggers slow down both the local network and out uplink. It gets to the point where the web is slow as balls. They banned Napster this week. 4 Years from now everyone entering the school will know that Napster is banned and that its school policy. They have to start somewhere.
If they're going to make an OSS media program, thats cool, but its not even needed. Whats needed is a library that will allow people to make OSS software. Even if its a binary version of the library, I think thats fine. Source is always preferred.
Well, teams are necessary. What isn't necessary are all the pretty icons and crap that have brought the app to hog speed. I want my webpages pretty and my buttons plain. This is precisely what I have with Communicator 4.6, except there's that pain in the ass java bug. The likelyhood that that product was released without anyone knowing the existence of that bug is very, VERY slim.
As for Mozilla, I've already noticed about 3 bugs and I've literally been using it for 4 minutes 32 seconds. The first on: nsLayoutHistoryState::GetState, ERROR getting History state for the key Netscape crashes. The second is with this damn and how I hit enter and it doesn't get registered until I start typing.
I'm not claiming its easy to make a web-browser. However, instead of dumping all this unnecessary spam and graphics and pretty stuff into it, they really should just attack the brute problems, screw the pretty shit and work on pretty shit once something is stable. Thats my $.02, but I'm sure most of you value it at $.0000002;) ~~K
There's a reason why I have postings by Jon Katz filtered. Its because I don't feel like reading what he has to say. Can you please make an option to have submissions _about_ Katz filtered as well? It just annoys me. I don't read his stuff. I don't want to read his stuff. I know you don't want people annoyed with /.
If you agree with me, then moderate up.
Ask _any_ psychiatrist if exposing pre-adolescents to sexual activity is healthy or harmful. I _know_ for a fact that they will tell you that its permanently harmful. If you don't believe me, then go ask a psychiatrist. Thats as far as I'm going to discuss it.
Harmed in the sense that, in my opinnion, pornography when combined with sexual abuse is harmful to children. It has lasting psychological effects.
I agree with you that lame softwareis an issue, and I'd rather not use blocking software but rather just not allow it. The way people look at this is that it filters 20 sites out of 1B. Thats a pretty good ratio in my opinnion. Sure it could be improved, but they need to start somewhere. It will get better though.
I understand that its going to piss someone off. Every action pisses off atleast one group of people. The actions a library makes to keep porn off the computers is no different (as I see it) than censoring swears and nudity on television. Yes the utilities used to censor need to be improved, but no, I don't think that because 20 or so legit websites are banned, that they should cease doing this. There's a certain amount of decency you want to keep in a public institution, so that nobody is harmed. Yes that sounds PC, but I seriously believe in it. Go to any college campus in the country and I assure you that viewing pornography on library computers is not allowed. I have yet to see one single student be vocal about such an issue. Are they embaressed to be vocal? I doubt it. I honetly wonder why.
Hey, I know the argument. I'm saying that porn can be left out of the public library. It already has no substance in public libraries anyways, so I really don't see why this is an issue.
Libraries are academic institutions. I fail to see how porn fits in the roll of academics. Sure, some may consider Michaelangelo's "David" as porn as opposed to art. Like I said before, I'm not concerning myself with the definition of porn. Lets just state that at some point, art crosses into porn. However fine that line may be, its still porn on one side and art on the other. I don't care where that line lies, just that it does exist. So lets ban the porn from libraries. I think we'll all live without it AND none of your rights are remotely violated.
http://members.xoom.com/linuxdaddies/nyc/nyc-088.j pg
:(
You'll have to copy and paste to see it... they're not allowing links
BSD Ass... check it out.
Look guy, a library is not a goddamn peep-show. Your argument is just as valid as someone arguing to remove any laws against indecent exposure. I hardly consider viewing it on a public machine part of your first amendment rights. Thats as valid as having sex in a public park and claiming religious freedom. Your argument just isn't there. We all know what porn is, so don't even try to drop the definition argument on me, because I won't bite. We're talking about a freaking library, not your own private home. If you need to look at porn so bad, then buy a playboymag/hooker or go to an internet cafe/home pc, and have at it. Otherwise, don't waste the taxpayers bandwidth. Then again, I guess you can;t expect much from someone who uploads nudey pics of his 9y/o daughter everynight to usenet.
p.s. your website sucks, and nobody cares about your redundant cliche arguments... go find a hobby or something
Honestly, I don't see people arguing for censorship in your public library is at all zealous. Censoring your home, yes, but a public library? Please! Censorship is not a good thing in most cases, but Christ, we're talking about keeping porn out of the site of children, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Yes, some politicians have gone overboard and are trying to outright ban porn, but thats already failed once and _will_fail_again_ if attempted. I'm not worried, because I vote, and we do have a democracy. The problem with most people is that they don't put their vote where their mouth is.
Hell, if you're going to bitch about anything, you might as well make it campaign financing. Its outright bribery, but I never see anyone complain about that! Rest assured, I'm putting my vote where my mouth is, and it has nothing to do with some lame software banning 10/1,000,000,000 webpages on the net. I just don't see that as a priority.
I think the mere fact that he uses vi and does all his work "alternative"-style makes him exempt from the suit genre. To be called a suit, first you must be with the mainstream suit population. This guy deviates from the mean.
I consider this guy a Linux guy who felt like writing about the dent he's put in the suits. Truth is, suits don't even know wtf Linux is, let alone how to use vi, or even what "root" is.
Sad day... when someone recognizes you on /.
I guess you'll be quiting this next huh?
hahahahahah!!
More like... What GPL'd program did they redistribute without the GPL? hdformat for one.
They've obviously violated the GNU Public License, so why doesn't GNU file a lawsuit? Hell if they need funding for the lawsuit (which I don't believe they do), I'm sure they would find plenty of donors.
This company is a blatent fraud, and they insult the intelligence of the OSS community and the concept of Linux as a whole. This is definately something that needs to be acknowldeged and made an example of legally. When do they get their Cease and Desist order?
You're right, the Judicial branch doesn't always take action on things. However, there are plenty of porn sites on the net to brin issue to this type of thing, and all it takes is 1 lawsuit or criminal prosecution for them to need to take action. /. FUD about how evil the government is and how oppressed we are, etc. are just a bit ridiculous. /. crowd).
I'm not saying to not concern yourself with such things, I'm merely saying that the usual
As for the protecting children stuff and the grey area... thats totally true, it is a grey area. Thats basically why we need to keep porn out of libraries, schools, etc. and allow it only in private surroundings. I don't care who you are, having porn popup on a screen with a child at the keyboard is an outrage. Some people in Congress just recognize this. I wouldn't call them evil oppressors (not that you have, I'm speaking more to the stereo-typical
I wouldn't go so far as to say logging will ever occur without a court order. Those legislations are the equivalent of not allowing nudity on television. That juvenile law especially, is to protect kids against pron, which _is_ known to have lasting psychological effects (mostly when combined with sexual abuse). I don't have a problem with that because I don't really see that there's a need for someone to lookup pron in a library or a school. I don't consider that a necessity.
As for what appears to be all-out restriction of the Internet in exhibit b,c, I can't see that as passing and actually being enforced. See, we have this branch of government called the Judicial branch. Everytime something is unconstitutional, they nix it. So the only way something like this will ever come to effect (for more than a couple months) is if they write an actual amendment into the constitution. They're a long way away from taking a bold measure like that.
I'm not worried. We've already seen the Computer Decency Act or whatever it was called. That didn't hold up as much... just a waste of Congressional time and money.
How would it work in space? I think I read something once about satelites and spacecraft needing special hardware to survive in space. Could this apply there?
Now I know of two people.
By mainstream America, I mean The United States. I'll keep using that term because everyone (with the exception of .0001% of the world's population in Uruguay) know what I'm talking about when I use it. Therefore, its completely irrelevent.
As for AOL bringing the net to mainstream America, my point wasn't that they have, its that there's a reason why they were able to do it: marketing and quality service. Of course they had issues when they reduced their fee to a flat rate, but that was poor planning. They don't have a history of being malicious.
As for it completely wiping out all dialup information, I don't buy it. In fact, I know of atleast one person who has installed it without experiencing any adverse effects with dialup networking outside of AOL.
There's no proof here that this was purposeful. Other than an overseen bug, there's nothing here thats tells you they're being malicious, simply because you (and I) do not know specificly what and how the new version effects the system. They mostlikely have a completely innocent goal: to simply things.
Now obviously there has been a mistake made by AOL. Thats not the issue, so stop arguing it. What the issue here is whether they did it purposefully. I'm pretty confident that they didn't.
I never said AOL was the Internet. I said they're bringing the Internet to mainstream America, and they are. Your screen name is your email address. You have IM to talk to other people both on AOL and on the net. You get a basic tcp/ip connection when you dialup, for telnet/ftp/www/gopher/etc.
If you don't call this providing Internet access thats easily configurable and easy to use, then I don't know what you'd call it. Yes AOL provides their own content and forums, etc. That does not mean that they don't also provide Internet access.
Look, I'm not saying its not a slippery slope, but if it prompted you for every driver it wanted to update, then everyone in the world would still click "yes" a million times and the same result would happen. AOL wants to simplify things. So if you say that its your default internet connection, then it'll make things really, really simple and dumb-down your machine. Thats the end result, no matter who you ask in this issue, its a fact. The fact that some stuff breaks (which mind you not everything breaks...) is merely a side-effect of the simplification process. They allow you to op-out of the it, just don't specify AOL as your default internet connection. There really is no issue here.
Get it right, MS never released updates/versions of windows that broke competitors software. What they broke were drivers written by Microsoft by replacing newer versions with older ones. You must've read Brian Livingston's article on CNN/IDG, which was pretty blasphemous to those who legitimately dislike MS. AOL does not deserve whatever they get, because $8B is a ridiculous amount of money to have to shell out because they were trying to make their product easier to use. When it comes down to it, thats all this is.
I'm highly skeptical of the maliciousness of version 5.0. I truely believe that they wished to make it easier to use, which is exactly what it does.
I still think they're doing an excellent job marketing themselves and bringing the net to mainstream America. So being beligerant about something like this is pretty much ridiculous. No company is going to purposely disable competitor software and think they could get away with it, especially after MS' little runin with making it impossible to download Netscape through IE.
There's no reason why anyone should be remotely alarmed by this. If you have any decent security in your website, then you filter everything between code here(-- did they appear?). As for adding that crap to a link, anyone who knows what a QUERY_STRING is, knows that this can be done. So in all reality, there's nothing remotely alarming here. If there were good browser security on the client side to begin with, then this wouldn't be an issue at all.
I wouldn't call this a legitimate issue. My school has all the Napster ports firewalled, and although I think its annoying, I completely agree with them. Bandwidth hoggers slow down both the local network and out uplink. It gets to the point where the web is slow as balls. They banned Napster this week. 4 Years from now everyone entering the school will know that Napster is banned and that its school policy. They have to start somewhere.
If they're going to make an OSS media program, thats cool, but its not even needed. Whats needed is a library that will allow people to make OSS software. Even if its a binary version of the library, I think thats fine. Source is always preferred.
Well, teams are necessary. What isn't necessary are all the pretty icons and crap that have brought the app to hog speed. I want my webpages pretty and my buttons plain. This is precisely what I have with Communicator 4.6, except there's that pain in the ass java bug. The likelyhood that that product was released without anyone knowing the existence of that bug is very, VERY slim.
;)
As for Mozilla, I've already noticed about 3 bugs and I've literally been using it for 4 minutes 32 seconds. The first on: nsLayoutHistoryState::GetState, ERROR getting History state for the key
Netscape crashes.
The second is with this damn and how I hit enter and it doesn't get registered until I start typing.
I'm not claiming its easy to make a web-browser. However, instead of dumping all this unnecessary spam and graphics and pretty stuff into it, they really should just attack the brute problems, screw the pretty shit and work on pretty shit once something is stable. Thats my $.02, but I'm sure most of you value it at $.0000002
~~K