I'll leave your point about underage minors having access to adult material, since that's your opinion, but I will say that not all places put magazines behind the counter out of reach of children (I know for a fact that many 7-11s do not), and that (obviously) not all adult magazines are bagged. I was talking about a legal obligation in that case.
Now, as for blocking: in this case, IMHO, the damage done by blocking sites is far greater than that of just letting the internet through unfiltered. Unfiltered internet gives the possibility of accessing sites containing material of highly questionable taste, while filtered internet denies certain access to sites containing perfectly legitimate public material.
Visit Peacefire for details of why filtering is a very bad idea(tm).
We don't stop prosecuting crimes because we believe the possibility of an innocent being deemed guilty to be low. Very low, in fact. At least, we like to believe that. Based on that belief, we decided that the good that came of prosecuting far outweighted any bad. With internet filtering, IMHO, the rewards and the problems are not nearly so clear.
Lastly: this is a private business, and the owner does indeed have the right to filter and block the internet access any way he likes. I was responding, however, to the angle that the original quesation contained, regarding how to deal with the problem, since the laundromat is a semi-public facility.
I've thought about the issue some more after some replies regarding logging, and I believe there are a few valid points:
Logging is an invasion of privacy. Even with a prominent notice, it would still be a deterrent to visit sites that are perfectly okay, but just of a sensitive, personal, nature. (STDs, etc, etc.)
In the same way, having the screens be prominently visible is more or less akin to logging, only with a constantly shifting audience of 'log viewers,' and a shorter 'log length.'
From that point of view, having the screens be easily visible by others would entain the same type of invasion of privacy as logging, with the same results: deterring people away from legitimate information that happens to be highly personal.
All that said, I think it comes down to this: it's a given that no technological solution will solve the problem of internet filtering well, and even the ones that might be worth considering (like logging) do so at the considerable penalty of stripping away privacy.
These kids are at the age where they can be responsible for their own actions, and where seeing pr0n probably will not scar them for life. It's a public facility, and there's no more obligation to censor/filter material for minors than a magazine store that happens to sell copies of Playboy and Penthouse.
That said, IMHO there is no good technical solution in terms of blocking, whether by keyword or anything else. Witness the tens of commercial products that are rediculed by Peacefire on a frequent basis. For any blocking scheme, there will always be holes in the system, and also sites that are incorrectly blocked.
I would suggest that each person should have to log on with a unique ID to use the system, and that all accesses would be logged, and that they are told that their activities are logged, and analyzed.
That said, it would probably also help to put the terminals in a position where the contents of the screen are prominently visible to other patrons of said laundromat. Public embarassment can be a reasonably good deterrent.
One interesting tool used in DNA research is called PCR, which is a way of multiplying the amount of DNA in a sample. 24 cycles of PCR amplification would yield a 2 ^ 24 increase in the quantity of a DNA based circuit, and takes less than a day to do. For once, memory could grow faster than data!
Yes, but there are practical issues that must be resolved with mutations that slip through the cracks in the PCR process, and how they might affect the data being processed by the DNA circuits...
I don't know if this would work, but IIRC, there are modified base-pairs for both purines and pyramidines that are more stable than the ones that normal organisms use?
Someone more up-to-date with this stuff help me out here?
Okay, what we have to do is massively DOS flatplanet continuously. Not just the SlashDDOS effect, but _continuously_. Until their site becomes unusable, and they have to move.
And then do it to them over and over again. If they're scrambling their IP, this might be the only way to attack them.
A second option would be to target their customers, and DOS them, preferably telling them why they're being DOSed.
They are there to uphold the law and ensure public saftey, give me one damn good reason why you wouldn't cooperate right then and there...
Umm, they didn't have a warrant? It's the old 'if you have nothing to hide, why won't you let us search your bag/house/body/harddisk' question. Answer: ummm, BECAUSE YOU DON'T HAVE A WARRANT???
As you stated later in the comment, picking screensavers may one day be like picking charities. You're giving something away, even if in this case it's an intangible. That said, it's an act of giving, not one of selling.
While a winning 'reward' might be an incentive to join, I don't see a financial 'lure' as being positive, since it may lead to people attempting to process blocks faster, possibly at the expense of correctness of data.
That said, people who give away their free cycles probably are due something. Currently, most distributed projects are non-profit in any case, so the point may be moot, but what about having a commercial company that relied on a distributed approach for one of their products donate a percentage of profits resulting from said computations to the charity of their choice? (or better yet, other non-profit distributed projects)?
I could see that as being fairer than a 'lottery', or no feedback into the system at all.
Hey, your comment got modded up as funny, but while it may not go so far as a moral 'obligation', it certainly does seem like more of the 'right' thing to do.
The argument goes that since SETI:
1) already has sufficient processing power and
2) has relatively little chance for 'success', that
a project with what seems to be more immediate benefits and that does have the possibility of indirectly saving lives would be a more worthwhile investment of extra cycles.
That said, it is your computer, and you're just as free to have it go download pr0n as research cancer.
A good point, but some of these things _can_ be considered fundamentals. The point is, the system reads from text files to figure out how it should configure itself when booting, sending/receiving mail, etc.
Clicking buttons in a dialogue box arguably makes things much easier, for newbie and many veterans alike. But there's a difference: when the newbie fucks up using the GUI interface so he (God forbid) can no longer run X, or even boot, he is _screwed_.
The veteran, on the other hand, will simply scream a series of obscenities about the frontend GUI program, go back, look through the man files, and fix it himself.
At the risk of another flame war, it's like the evolution of ed, vi, emacs, and errr, pico:
It can be said that those editors get easier to use as you transition from ed to pico, but there are cases in which emacs won't load. Heck, there might be cases where vi might not (or cannot) load, in which case you're stuck with ed. (The OpenBSD setup program allows you to edit fstab this way, I believe).
Point being that it's necessary to know what goes on because the GUI might not always be accessible. (Not to mention the lowest-common-denominator case of having to perform said task on another machine sans GUI).
"Record'em all, that part just takes money. Now wait for criminals, then check what you had on them, find patterns, refine the search algorithm."
Okay, Mr. Brilliant: let's see you show me even a simple 2-level Van Wijigarden(sp) or phase-structure grammar that could do even 1/1000th of what you just said. You do that, and I'll reply and admit in bold italics that I'm a fucking idiot. Otherwise, you admit that you're the moron.
(We'll leave out that phase-structure grammars have no known method of being parsed, and just go with the fact that it's the most powerful grammar, equal to a Van Wijjigarden grammar.)
You're also the kind of person who also goes around saying things like "The NSA and the CIA and the FBI together have many billions of dollars. You think they can't crack triple-DES? You've gotta be kidding!!! I mean, I have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, but I'm sure that the government is smart enough that they do!!! Really! Because they have a few billion dollars, a lotta Crays, and some MIT grads, they can solve problems that the entire civilian population can't! Really!!!"
The rest of your argument is, uh, too stupid for me to waste my time with. The above does fine.
Nefarious activities of private corporations aside, the government is powerless to use any information obtained without the proper procedures in the case of a cable modem user.
Sure, they can get it. They will get it. And it will be inadmissible in court. So it is useful, at least to a certain degree, although I'm sure that they would just frame you for something similar if they happened to get inadmissible evidence.
I was thinking about this a bit more. The problem is that there are constitutionality issues with this law. Some others have already raised issues of free speech (and press?) that might end up getting this taken to a bunch of appelate courts.
The problem that I see, is that the plantiff has to make an investment to sue: $30 and his own time if in small claims, or some other amount if as part of a class-action suit.
But if there are enough lawsuits, then the company would simply appeal, and possible get the law overturned. In that case, a bunch of people meaning to use the law against said spammer would end up with legal bills, while the spammer stood aside and sniggered.
So it comes down to a risk for the plantiff. If they made the amount a good $120 instead of $10, (or something at least equal to a day's wages for some middle-class Americans), then it might be worth the person's time to take a day off and go into small claims, pay $30 or whatever for filing fees, and then stand there arguing about the stupid "XXX naked sluts gone wild" that he got a month ago, and how he's going to prove that it really came from that spammer.
Otherwise, except for those with copiously large amounts of free time, and a true vendetta against the company, not many people are actually going to take the time to sue...
I dunno. IMHO Java is still changing and growing too much to be standardized. Heck, they just added inner classes in 1.1 -> 1.2, and we just got 1.3 a little while ago!
Not if they have to pay court costs. Filing in small claims will probably cost at least 30 or 40 dollars, and add to that the 10, and they'd be paying potentionally $50 or so per piece of spam that they send off to an aware and pissed resident. I like it!
I can see multi-head setups actually being more useful in other gaming genres, some of which would like to push a tremendous amount of information at the player at once.
Okay, so a rear view would be nice in an FPS, but I don't think with current technology that we could really take the frame rate hit. On the other hand,
IMHO, things like flight sims, some driving games, and the occasional RPG, frame rates are of no issue, the game wants to push lots of data, and the viewer actually has time to look at more than one display.
I take exception to the mathematician vs calculator argument here:
For one, my TI-89 does not hold a candle to any well-educated mathematician. Neither does my copy of Mathematica, MatLab, or Mathcad, etc.
The fact is, math requires just as much inventiveness and creativity as many other fields, although it may be argued that it might be a bit low on the emotion.
It's true that by current definitions of science, most religious teachings are pure and unadulterated bullshit. On the other hand, I don't think that taking science as the One True Source(tm) of knowledge about the world is such a good thing either.
Aside from all the tree-hugging and new-age philosophy, there are things that we will never understand, and things that we will always be in awe of.
Yet if you define science strictly, as a scientist defines it, then yes, religion must confine itself to being philosophy, and not science.
Creation "science" is bullshit. However, the idea of religion is as good as any other scientific conjecture. Well, except that it's impossible to either prove or disprove the existence of a God, or a religion's "correctness."
Slashdot Mirror
I'll leave your point about underage minors having access to adult material, since that's your opinion, but I will say that not all places put magazines behind the counter out of reach of children (I know for a fact that many 7-11s do not), and that (obviously) not all adult magazines are bagged. I was talking about a legal obligation in that case.
Now, as for blocking: in this case, IMHO, the damage done by blocking sites is far greater than that of just letting the internet through unfiltered. Unfiltered internet gives the possibility of accessing sites containing material of highly questionable taste, while filtered internet denies certain access to sites containing perfectly legitimate public material.
Visit Peacefire for details of why filtering is a very bad idea(tm).
We don't stop prosecuting crimes because we believe the possibility of an innocent being deemed guilty to be low. Very low, in fact. At least, we like to believe that. Based on that belief, we decided that the good that came of prosecuting far outweighted any bad. With internet filtering, IMHO, the rewards and the problems are not nearly so clear.
Lastly: this is a private business, and the owner does indeed have the right to filter and block the internet access any way he likes. I was responding, however, to the angle that the original quesation contained, regarding how to deal with the problem, since the laundromat is a semi-public facility.
I've thought about the issue some more after some replies regarding logging, and I believe there are a few valid points:
Logging is an invasion of privacy. Even with a prominent notice, it would still be a deterrent to visit sites that are perfectly okay, but just of a sensitive, personal, nature. (STDs, etc, etc.)
In the same way, having the screens be prominently visible is more or less akin to logging, only with a constantly shifting audience of 'log viewers,' and a shorter 'log length.'
From that point of view, having the screens be easily visible by others would entain the same type of invasion of privacy as logging, with the same results: deterring people away from legitimate information that happens to be highly personal.
All that said, I think it comes down to this: it's a given that no technological solution will solve the problem of internet filtering well, and even the ones that might be worth considering (like logging) do so at the considerable penalty of stripping away privacy.
These kids are at the age where they can be responsible for their own actions, and where seeing pr0n probably will not scar them for life. It's a public facility, and there's no more obligation to censor/filter material for minors than a magazine store that happens to sell copies of Playboy and Penthouse.
That said, IMHO there is no good technical solution in terms of blocking, whether by keyword or anything else. Witness the tens of commercial products that are rediculed by Peacefire on a frequent basis. For any blocking scheme, there will always be holes in the system, and also sites that are incorrectly blocked.
I would suggest that each person should have to log on with a unique ID to use the system, and that all accesses would be logged, and that they are told that their activities are logged, and analyzed.
That said, it would probably also help to put the terminals in a position where the contents of the screen are prominently visible to other patrons of said laundromat. Public embarassment can be a reasonably good deterrent.
My $0.02
towards the BOFH!
One interesting tool used in DNA research is called PCR, which is a way of multiplying the amount of DNA in a sample. 24 cycles of PCR amplification would yield a 2 ^ 24 increase in the quantity of a DNA based circuit, and takes less than a day to do. For once, memory could grow faster than data!
...
Yes, but there are practical issues that must be resolved with mutations that slip through the cracks in the PCR process, and how they might affect the data being processed by the DNA circuits
I don't know if this would work, but IIRC, there are modified base-pairs for both purines and pyramidines that are more stable than the ones that normal organisms use?
Someone more up-to-date with this stuff help me out here?
Okay, what we have to do is massively DOS flatplanet continuously. Not just the SlashDDOS effect, but _continuously_. Until their site becomes unusable, and they have to move.
And then do it to them over and over again. If they're scrambling their IP, this might be the only way to attack them.
A second option would be to target their customers, and DOS them, preferably telling them why they're being DOSed.
They are there to uphold the law and ensure public saftey, give me one damn good reason why you wouldn't cooperate right then and there ...
Umm, they didn't have a warrant? It's the old 'if you have nothing to hide, why won't you let us search your bag/house/body/harddisk' question. Answer: ummm, BECAUSE YOU DON'T HAVE A WARRANT???
Well, IMHO, no.
As you stated later in the comment, picking screensavers may one day be like picking charities. You're giving something away, even if in this case it's an intangible. That said, it's an act of giving, not one of selling.
While a winning 'reward' might be an incentive to join, I don't see a financial 'lure' as being positive, since it may lead to people attempting to process blocks faster, possibly at the expense of correctness of data.
That said, people who give away their free cycles probably are due something. Currently, most distributed projects are non-profit in any case, so the point may be moot, but what about having a commercial company that relied on a distributed approach for one of their products donate a percentage of profits resulting from said computations to the charity of their choice? (or better yet, other non-profit distributed projects)?
I could see that as being fairer than a 'lottery', or no feedback into the system at all.
Hey, your comment got modded up as funny, but while it may not go so far as a moral 'obligation', it certainly does seem like more of the 'right' thing to do.
The argument goes that since SETI:
1) already has sufficient processing power and
2) has relatively little chance for 'success', that
a project with what seems to be more immediate benefits and that does have the possibility of indirectly saving lives would be a more worthwhile investment of extra cycles.
That said, it is your computer, and you're just as free to have it go download pr0n as research cancer.
LOL, that's what Microsoft does!
(Well, not necessarily buy, but at least use. Witness IE, DirectX, err, even Windows itself.)
Yep. Unless they start releasing new DirectX and other "critical" (for my purposes anyway) components only under ME, I've no incentive to upgrade.
I only recently (4 months ago) moved to 98SE. Previously, I ran 95, with no forward compatibility issues whatsoever.
A good point, but some of these things _can_ be considered fundamentals. The point is, the system reads from text files to figure out how it should configure itself when booting, sending/receiving mail, etc.
Clicking buttons in a dialogue box arguably makes things much easier, for newbie and many veterans alike. But there's a difference: when the newbie fucks up using the GUI interface so he (God forbid) can no longer run X, or even boot, he is _screwed_.
The veteran, on the other hand, will simply scream a series of obscenities about the frontend GUI program, go back, look through the man files, and fix it himself.
At the risk of another flame war, it's like the evolution of ed, vi, emacs, and errr, pico:
It can be said that those editors get easier to use as you transition from ed to pico, but there are cases in which emacs won't load. Heck, there might be cases where vi might not (or cannot) load, in which case you're stuck with ed. (The OpenBSD setup program allows you to edit fstab this way, I believe).
Point being that it's necessary to know what goes on because the GUI might not always be accessible. (Not to mention the lowest-common-denominator case of having to perform said task on another machine sans GUI).
My $0.02
Dang, I wish I had mod privledge so I could mod you up! :)
And you're a fucking coward.
"Record'em all, that part just takes money. Now wait for criminals, then check what you had on them, find patterns, refine the search algorithm."
Okay, Mr. Brilliant: let's see you show me even a simple 2-level Van Wijigarden(sp) or phase-structure grammar that could do even 1/1000th of what you just said. You do that, and I'll reply and admit in bold italics that I'm a fucking idiot. Otherwise, you admit that you're the moron.
(We'll leave out that phase-structure grammars have no known method of being parsed, and just go with the fact that it's the most powerful grammar, equal to a Van Wijjigarden grammar.)
You're also the kind of person who also goes around saying things like "The NSA and the CIA and the FBI together have many billions of dollars. You think they can't crack triple-DES? You've gotta be kidding!!! I mean, I have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, but I'm sure that the government is smart enough that they do!!! Really! Because they have a few billion dollars, a lotta Crays, and some MIT grads, they can solve problems that the entire civilian population can't! Really!!!"
The rest of your argument is, uh, too stupid for me to waste my time with. The above does fine.
Have a nice day!
Nefarious activities of private corporations aside, the government is powerless to use any information obtained without the proper procedures in the case of a cable modem user.
Sure, they can get it. They will get it. And it will be inadmissible in court. So it is useful, at least to a certain degree, although I'm sure that they would just frame you for something similar if they happened to get inadmissible evidence.
I was thinking about this a bit more. The problem is that there are constitutionality issues with this law. Some others have already raised issues of free speech (and press?) that might end up getting this taken to a bunch of appelate courts.
The problem that I see, is that the plantiff has to make an investment to sue: $30 and his own time if in small claims, or some other amount if as part of a class-action suit.
But if there are enough lawsuits, then the company would simply appeal, and possible get the law overturned. In that case, a bunch of people meaning to use the law against said spammer would end up with legal bills, while the spammer stood aside and sniggered.
So it comes down to a risk for the plantiff. If they made the amount a good $120 instead of $10, (or something at least equal to a day's wages for some middle-class Americans), then it might be worth the person's time to take a day off and go into small claims, pay $30 or whatever for filing fees, and then stand there arguing about the stupid "XXX naked sluts gone wild" that he got a month ago, and how he's going to prove that it really came from that spammer.
Otherwise, except for those with copiously large amounts of free time, and a true vendetta against the company, not many people are actually going to take the time to sue...
I dunno. IMHO Java is still changing and growing too much to be standardized. Heck, they just added inner classes in 1.1 -> 1.2, and we just got 1.3 a little while ago!
Not if they have to pay court costs. Filing in small claims will probably cost at least 30 or 40 dollars, and add to that the 10, and they'd be paying potentionally $50 or so per piece of spam that they send off to an aware and pissed resident. I like it!
I can see multi-head setups actually being more useful in other gaming genres, some of which would like to push a tremendous amount of information at the player at once.
Okay, so a rear view would be nice in an FPS, but I don't think with current technology that we could really take the frame rate hit. On the other hand,
IMHO, things like flight sims, some driving games, and the occasional RPG, frame rates are of no issue, the game wants to push lots of data, and the viewer actually has time to look at more than one display.
My $0.02
I take exception to the mathematician vs calculator argument here:
For one, my TI-89 does not hold a candle to any well-educated mathematician. Neither does my copy of Mathematica, MatLab, or Mathcad, etc.
The fact is, math requires just as much inventiveness and creativity as many other fields, although it may be argued that it might be a bit low on the emotion.
Religion should not be in school!
Begin troll:
Religion sure as hell should be in school. They had better start teaching Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen, Wiccan(ism)?, and Satanism equally!
And if they don't, sue them for discrimination against fair representation of your religion!
End of Troll.
It's true that by current definitions of science, most religious teachings are pure and unadulterated bullshit. On the other hand, I don't think that taking science as the One True Source(tm) of knowledge about the world is such a good thing either.
Aside from all the tree-hugging and new-age philosophy, there are things that we will never understand, and things that we will always be in awe of.
Yet if you define science strictly, as a scientist defines it, then yes, religion must confine itself to being philosophy, and not science.
Creation "science" is bullshit. However, the idea of religion is as good as any other scientific conjecture. Well, except that it's impossible to either prove or disprove the existence of a God, or a religion's "correctness."
More to the point, one can argue that since a public school should be religion-neutral, so should any other public facility/place.