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.
That doesn't make sense. After all, the goal of filtering is that people who don't want to watch porn shouldn't have to. Therefore, simply make the web terminals private and nobody can complain about the pictures on someone else's screen. Problem solved.
I think by far the best principle is just to not put computers in hidden away corners and keep them out in the open.
I disagree. Internet terminals should be protected from public view out of simple privacy concerns. It's nobody's business what I read or view. Furthermore, if they can't see what I view, they can't claim that they are offended by it. Problem solved.
I'm not saying that libraries should filter their collections, but that many do based on budget constraints.
This is legitimate. It would not be legitimate for a library to buy Madonna's Sex book and then cut out the photos before putting it into circulation. That is the exact equivalent of internet filtering. Once you have decided to buy it, you can't spend any more resources on censoring it.
This proposition is unconstitutional on its face, the ACLU will do a good job as always.
A further note is that state law prohibits the display of "obscene" material in a public place, so that we may ask a patron to not view such material at the library. This lets patrons visit sites for information (GBL sites, abortion, et. al.) why still giving us the power to not have Playboy or www.whitehouse.com on public display.
Neither Playboy nor whitehouse.com are obscene. The porn available in adult book stores is not obscene either. "Obscenity" has a rather complicated definition involving contempary community standards and such, but it boils down to: sex with animals, sex involving violence and sex involving human waste products. All of which are readily available on the Internet of course, because they are legal in other jurisdictions.
Exactly one of which is not now, at least nominally, supported by advertising; in particular banner ads.
Right, but all of them (Usenet, Yahoo and Slashdot) were operated for a long time by enthusiastic volunteers for the fun of it, and were it not for idiotic banner ads, they would still be operated like that.
I am merely saying that it MAY very well run counter to your interests to do so.
Yes it might, but it doesn't, since removing the commercial aspect from the internet is exactly my goal. I liked the internet as it was 5 years ago, it was a vibrant place, people were motivated by gaining attention, not by accumulating money or patents. All useful services were already in place then. Everything was a bit harder to use, and that was good because it kept away the idiots.
I can understand many people's dissatisfaction with the current web advertising model, but subverting the means by which the content you enjoy is created is counter productive.
The content I enjoy is or was for the longest time created by enthusiastic volunteers (Usenet, Yahoo, Slashdot etc.). The internet was not intended to be and should not be about money; advocating solutions such as junkbuster or WebWasher is therefore rational.
Furthermore, I am the sole owner of my computer, my monitor and my bandwidth, and I will control how my property is used; downloading and displaying blinking and distracting banner ads is not one of the uses I elect to sanction.
Everything which helps to kill off the joke that is e-commerce is to be applauded.
Consumption taxes are better than income taxes: there's nothing wrong with making a lot of money, so it shouldn't be punished, but there is something wrong with our astonomical consumption level, so consumption should be punished.
Last time I checked, the following things were true: 1) It is not illegal to be neo-Nazi in the US 2) It is not illegal to traffic in Nazi memorabilia in the US 3) Yahoo! is a US-based company 4) Yahoo! has violated no US laws
Therefore, I don't see any problem as far as Yahoo! is concerned.
Yahoo has assets in France, and those are gone if they don't comply with a french court order.
Furthermore, if Yahoo executives have broken french criminal law (which I don't know), they are subject to extradition (which would be denied by the US government) as well as arrest upon entering any country that extradites to France, e.g. all European Union countries.
Well, tech benefits are nice and all, just make sure to never check your email on your free time, because there may be waiting some messages from work for you.
This whole thing is IMHO just a plot to drag employees into unpaid work-from-home.
It is ridiculous that some second-rate corporations get to advertise in my boot logs while the names of Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox et.al. never show even show up there. Is it more important to donate some money than a significant amount of time of your life? No it is not.
And don't give me the crap about "sponsor messages are not advertising". Of course they are. The advertisers want to own your mind in any way they can.
I'm sure that this little bug will be fixed as soon as reiserfs is accepted into the official kernel sources.
Linux is free and so is its documentation. If you want to understand the basic algorithms and data structures of the Linux kernel, start with David A Rusling's excellent free book "The Linux Kernel", put out by the Linux Documentation Project.
OK, so to promote freedom, would you ban these commercials?
Of course, advertising should be banned. Not only does it insult my intelligence, it is also a tremendous waste of resources and it promotes destructive ideals, such as "buy more stuff and you'll be happy", "get thin", "buy it on credit" etc. Commercial speech is not covered by freedom of speech anyway, so censorship would not only be possible, but also very desirable. To buy a product, you can always look it up in Consumer reports or in some yellow-page like catalog of specifications.
It's already true that many kids in the world learn English as their second or third language, and that most scientific and technical publications are written in English, so there cannot be any doubt that English will emerge as the world language.
English is not that bad actually: trivial grammar, many words. It has one huge deficiency though, which makes learning it unnecessarily difficult: there is no strong correlation between spelling and pronounciation. That needs to be fixed. The whole point behind a phonetic alphabet like ours is to tell the reader the correct pronounciation even if they have never seen the word before, based on a small set of simple rules.
I'm sure English will go in that direction, and we should accelerate it: through -> thru etc.
Except if you have to pay $1 for every piece of software on the average Debian system that's licensed under the GPL, the price would easily exceed that of commercial software.
I agree that it would be scary if the GPL could be revoked at any time because it doesn't constitute a valid contract.
Note that this would also endanger multi-author projects like Linux: What if person X, who has various patches in the kernel, sells the rights to Microsoft which then proceeds to revoke the GPL on those patches? They would have to be removed from all distributions immediately.
Maybe a slight change to the GPL could help. A valid, non-revocable contract in the US requires that both parties provide something of value. What if the GPL said something like
"In return for a non-exclusive, non-revocable right to copy, change and distribute the software, recipient agrees to provide valuable feedback in the form of bug reports, feature requests or patches".
After all, say we produce a device that can outthink and outproduce humans, but has no reason to do anything?
Obviously, the ones without inherent drive won't go anywhere. But as soon as a self-replicating artificial intelligence appears that *has* an inherent drive (for whatever reason: design or accident), you'd better watch out.
a) We have to develop (or find) a framework for doing numerical and symbolic math in a web browser (specifically things related to linear algebra), b) we need to create (or find) components for editing/displaying equations
Check out NetMath which I believe does exactly what you want.
If he lived today, he wouldn't show up on the talk shows. Nobody who fundamentally challenges the status quo gets free air time. Take Noam Chomsky for instance, maybe the most radical critic alive. When did you last see him on TV?
Do you really want to be out of a job because the computer can just write that new app by itself?
We will all be out of a job eventually. That's the whole point of technology: machines doing the work for us. We scientists will go last, but we too will go. The only question is: can we design a decent welfare state quick enough for the time when retirement begins at birth.
What exactly is bad about people staying away from e-commerce sites? The way I see it, e-commerce is a complete joke, every single e-business is losing money. They are only kept alive by outrageously inflated stock prices. The sooner this joke dies, the better.
Slashdot Mirror
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That doesn't make sense. After all, the goal of filtering is that people who don't want to watch porn shouldn't have to. Therefore, simply make the web terminals private and nobody can complain about the pictures on someone else's screen. Problem solved.
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I disagree. Internet terminals should be protected from public view out of simple privacy concerns. It's nobody's business what I read or view. Furthermore, if they can't see what I view, they can't claim that they are offended by it. Problem solved.
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If you can't relaxedly watch a porn movie together with your wife-to-be, I predict right now that your marriage will have problems.
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This is legitimate. It would not be legitimate for a library to buy Madonna's Sex book and then cut out the photos before putting it into circulation. That is the exact equivalent of internet filtering. Once you have decided to buy it, you can't spend any more resources on censoring it.
This proposition is unconstitutional on its face, the ACLU will do a good job as always.
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Neither Playboy nor whitehouse.com are obscene. The porn available in adult book stores is not obscene either. "Obscenity" has a rather complicated definition involving contempary community standards and such, but it boils down to: sex with animals, sex involving violence and sex involving human waste products. All of which are readily available on the Internet of course, because they are legal in other jurisdictions.
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Right, but all of them (Usenet, Yahoo and Slashdot) were operated for a long time by enthusiastic volunteers for the fun of it, and were it not for idiotic banner ads, they would still be operated like that.
I am merely saying that it MAY very well run counter to your interests to do so.
Yes it might, but it doesn't, since removing the commercial aspect from the internet is exactly my goal. I liked the internet as it was 5 years ago, it was a vibrant place, people were motivated by gaining attention, not by accumulating money or patents. All useful services were already in place then. Everything was a bit harder to use, and that was good because it kept away the idiots.
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The content I enjoy is or was for the longest time created by enthusiastic volunteers (Usenet, Yahoo, Slashdot etc.). The internet was not intended to be and should not be about money; advocating solutions such as junkbuster or WebWasher is therefore rational.
Furthermore, I am the sole owner of my computer, my monitor and my bandwidth, and I will control how my property is used; downloading and displaying blinking and distracting banner ads is not one of the uses I elect to sanction.
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1) It is not illegal to be neo-Nazi in the US
2) It is not illegal to traffic in Nazi memorabilia in the US
3) Yahoo! is a US-based company
4) Yahoo! has violated no US laws
Therefore, I don't see any problem as far as Yahoo! is concerned.
Yahoo has assets in France, and those are gone if they don't comply with a french court order.
Furthermore, if Yahoo executives have broken french criminal law (which I don't know), they are subject to extradition (which would be denied by the US government) as well as arrest upon entering any country that extradites to France, e.g. all European Union countries.
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This whole thing is IMHO just a plot to drag employees into unpaid work-from-home.
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And don't give me the crap about "sponsor messages are not advertising". Of course they are. The advertisers want to own your mind in any way they can.
I'm sure that this little bug will be fixed as soon as reiserfs is accepted into the official kernel sources.
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Of course, advertising should be banned. Not only does it insult my intelligence, it is also a tremendous waste of resources and it promotes destructive ideals, such as "buy more stuff and you'll be happy", "get thin", "buy it on credit" etc. Commercial speech is not covered by freedom of speech anyway, so censorship would not only be possible, but also very desirable. To buy a product, you can always look it up in Consumer reports or in some yellow-page like catalog of specifications.
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English is not that bad actually: trivial grammar, many words. It has one huge deficiency though, which makes learning it unnecessarily difficult: there is no strong correlation between spelling and pronounciation. That needs to be fixed. The whole point behind a phonetic alphabet like ours is to tell the reader the correct pronounciation even if they have never seen the word before, based on a small set of simple rules.
I'm sure English will go in that direction, and we should accelerate it: through -> thru etc.
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Who else is there? Most workers in Europe are organized in unions. How else could they oppose the organized capital?
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There has been a free version of cscope for quite a while now. It's called cs and available from ftp://cantor.informatik.rwth-aache n.de/pub/unix/.
Both versions work with the graphical tcl/tk interface cbrowser.
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Except if you have to pay $1 for every piece of software on the average Debian system that's licensed under the GPL, the price would easily exceed that of commercial software.
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Note that this would also endanger multi-author projects like Linux: What if person X, who has various patches in the kernel, sells the rights to Microsoft which then proceeds to revoke the GPL on those patches? They would have to be removed from all distributions immediately.
Maybe a slight change to the GPL could help. A valid, non-revocable contract in the US requires that both parties provide something of value. What if the GPL said something like
"In return for a non-exclusive, non-revocable right to copy, change and distribute the software, recipient agrees to provide valuable feedback in the form of bug reports, feature requests or patches".
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Obviously, the ones without inherent drive won't go anywhere. But as soon as a self-replicating artificial intelligence appears that *has* an inherent drive (for whatever reason: design or accident), you'd better watch out.
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Check out NetMath which I believe does exactly what you want.
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We will all be out of a job eventually. That's the whole point of technology: machines doing the work for us. We scientists will go last, but we too will go. The only question is: can we design a decent welfare state quick enough for the time when retirement begins at birth.
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