For an example of this, check out http://www.lds.net/. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints setup an ISP for their members that has filtering software "built-in." The users signup specifically because offensive (to their religious beliefs) materail is blocked.
That's true. That's why we vote on things like this.
I also agree that as it stands now, filtering software do better as frisbees than actually "protecting" someone.
Maybe in 100 years when the software can do "perfect" filtering and do so at a level that is configurable for the billions for views regarding offensive materail, then it may actually work.
Oops. Brain fart. Of course that should say block offensive and don't block inoffensive. Doh!
I agree that it is the families that must make the decision about filters in the home. However, in public schools and libraries that are operated by the cities or counties, filters should be voted on by the citizens of those communities. If the community says no, so be it. If, however, the community says yes, then that is their choice. If you don't like it, move.
The point is, that the Feds try to handle most decisions like these. If a law is going to be passed, it should be at the city or county level.
I don't think the Feds should get involved with filters at all. I believe the decision rests in the hands of the cities and counties alone. What is offensive in one county may not be so in another county. Forcing everyone to the same "standard" od morality is rediculus.
At this point in time, filters are less than worthless. When the technology gets to the point where it bolcks 99.99% over "inoffensive" material and 0% of the "non-offensive" material then let them install them.
All hail the Master-baiter. (Don't tell your mom.)
The role of the Federal Government is to maintain the military and provide a unified voice for the states to the rest of the world. It shouldn't get involved with the affairs of individuals, cities, counties, or even the internal affairs of the states.
For example, I believe that the Federal welfare system should be abolished. If a group of people want to have a welfare system, they should create it privatly. The welfare program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is an example of such a program. It provides a way to HELP members to get back on their feet. It is funded by the church menbers themselves and not by any government agency. I could care less if like Mormons (or any religion) or not, this is a program that works and government doen't have to get involved.
Tbe states can decide if the soil needs to be cleaned or not. The states can pass laws that work best for them and not for someone else.
Education is important. The founders believed that an educated people were better off. However, this should also be handled by the states. What works for one state doen't always work for another. It should be up to the states and not the Feds to manage the public schools. Another alternative is to provide a voucher to each family that covers the tuition for each student in primary or secondary school. (This is the same amount that it would cost the state to teach children for "free.") The parent can then choose to send their children to the school that they feel provides the best education. The statement about education is flawed. Free Education is good but we shouldn't require parents to send their kids to public schools when a private school might be better.
Child labor is bad. That might one thing that Federal Government steps in on. However, it can decided by the states what is the best for them when it comes to younger people in the work force.
For these reasons (and others), I believe that the Federal Government has it's fingers in to many pies. Those items you mentioned, and most others, are best left for the states to decide and not the Federal Government.
From the Communist Manifesto (at http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifes to.html)
Item 2 on his list of ways to bring a government to Communism is "A heavy progressive or graduated income tax." (It's about half way down the page.) Therefore having presented proof of my statement regarding the income tax, I conclude that I am not a dumbass just well informed.
As for the Commie bit, I have studied the Communist Manifesto because it lists the ways to subvert our Republic. If one cares enough about freedom in America, one could see that many of the items in the Manifesto have already be implemented. As an American, one should be watching for such things and acting to get them OUT of our govenment.
A Chinese proverb says "Know your enemy as yourself." If you know how your enemy is going to attack you, then it is easier to defend.
I might add that if you are for restricting the material that is availible to read, then one must cunclude that you are for a closed source system of learning.
One of the pillars of Communism, according to Karl Marx, is a heavy income tax. Such a tax implies that the Government has more right to a person's money than that person does. This is like saying that I have more right to your money than you do. If you believe that, send me your CC number.
I believe that we shouldnot only abolish the Inheritance tax, but all direct taxes on income. Such taxes lead to Communism. The only fair way to tax people is with indirect taxes such as a sales tax. Those with more money pay more taxes because, in general, they buy more expensive things.
The Inheritance tax is also a great way for the government to tax me twice. That money is what was left over after I was taxed and now the Governmetn gets to tax it again.
The Constitution provides for equal rights, not equal things.It is people who believe that the Government know better than I do about how to live MY life and spend MY money that are the true enemies of this Republic. (Yes, a Republic not a Democracy. Anyone who tells you that America is a Democracy hasn't done enough research.)
If I were trying to make you laugh, I would have said: "A priest, a minister and a rabi walk into a bar..."
I am not saying that playing Quake is criminal in any way shape or form. I spent many a day playing Doom in high school and am none the worse. As a matter of fact, I believe that a person's agency (the right a ability for a person chose for themselves) is God's greatest gift. (Yes, as a matter of fact, I am a member of the "religious right.")
What a person considers sin is based on their own cultural biases. It is my belief that such things are punished (or not) by whatever gods they believe in and not by me or a government which I participate in. However, the minute you do something that interferes with my unalienable rights (life, liberty and the persuit of happiness, you know Declaration of Independence stuff) I will do what ever is in my power to punish you for it. This means that I could care less if you jack off to the replays of your last deathmatch but will do my best to have you executed for premeditated murder in the real world.
I just thought I'd correct your "thoughts of sin" comment. While it is true that, in general, people will not commit a sin just because they had an evil thought, an evil though must preceed a sin. A person dosn't lie/cheat/steal/murder/whatever without thinking at some point (perhaps only seconds before the sin) that s/he is going to commit the act. Therefore, acts of sin are ALWAYS preceeded by thoughts of sin.
A device that, at the push of a button, will extent a cup holder from a computer. Said cup holder will retract back into the computer with a second push of the button. The cup holder will also be able to store portable versions called Cup Depositories (CD) or Delicious Vittle Depositories (DVD). The CD is shiny in one side to better protect a desk from condensation from cold drinks and to relect the heat of hot drinks away from the desk while the DVD may be shiny on both sides for even better protection.
This certainly looks to be more than an Email waire tap to me. I guess I had better stop reading the Communist Manifesto, the FSF's web site and this photo essay on "Nubile young teens and their dogs."
I'm the SysAdmin for an ISP that serves rural Colorado. We offer DSL is the larger cities in our areas like Alamosa. What drives us crazy is that Qwest never seems to get ANYTHING right. There's the same problems with waiting for them to put lines it for us the everyone complains about and when they finally do get it in, we spend two more weeks trying to get them to fix their mistakes. At this point our NetAdmin can trouble shoot their system better than they can. Once we get DSL up though, it's stable.
We also do wireless because most of our area is out in the boonies. We almost try to sell it over DSL because, although it's more expensive up front, we don't have to deal with Qwest.
There are several problems with our current government.
First is that it no longer matches the vision of the founders. Currently, about 1/2 the laws that come out of Washington are passed by Congress. Or in other words, 1/2 of the laws passed every year are passed 1) by the president as "Executive orders," 2) by the Supreme Court as they reinterperet new laws and 3) by national commisions and agencies in the form of rules and regulations. The Supreme Court has ruled that all three of the above are as much law as anything passed by congress.
Second, the Senate, which was established to protect the states' rights, originally had members appointed by the state legislatures. When the 17th amendment was ratified, it made Senators elected by the people, thus signing away the states' ability to defend themselves.
Third, we live in a welfare state. It seems to me that the line "promote the general welfare" now means the everyone should be on welfare. Candidates are elected, not because of their views, but because of their ability to bring more money "home" from Washington. We are at a point where we have the ability to choose between the Socialist and the otger socialist. No wonder we get tired of listing to them.
For example, let's look at the income tax. Karl Marx stated in his manifesto that one of the pillars of Communisim is a heavy income tax. An income tax implies that the government has more right to a person's money than the person that earned it. Then the politicians try to convince us that by letting us have more of our own money, they are doing us a great service. Internally, they refer to tax cuts as "tax expenditures." They actually consider a tax cut as a government expediture. Nice huh. The site http://www.fairtax.org has more details on this.
What we need to do is bring this country back to the original Constitution. We can only do that by electing people that believe in the priciples of the Constitution and the only way to do that is to learn those priciples for ourselves. You can start by checking out the site http://www.nccs.org. Once you know the priciples, theach them to others. The OS community did not grow because we kept knowledge to ourselves. Only by sharing our knowledge of the Constitution can we get enough people voting based on those priciples to elect candidates that believe in those priciples.
I'm all for the unified ports collection. I think that it could be done using the macros etc. described in the comments at daemonnews or something similar.
The catch is, as posted at DN, is that I don't think that any one of the BSDs are going to start it themselves. (BSDi might try, if for nothing else but the publicity.) I agree with one of the previous posters, it will probably need to be an "independent" group working on a "limited" number of ports. If that group can prove that what it comes up with works, then it would be easier to convince the ports maintainers to adopt the system and WHAMO! we have a unified ports collection.
Regarding concerns about the different focus of each BSD, a system can be developed the will allow an admin to configure the ports to do what s/he wants.
It was suggested elsewhere that a NOT_AUDITED flag could be used for those packages that are not audited for security. However, even OpenBSD doesn't audit their ports collection.
From the OpenBSD website: "The ports & packages collection does NOT go through the thorough security audit that OpenBSD follows. Although we strive to keep the quality of the packages collection high, we just do not have enough human resources to ensure the same level of robustness and security."
The NetBSD crew can have a flag like PORT_UNTESTED to say that the package has not been tested to run on every platform.
Something can be done with each of focus that will allow an admin to say "I only want security audited programs that can run on everything NetBSD can."
Developers/maintainers can add a flag to the packages like BUILT4_FreeBSD or BUILT4_RHLINUXEMU so admins can configure their setup to not build anything that doesn't build for their platform (of flavor of Linux Emulator.)
If you want to get something like this started, let me know. We can try to organize something and invite some of the ports maintainers from all of the BSDs. Let's not let a good idea disapear because no one did anything.
I work for an ISP the serves rural areas almost excusively. We offer DSL in cities and wireless for everyone else. The good news is that we're in a valley so our three towers cover most of the area. The monthly fees are comparable to DSL but the installation fees can be a bit higher.
Parents should be the only ones who control what their kids see. Some parents don't have any problems with their kids playing Soldier of Fortune or the various verions of Quake while others are offended by Super Mario Bros. (My wife's step-mother was that way.)
I assume that if I teach my children correct principles, they will usually live by them. OK, I'm realistic and know that that's not always the case, but as a general statement, I feel that it is valid. Parent's need to teach their children to take responsibility for their own actions.
On the other hand, I don't my two year old to come telling my "Look Daddy, he cut his arm off!" I don't see a problem with having the "violent" games sectioned off so that while I'm their with my kids, they don't have to see the violence. When I'm not there, I'd still rather they aviod them, but if they're old enough to be at the arcade with out me, their old enough to deal with the violent games.
There have been plenty of discussions about the coorelation (or lack therof) between violent games, movies, etc. and youth violence. I just want to say that if parents will take an active role in their children's lives, the children will be less likely to be "harmed" by the violence.
Musicians, like programmers, work long and hard to get good enough to produce a product that somebody actually wants. Like programmers, they have a choice on what that person needs to do to use that product.
When a programmer hacks out some useful code s/he needs to decide if prospective user get to pay for the privilege. If they want, they can release the code under the GPL, Perl Artistic License, or some other OSS license that let's me use the code for free. In music terms, I not only get a free MP3 or CD (the working program), but I also get the sheet music (the source).
Some programmers want to have more control over their program so they may only release binaries but give them away for free (as in beer). Musically speaking, I still get the free MP3 or CD but if I want to play it myself, I need to "reverse engineer" the music.
Other programmers my decide that I have the privilege of paying them for their program. Musically it means that I have to go out and buy the CD or MP3.
In all three cases, I am bound by the license agreement that the software was released under. As a programmer, I expect anyone using my code to be bound by whatever license I put on my code. Ethically, I honor a software license because I expect everyone else to honor mine. The same should be true of anything that is released, from software to books to music.
After all, isn't a recording simply precomplied sheet music?
Several people have touched on the fact that while at work, employees are using company equipment and that a company should be able to monitor what it's equipment is used for. Many of them also, pointed out that many companies do this to keep people on task and not downloading porn, etc. One poster, also, brought out the point that from a company standpoint, he would like to know if an employee is surfing kiddy-porn before the FBI finds out.
That point is a symptom of another problem in America: The rampant proliferation of law suits. The trend is that employers are getting sued because an employee did something wrong and schools are being sued because an administrator didn't know that a student was going to shoot up his school. Hany organizations are being forced to do this for their own protection.
People need to *gasp* take resposibilty for their own actions and quit blaming someone else just becuase they have deep pockets. Then, the only reason that an organization has to monitor email, etc. is to make sure that employees are doing the work that they are being paid for.
PerlStalker
It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt. Then it's just fun.
I am concerned with Apple's half-hearted support of BSD. Yes, they are going to try to stay synched with FreeBSD whereever possible. The problem they are going to run into is the same one that faced BSDI.
BSDI's BSD/OS has been trying to keep up with the variuos updates and such that have been released with the other BSDs and was always a step or two behind. Apple could end up with the same problems.
However, where BSDI took the "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" road (which, as a BSD/OS user, made me very happy), Apple may begin to view FreeBSD as "The Competition." The last thing BSD needs now is another "civil war."
The other catch is the "where ever possible." Who decides if it is "possible" to synch a particular bit of code? We could see Apple falling farther behind and/or forking away from the FreeBSD devolpment tree. I can live with that, but there may be others that can't.
In any case, any support for BSD from Apple (or any other company for that matter), no matter how small, is a good thing. People will begin to realize that there's more to life then Linux and Windows.
While it's true that anyone can create and/or sign a digital cert., the big web browsers will kick some cool message about not knowing who the certifying authority is. This is a Bad Thing if you are trying to run an e-commerce site.
Certs. from VeriSign and Thawte are automatically trusted by the popular browsers and will pass the user through without even telling them. These guys are trusted because they try to make sure that the person requesting the cert. is who they say they are.
Well, great. In theory we can "trust" the companies the certify. But who's to stop VeriSign from deciding that only Fortune 500 companies need certificates? What happen's to the little guy who can't shell out the $350 US for the cert but still wants to do secure e-commerce or other cool stuff.
With Thawte gone, there is no real threat to VeriSign to prevent them from doing that. Maybe we should start our own CA (-:
Slashdot Mirror
For an example of this, check out http://www.lds.net/. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints setup an ISP for their members that has filtering software "built-in." The users signup specifically because offensive (to their religious beliefs) materail is blocked.
PerlStalker
That's true. That's why we vote on things like this.
I also agree that as it stands now, filtering software do better as frisbees than actually "protecting" someone.
Maybe in 100 years when the software can do "perfect" filtering and do so at a level that is configurable for the billions for views regarding offensive materail, then it may actually work.
Oops. Brain fart. Of course that should say block offensive and don't block inoffensive. Doh!
I agree that it is the families that must make the decision about filters in the home. However, in public schools and libraries that are operated by the cities or counties, filters should be voted on by the citizens of those communities. If the community says no, so be it. If, however, the community says yes, then that is their choice. If you don't like it, move.
The point is, that the Feds try to handle most decisions like these. If a law is going to be passed, it should be at the city or county level.
PerlStalker
I don't think the Feds should get involved with filters at all. I believe the decision rests in the hands of the cities and counties alone. What is offensive in one county may not be so in another county. Forcing everyone to the same "standard" od morality is rediculus.
At this point in time, filters are less than worthless. When the technology gets to the point where it bolcks 99.99% over "inoffensive" material and 0% of the "non-offensive" material then let them install them.
PerlStalker
All hail the Master-baiter. (Don't tell your mom.)
The role of the Federal Government is to maintain the military and provide a unified voice for the states to the rest of the world. It shouldn't get involved with the affairs of individuals, cities, counties, or even the internal affairs of the states.
For example, I believe that the Federal welfare system should be abolished. If a group of people want to have a welfare system, they should create it privatly. The welfare program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is an example of such a program. It provides a way to HELP members to get back on their feet. It is funded by the church menbers themselves and not by any government agency. I could care less if like Mormons (or any religion) or not, this is a program that works and government doen't have to get involved.
Tbe states can decide if the soil needs to be cleaned or not. The states can pass laws that work best for them and not for someone else.
Education is important. The founders believed that an educated people were better off. However, this should also be handled by the states. What works for one state doen't always work for another. It should be up to the states and not the Feds to manage the public schools. Another alternative is to provide a voucher to each family that covers the tuition for each student in primary or secondary school. (This is the same amount that it would cost the state to teach children for "free.") The parent can then choose to send their children to the school that they feel provides the best education. The statement about education is flawed. Free Education is good but we shouldn't require parents to send their kids to public schools when a private school might be better.
Child labor is bad. That might one thing that Federal Government steps in on. However, it can decided by the states what is the best for them when it comes to younger people in the work force.
For these reasons (and others), I believe that the Federal Government has it's fingers in to many pies. Those items you mentioned, and most others, are best left for the states to decide and not the Federal Government.
PerlStalker
Beware of /.ers bearing facts.
s to.html)
From the Communist Manifesto (at http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manife
Item 2 on his list of ways to bring a government to Communism is "A heavy progressive or graduated income tax." (It's about half way down the page.) Therefore having presented proof of my statement regarding the income tax, I conclude that I am not a dumbass just well informed.
As for the Commie bit, I have studied the Communist Manifesto because it lists the ways to subvert our Republic. If one cares enough about freedom in America, one could see that many of the items in the Manifesto have already be implemented. As an American, one should be watching for such things and acting to get them OUT of our govenment.
A Chinese proverb says "Know your enemy as yourself." If you know how your enemy is going to attack you, then it is easier to defend.
I might add that if you are for restricting the material that is availible to read, then one must cunclude that you are for a closed source system of learning.
One of the pillars of Communism, according to Karl Marx, is a heavy income tax. Such a tax implies that the Government has more right to a person's money than that person does. This is like saying that I have more right to your money than you do. If you believe that, send me your CC number.
I believe that we shouldnot only abolish the Inheritance tax, but all direct taxes on income. Such taxes lead to Communism. The only fair way to tax people is with indirect taxes such as a sales tax. Those with more money pay more taxes because, in general, they buy more expensive things.
The Inheritance tax is also a great way for the government to tax me twice. That money is what was left over after I was taxed and now the Governmetn gets to tax it again.
The Constitution provides for equal rights, not equal things.It is people who believe that the Government know better than I do about how to live MY life and spend MY money that are the true enemies of this Republic. (Yes, a Republic not a Democracy. Anyone who tells you that America is a Democracy hasn't done enough research.)
PerlStalker
If I were trying to make you laugh, I would have said: "A priest, a minister and a rabi walk into a bar..."
I am not saying that playing Quake is criminal in any way shape or form. I spent many a day playing Doom in high school and am none the worse. As a matter of fact, I believe that a person's agency (the right a ability for a person chose for themselves) is God's greatest gift. (Yes, as a matter of fact, I am a member of the "religious right.")
What a person considers sin is based on their own cultural biases. It is my belief that such things are punished (or not) by whatever gods they believe in and not by me or a government which I participate in. However, the minute you do something that interferes with my unalienable rights (life, liberty and the persuit of happiness, you know Declaration of Independence stuff) I will do what ever is in my power to punish you for it. This means that I could care less if you jack off to the replays of your last deathmatch but will do my best to have you executed for premeditated murder in the real world.
PerlStalker
I just thought I'd correct your "thoughts of sin" comment. While it is true that, in general, people will not commit a sin just because they had an evil thought, an evil though must preceed a sin. A person dosn't lie/cheat/steal/murder/whatever without thinking at some point (perhaps only seconds before the sin) that s/he is going to commit the act. Therefore, acts of sin are ALWAYS preceeded by thoughts of sin.
PerlStalker
This is going to move phone sex in a whole new direction.
A device that, at the push of a button, will extent a cup holder from a computer. Said cup holder will retract back into the computer with a second push of the button. The cup holder will also be able to store portable versions called Cup Depositories (CD) or Delicious Vittle Depositories (DVD). The CD is shiny in one side to better protect a desk from condensation from cold drinks and to relect the heat of hot drinks away from the desk while the DVD may be shiny on both sides for even better protection.
This certainly looks to be more than an Email waire tap to me. I guess I had better stop reading the Communist Manifesto, the FSF's web site and this photo essay on "Nubile young teens and their dogs."
I'm the SysAdmin for an ISP that serves rural Colorado. We offer DSL is the larger cities in our areas like Alamosa. What drives us crazy is that Qwest never seems to get ANYTHING right. There's the same problems with waiting for them to put lines it for us the everyone complains about and when they finally do get it in, we spend two more weeks trying to get them to fix their mistakes. At this point our NetAdmin can trouble shoot their system better than they can. Once we get DSL up though, it's stable.
We also do wireless because most of our area is out in the boonies. We almost try to sell it over DSL because, although it's more expensive up front, we don't have to deal with Qwest.
PerlStalker
There are several problems with our current government.
First is that it no longer matches the vision of the founders. Currently, about 1/2 the laws that come out of Washington are passed by Congress. Or in other words, 1/2 of the laws passed every year are passed 1) by the president as "Executive orders," 2) by the Supreme Court as they reinterperet new laws and 3) by national commisions and agencies in the form of rules and regulations. The Supreme Court has ruled that all three of the above are as much law as anything passed by congress.
Second, the Senate, which was established to protect the states' rights, originally had members appointed by the state legislatures. When the 17th amendment was ratified, it made Senators elected by the people, thus signing away the states' ability to defend themselves.
Third, we live in a welfare state. It seems to me that the line "promote the general welfare" now means the everyone should be on welfare. Candidates are elected, not because of their views, but because of their ability to bring more money "home" from Washington. We are at a point where we have the ability to choose between the Socialist and the otger socialist. No wonder we get tired of listing to them.
For example, let's look at the income tax. Karl Marx stated in his manifesto that one of the pillars of Communisim is a heavy income tax. An income tax implies that the government has more right to a person's money than the person that earned it. Then the politicians try to convince us that by letting us have more of our own money, they are doing us a great service. Internally, they refer to tax cuts as "tax expenditures." They actually consider a tax cut as a government expediture. Nice huh. The site http://www.fairtax.org has more details on this.
What we need to do is bring this country back to the original Constitution. We can only do that by electing people that believe in the priciples of the Constitution and the only way to do that is to learn those priciples for ourselves. You can start by checking out the site http://www.nccs.org. Once you know the priciples, theach them to others. The OS community did not grow because we kept knowledge to ourselves. Only by sharing our knowledge of the Constitution can we get enough people voting based on those priciples to elect candidates that believe in those priciples.
PerlStalker
I'm all for the unified ports collection. I think that it could be done using the macros etc. described in the comments at daemonnews or something similar.
The catch is, as posted at DN, is that I don't think that any one of the BSDs are going to start it themselves. (BSDi might try, if for nothing else but the publicity.) I agree with one of the previous posters, it will probably need to be an "independent" group working on a "limited" number of ports. If that group can prove that what it comes up with works, then it would be easier to convince the ports maintainers to adopt the system and WHAMO! we have a unified ports collection.
Regarding concerns about the different focus of each BSD, a system can be developed the will allow an admin to configure the ports to do what s/he wants.
It was suggested elsewhere that a NOT_AUDITED flag could be used for those packages that are not audited for security. However, even OpenBSD doesn't audit their ports collection.
From the OpenBSD website: "The ports & packages collection does NOT go through the thorough security audit that OpenBSD follows. Although we strive to keep the quality of the packages collection high, we just do not have enough human resources to ensure the same level of robustness and security."
The NetBSD crew can have a flag like PORT_UNTESTED to say that the package has not been tested to run on every platform.
Something can be done with each of focus that will allow an admin to say "I only want security audited programs that can run on everything NetBSD can."
Developers/maintainers can add a flag to the packages like BUILT4_FreeBSD or BUILT4_RHLINUXEMU so admins can configure their setup to not build anything that doesn't build for their platform (of flavor of Linux Emulator.)
If you want to get something like this started, let me know. We can try to organize something and invite some of the ports maintainers from all of the BSDs. Let's not let a good idea disapear because no one did anything.
PerlStalker
I work for an ISP the serves rural areas almost excusively. We offer DSL in cities and wireless for everyone else. The good news is that we're in a valley so our three towers cover most of the area. The monthly fees are comparable to DSL but the installation fees can be a bit higher.
Check out our site http://www.amigo.net/ for an idea what prices you can expect.
PerlStalkerParents should be the only ones who control what their kids see. Some parents don't have any problems with their kids playing Soldier of Fortune or the various verions of Quake while others are offended by Super Mario Bros. (My wife's step-mother was that way.)
I assume that if I teach my children correct principles, they will usually live by them. OK, I'm realistic and know that that's not always the case, but as a general statement, I feel that it is valid. Parent's need to teach their children to take responsibility for their own actions.
On the other hand, I don't my two year old to come telling my "Look Daddy, he cut his arm off!" I don't see a problem with having the "violent" games sectioned off so that while I'm their with my kids, they don't have to see the violence. When I'm not there, I'd still rather they aviod them, but if they're old enough to be at the arcade with out me, their old enough to deal with the violent games.
There have been plenty of discussions about the coorelation (or lack therof) between violent games, movies, etc. and youth violence. I just want to say that if parents will take an active role in their children's lives, the children will be less likely to be "harmed" by the violence.
PerlStalker
Musicians, like programmers, work long and hard to get good enough to produce a product that somebody actually wants. Like programmers, they have a choice on what that person needs to do to use that product.
When a programmer hacks out some useful code s/he needs to decide if prospective user get to pay for the privilege. If they want, they can release the code under the GPL, Perl Artistic License, or some other OSS license that let's me use the code for free. In music terms, I not only get a free MP3 or CD (the working program), but I also get the sheet music (the source).
Some programmers want to have more control over their program so they may only release binaries but give them away for free (as in beer). Musically speaking, I still get the free MP3 or CD but if I want to play it myself, I need to "reverse engineer" the music.
Other programmers my decide that I have the privilege of paying them for their program. Musically it means that I have to go out and buy the CD or MP3.
In all three cases, I am bound by the license agreement that the software was released under. As a programmer, I expect anyone using my code to be bound by whatever license I put on my code. Ethically, I honor a software license because I expect everyone else to honor mine. The same should be true of anything that is released, from software to books to music.
After all, isn't a recording simply precomplied sheet music?
PerlStalker
Several people have touched on the fact that while at work, employees are using company equipment and that a company should be able to monitor what it's equipment is used for. Many of them also, pointed out that many companies do this to keep people on task and not downloading porn, etc. One poster, also, brought out the point that from a company standpoint, he would like to know if an employee is surfing kiddy-porn before the FBI finds out.
That point is a symptom of another problem in America: The rampant proliferation of law suits. The trend is that employers are getting sued because an employee did something wrong and schools are being sued because an administrator didn't know that a student was going to shoot up his school. Hany organizations are being forced to do this for their own protection.
People need to *gasp* take resposibilty for their own actions and quit blaming someone else just becuase they have deep pockets. Then, the only reason that an organization has to monitor email, etc. is to make sure that employees are doing the work that they are being paid for.
PerlStalker
It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt. Then it's just fun.
I am concerned with Apple's half-hearted support of BSD. Yes, they are going to try to stay synched with FreeBSD whereever possible. The problem they are going to run into is the same one that faced BSDI.
BSDI's BSD/OS has been trying to keep up with the variuos updates and such that have been released with the other BSDs and was always a step or two behind. Apple could end up with the same problems.
However, where BSDI took the "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" road (which, as a BSD/OS user, made me very happy), Apple may begin to view FreeBSD as "The Competition." The last thing BSD needs now is another "civil war."
The other catch is the "where ever possible." Who decides if it is "possible" to synch a particular bit of code? We could see Apple falling farther behind and/or forking away from the FreeBSD devolpment tree. I can live with that, but there may be others that can't.
In any case, any support for BSD from Apple (or any other company for that matter), no matter how small, is a good thing. People will begin to realize that there's more to life then Linux and Windows.
While it's true that anyone can create and/or sign
a digital cert., the big web browsers will kick some cool message about not knowing who the certifying authority is. This is a Bad Thing if you are trying to run an e-commerce site.
Certs. from VeriSign and Thawte are automatically trusted by the popular browsers and will pass the user through without even telling them. These guys are trusted because they try to make sure that the person requesting the cert. is who they say they are.
Well, great. In theory we can "trust" the companies the certify. But who's to stop VeriSign from deciding that only Fortune 500 companies need certificates? What happen's to the little guy who can't shell out the $350 US for the cert but still wants to do secure e-commerce or other cool stuff.
With Thawte gone, there is no real threat to VeriSign to prevent them from doing that. Maybe we should start our own CA (-: