Most EULAs have a clause saying effectively "We can change the terms of this license whenever we damn well please by posting it on (read: in some back corner of) our website. By continuing to use our product you agree to the new license, even though we never bother to actually inform you that it's been changed."
Also, most have clauses now stating "You agree that any legal issues are subject to the jurisdiction of the Courts of Timbucktu", meaning in effect that not only are you supposed to consult a lawyer, but you have to consult one who knows the laws of Timbucktu. And you'll probably have to travel there if it comes to any legal proceedings. Just out of curiousity, which would win if the laws of the place where you live state that any such jurisdiction assignment clause is null and void?
Yes, if you want to be a grammarian the plural is probably viruses. Who cares? The plural of 'box' isn't 'boxen' in English either, and neither would many other things in hackish usage satisfy your high school Englishg teacher.
I'd say that the plural of a biological virus is "viruses" while of a computer virus is "virii". As for a biological virus that builds computers... viruses, because it's biological and not a computer program. This way, "My computer has viruses!" (as in biological things eating it) is differentiated from "My computer has virii!" (as in malicious programs).
This virus-protein binding looks like it could be useful in fabrication, but i wonder how finely they can control the binding. Could they lay out a circuit path, or would the 'wires' be too uneven and too likely to be built short circuited?
I see quite a few ACs complaining that we always said software patents are bad, but we say these patents are good because they're GPLed.
My take on this is that software patents are still bad. But there's not a hell of a lot we can do about them at this point, since the big corporations can put a lot more money into keeping them (not to say we shouldn't TRY, but...). Since we can't stop software patents, we instead use patents against those companies.
As for the comment about publishing as prior art instead of patenting, i see two problems: First, the big corporations can use them as well, which is why Ralph Levien went the patent route. Second, we've seen before how often the USPTO grants patents even with the existance of prior art.
And it's standard in every *NIX distribution I've seen (Slackware, redhat, debian, suse, and mandrake linux, solaris/sunos, etc etc.)
IIRC, exim is the standard MTA in Debian (at least Debian woody). In earlier versions, again IIRC, it was smail. Sendmail is available for anyone who wants it, though.
Makeit available freely to anyone who wants it, and make it a high crime to violate it.
You forget one small thing... Ok, let's make it a high crime in the US to send spam to addresses on this list. So the spammers start sending mail from other countries... And they get a huge list of valid addresses to send to.
Even if you get half the world to pass these laws, what about the other half? Not to mention the countries where laws can be freely broken by anyone with enough money, and how much some countries dispise any attempt by the US to force laws on them...
Yes, the GPL does prohibit linking a subroutine library into the program. But, i wonder how exactly it applies to a dynamically loadable library, which isn't "linked" with the executable except in the sense that the executable calls functions defined in the library. To my thinking, that could fall under the executing clause:
The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.
And the situation is even more complicated under WinDOS, since any executable needs to be linked specifically against the particular version of the DLL, making the situation one more of making calls into a library statically linked into the executable that just happens to be loaded from a separate file... In this case i think it would fall under the GPL.
The English language has only one word, "free", to represent two concepts: free as in "we're giving away free beer" (no charge), and free as in "you have the right to free speech" (no restrictions). The phrase "free as in beer" means that the word free is being used in the same was as in the 'free beer' sentence.
Some other languages do make the distinction. Spanish, for example, uses libre for free-as-in-speech and gratis (or gratuito, if you really want to match parts of speech...) for free-as-in-beer.
and will argue and fight over them until we are Borg.
i don't think we'll ever be Borg. How would the collective survive with "Emacs vs. Vi", "Linux vs. *BSD", "deb vs. rpm", "My favorite distro vs. Every other distro", and so on?
Besides, what's "real time" for a complex mathematical computation? Fast enough for video games?
You think that'll stop the big corporations from trying? As much as they can get away with, they'll force the restrictions (technological and legal) these laws provide on other countries.
They've now got the right for the program, so everyone with distributing it is doing it illegally.
IANAL, but if the law makes any sense....
Anyone who recieved the program licensed under the GPL (if that oft-quoted comment is valid, that's just about everyone) may legally redistribute it, since there is no provision in the GPL to change the licensing terms. Any version Mattel distributes may have a proprietary license, but all those GPLed copies remain GPLed and Mattel can do nothing to change that.
and transferring the copyright does not allow Mattel to take away that license after the fact.
Unless the [hypothetical] original license had some sort of clause saying "these terms can be changed at our whim, and you have to watch our website to find out these changes" like most corporate licenses. Although i wonder if these clauses are enforcable (or at least were pre-UCITA...)
However, because no license is included in the source code as originally made available, it could be argued in court that no permission to distribute was ever granted. Perhaps this is Mattel's angle.
IANAL, of course, but i would think that the comment quoted in other posts puts the code under the GPL. Either way, i wouldn't be too surprised to see Mattel try to get it pulled anyway... Wonder how many sites mirroring it will include disclaimers along the lines of "This code was obtained under the Gnu General Public License (GPL), which grants permission to freely redistribute the program and source. Although the copyright has since been assigned to Mattel, there is NO provision for changing the licensing terms of this copy, so it remains under the terms of the GPL. Any copies downloaded from this site will also remain under the GPL as specified by the terms of the GPL." (if for some odd reason anyone WANTS this disclaimer, go ahead and take it)
The industry standard document interchange format is Word. Period.
The industry wants CSS, SDMI, etc. The industry loves DMCA and UTICA. The industry is stupid. Period. And we shouldn't let them push us into inferior, proprietary standards.
But chances are i won't change your mind. Oh well, no matter. At least the Library of Congress realized that ASCII Text is the best format for exchanging many documents (now we just have to watch out for Micros~1's Dread Questionmark Disease)
According to the info pages, a makefile created with the autoconf/automake system will have an uninstall target. This means that just about anything with a Makefile.am and a./configure script will support make uninstall.
And i always thought that one was official, since ESR is maintaining the file...
Anyway, that's the one i've always had bookmarked (although i keep a slightly reformatted mirror on my own box... Look for "Jargon File Flattener" in the comments about v4.1.0)
... chances are, it'll be all over the news tomorrow: "CNN chat with the President hacked". Why not, they did the same thing with this whole Yahoo etc DDoS attack.
Although, the AP article i read in the local paper was pretty funny Friday. "A trojan program, known as a daemon,..." "The daemons arrive at the victim with a fake return address." And i thought 'daemon' was a generic name for a program in the background providing a service, not a specific term for a DDoS tool or synonym for a 'packet'...
Anyone who doesn't understand 'hack' as defined in The Jargon File please stop reading now. Thank you. This just might qualify under sense 5, being a practical joke taking advantake of shortcomings in the CNN chatserver...
Don't worry, i noticed aptitude is still in 0.0.x releases, so it's nowhere near finished! My complaints were more directed towards capt, which is much more developed (and people are already calling it the replacement).
The "undo" i was referring to is how in dselect if you push +, then decide you don't want to install it after all, you can hit _ and it'll be in the state it was before the +. +, -, tab, i couldn't get capt to do the same thing without pressing R and resetting all changes i'd made. i would've thought that to be as trivial to add as anything else.
The grouping by priority i like mostly because i'm used to it from dselect. What would be really nice would be to pick first sort by status/priority/availability/section/whatever/none , then second within those groupings sort by status/priority/availability/section/whatever/none , third yet again, and last by name/download size/installed size/whatever. dselect does some of this, but it isn't very clear and you can't change the default (or if you can, i've never found how)
All in all, it's good that so many package selection programs are available, so people who hate one can use another.
but I can't help wondering how Linux newbies are coping with Debian
About a year ago, i installed Debian as my first Linux distro (only Windows (9x and 3.11) and various DOSses before). IIRC, the only trouble i had was getting X to work, because someone told me to use the MACH X-server when i needed SVGA. Once i figured that out, things went fine. The inital install was hamm, and i've since upgraded to frozen slink, unstable potato, and now (unknowingly;) unstable woody.
i'm one of the few people who actually like dselect. I've tried capt and aptitude (just a few minutes ago, in fact), and i like dselect better that either. I miss the info displays; the sorting by availability, priority, and name; the hold feature; the ability to undo mark-for-(un)install without resetting everything; indication of obsolete packages. Maybe some other things i haven't noticed yet. i hope they don't get rid of dselect without replacing it with something that includes all that functionality (or, i wish i were a good enough programmer to write that replacement).
Slashdot is certainly the first place i hear about many things. But 5000 Slashdot posts won't sway the government, which is why i suggest we/. the system, fill out petitions and write letters to our representatives. To do that requires organization. Were i in a position to provide that organization, i would, but i simply don't have the resources. Others do; we must call upon them to use those resources, and then convince the community to participate.
A post on Slashdot is a good first step. But it will not help if it's also the last step.
I think part of the reason the establishment wants all this copy protection is to prevent the little guy from being able to distribute his own stuff without paying through the nose to them. Why are DVDs encrypted, when it's simple enough to grab the output as it's going to the display? Why do record companies want a copy-protected format; part of it certainly is to eliminate the legitimate Internet distribution channels along with the piracy.
They're afraid of your prediction that the Internet can replace physical media, because that will mean they have to adapt or die. So, they're fighting with every angle they can imagine.
Yes, posting on Slashdot is a good first step. But i highly doubt that even 5000 posts on Slashdot would influence many of the governmental people in charge of passing or rejecting this.
Does anyone (EFF, ACLU, some other acronym, whoever) have a petition online against UTICA, clearly stating the many points in this article? Is there a list of people to contact, preferably with recommendations not to flame? i can't see how this could stand up in courts (IANAL), but it would certainly be easier and less expensive to combat this before it can become law.
The big corporations behind this have the money, the lawyers, and the lobbyists to push their views. We have the Slashdot Effect, if we can only figure out how to use it.
I suppose, if SafeSurf were more widely used, I could understand the general terminals being set to level 7 (meant for adults but not porn) and the terminals in the children's areas to level 3 (technical references). That would be reasonable.
Unfortunately, the levels don't quite live up to their names. I've yet to encounter any censorware that blocks exactly what it claims to and no more.
terminals in the children's portion of the library could be restricted to.kid-only domains
What, no Slashdot.org for the kids? No freshmeat.net, no segfault.org, no whitehouse.gov? Although, perhaps the kids would be more upset about being denied yahoo.com and wwf.com. To keep "bad stuff" from being put into.kid sites, someone is going to have to monitor them, and it'd probably end up that only the large commercial entities can really afford the legal proceedings (yes, i'm mildly pessimistic).
A sanitized playpen may be safe, but it's hardly useful or interesting to those inside...
Bull. I've seen empty space on magazine racks. Ask a library why they're not carrying Hustler and they're not going to tell you 'shelf space'.
Next time try responding to what was actually written. I said "why it's been ruled a library can refuse to carry", not why the libraries choose to carry or not to carry the materials.
This idea of the Internet costing absolutely nothing is a load as well. Electricity, at least in America, costs money.
Did i ever say the Internet was free? Can you quote a sentence, a phrase, or even a word that implies that? No. I simply said it costs more to buy and run censorware than not.
Bandwidth costs a lot of money. The difference in bandwidth between a kid looking at porn and a kid looking at research papers is amazing.
Perhaps things are different there, but everywhere i know of in the US Internet access is available as a flat charge, with no relation to bandwidth used.
AUP monitors need to get paid. And isn't the monitor herself a censor? Why pay a person an hourly wage, when you can install a filter and only pay for it once?
Did i say AUP monitors needed to be hired? It's not exactly a demanding job for a librarian to look over once in a while, and to respond if a patron complains.
The Internet costs money, too, and the government, once again, isn't going to pay for things that communities deem objectionable.
Sure it won't. i know many people who object to the IRS, who object to Social Security as it's currently handled, who object to gigantic pork-barrel projects, who object to PBS, who object to NASA, who object to the Dakotas, who object to welfare, who object to the things some people do with federal grants for the arts (and i'm not referring to the elephant-dung thing in New York). Need i continue? Yes, some people support these things to varying degrees, but i'm sure some people would support porn mags in libraries as well.
And finally, i want you to actually investigate these filters you champion. If you do a halfway decent job, you'll find that they block much more than just pornography, and you'll find that they don't do an extremely good job at blocking that. With today's technology it is completely impossible for a computer program to effectively "protect the children" without eliminating most of the usefulness of the Internet.
Yes but trust and respect goes with age and wisdom. Would you trust a twelve year old to drive a car? Or with a loaded gun?
Wisdom doesn't necessarily depend on age. There are many people 30 or 40 years old who i wouldn't trust with a gun or behind the wheel of a car, while i'm open to the possibility of a 12 year old being responsible enough. Trust and respect should be based on the person, and not just how many years they've been alive.
We make judgements based on age because statistically most people will fit the statistic. But we often forget that there are many who deviate from the norm in either direction.
But let's get back to Holland, MI. Does you library carry Hustler? Can any adult go into the adult section and pick up a copy of Hustler? Or maybe Penthouse? Has anyone ever asked the library to carry these magazines? I know my local library doesn't carry these, despite their very large circulation.
I've getting very sick of hearing this arguement. Do you know why it's been ruled that a library can refuse to carry certain printed matrials? Because printed materials take shelf space, and cost money to obtain. These are a physical resource that can be easily used up, so any library has to pick and choose just what will be carried.
The Internet is a different matter. It does not take up any more space on the computer to allow access to porn sites. It doesn't cost any more [public] money to get Internet-with-porn. In fact, it takes more hard drive space, processor time, RAM, and money to use filters to block them! "But wait, what about people tying up the terminals lookin at porn?" you ask? Software isn't needed to solve this problem, just an AUP and a librarian to go over and tell Sir to get off the computer, people need it for real work.
That's the difference: to not carry porn mags is a passive measure of not spending the money or the shelf space to carry them. To not carry certain websites is an active measure involving time, computing resources, and money to obtain, install, and use censorware.
As a second point, who decides what printed materials shouldn't be carried by the library? The library staff, with occasional input from the community. Who really decides what web sites will be blocked by nearly all censorware? Some big corporation, likely as not based in another state, who doesn't care about the standards in your community and who may or may not have a political agenda in addition to simply blocking porn (search the web for examples).
Your post has only one really valid point: the issue should be decided by the community, by the staff and patrons of the individual library, not by state or federal government (or private corporations, for that matter). But the public needs to be informed if they are to do the Right Thing (whatever that may be) instead of listening to whichever group has the slickest ad campaign. [Ob1984Reference:] Isn't that how Big Brother controlled the proles, but only telling them when it wanted them to know? This/. article may help someone, in Holland or any other town, fight against a campaign like the one in Holland now. Maybe not Holland in particular, but the underlying issue is certainly an stuff that matters to many Slashdot readers.
Let the community decide.
How are we preventing them by discussing this issue?
Slashdot Mirror
Why not?
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Also, most have clauses now stating "You agree that any legal issues are subject to the jurisdiction of the Courts of Timbucktu", meaning in effect that not only are you supposed to consult a lawyer, but you have to consult one who knows the laws of Timbucktu. And you'll probably have to travel there if it comes to any legal proceedings. Just out of curiousity, which would win if the laws of the place where you live state that any such jurisdiction assignment clause is null and void?
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I'd say that the plural of a biological virus is "viruses" while of a computer virus is "virii". As for a biological virus that builds computers... viruses, because it's biological and not a computer program. This way, "My computer has viruses!" (as in biological things eating it) is differentiated from "My computer has virii!" (as in malicious programs).
This virus-protein binding looks like it could be useful in fabrication, but i wonder how finely they can control the binding. Could they lay out a circuit path, or would the 'wires' be too uneven and too likely to be built short circuited?
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My take on this is that software patents are still bad. But there's not a hell of a lot we can do about them at this point, since the big corporations can put a lot more money into keeping them (not to say we shouldn't TRY, but...). Since we can't stop software patents, we instead use patents against those companies.
As for the comment about publishing as prior art instead of patenting, i see two problems: First, the big corporations can use them as well, which is why Ralph Levien went the patent route. Second, we've seen before how often the USPTO grants patents even with the existance of prior art.
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IIRC, exim is the standard MTA in Debian (at least Debian woody). In earlier versions, again IIRC, it was smail. Sendmail is available for anyone who wants it, though.
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You forget one small thing... Ok, let's make it a high crime in the US to send spam to addresses on this list. So the spammers start sending mail from other countries... And they get a huge list of valid addresses to send to.
Even if you get half the world to pass these laws, what about the other half? Not to mention the countries where laws can be freely broken by anyone with enough money, and how much some countries dispise any attempt by the US to force laws on them...
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And the situation is even more complicated under WinDOS, since any executable needs to be linked specifically against the particular version of the DLL, making the situation one more of making calls into a library statically linked into the executable that just happens to be loaded from a separate file... In this case i think it would fall under the GPL.
If i'm wrong, feel free to correct me.
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Some other languages do make the distinction. Spanish, for example, uses libre for free-as-in-speech and gratis (or gratuito, if you really want to match parts of speech...) for free-as-in-beer.
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i don't think we'll ever be Borg. How would the collective survive with "Emacs vs. Vi", "Linux vs. *BSD", "deb vs. rpm", "My favorite distro vs. Every other distro", and so on?
Besides, what's "real time" for a complex mathematical computation? Fast enough for video games?
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IANAL, but if the law makes any sense....
Anyone who recieved the program licensed under the GPL (if that oft-quoted comment is valid, that's just about everyone) may legally redistribute it, since there is no provision in the GPL to change the licensing terms. Any version Mattel distributes may have a proprietary license, but all those GPLed copies remain GPLed and Mattel can do nothing to change that.
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Unless the [hypothetical] original license had some sort of clause saying "these terms can be changed at our whim, and you have to watch our website to find out these changes" like most corporate licenses. Although i wonder if these clauses are enforcable (or at least were pre-UCITA...)
However, because no license is included in the source code as originally made available, it could be argued in court that no permission to distribute was ever granted. Perhaps this is Mattel's angle.
IANAL, of course, but i would think that the comment quoted in other posts puts the code under the GPL. Either way, i wouldn't be too surprised to see Mattel try to get it pulled anyway... Wonder how many sites mirroring it will include disclaimers along the lines of "This code was obtained under the Gnu General Public License (GPL), which grants permission to freely redistribute the program and source. Although the copyright has since been assigned to Mattel, there is NO provision for changing the licensing terms of this copy, so it remains under the terms of the GPL. Any copies downloaded from this site will also remain under the GPL as specified by the terms of the GPL." (if for some odd reason anyone WANTS this disclaimer, go ahead and take it)
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The industry wants CSS, SDMI, etc. The industry loves DMCA and UTICA. The industry is stupid. Period. And we shouldn't let them push us into inferior, proprietary standards.
But chances are i won't change your mind. Oh well, no matter. At least the Library of Congress realized that ASCII Text is the best format for exchanging many documents (now we just have to watch out for Micros~1's Dread Questionmark Disease)
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Yes, you will find exceptions. YMMV.
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And i always thought that one was official, since ESR is maintaining the file...
Anyway, that's the one i've always had bookmarked (although i keep a slightly reformatted mirror on my own box... Look for "Jargon File Flattener" in the comments about v4.1.0)
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Although, the AP article i read in the local paper was pretty funny Friday. "A trojan program, known as a daemon, ..." "The daemons arrive at the victim with a fake return address." And i thought 'daemon' was a generic name for a program in the background providing a service, not a specific term for a DDoS tool or synonym for a 'packet'...
Anyone who doesn't understand 'hack' as defined in The Jargon File please stop reading now. Thank you. This just might qualify under sense 5, being a practical joke taking advantake of shortcomings in the CNN chatserver...
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The "undo" i was referring to is how in dselect if you push +, then decide you don't want to install it after all, you can hit _ and it'll be in the state it was before the +. +, -, tab, i couldn't get capt to do the same thing without pressing R and resetting all changes i'd made. i would've thought that to be as trivial to add as anything else.
The grouping by priority i like mostly because i'm used to it from dselect. What would be really nice would be to pick first sort by status/priority/availability/section/whatever/none , then second within those groupings sort by status/priority/availability/section/whatever/none , third yet again, and last by name/download size/installed size/whatever. dselect does some of this, but it isn't very clear and you can't change the default (or if you can, i've never found how)
All in all, it's good that so many package selection programs are available, so people who hate one can use another.
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About a year ago, i installed Debian as my first Linux distro (only Windows (9x and 3.11) and various DOSses before). IIRC, the only trouble i had was getting X to work, because someone told me to use the MACH X-server when i needed SVGA. Once i figured that out, things went fine. The inital install was hamm, and i've since upgraded to frozen slink, unstable potato, and now (unknowingly ;) unstable woody.
i'm one of the few people who actually like dselect. I've tried capt and aptitude (just a few minutes ago, in fact), and i like dselect better that either. I miss the info displays; the sorting by availability, priority, and name; the hold feature; the ability to undo mark-for-(un)install without resetting everything; indication of obsolete packages. Maybe some other things i haven't noticed yet. i hope they don't get rid of dselect without replacing it with something that includes all that functionality (or, i wish i were a good enough programmer to write that replacement).
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A post on Slashdot is a good first step. But it will not help if it's also the last step.
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I think part of the reason the establishment wants all this copy protection is to prevent the little guy from being able to distribute his own stuff without paying through the nose to them. Why are DVDs encrypted, when it's simple enough to grab the output as it's going to the display? Why do record companies want a copy-protected format; part of it certainly is to eliminate the legitimate Internet distribution channels along with the piracy.
They're afraid of your prediction that the Internet can replace physical media, because that will mean they have to adapt or die. So, they're fighting with every angle they can imagine.
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Does anyone (EFF, ACLU, some other acronym, whoever) have a petition online against UTICA, clearly stating the many points in this article? Is there a list of people to contact, preferably with recommendations not to flame? i can't see how this could stand up in courts (IANAL), but it would certainly be easier and less expensive to combat this before it can become law.
The big corporations behind this have the money, the lawyers, and the lobbyists to push their views. We have the Slashdot Effect, if we can only figure out how to use it.
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Unfortunately, the levels don't quite live up to their names. I've yet to encounter any censorware that blocks exactly what it claims to and no more.
terminals in the children's portion of the library could be restricted to .kid-only domains
What, no Slashdot.org for the kids? No freshmeat.net, no segfault.org, no whitehouse.gov? Although, perhaps the kids would be more upset about being denied yahoo.com and wwf.com. To keep "bad stuff" from being put into .kid sites, someone is going to have to monitor them, and it'd probably end up that only the large commercial entities can really afford the legal proceedings (yes, i'm mildly pessimistic).
A sanitized playpen may be safe, but it's hardly useful or interesting to those inside...
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Next time try responding to what was actually written. I said "why it's been ruled a library can refuse to carry", not why the libraries choose to carry or not to carry the materials.
This idea of the Internet costing absolutely nothing is a load as well. Electricity, at least in America, costs money.
Did i ever say the Internet was free? Can you quote a sentence, a phrase, or even a word that implies that? No. I simply said it costs more to buy and run censorware than not.
Bandwidth costs a lot of money. The difference in bandwidth between a kid looking at porn and a kid looking at research papers is amazing.
Perhaps things are different there, but everywhere i know of in the US Internet access is available as a flat charge, with no relation to bandwidth used.
AUP monitors need to get paid. And isn't the monitor herself a censor? Why pay a person an hourly wage, when you can install a filter and only pay for it once?
Did i say AUP monitors needed to be hired? It's not exactly a demanding job for a librarian to look over once in a while, and to respond if a patron complains.
The Internet costs money, too, and the government, once again, isn't going to pay for things that communities deem objectionable.
Sure it won't. i know many people who object to the IRS, who object to Social Security as it's currently handled, who object to gigantic pork-barrel projects, who object to PBS, who object to NASA, who object to the Dakotas, who object to welfare, who object to the things some people do with federal grants for the arts (and i'm not referring to the elephant-dung thing in New York). Need i continue? Yes, some people support these things to varying degrees, but i'm sure some people would support porn mags in libraries as well.
And finally, i want you to actually investigate these filters you champion. If you do a halfway decent job, you'll find that they block much more than just pornography, and you'll find that they don't do an extremely good job at blocking that. With today's technology it is completely impossible for a computer program to effectively "protect the children" without eliminating most of the usefulness of the Internet.
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Wisdom doesn't necessarily depend on age. There are many people 30 or 40 years old who i wouldn't trust with a gun or behind the wheel of a car, while i'm open to the possibility of a 12 year old being responsible enough. Trust and respect should be based on the person, and not just how many years they've been alive.
We make judgements based on age because statistically most people will fit the statistic. But we often forget that there are many who deviate from the norm in either direction.
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I've getting very sick of hearing this arguement. Do you know why it's been ruled that a library can refuse to carry certain printed matrials? Because printed materials take shelf space, and cost money to obtain. These are a physical resource that can be easily used up, so any library has to pick and choose just what will be carried.
The Internet is a different matter. It does not take up any more space on the computer to allow access to porn sites. It doesn't cost any more [public] money to get Internet-with-porn. In fact, it takes more hard drive space, processor time, RAM, and money to use filters to block them! "But wait, what about people tying up the terminals lookin at porn?" you ask? Software isn't needed to solve this problem, just an AUP and a librarian to go over and tell Sir to get off the computer, people need it for real work.
That's the difference: to not carry porn mags is a passive measure of not spending the money or the shelf space to carry them. To not carry certain websites is an active measure involving time, computing resources, and money to obtain, install, and use censorware.
As a second point, who decides what printed materials shouldn't be carried by the library? The library staff, with occasional input from the community. Who really decides what web sites will be blocked by nearly all censorware? Some big corporation, likely as not based in another state, who doesn't care about the standards in your community and who may or may not have a political agenda in addition to simply blocking porn (search the web for examples).
Your post has only one really valid point: the issue should be decided by the community, by the staff and patrons of the individual library, not by state or federal government (or private corporations, for that matter). But the public needs to be informed if they are to do the Right Thing (whatever that may be) instead of listening to whichever group has the slickest ad campaign. [Ob1984Reference:] Isn't that how Big Brother controlled the proles, but only telling them when it wanted them to know? This /. article may help someone, in Holland or any other town, fight against a campaign like the one in Holland now. Maybe not Holland in particular, but the underlying issue is certainly an stuff that matters to many Slashdot readers.
Let the community decide.
How are we preventing them by discussing this issue?
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