A Tablet PC with a flexible paper thin screen that can be folded from the size of a credit card to A0, which has GPS, Bluetooth, Firewire 400 & 800, USB 1 and 2, every wireless connection method under the Sun, IRDA, Biometric authentication, works via a keyboard or a "keyboard glove", has a 15Ghz Transmeta processor, 1TB of RAM, 1PB of Storage, runs off a single AA battery for 3 year, runs Linux and responds to scribbles or the spoken word.
You forgot waterproof.
Submersible, actually. I do a lot of wilderness canoeing with a GPS.
Last year I worked at a call center in downtown Tampa for a major telecom corp that recently changed it's name. The call center was a subsidiary that was up for sale, so call volume and stats were of paramount importance to entice prospective buyers. We supported broken real-estate software and remote access on a broken NT network using broken tools and it was a living nightmare. The customers were pushy real-estate agents who for the most part weren't even remotely computer literate. We had to keep call times under 10 mins (impossible in most cases, given what crap we were supporting and the level of incompetence of the end-users). During the last few weeks I was there we actually got training in how to "punt" calls (also called "kicking them to the curb", I swear to God, that's what the management called it!!) in order to get them off the phone. Give the customer the barest fix and wait for them to call again. This kept volume up and call time down. We also had a Hotcube, only we called it the Pit, and I got to sit right across from it and watch the stats as they came in. It was very ugly. The place was in a constant state of crash-and-burn with some support techs taking 70-80 calls per day without actually providing any meaningful support. The few who actually did help the customer were rewarded with a pink slip. I and most of the other techs were temps and would be given another assignment by our agency when the place finally folded,so we weren't too worried, but the full-timers were in a constant state of panic waiting for the axe to fall. I finally found a full-time position as a Novell network support tech (no more phone work...yayyy!!!) before the place was sold, so I never got to see the place go under, but I have gruesomely vivid ideas of what it must have been like at the end. I've sworn off of phone support for life. Shit, I'll go back to working construction before I ever do that again!!
Ah, but money and religion are 2 different things.
You should've been around to tell that to Oral Roberts a few years back..."God will strike me dead if you don't give me your money!!"...or words to that effect
No it wouldn't - there are plenty of people who are really unhappy about kids discovering alternate viewpoints on religion, health, sexuality, and so
forth. None of those things are necessarily sexually explicit or obscene, but they are adult topics - they make adults uncomfortable and there are
plenty of adults who are dead set on passing on their closed mindsets to children.
Given that blocking software is ostensibly meant to block sexually explicit sites, my point still stands. In cases where a public library or other public access site is required to monitor the use of the Internet, the filtering of a TLD will make the use of censorware unnecessary, and still leave legitimate channels of information open. This is what the topic was about in the first place: control of public access, not private parental control. Perhaps I should have been more specific.
As far as parents using censorware? There will always be those parents and other adults who will abuse the software with the intent to deprive kids of legitimate sources of information. This doesn't really bother me too much. In an age where we are inundated with information, anybody who really wants to know the truth will find a way. Short of welding your kids into a steel cage I don't see how you can stop them. Hell, for that matter, you pretty much described my parents - fundamentalist Christians who would seize and destroy any reading material (this was long before the Internet) that they felt violated their closely-held beliefs. It was painful to bear, but it never stopped me from obtaining and reading whatever I pleased, just as censorware will never really stop kids from viewing whatever they please on the Internet. The points of access are far too numerous for a parent to reasonably expect to control, without resorting to the use of the above-mentioned steel cage.
An even better solution would be the mandatory, ot atleast universally volunteer, rating of web pages.
The best solution will eventually be to give the porn sites their own TLD (e.g.,.adult instead of.com), and heavily penalize them for stepping outside of their designated "channel". This will make it trivial to filter out all sites ending with ".adult" and pretty much render censorware irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
In summary: The Slashdot crowd wants
A Tablet PC with a flexible paper thin screen that can be folded from the size of a credit card to A0, which has GPS, Bluetooth, Firewire 400 & 800, USB 1 and 2, every wireless connection method under the Sun, IRDA, Biometric authentication, works via a keyboard or a "keyboard glove", has a 15Ghz Transmeta processor, 1TB of RAM, 1PB of Storage, runs off a single AA battery for 3 year, runs Linux and responds to scribbles or the spoken word.
You forgot waterproof.
Submersible, actually. I do a lot of wilderness canoeing with a GPS.
Last year I worked at a call center in downtown Tampa for a major telecom corp that recently changed it's name. The call center was a subsidiary that was up for sale, so call volume and stats were of paramount importance to entice prospective buyers. We supported broken real-estate software and remote access on a broken NT network using broken tools and it was a living nightmare. The customers were pushy real-estate agents who for the most part weren't even remotely computer literate. We had to keep call times under 10 mins (impossible in most cases, given what crap we were supporting and the level of incompetence of the end-users). During the last few weeks I was there we actually got training in how to "punt" calls (also called "kicking them to the curb", I swear to God, that's what the management called it!!) in order to get them off the phone. Give the customer the barest fix and wait for them to call again. This kept volume up and call time down. We also had a Hotcube, only we called it the Pit, and I got to sit right across from it and watch the stats as they came in. It was very ugly. The place was in a constant state of crash-and-burn with some support techs taking 70-80 calls per day without actually providing any meaningful support. The few who actually did help the customer were rewarded with a pink slip. I and most of the other techs were temps and would be given another assignment by our agency when the place finally folded,so we weren't too worried, but the full-timers were in a constant state of panic waiting for the axe to fall. I finally found a full-time position as a Novell network support tech (no more phone work...yayyy!!!) before the place was sold, so I never got to see the place go under, but I have gruesomely vivid ideas of what it must have been like at the end. I've sworn off of phone support for life. Shit, I'll go back to working construction before I ever do that again!!
You should've been around to tell that to Oral Roberts a few years back..."God will strike me dead if you don't give me your money!!"...or words to that effect
Given that blocking software is ostensibly meant to block sexually explicit sites, my point still stands. In cases where a public library or other public access site is required to monitor the use of the Internet, the filtering of a TLD will make the use of censorware unnecessary, and still leave legitimate channels of information open. This is what the topic was about in the first place: control of public access, not private parental control. Perhaps I should have been more specific.
As far as parents using censorware? There will always be those parents and other adults who will abuse the software with the intent to deprive kids of legitimate sources of information. This doesn't really bother me too much. In an age where we are inundated with information, anybody who really wants to know the truth will find a way. Short of welding your kids into a steel cage I don't see how you can stop them. Hell, for that matter, you pretty much described my parents - fundamentalist Christians who would seize and destroy any reading material (this was long before the Internet) that they felt violated their closely-held beliefs. It was painful to bear, but it never stopped me from obtaining and reading whatever I pleased, just as censorware will never really stop kids from viewing whatever they please on the Internet. The points of access are far too numerous for a parent to reasonably expect to control, without resorting to the use of the above-mentioned steel cage.
The best solution will eventually be to give the porn sites their own TLD (e.g., .adult instead of .com), and heavily penalize them for stepping outside of their designated "channel". This will make it trivial to filter out all sites ending with ".adult" and pretty much render censorware irrelevant.