I haven't RTFx'd at all here, but old-school photogs all know Kodachrome is great for shadow detail, which would back up your assertion that it did a good job with rendering detail in dark-skinned faces. Not just Kodachrome, but slide film in general is better at shadow detail, while print film is better at highlight detail. I always thought this had to do with physics, not a design choice. What I can say for sure is that photographers used to shoot *chrome (slide film) underexposed a half stop, to avoid featureless, blown-out highlights and to take advantage of the shadow detail.
Greed! Monopoly! Regulation! These are fun words to say.
The weird thing is, pharmaceutical companies don't make money consistently more than car companies, food companies, electronics companies, software companies, or any other kind of company. They simply aren't making the ton of money we'd like to complain about. This makes sense, because if drug research, development, and production DID make more money than doing something else, then Apple, Google, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos would invest their money into new pharmaceutical companies, so that they would make a ton more money. Those new companies would be competition for the old, tending to reduce prices.
In fact, when you think about who has a billion dollars to invest, who makes a ton of money, the big names that make crazy money are Apple, Google, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos - it's the computer technology people making crazy money. *We* are the greedy bastards.:â'O
* Like some technology companies, drug companies have bad years, when they spend $2 billion on R&D and nothing gets approved, and good years when they have a hit. Over time, their total returns are similar to other industries with similar volatility, and risk-adjusted returns are inline with the overall economy.
5-year quarterly profit margin average (all from ycharts): Oracle: 26.72% https://ycharts.com/companies/ORCL/profit_margin Google: 22.87% https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/profit_margin Apple: 22.74% https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/profit_margin Pfizer: 19.73% https://ycharts.com/companies/PFE/profit_margin Johnson & Johnson: 19.28% https://ycharts.com/companies/JNJ/profit_margin Mylan: 8.97% https://ycharts.com/companies/MYL/profit_margin Amazon:.36% https://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/profit_margin
Pharma average 18% http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28212223
So even if you cherry-pick the famous tech winners, the companies banking the most cash in tech, pharma looks pretty damn profitable. And remember, unlike tech companies, pharma companies are sitting, more and more, on old products that are patent protected or just don't have approved generics, and there is a trend of these products getting more expensive, not less.
OK, so now that we've countered the implicit argument that tech profit margins are insanely higher than pharma margins, let's look at all the misguided wrapper logic...
1. By this argument, Google and Apple should go into real estate, which has truly insane profit margins. But in the real world, people and businesses in one industry vertical generally do not just suddenly switch industries just because something else is more profitable. There are a few exceptions of big companies mostly pulling this off, like GE becoming primarily a financial services company, but people and organizations generally stick to what they know, and have massive institutional inertia generated primarily by middle management. Having spent over 20 years trying to get non-tech companies to act more like tech companies with minimal success, I know this from experience as well as third-party anecdote.
2. Yes, pharma profits go up and down with R&D, market conditions, and competition. Tech profits also go up and down with R&D, market, and competition. Just look at the quarterly results of any of the tech companies you cite, and compare with any pharma company. Both are R&D plays. Pharma patents offer stronger practical protection than in tech, so it should be more stable over time, as borne out when you compare the patent-holding winners in pharma to the companies that never have a hit drug. Historically, over the last 30 years, profit margins in pharma have strengthened, not gone in neutral cycles: http://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/average-profit-margin-pharmaceuticals-20671.html
3. In the real world, the specific tech companies and people you cite are actually going big in healthcare:
I'm sure there are studies of driver distraction when talking to someone who is in the car with them, but I've never seen those studies publicized or discussed. Common sense suggests that talking to someone sitting next to you, which includes normal human behaviors like looking at them for visual cues, has to be far more dangerous than hands-free cell calling. It's possible initiating a hands-free call is briefly more distracting than an in-car conversation, but that's a UI design issue.
City busses in Seattle have "don't talk to the driver while the bus is in motion" signs... for a good reason: they don't want you to distract the driver. So, why aren't there laws restricting conversations with people in your car? Beyond the practical impossibility of enforcing such a law, I suspect this has to do with technophobia, where "tech" is defined as something that seems new, rather than the tech we are already embedded in and used to. Cars themselves have gotten to the point of being assumed infrastructure, which is why we accept the general carnage on our roadways without question, while being up in arms about an increase in accidents due to mobile usage.
Another example of this kind of technophobia (or maybe technophilia in that it's what people want to hear about) is the publicity about studies of bacteria on cell phones. Sure, cell phones are rife with bacteria. But what about other things you have in your pocket, touch regularly, and would never think to clean, like keys and wallets? Keys have to be at least as bacteria-infested as your phone, and they haven't killed us off yet (except indirectly, through car crashes and sitting too much at the office). But I haven't seen any studies of general pocket-stuff bacteria publicized here or anywhere else. I suspect they exist, but where's the angst? Like the bacteria themselves, keys have been with us for a while now, so no angst.
Other commenters have noted that laws against cell phone use and texting do little to reduce usage. The advent of always-on remote connectivity to people and information is the killer app for self-driving cars. Young people instinctively realize driving cars get in the way of this connection, so they have stopped wanting to drive cars. Making a self-driving car is super hard/slow, but not much harder/slower than getting auto makers to do decent telematics UI design.
Farhad makes a lot of good points, but he underestimates the transformative nature of the iPhone. I agree that Google should build its own phone, but it's not about making yet another bespoke handset, it's about building another mobile computing transformation that Apple, with its walled garden approach, cannot even contemplate. It's not nearly enough to be a bit better than the iPhone - any serious competitor will need to take the next gigantic leap forward, and do it before Apple does.
When I first saw Episode 1, it seemed to confirm everything I had heard about Lucas' being self-absorbed, surrounded by yes-men, hating directing, treating actors as props, and being overly enamored of computer graphics and the technical aspects of digital media. In fact, I swore I would never again watch a Lucas film. I skipped E2 in theaters. Much, much later, E3 was about to come out, and E2 was going to be shown in HD on PPV, and I decided to give in and watch it. In preparation, I rewatched E1 on DVD.
What a revelation! E1 was still packed with sophomoric crap geared toward 4-year olds (yo George: kids look up to people 5 years older than they are, not 5 years younger!), but I suddenly realized that, if you managed to see past Jar-Jar's big, floppy appendages, there was a pretty interesting political-thriller message movie going on. E2, which had previously seemed wooden and laughable - especially the scenes with Annakin - now emerged as extremely realistic. If you were a young, straight man who had grown up with a bunch of bearded men in robes, wouldn't you be awkward and nervous vacationing alone with Natalie Portman, who, for this occasion, happens to wear nothing but tailored evening gowns cut down to her ass or, for more intimate encounters in candle-lit boudoirs, goth-couture fetish lingerie? If you were Queen of Naboo, wouldn't you be a bit awkward and distant when thrust into a situation where the punk kid you first met as a young boy has grown into a strapping bad boy, oozing with pent up sexual and mystical energy? Who has been assigned to watch your every move? Oh, and by the way, a relationship with him is strictly forbidden?
Once I started taking the movies seriously, I experienced a slow revelation. Where were the familiar Blacks and Whites of the E4-6? What's with all this ambiguous realpolitik? Why are the Jedi blowing it so badly? They're arrogant and isolated. They're a ruthless superpower. They're above the law. They're a hereditary, elitist priesthood with a lot of stupid rules that is totally willing to crush anyone who threatens their power. They represent everything I hate in real life. They're a lot like Pervez Musharraf - or, dare I say it? - George Bush. Hey, wait a minute! The Jedi are evil!
That's right, the Jedi are the Bad Guys of E1-3. And Annakin is the tragic hero. And there aren't any Good Guys.
This is the nasty, unwanted Truth about why so many people hate Episodes 1-3. Yes, the movies have their faults, but really, have you actually watched A New Hope lately? It doesn't stand the test of time very well (I saw it 9 times in the same theater over a period of 20+ years, so I feel I have a worthy opinion on this). What makes E1-3 different is that Lucas has changed - or revealed - his political views, and his fans didn't get the memo. Because if the people who dreamed of being a Jedi as a kid got the memo, well... imagine the Star Wars kid crossed with the Seattle WTO "riots" and you'd get the frightening picture of what might happen. Or maybe not - die-hard Star Wars fans simply look at me with disbelief and pity when I expound on my "Jedi are evil" theory.
I now consider E1-3 right up there with the Matrix Trilogy as some of the great, unacknowledged political films of the 21st Century. Matrix is clearly anarchist, but it's a bit harder to put a finger on Lucas' political persuasion, except that he's anti-Fascist. I'll be the first one to admit that I'm a sucker for romantic fantasy along the lines of "the True King will save us and restore the Realm of Good", but let's face it - now that we're adults, it's nice to have a few sci-fi spectaculars that fight the power. Where Battlestar Galactica Redux grabs the jugular, rips it out, and comes back for more, Lucas takes a somewhat oblique approach with Episodes 1-3. The result is something widely considered less than brilliant. But shattering people's blind faith in the Jedi and their supernatural powers is A Good Thing, even if they don't realize why it's happening.
As a temporary instructor at Seattle Central Community College, which was rated the top community college in the nation a few years ago for its innovative use of learning communities, I observed instructors spreading misinformation about plagiarism. I also observed what happens when students go through years of cookie-cutter education where originality and independent thought are actively discouraged, and students emerge with no sense of the master text that forms the basis of our civilization.
The "problem" of plagiarism exists because:
1. Schools conflate plagiarism issues with intellectual property law (copyright, trademark, patent) issues.
Plagiarism is a concept that is unique to academia - it says that you can freely leverage other people's work, but you must cite your sources. Intellecutal property law, on the other hand, says that your ability to leverage other people's work is limited, but if you purchase a license to use intellectual property, you can use it without citing your source. So, the two concepts are diametrically opposed. Think about it: students who plagiarize (claim someone else's work as their own) by buying papers are NOT violating copyright (an exclusive power to control the use of a work) - they are actively supporting it. Yet these two opposing concepts are always, always presented together as if they are the same thing. It's unbelievable how many times I've sat through a presentation on "plagiarism" that is an incomplete, inaccurate presentation of copyright law, sprinkled with vague moralistic precepts about not stealing, coupled with a lot of grinding, low-level bullshit about how to write citations in the MLS style - as if using the wrong punctuation in a citation makes it ethically suspect. Any student not asleep at the end of these presentations is likely to be more confused about plagiarism than when they started.
2. Schools don't acknowledge that plagiarism is only relevant to academia.
Plagiarism is a non-issue outside of academia. In the real world, ideas can be (legally) and are (routinely) stolen (copyright governs the use of concrete expressions of ideas, patents the implementation of ideas, not ideas themselves). In the non-academic art world, "Good artists borrow, great artists steal." Lawyers are required to copy forms and case law verbatim without acknowledgement (even in school). In business, plagiarism (using someone else's ideas, words or other work without acknowledgement) is also required. Plagiarism is only bad when many people with diverse views and goals need to build a collaborative, well-documented, self-maintaining system of thought over long periods of time. That's what academia is for, so plagiarism is a legitimate concern in the real world of the ivory tower research. Outside the ivory tower, plagiarism devolves into a vague moral concept that is systematically and productively violated.
3. Prior to graduate school, few students are given the opportunity to contribute to the great tree of knowledge.
This may sound pretentious, but really the whole point of the concept of plagiarism is to guide people who are doing original work based on preexisting academic literature, original sources, etc. If you never get a chance to add your own original work to the master text, you will never genuinely care about plagiarism. For the vast majority of pre-grad school students, the "term paper" requires zero original work. In fact, original work is generally discouraged. I went to college at Princeton, a school with mandatory original research papers starting in the Junior year, and yet I knew people who were accused of plagiarism because their papers were too original, and thus had interesting, complex, even groundbreaking ideas that were not cited from a source. These students were vindicated, of course, but the experience had a chilling effect on their later work. A more subtle form of this is the assertion that students don't have enough time or knowledge to say anything truly original in a term paper,
Why do you expect customers to pay you for limited Internet access? When you say "display pornography", do you include written material? Do you include maxim.com? What about hate speech on the web? Bomb making web sites?
Anyone who has read any serious analysis of censorware should know it is completely ineffective. Using it in a site where customers pay for your service will only result in their going elsewhere. If the nearby junior high school's parents' fears are a legitimate business concern, then you should relocate.
One possible solution might be to have a policy that customers may not disturb or offend other customers. Then your problem boils down to a slightly stickier version of the problem all cafe owners face.
Or you could install filtering, not announce it, and cross your fingers. That's a real-world approach that often works, sadly enough.
I'm running Openstep right now on my PII-400 Windows 98 box, in the form of WebObjects Version 4.0 Developer (Picasso2Z). This gives me all the standard Unix command line programs and the ability to run PopOver, an excellent Openstep mail client. It's a bit unstable under 98 (much better under NT), but that's a small price to pay for real MIME compliance and not having email viruses and web bugs.
Early versions of MacOSX Server could still be transformed into Nextstep (from a look-and-fell perspective) using the "defaults" shell command. By the time MacOSX is released, of course, everything will be well under the hood.
NeXT never died - I've been consulting professionally using NeXT technology since 1992. At each major transition (the end of hardware, the end of Nextstep, the "purchase" by Apple), developers jumped ship and declared the technology dead. But it lives on, and will live on in millions of MacOSX machines.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't RTFx'd at all here, but old-school photogs all know Kodachrome is great for shadow detail, which would back up your assertion that it did a good job with rendering detail in dark-skinned faces. Not just Kodachrome, but slide film in general is better at shadow detail, while print film is better at highlight detail. I always thought this had to do with physics, not a design choice. What I can say for sure is that photographers used to shoot *chrome (slide film) underexposed a half stop, to avoid featureless, blown-out highlights and to take advantage of the shadow detail.
Greed! Monopoly! Regulation! These are fun words to say.
The weird thing is, pharmaceutical companies don't make money consistently more than car companies, food companies, electronics companies, software companies, or any other kind of company. They simply aren't making the ton of money we'd like to complain about. This makes sense, because if drug research, development, and production DID make more money than doing something else, then Apple, Google, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos would invest their money into new pharmaceutical companies, so that they would make a ton more money. Those new companies would be competition for the old, tending to reduce prices.
In fact, when you think about who has a billion dollars to invest, who makes a ton of money, the big names that make crazy money are Apple, Google, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos - it's the computer technology people making crazy money. *We* are the greedy bastards. :â'O
* Like some technology companies, drug companies have bad years, when they spend $2 billion on R&D and nothing gets approved, and good years when they have a hit. Over time, their total returns are similar to other industries with similar volatility, and risk-adjusted returns are inline with the overall economy.
5-year quarterly profit margin average (all from ycharts): .36% https://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/profit_margin
Oracle: 26.72% https://ycharts.com/companies/ORCL/profit_margin
Google: 22.87% https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/profit_margin
Apple: 22.74% https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/profit_margin
Pfizer: 19.73% https://ycharts.com/companies/PFE/profit_margin
Johnson & Johnson: 19.28% https://ycharts.com/companies/JNJ/profit_margin
Mylan: 8.97% https://ycharts.com/companies/MYL/profit_margin
Amazon:
Pharma average 18% http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28212223
So even if you cherry-pick the famous tech winners, the companies banking the most cash in tech, pharma looks pretty damn profitable. And remember, unlike tech companies, pharma companies are sitting, more and more, on old products that are patent protected or just don't have approved generics, and there is a trend of these products getting more expensive, not less.
OK, so now that we've countered the implicit argument that tech profit margins are insanely higher than pharma margins, let's look at all the misguided wrapper logic...
1. By this argument, Google and Apple should go into real estate, which has truly insane profit margins. But in the real world, people and businesses in one industry vertical generally do not just suddenly switch industries just because something else is more profitable. There are a few exceptions of big companies mostly pulling this off, like GE becoming primarily a financial services company, but people and organizations generally stick to what they know, and have massive institutional inertia generated primarily by middle management. Having spent over 20 years trying to get non-tech companies to act more like tech companies with minimal success, I know this from experience as well as third-party anecdote.
2. Yes, pharma profits go up and down with R&D, market conditions, and competition. Tech profits also go up and down with R&D, market, and competition. Just look at the quarterly results of any of the tech companies you cite, and compare with any pharma company. Both are R&D plays. Pharma patents offer stronger practical protection than in tech, so it should be more stable over time, as borne out when you compare the patent-holding winners in pharma to the companies that never have a hit drug. Historically, over the last 30 years, profit margins in pharma have strengthened, not gone in neutral cycles: http://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/average-profit-margin-pharmaceuticals-20671.html
3. In the real world, the specific tech companies and people you cite are actually going big in healthcare:
Google is hu
I'm sure there are studies of driver distraction when talking to someone who is in the car with them, but I've never seen those studies publicized or discussed. Common sense suggests that talking to someone sitting next to you, which includes normal human behaviors like looking at them for visual cues, has to be far more dangerous than hands-free cell calling. It's possible initiating a hands-free call is briefly more distracting than an in-car conversation, but that's a UI design issue.
City busses in Seattle have "don't talk to the driver while the bus is in motion" signs... for a good reason: they don't want you to distract the driver. So, why aren't there laws restricting conversations with people in your car? Beyond the practical impossibility of enforcing such a law, I suspect this has to do with technophobia, where "tech" is defined as something that seems new, rather than the tech we are already embedded in and used to. Cars themselves have gotten to the point of being assumed infrastructure, which is why we accept the general carnage on our roadways without question, while being up in arms about an increase in accidents due to mobile usage.
Another example of this kind of technophobia (or maybe technophilia in that it's what people want to hear about) is the publicity about studies of bacteria on cell phones. Sure, cell phones are rife with bacteria. But what about other things you have in your pocket, touch regularly, and would never think to clean, like keys and wallets? Keys have to be at least as bacteria-infested as your phone, and they haven't killed us off yet (except indirectly, through car crashes and sitting too much at the office). But I haven't seen any studies of general pocket-stuff bacteria publicized here or anywhere else. I suspect they exist, but where's the angst? Like the bacteria themselves, keys have been with us for a while now, so no angst.
Other commenters have noted that laws against cell phone use and texting do little to reduce usage. The advent of always-on remote connectivity to people and information is the killer app for self-driving cars. Young people instinctively realize driving cars get in the way of this connection, so they have stopped wanting to drive cars. Making a self-driving car is super hard/slow, but not much harder/slower than getting auto makers to do decent telematics UI design.
Farhad makes a lot of good points, but he underestimates the transformative nature of the iPhone. I agree that Google should build its own phone, but it's not about making yet another bespoke handset, it's about building another mobile computing transformation that Apple, with its walled garden approach, cannot even contemplate. It's not nearly enough to be a bit better than the iPhone - any serious competitor will need to take the next gigantic leap forward, and do it before Apple does.
When I first saw Episode 1, it seemed to confirm everything I had heard about Lucas' being self-absorbed, surrounded by yes-men, hating directing, treating actors as props, and being overly enamored of computer graphics and the technical aspects of digital media. In fact, I swore I would never again watch a Lucas film. I skipped E2 in theaters. Much, much later, E3 was about to come out, and E2 was going to be shown in HD on PPV, and I decided to give in and watch it. In preparation, I rewatched E1 on DVD.
What a revelation! E1 was still packed with sophomoric crap geared toward 4-year olds (yo George: kids look up to people 5 years older than they are, not 5 years younger!), but I suddenly realized that, if you managed to see past Jar-Jar's big, floppy appendages, there was a pretty interesting political-thriller message movie going on. E2, which had previously seemed wooden and laughable - especially the scenes with Annakin - now emerged as extremely realistic. If you were a young, straight man who had grown up with a bunch of bearded men in robes, wouldn't you be awkward and nervous vacationing alone with Natalie Portman, who, for this occasion, happens to wear nothing but tailored evening gowns cut down to her ass or, for more intimate encounters in candle-lit boudoirs, goth-couture fetish lingerie? If you were Queen of Naboo, wouldn't you be a bit awkward and distant when thrust into a situation where the punk kid you first met as a young boy has grown into a strapping bad boy, oozing with pent up sexual and mystical energy? Who has been assigned to watch your every move? Oh, and by the way, a relationship with him is strictly forbidden?
Once I started taking the movies seriously, I experienced a slow revelation. Where were the familiar Blacks and Whites of the E4-6? What's with all this ambiguous realpolitik? Why are the Jedi blowing it so badly? They're arrogant and isolated. They're a ruthless superpower. They're above the law. They're a hereditary, elitist priesthood with a lot of stupid rules that is totally willing to crush anyone who threatens their power. They represent everything I hate in real life. They're a lot like Pervez Musharraf - or, dare I say it? - George Bush. Hey, wait a minute! The Jedi are evil!
That's right, the Jedi are the Bad Guys of E1-3. And Annakin is the tragic hero. And there aren't any Good Guys.
This is the nasty, unwanted Truth about why so many people hate Episodes 1-3. Yes, the movies have their faults, but really, have you actually watched A New Hope lately? It doesn't stand the test of time very well (I saw it 9 times in the same theater over a period of 20+ years, so I feel I have a worthy opinion on this). What makes E1-3 different is that Lucas has changed - or revealed - his political views, and his fans didn't get the memo. Because if the people who dreamed of being a Jedi as a kid got the memo, well... imagine the Star Wars kid crossed with the Seattle WTO "riots" and you'd get the frightening picture of what might happen. Or maybe not - die-hard Star Wars fans simply look at me with disbelief and pity when I expound on my "Jedi are evil" theory.
I now consider E1-3 right up there with the Matrix Trilogy as some of the great, unacknowledged political films of the 21st Century. Matrix is clearly anarchist, but it's a bit harder to put a finger on Lucas' political persuasion, except that he's anti-Fascist. I'll be the first one to admit that I'm a sucker for romantic fantasy along the lines of "the True King will save us and restore the Realm of Good", but let's face it - now that we're adults, it's nice to have a few sci-fi spectaculars that fight the power. Where Battlestar Galactica Redux grabs the jugular, rips it out, and comes back for more, Lucas takes a somewhat oblique approach with Episodes 1-3. The result is something widely considered less than brilliant. But shattering people's blind faith in the Jedi and their supernatural powers is A Good Thing, even if they don't realize why it's happening.
As a temporary instructor at Seattle Central Community College, which was rated the top community college in the nation a few years ago for its innovative use of learning communities, I observed instructors spreading misinformation about plagiarism. I also observed what happens when students go through years of cookie-cutter education where originality and independent thought are actively discouraged, and students emerge with no sense of the master text that forms the basis of our civilization.
The "problem" of plagiarism exists because:
1. Schools conflate plagiarism issues with intellectual property law (copyright, trademark, patent) issues.
Plagiarism is a concept that is unique to academia - it says that you can freely leverage other people's work, but you must cite your sources. Intellecutal property law, on the other hand, says that your ability to leverage other people's work is limited, but if you purchase a license to use intellectual property, you can use it without citing your source. So, the two concepts are diametrically opposed. Think about it: students who plagiarize (claim someone else's work as their own) by buying papers are NOT violating copyright (an exclusive power to control the use of a work) - they are actively supporting it. Yet these two opposing concepts are always, always presented together as if they are the same thing. It's unbelievable how many times I've sat through a presentation on "plagiarism" that is an incomplete, inaccurate presentation of copyright law, sprinkled with vague moralistic precepts about not stealing, coupled with a lot of grinding, low-level bullshit about how to write citations in the MLS style - as if using the wrong punctuation in a citation makes it ethically suspect. Any student not asleep at the end of these presentations is likely to be more confused about plagiarism than when they started.
2. Schools don't acknowledge that plagiarism is only relevant to academia.
Plagiarism is a non-issue outside of academia. In the real world, ideas can be (legally) and are (routinely) stolen (copyright governs the use of concrete expressions of ideas, patents the implementation of ideas, not ideas themselves). In the non-academic art world, "Good artists borrow, great artists steal." Lawyers are required to copy forms and case law verbatim without acknowledgement (even in school). In business, plagiarism (using someone else's ideas, words or other work without acknowledgement) is also required. Plagiarism is only bad when many people with diverse views and goals need to build a collaborative, well-documented, self-maintaining system of thought over long periods of time. That's what academia is for, so plagiarism is a legitimate concern in the real world of the ivory tower research. Outside the ivory tower, plagiarism devolves into a vague moral concept that is systematically and productively violated.
3. Prior to graduate school, few students are given the opportunity to contribute to the great tree of knowledge.
This may sound pretentious, but really the whole point of the concept of plagiarism is to guide people who are doing original work based on preexisting academic literature, original sources, etc. If you never get a chance to add your own original work to the master text, you will never genuinely care about plagiarism. For the vast majority of pre-grad school students, the "term paper" requires zero original work. In fact, original work is generally discouraged. I went to college at Princeton, a school with mandatory original research papers starting in the Junior year, and yet I knew people who were accused of plagiarism because their papers were too original, and thus had interesting, complex, even groundbreaking ideas that were not cited from a source. These students were vindicated, of course, but the experience had a chilling effect on their later work. A more subtle form of this is the assertion that students don't have enough time or knowledge to say anything truly original in a term paper,
Why do you expect customers to pay you for limited Internet access? When you say "display pornography", do you include written material? Do you include maxim.com? What about hate speech on the web? Bomb making web sites?
Anyone who has read any serious analysis of censorware should know it is completely ineffective. Using it in a site where customers pay for your service will only result in their going elsewhere. If the nearby junior high school's parents' fears are a legitimate business concern, then you should relocate.
One possible solution might be to have a policy that customers may not disturb or offend other customers. Then your problem boils down to a slightly stickier version of the problem all cafe owners face.
Or you could install filtering, not announce it, and cross your fingers. That's a real-world approach that often works, sadly enough.
I'm running Openstep right now on my PII-400 Windows 98 box, in the form of WebObjects Version 4.0 Developer (Picasso2Z). This gives me all the standard Unix command line programs and the ability to run PopOver, an excellent Openstep mail client. It's a bit unstable under 98 (much better under NT), but that's a small price to pay for real MIME compliance and not having email viruses and web bugs. Early versions of MacOSX Server could still be transformed into Nextstep (from a look-and-fell perspective) using the "defaults" shell command. By the time MacOSX is released, of course, everything will be well under the hood. NeXT never died - I've been consulting professionally using NeXT technology since 1992. At each major transition (the end of hardware, the end of Nextstep, the "purchase" by Apple), developers jumped ship and declared the technology dead. But it lives on, and will live on in millions of MacOSX machines.