grrr...the real world wouldn't be a place where we all had to compromise our ideals if we would stop compromising our ideals in order to sync in with the "real world".
I garantee you the junior high school kids across the street know plenty of what the porn industry could teach them already... and where they don't, they could definitely use the education. They'll be giving eachother oral sex whether or not the big bad internet shows them how to do it, and a little open communication could go a long way towards dispelling all the stupid myths and fears that get people so hung up later on. We wouldn't have all these stigmas in our society if we didn't see catering to them as a necessary fact of life in the "real world".
Then again, I'll still be here pontificating like a fundamentalist ass if you quit your job and get replaced by someone who just slaps on NetNanny or some equally inane solution. So compromise if you must, but please please don't give up on finding some way to push the boundry. A lot of us are suffocating in here.
Technology is slowly doing exactly what we've intended it to do -- free our wills from artificial barriers like location, strength, or other limitations of our bodies. When everyone has the tools and the knowhow to program DeCSS or Gnutella or whatever the tool-of-the-day is for themselves (and this is slowly happening -- witness the proliferation of script-kiddies), no court in the world will be able to make posession of copyrighted material dependent on holding some physical media approved by the creator. When communication is ubiquitous, no government in the current sense of the word will be able to regulate what crosses its borders.
It's possible that some institutions may learn to develop tools to control technology as fast as the public can develop tools to get around them. But as concepts like geography become obsolete, so will institutions like "France" that use them as their prime distinciton.
Scientific methodology is designed to eliminate wrong answers, not necessarily point you to the right questions. Corporate funding means researchers answer corporate questions, and that has the potential to choke out one of the last bastions (academia) for intelligent people applying scientific thought to projects that aren't tailored to create near-term financial gain.
I'm less worried about the possibility of corrupting good scientists into giving bad results than I am about the possibility of distracting them from helping me understand my world, which includes plenty besides profit motives. Or are we going to outsource that job to the legions of tired, mass-market theologians that are in it for the money too?
Granted, good sites like Deja won't exist if they can't find a way to pay for themselves. But playing devil's advocate: There was a recent ruling that E-Bay has the right to prevent competitors from meta-browsing its site and re-presenting the content. Deja is doing a similar thing, but with a public resource with no single owner. Should the "public" in some way be granted a say as to whether this is legit? I guess this isn't so much an argument against Deja as an argument against meta-browsing restriction. I don't think anybody objects to Deja as a browser allowing people to search their usenet posts, and we would get into a slippery slope trying to define which functionalities are conveniences and which are manglings of the post. (stopping before the train of thought gets too long and off topic)
Slashdot Mirror
I garantee you the junior high school kids across the street know plenty of what the porn industry could teach them already... and where they don't, they could definitely use the education. They'll be giving eachother oral sex whether or not the big bad internet shows them how to do it, and a little open communication could go a long way towards dispelling all the stupid myths and fears that get people so hung up later on. We wouldn't have all these stigmas in our society if we didn't see catering to them as a necessary fact of life in the "real world".
Then again, I'll still be here pontificating like a fundamentalist ass if you quit your job and get replaced by someone who just slaps on NetNanny or some equally inane solution. So compromise if you must, but please please don't give up on finding some way to push the boundry. A lot of us are suffocating in here.
It's possible that some institutions may learn to develop tools to control technology as fast as the public can develop tools to get around them. But as concepts like geography become obsolete, so will institutions like "France" that use them as their prime distinciton.
I'm less worried about the possibility of corrupting good scientists into giving bad results than I am about the possibility of distracting them from helping me understand my world, which includes plenty besides profit motives. Or are we going to outsource that job to the legions of tired, mass-market theologians that are in it for the money too?
Granted, good sites like Deja won't exist if they can't find a way to pay for themselves. But playing devil's advocate: There was a recent ruling that E-Bay has the right to prevent competitors from meta-browsing its site and re-presenting the content. Deja is doing a similar thing, but with a public resource with no single owner. Should the "public" in some way be granted a say as to whether this is legit? I guess this isn't so much an argument against Deja as an argument against meta-browsing restriction. I don't think anybody objects to Deja as a browser allowing people to search their usenet posts, and we would get into a slippery slope trying to define which functionalities are conveniences and which are manglings of the post. (stopping before the train of thought gets too long and off topic)