All I had to see to know I was against it was "Senator Mary Landrieu". I don't rememmber the details, but basicly for those that don't follow Louisiana politics she was elected by dead people etc., the recount confirmed that her oppononent really won the election, however due to political pressure at the time she was allowed to claim the office.
You obviously have not spent any time working with the issue, the first problem is putting the staff into a position of monitoring everyone, while trying to respect that persons right to privacy. The second is there are a lot of people out there that like to shock people, sort of internet flashers, where they load hardcore images on public computers not to view them, but to shock those around them.
Adressing your first point, I grew up around a public library from the staff side and I remember when this same question was asked about many other items, including magazines, audio books (for regular people not the visualy impaired), video tapes, computer software, and now the internet. Many of the librarians that make this point feel that computers have no place in a library, and still use an old fashion card catalog, many also feel that even paperback books have no place in a library.
The idea of having libraries hire staff to monitor use on internet computers has many problems in itself, first to be effective the person doing the monitoring, would have to view each page the child tried to view, before the child was allowed to view it. Second how do you train this staff in what is appropriate as some people are much more conservative/liberal than others, Third do you really think the kids would go to these sites on safe sex, life styles, etc. if they knew someone was reading over their shoulder ahead of time?
Ike
Why do you think Sparcs are useless, I am typing this on a seven year old SparcStation 10 with 1 85 mhz SM-81 processor and 176 megs of ram, I running netscape, playing MP3's with Xmms, downloading the 2nd Suse iso image, and chatting on IRC using xchat, sure there are faster machines out there, in fact I even own one, but how fast do you really need, and if I need more speed I can drop in a second SM-81 processor.
Ike
Slashdot Mirror
All I had to see to know I was against it was "Senator Mary Landrieu". I don't rememmber the details, but basicly for those that don't follow Louisiana politics she was elected by dead people etc., the recount confirmed that her oppononent really won the election, however due to political pressure at the time she was allowed to claim the office.
This is exactly the kind of article I would expect in a newpaper, implying that web based comics are just there to try to become newspaper comics. Ike
You obviously have not spent any time working with the issue, the first problem is putting the staff into a position of monitoring everyone, while trying to respect that persons right to privacy. The second is there are a lot of people out there that like to shock people, sort of internet flashers, where they load hardcore images on public computers not to view them, but to shock those around them.
Adressing your first point, I grew up around a public library from the staff side and I remember when this same question was asked about many other items, including magazines, audio books (for regular people not the visualy impaired), video tapes, computer software, and now the internet. Many of the librarians that make this point feel that computers have no place in a library, and still use an old fashion card catalog, many also feel that even paperback books have no place in a library.
The idea of having libraries hire staff to monitor use on internet computers has many problems in itself, first to be effective the person doing the monitoring, would have to view each page the child tried to view, before the child was allowed to view it. Second how do you train this staff in what is appropriate as some people are much more conservative/liberal than others, Third do you really think the kids would go to these sites on safe sex, life styles, etc. if they knew someone was reading over their shoulder ahead of time? Ike
Why do you think Sparcs are useless, I am typing this on a seven year old SparcStation 10 with 1 85 mhz SM-81 processor and 176 megs of ram, I running netscape, playing MP3's with Xmms, downloading the 2nd Suse iso image, and chatting on IRC using xchat, sure there are faster machines out there, in fact I even own one, but how fast do you really need, and if I need more speed I can drop in a second SM-81 processor. Ike