Australia's game classification system has no "adult" category, so many games sold without any controls at all elsewhere in the world are flat out banned ("Refused Classification") here.
So if what Conroy has announced here goes ahead, a whole pile of product pages at Amazon (among others) are going to have to go on the blacklist. (Leisure Suit Larry is among the games banned in Australia.
The problem is that many of the proposed filtering solutions work by routing traffic to IP addresses that host prohibited pages to a proxy server. As we saw with the Internet Watch/BT/Wikipedia debacle, this approach is likely to cause problems with high traffic sites (and may well overload the proxy server).
I've written a review of The Futurological Congress, but not of his other books, which include some other gems. Cyberiad is a great piece of fun, and His Master's Voice has dated much better than most of the alien contact stories from the 1960s.
Within Japan itself, the dramatic increase in available pornography and sexually explicit materials is apparent to even a casual observer. This is concomitant with a general liberalization of restrictions on other sexual outlets as well. Also readily apparent from the information presented is that, over this period of change, sex crimes in every category, from rape to public indecency, sexual offenses from both ends of the criminal spectrum, significantly decreased in incidence.
A good argument for the origins of religion in anthropomorphism is Stewart Guthrie's Faces in the Clounds (link is to my review).
"Attributing human or animal agency to events is an explanatory strategy
which, while it sometimes fails, is in general extremely effective.
Since other humans and, after them, animals are the most important things
in our environment, it is vitally important to take them into account
when they are there -- important enough that erring on the side of
caution means accepting regular anthropomorphic and animistic 'errors'."
His best book is I think Lord of Light - the link is to my review - which may be a bit complicated for pre-teens. But what about the Amber books?
I might have been too precocious a reader for my experience to be useful, but I remember enjoying Heinlein, Keith Laumer, Andre Norton, and a lot of other authors. Have a think about short stories - they're often more approachable than novels, both in complexity and size.
A lot of printers these days seem to run Linux internally, so I'm sure there's one somewhere where they forgot to cull the installed packages and ended up with stuff like freeciv installed.
If you enjoy thinking about this kind of stuff, a fun novel to read is Greg Egan's Permutation City (link is to my review). There's not much in that as a novel, but it's got some great ideas.
By this guy's argument, using lynx to view a web page is a crime, as is using Firefox without having Flash installed (which, since it doesn't come installed by default on Fedora, is how I use it).
If people people are that fanatic about making everyone see ads, they have an easy solution -- turn all their web pages into images. Or push all the content into Flash. Or use PDFs.
I wouldn't want to see a precedent for suing book reviewers... Most of my 1000 book reviews are positive (I try to avoid wasting my time reading crap) or neutral, but there are a few where I've just totally panned a book. So far I haven't hit anyone crackpot enough to sue me, fortunately.
My mother has been using Linux for nearly five years now. There've been a few problems, but as someone who supports Windows users at work, I can confidently say there have been *far* fewer problems than there would have been had she been running Windows. In particular, there have been absolutely no problems with malware and viruses.
And the claim that Windows Update is better than update systems for Linux is so wrong it's not funny. Sure, Windows Update keeps Windows (and maybe Microsoft Office) updated. But what about all the other applications on the system? They come (if you're lucky) with their own update systems, all of which work differently. The Fedora Core system my mother is running includes image-editing software, messaging clients, etc. etc. all of which are kept updated by the same update systme.
Open Source makes it possible for a single distributor to manage updates for all the softare on the system. In contrast, it's impossible for Microsoft (or anyone else) to manage updates for Adobe and Qualcomm and Apple as well as for their own software.
If Oxfam were really concerned about the third-world farmers, they would've been making noise against Europe's farmer-subsidies, against the smaller-but-still-significant American ones, and against Japan's protectionism.
If you'd done even rudimentary research, you'd have discovered that Oxfam has been very vocal in opposing farm subsidies. Try Googling something like oxfam "farm subsidies".
A great read for anyone curious about the P-T extinction is Douglas Erwin's book Extinction . He doesn't come to any definite conclusions, but thinks the balance of evidence is against an extraterrestrial impact as a cause.
I did most of the coursework for an honours degree in Pure Mathematics (albeit 15 years ago), but I can't see how I could contribute more to a project like this than editing stuff for readability and clarity.
But maybe that's useful... perhaps I should try editing some of the mathematics articles at Wikipedia.
Six or seven years ago, I ranked #1 on a search for "book reviews" at most search engines. Eventually the print media cottoned onto sensible TITLEs and link anchors, and I was displaced by the NRYOB and NYT (and I think I'm now down to 10th on Google). There are still some really poorly thought-out major sites, but things are getting harder for small web sites.
The Sydney Morning Herald has not only replaced its old-style "meaningless without context" headings with "boring" ones, but it's stuck them into its URLs - which is another SEO idea.
Danny.
"a must upgrade for all Windows users" - nonsense
on
Why Vista Won't Suck
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· Score: 1
I care about those improvements, but I don't think any of the users I support will. Why will Jane Doe upgrade her operating system in order to make life easier for developers? Speed improvements sound good, but the people most likely to want them probably have hardware that won't run Vista anyway.
There's no way Canon will license the KM anti-shake - they'd rather sell their expensive IS lenses! - but rumour has it that Olympus has licensed it for their forthcoming E-3.
Or get an Olympus DSLR with a subsonic dust-removal system. This really does work - people who turn up reporting dust in the Olympus SLR forum on dpreview are so are that they're considered novelties.
I know there are lots of options for cleaning sensors, but the last thing I want to have to do is worry about that on a hike, or while travelling in Africa, or anywhere like that.
Oh, and my E1 is weatherproof - splash- and dust-proof!
This guy has been mouthing off about this for some time. But unless he comes up with something new, he seems unlikely to sway his party. The anti-sedition laws have been rammed through, but they caused enough of a backbench backlash that I can't see Howard and co wanting to stir things up again.
But please join Electronic Frontiers Australia and help us keep an eye on this kind of thing!
Danny.
Further, it's not as if Red Hat-proper is "free". You can bet your bottom dollar that Red Hat is seeing dollar signs out of this deal. Big dollar signs.
If they want to call the operating system "Red Hat" or use Red Hat logos, that would require an agreement with Red Hat and could be expensive. Otherwise, Red Hat Linux is free. There are plenty of clones of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that are freely available, for example CentOS, and Fedora Core is free software.
Microsoft claims that newer versions of MS Office can import older MS Office files, but they don't do so successfully 100% of the time. That's Microsoft's fault, as no one is forcing them to make that claim.
Incidentally, I've had quite a few users come to me with damaged Word documents that no version of Microsoft Office could open - but which I successfully salvaged using OpenOffice.
Slashdot Mirror
So if what Conroy has announced here goes ahead, a whole pile of product pages at Amazon (among others) are going to have to go on the blacklist. (Leisure Suit Larry is among the games banned in Australia.
The problem is that many of the proposed filtering solutions work by routing traffic to IP addresses that host prohibited pages to a proxy server. As we saw with the Internet Watch/BT/Wikipedia debacle, this approach is likely to cause problems with high traffic sites (and may well overload the proxy server).
Danny.
I've written a review of The Futurological Congress , but not of his other books, which include some other gems. Cyberiad is a great piece of fun, and His Master's Voice has dated much better than most of the alien contact stories from the 1960s.
Danny.
I don't know Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming - is that what it sounds like, a parody of a traditional fairy story?
Danny.
I might have been too precocious a reader for my experience to be useful, but I remember enjoying Heinlein, Keith Laumer, Andre Norton, and a lot of other authors. Have a think about short stories - they're often more approachable than novels, both in complexity and size.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
As for GNOME, my mother manages fine with the file dialogs and they seem straightforward enough to me.
Danny.
Danny.
If people people are that fanatic about making everyone see ads, they have an easy solution -- turn all their web pages into images. Or push all the content into Flash. Or use PDFs.
Danny.
Danny.
And the claim that Windows Update is better than update systems for Linux is so wrong it's not funny. Sure, Windows Update keeps Windows (and maybe Microsoft Office) updated. But what about all the other applications on the system? They come (if you're lucky) with their own update systems, all of which work differently. The Fedora Core system my mother is running includes image-editing software, messaging clients, etc. etc. all of which are kept updated by the same update systme.
Open Source makes it possible for a single distributor to manage updates for all the softare on the system. In contrast, it's impossible for Microsoft (or anyone else) to manage updates for Adobe and Qualcomm and Apple as well as for their own software.
Danny.
So I'd love to see a similar chart with 100 categories - then one could conceivably try to read a book about each of them!
Danny.
If you'd done even rudimentary research, you'd have discovered that Oxfam has been very vocal in opposing farm subsidies. Try Googling something like oxfam "farm subsidies".
Danny.
Danny.
But maybe that's useful... perhaps I should try editing some of the mathematics articles at Wikipedia.
Danny.
The Sydney Morning Herald has not only replaced its old-style "meaningless without context" headings with "boring" ones, but it's stuck them into its URLs - which is another SEO idea.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
I know there are lots of options for cleaning sensors, but the last thing I want to have to do is worry about that on a hike, or while travelling in Africa, or anywhere like that.
Oh, and my E1 is weatherproof - splash- and dust-proof!
Danny.
This guy has been mouthing off about this for some time. But unless he comes up with something new, he seems unlikely to sway his party. The anti-sedition laws have been rammed through, but they caused enough of a backbench backlash that I can't see Howard and co wanting to stir things up again. But please join Electronic Frontiers Australia and help us keep an eye on this kind of thing! Danny.
If they want to call the operating system "Red Hat" or use Red Hat logos, that would require an agreement with Red Hat and could be expensive. Otherwise, Red Hat Linux is free. There are plenty of clones of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that are freely available, for example CentOS, and Fedora Core is free software.
Danny.
Incidentally, I've had quite a few users come to me with damaged Word documents that no version of Microsoft Office could open - but which I successfully salvaged using OpenOffice.
Danny.