The problem is that as the law stands, companies are generally better of folding as soon as a herd of wild prudes appears rather than telling them to get lost. A company has far more to lose from some kid seeing something their parents don't like than they do for adding just one more little bit of censorship.
The solution could easily be legislative, if only the sane majority got together and resisted the double-misnamed moral majority. All we need is to create a total exemption for third-party content, unless the aggregator is providing any censorship. Scuh a law would have to be written to ensure that community moderation remained permissible white retaining common carrier status, and it would probably need to allow removal of anonymous content which has been determined by a court to be illegal in their jurisdiction without compromising common carrier status, but it would be possible. That way, you can have a censored, kid-safe, prude-safe site, but it would be safer to censor nothing and let your competitors get sued into oblivion as they screw up.
But even a cleanliness argument is silly: right now, I'm in the main shopping street in my city, and in the last half-hour I've seen three women walk by in swimwear which wouldn't provide any meaningful cleanliness barrier but which would meet a ban on nudity (if we had one, which we don't). In any case, I'm sure that even the average homeless guy isn't any dirtier than a typical park bench, complete with windblown dust, pigeon crap, and all the rest (or, for that matter, the ground).
For that matter, the cleanliness angle is only relevant if you're sitting on the seat near-naked yourself, which makes complaining slightly hypocritical.
If only politicians were actually trying to govern rationally, but I suppose that is too much to hope for.
Not quite: self-censorship means censoring one's own speech, usually because it would lead to unfortunate social repercussions. Me thinking that a "yo mama" joke would be funny but not making it because I don't want to be looked down on would be self-censorship. What Facebook is doing is censorship. That's not to say that it is moral or immoral, or that it should be permitted or forbidden.
Personally, I do think that publishers should be absolutely immune to all charges relating to the content they publish provided they are common carriers, with permission only for user-moderation as occurs here or on reddit. OTOH, if a provider enforces any decency code, they should be liable for content as though they were the traditional publisher. That way, it encourages openness without mandating it. (I am actually far more concerned about the free-speach implications of privatising public open space, but that is harder to come up with a solution for.)
Personally, I think the South Australian rule is more enlightened: any nudity you like is allowed in public (but not if you photograph it and slap it on a wall - but then, who wants constancy in laws), provided it not for the purposes of causing shock (and you're not invading a public event - i.e. no streaking at sports matches).
One of my kids, visiting their grandparents, managed to conjure up some pretty sordid images of bestiality in no time by just googling one of her hobbies, horse riding.
That raises interesting questions about what her grandparents are into, or at least what there neighbours are into (since it does localise search results). I got to page 45 of the image search without seeing anything pornographic - that's where the never-ending results end.
That's almost as unfortunate than Claire Perry's kids, who found porn searching for "American Girl", which for me didn't appear until page 35 (there were some women in nice underwear about 10 pages earlier, but nothing you can't see in posters on any high street).
Obvious rebuttal: "In that case, let's reintroduce the laws against anyone who has received a Christian education or professed the Christian faith denying the teaching of the Established Church. Hmm, it turns out they're happy with gay marriage, even for clergy, so it looks like seven years in the slammer for you. Just be glad we're such wimpy progressives, or we'd be looking for some firewood right about now."
It is probably easier to return nothing at all than to try to figure out which sites are discussions of porn and which sites are porn: a site describing the effects of excessive porn viewing in terms of the harm to sexual function could look rather similar to erotic literature to a robot.
the death of a perfect man (Jesus) paid for the sin of a perfect man (Adam)
This is the part which, to me, is the most nonsensical part of Christianity. Who, precisely, is being paid? If God is all-powerful and capable of defining the rules of the universe, then if he could define the rules so that Jesus's death was an adequate balance for everyone's sin, why couldn't he have defined the rules such that Jesus's death was also unnecessary (he could have just forgiven the debt unilaterally, or extended an offer to forgive the debt to anyone who claimed it, which would be functionally identical except no-one had to be tortured). If he couldn't see the flaw in his rules, he's obviously not omniscient, if he couldn't fix the rules (or ignore them), he's obviously not the ultimate authority of the universe, and if he didn't care about his son being needlessly tortured, that doesn't make him very loving.
Freenet hasn't taken off because there isn't a killer app: BitTorrent is more efficient, and safe enough (and doesn't have corruption issues with it's download buffer (which also mangles your download queue)).
If BitTorrent became unreliable, popular use would switch to Freenet or GNUnet (and maybe Toad would switch from db40 to something more reliable). Of course, then it too would be blocked, but apparently there is work being done on transport plugins so Freenet traffic can be encapsulated in other transport streams.
IIRC, in the UK pigeons are legally vermin, equivalent to rats or mice: if they don't belong to someone, you can kill them by any means not deemed excessively cruel (that is, you can't torture them to death) at any time, in any place you're allowed to be doing whatever it is that you did to kill them (so shooting them somewhere you shouldn't isn't illegal because you shot them, but because you shouldn't be shooting there).
IIRC they removed unicode support after people started spamming RTL control codes and breaking the layout.
I think HTML5 (or possibly just WHAT WG HTML) specifies different rules for handling bidirectional text in sections of pages (something along the lines of returning to the previous direction when leaving some DOM elements), but they could hack up a working solution by sticking a LTR override at the end of every comment.
Money is not itself contradictory with a communist system: indeed, if you have any luxury or freedom of choice you need money to ensure fairness. Let's imagine you'd like to play the violin, and I'd like to go golfing. How do we decide what golf clubs are equivalent to your violin? Clearly, it is a question of how much work went into making them, and what raw materials were required. As soon as we allocate a relationship between an hour of work and a lump of iron ore or bauxite or wood, we have money. Now imagine I like running instead: all I need are some shoes and time. Does that mean I can work less, since I am using less of other people's work? If you want lessons, do you need to work more to compensate society for the productivity you are consuming? Even when it comes to essentials like food and housing, unless we all have the same thing or are fed out of common canteens, we run into the barter problem, so money makes it easier to get a fair distribution.
Of course, if there were no freeloaders and everyone were competent and attentive, everyone could work out the value of their consumption and self-regulate to make sure they didn't exceed their fair share, but in practice having fixed tokens or their electronic equivalent is rather simpler and more difficult to cheat.
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The problem is that as the law stands, companies are generally better of folding as soon as a herd of wild prudes appears rather than telling them to get lost. A company has far more to lose from some kid seeing something their parents don't like than they do for adding just one more little bit of censorship.
The solution could easily be legislative, if only the sane majority got together and resisted the double-misnamed moral majority. All we need is to create a total exemption for third-party content, unless the aggregator is providing any censorship. Scuh a law would have to be written to ensure that community moderation remained permissible white retaining common carrier status, and it would probably need to allow removal of anonymous content which has been determined by a court to be illegal in their jurisdiction without compromising common carrier status, but it would be possible. That way, you can have a censored, kid-safe, prude-safe site, but it would be safer to censor nothing and let your competitors get sued into oblivion as they screw up.
But even a cleanliness argument is silly: right now, I'm in the main shopping street in my city, and in the last half-hour I've seen three women walk by in swimwear which wouldn't provide any meaningful cleanliness barrier but which would meet a ban on nudity (if we had one, which we don't). In any case, I'm sure that even the average homeless guy isn't any dirtier than a typical park bench, complete with windblown dust, pigeon crap, and all the rest (or, for that matter, the ground).
For that matter, the cleanliness angle is only relevant if you're sitting on the seat near-naked yourself, which makes complaining slightly hypocritical.
If only politicians were actually trying to govern rationally, but I suppose that is too much to hope for.
I've no idea why girls aren't impressed by my 14" wang...
Step 1: create a religion (or at least a new sect).
Then, you can either demand censorship to such a level that it becomes unsupportable, or demand that censorship itself be banned.
1man1jar didn't do me that much harm - a nice swig of brain bleach and all was well again.
I'm sure I can take whatever the internet can throw at me.
(oblig.) /me sees your mum, decides otherwise. (sorry)
Not quite: self-censorship means censoring one's own speech, usually because it would lead to unfortunate social repercussions. Me thinking that a "yo mama" joke would be funny but not making it because I don't want to be looked down on would be self-censorship. What Facebook is doing is censorship. That's not to say that it is moral or immoral, or that it should be permitted or forbidden.
Personally, I do think that publishers should be absolutely immune to all charges relating to the content they publish provided they are common carriers, with permission only for user-moderation as occurs here or on reddit. OTOH, if a provider enforces any decency code, they should be liable for content as though they were the traditional publisher. That way, it encourages openness without mandating it. (I am actually far more concerned about the free-speach implications of privatising public open space, but that is harder to come up with a solution for.)
Personally, I think the South Australian rule is more enlightened: any nudity you like is allowed in public (but not if you photograph it and slap it on a wall - but then, who wants constancy in laws), provided it not for the purposes of causing shock (and you're not invading a public event - i.e. no streaking at sports matches).
You mean not everyone wants to see Natalie Portman covered in hot grits?
One of my kids, visiting their grandparents, managed to conjure up some pretty sordid images of bestiality in no time by just googling one of her hobbies, horse riding.
That raises interesting questions about what her grandparents are into, or at least what there neighbours are into (since it does localise search results). I got to page 45 of the image search without seeing anything pornographic - that's where the never-ending results end.
That's almost as unfortunate than Claire Perry's kids, who found porn searching for "American Girl", which for me didn't appear until page 35 (there were some women in nice underwear about 10 pages earlier, but nothing you can't see in posters on any high street).
Obvious rebuttal: "In that case, let's reintroduce the laws against anyone who has received a Christian education or professed the Christian faith denying the teaching of the Established Church. Hmm, it turns out they're happy with gay marriage, even for clergy, so it looks like seven years in the slammer for you. Just be glad we're such wimpy progressives, or we'd be looking for some firewood right about now."
It is probably easier to return nothing at all than to try to figure out which sites are discussions of porn and which sites are porn: a site describing the effects of excessive porn viewing in terms of the harm to sexual function could look rather similar to erotic literature to a robot.
the death of a perfect man (Jesus) paid for the sin of a perfect man (Adam)
This is the part which, to me, is the most nonsensical part of Christianity. Who, precisely, is being paid? If God is all-powerful and capable of defining the rules of the universe, then if he could define the rules so that Jesus's death was an adequate balance for everyone's sin, why couldn't he have defined the rules such that Jesus's death was also unnecessary (he could have just forgiven the debt unilaterally, or extended an offer to forgive the debt to anyone who claimed it, which would be functionally identical except no-one had to be tortured). If he couldn't see the flaw in his rules, he's obviously not omniscient, if he couldn't fix the rules (or ignore them), he's obviously not the ultimate authority of the universe, and if he didn't care about his son being needlessly tortured, that doesn't make him very loving.
Freenet hasn't taken off because there isn't a killer app: BitTorrent is more efficient, and safe enough (and doesn't have corruption issues with it's download buffer (which also mangles your download queue)).
If BitTorrent became unreliable, popular use would switch to Freenet or GNUnet (and maybe Toad would switch from db40 to something more reliable). Of course, then it too would be blocked, but apparently there is work being done on transport plugins so Freenet traffic can be encapsulated in other transport streams.
IIRC, in the UK pigeons are legally vermin, equivalent to rats or mice: if they don't belong to someone, you can kill them by any means not deemed excessively cruel (that is, you can't torture them to death) at any time, in any place you're allowed to be doing whatever it is that you did to kill them (so shooting them somewhere you shouldn't isn't illegal because you shot them, but because you shouldn't be shooting there).
IIRC they removed unicode support after people started spamming RTL control codes and breaking the layout.
I think HTML5 (or possibly just WHAT WG HTML) specifies different rules for handling bidirectional text in sections of pages (something along the lines of returning to the previous direction when leaving some DOM elements), but they could hack up a working solution by sticking a LTR override at the end of every comment.
Money is not itself contradictory with a communist system: indeed, if you have any luxury or freedom of choice you need money to ensure fairness. Let's imagine you'd like to play the violin, and I'd like to go golfing. How do we decide what golf clubs are equivalent to your violin? Clearly, it is a question of how much work went into making them, and what raw materials were required. As soon as we allocate a relationship between an hour of work and a lump of iron ore or bauxite or wood, we have money. Now imagine I like running instead: all I need are some shoes and time. Does that mean I can work less, since I am using less of other people's work? If you want lessons, do you need to work more to compensate society for the productivity you are consuming?
Even when it comes to essentials like food and housing, unless we all have the same thing or are fed out of common canteens, we run into the barter problem, so money makes it easier to get a fair distribution.
Of course, if there were no freeloaders and everyone were competent and attentive, everyone could work out the value of their consumption and self-regulate to make sure they didn't exceed their fair share, but in practice having fixed tokens or their electronic equivalent is rather simpler and more difficult to cheat.
(You also need money to mediate external trade.)