Currently I have 5 tabs open in Firefox and it's using about 600MB of physical memory.
That's after I restarted it an hour or so before I went to bed, and I just got up, so I haven't done much surfing in the meantime. For me that is normal behavior for Firefox.
I have Safari running as well, and after the same instance running for several weeks it's currently using about 270MB. But with Safari that memory usage is pretty constant - currently I have an AJAX app that causes caching of a ton of images open in it, and if I navigate away from it Safari will eventually free memory.
My Firefox instances never shrink and eventually CPU usage goes through the rough and stays high regardless what I do too. This is 2.0.11. I've tried no extensions, and it makes no difference. I've tried Firefox 3 beta2 and it was actually worse for me.
The US government publishes many of the best public map sources worldwide into the public domain. Not only TIGER (from the Census Bureau) but also vast quantities of imagery, radar topography etc. from NASA, massive amounts of data from the USGS (US Geological Survey), USDA (US Department of Agriculture), and a number of other agencies, including intelligence sources such as the National Geo-Spatial Intellligence Agency.
Of course I'm sure there are details they don't publish, but overall the US government is fantastic when it comes to releasing data for GIS use - I'm usually pretty critical of the US government, but when it comes to public access to data they are great. In the case of GIS they make the EU member states seem like a bunch of medieval fiefdoms that still believes map data to be a strategic resource. Incidentally, for many countries the best publicly available data comes from US intelligence sources. Unfortunately they are usually not detailed enough to be a good substitute for the local maps (the US agencies in question don't generally have a need to collect more detailed data).
As for creative commons solutions, for mapping it's easy to compare input from multiple sources, because there IS a single verifiable truth, and if someone keeps contributing data that disagrees with everyone else or frequently gets corrected and/or that generally doesn't match feature extracted data from satellite photos, then it's easy to discard their data or require it to be reviewed before inclusion.
Wikipedia is "good enough" most of the time. And OSM has the advantage that there is a perfect arbiter of truth: People can go out and check the data. If vandalism becomes a problem, correlation of data from multiple sources can easily be used to assign trust and reputation as long as you start with a core of people with a good track record. In many cases there'll also be the possibility of validating parts of the data against satellite photos and arial photos using feature extraction.
In other words, with OSM you can say with a reasonably high degree of certainty that if traces from N different people with a long history of editing the maps consistently agree with eachother and have a good match rate with feature extracted data, contributions that are consistent with eachother and come from contributors that have a history of agreeing with the N people in the core are likely to be good.
Once the map gets to a certain level of detail that means you can very well make it hard to get changes accepted (and just publish a layer of "untrusted" changes if people want them).
Getting enough data is the challenge for OSM, not ensuring the quality remains high once they reach critical mass.
I agree with you about the Ordinance Survey, but considering how many applications are depending on the US TIGER datasets which are inaccurate, outdated and incomplete I don't think the situation will be as bad with Open Street Map as you imply. The thing is it'll take a long time before the data is good enough, but once it is it's just a matter of preventing vandalism, as the rate of changes for maps are relatively limited, and then typically for very small detailed features on them (i.e. new access roads and paths are far more frequent than major new highways etc.).
If the Ordinance Survey opened up their maps people would still want to improve on them - they'd just have a far better starting point.
Thats because in the US the federal government can't own copyright, and so people can freely use the TIGER dataset created by the Census Bureau, while the UK is stuck in the middle ages with "Crown Copyright" on anything the government creates, and in the case of maps the copyright is vested in the Ordinance Survey, which is making money of licensing the map data commercially.
Unfortunately the situation with the Ordinance Survey doesn't look like it'll change for a long time.
Life in prison has exactly the same benefits in terms of preventing a person from committing a crime again. The death penalty only has any "benefits" if you either agree that society should condone violence as vengeance or believe it is an effective deterrent. Personally I don't believe there's any proof is any good as a deterrent, and I think using it as vengeance is downright wrong - condoning it creates a society that is in effect teaching people that killing people is sometimes the right thing to do.
Given that they're responding to someone who effectively made the claim that being into BDSM makes you more likely to be a murderer, I don't find it funny at all, rather a sad indictment of how intolerant society.
I believe the GP took issue with why the person who made the original statement felt the need to include BDSM on the list. Frankly, just pointing out he confessed to killing eight people should be sufficient - the BDSM and death yoga bits seems rather insignificant and pointless, unless you're someone who actually think that practicing either make you significantly more likely to be a murderer, in which case I'd really like to see references.
Most serial killers are described by a lot of people who know them as nice people. I'd venture to say that a lot of people who are "batshit crazy" learns to hide it well enough to function normally. Of course we don't really know whether or not this Sean Sturgeon character is as crazy as he looks - most of what's been written about him in the media is a result of his court battles with Reiser in the past where Reiser made lots of bizarre claims about him, combined with his supposed confession of multiple murders. However, since the original articles about that I've heard nothing - you'd expect the media would've been all over someone confessing to being a serial killer. Either something funny is going on, or the police checked it out and found the story to be bullshit, if he even did confess in the first place.
While there's no proof she's dead, there ARE a lot of indications she at least didn't disappear of her own free will. She just got a new job, she left her kids, she's made no further withdrawals on her bank accounts, and a lot of other details. Doesn't mean it can't have happened, but if I was a prosecutor I'd be reluctant not to at least try given all the weird stuff in this case.
Having means, motive and opportunity makes a suspect, it does not make someone guilty. Most people have the means, motive and opportunity to kills lots of people. When one of them turns up dead, you'll regularly find people with the means, motive and opportunity that can't come up with a good alibi and that will have additional factors pointing at them, yet that will be innocent.
Occams razor is also irrelevant. Any person trying to apply it to a criminal case really should be thrown off the jury ASAP. The entire point with "beyond all reasonable doubt" is that unlikely stories ARE sometimes true, and you don't want to risk convict just because there's a simpler explanation than what the defense has been able to present. It's not often cases with perfect defenses go to trial, because despite what TV tells you the prosecutors aren't generally out there to "get" someone at all cost - they're trying to get the right person. Both because it's their job and because they look incredibly bad if they keep losing cases where they were obviously wrong. If the defense can come up with a watertight defense, they'd likely be able to avoid ever going to trial.
So far I've seen lots of weak evidence in this case. I've also seen lots of weak explanations, and a lot wild claims, but they fit well with Hans' personality based on his past run-ins with Nina and with Sean Sturgeon that paint Hans as eccentric at best, and a raving lunatic at worst.
My opinion so far is that Nina is dead, and that chances are good that Hans did it, but that the evidence in no way are sufficient to justify convicting him. The fact that they have no body is a huge obstacle. The fact they have only small amounts of blood, and haven't been able to conclusively show anything about it (the person analyzing the blood sample recently had to admit in court she'd made a mistake in analyzing the small amount of blood found, even) is another problem. The fact the children were conveniently sent out of the country and conveniently not given a chance to testify, is another big problem (for that matter, the fact that they've been in the custody of Nina's parents, who are vocally against Hans, means they'd probably be worthless as witnesses anyway).
Beyond that there's small bits of things that paint a picture of Reiser as weird, and that may make him look suspicious, but that doesn't mean much as evidence, such as the car seat, the books (if he's guilty he'd be an idiot or madman to buy them - perhaps he is, or perhaps he's not guilty and just didn't consider the fact that the books might be found and/or used against him), that he showed up to pick up the kids (he was in a prolonged custody battle and believed Nina was a bad influence - if they had an argument before she disappeared there are lots of other stupid things he might have decided to do, such as taking the kids and fleeing, or just taking them out to spend time with them because he feared not seeing much more of them).
I've written on the problem with the blood "evidence" found before. Two years ago, my wife fell towards our kitchen door and thrust her arm through a glass pane. She got a cut that was about two inches long right alongside the main artery in her lower arm, and cut a tendon leading to her hands (luckily it was an unused one - apparently some people have an extra tendon that has no affect on hand movement). Before I managed to get something wrapped around it and slow down the bleed there was blood all over the hallway and parts of the kitchen. Literally pools of it - I would not be surprised if she lost quarter to half a liter (thats roughly half a pint to a pint for the metric challenged).
Luckily everything went well. In this case the damage was bad enough she had to go to hospital, and so there was a record, and if she'd disappeared at any point later, that record likely mean nobody would find it too suspicious that there's still blood in the hallway and kitchen - we occasionally find a spot we hadn't noticed as it found it's way eve
In Hans case, if you follow the court reporting (Wired has excellent coverage), his behavior even in court is so bizarre and counter-productive that I could easily believe he didn't realize how buying the books etc. would look. Of course, he could be acting, but if he thinks looking like a madman to the jury will help his defense it would seem he's twisted enough not to need to act. He comes with frequent outbursts, seems to regularly ask to or threaten to fire his attorney (the judge has told him he won't allow it), and generally seems to behave like someone with absolutely no understanding of how to come across like a likable, normal person.
The space is meaningless. What would they fill it with? Sure, boxed sets of multiple movies would require fewer disks. Who cares.
The other things are things I care about, though, and essentially means I'll stay away from buying any BluRay disks until all the security measures have been properly broken.
Most users don't need a public IP from their ISP either. MORE users need a public IP than need a static IP, though, so it's a service that'd need to be easier to enable. Just defaulting to giving people a private address but having a website to switch on public IP for a $1/month or something would make a huge difference - I doubt most people would ever notice they were running on a private IP.
A huge percentage of users are behind routers that NAT anyway, and don't notice or even know if their router supports port translation or default forwarding of incoming connections.
I don't think you understand what the GP meant. If your ISP NAT's you, you have no way of just "opening your firewall" to let a client connect back in, because you'd have no way of passing data too your firewall without etablishing a connection from the inside.
My home network is NAT'd, and yes, I can do what you describe, but the router I'm connected to my ISP via has a public IP address and supports NAT with port translation etc. If my router hadn't had a public IP address, there'd be no way for me to transparently connect to it from outside my ISP's nework.
You could, but in that case you'd need your ISP to run application level proxies for the protocols for which it'd be doable. For HTTP it is (starting with HTTP/1.1, since their proxy could use the Host: header to decided where to forward) but it'd require them to run extra hardware and you to tell them which domain names you'll be serving).
That said, an alternative that is definitively possible is for ISP's to start NAT'ing everyone by default and handing out public addresses only to customers who ask. Most people would never know the difference, and frankly for many of them it'd improve security (slightly, at least).
Another alternative is for them to give out v6 addresses, hand out routers with dual stacks to their customers and do NAT style translation to public IPv4 space combined with giving v4 addresses to customers that ask.
I depend on having a public IP, but if my ISP put something like either of those two alternatives in place I'd be perfectly happy with it. Even if they'd charge me a nominal amount.
And that might be a good idea for IP space in general: Charge a small fee per usable IPv4 address allocated from the RIR's. If you pay say $1 per IP address it doesn't matter much for a small business, but it will make a difference to the people holding on to huge chunks of IPv4 space where most of it either is unused or could be switched to local NAT'd addresses. Allocate the funds raised to IPv6 transition projects that anyone can apply for if they give up a certain percentage of their IPv4 space.
One of those things from my childhood that's now deeply embarrassing: I started programming very young, but only in basic at first. Around 10-11 I realized that to do any "cool stuff" I needed to know about assembler. But the sources I had didn't even really explain WHAT assembler was, and together with a couple of friends I tried figuring out how to do it, with rather poor results.
At first we tried poking in the textual strings of BASIC programs into memory, not realizing that even BASIC programs were stored in a more advanced way (on the C64 they were tokenized and keywords were stored as mnemonics to save space and speed up the interpreter). When we found out about the mnemonics bit we tried poking them in, which might've would've worked if we'd put them in the right locations and run them as basic programs instead of trying to use "sys" to call it. Finally one of us got hold of an assembler, and eventually a book on assembler programming.
I think it took a year or so from we started exploring it until we actually were writing simple assembler programs.
While an adult would've had an easier job finding and obtaining books about it instead of fumbling around the way we did, it does illustrate how much harder obtaining technical knowledge was.
Already when I got an Amiga it was far easier - there was a number of technical books (my first one for the Amiga was probably the Advanced System Programmers Guide), and mainstream computer magazines were running articles on assembler programming and other languages.
When I got a modem it got almost trivial.
If I'd started fresh again today, I'd probably just gone to wikipedia, followed by going to a search engine and searching for "assembler tutorial"
x86 assembler put me off, though. I haven't done any serious assembler programming since my Amiga days largely for that reason - when you've done M68k assembler, x86 assembler looks about as fun as poking your eyes out with a fork.
In other words your kids will just use the internet at their friends houses instead of at home when they want to access stuff you don't approve of, and instead of learning to deal with it with the guidance of an adult, they'll be learning from the kids that are happy to help them evade your scrutiny.
If you seriously think you'll stop your kids from accessing stuff you don't like by blocking it, you're an idiot.
I remember kids in my class talking in fascination about having seen movies involving sex with pigs, cows and assorted other animals at a far younger age than 13. No, I don't think it sounds worse. Kids will think most of that crap is interesting in the same way they find farting jokes hilarious and love watching things that are disgusting because it is disgusting not because it is sex. The only thing you achieve by trying to block this stuff is to glamorize it.
In other words you didn't have any friends with access to German or Danish porn mags. Hustler has always been tame - I remember how disappointed I was the first time I saw Hustler and realized how soft it was.
It also means that governments, employers, libraries and anyone else that feels like it can implement "near perfect" filtering software preventing adults that would otherwise be paying customers from viewing the sites, which is why you'll find that unless porn sites are forced by law to use.xxx it won't work. And that means you'll have to force every single national top level domain to apply the same restrictions (if the US tries to dictate restrictions like that for the rest of the world I can guarantee you the rest of the world would have new root servers damn quickly).
Not to mention the problem of defining what porn is. Bare breasts are common in European newspapers. UK newspapers even have their "page 3" girls, many of which have been under 18 (Samantha Fox, for example, had her "debut" at 16 with the consent of her mother, an age at which the pics of her bare breasts would've been considered child porn in many countries). Is it porn? Some of it clearly is there primarily to titillate, while other uses of bare breasts are there to illustrate the stories, and isn't considered to be racy at all in the countries it's published in.
When Janet Jackson bared her nipple on American TV, almost every newspaper in Europe displayed the pics, the down market ones in an attempt to be racy and because celebs always sell well, the rest to let us laugh at how puritan the US public is. Was that porn?
Some TV channels in the UK have bare boobs on TV almost every evening - because it sells, not for any other reasons. But most of it would never be considered porn by a European public. Considering the response to Janet's nipple, though, it'd cause riots in some parts of the US.
Well, we can start by saying "any site that has the word 'porn', 'tits' and 'sex' in the title".
If you extend that filtering to apply to page titles it'd mean most UK newspapers would belong in the.xxx domain. You're in any case just trying to evade the real issue.
Many of them also print nude pics, including pictures that would be illegal in many countries (some page 3 girls baring their breasts in UK newspapers have been 16 or 17, for example), but while UK newspapers are infamous for their "oh, we are so naughty, nudge, nudge, wink, wink" attitude, most European countries have newspapers that regularly feature nudity ranging from innocent uses because none of their readers actually considers it dirty, to intentionally trying to sell on sex.
In other words, forcing people into ".xxx" is stupid - no two countries agree on what porn is, and even within a single country attitudes are vastly different. And if one, as you suggest, don't force anyone into ".xxx" nobody will leave ".com" names for one simple reason:
While you are right that no porn operator want kids leeching, making their sites easy to filter means they WILL be filtered by overzealous governments, and also by a lot of places like employers, libraries, many internet cafees and any number of locations where adults might otherwise decide to look at their sites. These companies might operate a ".xxx" domain TOO, but they'd be damn stupid to limit their exposure to adults by making their sites easier to block.
I have to restart Firefox at least once a day or my system grinds to a halt. Paging out to disk works fine when the app you're using doesn't keep touching the pages, but in the case of Firefox that's clearly not the case, as the resident working set of Firefox grows for me until the system starts thrashing. Firefox is the ONLY app I use that misbehaves so badly, and it typically grows to 1-2GB before I give in and restart it ("give in" because I typically have a lot of tabs open and it's a pain to restart, even with the session restore feature). That's despite turning off all the annoying "features" related to caching etc. that eats memory. Even if I close down all but one tab none of this memory gets released.
For me, FF3 beta 2 was even worse than FF2 - I had to go back. I'll give the new beta another try, but I'm slowly getting used to using Opera and Safari instead, and Safari in particular is so much faster than Firefox that I might just manage to learn to tolerate it's user interface and drop Firefox entirely (and before you ask, while Safari eats quite a bit of memory too, it actually does release it again when I close tabs and doesn't keep growing and the same goes for Opera)
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I see you haven't bothered to RTFA. Go do that before you start whining next time.
That's after I restarted it an hour or so before I went to bed, and I just got up, so I haven't done much surfing in the meantime. For me that is normal behavior for Firefox.
I have Safari running as well, and after the same instance running for several weeks it's currently using about 270MB. But with Safari that memory usage is pretty constant - currently I have an AJAX app that causes caching of a ton of images open in it, and if I navigate away from it Safari will eventually free memory.
My Firefox instances never shrink and eventually CPU usage goes through the rough and stays high regardless what I do too. This is 2.0.11. I've tried no extensions, and it makes no difference. I've tried Firefox 3 beta2 and it was actually worse for me.
The US government publishes many of the best public map sources worldwide into the public domain. Not only TIGER (from the Census Bureau) but also vast quantities of imagery, radar topography etc. from NASA, massive amounts of data from the USGS (US Geological Survey), USDA (US Department of Agriculture), and a number of other agencies, including intelligence sources such as the National Geo-Spatial Intellligence Agency.
Of course I'm sure there are details they don't publish, but overall the US government is fantastic when it comes to releasing data for GIS use - I'm usually pretty critical of the US government, but when it comes to public access to data they are great. In the case of GIS they make the EU member states seem like a bunch of medieval fiefdoms that still believes map data to be a strategic resource. Incidentally, for many countries the best publicly available data comes from US intelligence sources. Unfortunately they are usually not detailed enough to be a good substitute for the local maps (the US agencies in question don't generally have a need to collect more detailed data).
As for creative commons solutions, for mapping it's easy to compare input from multiple sources, because there IS a single verifiable truth, and if someone keeps contributing data that disagrees with everyone else or frequently gets corrected and/or that generally doesn't match feature extracted data from satellite photos, then it's easy to discard their data or require it to be reviewed before inclusion.
In other words, with OSM you can say with a reasonably high degree of certainty that if traces from N different people with a long history of editing the maps consistently agree with eachother and have a good match rate with feature extracted data, contributions that are consistent with eachother and come from contributors that have a history of agreeing with the N people in the core are likely to be good.
Once the map gets to a certain level of detail that means you can very well make it hard to get changes accepted (and just publish a layer of "untrusted" changes if people want them).
Getting enough data is the challenge for OSM, not ensuring the quality remains high once they reach critical mass.
If the Ordinance Survey opened up their maps people would still want to improve on them - they'd just have a far better starting point.
Unfortunately the situation with the Ordinance Survey doesn't look like it'll change for a long time.
Life in prison has exactly the same benefits in terms of preventing a person from committing a crime again. The death penalty only has any "benefits" if you either agree that society should condone violence as vengeance or believe it is an effective deterrent. Personally I don't believe there's any proof is any good as a deterrent, and I think using it as vengeance is downright wrong - condoning it creates a society that is in effect teaching people that killing people is sometimes the right thing to do.
Given that they're responding to someone who effectively made the claim that being into BDSM makes you more likely to be a murderer, I don't find it funny at all, rather a sad indictment of how intolerant society.
I believe the GP took issue with why the person who made the original statement felt the need to include BDSM on the list. Frankly, just pointing out he confessed to killing eight people should be sufficient - the BDSM and death yoga bits seems rather insignificant and pointless, unless you're someone who actually think that practicing either make you significantly more likely to be a murderer, in which case I'd really like to see references.
Most serial killers are described by a lot of people who know them as nice people. I'd venture to say that a lot of people who are "batshit crazy" learns to hide it well enough to function normally. Of course we don't really know whether or not this Sean Sturgeon character is as crazy as he looks - most of what's been written about him in the media is a result of his court battles with Reiser in the past where Reiser made lots of bizarre claims about him, combined with his supposed confession of multiple murders. However, since the original articles about that I've heard nothing - you'd expect the media would've been all over someone confessing to being a serial killer. Either something funny is going on, or the police checked it out and found the story to be bullshit, if he even did confess in the first place.
While there's no proof she's dead, there ARE a lot of indications she at least didn't disappear of her own free will. She just got a new job, she left her kids, she's made no further withdrawals on her bank accounts, and a lot of other details. Doesn't mean it can't have happened, but if I was a prosecutor I'd be reluctant not to at least try given all the weird stuff in this case.
You'd think geeks would be more accepting of overloading. A name doesn't HAVE to be used for only one thing you know.
Occams razor is also irrelevant. Any person trying to apply it to a criminal case really should be thrown off the jury ASAP. The entire point with "beyond all reasonable doubt" is that unlikely stories ARE sometimes true, and you don't want to risk convict just because there's a simpler explanation than what the defense has been able to present. It's not often cases with perfect defenses go to trial, because despite what TV tells you the prosecutors aren't generally out there to "get" someone at all cost - they're trying to get the right person. Both because it's their job and because they look incredibly bad if they keep losing cases where they were obviously wrong. If the defense can come up with a watertight defense, they'd likely be able to avoid ever going to trial.
So far I've seen lots of weak evidence in this case. I've also seen lots of weak explanations, and a lot wild claims, but they fit well with Hans' personality based on his past run-ins with Nina and with Sean Sturgeon that paint Hans as eccentric at best, and a raving lunatic at worst.
My opinion so far is that Nina is dead, and that chances are good that Hans did it, but that the evidence in no way are sufficient to justify convicting him. The fact that they have no body is a huge obstacle. The fact they have only small amounts of blood, and haven't been able to conclusively show anything about it (the person analyzing the blood sample recently had to admit in court she'd made a mistake in analyzing the small amount of blood found, even) is another problem. The fact the children were conveniently sent out of the country and conveniently not given a chance to testify, is another big problem (for that matter, the fact that they've been in the custody of Nina's parents, who are vocally against Hans, means they'd probably be worthless as witnesses anyway).
Beyond that there's small bits of things that paint a picture of Reiser as weird, and that may make him look suspicious, but that doesn't mean much as evidence, such as the car seat, the books (if he's guilty he'd be an idiot or madman to buy them - perhaps he is, or perhaps he's not guilty and just didn't consider the fact that the books might be found and/or used against him), that he showed up to pick up the kids (he was in a prolonged custody battle and believed Nina was a bad influence - if they had an argument before she disappeared there are lots of other stupid things he might have decided to do, such as taking the kids and fleeing, or just taking them out to spend time with them because he feared not seeing much more of them).
I've written on the problem with the blood "evidence" found before. Two years ago, my wife fell towards our kitchen door and thrust her arm through a glass pane. She got a cut that was about two inches long right alongside the main artery in her lower arm, and cut a tendon leading to her hands (luckily it was an unused one - apparently some people have an extra tendon that has no affect on hand movement). Before I managed to get something wrapped around it and slow down the bleed there was blood all over the hallway and parts of the kitchen. Literally pools of it - I would not be surprised if she lost quarter to half a liter (thats roughly half a pint to a pint for the metric challenged).
Luckily everything went well. In this case the damage was bad enough she had to go to hospital, and so there was a record, and if she'd disappeared at any point later, that record likely mean nobody would find it too suspicious that there's still blood in the hallway and kitchen - we occasionally find a spot we hadn't noticed as it found it's way eve
In Hans case, if you follow the court reporting (Wired has excellent coverage), his behavior even in court is so bizarre and counter-productive that I could easily believe he didn't realize how buying the books etc. would look. Of course, he could be acting, but if he thinks looking like a madman to the jury will help his defense it would seem he's twisted enough not to need to act. He comes with frequent outbursts, seems to regularly ask to or threaten to fire his attorney (the judge has told him he won't allow it), and generally seems to behave like someone with absolutely no understanding of how to come across like a likable, normal person.
The other things are things I care about, though, and essentially means I'll stay away from buying any BluRay disks until all the security measures have been properly broken.
A huge percentage of users are behind routers that NAT anyway, and don't notice or even know if their router supports port translation or default forwarding of incoming connections.
My home network is NAT'd, and yes, I can do what you describe, but the router I'm connected to my ISP via has a public IP address and supports NAT with port translation etc. If my router hadn't had a public IP address, there'd be no way for me to transparently connect to it from outside my ISP's nework.
That said, an alternative that is definitively possible is for ISP's to start NAT'ing everyone by default and handing out public addresses only to customers who ask. Most people would never know the difference, and frankly for many of them it'd improve security (slightly, at least).
Another alternative is for them to give out v6 addresses, hand out routers with dual stacks to their customers and do NAT style translation to public IPv4 space combined with giving v4 addresses to customers that ask.
I depend on having a public IP, but if my ISP put something like either of those two alternatives in place I'd be perfectly happy with it. Even if they'd charge me a nominal amount.
And that might be a good idea for IP space in general: Charge a small fee per usable IPv4 address allocated from the RIR's. If you pay say $1 per IP address it doesn't matter much for a small business, but it will make a difference to the people holding on to huge chunks of IPv4 space where most of it either is unused or could be switched to local NAT'd addresses. Allocate the funds raised to IPv6 transition projects that anyone can apply for if they give up a certain percentage of their IPv4 space.
At first we tried poking in the textual strings of BASIC programs into memory, not realizing that even BASIC programs were stored in a more advanced way (on the C64 they were tokenized and keywords were stored as mnemonics to save space and speed up the interpreter). When we found out about the mnemonics bit we tried poking them in, which might've would've worked if we'd put them in the right locations and run them as basic programs instead of trying to use "sys" to call it. Finally one of us got hold of an assembler, and eventually a book on assembler programming.
I think it took a year or so from we started exploring it until we actually were writing simple assembler programs.
While an adult would've had an easier job finding and obtaining books about it instead of fumbling around the way we did, it does illustrate how much harder obtaining technical knowledge was.
Already when I got an Amiga it was far easier - there was a number of technical books (my first one for the Amiga was probably the Advanced System Programmers Guide), and mainstream computer magazines were running articles on assembler programming and other languages.
When I got a modem it got almost trivial.
If I'd started fresh again today, I'd probably just gone to wikipedia, followed by going to a search engine and searching for "assembler tutorial"
x86 assembler put me off, though. I haven't done any serious assembler programming since my Amiga days largely for that reason - when you've done M68k assembler, x86 assembler looks about as fun as poking your eyes out with a fork.
If you seriously think you'll stop your kids from accessing stuff you don't like by blocking it, you're an idiot.
In other words you didn't have any friends with access to German or Danish porn mags. Hustler has always been tame - I remember how disappointed I was the first time I saw Hustler and realized how soft it was.
Not to mention the problem of defining what porn is. Bare breasts are common in European newspapers. UK newspapers even have their "page 3" girls, many of which have been under 18 (Samantha Fox, for example, had her "debut" at 16 with the consent of her mother, an age at which the pics of her bare breasts would've been considered child porn in many countries). Is it porn? Some of it clearly is there primarily to titillate, while other uses of bare breasts are there to illustrate the stories, and isn't considered to be racy at all in the countries it's published in.
When Janet Jackson bared her nipple on American TV, almost every newspaper in Europe displayed the pics, the down market ones in an attempt to be racy and because celebs always sell well, the rest to let us laugh at how puritan the US public is. Was that porn?
Some TV channels in the UK have bare boobs on TV almost every evening - because it sells, not for any other reasons. But most of it would never be considered porn by a European public. Considering the response to Janet's nipple, though, it'd cause riots in some parts of the US.
If you extend that filtering to apply to page titles it'd mean most UK newspapers would belong in the .xxx domain. You're in any case just trying to evade the real issue.
Many of them also print nude pics, including pictures that would be illegal in many countries (some page 3 girls baring their breasts in UK newspapers have been 16 or 17, for example), but while UK newspapers are infamous for their "oh, we are so naughty, nudge, nudge, wink, wink" attitude, most European countries have newspapers that regularly feature nudity ranging from innocent uses because none of their readers actually considers it dirty, to intentionally trying to sell on sex.
In other words, forcing people into ".xxx" is stupid - no two countries agree on what porn is, and even within a single country attitudes are vastly different. And if one, as you suggest, don't force anyone into ".xxx" nobody will leave ".com" names for one simple reason:
While you are right that no porn operator want kids leeching, making their sites easy to filter means they WILL be filtered by overzealous governments, and also by a lot of places like employers, libraries, many internet cafees and any number of locations where adults might otherwise decide to look at their sites. These companies might operate a ".xxx" domain TOO, but they'd be damn stupid to limit their exposure to adults by making their sites easier to block.
For me, FF3 beta 2 was even worse than FF2 - I had to go back. I'll give the new beta another try, but I'm slowly getting used to using Opera and Safari instead, and Safari in particular is so much faster than Firefox that I might just manage to learn to tolerate it's user interface and drop Firefox entirely (and before you ask, while Safari eats quite a bit of memory too, it actually does release it again when I close tabs and doesn't keep growing and the same goes for Opera)