I guess... that they are not glamorous enough to tickle the imagination of the best and brightest.
No, remarkable progress has been made. The problem is that the appropriate use is rare enough that it's not worth the time to teach the algorithms to most students - the time would be better spent on other algorithms.
But the results can be dramatic in those one-off situations that can use the algorithm. My professor mentioned rewriting the med student-training hospital matching program and the intern-specialty scheduling programs using network flow algorithms. Overnight runs now take seconds.
I think the key algorithms we studied in the mid-90s were developed in the late 80s. If my poor memory is right, the complexity dropped from O(n^3) to something like O(n^lg(n)) or O(n^lg(lg(n))).
There's even more stunning improvement in the algorithms for solving multidimensional partial differential equations. (e.g., weather). Put a modern vector processor supercomputer running the algorithms from the 70s in one room, and a TRS-80 running the latest algorithms in another room, and the TRS-80 will easily beat the supercomputer. (Assuming it has sufficient memory to hold all of the model data, of course!)
Implement the modern algorithm on a 1024-node cluster....
They're coupled, but independent in the sense that you have to solve the problem of getting the planes into place _and_ the problem of getting the people into place. The crew that flew a plane in doesn't have to be the crew that flies it out. You can deadhead crew but you can't strap a 737 onto the back of an A3.
Seriously, one of my pet peeves is people thinking that there's something special about (thermo)nuclear explosions. They do produce a lot of radioactive fallout, but that takes days to kill.
I guess it's because of two factors.
1) the stories out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What people forget is that there's several orders of magnitude more energy in a thermonuclear explosion than an atomic explosion - iirc the LD50 rings for death from radiation vs. the other effects are inverted.
2) there were discussions of developing radiation-enhanced weapons ("neutron" bombs) in the 70s. These were specialized weapons designed to produce far more radiation than typical for such weapons.
Unfortunately the logical endpoint of thinking about this too long without true comprehension is the "mininukes" proposed by Bush et al. It's one thing to say "nukes are just very large explosions" at 5MT, it's a very different thing to join LeMay and claim that 20kT nukes are the same.
A few years ago an apartment resident (iirc) did something similar. I don't remember the details, just that he shared some service with his neighbors.
His landlord came down on him hard. A local company had an exclusive contract on providing that service and they demanded that the apartment complex deal with it. IIRC he was threatened with eviction unless he dropped the service. The story made the "legal issues" segment of the local news broadcast, and the lawyer told him he didn't have any options. He may have even been forced to drop his personal service even if he didn't share it with neighbors.
I'm showing my age here but I remember when it took a federal law to invalidate absolute restrictions on small satellite dishes. Exclusive arrangements on cable tv service were common and widely enforced.
The law changed the environment, but you should still check your particulars. E.g., I can easily imagine an apartment or condo complex banning wireless stations because 1) they wish to minimize interference between neighboring units and 2) they wish to retain the option of providing wireless service throughout the complex as a benefit of renting there. That's less likely with detached housing HOAs, but not impossible.
It's far harder than that alone since you also have to get the aircraft back to the right city (many are in the wrong city due to airport shutdowns due to the weather). Obviously you want to optimize the number of passengers carried along for those flights, but at the same time you'll be "burning" allowed worktime for the crew.
Even worse the crew and aircraft are independent variables. Obviously you need a crew to operate a flight, but the crew may end up in the "wrong" city for the usual schedule. It may be better to leave a plane on the ground and fly its crew "deadhead" to the "right" city than to have them fly a load of passengers to the "wrong" city.
There are reasonably efficient algorithms to solve these problems, but we spent most of my entire second-semester graduate-level algorithms class studying them (network flows). The algorithms most developers would come up (including me after a decade of experience and graduate-level algorithm class) are extremely inefficient and scale horribly.
The bottom line is that it's easy to imagine a system that has no problem with pertubations from the regular schedule but is totally overwhelmed when starting from scratch. I hope the bean counter who saved the company a few bucks by insisting on far more modest hardware gets canned for his costly lack of foresight, but we all know that IT will catch the heat.
Maybe you'll "only" get second-degree burns from the fireball, but what about everything else in your vicinity exposed to the same energy?
Anyway, for large nuclear explosions radiation isn't an immediate concern. If you're close enough to catch much radiation you're already dead from the other effects. What kills you at distance is the overpressure wave and the radiant energy. The former knocks down structures and the second ignites fires that grow into firestorms.
If you think back to those early films of atomic bomb tests, that's why the paint on the house smolders (radiant energy) before being blown to kindling (overpressure wave). Terminator 2 showed the same sequence.
You might think you're safe from 2nd degree burns if you hang out side during the initial flash, but that won't do you much good if the house is blown down around you.
P.S., before somebody mentions it a nuke's nuclear reaction has stopped long before the fireball is a foot or so across - the size of the original warhead. Afterwards everything else is a case of extreme thermodynamics, the origin of the energy is irrelevant.
An impact's fireball is far more spread out, but it ultimately comes down to a very large fireball and local seismic effects.
Taking a contrary view, a strike (in an unpopulated area!) could be the best thing possible.
The media has focused exclusively on major strikes, but they're so rare that no politican or bureaucrat can spend serious money studying them without ridicule.
What's forgotten are the far smaller - and far more frequent - minor strikes. Think about strikes that happen once every 5000 years or so. No government will take a serious look at an event that happens once every 5000 years... unless it causes significant devastation and something could be done. A 1900 MT bomb (using numbers mentioned elsewhere) would cause significant "local" devastation (on the scale of state or small country) and would affect the country for a generation (and the entire world for years from the dust cloud thrown up).... but unlike pandemics and wars this is an event that can be predicted and possibly averted. Today spending, oh, $20 million/year to fully fund continuous monitoring of earth-crossing orbits would be difficult for politicans to justify. But with a serious scare within our lifetimes the political landscape would change.
Do I hope we'll actually have a strike? Of course not. But a good scare (or better yet a strike on a dark moon that briefly casts shadows on earth) would force attention on the risks of minor strikes.
As others have pointed out it's perfectly legal to distribute the source by CD only. You might need case law to disallow distribution via now-obscure media like 9 track tapes or punch cards.
With one-off CDs, it would be trivial to run the source through a tool that replaces every "%RANDOM%" string with, duh, some random string. A different string per instance, all written to a database linking the string to the person getting the source.
If I wanted to put the source online, I could do the same thing with an Apache module (or Java code) so it inserts the tags on the fly. In this case the tags would be linked to the user via authentication (I simply require a free registration to get source so I can notify you of security issues) or your ip address/browser if nothing else.
You would be shocked at the number of companies that don't compile with "-Wall" because they want to reduce the number of warnings seen. Gives them a false sense of security, I guess.
The same companies complain about fragile, flaky code. I'm a miracle worker when I come in, fix each type of warning in turn, then leave the build files with "-Wall" enabled.
Nobody can guarantee 100% identical binaries. You can't account for different versions of the compiler and linker, different optimization flags, etc.
I also don't follow your argument that nobody can do the same thing with my code. Remember the hypothetical situation was a niche market with only a few players. If the commercial players want to look at my source code to get ideas I don't care - it improves the products for everyone. Besides anyone who takes a serious look at the code for ideas would see why these strings are there and could easily strip them.
But if they copy my code wholesale I want to know that I've been treated as an unpaid staff programmer.
That's annoying but not indefensible. Demanding hundreds of dollars for a CD mailed domestically or providing the source as large a printed document would be, imho.
This raises an interesting question. Let's say I have a program for a niche market and there are commercial competitors. I provide the binaries online but distribute the source via a CD.
Buried in my code is a statement, perhaps in a function, is a statement like:
static const char[] xid = "alk24lCAmql4==";
which I might claim is a source control code but which is really a hidden serial number that ties the source to a particular CD. Compiling the code gives you a slightly different, but functionally identical, binary. But it also gives me a mechanism to test for my code in your commercial products. (So it really is a "source control code"!) Does that violate the GPL?
I'm struggling to think of any reason why you would want to modify the JRE. That's comparable to hacking the gcc compiler or C library to add a new feature. It might solve a local problem, but will introduce numerous global ones.
JNI is more than adequate if you only need to access external libraries.
Language extensions could be handled by the C/C++ model - write a tool that compiles your "j++" code into standard java and then compile that.
Don't forget XDoclet. Add a few comments and a few templates and your POJO will create its own access layer. This could be anything from a simple DAO to a EJB.
Something else that's been overlooked - hibernate is not only compatible with jboss, it's actually funded by it now. The idea is that hibernate handles local storage and jboss wraps it with an EJB layer. If you're small enough to run everything locally you should be able to use XDoclet to create trivial "pass-through" EJB classes. It's then a trivial matter to switch to JBoss as your needs grow.
Are you talking about low-level depictions or over-the-top material? E.g., is the violence shoving and yelling or Rambo?
I've read that studies showed that children exposed to violent scenes were far more likely to be aggressive to their peers than children exposed to non-violent scenes. Even if they're isolated they demonstrate more anxiety and agitation.
On the other hand children don't pick up on sexual content (flirting, kissing, "making out") and teenagers are aroused but don't return to the classroom to cop a feel from a classmate. At least no more often than usual....
Homosexuality could be a manifestation of something entirely unrelated but beneficial to the gene pool.
Two examples that are nearly canonical now:
1) People of African descent have a significantly higher risk of sickle cell anemia. Clearly an evolutionary mistake, right? Wrong - the same gene provides significantly better protection against malaria. Some people die miserable deaths from SCA, but in evolutionary terms that's preferable to many more people dying miserable deaths from malaria.
2) There appears to be a high correlation between genius and mental illness, esp. bipolar illness. Some people think this is two different aspects of the same thing - eliminate bipolar illness and you'll eliminate genius. For all we know this is why homo sapiens sapiens has spread across the planet while all of our evolutionary forebears and cousins had limited ranges.
I believe you're thinking of "obscenity." See this recap of the Miller test.
I haven't studied this extensively (but have given it serious study in an effort to understand what may, and what may not, be provided on a website), but it is my understanding that pornography (and other material!) can be "indecent" or "obscene." If it's obscene, e.g., photographic depictions of bestiality, child pornography or incest, it can be banned nationally. Determining exactly what's "obscene" can be a difficult problem.
On the other hand "indecent" material may be acceptable in some communities but not others. A few states prohibit any depiction of penetrative sex. Some permit depiction of penetrative hetereosexual sex but ban penetrative homosexual sex. Some permit all (except the obscene items mentioned earlier). This is rapidly coming to the forefront as some aggressive prosecutors attempt to impose the highly restrictive standards of some communities nationally since the material is available in those communities via the postal system or the internet - in 1973 when the Miller test was invented "porn" was distributed in seedy adult theaters, not in the privacy of the viewer's home using either a VHS tape or broadband connection.
A further complication is the different protection offered to different media. The courts are loathe to ban written material, and drawings also get a fair amount of protection. One of the big questions before the court recently was photorealistic CGI and photoshopped images - as I recall the courts ruled that this material can't be banned solely because it -appears- to contain prohibited material.
BTW the Comstack act was late 1873, here. It criminalized distribution of information on birth control or abortions, and has never been revoked. As late as 1965 (just a few years before Roe v Wade) the state of Connecticut was still prosecuting doctors for prescribing birth control to married couples - see Griswold
Tobacco isn't increasingly restricted (sales to adults only, no smoking in an increasing number of public places) because it's addictive.
It's restricted because there is a tremendous amount of compelling evidence that smokers are far more likely to die than non-smokers. Heart disease, lung cancer, etc. Yet nearly all smokers picked up the habit in their teens and were addicted long before they truly comprehended the risks. Essentially nobody picks up smoking after their early 20s.
BTW, I don't think I've ever known an adult smoker who didn't wish he or she could quit. But that may be this environment - this being Boulder (and me running marathons) I can't think of anyone in my circle of acquaintances who currently smokes.
On the other hand it's clear that caffeine is addictive. It's so addictive that some hospitals are now giving intervenous caffeine to their surgery patients to minimize withdrawal symptoms. But it doesn't cause significant harm (and may even be beneficial) so nobody worries about it. In fact it's shocking when it is regulated, e.g., the caffeine-free Mt Dew in Canada.
I hate to turn your dream into a nightmare, but all of my experience screams that this claim has nothing to do with the broadcast flag. It's a naked power grab to control the internet within the US, cloaked in the semi-defensible argument that it's merely ensuring that the (controversial itself) broadcast flag is enforceable.
Consider this: our theocracy has resumed obscenity prosecutions. The defense, in a nutshell, is that the "community" that establishes "community standards" no longer exists in the era of the internet - the porn palace is not some seedy theater that you need to keep your kids from, it's a consumer viewing porn (via subscription, encrypted channels or the internet) in the privacy of their own home. The alternative is to allow the most repressed community in the country to define what's acceptable for the rest of the country.
Maybe this defense will succeed. Maybe it won't. But if it succeeds the feds won't have much authority to go after porn sites - or anything else that offends them. (I'm especially concerned about a latter-day Pentagon Papers case. There's a staggering disconnect between what this administration claims is true and what's the ground reality... and the incoming cabinet and Congress looks like it's moving even further into fantasyland.)
Enter this brief. Even if the government loses this obscenity case, the FCC can step in and say that it's shutting down any site containing "obscene" material as it, alone, defines it. There's far, far too many sites to monitor manually so they'll undoubtably turn to secret lists like the kiddie filters - and besides hard and softcore porn we'll undoubtably discover that the filters block breast cancer and chicken recipes, sites that discuss your rights under the Bill of Rights (except for the second, oddly), the Constitution itself, websites critical of the incumbent president or supportive of the challenger....
In these circumstances, discussing and criticizing The List itself will undoubtably be verboten. That might give the nasty porn guys (and liberals) ideas on how to circumvent the restrictions.
I still have a few issues of Byte magazine from the late 70s. Remember when they had an annual "language" issue where they exposed readers to a new language - Lisp, APL, etc.?
Anyway, I have ads for 128k floppy drives for over $1000. 4k of memory would cost hundreds of dollars. All of this far beyond what a HS student could afford. The mass storage for my first two computers (and the default for the first IBM PCs) were cassette tapes.
On the flip side one of my college labs (1981 or so) was a SBC with a 8080, a hex keypad and LED display, and one of those new-fangled breadboard things. It was easy to wire up 74xx chips into the system for experiments.
Ah, for the days when you could hand-assemble your code and enter it via a hex keypad... (or via the large toggles on the front of an IMSAI.)
But it replaced a system that had been up 24/7 since 1999. Or maybe it was 1998. And it had locked up, screamed about a corrupt BIOS on the first reboot, then failed to come up at all on the second. It may have been the last system I bought.
When I did buy hardware I only bought what I couldn't reuse - MB, CPU, case & PS, memory.
But it's unfair to say that we don't upgrade at all. A few years ago I "downgraded" from a 1600x1200 large monitor to a much smaller 1024x768 LCD monitor. I bought it to eliminate flicker so I'm happier with the smaller screen.
You overlooked another cost - messages lost because of the need to run messages through a spam filter so the recipient has any realistic ability to use email.
How many of us haven't been pissed because we haven't heard back from somebody, only to learn that the message was blocked by the filter?
Stupid drug laws probably account for at least half of our prisoners. People serving 20-year no-parole sentences for possessing small amounts of drugs, crimes commited by small time drug dealers since they can't turn to the police or the court system to resolve disputes, people stealing property so they can afford drugs that are expensive due to the cost of an illegal importation and distribution system.
That's also behind much of the US murder rate. Somebody rips you off for a few hundred dollars? We would go to the police. They can't so they blow away the bastard.
This is why the "child handgun deaths" must be taken with a boulder of salt. Anyone under the age of 25 is considered a child, and there's no distinction made between a HS student blown away by an unstable peer and some low-level drug dealer killed in a turf war.
N.B., I'm not arguing that all drugs are equal or that they should be totally decriminalized. Sell drugs to a kid or near a school and expect to spend a long time in prison. Run a meth lab in your house and spend a long time in prison.
But I would rather see pot decriminalized, subject to purity laws, and taxed to pay for drug treatment programs than the current mess.
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No, remarkable progress has been made. The problem is that the appropriate use is rare enough that it's not worth the time to teach the algorithms to most students - the time would be better spent on other algorithms.
But the results can be dramatic in those one-off situations that can use the algorithm. My professor mentioned rewriting the med student-training hospital matching program and the intern-specialty scheduling programs using network flow algorithms. Overnight runs now take seconds.
I think the key algorithms we studied in the mid-90s were developed in the late 80s. If my poor memory is right, the complexity dropped from O(n^3) to something like O(n^lg(n)) or O(n^lg(lg(n))).
There's even more stunning improvement in the algorithms for solving multidimensional partial differential equations. (e.g., weather). Put a modern vector processor supercomputer running the algorithms from the 70s in one room, and a TRS-80 running the latest algorithms in another room, and the TRS-80 will easily beat the supercomputer. (Assuming it has sufficient memory to hold all of the model data, of course!)
Implement the modern algorithm on a 1024-node cluster....
They're coupled, but independent in the sense that you have to solve the problem of getting the planes into place _and_ the problem of getting the people into place. The crew that flew a plane in doesn't have to be the crew that flies it out. You can deadhead crew but you can't strap a 737 onto the back of an A3.
YOU would be fried by radiation. :-)
Seriously, one of my pet peeves is people thinking that there's something special about (thermo)nuclear explosions. They do produce a lot of radioactive fallout, but that takes days to kill.
I guess it's because of two factors.
1) the stories out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What people forget is that there's several orders of magnitude more energy in a thermonuclear explosion than an atomic explosion - iirc the LD50 rings for death from radiation vs. the other effects are inverted.
2) there were discussions of developing radiation-enhanced weapons ("neutron" bombs) in the 70s. These were specialized weapons designed to produce far more radiation than typical for such weapons.
Unfortunately the logical endpoint of thinking about this too long without true comprehension is the "mininukes" proposed by Bush et al. It's one thing to say "nukes are just very large explosions" at 5MT, it's a very different thing to join LeMay and claim that 20kT nukes are the same.
A few years ago an apartment resident (iirc) did something similar. I don't remember the details, just that he shared some service with his neighbors.
His landlord came down on him hard. A local company had an exclusive contract on providing that service and they demanded that the apartment complex deal with it. IIRC he was threatened with eviction unless he dropped the service. The story made the "legal issues" segment of the local news broadcast, and the lawyer told him he didn't have any options. He may have even been forced to drop his personal service even if he didn't share it with neighbors.
I'm showing my age here but I remember when it took a federal law to invalidate absolute restrictions on small satellite dishes. Exclusive arrangements on cable tv service were common and widely enforced.
The law changed the environment, but you should still check your particulars. E.g., I can easily imagine an apartment or condo complex banning wireless stations because 1) they wish to minimize interference between neighboring units and 2) they wish to retain the option of providing wireless service throughout the complex as a benefit of renting there. That's less likely with detached housing HOAs, but not impossible.
It's far harder than that alone since you also have to get the aircraft back to the right city (many are in the wrong city due to airport shutdowns due to the weather). Obviously you want to optimize the number of passengers carried along for those flights, but at the same time you'll be "burning" allowed worktime for the crew.
Even worse the crew and aircraft are independent variables. Obviously you need a crew to operate a flight, but the crew may end up in the "wrong" city for the usual schedule. It may be better to leave a plane on the ground and fly its crew "deadhead" to the "right" city than to have them fly a load of passengers to the "wrong" city.
There are reasonably efficient algorithms to solve these problems, but we spent most of my entire second-semester graduate-level algorithms class studying them (network flows). The algorithms most developers would come up (including me after a decade of experience and graduate-level algorithm class) are extremely inefficient and scale horribly.
The bottom line is that it's easy to imagine a system that has no problem with pertubations from the regular schedule but is totally overwhelmed when starting from scratch. I hope the bean counter who saved the company a few bucks by insisting on far more modest hardware gets canned for his costly lack of foresight, but we all know that IT will catch the heat.
Maybe you'll "only" get second-degree burns from the fireball, but what about everything else in your vicinity exposed to the same energy?
Anyway, for large nuclear explosions radiation isn't an immediate concern. If you're close enough to catch much radiation you're already dead from the other effects. What kills you at distance is the overpressure wave and the radiant energy. The former knocks down structures and the second ignites fires that grow into firestorms.
If you think back to those early films of atomic bomb tests, that's why the paint on the house smolders (radiant energy) before being blown to kindling (overpressure wave). Terminator 2 showed the same sequence.
You might think you're safe from 2nd degree burns if you hang out side during the initial flash, but that won't do you much good if the house is blown down around you.
P.S., before somebody mentions it a nuke's nuclear reaction has stopped long before the fireball is a foot or so across - the size of the original warhead. Afterwards everything else is a case of extreme thermodynamics, the origin of the energy is irrelevant.
An impact's fireball is far more spread out, but it ultimately comes down to a very large fireball and local seismic effects.
Taking a contrary view, a strike (in an unpopulated area!) could be the best thing possible.
... but unlike pandemics and wars this is an event that can be predicted and possibly averted. Today spending, oh, $20 million/year to fully fund continuous monitoring of earth-crossing orbits would be difficult for politicans to justify. But with a serious scare within our lifetimes the political landscape would change.
The media has focused exclusively on major strikes, but they're so rare that no politican or bureaucrat can spend serious money studying them without ridicule.
What's forgotten are the far smaller - and far more frequent - minor strikes. Think about strikes that happen once every 5000 years or so. No government will take a serious look at an event that happens once every 5000 years... unless it causes significant devastation and something could be done. A 1900 MT bomb (using numbers mentioned elsewhere) would cause significant "local" devastation (on the scale of state or small country) and would affect the country for a generation (and the entire world for years from the dust cloud thrown up).
Do I hope we'll actually have a strike? Of course not. But a good scare (or better yet a strike on a dark moon that briefly casts shadows on earth) would force attention on the risks of minor strikes.
Not an issue if you only watch one channel.
Oh look, it's Colonel Carter in a slick leather outfit!
As others have pointed out it's perfectly legal to distribute the source by CD only. You might need case law to disallow distribution via now-obscure media like 9 track tapes or punch cards.
With one-off CDs, it would be trivial to run the source through a tool that replaces every "%RANDOM%" string with, duh, some random string. A different string per instance, all written to a database linking the string to the person getting the source.
If I wanted to put the source online, I could do the same thing with an Apache module (or Java code) so it inserts the tags on the fly. In this case the tags would be linked to the user via authentication (I simply require a free registration to get source so I can notify you of security issues) or your ip address/browser if nothing else.
You would be shocked at the number of companies that don't compile with "-Wall" because they want to reduce the number of warnings seen. Gives them a false sense of security, I guess.
The same companies complain about fragile, flaky code. I'm a miracle worker when I come in, fix each type of warning in turn, then leave the build files with "-Wall" enabled.
Nobody can guarantee 100% identical binaries. You can't account for different versions of the compiler and linker, different optimization flags, etc.
I also don't follow your argument that nobody can do the same thing with my code. Remember the hypothetical situation was a niche market with only a few players. If the commercial players want to look at my source code to get ideas I don't care - it improves the products for everyone. Besides anyone who takes a serious look at the code for ideas would see why these strings are there and could easily strip them.
But if they copy my code wholesale I want to know that I've been treated as an unpaid staff programmer.
Where do you get "flavours" out of this concept?
The working code is 100% identical. All that's different is unused strings used for tracking the code. Nobody blinks an eye with
static const char rcsid[] = "$Id$";
and this is nothing more than a variant that tracks who the code was distributed to. Unless they have a clue and strip out the strings.
That's annoying but not indefensible. Demanding hundreds of dollars for a CD mailed domestically or providing the source as large a printed document would be, imho.
This raises an interesting question. Let's say I have a program for a niche market and there are commercial competitors. I provide the binaries online but distribute the source via a CD.
Buried in my code is a statement, perhaps in a function, is a statement like:
static const char[] xid = "alk24lCAmql4==";
which I might claim is a source control code but which is really a hidden serial number that ties the source to a particular CD. Compiling the code gives you a slightly different, but functionally identical, binary. But it also gives me a mechanism to test for my code in your commercial products. (So it really is a "source control code"!) Does that violate the GPL?
I'm struggling to think of any reason why you would want to modify the JRE. That's comparable to hacking the gcc compiler or C library to add a new feature. It might solve a local problem, but will introduce numerous global ones.
JNI is more than adequate if you only need to access external libraries.
Language extensions could be handled by the C/C++ model - write a tool that compiles your "j++" code into standard java and then compile that.
Don't forget XDoclet. Add a few comments and a few templates and your POJO will create its own access layer. This could be anything from a simple DAO to a EJB.
Something else that's been overlooked - hibernate is not only compatible with jboss, it's actually funded by it now. The idea is that hibernate handles local storage and jboss wraps it with an EJB layer. If you're small enough to run everything locally you should be able to use XDoclet to create trivial "pass-through" EJB classes. It's then a trivial matter to switch to JBoss as your needs grow.
Are you talking about low-level depictions or over-the-top material? E.g., is the violence shoving and yelling or Rambo?
I've read that studies showed that children exposed to violent scenes were far more likely to be aggressive to their peers than children exposed to non-violent scenes. Even if they're isolated they demonstrate more anxiety and agitation.
On the other hand children don't pick up on sexual content (flirting, kissing, "making out") and teenagers are aroused but don't return to the classroom to cop a feel from a classmate. At least no more often than usual....
Homosexuality could be a manifestation of something entirely unrelated but beneficial to the gene pool.
Two examples that are nearly canonical now:
1) People of African descent have a significantly higher risk of sickle cell anemia. Clearly an evolutionary mistake, right? Wrong - the same gene provides significantly better protection against malaria. Some people die miserable deaths from SCA, but in evolutionary terms that's preferable to many more people dying miserable deaths from malaria.
2) There appears to be a high correlation between genius and mental illness, esp. bipolar illness. Some people think this is two different aspects of the same thing - eliminate bipolar illness and you'll eliminate genius. For all we know this is why homo sapiens sapiens has spread across the planet while all of our evolutionary forebears and cousins had limited ranges.
I believe you're thinking of "obscenity." See this recap of the Miller test.
I haven't studied this extensively (but have given it serious study in an effort to understand what may, and what may not, be provided on a website), but it is my understanding that pornography (and other material!) can be "indecent" or "obscene." If it's obscene, e.g., photographic depictions of bestiality, child pornography or incest, it can be banned nationally. Determining exactly what's "obscene" can be a difficult problem.
On the other hand "indecent" material may be acceptable in some communities but not others. A few states prohibit any depiction of penetrative sex. Some permit depiction of penetrative hetereosexual sex but ban penetrative homosexual sex. Some permit all (except the obscene items mentioned earlier). This is rapidly coming to the forefront as some aggressive prosecutors attempt to impose the highly restrictive standards of some communities nationally since the material is available in those communities via the postal system or the internet - in 1973 when the Miller test was invented "porn" was distributed in seedy adult theaters, not in the privacy of the viewer's home using either a VHS tape or broadband connection.
A further complication is the different protection offered to different media. The courts are loathe to ban written material, and drawings also get a fair amount of protection. One of the big questions before the court recently was photorealistic CGI and photoshopped images - as I recall the courts ruled that this material can't be banned solely because it -appears- to contain prohibited material.
BTW the Comstack act was late 1873, here. It criminalized distribution of information on birth control or abortions, and has never been revoked. As late as 1965 (just a few years before Roe v Wade) the state of Connecticut was still prosecuting doctors for prescribing birth control to married couples - see Griswold
Tobacco isn't increasingly restricted (sales to adults only, no smoking in an increasing number of public places) because it's addictive.
It's restricted because there is a tremendous amount of compelling evidence that smokers are far more likely to die than non-smokers. Heart disease, lung cancer, etc. Yet nearly all smokers picked up the habit in their teens and were addicted long before they truly comprehended the risks. Essentially nobody picks up smoking after their early 20s.
BTW, I don't think I've ever known an adult smoker who didn't wish he or she could quit. But that may be this environment - this being Boulder (and me running marathons) I can't think of anyone in my circle of acquaintances who currently smokes.
On the other hand it's clear that caffeine is addictive. It's so addictive that some hospitals are now giving intervenous caffeine to their surgery patients to minimize withdrawal symptoms. But it doesn't cause significant harm (and may even be beneficial) so nobody worries about it. In fact it's shocking when it is regulated, e.g., the caffeine-free Mt Dew in Canada.
I hate to turn your dream into a nightmare, but all of my experience screams that this claim has nothing to do with the broadcast flag. It's a naked power grab to control the internet within the US, cloaked in the semi-defensible argument that it's merely ensuring that the (controversial itself) broadcast flag is enforceable.
Consider this: our theocracy has resumed obscenity prosecutions. The defense, in a nutshell, is that the "community" that establishes "community standards" no longer exists in the era of the internet - the porn palace is not some seedy theater that you need to keep your kids from, it's a consumer viewing porn (via subscription, encrypted channels or the internet) in the privacy of their own home. The alternative is to allow the most repressed community in the country to define what's acceptable for the rest of the country.
Maybe this defense will succeed. Maybe it won't. But if it succeeds the feds won't have much authority to go after porn sites - or anything else that offends them. (I'm especially concerned about a latter-day Pentagon Papers case. There's a staggering disconnect between what this administration claims is true and what's the ground reality... and the incoming cabinet and Congress looks like it's moving even further into fantasyland.)
Enter this brief. Even if the government loses this obscenity case, the FCC can step in and say that it's shutting down any site containing "obscene" material as it, alone, defines it. There's far, far too many sites to monitor manually so they'll undoubtably turn to secret lists like the kiddie filters - and besides hard and softcore porn we'll undoubtably discover that the filters block breast cancer and chicken recipes, sites that discuss your rights under the Bill of Rights (except for the second, oddly), the Constitution itself, websites critical of the incumbent president or supportive of the challenger....
In these circumstances, discussing and criticizing The List itself will undoubtably be verboten. That might give the nasty porn guys (and liberals) ideas on how to circumvent the restrictions.
I still have a few issues of Byte magazine from the late 70s. Remember when they had an annual "language" issue where they exposed readers to a new language - Lisp, APL, etc.?
Anyway, I have ads for 128k floppy drives for over $1000. 4k of memory would cost hundreds of dollars. All of this far beyond what a HS student could afford. The mass storage for my first two computers (and the default for the first IBM PCs) were cassette tapes.
On the flip side one of my college labs (1981 or so) was a SBC with a 8080, a hex keypad and LED display, and one of those new-fangled breadboard things. It was easy to wire up 74xx chips into the system for experiments.
Ah, for the days when you could hand-assemble your code and enter it via a hex keypad... (or via the large toggles on the front of an IMSAI.)
I bought a new system last week.
But it replaced a system that had been up 24/7 since 1999. Or maybe it was 1998. And it had locked up, screamed about a corrupt BIOS on the first reboot, then failed to come up at all on the second. It may have been the last system I bought.
When I did buy hardware I only bought what I couldn't reuse - MB, CPU, case & PS, memory.
But it's unfair to say that we don't upgrade at all. A few years ago I "downgraded" from a 1600x1200 large monitor to a much smaller 1024x768 LCD monitor. I bought it to eliminate flicker so I'm happier with the smaller screen.
You overlooked another cost - messages lost because of the need to run messages through a spam filter so the recipient has any realistic ability to use email.
How many of us haven't been pissed because we haven't heard back from somebody, only to learn that the message was blocked by the filter?
Stupid drug laws probably account for at least half of our prisoners. People serving 20-year no-parole sentences for possessing small amounts of drugs, crimes commited by small time drug dealers since they can't turn to the police or the court system to resolve disputes, people stealing property so they can afford drugs that are expensive due to the cost of an illegal importation and distribution system.
That's also behind much of the US murder rate. Somebody rips you off for a few hundred dollars? We would go to the police. They can't so they blow away the bastard.
This is why the "child handgun deaths" must be taken with a boulder of salt. Anyone under the age of 25 is considered a child, and there's no distinction made between a HS student blown away by an unstable peer and some low-level drug dealer killed in a turf war.
N.B., I'm not arguing that all drugs are equal or that they should be totally decriminalized. Sell drugs to a kid or near a school and expect to spend a long time in prison. Run a meth lab in your house and spend a long time in prison.
But I would rather see pot decriminalized, subject to purity laws, and taxed to pay for drug treatment programs than the current mess.