No, it's not a missconception and the FTL implies time travel arguement has nothing to do with the way things ``appear.'' Actaully, almost nothing from realitivity talks about the way things appear. Realitivity talks about the way things ARE based on a well calibrated measurment grid, i.e. taking into account seperation. This means the core of the theory is not interested in how long it takes for light to get to your eye. Generally, solving the problem of "how do things appear" (taking into account how long it takes light to get to your eye) is a MUCH harder problem.. that the general public knows almost nothing about.
Anyway, It's pretty easy to show that FTL implies time travel.. just consider what happens when you use your FLT from an accelerated referance frame. The light cone of the accelerated referance frame is rotated on it's side, so the FTL travel points backwards from the original referance frame. It's not hard to fill in the details from this picture.
Also, every physics person I have ever talked to about this says it is true. I think there is even a Hawking quote about "We have not seen any visitors from the future, so there is probable no way to go FTL."
Why dose everyone assume that Linux is impossible at the high school level? Mexico and France are doing it right? We should be pushing the story that using microsoft products dose not really prepare you for any sort of real computer work, but using linux dose.. and the rest of the world will have smarter students within 4 years.
I think a bigger threat than the computers rising up against us is us purposely replacing ourselves with them.
Why is this a bad thing? A race that could redesign their own brains would kick ass. Humans designing such creatures to replace humanity IS evolution. We should want to improve ourselves, even if it means replacing ourselves!
I don't see a "The Matrix" scenario happening, but in that movie, the one agent was talking about how once humans let the computers do their thinking for them, it was no longer the humans' civilization.
The computers would be a part of our culture and for a long time they would value our culture for the stability (and some types of stimulation) it brings to their subset of our culture. Eventually, they would repace us, but it would take a while. It's kinda like liberals and libertarians replacing concervatives. The two L's have MUCH better ideas, but people still look to the concervatives for stability.
So say we make these ultra powerful, problem solving computers, that happily chug along solving our problems, that's all well and good, but then what would keep us from becoming lazy complacent slobs?
Nothing. That is why the replacment process will probable be painfull. It will eventually become clear that it is stupid to have more children, so fewer people will have children.. and the population will shrink to reasonable museam levels. The computers will be nice to them because earth is one huge museam of the computers culturral past. The remaining people will not be the part of society making advances, but they will not be slaves. Most people understand that they are not the most intelegent person in the world.. and they are happy well adjusted people anyway. I think life will be pretty good for these people.. at least by 99% of humanities standards.
People have intelligence, yet at the same time, they make a lot of stupid decisions. Who's to say computers won't be the same way? Would they always agree? Would they argue with each other? With us? In movies like the matrix, and terminator, the computers and robots all have the same agenda. I'm not sure that would be the case.
People are animals which are designed to make decissions based on VERY little information. This is why we have shit like religion. We would eventually manage to create computers without these problems:
(a) They would have the scientific method build into them at a more fundamental level.
(b) They would have a personality_fork() function which would help them think abouty multiple things at once. This would allow them to more effectivly concider multiple possitions at once.
These are just the natural features you would want to achive a major increase in intelegence.. and they would also help you resolve conflicts.
Actually, the computers might not be stand alone systems, but intelegent human surogates, i.e. they are attached to a human. We would do this bcause it would be very hard to simulate some parts of our brains on a computer. This would mean that for a LONG time the computers who replace humanity would really be humans who have this little voice inside their head which is very logical and has that fork() function I was talking about.
Perhaps someone could start a project to produce a GOOD "censorware" product, one that's engineered to block the right kind of sites.
First, there is very good censorware for libraries. It's called putting the computers in the middle of the room where anyone might happen to look over you sholder, complain to the librarian, and have you kicked out. If your library has a big problem with porn (i.e. many complains daily) then just run a slide show on the circulation desk computers that runs through the newer files in the netscape cache directories of the web browsers. These ideas will be FAR more effective then a software only solution.
Actually, the AVS probable to a better job of preventing kids from seeing porn then censorware dose, so if you really want to keep kids out of porn, just run an AVS which pays the sites more.
Second, the religious right dose not really care about blocking porn. They want to block information on gay rights, women's issues, etc. Porn is just a way to get people to lissen. This means that releasing an open source blocking program would only help them, i.e. they would proide a free program too, and we would still need to fight the legislation they push.
The short version of the above statment is "we can not prevent the crazies from controlling the censorware, so it is better not to have censorware."
Third, you over estimate the danger of internet content to kids. This is one of those "takl to your kids and the problem will go away things."
Clearly, the only solution we have is to kill all attempts to install censorware in public places.. and just let parents make up their own minds about censorware.
Now, if we want to do somethings to really help we should start suing the censorware companies for false blocks and implementing these ideas.
It passes whatever the browser originally sent and is compliant as a standard Web Proxy. There is no way to determine it's not a Browser unless you have prior knowledge.
Wrong. I can use a hidden frame which is pointed to a blocked site like peacefire.org. The main page will have javascript to open up 10 prono windows and ActiveX to change your desktop and startpage back to porno, but these "features" will be set on a delay and will not take effect unless the hidden frame fails to appear.. which will normally only happen when the site is blocked.
The only problem is identifing that the hidden frame did not appear. This is no problem if you can write the hidden frame yourself, but it could be a problem to identify another page.
That's nice, in theory, but anyone who's actually done CGI knows that anything that the browser sends back should be treated as a lie.
I have perl scripts that identify themselves as: Mozilla/4.7 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.10 i386), how long do you think it'll be before the censorwares do the same?
Yes, this is true, but censorware *may* currently improve it's blocking ratio by idnetifing it's self to porn sites. If they were so stupid as to design it this way then we could exploit this flaw and it would be very difficult for them to fix without suddenly unblocking hundereds of porn sites who want to be blocked.
I would say it is more likely the porno sites identify themselves to the censorware via some tag. We can still exploit this via frames, but it is a lot more complex. Actually, we could just host a page with some javascript on peacefire.org, load it in a hidden frame, and detect the blocking of the page. There is nothing they can do to prevent this execpt unblocking peacefire.org.
We could also detect censorware via ActiveX, but if you were going to that amount of trouble youm ight as well just remove the censorware with ActiveX.
All it would take is to take a ban list, and use a nice harsh crypt or CRC sum on each entry, with different seeds for each entry - when you are testing a URL for p0rn-ness, extract its domain and test it, then add in the path as well, and check it. easy.
I would like to see people patenting ideas like this to prevent the censorware people from using them. See this post and it's parent. If we have these stupid software patents we may as well use them for something good.
(4) Currently blocking software dose not work and people will eventually figure this out, so we could patent all the workable blocking software technology to prevent anyone from using it (maybe let the ADL use it if we must let someone use it). The list of things we should patent include:
(a) All applications of artificial intelegence to scanning content either from the blocking software OR to create a master list. I am including simple search applications like looking for fleshtones commonly found in porn. I am also including the idea of using a combination AI / human interface where the AI flags the human and lets them check the content.
(b) Patent the simple protocoll ideas, like online blocking list updates and special codes the porn sites can give out to help the blocking software avoid them. Also, patent the buisness model ideas like using a common blocking standard which many diffrent groups can provide lists to. Note: I realise that there is prior art for some of this, but that did'nt stop amazon..:)
It would be really cool to kill this industry with software patents! Unfortunatly, this takes a lot of money. It might be possible to work out some deal where joe hacker submits the idea, the ADL's blocking software company foots the bill, and the EFF/ACLU controls everyone else access to the patent, i.e. get the anti-Nazi people to pay for it in exchange for being the ONLY blocking software which is allowed to use it.. and they would hopefuly not be permitted to censor anyhting but hate speach. It's not an idea situation, but it might be the only way to get the patents paid for.
Plus, it might make more people understand the problems with software patents (and intelectual property in general).
(5) We need to produce hard evidence that human censorship methods (i.e. the librarian ask someone to leave when they cause a problem) are more effective then blocking. There are a variety of variations on the human sencorship method, including having a flshtones alarm (or slide show) on the circulation desks computer which scans the web browser caches, but they all havethe property that they block a MUCH larger percentage of porn then censorware dose.
We also need to point out that human censorship is the ONLY thing which wil block the kinds of things that the AFA uses to drum up support (like someone changing the background to porn).
How are techno bands any different than any other sort of band?
I do not know how much you are into Techno, but I have experenced a LOT of going to the record store and buying Techno CDs just in the hopes that they are good.
I said that people very rarely buy CDs which they already have (pirated) mp3 versions of. Friends of mine may buy OTHER cds of the same band because they liked the one they pirated, but they don't buy the ones they've already pirated.
I know people who actually pirate the songs first, then buy the same album. I have goten the impression this is not uncommon. It's partially wanting to play the songs in a car and wanting the CD it's self.
Now, I would not recommend for the bands to depend on these people. I'd suggest that they upload diffrent mixes to the pirate sites. Plus, this makes it hard for pirates to get exactly the same stuff as on the album.
I guess I'm not understanding you, because I don't see how this changes much. If you upload your music to a pirate FTP, you're simply opening up another distribution door.
Yes and no. I definitly have used pirate sites as a form of radio when I had time to browse them and I know lots of other people (with fast dorm internet access) who do the same thing. Plus, you should remember that many bandz have essentially no chance of getting airplay, so mass uploadings are much better then nothing.
If every band in the world begins trying to "aggresively" upload their song(s) to every FTP site in the universe, the situation is no different than looking at mp3.com - tons of songs and bands you've never heard of, and won't download and listen to by random chance.
True, but the bands that get there first will still get some valuble publicity. By the time that all the bands figure out that it is better to be agressive then just post it on mp3.com then we will probable have real mp3 based radio which will manage the mess.
I do not expect the pirate scene to realy live that long once the bands figure out how to take advnatage of it, but I do expect it to be an importent stepping stone towards a better system.
Yes, we should all contribute to peacefire.org (and the ACLU, and the EFF), but do not forget that there is activism we can do on the coding side too. Examples:
(1) We need to get as many people as possible to link to peacefire.org and censorware.org. Actually, we need an XML blocked site of the day list which people can display on their web pages (ala a slashbox). Banned book lists are very effective in raising awairness of printed media censorship, but only when everyone displays the banned book list. Plus, this convinces members of special interest groups that their sites are being blocked.
If we could really get a campaign going to link to peacefire and mirror peacefire's info on banned sites and instructions for disabling the software.
(2) We need a Perl/CGI module to identify any blocking software that the person viewing your page is using. This allows your page to react diffrently depending upon wether it's viewer is using censorware or not. This could have a variety of intersting effects including:
(a) People putting up pages which turnned into pornography when viewed via censorware. This would be funny as shit; and lots of people doing this would mean that the chances of accedentally viewing porn would go way up when you install censorware.
(b) Technically, pedofiles could use these types of CGIs to identify children browsing the internet, so censorware could be accused of *possibly* attracting pedofiles to kids! More realistically advertisors would use the script to make advertisments which exploited children more effectivly and further endangered privacy.
(3) We need ActiveX controls which disable censorware! I know peacefire has instructions on disabling censorware, but an ActiveX control would be simple and lots more people would put it on their web pages.
There are a lot of other purely code / web projects which need people to work on them (like finding flaws in censorware).. these above projects are just the most obnoxious.. so they seem like fun to discuss.
Anyway, mp3 does provide a new distribution method, but how it's going to re-write the rules in the music industry is awfully shaky.
Unfortunatly, I must partially agree with your points, but I would like to point out that there are a lot of things we can do to help them. The first thing is to turn the pirate sites into an actuall promotion system instead of just a distribution system. This is what I mean by having people submit upload URLs for sites to some promotional outfit (or to the band directly) and the bands would upload their promotional material to thse sites.
This would bve a more valuble form of promotion if we added support for HTML in mp3 comments to the major mp3 players, i.e. click a button on the player to open a web page in a browser which included art, lyrics, advertisments, links to go buy CDs, etc. This is somehting programmers would do that could really help the independant artists and would make it much more effective to distribute free music. I'd say artists need to actually verbally give their web address in a promotional song now since the players do not support this.
Consider how many people you know that trade mp3s that actually go out to buy CDs of the bands they already have mp3'ed songs of (Among my friends, I can say exactly 0 have done this).
I do not personally buy CDs of bands which are booked by major record labels (protest), but I do have a LOT of friends whose buying habbits are significantly influenced bit by mp3s. Techno bands especially can do really well by distributing free music since there are a lot of techno bands and it can be hard to find ones you like without first having the mp3s.. and many people want records and not just CDs. Once a DJ friend of mine pointed at a box of records and said "That box probable cost me $10,000, not because the record in it are expencive, but because I had to buy those 20 boxes worth of records to get these good ones."
Actually, I would not be surprised to see mp3 promotion surpass radio promotion really soon for things like Techno, but remember puttingyour shit on mp3.com dose not count as promotion. You need to really have an agressing campaign of uploading and pushing it on people in IRC.
But we can stop this, if we put our minds to it. Remember DiVX? That evil little play-for-play disk that Circuit City and (Sony? refresh my memory....) tried to foist on us? Did we not squash it like a bug? can we not do it again? Are we men, or are we Logitech?
I had a funny idea about this. People could print up SDMI Warning stickers and go put them on SDMI compliant players in the stores. I guess it would say soemthing like "Warning: This product uses SDMI which means it limit your ability to play music you obtain from the internet or purchas independantly on CDs. SDMI products have been known to force you to waist disk space, prevent you from letting friends lissen to your music, degrade the sound quality of music obtained on the internet, and you may loose all the music that you store on your computer if you loose the player. We recommend that you consider buying a true MP3 player without SDMI support."
The whole thing is fscked up anyway; bands spend 2-300 days a year on the road promoting their latest blood, sweat and tears giving concerts at $50 a pop, and who gets rich? Some fat cat in an ivory tower who can't carry a tune in a bucket. Two things are trying to solve that. One is the fact that pressing CD's is so cheap any two-bit outfit can hit the club circuit and hawk their own, and the other is the pay-for-download MP3 sites, where small-time artists can get the dough for good jam with no media costs involved. Neither involves signing your life away to some fat cat.
You know what? RIAA HATES that. We should love it. We should support it. See that it thrives. Make the old adage true: Money talks, bullshit walks.
Amen! They make you sign your life away because they control the promotion channels.. but MP3s will change this. I keep waiting to see some guy who collects pirate site upload URLs and charges artists to upload their promotional material to all these sites. I would be a kick ass way to get yourself in the ears of a lot of people with very little effort.
I mean lets face it you won't see any money or promotion from mp3.com so you may as well try and go directly to the consumer.. maybe the consumer will like it.
Also, lets not forget that there are better ways to make a buck off of the music you produce then just charging for every song. You can give away a lot of songs just to get people to come buy CDs, shirts, hats, some other songs on MP3, etc.
Actually, if you are a really good musician who produces a lot of jam sessions and practices which are of reasonable quality then you can provide your fans with this stuff too. I would suggest putting up a song of the week for free and running a pay for access fan club where members can download past songs odf the week. Also, tell them how to set up their mp3 player to play random songs from the members only area. Once fans get addicted to lissening to diffrent versions of the same song every time there will be no going back to bland old CDs which are the same song every time you play it.. and the fans will happily fork over $20-30 a year for access to this archive.
What I meant to say was I do not agree the federal government has legal standing to perform these functions. Police protection, I think you will agree, is within the jurisdiction of local authorities.
Yes, we do need to distinguish between the powers of the federal government and the powers of state governments. We have erroded many of the checks and balances in our consititution. I think both parties have been pretty nasty about this. The two recent ones that the republicans passed were item veto and limitations on the appeals process.
I do not think that our founding fauthers really did that good a job of the federal vs. state balance. The thing you must take into consideration is that local polotics is extreamly oorupt. I think the best balance is to leave implementation of many things to the local governments, but let the federal gorvernment step in and say "no you can not do that" for civil rights situations and interstate commerce situations.
Example: I think *experence* has shown that federal cops, like the DEA, ATF, and FBI, are unaccountable, dangerous, and gernerally a bad idea., but the local cops will be very corupt. I think the solution is not to have federal and local cops taking away people's rights (like we have now), but to have local cops who live in fear of some federal agency like Internal Affairs but with a lot more power. This Internal Affairs would have the power to really ruin a cops life just on a wim, but would not have the power to do shit to a civilian. This agency would be very well funded and would have many agents that harassed the cops who do things like racial profiling (i.e. it would not be like our internal affairs which is only interested in coruption and not civil rights abuses). The key to all of this is that Internal Affairs can not really tell the local cops what to do, only what not to do.
While moonshots and computers are cute, the 20th century achieved nothing close to the dramatic increases in life expectancy and quality of life in comparison.
Life expectancy is not the only measure of uality of life. Computer contribute significantly to our quality of life by allowing one person to magnify how much work they get accomplished. Moonshots will evetually mean we are not vulnerable to being wiped out by a big rock in space. Actually, I think our 20th century advances are much more significant. We can only improve life expectancy so much, but things like computers, cell phones, and airplains increase the effective life expectancy by letting us work more efficently. Now, people here do not take advnatage of the extrea free time.. they just work more.. but that is nott he fault of the technology.. it just provides the extra time. Europeans do take advantage of more of their free time and you could probable show that a good portion of the free time europeans now have comes from 20th century inventions.
No, I'm pretty confident that federal (and local) funding of the all sciences is a really good idea. Unlike these social programs or the federal cops, it dose not cost much money and the return on investment frequently is really high, but the return on investment is difficult to predict, so private industry tends not to fund pure research into many branches of science (like mathematics).
We might find a way to pay for the sciences without government someday and it might generate a LOT more money then government ever could, but it has not been figured out. I do not think that the current patent system could really do it.
Why is anyone going to care when you can download everything with your specialized file community client? These guys are beta testing an XML-over-IRC client that does a ridiculously great job of distributing MP3s, even better than napster. Check out Liberty: http://www.dvd-copy.com/file_community_software.ht ml
This is really interesting! I would like to see a non-napster based protocoll, but I would also like to hear what the existing IRC network people have to say about it. Do you think automated interfaces to IRC run the risk to damaging the IRC community, i.e. do you think the IRC community is strong enough to prevent collages frm banning IRC access to student because of mp3s?
I think that the fact that news programs hold interviews on IRC shows that the community has enough clout to wistand these attacks of ignorance and fear that this project may induce, but I would be curious to hear if anyone had a diffrent oppinion.
We need a way to get the word aout about this shit and prevent customers from buying the players. One option is to go to stores and place stickers on the products which say "Warning this product is SDMI compliant and/or limits the consumers fair use rights" and explains to people why they want an mp3 player which dose not take away their rights.
This articles proposed solution culd be as vulnerable as DVDs, but I would not count on it. It sounded like the song is to be decrypted on one device only, meaning that you will lose your whole music collection when you replace your player. This will piss consumers off a lot more, but it is a stronger system then what DVDs used. Actually, this system would incurage the one-hit-wonders, i.e. why should I go out and find a good band to lissen to when I will loses the music eventually by upgrading players?
The good news is that that they will probable put this chip in the computer somelace where the datastream after the chip can be cought and they can not just stop selling CDs and tapes.
So, no, I don't accept that government has a legal right to take my money to help anyone, including me!
Ok, I guess this means that you do not accept the government paying for the cops and thus do not accept property rights. This is a position some people take, but it is every bit as utopian a position as the left-wing-commune-drop-outs. (Note: the definition of utopian is untest with a connotation of experence suggesting that it is unlikely to work)
Government exists to do the essential jobs that we can not get the free market or the culture to do. Now, we can discuss intelegently the (a) essentialness of the specific job and (b) the chance that the market will do the specific job.
First, I do not support universal health care. social security, the war on drugs, and others, but the reason I do not support these program is: they don't work and the market dose a better job. This is not some Ayn Rand philosophical mumbo jumbo about how the market *should* do a better job, but real life experence. You can bitch about taxes all you want, but once people realize that you have no real life experence to back up your claim that "we should not have a government" then they will ignore you.. and really prventing stupid programs like univeral health care will fall on those of us who you call the "freeloading left" who can make our arguemnts based on real evidence instead of philosophical bullshit.
Second, I support things like funding of the sciences and education. Why? Well countries who stop funding them seem to go in the shitter pretty quick. Now, we may figure out how to fund these by the private sector someday, but we have not figured it out today.. and experence suggests that to just stop funding them will not cause people to figure out how to privatly fund them.. it will just make people stupid.
If someone held me up, took my money, then used it to find a cure for cancer, I'd still be pissed off that I was robbed. Even more pissed if the robber had said "Listen, I know what's best here, so be a good boy and hand over the wallet before I shoot you". It's one thing to be a thug, another to be an Annointed thug.
You have an annointed thug as soon as you have property rights, period. (Unless, you subscribe to an objectivist utopian ideal of everyone not stealing becuase they are objectivists) The truth is we don't know how to live without an annointed thug, period. This leaves you tring to argue that the government taking your hard earned money is somehow diffrent from the government taking away other people's ability to use your property.. an arguemnt that you will ultimatly base on some form of baseless cultural assumption.
Now, I'm not saing the government should nationalize all the buisnesses. Once we have accepted the fact that the government is a nasty thing which needs to take you money to run programs to help everyone (like the programs which allow you to be owner of your property, i.e. the cops) and have thrown out al the philosophical bullshit about property being some form of primitive. Then we are ready to discuss exactly which programs are good and which ones are bad based on practical concerns. Example:
The war on drugs is very very bad because it waists money and takes away people's freedom when they did not do anything which significantly effects another person.
Science is good becuase it is cheap compaired to the benifits and might not get done without some funding.
it had every word you would expect to find in a porn site on the meta tags.maybe that would be all you need to cause censorware to block the site, rather then actually detecting censorware
Yes, that is a reasonable form of protest, but it is really not as much fun throwing porn at censorware..:)
how would you go about checking for the program in html/java/activex, anyway?
I was assuming that they identify themselves someplace (like the browser identificatin string or cookies), but they may not do this.
ActiveX could definitly do it, but if you are going to the truble of writing an ActiveX control that dtects censorware.. why not just write an ActiveX control that removes censorware?. It pops up a little window which tells them about how bad censorware is and asks "Do you want to remove the censorware installed on this system?" If the person hits yes then it deletes the censorware.
Oh, that would be a sweet deal if somebody did that, but I expect the relevant patents are taken and if not, there is obviously prior art.
Yes, there is lots of prior art for traditional keyword based and black list based censorware, but I doubt there is any prior art for applications of artificial intelegence or using ahuman to identify a picture as pornographic, so you should be able to get patents on these. Hell, you could probable get a patent on the idea of looking for fleshtones as a partial key in identifing porn.
The biggest problem is that patenting up all these ideas would coust a lot of money, but it is nice to think that we could "bring an end to the technological advancement of censorware" with a few well placed software and buisness model patents. If free speach groups like the ACLU controled these patents they could enshure that the only effective censorware was censorware which refused to sell to libaries/schools and did not censor gay rights, women's rights, etc. The situation is that no current censorware is really effective. People will realize this in a few years and parents would need to switch censorware packages.
On the other hand, we should just not censor at all,
Absolutly! When some stupid legilsator passes a censorship law the ACLU and other freedom advocates should sue them on behalf of GALD, NOW, and other sites that are being blocked unfairly, but we may not win these cases and we may no win public oppinion by telling censorship horror stories. Once we have really lost the civil rights fight then we should consider adopting a stratagy which dose protect people from censorship and minimize the damage.
The only problem that I see with your proposal is that when people get lazy censorship goes up. Under the block as necissary solution then censorship goes down when people get lazy, so we should first try to push a solutuion which allows content by default.
The big proble with blocking as necissary is that it can work in tandom with regular censorware. This is VERY bad because then the library patrons loose both privacy AND access to ligetimate information. I really want to find a solution which beats censorware and prohibits censorware, but I'm having trouble comming up with one.
Hey! I have the solution! We wil run a campaign to get people to modify their pages to detect when a browser is useing censorware and add pronography to the page! It would also add a message saing "Only people who use censorware see the pornography on this page." that would be great to be able to counter AFA propoganda with "Oh, yeah! well there are a lot of web pages which turn into porn when people look at them through censorware!":) (Ok, maybe It would not be that effective, but it is a funny idea.)
Given that a library would pretty much have to dedicate a terminal to it, and then you'd have to have people looking at it... I just don't see librarians using it.
One terminal is cheaper then placing blocking software on all the terminals.. and who said that a librarian needs to look at it all the time?
Part of the beauty of my solution is that when the public gets pissy about porn in the library the librarians can respond be keeping a closer eye on things. Actually, I would love to see some librarys who are forced by law to implement filtering choose this idea and then ignore it. The real question here is dose it provide a legal alternative to purchasing filtering software when the legislator passes filtering laws.
Also, I should point out that many people are more scared of closing the browser window and finding porn on the desktop or another browser window. Censorware dose *nothing* to protect against this, but this solution would protect against this sort of thing (assuming that you have a way to tell that the picture is stil in use and keep it in the slide show for the librarian). Plus, the librarians do not need to spend a lot of time looking at the monitor system to check for this sort of thing, since by definition it sits there for a while.
The real problem here is the pro-censorship groups, not the porn. Solutions provided have to be geared in such a way that they either expose the lies of organizations like the AFA or they provide a way to cut their arguments to ribbons.
Absolutly! The biggest problem with my solution is that it can be used in tandom with library filtering software. What I would really like to see is a solution that prohibited filtering. I am considering patenting my solution to force people to remove other filtering software, but I doubt I will really put that much effort into the idea.:)
Maybe one of the anti-censorship groups would be willing to lock up the patents on censorship technologies.. and only allow their use when they reduced censorship.
I think a similar rule would apply to surfing at a library terminal...since the terminal is in a public area, you would surrender your right to privacy at that terminal. Hence, there would be no real privacy problems with having a librarian watch the images that went by.
Execpt that (a) we should want to *increase* privacy and (b) you have no way of knowing if someone is monitoring what you are browsing (unlike your sex in a public place analogy). I don't really want to create a system the prevents an increase in privacy. This is why I proposed that the system would not say identify the terminal who loaded the image, so that as long as there is more then one person using the computers this prevents the librarian from just watching someone browse (I really feal this is important). Also, the images should be distorted enough that text is frequently unreadable by the librarian.
This could work, if libraries thought that their folks had the time to be nannies.
This is a possible problem, but part of the point of my proposal is that you place the monitor behind the circulation desk where they can not help but see it. Technically, someone should do research to find out if the librarians can learn to monitor the system without slowing down their other work (and to find out how effecting the solution is in the first place).
If the librarians do have a problem monitoring the system we could set up an AI to identify flesh tones and other porn image traits and attract the librarian's attention when this happened.
BTW, A nice side effect of this system is that the library has exactly as effective a porn blocking system as they need. If they have no problem with porn then the librarians ignore the system, but if they have a problem then the librarians pay attentin to the system. I would like to point out that I do not think anyone should install this system unless they need it, i.e. you have bums comming into your library to watch porn, but If they have already passed a law in your area requiring filters then this really is the perfect solution.
Actually, my biggist problem with the system is that it dose not exclude the use of filtering wsoftware, i.e. I would hate to see a library install filtering software, realise it did not work, install this system too, and end up with a system which blocked constitutionally protected speach AND risked violating people's privacy. The only way I can think to get arround this is to patent the idea, write the software (slid show program), and make the EULA require them to not use any other filting software. Also, maybe make the software to require a client to be run on each terminal and have the client deactivate all other filtering software? Is there an easyer solution?
A simpler approach is to make sure all terminal screens are in high traffic, highly visible areas. If you want privacy you can do it from home. The only tech problem posed by this problem is relocating the terminals and any associated connections.
Yes, this would be a simpler approach. The correct solution is:
a) If you do not have a problem then do not do anything. b) If there is some sort of problem, i.e. someone uses the library for porn frequently, then move the computers to high traffic areas. c) If you still have a problem OR if they pass a law requiring filters then implement the system I described.
I would like to stress that part of the point of my proposed solutuion is that it should meatt he requirments for filtering proposed by a law.. and if it dose not meat the requirments then you only need to explain to the legislators that filtering software is not effective enough to really stop porn.
IMHO, the only way Censoring will work is if someone takes the time to look through every file coming through the pipe: images,.html pages,.zip files, etc. Unless that's done, you risk blacklisting something that's valid.
You are correct, but since large numbers of pages are added to thie internet every day it is actually the only way to block effectivly too.
Since that's theoretically impossible (and expensive) Censoring will not work.
Technically, this is not totaly correct. There is not way to monitor people's hme use of the internet, but it is possible to monitor people's use of the internet in libraries. the solution is to share the web browser cahche directories and have a monitor computer which runs a ``slide show'' of all the images in the various terminals cache directories. This cmputer would be set up in a possition, like the circulation desk, where there is a librarian most of the time. Now, privacy concerns are a big problem with this system. It may be possible to correct the privacy problems by not telling the librarian which system the image is from and digitally distorting the image to make text hard to read, but I do not really know. Aanway, this is about the only solution with a really high rate of porn blockage (and it incedientaly could have a really low rate of blocking constitutionally protected speach)
Now, the question on everyone's mind is "If the above system is the only one which manages to block a gpod portion of the porn then why arn't the AFA going for something like that?" The answer is that the pro-censorship people do not care about blocking porn. They really care a lot more about blocking access to gay rights, women's rights, etc. sites (and It gives their friends in the censorship companies who make shure that the software blocks these things some money).
Question for people: What did you think of my blocking proposal? Can it's privacy concenrs be resolved? Would pushing this proposal to libraries in Utah where this law has been passed help discredit the AFA? How can we prove that the above system is better then blocking software?
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No, it's not a missconception and the FTL implies time travel arguement has nothing to do with the way things ``appear.'' Actaully, almost nothing from realitivity talks about the way things appear. Realitivity talks about the way things ARE based on a well calibrated measurment grid, i.e. taking into account seperation. This means the core of the theory is not interested in how long it takes for light to get to your eye. Generally, solving the problem of "how do things appear" (taking into account how long it takes light to get to your eye) is a MUCH harder problem.. that the general public knows almost nothing about.
Anyway, It's pretty easy to show that FTL implies time travel.. just consider what happens when you use your FLT from an accelerated referance frame. The light cone of the accelerated referance frame is rotated on it's side, so the FTL travel points backwards from the original referance frame. It's not hard to fill in the details from this picture.
Also, every physics person I have ever talked to about this says it is true. I think there is even a Hawking quote about "We have not seen any visitors from the future, so there is probable no way to go FTL."
Why dose everyone assume that Linux is impossible at the high school level? Mexico and France are doing it right? We should be pushing the story that using microsoft products dose not really prepare you for any sort of real computer work, but using linux dose.. and the rest of the world will have smarter students within 4 years.
I think a bigger threat than the computers rising up against us is us purposely replacing ourselves with them.
Why is this a bad thing? A race that could redesign their own brains would kick ass. Humans designing such creatures to replace humanity IS evolution. We should want to improve ourselves, even if it means replacing ourselves!
I don't see a "The Matrix" scenario happening, but in that movie, the one agent was talking about how once humans let the computers do their thinking for them, it was no longer the humans' civilization.
The computers would be a part of our culture and for a long time they would value our culture for the stability (and some types of stimulation) it brings to their subset of our culture. Eventually, they would repace us, but it would take a while. It's kinda like liberals and libertarians replacing concervatives. The two L's have MUCH better ideas, but people still look to the concervatives for stability.
So say we make these ultra powerful, problem solving computers, that happily chug along solving our problems, that's all well and good, but then what would keep us from becoming lazy complacent slobs?
Nothing. That is why the replacment process will probable be painfull. It will eventually become clear that it is stupid to have more children, so fewer people will have children.. and the population will shrink to reasonable museam levels. The computers will be nice to them because earth is one huge museam of the computers culturral past. The remaining people will not be the part of society making advances, but they will not be slaves. Most people understand that they are not the most intelegent person in the world.. and they are happy well adjusted people anyway. I think life will be pretty good for these people.. at least by 99% of humanities standards.
People have intelligence, yet at the same time, they make a lot of stupid decisions. Who's to say computers won't be the same way? Would they always agree? Would they argue with each other? With us? In movies like the matrix, and terminator, the computers and robots all have the same agenda. I'm not sure that would be the case.
People are animals which are designed to make decissions based on VERY little information. This is why we have shit like religion. We would eventually manage to create computers without these problems:
(a) They would have the scientific method build into them at a more fundamental level.
(b) They would have a personality_fork() function which would help them think abouty multiple things at once. This would allow them to more effectivly concider multiple possitions at once.
These are just the natural features you would want to achive a major increase in intelegence.. and they would also help you resolve conflicts.
Actually, the computers might not be stand alone systems, but intelegent human surogates, i.e. they are attached to a human. We would do this bcause it would be very hard to simulate some parts of our brains on a computer. This would mean that for a LONG time the computers who replace humanity would really be humans who have this little voice inside their head which is very logical and has that fork() function I was talking about.
Perhaps someone could start a project to produce a GOOD "censorware" product, one that's engineered to block the right kind of sites.
First, there is very good censorware for libraries. It's called putting the computers in the middle of the room where anyone might happen to look over you sholder, complain to the librarian, and have you kicked out. If your library has a big problem with porn (i.e. many complains daily) then just run a slide show on the circulation desk computers that runs through the newer files in the netscape cache directories of the web browsers. These ideas will be FAR more effective then a software only solution.
Actually, the AVS probable to a better job of preventing kids from seeing porn then censorware dose, so if you really want to keep kids out of porn, just run an AVS which pays the sites more.
Second, the religious right dose not really care about blocking porn. They want to block information on gay rights, women's issues, etc. Porn is just a way to get people to lissen. This means that releasing an open source blocking program would only help them, i.e. they would proide a free program too, and we would still need to fight the legislation they push.
The short version of the above statment is "we can not prevent the crazies from controlling the censorware, so it is better not to have censorware."
Third, you over estimate the danger of internet content to kids. This is one of those "takl to your kids and the problem will go away things."
Clearly, the only solution we have is to kill all attempts to install censorware in public places.. and just let parents make up their own minds about censorware.
Now, if we want to do somethings to really help we should start suing the censorware companies for false blocks and implementing these ideas.
It passes whatever the browser originally sent and is compliant as a standard Web Proxy. There is no way to determine it's not a Browser unless you have prior knowledge.
Wrong. I can use a hidden frame which is pointed to a blocked site like peacefire.org. The main page will have javascript to open up 10 prono windows and ActiveX to change your desktop and startpage back to porno, but these "features" will be set on a delay and will not take effect unless the hidden frame fails to appear.. which will normally only happen when the site is blocked.
The only problem is identifing that the hidden frame did not appear. This is no problem if you can write the hidden frame yourself, but it could be a problem to identify another page.
That's nice, in theory, but anyone who's actually done CGI knows that anything that the browser sends back should be treated as a lie.
I have perl scripts that identify themselves as: Mozilla/4.7 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.10 i386), how long do you think it'll be before the censorwares do the same?
Yes, this is true, but censorware *may* currently improve it's blocking ratio by idnetifing it's self to porn sites. If they were so stupid as to design it this way then we could exploit this flaw and it would be very difficult for them to fix without suddenly unblocking hundereds of porn sites who want to be blocked.
I would say it is more likely the porno sites identify themselves to the censorware via some tag. We can still exploit this via frames, but it is a lot more complex. Actually, we could just host a page with some javascript on peacefire.org, load it in a hidden frame, and detect the blocking of the page. There is nothing they can do to prevent this execpt unblocking peacefire.org.
We could also detect censorware via ActiveX, but if you were going to that amount of trouble youm ight as well just remove the censorware with ActiveX.
All it would take is to take a ban list, and use a nice harsh crypt or CRC sum on each entry, with different seeds for each entry - when you are testing a URL for p0rn-ness, extract its domain and test it, then add in the path as well, and check it. easy.
I would like to see people patenting ideas like this to prevent the censorware people from using them. See this post and it's parent. If we have these stupid software patents we may as well use them for something good.
(4) Currently blocking software dose not work and people will eventually figure this out, so we could patent all the workable blocking software technology to prevent anyone from using it (maybe let the ADL use it if we must let someone use it). The list of things we should patent include:
:)
(a) All applications of artificial intelegence to scanning content either from the blocking software OR to create a master list. I am including simple search applications like looking for fleshtones commonly found in porn. I am also including the idea of using a combination AI / human interface where the AI flags the human and lets them check the content.
(b) Patent the simple protocoll ideas, like online blocking list updates and special codes the porn sites can give out to help the blocking software avoid them. Also, patent the buisness model ideas like using a common blocking standard which many diffrent groups can provide lists to. Note: I realise that there is prior art for some of this, but that did'nt stop amazon..
It would be really cool to kill this industry with software patents! Unfortunatly, this takes a lot of money. It might be possible to work out some deal where joe hacker submits the idea, the ADL's blocking software company foots the bill, and the EFF/ACLU controls everyone else access to the patent, i.e. get the anti-Nazi people to pay for it in exchange for being the ONLY blocking software which is allowed to use it.. and they would hopefuly not be permitted to censor anyhting but hate speach. It's not an idea situation, but it might be the only way to get the patents paid for.
Plus, it might make more people understand the problems with software patents (and intelectual property in general).
(5) We need to produce hard evidence that human censorship methods (i.e. the librarian ask someone to leave when they cause a problem) are more effective then blocking. There are a variety of variations on the human sencorship method, including having a flshtones alarm (or slide show) on the circulation desks computer which scans the web browser caches, but they all havethe property that they block a MUCH larger percentage of porn then censorware dose.
We also need to point out that human censorship is the ONLY thing which wil block the kinds of things that the AFA uses to drum up support (like someone changing the background to porn).
How are techno bands any different than any other sort of band?
I do not know how much you are into Techno, but I have experenced a LOT of going to the record store and buying Techno CDs just in the hopes that they are good.
I said that people very rarely buy CDs which they already have (pirated) mp3 versions of. Friends of mine may buy OTHER cds of the same band because they liked the one they pirated, but they don't buy the ones they've already pirated.
I know people who actually pirate the songs first, then buy the same album. I have goten the impression this is not uncommon. It's partially wanting to play the songs in a car and wanting the CD it's self.
Now, I would not recommend for the bands to depend on these people. I'd suggest that they upload diffrent mixes to the pirate sites. Plus, this makes it hard for pirates to get exactly the same stuff as on the album.
I guess I'm not understanding you, because I don't see how this changes much. If you upload your music to a pirate FTP, you're simply opening up another distribution door.
Yes and no. I definitly have used pirate sites as a form of radio when I had time to browse them and I know lots of other people (with fast dorm internet access) who do the same thing. Plus, you should remember that many bandz have essentially no chance of getting airplay, so mass uploadings are much better then nothing.
If every band in the world begins trying to "aggresively" upload their song(s) to every FTP site in the universe, the situation is no different than looking at mp3.com - tons of songs and bands you've never heard of, and won't download and listen to by random chance.
True, but the bands that get there first will still get some valuble publicity. By the time that all the bands figure out that it is better to be agressive then just post it on mp3.com then we will probable have real mp3 based radio which will manage the mess.
I do not expect the pirate scene to realy live that long once the bands figure out how to take advnatage of it, but I do expect it to be an importent stepping stone towards a better system.
Yes, we should all contribute to peacefire.org (and the ACLU, and the EFF), but do not forget that there is activism we can do on the coding side too. Examples:
(1) We need to get as many people as possible to link to peacefire.org and censorware.org. Actually, we need an XML blocked site of the day list which people can display on their web pages (ala a slashbox). Banned book lists are very effective in raising awairness of printed media censorship, but only when everyone displays the banned book list. Plus, this convinces members of special interest groups that their sites are being blocked.
If we could really get a campaign going to link to peacefire and mirror peacefire's info on banned sites and instructions for disabling the software.
(2) We need a Perl/CGI module to identify any blocking software that the person viewing your page is using. This allows your page to react diffrently depending upon wether it's viewer is using censorware or not. This could have a variety of intersting effects including:
(a) People putting up pages which turnned into pornography when viewed via censorware. This would be funny as shit; and lots of people doing this would mean that the chances of accedentally viewing porn would go way up when you install censorware.
(b) Technically, pedofiles could use these types of CGIs to identify children browsing the internet, so censorware could be accused of *possibly* attracting pedofiles to kids! More realistically advertisors would use the script to make advertisments which exploited children more effectivly and further endangered privacy.
(3) We need ActiveX controls which disable censorware! I know peacefire has instructions on disabling censorware, but an ActiveX control would be simple and lots more people would put it on their web pages.
There are a lot of other purely code / web projects which need people to work on them (like finding flaws in censorware).. these above projects are just the most obnoxious.. so they seem like fun to discuss.
Anyway, mp3 does provide a new distribution method, but how it's going to re-write the rules in the music industry is awfully shaky.
Unfortunatly, I must partially agree with your points, but I would like to point out that there are a lot of things we can do to help them. The first thing is to turn the pirate sites into an actuall promotion system instead of just a distribution system. This is what I mean by having people submit upload URLs for sites to some promotional outfit (or to the band directly) and the bands would upload their promotional material to thse sites.
This would bve a more valuble form of promotion if we added support for HTML in mp3 comments to the major mp3 players, i.e. click a button on the player to open a web page in a browser which included art, lyrics, advertisments, links to go buy CDs, etc. This is somehting programmers would do that could really help the independant artists and would make it much more effective to distribute free music. I'd say artists need to actually verbally give their web address in a promotional song now since the players do not support this.
Consider how many people you know that trade mp3s that actually go out to buy CDs of the bands they already have mp3'ed songs of (Among my friends, I can say exactly 0 have done this).
I do not personally buy CDs of bands which are booked by major record labels (protest), but I do have a LOT of friends whose buying habbits are significantly influenced bit by mp3s. Techno bands especially can do really well by distributing free music since there are a lot of techno bands and it can be hard to find ones you like without first having the mp3s.. and many people want records and not just CDs. Once a DJ friend of mine pointed at a box of records and said "That box probable cost me $10,000, not because the record in it are expencive, but because I had to buy those 20 boxes worth of records to get these good ones."
Actually, I would not be surprised to see mp3 promotion surpass radio promotion really soon for things like Techno, but remember puttingyour shit on mp3.com dose not count as promotion. You need to really have an agressing campaign of uploading and pushing it on people in IRC.
But we can stop this, if we put our minds to it. Remember DiVX? That evil little play-for-play disk that Circuit City and (Sony? refresh my memory....) tried to foist on us? Did we not squash it like a bug? can we not do it again? Are we men, or are we Logitech?
I had a funny idea about this. People could print up SDMI Warning stickers and go put them on SDMI compliant players in the stores. I guess it would say soemthing like "Warning: This product uses SDMI which means it limit your ability to play music you obtain from the internet or purchas independantly on CDs. SDMI products have been known to force you to waist disk space, prevent you from letting friends lissen to your music, degrade the sound quality of music obtained on the internet, and you may loose all the music that you store on your computer if you loose the player. We recommend that you consider buying a true MP3 player without SDMI support."
The whole thing is fscked up anyway; bands spend 2-300 days a year on the road promoting their latest blood, sweat and tears giving concerts at $50 a pop, and who gets rich? Some fat cat in an ivory tower who can't carry a tune in a bucket. Two things are trying to solve that. One is the fact that pressing CD's is so cheap any two-bit outfit can hit the club circuit and hawk their own, and the other is the pay-for-download MP3 sites, where small-time artists can get the dough for good jam with no media costs involved. Neither involves signing your life away to some fat cat.
You know what? RIAA HATES that. We should love it. We should support it. See that it thrives. Make the old adage true: Money talks, bullshit walks.
Amen! They make you sign your life away because they control the promotion channels.. but MP3s will change this. I keep waiting to see some guy who collects pirate site upload URLs and charges artists to upload their promotional material to all these sites. I would be a kick ass way to get yourself in the ears of a lot of people with very little effort.
I mean lets face it you won't see any money or promotion from mp3.com so you may as well try and go directly to the consumer.. maybe the consumer will like it.
Also, lets not forget that there are better ways to make a buck off of the music you produce then just charging for every song. You can give away a lot of songs just to get people to come buy CDs, shirts, hats, some other songs on MP3, etc.
Actually, if you are a really good musician who produces a lot of jam sessions and practices which are of reasonable quality then you can provide your fans with this stuff too. I would suggest putting up a song of the week for free and running a pay for access fan club where members can download past songs odf the week. Also, tell them how to set up their mp3 player to play random songs from the members only area. Once fans get addicted to lissening to diffrent versions of the same song every time there will be no going back to bland old CDs which are the same song every time you play it.. and the fans will happily fork over $20-30 a year for access to this archive.
What I meant to say was I do not agree the federal government has legal standing to perform these functions. Police protection, I think you will agree, is within the jurisdiction of local authorities.
Yes, we do need to distinguish between the powers of the federal government and the powers of state governments. We have erroded many of the checks and balances in our consititution. I think both parties have been pretty nasty about this. The two recent ones that the republicans passed were item veto and limitations on the appeals process.
I do not think that our founding fauthers really did that good a job of the federal vs. state balance. The thing you must take into consideration is that local polotics is extreamly oorupt. I think the best balance is to leave implementation of many things to the local governments, but let the federal gorvernment step in and say "no you can not do that" for civil rights situations and interstate commerce situations.
Example: I think *experence* has shown that federal cops, like the DEA, ATF, and FBI, are unaccountable, dangerous, and gernerally a bad idea., but the local cops will be very corupt. I think the solution is not to have federal and local cops taking away people's rights (like we have now), but to have local cops who live in fear of some federal agency like Internal Affairs but with a lot more power. This Internal Affairs would have the power to really ruin a cops life just on a wim, but would not have the power to do shit to a civilian. This agency would be very well funded and would have many agents that harassed the cops who do things like racial profiling (i.e. it would not be like our internal affairs which is only interested in coruption and not civil rights abuses). The key to all of this is that Internal Affairs can not really tell the local cops what to do, only what not to do.
While moonshots and computers are cute, the 20th century achieved nothing close to the dramatic increases in life expectancy and quality of life in comparison.
Life expectancy is not the only measure of uality of life. Computer contribute significantly to our quality of life by allowing one person to magnify how much work they get accomplished. Moonshots will evetually mean we are not vulnerable to being wiped out by a big rock in space. Actually, I think our 20th century advances are much more significant. We can only improve life expectancy so much, but things like computers, cell phones, and airplains increase the effective life expectancy by letting us work more efficently. Now, people here do not take advnatage of the extrea free time.. they just work more.. but that is nott he fault of the technology.. it just provides the extra time. Europeans do take advantage of more of their free time and you could probable show that a good portion of the free time europeans now have comes from 20th century inventions.
No, I'm pretty confident that federal (and local) funding of the all sciences is a really good idea. Unlike these social programs or the federal cops, it dose not cost much money and the return on investment frequently is really high, but the return on investment is difficult to predict, so private industry tends not to fund pure research into many branches of science (like mathematics).
We might find a way to pay for the sciences without government someday and it might generate a LOT more money then government ever could, but it has not been figured out. I do not think that the current patent system could really do it.
Why is anyone going to care when you can download everything with your specialized file community client? These guys are beta testing an XML-over-IRC client that does a ridiculously great job of distributing MP3s, even better than napster. Check out Liberty: http://www.dvd-copy.com/file_community_software.ht ml
This is really interesting! I would like to see a non-napster based protocoll, but I would also like to hear what the existing IRC network people have to say about it. Do you think automated interfaces to IRC run the risk to damaging the IRC community, i.e. do you think the IRC community is strong enough to prevent collages frm banning IRC access to student because of mp3s?
I think that the fact that news programs hold interviews on IRC shows that the community has enough clout to wistand these attacks of ignorance and fear that this project may induce, but I would be curious to hear if anyone had a diffrent oppinion.
We need a way to get the word aout about this shit and prevent customers from buying the players. One option is to go to stores and place stickers on the products which say "Warning this product is SDMI compliant and/or limits the consumers fair use rights" and explains to people why they want an mp3 player which dose not take away their rights.
This articles proposed solution culd be as vulnerable as DVDs, but I would not count on it. It sounded like the song is to be decrypted on one device only, meaning that you will lose your whole music collection when you replace your player. This will piss consumers off a lot more, but it is a stronger system then what DVDs used. Actually, this system would incurage the one-hit-wonders, i.e. why should I go out and find a good band to lissen to when I will loses the music eventually by upgrading players?
The good news is that that they will probable put this chip in the computer somelace where the datastream after the chip can be cought and they can not just stop selling CDs and tapes.
So, no, I don't accept that government has a legal right to take my money to help anyone, including me!
Ok, I guess this means that you do not accept the government paying for the cops and thus do not accept property rights. This is a position some people take, but it is every bit as utopian a position as the left-wing-commune-drop-outs. (Note: the definition of utopian is untest with a connotation of experence suggesting that it is unlikely to work)
Government exists to do the essential jobs that we can not get the free market or the culture to do. Now, we can discuss intelegently the (a) essentialness of the specific job and (b) the chance that the market will do the specific job.
First, I do not support universal health care. social security, the war on drugs, and others, but the reason I do not support these program is: they don't work and the market dose a better job. This is not some Ayn Rand philosophical mumbo jumbo about how the market *should* do a better job, but real life experence. You can bitch about taxes all you want, but once people realize that you have no real life experence to back up your claim that "we should not have a government" then they will ignore you.. and really prventing stupid programs like univeral health care will fall on those of us who you call the "freeloading left" who can make our arguemnts based on real evidence instead of philosophical bullshit.
Second, I support things like funding of the sciences and education. Why? Well countries who stop funding them seem to go in the shitter pretty quick. Now, we may figure out how to fund these by the private sector someday, but we have not figured it out today.. and experence suggests that to just stop funding them will not cause people to figure out how to privatly fund them.. it will just make people stupid.
If someone held me up, took my money, then used it to find a cure for cancer, I'd still be pissed off that I was robbed. Even more pissed if the robber had said "Listen, I know what's best here, so be a good boy and hand over the wallet before I shoot you". It's one thing to be a thug, another to be an Annointed thug.
You have an annointed thug as soon as you have property rights, period. (Unless, you subscribe to an objectivist utopian ideal of everyone not stealing becuase they are objectivists) The truth is we don't know how to live without an annointed thug, period. This leaves you tring to argue that the government taking your hard earned money is somehow diffrent from the government taking away other people's ability to use your property.. an arguemnt that you will ultimatly base on some form of baseless cultural assumption.
Now, I'm not saing the government should nationalize all the buisnesses. Once we have accepted the fact that the government is a nasty thing which needs to take you money to run programs to help everyone (like the programs which allow you to be owner of your property, i.e. the cops) and have thrown out al the philosophical bullshit about property being some form of primitive. Then we are ready to discuss exactly which programs are good and which ones are bad based on practical concerns. Example:
The war on drugs is very very bad because it waists money and takes away people's freedom when they did not do anything which significantly effects another person.
Science is good becuase it is cheap compaired to the benifits and might not get done without some funding.
it had every word you would expect to find in a porn site on the meta tags.maybe that would be all you need to cause censorware to block the site, rather then actually detecting censorware
:)
Yes, that is a reasonable form of protest, but it is really not as much fun throwing porn at censorware..
how would you go about checking for the program in html/java/activex, anyway?
I was assuming that they identify themselves someplace (like the browser identificatin string or cookies), but they may not do this.
ActiveX could definitly do it, but if you are going to the truble of writing an ActiveX control that dtects censorware.. why not just write an ActiveX control that removes censorware?. It pops up a little window which tells them about how bad censorware is and asks "Do you want to remove the censorware installed on this system?" If the person hits yes then it deletes the censorware.
You think edus don't have porn? Edus probably host the largest concentration of teenage males with web sites on the net. Beware *.dorm.college.edu
.edus?
First, this is irrelevent since the issue was about TLDs not porn. Why should beaver have stricter blocking applied to it then the rest of the
Second, I doubt that the censorware blocks much of the dorm room stuff.
BTW> I really hope Beaver Collage dose not let the censorware make them change their name. Collages should take a stand against this kind of shit.
Oh, that would be a sweet deal if somebody did that, but I expect the relevant patents are taken and if not, there is obviously prior art.
Yes, there is lots of prior art for traditional keyword based and black list based censorware, but I doubt there is any prior art for applications of artificial intelegence or using ahuman to identify a picture as pornographic, so you should be able to get patents on these. Hell, you could probable get a patent on the idea of looking for fleshtones as a partial key in identifing porn.
The biggest problem is that patenting up all these ideas would coust a lot of money, but it is nice to think that we could "bring an end to the technological advancement of censorware" with a few well placed software and buisness model patents. If free speach groups like the ACLU controled these patents they could enshure that the only effective censorware was censorware which refused to sell to libaries/schools and did not censor gay rights, women's rights, etc. The situation is that no current censorware is really effective. People will realize this in a few years and parents would need to switch censorware packages.
On the other hand, we should just not censor at all,
:) (Ok, maybe It would not be that effective, but it is a funny idea.)
Absolutly! When some stupid legilsator passes a censorship law the ACLU and other freedom advocates should sue them on behalf of GALD, NOW, and other sites that are being blocked unfairly, but we may not win these cases and we may no win public oppinion by telling censorship horror stories. Once we have really lost the civil rights fight then we should consider adopting a stratagy which dose protect people from censorship and minimize the damage.
The only problem that I see with your proposal is that when people get lazy censorship goes up. Under the block as necissary solution then censorship goes down when people get lazy, so we should first try to push a solutuion which allows content by default.
The big proble with blocking as necissary is that it can work in tandom with regular censorware. This is VERY bad because then the library patrons loose both privacy AND access to ligetimate information. I really want to find a solution which beats censorware and prohibits censorware, but I'm having trouble comming up with one.
Hey! I have the solution! We wil run a campaign to get people to modify their pages to detect when a browser is useing censorware and add pronography to the page! It would also add a message saing "Only people who use censorware see the pornography on this page." that would be great to be able to counter AFA propoganda with "Oh, yeah! well there are a lot of web pages which turn into porn when people look at them through censorware!"
Given that a library would pretty much have to dedicate a terminal to it, and then you'd have to have people looking at it... I just don't see librarians using it.
:)
One terminal is cheaper then placing blocking software on all the terminals.. and who said that a librarian needs to look at it all the time?
Part of the beauty of my solution is that when the public gets pissy about porn in the library the librarians can respond be keeping a closer eye on things. Actually, I would love to see some librarys who are forced by law to implement filtering choose this idea and then ignore it. The real question here is dose it provide a legal alternative to purchasing filtering software when the legislator passes filtering laws.
Also, I should point out that many people are more scared of closing the browser window and finding porn on the desktop or another browser window. Censorware dose *nothing* to protect against this, but this solution would protect against this sort of thing (assuming that you have a way to tell that the picture is stil in use and keep it in the slide show for the librarian). Plus, the librarians do not need to spend a lot of time looking at the monitor system to check for this sort of thing, since by definition it sits there for a while.
The real problem here is the pro-censorship groups, not the porn. Solutions provided have to be geared in such a way that they either expose the lies of organizations like the AFA or they provide a way to cut their arguments to ribbons.
Absolutly! The biggest problem with my solution is that it can be used in tandom with library filtering software. What I would really like to see is a solution that prohibited filtering. I am considering patenting my solution to force people to remove other filtering software, but I doubt I will really put that much effort into the idea.
Maybe one of the anti-censorship groups would be willing to lock up the patents on censorship technologies.. and only allow their use when they reduced censorship.
I think a similar rule would apply to surfing at a library terminal...since the terminal is in a public area, you would surrender your right to privacy at that terminal. Hence, there would be no real privacy problems with having a librarian watch the images that went by.
Execpt that (a) we should want to *increase* privacy and (b) you have no way of knowing if someone is monitoring what you are browsing (unlike your sex in a public place analogy). I don't really want to create a system the prevents an increase in privacy. This is why I proposed that the system would not say identify the terminal who loaded the image, so that as long as there is more then one person using the computers this prevents the librarian from just watching someone browse (I really feal this is important). Also, the images should be distorted enough that text is frequently unreadable by the librarian.
This could work, if libraries thought that their folks had the time to be nannies.
This is a possible problem, but part of the point of my proposal is that you place the monitor behind the circulation desk where they can not help but see it. Technically, someone should do research to find out if the librarians can learn to monitor the system without slowing down their other work (and to find out how effecting the solution is in the first place).
If the librarians do have a problem monitoring the system we could set up an AI to identify flesh tones and other porn image traits and attract the librarian's attention when this happened.
BTW, A nice side effect of this system is that the library has exactly as effective a porn blocking system as they need. If they have no problem with porn then the librarians ignore the system, but if they have a problem then the librarians pay attentin to the system. I would like to point out that I do not think anyone should install this system unless they need it, i.e. you have bums comming into your library to watch porn, but If they have already passed a law in your area requiring filters then this really is the perfect solution.
Actually, my biggist problem with the system is that it dose not exclude the use of filtering wsoftware, i.e. I would hate to see a library install filtering software, realise it did not work, install this system too, and end up with a system which blocked constitutionally protected speach AND risked violating people's privacy. The only way I can think to get arround this is to patent the idea, write the software (slid show program), and make the EULA require them to not use any other filting software. Also, maybe make the software to require a client to be run on each terminal and have the client deactivate all other filtering software? Is there an easyer solution?
A simpler approach is to make sure all terminal screens are in high traffic, highly visible areas. If you want privacy you can do it from home. The only tech problem posed by this problem is relocating the terminals and any associated connections.
Yes, this would be a simpler approach. The correct solution is:
a) If you do not have a problem then do not do anything.
b) If there is some sort of problem, i.e. someone uses the library for porn frequently, then move the computers to high traffic areas.
c) If you still have a problem OR if they pass a law requiring filters then implement the system I described.
I would like to stress that part of the point of my proposed solutuion is that it should meatt he requirments for filtering proposed by a law.. and if it dose not meat the requirments then you only need to explain to the legislators that filtering software is not effective enough to really stop porn.
IMHO, the only way Censoring will work is if someone takes the time to look through every file coming through the pipe: images, .html pages, .zip files, etc. Unless that's done, you risk blacklisting something that's valid.
You are correct, but since large numbers of pages are added to thie internet every day it is actually the only way to block effectivly too.
Since that's theoretically impossible (and expensive) Censoring will not work.
Technically, this is not totaly correct. There is not way to monitor people's hme use of the internet, but it is possible to monitor people's use of the internet in libraries. the solution is to share the web browser cahche directories and have a monitor computer which runs a ``slide show'' of all the images in the various terminals cache directories. This cmputer would be set up in a possition, like the circulation desk, where there is a librarian most of the time. Now, privacy concerns are a big problem with this system. It may be possible to correct the privacy problems by not telling the librarian which system the image is from and digitally distorting the image to make text hard to read, but I do not really know. Aanway, this is about the only solution with a really high rate of porn blockage (and it incedientaly could have a really low rate of blocking constitutionally protected speach)
Now, the question on everyone's mind is "If the above system is the only one which manages to block a gpod portion of the porn then why arn't the AFA going for something like that?" The answer is that the pro-censorship people do not care about blocking porn. They really care a lot more about blocking access to gay rights, women's rights, etc. sites (and It gives their friends in the censorship companies who make shure that the software blocks these things some money).
Question for people: What did you think of my blocking proposal? Can it's privacy concenrs be resolved? Would pushing this proposal to libraries in Utah where this law has been passed help discredit the AFA? How can we prove that the above system is better then blocking software?