"... is there going to be a beta testing program?"
Beta testing is for imperfect products, citizen. The Paranoia RPG is perfect. Your doubt of Paranoia's perfection constitutes an act of treason. Please report to the nearest Termination Facility at once. Have a nice daycycle.
Re: "When you deny the schools certain freedoms to decide for themselves what to teach, then everybody looses out--not just the students."
Public shcools are a state-run agency. They are supported by taxpayer money. They are subject to regulations governing federal employers. They are as much a part of the government as the police department, the FBI, or Congress. Thus, if a public shcool decides that websites about (insert unpopular religion/practice/philosophy here) are off-limits, then that amounts to government restriction on that religion/practice/philosophy).
Re: "Your arguement isn't about freedom. It's about preserving your views which are being taught in schools."
No, it isn't. If it were, I would insist that filters be implemented to block all religious sites and only allow sites about atheism, since I'm an atheist. But since I respect the religious rights of others, I want all filters removed from public computers so they can look up any damn religion they please, as per their rights under the 1st Amendment.
Re: "What you are also saying is that if they are taught one religion, they will automatically become undiscerning morons who can't figure out truth, as easily as you did."
Stop putting words in my mouth. What I'm saying that students should be taught about ALL religions, or at least not actually prohibited to learn about them using the school resources that they and their parents paid for. Net filtering is censorship. Censorship is denial of information. Denial of information is the opposite of what schools are for.
Re: "There are Internet connections all over. They are only banning certain sites in school, not everywhere the person goes!"
I've heard that one before, and it's quite possibly the lamest argument ever from the pro-filter crowd. Look, not everyone has an Internet connection at home. But everyone does pay taxes to support the libraries and public schools. Furthermore, everyone pays taxes that maintain the university/military/government servers and networks that form the backbone of the Internet (that's right, it's them and not AOL). And if those publicly-supported computers block sites about Religion A, then Religion A's taxpaying believers are being made to support a system that intentionally tries to stifle their beliefs.
Re: "Then private schools are unconstitutional, because the students are only presented with one view? or perhaps because they have filtered Internet access?"
No. Private schools are just that- private. They're not state-run, therefore any kind of religious/philosophical indoctrination they visit on their students is not government-backed like it would be at a public school.
Re: "If it's only about protecting the students, then parents can't have any authority over the children either."
Wrong. The family is a private institution. No backing by the state there, hence they can deny their kids any information they want without it amounting to government censorship.
That's the key thing here, Eugene. Daddy tells Junior that God made the earth in six days and forbids him to read about devilution- fine. Uncle Sam tells Junior that God made the earth in six days and forbids him to read about devilution- that's government censorship, regardless of which state agency is doing it.
The point of the article is that public schools and libraries- BY LAW- are required to use some kind of filterware, and the companies that write/publish this software won't say what sites they're blocking, and they often make it unneccesarily difficult to override the block list from an administrative level. What this means is that near-total control over what you can and can't see on the Net goes to the lowest bidder in the area.
Re: "and I would advocate...that high schools should employ a simple corporate-type filter that blocks only overtly pornographic type sites"
Impossible. Even living, breathing, thinking humans can't nail down a concrete definition of "overtly pornographic"- no nannyware app is going to be able to be up to the task. Filtering keywords will block way more than goat-fisting sites, and I defy you to write software that can look at a JPG file and determine whether it contains any squishy pink bits. And even if you could, try teaching it to separate art from "HOT ASIAN SLUTS!!!"- again, that's something even us meatbrains can't always manage.
Bottom line is this: Using filters to protect kids from Bad Stuff online is like using a snowshovel to take a fly out of a spiderweb- you could do it, but how much web will be left afterwards (pun intended)?
Re: But what I am really trying to ask is why can't the US ammend the laws to allow each school to decide for themselves on what they want to do? I realize that this opens a whole can of worms, but the free market allows each company to set its own prices. Why can't the schools have the same freedoms?
It's not about the schools' freedoms. It's about the students' freedoms. More to the point, it's about taking the power over what people can and cannot view and turning that power over to a corporation that won't release its list of blocked sites.
Slashdot Mirror
Beta testing is for imperfect products, citizen. The Paranoia RPG is perfect. Your doubt of Paranoia's perfection constitutes an act of treason. Please report to the nearest Termination Facility at once. Have a nice daycycle.
The parent wasn't talking about how the user tells whether the work is copyrighted. He's talking about whether the software can do it. Which it can't.
Poor website maintenance or unwillingness to announce his intensions? I wonder.
Public shcools are a state-run agency. They are supported by taxpayer money. They are subject to regulations governing federal employers. They are as much a part of the government as the police department, the FBI, or Congress. Thus, if a public shcool decides that websites about (insert unpopular religion/practice/philosophy here) are off-limits, then that amounts to government restriction on that religion/practice/philosophy).
Re: "Your arguement isn't about freedom. It's about preserving your views which are being taught in schools."
No, it isn't. If it were, I would insist that filters be implemented to block all religious sites and only allow sites about atheism, since I'm an atheist. But since I respect the religious rights of others, I want all filters removed from public computers so they can look up any damn religion they please, as per their rights under the 1st Amendment.
Re: "What you are also saying is that if they are taught one religion, they will automatically become undiscerning morons who can't figure out truth, as easily as you did."
Stop putting words in my mouth. What I'm saying that students should be taught about ALL religions, or at least not actually prohibited to learn about them using the school resources that they and their parents paid for. Net filtering is censorship. Censorship is denial of information. Denial of information is the opposite of what schools are for.
Re: "There are Internet connections all over. They are only banning certain sites in school, not everywhere the person goes!"
I've heard that one before, and it's quite possibly the lamest argument ever from the pro-filter crowd. Look, not everyone has an Internet connection at home. But everyone does pay taxes to support the libraries and public schools. Furthermore, everyone pays taxes that maintain the university/military/government servers and networks that form the backbone of the Internet (that's right, it's them and not AOL). And if those publicly-supported computers block sites about Religion A, then Religion A's taxpaying believers are being made to support a system that intentionally tries to stifle their beliefs.
Re: "Then private schools are unconstitutional, because the students are only presented with one view? or perhaps because they have filtered Internet access?"
No. Private schools are just that- private. They're not state-run, therefore any kind of religious/philosophical indoctrination they visit on their students is not government-backed like it would be at a public school.
Re: "If it's only about protecting the students, then parents can't have any authority over the children either."
Wrong. The family is a private institution. No backing by the state there, hence they can deny their kids any information they want without it amounting to government censorship.
That's the key thing here, Eugene. Daddy tells Junior that God made the earth in six days and forbids him to read about devilution- fine. Uncle Sam tells Junior that God made the earth in six days and forbids him to read about devilution- that's government censorship, regardless of which state agency is doing it.
The point of the article is that public schools and libraries- BY LAW- are required to use some kind of filterware, and the companies that write/publish this software won't say what sites they're blocking, and they often make it unneccesarily difficult to override the block list from an administrative level. What this means is that near-total control over what you can and can't see on the Net goes to the lowest bidder in the area.
Impossible. Even living, breathing, thinking humans can't nail down a concrete definition of "overtly pornographic"- no nannyware app is going to be able to be up to the task. Filtering keywords will block way more than goat-fisting sites, and I defy you to write software that can look at a JPG file and determine whether it contains any squishy pink bits. And even if you could, try teaching it to separate art from "HOT ASIAN SLUTS!!!"- again, that's something even us meatbrains can't always manage.
Bottom line is this: Using filters to protect kids from Bad Stuff online is like using a snowshovel to take a fly out of a spiderweb- you could do it, but how much web will be left afterwards (pun intended)?
It's not about the schools' freedoms. It's about the students' freedoms. More to the point, it's about taking the power over what people can and cannot view and turning that power over to a corporation that won't release its list of blocked sites.