Exactly. Where are the shows that're supposed to appeal to 18-35 year old males? Queer Eye? Will and Grace? Everyone Love Raymond? Gilmore Girls? Not to mention reality TV, which is a bloody nightmare.
The only thing you're left with is The Daily Show and The Sopranos. Those are the only shows I'll regularly watch anymore, and they're cable. After the demise of X-Files there's not any network show I'll bother to watch anymore. The networks simply don't cater to the young male demographic. Should they really be surprised that they're not watching as much TV?
So just because Bill Gates said it, it must be wrong? If you actually put into CONTEXT what he said, he's probbably right. Gates said that hardware costs will come down to the point where speech recognition and handwriting recognition will be incredibly cheap. That's hardly a controversial statement. 10 years ago you'd need a super-fast dual-processor box to decode an MP3 in real-time. Now we do it in a handheld where the processing costs are negligible (memory and the display are what's expensive).
As far as the "visual programming" the article didn't provide a direct quote, but it doesn't sound like he said visual programming would REPLACE writing text code, but merely that people would be doing more of it. A program like LabView is a good example of this. IIRC LabView is a program that'll let you design circuits, and thus do programming visually.
From what I understand, a lot of the bundling is because the content providers want all their channels packaged together. Viacom owns a shitload of channels, Disney owns a shitload more. It's possible that this legislation will hurt the content providers, and help the cable providers (since the cable providers won't be forced into packaging deals they don't like).
I wouldn't say exactly perfect, unless you don't have a problem with dumping out radioactive waste. There's 7 incidents we know about. Given the secrecy of the military who knows if there's more that we don't.
1954 - The submarine USS Seawolf (SSN-575) scuttles an experimental sodium-cooled reactor in 9,000 ft (2,700 m) of water off the Delaware/Maryland coast. At 33 kCi it's likely the most radioactive single object ever deliberately sunk, and has not been retrieved as of 2003. The reactor had problems with corrosion from the coolant, and was replaced by a conventional light-water reactor.
October 1959 - One killed and 3 seriously burned in explosion and fire of prototype reactor for the USS Triton (SSRN/SSN-586) at the United States Navy's training center in West Milton, New York. The Navy stated "The explosion was completely unrelated to the reactor or any of its principal auxiliary systems," but sources familiar with the operation claim that the high-pressure air flask that exploded was to feed a crucial reactor-problem backup system.
1961 - The USS Theodore Roosevelt (SSBN-600) attempts to dump the depleted resin from its demineralization system (used to remove dissolved radioactive minerals and particles from the primary coolant loops of submarines). The ship is contaminated when wind blows resin back onto the ship.
December 12, 1971 - In the Thames River near New London, Connecticut, radioactive coolant water is being transferred from the submarine USS Dace (SSN-607) to the submarine tender USS Fulton when five hundred gallons are spilled into the river.
1975 - The USS Guardfish attempts to dump the depleted resin from its demineralization system (used to remove dissolved radioactive minerals and particles from the primary coolant loops of submarines). The ship is contaminated when the wind blows resin back onto the ship. This type of accident is fairly common (see 1961).
October-November 1975 - While disabled, the submarine tender USS Proteus discharges radioactive coolant water into Apra Harbor, Guam. A Geiger counter at two of the harbor's public beaches showed 100 millirems/hour, fifty times the allowable dose.
May 22, 1978 - Aboard the USS Puffer near Puget Sound, Washington, a valve was mistakenly opened, releasing up to 500 gallons of radioactive water.
I'm seriously of the opinon that the whole concept of marriage should be a covenant between two (or three, or whatever) people and/or their church, and should not be any province of the government at any scale, federal, state, local - WHATEVER. It's none of their goddamned business.
Wow, I couldn't disagree more. If you want to perform some ritual so your god can smile upon a relationship, that's fine with me, but that's not what marriage is about. Marriage is about the community recognizing a relationship. For that to happen it has to be a legal recognition and not just a casual one. That means the government gets involved.
Christianity needs to recognize that marriage is NOT a religious institution, it's a recognition of commitment between two people. People only think of it as being under the auspices of the church for legacy reasons. It used to be the case that the church was the main authority in the society, so it made sense for it to register marriages, etc. This is no longer true, and it's time that churches recognize this fact. Any church will still be able to chose which people they choose to marry in their church. They can still get all pissy about gays "not really being married" like they have with anyone not being married in a church "not really being married", and everyone with half a brain will ignore them like usual.
You are right though, nothing is going to change until the older generation starts dying off. People under 35 or so are much more likely to support gay marriage. As soon as the boomers start kicking the bucket, this gay marriage debate will look like the segregation of the past.
I think we all know what fast means when it comes to a computer. The fineries may be disputed, but it's not ambiguous. If I say my Metro is faster than A Lamborghini, that's lying. You can make "ambigous" claims all you want about speed to start the car, acceleration, and how quickly the gas tank fills up, but we all have a general agreement of what fast is. Apple has been outright lying about their computer speeds for years now, and it's about time they get punched in the face for it.
You can't use a phone to change your marks, look at porn, download viruses, bring down the school network, etc. you can do all that with a school computer.
Well aren't we a good little Hitler Youth? You'll make a fine drone son. Just keep up your obediance to what the institution tells you.
If the only thing that's keeping you from changing your grades, downloading viruses, and bringing down the school network is some underpaid desk jockey "monitoring what's going on", then your school has some serious problems. You don't get security by monitoring peoples activities, that's just too hard. You get security by making the system hard to break.
On the other hand, off-the-shelf software has a well-defined cost (the sticker price), and has a phone number or web site that I can go to if there are problems, making it much easier and time-efficient to deal with these things.
Software support is in general a joke. Anyone that's called a support number for a mainstream software product can attest to that. The extremely expensive $10,0000 a year niche software is the exception of course, but you damn well better get good support for $10K a year.
I do agree with your 3 models of software though. But their certainly is OSS that fits into category two. Samba, Tomcat, and Postgres come to mind. Granted Joe User doesn't use these application, but Joe User doesn't use Windows 2003 server, IIS or SQL Server either. You can find people that'll support those services for $100 an hour. I'll certainly do it, and there's plenty of others who will too. Complex software requires people who know what they're doing. That's not to say Samba, Tomcat and Postgres couldn't be easier to configure (especially Samba, what a nightmare).
I think what should endear businesses to OSS though is the other meaning of free. ESR has dubbed it free as in speech, but I think that's the wrong comparison. What's really important about OSS is that it's free as in freedom. You aren't tied down to MS and what they want you to do.
Sorry, but OSS is NOT free (as in beer). People are paid for their time, and implementing anything takes time. This needs to be stressed to anyone that wants OSS as their instincts that nothing is truly priceless is true.
People get nervous about things being "free" because they think they're being sold the Brooklynn Bridge. People in general have a very good sense of what a friend of mine used to call "down-home cynicism". If you don't give them the catch, their imagination will run wild. If you're honest that the license is free, but the ultimate costs are not I think people will gladly accept this.
Gambling is already "underground", though mostly that means office pools, bets friends, pool halls, etc. I don't think people gamble online because it's illegal, they gamble online because they're addicts. Seriously, how fun is it to sit an your computer and push buttons all by yourself and lose money? That's the real danger of online gambling. It's so easily accessible to addicts that it becomes that much harder to stop their addictions.
The other problem is that since the gambling is online, and by nature in another country you can't regulate it at all. There's no way to make sure the games are fair, or people aren't being cheated out of winnings, etc. The only thing you could possibly do is legalize online gaming casinos within the country in the hopes that offshore casinos would lose serious business, since there's no guarantee their games are fair. Does that encourage more gambling since you'd have to allow promotion and advertising? I don't know. It's really a hard question to answer since the normal controls simply don't apply.
I'm not sure I really like the whole idea of online gambling either. There's really enough gambling in the country right now for anyone to get their "fix". I really have no idea how you can control it though. You can't put up a giant firewall around the entire country like China is trying to do (or at least let's HOPE that won't happen).
I suppose the only thing you can really control is the marketing and promotion of online gambling within the US. That's probbably even within the limits of free trade, since advertisements aren't really trade, per se.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, I just disagree on who should be doing the monitoring, and to what extent. Parents have the ultimate responsibility to take care of their kid, and are the ones in the best position to decide what monitoring is appropriate and understand what they see. The school shouldn't be playing Big Brother.
I understand that children have been growing up for quite a long time without their activities being routinely monitored by schools down to the personal communication level. We seemed to have survived so far without grivous harm taking place. As far as Columbine goes, it's fairly obvious that the parents were the ones that should have picked up on that. The kids had guns, talked fondly of Hitler, etc. I'm sure they'd deny they could have ever found out about it, but I find it hard to believe the parents didn't know _something_ was wrong with their kids.
If you're talking to a trusted friend/family member about something personal (traumatic event in your life for instance) and someone walks in the room, do you modify your behavior? Of course. Does that mean you shouldn't have been talking about it? Of course not. People do have legitimate reasons to keep secrets. Doing so isn't evidence that what you were talking about or doing is wrong.
There's an enormous difference in the privacy expectations of walking into a building, and monitoring every keystroke. It's analogous to the difference between a camera at a building entrance, and a camera in a bathroom.
Who gets to decide what's unsuitable? Is going to a site about homosexuality unsuitable? How about abortion? Are holocaust denier sites unsuitable? The point is that someone, somewhere is always going to have some problem with everything. Why don't I get to tell kids they can't look at sites involving Rush Limbaugh? I think he's harmfull to children, and a liar to boot. The guy will probbably encourage kids to become pill-poppers just like him.
This isn't a new problem as certain parents have long squawked about books like Huckleberry Finn and Catcher In The Rye even being available in the school library. If porn is the big problem it's pretty easy to spot if you've got an adult in the lab.
How old are these kids? Below a certain age I can see monitoring of the kids by a teacher, and not allowing chat and unrestricted access. Starting at somewhere around High School it seems very inappropriate to be monitoring every keystroke though.
So if the school owns a phone they can listen in on all calls? It may be legal for the school to do the monitoring, but that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. I find it frightening that a generation can grow up with the expectation of being monitored constantly.
You can tell when a teacher walks over and is monitoring what you type, just like you can tell when someone is in the same room as you listening to a conversation.
Duty of care? The internet is everywhere, not just schools. You can order up some nice heroin on the phone too, but there's no "duty of care" because you provide a phone line.
Are you going to bug the bathrooms to find out if anyone is making drug deals? What's so special about the internet that you feel you should monitor usage on such a personal level?
Good to hear that Big Brother is alive and well in our schools. This kind of thing just makes me sick. Is it appropriate to have computers monitor the phone line in a school for keywords or phrases, and then listen in when they're detected?
It doesn't really matter if their are laws against it, as that's not the point. The fire in theatre example is just a clear, simple example of speech that wouldn't be protected by the first amendment. In other words laws against it would pass constitutional muster.
And I don't want to see Rush Limbaugh appear anywhere. He offends me greatly. The thing about freedom is though you don't have a right to be not offended. I'm offended by most of reality TV, but I don't think it should be banned.
Indeed. I find it particularly ironic that the swine slashdot editors decided to censor out the word "fuck" in an article on censorship.
Slashdot editors: this isn't a damn newspaper where whiney grandmothers get all uppity about actually printing the word fuck. This is especially true in an article where the word is only referred to and not used. If we can't even refer to the word fuck without using euphimisms or taking out 90% of the letters in the word it only endorses the censorship endorsed by the FCC. Referring to the word just isn't the same thing as an article that starts out "Those fucking shitbag weasel-monkeys at SCO are at it again". (Though personally I would like to see an article like that.;) )
I think you're going a bit far. The constitution is always interpreted. Do you really think the founding fathers intended for any private citizen to posess something as powerfull as nuclear weapons? There are a few restrictions on free speech that the supreme court has ruled constitutional, and for the most part they're reasonable. Mostly they involve the old "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" and inducing people to commit violent acts. You can't have a "kill these abortion doctors" website for instance. Some people might say slander and libel are regulated, but I was under the impression these were civil matters. So I'm not sure if there's any particular law pertaining to them.
Now, that doesn't mean that this latest "no f-word" nonsense is legal. The FCC regulation of the airwaves is supposed to be allowed because of the small capacity of the radio spectrum. With sat radio, sat TV, cable TV, internet radio, and someday internet TV that argument are becoming less and less persusive.
This latest "crackdown" is purely for political gains. It's an election year and the Bush administration is in trouble. They're looking for anything to appease the conservative voter. "Hey look, we cleaned up that damn Howard Stern. please vote for us". The whole thing is just posturing. I'd compare it to when you were 8 years old and your parents decided to "crack down on this TV viewing". Two weeks later the big crack down was over, and it's business as usual.
Re:How can it die when Tivo is now a verb?
on
TiVo Will Die
·
· Score: 1
I've always used the word record for VCRs, and I think it's a very common replacement for using the word tape. It also sounds pretty stupid as we've got a perfectly acceptable alternative that everyone understands. You sound like a pretentious hipster if you say you're going to "tivo" something.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Where are the shows that're supposed to appeal to 18-35 year old males? Queer Eye? Will and Grace? Everyone Love Raymond? Gilmore Girls? Not to mention reality TV, which is a bloody nightmare.
The only thing you're left with is The Daily Show and The Sopranos. Those are the only shows I'll regularly watch anymore, and they're cable. After the demise of X-Files there's not any network show I'll bother to watch anymore. The networks simply don't cater to the young male demographic. Should they really be surprised that they're not watching as much TV?
So just because Bill Gates said it, it must be wrong? If you actually put into CONTEXT what he said, he's probbably right. Gates said that hardware costs will come down to the point where speech recognition and handwriting recognition will be incredibly cheap. That's hardly a controversial statement. 10 years ago you'd need a super-fast dual-processor box to decode an MP3 in real-time. Now we do it in a handheld where the processing costs are negligible (memory and the display are what's expensive).
As far as the "visual programming" the article didn't provide a direct quote, but it doesn't sound like he said visual programming would REPLACE writing text code, but merely that people would be doing more of it. A program like LabView is a good example of this. IIRC LabView is a program that'll let you design circuits, and thus do programming visually.
From what I understand, a lot of the bundling is because the content providers want all their channels packaged together. Viacom owns a shitload of channels, Disney owns a shitload more. It's possible that this legislation will hurt the content providers, and help the cable providers (since the cable providers won't be forced into packaging deals they don't like).
more like:
cia: We can't find any evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
bush: Find some!!
I wouldn't say exactly perfect, unless you don't have a problem with dumping out radioactive waste.
There's 7 incidents we know about. Given the secrecy of the military who knows if there's more that we don't.
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_disaster
1954 - The submarine USS Seawolf (SSN-575) scuttles an experimental sodium-cooled reactor in 9,000 ft (2,700 m) of water off the Delaware/Maryland coast. At 33 kCi it's likely the most radioactive single object ever deliberately sunk, and has not been retrieved as of 2003. The reactor had problems with corrosion from the coolant, and was replaced by a conventional light-water reactor.
October 1959 - One killed and 3 seriously burned in explosion and fire of prototype reactor for the USS Triton (SSRN/SSN-586) at the United States Navy's training center in West Milton, New York. The Navy stated "The explosion was completely unrelated to the reactor or any of its principal auxiliary systems," but sources familiar with the operation claim that the high-pressure air flask that exploded was to feed a crucial reactor-problem backup system.
1961 - The USS Theodore Roosevelt (SSBN-600) attempts to dump the depleted resin from its demineralization system (used to remove dissolved radioactive minerals and particles from the primary coolant loops of submarines). The ship is contaminated when wind blows resin back onto the ship.
December 12, 1971 - In the Thames River near New London, Connecticut, radioactive coolant water is being transferred from the submarine USS Dace (SSN-607) to the submarine tender USS Fulton when five hundred gallons are spilled into the river.
1975 - The USS Guardfish attempts to dump the depleted resin from its demineralization system (used to remove dissolved radioactive minerals and particles from the primary coolant loops of submarines). The ship is contaminated when the wind blows resin back onto the ship. This type of accident is fairly common (see 1961).
October-November 1975 - While disabled, the submarine tender USS Proteus discharges radioactive coolant water into Apra Harbor, Guam. A Geiger counter at two of the harbor's public beaches showed 100 millirems/hour, fifty times the allowable dose.
May 22, 1978 - Aboard the USS Puffer near Puget Sound, Washington, a valve was mistakenly opened, releasing up to 500 gallons of radioactive water.
I'm seriously of the opinon that the whole concept of marriage should be a covenant between two (or three, or whatever) people and/or their church, and should not be any province of the government at any scale, federal, state, local - WHATEVER. It's none of their goddamned business.
Wow, I couldn't disagree more. If you want to perform some ritual so your god can smile upon a relationship, that's fine with me, but that's not what marriage is about. Marriage is about the community recognizing a relationship. For that to happen it has to be a legal recognition and not just a casual one. That means the government gets involved.
Christianity needs to recognize that marriage is NOT a religious institution, it's a recognition of commitment between two people. People only think of it as being under the auspices of the church for legacy reasons. It used to be the case that the church was the main authority in the society, so it made sense for it to register marriages, etc. This is no longer true, and it's time that churches recognize this fact. Any church will still be able to chose which people they choose to marry in their church. They can still get all pissy about gays "not really being married" like they have with anyone not being married in a church "not really being married", and everyone with half a brain will ignore them like usual.
You are right though, nothing is going to change until the older generation starts dying off. People under 35 or so are much more likely to support gay marriage. As soon as the boomers start kicking the bucket, this gay marriage debate will look like the segregation of the past.
I think we all know what fast means when it comes to a computer. The fineries may be disputed, but it's not ambiguous. If I say my Metro is faster than A Lamborghini, that's lying. You can make "ambigous" claims all you want about speed to start the car, acceleration, and how quickly the gas tank fills up, but we all have a general agreement of what fast is. Apple has been outright lying about their computer speeds for years now, and it's about time they get punched in the face for it.
You can't use a phone to change your marks, look at porn, download viruses, bring down the school network, etc. you can do all that with a school computer.
Well aren't we a good little Hitler Youth? You'll make a fine drone son. Just keep up your obediance to what the institution tells you.
If the only thing that's keeping you from changing your grades, downloading viruses, and bringing down the school network is some underpaid desk jockey "monitoring what's going on", then your school has some serious problems. You don't get security by monitoring peoples activities, that's just too hard. You get security by making the system hard to break.
On the other hand, off-the-shelf software has a well-defined cost (the sticker price), and has a phone number or web site that I can go to if there are problems, making it much easier and time-efficient to deal with these things.
Software support is in general a joke. Anyone that's called a support number for a mainstream software product can attest to that. The extremely expensive $10,0000 a year niche software is the exception of course, but you damn well better get good support for $10K a year.
I do agree with your 3 models of software though. But their certainly is OSS that fits into category two. Samba, Tomcat, and Postgres come to mind. Granted Joe User doesn't use these application, but Joe User doesn't use Windows 2003 server, IIS or SQL Server either. You can find people that'll support those services for $100 an hour. I'll certainly do it, and there's plenty of others who will too. Complex software requires people who know what they're doing. That's not to say Samba, Tomcat and Postgres couldn't be easier to configure (especially Samba, what a nightmare).
I think what should endear businesses to OSS though is the other meaning of free. ESR has dubbed it free as in speech, but I think that's the wrong comparison. What's really important about OSS is that it's free as in freedom. You aren't tied down to MS and what they want you to do.
Sorry, but OSS is NOT free (as in beer). People are paid for their time, and implementing anything takes time. This needs to be stressed to anyone that wants OSS as their instincts that nothing is truly priceless is true.
People get nervous about things being "free" because they think they're being sold the Brooklynn Bridge. People in general have a very good sense of what a friend of mine used to call "down-home cynicism". If you don't give them the catch, their imagination will run wild. If you're honest that the license is free, but the ultimate costs are not I think people will gladly accept this.
Gambling is already "underground", though mostly that means office pools, bets friends, pool halls, etc. I don't think people gamble online because it's illegal, they gamble online because they're addicts. Seriously, how fun is it to sit an your computer and push buttons all by yourself and lose money? That's the real danger of online gambling. It's so easily accessible to addicts that it becomes that much harder to stop their addictions.
The other problem is that since the gambling is online, and by nature in another country you can't regulate it at all. There's no way to make sure the games are fair, or people aren't being cheated out of winnings, etc. The only thing you could possibly do is legalize online gaming casinos within the country in the hopes that offshore casinos would lose serious business, since there's no guarantee their games are fair. Does that encourage more gambling since you'd have to allow promotion and advertising? I don't know. It's really a hard question to answer since the normal controls simply don't apply.
I'm not sure I really like the whole idea of online gambling either. There's really enough gambling in the country right now for anyone to get their "fix". I really have no idea how you can control it though. You can't put up a giant firewall around the entire country like China is trying to do (or at least let's HOPE that won't happen).
I suppose the only thing you can really control is the marketing and promotion of online gambling within the US. That's probbably even within the limits of free trade, since advertisements aren't really trade, per se.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, I just disagree on who should be doing the monitoring, and to what extent. Parents have the ultimate responsibility to take care of their kid, and are the ones in the best position to decide what monitoring is appropriate and understand what they see. The school shouldn't be playing Big Brother.
I understand that children have been growing up for quite a long time without their activities being routinely monitored by schools down to the personal communication level. We seemed to have survived so far without grivous harm taking place. As far as Columbine goes, it's fairly obvious that the parents were the ones that should have picked up on that. The kids had guns, talked fondly of Hitler, etc. I'm sure they'd deny they could have ever found out about it, but I find it hard to believe the parents didn't know _something_ was wrong with their kids.
No.
If you're talking to a trusted friend/family member about something personal (traumatic event in your life for instance) and someone walks in the room, do you modify your behavior? Of course. Does that mean you shouldn't have been talking about it? Of course not. People do have legitimate reasons to keep secrets. Doing so isn't evidence that what you were talking about or doing is wrong.
There's an enormous difference in the privacy expectations of walking into a building, and monitoring every keystroke. It's analogous to the difference between a camera at a building entrance, and a camera in a bathroom.
Who gets to decide what's unsuitable? Is going to a site about homosexuality unsuitable? How about abortion? Are holocaust denier sites unsuitable? The point is that someone, somewhere is always going to have some problem with everything. Why don't I get to tell kids they can't look at sites involving Rush Limbaugh? I think he's harmfull to children, and a liar to boot. The guy will probbably encourage kids to become pill-poppers just like him.
This isn't a new problem as certain parents have long squawked about books like Huckleberry Finn and Catcher In The Rye even being available in the school library. If porn is the big problem it's pretty easy to spot if you've got an adult in the lab.
How old are these kids? Below a certain age I can see monitoring of the kids by a teacher, and not allowing chat and unrestricted access. Starting at somewhere around High School it seems very inappropriate to be monitoring every keystroke though.
So if the school owns a phone they can listen in on all calls? It may be legal for the school to do the monitoring, but that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. I find it frightening that a generation can grow up with the expectation of being monitored constantly.
You can tell when a teacher walks over and is monitoring what you type, just like you can tell when someone is in the same room as you listening to a conversation.
Duty of care? The internet is everywhere, not just schools. You can order up some nice heroin on the phone too, but there's no "duty of care" because you provide a phone line.
Are you going to bug the bathrooms to find out if anyone is making drug deals? What's so special about the internet that you feel you should monitor usage on such a personal level?
Good to hear that Big Brother is alive and well in our schools. This kind of thing just makes me sick. Is it appropriate to have computers monitor the phone line in a school for keywords or phrases, and then listen in when they're detected?
It doesn't really matter if their are laws against it, as that's not the point. The fire in theatre example is just a clear, simple example of speech that wouldn't be protected by the first amendment. In other words laws against it would pass constitutional muster.
And I don't want to see Rush Limbaugh appear anywhere. He offends me greatly. The thing about freedom is though you don't have a right to be not offended. I'm offended by most of reality TV, but I don't think it should be banned.
Indeed. I find it particularly ironic that the swine slashdot editors decided to censor out the word "fuck" in an article on censorship.
;) )
Slashdot editors: this isn't a damn newspaper where whiney grandmothers get all uppity about actually printing the word fuck. This is especially true in an article where the word is only referred to and not used. If we can't even refer to the word fuck without using euphimisms or taking out 90% of the letters in the word it only endorses the censorship endorsed by the FCC. Referring to the word just isn't the same thing as an article that starts out "Those fucking shitbag weasel-monkeys at SCO are at it again". (Though personally I would like to see an article like that.
I think you're going a bit far. The constitution is always interpreted. Do you really think the founding fathers intended for any private citizen to posess something as powerfull as nuclear weapons? There are a few restrictions on free speech that the supreme court has ruled constitutional, and for the most part they're reasonable. Mostly they involve the old "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" and inducing people to commit violent acts. You can't have a "kill these abortion doctors" website for instance. Some people might say slander and libel are regulated, but I was under the impression these were civil matters. So I'm not sure if there's any particular law pertaining to them.
Now, that doesn't mean that this latest "no f-word" nonsense is legal. The FCC regulation of the airwaves is supposed to be allowed because of the small capacity of the radio spectrum. With sat radio, sat TV, cable TV, internet radio, and someday internet TV that argument are becoming less and less persusive.
This latest "crackdown" is purely for political gains. It's an election year and the Bush administration is in trouble. They're looking for anything to appease the conservative voter. "Hey look, we cleaned up that damn Howard Stern. please vote for us". The whole thing is just posturing. I'd compare it to when you were 8 years old and your parents decided to "crack down on this TV viewing". Two weeks later the big crack down was over, and it's business as usual.
I've always used the word record for VCRs, and I think it's a very common replacement for using the word tape. It also sounds pretty stupid as we've got a perfectly acceptable alternative that everyone understands. You sound like a pretentious hipster if you say you're going to "tivo" something.