I am not going to go into detail because the reasons have been recounted thousands of times on Slashdot and other sites. Briefly:
The idea is logically flawed. Think about what a domain in the DNS actually is: it is an organisational unit. It makes no sense to separate out certain types of content into an entirely separate organisational unit. hustler.com is not a separate organisation from hustler.xxx.
It is not granular enough. A binary value of porn/not porn is so glib as to be useless. Who decides what is porn and what is not? What about servers in different countries? PICS solves all this; web authors rate the content they post based on objective criteria. For example, the RSAC rating service specifies four number of scales upon which a resource can be rated: violence, sex, nudity and language. A resource is rated from 0 to 4 on each of these scales. The values for the nudity scale are "none", "revealing attire", "partial nudity", "non-sexual frontal nudity" and "provocative frontal nudity".
It is not backwards-compatible. URIs should not change, but.xxx would force everyone to split their sites up and move half of them to an entirely different domain.
It solves the problem at the wrong level. PICS ratings, by contrast, are embedded in the HTTP header of a resource (including, in the case of HTML resources, the elements inside the element.
If MS does manage to 'conquer the internet', that would be like the Catholic church successfully conquering that irritating 'printing press' when it first showed up.
If they actually gave a shit about the content that young children are exposed to, then they would push for a.xxx domain name. Don't want XXX? filter it out.
No, no, no! A separate.xxx domain name is a much worse solution than this. The spectrum is like this:
stupid Separate.xxx domain
bad Human readable data on the 'entry page' of a site, format to be determined at huge expense to the taxpayer
Of course, the real problem with this bill is that it makes classification mandatory. If anyone is really concerned that their kids will see pornography then they should bloody well install a filter that blocks such content, along with any unclassified content. The market will then determine the worth of this idea.
But that would require parents to actually do their damn jobs, so that idea is out of the window.
Right there, in the big that says that Congress can regulate inter-state commerce. If Congress declares that a subject concerns inter-state commerce then Congress is free regulate it.
Owning a sword is not the same as having the intent to cut people down with it. Does everyone who owns a gun deserve to get shot?
It depends on who (or what) owns the sword.
Maybe if it is owned by a person, you can build up a trust relationshop... but Microsoft is not a person. Microsoft is a corporation; a collective entity that is entirely amoral, constantly seeking a single goal: the increase of shareholder value.
Microsoft will use their patents offensively the very moment that they decide it is profitable to do so.
Oops... ignore anything after the full stop and it makes sense! You have the choice of using a swap partition, a swap file, or no swap at all.
Before Linux 2.6, swapfiles used to impose a performance penalty. These days, the only difference between the two is one of convenience and flexibility.
3. An enterprising registrar sees this as an opportunity for offsetting costs, and profit (see: capitalism).
Yes, yes.... capitalism. I'm all for it, but hopefully that capitalism actually does something that contributes to society.
They can use the extra capital to improve their services which will benefit all their customers, and give their competitors the incentive to make similar improvements.
For Linux news, LWN; for general tech/sci news, Technocrat.
Slashdot has a *lot* more users than either though. Although some times it can seem otherwise, the good comments can show though... you just need to browse at +4 and ignore anything posted = 25 minutes after a story is posted.:)
I wish we'd stop linking to sites with such broken designs. It appears that my choice of font is too tall for the almighy web designers at The Escapist, and so the bottom of each column on the page is chopped off.
Also, although artificial pagination is such a common annoyance on the web today that it is not worth mentioning, for some reason whenever I switch into the tab containing the article, it sees fit to move to a different page!
(This seems to be a conflict between the page's choice of pgup/dn for next/previous page and my browser's use of ctrl+pgun/dn for next/previous tab).
Don't let them get away with such a crass generalisation. A protocol can not be patented because it is not an invention; it can not be copyrighted because it is not a creative or artistic work; it can not be a trade secret because it is disclosed when software implementing the protocol is given to someone else; and it is impossible to trademark because it's not a... trade mark.
Putting aside the French attempt to create a new form of Intellectual property (the DRM right), is there any other form of IP I have missed?
You're still missing my point. Before the EU came along, laws for the UK were debated in Parliament and the House of Lords by representatives of the UK. Now they are discussed behind closed doors and agreed upon by people who are *not* representatives of the UK. If you can't see the difference then there's not really any reason to continue this discussion.
PS, I am insulted by your implication that I read the Daily Mail.
No. Only one member of the Council is appointed by the government that I elected; the others are appointed by other member governments that I did not elect.
We are forced to implement directives proposed by the (unelected) Commission and nodded through by the Council, over the opposition of our single representative. There is no possibility for meaningful debate in our own Parliament and House of Lords. In effect, we have given up the ability to decide for ourselves which laws we (allow our government to) impose.
The only way to end this madness is to succeed from this insane union entirely.
The european parliament is an elected body (by the people, seats according to population, much like the US congress), while the european comission consists of the (elected) governments of the member states (imagine a senate where senators are the state governors). Which part of this system is "undemocractic"?
Not quite right. There are three bodies, the parliament, the council and the commission.
The parliament is directly elected; however it has very little power. It takes monumental effort to alter or block any legislation that the other bodies push its way, and if by some fluke it actually manages to get organised enough to do so, the commission/council will just try again, and again, and again, until they get the answer they want.
The council is not directly elected. It consists of governmnt ministers appointed from the government of each EU member state. The council weilds tremendous power; before any legislation goes to the parliament for modification/approval, the council can vote to adopt it, unmodified, in a simple majority vote.
The council is often (ab)used by its member governments to push through unpopular legislation that would never be passed if if it was proposed in in a democratic way in the government's own country. The government can then turn around to its own people and announce that the legislation must be implemented and that they have no choice in the matter, Because The EU Has Spoken.
There are actually several councils that make up The Council, I think they are divided as a normal government is divided into ministries; so the minister for X from each member government collectively make up the Council for X. A favourite trick of the commission is to schedule some unpopular legislation (e.g., Software Patents) for discussion by a council that has nothing to do with it (e.g., the Council of Agriculture and Fisheries). In this way, laws can be nodded through without having to withstand pesky inefficiencies such as democratic debate; if the Council approves a law then that's the "same" as each member government getting the same law approved democratically in their own countries, and so the law doesn't have to go via the elected parliament.
Finally there is the commission. As in a garden pond, the scum has floated to the top; I doubt a figure among them is not mired in sleaze and corruption. The UK commissioner Peter Mandelson lost his job twice over corruption.
The commission is not an elected body, and yet it has the sole power to introduce new legislation; in the rare case where the desired laws are shot down, the commission will just wait a few months/years and push them through again. For an example of this, see the Software Patents debacle, which is currently going through the third iteration of this process.
In summary, the EU is a crock of shite; our own governments have betrayed us by allowing it to evolve from the European Common Market (what we actually voted for) to a mostly unaccountable pan-European federal supergovernment. The poster you replied to was dead right when he asked,
So what does it feel like to not be able to make your own country's laws?
From where I'm sitting, it feels pretty damn rotten, and there's nothing I can do about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Leave. You can't beat 229,999,999 other idiots.
The idea is logically flawed. Think about what a domain in the DNS actually is: it is an organisational unit. It makes no sense to separate out certain types of content into an entirely separate organisational unit. hustler.com is not a separate organisation from hustler.xxx.
It is not granular enough. A binary value of porn/not porn is so glib as to be useless. Who decides what is porn and what is not? What about servers in different countries? PICS solves all this; web authors rate the content they post based on objective criteria. For example, the RSAC rating service specifies four number of scales upon which a resource can be rated: violence, sex, nudity and language. A resource is rated from 0 to 4 on each of these scales. The values for the nudity scale are "none", "revealing attire", "partial nudity", "non-sexual frontal nudity" and "provocative frontal nudity".
It is not backwards-compatible. URIs should not change, but .xxx would force everyone to split their sites up and move half of them to an entirely different domain.
It solves the problem at the wrong level. PICS ratings, by contrast, are embedded in the HTTP header of a resource (including, in the case of HTML resources, the elements inside the element.
An exceedingly apt analogy.
stupid
Separate
bad
Human readable data on the 'entry page' of a site, format to be determined at huge expense to the taxpayer
good
Existing, proven way to embed Machine-readable metadata embedded in a resource's headers.
Of course, the real problem with this bill is that it makes classification mandatory. If anyone is really concerned that their kids will see pornography then they should bloody well install a filter that blocks such content, along with any unclassified content. The market will then determine the worth of this idea.
But that would require parents to actually do their damn jobs, so that idea is out of the window.
Yes.
Fences are necessary to prevent your sheep from wandering into a neighbouring field and getting all mixed up, maybe trading dangerous ideas.
Do you feel safer now? baah
Great, more morons who don't understand PICS. At least this is better than the .xxx domain.
Right there, in the big that says that Congress can regulate inter-state commerce. If Congress declares that a subject concerns inter-state commerce then Congress is free regulate it.
It seems easier to make the TV detect when it is being watched, and pause the display of the program while there is no one watching the adverts.
Maybe if it is owned by a person, you can build up a trust relationshop... but Microsoft is not a person. Microsoft is a corporation; a collective entity that is entirely amoral, constantly seeking a single goal: the increase of shareholder value.
Microsoft will use their patents offensively the very moment that they decide it is profitable to do so.
Oops... ignore anything after the full stop and it makes sense! You have the choice of using a swap partition, a swap file, or no swap at all.
Before Linux 2.6, swapfiles used to impose a performance penalty. These days, the only difference between the two is one of convenience and flexibility.
FYI, a separate partition for swap space has not been required for many years.A separate partition has
Gah! I think I prefer what they do in 25 Hz countries -- just play the movie slightly faster... :)
What contract between me and the publisher? I am just exchanging some cash for a shiny disk. The publisher doesn't come into it. :)
The Internet does though.
Didn't for me...
Manufacturers already submit drivers for WHQL certification that basically do the following:
if (run_by_whql) {
do_stuff_slowly_and_safely ();
} else {
do_stuff_quickly_and_buggily ();
}
I'm not convinced that this will change anything.
For Linux news, LWN; for general tech/sci news, Technocrat.
:)
Slashdot has a *lot* more users than either though. Although some times it can seem otherwise, the good comments can show though... you just need to browse at +4 and ignore anything posted = 25 minutes after a story is posted.
I wish we'd stop linking to sites with such broken designs. It appears that my choice of font is too tall for the almighy web designers at The Escapist, and so the bottom of each column on the page is chopped off.
Also, although artificial pagination is such a common annoyance on the web today that it is not worth mentioning, for some reason whenever I switch into the tab containing the article, it sees fit to move to a different page!
(This seems to be a conflict between the page's choice of pgup/dn for next/previous page and my browser's use of ctrl+pgun/dn for next/previous tab).
Don't let them get away with such a crass generalisation. A protocol can not be patented because it is not an invention; it can not be copyrighted because it is not a creative or artistic work; it can not be a trade secret because it is disclosed when software implementing the protocol is given to someone else; and it is impossible to trademark because it's not a ... trade mark.
Putting aside the French attempt to create a new form of Intellectual property (the DRM right), is there any other form of IP I have missed?
You're still missing my point. Before the EU came along, laws for the UK were debated in Parliament and the House of Lords by representatives of the UK. Now they are discussed behind closed doors and agreed upon by people who are *not* representatives of the UK. If you can't see the difference then there's not really any reason to continue this discussion.
PS, I am insulted by your implication that I read the Daily Mail.
No. Only one member of the Council is appointed by the government that I elected; the others are appointed by other member governments that I did not elect.
We are forced to implement directives proposed by the (unelected) Commission and nodded through by the Council, over the opposition of our single representative. There is no possibility for meaningful debate in our own Parliament and House of Lords. In effect, we have given up the ability to decide for ourselves which laws we (allow our government to) impose.
The only way to end this madness is to succeed from this insane union entirely.
The parliament is directly elected; however it has very little power. It takes monumental effort to alter or block any legislation that the other bodies push its way, and if by some fluke it actually manages to get organised enough to do so, the commission/council will just try again, and again, and again, until they get the answer they want.
The council is not directly elected. It consists of governmnt ministers appointed from the government of each EU member state. The council weilds tremendous power; before any legislation goes to the parliament for modification/approval, the council can vote to adopt it, unmodified, in a simple majority vote.
The council is often (ab)used by its member governments to push through unpopular legislation that would never be passed if if it was proposed in in a democratic way in the government's own country. The government can then turn around to its own people and announce that the legislation must be implemented and that they have no choice in the matter, Because The EU Has Spoken.
There are actually several councils that make up The Council, I think they are divided as a normal government is divided into ministries; so the minister for X from each member government collectively make up the Council for X. A favourite trick of the commission is to schedule some unpopular legislation (e.g., Software Patents) for discussion by a council that has nothing to do with it (e.g., the Council of Agriculture and Fisheries). In this way, laws can be nodded through without having to withstand pesky inefficiencies such as democratic debate; if the Council approves a law then that's the "same" as each member government getting the same law approved democratically in their own countries, and so the law doesn't have to go via the elected parliament.
Finally there is the commission. As in a garden pond, the scum has floated to the top; I doubt a figure among them is not mired in sleaze and corruption. The UK commissioner Peter Mandelson lost his job twice over corruption.
The commission is not an elected body, and yet it has the sole power to introduce new legislation; in the rare case where the desired laws are shot down, the commission will just wait a few months/years and push them through again. For an example of this, see the Software Patents debacle, which is currently going through the third iteration of this process.
In summary, the EU is a crock of shite; our own governments have betrayed us by allowing it to evolve from the European Common Market (what we actually voted for) to a mostly unaccountable pan-European federal supergovernment. The poster you replied to was dead right when he asked,From where I'm sitting, it feels pretty damn rotten, and there's nothing I can do about it.
Know the signs! :)