ISO/IEC 8802-11:1999(E), that is, the official ANSI/IEEE 802.11 spec.
It says WEP is Wired Equivalent Privacy and makes absolutely no mention whatsoever of a "Wireless Encryption Protocol". The latter term may have grown into some level of colloquial use, but has no backing by the official standard at all.
Yes, if both transmitters are broadcasting at the exact same frequency with the same modulation scheme, they interfere with each other. The point of this paper is to ask why are we cramming ourselves into just a few tiny nooks of the spectrum, thus creating this interference problem, when the spectrum is so large and underutilized. The paper points at the various incarnations of 802.11 as efficient use of a small patch of spectrum. If we did that with a few more patches, we'd easily have enough space for colocated wireless networks to work around each other -- change their frequency utilization automatically based on what other networks are nearby to minimize interference. 802.11b has such an option already; it's called channel agility. Unfortunately, since there are only three truly non-overlapping channels (1, 6, 11) within the USA/FCC mandated spectrum for 802.11b, areas of heavy wireless activity can easily find themselves without a clear channel to switch to. However, with say, a few dozen nonoverlapping channels to choose from, channel agility becomes a powerful and effective tool in colocating many wireless networks with a minimum of interference and degradation.
The rules of and assumptions underlying the way the FCC is carving up spectrum are based on 1930's technology. It assumes transmitters and receivers have poor filters, and cannot tolerate adjacent or overlapping signals. It assumes no spread spectrum or channel agility / frequency hopping technology. Fast forward 70 years. Technology has marched on. Spread spectrum and channel agility are cheap and commonplace. Transmitters meet much stricter tolerances for sideband and out-of-band emissions. Receivers can pick up weaker signals, and much more successfully distinguish their signal from other overlapping or closely adjacent signals. Thus we can now pack several times the data per unit of spectrum than the current rules assume we can. Yet the rules prevent us from doing this on a large scale because the unlicensed bands in which we can operate are so few and small. Users of the licensed bands (most of them anyway, cell phones being the one big exception) have little incentive to deploy these technologies and make maximum use of their spectrum because the rules guarantee them enough free spectrum that they can use older, less efficient technology with abandon, and still get done everything they want to.
THAT is the point of this paper. We shouldn't be asking what if both nodes are at 2.4GHz. We should be asking why does the guy at 2.3GHz get to be so wasteful with his bandwidth when technology now makes it cheap and easy for him to get more done with less, and we're all crammed in here together at 2.4GHz?
True, 802.11b is too slow for high quality video. But so are all of those cameras. 640x480 max resolution? And you know you don't get full framerate at that resolution. Unless specifically stated otherwise, you should assume that max stated framerate is at minimum stated resolution, and the framerate for higher resolutions decreases proportionately to the resolution increase.
802.11b can handle 10fps at 640x480, jpegged. But I'd hardly call that "high quality video". And that's certainly about all you'll get out of any of these cameras.
But ISPs could make it part of their Terms of Service that they periodically do unannounced scans of port 25 of their customers' IPs. Anything that answers is given an automated open relay test. If it proves not to be an open relay, fine, it's left alone. If it is an open relay, an operator is notified and handles the problem. An equally effective and much less restrictive solution to that problem.
...this makes way too much sense. Perhaps I'm just being too cynical, but as wonderful as your suggestion is, I just don't see it happening, for three reasons.
1) The vast majority of the voting populace is stupid. Too many of them couldn't distinguish a good public debate from an old episode of Flying Circus. (Frankly, given some of the candidates lately, I'm not sure I can either.) Now I'd hope and expect this to be less true of the subset of the public that regularly uses the Internet, but sometimes, I'm just not too sure about that.
2) Most politicians don't want real public debate on issues. That takes thought and preparation and may require an admission that they were wrong about something or perhaps don't know enough about the issue to form an opinion. As long as there are only a few debates, they're televised, and they're short, the politicians can focus on just a few tried-and-true issues, avoid the tough questions, sling a little mud, distort a few statistics, and just be done with it already. Much less effort, and to the vast stupid swaths of population, much more convincing.
3) Most politicians don't want the playing field too level. Incumbents have more money. They like that more money means significantly better chances. And the Democrats and Republicans like that the television debate format doesn't scale well with increasing numbers of candidates. They'd like us to believe that really only two candidates can comfortably fit on a half-hour televised debate. Anything that brings third-party candidates into debates and lends them any air of legitimacy is bad to them, and to be avoided.
Again, this is my cynical side speaking here. My idealistic side is saying the exact same thing you are. Unfortunately, in the world of politics, and especially American politics, my cynical side tends to be closer to right much more often.
Excuse me for laughing derisively. The more to the patent is using the result of the geographic locality check to decide whether or not certain content should be sent? Perhaps you're not a programmer, but that boils down to a hash table lookup and an if statement. That's something your average second-year computer science undergrad should be able to come up with. Patents are awarded for innovations "not obvious to someone skilled in the art". The "more" that you are suggesting is patent-worthy is obvious to someone JUST BEGINNING TO LEARN THE ART.
In general, what you are saying is that given a method to determine some critical piece of information X, you should be able to patent using X to make a simple yes-or-no decision. That's ridiculous. Humans have been doing that for tens of thousands of years. "I am hungry. There is a fruit-bearing plant in front of me. Is the fruit poisonous or harmful to me in any way? If no, then eat it; if yes, then don't. Oh wait, I can't make a decision based on derived information because that's a patented process." With as little faith as I have in the USPTO, I think even they would reject that one.
Re:Cash registers, not fireproof safes
on
HDCP Break Proven
·
· Score: 1
the signals are only accessible by those who want to consciously make equipment designed for the purpose of veiwing them, which has no legitimate alternative use.
No legitimate use? I beg to differ. Viewing those signals is necessary to preserving MY rights as a legitimate paying customer for them. The whole reason HDCP is being designed is to rob the consumer of his/her fair use rights to works that they've PAID FOR legitimate access to. If you don't do an end-run around HDCP, then you can only use the signal in the exact ways prescribed by the distributor. Guess what? Distributors AREN'T ALLOWED to prevent you by force of law from using their signals in certain ways. These ways are called "fair use", and have come out of decades of intellectual property court trials as rights that YOU have. But distributors can rob you of these rights through technological means (e.g. HDCP), then use a heavy-handed, overly-broad, draconian law like the DMCA to prevent you from doing an end-run around their technological measures. This is exactly what they're doing. The only way I can preserve my fair use rights is to violate the DMCA, break into HDCP, and get at the plaintext signal myself. Guess what, that's exactly what I'm going to do. And I'm not going to feel the least moral compunction for taking back rights that were willfully and wantonly robbed from me in the name of corporate profit. This country is a Republic of the People, not a Republic of the Corporations. We're supposed to be guaranteed liberty and justice for all people, not profit and power for companies. Our leaders seem to have forgotten that, and you seem to be buying in to their "new logic".
The Japanese are wonderful people who treat each other and US visitors very well. People forgive acts of war when all is said and done. Violence, justly used does not make eternal hatred.
I'd like to second this. A few months ago I saw, through the eyes of a History Channel documentary, the most wonderful amazing thing. Fifty-some years after Pearl Harbor, survivors of the attack on both sides -- Japanese pilots and American sailors -- met with each other at the USS Arizona Memorial. They shook hands. They hugged each other. And they forgave each other. I was in tears just watching the limited portion that made it into the documentary. Tears of joy, hopeful, that even in our darkest times, maybe the human race isn't so bad after all.
When the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb, it was already clear that the U.S. had gained the upper hand in the war and would eventually win. But you're absolutely wrong that Japan had decided to surrender. Quite the opposite, Japan was girding itself for the U.S. to invade its mainland, and intended to defend its mainland with every able-bodied man, woman, or child, whether they had ever held a gun or not, whether they would even have a gun when they faced U.S. troops or not. President Truman had a terrible choice to make. He could either invade mainland Japan and occupy the whole island, which was expected to involve the deaths of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops and tens of millions of Japanese people, mostly not trained military but drafted at the last moment, or he could drop the atomic bomb and try to scare Japan into a quick surrender. Both choices were horrible. I won't speculate on whether the correct choice was made or not; in many senses, there was no correct choice.
But make no mistake: Japan did not decide to surrender until AFTER the second atomic bomb was dropped, and it was not a show or force to the USSR. At that time, the USSR was still our ally. We were greatful for their help in defeating Germany, and were still on good terms with them for a little while after the war ended.
If this were a good company, run by smart managers making good decisions, that just hit a run of bad luck, then yes, I would agree with you. Everyone has bad luck and hard times now and then, companies included, and this alone does not deserve disloyalty or abandonment. But stupid, incompetent management is a horse of a completely different color. That's not bad luck; that's bad leadership. Bad luck deserves a helping hand; bad leadership deserves that you not be there when it inevitably brings calamity down on everything around it.
Loyalty must be earned. If the management is truly incompetent, and it's obvious that their incompetence is ruining the company, and you have tried and failed to get them back on the right track, then management has failed to earn your loyalty, and you should not give it to them. Loyalty to your friends, however is another matter. If your friends have been producing good work, they deserve not to be left completely in the lurch. On the one hand, if the management is as bad as you say, sooner or later the company will tank, and your friends will be laid off. On the other hand, if your leaving will drastically accelerate this, then perhaps you do bear some measure of moral responsibility here. Talk to the companies that have given you offers. Tell them you've got several people working under you, whom you recommend highly, that may also be looking for jobs soon. Ask them if there might also be positions for these people at the new place. You might just get your whole department hired all at once. What a coup that would be -- saving all your friends from a sinking ship while simultaneously giving the royal shaft to the jerks who put the whole in the bottom of the ship in the first place.
Just what I needed. An easier way to blow fifteen bucks or more on an overpriced CD with one good song and nine bad ones on it. Of the last four times I've bought a CD based on one song, I've come away extremely disappointed three of those times. Next time, I'll use Napster. Not to steal the song, but to preview the whole album before I buy it. What if I only like that one song? Here's a hint to the music industry: SELL ME A SINGLE!
So? What's wrong with letting Hitler join the debates? All viewpoints deserve to be represented, whether you agree with them or not. And after hearing the arguments of a candidate you do not agree with, you can simply explain to your friends and family (or the world at large) why you do not agree with them. That's freedom of speech. That's one of the basic tenets this country was founded on. And it deserves to be upheld in the policital arena just as much as anywhere else.
I'm Jewish. My grandmother lost a great many friends and extended family in the Holocaust. But if Hitler was where Nader is now -- a third-party candidate with 5% or so of the polls, I would still argue for him to be included in the debates. Agreeing with a viewpoint should not be a prerequisite for defending it's place to be heard. Silencing the opposition is the cowardly last resort of a person that cannot capably refute the oposition's arguments with logical discourse.
If you are truly secure in your beliefs, then you should allow different beliefs to be expressed, and then argue back why you disagree with them. What do we call this process? We call it debate. And it's exactly what is NOT happening on television right now because only two candidates are involved.
Not only is it different in places, but also many calls and many options to calls are missing. This is why porting anything from Win9x to WinCE is many times more painful than porting to NT. If the WINE project put too much stock in following whatever WinCE source they could get hold of, they'd just end up with a swiss cheese API, which is what WinCE itself is.
As for the second question, someone always wants to emulate anything. What if we could shoehorn WINE into a Linux-based PDA? Then I'm sure it wouldn't be long before all kinds of WinCE apps were running on it....
Another option: short the stock. While I'll be just as saddened as the rest of you by the press Linux will get when LinuxOne's IPO sinks like a rock and never comes back, at least we can cash in on their misfortune, and that of the poor hapless fools who bought the stock. What will it tell Wall Street if, from the very first day of trading, over 25% of LinuxOne's publicly traded shares are shorted? It'll say that LinuxOne is a sham and we expect them to tank. Such messages tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies in the marketplace, even when not true from the start.
Wired is carrying the story here. This is the part that really scared me: after hearing only three hours of argument, judge Louis A. Kaplan pronounced, "I don't think there's the slightest question that the plaintiffs have a very good chance of success." If we can't count on a judge not to prejudge.....
What matters is what it does. If the program decrypts DVDs, the DVDCCA and/or MPAA will go after it if they didn't license it. And if the defense of DeCSS fails, then LiViD and any other program hoping to play a DVD without paying the DVDCCA extortion^H^H^H^Hlicensing fee will go down with the DeCSS ship, because there will be a precedent set. We MUST successfully defend DeCSS regardless of its actual usefulness as an app or utility, because if we don't, we will have lost any future similar cases even before they go to trial.
I don't care what Ramsey has in their catalog. No matter what it is, it is just a tool. It has legitimate uses; it has illegitimate ones. It can be used for good; it can be used for evil. We (and by that, I mean the government, as directed by the citizenry it governs, us) should be cracking down not on tools, but on people who use them for illegal purposes.
Why is a camera or a microphone any different from a hammer? I can buy a hammer at many local stores and put it in my toolbox. I can build a house for a homeless person with it. I could also bash somebody's head in with it. Does the government raid the local hardware store and seize all its hammers because they could be used in a murder? No. If I bash somebody's head in with a hammer, I am the one who gets prosecuted, as the individual who misused the tool.
This is why I support Ramsey. Though I am all for preserving what little privacy we have left, I know that no tool uses itself. Ramsey is not responsible for the camera pointing at me in the shower; the person who put the camera in my shower is. And that's who should bear the brunt of law enforcement's onslaught, not Ramsey.
How much sense does it make to rail against Big Brother and then leap to the defense of his supplier?
It makes perfect sense. Big Brother will always have suppliers. Everyday people will not. Taking down a supplier of tools that Big Brother wants to misuse and then assuming that means the end of that tool is just sticking your head in the sand like an ostrich. You can't see the tool anymore so you assume no one can get it, and you're safe. Utter bull. Big Brother can get any tool it wants. If we keep the tool available to all, we keep its potential for misuse in the public mind, so we learn of instances in which it is misused more readily. This makes it easier to speak out against misuses.
Eternal vigilence is the price of freedom. And privacy.
but that our parents don't spend enough time with their children.
Exactly. And unfortunately, this will only exasperate that problem. It encourages "drop 'em in front of the TV and let 'em bake for hours" parenting. After all, they can't see anything violent or harmful, so why not, right? Just as parents are thinking they're taking more responsibility for their children's upbringing by keeping potentially harmful images away from them, they are actually taking less responsiblity by making it easy to spend less time teaching their children how the world works, what is right, and what is wrong, instead ceding that job to the newly sanitized boob tube.
Parents, listen up. If you let your children learn all about life from television, you will get screwed-up children, no matter how censored the television is. Television bears far too little resemblance to real life to make that a viable option. If you don't want your kids to get the wrong idea about something, then you'd better give them the right idea yourself. They're your kids -- if you don't do it, who will?
Slashdot Mirror
ISO/IEC 8802-11:1999(E), that is, the official ANSI/IEEE 802.11 spec.
It says WEP is Wired Equivalent Privacy and makes absolutely no mention whatsoever of a "Wireless Encryption Protocol". The latter term may have grown into some level of colloquial use, but has no backing by the official standard at all.
The rules of and assumptions underlying the way the FCC is carving up spectrum are based on 1930's technology. It assumes transmitters and receivers have poor filters, and cannot tolerate adjacent or overlapping signals. It assumes no spread spectrum or channel agility / frequency hopping technology. Fast forward 70 years. Technology has marched on. Spread spectrum and channel agility are cheap and commonplace. Transmitters meet much stricter tolerances for sideband and out-of-band emissions. Receivers can pick up weaker signals, and much more successfully distinguish their signal from other overlapping or closely adjacent signals. Thus we can now pack several times the data per unit of spectrum than the current rules assume we can. Yet the rules prevent us from doing this on a large scale because the unlicensed bands in which we can operate are so few and small. Users of the licensed bands (most of them anyway, cell phones being the one big exception) have little incentive to deploy these technologies and make maximum use of their spectrum because the rules guarantee them enough free spectrum that they can use older, less efficient technology with abandon, and still get done everything they want to.
THAT is the point of this paper. We shouldn't be asking what if both nodes are at 2.4GHz. We should be asking why does the guy at 2.3GHz get to be so wasteful with his bandwidth when technology now makes it cheap and easy for him to get more done with less, and we're all crammed in here together at 2.4GHz?
Ah. Mister KFG has learned the first lesson in the art of not being seen. Don't stand up. Mister KFG, would you stand up now? KA-BOOM!
True, 802.11b is too slow for high quality video. But so are all of those cameras. 640x480 max resolution? And you know you don't get full framerate at that resolution. Unless specifically stated otherwise, you should assume that max stated framerate is at minimum stated resolution, and the framerate for higher resolutions decreases proportionately to the resolution increase.
802.11b can handle 10fps at 640x480, jpegged. But I'd hardly call that "high quality video". And that's certainly about all you'll get out of any of these cameras.
But ISPs could make it part of their Terms of Service that they periodically do unannounced scans of port 25 of their customers' IPs. Anything that answers is given an automated open relay test. If it proves not to be an open relay, fine, it's left alone. If it is an open relay, an operator is notified and handles the problem. An equally effective and much less restrictive solution to that problem.
Excuse me, but that's "Heavy D and The Boys" to you...
...this makes way too much sense. Perhaps I'm just being too cynical, but as wonderful as your suggestion is, I just don't see it happening, for three reasons.
1) The vast majority of the voting populace is stupid. Too many of them couldn't distinguish a good public debate from an old episode of Flying Circus. (Frankly, given some of the candidates lately, I'm not sure I can either.) Now I'd hope and expect this to be less true of the subset of the public that regularly uses the Internet, but sometimes, I'm just not too sure about that.
2) Most politicians don't want real public debate on issues. That takes thought and preparation and may require an admission that they were wrong about something or perhaps don't know enough about the issue to form an opinion. As long as there are only a few debates, they're televised, and they're short, the politicians can focus on just a few tried-and-true issues, avoid the tough questions, sling a little mud, distort a few statistics, and just be done with it already. Much less effort, and to the vast stupid swaths of population, much more convincing.
3) Most politicians don't want the playing field too level. Incumbents have more money. They like that more money means significantly better chances. And the Democrats and Republicans like that the television debate format doesn't scale well with increasing numbers of candidates. They'd like us to believe that really only two candidates can comfortably fit on a half-hour televised debate. Anything that brings third-party candidates into debates and lends them any air of legitimacy is bad to them, and to be avoided.
Again, this is my cynical side speaking here. My idealistic side is saying the exact same thing you are. Unfortunately, in the world of politics, and especially American politics, my cynical side tends to be closer to right much more often.
Excuse me for laughing derisively. The more to the patent is using the result of the geographic locality check to decide whether or not certain content should be sent? Perhaps you're not a programmer, but that boils down to a hash table lookup and an if statement. That's something your average second-year computer science undergrad should be able to come up with. Patents are awarded for innovations "not obvious to someone skilled in the art". The "more" that you are suggesting is patent-worthy is obvious to someone JUST BEGINNING TO LEARN THE ART.
In general, what you are saying is that given a method to determine some critical piece of information X, you should be able to patent using X to make a simple yes-or-no decision. That's ridiculous. Humans have been doing that for tens of thousands of years. "I am hungry. There is a fruit-bearing plant in front of me. Is the fruit poisonous or harmful to me in any way? If no, then eat it; if yes, then don't. Oh wait, I can't make a decision based on derived information because that's a patented process." With as little faith as I have in the USPTO, I think even they would reject that one.
No legitimate use? I beg to differ. Viewing those signals is necessary to preserving MY rights as a legitimate paying customer for them. The whole reason HDCP is being designed is to rob the consumer of his/her fair use rights to works that they've PAID FOR legitimate access to. If you don't do an end-run around HDCP, then you can only use the signal in the exact ways prescribed by the distributor. Guess what? Distributors AREN'T ALLOWED to prevent you by force of law from using their signals in certain ways. These ways are called "fair use", and have come out of decades of intellectual property court trials as rights that YOU have. But distributors can rob you of these rights through technological means (e.g. HDCP), then use a heavy-handed, overly-broad, draconian law like the DMCA to prevent you from doing an end-run around their technological measures. This is exactly what they're doing. The only way I can preserve my fair use rights is to violate the DMCA, break into HDCP, and get at the plaintext signal myself. Guess what, that's exactly what I'm going to do. And I'm not going to feel the least moral compunction for taking back rights that were willfully and wantonly robbed from me in the name of corporate profit. This country is a Republic of the People, not a Republic of the Corporations. We're supposed to be guaranteed liberty and justice for all people, not profit and power for companies. Our leaders seem to have forgotten that, and you seem to be buying in to their "new logic".
I'd like to second this. A few months ago I saw, through the eyes of a History Channel documentary, the most wonderful amazing thing. Fifty-some years after Pearl Harbor, survivors of the attack on both sides -- Japanese pilots and American sailors -- met with each other at the USS Arizona Memorial. They shook hands. They hugged each other. And they forgave each other. I was in tears just watching the limited portion that made it into the documentary. Tears of joy, hopeful, that even in our darkest times, maybe the human race isn't so bad after all.
When the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb, it was already clear that the U.S. had gained the upper hand in the war and would eventually win. But you're absolutely wrong that Japan had decided to surrender. Quite the opposite, Japan was girding itself for the U.S. to invade its mainland, and intended to defend its mainland with every able-bodied man, woman, or child, whether they had ever held a gun or not, whether they would even have a gun when they faced U.S. troops or not. President Truman had a terrible choice to make. He could either invade mainland Japan and occupy the whole island, which was expected to involve the deaths of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops and tens of millions of Japanese people, mostly not trained military but drafted at the last moment, or he could drop the atomic bomb and try to scare Japan into a quick surrender. Both choices were horrible. I won't speculate on whether the correct choice was made or not; in many senses, there was no correct choice.
But make no mistake: Japan did not decide to surrender until AFTER the second atomic bomb was dropped, and it was not a show or force to the USSR. At that time, the USSR was still our ally. We were greatful for their help in defeating Germany, and were still on good terms with them for a little while after the war ended.
Just what I needed. An easier way to blow fifteen bucks or more on an overpriced CD with one good song and nine bad ones on it. Of the last four times I've bought a CD based on one song, I've come away extremely disappointed three of those times. Next time, I'll use Napster. Not to steal the song, but to preview the whole album before I buy it. What if I only like that one song? Here's a hint to the music industry: SELL ME A SINGLE!
So? What's wrong with letting Hitler join the debates? All viewpoints deserve to be represented, whether you agree with them or not. And after hearing the arguments of a candidate you do not agree with, you can simply explain to your friends and family (or the world at large) why you do not agree with them. That's freedom of speech. That's one of the basic tenets this country was founded on. And it deserves to be upheld in the policital arena just as much as anywhere else.
I'm Jewish. My grandmother lost a great many friends and extended family in the Holocaust. But if Hitler was where Nader is now -- a third-party candidate with 5% or so of the polls, I would still argue for him to be included in the debates. Agreeing with a viewpoint should not be a prerequisite for defending it's place to be heard. Silencing the opposition is the cowardly last resort of a person that cannot capably refute the oposition's arguments with logical discourse.
If you are truly secure in your beliefs, then you should allow different beliefs to be expressed, and then argue back why you disagree with them. What do we call this process? We call it debate. And it's exactly what is NOT happening on television right now because only two candidates are involved.
Not only is it different in places, but also many calls and many options to calls are missing. This is why porting anything from Win9x to WinCE is many times more painful than porting to NT. If the WINE project put too much stock in following whatever WinCE source they could get hold of, they'd just end up with a swiss cheese API, which is what WinCE itself is.
As for the second question, someone always wants to emulate anything. What if we could shoehorn WINE into a Linux-based PDA? Then I'm sure it wouldn't be long before all kinds of WinCE apps were running on it....
Why is a camera or a microphone any different from a hammer? I can buy a hammer at many local stores and put it in my toolbox. I can build a house for a homeless person with it. I could also bash somebody's head in with it. Does the government raid the local hardware store and seize all its hammers because they could be used in a murder? No. If I bash somebody's head in with a hammer, I am the one who gets prosecuted, as the individual who misused the tool.
This is why I support Ramsey. Though I am all for preserving what little privacy we have left, I know that no tool uses itself. Ramsey is not responsible for the camera pointing at me in the shower; the person who put the camera in my shower is. And that's who should bear the brunt of law enforcement's onslaught, not Ramsey.
How much sense does it make to rail against Big Brother and then leap to the defense of his supplier?
It makes perfect sense. Big Brother will always have suppliers. Everyday people will not. Taking down a supplier of tools that Big Brother wants to misuse and then assuming that means the end of that tool is just sticking your head in the sand like an ostrich. You can't see the tool anymore so you assume no one can get it, and you're safe. Utter bull. Big Brother can get any tool it wants. If we keep the tool available to all, we keep its potential for misuse in the public mind, so we learn of instances in which it is misused more readily. This makes it easier to speak out against misuses.
Eternal vigilence is the price of freedom. And privacy.
Exactly. And unfortunately, this will only exasperate that problem. It encourages "drop 'em in front of the TV and let 'em bake for hours" parenting. After all, they can't see anything violent or harmful, so why not, right? Just as parents are thinking they're taking more responsibility for their children's upbringing by keeping potentially harmful images away from them, they are actually taking less responsiblity by making it easy to spend less time teaching their children how the world works, what is right, and what is wrong, instead ceding that job to the newly sanitized boob tube.
Parents, listen up. If you let your children learn all about life from television, you will get screwed-up children, no matter how censored the television is. Television bears far too little resemblance to real life to make that a viable option. If you don't want your kids to get the wrong idea about something, then you'd better give them the right idea yourself. They're your kids -- if you don't do it, who will?