I guess I don't have any more empirical support than you do, but I still think the installation and maintenance costs would be negligible.
So you're opposed to paying taxes to the library if they provide anything less than complete, unfettered access to everything available. Well then, you better start donating your entire income to your local library -- they've got years of Hustler and Penthouse subscriptions to catch up on.
Seriously, in the real world there are budget limitations, and I don't think it's at all unreasonable to, at the very least, choose not to obtain materials that the PUBLISHERS THEMSELVES don't want you to obtain, which is what this scheme is all about.
If I, as a private individual or as a business, created a web site and specified myself that I don't want it to be accessible from public libraries, or Slashdot account holders, or people not using MSIE, and each of those groups in turn agreed that they don't want access to it, who are you to demand otherwise? Or even if those groups did want access?
The adult metatag would be used by porn sites that agree that they do not want to be accessed by children, or public libraries, or whoever doesn't want to access them either. Sex education sites, or gay support sites, or whatever other sites which are currently susceptible to unfair filtering, certainly would not use the tag.
The conceptual leap from sites _offerring_ people the chance to easily avoid sites they _want_to_ avoid, to "paying librarians to rip out pages in books the government doesn't like", is ridiculous.
If "my tax dollars" is the best reason you can find to not even consider such a plan, maybe you ought to just move overseas and start a porn site of your own...
Remember, were talking about software. The government could pay someone (if that was even necessary!) to develop a filtering standard and open-sourced client software. Something like this would be so cheap and simple to do, its almost stupid.
All right, so some foreign websites and lazy operators (and all those other people who "just wont use it") will ignore it. So what? I think its still a workable and worthwhile idea. Especially if done not as a legal requirement, but as some incentive for "industry self-regulation", like the ratings system for movies and recently TV.
At the risk of sounding like a shrill PTA mother, "if even one child is saved from..."
Its not even like tobacco, where the manufacturers covertly market to children, not because theyre evil and want to corrupt them, but simply because it makes them money. Its not even like printed porn! With online porn, due to the credit card barrier, theres no money to be made from children, so there is no reason to even covertly market to them. And thus no reason other than (neglible) cost to not implement it.
Porn sites already use those age verification services, and they prominently say so, because its good for business. It makes middle-aged dad feel a little less guilty about downloading porn (and thus more willing to spend on it) if he knows that at least the kids dont have access to it. And besides, any site thats too cheap to put in a little META tag probably has shitty content anyway;)
As for your final remark, let me remind you that the whole issue revolves around minors, who legally CAN be prevented by society from doing or seeing certain things, because they legally DO NOT not possess the judgment to just switch the channel, or just dont go to that website, or otherwise "just say no." If you would trust your hormone-crazed teenager to stop and just go somewhere else after stumbling upon a hardcore porn site, well, you must be a better parent than Ill ever be. (Im nowhere close to being a parent myself, BTW.)
OK, just what is the real story, not the legend? It's always been my understanding that Linus Torvalds created Linux as an undergraduate, and it was totally unrelated to coursework; he just did it as a personal project.
Yet in the past six months or so, I keep reading more and more articles claiming he was a grad student, Linux was a student project, Linux was a PhD thesis, and so on.
>> And for anyone so silly to think Linux or any other OS isn't as vulnerable >>
Yes, it would be silly to claim that Linux is invulnerable to viruses. But I certainly do think that Linux is nowhere near AS vulnerable as Windows or MacOS is.
First, the links says "for you Lara Croft perverts." Did you seriously not brace yourself for the possibility of something pornographic when you clicked it?
Second, as previously mentioned, it's questionable as to whether the image was pornographic.
Re:I'd love to see a Tyler port
on
May Ten Quickies
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· Score: 1
"Magic Eye pictures of the 90's"? But Magic Eye pictures _are_ from the 90's!
>>> Sure, Windows costs lots of money and Linux is free. But suppose the purchaser is gifted enough to make lots of money from the use of a program (e.g. by buying a graphics program and selling pictures). With Microsoft, once you pay for your software license, it's paid for. Everything you make, after that expense, is yours. >>>
I know this doesn't apply to Microsoft, but have you ever heard of runtime royalties for development tools? How's that for infinite price?
>>> With Linux, you always owe something back to the community, and no one can say how much. The more you make, the more people will expect. In practice, it's a debt that can never be repaid. >>>
YOU say how much you owe. There may be expectations, but you are free to ignore them. You are under no obligation. "From each according to his abilities."
(And in case you're wondering, yes, I am a godless commie.)
The gnu drawing actually reminds me of some of Picasso's later pen-and-ink drawings.
Plus it looks like RMS.
I'd prefer it to any slick, sterile, high-tech logo. Especially those tacky, overGIMPified, 3-d rendered chrome logos which are endemic to most Linux projects. Those are the worst!
>>> Check out the clueless talkback responses for (yet another) another good laugh. >>>
Clueless? No more so than most of Slashdot, and every bit as rabidly ANTI-Microsoft. Of approximately fifty responses, I think I found one that was _moderately_ sympathetic to MS, the rest bash them as hard as "we" do.
So get a clue yourself before blowing off ZDNet readers. Some of us read more than just Slashdot.
Anyone who claims to have "figured people out long ago" (and given the average age of hackers, when would that be, at age five?) and rejects 95% of the people around him/her as uninteresting and not worthy of their attention is:
1) Arrogant (and hopefully will grow out of it), 2) Deluded,
>>> why do people consider this more userfriendly? it is so damn inefficient. >>>
Using a GUI file manager is more user-friendly because: 1) you don't have to know the 'mv' command and its syntax. 2) you don't have to type out the whole path without misspelling a single directory, or have to know that tab-completion makes it a little easier.
And yes, it may be considered ineffecient. But you command-line zealots need to learn two things: 1) User-friendliness and efficiency are, in most instances, opposite qualities in an interface. It's a rare interface that is both extremely easy to use and extremely efficient. 2) Efficiency is not the be-all, end-all, ultimate aim of tools.
Of course I'm not saying that expert interfaces such as CLI are not useful. Yes, I use xterm a lot.
And yes, when I go to my local Cantonese noodle shop, I can order my favorite noodles with sui-kau and squid balls (no, that's not what you may think..;o) without looking at the menu.
But I had to look at the menu the first few times I went there, and I like to try something new now and then. You yourself claim to have been using UNIX for years, but it's those very years of use that gave you fluency with the command-line interface. You had to start somewhere, and as for me, I'd rather start out with an easy to use GUI.
My problem is with the attitude that "GUIs are inefficient, and _I_ don't need them, therefore _no_one_ should need them. (And anyone who does is an idiot!)" And this is precisely what some people here seem to be saying.
>>> I'm always amused at how people have been confused into thinking that typing commands is evil. Which is easier? Searching through menus and looking for icons, or just typing "netscape&"? >>>
All right...
"Welcome to my restaurant! We've got some wonderful meals for you today, and we'd love to serve them for you.
"But I know how much of a hassle it is to browse through the menu, and read all those superfluous descriptions, and have to decide between the many choices available.
"So to save you the effort, we've dispensed with menus. Instead, you can just tell your friendly waiter exactly what you want. Of course, you'll have to specify your choice exactly. And if we don't have what you ask for, all your waiter will do is silently shake his head.
Fine, let's just abolish all libraries, then. After all, we're all capable of creating better ideas than anything that's come before us, with absolutely no previous knowledge or learning. Who needs old ideas? They just hinder us and prevent us from innovating.
Well isn't that too bad, we hackers won't be able to buy our PCs at ridiculously low prices. We'll actually have to use our PCs for five years instead of trading up every eighteen months.
First off, I don't think that the proliferation of inexpensive NCs or other information appliances, and the subsequent decrease in numbers of "real" computers, will raise their price that much. It's Moore's law, more than economies of scale, that have made PCs so cheap. If the market shrinks, yes, prices might go up a bit, but (for a few years at least) the research and investment that drove the prices down is already sunk, and it will to a large extent continue.
Secondly, the market, and we as consumers, are pretty unforgiving. Under your scenario, no one could get away with trying to sell a Pentuim II PC for $5000. We would all remember back to when they cost $1500, and the manufacturers would know that we remember. Eventually, they'd concede, and they'd find a way to sell them for, say, $2500, and we'd agree to that price.
And so what if prices go up? I wouldn't really mind paying twice as much for my "hacker" PC if I knew the extra cost was subsidising low-end information appliances that give one more grade-school kid or grandmother access to the Internet.
You sound just like the mainframe jocks who felt threatened by the first PCs twenty years ago. Get off your high horse and realize that this next step, if it comes about, is just the continued democratization of technology. Those masses of people who are "too stupid" to keep up with future hold a lot more power than we do.
A few months ago, I took my parents to a CC because they wanted a new bookshelf-size stereo. We found one that seemed OK, so my Dad asked me if it had a headphone jack. I looked around the front panel, the side, and top, and found none.
So I called the nearby salesperson and asked him if it had a headphone jack. He looked around a bit, and came up with a half-smile : "I guess it doesn't have one."
So then why, I asked him, did the little spec/price sheet for this stereo list, under the heading of "Recommended Accessories", a CD holder and _Stereo_Headphones_?!
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I don't have any more empirical support than you do, but I still think the installation and maintenance costs would be negligible.
So you're opposed to paying taxes to the library if they provide anything less than complete, unfettered access to everything available. Well then, you better start donating your entire income to your local library -- they've got years of Hustler and Penthouse subscriptions to catch up on.
Seriously, in the real world there are budget limitations, and I don't think it's at all unreasonable to, at the very least, choose not to obtain materials that the PUBLISHERS THEMSELVES don't want you to obtain, which is what this scheme is all about.
If I, as a private individual or as a business, created a web site and specified myself that I don't want it to be accessible from public libraries, or Slashdot account holders, or people not using MSIE, and each of those groups in turn agreed that they don't want access to it, who are you to demand otherwise? Or even if those groups did want access?
The adult metatag would be used by porn sites that agree that they do not want to be accessed by children, or public libraries, or whoever doesn't want to access them either. Sex education sites, or gay support sites, or whatever other sites which are currently susceptible to unfair filtering, certainly would not use the tag.
The conceptual leap from sites _offerring_ people the chance to easily avoid sites they _want_to_ avoid, to "paying librarians to rip out pages in books the government doesn't like", is ridiculous.
If "my tax dollars" is the best reason you can find to not even consider such a plan, maybe you ought to just move overseas and start a porn site of your own...
;)
Remember, were talking about software. The government could pay someone (if that was even necessary!) to develop a filtering standard and open-sourced client software. Something like this would be so cheap and simple to do, its almost stupid.
All right, so some foreign websites and lazy operators (and all those other people who "just wont use it") will ignore it. So what? I think its still a workable and worthwhile idea. Especially if done not as a legal requirement, but as some incentive for "industry self-regulation", like the ratings system for movies and recently TV.
At the risk of sounding like a shrill PTA mother, "if even one child is saved from..."
Its not even like tobacco, where the manufacturers covertly market to children, not because theyre evil and want to corrupt them, but simply because it makes them money. Its not even like printed porn! With online porn, due to the credit card barrier, theres no money to be made from children, so there is no reason to even covertly market to them. And thus no reason other than (neglible) cost to not implement it.
Porn sites already use those age verification services, and they prominently say so, because its good for business. It makes middle-aged dad feel a little less guilty about downloading porn (and thus more willing to spend on it) if he knows that at least the kids dont have access to it. And besides, any site thats too cheap to put in a little META tag probably has shitty content anyway
As for your final remark, let me remind you that the whole issue revolves around minors, who legally CAN be prevented by society from doing or seeing certain things, because they legally DO NOT not possess the judgment to just switch the channel, or just dont go to that website, or otherwise "just say no." If you would trust your hormone-crazed teenager to stop and just go somewhere else after stumbling upon a hardcore porn site, well, you must be a better parent than Ill ever be. (Im nowhere close to being a parent myself, BTW.)
OK, just what is the real story, not the legend? It's always been my understanding that Linus Torvalds created Linux as an undergraduate, and it was totally unrelated to coursework; he just did it as a personal project.
Yet in the past six months or so, I keep reading more and more articles claiming he was a grad student, Linux was a student project, Linux was a PhD thesis, and so on.
What are the facts?
It's not a closed-source virus that's the problem. It's a closed-source _operating_system_. Are you really that stupid?
>>
And for anyone so silly to think Linux or any other OS isn't as vulnerable
>>
Yes, it would be silly to claim that Linux is invulnerable to viruses. But I certainly do think that Linux is nowhere near AS vulnerable as Windows or MacOS is.
DEFINITELY!! DEFINITELY!!! DEFINITELY!!!
Aaaargh....
Yeah, just like those non-upgradeable, inflexible, useless lumps of shit in your garage, home entertainment center, and kitchen.
This sort of "absolute hacker" mentality is absurd. Get over it.
Sure, they could. But so what? In a sense, Red Hat Linux is not owned by Red Hat, it's owned by the GPL.
The GPL is inseparable from Linux, and no matter what happens to Red Hat the company, Red Hat Linux will remain free.
>>>
Porn = inexhaustible supply of images
>>>
Only problem is, there's not that much variation in color...
Oh, come on.
First, the links says "for you Lara Croft perverts." Did you seriously not brace yourself for the possibility of something pornographic when you clicked it?
Second, as previously mentioned, it's questionable as to whether the image was pornographic.
"Magic Eye pictures of the 90's"? But Magic Eye pictures _are_ from the 90's!
Heck, it should be obvious to anyone who grew up in Japan in the 1970's that this is the origin of this whole iMac translucent colored plastic trend.
>>>
First, there are about 600M people in the US,
>>>
HUH???????
>>>
Sure, Windows costs lots of money and Linux is free. But suppose the purchaser is gifted enough to make lots of money from the use of a program (e.g. by buying a graphics program and selling pictures). With Microsoft, once you pay for your software license, it's paid for. Everything you make, after that expense, is yours.
>>>
I know this doesn't apply to Microsoft, but have you ever heard of runtime royalties for development tools? How's that for infinite price?
>>>
With Linux, you always owe something back to the community, and no one can say how much. The more you make, the more people will expect. In practice, it's a debt that can never be repaid.
>>>
YOU say how much you owe. There may be expectations, but you are free to ignore them. You are under no obligation. "From each according to his abilities."
(And in case you're wondering, yes, I am a godless commie.)
The gnu drawing actually reminds me of some of Picasso's later pen-and-ink drawings.
Plus it looks like RMS.
I'd prefer it to any slick, sterile, high-tech logo. Especially those tacky, overGIMPified, 3-d rendered chrome logos which are endemic to most Linux projects. Those are the worst!
Now if every system aliased 'apropos'(surely one of the most cryptic command names of all) to 'help'...
>>>
Check out the clueless talkback responses for (yet another) another good laugh.
>>>
Clueless? No more so than most of Slashdot, and every bit as rabidly ANTI-Microsoft. Of approximately fifty responses, I think I found one that was _moderately_ sympathetic to MS, the rest bash them as hard as "we" do.
So get a clue yourself before blowing off ZDNet readers. Some of us read more than just Slashdot.
Give me a break.
Anyone who claims to have "figured people out long ago" (and given the average age of hackers, when would that be, at age five?) and rejects 95% of the people around him/her as uninteresting and not worthy of their attention is:
1) Arrogant (and hopefully will grow out of it),
2) Deluded,
and
3) *By definition*, socially inept.
>>>
why do people consider this more userfriendly? it is so damn inefficient.
>>>
Using a GUI file manager is more user-friendly because:
1) you don't have to know the 'mv' command and its syntax.
2) you don't have to type out the whole path without misspelling a single directory, or have to know that tab-completion makes it a little easier.
And yes, it may be considered ineffecient. But you command-line zealots need to learn two things:
1) User-friendliness and efficiency are, in most instances, opposite qualities in an interface. It's a rare interface that is both extremely easy to use and extremely efficient.
2) Efficiency is not the be-all, end-all, ultimate aim of tools.
Of course I'm not saying that expert interfaces such as CLI are not useful. Yes, I use xterm a lot.
;o) without looking at the menu.
And yes, when I go to my local Cantonese noodle shop, I can order my favorite noodles with sui-kau and squid balls (no, that's not what you may think..
But I had to look at the menu the first few times I went there, and I like to try something new now and then. You yourself claim to have been using UNIX for years, but it's those very years of use that gave you fluency with the command-line interface. You had to start somewhere, and as for me, I'd rather start out with an easy to use GUI.
My problem is with the attitude that "GUIs are inefficient, and _I_ don't need them, therefore _no_one_ should need them. (And anyone who does is an idiot!)" And this is precisely what some people here seem to be saying.
>>>
I'm always amused at how people have been confused into thinking that typing commands is evil. Which is easier? Searching through menus and looking for icons, or just typing "netscape&"?
>>>
All right...
"Welcome to my restaurant! We've got some wonderful meals for you today, and we'd love to serve them for you.
"But I know how much of a hassle it is to browse through the menu, and read all those superfluous descriptions, and have to decide between the many choices available.
"So to save you the effort, we've dispensed with menus. Instead, you can just tell your friendly waiter exactly what you want. Of course, you'll have to specify your choice exactly. And if we don't have what you ask for, all your waiter will do is silently shake his head.
"So, sir what would you like today?..."
Fine, let's just abolish all libraries, then. After all, we're all capable of creating better ideas than anything that's come before us, with absolutely no previous knowledge or learning. Who needs old ideas? They just hinder us and prevent us from innovating.
Yup.
Well isn't that too bad, we hackers won't be able to buy our PCs at ridiculously low prices. We'll actually have to use our PCs for five years instead of trading up every eighteen months.
First off, I don't think that the proliferation of inexpensive NCs or other information appliances, and the subsequent decrease in numbers of "real" computers, will raise their price that much. It's Moore's law, more than economies of scale, that have made PCs so cheap. If the market shrinks, yes, prices might go up a bit, but (for a few years at least) the research and investment that drove the prices down is already sunk, and it will to a large extent continue.
Secondly, the market, and we as consumers, are pretty unforgiving. Under your scenario, no one could get away with trying to sell a Pentuim II PC for $5000. We would all remember back to when they cost $1500, and the manufacturers would know that we remember. Eventually, they'd concede, and they'd find a way to sell them for, say, $2500, and we'd agree to that price.
And so what if prices go up? I wouldn't really mind paying twice as much for my "hacker" PC if I knew the extra cost was subsidising low-end information appliances that give one more grade-school kid or grandmother access to the Internet.
You sound just like the mainframe jocks who felt threatened by the first PCs twenty years ago. Get off your high horse and realize that this next step, if it comes about, is just the continued democratization of technology. Those masses of people who are "too stupid" to keep up with future hold a lot more power than we do.
A few months ago, I took my parents to a CC because they wanted a new bookshelf-size stereo. We found one that seemed OK, so my Dad asked me if it had a headphone jack. I looked around the front panel, the side, and top, and found none.
So I called the nearby salesperson and asked him if it had a headphone jack. He looked around a bit, and came up with a half-smile : "I guess it doesn't have one."
So then why, I asked him, did the little spec/price sheet for this stereo list, under the heading of "Recommended Accessories", a CD holder and _Stereo_Headphones_?!
We left pretty quickly.