Who, besides fourteen-year-olds, says "gay" to mean anything other than actual homosexuality? (Or joyousness, if being quaint...)
And while I realize these fourteen-year-olds are our future, I also realize that by the time they're twenty-four, they have at least one or more gay friends, so they have the decency not to use the word that way.
But it's not so much the original "crackers" who changed the meaning. If that were the case, I now declare myself a Man, so anyone who is male and not me is a Boy, because the word "Man" has CHANGED ITS MEANING to refer to me.
No, it's the news media, who really didn't have a clue anyway. They might as easily have called them "developers", or even "phreaks". The reason why "hackers" is so frustrating is that, like "developers", it has another meaning. It's not so troublesome that there's a new word for "cracker", but that there is now no word that covers the original meaning of "hacker".
That said, I've now grown up and started calling myself an "engineer"...
How do they get to be so wrong about these things, though?
Seriously, what adviser tells them that it's at all possible to filter the Internet reliably? Or that DRM will ever work? Or that there is such a thing as a "hacker tool", with no legitimate, legal use?
And, given technology is apparently important enough for them to legislate about, why do they not listen thoroughly enough to understand the opposing views? I don't mean they have to understand what a debugger actually does, but how do we get asshats like Tubes Stevens?
Actually, the Coca-cola company is one of the few legal exporters of Coca from Peru and such.
And I do remember hearing that people are developing ways of killing the Coca plant, as well, the idea being that you could specifically target it and leave everything else untouched. Do a pass over the country in a plane...
What morons. I'd hate to see Coca go, and I do miss it back in the states. It helps a lot with altitude, so would be very helpful on those Colorado skiing trips.
Why is it that you think any drug at all should be illegal?
As far as I'm concerned, let people screw up if they want to. The organized crime surrounding the drugs is worse than the drugs themselves -- or haven't we learned from Prohibition?
Hint: YouTube doesn't work in any open source player that I've tried.
You're right that it works on every "significant" platform -- I know 64-bit Linux isn't significant. But Moonlight is a port of Silverlight to Mono, and it DOES work on 64-bit Linux.
But as someone who rather likes not being tied to any 1 OS, be it OSX, Windows, or *nix, I'll stick with the truely open HTML option
Heh. Even you don't believe that...
(ya I know Silverlight runs on most but that's more due to the grace of Microsoft than anything, and requires special libraries like Mono I think if your not running a main OS)
"Grace of Microsoft", maybe. You could make many of the same arguments against Silverlight that you can against OOXML.
But, "requires special libraries like Mono"? At this point, I had to stop taking you seriously.
First, Mono is not a "library". It's a compiler and a runtime. By your logic, gcc and ld.so is a "special library".
Second, do you actually think CSS/HTML/Javascript don't require libraries? Just what do you think Gecko is? And, for that matter, Javascript has some standalone engines -- the Mozilla/Firefox JS engine is called Spidermonkey, and can be run standalone, or embedded into other apps. What makes Mono worse than Spidermonkey?
And finally, just what do you mean by "main OS"? Maybe you mean "mainstream OS"? Let's pretend, for a moment, that you mean Windows -- on which the.NET platform is, itself, no better than Mono. Except that you can get.NET through Windows Update... but I can get Mono through my package manager. Oh, and you can just doubleclick an EXE and it'll run.NET if it has to... oh wait, I can do misc binformats on Linux, too, and a simple shell script makes it irrelevant anyway.
The thing is this ISNT just another web technology, this is a MICROSOFT technology, which historically has always ment you need to run a Microsoft Enironment to get the benefit out of it.
That is true, but Microsoft hasn't really tried open formats before. I don't expect much, but it's possible that they'll get it right.
Consider that we have Moonlight on Linux, which is fully open, works on 64-bit, and appears to have video working. That's more than I can say for any Flash implementation.
I think that book on design might help with more specific recommendations. For example, #1 and #2 are about making things simple, but you don't talk about how. #4 touches on it, but you don't have numbers.
One of the things I've heard is that we can keep track of seven things at once -- so try to keep seven items or less that the user has to keep track of, and add depth if you need to. (If you have 20 or 30 config options, split them into categories.)
The other thing I would suggest is to constantly check out other programs, and notice the things that they do well. This is especially good if you have direct competitors, but also look at completely unrelated programs. You don't want to be constrained by someone else's design, but at the same time, it's nice if things are predictable.
And what someone else said: Know your audience. If you're writing a Linux program at all, pick a GUI library and stick to it, and provide a rich commandline interface. If at all possible, let your users run the program entirely from the commandline, with no X at all, but even if you need X, give us a commandline and a GUI.
Adobe may use Flash on their site, but if you don't have Flash, there's still HTML. If Microsoft is "doing away with most HTML pages entirely", I think that makes them a good deal worse than Adobe.
Specifically, notice how you can view their entire homepage without Flash.
I'd imagine you can view the entire site, save for Flash-specific stuff, without Flash.
It's one thing to use their technology themselves, but this tells me that Microsoft is actually using Silverlight to replace HTML, which is something that is generally considered bad when people do it with Flash, and is also something that even Adobe isn't doing with Flash.
My point, in otherwords, is that non-techies don't care about copy schemes, because it doesn't affect them.
And my point, which you are missing, is that "non-techies" is a smaller and smaller crowd these days.
Remember when only techies cared about the Internet? Back then, you could make the same argument -- someone who uses the Internet was, by definition, a techie.
Well, my grandmother uses the Internet. Literally -- she's hard of hearing, and email is simply easier for her.
So, in my experience, more and more people actually do know how to rip DVDs, who are not otherwise techies -- other than, oh, owning and using their own computer, cell phone, DVR, and so on.
Region-specific disks do not exist to serve consumers best in their native language, they exist to make it possible for studios to sell region-specific distribution rights with some veneer of confidence in the buyer that cheaper content from different distributors in other regions won't be imported to undercut the regional exclusivity.
I understand.
I'm not entirely sure what I mean by "wake up". Maybe I also mean "wake up to globalization", or maybe just "stop being such asshats".
So the feature you are referring to has nothing to do with the "need", insofar as such a need ever existed, for region-specific disks.
Actually, the feature I am referring to basically removes any reason other than what you just outlined. Were it not for this feature, they could argue that foreign discs are going to have weird menus, and I'm fairly sure standard DVDs can't tune their menus to the local language.
It should help foreign films, though. They no longer have to cut a deal with someone in the US, they simply have to hire a translator and make us pay for shipping. Depending on the country, the price of the movie plus shipping might be cheaper than the movie alone if it had a version here.
With a DVD, you have to get the right side up, wait for the menu to come up, and then figure out which button to push to make it go.
In almost every instance, that's going to be "select" or "OK", as the Play menu item will already be selected.
Not all HD-DVDs do this yet, but at least a few are to the point where they will simply play once the disc is in, because the menu can be brought up at any point during the movie. (A few DVDs did this also, but not nearly as many, as bringing up the menu involved completely stopping the movie, even if it was possible to resume where you were.)
God forbid somebody should want to stop a movie and start watching it again later.
Pause. Or, depending on the DVD player, Stop, then leave the player on.
With a tape, you can just hit stop or even eject the tape and it will start up right where it left off when you put it back in.
There's also scene selection, and on HD-DVDs, even scene bookmarking. Not as intuitive as a tape for the case where you're the only one using that particular tape, but suppose you start watching it, and have to do something else. Then someone else wants to watch it, so they rewind it and start watching. Good luck finding where you were.
Good luck getting your subtitles turned back on!
There's one button called "subtitles". Most DVD remotes have it, somewhere, in case the menu is too complex to navigate.
If you think my argument is bullshit, rebut it with actual information such as a plan to ensure that these internet-distributed shows will indeed actually carry subtitles.
Then present your argument better. You started off railing about how there won't be subtitles, then clarified with something like "Oh, but they can do subtitles, but I just know they won't."
As such, it seemed fairly luddite and absurd.
Now, your argument seems to be more along the lines of "I want some assurance that they'll do subtitles." And yes, but don't approach that as either being anti-Internet or specifically targeting Internet legislation. I'd look more for some option to get subtitles on any video, anywhere. Something like Captel might be a start.
Oh, by the way: This production seems to have quite a few subtitles, including English. They're fansubs, but they are in SRT format. They also seem to have Windows Media and Quicktime, which I assume means WMV9/VC1 and h.264, which also means (if you care) that you could probably play these all on Linux, using entirely native codecs.
Well, it's solid, stable, visually beautiful, has a very intuitive UI, and absolutely no loading screens. That puts it ahead of most other games, at least technologically.
it's been years since the traditional FPS interested me; the only FPS I've play in the past seven years or so is Metroid Prime, and that's an FPS only in that you have a first person view and a weapon.
You'd like Portal, then.
Personally, I'd say Halo and Half-Life are probably the best of the traditional FPSes, and I'd buy a console just to play either one. But then, I have managed to find an exclusive for everything except the PS3 that I'd gladly buy the console just to play.
Again, I agree with you, in principle. I'm not sure, however, that Apple's products would remain quality if they managed to take over the world, and I'm equally unsure that customers would still have more choice if Microsoft gained absolute control.
I don't think they'd have more choice than right now, only more choice than if Apple gained absolute control.
Basically, I'm saying that the freedom to choose cannot be guaranteed under the rule of any one corporation.
Oh, absolutely. I would much rather have none of them gain control... though, of course, I would also rather applications were more portable. Not just that you can make a portable app -- there's always some cross-platform libraries to help you there -- but more like POSIX, where it becomes almost more difficult to write an application that's not portable than to write one that is.
The trouble there, of course, is that a world in which application development is commoditized like that is a world where both Apple and Microsoft lose. Apple would no longer be as able to innovate, as innovative new Mac-only features would be ignored, even by Mac developers -- and Microsoft would no longer have a stranglehold on the world. So I'm not sure anyone really has the motivation to do that.
No, it's not. All you'd have to do is show that there is a rational basis for what you said. It's actually very easy... unless, in fact, there is no such rational basis.
Unless, of course, what I said was self-evident, in which case I'd just be repeating myself.
But I'm not sure if that applies, as I don't feel like digging back to the original point.
Yes, it would. The existence of Christmas would exist regardless of what traditions it happened to encompass, absolutely.
If it was called "Yule", would Christmas still exist?
If so, then Jesus is not the reason for the season. If not, then point goes to me.
And for many more, it would be. Look at Easter. It's got very little capitalism around it
Other than chocolate bunnies, and chocolate eggs, and Easter egg-making kits, and the Easter bunny at the mall, and Easter's day sale, and...
Let's take a holiday which has pretty much no capitalism associated with it -- Sukkot. I bet you've never heard of it. (I cheated; it's a Jewish holiday, but you have heard of Passover, where we buy Matzoh and all kinds of things Kosher for Passover, and of course there's Hannukah, which has become a "me too" to Christmas.)
Correct, it isn't. And even if you want to superimpose "religion" onto it somehow, how would that help your case, seeing as how there are no significant peoples, cultures, or societies who belong to that "religion" today, such that it would be celebrated by millions, let alone billions, of people?
Except, oh, everyone celebrating "Christmas".
Ad hominem.
Yep.
It does not address the unique part that Christianity plays in Christmas, and pretends that any cause is equal to any other.
It was actually using an extreme to illustrate a point: I am not arguing that any cause is equal to any other. I am trying to illustrate that one cause is not so important as to become the reason, when, especially in the case of Christmas, there are at least a few others that fit just as well.
The point is that you either get them to admit that they would be sexually aroused by boy-dog sodomy, or you reduce them to a stuttering mess as they try to wrap their brains around the concept.
And this should be pretty obvious to a third-party, watching this exchange on TV. Especially if you follow up with a statement like, "I don't know about you, but I would be thoroughly disgusted by that."
Because presumably, the point here is not to convince these idiots that you're right -- if they could actually believe such BS in the first place, what chance do we have? No, the point is to convince the voting population that you're right, by using these guys as such an easy ad-hominim target.
The "can't be moral without religion" idiots can actually be dealt with in a much simpler way -- by demonstrating that you absolutely do not believe in any religion, and are absolutely a moral person, at least when it comes to the major things that we all agree on. (You know the ones -- murder, rape, theft...) In fact, I think the reason I often play devil's advocate Atheist on Slashdot, and pick fights about religion, is because I so enjoy that debate.
Yes, ideas have power, but only as much as you give them.
We live in a free society. (You have "Texas" in your name, so I'm assuming you live in the US.) We have freedom of speech as an essential right, both because we believe it to be a self-evident right, and because we have faith that good ideas will win over bad ones.
This has been tested, time and time again, with people like you warning that certain people using free speech to spread certain ideas would result in the collapse of civilization, or a bunch of pedophiles, or something. It's happened right here, in the US, at least once before -- we were terrified that certain ideas would be so powerful as to result in the downfall of our capitalist society.
And we discovered that any way to prevent the spread of these ideas was more damaging to us -- to our freedoms, to who we are as a society -- than the ideas themselves.
Can you guess what I'm talking about? It should be obvious by now, if you know your history: Communism. The very idea of communism was so frightening that we were willing to tolerate a witch hunt, which we now call McCarthyism.
But since you believe ideas are so powerful, let me leave you with one parting thought: If an idea (child pornography) can make someone into something they're not (a pedophile), couldn't an idea undo the damage? Show them the broken families, show them those same children as adults, trying to cope...
Certainly, in some cases, a person will become a pedophile when they otherwise wouldn't have. And in other cases, a person who would have otherwise been a pedophile will become a sane, functional member of society. And many more people are perfectly capable of making their own decisions, and short of brainwashing, no amount of making information available will change their minds.
But if you believe that the free flow of information, on average, makes matters worse, then we're screwed, because information will flow freely, and there's nothing we can do about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Who, besides fourteen-year-olds, says "gay" to mean anything other than actual homosexuality? (Or joyousness, if being quaint...)
And while I realize these fourteen-year-olds are our future, I also realize that by the time they're twenty-four, they have at least one or more gay friends, so they have the decency not to use the word that way.
But it's not so much the original "crackers" who changed the meaning. If that were the case, I now declare myself a Man, so anyone who is male and not me is a Boy, because the word "Man" has CHANGED ITS MEANING to refer to me.
No, it's the news media, who really didn't have a clue anyway. They might as easily have called them "developers", or even "phreaks". The reason why "hackers" is so frustrating is that, like "developers", it has another meaning. It's not so troublesome that there's a new word for "cracker", but that there is now no word that covers the original meaning of "hacker".
That said, I've now grown up and started calling myself an "engineer"...
How do they get to be so wrong about these things, though?
Seriously, what adviser tells them that it's at all possible to filter the Internet reliably? Or that DRM will ever work? Or that there is such a thing as a "hacker tool", with no legitimate, legal use?
And, given technology is apparently important enough for them to legislate about, why do they not listen thoroughly enough to understand the opposing views? I don't mean they have to understand what a debugger actually does, but how do we get asshats like Tubes Stevens?
Go watch Sanctuary. It comes with no DRM, and is a pretty decent show.
Actually, the Coca-cola company is one of the few legal exporters of Coca from Peru and such.
And I do remember hearing that people are developing ways of killing the Coca plant, as well, the idea being that you could specifically target it and leave everything else untouched. Do a pass over the country in a plane...
What morons. I'd hate to see Coca go, and I do miss it back in the states. It helps a lot with altitude, so would be very helpful on those Colorado skiing trips.
Why is it that you think any drug at all should be illegal?
As far as I'm concerned, let people screw up if they want to. The organized crime surrounding the drugs is worse than the drugs themselves -- or haven't we learned from Prohibition?
Have you actually used them?
Hint: YouTube doesn't work in any open source player that I've tried.
You're right that it works on every "significant" platform -- I know 64-bit Linux isn't significant. But Moonlight is a port of Silverlight to Mono, and it DOES work on 64-bit Linux.
Heh. Even you don't believe that...
"Grace of Microsoft", maybe. You could make many of the same arguments against Silverlight that you can against OOXML.
But, "requires special libraries like Mono"? At this point, I had to stop taking you seriously.
First, Mono is not a "library". It's a compiler and a runtime. By your logic, gcc and ld.so is a "special library".
Second, do you actually think CSS/HTML/Javascript don't require libraries? Just what do you think Gecko is? And, for that matter, Javascript has some standalone engines -- the Mozilla/Firefox JS engine is called Spidermonkey, and can be run standalone, or embedded into other apps. What makes Mono worse than Spidermonkey?
And finally, just what do you mean by "main OS"? Maybe you mean "mainstream OS"? Let's pretend, for a moment, that you mean Windows -- on which the .NET platform is, itself, no better than Mono. Except that you can get .NET through Windows Update... but I can get Mono through my package manager. Oh, and you can just doubleclick an EXE and it'll run .NET if it has to... oh wait, I can do misc binformats on Linux, too, and a simple shell script makes it irrelevant anyway.
That is true, but Microsoft hasn't really tried open formats before. I don't expect much, but it's possible that they'll get it right.
Consider that we have Moonlight on Linux, which is fully open, works on 64-bit, and appears to have video working. That's more than I can say for any Flash implementation.
I very rarely hear people call Javascript a heap of crap who have actually used and understood it.
If you don't know who Douglas Crockford is, there's a very good chance you have no idea what Javascript can be.
I think that book on design might help with more specific recommendations. For example, #1 and #2 are about making things simple, but you don't talk about how. #4 touches on it, but you don't have numbers.
One of the things I've heard is that we can keep track of seven things at once -- so try to keep seven items or less that the user has to keep track of, and add depth if you need to. (If you have 20 or 30 config options, split them into categories.)
The other thing I would suggest is to constantly check out other programs, and notice the things that they do well. This is especially good if you have direct competitors, but also look at completely unrelated programs. You don't want to be constrained by someone else's design, but at the same time, it's nice if things are predictable.
And what someone else said: Know your audience. If you're writing a Linux program at all, pick a GUI library and stick to it, and provide a rich commandline interface. If at all possible, let your users run the program entirely from the commandline, with no X at all, but even if you need X, give us a commandline and a GUI.
Adobe may use Flash on their site, but if you don't have Flash, there's still HTML. If Microsoft is "doing away with most HTML pages entirely", I think that makes them a good deal worse than Adobe.
Specifically, notice how you can view their entire homepage without Flash.
I'd imagine you can view the entire site, save for Flash-specific stuff, without Flash.
It's one thing to use their technology themselves, but this tells me that Microsoft is actually using Silverlight to replace HTML, which is something that is generally considered bad when people do it with Flash, and is also something that even Adobe isn't doing with Flash.
Wikipedia links do NOT have a trailing slash!
By the way, I don't think I care anymore. Television lost, the Internet won.
So you're saying that was a negative dream to you? And that your brain is preparing you for the threat of sex with Jessica Alba?
At least we're not Fark, right?
Oh wait, now that I've actually read the comments...
The plot didn't involve nanotech directly, but it did have quotes like "I need your active molecules! Please, deposit them in the front slot!"
Ahem... or so I'm told.
"Try"?
And my point, which you are missing, is that "non-techies" is a smaller and smaller crowd these days.
Remember when only techies cared about the Internet? Back then, you could make the same argument -- someone who uses the Internet was, by definition, a techie.
Well, my grandmother uses the Internet. Literally -- she's hard of hearing, and email is simply easier for her.
So, in my experience, more and more people actually do know how to rip DVDs, who are not otherwise techies -- other than, oh, owning and using their own computer, cell phone, DVR, and so on.
I understand.
I'm not entirely sure what I mean by "wake up". Maybe I also mean "wake up to globalization", or maybe just "stop being such asshats".
Actually, the feature I am referring to basically removes any reason other than what you just outlined. Were it not for this feature, they could argue that foreign discs are going to have weird menus, and I'm fairly sure standard DVDs can't tune their menus to the local language.
It should help foreign films, though. They no longer have to cut a deal with someone in the US, they simply have to hire a translator and make us pay for shipping. Depending on the country, the price of the movie plus shipping might be cheaper than the movie alone if it had a version here.
In almost every instance, that's going to be "select" or "OK", as the Play menu item will already be selected.
Not all HD-DVDs do this yet, but at least a few are to the point where they will simply play once the disc is in, because the menu can be brought up at any point during the movie. (A few DVDs did this also, but not nearly as many, as bringing up the menu involved completely stopping the movie, even if it was possible to resume where you were.)
Pause. Or, depending on the DVD player, Stop, then leave the player on.
There's also scene selection, and on HD-DVDs, even scene bookmarking. Not as intuitive as a tape for the case where you're the only one using that particular tape, but suppose you start watching it, and have to do something else. Then someone else wants to watch it, so they rewind it and start watching. Good luck finding where you were.
There's one button called "subtitles". Most DVD remotes have it, somewhere, in case the menu is too complex to navigate.
Then present your argument better. You started off railing about how there won't be subtitles, then clarified with something like "Oh, but they can do subtitles, but I just know they won't."
As such, it seemed fairly luddite and absurd.
Now, your argument seems to be more along the lines of "I want some assurance that they'll do subtitles." And yes, but don't approach that as either being anti-Internet or specifically targeting Internet legislation. I'd look more for some option to get subtitles on any video, anywhere. Something like Captel might be a start.
Oh, by the way: This production seems to have quite a few subtitles, including English. They're fansubs, but they are in SRT format. They also seem to have Windows Media and Quicktime, which I assume means WMV9/VC1 and h.264, which also means (if you care) that you could probably play these all on Linux, using entirely native codecs.
Well, it's solid, stable, visually beautiful, has a very intuitive UI, and absolutely no loading screens. That puts it ahead of most other games, at least technologically.
You'd like Portal, then.
Personally, I'd say Halo and Half-Life are probably the best of the traditional FPSes, and I'd buy a console just to play either one. But then, I have managed to find an exclusive for everything except the PS3 that I'd gladly buy the console just to play.
I don't think they'd have more choice than right now, only more choice than if Apple gained absolute control.
Oh, absolutely. I would much rather have none of them gain control... though, of course, I would also rather applications were more portable. Not just that you can make a portable app -- there's always some cross-platform libraries to help you there -- but more like POSIX, where it becomes almost more difficult to write an application that's not portable than to write one that is.
The trouble there, of course, is that a world in which application development is commoditized like that is a world where both Apple and Microsoft lose. Apple would no longer be as able to innovate, as innovative new Mac-only features would be ignored, even by Mac developers -- and Microsoft would no longer have a stranglehold on the world. So I'm not sure anyone really has the motivation to do that.
Unless, of course, what I said was self-evident, in which case I'd just be repeating myself.
But I'm not sure if that applies, as I don't feel like digging back to the original point.
If it was called "Yule", would Christmas still exist?
If so, then Jesus is not the reason for the season. If not, then point goes to me.
Other than chocolate bunnies, and chocolate eggs, and Easter egg-making kits, and the Easter bunny at the mall, and Easter's day sale, and...
Let's take a holiday which has pretty much no capitalism associated with it -- Sukkot. I bet you've never heard of it. (I cheated; it's a Jewish holiday, but you have heard of Passover, where we buy Matzoh and all kinds of things Kosher for Passover, and of course there's Hannukah, which has become a "me too" to Christmas.)
Except, oh, everyone celebrating "Christmas".
Yep.
It was actually using an extreme to illustrate a point: I am not arguing that any cause is equal to any other. I am trying to illustrate that one cause is not so important as to become the reason, when, especially in the case of Christmas, there are at least a few others that fit just as well.
So, perhaps a better example would be, oh, Yule.
I was curious if there was a good reason why not, because it's actually genuinely possible that he'd never heard of Flac.
And of course, no one has to change.
The point is that you either get them to admit that they would be sexually aroused by boy-dog sodomy, or you reduce them to a stuttering mess as they try to wrap their brains around the concept.
And this should be pretty obvious to a third-party, watching this exchange on TV. Especially if you follow up with a statement like, "I don't know about you, but I would be thoroughly disgusted by that."
Because presumably, the point here is not to convince these idiots that you're right -- if they could actually believe such BS in the first place, what chance do we have? No, the point is to convince the voting population that you're right, by using these guys as such an easy ad-hominim target.
The "can't be moral without religion" idiots can actually be dealt with in a much simpler way -- by demonstrating that you absolutely do not believe in any religion, and are absolutely a moral person, at least when it comes to the major things that we all agree on. (You know the ones -- murder, rape, theft...) In fact, I think the reason I often play devil's advocate Atheist on Slashdot, and pick fights about religion, is because I so enjoy that debate.
Yes, ideas have power, but only as much as you give them.
We live in a free society. (You have "Texas" in your name, so I'm assuming you live in the US.) We have freedom of speech as an essential right, both because we believe it to be a self-evident right, and because we have faith that good ideas will win over bad ones.
This has been tested, time and time again, with people like you warning that certain people using free speech to spread certain ideas would result in the collapse of civilization, or a bunch of pedophiles, or something. It's happened right here, in the US, at least once before -- we were terrified that certain ideas would be so powerful as to result in the downfall of our capitalist society.
And we discovered that any way to prevent the spread of these ideas was more damaging to us -- to our freedoms, to who we are as a society -- than the ideas themselves.
Can you guess what I'm talking about? It should be obvious by now, if you know your history: Communism. The very idea of communism was so frightening that we were willing to tolerate a witch hunt, which we now call McCarthyism.
But since you believe ideas are so powerful, let me leave you with one parting thought: If an idea (child pornography) can make someone into something they're not (a pedophile), couldn't an idea undo the damage? Show them the broken families, show them those same children as adults, trying to cope...
Certainly, in some cases, a person will become a pedophile when they otherwise wouldn't have. And in other cases, a person who would have otherwise been a pedophile will become a sane, functional member of society. And many more people are perfectly capable of making their own decisions, and short of brainwashing, no amount of making information available will change their minds.
But if you believe that the free flow of information, on average, makes matters worse, then we're screwed, because information will flow freely, and there's nothing we can do about it.