What you're talking about is simply tracking kids under the premise that if they know their parents can see where they've been they won't go there (intentionally). The idea works well enough with adults to keep on the straight and narrow (witness all those cameras in the average convenience store - make a note of where most of them point next time you visit one), I see no reason it wouldn't work well in a controlled environment such as a school.
This is only effective, however, with parental diligence - ie: parents actually make a reasonable effort to keep up with their kids. There is no solution to apathy. Keeping this in mind, ISPs could (as a value-added option instead of a requirement by law) offer to keep logs of where the userid they signed up under has been. Like I said, it would be optional. That's a key point... but combine that with smart filtering and black listing and you have a rather comprehensive list that you can ship back to the parents on a daily/weekly basis. This neatly takes away power from the people who want it and put it back in the hands of the people who need it.
I don't care if a parent wants to censor material before being passed to their child, or even just logging where they've been. I do have a very serious beef to pick with any agency or group other than the parent(s) who want this. This is why I believe the australian broadcasting authority's approach is fundamentally flawed. Kids don't have access to the resources adults do, and legally they have no recourse / say - their parents have the ultimate authority. However, step on an adults toes and you've opened up pandora's box.
That being said... I would hate to be going to school in a place that implimented a system like this.
My mom worked at Northgate before they went out of business and it was a common occurance for UPS or Fedex to forget to have the customer sign for the computer. The result was that the customer can (legally, too) claim that the package was never delivered. Northgate (or UPS) often ate the cost of that. I know another friend who works in auto sales, and they've lost entire cars before - 30k, *poof*. These things happen - alot. The NYPD technically could do nothing if the prototype was shipped to the wrong address. They could kindly ask for it back (maybe even a small reward), but they cannot force you to give it up.
Infact, I got a package which contained something worth a rather large dollar amount and the guy didn't ask for signature. As a result, I was never billed. I will not divulge details, however. *g* Stuff like this happens all the time... it's why you buy insurance for these kinds of things...
I believe censorship is a result of various groups / countries wanting to protect their cultural identity (which includes their social taboos). The second thing I want to put forward is the fact that the internet is a culture-neutral medium - it breaks down the traditional geographical barriers that seperate us from other countries. Witness cultural exchange programs, founded under the premise that communication == exchange of ideas. That generally promotes a "blending effect" (for lack of a better description) between cultures.
My question is simple: in light of this, attacking censorware is only attacking the symptom, not the cause. What solutions do you believe are reasonable for accomodating the concerns of these groups? Going one step further, should they be accomodated?
This boycott is doomed to failure. There are several reasons for this: One, too big of a target - it's a rule of thumb in protesting that you pick something big enough to matter and small enough to win (emphasis mine). Amazon pumps out thousands of books each day. Do we honestly believe 150k slashdotters will have a noticable impact? We might contribute 1k books... total... for christmas. Also, did you tell your parents/friends not to shop at Amazon? Will you return the book if you get it for xmas? Strike one.
The second problem is that amazon is a high publicity "can-do-no-wrong" media darling. A boycott will be taken in a negative light... and while it will generate lots of publicity, it will hurt the credibility of the GNU project if/when the boycott fails. Strike two.
The last problem is simply one of practicality - geeks are not a political bunch. Infact, many pride themselves on avoiding politics. And to quote another well-known member of the community, trying to get this to work would be like "trying to herd cats". What's worse - many geeks already believe (perhaps rightly so) that the USPO is a complete joke and that simply ignoring patents like these would be easier. Eventually somebody else will correct this broken system now, right? Strike three.
Hope all those embedded systems on hubble are Y2K-compliant, and more importantly that the shuttle is. "Houston, we have a problem: the coffee machine won't turn on". "Damn.. CHECK 197! CHECK 197!" *cackle*
The big secret that nobody at NASA wants to tell anyone is that it wasn't really the Gyroscopes that failed. Some technician dropped his ham sandwich into the optical relay and ever since launch the cheese in it has been heating up and cooling down, thus forming a thin layer of cheese across the mirror. This is why we get all those stunning colorful shots with a yellow tint. The observatories were obviously annoyed so they sent up the shuttle to recover the ham sandwich.
Would you prefer we have just shot off a few astronauts without knowing whether they'd come back for sure? Who's conscience should that failure be on? Oh yeah, let's not forget Apollo 13... which nearly was a disaster. How about Challenger - politics killed those men. Should more testing have been done?
I watched the launch of this thing on NASA TV last night. It was pretty uneventful. One guy kept shouting "check 193! check 193!".. but I'm thinking maybe they were just trying to get their food to go. =)
Anyway, it would be really nice if NASA were more active in PR for this kind of stuff - their TV show.. well... stinks. hours of nothing punctuated by the heavy breathing of some guy going "okay.. it's now t-minus 15:43 to launch *heavy breathing* CHECK 193! CHECK 193! *heavy breathing*".... no wonder they can't secure any funding. Get deep throat off the air and put some inspiring music on during launch (I dunno, Hall of the mtn. king would run nicely for the 5 minutes or so until main launch sep).
Incase you were wondering... I was only watching TV because I botched a kernel recompile and left my system unusable (note to self: deleting/lib/modules/* is bad).
Time magazine selects a guy who creates a online business man of the year.. simply because it was "e-commerce"?! Tell me, if another company had gone IPO this year and been valued more than amazon.com would they have been a contender? No. Case in point: VA Research IPO. Of course, they're not the hip and trendy "e-commerce".. oh well then, right? Hrmph. I was so looking forward to finding out who man of the century would be... but maybe that anticipation was misplaced - Time magazine is just cashing in on the hype and popularity. Whoever's the most popular in the polls is gonna be the winner, which will be completely independent of who had the most influence on modern day living.
My vote for who should have been man of the year: The head of NASA. Trying to keep people interested in space exploration, trying to push the envelope by making more out of less. Dealing with politicians more concerned about tax breaks for their district than the exploration of the final frontier. God, it's enough to make me cry. Hell, the entire NASA team should have gotten an award - "company of the decade" or something.
My hats are off to this guy. Like RMS and a select few other geeks, this guy chose not to cash in. His reasoning was alittle different than I would have hoped, but hey.:) I'm really hoping more geeks will go the route of Socrates[1] and prove to the world that, while they could easily make alot of money, they choose not to because there are more interesting things in this world to do. If there's ever been a culture that could crack the US' (and many other countries now falling under the term "global capitalism") obsession with money it would be our culture.
[1] historical reference (it might have been plato) about a greek philosopher who was challenged by local merchants that he did nothing with his life and could never make money. He proved them wrong by carefully analyzing the market and then buying out olive production in the area. Next spring olives were in short supply due to a dry spring and he made a killing. Feel free to correct me here, I'm sure I've made some minor factual errors (I didn't spend as much time awake in philosophy class as I wanted to).
I just detailed why I think that Apple should open source the driver: simply put, because if they don't somebody else will. It's a critical failing of their long-term business plan to keep it closed source. This is not the first time/. has posted something encoded with Sorensen. Remember the TPM movie trailer? That was Sorensen. Alot of people were seriously annoyed by that - and alot of people are also seriously annoyed about *this*.. and if there was one thing that motivates programmers to create an alternative it's being frustrated with something! In this case, there's probably quite a few frustrated people out there who want to access this video but cannot! End result - somebody, somewhere, will code up a sorensen decoder and make it available for linux. It's a logical inevitability.
Uh, excuse me, but maybe you weren't paying attention in Open Source 101, so let me give you an "executive overview":
The free software movement has taken the position that proprietary hardware and standards is bad for the customer. They have also demonstrated this (repeatedly).
Open standards allows access to a wider audience, as well as supporting the diversification of technologies. In simpler terms: we can move forward quicker because we don't need to worry about 100% backwards compatibility - we're a recompile away from that at any given time.
Proprietary software (or hw) is based on either keeping your competitors from copying you (inevitably fails once the benefit from reverse-engineering exceeds the cost of it) in order to maintain a monopoly, and/or collect fees from your product. The latter is "ok" in my book so long as the license is non-exclusive and available to all, the former is morally reprehensible.
This is why proprietary codecs are bad - Apple has tried to corner the market on video and as a result the authors (probably blissfully unaware of this) cannot have the widest possible viewing audience. So, in a nutshell: due to market demand the codec will eventually be reverse-engineered and made available for linux, but in the meantime a good number of people are being denied access to media encoded on it simply because Apple wants to try to get a strangle-hold on the video market. Apple will fail because as the market grows, so too will the demand for an alternative to Apple's monopoly. Basic econ, my good man. But in the meantime, we are still stuck with not being able to view it... and I don't know about you.. but I'm an impatient guy!
This has got to be the wierdest thing I've ever seen - a site that can pump out 5 continuous streams of 50k/s while being slashdotted and have an average latency of 100ms! Whoah.
Of course.. it's unix.... Apache/1.3.0 to be exact. I want to know how that guy setup his box...
We've known about a second species of man for a LONG time - well.. atleast the phone company knows about this species. How else do you explain the awesome stupidity that happens whenever you work tech support? Normal people aren't this stupid, I don't think. I swear, there's a built-in mechanism to route this species' problems directly to your phone. Echelon, eat yer heart out....
In the tradition of open source, I hope they make it available for $1.00 plus S&H (if it's the standard rh6.1 w/o additions). I would be disappointed if they simply repackaged it and suckered their customers to pay alot more than they should.
Ha! I'm suing because they're using my patented color scheme of wearing BLUE PANTS and a WHITE T-SHIRT! However, if you read my license, paragraph 4, subsection c, it states that programmers, geeks, and readers of slashdot are EXCEMPT from this. You can, however, submit a can of mountain dew to my residence in gratis. =)
Instead of rehasing the obvious and just saying the USPO sucks, blah blah blah, how about I throw a question out for the legal minds on/. - What alternatives do we have to such a system (ie: how does one pressure government to correct this, and/or how would one go about practicing civil disobedience in a positive and very public way)?
If I lived in a place like Europa, I'd want to leave. That's probably why all the microbes moved to earth. Do you have any idea how *cold* it is out there?!
Slashdot Mirror
This is only effective, however, with parental diligence - ie: parents actually make a reasonable effort to keep up with their kids. There is no solution to apathy. Keeping this in mind, ISPs could (as a value-added option instead of a requirement by law) offer to keep logs of where the userid they signed up under has been. Like I said, it would be optional. That's a key point... but combine that with smart filtering and black listing and you have a rather comprehensive list that you can ship back to the parents on a daily/weekly basis. This neatly takes away power from the people who want it and put it back in the hands of the people who need it.
I don't care if a parent wants to censor material before being passed to their child, or even just logging where they've been. I do have a very serious beef to pick with any agency or group other than the parent(s) who want this . This is why I believe the australian broadcasting authority's approach is fundamentally flawed. Kids don't have access to the resources adults do, and legally they have no recourse / say - their parents have the ultimate authority. However, step on an adults toes and you've opened up pandora's box.
That being said... I would hate to be going to school in a place that implimented a system like this.
Infact, I got a package which contained something worth a rather large dollar amount and the guy didn't ask for signature. As a result, I was never billed. I will not divulge details, however. *g* Stuff like this happens all the time... it's why you buy insurance for these kinds of things...
I'm willing to bet, however, that their 5-7% performance increase will cost you about 25-30% in cost.
My question is simple: in light of this, attacking censorware is only attacking the symptom, not the cause. What solutions do you believe are reasonable for accomodating the concerns of these groups? Going one step further, should they be accomodated?
The second problem is that amazon is a high publicity "can-do-no-wrong" media darling. A boycott will be taken in a negative light... and while it will generate lots of publicity, it will hurt the credibility of the GNU project if/when the boycott fails. Strike two.
The last problem is simply one of practicality - geeks are not a political bunch. Infact, many pride themselves on avoiding politics. And to quote another well-known member of the community, trying to get this to work would be like "trying to herd cats". What's worse - many geeks already believe (perhaps rightly so) that the USPO is a complete joke and that simply ignoring patents like these would be easier. Eventually somebody else will correct this broken system now, right? Strike three.
I was aware of red and blue shifting... "yellow" shifting is conceivable, but I've never heard of it referred to as such. I suppose it's possible....
Anyway, yeesh... geek humor apparently needs to be free of any type of technical exaggeration or they'll hang you on the spot for it.... Hrrrrrrmmm...
Hope all those embedded systems on hubble are Y2K-compliant, and more importantly that the shuttle is. "Houston, we have a problem: the coffee machine won't turn on". "Damn.. CHECK 197! CHECK 197!" *cackle*
The big secret that nobody at NASA wants to tell anyone is that it wasn't really the Gyroscopes that failed. Some technician dropped his ham sandwich into the optical relay and ever since launch the cheese in it has been heating up and cooling down, thus forming a thin layer of cheese across the mirror. This is why we get all those stunning colorful shots with a yellow tint. The observatories were obviously annoyed so they sent up the shuttle to recover the ham sandwich.
Would you prefer we have just shot off a few astronauts without knowing whether they'd come back for sure? Who's conscience should that failure be on? Oh yeah, let's not forget Apollo 13... which nearly was a disaster. How about Challenger - politics killed those men. Should more testing have been done?
I disagree. What would you do differently in their shoes? It's easy to criticize something, it's alot harder to come up with a better solution.
Anyway, it would be really nice if NASA were more active in PR for this kind of stuff - their TV show.. well... stinks. hours of nothing punctuated by the heavy breathing of some guy going "okay.. it's now t-minus 15:43 to launch *heavy breathing* CHECK 193! CHECK 193! *heavy breathing*".... no wonder they can't secure any funding. Get deep throat off the air and put some inspiring music on during launch (I dunno, Hall of the mtn. king would run nicely for the 5 minutes or so until main launch sep).
Incase you were wondering... I was only watching TV because I botched a kernel recompile and left my system unusable (note to self: deleting /lib/modules/* is bad).
If I had mod points you'd be +5'd right now. Nothing like being able to poke fun at "the man of the year" for another 366 days.....
We have a patented one-click technology too.
Time magazine selects a guy who creates a online business man of the year.. simply because it was "e-commerce"?! Tell me, if another company had gone IPO this year and been valued more than amazon.com would they have been a contender? No. Case in point: VA Research IPO. Of course, they're not the hip and trendy "e-commerce".. oh well then, right? Hrmph. I was so looking forward to finding out who man of the century would be... but maybe that anticipation was misplaced - Time magazine is just cashing in on the hype and popularity. Whoever's the most popular in the polls is gonna be the winner, which will be completely independent of who had the most influence on modern day living.
My vote for who should have been man of the year: The head of NASA. Trying to keep people interested in space exploration, trying to push the envelope by making more out of less. Dealing with politicians more concerned about tax breaks for their district than the exploration of the final frontier. God, it's enough to make me cry. Hell, the entire NASA team should have gotten an award - "company of the decade" or something.
[1] historical reference (it might have been plato) about a greek philosopher who was challenged by local merchants that he did nothing with his life and could never make money. He proved them wrong by carefully analyzing the market and then buying out olive production in the area. Next spring olives were in short supply due to a dry spring and he made a killing. Feel free to correct me here, I'm sure I've made some minor factual errors (I didn't spend as much time awake in philosophy class as I wanted to).
I just detailed why I think that Apple should open source the driver: simply put, because if they don't somebody else will. It's a critical failing of their long-term business plan to keep it closed source. This is not the first time /. has posted something encoded with Sorensen. Remember the TPM movie trailer? That was Sorensen. Alot of people were seriously annoyed by that - and alot of people are also seriously annoyed about *this*.. and if there was one thing that motivates programmers to create an alternative it's being frustrated with something! In this case, there's probably quite a few frustrated people out there who want to access this video but cannot! End result - somebody, somewhere, will code up a sorensen decoder and make it available for linux. It's a logical inevitability.
This is why proprietary codecs are bad - Apple has tried to corner the market on video and as a result the authors (probably blissfully unaware of this) cannot have the widest possible viewing audience. So, in a nutshell: due to market demand the codec will eventually be reverse-engineered and made available for linux, but in the meantime a good number of people are being denied access to media encoded on it simply because Apple wants to try to get a strangle-hold on the video market. Apple will fail because as the market grows, so too will the demand for an alternative to Apple's monopoly. Basic econ, my good man. But in the meantime, we are still stuck with not being able to view it... and I don't know about you.. but I'm an impatient guy!
This has got to be the wierdest thing I've ever seen - a site that can pump out 5 continuous streams of 50k/s while being slashdotted and have an average latency of 100ms ! Whoah.
Of course.. it's unix.... Apache/1.3.0 to be exact. I want to know how that guy setup his box...
We've known about a second species of man for a LONG time - well.. atleast the phone company knows about this species. How else do you explain the awesome stupidity that happens whenever you work tech support? Normal people aren't this stupid, I don't think. I swear, there's a built-in mechanism to route this species' problems directly to your phone. Echelon, eat yer heart out....
What exactly were you thinking of?
In the tradition of open source, I hope they make it available for $1.00 plus S&H (if it's the standard rh6.1 w/o additions). I would be disappointed if they simply repackaged it and suckered their customers to pay alot more than they should.
Instead of rehasing the obvious and just saying the USPO sucks, blah blah blah, how about I throw a question out for the legal minds on /. - What alternatives do we have to such a system (ie: how does one pressure government to correct this, and/or how would one go about practicing civil disobedience in a positive and very public way)?
Man, talk about a buffer overflow. Gotta go get the plunger now... yeesh....
If I lived in a place like Europa, I'd want to leave. That's probably why all the microbes moved to earth. Do you have any idea how *cold* it is out there?!