Re:Good, but he's no Tolkein...
on
The Truth
·
· Score: 2
How about a review of 'the Hobbit' ? It would me more in keeping with Slashdot's 'nerd'
demographic
Uhm - do you seriously think that there are that many Slashdot readers who haven't already read, or at least heard a lot about, The Hobbit? C'mon really: the demographic that would enjoy it (people who like fantasy novels) will have already read it, or at least heard enough about it that they won't get anything new out of a review on Slashdot. A fantasy novel reader knowing nothing about Tolkein would be like a Slashdotter not knowing who RMS is. It's just not going to happen.
Personal God means that he doesn't believe God fits to his ideals.
Bzzzt. not true. Amongst the people who partake in theistic debates, "Personal God" refers to a god that is a person, a being, one mind. This is as opposed to the notion of a pantheistic type of God that is not really a thinking being.
Stop accusing atheists of being ignorant of the issues when aparently you weren't even aware of the basic terminology used in the debate over the centuries.
You are operating under the assumption that atheism is the active belief that there is no God. This is incorrect. While it is true that some atheists do believe that, it is not true that all of them do (and in fact the majority don't).
Atheism is the *LACK* of the belief that Gods do exist, rather than requiring the active belief that they don't. The difference is subtle, but highly relevant.
To say that both atheists and theists have a burden of proof is to assume that the neutral "maybe" position of agnosticism is the default starting point. But this is unfair for two reasons:
1 - There are certain types of statements that are not possible to disprove even if they are in fact false. The assertion that there is a god is such a statement. The logical term for it is a "non falsifiable assertion". If a claim is not falsifiable, then the burden of proof must lay with the claimant, because it would be impossible for the skeptic to prove himself even if he were correct. (It is often impossible to prove that you *didn't* do something, or that something *didn't* happen, or that something *doesn't* exist. Sure it's impossible to disprove god, but it's also impossible to disprove a number of other things, even things we don't believe in, like leprechauns, the tooth fairy, and so on.)
2 - We never give the benefit of the doubt to "maybe" cases in any other question, why should this be any diferent? We don't go around believing in the tooth fairy and in leprechauns, even though they are just as undisprovable as is god.
Thus, most athiests argue that atheism is a reasonable default starting hypothesis rather than something needing proof. All that is needed is to counter alleged proofs of god rather than come up with a disproof of our own. (because such a disproof isn't possible even if we are correct).
Now, keep in mind that I'm not asking that you agree with the above stance, only that you recognize that it is what most atheists think, and your argument is aimed at a strawman position very few atheists actually hold. You can't honestly counter the atheist position if you don't even know what it actually is.
I'm sick of this crap! Look, you should know better because you read the damn thing.
YOU CAN COPY A DVD WITHOUT DECRYPTING IT!
For the hard of thinking, let me repeat that:
YOU CAN COPY A DVD WITHOUT DECRYPTING IT!
So software to decrypt and play DVDs is not going to help or hinder pirating one stinkin' little bit. You're right however that it affects the movie industry's business. It increases sales by opening up markets to their products that didn't exist before (Linux users). Now, you can argue that the Linux user market is too small to matter, but you cannot argue that DeCSS HURTS the industry when it actually increases the number of potential customers (no matter how slightly).
I, for one, am not buying any DVDs until such time as I can actually play them on my computer. This software, if it were allowed to continue being developed would have turned me into a DVD buyer. I guess the movie industry doesn't want me as a customer for some reason.
It's one thing to make AOL the default browser, but when you answer 'yes', it ruins the other setups so you can't just go back to your old settings quickly - THAT is the nature of the complaint. The question asks about your "default" browser, then proceeds to make it your only browser that will actually run right.
Alright, then I back off on my point above. (I didn't read part 2 of Ticket Booth Turanny. I stopped after part 1 (in which he hadn't gone that far yet).)
I actaully already adressed this point up above. I said that manually generated blacklists would be unable to keep up with the speed of changes on the internet. Consider for example "geocities", or "xoom", where the website names are numeric IDs assigned to people. When someone lets their subscription lapse and someone else comes in to take their place with a totally different website, how are your human site-checkers going to know to go back and re-check that site again? How would you like it if it turned out that the website name you had just been given had been previously used by a porn site, and therefore your site was in a lot of blocking software's blacklists?
People tried to make sense of your crusade to sneak minors into dirty movies. I saw responsible parents expressing their shock and outrage that you'd seek to overrule the parenting they wanted their own kids to have.
You got this part dead wrong. Katz was trying to get some kids into a movie that their parentswanted them to be able to see. But the movie theatre wouldn't let them unless the parent attended with the child (even though the mother was right there at the ticket booth buying the tickets for them, giving her blessing for her children to watch the movie without her.)
Now, I'm not asking you to agree with Katz's actions in this, but I am asking that if you are going to deride someone that you deride them for their actual actions, not some strawman effigy of their actions. This was certainly not about Katz trying to sneak kids into movies against the parent's permission as you stated. It was about the fact that the ratings systems overrode the parent's own wishes.
I agree mostly with the notion that Katz really doesn't get it, and should stop trying to pretend he represents us. There's nothing wrong with not being a techno-geek - but there is something wrong with pretending you represent them when you don't. But I also believe quite strongly that when you criticize someone you need to be very careful to criticize their actual position and not a made-up postition that you falsely attribute to them.
Katz compared Slashdot to usenet and tried to attribute Slashdot's lower level of flame to the moderation system. I'm not trying to disparage the moderation system, but I don't think it's the reason at all for the less flamage.
I think the first reason is that, unlike on usenet, on Slashdot, after about a day a topic it mostly dead. It isn't on the main page anymore and only a few people are still posting to it. Their posts are not seen by the general population. This gets rid of two of the most common contributors to flame-wars:
long-drawn out debates where eventually each side exhausts all their intelligent arguments and is now just arguing for arguing's sake, and...
A deep-felt need to stop someone from spreading Bull$#!^+ in a place where other people will see it. Often someone will continue to argue with an opponent that they know isn't ever going to be convinced, just so that that opponent's statements don't end up going unchallenged in a public forum where others will see it. The fact that the Slashdot topics dissappear from most users' sights after about a day eliminates this incentive.
Another reason Slashdot has less flames is just that it is more time-consuming to follow a nested thread with this interface. Every time you want to look at the next message down the list you have to click it and wait for the graphics and banner ads to re-load. With a newsreader, you can digest a thread much, much faster and therefore don't mind participating in a deeply nested back-and-forth argument.
I don't think that the Moderation is the main cause, as Katz suggested.
I think he was not referring to the general population, but rather to politics and debate. I have absolutely no idea if this is any indication, but the few TV snippets I have seen of the British Parliment engaged in debate have much more animosity than the American equivilents. It seems to them to almost be a game that they play with enjoyment - prod the other guy into making a misstep.
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps there was more than one person who sent Katz similar messages? After all, you aren't the only person in the world with those particular, erm, "opinions", if you can call them that. He wasn't necessarily misquoting you - you don't know that for sure. He might have been quoting someone else.
I'm not the only person in the world. Even though I can ignore someone who is, in my opinion, a liar or a spin-doctor, by doing so I am letting him continue to spread FUD to others unchallenged. I'm not saying I actually feel this way about Katz - in fact I find his articles entertaining for the discussions they spark (even if the original article was rather naive). I'm just trying to explain why your suggestion to "just ignore" things you dislike isn't very practical.
Christianity was clearly the driving force behind the worldwide elimination of slavery. (A first in world history, by the way...)
In those days, almost *everything* was argued from a religious standpoint. If you wanted to convince someone, you made sure to make a lot of references to God. The pro-slavery camp also used Christianity to defend their position. Christianity was used as a debating rhetoric tool by both sides of the debate, so you are wearing blinders if you only see the anti-slavery camp's use of it.
Further, understand that the radical ideas in the constitution you claim to support were a direct outgrowth of Protestantism - our government is more closely modeled on Presbyterian church than on anything else that existed in 1776.
The founders of the country were Christian, but they certainly didn't use Christianity as a basis for the government. Quite the opposite in fact. Check this site: Some quotes by "founding fathers" of this country. Some more And some more Yes, they were Christians of one stripe or another, but it was their stepping away from orthodoxy and into a weaker more fuzzy religion that was the springboard for their ideals. They were men of "The Enlightenment", which was the beginning of the end for dogmatic religions. That they didn't drop their religion outright all at once doesn't change the fact that they were slowly losing faith. The irony is that a seperation of church and state actually helps the church. (Keep church and state tied together as was done in Europe, and each successive generation grows up more and more cynical toward religion.)
And finally, as to the more on-topic point: It doesn't matter whether or not you favor censoring porn when there doesn't even exist software that can do it correctly. What we have is software that attempts to filter just porn, but instead filters out non-porn as well (for example, denying access to yahoo altogether because some searches occasionally come up with sex sites). It also lets some porn through. In other words, the means to implement the censorship is flakey and broken, and as such the whole point is moot. Or at least it would be if the voting public had any clue how the internet works.
What you say would be really useful if it were actually technically possible - but it isn't. No, I'm not just saying it's hard - I'm saying that it is literally not possible, and the best you could do would be an approximation to it that unfairly blocks innocent sites.
The problem is with automated censoring. It doesn't work. It *can't* work until such a day as we develop computers capable of understanding the semantic meaning of human language. We aren't there yet, by a longshot. It's what is called the "breast cancer" problem. If you censor sites that use the word "breast" a lot, then you also censor sites providing medical information about breasts, like breast cancer. I haven't even begun to talk about the problem of reading images. ("Is this a JPEG of a pair of breasts as seen from below? Nope, it's just a pastoral landscape photo of some hills in the distance.")
The biggest and most compelling complaint about censorware is that it is impossible to categorize something as chaotic and large as the Internet correctly. If humans build up the blacklists maually, then they can't keep up with the volume of changes to the net. If computer programs do it, then they will miscategorize some things and this is very unfair to people running legit websites that get blacklisted by accident.
This is a problem regardless of what kind of blacklisting you are trying to accomplish. Whether its porn or anything else, it will not be possible to build an accurate and fair blacklist. Your suggestions of controlling which blacklist services to use by use of a consumer access card solves the government-control problem, but utterly fails to solve the real big problem that there will never be any acurrate blacklist sites to tune those cards onto.
Whaddya Mean "Selection"?!
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 1
Why are you implying that AOL prevides more stuff than "mom and pop" ISPs? What they provide is glitziness aimed at the ignorant consumer, with deliberately limited consumer choices to avoid confusion and make their task simpler. Now before you go charging off on me, I favor the existence of such things. They serve a very large role in the consumer market, and its a very important one. But they are not suitable for those with expert internet needs, and as such the possibility of them shoving out the smaller ISP's in wal-mart fashion scares the daylights out of me. In a world where AOL was the only viable choice, I would lose all of these services:
Run whatever the fsck I want on my own end (even 'fringe' systems like Linux, or whatever other stuff might come along tomorrow.
Run whatever browser I want on my end.
Run whatever dialup system I want on my end, and tinker with it (for example, for a while I had xringd set-up so that whenever I called my apartment with the right pattern of phone rings (let it ring 2 times, hangup, reapeat 3 times), my computer would dailup my local "mom and pop" ISP and connect itself, then generate an HTML page with URLS using its new current dynamic IP address (telnet://..., ftp://..., etc), and FTP this page up to the ISP's user-pages area. In this way I could, in a matter of a minute or so, get my home PC to connect itself to the internet, and tell me via the web page what its current IP address is. Thus I could, from work, go look at something on my home PC whenever I needed too without having to have the home PC actually dialed in 24/7. This sort of flexibility is just not possible when you can't pick your own dialup program or OS on your end.
I fear an AOL monopoly of ISP access not because I think AOL is bad all around, but just because it's bad for me. I shouldn't be forced to use the same limited selection of services that are deemed adequete for newbies. Call it elitist if you want, but because I do more with computers than most people do, an artificially simplified system like AOL provides is an obsticle rather than a help.
This practice varies by state. Here in Wisconsin, you can vote in any primary you want, without being in a party, but you have to pick just one of them (you can't vote in both the Democratic and the Republican primary at the same time, for example - but you could vote in the democratic primary this year and the republican one four years later.
This practice has good and bad points. The good point is that you don't have to marry yourself to one party just to have a say in things, but the bad point is that it is possible to ruin the opposing party's primary by "crashing the party" in years where your own party's candidate is a shoe-in. If your own party is only putting up one candidate, or if the issue has already been decided by the time the vote gets to Wisconsin, you might decide to go vote in the opposing party's primary - and pick their most incompetent candidate, hoping to force them to run him instead of their stronger candidate.
This is *not* like holding GM responsible for an accident that occurred because the car was faulty. This is like holding GM responsible for an accident that occurred because someone else came by when your car was parked, crawled underneath, cut your brake line, and ran off. The car as shipped by GM didn't cause the problem. You can argue that it made the problem a lot more likely, by putting the brake line in an easily accessible location that could be gotten at without the key, and you might even be right, but the firse blame still lays with the sabateur.
Think about it, given that the only secure system is one that can't be turned on, do you really want to start the precedent that laymen can decide that software you write was responsible for a security flaw? There is no such thing as perfect security, and choosing how far to go toward a secure system is a judgement call. Go too far and the system is a pain in the ass to use (rotating passwords every 30 seconds, have to re-login after 5 minutes of use, that sort of thing). Don't go far enough and every script kiddie out there ca ruin your day. Microsoft chooses to not go very far at all, and because of that I won't use their stuff, but I won't sue them over it.
About the only thing you *could* sue them over is false advertising when they make *claims* that they have good security. There's nothing wrong with selling an insecure system as long as the buyer isn't conned into thinking he is getting a secure system. (Remember how we all used to be happy with home computers that had no securty whatsoever - C64, Tandy, Amiga, Apple//e, etc.)
A lot of home computer users don't really *want* security. They want the computer to act like an appliance - no logging in. No time-consuming virus checks, no messing about with having to explicitly say an action is okay (like sharing drives), etc. Yes, those people are being stupid, but they should be allowed to be stupid. I'm getting tired of the way people in our society try to put off the blame for their own incompetence onto manufacturers. It's the reason products have all those silly labels on them these days. I even say a label the other day on a food product that said, "Warning: contains peanuts". Now I understand the need to warn people with deadly nut allergies about this in a lot of products, but this particular product was a glass (transparent) jar of...Peanuts. Anyone who can't figure out that there might be peanuts in a 22 ounce jar of Planters dry-roasted peanuts should to be removed from the gene pool, I'm sorry.
Read the article - they are suing someone that they *found* through a search engine. In fact, I have no idea why the article author felt the need to even mention how they found out about it. The fact that it was found via a search engine is fairly irrelevant to the story.
The basic premise of the book was not that a minority of people got their ideas pushed through, but that, even more sadly, a majority of the people became unthinking drones because they liked it. The ignorant majority started objecting to all this tough "reading" they had to do when there was TV easily available, and the mandate to burn books was supported by the populace. That's what made the story so poignant.
My only complaint about Bradbury is that he frequently made the popular mistake of blaming technology for social idiocy. There's nothing wrong with TV technology - the ability to transmit pictures and sound is immensely useful. The fact that it is usually used for inane dreck is not the 'fault' of the technology.
I read it on the advice of a friend about two years ago. I really hated it. Granted, the writing is excellent, and the characters are very believable and deep. But the plot was too depressing, and never really 'peaked' at any particular point. Seeing so many cases over and over where the various religious orders kept warping the knowlege over time was too close to home. The only plot elements that really tied the chronologically seperate vignettes together were of a mystical religious nature, and those failed to draw me into the story. So it felt like reading several short stories that didn't flow together well. It also lacked a climax. The level of interest and excitement remained the same throughout. There was no buildup. I was left at the end feeling rather frustrated and unsatisfied.
Probably part of the reason I didn't like it is that I'm an atheist and the mystical overtones turned me off quite a bit. Which is strange, because I really liked Orson Scott Card's "Ships of Earth", which was even more religious, in a way that was very offensive to me (All the good guys were the ones that accepted the "oversoul", all the bad guys were the ones that didn't). But the difference is that Card's religious overtones were added to a story that was pretty gripping and entertaining in itself (Humans abandoned earth because it was ruined by war, now the colonists' descendants are trying to come back again to repopulate earth after tens of thousands of years.) But in Canticle, there really didn't seem to be any major theme running through the little vignettes. They made okay short stories by themselves, but they didn't really hold together as a book very well.
The best FPS to come along in a long time has to be "Thief, The Dark Project". It solves a lot of what's wrong with other FPSen - nothing in the plot to draw you into it, and the tactics are mostly a measure of dexterity rather than brains. Thief tried to set things up so that if you run through in hack-and-slash style, you die. You aren't a beefy marine with oodles of hit points. If it only takes about three hits to kill a typical bad guy, it only takes about three hits to kill you too. Plus, you get huge backstab bonuses for attacking when the victim is unaware - giving you a very good reason to be careful and sneaky. Plus the levels are based on finding certain items and getting out. Killing things on the way is just a means to the ends - you don't get any score from it. You can get in and out without any killing if you are good. (In fact that's often an extra condition used at the harder difficulty setting - you must finish the mission without leaving any dead bodies behind.) All around an excellent game and I can't wait for Thief 2.
Now *thats* a game I'd love to have under Linux, especially the level editor.
When I first moved into this area, I heard an ad on the car radio for a company I had never heard of before. The slogan sounded something like, "Now you can fufill all your communication needs from one source - Tedious Metrocom!"
I thought - what the *$@$! Who names their company with a name like "Tedious"? What a marketting blunder. Then I later eventually found out that the name of the company was "TDS Metrocom". I misheard the TLA as if it were a word. It still gives me a chuckle whenever I hear it. Accidentally naming yourself "tedious" is the last thing you want to do in a market where the public is technology-phobic.
The problem isn't that this is metered, but that it is metered the wrong way. The fee should be incurred by the party that initiated the movement of the data. But this idea ends up making you pay for things you recieve unknowingly - like SPAM. You can't just swap it around and have the 'sender' pay either, because that ends up making web sites pay for DoS attacks on them. The problem is that there is no technical way to detect who 'asked for' the data to be sent. You can't just charge the client software all the time since the server could send more data than the client expected (for example, downloading SPAM via IMAP.) The problem with metering internet packets is that there is so much atuomation that the customer is not in control of the amount of data he traffics, and nobody has proposed a *fair* way to bill people only for the traffic that is "their fault".
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm - do you seriously think that there are that many Slashdot readers who haven't already read, or at least heard a lot about, The Hobbit? C'mon really: the demographic that would enjoy it (people who like fantasy novels) will have already read it, or at least heard enough about it that they won't get anything new out of a review on Slashdot. A fantasy novel reader knowing nothing about Tolkein would be like a Slashdotter not knowing who RMS is. It's just not going to happen.
Yeah, and baldness is just another hair color.
Bzzzt. not true. Amongst the people who partake in theistic debates, "Personal God" refers to a god that is a person, a being, one mind. This is as opposed to the notion of a pantheistic type of God that is not really a thinking being.
Stop accusing atheists of being ignorant of the issues when aparently you weren't even aware of the basic terminology used in the debate over the centuries.
Atheism is the *LACK* of the belief that Gods do exist, rather than requiring the active belief that they don't. The difference is subtle, but highly relevant.
To say that both atheists and theists have a burden of proof is to assume that the neutral "maybe" position of agnosticism is the default starting point. But this is unfair for two reasons:
1 - There are certain types of statements that are not possible to disprove even if they are in fact false. The assertion that there is a god is such a statement. The logical term for it is a "non falsifiable assertion". If a claim is not falsifiable, then the burden of proof must lay with the claimant, because it would be impossible for the skeptic to prove himself even if he were correct. (It is often impossible to prove that you *didn't* do something, or that something *didn't* happen, or that something *doesn't* exist. Sure it's impossible to disprove god, but it's also impossible to disprove a number of other things, even things we don't believe in, like leprechauns, the tooth fairy, and so on.)
2 - We never give the benefit of the doubt to "maybe" cases in any other question, why should this be any diferent? We don't go around believing in the tooth fairy and in leprechauns, even though they are just as undisprovable as is god.
Thus, most athiests argue that atheism is a reasonable default starting hypothesis rather than something needing proof. All that is needed is to counter alleged proofs of god rather than come up with a disproof of our own. (because such a disproof isn't possible even if we are correct).
Now, keep in mind that I'm not asking that you agree with the above stance, only that you recognize that it is what most atheists think, and your argument is aimed at a strawman position very few atheists actually hold. You can't honestly counter the atheist position if you don't even know what it actually is.
YOU CAN COPY A DVD WITHOUT DECRYPTING IT!
For the hard of thinking, let me repeat that:
YOU CAN COPY A DVD WITHOUT DECRYPTING IT!
So software to decrypt and play DVDs is not going to help or hinder pirating one stinkin' little bit. You're right however that it affects the movie industry's business. It increases sales by opening up markets to their products that didn't exist before (Linux users). Now, you can argue that the Linux user market is too small to matter, but you cannot argue that DeCSS HURTS the industry when it actually increases the number of potential customers (no matter how slightly).
I, for one, am not buying any DVDs until such time as I can actually play them on my computer. This software, if it were allowed to continue being developed would have turned me into a DVD buyer. I guess the movie industry doesn't want me as a customer for some reason.
Has anyone set up a legal defense fund? Is such a thing even appropriate in Norway? (Is is a "loser pays" system, or a "pay no matter what" system?)
What's the best way to send US currency? Convert it and send it, or send it and let them convert?
It's one thing to make AOL the default browser, but when you answer 'yes', it ruins the other setups so you can't just go back to your old settings quickly - THAT is the nature of the complaint. The question asks about your "default" browser, then proceeds to make it your only browser that will actually run right.
Alright, then I back off on my point above. (I didn't read part 2 of Ticket Booth Turanny. I stopped after part 1 (in which he hadn't gone that far yet).)
I actaully already adressed this point up above. I said that manually generated blacklists would be unable to keep up with the speed of changes on the internet. Consider for example "geocities", or "xoom", where the website names are numeric IDs assigned to people. When someone lets their subscription lapse and someone else comes in to take their place with a totally different website, how are your human site-checkers going to know to go back and re-check that site again? How would you like it if it turned out that the website name you had just been given had been previously used by a porn site, and therefore your site was in a lot of blocking software's blacklists?
You got this part dead wrong. Katz was trying to get some kids into a movie that their parents wanted them to be able to see. But the movie theatre wouldn't let them unless the parent attended with the child (even though the mother was right there at the ticket booth buying the tickets for them, giving her blessing for her children to watch the movie without her.)
Now, I'm not asking you to agree with Katz's actions in this, but I am asking that if you are going to deride someone that you deride them for their actual actions, not some strawman effigy of their actions. This was certainly not about Katz trying to sneak kids into movies against the parent's permission as you stated. It was about the fact that the ratings systems overrode the parent's own wishes.
I agree mostly with the notion that Katz really doesn't get it, and should stop trying to pretend he represents us. There's nothing wrong with not being a techno-geek - but there is something wrong with pretending you represent them when you don't. But I also believe quite strongly that when you criticize someone you need to be very careful to criticize their actual position and not a made-up postition that you falsely attribute to them.
I think the first reason is that, unlike on usenet, on Slashdot, after about a day a topic it mostly dead. It isn't on the main page anymore and only a few people are still posting to it. Their posts are not seen by the general population. This gets rid of two of the most common contributors to flame-wars:
Another reason Slashdot has less flames is just that it is more time-consuming to follow a nested thread with this interface. Every time you want to look at the next message down the list you have to click it and wait for the graphics and banner ads to re-load. With a newsreader, you can digest a thread much, much faster and therefore don't mind participating in a deeply nested back-and-forth argument.
I don't think that the Moderation is the main cause, as Katz suggested.
I think he was not referring to the general population, but rather to politics and debate. I have absolutely no idea if this is any indication, but the few TV snippets I have seen of the British Parliment engaged in debate have much more animosity than the American equivilents. It seems to them to almost be a game that they play with enjoyment - prod the other guy into making a misstep.
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps there was more than one person who sent Katz similar messages? After all, you aren't the only person in the world with those particular, erm, "opinions", if you can call them that. He wasn't necessarily misquoting you - you don't know that for sure. He might have been quoting someone else.
I'm not the only person in the world. Even though I can ignore someone who is, in my opinion, a liar or a spin-doctor, by doing so I am letting him continue to spread FUD to others unchallenged. I'm not saying I actually feel this way about Katz - in fact I find his articles entertaining for the discussions they spark (even if the original article was rather naive). I'm just trying to explain why your suggestion to "just ignore" things you dislike isn't very practical.
Some quotes by "founding fathers" of this country.
Some more
And some more
Yes, they were Christians of one stripe or another, but it was their stepping away from orthodoxy and into a weaker more fuzzy religion that was the springboard for their ideals. They were men of "The Enlightenment", which was the beginning of the end for dogmatic religions. That they didn't drop their religion outright all at once doesn't change the fact that they were slowly losing faith. The irony is that a seperation of church and state actually helps the church. (Keep church and state tied together as was done in Europe, and each successive generation grows up more and more cynical toward religion.)
And finally, as to the more on-topic point: It doesn't matter whether or not you favor censoring porn when there doesn't even exist software that can do it correctly. What we have is software that attempts to filter just porn, but instead filters out non-porn as well (for example, denying access to yahoo altogether because some searches occasionally come up with sex sites). It also lets some porn through. In other words, the means to implement the censorship is flakey and broken, and as such the whole point is moot. Or at least it would be if the voting public had any clue how the internet works.
The problem is with automated censoring. It doesn't work. It *can't* work until such a day as we develop computers capable of understanding the semantic meaning of human language. We aren't there yet, by a longshot. It's what is called the "breast cancer" problem. If you censor sites that use the word "breast" a lot, then you also censor sites providing medical information about breasts, like breast cancer. I haven't even begun to talk about the problem of reading images. ("Is this a JPEG of a pair of breasts as seen from below? Nope, it's just a pastoral landscape photo of some hills in the distance.")
The biggest and most compelling complaint about censorware is that it is impossible to categorize something as chaotic and large as the Internet correctly. If humans build up the blacklists maually, then they can't keep up with the volume of changes to the net. If computer programs do it, then they will miscategorize some things and this is very unfair to people running legit websites that get blacklisted by accident.
This is a problem regardless of what kind of blacklisting you are trying to accomplish. Whether its porn or anything else, it will not be possible to build an accurate and fair blacklist. Your suggestions of controlling which blacklist services to use by use of a consumer access card solves the government-control problem, but utterly fails to solve the real big problem that there will never be any acurrate blacklist sites to tune those cards onto.
- Run whatever the fsck I want on my own end (even 'fringe' systems like Linux, or whatever other stuff might come along tomorrow.
- Run whatever browser I want on my end.
- Run whatever dialup system I want on my end, and tinker with it (for example, for a while I had xringd set-up so that whenever I called my apartment with the right pattern of phone rings (let it ring 2 times, hangup, reapeat 3 times), my computer would dailup my local "mom and pop" ISP and connect itself, then generate an HTML page with URLS using its new current dynamic IP address (telnet://..., ftp://..., etc), and FTP this page up to the ISP's user-pages area. In this way I could, in a matter of a minute or so, get my home PC to connect itself to the internet, and tell me via the web page what its current IP address is. Thus I could, from work, go look at something on my home PC whenever I needed too without having to have the home PC actually dialed in 24/7. This sort of flexibility is just not possible when you can't pick your own dialup program or OS on your end.
I fear an AOL monopoly of ISP access not because I think AOL is bad all around, but just because it's bad for me. I shouldn't be forced to use the same limited selection of services that are deemed adequete for newbies. Call it elitist if you want, but because I do more with computers than most people do, an artificially simplified system like AOL provides is an obsticle rather than a help.This practice has good and bad points. The good point is that you don't have to marry yourself to one party just to have a say in things, but the bad point is that it is possible to ruin the opposing party's primary by "crashing the party" in years where your own party's candidate is a shoe-in. If your own party is only putting up one candidate, or if the issue has already been decided by the time the vote gets to Wisconsin, you might decide to go vote in the opposing party's primary - and pick their most incompetent candidate, hoping to force them to run him instead of their stronger candidate.
Think about it, given that the only secure system is one that can't be turned on, do you really want to start the precedent that laymen can decide that software you write was responsible for a security flaw? There is no such thing as perfect security, and choosing how far to go toward a secure system is a judgement call. Go too far and the system is a pain in the ass to use (rotating passwords every 30 seconds, have to re-login after 5 minutes of use, that sort of thing). Don't go far enough and every script kiddie out there ca ruin your day. Microsoft chooses to not go very far at all, and because of that I won't use their stuff, but I won't sue them over it.
About the only thing you *could* sue them over is false advertising when they make *claims* that they have good security. There's nothing wrong with selling an insecure system as long as the buyer isn't conned into thinking he is getting a secure system. (Remember how we all used to be happy with home computers that had no securty whatsoever - C64, Tandy, Amiga, Apple //e, etc.)
A lot of home computer users don't really *want* security. They want the computer to act like an appliance - no logging in. No time-consuming virus checks, no messing about with having to explicitly say an action is okay (like sharing drives), etc. Yes, those people are being stupid, but they should be allowed to be stupid. I'm getting tired of the way people in our society try to put off the blame for their own incompetence onto manufacturers. It's the reason products have all those silly labels on them these days. I even say a label the other day on a food product that said, "Warning: contains peanuts". Now I understand the need to warn people with deadly nut allergies about this in a lot of products, but this particular product was a glass (transparent) jar of...Peanuts. Anyone who can't figure out that there might be peanuts in a 22 ounce jar of Planters dry-roasted peanuts should to be removed from the gene pool, I'm sorry.
Read the article - they are suing someone that they *found* through a search engine. In fact, I have no idea why the article author felt the need to even mention how they found out about it. The fact that it was found via a search engine is fairly irrelevant to the story.
My only complaint about Bradbury is that he frequently made the popular mistake of blaming technology for social idiocy. There's nothing wrong with TV technology - the ability to transmit pictures and sound is immensely useful. The fact that it is usually used for inane dreck is not the 'fault' of the technology.
Probably part of the reason I didn't like it is that I'm an atheist and the mystical overtones turned me off quite a bit. Which is strange, because I really liked Orson Scott Card's "Ships of Earth", which was even more religious, in a way that was very offensive to me (All the good guys were the ones that accepted the "oversoul", all the bad guys were the ones that didn't). But the difference is that Card's religious overtones were added to a story that was pretty gripping and entertaining in itself (Humans abandoned earth because it was ruined by war, now the colonists' descendants are trying to come back again to repopulate earth after tens of thousands of years.) But in Canticle, there really didn't seem to be any major theme running through the little vignettes. They made okay short stories by themselves, but they didn't really hold together as a book very well.
Now *thats* a game I'd love to have under Linux, especially the level editor.
I thought - what the *$@$! Who names their company with a name like "Tedious"? What a marketting blunder. Then I later eventually found out that the name of the company was "TDS Metrocom". I misheard the TLA as if it were a word. It still gives me a chuckle whenever I hear it. Accidentally naming yourself "tedious" is the last thing you want to do in a market where the public is technology-phobic.
The problem isn't that this is metered, but that it is metered the wrong way. The fee should be incurred by the party that initiated the movement of the data. But this idea ends up making you pay for things you recieve unknowingly - like SPAM. You can't just swap it around and have the 'sender' pay either, because that ends up making web sites pay for DoS attacks on them. The problem is that there is no technical way to detect who 'asked for' the data to be sent. You can't just charge the client software all the time since the server could send more data than the client expected (for example, downloading SPAM via IMAP.) The problem with metering internet packets is that there is so much atuomation that the customer is not in control of the amount of data he traffics, and nobody has proposed a *fair* way to bill people only for the traffic that is "their fault".