Consider the "33000" year old wood (not fossils) has been found embedded in "millions of years old" Hawkesbury sandstone in Sydney. Which date is right?
Consider the many, many polystrate fossils in the world. Intrusion's ridiculous, unless you have a religious attachment to the dating of the rock layers that are crossed.
Consider many thousands of square miles of "upside down" strata (in one chunk; yes, even in the US) with negligible signs of movement at the interface. How did they get there? Did the whole lot flip over, extending hundreds of miles into space, and likewise into the magma?
Consider the sudden end of life-signs at the pre-Cambrian level.
Consider the observation that the gremlins in the lowest levels of strata are generally the kind of gremlins that would be there anyway: bottoom dwellers.
Consider the skeletons of modern man that Leakey found much further down than "Lucy."
Consider the many thousands of fossil sites at which "local flooding" events are blamed - and the "global flood" on dry Mars - and yet nobody wants to know about a global flood here. Why?
Have you ever read "Starlight and Time?" The same author made several accurate predictions, working from the same base priciples outlined in that book, about the planets in our solar system. The "standard" predictions were several orders of magnitude off - but who will you believe knows more about what's going on?
The same author, working from the same principles, wrote modelling and simulation software which is used worldwide and daily by people who think he's a nutcase because he believes in the same principles which make the modellers more useful to those people than any other modeller. Where will you stand?
Yes, as long as people "refuse to at least consider the scientific evidence of the world about them rather than stubbornly cling to outdated and misguided dogma," the human race will continue to bark up the wrong tree.
The same attitude got the Church of the Dark Ages burning heretics at the stake, and declaring (in defiance of the Bible, which was ruthlessly suppressed except for a few copies in a strange language chained to the walls at monasteries) that the earth was flat and all sorts of other stupidities.
The same attitude is universally WRONG no matter who uses it: you, the pope, a flat-earther, Charles Darwin, an MSCE, a creationist, a linux kernel developer... it matters not, in the face of that same attitude of "knowing" holier-than-thou contempt.
A lot of that which you know is fact, is opinion - myth. Once you understand that, your life will make more sense.
There are more pieces of complete, utter, tinfoil crap driving around on the roads than, say, Okas or Saabs... but does that make foil-wrapped death-traps better than well-engineered vehicles?
> WHat's the reality with Microsoft now?
The reality is that the carefully prepared W2Ktest site has died in the ass more often than I've had meals, and that skulking along with one brain-dead service, and the stock-install multi-service Linux box has been plugging along happily for three days.
The reality is that MicroSoft LIE when it gets broken (or broken into) - the pitiful "weather" excuse being clearly visible on globally accessible weather-radar images for the farce that it is - and always have behaved like this, and (it seems) always will.
As for MindCraft, name (or URL) me just one commercial (i.e. real world) website that serves only static pages less than 4k bytes long from RAM, and needs to shove those out a pipe 4x100M bits wide. I betcha can't! Betcha, betcha, betcha! Nyaaah!:-P
When you (anybody) can do that, I'll admit there's some point in their benchmarks - and did you notice that the second set of results were different in places by more than double? - and did you notice that all related bottlenecks in Linux or Apache were fixed within a week? - and did you notice that they didn't use khttpd for the test, which would have been much more appropriate for small flat pages? - and which real-world webmaster uses four logging partitions on their NT box? and... well, you get the idea... (-:
If they were putting their code where their mouth was, the full sources for every piece of software on the machine would be available, prefereably from the machine itself.
Everyone visit this site and point a copy of ISIC at that box. Call it operation SnowStorm, and re-read the IP from DNS at least hourly. The resulting continuous failure would not be interesting, but it would keep the box off air, maybe permanently, and may indeed kill boxes between it and the world.
Better yet, can we (collectively) afford a box for Rob to put a clone of SlashDot on (two hot-swappable drives and caddies, mirror SlashDot onto a drive, put it in the SlashClone box, let fly and repeat if/when it dies) and do the same to that box, sending the resulting damage reports to the Linux-Kernel mailing list? At least the web-site would look better...
Solomon's entire city used gold cutlery because silver wasn't considered valuable enough. And other things.
I don't think a mere house which takes 50 NT servers to operate* is really in the race at all. A trillion dollars might buy one of Solomon's city blocks, and young William has a good way to go to get to the magic trillion, even on paper.
I wonder what William III's foundation really spends its money on, and how closely it's tied to M$?
* Fifty NT servers... let me see... seven crashes a day? fifty a day? does he need fifty servers in order to have at least one up for each room at any instant? I guess it depends on what apps they run... I guess if he used XFree and multi-headed them, he could cut the lossage down to maybe six FreeBSD or Linux boxes.
Who cares if there's too much information provided? It would be silly to read all of it - or to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
In the "real" world (-: is the "real" computer world real? your call:-) you have newgroups, email lists, chat channels and such like, representing your raw material. It would not be difficult to maintain a list of "recognised" people and ratings for them, like the "posting history" on SlashDot and DejaNews.
The next layer down is moderated groups, lists and channels. Still pretty much freeforall, but some sense prevails. SlashDot and FreshMeat are examples of this level. Real-world science conferences fall somewhere near this level. Consider how much a scientist spends participating in a conference. Why do they do it?
Finally, you have peer-review sites and news/list/channel digests where experts consult all of the above plus their own knowledge and experience to produce more-or-less formal peer-reviewed output. This is, more or less, the computer equivalent of a journal.
What open source science would offer is essentially free, instant and potentially filtered access at any level of this brouhaha, in parallel with the existing buddy networks in email and snail-mail. Remember that email and usenet largely exist because of ArpaNet and similar educational networks.
Nobody is forced to read a word of the public-access low-quality crud. But it is always available if you're desparate! There is no paper equivalent of this at all, and when you're desparate or in a hurry, it could be a Godsend.
If you're not desperate, read the moderated stuff, but do it instantly, not for $hundreds/$thousands per year, and not with the author paying $100-$700 per page for the privilege of seeing it printed.
For example, Joe Random Poster's magnetic antigravity machine may not have worked, but in the process he may have solved a magnetics problem in a useful way. Sometimes a complete neophyte in your area of expertise is exactly the person you need to ask about a problem, because you can't see the forest for the trees. Finally, as is the case with the 3M PostIt Note inventor, sometimes people invent things because they don't know that what they're trying is impossible - and how many such inventions would be seeded from a public knowledge repository?
> I agree that peer-review is vital to filter > out crackpots and commercial propaganda. But > rather than the traditional editorial board > approach, why not slashdot style moderation?
What about INcredible papers? Quite a lot of things were generally rejected at first (e.g. discovery of the first platypus, RADAR, motor vehicles) because they were so new to the scientific community at large.
That's where SlashDot-ish review would really help, because as well as the "accepted by the establishment" peer review winners, you could make available the "really controversial and hated by peers but otherwise generally liked" and similar categories.
You still can't DCC _IN_ directly to a masq'ed client, unless you do a trick: allocate a port for each user and forward the data from that specific port to the assigned user. I haven't tried this under 2.0.x but did get it working once on 2.2.x: the caller aims their DCC to the appropriate port on the masq server instead of trying to hit the masq'ed user directly.
> You really think that their first move would be to waste processor time on a silly game.
Yes, that's quite likely. Consider, for example, how many people own machines with horsepower and RAM leaking out of the seams, and dual interleaved 3D video cards just to play Quake and such like.
BTW, he doesn't say "I am running an Elbrus/Elbrii," just "Elbrus is really cool." And I agree.
They get their speed by ignoring the derived-from-4004-25-years-ago Intel architecture to build the basic CPU core, then building a good on-the-fly Intel-to-reality translator for it. Which is essentially what everything since the PentiumPro has done.
AMD seem to finally be getting a process like this right with the K7, shpiing in weeks, whereas Intel might get around to shipping Merced before RC5-64 finishes. Perhaps instead of just selling out, Cyrix should have started making Elbrus?
Case 1: The ancient Novell 4 server is dying! Our 20-workstation system is in danger! Panic! Panic! Buy $Oz20,000 worth of NT server gear (multiple Xeons, bucketsful of RAM, hot swappable drives, the whole box 'n' dice) to replace it with! Well, almost... Settled for $Oz2400 worth of Linux gear and get brilliant response time now that the IPX protocol's been axed (MARS ain't so efficient). RAID-1 with caddies plus automated CD burning and checking for backup included.
BTW, all other boxes there are Windows: some 3.11, some 98, one 95, some NT 4.0 -- and not only did each OS have its own unique problem to deal with, but each machine had a separate different problem, except for one 3.11 box! I've spent four times as long tinkering with moronic workstations as I have on anything server-oriented to get the system on-line. Three of the workstations are about to become Linux, so that they don't need maintenance any more.
Case 2: We want to demo a brilliant new Web Commerce app... do we invest in an NT server and an NT client and $$$ worth of security stuff?
Naah, we patch Apache for 128-bit SSL, patch Netscape [hawk... spit; roll on Mozilla] for 128-bit SSL, and run the whole thing, SQL database and all, through a TCL/Tk plugin-and-app pair on one 32M Linux box that happened to be handy - or two Linux boxes, it makes no difference to security. Total elapsed development time, 16 working hours; hardware cost, nil; software cost, nil. Windows can't even keep the passwords secure - "How you say, emm dee five?" - and last week NT lost $2000 worth of telephone records here when it silently froze.
The halloween docs admitted that there were no one-day NT drivers, but forgot to mention the scarcity of NON-TOY one-day applications, even with the much-vaunted "Visual everything-in-sight" tools (ask the FoxPro developer community about that one - and remember to use words like "compatible" and "upgrade path" a lot).
Most people don't even understand it, but what they can understand is that it gives MS everything short of the right to take your firstborn and VCR, rape your missus on the way out and leave you with a bill for their time. Not so much a case of "who do we sue?" as of "how do we avoid being sued!"
While it slurs the "original" digital meaning of "Guru," as far as the public are concerned, it's new, fresh and has a positive slant. I get called a guru all the time - I guess none of these people've ever met a real guru...
news from XFree86 that a pre-4.0 build will be available in July 1999
Th' millennium done arrived! (-:
Now I can do my OpenGLised window manager, with a REAL desktop (with lamp, blotter and clock... and mouse...?), windows that REALLY minimise and proper fade-in (alpha channel) menus and popups!
running games in a window is shitty. am i the only one who feels this way?
Yes. (-:
I prefer to run games in a window while I'm debugging or monitoring something; that way I can also see the item that earns me money, and pause the game to attend to it if need be.
Get all your permissions right (e.g. kill off SUID unless the prog _really_ needs it _and_ gets run by other than root) chattr +i _everything_ that will take it, including directories. The +i bit doesn't care if you're root!
You might like to put a few favourite cracker recipe scripts in/tmp first... or at least, scripts with the same names but that perhaps don't do _quite_ the same things...
Then delete chattr. (-:
You can always put in a floppy and run it from there if you want to change something.
Also, mount as much as possible ro, nodev, noexec/nosuid and so forth, then mount a "fake"/etc over the top of the real one, with stuff like a "limited" fake fstab - and then delete umount.
I guarantee hours of entertainment watching the script kiddies smacking their heads against the wall!
The committee has been told, many times, in many ways, that this is technically impossible and that trying will cost heaps as people start using https: and such technologies by default. This seems to imply checking against an address list; let's run a sweepstake on how long it takes the first cracker to post the censorship site's own URL/IP on its list, plus a few others like *.gov.au.
You can't scan SSL and friends for content! Picture this:
This web page is being checked.
Please click on this link in approximately fifteen years after our server farm has broken your SSL key to ensure that what you're trying to fetch isn't naughty. We apologise for the inconvenience.
The problems that caused the Littleton and other shootings are the same as they've been for ages -- intolerance, parental incompetence, lack of emphasis on the importance of education.
Intolerance, yes, but why is it there? Some marks for working out, but not the correct answer.
Incompetence, yes, but why is it there? More marks for working out, but again not the correct answer.
Lack of education - oh, sure! Literacy went down and crime went up as compulsory education was phased in. This has been well documented in the USA, where pre-compulsion literacy ran to 98% in many northern states, and has never exceeded 92% since (ie 4x more illiterates). No marks at all for this one.
Now, riddle me this: if your child is whisked away to day-care, then pre-school, then school, and in each institution is regimented to some degree and dealt with always at a shallow level by a bunch of relative strangers, where and how are they to learn any principles of life?
In Oz, this soaks up 33 of their 98 waking hours each week. Bear in mind that many of the other 65 hours are spent before the idiot box or solely with others of their age, also desperate for emotional and social input.
As another poster here points out, the most impressive US school bombing was done by a member of the school board. Obviously, emphasis on the importance of education wasn't a crying need there!
[...] being a parent is a full-time responsibility, more important than your hobbies, your friends, even your career.
I can't agree more. Abdicating this responsibility to a school should be named as it is: criminal negligence.
It makes another point: even in a rigorously regimented group, there will be "misfits" and "nonconformists" a thing which the purveyors of fine homogenised lives seem unable to fathom. This causes eternal war between individuality which by definition cannot be stamped out (yes, dual meaning), and "uniformitarianism" which by definition has the goal of eliminating individuality.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider the "33000" year old wood (not fossils) has been found embedded in "millions of years old" Hawkesbury sandstone in Sydney. Which date is right?
Consider the many, many polystrate fossils in the world. Intrusion's ridiculous, unless you have a religious attachment to the dating of the rock layers that are crossed.
Consider many thousands of square miles of "upside down" strata (in one chunk; yes, even in the US) with negligible signs of movement at the interface. How did they get there? Did the whole lot flip over, extending hundreds of miles into space, and likewise into the magma?
Consider the sudden end of life-signs at the pre-Cambrian level.
Consider the observation that the gremlins in the lowest levels of strata are generally the kind of gremlins that would be there anyway: bottoom dwellers.
Consider the skeletons of modern man that Leakey found much further down than "Lucy."
Consider the many thousands of fossil sites at which "local flooding" events are blamed - and the "global flood" on dry Mars - and yet nobody wants to know about a global flood here. Why?
Have you ever read "Starlight and Time?" The same author made several accurate predictions, working from the same base priciples outlined in that book, about the planets in our solar system. The "standard" predictions were several orders of magnitude off - but who will you believe knows more about what's going on?
The same author, working from the same principles, wrote modelling and simulation software which is used worldwide and daily by people who think he's a nutcase because he believes in the same principles which make the modellers more useful to those people than any other modeller. Where will you stand?
Yes, as long as people "refuse to at least consider the scientific evidence of the world about them rather than stubbornly cling to outdated and misguided dogma," the human race will continue to bark up the wrong tree.
The same attitude got the Church of the Dark Ages burning heretics at the stake, and declaring (in defiance of the Bible, which was ruthlessly suppressed except for a few copies in a strange language chained to the walls at monasteries) that the earth was flat and all sorts of other stupidities.
The same attitude is universally WRONG no matter who uses it: you, the pope, a flat-earther, Charles Darwin, an MSCE, a creationist, a linux kernel developer... it matters not, in the face of that same attitude of "knowing" holier-than-thou contempt.
A lot of that which you know is fact, is opinion - myth. Once you understand that, your life will make more sense.
No http, traceroute dies after the router (.250)
How sad.
There are more pieces of complete, utter, tinfoil crap driving around on the roads than, say, Okas or Saabs... but does that make foil-wrapped death-traps better than well-engineered vehicles?
:-P
> WHat's the reality with Microsoft now?
The reality is that the carefully prepared W2Ktest site has died in the ass more often than I've had meals, and that skulking along with one brain-dead service, and the stock-install multi-service Linux box has been plugging along happily for three days.
The reality is that MicroSoft LIE when it gets broken (or broken into) - the pitiful "weather" excuse being clearly visible on globally accessible weather-radar images for the farce that it is - and always have behaved like this, and (it seems) always will.
As for MindCraft, name (or URL) me just one commercial (i.e. real world) website that serves only static pages less than 4k bytes long from RAM, and needs to shove those out a pipe 4x100M bits wide. I betcha can't! Betcha, betcha, betcha! Nyaaah!
When you (anybody) can do that, I'll admit there's some point in their benchmarks - and did you notice that the second set of results were different in places by more than double? - and did you notice that all related bottlenecks in Linux or Apache were fixed within a week? - and did you notice that they didn't use khttpd for the test, which would have been much more appropriate for small flat pages? - and which real-world webmaster uses four logging partitions on their NT box? and... well, you get the idea... (-:
If anyone breaks this machine, why not set it up to write a copy of BO2K to any floppy that appears in the drive, and see what happens next? (-:
If they were putting their code where their mouth was, the full sources for every piece of software on the machine would be available, prefereably from the machine itself.
Everyone visit this site and point a copy of ISIC at that box. Call it operation SnowStorm, and re-read the IP from DNS at least hourly. The resulting continuous failure would not be interesting, but it would keep the box off air, maybe permanently, and may indeed kill boxes between it and the world.
Better yet, can we (collectively) afford a box for Rob to put a clone of SlashDot on (two hot-swappable drives and caddies, mirror SlashDot onto a drive, put it in the SlashClone box, let fly and repeat if/when it dies) and do the same to that box, sending the resulting damage reports to the Linux-Kernel mailing list? At least the web-site would look better...
Solomon's entire city used gold cutlery because silver wasn't considered valuable enough. And other things.
I don't think a mere house which takes 50 NT servers to operate* is really in the race at all. A trillion dollars might buy one of Solomon's city blocks, and young William has a good way to go to get to the magic trillion, even on paper.
I wonder what William III's foundation really spends its money on, and how closely it's tied to M$?
* Fifty NT servers... let me see... seven crashes a day? fifty a day? does he need fifty servers in order to have at least one up for each room at any instant? I guess it depends on what apps they run... I guess if he used XFree and multi-headed them, he could cut the lossage down to maybe six FreeBSD or Linux boxes.
Who cares if there's too much information provided? It would be silly to read all of it - or to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
:-) you have newgroups, email lists, chat channels and such like, representing your raw material. It would not be difficult to maintain a list of "recognised" people and ratings for them, like the "posting history" on SlashDot and DejaNews.
In the "real" world (-: is the "real" computer world real? your call
The next layer down is moderated groups, lists and channels. Still pretty much freeforall, but some sense prevails. SlashDot and FreshMeat are examples of this level. Real-world science conferences fall somewhere near this level. Consider how much a scientist spends participating in a conference. Why do they do it?
Finally, you have peer-review sites and news/list/channel digests where experts consult all of the above plus their own knowledge and experience to produce more-or-less formal peer-reviewed output. This is, more or less, the computer equivalent of a journal.
What open source science would offer is essentially free, instant and potentially filtered access at any level of this brouhaha, in parallel with the existing buddy networks in email and snail-mail. Remember that email and usenet largely exist because of ArpaNet and similar educational networks.
Nobody is forced to read a word of the public-access low-quality crud. But it is always available if you're desparate! There is no paper equivalent of this at all, and when you're desparate or in a hurry, it could be a Godsend.
If you're not desperate, read the moderated stuff, but do it instantly, not for $hundreds/$thousands per year, and not with the author paying $100-$700 per page for the privilege of seeing it printed.
For example, Joe Random Poster's magnetic antigravity machine may not have worked, but in the process he may have solved a magnetics problem in a useful way. Sometimes a complete neophyte in your area of expertise is exactly the person you need to ask about a problem, because you can't see the forest for the trees. Finally, as is the case with the 3M PostIt Note inventor, sometimes people invent things because they don't know that what they're trying is impossible - and how many such inventions would be seeded from a public knowledge repository?
Now there's an education in a nutshell!
Now, who's dumb enough to say something like "but that doesn't happen in my discipline"? G'wan, I dare you! (-:
> I agree that peer-review is vital to filter
> out crackpots and commercial propaganda. But
> rather than the traditional editorial board
> approach, why not slashdot style moderation?
What about INcredible papers? Quite a lot of things were generally rejected at first (e.g. discovery of the first platypus, RADAR, motor vehicles) because they were so new to the scientific community at large.
That's where SlashDot-ish review would really help, because as well as the "accepted by the establishment" peer review winners, you could make available the "really controversial and hated by peers but otherwise generally liked" and similar categories.
> the young has been to post the Ten Commandments
> in schools
And then ignore them (both commandments and schools) and hope they'll go away.
It made ICQ DCC chat work for one of my clients
You still can't DCC _IN_ directly to a masq'ed client, unless you do a trick: allocate a port for each user and forward the data from that specific port to the assigned user. I haven't tried this under 2.0.x but did get it working once on 2.2.x: the caller aims their DCC to the appropriate port on the masq server instead of trying to hit the masq'ed user directly.
> You really think that their first move would be to waste processor time on a silly game.
Yes, that's quite likely. Consider, for example, how many people own machines with horsepower and RAM leaking out of the seams, and dual interleaved 3D video cards just to play Quake and such like.
BTW, he doesn't say "I am running an Elbrus/Elbrii," just "Elbrus is really cool." And I agree.
They get their speed by ignoring the derived-from-4004-25-years-ago Intel architecture to build the basic CPU core, then building a good on-the-fly Intel-to-reality translator for it. Which is essentially what everything since the PentiumPro has done.
AMD seem to finally be getting a process like this right with the K7, shpiing in weeks, whereas Intel might get around to shipping Merced before RC5-64 finishes. Perhaps instead of just selling out, Cyrix should have started making Elbrus?
These can effectively replace ssh: as to rdist, wouldn't rsync do? You could stunnel it if you felt it necessary.
A search on Google brought up lots of interesting stuff, notably this.
Look at http://kundip.copl.com.au/leonb/ipchains-MRTG-util s.html - it works for me, so far.
Case 1: The ancient Novell 4 server is dying! Our 20-workstation system is in danger! Panic! Panic! Buy $Oz20,000 worth of NT server gear (multiple Xeons, bucketsful of RAM, hot swappable drives, the whole box 'n' dice) to replace it with! Well, almost... Settled for $Oz2400 worth of Linux gear and get brilliant response time now that the IPX protocol's been axed (MARS ain't so efficient). RAID-1 with caddies plus automated CD burning and checking for backup included.
BTW, all other boxes there are Windows: some 3.11, some 98, one 95, some NT 4.0 -- and not only did each OS have its own unique problem to deal with, but each machine had a separate different problem, except for one 3.11 box! I've spent four times as long tinkering with moronic workstations as I have on anything server-oriented to get the system on-line. Three of the workstations are about to become Linux, so that they don't need maintenance any more.
Case 2: We want to demo a brilliant new Web Commerce app... do we invest in an NT server and an NT client and $$$ worth of security stuff?
Naah, we patch Apache for 128-bit SSL, patch Netscape [hawk... spit; roll on Mozilla] for 128-bit SSL, and run the whole thing, SQL database and all, through a TCL/Tk plugin-and-app pair on one 32M Linux box that happened to be handy - or two Linux boxes, it makes no difference to security. Total elapsed development time, 16 working hours; hardware cost, nil; software cost, nil. Windows can't even keep the passwords secure - "How you say, emm dee five?" - and last week NT lost $2000 worth of telephone records here when it silently froze.
The halloween docs admitted that there were no one-day NT drivers, but forgot to mention the scarcity of NON-TOY one-day applications, even with the much-vaunted "Visual everything-in-sight" tools (ask the FoxPro developer community about that one - and remember to use words like "compatible" and "upgrade path" a lot).
Most people don't even understand it, but what they can understand is that it gives MS everything short of the right to take your firstborn and VCR, rape your missus on the way out and leave you with a bill for their time. Not so much a case of "who do we sue?" as of "how do we avoid being sued!"
While it slurs the "original" digital meaning of "Guru," as far as the public are concerned, it's new, fresh and has a positive slant. I get called a guru all the time - I guess none of these people've ever met a real guru...
news from XFree86 that a pre-4.0 build will be available in July 1999
Th' millennium done arrived! (-:
Now I can do my OpenGLised window manager, with a REAL desktop (with lamp, blotter and clock... and mouse...?), windows that REALLY minimise and proper fade-in (alpha channel) menus and popups!
running games in a window is shitty. am i the only one who feels this way?
Yes. (-:
I prefer to run games in a window while I'm debugging or monitoring something; that way I can also see the item that earns me money, and pause the game to attend to it if need be.
Get all your permissions right (e.g. kill off SUID unless the prog _really_ needs it _and_ gets run by other than root) chattr +i _everything_ that will take it, including directories. The +i bit doesn't care if you're root!
/tmp first... or at least, scripts with the same names but that perhaps don't do _quite_ the same things...
/etc over the top of the real one, with stuff like a "limited" fake fstab - and then delete umount.
You might like to put a few favourite cracker recipe scripts in
Then delete chattr. (-:
You can always put in a floppy and run it from there if you want to change something.
Also, mount as much as possible ro, nodev, noexec/nosuid and so forth, then mount a "fake"
I guarantee hours of entertainment watching the script kiddies smacking their heads against the wall!
The committee has been told, many times, in many ways, that this is technically impossible and that trying will cost heaps as people start using https: and such technologies by default. This seems to imply checking against an address list; let's run a sweepstake on how long it takes the first cracker to post the censorship site's own URL/IP on its list, plus a few others like *.gov.au.
You can't scan SSL and friends for content! Picture this:
This web page is being checked.
Please click on this link in approximately fifteen years after our server farm has broken your SSL key to ensure that what you're trying to fetch isn't naughty. We apologise for the inconvenience.
The problems that caused the Littleton and other shootings are the same as they've been for ages -- intolerance, parental incompetence, lack of emphasis on the importance of education.
Intolerance, yes, but why is it there? Some marks for working out, but not the correct answer.
Incompetence, yes, but why is it there? More marks for working out, but again not the correct answer.
Lack of education - oh, sure! Literacy went down and crime went up as compulsory education was phased in. This has been well documented in the USA, where pre-compulsion literacy ran to 98% in many northern states, and has never exceeded 92% since (ie 4x more illiterates). No marks at all for this one.
Now, riddle me this: if your child is whisked away to day-care, then pre-school, then school, and in each institution is regimented to some degree and dealt with always at a shallow level by a bunch of relative strangers, where and how are they to learn any principles of life?
In Oz, this soaks up 33 of their 98 waking hours each week. Bear in mind that many of the other 65 hours are spent before the idiot box or solely with others of their age, also desperate for emotional and social input.
As another poster here points out, the most impressive US school bombing was done by a member of the school board. Obviously, emphasis on the importance of education wasn't a crying need there!
[...] being a parent is a full-time responsibility, more important than your hobbies, your friends, even your career.
I can't agree more. Abdicating this responsibility to a school should be named as it is: criminal negligence.
Uh, I used it in its monochrome sense.
It makes another point: even in a rigorously regimented group, there will be "misfits" and "nonconformists" a thing which the purveyors of fine homogenised lives seem unable to fathom. This causes eternal war between individuality which by definition cannot be stamped out (yes, dual meaning), and "uniformitarianism" which by definition has the goal of eliminating individuality.