I moved house a couple of years ago, at the same time I was working in a University tech support department. The hardware people downstairs had a load of new monitors arriving each week, each packed in excellent quality triple-layer cardboard boxes. Monitors, like books, being heavy are shipped in stronger boxes than PCs.
By flatpacking, I could store a cache under my desk and cycle home with about six at a time.
This is an Australian government project; some of the most clued-up people on the Net regarding metadata, and positively amazing by government standards. I hope they do something neat with metadata mark-up, or RDF.
Why Pandora ? As a Greek compilation of Spam sites and MLM scams, then it's a good name, but it's hardly culturally relevant to Australia.
Shame they didn't choose an Aboriginal name. They tend to make for great project names anyway; no cultural baggage from other languages, plenty to choose from so there's usually a pretty relevant one to be had, and easily pronounced across other languages.
it's not about the blocked porn, it's about the other useful material that is blocked.
Clearly this would be bad.
But does this "collateral blocking" happen with a decent ratings-based system, rather than NetNanny site lists ? I've not heard of an example. On a ratings-based system, it suits the aims of the site operator to get the ratings right. This is the big difference between PICS and NetNanny or BESS -- they don't have a strong business case to stop them "accidentally" excluding Scunthorpe
OK, so deliberately cheating on self-ratings is a potential problem. I don't have a solution off-hand.
I'm acting un-american. Probably cause I'm one of those communist europeans.
I'm a European too, and although I'm not a Communist, the UK Labour Party once rejected my application for membership as a possible "fellow traveller" with Militant 8-)
So what you're trying to do is to destroy PICS entirely.
I've never understood this. What's with the ultra-libertarian angle that says all rating systems are so bad that they're indistinguishable from state censorship by Ian Paisley ?
Besides which, if you had your way, the only viewable content left on the Web wouldn't be Yahoo, it would be The Barney Channel. Is that really what you want to achieve ?
This is a good point, which is why I deliberately referred to a library.
If you're the little town of Pleasantville, then it's probably easy. You really can get community consensus on what's permitted, if the community is small enough and close enough to the administrator.
For a big city though, this breaks down. Life sucks, doesn't it 8-) IMHO, you let the librarian decide. If you don't like it, then maybe you need to be careful picking your librarians. Librarians already exercise a lot of "choice" (if not outright censorship) by the books they purchase. Why is the Web so different ? It's an important decision, so you have trusted people doing it. For concrete examples, then I think library systems should take an exceedingly liberal view of what's permissible - "The Jack Straw Guide to Coming Out at School" ought to be permitted, as should the "Aryan Trailerpark Supremacist" site. Commercial Pr0n though ? Is that really what you want to spend library budgets on ?
I never give much credit to the "The First Amendment guarantees my right to Free Pr0n, delivered to my library" argument.
Secondly, I bet you don't have kids (I have no idea if you're actually married, because you certainly can't believe everything you read on/.). QUIT MY JOB, oh yes, that is just about the most helpful comment I've ever seen on the subject of effective childcare. No doubt you also think that all single mothers are also lazy trollops who should have their misbegotten brood dragged off to orphanages.
Also, just supposing that it is possible to parent your adolescent sprogs 24 hours a day, just what sort of warped oedipal weirdoes are you trying to raise here ? Don't you think that getting away from their parents some of the time is a good thing for children ? You know; school, mixing with other kids, learning a bit of independence ?
If my son is going to surf pr0n sites when he's older (any post-teen guy who denies they were ever tempted is lying), then he's damned well going to have to work hard on it. Hey, he might even learn some decent Unix admin skills to do it 8-)
Will Women's rights or Gayrights sites be acceptable for children?
It's your browser, you decide. This isn't censorship, because it's always an option to go and get your own browser. Limiting the availability of, or the settings on, a browser would be censorship, but that's not what PICS is about.
For me to make the statement, "Any content is acceptable" is as much an infringement of the rights of another culture to maintain their own moral standards, as it would be for the Taliban to force me to grow a beard and never look at another exposed ankle. It goes both ways; they shouldn't impose censorship on me, but neither should I impose licentiousness on anyone else. I shouldn't even censor www.kkk.org, or swastika.de from other people (although I might personally despise either of those sites).
My browser is now set to ban anything that's rated as "especially Canadian" according to VWP. I look forward to my first hit 8-)
If your argument is "Make them filter badly on sites until they implode and go away", then I think that's a slightly unworkable (but well intentioned) idea. If you mean "All control is Evil. so PICS is evil", then you're an idiot.
--
Information wants to be Free
Data fancies being tied up and spanked by Troi
incorporate PICS such that any site that lacks a correct PICS identification is immediately concerned of highest blocking requirements;
This already happens, except that IE's option to block unrated sites is off by default.
It's a user education thing. Maybe if M$oft would put some money into educating the population to use these features, rather than falling for scareware censorship programmes, then we'd be doing more PICS rating.
My own sites get PICS rated with both RSAC and SafeSurf. Haven't used VWP though.
OK, I'm meaning "Government" to be those faceless people in Washington with the Black Helicopters and "local community" to be those charming town meetings where you all volunteer to re-paint old ladies' white picket fences for them.
This is a rather simplified view of American society. 8-)
Not filtering at all isn't a good solution. Much of the Net isn't exactly the greatest of human achievements. I don't want to do the Victorian Parent thing here, but I (a bleeding-heart liberal) don't want my kids having free access to World-O-Badger-Pr0n. If you want to watch it, then that's up to you. If you want to let your kids watch it, then equally that's up to you (I think you're wrong, but they aren't my kids).
Filtering isn't censorship. Some stupid attempts at filtering might turn into censorship, but there's a reasonable case for filtering that doesn't impinge on any reasonable requirement for openness and freedom (tm).
Filters are good (good filters). You should put them in the hands of everyone who grants access to the web (I buy my kids a web browser, the local community funds a library, a mosque provides a "safe" browsing environment for those who share their moral outlook).
Whoever built the access gets to set the filter settings. If you don't like this, then either get your own access, or be part of the community that decides what settings you all want.
It only becomes censorship if there's no reasonable way round it. Government filters are bad, portal filters are bad, having Mormons pressure a commercial ISP in Salt Lake would be bad.
I like community based filtering. I'd much rather have more constrained communities providing access to their own members, under their own community's terms, than simply declaring an all-out jihad against the entire Net.
Various censoreware programs don't like it. Let's look at it again through their eyes:
This tiP IS Sure to not work
Recently I've been seeing a bunch of Spam for VIGOREX, but it was spelt varyingly as V'I'G'O,R,E,X etc. I couldn't really understand this, as a fairly trivial regex wipes them out nicely, so they certainly don't make it into my mailbox.
Presumably this isn't a technique to defeat spam-traps, but to defeat word-scanning dictionary-based censorware. I guess they mash spaces, but not punctuation.
OK, so this is an egg-sucking lesson for all you Slashdot grannies out there....
Site-based filtering is broken. This is just yet another instance of it. Proxying the content through another unblocked site (like this Akamai example) will blow holes in it. Blocking Yahoo (and anything else sufficiently generic) because they also link to Scunthorpe.gov.uk, as well as to the Baptist Church Choir, will shut out large valuable parts of the Net -- you might as well burn your modem.
If you don't like the content on the web, then filter on the web content by all means. Let's see PICS rating more commonly used. If you really have an issue with wanting a government imposed central filtering scheme, then pass yourself a law in your country that makes rating schemes mandatory (or you'll be defaulted to XXX). The problem of "keeping the kiddies safe" then defers to browser operators (those who put browsers in the hands of the kids). Set your home browser however you like (they're your kids) and let local communities set the standards for locally-funded institutions like schools and libraries. If you don't like the library filters, because you live in a straight-laced town, then don't complain to the democratic group who paid for it and chose the settings, just buy your own web time.
Don't forget that PICS is a framework for rating systems, not a rating scheme itself. I'd like to see a PICS Hippy-Lovechild rating scheme where free-love and pot sites were rated OK, but accountancy was a major no-no. Build a Tennessee rating scheme if you want, where sex outside a married family is forbidden, but it's OK with your sister (or even yer dawg). Custom rating systems are a fine way to build an "Islamist web", where followers of one set of moral values are perfectly at liberty to define their own standards, implement them on their own set of relevant sites, and neither I nor they will offend each other with moral conflicts.
This might even be a way for eBay to get round the "not selling Nazi relics in France" problem.
Confusing content with location is just never going to work right.
If you're working with low-res characters in dot-matrix calculator-vision, then they need to be big to be able to see them. If they're on a higher resolution screen, then they get better shapes, anti-aliasing etc. which makes them more readable. Although there's no simple "all 9 pixel high characters are readable" rule, it's certainly the case that smaller characters at better resolutions are more readable than larger characters, if their resolution is worse.
How small can you comfortably read on a screen ? On high-res paper ?
Safeties off on a reactor... write that one down as a no-no
Why ? Active safety is vastly over-rated on reactor designs. The only real safety features that have ever stopped reactor accidents have been good design, ie design that was inherently more stable and less likely to go off into reactivity feedback. Most accidents that have occurred have occurred despite active safety systems, and most that have been narrowly averted were averted because of that design's inherent behaviour.
Active safety systems are good, and we should use them, but their track record is that they aren't all that likely to save your butt when you most need it.
Chernobyl (and SL-1, just to show that the US can get it wrong too) were both caused by the positive reactivity coefficients that Tau Zero described so well. It's not widely appreciated that many reactors, especially the older designs, are incredibly dangerous when operating at low power, or in the initial startup phase, compared to their normal operating power. This is so contrary to "normal" engines and machines that it's hard to comprehend instinctively.
The Bellona site has a good piece on Soviet naval reactors, which goes into some detail of this. Their 3 or 4 generations of designs have sought to minimise these effects, often by such seemingly unrelated techniques as changing pipe diamters
The tactile senses are not dominated by vibratory inputs
I'd disagree. For small amplitudes, especially with a finger that isn't travelling over the surface, vibration provides a pretty good simulated sensation for touch. Sure, it's different -- but it feels the same.
How about a filter that tracks referrals from Slashdot and bounces them beyond a certain load level ?
I've no idea if that's what happening, but it's something I'd want to have on hand, if I ran a site like Anand that was regularly whacked with Slashdot's million typoing monkeys.
No, CO2 is hazardous on its own. If you don't know WTF you're talking about, then shut the Fortran up.
Mammals breathe oxygen in and CO2 out. Most of our breathing processes are regulated by the amount of CO2 in the nearby atmosphere, and if you increase that even slightly, all sorts of bad shit start to happen.
If CO2 is so nice to breathe, then there's a hundred dead Russian sailors who'd like to explain something to you.
I'm running the world's finest desktop OS (NT4) and complaining about how poor it is as a server OS. I'd much rather be trying to run a desktop on a good server OS.
Windows is a "desktop OS". Everything is built around that message handling loop (painfully so on Win9x). This makes for a whizzy and responsive single task desktop, and it's horrible for anything that's also running server stuff simultaneously. As we're increasingly in the scenario where the box is doing more invisible "serving" than it is running the foreground (except for gaming), then a server-tasked OS is a much better starting point.
We know what a "desktop OS" would look like, and let's not go there ! It's not where we want to be now, and it's going to become even less so in the future.
PS - Yes X sucks mightily. Fix that if you want to.
PPS - I'm no Linux expert, but I did sweat through Tannenbaum all those years ago. Does Linux use any of Minix ? I didn't think so. As your "Unix was for mainframes" comment was so misinformed, I'm unlikely to believe you on this either.
PPPS - Mod 4 "Informative" on this comment is what meta-moderation is for ! Give the moderators a clue to go with all that karma !
Slashdot Mirror
I moved house a couple of years ago, at the same time I was working in a University tech support department. The hardware people downstairs had a load of new monitors arriving each week, each packed in excellent quality triple-layer cardboard boxes. Monitors, like books, being heavy are shipped in stronger boxes than PCs.
By flatpacking, I could store a cache under my desk and cycle home with about six at a time.
When a recent high-profile dot.com crashed, I spent a week listening to CNN & NYT reporters et al. trying to pronounce "schadenfreude".
Woomera is easy, in comparison.
This is an Australian government project; some of the most clued-up people on the Net regarding metadata, and positively amazing by government standards. I hope they do something neat with metadata mark-up, or RDF.
Why Pandora ? As a Greek compilation of Spam sites and MLM scams, then it's a good name, but it's hardly culturally relevant to Australia.
Shame they didn't choose an Aboriginal name. They tend to make for great project names anyway; no cultural baggage from other languages, plenty to choose from so there's usually a pretty relevant one to be had, and easily pronounced across other languages.
--
Are the didgerati an Australian folk band ?
Go to the ARKive project and search for thylacine.
You don't want to interbreed siblings for well-known reasons.
If sibling tasmanian tigers are interbred, then they'll eventually form a different species.
...and Tennessee has always needed a tiger. 8-)
FORTRAN interpreters
Can't recall ever meeting an interpreter for Fortran. Were there such beasties ?
Just to do some flag-waving for the Brits, I'd say that LEO was the first machine with a recognisable OS.
I'd agree with your general point that OS (and indeed Disk OS) were around in the '50s, long before OS/360.
OTOH though, The Zuse ABC machine never had anything that resembled a monitor, let alone an OS.
it's not about the blocked porn, it's about the other useful material that is blocked.
Clearly this would be bad.
But does this "collateral blocking" happen with a decent ratings-based system, rather than NetNanny site lists ? I've not heard of an example. On a ratings-based system, it suits the aims of the site operator to get the ratings right. This is the big difference between PICS and NetNanny or BESS -- they don't have a strong business case to stop them "accidentally" excluding Scunthorpe
OK, so deliberately cheating on self-ratings is a potential problem. I don't have a solution off-hand.
I'm acting un-american. Probably cause I'm one of those communist europeans.
I'm a European too, and although I'm not a Communist, the UK Labour Party once rejected my application for membership as a possible "fellow traveller" with Militant 8-)
So what you're trying to do is to destroy PICS entirely.
I've never understood this. What's with the ultra-libertarian angle that says all rating systems are so bad that they're indistinguishable from state censorship by Ian Paisley ?
Besides which, if you had your way, the only viewable content left on the Web wouldn't be Yahoo, it would be The Barney Channel. Is that really what you want to achieve ?
This is a good point, which is why I deliberately referred to a library.
If you're the little town of Pleasantville, then it's probably easy. You really can get community consensus on what's permitted, if the community is small enough and close enough to the administrator.
For a big city though, this breaks down. Life sucks, doesn't it 8-) IMHO, you let the librarian decide. If you don't like it, then maybe you need to be careful picking your librarians. Librarians already exercise a lot of "choice" (if not outright censorship) by the books they purchase. Why is the Web so different ? It's an important decision, so you have trusted people doing it. For concrete examples, then I think library systems should take an exceedingly liberal view of what's permissible - "The Jack Straw Guide to Coming Out at School" ought to be permitted, as should the "Aryan Trailerpark Supremacist" site. Commercial Pr0n though ? Is that really what you want to spend library budgets on ?
I never give much credit to the "The First Amendment guarantees my right to Free Pr0n, delivered to my library" argument.
Which bozo moderated that tripe as "Insightful" ?
Secondly, I bet you don't have kids (I have no idea if you're actually married, because you certainly can't believe everything you read on /.). QUIT MY JOB, oh yes, that is just about the most helpful comment I've ever seen on the subject of effective childcare. No doubt you also think that all single mothers are also lazy trollops who should have their misbegotten brood dragged off to orphanages.
Also, just supposing that it is possible to parent your adolescent sprogs 24 hours a day, just what sort of warped oedipal weirdoes are you trying to raise here ? Don't you think that getting away from their parents some of the time is a good thing for children ? You know; school, mixing with other kids, learning a bit of independence ?
If my son is going to surf pr0n sites when he's older (any post-teen guy who denies they were ever tempted is lying), then he's damned well going to have to work hard on it. Hey, he might even learn some decent Unix admin skills to do it 8-)
Will Women's rights or Gayrights sites be acceptable for children?
It's your browser, you decide. This isn't censorship, because it's always an option to go and get your own browser. Limiting the availability of, or the settings on, a browser would be censorship, but that's not what PICS is about.
For me to make the statement, "Any content is acceptable" is as much an infringement of the rights of another culture to maintain their own moral standards, as it would be for the Taliban to force me to grow a beard and never look at another exposed ankle. It goes both ways; they shouldn't impose censorship on me, but neither should I impose licentiousness on anyone else. I shouldn't even censor www.kkk.org, or swastika.de from other people (although I might personally despise either of those sites).
My browser is now set to ban anything that's rated as "especially Canadian" according to VWP.
I look forward to my first hit 8-)
If your argument is "Make them filter badly on sites until they implode and go away", then I think that's a slightly unworkable (but well intentioned) idea. If you mean "All control is Evil. so PICS is evil", then you're an idiot.
--
Information wants to be Free
Data fancies being tied up and spanked by Troi
incorporate PICS such that any site that lacks a correct PICS identification is immediately concerned of highest blocking requirements;
This already happens, except that IE's option to block unrated sites is off by default.
It's a user education thing. Maybe if M$oft would put some money into educating the population to use these features, rather than falling for scareware censorship programmes, then we'd be doing more PICS rating.
My own sites get PICS rated with both RSAC and SafeSurf. Haven't used VWP though.
OK, I'm meaning "Government" to be those faceless people in Washington with the Black Helicopters and "local community" to be those charming town meetings where you all volunteer to re-paint old ladies' white picket fences for them.
This is a rather simplified view of American society. 8-)
Not filtering at all isn't a good solution. Much of the Net isn't exactly the greatest of human achievements. I don't want to do the Victorian Parent thing here, but I (a bleeding-heart liberal) don't want my kids having free access to World-O-Badger-Pr0n. If you want to watch it, then that's up to you. If you want to let your kids watch it, then equally that's up to you (I think you're wrong, but they aren't my kids).
Filtering isn't censorship. Some stupid attempts at filtering might turn into censorship, but there's a reasonable case for filtering that doesn't impinge on any reasonable requirement for openness and freedom (tm).
Filters are good (good filters). You should put them in the hands of everyone who grants access to the web (I buy my kids a web browser, the local community funds a library, a mosque provides a "safe" browsing environment for those who share their moral outlook). Whoever built the access gets to set the filter settings. If you don't like this, then either get your own access, or be part of the community that decides what settings you all want.
It only becomes censorship if there's no reasonable way round it. Government filters are bad, portal filters are bad, having Mormons pressure a commercial ISP in Salt Lake would be bad.
I like community based filtering. I'd much rather have more constrained communities providing access to their own members, under their own community's terms, than simply declaring an all-out jihad against the entire Net.
Various censoreware programs don't like it. Let's look at it again through their eyes:
This tiP IS Sure to not work
Recently I've been seeing a bunch of Spam for VIGOREX, but it was spelt varyingly as V'I'G'O,R,E,X etc. I couldn't really understand this, as a fairly trivial regex wipes them out nicely, so they certainly don't make it into my mailbox.
Presumably this isn't a technique to defeat spam-traps, but to defeat word-scanning dictionary-based censorware. I guess they mash spaces, but not punctuation.
OK, so this is an egg-sucking lesson for all you Slashdot grannies out there....
Site-based filtering is broken . This is just yet another instance of it. Proxying the content through another unblocked site (like this Akamai example) will blow holes in it. Blocking Yahoo (and anything else sufficiently generic) because they also link to Scunthorpe.gov.uk, as well as to the Baptist Church Choir, will shut out large valuable parts of the Net -- you might as well burn your modem.
If you don't like the content on the web, then filter on the web content by all means. Let's see PICS rating more commonly used. If you really have an issue with wanting a government imposed central filtering scheme, then pass yourself a law in your country that makes rating schemes mandatory (or you'll be defaulted to XXX). The problem of "keeping the kiddies safe" then defers to browser operators (those who put browsers in the hands of the kids). Set your home browser however you like (they're your kids) and let local communities set the standards for locally-funded institutions like schools and libraries. If you don't like the library filters, because you live in a straight-laced town, then don't complain to the democratic group who paid for it and chose the settings, just buy your own web time.
Don't forget that PICS is a framework for rating systems, not a rating scheme itself. I'd like to see a PICS Hippy-Lovechild rating scheme where free-love and pot sites were rated OK, but accountancy was a major no-no. Build a Tennessee rating scheme if you want, where sex outside a married family is forbidden, but it's OK with your sister (or even yer dawg). Custom rating systems are a fine way to build an "Islamist web", where followers of one set of moral values are perfectly at liberty to define their own standards, implement them on their own set of relevant sites, and neither I nor they will offend each other with moral conflicts.
This might even be a way for eBay to get round the "not selling Nazi relics in France" problem.
Confusing content with location is just never going to work right.
Resolution is good.
If you're working with low-res characters in dot-matrix calculator-vision, then they need to be big to be able to see them. If they're on a higher resolution screen, then they get better shapes, anti-aliasing etc. which makes them more readable. Although there's no simple "all 9 pixel high characters are readable" rule, it's certainly the case that smaller characters at better resolutions are more readable than larger characters, if their resolution is worse.
How small can you comfortably read on a screen ? On high-res paper ?
Safeties off on a reactor... write that one down as a no-no
Why ? Active safety is vastly over-rated on reactor designs. The only real safety features that have ever stopped reactor accidents have been good design, ie design that was inherently more stable and less likely to go off into reactivity feedback. Most accidents that have occurred have occurred despite active safety systems, and most that have been narrowly averted were averted because of that design's inherent behaviour.
Active safety systems are good, and we should use them, but their track record is that they aren't all that likely to save your butt when you most need it.
Chernobyl (and SL-1, just to show that the US can get it wrong too) were both caused by the positive reactivity coefficients that Tau Zero described so well. It's not widely appreciated that many reactors, especially the older designs, are incredibly dangerous when operating at low power, or in the initial startup phase, compared to their normal operating power. This is so contrary to "normal" engines and machines that it's hard to comprehend instinctively.
The Bellona site has a good piece on Soviet naval reactors, which goes into some detail of this. Their 3 or 4 generations of designs have sought to minimise these effects, often by such seemingly unrelated techniques as changing pipe diamters
The tactile senses are not dominated by vibratory inputs
I'd disagree. For small amplitudes, especially with a finger that isn't travelling over the surface, vibration provides a pretty good simulated sensation for touch. Sure, it's different -- but it feels the same.
How about a filter that tracks referrals from Slashdot and bounces them beyond a certain load level ?
I've no idea if that's what happening, but it's something I'd want to have on hand, if I ran a site like Anand that was regularly whacked with Slashdot's million typoing monkeys.
No, CO2 is hazardous on its own. If you don't know WTF you're talking about, then shut the Fortran up.
Mammals breathe oxygen in and CO2 out. Most of our breathing processes are regulated by the amount of CO2 in the nearby atmosphere, and if you increase that even slightly, all sorts of bad shit start to happen.
If CO2 is so nice to breathe, then there's a hundred dead Russian sailors who'd like to explain something to you.
Those lovely people over at the Dallas Semiconductor toyshop make a gadget that's just the job for this, the TINI board.
Size of a DIMM module, built-in 10baseT, a Dallas one-wire interface, runs Java and costs $50. What more could you want ?
I'm running the world's finest desktop OS (NT4) and complaining about how poor it is as a server OS. I'd much rather be trying to run a desktop on a good server OS.
Windows is a "desktop OS". Everything is built around that message handling loop (painfully so on Win9x). This makes for a whizzy and responsive single task desktop, and it's horrible for anything that's also running server stuff simultaneously. As we're increasingly in the scenario where the box is doing more invisible "serving" than it is running the foreground (except for gaming), then a server-tasked OS is a much better starting point.
We know what a "desktop OS" would look like, and let's not go there ! It's not where we want to be now, and it's going to become even less so in the future.
PS - Yes X sucks mightily. Fix that if you want to.
PPS - I'm no Linux expert, but I did sweat through Tannenbaum all those years ago. Does Linux use any of Minix ? I didn't think so. As your "Unix was for mainframes" comment was so misinformed, I'm unlikely to believe you on this either.
PPPS - Mod 4 "Informative" on this comment is what meta-moderation is for ! Give the moderators a clue to go with all that karma !