The problem isn't believing you are right, the problem is panning empirical evidence in order to make your views sound somehow superior to those other's have.

But you did not find flaws in any conservative's argument in this post, you've simply listed your beliefs which are dissimilar to theirs. I argue that they cannot find flaws in your "beliefs" without first citing empirical evidence. No amount of eloquence can take the place of hard facts.

That said, I'd like to muster what little eloquence I have to reframe the debate and help clarify where evidence ought to be gathered.

This argument revolves around the ethics of censoring or not censoring access to certain kinds of information to certain persons. I don't care if it's censoring pornography from minors or censoring world events and critical discussion in North Korea. Censorship by definition separates a subset of people from information available in the wild, necessarily replacing said information with falsehood. Intentional deception made for personal gain against the (expected) will of the deceived is the definition of Fraud.

Thus, all Censorship is a form of Fraud.

Now I cannot speak to the morality of this until someone less lazy than I dredges up some hard facts and evidence about whether or not lying to your children about the basic nature of the world by way of censoring their access to facts outside of the home causes more psychological harm than images or viral ideas can.

Or else perhaps someone can reframe the debate if they believe I am doing it an injustice? I really do believe that pornography is nothing more than a macguffin and a red herring in a debate about whether or not parents deserve government support in shielding their children from ideas which challenge whatever the household doctrine is. Christian parents want to protect their children's eyes from the "devil" of non-christian ideas. Secular parents want to protect their children from the secular devil of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll. Chinese parents support a government which actually makes strides in shielding their children's eyes from ideas which they fear will provoke civil unrest: including democracy, Falun Gong, and any material critical of the status quo.

But unlike China we are culturally heterogeneous. Our legal definition of "pornography" is so ambiguous that we leave it up to community standards to decide what is or is not obscene. We're left in a position where one person's pornography is another persons' politically protected speech (maybe even a PETA advertisement?)

So anyone who is in favor of government managed filters has to not only provide evidence that a generation raised alongside 15+ years of unfiltered internet access is any worse off than previous generations for it, but they have to very clearly define what they seek to filter and how that material is actually harmful enough to justify being replaced by misinformation.

0u!!

No, they most certainly have not. >:C

Sorry U, you're still being vague.

"Should decide what happens" .. to what? How do you "own" information?

People around you be trippin because it sounds like you are saying putting PII into facebook's database entitles users to make facebook do certain things. Please clarify? :P

So if they are asked to install a .deb file for a package that does not match the nit-picky philosophies of their distro, such as FFMPEG vs Debian, or else asked to modify their repo list to include these third parties, do the newbies A> research and make the right decision using their keen powers of observation, or B> rely on you to guide them each time?

That might not be a terribly common problem today, but as Linux Desktop acceptance rises both the sheer number of software projects to add to the repo and the number which fail to meet a distro's philosophy will rise as well.

FBOW, there are magnitudes more applications available for Windows than there are for *nix at present, from ameture to polished, from open source to boxed, and that number grows daily. This is possible partly because the distribution of Windows software is not presently bottlenecked in any centralized repository.

It stands to reason that the ecosystem of any distribution would have to scale hugely to be able to support a comparable number of apps. Does the current Repository model scale to certifying thousands of millions of applications as being free of malware?

If not, users will still be asked to install "uncertified" software from websites or boxes to fill the gap. Of course they should avoid anything coming through Email, but some users have a hell of a time distinguishing websites from email.

Agreed. The last thing the Kernel team needs to worry about is improving the Kernel. D:

Hunh. "Free with their internet" would normally indicate VOIP on cable or channelized DSL where I live. So those guys get listed in the white pages then?

Man, I can't even keep track. :D Next question: Who actually wants to be listed in the white pages? :P

Well, we could start by admitting you know nothing about me. I'm not a vegetarian, and I don't see anyone else this far down the thread who says that they are either. Why don't you look at some meat and calm down. :P

I eat meat in some form in pretty much every meal, and have my whole life, though the meat selection is largely beef, some chicken and a little pork from time to time. However I live in a small town, on the West Coast, and I'm not certain what a butcher's shop even looks like. I eat fast food, take-away, frozen food, and I have yet to even see "lamb" on a menu anywhere. I imagine it's a fairly unusual thing to eat in my region. Might just be more popular in the mid-west.

By "our point", I also don't mean "vegetarians", I mean people who don't feel we need to see a doctor just for panning the differences of timbre and undertone between farm animals. If you enjoy the tableau, more power to you, just lose the snobbery.

Absolutely correct, this is how Big Media wants all information to be made available. Only when you pay the appropriate ultra-specific, overinflated toll, and even then only at their discretion and convenience.

Try watching Crackle/C-spot videos (bankrolled by Sony) on Youtube outside of the US. Oops! Not available in your country. :3 Nor available for purchase. Just, not, legally available at all.

I'm sure glad Copyright Law encourages artists to create more works to fill the gap left by Copyright Law empowering rights holders to censor any content they had a hand or a pinky in creating. And it's refreshing to see the same creative spirit funding important content creation via triple-dipped internet pricing, which may or may not allow you access to the services we all enjoy today.

I've come pretty far down the thread without anyone explaining to me why there is still content for the white pages.

I mean, you're normally not listed there if you have a cell, right? or VOIP? How many non-businesses (aka non-yellow page fodder) still have landlines?

Meh, we've got different definitions of the word "broken".

I work for a small ISP that does consulting. We favor Windows over linux. We get folk who know little to nothing about computers, to have us install a fresh OS, and given the current balance we're not about to give them linux, because we actually don't want them to come back in. We want them to pay for internet and recommend their friends; broken computers translate in their mind to broken internet service.

We never get anyone coming to us to get new software, nor would I think a newbie know how a "repository" works or what current FOSS software gets named (aka, "I want to edit pictures" --> "Gimp" or "I want to make a flier" -> "inkscape or scribus or XYZoffice").

Repelling Malware would be a definite argument for pushing Linux, however Linux isn't any better than Win7 at protecting the naive from actively running what they should not, which leads to a lion's share of the problems that we see in the field.

Finally, the major definition of "broken" we have to live by is "does it follow de facto conventions". Literally, "does it work like it did yesterday" or "does it work like my neighbor" or "does it work like my computer at the office". Anything that foil's the end-user's expectation is "broken" by their definition.

By any metric, Global Ease of Use (not just "hey we made this part of the installer easier to use, job finished") is the gap Linux/BSD must cross in order to compete with Windows and Mac on the desktop. I mean, just look at Android. It's Linux based and it's bullying everyone else on the Mobile platform ... because Google invested enough into the distribution to give it Global Ease of Use. It has consistent and familiar conventions. 99% of people will never have to touch a text file or compile a module to use it or even do most common customizations to it.

It's presentation is end-user centric instead of ameture-project centric.

Now mind you there's nothing wrong with ameture projects per se; the bazaar development strategy is what drives the power of Linux as an OS. It's just that when combining that many odd shaped bricks you absolutely NEED heaps and heaps of mortar to fill the seams or I guarantee everyone who cares one iota about comfort will complain or move out from the bitter draft.

I'm not GP, but clarified his statement a bit. Palestine can't keep Isreal from getting invaded by, let's say, France.. but show me where Israel is morally obligated to help form a government that can't keep it's people from attacking Israel.

And you, Smiths:

Alright then, citation needed that any policies similar to this are actually being carried out. Your linked article doesn't say this is happening, just that an outrageous professor thinks it's worth trying. Fail troll is.

Then the question is .. can you tell Lamb from Kid? I guess it proves our point that the meat is interchangeable if you can change the species and they keep calling it lamb. 8I

No. In America, we've got Cow + Pig + chicken + fish. We've also got Turkey and Corn. Sheep get raised a lot more for wool than for eating, here, I guess *shrugs*

Seeing a doctor is probably a bit extreme unless you are wealthy. I probably can't discriminate a whole lot better than Unity can. I can differentiate between well prepared (steak vs pork vs chicken vs fish), but not (chicken vs turkey) or (ham vs bacon) or (salmon vs cod), let alone different sides of the same porterhouse.

Also, those distinctions are minuscule compared to (steak vs ground beef), (chicken vs scrambled eggs), or (tuna vs bubble gum). Just to provide some perspective, meat differentiation isn't like telling blue from purple it's like telling prussian from navy.

Didn't we have a slashdot article recently about coffee taste being impossible to synthesize, but if you label hot brown liquid "coffee" and make the room smell like coffee, people will generally think it is coffee?