While the suggestions are interesting, They seem overwrought. Why not simply pose an adult similarly to the picture and then ask the question: is this pornography? Combine that answer with the age of the true subject and voila. Thus, you get around the necessity of building databases of images of questionable material or distributing an image of dubious legality.

Telcos have long claimed non-responsibility for content because they're just providing the information and that they have no way of filtering it. It seems, then, that to promote tiered service breaks down this legal defense. After all, if they can pick and choose between types of traffic based on origin, it erodes their ability to say they can't filter on other criteria.

While that is a particularly emotional analogy, it's far from a perfect fit. In the naive case, proponents of tiered service argue that the internet is just a bunch of roads (sorry, not pipes in this case). And while we all get to ride cars, some people are in fire engines and ambulances. Voice traffic gets to be so blessed because it can be used for 911 calls.

Implementation is, of course, another matter entirely, and I do not pretend that it will only be restricted to voice or 'necessary' services. But calling tiered service 'discriminatory' or 'racist' is fallacious and needlessly confuses the issue.

Actually, the logs were 100% accurate.

What we have here is a case of corporate sabotage by their competitors wanting them to look bad. Call me a conspiracy nut, sure. You're going to say these things are impossible to break into or tamper with, but this is the truth!

WTF? Just when the presidency is starting to science seriously again, we come up with this kind of navel gazing? We can do better than this; we're giving science a bad name.

You point this out as if it's automatically a bad thing. While there are upsides and downsides, on the whole, it's called: progress.

Cite the absence of ink and paper, and one can just as easily counter with the saved trees and prevented pollution. Yes, those in the recycling industry just lost some work, but balance this against a cleaner community.

Cite the printers and distributors as lost jobs and then balance against the infrastructure needed to repair/replace these things.

Before we get too far down the path of bemoaning lost careers, who here would rather be a mudlark?

This is a good idea, and it delights me to see someone implement it. It reminds me a lot of Venti, the Plan 9 Archival Storage System (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/venti.html). An interesting side-effect of this is that, given a large variety of files in the system, it becomes a distributed look-up table of hash values. Any cryptologists out there need something like that as a resource? :)