This.

Good god, screw the standards. If it's good enough for microgoogle, we should be doing it too. The only thing we have to lose is visitors to our own damn sites, right? So how can I tune my kernel / apache to firehose the TCP window? xD

So which is it? Are you going to factually challenge someone's belief or backpedal from a badly played bluff because you simply don't have the cards?

I responded to you because I had just got done complaining about how much argument is taking place on this subject without a single mention of evidence. And then I happen upon you, who not only talks of evidence but suggests that there is an abundance of it, in favor of censorship — which is the windmill I happen to be tilting at today.

I mean I don't know anything about porn — I'd be lucky if I could perform a Google search on the topic without somehow lousing it up — but I strongly resist censorship. Especially when the folks doing the censoring cannot produce empirical data about what ill is being resolved by slicing up other people's access to empirical data and replacing it with falsehood.

I mean, no matter how many citations we might potentially find suggesting there is no causal link to harm, how can I find the studies you specifically claim to have that there is? Your claim is fantastic. On par with claiming to have proof of evidence of God. So imagine my disappointment when I learn you were just making it up as you went.

As to the Ad Hominem (please look that up too), If it's any help, I am sorry for suggesting you don't know the meaning of the word "poison". That was very passive-aggressive of me. I should have just flat out said it instead.

It's just that I have high expectations for people who spam promo codes, trying to make a buck convincing people that coconut oil can cure hypothyroidism. You've got to at least demonstrate knowledge of the basics, or you'll be taken about as seriously as Sarah Palin when somebody calls Bullshit on you.

Wait, you're still talking about Jeeves and Wooster, rite?

"I've never heard of" != "There is no such thing as"

Nonetheless, I would imagine from his vantage of tech support he's never heard of it only because it's such a delicate topic that it is not often discussed with tech monkeys. But that's the danger of not hearing about things: it's easy to infer they must not exist or must not be a serious threat.

This demonstrates that Censorship, be it systemic blacklisting at an ISP or self-censorship due to embarrassment, dooms any population to fall prey to exactly what dangers they use the censorship to avoid.

While I can't profess that this statement is accurate, it paints an interesting stereotype of how each political movement sees the other, doesn't it?

(American) Conservatives want to centralize morality..
(American) Liberals want to centralize equality..
Authoritarians want to centralize .. well .. authority..
Socialists want to centralize industry..
Anarchists want to decentralize everything.

Us Libertarians just want to slap y'all upside the head, and centralize absolutely as little as we have to in order to optimize both liberty and social order. We see liberty as important because it pushes routing decisions to the edge of the network where they belong. Without it civilization and culture really cannot scale. But we also require a minimum of centralized power in the form of government as an officiator to resolve exceptions and disputes.. lest too much power collect in one organization which would rise up as a de facto government and endanger liberty all over again.

Mom! tehcyder said a bad word, why isn't he filtered yet? D:

Brilliant! We've been waiting for you to step up to the podium, sir. Now, please link to some of this wonderful evidence you speak of demonstrating that pornography is in any way harmful, and if possible that it is sufficiently harmful to warrant censorship as a remedy. Maybe you can even churn out a good definition for "pornography" seeing as how, you know, "harmfulness" would have to be a good litmus at this point. Yes? No? I mean, why bother blocking "pornography" in specific if we could just block whatever data is proven to be harmful?

It's hard to make progress in any direction in a debate like this without some hard facts. Please get our lazy, slashdotting butts off of the couch by bringing some peer-reviewed results to the party and up the ante. :)

Also, I really cannot help but directly refute your basic illustration:

To which I really need to refer you to my home boy Paracelsus:

Which leads to the answer: "I would seek to imbibe at most a sub-toxic amount of the drink".

But that's something I really would have expected someone hawking "iHerb.com" in their sig to know already? I'm just saying..

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.