I recently interviewed a Save the Children organization's representative over child pornography. She pointed out that the ample psychological harm caused by kid rape is compounded by the victim's awareness that depictions of the act are being spread and "enjoyed." What's your take on this? She had previously mentioned a gateway theory, ie. that less access to child porn results in fewer child molesters, but I'd have to see the numbers before coming to conclusion.

This sounds like a reasonable difference of interpretation. What you dislike, I both dislike and am sick of.

And in the interests of geekery: the story's badness (to me) may not be its property as much as the result of a complex and partially random chain reaction. Consider: If I had been in a different mood, less attentive or placed emphasis on different words, would the introduction of Lewis have put me on my guard? If it hadn't, would I have ignored the story's resemblance to those three horrid tropes or taken them to be excusable? If I had been less disillusioned, would saving lives by bombing Westminster Abbey have seemed reasonable instead of mean-spirited, and would I have had suspended my disbelief over the near-psychotic protagonist not only entertaining the thought of time travel but deducing it immediately? There's some fascinating interplay and self-reinforcing loops at work here. A pity that I study another field entirely.

The impression remains that Greg Egan saw that he was holding all the cards, reached over, and kicked his opponent in the groin.

I had a look and narcistically figure that you might be interested in my take - mine, mind, with no attempt to make general statements.

The story started with a hoot. Egan's prose is pleasant, and moreover he shows familiarity with integrating it with his non-prose: the jailbreak somehow manages to retain momentum even when it digresses, at length, into physics. Maybe I'm just geeky enough. What with my recent experience with Mary Sues, the woman with incredible powers and complete self-assurance that's never ever contradicted was a tad annoying, despite the reasons for those traits.

C.S. Lewis is then introduced reading a disturbing letter about ****ing up kids, and he reads it with growing satisfaction and a sense of vindication. He then muses on planting the seed of faith in children's minds. For a writer who goes into the applications of quantum gravity theory in the middle of a jailbreak, this carries a shade of having Lewis twirl his moustache and go "mwahahahaha!" I skipped forward some, and found a debate scene that consists of a smug yet clearly inferior argument and of the protagonist striking it down, an innocent victim who shows who the bad guys are by suffering because of their convictions, and finally a scene where the unfalteringly serene messenger of truth suffers the increasingly irrational ravings of the fool who refuses to face reality. I put the story down. All three of these are familiar tropes from works from Jack Chick's to Eragon, and they weren't any more palatable now than they were then. I find "raving fool vs serene messenger" the most annoying of the three - which may be beause of my previous encounters more than this one, I can't tell - though the innocent victim is distinguished by her sheer unnecessity. Some works just have the villain kick a dog.

When the same happened in Finland, the Ministry of Communications announced that ISPs are free to refuse as long as they don't. If the results of voluntary ISP participation were found to be unsatisfactory, mandatory measures would be taken.

Come to think of it, there was no way the results could've been satisfactory. A 2% accuracy rate, DNS censoring that takes seconds to get through, trying to do this at all... Fortunately, a couple of big ISPs dropped out in spring 2008, when there was a bit of a backlash, and the Ministry hasn't had the opportunity to grab further state control.

I'm in the same situation as you and long considered Twitter an utter waste of time. That was until a journalist covering a demonstration in Egypt managed to do this and was released without charge while his photographer disappeared. I can't deny that Twitter can be used to do good. We're by and large unaware of the potential of our new tools, so this kind of experimentation may reveal valuable new things or at least get rid of the nagging feeling that they might be here.

This is the dawn of the Information Age. We do things. Occasionally they even work.

Whether this is on Slashdot for more reasons than being sneered at is a more difficult question.

Good point. I'd hazard a guess that people from the demographics that have the most trouble with new technology were the most likely to have trouble with electronic voting.

Selective.

Where the HELL do you get your ballots? Finnish ballots have a circle. You take a pencil and write a number in the circle. That's it, you're done. Voting is held for one issue at a time. The failure rate of this electronic voting system is several times higher than that of traditional ballots.

Traditional Finnish ballots fail because of unavoidable human stupidity, but here failures are due to technical problems and incompetent design that allows human stupidity to be expressed. The machines apparently allow removing the slotted card used before registering the vote - was there no defensive design at all? The Finns have not gone through the catastrophes you USAns have, and still think that every vote counts. Anything else is a mockery of democracy.

We are far indeed from knowing the extents of the Internet's potential, but know it's large enough to make the largest reference work in human history spring up out of nowhere. There's hardly a better time to experiment. If this goes wrong, the Britannica staff if anyone should be able to tell and they have an encyclopedia-wide revision to fall back on.

The rebellious air of Wikipedia's earlier years has dissipated, and editors no longer (widely) see the site as a competitor to Britannica. Both are used to provide information (yes, yes, Power Rangers Pokemon hur hur.) If one of them invents a way to do so better, hooray! Everybody wins.