Actually, there are limits to what "rules" they can set. They can't kick you out for doing something that is in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and a good lawyer would quickly demonstrate that taking pictures is one of those rights. Quibbles can be had on commercial use of those pictures but that is another matter altogether.

Otherwise the mall owners could set all sorts of wacko, arbitrary rules like: "No Blacks Allowed" or some such.

Personally as long as it is opt in and up to the INDIVIDUAL parents I don't see a problem with this. I wouldn't want to tell some parent they HAVE to let their little Suzy see a cock anymore than I'd want them telling ME what kinds of games my boys are allowed to have.

This is sheer folly. It is like insisting that the force of gravity should be an INDIVIDUAL opt in!

You are neglecting the fact that humans are mammals and there is a few billions of years of evolution to contend with here.

There is absolutely no way that you are going to control this, no matter how much control freakery you are willing to engage in, no matter how draconian laws and totalitarian enforcement of them you manage to muster, nature will take its course anyway and kids will find a way to see naked pictures and then a way to experiment with sex. All you are doing is turning natural things into guilty secrets (and thus making them more attractive to kids) and losing control of any educational (and thus preventive) measures that were at your disposal. The end result is potential destruction of your kid's lives when they do things they have no clue about in secret and get in serious trouble with unwanted pregnancies, suffer all sorts of psychological problems resulting from conflicts between natural emotions and religious indoctrination, not to mention all the inane laws that can make them into social pariahs marked for life with the self-"pedophile" scarlet letter.

Oh, wait, you probably do not believe in evolution, never mind then.

Every parent should have the right to decide what they think is appropriate for THEIR child and if the ISPs want to give them an easy to use option to exercise that right? As long as it isn't forced on anybody I think that's a good thing.

Hypocritical Self-contradiction Alert!

"Every parent should have the right to decide what they think is appropriate for THEIR child" and "As long as it isn't forced on anybody" are in direct opposition to each other.

Oh, you mean did not consider children as "somebodies" and idiot parents forcing imbecilic things onto them (like religion from birth) to be "forcing things onto anybody"! You think children to be mere property of their parents to do with as they wish, ala the Old Testament! Got ya!

After all being able to twist your offspring's brains into spaghetti is an absolute requirement for propagation of religion, so that when they become parents they can then damage their own children by passing your mental diseases onwards.

Oh, of course! I mean a kid seeing an erection or an ejaculation would immediately suffer such a massive brain damage as to go blind on the spot! No?

Well, at least it would be such a traumatic shock that he or she would be a PSTD victim for the rest of his/her life! Surely?

Or maybe, just maybe, the "parents" and the whole Western society are under an influence of some Judeo-Christian-Moslem frothing-at-the-snout mental disease that rots the parents' brains and turns them downright psychotic when it comes to sex and naked bodies and into completely insane, dangerous, violent mental cases when their offspring is thrown into the mix with one of the religious taboos ....

I mean its not like the "innocent little angels" are equipped with their own penises (erection capable - oh the horror!) and vaginas or something...

Next on the agenda: ban on mirrors for all minors. And then full body burkas with padlocks and bult-in catheters to piss through for all children!

Sex education at an age before it is actually needed? Never!!!

You are completely right, except for one wee little problem: in the "new" Russia, people still do all of these things except now it is not the Stalinist mismanagement but utter poverty that forces them to do so with no prospect for any improvement in foreseeable future with the added bonus of having lost free medical care and free education.

Most new apartments and houses are waaaaay out of reach of most families so only the top 5% or so lives it up like royalty, which if kept up for a long enough time will likely result in something stronger then mere "nostalgia" and the "lining up against walls" bit might be in vogue again.

Hence why Putin is so popular, most Russians came to believe that capitalism and democracy are essentially an american scam to get them to give up everything which they once had (medical care, education, super-power status, USSR, Soviet Bloc etc) in exchange for a bunch of worthless slogans from slick snake oil salesmen and then watch everything not nailed down getting stolen by a few sociopathic "oligarchs" to the cheers and back-patting by the Western "free press", press which then promptly turned - froth at the snout - on anyone trying to oppose the new feudal order as an "enemy of freedom and democracy". And so Putin exploits that sentiment by offering to star in this sad, old re-run in the role of the "patriotic strong-man to the rescue" who will oppose the West-sponsored thieves and restore national pride.

And the rest, as the saying goes, is history.

*Here's a hint: don't even bother trying.

Previous poster beat me to it, so here is another: thought crimes involving taboo subjects of the moment, like writing "child pornography" fiction, drawing "child pornography" cartoons or even just attempting to write a scholarly text on the subject, a work that disagrees with the official stance of the Holy Inquisition and which points out the psychotic attitude towards sex and minors in modern societies. People are in jail for this, and other "free speech we didn't like" crimes in the USA.

Writing a book that glorifies the aims of the current "enemies of the state", such as for example Al-Queda, is also likely to deprive you of your freedom, this time even bypassing the judicial system all-together and straight into some secret "detention centre" complete with "enhanced interrogation techniques" or should your book become too popular, simply executed without any due course whatsoever, something that has been demonstrated rather forcefully just a few days back.

The whole thing is, as always, the end result of a myriad of factors that lead to societal rot and allow sociopathic world-views to become acceptable.

It is natural in all societies that the sociopathic and psychopathic individuals always gravitate to the top, but in healthy societies they must at all times maintain some kind of pretense of wishing all the members of the society well. Thus they are barred from certain blatantly, obviously selfish actions. As a society rots, these obstacles are removed and the sociopaths can obtain wide-spread support or at least tacit approval for downright evil activity, such as persecution of minorities, mass scale theft of public resources, totalitarian powers etc.

But such rot has its own terrible long-term price: disintegration of the society's ideological backbone, with a possible violently malignant stage, such as the one Germany underwent in the 1930s.

For some of these assholes on the top it is also more a case of "riding the tiger" at this point. The less psychotic of these idiots who got the ball rolling down the Fascist Hill for personal profit have been caught by surprise by the effects of their own bullshit and now can't stop anymore. The monster they hatched turned out to be far more powerful than they anticipated and has a mind of its own...

Suddenly unmarked cars are pulling people over, seems you can't drive more than 2 miles without seeing someone pulled over anymore. I am pretty sure the war on car drivers as a way to justify jobs has begun in full earnest.

The thing is that this is still part of the "war on Terra" or the "war on drugs" schemes, not some new "war on car accidents" or an actual attempt to improve driving safety without all the idiocy of trying to make it into some kind of a "war".

So I expect you will see a continuous increase in the presence of all sorts of "security agencies" on the roads, all with absolute and unchallengeable authority over the citizen sheep - naturally, until eventually actual, genuine, "your papers please" checkpoints are established, first on the major roads, then on all the exits of cities and in the long run pretty much on every second street corner, Iraq-style. All in the name of "security" and "winning the war on [insert the boogeyman here]".

Genuine artist? Real artists ship & posting a couple of chapters is not finishing a book.

No, real artists are the ones who produce art, even if it is never completed.

And I already explained the difference between art and commercial crapola kitsch: its the motivation for creating it.

just to point out many ways in which your statements are factually and objectively wrong, rather than leave them unchallenged and potentially misguiding passers by ...

None of which you achieved, not to mention that by opening your post with such a whooper, your task became nigh impossible with whatever tiny amount of credibility was left to you after that...

I do love your fox news esque spin, ridiculing what I said without any argument or supporting evidence at all.

Actually, you did your own ridicule all by yourself, I merely operated the spot-light and the rim-shot machine. And if some "passer by" truly believes that a 2-line LCD screen is functionally equivalent to, say, a 24" 1920x1200 one, you might have him or her as your ally - by all means. I would not want to get between the two of you for anything! Why, I can already see you congratulating each other on your convergence of ideas ... using gloriously billowing clouds of "no loss of anything" smoke signals.

But hey, a lot people have genuine and interesting philosophical beliefs against paying for services rather than physical objects ("it's just bits, man! You can't own bits...!").

I am one of those people and such a belief is based on an in-depth analysis of what is "private property" and what are its characteristics and how they are utterly incompatible with the characteristics of information. Note that the objection is not to "services" - which are indeed quite subject to commercial exchange and are in fact one of the pillars of economy - but to the idea of "ownership" of particular patterns of information.

But that does not mean that I am against artists making a living, and I have to say that you appear to be a genuine artist, unlike a lot of the "properties" (their term) of the RIAA behemoths who purport to be "artists".

Our objection is to the corrupt, and inadequate for the modern age, method of being paid, i.e. a pig-headed, arrogant attempt to go against the very laws of physics in order to pretend that information can be someone's private property, an attempt that is extremely dangerous to our future because it ultimately requires a draconian police-state regime to sustain - it has, after all, laws of physics to deny - and as if that was not enough, it can (and will) be used as means of creating a neo-feudal "landed gentry" system in the area of human knowledge akin to the one that once governed real lands before the age of enlightenment and rural reforms.

Fortunately, many other ways exist. One of them being direct audience patronage, which is what you yourself are doing, and at which I wish you great luck and much income.

As to the rest of your post, it has always been my belief that ultimately the point of art is for the artist to share his ideas and thoughts with the audience and that financial aspects of art were always, to true artists, far secondary. That is what makes them distinct from kitsch peddlers whose whole idea is to "get rich quick and be famous", irrespective of what they supposedly "create" as a tool to achieve that goal. And it is my belief that those who are dedicated to their art sooner or later find financial success without having to resort to outright legal thuggery, which is again quite different from the depths of filthy lies backed by brutal force to which kitsch peddlers must descend to make their wares "financially viable".

The web is HTML, which is a mark-up language, which can be displayed any way you like. I can squeeze it onto a 2-line LCD watch and not lose anything.

I pretty much have to ignore the rest of your post from this point on as a discussion of usability with someone who thinks that he "did not lose anything" by taking, say, a National Geographic Magazine or even the Amazon.com web site and putting it on a 2-line 0.1" monochrome LCD screen of a watch is rather pointless. Unless of course you've been frequenting only the Fox News site or something. In which case I must point out that you would "not lose anything" by sending the whole thing to /dev/null either...

Subsequently, I am sure there more fruitful things for you to do than to try to sway me to your view of the world, like watching your neighbour's TV via the "no loss of anything" telescope made out of beer bottle bottoms ... or something involving a pair of cans and a string.

If you had merely stated that it was a "compromise", you would of course be correct, as we already agreed. However, describing it as a "kludge compromise" carries a negative implication, which is not merely an "objective truth" nor representative of a general consensus- it's your opinion.

No, it is merely an emphasis. A matter of degree. I could have said a very, very, very poor compromise to the same effect and just used more words to do it.

The glass-front phones are not just a compromise, they are a very, very, very poor compromise (i.e "kludge") for a long list of reasons, including diametrically opposed requirements of a touch screen interface and a device that can be held to one's face and talked into, thus putting that very touch interface in one's face, literally.

Again, its objective truth. It's physics. No glass-front brick format touch phone manufacturer can somehow magically escape this obvious reality, all they can do is come up with various unreliable methods of trying to disable the interface whenever they detect (or so they hope) the phone being used as a phone and not a smudgy underpowered computer with an imprecise interface that features 70% error rate for anyone with fingers thicker than a toothpick who is trying to type on its "virtual keyboard".

Kludge. Objective truth.

No, I didn't. The way that you said it I interpreted as either (a) you implying that many people held similar opinions ...

They do. I personally know many who are tired of the lack of choice in this matter.

or (b) that many people's usage patterns backed up your assertion, even if they didn't realise it.

Again true, a lot of people (if not a majority) are trend followers and are easily swayed by marketing and in fact never actually needed "smart phones" to begin with...

If you do not believe me, take some time to look at how average people around you use their iPhones and what not. Their typical usage pattern involves loading a lot of free apps and some commercial trendy apps, all within a month of purchase after which time none of these apps are ever opened again and the phone is used again only as a phone or a texting device. Many don't even have email set up on their "smart phones".

So clearly marketing and telco's need for extra income from "smart phone plans" is a major driving force here and the usage patterns would be quite different without the multi-billion dollar sales push by gizmo peddlers.

This is somewhat disingenuous. You claim that you are posting your personal opinion, but you phrase such things as if they are representative of generally-accepted consensus and/or trend, or "objective" truth (see above).

No, it is you who are getting all mixed up. I simply stated the truth, which has many aspects. There is the objective truth, as in the compromise aspects of the touch screen phones. There is the subjective truth as to my personal preferences. And then there is the high probability of the truth in the optimal patterns of usage for many phone users, many of whom do not even realize it, but the exact numerical breakdown of which is unknown.

It is the fact that I did all three in one post is what seems to bother you so greatly.

This is because with the advent of tablets the concept of a "smart phone" has become quite exposed for a kludge-compromise that it is.

as intended to be representative of a consensus rather than personal opinion because of the way it was phrased.

It was phrased that way because it is the objective truth. But that does not negate the fact that for many people (in fact probably most) the kludgy compromise is still the most convenient.

You interpreted my pointing out the obvious technical problems with glass-front "smart phones" as a condemnation of all the users of the phones. The fact that something is a kuldgy compromise does not mean that people will shy away from it. To the contrary, the reason such compromises are made because the public clamours for them.

I pointed out that from my perspective, based on my usage patterns the compromise is no longer acceptable and an increase in performance of the phone part as a communication device and the increase of performance of the data part in form of a tablet are in order.

Many will find that instead of usability gains they prefer for the thing to fit in their back jeans pocket. So I stated: "to each their own". Repeatedly.

The rest of your post is based on this misconception.

They are insignificant in historical perspective. If every country's populace was as spoiled, narcissistic and cowardly as that of the modern US, "global wars" with "anything goes" rules would be erupting for every few citizens that get killed by some wacko cult or a fringe political nut, pretty much every other week.

Far more people (per capita) got killed in terrorist attacks in countries all over the globe conducted by far-out-leftists, lunatic "separatist" movements, religious cults and what not.

In real wars the death toll was in hundreds of millions not in numbers measured in fractions of a percentile.

20 times more people get killed in car accidents in US every year but fighting "war on cars" does not offer the same kinds of opportunities for dictatorial power, national supremacism and profit as a bullshit "global war on terror" does.

9/11 was actually very educational for the world because the US was exposed, for all to see - on live TV - as a bunch of cowardly, whiny, self-absorbed, supremacist hypocrites whose whole pretense of "democracy and rule of law" fell apart like a cheap paper screen the very moment they took just one, tiny by historical standards, hit on the chin from a wacko religious cult and which resulted in a bout of mindless, screaming, incoherent, violent, murderous national hysteria that is getting ever worse as time goes on.

The one bright ray of hope is that the US will ruin itself financially in this insanity as its instigators gorge themselves on "war" profits and power while the populace slides ever closer to mindless police-state dystopia where summary executions of "enemies of the state" are quite acceptable, which also can't be too good for economy.

It does only one thing but it does it great. It makes calls.

Well, I wish for a modern clam-shell to expand that definition to "it transmits/receives voice and data" so that it can become the go-between for any data device I fancy, be it my tablet or a laptop.

Other than that, you are right indeed, clam-shell phones come with what is in effect a self-contained protective hard-case. Another reason why I think an updated, data-capable model would sell well.