So if what Conroy has announced here goes ahead, a whole pile of product pages at Amazon (among others) are going to have to go on the blacklist. (Leisure Suit Larry is among the games banned in Australia.

The problem is that many of the proposed filtering solutions work by routing traffic to IP addresses that host prohibited pages to a proxy server. As we saw with the Internet Watch/BT/Wikipedia debacle, this approach is likely to cause problems with high traffic sites (and may well overload the proxy server).

Danny.

Within Japan itself, the dramatic increase in available pornography and sexually explicit materials is apparent to even a casual observer. This is concomitant with a general liberalization of restrictions on other sexual outlets as well. Also readily apparent from the information presented is that, over this period of change, sex crimes in every category, from rape to public indecency, sexual offenses from both ends of the criminal spectrum, significantly decreased in incidence.

"Attributing human or animal agency to events is an explanatory strategy which, while it sometimes fails, is in general extremely effective. Since other humans and, after them, animals are the most important things in our environment, it is vitally important to take them into account when they are there -- important enough that erring on the side of caution means accepting regular anthropomorphic and animistic 'errors'."

Danny.