needs sleeeeeeeeep
is going to the dentist :(
just had a really nice curry with “the littles” (some of them are quite tall)
says please don’t change my status (too late)
is home! Demelza is here, the computer is here, now for some sleep zzzzzz
is about to pack up his computer…. and so it begins… pain
should really start packing up his room to go home for Christmas
can’t wait to see Demelza tomorrow! 34 days, not that anyone is counting…
could have sworn it is 2am… Wo I must be shattered if I am this sleepy this early… damn cold
has survived one year of Demelza! But still hopes for a few more… :P
WARNING: Some links on this page may offend some (probably won’t, but may)
Censorship is a big thing on the web these days. We have always seen the Internet as freedom of information. You connect up to the tube and then you have all the information (good or bad) within your grasp. When the likes of China and Australia to name but a few start to mess with this model we all get slightly edgy. For a time Net neutrality was the chief threat to the freedoms of the web, but thanks to a recent political change in the US this is unlikely to come into play in the near future.
With all this in mind when Censorship starts to come home and starts to involve that cornerstone of Internet free speech Wikipedia we all start to get more than a little edge. This is clear by the number of articles I have read on this so far.
So, to the problem. If you visit the following link you should find it is blank:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer
This is because it has been classed by IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) as child pornography. It is a picture of a mostly naked prepubescent girl. Now traditionally this would be fine, censoring child porn by anyone’s standards should be fine. But in this case the album cover, although banned in many countries, was never banned over here. It has caused outrage a few times, but nothing significant. Yet suddenly our wise and mighty Internet filters have deemed it to be too much for us now, despite it being around and never banned for a number of years.
What makes this whole mess even more strange/farcical is that they failed with their censorship.
The following link is the secure version of the page on Wikipedia:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Virgin_Killer (this one will almost certainly work for you)
This whole mess has made it into the public eye, for example, the BBC has this page on it:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7770456.stm
Note on the right there is a related link to the Scorpions homepage. If you click on that (here) you will note on the left a discography, which in turn also has the banned image on it.
So what the IWF has shown is you can not censor the web and in by trying to censor information that has been in public domain for years, all you actually do is drag it up and draw more attention to it. People got over this in the past enough for most countries not to act, why do we suddenly need protecting?
is have a sore throat clearing steak and ale pie.
Myself and Dan (one of my housemates) just had a very long, very philosophical, very confusing and brain bending discussion which I will do my best to explain.
We began talking about wether you should require users to have JavaScript running in their browser so they can log in and fully use a website, or wether you should put considerable pain into working on a solution which will work without for those without it. Those without it number in the 0.01 percentile or thereabouts and make up, for the most part an insignificant proportion of the population, but still a proportion none the less.
My opinion is that these people should be dropped for the sake of simplicity of your code solution and to push JavaScript to the few who don’t have it. Dan’s opinion was that we should work to maintain the web in its most basic form despite the complication as to allow those people to continue to function within it. I believe that opinion is correct anyway.
Actually, speaking of correct opinion, when it was clear neither of us was making much headway convincing the other to their point of view we began to discus what made up a point of view, wether one could ever be wrong and what the differences were between belief and knowledge.
This then moved the conversation into religion, and what constitutes right and wrong.
Some time later we moved back to our original discussion and linked our views on it to our core beliefs. Dan is a Humanist and believes that that good of the many outweighs the few, and in his example he described the analogy of someone making too much noise on a train. If he silenced this person then it would benefit the whole carriage. I then pointed out that his analogy then brought us back to the original question but arguing against his earlier point of view by suggest that he was smiting the one to make the systems better for the many (which is not quite true, but for the level of abstraction we had reached was close enough). He then points out that he would weight this decision in the favour of the one person and do his best to help them (in this case our one non-JavaScript fan). At the point he mentioned the favouring of the one over the many in this case I brought up the point of being extrovert and introvert. In his case he is defiantly introvert and as such puts his weight behind the one. In the case of the web (which tends to follow the argument I was making originally) it is mainly made up of people with something to say (blog and alike) and as such, extroverts who are more interested in the opinions and the good of the many.
OK, that is complicated and the best I can do to paraphrase about an hour and a half of at times deep and philosophical and at other times, deep and technical discursion in the small hours.
Who says computing people aren’t fun!
made a mistake, a 3am mistake…
I suggest you read this article from the times:
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article5288060.ece
It is about how as a society we are becoming all too cautious, how we are scared to touch people, children in particular for fear of being seen as trying to abduct them or being classed as a child molester or something else not only perverse but also wrong. It is about how children are kept indoors for fear about what might happen to them outside.
I used to help in the Beaver Scout which is boys from 6-8 years old. I helped there for years and constantly came up against this fear. For example, you would never put yourself in a situation where you were alone with a child or even a group of children. we couldn’t hug them or comfort them (yes, little boys do cry), hell, even some of them games were made too complicated. For example, we had one game called tails where they had a sock sticking out the back of their trousers like a tail, then “catchers” had to run round and grab all the tails they could. This if fine, but what happens when a child can’t get their tail in correctly, do we just stand there and list instructions? In fact we used to get one of the female leaders to deal with it. They understood why we got them to do that, but still, we shouldn’t even have to think about such things.
I can think of many times in the past where I have been in town or a public place, seen a child seemingly on their own and not gone over to help. instead I have looked around to see if I can identify the parents. Even waited until they do turn up so as not to go over to the child. I fear that if I did just as that parent turned up I would be shouted at, branded etc just for trying to provide honest help. After all, how are they to know my intentions.
Of course this isn’t just our fault, this is fuelled by government. This about how much use the CRB is for example. All it says is that at that time I haven’t been caught doing anything wrong to children that could have me prosecuted. How many people does CRB actually stop I wonder. We are talking about convicted child molesters etc who then seek work with children etc. I am guessing not many. And even if it didn’t stop them, I have just said that you never get left in a room alone with children anyway. In short, the CRB is a worthless bit of paper that does nothing more than make us feel a little safer from something that doesn’t exist.
I feel for the children growing up in this mess. I would give them a hug and say it will all be OK, but I can’t…