On Fri, Feb 11, 2000 at 10:25:38PM +0000, Hans Franke wrote: Right. But remember, we're still the Land of the Free, even though most European countries give their citizens a lot more freedom. See, any time the majority (or better yet, a well-funded and vocal minority) wants something censored, it's not censorship -- the founding fathers were only trying to protect our rights to say stuff that everyone agrees with, they hate people with unpopular tastes or opinions. There, you've hit the biggest problem. My understanding is that it's just a single scale -- from "not offensive" to "very offensive", according to someone, somewhere. Since the government likes to see everything in terms of strict threshholds (55 MPH = no problem, 56+ MPH = OK to lay down tack strips and cause a fatal crash), they've convinced themselves that everyone is offended by the same stuff. So some invisible authority gets to decide what's offensive and what isn't and everything comes prepackaged (no I don't know what the protocol is for labeling the show but I assume it's some between-visible-scan-lines thing like closed captioning is), so you're just supposed to set your TV for whatever age your kids are (they're all the same age, right?) and leave it at that. I think it's supposed to be done per show. Like the current TV rating system, where they put up a logo at the beginning of each show saying what its rating is. Ridiculous... If I owned a TV network, I'd just set everything to "most offensive" and forget about it. There's no *real* sex on US TV, but the bible thumpers are offended by even the hint of it. They think that nudity is inherently wrong, and I just *love* the illogic that you can say anything you want but you can't use certain words to say it. Say the exact same thing another way and you're OK though. Anyway this is all just another attempt to idiot-proof the world. Instead of just sitting down with their kids at a young age and explaining what sex is and why it should be taken seriously, the lazy absentee parents think the right thing is for their kids to be prevented at all costs from even looking down in the bath tub, so that they have no idea what's really going on, and it all comes as a total shock to them when they turn 18. People are unbelievably repressed in this country though. I thought my parents did a pretty good job of explaining everything, but they left some important stuff out, like the fact that sex is fun! What a mind-bender, hearing about neighbors etc. that had gotten pregnant "by accident", I couldn't possibly imagine how people would pull off such a complicated disgusting procedure without meaning to. Makes a whole lot more sense now! Exactly! Personally, I'm seriously, DEEPLY offended by anything to do with organized religion, yet as far as the government is concerned that stuff is all strictly G-rated. So I'll never convince my TV to automatically skip those shows. I have no problem with nudity though, and if I had kids I'd want them to see plenty of it too, so that the novelty would wear off and they wouldn't go into total cranial shutdown the way most Americans do when they see it (since we're strongly conditioned to think that the only time anyone shows any skin is when they're about to have sex with you, so we act like idiots when we see people naked in other contexts). But that's the *main* thing the government wants to stop us from seeing. Anyway, I'm not saying the government is trying to gradually eat away at our rights and subtly turn the USA into a totalitarian state so slowly that no one even notices. But if they WERE trying to do that, they'd go about it exactly this way! Well anyway, I was pissed off the *last* time the gov't forced everyone to pay for an unneeded feature in their TVs, which was closed captioning, but now I use it all the time! It's really handy when the actors are mumbling, or when they're talking in funny voices for no apparent reason (but the caption explains that they're quoting from a 1930s movie I never saw), or when my wife falls asleep but I want to keep watching. Yech, sorry about all this OT stuff, this has gotten pretty far from finding goodies in dumpsters. I once hauled an IBM 029 keypunch out of a dumpster, does that make up for it? It was at the company I worked for so there was no problem with permission, the guys who tossed it in really relished the experience (I guess they hadn't been big fans of that keypunch back when it was the company's only input device) so they were telling everyone, I flipped out of course but the same guys were nice enough to help me haul the thing out again. I've also had pretty good luck with the friendly neighborhood engineering school, especially because they're too cheap to get dumpsters for every building so a lot of the time stuff sits on loading docks for weeks before it gets hauled off, so you can just take it away (as long as you're sure it's scrap). I got a mostly-complete ASR33 and another terminal that way a couple of years ago, and a few other things (found a VK100 GIGI minus the PSU sitting by the curb with some other trash, outside RPI's linear accelerator a few years back). No need to get waist deep in transformer oil or anything yucky like that... John Wilson D Bit -------------- P.S. guess I spoke too soon about the drought of idiotic winter accidents being reported on our local TV news as "tragedies", apparently just last night some bozo in Utica went snowmobiling in the dark and ate a tree at high speed.

On Fri, Feb 11, 2000 at 10:50:37PM -0000, Eric Smith wrote: I can't *believe* what a great idea that is!!!! I'll sure buy one! Y'know, I'll bet I'm not the only one who'd be willing to pay substantially extra for a TV (or cable/satellite converter box) that had this scan feature built in. It would serve the censors right! My college roommates and I used to talk about projects like this, but the idea we tossed around involved just searching for a high percentage of "flesh tones" (so it would have been racist no matter whose flesh it was tuned for), so it would have been very prone to error. As it was we had to read through the monthly "skin guide" from the cable company, and establish a "SkinCon" rating for a particular night of TV (5 = nothing on, or worse yet, Grace Jones in Vamp, 4 and down meant some decent R-rated stuff, to get below 3 you have to cheat and rent a video), and performed regular "skin scans" of the premium movie channels to see if any interesting scenes were on right now. OK maybe we were a tad obsessed... John Wilson D Bit

We have that commercial up here too, but without the warning label. They must figure that we are either smarter here, or have dumber lawyers (both would be nice :-)). -- Dr. Mark Green mark(a)cs.ualberta.ca Professor (780) 492-4584 Director, Research Institute for Multimedia Systems (RIMS) Department of Computing Science (780) 492-1071 (FAX) University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H1, Canada