Look I get it that it's very possible somebody's kids might log onto the internet and might find objectionable material. I know of one parent who was supervising his kids in the living room as he read the newspaper. The kids went straight to Google Image Search and typed "big naked bums". You can imagine the rest.
I understand that a certain kind of person would like the problems of the world to simply go away with a wave of a hand or a casting of a magic wand. Clearly Stephen Conroy is one of those people.
In an on-camera interview with Fairfax Media's national Canberra bureau chief, Tim Lester, Senator Conroy dismissed the torrent of criticism directed at his policy as "misleading information" spread by "an organised group in the online world".
Asked what percentage of all of the nasty material on the internet his filters would block, Senator Conroy dodged the question, responding that his filters were "100 per cent accurate - no overblocking, no underblocking and no impact on speeds".
But Mark Newton, an engineer with ISP internode, said: "Censorship will not catch a single pedophile, will not cause a single image to disappear from the internet, will not protect a single child."
Senator Conroy also brushed aside concerns from leading academics and technology companies that the plan to block a blacklist of "refused classification" (RC) websites for all Australians was an attempt to shoe-horn an offline classification model into a vastly different online world.
"Why is the internet special?," he asked, saying the net was "just a communication and distribution platform".
"This argument that the internet is some mystical creation that no laws should apply to, that is a recipe for anarchy and the wild west. I believe in a civil society and in a civil society people behave the same way in the physical world as they behave in the virtual world."
Newton said this was a "gross oversimplification", pointing out that Australia Post and Telstra's telephone network were also distribution platforms but were not censored.
"Why should the internet, a distribution platform for all manner of intangibles, be censored as if it was a movie theatre? It makes no sense, the model doesn't fit," he said.
96% of the polls on the SMH say the internet is not a special case. 96% polled also do not support the government's internet filtering plan. This leads me to conclude that 96% of SMH's web readership don't think *any* kind o censorship is acceptable. So Stephen Conroy has a really difficult sell here.
It's not that I don't accept the merits of the argument that maybe if there were a targeted block done by the government, then it reduces the risk of the accidental discovery of nasty material by children. The bit I don't get is how Stephen Conroy refuses to see the overwhelming objection from a wide variety of parties as pretty much representative of the entire community.
What's fascinating in this whole non-debate is how Mr. Conroy seems so certain that his solution is going to a) work b) be accepted c) not circumvented by the highly motivated. Dare I say it, his position is so committed and inflexible, you wonder if he can ever come back from the far-out-on-a-limb position he has staked out.
I guess we'll wait and see, but Kevin Rudd is crazy letting this keen censor run with this idiotic, unpopular, irrational project.
Say Hello To My Little Friends
Then there's this article.
The two-minute clip begins with an exchange between a pint-sized Tony Montana and his, ah, young wife, on a set that includes a toy tiger, inflatable palm trees and a table covered with popcorn, not cocaine.
"Can't you stop saying 'fudge' all the time? It's boring, Tony," she tells him. "You deal coke and you kill people. That's 'wonderful', Tony."
Responds Montana: "I've got a fudging junkie for a wife."
"You son of a bee!" she retorts. "I'm leaving you, motherfudger."
The clip reaches its violent climax with a recreation of the final scene of Brian de Palma's 1983 gangster epic, where Montana, played by Al Pacino, pictured, falls face-first into a swimming pool after being shot. Or into a paddling pool filled with paper after he is hit in the back by a foam toy gun.
Many viewers expressed outrage at the post, while others - correctly - suspected the clip was not genuine. Its creator, Marc Klasfeld, a commercial and music video director, told CNN the video aimed to illustrate the pervasiveness of sex and violence in the media confronting children daily.
"What's interesting to me and my wife is that the video is shocking, yet every day we have to guard what our children view from television commercials or video game violence," said Klasfeld, an admitted fan of viral videos.
The thing is, like, as if the kids don't understand what's going on.
Here's the original video on Youtube. It's actually quite brilliant. It also goes to show just how infantile the dialogue was in that film, because it's working really well here. :)
So the question is, what exactly is Stephen Controy's net-nanny-filter going to do about this one?
RAM, Baby!
Something was wrong with my mac pro's RAM. I was only seeing the pair of 1 GB slots and not the other 3GB.2GB is the scraping the minimum for RAM when it comes to running Logic Pro and Final Cut Studio, therefore it was a real problem.
So I went and bought 2 sticks of 2GB to replace the faulty sticks and shoved them into the remaining 2 slots. I switched on the machine and what do you know? It now reads the missing 3, plus the 4 new gigs making the total... 9Gigabytes of RAM! Woohoo.
I think the 'A' tray the RAM sits on got knocked loose when I moved the current tower.
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