No wireless sex please, we're American When it comes to filtering adult content in the US things are due to get that bit more um, sticky. Two Democrat members of the US congress have sent an open letter to FCC Chair Kevin Martin, supporting the agency's goal of a nationwide wireless service suitable for family viewing and accusing detractors of playing for time. …
I just remember the fuss that the Merkin guvment made about China blocking off parts of t'internet they didn't want their people to see. Funny, but this looks to be exactly the same.
They should also remember that if it wasn't for porn, most of the internet probably wouldn't even exist yet. Streaming media for example, was pushed through development mainly to give us better ways of looking at porn online....because they were the ones willing to throw money at it.
Beyond the issue of whether porn should actually be filtered or not there is the fact that any filtering is a step towards more filtering.
Many people accept that some filtering of what they seem as extreme material (child porn) is ok, and although I am not 100% convinced I atleast concede that it would be hard to say "we already filter child porn so filtering potentially unlicensed media is no different".
Once something is filtered for some illegal material (Child Porn) and some social unacceptable material (Porn/Violence/swearing) it is much easier to try and extend this to cover other material.
Not at all, since my family loves pr0n!
Seriously now, what I understand this is (and am too lazy to read further than this article) is a special band that people could use to access this "safe" internet (if it can ever be achieved, that's another story). It seems NOT to mean than ALL the wireless Internet will be filtered. So, concerned parents could set up their kids machines to use this band -- while pretending their little boogers will not come up with some way to see the forbidden stuff anyway, since that's what we did, do and will always in saecula saeculorum. And everyone else could keep accessing the filth from the regular channels. Innit?
So the choice is between (likely) sub par speed, censored, Government Internet that I'll have to pay for through taxes and high speed, uncensored, and free Internet from my neighbor who didn't secure his wifi.
Sorry Govs, my neighbor provides a superior product at a better same price.
"...as well as deploying to 95 per cent of the USA within ten years, and providing basic access for free...."
Nothing in a capitalist country is "free"... eventually... and anyone thinking that ten years for this is all it'll require also thinks that Regan was a *good president... and that he actually had part in the "wall falling"... other than what bizmedia (re)ported.
Filth is in the eye of the washers.
After doing a week or two in the mid 70's learning about Telecom's at collage, about Pulse Code Modulation, Time Division Multiplex, Frequency Division Multiplex, Phase Division Multiplex; (& another multiplex,) the lecturer said "It's utterly impossible to go faster than 1200 baud on a PSTN (POTS) telephone line!" The room bust out laughing at that comment.
I did a back of an envelope (literally) calculation in four minutes, that showed that 48k over PSTN was possible. The lecturer said that it was still impossible. I must have missed a lesson because 56k is now possible over PSTN. (OK it was mostly Strowger then!)
So why can't you mix different multiplex's at the GHz spectrum?
I think this is a great idea. The only real problem is that they haven't gone far enough. Since this will be a small chunk of spectrum providing internet access for a large number of people, and paid for via taxes, then we finally have a solution to the traffic shaping problem. Low cost (that is, free) access with porn, streaming video, bittorrent, etc. blocked. On the other hand, people who need high bandwith applications can continue paying an ISP, who will no longer be able to claim that the heavy users are upsetting service for the light users, and will have to actually provide the service they are advertising.
-Daniel
The septics never cease to amaze me. I've recently moved to America, and on the TV here anything sexual or any swearing is pretty much always edited. I remember turning on Pulp Fiction during the final sequence in the diner, and the whole scene had been redubbed (very badly) to remove any strong language. In the UK I used to record loads of movies on my DVR to watch (since I'm not really a fan of much else on TV), in the US I'm unable to do that because the censoring just ruins all the films. Now what is equally amazing is how easy it is to find graphic real live programs about hunting that show guns being used to kill things, including detail of kill shots. Also films don't seem to get edited for violence on TV at all (just sex and swearing). Finally, and this is the one I really like, interspersed through your program that has been carefully redubbed to avoid swearing, and edited to remove images of boobs, you get lengthy adverts punting penis enlargement pills that are known not to work. They are called "natural male enhancement", but are pretty obvious in what they try to punt.
Of course, I remember a few years ago being in the Netherlands, and some people were talking about a scandal with illegal Belgian fireworks. Now the hypocrisy of worrying about illegal fireworks from another EU country, in a country where drugs and whores are legal, seems odd.
Maybe it's not just the septics.
Actually, you were both right -- 1200 baud was the limit, but obviously not 1200 bps. The key, as you realized at the time, is to encode more than one bit per baud. 2400 baud modems were still accurate descriptions, because they encoded the 2400 baud serial signal into 2400 bps over the PSTN network.
I actually had some of the same arguments with my DataComm instructors back then... shame on you for reminding me how old we are...
As a point of accuracy, however, remember that what they call a 56K modem actually maxes out at 53K. At 56K they caused too much interference. To achieve higher speeds they rely on compression.
However, as to the topic at hand, I can't believe that any company is really going to agree to their restrictions. Roll out a network that covers 95% of the USA within and allow no-charge access? We don't even have 95% of the land mass covered by cellular yet, and how many years has it been? Any company that goes into this knows that they are going to fail, and are just planning on renegotiating better terms at the term draws to a close -- or they are planning on failing and are just out to swindle the investors.
...depends entirely on how easily, rapidly, and accurately they are able find users based on measurements of their outgoing transmissions.
I would actually propose a completely different plan to the FCC, an outbound-only wireless text-casting service. Receivers could be very basic monochrome LCD affairs or USB dongles, that would simply be programmed to collect a programming schedule at the start of the week, from which the user would select articles, news feeds, maybe even whole books to be listened for at given times during that period, recored and saved, most likely with frequent repeats for convenience. No it wouldn't be the internet, but it would go a long way in helping create better informed society (which is at least what I hope the FCC's goal is), albeit one in which you must ignore the little ASCII art sponsorship adds.
No one would really like that though, they'd much rather wipe the drool of their keyboard while watching a skateboarding dog on youtube, and go around poking people on that book of faces thing. Ungrateful whippersnappers.
I don't claim to be an expert on our cousins over the pond, but in my limited experience I was under the impression that:
1) They really love pr0n. They buy and watch more pr0n than most of the rest of the world put together.
2) They really hate taxes. 'What's that? There's a man at the door wants me to take 3 cents off my wages so that poor people can get free healthcare?' 'Get me my gun honey!'
So... the plan is to provide free internet with no boobies, paid for by taxation?
Yeah. That's going to happen.
Supposing this did get anywhere near enacted, it'd be stillborn - for all the reasons I read in the comments, and one more.
Nobody would use it. Actually, that's a lie, a very very small minority of people would use it. Parents would _try_ to get their kids to only use that system, but the kids would subvert it somehow, rendering it pointless as a KiddieNet system.
Simple truth is, this is more moral majority crap from a country which trowels on the Religious facepaint over the syphilitic sores dribbling repugnant hypocritical pus down their maccie-d overstuffed chipmunk cheeks.
I'm not a fan of the US.
The plan is that this will be provided free, not that it will be funded by taxes. It's more likely to be funded by adverts in the same what that a lot of TV stations are. This means that when you browse, you'll get random popups from your internet connection as well as the sites that you are visiting... A bit like D-Link (I think it was) tried at one point. I don't think it'll work (personally, I'd use a tunnel/vpn to a machine out on the net, and then get "full" access), but that seems to be the plan.
@Donn Bly
The requirement is probably 95% of people, rather than 95% of the territory. It's a much more achievable target.
Hi, constant bombardment by all sorts of electromagnetic waves can't be healthy. I know for a long time they didn't allow home building within 1000 ft of high tension electric wires, which they now have abandoned. No one seems to care that we are being irradiated by all sorts of waves which could cause health problems. Microwaves from space, wireless, TV, radio, etc, etc. I really wonder what the heatlth risks are, afterall too much sun we know is harmful and can cause skin cancer, what about other electromagnetic waves? We don't need 'free' wireless, they tried that with phone internet, and it sucks with all the ads and poor bandwidth.
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If it allows the family values of my family, it might be fine. So the exclusion/inclusion criteria have to be rational: no nonsense about "marriage is only for pro-creation" (so after her last troubled-but-successful pregnancy, when my wife had her tubes tied, we should have divorced?, and if not then, now when she is in menopause?; definitely not MY family values!), or not letting children know that homosexual people exist (the only still-married of my kids is the lesbian one, a fine family in my book), or that contraception is available (I CERTAINLY want my grand-daughters to have access to data about that, and my grandsons also), or that only Christian values truly exist (Jefferson among other US founders appears to have been an atheist, and the current rash of Islamic martyrs was preceded by similar Christian ones a few centuries ago, etc.)....
But I suppose I am just dreaming...
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