<PERL FREE CONTENT FOLLOWS>Well, let's just say "free speech" is one of my pets. Free speech is so fundamental to freedom as a whole that any -and I mean ANY- censorship is the beginning of the slippery slope to dictatorship.
CountZero "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law
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Dictatorship occurs when you have someone who believes that they are more qualified to make all decisions, rather than the people who are actually being affected by those decisions. (you know, like those in the US Congress who think that their watching a five minute news spot means they know more about a case than judges who have been dealing with it for years.) Some folks who are implementing these filters are doing so because they're required to (doing it for a job, or doing it to comply with laws or other regulations.) You can say anything you want ... in your house, in public (well, okay, there are some restrictions, depending on where 'public' is, but you can say them, you'll just have to deal with repercussions from slander and whatever other laws might apply), but everyone else has the right to set their own rules on their property. To some extent, content filtering is a form of speech -- they're saying that certain words are not acceptable to them in the forum that they're controling. For all you know, it may be that they're not doing filtering on postings, but providing it as an optional output filter, for those users who may prefer not to see the original content if it had objectionable words. I'm a big fan of free speech, but I'm an even bigger fan of freedom of choice -- and a person can choose to go somewhere else if they don't agree with the rules in a particular (virtual|physical) location. I'm personally planning on establishing up my own country, on my path to world conquest, so I can get away from other people's stupid rules, and set up my own stupid rules. (there's a few gaps in the plan still, like finding and/or making a country, but I'm working on it)
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++ to you!I have exactly the same ideas. When I wrote "Censorship doesn't work", I meant it both in its political meaning and in its technical meaning: I still have to see the first script or module that does a "good" job of removing swearwords. It is a pity that people who like to institute censorship alwys seem to get their blood up when you question their ways.
CountZero "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law
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