Scott, what you said is both insulting and wrong. I understand the issues but don't agree with you. It is a matter of principles and I'm not ashamed of that.
Your dismissal of principles is more disturbing than your insult. Technology use should be guided by principles rather than the converse. The whole point of the exercise is to overcome limitations and improve the world for people. All of us must exercise moral judgment or we can be used as tools and do things we should be ashamed of. I think I've got both technical and moral issues right on this one. From a technical perspective, dumb networks are more efficient than "smart" ones. >From a moral perspective, censorship is wrong and censorship to support monopoly software shortcomings is doing something wrong for the sake of something bad. You can argue that this is the way things are but that only proves that things are not as they should be. There's no difference between the bits I'm uploading here in this email and the same bits sent by my own mail or web server. It's wrong for Cox to keep me from running either and that's one aim of their goofey email filter. The problem you have pointed out is not caused by people like me, it's caused by an OS that's so easy to abuse that it's responsible for the majority of the world's spam. As moral implementers of technology, we owe it to people to recommend software that works and eliminate software that creates problems. Doing otherwise only makes things harder. Networks, like software, are better when they don't have owners. Information is always better when you can get it from the source. Network owners have a tendency to get in the way and exploit their position. The most egregious example of that is state controlled, broadcast media. The more control we allow network owners to exert, the less good networks will do. On Tuesday 29 January 2008 11:22 pm, Scott Harney wrote: > You either a) don't understand what I am saying or b) don't want to > understand what I'm saying because it conflicts with your beliefs in some > way. Whatever. > The various other readers of the list will make their own judgements and > discuss the technical aspects. _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://mail.brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net
