On Tue, 2009-08-04 at 15:43 -0600, Brad Dorner wrote: > You assume that I want to be a thought cop. I would like to see all > sites marked for content. That way people get to choose what they see, > read, or filter. Nice clean simple. A site breaking the content > tagging rules gets a warning and then shut down if not corrected. > Again simple.
You completely ignored the Kyle's point. Creating a complete ontology[1] of Web site classifications is not so trivial as you assume. Who is going to decided at what point the "porn" flag should be turned on? "I know it when I see it" might work for the Supreme Court when deciding that something _isn't_ porn[2], but how do you decided that it is? Is a bare breast porn? What if it's a mother breast feeding? What if it's a discussion of how to perform a self-exam from breast cancer? What if it's a classical statue? Who gets to decided that discussing the murder of Armenians in Turkey is a form of hate speech? What if we don't use the word genocide[3]? Is advocating Islamic jihad hate speech? What about if we're using it in the tradition sense of "the struggle to live a holy life"[4]? When should a page be labeled as libelous? Do we use the US standard or UK[5]? Should the Thai police be able to require all pages criticizing the king be subject to Thailand’s lèse-majesté law[6]? And so on. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_%28information_science%29 [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potter_Stewart [3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide [4]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jihad [5]http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/aug/31/news.politicsandthemedia [6]http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11920909 -- "XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve your problem, you aren't using enough of it." - Chris Maden /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
