This is freeping rediculous. Libraries aren't Federal entities. They can do whatever the hell their state legislatures allow to. Conversely, they are also PROHIBITED from doing whatever their state legislatures FORBID them from doing.
I'm beginning to doubt that there is ANY intelligent life left in the Federal circuit courts. Congress, it's time for an overhaul. You're 140 years overdue.
:/ ttt
-archy-/-
But in the interest of making sure that people who can't (or won't) buy their own computers can have public library access to porn, they are willing to enable the the garbage perveyors to have unhindered access to those young corruptable minds! The court seems to have no problem restricting free speech when it comes to cigarette ads but God forbid we should protect our kids from the trash on the web.
Congratulations, liberals - - you win this round.
For you naysayers out there, if you live in a community where the library does not use software, you're living in the wrong neighborhood, or the wrong people, on your dime, are running said library.
"Internet filtering software" that "keeps pornography away from children" is one of those symbolic B.S. items that pollute the culture and make government more dangerous. It's another "Patriot's Act of 2002" that no one can oppose lest they be deemed unpatriotic, when in fact the damned thing is a collection of stupid, ugly stuff that impinges on civil liberties. Buy a vowel, folks: machines cannot recognize pornography when they see it. We barely have machines that can recognize faces in a database, and those are horribly inaccurate. They also cost tens of thousands of dollars each. So what the Net Nanny guys do instead is try to keep lists of nasty sites, and update them as fast as the pornsters move around. That, and key off certain words, an approach that collects amusing but annoying stories about banned breast-cancer sites as fast as it bans porn sites. There has to be at least one person here who bought one of these things and found it wouldn't let him visit Free Republic. Hey, some liberal on the software team thought it should be banned. Let's not fall for this crap because it has a nice name. It doesn't work, it's a waste of money, and all the good intentions in the world won't make it any better. Maybe in twenty years we'll know how to make machines as smart as Justice Potter Stewart; in the meantime, nobody knows how to make a thing that "knows it when it sees it." |