On Wed, Aug 06, 1997 at 12:39:54PM -0600, Jim Burnes wrote: [...]
Can you imagine going into a library and having censorship ratings stamped on the bindings of all the books there?
This is not a good analogy at all. Have you ever noticed that there are "childrens books" sections in the library? In fact, books in libraries *do* have ratings -- they just use a different technique than stamping it on the book. The fact is that realspace allows categorization (censorship, in your terminology) by spatial location -- something that cyberspace doesn't support. You don't complain about physical segregation of children's books, or keeping children out of bars. So presumably you wouldn't complain about some technical means of creating an analog in cyberspace? If so, then voluntary labelling is not so bad. Most sites that cater to "adult" tastes will label themselves; most sites that explicitly cater to children will label themselves; but the vast majority of sites won't bother. The fact that this system is not perfect is not an issue -- realspace separation is not perfect either. -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html