Kent Crispin wrote: Have you ever noticed that there
are "childrens books" sections in the library?
Great place to meet "babes," huh Kent?
You don't complain about physical segregation of children's books, or keeping children out of bars.
I certainly do. I would locate books in a way such that the children would be exposed to a variety of materials, instead of herded into playpens according to age and size. Also, in areas where children are allowed in bars if they serve food, or until a certain time of night, the atmosphere tends to be raised above just being a place for the parents to drink and get drunk. A 14 year-old guitar player named Little Charlie used to play with me at the Austex Lounge in Austin, and the liquor laws required him to leave the bar when the band was not onstage. He spent the breaks out in the parking lot, smoking dope and screwing his brains out with the young groupies. (My liver is gone, and his dick fell off. Thanks to the law, I won.)
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.
I think that a library-type cataloguing system adapted to the unique form of the InterNet and WWW could be the greatest thing since sliced bread. I would love not to have to visit 400 sites to find "hardware" plumbing instead of "women's" plumbing (and vice-versa). Likewise, I would rather not waste the bandwidth of myself and others when they visit my site in error, thinking "arson" has to with fires, and not with sex. The problem is that the words "voluntary" and "requirement" have, through some weird mutation of DoubleSpeak, become synonyms. Hardly anybody even tries to pretend, anymore, that they are not planning to trample the constitution and fry anyone that gets in their way when the ElectroMagnetic Curtain clangs shut. Even the Nazi's, in the early days, made some pretense of humanity when shipping fellow humans to the death camps. "Jaccuzzi? No, I don't thinks so, sir, but I'm certain there are plans for one. Now, climb aboard, please." Eventually, the reign of terror reached the point where it was all clubs and guns, with no need for pretense of humanity. When the gun-thievery began in earnest, the thieves still had to lie in bigger and bigger stages, tearing small, then larger, pieces off the Constitution at each step of their con game. With privacy and freedom, however, we have now reached a stage where the pretense of democracy is perfunctory, with the fascists who are rattling the chains standing on the stage behind the speaker as he or she assures us that "imprisonment for life will be a _voluntary_ requirement." The person I really feel bad for is Tim May. He used to at least be able to tell people, "I told you so! Check the archives from my previous life, and..." Prophecy loses its luster once _everybody_ can predict the future, and things have reached the point where everyone recognizes their cues in the march toward the "Tear-Stained Monologue" where, in an allegorical way, "The good-guy gets the girl. _I_ wind up dead." Face it, we all know where the cattle-cars are going, but they are carrying _other_ people--for now. Child molesters, drug dealers, and similar robbing, raping, low-down vermin who shouldn't have any rights, anyway. Oh, and a lady who put a quarter in a stranger's parking meter. And a 16 year old kid who shared a joint with a 15 3/4 year old friend. And a guy who pulled a stink-bomb prank on a government office. Oh yes, and an employee at Livermore Labs who pledged allegiance to the flag every day of his life, escrowed his crypto keys with the government even before it was required by law to do so, but forgot about the PGP 2.1 key on the floppy he's been using to shim up the short-leg of the couch on the front porch for the last few years. What are the major players in the computer and media industries planning in their secret meetings about the best way to require you and I to "volunteer?" They are planning to collectively "take one step back," leaving us ("voluntarily") standing in the line of fire. When the call to assembly comes, I plan on being the first one to line up. I think I'll position the line "one step ahead" of the land mines I plant the night before. TruthMonger