"Vladimir Z. Nuri" wrote:
DM, JW, *please* get more info on PICS. in the early stages of its development, many people were interested in using the rating system to rate *cool* pages. that is, the same system could be used to point to neat content and help people navigate. therefore, your examples always involving censorious groups like the "christian coalitian" is highly misleading. have you heard of the "point communications" awards, surely? such a system would benefit immensely from the standardization of ratings that PICS is trying to achieve..
I urge all rabid libertarians to get a clue about what the rating systems are actually trying to accomplish.
There's a similar debate about whether "guns kill people" or "people kill people"[*]. Although it's the repressive regime that actually causes the supression, the widespread availability of rating systems makes it easier for them to do so. Although the PICS rating system permits diverse rating systems, in practice the oligopoly in the browser market confines this to the value system of the ruling elite (unquote). Notably, the current RSACi rating system makes no distinction between consenting sex in marriage and paedophilia: both earn a Sex-4 rating. Probably many people feel the first is more acceptable than the second, but they have no way to express this in current PICS implementations. (http://www.rsac.org/rating_description.html) ::Boots [*] The correct answer, by the way, is "politicians kill people"