There is a price to pay for freedom. I would prefer to receive (or have to personally control) all the nastiness that appears in my inbox than give up any of my Internet freedoms. But that is my opinion of what is right for me. That, however, does not answer your question. My answer is that we do not force our version of what is right or wrong on others. The 'net is not an entity that has ethics nor are 'ubergeeks' the right people to determine what is and is not ethical for other users of the 'net. That is determined for us by the respective laws of the land in which we operate. -Steve * Randy Bush said:
i was helping get the link up into kacst (their nsf equivalent) in ryadh back in '94, and a rather grownup friend there, Abdulaziz A. Al Muammar, who had his phd from the states and all that, explained it to me something like this way.
yes, to a westerner, our ways of shielding our society seem silly, and sometimes even worse. but tell me, how do we liberalize and open the culture without becoming like the united states [0]?
not an easy problem. considering the *highly* offensive material that arrives in my mailbox (and i do not mean clueless nanog ravings:-), my sympathy for abdulaziz increases monotonically.
so perhaps we should ask, rather than ranting, how do we, the self-appointed ubergeeks of the net, think we can clean up our own back yards, before we start talking about how others maintain theirs?
randy
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[0] - which, americans need to realize is, to much of the civilized world, the barbarian hordes, sodom, and gomorrah rolled into one