What is your Opinion of Pornography in Public Libraries?

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So don't read or watch it.

ruveyn

The responses to my post are so hilarious!

Have you guys ever dealt with a giant institution, strapped for cash and mired in bureaucracy which relies on century old infrastructure?

Well that is ok then, I'll just ask the students politely to stop doing it and they will right?

Oh no wait, 3rd false firealarm this week and the front door is currently locked because an angry gang with swords is trying to kill a student who apparently insulted someone's sister over the weekend.

Phew I'm glad to get out of that mess and be off to a different campus, oh wait the police are here it turns out that one of our students has been killed in a drive by shooting which was a revenge attack for a drive by shooting he took part in, but he missed his intended victim. The whole thing escalated from being a turf war over who can deal drugs where.

It is so nice to see so many eager young minds to educate...



4 main sites spread across 10 miles with 2400 computers. Departments buying their own computers from different suppliers because they all have different needs for their courses. Internet bill £250,000 per year. Network link between campuses £100,000 per year. A grand total of 3 IT techs.

Try to network boot 2400 machines sat in victorian era buildings and guess what happens? Nothing. Want roaming profiles? Forget it. Your network will melt a longtime before anyone gets any work done...

Why not upgrade the network and run fibre everywhere? Because it will cost 25-30 million pounds and you don't have the budget.

Why not try to consolidate the PC make and replace all of them on a 3-5 year basis? Because budgets are set annually, you are not allowed to save and underspends mean you get a reduced a budget next year.

Sounds stupid? Well perhaps the simple pithy one line response is overthrow your democratically elected government and implement a IT budget system that makes more sense.

It also means you will be dropping £40,000 per machine just so that the little old grannies learning how to surf the internet have identical hardware to the industry standard CAD & 3D graphic design people along with a very expensive studio quality sound card and a full range of disabled input devices on every single machine. Along with a software licence for just about every piece of software that gets used. That means about a dozen different USB dongles hanging off the back of the machine to activate various bits of specialised software and 6-7 different PCI cards to control various bits of industrial CNC machinery.



Eyes normally come attached to people and people cost money, but wait we have divorced ourselves from reality so yes lets have some staff, an extra 1200 people that do nothing all day but watch students on computers to make sure they don't surf porn. that should just about do it.

Thanks for the suggestions, they were so obvious I'm amazed I didn't think of those already, silly me!

I don't.

Tadzio - Really? I just don't use pornography, or see any positive outcome to it. My sig might be obscene, but I doubt it uses people as sexual objects.

Why would one need to view internet pornography in a library?

No internet at home.

No privacy on the computer at home and someone in the house that won't allow you to watch it such as a parent or spouse.

That might be a great case for recommending an Ipad or Iphone.

You don't need 1200 people at a library to make sure computer equipment is not broken you are an idiot. If you don't have enough budget to hire a guy that controls the library's computers stop buying godamned computers and focus on books.

Tons of posts keep missing the point. Even though OP said "porn", the controversy he was talking about was about sexual content. It means that any research with what accounts as sexual content to the staff of the library would not be doable in it. And since posters around here and the statement from the idiot in lead of the library have already established that library staffs contain a bunch of idiots that shouldn't be trusted in regards to what speech should be available and what shouldn't.

Last edited by Vexcalibur on 13 Feb 2012, 12:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There is a difference between sexual content and porn, just ask the MPAA. http://www.mpaa.org/ratings/what-each-rating-means

Yes, that's the whole thing I am trying to say... The ACLU is complaining because library is blocking not porn but sexual content altogether.

In fact, not even "sexual content" but adult content.

http://www.aclu.org/free-speech/lawsuit ... ry-patrons

Even more so:

So, what the ACLU are asking for is for adult people to be able to request the filter to be disabled temporarily. In case their research is blocked by those badly done filters that filter anything considered "Adult" or "immoral" and not just porn sites.

Since it is a temporarily disablement of the filter, these people would not be able to enter porn sites or browse Child porn or bring Cuban cigars to US.

Last edited by Vexcalibur on 13 Feb 2012, 12:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yes, the "nude filters" work by color. A beige sweater could be blocked, but breasts painted blue or even tattooed enough will slip right through.

Last time I checked, there isn't any privacy in a public library either!

What in the hell are you talking about? What do disabilities have to do with pornography in a library?

Hi TeaEarlGreyHot,

I'm talking about the word "pornography", and the abuse of the word in the original post citing censorship challenged in court by lawsuits. The details of the lawsuits reveal that the word "pornography" was exploited so as to censor a wide range of items (I listed some on page one of this thread involving one lawsuit).

My mistake was probably assuming that John Q. Public was not absolutely near total stupidity and ignorance (self-proclaimed "gun-nuts" seem too have noticed the details that gun & hunting magazines were being regarded as being pornographic, while the militant feminists haven't figured out yet that works like "Our Bodies, Ourselves" and most other non-Canonical or non-Church sanctioned sources of feminist works were also regarded as being pornographic, and others don't seem to know that the notions of politics, art, philosophy, and science were all also compromised as being sporadically regarded as being pornographic).

Many "self-regarded non-biased" and short-sighted individuals have prejudicially assumed that anything "filtered" under the label "pornographic" must be things like at least " two 18 year old girls go at it in a public venue" to "two barely legal lesbians mentioned earlier going muff diving".

My experiences in using public libraries span a little more than five decades, and the latest issue of censorship in Northern California involved the magazines "Maxim" and "Cosmopolitan" having pornographic covers that were required to be shielded from public view at retail stores, and totally banned at county libraries, to guard sensitive individuals from offense, and to protect the children. Earlier incidences included the Reverend Jim Jones banning/restricting news publications at his facilities utilized by various Bay Area Counties in California for social welfare purposes, and incidences involving Attorney General Deukmejian, County Supervisor Liddicoat, Senator Briggs, and many local church leaders & feminists/gay rights/disability activists.

Disabled "ugly" people is from notable lawsuits listed in books similar to "Helping the Difficult Library Patron: New Approaches to Examining and Resolving a Long-Standing and Ongoing Problem", edited by Kwasi Sarkodie-Mensah (2002). The legality of banning ugly people and ugly resources from Public Libraries are listed in many federal court decisions ("those ugly people" view "that ugly trash", violating the purity of "We the people" as the healthy, wealthy, white, straight, male, Protestants with superior, but fragile & sensitive organs of discernment).

But, hearing the word "pornographic", members of the Idiocracy tend to assume that Tom Snyder must have just raped someone with his eyes as he's interviewing the person on his show.

Tadzio

What if I brought my own porno to the library?

Also what about laptops? A lot of people bring their own laptop to the library to use the wifi. I did that for a few months after I got my first laptop because I didn't have internet at home. How can they stop you from viewing what you want on them?

What part of that prevents the IT people from using a little automation to make their lives easier?


If that won't stop them, a filter won't either.


Then they need automation even more. If there are 3 of them and they have to drive somewhere else to reinstall the OS, that's a waste of time they don't have in the first place.


The era of building construction does not affect this. In any case, you don't have to do them all at once. You could establish a procedure for local library people to reboot in such a way that it netboots the OS installer and reinstalls unattended.

If netbooting is impossible for some reason, give the local library people a USB stick or CD that would do the same thing.


You could stagger the replacements. Maybe 5 or 6 models of computer is more complicated than 1, but you can deal with that a lot more easily that with 300 models.


What!?