This fails in the same way domain schemes such as .xxx or .adult fail:

• There can be no universal standard for defining content inappropriate for minors,

• and such a regime would be easily gamed by anyone wanting to use the government to censor content they don’t like.

  The technique is simple, just find a friendly jurisdiction and seek an injunction forcing anyone providing content about birth control, sex education, rape prevention, gay rights, and anything else controversial to wrap it in the aforementioned porn tag.

• Besides, the parental control would be routed around faster than you can say DVD Jon.

Ugh, bad idea Professor, just walk away.

Elvis has always been political. Once on Saturday Night Live, as a last minute replacement for The Sex Pistols, he awkwardly but gracefully – the Elvis way of doing things – stopped the performance of a second song, “Less Than Zero,” to play the song they told him not to play, “Radio, Radio.”

There’s apparently a rule prohibiting the use someone’s voice on-air without consent, the law in its majesty not differentiating between Joe Citizen and Joe Tyrant.

Let the Censors spill theirs

O’er “beaver”, “breast”, and “cocaine”.

Metcalf’ll strike them down for

Each packet that’s dropped in vain.

A clever filk (even if it doesn’t quite scan) of the original Python.

Second, as a journalistic organization we do not want our content associated inappropriately with, or appearing to endorse, issue action organizations.

For those of you playing the home version of the game, that means we don’t want the freakazoids in Congress howling for our funding to be cut if Human Rights Campaign, Greenpeace, or the ACLU mention a story we did on their website. Depending on the variety of reactionary you ask, NPR appears to be a tool of either Israel, the Palestinians, Our Corporate Overlords, Man-Hating-Feminists, G-Dless Communists, Zeta Reticulans, or the Axis of Evil. So you can see how some people can see a conspiracy theory in an inbound link.

But it’s clear from that letter that NPR doesn’t need clue, they need a spine.

It seemed both appropriate and ironical to review Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 at this point in time. Earlier this month the US Congress began consideration of a bill that would ban the unauthorized reproduction of digital works. At almost the same time, federal prosecutors urged a court in Philadelphia to require technology in public libraries that would block access to information that some consider offensive.

The City of Los Angeles has selected Fahrenheit 451 as the city’s common book to read this year. Interesting, since LA is the home of the industries who’d rather that we not read or create, but watch Britney and the Rock on cable.

People in the audience started laughing, until they realized that Tom was Not Being Funny At All. He was chosen to frankly address the post-Sept. 11 whither-the-Oscars conundrum head-on. “Should we celebrate the magic the movies bring? Now?” Tom asked, his eyes boring into the eyes of the TV multitudes and implanting rays of total domination. “Dare I say it?” He flashed a smirk with his robotically flawless teeth. “More than EVER,” he hissed, laying on his most Extreme Scientological Unction. He had been commanded by the Elders to Obi-Wan-Kenobi-ize the audience into rebelieving in the importance of the obscenely superfluous Oscars. Tom Cruise is becoming the Scary Flaming Eye from “The Lord of the Rings,” and I fear that nobody can stop him.

Wilson’s spot on. Hollywood’s become Mordor, dispatching Black Riders in the guise of lawyers and lobbyists to liquidate anyone denouncing Scientology, routing around the charred waste of commercial radio, or refusing to bow down before the beautiful and terrible Goddess of the Trailer Park.

I skipped watching the show, why should I give tacit support to an industry who’s current stated goal is to become a government sanctioned monopoly with police powers, and whose leaders consider every Citizen with a turing machine to be a terrorist?

I’m amused by the idea of a book being “hot” enough to keep G_D out of a building. It’s like the “Can G_D make a rock too big for him to lift” questions I asked my sister’s parish priest when I was a kid. My sister asked me to stop asking the priest questions.

One hopes she should be able to find some Liberal Christian scholars who can argue before the Crown that the evangelicals’ problem with homosexuality is not one shared by all Christians.

One thing you can say for the States, we may be full of crack smoking evangelicals, but we have a Constitution which protects us from most of the harm they can bring to bear.

On the way [ to police HQ ] the arresting officer gave me a triumphant smile. “After 11 September, you can’t travel with books like this,” he said. “In that case,” I replied, “perhaps you should stop publishing them in Germany, or, better still, burn them in public view.”

Brad Templeton has suggested starting an index of books you can be arrested for reading at the airport. We now know of two titles for that list.