bsdetector

Anyone that wants to see real examples can turn on showdead in preferences.

It implies that this list is the entirety of the cancelled NSF grants instead of a cherrypicked woke subset.

The cost to the content provider can be reduced to zero by the parents, by allowing it in parental controls.

So the maximum cost to a provider is capped at convincing parents to disable blocking of the content. That could be an unfathomably large sum for pornhub or negligible for wikipedia.

The question then is what's cheaper, paying to have parents enable the content (for instance advertising to make that choice acceptable) or rating the content? If it's the former that's essentially the same value parents place on blocking that content.

You're looking at rating content in this default-block scheme as a cost, but really it's a discount. You're paying a smaller amount to rate the content "G - general audience" then convincing parents to allow unrated content.

If the default wasn't "almost nothing" then you'd be sanctioning exposing some kids to content their parents didn't want them to see. If there's no economic incentive to tag content then it's not valuable content for kids.

Ultimately the problem is the provider knows what category the content is and the parent knows what the content policy is. Providers can't say whether it's "safe" or "unsafe", only what standards it complies with. Some parents will have weird policies like "only G-rated movies or any Jim Carey movie" that can't even be delegated in any reasonable way to providers.

So the header has "PG-13, US-legal" because it's a movie rated PG-13 and constitutionally-protected legal content in the US, and whatever other markets you want to open up. Providers could even include AI ratings so as to mass-tag their content at low cost, and parents can decide if a particular AI rating is okay.

Parental controls could even restrict official ratings to country of origin, so if you approve PG-13 it'll block that content from countries where you can't sue them for lying about it.

You're already responsible for everything you would be on a private server (one user). If you go to 8chan and see illegal content then good luck telling the authorities you're not responsible because it's 'just' in your browser cache.

Some people run their own Mastodon servers, where they share and participate in social media, so there's a proof by example that your fears are unfounded.

You host your own content, and non-230 telecom rules protect a pure cache so bandwidth and always-on internet needn't be an issue.

It shouldn't be baffling to you; it's not even a hard problem to solve, and the only reason why things like ActivityPub aren't done more today is because of 230. A monopoly on data gives centralized social media an unfair advantage that's only possible through legal immunity.

Without section 230 you'd get a few large publishing outlets moderating all content and you'd also get distributed media where the aggregation is done by each individual.

There just wouldn't be that middle area where social media sites get to choose what you are allowed to say or read just because they have a monopoly on the data.

For instance, you could run your own individual Hacker News site that collects the data and creates the same thing you see today - except you could choose to only view posts and comments by sources verified as humans. Or you could turn on 'show dead' on a grander scale - your choice.

Section 230 isn't required for social media.

Wouldn't just good screen sharing solve your coffee table problem?

Just have the coffee table iPad be a display for your own iPad. You could even have a virtual iPad on your mac that you show on the coffee one if you don't have your own.

MacOS has 'high-performance' screen sharing using hardware encoder/decoder now. Windows has had this for years and it's so fast it's like actually using the remote computer. It's not like old-school VNC, the only real functional drawback is that you can't leave wifi range.

Wikipedia Wow! article says it is equivalent of hydrogen line plus 10 km/s blue shift.

Even if this was a scanning beam I think we can assume it would take a lot of energy and so may be based on a simple scalable physical process. Using hydrogen to create it makes sense as it is low mass and can be replenished.

A ship approaching a sun will see the objects on the far side illuminated fully, but objects on the near side will be illuminated only on a thin edge, like a crescent moon, because they're looking at the 'back' side of the objects.

By sending out a pulse of light they could not just light up the ship-facing side of objects but also determine their precise location and velocity. Seems like something you'd want to do to not waste your thousand-year mission by accidentally colliding with a dark object.

The Wow! signal could be just such an event.

Aliens might use some type of scanning beam rather than a big flash, but I doubt we have the 1977 data to differentiate between a beam scanning our area and a solar-system-wide flash.

Seems reasonable that an alien craft travelling between stars might want to illuminate the whole star system to detect dark objects and plot a safe or more perfect course.

Apparently Wow! came from the same area and seemingly was blue-shifted by an amount that could make sense from an approaching craft, so that doesn't sound that silly to me.

Unlikely to be the real cause, not silly.

Would this be far enough out to use the sun's gravitational lensing to image distant planets?

It seems like the idea was to send a bunch of instruments way out and then take pictures in the brief time they were at a useful distance, but if there's a planet out there we can orbit and so stop the instruments at that distance it seems like we could make a permanent super telescope.