Porn Surfing Rampant At US Science Foundation 504
schwit1 writes "The Washington Times reports, 'The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive they swamped the agency's inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars.' One senior executive at the National Science Foundation spent at least 331 days looking at pornography on his government computer, records show. The cost to taxpayers: up to $58,000. Why aren't they running a product like Websense?"
Old News? (Score:4, Informative)
First this is coming from the Washington Times. Its the newspaper equivalent of Fox News.
Second this was reported back in January 2009.
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=NSF+porn+surfing&scoring=a&hl=en&ned=us&um=1&sa=N&sugg=d&as_ldate=2000&as_hdate=2009&lnav=hist9 [google.com]
331 days? But how many minutes? (Score:5, Informative)
We all know if you count your 'visits' by the day it seems to have big implications. But lets be realistic here. We all know you only visit for between 2-5 minutes.
Erring on the high side... 5 x 331 = 1655 minutes = 27.6 hours. And if we consider it work days, (about 8 hours), then that's actually hardly over 3 days.
Exaggerate much? Oh, but we wanted the headlines so so bad; we had to make it look big! (sarcasm)
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And right now, somewhere, people are reading this and frowining-- all the while having recently masturbated at work. Yes, everyone's shit still stinks. Yes, we all tug it. I wonder how much human time has been wasted worrying about this petty garble; consider the average time it takes to read and the average number of slashdot headline readers and I bet we're well over 27.6 hours!
I wouldn't recommend Websense (Score:5, Informative)
Re:bad idea... (Score:1, Informative)
Somehow, Penn & Teller's conclusions are always libertarian. Maybe it's a coincidence. Maybe libertarians are the smartest people in the world and so anyone with a brain would arrive upon the same conclusions. Maybe
Anyway, I've only seen a few episodes of that show, and on anything I know, it's just wrong. On this issue, there is study on romantic comedies with the same conclusions as GP:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7784366.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Re:bad idea... (Score:4, Informative)
I have to disagree.
Your response is simply a demonstration of how deeply ingrained the Judeo-Christian woo has become in the world-view of people brought up under its ever-present influence. As I pointed out to another poster on this thread, your assumption about rules and sex is proven wrong by the fact that many societies existed before the Judeo-Christian woo took root and some long after, in isolation, which had a completely different approach to the problems of children and overpopulation. In many, children were thought to be a communal responsibility, looked after by women of the tribe together and sexual restraint was practised essentially by various means involving natural contraceptives. Also the concept of "marriage", which seems to be the base foundation of modern societies did not exist in the form that is considered unquestionable by most people today. So the current "method" or societal organization and dealing with children is not by any means the only one, even though you would never get this impression from watching the modern societies in action.
Not the Europeans (Score:3, Informative)
But because sex sells, the Western culture is getting increasingly positively schizophrenic about it
Now us Brits are pretty stuck up on it, but not in the league of our American cousins who set new standards for being uptight and moralistic that make Victorian England look balanced on the subject.
Meanwhile over the channel in France, Netherlands, Italy and lots of other countries there really isn't the same set of hang-ups. Sex is a normal thing and people who preach about it being immoral are laughed at. Hell Italy have elected a bloke who seems to come out of a Porn film, France elected a string of leader who were regularly unfaithful including their latest President who split with his wife pretty much straight after getting elected and married a super model.
Western culture is fine, the problem is that Mid-Western culture is increasingly spreading to the rest of the US.
Re:bad idea... (Score:1, Informative)
Did you read your references? The first two don't even agree with you:
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/sep/11/books/bk-powers11 [latimes.com]
Summary: Some random journalist wrote a book about how porn is bad. Her methods are flawed, she overgeneralizes, and several competent professionals disagree with her.
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/29644568/ns/today-today_relationships/ [msn.com]
"Dr. Gail's Bottom Line: Pornography isn't intrinsically bad. It's bad only if it interferes negatively with people's lives or relationships."
http://www.lightedcandle.org/pornstats/porn_is_bad.asp [lightedcandle.org]
I'll give you credit: this site does actually agree with you. Even if we ignore the site's obvious bias, though, it doesn't seem to be a reliable source. Most of the claims are worded in such a way that they sound more significant than they actually are, and the most severe claims are without citations. (Some of the papers cited may be reliable, but I haven't looked them up yet.)