The definition of obscenity, according to the Supreme Court and known informally as the Miller test, is:

• must appeal to the prurient interest of the average person
• must describe sexual conduct in a way that is "patently offensive" to community standards, and
• when taken as a whole, it "must lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value"

One US schoolteacher wrote us a very angry email that complained some of her students had bookmarked images on this site, that our site shouldn't be on the net, and other claptrap.

This is our response. The net is not a babysitter! Children should not be roaming the Internet unsupervised any more than they should be roaming the streets of New York City unsupervised.

We cannot dumb the Internet down to the level of playground.  Rotten dot com serves as a beacon to demonstrate that censorship of the Internet is impractical, unethical, and wrong.  To censor this site, it is necessary to censor medical texts, history texts, evidence rooms, courtrooms, art museums, libraries, and other sources of information vital to functioning of free society.

Nearly all of the images which we have online are not even prurient, and would thus not fall under any definition of obscenity. Any images which we have of a sexual nature are in a context which render them far from obscene, in any United States jurisdiction. Some of the images may be offensive, but that has never been a crime. Life is sometimes offensive. You have to expect that.

The images we find most obscene are those of book burnings.

Please remember that no child has access to the Internet without the active consent of an adult. And absolutely no child should be left on the Internet alone. Supervision of children remains the responsibility of parents and teachers, as it bialways has and always will.

[rant]  Microsoft took two steps back last week as they announced that much published reports regarding their desktop domination were exaggerated.   Bowing to user outcry, they announced the decoupling of Internet Explorer 4 from the desktop.   Whew.

As discussed in these pages, IE4 presumed that everyone wanted their desktop to work just like their browser, single clicks to activate programs and underlining to indicate “clickable” areas.  Fortunately, turning off the webification of your desktop was trivial which makes it easy to enjoy Microsoft’s mature browser, but they’ve still got another feature to remove.

Microsoft’s answer to push is the Active Desktop.   While still in Beta, Active Desktop goes even further than Netscape’s Netcaster to clutter your monitor and confuse the user.  Like Netcaster, the idea is that you want your content no matter what – it’s so gosh darned important that you don’t care if it’s living on your desktop all the time.  Well, you don’t.

There should be two significant software epiphanies you’ve had in the past 5 years. #1 is when you first sat down at a web browser and thought, “Wow, look, unlimited information at my finger tips.”  #2 is when you first saw Pointcast and thought, “Zounds, information at my finger tips AND I don’t have to surf for it.”

Both Netcaster and Active Desktop attempt to expand on Pointcast’s idea by believing they can make it easier, but both solutions fail.  While Netcaster lives in a world where your either running it or not (it tends to bring your system to a crawl), Active Desktop attempts to meld pushable content with your desktop.  The end results, in both cases, are products that clutter your desktop with distractions.

In 4th grade, Ms. Kirkish scheduled a half-hour each Friday for us to clean our desks.  We washed them, dried them, and the end result was a clean work surface.  This was possibly brainwashing at an early age, but today I need as few annoyances on my desktop as possible… it’s part of how I work efficiently.

Both Active Desktop and Netcaster do much to simplify pushable content, but it is the delivery mechanism to my desktop that renders both products useless to me… I’d rather surf.