The "Communications Decency Act" of 1996, passed on Black Thursday as section 502 of
a major telecommunications reform bill. The CDA made it a federal
crime in the USA to send a communication which is "obscene, lewd,
lascivious, filthy, or indecent, with intent to annoy, abuse,
threaten, or harass another person." It also threatened with
imprisonment anyone who "knowingly" makes accessible to minors
any message that "describes, in terms patently offensive as
measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory
activities or organs".
While the CDA was sold as a measure to protect minors from the
putative evils of pornography, the repressive political aims of
the bill were laid bare by the Hyde amendment, which intended to
outlaw discussion of abortion on the Internet.
To say that this direct attack on First Amendment free-speech
rights was not well received on the Internet would be putting it
mildly. A firestorm of protest followed, including a February
29th mass demonstration by thousands of netters who turned their
home pages black for 48 hours.
Several civil-rights groups and computing/telecommunications
companies mounted a constitutional challenge. The CDA was
demolished by a strongly-worded decision handed down on in
8th-circuit Federal court and subsequently affirmed by the U.S.
Supreme Court on 26 June 1997 (`White Thursday'). See also Exon.
Node:cdr, Next:chad, Previous:CDA,
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cdr /ku'dr/ or /kuh'dr/ vt.
[from LISP] To skip past the first item from a list of things
(generalized from the LISP operation on binary tree structures,
which returns a list consisting of all but the first element of
its argument). In the form `cdr down', to trace down a list of
elements: "Shall we cdr down the agenda?" Usage: silly. See also
loop through.
Historical note: The instruction format of the IBM 704 that
hosted the original LISP implementation featured two 15-bit
fields called the `address' and `decrement' parts. The term `cdr'
was originally `Contents of Decrement part of Register'.
Similarly, `car' stood for `Contents of Address part of
Register'.
The cdr and car operations have since become bases for
formation of compound metaphors in non-LISP contexts. GLS
recalls, for example, a programming project in which strings were
represented as linked lists; the get-character and skip-character
operations were of course called CHAR and CHDR.