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But toiletry and garbage-related maintenance is on hold.

Which volunteers are taking up the slack on.

It's stupid that our system allows this so easily. It should have a cruise control mode that funds at existing levels until budget agreements are made.

That is exactly what it does have for anything of consequence.

Stop throwing monkey wrenches into our civilization

Stop trying to drag down civilization with endless unbreakable chains. I LIKE civilization. It seems many don't, and desire even more chains... #MakeGovernmentSmallAgain

There are also the 3 main Western news agencies, AFP, AP and Reuters.

I wish I could find the exact quote, but there was a visiting Russian author in the 1980's, who, when asked why he was laughing, said, essentially, that Russians were better informed than Americans, because Russians knew the news was lying to them, so they got their news from multiple sources to make sure they had the full story.

I tend to read news aggregator sites, rather than specific newspapers and reporting agencies. I also tend to go straight to the source, rather than reading the reprinted (and analyzed) version. You may find you have better luck visiting Reuters directly, rather than reading the version of a Reuters story that gets printed in NYT... most of my *news* reading comes from Reuters ( http://www.reuters.com/ ) and Agence France Presse ( http://www.afp.com/ ) directly, rather than other sites.

Also, you could try the CBC. They're pretty good at remaining neutral in their reporting. :) http://www.cbc.ca/news/

"There might also be a large gap in the historical record due to the myopic reliance on proprietary file formats for record-keeping by public authorities all round the world and the subsequent inability of future generations to read them."

A better punishment for Microsoft than paying 690 million dollars could be to let them convert all the world's documents being in MS proprietary formats into ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF). Otherwise the same mistake may be repeated when we have all forgotten...

The story is attributed to Agence France-Presse, the French newswire. Breitbart doesn't publish any content of their own; so far as I know, they're just an aggregator.

From the article:

"If you'd like to contact the AFP newswire about their story, you can do so via this form and selecting the "Contact news department" option for the first drop-down."

Google News is still Beta! And AFP (l'Agence France-Presse) sued them over content, despite their argument that it was Beta and "still under development".

Where did you get your information?

Cuba is organizing the progressive migration of the computers installed in the organisms of the Central Administration of the State towards free software, on the base of the operating system Linux, eliminating therefore the almost exclusive presence of the Windows in the machines.

The news extended during a conference offered by Robert of the Port [Haha! "Roberto Del Puerto"], director of the Office for the Computerization of the Society[!], in III the Factory of Free Software, which took place during just finalized Convention the Computer science International 2005.

The operating system Linux, created in the decade of 1980 by Linus Torval, difference of similars like Windows, Microsoft, in which its source code totally is opened, and therefore can be modified and distributed by the user whichever times it wants.

The Island, that it has at the moment more than 1500 users of Linux and one community of strong developer in several provinces of the country, already counts also on its own distribution of Linux --un joint of programs grouped according to its benefits and quality -- that was presented/displayed yesterday.

In addition, the Office for Computerization has designed a strategy that includes/understands actions of organization, techniques, design of a legal frame, as well as the qualification and the gradual change of the systems of Windows to Linux.

The policy will be rectoreada by a National Group, that integrates among others the own Office, the ministries of Justice, the Interior, of Computer science and the Communications, the Network Telematics of Health (Infomed), the CUJAE, the Young Club and the University of Computer science Sciences. This last one, with more than 6 000 students, already has destined one of its faculties for the development of programs on Linux.

They must be small potatoes

If you don't want a search engine spidering your pictures and news stories, don't put them on the web. If AFP were paper only, Google could not violate their copyright. It saves AFP money to stay offline.

This isnt about the images and content being taken from the AFP website, this is about AFP images and content on OTHER news sites such as the BBC, NYTimes etc appearing on Google News with the attributions stripped.

If you take a look at the AFP website, you will see that their website, while having a little news content, does not revolve around presenting news to the public.

If AFP decides to pay to go online to make money, they should know the rules of the Internet. First rule about search engines like Google: robots.txt. If they don't want Google to spider them, any half-decent Internet expert they hire would be able to keep Google out of their webspace in the time it takes to type

If you look at their robots.txt it contains the following:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /beta
Disallow: /francais/news
Disallow: /english/news
Disallow: /espanol/news
Disallow: /arabic/news

Speaking of investments, even if they somehow managed to stay completely ignorant of search engine operation, anyone who wants to sell something online needs to protect it. This is as easy as adding password accounts. Other online news services do just that.

Dealt with above, this is about reuse without attribution, which is NOT covered by any meaning of the term 'fair use'.

Copyright protects the rights of authors so that they can make money. Why should we give them the benefit of governmental protection when it's obvious they don't care about protecting the content themselves enough to use basic measures to do so?

My god, you have a perverted and thoroughly wrong view of copyright and the protections granted to it. The whole point of copyright is that YOU DO NOT REQUIRE other protection, it SHOULD be publically available with no threat of copyrights being stripped just because someone else decided to use your content and you sued to stop them.

By taking this action against Google, they are doing exactly what you want them to do, protect their copyrights. Copyright is granted so that works do not spend eternity in someones private collection never to be seen by the public. It grants the holders protection so that others can see the content.

Google is not a news organization. They are an aggregator.

Aggregators are GOOD for real news organizations. How the hell else would I ever hear of AFP?

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /beta
Disallow: /francais/news
Disallow: /english/news
Disallow: /espanol/news
Disallow: /arabic/news

You, sir, are yet another ass that's spouted his mouth off without realizing what the story is. Google News isn't spidering the AFP site. They're spidering the sites of AFP's customers, and republishing content, without paying AFP the fees that they charge their subscribers for the privilege to republish that content.

OK so this is the umpteenth comment modded up that says the same thing: that afp needs google more than google needs afp. newsflash: THAT'S NOT TRUE.

go to afp's homepage. you still think they rely on google for anything? that they want flocks of end-users(consumers) flocking to their site? no. that's not their business. check their 'products' and ask yourself is anyone coming through google likely to shell out money for something titled 'AFP's "ready-to-run" package in Flash format offers complete coverage of the the 2005 Formula 1 racing season'. they don't sell to users reading google news, they sell content for services like google news(and newspapers and whatever).

they're protecting their customers(and so their income source) with this move, if anything.

Hi,
Thanks for your response.
IANAL but your interpretation could be correct in some instances.
To me it seems that if you require a search engine (especially a free service like news.google.com that does not show full stories) operator to worry about this sort of thing they will never get off the ground. Chicklet-size images should be free to use for search purposes. But if the image is linked I think it should go to a page identifying the image owner's credit line and a full size version of the image or page that has it. Hopefully Google doesn't have to worry about this.

Incidentally it is not clear to me that there is a subscription Google could buy that would solve this problem. In fact if you look at afp.com you will see that Agence France-Press in fact is running a service that looks much like Google News, showing stories and photos. Some photos on the top page are the same size as what Google is using. So AFP protests their competitor being able to use their products to compete with them, however since it seems the two competing services are both free it seems moot. But it is questionable how big a photo can get and still be allowed. Would say a 4x6 cm image on your desktop (eminently "useable" I think) be free? If for search purposes (to lead people to the place where the photo and story is) I think it should be allowed.

right here, but google ignored them (if you RTFA)

Send feedback to AFP on what you think of this lawsuit here:

http://www.afp.com/english/afp/?pid=contact


You can always use John Doe's mailing address :-)

They disallow ALL robots in their robots.txt file. View it yourself: http://www.afp.com/robots.txt

Next time, think before you speak.

Me too, but I think you misheard. A brief search turns up this AFP story: "In London British charities said they had already received 16.5 million pounds (28.9 million dollars) in donations, more than matching the 15 million pledged by the government and thought to be a record for a disaster appeal." So in total that's already almost $60m.

The speech was also condemned by the European Union and Germany in particular, as well as by the United States, Australia and other Western states.
[...]
Speaking for the EU, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said that Dr Mahathir had employed "expressions that were gravely offensive, very strongly anti-Semitic and... strongly counter to principles of tolerance, dialogue and understanding".

"The Foreign Minister (Silvan Shalom) praised a letter that Chirac sent to the Malaysian prime minister condemning his statements. We see in that letter, a reiteration of Chirac's known position against any kind of antisemitism," spokesman Jonathan Peled said late Sunday.

Also, read Al-Jazeera, the only real news outlet in the Arab world. They don't publish in English, but the Ajeeb translation site will translate it for you.

In the business press, there's too much cheerleading. It's not like the old days, when Malcom Forbes Sr. ran Forbes, ran tough stories about corporate corruption, and accepted the risk of lawsuits. ("Go ahead, sue me. I'm a billionare.")

I've looked on Google, Yahoo!, and even tried to find the information from other sites containing news from the source AFP (which the site credits the information from) and there is literally no other even mention of this robot on the web. I can't help but wonder about the credibility of this article.

Most U.S. newspapers are affiliated with the AP and Reuters, though a smaller number use the Agence France-Presse, which is more popular internationally. Then there's United Press International, which is practically dead, so few papers use it.

Knight Ridder and Gannett are different animals altogether. They are huge corporations which own dozens of tiny newspapers you've never heard of and a few larger papers (USA Today is Gannett's flagship paper, while the San Jose Mercury News is KR's, though KR's Miami Herald is a better paper). One of the "advantages" of these giant corporations is that they share stories with other papers in the corporation, which enables a paper in Fargo to cover an event in San Francisco without having to put up the money for a regional bureau.

Better papers (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, etc.) maintain their own bureaus outside their hometowns (for instance, the Washington Post has about 10 bureaus in U.S. cities outside DC [Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, etc.], and about 12 bureaus in international cities [London, Tokyo, Moscow, etc.]), so they use a far higher percentage of their own content, but they still use the AP, Reuters and AFP for stories they can't afford to cover themselves or don't have the time to reach. However, you won't see a Knight Ridder story in a paper like the New York Times.

The big difference here is that aggregators/metabrowsers are computers that display headlines without discretion. Newspapers employ editors who have been trained in the art/science of news judgment. For this reason, a metabrowser will quickly become exceptionally boring and irrelevant.

The site is down. Even the google cache does not work. So I cannot add any more details. Anyway Filistin, Usame bin Ladin or Japanese, this even is NO GOOD!