Slashdot Mirror

If you contact an editor (via editor feedback they will usually try and help you where possible. I always try to (even though last time someone asked for help, I was moving house so it took 2 weeks to respond but...)
The application form has got to be filled in completely as it's the only way 'meta editors' can judge if you know 'the basics' (ie 'What is a URL?', 'What sort of sites should go in which categories', 'Can you spell?' sort of thing)
Richy C.
--

I agree with beebware that this will be resolved internally. The Open Directory Project prides itself on being a complete directory - I'm confident that useful listings (such as those about suicide, etc.) won't be lost when illegal sites are removed.

Remember, it's "sites with unlawful content" we're looking at here - unlawful content. As far as I know (and I am not a lawyer), it's perfectly legal to talk about suicide - actually committing suicide is illegal, but you can talk about it all you like. Sites containing child pornography are illegal because the pornography itself is what's illegal. (Of course, this is the way I see it - it's up to the lawyers to decide what actually happens. And I'll keep editing after they do.)

And an important note on the subject of this article: Dmoz is not "aka AOL" at all. It is owned by AOL/Time-Warner, but it's a separate project. Remember that ICQ has also been owned by AOL since June 8, 1998, and even Mozilla - related to Netscape - belongs to AOL. Just because a project is owned by AOL doesn't mean it's "aka AOL" - you got that part all wrong.

Ensure your site is working, the URL is correct and it has been submitted to the CORRECT category (quite a few submissions are deleted because of this).
ODP is human-edited, and therefore the site's got to be viewable by humans.
If you send me the URL by 'editor feedback' (when the server comes back up), with the details, I'll personally look into the matter and get back to you.
There is no secret, it's just that there may have been something on your site that an editor couldn't see, or your server was down or ...
Richy C.
--

From their About page, I find this line to be so misleading as to be a 1984ism:

The Open Directory is a self-regulating republic where experts can collect their recommendations, without including noise and misinformation.

Uhhhh, yeah. With this new change, it's self-regulating except where other people regulate it, or it regulates itself to avoid controversy. And experts can't collect their recommendations in certain categories because they're deemed inappropriate.

As someone pointed out, censorship is damage, and the Internet tries to route around it.

This has given me a new metaphor for it: censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence, and tries to keep people from finding out things they would otherwise want to know.

Let's take a look at the sensitive issue of "suicide."

Blocking "suicide," for instance, keeps people from learning about ways people can kill themselves. It also keeps people from learning ways NOT to kill themselves. I once saw a Suicide FAQ that described the various means people have tried, and the circumstances under which the people were left as vegetables. If a successful suicide is painful, try an unsuccessful one.

Blocking that category also makes it harder for people to recognize suicidal impulses, or what to do to prevent suicide. They may be found under some other Mental Health category, but which I couldn't tell you because the server just bowed under the /. Effect.

A proper "suicide" section might also include information for people trying to recover from the suicides of others. That might also be under mental health, but "mental health" is rarely the first keyword that pops into your mind when you think "suicide," is it?

So they remove the knowledge. That won't stop people from trying it. It may keep a few from succeeding, but those people won't be any better off. And then the people they leave behind will wonder what to do about it...

...and they have the audacity to start the first chunk of the 'About' text with The Internet Brain. They view the Internet as a repository of knowledge, and then start selectively ignoring parts they don't like... I don't need to tell you what this reminds me of.

(It's not until they actively try to excise those parts they don't like that it becomes a form of lobotomy.)
---

Quote from the guidelines:
Netscape will have the non-exclusive right to use and modify this material.
You are not giving Netscape the full copyright, and Netscape is not restricting usage - in fact, they encourage it - see the licence file regarding the data.
Richy C.
--

Several editors do, in fact, keep copies of the RDF dumps on their machine and it is well known within the ODP community that any action by Netscape/AOL that displeases a large majority of editors will result in us setting up a competing service (probably even with assistance of skrenta and co - the founders).
Netscape know that any major fowlups on their part will result in them being shot in the foot.
Richy C.
--

I'm a 'editall+catmv' at ODP (see my editor profile) and have been an editor practically since it started, and these guidelines are currently being discussed on the internal ODP editor forums.
The copyright, at no time, remained with the editor. If it did, then ex-editors could use court rulings to remove their listings. Netscape do own the copyright (and always have) - but with an 'non-exclusive licence', meaning you grant them the right to use the data but you still have full rights to do what you want with it.
The illegal sites section has been under planning for about 9 months now - and the mud has 'flown' over certain issues (mainly drugs and warez, but some porn). What some editors fail to realise is the ODP could be sued, and Netscape lawyers are just trying to 'cover their backs'.
As far as I'm concerned, this, like many other issues, will be resolved over time in the internal forums - with assistance from Netscape lawyers where there are 'gray areas'.
Richy C.
--

I'm a 'editall+catmv' at ODP (see my editor profile) and have been an editor practically since it started, and these guidelines are currently being discussed on the internal ODP editor forums.
The copyright, at no time, remained with the editor. If it did, then ex-editors could use court rulings to remove their listings. Netscape do own the copyright (and always have) - but with an 'non-exclusive licence', meaning you grant them the right to use the data but you still have full rights to do what you want with it.
The illegal sites section has been under planning for about 9 months now - and the mud has 'flown' over certain issues (mainly drugs and warez, but some porn). What some editors fail to realise is the ODP could be sued, and Netscape lawyers are just trying to 'cover their backs'.
As far as I'm concerned, this, like many other issues, will be resolved over time in the internal forums - with assistance from Netscape lawyers where there are 'gray areas'.
Richy C.
--

I'm a 'editall+catmv' at ODP (see my editor profile) and have been an editor practically since it started, and these guidelines are currently being discussed on the internal ODP editor forums.
The copyright, at no time, remained with the editor. If it did, then ex-editors could use court rulings to remove their listings. Netscape do own the copyright (and always have) - but with an 'non-exclusive licence', meaning you grant them the right to use the data but you still have full rights to do what you want with it.
The illegal sites section has been under planning for about 9 months now - and the mud has 'flown' over certain issues (mainly drugs and warez, but some porn). What some editors fail to realise is the ODP could be sued, and Netscape lawyers are just trying to 'cover their backs'.
As far as I'm concerned, this, like many other issues, will be resolved over time in the internal forums - with assistance from Netscape lawyers where there are 'gray areas'.
Richy C.
--

I'm a 'editall+catmv' at ODP (see my editor profile) and have been an editor practically since it started, and these guidelines are currently being discussed on the internal ODP editor forums.
The copyright, at no time, remained with the editor. If it did, then ex-editors could use court rulings to remove their listings. Netscape do own the copyright (and always have) - but with an 'non-exclusive licence', meaning you grant them the right to use the data but you still have full rights to do what you want with it.
The illegal sites section has been under planning for about 9 months now - and the mud has 'flown' over certain issues (mainly drugs and warez, but some porn). What some editors fail to realise is the ODP could be sued, and Netscape lawyers are just trying to 'cover their backs'.
As far as I'm concerned, this, like many other issues, will be resolved over time in the internal forums - with assistance from Netscape lawyers where there are 'gray areas'.
Richy C.
--

HOT DAMN! IT'S BACK! Thanks! That was one of the great Apple II disk image sites...it went down with a message a while back and then disappeared. Here are some Apple II sites, dealing with everyone's favorite 70's machine:
Graphical User Interface Gallery Has a tad bit of Apple II info, but tons of links and cynical reviews of GUIs!
Zophar's Domain General Emulation Info...with Apple II sections.
Also ODP has a few sections of Apple II info.
Check these sites

Definitions:
XML: Leading the way to make the web a ebiz thing

As for building out a Topical or Hierarchical structure like Yahoo's or DMOZ, you need to have meta data about the document. You can pull meta data from a URL, as was suggested earlier, but I wouldn't advise that. In order for this to work, your URL's start to look like 'http://city.gov/CityCouncil/MinutesOfMeeting/2000 /10/15/index.htm', which also makes it difficult to move things around, and makes it difficult to return the string 'CityCouncil', properly formatted when you build the hierarchy on the fly. If you include the hierarchy information in the page, you can get around some of these problems. I think the standard way to do this would be using meta tags. View the source of this page for an example of this. The downside to this is that you have to structure your hierarchy in advance, which goes back to getting & building requirements early, you also have to convert old documents to include these tags, and you have to make sure that future documents will have these tags properly implemented. If you're using URL paths to qualify the documents, you may be able to take advantage of an already existing directory structure to build your heirarchy. I just don't like using document locations to figure out what a document is about--its always seemed like a brittle solution to me. On the other hand, I've used the URL string to help make a first pass at placing meta tags into documents, usually using a Perl script. I still had to go back in and check the documents though.

I've used both FreeWAIS-SF and Verity for implementing searches like this, as well as home-grown solutions. I wouldn't advise using Verity since I think that it's prohibitively expensive, unless it has some feature that you require and are willing to pay for it. And I didn't think the home-grown solutions worked as well as the off the shelf products that were customized.

I know what you mean...I had forgotten about a lot of those C64 games until I discovered emulators. The gameplay is almost as good. One thing I remember about the C64 is that it had great sound for its day. Just go here for a list of some C64 emulators...there are several others.

The ZX81 Support Page has more info about that machine. See also entries in the Open Directory and the Google Web Directory.

The dmoz category for the movie is here with a fair number of links to sites about the movie (like the GIA).

David E. Weekly

The dmoz category for the movie is here with a fair number of links to sites about the movie (like the GIA).

David E. Weekly

I must say, it's sad to see Yahoo at the top of the list, and the Open Directory Project not even on there, especially since it's now bigger than Yahoo, and growing faster. (Though, as always, it's in need of editors.)

It is an interesting list to look over, some of the ones on there are very suprising.
---

The most notable places where RDF is presently used for real things (as opposed to "we'd like it to be used here vaporware") include:

• In the dmoz.org Open Directory RDF Dump
• The encoding of rpm2html used at rpmfind.net

The latter is exceedingly relevant, as it represents an encoding of metadata about Linux software packages in RDF form.

By golly, they even did this! they called it the 'open directory project'

such a remarkable idea - USERS moderate how relevant a site is to a category, not a computer.

You can even download the data and make your own directory from it - www.dmoz.org

Doesn't seem that way to me. These guys are from Hardin MD. The directory in the graph and mentioned most often in the text is MedWebPlus. The only time the mention themselves it is to say:

While the Hardin MD pages kept about the same average (10th)...

I had a quick look myself using "hematology" as they did in the original survey. It looks a lot less concerning than they make out - there still seem to be plenty of directory sites. Perhaps they're suggesting that the MedWebPlus site has been singled out for negative treatment? Seems a bit paranoid.

One interesting result from my test is that the dmoz Open Directory page is ranked higher than Google's own copy. At least they don't seem to be favouring their own pages.

Finally, here's a tip for anyone concerned about this alleged favouring of Yahoo pages: exclude Yahoo from the search by using the advanced search options, or by including "-site:yahoo.com" in the query terms.

f I'm looking for a list of sites with a particular topic (e.g. "Everquest"), I use Yahoo.

I'd encourage you, and others looking based on topic, to actuall use the Open Directory Project first. It's passed Yahoo in size, and is usually better maintained. That, and the fact that if you see a category is rather weak, you can always sign up to update it yourself.


---

I helped maintained a few Forums for many years on Compuserve out of the the love of the topic I was working with. When my priotities shifted and I no longer had the time to maintain that forum, I'm sure there were other member waiting to help out. In return for helping with so many forums, they gave me free access and made me a "helper" for a few months.

Consider, for a moment, what www.dmoz.org/ is doing with the open directory project. A small group of people using their life experiance and expertise to help other people find relavant information on the web. Once again, this is done out of kindness for the comunity and not for some kind of return. The ony payment is in the satisfaction of a job well done.

The problem with the volenteers is that they're "hooked" and the thought of them just stoping their on-line activity seems forein to them. "Wha?!? give up AOL? ? That would be like not breathing??", they might say, and there is the problem.

If you feel like you should be getting payed for the volenteer work you're doing, you're doing to much, and you should stop. The thought of holding AOL somehow liable for this very generous and fair bartering agreement is just daffy!

One more note: this is a class action suit brought for the volenteers. I smell a team of lawyers in bad suits looking to score easy money.

Not that it would happen, but if they wanted to, could a directory like Dmoz (which apparently cannot respond to emails from prospective editors) shut out their site from those who would use it freely? What do we have to ensure that something like this won't happen? What about a site that doesn't distribute its content all over, like SourceForge?

Although it's facisnating to consider an alternative history of the computer where development took place in another language, there is a much less theoretical question we could be asking: Is English, as the standard language for programmers, holding us back? Is there another natural language which would be better for describing our concepts or which would be easily speakable yet more understandable to our machines? As for the later, Constructed Logical Languages would be a massive boon to speech input and machine translation.

Could someone point us to some research on the usefulness of certain languages for certain tasks? Obviously the less letters the smaller keyboards, but is French really better for poetry or Latin for science?

I think you forgot your link. But here's one: fairvote.org. Also see Open Directory Project's listing on voting systems and the Voting Systems FAQ.

Dmoz's Programming Games category is a good place to start.

Libertarians truly disappoint me. Some of them pretend to be anarchists (with the label "individualist anarchist") but are really too chicken and too intellectually vapid to understand what anarchism is really about (anti-authoritarianism, and being against any form of power structure; corporate/psychological/state/etc.) Others are people recovering from fundamental Christianity who've turned to objectivist/rationalist and atheist ideology (an extreme reverse) to fulfil the same pathological craving for a dogma to be impassioned about. That's pretty lame, too, IMHO.

Shit, if you're going to be anti-government why not be anti-corporate? And if you're going to be logical and clear thinking why embrace the irrational values of Rationalism? And if you're going to read fiction as a basis for your political beliefs...well, you might as well go back to the Bible or Dianetics, for that matter. Get out of the psychological backwater of Colonialist Rationalism! And stop handing out those stupid charts, because I'm not on it!

Anarchism Links from DMOZ

author: Pulina Borsook
publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1891620789
pages: 256
rating: 8/10
summary: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech

I heard about Cyberselfish when driving around Vermont Memorial Day weekend from used bookstore to used bookstore. The NPR station was broadcasting an interview with Cyberselfish author Paulina Borsook, a writer who worked for Wired during its glory years. I was put off by the book's wretched title, but engrossed by the subject: the powerful undercurrent of libertarianism that flows through high-tech circles. I have been astounded but not amazed at the deeply adolescent and peevish libertarian attitudes that so many techies cling to, from gun worship to fear of governmental Internet regulation. Listening to Borsook speak intelligently and cogently about technolibertarianism made me want her book very much.

This month I garnered a copy of Cyberselfish, and I'm still appalled with the title (which comes from an eponymous essay for Mother Jones she wrote in July 1996, when such cyberlanguage wasn't so cybertrite). Cyberselfish is a book-length essay, in fact a somewhat thinly edited series of linked essays. There's a rush of immediacy and wit; for a random example, "Polyamory is the preferred term of art; it's gender-neutral, where polygamy and polyandry are not, and allows for all persuasions of partner choice (gay/straight/bi/it depends)." With the freshness and informality comes flaws. There is too much repeated material in the book. It's clear that essays written at different times have been cobbled together. Reading the book straight through is like reading some multivolume series straight through, in which the characters and history are rehashed at the beginning of each book.

Cyberselfish looks at a few specific examples of technolibertarianism in depth: Bionomics, cypherpunks, Wired magazine, and Silicon Valley's impressive lack of philanthropy. Each time Borsook exposes the compassionless, fearful, posturing, politically myopic core, without dismissing the good aspects of the high-tech culture and individuals. For example, she thinks fighting for privacy rights is good, but obsessing about it and descending into rabid, paranoid ranting on alt.cypherpunks is scary. She moves smoothly from the historical to the academic to the personal, deliberately exposing her own frailities and biases while she examines those of others.

To give a deeper example of the content of Cyberselfish, Bionomics is the use of biological (and particularly Darwinian) metaphors to describe economic processes, as popularized by Michael Rothschild (Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem) and then the The Bionomics Institute (TBI). Borsook convincingly points out through both empirical observation and reasoned analysis that Bionomics boils down to economic libertarianism, where government involvement is wrong and the most cut-throat, efficient and entrepeneurial businesses are the best. Ecological metaphors are used in Bionomics only when they're useful and sexy: The ecosystem of Hawaii was used as a metaphor for the fragility of protected industries. Under Bionomics logic, Hawaii's beautiful, lush, peaceful ecosystem is to be derided. Bionomics uses metaphors to draw syllogistic conclusions. Doing that can be powerfully convincing but amounts to hand-waving and emotional appeals. Borsook cuts through the smoke and mirrors.

After a few years, the Bionomics Institute conferences were (literally) taken over by the Cato Institute, the premier libertarian think tank in the nation. The annual Bionomics conterences began in 1993. The 1997 conference was the Cato/Bionomics Conference; 1998, the "Annual Cato Institute/Forbes ASAP Conference on Technology and Society." TBI morphed into software-startup Maxager, which intends to offer Bionomical tools to companies. Borsook wonders what meaning can be ascribed to the success or the failure of the company. If Maxager fails, is it because it wasn't Bionomically good enough, or just because of the many uncontrollable factors that cause the vast majority of startups to fail? If it succeeds, does it validate Bionomics, or just the good connections the founder has with Silicon Valley venture capitalists?

The other chapters are just as interesting. Cyberselfish sharply describes all the archetypes of the technolibertarians, from the neo-hippie polyandric Burning Man attendee to the Lexus-driving, 100-hour-a-week, plugged-in entrepeneur with a sprawling bungalow in Santa Clara county.

One of the most crystalline passages in the book describes Eric Raymond's leaking of the Halloween Document, written by Microsoft program manager Vinod Valloppillil. The two clearly have vast ideological differences, the open-source cowboy and the Evil Empire functionary, but they're both hard-core libertarians, an entirely unreported fact. In Borsook's words, "It was rather like discovering that both a liberal and a conservative senator had both acquired their law degrees from Yale: no news here."

As I said before, the book is somewhat haphazardly put together, and nearly every sentence is to some degree contentious; even someone who agrees with her basic position will find reason to quibble. Cyberselfish doesn't come near to answering all the questions it raises. Borsook doesn't really tackle the paradox that "libertarians celebrate the cult of the individual" but Open Source celebrates the collective. What does it mean to be an Open Source libertarian?

I personally think it's somewhat unfair to attack those flaws, as they're inexorably part of Cyberselfish's loose, immediate, opinionated, and conversational style. It's kind of like how Slashdot's open forums allow for a review like this and the inevitable "hot grits" responses.

On reflection, I think that I should have added a *HIPPIE MODE ON* somewhere tag up there. I'll definitely admit to being an idealist, though.

Still, in these comments there is subtext which says, "a true artist will create art even if he doesn't get paid. Anyone else has 'sold out', and is just trying to be The Man."

I didn't intentionally craft my message so as to imply that. It's great if you make a boatload of money off of your art/music/code/craftsmanship, but I do think that it's shallow and callous to pursue a career solely for the money; and it's empty and unfulfilling when you have to accept a job solely for the money. One of the reasons that I really respect Jewel is that during the first (and only) interview I ever saw, one of the fans in the studio asked her how to become famous. Her reply was along the lines of "Fame isn't what matters; if you love your art, then follow it where it leads you." [1]

With that being said, there is a very concrete difference I think that you're missing out on:

We shouldn't expect free food from chefs, free health care from doctors, free programs from programmers, nor do we label them "Sell-outs" or less than "true-professionals" if they expect/require to be paid for their work.

I love to cook. If I'm working at a restaurant and lose my job, I'm still going to whip up my excellent creations in my own kitchen. In that case, I'm cooking because I enjoy doing it. Just because I cook for free doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to cook for *you* for free. I might cook for you because I want to, or because I like to. But I'm not compelled to.

I'm not asking anyone to work for free. I'm just saying that IMO & IME, the genuine[2] artist has her own reasons for creating her art, and money isn't one of them.

That said, I think that it's beneficial for society as a whole to support (artists, doctors, ...) so that they can (create art, patch people up, ...) instead of wasting their talents working chips at a $FAST_FOOD_HELLHOLE or something similar. [3]

[1]My apologies; I have no exact quote, and it was a long while ago, on MuchMusic Intimate & Interactive.
[2] Genuine: I use this in the sense that Kierkegaard would.
[3] Capitalism isn't always the best vehicle for this - I personally think it sucks, but it seems to be the best solution that's been sucessfully implemented so far.

On reflection, I think that I should have added a *HIPPIE MODE ON* somewhere tag up there. I'll definitely admit to being an idealist, though.

Still, in these comments there is subtext which says, "a true artist will create art even if he doesn't get paid. Anyone else has 'sold out', and is just trying to be The Man."

I didn't intentionally craft my message so as to imply that. It's great if you make a boatload of money off of your art/music/code/craftsmanship, but I do think that it's shallow and callous to pursue a career solely for the money; and it's empty and unfulfilling when you have to accept a job solely for the money. One of the reasons that I really respect Jewel is that during the first (and only) interview I ever saw, one of the fans in the studio asked her how to become famous. Her reply was along the lines of "Fame isn't what matters; if you love your art, then follow it where it leads you." [1]

With that being said, there is a very concrete difference I think that you're missing out on:

We shouldn't expect free food from chefs, free health care from doctors, free programs from programmers, nor do we label them "Sell-outs" or less than "true-professionals" if they expect/require to be paid for their work.

I love to cook. If I'm working at a restaurant and lose my job, I'm still going to whip up my excellent creations in my own kitchen. In that case, I'm cooking because I enjoy doing it. Just because I cook for free doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to cook for *you* for free. I might cook for you because I want to, or because I like to. But I'm not compelled to.

I'm not asking anyone to work for free. I'm just saying that IMO & IME, the genuine[2] artist has her own reasons for creating her art, and money isn't one of them.

That said, I think that it's beneficial for society as a whole to support (artists, doctors, ...) so that they can (create art, patch people up, ...) instead of wasting their talents working chips at a $FAST_FOOD_HELLHOLE or something similar. [3]

[1]My apologies; I have no exact quote, and it was a long while ago, on MuchMusic Intimate & Interactive.
[2] Genuine: I use this in the sense that Kierkegaard would.
[3] Capitalism isn't always the best vehicle for this - I personally think it sucks, but it seems to be the best solution that's been sucessfully implemented so far.

I knew Google was a good engine, but I haven't been this impressed by a search engine in a long time.

There's more stuff about me on Google than there is on AV or Yahoo. Combined. There's even the infamous post to CSS-WG which got me in trouble with my employer, a number of my essays and papers, a campus newspaper interview from the best year of my life, and even an attendance roster from a meeting I don't remember going to.

This suggests that Google knows more about me than I do!

The annoying thing is the amount of noise, from people with the same or similar names (I. Keith Tyler, Tyler Keith, etc.), and the names of cities in Texas.

Anyway, I'm impressed, and no, I don't mind this stuff about me being readily available (except maybe the CSS-WG letter). I like it. "Look at me, everybody! I'm on Google!"

(Well, at least it's more impressive than an ODP link.)

It is so sad to see Apple pushing so much of its marketing energies into hawking, as "innovations," what amount to pretty case designs, when they have gone and eliminated truly innovative things like:

• Dylan

  A "kinder, gentler" version of Lisp

• Newton

  A really powerful PDA

• The "here again, gone again" QuickDraw GX scheme

My guess on why functional languages haven't been as popular as langugages such as C and Java is that they're typically good at doing one particular type of job, but not so hot generally. Consequently you end up with a bunch of different languages to solve different problems and no one language can reach a critical mass of widespread usage.

--

There's no need to have a hard drive to have your OS of choice: just create your own live CD. As soon as a few people have NICs, I'm sure we'll see pages with instructions to do just that. In the meanwhile, check out Live CDs on Dmoz.

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

Before the World Wide Web caught on, I initially browsed through many gopher sites. Do people still run those servers?

No[1], because the Web does everything Gopher did, and more, and better.

It would interesting to see those sites for posterity sake.

That's true, but no one's going to maintain one just for that, unless that IS why they're doing it.

I speak as the person who personally turned off the law.harvard.edu gopher server, as no one had noticed it was still running, and it hadn't logged any usage in two years. (This was in early '98.) On the one hand I was sad to destroy a small piece of history; on the other, I was happy to reclaim some cycles on the primary web server.

Kdt

[1] Well, there are probably some universities in slow-developing countries who had Internet access in circa 1994 or prior, but their national technological infrastructure hasn't advanced to the point where the Web is practical, and they still maintain their Gopher servers instead. I doubt there are very many places like that anymore, though. I would start with a search for a working Veronica server. There are still some Archie [e2][ODP] servers in existence, so I'm sure there's at least one Veronica around.
--

--

Indexing things by hand is a good idea, but yahoo can't do it well enough by hiring people. You need the power of open source.

--- no sig

Also check out this site about the open human edited directory project. It claims the Hotbot, Lycos, etc are using it.

--- no sig

In short, people choose their encryption based on what they know. Or what they think they know.

Encryption is hard to understand. You can't judge how strong an encryption is by its keyspace: a newspaper-style cryptogram has a larger keyspace than DES. The only way to find out how good an encryption system really is, is by trying to break it.

Therefore, we go by what experts in the field say. Or people that sound like experts. (I know one very charismatic person who has been making over $200K/year, calling himself an encryption expert, who has done little more than read Schneier's book. But he has the charisma and the high self-confidence to pull it off.)

As programmers, what should we do? It sounds like you're doing the right thing: researching. I recommend that you search not only the Internet, but also your local college library for magazines such as "Cryptologia" and "The Journal of Cryptology". (If you want information on-line, I recommend DMoz's site for links to more information.)

I'm not going to write a longish rant about hierarchal systems, I could, but I would just like to point out that the problem of hierarchal systems was one of the reasons why TimBL invented the web as you can see from his original proposal. In his book, he also says that the DNS is one of the weakest parts of the Internet. Now, I'm not saying that hierarchal systems are flawed in general, but they're not good for this purpose.

While I consider Serial Experiments Lain to be on the top of my list as far as depth and complexity go, Eva is right up there as well. 27 episodes, with movies and an alternate ending as well. The ending crafted for the original series was something of a letdown after the amazing buildup; I found the alternate far more suitable. I've yet to meet anyone who's had anything negative to say about Eva after watching the entire series to its conclusion.

If you're interested in samurai-era Japan I would also suggest Rurouni Kenshin. Focus on the 4-part OVA, and chew on pieces of the massive series as you see fit before watching the movie. Personally I haven't seen much of the series, but the OVA itself is spectacular.

There are of course others, but being a "casual" aficionado of high-quality anime these few stick out as being particularly well-done.

While I consider Serial Experiments Lain to be on the top of my list as far as depth and complexity go, Eva is right up there as well. 27 episodes, with movies and an alternate ending as well. The ending crafted for the original series was something of a letdown after the amazing buildup; I found the alternate far more suitable. I've yet to meet anyone who's had anything negative to say about Eva after watching the entire series to its conclusion.

If you're interested in samurai-era Japan I would also suggest Rurouni Kenshin. Focus on the 4-part OVA, and chew on pieces of the massive series as you see fit before watching the movie. Personally I haven't seen much of the series, but the OVA itself is spectacular.

There are of course others, but being a "casual" aficionado of high-quality anime these few stick out as being particularly well-done.

Ads already take up over a third of my screen real estate, but companies are paying me for it. And so they should.

I think you are right about them being very hard to ignore, but for a different reason. I think they will be hard to ignore because they will actually be relevant. But not only will they be relevant, but the consumer will have more control.

The new AdStreaming industry (banner ads downloaded via software bars on your desktop, for which you get a cut of the advertising revenue) with companies such as AllAdvantage provide the potential to turn advertising around.

I have been experimenting with a number of AdStreaming services for 3 months now and it has been an interesting experience. I know my treatment of banner ads has changed.

In the past I may have looked and clicked on banner ads on web sites every once in a while, but since I am now being paid to have ads displayed on my desktop, I refuse to click on any banner adverts that are on my desktop without permission. I will now only pay credence to any ads for which I am paid for my time. So sorry, Andover, but I don't care what ads you have, I won't click on them.

AdStreaming software is becoming supportive of the consumer, and it may well become even more so. I know of one company that has already built a cookie-blocker into it which allows you complete control over cookies. What would be cool is a company including a banner ad blocker proxy. I didn't give a web site permission to take up my real estate, so I am going to block your advertising. I will only allow advertising that comes through software of my choice, which I get remuneration for. For any web site owners that bitch about advertising paying for their site - get over it and find supplimentary income for your site.

In short, the consumer will gain more control, not less through the use of the right adstreaming software - for sure, there will be some dodgy companies, the same in any industry.

Everyone has a right to surf with no advertising. The flip side is that they have to find other ways to discover new products and services. Advertising is necessary to promote a new product/service and it is not an evil. The only part that is evil is that we do not have the power to turn it on or off at our will.

AdStreaming allows you to choose when you want to surf with adverts, and when not to. You can already choose not to receive ads from a certain industry, in the future you will be able to refuse adverts from certain companies, countries, or even block just that fscking 'punch the monkey' ad. :)

But for this to happen, more people need to make use of AdStreaming services, so that they become more attractive to advertisers than web site banner adverts.

I accept that it will be near impossible to remove all advertising from my online experience, but I have found that using AdStreaming services is certainly going about gaining my control back.

Cheers, rediguana

PS you will note that I haven't blatantly plugged any companies, nor listed URL's or referral id's. If you want to check some companies out, try searching for 'paid to surf' and you should be on your way. Open Directory will provide a good starting list. Unfortunately most are Windows only, with one supporting MacOS. :(

Damn, people, just because you lose your finger should this painful experience become even worth after you realize that all your passwords just invalidated and you can not open your email or your bank account information from the web? There are more advanced solutions for physically secured systems such as biometrics http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Se curity/Biometrics/ - check this out.

My favorite biometric is retinal scan: http://biometric-consulting.com/bio.htm its accuracy is 1:10,000,000. Finger print accuracy is only 1:500

I just don't think Fingerprints are good enough for computer security, plus I don't like anyone touching my hardware with their greesy fingers!

If you're going to have such a program for people to chat with, that is called a Cha tterbot. It's been done.

There are an assortment of Vi rtual Robots for different web tasks. Personally, I think the searching/indexing problem is still lacking a solution -- although librarians have been working on it for decades.

The ODP already has a Disputed Domain Names: verizonreallysucks.com category for links about this dispute.

The ODP already has a Dis puted Domain Names: mattl.com category for links about this dispute.