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I take it Douglas Adams was under your watchful eye, then, given his subversive tendencies to educate people that you have basic facts backwards in your first point (the milk-first approach is done so as to avoid the scalding you get with the milk-second approach, though George Orwell made a separate case for your preferred approach) and his advocacy for using both lemon and milk if one should so desire?

CC0:

sing CC0, you can waive all copyrights and related or neighboring rights that you have over your work, such as your moral rights (to the extent waivable), your publicity or privacy rights, rights you have protecting against unfair competition, and database rights and rights protecting the extraction, dissemination and reuse of data.

If you want to quote mine and manipulate my CC0 works and misrepresent me as saying something I didn't mean, then go right ahead. The Internet may bite bullshit hard at first, but it is a cybernetic system of self correction, and it is my friend. I am not afraid.

Perhaps instead of signing over the copyright directly the author can post it as (cc0) or (cc by), etc, or if not, retain a license to publish the original text on their blog. Shouldn't state funded research be public domain by federal law? Not that it all is but I paid for lots of research via taxes, including many that don't come to fruition, yet I can't access a lot of research papers without paying again? That's asinine, In fact, I don't accept that -- such backwards concepts are not allowed to exist in my reality.

This shouldn't even be a problem in the Age of Information. Research should be posted free for all to see, the work to complete it has already been paid for. Peer review and/or verification of the work should be included in the grant / subsidy contingent upon success or crowd-funded. It is a conflict of interest to fund the vetting of science in any journal that benefits by its publication. Instead, I ask: Where the hell is my Scientific Hitchhiker's Guide? -- It is ridiculous that this world doesn't have an open wiki of research simply because journals leverage the economically untenable sale of artificially scarce information.

If such a Digital Alexandrian Library did exist, then we'd be able to look up the first version posted without said corrections ala wayback machine or a research repo SCM, so waiving your "moral rights" wouldn't matter. Corrections and validation would require citations from other research, it would be easier to reference a paper, and if it were like the Hitchhiker's Guide: Earth Edition, then one could filter by verified research approved by editors, or go with the unfiltered firehose of information. You could then point people to the part where their defaming statements about you were created, by whom, and contest the information in a neutral way.

If you're worried about folks saying bad things about you then GTFO THE INTERNET FAST, MORON! (oops, too late) There is no objective test for offending remarks! I could say, "$PERSON loves kitties!" and you could sue me for defamation claiming I made offensive remarks about you participating in bestiality. It's these laws that are the problem.

There are no such things as rights. There is only freedom, or restriction. In absence of all freedom there is no restriction of action. We make laws to help prevent your actions from limiting the freedoms of others. The problem is that laws can be made that limit freedom for no good reason. We should always seek to reduce the number of laws restricting us to achieve maximum freedom and peace. Speech isn't violence, and thus should never be restricted, not even when Nature has to show how much of an idiot you were when printing a correction. You can not prove that something someone presented is offensive or derogatory because that is a matter of the observer's opinion. Things can only be true or false objectively, not subjectively. Get over it. If your lawmakers had any sense, it wouldn't be an issue in the first place, you litigious prick.

CC0:

sing CC0, you can waive all copyrights and related or neighboring rights that you have over your work, such as your moral rights (to the extent waivable), your publicity or privacy rights, rights you have protecting against unfair competition, and database rights and rights protecting the extraction, dissemination and reuse of data.

If you want to quote mine and manipulate my CC0 works and misrepresent me as saying something I didn't mean, then go right ahead. The Internet may bite bullshit hard at first, but it is a cybernetic system of self correction, and it is my friend. I am not afraid.

Perhaps instead of signing over the copyright directly the author can post it as (cc0) or (cc by), etc, or if not, retain a license to publish the original text on their blog. Shouldn't state funded research be public domain by federal law? Not that it all is but I paid for lots of research via taxes, including many that don't come to fruition, yet I can't access a lot of research papers without paying again? That's asinine, In fact, I don't accept that -- such backwards concepts are not allowed to exist in my reality.

This shouldn't even be a problem in the Age of Information. Research should be posted free for all to see, the work to complete it has already been paid for. Peer review and/or verification of the work should be included in the grant / subsidy contingent upon success or crowd-funded. It is a conflict of interest to fund the vetting of science in any journal that benefits by its publication. Instead, I ask: Where the hell is my Scientific Hitchhiker's Guide? -- It is ridiculous that this world doesn't have an open wiki of research simply because journals leverage the economically untenable sale of artificially scarce information.

If such a Digital Alexandrian Library did exist, then we'd be able to look up the first version posted without said corrections ala wayback machine or a research repo SCM, so waiving your "moral rights" wouldn't matter. Corrections and validation would require citations from other research, it would be easier to reference a paper, and if it were like the Hitchhiker's Guide: Earth Edition, then one could filter by verified research approved by editors, or go with the unfiltered firehose of information. You could then point people to the part where their defaming statements about you were created, by whom, and contest the information in a neutral way.

If you're worried about folks saying bad things about you then GTFO THE INTERNET FAST, MORON! (oops, too late) There is no objective test for offending remarks! I could say, "$PERSON loves kitties!" and you could sue me for defamation claiming I made offensive remarks about you participating in bestiality. It's these laws that are the problem.

There are no such things as rights. There is only freedom, or restriction. In absence of all freedom there is no restriction of action. We make laws to help prevent your actions from limiting the freedoms of others. The problem is that laws can be made that limit freedom for no good reason. We should always seek to reduce the number of laws restricting us to achieve maximum freedom and peace. Speech isn't violence, and thus should never be restricted, not even when Nature has to show how much of an idiot you were when printing a correction. You can not prove that something someone presented is offensive or derogatory because that is a matter of the observer's opinion. Things can only be true or false objectively, not subjectively. Get over it. If your lawmakers had any sense, it wouldn't be an issue in the first place, you litigious prick.

Link it to http://www.h2g2.com/ and put Don't Panic! in large friendly letters on the cover.

Judging by their featured articles it's somewhat less serious than Wikipedia.

That is a truly extraordinary story. Thanks for telling us about it

Here's a link for others who are interested in a really amazing piece of heroism

http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/A20460782

I have been an OSM contributor myself, and I'm sorry if I implied that the OSM volunteers and organizers are seeking to make a profit off of their activities... at least following the Gracenote fiasco path.

I agree that legally speaking the OSM license is such that the data generated can't reshaped into a proprietary license. There were many contributors to the CDDB that thought the database being generated was open sourced and that was implied while it was being developed... at least until it was too late to make a big difference. Many in the open source community get wary about those who would try to do that kind of thing again.

I like your analogies to other on-line encyclopedias (Encarta, Britannica, and others) to Wikipedia. It is quite fitting, although the OSM projects is going to take a fair bit more time before that happens. I see something similarly happening with Google, although there the analogy is perhaps better compared to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy project where that although there are good intentions and an organization involved who is sympathetic to the community as a whole, divergent interests are present where eventually this volunteer effort will fall apart. It is Google's effort that you have to question here, even if they promote "competition" to the OSM effort after a fashion. I wouldn't trust Google, at least so far as always being so friendly to the open source mapping community, or even hosting the service in the long term.

It sort of exists.

According to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy this will be hard, if you are a Computer Scientist:

(copied from http://www.h2g2.com/ )

Dave? Are you there Dave?

A test for artificial intelligence suggested by the mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing. The gist of it is that a computer can be considered intelligent when it can hold a sustained conversation with a computer scientist without him being able to distinguish that he is talking with a computer rather than a human being.

Some critics suggest this is unreasonably difficult since most human beings are incapable of holding a sustained conversation with a computer scientist.

After a moments thought they usually add that most computer scientists aren't capable of distinguishing humans from computers anyway.

I contend that the abbreviation that redirects to the BBC's site is the correct one

H2G2 is:

H2 = Hitch Hiker's (2 H's)
G2 = Guide (to the) Galaxy (2 G's)

When Adams put together the Internet version of the guide, he put it up at: http://h2g2.com/ It's still there, in fact...

If anything needed an abbreviation, it's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy... Even just typing "Hitchhiker's" is somewhat cumbersome. I wouldn't blame this one on elitism.

-If

Actually, you don't need a kitchen nor a toilet because, you can just visit the Italian bistro in the engine room. Duh.

You're living on it! ;-)

I remember around '98, in the twilight of Adam's life he sold the script for the movie and launched H2G2 as a sort of web version of the guide. There were then plans to release a PDA guide that would link to the encyclopediac H2G2 site. What happened?

Do you mean like this?

It is almost sad to think of how that name has been abused. I have specifically not contributed to H2G2 in part because of the copyright of what gets contributed. The Wiki* heirarchy (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikitionary, etc.) is released under the GFDL and the content is owned by the original author. In theory you can take one of your books, and as long as it is your own content you can re-release it under other licenses, just like you can do with GPL'd software. This is not the case with H2G2.

Originally it had quite a bit more brashness, and had content that went all over the place. It looks like it has degerated into a cute plaything for the BBC, which BTW owns the copyright for everything in H2G2 right now. The Old URL still resolves into this current site, and if anybody on /. knows the history of what happened over the past couple of years post dot bomb collapse, I would be interested. H2G2 also had quite a bit more content than Wikipedia originally, primarily because they had a jump start over Wikipedia.

Er.... what about H2G2 (HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy....)

See Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Yet there are institutes that help you recover from the effects of drinking one... Check out The official Page to find one.

• Wiki is very strongly fact-based, aiming to imitate a paper encyclopedia as much as possible. E2 and h2g2 are more open and have at last as much pop-culture content as they do factual stuff.
  
• Wiki and h2g2 only allow one article per title, while E2 allows multiple writeups per title (but only one writeup per title per person). h2g2 doesn't have the update/revert structure in place that Wiki does. By allowing multiple writeups, there's no way for a troll to replace good content with bad even for a short time.
  
• h2g2 and E2 both rely on editors with special powers, albeit in somewhat different ways. Wiki basically allows anyone to be an editor, while h2g2 requires editor approval to post an article and E2 requires editor approval to keep it posted.
  
• E2 and h2g2 both have strong communities, with E2 mainly depending on real-time chat and h2g2 on message forums.
  
• E2 allows and even encourages original creative content -- stories, poems, and opinionated reviews -- as much as it does factual content of any sort. h2g2 culture practically requires a creative (read: Douglas Adams-like) personal touch on submitted articles.

It's so common that the guy who wrote the thing used it for a certain related web site.

Zero-Peril Sunglasses, anyone?

You know, there really is a Guide. Check out http://www.h2g2.com for the content. They even put the "Don't Panic" text on the page. You can join as a researcher, and publish your own little snippets. Oddly enough, there's some useful information there. It's sort of a twisted blog for some, a slashdot for others, and a wacky Encyclopedia Galactica for others.

Be sure to check out an Entry for Earth.

Many thanks to the BBC for keeping this running.

Hurrah for h2g2!

The late but great Douglas Adams has seeen this all before

And an even greater success story - so much so that it was listed in the Sunday Times' Top 50 Websites of 2002 - is h2g2, the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, as inspired by Douglas Adams' series of the same name.

It has a nice collection of entries and the community feeling there is wonderful. You should check it out!

Try The 'Earth Edition' of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, it has a vast array of well-written articles.

The approach they take regarding peer review is interesting. There are two types of guide entry - edited and unedited. The edited guide is a collection of peer reviewed and edited articles, and likely to be more accurate and readable. The unedited guide entries are just anything, really. Could be total nonsense.

Anyway you should check it out, it is a good site and has a much better community aspect than Wikipedia or Everything2. In a sense it is more like Fark or Slashdot, only more friendly.

You may also enjoy this, then --> http://www.h2g2.com/ <-- especially if you're a fan of Douglas Adams. It is really quite impressive! And less dryly written than the Wikipedia.

There is an electronic version of the Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy here: http://www.h2g2.com/. It's rather good!

Brought to you courtesy of the clearly-a-sarky-observation-piece dept and can't-be-arsed-to-copy-the-colour-scheme-or-layout dept.

faux instructions

1. Surround yourself with a handful of Slashdot-aware friends.
2. Surround yourself with a variety of alcoholic beverages.
3. Familiarise yourself with things to slur when sufficiently intoxicated. These may include - but are not limited to: "Whaaaassssup!" and "I regret to inform you, ossifer, that my alcohol may contain trace amounts of blood".
4. Gather friends around a large monitor.
5. Familiarise yourself with the observations set out below, and decide among yourself which drinks to down, and when.
6. Load a web-browser, and visit Slashdot. Open up an article on practically any subject; display preferences set to 'flat, threshold 1, oldest first'.
7. Scroll down the page, slow enough so that even the booziest of observers has enough time to read and comprehend each post. As per the pre-arranged rules, consume a beverage of your choice.
8. CMP state,#bladdered : BNE stage_7

1. Read the observations listed below.
2. Depending on whether you agree with them or not, either nod sagely and concur, "True, true" or scowl angrily and accuse the author of smoking crack.

Drink a quantity of alcoholic substance and/or nod solemnly whenever...

• A poor analogy is constructed, embellished and never refuted, especially when it relates to the politics of MP3s, the feasibility of designing accessible websites, the ramifications of gun laws or the relative advantages/disadvantages of Intellectual Property.
• A large number of words in an article are unnecessarily hyperlinked, thus causing the hapless (yet curious) reader to place the mouse pointer over each and every one, in the hope that at least one of them might be in any way interesting.
• Someone says "Ummmm... you did read the article, didn't you?"
  • ...but they probably didn't read it themselves.
• An informative article is moderated as 'insightful', or vice versa.
• Someone claims that their post consists solely of the cold harsh facts of truth, while the opponent has to resort to name-calling, FUD or other such beastly tactics.
• The pre-emptive plea: "I'll probably get moderated down for saying this..." which of course gets moderated up.
  • ...they were posting anonymously to "protect their karma".
• The 'Slashdot mentality' is described and 'rebelled' against, to the author's karmic advantage.
  • ...they are effectively moderated up simply for voicing an opinion which is (or claims to be...) 'radically different'
  • ...plausible examples of the 'groupthink conformity' are mentioned (e.g. pro-Linux, pro-Open Source, anti-Microsoft, anti-spam, pro-Libertarian, anti-censorship, pro-Napster etc).
  • ...implausible examples are mentioned ("I'll probably get moderated down for voicing this opinion in what is clearly a predominantly anti-taildocking forum")
  • ...the author talks of 'Slashbots', 'Sheepdot' or other such anti-Slashdot rhetoric ("Open Source, Closed Minds... we are Slashdot")
  • ...a clearly inflammatory post is saved from a rightful (Score: -1, Flamebait) with the cautionary "this isn't a troll, I'm just pointing out the facts" or better still, the unconvincing "this isn't a troll - I don't even know what a troll is."
  • ...the score makes it clear that Slashdot moderators are becoming more sympathetic to pro-Microsoft posts than pro-Linux ones.
• A poster recognizes a troll and comprehends the futility in replying to such, but does so anyway with the resignation, "I know I'm not supposed to reply to trolls, but..."
• A poster is accused of being a troll despite being not even remotely inflammatory or controversial.
• After being berated for posting an insensitive, illogical or offensive post, the author caves in and posts, "*sheesh* it was only a joke! Evidentally you have no sense of humour!"
• Ignoring the numerous replies to a "It's funny. Laugh" article that clearly demonstrate that the posters have indeed found it to be amusing, someone suggests that everyone is taking it "waaaaay too seriously."
• Something is criticized as being "cool" or "trendy".
• A posting ends with the author saying, "eh, whatever", "go figure" or "*shrug*".
• Someone utilises any of the following terms or phrases: zealot, jihadist, sheeple, hysterical, misguided, whine, apologists, "funny, isn't it, how...".

1. Surround yourself with a handful of Slashdot-aware friends.
2. Surround yourself with a variety of alcoholic beverages.
3. Familiarise yourself with things to slur when sufficiently intoxicated. These may include - but are not limited to: "Whaaaassssup!" and "I regret to inform you, ossifer, that my alcohol may contain trace amounts of blood".
4. Gather friends around a large monitor.
5. Familiarise yourself with the observations set out below, and decide among yourself which drinks to down, and when.
6. Load a web-browser, and visit Slashdot. Open up an article on practically any subject; display preferences set to 'flat, threshold 1, oldest first'.
7. Scroll down the page, slow enough so that even the booziest of observers has enough time to read and comprehend each post. As per the pre-arranged rules, consume a beverage of your choice.
8. CMP state,#bladdered : BNE stage_7

1. Read the observations listed below.
2. Depending on whether you agree with them or not, either nod sagely and concur, "True, true" or scowl angrily and accuse the author of smoking crack.

Drink a quantity of alcoholic substance and/or nod solemnly whenever...

• A poor analogy is constructed, embellished and never refuted, especially when it relates to the politics of MP3s, the feasibility of designing accessible websites, the ramifications of gun laws or the relative advantages/disadvantages of Intellectual Property.
• A large number of words in an article are unnecessarily hyperlinked, thus causing the hapless (yet curious) reader to place the mouse pointer over each and every one, in the hope that at least one of them might be in any way interesting.
• Someone says "Ummmm... you did read the article, didn't you?"
  • ...but they probably didn't read it themselves.
• An informative article is moderated as 'insightful', or vice versa.
• Someone claims that their post consists solely of the cold harsh facts of truth, while the opponent has to resort to name-calling, FUD or other such beastly tactics.
• The pre-emptive plea: "I'll probably get moderated down for saying this..." which of course gets moderated up.
  • ...they were posting anonymously to "protect their karma".
• The 'Slashdot mentality' is described and 'rebelled' against, to the author's karmic advantage.
  • ...they are effectively moderated up simply for voicing an opinion which is (or claims to be...) 'radically different'
  • ...plausible examples of the 'groupthink conformity' are mentioned (e.g. pro-Linux, pro-Open Source, anti-Microsoft, anti-spam, pro-Libertarian, anti-censorship, pro-Napster etc).
  • ...implausible examples are mentioned ("I'll probably get moderated down for voicing this opinion in what is clearly a predominantly anti-taildocking forum")
  • ...the author talks of 'Slashbots', 'Sheepdot' or other such anti-Slashdot rhetoric ("Open Source, Closed Minds... we are Slashdot")
  • ...a clearly inflammatory post is saved from a rightful (Score: -1, Flamebait) with the cautionary "this isn't a troll, I'm just pointing out the facts" or better still, the unconvincing "this isn't a troll - I don't even know what a troll is."
  • ...the score makes it clear that Slashdot moderators are becoming more sympathetic to pro-Microsoft posts than pro-Linux ones.
• A poster recognizes a troll and comprehends the futility in replying to such, but does so anyway with the resignation, "I know I'm not supposed to reply to trolls, but..."
• A poster is accused of being a troll despite being not even remotely inflammatory or controversial.
• After being berated for posting an insensitive, illogical or offensive post, the author caves in and posts, "*sheesh* it was only a joke! Evidentally you have no sense of humour!"
• Ignoring the numerous replies to a "It's funny. Laugh" article that clearly demonstrate that the posters have indeed found it to be amusing, someone suggests that everyone is taking it "waaaaay too seriously."
• Something is criticized as being "cool" or "trendy".
• A posting ends with the author saying, "eh, whatever", "go figure" or "*shrug*".
• Someone utilises any of the following terms or phrases: zealot, jihadist, sheeple, hysterical, misguided, whine, apologists, "funny, isn't it, how...".

I remember reading in an interview with Douglas Adams that one thing he wanted to do was a PDA+GPS+wireless(possibly) and then use it as a Hitch Hikers Guide to Earth. That was one of the ideas behind the H2G2 project.

That idea always appealed to me. It would be very nice to be able to leave small virtual GPS caches around for other people. And to get current information about any place in the world.

You really wouldn't need all that frequent updates, stopping by at an internet cafe once a week or so would do it easily. (Could be problematic if you're visiting California though. ;-)

The books can be found in PDF format if you look around the web enough. But h2g2 itself hasn't been put onto a PDA yet that I'm aware of, but that would be cool. The closest thing there is right now is the WAP version of h2g2 at mobile.h2g2.com. Maybe there's still hope for the real life version of the Guide Douglas Adams was planning.

do we really need an "open source" enclopedia?

Yes. Definitely so.

An open source encyclopedia has problems, certainly. It might not even qualify for the strict use of the term "encyclopedia", but I'd still hate to lose them.

Here's a couple of "open source data repositories". See what you think:

• Norman Yarvin's hand-selected Usenet Archive
  Hand filtering of old Usenet that one guy thought was "useful". Idiosyncratic, unauthorative, and terribly useful. It's also quite nostalgic for the "good old days" of Usenet; names like John De Armond and Garry Coffman
• Hitchiker's Guide
  What started out as a very pure attempt at an "open source encyclopedia", but now has some serious issues over moderation and editorial control. Now it seems to be de-evolving into a chatroom

at least there's still this.
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces

Anyone remember the "Earth" application from Snowcrash (Neal Stephenson)? That seems to be the ideal point towards which all of this is evolving.. check out the Planet-Earth project which is directly inspired by Snowcrash as well as H2G2 and Everything2.

Strikes me as a bit strange, too. Such is life.

Eschatfische.

Why don't these artists that yell and scream about copyright infringement voluntarily release that "magic number"--how much they make per song (average) from the record companies? Could it be they don't want us to know? I'd have to say that it is probably pretty small, compared to what the record companies take. I'm not talking about how much they get paid for touring and whatnot, I'm talking about how much they get for selling a CD. Take out the cost of the CD manufacturing, the payoffs to Tower, and everything that deals with distribution. Napster doesn't need that. What you're left with is embarrassing...ask Courtney Love.

Furthermore, let's start looking at all the money the record companies are generating from the information of the buying public (our PRIVACY!) like demographic info and the ad revenues from Pepsi and crap. Suddenly, what Napster users are stealing doesn't look so significant. I'm not saying that infringing on copyright is okay or right, I'm saying that Napster is doing a better job of distribution than the idiots that are fighting it. Napster is more efficient, convenient, and less politcal. Copyright is about discrimination, it is about making sure that somebody else isn't making money off of your music---passing it off as theirs or bilking you. But if you are using a more expensive method of copying and distribution, let's call a spade a spade. I can't empathize with you anymore.

This whole thing reminds me of the Hitch Hiker's Guide, where all the third class citizens crash land on Earth and decide to use leaves as currency. They have to resort to burning down the forest to stem the counterfitting problem!

On a different note, if one more technologist (or even just somebody posing as an intelligent person) tries to tell me how great ASP stuff is going to be and how great optical networks are going to make my life, I will PUKE! The same greed mentality that has the record companies covering their asses exists in the Telecom world and the energy world. Hello Bill, wake up! If your precious optical network got built, every telecom, cable, satellite, and who knows what else provider would shrivel. It won't happen, they will make sure of it... sure the "network" will get built out, but it will look more like the duct system in Brazil than your utopia. I guarantee it. Why? Because as a consumer culture we are lazy and stupid and unable to force the companies to REALLY give us what we want.

And for my last rant: why does everone insist on saying that the Internet is to blame for all these problems? IT IS NOT! Sure it makes it easier, but it is merely an offshoot of the real "problem"---digitization. I have been copying software since 1982. Why? How? There was no internet! Because it is infinitely easy to make an EXACT duplicate of something that is comprised of nothing but zeros and ones when you have a device that reads and writes zeros and ones. And Bill Joy is worried about the book world--who is he kidding? Bookmaking has been primarily digital for at least 20 years, it is just that the publishers have not "released" the digital source and OCR technology hasn't stepped it up yet. I guarantee you that PDF and the e-books will eventually do to the book what "digital" music has done to musicians. And we'll be in this same argument...if that is what he worries about I worry about him. How many trees do we need to keep chopping down so Bill Joy can have little pieces of PAPER to copyright?

Eventually these morons will begin to see what copyright REALLY is about: credit. (and not credit cards) Whether or not YOU, the author, gets CREDIT for what you wrote, and maybe some form of renumeration.

Only in America could we be so bold as to rather DESTROY our creations than let them out of our CONTROL.

This is the idea that started it all. A group of travellers (net surfers), travelling the cosmos (Internet), adding journal entries making it easy to use.

oh well have fun
<shameless company plug>
http://www.interadtechnology.com/
</shameless company plug>

This sounds like it could easily become the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Earth
But h2g2 is already supposed to be that!

Although admittedly they both stand the same chance, which is probably not very much.


Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems

There is of course h2g2 -- Douglas Adams' famous guide. But it's more a practical encyclopedia. So maybe we really need something like a "free as in free speach" clone of Britannica.

Because assuming that space aliens understand English would be pathetically stupid? If Star Trek has taught us nothing else - and it hasn't - its that all sentient biengs in the universe speak English as their mother tongue. This is of course at odds with the beliefs of the hitchhikers who get around that by sticking a fish in their ear.

I think you might be paraphrasing from the guide. Life... has a preface that is similar, IIRC.

You could try lightly littering the lists of auction items with links to affiliates but I don't know of anybody who's made much money this way except maybe the people you'll affiliate with.

I've been using an Internet Ad agency, called amazing media that seem reasonably leanient towards clickthroughs and page views. You obviously get more money for higher clickthoughs but a low amount still pays something. Also a low pageview rate is acceptable, I signed up with about 3000 pageviews PCM. My reason for doing it was that if everybody else was making money out of ads why can't I.

I haven't recieved a single cent yet so maybe it's all a load of Fetid Dingo's Kidneys, and I've wasted my time.

It's been a long time since I did any thorough research into this so I'm sure that by now there are plenty of similar and better offers out there, but I just haven't been bothered to look.

So I was thinking "Of course he's read about the fish...".. given that you must have used it before and seen The Link. Oh, wait... The HyperLink on altavista's page... oops webpage which explains all about the fish .. damn .. the babelfish and its origins. it's a fish. It translates. the type of fish? Babel I guess. It's a babelfish. Calling it 'the fish' is not a bad thing. get over it.

---

So I was thinking "Of course he's read about the fish...".. given that you must have used it before and seen The Link. Oh, wait... The HyperLink on altavista's page... oops webpage which explains all about the fish .. damn .. the babelfish and its origins. it's a fish. It translates. the type of fish? Babel I guess. It's a babelfish. Calling it 'the fish' is not a bad thing. get over it.

---

I wouldn't call it competition or even ironic, if anything they are complementary - H2G2 could never hope to approach the accumulated geek knowledge contained within the nodes of Everything2 and, although Everything2 has its share of amusing entries it could never surpass the depth of humour that H2G2 manages.
H2G2 tries and succeeds at inducing guffaws while maintaining a smattering of fact, it is in the very nature of DNA fans (who make up the majority of H2G2 researchers) to find the humour in the mundane. Everything2 is a resource at heart whose noders are geeks and techies and while many of them are also DNA fans the nodes emphasize fact with an amusing edge. Kudos to the many busy noders and researchers out there who keep the two site growing.

Hai. So Desu. Gomen-Nasi.....
I meant that it was ironic that Hemos linked to Everything2, in order to explain an aspect of Hitchhiker's Guide Earth Edition. These two companies are the main players in this new market of User writeups on life. Also in this market is the startup E-Pinions
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This message brought to you by Colin Davis

Actually, the HHGG Earth Edition is here, although I can't get on the site (or even ping it) at the moment. The site you linked up (likely a typo) appears to be in Japaneese.

Please define "kewl new features" in the Mozilla product.

There are, from an end-user POV, two new concepts in Mozilla (as opposed to Netscape 6, which is NOT what is being developed here -- things like AIM are added by Netscape directly):

1) The theming concept. As this entry at H2G2 point out, themes are a concequence of the development of cross-platform code. And it works. It works today -- there's a whole new app just developed by some outside dev folks, called Forumzilla, for one. Personally, yes, I think the skins are a "gimmie", but I also see why it's important to showcase the tech _today_.

2) The IRC client. All the IRC client is, and has been, is a simple wrapper for basic TCP/IP calls, which is all that IRC basically does. It's not a replacement for MIRC or BitchX or any of those. And it's important to the dev team, too: They chat on IRC all the time, and use their own client to do so.

Just wanted to hopefully clear that up.

----Woodrow

It's really annoying to have to discover the "real" author underneath those great works. He's not concerned with pleasing his fans anymore - far more with creating new opportunities, making the most of his product's potential, etc etc, to actually care about his long term fans. Ok, so I might be inclined to do that too, if Hollywood was waving six figure amounts at me, but it's still a shame.

Oh, and I think it goes without saying that he's not got the slightest interest in slashdot, except as a vehicle to push all his latest and greatest creations, including (INCLUDING!) h2g2, the commercial ripoff of Everything.

Shame. SHAME, I say.

--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me