Slashdot Mirror

Please note, first, that this started out as a reply to a comment a friend made in my blog.

But it grew to such proportions, and touched in so many ideas central to this debate, that I felt it was appropriate to post here. Take it or leave it, mod me down, or up.. but at least read it - I just want to get a few ideas out there.

--begin rant--

So you admit, then, that the RIAA *is* evil. That's a start. But you still think it's OK for these students to be sued for $150,000 per violation?.. (since you didn't say you disagreed with the law..) - that's just ridiculous. A law shouldn't be used to make examples of people (like capital punishment is, enforced so selectively that a lot of people who 'should' get it don't, and some innocents are caught in its web..) - it should be a balanced response to a problem in society (and I believe only problems that cause intentional harm *to* society), that mitigates the problem by providing a reasonable consequence to the officially-disapproved-of action.

Intellectual property laws are not, not, not 'good laws'. They are not part of the 'social contract' - John Locke would fucking roll over in his grave if he'd heard of them. These latest laws - like the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension act - were specifically designed at the behest of the rich, powerful corporations (like Disney and the RIAA) who happen to own the intellectual property of others - in the instance of Disney, they own the animators' and writers' work, and the RIAA owns singers' work. They make money - loads
of money - off of other people's work, merely to provide distribution (and in Disney's case, production) methods. They are not making these laws to provide a balanced good for society to protect artistic works and methods in the future - just look at patent laws, for god's sake. They were made to throw a bone to the rich (who contribute huge amounts to the politicians who make the laws - just look at the amount Hollywood and record labels pay them), to keep them rich and keep the people from getting the use out of the very 'intellectual property' the laws protect.

These laws are the reason books by HG Wells are still under copyright 80 years later, the reason you can't photocopy your high school graduation picture.. hell, they're the reason you can't even so much as draw and distribute a fucking picture of Mickey Fucking Mouse without Disney suing you. They're the reason fansites are operating on shaky ground, and can get shut down without warning (remember when Lucasarts did that with the Star Wars fansites?) - these companies are rich and powerful, but dumb and old. They're perfectly willing to take people who love their product and would like nothing better than to support the creators of said product, and ruin them, just to get a point across - you don't own your culture, we own your culture, and if you want to participate in this culture, you've gotta Buy Our Stuff.

It's the face of exploitative consumerism.
That's why people are forced to buy something before they get a chance to see it once (and the same reason, like you said, that people aren't willing to buy something after they see it on Cartoon Network and it turns out to suck - for a thought example, let's say I was somewhat interested in Inuyasha until I saw it CN and discovered it was yet another find-all-the-magic-orb-pieces anime, which I dislike. I might've ended up buying it had I not first been exposed to it FOR FREE. So, there, I got a chance to see something and I decided not to buy it. And just how is that different from getting the same thing for free on a P2P network? Maybe that's what happened to Catgirl Nuku Nuku - perhaps people saw it and decided it wasn't worth purchasing the rest of the series, because it just wasn't worth $30 a DVD package, maybe? Not everyone has the money to afford that kind of thing. The number of people who saw the fansubs is the nearly sam

Please note, first, that this started out as a reply to a comment a friend made in my blog.

But it grew to such proportions, and touched in so many ideas central to this debate, that I felt it was appropriate to post here. Take it or leave it, mod me down, or up.. but at least read it - I just want to get a few ideas out there.

--begin rant--

So you admit, then, that the RIAA *is* evil. That's a start. But you still think it's OK for these students to be sued for $150,000 per violation?.. (since you didn't say you disagreed with the law..) - that's just ridiculous. A law shouldn't be used to make examples of people (like capital punishment is, enforced so selectively that a lot of people who 'should' get it don't, and some innocents are caught in its web..) - it should be a balanced response to a problem in society (and I believe only problems that cause intentional harm *to* society), that mitigates the problem by providing a reasonable consequence to the officially-disapproved-of action.

Intellectual property laws are not, not, not 'good laws'. They are not part of the 'social contract' - John Locke would fucking roll over in his grave if he'd heard of them. These latest laws - like the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension act - were specifically designed at the behest of the rich, powerful corporations (like Disney and the RIAA) who happen to own the intellectual property of others - in the instance of Disney, they own the animators' and writers' work, and the RIAA owns singers' work. They make money - loads
of money - off of other people's work, merely to provide distribution (and in Disney's case, production) methods. They are not making these laws to provide a balanced good for society to protect artistic works and methods in the future - just look at patent laws, for god's sake. They were made to throw a bone to the rich (who contribute huge amounts to the politicians who make the laws - just look at the amount Hollywood and record labels pay them), to keep them rich and keep the people from getting the use out of the very 'intellectual property' the laws protect.

These laws are the reason books by HG Wells are still under copyright 80 years later, the reason you can't photocopy your high school graduation picture.. hell, they're the reason you can't even so much as draw and distribute a fucking picture of Mickey Fucking Mouse without Disney suing you. They're the reason fansites are operating on shaky ground, and can get shut down without warning (remember when Lucasarts did that with the Star Wars fansites?) - these companies are rich and powerful, but dumb and old. They're perfectly willing to take people who love their product and would like nothing better than to support the creators of said product, and ruin them, just to get a point across - you don't own your culture, we own your culture, and if you want to participate in this culture, you've gotta Buy Our Stuff.

It's the face of exploitative consumerism.
That's why people are forced to buy something before they get a chance to see it once (and the same reason, like you said, that people aren't willing to buy something after they see it on Cartoon Network and it turns out to suck - for a thought example, let's say I was somewhat interested in Inuyasha until I saw it CN and discovered it was yet another find-all-the-magic-orb-pieces anime, which I dislike. I might've ended up buying it had I not first been exposed to it FOR FREE. So, there, I got a chance to see something and I decided not to buy it. And just how is that different from getting the same thing for free on a P2P network? Maybe that's what happened to Catgirl Nuku Nuku - perhaps people saw it and decided it wasn't worth purchasing the rest of the series, because it just wasn't worth $30 a DVD package, maybe? Not everyone has the money to afford that kind of thing. The number of people who saw the fansubs is the nearly sam

You'll find a whole crapload of antiwar links on my LiveJournal

Attention: trolls! Click this link to be directed to the blog of a stupid narcicistic teenage girl who needs attention. Especially negative attention! Please, insult her. Deride her. Make fun of her. She relishes it!

In other news, visit Ablabla.org for more quality content.

Attention: trollz! Click this link to be directed to the blog of a stupid narcicistic teenage girl who needs attention. Especially negative attention! Please, insult her. Deride her. Make fun of her. She relishes it!

In other news, visit Ablabla.org for more quality content.

Attention: tholls! Click this link to be directed to the blog of a stupid narcicistic teenage girl who needs attention. Especially negative attention! Please, insult her. Deride her. Make fun of her. She relishes it!

In other news, visit Ablabla.org for more quality content.

Attention: trollses! Click this link to be directed to the blog of a stupid narcicistic teenage girl who needs attention. Especially negative attention! Please, insult her. Deride her. Make fun of her. She relishes it!

In other news, visit Ablabla.org for more quality content.

Attention: trulls! Click this link to be directed to the blog of a stupid narcicistic teenage girl who needs attention. Especially negative attention! Please, insult her. Deride her. Make fun of her. She relishes it!

In other news, visit Ablabla.org for more quality content.

In case you can't tell, we're quite bored right now.

Attention: trols! Click this link to be directed to the blog of a stupid narcicistic teenage girl who needs attention. Especially negative attention! Please, insult her. Deride her. Make fun of her. She relishes it!

In other news, visit Ablabla.org for more quality content.

Attention: trollax0rs! Click this link to be directed to the blog of a stupid narcicistic teenage girl who needs attention. Especially negative attention! Please, insult her. Deride her. Make fun of her. She relishes it!

In other news, visit Ablabla.org for more quality content.

Attention: trolls! Click this link to be directed to the blog of a stupid narcicistic teenage girl who needs attention. Especially negative attention! Please, insult her. Deride her. Make fun of her. She relishes it!

In other news, visit Ablabla.org for more quality content

Attention: trolls! Click this link to be directed to the blog of a stupid narcicistic teenage girl who needs attention. Especially negative attention! Please, insult her. Deride her. Make fun of her. She relishes it!

In other news, visit Ablabla.org for more quality content

I fucked up the links.

Here is the corrected link to the teenage girl's journal.

I saw Bill putting words into Dan's mouth, before giving him a chance to add anything of value. I managed to find the transcript I was thinking of, the Dan Savage one can't compare to this: http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=ca rpeicthus&itemid=238893. Unfortunately I can't find the transcript on Fox News' site, presumably you have to purchase it. Too funny though.

My politics are fairly middle of the road, and that's why I get disgusted with O'Reilly, he is sensationalist to the extreme.

Something Awful's Guide To Surviving War In Iraq

Whitehouse.org

Get Your War On

Saddam Hussein's LiveJournal

(two of the above recently mentioned on the very article that's currently headlining Satanosphere).

Wow, cool. This is a perfect time to reference something I read in LiveJournal perusal the other day. Why? Because it brilliantly summarizes why this anonymous coward is making a flawed and ridiculously unfair argument.

On pro-war activists: I would like to propose that all pro-war people be drafted into the military and sent to the front lines. Money where your mouth is, folks.

Sounds familiar? Here's the problem. The parent poster is trying to create a direct relationship between a person's stance on an issue, and their character, by saying those that don't attend this conference are hypocrites.

From the lengthy LiveJournal thread:
You're making an untestable proposition in order to attack the character - not the position - of those you disagree with.

'Nuff said. Asking everyone who is against the DMCA and complains here to attend a conference which requires money and time to be thrown at the problem is unfair. I reserve the right to object to the DMCA on my own terms, thank you.

Two Things:

"Give Peace a Chance." - John Lennon

and

I wish for Peace

I've been doing something similar to this via the online blogging communities at LiveJournal

LiveJournal, like a lot of these online diarie thingys, has a field where you can enter the music you're currently listening to when you make new entries.

My system takes your username and grabs the most recent 50 tracks you've entered and trys to compare these tunes with the music that other people have entered - if you get a match then it will display some random tracks from that matching users most recent entries.

It appears to work well - but I haven't quite reached a critical mass of users.

Give it a go yourself

The Internet has always been a place for those among us who feel the need to share the meaningless tidbits of our lives to do so.

Weblogs? Whose crazy idea was that? Just somebody who thought he could write a bit of information that other people might want to read.

People have always and will always use the Internet to share information that other people don't care about. 99% of the internet is crap. If it wasn't, why would we need books on how to search the internet to get past the crap?

Personally, I enjoy sharing my little sections of life. I enjoy telling other people about what I had for lunch, where I was last night, what my opinion is on the schooling system at UIUC. I enjoy reading the daily struggles and tribulations of several dozen other people who I've formed groups with online.

I use a journal to track my own life as well as keeping track of others, and I enjoy it. I enjoy the escape it provides, and I enjoy the communcation tool it has become for me.

But most of all, when I see a book on the internet that I want to buy, I enjoy being able to wander over to my journal and posting about it.

Hey, even /. offers a journal feature, doesn't it?

That's what I thought.

Sex with her

FOXNews
Drudge
Rush
InstaPundit
The Bleat
Dilbert
Blue's
jwz
Davezilla

Iraq is not about national defense, it's not about terrorism, it's not about weapons of mass destruction. The question that Bush and Blair have still not answered is why they wish to go to war? Religon? Oil? Nothing I have heard yet makes sense.


One conspiracy theory about the (impending) war with Iraq is a currency war. In November 2000, Iraq stopped selling oil for US dollars and began accepting only euros. That would risk a huge devaluation of the US dollar as nations dumped dollars for euros to buy oil from the world's second largest oil supply.

Posted this question on my journal about a year ago and got some very thoughtful answers from my readers.

Also - if I go and grab a bunch of domains, make sure that after I register sex.com, I make sure to keep it from getting ganked from underneath me.

Pathetic that you trot out the old "MHz myth" whine. I was actually intrigued earlier in the discussion when someone pointed out that the price shown was that for a low-end PowerBook. That was something legitimate issue can be taken with (and Lindows is responding). Your cringing and moaning is old hat.

Everyone knows by now that PPC performs differently than x86. What's the big deal? When I'm comparing 2 products based on different technologies I take that into account. Are Mac zealots too lazy to just multiply in a fudge factor when comparing specs?

Lindows cannot be flamed for listing the specs of their product, then listing the corresponding specs of competing products. If you'll notice, they even list that the Apple laptop has a CD-R and theirs doesn't. And a bigger hard drive. And a modem in the base model. What, do you expect them to go on a Apple marketing spree in the middle of their site? "Please note that PPC is really cool and you should go buy an Apple laptop because Apple is really fast, somehow, even though they are based off of Mach microkernel (deprecated by CMU due to efficiency concerns), don't release SPEC results to back up their claims, and are based off of sludgy dying Motorola PPC instead of delicious fast IBM PPC."

And comparing a laptop to a PDA???

This is pathetic. Lindows lists the reasons for such a comparison right on the page:

Are You Considering a PDA? The Lindows Mobile PC beats a PDA or Pocket PC hands-down. Now (for only a few dollars more), you can have extreme mobility with the power and versatility of a PC in one affordable computer!

Mobility, power, and versatility. When I worked for a software/hosting company, I had a small Sony Vaio laptop. Very light, very easy to carry. I loved it, and I used my Visor quite a bit less because the Vaio was so convenient to have around. When I got laid off and I had to give the Vaio back, I started using the Visor more because my Dell Latitude is more of a pain to haul out.

I worked retail for a while. There were quite a few people who said "I'd like to get a laptop but they're heavy and expensive." and "Will this PalmOS/PocketPC unit run desktop software?". I steered a number of people to tiny units like the Sony PictureBook because of these concerns. Also don't forget that HP had that long Jornada with the flip screen and the keyboard. These are competitors that they need to address.

I love my Visor, but there are things (coding, writing long documents, etc) that a laptop is more handy for. Many people would jump at the opportunity to merge both into a single unit. Lindows doesn't beat you over the head. "BUY OUR L33T LAPTOP tO SURF TEH INTARWEB, WE ARE COOL3R THAN MAC AND MICRO$OFT. IF YOU GET A PALM YOU MUST GO DOWN THE STAIRS!!!!!!!!!@" No, it's "Are you considering...?" and they leave it at that. Get over yourself.

If you'd rather have a PDA, go for it. Just keep renaming your contact list to be a fake MP3 track and storing it on your iPod, Apple Boy. Keep holding your breath for the hack that will let you enter text on the jog wheel. I remember entering text that way. In the 1980s. On a Nintendo console. 20 years later I expect to be able to handwrite or type my text.

And for the record, I'm sitting on an iMac to type this right now, that I paid good money for. I don't despise Apple hardware (although the CD-ROM drive decided to crap out and take my ability to read many CDs and any CD-Rs with it). It's somewhat more efficient for the tasks I tend to do, and I leave it at that. But posts like yours are the reason I'm running a Linux-based OS on it and have no interest in going to OS X.

I had a problem getting xpdf to work the other day; I emailed the author and he helped me get it working. With Apple it would be "Oh that firmware update we released disabled your system because you didn't buy your RAM from Apple", or "Sorry, that über cool Web browser that uses KHTML ohhhh hohhhhhhhhhh so sexy technology we released did rm -rf on your home directory", or a deluge of insults from the fanboy peanut gallery saying that my workflow isn't properly merged into the Apple Document Model Reality Field Editing Mode. And the Apple world nickel-and-dimes you on shareware stuff. People release attractive software into the rest of the Unix world for free; I participate in this ecosystem myself. Meanwhile Apple users are like "pay $5 for this utility to make menus come up with control-alt-meta-double-bucky-on-the-one-mouse-but ton when you click here".

Here's a quote:

One benefit from this exercise is that I've been disabused of the idea that things would be systematically better were I to ditch Linux and switch to MacOSX. Macs seem to be approximately as finicky and fragile as real Unix systems, except that they like to fail silently instead of giving you obscure error messages. I've already developed a deep and abiding hate for that hidious little spinning rainbow disc that means "something has probably gone horribly wrong, but I'm going to protect you from knowing what."

I think I'll stick to systems that don't continue to charge premium prices while cheapening out at the same time (IDE instead of SCSI, etc), and operating systems that may waste my time, but at least don't charge for the privilege, thanks.

And yes, Lindows is vile for that trade show thing. I don't think there are many people who actually believe Michael Robertson is in it for altruism or because he feels community spirit.

I incorporated this into my 'modest proposal' to reform copyright that I posted in my livejournal last month:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/fin9901/day/200 3/ 01/15

(excerpt quoted below:)

We need to reform the copyright laws. My modest proposal goes something like this:

1) No copyright will ever under any circumstances last more than 100 years from original creation. If you can't make enough money off it in 100 years, you never will. This also makes it very simple to know when items are definitely out of copyright.

2) Items under copyright that are not being published fall out of copyright much quicker: any item that has been out of publication in the US cumulatively longer than a given time (varying as to the media type) becomes public domain-- i.e. "use it or lose it". Such a scheme might be: books, 20 years; audio and video, 10 years; computer software, 3 years; etc. The 'cumulative' wording is to keep publishers from trying to skirt the law by publishing things for 1 day every n years.

Sounds like a combination of Google's Zeitgeist and LiveJournal's MemeTracker. In other words, nothing that new.

It's also the basis for Computational Lexicography. Doing analysis on large corpora. One of the interests people have in this field is introduction of new words in society. The field used to use corpora such as the British National Corpus, but since the explosion of the Web, sites such as Google can far exceed that size. Weblogs are simply a good example of a more natural form of language. The interesting thing would be not so much to find new trends through words... but if we can truly solve the whole natural language parsing problem and use such information to extract higher-level knowledge

They bought Deja News, or whatever it was called, giving them direct access to the wisdom of the masses, as encoded in newsgroups. Except that newsgroups seem to be a fading concept, supplanted by mailing lists and blogs. Well, Google can't very well buy mailing lists (from whom would you buy them?) but they just bought most of the blogs. Note that they haven't bought or apparently even tried to buy any traditional mass-media company (CNN, NY Times, Knight-Ridder, etc). In the business world, nobody has placed much value so far on the collected, shared knowledge of the masses, so Google can buy Deja and Pyra for cheap.

The big question is what owning the major information conduits of the masses gets Google. Google didn't just buy Atrios or Dave Barry, they bought the medium everyone is using to blog.

This kind of gets me back to an idea I blogged about a little while back--that you could probably make a business out of aggregating blogs into an ersatz net magazine and selling advertising space on the result. Google presents the advertisers with the combined traffic of the top 20 blogs, shows them a prototype of a salon-style magazine and asks how much they'd pay for ad space, then goes to those top 20 blogs and asks them whether they'd agree to publish regularly in exchange for some (smallish) cut of the ad revenue.

Makes me wonder how long we have until Google buys LiveJournal...

adeu,
Mateu

wrote a bit on that in Destiny's Child, Indeed

Excerpt:

Since 1998, the Office of the Chief Actuary (a division of the U.S. Social Security Administration) has published lists of names in popularity order by gender and birth year from samples of Social Security Number applications. Curious parents-to-be can find the top 1000 male and female names from the year 2000 online - culled from a sample of 2,089,457 boys and 1,996,763 girls.

...

Female name "Trinity" is #74 in popularity - 98% of which are probably children of obsessive "Matrix" fans hoping for boy next so they can name him "Morpheus" (a name which I predict will break the top 100 list in about two years). Be on the lookout as single white mothers with children named "Trinity" start dating bald black men to make little Morpheuses with.

This proves that being single is definately your safest option.

But this is in relation to a topic, not just me rambling about what I had for breakfast

Someone rambling about what they had for breakfast is actually more interesting than you'd think.

See title;

Too many people now-a-days will start a blog/journal/diary/whatever and expect it to instantly become popular. They may write about everything and nothing, about politics and sex and drugs, but they never get really well-read.

Why? Because unless people know who you are, they generally don't care.

Let's pick on Livejournal for a second. It is flirting with 1 million user accounts right now (inluding mine), but how many do I read? Maybe I read about 4; There are thousands of .com blogs too; how many do I read? 1. Slashdot and K5 have journals too, but I only read 1 of those,too.

It should be no suprise that the journals/blogs/etc I read are those of people I feel I have an aquaiantance with, albeit at a distance. I read 'Taco's journal because I know what he did. I read Brad's livejournal because I know what he did; Same with Rusty, jwz and a few others.

But anyone else I don't care about. Why? Because they haven't *done* anything I care about. You may like to write, but don't expect people to read just because you do it. See title.

And I'm not alone; I started a popular internet thing that people use a lot. Suddenly I find names I don't know commenting in my LJ and showing up in my "friends" list, even on my Zoo page here. It's not because they like what I write just for the sake of it, but because they have a point of reference to relate to me on.

That's what it comes down too -- if we can't relate to you, we don't care.

See title;

Too many people now-a-days will start a blog/journal/diary/whatever and expect it to instantly become popular. They may write about everything and nothing, about politics and sex and drugs, but they never get really well-read.

Why? Because unless people know who you are, they generally don't care.

Let's pick on Livejournal for a second. It is flirting with 1 million user accounts right now (inluding mine), but how many do I read? Maybe I read about 4; There are thousands of .com blogs too; how many do I read? 1. Slashdot and K5 have journals too, but I only read 1 of those,too.

It should be no suprise that the journals/blogs/etc I read are those of people I feel I have an aquaiantance with, albeit at a distance. I read 'Taco's journal because I know what he did. I read Brad's livejournal because I know what he did; Same with Rusty, jwz and a few others.

But anyone else I don't care about. Why? Because they haven't *done* anything I care about. You may like to write, but don't expect people to read just because you do it. See title.

And I'm not alone; I started a popular internet thing that people use a lot. Suddenly I find names I don't know commenting in my LJ and showing up in my "friends" list, even on my Zoo page here. It's not because they like what I write just for the sake of it, but because they have a point of reference to relate to me on.

That's what it comes down too -- if we can't relate to you, we don't care.

Or this FotR parody.

Hehe!

jwz discovers Rez.

Of course, jwz being jwz, he has to include a link to a blog featuring the special trance vibrator

Not really ironic.

The page you saw actually belonged to Ultimate Search -- a rather infamous squatter company.

Its no suprise that ultsearch put links to spam filters on there.

By crikey its the real thing cobbers!

For those interested, most of the damage was caused not by regular fires, but by a "firestorm", burning embers raining down from the sky. This caused hundreds of spot fires around the suburbs, and in inaccessible areas, gaps between houses and fences, in power poles. This type of fire (this large) has never happened in Australia before.

For those blaming fire services for not being fast enough, some facts:

* The Canberra fire forces are equipped to deal with SIX house fires at the same time.
* Over FOUR HUNDRED homes have been destroyed.
Many more fires have burned and been put out by residents using garden hoses and garden tools.
Even those of you without a calculator can probably see where the problem lies.
Some suburbs have lost access to water completely, with water station pumps burned out.
One power station has been completely razed, residents in that area may be without power for a month or more.
Several fire engines and police cars have been lost, roads are blocked by fallen trees and power lines, some of which are on fire.
Firefighters have been out saving other people's homes while their own burned to the ground.
A fire station itself caught fire, and no engines went to put it out, as people's homes were still in danger.

Give them some credit for putting their lives and homes on the line, to save others.
_______________________
News links:

Residents are posting in a Canberra community at LiveJournal.
Canberra Communtiy

Google news about Canberra:
Google news

Canberra Connect Government Website (sometimes is not loading)
Canberra Connect

ACT Bushfire Status
www.esb.act.gov.au/media/bushfire.htm

Red Cross locating evacuees
www.news.com.au

Make a donation to the Red Cross
RedCross.org.au
_______________________
There's news from Observatory astronomers here
_______________________
http://news.ninemsn.com .au/National/story_45108.asp

Fires destroy Stromlo observatory
Irreplaceable equipment worth millions of dollars was destroyed when the Canberra bushfires ravaged the historic Mount Stromlo Observatory.
Research officer Vince Ford, a 38-year veteran of the observatory, told AAP staff were given 20 minutes' notice to evacuate as a fire storm on Mount Stromlo caught authorities by surprise.
A single road through pine forests links the observatory, established by the Commonwealth in 1924, with suburban Canberra.
"There's no way we could have saved it," Mr Ford said.
The fire storm destroyed all the observatory's telescopes and the original observatory building, which dated back to 1924.
"It's gone, it's all gone," Mr Ford said.
"We've lost all the telescopes, the administration building, which was the original observatory back in 1924.
"The first telescope has actually been there since 1910, it's gone.
"The main research telescopes, the 74-inch and 50-inch, they're gone. I've just seen pictures of it from the air and we don't have a telescope left."
The Australian National University (ANU) facility was one the premier astronomy training and research centres in Australia.
"(It's a huge loss) from a historical point of view, from a cultural point of view, from a scientific point of view," Mr Ford said.
"It's an absolute disaster."
Observatory staff still hope they may be able to salvage some of their research, stored on computers in office buildings that might have escaped the worst of the blaze.
The observatory offices are believed to be standing, but have been water damaged.
"At least we should be able to recover the hard disks from some of the computers, but at this stage we're guessing," Mr Ford said.
"All we know is the observatory is gone."
Some back-up files would also have been stored at the main ANU campus in Canberra.
"But a lot of the work will be at the observatory," Mr Ford said.

"Some of us, being suspicious sods, have stuff at home, but most of it would have been on the computers or in the offices up at the observatory."
ANU vice-chancellor Ian Chubb was due to meet observatory chiefs to be briefed on the extent of the damage. ©AAP 2003

Long live LiveJournal!

> I agree, but the fact that they had a perfectly good rendering engine ready to go, and decided on KHTML instead irks me.

I had all the little CSS bugs in KHTML, but I stick with Safari. Why? because it's a hell of a lot less bloated and easy to develop with than Gecko. Even JWZ thinks so.

Apparently the fact that Paul Festa linked here from his CNET article is going to reduce my Livejournal to the unadulterated depths of uselessness that the Slashdot forums have pioneered, so I guess I'll just turn off comments until the newbie shitstorm blows on by.

I'm not interested in your opinion. I'm not interested in explaining to you how you've completely missed the point of my post. I just don't care.

Thank you, drive through.

Someone else must have written that, as it looks like the kind of thing Slashdot trolls write, you know, "Slazdot sucks!" and it makes him look like an arogent shit. That's not the way I imagine someone who could found a huge project like Mozilla and organize all of the people who worked on it. If Mozilla is not targeted at "newbies", who is it for?

Wait a minute, I think I see it - the same people dumping troll posts on Slashdot also work for ZDnet. M$ whoring does not get lower than that - abuse of all possible contenders. Note that the article does not say anything good about Safari or KDE, it just heaps abuse on Mozilla. Up yours, ZDnet, Mozilla rocks so hard it even makes your site bearble by turning off all the adverts and pop ups.

In a Web log, Mozilla founder and former evangelist Jamie Zawinski said Apple is bad-mouthing Mozilla.

Yes, I could really use a debugger that runs backward for a problem I'm having recently. I wrote about it here last month:

Shaver pointed out this message. Apparently Michael Chastain wrote the very program I'm looking for, back in 1995. Nobody cared, the kernel APIs kept changing underneath it, and it died on the vine.

[...] The replayer is the cool part. It takes control whenever the target process executes a system call, annuls the original system call, and overwrites the target process registers and address space with the values that I want to be in there.

[...] If I put memory-access rule checking in at replay time, I can do better than e-fence, on stock binaries with no recompilation. Hell, I can do better than Purify on stock binaries and without tangling with their object-code-insertion patents.

I have enough information available in the proxy ptrace filter to implement PTRACE_SINGLESTEP_BACKWARDS. How would you like to have that capability in gdb? "Execute backwards until this data watchpoint changes." Imagine a graphical debugger with a scrollbar for time, where the top is "beginning of execution" and the bottom is "end of execution."

Yay progress.

Ok, the rest of his message reads as a ``why does my genius go unappreciated'' whine, but still, I want this program! The code is still available, but I'm sure not feeling motivated to try and port it to run on a modern kernel (it doesn't even support ELF binaries...)

It looks like after this message was sent to the linux-kernel list in 1999, there was a whole lot of talk, then three years of zilch. I mailed to ask if any progress was ever made. The answer was no: nobody ever made it work on modern systems.

Yes, I could really use a debugger that runs backward for a problem I'm having recently. I wrote about it here last month:

Shaver pointed out this message. Apparently Michael Chastain wrote the very program I'm looking for, back in 1995. Nobody cared, the kernel APIs kept changing underneath it, and it died on the vine.

[...] The replayer is the cool part. It takes control whenever the target process executes a system call, annuls the original system call, and overwrites the target process registers and address space with the values that I want to be in there.

[...] If I put memory-access rule checking in at replay time, I can do better than e-fence, on stock binaries with no recompilation. Hell, I can do better than Purify on stock binaries and without tangling with their object-code-insertion patents.

I have enough information available in the proxy ptrace filter to implement PTRACE_SINGLESTEP_BACKWARDS. How would you like to have that capability in gdb? "Execute backwards until this data watchpoint changes." Imagine a graphical debugger with a scrollbar for time, where the top is "beginning of execution" and the bottom is "end of execution."

Yay progress.

Ok, the rest of his message reads as a ``why does my genius go unappreciated'' whine, but still, I want this program! The code is still available, but I'm sure not feeling motivated to try and port it to run on a modern kernel (it doesn't even support ELF binaries...)

It looks like after this message was sent to the linux-kernel list in 1999, there was a whole lot of talk, then three years of zilch. I mailed to ask if any progress was ever made. The answer was no: nobody ever made it work on modern systems.

Incidentally, the female lead in that movie was a composite of several people the writers knew in college. One of them is Liralen Li, who is quite a fascinating person in her own right. She was involved in many interesting collaborative writing/roleplaying newsgroups in the early to mid '90s (such as alt.pub.dragons-inn, alt.pub.havens-rest (now, alas, deserted by its fictional folk and claimed as a social gathering spot), and certainly not least, alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo.

The translation of strings on LiveJournal.com had some similar problems.

One I remember specifically is the text labels used on time quantities. LiveJournal has a function which returns a pretty time specification based on a number of seconds, such as "1 minute", "2 years" and so on. That particular function became a bit of a translation nightmare, with languages with three different kinds of plurals and other complications.

Also, many of the forms on LiveJournal return a "Success!" message when they are complete, but at least one language didn't have a generic word for success, so the word "Success" has been included in the translation system lots of times so that such languages can say "Entry Posted Successfully!" and other such things.

More recently we've been working on the new style/template system which, unlike the old one, is designed with multiple languages in mind. In this case, since the new style system uses a procedural programming language, the translation support was significantly easier since the translation layers can include their own logic where necessary.

Software translation poses some interesting problems, indeed.

The translation of strings on LiveJournal.com had some similar problems.

One I remember specifically is the text labels used on time quantities. LiveJournal has a function which returns a pretty time specification based on a number of seconds, such as "1 minute", "2 years" and so on. That particular function became a bit of a translation nightmare, with languages with three different kinds of plurals and other complications.

Also, many of the forms on LiveJournal return a "Success!" message when they are complete, but at least one language didn't have a generic word for success, so the word "Success" has been included in the translation system lots of times so that such languages can say "Entry Posted Successfully!" and other such things.

More recently we've been working on the new style/template system which, unlike the old one, is designed with multiple languages in mind. In this case, since the new style system uses a procedural programming language, the translation support was significantly easier since the translation layers can include their own logic where necessary.

Software translation poses some interesting problems, indeed.

If you've only seen the photos and seen the press coverage, there's one alternate view in JWZ's journal.

I'm torn about your post, because on the one hand I'd LOVE it if Christmas were a bit more sedate. One thing that pisses me off about Christians in general is their attitude as a group that I have to respect it. I'm sorry, but stupid is stupid and I will not respect it. Christmas belongs in the dark ages, let's put it back there.

First off, when you think of Christians as a group, you're thinking of Fundamentalist Christians. Who, in my opinion, betrays Christianity, and most certainly doesn't represent the fundamentals of the Faith. Christmas doesn't belong in the Dark Ages, it's underlying message will continue to live.

On the other hand, I want to see Christmas fade away as part of society's natural evolution forward. If Christmas is made illegal in any form because of some nut calling it racist or any of the other things you mentioned in your post, then society will not have moved forward, and may have taken (yet another) step back.

Actually, you've made me think here. Maybe Christmas fading away would be beneficiary. It would strip the fluff off and leave only it's reason for existing- that we chose a day to celebrate the birth of our King. I admit it'd be a step back to ban it (or any other holiday), because that harkens back to the bad old days of cultural exclusivism.

Why is this interesting?

I'm curious how this works -- it was my understanding that a website is only responsible for statements made by visitors if they have an active filtering or censorship policy in place.

Prodigy and similar have been sued for statements made in their forums because they have a censoring policy, whereas sites like Slashdot have refused to alter or remove user comments, and so no cases have been brought to trial as they are (effectively) common carriers -- they're responsible for conveying information, not the information itself.

Is my understanding of this clear? If so, why would any online forum elect to take on the kind of liability that active censorship introduces? Wouldn't it be better to let the responsibility rest solely with the users?

god you slashbots are a bunch of freaks. a lot of you would feel good somewhere around here.