Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Introduces YRO
The Net is changing fast, and so are many of the issues surrounding your rights online. The US Policies on Encryption Export, governments filtering websites from their citizens, and right now, the PICS project In fact, the PICS project is what the first article's about. It's part 1 of 2.
YRO will be maintained by Michael Sims and Jamie McCarthy Their job will be similiar to what the existing Slashdot Authors do; read submissions and pick the best articles for publishing, just in a more focused area. In addition, they'll be writing original articles when it's appropriate. YRO will have room to post many stories that wouldn't have been able to appear on Slashdot, while Slashdot will continue to post the stories that we think are more relevant to everyone.
Michael Sims is a programmer for the Department of Energy and online free-speech activist who administers censorware.org. He swears that there won't be a nuclear catastrophe on January 1, 2000. Jamie McCarthy writes perl code all day; if he ever gets free time he works on The Holocaust History Project or censorware.org. He owns every book Theodore Sturgeon ever wrote.
We're pretty excited about this. I hope you are too. Now let's just see if it works...
God, looks like another zero score posting. Where has my karma gone? kaaaarmaaaa!
--
"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."
Reading the PICS article with its comments, as well as similar articles and their comments here on slashdot and elsewhere, I see a new emerging political philosophy that I'm sure will dominate YRO.
The computing populace at large, and hackers in specific, have been classified as neo-libertarian in beliefs. Although there are many exceptions, there does seem to be a libertarian-like streak in slashdot. However, this is as related to libertarianism as fishes are to whales.
Libertarians believe, in a nutshell, that governements should be limited in size, scope and power. This new Katzianism, as I'll call it, goes far beyond this. It's an "us versus them" philosophy. Corporations, proprietary developers, movies theaters, or anyone else that doesn't fit into "us", must be limited as well. Microsoft must be limited in size, scope and power otherwise personal liberty will be in danger.
For example: It's evil if the US Senate mandates music ratings, it's also evil if AOL includes a ratings system with its software, it's also evil if a Mom-and-Pop music store took these ratings into account. In a similar vein, Slashdot posting policies are decried as "censorship".
This Katzian attitude is guaranteed to raise its ugly head repeatedly in YRO. Be prepared for it. Be aware that many calls for freedom are in fact calling for the opposite.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Some of the most amazing things that I'm seeing throughout this are the things that high-tech workers are putting up with in the workplace. We're talking outright abuse in some cases. Others are finally working out what they really make for their time (wages divided by hours) and realizing that they aren't that far ahead of working at the 7-11.
But hey, saving money in the bank is easy when you never have time between sleep and work to spend it!
The Geek
Geekrights.org
TheGeek
http://www.geekrights.org
Kill the monkey
*whimper*
"New Katzianism"? "new emerging political philosophy"???
The concept you are struggling to articulate is usually termed "New
Deal Liberalism". It's several decades old, mostly born out of severe
abuses of corporate power combined with economic depression. Historical
roots go back further, to the era of the "robber barons" and even feudalism.
Mr. Katz, nice writer he though he may be, did not invent it.
It amazes me, just the thought, the very concept, that there could
be an opposition to large concentration of private power, is seen
as *unknown*. You've never heard of it before. You've never read
anything pre-Net about it before. You can't think of any framework.
The only way it's described is as some mutation or bastardization of
*Libertarianism*.
That's scary.
Slashdot has been having trouble scaling to keep up with its growth, and I'm not talking about the servers. With the rate that new stories go up, and the number of comments on each, it has been becoming difficult to keep up. Discussions don't usually stay active long enough to do them justice, because they get crowded out, with some stories falling off the bottom of the page the same day they are posted.
I've been thinking that the problem is that it is organized linearly in time, which doesn't scale too well. Maybe a solution would be to "add an axis", making the layout more two-dimensional by breaking it into sections, each of which would proceed linearly. It's not perfect, but it would allow each story to stay visible for a longer period in its section. It would still be hard to keep up with everything, simply because of the sheer volume, but people who want to skim everything and comment sporadically could do so, while those who want to discuss a single issue in greater depth would also be able to.
Maybe some of the most interesting threads could even be kept alive by using activity as well as age to determine the order of the stories. Also, when the number of comments on a story gets too unwieldy, maybe some of the most active sub-threads could be pulled out into new stories -- these could be kept in a separate sidebar for each section.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
It would be nice to be able to select that you wish the YRO articles on the slashdot page in the preferences. Otherwise I would have to check two pages. Users that are not so interested in this topic could still filter the YRO messages from their page while news junkies like myself have everything in one place.
Jilles
Nuff said. Then I can keep an eye on the topics, and jump in when it looks good.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Whooa there.
Being required to provide some additional descriptive information on a product that is widely distributed isn't an obvious violation of your rights.
People are required to label food they distribute, so people who hate, say, peanuts, can avoid that food.
What is so obviously bad about requiring people to label multimedia content so that people who hate, say, pornography can avoid it?
Not that I'm in favour of the proposed scheme, but let's _try_ not to jump on things.
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Not that I am suggesting that this is Cmdr Taco's main motivation (or that it even occurred to him), but this seems like a 'yet another reason' why the mainstream media will pay attention to /. and we who post here. Being as online rights are a hotbutton topic right now it seems reasonable to assume that the 'Real Journalists'(tm) who read /. looking for tips, story ideas and carefully thought out views will find much to mine in this new feature area.
Of course they will find lots of less stimulating intellectual fare as well...
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
How about TRYFAHO (The Rights You Fantasize About Having Online).
My dad always said that "Your rights only extend to the point where they interfere with someone elses". I thought that sounded pretty reasonable. Lately, though, I've come to the conclusion that my rights only extend as far as I'm able to enforce them. It's not a pretty view of society, but it seems to fit more often.
"Conserving bandwidth by not having a sig"
Oops, I guess that didn't work.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
See title, it's not feature. I'm so impression by the continuious improvement Rod and co. bring to slashdot. First the interview idea is very innovative --be that an invention of Rod or other sites. And the /. boxes. It's got practically more boxen than netscape boxes (CowboyNeil we love you please please add a darkhorizon/AICN slashbox.) And not to mention the self-moderating system is the best I have ever seen, this thing is going to change the web.
Way to go, we appricated.
CY