My fault - Sven's name is all over the web site, and Bram's is only in one place that I saw. I guess I could have fired vim up and checked, but I'm at work where we only have the HP-UX excuse for vi.
You'll see why it's important when Microsoft sells your management a new version of W2k with "Active Collaboration" that lets you share those expense reports over your intranet (or some such whiz-bang feature) once you install W2k server. Suddenly your 60 solaris/linux servers become 10 solaris servers and 150 W2k servers. Suddenly your job satisfaction drops as you spend more time walking the server room, rebooting, and fighting viruses.
Commercial acceptance of Linux on client machines helps keep Microsoft from taking over the servers too.
Depending on your school's policies, they may have a right to anything created using their facilities. Not that this is particularly ethical, but it is possible. Hope you wrote it on your home machine:)
You're correct, I strayed from the topic of public access. I get kind of worked up about this issue:)
Given that blocking software is ostensibly meant to block sexually explicit sites, my point still
stands. In cases where a public library or other public access site is required to monitor the use of
the Internet, the filtering of a TLD will make the use of censorware unnecessary, and still leave
legitimate channels of information open.
I really hope that that would be the case. I guess I have a lot less faith in the openmindedness of some segments of the population, but I would be thrilled if things worked out the way you describe.
My theory as a kid was always that if I was smart enough to outwit my folks and see or do something that they didn't think I was old enough for, then I probably was old enough. Now that I think back that wasn't the best way to gauge maturity, but really that's the way kids will act the world over.
Hopefully kids will just keep getting smarter and more disdainful of doing things just because "that's how we've always done it" - wonderful and very cool things seem to happen when the younger generation leaps ahead.
I had heard from 11223 (you can judge for yourself whether that is a reliable source or not) that the reason for the cap is to stop some of the rampant karma whoring that has been going on. Theoretically a cap of 50 will mean there is less reason for people to maintain multiple accounts just to moderate themselves up.
Originally when the cap came into being, the code didn't allow moderation to change your karma if you were over the limit of 50. It didn't take into consideration accounts which were already over 50, which is why our accounts are stuck. As of today my account has been zapped back to 50, so either el Commandante has seen me discussing the fact, or else there is a systematic process of karma capping going on.
It's interesting that yours hasn't been zapped yet - maybe accounts with 50 < karma < 100 don't get adjusted back down to 50? Enjoy your unmoderatable +2 postings while you can, I guess.
Wow, some very interesting and informative background - thanks.
I'm not saying France == Socialism; I was already aware that Sweden is much more the socialist country. Still, when you consider relative levels of taxes and government involvement in the ordinary citizen's life, from an American perspective the French system bears many of the same attributes as other socialist countries. France != Socialism and the socialistic symptoms that are present in France may not be due to true Socialism, but from this side of the pond it is pretty clear that France is closer to many of the ideals of socialism than the U.S, and thus is considered to be "more socialist" than the U.S.
There is a karma cap. Last week moderation stopped changing my karma from its 100+ value. I even tested this theory and got moderated down without any change to my karma. This morning my karma was still at its 100+ value, a couple hours later it was at 50. There's no way I lost 50+ points in two hours, especially since as far as I know I've never lost karma points in meta-moderation. So I think there is a cap at 50 and at least some accounts have been truncated to that value. There may be some karma values greater than 50 and less than 100 which have not been reduced to 50, but they may be changed in the near future.
Signal 11, 11223, and friends all have karma=50 right now I imagine.
No, but you can fight it by bringing skinheads out into the open and showing people how ridiculous and small-minded they really are. I recommend practicing that approach with every kind of fanatic, whether they be white supremacists, religious fanatics, or oppressive governments. Guess which one is looking silly in this case.
Yes, they will give in and compromise with the French, and everything will be lovey-dovey
with both Yahoo and the government of France. But my question is, "Why?"
Actually, according to a previous/. article which I am too lazy to look up, Jerry Yang basically told the French court to stuff it. He said they would not be changing any content on Yahoo.com to please the French. I think they did change Yahoo.fr, but that's so their french sysadmins don't have to go to jail:)
I think it's reasonable for the country of which you are a citizen to expect you to follow its laws. You generally don't stop being a citizen just because you are temporarily on the soil of a different country. If you don't like the laws of your government, there are other countries that you can be a citizen of. Or you could lobby to change the laws of your country.
I'm hoping this ruling is overturned, as it's completely wrong, IMO.
Using this logic, some despotic regime would be within its rights to prosecute its citizens for
criticizing it while in the U.S.
That probably happens all the time already, but nothing bad happens to the person if the U.S. refuses to extradite such a person and grants them permanent asylum and/or citizenship.
<flamebait>
Unless you're a 6-year-old kid being dragged home to a dicatatorship - in that case, the U.S. is a big 'ol pushover.
I think you mean "associating", not "assimilating". "assimilating France with socialism" would mean that the previous poster was an active participant in the socialist takeover of France. As he or she is a "heavily-armed American", I find that unlikely.
Although I don't wish to state my opinion in such a strong manner, I do think (along with the previous poster) that the government of France is more socialist that the government of the United States. Common symptoms include much higher taxes, more government regulation, and more services provided to the citizen by the state. In some cases this is good for the country (the USA isn't perfect, that's for sure) but insofar as socialism can be blamed for the French government's position on Nazi-related items, socialism is evidently not so good for the freedom of speech in France.
...signed, a not-very-heavily-armed (but then again, the pen is mightier, right?) American.
This will
make it trivial to filter out all sites ending with ".adult" and pretty much render censorware
irrelevant.
No it wouldn't - there are plenty of people who are really unhappy about kids discovering alternate viewpoints on religion, health, sexuality, and so forth. None of those things are necessarily sexually explicit or obscene, but they are adult topics - they make adults uncomfortable and there are plenty of adults who are dead set on passing on their closed mindsets to children.
There would be one benefit - moving porn into its own TLD would force people to admit that it isn't really the sex on the Internet that bothers them, it's the openness and the freedom. Once the public has to admit that it's been living in the dark ages, maybe some attitudes will start changing.
I did notice my karma got truncated to 50 this morning, alas. But if posters can get moderated up more than 5 per story, that ceiling of 50 is going to start feeling a little limiting.
My mistake - I meant that WIPO is transferring domains away from those defendants as if they were cybersquatting, even though they were really acting in good faith.
I've seen CmdrTaco FUBAR submissions as badly as I did, but not very many:)
The fault is mine as the submitter, rather than due to one of the/. editors. It figures that after several well-thought-out but rejected submissions, this one that I dashed off in haste got accepted. Thanks for good clarifications.
What the poster is trying to say is that people who bring domain disputes get to choose which
organization hears their case. WIPO has a track record of finding for the defendent 84% of the
time, much more than competing organizations, so they are the favoured choice of people
bringing such suits.
I think that's what I said - I was trying to summarize the article rather than repeat it in the submission box. This is a complicated topic which is tough to explain in a few words.
I personally don't understand how this ludricrious idea of letting the plantiff pick the court ever
got off the ground! What kind of f*cked up legal system works this way?!?
IANAL, but this is the case for many other kinds of law - it makes more sense than letting the defendant pick I think. What would be most fair would be to only have one arbitration system (so that both plaintiffs and defendants know what they're getting into) but subject it to much closer oversight. WIPO is in the process of rewriting international trademark law without legislative approval or control as we speak, which I find very disturbing. Unless some balance and consideration for the individual/small business is brought back into the discussion, WIPO could very easily eclipse NSI and the U.S. Congress as the major threat to the Internet as we know it.
According to the email I got last night, they had 138,000 registrations, far more than the 10,000 that they expected. I didn't have any problems with my registration which I did in June.
I guess I was thinking more of spam than Gnutella ads in my original response.
They happen to be improving the visibility of their files by exploiting the network
protocols, but that's their perogative; if you're going to say that "the rules of the game" are
against that, then you'd better have a snappy explanation about why the rules of the game don't
rule out child porn.
From the perspective of a Gnutella user (although I currently am not one) content (child porn, etc) is not the issue; labeling is. This Gnutella problem is the same as web sites that use keyword spam in their META tags to increase their ranking in search engines. In some cases it sounds like flatplanet isn't even going to provide a file, just and advertisement and a fake IP address. I'm not sure that you can call them "rules" since by design there is no central Gnutella authority, but the standards of the community are on the side of fairly representing the files which you are providing.
IMHO, anyone can provide anything on Gnutella with any name they want - ultimately there's no technical way to force them to adhere to truth in labeling standards. But on the other hand it's fair for the network users to develop a trust metric to help them separate out the wheat from the chaff. If that involves discarding search results from some clients or some networks, then so be it; it's not censorship to refuse to accept traffic from questionable parts of the net.
Personal favorite: The KDE control center persists in launching in a window which is somewhat taller than my screen (800x600) but not as wide. But there's nothing in the extra height - it's all blank space; as far as I can tell it does this solely to force me to click the "maximize" button (which really decreases the window's height and increases its width) to get it all on the screen. Worse yet, the next time I fire it up I have to do it all over again.
There are some apps (XBoing for example) which are always going to be too big for 800x600, and I accept that and don't run them. But it seems like a standard GUI control panel could just launch at the size of my screen (or smaller) and use some scroll bars, or at least remember the last resizing that I did last time.
Nobody wants to censor advertisers - they are welcome to put up a web page with their advertisements for those who are interested. However, they aren't welcome to use my network to send me their content without my request (and neither are the publishers of those other types of content). Also, they shouldn't be sending me ads when I really requested music, for instance.
As a separate issue, I don't feel that the information necessarily wants to be free if it is copyrighted. It is a caricature to say that all/.ers feel that way - they are just the most vocal about their opinions.
the installs are to dificult and the troubleshooting a nightmare
unless you have some UNIX background.
I dunno, Windows seems tougher to troubleshoot to me. You never know what crud in the registry could be hosing things. At least with Linux you can grep through/etc as a last resort, not to mention reading extensive documentation, HOWTOs, newsgroups, chat rooms, and of course the code itself.
Not that Mom could do that, but she can't troubleshoot Windows either. At least for the technical user Linux is easier to deal with.
There is no such thing as a "browser" because the internet isn't
simply pointing and clicking now.
Actually, I think the reverse is true. The Internet used to have a whole lot of different kinds of interaction, but thanks to Netscape, ie, and AOL, most people now see it as all pointing, all clicking, all the time.
That said, I also would have voted for just releasing the browser first, but since I haven't contributed any code to Mozilla I'm not really entitled to bitch. I wish more people felt the same way:)
Slashdot Mirror
My fault - Sven's name is all over the web site, and Bram's is only in one place that I saw. I guess I could have fired vim up and checked, but I'm at work where we only have the HP-UX excuse for vi.
Boy, is my face red...
Ummm, Roblimo? Come in, Roblimo! Ground control to Roblimo...
Wait a minute - if you're the real roblimo, why are you user #196470? I smell a rat...
The best IDE that money can't buy: priceless
This post brought to you by the letters v and i.
You'll see why it's important when Microsoft sells your management a new version of W2k with "Active Collaboration" that lets you share those expense reports over your intranet (or some such whiz-bang feature) once you install W2k server. Suddenly your 60 solaris/linux servers become 10 solaris servers and 150 W2k servers. Suddenly your job satisfaction drops as you spend more time walking the server room, rebooting, and fighting viruses.
Commercial acceptance of Linux on client machines helps keep Microsoft from taking over the servers too.
Depending on your school's policies, they may have a right to anything created using their facilities. Not that this is particularly ethical, but it is possible. Hope you wrote it on your home machine :)
and I expect you to actually make it a link, like this: http://www.vorbis.com/. You shouldn't lambaste /. for being lazy if you are too :)
You're correct, I strayed from the topic of public access. I get kind of worked up about this issue :)
I really hope that that would be the case. I guess I have a lot less faith in the openmindedness of some segments of the population, but I would be thrilled if things worked out the way you describe.
My theory as a kid was always that if I was smart enough to outwit my folks and see or do something that they didn't think I was old enough for, then I probably was old enough. Now that I think back that wasn't the best way to gauge maturity, but really that's the way kids will act the world over.
Hopefully kids will just keep getting smarter and more disdainful of doing things just because "that's how we've always done it" - wonderful and very cool things seem to happen when the younger generation leaps ahead.
I had heard from 11223 (you can judge for yourself whether that is a reliable source or not) that the reason for the cap is to stop some of the rampant karma whoring that has been going on. Theoretically a cap of 50 will mean there is less reason for people to maintain multiple accounts just to moderate themselves up.
Originally when the cap came into being, the code didn't allow moderation to change your karma if you were over the limit of 50. It didn't take into consideration accounts which were already over 50, which is why our accounts are stuck. As of today my account has been zapped back to 50, so either el Commandante has seen me discussing the fact, or else there is a systematic process of karma capping going on.
It's interesting that yours hasn't been zapped yet - maybe accounts with 50 < karma < 100 don't get adjusted back down to 50? Enjoy your unmoderatable +2 postings while you can, I guess.
Wow, some very interesting and informative background - thanks.
I'm not saying France == Socialism; I was already aware that Sweden is much more the socialist country. Still, when you consider relative levels of taxes and government involvement in the ordinary citizen's life, from an American perspective the French system bears many of the same attributes as other socialist countries. France != Socialism and the socialistic symptoms that are present in France may not be due to true Socialism, but from this side of the pond it is pretty clear that France is closer to many of the ideals of socialism than the U.S, and thus is considered to be "more socialist" than the U.S.
There is a karma cap. Last week moderation stopped changing my karma from its 100+ value. I even tested this theory and got moderated down without any change to my karma. This morning my karma was still at its 100+ value, a couple hours later it was at 50. There's no way I lost 50+ points in two hours, especially since as far as I know I've never lost karma points in meta-moderation. So I think there is a cap at 50 and at least some accounts have been truncated to that value. There may be some karma values greater than 50 and less than 100 which have not been reduced to 50, but they may be changed in the near future.
Signal 11, 11223, and friends all have karma=50 right now I imagine.
No, but you can fight it by bringing skinheads out into the open and showing people how ridiculous and small-minded they really are. I recommend practicing that approach with every kind of fanatic, whether they be white supremacists, religious fanatics, or oppressive governments. Guess which one is looking silly in this case.
Actually, according to a previous /. article which I am too lazy to look up, Jerry Yang basically told the French court to stuff it. He said they would not be changing any content on Yahoo.com to please the French. I think they did change Yahoo.fr, but that's so their french sysadmins don't have to go to jail :)
I think it's reasonable for the country of which you are a citizen to expect you to follow its laws. You generally don't stop being a citizen just because you are temporarily on the soil of a different country. If you don't like the laws of your government, there are other countries that you can be a citizen of. Or you could lobby to change the laws of your country.
That probably happens all the time already, but nothing bad happens to the person if the U.S. refuses to extradite such a person and grants them permanent asylum and/or citizenship.
<flamebait>
Unless you're a 6-year-old kid being dragged home to a dicatatorship - in that case, the U.S. is a big 'ol pushover.
</flamebait>
I think you mean "associating", not "assimilating". "assimilating France with socialism" would mean that the previous poster was an active participant in the socialist takeover of France. As he or she is a "heavily-armed American", I find that unlikely.
Although I don't wish to state my opinion in such a strong manner, I do think (along with the previous poster) that the government of France is more socialist that the government of the United States. Common symptoms include much higher taxes, more government regulation, and more services provided to the citizen by the state. In some cases this is good for the country (the USA isn't perfect, that's for sure) but insofar as socialism can be blamed for the French government's position on Nazi-related items, socialism is evidently not so good for the freedom of speech in France.
...signed, a not-very-heavily-armed (but then again, the pen is mightier, right?) American.
No it wouldn't - there are plenty of people who are really unhappy about kids discovering alternate viewpoints on religion, health, sexuality, and so forth. None of those things are necessarily sexually explicit or obscene, but they are adult topics - they make adults uncomfortable and there are plenty of adults who are dead set on passing on their closed mindsets to children.
There would be one benefit - moving porn into its own TLD would force people to admit that it isn't really the sex on the Internet that bothers them, it's the openness and the freedom. Once the public has to admit that it's been living in the dark ages, maybe some attitudes will start changing.
Posts can go higher than 5? Where?
I did notice my karma got truncated to 50 this morning, alas. But if posters can get moderated up more than 5 per story, that ceiling of 50 is going to start feeling a little limiting.
My mistake - I meant that WIPO is transferring domains away from those defendants as if they were cybersquatting, even though they were really acting in good faith.
I've seen CmdrTaco FUBAR submissions as badly as I did, but not very many :)
The fault is mine as the submitter, rather than due to one of the /. editors. It figures that after several well-thought-out but rejected submissions, this one that I dashed off in haste got accepted. Thanks for good clarifications.
I think that's what I said - I was trying to summarize the article rather than repeat it in the submission box. This is a complicated topic which is tough to explain in a few words.
IANAL, but this is the case for many other kinds of law - it makes more sense than letting the defendant pick I think. What would be most fair would be to only have one arbitration system (so that both plaintiffs and defendants know what they're getting into) but subject it to much closer oversight. WIPO is in the process of rewriting international trademark law without legislative approval or control as we speak, which I find very disturbing. Unless some balance and consideration for the individual/small business is brought back into the discussion, WIPO could very easily eclipse NSI and the U.S. Congress as the major threat to the Internet as we know it.
CRAP! Earlier this morning karma = some large number, now karma = 50. Dagnabbit.
According to the email I got last night, they had 138,000 registrations, far more than the 10,000 that they expected. I didn't have any problems with my registration which I did in June.
I guess I was thinking more of spam than Gnutella ads in my original response.
From the perspective of a Gnutella user (although I currently am not one) content (child porn, etc) is not the issue; labeling is. This Gnutella problem is the same as web sites that use keyword spam in their META tags to increase their ranking in search engines. In some cases it sounds like flatplanet isn't even going to provide a file, just and advertisement and a fake IP address. I'm not sure that you can call them "rules" since by design there is no central Gnutella authority, but the standards of the community are on the side of fairly representing the files which you are providing.
IMHO, anyone can provide anything on Gnutella with any name they want - ultimately there's no technical way to force them to adhere to truth in labeling standards. But on the other hand it's fair for the network users to develop a trust metric to help them separate out the wheat from the chaff. If that involves discarding search results from some clients or some networks, then so be it; it's not censorship to refuse to accept traffic from questionable parts of the net.
Personal favorite: The KDE control center persists in launching in a window which is somewhat taller than my screen (800x600) but not as wide. But there's nothing in the extra height - it's all blank space; as far as I can tell it does this solely to force me to click the "maximize" button (which really decreases the window's height and increases its width) to get it all on the screen. Worse yet, the next time I fire it up I have to do it all over again.
There are some apps (XBoing for example) which are always going to be too big for 800x600, and I accept that and don't run them. But it seems like a standard GUI control panel could just launch at the size of my screen (or smaller) and use some scroll bars, or at least remember the last resizing that I did last time.
Nobody wants to censor advertisers - they are welcome to put up a web page with their advertisements for those who are interested. However, they aren't welcome to use my network to send me their content without my request (and neither are the publishers of those other types of content). Also, they shouldn't be sending me ads when I really requested music, for instance.
As a separate issue, I don't feel that the information necessarily wants to be free if it is copyrighted. It is a caricature to say that all /.ers feel that way - they are just the most vocal about their opinions.
I dunno, Windows seems tougher to troubleshoot to me. You never know what crud in the registry could be hosing things. At least with Linux you can grep through /etc as a last resort, not to mention reading extensive documentation, HOWTOs, newsgroups, chat rooms, and of course the code itself.
Not that Mom could do that, but she can't troubleshoot Windows either. At least for the technical user Linux is easier to deal with.
Actually, I think the reverse is true. The Internet used to have a whole lot of different kinds of interaction, but thanks to Netscape, ie, and AOL, most people now see it as all pointing, all clicking, all the time.
That said, I also would have voted for just releasing the browser first, but since I haven't contributed any code to Mozilla I'm not really entitled to bitch. I wish more people felt the same way :)