.. run 'em through Babelfish twice. That might make them different enough to be legal:
SYMPTOMS
If you are 5,0 years old basic visual current in mode of environment of development of SDI and
have a form with a menu, StartupPosition of the form will be changed into " 0 handbooks " when the form is carried out. This problem occurs only if the form has a menu.
CAUSE
menus are added to the form with the turn-around time, which causes a form gives to the coast the event to occur. The event to give to the coast causes StartupPosition with the change incorrectly.
RESOLUTION
the only resolution available at this time must
not carry out basic visual in mode of SDI. Microsoft MODE confirmed this to be an anomaly in the products of Microsoft enumerated at the beginning of this article. We seek this anomaly and will announce new information here in the base of knowledge of Microsoft while it becomes available.
Of course, you might also run it through the Dialectizer:
If you are runnigg Bisual Basic 5.0 in SDI Debelopmin Enbironmin mode 'n habe a f'm wid a menu, the, uh uh uh, form's StartupPosishun will be changid to "0- Manual" when the, uh uh uh, form is run...
"Web searching made simple.[TM] Exclusively for locating commercial, professional, technical and academic information, products and services."
Perhaps a better slogan would be "Turning your web into a TV set." By filtering what this guy calls crap, he is excluding some of the best information repositories from his index. It is the non-commercial, private sites that are interesting for end-users (and often hard-to-find). If I want to buy stuff, there's already lots of portals for me to choose from.
As I'm testing this thing for missing sites, I have a hard time finding one that is listed. Slashdot, RIAA, no relevant hits. Microsoft, the first relevant hit somewhere at the bottom: "http://www.microsoft.com/office/outlook". The result list doesn't have ratings, doesn't show URLs in output either. So what is it exactly that took you two years? Ah, "filtering the crap", and adding the descriptions, I suppose. Thanks, but no thanks. If this wasn't December, I'd think this is an April Fool's joke.
The main problem I have with Mozilla is that it is a huge memory-eater. Whereas my Netscape 4.7 eats 12-20 MB with 10 windows open, Mozilla right now eats 32 MB, with a single window open. At startup, it "only" takes up 20 MB, but once you open and close a few windows, it's up at 32. There are some huge leaks in there.
It is actually a pretty accepted theory that there have once been water oceans on Mars, the interesting question, however, is: Where did all the water go? It doesn't seem so unlikely that Mars may have seas or even oceans under the surface, just like Europe. If we don't go there, we will never know.
Best of all, this kind of/. promotion is entirely free, and it probably gets a lot of more clicks than the banners at the top of the page. If I were a Slashdot advertiser, I'd ask for some "Anonymous Coward" stories per month..
ICANN is there to help the rich get richer, not to introduce "little-man" TLDs. The whole new-TLD-business was an ebay-style auction, and the registrars who would bring the most money to ICANN won.
The result is that large, evil corporations will now have their own TLDs, which is supposed to separate them from the "unprofessional" non- or semi-commercial parts of the web.
The normal users, however, might actually see things differently: They might prefer the non-biz, non-pro parts of the web. I for one would surely not like to see slashdot.biz.
Well, at least now we know why Esther Dyson was at this year's Bilderberg meeting.
--
Let me use this opportunity ..
on
Scour is Dead
·
· Score: 5
.. for some blatant self-promotion.
infoAnarchy reports on the many, many alternatives to Scour & Napster, be it distributed or centralized. It uses the K5 site engine, meaning anyone can submit stories and moderate submissions.
In our Resources section, you can get an overview of the many available file sharing tools. Here's the ones I would recommend:
One of the best alternative feature-wise is Filetopia (its userbase is relatively small).
If you like Napster, get Napigator. It allows you to connect to OpenNap servers where any file type can be shared (and which are not concerned by any changes in Napster's business model).
A good alternative to the Windows Napster client is FileNavigator.
Recently reborn: CuteMX, has a lot of features but requires IE.
Somewhat closer to Gnutella, with distributed servers: DirectConnect
I'm not a US citizen, but the following would be of interest to me:
What steps need to be taken to battle child pornography on the Internet, if any? Do existing laws suffice or are new ones necessary?
Do adults have a right to pornography, and if yes, how - especially on the Internet - should this right be protected while preventing minors from accessing pornography? Or shouldn't minors be prevented from access to pornography?
In your opinion, does pornography cause crime?
Is it in the interest of the US to advocate contraception instead of abstinence, or vice versa?
If a 11-year-old touches a 7-year-old sexually, is he a child molester? Should he be registered? Should he spend time in jail?
Do you believe in the existence of satanic ritual child abuse?
Off-topic:
What is your position in the creationism / evolution debate? Should creationism / evolution theory be taught in public schools?
Thanks for debunking some of the popular media myths. I think what we are witnessing is an increasing polarization of the American culture: The one half fears the Internet, thinking it "darkens" our souls, and gets isolated in a world of prefabricated standard mass media stupidity; teaching their children "traditional" values about pleasure, aggression, crime and punishment. The other half enjoys the new freedoms the Net gives us, they try to educate themselves and their children about it, and they prefer alternative news sources to "official channels". They have no problem with pornography and sexuality, and they see violent computer games as a good outlet for aggression.
I would not be surprised if we would find more violent offenders in the former group, given this research. The key question for the future will be which side wins. And it's not like the progressive side always wins. Remember the Dark Ages.
Finally, a congressman with a clue. This is the same guy who also introduced the "Music Owners Listening Rights" legislation, which would make services like my.mp3.com legal. I hope he succeeds in both cases.
Actually, the submitter is the CEO of Rocksoft and the text is the readme from the Veracity website. But since it's free as in speech, I don't have any problem with blatant advertising.
The strategy here is simple. MP3Board was sued by the RIAA, which also includes Time Warner. So now MP3B sues AOL (merging with TW) in order to outline their hypocrisy for supporting Gnutella while at the same time prosecuting other file sharing systems.
If AOL/TW is not guilty for Gnutella, they would be in an awkward position against MP3Board.com who did essentially the same thing (including providing access to the GnutellaNet).
Of course if AOL loses, MP3Board.com is screwed. If I were them, I'd use the cheapest lawyers and try to get this to the Supreme Court, trying hard to lose in every round:-)
The problem is what has already been discussed numerous times here on Slashdot: That by installing filters, you also limit speech outside the bounds of the respective ISP's terms of use. The First Amendmend is touched when laws require the ISP to install such filters. I presume that
"As a semi-public service, we cannot allow ourselves to display porn, since a junior high school is across the street."
refers to a law (local, state or federal) that prohibits the display of pornography within a certain radius of schools, kindergardens etc. We have similar laws concerning prostitution in Germany.
Now, if the law requires to install filters in Internet access near schools, this is most certainly a First Amendment issue.
If you can, refuse to do it. I know that's not very helpful, but if you believe so firmly in freedom of speech, you should stand up when it is challenged. Point them to the First Amendment.
If active resistance not an option for you, create a pseudo-working list that contains rare and specific phrases, demonstrate it with one or two carefully selected sites, and if someone tells you that it doesn't work, point them to Peacefire.
First, Gnutella doesn't develop at an impressive pace at all. There are many clients, but they are all still working with the 0.4 protocol, which is completely flawed (which is why Gnutella is unusable now).
Napster? The development they are most concerned with is of a legal nature.
There are two serious competitors: MojoNation and Blocks. And they both have to deal with the problems FreeNet deals with now.
The problems are far less trivial you think. On the one hand, you want information to be as dislocal as possible, on the other hand, you want to "localize" (search) the information on the network. An individual host has no idea which keys it is storing (at least in theory), it doesn't know their names (only their hashes) nor does it know the actual content (which is encrypted). So you can't simply say "Server X, tell me what you're storing".
Which is why meta-networks may be necessary, distributed search engines similar to AltaVista, but of a distributed nature. Again a new challenge, perhaps not less complex than FreeNet iself.
So don't trivialize. The FreeNet team is working very hard (just look at their development traffic), but they can't do wonders.
you're right in that the idea of reserved keyspaces makes announcements easier to implement. I hadn't heard of that before the interview.
Together with a searchable keyspace, it should be possible to implement a usenet-like announcement network in such a framework, which would, however, still lack a mechanism to attach ratings to certain keys and persons. Only in combination with these becomes the announcement network (or rather, in this case, the network of announcement keyspaces), a powerful tool: Person X (who has a nickname on FreeNet) has subscribed to announcement channel Y and rated this channel as "excellent". Because I trust person X, I can now subscribe to channel Y too, instead of channel Z, which has been rated by person X as "SPAM-Channel, run by PR company".
Only with such a distributed, pseudonymous announcement & rating system, possibly (and preferably) implemented within the existing FreeNet framework, will it be possible to make FreeNet truly independent of outside sources (which the WWW is, in fact, not).
It is true, dropping unpopular information is a problem if the definition of popularity comes from outside sources. Here's an excerpt of a paper I have written on this problem:
1) Announcements
In order to search for something, people have to know it. Right now, FreeNet only allows you to request a key you know, but even if you could search all FreeNet nodes, this would not help much.
Because of this, FreeNet can only _extend_ other media, and not at all replace them. Because there are no broadcasts, and no standards of quality. (Don't be angered by this part of the sentence -- having standards of quality does not mean that you censor stuff, but it means that you make it possible to filter it on an individual basis.)
Let's take a simple analogy: A baby that is born into this world sees and learns from various sources. It is constantly bombarded with information ("broadcasts"). Only on the basis of the outside information it receives, it can actually formulate and eventually ask questions about the world it lives in ("search/request").
But let's stretch this analogy a bit. Imagine the baby grows up to a kid and he does not have a TV, he does not have many friends, he does not have high level education. The kid does however have Internet access, but it is only limited to FreeNet (once the final version of FreeNet has been released, the complete World Wide Web, Usenet, IRC etc. have been abandoned because they suck in comparison).
Now what questions is the kid supposed to ask? What is he supposed to look for? How should he find out?
Of course, the real life situation is much different. There are still TV & Co. and people will use FreeNet to find stuff they have heard about somewhere else. This is the Napster situation: They claim to promote new artists, but how should anyone find out about new artists if all that Napster allows is file searches (and chat)?
As we know, the other places where people get their information on "what to search" are mostly non-anonymous, often highly centralized and can be censored easily. Imagine there are top secret documents that show the cooperation between the N*S*A and Micro$oft, and someone has managed to get a hold of them. Now he puts them on FreeNet, names the key/secret/nsams.txt and waits for people to leech them.
But why should anyone search for them in the first place?
Our current key servers are in fact a way of announcing new information put on FreeNet, but of course they are no real solution---for reasons everyone knows.
So I think it is quite irrefutably true that we need a system of announcing new keys, and it must be a distributed and an anonymous one. Only if this is the case, FreeNet can indeed replace most common Internet applications.
2) Ratings
Before we talk about the technical realization of announcements, let us not forget another important issue. Let us assume the claimed relationship between No Such Agency and Redmond/WA is a fraud made up to denounce the great applications Uncle Steve & Uncle Bill produce. As true Microslaves, we want to let the world know. According to what I call "old thinking", we do this: We create a new announcement called "NEWS: Microsoft story a hoax! --- read here" and broadcast it.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is like the people on Gnutella who used the search monitor that displays incoming results to chat. This is like the virus warnings on Usenet that are automatically sent out by bots browsing the groups. It works, but it's not elegant. It's a workaround.
I like Slashdot. [Slashdot explanation omitted]
Basically, Slashdot has found a solution to a common problem, and that's one of the reasons for their huge success. When I see a story that interests me and I have little time, I set my threshold to "4 or 5" and browse. And I often find true gems in there without much searching. Sometimes good laughs, too.
But of course Slashdot suffers from the same problems all websites have, it's censorable. Just recently Microsoft has demanded that Slashdot should censor (delete) comments of some visitors who talked about and linked to the Microsoft Kerberos specifications. Slashdot hasn't given in, but under certain circumstances, they have to, and they will. On the other hand, the Kerberos specifications have shown up on FreeNet just the same day. (The only reason I know this is because of the keyservers, which are, of course, censorable as well.)
The rating problem is absolutely essential for the future of information exchange on the net. This sentence is so important that I repeat it here: The rating problem is absolutely essential for the future of information exchange on the net. But it is not necessary in the "old world", and as most people apply "old thinking" to the "new world", they often forget the importance of ratings.
In the example above (not Kerberos, the Microsoft story) the "new thinking" solution would be to attach rating entries to the announcement. User 1 could say: "Score -1: Fraud", user 2 could say: "Score 0: Redundant", user 3 could say: "Score 2: Funny".
Furthermore, one or more ratings could be attached to each rating, and to the rating of the rating.
Of course, that alone doesn't do the trick. What if a religious zealot posts some crazy text on the coming apocalypse, and many religious zealots agree with him and rate it up, just by means of their large numbers (or even generate multiple ratings per user)? We need to be able to filter the ratings.
We need nicknames.
Don't scream. We really need them. They are truly anonymous. Without them, we're lost in the information jungle. But with them, we choose our guides, everyone by himself, and stick to them. We filter the announcements by the opinions of the people who mostly share our own opinion. Filtering doesn't necessarily mean hiding, it can also mean (like with killfiles) marking an announcement read, etc.
The option must be given for both announcements and ratings, but it should only be mandatory for ratings. I have thought about giving the option of posting announcements completely without any UID, but that creates a LOT of problems. It's possible, however, to replace the nick with a random number/letter combination if this is desired by the user. (Reason: You may accidentally give away your nick name and thus reveal the identity behind all of your files, although not legally.)
Once we have announcements with optional nicknames, and ratings with mandatory nicknames, all in a nested structure if desired, we can do all sorts of filtering of incoming broadcasts. We can
display only announcements from a list of known nicks
display only announcements that have ratings attached to them (these might trickle in later)
display only announcements with positive ratings from a certain author
display only announcements that have an overall positive score
etc.
display all parentless children (ratings to which we don't have any parent announcements)
[discussion of possible implementation omitted]
5) Random thoughts
Should FreeNet indeed allow users to express their opinion uncensored and share all kinds of information freely, and, at the same time, read and enjoy interesting information from other people without having to resort to other media to find out what IS interesting, it is a new evolutionary step in the history of mankind.
This is no exaggeration. There are good books on how the masses can be controlled and influenced using corporate mass media, and AOL & M$ would surely like the Internet to work the same way. They would just love to track every move you make and to supply you with totally "customized" "information" (i.e. commercials, PR). They will kindly ask you for your feedback after every story they send you, and collect this data to improve their ability to influence YOU -- of course, all of this will be semi-automatic. [Tell you a secret: Most of this is already true to some degree anyway.]
But with FreeNet it's totally different. There is no central authority, and people actually have to think by themselves. They have to build their own taste, and train their ability to express their thoughts. They have to make rational choices. Good ideas may have a chance to spread naturally. And there are no limits whatsoever to what you may think and express.
I don't call it a revolution, because if all goes well, no blood will be spilt. But it is a new evolutionary step, from all the different mass media we had in the past to something new, something exciting, no longer "mass media" but rather "human media".
Now let's be a bit crazy and think what would be possible if such a system existed. We could extend it to make anonymous, quick and easy micro- and macropayments possible! I have absolutely no clue how this could -- legally and technically -- work, because we somehow need to get the real money into the system. OTOH, we might create our own anonymous currency and try to convince others to accept it. Yeah, I know it's crazy. But I warned you.
When this would be the case, all kinds of information exchange could be done on FreeNet. Two kinds of payment would be possible: One, the initial release of information after a certain amount has been paid in advance by many users, two, the voluntary payment for information already received.
And I am absolutely sure that in the next decades, ever larger parts of our economy will be entirely based on information exchange. I don't want to speculate about nanotechnology or other future tech. here, but it is clear that increasing automatization changes our focus. We need to create viable concepts of making money from information without restraining its distribution. So how do we open the door to the new economy of ideas?
FreeNet is the key. Let's forge it.
(Note that I didn't know about MojoNation when I wrote this, which also sounds very interesting, and does want to implement a rating system.)
immoral is a judgment call, it's not up to you to decide for the author, that is THERE right
If you don't want your thoughts to be spread, don't speak them. The idea that you have the right to control your ideas and creations is absurd, and it is a "right" that could only be exercised in an era of few-to-many communications. That era is over now, and that's a very, very good thing. Of course, some people are always trying to pull us back into the Dark Ages.
Slashdot Mirror
(English-to-French, French-to-English of http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q 177/0/89.ASP.)
Of course, you might also run it through the Dialectizer:
--
Perhaps a better slogan would be "Turning your web into a TV set." By filtering what this guy calls crap, he is excluding some of the best information repositories from his index. It is the non-commercial, private sites that are interesting for end-users (and often hard-to-find). If I want to buy stuff, there's already lots of portals for me to choose from.
As I'm testing this thing for missing sites, I have a hard time finding one that is listed. Slashdot, RIAA, no relevant hits. Microsoft, the first relevant hit somewhere at the bottom: "http://www.microsoft.com/office/outlook". The result list doesn't have ratings, doesn't show URLs in output either. So what is it exactly that took you two years? Ah, "filtering the crap", and adding the descriptions, I suppose. Thanks, but no thanks. If this wasn't December, I'd think this is an April Fool's joke.
I think we have a potential fucked company here.
--
--
--
--
The result is that large, evil corporations will now have their own TLDs, which is supposed to separate them from the "unprofessional" non- or semi-commercial parts of the web.
The normal users, however, might actually see things differently: They might prefer the non-biz, non-pro parts of the web. I for one would surely not like to see slashdot.biz.
Well, at least now we know why Esther Dyson was at this year's Bilderberg meeting.
--
infoAnarchy reports on the many, many alternatives to Scour & Napster, be it distributed or centralized. It uses the K5 site engine, meaning anyone can submit stories and moderate submissions.
In our Resources section, you can get an overview of the many available file sharing tools. Here's the ones I would recommend:
But again, please come visit us at iA to find out about the best new tools. We know our stuff.
File sharing will never die.
--
--
--
Off-topic:
Pick what you like, if any.
--
--
I would not be surprised if we would find more violent offenders in the former group, given this research. The key question for the future will be which side wins. And it's not like the progressive side always wins. Remember the Dark Ages.
--
--
--
--
--
--
If AOL/TW is not guilty for Gnutella, they would be in an awkward position against MP3Board.com who did essentially the same thing (including providing access to the GnutellaNet).
Of course if AOL loses, MP3Board.com is screwed. If I were them, I'd use the cheapest lawyers and try to get this to the Supreme Court, trying hard to lose in every round :-)
See http://www.infoanarchy.org for daily news on file-sharing & related issues.
--
The problem is what has already been discussed numerous times here on Slashdot: That by installing filters, you also limit speech outside the bounds of the respective ISP's terms of use. The First Amendmend is touched when laws require the ISP to install such filters. I presume that
"As a semi-public service, we cannot allow ourselves to display porn, since a junior high school is across the street."
refers to a law (local, state or federal) that prohibits the display of pornography within a certain radius of schools, kindergardens etc. We have similar laws concerning prostitution in Germany.
Now, if the law requires to install filters in Internet access near schools, this is most certainly a First Amendment issue.
--
If active resistance not an option for you, create a pseudo-working list that contains rare and specific phrases, demonstrate it with one or two carefully selected sites, and if someone tells you that it doesn't work, point them to Peacefire.
--
Napster? The development they are most concerned with is of a legal nature.
There are two serious competitors: MojoNation and Blocks. And they both have to deal with the problems FreeNet deals with now.
The problems are far less trivial you think. On the one hand, you want information to be as dislocal as possible, on the other hand, you want to "localize" (search) the information on the network. An individual host has no idea which keys it is storing (at least in theory), it doesn't know their names (only their hashes) nor does it know the actual content (which is encrypted). So you can't simply say "Server X, tell me what you're storing".
Which is why meta-networks may be necessary, distributed search engines similar to AltaVista, but of a distributed nature. Again a new challenge, perhaps not less complex than FreeNet iself.
So don't trivialize. The FreeNet team is working very hard (just look at their development traffic), but they can't do wonders.
--
you're right in that the idea of reserved keyspaces makes announcements easier to implement. I hadn't heard of that before the interview.
Together with a searchable keyspace, it should be possible to implement a usenet-like announcement network in such a framework, which would, however, still lack a mechanism to attach ratings to certain keys and persons. Only in combination with these becomes the announcement network (or rather, in this case, the network of announcement keyspaces), a powerful tool: Person X (who has a nickname on FreeNet) has subscribed to announcement channel Y and rated this channel as "excellent". Because I trust person X, I can now subscribe to channel Y too, instead of channel Z, which has been rated by person X as "SPAM-Channel, run by PR company".
Only with such a distributed, pseudonymous announcement & rating system, possibly (and preferably) implemented within the existing FreeNet framework, will it be possible to make FreeNet truly independent of outside sources (which the WWW is, in fact, not).
--
(Note that I didn't know about MojoNation when I wrote this, which also sounds very interesting, and does want to implement a rating system.)
--
If you don't want your thoughts to be spread, don't speak them. The idea that you have the right to control your ideas and creations is absurd, and it is a "right" that could only be exercised in an era of few-to-many communications. That era is over now, and that's a very, very good thing. Of course, some people are always trying to pull us back into the Dark Ages.
--
Yes, but it is not immoral. Sometimes laws have to change. And more often than not it is necessary to break them in order to change them.
--