Yes, Google is fast at finding sites that other people think are important. Usually I find that these sites really are what I'm looking for (and google is often more useful than even my own bookmarks).
But on the other hand it's important to remember that there are times when you want to find things that are obscure and still relatively "undiscovered". Sticking together a boolean query using altavista's "advanced" search is still the best solution for problems like this, as far as I know.
If everyone got in the habit of checking google first, it'll get awfully hard for new sites to get established.
My recommendation: if you're looking for something fast, try google first.
If you're writing a webpage on a certain subject, and you want to add a listing of related links, use altavista first.
(And what's going to happen when it sinks in that the act of creating a link is effectively a vote to rank a site higher? There's going to be an explosion of some fairly mindless link-farming...)
Let's try another example: remember the O'Reilley interview a little while back? They heard a bunch of wonderful things about some NT based web tools, and they went "Well, let's not be blinded by ideology on this", and then they discovered that the NT "solution" was grossly oversold. Now they've backed away from it and they're going with open source. A little commitment to "ideology" in this case would have saved them a lot of pain.
The point of all the ideological debate is not adherance to a religion for the sake of the religion, the point is to try and discover a general set of principles (or at least some rules of thumb) that might save you from making some mistakes. It's a lot of work to try and carefully evaluate every option. Maybe it's flat out impossible: you can't develop a project using every combination of available software before deciding which is best. You *have* to "reduce your choices" somehow. So what shortcuts are you going to use?
It's looking like "stay away from proprietary software if you can" is a pretty good shortcut.
I think there may be a problem with this analysis in that a WYSIWIG system has to have some way of interpreting "what you see" and turning it into the coding that you get.
This amounts to scanning an image an converting it into a logical structure, which is, as they say, non-trivial.
Look at what happens if you feed a typical HTML file into a WYSIWIG editor, edit it a little, and then try and look at it in a text editor again. Often the WYSIWIG editing generates so much additional, spurious coding that the HTML file has become unreadable to a human being.
So you can't just call WYSIWIG "realtime preview", because it's a one-way trip through that lens. You have to give up control over the logical structure, and hope that the "what you see" will turn out to be "what you want".
Many people here are skeptical about the security of an over-the-internet voting scheme. Funny, because the problems strike me as real, but fixible. And the current voting systems are currently subject to abuse, and badly in need of some sort of fix.
Not too long ago there was a vote on public funding of a sports stadium in San Francisco, where there was clearly an attempt made at rigging the result. There is no question about whether the election was dirty, the only question is *how* dirty it was, i.e. were the dirty votes enough to swing the (evidentally quite close) election. There was funny stuff like election watchers reading people's ballots, boxes of returns that took hours to get from the polls to the counting site, "special" poling sites opened in neighborhoods likely to be in favor of the stadium and so on. Someone was even caught voting twice... the DA (known to be pro-stadium) declined to prosecute.
With many apologies to the sane people in the audience, I'll take the red bait this time:
bugg wrote:
> with a license like the GPL, its closer to > communist
The GPL and communism have very little to do with each other, unless you're the kind of person who can only handle two alternatives (if it's not friendly to old fashioned, money-grubbing closed-source software companies, then it must be... communist!).
Very few people (including folks like myself with a libertarian bent) think that freedom needs to be absolute (e.g. "I don't see how you can call any society where you're not free to rape, murder, pillage a *free* society.") We buy into restrictions on individuals that are supposed to help guarantee everyone's freedom.
Hence, the GPL.
When possible, I try and avoid getting involved with BSD liscened projects, because there's too much danger of closed, proprietary forks. Software development is a social process, and maintaining the momentum of the project is all important.
I've been looking at postgresql lately, and if you look at the history of that project, the code base has been through *two* proprietary forks. If it weren't for this kind of nonsense bleeding energy out of the project, it might be as good as Oracle by now.
"My housemates and I decided to have a hacking party. We do this every month or so. Since we have a network of PCs running Unix at home, it is easy to get lots of people programming together. We couldn't decide what to build so I said `Well, we all like science fiction novels. So let's build a system where we type in the names of the books that we like and a rating. Then the system can grind over the database and figure out what books to suggest.'"
And?
"It took us the whole afternoon, but we got it to the point where it would notice that I liked Books A, B, and C but hadn't read Book D, which other people who liked A, B, and C had liked. So that was suggested for me. We also got it to notice if you and I had opposite tastes and suppress your recommendations."
This was back in 1994. Anne and her friends had, in one afternoon, completed virtually the entire annual research agenda of at least two MIT professors (neither in my department, I'm relieved to note).
(... And if you all had any sense you quit reading this slashdot crap until you'd finished reading this book. It's all available on-line, but it's definitely worth buying a hardcopy of it.)
Anyway, as for Firefly... everyone I know thought it was ridiculous. They played with it in the same way people play with bablefish, just to laugh at how stupid the results were. Microsoft bought it? Cool... I hope they buy lots of other useless companies. They shut it down? Too bad, it would be better if they wasted more money on it. Maybe passport will help burn some of their cash.
That is not a copyright violation, that's a quotation, and it's covered under the doctrine of "fair use".
(And it sure would be nice if the boundaries of fair use were outlined for audio samples as well as it is for literary quotes and for fragments of sheet music... but for that to happen, the big guys would have to admit that they don't absolutely control every last little bit of every byte in existance, and in the meantime you can make money selling "sample rights" to the timid &/or the ignorant with too much money on their hands.)
Never forget the possibility that upper management has too much time (and cash) on their hands.
Mergers/buyouts/etc often have no apparent logical purpose, and quite often no one wins on them. But it makes the big guys feel bigger when they get to cut some deals.
Okay, so "Behind Blue Eyes" and "Baba O'Reilley" are certainly very good (though I've heard them so many times, there's no way I can judge their degree of greatness anymore). There was some other really good material from the "Lifehouse" project that appeared on the nearly forgotten Townsend solo album "Who Came First?". This is a weird album in a lot of ways: On the down side, the production of it seems kind of flat somehow (I suspect they tried to get by with too many studio overdub tricks, and the absence of the rest of the Who really shows). But on the plus side, some of the songs are amazing, in particular "Nothing is Everything", a great nihilistic/existentialist anthem. (This song makes a great contrast to the more religious/spiritual "Pavardigar" on the flip side).
There is also a not-very-exciting version of "Pure and Easy", which as I remember it was also supposed to be a "Lifehouse" song... if you add all of these up, it doesn't leave a lot of room for Townsend to write new material... (There will also be previously unheard songs written and performed by Townshend.). This means he must of had to *cut* something, and that definitely doesn't sound good to me.
And yeah, the inclusion of "The Grid" stuff makes it sound to me like there really is some revisionism going on here. It's not completely impossible that Townsend could have come up with a VR-like scenario in the early 70s, but I really doubt it. It seems much more likely that he's lifting elements from his more recent "Psychoderelict" project.
And personally, I thought "Psychoderelict" wasn't great, but certainly wasn't awful. Maybe it didn't quite add up to anything, but he was playing around with a bunch of interesting elements. For example, witches tits.
(And personally, my favorite drummer these days is Gino Robair -- formerly of the Splatter Trio. If you think Keith Moon was energetic and sloppy, you should try and catch Gino live some time...)
As long as we're on the topic of the Redhat portal, here's a subject I think is interesting. Redhat has been selectively filtering the stories they pass on from slashdot. As I write this, when I look at slashdot, the top story is: "Red Hat IPO Surprise".
If I look at www.redhat.com, the top story in their Slashdot box is "Be Inc. IPO launched"
When I click through to redhat's filtered version of slashdot, and compare it to slashdot, I see that there's another missing story also: "Red Hat Portal Picking up Steam"
I'm sure if you asked them about it, Redhat would tell you "our lawyer's made us do it", and I would *hope* that this filter is going to be dropped after the IPO... but still, things like this make me a little uneasy.
I'd say that a "portal" site is designed to encourage people to make it the default that your browser starts up with.
Netscape.com was the first real "portal", because most people left the default as it was shipped. Then Netscape invented their "Net-Center" concept, and all of a sudden yahoo.com became the number one web site, as users fled from that grossly over-complicated monstrosity.
No one seems to have learned this lesson, however, and web "designers" the world over think that they're going to get lots more eyeballs if their page takes ten minutes to load on a slow modem.
Redhat's site went from bad to worse on their last re-design. I don't have high hopes for the next one.
(The feature that they *really* need is a searchable archive of the redhat mailing lists. This has been busted for years.)
Yeah, SF can be studied seriously, just like anything can be studied seriously. There is the question as to why you would want a degree in SF (skipping the whole issue of why you would want a degree in anything...). You might be interested in:
training in becoming an SF writer
developing scenarios of plausible futures
special effects techniques
social and historical significance of SF
If you actually read the BBC article, the focus of this degree sounds like it's mostly about training students to be science teachers. They're supposed to learn how to use SF as a way of focusing the student's attention.
It does seem to be a little extreme to focus an entire 4 year degree on this: calling it a degree in "science fiction" seems like a marketing technique for attracting undergrads. If you actually wanted to work in this field, wouldn't you want a degree in "science education" or something?
But that said, it isn't the stupidiest idea in the world. For example, I probably learned more about tidal forces reading Larry Niven's story "Neutron Star", in spite of it's innaccuracies, than in any of the introductary science texts I'd seen (all of which seem to completely mangle the issue). It's often occured to me that if I were teaching kids earth science I'd take an approach like "Now, what would our planet be like if it's axis weren't tilted? What if it were tilted 90 degrees? What if the orbit was smaller or larger? What if the moon were a different size?" There's no question in my mind that Hal Clement must have been one of the greatest science teachers ever.
Not that any of this matters really, since American kids don't want to study "hard stuff" like the sciences, and there appears to be a glut of scientists and engineers on the market, and if we run out of them we can always buy some more from China or India.
don't control the wrong parameter
on
Hacker's Diet
·
· Score: 1
I've got one, and only one thing to say on this subject: don't control the wrong parameter. Being in good shape doesn't mean losing weight (it might mean gaining weight). It might make more sense to think about increasing your body density (you may want to reduce fat and gain muscle). Lacking a large tank of water, it isn't all that easy to measure your body's volume, but this doesn't justify the endless obession about "weight" just because that's easy to measure.
You'd be better off throwing away the scale, and using a tape measure. Or even better, measure the number of miles you can walk/run/bike (and preferably do it about three times a week).
> When the Bill of Rights was framed, it was > easy for a citizen to arm himself with > weapons equal to that of the army.
Actually, I think a gun was an expensive piece of hardware back then, and if you believe the article in the current issue of The Economist, not many people had them.
> If the Constitution were being followed > today, any citizen could legally own > military weapons capable of stopping an M1 > or an AH-64.
Motivated guerillas, fighting on their home territory, can do a lot with "inferior" technology. Think about the Vietnam war.
(By the way, traditionally guerillas use Molotov cocktails against tanks. Though personally, if I were up against M-1 tanks, I would consider strategies like, say, throwing some sand in the treads.)
> Supposedly, that is not allowed > since without military weapons nobody can > blow up a building in Oklahoma.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. The federal building in Oklahoma was blown up with a bomb made from something like 55 gallon drums of oil and fertilizer mixed together.
Yes, spam is evil, and no I will not be crying any tears for the poor spammer who got booted from their ISP.
But a few thoughts:
(1) If nettiquette becomes law, then it won't be nettiquette any more. The principles of nettiquette are not always precisely defined, because there's no reason they should be: they're just customary rules of thumb.
(A favorite example: are you allowed to publically post email that was sent privately to you? This is usually a rude thing to do, but I would argue that there are exceptions. What if it was a death threat?)
(2) If you look at the terms agreements ISPs are offering these days, they are all decidely one-sided. They seem to run something like: "We guarantee nothing, you agree not to post anything that will violate any laws or otherwise offend a little old lady from Passadena, if you behave inappropriately we will yank your service, we get to decide what's inappropriate, and we may change this agreement without notice but you still have to follow it."
The inspiration for these agreements is largerly the necessity of dealing with spammers at the ISP level, but this seems to have resulted in a world full of spineless ISPs, ready to roll over at the first ominous legal letter they receive.
What good is a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech if your wire can be cut?
> Remember -- this was done as a favor, not a > contractual agreement.
The point is that you wouldn't be any better off with a website with Harvard or with a commecial ISP: everyone's stated policy seems to be to cave in the moment they get a scary legal notice.
What's wrong with saying "This has nothing to do with us, we're just carrying the information, we didn't put it up there. Take it up with the person who's responsible for the content."
If you make an obscene phone call, can they sue the phone company?
And would it make sense to require the phone company to screen all calls for obscene content, to make sure that no one is misusing the service?
> So? Hey, as an ISP > they have a right to yank anybody's web site if > they want too; in this case, at least Packet > Storm can go back up.
It actually bother's the hell out of me that *all* ISPs are this spineless. Their legal agreements all *suck*. "We get to do anything we want, we guarantee you nothing, we take no responsibility for what you do, but if we don't think it's appropriate we'll stop you, we're the sole arbiters of what's appropriate, and by the way we can change this agreement without notice and you've still got to follow it."
Is this anyway to run a brave new world of free information?
I'm beginning to think we need a "User's Bill of Rights", and we need to start boycotting ISPs that don't support that bill of rights.
Sure, I might be interested in working on a project like this. I think of it as "trying to make the web a little more like Xanadu".
You folks could do worse than to read a bit of Ted Nelson to go with your Neal Stephanson: A New Home for the Mind?
It's pretty obvious these days that Xanadu was an attempt at doing too much all at once ("worse is better" and all that). Now that we've got part of what it was intended to be, it might be a good idea to try and evolve towards it...
Example of a pro-IMF (etc.) etc article at he Economist
And now slashdot can't handle my html (though, Netscape 4.5 has no problem with it). So you've got to cut and paste those last two: http://www.globalexchange.org/economy/rulemakers/ http://www.economist.com/editorial/freeforall/libr ary/index_special_collection.html
(Slashdot's alpha-quality is pissing me off today. They sold this shit?)
I've been an Economist subscriber for a few years now, and despite some problems I've been pretty impressed with it, particularly it's technical reporting. So I've been submitting Economist stories to slashdot off and on (because I'm sick of all the pointers to zdnet, cnn and msnbc)... I thought about submitting this one, but it looked like pretty lame business-think stuff to me, so of course, this is the one that made it. Whatever.
However, it is true that they can be a bit naive about computers (e.g. I remember a particularly funny article about how wonderful Object Oriented programming is because of all the code that gets reused, thereby saving oodles of programming dollars).
Anyway: the primary strength of the Economist is that they really do report on global news (unlike, say "US News and World Report", where the "world report" half of their title typically refers to one page). The Economist, on the other hand has lots of stories about things like competing consititutional conventions in Zimbabwe (have you heard about that one? Why not?).
It's a bit misleading to call it a "conservative" publication, because it's British and it has different biases than American conservatives do. They're rabidly opposed to the right to bear arms, regard the death penalty with suspicion, and they're opposed to the "War on Drugs". They're also nowhere near as hostile to the UN as American conservatives... and they're positively in love with the IMF and the World Bank (I would guess that the average American doesn't even have a clue as to what the IMF does.)
Just for the hell of it, some links on that subject:
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, Google is fast at finding sites that other people think are important. Usually I find that these sites really are what I'm looking for (and google is often more useful than even my own bookmarks).
But on the other hand it's important to remember that there are times when you want to find things that are obscure and still relatively "undiscovered". Sticking together a boolean query using altavista's "advanced" search is still the best solution for problems like this, as far as I know.
If everyone got in the habit of checking google first, it'll get awfully hard for new sites to get established.
My recommendation: if you're looking for something fast, try google first.
If you're writing a webpage on a certain subject, and you want to add a listing of related links, use altavista first.
(And what's going to happen when it sinks in that the act of creating a link is effectively a vote to rank a site higher? There's going to be an explosion of some fairly mindless link-farming...)
Let's try another example: remember the O'Reilley interview a little while back? They heard a bunch of wonderful things about some NT based web tools, and they went "Well, let's not be blinded by ideology on this", and then they discovered that the NT "solution" was grossly oversold. Now they've backed away from it and they're going with open source. A little commitment to "ideology" in this case would have saved them a lot of pain.
The point of all the ideological debate is not adherance to a religion for the sake of the religion, the point is to try and discover a general set of principles (or at least some rules of thumb) that might save you from making some mistakes. It's a lot of work to try and carefully evaluate every option. Maybe it's flat out impossible: you can't develop a project using every combination of available software before deciding which is best. You *have* to "reduce your choices" somehow. So what shortcuts are you going to use?
It's looking like "stay away from proprietary software if you can" is a pretty good shortcut.
Good to see BSD get some of the limelight.
That's spotlight. Most of us here want to see free unixes in the spotlight. Microsoft, we want to see fading into the limelight.
Kids these days. No grasp of cliches at all.
I think there may be a problem with this analysis
in that a WYSIWIG system has to have some way of interpreting "what you see" and turning it into the coding that you get.
This amounts to scanning an image an converting it into a logical structure, which is, as they say, non-trivial.
Look at what happens if you feed a typical HTML file into a WYSIWIG editor, edit it a little, and then try and look at it in a text editor again. Often the WYSIWIG editing generates so much additional, spurious coding that the HTML file has become unreadable to a human being.
So you can't just call WYSIWIG "realtime preview",
because it's a one-way trip through that lens. You have to give up control over the logical structure, and hope that the "what you see" will turn out to be "what you want".
Many people here are skeptical about the security of an over-the-internet voting scheme. Funny, because the problems strike me as real, but fixible. And the current voting systems are currently subject to abuse, and badly in need of some sort of fix.
Not too long ago there was a vote on public funding of a sports stadium in San Francisco, where there was clearly an attempt made at rigging the result. There is no question about whether the election was dirty, the only question is *how* dirty it was, i.e. were the dirty votes enough to swing the (evidentally quite close) election. There was funny stuff like election watchers reading people's ballots, boxes of returns that took hours to get from the polls to the counting site, "special" poling sites opened in neighborhoods likely to be in favor of the stadium and so on. Someone was even caught voting twice... the DA (known to be pro-stadium) declined to prosecute.
Our current electoral systems are badly in need of improvement. New technology might provide a partial solution.
With many apologies to the sane people in the audience, I'll take the red bait this time:
bugg wrote:
> with a license like the GPL, its closer to
> communist
The GPL and communism have very little to do
with each other, unless you're the kind of
person who can only handle two alternatives
(if it's not friendly to old fashioned,
money-grubbing closed-source software
companies, then it must be... communist!).
Very few people (including folks like myself
with a libertarian bent) think that freedom
needs to be absolute (e.g. "I don't see how
you can call any society where you're not free
to rape, murder, pillage a *free* society.")
We buy into restrictions on individuals that
are supposed to help guarantee everyone's
freedom.
Hence, the GPL.
When possible, I try and avoid getting involved
with BSD liscened projects, because there's too
much danger of closed, proprietary forks.
Software development is a social process, and
maintaining the momentum of the project is all
important.
I've been looking at postgresql lately, and if
you look at the history of that project, the
code base has been through *two* proprietary
forks. If it weren't for this kind of nonsense
bleeding energy out of the project, it might be
as good as Oracle by now.
by Philip Greenspun, Chapter 9 of Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
(... And if you all had any sense you quit reading this slashdot crap until you'd finished reading this book. It's all available on-line, but it's definitely worth buying a hardcopy of it.)
Anyway, as for Firefly... everyone I know thought it was ridiculous. They played with it in the same way people play with bablefish, just to laugh at how stupid the results were. Microsoft bought it? Cool... I hope they buy lots of other useless companies. They shut it down? Too bad, it would be better if they wasted more money on it. Maybe passport will help burn some of their cash.
That is not a copyright violation, that's a quotation, and it's covered under the doctrine of "fair use".
(And it sure would be nice if the boundaries of fair use were outlined for audio samples as well as it is for literary quotes and for fragments of sheet music... but for that to happen, the big guys would have to admit that they don't absolutely control every last little bit of every byte in existance, and in the meantime you can make money selling "sample rights" to the timid &/or the ignorant with too much money on their hands.)
Never forget the possibility that upper management has too much time (and cash) on their hands.
Mergers/buyouts/etc often have no apparent logical purpose, and quite often no one wins on them. But it makes the big guys feel bigger when they get to cut some deals.
It presumes that SGI is capable of making a decision.
Okay, so "Behind Blue Eyes" and "Baba O'Reilley" are certainly very good (though I've heard them so many times, there's no way I can judge their degree of greatness anymore). There was some other really good material from the "Lifehouse" project that appeared on the nearly forgotten Townsend solo album "Who Came First?". This is a weird album in a lot of ways: On the down side, the production of it seems kind of flat somehow (I suspect they tried to get by with too many studio overdub tricks, and the absence of the rest of the Who really shows). But on the plus side, some of the songs are amazing, in particular "Nothing is Everything", a great nihilistic/existentialist anthem. (This song makes a great contrast to the more religious/spiritual "Pavardigar" on the flip side).
There is also a not-very-exciting version of "Pure and Easy", which as I remember it was also supposed to be a "Lifehouse" song... if you add all of these up, it doesn't leave a lot of room for Townsend to write new material... (There will also be previously unheard songs written and performed by Townshend.). This means he must of had to *cut* something, and that definitely doesn't sound good to me.
And yeah, the inclusion of "The Grid" stuff makes it sound to me like there really is some revisionism going on here. It's not completely impossible that Townsend could have come up with a VR-like scenario in the early 70s, but I really doubt it. It seems much more likely that he's lifting elements from his more recent "Psychoderelict" project.
And personally, I thought "Psychoderelict" wasn't great, but certainly wasn't awful. Maybe it didn't quite add up to anything, but he was playing around with a bunch of interesting elements. For example, witches tits.
(And personally, my favorite drummer these days is Gino Robair -- formerly of the Splatter Trio. If you think Keith Moon was energetic and sloppy, you should try and catch Gino live some time...)
Um, I meant to say that the mail archive on the redhat site has been busted for *months*.
Years?
If I look at www.redhat.com, the top story in their Slashdot box is "Be Inc. IPO launched"
When I click through to redhat's filtered version of slashdot, and compare it to slashdot, I see that there's another missing story also: "Red Hat Portal Picking up Steam"
I'm sure if you asked them about it, Redhat would tell you "our lawyer's made us do it", and I would *hope* that this filter is going to be dropped after the IPO... but still, things like this make me a little uneasy.
I'd say that a "portal" site is designed to encourage people to make it the default that your browser starts up with.
Netscape.com was the first real "portal", because most people left the default as it was shipped. Then Netscape invented their "Net-Center" concept, and all of a sudden yahoo.com became the number one web site, as users fled from that grossly over-complicated monstrosity.
No one seems to have learned this lesson, however, and web "designers" the world over think that they're going to get lots more eyeballs if their page takes ten minutes to load on a slow modem.
Redhat's site went from bad to worse on their last re-design. I don't have high hopes for the next one.
(The feature that they *really* need is a searchable archive of the redhat mailing lists. This has been busted for years.)
Yeah, SF can be studied seriously, just like anything can be studied seriously. There is the question as to why you would want a degree in SF (skipping the whole issue of why you would want a degree in anything...). You might be interested in:
If you actually read the BBC article, the focus of this degree sounds like it's mostly about training students to be science teachers. They're supposed to learn how to use SF as a way of focusing the student's attention.
It does seem to be a little extreme to focus an entire 4 year degree on this: calling it a degree in "science fiction" seems like a marketing technique for attracting undergrads. If you actually wanted to work in this field, wouldn't you want a degree in "science education" or something?
But that said, it isn't the stupidiest idea in the world. For example, I probably learned more about tidal forces reading Larry Niven's story "Neutron Star", in spite of it's innaccuracies, than in any of the introductary science texts I'd seen (all of which seem to completely mangle the issue). It's often occured to me that if I were teaching kids earth science I'd take an approach like "Now, what would our planet be like if it's axis weren't tilted? What if it were tilted 90 degrees? What if the orbit was smaller or larger? What if the moon were a different size?" There's no question in my mind that Hal Clement must have been one of the greatest science teachers ever.
Not that any of this matters really, since American kids don't want to study "hard stuff" like the sciences, and there appears to be a glut of scientists and engineers on the market, and if we run out of them we can always buy some more from China or India.
I've got one, and only one thing to say on this subject: don't control the wrong parameter. Being in good shape doesn't mean losing weight (it might mean gaining weight). It might make more sense to
think about increasing your body density (you may want to reduce fat and gain muscle). Lacking a large tank of water, it isn't all that easy to measure your body's volume, but this doesn't justify the endless obession about "weight" just because that's easy to measure.
You'd be better off throwing away the scale, and using a tape measure. Or even better, measure the number of miles you can walk/run/bike (and preferably do it about three times a week).
Or even simpler: kill your automobile.
sjames (sjames@nospam.gdex.net) wrote:
> When the Bill of Rights was framed, it was
> easy for a citizen to arm himself with
> weapons equal to that of the army.
Actually, I think a gun was an expensive piece
of hardware back then, and if you believe the
article in the current issue of The Economist,
not many people had them.
> If the Constitution were being followed
> today, any citizen could legally own
> military weapons capable of stopping an M1
> or an AH-64.
Motivated guerillas, fighting on their home
territory, can do a lot with "inferior"
technology. Think about the Vietnam war.
(By the way, traditionally guerillas use Molotov
cocktails against tanks. Though personally, if
I were up against M-1 tanks, I would consider
strategies like, say, throwing some sand in the
treads.)
> Supposedly, that is not allowed
> since without military weapons nobody can
> blow up a building in Oklahoma.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here.
The federal building in Oklahoma was blown
up with a bomb made from something like 55 gallon drums of oil and fertilizer mixed together.
Yes, spam is evil, and no I will not be crying any tears for
the poor spammer who got booted from their ISP.
But a few thoughts:
(1) If nettiquette becomes law, then it won't be nettiquette
any more. The principles of nettiquette are not always
precisely defined, because there's no reason they should
be: they're just customary rules of thumb.
(A favorite example: are you allowed to publically post
email that was sent privately to you? This is usually a
rude thing to do, but I would argue that there are
exceptions. What if it was a death threat?)
(2) If you look at the terms agreements ISPs are offering
these days, they are all decidely one-sided. They seem
to run something like: "We guarantee nothing, you agree
not to post anything that will violate any laws or
otherwise offend a little old lady from Passadena, if
you behave inappropriately we will yank your service, we
get to decide what's inappropriate, and we may change
this agreement without notice but you still have to
follow it."
The inspiration for these agreements is largerly the
necessity of dealing with spammers at the ISP level, but
this seems to have resulted in a world full of spineless
ISPs, ready to roll over at the first ominous legal
letter they receive.
What good is a constitutional guarantee of freedom of
speech if your wire can be cut?
> Remember -- this was done as a favor, not a
> contractual agreement.
The point is that you wouldn't be any better off
with a website with Harvard or with a commecial
ISP: everyone's stated policy seems to be to cave
in the moment they get a scary legal notice.
What's wrong with saying "This has nothing to
do with us, we're just carrying the information,
we didn't put it up there. Take it up with the
person who's responsible for the content."
If you make an obscene phone call, can they
sue the phone company?
And would it make sense to require the phone company to screen all calls for obscene content,
to make sure that no one is misusing the service?
> So? Hey, as an ISP
> they have a right to yank anybody's web site if > they want too; in this case, at least Packet
> Storm can go back up.
It actually bother's the hell out of me that
*all* ISPs are this spineless. Their legal
agreements all *suck*. "We get to do anything
we want, we guarantee you nothing, we take no
responsibility for what you do, but if we don't
think it's appropriate we'll stop you, we're the
sole arbiters of what's appropriate, and by the
way we can change this agreement without notice
and you've still got to follow it."
Is this anyway to run a brave new world of free information?
I'm beginning to think we need a "User's Bill of
Rights", and we need to start boycotting ISPs
that don't support that bill of rights.
Sure, I might be interested in working on a project like this. I think of it as "trying to make the web a little more like Xanadu".
You folks could do worse than to read a bit of Ted Nelson to go with your Neal Stephanson: A New Home for the Mind?
It's pretty obvious these days that Xanadu was an attempt at doing too much all at once ("worse is better" and all that). Now that we've got part of what it was intended to be, it might be a good idea to try and evolve towards it...
The new world order needs more loose cannons rolling around on the deck.
Anyone remember back when the only private company selling sattelite surveillance photos was the Spot Image Corporation?
Would anyone else be in this business, if it hadn't been for Spot Image breaking the monopoly of government intelligence agencies?
Viva le'Arrogant. Or whatever.
Goddamn it. Punched "Submit" on my way to hit "Preview".
Here's what the links should have looked like:
And now slashdot can't handle my html (though, Netscape 4.5 has no problem with it). So you've got to cut and paste those last two: http://www.globalexchange.org/economy/rulemakers/ http://www.economist.com/editorial/freeforall/libr ary/index_special_collection.html
(Slashdot's alpha-quality is pissing me off today. They sold this shit?)
I've been an Economist subscriber for a few years now, and despite some problems I've been pretty impressed with it, particularly it's technical reporting. So I've been submitting Economist stories to slashdot off and on (because I'm sick of all the pointers to zdnet, cnn and msnbc)... I thought about submitting this one, but it looked like pretty lame business-think stuff to me, so of course, this is the one that made it. Whatever.
However, it is true that they can be a bit naive about computers (e.g. I remember a particularly funny article about how wonderful Object Oriented programming is because of all the code that gets reused, thereby saving oodles of programming dollars).
Anyway: the primary strength of the Economist is that they really do report on global news (unlike, say "US News and World Report", where the "world report" half of their title typically refers to one page). The Economist, on the other hand has lots of stories about things like competing consititutional conventions in Zimbabwe (have you heard about that one? Why not?).
It's a bit misleading to call it a "conservative" publication, because it's British and it has different biases than American conservatives do. They're rabidly opposed to the right to bear arms, regard the death penalty with suspicion, and they're opposed to the "War on Drugs". They're also nowhere near as hostile to the UN as American conservatives... and they're positively in love with the IMF and the World Bank (I would guess that the average American doesn't even have a clue as to what the IMF does.)
Just for the hell of it, some links on that subject:
As always, there are problems with jumping from a correlation to an assumption about a cause and effect.
Could it be that having brain damage makes you more likely to use cellular phones?
Makes sense to me.