> woah, hemos you have to explain your thinking > on this one. i cant even come close to finding > anything with a neo-luddite feel to it in this > article.
I think what he's talking about is the angle the author is taking: "Could this be the death of e-commerce?"
Answer: No, it won't. Next?
Re:How about T? (lyx plug & ncurses while
on
Fifteen Years of X
·
· Score: 1
Sounds cute, but when I need to do some halfway serious work over a slow connection, I just run emacs (the original text-oriented windowing system).
Now if you thought of this "T" project as a method of running X windows from inside of emacs, you would have the immediate support from the emacs faithful. I suggest asking around on alt.religion.emacs.
Re:Why are they so fat?!
on
Linus @BALUG
·
· Score: 0
There are a few things to say about this. A lot of Americans are fat because:
(1) the food is really good here (especially in the SF Bay Area).
(2) everyone drives cars (though not always like the spiffy red one everyone here is jonesing after). No one walks, no one rides a bike, and the issue of fitting into seats on public transit doesn't come up because no one rides public transit.
Now in particular, computer geeks tend to be fat:
(1) because they spend sixteen hours a day sitting in front of a computer screen swigging coke and eating hostess cupcakes.
(2) in this culture, you need to be "abnormal" to want to become smart. Pretty people tend to become jocks and insurance salesmen. You don't need to be a fat person to turn into a computer geek, but it does help a lot.
You also missed the fact that Rasterman didn't expect to be quoted literally. He asked Rob to paraphrase it, and instead, Rob just posted it. This was supposed to be a quickie note to Rob.
Yes, that bothered me a lot also. He spends a lot of time deomonstrating a lack of understanding of what the FSF means by "free"... and all of that is just a long winded lead-up to the theme of his article: You can get paid for doing open source work. This is not exactly a new idea.
I have no idea why the moderator marked it down, but I can kind of understand why.
I mean, look at the criteria you quoted:
> They call somone names.
"Lucas is a wimp" qualifies.
> Bad comments are repeats of something said 15 > times already making it quite apparent that the > writer didn't read the previous comments.
Bordeline, IMO.
> They are hard to read or just don't make any > sense.
This is the big one. Many sentences are just too hard to parse. I don't know what the author is getting at.
> They detract from the article > they are attached to.
On the other hand, this doesn't apply, because it's impossible to detract from this idiotic topic. The real mystery is why any moderator would waste time on this discussion.
> Real Science Fiction fans find the "Star Wars" > crap banal and repulsive. Tediously boring, > nothing but a light-duty framework to hang > 'special effects' off.
I'm inclined to agree. I've been wondering about slashdot's Star Wars obsession lately. Why do they think that this particular silly movie is more interesting than, say, the last Bruce Sterling novel?
I just decided to give the ignore "Star Wars Prequels" option a try in the Preferences... this could be almost as useful as the Katz-killer.
Damn, I was getting set for a good set of anti-Star Wars rants, but despite a couple of interesting points, as I read through it seemed like he was getting more crazy and irrational. I thought, is this just flamebait? But no then you find he's a religious fanatic too. He's not just pretending he's a nut, he really is a nut.
The site he links to is really funny, though... it's worth looking at (even though it is on *goddamn* *geocities* *with* *their* *goddamn* *fuckedup* *pop-up* *ads*): The Force=Satan
My take on Star Wars: the first movie was obviously a breakthrough, the second movie was saved only by the Leigh Bracket script, the third was very uneven, and not really worth much... the "special effects as star" concept was already getting really tired. And speaking of racism in Star Wars: I was really pissed that the one strong black character that was introduced in the second movie was literally turned into a spear carrier in the third.
I will probably go see the new movie, but I don't expect much from it. Certainly not after seeing those shots in the last issue of Wired... it looks like we're in for some really dorky, ugly aliens this time around, even worse than Jim Henson's crap.
And as for any religious implications of the Force... in the real world, you may notice that power falls into the hands of both the good and the bad, and guns work no matter who pulls the trigger. If that doesn't contravene the existence of god, than neither does positing a black and white magic. If you really want to look for something to be upset about, I might suggest "Raiders of the Lost Ark", in which Jehova is turned into a special effect.
There's a difference between taking a piece of a work and using it in a different context, and grabbing someone else's work and using it in the same way.
If they had cut up a bunch of Dilbert panels and glued them on a canvas, it might be a little different, but the "Dilbert Hole" stuff are comic strips much like any other comic strips (with cruder dialog). They created another comic strip using the Dilbert artwork and worse the Dilbert *name*.
There's a tradition in parody of using transparent aliases for the target... how hard would it be to change Dilbert and Dogbert to Dildo and Dogdoo or something like that?
These days, I'm leaning toward the view that we don't need any intellectual property laws... but even in the absence of laws, I would still regard the "Dilbert Hole" as crossing an ethical boundary. It deserves to be boycotted, and the people who perpetrate it deserve a storm of angry email rather than a legal warning.
A final thought: If you're trying to contrive a test case, it's not a bad idea to actually create something of some sort of artistic value, so that the people shooting it down will have trouble claiming that they're the good guys.
If you really want to weaken laws against appropriation, you need to set up a series of test cases, where at each little step it's difficult to claim that there's something unfair about the usage.
That's the method that was used to roll back the obscenity laws... From "Lady Chatterly's Lover" through "Tropic of Cancer" to "Naked Lunch".
-- "redbreast, weeping, autumn light, and tenderness"
Salon is pretty good in a lot of ways (I started reading it because they carry columns by Camille Paglia and Susie Sexpert), but they also get some criticism for being flacks for the Democrats... and in my opinion the criticism seems to be deserved. They do a good job of writing about open source software because their biases happen to be in support of it... if they were biased against it, then there'd be serious problems. Internet news sources seem to be having a hard time with concepts like "ethics".
Yeah, Henry Spencer is way cool. Even if you don't count his work on stuff like the regexp package, there's his postings on usenet, notably in the C newsgroups and the sci.space newsgroups. In a landscape dominated by ignorant flamers, Henry Spencer has always been out there very calmly posting corrections. I've had Henry Spencer autoselected in nn for years.
And man, John Gilmore was one of the founders of Cygnus...
Editor's note: This story has been corrected. Comments attributed to Doubleclick suggesting that AltaVista wished to downplay its strategy could not be independently confirmed and have been removed. Further, comments that the sold search positions were identical to regular search results were incorrect. Wired News regrets the error.
So it could be that AltaVista is trying to backpeddle quickly, or it could be that Doubleclick was engaging in a little FUD. (And if Wired can't do an accuracy check *before* they post something, maybe it's time to boycott Wired).
And yes, this is a big deal. Maintaining a separation between advertising and content is very important if you care at all about at least keeping up an appearence of integrity. It's always a worry that advertising supported media will be corrupted by their advertisers. If they were going to suddenly start selling placement in their rankings, without providing any visual cue about what was paid for, that would be clearly unethical. It might even be illegal (deceptive business practice?).
How would you feel if you found out that the headlines of your local newspaper could be bought?
It's rather like that one guy who said he went on a killing spree because he'd eaten so many Twinkies that he had gone crazy (this was a looooooooong time ago; you probably will be hard-pressed to fine a Web link to it).
This was in the news again recently. There are some interesting features that get lost in the urban legend. The murderer, Dan White, was an ex-cop, and a former member of the San Francisco board of supervisors. He was beloved by conservatives at a time when the elected leadership of San Francisco had swerved decidedly to the left. He decided to resign from the board of supes over financial difficulties, which would allow the liberal mayor, George Moscone, to appoint someone else. Some conservatives offered White financial help if he stayed in office, but Moscone was going to turn him down, so White then returned with a gun, and started in on a spree of killing elected officials. He got through two of them, including George Moscone (the mayor of SF) and Harvey Milk (the first openly gay official in the US), but evidentally he had plans to hit more of them. (That's the little tidbit that brought this story back into the news).
Dan White went on trial for murder, put up the infamous "Twinkie Defense", and got off with manslaughter.
This is what you're all missing: this is not a case of those silly judges and lawyers playing silly silly games. The legal system isn't stupid, it's fucking corrupt. Dan White was connected. He was an ex-cop (the guys who arrested him were friends of his). He was backed by the local conservatives... and they probably loved the fact that he blew away the most liberal mayor in the history of the city.
Since then we've had to deal with limosene liberals like Willie Brown... but that's another story.
In defense of Xanadu's focus on actually paying for information:
this idea was developed long before the WWW demonstrated how much information people are willing to post for free.
there is still a wide range of information which people are unwilling to provide for free. Some of it is available on the web to those willing to, say, front a Credit Card number, but much of it isn't. The WWW "docuverse" is, and will remain somewhat limited without convienient means of payment built into it.
That said, yes, I also have reservations about the Xanadu method of handling royalties. Having a flat rate for each byte of information makes things more convienient for the people browsing around, but all bytes are not created equal, and if you've authored something that you think is worth more than the Xanadu flat rate, then you're just not going to post it on the Xanadu system.
So the Xanadu "docuverse" will remain limited also...
Personally, true backlinks and really good annotation capabilities strike me as being the really important features proposed for Xanadu, followed closely by real document IDs (independant of physical location, i.e. URLs) and integrated backup and version control.
I can't say I'm optimistic about ever getting my hands on a real Xanadu system, though. But then, I'd also given up long ago on ever getting a real free Unix, and here we are...
It's nice to see someone here talking about Ted Nelson's work, even in a backhanded and somewhat distorted way.
There is more to the Xandau concept than a hypertext system with a system of keeping track of royalites. As I understand it keeping track of royalties isn't really the hard part. For example, Xanadu is supposed to allow backward tracing of links, so that you can ask a question like "Who is talking about what I'm reading now, are there any rebuttals in existance?".
In any case, keeping track of the licensing of individual little pieces of code without something like Xanadu, that does sound like daunting task. Quite possibility daunting enough to discourage people from following up on this "COSS" proposal.
I'd suggest to anyone who's interested that they should get their information about Xanadu from some place a little more direct than Wired: Xanadu
I just thought I'd jump in and say that while I disagree strongly with ESR's advice to young hackers about choosing a boring handle, I do think that it's a really really really good idea to avoid a name that someone else is going to use for a video game some day.
Many people are taking the phrase "Slashdot kiddies and their spiritual kin" to mean that *all* people on Slashdot are kids who don't deserve to be taken seriously.
It's an obvious variation of the phrase "script kiddies". Does using that phrase imply that anyone who uses a script is a kid?
(Yes, ESR is a good writer. Would that we were all good readers.)
And the title of that episode was a (rather inane) reference to Shakespere's MacBeth:
Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? I see thee yet, in form as palpable As this which now I draw. Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going; And such an instrument I was to use. Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses, Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still, And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, Which was not so before. There's no such thing: It is the bloody business which informs Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one halfworld Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder, Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf, Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace. With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear Thy very stones prate of my whereabout, And take the present horror from the time, Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives: Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.
Now, compare and contrast this passage with the recurrent motifs of Richard Thieme's article.
There is some major neatness happening here. I've been trying to think about problems like this for a while: how do you organize, open, collaborative intellectual efforts in general, (not just for software)? I think that slashdot is engaged in some impressive experiments in this direction. We may be on the verge of coming up with something that may rival the historical importance of the invention of the GPL.
The trouble with negative filtering systems in a world of multiple virtual identies is obvious: anyone who is filtered out has the option of immediately returning under another name.
So, in the absence of verifiable meatspace identies, you need to use some positive filtering, you select for the people who seem to be making an effort to do a good job. (Preventing forgery is still a problem, but it's eaisier to solve than pinning virtual identities to physical ones.)
Letting everyone contribute to the ranking process can't really work, because of the problem of bozo's jamming the system using multiple identities.
The slashdot system where anyone can contribute to the discussion and possibly earn moderator status from the existing moderators... this strikes me as brilliant.
And in retrospect, bootstrapping the system with a closed group of moderators was a really interesting approach. A state designed to whither away?
Can we game it out to see if there still problems?
(1) Forgery, mentioned above. Eating a cookie doesn't imply any kind of PGP identity verification, (or maybe it does, and I don't understand cookies).
(2) The anonymity of moderators sounds a bit problematic to me. There is the problem of not being able to "confront your accusers", and it also strikes me that it places a lot of burden on the moderators to conceal their status. And personally, I'd be reluctant to do a lot of volunteer work that I'm not allowed to take credit for. Open societies use anonymity only sparingly...
So maybe this isn't a good idea, despite the bad taste you might have in your mouth from petty dictators on IRC (like Tom Christiansen?).
(3) Can slashdot scale up further into the million reader's range?
(a) If it got that big, the one central Moderator of Moderators would undoubtably be overwhelmed by the job of policing 1000s of moderators. So at the very least, all of the moderators would probably have to start moderating each other's activities... or maybe there should be a hierarchy of promotion, where moderators earn meta-moderator status?
(b) A Slashdot with a million readers would become a force to be reckoned with in the commercial arena: the buzz on slashdot could make or break a company. There would be a lot of incentive to try and corrupt the system, for example a large software company (possibly located in the Northwest) might send in a troupe of moles whose job is to post intelligently to earn moderator status.
Anyway, I'm really interested to see where all of this ends up: I have fantasies of letting loose a group of volunteers on a problem like pinning down the truth about a big subject, like say global warming (investigating the magnitude of the problem, the weight of the evidence, the various prejudices pushing people in different directions, and possible methods of preventing or ameliorating the problems). Can we set up a dynamic intelectual web on the net where order has a chance to rise up above the noise?
> Well, in at least the new versions of IE you > can configure your news reader, and I think > you can do the same with Netscape 4.x as well, > of course the default is the newsreader > bundled with the browser, but you can switch.
I've heard that the Solaris version of Internet Explorer works this way, but I'm using Linux. And I rather not use MS stuff if I can avoid it. Netscape Communicator 4.x does not have this feature to my knowledge. Edit/Preferences/Navigator/Applications doesn't have an entry to change what a "news:" link does. The stripped down Netscape Navigator product might very well have something like this, however, but at this point I'm just going to wait for the new Mozilla.
> However, at least for those of us behind > corporate firewalls, web-based tools are > much nicer than using a newsreader.
I have a bit of sympathy for this kind of argument (personally I get annoyed by web designs that won't work on slow modems or with lynx, etc). I would think the solution would be to have a slashdot preference that let's you choose the old web-based method if you like.
Slashdot Mirror
Anonymous Coward wrote:
> woah, hemos you have to explain your thinking
> on this one. i cant even come close to finding
> anything with a neo-luddite feel to it in this
> article.
I think what he's talking about is the angle the
author is taking: "Could this be the death of
e-commerce?"
Answer: No, it won't. Next?
Sounds cute, but when I need to do some halfway serious work over a slow connection, I just run emacs (the original text-oriented windowing system).
Now if you thought of this "T" project as a method of running X windows from inside of emacs, you would have the immediate support from the emacs faithful. I suggest asking around on alt.religion.emacs.
There are a few things to say about this. A lot of Americans are fat because:
(1) the food is really good here (especially in the SF Bay Area).
(2) everyone drives cars (though not always like the spiffy red one everyone here is jonesing after). No one walks, no one rides a bike, and the issue of fitting into seats on public transit doesn't come up because no one rides public transit.
Now in particular, computer geeks tend to be fat:
(1) because they spend sixteen hours a day sitting in front of a computer screen swigging coke and eating hostess cupcakes.
(2) in this culture, you need to be "abnormal" to want to become smart. Pretty people tend to become jocks and insurance salesmen. You don't need to be a fat person to turn into a computer geek, but it does help a lot.
No, no, no:
.sig quotes myself, but if anyone else feels like it, feel free.
"AOL is Al Gore."
I don't do
You also missed the fact that Rasterman didn't
expect to be quoted literally. He asked Rob to
paraphrase it, and instead, Rob just posted it.
This was supposed to be a quickie note to Rob.
Yes, that bothered me a lot also. He spends a lot of time deomonstrating a lack of understanding of what the FSF means by "free"... and all of that is just a long winded lead-up to the theme of his article: You can get paid for doing open source work. This is not exactly a new idea.
I have no idea why the moderator marked it
down, but I can kind of understand why.
I mean, look at the criteria you quoted:
> They call somone names.
"Lucas is a wimp" qualifies.
> Bad comments are repeats of something said 15
> times already making it quite apparent that the > writer didn't read the previous comments.
Bordeline, IMO.
> They are hard to read or just don't make any
> sense.
This is the big one. Many sentences are just
too hard to parse. I don't know what the
author is getting at.
> They detract from the article
> they are attached to.
On the other hand, this doesn't apply, because
it's impossible to detract from this idiotic
topic. The real mystery is why any moderator
would waste time on this discussion.
Yes, I was wondering about that myself.
He's got the mathematician's esthetic: everything
has to be done with the bare minimum of
primitives.
> Real Science Fiction fans find the "Star Wars"
> crap banal and repulsive. Tediously boring,
> nothing but a light-duty framework to hang
> 'special effects' off.
I'm inclined to agree. I've been wondering about
slashdot's Star Wars obsession lately. Why
do they think that this particular silly movie
is more interesting than, say, the last Bruce
Sterling novel?
I just decided to give the ignore "Star Wars
Prequels" option a try in the Preferences... this
could be almost as useful as the Katz-killer.
Yes, and they interviewed one (1) undergraduate.
A great article. I'm glad to have reputable news
sources like this on the web.
"I'm proud that I fell for all the hype."
That's great, you should put that on a T-shirt.
You can sell it to Microsoft fans.
But if you're selling to geeks,
"Painted whore of the Linux world"
is not a bad rep to have.
Damn, I was getting set for a good set of anti-Star Wars rants, but despite a couple of interesting points, as I read through it seemed like he was getting more crazy and irrational. I thought, is this just flamebait? But no then you find he's a religious fanatic too. He's not just pretending he's a nut, he really is a nut.
The site he links to is really funny, though... it's worth looking at (even though it is on *goddamn* *geocities* *with* *their* *goddamn* *fuckedup* *pop-up* *ads*):
The Force=Satan
My take on Star Wars: the first movie was obviously a breakthrough, the second movie was saved only by the Leigh Bracket script, the third was very uneven, and not really worth much... the "special effects as star" concept was already getting really tired. And speaking of racism in Star Wars: I was really pissed that the one strong black character that was introduced in the second movie was literally turned into a spear carrier in the third.
I will probably go see the new movie, but I don't expect much from it. Certainly not after seeing those shots in the last issue of Wired... it looks like we're in for some really dorky, ugly aliens this time around, even worse than Jim Henson's crap.
And as for any religious implications of the Force... in the real world, you may notice that power falls into the hands of both the good and the bad, and guns work no matter who pulls the trigger. If that doesn't contravene the existence of god, than neither does positing a black and white magic. If you really want to look for something to be upset about, I might suggest "Raiders of the Lost Ark", in which Jehova is turned into a special effect.
There's a difference between taking a piece of a work and using it in a different context, and
grabbing someone else's work and using it in the
same way.
If they had cut up a bunch of Dilbert panels and
glued them on a canvas, it might be a little
different, but the "Dilbert Hole" stuff are comic
strips much like any other comic strips (with
cruder dialog). They created another comic strip using the Dilbert artwork and worse the Dilbert
*name*.
There's a tradition in parody of using transparent
aliases for the target... how hard would it be to
change Dilbert and Dogbert to Dildo and Dogdoo or
something like that?
These days, I'm leaning toward the view that we
don't need any intellectual property laws... but
even in the absence of laws, I would still regard
the "Dilbert Hole" as crossing an ethical
boundary. It deserves to be boycotted, and the
people who perpetrate it deserve a storm of angry
email rather than a legal warning.
A final thought:
If you're trying to contrive a test case, it's
not a bad idea to actually create something of
some sort of artistic value, so that the people
shooting it down will have trouble claiming that
they're the good guys.
If you really want to weaken laws against
appropriation, you need to set up a series
of test cases, where at each little step it's
difficult to claim that there's something
unfair about the usage.
That's the method that was used to roll back the
obscenity laws... From "Lady Chatterly's Lover"
through "Tropic of Cancer" to "Naked Lunch".
--
"redbreast, weeping, autumn light, and tenderness"
Salon is pretty good in a lot of ways (I started
reading it because they carry columns by Camille
Paglia and Susie Sexpert), but they also get some
criticism for being flacks for the Democrats...
and in my opinion the criticism seems to be
deserved. They do a good job of writing about
open source software because their biases happen
to be in support of it... if they were biased
against it, then there'd be serious problems.
Internet news sources seem to be having a hard
time with concepts like "ethics".
Yeah, Henry Spencer is way cool. Even if you don't count his work on stuff like the regexp package, there's his postings on usenet, notably in the C newsgroups and the sci.space newsgroups. In a landscape dominated by ignorant flamers, Henry Spencer has always been out there very calmly posting corrections. I've had Henry Spencer autoselected in nn for years.
And man, John Gilmore was one of the founders of Cygnus...
Kids these days, they don't know anything...
It appears that the Wired story has been revised since it was posted on slashdot: A Search for the Highest Bidder
So it could be that AltaVista is trying to backpeddle quickly, or it could be that Doubleclick was engaging in a little FUD. (And if Wired can't do an accuracy check *before* they post something, maybe it's time to boycott Wired).And yes, this is a big deal. Maintaining a separation between advertising and content is very important if you care at all about at least keeping up an appearence of integrity. It's always a worry that advertising supported media will be corrupted by their advertisers. If they were going to suddenly start selling placement in their rankings, without providing any visual cue about what was paid for, that would be clearly unethical. It might even be illegal (deceptive business practice?).
How would you feel if you found out that the headlines of your local newspaper could be bought?
It's rather like that one guy who said he went on a killing spree because he'd eaten so many Twinkies that he had gone crazy (this was a looooooooong time ago; you probably will be hard-pressed to fine a Web link to it).
Try: Unsafe at any speed - The final cover-up
This was in the news again recently. There are some interesting features that get lost in the urban legend. The murderer, Dan White, was an ex-cop, and a former member of the San Francisco board of supervisors. He was beloved by conservatives at a time when the elected leadership of San Francisco had swerved decidedly to the left. He decided to resign from the board of supes over financial difficulties, which would allow the liberal mayor, George Moscone, to appoint someone else. Some conservatives offered White financial help if he stayed in office, but Moscone was going to turn him down, so White then returned with a gun, and started in on a spree of killing elected officials. He got through two of them, including George Moscone (the mayor of SF) and Harvey Milk (the first openly gay official in the US), but evidentally he had plans to hit more of them. (That's the little tidbit that brought this story back into the news).
Dan White went on trial for murder, put up the infamous "Twinkie Defense", and got off with manslaughter.
This is what you're all missing: this is not a case of those silly judges and lawyers playing silly silly games. The legal system isn't stupid, it's fucking corrupt. Dan White was connected. He was an ex-cop (the guys who arrested him were friends of his). He was backed by the local conservatives... and they probably loved the fact that he blew away the most liberal mayor in the history of the city.
Since then we've had to deal with limosene liberals like Willie Brown... but that's another story.
Okay, sorry if I missed your Xanadu link.
In defense of Xanadu's focus on actually paying for information:
That said, yes, I also have reservations about the Xanadu method of handling royalties. Having a flat rate for each byte of information makes things more convienient for the people browsing around, but all bytes are not created equal, and if you've authored something that you think is worth more than the Xanadu flat rate, then you're just not going to post it on the Xanadu system.
So the Xanadu "docuverse" will remain limited also...
Personally, true backlinks and really good annotation capabilities strike me as being the really important features proposed for Xanadu, followed closely by real document IDs (independant of physical location, i.e. URLs) and integrated backup and version control.
I can't say I'm optimistic about ever getting my hands on a real Xanadu system, though. But then, I'd also given up long ago on ever getting a real free Unix, and here we are...
It's nice to see someone here talking about Ted Nelson's work, even in a backhanded and somewhat distorted way.
There is more to the Xandau concept than a hypertext system with a system of keeping track of royalites. As I understand it keeping track of royalties isn't really the hard part. For example, Xanadu is supposed to allow backward tracing of links, so that you can ask a question like "Who is talking about what I'm reading now, are there any rebuttals in existance?".
In any case, keeping track of the licensing of individual little pieces of code without something like Xanadu, that does sound like daunting task. Quite possibility daunting enough to discourage people from following up on this "COSS" proposal.
I'd suggest to anyone who's interested that they should get their information about Xanadu from some place a little more direct than Wired: Xanadu
I just thought I'd jump in and say that
while I disagree strongly with ESR's advice
to young hackers about choosing a boring
handle, I do think that it's a really really
really good idea to avoid a name that someone
else is going to use for a video game some day.
A simple point:
Many people are taking the phrase "Slashdot
kiddies and their spiritual kin" to mean
that *all* people on Slashdot are kids
who don't deserve to be taken seriously.
It's an obvious variation of the phrase
"script kiddies". Does using that phrase imply
that anyone who uses a script is a kid?
(Yes, ESR is a good writer. Would that we
were all good readers.)
That was "Dagger of the Mind".
And the title of that episode was a (rather inane)
reference to Shakespere's MacBeth:
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There's no such thing:
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one halfworld
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace.
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives:
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.
Now, compare and contrast this passage with the
recurrent motifs of Richard Thieme's article.
There is some major neatness happening here.
I've been trying to think about problems
like this for a while: how do you organize,
open, collaborative intellectual efforts in
general, (not just for software)? I think
that slashdot is engaged in some impressive
experiments in this direction. We may be
on the verge of coming up with something
that may rival the historical importance
of the invention of the GPL.
The trouble with negative filtering
systems in a world of multiple virtual
identies is obvious: anyone who is
filtered out has the option of
immediately returning under another name.
So, in the absence of verifiable
meatspace identies, you need to use some
positive filtering, you select for the
people who seem to be making an effort to
do a good job. (Preventing forgery is
still a problem, but it's eaisier to
solve than pinning virtual identities to
physical ones.)
Letting everyone contribute to the
ranking process can't really work,
because of the problem of bozo's jamming
the system using multiple identities.
The slashdot system where anyone can
contribute to the discussion and possibly
earn moderator status from the existing
moderators... this strikes me as
brilliant.
And in retrospect, bootstrapping the
system with a closed group of moderators
was a really interesting approach. A
state designed to whither away?
Can we game it out to see if there still
problems?
(1) Forgery, mentioned above. Eating a
cookie doesn't imply any kind of PGP
identity verification, (or maybe it does,
and I don't understand cookies).
(2) The anonymity of moderators sounds a
bit problematic to me. There is the
problem of not being able to "confront
your accusers", and it also strikes me
that it places a lot of burden on the
moderators to conceal their status. And
personally, I'd be reluctant to do a lot
of volunteer work that I'm not allowed to
take credit for. Open societies use
anonymity only sparingly...
So maybe this isn't a good idea, despite
the bad taste you might have in your
mouth from petty dictators on IRC (like
Tom Christiansen?).
(3) Can slashdot scale up further into
the million reader's range?
(a) If it got that big, the one central
Moderator of Moderators would undoubtably
be overwhelmed by the job of policing
1000s of moderators. So at the very
least, all of the moderators would
probably have to start moderating each
other's activities... or maybe there
should be a hierarchy of promotion, where
moderators earn meta-moderator status?
(b) A Slashdot with a million readers
would become a force to be reckoned with
in the commercial arena: the buzz on
slashdot could make or break a company.
There would be a lot of incentive to try
and corrupt the system, for example a
large software company (possibly located
in the Northwest) might send in a troupe
of moles whose job is to post
intelligently to earn moderator status.
Anyway, I'm really interested to see where
all of this ends up: I have fantasies of
letting loose a group of volunteers on a
problem like pinning down the truth about
a big subject, like say global warming
(investigating the magnitude of the problem,
the weight of the evidence, the various
prejudices pushing people in different
directions, and possible methods of
preventing or ameliorating the problems).
Can we set up a dynamic intelectual web on
the net where order has a chance to rise up
above the noise?
> Well, in at least the new versions of IE you
> can configure your news reader, and I think
> you can do the same with Netscape 4.x as well,
> of course the default is the newsreader
> bundled with the browser, but you can switch.
I've heard that the Solaris version of Internet
Explorer works this way, but I'm using Linux.
And I rather not use MS stuff if I can avoid it.
Netscape Communicator 4.x does not have this feature to my knowledge.
Edit/Preferences/Navigator/Applications doesn't
have an entry to change what a "news:" link
does. The stripped down Netscape Navigator
product might very well have something like this,
however, but at this point I'm just going to
wait for the new Mozilla.
> However, at least for those of us behind
> corporate firewalls, web-based tools are
> much nicer than using a newsreader.
I have a bit of sympathy for this kind of
argument (personally I get annoyed by web
designs that won't work on slow modems or
with lynx, etc). I would think the solution
would be to have a slashdot preference that
let's you choose the old web-based method if
you like.