I really do wonder what brings people to zealously defend actions like this. Sure, it could be a mix up, but a really ill conceived one. It's obvious that you don't have all the answers, just like others here.
My guess is that the poster feels that Slashdot posters are simply leaping to unjustified paranoid conclusions, and the depth of this faith (or so he pictures it) outrages him (or her).
The intensity of the poster's reaction is simply a reflection of his or her perception of Slashdot readers' zeal.
There are many possible explanations which do not involve conspiracy to hide information. For example, this could just be the work of some low-level IT guy who wanted to filter out one URL which happened to contain 'iraq' because the search-engine robots were burdensome to the webserver. I, for one, prefer to remain suspicious.
I don't believe anyone has ever been stupid enough to say Saddam was behind September 11, but there has been quite a bit of tiptoeing around the idea among the administration.
Instead we have statements that heavily suggest this was the case, while leaving enough room to squirm away later:
Bush: "The regime has long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations. And there are al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq," he said.
They didn't remove them; the files are still online. They just won't be linked from Google.
But you are right about the fact that some of the files contain allegations about Iraq / al Qaeda links that the administration has now backed away from. An example of such a document is this one: http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/excerpts_se pt26.html
In particular, the infocus/iraq subdirectory seems to contain all the transcripts of Ari Fleischer's and Bush's interviews and press conferences leading up to the war and after.
No doubt the paranoids will continue to beleive that every single directory on the server somehow happens to have a/iraq subdirectory, no matter what the topic, and we'll be hearing about Bush's suppression of the Internet for months ("'cause I saw it on Slashdot").
As others have noted on this thread, some of the URLs do exist.
Whether or not they exist, though, why is paranoia so unjustified? It seems very clear the White House does not want you to find these URLs easily, while still being able to claim they're online and thus public. This at least should be grounds for some concern.
No, the Nazis were democratically elected. Hitler wasn't. He was appointed Chancellor by von Hindenburg as a means of reaching a compromise between the Nazis and the ruling centre-right coalition.
When von Hindenburg died, Hitler took on the role of President without consulting the electorate, and combined the presidency and the chancellorship into the office of Fuehrer. This act was confirmed by a referendum (or maybe a plebiscite?) later, but by this time the Nazis were firmly in control and brownshirt thugs were around to beat up anyone who voted the wrong way.
Remember about American Indians and people from Polynesia? The arrival of germs brought by Spanish and French invaders mostly exterminated them. The few of them whose immune system was strong enough and trained enough to sustain the arrival of new germs, have survived.
Mmm hmm. And we good old British WASPs played no role in that at all, eh?
I'm not saying that the French and the Spanish did nothing. But the spread of smallpox among t North American plains Indians was almost wholly the fault (even conscious in some cases) of the English-speaking settlers coming from the east.
Maybe I'm nitpicking, but the convenient omission of the now-dominant national group kind of pissed me off.
And since DNA is already involved in porn and sex in so many ways, this was basically the logical continuation. As long as I'm not DNA-spammed by malevolent viruses, I'm happy.
Well, we've already got DNA spam; it's called... umm... SPAM.
The first of your links seemed to suggest that this conclusion depended on not taking the tidal effects of the moon into account, i.e. that with the tidal effects considered, Earth was more likely to be engulfed.
I was amused by this line (from the second link): "Perhaps this 200 million year reprieve will give humans enough time to form their own survival capsules and escape into deep space."
I think that if we really haven't invented "survival capsules" 5.5 billion years from now, that another 200 million aren't going to matter much.:) (By that time we'll probably be dead or Vorlons, anyway.)
So shareware and freeware programs have been illegal all these years... thank you so much SCO, for clarifying this point. NOT!
I don't know about shareware, but freeware is "ublic domain", which means the copyright holder has chosen to divest himself of all personal rights to the code. SCO's statement, on the other hand, applies only to software licenses which rely on copyright to function. This would apply to GPL, LGPL, BSD, the Artistic Licence, etc., etc. Public-domain software is within the scope of this claim.
Soon it will be everyone's Christmas gift to Grandma or Grandpa, who complain all the time about those young punks in their fast cars always wanting to pass them.
Not so much electronic connectivity, but good old human communication. Iraq needs a free press among other things as well.
Yes, it will be interesting to see how long it will be before the Americans permit a free press in Iraq. They are taking definite steps in that direction: the newspaper of the Iraqi Communist party has now resumed publishing openly for the first time in 24 years. (The Ba'ath party newspaper might take a while longer to come back.;))
Well, you need to allow third-party people to get at the DVD data to do this.
The MPAA types might not object to this use, but the kind of openness necessary to allow it woul probably be exploitable for other purposes -- avoiding region-coding, outright ripping, etc.
The GPL license COULD potential open a business up for a lawsuit, and anyone who reads Slashdot knows that GPL-lovers are very quick to cry for censure of any company suspected of violating the license.
Why would it be any likelier than someone would sue if the code was GPL'ed?
Let's say someone get's the government's GPL'ed software and breaks the license. Now, either their actions would or would not have also broken the license if it had been released under BSD.
Obviously, if they also would've broken BSD (e.g. they stole the code outright with no attributions) then they're bad people and they deserve to be sued.
Now, if they broke the GPL but wouldn't have broken the BSD (e.g., if they released a closed-source derivative work) and they get sued, why is this a bad thing? They broke the terms of the software license, as laid out.
It would be even more restrictive were this a closed-source license.
Sorry, GPL is not a religion. BSD works well, and considering this is a government application using the GPL is unlikely
Why is it unlikely? The only difference between GPL and BSD that's significant in this instance is that ability to release a code closed-source derivative.
Do you think this is something the government would need to do?
Whine, bitch, groan then accept reality and move on. The rest of the world seems to be ahead of you:)
This isn't an argument about forcing the government to go with GPL or some such thing. It's an argument about whether the government should make a practice of avoiding the GPL, and I've seen no argument yet for that.
You've confused discontinuity with corner, aka, non-differentiable point. absolute value of x has a corner at 0, but is continuous there, and the fourier series for absolute value of x (on a suitable interval) converges at 0.
My interpretation of the OP's post was that a corner was a jump discontinuity. Was Lagrange's complaint more general? Would he have thought, for example, that abs(x) couldn't be approximated by trig functions?
I was wrong in claiming the recommendation only applied to 'professional on-line media', as the following bit from the article shows:
It's pretty zany to imagine that just about every form of online publishing, from full-time news organizations to occasional bloggers to moderated chat rooms, would be covered. But it's no accident. A January 2003 draft envisioned regulating only "professional on-line media." Two months later, a March 2003 draft dropped the word "professional" and intentionally covered all "online media" of any type.
Why is this a good idea in principle? The media type should not influence this determination.
Why not? Clearly there are already different standards for professional media than for Joe Random Blogger; newspapers can be bitten hard for failing to insert words like "alleged", etc. Many newspapers have policies about letters to the editor that require giving prior notice of the letter to anyone attacked in the letter.
There is clearly some use in having these different standards; the question is whether they make sense with the Internet, and whether they actually need to be legislated or whether we could let the market punish those who break the rules.
The Internet is capable of creating a sudden critical mass on a newsworthy issue to a degree never seen in human history. Forcing a response would dampen this ability, but since this critical mass is quite often misdirected (witness the number of alarmist Slashdot stories that turned out to be misunderstandings) this may be a good thing.
I'm inclined to think it wouldn't be, though. Why should we remove the one thing -- capacity for immediate response -- that the Net has going for it?
I don't understand all this fuss about blogs, etc. The recommendation, as presently worded, clearly applies only to 'professional on-line media' (see below).
Unless you blog for a living, this won't apply to you. Not that I don't think it's overly restrictive, but believing it would apply to all varities of online publishing seems completely against the authors' intention.
Definitions
For the purposes of this Recommendation:
the term "professional on-line media" means any natural or legal person or other entity whose main professional activity is to engage in the collection, dissemination and/or editing of information to the public on a regular basis via the Internet;
the term "information" means any statement of fact, opinion or idea in the form of text, sound and/or picture.
Through it's younger PlanetMath is also quite a good reference for math, largely because it's maintained by the general public instead of a small team. Plus, all the content is distributed under the GNU FDL.
Slashdot Mirror
I really do wonder what brings people to zealously defend actions like this. Sure, it could be a mix up, but a really ill conceived one. It's obvious that you don't have all the answers, just like others here.
My guess is that the poster feels that Slashdot posters are simply leaping to unjustified paranoid conclusions, and the depth of this faith (or so he pictures it) outrages him (or her).
The intensity of the poster's reaction is simply a reflection of his or her perception of Slashdot readers' zeal.
There are many possible explanations which do not involve conspiracy to hide information. For example, this could just be the work of some low-level IT guy who wanted to filter out one URL which happened to contain 'iraq' because the search-engine robots were burdensome to the webserver. I, for one, prefer to remain suspicious.
I don't believe anyone has ever been stupid enough to say Saddam was behind September 11, but there has been quite a bit of tiptoeing around the idea among the administration.
o litics020926.html
Instead we have statements that heavily suggest this was the case, while leaving enough room to squirm away later:
Bush: "The regime has long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations. And there are al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq," he said.
This comes from the following, by ABC News:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/Iraqp
They didn't remove them; the files are still online. They just won't be linked from Google.
e pt26.html
But you are right about the fact that some of the files contain allegations about Iraq / al Qaeda links that the administration has now backed away from. An example of such a document is this one:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/excerpts_s
In particular, the infocus/iraq subdirectory seems to contain all the transcripts of Ari Fleischer's and Bush's interviews and press conferences leading up to the war and after.
No doubt the paranoids will continue to beleive that every single directory on the server somehow happens to have a /iraq subdirectory, no matter what the topic, and we'll be hearing about Bush's suppression of the Internet for months ("'cause I saw it on Slashdot").
As others have noted on this thread, some of the URLs do exist.
Whether or not they exist, though, why is paranoia so unjustified? It seems very clear the White House does not want you to find these URLs easily, while still being able to claim they're online and thus public. This at least should be grounds for some concern.
Hitler was democratically elected.
No, the Nazis were democratically elected. Hitler wasn't. He was appointed Chancellor by von Hindenburg as a means of reaching a compromise between the Nazis and the ruling centre-right coalition.
When von Hindenburg died, Hitler took on the role of President without consulting the electorate, and combined the presidency and the chancellorship into the office of Fuehrer. This act was confirmed by a referendum (or maybe a plebiscite?) later, but by this time the Nazis were firmly in control and brownshirt thugs were around to beat up anyone who voted the wrong way.
I wish I could compare to google.com, but for the past year or so, google.com automatically forwards all canadian IP's to google.ca
I guess you just didn't notice the "Go to Google.com" link on the lower right, eh?
Wait, I have a better idea: why not put together a collection of local info (maybe print it also) and call that, say, Yellow Pages? :-)
:)
Because they might have to rename it to NIS?
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned that Apache is down too.
Sigh... they had to choose the last bloody day I can download anything before I move (after which I'll be without Internet access for a week).
(Then again I can probably hold off on installing a webserver until my net access is back.)
"I feel that the Internet is our last source of un-censored and un-biased information."
I think you're forgetting about Fox News...
Um, that could be taken two ways. Which way do you mean: the right one or the wrong one?
Remember about American Indians and people from Polynesia? The arrival of germs brought by Spanish and French invaders mostly exterminated them. The few of them whose immune system was strong enough and trained enough to sustain the arrival of new germs, have survived.
Mmm hmm. And we good old British WASPs played no role in that at all, eh?
I'm not saying that the French and the Spanish did nothing. But the spread of smallpox among t North American plains Indians was almost wholly the fault (even conscious in some cases) of the English-speaking settlers coming from the east.
Maybe I'm nitpicking, but the convenient omission of the now-dominant national group kind of pissed me off.
And since DNA is already involved in porn and sex in so many ways, this was basically the logical continuation. As long as I'm not DNA-spammed by malevolent viruses, I'm happy.
Well, we've already got DNA spam; it's called... umm... SPAM.
The first of your links seemed to suggest that this conclusion depended on not taking the tidal effects of the moon into account, i.e. that with the tidal effects considered, Earth was more likely to be engulfed.
:) (By that time we'll probably be dead or Vorlons, anyway.)
I was amused by this line (from the second link): "Perhaps this 200 million year reprieve will give humans enough time to form their own survival capsules and escape into deep space."
I think that if we really haven't invented "survival capsules" 5.5 billion years from now, that another 200 million aren't going to matter much.
So shareware and freeware programs have been illegal all these years... thank you so much SCO, for clarifying this point. NOT!
I don't know about shareware, but freeware is "ublic domain", which means the copyright holder has chosen to divest himself of all personal rights to the code. SCO's statement, on the other hand, applies only to software licenses which rely on copyright to function. This would apply to GPL, LGPL, BSD, the Artistic Licence, etc., etc. Public-domain software is within the scope of this claim.
But at the same time, it has also generated FUD--"fear, uncertainty, and doubt"--among Linux users.
At long last I know what FUD means! All this time, I was too afraid and uncertain of myself to ask. Now my geek cred can remain intact.
Exactly! And what do you do with international treasure? You bury it away in some dingy, windowless room...
Well, at least it's Windows-less.
Soon it will be everyone's Christmas gift to Grandma or Grandpa, who complain all the time about those young punks in their fast cars always wanting to pass them.
Not so much electronic connectivity, but good old human communication. Iraq needs a free press among other things as well.
;))
Yes, it will be interesting to see how long it will be before the Americans permit a free press in Iraq.
They are taking definite steps in that direction: the newspaper of the Iraqi Communist party has now resumed publishing openly for the first time in 24 years. (The Ba'ath party newspaper might take a while longer to come back.
Well, you need to allow third-party people to get at the DVD data to do this.
The MPAA types might not object to this use, but the kind of openness necessary to allow it woul probably be exploitable for other purposes -- avoiding region-coding, outright ripping, etc.
The GPL license COULD potential open a business up for a lawsuit, and anyone who reads Slashdot knows that GPL-lovers are very quick to cry for censure of any company suspected of violating the license.
Why would it be any likelier than someone would sue if the code was GPL'ed?
Let's say someone get's the government's GPL'ed software and breaks the license. Now, either their actions would or would not have also broken the license if it had been released under BSD.
Obviously, if they also would've broken BSD (e.g. they stole the code outright with no attributions) then they're bad people and they deserve to be sued.
Now, if they broke the GPL but wouldn't have broken the BSD (e.g., if they released a closed-source derivative work) and they get sued, why is this a bad thing? They broke the terms of the software license, as laid out.
It would be even more restrictive were this a closed-source license.
Sorry, GPL is not a religion.
BSD works well, and considering this is a government application using the GPL is unlikely
Why is it unlikely? The only difference between GPL and BSD that's significant in this instance is that ability to release a code closed-source derivative.
Do you think this is something the government would need to do?
Whine, bitch, groan then accept reality and move on. The rest of the world seems to be ahead of you
This isn't an argument about forcing the government to go with GPL or some such thing. It's an argument about whether the government should make a practice of avoiding the GPL, and I've seen no argument yet for that.
You've confused discontinuity with corner, aka, non-differentiable point. absolute value of x has a corner at 0, but is continuous there, and the fourier series for absolute value of x (on a suitable interval) converges at 0.
My interpretation of the OP's post was that a corner was a jump discontinuity. Was Lagrange's complaint more general? Would he have thought, for example, that abs(x) couldn't be approximated by trig functions?
I was wrong in claiming the recommendation only applied to 'professional on-line media', as the following bit from the article shows:
It's pretty zany to imagine that just about every form of online publishing, from full-time news organizations to occasional bloggers to moderated chat rooms, would be covered. But it's no accident. A January 2003 draft envisioned regulating only "professional on-line media." Two months later, a March 2003 draft dropped the word "professional" and intentionally covered all "online media" of any type.
Why is this a good idea in principle? The media type should not influence this determination.
Why not? Clearly there are already different standards for professional media than for Joe Random Blogger; newspapers can be bitten hard for failing to insert words like "alleged", etc. Many newspapers have policies about letters to the editor that require giving prior notice of the letter to anyone attacked in the letter.
There is clearly some use in having these different standards; the question is whether they make sense with the Internet, and whether they actually need to be legislated or whether we could let the market punish those who break the rules.
The Internet is capable of creating a sudden critical mass on a newsworthy issue to a degree never seen in human history. Forcing a response would dampen this ability, but since this critical mass is quite often misdirected (witness the number of alarmist Slashdot stories that turned out to be misunderstandings) this may be a good thing.
I'm inclined to think it wouldn't be, though. Why should we remove the one thing -- capacity for immediate response -- that the Net has going for it?
I don't understand all this fuss about blogs, etc. The recommendation, as presently worded, clearly applies only to 'professional on-line media' (see below).
Unless you blog for a living, this won't apply to you. Not that I don't think it's overly restrictive, but believing it would apply to all varities of online publishing seems completely against the authors' intention.
Definitions
For the purposes of this Recommendation:
the term "professional on-line media" means any natural or legal person or other entity whose main professional activity is to engage in the collection, dissemination and/or editing of information to the public on a regular basis via the Internet;
the term "information" means any statement of fact, opinion or idea in the form of text, sound and/or picture.
Through it's younger PlanetMath is also quite a good reference for math, largely because it's maintained by the general public instead of a small team. Plus, all the content is distributed under the GNU FDL.