There are quite a few things that should have been done about rotten links. One is more active use of the HTTP responses 301 and 410.
If you move a page, make sure the server responds with 301 for a long time to come.
I wrote a note with the intention of submitting it to W3C for possible publishing as a note, but their author guidelines are only open to members. Anyway, it describes the use of Apache.htaccess and Redirect directives, and what ISPs should do to expired accounts.
Then, robots should be written to update links based on the 301 response, or remove links in case of a 410 response. This would reduce the amount of work required to keep links up-to-date.
And when you see what Disney did to my beloved Winnie-the-Pooh, well at least that's what made me convinced something is fundamentally wrong with the copyrights.
I'm running a How To Use A Compass site, and in my experience anybody can contribute with valuable insights, fix things that are unclear, or even outright wrong. I've had kids pointing errors out to me, and kids should be taught to analyze texts critically.
I think my guide is really good now, it's the best on the net, and it's better than some standard textbooks on the subject, still it can be improved. One of the things I have learnt is that fixing things should be formalized, something like a bug-tracking-system for texts. Of course, texts are different from software, either the program works or it doesn't, for software you have clearer criteria for what's right or wrong. Therefore, more extensive discussion must be done about each problem that arises, and it'll take longer to develop an very good text than very good software, and one might have to respond to some problems by posting different opinions about the same topic, but I think it'll work well.
I'm considering the FDL for this guide, register a domain for it, make a bunch of mailing lists, for developers, questions from newbies, and expand it's scope to include orienteering in general. Probably, I'll eventually submit it for inclusion in Nupedia as well.
Yep, and this is an important problem. A few days ago, when I first heard about the campaign, I went over there and submitted the following:
Being a geek and Free Software enthusiast, I'm of course happy to see IBM join
in with the effort to get Linux into the mainstream (yeah, it's there for a
large part allready, but most people doesn't realize it yet).
However, more important than Free Software, is free expression, and it is my
opinion, an opinion I share with many socially responsible computer pr
ofessionals, that the so-called "content protection schemes" are the greatest
threat to free expression in the Western world today. Obviously, there are far
greater threats in other parts of the world, where human rights is violated on
a
daily basis, but content protection, is our greatest problem.
Well, the point being that while it is good to see that you withdrew the first
CPRM plan, I don't think you will get broad acceptance among geeks unless you
pull out of the whole idea.
Content protection is evil, it is impossible to balance the rights of the users
and the rights of the content providers by using content protection. It can't
be
done.
Now, on the Internet, we all become content providers, and with my writing
speed, I'm a big one too;-) and of course content providers must be
compensated
by society, othervice they can't realistically provide content. What society
needs to realize, however, is that the days where there was a certain scarcity
in the distribution medium is gone. When there is no scarcity, the Right Thing
[tm] to do is _share_, so what has to happen is that society (that means every
one of us), figures out a way to compensate the creators when everything is
shared. Content Protection undermines this, and therefore it has to go. Since
I'm not among the Libertian geeks, I think Content Protection should be banned,
but that's a looong discussion.
Anyway, I hope you will pull out of the CPRM entirely.
I got a short and a-bit-personalixed response shortly thereafter. I suggest people head over and let them know that this CPRM stuff is the worst thing they can do if they really want acceptance.
Yeah, me too. Or if they wanted a guarantee that I wasn't working for anybody else, I'd tell them to finance my [Antartica|Ellesmere Island|Himalaya|somewhere demanding) expedition....:-) I wonder if my knowledge would be worth that much...?
Well, I don't read it that way. I can't say it justifies shouting about proof, really. But then, I don't know anything about Kerberos beyond what I read on/. when M$ lawyers came creeping....:-)
Eh, I might misunderstand you, but the algorithm itself is in the public domain (where it belongs). It's the software the developers write that are BSD licensed. If commercial entities don't like the license, they can write their own software from scratch.
I have a few old-style cassettes that I want to encode with Vorbis, anybody have any ideas how this can be done most easily?
I've tried to do it on my parent's old win95 computer, but since the encoder wants (wanted at least) stereo 44kHz files and since the disk is rather small, it's not feasible to play them and make WAV files (I've tried). It would be preferable to encode it directly into Vorbis.
Eh, well I guess I might be the most effective Karma Whore around. I got +1 bonus before I could moderate and I've been up to 50 for a while now but still I'm not eligible for meta-moderating.
But, I can tell you, it does cap at 50, and there are no +2.:-)
Seriously, I don't think I've karmawhored that much really. The only time I might have been karma whoring was that story Hemos posted about spammers getting jailed, that I submitted. It wasn't good.
BTW, the 50 cap is a Good Thing [tm], if somebody has been karma whoring up to that point, it removes the incentive to continue karma whoring.
Hm, no, I can't agree. For civil disobedience to work, you need to fight and get into court every possible case you can get, get it as far as you can, and get it as early as you can. That's why it is important to get this through. And I really think it is a good case.
ven if Jammer could find a lawyer to represent him, he would probably be advised to pay the fine and move on. Jessica Litman, a professor
of copyright law at Wayne State University in Chicago, says that in these cases a lawyer's best advice would be to pay the fine. "If you're a
lawyer and someone comes to your client from Walt Disney, you are not going to tell your client to go ahead with the trial," she says. "You
could be right, but it would take seven years and $100,000 to find out."
I don't think it can be stated any clearer: The legal system doesn't work. If the case can't be tried in court by any realistic means, there is no way to obtain justice. Too bad.
"We enjoy this because it's an intellectual challenge," Powell says. "There is a real art and skill in this."
Just like the script kiddiez, right....
Well, I haven't got any pirated programs, free software makes them irrelevant. That you don't like the prize or the license it's no excuse, just don't use the stuff and move on.
But this guy has got an attitude that I really don't like.
Hm, well, in this case, I can't say Occam's Razor (one of my favorites) can be applied. There is no evidence whatsoever either way, which means no valid conclusion can be drawn either way. Drawing any conclusion either way at this point (like you seem to do) is just going to blur your mind if any important evidence pop up for either hypothesis. We'll just have to continue searching (with piggy-back projects preferably...).
Some of you might be aware that the aliens we are seeing here on earth are rich kids who come to earth to have fun by appearing before people who are so weird nobody would believe them anyway.
Now, my theory, nay, proven fact is that the large number of crashes is due to interstellar drunken driving. Kids go to these clouds and get seriously pissed. It is well known in the Galactic Community (just ask any alien!) that the parties on earth take off, so the alien kids can't stop after inhaling a cloud, but continue to earth, where they are caught in our strong gravitional field with the inevitable result, a crash.;-)
Actually, I don't understand Stallman's IP philosophy that way. It doesn't seem like he is against IP as such, he just thinks of IP in it's classical meaning: IP doesn't exist to benfit right holders primarily, but to benefit the society. Of course, right holders get their deserved piece of the cake too, but it is still to benefit society that they get it.
I think it is very important that US gets proper spam regulations, a lot of things has happened that has convinced me that we need anti-spam laws, as much I was opposed to it in the beginning.
You need something like the legislation we have here in Norway, it's confirmed opt-in or die.
Talking about off shore, I get most my spam, something like 90%, from US sources. Since most of Europe has anti-spam laws, or something coming up, a ban on spam in the US will mean we'll just block the countries who host spammers, the international nature of the internet will probably force them to get good regulations quite fast. I think that's the best solution to the spam problem (which is I think is a rather larger problem).
While the sun is certainly not at the center of the Universe, there is no center of the Universe in current cosmology, such exercises are very good, and I wish people would use them more in school. It certainly aids critical thinking, and a lot of things that we take for granted that in fact may be wrong, may be questioned.
They didn't send people, but they sent a bunch of probes. Anyway, if NASA hadn't, the soviets would probably have done it some time during 1970-71. It's a nice article here.
If they're talking about not supporting Microsoft of Netscape extensions to
HTML, I'm right behind them. But if they're talking about not supporting
HTML-3.2, then screw them!
AFAICT, they're not. They're pointing out that it is not the old standards that are the problem, it's the old sucky implementations of these standards (or whatever they implemented) that we need to get rid of.
Now, I think this proposal is very radical, indeed, I think it might be too radical. However, if you design pages after the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (which you should), the backward compatibility issues will be few, I think.
There are some very annoying things, like the font-size stuff in IE3. If I remember correctly, it scales the font relative to the default font of the element instead of relative to the parent element, which is what the spec says. Getting this incredibly bad browser out of circulation would of course be great. However, one needs to weigh the importance of using the font size extensively to the importance of getting IE3 out of the market.
Further, HTML4.01 Strict is a far better standard IMHO than HTML3.2. HTML3.2 was dictated pretty much by the panics that went on in the browser wars. HTML4.0 Strict gets back to the "separate style from content", which is a really Good Thing [tm]. HTML has a few problems, I think, mainly in the rather strange distinction between block level elements and inline level elements, but the separatation style from content is still something Good and Important.
And, BTW, WASP used Amazon as an example of sites that can't participate because they can't have a design that chase off a single user. Well, Amazon has a design which certainly chases me off as it is now...
Is the Internet essential for children
learning to read? No. Is the Internet essential for children learning to subtract?
No.
That's where you are in second grade. You can't stop there.
Is the Internet essential for college students learning about particle physics?
No.
I guess we would have to agree that we disagree on that matter. Particle physics is one of the fields (astronomy is too) where it takes a very long time for printed media to catch up with material made available by research institutions on the web. There is no way you can learn about current research in particle physics without using the web at least weekly. As for researchers, people on the house here rarely consult printed media anymore.
Now, if we're talking 15-year-olds, it is not critical that they have access to the latest results. If they get access to it, however, it will significantly enhance their education. I get kids coming up to my office to interview me about things like general relativistic world models. To let them in, of course I demand that they are well prepared, and they really are, and they have been using the web to gather information that is hardly available to them by any other means.
However, what is most essential about giving them access to the internet, is something that has been mostly neglected in normal education: Kids are taught about what to think, but not how to think. How to filter out the crap in the Real World [tm] in which the internet is important, is so important that if you neglect it, you will have been given an education that is hardly useful.
School is supposed to prepare you for the Real World[tm], how can you possibly have an education without proper exposure to the internet?
Slashdot Mirror
If you move a page, make sure the server responds with 301 for a long time to come.
I wrote a note with the intention of submitting it to W3C for possible publishing as a note, but their author guidelines are only open to members. Anyway, it describes the use of Apache .htaccess and Redirect directives, and what ISPs should do to expired accounts.
Then, robots should be written to update links based on the 301 response, or remove links in case of a 410 response. This would reduce the amount of work required to keep links up-to-date.
And when you see what Disney did to my beloved Winnie-the-Pooh, well at least that's what made me convinced something is fundamentally wrong with the copyrights.
I think my guide is really good now, it's the best on the net, and it's better than some standard textbooks on the subject, still it can be improved. One of the things I have learnt is that fixing things should be formalized, something like a bug-tracking-system for texts. Of course, texts are different from software, either the program works or it doesn't, for software you have clearer criteria for what's right or wrong. Therefore, more extensive discussion must be done about each problem that arises, and it'll take longer to develop an very good text than very good software, and one might have to respond to some problems by posting different opinions about the same topic, but I think it'll work well.
I'm considering the FDL for this guide, register a domain for it, make a bunch of mailing lists, for developers, questions from newbies, and expand it's scope to include orienteering in general. Probably, I'll eventually submit it for inclusion in Nupedia as well.
I got a short and a-bit-personalixed response shortly thereafter. I suggest people head over and let them know that this CPRM stuff is the worst thing they can do if they really want acceptance.
Yeah, me too. Or if they wanted a guarantee that I wasn't working for anybody else, I'd tell them to finance my [Antartica|Ellesmere Island|Himalaya|somewhere demanding) expedition.... :-) I wonder if my knowledge would be worth that much...?
I got, as an At Large member, an e-mail yesterday, soliciting comments. I think it is a good idea to head over and tell them what you think.
Well, that was an answer to the question, I don't have more to say.
Well, I don't read it that way. I can't say it justifies shouting about proof, really. But then, I don't know anything about Kerberos beyond what I read on /. when M$ lawyers came creeping.... :-)
Eh, I might misunderstand you, but the algorithm itself is in the public domain (where it belongs). It's the software the developers write that are BSD licensed. If commercial entities don't like the license, they can write their own software from scratch.
I've tried to do it on my parent's old win95 computer, but since the encoder wants (wanted at least) stereo 44kHz files and since the disk is rather small, it's not feasible to play them and make WAV files (I've tried). It would be preferable to encode it directly into Vorbis.
Any ideas?
Seriously, I don't think I've karmawhored that much really. The only time I might have been karma whoring was that story Hemos posted about spammers getting jailed, that I submitted. It wasn't good.
BTW, the 50 cap is a Good Thing [tm], if somebody has been karma whoring up to that point, it removes the incentive to continue karma whoring.
Hm, no, I can't agree. For civil disobedience to work, you need to fight and get into court every possible case you can get, get it as far as you can, and get it as early as you can. That's why it is important to get this through. And I really think it is a good case.
Where does he say that? The exact quote please!
Actually, on this machine, I haven't got any audio software... :-)
I don't think it can be stated any clearer: The legal system doesn't work. If the case can't be tried in court by any realistic means, there is no way to obtain justice. Too bad.
Just like the script kiddiez, right....
Well, I haven't got any pirated programs, free software makes them irrelevant. That you don't like the prize or the license it's no excuse, just don't use the stuff and move on.
But this guy has got an attitude that I really don't like.
Well, if we had a type III civ in our galaxy, we would most probably know by now. Seriously.
Hm, well, in this case, I can't say Occam's Razor (one of my favorites) can be applied. There is no evidence whatsoever either way, which means no valid conclusion can be drawn either way. Drawing any conclusion either way at this point (like you seem to do) is just going to blur your mind if any important evidence pop up for either hypothesis. We'll just have to continue searching (with piggy-back projects preferably...).
Now, my theory, nay, proven fact is that the large number of crashes is due to interstellar drunken driving. Kids go to these clouds and get seriously pissed. It is well known in the Galactic Community (just ask any alien!) that the parties on earth take off, so the alien kids can't stop after inhaling a cloud, but continue to earth, where they are caught in our strong gravitional field with the inevitable result, a crash. ;-)
Actually, I don't understand Stallman's IP philosophy that way. It doesn't seem like he is against IP as such, he just thinks of IP in it's classical meaning: IP doesn't exist to benfit right holders primarily, but to benefit the society. Of course, right holders get their deserved piece of the cake too, but it is still to benefit society that they get it.
You need something like the legislation we have here in Norway, it's confirmed opt-in or die.
Talking about off shore, I get most my spam, something like 90%, from US sources. Since most of Europe has anti-spam laws, or something coming up, a ban on spam in the US will mean we'll just block the countries who host spammers, the international nature of the internet will probably force them to get good regulations quite fast. I think that's the best solution to the spam problem (which is I think is a rather larger problem).
While the sun is certainly not at the center of the Universe, there is no center of the Universe in current cosmology, such exercises are very good, and I wish people would use them more in school. It certainly aids critical thinking, and a lot of things that we take for granted that in fact may be wrong, may be questioned.
Damn, I bet you searched Google with the same key words as I did! :-) But did you read the whole article? :-)
They didn't send people, but they sent a bunch of probes. Anyway, if NASA hadn't, the soviets would probably have done it some time during 1970-71. It's a nice article here.
AFAICT, they're not. They're pointing out that it is not the old standards that are the problem, it's the old sucky implementations of these standards (or whatever they implemented) that we need to get rid of.
Now, I think this proposal is very radical, indeed, I think it might be too radical. However, if you design pages after the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (which you should), the backward compatibility issues will be few, I think.
There are some very annoying things, like the font-size stuff in IE3. If I remember correctly, it scales the font relative to the default font of the element instead of relative to the parent element, which is what the spec says. Getting this incredibly bad browser out of circulation would of course be great. However, one needs to weigh the importance of using the font size extensively to the importance of getting IE3 out of the market.
Further, HTML4.01 Strict is a far better standard IMHO than HTML3.2. HTML3.2 was dictated pretty much by the panics that went on in the browser wars. HTML4.0 Strict gets back to the "separate style from content", which is a really Good Thing [tm]. HTML has a few problems, I think, mainly in the rather strange distinction between block level elements and inline level elements, but the separatation style from content is still something Good and Important.
And, BTW, WASP used Amazon as an example of sites that can't participate because they can't have a design that chase off a single user. Well, Amazon has a design which certainly chases me off as it is now...
That's where you are in second grade. You can't stop there.
I guess we would have to agree that we disagree on that matter. Particle physics is one of the fields (astronomy is too) where it takes a very long time for printed media to catch up with material made available by research institutions on the web. There is no way you can learn about current research in particle physics without using the web at least weekly. As for researchers, people on the house here rarely consult printed media anymore.
Now, if we're talking 15-year-olds, it is not critical that they have access to the latest results. If they get access to it, however, it will significantly enhance their education. I get kids coming up to my office to interview me about things like general relativistic world models. To let them in, of course I demand that they are well prepared, and they really are, and they have been using the web to gather information that is hardly available to them by any other means.
However, what is most essential about giving them access to the internet, is something that has been mostly neglected in normal education: Kids are taught about what to think, but not how to think. How to filter out the crap in the Real World [tm] in which the internet is important, is so important that if you neglect it, you will have been given an education that is hardly useful.
School is supposed to prepare you for the Real World[tm], how can you possibly have an education without proper exposure to the internet?