As I stated many times in the foras (I was dmoz editor "kjetikj"), the informal peer review process that makes OSS development work, does not exist in dmoz. I pointed this out, using the example of Society/History/Science as an example (the category where I started editing), many times over a period of about two years. It should be apparent to anyone knowledgeable in the history of science that this category is of very bad quality. Two years is a very long time, and when it is totally impossible to get people to realize how bad this is in two years, it's not going to improve. It's something you just have to realize. There are many other examples as well, most of Science/Astronomy is pretty much in the same state.
You know what finally made me quit? For half a year, someone had submitted a portuguese language site to me. Now, I can't read much portuguese, but browsing the entire site, I could see it was a high quality site, I could see that because I'm an expert on the subject, I recognize illustrations, some nomenclature, etc. Well, I sent it over to World/Portuguese, who are short of editors, and the site remained in unreviewed for a month. The submitter submitted it again, and I sent a note apoligizing for the fact that I couldn't accept it as per the guidelines, and that it's stuck in unreviewed, and encouraged the submitter to sign up as an editor. This very knowledgeable person was rejected as an editor. This continued for half a year, with me apologizing to the submitter each time of the terrible shortcoming of dmoz. Eventually, there were so many corresponding cats in World, I made a category with links to those and decided to list this site in this cat. Well, the cat with non-english sites eventually became obsolete, and so an editall goes in and moves the site to World/Portuguese, where it is stuck in unreviewed. Naturally, the editall made no attempt to understand why the site was listed where it was. Now, I'd like her to apologize to the submitter why the high-quality site is not listed in dmoz, I can tell you, you don't feel too good about it. So, the problem is here, dmoz has to reject high quality sites because it doesn't fit in the rigid hierarchy. You know, when dealing with editalls, they usually stick so tightly to the guidelines they could be replaced very easily in most cases by a robot.It's just rational what they do. On the other hand, editalls also go around accepting low-quality sites while category editors are discussing whether the quality of a site is good enough for accepting. It's a mess, and it won't improve.
I think there are examples of excellence in the Science
hierarchy.
OK, I must admit that I haven't looked that thoroughly through everything there. Particularily, in Biology, there is a lot of things I would have no clue about.
whilst for specialist
areas (eg. in science and computing) DMoz absolutely trounces Yahoo.
I can't really agree with you. While I think that Yahoo sucks badly in many fields (I spent one year getting them to remove a site that I had but removed), most of Science/Astronomy in dmoz (which happens to be my field of research) is really bad. The Mars category is an exception. Also, I edited Society/History/Science long ago, but totally clueless editalls kept adding very low quality sites to the category, symlinks and subcats were added without thought or planning, leaving the category in an unbelievable mess. It still is, I simply didn't have time to clean it up, and should serve as an example of how bad it can get. I suspect that most of Science has been built in the same way, and that's why it doesn't work.
I think what the world needs is a directory built from scratch, but on different principles than Dmoz. In Dmoz, individuals are granted too much power, when they become editors, or editalls, metas or whatever. At the same time, they reject most of the applicants, wasting a lot of talent. This has destroyed the informal peer-review process which makes Open Source Software development work, so, to get a working directory, you would have to make so the peer-review works. In dmoz, it's as good as non-existant.
I quit dmoz after more than two years of editing. It was a great idea, but they blew it. Large parts of the directory sucks badly, and it is not going to improve. While it is still slightly better than Yahoo, it is my opinion that the Web lacks a usable directory.
You can't. Your understanding is simply totally flawed. Now, get out you math book, you'll see that there is no center on the surface of a sphere!. That's all there is to it. I could use the same logic to prove that my bed is the center of the Universe.
5,812.98 inches, and each side is 9,131 inches
Wrong. You can't measure the original length of these things to the accuracy of an inch. Less than a meter is hard. For example, approximately 7 meters has eroded away from the top of Cephren's pyramid. So, this:
Incredibly, this calculation is accurate to six digits.
is just laughable. Bullshit in, bullshit out.
As measured by today's laser instruments, all of these perfectly
cut and intentionally bowed stone blocks duplicate exactly the curvature of the
earth. The radius of this bow is equal to the radius of the Earth.
You should stop reading and start thinking instead. Nowadays, there is no clear surface of the pyramids. It's just huge rocks. If you think that you need a laser instrument to measure anything there, you should jump on a plane to Egypt and see for yourself. It is not possible to measure anything about the slope of the pyramids to an accuracy to more than a few degrees. There are similar reasons why it is wrong to say that they couldn't have used solar methods to align the pyramids.
Also, if you go to Egypt (I've been there, and the things I saw are the most impressive manmade things I have seen), you'll see that the Pyramids (there are if I remember correctly 97 known pyramids), were built on trail and error.
They are fantastic, but they are fantastic because it shows the dedication and skill of the Egyptian people.
It has no merit it all, it's the typical crackpot stuff. I've seen the sphinx up close, and you have to be damn selective of your evidence to see what they saw. Anybody can write a book about "egyptology" and it'll sell like hell. That's because there are tons of mysteries that has been solved centuries ago, that aren't mysteries at all. Exactly like this with alignments to north. It's no mystery they did it, it has never been a mystery, but you bet we're going to hear about it for centuries....:-(
The Egyptians were brilliant. They built this stuff, and it's an exciting field of research, but please, leave the things that has been beaten to death, dead.
Ok, maybe I didn't explain this clearly... Take a world map, unfold it onto the
floor. Draw a vertical line straight through where the pyramids are. Now
measure how much land is to the left and how much is to the right. You'll find
that they are almost totally equal. Coincidence? I can't say it's not, but it's a hell
of a big one, that's my point.
Then, take a map that is split not in the pacific, but in the Atlantic. Draw a line through the pyramids, and you'll see how ridiculous this argument is.
Just to followup on myself before I get in trouble for it: The Nature article says that solar methods are ruled out, and I find it hard to understand why. That reasoning probably refers to the relatively large angular size of the sun, something that necessarily blurs any shadow (creating an umbra and a penumbra). I'm pretty sure however, without having ever tried it or done the math, that you are not constrained by the size of the sun. If you have nice, flat, white surface, and a sharp needle on a pole to make the shadow, you should be able to estimate the penumbral regions pretty well, especially if you can do it while the air stands pretty still.
Let me first said that the Great Pyramids of Giza is the most impressive work I have ever seen (yes, I have been there). It's just incredible, and the feeling of standing at the foot, or being inside them is hard to describe. So is, BTW, the feeling you get in many of the newer temples in Egypt, for instance the Carnac temple.
However, aligning anything with True North is easy. It has never been a riddle, whoever says so is just out to get some good press for a book or research grants.
I describe in my How to use a Compass-pages (in a section on how to navigate without a compass), how you can find true north easily, and to extremely high accuracy by only using the sun. They could well achieve the desired accuracy with the methods described there.
Do you happen to live in a so-called 'big' town like NY or Frankfurt?
Actually, I live in Oslo...
Oslo is probably the smallest large town in the world, it has it's share of traffic, noise, criminality and excessively high housing costs. Fortunately, I have never lived more than 200 meters from the forest, mostly peaceful neighbourhoods.
Could you imagine it being *worth* living in really rural Sweden to find a good
place to live, to rise your children, to write good Software...
Oh, certainly, I think you missed my point entirely. I would love to move somewhere beautiful and quiet, if I could get a challenging job in such a community!
I am kind of frustrated each time I hear about people living in a
beautiful area like e.g. Klarälvdalen as for several reasons I can not move there
myself.
Why don't you ask them if they're hiring....?:-)
Anyway, Klaraälvdalen may not be exactly the place for me, I would more be looking for a place with exciting mountains. There are lots of such communities around here, the trouble is getting a challenging job.
Well, you could say that Oslo, Norway, Trolltech's home base is rural, well, it might be in a global perspective, but I really ROTFLed when I read the press release, because among the rather largish companies, there is Klarälvdalens Datakonsult. Well, for those who don't know, Klarälvdalen is really rural Sweden. It's pretty much in the middle of nowhere, by Swedish standards. Nevertheless, if you happen to love nature, forests, rivers, hunting, etc., like I happen to do, well, it's not bad at all, it could well be the place to be. My uncle lives not too far away, BTW.
Hm, I flamed this treaty in a different forum earlier today.
However, didn't they get a lot of comments to the 17th draft allready? It was the same comments. Why didn't they change anything for the better before publishing the 19th draft?
I think we should keep an eye out for the actuall legal wording in the treaty, and we need some lawyers on it. Now, they may make a few public comments to get us off their backs, and keep all the wrong stuff in the treaty, and once this stuff becomes national laws, it's bad enough.
While they might have gotten a clue, I wouldn't be too confident.
Well, I'm coding mostly by hand myself, but since my mother wanted to start writing web pages, and since Amaya is the only tool that produce valid code, I thought I'd give it a try.
It works allright, she uses it successfully for most purposes, but that's because she writes relatively simple pages. But then, if everybody wrote simpler pages, the web would be a better place, wouldn't it?:-)
I agree. I spend more time correcting the code that FrontPage produces than I would writing everything from scratch. And, if you stick to HTML4 Strict and use stylesheets for layout, it really is very simple.
But, it is also worth noting that Tim Berners-Lee never thought anybody would write code by hand...
I'm being trolled. If you'd care to read a few thousand pages in the W3C TR section, you'll see that they are at least 10 years ahead of anybody. Tell me, have anything at all happened in the last 5 years? I would claim no! There has not been a single significant advance in 5 years! And it is not W3C who have been destroying the markets, it's the astonishing short-sightedness of the browser warriors, who created two identical badly sucking browsers, who are actually trying to claim that one browser is better than the other. It's really astonishing to see how little useful features they have managed to implement in five years...
Your way of creating standards kills brilliance. There are a few people out there who are really brilliant, but nobody is capable of seeing it, so they're not scratching itches. Then, you've got a few idiots coming along trying to convince everybody that they actually have a good product, and since nobody understands brilliance even when it's before their eyes, well, the result is apparent, two identical sucky browsers.
That's the kind of attitude that's destroying the web. What was really good about the web was that it was totally independent of platform and application. That's what made it take off. There are lots of fantastic things that has remained unrealized because of people like you who let your employers dictate how you write web apps. I'd say, if they dictate how to write web apps, quit! It's as simple as that.
Wow, that they are experimenting with something that isn't windows is really great! I don't know about 3D, but I mean windows has been around for 30 years, and is still pretty much the only GUI that has been tried to any extent... I mean, one would think that the IT industry is revolutionized, but then, most of the great things have been here longer than I....
Everyone's votes counts, and everyone should be
allowed to vote.
You know, I'm starting to have doubts... A friend of mine worked at an election, and in comes a man, she asks: "may I see your voting card, please?" he looks at her, she repeats. Well, it became obvious that he didn't have a voting card. Well, she told him not to worry, "what's your name, sir, I can find you in the files?" she asked. "Carl" he responded. "Carl, what?" she asked "what's you last name sir?" Well, he didn't know. So, he couldn't vote. Well, one hour later, he comes back guided by his son. Goes into a locker and comes out again, with the ballot. To ensure a secret vote, you get an envolope to put the ballot in, but he hadn't managed to put it in there. His son had to do that for him.
Well, it is quite clear that someone who doesn't know his own name, and is incapable of opening an open envelope is rather incapable of making an informed decision on candidates. Yet, his vote counts as much as mine.
Well, it is a slippery slope, this. Who do you want to exclude from voting? Therefore, I don't want to say that someone like that should be excluded, but I do feel bad about it. And, it does say something as to the performance of democracy.
So what? You know, sometimes you make certain model assumptions, and you start out by assuming certain things, and see where you end up.
I agree that it is hard to prove the existance of black holes, and the only evidence I will accept as firm, is that you can resolve a structure where
you have a bright accretion disk with matter falling into the black hole, and then it suddenly goes black in the center. It's be a while before something like that can be done. Yet, I'm going to write in my master's thesis that "I assume that the standard black hole model for quasar energy production is essentially correct".
You see, Black Holes are really quite simple. It's just that gravity collapses an object beyond any other known force. So, you've got something really simple that explains an awful lot of things. So, you'll going to have an awful lot of explaining to do if you reject black holes. Of course, you have the full right to reject black holes, but I am pretty sure you'll have serious trouble coming up with anything that isn't effectively cut down by Occam's Razor, i.e. you can't find anything simpler that explains all the facts. I think.
The advantage of theorizing based on such assumptions, is further that you can come up with many more empirical consequences, which means that you get the chance of actually putting the entire model to test. In other words, that people come up with things like this, is necessary to test the model and may lead to the model being abandoned.
So, the Black Hole model is a great model, at least compared to many other models people have faith in.
I've been thinking about this for some time. The primary purpose and reason for developing it was to fight oppressing regimes, but rights are being taken away at such a pace these days, we might need it ourselves in not so long....
People mention Freenet, but Freenet only protects information that is there. You've got to make sure that if police or military forces comes bursting in one night, information must be stored where they can't close it down and distributed from there.
Also, it is important that people who support a site don't use too much bandwidth and HD space before it gets serious. Othervice, people may not be able give the necessary resources.
What I have in mind is a network where those providing endagered resources can call for support (CFS). Those who respond to the CFS set up a software to download an image of the site every now and then (say once a month, once a week or something), and at least after controversial information has been published.
Next, we need something that sets off an alarm that the endagered site is being attacked. This has to include the possibility that the site just goes down without warning (military forces shoot the webmaster and blows everything to pieces, to take an extreme). This could be done by checking every now and then if the server is up, and if it stays down for any extended period of time, the alarm would go off. Naturally, there must not be too many false alarms, or the system will loose credibility. This pretty much rules out Windows as platform....:-) Also, it should be possible for the administrator to set off the alarm by a single command, so that if somebody comes bursting in, they have to act fast to stop the information from being transmitted. Other features such as the administrator saying "if my site goes down at 12:15 and you don't hear from me, we're under attack". Also, intelligence might try to fool the system to mirror useless or bogus information, we would have to work hard to make sure we are one step ahead.
If a site is under attack, there are a number of things that could be done. First, put up a mirror of any information that you have stored, dump it on Freenet. Maybe some sort of system could be set up so that nameservers are updated with information about one of the mirrors, so that the web site has very little downtime? Perhaps a global network of name servers similar to the two provided by Granite Canyon's Public DNS service, where authority can be transfered as part of an alarm. One can also attempt to keep e-mail working as well, but that's of little use if the admin has been shot.... If the alarm has been set off by the admin, one should try to download a mirror as a part of the alarm response to get the latest.
I have also been thinking about how to use the internet to try to keep those suppressed online using minimalist solutions, e.g. TCP/IP over ham radio. It might have low bandwidth, but perhaps sufficient for e-mails...?
Nobody won the browser wars, damnit! We all lost! The browser wars set us back 10 years, to the time before the web. The Web was invented so that anybody could view anything on anything, the browser wars destroyed that. Instead, we got two sucky browsers that look the same, feel the same, renders pages almost identical. One is perhaps more bloated than the other, but they both suck badly. Instead, we should have had a great diversity in browsers, each with different features, leaving the layout of the page and the control of the page largely in the hands of the users. Very little of the web's potential is realized, all it does is put food on the table for a few overpaid graphics designers, while web pages are still linear or hierarchal. Arrrrggggh!
Slashdot Mirror
You know what finally made me quit? For half a year, someone had submitted a portuguese language site to me. Now, I can't read much portuguese, but browsing the entire site, I could see it was a high quality site, I could see that because I'm an expert on the subject, I recognize illustrations, some nomenclature, etc. Well, I sent it over to World/Portuguese, who are short of editors, and the site remained in unreviewed for a month. The submitter submitted it again, and I sent a note apoligizing for the fact that I couldn't accept it as per the guidelines, and that it's stuck in unreviewed, and encouraged the submitter to sign up as an editor. This very knowledgeable person was rejected as an editor. This continued for half a year, with me apologizing to the submitter each time of the terrible shortcoming of dmoz. Eventually, there were so many corresponding cats in World, I made a category with links to those and decided to list this site in this cat. Well, the cat with non-english sites eventually became obsolete, and so an editall goes in and moves the site to World/Portuguese, where it is stuck in unreviewed. Naturally, the editall made no attempt to understand why the site was listed where it was. Now, I'd like her to apologize to the submitter why the high-quality site is not listed in dmoz, I can tell you, you don't feel too good about it. So, the problem is here, dmoz has to reject high quality sites because it doesn't fit in the rigid hierarchy. You know, when dealing with editalls, they usually stick so tightly to the guidelines they could be replaced very easily in most cases by a robot.It's just rational what they do. On the other hand, editalls also go around accepting low-quality sites while category editors are discussing whether the quality of a site is good enough for accepting. It's a mess, and it won't improve.
OK, I must admit that I haven't looked that thoroughly through everything there. Particularily, in Biology, there is a lot of things I would have no clue about.
No, unfortunately....
I can't really agree with you. While I think that Yahoo sucks badly in many fields (I spent one year getting them to remove a site that I had but removed), most of Science/Astronomy in dmoz (which happens to be my field of research) is really bad. The Mars category is an exception. Also, I edited Society/History/Science long ago, but totally clueless editalls kept adding very low quality sites to the category, symlinks and subcats were added without thought or planning, leaving the category in an unbelievable mess. It still is, I simply didn't have time to clean it up, and should serve as an example of how bad it can get. I suspect that most of Science has been built in the same way, and that's why it doesn't work.
I think what the world needs is a directory built from scratch, but on different principles than Dmoz. In Dmoz, individuals are granted too much power, when they become editors, or editalls, metas or whatever. At the same time, they reject most of the applicants, wasting a lot of talent. This has destroyed the informal peer-review process which makes Open Source Software development work, so, to get a working directory, you would have to make so the peer-review works. In dmoz, it's as good as non-existant.
I quit dmoz after more than two years of editing. It was a great idea, but they blew it. Large parts of the directory sucks badly, and it is not going to improve. While it is still slightly better than Yahoo, it is my opinion that the Web lacks a usable directory.
You can't. Your understanding is simply totally flawed. Now, get out you math book, you'll see that there is no center on the surface of a sphere!. That's all there is to it. I could use the same logic to prove that my bed is the center of the Universe.
Wrong. You can't measure the original length of these things to the accuracy of an inch. Less than a meter is hard. For example, approximately 7 meters has eroded away from the top of Cephren's pyramid. So, this:
is just laughable. Bullshit in, bullshit out.
You should stop reading and start thinking instead. Nowadays, there is no clear surface of the pyramids. It's just huge rocks. If you think that you need a laser instrument to measure anything there, you should jump on a plane to Egypt and see for yourself. It is not possible to measure anything about the slope of the pyramids to an accuracy to more than a few degrees. There are similar reasons why it is wrong to say that they couldn't have used solar methods to align the pyramids.
Also, if you go to Egypt (I've been there, and the things I saw are the most impressive manmade things I have seen), you'll see that the Pyramids (there are if I remember correctly 97 known pyramids), were built on trail and error.
They are fantastic, but they are fantastic because it shows the dedication and skill of the Egyptian people.
The Egyptians were brilliant. They built this stuff, and it's an exciting field of research, but please, leave the things that has been beaten to death, dead.
Then, take a map that is split not in the pacific, but in the Atlantic. Draw a line through the pyramids, and you'll see how ridiculous this argument is.
Just to followup on myself before I get in trouble for it: The Nature article says that solar methods are ruled out, and I find it hard to understand why. That reasoning probably refers to the relatively large angular size of the sun, something that necessarily blurs any shadow (creating an umbra and a penumbra). I'm pretty sure however, without having ever tried it or done the math, that you are not constrained by the size of the sun. If you have nice, flat, white surface, and a sharp needle on a pole to make the shadow, you should be able to estimate the penumbral regions pretty well, especially if you can do it while the air stands pretty still.
However, aligning anything with True North is easy. It has never been a riddle, whoever says so is just out to get some good press for a book or research grants.
I describe in my How to use a Compass-pages (in a section on how to navigate without a compass), how you can find true north easily, and to extremely high accuracy by only using the sun. They could well achieve the desired accuracy with the methods described there.
Actually, I live in Oslo...
Oslo is probably the smallest large town in the world, it has it's share of traffic, noise, criminality and excessively high housing costs. Fortunately, I have never lived more than 200 meters from the forest, mostly peaceful neighbourhoods.
Oh, certainly, I think you missed my point entirely. I would love to move somewhere beautiful and quiet, if I could get a challenging job in such a community!
Why don't you ask them if they're hiring....? :-)
Anyway, Klaraälvdalen may not be exactly the place for me, I would more be looking for a place with exciting mountains. There are lots of such communities around here, the trouble is getting a challenging job.
Well, you could say that Oslo, Norway, Trolltech's home base is rural, well, it might be in a global perspective, but I really ROTFLed when I read the press release, because among the rather largish companies, there is Klarälvdalens Datakonsult. Well, for those who don't know, Klarälvdalen is really rural Sweden. It's pretty much in the middle of nowhere, by Swedish standards. Nevertheless, if you happen to love nature, forests, rivers, hunting, etc., like I happen to do, well, it's not bad at all, it could well be the place to be. My uncle lives not too far away, BTW.
Yeah, I thought that legal terms were there to be precise....
However, didn't they get a lot of comments to the 17th draft allready? It was the same comments. Why didn't they change anything for the better before publishing the 19th draft?
I think we should keep an eye out for the actuall legal wording in the treaty, and we need some lawyers on it. Now, they may make a few public comments to get us off their backs, and keep all the wrong stuff in the treaty, and once this stuff becomes national laws, it's bad enough.
While they might have gotten a clue, I wouldn't be too confident.
It works allright, she uses it successfully for most purposes, but that's because she writes relatively simple pages. But then, if everybody wrote simpler pages, the web would be a better place, wouldn't it? :-)
Right, and I'm not even a computer science student, and I'm proud of it.
But, it is also worth noting that Tim Berners-Lee never thought anybody would write code by hand...
It's much better on rendering valid pages. You should get those designers to check their code and see what happens then.
Your way of creating standards kills brilliance. There are a few people out there who are really brilliant, but nobody is capable of seeing it, so they're not scratching itches. Then, you've got a few idiots coming along trying to convince everybody that they actually have a good product, and since nobody understands brilliance even when it's before their eyes, well, the result is apparent, two identical sucky browsers.
That's the kind of attitude that's destroying the web. What was really good about the web was that it was totally independent of platform and application. That's what made it take off. There are lots of fantastic things that has remained unrealized because of people like you who let your employers dictate how you write web apps. I'd say, if they dictate how to write web apps, quit! It's as simple as that.
Wow, that they are experimenting with something that isn't windows is really great! I don't know about 3D, but I mean windows has been around for 30 years, and is still pretty much the only GUI that has been tried to any extent... I mean, one would think that the IT industry is revolutionized, but then, most of the great things have been here longer than I....
You know, I'm starting to have doubts... A friend of mine worked at an election, and in comes a man, she asks: "may I see your voting card, please?" he looks at her, she repeats. Well, it became obvious that he didn't have a voting card. Well, she told him not to worry, "what's your name, sir, I can find you in the files?" she asked. "Carl" he responded. "Carl, what?" she asked "what's you last name sir?" Well, he didn't know. So, he couldn't vote. Well, one hour later, he comes back guided by his son. Goes into a locker and comes out again, with the ballot. To ensure a secret vote, you get an envolope to put the ballot in, but he hadn't managed to put it in there. His son had to do that for him.
Well, it is quite clear that someone who doesn't know his own name, and is incapable of opening an open envelope is rather incapable of making an informed decision on candidates. Yet, his vote counts as much as mine.
Well, it is a slippery slope, this. Who do you want to exclude from voting? Therefore, I don't want to say that someone like that should be excluded, but I do feel bad about it. And, it does say something as to the performance of democracy.
Just a minor thing, if it's GPLed, it's not public domain.
So what? You know, sometimes you make certain model assumptions, and you start out by assuming certain things, and see where you end up.
I agree that it is hard to prove the existance of black holes, and the only evidence I will accept as firm, is that you can resolve a structure where you have a bright accretion disk with matter falling into the black hole, and then it suddenly goes black in the center. It's be a while before something like that can be done. Yet, I'm going to write in my master's thesis that "I assume that the standard black hole model for quasar energy production is essentially correct".
You see, Black Holes are really quite simple. It's just that gravity collapses an object beyond any other known force. So, you've got something really simple that explains an awful lot of things. So, you'll going to have an awful lot of explaining to do if you reject black holes. Of course, you have the full right to reject black holes, but I am pretty sure you'll have serious trouble coming up with anything that isn't effectively cut down by Occam's Razor, i.e. you can't find anything simpler that explains all the facts. I think.
The advantage of theorizing based on such assumptions, is further that you can come up with many more empirical consequences, which means that you get the chance of actually putting the entire model to test. In other words, that people come up with things like this, is necessary to test the model and may lead to the model being abandoned.
So, the Black Hole model is a great model, at least compared to many other models people have faith in.
People mention Freenet, but Freenet only protects information that is there. You've got to make sure that if police or military forces comes bursting in one night, information must be stored where they can't close it down and distributed from there.
Also, it is important that people who support a site don't use too much bandwidth and HD space before it gets serious. Othervice, people may not be able give the necessary resources.
What I have in mind is a network where those providing endagered resources can call for support (CFS). Those who respond to the CFS set up a software to download an image of the site every now and then (say once a month, once a week or something), and at least after controversial information has been published.
Next, we need something that sets off an alarm that the endagered site is being attacked. This has to include the possibility that the site just goes down without warning (military forces shoot the webmaster and blows everything to pieces, to take an extreme). This could be done by checking every now and then if the server is up, and if it stays down for any extended period of time, the alarm would go off. Naturally, there must not be too many false alarms, or the system will loose credibility. This pretty much rules out Windows as platform.... :-) Also, it should be possible for the administrator to set off the alarm by a single command, so that if somebody comes bursting in, they have to act fast to stop the information from being transmitted. Other features such as the administrator saying "if my site goes down at 12:15 and you don't hear from me, we're under attack". Also, intelligence might try to fool the system to mirror useless or bogus information, we would have to work hard to make sure we are one step ahead.
If a site is under attack, there are a number of things that could be done. First, put up a mirror of any information that you have stored, dump it on Freenet. Maybe some sort of system could be set up so that nameservers are updated with information about one of the mirrors, so that the web site has very little downtime? Perhaps a global network of name servers similar to the two provided by Granite Canyon's Public DNS service, where authority can be transfered as part of an alarm. One can also attempt to keep e-mail working as well, but that's of little use if the admin has been shot.... If the alarm has been set off by the admin, one should try to download a mirror as a part of the alarm response to get the latest.
I have also been thinking about how to use the internet to try to keep those suppressed online using minimalist solutions, e.g. TCP/IP over ham radio. It might have low bandwidth, but perhaps sufficient for e-mails...?
Nobody won the browser wars, damnit! We all lost! The browser wars set us back 10 years, to the time before the web. The Web was invented so that anybody could view anything on anything, the browser wars destroyed that. Instead, we got two sucky browsers that look the same, feel the same, renders pages almost identical. One is perhaps more bloated than the other, but they both suck badly. Instead, we should have had a great diversity in browsers, each with different features, leaving the layout of the page and the control of the page largely in the hands of the users. Very little of the web's potential is realized, all it does is put food on the table for a few overpaid graphics designers, while web pages are still linear or hierarchal. Arrrrggggh!