National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Last time I checked, "colored" was considered offensive, and the last few times I heard it used it was sure hard to take it any other way.
Perhaps the NAACP should change their name before they waste money squatting on domains. Granted, a name change would be a lot more expensive than sitting on a few domains, but anyone who really wants to read racist trash is going to find it no matter what. The name, OTOH, is kind of hard to ignore.
What you clearly don't understand is that Corel are not only violating a license agreement, but attempting to re-license the software they're distributing without the permission of the copyright holders.
Tell ya' what, why don't you grab a copy of the Corel Draw CDs, dump the files onto disk, modify a few configuration files and replace the install program with one of your own, nuke the Corel license agreement and replace it with your own license, knock off a couple thousand CD-Rs and send 'em out to a bunch of nice folks to Beta test it for you? How long do you think it would take Corel to have you thrown in jail? Do you think that what Corel are doing with regard to the GPL is any different?
If Corel have proprietary software that they want to keep under wraps for whatever reason, they should specify that the license applies only to that software and that it does not alter or effect the existing license on any of the other code included with their distribution.
The online, searchable indices (for the Perl books, for instance) are already a great value. I recently suggested adding a full-text search capability (returning only page number references), and Tim seemed to agree that this would be a good thing--hopefully this will happen soon after the server issues are resolved? Tim?
That's why we need JFS (was Re:hmmmmmmmmmm)
on
2.3TB drives for $50
·
· Score: 2
The trend towards huge storage is one of the reasons why folks want a JFS for Linux. I had to fsck a couple 10GB IDE disks a few weeks ago and it was coffee break time. I can't imagine what TB-scale fsck times would be like. I have my fingers crossed that XFS makes it into Linux 2.6 (next year?).
It's a conspiracy, I tell ya. This guy's either a closet bug-muncher, or his cousin is fixin' to open a bug cafe in San Francisco. He prolly can't wait to munch down on some juicy nightcrawlers.
There's no doubt things seem to be a little "calmer" up north. I don't imagine I'd be too worried about the bad guys if I lived in Canada. However, I live in a country where the cops are hamstrung by courts that routinely give murderers a slap on the wrist but slam people found guilty of the latest high-profile political crime de jur. Instead of going after dangerous criminals, our police departments spend their time going after easy money, like speeding tickets. People caught abusing weapons, like children taking guns to school or armed robbers, are rarely prosecuted to the full extent of the law, while the BATF stage no-knock raids on harmless weapons collectors and confiscate their weapons, often ruining them financially as a result and netting no improvement in public safety.
What am I to do if I come face to face with an armed criminal who wants to harm me or my family and steal our property? Call the police so they can clean up my childrens' remains and take pictures? No, thanks. Blame whomever or whatever you want for the problem, but until things change, my little Glock 19 is going to stay right where I can use when need be, ready to rock n roll.
There is an arms war, but it is not citizen against citizen. It is the citizen against those who should by all rights no longer enjoy the status of "citizen"--criminals, who should be imprisoned, yet are allowed to continue to enjoy the rights they take from others with impunity.
The Constitution only affords sufficient protection of individual rights when the insitutional framework it established operates as intended. When the courts and legislature are corrupt, as they are now, it falls upon the citizenry to resist government infringements on their rights individually and peacefully, then and only then, by the use of defensive force, if need be. Many Americans are already resisting by refusing to file federal income tax forms and/or caching "illegal" firearms (which are arbitrarily selected for prohibition based on their appearance or ammo capacity). Whether or not things escelate beyond that is up to the folks who gassed and burned the children in Waco, Texas. We kicked an empire square in the arse over taxes once before, we can do it again, if we have to.
I still hope for peaceful change from the bottom up, and I think the Internet is playing a role in that change, that's why the government and their media machine fear it. I'd guess that they fear the Internet more than our firearms--it's difficult for them to get away with their shenanigans in the light of day. I just hope the Timothy McVeighs don't muck things up and start a war that no one can win.
FWIW, what I find interesting is that the federales are using the same arguments against encryption that they've been using against the right to own and carry weapons since the Kennedy assasination--that all must suffer a diminution of their rights because of the infractions of a few. The same argument, that if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns, holds true for encryption, just as it does for all proscriptive laws. When a law prohibits a certain behavior, outlaws (who are by definition, law breakers) will continue the behavior while those who wish to abide by the law won't.
Your little gripe reads like something Bill Gates wrote many years ago to a bunch of cretins who actually had the nerve to give away software.
Red Hat give away the code, they don't sell it because they don't own it, or have you forgotten that? If you don't want others to profit from your work, then don't release it under an Open Source license--be like Bill.
OSS just got raped? Care the explain how? Is it rape when I use OSS at work? After all, I'm being paid for the work I produce with OSS. Is it rape when a consultancy make money installing and maintaining OSS-based networks for their customers? Is it rape when Red Hat invest millions of dollars into Linux, GNU, and other OSS?
The article is talking about the desktop OS that most business users are running for "productivity apps" folks, and that's Windows 95 (some 98, but not much), not NT.
Productivity hasn't increased because the productivity tools, the Office apps, crash often, and tend to break easily. Install any application that uses ODBC and you risk breaking Access or other parts of Office. Crash one of the Office apps, and it may end requiring a re-install of the OS and huge stack of application CDs. If an Office app crashes and damages the user's document file, there's a good chance the user won't even know there's a problem with the file and will waste hours trying to load it. To make matters worse, Word will blindly load a broken file without any sanity checks, then bring the system down if the doc is badly broken (this is why I prefer Lotus Word Pro--at least it usually won't load a broken document).
Speaking from personal experience, moving from Windows to Linux has already saved me at least 30 days of downtime in the last year. I've had only two hard crashes, both while tweaking the IDE controller settings with hdparm, so those don't really count since I knew that what I was doing could crash the box. I've never had Linux crash, rendering itself unusable and requiring a re-install, while Windows 95 did this to me at least three times, and OS/2 at least once. I've never had Emacs/XEmacs crash and destroy a document, neither has WP 8.0 Linux crashed.
Windows 9x is nothing but a distraction. Any time wasted with crashes, broken documents, feature-bloated, overly complex software is dollars down the tubes. This is unacceptable, unless you don't value your time.
Microsoft should introduce two new certifications:
MCMNE: Microsoft Certified Menu Navigation Engineer
MCCRE: Microsoft Certified Crash Recovery Engineer
How exactly would the uberidiots in D.C. manage to track e-mail usage in the first place? The costs of monitoring traffic, let alone collecting the taxes, would probably exceed any potential revenues.
This is probably either a "mature" Internet hoax, or a stupid scheme dreamed up by bureaucrats worried about losing their gravy jobs. As a matter of fact, I can't see any reason for the USPS to exist outside of high volume, low speed junk mail delivery. What little business they haven't lost to e-mail and fax machines is divided up between Fedx and UPS. The Postal Service should be sold for scrap, and their functions should be farmed out to the lowest bidder.
Re:Everything computer is a Microsoft spinoff
on
SCO does Linux
·
· Score: 2
IBM Entry Level Systems "invented" the 5150 PC that Q-DOS (Quick n Dirty OS), later known as MS-DOS/PC-DOS, ran on. Microsoft didn't "write" anything, except maybe that annoying dancing paperclip thing in the Office apps.
If Bill Gates is responsible for anything, it is the presence of a hardware reset button on the front panel of virtually every Intel-based PC manufactured since the mid-1980s. Quite an accomplishment, huh. Have you ever considered the likelihood that PC manufacturers are more concerned about the MTBF rating on the reset switches they install than on the power switches?
If Gates hadn't inserted his evil self into the mix early on, someone else would have come along with a different solution, and probably a much better one. "Personal computing" was an inevitability, not a "Bill Gates invention."
The problem is that your X server isn't using your graphics chipset's hardware acceleration capabilities. XFree86 4.0 will address some of this, and I'm sure the dot releases following will bring some pretty good performance gains. I'd settle for my TNT delivering 90% of the performance I get with the same card in one of my other machines that runs Win 95.
I was getting half-way decent on Q2 DM on that Winnders box, but I got sick of the constant crashes (not to mention the fact that I wasn't getting any work done). With hw accel. on Linux, I could go back to being a total slacker and rule my favorite DM server!
Wake up and smell the coffee, son. The whole damned political culture is corrupt and cynical. There really isn't a dime's worth o' difference between any of them. Even those with the best intentions are taken in the back rooms and read the riot act as soon as they reach the halls of power. It's the "leadership" [cough] of both parties that run things in Washington, and all they care about is their gravy train--life, liberty, and the pursuit of property be damned. It's one big, nasty game of good cop/bad cop, and we're the suckers stuck in the middle.
I don't imagine the situation is much different anywhere else in the world.
Re:Free information, anyone?
on
New Cyberlaws
·
· Score: 2
You might expect support from "the taxpayers," but not everyone who reads slashdot, or "experiments," makes the mistake of believing that their need is a claim against the lives of others. As hard as it may be for you to believe, there actually exist people who prefer to keep to themselves and don't expect "help" from the government, which is nothing more than benefitting from stolen wealth--the fact that the government steal it notwithstanding.
Don't forget about desktop and laptop passwords, which aren't always easy to circumvent, and often require a call to the manufacturer's tech line and some sort of ID before you can get the magic incantation. Beyond that, you have password-protected applications, Office documents, db accounts, PGP, etc. which all require varying degrees of knowledge and/or hassle to bypass, or are so difficult to bypass that it isn't worth the effort required, thereby making the protected property, real or intellectual, worthless for all intents and purposes.
Then there are PDAs, door lock PINs, secure filing cabinet PINs, ATMs, etc.
The use of password protection has proliferated beyond out ability to manage it and it's not always cheap to bypass the protection.
The article mentions that some of the remaining plants will have to shut down to finish their remaining remediation work. This suggests the possibility that it might not be a good thing to leave these plants running without the fixes in place.
Of course we know that no one would even dream of running a nuke plant in an unsafe manner.
Like it or not, if you're a U.S. slave^H^H^H^H^Htaxpayer, the government steals your money and uses it to buy hardware and software for the military. Would you rather they piss your money away on Microsoft products, or use Open Source and (hopefully) at least spend it on better hardware--and maybe return some of our "investment" in the form of useful code?
I, for one, am tired of the feds stealing my money and feeding it to Microsoft for crappy software. I'd much rather see our destroyers run by Linux or BSD than by NT--at least we wouldn't have to worry that our multi-billion dollar investment in warships wouldn't be subject to BSODs in the heat of battle. I'm sure if you're rear-end were riding on one of these boats, you'd be happy to know that the main console didn't have a "Start" button in the lower left-hand corner. Remember that thing called "The Draft?" You never know when you might end up having to trust your life to the software the military use. Stranger things have happened.
I've only considered this as a strictly volunteer project, directed by a university and the top level hosts and database hosted there, with some corporate sponsorship thrown in for good measure.
I don't know if this would work if commercialized, since a lot of the folks who have the knowledge, experience and compute power to participate would probably not feel too warm or fuzzy about helping to build the next Yahoo!, especially when the IPO made the company worth millions overnight. It would certainly be tough to maintain the same level of participation after going commercial, unless some hitherto unforeseen way of rewarding participation per contribution were discovered. Perhaps corporate sponsors could offer premiums to contributors based on sites spidered? Maybe something along the lines of frequent flyer miles?
Not to harp on one of my pet ideas or anything, but I think a distributed spidering project could be pulled off. The trick would be to delegate the work based on compute power and bandwidth, with the "low-end" clients doing the grunt work of spidering, then passing the raw data up to the bigger iron with more bandwidth where the relationships between sites could be ferreted out, keywords could be indexed and context established, etc. These sites could then pass the cooked data back to the top level servers (compressed, of course) for whatever final work needs to be done and then insertion into the database. The idea is to have each client do the work it's best suited for, and to distribute the load more evenly. Bandwidth could be a problem, but I think a lot of the data could be "tokenized" somewhat once references have been established, and some compression would probably help.
If I had the networking know-how I would put together a proposal and start taking flame-mail, er, suggestions. Since I don't, I hope someone who does and is as crazy as me will pick up on the idea.
Don't you realize that Janet only wants to "protect the children?" The only problem with Janet is that her idea of "protecting" someone is to douse them with CS cut with methylene chloride, then burn them to death.
Sometimes I think this is all part of some grand conspiracy, sometimes I have to chalk it up to stupidity on a grand scale. I lean towards "stupidity" on this one--anyone who honestly believes that crypto can be stopped, or even regulated, is braindead.
This is a situation where a hierarchical workload distribution would probably work. Unlike the SETI project with its huge, monolithic data chunks, a spidering project would be dealing with small (comparatively speaking) chunks. There could be several levels of capability depending on host speed, storage, bandwidth, etc. A company with Suns, a few Gig to spare, and a T3 could handle more volume and complexity--maybe spending their cycles figuring out relevance by context and links, etc., rather than spidering. A lot of the grunt work could be done before the cataloged data are returned to the destination hosts. This would also be a little nicer to bandwidth, I guess.
Look at the awful job most of the search engines are doing keeping up with the web. Why not a distributed spidering project? Hand out a base of URLs to spider, then let remotes spider from there. As the ever pessimistic Rob has already pointed out to me, the load on the host end would be huge, but I still think if it were done right, the whole net could be cataloged in a few months, then kept updated.
It seems like a distributed spidering project with a search engine front end like Google on different hardware/net could make a search engine useful again. There are probably a few interesting things that sites could do to streamline the workload--I haven't thought of them, but my spidie senses are tingling.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Guggenheim invented the museum.
By law, only the SSA can request your SSN. IRS'
use of the SSN is a big no-no, and there are
several folks fighting it.
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Last time I checked, "colored" was considered offensive, and the last few times I heard it used it was sure hard to take it any other way.
Perhaps the NAACP should change their name before they waste money squatting on domains. Granted, a name change would be a lot more expensive than sitting on a few domains, but anyone who really wants to read racist trash is going to find it no matter what. The name, OTOH, is kind of hard to ignore.
What you clearly don't understand is that Corel are not only violating a license agreement, but attempting to re-license the software they're distributing without the permission of the copyright holders.
Tell ya' what, why don't you grab a copy of the Corel Draw CDs, dump the files onto disk, modify a few configuration files and replace the install program with one of your own, nuke the Corel license agreement and replace it with your own license, knock off a couple thousand CD-Rs and send 'em out to a bunch of nice folks to Beta test it for you? How long do you think it would take Corel to have you thrown in jail? Do you think that what Corel are doing with regard to the GPL is any different?
If Corel have proprietary software that they want to keep under wraps for whatever reason, they should specify that the license applies only to that software and that it does not alter or effect the existing license on any of the other code included with their distribution.
The online, searchable indices (for the Perl books, for instance) are already a great value. I recently suggested adding a full-text search capability (returning only page number references), and Tim seemed to agree that this would be a good thing--hopefully this will happen soon after the server issues are resolved? Tim?
The trend towards huge storage is one of the reasons why folks want a JFS for Linux. I had to fsck a couple 10GB IDE disks a few weeks ago and it was coffee break time. I can't imagine what TB-scale fsck times would be like. I have my fingers crossed that XFS makes it into Linux 2.6 (next year?).
It's a conspiracy, I tell ya. This guy's either a closet bug-muncher, or his cousin is fixin' to open a bug cafe in San Francisco. He prolly can't wait to munch down on some juicy nightcrawlers.
A nice, reasonable response. Thanks.
There's no doubt things seem to be a little "calmer" up north. I don't imagine I'd be too worried about the bad guys if I lived in Canada. However, I live in a country where the cops are hamstrung by courts that routinely give murderers a slap on the wrist but slam people found guilty of the latest high-profile political crime de jur. Instead of going after dangerous criminals, our police departments spend their time going after easy money, like speeding tickets. People caught abusing weapons, like children taking guns to school or armed robbers, are rarely prosecuted to the full extent of the law, while the BATF stage no-knock raids on harmless weapons collectors and confiscate their weapons, often ruining them financially as a result and netting no improvement in public safety.
What am I to do if I come face to face with an armed criminal who wants to harm me or my family and steal our property? Call the police so they can clean up my childrens' remains and take pictures? No, thanks. Blame whomever or whatever you want for the problem, but until things change, my little Glock 19 is going to stay right where I can use when need be, ready to rock n roll.
There is an arms war, but it is not citizen against citizen. It is the citizen against those who should by all rights no longer enjoy the status of "citizen"--criminals, who should be imprisoned, yet are allowed to continue to enjoy the rights they take from others with impunity.
The Constitution only affords sufficient protection of individual rights when the insitutional framework it established operates as intended. When the courts and legislature are corrupt, as they are now, it falls upon the citizenry to resist government infringements on their rights individually and peacefully, then and only then, by the use of defensive force, if need be. Many Americans are already resisting by refusing to file federal income tax forms and/or caching "illegal" firearms (which are arbitrarily selected for prohibition based on their appearance or ammo capacity). Whether or not things escelate beyond that is up to the folks who gassed and burned the children in Waco, Texas. We kicked an empire square in the arse over taxes once before, we can do it again, if we have to.
I still hope for peaceful change from the bottom up, and I think the Internet is playing a role in that change, that's why the government and their media machine fear it. I'd guess that they fear the Internet more than our firearms--it's difficult for them to get away with their shenanigans in the light of day. I just hope the Timothy McVeighs don't muck things up and start a war that no one can win.
FWIW, what I find interesting is that the federales are using the same arguments against encryption that they've been using against the right to own and carry weapons since the Kennedy assasination--that all must suffer a diminution of their rights because of the infractions of a few. The same argument, that if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns, holds true for encryption, just as it does for all proscriptive laws. When a law prohibits a certain behavior, outlaws (who are by definition, law breakers) will continue the behavior while those who wish to abide by the law won't.
Your little gripe reads like something Bill Gates wrote many years ago to a bunch of cretins who actually had the nerve to give away software.
Red Hat give away the code, they don't sell it because they don't own it, or have you forgotten that? If you don't want others to profit from your work, then don't release it under an Open Source license--be like Bill.
OSS just got raped? Care the explain how? Is it rape when I use OSS at work? After all, I'm being paid for the work I produce with OSS. Is it rape when a consultancy make money installing and maintaining OSS-based networks for their customers? Is it rape when Red Hat invest millions of dollars into Linux, GNU, and other OSS?
The article is talking about the desktop OS that most business users are running for "productivity apps" folks, and that's Windows 95 (some 98, but not much), not NT.
Productivity hasn't increased because the productivity tools, the Office apps, crash often, and tend to break easily. Install any application that uses ODBC and you risk breaking Access or other parts of Office. Crash one of the Office apps, and it may end requiring a re-install of the OS and huge stack of application CDs. If an Office app crashes and damages the user's document file, there's a good chance the user won't even know there's a problem with the file and will waste hours trying to load it. To make matters worse, Word will blindly load a broken file without any sanity checks, then bring the system down if the doc is badly broken (this is why I prefer Lotus Word Pro--at least it usually won't load a broken document).
Speaking from personal experience, moving from Windows to Linux has already saved me at least 30 days of downtime in the last year. I've had only two hard crashes, both while tweaking the IDE controller settings with hdparm, so those don't really count since I knew that what I was doing could crash the box. I've never had Linux crash, rendering itself unusable and requiring a re-install, while Windows 95 did this to me at least three times, and OS/2 at least once. I've never had Emacs/XEmacs crash and destroy a document, neither has WP 8.0 Linux crashed.
Windows 9x is nothing but a distraction. Any time wasted with crashes, broken documents, feature-bloated, overly complex software is dollars down the tubes. This is unacceptable, unless you don't value your time.
Microsoft should introduce two new certifications:
It now reads: Microsoft's next messaging move: publishing protocol
Interesting, I guess it's easy to get it right when there are thousands of netizens doing your homework for you.
How exactly would the uberidiots in D.C. manage to track e-mail usage in the first place? The costs of monitoring traffic, let alone collecting the taxes, would probably exceed any potential revenues.
This is probably either a "mature" Internet hoax, or a stupid scheme dreamed up by bureaucrats worried about losing their gravy jobs. As a matter of fact, I can't see any reason for the USPS to exist outside of high volume, low speed junk mail delivery. What little business they haven't lost to e-mail and fax machines is divided up between Fedx and UPS. The Postal Service should be sold for scrap, and their functions should be farmed out to the lowest bidder.
IBM Entry Level Systems "invented" the 5150 PC that Q-DOS (Quick n Dirty OS), later known as MS-DOS/PC-DOS, ran on. Microsoft didn't "write" anything, except maybe that annoying dancing paperclip thing in the Office apps.
If Bill Gates is responsible for anything, it is the presence of a hardware reset button on the front panel of virtually every Intel-based PC manufactured since the mid-1980s. Quite an accomplishment, huh. Have you ever considered the likelihood that PC manufacturers are more concerned about the MTBF rating on the reset switches they install than on the power switches?
If Gates hadn't inserted his evil self into the mix early on, someone else would have come along with a different solution, and probably a much better one. "Personal computing" was an inevitability, not a "Bill Gates invention."
Buy a clue.
The problem is that your X server isn't using your graphics chipset's hardware acceleration capabilities. XFree86 4.0 will address some of this, and I'm sure the dot releases following will bring some pretty good performance gains. I'd settle for my TNT delivering 90% of the performance I get with the same card in one of my other machines that runs Win 95.
I was getting half-way decent on Q2 DM on that Winnders box, but I got sick of the constant crashes (not to mention the fact that I wasn't getting any work done). With hw accel. on Linux, I could go back to being a total slacker and rule my favorite DM server!
Wake up and smell the coffee, son. The whole damned political culture is corrupt and cynical. There really isn't a dime's worth o' difference between any of them. Even those with the best intentions are taken in the back rooms and read the riot act as soon as they reach the halls of power. It's the "leadership" [cough] of both parties that run things in Washington, and all they care about is their gravy train--life, liberty, and the pursuit of property be damned. It's one big, nasty game of good cop/bad cop, and we're the suckers stuck in the middle.
I don't imagine the situation is much different anywhere else in the world.
You might expect support from "the taxpayers," but not everyone who reads slashdot, or "experiments," makes the mistake of believing that their need is a claim against the lives of others. As hard as it may be for you to believe, there actually exist people who prefer to keep to themselves and don't expect "help" from the government, which is nothing more than benefitting from stolen wealth--the fact that the government steal it notwithstanding.
Don't forget about desktop and laptop passwords, which aren't always easy to circumvent, and often require a call to the manufacturer's tech line and some sort of ID before you can get the magic incantation. Beyond that, you have password-protected applications, Office documents, db accounts, PGP, etc. which all require varying degrees of knowledge and/or hassle to bypass, or are so difficult to bypass that it isn't worth the effort required, thereby making the protected property, real or intellectual, worthless for all intents and purposes.
Then there are PDAs, door lock PINs, secure filing cabinet PINs, ATMs, etc.
The use of password protection has proliferated beyond out ability to manage it and it's not always cheap to bypass the protection.
The article mentions that some of the remaining plants will have to shut down to finish their remaining remediation work. This suggests the possibility that it might not be a good thing to leave these plants running without the fixes in place.
Of course we know that no one would even dream of running a nuke plant in an unsafe manner.
Like it or not, if you're a U.S. slave^H^H^H^H^Htaxpayer, the government steals your money and uses it to buy hardware and software for the military. Would you rather they piss your money away on Microsoft products, or use Open Source and (hopefully) at least spend it on better hardware--and maybe return some of our "investment" in the form of useful code?
I, for one, am tired of the feds stealing my money and feeding it to Microsoft for crappy software. I'd much rather see our destroyers run by Linux or BSD than by NT--at least we wouldn't have to worry that our multi-billion dollar investment in warships wouldn't be subject to BSODs in the heat of battle. I'm sure if you're rear-end were riding on one of these boats, you'd be happy to know that the main console didn't have a "Start" button in the lower left-hand corner. Remember that thing called "The Draft?" You never know when you might end up having to trust your life to the software the military use. Stranger things have happened.
I've only considered this as a strictly volunteer project, directed by a university and the top level hosts and database hosted there, with some corporate sponsorship thrown in for good measure.
I don't know if this would work if commercialized, since a lot of the folks who have the knowledge, experience and compute power to participate would probably not feel too warm or fuzzy about helping to build the next Yahoo!, especially when the IPO made the company worth millions overnight. It would certainly be tough to maintain the same level of participation after going commercial, unless some hitherto unforeseen way of rewarding participation per contribution were discovered. Perhaps corporate sponsors could offer premiums to contributors based on sites spidered? Maybe something along the lines of frequent flyer miles?
Not to harp on one of my pet ideas or anything, but I think a distributed spidering project could be pulled off. The trick would be to delegate the work based on compute power and bandwidth, with the "low-end" clients doing the grunt work of spidering, then passing the raw data up to the bigger iron with more bandwidth where the relationships between sites could be ferreted out, keywords could be indexed and context established, etc. These sites could then pass the cooked data back to the top level servers (compressed, of course) for whatever final work needs to be done and then insertion into the database. The idea is to have each client do the work it's best suited for, and to distribute the load more evenly. Bandwidth could be a problem, but I think a lot of the data could be "tokenized" somewhat once references have been established, and some compression would probably help.
If I had the networking know-how I would put together a proposal and start taking flame-mail, er, suggestions. Since I don't, I hope someone who does and is as crazy as me will pick up on the idea.
Don't you realize that Janet only wants to "protect the children?" The only problem with Janet is that her idea of "protecting" someone is to douse them with CS cut with methylene chloride, then burn them to death.
Sometimes I think this is all part of some grand conspiracy, sometimes I have to chalk it up to stupidity on a grand scale. I lean towards "stupidity" on this one--anyone who honestly believes that crypto can be stopped, or even regulated, is braindead.
This is a situation where a hierarchical workload distribution would probably work. Unlike the SETI project with its huge, monolithic data chunks, a spidering project would be dealing with small (comparatively speaking) chunks. There could be several levels of capability depending on host speed, storage, bandwidth, etc. A company with Suns, a few Gig to spare, and a T3 could handle more volume and complexity--maybe spending their cycles figuring out relevance by context and links, etc., rather than spidering. A lot of the grunt work could be done before the cataloged data are returned to the destination hosts. This would also be a little nicer to bandwidth, I guess.
Look at the awful job most of the search engines are doing keeping up with the web. Why not a distributed spidering project? Hand out a base of URLs to spider, then let remotes spider from there. As the ever pessimistic Rob has already pointed out to me, the load on the host end would be huge, but I still think if it were done right, the whole net could be cataloged in a few months, then kept updated.
It seems like a distributed spidering project with a search engine front end like Google on different hardware/net could make a search engine useful again. There are probably a few interesting things that sites could do to streamline the workload--I haven't thought of them, but my spidie senses are tingling.