It was interesting to read the very detailed answers given to the questions, but I couldn't help feeling that Jay didn't fully address the second part (and to me the more important) that I asked: namely how will it not be the case that accepting corporate sponsorship (in this case Reuters' $100,000) not inevitably lead to control of the organization.
Jay answers this by saying that he'll make sure that there's no undue influence brought to bear on the editor. That misses the point that Chomsky (yes, I know hate him if you must but he makes some good points) & Herman make about media censorship, which is that the people that occupy positions in which they know they're funded by big business are RARELY directly censored. Instead most of the time they self-censor (see paragraph 4). The Pacifica Radio Network made the decision to avoid government or corporate underwriting explicitly because they realised that any normal, reasonable person is influenced by the source of their funding and has it hovering in the back of their mind.
I like the idea that Jay proposes of having professional editors sorting the wheat from the chaff but believe that although the site may have initial success and credibility it will inevitably be slowly co-opted because of the process of media hegemony detailed by Chomsky and Herman.
B.t.w. anyone idolizing Bob Woodward should think about this perspective. I think he and Seymour Hersh are prime examples of how well intentioned individuals are unable to make an effective difference within a corporately funded system.
I'm with you. Having seen the difference between BBC content and the crap available here I think the results are in: state-funded broadcasting works better and costs less.
t is actually a criminal offense) to watch TV unless you
It's actually stronger than that AFAIK: you need to pay a license fee if you own equipment for receiving television signals. Doesn't matter if you swear blind that you never switch it on or that it's for research purposes etc.
Young man, back in the day when all you got from the BBC was a crackly reception on the rabbit ears people were busy copying tapes of shows and giving them to each other because they couldn't get the content any other way. The BBC was slow to move into selling what we called "audio cassettes" and "video cassettes" because they were funded directly by the government and everyone in the kingdom had to pay a "license fee". The BBC used this money to create their own content and let anyone that wanted do their own thing with it as long as it wasn't obvious commercial reselling. And why not? After all everyone had paid for it, so if you wanted to build up an extensive library of 30 minute cassette tapes of Woman's Hour then that was your problem.
In fact, getting the BBC to sell you official merchandise of e.g. Hornblower By the Way or RadioActive proved to be mighty fucking difficult and as far as anyone knows the tapes of decades of superb radio comedy are slowly turning to dust in the bowels of some archive location. In fact if you go to the BBC's main "shop" (and I use the word very generously) in London you'll find a pathetic small store with nothing to sate the appetite of a consumer waiting to be spurred into a feeding frenzy.
The BBC could and should make a handsome profit selling original editions of back-archives and current content, produced, directed and funded solely by the license-fee payers and not show anything else. Fans like boxed sets and official paraphernalia. If someone wants to not buy them then they'll find a way around DRM anyway.
DRM is not appropriate or useful to BBC content.
Well,if you buy the wiki concept then there should be enough non-malicious, non-misinformed people with the ability to change any errors back and sanity will win out.
I'm assuming that you evaluated and rejected some of the other high-profile citizen journalism outfits that predate the founding of your own project. Off my head I can think of:
The Indymedia network is one of the longest standing examples of an attempt to have a large citizen journalist network.
What was it that you found lacking in the above and why did you decide to start a new project instead of reforming and adapting one of the above? Do you think that your decision to accept corporate sponsorship (which is rejected by the Pacifica Network) will see your organization's focus inevitably drift toward the anodyne ineffectiveness of e.g. NPR?
Re:Excessive Complexity for a Simple Solution
on
Brave New Ballot
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· Score: 1
Why the hell do you want to take a recipt out the door with you?
Well duh! Obviously so that you exchange the receipt for an iPod when you turn it in to the Democrat Party to prove you voted for their candidate.;)
The League of American Bicyclists have put together excellent courses on the safest way to cycle based upon research done by people like Forester and John Allen.
Reading the original post I wonder if it is a deliberate troll. My reasons for that suspicion are that the poster says that the lane was narrow. Now, according to the drivers handbooks of most states and a considerable body of case law it is not recommended to pass another road user with less than 4 feet of clearance. I would suspect that the cyclist knew that this was not possible and did not want to take the chance of a judgement-impaired driver trying to "squeeze past". I find it hard to believe that the OP would not be aware of that. Sit back dude, and relax, you won't get anywhere faster (except prison) by rushing around.
I'd agree with you that most of the stuff that I've just read there is "unstable". What I am interested in is not the site content, but how GoDaddy folded in the towel immediately and apparently are claiming that they had to do so because of the laws of a foreign nation.
It was the only source for the story which a friend in Ireland sent to me. I looked around for other sources but couldn't find one. I take your point though. Here's a copy of the story which is (c) Irish Independent
AN American domain name provider has suspended access to the controversial rateyoursolicitor.com website after an Irish High Court issued a court order to remove offensive material about a barrister from the site.
Godaddy.com, an award winning internet site, suspended access to the rateyoursolicitor.com portal within 24 hours of an injunction issued by Judge Michael Hanna.
Last Wednesday, Judge Hanna issued an order that defamatory material posted about Jayne Maguire, a barrister, on rateyoursolicitor.com must be removed with immediate effect.
Ms Maguire has claimed that John Gill, of Drumline, Newmarket on Fergus, defamed her by posting offensive remarks on rateyoursolicitor.com.
Mr Gill, chairman of the Victims of the Legal Profession Society, denied that anything concerning Ms Maguire was published or posted on the site.
Ms Maguire is seeking damages for defamation and privacy and an interlocutory injunction of the statements about her on the site which she says is administered by Mr Gill.
Godaddy.com have locked access to the site domain name until High Court proceedings are concluded. Lawyers acting for Ms Gill served notice on www.gmax.net, an American Internet Service Provider that is host to the site.
It had been thought that Godaddy.com was hosting the site which invites Irish people to rate their lawyers, however gmax.net has now been identified as the ISP and has received notice of the High Court proceedings.
Dearbhail McDonald
Ireland is not in the U.K. so the laws there have absolutely no bearing on this situation. It is my understanding that the Irish fought against British occupation for several centuries and then topped it off with a war from 1916 to 1922. There's a good new movie out called The Wind that Shakes the Barley about it.
So, a better question might be, are US hosted websites and registrars under the control of Irish courts? I don't understand how an Irish court ruling makes any difference to a US company. What other countries' courts exercise legal control over US ISPs and registrars?
gmax.net didn't (as I understand it) create the content. They just host the website whose content is presumably created in Ireland, so the Comm.Dec.Act should apply. It's not gmax.net's legal obligation, nor presumably is it GoDaddy's. It's just that GoDaddy apparently will pull the plug on us as soon as someone even threatens to sue!
From digging around a bit more I see that there's a companion website called CrookedLawyers.com put out by people called "Victims of the Legal Profession".
Don't forget the agreement that he makes you sign before you even know what's going on, AND he makes YOU pay for the date and then makes agreements with all of your friends that they won't sell you anything unless he gets a cut of it.
Amen. I'd vote for you, except that I believe that this whole "voting for other people to do things for me" is what got us into this mess. You're never going to get a party that's as good at determining your interests and implementing them as you are. They all fucking suck and voting for them just perpetuates it all. Give me MANDATED, RECALLABLE functionaries to do my bidding, not some fuck that pretends to do what's in my interests.
As of right now there are machines that seem to be German Tor servers running:
Real-Time Tor Detection Service has found 81.169.178.235 is a Tor Network exit node nickname morphium, running Tor 0.1.1.23 on Linux i686 at Host Name morphium.info so you appear to be in DE-Germany (verified) (Berlin) through Internet Service Provider (ISP) Strato Rechenzentrum (or possibly Strato Rechenzentrum Berlin)
And the network appears to be running fine. I just started using Tor and was please with how easy it was to set up and how fast the network appears to be.
No one buys a wireless adapter for a Mac laptop, because they all come with one.
Not true. A couple of months ago I was asked by some starving-student acquaintances to help them set up wifi in their apartment. They had two older PowerBooks neither of which had wireless of any sort built into them. Faced with spending either $20 x 2 (on sale at Fry's) for USB adapters with an ralink rt2500 chipset and a c.$70 Linksys-WRT54G router versus c.$80 x 2 (now reduced to $50)for the apple brand cards and c.$200 for the Airport Extreme Base Station they decided to save the money and go with the $250 cheaper solution.
Yes, the PowerBooks were "Airport Extreme Ready", but all that means is that they have the antenna built into the casing and a space inside for the card. I wouldn't mind betting there are quite a few people in a similar situation. I'm hoping that it's not the rt2500 driver that's compromised... that would suck as ralink have been pretty good about releasing open drivers.
us being in their countries doesnt make them very happy, but it is not the root cause of te terrorist attacks
Oh come on! All the attacks in Europe have been EXPLICITLY because of it. The 9-11 attacks were EXPLICITLY because of the USA backing up the Saudi state and Israel. So, unless you think they bother to take terrorist action and at the same time lie about why they're doing it you should accept that the stated motivation is indeed the motivation. Otherwise you get into completely speculative psychologising about how if only Osama had got more nipple when he was a kid then he wouldn't be acting out.
The "clash of civilisations" stuff is equally unconvincing. We wouldn't be clashign with them if we weren't in their countries or they in ours. As soon as the Islamic hordes start rolling their tanks across the oceans then I'll buy the threat, otherwise it's clear that they're reacting to the presence of our armies and proxy armies.
(PS why the lame appeal to the mods? let whatever happens happen!)
Terrorism is a bit different. The ideological motivation makes it harder to suppress based on fear. Even if the terrorists are afraid they still take action. As regards the simple criminality of cheating on bus fares, maybe it's effective, same as NYC's "broken windows" policies, but even under total communism there were still criminals.
Whether or not the people are comfortable is hard to say. We'll see if this latest "terror plot" is all bullshit or has any basis in reality in a year or two. At least the British police didn't murder any Brazilian plumbers this time.
I don't think any reasonable person would object to a panel of judges being presented with serious evidence by a police/security investigation team and issuing a warrant that says it's reasonable to investigate further on that basis. That bar of "reasonable" should be set very high though and it's pretty obvious that the British police and judicial system is deeply corrupt and willing to forge evidence (see all the long history of that with the trials of the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four etc)
In reality, there isn't much you can do against terrorists even with an over-arching, nanny-state that oversees all aspects of life. The terrorists just get more and more cautious and the atrocities committed by the state in attempting to suppress them creates yet more polarised extermists. The only way to deal with it is to address the root causes: e.g. get out of their countries and stop killing their families and co-religionists. Pretty easy.
A lot of people seem to believe that FC is just an unstable testing ground for RH Enterprise Linux. This ignores the existence of the truly unstable, baby-eating "Rawhide" development series and the fact that there is support for any FC(n) up to the release of FC(n+2). Do you think there's any truth to it though?
Since at least 1989 (with Dictyostelium) developmental and evolutionary biologists have used Turing's mechanism to explain pattern formation. Good site here
I'm not aware of any other part of the world where the US uses landmines (care to enlighten me?).
Kuwait and Iraq in 1991 and they were shipped to but not deployed in Kosovo.
http://hrw.org/backgrounder/arms/arms0805/
Good points and I have to admit that I was confused about the difference, so thanks, I've learnt something from you.
[start whine]I've been dabbling with CSS and have been frustrated with the necessity to use e.g. javascript to dynamically resize divs to the height of the greatest column present.
It just seems like a lot of repetitive work for something that is done very commonly. I understand the point that IE's non-compliance with standards effs things up for everyone else, but even so.... [end of whine]
In any event, thanks for the informative post.
Slashdot Mirror
It was interesting to read the very detailed answers given to the questions, but I couldn't help feeling that Jay didn't fully address the second part (and to me the more important) that I asked: namely how will it not be the case that accepting corporate sponsorship (in this case Reuters' $100,000) not inevitably lead to control of the organization.
Jay answers this by saying that he'll make sure that there's no undue influence brought to bear on the editor. That misses the point that Chomsky (yes, I know hate him if you must but he makes some good points) & Herman make about media censorship, which is that the people that occupy positions in which they know they're funded by big business are RARELY directly censored. Instead most of the time they self-censor (see paragraph 4). The Pacifica Radio Network made the decision to avoid government or corporate underwriting explicitly because they realised that any normal, reasonable person is influenced by the source of their funding and has it hovering in the back of their mind.
I like the idea that Jay proposes of having professional editors sorting the wheat from the chaff but believe that although the site may have initial success and credibility it will inevitably be slowly co-opted because of the process of media hegemony detailed by Chomsky and Herman.
B.t.w. anyone idolizing Bob Woodward should think about this perspective. I think he and Seymour Hersh are prime examples of how well intentioned individuals are unable to make an effective difference within a corporately funded system.
I'm with you. Having seen the difference between BBC content and the crap available here I think the results are in: state-funded broadcasting works better and costs less.
t is actually a criminal offense) to watch TV unless you
It's actually stronger than that AFAIK: you need to pay a license fee if you own equipment for receiving television signals. Doesn't matter if you swear blind that you never switch it on or that it's for research purposes etc.
Young man, back in the day when all you got from the BBC was a crackly reception on the rabbit ears people were busy copying tapes of shows and giving them to each other because they couldn't get the content any other way. The BBC was slow to move into selling what we called "audio cassettes" and "video cassettes" because they were funded directly by the government and everyone in the kingdom had to pay a "license fee". The BBC used this money to create their own content and let anyone that wanted do their own thing with it as long as it wasn't obvious commercial reselling. And why not? After all everyone had paid for it, so if you wanted to build up an extensive library of 30 minute cassette tapes of Woman's Hour then that was your problem. In fact, getting the BBC to sell you official merchandise of e.g. Hornblower By the Way or RadioActive proved to be mighty fucking difficult and as far as anyone knows the tapes of decades of superb radio comedy are slowly turning to dust in the bowels of some archive location. In fact if you go to the BBC's main "shop" (and I use the word very generously) in London you'll find a pathetic small store with nothing to sate the appetite of a consumer waiting to be spurred into a feeding frenzy. The BBC could and should make a handsome profit selling original editions of back-archives and current content, produced, directed and funded solely by the license-fee payers and not show anything else. Fans like boxed sets and official paraphernalia. If someone wants to not buy them then they'll find a way around DRM anyway. DRM is not appropriate or useful to BBC content.
Well,if you buy the wiki concept then there should be enough non-malicious, non-misinformed people with the ability to change any errors back and sanity will win out.
And of course, how could I forget WikiNews ?
- The Indymedia network is one of the longest standing examples of an attempt to have a large citizen journalist network.
- The Pacifica Network (especially the Democracy Now show
- The New Standard
What was it that you found lacking in the above and why did you decide to start a new project instead of reforming and adapting one of the above? Do you think that your decision to accept corporate sponsorship (which is rejected by the Pacifica Network) will see your organization's focus inevitably drift toward the anodyne ineffectiveness of e.g. NPR?Why the hell do you want to take a recipt out the door with you? ;)
Well duh! Obviously so that you exchange the receipt for an iPod when you turn it in to the Democrat Party to prove you voted for their candidate.
The League of American Bicyclists have put together excellent courses on the safest way to cycle based upon research done by people like Forester and John Allen.
Reading the original post I wonder if it is a deliberate troll. My reasons for that suspicion are that the poster says that the lane was narrow. Now, according to the drivers handbooks of most states and a considerable body of case law it is not recommended to pass another road user with less than 4 feet of clearance. I would suspect that the cyclist knew that this was not possible and did not want to take the chance of a judgement-impaired driver trying to "squeeze past". I find it hard to believe that the OP would not be aware of that. Sit back dude, and relax, you won't get anywhere faster (except prison) by rushing around.
I'd agree with you that most of the stuff that I've just read there is "unstable". What I am interested in is not the site content, but how GoDaddy folded in the towel immediately and apparently are claiming that they had to do so because of the laws of a foreign nation.
Well, I can't pretend to know much about your politics or history, but I enjoyed watching it and my Irish friends tell me that it's very accurate.
Ireland is not in the U.K. so the laws there have absolutely no bearing on this situation. It is my understanding that the Irish fought against British occupation for several centuries and then topped it off with a war from 1916 to 1922. There's a good new movie out called The Wind that Shakes the Barley about it.
So, a better question might be, are US hosted websites and registrars under the control of Irish courts? I don't understand how an Irish court ruling makes any difference to a US company. What other countries' courts exercise legal control over US ISPs and registrars?
gmax.net didn't (as I understand it) create the content. They just host the website whose content is presumably created in Ireland, so the Comm.Dec.Act should apply. It's not gmax.net's legal obligation, nor presumably is it GoDaddy's. It's just that GoDaddy apparently will pull the plug on us as soon as someone even threatens to sue!
From digging around a bit more I see that there's a companion website called CrookedLawyers.com put out by people called "Victims of the Legal Profession".
Don't forget the agreement that he makes you sign before you even know what's going on, AND he makes YOU pay for the date and then makes agreements with all of your friends that they won't sell you anything unless he gets a cut of it.
Amen. I'd vote for you, except that I believe that this whole "voting for other people to do things for me" is what got us into this mess. You're never going to get a party that's as good at determining your interests and implementing them as you are. They all fucking suck and voting for them just perpetuates it all. Give me MANDATED, RECALLABLE functionaries to do my bidding, not some fuck that pretends to do what's in my interests.
This is interesting but the sample size is too small to let us know how accurate this technique really is.r story10433.html?by=company
http://www.mathworks.com/company/user_stories/use
No one buys a wireless adapter for a Mac laptop, because they all come with one. Not true. A couple of months ago I was asked by some starving-student acquaintances to help them set up wifi in their apartment. They had two older PowerBooks neither of which had wireless of any sort built into them. Faced with spending either $20 x 2 (on sale at Fry's) for USB adapters with an ralink rt2500 chipset and a c.$70 Linksys-WRT54G router versus c.$80 x 2 (now reduced to $50)for the apple brand cards and c.$200 for the Airport Extreme Base Station they decided to save the money and go with the $250 cheaper solution. Yes, the PowerBooks were "Airport Extreme Ready", but all that means is that they have the antenna built into the casing and a space inside for the card. I wouldn't mind betting there are quite a few people in a similar situation. I'm hoping that it's not the rt2500 driver that's compromised... that would suck as ralink have been pretty good about releasing open drivers.
us being in their countries doesnt make them very happy, but it is not the root cause of te terrorist attacks Oh come on! All the attacks in Europe have been EXPLICITLY because of it. The 9-11 attacks were EXPLICITLY because of the USA backing up the Saudi state and Israel. So, unless you think they bother to take terrorist action and at the same time lie about why they're doing it you should accept that the stated motivation is indeed the motivation. Otherwise you get into completely speculative psychologising about how if only Osama had got more nipple when he was a kid then he wouldn't be acting out. The "clash of civilisations" stuff is equally unconvincing. We wouldn't be clashign with them if we weren't in their countries or they in ours. As soon as the Islamic hordes start rolling their tanks across the oceans then I'll buy the threat, otherwise it's clear that they're reacting to the presence of our armies and proxy armies. (PS why the lame appeal to the mods? let whatever happens happen!)
Terrorism is a bit different. The ideological motivation makes it harder to suppress based on fear. Even if the terrorists are afraid they still take action. As regards the simple criminality of cheating on bus fares, maybe it's effective, same as NYC's "broken windows" policies, but even under total communism there were still criminals.
I don't think any reasonable person would object to a panel of judges being presented with serious evidence by a police/security investigation team and issuing a warrant that says it's reasonable to investigate further on that basis. That bar of "reasonable" should be set very high though and it's pretty obvious that the British police and judicial system is deeply corrupt and willing to forge evidence (see all the long history of that with the trials of the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four etc)
In reality, there isn't much you can do against terrorists even with an over-arching, nanny-state that oversees all aspects of life. The terrorists just get more and more cautious and the atrocities committed by the state in attempting to suppress them creates yet more polarised extermists. The only way to deal with it is to address the root causes: e.g. get out of their countries and stop killing their families and co-religionists. Pretty easy.
A lot of people seem to believe that FC is just an unstable testing ground for RH Enterprise Linux. This ignores the existence of the truly unstable, baby-eating "Rawhide" development series and the fact that there is support for any FC(n) up to the release of FC(n+2). Do you think there's any truth to it though?
Since at least 1989 (with Dictyostelium) developmental and evolutionary biologists have used Turing's mechanism to explain pattern formation. Good site here
I'm not aware of any other part of the world where the US uses landmines (care to enlighten me?). Kuwait and Iraq in 1991 and they were shipped to but not deployed in Kosovo. http://hrw.org/backgrounder/arms/arms0805/
Good points and I have to admit that I was confused about the difference, so thanks, I've learnt something from you. [start whine]I've been dabbling with CSS and have been frustrated with the necessity to use e.g. javascript to dynamically resize divs to the height of the greatest column present. It just seems like a lot of repetitive work for something that is done very commonly. I understand the point that IE's non-compliance with standards effs things up for everyone else, but even so.... [end of whine] In any event, thanks for the informative post.