Re:Your rights won't be taken away
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 1
Well, thanks for putting it in, IHMHO, the worst possible context!:-/ You're of course entitled to YHO.
Out of curiosity, since it didn't sound like it fit that political mold (perhaps my ignorance), I looked it up... I don't see that line: http://www.chattownusa.com/Avenues/Politics /lw/com munist/Internationale.html
Anyway, acting out the advice of those who sang the Internationale doesn't seem to yield much in the way of human rights, or even political power or good jobs for the workers.
Re:The word is treason
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 2
If a reporter discovers classified information and shares it
IANAL (and I can't believe the rest of you are) but I believe that there's no such thing as 'classified' outside internal gov't regulations. Once it's in the hands of someone who is not a gov't employee subject to those regulations, it's just information.
An actual attorney would help.
Also, let's not be so naive as to think that various bureaucrats don't classify things to cover their asses.
Finally, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out in his book "Secrecy", secrets and classification are harmful, and not just in the open gov't sense: Bad ideas, driven by someone's power in the bureaucracy or just a lack of attention, don't see the light of day. And they don't face competition in the 'marketplace of ideas'. It's the same thing as closed source code -- not enough eyeballs, and the only ones who see it are driven by narrow interests. We end up doing really stupid things. His example was the CIA insisting that the USSR was prospering in the early 1980's based on classified 'info', when anyone who just walked down the street in Moscow could see it was falling apart.
Re:1984? More of a Brave New World
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 2
While I'd usually agree, I'd say not in this case. I thnk the responses to the survey are motivated by fear due to 9/11, not a desire for more beer.
I think 12 months ago, indefinite anonymous imprisonment with no lawyer or day in court would have been politically impossible
Re:OT: Source for your version of Gettysburg?
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, I don't have it anymore. If you search Google for 'gettysburg address' and check the first few entries, you'll probably find the same version I did.
Re:One of my favourite quotes...
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 2
I disagree with your assessment of the threat. At those earlier times, there were no chemical, biological, radiation, and nuclear weapons which could be used to wreak substantial destruction against our civilian population.
You're comparing the Civil and Revolutoinary Wars with Al Queda or Saddam Hussein? With all due respect, RTFHB (read a friendly history book).
Re:One of my favourite quotes...
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Fair enough. Also, at least Lincoln made clear our universal objectives.
What are we sacrificing for now? Merely security for the majority? Every tinpot dictator in history has provided that.
Your rights won't be taken away
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
These are inalienable rights, not privileges. The question is whether you choose to excercise them.
The state can't give you free speech, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Like old Campbell said, 'Freedom is something you assume. Then you wait for someone to try to take it away from you. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.' - Utah Phillips
Re:One of my favourite quotes...
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The United States has not had real conflict in its borders since the mid 19th century... In light of that fact, it wasn't surprising that a rhetoric of a free society was able to develop.
That rhetoric developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, mostly during wars.
During the Revolutionary War (1776), with the most powerful navy in the world anchored in NY harbor (the British), Jefferson wrote,
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, overnments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...
The First Amendment, the subject of this article, was writting ~1790, not during war but not exactly a time of peace and harmony.
During the Civil War, in the mid-18th century, at perhaps the lowest, most dangerous moment in our nations history (the Battle of Gettysburg), Lincoln said,
... our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.... from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that this government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.
Makes us look like wusses, throwing it all away in the face of the relatively very minor threats we face in 2002.
Re:I wonder what slashdot's percentages are....
on
Netscape 7.0 is Out
·
· Score: 1
It is basically the same. I was just thinking that too.
One significant difference: Opera was pure MDI (AFAIK) -- you could only have one Opera window open. No drag'n'drop between windows. With Mozilla, you can have one window with tabs from, e.g., this/. story, another with some research you are doing, etc. (Now, I'm told, Opera allows multiple windows, but I'm not sure if it's mutli-window AND tabs, or mutli-window XOR tabs.)
MDI = Multiple Document Interface. It displays multiple documents in the same window (tabs not required, or even standard). I think it saves memory and increases performance, which made it useful long ago.
Don't bother with Salon's commentary on it, read Brandt's actual article:
---
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 02:14:43 -0100 From: "nettime's_roving_reporter" nettime [at] bbs.thing.net Subject: googlewatch: PageRank -- Google's Original Sin
http://www.google-watch.org/pagerank.html
PageRank: Google's Original Sin by Daniel Brandt August 2002
By 1998, the dot-com gold rush was in full swing. Web search engines had been around since 1995, and had been immediately touted by high-tech pundits (and Forbes magazine) as one more element in the magical mix that would make us all rich. Such innovations meant nothing less than the end of the business cycle.
But the truth of the matter, as these same pundits conceded after the crash, was that the false promise of easy riches put bottom-line pressures on companies that should have known better. One of the most successful of the earliest search engines was AltaVista, then owned by Digital Equipment Corporation. By 1998 it began to lose its way. All the pundits were talking "portals," so AltaVista tried to become a portal, and forgot to work on improving their search ranking algorithms.
Even by 1998, it was clear that too many results were being returned by the average search engine for the one or two keywords that were entered by the searcher. AltaVista offered numerous ways to zero in on specific combinations of keywords, but paid much less attention to the "ranking" problem. Ranking, or the ordering of returned results according to some criteria, was where the action should have been. Users don't want to figure out Boolean logic, and they will not be looking at more than the first twenty matches out of the thousands that might be produced by a search engine. What really matters is how useful the first page of results appears on search engine A, as opposed to the results produced by the same terms entered into engine B. AltaVista was too busy trying to be a portal to notice that this was important.
Enter Google By early 1998, Stanford University grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin had been playing around with a particular ranking algorithm. They presented a paper titled The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine at a World Wide Web conference. With Stanford as the assignee and Larry Page as the inventor, a patent was filed on January 9, 1998. By the time it was finally granted on September 4, 2001 (Patent No. 6,285,999), the algorithm was known as "PageRank," and Google was handling 150 million search queries per day. AltaVista continued to fade; even two changes of ownership didn't make a difference.
Google hyped PageRank, because it was a convenient buzzword that satisfied those who wondered why Google's engine did, in fact, provide better results. Even today, Google is proud of their advantage. The hype approaches the point where bloggers sometimes have to specify what they mean by "PR" -- do they mean PageRank, the algorithm, or do they mean the Public Relations that Google does so well:
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Google goes on to admit that other variables are also used, in addition to PageRank, in determining the relevance of a page. While the broad outlines of these additional variables are easily discerned by webmasters who study how to improve the ranking of their websites, the actual details of all algorithms are considered trade secrets by Google, Inc. It's in Google's interest to make it as difficult as possible for webmasters to cheat on their rankings.
It's all in the ranking
Beyond any doubt, search engines have become increasingly important on the web. E-commerce is very attuned to the ranking issue, because higher ranking translates directly into more sales. Various methods have been designed by various engines to monetize the ranking situation, such as paid placement, pay per click, and pay for inclusion. On June 27, 2002, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission issued guidelines that recommended that any ranking results influenced by payment, rather than by impartial and objective relevance criteria, ought to be clearly labeled as such in the interests of consumer protection. It appears, then, that any algorithm such as PageRank, that can reasonably pretend to be objective, will remain an important aspect of web searching for the foreseeable future.
Not only have engines improved their ranking methods, but the web has grown so huge that most surfers use search engines several times a day. All portals have built-in search functions, and most of them have to rely on one of a handful of established search engines to provide results. That's because only a few engines have the capacity to "crawl" or "spider" more than two billion web pages frequently enough to keep their database current. Google is perhaps the only engine that is known for consistent, predictable crawling, and that's only been true for less than two years. It takes almost a week to cover the available web, and another week to calculate PageRank for every page. Google's main update cycle is about 28 days, which is a bit too slow for news-hungry surfers. In August, 2001 they also began a second "mini-crawl" for news sites, which are now checked every day. Results from each crawl are mingled together, giving the searcher an impression of freshness.
For the average webmaster, the mechanics of running a successful site have changed dramatically from 1996 to 2002. This is due almost entirely to the increased importance of search engines. Even though much of the dot-com hype collapsed in 2000 and 2001 (a welcome relief to noncommercial webmasters who remembered the pre-hype days), the fact remains that by now, search engines are the fundamental consideration for almost every aspect of web design and linking. It's close to a wag-the-dog situation. That's why the algorithms that search engines consider to be consistent with the FTC's idea of impartial and objective ranking criteria deserve closer scrutiny.
What objective criteria are available?
Ranking criteria fall into three broad categories. The first is link popularity, which is used by a number of search engines to some extent. Google's PageRank is the original form of "link pop," and remains its purest expression. The next category is on-page characteristics. These include font size, title, headings, anchor text, word frequency, word proximity, file name, directory name, and domain name. The last is content analysis. This generally takes the form of on-the-fly clustering of produced results into two or more categories, which allows the searcher to "drill down" into the data in a more specific manner. Each method has its place. Search engines use some combination of the first two, or they use on-page characteristics alone, or perhaps even all three methods.
Content analysis is very difficult, but also very enticing. When it works, it allows for the sort of graphical visualization of results that can give a search engine an overnight reputation for innovation and excellence. But many times it doesn't work well, because computers are not very good at natural language processing. They cannot understand the nuances within a large stack of prose from disparate sources. Also, most top engines work with dozens of languages, which makes content analysis more difficult, since each language has its own nuances. There are several search engines that have made interesting advances in content analysis and even visualization, but Google is not one of them. The most promising aspect of content analysis is that it can be used in conjunction with link pop, to rank sites within their own areas of specialization. This provides an extra dimension that addresses some of the problems of pure link popularity.
Link popularity, which is "PageRank" to Google, is by far the most significant portion of Google's ranking cocktail. While in some cases the on-page characteristics of one page can trump the superior PageRank of a competing page, it's much more common for a low PageRank to completely bury a page that has perfect on-page relevance by every conceivable measure. To put it another way, it's frequently the case that a page with both search terms in the title, and in a heading, and in numerous internal anchors, will get buried in the rankings because the sponsoring site isn't sufficiently popular, and is unable to pass sufficient PageRank to this otherwise perfectly relevant page. In December 2000, Google came out with a downloadable toolbar attachment that made it possible to see the relative PageRank of any page on the web. Even the dumbed-down resolution of this toolbar, in conjunction with studying the ranking of a page against its competition, allows for considerable insight into the role of PageRank.
Moreover, PageRank drives Google's monthly crawl, such that sites with higher PageRank get crawled earlier, faster, and deeper than sites with low PageRank. For a large site with an average-to-low PageRank, this is a major obstacle. If your pages don't get crawled, they won't get indexed. If they don't get indexed in Google, people won't know about them. If people don't know about them, then there's no point in maintaining a website. Google starts over again on every site for every 28-day cycle, so the missing pages stand an excellent chance of getting missed on the next cycle also. In short, PageRank is the soul and essence of Google, on both the all-important crawl and the all-important rankings. By 2002 Google was universally recognized as the world's most popular search engine.
How does PageRank measure up? In the first place, Google's claim that "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web" must be seen for what it is, which is pure hype. In a democracy, every person has one vote. In PageRank, rich people get more votes than poor people, or, in web terms, pages with higher PageRank have their votes weighted more than the votes from lower pages. As Google explains, "Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important.'" In other words, the rich get richer, and the poor hardly count at all. This is not "uniquely democratic," but rather it's uniquely tyrannical. It's corporate America's dream machine, a search engine where big business can crush the little guy. This alone makes PageRank more closely related to the "pay for placement" schemes frowned on by the Federal Trade Commission, than it is related to those "impartial and objective ranking criteria" that the FTC exempts from labeling.
Secondly, only big guys can have big databases. If your site has an average PageRank, don't even bother making your database available to Google's crawlers, because they most likely won't crawl all of it. This is important for any site that has more than a few thousand pages, and a home page of about five or less on the toolbar's crude scale.
Thirdly, in order for Google to access the links to crawl a deep site of thousands of pages, a hierarchical system of doorway pages is needed so that crawler can start at the top and work its way down. A single site with thousands of pages typically has all external links coming into the home page, and few or none coming into deep pages. The home page PageRank therefore gets distributed to the deep pages by virtue of the hierarchical internal linking structure. But by the time the crawler gets to the real "meat" at the bottom of the tree, these pages frequently end up with a PageRank of zero. This zero is devastating for the ranking of that page, even assuming that Google's crawler gets to it, and it ends up in the index, and it has excellent on-page characteristics. The bottom line is that only big, popular sites can put their databases on the web and expect Google to cover their data adequately. And that's true even for websites that had their data on the web long before Google started up in 1999.
What about non-database sites? There are other areas where PageRank has a negative effect, even for sites without a lot of data. The nature of PageRank is so discriminatory, that it's rather like the exact opposite of affirmative action. While many see affirmative action as reverse discrimination, no one would claim (apart from economists who advocate more tax cuts for the rich) that the opposite, which would be deliberate discrimination in favor of the already-privileged, is a solution for anything. Yet this is essentially what Google claims.
Those who launch new websites in 2002 have a much more difficult time getting traffic to their sites than they did before Google became dominant. The first step for a new site is to get listed in the Open Directory Project. This is used by Google to seed the crawl every month. But even after a year of trying to coax links to your new site from other established sites, the new webmaster can expect fewer than 30 visitors per day. Sites with a respectable PageRank, on the other hand, get tens of thousands of visitors per day. That's the scale of things on the web -- a scale that is best expressed by the fact that Google's zero-to-ten toolbar is a logarithmic scale, perhaps with a base of six. To go from an old PageRank of four to a new rank of five requires several times more incoming links. This is not easy to achieve. The cure for cancer might already be on the web somewhere, but if it's on a new site, you won't find it.
PageRank also encourages webmasters to change their linking patterns. On search engine optimization forums, webmasters even discuss charging for little ads with links, according to the PageRank they've achieved for their site. This would benefit those sites with a lower PageRank that pay for such ads. Sometimes these PageRank achievements are the result of link farms or other shady practices, which Google tries to detect and then penalizes with a PageRank of zero. At other times professional optimizers get away with spammy techniques. Mirror sites and duplicate pages on other domains are now forbidden by Google and swiftly punished, even when there are good reasons for maintaining such sites. Overall, linking patterns have changed significantly because of Google. Many webmasters are stingy about giving out links (which can dilute your transference of PageRank to a given site), at the same time that they're desperate for more links from others.
What should Google do? We feel that PageRank has run its course. Google doesn't have to abandon it entirely, but they should de-emphasize it. The first step is to stop reporting PageRank on the toolbar. This would mute the awareness of PageRank among optimizers and webmasters, and remove some of the bizarre effects that such awareness has engendered. The next step would be to replace all mention of PageRank in their own public relations documentation, in favor of general phrases about how link popularity is one factor among many in their ranking algorithms. And Google should adjust the balance between their various algorithms so that excellent on-page characteristics are not completely cancelled by low link popularity.
PageRank must be streamlined so that the "tyranny of the rich" characteristics are scaled down in favor of a more egalitarian approach to link popularity. This would greatly simplify the complex and recursive calculations that are now required to rank two billion web pages, which must be very expensive for Google. The crawl must not be PageRank driven. There should be a way for Google to arrange the crawl so that if a site cannot be fully covered in one cycle, Google's crawlers can pick up where they left off on the next cycle.
Google is so important to the web these days, that it probably ought to be a public utility. Regulatory interest from agencies such as the FTC is entirely appropriate, but we feel that the FTC addressed only the most blatant abuses among search engines. Google, which only recently began using sponsored links and ad boxes, was not even an object of concern to the Ralph Nader group, Commercial Alert, that complained to the FTC.
This was a mistake, because Commercial Alert failed to look closely enough at PageRank. Some aspects of PageRank, as presently implemented by Google, are nearly as pernicious as pay for placement. There is no question that the FTC should regulate advertising agencies that parade as search engines, in the interests of protecting consumers. Google is still a search engine, but not by much. They can remain a search engine only by fixing PageRank's worst features.
_________________
Daniel Brandt is founder and president of Public Information Research, Inc., a tax-exempt public charity that sponsors NameBase. He began compiling NameBase in 1982, from material that he started collecting in 1974, and is now the programmer and webmaster for PIR's several sites. He participates in various forums where webmasters share observations about the often-secretive algorithms, bugs, and behavior of various search engines. Brandt has been watching Google's interaction with NameBase ever since Google, in October, 2000, became the first search engine to go "deep" on PIR's main site by crawling thousands of dynamic pages.
Google Watch
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Linux has open source simply because it does not work without it! You cannot boot a computer without fucking with the damn messed up errors it generates.
I was so glad to move off Linux and onto Windows and not ever have to fuck with that crap again.'
Let's hear it for opaque interfaces and closed source!
The reason Microsoft doesn't provide reveal codes for Word is probably the same reason they don't for Windows: As they said in court, it would be a national security risk if people saw how it actually worked. Of course, they didn't clarify if the risk was the security holes or the resulting panic.
I can simultaneously display the document source (the Reveal Codes) and WSYWIG in WordPerfect. I don't have to click three things and read a dialog balloon; it's displayed instantly, for everything (not depending on what I'm doing), as I type.
My anecodotal evidence is different: I support 4 law firms, all of which use WordPerfect (not because of me -- I support other businesses that use Word).
Certainly, a number of firms have switched to Word. The secretaries I know cursed at the loss of control over their docs (Reveal codes, which allows direct editing of the document source), and the 'help', like clippy. One secretary's hard day:
Clippy: 'It looks like you're writing a letter, would you like some help?'
Legal Secretary: 'No I don't want your #@$%! help! Get the @#$! out of my way! I've been writing letters for 20 years! Who the $##! are you??!!'
I support many WordPerfect users. Most Word documents open without a problem, and Word imports the WordPerfect docs successfully.
Of course, the conversion isn't perfect. Advanced layout suffers. For most documents it looks OK, but the document source shows the formatting to be a fragile mess; send it back and forth a few times and I'm leary about what would happen. Unless there is editing to do, I set the users up to use a free Word viewer: http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/200 0/wd97vwr 32.aspx
I happily use WordPerfect on Windows every day, and I have my choice of apps.
The reason: "Reveal codes", which shows you the source of the document -- the text with all the formatting codes, with all the benefits you can imagine: You can see exactly which codes are doing what and where, insert and edit codes precisely, search for codes, double-click on one to change it, etc.
I always keep it open in a small window at the bottom, so I simultaneously get the source and the WYSIWYG. I'm not sure it appeals to the typical end user, but/. users should appreciate it.
Also, it should be a very good low-end XML editor: It natively uses formatting tags [b]like this[/b] (open Reveal Codes and see), it's supported SGML (an HTML/XML precursor and (superset?)) for over a decade and XML for a couple years. I've never had to try, but these guys think so (or try searching Google for much more info): http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/05/31/wordpe rfect/
I didn't say those things, the Voyager Project Manager did. I presume he knows something about the power source and the liklihood of entering the heliopause any time soon.
The voyager spacecraft are about to cross heliopause,
Per project manager Ed Massey in the Yahoo article, it's a long way away: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story &u=/nm/ 20020820/ts_nm/space_voyager_dc_2
... "We don't run out of electrical power until about 2020," he said. "There's every expectation that Voyager 1 will... at least enter the heliopause. There may be a question as to whether it will exit out the other side before we run out of power."
At 59, with only about four years with Voyager, Massey said he would be retired long before the probes hit the heliopause....
Seems like a strange choice by IBM: Much of their business strategy is built around Linux. They say they spent $1 billion on it last year (or this year?), and the executive that spearheaded their Linux strategy got promoted to CEO.
Why would they stop people from installing Linux on their own hardware?
Lou Gehrig, "The Iron Horse", was the greatest first baseman ever, and I don't say something like that about a Yankee unless it's pretty much indisputable. He played with Babe Ruth (you may have heard of him) on the New York Yankees in the 1920s and 30s, winning an amazing 8 championships.
Gehrig was probably one of the top 3-5 hitters in history. He also held the record, until Baltimore shortstop Cal Ripkin broke it recently, of playing 2130 straight games without a breather. Nobody else even comes close to those two. When was the last time you missed a day of work? You can see his stats here: http://baseball-reference.com/g/gehrilo01.s html
A longer, more comprehensive bio: http://www.historicbaseball.com/p_gehrig_lou .html
On the day he announced he had ALS, he famously stood at a microphone on the Yankee stadium infield and announced to the crowd, 'Today, I'm the luckiest man on the face of the earth...'. [sniff!] This brings tears to the eyes of us baseball fans.
Think of someone gathering headers from mail servers over a period of time: Marketers, corporate IT depts, law enforcement, whatever else.
They could learn a lot about you and your contacts without much effort: It's completely automated; no human interaction required.
Is there any rule against it? You're not opening the e-mails.
What would you do with the info? I can't think what marketers would do -- maybe target people who have more friends. A business might benefit from a study of how communication and info really flows in their company. For law enforcement, the info could be invaluable in trying to put together a picture of a criminal organization. And don't forget the true innovators, virus writers!
It's an excellent feature, but we need to articulate the benefits to users.
Users are not going to read, alter or redistribute code. Most have not been stung by EULAs (yet) and when it happens, they won't know there is an alternative.
So the OSS community, instead of preaching to the converted, has to show users the benefits they will see. I challenge anyone to do it right here, right now, and provide the OSS community with some talking points and boilerplate text.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, thanks for putting it in, IHMHO, the worst possible context! :-/ You're of course entitled to YHO.
... I don't see that line:s /lw/com munist/Internationale.html
Out of curiosity, since it didn't sound like it fit that political mold (perhaps my ignorance), I looked it up
http://www.chattownusa.com/Avenues/Politic
Anyway, acting out the advice of those who sang the Internationale doesn't seem to yield much in the way of human rights, or even political power or good jobs for the workers.
If a reporter discovers classified information and shares it
IANAL (and I can't believe the rest of you are) but I believe that there's no such thing as 'classified' outside internal gov't regulations. Once it's in the hands of someone who is not a gov't employee subject to those regulations, it's just information.
An actual attorney would help.
Also, let's not be so naive as to think that various bureaucrats don't classify things to cover their asses.
Finally, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out in his book "Secrecy", secrets and classification are harmful, and not just in the open gov't sense: Bad ideas, driven by someone's power in the bureaucracy or just a lack of attention, don't see the light of day. And they don't face competition in the 'marketplace of ideas'. It's the same thing as closed source code -- not enough eyeballs, and the only ones who see it are driven by narrow interests. We end up doing really stupid things. His example was the CIA insisting that the USSR was prospering in the early 1980's based on classified 'info', when anyone who just walked down the street in Moscow could see it was falling apart.
While I'd usually agree, I'd say not in this case. I thnk the responses to the survey are motivated by fear due to 9/11, not a desire for more beer.
I think 12 months ago, indefinite anonymous imprisonment with no lawyer or day in court would have been politically impossible
Sorry, I don't have it anymore. If you search Google for 'gettysburg address' and check the first few entries, you'll probably find the same version I did.
I disagree with your assessment of the threat. At those earlier times, there were no chemical, biological, radiation, and nuclear weapons which could be used to wreak substantial destruction against our civilian population.
You're comparing the Civil and Revolutoinary Wars with Al Queda or Saddam Hussein? With all due respect, RTFHB (read a friendly history book).
Fair enough. Also, at least Lincoln made clear our universal objectives.
What are we sacrificing for now? Merely security for the majority? Every tinpot dictator in history has provided that.
These are inalienable rights, not privileges. The question is whether you choose to excercise them.
The state can't give you free speech, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Like old Campbell said, 'Freedom is something you assume. Then you wait for someone to try to take it away from you. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.' - Utah Phillips
The United States has not had real conflict in its borders since the mid 19th century ... In light of that fact, it wasn't surprising that a rhetoric of a free society was able to develop.
...
... our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. ... from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that this government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.
That rhetoric developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, mostly during wars.
During the Revolutionary War (1776), with the most powerful navy in the world anchored in NY harbor (the British), Jefferson wrote,
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, overnments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
The First Amendment, the subject of this article, was writting ~1790, not during war but not exactly a time of peace and harmony.
During the Civil War, in the mid-18th century, at perhaps the lowest, most dangerous moment in our nations history (the Battle of Gettysburg), Lincoln said,
Makes us look like wusses, throwing it all away in the face of the relatively very minor threats we face in 2002.
It is basically the same. I was just thinking that too.
/. story, another with some research you are doing, etc. (Now, I'm told, Opera allows multiple windows, but I'm not sure if it's mutli-window AND tabs, or mutli-window XOR tabs.)
One significant difference: Opera was pure MDI (AFAIK) -- you could only have one Opera window open. No drag'n'drop between windows. With Mozilla, you can have one window with tabs from, e.g., this
MDI = Multiple Document Interface. It displays multiple documents in the same window (tabs not required, or even standard). I think it saves memory and increases performance, which made it useful long ago.
Like refusing to access SSL pages
I don't think that's been a problem in Moz for a long time, maybe a year. I use it all the time
Don't bother with Salon's commentary on it, read Brandt's actual article:
---
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 02:14:43 -0100
From: "nettime's_roving_reporter" nettime [at] bbs.thing.net
Subject: googlewatch: PageRank -- Google's Original Sin
http://www.google-watch.org/pagerank.html
PageRank: Google's Original Sin
by Daniel Brandt
August 2002
By 1998, the dot-com gold rush was in full swing. Web search engines had been around since 1995, and had been immediately touted by high-tech pundits (and Forbes magazine) as one more element in the magical mix that would make us all rich. Such innovations meant nothing less than the end of the business cycle.
But the truth of the matter, as these same pundits conceded after the crash, was that the false promise of easy riches put bottom-line pressures on companies that should have known better. One of the most successful of the earliest search engines was AltaVista, then owned by Digital Equipment Corporation. By 1998 it began to lose its way. All the pundits were talking "portals," so AltaVista tried to become a portal, and forgot to work on improving their search ranking algorithms.
Even by 1998, it was clear that too many results were being returned by the average search engine for the one or two keywords that were entered by the searcher. AltaVista offered numerous ways to zero in on specific combinations of keywords, but paid much less attention to the "ranking" problem. Ranking, or the ordering of returned results according to some criteria, was where the action should have been. Users don't want to figure out Boolean logic, and they will not be looking at more than the first twenty matches out of the thousands that might be produced by a search engine. What really matters is how useful the first page of results appears on search engine A, as opposed to the results produced by the same terms entered into engine B. AltaVista was too busy trying to be a portal to notice that this was important.
Enter Google
By early 1998, Stanford University grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin had been playing around with a particular ranking algorithm. They presented a paper titled The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine at a World Wide Web conference. With Stanford as the assignee and Larry Page as the inventor, a patent was filed on January 9, 1998. By the time it was finally granted on September 4, 2001 (Patent No. 6,285,999), the algorithm was known as "PageRank," and Google was handling 150 million search queries per day. AltaVista continued to fade; even two changes of ownership didn't make a difference.
Google hyped PageRank, because it was a convenient buzzword that satisfied those who wondered why Google's engine did, in fact, provide better results. Even today, Google is proud of their advantage. The hype approaches the point where bloggers sometimes have to specify what they mean by "PR" -- do they mean PageRank, the algorithm, or do they mean the Public Relations that Google does so well:
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Google goes on to admit that other variables are also used, in addition to PageRank, in determining the relevance of a page. While the broad outlines of these additional variables are easily discerned by webmasters who study how to improve the ranking of their websites, the actual details of all algorithms are considered trade secrets by Google, Inc. It's in Google's interest to make it as difficult as possible for webmasters to cheat on their rankings.
It's all in the ranking
Beyond any doubt, search engines have become increasingly important on the web. E-commerce is very attuned to the ranking issue, because higher ranking translates directly into more sales. Various methods have been designed by various engines to monetize the ranking situation, such as paid placement, pay per click, and pay for inclusion. On June 27, 2002, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission issued guidelines that recommended that any ranking results influenced by payment, rather than by impartial and objective relevance criteria, ought to be clearly labeled as such in the interests of consumer protection. It appears, then, that any algorithm such as PageRank, that can reasonably pretend to be objective, will remain an important aspect of web searching for the foreseeable future.
Not only have engines improved their ranking methods, but the web has grown so huge that most surfers use search engines several times a day. All portals have built-in search functions, and most of them have to rely on one of a handful of established search engines to provide results. That's because only a few engines have the capacity to "crawl" or "spider" more than two billion web pages frequently enough to keep their database current. Google is perhaps the only engine that is known for consistent, predictable crawling, and that's only been true for less than two years. It takes almost a week to cover the available web, and another week to calculate PageRank for every page. Google's main update cycle is about 28 days, which is a bit too slow for news-hungry surfers. In August, 2001 they also began a second "mini-crawl" for news sites, which are now checked every day. Results from each crawl are mingled together, giving the searcher an impression of freshness.
For the average webmaster, the mechanics of running a successful site have changed dramatically from 1996 to 2002. This is due almost entirely to the increased importance of search engines. Even though much of the dot-com hype collapsed in 2000 and 2001 (a welcome relief to noncommercial webmasters who remembered the pre-hype days), the fact remains that by now, search engines are the fundamental consideration for almost every aspect of web design and linking. It's close to a wag-the-dog situation. That's why the algorithms that search engines consider to be consistent with the FTC's idea of impartial and objective ranking criteria deserve closer scrutiny.
What objective criteria are available?
Ranking criteria fall into three broad categories. The first is link popularity, which is used by a number of search engines to some extent. Google's PageRank is the original form of "link pop," and remains its purest expression. The next category is on-page characteristics. These include font size, title, headings, anchor text, word frequency, word proximity, file name, directory name, and domain name. The last is content analysis. This generally takes the form of on-the-fly clustering of produced results into two or more categories, which allows the searcher to "drill down" into the data in a more specific manner. Each method has its place. Search engines use some combination of the first two, or they use on-page characteristics alone, or perhaps even all three methods.
Content analysis is very difficult, but also very enticing. When it works, it allows for the sort of graphical visualization of results that can give a search engine an overnight reputation for innovation and excellence. But many times it doesn't work well, because computers are not very good at natural language processing. They cannot understand the nuances within a large stack of prose from disparate sources. Also, most top engines work with dozens of languages, which makes content analysis more difficult, since each language has its own nuances. There are several search engines that have made interesting advances in content analysis and even visualization, but Google is not one of them. The most promising aspect of content analysis is that it can be used in conjunction with link pop, to rank sites within their own areas of specialization. This provides an extra dimension that addresses some of the problems of pure link popularity.
Link popularity, which is "PageRank" to Google, is by far the most significant portion of Google's ranking cocktail. While in some cases the on-page characteristics of one page can trump the superior PageRank of a competing page, it's much more common for a low PageRank to completely bury a page that has perfect on-page relevance by every conceivable measure. To put it another way, it's frequently the case that a page with both search terms in the title, and in a heading, and in numerous internal anchors, will get buried in the rankings because the sponsoring site isn't sufficiently popular, and is unable to pass sufficient PageRank to this otherwise perfectly relevant page. In December 2000, Google came out with a downloadable toolbar attachment that made it possible to see the relative PageRank of any page on the web. Even the dumbed-down resolution of this toolbar, in conjunction with studying the ranking of a page against its competition, allows for considerable insight into the role of PageRank.
Moreover, PageRank drives Google's monthly crawl, such that sites with higher PageRank get crawled earlier, faster, and deeper than sites with low PageRank. For a large site with an average-to-low PageRank, this is a major obstacle. If your pages don't get crawled, they won't get indexed. If they don't get indexed in Google, people won't know about them. If people don't know about them, then there's no point in maintaining a website. Google starts over again on every site for every 28-day cycle, so the missing pages stand an excellent chance of getting missed on the next cycle also. In short, PageRank is the soul and essence of Google, on both the all-important crawl and the all-important rankings. By 2002 Google was universally recognized as the world's most popular search engine.
How does PageRank measure up?
In the first place, Google's claim that "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web" must be seen for what it is, which is pure hype. In a democracy, every person has one vote. In PageRank, rich people get more votes than poor people, or, in web terms, pages with higher PageRank have their votes weighted more than the votes from lower pages. As Google explains, "Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important.'" In other words, the rich get richer, and the poor hardly count at all. This is not "uniquely democratic," but rather it's uniquely tyrannical. It's corporate America's dream machine, a search engine where big business can crush the little guy. This alone makes PageRank more closely related to the "pay for placement" schemes frowned on by the Federal Trade Commission, than it is related to those "impartial and objective ranking criteria" that the FTC exempts from labeling.
Secondly, only big guys can have big databases. If your site has an average PageRank, don't even bother making your database available to Google's crawlers, because they most likely won't crawl all of it. This is important for any site that has more than a few thousand pages, and a home page of about five or less on the toolbar's crude scale.
Thirdly, in order for Google to access the links to crawl a deep site of thousands of pages, a hierarchical system of doorway pages is needed so that crawler can start at the top and work its way down. A single site with thousands of pages typically has all external links coming into the home page, and few or none coming into deep pages. The home page PageRank therefore gets distributed to the deep pages by virtue of the hierarchical internal linking structure. But by the time the crawler gets to the real "meat" at the bottom of the tree, these pages frequently end up with a PageRank of zero. This zero is devastating for the ranking of that page, even assuming that Google's crawler gets to it, and it ends up in the index, and it has excellent on-page characteristics. The bottom line is that only big, popular sites can put their databases on the web and expect Google to cover their data adequately. And that's true even for websites that had their data on the web long before Google started up in 1999.
What about non-database sites?
There are other areas where PageRank has a negative effect, even for sites without a lot of data. The nature of PageRank is so discriminatory, that it's rather like the exact opposite of affirmative action. While many see affirmative action as reverse discrimination, no one would claim (apart from economists who advocate more tax cuts for the rich) that the opposite, which would be deliberate discrimination in favor of the already-privileged, is a solution for anything. Yet this is essentially what Google claims.
Those who launch new websites in 2002 have a much more difficult time getting traffic to their sites than they did before Google became dominant. The first step for a new site is to get listed in the Open Directory Project. This is used by Google to seed the crawl every month. But even after a year of trying to coax links to your new site from other established sites, the new webmaster can expect fewer than 30 visitors per day. Sites with a respectable PageRank, on the other hand, get tens of thousands of visitors per day. That's the scale of things on the web -- a scale that is best expressed by the fact that Google's zero-to-ten toolbar is a logarithmic scale, perhaps with a base of six. To go from an old PageRank of four to a new rank of five requires several times more incoming links. This is not easy to achieve. The cure for cancer might already be on the web somewhere, but if it's on a new site, you won't find it.
PageRank also encourages webmasters to change their linking patterns. On search engine optimization forums, webmasters even discuss charging for little ads with links, according to the PageRank they've achieved for their site. This would benefit those sites with a lower PageRank that pay for such ads. Sometimes these PageRank achievements are the result of link farms or other shady practices, which Google tries to detect and then penalizes with a PageRank of zero. At other times professional optimizers get away with spammy techniques. Mirror sites and duplicate pages on other domains are now forbidden by Google and swiftly punished, even when there are good reasons for maintaining such sites. Overall, linking patterns have changed significantly because of Google. Many webmasters are stingy about giving out links (which can dilute your transference of PageRank to a given site), at the same time that they're desperate for more links from others.
What should Google do?
We feel that PageRank has run its course. Google doesn't have to abandon it entirely, but they should de-emphasize it. The first step is to stop reporting PageRank on the toolbar. This would mute the awareness of PageRank among optimizers and webmasters, and remove some of the bizarre effects that such awareness has engendered. The next step would be to replace all mention of PageRank in their own public relations documentation, in favor of general phrases about how link popularity is one factor among many in their ranking algorithms. And Google should adjust the balance between their various algorithms so that excellent on-page characteristics are not completely cancelled by low link popularity.
PageRank must be streamlined so that the "tyranny of the rich" characteristics are scaled down in favor of a more egalitarian approach to link popularity. This would greatly simplify the complex and recursive calculations that are now required to rank two billion web pages, which must be very expensive for Google. The crawl must not be PageRank driven. There should be a way for Google to arrange the crawl so that if a site cannot be fully covered in one cycle, Google's crawlers can pick up where they left off on the next cycle.
Google is so important to the web these days, that it probably ought to be a public utility. Regulatory interest from agencies such as the FTC is entirely appropriate, but we feel that the FTC addressed only the most blatant abuses among search engines. Google, which only recently began using sponsored links and ad boxes, was not even an object of concern to the Ralph Nader group, Commercial Alert, that complained to the FTC.
This was a mistake, because Commercial Alert failed to look closely enough at PageRank. Some aspects of PageRank, as presently implemented by Google, are nearly as pernicious as pay for placement. There is no question that the FTC should regulate advertising agencies that parade as search engines, in the interests of protecting consumers. Google is still a search engine, but not by much. They can remain a search engine only by fixing PageRank's worst features.
_________________
Daniel Brandt is founder and president of Public Information Research, Inc., a tax-exempt public charity that sponsors NameBase. He began compiling NameBase in 1982, from material that he started collecting in 1974, and is now the programmer and webmaster for PIR's several sites. He participates in various forums where webmasters share observations about the often-secretive algorithms, bugs, and behavior of various search engines. Brandt has been watching Google's interaction with NameBase ever since Google, in October, 2000, became the first search engine to go "deep" on PIR's main site by crawling thousands of dynamic pages.
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Linux has open source simply because it does not work without it! You cannot boot a computer without fucking with the damn messed up errors it generates.
I was so glad to move off Linux and onto Windows and not ever have to fuck with that crap again.'
Let's hear it for opaque interfaces and closed source!
The reason Microsoft doesn't provide reveal codes for Word is probably the same reason they don't for Windows: As they said in court, it would be a national security risk if people saw how it actually worked. Of course, they didn't clarify if the risk was the security holes or the resulting panic.
It's not nearly the same thing.
I can simultaneously display the document source (the Reveal Codes) and WSYWIG in WordPerfect. I don't have to click three things and read a dialog balloon; it's displayed instantly, for everything (not depending on what I'm doing), as I type.
My anecodotal evidence is different: I support 4 law firms, all of which use WordPerfect (not because of me -- I support other businesses that use Word).
Certainly, a number of firms have switched to Word. The secretaries I know cursed at the loss of control over their docs (Reveal codes, which allows direct editing of the document source), and the 'help', like clippy. One secretary's hard day:
Clippy: 'It looks like you're writing a letter, would you like some help?'
Legal Secretary: 'No I don't want your #@$%! help! Get the @#$! out of my way! I've been writing letters for 20 years! Who the $##! are you??!!'
I support many WordPerfect users. Most Word documents open without a problem, and Word imports the WordPerfect docs successfully.
0 0/wd97vwr 32.aspx
Of course, the conversion isn't perfect. Advanced layout suffers. For most documents it looks OK, but the document source shows the formatting to be a fragile mess; send it back and forth a few times and I'm leary about what would happen. Unless there is editing to do, I set the users up to use a free Word viewer:
http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/20
I happily use WordPerfect on Windows every day, and I have my choice of apps.
/. users should appreciate it.
e rfect/
The reason: "Reveal codes", which shows you the source of the document -- the text with all the formatting codes, with all the benefits you can imagine: You can see exactly which codes are doing what and where, insert and edit codes precisely, search for codes, double-click on one to change it, etc.
I always keep it open in a small window at the bottom, so I simultaneously get the source and the WYSIWYG. I'm not sure it appeals to the typical end user, but
Also, it should be a very good low-end XML editor: It natively uses formatting tags [b]like this[/b] (open Reveal Codes and see), it's supported SGML (an HTML/XML precursor and (superset?)) for over a decade and XML for a couple years. I've never had to try, but these guys think so (or try searching Google for much more info):
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/05/31/wordp
Mine can also render webpages weighing up to 280 pounds (if printed on glossy).
If you consider its powerful tabs, its strength can multiply up to ~24 times (but not much higher - see bug 148535).
I didn't say those things, the Voyager Project Manager did. I presume he knows something about the power source and the liklihood of entering the heliopause any time soon.
The voyager spacecraft are about to cross heliopause,
y &u=/nm/ 20020820/ts_nm/space_voyager_dc_2
... "We don't run out of electrical power until about 2020," he said. "There's every expectation that Voyager 1 will ... at least enter the heliopause. There may be a question as to whether it will exit out the other side before we run out of power."
...
Per project manager Ed Massey in the Yahoo article, it's a long way away:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor
At 59, with only about four years with Voyager, Massey said he would be retired long before the probes hit the heliopause.
Seems like a strange choice by IBM: Much of their business strategy is built around Linux. They say they spent $1 billion on it last year (or this year?), and the executive that spearheaded their Linux strategy got promoted to CEO.
Why would they stop people from installing Linux on their own hardware?
At least, that's what Novell and the reviewers say.
Whatta buncha geeks.
s html
u .html
...'. [sniff!] This brings tears to the eyes of us baseball fans.
Lou Gehrig, "The Iron Horse", was the greatest first baseman ever, and I don't say something like that about a Yankee unless it's pretty much indisputable. He played with Babe Ruth (you may have heard of him) on the New York Yankees in the 1920s and 30s, winning an amazing 8 championships.
Gehrig was probably one of the top 3-5 hitters in history. He also held the record, until Baltimore shortstop Cal Ripkin broke it recently, of playing 2130 straight games without a breather. Nobody else even comes close to those two. When was the last time you missed a day of work? You can see his stats here:
http://baseball-reference.com/g/gehrilo01.
A longer, more comprehensive bio:
http://www.historicbaseball.com/p_gehrig_lo
On the day he announced he had ALS, he famously stood at a microphone on the Yankee stadium infield and announced to the crowd, 'Today, I'm the luckiest man on the face of the earth
Think of someone gathering headers from mail servers over a period of time: Marketers, corporate IT depts, law enforcement, whatever else.
They could learn a lot about you and your contacts without much effort: It's completely automated; no human interaction required.
Is there any rule against it? You're not opening the e-mails.
What would you do with the info? I can't think what marketers would do -- maybe target people who have more friends. A business might benefit from a study of how communication and info really flows in their company. For law enforcement, the info could be invaluable in trying to put together a picture of a criminal organization. And don't forget the true innovators, virus writers!
and Consumer's Union would fight the maker in court
Why isn't Consumer's Union involved in these issues? Or are they? If not, I think they'd be interested if someone explained it to them.
It's an excellent feature, but we need to articulate the benefits to users.
Users are not going to read, alter or redistribute code. Most have not been stung by EULAs (yet) and when it happens, they won't know there is an alternative.
So the OSS community, instead of preaching to the converted, has to show users the benefits they will see. I challenge anyone to do it right here, right now, and provide the OSS community with some talking points and boilerplate text.