We're not exactly treated like migrant workers...
on
IT Unions?
·
· Score: 2
The genesis of unions was the horrible state of the typical industrial workplace. Issues like unsafe work environments, low hourly pay, oppresive or inflexible policies, and other complaints existed, without a means of addressing them. This is not exactly the state of the IT industry. Ok, so the foosball tables are being taken away at some places, and we're being asked to limit consumption of coffee to 5 cups an hour to limit workplace violence. But we're hardly losing fingers in the process of working on dangerous machinery and then getting fired because we need a day off to wait for the bleeding to stop.
Unions had their place, and that place will come back if they disappear. Nonetheless, I don't think that we have such a complaint to lodge that WE need one. And, for the record, as someone who once had to deal with them from a management perspective, I hate unions.
Now the problem is just getting a process that can get us from growing 4 mm in length to 47,000 km
Oh, cool! We're almost there. So, when does it go up...next week, or do we have to wait until after the summer? By the way, just how much pure carbon do you think they'll need, anyhow? I might be able to spare a few grams of it from off the valves in my car...
I think the problem with finding someone who can stand up and present coherently on why Napster is good is fundamental and inescapable...and also why they are losing in court. The bottom line is that when you get down to it, Napster is primarily used to do something that is prohibited by law. Yes, I know...information wants to be free, and all that. That's not the point...I'm not saying that music SHOULD be controlled by record companies and the neocommercialfacist RIAA. I'm just saying that as the law exists now, it's illegal to do what everyone wants to do when they use Napster.
The key to this is that the way our government works from a citizenship perspective, when we don't agree with a law, we are supposed to change it. Yes I know, "civil disobedience," yadda yadda yadda. Civil disobedience was developed for situations where there are no means to address a problem within the system. That does not exist at the moment.
To enable something like Napster in the future, the laws which prohibit sharing of music need to be repealed. The organizations which lobby in defense of these laws need to be countered. But until the laws are changed, it's going to be very difficult to stand up and intelligently say, "Well, it's against the law, yeah. But let's allow it anyways, just this once?"
Oh yeah, we can actually see the architecture of one of those. If this is actually for real, why is it that there's so little hard data being provided, despite the inevitable simplicity of the device? Something here smells very funny...
I had a profoundly strong feeling that this was the case. How often does someone of such stature, education, and wisdom just bow down immediately when challenged in this way, particularly when they are being bullied into failing to share information and educate the public? The word that came to mind was "martyr.":)
Well, the RIAA wanted to be able to control information...let's see how they like what happens when they get what they want
I wonder how the chips made with the new.13 micron spec hold up when overclocked? I would imagine that there's less tolerance for variations. Also, the SOI...I wonder how well THAT would tolerate overclocking. Might there be a bit of trouble with heat transfer from one layer to another that gets worse when you're running it very hot with a very cold surface above it, as is done with a peltier?
I tried one of these out late last year when Microvision was at the AUSA convention. I wouldn't say that it doesn't interfere with your vision, however; you have a small screen in front of your eye, which is translucent but colored as well. It's a very far cry from just having something appear in your vision as an augmentation to normal sight.
Also, due to the fact that a small blue laser for this application has yet to be invented (and for that matter, ANY blue laser with a long lifespan that can be used for this application), color displays are quite a long way off. They have the red and green, but blue is a major problem.
The difference is mostly in amount, and what purpose it really serves. If you're running a quake server (hardware investment, bandwidth costs) and charge $5 a participant...well, I can see that, particularly since you're offering a service as well. But this guy didn't really offer much, did he? Do you really think that it incurred that much cost/trouble/work to get a bunch of random data (which someone else generated, btw) and FTP it to someone?
It'd be like trying to charge $800 for a Red Hat distro, to cover shipping and handling or some strange thing like that. And what's more, it makes me question the motive behind the whole thing. My opinion is that this wasn't motivated by scientific curiosity, but just greed. He picked a challenge he didn't think anyone else could meet, and charged $100 a head just to try. Where do you think that $100 ended up?
In space, nobody can hear you scream...
on
Space Station BSOD
·
· Score: 1
The day really gets off to a bad start. The server connection to the net is down hard. We worked on it last night until 0100 and could not bring it up. We were doing the file server part of network reconfiguration yesterday. This moved the FS to the lab-we also extended the Ethernet lan from the Node into the lab (not part of the procedure). This allowed the server to rejoin the network without delay, rather than waiting much later when the RF access points are set up. The plan was working well, and the server was online from mid afternoon. At about 2200, we were reconfiguring some mail files which, with a lot of help from Windows NT, got put in the wrong place during the backup procedure. When we finished restoring the files, the network was down and would not come back up. We worked this for several hours. Finally, jiggling some cables brings just a part of the net back. (that really instills confidence in the stability of your network).
This is so strangely reminiscent of a past job. It's just fascinating to realize that, unlike the place where I ran into these problems, this happened miles and miles above earth, in the vacuum of space. The good thing though...in space nobody can make off with your full set of TechNet CDs:)
Exactly...and this is the exact thing that could be sparked by short-range high-bandwidth networking systems like (if they ever get it interoperating correctly) Bluetooth. Furthermore, some of the problems with having all of this melded together into one box (someone comes up with a good idea, but TOO BAD, because the box already exists, too hard to add things...sorry!) would go away.
On top of that, conceivably, with enough improvement in wireless networking (hey, we're talking about portable terabyte drives...I can dream) some of the functions of the system could remain at home. What if you didn't need the TiVo part to follow you around, just the ability to connect to it and see what you want?
One last thing...could someone snag the source code behind the Speech-To-Text translation in Echelon for inclusion into this? I'd really dig being able to index all that radio/movie/tv stuff with a localized search engine, so I can easily find that scene from "The Ref" where Dennis Leary is commenting on why Gus should be so upset:)
Unbelieveable. This guy comes across a theoretically impossible task, and turns it into a scam basically, whereby anyone who wants to try to meet the challenge must pay up front. This is truly disgusting. BR>If this were something where a person sponsored it with a little web space, publicity, and the prize money, then ok, I can understand that, that's fantastic. But this was nothing more than a very thinly veiled scheme to make money off of other people's attempts at a valid challenge.
Hey, I wish Fermat's Last Theorem hadn't been solved. Then I could put up a site, saying "I'll pay $5,000 to anyone who can solve it, but first send me $100. Once I have the money, I'll tell you what Fermat's Last Theorem is."
I live in DC, and attend that meeting with some regularity (greets to Paul, Jake, et alia), and can attest fully to the nature of this article. The meeting has evolved over the last several years, along with the "dot-com" phenomenon, and has matured from mostly high school students to young employees of major tech and financial companies, where we work in security and programming positions. We still talk about what makes things tick and bizzarre projects (like programming GameBoys to do things they really aren't intended to do), but it's been somehwat transformed by the fact that we now all have outlets for our energies and skills. We're no longer rooting around for places to use what we know, and it shows.
This to me shows the overwhelming hypocricy of the liberal movement. I have no doubt that those attacking this site were liberals, doubtless believing themselves to be on some righteous crusade.
Oh, come on, get over it already. This wasn't "Free Republic v. the Liberal Movement," it was "Free Republic v. One Major Nutcase." This was not any project of the DNC or any other garbage like that, just the activity of a single loon who (and here I wholeheartedly agree with you) wanted to violate the rights of others to express themselves. I don't really know the whole message of Free Republic beyond what has been mentioned here, but I don't need to; there is a community with a voice, and they have a right to speak, particularly on a forum website of their own creation and use.
And for those who would say that this injunction is censorship, I suggest you read the details and see just what was taking place. This guy was free to express his opinions for quite some time by merely posting normally; instead he clearly did attempt to disrupt the site to such a degree that it would have to close down entirely. He is the one attempting censorship, not them.
Using things like iButton does not get around the issue here. All you have done is slightly shift the nature and physical whereabouts of the device which contains the private key/shared secret/magic word that opens the castle gates.
The bottom line is what it always has been: security is a matter of depth and cannot possibly be judged by the technical merits of any one component. Like a chain, the weakest link defines the strength of the entire system.
First, the entire park runs at 30 frames per second...
Now, THAT would be a great video display...the only problem would be getting the helicopter to hold still while you racked up the frags....and making sure the other players weren't in other aircraft so they could see you coming!
I highly doubt that they will have you on the same wire as their systems. Not only would it actually be harder to put you on the same wire (after all, we're talking about a very latency-sensitive production system here), Disney just plain isn't that stupid. They've been proactive about security for a long, long time, and regularly have their entire risk stance examined by an outside party. The last one that I heard about, the big risk that was overlooked was that of a crash from one of the low-flying airplanes that give rides over the park...
Oh, there's a lot more to it than that...I simply cannot believe how many things in this story make no sense. For starters, here's where I think thing really went wrong at first:
OK, some guy on Efnet (an Internet chat area) told me last night he would Western Union me $250 if I wrote a diary of one of my typical days and e-mailed it to him in.doc format.
Okay...anyone who knows IRC knows what insano things that posers will say in channels. Enough said, just someone say it to a reporter before he does this sort of story again?
He was too stupid to be a Fed.
Ok...maybe that one is credible. If I were a journalist doing a story on something that gets as technical as this topic, I'd have someone backing me up who can smell the difference between truth and what these guys are dishing out.
...through an untraceable NetZero account. I use www.anonymizer.com to go to the Yahoo account because I'm paranoid. Hell if anyone's going to get my IP (Internet address). Screw the Feds, they are lazy they won't trace me back that far. Plus I got *67 on, they'll need subpoenas to, and a ton of tracing to even get close to me.
Um...ok...I don't follow that NetZero is untraceable because it is free. And if he knows it's untraceable, why use anonymizer? Or try to hide his number from logging systems by using *67 (which won't work, btw)? And he talks as though subpoenas are hard to get...fact is, getting a subpoena for a phone number is a piece of cake. All you need to do is file a "John Doe" lawsuit and request an expedited subpoena. The ISP will gladly turn over the information...they have entire departments just for this purpose usually.
By then I'll have a new number. Hell, I go through telephone lines about one every 2-3 months.
Um...dude? Word of warning...the phone companies keep their records longer than that...some of them actually remember your address for upwards of 4 or even as many as 5 or 6 months...amazing huh?
At that point I started tuning out. These guys supposedly are pulling in thousands a month in fraud, yet somehow they have managed to elude capture despite the incredible numbers of mistakes they make in covering up their tracks? This is ludicrous...but the biggest scam is the fact that a reporter got a great story that even got slashdotted, for $250. Too bad it's all lies...it looks as though these two losers really ended up scamming even more people than they claim to.
You speak as though responsibility is finite in quantity, as though it has to be divvied up among those who share it. If the person who committed an act of violence was in some way driven towards that act by an outside party, he is no less responsible, but that outside party played a part as well. Just because we might say that they "share" the blame does not mean that you divide it up between them, or that one is suddenly innocent because another bears some measure of guilt for their role.
Granted, the person committing the act was already predisposed towards doing it, and might have done it anyways no matter what. But I really cannot believe for a second that pointing out abortion clinic doctors as targets and rewarding violent behavior towards them would have no impact whatsoever. Simple cause and effect...and doing something is a cause.
I think that neither the people who claim that this is impossible nor the people who want to dismiss it are correct. There is undoubtedly a major problem, and it is only getting worse. The flip side of that, however, is that while we are getting farther and farther from having a complete listing of the web in search engines, the ability of end users to find what they are looking for appears to be improving, particularly with the advent of better search engines like Google.
The solution to indexing the web completely, or much more completely, has to lie in another methodology. How about a distributed solution? Google@home? distributedYahoo!.net? Honestly...there are ways to tackle the problems, and the reason why this entire system exists is because people refused to just shake their heads and say, "Nope, can't do it...sorry!"
How about a button in browsers that enables you to mark a page as a dead link? Just hit that button and a centralized system gets a reference to the URL currently in your browser. That centralized system is funded by all search engines and all search engines draw from it. Yes, I know..."What if a user falsely claims a site to be dead?" Well, what if it took 100 different IPs claiming it to be dead before it really was considered dead? If you don't get many people hitting the site from a search engine in the first place, then you probably aren't serving it up to too many people.
How about a system for pre-indexing an entire site, such that the person who runs it can have a single document at the root of their domain with the index results? A standard could be developed that would even go so far as to map out the existing sub-sites (for AOL personal sites, for example) so that the engine could go to each one for the index documents.
I guess that what I mean to say here is that the problem is largely based around the hugeness of the web, and how brute force is no longer enough. But that's not really that big a problem...all that's needed is a bit of creativity.
Here's an interesting question: What does the Constitution say about our freedom of impression? We have the right to express ourselves, but what do you do when the amount of information becomes so enormous and so broad that someone HAS to choose what you allow in to your senses? I think that end-user controlled systems like this one here at/. are the only reasonable answer, particularly since anything else is censorship by definition.
Ignore the notion of someone limiting their own experience and input and thereby harming themselves...that is such a non-point it is ridiculous. Time and time again, lawmakers, courts, and groups like the ACLU have repeated one of the most understated fundamental precepts of the Constitution: government is not supposed to try and protect people from themselves. We are entitled to the chance to screw up and close off too much information.
I'm gathering that since he's going through all the trouble of having the business out on an island that far from shore, and keeping the nature of the business a secret, that security is a major concern. For this reason, you cannot rely on 802.11-based solutions or packet radio (also referred to above as HAM or amateur radio). Even WEP on the 802.11b standard is, IMHO, insufficient security, particularly since it is non-directional; any signal strong enough to get out to the island is also strong enough to cover an awful lot of land, and anyone in that area could sniff it. Packet radio is even less secure, and again, as noted above, there are probably restrictions on commercial use.
There are a multitude of systems for inter-building and inter-campus bridging, all of which will get you significant bandwidth. Some use microwave technologies, other use lasers. I'm not aware of how much curvature of the earth takes place over 10 KM, or how tall a tower you may be able to build to see over the horizon, but I would definitely look there. One more thing, also security-related: physically secure the land-side of your connection, as it's a perfect place to just hook up a laptop and sniff like the dickens.
Yes, but that is the nature of any significant leap forward. All the Gutenberg press did was speed up the reproduction of texts, but the ability to produce multiple copies of one written work of any size at such a rate enabled new uses for printed material, which in turn helped proliferate literacy, etc, etc... And that is the point I put forward here: that the ripples and aftershocks (and whatever other cliches you wish to use) of the basic functionality of the Internet are still moving outwards, and while there are lulls between them, there are more yet to come.
Slashdot Mirror
Unions had their place, and that place will come back if they disappear. Nonetheless, I don't think that we have such a complaint to lodge that WE need one. And, for the record, as someone who once had to deal with them from a management perspective, I hate unions.
Oh, cool! We're almost there. So, when does it go up...next week, or do we have to wait until after the summer? By the way, just how much pure carbon do you think they'll need, anyhow? I might be able to spare a few grams of it from off the valves in my car...
I think the problem with finding someone who can stand up and present coherently on why Napster is good is fundamental and inescapable...and also why they are losing in court. The bottom line is that when you get down to it, Napster is primarily used to do something that is prohibited by law. Yes, I know...information wants to be free, and all that. That's not the point...I'm not saying that music SHOULD be controlled by record companies and the neocommercialfacist RIAA. I'm just saying that as the law exists now, it's illegal to do what everyone wants to do when they use Napster.
The key to this is that the way our government works from a citizenship perspective, when we don't agree with a law, we are supposed to change it. Yes I know, "civil disobedience," yadda yadda yadda. Civil disobedience was developed for situations where there are no means to address a problem within the system. That does not exist at the moment.
To enable something like Napster in the future, the laws which prohibit sharing of music need to be repealed. The organizations which lobby in defense of these laws need to be countered. But until the laws are changed, it's going to be very difficult to stand up and intelligently say, "Well, it's against the law, yeah. But let's allow it anyways, just this once?"
Ah, I see that my post was modded down for being "offtopic." I seem to remember the submission having the following line:
And what with Denmark being an EU member, nobody will dare call them a rogue state or something.
Might I helpfully suggest a website to the moderator in question...
This differs from a HandSpring Visor how?
Oh yeah, we can actually see the architecture of one of those. If this is actually for real, why is it that there's so little hard data being provided, despite the inevitable simplicity of the device? Something here smells very funny...
I had a profoundly strong feeling that this was the case. How often does someone of such stature, education, and wisdom just bow down immediately when challenged in this way, particularly when they are being bullied into failing to share information and educate the public? The word that came to mind was "martyr." :)
Well, the RIAA wanted to be able to control information...let's see how they like what happens when they get what they want
I wonder how the chips made with the new .13 micron spec hold up when overclocked? I would imagine that there's less tolerance for variations. Also, the SOI...I wonder how well THAT would tolerate overclocking. Might there be a bit of trouble with heat transfer from one layer to another that gets worse when you're running it very hot with a very cold surface above it, as is done with a peltier?
I tried one of these out late last year when Microvision was at the AUSA convention. I wouldn't say that it doesn't interfere with your vision, however; you have a small screen in front of your eye, which is translucent but colored as well. It's a very far cry from just having something appear in your vision as an augmentation to normal sight.
Also, due to the fact that a small blue laser for this application has yet to be invented (and for that matter, ANY blue laser with a long lifespan that can be used for this application), color displays are quite a long way off. They have the red and green, but blue is a major problem.
The difference is mostly in amount, and what purpose it really serves. If you're running a quake server (hardware investment, bandwidth costs) and charge $5 a participant...well, I can see that, particularly since you're offering a service as well. But this guy didn't really offer much, did he? Do you really think that it incurred that much cost/trouble/work to get a bunch of random data (which someone else generated, btw) and FTP it to someone?
It'd be like trying to charge $800 for a Red Hat distro, to cover shipping and handling or some strange thing like that. And what's more, it makes me question the motive behind the whole thing. My opinion is that this wasn't motivated by scientific curiosity, but just greed. He picked a challenge he didn't think anyone else could meet, and charged $100 a head just to try. Where do you think that $100 ended up?
The day really gets off to a bad start. The server connection to the net is down hard. We worked on it last night until 0100 and could not bring it up. We were doing the file server part of network reconfiguration yesterday. This moved the FS to the lab-we also extended the Ethernet lan from the Node into the lab (not part of the procedure). This allowed the server to rejoin the network without delay, rather than waiting much later when the RF access points are set up. The plan was working well, and the server was online from mid afternoon. At about 2200, we were reconfiguring some mail files which, with a lot of help from Windows NT, got put in the wrong place during the backup procedure. When we finished restoring the files, the network was down and would not come back up. We worked this for several hours. Finally, jiggling some cables brings just a part of the net back. (that really instills confidence in the stability of your network).
:)
This is so strangely reminiscent of a past job. It's just fascinating to realize that, unlike the place where I ran into these problems, this happened miles and miles above earth, in the vacuum of space. The good thing though...in space nobody can make off with your full set of TechNet CDs
Exactly...and this is the exact thing that could be sparked by short-range high-bandwidth networking systems like (if they ever get it interoperating correctly) Bluetooth. Furthermore, some of the problems with having all of this melded together into one box (someone comes up with a good idea, but TOO BAD, because the box already exists, too hard to add things...sorry!) would go away.
:)
On top of that, conceivably, with enough improvement in wireless networking (hey, we're talking about portable terabyte drives...I can dream) some of the functions of the system could remain at home. What if you didn't need the TiVo part to follow you around, just the ability to connect to it and see what you want?
One last thing...could someone snag the source code behind the Speech-To-Text translation in Echelon for inclusion into this? I'd really dig being able to index all that radio/movie/tv stuff with a localized search engine, so I can easily find that scene from "The Ref" where Dennis Leary is commenting on why Gus should be so upset
Uh, yeah, I know that. It's called humor, dude...it's not made to fit like car parts in a Ferrari :)
In other words, I was associating one scumbag scheme with another.
Unbelieveable. This guy comes across a theoretically impossible task, and turns it into a scam basically, whereby anyone who wants to try to meet the challenge must pay up front. This is truly disgusting.
BR>If this were something where a person sponsored it with a little web space, publicity, and the prize money, then ok, I can understand that, that's fantastic. But this was nothing more than a very thinly veiled scheme to make money off of other people's attempts at a valid challenge.
Hey, I wish Fermat's Last Theorem hadn't been solved. Then I could put up a site, saying "I'll pay $5,000 to anyone who can solve it, but first send me $100. Once I have the money, I'll tell you what Fermat's Last Theorem is."
I live in DC, and attend that meeting with some regularity (greets to Paul, Jake, et alia), and can attest fully to the nature of this article. The meeting has evolved over the last several years, along with the "dot-com" phenomenon, and has matured from mostly high school students to young employees of major tech and financial companies, where we work in security and programming positions. We still talk about what makes things tick and bizzarre projects (like programming GameBoys to do things they really aren't intended to do), but it's been somehwat transformed by the fact that we now all have outlets for our energies and skills. We're no longer rooting around for places to use what we know, and it shows.
Wonderful! Finally, a way all those poor Northpoint subscribers can get high-speed access again!
This to me shows the overwhelming hypocricy of the liberal movement. I have no doubt that those attacking this site were liberals, doubtless believing themselves to be on some righteous crusade.
Oh, come on, get over it already. This wasn't "Free Republic v. the Liberal Movement," it was "Free Republic v. One Major Nutcase." This was not any project of the DNC or any other garbage like that, just the activity of a single loon who (and here I wholeheartedly agree with you) wanted to violate the rights of others to express themselves. I don't really know the whole message of Free Republic beyond what has been mentioned here, but I don't need to; there is a community with a voice, and they have a right to speak, particularly on a forum website of their own creation and use.
And for those who would say that this injunction is censorship, I suggest you read the details and see just what was taking place. This guy was free to express his opinions for quite some time by merely posting normally; instead he clearly did attempt to disrupt the site to such a degree that it would have to close down entirely. He is the one attempting censorship, not them.
Using things like iButton does not get around the issue here. All you have done is slightly shift the nature and physical whereabouts of the device which contains the private key/shared secret/magic word that opens the castle gates.
n dex_q1.html#011801-1
Don't consider it that way? Examine this: http://www.atstake.com/research/advisories/2001/i
The bottom line is what it always has been: security is a matter of depth and cannot possibly be judged by the technical merits of any one component. Like a chain, the weakest link defines the strength of the entire system.
First, the entire park runs at 30 frames per second...
Now, THAT would be a great video display...the only problem would be getting the helicopter to hold still while you racked up the frags....and making sure the other players weren't in other aircraft so they could see you coming!
I highly doubt that they will have you on the same wire as their systems. Not only would it actually be harder to put you on the same wire (after all, we're talking about a very latency-sensitive production system here), Disney just plain isn't that stupid. They've been proactive about security for a long, long time, and regularly have their entire risk stance examined by an outside party. The last one that I heard about, the big risk that was overlooked was that of a crash from one of the low-flying airplanes that give rides over the park...
Oh, there's a lot more to it than that...I simply cannot believe how many things in this story make no sense. For starters, here's where I think thing really went wrong at first:
.doc format.
...through an untraceable NetZero account. I use www.anonymizer.com to go to the Yahoo account because I'm paranoid. Hell if anyone's going to get my IP (Internet address). Screw the Feds, they are lazy they won't trace me back that far. Plus I got *67 on, they'll need subpoenas to, and a ton of tracing to even get close to me.
OK, some guy on Efnet (an Internet chat area) told me last night he would Western Union me $250 if I wrote a diary of one of my typical days and e-mailed it to him in
Okay...anyone who knows IRC knows what insano things that posers will say in channels. Enough said, just someone say it to a reporter before he does this sort of story again?
He was too stupid to be a Fed.
Ok...maybe that one is credible. If I were a journalist doing a story on something that gets as technical as this topic, I'd have someone backing me up who can smell the difference between truth and what these guys are dishing out.
Um...ok...I don't follow that NetZero is untraceable because it is free. And if he knows it's untraceable, why use anonymizer? Or try to hide his number from logging systems by using *67 (which won't work, btw)? And he talks as though subpoenas are hard to get...fact is, getting a subpoena for a phone number is a piece of cake. All you need to do is file a "John Doe" lawsuit and request an expedited subpoena. The ISP will gladly turn over the information...they have entire departments just for this purpose usually.
By then I'll have a new number. Hell, I go through telephone lines about one every 2-3 months.
Um...dude? Word of warning...the phone companies keep their records longer than that...some of them actually remember your address for upwards of 4 or even as many as 5 or 6 months...amazing huh?
At that point I started tuning out. These guys supposedly are pulling in thousands a month in fraud, yet somehow they have managed to elude capture despite the incredible numbers of mistakes they make in covering up their tracks? This is ludicrous...but the biggest scam is the fact that a reporter got a great story that even got slashdotted, for $250. Too bad it's all lies...it looks as though these two losers really ended up scamming even more people than they claim to.
You speak as though responsibility is finite in quantity, as though it has to be divvied up among those who share it. If the person who committed an act of violence was in some way driven towards that act by an outside party, he is no less responsible, but that outside party played a part as well. Just because we might say that they "share" the blame does not mean that you divide it up between them, or that one is suddenly innocent because another bears some measure of guilt for their role.
Granted, the person committing the act was already predisposed towards doing it, and might have done it anyways no matter what. But I really cannot believe for a second that pointing out abortion clinic doctors as targets and rewarding violent behavior towards them would have no impact whatsoever. Simple cause and effect...and doing something is a cause.
I think that neither the people who claim that this is impossible nor the people who want to dismiss it are correct. There is undoubtedly a major problem, and it is only getting worse. The flip side of that, however, is that while we are getting farther and farther from having a complete listing of the web in search engines, the ability of end users to find what they are looking for appears to be improving, particularly with the advent of better search engines like Google.
The solution to indexing the web completely, or much more completely, has to lie in another methodology. How about a distributed solution? Google@home? distributedYahoo!.net? Honestly...there are ways to tackle the problems, and the reason why this entire system exists is because people refused to just shake their heads and say, "Nope, can't do it...sorry!"
How about a button in browsers that enables you to mark a page as a dead link? Just hit that button and a centralized system gets a reference to the URL currently in your browser. That centralized system is funded by all search engines and all search engines draw from it. Yes, I know..."What if a user falsely claims a site to be dead?" Well, what if it took 100 different IPs claiming it to be dead before it really was considered dead? If you don't get many people hitting the site from a search engine in the first place, then you probably aren't serving it up to too many people.
How about a system for pre-indexing an entire site, such that the person who runs it can have a single document at the root of their domain with the index results? A standard could be developed that would even go so far as to map out the existing sub-sites (for AOL personal sites, for example) so that the engine could go to each one for the index documents.
I guess that what I mean to say here is that the problem is largely based around the hugeness of the web, and how brute force is no longer enough. But that's not really that big a problem...all that's needed is a bit of creativity.
Here's an interesting question: What does the Constitution say about our freedom of impression? We have the right to express ourselves, but what do you do when the amount of information becomes so enormous and so broad that someone HAS to choose what you allow in to your senses? I think that end-user controlled systems like this one here at /. are the only reasonable answer, particularly since anything else is censorship by definition.
Ignore the notion of someone limiting their own experience and input and thereby harming themselves...that is such a non-point it is ridiculous. Time and time again, lawmakers, courts, and groups like the ACLU have repeated one of the most understated fundamental precepts of the Constitution: government is not supposed to try and protect people from themselves. We are entitled to the chance to screw up and close off too much information.
I'm gathering that since he's going through all the trouble of having the business out on an island that far from shore, and keeping the nature of the business a secret, that security is a major concern. For this reason, you cannot rely on 802.11-based solutions or packet radio (also referred to above as HAM or amateur radio). Even WEP on the 802.11b standard is, IMHO, insufficient security, particularly since it is non-directional; any signal strong enough to get out to the island is also strong enough to cover an awful lot of land, and anyone in that area could sniff it. Packet radio is even less secure, and again, as noted above, there are probably restrictions on commercial use.
There are a multitude of systems for inter-building and inter-campus bridging, all of which will get you significant bandwidth. Some use microwave technologies, other use lasers. I'm not aware of how much curvature of the earth takes place over 10 KM, or how tall a tower you may be able to build to see over the horizon, but I would definitely look there. One more thing, also security-related: physically secure the land-side of your connection, as it's a perfect place to just hook up a laptop and sniff like the dickens.
Yes, but that is the nature of any significant leap forward. All the Gutenberg press did was speed up the reproduction of texts, but the ability to produce multiple copies of one written work of any size at such a rate enabled new uses for printed material, which in turn helped proliferate literacy, etc, etc... And that is the point I put forward here: that the ripples and aftershocks (and whatever other cliches you wish to use) of the basic functionality of the Internet are still moving outwards, and while there are lulls between them, there are more yet to come.