Content filtering is not a new problem. Go down to your public library and ask for the latest copy of Penthouse.
This is not a valid comparison. Dead tree publishing is "opt-in", meaning that you only have access to the things you specifically request. Penthouse, besides being controversial, is not high on the list of priorities when it comes to the goals of an educational, record-keeping institution such as a library. There are many obscure journals and books that you won't find at all but the biggest university libraries. Would you argue that this is content filtering as well?
The Internet is, of course, an "opt-out" system. Once you plug your computer into the internet, you instantly have access to everything (neglecting pay-for-access databases and such). So anything that's not there has been actively blocked. Which is a completely different animal than simply not opting in to the more obscure or more controversial dead tree publications.
I'm one of the old-school engineers who believes that, since we have two ears we only need two transducers.
I don't have the educational background to have informed opinions on issues like this, and I don't have strong feelings on the issue. But I see two problems with this theory:
1. The flaps of your ear contribute a lot to the perception of sound, especially the highs, being more directional. If you are direcly facing, and then directly pointing away from a sound source, you should theoretically hear no difference. (you should get equal amounts of sound in each ear). But try it and you'll definitely hear a difference--the highs will be less pronounced.
2. It doesn't take much signal, especially bass, to get to where you can feel it physically, with your sense of touch. And of course every area of skin is a receptor there, and hence very directional.
I'm sure these points have been brought up before: where does the "two transducers is all you need" camp stand on these?
One thing I don't understand is why everybody around here seems to be favoring Gore over Bush.
It's the supreme court, stupid.(1)
Imagine if the prayer in school decision had gone the OTHER way. Imagine if Microsoft goes to the Supreme Court under Bush-appointed judges. Imagine rulings on the constitutionality of the DMCA!
Ignoring the whole issue about wide-spread use and consistency, this might be possible.
That's like saying "ignoring the problem of objects gaining mass as they accelerate, there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to travel at the speed of light!"
No one is going to use a DNS system that only a microscopic portion of the internet can access. No one is going to say "visit my website at http://indpendentdns.unconventionaltld, but make sure you have OSSDNS servers in your DNS list!" No one is going to use an e-mail account when 99.9% of their mail gets dropped because the mailservers can't resolve the domain name.
Linux caught on eventually, why not this?
Linux caught on eventually among relatively small groups of computer enthusiasts, and is just now peeking into the corporate world. But a decision to use Linux doesn't depend on others doing so for it to be useful.
And "Open Source" would really have nothing to do with it. The source code to BIND is of course already available. Using the term "open source" to mean decentralized and anarchistic just dilutes the meaning of the term.
The problem with this approach is that in the real worl this deisng has a massive performance hit.
This may be true in theory. But have you ever played with BeOS? It's the most ridiculously responsive, zippiest OS I've EVER worked with! I guess the theoretical performance hit can be worked around, given enough ingenuity.
I always wished I could read usenet postings that were really old, say 8+ years. The old-timers always talk about the glory days of usenet, and we always see references to the famous postings of "Larry Wall" on April Fool's day, when the concept of Perl Poetry was first seen, or of course, the famous Linus posting when Linux first met the world. Anyone know of a place where you can read really old messages like these?
In my opinion, only daemons and tty clients should be in textmode.
That would make a Linux box completely useless remotely, or without an X server. The power of UNIX is in its command line. If you like a system whose functionality is inseparable from its GUI, Microsoft would love to sell you a copy of NT.
And there are lots of GUI frontends to SAMBA and the like. I don't feel like searching them out, you can do your own homework. But they're there.
coalition (n): An alliance, especially a temporary one, of people, factions, parties, or nations.
Wouldn't big business benefit as a whole if predatory patents like this gain legitimacy? With all the bad press Amazon has gotten for this stupid patent, wouldn't it be a great way to influence public opinion in favor of it by making it look reasonable and useful?
My apologies if this is a shallow question that has been thought through, but I've just recently heard about Mojo Nation.
What happens when the US decides to start taxing purchases made on the internet? Mojo are useless to the government, they'll want dollars. But will there even be a dollar/Mojo exchange?
--
Re:You haven't defended Free Speech until...
on
Freenet 0.3 Released
·
· Score: 2
The question of what information you personally disseminate is completely irrelevent. Assuming we're not talking about content that places any sort of excessive bandwidth or storage requirements on the server, then acting as a relay for encrypted recipie for chocolate chip cookies is no different than acting as a relay for encrypted Nazi propeganda. Everyone has an equal, anonymous, uncensorable voice, and that's the basic idea behind freenet.
It's not as if all the encrypted information sitting on your server has your stamp of approval on it. It's specially designed so that you don't even know what's there!
If your qualm is that you could possibly be furthering the Nazi cause, perhaps you should reflect that what you are really doing is supporting a much bigger and more important ideal; free speech.
He merely wanted to protect his own freedom of speech--his freedom to decide what information he does disseminate and what information he doesn't.
Honestly, that's hardly freedom of speech. It's not speech just to act as a technological relay for information; mailmen don't cry out that their freedom of speech is violated when the possibility is very real that they could be disseminating material that they don't agree with. Would you consider it unethical for the post office to faithfully deliver a message that contains objectionable material? Should they instead take the liberty of exercising discretion over what they will and won't disseminate?
Not complicated, but resourceful I'd say. It's not as if someone said "look, there's the battery, short it out," it was a case of someone screwing with my BIOS and me needing to find a way to fix it.
I didn't have a manual, I just figured that the battery-looking thing probably was responsible for storing the time and all the other BIOS settings, so I figured shorting it out would solve the problem. Not bad for 15, or however old I was at the time.
Sending videos over fibre-optic networks and playing them on PSX2s? Nobody tell the MPAA.
Are you joking? The MPAA would love this. It's just the infastructure they need to stream the video to you and make you pay each time you watch it. Hell, Sony might just stop releasing PSX2 games on CD and just stream the game to you each time you play it! Then of course they can send the information about how often you play it to the respective manufacturer, for a nominal fee...
Your brother may be smart, but he's obviously not a computer geek. I have plenty of smart friends who don't know the first thing about the mechanics of computers. On the other hand, I suck at swimming, even though I like the water.
I was a high school senior three months ago, and I assure you I can chain IDE devices. I even manually short circuited the internal battery on my computer once when someone set a BIOS password and then forgot it (how's that for resourcefulness?). We are not extinct.
Three cheers for that idea! I've been wishing the demo scene would find some life even without the extra incentive of deterring script kiddies--demos are just plain cool!
A few links that are pertanent:
www.scene.org - sort of a ground central for the demoscene today, the way I guess the Hornet archive used to be, though I didn't even know what a demo was when hornet was in business.
Orange Juice, the self-proclaimed "demoscene information center, though I've never found anything useful there. Mostly pertanent to Europe, I think.
Personally, I'd love to see growth in the Linux demoscene, because even though there are lots of great (and recent!) demos out there, no one from the DOS demoscene ever releases source code! I'd really love to learn some of the tricks of the trade, and it's hard to even know where to start without being able to look at the work of the masters.
In case any of you have never seen a demo and happen to be running Windows, my personal favorite is Bakkslide Seven, made by the group Omnicolor. Even more impressive is the fact that it is 64kb in its entirety: music, graphics, and everything!
I SERIOUSLY doubt AOL has even close to 90% of the messaging market. ICQ, Yahoo, and MSN may not have the same userbase AIM does, but there's no way they constitute a mere 10% of the market.
Perhaps they're forgetting that people can use more than one messenger at a time? I know I do, having friends on different messaging systems.
--
Re:on a related note: pgp/gpg+mutt possible?
on
GPG vs. PGP?
·
· Score: 3
Straight off the Mutt Index Page... but I'll refrain from editorializing:
I'm thinking that their "5 years" of development was in making the processor in the CueCat itself. If you take your CueCat and scan something, you'll notice that you can scan forwards, backwards, sideways, upside-down, flipped to the right, to the left, and so forth. All of these methods work really well, and that obviously took a _lot_ of talent, IMHO.
Is this a joke?
Recall your last visit to the grocery store. Does the clerk at the front take the item, find the barcode, align it so that it faces a certain direction, and then carefully guide it straight across the scanner?
Does the pen-like thing they use to scan your library card have sticker that says "this side up?"
I don't know anything about the science behind barcode scanning (and obviously neither do you!) but it seems this is a mechanism built into every barcode scanner since the creation of barcode scanning.
To more directly respond to your suggestion though, isn't Debian's system part of the over all problem? Not it's technical merits, but rather the fact that it's only for Debian and its child distros?
The unity of the Debian distribution depends on the ability of the Debian developers to issue and enforce policy. Every single package on my system installs documentation into/usr/doc. The naming and versioning systems are standardized, so there's no 3.2rc3 vs 3.20-4 problems. The installation scripts depend on things being laid out the way the Debian packages lay them out. It's the price of the cohesion you get with Debian.
I'll be interested to see how this OpenPackage aims to overcome this. Create and enforce policy, like Debian, or what...?
I started my journey into the world of Unix OS's with RH 6.0, then upgrading to 6.1. The first couple of rpm's I dealt with really impressed me with how it handled stuff.
[...]
After figuring out how to pull down the latest ports package I tried running a couple of them. I can't begin to express how impressed I was with this.
I can't help it...
You would love Debian. Imagine RPM with a centralized, authoritative package repository. Imagine never having to search for dependencies again, because they are all right there on the same server. Imagine using a program (we call it apt-get -- ahh, the sweetness in that name!) that automatically downloads and installs the newest (run "unstable" and it's the truth) versions of whatever software fits your fancy.
Don't blame the web designers. Sometimes management makes us do it.
Heh, sorry, I've never done web pages in an environment where I'm not the designer, coder, and manager all at the same time--I have no concept of the division of labor in such a situation...
I can't believe no one else has complained about this yet.
What are web designers THINKING when they require you to have flash to view a web page?? In lynx I get:
[EMBED]
Wow, that's nice. In Netscape, of course, it complains that it doesn't have flash. I even downloaded and installed it, and it now crashes on load. Wonderful...
What makes me maddest of all is that they probably use it just for stupid special effects like text that whooshes in and out.
Could anyone report what kind of stability they get running Debian unstable? The Debian web page says: "This release is currently considered ``unstable''. That means that things will break if you run it. Woody isn't even a complete or functioning
system yet." However, I've heard people say that Debian's unstable is more stable than other dists main release...
Why in the world is it my civic duty to do the patent office's job? You let them off for granting obvious patents, and then shift the responsibility on these bad patents to me.
I'm sorry, but I have better things to do than monitor the patent office's patent applications. And you know what? I shouldn't have to. I pay to have someone do it for me.
The patent office probably received the applications, couldn't find anything in the library to contest Amazon's (and you ever so cleverly worded "Some obscure company's") claims?
Sorry, they're not getting off that easy. If they had so much as asked ONE PROFESSIONAL in the industry whether they'd ever heard of HYPERLINKING, they would have been told that not only is there prior art, but that the idea is already in widespread use! Again, why are you letting them off on a plea of innocent ignorance, when their job is not to be ignorant?
And don't tell me some tear-jerker story about how many patents these poor few people have to go through. Because if that's the case, it's congress's responsibility to hire more examiners. Likewise, that's what I pay them to do.
As for objection to the patents, would you consider it conspicuous objection if someone really high-profile like, say, the president of a major computer book publisher wrote an open letter to a company who filed an obvious patent like maybe a major online bookseller? And how about the article I read about the Amazon patent in Newsweek a few months later? And then the article I read in my local newspaper a few weeks after that?
(And I have a couple of patents, and busted my ass to get them... so I can tell you how difficult it is to obtain one of these puppies.)
Right, I hope this isn't too presumptuous, but I'm assuming you're not the CEO of a multinational corporation with teams of lawyers?
Slashdot Mirror
Content filtering is not a new problem. Go down to your public library and ask for the latest copy of Penthouse.
This is not a valid comparison. Dead tree publishing is "opt-in", meaning that you only have access to the things you specifically request. Penthouse, besides being controversial, is not high on the list of priorities when it comes to the goals of an educational, record-keeping institution such as a library. There are many obscure journals and books that you won't find at all but the biggest university libraries. Would you argue that this is content filtering as well?
The Internet is, of course, an "opt-out" system. Once you plug your computer into the internet, you instantly have access to everything (neglecting pay-for-access databases and such). So anything that's not there has been actively blocked. Which is a completely different animal than simply not opting in to the more obscure or more controversial dead tree publications.
--
I'm one of the old-school engineers who believes that, since we have two ears we only need two transducers.
I don't have the educational background to have informed opinions on issues like this, and I don't have strong feelings on the issue. But I see two problems with this theory:
1. The flaps of your ear contribute a lot to the perception of sound, especially the highs, being more directional. If you are direcly facing, and then directly pointing away from a sound source, you should theoretically hear no difference. (you should get equal amounts of sound in each ear). But try it and you'll definitely hear a difference--the highs will be less pronounced.
2. It doesn't take much signal, especially bass, to get to where you can feel it physically, with your sense of touch. And of course every area of skin is a receptor there, and hence very directional.
I'm sure these points have been brought up before: where does the "two transducers is all you need" camp stand on these?
--
One thing I don't understand is why everybody around here seems to be favoring Gore over Bush.
It's the supreme court, stupid.(1)
Imagine if the prayer in school decision had gone the OTHER way. Imagine if Microsoft goes to the Supreme Court under Bush-appointed judges. Imagine rulings on the constitutionality of the DMCA!
1: Not a personal attack, just a catchy slogan...
--
Where do they allow...for a postal monopoly?
Clause 7: To establish Post Offices and post Roads
As for a monopoly, what is UPS?
--
Ignoring the whole issue about wide-spread use and consistency, this might be possible.
That's like saying "ignoring the problem of objects gaining mass as they accelerate, there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to travel at the speed of light!"
No one is going to use a DNS system that only a microscopic portion of the internet can access. No one is going to say "visit my website at http://indpendentdns.unconventionaltld, but make sure you have OSSDNS servers in your DNS list!" No one is going to use an e-mail account when 99.9% of their mail gets dropped because the mailservers can't resolve the domain name.
Linux caught on eventually, why not this?
Linux caught on eventually among relatively small groups of computer enthusiasts, and is just now peeking into the corporate world. But a decision to use Linux doesn't depend on others doing so for it to be useful.
And "Open Source" would really have nothing to do with it. The source code to BIND is of course already available. Using the term "open source" to mean decentralized and anarchistic just dilutes the meaning of the term.
--
The problem with this approach is that in the real worl this deisng has a massive performance hit.
This may be true in theory. But have you ever played with BeOS? It's the most ridiculously responsive, zippiest OS I've EVER worked with! I guess the theoretical performance hit can be worked around, given enough ingenuity.
--
I always wished I could read usenet postings that were really old, say 8+ years. The old-timers always talk about the glory days of usenet, and we always see references to the famous postings of "Larry Wall" on April Fool's day, when the concept of Perl Poetry was first seen, or of course, the famous Linus posting when Linux first met the world. Anyone know of a place where you can read really old messages like these?
--
you forgot built-in compression as well.
When 40GB hard drives can be had for $100? Who needs to compress?
--
In my opinion, only daemons and tty clients should be in textmode.
That would make a Linux box completely useless remotely, or without an X server. The power of UNIX is in its command line. If you like a system whose functionality is inseparable from its GUI, Microsoft would love to sell you a copy of NT.
And there are lots of GUI frontends to SAMBA and the like. I don't feel like searching them out, you can do your own homework. But they're there.
--
coalition (n): An alliance, especially a temporary one, of people, factions, parties, or nations.
Wouldn't big business benefit as a whole if predatory patents like this gain legitimacy? With all the bad press Amazon has gotten for this stupid patent, wouldn't it be a great way to influence public opinion in favor of it by making it look reasonable and useful?
Just a thought...
--
My apologies if this is a shallow question that has been thought through, but I've just recently heard about Mojo Nation.
What happens when the US decides to start taxing purchases made on the internet? Mojo are useless to the government, they'll want dollars. But will there even be a dollar/Mojo exchange?
--
The question of what information you personally disseminate is completely irrelevent. Assuming we're not talking about content that places any sort of excessive bandwidth or storage requirements on the server, then acting as a relay for encrypted recipie for chocolate chip cookies is no different than acting as a relay for encrypted Nazi propeganda. Everyone has an equal, anonymous, uncensorable voice, and that's the basic idea behind freenet.
It's not as if all the encrypted information sitting on your server has your stamp of approval on it. It's specially designed so that you don't even know what's there!
If your qualm is that you could possibly be furthering the Nazi cause, perhaps you should reflect that what you are really doing is supporting a much bigger and more important ideal; free speech.
He merely wanted to protect his own freedom of speech--his freedom to decide what information he does disseminate and what information he doesn't.
Honestly, that's hardly freedom of speech. It's not speech just to act as a technological relay for information; mailmen don't cry out that their freedom of speech is violated when the possibility is very real that they could be disseminating material that they don't agree with. Would you consider it unethical for the post office to faithfully deliver a message that contains objectionable material? Should they instead take the liberty of exercising discretion over what they will and won't disseminate?
--
Not complicated, but resourceful I'd say. It's not as if someone said "look, there's the battery, short it out," it was a case of someone screwing with my BIOS and me needing to find a way to fix it.
I didn't have a manual, I just figured that the battery-looking thing probably was responsible for storing the time and all the other BIOS settings, so I figured shorting it out would solve the problem. Not bad for 15, or however old I was at the time.
--
Sending videos over fibre-optic networks and playing them on PSX2s? Nobody tell the MPAA.
Are you joking? The MPAA would love this. It's just the infastructure they need to stream the video to you and make you pay each time you watch it. Hell, Sony might just stop releasing PSX2 games on CD and just stream the game to you each time you play it! Then of course they can send the information about how often you play it to the respective manufacturer, for a nominal fee...
--
Your brother may be smart, but he's obviously not a computer geek. I have plenty of smart friends who don't know the first thing about the mechanics of computers. On the other hand, I suck at swimming, even though I like the water.
I was a high school senior three months ago, and I assure you I can chain IDE devices. I even manually short circuited the internal battery on my computer once when someone set a BIOS password and then forgot it (how's that for resourcefulness?). We are not extinct.
--
A few links that are pertanent:
Personally, I'd love to see growth in the Linux demoscene, because even though there are lots of great (and recent!) demos out there, no one from the DOS demoscene ever releases source code! I'd really love to learn some of the tricks of the trade, and it's hard to even know where to start without being able to look at the work of the masters.
In case any of you have never seen a demo and happen to be running Windows, my personal favorite is Bakkslide Seven, made by the group Omnicolor. Even more impressive is the fact that it is 64kb in its entirety: music, graphics, and everything!
--
I SERIOUSLY doubt AOL has even close to 90% of the messaging market. ICQ, Yahoo, and MSN may not have the same userbase AIM does, but there's no way they constitute a mere 10% of the market.
Perhaps they're forgetting that people can use more than one messenger at a time? I know I do, having friends on different messaging systems.
--
Straight off the Mutt Index Page... but I'll refrain from editorializing:
Using Mutt with PGP/GPG
--
I'm thinking that their "5 years" of development was in making the processor in the CueCat itself. If you take your CueCat and scan something, you'll notice that you can scan forwards, backwards, sideways, upside-down, flipped to the right, to the left, and so forth. All of these methods work really well, and that obviously took a _lot_ of talent, IMHO.
Is this a joke?
Recall your last visit to the grocery store. Does the clerk at the front take the item, find the barcode, align it so that it faces a certain direction, and then carefully guide it straight across the scanner?
Does the pen-like thing they use to scan your library card have sticker that says "this side up?"
I don't know anything about the science behind barcode scanning (and obviously neither do you!) but it seems this is a mechanism built into every barcode scanner since the creation of barcode scanning.
--
To more directly respond to your suggestion though, isn't Debian's system part of the over all problem? Not it's technical merits, but rather the fact that it's only for Debian and its child distros?
/usr/doc. The naming and versioning systems are standardized, so there's no 3.2rc3 vs 3.20-4 problems. The installation scripts depend on things being laid out the way the Debian packages lay them out. It's the price of the cohesion you get with Debian.
The unity of the Debian distribution depends on the ability of the Debian developers to issue and enforce policy. Every single package on my system installs documentation into
I'll be interested to see how this OpenPackage aims to overcome this. Create and enforce policy, like Debian, or what...?
--
I started my journey into the world of Unix OS's with RH 6.0, then upgrading to 6.1. The first couple of rpm's I dealt with really impressed me with how it handled stuff.
[...]
After figuring out how to pull down the latest ports package I tried running a couple of them. I can't begin to express how impressed I was with this.
I can't help it...
You would love Debian. Imagine RPM with a centralized, authoritative package repository. Imagine never having to search for dependencies again, because they are all right there on the same server. Imagine using a program (we call it apt-get -- ahh, the sweetness in that name!) that automatically downloads and installs the newest (run "unstable" and it's the truth) versions of whatever software fits your fancy.
We call it Debian.
--
Don't blame the web designers. Sometimes management makes us do it.
Heh, sorry, I've never done web pages in an environment where I'm not the designer, coder, and manager all at the same time--I have no concept of the division of labor in such a situation...
Woe to the clueless managers of the world!
--
I can't believe no one else has complained about this yet.
What are web designers THINKING when they require you to have flash to view a web page?? In lynx I get:
[EMBED]
Wow, that's nice. In Netscape, of course, it complains that it doesn't have flash. I even downloaded and installed it, and it now crashes on load. Wonderful...
What makes me maddest of all is that they probably use it just for stupid special effects like text that whooshes in and out.
--
Could anyone report what kind of stability they get running Debian unstable? The Debian web page says: "This release is currently considered ``unstable''. That means that things will break if you run it. Woody isn't even a complete or functioning
system yet." However, I've heard people say that Debian's unstable is more stable than other dists main release...
--
Why in the world is it my civic duty to do the patent office's job? You let them off for granting obvious patents, and then shift the responsibility on these bad patents to me.
I'm sorry, but I have better things to do than monitor the patent office's patent applications. And you know what? I shouldn't have to. I pay to have someone do it for me.
The patent office probably received the applications, couldn't find anything in the library to contest Amazon's (and you ever so cleverly worded "Some obscure company's") claims?
Sorry, they're not getting off that easy. If they had so much as asked ONE PROFESSIONAL in the industry whether they'd ever heard of HYPERLINKING, they would have been told that not only is there prior art, but that the idea is already in widespread use! Again, why are you letting them off on a plea of innocent ignorance, when their job is not to be ignorant?
And don't tell me some tear-jerker story about how many patents these poor few people have to go through. Because if that's the case, it's congress's responsibility to hire more examiners. Likewise, that's what I pay them to do.
As for objection to the patents, would you consider it conspicuous objection if someone really high-profile like, say, the president of a major computer book publisher wrote an open letter to a company who filed an obvious patent like maybe a major online bookseller? And how about the article I read about the Amazon patent in Newsweek a few months later? And then the article I read in my local newspaper a few weeks after that?
(And I have a couple of patents, and busted my ass to get them... so I can tell you how difficult it is to obtain one of these puppies.)
Right, I hope this isn't too presumptuous, but I'm assuming you're not the CEO of a multinational corporation with teams of lawyers?
--