I'd be just as afraid of being sued for negligence as copyright violations. At least one site gets slashdotted every day, right? So they KNOW that it happens, yet they continue to post links to sites that might not be able to handle it.
amyhughes.com is TOTALLY down right now. The NAMESERVER isn't even working. And the/. admin KNEW that might happen. And what if poor Amy Hughes exceeds her allocated bandwith and has to pay out the wazoo for it? She may not have ads on her site, and now she has a large bill to pay.
I'm not trying to flame anybody (and IANAL), but.... it sounds like negligence to me. Maybe they figure that the people who can't handle the load don't have the resources to sue them, either. I guess that's a valid point. But it's still not very nice.
So why can Google do it? Why force/. users to haphazardly mirror (potentially copyrighted) things rather than doing it in an orderly and controlled fashion?
The sites that would be concerned about copyright issues would probably be able to handle the load - CNN, NY Times, etc... so you just don't enable caching for them. (And if someone complains about copyright violations... Disable it for that site!)
How about building the cache on top of Squid? Write a program so links would reference, say, http://slashdot.org/cache/www.amyhughes.org/lego/. This program then requests the URL through Squid, which takes care of making sure that the site receives the appropriate number of hits. (Squid checks to make sure the data hasn't changed, and if it hasn't, the data isn't downloaded - this results in the site registering a hit, but not having to transfer any data other than the header response.) If a site seems like it might get slashdotted (and I can usually guess when a URL will be slashdotted), the editor clicks a button and POOF - the URL in the story is automatically changed and the cache program lists it as a valid site to cache (so that people can't use it to bypass pr0n filters at work). This can't be THAT difficult, can it? Squid does all the work for you, and who needs permission from the site to use Squid? Are there any implications (described in the FAQ or otherwise) that I haven't addressed (besides non-relative links in the HTML needing to be rewritten)?
Ahh, if only my C compiler would be so nice... "I know that you REALLY meant to put a semicolon there, so rather than warn you and refuse to compile, I'll just fix it." Sure, we'd get progressively sloppier code, but if you can understand what I meant, the compiler should be able to as well!
I know this is off topic, but with several instances over the past couple days, I'm forced to cry out - would the editors PLEASE fix incorrect uses of "its"/"it's" on the main page?! It's not that hard:
"it's" means "it is"
"its" is the possessive form of "it"
If you can't replace "it's" with "it is," then you're using the wrong word. It just makes the main page look like someone's guestbook. Fix it for my English teacher's sake, please!
Slashdot Mirror
amyhughes.com is TOTALLY down right now. The NAMESERVER isn't even working. And the /. admin KNEW that might happen. And what if poor Amy Hughes exceeds her allocated bandwith and has to pay out the wazoo for it? She may not have ads on her site, and now she has a large bill to pay.
I'm not trying to flame anybody (and IANAL), but.... it sounds like negligence to me. Maybe they figure that the people who can't handle the load don't have the resources to sue them, either. I guess that's a valid point. But it's still not very nice.
So why can Google do it? Why force /. users to haphazardly mirror (potentially copyrighted) things rather than doing it in an orderly and controlled fashion?
The sites that would be concerned about copyright issues would probably be able to handle the load - CNN, NY Times, etc... so you just don't enable caching for them. (And if someone complains about copyright violations... Disable it for that site!)
How about building the cache on top of Squid? Write a program so links would reference, say, http://slashdot.org/cache/www.amyhughes.org/lego/. This program then requests the URL through Squid, which takes care of making sure that the site receives the appropriate number of hits. (Squid checks to make sure the data hasn't changed, and if it hasn't, the data isn't downloaded - this results in the site registering a hit, but not having to transfer any data other than the header response.) If a site seems like it might get slashdotted (and I can usually guess when a URL will be slashdotted), the editor clicks a button and POOF - the URL in the story is automatically changed and the cache program lists it as a valid site to cache (so that people can't use it to bypass pr0n filters at work). This can't be THAT difficult, can it? Squid does all the work for you, and who needs permission from the site to use Squid? Are there any implications (described in the FAQ or otherwise) that I haven't addressed (besides non-relative links in the HTML needing to be rewritten)?
Temporary? They'd probably want to encode it into their DNA.
"Once considered a sensitive actor, Reeves now gets by on his athletic bearing and stoic demeanor."
. . . yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking after watching Bill & Ted, Speed, and Johnny Mnemonic... He's a SENSITIVE actor. Whoa.
Ahh, if only my C compiler would be so nice... "I know that you REALLY meant to put a semicolon there, so rather than warn you and refuse to compile, I'll just fix it." Sure, we'd get progressively sloppier code, but if you can understand what I meant, the compiler should be able to as well!
I know this is off topic, but with several instances over the past couple days, I'm forced to cry out - would the editors PLEASE fix incorrect uses of "its"/"it's" on the main page?! It's not that hard:
"it's" means "it is"
"its" is the possessive form of "it"
If you can't replace "it's" with "it is," then you're using the wrong word. It just makes the main page look like someone's guestbook. Fix it for my English teacher's sake, please!