I don't know what they feel. I know what the law says. I think it is a smart law. It doesn't make drivers try to guess what pedestrians are going to do, and it requires a clear and unambiguous signal from the ped that he wants to cross. It means that a courteous pedestrian at a busy intersection can actually deliberately allow traffic to pass and wait for a natural break instead of forcing everyone to stop. In a college town at class breaks this is an important concern. And some drivers create a hazard and traffic problems because they won't allow a courteous ped to let people go by, they'll stop if there's a ped anywhere close to any intersection. Sometimes it is fun to go stand on the corner and just watch cars go by, or stop, and see how long they'll wait before they give up expecting you to cross.
than it is for people to slam on the breaks because the pedestrian has to enter the crosswalk to get them to stop?
If the pedestrian isn't a complete moron, you won't have to slam on the brakes. He's not going to leap out in front of oncoming traffic.
You know how dangerous it is for an Oregon pedestrian to "enter the crosswalk" and trigger the "must stop" law? Really outstandingly dangerous. Not. Any part of his body or what he is carrying or pushing (baby carriage, e.g.) on or over the roadway. That means he sticks his hand out over the road. Or a toe. "Hanging ten" on the curb -- that's it.
But as for what they feel about making things more dangerous -- yes, they do want to. A while back many of the cities got on the bandwagon of "bulbed intersections." I.e., they took intersections on a standard city street that had on-street parking (effectively four lanes wide with two lanes of parked cars) and moved the sidewalk out right next to the traffic lane at the intersection, thus removing any protection from traffic that didn't stop due to the parked cars. (Old intersection: someone who steps into the crosswalk is in the parking lane and an errant driver has to plow through parked cars - or a rarely empty parking lane - to get to the ped and run him over. Or be cutting a right turn really tight.) Thus also moving the pedestrian who is still on the sidewalk out right next to the moving traffic before that traffic has to stop. Instead of being in the crosswalk while still several feet from the moving traffic (giving the traffic plenty of time to stop if they physically can), the pedestrians are now less than a foot away from cars that aren't required to stop for them because they legally are not yet in the crosswalk. This was touted as being safer for pedestrians. Nobody has been able to explain why. I'm not aware of a spate of death from this arrangement, so I expect that self-preservation is keeping the disaster from happening.
If you're driving along in the right hand lane when they want to merge they'll just shove you out of the way. It happened several times and I had to get out of their way or crash.
While it is a warm feeling to think you have the complete right of way in such a situation, it turns out that some states (if not all) have actually put a responsibility upon you to assist the merging driver in doing so. That means pulling over or creating a hole.
You can stand there all day at a pedestrian crossing and nobody will stop to let you cross.
In Oregon, that's how it is supposed to work. The people who stop for a pedestrian who isn't in a crosswalk are actually creating the hazard because others will not expect them to do that. Oregon says that a driver is required to stop only when the pedestrian is IN the crosswalk with an intent to cross. You can stand on the sidewalk and look woefully at the drivers going by, but until you stick a toe out over the crosswalk they don't have to stop.
I strongly recommend butt-to-butt Chrome extension. You won't see "my butt" anymore and your browsing experience will be massively improved (and funnier).
Thank god I don't work in a clothing optional workplace where I would have to see your butt in the first place.
In that instance, you're counting down the number of bottles left.
I open the fridge door. I start counting UP from zero. If there are no bottles, then I stop at zero.
I am not counting DOWN because there wasn't ONE bottle to have counted down from. I would be counting down if I said "I've just taken one bottle out and now there are zero", but that's still counting, and that's not the situation I spoke of to start with.
I start counting at zero. "I have zero bottles of Mt. Dew, it is time to go to the store."
Kids naturally start counting at zero. "I have zero breakfast from my parents today, I'll be fed for zero dollars at school." "I'll learn zero about... today...".
If the lowest counting number you know is one, then you have a real problem. "I don't know how to count how little Mt. Dew I have, I don't know what I'll dew..."
I don't know about Europe, but my US T-Mobile plan recently has apparently extended my data plan to free international by default.
"Apparently" is the operative word here. Before you rely on the claim in their ad, check with T-Mobile about your specific plan.
I saw the ad and thought "yay!" Then I went online to see which plans it applied to, and of course mine was not one of the few that it does.
And if your plan is covered, keep in mind that when you turn your phone on "over there", it will register your US number and you'll be "able" to get all your calls forwarded from the US -- at the international roaming rate.
If a program's installer is filled with traps that you have to carefully watch for to avoid - that sets off huge blaring alarms in the heads of most experienced users.
This is why I will never willingly install Chrome. Just once too often I found it was going to be installed by default with a java update. McAfee AV now seems to be the beneficiary of such stealth installation.
And worse are the ones where it isn't just stealth by having small text somewhere during the download, it's complete secrecy. I needed an AC3 codec for my PVR device and found myself the proud owner of a new web search provider that would reset itself to be my search provider every time I unset it.
It's only 1.5 hours by car, and, based on what Google maps says, they also have a train that runs 6 times a day. By the time you get to the airport, go through security,
Unfortunately for people living in Milwaukee, if you want to fly someplace like New York or LA or Orlando to see Mickey, you usually can't fly there directly. You go to the closest hub for your chosen airline, which for United at least is Chicago Orchard Field (ORD). From there you transfer to something going closer to where you want. And when you come back, you will probably go through ORD and catch a plane to Milwaukee.
It is probably faster and more convenient to drive to the airport in Milwaukee and go through security there than to drive to the mess that is ORD, find parking, ride the train to the terminal, go through that security mess, walk half a mile to the furthest reach of Concourse C or F, and then wait for your plane.
In any case, there are reasons people would fly from ORD to MKE other than just wanting to go visit the Miracle Mile or go to a Blackhawks (Stanley Cup!) game at United stadium.
IPv6 users are laughing at your dumb ass right now. Can your idiot ass guess why?
Because it is easy for them to be sneaky shits and use mullions of different IP addresses. Like I said, when the sneaky shits overwhelm the services they are being given for free, the services go away. I've dealt with people like you before. I'm still here. So are my websites.
Fuck, my company would have been dead long ago with an idiot like you behind the wheel.
Yeah, it's a horrible thing to try to make sure that company resources are available for the intended company use and not overwhelmed by leeches sucking up every cycle on a service that they aren't paying for but feel entitled to suck dry. Yeah, the company would simply love being told that they need to buy a rack full of servers and more bandwidth because you want to copy every bit of data on the website.
You're the kind of moron that thinks a TI 99/4A would make for a good switch or router.
It's such a pleasure talking to you. Do you do anything constructive or just toss insults at people you disagree with?
Robots.txt is essentially a 'you may trawl, link to, and archive/copy this digital information' or 'you may not trawl, link to, and/or archive/copy this digital information'
Robots.txt has absolutely nothing to do with you linking to my data. What it says is you may not ABUSE MY SERVERS by DOWNLOADING EVERY FILE ON THE OFF CHANCE THAT SOMEDAY SOMEONE MIGHT WANT TO LOOK AT IT ON YOUR ARCHIVE. You can do whatever the hell you want with YOUR server, but MY SERVER is under MY CONTROL and I have the right to say what you may or may not do on it.
The problem is that people such as yourself often think that the presence of your data on someone elses machine somehow gives you the right to install invasive DRM software in an attempt to get their machine to do your bidding instead of the owner's.
I don't know what the fuck you are talking about. Robots.txt is not DRM, and I'm not trying to get some data scraper's system to "do my bidding". They can do whatever the fuck they want as long as they don't use my system to do it.
Once the data is recorded and someone else gets a copy, it's only a matter of time before it gets decrypted/distributed.
Still unclear on what you think you are contributing to this discussion. You want to look at my data, you can come do it all day, every day. Yeah, if you're a moron who tries to update a static image once a minute 24/7, I'll shut you off like the idiot abuser you are, but other than that, knock yourself out.
What robots.txt stops is people who think they can index my system better than I can and want to make money doing it, or who think that they need to archive tide predictions for every day from year 1900 through 2100 at every site where tidal constituents are available, they need my system to generate those predictions for them, and in doing so they keep legitimate users from being able to access my site.
The only solution that offers certainty of control is non-distribution. If you can't make money this way, it's time to find a new job.
Thanks. Your vote for me to take the free information I provide off-web has been recorded.
As for "mak[ing] money this way", I don't get paid to give out data for free, I get paid for collecting the data. That's whether or not I let people like you abuse my systems by trying to index them for me.
I don't think you realize just how much dialup ISP's have modernized.
The ISP modernization doesn't change the 22.3k modem speed that is often the best you can do on a rural phone line.
Most of them offer services (which you can turn on or off) where they strip out a lot of unneeded content and/or downsample images prior to delivery.
You're using an HTTPS connection to your bank and the ISP can just modify the content in any way it wants without breaking that? Wow. What good is SSL if MIM can just change what they pass on?
Yeah, because many rural roads are highways with little traffic.
Many rural roads are dirt and just wide enough for two cars to pass in opposite directions if they are really careful. Many of those tend to follow property lines instead of regular grids, so you'll find yourself trying to make sharp right and left turns on a dirt road at 70MPH is you drive the way you want. The roads are designed for 25 at best, not like the Interstates that are designed for 70. You really have no clue, and it is obvious there is no way to clarify things for you. You've got what you want, others can get by with what you think they need.
I suppose they are just trying to honor site owner's wishes even when they may have initially forgotten about robots.txt and added it later. The robot doesn't know that the old content belonged to someone else who DID NOT wish to block it.
That's probably why they do it that way. They could have picked either side and been wrong for some group. The website operator who didn't know about robots.txt to start with and found some of his material on a robot indexer shouldn't have to track down every robot who has ever visited to be able to rectify the mistake.
The other issue with keeping data after a robots.txt is published by a new owner of a domain is that the archive will contain data that claims to have come from that website but in fact did not. This can create issues for both the new and old owners. Someone who finds defamatory material in the archive may decide to focus his anger on the new website owner who is completely innocent and forced to prove a negative ("I never published that page.") The old owner may find out that his copyright material now has a presumed ownership by the new domain name owner. ("This image came from the domain example.com which is owned by Bill Smith...") If the material was popular, the new owner may be deluged with requests for updates to material he never knew existed and doesn't have time to deal with.
The other side of the choice means that someone who buys an abandoned domain name can get all the previous content from that domain dumped from the archives. The question that could be asked, if the original domain owner cared about having his information archived, why did he abandon the domain? Is abandoning his domain also abandoning the data it served?
Tough cookies! If you want to control how your data is used I don't see a problem with requiring you actually take the time to learn about things like robots.txt before you publish.
Yes, "screw every website owner who didn't fall off the turnip truck knowing everything there was to know about websites" is one opinion. Being a bit more considerate and not making every mistake a permanent one is another opinion.
It's really no different than releasing source code under the GPL and then later turning it into a closed source product.
Ahh, yes, it is different. Putting information on a website so people can come look at it is not releasing it under GPL.
A reasonable solution might be for the archives to remove everything they have with the same link as is now protected by the robots.txt, but keep anything that isn't the same. This runs into the problem that to know if the links are the same the robot has to scrape the site.
It's not a simple issue.
As someone who has been running websites since around 1992 or so, long before robots.txt was necessary, and before almost anyone imagined trying to keep a full archive of everything that ever appeared on the web, I am actually amazed at the attitude that everything that has ever appeared on the web must be available for anyone who wants it no matter what the original author desires. I know there are too many things that I've had to correct to ever want all previous versions to be wandering about to confuse people. Too many things I've changed my mind on, too.
When robots.txt is used for censorship, it no longer deserves any respect.
It's not censorship when I tell robot data scrapers to bugger off and not abuse the website I run by copying every image I have and looping through the multiple links that take people there, or to invoke a program that generates data on they fly tens of thousands of times a day to the detriment of real users who actually have an interest in the information and can't get it because some robot is using all the available server processes.
I hope more people decide to ignore them.
The day that the first scraper starts ignoring mine, his IP is going into the firewall. If he tries to be a sneaky shit and use multiple IPs, then the site where YOU could come get data for free may very well go away, and you wind up with nothing. Neither I nor my employer have the spare bandwidth and cpu cycles to have every robot come download the Tb of data I have on the web. If free public access becomes an abuse of the server, the free public access goes away.
We should never let other people decide what we can see and hear.
When you are talking about my data, I have every right to decide whether you can see or hear it. It is your attitude of entitlement that makes me always have second thoughts about putting anything on the web. Most people are reasonable, decent people who appreciate the service. Some think they have a right to demand it.
Well, maybe it's not a "crawler", but if it copies all outbound traffic it does essentially the same thing while leaving no footprints.
Chew on that for a while.:)
Hmm. (Thinking) Oh my! NSA is sniffing all outbound traffic from my webserver, where people get publicly available information for free. Oh noes! They might see something they could have seen for themselves!
BTW, I am sure he NSA's archive crawler does not honor the robots hing.
As a website operator who carefully watches connection counts and has a robots.txt to exclude most of the site content, I am pretty sure there is no "NSA's archive crawler" visiting, at least none with any frequency that it matters.
Of course, as a robot, archive.org should respect robots.txt.
I have a website with millions of files of data that archive.org has no reason to keep for me, all behind a robots.txt that bars such nonsense.
I also have a link to a realtime predicted tide generator which takes about 30 seconds to calculate the information it sends back. Before I hacked in a robots.txt to cover it (it's on a different port than the normal web server and thus, according to the robot operators, a completely different website than the one that already had a robots.txt to stop them) one "helpful" robot indexer latched onto it and was sending ten requests per minute. Nice of them to throttle themselves, yeah, when they were running my apache server up to the connection limit (keeping other people from using the site) and driving the load up so the site was useless for anyone local.
So any suggestion that any robot operator ignore robots.txt should be shouted down as the complete nonsense it is.
People have used robots.txt to buy up domains they want to censor.
You can't buy a domain with a robots.txt. Once you own the domain, you have the right to "censor" it all you want, including the use of a robots.txt that bars all robots. But if your goal was to "censor" a website, just stop running an HTTP server. That's much better than any robots.txt in keeping everyone from getting your stuff.
Unless you want to, you know, use the phone later. (Presumably at some time and location where you're no longer worried about being tracked).
Anyone that paranoid is never in a place where they aren't worried about being tracked. LF11, we're talking about you here. And we know where you are. You're hiding under the bed with your iPad watching TV from your Hopper. Yes, we just heard you squeal.
There are countless other methods for contact and delivery in the modern world that I think are superior to and preferable to the USPS.
FTFY. And thus nobody can have a different opinion of the need for USPS.
I think delivering mail to every address ONCE per week is entirely reasonable.
You don't care about more than once a week, therefore once a week is sufficient for everyone else.
Hmmm. Let's see. Bill is printed on a Tuesday. Pickup is Monday, so we're one week into the billing cycle before the bill leaves the office. The bill makes it to the closest USPS facility on Friday, but local delivery is Thursday. The bill sits in USPS hands for another week. So, ummm, we're 17 days into a billing cycle before the bill gets to the person who has to pay it. Another week before the mail is picked up, 24 days, Thursday. Gets to the USPS office closest to the payee next Tuesday. Oops, missed this weeks delivery by one day. Delivered the following Monday. Thirty five days.
I've got idjit companies that have 14 day payment windows and get pissy on day 15. Many are 21. None is 35.
But, you say, the company sending the bill will adopt the billing cycle to the local email delivery dates, right? Sure. They'll give up the chance for late payment fees by being helpful in setting the billing cycle. They all seem really happy to take weekends and holidays into consideration now, don't they? Feh.
Also, the only thing the USPS does for me is deliver physical spam to my door that I have to clean out by taking out of the box and dumping it in the trash every week.
And for this crime everyone else deserves to have their mail service cut back to once a week. I'm sorry you don't get any real mail. It probably means nobody loves you.
No, but a modem is, and last I checked there are nationwide dialup ISP's that still offer service in every area code.
You'll be quite happy for them to spend ten minutes accessing a website over a slow dialup line because you've got yours and you don't care. Ok. Hey, they've got nothing else to do with their evenings once the cows have been milked and the pigs slopped, right? They can pay the bills by candlelight.
I ride my bike 12 miles every day (some days I do 25 miles, occasionally I do a 52 mile route.)
Why yes, people who live in rural areas have nothing better to do with their time than take long bike rides so they can get their mail. Phones and bikes are the solution to all rural communications problems.
Riding a car that far takes all of 10 minutes in a rural setting.
Let's see. Ten miles in ten mintues. A mile a minute average. 60MPH. And since it would take a round trip (you do allow them to go home after they pick up their mail, don't you?) that ten minutes for ten miles turns into 120MPH, without considering the time it takes to actually pick up the mail. Even the 60MPH value is ridiculous, so it's clear you don't know what rural areas of the US are like at all.
The fact of the matter is that what USPS currently does is not sustainable, with or without the political mess.
And now we've hit the poorly defined buzzword "sustainable." You win, you've got all the right buzzwords.
As for BFE, it is no surprise you'd use that to refer to the rural areas you think don't deserve to get local mail service.
Of course they did. It's called "nominative fair use". They have to identify who they're criticizing;
That's not creating a need to use trademarks. They can identify them by simple language. I've put up web pages with complaints about various companies. Not once did I have a need to use any of the companys' trademarks to identify them. I just called them by name. And I can attest to the fact that using simple language to call them by name didn't stop them from finding the pages and complaining. They just had no legal grounds to demand a takedown because none of their IP was infringed.
it's just empty-headed bellyaching (the kind we could probably expect from you).
Thanks for demonstrating a civil way to have a disagreement.
Fair Use is applicable to trademarks, too.
Which still does not create a need to use them. It may, in some really stretched interpretation, mean they can use them. But if they use them to try to identify their website as an official function of the University (which is what is alleged to have been done) fair use does NOT protect them.
So, what in "fair use" creates a need to use a trademark, and not just a desire to use it to make the site look more official?
Slashdot Mirror
So they feel it's more hazardous
I don't know what they feel. I know what the law says. I think it is a smart law. It doesn't make drivers try to guess what pedestrians are going to do, and it requires a clear and unambiguous signal from the ped that he wants to cross. It means that a courteous pedestrian at a busy intersection can actually deliberately allow traffic to pass and wait for a natural break instead of forcing everyone to stop. In a college town at class breaks this is an important concern. And some drivers create a hazard and traffic problems because they won't allow a courteous ped to let people go by, they'll stop if there's a ped anywhere close to any intersection. Sometimes it is fun to go stand on the corner and just watch cars go by, or stop, and see how long they'll wait before they give up expecting you to cross.
than it is for people to slam on the breaks because the pedestrian has to enter the crosswalk to get them to stop?
If the pedestrian isn't a complete moron, you won't have to slam on the brakes. He's not going to leap out in front of oncoming traffic.
You know how dangerous it is for an Oregon pedestrian to "enter the crosswalk" and trigger the "must stop" law? Really outstandingly dangerous. Not. Any part of his body or what he is carrying or pushing (baby carriage, e.g.) on or over the roadway. That means he sticks his hand out over the road. Or a toe. "Hanging ten" on the curb -- that's it.
But as for what they feel about making things more dangerous -- yes, they do want to. A while back many of the cities got on the bandwagon of "bulbed intersections." I.e., they took intersections on a standard city street that had on-street parking (effectively four lanes wide with two lanes of parked cars) and moved the sidewalk out right next to the traffic lane at the intersection, thus removing any protection from traffic that didn't stop due to the parked cars. (Old intersection: someone who steps into the crosswalk is in the parking lane and an errant driver has to plow through parked cars - or a rarely empty parking lane - to get to the ped and run him over. Or be cutting a right turn really tight.) Thus also moving the pedestrian who is still on the sidewalk out right next to the moving traffic before that traffic has to stop. Instead of being in the crosswalk while still several feet from the moving traffic (giving the traffic plenty of time to stop if they physically can), the pedestrians are now less than a foot away from cars that aren't required to stop for them because they legally are not yet in the crosswalk. This was touted as being safer for pedestrians. Nobody has been able to explain why. I'm not aware of a spate of death from this arrangement, so I expect that self-preservation is keeping the disaster from happening.
Using a gigantic amount of very small units tends to make the whole thing meaningless.
Au contraire.
Doesn't it mean more if they say they have a googleplex of femtoseconds of data from 1.6 billion millicustomers? THAT'S a lot of data, you bet.
If you're driving along in the right hand lane when they want to merge they'll just shove you out of the way. It happened several times and I had to get out of their way or crash.
While it is a warm feeling to think you have the complete right of way in such a situation, it turns out that some states (if not all) have actually put a responsibility upon you to assist the merging driver in doing so. That means pulling over or creating a hole.
You can stand there all day at a pedestrian crossing and nobody will stop to let you cross.
In Oregon, that's how it is supposed to work. The people who stop for a pedestrian who isn't in a crosswalk are actually creating the hazard because others will not expect them to do that. Oregon says that a driver is required to stop only when the pedestrian is IN the crosswalk with an intent to cross. You can stand on the sidewalk and look woefully at the drivers going by, but until you stick a toe out over the crosswalk they don't have to stop.
I completely fail to understand the willingness of anyone to use one of these things for any discount. Even for a 100% discount I wouldn't do it.
What happens when your insurance goes up to $1200 a year because you won't use the device? Would a 100% discount sway your opinion then?
I strongly recommend butt-to-butt Chrome extension. You won't see "my butt" anymore and your browsing experience will be massively improved (and funnier).
Thank god I don't work in a clothing optional workplace where I would have to see your butt in the first place.
In that instance, you're counting down the number of bottles left.
I open the fridge door. I start counting UP from zero. If there are no bottles, then I stop at zero.
I am not counting DOWN because there wasn't ONE bottle to have counted down from. I would be counting down if I said "I've just taken one bottle out and now there are zero", but that's still counting, and that's not the situation I spoke of to start with.
Kids naturally start counting at zero. "I have zero breakfast from my parents today, I'll be fed for zero dollars at school." "I'll learn zero about ... today...".
If the lowest counting number you know is one, then you have a real problem. "I don't know how to count how little Mt. Dew I have, I don't know what I'll dew ..."
Leave it to the leader of the "Me" generation to get his name branded onto anything he can.
I don't know about Europe, but my US T-Mobile plan recently has apparently extended my data plan to free international by default.
"Apparently" is the operative word here. Before you rely on the claim in their ad, check with T-Mobile about your specific plan. I saw the ad and thought "yay!" Then I went online to see which plans it applied to, and of course mine was not one of the few that it does.
And if your plan is covered, keep in mind that when you turn your phone on "over there", it will register your US number and you'll be "able" to get all your calls forwarded from the US -- at the international roaming rate.
If a program's installer is filled with traps that you have to carefully watch for to avoid - that sets off huge blaring alarms in the heads of most experienced users.
This is why I will never willingly install Chrome. Just once too often I found it was going to be installed by default with a java update. McAfee AV now seems to be the beneficiary of such stealth installation.
And worse are the ones where it isn't just stealth by having small text somewhere during the download, it's complete secrecy. I needed an AC3 codec for my PVR device and found myself the proud owner of a new web search provider that would reset itself to be my search provider every time I unset it.
It's only 1.5 hours by car, and, based on what Google maps says, they also have a train that runs 6 times a day. By the time you get to the airport, go through security,
Unfortunately for people living in Milwaukee, if you want to fly someplace like New York or LA or Orlando to see Mickey, you usually can't fly there directly. You go to the closest hub for your chosen airline, which for United at least is Chicago Orchard Field (ORD). From there you transfer to something going closer to where you want. And when you come back, you will probably go through ORD and catch a plane to Milwaukee.
It is probably faster and more convenient to drive to the airport in Milwaukee and go through security there than to drive to the mess that is ORD, find parking, ride the train to the terminal, go through that security mess, walk half a mile to the furthest reach of Concourse C or F, and then wait for your plane.
In any case, there are reasons people would fly from ORD to MKE other than just wanting to go visit the Miracle Mile or go to a Blackhawks (Stanley Cup!) game at United stadium.
Wow. I've picked up a stalker. Your mother must be so proud.
IPv6 users are laughing at your dumb ass right now. Can your idiot ass guess why?
Because it is easy for them to be sneaky shits and use mullions of different IP addresses. Like I said, when the sneaky shits overwhelm the services they are being given for free, the services go away. I've dealt with people like you before. I'm still here. So are my websites.
Fuck, my company would have been dead long ago with an idiot like you behind the wheel.
Yeah, it's a horrible thing to try to make sure that company resources are available for the intended company use and not overwhelmed by leeches sucking up every cycle on a service that they aren't paying for but feel entitled to suck dry. Yeah, the company would simply love being told that they need to buy a rack full of servers and more bandwidth because you want to copy every bit of data on the website.
You're the kind of moron that thinks a TI 99/4A would make for a good switch or router.
It's such a pleasure talking to you. Do you do anything constructive or just toss insults at people you disagree with?
Robots.txt is essentially a 'you may trawl, link to, and archive/copy this digital information' or 'you may not trawl, link to, and/or archive/copy this digital information'
Robots.txt has absolutely nothing to do with you linking to my data. What it says is you may not ABUSE MY SERVERS by DOWNLOADING EVERY FILE ON THE OFF CHANCE THAT SOMEDAY SOMEONE MIGHT WANT TO LOOK AT IT ON YOUR ARCHIVE. You can do whatever the hell you want with YOUR server, but MY SERVER is under MY CONTROL and I have the right to say what you may or may not do on it.
Jesus Christ you are arrogant.
The problem is that people such as yourself often think that the presence of your data on someone elses machine somehow gives you the right to install invasive DRM software in an attempt to get their machine to do your bidding instead of the owner's.
I don't know what the fuck you are talking about. Robots.txt is not DRM, and I'm not trying to get some data scraper's system to "do my bidding". They can do whatever the fuck they want as long as they don't use my system to do it.
Once the data is recorded and someone else gets a copy, it's only a matter of time before it gets decrypted/distributed.
Still unclear on what you think you are contributing to this discussion. You want to look at my data, you can come do it all day, every day. Yeah, if you're a moron who tries to update a static image once a minute 24/7, I'll shut you off like the idiot abuser you are, but other than that, knock yourself out.
What robots.txt stops is people who think they can index my system better than I can and want to make money doing it, or who think that they need to archive tide predictions for every day from year 1900 through 2100 at every site where tidal constituents are available, they need my system to generate those predictions for them, and in doing so they keep legitimate users from being able to access my site.
The only solution that offers certainty of control is non-distribution. If you can't make money this way, it's time to find a new job.
Thanks. Your vote for me to take the free information I provide off-web has been recorded.
As for "mak[ing] money this way", I don't get paid to give out data for free, I get paid for collecting the data. That's whether or not I let people like you abuse my systems by trying to index them for me.
I don't think you realize just how much dialup ISP's have modernized.
The ISP modernization doesn't change the 22.3k modem speed that is often the best you can do on a rural phone line.
Most of them offer services (which you can turn on or off) where they strip out a lot of unneeded content and/or downsample images prior to delivery.
You're using an HTTPS connection to your bank and the ISP can just modify the content in any way it wants without breaking that? Wow. What good is SSL if MIM can just change what they pass on?
Yeah, because many rural roads are highways with little traffic.
Many rural roads are dirt and just wide enough for two cars to pass in opposite directions if they are really careful. Many of those tend to follow property lines instead of regular grids, so you'll find yourself trying to make sharp right and left turns on a dirt road at 70MPH is you drive the way you want. The roads are designed for 25 at best, not like the Interstates that are designed for 70. You really have no clue, and it is obvious there is no way to clarify things for you. You've got what you want, others can get by with what you think they need.
I suppose they are just trying to honor site owner's wishes even when they may have initially forgotten about robots.txt and added it later. The robot doesn't know that the old content belonged to someone else who DID NOT wish to block it.
That's probably why they do it that way. They could have picked either side and been wrong for some group. The website operator who didn't know about robots.txt to start with and found some of his material on a robot indexer shouldn't have to track down every robot who has ever visited to be able to rectify the mistake.
The other issue with keeping data after a robots.txt is published by a new owner of a domain is that the archive will contain data that claims to have come from that website but in fact did not. This can create issues for both the new and old owners. Someone who finds defamatory material in the archive may decide to focus his anger on the new website owner who is completely innocent and forced to prove a negative ("I never published that page.") The old owner may find out that his copyright material now has a presumed ownership by the new domain name owner. ("This image came from the domain example.com which is owned by Bill Smith ...") If the material was popular, the new owner may be deluged with requests for updates to material he never knew existed and doesn't have time to deal with.
The other side of the choice means that someone who buys an abandoned domain name can get all the previous content from that domain dumped from the archives. The question that could be asked, if the original domain owner cared about having his information archived, why did he abandon the domain? Is abandoning his domain also abandoning the data it served?
Tough cookies! If you want to control how your data is used I don't see a problem with requiring you actually take the time to learn about things like robots.txt before you publish.
Yes, "screw every website owner who didn't fall off the turnip truck knowing everything there was to know about websites" is one opinion. Being a bit more considerate and not making every mistake a permanent one is another opinion.
It's really no different than releasing source code under the GPL and then later turning it into a closed source product.
Ahh, yes, it is different. Putting information on a website so people can come look at it is not releasing it under GPL.
A reasonable solution might be for the archives to remove everything they have with the same link as is now protected by the robots.txt, but keep anything that isn't the same. This runs into the problem that to know if the links are the same the robot has to scrape the site.
It's not a simple issue.
As someone who has been running websites since around 1992 or so, long before robots.txt was necessary, and before almost anyone imagined trying to keep a full archive of everything that ever appeared on the web, I am actually amazed at the attitude that everything that has ever appeared on the web must be available for anyone who wants it no matter what the original author desires. I know there are too many things that I've had to correct to ever want all previous versions to be wandering about to confuse people. Too many things I've changed my mind on, too.
When robots.txt is used for censorship, it no longer deserves any respect.
It's not censorship when I tell robot data scrapers to bugger off and not abuse the website I run by copying every image I have and looping through the multiple links that take people there, or to invoke a program that generates data on they fly tens of thousands of times a day to the detriment of real users who actually have an interest in the information and can't get it because some robot is using all the available server processes.
I hope more people decide to ignore them.
The day that the first scraper starts ignoring mine, his IP is going into the firewall. If he tries to be a sneaky shit and use multiple IPs, then the site where YOU could come get data for free may very well go away, and you wind up with nothing. Neither I nor my employer have the spare bandwidth and cpu cycles to have every robot come download the Tb of data I have on the web. If free public access becomes an abuse of the server, the free public access goes away.
We should never let other people decide what we can see and hear.
When you are talking about my data, I have every right to decide whether you can see or hear it. It is your attitude of entitlement that makes me always have second thoughts about putting anything on the web. Most people are reasonable, decent people who appreciate the service. Some think they have a right to demand it.
Well, maybe it's not a "crawler", but if it copies all outbound traffic it does essentially the same thing while leaving no footprints. Chew on that for a while. :)
Hmm. (Thinking) Oh my! NSA is sniffing all outbound traffic from my webserver, where people get publicly available information for free. Oh noes! They might see something they could have seen for themselves!
BTW, I am sure he NSA's archive crawler does not honor the robots hing.
As a website operator who carefully watches connection counts and has a robots.txt to exclude most of the site content, I am pretty sure there is no "NSA's archive crawler" visiting, at least none with any frequency that it matters.
I also have a link to a realtime predicted tide generator which takes about 30 seconds to calculate the information it sends back. Before I hacked in a robots.txt to cover it (it's on a different port than the normal web server and thus, according to the robot operators, a completely different website than the one that already had a robots.txt to stop them) one "helpful" robot indexer latched onto it and was sending ten requests per minute. Nice of them to throttle themselves, yeah, when they were running my apache server up to the connection limit (keeping other people from using the site) and driving the load up so the site was useless for anyone local.
So any suggestion that any robot operator ignore robots.txt should be shouted down as the complete nonsense it is.
People have used robots.txt to buy up domains they want to censor.
You can't buy a domain with a robots.txt. Once you own the domain, you have the right to "censor" it all you want, including the use of a robots.txt that bars all robots. But if your goal was to "censor" a website, just stop running an HTTP server. That's much better than any robots.txt in keeping everyone from getting your stuff.
Unless you want to, you know, use the phone later. (Presumably at some time and location where you're no longer worried about being tracked).
Anyone that paranoid is never in a place where they aren't worried about being tracked. LF11, we're talking about you here. And we know where you are. You're hiding under the bed with your iPad watching TV from your Hopper. Yes, we just heard you squeal.
There are countless other methods for contact and delivery in the modern world that I think are superior to and preferable to the USPS.
FTFY. And thus nobody can have a different opinion of the need for USPS.
I think delivering mail to every address ONCE per week is entirely reasonable.
You don't care about more than once a week, therefore once a week is sufficient for everyone else.
Hmmm. Let's see. Bill is printed on a Tuesday. Pickup is Monday, so we're one week into the billing cycle before the bill leaves the office. The bill makes it to the closest USPS facility on Friday, but local delivery is Thursday. The bill sits in USPS hands for another week. So, ummm, we're 17 days into a billing cycle before the bill gets to the person who has to pay it. Another week before the mail is picked up, 24 days, Thursday. Gets to the USPS office closest to the payee next Tuesday. Oops, missed this weeks delivery by one day. Delivered the following Monday. Thirty five days.
I've got idjit companies that have 14 day payment windows and get pissy on day 15. Many are 21. None is 35.
But, you say, the company sending the bill will adopt the billing cycle to the local email delivery dates, right? Sure. They'll give up the chance for late payment fees by being helpful in setting the billing cycle. They all seem really happy to take weekends and holidays into consideration now, don't they? Feh.
Also, the only thing the USPS does for me is deliver physical spam to my door that I have to clean out by taking out of the box and dumping it in the trash every week.
And for this crime everyone else deserves to have their mail service cut back to once a week. I'm sorry you don't get any real mail. It probably means nobody loves you.
No, but a modem is, and last I checked there are nationwide dialup ISP's that still offer service in every area code.
You'll be quite happy for them to spend ten minutes accessing a website over a slow dialup line because you've got yours and you don't care. Ok. Hey, they've got nothing else to do with their evenings once the cows have been milked and the pigs slopped, right? They can pay the bills by candlelight.
I ride my bike 12 miles every day (some days I do 25 miles, occasionally I do a 52 mile route.)
Why yes, people who live in rural areas have nothing better to do with their time than take long bike rides so they can get their mail. Phones and bikes are the solution to all rural communications problems.
Riding a car that far takes all of 10 minutes in a rural setting.
Let's see. Ten miles in ten mintues. A mile a minute average. 60MPH. And since it would take a round trip (you do allow them to go home after they pick up their mail, don't you?) that ten minutes for ten miles turns into 120MPH, without considering the time it takes to actually pick up the mail. Even the 60MPH value is ridiculous, so it's clear you don't know what rural areas of the US are like at all.
The fact of the matter is that what USPS currently does is not sustainable, with or without the political mess.
And now we've hit the poorly defined buzzword "sustainable." You win, you've got all the right buzzwords.
As for BFE, it is no surprise you'd use that to refer to the rural areas you think don't deserve to get local mail service.
Of course they did. It's called "nominative fair use". They have to identify who they're criticizing;
That's not creating a need to use trademarks. They can identify them by simple language. I've put up web pages with complaints about various companies. Not once did I have a need to use any of the companys' trademarks to identify them. I just called them by name. And I can attest to the fact that using simple language to call them by name didn't stop them from finding the pages and complaining. They just had no legal grounds to demand a takedown because none of their IP was infringed.
it's just empty-headed bellyaching (the kind we could probably expect from you).
Thanks for demonstrating a civil way to have a disagreement.
Fair Use is applicable to trademarks, too.
Which still does not create a need to use them. It may, in some really stretched interpretation, mean they can use them. But if they use them to try to identify their website as an official function of the University (which is what is alleged to have been done) fair use does NOT protect them.
So, what in "fair use" creates a need to use a trademark, and not just a desire to use it to make the site look more official?