I did notice that the only "absolutism" that popped up in the article was the belief that free software was good and non-free software was bad. This is unfortunate, as I am going to have to pay off my student loans some day, and good will just isn't going to cut it.
In other news, what, if anything, did that last question have to do with software? The relationship between atheism and good software? I'm Buddhist, one of my roomates is Catholic, and the other is Jewish. We all write code the same way, and have similar views on software law. The discussion of religion seemed to be wholly tangential.
How about "The Sim Hot Zone", where the family's pet monkey causes Sims to develop massive internal bleeding and eventually crash and bleed out? Maybe the virus could mutate, become airborne transmitted, gradually decimate the community, that sort of thing. Eventually, you could call in the Outbreak/Andromeda Strain option and firebomb the house and allow life to go on as normal. Or wait for a multiplayer version, and spend your time developing an army of plague monkies so that you could infect and conquer other communities. Or SimLepracy... I can see the digitized extremeties falling off now...
My first thought when I say the mention of voice activation was "Who the hell wants to talk to their palm pilot?!". Yeah, the stylus input is irritating at times if you have to click a lot of buttons or you write a whole lot, but having known a number of friends with RSI that have tried voice recognition, I am really not eager to have my text undergo additional garbling at the hands of a pilot in need of a miracle ear. Hopefully, Palm will have the sense to keep voice activation as a disable-able option, or maybe relegate it to a particular product line (Palm IV? Palm VIII? Palm ((6!) + 8?))?), which I will then proceed not to buy. Does anyone out there see a rampant demand for a voice activated handheld?
This actually seems to be an intelligently written and well done study. Their claims aren't outlandish or too far reaching, and they're obviously building on a significant body of research and theory. What I take issue with is the invocation of Columbine at the beginning of the paper. Why dump this incident at the top of an otherwise scholarly paper? Yes, there has been a great association by members of the media between the two kids who did the killings and violent video games, but placing it in this context makes it sound like they are claiming to have the answer, which is not a claim that they are making. The article itself admits that the games would be only one possible factor. Why not come right out and admit what that means? Video games may increase short term and/or long term aggression. But there is no indication that otherwise healthy people will go on a shooting rampage based on nothing more than a few rounds of Doom. Associating Columbine with the evils of violent video games is a cheap cop out, an attempt to paper over serious societal problems with a scape goat. There was much, much more wrong with those kids than having played Doom, and to focus only on video games as the trigger is both cowardly and dangerous.
Most of that stuff about the "lost tribes of Israel" is all bunk. While there really is an Ethiopian Jewish population, most of which immigrated to Israel after the declaration of the Jewish state, the real truth about the "lost tribes" that is accepted by most serious historians is that they were assimilated into the other local populations. Every time any slightly unusual ethnic group is found in a remote location, someone tries to claim that they've found one of the lost tribes of Israel, but nothing conclusive or even promising ever comes of it.
Fraid not. If you've taken a look at the site recently, like for instance here, it has been made pretty clear that M15 of mozilla will be the netscape commercial beta. As for the funky numbering, there are two theories on that floating around: one, posted earlier by Col. Klink, says that Netscape 5 was the origonal OS browser developed prior to Mozilla and Gecko. The other theory says that Netscape is playing the revision jumping game to make it sound like they're keeping up with the Jonses (or in this case, the Gateses). Either way, the NS browser being built is the one on Mozilla.org. It'll be given a lot of polishing and (hopefully) a lot more bug fixes before it gets out of the back room, but it will still be Mozilla. The basis for the branding, integrated AOL IM, and everything else is already in there, either visible in M14 or lurking in the code.
I think the deal with the skinning engine came in with attempts by AOL/Netscape to make the mozilla project more appealing to the rest of corporate America. If you recall the article that came out when Mozilla was declared to be Netscape 6, it was mentioned that corporate branding was going to be a Mozilla option- you know, an IBM skinned browser, or a Bank Boston browser for paying monthly fees on your checking account online. If the skin engine is the source of as much of Mozilla's trouble as you say, then the blame lands in the lap of the marketing department for swapping corporate appeal for utility.
If a rival company makes its business around a patent you own, you should be required to take action immediately, not be allowed to wait until it becomes impossible for the other company to easily comply.
There's definately some merit to this idea, but there's also the point that it really provides inadequite protection for companies that are trying to protect their work. Making every company police its own patents, rather than placing the burden of doing research into previous patents on the creator of the new work, would mean that circumventing patents was legal as long as you didn't get caught. That's pretty clearly unjust. Large companies with a lot of patents (or industrious small companies) or small companies strapped for resources can't spend the time that it would take to investigate every similar product that comes up and investigate the patent issues. Even under the current scheme, if you're an unscrupulous or under informed small-time operator, it's easy enough to avoid legal trouble. If they don't want to devote an entire department to tracking down patent disputes, the only choice is to wait until a possibly infringing patent surfaces somewhere prominant and then go after it. There is certainly potential for abuse in that; as you say, a company can wait around until another company must either shut down, or license the patent from them and pay hefty compensation. But requiring the patent holder to do all of their own checking unfairly favors companies willing to copy the work of others and then wait for time to run out.
Well, they've already got one step in the right direction towards simulating the 'Ivy League' experience. At an online university, there is no chance in hell that you'll ever see your profesor outside of class or get any advice on what classes to take - just like at Fair Harvard.
Student: Hi proffesor smith! Prof: Do I know you? Student: you're my academic advisor. Prof: really? Student: it's not important. Just sign this form and let me go home. Prof: works for me.
Jim Henson (not Henderson) died well more than a year ago. The last project that he worked on was the Muppets go to Universal Studios, I believe, which was in production around 1989. I think that he died the next year. Every Muppets production since then has been done without him, with his son doing the voice of Kermit the Frog (for anyone who ever saw Henson in person, you may recall that he actually talked basically like Kermit; he changed very little to do the voice) Why do I know this? I was there in '89 watching the Indiana Jones action spectacular when Henson was filming. My uncle's nose is prominantly featured in a shot of Snow White sitting in the audience.
If you'll notice, he gave Mary Poppins a 'G' apperantly because it scored a 100% in Wanton Violence, Hate, Drugs, Sex, and apperantly everything else. You get a lower rating for having more of the offensive material. Great system he's got there... very intuitive
But in a certain sense, isn't Occam's Razor a pretty arbitrary standard? It is quite useful in a lot of theoretical applications. It allows theories to be created that allow more simplicity, thereby making them easier to apply and implement. I am questioning the use of Occam's Razor at all in such a context. Why in this particular situation is there a compelling reason to chose a simple reason over any other? To me, the real test of a theory or a worldview is functionality, at least in this context. A simple view that there is nothing beyond the reality that you can describe with physics and logic is certainly adequite. But, in certain cases and certain people, a view of the world that is more prone towards an acceptance of certain phenomena without direct physical proof can be useful. In such a case, there is nothing to suggest that such a view is any more ill-suited or ill-conceived than any other.
Oh, and the Santa Claus thing was really meant as a joke; the real thrust of my idea was the rest of the post.
You're correct. Religion has no place in politics. The U.S. gov't lives by the idea of separation of church and state. Note that it is church and state. Church, as in the organized institutions run by mankind. It's not a separation of God and state.
The problem is, if you put god in government, you establish the beliefs of theistic religion over those of non-theistic ones, and over the objections of atheists and agnostics. Making god the "higher authority" for a system of government amounts to the sort of establishment that the constitution speaks out against. In the US system of government, the Constitution and ideas of the public interest are our highest authority, and they are free to contradict religious law or decree, as they should be. Everyone is still free to follow rules for themselves that are more restrictive than those of the government, and in many cases even to expect accomidation for such beliefs from the government. But they are not free to expect those ideas to be implemented by the government under a solely religious banner. If their is a public interest component of them, than maybe they will be (and admittedly, our own religious beliefs are always going to play a role in what we think is in the public interest).
Actually, if you want to talk about utility, that the source hisself (J.S Mill) would say that the right vote for Senator Smith is to vote against legalizing murder because the loss of security created by legalizing murder outweighs the fun that people would have killing eachother. In Mill's original system, the ideas of rights as being needed to ensure maximum utility through preserving mutual escurity held a high place. Utilitarianism, which did figure heavily in the founding of the nation, is not a particularly democratic idea. It assumes that there are people who perceive the situation more clearly and can decide when someone's interest overtakes that of someone else, even when that someone else is the majority. So some degree of the decision is still going to rest with Senator Smith's character, and that character is, like it or not, going to be influenced by his religious beliefs. He is not going to vote 'no' because the pope says so, but he may vote no because the teachings of the pope (or the Dalai Lama, or Anton Levay) influence the way that he evaluated the utility of the situation.
Your view of the meaning of the Constitutions non-establishment clause seems fine to me, but we have to remember that our government system here in the US is judged not only by the literal words of the Constitution, but also by interpretation and precident. Civil servants, right up to the level of the president, can be as religious as they want in their personal lives. But when they begin to espose their views in policy or legislation, they are acting as agents of the government, and are bound by the principles of the Constitution. If I am elected to office and am a devout Zoroastrian, that is fine. There is nothing that the government can (or should) do to stop me from practicing my religion, raising my kids in my faith, and associating with other memebers of my faith. But if I try and create legislation or policy that is based on my beliefs, I am now using the government as a medium to present and establish my beliefs. This amounts to an unconstitutional establishment of religion if there is no motive for my actions other than my religious belief. Laws and policy in the United States must be established by values of public interest and utility, not by personal belief. We are not a nation that engages in confessional politics, and it is probably what has kept the nation safe all these years. We have some religious groups involved in politics, but we do not have dominant religious parties the way that nations like India, Sri Lanka, and others do. In both those countries, the marriage of political ideology with religious ideology has created volitile conflict, something that we would probably just as soon be without (unless you are interested in a 30 or 40 year long state of near-Civil War, like Sri Lanka has had). The message of all of this is just that politics in the public life tends to be bad news. I have no problem with electing religious people to office if they are commited to a government that does not favor one belief system over another. Anything else is going to lead us somewhere that we would probably rather not go (Who's up for a vacation in Iran?)
Actually, some kids at MIT did some calculations and showed pretty conclusively the impossibility of Santa Claus existing and visiting all the good little Christian children in the course of one night. I don't really think anyone has done anything comperable for religion that didn't hinge on a lot of silly ass metaphysics. I myself have never seen Occam's Razor, or anything else in the fields of logic and science, as having a lot of relevance to my religious life. There are a lot of ways of looking at the world. In my view, there's nothing wrong with using a couple of them in their proper time. It is entirely possible to hold science and religion to be complimentary rather than mutually exclusive. And I don't think that there is any single principle, logical or otherwise, that can with authority declare the presence or absence of God, gods, the devas and Yakshas, or anything else for that matter. Religious belief stems from a different sort of authority, and is subject to a slightly different form of examination that belief about particle physics.
I agree, it is important to teach kids to make a difference. But, I still think there's something a but sketchy about this:
These kids are eight. Teaching kids to buck the system is great, but only if they understand the system. There's nothing wrong with pointing out that the powers that be can do something wrong, but it's important to present a balanced view, and point out that the powers that be from time to time get one right. Eight year olds don't have enough experience to put something like this in context
This guy seems to have his own axe to grind, and it has nothing to do with the kids. He keeps ranting about "politically correct" truth being enshrined in museums and the evils of liberalism, and frankly this has nothing to do with either.
Teaching kids that they can make changes is great. Using them as a medium to spread your own political beliefs is an abuse of authority
By "real", I intended to imply "ideal". A revolution in the ideal, optomistic sense. And the definition I offered is probably what people involved in a revolution would say was at stake, wether or not it is the reality. Whoever perpetrated these attacks makes no attempt at offering an ideological justification for their actions, or any manner of replacing the system they are trying to harm.
Real revolutions in the sense of historical revolutions have usually meant a lot of people dieing for someone's pocket book or ego, while backed up by some sort of political dogma. I'm not a big advocate of them myself.
Sure this is a revolution. One on par with Woodstock '99, when a bunch of semi-drunken and/or stoned kids burned a bunch of trailers and tore the stage apart, occasionally mouthing something about being anti-materialist while robbing a gift shop. What we've seen today is nothing more than vandalism. Sure, there may be some sort of political ideology behind the choice of targets, and maybe there is some sort of organised group involved. But you neeed more than that to constitute a revolution. A real revolution is about taking apart old ideas that don't work and replacing them with new ones that do. These actions make no attempt to do that; they're just someone trying to cause people problems. If this is a protest, it is a very shallow and cowardly protest, and maybe even one that works against its stated goals. It reminds me of the masked "anarchists" in Seattle, proving their coolness to the world by commiting acts of "revolutionary terrorism" against unoccupied Starbucks coffe shops. If these people want to effect changes (and frankly, there has been no indication that they do; they may just get off on taking sites down), than they've picked a very superficial way to try and go about it.
Rememeber the stories everyone hears about Orson Welles Halloween broadcast of War of the Worlds? This is sounding strangely similar to me. There are some real crashes going on, but I am seeing a lot of reports of sights being down that are, as near as I can tell, still entirely up and running. Some big sights went down today, and now every time that someone can't load a webpage, or hits a server that blocks pings someone claims that they've been crippled by a DOS.
Someone mentioned earlier that Adobe may have taken themselves down because they were afraid they might get hit next (as of 09/02/2000 12:53 EST, I can get to the page; it did seem to be down earlier). I wonder how many sites are unplugging or blocking partial traffic out of fear of a hit. Whatever else is going on tonight, we're getting a good view of the power of the Internet as a rumor mill and propigator of memes. Pretty impressive.
All the articles have said that the outages occured earlier today. eBay, for instance, went down around 3PST/6EST this afternoon. ABC news, as far as I know, was never down; it was just hosting a story on the outages. The only sight that has been mentioned as being down that I still can't get to is Adobe.
The fact that two more attacks have been carried out in the same manner on two sites of similar size and renown in the past 24 hours seems to kind of punch some holes in the theory that it was a server misconfig. It's possible that Yahoo going down inspired some script kiddies somewhere to try and take down a few other 'big ones', but I doubt that three sights of this size were all suffering from simultanious server problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Destroys all MP3's on the system, hunh? Looks like Metallica is finally starting to wise up and fight dirty. . .
In other news, what, if anything, did that last question have to do with software? The relationship between atheism and good software? I'm Buddhist, one of my roomates is Catholic, and the other is Jewish. We all write code the same way, and have similar views on software law. The discussion of religion seemed to be wholly tangential.
How about "The Sim Hot Zone", where the family's pet monkey causes Sims to develop massive internal bleeding and eventually crash and bleed out? Maybe the virus could mutate, become airborne transmitted, gradually decimate the community, that sort of thing. Eventually, you could call in the Outbreak/Andromeda Strain option and firebomb the house and allow life to go on as normal. Or wait for a multiplayer version, and spend your time developing an army of plague monkies so that you could infect and conquer other communities.
Or SimLepracy... I can see the digitized extremeties falling off now...
My first thought when I say the mention of voice activation was "Who the hell wants to talk to their palm pilot?!". Yeah, the stylus input is irritating at times if you have to click a lot of buttons or you write a whole lot, but having known a number of friends with RSI that have tried voice recognition, I am really not eager to have my text undergo additional garbling at the hands of a pilot in need of a miracle ear. Hopefully, Palm will have the sense to keep voice activation as a disable-able option, or maybe relegate it to a particular product line (Palm IV? Palm VIII? Palm ((6!) + 8?))?), which I will then proceed not to buy. Does anyone out there see a rampant demand for a voice activated handheld?
This actually seems to be an intelligently written and well done study. Their claims aren't outlandish or too far reaching, and they're obviously building on a significant body of research and theory. What I take issue with is the invocation of Columbine at the beginning of the paper. Why dump this incident at the top of an otherwise scholarly paper? Yes, there has been a great association by members of the media between the two kids who did the killings and violent video games, but placing it in this context makes it sound like they are claiming to have the answer, which is not a claim that they are making. The article itself admits that the games would be only one possible factor. Why not come right out and admit what that means? Video games may increase short term and/or long term aggression. But there is no indication that otherwise healthy people will go on a shooting rampage based on nothing more than a few rounds of Doom. Associating Columbine with the evils of violent video games is a cheap cop out, an attempt to paper over serious societal problems with a scape goat. There was much, much more wrong with those kids than having played Doom, and to focus only on video games as the trigger is both cowardly and dangerous.
Most of that stuff about the "lost tribes of Israel" is all bunk. While there really is an Ethiopian Jewish population, most of which immigrated to Israel after the declaration of the Jewish state, the real truth about the "lost tribes" that is accepted by most serious historians is that they were assimilated into the other local populations. Every time any slightly unusual ethnic group is found in a remote location, someone tries to claim that they've found one of the lost tribes of Israel, but nothing conclusive or even promising ever comes of it.
Fraid not. If you've taken a look at the site recently, like for instance here, it has been made pretty clear that M15 of mozilla will be the netscape commercial beta. As for the funky numbering, there are two theories on that floating around: one, posted earlier by Col. Klink, says that Netscape 5 was the origonal OS browser developed prior to Mozilla and Gecko. The other theory says that Netscape is playing the revision jumping game to make it sound like they're keeping up with the Jonses (or in this case, the Gateses). Either way, the NS browser being built is the one on Mozilla.org. It'll be given a lot of polishing and (hopefully) a lot more bug fixes before it gets out of the back room, but it will still be Mozilla. The basis for the branding, integrated AOL IM, and everything else is already in there, either visible in M14 or lurking in the code.
I think the deal with the skinning engine came in with attempts by AOL/Netscape to make the mozilla project more appealing to the rest of corporate America. If you recall the article that came out when Mozilla was declared to be Netscape 6, it was mentioned that corporate branding was going to be a Mozilla option- you know, an IBM skinned browser, or a Bank Boston browser for paying monthly fees on your checking account online. If the skin engine is the source of as much of Mozilla's trouble as you say, then the blame lands in the lap of the marketing department for swapping corporate appeal for utility.
There's definately some merit to this idea, but there's also the point that it really provides inadequite protection for companies that are trying to protect their work. Making every company police its own patents, rather than placing the burden of doing research into previous patents on the creator of the new work, would mean that circumventing patents was legal as long as you didn't get caught. That's pretty clearly unjust. Large companies with a lot of patents (or industrious small companies) or small companies strapped for resources can't spend the time that it would take to investigate every similar product that comes up and investigate the patent issues. Even under the current scheme, if you're an unscrupulous or under informed small-time operator, it's easy enough to avoid legal trouble. If they don't want to devote an entire department to tracking down patent disputes, the only choice is to wait until a possibly infringing patent surfaces somewhere prominant and then go after it. There is certainly potential for abuse in that; as you say, a company can wait around until another company must either shut down, or license the patent from them and pay hefty compensation. But requiring the patent holder to do all of their own checking unfairly favors companies willing to copy the work of others and then wait for time to run out.
Well, they've already got one step in the right direction towards simulating the 'Ivy League' experience. At an online university, there is no chance in hell that you'll ever see your profesor outside of class or get any advice on what classes to take - just like at Fair Harvard.
Student: Hi proffesor smith!
Prof: Do I know you?
Student: you're my academic advisor.
Prof: really?
Student: it's not important. Just sign this form and let me go home.
Prof: works for me.
Jim Henson (not Henderson) died well more than a year ago. The last project that he worked on was the Muppets go to Universal Studios, I believe, which was in production around 1989. I think that he died the next year. Every Muppets production since then has been done without him, with his son doing the voice of Kermit the Frog (for anyone who ever saw Henson in person, you may recall that he actually talked basically like Kermit; he changed very little to do the voice) Why do I know this? I was there in '89 watching the Indiana Jones action spectacular when Henson was filming. My uncle's nose is prominantly featured in a shot of Snow White sitting in the audience.
If you'll notice, he gave Mary Poppins a 'G' apperantly because it scored a 100% in Wanton Violence, Hate, Drugs, Sex, and apperantly everything else. You get a lower rating for having more of the offensive material. Great system he's got there... very intuitive
Oh, and the Santa Claus thing was really meant as a joke; the real thrust of my idea was the rest of the post.
Actually, if you want to talk about utility, that the source hisself (J.S Mill) would say that the right vote for Senator Smith is to vote against legalizing murder because the loss of security created by legalizing murder outweighs the fun that people would have killing eachother. In Mill's original system, the ideas of rights as being needed to ensure maximum utility through preserving mutual escurity held a high place. Utilitarianism, which did figure heavily in the founding of the nation, is not a particularly democratic idea. It assumes that there are people who perceive the situation more clearly and can decide when someone's interest overtakes that of someone else, even when that someone else is the majority. So some degree of the decision is still going to rest with Senator Smith's character, and that character is, like it or not, going to be influenced by his religious beliefs. He is not going to vote 'no' because the pope says so, but he may vote no because the teachings of the pope (or the Dalai Lama, or Anton Levay) influence the way that he evaluated the utility of the situation.
Your view of the meaning of the Constitutions non-establishment clause seems fine to me, but we have to remember that our government system here in the US is judged not only by the literal words of the Constitution, but also by interpretation and precident. Civil servants, right up to the level of the president, can be as religious as they want in their personal lives. But when they begin to espose their views in policy or legislation, they are acting as agents of the government, and are bound by the principles of the Constitution. If I am elected to office and am a devout Zoroastrian, that is fine. There is nothing that the government can (or should) do to stop me from practicing my religion, raising my kids in my faith, and associating with other memebers of my faith. But if I try and create legislation or policy that is based on my beliefs, I am now using the government as a medium to present and establish my beliefs. This amounts to an unconstitutional establishment of religion if there is no motive for my actions other than my religious belief. Laws and policy in the United States must be established by values of public interest and utility, not by personal belief. We are not a nation that engages in confessional politics, and it is probably what has kept the nation safe all these years. We have some religious groups involved in politics, but we do not have dominant religious parties the way that nations like India, Sri Lanka, and others do. In both those countries, the marriage of political ideology with religious ideology has created volitile conflict, something that we would probably just as soon be without (unless you are interested in a 30 or 40 year long state of near-Civil War, like Sri Lanka has had). The message of all of this is just that politics in the public life tends to be bad news. I have no problem with electing religious people to office if they are commited to a government that does not favor one belief system over another. Anything else is going to lead us somewhere that we would probably rather not go (Who's up for a vacation in Iran?)
Actually, some kids at MIT did some calculations and showed pretty conclusively the impossibility of Santa Claus existing and visiting all the good little Christian children in the course of one night. I don't really think anyone has done anything comperable for religion that didn't hinge on a lot of silly ass metaphysics. I myself have never seen Occam's Razor, or anything else in the fields of logic and science, as having a lot of relevance to my religious life. There are a lot of ways of looking at the world. In my view, there's nothing wrong with using a couple of them in their proper time. It is entirely possible to hold science and religion to be complimentary rather than mutually exclusive. And I don't think that there is any single principle, logical or otherwise, that can with authority declare the presence or absence of God, gods, the devas and Yakshas, or anything else for that matter. Religious belief stems from a different sort of authority, and is subject to a slightly different form of examination that belief about particle physics.
Teaching kids that they can make changes is great. Using them as a medium to spread your own political beliefs is an abuse of authority
Real revolutions in the sense of historical revolutions have usually meant a lot of people dieing for someone's pocket book or ego, while backed up by some sort of political dogma. I'm not a big advocate of them myself.
Sure this is a revolution. One on par with Woodstock '99, when a bunch of semi-drunken and/or stoned kids burned a bunch of trailers and tore the stage apart, occasionally mouthing something about being anti-materialist while robbing a gift shop. What we've seen today is nothing more than vandalism. Sure, there may be some sort of political ideology behind the choice of targets, and maybe there is some sort of organised group involved. But you neeed more than that to constitute a revolution. A real revolution is about taking apart old ideas that don't work and replacing them with new ones that do. These actions make no attempt to do that; they're just someone trying to cause people problems. If this is a protest, it is a very shallow and cowardly protest, and maybe even one that works against its stated goals. It reminds me of the masked "anarchists" in Seattle, proving their coolness to the world by commiting acts of "revolutionary terrorism" against unoccupied Starbucks coffe shops. If these people want to effect changes (and frankly, there has been no indication that they do; they may just get off on taking sites down), than they've picked a very superficial way to try and go about it.
Rememeber the stories everyone hears about Orson Welles Halloween broadcast of War of the Worlds? This is sounding strangely similar to me. There are some real crashes going on, but I am seeing a lot of reports of sights being down that are, as near as I can tell, still entirely up and running. Some big sights went down today, and now every time that someone can't load a webpage, or hits a server that blocks pings someone claims that they've been crippled by a DOS.
Someone mentioned earlier that Adobe may have taken themselves down because they were afraid they might get hit next (as of 09/02/2000 12:53 EST, I can get to the page; it did seem to be down earlier). I wonder how many sites are unplugging or blocking partial traffic out of fear of a hit. Whatever else is going on tonight, we're getting a good view of the power of the Internet as a rumor mill and propigator of memes. Pretty impressive.
All the articles have said that the outages occured earlier today. eBay, for instance, went down around 3PST/6EST this afternoon. ABC news, as far as I know, was never down; it was just hosting a story on the outages. The only sight that has been mentioned as being down that I still can't get to is Adobe.
If it was gone before, www.microsoft.com is up now. Zone.com is up and alive too.
The fact that two more attacks have been carried out in the same manner on two sites of similar size and renown in the past 24 hours seems to kind of punch some holes in the theory that it was a server misconfig. It's possible that Yahoo going down inspired some script kiddies somewhere to try and take down a few other 'big ones', but I doubt that three sights of this size were all suffering from simultanious server problems.
The NYTimes has an article on the dsitributed attack on eBay today here.