The Federal Trade Commission has created a list of those individuals it claims are most responsible for unsoliticted commericial email, or spam. The top five offenders are

1. Infinity Wyatt
2. Soiling L. Republished
3. vozslwernv
4. c6c,mkl2
5. I Stanton Firm

Why are black and white photographs so mysterious and captivating? My guess is that when we view black and white images, we are using only our rods to percieve the image.

Rods are light receptive structures on our retinas that respond to intensity -- the amount of light. They are what entable our night vision. Cones, on the other hand, allow us to percieve color. However, they aren't sensitive enough to percieve color at night, so rods are doing most of the work after the sun goes down.

Night time is mysterious and dangerous. We have evolved to be afraid of the night. We rely primarily on light to understand the world around us, and no sun puts us at a serious disadvantage.

When we look at black and white images, we are looking at a lit-up night -- a strange scene where we can know much more than we should be able to with the incoming information. Our rods tell us that we are experiencing a kind of night, yet we can percieve much more detail than we normally do at night. Anything that comes within our gaze has all the mysterious aura of being about at night, yet we can somehow understand it. I believe this is why a black and white image are so magical.

Tux the penguin, mascot for the Linux computer operating system, has let his weight balloon to dangerous levels, say close friends.

"He's had a productive month on the CryptoGate project, but he really needs to get out and exercise" says Larry Scott, lead developer of the open-source CryptoGate software project.

"All he does is sit on his fat ass in front of the computer, typing and eating herring" says colleague David Mothman. "His place is disgusting. He never cleans. He should move back in with his mom. Has anyone ever seen him doing any physical activity?"

Here is the text of a letter I emailed to the wikipedia-l list:


I'm pitching an idea for a postmodern wikipedia. What I mean by that is that there are multiple concurrent versions of an article. Instead of a zero-sum game where only one text can inhabit a title at any time, a user can choose from different branches. The user basis this decision on who the authors are, and how many people agree with the text.

A PGP sign-off system will keep track of who wrote what, and who agrees with it. Authors who have had a lot of people sign off on their word will get bonus scores on their texts, and articles that well-reputed authors sign off on will get also get bonus scores.

A 'troll pit' of low-rated articles by low-rated authors will be automatically filtered from casual browsers.

The immediate wikipedia problems that this solves are:
- Edit wars. This is common with articles covering controversial topics, such as abortion. Proponents of different truths will build and maintain their side of the story, including counter arguments, instead of trying to destroy the other side. There is no negative sign-off, so the only thing the article measures is how many people agree with it, not how many disagree.
- Grafitti. Small, hard-to-detect changes to articles will not be signed off on by many people, so they will not survive a reputation filter. Those branches will go into the troll pit.
- Trolling. See graffiti. Giving a definition of trolling that makes it distinguishable from grafitti is left as an exercise for the reader.
- Lack of attribution.With a pgp sign-off system, articles can be attributed to authors, even if they are anonymous.
- Public perception. The steady maintanance of well-respected articles by reputable authors will make wikipedia a trusted source of information.

I've been watching and using wikipedia for about a year now. I know there's been a lot of discussion on impriving wikipedia, and I would like to throw in my two cents.
I think it would improve wikipedia to allow forking of articles, and maintain these forks. Philosophically, I think postmodernism is mostly BS, but I think a postmodern critique of wikipedia would improve it.

- Wikipedia contains no authorship information. This creates a false sense of authority and objective knowledge. I find 'neutral point of view' to be an oxymoronic statement. A point of view is by defition a perspective; a bias.

- Contested truths are fought in a zero sum game where only one text can inhabit an article at any time.

So instead of 'the definitive' article, a 'contested tree' of an article.

Additionally, I recommend installing a 'signing off' system, where authors sign off on their works, perhaps using pgp keys. Users who sign a lot of articles in agreement with other signers get a higher reputation system. If someone updates a text, the text has a higher reputation if its ancestral authors sign off on the updates.

Filtering works by reputation would make a better wikipedia experience for casual users. Unpopular authors can maintain their own branches, and controversial topics might maintain several concurrent branches. This would relive edit wars as proponents of particular truths would be more intersted investing time and effort into crating and maintaining those truths than destroying others'. Furthermore, if someone's work is vandalised, in their perspective, that author can apply filters which ignore the updates of proponents of a competing truth.

Gary Hinderman, lead developer of the open-source project 'TelMeme', announced that the project has logged over 4000 hours of porn viewing last month. "These numbers are just incredible. It's amazing how much porn can be viewed by 4 very motivated hackers," Gary said in the monthly update.