Comment Re:jimmy and catalan's wikipedia (Score 1) 164
Hi! I actually have no idea why you think that. I had to search in my emails to even find out who "Goma" is.
Hi! I actually have no idea why you think that. I had to search in my emails to even find out who "Goma" is.
The problem with your rant, Pete, is that I have told the absolute truth at every point here. We are not pursuing a search engine to rival Google et al. This grant is not about that type of project, and that type of project would be - quite frankly - ludicrous to attempt on a $250,000 grant.
Discovery at Wikipedia is awful, this is universally understood and acknowledged. This grant is the beginnings of an exploration of how to improve it.
The bullshit - and it is bullshit, and I have said it before and will say it again, that this is some kind of google competitor or was ever conceived to be - is a fantasy based on absolutely no facts of any kind, and a very very very skewed and aggressive reading of a preliminary document.
I thought this worthy of just popping in to comment even before the real interview because the question is so ludicrously misinformed.
I am a strong supporter of personal privacy and freedom of speech. Based on everything that I have seen so far, Eric Snowden will go down in history as a hero. I have been reading lots about him, including his youthful posts to Ars Technica. I think it really interesting to think about the process by which the young man who made those posts became the man we see before us today facing down all the might of the US intelligence services based on a strong belief that mass surveillance is wrong and illegal.
My actions at Wikipedia around this were perfectly honorable and noble and did not violate any rules of any kind. I invited a discussion of information that is already completely public - the user accounts that he used at Ars Technica have been widely reported. I was curious (and am still curious) to find more of his past writings. I am working through various connections to try to talk to him - I had hoped to do so in person when I visit Hong Kong in August, but obviously he's gone from there now.
I think he needs strong support from people well positioned to provide that support. I think that what he did was illegal - quite clearly so. I highly recommend the book "Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobendiance" by former US Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas for a very interesting analysis of the ethics around breaking the law deliberately in the interests of justice.
The knee jerk reaction by some in the Internet community has been, as usual, annoying. They call it anonymous "coward" for a reason - it's easy to sling mud and pretend to have the high moral ground if you feel completely and utterly unconcerned about the facts of reality.
I actually don't take any salary at all. Nor expenses. It's a fun joke, but it would be funnier if actually true.
Learn to think in the wiki way.
Rather than make it hard for users to do what they want to do, on the (very valid) assumption that some of them will do bad things, or things they don't really want to do, it is better to make it easy for users to recover from those mistakes, and for others to recover easily from any side effects of those mistakes.
This is not always possible. But it usually is.
Jimmy Wales - Wikipedia.org
Since the objective is to recover disk space, the smallest couple of million files are unlikely to do very much for you at all. It's the big files that are the issue in most situations.
Compile a list of all your files, sorted by size. The ones that are the same size and the same name are probably the same file. If you're paranoid about duplicate file names and sizes (entirely plausible in some situations), then crc32 or byte-wise comparison can be done for reasonable or absolute certainty. Presumably at that point, to maintain integrity of any links to these files, you'll want to replace the files with hard links (not soft links!) so that you can later manually delete any of the "copies" without hurting all the other "copies". (There won't be separate copies, just hard links to one copy.)
If you give up after a week, or even a day, at least you will have made progress on the most important stuff.
Theresa May has not said "NO" and indeed has not responded at all. The report quotes a press release that was issued before my petition was even launched. There has been no response to me at all so far.
Every signature counts as they are clearly feeling the pressure.
Jimmy Wales
"Life is a garment we continuously alter, but which never seems to fit." -- David McCord