Since they say they're a "charitable non-profit organization", it doesn't make sense that they use vialoflife.com, with a .com TLD implying a commercial entity. I notice that vialoflife.org also works, so they should advertise that as their primary URL.
Re #40: I agree in principle with use of the Ogg format, but unfortunately it won't work in my iPod... really that's a failing of Apple rather than of Ogg, but it's still a nuisance.
Re #168: I think some of the problems with Wikipedia (that have come up on this site from time to time) are analogous to the ones you outline. Like old courthouses, Wikipedia has structures designed for openness and transparency, but a modern-day bunker mentality has taken hold among some of its leaders which causes some of the old stuff to seem like a quaint relic of a bygone age (which is all happening under Internet Time, so it's happened in just a few years, not decades). Also, like the Internet as a whole, Wikipedia is in a sense a "lab experiment run amuck like kudzu" and has run into types of attacks, criticisms, and enemies unanticipated in the original design, which in a classic "action / reaction" manner led in turn to the leaders feeling besieged and turning to ever increasing repudiations of the original free and open style that helped the site succeed in the first place.
I just read that Chavez has ordered the time zone of Venezuela changed to a weird half-hour zone with very little advance notice; this has the worldwide timekeeping and software development communities up in arms because it messes up all the software that doesn't have that strange new zone as an option.
On another subject, a Wikipedia ArbCom case is now in progress about the whole silly "BADSITES" thing. This site is being mentioned among others.
The Wikipedia ArbCom is considering the issue of links to so-called "attack sites" now. This site is one of those coming up for discussion; the consensus seems to be that it's not an "attack site", but that hasn't stopped a person from getting smeared for being a participant here.
Netflix "Watch It Now" doesn't work in the Mozilla browsers either, and I refuse to switch to M$IE for them.
ethan @ 266: Yeah, I had the very same item in my Netflix queue and had noticed it dropping to "Very Long Wait" (do they have an "Excruciatingly Long Wait" category?), but hadn't noticed that it had dropped into the "Saved" category until you pointed this out here. I guess that's what they do when the last copy gets lost, stolen, broken, or something. Do they have some kind of triage system to decide whether such things are ever worth buying another copy of or should just stay forever in the unavailable column?
I've had "Clerks: Uncensored: Disc 1" at the top of my queue for ages, and while it sometimes shows "Available Now", it keeps switching to "Very Long Wait" and I never manage to get it. Below it in the queue is "Clerks: Uncensored: Disc 2", but their system seems to be smart enough not to give you the second disc of something when the first disc is ahead of it in the queue and unavailable, so they don't send that either even though it's always shown as "available now". Also, "Star Trek: The Original Series: Vol. 9" is down in "Saved; unknown" even though volumes 1 through 8, and 10 through 40, are all in the queue and available now (but there's other stuff ahead of them so none has been shipped yet).
Well, according to the the block log, that guy doesn't seem to be banned.
In the defense of the other guy who scolded him, there is a large problem on Wikipedia with people creating pages about "stuff they made up at school one day"... so when somebody writes about a real, but little-known work that sounds like that sort of hoax, it just doesn't look good to the next editor who comes by.
That's the "stable revisions" concept, that's been under discussion for a long time. If well-implemented, it might actually be a good thing. It depends on who gets to approve revisions; there are a wide variety of proposals out there in that regard, some of them very inclusive (like automatically granting the power to long-standing editors with a decent edit count). On the other hand, if it winds up being a select clique that has this power, it could be bad as the blogs claim.
SwatJester is trying to get your site declared an "Attack Site" yet again... this time for alleged antisemitic remarks against him that I've been unable to locate.
Although the BADSITES proposal is officially defeated, there is a clique of powerful Wikipedians who insists on enforcing it anyway, citing an ArbCom decision from last year banning links to a particular site (Encyclopedia Dramatica) on the grounds of it being a "harrassment and outing site". In my opinion, that was a bad decision, exceeding the proper bounds of the ArbCom which is explicitly barred from making policy or intervening in content decisions, and it was made worse by the way it's been misused ever since to suppress criticism. I wrote an essay about this on Wikipedia.
I was formerly one of the "fanatical" supporters of Wikipedia, who referred to critics as "Wiki Whiners" and generally took the pro-Wikipedia party line. What "turned me" away from this was my strong dislike of censorship, which led me to strongly oppose the "BADSITES" policy in all its forms (ironically, the way I first ran afoul of it was in my tendency to post links to sites like Wikipedia Review in order to criticize and make fun of them; the draconian interpretation of the no-link policy bans even that).
At present, I'm still not an "anti-Wikipedian"; I still generally like the site, and haven't really had major disputes over its actual content, and I still participate in editing it. However, I really wish that annoying clique would go away.
There's actually nothing new about almanac paranoia; this item is reported in the history section of the Old Farmer's Almanac site:
In 1942 a German spy was apprehended by the FBI after being landed on Long Island, New York, by a U-boat the night before. The impact of this event was felt all the way to Dublin, New Hampshire, because The Old Farmer's Almanac was found in his coat pocket. The U.S. government speculated that the Germans were using the Almanac for weather forecasts, which meant that the book was indirectly supplying information to the enemy.
Fortunately, Sagendorph managed to get the government to agree that there would be no violation of the "Code of Wartime Practices for the American Press" if the Almanac featured weather indications rather than forecasts. It was a close call that almost ruined the Almanac's perfect record of continuous publication.
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