On Wed, 12 Apr 2000 18:51:51 +0200, Salvador Vidal said:
May be the first step of a ecologist truster will be to devolop a black
list of companies that are very agresive agains nature, the people that
join this truster will be able to have censorship of this companies in
order to presure them to change their behavior.
This is unfortunately a Nice Idea, but probably well into the NP-messy category
of things. The problem is that eliminating a sufficient amount of what the
statisticians call "false positives" will be quite challenging, and probably
involve a large amount of natural-language processing.
Typical scenarios you need to address:
1) If you are censoring company XYZ-Example.Com because of their dumping of
nuclear wastes into the local drinking supply, you need to make sure that your
censorship doesn't accidentally censor the press release they issue stating
that they have stopped doing it, and will pay to clean the drinking supply.
2) If you are censoring company ABC-Example.Com because of their CEO's viewpoint
on <insert touchy social topic here>, you want to be careful not to accidentally
censor a message from their chief networking manager that contains the technical
information that you asked for on a mailing list....
It would be a shame if you failed to get my commentary on your ideas because
you were censoring my employer because of their failure to rename a dormitory
currently named for a famous and illustrious person who has been alledged to
have been a racist at one time...
Remember - I may work for the University, but I'm almost always stating my OWN
opinions unless I specifically flag something as being "The Party Line".
--
Valdis Kletnieks
Operating Systems Analyst
Virginia Tech