Re: Some Questions to Xanadu

[Soeren Grenzdoerffer <leonardo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Andrew Pam wrote:
> 
> On Tue, May 26, 1998 at 03:46:35PM +0200, Soeren Grenzdoerffer wrote:
> > I'm Soeren Grenzdoerffer, student of computer science and currently working
> > at my diploma with the topic 'Ted Nelsons Xanadu'.
> 
> I would be glad to help, and would also be very interested to see your
> paper!

If I'm ready I can mail it to you. But it's only in german and my
english is to bad to translate it.
> 
> 
> > a)
> > Ted Nelson wrote in several publications that there is no censorship in
> > Xanadu.
> 
> That is certainly one of the very strong goals.
> 
> > How will you handle forbi[dd]en topics like bomb-building or
> > child-pornograp[h]y?
> 
> The important question is, who says they are forbidden?  In each country
> there are different laws and customs and different things are forbidden.
> 
> > In Germany they trying to disconnect server in the WWW with such topics from
> > the net. I can't imagine that the government would allow Xanadu publishing
> > such topics.
> 
> We hope that they will not be able to prevent it, since Xanadu is intended
> to be a global system.  Of course servers in a particular country need not
> carry material that would be illegal in that country, but that does not
> prevent other servers in other countries from carrying the information.
> This is of course exactly the existing situation with the Web.

But is there not the danger that different gouverments ban Xanadu
because such topics (and I don't think about small countries but
countries like USA or the coutries of Europa. (OK. I know only the
discussion about that in germany but I can imagine that the discussion
is in other countries too.))
> 
[snip b), c), d), e)]

> > f)
> > Without removing any document out of Xanadu how do you want to handle
> > 'junk-information' ?
> 
> What is junk information?  This is largely subjective.
> Also, we plan to have Hierarchichal Storage Management, so that
> infrequently accessed information will migrate to off-line media which
> will not be loaded on-line again until requested by someone.

IMO is 'junk-information' small pages to a topic which are linked to a
big document, but has only a small phrase, a Link and a small picture on
it (e.g.'I like Ted Nelson and his Xanadu-System', a Link to xanadu.net
and a small picture of Ted Nelson). No big information, but if you're
searching something about the topic you find that link you can follow.
> 
[snip g), h), i)]

Soeren