Hi Bill, With all due respect I think that your attitude is very short sighted. There are many valuable and valid reasons why people may wish to capture websites, without wishing to 'steal' intellectual property which is what you seem to be inferring.
As a school teacher teaching 13 - 18 year olds there are problems we encounter with internet based study all the time. Apart from dubious chatrooms and their inherent dangers, the chances of pornography and worse getting through the filters and firewalls (We belong to an educational Broadband service with plenty of safeguards but still unsavoury stuff gets through), one of the major problems when studying using the internet is non-focussed surfing by the students. Youngsters love to wander off course in search of interesting tidbits (haven't we all been sidetracked from time to time!) and whole lessons can be wasted. One of the ways of overcoming this in SOME circumstances is to download pre chosen sites onto a local server and let students use these for focussed study. Further, and perhaps more importantly, unlike books etc, many sites on the internet are by nature transient and it is sometimes useful to capture valuable sites before they disappear. I found this out to my cost years ago, when I based a series of lessons on the content of some websites, some of which disappeared before I began to teach the course and made a whole lot of planning useless. The Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/acq/devpol/webarchive.html) points out that the average life of websites is some 44 days and they are attempting to capture much valuable material before it disappears. How can this be a problem - imagine if the SGS were to disappear if John had a problem and noone was able to maintain the site. Should we shrug our shoulders and say 'tough' or hope that someone had archived it for future generations. As I said there are many reasons for wanting to capture/archive websites and by blocking the process we may be losing valuable material for future generations, imagine if all the books from previous generations had bee lost by not putting them into libraries, that is unthinkable as is losing much of the internet content. Terry Dixon Quoting Bill Thayer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Looking at the indiscriminate capturing of websites from the server's > standpoint, please be sure (a) you really need to do it; (b) you have > correct settings......... ............A total waste of resources; equal waste from the standpoint of the > "user" -- I can hardly call them that -- who surely throws away all > this stuff that clogs up their computer. > > If you have cable you have no excuse for doing this, plus, as pointed > out, websites work best in their Web context, not truncated on a hard > disk. If for some reason you must do this, please learn how to set > your settings. > > -- > Bill Thayer > 41N53 87W38 > col cuore a > 42N59.5 12E42.4 alt.313m > > http://www.ukans.edu/history/index/europe/ancient_rome/I/home.html > > - > ----------------------------------------------- This mail sent through http://webmail.zoom.co.uk -
