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It's especially crazy that they would write now about how mistaken Orwell was. Last year, it might have made some sense, but now... Nearly every day I hear about more and more moves by the U.S. government to loosen restrictions on police to spy on U.S. citizens. Also, there's talk about an American Empire -- how the U.S. government should rightly rule over the rest of the world, and from "mainstream" intellectuals rather than extremists.

The fact that the U.S. government is using technology to move towards totalitarianism does not mean that technology is the important ingredient. And, of course, the fact that many Americans are responding to the propaganda they're being innundated with by calling for more security doesn't suggest the absence of totalitarianism. When the Reichstag burned, most Germans were scared and were willing to give up some of their liberty for some more security. Totalitarianism only works when the people ask for it.

The problem, though, is that there's a sort of event-horizon with liberty. There's a point beyond which you have little room for resisting. And it's possible for most people to cross it without noticing. As long as nobody is shooting at you or otherwise interfering in your life, you might not notice that some of the most effective means for radically changing government have been eliminated, and that suppression of dissidents has become so efficient and effective that effective dissent becomes impossible. When you start to see the darker side of the "security" you asked for, you find that there's no turning back. In Germany, it took the destruction of the country and the deaths of millions to unseat Hitler.

Fortunately things aren't so stark as that. Supressing dissidents is never easy, and human ingenuity has a way of somtimes finding ways around "insurmountable" problems. But I think the event-horizon analogy is appropriate, because it doesn't take large scale repression to protect power and stifle resistance. There is a point where resistance and chance of success become much more difficult, and you can easily pass that point without noticing.

It's because they charge fat people for 2 seats...all that extra loot is keeping their profit margin nice and high.

Lack of cheap energy is at the root of so many of the world's major problems, it's a wonder we're still pumping petrochemicals around. Lunar-generated solar power could be beamed to Earth via microwave and easily solve our energy shortage. We could have more power than we'd know what to do with AND begin colonizing our solar system at the same time. What could be better?

As a side note, I wonder, too, if orbitally-generated solar power couldn't solve some of our political problems here on Earth. If we could destroy the oil economy, we'd destroy most of the funding that Middle Eastern terrorist organizations depend upon.

Even as Bush prepares to attack Iraq we continue to import millions of barrels of oil from Iraq every month -- as much as they will sell us. Our oil money directly funds terrorist organizations like Al Qaida and the regimes that harbor them. Dry up the oil economy and you dry up their funding -- it's an interesting hypothesis, at any rate. In my opinion, instead of national ID cards, so-called Patriot Acts, and new cabinet-level Terror Czars, we ought to be spending our money in a much more productive way -- solving the energy problems that fund terrorism in the first place.

Ever wonder why Bush feels the need to back out of a treaty Clinton signed for the creation of an international court against war crimes? Morality is a bitch.

I would post examples from The NYTimes, but they don't let you see previous issues of the paper online for free. However, as I recall their picks closely mirrored The Washington Post's:

The Washington Post
Top Story: Cyber-Attacks by Al Qaeda Feared
No. 2 Story: SEC Charges WorldCom With Fraud
No. 3 Story: U.S. Court Votes to Bar Pledge of Allegiance

The Los angeles Times
Top Story: 'Tweens: From Dolls to Thongs
One of the store mannequins wears a fringed denim skirt riding low on the hips and a top pushed high on the midriff. Another has shorts that roll down on the tummy and a one-shoulder top.
No. 2 Story: Pledge of Allegiance Violates Constitution, Court Declares
No. 3 Story: WorldCom Hit With Federal Fraud Lawsuit

The Los Angeles Times shows a consistent bias toward "Reader's Digest" type stories that are entertaining and give you something to gossip about but don't really tell you anything of value. I also get the sense that many LA Times reporters are really failed screenplay writers who can't let go of the need to create drama. However, they do occasionally print something worth reading.

The LA Times is owned by The Chicago Tribune , which puts even less original content on its Web site and is more "in-your-face" about pressuring you to subscribe.

I suspect Slashdot would link to The Wall Street Journal more often if the paper made more than 1% of its content available to non-paying subscribers. (I had a paid subscription to wsj.com for about a year, but I no longer do because it's just not worth that much to me.)

I'd like to read Le Monde , but the French refuse to publish an English version. Go figure.

All of Knight-Ridder's newspapers (The San Jose Mercury News , Miami Herald , Philadelphia Inquirer , et al) have been crippled by the "RealCities Network" which forces all of its sites to use the same content-poor, ad-rich design. The saddest story of the group is the SJMercury though, which has just fallen apart since the parent company began slashing costs and forcing the RealCities conformity on its once industry-leading site. The Miami Herald is an unofficial training school for future Washington Post reporters, but that doesn't matter if you can't find their content on the Web.

Slashdot doesn't link to the Financial Times often (ever?), though it's a great paper. It just doesn't turn out a lot of unique content that's of interest to most Slashdot readers.

Newspapers aside, Slashdot has linked to CNN and the BBC in the past, though not the CBC . ABC, CBS and NBC generally provide watered down news for people who don't like to read newspapers -- not Slashdot readers.

Slashdot often links to MSNBC , but I expect that will begin to decline -- MSNBC.com's founding editor (Merrill Brown, a former Washington Post reporter) recently announced that he's resigning after 6 years to pursue other, undisclosed "opportunities." The New York Times noted on June 12 (you'll have to pay for the archived version of the story) that he offhandedly mentioned that MSNBC.com is about to be swallowed by MSN for economic reasons. (In other words, Microsoft put its foot down and said financial concerns outweigh editorial concerns.)

The International Herald-Tribune writes some of its own content, but a lot of the paper is an amalgamation of New York Times and Washington Post stories.

I haven't read the Seattle Post-Intelligencer or the Seattle Times in a while, but you may find some good technology stories there.

Bottom Line: Slashdot links to a disproportionate number of New York Times and Washington Post stories because both papers' sites post a lot of content and that content is top notch. It also helps that they're among the most recognizable names in journalism, but the Slashdot system is set up to allow editors to pick from the best stories that are submitted, regardless of the content provider's brand recognition. If you read a good story somewhere, submit it -- the quality of the story is more important than the misguided registration policies of the content provider. And if I've missed a good site people should be reading, reply to this message and let people know.

Given the fact that both germany, france and others are buying into Linux now, with good support from IBM, I see very little chance that this will succeed in Europe or Asia (the latter being the most important since they make our motherboards). Also the heavy investments in Linux from IBM will leave at least one major player out of the conspiracy. Palladium won't work unless M$ can control the server side too, and with all the Apache servers out there and with players like Sun and IBM not buying into this, it will probably die a slow but certain death.

Well, I guess that this and this says a lot about the EU stance on these issues. Democracy may not be needed here (and no - the EU structure is certainly not democratic) - only people like Mario Monti, who certainly can't be accused for just following the big business (look at the GE-Honeywell merger and several other cases).

It's not yourself speaking you want to visualize - it's your environment. I personally think that transmitting a photo of your beach vacation is silly, but on-the-fly image recognition, OCR, and translation services could actually have something in them. The phone-camera combination is your light-weight client, and the hard processing is done remotely, probably as a pay service.

I personally wouldn't mind having a huge, convenient visual dictionary available. Point, shoot, wait, and read:

"The Sydney opera house, built in blah blah, Press 'more' for further information."

"The object you are looking at is a Bengalese tiger. Run."

Come to think of it - Google, need a project manager for this? ;)

That may be in your eyes, but in the eyes of the rest of the world, the US is quite a dominating force that can even be looked upon as a terrorist nation.

Take for example, the International Crimes Court that 139 countries worldwide have signed the treaties for. This is the new governing body that will try leaders of a country or soldiers in a conflict for crimes against humanity. If a soldier raped a girl while in conflict, they would be tried here. If a leader murders a large population of civilians, this is the court that they would be tried in. Now, you mentioned the "leader in freedom and democracy," who is the ONLY industrialized, democratic nation that has refused to sign, in fact "unsigned" what was previously signed this treat. Yup, the United States. The leader of the free world, the country that believes in "justice for all" (if you are American)

In fact, recently, there's a bill going before Congress that will allow a President to order military force to "rescue" a "criminal" from the ICC. So, if you are an American soldier and you raped a Bosnian girl, don't worry, the US will rescue you. If you kill the POW, don't worry, you won't be convicted.

So, what you are saying is true.."leading force for freedom and democracy" Only if you're an American

Now that they've got the javascript problems introduced in 0.9.6 ironed out (my test was IHT, since they're reputedly a site designed to take advantage of NS6's capabilities), they just have to fix printing.

I still don't know why when the Mozilla team has created one of the best rendering engines on the planet, they can't apply the same techniques to create good looking output for a printer device. Instead, the result always seems to look strangely sized and poorly laid out -- not at all like the original page.

Now, I still use Moz for my daily browser (and mail), but this shouldn't be that tough.

----

Everyone must learn how to protect themselves from a malicious person wielding a banana.

I can't tell you how you SHOULD design your page, but this site is a pretty good example of everything you SHOULDN'T do. Excessive javascript, needless browser dependencies, superfluous navigation 'gadgets'...

The International Herald Tribune
This site is simply one of the best I have ever seen. It has all the right attributes, works in both Mozilla and IE5/6 identically, without loosing any of its cool functionality, beautiful typography or features.

37 Signals
Is an example of a design firm that excels in clarity and a good understanding of what web design needs to do. Take a look at the work they have done.

Both of these sites are given as examples because they look superb without throwing away any functionality. They demonstrate through beauty and execution what usability means.

The pro usability websites, whilst good for evangelism are sometimes ugly to look at, and not simple to navigate (and yes I know that "ugliness" subjective). You can find them for yourselvs.

I've thought for a long time that one of the great web design firms should team up with the makers of a strong distro, so that the next generation of Linux desktop could be created; a desktop that is not windoze or aqua, but a third, elegant and unique thing.

Does anyone knows if this bug is out?

I have the IHT frontpage as my homepage. Most of the times, 70-80%, mozilla will crash.

THe Mozilla ID:

Mozilla 0.9.7
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.7) Gecko/20011221

Yeah, Techno fetishists everywhere are already creaming their pants over the demonstration of the new "doctrine" of remote warfare displayed by the US in the Afghan War.

It's certainly good for initial deployment and aerial interdiction and control, but remains untested for endgame positional tactics using soft assets.

But this development is nothing that Our Prophet Philip Dick did not foresee in such stories as Second Variety .

It reminds me of how Twain saw the devastating and immobilizing affect on warfare of machine guns and trench technology in the closing chapters of his 1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court .

Or HG Wells foreseeing aerial warfare and the bombardment of cities and civilian populations in The War in the Air .

But because war is politics by any means necessary, when one approach is blocked the street will find a way to express itself through another. If politicized groups and countries cannot hope to use conventional warfare, then they will move on to more promising avenues and asymmetrical opportunities. Things more horribly inventive than destroying buildings with sharp knives and opportunity.

And as so many here have pointed out, most of this is self-serving propgaanda. 30% of munitions dropped still fail to explode. And this article points out, the Rout of the Taliban was largely a social victory. Factions on the ground saw which way the wind was blowing, shaved their beards, and changed sides.

But most of the same local bosses are still running things... why else do you think so many high-profile "Taliban" are being let go. Why is it proving so difficult to arrest Omar, a practically dead, half-blind guy doing a Steve McQueen on a motorbike?



Meanwhile, Blair ran a victory lap in Kabul. Right.

Remember, the Russians also "took" Afghanistan with virtually no resistance within a few months. But their mistake was to stay longer, and eventually the factions started uniting against them. That KC-130 that crashed, they are flying bricks. One hasn't crashed in error since the start of the 1970s. Odds are it was brought down by a shoulder-launched SAM at extremely close range.

And now the Marines are exiting and being replaced by the 101st, who'll be digging fortifying those bases that annoy the Russians so much. They are there for the long haul? I hope they have better luck than Reagan's Marines in Lebanon.

And why are Katz's articles so goddamn difficult to read? Does he go through a rewrite phase where he trys to find longer latinate words whenever possible, replacing anything short and punchy with polysyllabic monstrosities? A dose of Strunk and Whyte would go a long way there.

Look, I don't if Katz is asking a lot of rhetorical questions or what, but here's my own take on the current situation: I sleep better knowing we're using the "bunker busters" to penetrate twenty or so feet into the ground (from an altitude of 40,000 + feet and obliterate the caverns and bunkers of these people.

Here's a link from the International Herald Tribune. A commander talks about dropping a bunker buster on a terrorism camp, seeing the ground implode, and then seeing the hills light up with small arms fire (a bunch off pissed of al-qaeda fuckers):

International Herald Tribune Bunker Buster article

I'm not particularly moved by war and hope everything gets settled peacefully, but, cripes, these guys are stateless, asymentrical savages. There's no two ways about it.

So, as far as I'm concerned, let us all praise the bunker busters and hope they're contributing to our self-defense.

• Official site for the match
• Brain Games network
• CNN report
• CBS News report
• BBC News report
• The Times
• Financial Times
• Daily Telegraph
• Associated Press
• Reuters
• Britannica India
• International Herald Tribune

• Netzeitung report (German)
• Yahoo.de (German)
• ORF Futurezone (German)
• Financial Times (German)
• Chesslines survey (French)
• CNN en Español (Spanish)
• CNN Italia (Italian)
• BBC Brasil (Portugese)
• Express (Swedish)
• El Comercio Peru (Spanish

now from an unposted thought from earlier, I wonder if there's a connection with the following :

. .

The International Herald Tribune has a piece which suggests that new software may be used to monitor for stolen music on your PC.

The company in question, EMusic, proposes to use the DMCA to shoehorn its software into a policing role for Napster users, as well as, no doubt, any other user of digital media, on behalf of the rights of copyright owners. Their chief, Gene Hoffman, baldly states, "Privacy is not the issue, Piracy is."

His statement implies that the trade for using the technologies which have themselves created an era of stunning growth for media companies, is a blunt, painful, surgical implant into our private equipment and facilities.

Whilst, In a update yesterday, Wired reports that the DMCA is said not to impact the rights of customers under first sale doctrine, an aggressive, "policing" stance such as the one proposed by EMusic, appears it would infringe that.

At a blunt guess, EMusic would effectively be placing a toll gate on the legitimate transfer of a legally purchased work. Under its plans to hoop up ISPs into blocking "infringing" accounts, it creates a lopsided penalty for alleged infirngement.

It is not stated how EMusic's system is or could be audited. If a legitimate owner of a work wished to sell or trade, in an error, trust could be reduced, impeding a sale. If the vendor's ISP account were incorrectly blocked, it is conceivable that the action might be a restraint of trade.

Either way EMusic wants to introduce a burden of proof on your ownerwhip of digital media. The company may be bandwagon jumping, or monkeying on the back of the "great fear" promulgated around Napster, but EMusic looks hawkish, and copyright lawers are becoming increasingly aggressive.

. .

Dear Slashdotters, I think the corporate wagons are circling. Are you up to the argument? Or have we left things too late?

The writer of the article thinks, that overclassification of issues often intends to cover up governmental wrongdoing, and so the criminalization of reporting classified information is a threat to the free press.

This bill is not necessary and controversial, because already law exist, which prosecutes reporting of information which actually harms national security and is not just classified.

Maybe this intentional (no journalist is that stupid?) endangering of lives will ease the passage of this bill.

Ddirectly after the announcement of the findings of fact, the International Herald Tribune (and possibly one or both of the parent papers, New York Times and Washington Post) ran a story on a connection with the legions of lawyers that served in the tobacco wars (i.e., smokers claiming damages from the major tobacco companies) and who might soon be out of work. There are some interesting parallels. The big weakness in M$ litigation would be that most of Windows has been soled through original equipment manufactorers (OEMs). The only strong case, the article stated, was for Win98 updates bought as CD-ROMs in shops.

This is half truth for my case. Yes, I don't want to use M$'s products, but no, I replace Windows with Linux. At work, I develop on Solaris, and uses M$ office suite on Windows. Recently I knocked off Windows and uses Linux + Star Office instead. At home I uses Linux as my desktop, which otherwise would be Windows. I can't imagine using SCO or Solaris x86 as my desktop.

If I'm a typical Linux user, then more Windows are being replaced with Linux than Unix are.

The lack of standards in the Linux community, coupled with a lack of key productivity applications and with Unix complexity, will continue to make Linux a poor choice for the mainstream business productivity user.

Check out this article Free Software Fares Well as 'Suite' Rival For Microsoft on IHT, Thursday, Oct 14, 1999 edition. Some quote I extracted:

Based on a test of Sun's product, Microsoft might have something to worry about......

But its StarOffice is not just an office suite; it's virtually an alternative operating system, one with its own browser, its own file explorer and a taskbar that mimics the standard Windows form........

I tested StarOffice running under Microsoft Windows 98.....

The word processor is good enough to go head-to-head against the market leaders.......

So you don't have to spend a bundle on office suites: StarOffice is a valid choice, and it won't cost you.

Basically this article says Star Office fare well compared to M$ Office and is a valid alternative. It doesn't mention using Star Office on Linux, but it does say Star Office is virtually an alternative OS that Windows user would find it as easy to use.

If you're not brave enough to try new things, and is willing to pay more to use Windows, then stick to Windows. If you're brave enough and want to cut cost, Linux + Star Office is quite a good choice. In a business enviornment, let the system administrator handle the tough job, you'll find the difficulty of using Linux as a productivity desktop is not really that high.

To push into mainstream, Linux needs more good and useful applications. I believe two years will address a lot of this issue.

We believe Linux deployments for desktops will not usurp OS dominance from Microsoft.

Only time will tell whether Linux will usurp M$ dominace or not. But as Linux will never go under, do we have a dateline here? The Linux commmunity will repeatedly attempt to break M$ dominace until, of course, we succeed.