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There were similar stories in the Canadian media a few weeks ago. Ontario casinos are equipped with face-reginition technology, designed to catch known cheats and other criminals. (Note that they don't scan everyone who walks into a casino -- just those who look suspicious.) This technology is in use in casinos in the United States as well.

Normally I'd be more than willing to jump on the paranoia bandwagon, but in this case, technology is being used to fight real crime. Not surprisingly, there has been talk of this technology being installed in other areas, such as banks. Personally, I can't wait until we're able to nab criminals from orbit using high-resolution satellites. Or even better, high-resolution satellites equipped with lasers. :)

Found this great article through adnews.com: The best commercials that never were (National Post).

Cato Institute, a libertarian think take said that California's deregulation was screwed up and would be a fiasco in 1996 when it was proposed. So much for this being a failure of free markets, more like braindead bureaucrats.

Story Is Here

another article from the National Post's magazine. You'll have to click on the article "Of Mice and Men" on the main page as there is no direct link.

According to this article, the Canadian "quality of life" is largely irrelevant.

Anyone who thinks Y2K was fake and we were all tricked should read this article.

It talks about Peter de Jager, the foremost expert on the Y2K problem. In late 1998, after the industry had finally started to move on the problem, Mr. de Jager was convinced that the disaster would be averted. However, the media continued to proclaim doom and gloom, and anti-computer Luddites everywhere continued to stock up on supplies.

When the lights stayed on at the stroke of midnight, Mr. de Jager was suddenly considered a snake-oil seller and even received death-threats.

Y2K was beaten, well before Jan. 1, 2000, but the media had us believing otherwise.

http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?f=/sto ries/20001130/388184.html

Agreed -- but with the caveat that each county should have used the same method when voting, so that the errors introduced by the voting/counting methodology were evenly distributed across the population.

Unfortunately, that was not the case in this election. Some counties used the Optiscan system (not subject to "chad" error), and others used punch cards (which, as we're painfully aware, are).

So any inaccuracies introduced by the hand-count (or rather, by the original vote, and possibly corrected by the hand count) are not evenly distributed among counties.

Depending on how you vote, this either unfairly skewed the election to Bush on November 7th, or it will skew the election to Gore in the days ahead as the hand recounts progress.

The time to have decided this was before the vote, when one's political leanings wouldn't have entered into the equation. Sadly, it's too late for that, which is why we're in this mess.

Quoted from a Canadian commentary (albeit a highly partisan one in favor of Bush) on the subject:

But a hand count is all about the arcane art of chad divining. The chad is the little bit of paper that gets punched out. It's held on in four places, and who voted for whom depends on how many of those threads need to be severed to constitute a vote. Maybe none needs to be severed, as proponents of the "dimpled chad" (a slight indentation) argue. All we know is that the count began by using a three-point severance as the standard for an official vote. When it came to two-point severances, officials were allowed to use their discretion as to which of these were valid. But even that leeway wasn't enough. So, a quarter of the way through, Ms. LePore switched to the "sunlight" test. In other words, if you hold the ballot up and see light coming through at any point, you are entitled to interpret that as a vote for whomsoever you perceive the sun shineth. Alas, over in the Bush pile, it's a total eclipse. On Saturday night, after a sample count of 1%, the Incredible Chad Diviners had given the Vice-President a net gain of 19 votes. That's when Ms. LePore chose to demand a full hand count. We are not in Florida or Kansas anymore: We are in ... Chad.

If (if!) this report (I see no substantiation here, and the article is extremely partisan, so I'm still classifying it as "rumor" - I'm sure if there's evidence for it, a Bush partisan will substantiate it :-) about the changing of the standard between three-point severance to "sunlight" or the "dimpled chad" partway through the recount turns out to be true, it raises questions about the impartiality of the hand recount.

Back to my "standards" thread - this Salon article points out that heavily-Republican counties use the Optiscan system, which isn't subject to the "chad" issue. If true, it appears that votes in Republican counties already "count" about 0.001% more than those in Democrat counties, and there's a legitimate argument that Gore's calling for a hand-recount evens the score.

IMHO both the National Post and Salon articles (and the post to which I'm replying) constitute evidence that we need both a standard ballot and a standard counting system.

(And that, Constitutionally, these standards should be set on a per-state basis, not the Federal level.)

The duck really took flight on Oct. 9, when 15,000 people called. By the end of the week, with the phone number circulating throughout the Internet, more than 250,000 callers called NDB.

The number of calls to the number is costing the company about US$8,000 a day, but Mr. McQuilkin said it is money well spent.

Maybe, just MAYBE, there is more than the /. effect at play here.

For tech news, I check BBC Tech News, Ace's Hardware, Tom's Hardware , or ARS Technicia. ZDNet has become way to sensational and biased. And all the crappy banners! More like The National Enquirer of geekdom.

For discussions, I check K5 or Rootprompt. And Slashdot. But it's tough to have a discussion here anymore.

I'm sorry to say, but Slashdot, while I check it regularly, is starting to have too high a signal-to-noise ratio. Not enough "discussion" too much "babooey to natalie portman's beowulf cluster of hot grits and penis bird on toast."

It's safer to stay off the main page if I want some interesting discussion. As well, I don't tolerate mistakes in my profession. No matter what I do, I like it to be as perfect as humanly possible. While I know mistakes happen, there have been far too many here, adding to the signal-to-noise ratio, and reducing my faith in accurate articles.

I get my news elsewhere, but I still come back, hoping the old days will return.

A couple of things. There is no debate as to whether or not these fertilized eggs are humans. They indeed have the genetic makeup that makes them humans. The debatable part is whether or not it is a person. Some argue that it only becomes a human when it passes through the proverbial cervix of the woman, some argue that it's when the egg is fertilized by the sperm. This isn't the debate that we're discussing now though.

Again, I do not disagree with your idea that we repair these problems in the womb, after the baby is on its way to being born, however, once we decide to eliminate the embryos that are not "up to snuff" in some way (CF, Huntington's disease, predisposition to breast cancer, Lou Gehrig's disease, etc) we are already on that slippery slope.

People that are much taller and stronger than others have a great chance of surviving in certain places in the world. Why don't we try to design our humans in order to allow them to survive in these environments.

There's an article about a couple in the National Post which talks about a couple of parents wanting to choose a female child in order to cure their own phsychological illness (diagnosed by doctors). How does differ from the subject of today's discussion about the child raised for stem cells? Or does it differ at all?

And please don't tell me to avoid the Mengele reference. I had plenty of friends and relatives that have suffered through a certain government's efforts to create a homogenous people. There might not be a "master plan" as you put it, but where do we draw the line? Which diseases are alright to cure, and which diseases are not OK to cure?

I know first hand how someone with a horrible disease can be a burden on society, however, I know also that said sick person contributes more to society through the changes he makes in other's people's lives than what he draws from it in financial terms.

I've been reading some reports that, thanks to NBC's time delay scheme, a lot of border towns like Detroit and Buffalo will be tuning into CBC's live coverage instead. Now, if IcraveTV was still operating, just think of the Olympics viewership NBC would lose to others who can't pick up the terrestrial signals...

There's also an article in the National Post.

I work for the Post's parent company, and can tell you that it's normally very right of center. "So?", you ask? Well, that means that all the PHBs are really starting to take Open Source seriously. All the talk of "strategy" and the fact that Linux and Apache are being used in a great number of IT shops means that the Open Source movement is building critical mass - a snowball effect is starting. That happened with Windows - M$ came up with 2 good Windoze apps - Word and Excel, and seeded these apps in new Windoze installs. These apps attracted new customers to the OS, which attracted more developers, who created more apps for the OS,which attracted more customers, (etc. ect., ad nauseum, ad infinitum). If it happens to Linux, well now we've got a horse race.

If Micro$oft is good for any one thing, it's showing the way to World Domination - "Build good applications, and they will come". What we've got right now is Linux, Apache, Samba - as well as Standards Compliant network services. If the Open Source movement were to leverage these, we need not concern ourselves about Microsoft or AOL or anyone else's big ugly giant. The market wind will blow in our direction.

"MEOWRRR". Oops, let the cat outta the bag. Where'd I file that source tree?

Slightly off-topic, but as of yesterday the Ontario Court of Appeal has just put Canada's pot law into limbo:

The National Post

June 30, 2000: MP3 Summit Ian at MP3 Summit webcast
You can find Ian's hour long talk at the MP3 Summit about 1 hour 8 minutes into the Wednesday webcast.

June 16, 2000: Guardian Free market fight for music moguls
Interesting article in a British national newspaper.

May 27, 2000: LA Weekly Genie 1, Bottle 0
Very amusing article on Freenet and copyright. Highly recommended.

May 24, 2000: Channel 4 News Hackers stay one step ahead
A very cool news item talking about recent attempts by the British government to censor the Internet and how Freenet will make this very difficult. Includes text and streaming video of the item.

May 23, 2000: Libération L'anarchie est au bout du clavier
An interesting French article about Freenet, concentrating on the freedom of information aspects of the system rather than just copyright.

May 12, 2000: National Post Napster secured page in Internet history
Interesting description of why Freenet is not vulnerable in the same way that Napster is, although I must say that their "final thought" is slightly perplexing!

May 12, 2000: O'Reilly Network Gnutella and Freenet represent true technological innovation
A nice article concentrating, for a change, on the technical side of Freenet and Gnutella. Reasonably accurate, although it understates the efficiency improvement that Freenet should provide (describing it as of comparable efficiency to the WWW where it should be much more efficient).

May 12, 2000: Het Nieuwsblad Vrijheid van downloaden
A Belgian article about Freenet.

May 10, 2000: Houston Chronicle Software developer pledges to foil all intellectual property watchdogs
A version of the article below, doesn't require that you register.

May 10, 2000: New York Times The Concept of Copyright Fights for Internet Survival
One of the better articles; concentrates on the copyright issue. Requires free registration.

April 27, 2000: PCFormat Daily FreeNet
A brief article on Freenet.

April 27, 2000: Heise News-Ticker World Wide Anarchy: Netz ohne Kontrolle
A German article on Freenet.

April 26, 2000: CNET.com Free, anonymous information on the anarchists' Net
Entertaining article with some nice quotes.

April 17, 2000: The Irish Times Anarchy Rules Alternative Web
A rather amusing article on Freenet.

April 16, 2000: Freshmeat Client As Server: The New Model
An interesting article discussing distributed systems and how systems like Freenet are actually in a similar spirit to the original Internet.

April 13, 2000: El País Freenet propone una red sin censuras, alternativa a la WWW
A Spanish article about Freenet.

April 10, 2000: Slashdot.org FreeNet's Ian Clarke Answers Privacy Questions
A very informative interview conducted by the readership of SlashDot.org, probably the closest thing to a FAQ, aside from our faq.

March 25, 2000: ABC News Freedom on the Net?
A rehash of the New Scientist article below, but likely to reach a much larger audience.

March 25, 2000: New Scientist Out of control
A "big bad Internet"-style article, but it is reasonably well researched and seeks the opinions of those who might be considered Freenet's opposition.

March 23, 2000: Heise.de Ein Netzwerk, das Zensur unmöglich machen soll
A German article on Freenet.

March 14, 2000: OLinux Freenet, a polemic concept to deal with WWW
An English translation of a Brazilian interview with Ian Clarke. Focuses on the technical aspects of Freenet, and goes into a reasonable amount of detail as to how the system works.

March 10, 2000: Webwereld Anoniem Freenet ultieme schuilplaats voor piraten
A Dutch article on Freenet. My Dutch is a little rusty but it looks like it is primarily inspired by the Wired article below.

March 8, 2000: no spoon FreeNet : le réseau anonyme distribué qui supplantera le Web
An excellent French article on Freenet, draws an interesting parallel between Freenet and the writings of Neal Stephenson.

March 3, 2000: Need To Know sufficiently advanced technology: the gathering
A brief but excellent article again approaching Freenet from a pro-freedom standpoint.

February 24, 2000: PigDog Journal Get in on the Ground Floor of Freedom
A very positive little article describing Freenet and why they think it is interesting using some rather "colorful" language.

August 14, 1999: Brave Gnu World FreeNET
One of the first articles about Freenet back when it was 100% theory. Still an excellent introduction to the way Freenet works.

FWIW link here
--

Today in the National Post there was an interesting interview with Courtney Love on the economics of the music industry, particularly with reference to Napster's and Gnutella's impact.

copyright infringement is wrong. While you might want freedom to do what you want, so do the people who put copyrights on things. They want the freedom to do what they want with their ideas, and not have every john doe screwing around with it. There's more than one kind of liberty.... freedom to do what you want with other peoples things, and freedom to do what you want with your own. People generally forget about the second one on /.

Morality doesn't matter?.

The point of the is radical. The point is that morality doesn't matter. The article is not about whether it's right or wrong to copy information. The article states that it is possible so it will happen. There's nothing that can be done about it. Period.

Check out ANY Canadian news source for the lastest news, like the Natinoal Post, here's a clip:

ORLEANS, Ont. - A 15-year-old boy who was often teased by his peers went on a stabbing rampage in an Ottawa-area high school yesterday, an attack that came on the first anniversary of the fatal school shooting in Columbine, Colo.

The story has already been submitted to Slashdot, now we wait.

In my neck of the woods, we have just seen the end of a trial of a girl who was 15 years old when she beat another girl to death. For background check out this list of newspaper art icles. The most relevant to this discussion is this article.

Highlights of the article referenced in the second link are:

One of her friends, according to court documents, described her as "messed up in her head ... really weird," and that she liked punching people in the face.

Barbara Smith, her school counsellor, described her to the court as "a very angry kid, one who had refused counselling."

Is this someone who would be reported to WAVE? If so, would anything have been done? Should there have been something done?

It sounds like all the right bells were ringing in this case, but we still have one girl dead and another going to prison.

Note that the girl in question here could not possibly have fit the "standard geek profile".

In my neck of the woods, we have just seen the end of a trial of a girl who was 15 years old when she beat another girl to death. For background check out this list of newspaper art icles. The most relevant to this discussion is this article.

Highlights of the article referenced in the second link are:

One of her friends, according to court documents, described her as "messed up in her head ... really weird," and that she liked punching people in the face.

Barbara Smith, her school counsellor, described her to the court as "a very angry kid, one who had refused counselling."

Is this someone who would be reported to WAVE? If so, would anything have been done? Should there have been something done?

It sounds like all the right bells were ringing in this case, but we still have one girl dead and another going to prison.

Note that the girl in question here could not possibly have fit the "standard geek profile".

Normally I don't respond to offtopic posts -- but I had to post this for the record.

There is another side to the Mumia story, check out this National Post story. The NP is Canada's major national newspaper -- and this is a good balanced article that counters a lot of hype surrounding the case.

As far as Canadian courts enforcing a judgment against a Canadian person entered by a U.S. court, there is a recent case, Braintech where a Texas court issued a judgment against a Canadian and the Canadian court decided that the behavior didn't violate Canadian law and wouldn't enforce the Texas court judgment.

Such jurisdictional issues are a hot topic in legal circles. If you want to see how a lawyer thinks about these issues, read the text of a speech given yesterday at a conference at George Mason University here. The American Bar Association has an "Internet Jurisdiction" project which you can read about here.

Finally, I think it is important to remember that there are international treaties relating to intellectual property that are very valuable to U.S. citizens because our higher than average standard of living is based, to a significant degree, on the IP that we create. You can read the two treaties that are the basis for the DMCA under the "documents" section here.

Earlier to that, a disk containing a list of informants was left in a phone booth. Someone found it and took it home to discover that, not only was this disk left somewhere, the files on it were not encrypted. Luckily the person who found the disk was honest enough to return it, and it was believed that the identity of the informants was not released to anyone else.

National Post general story

NFL tells iCraveTV to back off

National Post general story

NFL tells iCraveTV to back off

Well, at least according to THIS GUY.

Could this be the same person who sued Global TV about the Bugs Bunny cartoon a little while ago..
National (Canada) Post Article


ttyl
Farrell

Mr. Berners-Lee also had harsh words to say about the application of patent law and intellectual property rights, suggesting that an ethos of "whatever you can get away with" will inhibit the adoption of common standards, essential to the continued growth of the Web.

I wanted to write regarding the "Computer hackers really are anti-social geeks" article by Mr. Stewart Bell. This article fails to cite any evidence collected by Mr. Marc Rogers to prove any of the points that he asserts. Now I understand that this is a newspaper, and not a scientific paper - but I found this article to be offensive in the extreme.

This gentleman asserts that "hackers" frequently come from broken families, and may have been abused. It is not explained why he might think that, or what scientific method he might have used to ascertain this knowledge. Nor is it anywhere compared to what percentage of the non-hacker population come from broken families or are abused. I would think that by using some basic statistics, it is far more likely that a non-hacker would have been abused than a hacker.

If such an article had been written about a racial or religious group, this article would have never made it into your paper - it would have been judged to be trash science, only an attempt to justify ridiculous stereotypes. The assumptions made in it are ludicrous in the extreme, and I am outraged that such an item would appear in an otherwise prestigious newspaper. I hope that in future, journalistic integrity and facts will win out over sensationalism and assumptions.

Sincerely,

Leilah Thiel