Slashdot Mirror

The author was interviewed on NPR's Science Friday last year. They talk about some specific examples from the book, and it's an entertaining interview. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4851397

The fundamental fact driving radical Islam is the 400 year decline of Islamic civilization in competition with the West. What Went Wrong?

...but I'm not sure his server is.

I believe that public sites, like slashdot, are protected by the first amendment.

I believe that a personal hard drive is protected against unreasonable searches by the fourth amendment.

But private and semi-private uses of the Internet, which are used to facilitate a great many other crimes and conspiracies than crimes against children, belong in a somewhat different category. Consider, for example, the difference between ordering a product with a credit card over the telephone and ordering a product with a credit card over the Internet. In one case, a single credit card number is at risk; in the other, tens of thousands are at risk.

One poster said that sex crimes against children are not especially serious, but if four year olds could type, I'm not sure they would agree. The NYT recently published a chilling study of Internet usage by pedophiles who did much worse than simply store dirty pictures on their hard drives. And while I agree that this is an especially emotion-laden issue, the successful use of the Internet by any group of criminals to further crime should be of concern to all.

If crime in the U.S. reaches the level it has in the former Soviet Union, there will be no Bill of Rights left to protect. When it comes to kicking your door in, gangsters can be as bad as policemen.

The first step should be an increase in legal remedies and penalties for misuse of the Internet. A ten-year prison sentence for knowingly abetting a felony on the Internet could help, just as the simple steps of putting posters of criminals on Post Office walls and threatening kidnappers with the death penalty both did some good.

This is a constitutional minefield, but we need to protect not only the Bill of Rights but also our most vulnerable, youngest, and most helpless citizens. Raping a child is no laughing matter, and whether the rapist is a criminal or a mental patient (he is both), such a rapist needs to be captured and locked away forever, not necessarily in a hell-hole, but some place with a lock on the door and no kids in reach.

Here's an NPR audio clip on the NY Times story:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5069301

YOU'RE PITIFUL!
Yes, Al recently recorded a James Blunt parody which unfortunately, due to matters beyond his control, will not be appearing on his forthcoming album. But if you're so inclined, you can just download it for FREE! Go ahead, we won't tell anybody! Right-click (option-click for Mac) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, or here, or here or here, not to mention here, or even here!

Basically, James Blunt approved the parody, so Weird Al went ahead and did the track, but then James Blunt's record label objected - so Weird Al released it for free on his website.

"I have a long-standing history of respecting artists' wishes," Yankovic writes. "So if James Blunt himself were objecting, I wouldn't even offer my parody for free on my Web site. But since it's a bunch of suits -- who are actually going against their own artist's wishes -- I have absolutely no problem with it."

There was a radio story on NPR about Edward Tufte over the weekend, if you haven't listened to it yet.

but you can buy them anywhere. Some even come with useful data on them already.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5338506/

The article seems to be /.'d, so here's some additional information on this.

The submitter of this article said, "I would love to see a free wireless mesh that's not dependent on any government or corporation take over the world."

I'd love to see everyone in their dream house with a luxury car getting 250 MPG that's not dependent on any government or corporation.

I think both those statements have the same likelyhood of coming true.

I'd guess that 98% of Americans consider sewer, water, and electrical essential no matter where they live. I would guess that internet access still falls below those three. Fat-pipe internet access may eventually be a true utility that is natuarlly expected to exist anywhere, but it isn't there yet. Even when it does, why would anyone think it wouldn't depend on any government or corporation? All major utilities require BOTH government and corporations. If anything, it will move further away from small local ISP's (like internet and electricity started with). Huge infrastructure with high reliability and reasonable cost demands this type of change.

Having recently come out of a community planning meeting, our small town of 600+ has determined that wireless internet access for all could be a big another way to try and lure younger folks (like myself) that are choosing between other small towns in the area. I'm in the very first stages of feasabiltiy - looking at all the options. The problems of course come down to who pays for it. In the case of our aging community, a lot of folks don't see the need or even want access. That means they don't want any of their tax dollars going to fund it (never mind that my tax dollars fund their senior center and senior bus). On top of that, the local telco isn't very excited to see their individual DSL subscriptions go away either. Then there is the issue of hardware and support. With a town of this size, it is nearly impossible to have 24x7 support. These are just a few of the things that go into the hopper when you're looking at building the infrastructure of small towns which at the end of the day really are what make up the mesh between the 2-5 metro locations in each state. Doing this without local government or a corporate sponsor will be difficult. If this article has any detail (when it's available again!), I hope I can learn some slick new tricks.

The folks at Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me are going to have a field day with this. The gag headlines almost write themselves.

Industry sources say the major manufacturers also worry that adding the safety brake to some table saw models but not others would make them vulnerable to lawsuits.

Somehow a less biased person might look at the middle east and think that their problems stem from lousy...

Somehow a less biased person might look at the middle east and think that their problems stem from lousy...

Somehow a less biased person might look at the middle east and think that their problems stem from lousy...

Somehow a less biased person might look at the middle east and think that their problems stem from lousy...

Somehow a less biased person might look at the middle east and think that their problems stem from lousy...

So Pluto has 3 moons? I had never seen this picture before and think it is very cool.
Pluto via Hubble

I don't know the answer to your question, but am pretty sure that Paul Graham and I were interviewed before the WSJ picked this up (that is, that the WSJ are the ankle-biters, in this case). Here's the link to the NPR piece, with transcript and audio: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5624749

This has been going on for months. State of the art in spam these days is a paragraph of text and a image attachment that contains the actual payload. The idea is that the text is non-spammy and lowers the filters score and the filter cannot "read" the actual spam payload to raise the score. I don't think that this technique will work because the literature they are using tends to be public domain and most of it is pretty old. The problem for the spammer is that this text doesn't really resemble modern English. It confuses people because they can read the text. This is a little different than six months ago where the text was a paragraph of random words strung together. While a person may have to think twice about this new text a Bayes filter isn't reading the message. To the filter all text looks a collection of words. Once the user trains his filter against these new messages the filter will see the old fashioned words as spammy since they don't appear in modern communication. Then these passages become beacons that reveal the message as spam. I think that this attack only works in two cases, where someone mis-classifies one of these messages as ham or if the filter belongs to an English Literature professor.

Paul Graham spoke to this issue on NPR yesterday (Aug 8, 2006) morning. Here's a link to Paul Graham's interview.

-- Ecks

I heard an interview yesterday on NPR about this.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5624749

I heard an interview yesterday on NPR about this.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5624749

NPR, because reading is dumb: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5583668

There was a piece on NPR radio a few weeks ago about an inventor who is marketing a device similar to the mosquito one in this article only it is specifically desinged to be annoying to teenagers (he had problems with them congregating in front of his store). Amusingly his daughter then subverted it for her own use by creating ringtones of the noise so that she could turn her phone on during school (since vibra mode can still be audible in a quiet classroom) and none of the teachers can hear it even though everyone else can lol.

They even had the ringtone as a downloadable ringtone there (you can't of course hear it at all if you're over 25 or so, as you age you lose the ability to hear in those outlier frequency ranges).

Here's a link to the story:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5434687

He was not equipped to go into the business of making table saws and having to compete with the likes of Delta or Rigid, so he decided to try to license the patents to them. But they wouldn't bite, so he finally did have to go into the manufacturing business himself. Should he have been refused a patent? I don't think so.

If you introduce your product to the market before a patent is issued, aren't you opening yourself up to infringement? I think the usual path is to develop the product, patent it, and then either build and sell it, or license it out to someone else who can do that.

real player is a necessity when you want to listen to audio clips from sites such as http://www.npr.org/, but i don't hear any complaints about that one.
 
RP is not really that big of an issue provided you babysit the installation and only install what is needed to run rm streams. it's definitely not as big an issue as it was a number of years ago. the most annoying thing i find about it is when websites make you pick a specific media player, because variety IS the spice of life, but i can understand a group's choosing one format to avoid the cost of encoding across multiple formats.
 
now i just have to figure out if any of the 130 New Critical Objects Ad-Aware found on this computer were caused by Real Networks software so that I can make sure my foot isn't anywhere near my mouth...

Some states are moving to require this. They are being blocked by people claiming that older/impoverished people will be disenfranchised because they will have to have birth certificates and prove who they are to get a "free" voter ID if they do not have a standard ID like a driver's license.

Read more here at NPR with Audio

Try cops killing you while you are doing something perfectly legal, and the cops get away with it. It's ironic that the cops want to install cameras everywhere (because one of YOU is a criminal), but it's not ok for you to tape them.

I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking every day (carpal tunnel syndrome), and version 9 has around 99% accuracy, with around 98% out-of-the-box with no training. This means 10 or so errors out of a 1000 word dictation.

I didn't believe it either, until I actually tried it. Dragon is the first worthwhile speech recognition solution I've seen that's practical for general use (Though I'd love if they'd release a "programmers" version to compliment the Medial/Legal versions). I get about 99% accuracy (a decent microphone is *very* important!)

Dragon 9 also doesn't "technically" need training, but accuracy further improves if you do bother to train it a bit. The NYT reviewer was able to get 99.6% accuracy after a short training session.

Here's a few reviews of version 9:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/20/technology/20pog ue.html?ex=1154318400&en=6fd795114b3f72ea&ei=5070

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5577523

That's so last century. NPR did a bit on the new Dragon Dictate 9. The NPR reporter got 100% accuracy out of the box, no training.

Dictation Software Improves Usability, Accuracy

oh really?

I have allergies, and often my sense of smell is less than acute. And I do like to make guacamole.

This expert advocates using all five senses to assess ripeness.

• That the West is supporting corrupt dictatorships when convenient
• That the West is a decadent, post-capitalist, imperialist society desirous of world domination
• That the NATO is aggressive and wants to expand to the borders of USSR (now Russia)
• That the Western radio and television are a mindless infotainment (pot/kettle here)
• That Leonard Peltier is a political prisoner, among others
• That Move bombing was an act of government-perpetrated domestic terrorism
• That the US police is armed, dangerous and may shoot first
• That black americans were an oppressed underclass until the middle of 20th century, and that racism is still alive and well among people in some states.
• That the West props up the apartheid regime in South Africa
• That the West props up Israel and pays for its wars
• That Israel is unfair to Palestinians
• That the West destabilized Afghanistan to to make it a thorn in USSR's side
• That the Vietnam war was a horrendous crime, despite what US Presidents said at the time
• That the West wants military supremacy over everyone else, and may use nuclear weapons for aggressive purposes
• That the US economy is a colossus on clay legs, supported only by mountains of green paper and by fear of global economic collapse (countries started replacing dollars with gold and euros only after 2000)
• ... and many other pure propaganda stories like that.

Mod parent up.

What kind of moronic, head-stuck-up-his-ass dyed in the wool IDIOT modded parent down?

Are there genuinely assholes that believe in this security through obscurity? If so, I hope you still defend my right to arms, so that when the day comes, and push comes to shove, I'll be able to go down fighting.

This ruling is absurd. The invocation of state secrets, an absurd doctrine, in such a mundane case, is absurd. This level of monitoring is absurd, as is SBC (AT&T Reborn! Empire Reborn!) playing lapdog to an administration that was supposed to be about small government.

Thankfully, I know that I'm wealthy enough, and smart enough, and connected enough, that when people like me fail, and our freedoms are wiped out, and the mass arrests start, I'll be able to get out. My parents fled horrifying regimes elsewhere in the world; I never imagined I might have to do it here, as well. It doesn't hurt that I have citizenship in 3 countries. For the rest of you stupid fucks that let this happen, rot in hell.

yet you don't hear complaints calling for the building industry to stop installing windows

You've discovered the Plastic Neutron Bomb! Contact the Pentagon immediately!

story about company that manufactures synthetic diamonds http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5570666

I'm also a Type 1, and I agree that I'd rather have the insulin produced by me instead of injecting it. Even with the research being done on inhaled insulin, it's still insulin that I have to get externally.

For consumers, switching to ethanol would cost only about $100 per car. Kammen said all it takes are some new hoses and a new gas cap. "This is actually a switch we could make very easily and very quickly," he said.

Kammen is working to get an initiative on California's November ballot requiring that all new cars sold in the state be flex-fuel ready within five years. According to UC Berkeley, in 2004, ethanol-blended gasoline accounted for just 2 percent of all fuel sold in the United States, though nearly 5 million vehicles are already equipped.

"Converting to fuel ethanol will not require a big change in the economy," Kammen said. "We are already ethanol ready. If ethanol were available on the supply side, the demand is there."

Or to rural America:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4496502

I'm fuzzy on the details, but I've heard this before... to get the correct solution for quantum mechanics and special relativity for the hydrogen atom you need to include the interaction of virtual particles. But when you ask a follow up question that's like (but here's where I'm fuzzy on the details) "how do these virtual particles interact all by themselves (eg in a vacuum)" you get an explosion that gives an unbelievably large value.

I did a google search on "120 orders of magnitude wrong" and got some interesting results... the search result of one appears to be a transcript of a "Science Friday" interview, but the link http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4513655 does not show the words.

Huh? Are you crazy?

The _only_ place where we don't have a 100% ready replacement for oil is the transportation sector. That's it.
Replacements for oil, non-transport:
1. Solar
2. Nuclear (France already supplies 80% of its energy needs using nuclear power. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5369610)
3. Ethanol
4. Natural gas
5. Wind Power (this is another name for solar).
6. Coal
7. Geothermal
8. Hydropower, both tidal and gravity based. (this is _also_ another name for solar).

Using nuclear alone, there's no reason we couldn't sustain 100% of our needs, including all uses of electricity. Using currently avaliable, ethanol-powered vehicles, we could sustain our entire farm economy. Of course, there isn't enough ethanol to drive the _entire_ transport sector; we'd have to limp along with ethanol for light truck agricultural/farm usage, more sophisticated biodiesel for heavy industrial usage, and extremely expensive synthetical gasoline for individual usage. But in the intermediate term, assuming a huge spike in gasoline prices, there's no reason we could shift entirely to a biodiesel (non-corn based) transport economy. My company is involved in some next-gen biodiesel research, and assuming we can land some investment capital, we'll be moving along to the "development" phase. Our existing research has demonstrated that although corn simply isn't efficent enough to cover all of our fuel needs, there are most definitely high cellulose crops (I'm not going to disclose these here, but you can look them up; hint: look on Google scholar) out there that could easily sustain worldwide fuel usage several times over with a minimal amount of land/sea usage.

Assuming a radical shift in fuel prices, I'd also suggest that we'd see alteration in vehicle usage patterns, in the intermediate term. We'd see electric (and therefore nuclear) powered cars in urban areas, with minimal range and capacity. We'd see intracity "cruiser" style vehicles, using biodiesel or other forms of fuel. Perhaps we'll see the development of high-capcity fuel cells (fuel cells, in terms of fuel cycle, are functionally no different that high-capacity batteries. Conventional battery technology is kind of a dead-end, but fuel cells give us a different way to store and use electricity).

I can't discuss this matter in a Slashdot comment, really. There's just too much information, and too many possibilities, all depending upon the price of a gallon of gasoline. In the past, where gasoline was significantly cheaper than drinking water, it really didn't make much sense to look at alternatives. Now, with high prices, and higher prices on the horizon, alternatives are really taking off. The fundamentals of the problem come down to energy; whether you are talking about heating homes, running agricultural equipment, driving your kids to school, or moving tanks around; and ultimately, we're surrounded by vast resevoirs of energy ripe for the taking. We're far more apt to run into political conflicts than to run out of space and/or energy; the former is a social problem requiring social solutions, while the latter is a technical problems requiring a combination of technical solutions and social willpower.

Fortunately, in a free market, the latter (social willpower) is provided by high prices on pre-existing technical solutions.

rj

Reaction probably varies from person to person, since some people in this study of poison ivy became more sensitive with repeated exposure.

Personally, I'd squish the buggers anyway, rather than let them reproduce.

NPR's Morning Edition did an interesting articleon June 22 about the impending launch:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5503182

They interview the two senior officials who have reservations about the launch. What I found most interesting were the odds that one NASA employee mentions, which are definitely in favor of the launch and mission succeeding based upon the track record of the shuttles. Yes, it's a dangerous mission and NASA cannot guarantee that falling foam will not damage the shuttle, but in the hundred plus launches only two shuttles have been lost, which isn't a bad track record. However, from the sound of the article, NASA is ready to finish the planned missions and be done with the shuttles. Definitely worth a listen.

This is easy to undo? Well, maybe if they discovered oil there, we'd find out.

Here's where I first heard about this.

Old news.

I could actually hear Frank Deford's voice as I read this.

For example, I think it was in this story (I can't listen to it now to be sure) that the interviewer very politely tore apart a GM executive's argument for why many families "need" an SUV. Now, I'll agree that sometimes interviewees aren't challanged as strongly as I might like, but misleading or false statements do get challanged.

I'm sorry I missed that segment. I used to listen to NPR a lot more (drove to work in a town with good reception of an NPR station), but slowly went off them in favor of the BBC (which was also syndicated at the same time as my commute). Perhaps it was just the luck of the draw in terms of program segments, or maybe the program at the time I was driving wasn't one of the more journalistically strict (my memory's fuzzy by now), but I do recall hearing a number of interviews on NPR that were woefully weak. Granted, NPR does a stellar job compared to Fox, CNN, and the like that seem to consistently dive for the lowest common denominator (perhaps a sad truism of news-for-profit?), but in comparison to the BBC, I found NPR just didn't stand muster. I'd be thrilled if this has changed. Once I can start working from home again (hopefully in about a half a year or so), I'll be able to listen with more regularlity.

Cheers,

Thank you! I was going for a well known case (and trying to document it) but I appreciate the criticism. Some other examples might be comparing JetBlue or SkyWest and United Airlines and other unionized airlines. Albeit there are other obstacles to running an airline business, unions are only one. But these non-unionized airlines are showing consistent profit while their unionized competitors aren't seeing profit even with massive government support (similar non audio link here.)

I might also mention various problems with teachers unions. But that's an entirely different story.

I think most competitive industries that have unions display these tendencies. A government enforced monopoly always seems to be a bad deal for everyone, not just unions. Besides, the main point of my post was not that unions are bad, merely that Carnegie was not an imbecile.

It is well-settled in constitutional law that a warrant is not required to obtain bank records. Your post is completely ignorant to this fact.

Someone may wish to inform congress of this fact because several congressmen, including one quoted in the fair and ballanced (tm) Fox News article you link to below. I'd like to see some evidence that my bank records are not subject to the same protections that other evidence collected against me would be. I'm not saying you're not correct but not even Stuart Levy mentions that fact when defending this program. If what you say is true, that would be an easy trump card for them to play in defending this program.

Funny how the anti-Bush left has no problems with my tax dollars being taken away by the government and redistributed. It's just my money's privacy that they care about? So my privacy interest in my finances is more important than my property interest therein? What nonsense.

There is not just a conern about "your money's privacy" there is a concern about your and my privacy in total. Levying a tax is not the same as snooping through your financial transactions and it's very prejudicial to suggest otherwise. These two things are apples and oranges.

And it has been reported that Congress did, in fact, have oversight of this program. AP reports that Congress was briefed. In fact, several members of Congress called newspapers to plead with them not to publish it (do a simple Google news search for crissakes). Seems the members of Congress aren't too quick to stand up and admit to being briefed until they do some polling on it. - Victory is born of 1000 fathers; defeat is but an orphan.

Yes, I see that congress was informed. In the article you site, it says:
"He (Snow) said Congress had been briefed on the program."

Note that it doesn't say what agency of with authority over the White House is checking to see that they're carrying out this program in a manner that is contitutionally compliant because, in this case, briefed means that the White House is telling them what they're doing but no one is able to check their statements against the facts, just like in the domestic wiretapping program. Briefed does not equal oversite. Oversite means that someone in charge is watching and verifying they're doing their jobs properly and honestly.

Also, I'd like to point out that I did do a Google search on the topic. I was entirely unable to find any statements leading me to believe that any members of congress asked the press not to run the story. I was, however, able to find plenty of ink about how the White House asked them not to run the story. From the very article you pointed us to:

"Treasury Department officials spent 90 minutes Thursday meeting with the newspaper's reporters, stressing the legality of the program and urging the paper to not publish a story on the program, McManus said in a telephone interview.

The New York Times and Los Angeles Times quoted their editors as defending their decision to publish the financial data tracking effort despite being asked by the administration to withhold publication."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,200733,00.html

"But he (John Snow) was unhappy that the program's existence was revealed in news accounts. The Bush administration tried to talk reporters out of running the story."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5507145

Last I cheked, neither Treasury Secretary John Snow nor "Treasury Department officials" were congressmen or agents answering directly to congress.

I seriously think some of you either 1) want to lose this struggle against terror or 2) are incredibly naive about the fact that al Qaeda wants to nuke your as

Great post. I like the fact-checking idea, and thought of a nebulous version of it before you even said that. Here's a link for feedback: NPR Taking Issue