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aforementioned article in NYT>
My apologies for messy format (never used html mail before).

2003-04-23 19:52:28 Edgar Codd dies at 79 (articles,news) (rejected)

NY Times story (registration, etc.) Edgar Codd, Key Theorist of Databases, Dies at 79.

Like you, I couldn't care less that my submission was rejected, but this should have been on the frontpage of /. one way or the other.

JP

Bush, the closest thing to fascist we've ever had.

Just remember what it was like 3 years ago: Economy was good, we had jobs, the President was brokering peace between Israel and Palestine, and our biggest worry was that the President had consentual sex with his adult intern. Oh my.

Today: Economy is crashing, > 6% unemployment
rate is common in urban areas across the country, we're in a questionable and bloody war for oil, the same people who bolstered Saddam into power are in control today, Israel and Palestine aren't even on the map, the Bush administration is silencing political critics, and the government wants to investigate your private life to make sure you are not a terrorist, headed by Big Brother himself.

So much has been lost in just 3 years.

Hmmm.... No. The fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives seek to defend the status quo, and revert to political legacies while liberals seek to contrive a political evolution. This at least is the classical definition of Conservatives and Liberals respectively.

Your summation of the two positions could however be argued as applicable to Republicans and Democrats (Although I personally would disagree).

Now as a response that defends the tax cut, you really are ilinformed.

You see the tax cut isnt actually going to put money into the hands of anyone but the top one half percent. Fine, you might argue that they deserve it, but as Krugman pointed out in a recent op-ed, the big problem with the cuts is whats gonna happen to the states.

Many, if not most state governments are having some very serious budget problems. Their natural response is to cut programs, which in turn pulls spending out of the economy and hurts commercial jobs. Lets call this bad impact A. A further problem is that the budget problems are so bad that the programs being cut arent things like welfare (which was quite effectively reformed and slimmed in the 90s) but are rather things like EDUCATION and Childrens healthcare.

lets take NY as an example. As a result of budget deficets, Education is slated to be cut by about 2 Billion dollars (health care will be cut even more). This isnt gonna hit the economy slowly (like the tax cut) but right NOW.

If G.W. really wanted to put money into the economy and create jobs TODAY he would bail the states out for this years budget. The money would hit the economy immediatly, and jobs actually would be created. Instead he is rolling out tax cuts over 10 years, thats a really smart recover plan isnt?

I used to be a Republican. I like small government, self reliance and the promotion of individual liberty. Unfortunatly I realized sometime ago that the Republican party has been hijacked by a bunch FUNDAMENTAL RELIGOUS OLIGARCHS that are intent on (A) destroying individual liberty (B) enriching a select few at the expense of the majority by legally skewing the system to favor those who currently hold power (C) Entrenching the Christian right into government (D) Blindly cutting doleing out political/tax favors to his friends (also known as 'Chronism').

Thats why Im a libertarian now, and why I might unfortunatly have to vote Democrat next election. Because the damage being done by bush to this country might be irrepairable, and the Democrats will never be evective to actually achieve their misguided ends (witness the Clinton's health care plan).

Frankly, Bill Clinton was the best republican this country has had in a long time, and I would welcome his philandering ways if it would turn back the Christian Fundamentals in this country.

Deliberately Distorting the Digital Mechanism
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL

While tinkering recently with one of the first personal computers from the 1980's, the digital artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans took a look at its technical tutorial. As Mr. Paesmans recalled, the on-screen guide delivered a reassuring message: "Remember, don't be scared. You cannot do anything wrong on this computer."

Since 1994 Ms. Heemskerk and Mr. Paesmans, collaborating under the name Jodi, have created a series of Internet-based artworks that deliberately cause computers to do the wrong thing. Viewers of these online works will find their screens filled with meaningless text and needlessly blinking graphics. Web-browser windows spawn smaller windows that race maddeningly around the screen. Links that appear to lead somewhere yield dead ends. Like a sci-fi thriller, this could be delightful, except that the underlying premise is of computers in complete control. A terrifying thought.

Beginning tomorrow Jodi will be the subject of a retrospective exhibition, "install.exe," at Eyebeam, a new-media art center in Manhattan. It was organized at Plug.In, a new-media art center in Basel, Switzerland, where it was shown last fall before it traveled to Berlin. The exhibit, which runs through June 14 at Eyebeam's gallery at 540 West 21st Street, contains nearly two dozen works. Many of them can also be viewed online at www.jodi.org, asdfg.jodi.org, 404.jodi.org, wrongbrowser.com and wwwwwwwww.jodi.org.

Prepare to be disoriented, if not stuck, in a World Wide Web gone awry. The Web is less than a decade old, so it might seem premature to declare that Jodi's works are classics of Internet art. Yet these artists were probably the first to use the Internet's own visual language to create what are in effect paintings of the Internet landscape. They did so by exposing the hidden computer code that makes Web pages do what they do, then altered its odd texts and strange symbols so that they became abstract art. They also took Web features and simulated what would happen if they ran amok. For people who assume that a computer is a benign dictator, these were reminders that the slightest transgression could turn it into a deranged despot.

Like Cezanne's late works in which the raw canvas is often part of the painting, Jodi's sites force viewers to become conscious of the Web's appealing surface and the digital mechanism that lurks below.

Annette Schindler, the director of Plug.In and the co-curator of "install .exe," said, "You think you know your computer, but really all you know is a surface on your screen." This state of affairs is based on the foolish hope that our technology, like our cars, will always operate properly, so that we never have to look at the oily, gritty bits under the hood. But Jodi subverts this notion. Visitors to the duo's Web sites, Ms. Schindler said, "immediately have the experience that Jodi wants to give them, which is, `What if everything goes wrong?' "

In questioning the Internet's rules, Jodi has had a huge influence on digital artists.

"They are the only Internet-based artists that have created a truly new aesthetic," said the male half of the anonymous digital-art duo known as 0100101110101101.org in a recent phone call. "They have influenced almost everything on the Internet that is related to art," he said. "It's like trying to find a painter who was not influenced by Michelangelo."

Ms. Heemskerk and Mr. Paesmans were resident artists at San Jose State University in the heart of Silicon Valley in 1994, at the start of the dot-com era. One day while working on a Web project they accidentally omitted a bracket from the computer code, and the resulting Web page was a messy jumble of text and characters. They liked what they saw and began to experiment.

Mr. Paesmans said they initia

This is an interesting news piece. It was even more interesting when I read about it this morning in Tuesday's New York Times Science Section in an article by Chris Dixon. Was this submission an original idea or just inspired by the NY Times article?

Yet another NY times article about the endless battle against Spam.

even better, "printer friendly version"

WASHINGTON, April 19 -- The United States is planning a long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access to military bases and project American influence into the heart of the unsettled region, senior Bush administration officials say.
American military officials, in interviews this week, spoke of maintaining perhaps four bases in Iraq that could be used in the future: one at the international airport just outside Baghdad; another at Tallil, near Nasiriya in the south; the third at an isolated airstrip called H-1 in the western desert, along the old oil pipeline that runs to Jordan; and the last at the Bashur air field in the Kurdish north.

I suppose that U.S. troops might abandon their boots and start wearing Nikes. Until they do, don't hold your breath waiting for that apology!

The US has no reason to colonize/subjugate Iraq.

Oh I can think of at least one reason... and if you've been paying attention to the news from Iraq, it's becoming evident that we've just uncorked a new Islamic state. That's what happens with "democracy" in that part of the world- it turns into theocracy because the people there are so right wing. (As it is always threatening to do here.)

It would be militarily impossible without using unconscionably brutal tactics, and whatever bad stuff may have happened in Vietnam and Central America, the US Military simply does

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/fashion/20TIVO.h tml?ex=1051416000&en=a77422bb2a91649e&ei=5062&part ner=GOOGLE

Google NYTimes News Partner link thing

No free reg required.

Alright, that didn't work, do the Google Affiliate I guess.

There, this one works.

Sorry about that, but still, it's not too hard. There should be no more straight links that require registering in the main story, just get the Google affiliate.

Alright, this has been mentioned many times, but here it is one more time.

Just replace the "www" with "archive" in the link and the NYTimes requires no registration!

There you go!

That wasn't hard, now was it?

Here are two screenshots (reg req?) of FBCB2, a battlefield force-viewing program.

Can someone tell me what OS it's running on?

Plainly FBCB2 is using X11 windows to draw the display. But the open "Start" menu in the lower-left strongly resembles Microsoft Windows(tm), except for the replacement of the "Flying Window" logo with a yellowish blob.

It seems excessively fragile to be running two boxes for the software and it's display- could it be that FBCB2 is a Unix program, but the Army has adapted a Microsoft-like X11 window manager to make their troops feel more comforatable with it?

Don't miss his complaints about the interface! The button arrangement on this phone is apparently a PITA.

Don't miss his complaints about the interface! The button arrangement on this phone is apparently a PITA.

Don't miss his complaints about the interface! The button arrangement on this phone is apparently a PITA.

The immediate cause of death was a fall that caused a head injury. Last year, Atkins received treatment for a heart condition, said to be caused by an infection unrelated to his diet.

The current average life expectancy for American men is 74.0. It's too early to start throwing questions out about Robert Atkins and his diet, but his untimely death will eventually spark them.

The moderators who marked this "informative" didn't actually try it. It doesn't work (even after you remove the space). Here is the link to prove it.

Sci fi indeed, these teeth are scarier than the Alien trilogy!

I think he should spend the money on something more productive -- like a visit to the dentist for starters... .
.
.
.

Wow that was mean. O:-)

Holy bajesus, check out the grimey, yellow choppers. You'd think with $10 mil to spend on a geek temple, he'd have some left over for some white strips.

here

Yah. Looks like NYT got wise to us. Replacing 'www' with 'archive' no longer works. Just redirects to the main page.

So here is the Google/NYT partner link

for the first time in ages, I'm looking forward to the discussion on this, in the hope that someone explains it in a manner I can understand

[The Poincaré] conjecture is that every simply connected compact 3-manifold without boundary is homeomorphic to a 3-sphere.

Loosely speaking, this means that every 3-dimensional object that has a set of sphere-like properties can be stretched or squeezed until it is a 3-sphere without breaking it. Note that a 3-sphere consists of all those points in 4-dimensional space R4 that have a distance of 1 from the origin.

For the lazy/paranoid.

Original No-Reg NYT Article Here

My 'twin' is probably using this link.

Heh. Good point. But the real math behind this is just about as silly: to double in 7 years, the industry would need to grow CONTINUOUSLY at about 11% annually. That's huge! According to the latest NY Times magazine, there has been more like a 17-25% staff reduction recently. That's more like LOSING 11% annually! I can't see any trends to indicated this would turn around so extremely any time soon enough to double tech jobs within 15 years, let alone 7.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/magazine/13UNEMP LOYED.html

The above article talks about a guy whose former job position was "vice president and a director of interactive marketing for Rapp Digital" currently employed as a sales person at a Gap store.
Talk about diversifying your skillset!

The German parliament which has just adopted DMCA-style provisions to outlaw the circumvention of technical protection measures that control and curtail the fair use of intellectual property (and only needs the other House's assent for part of the new legislation) makes Germany the third country, following Denmark and Greece, to implement the highly controversial "monstrosity" known as the European Union Copyright Directive 2001/29/EC.

This move, allegedly a "propaganda victory" dubbed "lex Bertelsmann" (after the giant media conglomerate expected to line their corporate pockets under the new laws) in furious disapproval by tech-savvy parts of the news media, makes Germany one of the early adopters setting an unfortunate precedent for further European countries like the UK and France whose citizens, and notably developers like Linux kernel guru Alan Cox, will probably not be spared from similar legislation for much longer either.

Although open-source researchers, cyber-rights activists and even the ruling Social Democrats' very own IT experts as well as hardware manufacturers underlined the severe dangers and inconsistencies of this new and doubtful philosophy extending copyright law to reduce many of the general public's rights to insignificance, in a debate focusing only on academic exemptions from the publishers' power grab, the opposition even tried to tighten the government's bill, ignoring widespread experiences of Chilling Effects such as censorship and assaults on the Freedom to Tinker during the past four years under the EUCD's U.S. counterpart of draconian "bad law and bad policy", the flawed Digital Millennium Copyright Act, another overreaching implementation of the

... or CNN...

Who said anything about crimes? I mean, a news organization would never keep government sponsored crimes quiet, would they?

People in the battlefield have things they can't report because it would endanger themselves and the troops they're with. That's nothing new. Soldiers often can't tell even their family exactly where they're going or what they'll be doing ahead of time.

Google is exploding that strategy by taking advantage of the basic strength of the Internet: the ability to go instantly from one place to any other at no cost beyond the basic connection.

Well, at no cost besides yer personal info, like your income +/-5K, age, gender, zip code, job title, and an offer to get spam from yesmail. Imagine if every new site you browsed to ask for this -- yikes!

Dude, the chinese are getting fat because they are eating fries and burgers just like us.

Honestly, what the hell are you talking about? I eat tons of rice and I have lost fat steadily for the last year! (I'm a Canadian euro-mutt, btw, not asian)

It's, for the most part, all about the calories guys. Yes, the GI might influence your hunger a bit, going into ketosis may increase fat burning by some percentage (and accidently going into keto-acidosis will kill you), but every fad diet that works, in the end, comes down to low caloric input.

Atkins, Body for Life, Body Opus, the Zone, etc, etc - all low cal!

Low-fat food is just as nutitrious as high-fat food, but more healthy because it contains less fat.

That has yet to be confirmed. Fat is not necessarily bad.

You eat the same amount of it because your body needs a certain volume to feel full, not because you have to reach a certain fat-content before you can stop eating.

The parent post was implying that your body eats to obtain a certain amount of *calories* before it feels satisfied (not volume). Since fat packs more calories per pound than any other digestible ingredient, you can eat much less fatty food than low-fat food, and yet be just as sated. Furthermore, most fats have a certain chemical component which when broken down in your stomach makes you feel fuller than you really are.

But take all claims with a grain of salt (especially what the government says about healthy eating - they know less than anyone in the field and even the people in the field aren't sure what the answers are).

See:
Thread on food
Comprehensive NY Times article discussing fat in diet

It was starting to piss me off, so I created:
Login: sladotter
Password: slashdot
Feel free to use it.

The REAL link to the article is this:

In Searching the Web, Google Finds Riches

A Brief History of the Multiverse
By PAUL DAVIES
New York Times, April 12, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/opinion/12DAVI.h tml?pagewanted=print&position=top

SYDNEY
Imagine you can play God and fiddle with the settings of the great cosmic machine. Turn this knob and make electrons a bit heavier; twiddle that one and make gravitation a trifle weaker. What would be the effect? The universe would look very different -- so different, in fact, that there wouldn't be anyone around to see the result, because the existence of life depends rather critically on the actual settings that Mother Nature selected.

Scientists have long puzzled over this rather contrived state of affairs. Why is nature so ingeniously, one might even say suspiciously, friendly to life? What do the laws of physics care about life and consciousness that they should conspire to make a hospitable universe? It's almost as if a Grand Designer had it all figured out.

The fashionable scientific response to this cosmic conundrum is to invoke the so-called multiverse theory. The idea here is that what we have hitherto been calling "the universe" is nothing of the sort. It is but a small component within a vast assemblage of other universes that together make up a "multiverse."

It is but a small extra step to conjecture that each universe comes with its own knob settings. They could be random, as if the endless succession of universes is the product of the proverbial monkey at a typewriter. Almost all universes are incompatible with life, and so go unseen and unlamented. Only in that handful where, by chance, the settings are just right will life emerge; then beings such as ourselves will marvel at how propitiously fine-tuned their universe is.

But we would be wrong to attribute this suitability to design. It is entirely the result of self-selection: we simply could not exist in biologically hostile universes, no matter how many there were.

This idea of multiple universes, or multiple realities, has been around in philosophical circles for centuries. The scientific justification for it, however, is new.

One argument stems from the "big bang" theory: according to the standard model, shortly after the universe exploded into existence about 14 billion years ago, it suddenly jumped in size by an enormous factor. This "inflation" can best be understood by imagining that the observable universe is, relatively speaking, a tiny blob of space buried deep within a vast labyrinth of interconnected cosmic regions. Under this theory, if you took a God's-eye view of the multiverse, you would see big bangs aplenty generating a tangled melee of universes enveloped in a superstructure of frenetically inflating space. Though individual universes may live and die, the multiverse is forever.

Some scientists now suspect that many traditional laws of physics might in fact be merely local bylaws, restricted to limited regions of space. Many physicists now think that there are more than three spatial dimensions, for example, since certain theories of subatomic matter are neater in 9 or 10 dimensions. So maybe three is a lucky number that just happened by accident in our cosmic neighborhood -- other universes may have five or seven dimensions.

Life would probably be impossible with more (or less) than three dimensions to work with, so our seeing three is then no surprise. Similar arguments apply to other supposedly fixed properties of the cosmos, such as the strengths of the fundamental forces or the masses of the various subatomic particles. Perhaps these parameters were all fluke products of cosmic luck, and our exquisitely friendly "universe" is but a minute oasis of fecundity amid a sterile space-time desert.

How seriously can we take this explanation for the friendliness of nature? Not very, I think. For a start, how is the existence

Science: A Skeptical Look At The Universe

The NY Times has a short, interesting article on universe theory. The author, Paul Davies, writes: 'This idea of single universe, or single reality, has been around in philosophical circles for centuries. The scientific justification for it, however, is new.' It is quite an interesting read. The author is Physicist and pretty good science writer." Davies is not kind to the universe theory.

no registration required

I'm not anti-American; I've got numerous American friends and colleagues, I've worked in the US for a while, I was in New York last January and will come back to the US for business purposes at least once more this year.

Of course, my message was alluding partly to the American media. My opinion on these is that even alleged serious newspapers such as the New-York Times have degraded standards when it comes to international news. All too often, the international news articles would be more appropriately moved to a "commentary" or "opinion" section.

One troubling fact, for instance, is that all too often these articles dwell on alleged motivations, often implying that actions by foreign people or leaders are motivated by anti-Americanism or envy. Let me given you an example: in a recent article commenting on the opposition from several judicial bodies to a proposal to change French criminal procedure to include plea bargain, the journalist commented: "In France, perceived concessions to English-American forms of law, no matter how slight, have run into strong resistance.". Now, of course, this implies this resistance is motivated by anti-Americanism, ignoring real concerns about constitutional rights such as the right to a fair trial. In short, the journalist attributes motivations to people who cannot defend themselves. Is that reporting, or partisan comment?

I won't even mention the moral judgments routinely doled out as facts. The point is that such so-called reporting is bound to shape the impressions of the reader in a certain direction, in this case to believe that any opposition to the policies of the United States government is motivated by dubious issues.

Now you can understand better what happens in countries such as Saudi Arabia. In those countries, the media and the education system are even more biased. People are taught from their infancy that, say, the Jews are cunning liars. They are taught about the moral superiority of their religion compared to the "immoral" West.

The parallel is striking. Self-righteous biased reporting replacing facts and objective analysis. Of course, the situation in Saudi Arabia is far worse than in any Western countries, but still one should always pay attention to the agendas of the media outlets.

The link to violence? Why do all these people sponsors terrorist groups through so-called "charities"? Where do they find the terrorists? Part of the explanation seems to be that prejudice ingrained from infancy breeds violence.

Albright's speech on Iran-U.S. relations (March 17, 2001) Excerpt:

In 1953, the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran's popular prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons, but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development and it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.

Moreover, during the next quarter century, the United States and the West gave sustained backing to the Shah's regime. Although it did much to develop the country economically, the Shah's government also brutally repressed political dissent.

As President Clinton has said, the United States must bear its fair share of responsibility for the problems that have arisen in U.S.-Iranian relations. Even in more recent years, aspects of U.S. policy toward Iraq during its conflict with Iran appear now to have been regrettably shortsighted, especially in light of our subsequent experiences with Saddam Hussein.

New York Times special report on the events.

If the above two do not make your blood boil, then you are not an American and you can go back to whatever European country you or your ancestors came from.

http://archive.nytimes.com/2003/04/10/technology/1 0POWE.html

trick learned from a previous post:
replace www with archive to avoid the registration
link

so you don't need to register

Los Angeles, April 9

From now on South-Central will start disappearing from maps, and the area will be called South Los Angeles in city documents, correspondence, maps and community plans.

While I certainly agree that the last presidential election had problems, your analysis of the problems could use a little help.

Our popular vote is deliberately irrelevant for the presidential election; this is to prevent a few populous states from running off with the election. Hypothetical situation: the electoral college is thrown out, and two candidates are running for the popular vote in an election. Candidate A has run a very tightly targetted (read: lots of gifts and pork to specific locations) campaign of promises to key population centers, and has almost 100% of the vote in California, Texas and New York, but has only about 40% of the vote in every other state. Even though 47 out of 50 states prefer B, A has a significant chance of winning. This is why we use the electoral college rather than popular vote. If you don't like it, changing the rule requires a constitutional amendment, by all means work towards getting it, many people agree with you.

The Governor of Florida has no obligation to pay attention to the popular vote of the nation, or even Florida (except during his own election, of course). The Governor of Florida is responsible for executing the laws passed by the Florida State Legislature to regulate operation of the election. There are those who allege that he did not do this, that he bent (or allowed his staff and allies to bend) these laws to benefit his brother at the expense of the Gore campaign. Any evidence along these lines is sparse, and it is doubtful that it will ever be proven one way or the other.

The "confusion of the divits" was tragic, and underscored the need of Florida (and most other states for that matter) to reevaluate the systems they use for voting. Many countries do fine just marking an X on a piece of paper and hand counting the pieces of paper. Some countries have interesting higher tech ideas that may be worth considering. Regardless of what gets chosen, it's clear that using a stylus to punch holes in a piece of paper leaves a lot of room for confusion, for not having a clear understanding of the intent of the voter. Minimizing this confusion in the future is very important.

The amount of time they spent investigating was not wasted time IMHO. The amount of time they spent bickering about how to investigate was, and I considered both candidates responsible for that.

Incidentally, are you aware that, in 2001, a group of news agencies carefully examined all the "rejected" ballots in Florida and determined that: A) if Gore had successfully received the partial recount he had requested, he still would have lost; and B) if Bush received the statewide recount that he halfheartedly countersuggested, Gore probably would have won.

So, yes, I consider Bush to be an illegitimate president, simply because a thorough recount indicates that Gore won Florida, and therefore won the election. I don't blame any "ignoring" of the popular vote for the wrong person being in the White House, or any alleged corruption by Bush's brother or campaign manager. I blame simply the sorry state of our voting systems in this country, and the inadequate set of laws governing recounts in the state of Florida.

fyi, go to the linked URL, then edit out the first web addr and change the www to archive and then you'll be able to read the article without that STOOPID registration crap!

ie, change this url:

old url

to this:

new url

fyi, go to the linked URL, then edit out the first web addr and change the www to archive and then you'll be able to read the article without that STOOPID registration crap!

ie, change this url:

old url

to this:

new url