Domain: nytimes.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to nytimes.com.
Comments · 17,660
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Re:Scud Missles launched
According to this none of them were
:) [fourth paragraph] -
Re:Victory for Halliburton!
Troll... may I ask why?
Cheney was CEO of Halliburton. When he stated he was going to be running for VP of the US he stepped down to being Halliburton's chairman of the Board. Then left Halliburton in August of 2000. What's interesting is Halliburton was super nice to him and awarded him $20,000,000.00 (despite his origional severence package required he be awarded only $2,100,000.00 and required him to stay until he was 62. He's 59.) He owns more than a million shares (over $10,000,000.00 worth) of this commpany. Why was Halliburton so nice to Cheney despite his leaving before he was supposed to? Large companies aren't really known for being nice guys to anyone (especially former employees) unless it's in their best interest.
http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/08/12/ cheney.parachute.ap/
You'll also note than Halliburton was busted for extremely fishy and illegal accounting in July of 2002.
http://money.cnn.com/2002/07/10/news/cheney_lawsui t/
Well somewhere this vanished and accoring to http://www.judicialwatch.org/2221.shtml the whitehouse stopped the court order illegally. I'm not sure if I believe that story, but I haven't heard anything about this case since July of 2002. Anyone know anything about what happened to the charges?
Since Bush was elected (or placed in office by Florida's Supreme Court, rather) Halliburton has been handed many federal contracts worth many billions of dollars.
I simply can't stand the thought of my tax dollars and my friends in the military are being abused for the profit of someone who already has more money than anyone could need.
For more interesting articles concerning Halliburton and Cheney:
http://www.observer.co.uk/bush/story/0,8224,759141 ,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,912515 ,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/13/business/13HALL. html -
Re:Not necessarily the war yet
This is an excellent article supporting this point. (google partner link).
Come home safely. -
And you read this...
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Re:Insert Internet Inventor Joke HereWell, strictly speaking he wasn't the loser...
Yes, he was. Twit.
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Re:Insert Internet Inventor Joke HereHe won in 2000, after all...
No, he didn't. Twit.
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Scalia says "No, there aren't"
"Justice" Scalia has explained that you are wrong. You see, "Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires." But don't worry; he promises to protect the constitutional minimum. I feel safer already.
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Re:Different at the College Level...Why?
To avoid differing versions, costly rewrites and so on, most publishers give their books to a few select committees in Texas (and California) for approval and only if they pass there do they go on to the rest of the country.
Woo, Texas, where the right-wing trolls control the education system.
Anyone else sick of this damn state too? -
Re:Historical strips!The main reason we can't find the originals anymore is because the newspapers have been discarded. The libraries screwed up and threw out the papers after microfilming everything, in the name of preserving "intellectual content" and "saving shelf space".
Note that microfilm is black & white only and often of poor quality.
You can read more about it in Nicholson Baker's controversial "Double Fold", excerpts at nytimes.com or bookreporter.com.
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Re:Better Investment
...yet the guy who invented that is probably lounging on his own island right now.
So now tell me what's dumb.
How about giving it a buzzword-laden plug [no reg!*] in the Pre-Christmas Sunday Edition Special Section Year In Ideas 2002 [no reg!*] and then trying to charge *$2.95 for access to it a year later?
This little siggy stayed home. -
Re:Better Investment
...yet the guy who invented that is probably lounging on his own island right now.
So now tell me what's dumb.
How about giving it a buzzword-laden plug [no reg!*] in the Pre-Christmas Sunday Edition Special Section Year In Ideas 2002 [no reg!*] and then trying to charge *$2.95 for access to it a year later?
This little siggy stayed home. -
Re:Why "RF based/cash replacement? Metrocard
Speaking of which, they are now eliminating tokens completely.
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Re:it's psychosomatic...
Diabetes used to be a thing adults got. It wasn't until the FDA recommended that we make starches the basis of our diet that we had a problem with childhood diabetes. What if it's all been a big fat lie? is a really excellent article which was in the NY times on this very subject.
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Apple's unique ability to do what they do
It occurred to me the other day that Apple is steering us towards the shiny (brushed) metal future that countless science fiction books, movies, TV shows, movies and conceptual art has foretold.
The clean look that surrounded factious HAL's world in 2001: A Space Odyssey is becoming Apple's reality.
The stores are just an extension of this; they have managed to create, as others have pointed out, an environment that is conducive to buying because it doesn't seem designed for selling. Yes, it shows off the products, but it doesn't show them off the obvious here's-the-damn-product way that car showrooms do, and it doesn't layer products on shelves like Wal-Mart (and most everyone else). It just sets the products up the ideal space you would want to use them, a sterile (yet warm and comfortable) studio somewhere overlooking the flying-car future of New York.
It reminds me of Gerhard Richter, the fussed-over German painter, who lives in such an environment: homely sterility.
But what Apple does is pretty much impossible for any else to replicate: They are able to create such an environment because they not only dictate what is sold (Wal-Mart does this) but because they make (i e design) most everything they sell. Additionally they set the most-always-followed president for the design of products that accompany what they make: Their human interface design stretches beyond the software that runs on their OS, it encompasses most every product and most every product box that they sell.
Because of this kinetic link not just between what they make and what they sell but what other people make for them to sell, Apple is uniquely able to create the Apple Store, something no Windows PC maker could because of the mesh that makes up not just their software or hardware world, but any front-end retail attempts.
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How about this jihadder who wants to be at MS
The ny times says that this guy wants to be a suicide bomber but that his other dream is to be a programmer for Microsoft.
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Puritans
And as we probably all learned at school, the a distinguishing feature of Puritans is their faith in providence.
How long before Witchfinder General is added to Mr Ashcroft's job description? -
Re:Where do we get the H?
it takes nearly five gallons of crude oil to produce one bushel of corn
I call bullshit on this one.
There is no way it takes 5 gallons of crude oil to create a bushel of corn. A gallon of crude costs about $ .50, while a bushel of corn costs under $2.00. If this was true, every corn farmer in America would have gone broke a long time ago.
From this article:
One need look no further than the $190 billion farm bill President Bush signed last month to wonder whose interests are really being served here. Under the 10-year program, taxpayers will pay farmers $4 billion a year to grow ever more corn, this despite the fact that we struggle to get rid of the surplus the plant already produces. The average bushel of corn (56 pounds) sells for about $2 today; it costs farmers more than $3 to grow it. But rather than design a program that would encourage farmers to plant less corn -- which would have the benefit of lifting the price farmers receive for it -- Congress has decided instead to subsidize corn by the bushel, thereby insuring that zea mays dominion over its 125,000-square mile American habitat will go unchallenged.
From this article:
Growing the vast quantities of corn used to feed livestock in this country takes vast quantities of chemical fertilizer, which in turn takes vast quantities of oil -- 1.2 gallons for every bushel. So the modern feedlot is really a city floating on a sea of oil.
From this article:
The corn, in breathtaking defiance of economic common sense, sells for 50 a bushel less than it costs to produce, without regard to the foregone value of the water.
From this blurb about Frank Moore:
The amount of fossil fuel needed to produce one bushel of corn has been estimated at anywhere from one to six gallons.... Today's farm requires fossil fuels to manufacture fertilizer, power machinery and transport the final product. The short-term benefit is the corn gets to market more economically. The long-term effects are pollution, soil destruction and the depletion of a non-renewable resource.
These are just a few references availabe. The point is that corn production is subsidized and it uses a huge number of natural resources. In the words of South Park's portrayal of Johnny Cochrane, "this does not make sinse". -
Obligatory free link
no registration required link in printer friendly format (otherwise it's five pages)
More images from probe homepage -
Thanks Google!
Thanks to this google link, you don't need to register: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/11/business/11PRIV
. html?ex=1047963600&en=b851b67c98e9787e&ei=5062&par tner=GOOGLE -
Well...
Is this Mitchell a man or a woman? It's hard to keep them straight these days
Well, he has a beard, for what it's worth... -
Reg-free link here...
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Reg Free Link
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Re:Antisocial author
Here's a related story in New York Times IM Expands to Work
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Just replace www with archiveYou can access all www.nytimes.com without registration by just replacing www with archive.
Such as archive
I have proxomitron on my pc do this automatically.
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Sounds like a good ideaI'd like to start out by saying that I'm all for innovation and I hope that AOL/TW can actually make this work. It certainly changes the way you watch tv when you can set your own schedule. This service will have an advantage over Tivo in that you won't have to remember to record shows. Just search through the archive and press play.
I do see some reasons why I will still keep my Tivo:- Networks determine the availability of their shows
- No ability to save a local copy
- No commercial skipping
- They'll be monitoring your tastes:
"Or one household might see a commercial for a luxury car while another sees a pitch for an economy model. 'Increase the effectiveness of advertising by sending different ads to different homes,' the demonstration promises."
For those of you wearing tin foil hats that don't want to register go here -
Other linksThanks to Google news search:
NY Times Technology (no reg req): AOL Is Planning a Fast-Forward Answer to TiVo
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I Love Google
nytimes annoying free registration not required here.
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Re:They listened to MY work!
Whoa. Umm. Is this a troll? You posted as Anonymous Coward instead of "the real Seth Finklestein" who has "uid#582901". Interestingly, however, on www.slashdot.org/~Seth%20Finkelstein (that's how the NY Times article spells Seth's last name), I notice that the real UID appears to be 90154; #582901 has the same user info (including a pointer to #90154) but less highly modded comments. Hm.
Your post has the kind of shameless self-aggrandizement we're supposed to suspect coming from Seth; this seems like too easy of a setup, too obvious a troll waiting for someone to say "shut up Seth". Anyway, it's hard for the rest of us to figure out what's going on but michael makes a decent case at www.stalkedbyseth.com, and if they keep him around they must think he's right at least a little.
So. Um. Mod parent troll?
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google news link
Here is the link provided by google news to the NY times article:
In a Digitally Animated World, Oscar Stands Rigid
later, -
Correct Link
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Evaluating sources and providing narrativesMaybe the problem has something to do with how science tries to be objective and rather disembodied- which can make it tough for humans (predisposed to play psychological games with each other) to relate. An untestable hypothesis: in the past, survival may have depended as much on accepting sensationalistic narratives and understanding tribal intrigues as applying critical thinking and technology, if not more so. Carl Sagan and Feynman added a personal touch to the quest for understanding. Many people are entertained by the story of a creative underdog trying to get at the truth.
That said- if mainstream media would do a better job of citing sources, critically evaluating credibility (even when less credible sources say more entertaining things), and giving reasons and deductions instead of rote facts, people might learn that science is a process, not a dogma.
The same problem exists for science ed- if you don't tell students how we got from Darwin's observations and theories to empirical tests, the compelling stories of trusted parents and friends will outweigh the rare knowledgeable biology teacher. For every fact, people should have an idea of the process of thinking behind it. (And maybe the world could use more stories of heros who succeed with knowledge, rather than manipulation and smokescreens.)
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They cover the wrong subject in the wrong way
I see a lot of science articles from The New York Times, especially linked to on slashdot, but when I read the articles I generally think they are awful. The reason is that reading them gives you no substantive understanding of the science that is going on. They often seem to choose subjects like string theory or loop quantum gravity, which are extremely complex, and then try to explain them at an elementary school science level. This is simply a futile endevor and they end up saying basically nothing. I am working on my Ph.D. in theoretical physics and even I can't often tell from the article what the theory claims, and often I know of several theories they might be talking about and am not even sure which one it is because the coverage is so vague. I can't see how anyone could read these and getting anything of use from them. Frankly I don't know how you could explain string theory to someone at such a basic level, even in an entire book, much less a news paper article. Especially when even many physicists (myself included) don't know that much about it.
I think they should really focus on science they can explain, and make sure to explain how these things are based in fact and come from experimental evidence. This is the basis of the difference between science and pseudoscience. Bob Park, a frequent crusader against pseudoscience, hypothesises that these insubstantial, vague accounts of outlandish modern physics that are often given to laymen make science sound basically indistinguishable from pseudoscience, and thus help bolster beleif in pseudoscience. I'm not sure I beleive this, but I do think it's a possibility. A good example is an author I heard interviewed who wrote a book about how ESP could be based on quantum entanglement. This is an absurd claim if you know anything about entanglement and quantum decoherence, but does sound sort of reasonable if you just take some very vague notions about quantum mechanics (namely, it's hell-a-weird).
Does good science make interesting journalism? Well, I think a lot of it can if it's well told, because science is fundementally a mystery story, and most people like mysteries. Just look at the success of CSI. I think we must stick to work that has widely acknoledged validity, though, and to work which is experimentally grounded. We must also get through that when you read "A Breif History of Time" you are not getting the whole picture. Gernally, being ignorant of something is far less hazzardous when you're aware of your ignorance.
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More on Stambler
A very interesting (and insightful) account of the first two days of the trial can be found here
Not only did the other parties settle, they settled for huge amounts of money. First Data settled for $4 million. This, of course is on top of nearly a million dollars in other settlements from other victims, and on top of a $2.6 million settlement for Stambler's previous bogus patent. A nice way to make $7.5 million. -
God and science> So Young Earthism is bad science, **not religion**.
I disagree. Science is using observation to determine the viability of hypotheses. Here are a few reasons to believe the Biblical account:
This paper states humanity likely moved out of the Middle East very recently...
Using rare mutations to estimate population divergence times: A maximum likelihood approach
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 95, pp. 15452-15457, December 1998
http://www.rannala.org/papers/PNAS98.pdf
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In this paper we propose a method to estimate
by maximum likelihood the divergence time between two populations,...
When applied to three cystic fibrosis mutations, the estimatorRD
could not exclude a very recent time of divergence among three
Mediterranean populations. On the other hand, the divergence
time between these populations and the Danish population was
estimated to be, on the average, 4,500 or 15,000 years, assuming
or not a selective advantage for cystic fibrosis carriers, respectively.
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Evolutionary Genetics tries to estimate how 'old' our current species is by dividing the number of mutations observed in a specific DNA region with the estimated mutation rate. The generally accepted figure is around 150,000 years, but...
A high observed substitution rate in the human mitochondrial DNA control region.
Nat Genet. 1998 Feb;18(2):109-10.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ent rez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9090380&dopt=Abstract
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The rate and pattern of sequence substitutions in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region (CR) is of central importance to studies of human evolution and to forensic identity testing. ...We compared DNA sequences ... an empirical rate of 1/33 generations, or 2.5/site/Myr. This is roughly twenty-fold higher than estimates derived from phylogenetic analyses. This disparity cannot be accounted for simply by substitutions at mutational hot spots, suggesting additional factors that produce the discrepancy between very near-term and long-term apparent rates of sequence divergence. The data also indicate that extremely rapid segregation of CR sequence variants between generations is common in humans, with a very small mtDNA bottleneck. These results have implications for forensic applications and studies of human evolution.
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This paper shows how genetics is now used to determine the human family tree:
The Human Family Tree: 10 Adams and 18 Eves
NY Times Article (free subscription required)
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national /science/05 0200sci-genetics-evolution.html
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The human genome is turning out to be a rich new archive for historians and prehistorians ...
Population geneticists believe that the ancestral human population was very small -- a mere 2,000 breeding individuals ...
But the family tree based on human mitochondrial DNA does not trace back to the thousand women in this ancestral population. The tree is rooted in a single individual, the mitochondrial Eve, because all the other lineages fell extinct. ...
The same is true of the Y chromosome tree, a consequence of the fact that in each generation some men will have no children, or only daughters,
This ancestral human population lived somewhere in Africa, geneticists believe, and started to split up some time after 144,000 years ago, give or take 10,000 years, the inferred time at which both the mitochondrial and Y chromosome trees make their first branches. ...
The tree is rooted in a single Y chromosomal Adam, and has 10 principal branches, Dr. Cavalli-Sforza reports. ...
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Besides the curious fact of the "single-ancestor" DNA bottleneck existing at all, it applies to both male and female branches, at around the same time and the previous paper about the mtDNA mutation rate applies to the 144,000 years estimate. (i.e. divide-by-20).
Continuing on, the paper talks about how the male lineage began to descend. It refers to the Y-chromosome originator of the lineage as 'Adam'...
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Of these sons of Adam, the first three (designated I, II and III) are found almost exclusively in Africa. Son III's lineage migrated to Asia and begat sons IV-X, who spread through the rest of the world ...
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In other words, the Y-Chromosome ancestor was:
- A single male chromosomal ancestor
- With three descendant male lineages
- The third male lineage had seven sub-lineages
- These seven sub-lineages from the third lineage populate all the world except the Middle East and Africa.
This is shown quite clearly by this chart accompanying the NY Times article.
The Bible says the same thing: [This is the only section of this post from the Bible]
- We are all descended from a single male ancestor - Noah
- Noah had three male descendants
- One of the three sons, Japeth, had seven sons
- The Japeth lineage (his seven sons and their descendants) populated all the world except the Middle East and Africa.
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The Bible. Genesis 10:
1 Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood.
2 The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras....
Note: 7 sons in all
5 By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.
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The Bible says the world, created about 6000 years ago, was destroyed by a worldwide flood around 5000 ago. It describes how, in the aftermath of the flood, human lifespan began declining at an rapid rate - from close to 1000 years before the flood, to around 100-200 years within a few hundred years after the flood ended. This could be due to highly increased radiation during the aftermath of the flood causing DNA damage. The increased radiation could account for the 1/3/7 lineage being so distinct (due to increased mutations during the immediate aftermath).
One causative factor in radiation release could simply be the earth being torn up during the flood - the Bible describes the earth as a single continent before the flood (Genesis 1: "And God said, "Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear." And it was so. 10 God called the dry ground "land," and the gathered waters he called "seas." ), multiple continents after ("islands of the Gentiles" - a common term to refer to the rest of humanity). The radiation release could not only account for shortened lifespan and the reason for the 1/3/7 lineage pattern being distinct - it could also skew techniques like radiocarbon dating.
Some other facts:
- The oldest records of civilizations date back around 5000 years
- The oldest living trees (determined by tree rings on the same tree - not radiocarbon dating) are around 5000 years as well. Though there is no reason trees can't live longer.
- Flood stories exist in many (most?) world cultures
- To account for problems with evolutionary theory, a new theory, Punctuated Equilibrium has gained prominence
Two last things: You can't *prove* God -- the Bible says God is pleased by faith. Similarly, you can't prove atheism either. But with evidence like the three papers above, science is consistent with belief in the words of Jesus Christ. And his words are those that are recorded in the Bible - and a lot has been done in his name - the crusades, inquisitions, racism - that is against his words.
- A single male chromosomal ancestor
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They listened to MY work![I made a difference! The court listened! And, screw karma, it is sickening hypocrisy for Michael Sims to post the above article, because of his hijacking the censorware.org website and breaking Censorware Project legal trust.
See also Bennett Haselton's comments on the hijacking and Jonathan Wallace's comments]Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 10:41:18 -0400
From: Seth Finklestein
To: Seth Finklestein's InfoThought list
Subject: IT: Federal censorware law down! (and Seth Finkelstein's reports!)
I'm ecstatic that the court seems to have used my pioneering efforts in anticensorware work as one factor in its decision, in passages such as these:
Another technique that filtering companies use in order to deal with a structural feature of the Internet is blocking the root level URLs of so-called loophole Web sites. These are Web sites that provide access to a particular Web page, but display in the user's browser a URL that is different from the URL with which the particular page is usually associated. Because of this feature, they provide a loophole that can be used to get around filtering software, i.e., they display a URL that is different from the one that appears on the filtering company's control list. Loophole Web sites include caches of Web pages that have been removed from their original location, anonymizer sites, and translation sites.
Caches are archived copies that some search engines, such as Google, keep of the Web pages they index. The cached copy stored by Google will have a URL that is different from the original URL. Because Web sites often change rapidly, caches are the only way to access pages that have been taken down, revised, or have changed their URLs for some reason. For example, a magazine might place its current stories under a given URL, and replace them monthly with new stories. If a user wanted to find an article published six months ago, he or she would be unable to access it if not for Google's cached version.
Some sites on the Web serve as a proxy or intermediary between a user and another Web page. When using a proxy server, a user does not access the page from its original URL, but rather from the URL of the proxy server. One type of proxy service is an anonymizer. Users may access Web sites indirectly via an anonymizer when they do not want the Web site they are visiting to be able to determine the IP address from which they are accessing the site, or to leave cookies on their browser.(8) Some proxy servers can be used to attempt to translate Web page content from one language to another. Rather than directly accessing the original Web page in its original language, users can instead indirectly access the page via a proxy server offering translation features.
As noted above, filtering companies often block loophole sites, such as caches, anonymizers, and translation sites. The practice of blocking loophole sites necessarily results in a significant amount of overblocking, because the vast majority of the pages that are cached, for example, do not contain content that would match a filtering company's category definitions. Filters that do not block these loophole sites, however, may enable users to access any URL on the Web via the loophole site, thus resulting in substantial underblocking.
This is an aspect which I've been trying to get into the censorware debate for ages. I'm overjoyed that the court heard, they got it, they listened, and it helped strike down Federal censorware law! These are the reports which seem to have made a difference in the above:
BESS's Secret LOOPHOLE: (censorware vs. privacy & anonymity) - a secret category of BESS (N2H2), and more about why censorware must blacklist privacy, anonymity, and translators
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/loophole.phpBESS vs The Google Search Engine (Cache, Groups, Images) - BESS bans cached web pages, passes porn in groups, and considers all image searching to be pornography.
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/google.phpSmartFilter's Greatest Evils - why censorware must blacklist privacy, anonymity, and language translators
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/smartfilter/greate stevils.phpThe Pre-Slipped Slope - censorware vs the Wayback Machine web archive - The logic of censorware programs suppressing an enormous digital library.
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/general/slip.php-- Seth Finklestein Consulting Programmer http://sethf.com
Anticensorware Investigations: http://sethf.com/anticensorware/
Seth Finklestein's Infothought list - http://sethf.com/infothought/
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/19/technology/circu its/19HACK.html
TROLL ALERT! I now seem to have attracted troll imposters. The real Seth Finklestein has uid#582901 -
Article Sans Reg
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Re:Non-registration link
And HERE'S the link to the first page instead of the second =P
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Re:Non-registration link
for those who would prefer to go to the FIRST PAGE of the article instead of the second page, here you go
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Non-registration link
I'm sure everyone would prefer to read the article here since it doesn't require a username or password.
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The evidenceFor the record, PlanetGamecube may not be the best source for unbiased info.
Allow me to bring you up to speed:
The X-Box's woes, and the price of Microsoft's sacrifices.
Heck, a quick search on Google has yielded this, and that's just scratching the surface.
As for relationships, this is a good article to start.
I'm certain a bit more hunting around Google News will yield what you're looking for.
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If Unix is dead...
If Unix is dead, then we're all zombies... Imagine the movie potential! I can see it now...
Zombie Process: Zombies in Manhattan. Zombies from around the world arise from the dead and "kill -9" countless in the relentless pursuit of the Dell Dude.
Zombie Process II: Zombies in Redmond. After successfully slaying the Dell Dude, the zombies point their efforts towards Steve Ballmer. Lots of loud, undiscernable yelling would take place this one.
Zombie Process III: Zombies Everywhere. In this exciting wrap-up to the trilogy, the zombies chase around anyone who is found to be using a Windows computer. Mayhem breaks loose in server rooms and homes across the world, and in the end Unix systems supplant all Windows systems. What a happy ending to the trilogy!
Zombie Process IV: Zombies in Space. In a somewhat odd extension of the trilogy, this movie would have an unclear, poorly-defined plot, but it would take place in space! Lots of exciting lasers and spaceships for sure. -
First Google link
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Re:Humane ConsiderationsSecond, inspections worked pretty well from '91-'98, with no real help from Iraq.
On what do you base that conclusion? Between 1991 and 1998, UNSEC passed more than a dozen resolutions condemning Iraq's defiance, and demanding immediate compliance. It finally got to the point in 1998 where Iraq simply declared that they would no longer cooperate with UNSCOM at all. How do you interpret that as "worked pretty well?"
Something near 80% of stockpiles destroyed due to inspections, right?
We haven't the foggiest idea. We have no idea what Iraq's stockpiles consist of. The figure may be 100%, or it may be 10%. We have no way of knowing, because Iraq refuses to tell us.
And even if inspections aren't good at finding secret caches of buried weapons, they seem pretty good at preventing new development.
According to Iraqi defectors, this is not the case. According to defectors, Iraq's nuclear program in 1994 was stronger than it had been before the war:Four years later, the international agency was so certain that it had eradicated the Iraqi nuclear program that it wanted to end aggressive inspections in favor of passive "monitoring." Then a slew of defectors came out of Iraq ? including Hussein Kamel al-Majid, the son-in-law of Saddam Hussein who led the Iraqi program to build weapons of mass destruction; Wafiq al-Samarrai, one of Saddam Hussein's intelligence chiefs; and Khidhir Hamza, a leading scientist with the nuclear weapons program. These defectors reported that outside pressure had not only failed to eradicate the nuclear program, it was bigger and more cleverly spread out and concealed than anyone had imagined it to be.
(Kenneth Pollack, "A Last Chance to Stop Iraq," New York Times editorial, February 21, 2003.)
In the late 1990's, American and international nuclear experts again concluded that the Iraqi nuclear program was dormant: yes, the scientists were still working in teams; yes, they still had all of the plans; and yes, they probably were hiding some machinery ? but they were not making any progress. Then another batch of important defectors escaped to Europe and told Western intelligence services that after the inspectors left Iraq in 1998, Saddam Hussein had started a crash program to build a nuclear weapon and that the Iraqis had devised methods to hide the effort.
I do agree that it would be a lot easier with genuine Iraqi compliance, but that's a lot to expect of any country in a region so volatile.
I'm a little unclear on this point. Are you saying that we (by "we" I mean both the Allies and UNSEC) should back down from our demands on Iraq which have stood since 1991, and which Iraq has accepted in full, because they're a lot to ask?
Given that any government must have the at-least-tacit approval of its people, what is so unnatural about democracy?
Your premise is incorrect. A government does not need the approval of its people. The Taliban did not have the approval of its people; it stayed in power as long as it did through domination and intimidation. The Baath government does not have the approval of its people; it has stayed in power as long as it has through domination and intimidation. (Incidentally, the House of Saud doesn't have the approval of its people either, but it's stayed in power through appeasement rather than through violence. Better, but still hardly legitimate in the western sense of the word.)
Any time these two things coexist, democracies sprout like weeds.
Democracies have never sprouted like weeds. Ever.
I don't buy that a single man, or the Ba'ath party, can forcibly subjugate an entire country.
Denial is not a valid argument. ;-) -
In related news... A Virtual March on WashingtonThe Win Without War Coalition organized today the first ever Virtual March on Washington. Opposed the potential war on Iraq, the protesters have organized over 85,000 emails, faxes, and phone calls, translating to more than one phone call per minute to each Senate office.
The New York Times, the BBC, The Washington Post, and others While not using any new technology, the protest was organized completely via the Internet, and could be indicative of the way digital culture is blending with traditional culture every passing day."
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Article Incomplete - Cost not $18
The article at the Washington Post is not as complete as the one at the New York Times. In particular, AOL is trying to sell a value-added service to consumers who already have broadband service.
"In the next few weeks, AOL is going to introduce an improved $15-a-month service, with a bundle of content and services meant for people who already buy broadband connections from their cable or telephone companies. That offering will include a limited version of MusicNet that will let users download 20 songs a month and listen to another 20 one time."
For those who don't want the regular AOL, "for $8.95 a month, users will be able to listen to a catalog of music, now at 250,000 songs and growing, on their computers... The standard $8.95 version of the service will allow users to listen to an unlimited number of songs on demand ...They can also download the songs to their computers for higher sound quality and the ability to listen to them when not on the Internet." What you will not be able to do for $8.95 is burn CD's from the downloaded songs. "A subscriber can listen to MusicNet's downloads on no more than two computers. They also cannot be copied to other devices or sent to other people."
The premium service is $17.95 and allows the burning of 10 songs a month in addition to unlimited listening. -
no surprises
Sun's really got to rethink the way it does business, i think. there's an interesting article at NYT on the topic. There was something in there (that I can't find now to save my life) about how Sun was going to do subscription-style pricing, but at a rate more competitive than Microsoft.
There's also interesting discussion in there and here about the company's dependence on proprietary, expensive hardware in today's world of home 192-node beowulf clusters. ;) -
Registration Free Google Link to NYTimes Article
Thanks to http://news.google.com/ here it is:
A Radio Chip in every consumer product -
What happens to privacy when...But what happens to privacy when everything you buy can be tracked from store floor to door?
But what happens to privacy when everything you read can be tracked?
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no registration neccesary.
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Non reg Link