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Because I know it's the only part of the article most people will care about...

Don't worry any more you guys (and Taco).

It's OK.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the heck out of the fantasy/role-play aspect of these games, and recognize that the simulated progress provides the continuity that makes them so compelling. But it is important to be aware that they are habituating and therefore addictive. It is equally important to understand that the maximization of the addictive qualities contributes to a predictable revenue stream.

Just something to think about next time you are considering allowing yourself to become sleep-deprived (which contributes to a lack of judgement), in order to slay that next beast.

Why is there so much linking in Slashdot articles ?

Something I, read somewhere...

Just curious. I'm still fuzzy on why anybody's worried about information being collected. So far, the only problem I've had with it is now my email address is recieving 'special offers!' a couple of times a day.

(warning - unsubstantiated statistics to follow)
as an aside, more sites seem to be moving back to serving ads off of the same server as the page itself (e.g. nytimes). might be due to the with the hosts 127.0.0.1 doubleclick.net trick.

I got a letter published in the NY Times. (scroll to the bottom) I tend to think the media are not taking this seriously (yet) - except the Mercury News which is bashing it frequently. EFF where are you?

As if to prove its point, the article brought up one of those big pop-under ads. That earns the article an immediate right click->'Back' in my book.

* 2002-03-25 16:30:16 First Challenge to CIPA (yro,censorship) (rejected)

From the NY Times article:

"The coalition of plaintiffs includes the American Library Association, the American Civil Liberties Union and Jeffrey L. Pollock, a Republican Congressional candidate who favored mandatory filtering until he discovered that his own campaign's Web site was blocked by one of the most popular filtering programs."

Yes, yes, I do. Enjoy.

The story, no registration required.

And before someone tries to scold me for this again: This is from a partnership that NYT has with Asahi.com, and it adds Asahi.com's ads to the page. Instead of "paying" with your registration, you're "paying" with the act of barely glancing at Asahi.com's ads for a split second before moving on to the actual story. And the New York Times seems to be fine with it, because they set the whole thing up.

I kept it short and sweet. Scroll to the bottom.

Try this:

1. Click the link http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/21/technology/circu its/21DRIV.html from the main page.

2. This brings you to the redirect URL: http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.n ytimes.com/2002/03/21/technology/circuits/21DRIV.h tml

3. Replace the first "www" with the word "college" (or the word "archive").

So it now looks like:

http://college.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://w ww.nytimes.com/2002/03/21/technology/circuits/21DR IV.html

Then go to that page. Voila, no registration required.

For those of you who missed, I am of course referring to this guy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/14/technology/circu its/14MANN.html

Hopefully, you can also make this shoot out the other way, ala Locutus of the Borg ;)

Does anybody remember DEC's
Digital Network Appliance Reference Design aka "shark"?

Microsoft pressured DEC to not sell it - otherwise they would drop support for NT/alpha (which they did anyway...). See here for the details.

Is certification really that important vs. having the experience anyways?

While this suit appears to be just about the Windows trademark, it smells like MSFT is defending the Windows-compatible O/S turf. Other than OS/2, there's yet to be a fully binary-compatible Windows knock-off. That it took a company with IBM's resources to do it is significant. (Although I did just find this: "REAL/32 is a sophisticated, 32-bit, real-time, multi-tasking, multi-user DOS/Windows compatible operating system.")

This brings to mind one of the antitrust lawsuits against IBM, brought by DOJ in 1969 to challenge the monopoly IBM had on the mainframe hardware and software market. IBM was bundling its operating software with the hardware, and would not make it available as separate product. This was intended to prevent rival hardware manufacturers (scroll down a bit) from getting into the IBM-compatible mainframe business.

IBM's business model was classic lock-in. If the software were available to all comers, there'd be no more reason to buy big iron from IBM, except of course FUD ("nobody ever got fired for buying IBM...")

So, although it looks on the surface like a trademark dispute, my gut sez MSFT is out to keep Lindows off the desktop.

The story, no registration required.

You can all find this yourselves by going to this page and looking for the same headline. They have all of the NYT articles without any registration required.

How about a page that doesn't require any login at all?

The story, sans login. This can be replicated for every single NYT story on Slashdot or any other site via this page.

Banks loan money and that's where they primarily make their money.

Had an article today about taming the consumer

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/11/opinion/11ZITT.h tml

It talks about taking control away from the users. It also mentions Microsofts "trusted" PCs. The author seems to think mainstream userse will gladly buy a computer with limited capability if its easier to use and less likely to crash (more like a vcr, gaming system, etc.)

be sure to visit this NYTimes forum to witness how father willian's evile deceptive paid2post ?pr? bots MiSlead J. Public, all day, every day, for 5 years now. IT's the least you can do.

...this article with a bit more detail.

I can see some future biologist doing the the heavy work on decoding this now. And the arguments. of course, if it contained something like the Linux kernel, figuring it out could take awhile.

Heck I am still waiting for folks to find a licensing and copyright statement in the human genome.

;-)

How much ass does Google kick? All of it.

Remember when searching the Internet was hard? The dark days when we relied on dumb-as-sand machine intelligences, like those on the back-ends of AltaVista and Lycos, to rank the documents that matched our keywords? The grim era before Google, when searching was a spew of boolean mumbo-jumbo, NEAR this, NOT that, AND the other?

God, that sucked.

Lucky for the Internet, Google figured out the One True Way to make sense of the Internet, to defeat gamers of the system and send info-free brochureware plummeting to number n - 1 out of n results.

They did it with our help. Google's near-magical ordering of the Internet is built around the notion that computers are good at doing repetitive, uncreative things -- fetishistically counting things, for example -- and rotten at understanding why they're being asked to do these boring tasks. By contrast, human beings are great at understanding why they're doing something, but they're woefully deficient in the do-the-same-thing-perfectly-and-forever department.

AltaVista tried to get computers to do both the repetitive parts (capturing billions of documents) and the creative parts (figuring out what the documents are about). This yielded the largest collection of randomly organized documents in the world, a Web-accessible version of a library where all the books have been re-shelved by axe-grinding illiterates who wanted to make sure that no matter what you were looking for, you'd find porn.

Yahoo tried just the opposite, getting human beings to manually identify and describe all the documents comprising what was meant to be an exhaustive index of all the worthwhile pages on the Web. There were "scaling issues" involved in this laudable effort (for "scaling issues" here, substitute "catastrophic failures"), and over time, Yahoo's directory dwindled to an increasingly marginal sliver of the Internet's vastness. At the rate that Yahoo's army of indexers work, and at the rate that the Internet's unwashed horde of writers is adding to the noosphere, it's only a matter of a few years before every human being alive will have to pass his or her every working hour contributing to Yahoo's index, just to keep its sliver from dwindling into utter pointlessness.

Let humans do what they do; let computers do the same.

Google bridges the divide between human-generated indexes and machine-generated analysis.

Y'see, the Web is full of people like you and me, making links between documents; human beings, making decisions about documents, voting with their links. When I link to some arbitrary document, it's an indication that I think that it's in some way authoritative. When you link to a document I wrote, you're indicating that I'm in some way authoritative. The Internet is already structured in a meaningful way, but that structure is obscured. Google teases out the relationship between the URLs, examining the webs of authority: this person is linked to by 50,000 others, and he links to this other person over here, which indicates that person one is a pretty sharp individual, one who's inspired 50,000 human beings to take time out of their busy schedules to link to him; and person one thinks that person two is on the ball, which suggests that person two knows what she's on about.

It's a best-of-both-worlds solution. The computers at Google are asked to tirelessly count and re-count the number and destination of links on every page that Scooter, the Googlebot, can lay its user-agent on. Those links are made by human beings, doing what they do best, link by link, drip by drip, layering a film of order over the Internet.

The approach works well. Eerily well. Enter a couple of search terms, and biff-bam, the most authoritative documents containing those keywords are served up in an instant. Nearly every document on the Web has a human decision associated with it for Google to glom onto; that's because nearly every document on the Web has a human author. Human authors don't just put documents onto the Web; they put them into the Web, into the meshed hairball of incoming and outgoing links, indicating not only what keywords the document contains, but also who the document's author believes is authoritative, and vice versa.

It's quite elegant.

An imperfect forgettery

Meatspace ASCII, the revered printed word, has many things going for it:

• It's high-resolution: Whether scrawled with a toddler's crayon or hammered out by a quaint, humming Selectric's print-ball, a traditionally printed word is an order of magnitude sharper and better-defined than the phosphors marching across your screen.
• It requires no specialized reader: A printed word can be read by any literate human being during daylight hours without any particular technological assist, specialized readers, or even electricity.
• It is hard to make obsolete: Printed works don't staledate the way that electronic words do. It's difficult to apply "digital rights management" schemes to the printed word that will stymie generations to come with bizarre cryptosystems that seek to circumvent posterity.

As someone in possession of tens of thousands of books, I understand why people get misty and sentimental about dead-tree libraries. As someone who has moved twice in the past 18 months, I feel compelled to point out that the printed word has a couple of major downsides:

• It is fragile: We print books on the same substrate we employ for cleaning our nether regions after excreting. Think about that for a second: Paper is considered degradable enough to flush billions of sheets of it down the crapper every day, and yet we entrust our precious words to a material that auto-incinerates if you put it into contact with oxygen.

  Well, so what? We've got mass production techniques that will let us preserve our most important documents by making millions of copies of them. Which brings us to the next problem:

• It is bulky. Moving-box companies sell specialized shipping boxes for books, boxes that are smaller than all the other species of boxen. That's because books are freakin' heavy. They're made from trees!

Every year, storage media increases in density, decreases in size, and gets cheaper. I can fit all the hard drives of all the computers I've owned, plus all the floppies for all the computers that I owned before hard drives were common, onto the hard drive of my latest laptop, with storage to spare. Hell, most of that stuff will fit on my iPod! The data that previously occupied a roomful of storage devices now fits comfortably in my pocket.

In a world of degradable storage, replicating copies is the surest way to guarantee longevity. Whether your data is in atoms or bits, the more copies you make of it and the more widely you disperse it, the greater the likelihood that your data will persist forever. (That's why Jaron Lanier jokingly proposed encoding printed matter into the DNA of the notoriously prolific cockroach, as a means of ensuring archives through a nuclear war and beyond.)

With bulky printed words, only the commercially successful (and hence prolific) and very lucky works are likely to survive the voyage through history. All the words we write try to crowd into the lifeboat, but only a lucky few survive.

The historical forgettery is something of a blessing, though. Many's the word that's been penned, in casual correspondence or published works, that is best forgotten. I know that I've written a few things I'd rather no one ever saw. Much of it is embarrassing; most of it is banal. History flenses away the great bulk of utterance and leaves behind a barely manageable archive that we can get our heads around.

Words-as-bytes need not be forgotten! Storage is cheap, storage is compact, and the lifeboat has got plenty of room for every jot and tittle keyed into the Internet. Brewster Kahle built an archive with several copies of the Web at different times, using off-the-shelf PCs and standard drives.

This is a good thing, but it's also a pain in the ass. Our embarrassing excesses, drunken rants, typos and brain farts and flames no longer vanish into our sub-consciences, but rather hang around like embarrassing relatives, undeniably ours, with us forever.

There's an upside, of course. The enduring presence of our publicly stated positions acts as an accountability system, making us own up to our errors and perhaps encouraging us to think carefully before putting our fingers on our keyboards. Old Usenet clients used to have a standard warning that would appear the first time you used Usenet to send a message, a dire warning to the effect that your words were about to pass from your computer and onto the computers of thousands of other people, and are you really sure that you've expressed yourself adequately?

Perfect surveillance

Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn features Lionel Essrog, a private detective with Tourette's Syndrome whose obsessive-compulsive illness makes him ideal for long, boring stake outs and wiretap parties. Once the compulsion to listen for a keyword in the soup of a rambling conversation or to continually re-check a staked-out doorway for a suspect has been planted in Lionel's Tourettic brain, he is unable to do anything except listen and watch until the compulsion has been satisfied.

Boring, repetitive, endless tasks don't actually require someone with a compulsive disorder to do them; computers can do them just fine. A computer can sieve through the torrent of packets passing over the Internet and look for keywords like "terrorism" and "anthrax" and "fissile" and "child-porn," then flag them for later consideration by law-enforcement officials at spooky three-letter agencies.

Law enforcement doesn't really need any specialized equipment to surveil the average netizen. Google does it better than anything else possibly could (dirty snitch), and it doesn't cost a cent.

But Google only acts on the public data that human beings are free to link to and that the Googlebot is free to discover. Private documents (email, instant messages, internal memos) are off-limits to Google. Even if you manually poured them down the Googlebot's throat, the absence of incoming or outgoing links to these documents means that they won't be placed in any meaningful context in the Googleverse.

Increasingly, law-enforcement agencies are pushing for (or owning up to) the creation of really creepy spyware projects like Eschelon, Magic Lantern, and Carnivore, systems that are placed on your computer, at your ISP or at a major Internet backbone, and used to indiscriminately capture all of the data they encounter, shunting it off to shadowy bunkers where the secret masters of the universe can use it to shine a light up the skirts of your privacy and, possibly, that of criminals, too.

People are, rightfully, very upset about all of this. Continuous wiretapping of the entire Internet is a revolting idea, something like the Panopticon, a prison where the warders can see your every move from perfect obscurity. It's enough to make you want to draw your blinds and curl up under the sofa.

AltaVista for them, Google for us

But what do they do with all of that data that they collect? Filter it for keywords? Fat chance. The volume of false positives (e.g., people talking about child pornography who aren't child pornographers) far exceeds the volume of actual criminal activity. Even creaky old Lycos gave up on plain-old keyword matching a long, long time ago.

Maybe they manually check it. After all, that approach worked for Yahoo, right? Oh, right, it didn't work. Scratch that.

Then they must use some hybrid approach: human editors and AI (Artificial Intelligence or Almost Implemented, take your pick) working in concert to tweeze out the most relevant material as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Right. AltaVista.

Poor bastards.

since noone has posted it yet, i guess my karma-whoring is as good as any ..

login free link

Try this:

1. Click the link from the main page.

2. This brings you to the redirect URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www .n ytimes.com/2002/03/07/arts/music/07POPL.html

3. Replace the first "www" with the word "college" (or the word "archive").

So it now looks like:

http://college.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://w ww.nytimes.com/2002/03/07/arts/music/07POPL.html

Then go to that page. Voila, no registration required.

Go here:
http://college.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://w ww.nytimes.com/2002/03/07/arts/music/07POPL.html To view the article without registration.

I'm not karma-whoring, I've already hit the cap.

And...

"That is not to mention the White House itself, where no fewer than 35 administration officials have declared that they owned Enron stock at some point, in some cases running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and several senior figures, including the US Trade Representative, Robert Zoellick, and the White House economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, who served as paid Enron consultants before entering government. Mr Lindsey has been particularly active in blending his political and his commercial interests. For much of 2000 he remained on the Enron payroll, even as he was in charge of the economic platform on which Mr Bush was running for president. And late last year, before the catastrophic nature of Enron's problems became public, he took it upon himself to conduct an investigation into the possible wider economic fallout of a major energy company - he insists he had no particular one in mind - going bankrupt overnight." Source: Source: here

In order to understand why these estimates are so large, you have to realize the incredible biodiversity of the plan and insect kingdoms. Plants make up to 22 percent of the total number of species, and insects pretty much account for the rest. Mammals take up considerably less than 1% of that total.

Many of these species have such high evolutionary rates that they can evolve very quickly and often fill extremely specialized roles in a niche environment. Given this high rate of evolution, the mind-bogelling estimates of the total number, and the intrusionary nature of detection techniques, isn't this goal a little too unrealistic? It would seem to me that by the time you finally have catalogued them 'all,' a good percentage will have become extinct and whole bunch of new players will have emerged. In addition, verifying the continued existance of these species whould be an enourmous job.

In order to understand why these estimates are so large, you have to realize the incredible biodiversity of the plan and insect kingdoms. Plants make up to 22 percent of the total number of species, and insects pretty much account for the rest. Mammals take up considerably less than 1% of that total.

Many of these species have such high evolutionary rates that they can evolve very quickly and often fill extremely specialized roles in a niche environment. Given this high rate of evolution, the mind-bogelling estimates of the total number, and the intrusionary nature of detection techniques, isn't this goal a little too unrealistic? It would seem to me that by the time you finally have catalogued them 'all,' a good percentage will have become extinct and whole bunch of new players will have emerged. In addition, verifying the continued existance of these species whould be an enourmous job.

This is old news, most of which was solved in the Cold War. The problem is not so much collecting, and translating information, as getting U.S. policy makers, Departments and Agencies to use the public sources, and use them correctly.

Historically, the US Government has (and may still do) purchase many periodicals, and maps abroad and shipped them to Washington DC, in quantity.

Since early in the Cold War, the U.S. Government via its Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a.k.a. FBIS, has collected, translated and published mountains of TV and radio broadcasts and newspaper articles. Many Universities have the unclassified version of FBIS on CD-Rom if you want to search it.

Journal translations are a more expensive problem. During the Cold War, U.S. translators and scientist worked through complex translations of all kinds. The critical break throughs in stealth designs came from Soviet research, translated and provided to the Lockheed Skunk Works. Skunk Works designed a diamond shaped plane that became the F-117 Stealth Fighter Bomber, the only aircraft to that date designed by electrical engineers.

Today the translation problem is its decentralization. Translations of uncommon works are selected and translation paid for by smaller itelligence offices and units. To my limited knowledge, those translations are bartered and lent between small offices, not centralized and indexed and free for all Intelligence Agencies. This sounds to me like a cost saving exercise to keep the cost of many security cleared translators down.

As for commercial sattelite coverage, U.S. Space Command identified this problem. The U.S. government has a mixture of legal shutter control, such as for images of Isreal, and monopolistic purchases of commercial images of war zones, such as exclusive buying all Ikonos images of Afganistan. This has the benefit of providing a pool of images for release to the media, while securing U.S. Sattelite technical capabilites.

As for maps, although we buy more foreign maps all the time, U.S. maps for much of the world are as good as they get. This is not to declare that they are perfect, but for example, the CIA street map of Moscow was the ONLY Moscow street map that was worth a damn.

This topic is not just old news, this is Cold War news.

-Nathaniel

At the close of 1939, a woman sat on a snow covered log in a Swedish forest and re-read a letter from a chemist in Germany. The chemist had detected barium where he hadn't expected to find any. He wrote her because he couldn't figure out where the barium was coming from. The woman, Liese Mietner, figured out that the chemist, Otto Hahn, had split Uranium. Without Mietner's insight into the underlying physics, Hahn's observation might have been dismissed. So there might indeed be "some crazy chemistry..." taking place.

On the other hand, as soon as Mietner's nephew got back to England from his Christmas break, the British were reproducing Hahn's experiment. Without reproducible results, the results could just be background noise.

See this article from the New York Times: Florida Community Can't Shut Down 'Voyeur Dorm' - October 5, 2001; upheld in the Supreme Court as cited in Wired - Court Rejects VoyeurDorm Case, February 25, 2002.

Granted, it's limited to the discussion of zoning laws in a local jurisdiction, but the courts seem to have held that businesses that only conduct commerce on the Internet are not limited by the regulations of the locations in which elements of the business are physically located.

Also, it's a messy can of worms, but they have definitely found that the Internet is a 'place' different from physical space, so the Elcomsoft lawyers have just made the next step.

Gonna be fun to watch!

take a look at look at THIS for the next target for Valenti and the other useless drones.

"How DARE anyone establish a network where people can share anything without our getting our tithe."

Great timing, this speech from Mundie. The New York Times online" (free registration, blah blah) has an ARTICLE today talking about how IT services are booming.
Two excerpts:
1. "These services include just about everything computer-related except the hardware and software products themselves. Services include maintenance, installation, help-desk support and training, as well as consultation on how to use the technology."
2. "Last year, for the first time, companies worldwide spent more on computer services than on hardware, according to International Data Corporation, part of the International Data Group."
Seems like the people using free tools are going to be seeing the value Mundie and co. don't.

Great timing, this speech from Mundie. The New York Times online" (free registration, blah blah) has an ARTICLE today talking about how IT services are booming.
Two excerpts:
1. "These services include just about everything computer-related except the hardware and software products themselves. Services include maintenance, installation, help-desk support and training, as well as consultation on how to use the technology."
2. "Last year, for the first time, companies worldwide spent more on computer services than on hardware, according to International Data Corporation, part of the International Data Group."
Seems like the people using free tools are going to be seeing the value Mundie and co. don't.

Microsoft pays no taxes now How can they pay less?

So how does downloading music for free respect the rights of the artists who created it?

Well it does, to roughly the same degree as downloading legally purchased music from RIAA sites as documented here. If only every fourth music enthusiast were to send the artists one penny, the artists would still come out way ahead siding with the copyright violators than they would siding with the music cartels. If only one in four hundred send the artists a dollar using fairtunes, the artists come out ahead.

So called music pirates have nothing on the media cartels when it comes to causing the artist direct. verifiable, and potent financial harm, indeed based on the corrilation of P2P usage and CD sales, quite the opposite.

The right link for the article (including images) is here.

Right now I'm converting my Divx collection into a colony of cockroaches... take that MPAA!

Uh huh. That's a deft little attempt on your part to ignore the massive election fraud that happened in Florida, without which Bush wouldn't be calling himself President. Further, Florida was the focal point of legal actions by both sides concerning the election, so in the most real sense the election was decided there. You did hear of a little case called Bush vs. Gore, didn't you?

As for "learning something", here's some starters for you.

1.58 million votes were never recounted even once.

There were also a lot of people who lost their right to vote because they were wrongly labelled as felons by a private company Kathryn Harris hired to scrub the voters lists.

And then there were all the illegal absentee ballots, some postdated as much as a week after the election, that did get counted.

According to the NORC recount, Gore won under all six possible scenarios for a state wide recount. If you count all the votes, Gore wins. If you don't count all the votes, Bush wins. It's as simple as that.

Here are a few:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/01/technology/01DIG I.html?todaysheadlines

http://www.senate.gov/~commerce/press/107-159.html

http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/174828.html

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-847229.html

http://www.theregus.com/content/54/24195.html

Hope you weren't being sarcastic.

Right here:
http://college.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://w ww.nytimes.com/2002/02/28/technology/28SPAC.html

I'm not karma-whoring, I've already hit the cap.

• Dr Nielsen's quick and dirty ways to better usability [Sydney Morning Herald] (Feb. 19)
• Keep the web simple, stupid [BBC] (Feb. 18)
• Miss the Web's early days? Use this time machine to visit! [ZDNet] (Feb. 15)
• The Future of Cellphones Is Here. Sort Of [New York Times] (Feb. 14)
• Olympics Site Not Medal-Worthy [WIRED News] (Feb. 11)

And do put the source after the title, the title is what is interesting here, knowing the source is secodary. This also helps to keep the primary information (title) on one line, if the secodary information (source + date) wraps then that is less of an issue.

they should have tried to stop this.

That guy doesn't look Persian AT ALL. He looks like an arab. What is this garbage? Is this total bullshit?

http://archives.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http:// www.nytimes.com/2002/02/24/magazine/24NITV.html

Here is the registration-free link.

karma whoring is fun for the entire family!

A column in the New York Times (you know the deal) proposes the same thing for this fine city. I think it's a great idea. A gas tax is far less efficient: it will over-encourage (economically) inefficient fuel efficiency improvements, and won't have other good properties, like encouraging people to seek out less-congested roads or travel at less-busy times.

There's a separate reason for distance-based charges: auto insurance. Every car on the road, especially a busy road, imposes a large externality on the others: even drunk drivers are mostly harmless even to themselves if they're lucky enough to stay off busy streets. (It takes two to tango in most accidents, in other words, even if one of them is more "at fault" legally or morally.) Charging for car insurance by the mile, rather than the year, would get more cars off the road and reduce accidents for all of us.

Long live corrective taxes!