Slashdot Mirror

Jeff Bates, executive editor of Slashdot.org, said that he had no reason to doubt the report and that he was aware that Mr. Katz had known Junis for a long time. "I know that Jon has reason to trust him if nothing else," he said.

Mr. Katz said Junis had agreed to take part in a public question-and- answer session on Slashdot.org soon, once things settle down a bit in Afghanistan.

Katz's Deserved Embarassment and Humiliation, set in NY Times Roman

A little while back there was an article on Slashdot and a debate over the virtues of homosexuality and whether or not Rob Malda's ass is "open" enough. Well here are some more cumshots. It seems an article in the New York Times (free reg) says JonKatz swallows and asks for seconds. "You always get a little more when you press the prostate with your finger" giggled the girlish JonKatz. michael could only reply with "I'M MODDING YOU DOWN UNLESS YOU GIVE ME HOT GOBBETS OF MAN PROTEIN!!!" and was severely beaten by the people who pay his salary.

Guess this story adds another reasonably reputable source to the mix...

My theory is that the difference between Slashdot and other media is that they never correct themselves, no matter how inaccurate, so readers are left with a false picture of accuracy.

I can't resist: Cheap Irony: Are you now going to correct yourself on the subject of corrections?

Now, what merits a correction, that's lots of fun fodder for media analysis. Of course you won't have to pay out on the challenge, because this sort of article isn't the type of material that is thought to require a correction (but if you were fair, you'd send me a Thinkgeek T-shirt anyway for catching you out above :-)).

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Gosh, it must be a slow news day, huh? Maybe there isn't stuff going on like spyware reading your forms, system config, and search engine queries.

Sigh. Well, I've got something more up their alley. There you go, guys. I've got extra karma, so one of you can submit it.

(The article can be found here. Excerpts follow.)

... It plans to have its first products finished sometime next year. .... By driving down the cost of G.P.S. technology, the company says, it expects to help "everyday people track everyday things." ... It is the first start-up venture for Mr. Wozniak since he closed his previous company, Cloud 9, a maker of high-end consumer remote control devices, in 1988.

While Mr. Jobs went on to found Next Inc., bought Pixar (news/quote), and then returned to Apple as its chief executive in 1997, Mr. Wozniak, now 51, has largely remained on the sidelines. That has made him unusual in a hothouse business and technology culture that is characterized by serial entrepreneurs, few of them walking away after either success or failure. Instead, he has occupied himself with private investments and has taught computer education for elementary through high school students in the Los Gatos, Calif., school district, where he lives.

The new company will not initially announce what products it is planning and Mr. Wozniak said this week it was likely that it would not at first market its own products. It will instead seek licensing and marketing arrangements with other consumer electronics and related companies.

He said one goal was to take technologies that are now costly and reduce them in price so they could be sold in consumer markets. ...
Mr. Wozniak said he had enjoyed simply being a consumer of new technologies for more than a decade. But last year, a friend visited and began talking about an idea that used G.P.S. in a strange way and he found himself excited by the prospects of doing something with this.

"Sometimes I say that and I'm not really serious," he remarked, "but this time I was really serious."

...
Mr. Galanos said his firm had been excited about both the company's technology idea and the possibility of backing Mr. Wozniak.

"After all how many times will Steve jump on something new again?" he said.

The new company will not initially announce what products it is planning and Mr. Wozniak said this week it was likely that it would not at first market its own products. It will instead seek licensing and marketing arrangements with other consumer electronics and related companies.


appears that unlike the first Apples, Woz plans on licensing these things at first. proving he has at least learned something!

The extraordinary thing about this is how lightly CSFB (and the street as a whole) is getting off. The profits from inappropriate IPO allocations alone substantially exceeded the penalties.

No penalties will ever be assessed against the hundreds of analysts who hyped internet stocks in exchange for those companies giving their firms a slice of the investment banking business.

Ask any analyst from any wall street firm, sell side or buy side, and they will tell you that everybody does this. Compare the SEC's treatment of big firms doing outwardly crooked things to their treatment of the little guy.

It looks like they're too busy busting 15-year olds to attack the real stock manipulators.

IN-CAR information services like the OnStar system from General Motors are starting to duplicate some of the Web's most useful offerings: driving directions, stock quotes, customized news and weather reports. Now, some of the companies behind these services are adding advertising and "mobile commerce" to the mix.

The companies say their subscribers will not be subject to the dashboard equivalent of junk e-mail and annoying pop-up ads. Consumer concerns about privacy, along with the focus on driver distractions prompted by the spread of cellphones, mandate a conservative approach. But the possibilities may be too interesting to ignore.

For example, Wingcast, a joint venture of Ford Motor and Qualcomm, plans to offer a "gas station locator" feature soon after its service is introduced in mid-2002, said Mark Lieberman, vice president for business development. Subscribers can set up a personal profile on the service's Web site, then designate their preferred gas station chains. When fuel is running low, a computerized voice will notify the driver and offer directions to the nearest station.

Similar features of these so-called telematics services might let the driver know which gas station in the area has the lowest prices, whether a favorite department store is having a sale or when a new CD by a favorite artist is available at a music outlet nearby. Services like Wingcast could potentially charge companies for the right to send marketing messages to their customers, or get a cut when a transaction takes place.

"To me, it's an opt-in kind of service," Mr. Lieberman said. "It can't be just like the Web advertising we're so used to that just comes across your screen. It's got to be meaningful to that person and relevant when you're in a car environment. It's got to meet the profile of the customer."

The heart of telematics services are functions that guide the driver and summon help in case of an emergency. Using cellular technology and a receiver that picks up signals from the satellites of the Global Positioning System, a subscriber's car can report its location to a command center, and the driver can communicate with an operator or with a voice-recognition system through a hands-free microphone and the car's speakers. Other services are built around small screens on the dashboard that display maps and other information.

This equipment makes it technically possible for the system to know a car's location at any time, information that could be used to deliver highly specific ads pointing the driver to, say, a restaurant or store a block away. But the telematics companies do not want to appear to be stalking their customers and barraging them with marketing messages. (The wireless phone industry will soon confront the same issue, as the federal government pushes it to add tracking features to phones for safety reasons.)

OnStar, by far the biggest service with 1.5 million users, says it makes note of a car's location only in an emergency or when a driver makes contact with the service. The OnStar system is built into many G.M. models and the high-end Honda Acura models; the service is free for the first year.

"The privacy and the confidentiality of our subscribers are of the utmost importance," said Don Butler, the OnStar vice president in charge of the new Virtual Advisor service. "We're not going to be in a situation where we are tracking the location of a vehicle. We just don't think that's what consumers are looking for."

OnStar seems more interested in advertising that is tied to content, not to a subscriber's location. Subscribers obtaining stock quotes from the automated Virtual Advisor service are told that the information is sponsored by Fidelity Investments. If they have a Fidelity account, they can connect to an automated Fidelity system and trade stocks while they drive.

Subscribers, who pay $199 to $399 a year for OnStar, incur additional per-minute fees from OnStar when they are connected to Virtual Advisor, which also offers content from ESPN, ABC News, The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets. Mr. Butler said his company was exploring the idea of inserting ads into this content, but said, "we've got to be careful on how far we go."

Of course, drivers listen to unsolicited commercial messages every day on their car radios, with no fuss. Philip J. Rowland, a principal in the London office of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company who has studied the telematics market, predicted a shift from traditional radio to digital audio services for drivers. This might mix personalized information, like local traffic reports, with advertising messages that the subscriber has agreed to receive.

Mr. Rowland said the increased automation of telematics services, using voice recognition and other technologies, should lower the cost significantly. Growth could also be driven by loyalty programs for gas stations and airlines, he added. For example, a service might let a driver know about a chance to earn frequent-flier miles by shopping at a store nearby.

McKinsey estimates that telematics could be a $100 billion business in the United States, Western Europe and Japan by 2010. But Mr. Rowland said the industry was still in its early stages, and "there's huge uncertainty about what consumers will pay for."

At least one company is sticking to a basic approach. ATX Technologies, which provides telematics systems and services for Mercedes-Benz, Lincoln-Mercury and other carmakers, tries to strengthen the bond between car buyers and car brands, said Gary Wallace, a company spokesman. Functions like alerting the driver, the manufacturer and perhaps a local dealer to a problem with the car are a priority, he said, while helping to pitch products that have little to do with cars is not.

"We've done a lot of research, and we haven't seen any of our customers wanting that type of service," Mr. Wallace said. "Primarily, when you're in your car, the information you want is kind of vehicle-centric. I think that's what customers really want now."

printable press demo version available

also, in the same vein is robots.cnn

could someone explain me this NYTparser

whorl.da.ru

I've found consistently better prices on the web, even recently, than I have in-store for electronic goods

There was a related article in the NY times this week about electronics manufacturers who inflate their list prices so that retailers can easily offer their goods at a "bargain".

Also in this morning's Times, an article about how "Cardcaptor Sakura" was changed to "Cardcaptors" for the American audience. Interesting article, it reads like it was written by an otaku,

http://archive.nytimes.com/2002/01/17/technology/c ircuits/17VIDE.html

You just switch the 'www' with 'archive'.

There was an article in the New York Times about that this very day. (registration, yadda, blah blah, if someone wants to post the 'registration-free' link, please do; I don't remember how to construct them) Quite interesting.

BTW, I didn't even know there was a KaZaa client for Linux. Where can I find it? :)

It's not just Hollywood and the music industry. In a capitalist digital information age, everything becomes an commodity alienated from its creator and exchanged in world trade for the profit of large corporations in the wealthy countries.

Examples abound. The New York Times today reports (free subscription required) that U.S. fish farmers successfully lobbied for protection against Vietnamese imports by arbitrarily defining the word "catfish". Now Congress has propertized that part of our common English language and given it away to its campaign contributors.

I hold out no hope for Congress and the courts to change copyright law and promote innovation in the wise ways Lessig proposes in his new book. It seems to me instead that we consumers face the choice of allowing complete control, or of violating these laws and engaging in massive piracy a la Napster, only better technologically.

It's time to abandon the World Wide Web and move to Freenet.

here (free regblah.)
AND for cut and pasters: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/10/technology/circu its/10NEXT.html

This wasn't one of the mentioned Slashbacks, but it probably could have been. The NY Times is running a story on Time Canada's (free reg...) apparent faux pas on the new iMac announcement. The article is a bit more about the content of the article than the error which was oh so recently immortalized here on slashdot, but its still a good read.

This wasn't one of the mentioned Slashbacks, but it probably could have been. The NY Times is running a story on Time Canada's (free reg...) apparent faux pas on the new iMac announcement. The article is a bit more about the content of the article than the error which was oh so recently immortalized here on slashdot, but its still a good read.

Observing the public reaction, it is clear that like its predecessor it is destined to invade and fully occupy the public imagination for the next couple of years. Bully for Apple, and for Ive. And it will be perfect for my parents.

But what I've realized I'd personally like most is just the detached hub. I'll buy my own flat-screen thank you (maybe an Apple Cinema display). I don't need more than one viewing angle and I'd rather put the hub itself off towards the back of the desk. Just need the LCD, keyboard, mouse/trackball and speakers up front.

I hope they're planning on releasing this iHub on its own, some time soon. It would be a sweet machine - short on expandability, but as this NYT article points out, at a better price point (and a helluva lot more aesthetic) than the G4 towers.

-Renard

For the lazy: substitute 'archives' where www appears

It's funny to read the Katz review and it was like, "Orange County was really challenging!"

And you go over to the NYTimes review and they're like, "It sucked."

...the Selective Service Act is still on the law books...what makes you think that we'll ever get rid of national identity cards once they're introduced..?

The draft ended in 1973 and was replaced by an all volunteer army. A new act was passed in 1980 that required registration but there was no draft. The fact that selective service laws are periodically re-evaluated is evidence that national ID cards, should they ever be introduced, would receive similar periodic review.

The hard, cold fact is that, in government as well as in systems, preventing bad things from happening is far more effective than trying to undo the mistakes later.

That principal would be an argument in favor of national id cards, which are supposed to aid in preventing terrorist attacks, which are especially hard to undo later.

For one thing, many of the most draconian provisions are ineffective...

You've shifted the argument to whether Draconian methods are effective. Obviously, if the methods are ineffective they should be not be implemented, Draconian or not. The real debate begins once you've decided a measure is effective but infringes customary freedoms. For instance, if national id cards would have prevented the events of 9/11, would they then be reasonable price to pay? Serious-minded people often disagree and fortunately democracy provides a peaceful way of resolving the dispute.

Notice that it looks like their using NT4. Take a look at the monitor in the upper left hand corner. Looks like an NT4 logon screen to me.

The NY Times had a cute little article about Amargosa Valley, which is apparently within sight of Yucca Mountain (although they point out you can see for 100 miles from Amargosa on a clear day, which is most days). They point out that the government is also looking at that area to set up a national training center for combating terrorism. They've been doing some kind of training there for several years.

By the way, I grew up in bumpkinville NY (house in a forest with the nearest neighbor about a mile away), but Amargosa Valley sounds pretty quiet even by my standards.

All in all, it sounds like quite an interesting place to live! :-)

"For full access to our website, please complete this simple registration form..." or dont.

http://college.nytimes.com/2002/01/11/technology/1 1CYBERLAW.html

http://archives.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http:// www.nytimes.com/2002/01/11/technology/11CYBERLAW.h tml

Since Kaplan is leaving, I'm wondering who will take over the job, of anybody? Has there been anything else out there like this?

______________________

The mixing of news features and advertising is nothing new, although I must say the New York Times Tolkein Archives "Sponsored Feature" is a much classier treatment than Yahoo's use of banners as news stories particularly in the way it handled two other movies, Monsters Inc and Harry Potter, which was worse than misleading -- it was ugly and devoid of interesting content.

The nice thing about the NYT Sponsored Feature, by contrast, is that they have a great deal of good content in their archives, and presumably the sponsorship goes into getting the stuff off microfilm and out of file drawers and onto their web pages.

we've been monitoring/debunking this NYT forum for almost 4 years now. all day, every day, the screen is filled with billygate's paid2post ?pr? bot's screed. bashing/demeaning/attempting to discredit ALL things that aren't payper liesense fud, whilst shilling/touting for the felonious kingdumb, & IT's variety of payper (stock market) FraUDs. fuddy thing is, IT's the SAME guise, all day, every day. what cheapskate scammers they are. J. Public deserves MUCH better.

At least his scam was believable enough to fool a thousand people. ZeoSync got to choose a more believable scam to beat a 17 year old.

From the NY Times:

Mr. Perlman takes an engineer's pride in describing the company's solution to the problem of converting the contents of compact discs into MP3 files that can be stored digitally. Moxi has designed a specialized device, which would be rented to consumers on an hourly basis, that uses powerful microprocessors to convert 100 CD's an hour and store them as digital files. He said Moxi had taken significant pains to protect the digital rights of music and video content producers. The system uses cryptography extensively to place barriers against illegal sharing of copyrighted material, the kind of trading that got the Napster music-swapping service into legal trouble.

Forget it.

As for my 2 cents, I'd prefer the computer as the ultimate command center. Why? Like other people have mentioned, pretty much all the pieces are already there. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, the software and hardware in the computer world are standardized commodities that can be mixed and matched to your preference (e.g. you can have a linux/windows/mac box with your choice of graphics cards, DVD drives, and PVR software) allowing for competition and best-of-breed components. This is in comparison to the "black box" philosophy of cable boxes and their ilk. Furthermore, as for resolution of display, TV sucks compared to even the lowest resolution monitors these days...

On the other hand, I guess I can understand that not everyone is able to mix and match components and put together their own customized system and would like nothing more than to plug in an appliance that does everything they want it to do.

I guess it boils down to the same debate between people who build their own computers specifying everything down to the CPU fan vs. those who buy a complete system pre-loaded and configured with every software program they need to run.

Its common enough, since MIT is suing tech companies over imaging software they've patented.

The companies that produce LimeWire, Grokster and KaZaA have since posted new versions of their software, without the tracking program. The maker of LimeWire also issued an apology.
...
The game is free, although users first view an advertisement. The program collects information about sites visited over the last two days to better place ads.
...
Mike Calderone, president of Strategic Advertising Services Inc., which runs the ClickTillUWin game, said outside distributors had been instructed to get users' permission before installing the software -- but that was not done.

Greg Bildson, chief technology officer of LimeWire L.L.C., said the company was led to believe the program did no more than link to a game, making the permission request unnecessary.

Robert Regular of Cydoor Technologies Inc., which distributed the ClickTillUWin software to the file- sharing companies, said the program was not supposed to collect information until users activated it -- and had an opportunity to be notified and decline if they so chose.

Mr. Regular said he did not believe that deception was intended by any of the parties.

And as for the spyware in general, I never install it personally, but I say if people choose to install it and as a result it helps these software companies to make some money, then I see nothing wrong with them including it with their installation programs (of course with an option not to use it).

keeping up with felonious father william's latest payper liesense FraUDs = infinity

advertising on /. = even more money(tm) for VA larry et al

having your own unique web identity (backed by legitimate products/services) = priceless

nothing in life is 'free', for everything else, there's money(tm)(sm)($$)

don't forget to visit this NYT forum, where father william's paid2post ?pr? bots prattle on&on, all day, every day, about how bad linux/gnu/o-s is, while singing the praises of the InFactDead BugWear liesense distributed buy the kingdumb.

Yes it is banned in Australia. I have no clue why though. Probably because they don't have a 18+ rating for games...

Now if people took a look of what they ban in Germany and Austria... There was an article at the NYT about how they deal with Nazi content in games a few days ago. Pretty interesting stuff and imho I would not mind if that stuff is banned.

while you're at it, don't forget to visit this NYT Forum, reg. req., where billygates' paid2post pr bots continue (for 5 years now) to MiSinform J. Public/the unwashed. 'course they (NYT) only have 7 million subscribers being MiSled, all day, every day.

y'all's head in the sand approach to the general public, is almost as bad as my, delete the felonious fuddites one. In case you haven't noticed, IT's not just about writing better code (you're already doing a good job of that). leave the 'jus folks to find out on their own, & they never will. last night the shills were going on again about how o-s code/linux is stolen ip. whatever. happy gnu year. may be yOUR last if you don't think like the crooks whoare determined to delete you, as you venture to believe you're creating an atmosphere of cooperation/co-existence with dammned.

best,

The small band of Hobbyist Whiners et al

The New York Times is also running the story, mostly the same info but with a few interesting facts not mentioned in the Yahoo version.

The New York Times is also running the story, mostly the same info but with a few interesting facts not mentioned in the Yahoo version.

Then check out this Mining Company Gets Protection in Legislation Pushed by Daschle from the NY Times. Missing from the article was the amount that Homestake mining paid to Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota for this.

Yes I know that there is science involved, but I question which came first, the science proposal or the liability protection legislation.

At least there are no PCB's in my foods. PCB's are very very toxic and persistent material (they don't break down). Good old General Electric is going to have to dredge the Hudson river to clean up the PCB mess it made years ago, and hopefully it will cost about 500 million $$ so hopefully it will discorage them and others from this kind of pollution. Seems fines are the only remedy corporations understand which is sad...
The times has a short abstract about the GE cleanup.

I'm sure the current airport security staff, the one where 25% didn't graduate from high school, will have no trouble mastering the subtleties of psychological interrogation.

It should be noted that Farwell is a bit of a publicity hound, and has formed his own company called Brainwave Science which peddles a technique he calls "Brain Fingerprinting" (Yes, a stupid name). He has essentially overstated the value of his technique, and now claims it can be used to detect terrorists. The NYTimes did a decent article on the issue here (free reg, blah blah).

Oh, and it's been shown that you can demonstrate the same effect by simply measuring reaction times (no need for goofy electrode cap) (Seymour, T.L.; Seifert, C.M.; Mosmann, A.M. and Shafto, M.G. Using response time measures to assess "Guilty Knowledge". Journal of Applied Psychology, 2000, 85.)

As someone who works in the field (and who is avoiding trouble by posting anonymously), I can tell you that these techniques are not well suited for practical use. Also, with some exceptions (e.g., Farwell), most researchers don't make grand claims about applications of such technologies. The publicity offices at universities and journals like to jazz things up a bit by overstating scientific findings -- gets the university's name out there.

Interestingly, replacing the www with college seems to give you a direct link to articles at nytimes. No registration required!

Direct Link to article

http://college.nytimes.com/2002/01/01/science/phys ical/01MICR.html

1. Click the original link from the headline:

http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.n ytimes.com/2001/12/28/technology/28CYBERLAW.html

2. From that URL, replace the first "www" with either the word "archive" or the word "college".

That should let you view it without logging in.

I too read the CNN story; it was also on a bunch of other news sites. Each of them had the same headline - or some slight variation thereon. NYT, for example.
Don't feel grumpy. Revel in the fact that you're superior to all those subeditors who mindlessly copy headlines written by AP hacks.

Because each fresco is numbered, and each number corresponds to a picture of a box drawn underneath it, it is Dr. Jacobelli's theory that the depictions may have served as a kind of memory aid for customers who might have been more apt to forget that their clothes were in Locker 6, for example, than that they were in the box right under the group sex scene.

The second article mentions the Department of Defense guidelines for passwords. They're an interesting read.

Here is the right link

Story here no login required

Here is a link that works

The Link

er, and if that doesn't, simply take the linked url in the sotry and replace www.nytimes.com with archive.nytimes.com