Slashdot Mirror

is here.

I found a working lijnk, and saved $2.50!

Thanks AC.

George

Oh, and here's a story that the New York Times ran on it a last week.

NYT recently had an extensive article on the film. I watched the subtitled version -- do watch it, and other Miyazaki films, they're great.

The NYTimes had a similar story on Tuesday, which probably prompted this Post story. Interesting point: it says several studies show Metro DC has more engineers and programmers than Silicon Valley or Route 128.

Read it, with free signup, here

A method and system for placing an order to purchase an item via the Internet.
The New York Times and the The Ecomomist have a system for buying "items" with one click.
These "items" are articles from previous issues but it does the exact same thing that Amazon is trying to patent. Can Amozon belive the patent will actually stand? If not then why are they patenting something that obviously is a) not invative and b) has an example of prior art?
%vi .emacs

It is amazing the comments and speculation from people who have no idea about what is in the show except for a couple of sound bites.

Here is a link to the Press Release I put up on the L0pht web site which should give a better discription of the contents of the show.

L0pht was interviewed and we tried to describe what hacking really is. We specifically told MTV that it wasn't downloading a scanner someone else wrote, then looking up a sploit on rootshell and running a script.

I haven't seen the show so I don't know how much of what we said made it in. I will reserve my judgement of the show until I at least see it.

-weld

For a cool article in the NY Times about real hackers look here.

Today's story in the NY Times (free account, yadda yadda) on Dirty Tricks on the web has a whole section on Meta Tag tricks and talks about Playboy suing a number of sites who have spammed thier meta tags with the word "playboy" to increase traffic from search engines.

The article makes some other interesting points, although it seems to be geared for the "non-techies."

...is that, as Bruce Schneier and a recent NYTimes article both point out, it re-introduces the problem of voter coercion that was eliminated by public, manned, polling places. In the polling booth, your vote is private, and public representatives can vouch for that fact. At home/work, others can buy or threaten you to vote a particular way and can watch to ensure that you follow-through.

--LinuxParanoid, apparently not just paranoid about Linux-related things ;-)

Fair comments, but I think it's more of a done deal than you suggest.

It's been in the offing for ages, and it's a nice fit particularly with the Sprint PCS wireless business. Bell South isn't a serious competitor given the regulatory hurdles, which aren't too bad for Sprint & MCI at all given their overlap. The European telecoms companies are all screwed up after the Telecom Italia fiasco and not seriously in the running.

There's a good long story at the NYT that covers many of these issues and also an editorialat the Economist.

I'd like to point out that the reporting on this story is very muddy. None of the science writers seem to know how to use the words force, velocity, impulse, or energy correctly in a sentence, nor which units go with which measurements.

I'd like to offer the following as evidence:

• SF Chronicle
  
  Their computers used the metric term newtons, or grams per second of force, to send final course and velocity commands to the Mars-bound spacecraft.
  
  A newton is not a gram per second!
• LA Times
  
  As a result, JPL engineers mistook acceleration readings measured in English units of pound-seconds for a metric measure of force called newton-seconds.
  
  Force is not measured in newton-seconds!
• Washing ton Post
  
  The navigators, in turn, performed their analysis of the spacecraft's position in space based on the assumption that the descriptions of these firings were in metric units of force per second (newtons). In fact, the numbers instead represented pounds (of force per second).
  
  A pound is not force per second!
• LA Times
  
  But, basically, Lockheed was providing the JetPropulsion Laboratory with data on the amount of energy imparted to the spacecraft by its thrusters that are fired periodically. This was measured in pound-seconds, Hinners said.
  
  Energy is not measured in pound-seconds! Perhaps an energy change was indicated by a reading in pound-seconds, but it's erroneous to write that energy is measured in those units.

It looks to me that either a Reuters, AP, or some press release initially confused impulses with force, and the error has propogated through every major news organization in the country. Either that, or quite a few science writers would seem to think that the general public has no real idea about what they're reading and couldn't care less if it's technically correct. Something should be written about the correct relationship between force, impulse, and energy using the words correctly in a sentence, along with the correct units of measurement so that some education of the American public comes of this.

Or it could be that I'm being too nit-picky. Sue me for being an engineer...

Robby

but compared to prior years, 1999 has been pretty tame in terms of 7+ magnitude quakes..
front story.
ch art of quakes in 20th century: requires login. shows only 11 (i guess it would be 12 including today's quake in mexico) in 1999, with the average being just under 20, and 1943 being the most active year with 41 total 7.0+ quakes.

but compared to prior years, 1999 has been pretty tame in terms of 7+ magnitude quakes..
front story.
ch art of quakes in 20th century: requires login. shows only 11 (i guess it would be 12 including today's quake in mexico) in 1999, with the average being just under 20, and 1943 being the most active year with 41 total 7.0+ quakes.

I'm not a physicist, but for no particular reason I have been on a tour of a reactor, and still seem to remember some related elementary foo...

How much do you remember about nuclear fission (which, presumably is what happened in this incident, since the conditions would seem completely inadequate for fusion)?

The splitting of an atom can free neutrons, sending them in various directions. Depending upon various conditions (such as the amount of fissionable material, the presence or absence of materials that either absorb or reflect the neutrons, and so forth), these neutrons may or may not collide with other atoms. These collisions can induce more splitting, leading to the possibility of a self-sustaining chain-reaction.

Incidentally, the NY Times/Associated Press article mentions that the workers thought they saw a blue glow. Dunno about you folks, but this reminded me of Cerenkov radiation. For more info on that, see this page.

http://www. nytimes.com/library/tech/99/09/biztech/articles/23 fraud.html


-S. Louie

This article details recently uncovered email evidence, which provides a rare inside look at how Microsoft uses it's PR department. Back in October when the AOL/Netscape deal came out, they immediately decided to start a PR campaign to show that the AOL deal "undermines the core of the case." Top Microsoft officials ordered PR people to orchestrated a seemingly independent and spontaneous campaign, using it's "friends in politics" (Microsoft is by far is the biggest 'contributor' to various politicians election campaigns - Microsoft-sympathetic comittee members recently even tried to nuke the DOJ antitrust division's financing - talk about interference with criminal justice), "sympathetic columnists" (paid articles?) to pointedly manipulate the public opinion. Once again.

The NYTimes has an article on it, so this rumor must be true. According to it, the official policy will be announced on Thursday (today???). -B

is here. It's NYTimes...so you need the free account.

Not much for me to add. Kurick rocked my world...changed the way I look at it actually. I'm thrilled that AI might finally see the light of day. Speilberg is no Kubrick. So what? He is a good director, and if Kubrick trusted him with this project...who am I to argue?

One of the graphics they use at http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990 905mag-satellite.pop.jpg has an error. The resolution of the Panchromatic sensor on Landsat 7 is *supposed* to be 15 meters, not 5 as labeled. I betcha it's not even 15 meters:) I guess the Times "blew" that one :) It's also misleading to suggest that all those satillites are competitors to Space Imaging since they "own" half of those satillites.

Programming and book-writing are different. For one thing, no matter how the term Open Source is bandied about, you can't really have an "Open Source" book--someone doesn't know what he's talking about. First of all, a book is already source--it's the written code that our brains "compile" into understanding. This similarity is why we call programming formats "languages."

Second, as for being "open"--well, the only way a book really could be open is if it were being written with contributions from any yahoo who came down the pike. Which, I suppose, might be an interesting idea...come up with character sketches and an outline, farm out each chapter to a particular person, then have an editor try to put them all together into something that made sense. But for the normal everyday definition of a book...how can you have "open source" for something that has already been completed? If it's public-domain...then yes, anyone who cares to can make "updates," yes...but since Shakespeare, Clemens, Burroughs, and all those other ancient pubdom authors are dead, there's no "project gatekeeper" to apply those updates. (And if someone claimed to be, how many literary authorities do you think would accept that?)

I know this won't do any good, but please, people, try to think before you apply the term "open source"? It's a term with a very specific meaning, and by misapplying it and broadening its use into a general-purpose buzzword, you make it that much less useful.

Second, to the issue of literary quality. The original poster's point about the publishing industry is actually pretty much true, as is the objectivity of programming. Still, I think some people might not quite get it, and maybe this example will help clarify things a little.

What if 99.999% of all Slashdot posters were all high-posting-volume, low-content Anonymous Cowards (instead of only seeming that way sometimes :) and there were no moderation system? Would you even bother reading the discussion threads anymore? I don't just mean would you still read it as it is now, but would you still read it if it were a hundred times worse?

Well, that's the way it is in the literary world. With /., at least people have to have some modicum of technical knowhow to even want to read it, much less post to it. But to write, you only need to know how to write--so out in the greater world, any ten-year-old can crank out bad fiction (and looking at the fanfic newsgroups sometimes, it often looks as though most of them do). The vast majority of things that are written are things that nobody except their authors would want to read.

And so the whole vast system of publishing houses, editors, slushpiles, agents, and so on gradually evolved as a form of self-defense, as a system to provide some level of quality control to the consumer, so in return the consumer will have good books to read, rather than spending his time doing something marginally more useful and enjoyable, like clipping his toenails.

Looking at the current e-publishing sites out there, you won't find very many successful ones (at least, of those that are better-known) that have no submission standards. AlexLit requires it to have been published elsewhere already. Online Originals has a board of editors who go through submissions. And so it goes.

Self-publishing outfits have existed in the "real world" for a long time; they're called vanity presses. They charge you some ridiculous amount of money to publish your book--the name comes from the fact that it's presumably your vanity that makes you pony up the cash for it. With a more legitimate publisher, of course, they'll foot the bill themselves, and pay you royalties...but thence comes the problem of the midlist--shipping and storage expenses have gotten so high that publishers can't afford to publish anything less than a bestseller.

Which is where, hopefully, e-publishing could provide some breaks, letting more "good but not great" writers get published by eliminating storage and shipping costs...but all the same, there has to be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff...and I believe most people will think that anything someone has to pay to get published probably isn't worth reading.

(It also doesn't help matters, in my opinion, that fatbrain wants you to register before you can even see what they have available at the moment.)

Belluzzo might be joining Microsoft, says this cnet/NYT article.

"When Belluzzo's resignation was announced yesterday, Silicon Graphics spokesman John Cristofano would say only that the departing CEO was leaving to take a position at a company that doesn't compete with SGI." Well, not yet, anyway... this sounds very fishy. :)

--------

New York Times. (Free login req.)
MSNBC
CNet

Eschew Obfuscation

NY Times. (Requires free login!)
MSNBC
CNet

Eschew obfuscation.

This was in the latest comp.risks digest. The article makes reference to a NewsScan Daily article called "Spy Who Messaged Me" -- Now Playing at Microsoft!, which in turn cites the New York Times article.

man, am I good at remembering past stories:
The description of the original device has been posted here (slashdot discussion: here).
an analysis of the device by the RSA Labs has been posted here (related slashdot posting).

The scoop is that eukaryotes, like plants/animas/yeast/etc.---in other words, the more complex organisms that we see around us---are older than previously thought, 2.7 billion years instead 1.7 billion. The simpler prokaryotes like bacteria are still thought to have originated between 3.5 and 3.8 billion years ago. See the New York Times article for a better scoop. (free login required) -zook

"Feeding the lion" is how Max Metral describes his visits to Microsoft headquarters. Metral is the 24-year-old chief of technology at Firefly Network, a small Internet software company based in Cambridge, Mass. One evening in February, he and his partners flew to Seattle to spend the next day showing off Firefly's software, which has aroused a good deal of investor interest. One of the Microsoft engineers, who have elevated the techno-put-down to high art, glanced at Firefly's software and concluded, "We could do that in a week." But they did seem interested in Firefly's business plan, Metral recalls. When the meetings were over and the Firefly team drove back to Sea-Tac International Airport, they had not only fed the lion but also felt the fear.

The New York Times, June 29, 1997 [registration required, sorry]
The Buzz About Firefly
By DANIEL LYONS

Hey look at that...a blatent copyright violation and a deep link. I guess I'm gonna be bitch slapped by some lawyers today. Wait... No I'm not. .. I'm an Anonymous Coward!

Reply to self:

from an article linked to by Mindshare

As it stands, conventional methods of contacting Congress still carry the most weight, even in offices where staff members read e-mail daily.

"A well-written letter is always the best way to go about it," said Scott Harshman, a legislative assistant who routes e-mail for Representative John Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania. Still, from seeing so much e-mail, he recognizes the importance of Congressional offices' offering online communication. "People ask, 'How come this representative doesn't have e-mail?'" Harshman said. "It sends a message to your constituency."

Even so, in Congressional offices that offer constituents no electronic avenue for communication, aides say the decision holds no visible repercussions.

"Once in a while, somebody will write us a letter that says, 'When will you get it?' But it has not been a big issue," said Vince Morelli, legislative director to Representative Elton Gallegly, Republican of California. "Nobody seems to be complaining. People prefer to do it the old-fashioned way."

SO COMPLAIN! Let them know that if they don't use the internet, especially to communicate with their constituents, they have no business trying to dictate how others use it.

I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore! -- Peter Finch's character, Network

Or try:

Login: qqqqq
Pass: qqqqq

Not so much finger movement, I've got lazy fingers.

Makes me wonder though, it would be neat (for their marketing purposes and/or as a show of this community's elegance) for us to all use slashdot, slashdot.

Goes back to NYT, tries slashdot, slashdot.

Hey, who's got the password for slashdot?

Maybe monkeys will be able to do it soon Article On Video Game Playing Monkeys. (Make sure to read past the bit about the monkey video game for humans to the part about the human video games for monkeys.) Ok, maybe they can't "shuttle between websites," but it would be really fun to play against a monkey in Doom especially if he/she were a competitive opponent, IMHO. Don'tcha think? They've got to start wiring up zoos!!

Here's the link:

http://www.ny times.com/library/tech/99/07/circuits/articles/22b itt.html

Commerce Department yanks ICANN's chain, backhands NSI

On 9 July the Commerce Department sent a 32-page letter [1] to the ICANN board and the House Commerce Committee, responding to committee chairman Tom Bliley's questions on ICANN's recent actions [2]. Here's the NY Times's coverage [3] of this letter (free registration and cookies required). Commerce Department officials said that ICANN should

hold all meetings in public,

drop a proposed $1-per-domain-name fee until a permanent ICANN board can vote on it, and

draw up binding contracts with domain-name services that would bar ICANN from going beyond their mission.

Commerce did not let NSI entirely off the hook, either. While chastising ICANN for a threat, issued in its Berlin meeting, to cancel NSI's authority to issue domain names, the Commerce letter states baldly that unless NSI signs ICANN's operating agreement, Commerce will in fact terminate that authority. NSI must stop at once claiming the .com, .net. and .org domain-name databases as their intellectual property, Commerce insists.

Congress has now scheduled the investigative hearing promised by Bliley. The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations will convene "Domain Name System Privatization: Is ICANN Out of Control?" on Thursday, July 22, 1999 at 11:00 a.m. in the Rayburn House Office Building, room 2322.

On 16 July Commerce again extended the deadline [4] for the end of the open domain registration test. The test had already been extended once [5] because of protracted wrangling among NSI, ICANN, and the test registrars. The new target date for wider participation in competitive registration is 6 August.

[1] http://www.ntia.doc.gov/n tiahome/domainname/blileyrsp.htm
[2] http://www.news.com/N ews/Item/Textonly/0,25,38200,00.html?pfv
[3] http://www.ny times.com/library/tech/99/07/biztech/articles/10ne t.html
[4] http://www.zdnet.co m/zdnn/filters/bursts/0,3422,2295115,00.html
[5] http://tbtf.com/archive/1999-07-08.html #s01

TBTF Is required reading for anyone with a clue.

Commerce Department yanks ICANN's chain, backhands NSI

On 9 July the Commerce Department sent a 32-page letter [1] to the ICANN board and the House Commerce Committee, responding to committee chairman Tom Bliley's questions on ICANN's recent actions [2]. Here's the NY Times's coverage [3] of this letter (free registration and cookies required). Commerce Department officials said that ICANN should

hold all meetings in public,

drop a proposed $1-per-domain-name fee until a permanent ICANN board can vote on it, and

draw up binding contracts with domain-name services that would bar ICANN from going beyond their mission.

Commerce did not let NSI entirely off the hook, either. While chastising ICANN for a threat, issued in its Berlin meeting, to cancel NSI's authority to issue domain names, the Commerce letter states baldly that unless NSI signs ICANN's operating agreement, Commerce will in fact terminate that authority. NSI must stop at once claiming the .com, .net. and .org domain-name databases as their intellectual property, Commerce insists.

Congress has now scheduled the investigative hearing promised by Bliley. The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations will convene "Domain Name System Privatization: Is ICANN Out of Control?" on Thursday, July 22, 1999 at 11:00 a.m. in the Rayburn House Office Building, room 2322.

On 16 July Commerce again extended the deadline [4] for the end of the open domain registration test. The test had already been extended once [5] because of protracted wrangling among NSI, ICANN, and the test registrars. The new target date for wider participation in competitive registration is 6 August.

[1] http://www.ntia.doc.gov/n tiahome/domainname/blileyrsp.htm
[2] http://www.news.com/N ews/Item/Textonly/0,25,38200,00.html?pfv
[3] http://www.ny times.com/library/tech/99/07/biztech/articles/10ne t.html
[4] http://www.zdnet.co m/zdnn/filters/bursts/0,3422,2295115,00.html
[5] http://tbtf.com/archive/1999-07-08.html #s01

TBTF Is required reading for anyone with a clue.

There is some interesting news about him. Check out the URL about instant company.

1) Yeah, it wasnt't he potshots that took at the ATF or anything like that...

Who were coming in unannounced through an open window without identifying themselves. And why were they there in the first case? Because he was a religious gun nut.

2) I don't know what you are talking about, but I'm sure its bullshit anyway.

So you don't think the NYPD are capable of brutality? An NYPD office (Volpe) recently plead guilty to shoving a broomstick up someone's ass... Other NYPD offices shot at an unarmed man (Diallo) 41 times!

3) Sure, a kid born in poverty has as much freedom of speech as anyone else. No one is going to listen to him, but that isn't that point.

But that IS the point. It's easy nowadays to put up a web page and express yourself however you like, but if you don't have the money to defend yourself, a single threat of legal action can usually shut you up. That's what took Packet Storm down.

4) Bullshit, the cops can't do their job becuase every criminal cliamns they've been beaten if the cops do so much as look at them funny.

Let's talk about NYPD again. According the the NY Times:

It [NYPD] routinely pays out tens of thousands of dollars to people who say the police abused them, but the Police Department rarely formally investigates their allegations, and the officers named in their lawsuits almost always continue working without scrutiny or punishment.

Here's the link.

5) Every lawyer who represents someone has passed the bar, so is by definition competent.

So you think that OJ would have done just as well if he'd relied on a public defender?

Thanks for the liberal propaganda though.

Once you can label someone, it's so easy to dismiss them. Usually people who mention David Koresh are labeled as conservatives, but I guess that doesn't matter. As long as you can tie up their philosophy with a single word, you can easily dismiss whatever they have to say.

Come on, Boston Globe. Before going to press, you would think that you could at least check and see if all the URLs in your stories are correct. If you did so, you would realize that the web site for Major League Baseball is not mlb.com, as stated in your article:

The computer police entrusted with sniffing out corruption did their job, according to Alex Tam, director of Major League Baseball's web site (mlb.com).

It is, in fact, majorleaguebaseball.com. I could maybe expect something like this from the NY Times, but not from an organization as good as the Boston Globe :)

And in memory of DeForest Kelley, I just have to say:

• He's dead, Jim.

Sorry, just couldn't resist. :-)

At The NYT's article the war part of the plot is described.

Frankly, I don't even plan to see the South Park movie. Why can more movies have good clean humor, like the hilarious negro antics of Jar Jar Binks? That's the movie I'm sending my kids to see.

well sort of, the by-line isn't NYTimes it's CMPNet, but it's still linked from the NYTimes Tech page. Sheesh!

http://www.nytimes.c om/techweb/TW_Andover_Net_Buys_Slashdot.html

Of course, it's not just email that goes astray, just ask J. D. Salinger.

"Don't ever tell anybody anything" -- Holden Caulfield

(free reg. required, of course)

Also has a link to the full text so far. Pretty interesting....
--
Ce qui est n'est pas clos, du point de vue le plus essentiel.

Last Sunday's New York Times Magazine had an interesting article about Joschka Fischer, the formerly radical politician who is now the German foreign minister. It's worth checking out, particularly for Americans who are generally deprived of any news about the day-to-day political life of other industrial democracies.

The article that I read in the NY Times had some countervailing opinion. The size of the decrease is at the limits of the resolution of the measuring technique. We also don't know enough about natural variation in the size of telomeres to tell if the decrease is stastically significant.

For those of you unconvinced by the reputability of the reporter, here is a NYTimes report. If you aren't convinced by this report, then perhaps you should travel to Washington and listen to the House hearings yourself.

-B

Jeez, it's worse than the New York Times .

That's exactly it. They created a few atoms of plutonium and had the necessary equipment from the physics department to detect it.

Here's an updated URL for the article:
http://search.nytimes.com/search/daily/bin/fastweb ?getdoc+site+ site+26193+3+wAAA+nuclear%7Ereactor%7Estudents

I love going to the UofC. :)

This one appears to work.

http://ww w.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/05/biztech/articles/ 12videogame.html

Accordint to This NY times article there are at least two other cases concerning this same question. Let's hope this ruling sticks before both those courts, and is upheld in the (inevitable) appeal to the US supreme court.

Before anyone gets upset about another login-required NY times article, remember login/password=cypherpunks/cypherpunks.