Slashdot Mirror

• An Iron Curtain is Descending on US
  
  
• Cheney: Water torture is OK
  
  
• Bush administration says detainee shouldn't be able to tell attorney how he was tortured in secret CIA prison
  
  
• The United States is now prosecuting suspected terrorists on the basis of their intentions, not just their actions
  
  
• Man arrested for saying "I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible"
  
  
• Civil Liberties Advocates' Worst Fears Realized with Patriot Act Scandal
  
  
• Activist, anti-Bush lawyer "falls to death at hotel
  
  
• Abuse and Torture by U.S. troops
  
  
• plenty more, regretfully...
  
  

• An Iron Curtain is Descending on US
  
  
• Cheney: Water torture is OK
  
  
• Bush administration says detainee shouldn't be able to tell attorney how he was tortured in secret CIA prison
  
  
• The United States is now prosecuting suspected terrorists on the basis of their intentions, not just their actions
  
  
• Man arrested for saying "I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible"
  
  
• Letter to the editor prompts visit from Secret Service
  
  
• Activist, anti-Bush lawyer "falls to death at hotel
  
  
• Abuse and Torture by U.S. troops
  
  
• plenty more, regretfully...
  
  

Those guys are the "lot."

Here's an old question you might want to ask yourself: Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?

I think a similar problem will result from trying to sell a used diamond encrusted laptop. IOW, it's not worth $1e6. That's just what the company is charging for it. The buyer immediately loses a significant portion of its value just by purchasing it.

If they go independant

* Their music will *never* be played on mainstream radio ("payola", though in more subtle forms, is very much alive today)
* Their videos will never be played on Music Channels like mTV
* Their CDs will never be sold in major music stores, or sold on major online retailers.
* As a result of the aforementioned, they will never be able to to gain much exposure, and thus never be able to sell many concert tickets, which is the biggest revenue stream for most musicians.

In short, going independent is a sure way to not make much money.

The entire music industry is a cartel, much like the DeBeers diamond cartel. Like DeBeers has with diamonds, they have near complete control over the production and distribution of their product. This allows them to manipulate both supply and demand, which in turn, allows them to sell their product for more than it would be worth in a truly open market. Because of the control they have over every aspect of music production and distribution, third parties are not able to make much money selling music unless they join the cartel.

Currently the music industry is trying to further limit distribution of their product via DRM. This further increases the profit margins because consumers cannot resell their DRM locked music, like they can used tapes or CDs. DeBeers has done a similar thing - though by different means (obviously you can't put DRM on a diamond), and been very successful at it over the last century.

I know the DeBeers/Music Industry analogy isn't perfect, by DeBeers is the most successful cartel ever so I imagine every cartel looks to it for "inspiration".

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200009/file-sharing /4

Unless you are Cher or Elton John, you are not going to do well with the current copyright situation. You'll see your music sell a million albums and yet make a mysteriously small amount of money.

This is the meat but it goes into quite a bit of detail.

From the article:

Last year the worldwide sales of all 600 or so members of the Recording Industry Association of America totaled $14.5 billion--a bit less than, say, the annual revenues of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance. As for the tiny labels at South by Southwest, many of the dot-coms in attendance could have bought them outright for petty cash.

After the show I asked Cleaver if he was concerned about the fate of the music industry in the Internet age. "You must be kidding," he said. With some resignation he recounted the sneaky methods by which three record labels had ripped off the band or consigned its music to oblivion, a subject to which he has devoted several chapters of an unpublished autobiography he offered to send me.

(He had nicer things to say about his current label, Checkered Past.) Later I asked one of the music critics if Cleaver's tales of corporate malfeasance were true. More than true, I was told--they were typical. Not only is the total income from music copyright small, but individual musicians receive even less of the total than one would imagine. "It's relatively mild," Cleaver said later, "the screwing by Napster compared with the regular screwing."

Although many musicians resent it when people download their music free, most of them don't lose much money from the practice, because they earn so little from copyright. "Clearly, copyright can generate a huge amount of money for those people who write songs that become mass sellers," says Simon Frith, a rock scholar in the film-and-media department at the University of Stirling, in Scotland, and the editor of Music and Copyright (1993). But most musicians don't write multimillion-sellers. Last year, according to the survey firm Soundscan, just eighty-eight recordings--only .03 percent of the compact discs on the market-accounted for a quarter of all record sales. For the remaining 99.97 percent, Frith says, "copyright is really just a way of earning less than they would if they received a fee from the record company." Losing copyright would thus have surprisingly little direct financial impact on musicians. Instead, Frith says, the big loser would be the music industry, because today it "is entirely structured around contracts that control intellectual-property rights--control them rather ruthlessly, in fact."

He's an absolutely huge omission from the list.

If you're unaware, he wrote a memo in 1945 titled 'As we may think' which laid down a lot of seminal ideas about information, computing devices (the Memex) and the way in which we interact with it - specifically the concept of hypertext.

If you haven't already read his memo, give it a shot. Along with Alvin Toffler's book 'Future Shock', this changed the way I view technology for ever... oh, stick Alvin Toffler on the list too, Bill Gates for 'commoditising' the PC, Gordon Moore, pretty much anyone who ever worked at Xerox PARC and the guy who invented the MP3 codec. They're all important to why we're sat here today.

Moreover, diamond is decidedly not tough. It may be hard (resists scratching), and stiff (resists bending), but it does not resist fracturing or shattering.

The toughest natural mineral is probably jade (both varieties), even though it's decidedly not hard. You can scratch it with a good knife, but if you take a hammer to a slab of jade, you're liable to damage the hammer. Interestingly, the microscale structure of jade is not unlike the material in TFA -- interlocking crystals, which are responsible for its physical strength.

The perception of diamonds as "forever" and "indestructible" was constructed by the diamond industry. Diamonds aren't rare, either.

--
Dum de dum.

Iraq was not ready for democracy and will not be anytime soon from the way it looks. As bad as this sounds, a dictator was needed to keep the country in check.

The fact that so many people risked their lives to vote when they finally had a chance suggests that this is something they want, and that it's not something we arrogant Westerners are imposing on people who "chose" their dictator. Imagine telling an escapee from North Korea that we don't think North Koreans are "ready for democracy" and are better off under Kim.

Can we fix our mistake - I don't know...probably not, at least not without angering millions, losing thousands of our own citizen's lives, and making our children and grand children pay for this continuing war. Is it worth it...I don't think so...what about you?

A friend is of the opinion that we should fight ruthlessly, knowing that this means killing a whole lot of people and leveling any neighborhood that's not pacified, or not fight at all; and that our current strategy handcuffs our troops, whose specialty is fighting, not "winning hearts and minds." I don't know whether to think this is awful, or agree. But I don't think that leaving will end the war, not while we remain in the region, support Israel, and refuse to convert to Wahabism.

Returning to China, the Atlantic Monthly had an article saying that China is a military threat to America (at least at sea) not because their numbers outweigh our technology, but because they, too can fight "asymmetric warfare." Hit one US ship with one rocket and CNN and Fox News will trumpet it, track the American body count, and show weeping families.

... government is not after you.

That's a lame excuse for violations of your rights and it does not save you from real harm. When you give government the power to intimidate and harass, they might use it on people who are fighting for your rights.

Some interesting reading:

1. Atlantic on MLK wiretap
2. A better article on the same subject, drawing parallels to current policy.
3. An LA Times article on just how bad things got.
4. UK harassment of nonviolent protesters
5. The UK police state. The power to abuse has not stopped crime or terrorism.
6. Secret prisons, how bad it has gotten today.
7. They will take your laptop, just a small reminder of how it works.

The list of current issues goes on and on. When you allow government to abuse you, it will.

I'm shocked, shocked I tell you to find that deceptive advertising is going on. I mean it's not like they, as in the ubiquitious they, think people are malleable, easily led astray, brainwashed, etc, etc.

De Beers has the longest running viral marketing campaign in history. It started in the 1880's and is still going strong today.

...Sorry FBI for killing your wiretap program...

Wasn't it fashionable to predict this kind of thing in the 1950's?

Have a read over this article in The Atlantic. It pretty much describes me to a T, and it's reassuring to know I'm not the only one :).

So why does intentionality matter so much to humans in perceiving threats? I think it's the same as the religious impulse: to feel a fiber of justice, empathy and consciousness in the environment -- a social evolutionary adaptation. The Bush braintrust, recognizing this, plays up this fear through rhetoric of "terror," "evil" and "homeland."

(A fine article on this theme.)

A similar story appeared in Wired three years ago: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.h tml
and here's some background on De Beers and engagement rings: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond

This article from The Atlantic, published over 20 years ago, that does a great job of telling the story of how diamonds became expensive. It's fascinating, and it makes you really wonder what DeBeers has done all these years to prop up their cartel.

The short version is this: diamonds are not precious stones, and they are not rare. Their main value is their emotional value of the person who received the stone; it's not based on any market value whatsoever. And diamonds became "required" for engagement rings through one of the best marketing campaigns in history that leveraged the power of Hollywood in the 1940's.

I don't think I'm going to be buying any natural diamonds any time soon. Artificial? Maybe... but I'd probably prefer a real precious stone.

All in all, an investment in a diamond mine or even in a diamond ring may be a very bad investment.

The Diamond Story

first of all, jewelers don't make a "huge profit margin" on diamonds, in fact they generally make very little, unless you walk in there waving a huge wad of cash. there is a very well known document called the "rap sheet" (aka rappaport sheet) which is published weekly and lists the wholesale prices for various grades and types of diamonds. if you know even a little, you can get a jeweler to give you 5% over rap, which is hardly a huge margin compared to media/software/drug companies.

secondly, diamonds are definitely an item for which you get what you pay for. can you overpay? absolutely. but a $5000 diamond from a good retailer (like whiteflash or blue nile) is going to be twice as good as a $2500 diamond when it comes to the all-important flashyness factor (amount of light returned through the top of the stone) also, any good retailer will buy your diamond back for what you paid for it originally if you want to trade up (like the gold guy)

third, I never understood what all the fuss was about diamonds, until I bought my fiancee (now wife) one. I'm a pretty miserly guy in general but I have to say splashing out for a 1ct SI1 with excellent cut and symmetry was an amazingly good decision (for me) in retrospect. she gets complements on it every day (years later), and, sad to say EVERYONE JUDGES OUR RELATIONSHIP BASED ON THE FRICKING ROCK. I can't tell you how many times she's heard "oh he must really love you" -- gak -- sad but true.

finally, to get a bit of historical perspective, the fall of DeBeers has been predicted for quite some time now.. I recommend Ed Epstein's fantastic article from The Atlantic.. if you don't look at the date you might think it was just published: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond and for those who want a fantastic and unbiased source for diamond info, I highly recommend http://www.pricescope.com/

10 Reasons never to accept a diamond, published in The Economist.

And then of course, the classic Atlantic article about the DeBeers Diamond cartel, and how the manufacture need.

If diamonds are so special, how come they're 20x more common than sapphires but come at such a high premium?

Another great (though slightly dated but still relevant) article from The Atlantic on the diamond market's inflated value. Great reading if you have some time to kill.

But for South Korea, a more immediate danger may be North Korea's artillery.

The capital Seoul, only 60 km (37 miles) south of the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone that has divided the peninsula since the end of the Korean War in 1953, has long been within range of one of the world's most powerful artillery batteries.

South Korea's Defense Ministry said the North had amassed more than 13,000 pieces of artillery and multiple rocket launchers, much of it aimed at Seoul.

Jane's International Defense Review estimates that if North Korea launched an all-out barrage, it could achieve an initial fire rate of 300,000 to 500,000 shells per hour into the Seoul area -- home to about half the country's 48.5 million people.

The biggest are 170-mm self-propelled artillery guns and 240-mm multiple rocket launchers. It also has hundreds of Scud missiles that could hit any part of South Korea.

"We have reason to believe that the chemical weapons are with the forward artillery units that are targeting Seoul. If we don't get those early, we end up with chemicals on Seoul." North Korea: The War Game

When negotiators were hammering out the 1994 accord - over similar concerns about North Korea's nuclear intentions - Pyongyang also warned that it would turn the South Korean capital of Seoul into a "sea of fire".

SEOUL, South Korea -- In an unusually explicit threat to its neighbor yesterday, North Korea warned that Japan would be immersed in a "nuclear sea of fire" if the United States were to attack the North.

Speaking to the BBC's Mike Thompson in Pyongyang, Mr Ri said his government was becoming increasingly alarmed at signs that Washington planned to send more aircraft carriers, bombers and troops to the region.

He said such actions would mean that the US was either planning to invade the North or launch attacks against it.

In response, he insisted, Pyongyang would not just sit and wait, and might decide to strike first if necessary.

The country currently has a standing army of more than one million soldiers. The US has about 37,000 troops based in South Korea.

Torture is a great tool if you just want to convict someone regardless of their innocence, but it makes a bad tool in instances where the truth matters. From a great article from The Atlantic , Mark Bowden writes that torture risks killing the subject and gets the subject to say whatever he thinks will get him out of the situation--which may not be the truth. Interrogation has a large component of mind games and social engineering involved. In a real life example, a subject in American custody is told he will be tortured unless he divulges certain facts. He believes that American law prevents the interrogators from doing anything bad to him. So the interrogators threaten to ship him to Egypt, where he will be interrogated by Israeli Mossad agents. The guy caved. Stuff like that. Microwaving people just gets them to say what they think you want them to say. FBI: "Tell us where the bomb is! Tell us you want to bomb the Pentagon!" Guy: "I want to bomb the Pentagon. Let me go!"

Yes. "Have you ever tried to sell a diamond"? http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond

Our faces and irises are visible and our voices are being recorded.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200209/mann

Iris scanner - a million bucks

Glasses with a picture of someone else's eyeballs - $5.00

Stickin' it to da man! - priceless.

Genealogists discover royal roots on every family tree

In which they discuss the royal roots of Brooke Shields.

What is it about Brooke? Well, nothing -- at least genealogically.

Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another.

then there is this old link to the notion of the Most Recent Common Ancestor of Mankind.

The huge number of proven descents of people from common European royal ancestry in historical times, when considered with the vastly greater number of descents that must exist but are not among the rare few that can be proven, suggest strongly that everyone, in the West at least, is descended from an MRCA in historical times. They suggest, for example, that everyone in the West is descended from Charlemagne, c. 800 AD.

It would seem possible that, even with a lot of geographical separation, the MRCA of the entire world is still within historical times, 3000 BC - 1000 AD. In fact, it is quite likely the entire world is descended from the Ancient Egyptian royal house, c. 1600 BC.

We pick them as an example because they left proven descents for centuries, so it seems likely their descents did not die out, and they are ancestors of some people alive today. Hence probably ancestors of all people alive today.

Quite likely almost everyone in the world descends from Confucius, c. 500 BC. We pick him as an example because he is the proven ancestor of some people alive today. Hence probably the ancestor of all people alive today.

Atlantic Magazine, among others, had a story on this a few years back.

The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne

We have adopted a plan which we have worked out in cooperation with the South Vietnamese for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground forces, and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces on an orderly scheduled timetable. This withdrawal will be made from strength and not from weakness. As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater.

I have not and do not intend to announce the timetable for our program. And there are obvious reasons for this decision which I am sure you will understand. As I have indicated on several occasions, the rate of withdrawal will depend on developments on three fronts.

One of these is the progress which can be or might be made in the Paris talks. An announcement of a fixed timetable for our withdrawal would c

While I don't think anything you're suggesting has ever happened, we did find out from Al Qaeda records that they had never seriously considered using chemical & biological weapons in terrorist strikes until the American press detailed how easy they are to obtain and how devestating the effect would be.

Now, that wasn't classified information; but it does show, at least, that when the American media publishes information useful to terrorists, it doesn't go unnoticied.

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.

Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct entry.

Oh, drinkypoo, why can't the rest of Slashdot be as informed, educated, and intelligent as you?

Ah, but they can be! All they have to do besides be a natural-born genius and all-around pimp daddy mack is to read slashdot. That's where I got the heads-up on what's Inside Al-Qaeda's Hard Drive. Asshole.

If you haven't read the story yet, read it. It's absolutely fascinating to look and see what's on the enemy's mind.

Bamford only got several points wrong in his last book on NSA, but I suspect that was because he was purposively fed the wrong data by his NSA sources.....

That is such a patently nonsensical remark - eavesdropping illegally on the client's telephone and Internet calls/messages is not customer data.

For an excellent (and really shocking) story on how NSA is able to spy on all Americans' calls and Web traffic, read the article in the April issue of Atlantic Monthly.

It's a good read for techies since it explains (in general terms) how and what the NSA is collecting. It's also an excellent primer for anyone who still believes that since he's not doing anything wrong he doesn't mind being watched.

I can't remember were I read it, guess it was slashdot... but

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200501/clarke

did mentioned UAVs to conduct reconnaissance in the United States, and it also described how well it (and all coming patriot acts) protected America against, well, against whom?

You start hyping. You have to make sure that your customers know that YOUR, and only YOUR accessories offer the value they're looking for. You NEED those earplugs, because they're original and without, the iPod is no longer cool. You NEED our case because only with it, you show the world that you have the original and only then you are part of the family.

Apple may be pretty good at herding consumers, but they're absolutely nothing compared to, say, De Beers. De Beers created the diamond ring as a cultural item less than a hundred years ago. Now, you have to give your lady love a diamond ring -- no alternatives.

The story I linked to is pretty interesting -- if you have a couple minutes, it's a worthwhile read.

And that's how you make money... Restrict the market. You're making the assumption that there's a free market for diamonds, there isn't. You might have a million tonnes of gold in your back garden (or in space) but if you sell it by the ounce it won't have an affect on the world market.

e.g.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond

I agree; it seems silly to pick on homosexuality when there are lots of worse things about parents that can put a child at a disadvantage: Drug use, abusive behavior, absence, or flat out being on the shallow end of the gene pool.

Absence is a particularly interesting one. That bastion of hard-core conservativism, The Atlantic, reported a while back that children raised without both a male and female role model in the home are at a significant disadvantage compared to those who do not (subscription required). Now that was comparing single-parent relationships to two-parent relationships, so it is extrapolation to suggest this applies to homosexual relationships.

The child of the same-sex relationship will have to find a role model of the gender not represented by his or her parents just the same as a child of a single-parent home has to. And in both cases, there's no telling who the child will choose, or if the child will have no strong role model at all. So it's not a particularly devious extrapolation, and until someone is able to do some legitimate research, it seems to me to be a reasonable hypothesis: The child of a same-sex couple will be at a disadvantage compared to one raised by a male and female parent.

It's not very fair, but who said life is fair? My child, for example, will be at a disadvantage because his father's an asshole who spends too much time in flamewars on Slashdot.

By that same notion, I don't really choose a religion. I have a certain connection with God, I feel it, it's there, it predates even the notion of religion in my life. I can only assume it would be the same for someone being gay or straight or bi - they choose their behavior, but the preference itself is sort of built in.

However, I asked why belief in god(s) would make one illogical, and since you fail to give any logical (or other kind, for that matter) proof against the existance of god(s), you fail to answer that question.

If the government decided to leak embarrassing details about somebody's private life in order to discredit them, do you think they would hold a press conference and say "here's what we found with our secret wiretapping of Joe Schmoe's bedroom"? Probably not. Much better to secretly leak the details through a few middle men, so that they "just happen" to appear in the press or some blogs. At that point, the media will go into its usual feeding frenzy and the character assassination is complete without anyone ever knowing that the government was involved.

Given that, it would be difficult in most cases to show government wrongdoing. However, the U.S. government does have a known history of wiretapping political enemies, and the Bush Administration's predilection for trying to discredit people using confidential/personal information (even if they have to make up the details to suit their purpose) is so well-known it has earned its own nickname.

So no, I don't have direct examples, but there is clearly a willingness in some parties to do such things, and absent any checks or balances there would be no reason for them not to. Which is what makes it so troubling that they are trying to do away with those very checks and balances.

The tribes were giving money to Democrats before Abramoff got involved. He told them to give to Republicans and they stopped giving to Democrats. Abramoff (and K street) are about as Republican as they come. The "the remarkably bipartisan nature of the beneficiaries of Mr. Abramoff's largesses" is flat out a lie, and I suspect you know it.

It seems that the fact that the tribes gave more money to Democrats when the Democrats controlled both houses of congress, and switched to giving more money to Republicans when Republicans took control of both houses of congress seems dark and sinister to you, but to anyone with less of an axe to grind, does it really seem even passing strange? The question, after all, is not of who took money from the Indians; it is of who Mr. Abramoff was able to buy off by brokering specific contributions for specific votes. It should come as no surprise to anyone who is not laughably partisan that Mr. Abramoff found eager takers of his clients' money on both sides of the aisle.

In any case, the issue isn't who they gave money to, it's who brokered the sale of votes.

Um, no. By now, the fact that Abramoff was brokering votes is old news, sealed with an indictment. The question now is not who was buying votes (Mr. Abramoff), but who were selling them (a remarkably bipartisan crowd).

I have no intention of going off onto whatever "legalist" side ally you're talking about.

Then I suggest you drop, once and for all, the talking point that `no Democrat has been indicted for taking money from Mr. Abramoff', as this is true only in the (narrow, legalistic) sense that no member of either party has been so indicted.

On the WMD issue, you are entitled to your own opinions, of course, but you are not entitled to your own facts. In UN Security Council resolution 1441, the entire Security Council voted unanimously that Saddam Hussein had not complied with 12 years of UNSC resolutions demanding he disarm. That's right, unanimously -- not a single `no' vote: not France, not Russia, not China. This is hardly surprising, of course, since the intelligence services of France, Germany, and Russia had all concluded that Saddam had WMD, and an active program to produce more.

Our allies abroad were not alone in this, of course. Bill Clinton had reached the same conclusion, authorizing air strikes based on this in 1998. At that time, both parties united in support of that conclusion, and both parties united again around UNSC resolution 1441.

Prior to going to war, Mr. Bush presented a 23 count indictment of Iraq to the US congress, and asked for authorization to use force. One of these 23 counts was Iraq's WMD program (absurdly, the anti-war crowd seems to have no argument with the other 22), a charge which was backed with public evidence presented to the Senate and House, and private evidence presented to the House and Senate intelligence committees. Not a single Senator or Congressman asserted that they had been given insufficient evidence to decide if Saddam had WMDs. Not a single Senator or Congressman asserted that the President was withholding evidence. The resolution authorizing force passed both houses overwhelmingly.

For you (or John Kerry, who has since admitted that he failed to show up for fourteen of sixteen Senate Intelligence committee briefings on Iraq) to now claim that Senate Democrats didn't know what they were voting on or didn't bother to examine the evidence they were presented hardly reflects poorl

An alternative is sub-seabed deposition. See: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96oct/seabed/sea bed.htm Basically, abyssal plains in the middle of the ocean (away from the edges of crustal plates) have been accumulating mud and sediments for millions of years. In some cases, the mud layer is more than a mile thick. The idea is to drill holes in the mud and deposit the waste under the mud. The mud is similar to clay and has the consistency of peanut butter. The containers would last probably a couple of thousand years, then gradually decompose. The waste would be gradually released and then diffuse through the mud over thousands of years, and would diffuse into the oceans in a very slow and diffuse manner. Read the whole article.

I once read a brilliant article in Atlantic Monthly that made an argument similar to what your first point is, but slightly different. I would find it, but I'm too lazy to figure out what the name of it was and how to link to it.

The basic argument was that the Genius has replaced the Saint as a sort of focus of idol worship in contemporary culture, paralleling a shift in emphasis from religious to secular.

The idea was that individuals such as Einstein, while brilliant, were really not all that much more brilliant than his contemporaries (e.g., Godel, Schrodinger, others whom have become forgotten outside of certain circles), but that because of historical circumstances and cultural variables, he became elevated to the level that he is today. Einstein, the authors argue, sort of became a figurehead, an idol whose image and symbolic meaning came to surpass the individual he really was, to the point that it is impossible to discuss him as he really was.

I'm not trying to say that Einstein wasn't smart, or worthy of praise. I'm also not able to articulate the argument of the article as well as its original author. But I think it's an interesting idea, one that I very much agree with.

It's similar to what you are saying about certain "prototypes" appearing that society seems to identify with and emulate.

Though the term "information overload" was coined, I believe, by Jan Noyes in her book, User Centred Design, this problem has been recognised for many years, most relevantly by Vannevar Bush in his essay 'As We May Think'.

A couple of posters have already mentioned that they use the Internet as an aid to long term memory (btw - short term memory is different to what many people think - it only last a few seconds. Problems recalling information (or not remembering something you dealt with in great detail a while ago is a problem of long term memory [decoding error]). This does result in problems: people (myself included) often try to solve the same thing twice before realising that they've already done it; and other relevant documents may be couched in unfamiliar terms but are not retrieved from search engines because the wrong phrases are used (the problem of 'synonymy' seen in search engines).

What people tend to do instead of committing facts to memory for rapid recall is that people use computers and information sources as artifacts to help them find things at a later date. The cognitive strategies used by people differ and do change when the information environment is more amenable. There's stuff about information foraging by Pirolli and Card at Xerox Parc for those who are interested.

Nobody knew what the Internet was capable of, and it may well have been a unique insight.

Only a PTO patsy would say that. Hyperlinks were invented at least 60 years ago. Pausing of recording media was also at least 60 years ago.

The only people who talk about ideas as units are the patent mafia. People who really create know better.

---

Have you written to your representatives about patents? A write-in campaign is our only hope!

Israel will take the threat seriously and bomb the hell out of Iran's caches of missiles and nuclear weapons facilities.

Unfortunately that probably won't work, as was detailed in this war game simulation put on by the Atlantic last year. Here's the salient quote:

What about a pre-emptive strike of our own, like the Osirak raid? The problem is that Iran's nuclear program is now much more advanced than Iraq's was at the time of the raid. Already the U.S. government has no way of knowing exactly how many sites Iran has, or how many it would be able to destroy, or how much time it would buy in doing so. Worse, it would have no way of predicting the long-term strategic impact of such a strike. A strike might delay by three years Iran's attainment of its goal--but at the cost of further embittering the regime and its people. Iran's intentions when it did get the bomb would be all the more hostile.

Iran is run by kooks, but surely they're smart enough not to put everything in one place like Iraq did.

Very far back indeed. In 1945, a guy by the name of Vannevar Bush published an article called "As We May Think" in the Atlantic Monthly. In it, he describes a device called a "memex" which is thought to have forseen the web (among a number of other things). This device also incorporates a heirarchial menu system to navagate documents. It's quite the classic paper, and I would encourage anyone with an interest in either the history of computing, or Human-Computer Interfaces to read it:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush

The memex is described on the fourth page at this link, but the whole article is worth reading.

James T. Fallows

This time I DID press "preview..."

I'm sure that a widely regarded author of several security books, a cryptographer who's created a fairly robust algorithm, and a guy who's been called to testify before Congress several times is all broken up about slashdot user 805235 thinking his article sucks.