Slashdot Mirror

By the by, here are a couple of articles that address and expound upon (with bigger 'public' names like Bill Joy) the progress of A.I.

May artificial intelligence remain artificial
A.I. Can't Yet Follow Film Script

Slashdotters defending DRM... am I crazy or am I the last sane one? I'm not sure sure anymore.

Slashdot continues to get more mainstream readership, even getting mentioned in print articles these days. As a side effect of this visibility, the activity of astroturfers has increased -- notice that the pro-MS AC(s) tend to have the same writing style and logical fallacies. When other readers put them in their place, a handful UIDs dog pile one or two posters with ad hominem attacks or the "you-just-don't-like-Microsoft" (appeal to emotion?) attack. Microsoft has a long practice of 'turfing in it's marketing:

• MSFT paid Gartner to publish MSFT material as Gartner's
• fake "grass roots" letter writing
• another fake letter writing campaign
• paid for people to hang out in AOL forums
• paid for people to hang out in ZDNet "talkback" forums
• paid for people to hang out in CompuServe forums
• MSNBC doctored Wall Street Journal material
• Stuffed an on-line ballot box
• planned to plant fake op-ed pieces in local newspapers
• funded favorable think-tank whitepapers
• 'Astroturf' PR campaign exposes Microsoft goals.
• Joseph Menn. "Lobbyists Tied to Microsoft Wrote Citizens' Letters." The Los Angeles Times; Aug 23, 2001; pg. A.1 (print)
• Windows Outstuffs Linux in Poll
• Dead People, Fake Letters, Support Microsoft - Report
• Dead people rise in support of Microsoft
• Microsoft employee's move against AOL backfires
• The Freedom to Innovate Network - an 'Astroturf' Organisation

Also, right now MS is in a panicked marketing blitz. notice all the product placement on the tech sites. The embarassing stuff just disappears from the top page less than a day, but the press releases sit there for weeks.

It makes sense. Most Windows users have both Windows and Office because it's what the OEMs had installed on the machines they bought, nothing more or less. Most of these are either apathetic or know nothin else, so they will not write. Others are pissed off at the low quality, made worse by Microsoft treating security and stability issues as PR issues -- How many times have you heard "computers" crash from BSD, Novell, QNX, Linux, or OS X users? Or is it just the MSCEs? Most remaining clients could go easily over to OS X or one of the Linux distros and the next IT boom would start, like the previous one, without Microsoft.

In short, they need DRM to survive the summer and few, except for MS and RIAA staff

Slashdotters defending DRM... am I crazy or am I the last sane one? I'm not sure sure anymore.

Slashdot continues to get more mainstream readership, even getting mentioned in print articles these days. As a side effect of this visibility, the activity of astroturfers has increased -- notice that the pro-MS AC(s) tend to have the same writing style and logical fallacies. When other readers put them in their place, a handful UIDs dog pile one or two posters with ad hominem attacks or the "you-just-don't-like-Microsoft" (appeal to emotion?) attack. Microsoft has a long practice of 'turfing in it's marketing:

• MSFT paid Gartner to publish MSFT material as Gartner's
• fake "grass roots" letter writing
• another fake letter writing campaign
• paid for people to hang out in AOL forums
• paid for people to hang out in ZDNet "talkback" forums
• paid for people to hang out in CompuServe forums
• MSNBC doctored Wall Street Journal material
• Stuffed an on-line ballot box
• planned to plant fake op-ed pieces in local newspapers
• funded favorable think-tank whitepapers
• 'Astroturf' PR campaign exposes Microsoft goals.
• Joseph Menn. "Lobbyists Tied to Microsoft Wrote Citizens' Letters." The Los Angeles Times; Aug 23, 2001; pg. A.1 (print)
• Windows Outstuffs Linux in Poll
• Dead People, Fake Letters, Support Microsoft - Report
• Dead people rise in support of Microsoft
• Microsoft employee's move against AOL backfires
• The Freedom to Innovate Network - an 'Astroturf' Organisation

Also, right now MS is in a panicked marketing blitz. notice all the product placement on the tech sites. The embarassing stuff just disappears from the top page less than a day, but the press releases sit there for weeks.

It makes sense. Most Windows users have both Windows and Office because it's what the OEMs had installed on the machines they bought, nothing more or less. Most of these are either apathetic or know nothin else, so they will not write. Others are pissed off at the low quality, made worse by Microsoft treating security and stability issues as PR issues -- How many times have you heard "computers" crash from BSD, Novell, QNX, Linux, or OS X users? Or is it just the MSCEs? Most remaining clients could go easily over to OS X or one of the Linux distros and the next IT boom would start, like the previous one, without Microsoft.

In short, they need DRM to survive the summer and few, except for MS and RIAA staff

The WIRED cover article, May issue (albeit poorly titled) describes technical innovations in Revolutions, including full transition mid-scene of humans into computer generated models, resampling of photography over constructed 3d computer models, and the biggest motion-capture studio ever constructed.

The free software community needs to do a couple of things:
convince them that there is money to be made by either producing a client or
that, given a published API, that a sourceforge project can make a working client.
there may even be a code-for-play-time business model here: free software game, contributors play at will, non-contributors cough up a few quid...
I've never played one of these MUD things, but this could coax me out. Are they going to make it immersive, and do a lot of dwarvish and elvish, or are the copyright owners going to interfere?
OTOH, if snubbed, the free software community could respond by approaching Robert Jordan for a WOT MUD...

I couldn't agree more. And i think this article shows that the benefits of the shuttle are lacking.

To quote the article : "They [shuttle proponents] think the dream of spaceflight is so fragile that, while crashes cannot derail it, the cancellation of a single program could shut it down for good. They fear that if we take one small step back, we will never again be able to go forward. "

lets go to mars already.

BTW, I think NASA/society sets the bar too-high for astronauts ... a crew of high school kids with an old-fart chaperone (someone who is 28-years old) would do a far better job than the over-qualified astronauts ... real-life example is the reactor control room of a US Navy submarine.

...people who have absolutely no use for raw data...

I have a use for it, I'd analyse it to death until I have some sort of sequence that matches the dimensions of the Pyramids, preferably also chucking in the orientation of Stonehenge and distance of Easter Island from Atlantis.

Then I'd write a book.

Perhaps I should patent my Business plan first? or is there prior art?

In the UK where public and private owned CCTV cameras are everywhere already, reports into how well they work indicate that camera operators are likely to target just young males of visable minorities and engage in voyerism of attractive women.

I don't have the link, but there was a good article in the NY Times I think about this, around 2001.

Some Camera to Watch Over You is a related Wired article.

Here's a tidbit..

As I have been watching Evan and you on the Stalker Channel the past couple of days, I have been trying to figure out if the two of you have a thing going. It's hard because the camera doesn't give me audio, I have to work it out from body language. And after careful analysis of instant replays, I suspect you of being one of those dangerous types who innocently give good body language to everyone. The type of girl who should have someone walking 10 paces in front of her with a red flashing light and a clanging bell. Just my type.

The TIPS program was killed off with the passing of the Homeland Security Act.

This was briefly covered here with a link to a more substantial piece here

Thank god for cooler heads.

Here's another link:

http://www.cfp2000.org/news/student_reports/stephe nson-waldman.html

Audio-only players are so 90s. Personally, I'm saving my money for the Archos AV320, or something like it. Big screen, MP3 *&* MPEG video playback and record. The lack of wireless, though, is a sore point.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.04/play.html ?pg=12

http://shanebrinkmandavis.com/homepage/JBMM/Prerel easePicts/

Windows defragmentation toll was written by a good christian company and banned by Nazi germany.

DisKeeper was created by Executive Software, who are a Scientologist company. The Nazi Germany predates Scientology. It was the clearly non-Nazi German government who made doing business with the Church of Scientology illegal.

an that is just to apple user and no one else. imagine if this had been world wide.

On the otherhand 1 million sales is a tiny drop in the record sales bucket. if there are 1 million songs sold that's less than 100,000 albums sold. which means over the course of a year that will mean about a million album sold if they can sustain this pace. that's trivial. how many times a year does a artist release an album that goes "platinum"? seems to me they are many every year, some from each record label. thus if apple sustains this pace it will only contribute a single platinum album. Of course there may be a large multiplier effect if the profit margins on this are higher/lower than normal album sales.

What this really shows is how utterly insignificant all of the the other on line music sales were prior to this. they didn't even register: a single mega-record store in NY city could outsell all of the annual online music in a good day prior to apple's involvment. likewise selling CDs by mail also vastly exceeded this market.

heck AOL sent out more of their free trial disks than that!

on the otherhand, once this hits the rest of the world and once this hits the windows world. now were talking a large dent in the sales of music online. again remeber their may b eprofit margin mulitpiers too. this will be true in places that yearn for "pop" music but dont have such good access to music stores as in the US. likewise, world artists will be able to crack the US market if apple lets in lables that lack US distribution systems.

now lets talk about how intrusive the DRM is. its not bad compared to all previous efforts. you can keep your music on a CD so insome sense you own it. but re-ripping it is supposed to be not so good, and thus since digital music is the only way you will be using music in the future having an unrippable high quality CD is not as good as it seems. Apple's tech knowledge base warns you to deauthenticate your mac before you reformat the disk or sell it. its not clear but it seems to imply that you could lose one of your 3 authentications if you dont.

Apple warns you they are free to change how they authenticate your music when you install it on a new mac any time they wish.

This lack of clarity over the authentication protool has me worried but not hyperventilating.

legitmate questions include:

1)how do I authenticate my music on future macs or ipods if mac sells its music store to someone who either goes out of bussiness or starts charging fees to authenticate. (dont laugh mac switched its bussiness model from free to pay for mac.com and claris works)

2) Someday i'll want to keep my music on my phone, credit- card computer, ring, implant, etc....will future itunes allow me to move music to non-mac music players?

3) if my computer is lost, the mother board dies, my hard disk crashes, or a virus eats it, or my employer seizes it before deauthenticate have I lost one of my authentications?

4) what if I go bankrupt and cant get a visa card. how do I maintain a music store account so I can authenticate?

5) in the future, will legacy macs that cant run the latest OS also not be able to de-authenticate?

As I said I'm not hyperventilating, and like 8-tracks and vinyl I dont have the unreasonable expectation that I wont want to replace my music media in the future. but I dont want to be forced to because say apple goes out of the music bussniess.

and yes I realize I can make an audio CD but its not the same as having bought a CD in the store since the store bought CD will rip to higher audio quality for use in digital players (and I predict in the future all useful players are going to be digital-- there wont be many CD players except as ripping devices)

http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,58718,00. html

Also your racist comments show how little you know about Indian programmers some of who are big names in the American Computer Industry

1. Go the Bank and change $1 for 5000000 Indian Rupees
Slightly exaggerated

2. Hire 1000 Indian programmers with above currency
Senior managers at HP sign off $1million invoices all the time, any expenditure less than $1million is not questioned.

3. Tell the programmers to recompile all statically-linked applications with the new libraries
Easy

4. Hire unemployed American programmer [oddtodd.com] for $20000 to translate the program from Hindi to English
Fair enough, with Indian programmers you don't need this step, I retract this particular statement.

5. Charge large corporations big $$$ for upgrading all their software
Or less $$$ than competing US corporations with US programmers paid $30000 for just one programmer.

5. Profit!!! (Really)
The CEO of Walmart is richer than Bill Gates, despite the fact the majority of his US workforce is living on charity and Government aid. Your taxpayer dollars are paying for Walmart's reduced salary, and therefore Walmart's profits. Walmart keeps its salaries low by requiring drug tests and by having patrolling managers who are under orders to stop employees talking (time theft) because "idle talk forms unions"

It is unfortunate that things have to go this way, but until this silliness is brought home-- literally-- the masses can't get behind any effort to put a stop to it.

Does the DMCA make life difficult or inconvenient for your family or non-technical friends? Probably not. Not in a way that they notice or associate with anything in particular. Not being able to rip music CDs may impact a reasonable chunk of the voting public, but no critical mass there.

Wait until your parents want to Tivo their favorite TV show or a movie on a premium station that they pay extra for, but they find out that not only can they not record that show or movie, but in fact the Tivo is not really functional at all anymore... and maybe their VCR doesn't record everything they want, either.

When voters are effected by this stuff, and when they are effected enough so that they get angry, matters like this will suddenly get the attention they deserve. So long as lobbyists and campaign contributors are the only ones making noise, there won't be anything reasonable coming out of our politicians.

At least FCC Chairman Michael Powell likes his Tivo, so maybe there will be some advocacy there. Maybe.

well in the last 6 months ALL internet music sales combined added up to less than this figure.

in one day apple users alone doubled internet sales of downladable music. that's a smashing success. imagine if this had been international plus windows users too. damn!.

wired has the figures

"Still, I wish there was a little more content in some of this stuff."

Attention Class, For Todays Field Trip we will be visiting CompUSA and seeing who can steal the most software.

Could article this be what you were talking about?
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.07/longboom.h tml

his books don't quite click for me, but I always liked the other odds & ends he wrote. his 1999 piece about ebay was always one of my favorites.

You can also find further coverage here and coverage on a seperate settlement with a Princeton student here.

Time to expand my musical tastes.

independent-artists.com

boycott-riaa.com

Why RIAA Keeps Getting Hacked

RIAA Affiliated Labels

Hmmm. Can't seem to get to the RIAA site right now...

> Typical slashdot. Just make up some facts to support your case.

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,50518,00.ht ml

Read the second graph. Then, go away.

You might want to check out this site which debunks the myth that polygraphs work. And yes, I'll bet most people probably give up their passwords themselves. For instance, Jim Bell, the guy behind Assination Politcs, a guy who should know better, gave up his PGP passphrase as part of his plea bargin. He is now suing the state of Washington and a host of others for the costs of breaking the encryption, brute-force using 1997 hardware.

These adresses are from OverPeer.

They are using the built-in messaging facilities of the P2P clients themselves.

I wonder how long it'll be before they start doing pop-up spam ... er, I mean "educational alerts" ...

In three studies -- none more recent than 1996 -- aeronautic adviser RTCA concluded portable electronic devices have the potential to interfere with critical aircraft instruments such as the altimeter. The study also said the likelihood of interference is low.

"We would get a fairly detailed and credible report of an interference event," said John Sheehan, who headed the RTCA's last study and now owns his own aviation consulting firm. "We would try to replicate that in the same aircraft and same airplane seat and couldn't do it."

"Interference" is not only the garbling of communication. It can include false warnings of unsafe conditions or noise in the flight crew's headphones. In a recent incident, a Slovenian airplane en route to Sarajevo made an emergency landing after a cell phone accidentally left on in the luggage compartment triggered an erroneous fire warning aboard the aircraft.

Boeing once purchased a passenger's laptop after claims that the computer caused interference during a flight from London to Paris; the pilot said turning the laptop on and off triggered autopilot error. Boeing then flew that same laptop on the same route in the same seat and was unable to duplicate the interference.

But it doesn't mean the interference never occurred, Sheehan said. Engineers say replicating interference is tricky because they can't duplicate the exact environment of the plane, which at the time of the interference could have been bombarded with other microwave emitters like radio towers and satellite transmissions.

Unfortunately this is a rehash of old news. The fact that Mobiles, PDAs and Laptops *can* cause interference has been widely known for a long time. Anyone that has flown in the last 5 years will be familiar with the warning to turn off these devices on take off and landing. The possible Ban on laptops etc relate to the introduction of 'ultrawideband' capabilities for these devices which 'could affect a plane's electronics, including its instrument landing system and its collision avoidance systems'. Ultrawideband devices are expected to hit the stores this year, and will range from laptops to PDAs to the following military applications: Since Aircrew will not be able to tell the difference between UWB devices and regular laptops, it seems that a blanket ban may be applied. A good overview of Ultrawideband and its political consiquenses can be found here An article on Ultrawideband and its effects on aeroplanes can be found here

Colin Crawford, an executive at the publisher IDG and a long-time Apple watcher, said, "It looks very cool and easy to use. It's classic Apple. They've taken a complex environment and made it simple."

Crawford said the service is likely to change significantly in coming months, with price drops and big growth in the library of available music.

"It's a premium service at the moment," he said. "The audience that Apple is after here can afford the iPod and to pay for music like this. But by the time it comes to Windows, it'll be a lot different."

More here: click

Maybe he's right...?

Crawford said the service is likely to change significantly in coming months, with price drops and big growth in the library of available music.

"It's a premium service at the moment," he said. "The audience that Apple is after here can afford the iPod and to pay for music like this. But by the time it comes to Windows, it'll be a lot different."

An interesting read on how games do teach us valuable lessons, and some amazing insight into how we could change teaching habits to leverage the advantages games bring to the table.

If you're smoking in your dorm room, a 'oney', or 'one hitter', is probably the least conspicuous means of getting certain psychoactive chemicals into your blood, but the use of the tube as described above need not be limited to such low quantity imbibing. Water pipe, steamroller, Jay or Joint, vaporizer, chillum, blunt, or iBong smoke could also be blown through one of these things and work equally well:)

Great idea! Sort of like this one from 1997? :^)

In two words: Information leaks.

It's been demonstrated that you can predict, to a high degree of likelyhood, when a military strike is about to happen by counting how many pizzas are delivered to the Pentagon.

It's somewhat like the before-mentioned leaky abstraction concept, but applied to information.

It's going to get alot worse long before it gets better. Those who believe that true privacy is possible in the future are delusional.

For a well though-out article on the subject, try reading this Wired article that

One of the problems with Chinese thinking is that the Chinese consider Americans or, in general, Westerners to be only "Whites" or "Blacks". The Chinese do not consider, say, Vietnamese to be Americans. So, to the Chinese, praising Americans means praising only "Whites" or "Blacks". The Chinese way of thinking is racist. This observation is another reason why Westerners are radically different from non-Westerners like the Chinese. For the record, when we Americans praise Western society, we are praising all the ethnic groups in Western society. Let's stop thinking and acting like the Chinese, okay? This matter is not an issue of race but is an issue of culture.

The critic further writes, " First of all, Taiwan is also populated by Chinese, and they have grown out of an opressive military regime into a fairly well functioning democracy ".

Let's consider the following.

1. The constitution of the Chinese living in Taiwan supports the integration of both Tibet and Mongolia into mainland China. While Tibetans suffer and die at the hands of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, the Chinese in Taiwan support integrating Tibet into "One China".

2. The Chinese son of the chairman of a powerful conglomerate in Taiwan has joined with the son of Jiang Zemin, the butcher of Tibet, to build an advanced silicon-wafer factory in Shanghai. (reference: "Sons of prominent Chinese team up on chip venture")

3. Senior Chinese military officials retired from the Taiwanese military have gone to mainland China and given military secrets about the American F-16 fighter jet to the Beijing government. (reference: "Sons of prominent Chinese team up on chip venture")

4. The Chinese from "poor, little, scared" Taiwan have invested more than $50 billion into more than 50,000 businesses in mainland China. How did this phenomenon happen? Immediately, after the Tienanman Square incident back in June 4, 1989, the American government and businesses curtailed investments in mainland China. The Taiwanese (and the other Chinese in Hong Kong) seized this window of opportunity and accelerated investments into mainland China. The rate of investments from Taiwan into China has skyrocketed to the present levels; investments continue to grow at double-digit rates.

5. In 1999, the "Wall Street Journal" reported that of all the Chinese arrested and convicted of stealing American military technology to give to Beijing, the majority of these Chinese came from Taiwan. Please read "Crypto Smuggle Scheme Busted" for an example of Chinese (from Taiwan) who were recently arrested for attempting to smuggle American military technology to mainland China.

If they name it "Bob", they'll have the evil empire itself on their case. Shiver.

I used to get that kind of answer...

I mostly solved it by joining a toastmasters club. Ironically the interviewer that recommended that to me, ended up joining about 3 years after I did, and I thought he recommended it because he'd been in it...

There is always a way of saying what you have to say in a way that is absorbable by your audience.

Example: Nobody likes to hear "you did that wrong" but most people are interested in how they might do something better so they will usually absorb "I think there is room for improvement here, and you might like to try blah".

Often now, when asked a technical question that might have a superficially simple answer, I answer "the simple or usual answer is blah", and then I ask "Do you want more technical detail on the possible variations?" Mostly they don't.

The other possibility is you might have a mild case of aspergers (nearly autism), where things that are important to most people like who is having a good day, what their family is up to, what clothes to wear, and which famous person is dating whom, etc is completely unimportant to you.

And then you have to learn modified communication systems to talk to these people. Unfortunately, you'll frequently find them in management. ie your boss.

It isn't really unreasonable, after all you wouldn't expect a computer that speaks netbeui to understand one that speaks tcp/ip?

Which reminds me I can't get my win98 machines to see each other. curses. I'm trying IPX/SPX next. Eventually if I ever figure out how to make gnome2 work I might be able to give up win98..

Here was that article I was talking about.

Blackjack is the real game of number savvy nerds. I read an article in Wired that dealt with a group from MIT that played blackjack, counting cards and making great money by playing as a group. It was a fun story that made me wish I could could think of something like that. You can find it online at Hacking Las Vegas

While looking up Judge Wilson from this article, someone with some respect for the difference between a technology and its application, I noticed that the page template looked familiar. Turns out that ol' Judge Charles F. Eick is a few floors down from Judge Wilson in the same building.

In case your memory is decaffinated at the moment, Eick is the judge that ruled to force SonicBlue to spy on its ReplayTV owners to collect copyright infringement proof against them for movie studios plaintiffs in a lawsuit, a ruling fortunately overturned by another judge.

Well, it turns out that a citizen's panel is reviewing Judge Eick for reappointment and needs our opinion regarding his judicial conduct. Deadline is May 5. Maybe the first step to winning the war for privacy is to make sure judges sitting on benches understand that whole 4th amendment thingie?

Although it's about blackjack, not poker, I'd also recommend Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich. The subtitle speaks for itself, "The inside story of six MIT students who tooks Vegas for millions." You can't ask for a better story about geeky college students analyzing the mathematics of card counting and beating Vegas at their own game.

Read Hacking Las Vegas over at Wired about MIT nerds' exploits in Vegas.

Yes, it's the good old Chaos Computer Club, playing the game for more 20 years. He's well respected in Germany and the annual CCC-Congress draws a crowd of thousand. You might want to take a look at the speakers-list and lectures of last years conference at: http://www.ccc.de/congress/2002/fahrplan/speakers. en.html

and an interesting piece from wired (1998):
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,17050,00. html">

and they make cool t-shirts,too!

Not too long ago in Wired magazine there was a story that they actually loose money on clients who recieve more the 5 shipments! Their business model really has to change for those customers. But I think they are more focussed on growth at the moment.

I also had a few time that DVD's were temporarily missing. But this has always been resolved. It happened a few times in a short period. Makes you think.

Anyway I still really like their service. Have been a member for a long time. I just hate commercial interuptions on TV. And I hate late-fees at block buster. This is my perfect system.

L.A.Marco

Netflix had a big spread in Wired several months back... the business model of the company is such that they are only profitable on accounts which rent 5 or less movies a month.

It is an interesting theory but there is no mention in the story about how the location of distribution centers affect the waiting period. Or the actual waiting period versus the one listed. I have been using NetFlix for a couple years now and have never experienced this problem. I live in Atlanta, GA where there is a distribution center for NetFlix and receive my next movie within five days of sending in a movie. I average six movies a month, which according to an article in Wired, makes my account a loss for NetFlix [wired.com] because of shipping charges. "It's so convenient that the average Netflix customer watches five movies a month. Some subscribers rent twenty or more. (Which is a problem: Netflix loses money on postage for households that rent more than five a month.)"

"It's so convenient that the average Netflix customer watches five movies a month. Some subscribers rent twenty or more. (Which is a problem: Netflix loses money on postage for households that rent more than five a month.)"

So, if this is true (and hopefully Wired has become more trustworth as a "news source" in recent years...), then obviously they want to discourage people from renting more than 5 per month.

The method above seems like a pretty good way to do it!