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Slashback: Hollywood, Commons, Misidentification
Keeping America strong by making mislabeling the problem! It really isn't too late to avoid the worst of the Real-ID Act, and Bruce Scheier's essay on it should be required reading.
Needs more cowbell! c1one writes "In an update to the story Trent Reznor Challenges Music Norms, there has been an "Unofficial The Hand that Feeds Remix Contest." The contest has produced an extreme range of styles, from Hip-Hop to HeeHaw and even a few lounge versions, to name a few. The point though, is that after listening to almost 400 remixes, some of the tracks rival the level of professionalism and creativity found on some of the "official" halo releases. The contest deadline was 5/5/05 and voting by 20 appointed international judges ranging from a Berklee College of Music graduate and various studio engineers to a former Nothing Studio's intern has commenced. They will determine a top ten list using the "nine inch rating scale" that should be available to entertain and to vote on soon."
Graceful reactions are worth emulating. Author Will Iverson writes with a reaction to Simon Chappell's review of his book Apache Jakarta Commons :
"Hi Guys!
I would just like to respond regarding the Slashdot review as posted:
So... I don't know how negatively the review was influenced by the inclusion of the Apache material, but it is entirely above-board per the Apache license and essentially reciprocal - I'm giving the material in the book back to the community via a free license to download the material.
- The book itself is published under an open license - the material in the book will be available as a free electronic download in a few months.
- Yes, the last 125 pages *is* (for all intents and purposes) the printed javadoc. This was included at the request of the publisher, and it is valuable for some people.
Oh, and as an FYI, book writing is hardly a cash cow - I only wish. ;)
Cheers & best wishes,
Will Iverson
A classic case of Americans all looking alike. Of the post "German Robot Dogs Dominate 2005 RoboCup U.S. Open," Ethan Tira-Thompson writes "The linked article has it wrong -- the German team played CMU, not UT Austin. Major screwup on the AP's part, but they don't say who wrote the original article! "
Here's an excerpt from the team's CMU team's announcement:
From: Manuela Veloso Date: May 10, 2005 2:51:14 PM EDT To: scs-all@cs.cmu.edu Subject: US Open Champs :-)Hi,
We won the RoboCup US Open, in the AIBO league. We played UPenn in the final and won 2-1 in overtime. UPenn (Dan Lee) and UT Austin (Peter Stone) came second and third, playing very well and very close to us. They are great teams. Our team, CMDash'05 still has a long way to go to better prepare for the Internationl RoboCup in Japan in July :-)
Please congratulate the complete team for the USOpen victory:
Sonia Chernova, team leader, CSD PhD student, robot behaviors, motion learning Colin McMillen, CSD PhD student, teamwork, networking, goalie Paul Rybski, RI PostDoc, state estimation, multi-robot world modeling, behaviors Juan Fasola, CSD junior, vision, defender, behaviors, motion Felix vonHundelshausen, CSD PostDoc, vision Alex Trevor, CSD senior, vision Sabine Hauert, exchange CS Master student from Switzerland, localization, behaviors Raquel Ros Espinoza, visitor from Barcelona, behaviors, vision
and with the help at the Open of the veterans: Doug Vail, CSD PhD student, vision James Bruce, CSD PhD student, vision, motion"
Hey, they got most of it right. A Harvard Crimson story linked from a Slashdot post headlined "Mathematicians Become Hollywood Consultants" described Jonathan Farley, a math professor who co-founded a consulting agency to help Hollywood get mathematics right in movies an television shows. Farley wrote to point out that his neither a Harvard post-doctoral fellow nor a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, writing "I am not and never have been either. (I am a tenured professor elsewhere and have been for several years.) This was an incorrect statement initially made by poor reporters at the Harvard University student newspaper. " Farley points to this Boston Globe story which gets it right.
"It really isn't too late to avoid the worst of the Real-ID Act, and Bruce Scheier's essay on it should be required reading."
Yes, definitely! I really like the points he makes, such as that REAL ID is bad because:
- Real addresses on all cards, even for undercover police officers
- Insecure RFID technology allowing unauthorized access
- Machine readable = ATM > 7-11's Database > Choicepoint > Spammers and Identity Theifs
- Expensive ($120 million estimated per state!) and unfunded! The last thing we need are more deficits!
- Power grab by national government
And the best of all, besides it probably decreasing security:
- Polls overwhelmingly show no one wants it! And over 600 organizations oppose it!
Now, if that doesn't sound like a completely botched-up job, I don't know what is.
"Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write it should be hard to understand."
Write your GOVERNORS people! The national association of governors isn't a fan of the act and they want to protest it. WRITE YOUR GOVERNOR!!!!! it may still be able to be stopped
Most police officers already using the address of their precinct office instead of their home address whenever they give out an address, precisely to keep perps from tracking down where they live.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
There is a difference between your postal address, and physical address. The idea is that it's not for sending you mail, but to find YOU.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Yes, states and the federal government are both funded by taxes, but they are different pools of money from different sources. The federal tax base consists primarily of funds collected via the federal income tax, with small amounts coming from import tariffs and the like. States each choose how to raise money and usually have their own income taxes, but those are usually much lower and supplemented by sales taxes and possibly property taxes (although property tax tends to go to municipalities, at least it does where I'm from).
In any case, the reason unfunded mandates matter is because the federal government effectively tells the states how to spend their money, irrespective of any budgetary plans each state might have. In effect, the federal government gets to claim it's being more fiscally responsible than it really is because these expenditures aren't showing up on its balance sheet, while the states incur extra debt. Worse, the burden of a program like REAL ID will vary by state; those states with relatively sophisticated driver licenses probably won't have to spend as much on compliance as other states.
I got back from modern Russia yesterday (literally - I was there on holiday for a week) and on four different ocassions I was stopped and asked for my "papers" (AKA my passport).
The first was walking down the street in St. Petersburg - a pair of cops stopped me, and demanded "papers".
The second was as I was getting onto the St. Petersburg metro (I think the station was Moskovstaya). There were a whole bunch of OMON soldiers around, and a pair (and a cop) stopped me and asked for my papers.
The third was when my taxi got pulled over (in a nice part of Moscow) and the cops checked my and the driver's papers.
The fourth was as I was taking a picture of a convoy of important people (I guess they were inportant - they had one hell of an escort) leaving the VE-Day celebrations. As I raised my camera, a passer-by stepped in front of me, pushed me against the nearby wall, showed me his ID (with the cyrilic letters FSB and the shield on it) and demanded my papers in awful english. I pretended to not understand, and after a few tries he lost interest in me and ran to go stop an old lady who crossed the security perimeter.
So it's not only in Soviet Russia - it's in Putin's Russia as well.
Cue The Sun...