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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.
Well since this blurb isn't really about anything in particular, the post I'm writing right now can't be offtopic, right?
Or, if they were serius about defending American safety then they would be stationed in American cities trained and equipped to deal with terrorist attacks.
Oh, but wait, that's not their job. The job of the American military is to defend Iraqi freedom.
Think boundary defense; if you want to protect a goal, do you let the goal-tender be the first line of defense? No, you try and keep the ball as far away from the goal as possible. The analogy is not spot on, but by placing American troops overseas, you give terrorists a target that isn't on American soil - and, not cooincidentally, not subject to many of our laws, making it easier to deal with threats.
The logic of this (the invasion of Iraq and forgotten Afghanistan) is fairly sound; the morality of it is potentially questionable. Personally, if we as a country had been more upstanding in Iraq, I think we'd have a leg to stand on, possibly even ridden our horses straight through into Syria or Iran for the same purpose. As it stands, we didn't treat the Iraqis as well as we should have, and so we're not really much better (in the eyes of many, especially those in the region) than the previous regime.
Exactly! In Soviet Russia you show your papers, in George Bush's America, papers show you!
In the old days you would be asked for your papers and then told to move along, but now they can just tell you to move along, much more efficient.
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It's really, ultimately, taxpayer dollars, right? Or can someone school me on the point, preferrable in an Alan Greenspan mumble?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I suspect this is going to be a problem for repo and tow-truck guys. I have spoken with a few of them and they all say rule #1 is never give out your address. They put their PO Box on their license, but some don't even like to give that out. They do this because there are some crazy people who shoot at them and all sorts of stuff.
Okay, I do not get this at all...
From the post:
Farley wrote to point out that his[sic] 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.)
FTA:
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Harvard professor Jonathan Farley is an award-winning scholar, but he wouldn't mind being known as a Hollywood mathematician.
So I thought to myself, couldn't he just come out & say he's a Harvard prof., not a grad student? But then, I googled, & lo & behold:
http://math.mit.edu/people/faculty/farley.html
Is he the male equivalent to prime-time Alias? A doppelganger? An elaborate hoax?
My argument may not be obvious, but it's not hard to follow, either. It centers around the notion that security must be evaluated not based on how it works, but on how it fails.
It doesn't really matter how well an ID card works when used by the hundreds of millions of honest people that would carry it. What matters is how the system might fail when used by someone intent on subverting that system: how it fails naturally, how it can be made to fail, and how failures might be exploited.
I thought it was worth repeating.
putting your ID in an anti-static bag to prevent reading will not be very popular with 'the man.'
...
Probably not. But they'll have to put up with it, for the same reason that they were forced to allow general use of encryption. RealID is an open invitation to identity theft, as is any ID based on RFID. It can be read without you knowing any time you get close to a hidden RFID reader.
Carrying a RealID card around unshielded makes about as much sense as sending your login/password across the Net in the clear. Anyone with any sense will shield the former, just as they encrypt the latter. No amount of intoning "National Security" will change this.
Sure, we'll hear lots of reassuring words. But all it'll take is a few reports of stolen RealID info, and reassuring words simply won't work.
We might note that there are already several RF-shielded wallets for sale in the US. I'll bet that sales will soon increase. And, y'know, my wallet is getting a bit old and worn
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Police officers are allowed to carry guns while driving. Others are not (guns in vehicles must be in lockers). Is there a problem with that? No. It makes perfect sense- it's not a question of "privelege", it's a question of what their job requires.
You can adduce a couple hundred examples without expending much effort. Enabling law enforcement to do its job in this kind of way is not going to make anything "falls aparts".
I tried to use my passport instead of my driver's license to get onto an air force base (where I work). Didn't work. I was amused that the US air force wouldn't accept a US passport as adequate identification, but would accept a state driver's license. It wasn't just one guard either; they had specific instructions that passprts weren't acceptable.