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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.
A handful of updates, corrections and further thoughts on recent Slashdot stories follow; read on for updates on the Real-ID Act, Hollywood consultant math professor Jonathan Farley, the real first losers (and winners of the U.S. Open's Aibo League) at the 2005 Robo-Cup, and more. Details below.A handful of updates, corrections and further thoughts on recent Slashdot stories follow; read on for updates on the Real-ID Act, Hollywood consultant math professor Jonathan Farley, the real first losers (and winners of the U.S. Open's Aibo League) at the 2005 Robo-Cup, and more. Details below.
WAY TO GO SLASHDOT!
No longer are duplicate stories enough. Nor are duplicate stories on the same day or within the same hour. No, NOW WE DUPLICATE THE STORY WITHIN ITSELF!
Congratulations!
Please lets keep down the "your papers please" posts, these ID's will have RFID, 'they' will be able to check you papers anytime, anyplace. I'm sure putting your ID in an anti-static bag to prevent reading will not be very popular with 'the man.'
;)
And by the way, I grow more fond of my sig at every posting.
If you voted for Nader, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!!
If the American military was serius about defending American freedom, they would hunt down Sensenbrenner, drag him into the street and shoot him through the lungs. 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. Well, it's good to see American tax dollars paying the American military to do its job.
You missed last year's GOP convention I take it?
[http://it-tastes-so-good.blogspot.com] Are you hungry?
Sooooooo... is this the thing that will take a lot of money from the US tax payers to identify 12 persons per 30 years instead of looking the reports that you will be attacked by some people in planes that you knew all along?
No sig for now.
Ok, the jokes roll in about the dupe of the summary, but how did that one slip through?
Guess they should have used the preview button!
Hmm, most mathematicians that go to Hollywood end up getting their maths screwed up. Thats where 1 infringing copy = $150,000 in damages. I'd get out of there quickly if I were that guy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"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."
I think there are better uses for mod points than trying to make Trolltalk a nice place for the trolls.
English is easier said than done.
REAL ID requires that driver's licenses contain actual addresses, and no post office boxes. There are no exceptions made for judges or police -- even undercover police officers. This seems like a major unnecessary security risk.
Yeah, because everybody know that undercover police officers take their real ID papers with them under cover. [/sarcasm]
If there's a need to keep the address of judges and police officers secret, then allow them to list FAKE addresses, or rather an address that is re-routed through a mail screening service. Don't allow any Tom, Dick, and Harry to list their address as
Box 5, Jean Climax' Barber, Maildrop and Internet Café.
REAL ID also prohibits states from issuing driver's licenses to illegal aliens. This makes no sense, and will only result in these illegal aliens driving without licenses -- which isn't going to help anyone's security.
How does that make no sense? Like, knowing who people are before giving them identification? If they drive so horribly without a license, what would make them try to get one?
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
For those who don't want to click on all 500 links, i've parsed out all the urls into a txt file which is availabe here.
wget -i files.txt
Which is why one should never assume anything from a student newspaper (or Slashdot) is fact.
If you post it, they will read.
Just a comment. I wanted to say how much I enjoy reading the stories posted on Slashdot, and participating in the interesting discussions. People express lot of different points of view that I never would have thought of on my own.
Just a comment. I wanted to say how much I enjoy reading the stories posted on Slashdot, and participating in the interesting discussions. People express lot of different points of view that I never would have thought of on my own.
No need to wait for a repost - this one dupes itself!
Slashdot's name? When my compiler sees
I presume that all of the REAL ID attributes that are applied to driver's licenses are also applied to state identifications? I have not seen that addressed anywhere.
See, I have a problem with that. Driving is a privilege and not a right. If you don't want to participate, just don't get a license and don't drive. However, existing is not an option and to do anything (get a library card, bank account, internet access, rent an apartment, get a job) you have to have an identification card.
So the only way to avoid the requirements of this REAL ID thing is to remove yourself entirely from the technological, social and economic grids. You won't be able to live anywhere, buy anything or work anywhere. So as long as you can do without that, you'll be okay.
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
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?
So I agree with Scheiner REAL ID is an absolutely terrible idea (it combines the worst security aspects of national and state IDs) it really isn't clear to me that a national ID card could not make identification more reliable as well as realizing significant economic savings by standardization.
In particular while I agree that using one ID system introduces a common point of high value failure it also economiclly feasible to invest a great deal more in the ID system. If one ID replaces n IDs you can make the ID cost roughly about the sum of the costs of all those other IDs. If one national ID replaced all our driver's liscensces, passports, credit cards and so forth it could afford more sophisticated safegaurds than any of the former IDs individually.
So while REAL ID seems to introduce the single point of failure without benefitting from economies of scale it seems perfectly possible that at some point in the future the increased safety provided by cryptographic smart card features, biometrics, and other possible features would outweigh the safety disadvantages of one point of attack. Furthermore the amount of resources spent to verify the card holder at issuance or for replacement could be similarily increased.
Furthermore it seems to me that our current system already has the problem of a single point of attack insofar as is relevant to terror. I let my drivers liscensce expire and prove my identity entierly via my passport. I have never had to produce any other ID for airline flights or other government related authentication. I have no doubt I could get a credit card or SSN number with a passport plus some easy to aquire items (bills to your address in that name etc..).
So while one wouldn't want to implement a system like REAL ID, or any system that hasn't already gone through some extensive real world testing. It seems at least possible that the increased resources availible by combining IDs could be used to more than outweigh any disadvantges, especially since the relevant ID systems already suffer from many of the purported disadvantages.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
The dupes just keep getting closer together, don't they? The dupes just keep getting closer together, don't they?
No, the answer is simpler than that. You see, they are running Linux, which runs X-Window. In X, you select some text and click the middle mouse button on another window to paste your selection. However, the mid-button is less used than the left one, so the contacts get dirty. When they clicked the mid button, the dirty contacts bounced and registered two clicks, so the selected text was pasted twice.
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
It's the first dupe in one post. We've all just seen history folks. In 20 years, your kids (or clones, for those of you who don't/can't breed) will ask you about this moment. Remember it well.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
At least this is new. It's been a while since the last new insane bit of grammar/spelling I've seen ("copy'd").
Dupe!
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Whatever information the license contained, you could read it.
Then someone came up with the bright idea of adding a magnetic strip.
If you live in a state/country that still uses magstrips,
beat the hell out of it with a hammer so it won't be machine readable anymore.
Nowadays, the latest and greatest IDs use "3D" barcodes.
Instead of your up and down stripes, imagine a low rez snowstorm.
Now you have no clue what information your license contains
The next gen passport/national ID/driver's license might use
RFid tags.
The trend has been to increase information density while obfuscating the content.
g'luck witholding your ID.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I personally think the new single that's been getting excessive amounts of airtime sucks
If you read that again, you'll realize I said the single sucks.
Not Nine Inch Nails, not Trent Reznor, just the new single.
I haven't heard the rest of the album. I'm sure I will eventually
But if that one song reflects the new sound NIN is aiming for...
I'll most likely be underwhelmed.
I like their older work.
I hope this CD isn't like Metallica & their craptacular last album
Change the sound too much and people will hate it.
Maybe that's why the made such a big PR-fest of their Remix Contest.
...So their fans will have something worth listening to.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Actually, see, they pasted once, picked up the ringing telephone, and after they ended the conversation, they pasted again, thinking they didn't do it before.
Since it was already 6PM, they never minded checking the text after it was ready, because this Slashback is a lengthy, worksome article that gets little of the usual user input and ended with this unique paragraph-dupe specimen.
See? Occam's Razor! This doesn't require the intricacies of the middle-click-bounces-on-tennis-balls-which-bounces -in-two-separate-walls-boucing-back -into-the-coffee-table-which-in-turn-hits-the-penc il-holder-in-the-desk-that-falls-over-the-middle-b utton-again-trick explanation!
(However, I'm waiting for the day we'll get the dupe-within-dupe story. That day I'll KNOW something is wrong with the Matrix!!!!!)
I don't know about Audubon itself. I do think that it used to be common to not give farmers street addresses. I grew up on a Rural route. My street address was:
Rural Route 2, Box 155b
Buffalo, MN, 55362
They gave us street addresses about 15 years ago. I know plenty of people in rural areas who still have the rural route address.
Note that this is a rural route, box address. This is different from a P.O. box, contrary to what the grandparent post claimed. From a rural route box there is no way to guess what street you live on. Even if you follow the postal carrier you cannot know, as houses are built they have to add more boxes. (There was a trailer home on the property with box 156b1)
Every time I move my state requires me to get a new license to reflect my new address. If I move out of state I have to turn over my old license and get one in the new state. (Generally they just mark the old license as invalid as a license, but still proof of ID, and give you papers that are proof of license - confusing but it works until you get the new license in about a month)
In most states licenses are only good for 4 years. Every 4 years I have to go get a new license, which includes a vision test. (no other tests) Arizona was/is an exception. A few years back they made all licenses good for 60 years or some such, in protest of new federal drivers license regulations - I think that was only for a short time though. (Yes, there are federal laws about drivers licenses already, but only apply to renewals)
Driving is a privilege, ok, but it relates to the right to travel. I think, not too clear on this, that a driver's license, once you have one, is considered property, so if they take it away in an arbitrary and capricious manner without due process, you might have a claim.
OK, the the real ID bill has passed and been signed.
Let's say you are in the state agency which would be forced to implement it. What can you do to comply with the letter of the law, while making it not work in practice?
Conversely, how could you implement it to really screw with people, triggering a backlash so it's gets repealed or ignored?
Anybody want to draft a bill to repeal realID? should be easy, one paragraph. Find a sponsor, maybe Ron Paul for starters, and get it voted on every year, for as many years as it takes.
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".
would everyone equate a driver's license with a universal id card. is it really the assumption in the US that every last individual will wish to drive a goddamn car?
My Microsoft Intellimouse developed a habit of registering a double-click when the left button was pressed only once. I guess Microsoft don't de-bounce their mouse buttons (or if they do, they suck at it).
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
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...
Carte Blanche for the Terror Cops
Senate Gives Dept. Homeland Security Power to Waive All Laws
By ROBERT SHULL
In passing the Iraq War Supplemental yesterday, the Senate also gave the Secretary of Homeland Security the power to waive any and all law in the course of building roads and barriers along the U.S. borders -- without limit and with no checks and balances. The measure is part of the "REAL ID Act of 2005," the controversial immigration bill attached by the House as a rider to the Iraq war supplemental.
The consequence of this decision is that Congress has given one man a license to waive any law, for any reason or for no reason at all. Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security, now has the power to simply waive away laws that protect the environment, safeguard public health, ensure consumer and workplace safety, prevent unfair business practices, and ban discrimination -- at his sole and unreviewable discretion.
There is too much at stake to grant any government officials the power to waive all law. Immediately at stake, of course, are current environmental protections in the vicinity of the borders, but even more is at stake. These fences and roads will not build themselves-- they must be put in place by workers, who could lose all their workplace safety protections as well as their rights to collective bargaining or even overtime pay. This new power comes completely without limit; every law, from child labor to ethical contracting, can now be waived.
Congressional supporters of this measure would like us to believe that this measure means only that DHS can speed up completion of one small stretch of fence in the "Smuggler's Gulch" area near San Diego. Nothing could be further from the truth. This measure is written so that Michael Chertoff will have unlimited authority to waive all law in the course of building roads and barriers and removing obstacles to the detection of illegal immigrants, and it applies anywhere in the vicinity of the borders. Earlier versions of this provision would have limited its scope just to environmental laws and just to Smuggler's Gulch, but the version now passed by both houses of Congress applies everywhere along the borders and applies to all laws on the books.
We expect government officials to execute the law. No government agency should be above the laws that preserve America's democracy. Congress has granted the Secretary of Homeland Security unbridled authority to act however he sees fit, without consequence, accountability, and any opportunity for judicial review.
[Robert Shull is Director of Regulatory Policy at OMB Watch.]
Quite the contrary, one has the right to the quiet enjoyment of one's property. Everyone has a right to use a public road, and it can only be taken away if
- you are using a motor vehicle, and
- a court of competent jurisdiction takes your right away for cause, or
- You have not met the age or competence standard for using a motor vehicle, an inherently dangerous thing.
"Driving is a privilege and not a right" is an urban legend. If it wasn't a right, the cop could cancel your license on the spot.--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Trent Reznor hasn't challenged anything, instead, he's jumped on the bandwagon. Bands, including ones on major labels too, have been distrubuting remix packs for years now. Just because Reznor is using Garageband and prior artists used Acid packs, that doesn't make Reznor's offering any more "open to the common user". You could even argue the opposite.