First they helped take down Dan Rather, then were named Time magazine's blog of the year, now this. I'm sure Hindrocket, The Big Trunk, and Deacon are quite proud of how well Powerline has done this year...
What if there was no evil MS conspiracy behind all those patent plans?
Oh my God, I've accidentally logged onto the Bizarro World Slashdot!
Next there will be stories on why Apple's design sucks, why Open Source will fail, and how SCO is the greatest company in the world. And there will be no story dups!
Kelly's Out of Control, Stephenson's Diamond Age
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Of Ants and Robots
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· Score: 2, Informative
The idea of emergent behavior arising spontaneously from "dumb" parts was covered extensively in Kevin Kelly's Out of Contol. In fact, I was reading it at the same time as I was reading Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, and I ended up reading both rather slowly because there was such rich mental resonance between the two (one fact, one fiction) both talking about the same thing.
1. I don't want local government providing free wifi on the simple principle that it's not a proper function of government. Government exists only to provide services that cannot be provided by the free market, especially those directly related to government's protective function (i.e., it's legal monopoly on the use of force, namely police, courts, and national defense) to prevent force being used against it's citizens. There's ample evidence that private firms can provide WiFi.
2. That said, I am opposed to this law because it violates the principles of federalism and subsidiarity, i.e., power should devolve to the lowest level of government capable of handling the problem. Just as the federal government should enact no laws or programs capable of being taken care of by state governments (see also the Tenth Amendment), state governments should make no law limiting the range of freedom of local governments to govern themselves (naturally, this is as long as laws passed by such local governments do not infringe upon the guaranteed rights of it's citizens).
Thus while I think it's a bad idea for local governments to pay for free WiFi access, it's a worse idea for the state government to be sticking it's nose unnecessarily into local affairs.
The biggest problem with Wikipedia is Bias
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FUD-Based Encyclopedias
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Wikipedia is a great idea in theory, and fine for most non-controversial sibjects. However, when it come s to political subjects, Wikipedia seems slanted to the left in comparison to other encyclopedias.
There are other examples of bias on similar political subjects. Occasionally the administrators will take steps to prevent the most overt forms of bias (for example, locking the page on George W. Bush), but mre subtle bias eitehr goes on corrected, or if corrected has those corrections erased the original biased entry reinstated.
Scientists also announced that they had discovered a principle similar to Von Neuman's Catastrophe, namely The Slashdot Effect. This effect makes it impossible to both link to the story from Slashdot and read the story thus linked, as the very act of linking it renders the story impossible to read. To isolate these quantum fluctuations from the greater Slashdot Effect, scientists have suggested calling this specific quantum problem Commander Taco's Catastrophe...
This story reminds me a bit of the conditions right before the collapse of communism. Democratic Senators and the editorial board of The New York Times all said that the Soviet Union was a permenant fixture on the world stage, that co-existence rather than opposition was the only way to deal with it, and that Ronald Reagan was a fool for building up our military and seeking to fight it.
Ronald Reagan was right, and elite wisdom was wrong. The Soviet Union was already decaying from within, and all it took was a few firm pushes (IRNMs in Europe, aid to the Mujahadeen, SDI) to help push it over the edge.
So it is with Microsoft. Besides Windows and Office, what products do they have that are profitable? Story after story comes out about how Microsoft is going to take over this or that sector of the industry (MSN, WinCE, WMP), but they never seem to turn a profit. Like the Soviet Union, they've overexpanded, they have a restive population tired of chaffing under their iron bootheel, and a few pushes (Linux, iTunes, etc.) may be enough to push them over the edge.
To put it another way: It's no accident that both the Soviet Union and Microsoft are called "the Evil Empire."p.
In addition to having a great, spooky score, Forbidden Planet is one of the greatest science fiction films of all time (and far better, to my mind, than The Day The Earth Stood Still and its fascist interstellar-UN robot overlords). Scenes like the attack of the Monster from the ID on the space ship, the interiors of the Krell city, and the climax still hold up today. It's arguably the best science fiction film before 2001, and perhaps the best until Star Wars (Metropolis (or rather, what survives of it), is, IMHO, too heavy-handed in its philosophising.)
Whatever happened to "Integral Fast Reactors" I heard about in the late 1980s, which were also supposed to be meltdown-proof? My understanding was that the configuration of the rods was such that if the reaction moved beyond a certain range, it actually dapened the reaction. (I'm relying on memory, and Google is of limited help, so forgive me for being fuzzy on the details.)
I carve all my important data on stone tablets. If it was good enough for Yaweh, they by Him, its good enough for me! I look forward to over 2000 years of stable storage without data loss! Unless, of course, I need to smite some wayward Israelites with them or something...
Otherwise he's know that it's always a bad idea to tell the truth rather than CYA in a memo.
Which is not to excuse his spyware-infested piece of crap. But where ever business memo must be written in such a way that you csn't tell the truth because it might be used against you in a court of law, your have a big problem with your tort system.
The "World Social Forum" is the sort of gathering that invites Noam Chomsky to speak, rails against "capitalism" and "imperialism" and seeks to rehabilitate communist and Marxist ideas. Hey, it's a partially free world (and not, IMHO, thanks to people attending the World Social Forum), and if you want to talk about the technology being used there, fine. But don't you think it worthy of at least mentioning the political context? If you want to reinstitue the Fourth International (historical reference to the Cold War, kids; go look it up), then at least have the courage to admit so.
All this sounds rather like Michael Rothschild's Bionomics: Economy As Ecosystem. According to the description, Rothschild "sees capitalism as the evolutionary result of organisms (businesses, corporations, markets, economies) that seek to preserve themselves through adaptation to environment and "genetic" inheritance of successful characteristics."
I have not read it yet, but it got very good reviews.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Buy an expensive gift?
2. Buy a really expensive gift?
3. Spend $50 for the special "have the invoice dated last week" HubbySaver(tm) feature?
4. Cringe in abject terror?
5. Sleep on the couch?
Oh my God, I've accidentally logged onto the Bizarro World Slashdot!
Next there will be stories on why Apple's design sucks, why Open Source will fail, and how SCO is the greatest company in the world. And there will be no story dups!
2. That said, I am opposed to this law because it violates the principles of federalism and subsidiarity, i.e., power should devolve to the lowest level of government capable of handling the problem. Just as the federal government should enact no laws or programs capable of being taken care of by state governments (see also the Tenth Amendment), state governments should make no law limiting the range of freedom of local governments to govern themselves (naturally, this is as long as laws passed by such local governments do not infringe upon the guaranteed rights of it's citizens).
Thus while I think it's a bad idea for local governments to pay for free WiFi access, it's a worse idea for the state government to be sticking it's nose unnecessarily into local affairs.
To take just one example: Wikipedia has settled on a definition of genocide so narrow that it excludes the masisve genocies carried out by the Soviet Union and Communist China. Moreover, excluding all Soviet genocide even goes against their stated definition, as several instances of Soviet genocide (the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, the exile of the Volga Germans, etc.) meet the UN criteria of mass murdrers aimed at a particular ethnic group.
There are other examples of bias on similar political subjects. Occasionally the administrators will take steps to prevent the most overt forms of bias (for example, locking the page on George W. Bush), but mre subtle bias eitehr goes on corrected, or if corrected has those corrections erased the original biased entry reinstated.
I like Howard's non-fiction as well as his fiction, which is one of the reasons I wrote some movie reviews with him:
- Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
- The Fabulous World of Jules Verne.
- The Incredibles
(Actually, Howard, Cory and I are all in the Turkey City Writer's Workshop together.Ronald Reagan was right, and elite wisdom was wrong. The Soviet Union was already decaying from within, and all it took was a few firm pushes (IRNMs in Europe, aid to the Mujahadeen, SDI) to help push it over the edge.
So it is with Microsoft. Besides Windows and Office, what products do they have that are profitable? Story after story comes out about how Microsoft is going to take over this or that sector of the industry (MSN, WinCE, WMP), but they never seem to turn a profit. Like the Soviet Union, they've overexpanded, they have a restive population tired of chaffing under their iron bootheel, and a few pushes (Linux, iTunes, etc.) may be enough to push them over the edge.
To put it another way: It's no accident that both the Soviet Union and Microsoft are called "the Evil Empire."p.
Which is not to excuse his spyware-infested piece of crap. But where ever business memo must be written in such a way that you csn't tell the truth because it might be used against you in a court of law, your have a big problem with your tort system.
Maybe you should just stop trying to copy that 17 meg file...
Mike Tyson accused Michael Jordan of being "violent and out of control."
And Richard Simmons accused Charlton Heston of being "way too gay."
And here's another look at why the crises is much closer than Lowenstein believes by the same author.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm watching him watch his Sims watch TV."
Now it's going to be:
"I'm watching him watch TV to watch the Sims so he can vote for what the Sims watch on TV."
I have not read it yet, but it got very good reviews.