When something like 20 foreign nationals from the same general region of the world get truck driver licenses and apply for hazardous materials hauling permits all within a couple of months of each other, somebody in some FBI office somewhere should ask some questions. There was nothing encrypted in that transaction, and they are only now putting that together.
Thousands of people get hazardous materials driving licenses, many of them foreign nationals. And guess what? No one tells the FBI! Furthermore, if the FBI were to have somehow become aware of these licences a month ago, what would they have done?
There are a lot of legitimate reasons to have these licences, so, according to Slashdot philosophy, the FBI shouldn't do anything until a crime is committed. Yes, back in the 1960s, the FBI could have put these people under surveillance just to see if they were up to something nefarious, but now it's almost impossible. Not to mention, what you are calling for is "ethnic profiling!"
The British Home Secretary is considering compulsory identity cards, despite the fact that such cards would not have made any difference in the recent terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The British have generally opposed their reintroduction since the wartime system of identity cards was abolished in 1952.
It's not clear to me that it "would not have made any difference." It would be a lot harder for these people to purchase airline tickets if they had to show IDs that said their visas were expired. Two of them were, in fact, wanted for questioning by the FBI.
There is some potential for abuse with national ID cards, but we shouldn't exaggerate too much. I believe almost all western European countries already have them and they are not totalitarian regimes.
Re:MSNBC Article on BinLaden and CIA
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 2
One would hope we would have learned from these mistakes, but we never do...
And what would have been the right thing to do? Just let the Soviets fuck over the Afghanis?
Re:there's an argument to be made....
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 3, Informative
Our "defense" industry is largely what caused this debacle -- the number one export for the United States is weapons. Think about that for a second -- we make more money selling weapons to the rest of the world than any other thing that we make.
No, the US is the #1 exporter of arms, but arms sales are hardly our leading export. According to http://www.iansa.org/news/2000/aug_00/us_arms.htm, arms deliveries from the US in 1999 were $18 billion (new contracts were $11 billion).
By contrast, according to the latest Statistical Abstract (Table 1329), electrical machinery accounted for $75 billion dollars worth of exports, computers and office machinery, $40 billion, power generating machinery, $30 billion, etc. Total exports were about $960 billion, so arms sales are only about 2% of the total.
Bush (not my favorite president to say the least) was struggling with some legitimate moral issues regarding stem cells from aborted fetus.
I'm sure he was. In the same way that the pope must have felt about birth control pills or condoms and the witch hunters felt in the early 1400's...
Or maybe in the same way people felt about sterilizing retarded people a century ago. Or maybe they felt the same way about frontal lobotomies or experimenting on concentration camp inmates.
Pure science is the ultimate morality. Give it freedom.
Yeah, right, we shouldn't have any other concerns besides the quest for knowledge.
Am I correct in understanding that among that 50.4% are sites like Yahoo's Geocities and AOL personal pages? Which is to say, the sites are hosted by Yahoo and AOL, but the actual content is put there by individuals.
Not only that, but the time includes instant messaging and email, which is why Hotmail appears so high on the list.
Quote from http://www.jmm.com/xp/jmm/press/2001/pr_060401.xml
"Total Usage Minutes: The total number of usage minutes spent at the online property, Web site, category, channel or application during the course of the reporting period."
Its nice to see that US corporate officers and employees can cower behind the corporate shield for liability but the DMCA can put blame on one man and violate his first amendment right to speech at the same time?
There is no shield of liability for corporate officers or employers. Limited liability applies to shareholders, so that if your Aunt Bernice invests in Intel and Intel gets sued for a billion dollars, the most she can lose is her investment, and not her house.
There was some actually some evidence for life from outer space announced a few weeks ago. I don't think they have actually done a thorough job of ruling out other sources, but it's interesting nonetheless. Here's a press release copied from http://unisci.com/stories/20013/0730011.htm
First Evidence Of Life Coming From Space Reported
Evidence of living bacterial cells entering the Earth's upper atmosphere from space has come from a joint project involving Indian and UK scientists.
The first positive identification of extraterrestrial microbial life was reported on Sunday (July 29) at the Astrobiology session of the 46th Annual SPIE meeting in San Diego, by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University in Wales. He spoke on behalf of an international team led by Professor Jayant Narlikar, Director of the Inter-Universities Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India.
Samples of stratospheric air were collected on January 21 under the most stringent aseptic conditions by Indian scientists using the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) cryogenic sampler payload flown on balloons from the Tata Institute Balloon Launching facility in Hyderabad.
Part of the samples sent to Cardiff were analyzed by a team at Cardiff University led by Professor David Lloyd, assisted by Melanie Harris.
Commenting on the results, Professor Wickramasinghe said, "There is now unambiguous evidence for the presence of clumps of living cells in air samples from as high as 41 kilometers, well above the local tropopause (16 km), above which no air from lower down would normally be transported."
The detection was made using a fluorescent cyanine dye which is only taken up by the membranes of living cells. The variation with height of the distribution of such cells indicates strongly that the clumps of bacterial cells are falling from space.
The daily input of such biological material is provisionally estimated as about one third of a ton over the entire planet.
This new evidence provides strong support for the Panspermia theory of Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe.
"We have argued for more than two decades that terrestrial life was brought down to Earth by comets and that cometary material containing microorganisms must still be reaching us in large quantities," Professor Wickramasinghe said.
Cardiff University is home to the UK's first Center for Astrobiology, which provides the UK with a facility to contribute to space missions probing for life on solar system bodies. The Center is a joint initiative between the University and the University of Wales College of Medicine.
The Center combines research interests in astronomy and molecular cell biology to throw light on the emergence and development of life in the cosmos and planetary bodies. The work of the Center will also provide information essential for the emergent discipline of space medicine.
Cardiff University has a history of service to Wales and the world which dates from its foundation by Royal Charter in 1883. Today, independent government assessments recognize the University as one of Britain's leading research and teaching universities.
Working in a particular job is not a right (most times), but the employer should not be able to decide unilaterally what accommodations they will make and which ones they will not.
Of course the employer should be able to decide unilaterally. Once upon a time America was the land of the free, and people were able to choose for themselves which things were important in an employee and which were not. Then we had laws which banned discrimination, which supposedly meant you had to treat people who were equally qualified the same and ignore irrelevant characteristics. Now, with the ADA, people who cannot do the job as well, or cost more to do the job, are supposed to be treated "equally"? What a joke.
It reminds me of the Vonnegut story of Harrison Bergeron, where people who are better at something are artificially handicapped so that everybody is equal. If employeres are allowed to consider my characteristics which make me good at a job, they should be allowed to consider those that make me bad for a job, too, including those I'm born with or those that I acquire by accident.
If this employer is wrong, so what. There are four million other employers in the country. Surely if something is not important for a job, most other employers will agree with you.
It shouldn't be the responsibility of every individual or every business to have the wisdom of Solomon. Fairness in the private sector comes about from choice.
I fail to understand what is it that they are guilty of. They just wrote and hosted a file sharing service. Like, you know, millions of FTP sites out there, and newsgroups and whatnot. How are they guilty if people using their service decide to use it for some illegal purpose? Is Smith & Wesson guilty because I decided to kill someone using a weapon manufactured by them?
Give me a break! Their file-sharing service did not just incidentally share copyright-infringing music, that was the purpose of the site. In case you missed the point, they made their money selling ads for MP3 players so you didn't have to actually buy the CD!
Don't make up straw-men slippery-slope arguments about what might be illegal. People who excuse this or Napster because someone, somewhere may occasionaly have a non-infringing use are out of touch with reality. Lots of things are banned even though they have legitimate uses. Lock picks are illegal in most states, yet that doesn't stop you from going to the hardware store and buying things that have mostly legitimate uses.
Re:Not gonna fly until after 2004...
on
Triana Mothballed
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· Score: 3, Informative
because those pesky scientists would most likely use it to gather evidence about inconvenient issues like global warming and pollution. In the mean time, the money is much better spent on that trillion dollar orbiting erector set.
There are already satellites that study the climate and this one would not add anything special. The satellites show that the middle and upper atmosphere have warmed much less than ground level, which is the opposite of what is predicted by the computer climate models.
Actually, as noted by others here, this satellite was a political project, not one that was thought up by scientists, so it's a good thing that it was killed.
There are already satellites used to measure global warming. There may be other kinds of sensors you'd want, but this orbit is hardly ideal.
By the way, the satellites show there has been essentially no warming in the upper atmosphere, a fact which none of the computer climate models can explain.
Has Microsoft ever sued anybody for patent infringement? I think I would have heard about it if they had. They get tons of patents, but they have to for defensive purposes.
That is what I was asking above -- why does not that same rationale (which is commonly being peddled by Passport advocates) make users keep their email address books or bookmark lists on Microsofts or AOL servers, instead of keeping them on their local machines (and copying these lists if needed to their laptops or other machines)?
The answer is that the heavy and numerous downsides of a centralized third party database of your personal data far outweigh any minor convenience of being able, say, to email friends from a cruse ship, without that so "terribly hard" job of having to copy address book to your laptop.
Actually, I do keep a list of email addresses, as well as phone numbers on a Yahoo account, even though I don't use Yahoo mail. I find it hard enough to keep my work and home machines in sync, much less my non-existent laptop to take on cruise ships.
I also keep an encrypted list of passwords in a file on a central server somewhere. I do that not just because I want to access them from more than one place, but also because I want to have them if my hard disk crashes (which happens about one every three years).
The "numerous and heavy downsides" of Passport are so far entirely theoretical. I've never seen a single complaint from anyone.
If you want to see free reporting, look to the BBC.
Oh, that's crap. Every news source has its biases. I will agree that some are a lot less sensationalistic than others, but none of them are "free."
Big media in fact criticize big advertizers a lot. A few years ago, NBC _faked_ a report on GM trucks catching fire in crashes, despite the fact that GM is the second biggest advertizer. Nor did the fact that Ford is a huge advertizer result in any lack of coverage of the huge Firestone-Ford tire debacle.
By the way, we have non-profit news sources here, too, including PBS (dull) and NPR (very good). The get most of their money by asking, though, instead of using the gun, as the BBC does.
Instead of inventing some economic models, it is
much better to rely on public information provided
by those who run successful FSP journals. In [4]
Minton and Wellman provide a detailed analysis of
the economic matters involved in the production of
JAIR based on their five years of experience. They
find that "the only significant cost involved in pro-ducing
the journal is the cost of the review and
editing process. Thus, the universities and research
labs that employ JAIR's editors effectively subsidize
the journal by supporting this work." In turn,
Louis, Schneider, and Rehmann [3] published an
account of the costs of running Documenta Mathe-matica
based on their four years of experience. In
their detailed analysis they reach a revealing
amount of $210 per year ("including hidden
costs"). So, not surprisingly, Rehmann wrote to me:
"Our journal was never sponsored by anybody.
Needless to say, the journal is hosted on my PC,
which I have anyway."
3. Louis, A.K., Schneider, P. and Rehmann, U. Documenta Mathementa
(Aug. 31, 1999); www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/~rehmann/bericht-e ng.
html.
4. Minton S. and Wellman, M.P. JAIR at five. AI Magazine, 20, 3 (Sum-mer
1999); www.isi.edu/sims/minton/papers/jairfive.pdf.
Also, for those who haven't seen it, take a look at ResearchIndex
(CiteSeer), should definitely visit it. See http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs
It's really wonderful to be able to see the citations in context--for a good
example, see http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/abiteboul97lorel.html-- and browse
the documents that are available on the web. Right now it's just computer
science, but hopefully all research papers will eventually be on the web.
I won't go on, but you get the idea. All the costs you mentioned are covered by grant money, and as for the time, it's part of the job - it's like a secretary bitching because he/she has to type a letter and answer the phone.
No, the point is that the publisher does not pay for this, so the publisher should not own it for the next few decades.
The record companies really cannot continue ripping both the consumers _and_ the artists off for much longer.
Funny how even artists pissed off at their record companies (e.g. Courtney Love) have not volunteered to have all their future songs available for free. I think the Greedy Arrogant Cheapskates on Slashdot are just using this as an excuse.
. I read recenly in the British press that for her recent gigs in the UK Madonna made over £1million (thats $1.5mill us) per NIGHT and she did 6 gigs. I am sure other bands (cough metallica) make roughly the same.
You haven't a clue. Most tours lose money if you don't include merchandise sales; many lose money even when you do include those sales. Madonna grossed $1.5 million per night but she sure didn't clear that much. Most of her money (and it's a lot) comes from record sales. Only a couple dozen bands have big tours each year; hundreds have recording contracts and the records can keep selling for years after the bands are too old to tour.
UK Hearsay sold 1 million singles and only got 22thousand pounds each!
Gee, only. And how much did Napster pay them?
along with sales from millions of albums they get almost nothing (say 5% of sales profits) if you really support an aritst see them live they get the money
Okay, give us some numbers. How much did this band net from concerts versus record sales?
Recorded music should be a form of advertising an performance for the fans a way of making money.
Gee, that's awfully friggin' generous of you. Let me guess, you don't have a recording contract, do you?
I don't know about Florida, but many states do, in fact, have laws against wearing masks in public. These were written to counteract Ku Klux Klan rallies.
The economy may not be a zero sum game but nature is. What you are describing a money flowing around in a closed system. Somewhere down the line either somebody prints more money (leading to money being worth less) or somebody takes something out of the earth and sells it.
Even some low impact product like a software license requires natural resources. Programmer has to eat, drink, clothe himself, live in a heated house, and perhap even an office. He need a computer and electricity which required mining and drilling. The economy only grows at the expense of natural resources. Maybe they did not teach you that in econ 101 but it's true nevertheless. There is no such thing as free lunch.
Nature is a zero-sum game? In what sense? A programmer has to eat, yes, but there is not a fixed amount of food; it is created anew all the time. A computer is made from raw materials, but none of them are limited in any meaningful sense. We couldn't possibly use all the silicon on the Earth if we wanted to. Plastics now are created from oil, but we could create them from plants, instead. The only important resource that's problematic is energy, but that's not as big a limitation as most people think.
If you want to look at some interesting web sites, take a look at this book by the late Julian Simon, or John McCarthy's page on human progress.
Slashdot Mirror
Thousands of people get hazardous materials driving licenses, many of them foreign nationals. And guess what? No one tells the FBI! Furthermore, if the FBI were to have somehow become aware of these licences a month ago, what would they have done?
There are a lot of legitimate reasons to have these licences, so, according to Slashdot philosophy, the FBI shouldn't do anything until a crime is committed. Yes, back in the 1960s, the FBI could have put these people under surveillance just to see if they were up to something nefarious, but now it's almost impossible. Not to mention, what you are calling for is "ethnic profiling!"
It's not clear to me that it "would not have made any difference." It would be a lot harder for these people to purchase airline tickets if they had to show IDs that said their visas were expired. Two of them were, in fact, wanted for questioning by the FBI.
There is some potential for abuse with national ID cards, but we shouldn't exaggerate too much. I believe almost all western European countries already have them and they are not totalitarian regimes.
And what would have been the right thing to do? Just let the Soviets fuck over the Afghanis?
No, the US is the #1 exporter of arms, but arms sales are hardly our leading export. According to http://www.iansa.org/news/2000/aug_00/us_arms.htm
By contrast, according to the latest Statistical Abstract (Table 1329), electrical machinery accounted for $75 billion dollars worth of exports, computers and office machinery, $40 billion, power generating machinery, $30 billion, etc. Total exports were about $960 billion, so arms sales are only about 2% of the total.
Or maybe in the same way people felt about sterilizing retarded people a century ago. Or maybe they felt the same way about frontal lobotomies or experimenting on concentration camp inmates.
Yeah, right, we shouldn't have any other concerns besides the quest for knowledge.
Not only that, but the time includes instant messaging and email, which is why Hotmail appears so high on the list.
Quote from http://www.jmm.com/xp/jmm/press/2001/pr_060401.xm
"Total Usage Minutes: The total number of usage minutes spent at the online property, Web site, category, channel or application during the course of the reporting period."
There is no shield of liability for corporate officers or employers. Limited liability applies to shareholders, so that if your Aunt Bernice invests in Intel and Intel gets sued for a billion dollars, the most she can lose is her investment, and not her house.
First Evidence Of Life Coming From Space Reported
Evidence of living bacterial cells entering the Earth's upper atmosphere from space has come from a joint project involving Indian and UK scientists. The first positive identification of extraterrestrial microbial life was reported on Sunday (July 29) at the Astrobiology session of the 46th Annual SPIE meeting in San Diego, by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University in Wales. He spoke on behalf of an international team led by Professor Jayant Narlikar, Director of the Inter-Universities Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India.
Samples of stratospheric air were collected on January 21 under the most stringent aseptic conditions by Indian scientists using the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) cryogenic sampler payload flown on balloons from the Tata Institute Balloon Launching facility in Hyderabad.
Part of the samples sent to Cardiff were analyzed by a team at Cardiff University led by Professor David Lloyd, assisted by Melanie Harris.
Commenting on the results, Professor Wickramasinghe said, "There is now unambiguous evidence for the presence of clumps of living cells in air samples from as high as 41 kilometers, well above the local tropopause (16 km), above which no air from lower down would normally be transported."
The detection was made using a fluorescent cyanine dye which is only taken up by the membranes of living cells. The variation with height of the distribution of such cells indicates strongly that the clumps of bacterial cells are falling from space.
The daily input of such biological material is provisionally estimated as about one third of a ton over the entire planet.
This new evidence provides strong support for the Panspermia theory of Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe.
"We have argued for more than two decades that terrestrial life was brought down to Earth by comets and that cometary material containing microorganisms must still be reaching us in large quantities," Professor Wickramasinghe said.
Cardiff University is home to the UK's first Center for Astrobiology, which provides the UK with a facility to contribute to space missions probing for life on solar system bodies. The Center is a joint initiative between the University and the University of Wales College of Medicine.
The Center combines research interests in astronomy and molecular cell biology to throw light on the emergence and development of life in the cosmos and planetary bodies. The work of the Center will also provide information essential for the emergent discipline of space medicine.
Cardiff University has a history of service to Wales and the world which dates from its foundation by Royal Charter in 1883. Today, independent government assessments recognize the University as one of Britain's leading research and teaching universities.
30-Jul-2001
It reminds me of the Vonnegut story of Harrison Bergeron, where people who are better at something are artificially handicapped so that everybody is equal. If employeres are allowed to consider my characteristics which make me good at a job, they should be allowed to consider those that make me bad for a job, too, including those I'm born with or those that I acquire by accident.
If this employer is wrong, so what. There are four million other employers in the country. Surely if something is not important for a job, most other employers will agree with you.
It shouldn't be the responsibility of every individual or every business to have the wisdom of Solomon. Fairness in the private sector comes about from choice.
Don't make up straw-men slippery-slope arguments about what might be illegal. People who excuse this or Napster because someone, somewhere may occasionaly have a non-infringing use are out of touch with reality. Lots of things are banned even though they have legitimate uses. Lock picks are illegal in most states, yet that doesn't stop you from going to the hardware store and buying things that have mostly legitimate uses.
There are already satellites used to measure global warming. There may be other kinds of sensors you'd want, but this orbit is hardly ideal.
By the way, the satellites show there has been essentially no warming in the upper atmosphere, a fact which none of the computer climate models can explain.
Has Microsoft ever sued anybody for patent infringement? I think I would have heard about it if they had. They get tons of patents, but they have to for defensive purposes.
I also keep an encrypted list of passwords in a file on a central server somewhere. I do that not just because I want to access them from more than one place, but also because I want to have them if my hard disk crashes (which happens about one every three years).
The "numerous and heavy downsides" of Passport are so far entirely theoretical. I've never seen a single complaint from anyone.
Big media in fact criticize big advertizers a lot. A few years ago, NBC _faked_ a report on GM trucks catching fire in crashes, despite the fact that GM is the second biggest advertizer. Nor did the fact that Ford is a huge advertizer result in any lack of coverage of the huge Firestone-Ford tire debacle.
By the way, we have non-profit news sources here, too, including PBS (dull) and NPR (very good). The get most of their money by asking, though, instead of using the gun, as the BBC does.
Among the interesting bits was this:
Also, for those who haven't seen it, take a look at ResearchIndex (CiteSeer), should definitely visit it. See http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs It's really wonderful to be able to see the citations in context--for a good example, see http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/abiteboul97lorel.html-I don't know about Florida, but many states do, in fact, have laws against wearing masks in public. These were written to counteract Ku Klux Klan rallies.
Corporations can be and regularly are tried on criminal charges and assessed criminal penalties (usually fines).
Moderation Totals:Flamebait=4, Troll=3, Insightful=5, Interesting=1, Informative=3, Funny=2, Overrated=6, Total=24.
If you want to look at some interesting web sites, take a look at this book by the late Julian Simon, or John McCarthy's page on human progress.